INTRODUCTION 1 The children of ]ohn and Elizabeth Lamb were children as wel1.of the Inner Temple, the medieval headquarters of the Knights Templars and Knights of St. ]ohn of ]erusalem and the seat of English law and Inn of Court where once functioned Sir Edward Coke and ]ohn Selden and even Chaucer and Gower some say. From its garden in Shakespeare's vision came the emblems for the Wars of the Roses. Lamb was bom in a ground-ftoor apartment at 2 Crown Office Row on February 10, 1775, and Mary presumably at another address on December 3, 1764. Their brother ]ohn, the ]ames Elia of Elia's "My Relations," pretentious, dogmatic, remotely humane, was bom on ]une 5, 1763. He attended Christ's Hospital from 1769 to 1778, then entered the South Sea House, and there rose from clerk to accountant. He published a pamphlet on the prevention of cruelty to animals, was married, and accumulated a collection of paintings of value. He died on October 26 and was buried at the church of St. Martin Outwich on November 7, 1821. Elizabeth, bom on ]anuary 9, 1762, Samuel, baptized on December 13, 1765, a second Elizabeth, bom on August 30, 1768, Edward, bom on September 3, 1770, and possibly the William interred from the Temple in June 1772 at the church of St. Dunstan-in-the-W est were their sisters and brothers who died in childhood. Elizabeth, the children's mother, was bom in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, in a year not determined. Her father, Edward Field, eamed his living as a gardener and died in 1766. Her mother, Mary, the eldest daughter of Edward Bruton (d. 1726) and the former Elizabeth Tyrrell (d. 1745), was baptized at Kimpton on May 28, 1713, and married at Hitchin on September 14, 1736. Mrs. Field supported herself after her husband's death until hers on ]uly 31, 1792, as the caretaker of Blakes­ ware, the manor house near Widford of Wil1iam Plumer (1687-1767), [xxvi] Introduction and their family. Elizabeth כ', the fonner Elizabeth Byde (d. 1778 Lamb, who was living in St. Marylebone, London, before her marriage in St. Dunstan's-in-the-West on March 29, 1761, was a good mother and loved all her children, though according to Lamb she did not understand and too often neglected Mary. Mary was a good daughter and loved her. But on September 22, 1796, while helping to set the table for dinner, Mary was mastered by a lurking insanity. She began throwing forks wildly about the room, one of them wounding her father, and she seized a case knife from the table and pursued around the room her little apprentice dressmaker. When Mrs. Lamb cried out at her daughter, Mary, shrieking, tumed on her mother and killed her with a knife thrust to her heart . John, the children's father, was bom in about 1725 to a Lincolnshire cobbler and his wife whose given names are not known. J ohn Lamb went probably to the grammar school or to Christ's Hospital in Lincoln and then went to London to become a footman. He retumed home a few years later to display his livery to his mother. He developed into a courageous and an independent man, brisk and happy for the most part, and came to appreciate humorous verse and the poetry of Prior and Swift. At one point he lived in Bath and at another joined a Society of Friends. In perhaps 1770 he published Poetical Pieces on Several Occasions and from 1772 to 1799 served as a first waiter in Inner Temple Hall. But from about 1747 to 1792 he chiefly served Samuel Salt. Salt, a shy eccentric, was a son of Vicar John Salt of Audley, Staffordshire, and for years the widower of the fonner Elizabeth Benson. He had become a member of the Inner Temple in 1745 and the owner of the Lambs' and his own apartments at 2 Crown Office Row in about 1768. He became a bencher, reader, and treasurer of the Inner Temple, a member of Parliament, director of the South Sea and East India companies, govemor of a number of hospitals and of Christ's Hospital, and the benefactor of the Lambs. He opened his library to them, played a part in the entrances of Lamb and probably Lamb's brother into their school and businesses, and left their parents five hundred pounds in South Sea stock, two hundred pounds in cash , and a ten-pound annuity upon his death on July 27, 1792. The elder John Lamb, Elia's Lovel of "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple", was Salt's friend, attendant, and keeper of time and books and treasury. He died querulous and palsied and was buried at the church Introduction [xxvii] of St. Andrew, Holbom, on April 13, 1799, beside his wife and sister, Sarah . Sarah, the children's Aunt Hetty, a spinster