I was, I think, about eight years old when my parents removed from
Keppel Street to Harrow-on-the-Hill. My father’s practice, I take it,
was becoming less and less satisfactory, and his health equally so. And
the move to Harrow was intended as a remedy or palliation for both these
evils. My father was a very especially industrious and laborious man.
And I have the authority of more than one very competent judge among his
professional contemporaries for believing that he was as learned a
Chancery lawyer as was to be found among them. How then was his want of
success to be accounted for? One of the competent authorities above
alluded to accounted for it thus: “Your father,” he said to me many
years afterwards, when his troubles and failures had at last ceased to
afflict him, “never came into contact with a blockhead without insisting
on irrefutably demonstrating to him that he was such. And the blockhead
did not like it! He was a disputatious man; and he was almost in
variably--at least on a point of law--right. But the world differed
from him in the opinion that being so gave him the right of rolling his
antagonist in the dust and executing an intellectual dance of triumph on
his prostrate form.” He was very fond of whist, and was I believe a good
player. But people did not like to play with him. “Many men,” said an
old friend once, “will scold their partners occasionally. But Trollope
invariably scolds us all round with the utmost impartiality; and that
every deal!”
He was, in a word, a highly respected, but not a popular or well-beloved
man. Worst of all, alas! he was not popular in his own home. No one of
all the family circle was happy in his presence. Assuredly he was as
affectionate and anxiously solicitous a father as any children ever had.
I never remember his caning, whipping, beating or striking any one of
us. But he used during the detested Latin lessons to sit with his arm
over the back of the pupil’s chair, so that his hand might be ready to
inflict an instantaneous pull of the hair as the _pœna_ (by no means
_pede claudo_) for every blundered concord or false quantity; the result
being to the scholar a nervous state of expectancy, not judiciously
calculated to increase intellectual receptivity. There was also a
strange sort of asceticism about him, which seemed to make enjoyment or
any employment of the hours save work, distasteful and offensive to him.
Lessons for us boys were never over and done with. It was sufficient for
my father to see any one of us “idling,” _i.e._ not occupied with book
work, to set us to work quite irrespectively of the previously assigned
task of the day having been accomplished. And this we considered to be
unjust and unfair.
I have said that the move to Harrow was in some degree caused by a hope
that the change might be beneficial to my father’s health. He had
suffered very distressingly for many years from bilious headache, which
gradually increased upon him during the whole of his life. I may say
parenthetically that from about fifteen to forty I suffered
occasionally, about once a fortnight perhaps, from the same malady,
though in a much less intense form. But at about forty years old I
seemed to have grown out of it, and since that time have never been
troubled by it. But in my father’s day the common practice was to treat
such complaints with calomel. He was constantly having recourse to that
drug. And I believe that it had the effect of shattering his nervous
system in a deplorable manner. He became increasingly irritable; never
with the effect of causing him to raise a hand against any one of us,
but with the effect of making intercourse with him so sure to issue in
something unpleasant, that unconsciously we sought to avoid his
presence, and to consider as hours of enjoyment only those that could be
passed away from it.
My mother’s disposition on the other hand was of the most genial,
cheerful, happy, _enjoué_ nature imaginable. All our happiest hours were
spent with her; and to any one of us a _tête-à-tête_ with her was
preferable to any other disposal of a holiday hour. But even this under
all the circumstances did not tend to the general harmony and happiness
of the family circle. For of course the facts and the results of them
must have been visible to my father; and though wholly inoperative to
produce the smallest change in his ways, must, I cannot doubt, have been
painful to him. It was all very sad. My father was essentially a good
man. But he was, I fear, a very unhappy one.
He was extremely fond of reading aloud to the assembled family in the
evening; and there was not one individual of those who heard him who
would not have escaped from doing so, at almost any cost. Of course it
was our duty to conceal this extreme reluctance to endure what was to
him a pleasure--a duty which I much fear was very imperfectly performed.
I remember--oh, how well!--the nightly readings during one winter of
_Sir Charles Grandison_, and the loathing disgust for that production
which they occasioned.
