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T!
LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
'Johti Heywood. t'lmu-r, Maitduster.
LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
BY
FRANCIS ESPINASSE.
Srcanti Series.
' Hie manus, ob patriam pugnando vulnera passi,
Quique sacerdotes ca-'ii, dum vita manebat,
Quique pii vates, et Phosbo digna locuti,
Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes,
Quique sui memores alios fecere merendo."
j^neid, vi. 660-65.
" Behold, a band
Of whom some suffered for heir Fatherland ;
With them are priests whose /ives were undefiled,
And reverent bards on whom Apollo smiled.
Inventors, too, of useful arts are here.
And those whose worth has made their memory dear.
LONDON:
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO., Stationers' Hall Court.
^L\NCI1EST^:K: jorix heywood.
iS77-
• • • • * * » I ,
CONTENTS.
I. SAMUEL CROMPTON
II. THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEI, FAMILY
III. THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL .
IV. THOMAS PERCIVAL .
V. CAPTAIN JAMES KING
VI. GEORGE ROMNEY .
VIL HENRY CORT ....
VIII. THE TOWNELEYS OK TOWNELEY
IX. JOHN DALTON
X. WILLIAM ROSCOE .
XI. FELICIA HEMANS .
Xn. JOHN DRINKWATER-BETHUNE
XIII. THE TWO THOMAS WALKERS .
XIV. MARIA JANE JEWSBURV .
XV. HENRY LIVERSEEGE
XVI. SIR JOHN BARROW .
XVII. WILLIAM WHEWELL
XVin. THOMAS DE QUINCEV
XIX. SAMUEL BAMFORD .
TAGE
I
49
82
'73
195
211
224
238
261
274
286
296
306
323
340
35"
363
37S
462
NOTE ON THE CHEVALIER TOWNELEY AND HUDIBRAS
493
305189
LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
I.
SAMUEL CROMPTON*
npHE spinning-mule, invented by Samuel Crompton, has
more than any single machine contributed to the
progress and prosperity of the cotton manufacture, though
the inventor himself profited little by the successful inge-
nuity and labour which helped to enrich his county and his
country. Indeed, of the three men — Hargreaves, Ark-
wright, and Crompton — who may be grouped together as
the originators of modern cotton-spinning, Arkwright alone
accumulated wealth, and this because in business faculty
he was greatly the superior of his two contemporaries.
The operations of the founder of the factory system were,
it is true, far more extensive than those of the inventors of
the jenny and the mule. But if the sphere of Arkwright's
* Gilbert J. French, The Life and Times of Sarmiel Crompton,
Ltventor of the Spin7iing- Machine called The Mule, with an Appendix
oj original documents, second edition (Manchester and London, 1 860).
A Brief Memoir of Sa?mtcl Crompton, by John Kennedy, Esq., in
Memoirs of tlie Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, second
series, vol. v. (London, 1831). Bennet Woodcroft, Brief Biographies
of Inventors of Machines for the Manufacture of Textile Fabrics
(London, 1863), § Crompton, &c., &c.
A
2 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
efforts and achievements had been much narrower than it
was — if he had been simply, Hke Hargreaves or Crompton,
the inventor of an isolated machine, he would assuredly
have made out of it much more for himself than these two
men made for themselves out of the jenny and the mule.
By nature and by training Arkwright was as fitted as
Crompton seems to have been unfitted for the battle of
industrial life. Invention has been called the poetry of
labour ; and certainly inventors or projectors are, as little
as poets, all cast in the same mould. Stalwart, shrewd, and
hearty Sir Walter Scott did not differ more from the melan-
cholic and morbid Cowper than the burly, resolute, and
not over - scrupulous Arkwright from the shrinking and
sensitive Crompton, whose rather sad story now falls to
be told.
The only son of a small farmer at Firwood, near Bolton,
Samuel Crompton was born there on the 3d of December
1753. His parents combined — as was then common —
petty manufacturing with their petty agriculture. In the
intervals of farm and dairy labour they carded, span, and
wove, finding a market for their wares in Bolton, a town
long previously famous for its fustians and other heavy
fabrics. When Crompton was born, the population of
Bolton was probably much less than the 5000 which it
became twenty years later. The town was still called
Bolton-in-the-Moors, from the marshy waste which sur-
rounded it, and most of which, thanks partly to Crompton
himself, is now covered with houses and mills. Writing: or
publishing in 1795, Dr. Aikin says, that "in the memory
of some persons now living, not more than one cow used
to be killed weekly in Bolton ; or, if two, the unsold beef
used to be sent to Bury market," 1 a fact which indicates
the poverty as well as scantiness of the population. In
^ Coimtry Round Manchesta; p. 261.
SAMUEL CROMPTON. 3
1773 Great and Little Bolton contained only 5,339 inhabi-
tants ; a hundred years afterwards the population of the
parliamentary burgh of Bolton was more than 93,000, an
increase to which the success of Crompton's mule has
largely contributed. In the production of its fustians and
so forth, which at the time of Crompton's birth were the
staple commodities of the place, Bolton was greatly de-
pendent on the North of Ireland. Thence was brought
the linen yarn for the warps, which, before Arkwright's
rollers came into use, the cotton-spinning resources of the
North of England could not supply of proper strength.
Once a week there was a market for unbleached goods,
the products of the town and neighbourhood. It was
attended by buyers from Manchester and London; and the
rural quota of the wares which they came in search of —
" fustians, herring-bones, cross-overs, quiltings, dimities,
and other goods — were carried to market by the small
manufacturers (who were for the most part equally small
farmers), in wallets balanced over one shoulder, while on
the other arm was often hung a basket of fresh butter," ^ — a
primitive conjunction of the products of the dairy and the
loom.
Crompton's progenitors had seemingly been better off
than were his parents. His birthplace, Firwood farm,
once belonged to the Crompton family, but was mortgaged
by his grandfather, and sold by his father, who remained
on it merely as a tenant. Crompton's parents were honest,
hard-working, and strictly religious people. The construc-
tiveness inherited by Samuel, and turned to account in the
invention of the spinning-mule, was applied by his father
for the benefit of the church (now All Saints, Little
^ French, p. 7. See in First Series, p. 373-Si the whole of Mr.
French's interesting description of Bolton, its aspects and its trade, at
the time of Crompton's birlh.
4 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Bolton), which he attended. The elder Crompton was
fond of music, a taste also inherited by his son ; and when
his day's work was over, he helped to erect the organ
gallery, even beginning to build an organ, unfinished at
his death. He died when Samuel was a boy of five, and
there were also two daughters, of whom little more than
that they existed is recorded. One removal of the Crompton
family from Firwood farm to a cottage in the same town-
ship had taken place soon after Samuel's birth, and just
before the death of the father there was another to a portion
of a neiglibouring and ancient mansion, known from its
situation as Hall-in-the-Wood. The landlord of the Cromp-
tons, the purchaser of Firwood, seems also to have been the
ownerofHall-i'-th'-Wood(as it was called in the vernacular),
which was otherwise untenanted. The couple, whom, as
deserving people, he may have wished to assist, would look
after it. They were probably falling rather than rising in
the world, and perhaps the offer of a domicile at a lower
rent led them cheerfully to exchange a little home of their
own for the part-occupancy and custodianship of Hall-in-
the-Wood. Since it became famous as the birthplace of
the mule it has had many visitors, and one of them thus
records what were its aspects, internal and external, nearly
a century after the Crompton family first made it their
home : —
"An interesting specimen of the old rural mansion before Lanca-
shire had become manufacturing— it is Elizabethan in style, small
compared with modern mansions, but commodious and snug, and
shows the advancing wealth of the owners of the successive additions
which have from time to time been made to its accommodation : first,
the roomy kitchen or hall, with sleeping apartments above, lit by
latticed windows ; then the addition of a dining-hall and drawing-room,
with their large oriel windows of stained glass. The situation is very
fine, on a plateau once covered with timber, from which it derived its
name. The little river Eagley, a tributary of the Irwell, runs deep in
the valley beneath, the high land descending precipitously in some
SAMUEL CROMPTON. 5
places almost to the banks of the stream. Even at this day, in spite
of the long chimneys within sight, and the sky dimmed by smoke, the
neighbourhood of Ilall-in-the-Wood exhibits one of the best specimens
of South Lancashire scenery." ^
Here, with her Httle son and her two daughters, the widow
Crompton abode after her husband's death, farming and
manufacturing as before. Her dairy produced butter which
was considered excellent, and the bees in the old-fashioned
garden of the Hall supplied her with marketable honey.
She was a superior woman, and of a superiority so appreci-
ated, that, even in those days of the subjection of the sex, she
was appointed overseer of the poor of her township. Dame
Crompton seems to have been in one respect well qualified
for the office. She was of a somewhat vigorous disposition,
loving her son indeed, but all the more on that account
not sparing the rod, and chastising him betimes. One
fancies that this sort of training must have aggravated any-
thing that was morbid in a naturally shy and sensitive boy.
His mother sent him, however, to a good day-school in
the neighbourhood, where he made fair progress in arith-
metic, algebra, and geometry, taking kindly to such studies.
Playmates or companions he seems to have had none. Of
the sisters nothing is said, and besides mother and son,
the only inmate of their section of the quaint mansion of
whom mention is made was a lame old uncle on the father's
side, so much of a cripple that he never left his one room,
where he oscillated between his bed and his loom. Uncle
Alexander was religious, like the rest of the family, but
church-going was out of the question ; and thus it was that
he contrived to compensate himself for the deprivation : —
"On each succeeding Sunda)', when all the rest of the family had
gone to morning service at All Saints, Uncle Alexander sat in his
^ Quarterly Review (for January i860), No. 213, § Cotton-Spinning
Machitus and their Inventors (by Mr. Samuel Smiles), p. 66.
6 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
solitary room listening for the first sound of the bells of Bolton parish
church. Before they ceased ringing, he took off his ordinary working-day
coat, and put on that which was reserved for Sundays. This done, he
slowly read to himself the whole of the Morning Service and a sermon,
concluding about the same time that the dismissal bells commenced
ringing, when his Sunday-coat was carefully put aside, to be resumed
again, however, when the bells took up their burthen for the evening
service, which he read through with the same solemnity." ^
From early childhood, in all likelihood, Crompton was
accustomed to help his hard-working mother in her
humble manufacturing operations, and " probably his little
legs became accustomed to the loom almost as soon as
they were long enough to touch the treddles." School itself
may not have released him from his home labours, and as
he grew up, his mother kept him close to his work, in-
sisting, like a wicked fairy tormenting a captive princess,
that he should do a certain stint every day, at the risk, in
case of neglect, of a terrible scolding, or worse. He was a
boy of fourteen when Hargreaves, by 1767, as has been
told elsewhere,^ so far perfected the spinning-jenny that a
child could work with it eight spindles at once. Two years
later the jenny was pretty generally used in Lancashire;
and Crompton, cetat 16, "span on one of these machines
with eight spindles the yarn which he afterwards wove into
quilting, and thus was he occupied for the five following
years." The spinning-jenny which Crompton used was
perhaps a poor one, or there may have been inherent im-
perfections in the machine itself. In any case, much of
his time was passed painfully in " mending the ever-breaking
ends of his miserable yarn," to get through the day's ap-
pointed task and escape the maternal reproaches. It was
a drudging, cheerless, lonesome life for the poor lad, and
no wonder he grew up an unsocial and irritable young man.
His one solace was derived from his inherited love of
1 French, p. 24. - First Series, p. 324.
SAMUEL CROMPTON. 7
music. The son of the amateur organ-builder made him-
self a fiddle, the first little achievement of the mechanical
genius implanted in him, and destined to find before long
a very different development : —
"He soon scraped a very intimate acquaintance with his fiddle,
which became to him truly a bosom friend, proving in after-life the
solace of many a solitary hour, and a source of consolation after many
a bitter disappointment. With this musical friend he, on winter nights,
practised the homely tunes of the time by the dim light of his mother's
kitchen fire or thrifty lamp ; and in many a summer twilight he wan-
dered contemplatively among the green lanes or by the margin of the
pleasant brook that swept round her romantic old residence."^
This construction of a fiddle that could be played on
betokens considerable handiness in a youth who had no
practical acquaintance with any but his own monotonous
craft, and it perhaps aided in awakening his dormant
mechanical powers. He had spun for five years on one of
Hargreaves' spinning-jennies, when some dim conception
of the mule floated into his brain, as day after day he
felt more and more keenly the imperfections of the new
machine — imperfections very palpable and very grievous,
whatever its superiority to the old one-thread spinning-
wheel, which it was rapidly displacing. Besides craving for
a machine that would turn out yarn less brittle than that
which was " ever breaking " as it came from the jenny, he
was probably stimulated by the demand for a finer kind of
yarn than any that could be then produced eff"ectively in
England. In the muslin trade, the fabrics of India all
but monopolised the market. The Act of 1721, which
made penal the importation or use of Indian calicoes, plain
or printed, did not prohibit muslins, and those of India
defied English competition. English calicoes, for which
Arkwright's rollers furnished the warp, and the spinning-
* French, p. 23.
8 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
jenny of Hargreaves the weft, were being produced in con-
siderable quantities, when, we are told, " the manufacture of
the still more delicate and beautiful muslin was attempted
both in Lancashire and at Glasgow with weft spun by the
jenny." But, it is added, " the attempt failed owing to the
coarseness of the yarn. Even with Indian weft, muslins
could not be made to compete with those of the East." ^
Nay, according to Crompton's latest biographer, in Bolton
itself, for three years before he began to work at his
machine, muslins had been woven, " but either from hand-
spun material or from the fine yarn occasionally imported
from the East Indies." The hand-spun yarn was trouble-
some to produce ; the East Indian was costly ; so here
would be stimulus given at his own door, as it were, to the
young inventor. Crompton's mule was to enable the
English spinner to produce a yarn out of which the most
delicate muslin could be woven, not only to compete with,
but to supersede, the airiest fabrics of the East.
Five long years, from his twenty-second to his twenty-
seventh, Crompton brooded over, experimented on, and
worked at his nascent machine. In his moments of
greatest hope, however, he did not dream of a patent and
a fortune, but thought only of turning out for his own loom,
and with greater ease, a finer and more valuable yarn than
that which he and his fellow-craftsmen had painfully and
laboriously educed from the jenny. The machine, if it
proved effective, was to be kept a close secret, and thus
the already solitary and uncompanionable young man
probably became less disposed than ever for society. His
tools were few and scanty — those used by his father in
building the unfinished organ, and notably a clasp-knife of
his own, which did him yeoman's service. Some others he
bought with what money he could spare from his slender
* Baines, Cotton Maftitfai-linr, p. 334.
SAMUEL C ROMP TON. 9
earnings : partly to increase these, partly to gratify his
taste for music, he fiddled in the orchestra of the Bolton
Theatre during its period of intermittent opening, for the
sum of eighteenpence a night. Of such poor tools as he
possessed and acquired, moreover, he had to teach himself
the use, since to ask for aid or instruction from the more
skilful might have been to betray his secret. " It is known,
however, that he frequently visited a small wayside smithy
in the township, where, we are informed, he ' used to file his
bits of things.' " Both to maintain due secrecy, and because
his labour for his daily bread left him little leisure, he
worked constantly at his machine during the night : —
"Indeed, this it was which first called the attention of his family and
neighbours to his proceedings. Strange and unaccountable sounds
were heard in the old Hall at most untimely hours ; lights were seen
in unusual places ; and a rumour became current that the place was
haunted. Samuel, however, was soon discovered to be himself the
embodied spirit (of invention), which had caused much fear and trouble
to his family. Even when relieved from the alarm of a ghost, they yet
found that they had among them a conjuror I for such was the term
applied in contempt to inventors in those days, and indeed for a long
time afterwards." ^
Something worse than the contempt and gibes of ignorant
neighbours threatened the young inventor just as the long
term of his patient experimenting approached a close. He
had begun to work on his machine in 1774; five years
more — the five years of his unremitting and solitary toil —
bring us to 1779, the date of that uprising and outbreak of
the Lancashire working classes against machinery, especially
the spinning-jenny, which has been already described
elsewhere. 2 The fury of the machine-breakers was scarcely
anywhere more destructive than in the neighbourhood of
Bolton. The rumours that Crompton was inventing more
of the machinery on which the mob was wreaking its
^ French, p. 37-8. " First Series, \->. 423-7.
y B
lO LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
vengeance might easily have procured him a visit from the
rioters ; and, as recorded in the following passage, they
were once seen and heard, busy at their work of demolition,
in the immediate neighbourhood of Hall-in-the-Wood : —
" Crompton was well aware that his infant invention would be still
more obnoxious to the rioters than Hargreaves' jenny, and appears to
have taken careful measures for its protection or concealment should
they have paid a domiciliary visit to the Hall-in-the-Wood. The
ceiling of the room in which he worked is cut through, as well as a
corresponding part of the clay-floor of the room above, the aperture
being covered by replacing the part cut away. This opening was
recently detected by two visitors, who were investigating the mysteries
of the old mansion ; but they could not imagine any use for a secret
trap-door until, on pointing it out to Mr. Bromiley, the present tenant,
he recalled to his memory a conversation he had with Samuel
Crompton during one of his latest visits to the Hall many years ago.
Mr. Crompton informed Mr. Bromiley, that once, when he was at
work on the mule, he heard the rioters shouting at the destruction of a
building at ' Folds ' (an adjoining hamlet), where there was a carding-
engine.^ Fearing that they would come to the Hall-in-the-Wood and
destroy his mule, he took it to pieces and put it into a skip which he
hoisted through the ceiling into the attic by the trap-door, which had,
doubtless, been prepared in anticipation of such a visit, and now offers
a curious evidence of the insecurity of manufacturing inventions in their
early infancy. The various parts were concealed in a loft or garret near
the clock, and there they remained hid for many weeks ere he dared
to put them together again. But in the course of the same year the
Hall-in-the-Wood wheel was completed, and the yarn spun upon it
used for the manufacture of muslins of an extremely fine and delicate
texture. "
Yes, success had at last crowned the persistently and
^ This statement is curiously confirmed by a passage in Josiah
Wedgewood's contemporary and epistolary chronicle of the doings of
these rioters: — " By a letter from Bolton," he writes to a friend, "I
learned that the mob entered that place on Tuesday, 5th October
1 779. . . . They next proceeded to Mr. Kay of The Folds and de-
stroyed his machine and waterwheel, and then went to work with the
lesser machines ' — spinning-jennies — "all above so many spindles."
See First Series, p. 426.
2 French, p. 54-7.
SAMUEL CROMPTON. I I
perseveringly tentative labours, prosecuted in silence and
secrecy, day after day, night after night, with the rudest
tools, by the inexperienced, unassisted, the solitary and
indigent young inventor, during five long years, spent in
what Crompton afterwards described as " a continual
endeavour to realise a more perfect principle of spinning.
Though often baffled," he adds, " I as often renewed the
attempt, and at length succeeded to my utmost desire, at the
expense of every shilling I had in the world." ^ The result
was the machine called at first, from its birthplace, the
" Hall-in-the-Wood wheel," or sometimes, from the fine
quality of the yarn spun on it, the " muslin wheel," but ulti-
mately and now known as the " mule," from its combination
of the principle of Arkwright's rollers with that of Har-
greaves' spinning-jenny. After chronicling the origin, pro-
gress, and results of these last two famous inventions, the
historian of the cotton manufacture proceeds thus to
describe the mule : —
" During the period that has now passed under review, Hargreaves
and Arkwright had established the cotton manufacture by their spinning
machines ; but those machines were not adapted for the finer qualities
of yarn. The water-frame spun twist for warps, but it could not be
advantageously used for the finer qualities, as thread of great tenuity
has not strength to bear the pull of the rollers when winding itself on
the bobbins. This defect in the spinning machinery was remedied by
the inventor of another machine, called the vmle, or the nude jennv,
from its containing the principles of Arkwright's water-frame and
Hargreaves' jenny. Like the former, it has a system of rollers, to
reduce the roving ; and, like the latter, it has spindles without bobbins
to give the twist, and the thread is stretched and spun at the same time
by the spindles, after the rollers have ceased to give out the rove. The
distinguishing feature of the mule is, that the spindles, instead of being
stationary, as in both the other machines, are placed on a movable
carriage, which is wheeled out to tlie distance of fifty-four or fifty-six
inches from the roller-beam, in order to stretch and twist the thread, and
wheeled in again to wind it on the spindles. In the jenny, the clasp,
' French, p. 37.
12 LANCASHIRE WORTH IRS.
which held the rovings, was drawn back by the hand from the
spindles; in the mule, on the contrary, the spindles recede from the
clasp, or from the roller-beam which acts as a clasp. The rollers of
the mule draw out the roving much less than those of the water-
frame ; and they act like the clasp of the jenny, by stopping and
holding fast the rove after a certain quantity has been given out,
whilst the spindles continue to recede for a short distance farther ; so
that the draught on the thread is in part made by the receding of the
spindles. By this arrangement, comprising the advantages both of the
rollers and the spindles, the thread is stretched more gently and
equably, and a much finer quality of yarn can therefore be pro-
duced." ^
Was the first rude conception of the rollers in the Hall-
in-the-Wood machine borrowed from those of Arkwrisht ?
is a question that naturally arises. In 1772, two years
before Crompton began his experiments, Arkwright's rollers
were hard at work in the Cromford mill, and turning out
cotton yarn fit to be woven into hose. At first sight, it
would therefore seem as if Crompton's rollers must have
been suggested by Arkwright. But the weight of such
evidence as there is, consisting partly of Crompton's own
testimony, or reported testimony, tends decidedly the other
way. On this point, his earliest biographer, who knew him
personally and intimately, and who was himself a practical
cotton-spinner, speaks thus explicitly : —
"Mr. Crompton's first suggestion was to introduce a single pair of
rollers, viz., a top and a bottom, which he expected would elongate the
rove by pressure, like the process by which metals are drawn out, and
which he observed in the wire-drawing for reeds used in the loom.
In this he was disappointed, and afterwards adopted a second pair of
rollers, the latter pair revolving at a slower speed than the former ; and
thus producing a draught of one inch to three or four. These rollers
were put in motion by means of a wooden shaft with different-sized
pullies, which communicated with the roller by a band. This was
certainly neither more nor less than a modification of Mr. Arkwright's
roller-beam ; but he often stated to me, that -cohen he constructed his
^ Baines, Cotton Manufacture, p. 197-8.
SAMUEL CROMPTON. 1 3
machine, he kntiu nothing of Mr. Arkwrighf s discoz'ery. Indeed, we
may infer that he had not, otherwise he would not have gone thus
rudely to work ; and, indeed, the small quantity of metals which he
employed, proves that he could not have been acquainted with Mr.
Arkwright's superior rollers and fixtures in iron, and their connection
by clockwork. Even the rollers were made of wood, and covered
with a piece of sheepskin, having an axis of iron with a little square
end, on which the pullies were fixed. Mr. Crompton's rollers were
supported upon wooden cheeks or stands. His tops were constructed
much in the same way, with something like a mouse-trap string to keep
the rollers in contact. His first machine contained only about twenty
or thirty spindles. He finally put dents of brass-reed wire into his
under rollers, and thus obtained a fluted roller. But the great and
important invention of Crompton was his spindle-carriage, and the
principle of the thread having no strain upon it until it was completed.
The carriage w ith the spindles could, by the movement of the hand
and knee, recede just as the rollers delivered out the elongated thread
in a soft state, so that it would allow of a considerable stretch before
the thread had to encounter the stress of winding on the spindle. This
was the corner-stone of the merits of his invention." ^
Or, as in a much more recent sketch of Crompton, a
living expert puts it : " In this machine was accomplished
for the first time the action of the spinners left arm an<i
finger and thumb, which consisted in holding and elongat-
ing the sliver as the spindle was twisting it into yarn." -
Confident, justly confident, that he had succeeded in solv-
ing his problem, and believing a comfortable future to be
in store for him, Crompton (cetat 27) took unto himself a
wife. "She was a very handsome, dark-haired woman, of
middle size and erect carriage," while Crompton himself is
described as, in his prime, "a singularly handsome and
prepossessing man ; all his limbs, and particularly his
hands," it is added, "were elegantly formed, and possessed
great muscular power." The new Mrs. Crom])ton was
well connected withal, being the daughter of a quondam
' Kennedy's Brief Memoir of Crompton, quoted by Baines, Cotton
Manufacture, p. 201. '^ Woodcroft, p. 13.
14 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
West India merchant, "a Mr. Pimlott, who resided at New
Heys Hall, near Warrington." But her father had, like
Dogberry, had losses, and she migrated from Warrington to
Turton near Bolton, because there "ample and profitable
employment could be obtained by si)inning on Hargreaves'
jenny." A genuine spinster, " in this art she was particu-
larly expert, a circumstance which is said to have first
attracted young Crompton's attention to her,'' ^ and which
made her emphatically a help meet for him. They were
married in the February of 1780, and set up house in a
cottage attached to Hall-in-the-Wood, where Crompton
continued to occupy a room or two for the purposes of his
iiandicraft. The young couple worked together in secrecy
at the mule. Rude and imperfect as was its first, compared
with its later and latest forms, it turned out then yarn of
both a fineness and a firmness unknown before, and the
arrival of which in the market startled the Bolton manufac-
turers. The demand for it was immediate and pressing,
and, to supply as much as he could of it, Crompton gave up
weaving, and, with his wife, devoted himself to spinning.
He produced, as he went on, ever finer and finer yarn, and
could obtain his own price for the small quantities which
alone it was in his power to furnish. " He stated to Mr.
Bannatyne," the author of the account of cotton-spinning
contributed to the old supplement of the " Encyclopaedia
Britannica," " that on the invention of his machine ' he
obtained 14s. per. lb. for the spinning and preparation of No.
40 {i.e., yarn weighing 40 hanks to the pound) ; that a short
time after he got 25s. per. lb. for the spinning and pre-
paration of No. 60 ; and that he then spun a small quantity
of No. 80 to show that it was not impossible, as was sup-
posed, to spin yarn of so fine a grist, and for the spinning
and preparation of this lie got 42s. per. lb." What was
^ French, p. 59.
SAMUEL CROMPTON. 15
then a quality of almost incredible fineness " is now con-
sidered a very low number; and since the multiplication of
Crompton's mules," and, it may be added, the many and
great improvements made in his originally rude machine,
" it can be produced and sold in any quantity at about 2s.
the pound."
With a demand for the new yarns greater than the
supply, and commanding his own price for them, young,
newly and happily married, conscious, too, that he was reap-
ing where himself had sown, Crompton at last found a
little sunshine lighting up his life. Alas ! his felicity was to
be of brief duration. He might keep his own secret, but
that he had a secret to keep could not long be hid. It was
soon noised abroad that the spring-head from which the
wonderful yarn trickled was a room in Hall-in-the-Wood,
and that Crompton was producing it there from a new
machine of his own invention. The inventor found himself
the envy of surrounding spinners, and the object of a
harassing as well as a perilous curiosity. The oltl Hall
was beset not only by purchasers, but by pryers, who flocked
thither to find out the mystery of the new machine's con-
struction. Every species of espionage was resorted to.
People climbed up ladders to look at him through the
window, and when he baffled this scrutiny by interposing a
screen, " one inquisitive adventurer is said to have en-
sconced himself for some days in the cock-loft, where he
watched Samuel at work through a gimblet-hole pierced
through the ceiling." There is even a tradition that Ark-
wright, then in the full tide of his success, came over from
Cromford to the Bolton which he knew so well, and made his
way into Hall-in-the-Wood when Crompton was absent
collecting poor-rates for his mother. Arkwright's first wife,
dead long before, had been, it seems, the aunt of a female
bosom friend of Crompton's wife, and in this or some other
1 6 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
way the ever-vigilant Richard was enabled to pay what
seemed a friendly visit, while in reality he was making a
voyage of discovery. It is a pity that the two did not
meet, since a patent and a partnership might have been
the result, and both patent and partnership must have pros-
pered if taken in hand by the pushing, practical, and in-
domitable Arkwright. As it was, the sensitive Crompton
allowed himself to feel worried out of his life by all this
spying and prying, annoyances which were, in fact, a tribute
to the excellence of his machine. It is noticeable, paren-
thetically, that among the causes of Crompton's unhappiness
and disorder of mind at this time, the old threats or violence
of spinners indignant at the invention and use of machinery
is not perceptible. In Bolton and its neighbourhood, the
spinning-jenny of Hargreaves had for years been popular,
and the incursions of machine-breakers from other dis-
tricts been suj)pressed by force. In quiet times, indeed,
Crompton's mule could scarcely rouse opposition of this
kind, since, at least at first, it did not so much increase
the quantity, as improve the quality, of the yarn in the
market.
A man of ordinary energy and resource would, in
Crompton's position, have endeavoured to procure a
patent for his machine. If he had not himself the means,
there must have been numbers of others who would have
been ready and eager to associate themselves with him in
patenting an invention of which the powers and resources
were proved beyond possibility of doubt. Crompton was
neither as poor nor as obscure as Arkwright when the
now prosperous owner of the Cromford mills invented or
appropriated the rollers, and Arkwright procured wealthy
partners and a patent. Even Hargreaves had managed to
patent his spinning-jenny, though too late to benefit him-
self. But, strange want in a Lancashire man and a
SAMUEL CROMPTON. 1 7
Lancashire worker, Crompton seems to have been entirely
deficient in " push," and he succumbed when he ought to
have triumphed. All the practical defects of his character
were aggravated by the petty but perpetual annoyances to
which he was subjected, and they seem to have driven him
half-distracted. His mood at this crisis of his fate he him-
self thus described long afterwards in a manuscript which
he left behind him : " During this time I married and
commenced spinner altogether. But a few months re-
duced me to the cruel necessity, either of destroying my
machine altogether, or giving it up to the public. To
destroy it I could not think of; to give up that for which I
had laboured so long was cruel. I had no patent, nor the
means of purchasing one. In preference to destroying I
gave it to the public," — an act of imprudent generosity,
which, under the circumstances, is almost without a parallel
in the history of industrial invention.
Crompton was encouraged to make this sacrifice by the
advice of a " Mr. (afterwards Major) Pilkington of Siver-
well House, Bolton," who was himself a considerable
manufacturer. Mr, Pilkington was allowed to inspect the
machine, and was made acquainted with the principle of
its operation. Incredible as it seems, he advised Crompton
to present the mule to the public. Agitated, tormented,
dejected, too shy, and perhaps too proud, to go about
asking for pecuniary aid wherewith to procure a patent,
Crompton took the unkind advice of this unwise counsellor.
He did not, indeed, quite give away the mule, since, before
he parted with it, — and he surrendered not only the prin-
ciple of the invention, but the very machine on which he was
working, — he received a document, possessing, as it hap-
pened, no legal validity, and in which some eighty firms
and individual manufacturers agreed to pay him the moneys
respectively subscribed by them, amounting in all to the
1 8 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
magnificent sum oi £(il, 6s. 6d. ! Let the most copious
and best-instructed of Crompton's biographers tell the
remainder of the shameful and sorrowful story : —
" The miserable result was, that, according to Mr. Kennedy's account,
about ;^5o only accrued to Mr. Crompton from this source " — the afore-
said subscription—" while, on the authority of Mr. Pilkington, the gross
receipts amounted to ;ifio6. Mr. Crompton himself says : 'I received
as much by way of subscriptions as built me a new machine, with only
four spindles more than the one I had given up — the old one having
forty-eight, the new one fifty- two spindles.'
"That Mr. Crompton's statement is probably the most correct, may
be gathered by reference to an existing copy of the agreement and list
of the subscribers, in his own handwriting. There are fifty-five sub-
scribers of one guinea each, twenty-seven of half-a-guinea, one of seven
shillings and sixpence, and one of five shillings and sixpence, mak-
ing together £(>'], 6s. 6d. ; but as it is known that several did not
pay at all, and that he was at considerable expense of time and
money in personally collecting the subscriptions of others, it may be
assumed that the amount received did not exceed £(iO. The list is
curiously interesting, as containing among the half-guinea subscribers the
names of many Bolton firms now"— 1860— "of great wealth and emi-
nence as mule-spinners, whose colossal fortunes may be said to have
been based upon this singularly small investment.
" No sooner was the mule given up to the public than the subscrip-
tions entirely ceased. Crompton's hopes of reward and remuneration
were blasted, and many of those who had previously given their names
evaded or refused payment. Let us again use his own words in de-
scribing this very shameful transaction : — ' At last I consented, in hope
of a generous and liberal subscription. The consequence was, that from
many subscribers, who would not pay the sums they had set opposite
their names when I applied to them for it, I got nothing but abusive
language, given me to drive me from them, which was easily done, for I
never till then could think it possible that any man (in such situation of
life and circumstances) could pretend one thing and act the direct oppo-
site. I then found it was possible, having had proof positive.'
"It thus appears that the money received for giving publicity to
his wonderful invention merely sufficed to replace the machine he
had given up ; and for his loss of time, study, and toil, he had not as
reward or recompense a single shilling. But this pecuniary loss was
less mortifying to his honourable and sensitive mind than the deceitful
ingratitude he met with from too many of the persons he had so gene-
SAMUEL CROMPTON. I9
rously trusted. A record exists with the names of some of the men
who used him thus infamously, but we blot these names from our
paper, and spare their descendants the mortification of learning that
when Samuel Crompton respectfully asked their ancestors to pay their
promised subscriptions, and put before them their own written agree-
ment to do so, they denounced him as an impostor, and asked him how
he dared to come on such an errand ! By this means many saved their
miserable guinea (for that was the utmost extent of any subscription),
but at what a fearful sacrifice of honesty and honour ! " ^
This was the return made to Crompton for his gift of
the mule to the community which specially profited by it.
The shabby and sordid treachery of his townsfolk sank
deep into his soul, and hopeless resentment permanently
clouded a disposition which was not by nature a cheerful
or buoyant one. Crompton was himself an upright man,
and his very integrity increased his exasperation at the
meanness, faithlessness, and sometimes insolence, with
which his benefaction was repaid. He became thenceforth
suspicious and distrustful of all the world ; and, with a
temper soured by disappointment, was prone to fancy
himself insulted when not the slightest offence had been
intended.
Thus it came about that, not very long after his sur-
render of the mule to the public, Crompton declined
an overture, the acceptance of which might have effaced
all or most of the disastrous consequences of his pre-
cipitancy Among the subscribing firms entitled to
inspect and copy the mechanism of the mule was that of
Peel, Yates, & Co., of Bury, the chief or most energetic
partner in which was Mr. (afterwards Sir) Robert Peel, son
of the founder of the family, and father of the states-
man. There is a story told of a visit of Mr. Peel to Hall-
in-the-Wood for the purpose of seeing and studying the
mechanism of the mule. He took with him, it is said,
^ French, p. 75.
20 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
some of the mechanics in his employment. They in-
spected the mule, and carried off in their heads the
details of its construction and working. Mr. Peel could
have meant no offence, but he mistook his man if, as is
reported, he tendered Crompton, in rather too business-like
a way, a payment of sixpence for each of these mechanics,
presumably to compensate the inventor for the time lost
during their inspection of his handiwork. Crompton,
it is added, resented the offer as an insult, and never
forgot or forgave it ; if so, greatly to his own disadvantage.
He or his household received two more visits from Mr.
Peel when he had removed (within five years from the
date of the invention of the mule) to a farmhouse at
Oldhams, some two miles north of Bolton, perhaps to
escape the importunities of the visitors who, even after the
mule was given to the public, continued to haunt the
Hall-in-the-Wood. At Oldhams, nevertheless, he was
still pestered by the curious, intent on inspecting the
improvements which he was supposed to have made in the
machine; and, to baffle them, "he contrived a secret
fastening to the door in the upper story where he worked
at the mule." It was from no mere curiosity of this kind
that Mr. Peel paid the two visits to Oldhams, one of
which, and the objects of both, are thus described by
Crompton's biographer from information received : —
"Mr. George Crompton " (Crompton's eldest son, born in 1781)
"had a vivid recollection of two visits paid to Oldhams by the first Sir
Robert Peel, then an eminent though untitled manufacturer. . . . On
his first visit Crompton was absent, but Mr. Peel chatted with his wife,
and gave young George half-a-guinea. Mrs. Crompton going into her
dairy to bring her guest a bowl of milk, Mr. Peel took the opportunity
to ask the boy where his father worked. George was pointing out the
nail-head which, on being pressed, lifted the concealed latch of the door
leading to the upper story, when his mother returned with the milk,
and by a look warned him that he had committed an error."
