_Mrs. Leicester's School_.--A Removal.--_Poetry for Children_.
1807-9.--Æt. 43-45.
The _Tales from Shakespeare_ were no sooner finished than Mary began,
as her letters show, to cast about for some new scheme which should
realise an equally felicitous and profitable result. This time she
drew upon her own invention: and in about a year a little volume of
tales for children was written, called _Mrs. Leicester's School_, to
which Charles also contributed. The stories, ten in number, seven by
Mary and three by her brother, are strung on a connecting thread by
means of an introductory DEDICATION TO THE YOUNG LADIES AT AMWELL
SCHOOL, who are supposed to beguile the dreariness of the first
evening at a new school by each telling the story of her own life, at
the suggestion of a friendly governess who constitutes herself their
"historiographer."
There is little or no invention in these tales; but a "tenderness of
feeling and a delicacy of taste"--the praise is Coleridge's--which
lift them quite above the ordinary level of children's stories. And in
no way are these qualities shown more than in the treatment of the
lights and shades--the failings and the virtues--of the little folk,
which appear in due and natural proportion; but the faults are treated
in a kindly, indulgent spirit, not spitefully enhanced as foils to
shining virtue, after the manner of some even of the best writers for
children. There are no unlovely impersonations of naughtiness pure and
simple, nor any equally unloveable patterns of priggish perfection.
But the sweetest touches are in the portrayal of the attitude of a
very young mind towards death, affecting from its very incapacity for
grief, or indeed for any kind of realisation, as in this story of
_Elizabeth Villiers_ for instance:--
"The first thing I can remember was my father teaching me the alphabet
from the letters on a tombstone that stood at the head of my mother's
grave. I used to tap at my father's study door: I think I now hear him
say, 'Who is there? What do you want, little girl?' 'Go and see mamma.
Go and learn pretty letters.' Many times in the day would my father
lay aside his books and his papers to lead me to this spot, and make
me point to the letters, and then set me to spell syllables and words:
in this manner, the epitaph on my mother's tomb being my primer and my
spelling-book, I learned to read.
"I was one day sitting on a step placed across the churchyard stile,
when a gentleman passing by heard me distinctly repeat the letters
which formed my mother's name and then say _Elizabeth Villiers_ with a
firm tone as if I had performed some great matter. This gentleman was
my Uncle James, my mother's brother: he was a lieutenant in the navy,
and had left England a few weeks after the marriage of my father and
mother, and now returned home from a long sea-voyage, he was coming to
visit my mother--no tidings of her decease having reached him, though
she had been dead more than a twelvemonth.
"When my uncle saw me sitting on the stile, and heard me pronounce my
mother's name, he looked earnestly in my face and began to fancy a
resemblance to his sister, and to think I might be her child. I was
too intent on my employment to notice him, and went spelling on. 'Who
has taught you to spell so prettily, my little maid?' said my uncle.
'Mamma,' I replied; for I had an idea that the words on the tombstone
were somehow a part of mamma, and that she had taught me. 'And who is
mamma?' asked my uncle. 'Elizabeth Villiers,' I replied; and then my
uncle called me his dear little niece and said he would go with me to
mamma: he took hold of my hand intending to lead me home, delighted
that he had found out who I was, because he imagined it would be such
a pleasant surprise to his sister to see her little daughter bringing
home her long-lost sailor uncle.
"I agreed to take him to mamma, but we had a dispute about the way
thither. My uncle was for going along the road which led directly up
to our house: I pointed to the churchyard and said that was the way to
mamma. Though impatient of any delay he was not willing to contest the
point with his new relation; therefore he lifted me over the stile,
and was then going to take me along the path to a gate he knew was at
the end of our garden; but no, I would not go that way neither:
letting go his hand I said, 'You do not know the way--I will show
you'; and making what haste I could among the long grass and thistles,
and jumping over the low graves, he said, as he followed what he
called my _wayward steps_--
"'What a positive little soul this niece of mine is! I knew the way to
your mother's house before you were born, child.' At last I stopped at
my mother's grave, and pointing to the tombstone said 'Here is mamma!'
in a voice of exultation as if I had now convinced him I knew the way
best. I looked up in his face to see him acknowledge his mistake; but
oh! what a face of sorrow did I see! I was so frightened that I have
but an imperfect recollection of what followed. I remember I pulled
his coat, and cried 'Sir! sir!' and tried to move him. I knew not what
to do. My mind was in a strange confusion; I thought I had done
something wrong in bringing the gentleman to mamma to make him cry so
sadly, but what it was I could not tell. This grave had always been a
scene of delight to me. In the house my father would often be weary of
my prattle and send me from him; but here he was all my own. I might
say anything and be as frolicsome as I pleased here; all was
cheerfulness and good humour in our visits to mamma, as we called it.