But I do not think that I and my brothers were bad boys. We were, I take
it, always obedient. And one incident remains in my mind from a day now
nearly seventy years ago, which seems to prove that the practice of that
virtue was habitual to me. An old friend of my mother’s, Mrs. Gibbon,
with her daughter Kate, mentioned on a former page as the companion of
my lessons in the alphabet, were staying with us at Harrow. Mrs. Gibbon
and Kate, and my mother and I were returning from a long country ramble,
across some fields in a part of the country my mother was not
acquainted with. There was a steep grassy declivity, down which I and
the little girl, my contemporary, hand in hand were running headlong in
front of our respective parents, when my mother suddenly called out,
“Stop, Tom!” I stopped forthwith, and came to heel as obediently as a
well-trained pointer. And about five minutes later, my mother and Mrs.
Gibbon, following exactly in the line in which we had been running,
discovered a long disused but perfectly open and unfenced well!
If I had not obeyed so promptly as I did, I should not now be writing
“reminiscences,” and poor “Katy ’Bon,” as I used to call her, would have
gone to her rest some ten years earlier than she found it. My mother
always said that she could in no wise account for the impulse which
prompted her to call to me to stop!
The move to Harrow was as infelicitous a step in the economic point of
view as it was inefficacious as a measure of health. My father took a
farm, of some three or four hundred acres, to the best of my
recollection, from Lord Northwick. It was a wholly disastrous
speculation. It certainly was the case that he paid a rent for it far in
excess of its fair value; and he always maintained that he had been led
to undertake to do so by inaccurate and false representations. I have no
knowledge of these representations, but I am absolutely certain that my
father was entirely convinced that they were such as he characterised
them. But he was educated to be a lawyer, and was a good one. He had
never been educated to be a farmer; and was, I take it, despite
unwearied activity, and rising up early and late taking rest, a bad one.
To make matters worse moreover he built on that land, of which he held
only a long lease, a large and very good house. The position was
excellently chosen, the house was well conceived and well built, and the
extensive gardens and grounds were well designed and laid out; but the
unwisdom of doing all that on land the property of another is but too
obvious.
The excuse that my father might have alleged was that he was by no means
wholly dependent either on his profession or on his farm, or on the not
inconsiderable property which he had inherited from his father or
enjoyed in right of his wife. He had an old maternal uncle, Adolphus
Meetkerke, who lived on his estate near Royston in Hertfordshire, called
Julians. Mr. Meetkerke--the descendant of a Dutchman who had come to
this country some time in the eighteenth century as diplomatic
representative of his country, and had settled here--lived at Julians
with an old childless wife--the daughter, I believe, of a General
Chapman--and my father was his declared heir. He had another nephew, Mr.
John Young, as flourishing and prosperous an attorney as my father was
an unsuccessful and unprosperous barrister. John Young, too, was as
worthy and as highly-respected a man as any in the profession. But my
father, as settled long years before, was to be the heir; and I was in
due time shown to the tenantry as their future landlord, and all that
sort of thing. I suppose my grandfather, the Rev. Anthony Trollope, of
Cottenham in Hertfordshire, married an elder sister of old Adolphus
Meetkerke, while the father of John Young married a younger one. And so,
come what might of the Harrow farm and the new house, I was to be the
future owner of Julians, and live on my own acres.
Again, _Dîs aliter visum_!
I well remember more than one visit to Julians with my parents about
this time--visits singularly contrasted with those to my Grandfather
Milton, the vicar of Heckfield. The house and establishment at Julians
were on a far more pretentious scale than the home of the vicar, and the
mode of life in the squire’s establishment larger and freer. But I liked
Heckfield better than Julians; partly, I think, even at that early age,
because the former is situated in an extremely pretty country, whereas
the neighbourhood of the other is by no means such. But I please myself
with thinking, and do really believe, that the main reason for the
preference was that the old Bristol saddler’s son was a far more
highly-cultured man than the Hertfordshire squire.
He was a good man, too, was old Adolphus Meetkerke; a good landlord, a
kindly natured man, a good sportsman, an active magistrate, and a good
husband to his old wife. But there was a sort of flavour of roughness
about the old squire and his surroundings which impressed itself on my
observation even in those days, and would, I take it, nowadays be deemed
almost clownish rusticity.
