A tour de force in the tradition of Hawksmoor and Chatterton, Peter Ackroyd’s new novel of deceit and betrayal is a witty reimagining of a great nineteenth-century Shakespeare forgery.
Charles and Mary Lamb, who will achieve lasting fame as the authors of Tales from Shakespeare for children, are still living at their parents’ home. Charles, an aspiring writer bored stiff by his job as a clerk at the East India Company, enjoys a drink or three too many each night at the local pub. His sister, Mary, is trapped in domesticity, caring for her ailing, dotty father and her maddening mother. The siblings’ enchantment with Shakespeare provides a much-needed escape, and they delight in reading and quoting the great bard. When William Ireland, an ambitious young antiquarian bookseller, comes into their lives claiming to possess a “lost” Shakespearean play, the Lambs can barely contain their excitement. As word of the amazing find spreads, scholars and actors alike beat a path to Ireland’s door, and soon all of London is eagerly anticipating opening night of a star-studded production of the play.
The perfect, lighthearted follow-up to Ackroyd’s magnificent biography of Shakespeare, The Lambs of London transforms the real-life literary hoax into an ingenious, intriguing drama that will keep readers guessing right to the end.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Following up on his recent nonfiction Shakespeare: The Biography, Ackroyd brings readers forward to London at the turn of the 19th century, and to denizens who are preoccupied with the Shakespearean past. The plot is a lightly fictionalized story about real-life essayist Charles Lamb and his sister Mary, both passionate devotées of the Bard, and their fraught friendship with William Henry Ireland, a bookseller who unearths a trove of Shakespeare documents, including what seems to be an unknown play. The mystery of the play's origin shapes an enchanting, slightly melancholy, exploration of Regency society. The young characters struggle with the constraints of their day—the brilliant, fragile Mary feels suffocated by the strictures of feminine domesticity; William chafes against his father's domination—but they do so without craning their necks toward modernity as an escape route: Ackroyd knows that the past is another country; there his characters live, and there they stay. Steeping readers in revealing but unobtrusive period detail, Ackroyd once again delivers a psychologically rich evocation of a vanished time. (June 20)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Peter Ackroyd, author of London: The Biography and other historical novels, imbues his newest work, based on real people in 19th-century London, with Elizabethan flair. Filled with colorful characters, suspense, ambiguity, and wit, this tragicomedy offers a rich appreciation of literature and history. The only debate centered on the novel's historical accuracy. The Los Angeles Times faulted Ackroyd for presenting inaccuracies that contradict known history, despite the author's admitted fictional bent (Mary falls for the real-life forgerer William, for example). But most critics praised Ackroyd's "intriguing adjustments" to history (Newsday).
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Monkeys on the Moon,
By A. Hickman (Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Lambs of London (Paperback)
"The Lambs of London" is a nifty little book that blends history and fiction with just a soupcon of mystery to make for a very satisfying read. In the last decade of the 18th century, William Henry Ireland really did produce a number of Shakespeare-related manuscripts (including a letter to the bard from Queen Elizabeth) that experts swore were authentic. I know of no factual connection to Charles and Mary Lamb, but Mary's tragic history (somewhat telescoped here) dovetails nicely with that of Ireland, who, like Chatterton, was but a teenager when he committed his infamous forgeries, the most notorious of which was a "lost play" by Shakespeare entitled "Vortigern," after the Dark-age British King. Other sources give the full title of the play as "Vortigern and Rowena," although this is never mentioned by Ackroyd, and there are other minor discrepancies as well (for instance, Ireland's so-called "patron" and source of the manuscripts is usually given as another young man and not a woman), but Ackroyd is not so much interested in the truth as in the "larger narrative." And a riveting narrative it is! Along the way, we meet such period heavy hitters as Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Thomas de Quincey, and there are fine portraits of lesser-knowns such as Ireland's father, Samuel, an antiquarian who was ruined by the scandal, and Charles Lamb's circle of bibulous friends from the East India House, who stage a play of their own, portraying the "mechanicals" in Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream." The climax of the novel is a brilliantly realized staging of "Vortigern," which may or may not have been the travesty it was later judged to be. There is more attention to character and plot in "The Lambs of London" than is typical of Ackroyd's novels, thus making this one of his best. I recommend it warmly.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Lambs of London,
By
This review is from: The Lambs of London: A Novel (Hardcover)
The Lambs of London is the story of Charles and Mary Lamb, authors of Shakespeare for Children, and the great literary hoax that was played upon London in the first few years of the 19th century by William Henry Ireland, son of a book seller.
