EARLY LIFE IN READING
Towards the end of the year 1791, before the little Mary had become
quite four years old, a change came over the fortunes of the family.
Dr. Mitford, in spite of some really good qualities, was of a careless
and thoughtless disposition as regards money matters, and was,
unhappily, addicted to games of chance. “He had the misfortune,” writes
his daughter, “to be the best whist player in England,” and like the
celebrated Mr. Micawber and so many of his class, he had an unchanging
faith in his own “good luck,” and felt confident that however dark
the horizon might be something would turn up to his advantage.
“Dr. Mitford,” remarks a shrewd writer, “belonged to that class of
impecunious individuals who seem to have been born insolvent.”
He had come into possession of a large fortune on his marriage, for
his bride-elect had refused to have any settlement made concerning
property under her own control, and this fortune had already nearly
melted away.
In spite, however, of all his thoughtless extravagance, from which both
wife and child suffered severely, they remained at all times devoted
to him. As she grew older Mary could not shut her eyes to her father’s
faults; but she loved him in spite of them, dwelling constantly in her
writings upon his invariable kindness to her as a child, which claimed,
she considered, her lasting gratitude. “He possessed indeed,” she
remarks, “every manly and generous quality, excepting that which is so
necessary in this workaday world—the homely quality called prudence.”
On leaving Alresford, where many of their valued possessions had to
be sold, the little family removed to a house in Southampton Street,
Reading, where the doctor hoped to establish a practice. This street,
which crosses the river Kennet by a stone bridge, has still an
old-world appearance, with its modest-looking dwelling-houses and its
old-fashioned inns; while high above its roofs rises the spire of the
old church of St. Giles.
[Illustration: SOUTHAMPTON STREET]
It is in connection with this very church that we have a pleasant
glimpse of the little Mary from the pen of Mrs. Sherwood, then a young
girl living in Reading. “I remember,” she writes, “once going to a
church in the town, which we did not usually attend, and being taken
into Mrs. Mitford’s pew, where I saw the young authoress, Miss Mitford,
then about four years old. Miss Mitford was standing on the seat, and
so full of play that she set me on to laugh in a way which made me
thoroughly ashamed.”
Writing of this same period in after life, Mary Mitford says: “It is
now about forty years since I, a damsel scarcely so high as the table
on which I am writing, and somewhere about four years old, first became
an inhabitant of Belford Regis” (her name for Reading), “and really
I remember a great deal not worth remembering concerning the place,
especially our own garden and a certain dell on the Bristol road to
which I used to resort for primroses.”
It was during this first residence in Reading, when she was still a
small child, that she saw London for the first time.
“Business called my father thither in the middle of July,” she writes,
“and he suddenly announced his intention of driving me up in his gig
(a high open carriage holding two persons), unencumbered by any other
companion, male or female. George only, the old groom, was sent forward
with a spare horse over-night to Maidenhead Bridge, and, the dear papa
conforming to my nursery hours, we dined at Crauford Bridge ... and
reached Hatchett’s Hotel, Piccadilly (the New White Horse Cellar of the
old stage-coaches), early in the afternoon....
“I had enjoyed the drive past all expression, chattering all the way,
and falling into no other mistakes than those common to larger people
than myself of thinking that London began at Brentford, and wondering
in Piccadilly when the crowd would go by; and I was so little tired
when we arrived that, to lose no time, we betook ourselves that night
to the Haymarket Theatre, the only one then open. I had been at plays
in the country, in a barn in Hampshire ... but the country play was
nothing to the London play—a lively comedy with the rich caste of
those days—one of the comedies that George III enjoyed so heartily. I
enjoyed it as much as he, and laughed and clapped my hands and danced
on my father’s knee, and almost screamed with delight, so that a party
in the same box, who had begun by being half angry at my restlessness,
finished by being amused with my amusement.
“The next day, my father, having an appointment at the Bank, took the
opportunity of showing me St. Paul’s and the Tower.
“At St. Paul’s I saw all the wonders of the place, whispered in the
whispering gallery, and walked up the tottering wooden stairs, not into
the ball itself but to the circular balustrade of the highest gallery
beneath it. I have never been there since, but I can still recall most
vividly that wonderful panorama: the strange diminution produced by
the distance, the toy-like carriages and horses, and men and women
moving noiselessly through the toy-like streets.... Looking back to
that [scene] what strikes me most is the small dimensions to which
the capital of England was then confined. When I stood on the topmost
gallery of St. Paul’s I saw a compact city spreading along the river,
it is true, from Billingsgate to Westminster, but clearly defined to
the north and to the south, the West-End beginning at Hyde Park on the
one side and the Green Park on the other. Then Belgravia was a series
of pastures and Paddington a village.
“We proceeded to the Tower, that place so striking by force of contrast
... the jewels and the armoury glittering ... amidst the gloom of the
old fortress and the stories of great personages imprisoned, beheaded,
buried within its walls;—a dreary thing it seemed to be a queen! But at
night I went to Astley’s, and I forgot the sorrows of Lady Jane Grey
and Anne Boleyn in the wonders of the horsemanship and the tricks of
the clown.”
Into the last day were crowded visits to the Houses of Lords and
Commons, to Westminster Abbey, to Cox’s Museum in Spring Gardens, to
the Leverian Museum in the Blackfriars Road, and finally at night
to the theatre once more, returning home on the morrow “without a
moment’s weariness of mind or body.”
About this time Lord Charles Murray-Aynsley, a younger son of the Duke
of Athol, became engaged to be married to a cousin of the Mitfords.
“Lord Charles, as fine a young man as one should see in a summer’s
day, tall, well-made, with handsome features ... and charming temper,
had an infirmity which went nigh to render all [his] good gifts of no
avail; a shyness, a bashfulness, a timidity most painful to himself and
distressing to all about him.... That a man with such a temperament,
who could hardly summon courage to say ‘How d’ye do?’ should ever have
wrought himself up to the point of putting the great question was
wonderful.... I myself, a child not five years old, one day threw him
into an agony of blushing by running up to his chair in mistake for
my papa. Now I was a shy child, a very shy child, and as soon as I
arrived in front of his lordship and found that I had been misled by a
resemblance of dress, by the blue coat and buff waistcoat, I first of
all crept under the table, and then flew to hide my face in my mother’s
lap; my poor fellow-sufferer, too big for one place of refuge, too old
for the other, had nothing for it but to run away, which, the door
being luckily open, he happily accomplished.”