Right well do I remember the look and figure of my Aunt Meetkerke,
properly great-aunt-in-law. She was an admirable specimen of a squiress,
as people and things were in that day. I suppose that there was not a
poor man or woman in the parish with whose affairs of all sorts she was
not intimately acquainted, and to whom she did not play the part of an
ever-active providence. She always came down to breakfast clad in a
green riding-habit, and passed most of her life on horseback. After
dinner, in the long low drawing-room, with its faded stone-coloured
curtains and bookless desert spaces, she always slept, as peacefully as
she does now in Julians churchyard. She never meddled at all with the
housekeeping of her establishment. That was in the hands of “Mrs. Anne,”
an old maiden sister of Mr. Meetkerke. She was a prim-looking,
rosy-apple-faced, most good-natured little woman. She always carried a
little basket in her hand, in which were the keys, and a never-changed
volume of Miss Austen’s _Pride and Prejudice_, which she always
recommenced as soon as she had worked her way to the end of it. Though a
very precise sort of person, she would frequently come down to breakfast
a few minutes late, to find her brother standing on the hearth-rug with
his prayer-book open in his hand waiting for her arrival to begin
prayers to the assembled household. He had a wonderfully strong rasping
voice, the tones of which were rarely modulated under any circumstances.
I can hear now his reverberating, “Five minutes too late again, Mrs.
Anne; ‘Dearly beloved brethren,’” ... etc., the change of person
addressed, and of subject, having been marked by no pause or break
whatever save the sudden kneeling at the head of the breakfast table;
while at the conclusion of the short, but never missed prayers, the
transition from “Amen” to “William, bring round the brown mare after
breakfast” was equally unmarked by pause or change of voice or manner.
The parish in which Julians is situated is a small vicarage, the
incumbent of which was at that time a bachelor, Mr. Skinner. The church
was a very small one, and my great-uncle and his family the only persons
in the congregation above the rank of the two or three small farmers and
the agricultural labourers who mainly composed it. Whether there was any
clerk or not I do not remember. But if any such official existed, the
performance of his office in church was altogether not only overlaid but
extinguished by the great rough “view-halloa” sort of voice of my uncle.
He never missed going to church, and never missed a word of the
responses, which were given in far louder tones than those of the vicar.
Something of a hymn was always attempted, I remember, by the rustic
congregation; with what sort of musical effect may be imagined! I don’t
think my Uncle Meetkerke could have distinguished much between their
efforts and the music of the spheres. But the singers were so well
pleased with the exercise that they were apt to prolong it, as my uncle
thought, somewhat unduly. And on such occasions he would cut the
performance short with a rasping “That’s enough!” which effectually
brought it to an abrupt conclusion. The very short sermon--probably a
better one for the purpose in hand than South or Andrews would have
preached--having been brought to an end, my uncle would sing out to the
vicar, as he was descending the pulpit stairs, “Come up to dinner,
Skinner!” And then we all marched out, while the rustics, still
retaining their places till we were fairly out of the door, made their
obeisances as we passed. All which phenomena, strongly contrasted as
they were with the decorous if somewhat sleepy performance in my
grandfather’s church at Heckfield, greatly excited my interest. I
remember that I had no dislike to attending service either at Heckfield
or Julians, while I intensely disliked making one of a London
congregation.
If I remember right there were two or three Dissenters and their
families at Heckfield, generally considered by their neighbours much as
so many Chinese settled among them might have been--as unaccountably
strange and as objectionable. But nothing of the sort existed at
Julians; and I take it, as far as may be judged from my uncle’s general
tone and manner in managing his parish, that any individual guilty of
such monstrous and unnatural depravity would at once have been consigned
to the parish stocks.