SAMUEL CROMPTON. 21
What follows is much more important than this
anecdote, however characteristic and descriptive of the
Crompton household: —
"It is understood by his family, on the information of Mr. Crompton
himself, that the objects of Mr. Peel's visits were, first, to induce him
to accept a lucrative situation of trust in his establishment, and, after-
wards, an offer of partnership. Both of these offers Mr. Crompton
declined, partly, it is believed, from a somewhat morbid desire for
independence that clung to him through life ; partly from a jealous
suspicion of persons in superior social position, caused (as has already
been said) by the cruel treatment he received when he surrendered his
first mule ; but most of all from a feeling of personal dislike to the
future baronet, which he entertained all his life, arising (as we have been
informed) from some disagreement on the occasion of Mr. Peel's first
inspection of the mule, " ^ produced by the aheady recorded tender of
the sixpences.
Things might have gone well with Crompton, or at least
very much better than they did go, had he accepted Mr.
Peel's offer. The man who refused it on such grounds as
those just recorded was evidently little fitted to succeed in
business.
At Oldhams Crompton rented a few acres of land, and
kept a cow or two, from the milk of one of which Mrs.
Crompton brought Mr. Peel the jugful of the preceding
anecdote. Another little glimpse of the interior of the
humble household of the inventor of the mule is given in
this reminiscence of his eldest son's : —
"\Mien I was quite a child my father removed from Ilall-in-thc-
Wood to Oldhams, and there a brother and a sister were born. I recol-
lect that, soon after I was able to walk, I was employed in the cotton
manufacture. My mother used to bat the cotton wool on a wire riddle.
I It was then put into a deep brown mug with a strong ley of soap-suds,
f My mother then tucked up my petticoats about my waist, and put me
I, in the tub to tread upon the cotton at the bottom. When a second
I riddleful was batted, I was lifted out, and it was placed in the mug, and
' ^ French, p. Si and note.
22 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
I again trode it down. This process was continued until the mug
became so full that I could no longer safely stand in it, when a chair
was placed beside it, and I held on by the back. When the mug
was quite full, the soap-suds were poured off, and each separate dollop
of wool well squeezed to free it from moisture. They were then placed
on the bread-rack under the beams of the kitchen-loft to dry. My
mother and my grandmother curled the cotton wool by hand, taking
one of the dollops at a time, on the simple hand-cards. When carded,
they were put aside in separate parcels ready for spinning."^
Accustomed from his childhood to spin, Crompton pro-
duced from his own machine, as may be supposed, better
yarn than was turned out from it by any one else. It might
be supposed, too, that he would have attempted to extend
his operations by employing others to spin under him. He
seems to have tried this plan, and meanwhile to have
invented a new carding-machine ; but any hitch, great or
small, in the conduct of an enterprise, threw the morbid
and moody Crompton out of gear ; and after experimenting
as an employer of labour, he sank again into dependence
on his own and his wife's, with that of the children who
were growing up about him. " I pushed on " (such is
his own account of this section of his career), " intending
to have a good share in the spinning line, yet I found there
was an evil which I had not foreseen, and of much greater
magnitude than giving up the machine, viz., that I must be
always teaching green hands, employ none, or quit the
country ; it being believed that if I taught them they knew
their business well. So that for years I had no choice
left but to give up spinning or quit my native land. I cut
up my spinning-machines for other purposes." " On one
occasion," says his biographer, " when much incensed by a
repetition of this injustice, he seized his axe and broke his
carding-machine to pieces, remarking: 'They shall not
have this too.'" - But Crompton did neither "quit" his
1 French, p. 78. ^ lb., p. 91-2.
SAMUEL CROMPTON. 23
"native land " nor entirely "give up spinning." Seemingly
what he did do, when the paroxysm was over, was " to
betake himself to his original occupation of weaving, or at
least to spin only such yarn as he could employ in his own
looms as a small manufacturer." In 1791 we find him
leaving his "pretty and pleasant" abode at Oldhams
(actually, it is said, to avoid being reappointed overseer of
the poor !), and removing to Bolton, to occupy the house
"now" — which means in i860 — " 17 King Street, with tlie
attics over it and two adjoining houses for manufacturing
purposes. During the six following years," adds his
biographer, " his family was increased by the birth of four
more sons — a circumstance which appears to have induced
him to make fresh attempts to work his inventions with pro-
fit, as we find that he filled the centre attic with preparatory
machiner}^ and that the others had two new mules. In
working them he was now assisted by his two eldest boys."
At the end of the six years he lost his good, true, hard-
working wife, and was left with eight children, some of
them infants, others of them old enough, as has been seen,
to assist him in his handicraft. After her death he joined
— a step characteristic of his dreamy disposition — the
Swedenborgians, wlio were then rather an increasing sect
here and there in Lancashire, and he became a zealous
member of its Bolton congregation, taking " entire charge
of the psalmody in the church," and composing hymn-
tunes for the choir. Crompton was a religious, and
altogether, in his private life, a well-conditioned man, a
good husband and a good father, frugal and industrious in
his habits. His failures or non- successes were due not
to any irregularities of conduct, but solely to want of
business faculty, and his lot was cast in a stirring and
pushing community at a time of great industrial expansion
and excitement. He was never in debt, and indulged in
24
LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
speculation as little as in dissipation. The yarn he span
was the finest, and the muslin he wove was the most
delicate, in the market. But original defects of nature,
which disappointment had aggravated, kept him behind
in the race of life. " I found to my sorrow," he wrote
once, " I was not calculated to contend with men of the
world, neither did I know there was such a thing as pro-
tection for me on earth ! I found I was as unfit for the
task that was before me as a child of two years old to
contend with a disciplined army." ^ To such a height did
his shyness and sensitiveness grow, that "he has been
known," says his biographer, "to return from Manchester
without even attempting to transact business, because he
observed himself to be pointed out to strangers as a
remarkable man." If he did "attempt to transact busi-
ness," he too often, as might be expected, shirked the
bargaining and higgling of everyday trade. "When he
attended the Manchester Exchange to sell his yarns or
muslins, and any rough-and-ready manufacturer ventured
to offer him a less price than he had asked, he would
invariably wrap up his samples, put them into his pocket,
and quietly walk away."^ Poor Crompton ! But well
might he be " pointed out " in the streets of Manchester
or in any other cotton-manufacturing town as a " remark-
able man," for he had created a new and mighty industry.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the rude
machine put together in secrecy and concealment, in fear,
and almost in trembling, was producing a wide-spread and
plenteous harvest of golden fruit. The mule turned out
yams of most kinds, and, unlike Arkwright's rollers, which,
to yield a profit, needed to be worked on a large scale and
by extraneous motive power, the mule was a hand-machine,
and whoever had ten fingers could spin with it. As it hap-
^ French, p. 95. " lb., p. 95 and note.
SAMUEL CROMPTON. 2$
pened, moreover, a few years after the invention of the
mule, all Arkwright's processes became public property,
through the judicial decisions which cancelled his patents.
This event gave a great impulse to the use of the mule, by
making Arkwright's roving machinery generally available ;
and at first the mule did not rove, it merely span. The
mule had been given to all the world, and in course of
time all the world of cotton-spinning seized upon it. In
1784, the year before Arkwright's patents were cancelled,
there were at work in England 20,000 of Hargreaves'
hand-jennies of eighty spindles each, against 550 of Cromp-
ton's mules, of ninety spindles each. But as soon as
Arkwright's patents were cancelled, the mule began rapidly
to displace or to gain upon the jenny. As has been said
or quoted elsewhere, " The dissolution of Arkwright's patent
and the invention of the mule concurred to give the most
extraordinary impetus to the cotton manufacture. Nothing
like it has been known in any other great branch of indus-
try. Capital and labour rushed to this manufacture in
a torrent, attracted by the unequalled profits which it
yielded."^ Readers of the First Series may remember
Robert Owen starting in the cotton manufacture with no
other stock in trade than three of Crompton's mules, the
rovings for which he bought from " two young industrious
Scotchmen of the names of M'Connell and Kennedy," ^
afterwards a famous firm. How mules, clieap and easy of
construction, and workable everywhere, were set up through
the length and breadth of industrial Lancashire, may be
easily conceived. Of the effects of the general use of the
mule on the weavers in a single district of Lancashire there
is a graphic description by Radcliffe, the improver of the
power-loom, when chronicling the history of the cotton
manufacture in his own township of Meller, fourteen miles
1 First Series, p. 455. ' lb., p. 453.
D
26
LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
from Manchester. The following sketch of his is a con-
tinuation of that in which he delineated the half-agricultural,
half-manufacturing, industry of the small Lancashire farmer
in the days before Hargreaves, Arkwright, and Crompton : —
"From the year 1770 to 1788, a complete change had gradually been
effected in the spinning of yarns ; that of wool had disappeared alto-
gether, and that of linen was also nearly gone ; cotton, cotton, cotton,
was become the almost universal material for employment ; the hand-
wheels were all thrown into lumber-rooms ; the yarn was all spun on
common jennies ; the carding for all numbers up to 40 hanks in the pound
was done on carding-engines ; but the finer numbers of 60 to 80 were
still carded by hand, it being a general opinion at that time that
machine-carding would never answer for fine numbers. In weaving,
no great alteration had taken place during these eighteen years, save
the introduction of the fly-shuttle, a change in the woollen looms to
fustians and calico, and the linen nearly gone, except the few fabrics in
which there was a mixture of cotton. To the best of my recollection,
there was no increase of looms during this period, but rather a
decrease. "
They had decreased for the simple reason that, whatever
the increased production of yarn through Hargreaves' in-
vention of the spinning-jenny and Arkwright's successes
with his rollers, the use of Kay's fly-shuttle enabled the
weaver to do more than keep pace with it. But, on the
introduction of the mule, all this was changed. Multitu-
dinous indeed must have been the mules set to work, and
enormous the increase in the quantitity of the yarn pro-
duced through them, to lead to such a multiplication of
hand-looms, and such an improvement in the position of
the hand-loom weaver, as are described in the foUowins:
passage : —
"The next fifteen years, viz., from 1788 to 1803, I will call the
golden age of this great trade. Water-twist," spun by Arkwright's
rollers, "and common jenny-yarns," from Hargreaves' famous machine,
"had been freely used in Bolton, &c., for some years prior to 1788 ; but
it was the introduction of mide-yarns about this tune, along with the
SAMUEL CROMPTON. 2/
other yarns, all assimilating together and producing every description of
clothing, from the finest book-muslin, lace, stocking, &c., to the
heaviest fustian, that gave such a preponderating wealth through the
loom.
"The families I have been speaking of, whether as cottagers or small
farmers, had supported themselves by the different occupations I have
mentioned in spinning and manufacturing, as their progenitors, from the
earliest institution of society, had done before them. But the mule-
twist now coming into vogue for the ii-arp as well as weft, added to the
water-twist and common jenny-yams, with an increasing demand for
every fabric the loom could produce, put all hands in request, of every
age and description. The fabrics made from wool and linen vanished,
while the old loom-shops being insufficient, every lumber-room, even
old barns, carthouses and outbuildings of every description were re-
paired, windows broken through the old blank walls, and all fitted up
for loom-shops. This source of making room being at length exhausted,
new weavers' cottages with loom-shops rose up in every direction ; all
immediately filled ; and, when in full work, the weekly circulation of
money, as the price of labour only, rose to five times the amount ever
before experienced in this district, every family bringing home weekly
40, 60, 80, 100, or even 120 shillings per week ! It maybe easily con-
ceived that this sudden increase of the circulating medium would, in a
few years, not only show itself in affording all the necessaries and com-
forts of life these families might require, but also be felt by those who,
abstractedly speaking, might be considered disinterested spectators ;
but in reality they were not so, for all felt it, and that in the most
agreeable way too ; for this money in its peregrinations left something
in the pockets of every stone-mason, carpenter, slater, plasterer, glazier,
joiner, &c., as well as the corndealer, cheesemonger, butcher, and
shopkeepers of every description. The farmers participated as much as
any class by the prices they obtained for their corn, butter, eggs, fowls,
with every other article the soil or farmyard could produce, all of
which advanced at length to nearly three times the former price. Nor
was the proportion of this wealth inconsiderable that found its way into
the coffers of the Cheshire squires who had estates in this district, the
rents of their farms being doubled, and in many instances trebled." ^
The rude machine of the Hall-in-the-Wood had done all
this for the community in general, and for the hand-loom
weaver in particular. Those were days when what has
^ William Radcliffe, Origin of Poiver-Loom Weaving, quoted by
l>aines, Cotton Mamifactura; p. 338.
28 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
become the trade of almost a pariah class of handicraftsmen
could be described as " that of a gentleman." " The hand-
loom weavers," according to the same authority, " brought
home their work in top-boots and ruffled shirts, carried a
cane, and in some instances took a coach." " Many weavers
at that time," adds a commentator on this statement, " used
to walk about the streets with a five-pound Bank of Eng-
land note spread out under their hat-bands ; they would
smoke none but long 'churchwarden' pipes, and objected
to the intrusion of any other handicraftsmen into the parti-
cular rooms in the public-houses which they frequented," ^
Several causes were soon at work to bring down the hand-
loom weaver to a lower level ; among them was the invention
of the power-loom by Edmund Cartwright, who took out
his first patent in 1784, though years elapsed before it was
perfected, and before the power-loom largely displaced the
ancient and immemorial hand-loom. Moreover, while
these causes were operating, the independent mule-spinner,
working at home, and his or her own master or mistress,
was being gradually brought inside the factory system,
which, with his rollers and the organisation of labour needed
to v/ork them, Arkwright had founded. In 1790, the
manager of David Dale's New Lanark Mills for the first
time drove mules by water-power, that of the rushing and
falling Clyde. And a still more effective transformation of
home into factory industry was made through the applica-
tion of Watt's steam-engine to drive cotton machinery of
all kinds — an application, too, locaUsing and concentrating
in districts where coal and iron abounded the manufacture
which otherwise might have been diffused, and might have
flourished wherever there were streams capable of affording
water-po\yer. Meanwhile, also, the machine of the Hall-in-
the-Wood, in constant use by many hands, was being im-
^ French, p. 102.
SAMUEL CROMPTON. 29
proved in various ways, and by various contrivances,
towards its present form. One of the most noticeable
results of all this expansion was, that some years before
the nineteenth century opened, Crompton's mule had
directly and indirectly led to the displacement of Indian
muslins and light fabrics by those of British manufacture,
Lanarkshire in this particular branch of industry already
rivalling Lancashire. The year 1787 maybe fixed on as
about the date of the latest renewal by British manufacturers
— in this case cotton, not woollen manufacturers — of the old
protest against the competition of East Indian products with
those of " native industry." ^ Six years afterwards, in 1793,
the tables were so completely turned, that we hear the
East India Company, in a " Report of the Select Committee
of the Court of Directors upon the subject of the cotton
manufacture of this country," uttering the lament that
" every shop offers British muslins for sale equal in appear-
ance and of more elegant patterns than those of India, for
one-fourth, or perhaps more than one-third, less in price." -
Nay, at one time, so versatile was the mule, it seemed
likely that Arkwright's rollers themselves would be laid
aside to make way for it. The use of the power-loom, how-
ever, which required for its operation a specially strong
yarn, prevented the mule from displacing as a yarn-spinning
machinethe rollers of Arkwright,^ as it undoubtedlydidatlast
completely displace, in the cotton manufacture at least, the
spinning-jenny of Hargreaves. To the spinning-jenny and
the water-frame is to be mainly ascribed, no doubt, the
' Ure, Cotton ]\Ianufactitrc (London 1861), i. 296.
^ I'aines, Cotton Manufacture, p. 334.
^ lb., p. 308. Mr. Baines adds as another cause of the survival of
Avkwriglit's water-frame, that "improvements which were made in the
machine also enabled the manufacturers to sell the water-twist of low
counts cheaper than mule-twist."
30 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
increase in the import of cotton wool from less than four
million pounds in 1764, to nearly eleven and a half millions
in 1784. But it is to Crompton's mule that was chiefly due
the still more striking increase in the same import between
1784 and the first year of the nineteenth century. In
1800 the import of cotton wool had risen to a quantity
ratlier greater than fifty-six million pounds.
It was in this same year of 1800 that, struck by the
contrast between the little or nothing which he had gained
for himself, and the much which he had achieved for his
country and his county, some Manchester sympathisers
— foremost among them Mr. Kennedy, Crompton's first
biographer, and one of the earliest historians of the cotton
manufacture,^ — bethought them of attempting to raise a
^ This is the Mr. Kennedy, one of the founders of the well-known firm
of M'Connell & Kennedy, respecting whose Immble beginnings in the
cotton trade, when they were able to make only the rovings which the
young Robert Owen and others bought and span upon mules into
thread, see First Series, p. 453, note. Late in life Mr. Kennedy
printed for private circulation a volume of essays (including the "Brief
Memoir of Crompton "), which the writer has not been able to procure
or to consult. In the Library of the Patent Office, however, there is
a MS. transcript, from the printed volume, of one of these pieces,
entitled, "Brief Notice of my Early Recollections, in a Letter to my
Cliildren," and from this interesting autobiographical fragment the
following particulars are taken. John Kennedy was born in 1769, in
the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, on the slender paternal estate of
Knockalling, some six miles from New Galloway. His father died
when he was young, leaving him, with four brothers and two sisters, to
be brought up by their mother, a superior Scotchwoman of the old
type. When advanced in years, and living amid the stir of populous
Manchester, he remembered the melancholy induced in his boyish
mind by the silence of "the still valley and blue mountains " of his
secluded and thinly-peopled Scottish home, where the arrival of a travel-
ling pedlar made a sensation. From early years he was led to think of
pushing his fortunes at a distance, as family after family of the few in
his neighbourhood winged its flight to the West Indies and to England.
One of the companions of his boyhood was Adam Murray, afterwards
SAMUEL CROMPTOX. 31
public subscription for the benefit of the strugghng inven-
tor. Unfortunately, the circumstances of the time were
unfavourable to the success of the benevolent scheme.
To war with France and the fiscal burdens imposed by it —
burdens, however, which the productiveness of the mule
and the new development bestowed by it on the cotton
manufacture enabled the nation more easily to bear — were
added depressed trade and high prices of food, bringing
occasional riots in their train. The year in which the
subscription for Crompton was set on foot was that of a
renewed suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and of the
establishment (in Spitalfields) of the first of English soup-
kitchens. Comparatively few subscriptions could in these
circumstances be procured. Among the few was one
meriting remembrance. "When Mr. Arkwright, the son
eminent as a Lancashire cotton-spinner, who migrated from their quiet
glen to Chowbent, to be apprenticed to a machine-maker there, a fellow-
countryman, Mr. Cannan, formerly of Kells, and among whose other
apprentices was another young Scotchman, James M'Connell, after-
wards Kennedy's partner. At the age of fifteen, the young Kennedy
accordingly left Knockalling to join his friend as a fellow-apprentice in
the Chowbent establishment, and great was his astonishment when at
Dumfries he saw for the first time a few lighted lamps in the streets,
and a waggon not only with four wheels, but with four horses. His
apprenticeship successfully over, he started in business in Manchester
with the two Sandfords and his friend James M'Connell as machine-
makers and spinners, the firm being Sandford, M'Connell, & Kennedy,
he taking charge of the machine department. It was at this time that
Robert Owen bought their rovings. Their first shop was in Sl.ible
Street, or Back Chetham Street, their capital not more than ;f 700, and
the machines which they worked as well as made "were put up in any
convenient garrets." After a few years the firm was dissolved, and a
new one, M'Connell & Kennedy, formed, the operations of which
were so primitive that their cards were turned by horse or by hand.
Six or seven years later they built their first mill in Union Street, and
rose in time to great manufacturing eminence and wealth. Mr. Kennedy
died in 1855, in his eighty-sixth year, and, with faculties unimpaired,
transacted business to the last.
32 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
and successor of Sir Richard Arkvvright, was waited upon
by Mr. Lee," Mr. Kennedy's active coadjutor in the good
work, " he said that he would contribute cheerfully,
candidly acknowledging the merit of the invention, — at the
same time observing that ' Mr, Crompton had been his
most bitter rival, as he had superseded the machine of his
father's invention in all the finer numbers of yarn.' He
contributed thirty guineas to the fund." ^ But liberality
like this was rare, and those who had reaped profit from
the mule were more backward with their money than was
the second Richard Arkwright, who had suffered by its
success. " So great, indeed, was the difficulty of collecting
the sums subscribed, that the matter was of necessity
prematurely abandoned. Between four and five hundred
pounds was all that could be realised, and that was handed
over to Crompton to increase his little manufacturing estab-
lishment for spinning and weaving. As a consequence
of his possession of this additional capital, he soon after-
wards rented the top-story of a neighbouring factory, one
of the oldest in Bolton, in which he had two mules — one of
360 spindles, the other of 220— with the necessary pre-
paratory machinery. "Yht power \.o turn the machinery was
rented with the premises. Here also he was assisted by
the elder branches of his family; and it is our duty, though
a melancholy one, to record that the system of seducing
his servants from his employment was still persisted in, and
that one, at least, of his sons was not able to withstand the
specious and flattering inducements held out by wealthy
opponents to leave his father's service and accept extra-
vagant payment for a few weeks, during which he was
expected to divulge his father's supposed secrets and his
system of manipulating upon the machine." ^ The faith-
lessness, stinginess, and insolence of fellow-manufacturers
' French, p. 112. '^ lb., p. 112-14.
SAMUEL C ROMP TON. 33
enriched by his nmle had deeply wounded the sensitive
and honourable Crompton. And now came the heaviest
blow of all, the sordid treachery of his own son.
As the years rolled on, Crompton became no richer,
though his frugality and industry kept him from lapsing
into anything like absolute poverty. Of his five sons, two
were by way of helping him in his business, but they seem
to have been young men of expensive habits, and Cromp-
ton's acquaintance with care did not diminish in familiarity.
He felt that the community owed him something, but the
endeavours of his friends to make it sensible of its obliga-
tions had not done much for him. Turning from Lanca-
shire to London, in 1807 he made an abortive application
to Sir Joseph Banks and the Society of Arts to aid him in
procuring " from the Government or elsewhere," as he
phrased it, " a proper recompense for his invention."
Through some blundering, on all sides apparently, four
years elapsed before Crompton discovered that nothing was
to be expected either from Sir Joseph or from the Society.
However, as it chanced, not long before this discovery,
there happened something that encouraged him to make a
more direct effort to obtain a national reward. In 1809,
when he had wasted much of his substance in endeavours
to manufacture by the power-loom, which he had invented
years before, after the usual memorialising and petitioning,
and the due process of investigation by a Committee of
the House of Commons, the Reverend Edmund Cart-
wright procured from Parliament a grant of ;^i 0,000 for
his invention. Crompton's claims to a parliamentary grant
were much stronger than Cartwright's ; for the mule was in
general use, while the power-loom was as yet little valued
or applied. Cartwright, however, had not only procured a
patent for his loom, but an Act of Parliament (in iSoi)
prolonged its operation on its expiry without profiting the
E
34 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
inventor, whereas poor Crompton had presented his inven-
tion to his community and country. Stimulated, doubt-
less, by Cartvvright's successful application to the Govern-
ment and to Parliament, and perhaps urged forward by
friends, Crompton resolved on what was for him rather a
spirited enterprise. It was to visit the manufacturing
districts of the United Kingdom and ascertain in person
the results of the use of his invention, with the object of
claiming from Government a national reward. He received
considerable attention during his tour, and at Glasgow,
where the mule had created a new and great Scottish
industry, the muslin trade, arrangements were made to give
him a public dinner. But any demonstration of this kind
was too much for a man of his morbid shyness, and,
to quote his own account of the matter, " rather than face
up, I first hid myself, and then fairly bolted from the city.^
The following is an exposition of the statistical results of
Crompton's tour of investigation, completed from the evi-
dence given a year afterwards before a select Committee of
the House of Commons, of which more anon : —
"From the information obtained, he calculated that between four
and five millions of mule spindles were then in actual use. But this
estimate was afterwards found to be much too low. It referred to
360 factories only, and did not include any of the numerous mules used
in the manufacture of woollen yarn.
"There is some difficulty in fully appreciating the value of very
^ French, p. 150, where is the following note: " Another anecdote
illustrative of Mr. Crompton's extreme modesty and shyness may be
mentioned on the authority of his sons. Mr. Kennedy called upon him
one day in King Street, accompanied by a foreign Count, who much
desired to be introduced to him, but Crompton -cas laid down in bed, and
coidd not see him. Mr. Kennedy went up-stairs, and said that if he did
not get up and come down-stairs, his friend should visit him in his bed-
room ; but Crompton could not be persuaded. He declared em-
phatically that if the Count was brought up he would get under the
bed."
SAMUEL CROMPTON. 35
high numbers by persons unaccustomed to their use ; we therefore
venture to suggest a familiar standard of measurement, to assist such of
our readers as may be so placed, and assume that the Old Testament is
made up of 2,728,100 letters. Now the number of mule-spindles
which Mr. Crompton found to be in use in the latter part of the year
181 1 amounted to upwards of three-fourths more than the number of
letters in the Bible, or to 4,600,000." It is added, in a note, "from a
MS. document in Crompton's handwriting," that "at this time the
number of spindles used upon Hargreaves' jenny machines was
155,880, upon Arkwright's water-frame 310,516;" to such an extent
had the mule out-stripped both of the two great inventions which
preceded it. To return: — "It was further found that about forty
millions of pounds of cotton-wool was spun upon these mules annually ;
that double the amount of wages was paid for spinning on the mule to
that of all other machines for the purpose put together ; that about
two-thirds of the entire amount of steam-power employed in cotton-
spinning was then applied to turning Crompton's mule-spindles ; that
at least lour-fifihs of the cotton-cloth bleached in the principal bleach-
works in Lancashire was woven from yarn spun on mules ; that the
value of buildings, power, and machinery engaged in spinning on Mr.
Crompton's system was between three and four millions sterling ; that
70,000 persons were directly employed in spinning on mules ; 150,000
more in weaving the yarn thus spun ; and at the usual computation of
two others dependent on each worker, the aggregate number of people
depending on the mule for their living amounted to 660,000 people,
without including the large addition of those who were engaged in
working machinery, growing cotton, transporting it, dyeing, printing,
embroidering, exporting and selling."^
Home again from his tour, Crompton laid his facts and
figures before his kind Manchester friends, Mr. Kennedy
and Mr. Lee. They at once gave him every encourage-
ment and aid in preparing a case to be; laid before Govern-
ment in support of a claim for a national reward, such as
had been bestowed on the inventor of the power-loom,
then a much less successful and productive machine than
the mule had proved itself to be. A friendly Manchester
solicitor tendered his gratuitous help in drawing up a
memorial. Influential Lancashire gentlemen, men, and
^ French, p. 148 50.
36 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
manufacturers, signed a certificate confirmatory of its
statements, and, furnished with suitable letters of introduc-
tion, Crompton proceeded to London in the February of
18 1 2. Spencer Percival, who had procured Cartwright his
reward, was then Prime Minister and Chancellor of the
Exchequer. He seems to have viewed Crompton's claim
with favour, for, indeed, Chancellors of the Exchequer in
that time of costly war knew the fiscal value of the cotton
manufacture, and that to foster its development was a matter
of grave national concernment. A petition of Crompton's
to the House of Commons was referred to a select com-
mittee, several of the members of which were Lancashire
gentlemen or manufacturers. The Lord Stanley of the
day, afterwards Earl of Derby, the grandfather of the
present Earl, was its chairman, and both in public and
in private showed himself a kind friend to Crompton.
Crompton's old diflfidence and shyness prevented him from
waiting personally on ministers and Members of Parliament,
but he was not at all backward in urging his claims by
letter. " Copies of a considerable portion of this corre-
spondence have been preserved. The letters," we are told,
" are invariably written in a style of respectful yet manly
and straightforward independence, which we are compelled
to admire, though at the same time it must be confessed
that they might have been more useful had they been
tempered with a little more worldly policy." Crompton
still harboured the old grudge at the first Sir Robert Peel,
and would not cultivate friendly relations with the man whose
position, antecedents, and politics gave him great weight,
especially in such a matter, with the IVIinistry. Sir Robert
seems, nevertheless, to have exerted himself in behalf of
the irritable inventor. He gave evidence before the
committee, of which he was a member, in Crompton's
favour, and so did the ISIr. Pilkington who had advised
SAMUEL C ROMP TON. 37
the surrender of the mule to the public. Other manu-
facturers testified strongly to the proved and incontestible
value of the mule. The creator of the modern steam-
engine, *' Mr. James Watt, of the House of Boulton, Watt,
& Co., Birmingham," being called, and asked if he had
" erected many steam-engines for turning machinery upon
Mr. Crompton's principle," gave this brief but emphatic
reply : " A considerable number ; I conceive about two-
thirds of the power of steam-engine we have erected for
spinning cotton has been applied to turning spindles
upon Mr. Crompton's construction." One of the bits of
evidence most likely to tell upon a Chancellor of the
Exchequer and a House of Commons was the statement
of Crompton's friend, Mr. Lee, " cotton-spinner of the
house of Philips & Lee of Manchester," that the annual
amount of duty paid merely upon the cotton imported to
be spun by the mule was not less than ;^35o,ooo a year.
The committee reported in Crompton's favour, without
naming a sum, and the Prime Minister seems to have
thought of proposing to give him ^^20,000, twice the
amount of the grant bestowed on Cartwriglit. But, as poor
Crompton's ill luck would have it (to say nothing of that
of the victim him-elf), before the proposal was quite
matured and made, came Bellingham's assassination of
Percival : —
"On the iilh day of May" 1812, "Mr. Crompton was in the lobby
of the House of Commons in conversation with Sir Robert Peel and
Mr. Blackbume," one of the members for Lancashire and a staunch
friend of the inventor's, "upon the subject of his claim, which was
about to be brought forward, when one of the gentlemen remarked,
' Here comes Mr. Percival.' The group was immediately joined by
the Chancellor of the Exchequer," Percival, "who addressed them with
the remark, ' You will be glad to know that we mean to propose twenty
thousand pounds for Crompton ; do you think /hatw'iW be satisfactoiy ? "
Mr. Crompton did not hear the reply, as, from motives of delicacy, he
3o5 I B9
38 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
lett the party and walked down a short stair leading out of the lobby,
but before he left it, he heard a great rush of people and exclamations
that Mr. Percival had been shot, which was indeed the fact. The
assassin, Bellingham, in an instant had deprived the country of a
valuable Minister, and Crompton lost a friend and patron at the mo-
ment of the most critical importance to his fortune." ^
Even so. And when, after some few weeks of "minis-
terial crisis," a new Government was formed, the long-lived
Liverpool administration, Vansittart succeeded Percival in
the Chancellorship of the Exchequer. He, too, was not
^ French, p. i6i. The Commons were sitting in committee of
the whole House, at the instance of Brougham, to hear evidence
against the Orders in Coimcil. " For some days the examination of
witnesses proceeded. On Monday the nth May, Brougham, as usual,
moved the order of the day for going into committee. Babington took
the chair; Robert Hamilton, a manufacturer 'of earthenware in Staf-
fordshire, was summoned for examination; and Brougham, after com-
plaining of Percival's absence, commenced to examine him. One of the
members started off to Downing Street to summon the Minister ;
Brougham went on with his questions ; finished his examination-in-
chief ; and Stephen, the real originator of the Orders, commenced the
cross-examination of the witness. In the meantime, the member who
had gone to fetch Percival had met the Minister in Parliament Street,
Percival characteristically darted forward to the House. The lobby
was comparatively full ; a tall man in a tradesman's dress was standing
by the door through which the Minister passed into it. He placed a
pistol at Percival's breast and fired, Percival walked on one or two
paces, faintly uttered, 'Oh! I am murdered,' and fell on the floor."
— Spencer Walpole's Life of The Right Honoui-able Spencer Percival
(Lond. 1874), ii. 295. The statement quoted in the text is scarcely con-
sistent with this account of Percival's assassination. French, however,
adds elsewhere (p. 176, note), "Mr. Percival when he was shot had a
memorandum in his hand as follows : —
' Crompton, ^20,000
10,000
5.OCO'
which was understood to signify, not less than ^^5000, but ^20,000
if possible."
SAMUEL CROMPTON. 39
unfriendly to Cromptoii, but at that period of great national
stress — England in arms almost alone against a world — some
of his colleagues seem to have regarded the unfortunate
inventor as a bore, and one of them so far mistook Cromp-
ton's character and position as to drop the hasty, harsh, and
calumnious remark, "Give the man ^100 a year; it will
be as mucii as he can drink." The circumstances of the
time were indeed singularly unfavourable to a liberal treat-
ment of Crompton's claim. The war in the Peninsula
called for new taxes and new loans, and the manufacturing
distress produced by Napoleon's Berlin and Milan decrees,
and the Orders in Council with which the English Govern-
ment retaliated on them, culminated in machine-breaking
and other riots in the manufacturing districts. The Ministers
were more anxious to pass new penal enactments multi-
plying capital punishments, with which to terrify these dis-
turbers of the peace, than to weigh the value of Cromp-
ton's invention ; and both rioting and active political dis-
content were rife in and about the very Bolton from which
he came.^ At last, on the 26th June 1S12, and of course
^ The severity of the law and its administration at tliis time, without
additional penal enactments, may be estimated from the following con-
temporary record : "Manchester, 13th June," 1S12. "About twelve
o'clock on Saturday, the awful sentence of the law," death by hanging,
"was put upon the eight persons condemned at the late special assize
at Lancaster, viz., James Smith," and three others, "for burning, &c.,
Messrs Wroe & Duncough's weaving mill at West Houghton," in
Bolton parish ; "John Howorth," and two others, "for breaking into
the house of John Holland in this town, ajtd stealing bread and cheese,-
and Hannah Smith for highway robbery by stealing potatoes at Bank
Top in this town." — Annual Register for 181 2, Chronicle, p. 85.
These riotous proceedings of the time, with which were mixed up
simple thefts instigated by hunger, but equally punished by death,
began with the frame-breaking Luddites in Nottingliamshire, and
thence extended to other counties. To daunt the Nottinghamshire
rioters, the Government introduced into Parliament the Framework
Knitters' Bill, which made the destruction of the frames used in the
40 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
by previous agreement with Vansittart, Lord Stanley, as
chairman of the select committee on Crompton's claim,
rose and moved that a grant of ^^5000 should be made to
hosiery trade a capital offence. It was to oppose this bill that the
young Lord Byron {atat 24) delivered his maiden speech in the House
of Peers, on the 27th February 1812, just two days before he became
famous by the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold.
Byron spoke on the occasion not only as an English peer, but as a
Nottinghamshire man. " During the short time," he said, " I recently
passed in Nottinghamshire, not twelve hours elapsed without some fresh
act of violence, and on the day I left the county, I was informed that
forty frames had been broken the preceding evening, as usual without
resistance and without detection." Wellington was then pursuing his
victorious career in the Iberian peninsula ; he had stormed Ciudad
Rodrigo on the 19th of Januaiy before Byron thus addressed his grave
and reverend seniors of the Upper House : "All the cities you have
taken, all the armies which have retreated before your leaders, are but
petty subjects of self-congratulation if your land is divided against itself,
and your dragoons and your executioners must be let loose against your
fellow-citizens. You call these men a mob, desperate, dangerous, and
ignorant, and seem to think that the only way to quiet the Bellua vml-
toriim capititjn is to lop off a few of its superfluous heads. But even a
mob may be better reduced to reason by a mixture of conciliation and
firmness than by additional irritation and redoubled penalties. Are
we aware of our obligation to a mob? It is the mob that labour in
your fields and serve in your houses, that man your navj' and recruit
your army, that have enabled you to defy all the world, and can also
defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair. You
may call the people a mob, but do not forget that a mob often speaks
the sentiments of the people." Here is the spirited peroration of this
maiden speech of the author of Childe Harold ^nd Don Juan: "With
all due deference to the noble Lords opposite, I think a little investiga-
tion, some previous inquiry, would induce even them to change their
purpose. That most favourite state measure, so marvellously effica-
cious in many and recent instances," the treatment of the "Catholic
claims" among them — " temporising— would not be without its advan-
tages in this. When a proposal is made to emancipate or relieve,
you hesitate, you deliberate for years, you temporise and tamper with
the minds of men, but a death-bill must be passed off-hand, without a
thought of the consequences. Sure I am, from what I have heard and
f:om what I have seen, that to pass the bill under all the existing
SAMUEL CROMPTON. 4 1
the inventor, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer having
signified his approval, a resolution to that efifect was passed
at once. To Crompton, after his costly tour in search
of statistics, followed by a five months' sojourn in London,
away from his business, to say nothing of the expense
incurred by him in promoting the parliamentary inquiry,
and in dancing attendance on the magnates of the Legisla-
ture and the Ministry, the smallness of the grant was a
terrible disappointment. This was enhanced by the taunts
with which, when he returned home, he was, it seems,
assailed by his sons. They had reckoned confidently on a
much larger grant, and reproached him with having mis-
managed a promising case.
