My Father's Printing Office--The Prize Ring--The Fistic Art--
First Steps in Education--A Boy's Reading--Carlyle--Parents
and Children--A School Chum--Technical Education--Plaster
Medallions.
At the age of twelve I was taken from school and set to work in my
father's printing office. There must have been a serious fall in the
family fortunes about this time, for a year earlier I had been removed
from the respectable little private seminary I had hitherto attended
and transferred to a school of the roughest sort, where the pupils paid
threepence a week apiece to the schoolmaster and we used to give off the
result of our lessons in platoons. I learned a little freehand drawing
here in the South Kensington manner, for we had a night school which was
affiliated to the Art department there, and our teachers came to us once
a week from Birmingham. I was secretly very unhappy all this time, and
brooded much on the disguised prince idea among my rough companions.
My way to school led me past the Champion of England public-house, kept
by the Tipton Slasher--William Perry, from whom Tom Sayers afterwards
wrested the honours of the Prize Ring. I got to know that knock-kneed
giant well, and took an enormous pride in my acquaintance with him. I
remember one summer evening, seeing him eject an enormous fat Frenchman
from his door--one of the colony of artificers in glass which lived
there at this time. The champion's was the last house in the parish,
and beside it lay the Birmingham and Worcester Canal. The big pugilist
conducted his captive to the bridge and dumped him down there on the
wall, the top of which was all frayed and crumbled by the action of the
towing ropes. The fat Frenchman, who was good-naturedly tipsy, picked
up a loose half brick and tossed it after the departing Slasher. The
missile took him between the shoulders, and he, turning in wrath, flung
out one windy buffet at his assailant, and toppled him over the bridge
into the canal. There was a momentary flurry, and then a bystander lent
the immersed Frenchman one end of a barge-pole, and he was drawn to
the side, apparently quite sobered. The Slasher stood guffawing on the
bridge, a little crowd of loafers roared with laughter, and the fat
victim of the incident seemed as much amused by it as anybody. He struck
a burlesque fighting attitude on the tow-path, and then went dripping
homeward.
This small episode was quite in tune with the place and the time, and
nobody thought it worth more than a laugh. The good old Prize Ring
was even then sinking into disrepute and only the giant fight of years
later, when England and America were matched against each other in the
persons of Tom Sayers and The Benecia Boy, gave it a momentary flicker
before, as it were, it fell into the socket, and one form of British
valour died.
The Slasher was, of course, the central luminary, but there were scores
and scores of lesser lights revolving round him. The fistic art in those
days was very generally practised and a stand-up fight between two local
champions was often undertaken for the mere love of the thing. It was
not at all an uncommon practice for a party of eight to be brought
together, lots would be drawn, and four would stand up against four,
then two against two, and the survivors of the competition would fight
it out between them. I witnessed many of these contests and can bear
evidence that there was less rowdyism displayed than can be noted any
day amongst the crowd on a modern race-course. It was good, serious,
scientific fighting and the rules of the Ring were strictly observed.
Any violation of them would indeed have aroused the spontaneous anger
of the crowd, for the laws of the game were known to everybody and were
universally respected. I hope I am not going to sermonise often in the
course of this narrative, but I have always thought that the legislative
meddling with the Prize Ring was a grave mistake. The hooliganism of
modern days was absolutely unknown at the time of which I write and the
roughest crowd might be relied upon to see fair play between any chance
pair of combatants. But the best of the sport was that it was commonly
carried on out of that pure hardihood which at one time made the rougher
sort of Englishman the pick of the world for valour and endurance. The
sentimentalists and humanitarians abolished the Prize Ring because of
its brutality, and the result is that all sense of honour has gone out
among the rougher classes, and the record of the police courts have
familiarised everybody with the use of the knife in private warfare, a
thing almost unknown until the Prize Ring was abolished.
I have very often thought it odd that I have not even a fragmentary
memory of the very earliest steps in education. I recall quite easily a
time when I could not read, and the recollection of one superb moment
is very often with me. That moment came with the reading of a story,
entitled _The Mandatés Revenge; or the Riccaree War Spear_, which came
from the pen of Mr Percy B. St John, and may still be found in some
far-away number of _Chambers's Journal_. I have never gone back to that
story. I have never had the courage to go back. It would be something
like a crime to dissipate the halo of romance and splendour which lives
about it, as I know most certainly I should do if I read it over again.