Mr. Meetkerke was, as I have said, an active magistrate. But only one
instance of his activity in this respect dwells in my recollection. I
remember to have seen, in the nondescript little room that he called his
study, a collection of some ten or a dozen very nasty-looking pots, with
some white pasty looking substance in each of them, and to have wondered
greatly what mystery could have been attached to them. I learned from
the butler’s curt word of information that they were connected with my
uncle’s magisterial duties, and my mind immediately began to construct
all kinds of imaginings about wholesale poisonings. I had heard the
story of the “Untori” at Milan, and had little doubt that we were in the
midst of some such horrible conspiracy. A few days later I learned that
the nasty-looking pots were the result of a magisterial raid among the
bakers, and contained nothing worse than alum.
These reminiscences of Julians and its little world recurred to me when
speaking of my father’s financial position at the time he took a farm at
Harrow and built a handsome house on another man’s land. He was at that
time Mr. Meetkerke’s declared heir, and would doubtless have inherited
his property in due time had childless old Mrs. Meetkerke lived. But one
day she unexpectedly took off her green habit for the last time, and in
a day or two was laid under yet more perennial green in the little
churchyard! Mr. Meetkerke was at that time over sixty. But he was as
fine an old man physically as anybody could wish to see. Before long he
married a young wife, and became the father of six children! It was of
course a tremendous blow to my father, and never, as I can say from much
subsequent information, was such a blow better or more bravely borne. As
for myself, I cannot remember that the circumstance impressed me as
having any bearing whatsoever on my personal fate and fortunes. In after
years I heard it asserted in more than one quarter that my father had in
a great measure himself to thank for his disappointment. He was a
Liberal in politics after the fashion of those days, (which would make
excellent Conservatism in these,) while Mr. Meetkerke was a Tory of the
very oldest school. The Tory uncle was very far indeed from being an
intellectual match for his Liberal nephew, and no doubt used to talk in
his fine old hunting-field voice a great deal of nonsense which no
consideration of either affection, respect, or prudence, could induce my
father to spare. I fear he used to jump on the hearty old squire very
persistently, with the result _à la longue_ of ceasing to be a _personâ
gratâ_ to the old man. It _may_ be that had it been otherwise he might
have sought affection and companionship elsewhere than from a young
wife. But ...!
My father, as I have said, struggled bravely with fortune, but as far as
I have ever been able to learn, with ever increasing insuccess. His
practice as a barrister dwindled away gradually till it became not worth
while to keep chambers; and his farming accounts showed very
frequently--every year, I suspect--a deficit.
One of the reasons for selecting Harrow as his scene of rustication had
been the existence of the school there. I and my brothers were all of us
destined from our cradles to become Wykehamists, and it was never my
father’s intention that Harrow instead of Winchester should be our
definitive place of education. But the idea was, that we might, before
going to Winchester, avail ourselves of the right to attend his parish
school which John Lyon bequeathed to the parishioners of Harrow.
I went to Winchester at ten years old. The time for me to do so did not
wholly depend on the will of my parents, for the admission in those
days, as in all former days up to quite recent times, was by nomination
in this wise. There were six electors:--1. the Warden of New College,
(otherwise more accurately in accordance with the terms of Wykeham’s
foundation, the College of St. Mary Winton _prope_ Winton); 2. the
Warden of Winchester College; 3. the Sub-Warden of Winchester; 4. the
“Informator” or head master of Winchester; and 5. and 6. two “Posers”
sent yearly by New College, according to a certain cycle framed _ad
hoc_, to the Winchester election. It was at the election which took
place in July that all vacancies among the seventy scholars, who
together with the warden, fellows, two masters, chaplains, and
choristers constituted the members of Wykeham’s foundation, were filled.
The vacancies were caused either by the election of scholars to be
fellows of New College, or by their superannuation at eighteen years of
age, or by their withdrawal from the school. The number of vacancies in
any year was therefore altogether uncertain. The first two vacancies
were filled by boys who came in as “College Founders,” _i.e._ as of kin
to the founder. Of course the bishop’s kin could be only collateral; and
I remember that “the best blood,” was considered to be that of the
Twistletons. Originally there had been an absolute preference for those
who could show such relationship. But as time went on it became apparent
that the entire college would thus be filled with Founder’s kin; and it
was determined that two such only should be admitted to Winchester every
year, and two only sent out to fellowships at New College. Even so the
proportion of fellowships at the Oxford College awarded to Founder’s kin
was large, for it was reckoned in those days that the average vacancies
at New College, which were caused only by death, marriage, or the
acceptance of a college living, amounted to seven in two years, of which
the Founder’s kin took four. And this rule operated with certain
regularity. For the superannuation at eighteen did not apply to
Founder’s kin, who remained in the school, be their age what it might,
till they went to New College.
