Several literary men of eminence have from time to time suggested to me
that I ought to write my memoirs, but I have long held the opinion that
such works have scarcely a legitimate interest for one’s contemporaries.
Now, however, that I have exceeded, by fourteen years, the age of man, I
begin to regard the opinion of others, and to look upon myself as a sort
of incipient posterity, and am disposed to make the experiment of placing
some portion of my life on record.
Most people who attain to birth, parentage, and education, find the
latter the most doubtful of the three, even the first being somewhat
uncertain. For myself, there is a tradition in my family that I was born
by candle-light on the 10th of March, 1809: it was at midnight, and in
the town of Leeds.
To keep those in order who believe too much, Nature has issued a series
of minds that believe too little, and I am one of these; I could prove
to the satisfaction of any free metaphysician that I have never existed
at all, and that I am a mere optical illusion, like the rest of my
fellow-men.
As to my parentage, I believe in that implicitly. But who else would be
so credulous, if it were to his interest to prove the reverse?
As to my education, it has been as scanty as that of the best of us; it
would be too great a joke to suppose that eighty years is a sufficient
time for the acquisition of any knowledge worth naming. Herschel, for
example, discovered the planet Uranus; that educated him, though it had
been in the place where he found it for countless millions of years.
The educated are those who appreciate things at their true value; culture
does not merely signify knowledge, but its acquisition in the utmost
detail.
My father was said to have a musical genius, and rumour handed down
that my mother fell in love with him on that account. She was the most
emotional woman that I ever had the pleasure of knowing, and I can
understand her marrying at the age of thirty-three a youth of nineteen,
which she did; but I cannot understand my father at his age marrying her.