Crompton was now verging on sixty, and perhaps it
would have been better for him to have accepted, in lieu of
the grant, even so small a pension as ;2^ioo a year. With
what remained of it, after all the inevitable deductions to
circumstances, without inquiry, without deliberation, would only be to
add injustice to irritation, and barbarity to neglect. The framers of
such a bill must be content to inherit the honours of the Athenian law-
giver, whose edicts were said to be written not in ink, but in blood.
But suppose it passed, suppose one of those men, as I have seen them,
meagre with famine, sullen with despair, careless of a life which your
Lordships are about to value at the price of a stocking-frame, suppose
this man surrounded by the children for whom he is unable to procure
bread at the hazard of his existance, about to be torn for ever from a
family which he lately supported in peaceful industry, and which it is
not his fault that he can no longer so support, — suppose this man — and
there are ten thousand such from whom you may select your victims —
dragged into court to be tried for this new offence by this new law,
still there arc two things wanted to convict and condemn him — twelve
butchers for a jury and a Jeffries for a judge." ^ This burst received no
response from the probably startled Ministerial Bench. The bill, which
had been passed by the Commons, was passed by the Lords, and not long
afterwards the capital punishment which it inflicted on frame-breakers
was extended to the destroyers of machinery in general.
' rayliamentary History (Lond. 1812), xxi. 966.
42 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
be made from it, he started in the bleaching trade, which
was receiving a great extension from the more and more
successful application of the seemingly useless elemental
gas discovered in 1774 by Scheele, then an obscure Swedish
apothecary, and named by him chlorine. Crompton's
bleachworks were at Over Darwen. Fortune did not smile
on the new enterprise ; and another into which he entered,
by becoming a partner in a firm of cotton merchants and
spinners, made him no richer than it found him. Some
five years or so after the affair of the parliamentary grant,
Crompton's sons, who had been associated with him in his
bleaching and other undertakings, were either dead or dis-
persed, and, almost alone in the world, he " carried on his
small original business without assistance, spending much
of his time in devising the mechanism proper for weaving
new patterns in fancy muslins." Here again his lack of
business faculty neutralised his industry and ingenuity.
Neighbours and " pretended friends " pirated his patterns,
and undersold him by manufacturing them in fabrics of
inferior quality. Suppose a state of things in which there
was no law of copyright, and a gifted but unpractical author
published his own books in competition with " the trade,"
his position would be analogous to that of Crompton
during much of his life ; and it is easy to see what would be
the fate of a sensitive man of literary genius engaged in
that trying struggle and unequal rivalry.
As old age crept on him, Crompton grew poorer, and
a widowed daughter, who became his housekeeper, made
things worse for him instead of better. He had reached
his seventy -second year when, in 1824, some Bolton
friends — the kind Mr. Kennedy of Manchester once more
co-operating — raised unknown to him a subscription, with
the result of which they bought him an annuity of ^63.
It is interesting to note, as a proof of the wide-spread use
SAMUEL CROMPTON. 43
of the mule, that to this subscription Continental indus-
trialists contributed. "The amount raised," we are told,
*' was collected in small sums, from one to ten pounds ;
some of which was contributed by the Swiss and French
spinners, who acknowledged his " — Crompton's — " merits,
and pitied his misfortunes." ^ A year or two afterwards, a
bustling and warm-hearted resident in Crompton's town
(probably a newspaper editor), a " Mr. J. Brown," who
was then writing and printing what remains an unfinished
history of Bolton, took up Crompton's claims once more,
and promoted with considerable ardour a movement to
procure the ill-fated inventor a second parliamentary grant.
There were precedents that warranted the attempt. Dr.
Jenner, who gave up to his country and to mankind his
discovery of vaccination, had received, by way of recom.
pense, two parliamentary grants, one, in 1802, of ;!£"i 0,000,
and another, in 1807, of ^20,000. No fewer than three
parliamentary grants had been lavished on the Scotchman,
Macadam, for inventing the mode of manipulating roads
which bears his nam^e ; and the third of them was voted
about the time when Brown resuscitated Crompton's
claims. The busy and bustling Brown began with the
production of a pamphlet setting forth these claims, and
then drew up a memorial, specially contrasting the reward
given for the mule with the grant of double the amount
to the inventor of the power-loom, whose rights, unlike
Crompton's, were secured by patent, and whose inven-
tion, even then, had been very much less productive
than the mule. The document was numerously and influ-
entially signed in Bolton. Crompton would not hear of
applications for signatures elsewhere, or of a public meet-
ing to be held in his own town, to support the prayer of
the memorial. Brown proceeded to London early in 1826,
^ Kennedy, p. 324.
44 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
circulated a long petition to Parliament on behalf of
Crompton, and worked hard to procure from the Govern-
ment of the day a favourable consideration of Crompton's
case. By 1826 the Vansittart of 1S12 had become Lord
Bexley, and was still a member of the Ministry as Chan-
cellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, an office much inferior
in importance to that of Chancellor of Exchequer, which
he held at the time of the original grant to Crompton.
"Lord Bexley" — it was thus Brown wrote to Crompton on
the 22d of April 1826 — "was sincere in his desire to serve,
and only failed from the want of power, without losing his
own declining weight in the Cabinet." The petition does
not seem to have been so much as presented to the House
of Commons, and " Mr. Brown's suicide,"— how caused,
or at what time occurring, is not mentioned — threw a
cloud over the transaction which it would now be difficult
to penetrate. In a few months more than twelve from
the arrival of the unsuccessful and unfortunate Brown in
London, and after but a brief enjoyment of his petty
annuity, Crompton was beyond the reach of human rewards
or ingratitude, and had shuffled off this mortal coil. " He
died in his house in King Street, Great Bolton, on the 26th
June 1827, aged seventy-four years, of no particular com-
plaint, but by the gradual decay of nature, increased, if
not hastened, by a life brimful of corrosive cares and
mental sorrows. These cares and sorrows were greatly
accumulated in his latter days, so that, unhappily, neither
mind nor body could at all times bear up against them,
and he became occasionally less abstemious in his habits
than had been bis custom through his former life. To the
last, however, he retained the esteem of his friends, and
the regretful pity of all who knew him." ^
Some three years after Crompton's death, his friend and
^ French, p. 213.
SAMUEL CROMFTON. 45
patron in life, Mr. Kennedy, read before the Manchester
Literary and Philosophical Society a "brief memoir" of
the inventor. But nearly thirty years more elapsed before
a local or general feeling of any depth or extent was created
in Crompton's favour, and the minds of Lancashire men
were led to ponder on the magnitude of his contribution to
the staple industry of their county, and on the scantiness
of the recognition and recompense which had been bestowed
on it and on him. In the winter of 1858-59 two lectures
on Crompton's life and work were delivered in the Bolton
Mechanics' Institution by INIr, Gilbert James French, its
president — a man of superior insight and attainments.
The new generation which had come to maturity in Bolton
since Crompton's death was much impressed by the narra-
tive of the achievements and biography of their ill-fated
townsman, and one of the results of this revival was the
publication, in the succeeding autumn, of the first edition
of Mr. French's " Life and Times of Crompton," the work
to which the present memoir is so much indebted. Mr.
French was not content with a merely literary tribute to
the memory of the inventor of the mule. He exerted
himself to raise a subscription for Crompton's then only
surviving son, John, who was old and poor. The appeal
received a warm response from the manufacturers and
machine-makers of Bolton, and when a nephew of the
old man's interfered and prevented the kind scheme from
being carried out, the biographer of the father contributed
generously to the support of the son. There was no one
to interfere with Mr. French's next attempt to do honour
to the inventor's memory, and he raised, easily and privately,
a sum of ;i^20o, with which a plain monument was erected
over Crompton's grave in the parisli churchyard. Mean-
while, the Bolton community was becoming desirous of
testifying, in some more public and conspicuous way, to
46 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
its new sense of Crompton's services, and of effacing the
reproach which his biography stamped upon their town.
Ultimately, after several changes of place, the erection of
a statue of Crompton in Bolton was determined on. A
public meeting was held, and a subscription raised, which
finally produced nearly ;^2ooo. The execution of the statue,
cast in copper-bronze, with bas-reliefs of Hall-in-the-Wood
and Crompton working at his machine, was intrusted to
Calder Marshall, and the 24th of September 1862 saw it
presented to the Bolton Town Council with much pomp
and circumstance. Bolton and its whole population held
gala on the occasion, with processions, decorations, and
triumphal arches. Streams of visitors from the surround-
ing districts poured in to keep Crompton's townsmen com-
pany in doing public honour to the ill-fated inventor's
memory. There were civic, military, and trade processions,
oratory without doors and at banquets within, by local
authorities and notables, and even a balloon ascent for the
recreation of the vast holiday-making multitude, with illumi-
nations and fireworks at night. Poor old John Crompton,
cetat 72, was not quite forgotten in the celebration of his
father's achievements. " He was accommodated with a
chair at the side of the statue," ^ and a few weeks after-
wards the then Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, sent
him a gratuity of ^^50. The statue in Nelson Square
remains one of the chief public monuments of Bolton, but
more striking or significant than any art-memorial is the
purely industrial structure thus described by his loving
biographer : —
"Near the Hall-in-the-Wood rises one of those octagonal columns
so common in the manufacturing districts, which serve as visible
^ Bolton Chronicle of 27th September 1862, where is a copious
account of the day's proceedings.
SAMUEL CROMPTON. 47
S}TnboIs of the industry that surrounds them. The chimneys in and
about Bolton are very numerous, and many of them are of great height,
but all dwindle into pigmy dimensions compared with that near
Crompton's former residence, which shoots up into the sky to a height
of 366 feet (by far the loftiest structure in the district), and attracts to
it every wandering eye in the surrounding countr)\ Unintentionally,
it has become a conspicuous landmark, indicating with power and
precision the site of his invention. Built for an entirely different pur-
pose, the principal use of this tall and really graceful structure is
in connection with numerous steam engines and furnaces in a huge
factory, where some thousands of men and boys are employed in
making mule-spinning machinery', not merely for the supply of the
district or of the nation, but to be distributed through all the empires
of Europe, and even to the outskirts of civilisation in Africa ; for,
wherever the humanising effects of their industry have become known,
Crompton's mules and their accessory engines are welcomed and
cherished. Thus another unintentional tribute to the honour of their
inventor is perpetuated by the weekly production of thousands of mule-
spindles almost on the very spot of their invention, propelling with
regularity, as from a mighty heart, the life-blood which circulates
through and sustains this stupendous system of manufacture."^
Crompton's mule, improved into its present self-acting
form, will probably keep his name alive while cotton-
spinning endures. The mention ot Ciompton's name
excites a feeling of compassion blended with regret that
the industrialists of his county and the Government of
his country did so little for the man who had done so
much for them. By the splendour of its results, the
national and individual wealth which it has created, the
masses of population to which it has given employment,
the mighty factories and hives of industry of many kinds
which have grown out of that rude machine of the Hall-in-
the-Wood, the mule has become far more conspicuous in
the history of British industry and of the cotton manufac-
ture, than the spinning-jenny of Hargreaves or the water-
frame of Arkwright. Unlike Hargreaves or Arkwright,
^ French, p. 230.
48 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
moreover, Crompton was never suspected of appropriating
illicitly or unscrupulously the inventions of other men, and
from first to last he was in all things an upright and
honourable man. In this respect, as in his melancholy
destiny, he resembles John Kay, the inventor of the fly-
shuttle, the machine which first gave an impetus to our
textile manufactures. The contrast between the struggle
in which most of Crompton's life was passed and the
successes and opulence developed by others from the
machine of his invention, arouses the more pity and
sympathy because the triumphs of the mule were achieved
while he was yet alive. Other and greater men than
Crompton have received wages much less proportionate to
the value of their work. But for the most part, it was
posterity that reaped where they had sown, and Crompton's
was the unhappy case of one condemned to be satisfied
with a few ears of corn from a mighty, far- spreading,
and golden harvest, showing itself on ground which, unas-
sisted and solitary, he had reclaimed from the wilderness.
Faults of character and errors of conduct no doubt contri-
buted to make his life what it was. But those faults and
errors were of the unworldly and almost child-like kind,
which, in a man of Crompton's pursuits and surroundings,
excites surprise and sympathy rather than criticism and
censure. Singular thing to have to say of a notable
Lancashire man and Lancashire worker, — Samuel Cromp-
ton seems to have failed in life chiefly from a want of —
pushl
II.
THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMILY*
THE one industrial family which has given England a
Prime Minister can be traced back to the beginning of
the fifteenth century. Belonging to the yeoman class, the
ancestors of Peel the statesman were then settled as Peeles,
or De Peles, in the Yorkshire district of Craven, and were
at the same time " seised of lands " in the Lancashire
Hundred of Blackburn. Two centuries later, Peeles were
still to be found in or near Blackburn, some of them
boasting of gentle blood and of a coat of arms. Whether
by a mere coincidence, or from a continuance of an old
connection between the Yorkshire and Lancashire Peels, is
unknown, but certainly "about 1600 " a William Peele (as
the name was then spelt), progenitor of the family which
became historic, migrated to the neighbourhood of that
Lancashire town from East Marton in Craven. There is
* Sir Lawrence Peel, A Sketch of the Life and Character of Sir Robert
/V^/ (London, 1S60). W.Cooke Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Robert
Peel, 3 vols. (London, 1847). Edmund Potter, Calico- Printittg as an
Art Manufacture {"London, 1852). Report of Select Committee of House
of Commons on Trade, &'c. (1833), § Evidence of James Thomson (of
Clitheroe). Ab>idgments of Specifications relating to Bleaching, Dyeing,
and Printing Calico and other Fabrics. Published by the Commissioners
of Patents (London, 1859). Statutes at Lar^^e. Journals of the
House of Commons. Baines's Lancashire and History of the Cotton
Manufacture, &c., &c.
G
50 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
no evidence of any consanguinity between this Yorkshire
Peele and the pre-existing Lancashire Peeles in whose
vicinity he settled. His unassuming descendants were
content to derive their origin from the Peeles of Craven,
from some of those "good yeomen Avhose limbs were
made in England." The father of Sir Lawrence Peel,
cousin and biographer of the statesman, was the brother
of a baronet — the first Sir Robert ; but he is said by his
son to have been " impatient of the addition of Esquire
to his name, which custom had then made general. I
have heard him when I was a boy," Sir Lawrence con-
tinues, " more than once, something in the style of
Jonathan Oldbuck, pish to himself over this superscription
of his letters, half-play fully and half-peevishly muttering to
himself, 'A pretty Esquire truly!' He would sometimes
add, that he was a yeoman, and that his family before him
were yeomen." When Sir Robert the statesman was shown
a genealogical dissertation, the object of which was to
establish, from the identity of surname, a connection be-
tween the earlier and the later Lancashire Peels, he is
reported to have made a characteristic remark " upon the
inconclusiveness of this sort of reasoning," and to have
declared that he " preferred to follow the traditions of his
family." i
William Peele's living descendant, the candid historio-
grapher of the family, describing the farm near Blackburn
where his progenitor settled at the beginning of the seven-
teenth century, speaks thus of it, of him, and of his imme-
diate successors. It was " in a melancholy site (whence
the family may have drawn some of their hypochondriac
humour), a low situation, which gave the farmhouse that
they occupied the title of De Hole, or Hoyle House, for it
was written both ways. Hoyle signifies hole. Low in
1 Sketch, p. 9-10.
THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMILY. 51
situation as in origin, here for many years they resided." ^
Farmer WiUiam's grandson, Robert (a favourite name in
the family), who literally " flourished " about the middle of
the seventeenth century, not only added, after what was
just becoming the fashion of his time and district, a
domestic woollen manufacture to his slender agriculture,
but printed the w^ooUen cloth spun and woven by him-
self, or by others, by either or by both. " The cloth was
stamped with patterns from wooden blocks, on which they
were cut. Some of these blocks were seen by my " —
Sir Lawrence Peel's — " father when a boy, lying neglected
in a lumber-room in his grandfather's house ; " and this
grandfather was a grandson of the first owner of the blocks.
" He expressed his regret that they had not been preserved,
and described them as curious from their very rudeness." ^
The farmer, woollen manufacturer, and woollen-printer of
the Hoyle House throve by his industry and enterprise, and
associated with the respectabilities of his neighbourhood.
Of his two sons, one became curate of Blackburn; the
elder, another Robert, was able to purchase, after his father's
death, a small estate in the neighbourhood of Blackburn,
then known as the Crosse, called subsequently Peel's Fold,
and still possessed by the Peels that are. William, the son
and heir of the purchaser of the Crosse, was kept down by
ill health, and with him the fortunes of the family rather
receded than advanced. Under William's son, again a
Robert, and with him more particularly we have now
to deal, the family fortunes took a fresh start, and went
forward until his grandson, the famous Sir Robert, found
himself Prime Minister of England. It was in the days ol
this particular Robert of ours that the family surname
became Peel instead of Peele. A thrifty and practical
man, who loved to economise labour, even when writing
1 Sketch, p. 6-7. => lb., p. II.
52 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
his signature, he dropped the final " e " from his surname,
"for no better reason," says his grandson, "than the
utiUtarian one which he assigned, that it was of no use, as
it did not add to the sound." ^
Born in 1723, this first Robert of the Peels without the
final <f, who may be considered the founder of the family,
was fairly bred and educated, and his patrimony brought
him a hundred a year. He farmed his paternal acres, and
as children grew up about him — for in 1744 he married
Elizabeth Haworth of Lower Darvven, a wife of blood
gentler than his own — he eked out his income, it seems, by
domestic spinning and weaving, still after the fashion of
the district and the time. His wife's brother had learned
calico-printing in London ; and, if Sir Lawrence Peel's
version of the matter be correct, this marriage had an
important effect on the fortunes of the husband. Haworth's
persuasions, we are told, induced Robert Peel to give up
farming and to try calico-printing, combined with manu-
facturing, in Blackburn town. Nay, according to the same
authority, this Haworth " was reputed in his family, and I
believe with truth, to have been the first calico-printer in
Lancashire." 2 On account of which statement, and for
other reasons, something falls to be said here concerning
the history — as usual in such cases, an obscure one — of the
English print-trade.
About the first trace of cloth-printing in England is
discoverable in the description of " a special privilege," by
which James I., anno 1619, granted to George Wood for
1 Sketch, p. 13. Yet this elision must have been first practised when
he was somewhat advanced in years, since in the patent taken out by
him in 1779 {cutat 55), and referred to post, p. 75, he designates him-
self " Robert Peele." Perhaps the final e was dropped after he had
retired from business, and when such a modification of signature might
be attended by a minimum of commercial or other inconvenience.
•' lb., p. 16.
THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMILY. 53
twenty-one years "the sole printing and stayning within
England and Wales of linen cloth in colours : "^ in considera-
tion of which privilege ;^to was to be paid yearly into his
Majesty's Exchequer. In the middle of the same century,
it has been seen, Robert Peele, the great-grandfather of our
Robert, printed with rude wooden blocks the woollens
in which he dealt. Meanwhile, the importation, through
the East India Company, of the printed calicoes of the
East diffused a taste for such goods, and induced ingenious
Englishmen to attempt to imitate them, and to compete
with their importers and vendors. At a still earlier period,
plain calicoes had been imported into England from India,
and the printing both of these and British stuffs of various
kinds began at home to compete with the Eastern wares.
Thus in 1676, a certain William Sherwin receives from
Charles II. a grant for fourteen years of the sole use of an
invention described as "A new and speedy way for printing
of broad calicoes and Scotch cloth with a double-necked
rowling-presse, which," says the royal granter, prompted
no doubt by the enterprising grantee, " being the only true
way of East India printing and stayning such kind of goods,
was never till now performed in our kingdom of England
or dominion of Wales, and therefore may, as we are
credibly informed and doe believe, bee no small use and
advantage to our loving subjects." ^
What with the import of Eastern prints, what with the
English manipulation of plain cloths of one kind or
another, sometimes imported calicoes, sometimes domes-
tic, either wholly of linen or of linen and cotton mixed
(since English calico composed wholly of cotton was
not produced until a century later), the woollen manu-
facturers were already sounding an alarm. In 1678, two
^ Abridgments of Specifications relating to Bleaching, &c., p. 20.
2 lb., p. 7 (No. 190).
54 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
years after the grant to William Sherwin, was issued a
pamphlet, "The Ancient Trades Decayed and Repaired,"
in which the competition of these fabrics with the woollen
manufacture is protested against thus : —
"This trade" — the woollen — "is very much hindered by our own
people, who do wear many foreign commodities instead of our own ; as
maybe instanced in many particulars ; viz., instead of green say" — a
sort of serge — "that was wont to be used for children's frocks, is now
used painted and hidian stained and striped caliro ; and instead of a
perpetuana or shalloon" — a worsted stuff, so called from Chalons, the
first place of its manufacture or sale — •" to line men's coats with, is used
sometimes a glazened calico, which in the whole is not above 1 2d.
cheaper, and abundantly worse. And sometimes is used a Bengal"
— made of silk and hair — "that is brought from India, both for linings
to coats and for petticoats too ; yet our English ware is better and
cheaper than this ; only it is thinner for the summer. To remedy
this, it would be necessary to lay a very high impost upon all such com-
modities as these are, and that no calicoes, or other sort of linen, be
suffered to be glazened,'' — i.e., glazed.^
In which passage, the expression " calicoes or other sort
of linen " shows that the term " calico " was used to
designate any light textile fabric not made of wool or
silk.2
In spite of English inventiveness and enterprise, it is
probable, however, that the domestic print-trade was for
long an inconsiderable branch of industry, and that the
printed stuffs in ordinary use were chiefly imported from
' Quoted by Baines, Cotton Mattufacture, p. 77.
^ One of the earliest notices of calico as the name for an article of
wear is in the "England's Heroicali Epistles" of Michael Drayton,
pubhshed in 1598. Edward IV. is supposed to be addressing Jane
Shore in this flattering strain : —
" If thou but please to walk into the Pawn,
To buy the cambric, calico, or lawn ;
If thou the whiteness of the same would'st prove,
From thy far whiter hand pluck off thy glove."
Here "calico " is probably a synonym for "linen."
THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMHY. 55
the East. But some impetus, it is also probable, was
given to it by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,
which sent to our shores thousands of ingenious French-
men, skilled in new or novel industries. The Edict of
Nantes was revoked in 16S5. According to a witness of
some competency — literally a witness, since the following
passage is quoted from the evidence given before a
select committee of the House of Commons in 1833 by
Mr. James Thomson, an experienced and instructed calico-
printer of Clitheroe,^ — it was some five years later that this
trade first possessed a distinguishable local habitation in
England : —
" Its origin," he says, "dates from about the year 1690, when a small
print-ground was established on the banks of the Thames at Richmond
by a Frenchman, who in all probability was a refugee after the revoca-
tion of the Edict of Nantes. The first large establishment was at
Bromley Hall in Essex; it stood No. i in the Excise books when the
duty was first imposed, showing that it was at that time the most con-
siderable manufactory of [jrinted calicoes near London. There was a
lead pump there some years ago, when it was still a manufactoiy of
printed calicoes, with the date 1710 upon it."
But before this establishment at Bromley Hall could
become " considerable," or the English print-trade, then
and long afterwards concentrated in London and the
metropolitan counties, could attain dimensions large
enough to induce financiers to subject it to an excise duty,
an important event in its history occurred. The clamour
of the woollen and silk manufacturers availed to pro-
cure a legislative prohibition of the import and use of the
printed calicoes of the East ; and had it not been for this
prohibition, the nascent English industry would probably
have been annihilated in an unequal competition with the
cheaper as well as more prized and popular products of
1 Q. 3821.
56 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Asia. One protest of the woollen manufacturers has been
already heard. Another and a more general protest is
chronicled by a famous historian as raised at the very time
of the establishment of the printworks at Richmond, to
the domestic industry carried on in which the success of
the outcry was to give a considerable stimulus. In 1690
and the following year, Sir Josiah Child and the monopoly
of the East India Company, of which he was the head,
formed the subject of a fierce pamphleteering controversy,
the preliminary to a keen parliamentary struggle. A new
company was started, which claimed a right to share the
monopoly possessed by Sir Josiah's. It had its partisans,
but in the strife were heard the voices of English manufac-
turers as little friendly to the new company as to the old,
and disposed to invoke a ban on both of them. Says Lord
Macaulay : ^ —
"There were, however, great differences of opinion among those who
agreed in hating Child and the body of which he was the head. The
manufacturers of Spitalfields, of Norwich, of Yorkshire, and of Wilt-
shire considered the trade with the Eastern seas as rather injurious
than beneficial to the kingdom. The importation of Indian spices
indeed was admitted to be harmless, and the importation of Indian
saltpetre to be necessary ; but the importation of silks and of Bengals,
as shawls were then called, was pronounced to be a curse to the
country. The effect of the growing taste for such frippery was, that our
gold and silver went abroad, and that much excellent English drapery
lay in our warehouses till it was devoured by the moths. Those, it
was said, were happy days for the inhabitants both of our pasture-lands
and of our manufacturing towns, when every gown, every waistcoat,
every bed, was made of materials which our own flocks had furnished tja
our own looms. Where were now the brave old hangings of arras
which had adorned the walls of lordly mansions in the time of Eliza-
beth? And was it not a shame to see a gentleman, whose ancestors
had worn nothing but stuffs made by English workmen out of English
fleeces, flaunting in a calico shirt and a pair of silk stockings from
Moorshedabad ? Clamours such as these had, a few years before,
History of England {\.oxi^ox\, 1873), ii. 307.
THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMH.Y. ^7
extorted from Parliament the Act which required that the dead should
be wrapped in woollen ; and some sanguine clothiers hoped that the
Legislature would, by excluding all Indian textures from our ports, im-
pose the same necessity on the living."
The " sanguine clothiers " of this extract had not very
long to wait for the fulfilment of these hopes, though, when
it did come, they were not satisfied. Ten years afterwards,
in 1700, was passed the Act 11 & 12 William III., cap. 10,
the preamble of which is very curious reading in these free-
trading times. " Whereas it is most evident," this enact-
ment begins, " that the continuance of the trade to the East
Indies, in the same manner and proportions as it hath been
for two years last past, must inevitably be to the great detri-
ment of this kingdom, by exhausting the treasure thereof, and
melting down the coin and taking away the labour of the
people, whereby very many of the manufacturers of this
nation are become excessively burdensome and chargeable
to their respective parishes, and others are thereby com-
pelled to seek for employment in foreign parts" — "For
remedy thereof," the Legislature in its wisdom prohibited,
under very severe penalties, not merely the sale, but the use
and wear, of all " wrought silks. Bengals, and stuffs mixed
with silk or herba, of the manufacture of Persia, China, or
East India, and all calicoes, painted, dyed, printed, or
stained there." If they were " found in any house, shop,
or warehouse, or any other place whatsoever," they were
seizable, and the owner or possessor was liable to a penalty
of ;^2oo, two- thirds of it to go to the informer. But the
prohibition concerning calicoes touched only those printed
in the East, and not such as might be printed at home.
So far, therefore, as the measure proved to be effective for
its object, it merely altered the form of what the woollen
manufacturers considered to be a grievance. Oriental
were replaced in the market by domestic prints, the fabric
H
58 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
of which was either made in England, or consisted of plain
calico imported from the East, not prohibited by the Act,
and printed at home. Thus it was that the Bromley Hall
establishment grew to be "considerable." The ancient
" pump," extant there in Mr. Thomson of Clitheroe's time,
bore, it has been seen, the date of 1 7 1 o. In the April of the
preceding year, lively Richard Steele founded the " Tatler "
and in No. 2. thereof testimony is borne to the conspi-
cuous existence of the English calico-printer, with designs
and patterns of his own. " Suppose," says Isaac Bicker-
staff, p]sq., " an ingenious gentleman should write a poem
of advice to a calico-printer, do you think there is a girl in
England that would wear anything but the taking of Lille
or the battle of Oudenarde ? " — Marlborough's and Eugene's
prime military successes of the year before. " They would
certainly be all the fashion till the heroes abroad had cut
out some more patterns." A few years more, and in 17 11
the English print-trade had so thriven that the financiers
of the day, with the costly Spanish Succession War still
Hngering on their hands, were tempted to impose an excise
duty of 3d. per yard on home-printed calicoes. In a
"Spectator" of the following year (4th February 171 2) we
have, it may be added, a young woman " without a fortune,
but of a very high mind," making the avowal, " I wear the
hooped petticoat, and am all in calicoes what the finest are
in silks." The calicoes taxed by the 10th Anne, cap. 19
(and in 1714 the duty was raised from 3d. to 6d. a yard),
were either the cotton fabrics of the East, imported plain
to be printed at home, or, if woven at home, they were of
cotton and flax mixed. The duty on printed linens entirely
of flax was and remained three-halfpence a yard, half of
that originally laid on those other fabrics, and the linen
branch of the print-trade was probably fostered by having a
lighter fiscal burden imposed on it. The development of
THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMILY. 59
the domestic print-trade of course stimulated invention,
and in 17 15 we have such a record as the following of a
patent granted to Peter Dubison (whose name sounds like
that of a Frenchman) for " A new peculiar way or method
of printing, dyeing, or staining of calicoes in grain with
colours more bright and lasting, and which shall bear wash-
ing and weather much better than any heretofore used in
Europe, and that such calicoes shall equal, if not exceed in
beauty and use, those stained in the Indies."^
Through this increased printing at home of domestic
fabrics, some partly cotton, partly flax, others wholly linen,
and above all (probably), of plain calicoes imported from
the East, the English market continued to be well supplied
with goods of the kind to prevent the sale and use of which
the woollen manufacturers had procured the Act of 1700.
Four or five years, accordingly, after the grant of the patent
to Peter Dubison, the woollen manufacturers again lifted
up their voices, and began to agitate for more stringent
legislative enactments against the sale and use of printed
textile fabrics.- The result was the Act of 1721 (the 7
George III., cap. 7). A shopkeeper exposing for sale such
cahco, or any household stuff containing it, subjected him-
self to a penalty of ;^2o, which was also imposed on any-
body using or weaving the prohibited fabric in "any
household stuff." The prohibition extended to all stuff,
"made of cotton or mixed therewith, which shall be
printed or painted with any colour or colours." There
were a few exceptions from the operation of this strin-
gent enactment. One of them, and, as it turned out, a
most important one, was that of fustians. Printed linens
^ Abridgments of Specifications relating to Bleaching, dr=r., No. 400,
p. II.
* See in Fiisi Series, p. 298, the lively and almost picturesque pro-
test of a contemporary pamplileteer against the general use of printed
calicoes and linens even "among the meaner sort."
60 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
were not prohibited by the Act, and fustians were specially
exempted from its operation. Thus the trade, though
crippled by the prohibition of the use of calicoes imported
from the East and printed at home, continued to exist, and
even to thrive. Eight years after the passing of the Act of
1720, the author, probably Daniel De Foe, of " A Plan of
the English Commerce," published in 1728, thus chronicled
the growth of a traffic in domestic linen, printed and dyed
at home : —
"I proceed," he says, "to another visible increase of trade, which
spreads daily among us, and afiects not England only, but Scotland and
Ireland also, though the consumption depends wholly upon England, —
and that is the printing or painting of linen. The late Acts prohibit-
ing the use and wearing of painted calicoes, either in clothes, equipages,
or house furniture, were without question aimed at improving the con-
sumption of our woollen manufacture, and in part it had an effect that
way. But the humour of the people running another way, and being
used to and pleased with the light, easy, and gay dress of the calicoes,
the calico-printers fell to work to imitate those calicoes by making the
same stamps and impressions, and with the same beauty of colours,
upon linen, and thus they fell upon the two particular branches of linen
called Scots cloth and Irish linen. So that this is an article wholly new
in trade, and indeed the printing itself is wholly new" — no, not quite —
" for it is but a few years ago since no such thing as painting or printing
of linen or calico was known in England ; all being supplied so cheap
and performed so very fine in India, that nothing but a prohibition of
the foreign-printed calicoes" — followed by one of "foreign" calicoes
printed in England — "could raise it up to a manufacture at home ; where-
as now it is so increased that the Parliament has thought it of magnitude
sufficient to lay a tax upon it, and a considerable revenue is raised
by it."i
But besides this printing of home-made linens, there
grew up again a printing of home-made fabrics partly of
cotton, partly of flax. Fustians, it has been already men-
tioned, were exempted from the prohibition directed
against the printing of fabrics of that mixed texture, and
both manufacturers and printers availed themselves of the
■^ Quoted by Baines, Cotton Mannfactuiv, p. 260.
THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMILY. 6 1
exemption to evade the letter of the Act. Thus a petition
of worsted-weavers of London, presented to the House of
Commons in 1735, complained that "of late years a stuff
made of linen yarn mixed with cotton, and improperly
called by the name of fustian, hath been invented in this
kingdom, and great quantities are now made thereof,
which, when printed, cannot without the greatest diffi-
culty be distinguished from an Indian calico, and that
under colour of the said English - printed calicoes, all
Indian calicoes may be worn in this kingdom in as open
a manner as if no law had been already made to the
contrary." ^ This evasion of the law had not been per-
mitted by the woollen interest without attempts, or at least
threats of attempts, to enforce the penalties imposed by the
Act of 1720, and the consequence was a strenuous and at
last successful struggle ^ of the Lancashire manufacturers
of so-called fustians to induce the Legislature to legalise
the production and printing of these fabrics. Happily for
their efforts, they were aided by many even of the woollen
manufacturers of Lancashire and Yorkshire (Norwich seems
to have been the great stronghold of the prohibitionists),
who, for their own interest, were averse to restrictions
on the fustian manufacture. In illustration of their view
of the matter may be quoted one of several petitions
of the kind — that from Wakefield and adjacent p'aces
showing : —
"That great numbers of the poor of the said town and places
adjacent have been brought up and are employed in the woollen
manufacture, and entirely depend on the same for their maintenance,
and that great quantities of the woollen goods made in the neighbour-
hood arc exported to the coasts of Africa and the West Indies, and in
return for the same, amongst other products, very large quantities of
1 Journals of the House of Commons, 25th February 1735.
^ See First Series, p. 298-9.
C2 LA\'CASII1RR WORTHIES.
cotton wool are brought back, which have always been manufactured
in several parts of this kingdom into fustians, many whereof are
printed : and that the petitioners apprehend, that in case any of the
goods made of linen and cotton in this kingdom be prohibited under
pretence of an Act made in the seventh year of the reign of his late
Majesty King George I., it will very much lessen the consumption
of cotton, and consequently prejudice and prevent the exportation of
woollen goods." ^
Early in 1736, accordingly, the Legislature passed tlie
famous " Manchester Act," as it was called. " Whereas,"
says this enactment (9 George II., cap. 4), "great quan-
tities of stuffs made of linen yarn and cotton wool have for
several years been manufactured, and have been printed
and painted, within this kingdom of Great Britain, and the
said manufactures, so printed or painted, are a branch of
the ancient fustian manufacture of Great Britain " : there-
fore Parliament, in its wisdom, permits the production,
sale, and use of "any sort of stuff made of Hnen yarn and
cotton wool, manufactured and printed, or painted with
any colour or colours, within the kingdom of Great
Britain, provided that the warp thereof be entirely linen
yarn." As calicoes of which the warp was other than
linen yarn were not then, or for long afterwards, produced
in England, this last quaUfication was probably introduced
in order to prevent the use of the cheap Indian calicoes
made entirely of cotton, and the Eastern origin of which
could thus be easily recognised and determined.
