[PRELIMINARY NOTE.—Having somewhat rashly consented
to write a short biographical preface to a volume of
selections to be made in America from the writings
of my friend, Mr. Hughes, I applied to him directly
for the needful facts and dates. His answer was an
autobiographical letter which I found so interesting
that I resolved to print it, omitting only a few
intimate allusions natural in such a communication, but
with which the public has nothing to do. My temptation
was the greater that the letter was not intended
for publication, and had, therefore, that charm of
unpremeditated confidence which is so apt to be wanting
in more deliberate autobiographies. I cannot consult
him, (and I confess that I purposely waited till I
could not) for he is already at sea, on his way to
America, and I fear that friendship may have tempted
me to an unwarrantable liberty, but I could not bring
myself, even at the risk of seeming indiscreet, to
deny to others what had given me so much pleasure.
At any rate, the indiscretion is wholly my own and
in direct violation of the injunction with which Mr.
Hughes’ letter concludes: “I hate the idea of being
presented in any guise to any public; so if you can’t
squelch the plan altogether, give only the driest and
meagrest facts and dates.” I feel somewhat as if I had
been reporting a private conversation, and take upon
myself in advance all the reproach that belongs of
right to that scourge and desecrator of modern life,
the “Interviewer.” For the first time, I look forward
with dread to my next meeting with an old friend,
after having thus practised the familiar stage device
of putting the right letter into the wrong cover. As
the brief record of a well-spent and honorable life,
devoted to unselfish ends and associated with notable
friendships, Mr. Hughes’ letter has a higher than
merely personal interest. Of any critical introduction
to American readers no one could stand in less need
than he. The same qualities of manliness, frankness,
simplicity and sympathy, with whatever is generous and
humane, that gave and continue to “Tom Brown” a success
that may be compared with that of “Robinson Crusoe,”
are not wanting in his other works.—J. R. L.]
“I was born on October 20th, 1822, at Uffington, Berks, of which
village my grandfather was Vicar. He was also a Canon of St. Paul’s,
and spent half the year at his house in Amen Corner, with which my
first memories of London are connected. It was, till this year, the
strangest quiet old nook in the city, behind its big timber gates,
within one hundred yards of Fleet street on one side, and Newgate
Market on the other, but the distant murmur of life only made the
repose more striking in those days. Now they are building some new
minor Canons’ houses on the vacant ground beyond which will be opened
out towards Newgate street, and the corner will be a thoroughfare.
The most remarkable fact of my childhood happened there, as I was in
the house (I believe) with Sir Walter Scott, a great friend of my
grandfather, on his last sad visit to London.
“My grandmother was a very notable woman in many ways, and a great
economist and early riser. She used to take me and my brother out
shopping in the early morning, and our excursions extended as far
as Billingsgate fish-market, then at the height of the career which
has secured for it an unenviable place in our English vocabulary.
It was certainly a strange place for a lady and small boys, and is
connected with the most vivid of my childish memories. Toddling after
my grandmother to the stall where she made her purchases, we came
one morning on the end of a quarrel between a stalwart fish-fag and
her fancy man. She struck him on the head with a pewter pot which
flattened with the blow. He fell like a log, the first blood I had
ever seen, gushing from his temples, and the scene is as fresh as ever
in my memory at the end of half a century. The narrow courts in that
neighborhood are still my favorite haunts in London.
“But my town visits were short. I was a thorough country-bred boy,
and passed eleven months in the year at the foot of the Berkshire
chalk-hills, much in the manner depicted in ‘Tom Brown.’
“I was sent to school at the early age of eight, to accompany my elder
brother. It was a preparatory school for Winchester, and the best
feature about it was the Winchester custom, called ‘standing up,’
which means that we were encouraged to learn a great deal of poetry
by heart, for which we got extra marks at the end of the half year.
We were allowed (within limits) to choose our own poets, and I always
chose Scott from family tradition, and in this way learned the whole
of the ‘Lady of the Lake,’ and most of the ‘Lay of the last Minstrel’
and ‘Marmion,’ by heart, and can repeat much of them to this day.
