RETURN TO READING
After the extraordinary event of the lottery ticket the Mitfords were
suddenly placed in a position of opulence, and they joyfully quitted
their dingy London lodgings and returned once more to Reading. The
doctor had taken a new red brick house in the London Road, a road which
in those days bordered the open country.
The house is still standing, and is probably much as it was in the
Mitfords’ day. It has a deep verandah in front, and behind stretches a
long piece of garden. A small room at the back of the house is pointed
out to visitors as Dr. Mitford’s dispensary.
Mary Russell Mitford loved the old town of Reading—Belford Regis, as
she always calls it in her stories—and the various descriptions of the
place, scattered throughout her writings, make the Reading of her day
to live again.
On one occasion she describes the view of the town as seen from
the jutting corner of Friar Street, where she had taken shelter
from a shower of rain. She speaks of “the fine church tower of St.
Nicholas,[2] with its picturesque piazza underneath” and its “old
vicarage house hard by, embowered in evergreens”; of “the old irregular
shops in the market-place, with the trees of the Forbury beyond just
peeping between them, with all their varieties of light and shadow.”
[Footnote 2: St. Lawrence.]
Another day, after mentioning “the huge monastic ruins of the Abbey;”
with all its monuments of ancient times, she goes on to say “or for
a modern scene what can surpass the High Bridge on a sunshiny day?
The bright river crowded with barges and small craft; the streets and
wharfs and quays, all alive with the busy and stirring population of
the country and the town—a combination of light and motion.”
Miss Mitford has described this same scene as it appeared on a cold
winter’s evening in a book written late in life entitled, _Atherton and
other Stories_, which we should like to quote here.
“From ... the High Bridge the Kennet now showed like a mirror
reflecting on its icy surface into a peculiar broad and bluish shine,
the arch of lamps surmounting the graceful airy bridge and the
twinkling lights that glanced here and there, from boat or barge or
wharf, or from some uncurtained window that overhung the river.”
But the chief beauty of the old town was to be seen in summer time
on a Saturday (market-day) at noon. “The old market-place, always
picturesque from the irregular architecture of the houses, and the
beautiful Gothic church by which it is terminated, is then all alive
with the busy hum of traffic.... Noise of every sort is to be heard,
from the heavy rumbling of so many loaded waggons over the paved
market-place to the crash of crockery ware in the narrow passage of
Princes Street. One of the noisiest and prettiest places is the Piazza
at the end of St. Nicholas Church appropriated by long usage to the
female vendors of fruit and vegetables.” The butter market was at
the back of the market proper, “where respectable farmers’ wives and
daughters sold eggs, butter and poultry.” Here too “straw-hats, caps
and ribbons were sold, also pet rabbits and guinea-pigs, together with
owls and linnets in cages.”
[Illustration: DR. MITFORD’S HOUSE IN THE LONDON ROAD]
Among the odd characters who turned up on the occasion of markets
or fairs Miss Mitford mentions a certain rat-catcher by name Sam
Page “whose own appearance was as venomous as that of his retinue,”
and “told his calling almost as plainly as the sharp heads of the
ferrets which protruded from the pockets of his dirty jean jacket,
or the bunch of dead rats with which he was wont to parade the streets
of B. on a market-day.” But before he had taken to this business,
she says, he had tried many other callings, amongst them those of “a
barrel-organ grinder, the manager of a celebrated company of dancing
dogs, and the leader of a bear and a very accomplished monkey. Suddenly
he reappeared one day at B. fair as showman of the Living Skeleton, and
also a performer [himself] in the Tragedy of the Edinburgh Murders, as
exhibited every half-hour at the price of a penny to each person.” Sam
confessed that he liked acting of all things, especially tragedy; “it
was such fun.”
Of the period with which we are dealing Mary writes: “I was a girl at
the time—a very young girl, and, what is more to the purpose, a very
shy one, so that I mixed in none of the gaieties of the place; but
speaking from observation and recollection I can fairly say that I
never saw any society more innocently cheerful.” She tells us of “the
old ladies and their tea visits, the gentlemen and their whist club,
and the merry Christmas parties with their round games and their social
suppers, their mirth and their jests.”
And now for Mary herself: how did she strike the new acquaintances
that her parents were making? One who knew her well tells us that “she
showed in her countenance, and in her mild self-possession, that she
was no ordinary child; and with her sweet smile, her gentle temper, her
animated conversation, her keen enjoyment of life, and her incomparable
voice—“that excellent thing in woman—there were few of the prettiest
children of her age who won so much love and admiration from their
friends young and old as little Mary Mitford.”
In one of Miss Mitford’s tales entitled _My Godmothers_ there is an
amusing account of a stiff maiden lady of the old school by name Mrs.
Patience Wither (the “Mrs.” being given her by brevet rank). “In point
of fact,” writes Mary, “she was not my godmother, having stood only as
proxy for her younger sister, Mrs. Mary, my mother’s intimate friend,
then falling into a lingering decline.
