When William met Mary: The rewriting of Mary Lamb’s and William-Henry Ireland’s stories in Peter Ackroyd’s "The Lambs of London"
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2012
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
Peter Ackroyd’s London novels represent a distinctive component in his project of
composing a literary-historical biography of the city. Understanding London as a multilayered
palimpsest of texts, Ackroyd adds to this ongoing process by rewriting the city’s
history from new, imaginative perspectives. For this he employs approaches and strategies
such as parody, pastiche, genre mixture, metafiction, intertextuality and an incessant
mixing of the factual with the fictititious. The aim of this article is to explore the
various ways in which he toys with historical reality and blurs the borderline between
fiction and biography in The Lambs of London (2004), offering thus an alternative rendering
of two unrelated offences connected with late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century London literary circles: Mary Lamb’s matricide and William-Henry Ireland’s
forgeries of the Shakespeare Papers.
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Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 47.4 (2012), pp. 177-195