Milton reckoned highest for marks, but I was prejudiced against him
in this wise: Not far from the school was Addington, a place of the
then Duke of Buckingham, who was also a friend of my grandfather,
who, with my grandmother, paid him a visit at the end of our first
half year. We went over to sleep, and travel back home next day with
the old folk, and in the morning before starting, the Duchess gave us
each a sovereign, neatly wrapped up in white, glossy paper. It was the
first piece of gold I ever had, and I kept it in my hand to look at on
the journey. I was leaning out of the window of the carriage when my
attention was suddenly called to some roadside sight, and I dropped the
precious metal. My shout of anguish and dismay brought the carriage to
a stand-still, and I had to confess. After some trouble my sovereign
was found, and taken charge of by my grandmother, who, in due course,
returned it to me, no longer in current coin of the realm, but in the
shape of a pocket edition of Milton’s poems, with ‘Thomas Hughes from
the Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos’ written on the title page. I
still possess the odious small volume, and have learnt to forgive the
great Puritan,—indeed, I have read Masson’s life of him with real
interest in these latter days. But I never learnt a line of him by
heart as a boy, and regret it to this day.
“Those were evil days in Wessex, the time of the Swing riots and
machine and rick burning. My father was the most active magistrate in
the district, and was constantly in the saddle, keeping the King’s
peace. He was an old fashioned Tory, but with true popular sympathies,
and had played cricket and football all his life with the men and boys
of our village, and it is one of my proudest memories that only one man
from Uffington joined the rioters, and he came back after three weeks
ashamed and penitent. Amongst other good deeds, my father rode off
alone one night and saved the house and chapel of a dissenting minister
in a neighboring village from being sacked and burned. Nevertheless I
can not pretend to say that I was brought up to look upon dissenters as
anything but a stiff-necked and perverse generation.
“At the age of ten, February 1834, I was sent on to Rugby with my
brother, as, happily for us, Arnold had been a college friend of my
father. Here I stayed till I was nearly nineteen, starting from the
bottom and ending in the sixth form, though by no means at the head of
the school.
“It was a very rough, not to say brutal, place when I went there, but
much mended during those years.
“I was a very idle boy so far as the regular lessons were concerned,
and I expect I should have been advised to go elsewhere early in my
career but for a certain fondness for history and literature which
Arnold discovered in me and which (I fancy) covered a multitude of
sins. He first struck it at a monthly examination of the Shell, then
the form intervening between the fourth and fifth. He asked the head
boy why it was the Romans had so specially rejoiced over the terms
of a certain treaty with the Parthians (we were reading Horace, I
think). It came all down to the lowest bench where I was, and I said,
‘because they got back the eagles taken from Crassus,’ and sent a
gleam of pleasure into the Doctor’s face which was getting rather
grim. Up I went to the top of the form, and from that time he often
asked me questions _outside_ the text book and specially by way of
illustration from Scott’s novels, to which he was fond of referring.
I could generally come to the point, having them at my fingers’ ends,
and was proud of my consequent recognition. To this day I remember the
feeling of grief and humiliation which came across me when I failed
him on a critical occasion. It was years after the above event when
I was in the sixth, and some distinguished visitor (Bunsen, I think
it was) was present at the lesson. We were reading the passage in
Aristotle about old age, (is it in the Ethics or Politics? I’m sure
I forget) and he asked the head of the school to illustrate from
Scott’s novels what Aristotle says about the characteristic of old
age, to be absorbed in petty interests and to be careless about great
contemporary events. Down came the question, past some very able and
some very studious boys, since distinguished one way or another—past
John Connington, Matt. Arnold, Sir R. Cross, to me—and then the Doctor
paused for several seconds with a confident look. But no response came
and he passed on, ‘and I was left lamenting.’ No one answered, and he
had to remind us of the old Abbot, pottering away in his garden on the
border, when Mary and her defeated followers ride up before Crossing,
and the old monk leans on his spade and looks after them, saying, ‘I
could pity this poor Queen and these Lords, but what are these things
to a man of four score—and it’s a fine growing morning for the young
kale-wort’—and so goes to his spading again.