These two boys of Founder’s kin were admitted by the votes of the six
electors. After them came the boy nominated by the Warden of New
College; then the nominee of the Warden of Winchester; and so on till
the eighth vacancy was filled by the nominee of the junior “Poser.” Then
a ninth vacancy was taken by the Warden of New College’s second
nomination, and so on. Of course the vacancies for Winchester were much
more numerous than those for the Oxford College; and it often happened
that the “Poser’s” second or sometimes even third nomination had a very
good chance of getting in in the course of the year. The cycle for
“Posers,” which I have mentioned, allowed it to be known who would be
“Poser” for a given year many years in advance; and the senior “Poser’s”
first nomination for 1820 had been promised to me before I was out of my
cradle. He was the Rev. Mr. Lipscomb, who subsequently became Bishop of
Jamaica. It was written therefore in the book of fate that I was to go
to Winchester in the year 1820, when I should be ten years old.
That time, however, was not yet; but was looked forward to by me with a
somewhat weighty sense of the inevitability of destiny. And I can well
remember meditating on the three fateful epochs which awaited me--to
wit, having certain teeth taken out in the immediate future; going to
Winchester in the _paulo post futurum_; and being married in the
ultimate consummation of things. All three seemed to me to need being
faced with a certain dogged fortitude of endurance. But I think that the
terrors of the first loomed the largest in my imagination, doubtless by
virtue of its greater proximity.
I remember, too, at a very early age maintaining in my own mind, if not
in argument with others, that to be brave one must be very much afraid
and act in despite of fear, and uninfluenced by it and that not to fear
at all, as I heard predicated of themselves by sundry contemporaries,
indicated simply stupidity. And when the day for the dentist came my
heart was in my boots, but they carried me unfalteringly to St. Martin’s
Lane all the same.
At present, however, we are at Harrow getting into my father’s new
house, and establishing ourselves in our new home. It was soon arranged
that I was to attend the school, scarcely, as I remember, as a regular
inscribed scholar attending the lessons in the school-room, but as a
private pupil of the Rev. Mark Drury. I was about eight years old at the
time; and I suppose should hardly have been accepted as an admitted
member of the school.
At that time Dr. Butler, afterwards Bishop of Peterborough, was the head
master. He was not the right man in the right place. He was, I take it,
far more adapted for a bishop than a schoolmaster. Moreover, there were
certain difficulties in his position not necessarily connected with the
calling of a head master. He had succeeded Dr. Drury in the head
mastership, and he found the school full of Drurys. Mark, the brother of
Dr. Drury, was the second master; a Mr. Evans, a respectable quiet
nonentity, was the third; Harry Drury, a son of the old doctor, was the
fourth, and was the most energetic and influential man in the place;
William Drury, the son of Mark, was the fifth; and two young men of the
names of Mills and Batten were the sixth and seventh masters. They were
all in priests’ orders, and all received as many boarders as they could
get. For the objectionable system, which made the fortunes of the
masters far more dependent on their trade as victuallers than on their
profession as teachers, had been copied from Eton, with the further evil
consequence of swamping John Lyon’s parochial school by the creation of
a huge boarding school. This, however eminently successful, has no
proper claim to be called a “public school,” save by a modern laxity of
language, which has lost sight of the fact that the only meaning or
possible definition of a “public school” is, one the foundation of which
was intended not for a parish or other district, but for all England. If
merely success, and consequent size, be held to confer a claim to the
title, it is clear that there is no “private” school which would not
become a “public school” to-morrow if the master and proprietor of it
could command a sufficient amount of success. And even then the question
would remain, _What_ amount of success must that be?
The world in general, however, dislikes accuracy of speaking. And Harrow
was then, and has been since, abundantly large enough and successful
enough to be called and considered a “public school” by the generality,
who never take the trouble to ask themselves, What makes it such?
