Odd to think that some of their works were still popular when I was a child – certainly I had a copy of Tales From Shakespeare. Does anyone ever read them these days, I wonder
The tale which caught my attention this time is by Mary & comes from Mrs Leicester’s School: or The History Of Several Young Ladies Related By Themselves
Published in 1808 it has the distinctly Gothic flavour which was popular then – Jane Austen was writing Northanger Abbey at about the same time. This one is not at all funny however – it has a stern moral, not my taste at all. But it was the title which drew me in & kept me going: Margaret Green The Young Mahometan
Margaret & her recently widowed mother go to live with a very rich, elderly & now frail woman in her vast house. Most rooms are shrouded & closed but Margaret is allowed to roam & eventually manages to penetrate the library
“If you never spent whole mornings alone in a large library, you cannot conceive the pleasure of taking down books …”
Written by Mary Lamb no doubt from the heart & from experience. In childhood she had been granted free range of the library of her father's employer, Samuel Salt, a bencher of the Inner Temple
The fictional Margaret comes across Mahometism Explained which had a great many of its leaves torn out. Nevertheless it was full of wonders, & Margaret came to believe that she must be a Mahometan “for I believed every word I read”
The problem with this was that, as the book explained:
“After we are dead, we are to pass over a narrow bridge, which crosses a bottomless gulf. The bridge was … no wider than a silken thread”, and all non-Mahometans would slip & drop into the gulf that had no bottom
Clearly neither her mother nor their patroness would be able to make this journey
Margaret grew anxious, became ill, & the physician discovered that “I had read myself into a fever”
She is removed to the physician’s home, where his wife is skilled in the care of such cases. She prescribes a visit to Harlow Fair where there were “rows of booths that were full of showy things; ribbands, laces, cakes & sweetmeats". Margaret is loaded with gifts, companions of her own age are invited round to play & the doctor’s wife coaxes her into explaining the source of her anxiety
Thus Margaret then learns that “so far from ‘Mahometism Explained’ being a book concealed only in this library, it was well known to every person of the least information”
And what is more, the missing pages would have explained that the stories of Mahometism were not true
“I was carried home at the end of a month. Perfectly cured of the error into which I had fallen, & very much ashamed of having believed so many absurdities”
What is intriguing about this story, apart from the renewed topicality of anxieties in the west about the Muslim faith, is the way that the treatment (though not the diagnosis) would not seem extraordinary to any modern therapist or medic concerned to treat anxiety
And the determination to wean her away from error is not that far from the governments determination to wean young hotheads from 'extremism'
Related post