My father would tell me how quietly mamma slept there, and that he and
his little Betsy would one day sleep beside mamma in that grave; and
when I went to bed, as I laid my little head on the pillow I used to
wish I was sleeping in the grave with my papa and mamma, and in my
childish dreams I used to fancy myself there; and it was a place
within the ground, all smooth and soft and green. I never made out any
figure of mamma, but still it was the tombstone and papa and the
smooth green grass, and my head resting on the elbow of my
father."....
In the story called _The Father's Wedding Day_, the same strain of
feeling is developed in a somewhat different way, but with a like
truth. Landor praised it with such genial yet whimsical extravagance
as almost defeats itself, in a letter to Crabb Robinson written in
1831:--"It is now several days since I read the book you recommended
to me, _Mrs. Leicester's School_, and I feel as if I owed you a debt
in deferring to thank you for many hours of exquisite delight. Never
have I read anything in prose so many times over within so short a
space of time as _The Father's Wedding Day_. Most people, I
understand, prefer the first tale--in truth a very admirable one--but
others could have written it. Show me the man or woman, modern or
ancient, who could have written this one sentence: 'When I was dressed
in my new frock, I wished poor mamma was alive, to see how fine I was
on papa's wedding day; and I ran to my favorite station at her bedroom
door.' How natural in a little girl is this incongruity--this
impossibility! Richardson would have given his Clarissa and Rousseau
his Heloïse to have imagined it. A fresh source of the pathetic bursts
out before us, and not a bitter one. If your Germans can show us
anything comparable to what I have transcribed, I would almost undergo
a year's gurgle of their language for it. The story is admirable
throughout--incomparable, inimitable."
The second tale,--_Louisa Manners, or the Farm House_, has already
been spoken of (p. 9); for in Louisa's pretty prattle we have a
reminiscence of Mary's happiest childish days among "the Brutons and
the Gladmans" in Hertfordshire; and in _Margaret Green, or the Young
Mahometan_ (pp. 10-16), of her more sombre experiences with
Grandmother Field at Blakesware.
The Tales contributed by Charles Lamb are _Maria Howe, or the Effect
of Witch Stories_, which contains a weird and wonderful portrait of
Aunt Hetty; _Susan Yates, or First Going to Church_ (see pp. 2-3), and
_Arabella Hardy, or the Sea Voyage_.
It may be worth noting that Mary signs her little prelude, the
_Dedication to the Young Ladies_, with the initials of her
boy-favourite Martin Burney; a pretty indication of affection for him.
Many years after the appearance of _Mrs. Leicester's School_,
Coleridge said to Allsop: "It at once soothes and amuses me to
think--nay, to know--that the time will come when this little volume
of my dear and well-nigh oldest friend, Mary Lamb, will be not only
enjoyed but acknowledged as a rich jewel in the treasury of our
permanent English literature; and I cannot help running over in my
mind the long list of celebrated writers, astonishing geniuses,
Novels, Romances, Poems, Histories, and dense Political Economy
quartos which, compared with _Mrs. Leicester's School_, will be
remembered as often and prized as highly as Wilkie's and Glover's
_Epics_ and Lord Bolingbroke's _Philosophics_ compared with _Robinson
Crusoe_."
But a not unimportant question is--What have the little folk thought?
The answer is incontrovertible. The first edition sold out
immediately, and four more were called for in the course of five
years. It has continued in fair demand ever since; though there have
not been anything like so many recent reprints as of the _Tales from
Shakespeare_. It is one of those children's books which to re-open in
after life is like revisiting some sunny old garden, some favourite
haunt of childhood where every nook and cranny seems familiar, and
calls up a thousand pleasant memories.
_Mrs. Leicester's School_ was published at Godwin's Juvenile Library,
Skinner Street, Christmas 1808; and, stimulated by its immediate
success and by Godwin's encouragement, Mary once more set to work,
this time to try her hand in verse.
