Product Description

From the author of Chatterton and Shakespeare: A Biography comes a gripping novel set in London that re-imagines an infamous 19th-century Shakespeare forgery.

Charles and Mary Lamb, who will in time achieve lasting fame as the authors of Tales from Shakespeare for Children, are still living at home, caring for their dotty and maddening parents. Reading Shakespeare is the siblings’ favorite reprieve, and they are delighted when an ambitious young bookseller comes into their lives claiming to possess a ‘lost’ Shakespearea play. Soon all of London is eagerly anticipating opening night of a star-studded production of the play not knowing that they have all been duped by charlatan and a fraud.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #200132 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-10
• Released on: 2007-07-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

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.

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.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Author of such acclaimed historical novels as Hawksmoor (1986) and Chatterton (1988), this British master of the genre carefully weaves another gorgeously textured fictional narrative based in historical fact and on historical figures. The famous late-nineteenth-century English essayist Charles Lamb is the focal point around which Ackroyd tells a stylish, intelligent, and suspenseful tale. Into its major theme, the authenticity of historical documents, he spins a secondary theme of domestic disharmony and eroding personalities behind seemingly ordinary middle-class doors. Charles Lamb is seen here as a young man launched on a writing career but still tethered to his clerk's job at London's East India Company. Another young man, William Ireland (also an actual person), befriends Charles and Charles' frustrated sister, Mary. William Ireland works in his father's antiquarian bookstore, and simultaneous to his stepping into the Lambs' domestic universe, he finds himself the almost accidental owner of a treasure trove of Shakespearean documents, including the text of a lost play. Dissembling is practiced as an art form in this novel, leading the reader on a delicious quest to learn the true story of the Shakespeare manuscripts. Marvelous, sophisticated entertainment, with special appeal for admirers of Henry James' immaculate novella The Aspern Papers. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Monkeys on the Moon
"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.

The Lambs of London
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.

Seedy and unappealing
I didn't care for this book at all. Too speculative, and the characters were not especially likable.