On October 1st, 1847, I made my appearance in this "vale of tears",
"little Pheasantina", as I was irreverently called by a giddy aunt, a pet
sister of my mother's. Just at that time my father and mother were
staying within the boundaries of the City of London, so that I was born
well "within the sound of Bow bells".
Though born in London, however, full three quarters of my blood are
Irish. My dear mother was a Morris--the spelling of the name having been
changed from Maurice some five generations back--and I have often heard
her tell a quaint story, illustrative of that family pride which is so
common a feature of a decayed Irish family. She was one of a large
family, and her father and mother, gay, handsome, and extravagant, had
wasted merrily what remained to them of patrimony. I can remember her
father well, for I was fourteen years of age when he died. A bent old
man, with hair like driven snow, splendidly handsome in his old age,
hot-tempered to passion at the lightest provocation, loving and wrath in
quick succession. As the family grew larger and the moans grew smaller,
many a pinch came on the household, and the parents were glad to accept
the offer of a relative to take charge of Emily, the second daughter. A
very proud old lady was this maiden aunt, and over the mantel-piece of
her drawing-room ever hung a great diagram, a family tree, which mightily
impressed the warm imagination of the delicate child she had taken in
charge. It was a lengthy and well-grown family tree, tracing back the
Morris family to the days of Charlemagne, and branching out from a stock
of "the seven kings of France". Was there ever yet a decayed. Irish
family that did not trace itself back to some "kings"? and these
"Milesian kings"--who had been expelled from France, doubtless for good
reasons, and who had sailed across the sea and landed in fair Erin, and
there had settled and robbed and fought--did more good 800 years after
their death than they did, I expect, during their ill-spent lives, if
they proved a source of gentle harmless pride to the old maiden lady who
admired their names over her mantel-piece in the earlier half of the
present century. And, indeed, they acted as a kind of moral thermometer,
in a fashion that would much have astonished their ill-doing and
barbarous selves. For my mother has told me how when she would commit
some piece of childish naughtiness, her aunt would say, looking gravely
over her spectacles at the small culprit: "Emily, your conduct is
unworthy of the descendant of the seven kings of France." And Emily, with
her sweet grey Irish eyes, and her curling masses of raven-black hair,
would cry in penitent shame over her unworthiness, with some vague idea
that those royal, and to her very real ancestors, would despise her small
sweet rosebud self, as wholly unworthy of their disreputable majesties.
But that same maiden aunt trained the child right well, and I keep ever
grateful memory of her, though I never knew her, for her share in forming
the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest, noblest woman I have ever
known. I have never met a woman more selflessly devoted to those she
loved, more passionately contemptuous of all that was mean or base, more
keenly sensitive on every question of honor, more iron in will, more
sweet in tenderness, than the mother who made my girlhood sunny as
dreamland, who guarded me until my marriage from every touch of pain that
she could ward off, or could bear for me, who suffered more in every
trouble that touched me in later life than I did myself, and who died in
the little house I had taken for our new home in Norwood, worn out ere
old age touched her, by sorrow, poverty and pain, in May, 1874.
Of my father my memory is less vivid, for he died when I was but five
years old. He was of mixed race, English on his father's side, Irish on
his mother's, and was born in Galway, and educated in Ireland; he took
his degree at Dublin University, and walked the hospitals as a medical
student. But after he had qualified as a medical man a good appointment
was offered him by a relative in the City of London, and he never
practised regularly as a doctor.
In the City his prospects were naturally promising; the elder branch of
the Wood Family, to which he belonged, had for many generations been
settled in Devonshire, farming their own land. When the eldest son
William, my father, came of age, he joined with his father to cut off the
entail, and the old acres were sold. Meanwhile members of other branches
had entered commercial life, and had therein prospered exceedingly. One
of them had become Lord Mayor of London, had vigorously supported the
unhappy Queen Caroline, had paid the debts of the Duke of Kent, in order
that that reputable individual might return to England with his Duchess,
so that the future heir to the throne might be born on English soil; he
had been rewarded with a baronetcy as a cheap method of paying his
services. Another, my father's first cousin once removed, a young
barrister, had successfully pleaded a suit in which was concerned the
huge fortune of a miserly relative, and had thus laid the foundations of
a great success; he won for himself a vice-chancellorship and a
knighthood, and then the Lord Chancellorship of England, with the barony
of Hatherley. A third, a brother of the last, Western Wood, was doing
good service in the House of Commons. A fourth, a cousin of the last two,
had thrown himself with such spirit and energy into mining work, that he
had accumulated a fortune. In fact all the scattered branches had made
their several ways in the world, save that elder one to which my father
belonged. That had vegetated on down in the country, and had grown poorer
while the others grew richer. My father's brothers had somewhat of a
fight for life. One has prospered and is comfortable and well-to-do. The
other led for years a rough and wandering life, and "came to grief"
generally. Some years ago I heard of him as a store-keeper in Portsmouth
dock-yard, occasionally boasting in feeble fashion that his cousin was
Lord Chancellor of England, and not many months since I heard from him in
South Africa, where he has secured some appointment in the Commissariat
Department, not, I fear, of a very lucrative character.
Let us come back to Pheasantina, who, I am told, was a delicate and
somewhat fractious infant, giving to both father and mother considerable
cause for anxiety. Her first attempts at rising in the world were
attended with disaster, for as she was lying in a cradle, with carved
iron canopy, and was for a moment left by her nurse in full faith that
she could not rise from the recumbent position, Miss Pheasantina
determined to show that she was capable of unexpected independence, and
made a vigorous struggle to assume that upright position which is the
proud prerogative of man. In another moment the recumbent position was
re-assumed, and the nurse returning found the baby's face covered with
blood, streaming from a severe wound on the forehead, the iron fretwork
having proved harder than the baby's head. The scar remains down to the
present time, and gives me the valuable peculiarity of only wrinkling up
one side of my forehead when I raise my eyebrows, a feat that I defy any
of my readers to emulate. The heavy cut has, I suppose, so injured the
muscles in that spot that they have lost the normal power of contraction.
My earliest personal recollections are of a house and garden that we
lived in when I was three and four years of age, situated in Grove Road,
St. John's Wood. I can remember my mother hovering round the dinner-table
to see that all was bright for the home-coming husband; my brother--two
years older than myself--and I watching "for papa"; the loving welcome,
the game of romps that always preceded the dinner of the elder folks. I
can remember on the first of October, 1851, jumping up in my little cot,
and shouting out triumphantly: "Papa! mamma! I am four years old!" and
the grave demand of my brother, conscious of superior age, at
dinner-time: "May not Annie have a knife to-day, as she is four years
old?"
It was a sore grievance during that same year 1851, that I was not judged
old enough to go to the Great Exhibition, and I have a faint memory of my
brother consolingly bringing me home one of those folding pictured strips
that are sold in the streets, on which were imaged glories that I longed
only the more to see. Far-away, dusky, trivial memories, these. What a
pity it is that a baby cannot notice, cannot observe, cannot remember,
and so throw light on the fashion of the dawning of the external world on
the human consciousness. If only we could remember how things looked when
they were first imaged on the retinae; what we felt when first we became
conscious of the outer world; what the feeling was as faces of father and
mother grew out of the surrounding chaos and became familiar things,
greeted with a smile, lost with a cry; if only memory would not become a
mist when in later years we strive to throw our glances backward into the
darkness of our infancy, what lessons we might learn to help our
stumbling psychology, how many questions might be solved whose answers we
are groping for in vain.