“I cannot help to this day wondering at the patience and forbearance
both of him and my tutor, Cotton, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, over
my frightful copies of verses, and Greek and Latin prose. As I was head
of the eleven at cricket, and of bigside at football, I naturally had
but small leisure to devote to such matters, and consequently my copies
were notorious for the number of _picture frames_ they were certain to
contain,—picture frames being the strong black marks which the Doctor
used to make round bad, false concords
+--------------------+
| munus hospitalis |
+--------------------+
or quantities
+--------------------+
| munera stare |
+--------------------+
“He used to do it slowly and grimly, his under lip seeming to grow out
as the pen went deliberately round the wretched words, and one did
not feel good during the operation. But as no boy enjoyed the sausage
seller’s buffooneries, or Socrates’ banters more than I, (tho’ I made
sad hashes in construing them) I remained in favor, tho’ incorrigible,
till the end.
“I carried away from Rugby dreadfully bad scholarship, but two
invaluable possessions. First, a strong religious faith in and loyalty
to Christ; and secondly, open mindedness. It was said (and is still
said, I believe,) of Arnold, by way of censure, that to him everything
was an open question every morning of his life. And though he never
made any direct effort to unsettle any of our convictions that I can
remember, we went out into the world the least hampered intellectually
of any school of English boys of that time. To this day I am always
ready to change an old opinion the moment I can get a better one, and
so I think it has been with many of my old school-fellows, though we
believed ourselves to be a thorough _true blue_ school.
“Perhaps I also owe to Rugby my strong democratic bias, but I don’t
think it. I guess I was born so (or _barn-zo_, as Wessex chaw-bacon
pronounced it in the famous story). As a little scrap in petticoats
nothing pleased me so much as playing with the village children, and I
could never understand why they shouldn’t have all the things I had. At
any rate it was at Rugby that I first was able to indulge my radical
propensities. Up to my time, the school-close (or playgrounds) was kept
as sacred ground, no ‘lout’ (as we politely called the neighboring
lieges) being allowed to set foot within the precincts, and I had
often noticed the insolent airs with which casual intruders in fustian
or corduroy had been extruded. So when I became head of the eleven
(and so a sort of constitutional monarch in the close) I asked the
best cricketers amongst the ‘louts’ to come in and practice with me
on summer evenings, and got up matches with their club, to the great
advantage, I still believe, of school as well as town.
“I was dreadfully loath to leave, and when I was obliged, (as nineteen
is the limit of ages) was much averse to going up to Oxford. I knew
that my scholarship was too weak to allow me to take anything like high
honors, and so, as my profession was to be the Bar, I wanted to go up
to London at once and enter at an Inn of Court. My father, however,
after consulting his legal friends, decided that I should go to Oxford,
and accordingly I went up to his old College, Oriel, in February, 1842.
My first year at Oxford was utterly wasted, except that I learned
to pull a good oar, and perfected myself in boxing, which was then
much in vogue, several prize-fighters being generally kept in pay by
the under-graduates. The lectures were perfectly easy to me as I had
read all the books at Rugby, and I employed no private tutor. I knew
I couldn’t take high honors, (or at any rate choose to think so) and
as I happened to fall into an idle, fast set, just did as the rest,
and made a fool of myself in all the usual ways. But I never much
enjoyed that kind of thing and got very sick of it by the time I had
taken my little-go, and towards the end of my second year, just before
I was of age, the most important event of my life happened, for in
the long vacation I became engaged to my wife, then a schoolgirl, the
great friend of my only sister. This pulled me up short. Our parents
very properly said we were silly young people and must not see one
another for years, or correspond, that we might see whether we really
knew our minds. I went back to Oxford quite a new man, knocked off
all not absolutely necessary expense, and lived decently and soberly
for the rest of my time, taking my degree the first moment I could
without coaching, by which I saved money. Consequently, with the help
of a small legacy of £200, which came to me at twenty-one from an old
great-aunt, I came away quite out of debt and with some small balance
towards furnishing chambers in London, which was fairly creditable, as,
there being three of us up at once, my father only allowed us £200 a
year each. This was supposed to be too small for a fellow to live on!!