The passing of the Manchester Act of 1736 gave, as
has been narrated elsewhere in some detail, ^ a great
impetus to the production of mixed fabrics of cotton and
flax, the only form of the cotton manufacture then prac-
tised in England.^ The impetus was of course shared by
^ Journals of the House of Commons, 26th February 1735.
* J irst Series, p. 299.
^ It may be worth adding, as an odd little episode in this chapter
THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMILY. d^
the print-trade ; and, as it happened, much of the cloth,
the printing of which was there and then legalised, was
produced in and near the Blackburn of the founder of the
Peel family, and of his contemporary and assistant, James
Hargreaves, the all but undoubted inventor of the spinning-
jenny. "The manufactures of Blackburn appear to have
arisen in the time of the Commonwealth, and maybe dated
about the year 1650;" so that the Robert of the rude
wooden blocks was among the earliest of Blackburn
manufacturers : —
"The first fabrics for which this place was distinguished were
called Blackburn checks, a species of cloth consisting of a linen warp
and cotton woof, one or both of which being dyed in the thread, gave
to the piece when woven a striped or checked appearance. This
article was afterwards superseded by the Blackburn greys, so called
from the colour, neither the warp nor the weft having been dyed.
The component parts of this cloth consisted of a mixture of linen and
cotton, and, when manufactured, the pieces were generally sent to
London to be printed. " ^
of our industrial history, that on the passing of the Manchester Act,
the indignant woollen manufacturers of Norwich thought of avenging
themselves on the victors by carrying the war into the enemy's countr}',
and competing with the Lancashire men in their own peculiar sphere
of operations. Here are two of the "resolutions of the Committee
of Trade at Norwich since the passing the Act for allowing the wear
of stuffs made of linen yarn and cotton wool, printed or painted,
manufactured in Great Britain, provided the woof is entirely linen
yarn : "—
"Experiment," say the resolutionists, "having been made by some of the
principal woollen manufacturers of this city of cotton yarn spun here, it is very
probable, if they proceod in that manufacture, that this city will be as fimous for
cotton as it is for worsted stuffs : Resolved, therefore, that a subscription be made
for raising a sum of money to be given to such person as shall produce to the
Committee of Trade, at the Guild Hal in tiiis city, the best piece of stuff, twenty
yards long and one broad, weaved of cotton wool and linen yarn within this city ;
and to encourage workmen to excel in weaving cotton stuffs, resolved that a guinea
be given to the journeyman or person who shall weave the piece so judged the
best as aforesaid."— C7(;///i-w/a«'i M a^azine l^ox March 1736), vol. vi. p. 169.
^ Baines, Lancashire (first edition), iii. 323.
64 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
It was probably to engage in the manufacture of tnese
Blackburn greys, the demand for which was stimulated by
the passing of the Act of 1736, and by the general growth
of British trade and commerce then and afterwards, that
Robert Peel migrated from his farmhouse to Blackburn.
The migration must have taken place years after the pass-
ing of the Manchester Act, since at that date he was
only thirteen. He married in 1744, and, as there is pro-
bably some truth in the tradition that he was induced by
his brother-in-law to exchange farming for manufacturing,
his settlement at Blackburn may have been towards the
middle of the eighteenth century. The earliest distinct
notice that we have of him is, "about 1760," employing
his neighbour, James Hargreaves, then an obscure car-
penter or weaver, or both, to help him in carrying out
improvements in the carding-machine of the unfortunate
Lewis Paul, which, soon after its introduction into Lanca-
shire and the death of its inventor, he had adopted, and
was further adapting. The machine thus improved was
laid aside by him after a few years (its story has been
already told elsewhere i); but that he was one of the first
to see the merits of what, in the hands of Arkwright,
became a great and notable success, and that he selected
Hargreaves to aid him in his schemes for improving it,
indicates that this Robert Peel was a man of more than
ordinary insight and enterprise.
What are we to make, on the other hand, of the story
that it was not to engage in spinning and weaving, but in
cloth-printing, that he migrated from Peel Fold to a house
which he bought for himself in Fish Lane, Blackburn? —
what of the intimation that either he, as many say, or his
brother-in-law, Haworth, as Sir Lawrence Peel says, was the
first person who introduced calico-printing into Lancashire.?
^ First Series, p. 36S.
THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMILY. 65
It is indubitable that early in the second half of the
eighteenth century the print-trade began to settle in Lanca-
shire, in order to be near the producers of cloth, and that
in time Blackburn and neighbourhood became one of its
seats.^ All, however, of the chroniclers of the print-trade
who are not exposed to the temptation of enhancing the
achievements of the founder of the Peel family agree that
cloth- printing was introduced into Lancashire by the
Claytons of Bamber Bridge, near Preston, "about 1764,"
long after our Robert Peel migrated from Peel Fold to
Blackburn. Yet, according to Sir Lawrence Peel, the
notion of printing Lancashire-made cloth in the county, or
near the place, of its production, first occurred to Haworth.
He communicated it to his brother-in-law, and the result
is represented to have been that our Robert Peel resolved
to migrate from Peel Fold and its agriculture to manu-
facturing Blackburn, there to become a cloth-printer. In
Sir Lawrence Peel's narrative, he raises some money for
the purpose by mortgaging his farm. Haworth contributes
what he can, and Yates of the Black Bull Inn in
Blackburn (called in the vernacular, according to another
authority, not Sir Lawrence, " Billy fro' the Bull " 2), the
richest of the three, is persuaded to join them with ;^5oo
down. Thus all at once starts into existence a firm of
cloth -printers trading as Haworth, Peel, & Yates, with
works at Brookside, near Blackburn, in addition to Robert
Peel's new house in Fish Lane of the same town. Is it
1 Potter, p. II.
2 The "authority" is the writer of some instructive and entertaining
papers on "The Peel Family," which were contributed to the Man-
chester Examiner and Times in October and November 1S50. Such
dubiety and indistinctness enshroud the early story of the Peels, that
this writer assigns the formation of the firm of Haworth, Peel, &
Yates, not to Robert Peel, the founder of the family, but to his son,
the first baronet, and father of the statesman.
I
66 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
not more likely that the firm began as manufacturers of
Blackburn greys, and that only some time after the Clay-
tons had introduced cloth-printing into Lancashire did
they add that new branch to their other business? This
view, supported by dates, receives a certain confirmation
from a tradition that the notion of engaging in cloth-print-
ing was first suggested to the firm by an accidental proof of
the profits to be realised in that department of industry.
Some cloth of theirs had in the weaving been spoilt, it
is said, for its original purpose, and they sent it to the
Claytons at Bamber Bridge to be printed for them as
handkerchiefs. These they disposed of at such a profit
that they were induced to add cloth-printing to their other
industrial operations.
However this may be, it is clear that, in the traditional
biography of the founder of the Peel family, there has been
at work the familiar process — as old as biography itself —
which exaggerates the achievements of the progenitors of
celebrated men. The grandfather of a Prime Minister
ought, there was a feeling, to have done something notable.
Our Robert Peel was known to have been a calico-printer,
and round this atom of fact accreted myths of various kinds
suited to the fame and position of his grandson at the
time when most of them emerged into existence. Thus
one tradition ascribes to this Peel of ours the discovery of
the " acetated aluminous mordant " said to have been
" first employed by the English calico-printers," and to be
" the most valuable known ; " though " it was discovered
by no induction of reasoning from experiment, but was
the gradual result of a series of tentative processes, tried
empirically and by guesswork." " Alum," according to the
same authority, " was the only mordant used by the first
English calico-printers, and is still the only one known in
India. Several ingredients were tried at hazard to increase
THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMILY. 6/
its efficacy, but it was found that none was of avail save
the acetate of lead, commonly called sugar of lead. It has
been supposed that this mode of acetating the alum may
have been found out by Peel, and the secrecy used in the
calendering is quoted as a proof of the hypothesis." ^ This
" secrecy used in the calendering " refers to " a tradition in
the family that he made his first experiments secretly in
his own house ; that the cloth, instead of being calendered,
was ironed by a member of his own family ; that the first
pattern was a parsley leaf, and that hence he acquired the
nickname of ' Parsley Peel' " ^ " The local story," this writer
proceeds, " told by some old inhabitants of Blackburn is a
little different. They say that the experiments were made
in the house at Fish Lane, not at the farm of Peel's Fold ;
that the pattern was a parsley leaf scratched on a pewter
plate, such as was then ordinarily used at the tables of the
middle classes ; and that the calendering was performed by
a poor woman named Milton, who lived in an adjoining
cottage." As " the secrecy of the calendering," in the one
version of this story, produced the notion that Peel was the
first to discover the merits of acetate of lead as a mordant,
so, " on the other hand," according to the same authority,
" the mention of the pewter plate is by some imagined to
indicate the substitution of engraved metal for wooden
blocks in printing the patterns ; but we believe " — the fact
is undoubted ^ — " that this improvement was first effected
in London." Indeed, there is, among the specifications of
patents, one for "printing calimancoes by copper-plate,"
taken out as early as 1754. After they have been treated
in various ways, " cleanse them," says the patentee, " in
fair water, and then emboss, print, or stain them on a
copper plate designed and engraved for that purpose."
^ Cooke Taylor, i. 5. - lb., p. 2.
^ Baines, Cotton Manufacture, p. 265.
68 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Let US turn to Sir Lawrence Peel's more recent, and, in
all probability, much more authentic version of the story of
the parsley leaf, and the myth which makes Peel a great
inventor of any kind in calico-printing dwindles to nothing.
Speaking of the operations of Haworth, Peel, & Yates, Sir
Lawrence says : —
"In the course of their experiments in printing, they introduced
some improvements also in that art, but I know nothing as to their
nature or degree of importance. My father" — the son of the alleged
inventor — ^^ did not speak of them to tne, as he probably would have done
had they been considerable. One story, of several v/hich are in print,
relating to the first steps which they made, I am able to confirm, as
I have heard it from several members of the family ; and as, inde-
pendently of family associations, it possesses a certain interest in itself,
I am glad to repeat it. Mr. Peel was in his kitchen making some
experiments in printing on handkerchiefs and other small pieces, when
his only daughter, then a girl, afterwards Mrs. Willock, the mother of
the postmaster of Manchester, brought him from their 'garden of
herbs ' a sprig of parsley. It is some proof of taste in so young a girl
that she could discern beauty in a common pot-herb, since I believe
that the common thought even now about parsley, once like the laurel
leaf in honour, is that it was created for a garnish or a fiy. She
pointed out and praised the beauty — exquisite beauty — of the leaf,
and looking by habit of imitation, naturally, to the useful side, she
said that she thought it would make a very pretty pattern. He took
it out of her hand, looked at it attentively, praised it for its beauty and
her for her taste, and said that he would make a trial of it. She,
pleased not to be pooh-poohed, as discoverers among juniors often are,
lent her aid with all the alacrity of fourteen. A pewter dinner-plate,
for such was then the common dinner-plates in families of that degree,
was taken down from the shelf, and on it was sketched, say rather
scratched, a figure of the leaf, and from this impressions were taken.
It was called in the family 'Nancy's pattern,' after his daughter. It
became a favourite; in the trade it was known as the parsley-leaf
pattern ; and apt alliteration lending its artful aid, gave its inventor the
nickname of ' Parsley ' Peel, which, not having the least mixture of ill-
nature in it — no barb to make it stick — did not adhere." '
Here, then, is no suggestion that any improvement in the
1 Sket<.h, p. 18-20.
THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL fA.U/LV. Cg
processes of calico-printing was connected with the facts
of this agreeable story. But once more, in recent years,
the, myth which makes the founder of the Peel family a
great inventor in the print-trade thus emerged, embellished
and magnified : —
*' Robert Peel's attention was principally directed to the printing of
calico — then a comparatively unknown art — and for some time he
carried on a series of experiments with the object of printing by
machinery'. The exjDeriments were secretly conducted in his own
house, the cloth being ironed for the purpose by one of the women of
the family. It was then customary, in such houses as the Peels, to use
pewter plates at dinner. Having slietched a figure or pattern on one
of the plates, the thought strack him that an impression might be got
from it in reverse and printed on calico with colour. In a cottage at
the end of the farmhouse lived a woman who kept a calendering
machine, and going into her cottage, he put the plate, with colour rubbed
into the figured part and some calico over it, through the machine, when
it was found to leave a satisfactoiy impression. Sucli is said to have been
the origin of roller-printing on calico. Robert Peel shortly perfected
his process, and the first pattern he brought out was a parsley leaf :
hence he is spoken of in the neighbourhood of Blackburn to this day "
(?) "as 'Parsley Peel.'" 1
Thus it is that stories grow and swell, until, in popular
periodicals, we have it gravely set down that Robert Peel of
Blackburn " produced the first piece of printed cotton the
world had ever seen " ! " and even the first mangle " ! -
But concerning both the roller-printing or cylinder-printing
(the application of which forms an era in the history of
the print-trade) referred to in the preceding extract, and
the process antecedent to its discovery, something must now
be said and quoted, or quoted and said : —
"Calico-printing has been the subject of modern improvements,
1 Smiles, Self-Help (London, 1866), p. 38.
' Assertions seriously made in a paper entitled "The Blackburn
Farmer," i.e., Robert Peel of Blackburn, contributed to the Leisure
Hour for March 1S57.
70 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
which may be compared in importance with those in cotton spinning
and bleaching ; and most of these improvements have either originated
or been matured and perfected in Lancashire. The old method of
printing, still continued for certain parts of the v/ork, was by blocks of
sycamore, about ten inches long by five broad, on the surface of which
the pattern was cut in relief, in the common method of wood-engraving.
On the back of the block was a handle, by which the workman held it ;
the surface was applied to a woollen cloth stretched over a vessel con-
taining the colour, and in contact with that colour, so as to be saturated
by it, and was then laid upon the piece of cloth (there being wire-
points at the corners of the block to enable the workman to apply it
with exactness), and struck with an iron mallet. Thus the figure was
impressed upon the cloth, one colour only being used at once ; and if
other colours were required to complete the pattern, it was necessary to
repeat the operation with different blocks. In order to produce more
delicate patterns than could be engraved on wood, copper plates were
introduced in the neighbourhood of London, and the cloth was thus
printed from flat plates with the kind of press used in copper-plate
printing. Each of these modes was tedious, as no more of the cloth
could be printed at once than was covered with the wooden block or
copper plate, and a single piece of calico twenty-eight yards in length
required the application of the block 448 times. " ^
Ingenious men must have betimes endeavoured to strike
out some swifter than this slow process of block-printing,
and in 1764, if not earlier, we light upon traces of cylinder-
printing. In that year, Thomas Fryer, Thomas Greenhow,
and John Newbery patented " a machine for printing,
staining, and colouring of silk, stuffs, linen, cottons, leather,
and paper," — the specification adds, " by means of copper
cylinders, on which the colours are laid by smaller
cylinders, which are put in motion by other plain cylinders."
" A gentleman of Paris," says Sylvanus Urban in the
following year, 1765, "has invented a machine which, by
means of some engraven cylinders and the help of three
workmen, prints 200 ells of calico in an hour, which before
employed fifteen men. A machine of the like kind has
^ Baines, Cotton Ma7tufacttire, p. 20-25.
THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMILY. J I
long been invented in England, a model of which may
be seen by the curious at St. John's Gate,"^ where Mr.
Cave was much given to the patronage of mechanical
projects.^ Nearly twenty years elapsed, as is often the
way in these cases, before cylinder-printing was made
fruitfully applicable by a contrivance for which Thomas
Bell took out a patent in 1783, and which he sets forth to
be " a new and peculiar art or method of printing with one
colour, or with various colours at the same time, on linens,
lawns, calicoes, woollen cloths, silks, &:c. ": —
"This specification contains a description of a six-coloured cylinder
printing-machine. The six rollers are arranged round a large central
bowl, but placed over the bowl, instead of under, as now practised. The
chief interest in this invention consists in the introduction of the steel
doctor. The colour is supplied to each roller by what is called the
box-doctor. There are springs and screws to push the box-doctor up
to the rollers ; also screws to press the rollers to the bowl, and brass
steps to carry them ; and there are toothed wheels to drive the rollers
simultaneously. There is also a winding-on frame, by which the
unwinding of the cloth firom one roller before printing winds the
printed cloth on another, with a coupling-box to detach the roll when
filled.'"'
Another year all but a few days, and the same Thomas
Bell takes out a second patent, thus described by the same
hand : —
"The drawing exhibits a three-colour cylinder printing-machine
which does not appear to contain much novelty" — though, as will be
seen, there is something in it that is both novel and important. " It
is merely a representation of a smaller machine than that described at
1378. The doctor-box is again given ; a scrimp-rail is introduced.
The centres of the printing rollers are still made of iron, and covered
^ Gentleman^ s Magazine (for September 1765), vol. xxxv. p. 439.
^ See First Scries, p. 349.
^ Abridgments of Specifications relating to Bleaching Quly 17, 17S3),
No. 1378, p. 41.
72 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
with copper or other metal, which can be taken off at pleasure, and by
these means fresh patterns put on as often as required." ^
In fact, " a Scotchman of the name of Bell," as he is
styled in the following extract, had made cyhnder-printing
applicable in a fashion and with results thus described by
the historian of the cotton manufacture : —
"The grand improvement in the art was the invention of cylinder-
printing, which bears nearly the same relation in point of despatch to
block-printing by hand as throstle or mule spinning bears to spinning
by the one-thread wheel. This great invention is said to have been
made by a Scotchman of the name of Bell, and it was first successfully
applied in Lancashire, about the year 1785, at Mosney, near Preston,
by the house of Livesey, Hargreaves, Hall, & Co., celebrated for the
extent of their concerns and the magnitude of their failure in 17S8,
which gave a severe shock to the industiy of that part of the country.
This new mode of printing may be thus described : A polished copper
cylinder, several feet in length (according to the width of the piece to
be printed), and three or four inches in diameter, is engraved with a
pattern round its whole circumference, and from end to end. It is
then placed horizontally in a press, and, as it revolves, the lower part
of the circum.ference passes through the colouring matter, which is
again removed from the whole surface of the cylinder, except the
engraved pattern, by an elastic steel blade placed in contact with the
cylinder, and reduced to so fine and straight an edge as to take off the
colour without scratching the copper. This blade has received the
name of the doctor, which may be a workman's abbreviation of the
word abductor, applied to it from the purpose which it answers ; or may
have been given from a vulgar use of the word ' to doctor^ meaning to
set to rights. The colour being thus left only on the engraved pattern,
the piece of calico or muslin is drawn tightly over the cylinder, which
revolves in the same direction, and prints the cloth. After the piece is
printed, it passes over several metallic boxes, six feet long, ten inches
broad, and six inches deep, heated by steam, which dry it. A piece of
cloth may be thus printed and dried in one or two minutes, which by
the old method would have required the application of the block 448
times. Nor is this all. Two, three, four, and even five cylinders may
be used at the same time in one piece, each cylinder having engraved
upon it a different portion of the pattern, and being supplied with a
^ Abridgments of Specifications relating to Bleaching (]\.\\y 9, 1784),
No. 1443, p. 43.
THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMILY. yi
different colour. Tlie piece passes over tbem successively, and receives
the entire pattern almost in the same moment. To produce the same
effect by hand-block printing would have required 896, 1344, 1792, or
2240 applications of the bloclcs, according as two, three, four, or five
cylinders may have been employed. The saving of labour, therefore, is
immense ; one of the cylinder-printing machines, attended by a man
and a boy, is actually capable of producing as much work as could be
turned out by 100 block-printers and as many tear-boys. In conse-
quence of the wonderful facilility given to the operation, three-fourths
of all the prints executed in this country are printed by the cylinder
machine.^
It was the invention of cylinder-printing that enabled
the print-trade to attain its modern gigantic development,
one which is in striking contrast to its humble beginnings.
In 1754, before, in all probability, the print-trade had begun
its migration from London and neighbourhood to Lanca-
shire, a patent, it has been seen, was taken out for printing
" calimancoes " by means of copper plates. In that same
year, to have produced " a piece of English chintz," " printed
on a British cotton " (which must have contained, however,
an admixture of flax), was considered such a marvel, that the
fabric was formally presented to the then Princess of Wales,
the widow of Prince Fred, ("who was alive and is dead")
and mother of George III. : —
Her Royal Highness was graciously pleased to accept of it as " being
of our own manufacture," and the presentation was elaborately chronicled
by the court newsman of the day. The happy donor was a " Mr.
Sedgwick, a very considerable wholesale trader in printed goods."
" And, " says the semi-official record, "on Sunday morning" (!) "the
said gentleman was, by Sir William Irby, introduced to Her Royal
Highness at Leicester House," in what were then Leicester Fields, and
the abode of semi-royalty, their memory being preserved in the dubious
Leicester Square of our own day, " and had llie honour to kiss her hand,
when Her Highness was pleased to say she was very glad we had ar-
rived at so great a perfection in the art of printing, and that in her opinion
it was preferable to any Indian chintz whatsoever, and" she "would
^ Baines, Cotton Manufnctttrc, p. 265-6.
74 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
give orders to have it made up into a garment for Her Ilighness's own
wear immediately, as an encouragement to tlie labour and ingenuity of
this countiy."^
There was no Queen in the England of those days, George
II. having been long a widower, and this Princess of Wales,
with a court and pretensions of her own, was not indisposed
to gain a little popularity by the patronage of native indus-
try. In 1750, four years before this presentation, only some
fifty thousand pieces of so-called calico were printed in
England. A century after Mr. Sedgwick's appearance at
Leicester House, the number of pieces printed was twenty
millions, "containing a weight of cotton about one-seventh
the entire import of cotton." ^ But to return to the founder
of the Peel family.
If our Robert Peel contributed no great invention to the
print-trade, he was, nevertheless, an energetic and sagacious
man, who from modest beginnings rose to have works and
mills at Church and Altham, both of them in the Blackburn
vicinage. He combined cotton manufacturing with the
print-trade ; the former business he seems to have carried
on at Altham, the latter at Church. In so far as he may
have been an inventor or adapter of inventions, the cotton
manufacture, pure and simple, much more than calico-print-
ing, was his sphere. His quick adoption and attempted
improvement of the carding-machine of poor Lewis Paul,
and his employment of Hargreaves, have been already
noticed, and show him to have possessed, in that
department, a discernment beyond the common. " Lie,"
Sir Lawrence Peel's father, "told me," Sir Lawrence,
"that his father," our Robert Peel, "was born a thinker
and an inventor ; that his genius for mechanics was
considerable, and that he was the real inventor of one
^ Quoted by Baines, Cotton Manufacture, p. 260.
^ Potter, p. 15.
THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMILY. 75
very important improvement in the machinery for cotton-
spinning, for which, if he had chosen to claim his o^\'n,
he might have had a patent. He added, that his
father was a shy and reserved man, who was averse
from putting himself forward." ^ As it happens, however,
we have a distinct record of one cotton-spinning patent
taken out by this Robert Peel. Arkwright's rollers, as well
as the spinning-jenny of Hargreaves, had long been suc-
cessfully at work, when, in 1779, there was granted to
" Robert Peele of Church, near Blackburn, calico-printer,"
a patent for what the specification calls a " method of
dressing, carding, slubbing, roving, and spinning cotton ; "
but it does not seem to have made a mark in the history of
the manufacture.
The year 1779, in which this patent was taken out, con-
tributed an era to Robert Peel's career. He was now fifty-
six, and he found himself forced to begin, in a certain sense,
life over again. He had adopted in his cotton-manufactur-
ing business, no doubt, whatever machinery invented by
others could be used without infringing patents, and his
zealous use of machinery is proved by his own patent itself
But in 1779 came that violent uprising of the Lancashire
working people against machinery, the story of which has
been already told in some detail elsewhere.^ Peel was
among its victims. Possibly his mill at Altham, like Ark-
wright's at Chorley, was destroyed by the furious multitude.
In any case, after that outbreak, says Sir Lawrence : —
" Mr. Peel, fearing to expose his business again to similar interruptions,
and his property again to injury, removed to Burton-upon-Trent in
Staffordshire " — even then famous for its ale — " where he took a lease for
three lives from the Earl of Uxbridge of some land favourable to his
purpose, part of which abutted on the Trent. He built three mills
there, to supply one of which with water he cut a canal, at the cost, as
^ Sketch, p. 18. ^ First Series, p. 423-7.
7^ LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
I have been told, of ^9000. All the works which he erected or caused
to be made there were of a solid and enduring kind ; the same things
would be done now in a better and more economical mode, but they
evidence a man who built upon solid foundations, and liked nothing of
a flimsy character. His business from this time prospered, and under-
went no further material change. It proceeded in a course of material
prosperity, and enriched himself and his family."
More than two years before what must have been,
at his age, a painful vicissitude of migration, met, how-
ever, as has been seen, manfully and energetically, his
partnership with his brother-in-law seems to have been
dissolved. Haworth, it appears, established printworks
of his own near Bury, in partnership with a Mr. Yates,
probably a relative of the same Yates of the Black Bull
Inn at Blackburn, who helped to found the firm of
Haworth, Peel, & Yates. The old firm became Peel &
Yates; and of its existence in 1776 we have an indication,
and rather a curious one.^ Whether Yates accompanied
his partner to Burton is not stated, but after Robert Peel
migrated thither the firm retained the style of "Peel &
Yates." 2
^ "The subjoined paragraph is extracted from an old newspaper : —
'The following memorandum was wrote in a Bible now in the pos-
session of a family at Rishton, near Blackburn, for the purpose, no
doubt, of recording the period when the manufacture of calico was
first introduced into this county: — '15th September 1776. Thomas
Duxbury, of Rishton, near Blackburn, sold to Messrs Peel, Yates, &
Co., Church Bank, two common-fine calico pieces for £^, 9s. 8d.
These were the first calico pieces ever manufactured in this kingdom.'
This is an erroneous statement, as Arkwright and his partners made
calicoes in 1772 or 1773; but these may have been the first pieces of
calico manufactured in Lancashire, and the memorandum shows the
extraordinary price which they fetched." — Baines, Cotton Manufacture,
V- 333-4, "ote.
^ "Three extensive cotton manufactories erected a few years since
near this town" — Burton-upon-Trent — "by Messrs Peel, Yates, &
Co., now afford employment to some hundreds of persons." — Stebbing
Shaw, History and Antiquities of Staffordshire {yoTiAon, 1798), i. 14.
THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMILY. J J
One son, his third, Robert, who became the first baronet
of the family, had left the paternal roof years before to
join the establishment of Yates & Haworth at Bury, as
will be duly chronicled hereafter. Some of his sons, of
whom there were not a few, probably accompanied him
to Burton, while others of them may have remained in
charge of the printworks at Church: —
"He understood thoroughly every branch of the cotton trade," says
Sir Lawrence Peel, "and instructed his sons himself. He loved to
impress on their minds the great national importance of this rising
manufacture. He was a reflecting man, who looked ahead ; a plain-
spoken, simple-minded man, not illiterate, nor vulgar either in language,
manners, or mind ; but possessing no refinement in his tastes, free from
affectation, and with no desire to imitate the manners or mode of life
of a class above his own. His sons resembled him, and a strong
likeness pervaded the whole family ; they were, without exception,
hard-working, industrious, plain, frugal, unostentatious men of business,
reserved and shy, nourishing a sort of defensive pride, and hating all
parade, shrinking perhaps too much from public service and public
notice, and, it may be, too much devoted to the calm joy of a private
station. They were 'loyal men,' Tories in politics, a party on which
their opponents have since dexterously affi.xed the un-English name
of ' aristocrat,' a kind of moral retribution certainly, since it was
first applied by the Tories to the heads of the Whig party — a party
whose strength, nevertheless, has commonly been derived from the best
support of a party, the middle ranks of the people. Tories, however,
as the Peels generally were, they were at all times fair samples of the
English national spirit of self-reliance and sturdy independence." ^
Thus it was from his progenitors that Peel the statesman
inherited not only his politics but the " reserve " with
which he was sometimes reproached. Of the gait and
personal appearance of the grandfather of the states-
man. Sir Lawrence adds the following interesting descrip-
tion : —
"Old Mr. Peel was rather an absent man. When he walked the
streets of Burton, he used to look downwards, and seemed ever to
^ Sketchy p. 21.
yS LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
be calculating some stiff question; and the common folks, shrewd
enough commonly in their perception ot eccentricities, dubbed him
' The Philosopher.' They gave him also another nickname, which I
have forgotten, which was derived from his habit of looking downward
as he walked. He must have been a philosopher indeed who, walking
upon them, could calmly contemplate the then round pebbles of Burton
pavement. He stooped a little in his latter days ; in his youth he had
been remarkably erect. He wore a bushy Johnsonian wig ; like that
sage, he was dressed in dark clothes of ample cut ; he leaned as he
walked upon a tall gold-headed cane, and as he was a very handsome
man, he looked a figure stately enough for a mediaeval burgomaster." ^
So much for the outward man of the founder of the Peel
family. Now, from the same hand, for a trait and anecdote
or two, partly of himself, partly of his wife, a dame of
gentler blood than his. They are not very significant,
but still are acceptable in the great scarcity of information
respecting this first in any way conspicuous Peel house-
hold :—
"It chanced one day that the Earl of Uxbridge, from whom he
rented his mills, called upon him on some business, on the conclusion
of which his Lordship was invited by Mr. Peel to his house, an invita-
tion which was courteously accepted. They walked together to the
house, which was at no great distance. As they approached it, Mr.
Peel saw that the front door was closed, and being always impatient
of form and also a valuer of time, he led his honoured guest into the
house by the back way on a washing-day, and whilst piloting him
through a North-West passage, not v/ithout its obstructions of tubs,
pails, and other household utensils, was observed by the reproachful
eye of his wife, who failed not, with a due observance, however, of
time and place, to make continual claim, in the name of decorum,
against an entry scarcely less lawless in her eyes than a disseisin."
Of the next story Mrs. Peel is more prominently and
strikingly the heroine : —
"This dame was quite able to guide the helm herself, as the follow-
ing anecdote will prove : —
"There was a panic; some great house had fallen. Mr. Peel was
from home when the news arrived, which came on a Saturday night.
1 Sketch, p 24.
THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMILY. "JC^
Rumour immediately puffed out her livid cheeks and began to throw
out ugly hints, and she did not spare the Peels, who were at this time
connected with a bank on which a run was apprehended. The next
morning Mrs. Peel came downstairs to breakfast dressed in her very
best suit, and seeing her daughter less handsomely attired than she in
her politic brain judged expedient, she desired her to go upstairs and
put on her very best clothes (for she respected raiment, and did not
call it ' things '). She counselled her also as to her looks. ' Look
as blithe as you can,' said she, 'for, depend upon it, if the folks see
us looking glum to-day, they will be all at the bank to-morrow.' So
out they sallied to church, and straight on in their ample garments
they sailed, slowly, serene, wearing no false colours, saluted and
saluting in return, holding their own, making no tacks, neither porting
nor starboarding tlieir helms, but proceeding as though they could
sweep over any ugly-looking craft which might cross them. And we
may fancy some of their humbler female neighbours mentally pricing
their gowns as they passed, with an ' Oh, bless you ! they are as safe
as the church ! ' for people will estimate solvency, rather illogically,
by what has been already expended. Wlio will say that this dame
was not fit to be the grandmother of a politic Minister? " ^
Who, indeed?
When quite an old gentleman, Robert Peel retired from
business, and spent with his wife his last years in a house
which he built for himself at Ardwick Green, then a suburb
of Manchester as rural as its name would betoken. " The
old people were present at the christening of their Robert's
sixth child. Their grandson Robert, the late Minister, used
when a child to visit them at Ardwick ; he spoke of them
always with respect and affection, and used to describe his
grandfather as a venerable, fine-looking old man. The
founder of the Peel family died in September 1795, nine
months before his wife, who was about his own age,
and who, though from no selfish motive, had hoped to
survive him. " Robert," she said to her husband,
one evening, towards the close of their lives, as they
sat by their fireside at Ardwick Green, " Robert, I
^ Sketch, p. 24-6.
80 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
hope that I may Hve a few months after thee." To his
interrogatory " Why ? " she replied, " Robert, thou hast been
always a kind, good husband to me ; thou hast been a man
well thought of, and I should like to stay by thee to the
last, and keep thee all right." ^ The kindly old dame's wish
was granted, and some six months after the death of her
husband, she was laid by his side in a vault of St. John's
Church, Manchester. It was one built by himself for
himself — as if, even in death, he did not care to return to
Blackburn, where, in the parish church, was the old family
vault of the Peels.
Thirty years or so afterwards, an industrious if almost
forgotten historian of Lancashire asked the first Sir Robert
Peel for some account of his father, and received the
following reply : —
" It is not in my power to furnish you with any particulars of much
interest. He moved in a confined sphere, and employed his talents in
improving the cotton trade. He had neither wish nor opportunity of
making himself acquainted with his native country, or society far re-
moved from his native county of Lancaster. I lived under his roof
until I attained the age of manhood, and had many opportunities of
discovering that he possessed in an eminent degree a mechanical genius
and a good heart. He had many sons, and placed them all in situa-
tions where they might be useful to each other. The cotton trade was
preferred as best calculated to second this object, and by habits of in-
dustiy, and imparting to his offspring an intimate knowledge of the
circumstances of the cotton manufacture, he lived to see his children
connected together in business, and, by their successful exertions, to
become, without one exception, opulent and happy. My father may
truly be said to have been the founder of our family, and he so accu-
rately appreciated the importance of commercial wealth in a national
point of view, that he was often heard to say that the gains to the
individual were small compared with the national gain. The only
surviving record of my father is to be found in the memory of his sur-
viving friends ."-
^ Sketch, p. 28.
^ Corry, History of Lancashire (London, 1S25). In the original
THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMILY. 8 1
This emphatic and trustworthy testimony proves that
the founder of the Peel family was no ordinary man, no
mere accumulator, however successful and energetic, of
wealth ; but that though his culture was probably as limited
as his sphere, he was capable of viewing from a national, as
well as from a personal, point of view the new industries
in the development of which he was aiding. The Burton
people had more reason than they knew of to dub him
"The Philosopher." Practical sagacity and energy are
common enough among industrial architects of their own
fortunes, but in the founder of the Peel family these qualities
were combined with a trace, at least, of the patriotic feeling
which bore fruit in the lives of the two Roberts, his son and his
grandson. Before he died he saw his third son, a prosperous
and opulent man, sitting in the House of Commons, where
the earliest measures of beneficent factory legislation were
to be originated by this first Sir Robert, as he was to be.
His son, again, a boy of seven, when the founder of the
family died, was already in training for the career destined
to carry to all the ends of the earth the fame of the name ot
Peel.
edition of Baines's Lancashire, iii. 670 (and the error is repeated in the
second edition of 1870, i. 519 note), this interesting extract from Cony's
book is quoted as a sketch of Sir Robert Peel, the first baronet, by his
son the statesman. The mistake, or even perversion, is the more
singular that Corry's statement is perfectly distinct ; and he says that he
received the sketch from "the present baronet," who in 1825 was of
course the first Sir Robert Peel. Further, the passage as given by
Corry concludes thus: — "He was born at the family estate, called
Peel Cross, near Blackburn, and died at Manchester about the year
1800, in the 79th year of his age." This is not Sir Lawrence Peel's date,
adopted in the text ; but clearly it is quite inapplicable to the first
baronet, who died in 1830. Baines, however, actually transformed the
concluding sentence of the sketch in Cony, finishing off the extract
thus : " And died at Drayton Park, Staffordshire, on the 3d of May 1S30,
in the 74th year of his age."
