The shocking story of Charles and Mary Lamb: Slightly Foxed podcast reviewed

The Slightly Foxed podcast, like the quarterly and old bookshop of the same name, is almost muskily lovely. It’s the sort of thing you can imagine listening to with a dog at your feet and whisky by your side in a draughty Mitfordesque folly. Ordinarily, you might attribute its homeliness to the fact that it is recorded around a kitchen table. But with the hosts now socially distanced across the country, and it feeling just as cosy, you realise that the atmosphere must derive from something else.

In the latest episode, Philippa, Hazel and Gail were joined down the line by biographer Felicity James to discuss the early 19th-century writers Charles and Mary Lamb. Perhaps best known today for their Tales from Shakespeare, the siblings, of whom Mary was the elder by a decade, earned some notoriety in their own time for their bond following a terrible family drama.

It began, as James recounted, just before dinner on 22 September 1796 when Mary, then a dressmaker, was chiding her apprentice. Having grown up quite comfortably in the Inner Temple, where her father was a clerk, Mary had found herself working around the clock to support him after his employer died and he himself suffered a stroke. Her ill mother, similarly dependent, stepped in to resolve the dispute. Suddenly, Mary snapped. Charles returned from work at East India House to find his mother fatally stabbed in the heart, his father wounded with a fork, and Mary grasping a carving knife.

It was probably for the best that, when Charles and Mary came to compose their Shakespeare for children, he did the tragedies and she the comedies. The matricide naturally had a devastating effect upon her already deteriorating mental health.