Tale of two siblings, Shakespeare and a scam

THE LAMBS OF LONDON

By Peter Ackroyd

Nan A. Talese, $23, 213 pages

REVIEWED BY KELLY JANE TORRANCE

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Perhaps the best stories have a little of both. It’s an idea on which Peter Ackroyd has built an entire career.

The prolific British writer specializes in historical fiction of the most creative type. “Chatterton,” shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987, asked whether 18th-century English poet Thomas Chatterton really committed suicide at age 18. “The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde” tells the story of the Irish wit’s last days in Wilde’s own voice.

Mr. Ackroyd continues the tradition with his latest novel, “The Lambs of London.” The Lambs of the title are ostensibly Charles and Mary Lamb, the brother and sister who in 1807 published the children’s book “Tales from Shakespeare.” But it may also refer to the many Londoners who fell for a particularly well-executed scam; Mr. Ackroyd explores their loss of innocence.

In “Lambs,” Mr. Ackroyd re-creates Georgian London, in all its splendor and squalor. The author has an obvious love for the city and its great history. His “London: The Biography” was an 848-page love letter. Mr. Ackroyd also has a talent for compression. The first chapter of “Lambs” transports us to another world and introduces the psychological complexity of the Lambs in a mere 13 pages.

The biographer of Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare clearly knows his stuff. But “Lambs” never comes off as an attempt to show off his knowledge. Instead, the historical context serves as a jumping off point for the more important exploration of such themes as the relationship between parents and children, the roots of madness and the desperate desire we all sometimes have to believe, whether in a project or a person, despite the evidence.

Mary and Charles Lamb live with their parents, a father who is quickly becoming senile and a mother who resents her husband for it. (“Her husband had a habit of trying to urinate out of the bedroom window, a habit to which Mrs. Lamb was strenuously opposed.”) Both Lambs have aspirations. Charles spends his days as a clerk at the British East India Company, but in his spare time writes literary essays. The put-upon Mary just wants to get out of the house.

Mary loves Charles with a devotion bordering on the obsessive. Charles relies on Mary to inspire his work, and Mary relies on Charles to inspire her education. But Mary can’t help but feel resentful: “He was going to a world of companionship and learning, while she was left in the company of her mother and of Tizzy,” the maid. Charles has his own ambivalent feelings: “But there were times when her attention to him, intense and sensitive, repelled him.”

Into this bubbling cauldron of unstated emotion comes William Ireland. The son of a bookseller, he wants to enter the world of the intelligentsia as much as Mary does. “If he could become acquainted with Mr. Lamb, then he might enter this charmed fellowship,” he thinks. He begins by selling Charles a book once owned by William Shakespeare.

Charles and Mary both adore the Bard. As adolescents, they played together the romantic Shakespeare parts: Beatrice and Benedick, Ophelia and Hamlet. Mary, shy and pockmarked from smallpox, is quick to take into her confidence this other Shakespeare lover. Ireland soon makes a name for himself when he produces an astounding set of Shakespeariana: a deed bearing the Bard’s signature, a testament settling the question (that is still debated today) of whether he was a Catholic and finally an entire lost play.

It’s easy to see why Mary and Ireland so desperately wanted to be a part of Charles’ circle. “Lambs” is set in a lost world of the intellect. Charles and his friends, including writer Thomas de Quincey, speak in wit and poetry, even after having a few too many at the pub. But Mary wants that escape, too. “Had she the courage or the opportunity, she would be drunk every day of her life,” Mr. Ackroyd writes. “To be buried alive — was that not motive enough to drink?”

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