III.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL*
THE first Sir Robert Peel was born in 1750, about the
time when, as is surmised, his father, the founder of
the family, exchanged farming at Peel Fold for manufac-
turing at Blackburn. Very little of his early life has been
chronicled or is known. Most of that little is found in a
memoir of him, published the year after he was made a
baronet, in a volume of Public Characters, a biographical
annual which catered to the curiosity of our fathers con-
cerning the careers of notable men, their contemporaries.
The style of the memoir is inflated, but it contains anec-
* Ptthlic Cha7-acters of 1803-1804 (London, printed for Richard
Phillips, 1804), § Sir Robert Peel, Bart., M.P. The Peel Family, its
Rise and Fortunes, a series of papers published in the Maiichester
Examiner and Times during October and November 1850. The
History of the Facto7-y Movement, from the year \Zo2 to the F}iaci?nent of
the Ten Hours Bill in 1847, by Alfred (London, 1857). The Life of
Robert Ozven, written by himself (London, 1857). Earl Stanhope's Life of
the Right Honourable William Pitt (London, 1861). Public General
Statutes, 1802 and 1 8 19. Report of the Minutes of Evidence taken befo7-e
the Select Committee of the Hotise of Commons on the State of the Children
Employed in the Manufactures of the Utiitcd KingdoiJi, 25th April-i8th
June 1816. Sir Lawrence Peel's Sketch, and W. Cooke Taylor's Lift
and Tit?ies of Peel. Smiles's Selfllelp. Parliamentary History, &^c,,
&-C.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 83
dotes and traits of him mentioned nowhere else, and pos-
sibly contributed by some who knew him. In this per-
formance it is loftily recorded that the first Sir Robert Peel
"gave early proofs of uncommon quickness of perception,
and betrayed an impatience of being excelled ; for when a
boy he could little brook a superior. . . . The contempo-
raries of his youth are unanimous in their testimony that
he discovered a precocious attachment to books, and an
insatiable thirst of knowledge. In his early, as well as his
more mature years, even when his commercial concerns
were most urgent, he rarely omitted to devote some part of
every day to reading. . . , The hours that others dissipated
under pretence of recreation were employed by him in
books, and the midnight lamp incessantly witnessed the
patient labour with which he cultivated his intellectual
faculties." Sir Lawrence Peel calls him " an ambitious
man," and his ambition, according to his contemporary
biographer of 1803, displayed itself betimes. "Very early
in life, and while fortune appeared to shut the door of
advancement against him, Sir Robert Peel entertained
strong hopes of being the founder of a family ; and at the
age of fourteen, to the great entertainment of his brothers "
(he was the third of seven sons), " he avowed his determina-
tion to raise himself to rank and consequence in society.
He bottomed these hopes on a conviction that any situa-
tion in this free country is accessible to a good capacity,
aided by prudence and industry." Wonderful, if true, for a
boy of fourteen.
In the more sober narrative of his nephew Sir Lawrence,
the future baronet and millionnaire " certainly evinced at
an early age sagacity and forethought, and a desire to
depend upon himself alone. When he was eighteen, he
told his father that he thought they were ' too thick upon
the ground.' These were his words, and he ofifered to go
84 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
elsewhere if his father would give him ^500 to begin life
with — a proposal which was not then conceded. " ^ Possibly
Mr. Peel had not many sums of that amount to spare,
and the ambitious youth plodded on for several years in
his father's business. Meanwhile his uncle Haworth, with a
Yates whom one takes to be a relative of the partner of
Peel, senior, had quitted the Blackburn firm, and estab-
lished printworks on the banks of the Irwell, five or six
miles from Manchester, at Bury, the birthplace of John
Kay, the inventor of the fly-shuttle, and from of old a seat of
manufacture. Haworth resolved to choose another partner
among his brother-in-law's sons, and he pitched upon the
energetic as well as ambitious Robert, to whose departure,
at the age of twenty-two,^ it seems, with a definite prospect
of this satisfactory kind, the father consented. The Bury
firm of Haworth & Yates was in its infancy, and young
Robert had been brought up frugally. On his arrival at
Bury, he boarded in the house of Haworth's other partner,
Yates, a married man with a family. The sum paid for
board and lodging by the junior to the senior partner was
at first, says gossip, " only 6s. a week ; but Yates consider-
ing this too Kttle, insisted on the weekly payment being
increased a shilling, to which Peel at first demurred, and a
difference between the partners took place, which was
eventually compromised by the lodger paying an advance
of sixpence a week," ^ — a story which may be believed or
not, as the reader pleases. Certain it is, however, that this
sojourn under Yates's roof was the means of colouring with
a little romance the young man's laborious life. " William
Yates's eldest child was a girl named Ellen, and she very
soon became an especial favourite with the young lodger.
On returning from his hard day's work at 'the Ground,'"
^ Sketch, p. 32. - Public Characters, p. 6.
3 Selj-Help, p. 40.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 85
as the printworks on the banks of the Irwell were called,
" he would take the little girl upon his knee, and say to
her, ' Nelly, thou bonny little dear, wilt be my wife ? ' to
which the child would readily answer ' Yes,' as any child
would do. ' Then I'll wait for thee, Nelly ; I'll wed thee
and none else,' " ^ — a story founded upon fact, and which,
as thus told, one would wish to be true. The first Sir
Robert Peel was a man of strong feeling, and tenacious in
his attachments. He waited and he worked until the little
girl had grown to be a beautiful young woman of marriage-
able age. Who knows how much of the prosperity of the
Bury house may have been due to the young man's affec-
tion for the daughter of his partner, and to his ambition for
her sake, as well as for his own?
Prosper the firm did, and mainly through the energy
and ability of the junior partner. The discernment of his
uncle had brought him into the Bury firm, and his father-
in-law that was to be strengthened his position in it.
" Eventually Mr. Haworth left the firm, and Mr. Yates
became its senior partner. He, however, deferred a great
deal to his junior partner. To every remonstrance which
the innovations of young Robert Peel excited among the
older hands, Mr. Yates — his Goulburn, and an excellent
second — used to give invariably this one answer, ' The will
of our Robert is law here.' " ^
"He was a man," Sir Lawrence continues, "of untiring energy.
For many a day his life was one of hard, incessant labour. He
would rise at night from his bed, when there was a likelihood of bad
weather, to visit the bleaching-grounds ; and one night in each week
he used to sit up all night, attended by his pattern-drawer, to receive
any new patterns which the London coach, arriving at midnight,
might bring down ; for at first they were followers and imitators of
the London work, but they soon aspired to lead their masters, and it
1 Self-Help, p. 40. * Sketch, p. 33.
86 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
was soon apparent to the Londoners themselves that their trade would
desert them and flow into these new channels." Elsewhere his nepliew
says, "My father, who, though he loved his brother, was not blinded
or biassed by natural affection, always spoke with great respect of his
brother's understanding, and allowed him the palm for sagacity and
ability as a man of business. I remember asking my father — I hope in
no spirit of impertinent curiosity — why it was that 'the Bury house,' of
which my uncle was the head, had so far surpassed in success tliat in
which my father and his other brother were partners? He said, after a
short pause, ' I think they had more brains. ' "
Young Peel settled at Bury, and began the development
of the print business on "the Ground" some ten years
after the introduction of the trade itself into Lancashire by
the Claytons. But the processes of the print-trade, both
in Lancashire and in London, were still primitive and slow,
and they remained such until cylinder-printing came into
vogue. In taste, too, the English calico-printers were
sadly deficient.
"The simplicity and stiff, awkward appearance of some of the
earliest patterns designed and used at ' the Ground ' would now excite a
smile, and are such, both as regards position and colouring, as the
merest tyro in the art would now scarcely think of executing. Yet
these things sold high, and for one description of work alone there was
for many years a regular demand of 20,000 pieces, the profit on each
piece being one guinea clear." ^
The English product, whatever its defects, was the
only one of which the law permitted the purchase or the
use, and supply created a demand even at a high price.
The young Peel's success in developing the Bury business
was so rapid, that a year or two after he joined the firm
they were driving a considerable colonial, called the
" foreign " trade in the passage about to be quoted. Sup-
posing that he went to Bury in 1772, the firm must have
been exporting to the American colonies two years after-
^ 77^1? Peel Fatnily, chap. vi.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 8/
wards, since 1774 is the date of the non-importation agree-
ment referred to in the following extract : —
"The firm early began a foreign trade, and kept a shipping ware-
house in Liverpool. It was the chintzes of Peel & Yates, among
others, that, previous to the League of Boston, the good citizens of that
city prohibited their wives and daughters from wearing; and many
American ladies, in their zeal for the public cause, burnt their stock of
English-printed gowns, rather than wear an article of British taxation.
The style of the calico patterns continued the same almost invariably
from year to year, the high price readily obtained for them making it
not so strictly essential to obtain newer, richer, or more original designs.
The patterns generally consisted of leaves variously disposed, small
circles, pippins, clubs, dice, and diamonds, and spots, and flower-heads
of the daisy or buttercup form, which mostly presented, not a delicate
profile view, but, disposed over the calico, stared the beholder full in
the face — what are called ' set ' patterns, trails, &c. , not being then in
use ; whilst on the ' furnitures,' some fully-opened sunflowers were five
inches across, and the thorns of rose-stalks most palpably displayed, as
if the artist conceived that was being very true to nature. But notwith-
standing the inferiority of the patterns, the price of a garment-piece of
goods of the above description, containing twenty yards, was from £^
to £S, or 3s. to 3s. 6d. a yard, and even more. Many years later, the
very commonest print possible to purchase was is. 6d. a yard" — they
can now, 1876, be had, it seems, for a fourth of the sum — "and down
to 1810, good prints of one or two colours only, on a white ground,
were 2s. 6d., or higher, muslins 3s. 6d. a yard, and printed 'furnitures'
the same price."-'
So much for the aspects and prices of those earlier
products of the Lancashire print-trade ; now for its printer's
modus operandi: —
" Prints at first received from the hands of the printer only an
impression from the block, or one colour, which was generally an
outline of the object, if more colours were to be laid on. The laying
on of colours was done by women, of whom a large body were main-
tained, called ' pencillers,' and long ranges of workshops were set
apart for their use, as that of Peel Street and New Street, now divided
into dwellings, but which were built for pencilling-shops, and mistresses
^ The Peel Family, chap. vi.
88 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
appointed over them. The number of ' pencillers' was very great, and
the work most delicate and beautiful, as may be seen upon an inspection
of any of the best old pieces of print so treated. One then considered
very costly and beautiful was a chintz pattern upon a white ground ;
the outline of dark purple was laid on by the block ; the remaining
colours, two greens, two reds, two blues, a drab and a yellow, being
pencilled upon the cloth by the women ; and it must be remembered
that every single leaf or object all over the work had to be separately
touched with a pencil of the colour required. Thus it will be found
the surface of the cloth required passing over nine times previous to the
completion of the pattern. Sometimes, in a great press of business,
pencilling was given out to be done at home, apart from the works ; but
this was rather inconvenient on account of the pieces having to be
drawn upwards from the work-table, for the colours to diy. In the
shops each woman had her piece suspended before her, with a supply
of hair-pencils of different degrees of fineness, according to the size
of the figure or object to be touched, and saucers containing ' colour ' of
red, green, blue, yellow, &c., of each variety of shade, according to
the pattern required. When the outline only required filling up with
the appointed tint, the work was easily and expeditiously performed,
and a good workwoman might sometimes earn £^ a week. In this
state of things there was no lack of suitors, and a young woman had
then no more to do than to signify whom she would choose among
those too often mercenary swains ! " ^
Lastly, and to conclude : —
"A number of females were also employed at Bury ground as
'block pinners,' and apprentices were regularly received to the busi-
ness, which consisted in inserting small lengths of brass wires or pins,
of different degrees of fineness, into a wooden block to form the
pattern required, which was delineated on the block by a putter-on or
dresser. Sometimes rollers of lead or boxwood " — metal, it will be
observed, is here spoken of as a material familiar to the print-trade —
"were used to receive the pinning pattern; but from the hardness of
the metal or wood these were more difficult than the common block,
whose surface was generally plane-tree. I have known one block of
an extra size contain nearly 63,000 pins. This work is now seldom
required except for the printing of silk handkerchiefs and tablecovers,
and this is of a very coarse description. A woman in this business
could well earn from 12s. to 24s. a week." ^
The Peel Family, chap. vi. ^ lb.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 89
Such were the tedious processes of a hundred years ago,
whereas now four, five, and six colour cyhnder machines
are in use, turning over a piece of 200 yards in a minute,
each cyhnder applying its special portion of the pattern
to the cloth as this passes along. One man to regulate the
rollers, with two boys to supply the colours, can do as
much work as 200 men were needed for in the days of
block-printing. So great has been the consequent exten-
sion of calico-printing, that one -seventh of the whole
cotton imported goes to feed the British print- trade with
raw material.
And this mention of cotton brings us to another large
enterprise in which the Bury firm was soon engaged.
" Until a regular supply of calico could be procured,
much" — not all, since a mixture of flax and cotton was
sometimes used — " was of linen, of rather coarse texture ;
and it was the very limited supply they were able to obtain
of this material that principally directed the attention of
those who could estimate the capabilities of the printing
trade to the much more extensive manufacture of cotton
into calico." Fortunate in this respect for him were the
circumstances of the time at which the young Peel settled
in Bury and threw his energies into the print-trade. Soon
after his arrival there, Arkwright, in 1774, took out the
patent which made possible the manufacture of calico all
of cotton, and five years later Crompton invented the
mule, which gave completeness, as it were, to the new
cotton manufacture. The reader has seen how Robert Peel
pounced upon the mule, and offered to take its inventor
into partnership.^ For already, and no doubt from the
earliest practicable moment. Peel and his partners had
begun to manufacture calico for their printworks, and
with the mule at their disposal, their operations in this
' Ante, p. 10.
90 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
way could become larger and larger. Five years after
the invention of the mule, Peel and the firm of which he
was now the working head had no fewer than 6,800 persons
in their employment. The calicoes, which they bleached,
as well as printed, were manufactured by weavers whom
they hired, out of yarn spun by their own "hands." In
our own days — days of the division of labour — there is —
indeed, for a long time there has been — a separation of
the businesses of spinner and manufacturer, of bleacher
and calico-printer. But the Bury house performed all
four operations, gaining a profit upon each, and thus it
came to employ a number of workers, probably much
greater than any single firm in the cotton trade of to-day
can boast of having in its service.
"They soon had in the neighbourhood around Buty what were then
considered immense establishments, as the Radcliffe Mill, Makiii Mill,
Hinds, the Burrs, White Ash, and Summerseat, and employed weavers
in Yorkshire and over a large portion of North and East Lancashire.
They had also a printwork, afterwards purchased by Messrs Grant,
at Ramsbottom, in connection with the works at Bury, and a bleaching
and chemical work situated between Buiy and Radcliffe ; besides
which, the extensive grounds and crofts around their printing estab-
lishments, and in front of Chamber Hall, to the extent of many acres,
were covered with pieces stretched to bleach. To persons unaccustomed
to the sight of these white fabrics in great numbers, side by side and
length by length, overspreading and completely hiding the green grass,
they have all the effect at a distance, especially in sunlight, of extensive
and brilliant sheets of water." ^
A pleasant and picturesque spectacle then and for some
time afterwards, since it was only in 1776 that a certain
Swedish apothecary's assistant, named Scheele, discovered a
greenish-looking gas, and called it chlorine, little suspecting
that it was to be the great bleaching agency of the future, and
^ The Peel Family, chap. iv.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 9 1
by its swift and potent efficacy in that way, economising
space as well as time, was to contribute enormously to
the development of the cotton manufacture in general, and
of calico-printing in particular.
Long before the business expanded to these dimensions,
Peel must have quitted the house of his partner, Yates, and
set up some frugal little bachelor-home of his own. Doubt-
less, too, he might have married, and married well, long
before he could point to more than 6,000 human beings
as dependent upon himself and his firm. But he waited
and waited, hopefully and happily, until the little girl who
sat upon his knee when he first settled at Bury had grown
to marriageable womanhood ; and in this case the course
of true love seems to have run with perfect smoothness.
Here — fancy filling in an outline of fact — is a little sketch
of some of the surroundings of iliQSQ promessi sposi, and of
some of their pre-matrimonial perambulations : —
"Her" — the young lady's — "father lived at Woodhill, a house and
grounds lying on the opposite bank of the river Irwell to that on which
the works were situated, and in consequence of this convenient position,
during Mr. Yates's residence at Woodhill a wooden bridge was thrown
across the river, which is not deep, from the garden, and formed a very
agreeable and expeditious mode of transit between 'the Ground,' as
the printworks and their appurtenances were called, and Woodhill, as
will appear to any one acquainted with the road, that must else have
been taken over Bury Bridge and down the Mill Brow. But it was
not Mr. Yates and his son Edmund alone who realised all the benefit
of this positive mode of communication ; it was also over this bridge
that Mr. Peel sped to visit his lady-love in the days of his happy and
successful wooing. And when ' the Ground ' was silent, and the people
retired from their daily labour. Miss Yates often returned across the
bridge with him, and, in the pleasant and quiet summer evenings, strolled
along towards tlie higher grounds, whilst he would point out to her with
pride and pleasure the rapid rise of quickly-extending buildings, all too
little ior the large and increasing demands that assailed them."^
^ The Peel Family, chap. vii.
92 LANCASHIRE WOK I HIES.
Ellen Yates is described by Sir Lawrence Peel as "a
young girl of sweet disposition, sense beyond her years,
pleasing manners, and with a handsome person." Take,
on the other hand, this slight portraiture of her mature
wooer, twice or so the age of his beloved : —
" His walk when in the prime of manhood was slow, dignified, and
majestic. His dress was of good material, but worn in a careless and
slovenly manner, as if it occupied little share of his attention. His
hands were often crossed behind his back under his coat, and unless
engaged in conversation, his attention and thoughts appeared almost
always pre-occupied. He was a man whom no one would venture
lightly to accost even upon a trifling subject." ^
At last arrived the day, the happy day, when the two
were made one, and some time in 1783 Ellen Yates
became Mrs. Robert Peel. The match turned out
excellently well, "though he was a grave man of business,
thirty-six" — no, thirty-three — "years of age, and she a
handsome lively girl," — Sir Lawrence Peel not forgetting to
mention "with a large dowry," ''She was," he adds, '• an
excellent wife, affectionate and sweet-tempered, possessed
of a good understanding and a sound judgment. She con-
formed in all things to her husband's tastes and views, and
though naturally inclining to a gayer life, she reconciled
herself at once to those quiet domestic habits which were
in a manner indigenous among the Peels." Nay, she was
useful to her husband even in his business, as is recorded
thus : — " Mr. Peel was a very inditTerent and unintelligible
writer, using the pen just in the position he chanced to take
it up, which was as often the wrong side before as not.
In the earlier years of his marriage, when Mr. Peel had
much of the correspondence under his own notice, his wife
was the person who wrote the letters of most consequence
that fell to the husband's more immediate share of the
' The reel Family, chap, vii.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 93
home and foreign business transactions." ^ Yes ; and in
those earher years of his marriage, even in his domestic
arrangements business was not forgotten. After the
wedding, the bridegroom took his bride home to a very
small house, "the front part of which is still" — a.d. 1850,
that is — "the counting-house on ' the Ground,' consisting
only of an entrance hall, two parlours and a kitchen, with
corresponding rooms above ; and over the yard a room was
built," says the faithful chronicler, "because it would make
a large packing-room for printed goods, and they were
short of a place for that purpose." - In this small house
were born to the Peel couple their first two children,
daughters both; but just when the arrival of a third child
was expected they had migrated to a larger residence, not
far from the works — Chamber Hall, to wit, an ancient
building, improved for its new tenants by the addition of a
"splendid front," and otherwise. In due season, on the
5th of February 1788 (the year before the first French
Revolution broke out to alter the whole course of the
British politics in which the little stranger was to play a
prominent part), the third child arrived, and proved to be
a boy, — Sir Robert Peel, the statesman that was to be. It
was a great day for the Peel household, and ale flowed
in copious streams from Chamber Hall to refresh the
workers of " the Ground " in honour of the birth of a son
and heir to their employer. The happy sire's gladness
and gratitude found another, a more solemn and a more
fruitful, expression. " When the glad tidings reached him
that he was the father of a son, he fell on his knees in his
closet and returned thanks to the Almighty, and in the
same moment he vowed that he ' would give his child to
his country,' — an offering which, however lightly it may
have been treated by those who knew not the deep earnest-
^ T/ie Peel Family, chap. vii. - lb.
94 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
ness of the man's nature, was as piously formed in hope,
and as gratefully in spirit, as was ever, in times of old,
a solemn dedication made of a child of hope to the service
of God." So says undoubtingly the truthful historiographer
of the Peels,^ a veteran, experienced, and far from credu-
lous lawyer and judge. And such really seems to have
been the vow registered by a calico-printer in a remote,
petty, and obscure provincial town in the England of the
old age of the arch-trifler Horace Walpole ; the England of
the dissolute youth of the Prince of Wales, afterwards his
Majesty George IV. ; the England of that at first splendid
theatricality, political and parliamentaiy (it grew dim and
dreary enough before long), the impeachment of Warren
Hastings by Mr. Edmund Burke, which began in West-
minster Hall eight days after the birth of the little boy at
Chamber Hall. It was in considerable measure due to
the simple-minded enthusiasm, the unquestioning and
ardent patriotism, — backed effectively by their money, —
of men of this Bury manufacturer's stamp, that England
was enabled to traverse unscathed the domestic and
foreign perils of the Revolutionary period which opened in
the year following the birth of the second Sir Robert
Peel.
In 1790, two years after the birth of the future Prime
Minister, the inventions of Arkwright and Crompton, in
their combined and fruitful operation, were largely de-
veloped, and the Bury firm had them at command for the
manufacture of the calicoes to be printed on. As regards
the special business of Peel and his partners, cylinder-
printing, brought into play in Lancashire some three years
before, had also given the print-trade a great impetus. In
1790 the import of cotton wool into this country was five
times what it had been ten years before, and in the same
1 Sketch, p. 40.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 95
interval the value of the British cotton manufactures
exported had increased nearly eightfold, to say nothing of
home consumption. The Bury firm participated largely
in the prosperity indicated by these figures or facts, — a
prosperity which, with occasional breaks, eclipses, and
depressions, increased as the years rolled on, though never,
seemingly, at a greater ratio than during the last decade of
the eighteenth century. "About 1790," with capital
overflowing in his hands, the wealthy and thriving Peel
began to buy property in and near Tamworth, the Stafford-
shire borough in the parliamentary representation of which
the Peel family has shared ever since. He built cotton
mills in the neighbourhood, too, and this gave him a
further hold on the borough. In 1797 he so increased his
purchases that they included the whole of the estate of
Drayton, with which the memory of Peel the statesman
is familiarly associated. He pulled down most of the
old manor-house, and built upon its site the modern
mansion owned by his grandson, the third baronet, and
Sir Robert Peel of to-day. These successive purchases of
Drayton and its manor were made from the Thynnes, now
Marquises of Bath, into whose possession they had gradu-
ally come from the Devereuxes, Earls of Essex. It was
from Drayton that Queen Elizabeth's Earl of Essex set forth
on his ill-fated Irish expedition, about two hundred years
before its purchase by the Bury calico-printer.^ But Bury
was not as yet neglected for the new and at first only
occasional home at Drayton, though the journey from the
one place to the other took the family coach "two entire
days and a portion of a third " to perform.^ For some
time Bury remained the headquarters of the Peels. It
^ Stebbing Shaw, History of Staffordshire {LoxiC^oxi, 1798, &c.), vol.
ii. part i. p. 8.
- Sketch, p. 59.
9^ LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
was during the interval between Peel's first and last
purchases at Drayton that Dr. Aikin's bulky and useful
quarto appeared ; and from his description of the Bury
of 1795, which, thanks chiefly to Peel and his firm, had
doubled its population since their settlement in it, let the
following passage be quoted : —
"The town and neighbourhood of Bury have been highly benefited
by the establishment of the very capital manufacturing and printing
works belonging to the company of which that very respectable gentle-
man, Robert Peel, Esq., member of Parliament for Tam worth, is the
head. The principal of these works are situated on the side of the
Irwell, from which they have large reservoirs of water. There is like-
wise a separate reservoir, supplied by a spring of fine clear water,
which is used for the washing of goods when the river is muddied by
floods. The articles here made and printed are chiefly the finest kinds
of the cotton manufactory, and they are in high request both at Man-
chester and London. The printing is performed in the most improved
methods, both by wooden blocks and copper rollers, and the execution
and colours are some of the very best of the Lancashire fabric. The
premises occupy a large portion of ground, and cottages have been
built for the accommodation of the workmen, which form streets and
give the appearance of a village. Ingenious artists are employed in
drawing patterns, ^ and cutting and engraving them on wood and copper,
and many women and children in mixing and pencilling the colours, &c.
The company has several other extensive works in the neighbourhood,
^ At first the Bury firm had no drawing-shop, receiving most of their
patterns from London, and employing only one pattern-designer, also
from London, who had a small room to himself, and was called " Mr.,"
a great distinction, doubtless, in the Bury of a hundred years ago.
At the date, however, of Aikin's description, things had altered in this
respect. " In those palmy days of calico-printing, pattern-drawers were
considered a very fashionable " (!) "body of men." In society — wonder-
ful to relate — "they appeared in breeches, white silk stockings, silver
buckles on the shoes and at the knee, ruffles at the waist, soft cravat
of fine muslin tied round the throat, with long ends falling on the
breast, and often embroidered, and the hair powdered." — The Peel
Family, chap. vii. According to the same authority, men employed
in block-printing earned from 40s. to 60s. a week, which represents, of
course, a much larger value than the same wages now.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 97
as well on the Irwell as on the Roch. Some of these are confined to
the carding, slubbing, and spinning of cotton ; others, to washing the
cottons witli water-wheels, which go round with great velocity, but can
be stopped in an instant for taking out and putting in the goods.
Boiling and bleaching the goods are performed at other works. In
short, the extensiveness of the whole concern is such as to find constant
employ for most of the inhabitants of Bury and its neighbourhood, of
both sexes and all ages ; and notwithstanding their great number, they
have never wanted work in the most unfavourable times. The peculiar
healthiness of the people employed may be imputed partly to the
judicious and humane regulations put in practice by Mr. Peel, and
partly to the salubrity of the air and climate. At a short distance from
Bury and the works is a large well-built house called Chamber Hall,
in which Mr. Peel himself resides, and in an adjoining meadow is a
cottage or nursery for his young family," — among them a Master Robert,
one day to be known to fame. " The whole is fitted up in a style of
neatness and elegance, and surrounded with ornamental grounds and
rising plantations." With an eye to the future as well as the present,
the Doctor adds: "The canal from Bury to Manchester, which will
come within the breadth of the Irwell from Mr. Peel's works, will
greatly facilitate the conveyance of goods and raw material. " ^
A not unpleasing picture of a scene of thriving and
wholesome or wholesome-looking industry.
"That very respectable gentleman, Robert Peel, Esq.,"
is spoken of in the foregoing extract as "member of
Parliament for Tamworth." Yes ; and before he attained
this dignity he had become more or less of a public nan ;
to explain the how and the why of all which, we must go
back a little in his story. In the intervals of business,
Peel, it will be remembered, was bookish from his youth
upwards; and being of a reflective turn, he formed
notions of his own about many things that lay beyond
the sphere of calico-printing. His reading, however, had
not included the Wealth of Nations, or if so, it left him un-
convinced on one important question of national economics,
nay — as will be seen hereafter — as to the absurdity of
^ Country Round Manchester, p, 268.
N
98 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
the so-called " commercial system " of political economy,
to overthrow which was one of the chief objects of
Adam Smith in writing his famous book. Adam Smith, in
1776, refuted the notion that, since a national debt is held
by the nation itself, there is no harm in it, and four years
afterwards, Peel, it seems, published a pamphlet in support
of the thesis which had been impugned in the Wealth of
Nations. Peel's present biographer has not fallen in with
a copy of this pamphlet ; but it is thus described in the
contemporary memoir of its author already quoted from : —
"The first" — was there ever another? — " literary essay attempted by
the subject of these memoirs was a pamphlet published in 1780 on the
national debt. The ingenuity and novelty of the inferences main-
tained in that work excited considerable attention ; and although they
might then appear paradoxical to superficial minds, yet every subsequent
year has more and more confirmed the truth of them " — nonsense.
"At the close of the American war, the fears of the nation were very
powerfully excited by the vast increase of our funded debt," — to some-
thing less than two hundred and fifty millions sterling; — "and the com-
mercial part of the community suffered more than any other body of
men from apprehensions that our increased burdens would soon fetter
our exertions, if not ultimately involve the nation in bankruptcy. Sir
Robert very early discovered, and, if we are not mistaken, was the
first" — not at all — "to maintain, that the national wealth was not
diminished by the increase of the national debt, and that statesmen
had misconceived its operations by confounding a public with a private
engagement.
"With a view to correct this radical error, as well as to remove the
apprehensions of the timid, and to restore confidence in the people
in respect to their own resources, he published his thoughts, under the
title of 'The National Debt productive of National Prosperity.' He
seems at tliat time to have stood alone in this novel opinion ; but, as
the subject has since become better understood, and his arguments have
derived strength from subsequent occurrences, the generality of men
view with more complacency the present state of the nation, altliough
the debt has been nearly trebled since the pamphlet appeared. In
this work he maintained that a domestic public debt, owed by the
community at large to a part of the same community, cannot impair
the aggregate wealth of that community, and that if a given sum, how-
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 99
ever large, was annually raised from ihe people to pay the interest of the
debt, the same sum being received by the public creditors, and laid out
in the purchase of articles of necessity and comfort for themselves pro-
vided by national industry, circulates at home, and in its transit from one
possessor to another gives birih to new sources and modifications of
wealth." 1
Of this wonderful pamphlet Sir Lawrence Peel makes
no mention. Another of Peel the statesman's biographers
dismisses it with the remark,^ that "it has long since sunk
into the oblivion which usually awaits speculations on such
subjects; but it is supposed to have had some share in
bringing him " — its author — " acquainted with Mr. Pitt,
who soon regarded INIr. Peel as his safest adviser on
manufacturing and commercial subjects." A very unlikely
supposition, followed by a very questionable statement.
Four or five years after the publication of the pamphlet,
which, if he ever read it, Pitt, as a disciple of Adam
Smith,^ must have tossed aside with contempt, Peel was
^ Public Characters 0/ 1803-4, P- 9-
* Taylor's Life and Times of Peel, i. 9.
3 "In his" — Pitt's — "speech on the Budget this year" — 1792 —
"one of the greatest and most comprehensive financial statements that
he ever made, it is striking to find the Prime Minister ascribe the
merit ot his system in no small degree to the author ot the Wealth of
Nations, *an author,' said Pitt, 'now unhappily no more, whose
extensive knowledge of detail and depth of philosophical research
will, I believe, furnish the best solution to every question connected
with the history of commerce or with the systems of political economy.'"
— Lord Stanhope's "Life of Pitt," ii. 141. Elsewhere in the same
work (iv. 402), is quoted the following interesting reminiscence of a
meeting between Pitt and the philosopher, showing how thoroughly
Pitt had mastered the doctrines of the Wealth of A^ations : — "There
is an anecdote which Lord Sidmouth was also fond of telling of Pitt
in company with another eminent man. Pitt, so Lord Sidmouth
used to premise, had a talent of improving a man's own sentiments,
and returning them to him in a better dress. Once, when Lord Sid-
mouth had dined at Pitt's house with Dundas and Adam Smith,
the latter said to Lord Sidmouth after dinner, 'What an extra-
lOO LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
probably brought — but as a practical man, not as a specu-
lative pamphleteer — into contact with Pitt. In course of
time, the self-made manufacturer conceived the strongest
admiration for the Heaven-born Minister ; but there is not
the slightest evidence that Peel was ever a special adviser
of Pitt's "on manufacturing and commercial subjects." In
point of fact, Peel first emerges into public life as a keen
opponent of a fiscal scheme of Pitt's, and of one of Pitt's
early attempts to carry out free trade principles ; which
emergence into public life befell in this wise : —
In 1784 the young Pitt, Prime Minister in his twenty-
fifth year, triumphed over the Fox-North coalition, which
he had displaced at the fiat of the King, and the result of
a general election showed the nation to be of the same
mind as George III. But Pitt received from his beaten
opponents a troublesome legacy of national debt and
difficulty, the result chiefly of the American war, partly of
their own financial inefficiency. One of his first tasks
was to reorganise the financial and fiscal system of the
country, and he performed it, on the whole, very success-
fully, as well as very skilfully, and with the general approval.
But whatever his skill, he could not do without new taxes,
and, among other sources of revenue, the rising, thriving,
and prosperous cotton manufacture seemed to him, as it
had seemed to his immediate predecessors, one promising
and profitable. The print-trade had long been subject to
an excise duty, and Pitt bethought him that, besides in-
creasing this old duty, he might levy a new impost of the
same kind on home-made plain calicoes. His proposal to
this effect, with the larger budget in which it was a little
item, received the sanction of Parliament,^ the whole sum
ordinary man Pitt is ! He makes me understand my own ideas better
than before.' "
^ In 1774 the piohibition to print or dye English calicoes wan
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 01
expected from the new duties not being estimated at much
more than ^/^3o,ooo. The extension of the always un-
popular excise to bleached calicoes and the imposition of the
*' fustian tax," as it was called, produced a great ebullition
of discontent in Lancashire — discontent enhanced by the
fact that the year before there had been a great reduc-
tion in the very heavy import duties previously levied on
muslins and calicoes, and, in any case, far louder and more
threatening than any possible yield from the tax was
.worth. To this grievance, moreover, was almost simul-
taneously added another, arising out of Pitt's Irish policy.
Chatham's son, already the advocate at once of free
trade, of parliamentary reform, and of true justice to
Ireland, traced the Irish distress of the time to what seem
now the almost incredibly absurd restrictions then imposed
on the commerce between England and the sister island.
On most of the manufactures of and exports from Ireland
prohibitory duties were imposed in England, while those
of England were admitted into Ireland at duties compara-
tively low. One of Pitt's proposals was that the duties
should be reduced in the country where they were highest
to the amount payable on the same commodities in the
removed, and they miglU be printed on paying an excise duty of 3d.
per square yard. In 1779 and 1782 three several additions of 5 per
cent., making in the whole 15 per cent., were made to that duty. "In
1784, when Mr. i'itt imposed new taxes to repair the finances of the
country, injured by the American war, he taxed not only printed but
even bleached goods, and comjiclled the bleachers, jjrinters, and dyers
to take out licences, for whicli the sum of ^2 was to be paid annually.
By the Act passed for tliis purpose (24 George III., c. 40), he laid a
new duty on all cottons and mixed goods of id. per yard, if bleached
or printed, under 3s. per yard in value, and 2d. on all above that
value, in addition to the former duties of 3d. per yard, and 15 per
cent, additional was charged on the new duties as well i;s on the old.
These impositions excited great alarm and discontent throughout
Lancashire, &c. — Baines, " Colton jMaiinfactitre,^'' p. 279.