Dr. Butler was eminently a gentleman, extremely suave in manner, gentle
in dealing with those under his authority, mild and moderate in his
ideas of discipline, a genuinely scholarly man in tastes and pursuits,
though probably not what experts in such a matter would have called a
profound scholar. But he had not the energetic hand needed for ruling a
large school; and his rule was not a success. Mark Drury, though from
the old Drury connection his house was always full of pupils, cannot be
said to have exercised any influence at all on the general condition and
management of the school by reason of the extraordinary and abnormal
corpulence which kept him pretty well a prisoner to the armchair in his
study. He had long since, at the time when I first knew him, abandoned
the practice of “going up,” as it was technically called, _i.e._, of
climbing the last portion of Harrow Hill through the village street. On
this topmost part of the hill are situated the church, the churchyard,
and the school-house, rebuilt, enlarged, beautified, since my day; and
this “going up” had to be performed by all the masters and all the boys
every time school was attended. But of this climb Mark Drury had been
incapable for many years, solely by reason of his immense corpulence.
Naturally a small delicately-made man, with small hands and feet, he had
become in old age the fattest man I think I ever saw. He used to sit in
his study, and there conduct the business of tuition, leaving to others
the work of hearing lessons in school.
His house had the reputation of being the most comfortable of all the
boarding houses--a fact due to the unstinting liberality, careful
supervision, and motherly kindness of “Mother Mark,” an excellent and
admirable old lady, than whom it would be impossible to conceive any one
more fitted for the position she occupied. The unstinting liberality, it
is fair to say, characterised all the Drury houses; and probably the
others also. But for truly motherly care there was but one “Mother
Mark.” “Old Mark” was exceedingly popular, as indeed he deserved to be,
for a more kindly-natured man never existed. He had an old-fashioned
belief in the virtues of the rod; and though his bodily infirmity
combined with his good nature to make him sparing in the application of
it, a flogging was at his hands sufficiently disagreeable to make one
desirous of avoiding it. “Your clock,” he would say, “requires to be
wound up every Monday morning,” meaning that a Monday morning flogging
was a good beginning of the week. But the rods were kept in a cupboard
in the study--how well I remember the Bluebeard-closet sort of
reputation which surrounded it!--and the cupboard was always kept
locked. And very often it happened that somehow or other the key was in
the keeping of Mrs. Drury. Then a message would be sent to Mrs. Drury
for the key, and very probably the proposed patient was the messenger,
in which case--and it is strange that the recurrence of the fact did not
suggest suspicion to old Mark--it almost invariably happened that Mrs.
Drury was very sorry, but she could not find the key anywhere! There
never surely was a key so frequently mislaid as the key of that terrible
cupboard!
Well, it was arranged that I was to go every day to Mark Drury’s study,
not, as I have said, as a regular member of the school, but to get such
tuition as might be picked up from the _genius loci_, and from such
personal teaching as the old man could bestow on me at moments
unoccupied by his own pupils. And this arrangement, it must be
understood, was entirely a matter of friendship--one incident of the
many years’ friendship between my parents and all the Drurys. There was
no question of any honorarium in the matter.
My father’s appetite for teaching was such that he would, I am very
sure, have much preferred keeping my brother and myself under his sole
tuition. But he used to drive up to London in his gig daily to his
chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, for he still struggled to hope on at his
profession. (I remember that these drives down in the dark winter
evenings became a source of some anxiety when a messenger travelling
with despatches for the French Minister, who at that time rented Lord
Northwick’s house at Harrow, was mysteriously murdered and his
despatches stolen.) And it thus became necessary that some means should
be found for preventing us boys from making _école buissonière_ in the
fields and under the hedgerows.
I do not think I profited much by my attendance at old Mark’s
pupil-room. The boys whose lessons he was hearing stood in a row in
front of his armchair, and I sat behind him, supposed to be intently
occupied in conning the task he had set me, in preparation for the
moment, when, the class before him having been dismissed, he would have
little me, all alone, in front of him for a few minutes, while another
class was mustering.