I daresay Mr St John was an estimable person in his day; but he
could not have written one such story as that my memory so dimly, yet
splendidly recalls, without having made himself immortal. In sober
truth, I do not believe that any man, whatever, in any time or country,
ever wrote a story quite as enthralling and as wonderful as I thought
the _Mandans Revenge_ to be. The curious part about this recollection
to me is, not that I should have found so intense a joy in what was
probably a very commonplace piece of hackwork, but that the faculty
of reading at all was, as it were, sprung upon me, and that I remember
clearly a feeling of surprise that I had not discovered this wonderful
resource before. In effect, I said to myself, “This is the best thing
I have yet encountered, and I am never going to do anything else,
henceforward.” Fortunately for myself, I have not quite kept that
promise, though the printed page has never ceased to be a joy.
In my father's shop we sold not only such serious literature as the
population cared to buy, but we dealt, too, in the ephemeral. Mr J. F.
Smith wove stories for _Cassell's Illustrated Family Journal_ and the
_London Journal_ which would have made the fortune of a modern man; and
there was one writer in _Reynolds' Miscellany_ who was most delightfully
fertile in horrors. In one chapter he buried a nobleman alive in the
family vault, and described his sensations in his coffin so poignantly
that for weeks I was afraid to go to sleep lest I should dream about
him. My father was an uncommonly well-read man; but he made no attempt
to regulate my studies, except that now and then he would suggest to
me that I was wasting time in the perusal of rubbish; and I do suppose
that, as a boy, I read as much actually worthless stuff as anybody
ever did within an equal time. But I do not know whether, after all, it
matters very greatly what a child reads, so long as he has full and free
access to the best of books.
Amongst my earliest literary treasures was a fat, close-printed volume,
the binding of which had been torn away. I do not suppose it had ever
been issued in the form of a single volume; but it contained _Roderick
Random_, _Gil Blas_, _The Devil on Two Sticks_ and _Zadig_; _or,
the Book of Fate_, and it was my companion through many hundreds of
delightful hours. It is both curious and touching to remember the
innocence with which one's childish fancy ranged through those pages. I
have not turned back to look at my old friend, Asmodeus, for a good many
years; but there is one episode in the story of the unroofed city in
which an artist is unable to take his mistress to a ball because she has
no stockings, and the brilliant idea occurs to him that he should paint
a pair upon her legs. There is a special sly mention of the work upon
the garter; and the whole business used to seem to me most magnificently
comic. There was no more of a suggestion of an impropriety about it than
there was about my breakfast bowl of bread and milk. It was just simply,
innocently, and gloriously funny; and it has long been my belief that
the time at which it is best that a reader should make acquaintance with
our rather indelicate old classics is the time of innocence, when no
grossness of suggestion has a meaning, though the mind is fully open
to the reception of all the reader's own experience teaches him to
understand.
I suppose I am going to say a Scythian sort of thing, but I do not
remember any very keen or special pleasure in my first encounter with
Shakespeare. Perhaps it came when I was too young; but at first the
impression made upon me was certainly much inferior to that produced
by Mr Percy B. St John, and he was only one of that assembly of
wonder-workers of whom the nameless hacks of _Reynolds'_ and _Bow Bells_
were members. When it began to dawn upon me that the spell he exercised
was of another kind, I cannot tell. I suppose that the conception of his
greatness slowly expanded with the expanding mind; but I know that I had
come to young manhood before any special sense of wonder dawned.
After that first discovery of the power to read at all, which came with
the _Mandans Revenge_, the one salient thing in memory is the
sudden finding of Carlyle's _Heroes_ and _Sartor Resartus_. Some
literary-minded compositor in my father's employ had placed the book in
a rack of type-cases, and had apparently forgotten it. It bore on many
pages the stamp of some Young Men's Christian Association in a Northern
town, and my literary-minded compositor seems to have looted it. It
was my most valued possession for some years. It was, no doubt, a very
obvious duty to return it to the institution whose inscription it bore,
but I do not think the idea ever presented itself to me.
