1835-1841.
My childhood is passed at Burnley with my aunts.--My grandfather and
grandmother.--Estrangement between Gilbert Hamerton and his brother of
Hellifield Peel.--Death of Gilbert Hamerton.--His taste for the French
language.--His travels in Portugal, and the conduct of a steward during
his absence.--His three sons.--Aristocratic tendencies of his
daughters.--Beginning of my education.--Visits to my father.
I was not brought up during childhood under my father's roof, but was
sent to live with his two unmarried sisters. These ladies were then
living in Burnley with their mother.
Burnley is now a large manufacturing town of seventy thousand
inhabitants, but in those days it was just rising in importance, and a
few years earlier it had been a small country town in an uncommonly
aristocratic neighborhood. The gate of Towneley Park opens now almost
upon the town itself, and in former times there were many other seats of
the greater or lesser squires within a radius of a very few miles. It is
a common mistake in the south of England to suppose that Lancashire is a
purely commercial county. There are, or were in my youth, some very
aristocratic neighborhoods in Lancashire, and that immediately about
Burnley was one of them. The creation of new wealth, and the extinction
or departure of a few families, may have altered its character since
then, but in the days of my grandfather nobody thought of disputing the
supremacy of the old houses. There was something almost sublime in the
misty antiquity of the Towneley family, one of the oldest in all
England, and still one of the wealthiest, keeping house in its venerable
castellated mansion in a great park with magnificent avenues. Other
houses of less wealth and more modern date had their pedigrees in the
history of Lancashire.
My grandfather, Gilbert Hamerton, possessed an old gabled mansion with a
small but picturesque estate, divided from Towneley Park by a public
road, and he had other property in the town and elsewhere enough to make
him independent, but not enough to make him one of the great squires.
However, as he was the second son of an ancient Yorkshire family, and as
pedigrees and quarterings counted for something in those comparatively
romantic times, the somewhat exclusive aristocracy about Burnley had
received him with much cordiality from the first, and he continued all
his life to belong to it. His comparative poverty was excused by a
well-known history of confiscation in his family, and perhaps made him
rather more interesting, especially as it did not go far enough to
become--what poverty becomes so easily--ridiculous. He lived in a large
old house, and plentifully enough, but without state and style. His
marriage had been extremely imprudent from the worldly point of view. An
aunt of my grandfather's, on his mother's side, had invited him to stay
with her, and had not foreseen the attractions of a farmer's daughter
who was living in the house as a companion. My good, unworldly
grandfather fell in love with this girl, and married her. He never had
any serious reason to regret this very imprudent step, for Jane Smith
became an excellent wife and mother, and she did not even injure his
position in society, where she knew how to make herself respected, and
was much beloved by her most intimate friends. I remember her, though I
never knew my grandfather. My recollection of her is a sort of picture
of an old lady always dressed in black, and seated near a window, or
walking slowly with a stick. The dawn of reason and feeling is
associated in my memory with an intense affection for this old lady and
with the kind things she said to me, not yet forgotten. I remember, too,
the awful stillness of her dead body (hers was the first dead human body
I looked upon), and the strange emptiness of the house when it had been
taken away.
Though my grandmother was only a farmer's daughter, her parents were
well-to-do in their own line of life, and at various times helped my
grandfather with sums of money; but the fact remained that he had
married quite out of his class, and it has always seemed to me probable
that the marriage may have had some connection with the complete and
permanent estrangement that existed between Gilbert Hamerton and his
brother, the squire of Hellifield Peel. As soon as I was old enough to
understand a little about relationships, I reflected that the houses of
my own uncles were open to me, that my cousins were all like brothers
and sisters to me, and yet that my father and my aunts had never been to
their uncle's house at Hellifield, and that our relations there never
came to see us at Burnley. The explanation of this estrangement given by
my grandfather, was that there had been a disagreement about land; but
perhaps he may have felt some delicacy about telling his children that
his unambitious marriage had contributed to render the separation
permanent. However this may have been, my grandmother never once saw the
inside of her brother-in-law's house, and when she died there was, I
believe, not even the formal expression of condolence that is usual
among acquaintances. Gilbert Hamerton had lived at Hollins, a house and
estate inherited from his mother; and James Hamerton, the elder brother,
lived in a castellated peel or border tower at Hellifield, which had
been built by Lawrence Hamerton in 1440. The two places are not much
more than twenty miles apart; but the brothers never met after their
quarrel, and my grandfather's sons and daughters never saw their uncle's
house. One result of the estrangement was that we hardly seemed to
belong to our own family; and I remember a lady, who had some very vague
and shadowy claims to a distant connection with the family at
Hellifield, asking one of my aunts in a rather patronizing manner if she
also did not "claim to be connected" with the Hamertons of Hellifield
Peel. Even to this day it is difficult for me to realize the simple fact
that she was niece to an uncle whom she had never seen, and first cousin
to his successor.
My grandfather had lived in apparently excellent health till the age of
seventy-seven, when one afternoon as he was seated in his dining-room at
Hollins, nobody being present except his eldest daughter Mary, he asked
her to open the window, and then added, "Say a prayer." She immediately
began to repeat a short prayer, and before she had reached the end of it
he was dead. There is a strange incident connected with his death, which
may be worth something to those who take an interest in what is now
called "Psychical Research." At the same hour his married daughter was
sitting in a room forty miles away with her little boy, a child just old
enough to talk, and the child stared with intense interest at an empty
chair. His mother asked what attracted his attention, and the child
said, "Don't you see, mamma, the old gentleman who is sitting in that
chair?" I am careful not to add details, as my own imagination might
unconsciously amplify them, but my impression is that the child was
asked to describe the vision more minutely, and that his description
exactly accorded with his grandfather's usual appearance.