and her brother's senior by ten years, completed the household. She disrupted it by a strange dark and religious character that conflicted with the sunny personalities of her brother and especially her sister-in-law. The repeated attempts of the gentlewomanly Mrs. Lamb to soften the rudeness of Sarah with attentions only vexed her. The hatred that was thus irritated into existence made them wretched before each other for twenty years and would have done so for longer had not Charles and Mary brought them finally into concord. No such trouble ever existed between Sarah and Lamb. He acknowledged in the Maria Howe story of his and Mary's M rs. Leicester's School: Or, the History 01 Several Young Ladies, Related by T hemselves (1809) that his aunt's love was for him alone and, though he was sometimes apprehensive of her, his love for his aunt nearly exceeded his combined love for his parents. His serious disposition and a spirit delicate and subject to fears and depressions kept him somewhat apart from them, and they frequently had to leave him in order to attend to Salt's needs or chose to leave him for parties or friends. At those times Lamb generally elected to be by himself, to excite his imagination from the books in Salt's chambers or liberate his thoughts by the fountain and the sundial and in the walk - ways of the gardens of the Temple. Yet his aunt was close when he needed her. Because of that and their profoundly harmonious natures it was usually in her lap that he sought and found solace when frightened in his solitude or the night or by the black things in illustra- tion in Joseph Glanvill's Philosophical Considerations Touching Witches and Witchcra!t and Thomas Stackhouse's A New History o! the Holy Bible. She died on February 9 , 1797 . Mary too watched over him and twice took him into Hertfordshire . In 1778 or 1779 they visited their grandaunt the former Anne Bruton . She, who was baptized in 1717 and married in May 1747 to J ames Gladman (1704-1769), had long been at the farm in Mackery End where her husband had been a yeoman. She continued there to her death on August 3, 1799, as the housekeeper of Thomas Hawkins. l, told howי Mary, writing as Louisa Manners in Mrs. Leicester's Schoo she and her brother had wandered through the farmhouse and over its grounds, looked into the bam and stroked the pied cow, observed the [;xxviii] Introduction thresher and the bees at their work and the milkers and the fowl, searched the woodhouse for eggs and the orchard for flowers, picked currants and gooseberries and tumbled in the hay, watched the sheep­ shearing and joined in a sheepshearing supper, and taken their dinners with the field hands at a long white table before a faggot fire. Lamb mentioned those days when telling of later ones in "Mackery End, in Hertfordshire." In about 1781 Mary took him to visit their grand­ mother. Mary had been a guest at Blakesware before its mistress' death and so was able to leave her impressions of Mrs. Plumer as well as of Mrs. Field and the ancient mansion with marble hall of Hogarth prints and high-placed busts or hanging medallions of the twelve Caesars, room o·f portraits of Plumers in costumes of former times, and bedroom of ·old-fashioned furniture and tapestries Biblical in theme. Mary left her impressions as those of Margaret Green in Mrs. Leicester's School. Lamb left his fullest ones, of his grandmother and the house, in "Dream-children; a Reverie" and "Blakesmoor in H--shire." Before Mary took him to Blakesware, the performance of Thomas Augustine Arne's opera Artaxerxes given with David Garrick's panto­ mime Harlequin's Invasion at Drury Lane in the evening of December 1, 1780, had in fancy taken him farther. He had attended with his elders on passes supplied by Francis Fielde (d. 1809), his godfather, supposedly Richard Brinsley Sheridan's confidant, and the oilman of High Holbom and Cavendish Square whose widow in 1812 conveyed to Lamb the Hertfordshire property of Button Snap. Lamb recalled in "My First Play" that it had transported him to a heaven beyond its spectacular Persian setting. The schooling of Mary was limited to William Bird's Academy, a day school at 3 Bond Stables, Fetter Lane, across Fleet Street from the Temple. There she learned arithmetic and English composition from Benjamin Starkey, who became the author of M emoirs 0/ the Li/e 0/ Benj. Starkey, Late 0/ London, but Now an Inmate 0/ the Freemen's H ospital, in N ewcastle (1818) and the subject of Lamb's "Captain Starkey." After she had completed her studies she began her apprentice­ ship as a dressmaker.