102 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
country where they were lowest. The indignation of the
Lancashire manufacturers at the fustian tax was aggravated
by this proposal to establish free trade between England
and Ireland. The doctrines of Adam Smith were accepted
by the manufacturers of Lancashire then just as little as
now, a hundred years after the publication of the Wealth
of Natiotis, they are accepted by those of the United
States, of France, Austria, and Russia. To complete the
contrast between the England of that day and this, Fox
and the Whigs were vehemently opposed to free trade
between England and Ireland, and the "Liberal" states-
men and politicians of 1785 aided and abetted to the
utmost of their power the " Protectionist " manufacturers
of Manchester and Lancashire. The Lord Derby of 1785,
as a Whig and Lancashire magnate, welcomed Fox to
Knowsley, where he introduced him to the spokesmen
of the malcontent manufacturers of the county; and the
Whig parliamentary leaders, in their then political straits,
were delighted to form an alliance with the representatives
of the cotton manufacture — a young but already great and
a rapidly growing industrial interest. Of the "fustian tax,"
more may have to be said in the memoir of Thomas Walker
the elder, the Lancashire worthy who headed the agitation
against the impost. Meanwhile here are a few elucidatory
extracts from the reports of the proceedings of the House
of Commons arising out of the twofold grievance — Pitt's
fustian tax and his Irish propositions : —
"March 16, 1785. — 'Mr. Stanley,' one of the members for Lancashire,
' informed the House that the petition M'hich then lay at his feet (for it
was too heavy for him to carry in his hand), had been transmitted to him
with directions that he should present it to the House ; it was signed
by 80,000 manufacturers in different parts of Lancashire.' By "manu-
facturers" tlie honourable gentleman meant "persons engaged in
manufacture ; " 80,000 being really, it seems, the whole number of
human souls then dependent, as employers and employed, on the
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. IO3
Lancashire cotton manufacture. 'They complained,' the honourable
gentleman continued, 'of the tax imposed last year on the fustian and
other cotton manufactures as absolutely ruinous to their trade, and of
the introduction of excise officers into their houses. They stated that,
without any benefit to the revenue, this tax would subject their manu-
factures to full 8 per cent, in the exportation, which would necessarily
deprive them of the markets that they actually had, and drive their
workmen to the necessity of emigrating to other countries.' Then
comes a deploring and almost despairing reference to the Irish griev-
ance. ' They added, that the admission of Irish fustians and cottons
into England was all that was wanting completely to annihilate the
cotton trade of this countiy, by which so many thousands of indus-
trious and useful subjects got their bread. The petition having been
read by the clerk, Mr. Stanley moved that it be referred on Monday
next to a committee of the whole House.' This was agreed to after
a discussion, in which Mr. Stanley, rising again, made, among others,
the following remarks : ' The manufacturers, unwilling to submit any
longer to the hardships arising from a burdensome tax, and from a
still more burdensome mode of collecting it, had resolved to discharge
their workmen as they brought home their work. This had already
been done to a great degree, and so numerous was the body of men
thus thrown out of employment, that they were begging through the
streets in crowds, living only on the bounty of their opulent fellow-
citizens, who were thus obliged to tax themselves very high in order
to prevent the manufacturers from emigrating to some other country
in search of employment.' " ^
On the very day when the grievance of the fustian tax
was thus gravely handled, the House of Commons seems
to have gone into committee to hear, on the other and
Irish grievance, the evidence of remonstrant P^nghsh
manufacturers. One testimony reported as given on the
occasion is very germane to our subject : —
"Wednesday, March 16. — Mr. Peel, an eminent manufacturer of
Manchester, was then called to the bar. The questions proposed to
him led into a very minute detail of the expenditure incident to the
different branches of the manufactures of both kingdoms. From
what he said, it appeared that the Irish manufacturer, after paying
a duty of 104 per cent, (which was looked upon as the equivalent to
^ rarliatncntary IIisto)y, xxv. 362, &c.
104 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
the internal excise of this kingdom), would afterwards retain a
superiority of 13 per cent.^ This gentleman being asked, said he
employed 6,800 persons, and paid an annual excise of _^20, 000. He
was then asked what number he should employ if the ' Irish ' proposi-
tions were passed into law. His answer was, ' Most certainly the same,
if not a greater number; but it should be in Ireland'" — where labour
was so cheap ; nominally cheap, that is — a distinction with a difference,^
1 Pitt in one of his speeches thus ridiculed Peel's statement : — "The
Irish cotton trade was to be imported into England, according to his
plan" — this theory of Peel's — "at \o\ per cent, duty, and yet it was
said they were to undersell the English manufacture 13 per cent.
These two sums amounted to 23^ per cent. This, therefore, added to
the other two sums, would amount to 34 per cent. ; at which disadvan-
tage, therefore, if the manufacturers who had stated this degree of
danger to the House deserved any degree of credit, they had been
hitherto dealing in Ireland, so as to have almost exclusively engrossed
that market, and had increased and flourished to an extent hardly to
equalled by any other branch of trade known — a thing perfectly beyond
the reach of relief, and even unworthy of a single serious thought." —
Parliamentary History, xxv. 585-
* Pitt, in the speech just quoted from, dwelt forcibly on this difference.
"Mr. Pitt then went into that part of the question which related to
the apprehensions of certain persons of being undersold by the import
of the manufactures of Ireland in our own markets. He combated
t'ne docti'ine that Ireland, from the cheapness of labour, must neces-
sarily be able to undersell the English manufacturer. Was it," he
asked, "because the rudest species of labour was somewhat cheaper in
Ireland than in England, that the former therefore had the advantage
of the latter ? No ; it did not depend on that sort of work which was
required for the roughest and rudest occupations of agriculture whether
a nation was to flourish in manufacture or not ; it was a habit of
industry and ingenuity which was to effect it. He drew a distinction
between the meaning of the words ' wages ' and ' labour,' observing that a
man's wages might be extremely low, and yet the price of his labour
very dear, provided that he did but a small quantity of work. He in-
stanced the example of an Englishman and an Irishman, that perhaps
the latter, though receiving but 5s. per week, might really be a dearer
workman to his employer than the former at 8s., provided the one
v.'orked hard and the other was idle. He said also, that besides the
different degrees of the industry of the two nations, he was well
informed and sufficiently convinced that tlie rate of wages, as well as
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. IC5
since cheap labour is often the dearest, as Peel would probably have
found if he had migrated with his capital to Ireland. "Being further
asked respecting the sentiments of his friends, he affirmed, that all he
had conversed with on the subject were of the same mind," — ready to
migrate to Ireland if the Irish propositions became law.^
Neither of the two grievances survived long to harass
and alarm the Lancashire manufacturers. A month or
so after that evidence of Peel's, Pitt gave way in the
matter of the obnoxious fustian tax, and brought in a
bill (his rival Fox eagerly seconding him) to repeal so
much of the Act of the preceding year " as imposed a
duty on plain cottons and fustians," which duty was
accordingly repealed amid the general approval of
the House. With his Irish propositions the Minister
persevered, but the opposition to them in Parliament
(where Peel's evidence was often quoted against them) and
out of it Avas so strenuous and persistent, that he was
obliged to modify them in a way which made them
unpopular in Ireland." The Irish Parliament had accepted
of labour, was greater in Ireland than in England in any branch of
manufacture which required execution and ingenuity, instancing a
gentleman, whom he described to be the first and the principal person
in the cotton business in Ireland (Major Brooke), who was several
times in danger of losing his life because he refused to allow his workmen
a greater price than they had in IManchester." Very encouraging for
the English manufacturers intent on migrating with their capital to
Ireland ! ^ Gentleman'' s Magazine, Iv. 449.
^ Ireland, it appears, from one of the first debates in the House of
Commons on the commercial propositions, was regarded by some non-
Irish members as so completely a foreign country that a Scotch
representative, Sir William Cunyngham, urged an objection which
seems perfectly astounding now : — "If the resolutions were agreed to
as they stood at present," he said, "the Irish would import grain into
the western ports of Scotland, and greatly undersell the Scotch farmers ;
the consequence of which would be, the latter would not be able to pay
their rents, and thus the landowner would be ruined." — Parliavicntary
Histoiy, XXV. 34.
o
I06 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
them in their first form, but it rejected them as they had
become when they issued from the debates and divisions
of the English Parliament. England and Ireland were
obliged to wait for the Union before anything like reciprocal
free trade could be established ; and immediately after the
failure of Pitt's scheme, the English " Liberal " leader was
feasted in Manchester for aiding in this victory of "pro-
tection ! "
"To Pitt," says his latest biographer, "the failure of the Irish com-
mercial measures was a deep disappointment, a bitter mortification.
To them, to the framing or to the defence of their details, he had
applied himself for almost a twelvemonth ; and here was the result — the
object of public good not attained, the jealousy of both nations stirred
anew, and to himself for a time tlie decline of public favour alike, though
on exactly opposite grounds, in England and in Ireland. . . . On the
other hand, Fox, as the champion of high protective duties, enjoyed in
many quarters the gleam of returning popularity. Being at Knowsley
in the course of that autumn on a visit to Lord Derby, the two friends
went together to Manchester, and were warmly welcomed by the great
metropolis of manufacturers. Here is Fox's own account of it : ' Our
reception at Manchester was the finest thing imaginable, and handsome
in all respects. All the principal people came out to meet us and
attended us into the town with blue and buff cockades, and a proces-
sion as fine, and not unlike that upon my chairing in Westminster.
We dined with one hundred and fifty people. The concourse of people
to see us was immense, and I never saw more apparent unanimity than
seemed to be in our favour.' "i
Lancashire manufacturers denouncing free trade with Ire-
land, and, if it should befall, threatening to transport them-
selves and their capital to that poor island, in their fear of
the competition of cheap Irish labour; — "Liberal" leaders
and statesmen echoing and swelling their clamour, and
receiving a triumphant welcome in Manchester for helping
to make it successful : — what a difference between Then
and Now !
Thus it was not as a counsellor or confidant of Pitt's,
1 Lord Stanhope, Life of Pitt, i. 275.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 10/
but as an opponent of his fiscal proposals and commercial
policy, and one in alliance so far with Fox and the
Whigs, that Peel made his first recorded appearance on
the stage of public affairs. But a time came when the
Bury manufacturer correctly appreciated Pitt's commercial
as his other policy, and said of the author of the fustian
tax and the advocate of the Irish propositions : " No
Minister ever understood so well the commercial interests
of the country. He knew that the true sources of its
greatness lay in its productive industry." ^ A year or so
after the collapse of the Irish propositions, Pitt attempted
another step in the direction of free trade, and negotiated
^ Sketch, p. 42. The following interesting testimony, from a manu-
facturer's point of view, to Pitt as a Minister may be worth giving.
After the passage quoted in the text, Sir Lawrence Peel proceeds
thus: — "I may observe here, that my own father entertained a similar
opinion of Mr. Pitt, though he entertained no high one of that
Minister's colleagues or successors. His own political opinions were
those of Mr. Pitt in the first years of the administration of that states-
man, before the French Revolution had made the times unpropitious
for political changes, and put all the machinery out of gear. lie once
described ]\Ir. Pitt to me as the fairest Minister he had ever known.
He said that he was often struck, when he attended that Minister on
deputations from the city, with the great fairness with which he treated
adverse opinions, receiving and placing in their best light opinions at
variance with his own. My father added, that if it chanced, as it
sometimes happened, that they had but a poor spokesman, Mr. Pitt
would put their arguments for them in the best light which they could
receive; 'he would state our own case for us,' he said, 'better than
we could have stated it for ourselves, and then he would give his own
answer; he never hid himself, but would say, "Gentlemen, I have
stated your case for you, now I will state my own.'" I observed that
though he praised the dexterity and ability of the Minister highly, my
father praised his openness and candour more. This praise made the
more impression on me because it came from one who by no means ap-
proved of the whole policy of Mr. Pitt, and remained throughout his
life the firm supporter of parliamentary reform."
I08 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
the commercial treaty with France.^ Laid before
Parliament early in 1787, it was vehemently attacked by
Fox and the Whigs, both because its principle was that of
commercial freedom, and because it tended to establish
what in our day is called an Anglo-French alliance ; Fox
declaring France to be " the natural foe " of England —
a doctrine against which Pitt earnestly protested. Little
thought the rivals then how soon their parts were to be
exchanged. Fox and the Whigs hoped to raise against
the commercial treaty with France the same outcry which
had marred the success of the Irish propositions. But
they found themselves mistaken. " Our merchants and
manufacturers were, upon the whole, well pleased, or at
least acquiescing and quiet. There came from any body
of them to the House of Commons only one considerable
petition, and that petition prayed only for postponement.
Notwithstanding every effort, and in spite of all the
eloquence of Fox and Sheridan, of Francis and Grey,"
afterwards the first Earl Grey of the first Reform Bill, " an
address in approval of the treaty was carried by over-
whelming numbers — 236 against ii6."2
What Peel and the Lancashire manufacturers as a body
thought of the commercial treaty with France does not
appear ; but in any case, events were approaching destined to
make them the firmest supporters of Pitt's general policy.
They were unexpected events, unforeseen even in the February
of 1792, though by that time the French Revolution was
vigorously developing itself, and though, only five months
before, the flight to Varennes had been followed by the
Declaration of Pillnitz. Early in the year of the first
coalition against France, and the commencement of one
of the longest and fiercest of general European wars, Pitt
brought in the last of his skilful peace-Budgets, little sus-
1 Signed 26th September 1786. ^ Lord Stanhope, i. 327.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. IO9
pecting that it was to be the last. He had a surplus, one-
half of which he was to apply to the Sinking Fund, the
other half to remission of taxation, and, in his sanguine
exuberance, he thought of reducing the four to three
per cents. For the system of finance and the commercial
policy which had yielded these results he was indebted
to Adam Smith, and in his Budget-speech he owned his
obligations to the author of the Wealth of Nations :
"an author," said the Minister, "now unhappily no more,
whose extensive knowledge of detail and depth of philoso-
phical research will, I believe, furnish the best solution to
every question connected with the history of commerce or
with the systems of political economy." With Europe just
about to burst into flames, and despite such premonitory
symptoms of coming domestic commotion as the anti-
Priestley Birmingham riots of the preceding year, Pitt
saw before him a decade and a half at least of probable
peace, of additions to the Sinking Fund, and of remissions of
taxation ; " for although," he said, we must not count with
certainty on the continuance of our present prosperity
during such an interval, yet unquestionably there never was
a time in the history of this country when, from the situa-
tion of Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen
years of peace than we may at the present moment.'' ^
Another year, and in the February of 1793, the French
Republic declared war against England, and a few months
afterwards the Duke of York with ten thousand British
troops was in front of Valenciennes. The great war
against the Revolution abroad had opened, and at the same
time Pitt found himself forced to wrestle with the Revolu-
tion at home. Everywhere the nation was divided into two
camps of ardent friends and ardent foes of the French
Revolution. To take out of many one instance of the doings
* Loid Stanhope, ii. I40.
no LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
and attitude of the sympathisers with France : — "In Shef-
field there was appointed a day of rejoicing to celebrate
the success of the French arms. An ox was, in the first
place, roasted whole and eaten, after which the members
assembled, walked in procession with the French tricolours
flying, and with a picture at the end of a pole which repre-
sented Dundas," — Pitt's right-hand man, — " and Burke
stabbing Liberty. An ofificer quartered at Sheffield wrote as
follows to his brother next day : ' They are as resolute and
determined a set of villains as I ever saw, and will gain
their object if it is to be gained. They have debating
societies, and regular correspondence with the other towns ;
they have subscribed to purchase firearms, and are endea-
vouring to corrupt the soldiers.' " ^ But all English towns
and seats of industry were not like Sheffield. In the Man-
chester of 1792, as in the Birmingham of 1791, the Church-
and-King party was the strongest in the lower as well as in
the upper strata of society. Of the state of feeling in
Manchester at this time, more will have to be said in the
memoir of Thomas Walker. Here, meanwhile, is a sketch
of Peel's first recorded appearance in public life, after he
became a member of Parliament. He entered the House
of Commons in 1790 as member for Tamworth, and in the
December of 1792, these were the things said and done in
the Manchester which, not many years before, had given a
triumphal reception to Charles James Fox, now as fierce a
friend of the French and their revolution as Pitt had become,
slowly and reluctantly, the resolute enemy of both : —
"On the nth of December 1792, he " — Peel — "attended a meeting
at Manchester to establish an association for the maintenance of con-
stitutional order, and in the course of the proceedings is represented to
have said, ' That it was time for the people to rouse from their lethargy,
for there were incendiaries in the country.' These incautious words
^ Lord Stanhope, ii. 275.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. Ill
stimulated the populace ; a " Church and King " mob assembled ; the
office of a Liberal newspaper, the Herald, was attacked, and some injury
was done to the dwellmgs of Mr. Walker and others, who, as earnest
advocates of reform, were obnoxious to the zealous royalists.
" Mr." afterwards Earl " Grey introduced the subject in the House of
Commons, and having censured the violence used, called on Mr. Peel
to name the incendiaries he had stigmatised. Mr. Peel denied the
authority of the newspaper report. He disclaimed having said any-
thing more than ' God save the King.' He vindicated the Manchester
Association ; it consisted of men of independent principle ; every man
in it spoke his sentiments, and none but sentiments of loyalty were
uttered. With regard to the riots, he stated that when he left the town
all was quiet, and he regretted that the people afterwards broke into
disorder. The objects of the Association were to protect the laws, and
to discourage any attempt to break in upon the peace of society. There
were in Mancliester some few disaffected persons ; but in general they
were contented, happy, and attached to the Government and constitu-
tion. As to party among them, there was once a division ; one party
was called Pittites, and the other Foxites ; but that had ceased ; they
had all coalesced, and called themselves Kingites.
"This was a very correct account of the state of public feeling in
Manchester at the period ; most of the master manufacturers were firm
supporters of the Government, and so zealous were the populace in
their attachment to the Church, that the children of dissenters were
frequently hooted at and insulted in the street. But this flaming loyalty
was not destined to endure ; it was burned out by its own intensity.^
Not in the case of our Robert Peel. The next ghmpse we
have of him, four years or so later, shows no diminution
oi his loyalty. The war with France had gone on, producing
few or no English triumphs on land, whatever the successes
of Howe, Jervis, and Duncan on the sea. In 1797 the
victories of the young Napoleon left England without an
ally. After the failure of one attempt to negotiate, Pitt was
forced for a time to prosecute the war alone. Surpluses
and remissions of taxation were now things of the past, and
towards the end of 1797, Pitt had to announce a deficiency
of nineteen millions, which he proposed to cover by a loan
* Cooke Taylor, i. 10.
112 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
of twelve millions and by new taxes. " The plan was to
augment the assessed taxes at once to three times, and pro-
gressively to four times their existing amount, with, how-
ever, some deductions and exceptions in favour of those
least able to pay. The number of persons immediately
affected by this impost was calculated by Pitt at about
800,000." The nation was as yet unused to have its
burdens thus increased. Considerable, accordingly, was
the public dismay, loud the clamour of the Whig orators.
But even more than Pitt asked for and received was needed.
In his financial strait he resolved to carry out the sugges-
tion of a non-official friend for an appeal to the nation,
and to this appeal, it will be seen, a notable response was
given by the Bury manufacturer and his partner : —
"Already in the preceding December, when the financial scheme of
Pitt was in committee, a practical suggestion had been thrown out by
the Speaker" — Addington. "He was confident, he said, that many
persons of affluent fortune, sensible of the delicacy which forbore from
searching too minutely into capital, would be willing to come forward
with free contributions beyond the rate of their assessment, and he
advised a clause to give such persons the opportunity. The Minister
availed himself of the idea ; and during the months of February and
March 1798 such contributions rapidly flowed in. To receive them,
hustings, as though for an election, had been raised beneath one of the
piazzas of the Royal Exchange. There came crowding by hundreds
merchants and tradesmen of all ranks, and with divers gifts, varying
from one guinea to ^3000. On the first day the subscriptions exceeded
^^46,000. Nor did that generous spirit decline. Mr. Robert Peel,
father of the celebrated statesman, and at that time in partnership with
Mr. Yates as a manufacturer of calicoes at Bury in Lancashire, paid in,
from a loyal impulse, no less than ,^10,000." For which statement
Lord Stanhope cites Macpherson's History of Commerce, vol. iv. p.
440. " As I " — Lord Stanhope — "have heard the story told, Mr. Peel
having subscribed this large sum on the spur of the moment, and with-
out consulting his senior partner, travelled back to Bury in some
anxiety as to that partner's assent. But Mr. Yates had a spirit as
loyal as his own. On being told by Mr. Peel what he had done, he
merely turned round and said, 'You might as well have made it
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. II3
£10,000 while you were about it.' In relating the fact, Mr. Mac-
pherson," A.D. 1S05, "adds, 'Is there any other country in the globe
that could produce a manufacturer who can spare such a sum ? ' " 1
It was early in the year of this magnificent gift of the
Bury firm that reports of a French invasion, with the
young General Bonaparte to organise and head it, gave a
new impetus to the volunteer movement in England. Pitt
suspended the Habeas Corpus ; the King with his own
hand struck Fox's name from the list of Privy Councillors ;
while the militia was embodied and the navy increased —
the nation supporting, with money and with men. Monarch
and Minister in their war against the Revolution at home
and abroad. Peel was ready not only with money, but
with men. "In 1798, besides the large contributions he
made, and the powerful patronage extended to the Lanca-
shire Fencibles and the Tamworth Armed Association, he
placed himself at the head of a corps of volunteers, con-
sisting of six companies, mostly of his own artificers ; and
if ever officer possessed the hearts of his soldiers, it was
the Lieutenant-Colonel-Commandant of the Bury Loyal
Volunteers." ^ His speech made at the consecration of the
colours has been preserved, and is much more animated
than almost any other extant specimen of his oratory.
There is something both patriarchal and feudal in the tone
and tenor of the following address, and deep must have
been the general loyalty evoked when a Bury calico-printer
could address his "artificers" thus : —
"I should be extremely wanting in justice to you and to my own
feelings, if I did not embrace this opportunity of testifying the high
sense entertained by myself and brother officers of your soldier-like
behaviour and good conduct. At a time when the British shores are
menaced by a hostile invasion ; when our rapacious enemies — enemies
^ Lord Stanhope, iii. 92.
^Public Characters of 1S0J-4, p. 16.
114 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
alike of the cottage and the palace— thirsting for our blood and treasures,
and anticipating the promised destruction of our religion, government,
and commerce, are appointing taskmasters to be stationed in our
workshops, to seize the fruits of our industry, and to fetter us in
perpetual bondage, a new spectacle presents itself, appalling to the
slaves of despotism. Men forced into military service by the terror of
the guillotine were palsied at the sight of British volunteers serving
their sovereign without pay; of peaceable citizens converted into
soldiers ; of the industrious mechanic supporting his family by labour
in the day, and learning the use of arms by night. This spectacle
dissipated every apprehension at home, and penetrated with despair the
hirelings of ambition.
"Having the honour of being placed at the head of this highly
respectable corps, and considering you as a part of my own family,
allow me to call your attention to the discharge of those duties which
our new engagements have rendered indispensable. Continue a regular
attendance at the places appointed for your exercise ; associate not
with the vicious, but having raised yourself to a situation command-
ino- respect, continue to deserve it by your conduct. Attend to your
officers, and you will ever experience from them a return of kindness
and friendship. With regard to myself, I wish to be considered rather
as your parent than commander ; and in your sickness and distress, I
shall ever feel happy in affording every assistance in my power to your-
selves and families " ^ — instead of being content to refer you to the
parish authorities and the relieving-officer.
Whether the worthy man's interpretation of contemporary
historical facts was correct or not, certainly the meditated
French invasion had not come off, and General Bonaparte
sailed with his expeditionary force to Egypt instead of to
England. But in 1798 there did break out an Irish
rebelUon ; and in the August of that year the French
General Humbert, with eleven hundred "slaves of des-
potism," did land at Killala to aid it. General Humbert
had to surrender, and the rebellion was crushed ; but
having vanquished the domestic, leagued with the foreign
foe, Pitt resolved on a healing measure— nothing less than
a legislative Union of Ireland with England and Scotland.
1 Public Characters 0/1S0J-4, p. 16.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. II5
The history of the .Union does not fall to be written here.
Peel's contribution, however, to the success of the memorable
measure is noteworthy. His first appearance in public life
had been made as the champion of the English manu-
facturers to oppose Irish competition ; and though restric-
tions on the commerce between the two kingdoms were not
abolished by the Union, commercial concessions were made
— if chiefly on one side, and much more to than by the Irish.
Yet, in view of the imperial value of the Union, Peel, who,
in 1785, had been foremost in opposition to anything like
free trade with Ireland, heartily supported the Minister, and
in a speech far longer and more elaborate than his usual
House of Commons' deliverances. Beginning with a con-
trast between his attitude then and now —
"The support," he said, "I have given to the present measure does
not arise from a change of sentiments, but of circumstances. This plan
embraces great advantages, both political and commercial, which, by
uniting two countries into one country, are calculated to add strength
and security to the empire ; and is so essentially necessary at this time,
when a daring attempt has been made, both by intrigue and force, to
separate the countries, that inferior considerations ought not to weigh
against a plan which bids fair to frustrate such attempts, and to con-
solidate both the interest and affections of the sister kingdoms. By an
union we shall become one people ; and though the benefits in a com-
mercial point of view will be chiefly enjoyed by Ireland, yet, if an
opinion may be formed of the sentiments of the trading body of this
nation from their patriotic and respectful silence " — very different from
the clamour of 1 7S5 — " a disposition is manifested to reach out a friendly
arm to their distressed brethren, to raise them from their present un-
happy state to a condition of ease and comfort similar to our own" — a
hope benevolent but futile. "This conduct does the British merchants
and manufacturers so much honour, that I feel particular pleasure in
classing myself among that highly valuable and respectable body ol
men."
With all his wish to maintain a " patriotic and respectful
silence " on the injustice done to England by tliis new
ir6 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
instalment of "justice to Ireland," Peel could not refrain
from one mild protest and warning.
"Though a friend," he continued, "to the principle of the measure,
I think it my duty to draw the attention of the House to the sixth
resolution. It must be the intention of every one to place both
countries on an equal footing ; and though nothing can be apprehended
unfavourable to this country during the present low circumstances of
Ireland, it may have an operation, at a future time, highly prejudicial
to our domestic industry. Each country is to provide for its own
public debt ; and that of Great Britain being infinitely larger than the
debt of Ireland, heavy taxes are necessarily imposed on almost every
article of consumption, which has so strong a tendehcy to enhance the
price of labour, that goods manufactured under such a pressure cannot
be rendered on equally low terms with the produce of labour in places
where similar burdens do not exist. Unless this objection be removed,
the measure cannot be expected to have the concurrence of Great
Britain. I feel it the more necessaiy to urge this point, having
perceived a want of that liberality in the Irish Government which
characterises our own. The commercial intercourse now subsisting
betwixt the two countries has lost every feature of reciprocity ; British
manufactures being heavily taxed on their admission into Ireland,
whilst the goods of that kingdom meet with every encouragement
here" — a great change, seemingly, since 1 785. "Whatever the con-
duct of Ireland respecting the proposition of a union, I trust the firm-
ness of administration will be such as to refuse all concession to menace
and intrigue ; and that the aid which may be deemed necessary to
extend in future to that nation will be received as the genuine offspring
of affection. I always will oppose the giving much for nothing, when
demanded as a matter of right.
" Having said thus much as a commercial man, I beg the further
indulgence of the House as a Member of Parliament." ^
But the reader need not be troubled with Peel's general
views of the advantages of a Union, the chief opponents
of which, bating a few English Whigs, belonged to the
nation gaining everything by the measure. It was probably
because it was an expression of opinion from one who
might be considered the spokesman of the English manu-
facturers, and who expected to lose commercially by the
1 Fublic Characters 0/1803-4, p. 20-21.
\
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. WJ
Union which he advocated as useful imperially, and as an
act of charity to impoverished Erin, that Peel's speecli
was circulated pamphlet-wise in Ireland, and was deemed
a valuable aid by the Government. It was delivered on
ist May 1799. In the November and December of the
following year a batch of baronets was made ; among them
" Robert Peel, of Drayton Manor, in the county of Stafford."
A few weeks more, and, thwarted by the King in his attempt
to concede Roman Catholic Emancipation by way of
crowning the Union, Pitt ceased to be Premier (February
1 801), and Addington reigned in his stead. In the October
of the same year the preliminaries of the Peace of Amiens
were signed, followed by general rejoicings in England and
in France, wearied of the long conflict. In the May follow-
ing, stimulated partly by the popularity of the peace, the
Whigs made a dead-set at the fallen Minister with votes of
censure, direct and indirect. These were confronted by a
motion of thanks to Pitt for his conduct during the war. In
the debate which thus arose, Sir Robert Peel spoke warmly
and generously in support of the ex-Ministcr, who had by
this time become his model statesman.
"He had," he said, "the honour to be a member of the commercial
world, and had had frequent occasion to transact with the late Chan-
cellor of the Exchequer" — Pitt — "business of great difficulty and
importance. From personal knowledge he was therefore able to state,
that no Minister ever understood so well the commercial interests of
the country. He knew that the true sources of its greatness lay in its
productive industry. Circumstances obliged him to lay burdens on the
country, but he had first taught the country how to bear those burdens.
Large debts were indeed contracted, but they were more than equalled
by the increase of wealth arising from his wise measures. It was not
unusual for a country to flourish in peace, but where was there another
Minister to be found under whose auspices the resources of the country
had been doubled in the midst of an expensive and vigorous war?
Debts had been contracted, but they were all domestic debts, and the
interest was spent among ourselves " — the doctrine of his old pamphlet
still upheld. "Whatever might be said of our burthens, the country
Il8 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
under their pressure was more flourishing than at any former period.
. . . The late Minister had been the benefactor of his country, and
had neglected no one's interest but his own. It had indeed been said,
that though he did not enrich himself, he had secured his influence by
bestowing pensions and titles on others" — a certain baronet among
them. "But he had no occasion to have recourse to such arts; he
had secured sufiicient support by honourable measures. Three parts of
the House, who were incapable of being bribed, were his friends. When
such was the case, the House ought not to content themselves with a
bare vote of thanks, but to bestow on him some more solid mark of
their approbation. It would be disgraceful to the nation to allow
such a man to retire to languish in poverty. He, for one, would be
happy to contribute to prevent this ; not from any personal motives,
but on account of the important services he had rendered his
country."^
A peroration which, if not in the best of taste, was inspired
by warm and generous feeling. ^ Pitt, sooth to say, so
successful as a national financier, and though simple in his
personal habits, as well as without wife or child, had been
sunk for years in pecuniary embarrassments, caused mainly,
it seems, by waste on and in the servants' hall. Unfortu-
nately, debt weighed heavily on him, when he formed his
first and only attachment ; and he felt forced by it to give
up further thought of the woman whom he loved, and by
whom, as his wife, order might have been restored to,
and preserved in, his domestic finances. The London
merchants offered him ;^i 00,000, delicately assuring him
that he need never know the names of the subscribers — a
delicacy absent from Sir Robert Peel's peroration. When
1 Cooke Taylor, i. 15-16.
^ Sir Robert Peel's contemporary biographer {Public Characters of
1803-4, p. 15) speaks of the effect produced by this speech as so great
"that a subscription was opened in the Cky the day follewing, and he
himself was one of the most liberal subscribers, to erect a statue of Mr.
Pitt, expressive of the lively sense entertained of his services, and to convey
to the world a lasting mark of the gratitude of the nation, which, if not
occasioned, was greatly promoted by this speech."
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 19
the proud Pitt declined the generous and graceful offer,
the King was ready with an also anonymous ;:/^3o,ooo ; but
neither would Pitt accept this. Ultimately private friends
made up a "loan" of ^^i 1,000, which relieved him from
his most pressing difficulties, and enabled him to live in
comfort, though with a greatly reduced establishment, and,
what he felt more, with Holwood sold — Holwood among
its oaks {the present Earl of Derby bought it some years
ago for an occasional residence) looking over Keston
Common and Cccsar's Camp, and but a mile or so from
Hayes, where still stands what was Chatham's Kentish
house and home, with the yews and cypresses planted by
the great Minister. Pitt was born at Hayes, and there,
*' when a boy," he once told a friend, " I used to go bird-
nesting in the woods of Holwood ; and it was always my
wish to call it my own." He lived to call it his own ; and
it was "after a conversation with him in the open air I
well remember," Wilberforce writes, " at the root of an old
tree at Holwood " — where a seat with a suitable inscription
commemorates the fact — " I resolved to give notice, on a fit
occasion, in the House of Commons, of my intention to
bring the subject" of the slave trade "forward." And it
may be as well to mention here, that the first Sir Robert
Peel was on this point a decided opponent of Wilber-
force and the philanthropists. An abolition of the slave
trade, which in his opinion was, — and it really seems to have
been — conducted much more humanely by England than
by any other nation, he pronounced to be mischievous.
" Instead of benefiting tlie cause of humanity," he said
once, " it will injure it exceedingly. What is given up here
will be adopted elsewhere, and without any of the humane
regulations established by this country." ^ A fierce Euro-
pean war was raging when he urged this objection — one not
^ Speech (on Slave Importation Bill), May i, 1S06.
120 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
unpractical at the time, since the possibiHty of a general
consensus of civilised nations to abolish the slave trade
could scarcely have been then foreseen by the most
prescient and far-sighted of philanthropic enthusiasts.
With the growth of the English cotton manufacture,
however, there had arisen a system of white slavery at
home, and of this Sir Robert Peel was the first to effect
a mitigation. We have come now to the earUest of
those measures of factory legislation, of which he was the
originator, though expanded and extended as they have
been by later labours, and by men living nearer our own
time, other names than his are mainly associated with
the history of the movement. But his is the merit of
having originated it — a merit all the greater that he was
himself an employer, and on the largest scale, of the labour
which neither prejudices naturally cherished by men in his
position against the interference of the State with the
operations of the manufacturer, nor the fear that profits
might be diminished by such interference, prevented him
from calling on the Legislature to protect from the cupidity
or carelessness of the capitalist. The factory legislation
which Sir Robert Peel asked for and obtained was not
very stringent from the modern point of view, nor did it at
the time prove extremely effective for his object. But it
was the beginning of all that has been done since, and of
all that may yet be done in any and in every sphere of in-
dustry, to substitute the operation of just and humane laws
for the tyranny and caprice of the employer, whether he be
a capitalist, or, as often happens, himself a working man,
employing and paying for the labour of children. It was
the first distinct recognition by the State of its parental
relationship and duties to the helpless children of the poor.
All our modern systems of inspection, now nearly as wide
as industry itself, prescribing and regulating the hours and
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 121
conditions of the toil of children and women in mine and
field, as well as workshop and factory, forbidding the young
to be overworked, and compelling them to receive school
instruction as a condition of employment — all of them have
sprung out of the first Sir Robert Peel's modest and tenta-
tive eff'orts to improve the condition of apprentices in the
cotton manufacture. But before chronicling his legislative
efforts in this direction, something must be said of the
juvenile labour called into existence, under new conditions,
by the expansion of tlie British cotton manufacture, and
by the birth and growth of the factory system.
The water-frame of Arkwright, like the spinning-jenny
of Hargreaves, was worked chiefly by children, and though
the fine spinning on Crompton's mule was done chiefly by
adults, the rovings to be fine-spun seem to have been gene-
rally prepared by children also. With the gigantic expan-
sion of the cotton manufacture, through the inventions of
Hargreaves, Arkwright, and Crompton, there thus arose an
enormous demand for juvenile labour — a demand far greater
than the natural growth of population in the manufacturing
districts could supply. In Lewis Paul's time, it has been
seen, the ingenious inventor went with his machines to
the children in workhouses and foundling hospitals, hoping
that the cheapness of their labour, which cost little or
nothing, would compensate for the practical imperfection
of his experimental machinery, or that those who had to
support them would cheerfully give him a trial, and set
them to work at machines the product of which might con-
tribute to defray the expense of their maintenance. But
with the proved success of Arkwright's water-frame and
Crompton's mule all this was altered. Every child in the
manufacturing districts was able to find employment, and
many children out of them were needed. The new cotton
industry could not be supported by the children born and
Q
122 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
bred in the seats of the manufacture, and other parts of the
country were put under requisition to supply the deficiency.