Alas, it is even worse now, I fear!
“I had the good luck to be under Clough (the poet) and Fraser, now
Bishop of Manchester, who were Oriel tutors at that time, and the
latter of whom is still one of my closest friends. I went up, as I
have said, believing myself still a Tory, but left Oxford a Radical.
Something of the change was owing to the insolence of undergraduate
life at that day, but more to a tour I took with a pupil through the
North in the long vacation of my third year. My pupil was the son of
a neighboring Berkshire squire, and all his father wanted was that I
should keep him out of mischief. If he could be interested or taught
anything, so much the better. We happened to stop at a Commercial hotel
in Lancashire on our way North, and in the bagman’s room I got into
an argument with some of the North county travellers on the subject
of the Corn Laws, then prominently before Parliament. On this first
night I came speedily to the conclusion that I knew very little about
the matter, and before I returned to Oxford for Michaelmas term I had
become a good free-trader.
“I was nearly twenty-two when I went up to London, straight from
Oxford, to begin my legal career. My father kindly suggested that I
should take a run on the Continent before settling down, to get up my
French and German to the point at any rate of tolerably fluent small
talk, and here again I have no doubt but he was right, as the want of
early training of ear and tongue has left me a helpless mortal ever
since. However, I was determined to lose not a month or a week if I
could help it, and soon found myself in small rooms on the third floor
at No. 15 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, from the windows of which, on a fine
day, I could see the Surrey hills. I paid £30 a year for the chambers,
and lived in them for another £70, keeping down my whole expenditure
within £100 a year, a feat I am still rather proud of. I never could
have done it but for a glorious old woman who kept the house, and did
for all the inhabitants, of whom only two lived in their chambers. She
had come up from Devonshire as a girl some fifty years before to that
house where she had been ever since, and in all that time had never
seen the Thames, which is, as you know, not five minutes’ walk from
Lincoln’s Inn Fields; nor St. Paul’s, except the dome, from the top
windows of No. 15. She still spoke with a delightful Devonshire accent,
all her U’s being as soft as if she had left Torquay yesterday, and I
won her heart at once by professing, or I should say acknowledging, a
passion for _junket_, which she prepared in a reverent and enthusiastic
manner on the slightest excuse. As my wife that was to be lived in
Devonshire, the coincidence was peculiarly grateful to me, and the dear
old woman, Roxworthy by name, could not have had my interests more at
heart had I been her own son.
“There I lived for two years and upwards pleasantly enough, for several
old school and college friends had chambers in the neighborhood. My
engagement was a constant stimulus to work and economy, and made me
indifferent as to society. I just visited two or three family friends
on Sundays, and for the rest did very well without it. From my own
experience I would have every youngster get engaged by the time he is
twenty-one, though I am not prepared to maintain that a long engagement
is so good for girls as for boys. Mine at any rate was the making
of me. My democratic instincts grew in strength during these years,
notwithstanding the failure of my first practical endeavors to act
up to them. One of these I will mention. Every house in the Square
was entitled to a key of the five gardens, in which I spent most of
the long summer evenings; and, seeing the number of ragged children
who came round the railings and looked wistfully through at the lawns
and beds within, I extended my privilege to them and used to let them
in by the scores, and watch them tumbling on the grass and gathering
the daisies with entire satisfaction. From the first, this outrageous
proceeding greatly scandalized the Beadle, whose remonstrances I
entirely disregarded, until at last a notice came from the Trustees of
the Square that the key of No. =15= would be called in. This threat so
alarmed poor Mrs. Roxworthy that I was fain to promise amendment, and
so ceased myself to frequent the gardens. At the end of thirty years a
strong effort is being made, as you may see in the papers, to throw the
gardens open; so I live in hopes before long of seeing my revenge on
the ghost of the Beadle of my day.
