The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6 · Chapter 284Letter 544
This chapter is not translated yet. You are reading the original.
[? Late April, 1832.]
One day in my life Do come. C.L.
I have placed poor Mary at Edmonton—
I shall be very glad to see the Hunch Back and Straitback the 1st Even'g they can come. I am very poorly indeed. I have been cruelly thrown out. Come and don't let me drink too much. I drank more yesterday than I ever did any one day in my life.
Do come.
Cannot your Sister come and take a half bed—or a whole one? Which, alas, we have to spare.
[Mary Lamb would have been taken to Walden House, Edmonton, where mental patients were received. A year later the Lambs moved there altogether.
The Hunchback would be Knowles; the Straitback I do not recognise.
John Forster (1812-1876), whom we now meet for the first time, one of Lamb's last new friends, was the author, later, of Lives of the Statesmen of the Commonwealth and the Lives also of Goldsmith and of Landor and Dickens, whose close friend he was. His Life of Pym, which was in Vol. II. of the Statesman, did not appear until 1837, but I assume that he had ridden the hobby for some years.]