The administrators of the poor-law throughout the kingdom
hailed the opportunity to rid themselves and the rates of
the burden of pauper children. From the workhouses of
London, as elsewhere, there set in a steady stream of
covered waggons freighted with children to be apprenticed
to the cotton manufacturers of the North of England. So
great was the demand for the labour of these children, that
at least an assertion was once made in the House of
Commons to the effect that the workhouse authorities of a
London parish were said to have forced on a Lancashire
manufacturer the agreement that with every batch of
twenty sound children he should take one idiot ! ^
An apprenticeship system of this kind, it can be easily
supposed, led to many abuses. There was no one to care
for, or possessing authority to protect, the helpless young-
sters, many of them brought from a distance. There was no
limitation of the age under which they should not be worked ;
nor of the number of hours of labour, and very general
was the now forbidden practice of working the factories all
through the twenty-four hours, one set of children during
the day preparing the material to be spun by another set
during the night. "The cotton trade introduced here,"
says good Dr. Aikin in 1795, speaking of Dukinfield,
" while it affords employment to all ages, has debilitated
the constitutions and retarded the growth of many, and
made an alarming increase in the mortality. This effect is
greatly to be attributed to the pernicious custom, so pro-
perly reprobated by Dr. Percival," — a Worthy of whom more
hereafter, — " and other physicians, of making the children in
the mills work night and day, one set getting out of bed
1 Speech of Leonard Horner (6th June 1 81 5), quoted in History 0/
the Factory Movement, i. 41.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. I23
when another goes into the same, thus never allowing the
beds to be well ventilated." ^ Dr. Aikin is the better worth
quoting, both because he wrote in the childhood of the
factory system, and because he often speaks admiringly of
the nimbleness of the children employed in working the
then comparatively new machinery, and of the profitable
occupation thus given to the families of the poor. Writing,
at the same date, of the parish of Eccles, he suspends his
narrative to philosophise — not a frequent practice of his —
and to this effect : —
"The inventions and improvements of machines to shorten labour has
had a surprising influence to extend our trade, and also to call in hands
from all parts, especially children for the cotton-mills. It is the wise
plan of Providence, that in this life there shall be no good without its
attendant inconvenience. There are many which are too obvious in these
cotton-mill and similar factories, which counteract that increase of popu-
lation usually consequent on the improved facility of labour. In them,
children of very tender age are employed, many of them collected from
the workhouses in London and Westminster, and transported in crowds
as apprentices, to masters resident many hundred miles distant, where
they serve unknown, unprotected, and forgotten by those to whose care
nature or the laws had consigned them. These children are usually
too long confined to work in close rooms, often during the whole night ;
the air they breathe from the oil, &c., employed in the machinery, and
other circumstances, is injurious ; little regard is paid to their cleanliness,
and frequent changes from a warm and dense to a cold and thin atmos-
phere are predisposing causes to sickness and disability, and particu-
larly to the epidemic fever, which is so generally to be met with in these
factories. ... It must be added, that the want of early religious in-
struction and example, and the numerous and indiscriminate association
in these buildings, are very unfavourable to their future conduct in life.
To mention these grievances is to point out their remedies ; and in
ma-ny factories they have been adopted with true benevolence and much
success. But in all cases 'the public have a right to see that its
members are not wantonly injured, or carelessly lost,' " — a quotation from
an unknown author, but a sensible, whoever he may have been.''
Country Round Manchester, p. 456. ^ lb. p. 219.
124 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Such was the state of things as it struck a cahn and
impartial observer five years or so before the beginning of
our century. Some little movement to better it seems to
have begun a year or so after the publication of Dr, Aikin's
book, and there is one faint indication of a talk of legis-
lative action for the improvement of the condition of fac-
tory children. In 1796 a self-constituted body, without
any official status, but calling itself the " Manchester Board
of Health," received from the benevolent Dr. Percival (of
it, as of him, more hereafter), a paper of reflections and
suggestions on the condition of the factory children of
Manchester and neighbourhood, very strongly resembling
in tone and tenor the passage just quoted from Dr. Aikin.
It concludes thus : " From the excellent regulations which
subsist in several cotton factories, it appears that many of
these evils may, in a considerable degree, be obviated ;
and we are therefore warranted by experience, and are
assured, that we shall have the support of the liberal
proprietors of these factories, in proposing an application
for parliamentary aid (if other methods appear not likely
to effect the purpose), to establish a general system of law
for the wise, humane, and equal government of all such
works." ^ And we are further vaguely told that " Mr.
Wilbraham Bootle was the first to moot the question in the
House of Commons." 2 But Sir Robert Peel, before a
committee of that House, testified to a complete ignorance
of this mooting of the question by Mr. Wilbraham Bootle ;
nor has the present writer been able to discover anything
more about him and it. Not until 1S02 was a bill intro-
duced into Parliament dealing with the system of juvenile
labour which the expansion and extension of the cotton
manufacture had created, and aiming at the correction of
the more flagrant of its evils. The bill was introduced by
^ History of the Factory Movement, i. 29. ^ lb.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 125
Sir Robert Peel, and fortunately so, since he was known to
the House of Commons not to be a mere philanthropist,
but to have an enormous stake in the trade legislative inter-
ference with which he proposed. In fact, he was credibly
reported about this time to have in his employment 15,000
persons, and to be paying ;,^4o,ooo yearly to the excise.^
Whatever mischief the war and Pitt had done to others, he
could not, and did not, complain that either or both had
injured him. The story of the legislation proposed by him
in 1802 is characteristic of a man humane and benevolent,
but slow to innovate, and not the least given to pry into or
to find fault with his neighbours' ways. It came out first
some thirteen years later in evidence given by him before,
and statements furnished by him to, a committee of the
House of Commons then inquiring into the necessity for
further factory legislation — evidence and statements which
no one writing about these matters has seemingly, until
now, taken the trouble to read. Peel was not impelled to
propose factory legislation by what he had seen or heard
of misdoings in other people's works, but by what he knew
to be misdone in his own. Some fifteen years before the
opening of the present century, complaints were rife for a
time concerning the bad condition of the children in one
of his works — the Radcliffe — and the neighbourhood feared
the spread of the malignant fever said to be raging among
them. One of the public-spirited and philanthropic per-
sons who afterwards founded the Manchester Board of
Health aforesaid procured the appointment — doubtless with
Peel's own cheerful assent and co-operation — of a sort of
Medical Commission of Inquiry into the state of things at
this mill, and their report clearly indicated their belief that
the children worked too long, too unremittingly, and too
^ Fublic Characters 0/1803-4, p. 31-3.
126 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
far into the night. ^ Yet the owner of the Radcliffe Mill
was an employer careful of the well-being of his work-people
in general, and of his apprentices in particular. Among
his humane arrangements he had established a " 'prentice-
house for boarding the children at Radcliffe, and another
at Hinds, each under the superintendence of a mistress —
strict attention being paid to their health, cleanliness, and
clothing." 2 Concerning the general internal arrangements
of his mills, this is the answer which Peel gave to the
committee of 1815, when questioned as to their ventilation
at an earlier time. It is an answer worth quoting, not
only from its bearing on the subject in hand, but from the
interesting reference to Richard Arkwright : — " Complete
ignorance of the nature of building requiring ventilation,"
he said, "might afford some excuse, but I believe my
buildings took pattern from buildings that were erected by
a man who has done more honour to the country than any
man I know, not excepting our great military characters —
I mean Sir Richard Arkwright. He originated the build-
ings, and I believe they were made conformable to his
machinery. We all looked up to him, and imitated his
mode of building." Yet, in spite of buildings modelled
upon Arkwright's, in spite of 'prentice-houses, mistresses,
injunctions, and all that a benevolent employer could do
in the way of organisation and regulation, Peel found that
things were not going as they ought to go, and even that
one of his mills was complained of as a nuisance and a
danger. The master was in Parliament, or at Drayton,
or in his counting-house, and the master's eye could not
supervise every item of that vast industry and business.
In a statement which he handed in to the committee of
1 The Works of TJiomas Percival, M.D. (London 1807), ii. 294,
'' Memoir of T. B. Bay/ey."
* The Feel Family, chap. iv.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 12/
1815, and after mentioning that at the ea/Her time now
spoken of — the first years of the present century — he had
in his employment about 1000 apprentices, he proceeds
to say, with noticeable and commendable frankness : —
'* Having other pursuits, it was not often in my power to visit the
factories. But whenever such visits were made, I was struck with a
uniform appearance of bad health, and, in many cases, stunted growth,
of the children. The hours of labour were regulated by the interest of
the overseer, whose remuneration depending on the quantity of work
done, he was often induced to make tlie poor children work excessive
hours, and to stop their complaints by trifling bribes. Finding our
own factories under such management, and learning that the like
practices prevailed in other parts of the kingdom where similar
machines were in use, the children being much overwoiked, and
often little or no regard paid to cleanliness and ventilation in the
buildings — having the assistance of Dr. Percival and other eminent
medical gentlemen of Manchester, together with some distinguished
characters both in and out of Parliament, I brought in a bill in the
forty -second of the King," &'c., &c. And further on in the Blue
Book his reported evidence contains the following emphatic statement :
"I did it" — i.e., I introduced the bill of 1802 — "not so much for the
benefit of others, but finding that my own mills were mismanaged,
and that, with my other pursuits, I had it not in my power to put tliem
under a proper regulation."
It was not, therefore, as a philanthropist in search of a
mission, or from any ambition of the "friend of humanity"
kind, that Peel became a factory legislator. It was mainly
because he saw his good wishes for his work-people de-
feated by the greed of subordinates that he felt compelled
to invoke the aid of the Legislature and the law, and that
he framed and brought into the House of Commons the
first of all factory bills. His motion for leave to introduce
it was made on the 6th of April 1802, at a time which he
might consider favourable to such legislation, since the
Peace of Amiens had been signed some weeks before, and
the public mind was in a state of comparative quiescence.
The Parlia7Jientary History, though copious enough on
128 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
much more trivial contemporary events, takes no notice
of his motion, and the discussion on it must be sought for
in the newspapers of the day. Sir Robert Peel's speech on
the occasion is briefly reported in them, and was probably
itself a brief one. He acknowledged the advantages which
manufacturers received from juvenile labour, but pointed
out the great evils produced by it while unrestricted, un-
regulated, and unprotected. " From an immense number"
of children " being crowded together, impurity often arose,
and disease followed." The mind and morals, as well as
the body, suffered. "A greater evil still was want of
instruction. Leaving their parents at a tender age, they
were afterwards often completely neglected, and contracted
the most profligate habits." Peel's motion was seconded
by Lord Belgrave, afterwards Marquis of Westminster,
in what the newspaper report calls a "very animated"
speech, which he concluded by saying, " that if the case of
these children was disregarded, they would bring down the
vengeance of insulted Heaven upon a hard-hearted and
reprobate nation." It is added, " Every one who spoke
paid a high compliment to the humanity and public spirit
of the honourable mover." ^ Indeed, though objections on
the familiar ground of the impropriety of legislative inter-
ference with labour were not wanting. Sir Robert Peel's
chief difhculty then seems to have been not so much with
those who said that he went too far, as with those who said
that he did not go far enough. Honourable gentlemen
who knew nothing of the feeling of " the trade," whose
personal interests were not compromised, and who had
never thought of factory legislation until Sir Robert Peel
proposed it, now wished to extend the operation of the
bill from apprentices in factories to all "young persons"
engaged in labour anywhere. When the House went into
' Morning Chronicle of April 7, i S02.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 29
committee on the iSth of May, suggestions of this kind
were urged, and it was even recommended that the number
of apprentices whom any one master might employ should
be restricted by law. To such attempts Sir Robert Peel
offered a determined resistance. He " expressed surprise
at these endeavours to lay under burdensome restrictions
a great branch of manufacture. The House would act
more consistently with its usual good sense by sanctioning
a reform than by encouraging speculative innovation " — a
characteristic remark. There were from 10,000 to 12,000
apprentices then employed, and all of them would be
affected by the measure. " Was not this enough by way
of experiment ? Would it not be better to wait and see
the effect of these regulations before Parliament went
further ? " And again : —
" Sir Robert Peel assured the House that such propositions would
excite the greatest alarm in the country, and that the table would soon
be covered with petitions. Had it not been known that he took the
lead in the business, many would already have been presented. When,
in an unprecedented manner, the cotton manufacturers had come
forward and offered to lay themselves under many restrictions, it was
rather hard that gentlemen, who before were quite inactive, should
now propose regulations which would go nigh to ruin them, and,
along with them, the most important branch of manufactures the
country carries on."
On the 2d of June the bill was read a third time and
passed, after a discussion in which the two classes of
objectors — ("You go too far;" "You don't go far
enough") — said their say. And be it noted that among
the objectors of the first class was Mr. William Wilberforce
himself. IMr. William was a member for Yorkshire, and
complained that the bill, as it stood, would affect injuriously
the interests of some of his constituents, for it dealt with
the woollen as well as with the cotton industry. Mr.
Wilberforce, so tender of the distant black, proposed a
R
130 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
clause to extend the period of nightwork beyond the date
named in the bill as that at which it was to cease !
The Lords passed the bill, probably pretty much as it
came to them ; and, with greater swiftness than has marked
the parliamentary progress of most of its progeny, it took its
place in the statute-book as the 42d George III., cap, 73,
in the same year which had witnessed its introduction into
the House of Commons. It called itself " An Act for the
preservation of the health and vtorals of apprentices and
others employed in cotton and other mills, and in cotton
and other factories ; " and both the spirit and wording of
some of its provisions seem now old-fashioned enough.
Foremost among these was a limitation of the hours of
work to twelve hours a day, reckoned from six in
the morning to nine at night, thus leaving three hours of
the possible working-day for meals, recreation, and instruc-
tion. Nightwork was to be abolished gradually, not
ceasing altogether until the June of 1804, so that the blow
might not fall too suddenly on Mr. William Wilberforce's
constituents, among other people. A separation of the
sleeping apartments of the sexes was enjoined. Regula-
tions were imposed for the instruction, secular and religious,
of the young people. During the first four years the
apprentice was to be taught reading, writing, and arithmetic,
" or either of them, according to the age and abilities of
such apprentice," and "by some discreet and proper
person," to be appointed and paid by the master or mistress ;
the instruction to be given " in some room or place " in
the factory. One hour every Sunday the apprentice was
to be " instructed and examined in the principles of the
Christian religion ; " if belonging to the Church of England,
to be taken once every year " to be examined by the
rector, vicar, or curate of the parish;" and between the
ages of fourteen and eighteen " to be duly instructed and
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. I3I
prepared for confirmation," and *' to be brought and sent
to the Bishop of the diocese to be confirmed." In Scot-
land, the apprentice was to be examined once a year " by the
minister of the parish," and between fourteen and eighteen
*' to be carried to the parish church of Scotland to receive
the sacrament of the Lord's Supper as the same is administered
in churches in Scotland." All apprentices were to be sent
to church or chapel once a month at least, or in case they
could not attend on Sunday, " the master or mistress,
either by themselves or by some proper person, shall cause
divine service to be performed once at least every Sunday ;
and it is added emphatically, " such master or mistress is
hereby strictly enjoined and required to take due care that
all his or her apprentices regularly attend divine service
according to the directions of this Act." The sanitary
clauses ordered all "rooms and apartments" in the mill to
be " twice at least a year well and sufficiently washed with
quicklime and water," and due care to be taken to " pro-
vide a sufficient number of windows and openings " to
"ensure a proper supply of fresh air." If any infectious
disease broke out, a physician was to be called in, and
apply remedies to be administered, and make regulations to
be carried out, at the expense of the master or mistress.
A copy of the Act was to be hung up conspicuously in the
mill, and, for an infraction of its provisions, a penalty was
to be imposed of not more than j[^^ or less than 40s. ; one
half to be paid to the informer, the other to the overseers
of the poor. Further, and to ensure, as it was fondly
hoped, the execution of the provisions of the Act, the
Justices, at Midsummer Sessions, were directed to appoint
two persons not interested in or connected with factories —
one of them a Justice of the Peace, the other a
clergyman of the Established Church, or, if that arrange-
ment was not convenient, two Justices or two clergymen —
132 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
mere unpaid amateurs — to visit and inspect, and report
from time to time in writing to the Quarter Sessions on the
condition of the factories, and whether the Act was observed.
Such were the main provisions of this first of all the
Factory Acts that have been or are to be. Of its working
more hereafter.
Peel's own children, meanwhile, were growing up around
him, among them the little boy born at Chamber Hall,
and christened Robert, the year before the first French
Revolution broke out. This was the child at whose birth,
and in his gratitude that it was a boy, the father, as already
told, vowed to "give it to his country." The vow, he
thought, could not be better kept than by attempting to
make the little Robert a second Pitt. Thirty years after
the happy birth in Chamber Hall, when the father was
withstood in Parliament on the currency question by the
son, a rising young legislator, the old Sir Robert took the
House of Commons rather affectingly into his confidence,
on the occasion of having to " oppose a near and dear re-
lative " — the new Robert. For his own part, he said, he M^as
content to abide by the monetary policy of Mr. Pitt, whom
he had " always thought " to be " the first man in the country.
He well remembered, when that near and dear relative was
only a child, he observed to some friends who were stand-
ing near him, that the man who discharged his duty to his
country in the manner Mr. Pitt had done, was most to be
admired and most to be imitated ; and he thought at that
moment, if his own life and that of his dear relative
should be spared, he would one day present him to his
country to follow in the same path." ^ Thus, from his
earliest days, the child was in training for a great part to be
played in public life. " When he was a very little fellow, his
1 Cooke Taylor, i. 33-4.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 33
father would sometimes playfully lift him on to a little
round table which stood by the breakfast-table, and would
hear from that 'tribune' the recitation of some juvenile
lesson. No sounds pleased the father so well from his
boy's hps as those which showed that the work was going
on. ... At a maturer age, at about twelve years, the
boy was accustomed to repeat each Sunday to his father,
commonly in the study, all that he could remember of the
sermon ; and occasionally a guest at the dinner-table, some
member of the family, or intimate friend, was permitted to
hear that which was more generally repeated to his father
alone. He was taught not merely to repeat the discourse,
but to give the substance of it in his own words, was
encouraged to ask questions, and to obtain a solution of
any difficulties which the subject might have presented." ^
Thus betimes was trained the flowing orator and ready
debater of after years.
"And what were the natural gifts of this child, the object of such
unceasing cultivation ? " asks Sir Lawrence Peel, who proceeds thus to
answer his own question. " He was a quick, clever boy, and also a
thinking boy, naturally obsei^vant and reflecting. He was no prodigy
certainly. His parts and his promise were such as many boys have
and give. My father used to say that he thought his second nephew,
William Yates Peel, had naturally the quicker parts. He received an
early aim, one great advantage. He was stimulated to exertion by the
thought that great things were expected from him ; he was disciplined,
and was soon able to go, from the force of habit, in that direction to
which duty pointed, then to transfer his allegiance from custom to a
higher motive and a higher discipline. On the other hand, the
discipline acted on his mind like an overtight ligature on a jilant ; it
checked and dwarfed the plant. His originality and the freedom of
his mind, though not destroyed, was impaired by it. He grew up
graver than becomes a boy. Plis thoughts, as his manners, were cast
too much in an artificial mould, and were tinged by a certain formality.
A tendency to follow where he should have led was long observed in
Sketch, 43-5.
134 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
him," &c., &c. " As a boy, he was always under a strict discipline ; r.
good boy, of gentle manners, by choice rather seeking older than
younger companions, shrinking from all rudeness or coarseness, praised
by the old, and therefore not over-popular with the young. He was
quick in feeling, very sensitive, impatient of opposition from his young
companions, and dreading ridicule overmuch. He would walk a
mile round rather than encounter the rude jests of the Bury lads,
which his young companions bore with more philosophy. This was
not altogether a healthy state, and resembles the tenderness of a forced
plant. I have said that the elder Peels were shy and reserved men ;
he had his full share, naturally, of this defect, and shrank from strange
approach."
There is a rather curious contemporary testimony borne
by the elder Peel's flowery biographer of 1803-4 to this
parental tutorship of his son, who, of course, however, had
also ample professional instruction. " The plan of reading
which he," Peel senior, " early prescribed to himself, and
which he has never " (?) " discontinued, was as judicious,
as it was singularly adapted to give originality and quick-
ness to his perceptions — a plan which he not only recom-
mends his children to pursue, but daily trains them
in the practice of. His eldest son, a youth of the most
promising talents" — the young Robert, and statesman that
was to be — " who is little more than fifteen years of age, has
been so much in the habit of exercising the retentiveness of
his memory, conformably to this method, that very few
indeed of his age can carry with them more of the senti-
ments of an author than himself When he reads a portion
of a book, closing the volume, he immediately retraces the
impressions which were made on his memory, and the
mind, we know," ^ &c., &c. But a youth of fifteen could not
be always kept at his father's side, and to Harrow he was
sent. There the Bury calico-printer's son found himself the
school-fellow of the young Lord Byron, whose nature was,
^ ruhlic Characters of 1S0J-4, p. 9.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 35
and whose upbringing had been, so different from that of
the model boy with the nurture that has been seen ; and who
afterwards in his journal thus wrote of those old Harrow
days : " Peel, the orator and statesman that was or is or is
to be, was my form-fellow, and we were both at the top of
our remove. We were on good terms, but his brother" —
William Yates Peel, the son who was thought to have
*' naturally the quicker parts of the two " — " was my intimate
friend; there were always great hopes of Peel amongst us
all, masters and scholars, and he has not disappointed
them. As a scholar, he was greatly my superior; as a
declaimer and actor, I was reckoned at least his equal ; as a
schoolboy, out of school I was always in scrapes, and he
never ; and in school he always knew his lesson, and I
rarely ; but when I knew it, I knew it nearly as well ; and
in general information, history, (S:c., I think I was his
superior, as well as of most boys of my standing." From
Harrow onwards, the paths of the two school-fellows
diverged — Byron went to Cambridge, Peel to Oxford.
** Admitted as a gentleman commoner of Christ Church, the young
man seemed not entirely devoted to absorbing study. . . . He was a
boater and a cricketer ; his dress, too, was fashionable. A reading
man with boots by Hoby and a well-tied cravat ! He affects the
Admirable Crichton ! This is a common criticism to which variety is
subject. . . . There was not, however, any affectation in his case,
nor is there anything in it to be wondered at. Peel had no need of
cramming ; he had been well fed with learning from the cradle. • . .
A portion of his time sufficed amply for the studies of the place ; a
portion of his time might then be devoted safely to the ordinary busi-
ness of the little world around him. The result proved the wisdom of
his course. In a remarkably good year, in which were found the
names of Gilbert, Hampden, Whately, he took a double fii^st-class.
He was the first man so distinguished. At the preceding examinations
under the then new system, no one had gained the first class in mathe-
matics."^
1 Sketch, p. 52-4.
136 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
"At twenty-one he was attentive to his dress, and dressed well and
fashionably, though not to the full of the 02itre style which then pre-
vailed. It was still the fashion to wear powder in the hair at a dinner
or evening party ; and this fashion, which concealed the sandy colour
of his hair, and suited his complexion, became him well. With good
features, a sweet smile, a well-formed head, high and ample forehead,
not too grand a portico, and a countenance which, when animated,
was not wanting in expression or fire, he was generally thought a very
good-looking young man. . . . His appearance and manners were
those of a gentleman. In any society where he was intimate he was
an amusing, intelligent, and instructive companion. . . . He con-
versed well, and when any subject interested him, his face lighted up,
and you saw by the animation of his manner and the glow of his
countenance his enthusiastic admiration of genius, nobleness, or any
greatness. " ^
Such was the young Robert Peel, as nature had fashioned
him and education and circumstances had developed
him, when, cetat. 21 — his wealthy father having bought
for him, with the co-operation of the Treasury, the then pur-
chaseable Irish borough of Cashel — he entered the House
of Commons. His university reputation had preceded
him ; his father was a staunch supporter of things as they
were, and, after a year's silence, the young Peel was com-
missioned by the new Percival Ministry to second the
address at the opening of the session of 1810. At his very
debut he was called on to defend the indefensible — the ill-
timed and mismanaged Walcheren expedition ; and he
performed his task with spirit and skill, Pitt, his father's
idol, had died three years before, but what small opening
there might have been for a successor to Chatham's son
was already filled — at least, so the world thought — by
Co.nning ; and in truth the young Peel was not, nor could
all his father's care and money make him, a second Pitt.
Industry he had, however, and capacity, and he became
private secretary to Lord Liverpool, who was then Secre-
1 Sketch, p. 60.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 137
tary for the Colonies and for War — offices since, and very
properly, dissociated. " He filled this office for a short
time only, but he filled it long enough to increase the
good opinion which that nobleman, who observed in him
from the first a remarkable love of and aptitude for business,
had formed of him. It happened that whilst he held this
office a letter, written by him on some public but domestic
occurrence of the time, was laid before the old King, who
was interested in the subject of it. The King was pleased
with and praised the letter, called it ' a good business
letter,' and then passing on, in his quick manner, from the
commendation of the son's letter to the character of the
father, he spoke warmly in praise of the latter, concluding
with an emphatic declaration that he was ' a very honest
man ' — the culmination of his praise. Sir Herbert Taylor,
who was present on the occasion, wrote, with much good
nature, an account of the matter to old Sir Robert Peel,
conferring thereby all the pleasure which he expected to
flow from this communication ; " ^ pleasure doubtless greater
because his son was praised than because the King had
spoken thus of himself, since nothing could exceed old Sir
Robert's interest in the sayings and doings of the pro-
mising youth in whom his hopes were centred. Indeed, the
audience in the theatre of politics were soon made aware
of the presence of an old gentleman in the boxes accom-
panying his son's performances with expressions of approval,
pointing the attention of friends and neighbours to their
merit, and displaying visible emotion as often as the slightest
applause was bestowed upon his hopeful. He made no
secret of his expectation that his son was to be Prime
Minister, and thus a handle was given to scoffers. " One
of the clever squibs of the day was a pretended 'last will
and testament of a patriot,' in which the qualities they were
^ Sketch, p. loi.
138 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
supposed to want most was bequeathed to the principal
public men of the period ; the paragraph relating to Peel
is not bad : — ' I give and bequeath my patience to Mr.
Robert Peel — he will want it all before he becomes Prime
Minister of England ; but in the event of such a contin-
gency, my patience is to revert to the people of England,
who will stand sadly in need of it.' ^ The " contingency "
was not regarded as very probable, even on the Ministerial
side of the House. Not only was Canning preferred to
Peel, but he " was deemed inferior to such young men as
Lord Palmerston, Mr. Charles Grant, and Mr. Frederick
Robinson," afterwards first Earl of Ripon, who rose high
enough, but also sank low enough before all was done.
There was nothing for it but to wait and work, and submit
to be overshadowed by showier or more expert com-
petitors. His chief, who saw his solid value, soon promoted
him from private secretaryship to the Under Secretary-
ship of his own department, War and the Colonies ; and
when, after the assassination of Percival (which dashed
poor Crompton's hopes of an adequate reward), Lord
Liverpool himself entered on his long Premiership, he
appointed the young Peel to the difficult post of Irish
Secretary. In the letter to the then Viceroy announcing
the appointment, the new Premier bore testimony to
Peel's "particular good temper and great frankness of
manners." ^
It was at a critical period that Peel, atat. 24,
found himself virtual ruler of Ireland, under a Lord-
Lieutenant given over to " drunken orgies." Catholic
Emancipation had been made an " open question " by Lord
Liverpool; a majority of the House of Commons favoured
it ; and had wisdom ruled the councils of the Irish Roman
^ Cooke Taylor, i. 47.
* Yonge's Life, d'-r., of Second Eai'l of Liverpool {London 1868), i. 425.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 39
Catholics, a measure of emancipation might have been
carried before the Peace. The English Catholics were for
assenting to something like a Concordat in return for Eman-
cipation, and even the Pope approved. But O'Connell, then
rising into prominence, denounced the scheme of reciprocal
concession, and " the slaves of Rome " who favoured it.
In the House of Commons Peel had resisted unconditional,
and his residence in Ireland made him the opponent of
conditional emancipation. The turbulent O'Connell ridi-
culed him as " Orange Peel," as a " raw youth squeezed out
of the workings of I know not what factory in England,
who began his parliamentary career by vindicating the
gratuitous destruction of our brave soldiers in the murderous
expedition to Walcheren ; and was sent over here before he
got rid of the foppery of perfumed handkerchiefs and thin
shoes." With such a reception from the representative of
Irish patriotism, with a chief sunk in " drunken orgies," with
the Irish hierarchy and priesthood deaf to all proposals of
a compromise, Peel was thrown back, when in Ireland,
upon the alliance of the friends and champions of Protes-
tant ascendancy, and became, what he might not else
have been, a decided opponent of " Catholic claims," in any
form. Otherwise, as Irish Secretary, he began already to
show that practical ability which through life continued
to be his characteristic. He found chaos in his office, and
he made it order. He reformed the system of Irish
Police. He did his utmost to foster the trade and
commerce of Ireland, and fondly hoped to mitigate the
rancour of Catholic and Protestant by bringing the chil-
dren of both religions to be taught together in the same
public school. All was in vain. Agrarian outrage super-
vened on political and religious agitation, and had to be
met. Weary at last of presiding over the seemingly hopeless
anarchy into which Ireland had sunk, he resigned his ofiice,
140 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
and betook himself for a season to the study of the
currency question, and to the solution of the great problem
" What is a pound?" But to return to his sire.
From the passing of the Parish Apprentices Act, in 1802,
to the Peace of 1815, Sir Robert Peel figures occasionally
in the pages of the predecessor of Hansard, the Parliamen-
tary History. His speeches, brief or briefly reported, are
chiefly on commercial, trade, and fiscal topics, and generally
sensible and to the point One of the earliest of them, sub-
sequently to the passing of the Act aforesaid, was in the debate
on an address to the King two days after England declared
war against France once more ; the peace of Amiens having
proved a mere hollow truce. The retention of Malta by
England had been m.ade by Napoleon, then First Consul,
one of the excuses for the measures by which he provoked
the new war ; and the patriotic Sir Robert, when referring
to this plea, said in his good old Tory way, and with an
attempt, rare in liis oratory, at point : — " It did not appear
to be so much the desire of the French Government to
obtain the rock of Malta ; the rock of the English constitu-
tion was what they really aimed at." About two years
afterwards, low prices of corn having resulted from two
productive harvests, the Ministers (Pitt once more at the
head of affairs) brought in a bill raising from 54s. to 66s.
the price at which wheat might be imported duty free.
Then, as again twelve years later. Sir Robert Peel made a
stand. He loved Pitt partly because Pitt, he thought,
understood the value of the manufacturing industry of the
country ; and though it was with Pitt as Premier that this
corn bill was proposed, he resisted it. " Sir Robert Peel
argued that the manufacturing interest should be supported
against foreign competition by supplying the necessaries of
existence at a reasonable rate. A temporary depression of
the farmers' profits ought not to be made the cause of a
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. I4I
permanent burden on the consumer." Nevertheless the
bill was passed. Against measures directly affecting for
the worse the interests of the cotton manufacture, whether
they were to limit the number of apprentices in the print
trade (as that great philanthropist Sheridan once proposed),
or to fix a minimum of wages for cotton weavers by way of
alleviating their distress, or to lay a tax on raw cotton (in
favour of our colonies as against the United States), liis
voice was always raised. Once he had an opportunity of
ventilating in the House of Commons his old notion that
the national debt was no evil because the nation was its
own creditor; and he paraded his crotchet with all the
earnestness of 1780, But with the exception of his factory
legislation, the most memorable episode of his later parlia-
mentary career was his opposition to the famous corn
bill of 18 1 5, brought in when free intercourse with
the Continent was being renewed, and low prices of corn
were once more alarming the agricultural mind. The
ministerial Sir Robert Peel threw himself heart and soul
into opposition, and advocated the policy to which, after
long resistance, his son was thirty or so years later to give
effect. In the discussion in the House of Commons, be it
noted, the younger Peel mildly and briefly supported the
new corn bill, on the same ground which made Grattan
support it lengthily and ardently — because imports of foreign
corn might injure Ireland. Not so Peel the father.
" He said tliat it was an error to suppose that the interests of the
landholder and of the manufacture were conflicting and incompatible.
They were, in the view of enlightened policy, the same ; and the
success or ruin of the one was tlie success or ruin of the other,
inasmuch as the country generally had been enriched by the sale of our
manufactures, the landholders had received their share of the wealtli
and advantages. It had been the wise policy of former Governments
to keep the price of the chief article of subsistence as low as possible ;
upon this principle Mr. Pitt had acted with success, but the system
142 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
was now about to be changed. It was undoubtedly true that the rent
of land would be diminished by the unlimited importation of corn" — a
general impression then as thirty years afterwards; "but if the
resolutions upon the table passed in their present shape, the manufac-
tures of the towns would be destroyed, and the land must consequently
be depreciated ; corn might be grown, but paupers would be the only
customers for it " — a statement which, if made from the platform thirty
years later, would have produced " Tremendous cheers." " It was,
in truth, impossible to separate the two interests. The value of
land, within memory, had in some places increased threefold. The
owners had derived their benefit from the political state of things, and
now they must suffer the depreciation produced by an alteration of
that political state. With respect to our manufactures, it was allowed
that during the war our triumphant situation on the sea had enabled
us to force a trade without rivals ; but now we were open to competi-
tion, it would be nonsense in us to throw fresh obstacles in the way of
those who had so many to contend against. In his opinion, it might
be fairly argued that the manufacturer had been the great benefactor
of the landed interest. He did not say that his design was to serve
the landowner. That had been the result of the flourishing state of
our manufactures ; and in the difficulties now to be encountered the
landowner ought to participate. By the measures now upon the table,
the wise system pursued for years was about to be subverted, and the
labourers prevented from putting the real wealth of the country into
that marketable shape."
Again : —
"At a subsquent stage of the bill, he declared that a bounty on the
importation of corn when the price was high would be by far a more
preferable measure than tire one embraced by Mr. Robinson's bill. On
the presentation of a petition from Manchester, he returned to the sub-
ject, and said that the petition showed the unanimous opinion enter-
tained of this bill in our largest manufacturing town. He begged the
House also to observe that the petition was not urged by any want of
attachment to the Government, for during the most pressing periods of
the war the people of Manchester had abstained from all complaints,
because they had hoped that the return of peace, whenever it might
arrive, would cause a cessation of their burdens. He had witnessed
their feelings on former occasions with great uneasiness, as they arose
from a want of- bread ; but when they were told that it would be un-
generous to publish their complaints, they submitted to their hard con-
dition with the most praiseworthy silence. He considered the present
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 43
bill as the most injurious and unprecedented measure which had occurred
in his time, as it went to affect an immensely numerous and loyal body
of people, who had supported Government by their labour and the
advantages derived from its exercise. Was it then to be endured that
Ministers should lend themselves to such a measure? He would tell
them that they had but one interest to consult, and that was to support
the labourer in manufacturing industry. Was it intended that we
should for the future live only on the produce of our land ? If so, what
would become of the resources from our manufactures when our
machinery should be lost ? He was persuaded our manufacturers would
not sit still and see their trade frittered away and destroyed ; they would
go abroad, and exert themselves where their labour would be properly
appreciated and enable them to procure the necessaries of life. He,
however, yet hoped that as the injurious tendency of the measure must
now be evident, it would not be suffered to proceed, but that Ministers
would convince the anxious multitude that they were alive to their real
and vital interests. The fact was, that the more the measure became
known, the more generally it was execrated and condemned. The
people were not to be cajoled by such arguments as that the bill would
give them cheap bread" — by " steadying the price," as had been gravely
contended ; "they knew better — they knew the theory was impossible — •
and, considering the inevitable consequences of the measure, he hoped
that the House would not suffer it to proceed further." ^
This was the stand made by the old Tory and Church-
and-State Peel against the corn bill of 18 15. In spite,
however, of his unadorned eloquence, the House did allow
the bill to " proceed further," and passed it was amid angry
protests throughout the country ; excited multittides raging
against it at the very doors of Parliament, which had to call
in the military to protect its august deliberations from vio-
lence. To the large majorities by which the measure was
carried Saint William Wilberforce, sworn friend of the black,
contributed a not silent vote. Until the average price
of wheat rose to 80s., the ports were to be closed against
foreign corn — so Parliament in its wisdom decided. As it
happened, moreover, neither the hopes of those who suj>
ported the bill nor the fears of those who opposed it were
^ Cooke Taylor, i. 21-3.
144 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
realised. The price of corn was not kept up to the wished-
for standard, neither did the British manufacturer migrate
with his capital and machinery to foreign lands.
When the victory of Waterloo restored peace to Europe,
Sir Robert Peel was a man of sixty-five. He had ceased to
live in Lancashire, Drayton being his customary country
residence, but he seems to have still superintended his
wide-spread concerns. At any rate, he continued to take a
lively interest in the state and prospects of manufacturing
industry, as has been shown by his anti-corn-law speeches ;
and a sudden and unexpected appeal now summoned him
to renew his old legislative efforts on behalf of the chil-
dren employed in it, — for the sake of humanity alone, not
for his own sake or for that of his order in the least. The
summons came this time primarily from Scotland, though
not from a Scotchman, but from a Welshman — the Robert
Owen who migrated from Lancashire to Lanarkshire, and,
marrying the daughter of David Dale of Glasgow, became
manager and part proprietor of the famous cotton-mills
within earshot of the rushing and falling Clyde, where
Richard Arkwright saw the germ of a Scottish Manchester.