But, meanwhile, came the domestic upset of a removal, nay of two. The
landlord of the rooms in Mitre Court Building wanted them for himself,
and so the Lambs had to quit. March 28, 1809, Charles writes to
Manning: "While I think on it let me tell you we are moved. Don't come
any more to Mitre Court Buildings. We are at 34 Southampton Buildings,
Chancery Lane, and shall be here till about the end of May; then we
remove to No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, where I mean to live and die; for
I have such a horror of moving that I would not take a benefice from
the king if I was not indulged with non-residence. What a dislocation
of comfort is comprised in that word 'moving.' Such a heap of little
nasty things, after you think all is got into the cart: old
dredging-boxes, worn-out brushes, gallipots, vials, things that it is
impossible the most necessitous person can ever want, but which the
women who preside on these occasions will not leave behind if it was
to save your soul. They'd keep the cart ten minutes to stow in dirty
pipes and broken matches to show their economy. Then you can find
nothing you want for many days after you get into your new lodgings.
You must comb your hair with your fingers, wash your hands without
soap, go about in dirty gaiters. Were I Diogenes I would not move out
of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had had nothing but
small beer in it, and the second reeked claret."
The unwonted stress of continuous literary work and the turmoil and
fatigue of a double removal produced the effect that might have been
anticipated on Mary. In June (1809) Lamb wrote to Coleridge of his
change "to more commodious quarters. I have two rooms on the third
floor," he continues, "and five rooms above, with an inner staircase
to myself, new painted and all for £30 a year! I came into them on
Saturday week; and on Monday following Mary was taken ill with the
fatigue of moving; and affected I believe by the novelty of the house,
she could not sleep, and I am left alone with a maid quite a stranger
to me, and she has a month or two's sad distraction to go through.
What sad large pieces it cuts out of life!--out of _her_ life, who is
getting rather old; and we may not have many years to live together. I
am weaker, and bear it worse than I ever did. But I hope we shall be
comfortable by-and-by. The rooms are delicious, and the best look
backwards into Hare Court where there is a pump always going. Just now
it is dry. Hare Court trees come in at the window, so that 'tis like
living in a garden. I try to persuade myself it is much pleasanter
than Mitre Court; but alas! the household gods are slow to come in a
new mansion. They are in their infancy to me; I do not feel them yet;
no hearth has blazed to them yet. How I hate and dread new places!...
Let me hear from some of you, for I am desolate. I shall have to send
you, in a week or two, two volumes of juvenile poetry done by Mary and
me within the last six months, and that tale in prose which Wordsworth
so much liked, which was published at Christmas with nine others by
us, and has reached a second edition. There's for you! We have almost
worked ourselves out of child's work, and I don't know what to do....
Our little poems are but humble, but they have no name. You must read
them, remembering they were task work; and perhaps you will admire the
number of subjects, all of children, picked out by an old bachelor and
an old maid. Many parents would not have found so many."
Lamb left his friends to guess which were his and which Mary's. Were
it a question of their prose the task were easy. The brother's "witty
delicacy" of style, the gentle irony under which was hid his deep
wisdom, the frolicsome, fantastic humours that often veiled his
tenderness, are individual, unique. But in verse, and especially in a
little volume of "task-work," those fragments of Mary's which he
quotes in his letters show them to have been more similar and equal.
It is certain only that _The Three Friends_, _Queen Oriana's Dream_,
and the lines _To a River in which a Child was Drowned_ were his, and
that his total share was "one-third in quantity of the whole." Also
that _The Two Boys_ (reprinted by Lamb in his _Detached Thoughts on
Books and Reading_), _David in the Cave of Adullam_, and _The First
Tooth_ are certainly Mary's. Through all there breathes a sweet and
wise spirit; but sometimes, and no doubt on Mary's part, the desire to
enforce a moral is too obtrusive, and the teaching too direct, though
always it is of a high and generous kind; never pragmatic and
pharisaic after the manner of Dr. Watts. That difficult art of
artlessness and perfect simplicity, as in Blake's _Songs of
Innocence_, which a child's mind demands and a mature mind loves, is
rarely attained. Yet I think _The Beasts in the Tower_, _Crumbs to the
Birds_, _Motes in the Sunbeam_, _The Coffee Slips_, _The Broken Doll_,
_The Books and the Sparrow_, _Blindness_, _The Two Boys_, and others
not a few, must have been favourites in many a nursery.