The old gentleman preserved the costume and manners of the eighteenth
century, wearing his pig-tail, breeches, and shoe-buckles. He took life
too easily for any intellectual achievements, but he had a great liking
for the French language, and wrote a very original French grammar, which
he had curiously printed in synoptic sheets, at his private expense,
though it was never completed or published. I have sometimes thought it
possible that my own aptitude and affinity for that language may have
been inherited from him, and that his labors may in a manner have
overcome many difficulties for me by the wonderful process of
transmission. He never lived in France, and I believe he never visited
the country, his French conversations being chiefly held with a
good-natured Roman Catholic chaplain at Towneley Hall. My grandfather's
most extensive travels were in Portugal, lasting six months, and with
regard to that journey I remember two painful incidents. His travelling
companion, a younger brother, died abroad, in consequence of having
slept in a damp bed. The other incident is vexatious rather than
tragical, and yet Wordsworth would have seen tragedy in it also. During
his absence from home, my grandfather had confided the care of his
estate to an agent, who cut down the old avenue of oaks that led to the
house, on the pretext that some of the trees were showing signs of
decay, and that he had an acceptable offer for the whole. The road
retained the name of "The Avenue" for many years, but the trees were
never replaced.
Perhaps the reader will think this incident hardly worth mentioning, but
to a lover of trees, avenues, and old houses, such as I confess myself
to be, it seems the very perfection of a vexatious incident. I cannot
imagine anything whatever, not entailing any serious consequences, that
would have tried my own temper more.
On my grandfather's death, the whole of his property went to his eldest
son. He had brought up all his three sons to be solicitors, not because
he had any peculiar enthusiasm for the legal profession, but simply as
the readiest means of earning a living. The sons themselves had no
natural affinity for the law; my eldest uncle heartily disliked it, the
other regarded it with cool indifference, and my father expressed his
desire that I should never be a lawyer, on the ground that a man had
enough to plague him in his own concerns without troubling his mind
about those of other people. One curious distinction may be noted here,
as the result probably of that intermingling with the every-day world,
which happens naturally in the career of provincial attorneys. Whilst my
aunts remained all their lives aristocratic in their feelings, and
rather liked to enjoy the hospitality of the great houses in the
neighborhood, my uncles, and my father also, abandoned all aristocratic
memories and aspirations, and entered frankly into the middle class.
Each of them did what was natural under the circumstances. Women are
generally more aristocratic than men, and cling more decidedly to their
class, and I think my aunts showed better taste in liking refined
society than my father did in lowering himself to associate with men of
an inferior stamp in rank, in manners, and in habits. I distinctly
remember how one of my aunts told me that somebody had made a remark on
her liking for great people, and the only comment she made was, that she
preferred gentlefolks because their manners were more agreeable. She was
not a worshipper of rank, but she liked the quiet, pleasant manners of
the aristocracy, which indeed were simply her own manners.
My childhood could not have been better cared for, even by my own
mother, than by these two excellent ladies. They gave me a beginning of
education, and they have told me since that I learned to read English
with the greatest facility, so that when I was sent to the Grammar
School at Burnley, at the early age of five and a half, the master
considered me so well forward that I was set at once to Latin. In those
days it was a part of the wisdom of our educators to make us learn Latin
out of a grammar written in that language, and I retain some
recollection of the perfectly useless mental fatigue and puzzlement that
I was made to undergo in learning abstract statements about grammatical
science that were written in a tongue which I could not possibly
understand. The idea of taking a child five and a half years old, and
making it learn a dead language by abstract rules, is of itself a great
error. The proper way to teach a child Latin is simply to give it a
vocabulary, including only the things that it can see or imagine, and a
few verbs to make little phrases. I had learned to read English so
easily that good hopes were entertained for the rest of my education,
but my progress in Latin was very slow, and the only result of my early
training was to give me a horror of everything printed in Latin, that I
did not overcome for many years.
There was another child-pupil rather older than I, and the head-master
of those days (Dr. Butler's predecessor), who had a rude disposition,
sometimes amused himself by putting me on one of his knees, and the
other little boy on the other knee, after which, by an adroit
simultaneous movement of the two legs, he suddenly brought our heads
into collision. I quite remember the sensation of being stunned on these
occasions, but am not aware that my Latin was any the better for it.
My recollection of those early years is extremely vague, and there is
little in them that could interest the reader. I was taken once or twice
a year to my father, and always disliked and dreaded those visits, as I
feared him greatly, and with good reason. On one of these visits, when
quite a child, I persuaded my father's groom to let me mount his
saddle-horse, which I remember as a gray animal of what seemed a
prodigious altitude. The man put me on the horse's back, and being
entirely destitute of common-sense or prudence, actually gave me a whip
and left the bridle to me. I applied the whip vigorously, and was very
soon thrown off and carried back to the house covered with blood,
happily without more serious consequences. Another little incident has
more of the comic element. My father employed a tailor for himself, and
told the man to make me a suit without entering into any particulars.
The tailor being thus left to his own wisdom, made a costume that was
the exact copy of a full-grown squire's dress on a small scale. It was
composed of a green cut-away coat, a yellow waistcoat, and green
trousers, the whole adorned with gilt buttons. The tailor dressed me,
and then, proud of his work, presented me to my father and the ladies.
If the tailor was proud, my pride and satisfaction were at least equal
to his, and we neither of us could in the least understand the roars of
laughter that my appearance provoked, whilst our feelings were deeply
wounded by my father's tyrannical decree that I was never to wear those
beautiful clothes at all. Even to this day I am capable of regretting
that suit, and certainly I often see children now whose costumes are at
least equally absurd.