“Mrs. Patience was very masculine in person, tall, square, large-boned
and remarkably upright. Her features were sufficiently regular, and
would not have been unpleasing but for the keen, angry look of her
light blue eye ... and her fiery, wiry red hair, to which age did no
good,—it would not turn grey.... She lived in a large, tall, upright,
stately house in the largest street of a large town. It was a grave
looking mansion, defended from the pavement by iron palisades, a flight
of steps before the sober brown door, and every window curtained and
blinded by chintz and silk and muslin, crossing and jostling each
other. None of the rooms could be seen from the street, nor the street
from any of the rooms—so complete was the obscurity.
“On the death of her sister Mrs. Patience ... was pleased to lay
claim to me in right of inheritance, and succeeded to the title of
my godmother pretty much in the same way that she succeeded to the
possession of Flora, her poor sister’s favourite spaniel. I am afraid
that Flora proved the more grateful subject of the two. I never
saw Mrs. Patience but she took possession of me for the purpose of
lecturing and documenting me on some subject or other,—holding up my
head, shutting the door, working a sampler, making a shirt, learning
the pence table, or taking physic....
“She was assiduous in presents to me at home and at school; sent
me cakes with cautions against over-eating, and needle-cases with
admonitions to use them; she made over to me her own juvenile library,
consisting of a large collection of unreadable books ... nay, she even
rummaged out for me a pair of old battledores, curiously constructed
of netted pack-thread—the toys of her youth! But bribery is generally
thrown away upon children, especially on spoilt ones; the godmother
whom I loved never gave me anything, and every fresh present from Mrs.
Patience seemed to me a fresh grievance. I was obliged to make a call
and a curtsy, and to stammer out something which passed for a speech,
or, which was still worse, to write a letter of thanks—a stiff, formal,
precise letter! I would rather have gone without cakes or needle-cases,
books or battledores to my dying day. Such was my ingratitude from five
to fifteen.”
One of the most prominent figures in the Reading of those days was Dr.
Valpy, headmaster of the Reading Grammar School. The school consisted
of a group of buildings “standing,” writes Miss Mitford, “in a nook of
the pleasant green called the Forbury, and parted from the churchyard
of St. Nicholas by a row of tall old houses. It was in itself a pretty
object—at least I, who loved it almost as much as if I had been of the
sex that learns Greek and Latin, thought so.... There was a little
court before the door of the doctor’s house with four fir trees, and
at one end a projecting bay window belonging to a very long room [the
doctor’s study] lined with a noble collection of books.” The Forbury
was used as the boys’ playground.
Dr. Valpy was much reverenced by his fellow-townsmen and greatly loved
by his pupils, in spite of the stern discipline of those days which
he considered it his duty to administer to culprits. Among his pupils
was Sergeant Talfourd, who thus describes his character: “Envy, hatred
and malice were to him mere names—like the figures of speech in a
schoolboy’s theme, or the giants in a fairy-tale, phantoms which never
touched him with a sense of reality.... His system of education was
animated by a portion of his own spirit: it was framed to enkindle and
to quicken the best affections.”
Another contemporary who happened to be of a cynical turn of mind
remarks of Dr. Valpy: “Had he been more supple in his principles or
less open in their avowal he might have risen to the highest position
in his sacred profession. A mitre might have been the reward of
subserviency and the revenues of a diocese the bribe of tergiversation
and hypocrisy, [but] he left to others such paths to preferment ...
and lived in the enjoyment of an unblemished reputation and a clear
conscience.”
On the further side of the Forbury stood a large old-fashioned building
adjoining the Abbey Gateway and bearing the name of the Abbey School.
It was a school for “young ladies” of the ordinary type belonging to
the eighteenth century, but which, at the time we are writing of,
was gradually taking a higher position in general estimation. Three
authoresses of very different degrees of fame were pupils in this
establishment, namely: Jane Austen for a short time as a very young
child, in about the year 1782, Miss Butt (afterwards Mrs. Sherwood) in
1790, and Mary Russell Mitford when the school was removed to London in
1798.
The school had formerly been carried on under the management of a Mrs.
Latournelle, a good-natured person but, as Mrs. Sherwood tells us,
“only fit for giving out clothes for the wash, mending them, making tea
and ordering dinners.” But after a time she took as a partner a young
lady of talent and of excellent education who at once made her mark
felt.
What, however, caused the permanent success of the school was the
arrival in Reading of a certain Monsieur St. Quintin, the son of a
nobleman in Alsace—a man of very superior intellect—who had been
secretary to the Comte de Moustier, one of the last ambassadors from
Louis XVI to the Court of St. James. Having lost all his property in
the French Revolution, he was thankful to accept the post of French
teacher in Dr. Valpy’s school, and was soon afterwards recommended
by the doctor as a teacher of French in the Abbey School. In course
of time he married Mrs. Latournelle’s young partner, and they “soon
so entirely raised the credit of the seminary,” writes Mrs. Sherwood,
“that when I went there, there were above sixty girls under their
charge. The style of M. St. Quintin’s teaching,” she says, “was lively
and interesting in the extreme.”
Dr. Mitford had been a warm friend to M. St. Quintin ever since his
arrival in Reading, and there was much pleasant intercourse between the
Mitfords and the St. Quintins. In the summer of 1798 the school was
transferred to London, and Dr. and Mrs. Mitford, who had then decided
to send their little daughter to school, were glad to place her under
the friendly care of M. and Madame St. Quintin.
[Illustration]