“I read hard at the law, but it was very much against the grain, and my
endeavors to master the subtleties of contingent remainders, executory
devises, the _scintilla juris_, and all the rest of it, were only
partially successful. I sometimes think I might have taken _con amore_
to common law and to criminal business, but conveyancing and real
property law had no attractions for me, beyond the determination, if I
could, to make a living by them. I read with a very able conveyancer
and kindly old gentleman, who did his best to impart the mysteries to
some six pupils. He soon found where my strength, such as it was, lay,
and employed me in the preparation of deeds—such as appointments of new
Trustees, where the operative part was quite simple common form, but
long statements of fact had to be made in the recitals. These I rather
excelled at, and on the whole, by the time I was of standing to be
called to the Bar, was probably about as fit for that ceremony as the
average of my cotemporaries.
“Three months before it took place I was married, the probation which
my wife’s parents had very properly insisted on, having expired at the
beginning of 1847, and we being found entirely in the same mind after
our three years of separation. Most of our friends thought us mad,
as we started on the vast income of £400 a year. It was confidently
foretold that we should be living on our friends or in the workhouse
before long, which prophesies however were entirely falsified. We
started in tiny lodgings, almost opposite the house we now live in, and
always managed to pay our way in the worst of times. And though I admit
the experiment was a risky one, I have never repented it.
“The year of my call, 1848, was the year of revolutions, and on the
10th of April I paraded, like the rest of respectable society, as a
special constable, though with shrewd misgivings in my own mind that
the Chartists had a great deal to say for themselves. In which belief I
soon found sympathizers. Frederick Maurice had recently been appointed
Chaplain of Lincoln’s Inn, and was gathering round him a number of
young Barristers and Students, whom he was putting to work in their
spare time at a ragged school, and visiting the poor in a miserable
district near Lincoln’s Inn. Contact with our wretched clients soon
made it clear to us that something more radical and systematic was
needed to raise them to anything like independence. They were almost
all in the hands of slop sellers, chamber masters, or other grinders
of the faces of the poor. What could be done to deliver them? In the
autumn, one of our number spent some time in Paris and came back full
of the material and moral effects of association amongst the workmen
there.
“We resolved to try the experiment and accordingly formed ourselves
into a society for promoting Workingmen’s Associations, with Maurice
as president. The idea grew on us apace, and soon called out an amount
of enthusiasm which surprised ourselves. We were all busy men, tied to
offices from ten till five, so we met at six in the morning and eight
at night to settle our rules, and organize our work. We were all poor
men too, but soon scraped together enough money to start our first
Association. This we resolved should be a tailoring establishment,
for which we could ourselves, with the help of our friends, find
sufficient custom in the first instance. We had no difficulty in hiring
good airy workshops, but how to fill them was the rub. We were now in
communication with a number of poor workpeople, especially amongst the
Chartists, and, to cut a long story short, started our Association
with a slop-worker who had been in prison as manager, and some dozen
associates of kindred opinions in the workroom.
“I needn’t trouble you with any details of the Christian Socialist
movement, of which this was a beginning, and which made a great noise
in the press and elsewhere at the time. It has survived any number of
follies and failures, and has gradually spread till there is a union
of Societies all over the kingdom, doing a work for our poorer classes
which one can only wonder at and be thankful for.
“We wrote tracts, and started a small paper, ‘The Christian Socialist,’
and were soon at open strife with nearly the whole of our press, both
the ‘Edinburgh’ and the ‘Quarterly’ condescending to bestow on us
contemptuous, but very angry articles, in which they were joined by
weeklies and dailies innumerable. But we were young, saucy, and so
thoroughly convinced we were right that ‘we cared, shall I say, not a
d—n for their damning.’