Charles is a clerk at the East India House. He's bored with his job and spends his free time in taverns drinking with his friends. In fact, when we first meet him, he is slightly less than sober. His sister Mary, is a fragile young woman who is emotionally and physically unwell. She idolizes her brother and puts up with Charles's coming home drunk at odd hours. They live with their parents, their overbearing mother and their slightly senile father. They soon become acquainted with Ireland, who at the age of 17 is already a writer. To suit his own fancy, he "discovers" a lost Shakespearean work called "Vortigern" as well as a testament allegedly written by Shakespeare's father. Its pretty obvious that both works are forgeries; the text of the play uses too many 19th-century phrases and it only has four acts. The documents were also found under suspecious cercumstances that Ireland refuses to discuss. But London, caught up in this extraordianry new "find" recognizes the work as real and the play is performed. While the major facts of the book are true, there is a lot that is not and there are a few misleading things as well. The dates are slightly off: in the book, the forgery and Mary's death take place in or before 1804; in real life, the forgery took place in 1796. In real life, also, Mary survived her brother. Shakespeare for Children was written in 1807; and while this book does not cover that time period, it might have been nice for the author to have at least mentioned it in his afterword. Also, before I learned very much about the Lambs, I'd assumed that Charles and Mary were much closer in age than they actually were (in realy life they were born nine years apart, she being the elder). Also (and this is a spoiler), when Mary attacks her mother and kills her, Ackroyd makes no mention of the fact that Charles did everything his power to prevent her from being sent to an asylum, including declaring himself her guardian. Aside from these historical details, which makes the book confusing in some places, this book is an excellent depiction of London in the pre-Victorian period. It's a quick read but well written and extremely fascinating. I also recommend reading Ackroyd's Shakespeare: a Biography.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Quick read with surprising depth,
By Avid Reader (USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Lambs of London (Paperback)
I'm not a scholar of Shakespeare nor historic England, but I found the combination of a book that delved into Shakespeare and life 200 years ago to be an irresistable combination. In this novel, author PEter Ackroyd takes a true event -- the forgery of some Shakespeare letters, poems, and a play -- and brings the perpetrators and other early 19th-century Shakespearians to life.
For me, the most entertaining thing was to try to inhabit the minds of people who literally seemed to have Shakespeare at-hand in their everyday speech and perception. They could quote him as easily as we'd quote lines from a sitcom or commercial. And "they" were not necessarily scholars and children of nobility. These were shopkeepers and clerks -- but with ambitions, intelligence, and intensity. I'd like to think that I would have been able to do so, if I had been raised in that environment, too. The pace of the story never slackens. We first meet Mary Lamb (an old maid, destined to care for her senile father) and Charles Lamb (her brother, a clerk with the East India company who dreams of glory as a literary critic and essayist). Since childhood, these two have been close, and they have shared a love of language and intellectual conversation. While Mary is house-bound, due to the restrictions of her era, Charles works and goes drinking with his friends several night a week. He's found a boisterous, reasonably literate crew of pals, and they respect the small articles he's been able to place in literary publications. Charles meets -- or rather, is baited by -- William Ireland, an ambitious and possibly genius 17-year-old son of a bookseller. Ireland begins to share with William and Mary a series of Shakespeare pieces -- a letter, a poem -- that he has forged. When these are declared by scholars to be genuine, William presents his greatest forgery: an entire play. The play is produced, and it's met with derision and closes in six nights, as, perhaps, the public senses that it's not really Shakespeare. The forgeries unravel, and lives unravel. Ironically, William did it to impress his father and to test his literary skills, but not for glory or money (which are the reasons his father pursued the verification to its ultimate failure). The author does a deft job of sketching scenes and then leaving them before you get everything you want. You want to hear more from Charles' cronies, who are witty and foolish at the same time. You want the mini-play that Charles tries to produce to be done more than once (in front a inmates in an asylum). You want Mary and William to fall in love and read plays and poetry together for 40 years. You want Charles to achieve his ambition as a literary critic. And so on. The only clunker in this book is a two-page visit that William and his father make to a pair of clerics who are Shakespeare scholars, and who become crucial to the deception because they are pleased that the newly found works "prove" that Shakespeare was not a secret Catholic. Those clerics are described as owning a black foundling boy, a former slave, who they molest every night. It's a dumb, unnecessary detail -- as neither the clerics nor the boy appear again in the book. So why does the author go out of his way to make those insults?
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Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs):
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Samuel Ireland, William Ireland, Miss Lamb, Mary Lamb, Rosa Ponting, Charles Lamb, Laystall Street, Tom Coates, Drury Lane, Edmond Malone, Berners Street, Doctor Parr, Holborn Passage, Benjamin Milton, Alfred Jowett, Selwyn Onions, Westminster Words, East India House, Billiter Inn, Henley Street, Church House, Pall Mall Review, Thomas De Quincey, Siegfried Drinkwater, William Shakespeare Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Surprise Me!
Samuel Ireland, William Ireland, Miss Lamb, Mary Lamb, Rosa Ponting, Charles Lamb, Laystall Street, Tom Coates, Drury Lane, Edmond Malone, Berners Street, Doctor Parr, Holborn Passage, Benjamin Milton, Alfred Jowett, Selwyn Onions, Westminster Words, East India House, Billiter Inn, Henley Street, Church House, Pall Mall Review, Thomas De Quincey, Siegfried Drinkwater, William Shakespeare Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Surprise Me!
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