How shall I speak of the extraordinary emotions which were excited in
my mind at a chance opening of the pages at the first chapter of the
_Sartor_? The hurling satire of the opening paragraph--the torch of
learning having so illuminated every cranny and dog-hole in the universe
that the creation of the world had now become no more mysterious than
the making of a dumpling, though concerning this last there were still
some to whom the question as to how the apples were got in presented an
insoluble problem--this seized me with an amazement of pleasure. I do
not mean to say a presumptuous thing at all; but it is a simple fact
that from this first beginning of acquaintance with Carlyle, he never
once appeared to teach me anything in the way of thought. I know he did
so; I know that he profoundly coloured the fountains of my mind for many
years; that long and long after the experience I am recording, I thought
Carlyle, and wrote Carlyle; and that neither the thinking nor the
literary mode could ever have occurred to me without his influence;
but in my first reading of his pages, he seemed to be telling me things
which were deeply implanted in my soul already. The truth about the
matter is, probably, that he dominated me so completely that I did not
think at all of domination. But all I know is, that I seemed suddenly
to have found an unexpected and hitherto unimagined self. I leapt in
transport to encounter a majestic Me; and in this impulse I can honestly
aver that there was no tinge of vanity. I should say, rather, that
it sprang from the utter humility of the disciple who instantly,
absolutely, and unquestionably accepted the master's word. Be these
things as they may, the Carlylean gospel came to me, not as a revelation
of another's mind, but as an unveiling of a something which seemed
to have been for ever my own, though until that great hour I had not
dreamed of its possession.
I do not propose to make any immediate flight into sentiment. The thing
for which I am trying is a genuine recollection of the way in which the
growth of this emotion was marked within myself. Things are very much
otherwise to-day; but nearly three-score years ago there was a certain
purposed austerity practised by the most dutiful and praiseworthy
parents, which froze the natural budding affections of a child. Before
I had arrived at the technical age of manhood, my father had become the
dearest friend I had in the world, and the friendship lasted till his
death; but as a child I feared him. He was by nature as kindly a man as
ever lived; but he had been bred in the old rigid Calvinistic creed of
Scotland, and though I knew very well, in later years, how his heart had
rebelled against him, he was, throughout my childhood and early youth,
the embodiment of justice, certainly, so far as he could see it,
but always of an apparently unpitying severity. Any judgment of his
character based on the system of discipline in which he devoutly
believed would have been false in the extreme, for the infliction
of pain was actually abhorrent to him. I remember how, on scores of
occasions, when I put him to the ordeal of administering a hiding to
myself, his face would grow pale, and his hand would tremble.
Between my mother and myself there were none of those intimacies of
affection which make life so happy to a child. The whole atmosphere of
the house repelled love, and its whole principle seemed to be embodied
in the belief that a child should think despitefully of himself, and
should repress all natural ebullitions of fondness or of gaiety. I have
been trying hard to recall the surname of the boy to whom my heart
first flowed out in a real affection, but memory fails me. He was a
schoolfellow of mine, and I guess that he may have been of Scottish
parentage, because his Christian name was Gavin. I can give no reason,
at this time of day--nor ever in my maturer years have I been able to
find a reason--why I should have loved that small contemporary as I
did. I cannot say that he was conspicuously gifted in any way. He was
certainly no Steerforth to my Copperfield, being neither distinguished
for good looks, nor for brilliance at his schoolwork, nor for success in
games.
It was at this time that there was an ebb in the family fortunes, and
I was hastily taken away from a respectable private school in the High
Street, and sent, as I have explained, to a big vulgar establishment a
mile away, where a crowd of some three hundred lads attended, at a cost
to their parents of threepence a week per head. I did not stay
there long, but whilst I was kept there, by the strain on the family
exchequer, I was very unhappy. It was in the midst of a sore-hearted
loneliness that I encountered Gavin, who, to the best of my belief, was
the son of a bargee who worked on the Worcester and Birmingham Canal.
The impulse which took me towards him I have always regarded as one of
the strangest, as it was undoubtedly one of the strongest, I have known.