“Most of my friends looked very serious, and prophesied that my
prospects at the Bar would be ruined by my crotchets, and indeed I was
dreadfully afraid of this myself. But the state of things in England
was so serious, and I was so thoroughly convinced of the necessity of
work in this direction, that I couldn’t give it up. No doubt I lost
some business by it, but other business came, as I was wonderfully
punctual at Chambers and soon got to be friends with my few clients,
who even got to pardon, with a shrug of the shoulders, the queer folk
they often found there. And queer no doubt they were for a Chancery
barrister’s chambers, as emissaries from the tailors’, shoemakers’,
printers’, and builders’ Associations (we had a dozen of them going by
this time) were often in and out about their rules and accounts and
squabbles. I only remember one instance in which I really suffered.
A dear old gentleman, a family friend of ours, had managed with much
difficulty to persuade his solicitor to give me some business. That
most respectable of men, head of a firm which could have made any
young barrister’s fortune, arrived one afternoon at my chambers with
a brief, and was asked by my clerk to sit down for a moment till I
was disengaged. This he did, graciously enough, though no doubt with
the thought ‘how little I could know my business to keep him waiting
even for a moment,’ when my door opened, and a full-blown black person
(lately from the West Indies in quest of advice and aid for the
freedmen there) walked out. This was too much for my intending client,
who hurried away, saying he would call again, but I never saw his brief
or him.
“So things went on for some years during which I managed to maintain
my growing family without dropping my work for the Associations. We
had migrated to Wimbledon, for health’s sake, where we built a house
side by side with one of the other Promoters, which had one large
room common to both houses, the subject of much chaff and fun to our
visitors and acquaintance. Our garden was also in common, and both
arrangements, I think, answered well.
“About this time Maurice became convinced that if Associations of
working people were to succeed, the men must be better educated in the
highest sense. So he set to work to establish the Workingmen’s College,
of which he was the first and I am the present Principal. It is a very
noteworthy institution, at which, by the way, Emerson and Goldwin
Smith, besides Stanley, Kingsley, Huxley, and other eminent Englishmen,
have delivered opening addresses, at the beginning of the academical
year, in October.
“I found it at first very hard to discover my mission at the college.
I tried lectures on the law of combination and association, but they
did not draw, and all the other classes for which I was competent, were
filled by much better teachers from amongst our number. So, noting how
badly set up the men were with round shoulders, and slouching gait, and
how much they needed some strong exercise to supple them, I started a
boxing class, and had some horizontal and parallel bars put up in the
back-yard. These proved a great success, and at last it became clear to
me, that all my Oxford time spent on such matters had not been thrown
away. In connection with the boxing and gymnastic classes, we started
social gatherings for talk and songs, over a cup of tea, which also
were wonderfully successful. I remember Hawthorne coming to one of
them; brought by his friend, H. Bright, of Liverpool, and quite losing
his shyness and reserve for the evening.
“By this time we had a boy of eight, and, thinking over what I should
like to say to him before he went to school, I took to writing a story
as the easiest way of bringing out what I wanted. It was done mainly in
the long vacation of 1856, but wasn’t published till early in the next
year, and made such a hit that the publishers soon betrayed the secret,
and I became famous!
“Whereupon arose again the professional bugbear, now set at rest for
years. I had managed to get over and live down Christian Socialism, but
who on earth would bring business to a successful author! I considered
whether I shouldn’t throw over Lincoln’s Inn and take to writing, but
decided that the law was best for me, and determined to stop writing.
This good resolution held for two years, when the Berkshire festival
of scouring the White Horse, (an old Danish or Saxon, certainly Pagan
figure, still left on our chalk-hills,) came round, and my old country
friends made such a point of having an account of it from me that I
gave in and wrote my book No. 2.
