{"id":17950,"date":"2011-07-06T15:09:22","date_gmt":"2011-07-06T19:09:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=17950"},"modified":"2011-07-06T16:48:30","modified_gmt":"2011-07-06T20:48:30","slug":"making-of-a-lamb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/07\/06\/making-of-a-lamb\/","title":{"rendered":"Making \u2018Of Lamb\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In 1796, at the age of thirty-two, Mary Lamb had an attack of madness and killed her mother and wounded her father with a knife. She was\u00a0institutionalized\u00a0for three years until the death of her father, when, at the behest of her younger brother, Charles, she was brought to live with him. Charles Lamb was a clerk at the East India Company and a well-regarded essayist, and he remained Mary\u2019s caretaker and companion for the rest of their lives. The Lamb siblings were part of a literary circle that included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Wordsworths, William Hazlitt, and Mary Shelley, and they are the subject of the biography A Portrait of Charles Lamb<\/em> by David Cecil.<\/p>\n

Their story is also at the heart of a strange new illustrated poem that was published as a book by McSweeney\u2019s this month. Of Lamb<\/a><\/em> is a collaborative project between poet Matthea Harvey<\/a> and artist Amy Jean Porter<\/a>.\u00a0Harvey was fascinated by the process of erasures after seeing Tom Phillips\u2019s\u00a0A Humument<\/em> and Jen Bervin\u2019s\u00a0Nets<\/em> and decided to do one herself with the first book she could find for three dollars. \u201cI picked up\u00a0A Portrait of Charles Lamb<\/em> completely randomly,\u201d Harvey told me. \u201cWhen I discovered that Mary<\/em> and Lamb<\/em> were on each page, a story in poems started to emerge.\u201d There are echoes of Sarah Josepha Hale\u2019s famous nineteenth-century rhyme \u201cMary Had a Little Lamb,\u201d which tells the story of a young girl named Mary Sawyer who brings her pet lamb to school. But there are also weirder, more fascinating moments, too: \u201cNerves his family \/ Trouble his home \/ Dark spirits his company.\u201d<\/p>\n

Below are a few slides of Harvey\u2019s erasures and the illustrations by Porter. Porter says she was \u201cthinking of an illustrative tradition of a nineteenth-century British variety\u2014Edward Lear, Beatrix Potter, Eleanor Vere Boyle\u201d but also cites brass chandeliers, water towers, and artists such as Balthus and Gabriel Orozco as\u00a0inspiration. Click to enlarge.<\/p>\n\n\t\t