Charles Lamb in 1798. Portrait in chalk and ink by Robert Hancock. National Portrait Gallery, 449.

While the history of Joseph from the Old Testament was often retold for children, the tragic story of Saul and David seems to have been passed by.  The tragic chronicle of the rise and fall of Saul, the first king of Israel, has everything—war, sex, violence, betrayal, and black magic. In the story’s most terrifying episode, Saul panics when his prayers about the outcome of a looming battle with the Philistines go unanswered.  He goes in disguise to the woman of Endor and demands that she raise the prophet Samuel from the dead, contravening his own law against consultations with practitioners of the dark arts.  The angry specter’s prediction that Saul will lose the battle and his life the next day comes to pass.

The boy Charles Lamb between the ages of four and eight became “extremely inquisitive about witches and witch-stories” after he went into his father’s “book-closet” and wrestled the two folio volumes of Thomas Stackhouse’s New History of the Bible down from the upper shelf. The physical exertion was repaid by the chance to study the splendid engravings, except one he regretted having seen because it provided the container of his night terrors. The plate of the witch of Endor was the trigger: the terrors’ actual source were “archetypes” deep within the mind which “afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadow-land of pre-existence.”  Samuel, was depicted in Stackhouse as an old man wrapped in a mantle, and every night this spectre sent a hag that perched on Charles’ pillow.  He was so frightened that he avoided going into his room even in broad daylight.

Lamb’s 1820 description of a book illustration that made an indelible impression on him in childhood, with its penetrating analysis of its significance to him as an adult, is one of the earliest I know of.  It also offers more mundane evidence that children examined large books like Stackhouse which were not specifically intended for them, but neither excluded them, the wealth of illustrations being the main attraction.

Plate of the Witch of Endor raising the prophet Samuel from Thomas Stackhouse’s New History of the Bible (1733)

But some other details are puzzling. It occurred to me that it was possible that Charles might have looked at a copy of Stackhouse in the extensive library of his father’s employer Samuel Salt.  The Lamb family lived one floor below Salt in the Inner Temple and both Mary and Charles were given permission to read books there.   Could Elia have refashioned Charles’ memories for some purpose?  He did caution his readers at the end of “The Old Benchers: ”Let no one receive the narratives of Elia for true records!  They are, in truth, but shadows of facts—verisimilitudes, not verities.”   Salt did own a set of the two huge tomes:  a copy of the 1755 edition was sold at the 1793 Leigh & Sotheby sale of his library.

This edition, the last issued during Stackhouse’s lifetime, had 104 plates, significantly more than the first two editions.  However, Charles has to have looked at a copy of the original edition of 1733: the edition of 1755 replaced the plate of the Witch of Endor with another with another of Saul falling on his sword.  I can think of all kinds of fanciful solutions to this little mystery….  Salt had owned a copy of the 1733 edition, which he loaned to Lamb.  When Charles poked his fingers through the plate of Noah’s ark, he was forbidden to look at the book he had spoiled.  Eventually Salt replaced it with the 1755 edition, which had many more plates than the first or second editions.  Or the auctioneers miscataloged Salt’s copy.  That does address the question, could John Lamb found the 3 guineas to purchase the large and expensive book?  Maybe he found a used copy somewhere.   At present there seems to be no record of the books he owned.  Stranger things have happened than the miraculous discovery of the John Lamb Stackhouse in some private or institutional collection.

Stackhouse’s New History in two folio volumes.