“By this time my clients had become case-hardened, and finding no
particular ill effects from my previous escapades, I gave in in a
weak moment to a tempting offer of Macmillan’s, and wrote ‘Tom Brown
at Oxford,’ for his magazine. Moreover, I had now made a plunge into
public life, and was one of the leaders of a semi-political party. This
is how it came about: There had been roused in me lively sympathies
with the Abolitionists, and I had followed eagerly the progress of
events through the Fugitive Slave, and Free Soil agitations. There was
no warmer sympathizer with Garrison and John Brown and Levi Coffin,
in England; so when the Lincoln election came, and South Carolina led
off the seceding states with jubilant applause of society in England,
I went at once fiercely into the other camp. You may judge of the
difficulty of getting our public men of note to take active sides with
the North (tho’ many of them didn’t conceal their sympathy, and were
ready to speak in Parliament, and write,) by the fact that I was about
the most prominent speaker at the first great public meeting, which
was held in London. This proved to be such an extraordinary success,
that there was no further effort on the part of the jingoes (that
name hadn’t yet been invented, but it was precisely the same party,)
to demonstrate publicly in the metropolis. In other centres there was
need of such work, and I went to Birmingham and Liverpool to speak
and deliver lectures on the war and its causes and issues. It was
supposed that there was to be a row at the latter place, which was the
stronghold of the Rebels; but all went off quietly.
“It was mainly in consequence of these doings that I was asked by the
working folk in South London to stand for Lambeth in 1865. I did so,
and was brought in triumphantly at the head of the Poll, and almost
all the expense paid by subscription. From that time I gradually gave
up legal business, and in 1868 took silk, as it is called, _i. e._,
became a Queen’s Counsel. In 1869 I wrote ‘Alfred the Great’ for
Macmillan’s Sunday Series. I now made it my chief business to attend
to Social-Political questions in Parliament; sat on two Trades Unions
Commissions; got amendments to the Industrial and Friendly Societies
Acts through the House, but never took to party politics.
“In 1870, as I hope you remember, I paid my delightful visit to America.
“In 1872 I lost my dear eldest brother, and soon after wrote the memoir
of him for my family. Maurice also died, and I became Principal of the
Workingmen’s College.
“Before the next election (1874) the Co-operative question had come
to the front. The success of the Upper Class London Supply Societies
[copies of our working-class Associations in their main principle and
features] had roused the tradesmen throughout the country. I was a
candidate for Marylebone, and was fiercely opposed by the tradesmen,
and supported by the professional and working classes. There were three
Liberal candidates for only two seats, so it was agreed to refer it to
the Attorney General to say who should retire, and he decided that I
had the worst chance of winning the seat (on one-sided and insufficient
evidence, as my supporters maintained, and I think rightly). I
therefore retired, and got no chance of entering that Parliament. For
by this time the Trades Protection Society had been organized, to
fight against neither small nor great, but only against those accursed
revolutionists who had supported the Co-operative movement, and refused
to flinch from it.
“So it happened that I was again thrown out at the election this
year. I had consented, on the unanimous and unsolicited request of
the Liberal party in Salisbury, to stand there, and all went well
till just before the election, when the Trades Protective people
permitted the party organization to throw me over. I doubt if I shall
ever return to the House, as my views on the Church question make me
an almost hopeless candidate in the North of England, and my support
of Co-operation a perfectly hopeless one at present in the South. I
care, however, very little about it, having plenty to do outside in
keeping irons hot, especially that most interesting of all my irons,
the Tennessee settlement, which I hope to keep very hot indeed, and
look upon as about the most hopeful of the many New Jerusalems which
have attracted me during my pilgrimage. I am off to open Chapter II.
of that Romance [Chapter I., the getting the titles clear, buying the
land, &c., having taken some two years.] on the 12th of next month, and
I can’t tell you how much my heart is in it.
“And so end my confessions. The only other points of interest, omitted
above, are the publication of the ‘Old Church,’ in 1877, when the
disestablishment movement began to get serious, and ‘The Manliness
of Christ,’ this Spring, (1880), which latter has been already
republished on your side in four different forms; and lastly, my share
in the Volunteer movement, which I joined at its start in 1859. The
Workingmen’s College raised a corps of two companies at once, of
which, after serving for a few weeks as private, I was made Captain.
It soon swelled into a regiment, the 19th Middlesex, of which I became
Colonel, and served in it twelve years.”