_The Text_, in which a self-satisfied little gentleman who listens to
and remembers all the sermon is contrasted, much to his disadvantage,
with his sister who did not hear a word, because her heart was full of
affectionate longing to make up a quarrel they had had outside the
church-door,--is very pretty in a moral, if not in a musical point of
view. This and the three examples which I subjoin were certainly
Mary's. The lullaby calls up a picture of her as a sad child nursing
her little Charles, though he was no orphan:
NURSING.
O hush, my little baby brother;
Sleep, my little baby brother;
Sleep, my love, upon my knee.
What though, dear child, we've lost our mother;
That can never trouble thee.
You are but ten weeks old to-morrow:
What can _you_ know of our loss?
The house is full enough of sorrow,
Little baby, don't be cross.
Peace! cry not so, my dearest love;
Hush, my baby-bird, lie still;
He's quiet now, he does not move,
Fast asleep is little Will.
My only solace, only joy,
Since the sad day I lost my mother,
Is nursing her own Willy boy,
My little orphan brother.
The gentle raillery of the next seems equally characteristic of
Mary:--
FEIGNED COURAGE.
Horatio, of ideal courage vain,
Was flourishing in air his father's cane,
And, as the fumes of valour swelled his pate,
Now thought himself _this_ hero, and now _that_:
"And now," he cried, "I will Achilles be,
My sword I brandish; see, the Trojans flee.
Now I'll be Hector, when his angry blade
A lane through heaps of slaughtered Grecians made!
And now, by deeds still braver, I'll evince
I am no less than Edward the Black Prince:
Give way, ye coward French."--As thus he spoke,
And aimed in fancy a sufficient stroke
To fix the fate of Cressy or Poictiers
(The Muse relates the hero's fate with tears);
He struck his milk-white hand against a nail,
Sees his own blood, and feels his courage fail.
Ah! where is now that boasted valour flown,
That in the tented field so late was shown?
Achilles weeps, great Hector hangs the head,
And the Black Prince goes whimpering to bed!
The last is so pretty a little song it deserves to be fitted with an
appropriate melody:--
CRUMBS TO THE BIRDS.
A bird appears a thoughtless thing,
He's ever living on the wing,
And keeps up such a carolling,
That little else to do but sing
A man would guess had he.
No doubt he has his little cares,
And very hard he often fares,
The which so patiently he bears,
That, listening to those cheerful airs,
Who knows but he may be
In want of his next meal of seeds?
I think for _that_ his sweet song pleads.
If so, his pretty art succeeds,
I'll scatter there among the weeds
All the small crumbs I see.
_Poetry for Children, Entirely Original, by the Author of Mrs.
Leicester's School_, as the title-page runs, was published in the
summer of 1809, and the whole of the first edition sold off rapidly;
but instead of being reprinted entire, selections from it
only--twenty-six out of the eighty-four pieces--were incorporated by a
schoolmaster of the name of Mylius in two books called _The First Book
of Poetry_ and _The Poetical Class Book_, issued from the same
Juvenile Library in 1810. These went through many editions, but
ultimately dropped quite out of sight, as the original work had
already done. Writing to Bernard Barton in 1827 Lamb says: "One likes
to have one copy of everything one does. I neglected to keep one of
_Poetry for Children_, the joint production of Mary and me, and it is
not to be had for love or money." Fifty years later such specimens of
these poems as could be gathered from the Mylius collections and from
Lamb's own works, were republished by Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt and also by
Richard Herne Shepherd; when, at last in 1877, there came to hand from
Australia a copy of the original edition: it had been purchased at a
sale of books and furniture at Plymouth in 1866 and thence carried to
Adelaide. It was reprinted entire by Mr. Shepherd (Chatto and Windus,
1878), with a preface from which the foregoing details have been
gathered. A New England publisher early descried the worth of the
_Poetry for Children_; for it was reprinted in Boston--eighty-one
pieces, at least, out of the eighty-four--in 1812. A copy of this
American edition also has recently come to light.
This was Mary's last literary undertaking in book form; but there is
reason to think she wrote occasional articles for periodicals for some
years longer. One such, at any rate, on _Needle-work_, written in
1814, is mentioned by Crabb Robinson, of which more hereafter.