Born in 1764, Mary Lamb was forced to help support her impoverished family from a very young age by doing needlework and being the primary caregiver for her invalid mother and her numerous siblings. Although she was allowed to attend school, her family responsibilities and her developing problems with mental illness (she is now believed to have suffered from bipolar disorder) marked her early life. Her younger brother, Charles, was her constant companion despite his own bouts of mental illness which led to his confinement in a sanatorium in London for a time. By 1796, Mary's mother required constant care and Mary was also obliged to work full-time on her needlework. The effect on her mental health so alarmed her family that her brother was sent to the local physician but he was not at home.
And so it happened, on September 24, 1796 that...
Mary fatally stabbed her mother and injured her father. In an account published by the London Times in 1796:
It appeared by the evidence adduced, that while the family were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized a case-knife laying on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little girl, her apprentice, round the room. On the calls of her infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her first object, and with loud shrieks approached her parent. The child, by her cries, quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but too late. The dreadful scene presented to him the mother lifeless, pierced to the heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly standing over her with the fatal knife, and the old man her father weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead from the effects of a severe blow he received from one of the forks she had been madly hurling about the room.
A subsequent inquest brought in a verdict of Lunacy. Despite considerable local publicity, Mary was never tried and was not publicly named as her mother's killer until after her death. After being confined in a madhouse for nearly a year, she was later released into her brother Charles' custody. Despite urging from members of his family to leave Mary in the institution, Charles's own experience with the mental asylums of the time made it impossible to leave his beloved sister in one for the rest of her life. At the age of 21, he took on the responsibility of caring for her and gave up his own marriage plans in the process. After their father died in 1799, Charles and Mary shared a home together and their later literary collaborations, as well as the works they published independently, have given them both a quiet immortality in English literature. While Mary continued to suffer from bouts of insanity that required occasional hospitalization, she and her brother remained part of London's literary scene for many years. Ironically, it was her brother Charles who was the first to die in 1834 and Mary lived out the rest of her life in frail health until her death in 1847. They are buried next to each other
More information on Charles and Mary Lamb can be found here.
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