In The Champion for December 11, 1814, was printed a letter defending tailors against Lamb.
[Page 204.] On Needle-Work.
The British Lady's Magazine and Monthly Miscellany, April 1, 1815. By Mary Lamb.
The authority for attributing this paper to Mary Lamb is Crabb Robinson. In his Diary for December 11, 1814, he writes: "I called on Miss Lamb, and chatted with her. She was not unwell, but she had undergone great fatigue from writing an article about needle-work for the new Ladies' British Magazine. She spoke of writing as a most painful occupation, which only necessity could make her attempt."
We know that Mary Lamb's needle was required to help keep the Lamb family, not only after Samuel Salt's death in 1792, when they had to move from the Temple, but very likely while they were there also. In one of the newspaper accounts of the tragedy of September, 1796, she is described as "a mantua-maker." Possibly she continued to sew for a while after she joined her brother, in 1799, but she would hardly call that "early life," being thirty-five in that year.
[Page 210.] On the Poetical Works of George Wither.
This is the one prose article that, to the best of our knowledge, made its first and only appearance in the Works (1818). It was inspired by John Mathew Gutch (1776-1861), Lamb's schoolfellow at Christ's Hospital, with whom he shared rooms in Southampton Buildings in 1800. Later, when Gutch had become proprietor, at Bristol, of Felix Farley's Bristol Journal (in which many of Chatterton's poems had appeared), he took advantage of his press to set up a private edition of selections from Wither, a poet then little known and not easily accessible, an interleaved copy of which, in two volumes, was sent to Lamb in 1809 or 1810. Gutch told the story in an Appendix to his Lytell Geste of Robin Hoode (1847), wherein he printed a letter from Lamb dated April 9, 1810, concerning the edition, in the course of which Lamb remarks: "I never saw Philarete before—judge of my pleasure. I could not forbear scribbling certain critiques in pencil on the blank leaves.... Perhaps I could digest the few critiques prefixed to the 'Satires,' 'Shepherd's Hunting,' etc., into a short abstract of Wither's character and works...."
Lamb returned the book with this letter; and Gutch seems to have then sent it to Dr. John Nott (1751-1825), of the Hot Wells, Bristol, a medical man with literary tastes, and the author of a number of translations, medical treatises, and subsequently of an edition of Herrick; who added comments of his own both upon Wither and upon Lamb.