SOURCE: Woodbery, Bonnie. “The Silence of the Lambs: Anti-Maniachal Regimes in the Writings of Mary Lamb.” Women's Writing 5, no. 3, (1998): 289-303.

In the following essay, Woodbery maintains that Mary Lamb's works reveal information on contemporary treatment of the mentally ill.

This article examines Mary Lamb's poems and her short tale “The Young Mahometan” for what they reveal about Lamb's experience of madhouse confinements. I suggest that in her works for children, Lamb articulates an idiom of the body as it both reflects and resists what was often a brutal silencing of the mad body in early nineteenth-century madhouses. Roy Porter is correct in his lament that we “remain quite staggeringly ill-informed” about the state of mind of Mary Lamb, one of the “most famous Georgian mad people” (Porter et al, Mind-Forg'd Manacles, p. 234). Aside from letters to Dorothy Wordsworth and to Sarah Stoddart in which Mary Lamb briefly refers...