He and I were pretty much alike in age--somewhere between nine and ten
we must have been--and we seemed to slide together like two separate
rainspots which meet upon a window-pane in wet weather. We used to
wander about the stony playground, from which every blade of grass was
trampled, except in the remoter corners, and to walk with our arms
about each other's shoulders, and to exchange almost daily such trumpery
schoolboy treasures as we owned. I never had a child sweetheart, and I
never knew anybody with whom I exchanged a caress, or bartered a word of
real kindness, until I fell in with this fascinating young ragamuffin.
I never spoke about him to a soul, but he filled my thoughts night
and day, and I was never happy out of his society. I am guilty of no
exaggeration when I say that. The feeling I had towards him was, in its
own time, so tender, so yearning, so complete in its absorption of my
whole nature, that it stands altogether apart in my experience. And
when, after a period of some six months, perhaps, the family fortunes
revived a little, and I was restored once more to the society of my own
social equals, I was broken-hearted at the thought of losing him.
The master of this rough school had a glimmering of the necessity for
technical education, and on occasional afternoons a chosen number of us
were drafted off into a big class-room to watch some craftsman working
at his trade. One of these men set the whole class on fire with a spirit
of emulation. He brought with him a number of medallions, a quantity of
plaster-of-paris, a stick or two of common sulphur, and a small brazier,
and he proceeded to show us how plaster casts were taken from his
medallions. The first part of the process was to oil the surface of the
medal, and to bind a strip of brown paper about its edge, so as to
form a shallow little well. The next business was to melt enough of
the sulphur to secure a cast of the medallion. This part of the process
resulted in the production of a most appalling smell, which was not
lessened in pungency when the odour of singed brown paper was added to
that of melting sulphur. When the cast was cool it also was bound round
with brown paper, and a compound of plaster-of-paris and water was
poured over it When this had hardened, behold! a snowy reproduction of
the original medallion. We all went quite wild about this process, and
when the workman filled in the hollowed head in the mould--it was a
portrait of John Wesley--with the white preparation, very carefully, by
the aid of a small spoon and a camel-hair pencil, we watched with
wonder for the next development. The craftsman took a small quantity
of chrome-yellow, and, having mixed it carefully with his creamy paste,
poured it over the white stuff, so that in a few minutes we saw a snowy
bas-relief of the great divine set on a golden-coloured background. From
then until I left the school there was an actual fever for the making of
plaster medallions, mainly from the heavy, half-effaced Bolton pennies
which at that time were in circulation; and among those who were most
devoted to this pursuit were my friend Gavin and myself.
We made casts by the dozen and the score, and when it was known
definitely that I was leaving the school, he gave to me his _chef
d'oeuvre_, in the shape of a reproduction in two colours of a medal
which had been struck to commemorate the opening of the Crystal Palace
in Hyde Park. There was a solemn understanding between us that I,
likewise, should make a cast in two colours, and present it to my chum,
and this was to be the symbol and token of an eternity of friendship.
I took home the medal; I saved my infrequent pence for the purchase
of materials; and one night, all being ready, I set to work to melt my
sulphur in a cracked teacup in the kitchen oven. The whole family was
assembled in that apartment, for the sitting-room was never used
save upon unfrequent gala days, and before long there were sniffs of
bewilderment and suspicion at the stench which began to fill the room. I
had not thought of this, and I was afraid for the life of me to withdraw
the teacup. It was a winter night, and a great fire was blazing on the
hearth, so that it was no wonder when the cracked teacup burst asunder,
and let out its contents on to the iron floor of the oven. Then there
arose an odour of mere and perfect Tophet, and the room was filled with
a sulphurous smoke. I confessed myself the author of the mischief by
trying to bolt, and I suffered then and there. We were very near being
driven entirely out of house and home that night, and I was very shy of
reviving the experiment. But my promise lay upon my conscience like
a cloud. I _had_ to keep it. To fail in that would have been an
unspeakable disloyalty, and very tremulously I made a new occasion when,
as I fancied, the coast was clear. It was not so disastrous, in one
respect, as the first, but the burning sulphur again betrayed me, and
the very natural judgment was that I had been guilty of pure contumacy.