How I hated it all! How very much more bitterly I hated it than I ever
hated any subsequent school troubles! What a Pariah I was among these
denizens of Mark’s and other pupil-rooms! For I was a “town boy,”
“village boy” would have been a more correct designation; one of the
very few, who by the terms of the founder’s will, had any right to be
there at all; and was in consequence an object of scorn and contumely on
the part of all the _paying_ pupils. I was a charity boy. But at
Winchester subsequently I was far more of a charity boy, for William of
Wykeham’s foundation provided me with food and lodging as well as
tuition; whereas I claimed and received nothing save a modicum of the
latter at the hands of those who enjoyed and administered John Lyon’s
bounty. Yet, though at Winchester there were only seventy scholars and a
hundred and thirty private pupils of the head master, or “commoners,”
there was no trace whatsoever of any analogous feeling, no slightest
arrogation of any superiority, social or other, on the part of the
commoner over the collegian. In fact the matter was rather the other
way; any difference between the son of the presumably richer man, and
the presumably poorer, having been merged and lost sight of entirely in
the higher scholastic dignity of the college boy.
I remember also, more vividly than I could wish, the bullying to which I
and others were subjected at Harrow. There was much of a very brutal
description. And in this respect also the difference at Winchester was
very marked. The theory of the two places on the subject was entirely
different, with the result I have stated. At Harrow, in those days--how
it may be now I know not--no “fagging” was authorised or permitted by
the masters. No boy had any legitimate authority over any other boy. And
inasmuch as it was, is, and ever will be, in every large school
impossible to achieve such a Saturnian state of things, the result was
that the bigger and stronger _assumed_ an authority supported by sheer
violence over the smaller and weaker. At Winchester, on the other hand,
the subjection of those below them in college to the “prefects” or upper
class, was not only recognised but enforced by the authorities. It thus
came to pass that many a big hulking fellow was subjected to the
authority of a “prefect” whom he could have tossed over his head. It was
an authority nobody dreamed of resisting; a matter of course; not a rule
of the stronger supported by violence. And the result--contributed to,
also, by other arrangements, of which I shall speak hereafter--was that
anything of the nature of “bullying” was infinitely rarer at Winchester
than at Harrow.
Despite old Mark’s invariable good-nature and kindness, my hours in his
study were very unhappy ones; and I was hardly disposed to consider as a
misfortune a severe illness which attacked me and my brother Henry, and
for the nonce put an end to them. Very shortly it became clear that we
were both suffering from a bad form of typhus. How was such an attack to
be accounted for? My father’s new house was visited, and examined, and
found to be above suspicion. But further inquiry elicited the fact that
we boys had passed a half hour before breakfast in watching the
proceedings of some men engaged in cleaning and restoring an old drain
connected with a neighbouring farm house. The case was clear! It would
seem, however, that the proper mode of treatment was not so clear to the
Harrow general practitioner--a village apothecary of the old school,
who, strange as it may seem, was the only available _medico_ at Harrow
in those far off days. He treated us with calomel, and very, very nearly
let me slip through his hands. It would have been _quite_, but for a
fortunate chance. Among our Harrow friends was a Mrs. Edwards, the widow
of a once very well known bookseller--not a publisher, but a scholarly,
and indeed learned, seller of old books--who had, I believe, left her a
considerable fortune. She was a highly cultured, and very clever woman,
and a special friend of my mother’s. Now it so happened that a Dr. Butt,
a physician, her brother, or brother-in-law, I forget which, paid her a
visit just at the time we boys were at the worst. Mrs. Edwards brought
him to our bedsides. I was altogether unconscious, and had been raving
about masters coming in at the window to drag me off to the pupil-room.
My knowledge of what followed therefore is derived wholly from my
mother’s subsequent telling. Dr. Butt, having learned the treatment to
which we had been subjected, said only “No more calomel, I think. Let me
have a glass of port wine immediately.” And with his finger on my wrist,
he proceeded to administer a teaspoonful at a time of the cordial. A few
more visits from Dr. Butt set us fairly on the way to recovery; and from
that day, some sixty-eight years ago, to the present, I have never
passed one day in bed from illness.