Though the application of steam to cotton-spinning, by
substituting another motive power for that of water, falsified
Arkwright's prediction. Dale's cotton-mills, which had been
constructed on Arkwright's plans, and in which, indeed,
Arkwright was for a short time a partner, throve -in the
hands of the capable and experienced Robert Owen until
he became a dreamer of dreams. He made the New
Lanark Mills, as has been already said, one of the " indus-
trial showplaces of Europe." ^ The internal arrangements
of these mills were the best that could be contrived.
The workers were provided with good houses, and stores
^ For a sketch of David Dale's biography, and of the early history of
the New Lanark Mills, see First Series, pp. 449-54.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 45
were established to supply them cheaply with the best
articles of food and clothing. Schools were built for the
children, who were not allowed to work until they were ten,
and whose labour was strictly limited to ten hours a day.
The Scotch partners, Dale's successors — hard-headed and
not very soft-hearted capitalists and men of business — dis-
approved of Owen's ways and views, and seceded, but he
managed to get at last other and more congenial in
their place — philanthropic Englishmen, Quakers some of
them, and, most notable of all of them, Jeremy Bentham,
the sage himself. As Owen's arrangements for the health,
comfort, and happiness of his workers perfected themselves,
visitors from all parts of the kingdom, and even of the
Continent, came to study the realised cotton-idyl of the
New Lanark Mills, which, moreover, were successful finan-
cially. If Owen had but gone on as he began, who knows
what good influences his model mills might not have
diffused, and what beneficent effects they might not have
produced on the organisation of British industry elsewhere ?
But soon, too soon, he was merging the practical in the
speculative, running-a-muck against "Theology" among
other venerable or venerated things. He printed " Essays
on the Formation of Character " (to be manufactured, like
cotton goods, by machiner}'), and the rank of some of the
persons with whom these productions brought him into cor-
respondence and connection made him restless and ambi-
tious, not to speak of the vanity developed in him by the
praises of admiring visitors. The left hand began to be too
familiar with what the right hand was doing, and at last he
fancied that his true mission was to regenerate the whole
human race and to re-organise civilised society — on the
pattern of his New Lanark Mills, but under conditions
wholly different from those which made him there monarch
of all he surveyed. One of the first steps taken by Owen
T
146 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
after the formation of his partnership (in 18 14) with the
English philanthropists and philosopher, was, however, both
legitimate and laudable ; though ultimately, alas ! it led him,
or contributed to lead him, away and astray from home and
its work. Before the war with revolutionary France broke
out, cotton-wool had been imported duty free, but in the
course of the costly contest, pressing ever more and more
on the national finances, a heavy duty came to be levied on
its import. The well-meaning Owen knew that a proposal
to protest against the obnoxious impost would collect an
eager throng of fellow-manufacturers, mute to any appeal
of mere philanthropy. If, he seems to have thought, he
could bring them together on this ground, he would have a
chance of persuading them to listen to his denunciations
of evils — such, for instance, as the premature and protracted
employment of children — which he himself had abolished
in his own mills, but which remained flagrant and pernicious
in those of many other employers. But let Owen tell his
own story : —
" In 18 14 I had formed a new partnership with men pledged to assist
my views for the reformation of society in my way in practice.
I therefore commenced measures accordingly. My first step was to
call a meeting of the manufacturers of Scotland in 1 81 5, to be held in
the Tontine, Glasgow, to consider the necessity and policy of asking
the Government, then under Lord Liverpool's administration, to remit
the heavy duty then paid on the importation of cotton, and to consider
measures to improve the condition of the young children and others
employed in the various textile manufactures now so rapidly extending
over the kingdom. The meeting was presided over by the Lord
Provost of Glasgow, and was very numerously attended by the leading
manufacturers of that town. I stated to the meeting my object in
calling it, and first proposed that an application should be made to
Government to remit the tax upon the raw material of the cotton
manufacture. This was carried unanimously by acclamation," — for it
came home to the pockets of the men of Glasgow. Very different was
the reception given to Owen's next and philanthropic overture. "I
then proposed a string of resolutions to give relief to the children and
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 47
others employed in cotton, wool, flax, and silk mills. They contained
the same conditions which I afterwards embodied in a bill which /
induced the first Sir Robert Peel to propose for me to the House of
Commons." Owen's egotism, when he wrote this, was fully developed.
"The propositions were read by me to the meeting; but although
all were enthusiastically in favour of asking for the remission of the
tax, not one," — not even one among so many! — "would second my
motion for the relief of those whom they employed. I then declined
to proceed with them in the business of the meeting "—if they would not
swallow the black draught, they should not have the barley-sugar, —
" and it therefore came to nothing. But I told them I should take my
own course in both measures, independently of them."
" New Lanark was now becoming the most celebrated establishment
of the kind at home or abroad, and was visited by strangers from all
parts of the world, averaging yearly, from that period until I left it to
go to the United States," — on a bootless errand, — "ten years later, not
less than two thousand." The inference is that the manager of an
establishment so well known and so visited could do something in the
world without the aid of the men of Glasgow.
"On returning from the Glasgow meeting to this establishment, T
immediately sent to the Lord Provost of Glasgow, as chairman of the
meeting, a copy of the address which I had read, and sent copies of it
also to the Government, and to every member of both Houses of
Parliament. I also had it published in the London and provincial
press.
"This address made me yet better known to the Government, and
was afterwards a passport for me to all" (?) "the members of both
Houses of Parliament, and it created a considerable sensaiion among
the upper classes and the manufacturing interest over the kingdom.
"As soon as I had made this address thus public, I proceeded to
London to communicate with the Government, and to learn what it
would do on both subjects. I was referred to Mr. Nicholas Vansittart,
afterwards Lord Bexley," — then Chancellor of the Exchequer, — "re-
specting the remission of the tax. I was well received by him, and in
our conversation he asked me some questions, which I cannot now
remember ; but my prompt, decided reply made him blush like a
sensitive maiden on account of his previous want of knowledge on the
subject," — for Vansittart was not "a second Pitt." "The tax was four-
pence per pound, and he said he would remit the whole, except to the
amount ol a small portion of a penny, which he said would be retained
for some Government object or arrangement. " The tax, according to
Baines, was more like 2d. per pound — l6s. ild. per icxj lbs. — which.
148 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
according to the same authority, was reduced in the year of Owen's
visit to Vansittart to about id. per pound — 8s. yd. per 100 lbs.
"The Government was also favourable to my views for the relief of
the children and others employed in the growing manufactures of the
kingdom, if I could induce the members of both Houses to pass a bill
for the purpose. This was a formidable task to attempt to effect, for
by this time the manufacturing interest had become strong in the
House of Commons, and yet stronger in its out-of-door influence with
the members, whose election was much under its control. But I made
up my mind to try what truth and perseverance could effect.
"I waited personally on the leading members of both Houses, and
explained to them my object, which was to give some relief to a most
deserving, yet much oppressed part of our population. I was in
general well received, and had much promise of support, especially
from the leaders of the various sections into which parties were then
divided. Lord Lascelles, member for Yorkshire, afterwards Earl of
Harewood, and at that period the most influential " (?) "member of the
House of Commons, offered me his full assistance, and requested me to
use his name with mine in calling meetings of the members of both
Houses to promote my proposed bill when introduced into Parliament.
When by these means the leading members of both Houses had
become interested, and were desirous the bill which I had prepared
should be introduced, a final meeting was conjointly called by Lord
Lascelles and myself of the members of both Houses who had taken
with us the greatest interest at former meetings to forward the measure,
now to consider, as I was not a member, who should be requested to
take charge of the bill, and to introduce it into the House of Commons.
The first Sir Robert Peel was now a member of the House of Commons,
was an extensive manufacturer, and stood well with the Government
and the House generally. But I had never applied to him or to any
other manufacturer in the House, and it was not known to the meeting
how he might view my proposals. The members present at the
meeting (which with the previous one was held in the King's Arms
Hotel, New Palace Yard, Westminster, and was numerously attended)
suggested that if Sir Robert Peel would introduce the bill, he would be
a very fit person to carry it through the House of Commons. The
meeting wished to know whether I had any objections to Sir Robert
Peel's taking charge of the bill, if he would undertake it. He had
never been present at any of our meetings, and I did not know how
as a manufacturer he was inclined to act, and I believed that so far he
was altogether unacquainted with our proceedings. But I could have
no objection to him if he was willing to accept the charge. The
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 49
meeting asked me if I would endeavour to ascertain his views upon
the subject, and I consented to do so. My calling upon him for this
purpose was the first intimation that Sir Robert Peel had of these
proceedings.
"When I informed him of the support which I was offered from the
leading members in both Houses, he very willingly accepted the offer,
and agreed to attend the next meeting of the favouring members, that
he might learn their wishes as to the best mode of proceeding. He
did so ; and at that meeting all the arrangements were concluded for
introducing the bill into the House of Commons with all the clauses as
/had prepared them." ^
Thus, according to Owen's account, it was he, the
philanthropist-manufacturer of the New Lanark Mills,
who originated the second distinctly recorded attempt at
factory legislation, and the bill introduced by Sir Robert
Peel into the House of Commons in 18 15 was framed by
him and by no one else. Owen's account is corroborated,
though with some little modification, by Sir Robert Peel's
statement to the House of Commons' committee of 181 6.
He then sketched thus the history of the bill which he
had introduced the year before. " A worthy man,'' lie
said, " produced a plan to me, which I am not ashamed to
own, and I conceived that the intention of that gentleman
was so good, and his wishes so earnest, that I did not lend
an unwilling ear to him." But though " far from adopting
his plan of improvement to the extent he went, I still
deemed an alteration necessary," in the present arrange-
ments of the cotton manufacture, " and that gave birth to the
bill of last year, which bill, in its progress, was attended by
many honourable members of this House, and met with
great approbation." Robert Owen, there cannot be the
slightest doubt, was the "worthy man" here referred to by
Sir Robert, who, at the same time, hints that the ardent
Welshman went too far for him. To conciliate his fellow
manufacturers. Peel lessened the stringency of the bill as
^ Robert Owen, Life by Himself, i, 1 13-16.
150 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
framed by Owen ; and before all was done, it underwent,
for the same reason, further and further modifications, until
its first parent could scarcely recognise, and was almost
disposed to disown, his offspring.
"Had Sir Robert Peel," Owen grumbled some forty years after-
wards, "been so inclined, he might have speedily carried this bill as it
was through the House of Commons during the first session, in time
for it to have passed triumphantly through the Lords. But it appeared
afterwards that he was too much under the influence of his brother
manufacturers ; and he allowed this bill, of so much importance to the
country, the master manufacturers, and the working classes, to be
dragged through the House of Commons for four sessions before it was
passed, and when passed, it had been so mutilated in all its valuable
clauses that it became valueless for the objects I had intended.
"At the commencement of these proceedings I was an utter novice
in the manner of conducting the business of the country in Parliament.
But my intimate acquaintance with the proceedings for the four years
during which this bill was under the consideration of both Houses,
opened my eyes to the conduct of public men, and to the ignorant,
vulgar self interest, regardless of means to accomplish their object, of
trading and mercantile men even of high standing in the commercial
world. No means were left unturned by these men to defeat the
object of the bill in the first session of its introduction, and through
four years in which, under one futile pretence and another, it was kept
in the House of Commons." ^
Even so ; but Sir Robert Peel, who had been in the
House of Commons for a quarter of a century, knew from
the first the potency of the opposition, which forty years
afterwards Owen fancied, or fancied that he fancied, might
have been averted by an attempt to hurry the bill through
Parliament in a single session. When, in 1802, thirteen
years before. Peel proposed the Factory Apprentices Bill,
what would otherwise have been the opposition of the
manufacturers was silent and inert because the measure was
introduced by him. But now he found arrayed against him
the whole, or almost the whole, strength of the interest, the
^ Robert Owen, Life by Himself , i. 116.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. I5I
clamour of which, in its comparative infancy thirty years
before, had daunted Pitt, and been eagerly taken, for party
purposes, into alliance by Fox. The manufacturers of cotton
alone were now a most powerful body, out of the House
even more than in it ; and in opposition to further, or to
stringent, factory legislation, were doubtless ranged all the
other manufacturers of woollen, of flax, of silk, who, by
adapting to their operations the machinery of the great
inventors of the cotton industry, found their interests so
far the same as those of the cotton manufacturers, and
themselves threatened with the same restrictions. " Children
at this time," says Owen with natural indignation, "were
admitted into the cotton, wool, flax, and silk mills at six,
and sometimes even at five years of age. The time of
working, winter and summer, was unlimited by law, but
usually it was fourteen hours per day, in some fifteen, and
even, by the most inhuman and avaricious, sixteen hours ;
and in many cases the mills were artificially heated to a
high state most unfavourable to health." ^ Too true ! The
Apprentices Act of 1802, which sought to abolish these
evils, had become either obsolete or ineffective. When
the workhouses first emptied their little inmates on the
cotton districts, and parish apprentices were eagerly sought
for by employers, many if not most of the mills lay away
from towns, on the banks of streams available for water-
power. But with the application of the steam-engine as
a motor of machinery, water - power dwindled in value.
Mills were built in towns, and population adjusting itself
to the demand for juvenile labour, the employer was no
longer left dependent on the workhouse, and gave up the
apprenticeship system altogether. The mass of the children
now employed, not being apprentices, were not subject to
the provisions of Sir Robert Peel's Act of 1802, which had
^ Robert Owen, Life by Himself, i. 116.
152 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
thus in most places become a dead letter. Even in districts
where the apprenticeship system lingered, employers could
carry out its provisions or not pretty much as they chose.
There existed no officers or salaried inspectors whose
business it was to watch for and to punish infractions
of the law. Arkwright's son, Richard the second, was
questioned on this point during his examination before the
House of Commons' committee of 1816. " That Act," he
said, speaking of Sir Robert Peel's measure of 1802, "has
not been followed up with respect to the visiting of magis-
trates these thirteen years " — that is, in fact, almost ever
since it was passed. " I think," he added, " they visited
my mills at Cromford twice." But even had inspection
been effective, the Act was evaded by the employment of
children who were not apprentices, and who were supplied
in tolerably ample numbers by the growth of population in
towns, stimulated as it was by the vast expansion of the
cotton trade. Their labour was cheap, but the machinery
of the cotton-mill became ever more and more costly and
complicated with the progress of the manufacture ; and
when Peel brought in his second bill, the employers fancied
that they would be losers if the Legislature diminished the
time during which the cheap labour of the children brought
them a profit by its appHcation to the expensive machinery
of the mills. Not only so ; the general use of the steam-
engine in cotton-mills, the enlargement and elaboration
of their machinery, the growth of fine spinning through the
invention and development of Crompton's mule, brought
adult labour more and more into play. The children who
had once performed the principal part in the cotton manu-
facture became in many operations the mere though
indispensable adjuncts and assistants of the adult, who
often directly employed his juvenile subordinate. Any
measure, therefore, that restricted the hours of the labour
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL, 1 53
of the children, inevitably though indirectly shortened those
of the adult operative, to whom this human machinery was
as necessary as the wood and iron of his mules, his spindles,
and his carding-machines. " You are now," the manufac-
turers of 1815 said to Sir Robert Peel, "no longer, as
in I So 2, interfering merely with the labour of children —
and it was an interference which we could avoid and
evade — but you are virtually dictating to adults the hours
during which they shall work, and are laying the axe at the
root of our whole system of manufactures."
What, actual and potential, was the strength of the Par-
liamentary opposition to new factory legislation for the
protection of children under these new circumstances, Sir
Robert Peel knew better than Owen could know or than
we can know. He received encouragement, no doubt, from
philanthropic members on both sides of the House, and
from individual members of the Administration, but the
Government did not, as a Government, support him, and he
found in 181 5 a state of feeling, in ParUament and out of it,
very different from that of 1802. He was growing old too,
and was himself a manufacturer, belonging to a class, the
interests of which had just then been unfairly dealt with, he
thought, by the passing of the Corn Bill ; and which, after this
punishment for their sacrifices during the war, complained
that now when peace had come, their industry was threatened
with destructive or damaging legislation. Little wonder if
the practical man, thus situated, did not share Owen's
hope of getting the bill through Parliament in a single
session, and if he endeavoured to disarm opposition by
avoiding anything like precipitancy. It was on the 6th of
June, 181 5 (twelve days before the Batde of Waterloo),
that Peel introduced his second Factory Bill. Instead of
attempting to hurry it through Parliament, as Owen urged,
he proposed that it should be read a first time and then
u
154 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
printed, to be circulated during the recess through the
country, "and receive the proper amendments." In his
apparently brief speech when introducing the measure he
did little more than explain its chief provisions, which were
" that no children should be employed under the age of ten
years, either as apprentices or otherwise, and the duration of
their labour should be limited to twelve hours and a half
per diem, including the time for education and meals, which
would leave ten hours for laborious employment." In the
bill printed " as amended " a week afterwards, the ten hours'
limit, always contended for by Owen, was modified in some
cases. No one under eighteen was to be employed more
than ten and a half hours for any day, but it was only
for those children receiving instruction that ten hours was
to be the limit. During the first four years after admission
to the mill, the child was to be instructed one half-hour
every working-day in reading", writing, and arithmetic, either
by " some discreet and proper person " to be provided by the
mill-owner, or in some public school near at hand. The half-
hour so spent was added to the meal time, and the child or
young person receiving such instruction could be worked
only ten hours a day, but in other cases work for ten and a
half hours was permissible. No child was to be employed
under ten years of age. The inspection of mills was en-
trusted to the Clerk of the Peace or to a visitor or visitors
appointed by the Justices, who might remunerate them, and
a report was to be made once a year. The penalty for the
infraction of these regulations was to be not more than
£^\o or less than ;^5, one-half to be paid to the informer.
Such were the main provisions of the bill of 1S15, and
during the recess it was no doubt very extensively circu-
lated among all whom it concerned. Great appears to
have been the opposition to it from manufacturers, Eng-
lish and Scotch, who had known nothing of legislative
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. I55
restrictions since the Act of 1S02, and its restrictions had
long ceased to be effective. When Parliament again met,
Sir Robert, it would seem, found the advice of friends and
the clamour of foes urging him in one and the same direc-
tion — to ask for a Parliamentary enquiry before proceeding
further with the bill. Here is all that is reported of his
speech on the occasion (April 3, 1816} — perhaps it was all
that he said : —
"Sir Robert Peel rose, in pursuance of a previous notice, to submit
a motion to the House respecting the state of children employed in
cotton manufactories. The object of his motion was altogether national,
as it affected the health and morals of the rising generation, and went
to determine whether the introduction of machinery into our manufac-
tories was really a benefit. The principal business in our cotton manu-
factories was now performed by machinery, and of course interrupted
the division of work suitable to the respective ages, which formerly was
practised in private houses. The consequence was that little children,
of very tender age, were employed with grown persons at the machinery ;
and those poor little creatures, torn from their beds, were compelled to
work, even at the age of six years, from early morn to late at night, a
period of perhaps fifteen or sixteen hours ! He allowed that many mas-
ters had humanely turned their attention to the regulation of this prac-
tice ; but too frequently the love of gain predominated, inducing them
to employ all their hands to the greatest possible advantage. Some
time ago he had introduced a bill into the House for regulating the
work of apprentices, which was attended wilh the hapiiiest results, and
their time was limited ; but children were still subjected to all the hard-
ships to which carelessness or cupidity might expose them. The House
was well aware of the many evils that resulted from the want of educa-
tion in the lower classes. One object of the present bill was to enable
manufacturing children to devote some of their time to the acquirement
of a little useful simple knowledge, such as plain reading and writing.
He hoped those children would experience the protection of the House,
for if it were not extended to them, all our excellent machinery would be
productive of injury. It might, perhaps, be said that free labour should
not be subjected to any control ; Ijut surely it could not be inconsistent
with our constitution to protect the interests of those helpless children.
The honourable Baronet concluded with moving that a committee be
appointed to take into consideration the state of the children emj^loycd
156 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
in the different manufactories of the United Kingdom, and to report
the same, together with their observations thereupon, to the House."
There followed other speeches, from members manufac-
turing and non-manufacturing, speeches which showed what
a storm of opposition would have been raised had Sir
Robert proposed to legislate without preliminary enquiry.
For instance, a Mr. Curwen looked upon the bill " as an
insult to parents," "Parents," said this honourable gentle-
man, "must be best aware of the quantity of work their
children were able to bear, and must undoubtedly feel
most for their distress. Such a proceeding," as this pro-
posal of legislative interference, " was a libel on the
humanity of parents." However, even he " had no objec-
tion to a committee," which was appointed and sat, taking
evidence from the 25th of April to the 28th of June,
1816.
All sorts and conditions of men, from the second Richard
Arkwright, then on his way to become the wealthiest Com-
moner in England, and from " Astley Cooper, Esq.," the
great surgeon that was, and Sir Astley Cooper that was to
be, down to humble operatives, were examined on the theory
and practice of child labour in factories. The evidence,
as usual in these cases, was emphatic on both sides, and
as conflicting as it was emphatic. Manufacturers testified
that their mills were salubrious, that the children in them
were not over-worked, and that the juvenile mortality was
slight. Medical men, practising in the manufacturing dis-
tricts, had, on the other hand, from their own personal ex-
perience, come to exactly the opposite conclusion. It was
l)roved that in some cases children of five were employed
in mills, and that sometimes children of other ages were
worked fifteen hours a day. These, no doubt, were excep-
tional cases, but there was nothing in the law to prevent
the exception from becoming the rule, since it was admitted
THE FIRST S/R ROBERT PEEL. 1 57
on all hands that the Parish Apprentices Act of 1802 had
become a dead letter, and no appointment of visitors by
the magistrates, which the Act enjoined, had been made
anywhere in the Hundred of Salford. The second
Richard Arkwright deposed that no children were admitted
into the Cromford Mills under the age of ten, or until
they had learned to read. The hours of attendance were
tliirteen, from which was to be deducted one hour for
dinner, and from fifteen to twenty-eight minutes for break-
fast ; so that, in those earliest of cotton-mills, children of ten
must have worked eleven and a half hours out of the twenty-
four. It was this son, heir and successor of the founder of
the factory system, one learns with pleasure from his own
evidence, who invented the fan in the scutching-room, a
simple and effective contrivance for ventilating it. But if
the children in the mills of the second Richard Arkwright,
who seems to have been a humane and careful employer,
were worked eleven and a half hours at the lowest, how many
more may not have been the number of hours during which
they were worked here and there by greedy and callous em-
ployers, restrained by no law ; to say nothing of what could
be done, as Sir Robert Peel had discovered in his own
mills, by unscrupulous overseers acting in flat transgression
of the orders of humane employers? Owen and Peel were
both of them examined, and Owen testified to the good
effects produced in his own mills through the limitation,
voluntarily imposed by himself, of children's labour to ten
hours a day. Peel's evidence, and the long, the creditably-
emphatic written statement which he handed in to the
committee, have been already quoted from. Apart, it may
be added, from evidence as to matters of fact, some of the
manufacturers opposed to legislation laid great stress on
fears often expressed since, and generally found chimerical ;
but which may have made a greater than their due impres-
158 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
sion then, when a long war was being followed by peace,
and the competition of Continental manufacturers with
those of England was beginning or reviving. Foreign
countries, where no such restrictions existed, would, the
committee were told, gain an advantage over us, and Eng-
lish capital and workmen, already overweighted by taxa-
tion, would seek refuge in those happy lands where the law
did not prevent a cliild of five from doing what he liked
with its own labour. Such vehement assertions have all
sunk into silence now, but they may have seemed potent
tlien, not only to manufacturers, but to the legislative country
gentlemen, who in their fear of foreign competition, had
enacted a Corn Law the year before. All this and a great
deal more evidence was presented to the House in a Blue
Book, but without any report or recommendations from the
committee itself, perhaps because its members could come
to no agreement on the points in dispute.
During the following year, 181 7, nothing parliamentary
appears to have been said or done in the matter of new fa(Si
tory legislation. Sir Robert Peel seems to have been absent
from the House of Commons, in all likelihood through
illness or from ill health. A new campaign was opened,
however, in the February of 1818, when Sir Robert intro-
duced another Factory Regulation Bill, the provisions of
which showed that he and the friends of the' cause thought it
advisable to make considerable concessions to the enemy.
The former bill embraced all factories, woollen, silk, or flax,
as well as cotton ; the new bill lessened the area of opposition
by restricting its scope, not merely to cotton factories, but
to cotton-spinning mills alone. It was to be operative only
in " cotton mills, manufactories, or buildings in which
cotton-yarn is made." The age at which children might
begin to work was lowered from ten to nine. The hours
during which they might work were extended to eleven, —
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 159
twelve and a half hours of attendance at the mill, with half
an hour for breakfast and an hour for dinner. The pro-
vision of the old bill prescribing instruction was dropped
in the new one. That respecting the Justices and the
appointment of Inspectors was retained, and the penalties
for infraction were to be from £'io to ^20. After the
usual fight, in which the old Sir Robert had this time
the assistance of his son — who did not, however, in later
years, remain very faithful to the cause thus espoused in
his youth, — the bill was carried through the Commons on
the 27th of April 1818, by a majority of 65, in a small house
of 1 17 members. But the battle was not yet over. On the
arrival of the bill in the Peers, where it was taken in hand
by Lord Kenyon, it had to run the gauntlet of considerable
opposition, at the head of which was a Scotch peer, the
Earl of Lauderdale — Byron's " Lauderdale, shrill, Scotch,
and acute." The Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, spoke
strongly in its behalf, declaring that " if all the medical
staff of Manchester were brought to the bar of the House
to prove that children worked more than fifteen hours
a day without being thereby injured, he would not believe
them." But the manufacturers had asked to be heard by
counsel against the bill, and after this hearing. Lord
Kenyon withdrew it until the ensuing session. In the
February of 1819, the subject was brought again before the
House of Peers, and on the motion of Lord Kenyon, a
select committee was appointed to inquire into the question
of the labour of children in factories. The evidence given
in favour of restriction was even stronger than that received
by the House of Commons' Committee of 18 16. A bill
being now passed in the Peers, it was accepted by the Com-
mons, and became during the same session the law of the
land. This is the Act 59 George III., cap. 66; a brief
enactment, and not containing those provisions of the former
l60 LASCASHIRE WORTHIES.
bills, whicli alone could have made it effective. Its scope
was restricted to factories where cotton and cotton only was
spun. No child younger than nine was to be employed,
and no person under sixteen was to be actually worked in
them more than ten and a half hours on any one day, the
whole permitted number of hours of attendance being
twelve, with an hour and a half for meals. Nothing was
said concerning the instruction of the children ; and, above
all, nothing of the appointment of visitors or inspectors.
But penalties of from ;^io to ;^2o for infraction were
retained, and a sanitary provision was added ; ordinary
" ceilings and interior walls to be washed with quicklime
and water twice a year."
This was not much to have gained, after so many sessions
of parliamentary campaigning and battling. The first Sir
Robert Peel's Apprentices Bill of 1802, passed seventeen
years before, regulated woollen and other as well as cotton-
mills, but here it was only cotton-spinning mills that were
brought, or retained, within the purview of the State's parental
authority and supervision. The Act of 1802 directed that
both secular and religious instruction should be furnished to
the young people for whom it legislated. Here any and
every provision of the kind was omitted. The Act of 1802,
moreover, enjoined the appointment of inspectors or
visitors, who were to report on the execution of its direc-
tions, and though this injunction proved to be inoperative,
it signified at least a desire on the part of the Legislature
to enforce the fulfilment of its enactments. There was no
provision of the kind in the Act of 18 19, and everything
was left to " the informer," not a person likely to abound
in the manufacturing districts of that, or of any time. The
Act of 18 ig turned out, moreover, to have been so negli-
gently drawn that its operation was grievously obstructed by
a difficulty in the summoning and examination of witnesses,
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. l6l
even when the " informer," professional or philanthropic,
did choose to exert himself Hence the law was constantly
evaded, and its execution had broken down, when Byron's
friend, the then advanced Liberal member for Westminster,
Sir John Cam Hobhouse, took up the grievance in the House
of Commons. He was the author, six years afterwards, of
the Act (6 George IV., cap. 23) amending that of 1819, and
which for young persons under sixteen, made ten and a half
hours the maximum period of daily labour permissible.
This new Act contained satisfactory provisions for summon-
ing witnesses, and for compelling them when summoned to
give evidence; provisions, the absence of which, had rendered
ineffective Sir Robert Peel's measure of 18 19. But the Act
of 1825, too, was made of no avail by the ingenuity of the
lawyers; and in 1829, Sir John Cam Hobhouse, still taking
the lead, procured the passing of another, the 10 George IV.,
cap, 31, which deprived of validity technical objections, previ-
ously and successfully taken when the name and designation
of every partner in the firm prosecuted had not been stated in
the summons. The last of Sir John Cam Hobhouse's well-
meant legislative efforts of this kind, issued in the i & 2
William IV., cap. 39, another ten and a half hours' bill, and
including, unlike most of its predecessors, weaving as well as
spinning-mills. Yet whether they were weavmg or spinning-
mills, it was those of the cotton manufacture alone that
were legislated for by any of these enactments, with the ex-
ception of Sir Robert Peel's Apprentices Bill of 1802, which
did include woollen-mills, but that measure had long, as has
been seen, become obsolete through the abandonment of
the apprenticeship system and from other causes. With
1 83 1, and the last of Sir John Cam Hobhouse's Bills, regulat-
ing juvenile employment in the cotton manufacture alone,
the Reform Bill was approaching, and there had already
come an awakening of public feeling in Yorkshire, a county
X
I02 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
the seat of an extensive woollen manufacture, all the con-
ditions and operations of which remained untouched, and
unregulated by any law. Fiery Oastlers and vehement
Sadlers were beginning to incite the men of Yorkshire, in
the great centres of the woollen manufacture, to demand a
ten hours' bill. Yorkshire, which had been left out of the
scope and operation of all these recent short-time enact-
ments, passed for the cotton trade alone, responded to the
call, and the Lancashire operatives found themselves
enlisting under the banner of a Ten Hours' Bill, unfurled
by the leaders of the woollen operatives of Yorkshire.
Noblemen and gentlemen, and influential sections of politi-
cal parties, engaged actively in the new movement. With
varying fortunes, under successive leaders, the agitation
proceeded, until at last the victory was won ; and since then
the manufacturers themselves have learned to be grateful
for the Factory Acts, which, if stringent in their provisions
and operations, at least impose the same equal restrictions
upon all, and no longer allow the greedy and unscru-
pulous a commercial advantage over their more humane
or less grasping competitors. Effective factory legislation
dates from 1833, and the 3 & 4 William IV,, cap. 103, which
flowed from a Royal Commission of Inquiry, appointed
as a result of the agitation in and out of parliament, begun
by such men as the fiery Oastler and the vehement Sadler.
That Act appointed paid inspectors, the one thing most
needed, and from then till now, the principles embodied in
Sir Robert Peel's first measure of 1802 have gone on
slowly but steadily triumphing, until at the time of this
present writing^ we seem to be on the verge of legislation
which will prohibit the employment of any child of tender
years in any kind of hard labour, and make the reception
of some modicum of instruction a condition precedent to,
1 A.D. 1875.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 163
and an accompaniment of, the remunerative employment of
any British child in town or country, in field and factory,
in mine and workshop. An effective check will every-
where be placed on the negligence of employers, and on
the carelessness or greed of parents, and all this beneficent
legislation traces its origin to the first Sir Robert Peel's
modest measure of 1802.
The year 18 19, which witnessed the aid given by the
young Peel, then out of office and biding his time, to his
old father in the discussion on the Factory Bill, was also
that of their disagreement on the currency question. It
was the first of the younger Peel's changes of opinion, the
prelude, though a distant one, to others of more importance.
Old Sir Robert loved inconvertible paper-money, not wisely
but too well, and when just entering on official life, in war-
time, moreover, the docile young Robert, as well as his obsti-
nate old father, had opposed the resumption of cash-pay-
ments proposed by the Whig, Francis Horner. But with the
peace, with a temporary release from official trammels, and
with the leisurely study of a question, the settlement of
which one way or another did not affect "the Constitution,"
the younger Peel came round to Horner's view, which has
since become that of almost all the world. He was made
(for the Government kept its eye on him) Chairman of the
Select Committee appointed in the February of 181 9 to
inquire into the resumption of cash-payments, and on the
24th of May he was to propose a measure enjoining that
resumption. Before his son began his statement, old Sir
Robert rose to present a petition in favour of the existing
system, and in the course of a speech supporting its
prayer, he warned the House against the resolutions which
the son was about to propose. " He really thought the
resolutions were of a very extraordinary character. It was
true that he should have to opi)Ose a very near and dear
1 64 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
relation ; but while it was his own sentiment that he had a
duty to perform, he respected those who did theirs, and
who considered them to be paramount." Then followed
the touching passage, already quoted,^ recording his early
wish, when that near and dear relative was young, one day
to present the child to his country, to follow in the path of
" Mr. Pitt." "It was very natural," he added, "that such
should be his wishes, although those who did their duty
might be at once contented with their conduct. He was
well satisfied that the head and heart of that relation were
in the right place, and that though he had deviated a little
from the path of propriety in this instance, he would soon
be restored to it." The younger Peel, in his elaborate
statement, thus referred to the mild paternal protest : —
" Many other difiiculties," he said, "presented themselves
to him in discussing this question ; among them was one
which it pained him to observe, and that was the necessity
he felt of opposing himself to an authority to which he had
always bowed, and, he hoped, should always bow with defer-
ence. But here he had a great public duty imposed on him,
and from that duty he would not shrink, whatever might be
his private feelings." Whereupon the old gentleman resigned
himself to his fate, and cash-payments were resumed at the
instance of his erring but still dearly-beloved son.
The speech on the resumption of cash-payments seems
to have been old Sir Robert's last in the House of Com-
mons. He was verging on the seventies, and the little
disagreement with his son perhaps contributed, as well as
advancing years, to his withdrawal from the House of
Commons. Long before he had relinquished to sons the
management of the business, and at the general election in
1820 he retired from parhamentary into private life — one
of his sons succeeding him as Member for Tam worth, which
^ Ante, p. 132.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 65
he had represented for thirty years. He spent the remain-
ing decade of his Hfe in opulent privacy at Drayton
Manor; and if there be truth in the description given of
his tastes and intellectual habits by his contemporary
biographer of 1803-4, his enjoyment of "retired leisure"
vk^as not marred by en7iui. "After describing him as in
person tall, manly, and well-proportioned," — "his eye,"
it is added, "when he speaks, lights up his countenance
with peculiar animation;" "his address is affable, unem-
barrassed, and very engaging," — this grandiose biographer
proceeds thus : —
" In conversation he is very attentive and communicative, relishing
extremely sallies of wit in others, and is not unfrequently very happy
himself in repartee. Although he has greatly improved his intellectual
faculties by an extensive acquaintance with books, particularly on the
subject of the history, commerce, and constitution of his native country,
yet it is evident that his mind has derived its chief advantages from an
attentive observation of men and manners, which probably has not a
little contributed to give novelty and originality to his ideas. Being
much conversant with the world, and having had transactions with
cveiy class of society, he has acquired a very quick perception of
human character, without imbibing the narrow prejudices and sus-
picious circumspection usually attendant on such vai-ious intercourse.
Colloquial discussions " — these are certainly most unexpected traits —
"on the phenomena of nature constitute his chief delight ; and to an
early habit of abstracting and generalising his ideas, he unites the
curiosity of a naturalist and the eye of an acute observer." ^
It may be as well to add from the same sketch, pub-
lished when he was a man of fifty-three or so, some more
traits and anecdotes ; perhaps, as formerly liinted, com-
municated by friends, and, whatever their origin, made the
most of by the high-flown biographer, whose record requires
to be considerably condensed : —
"As the merit by which he acquired made him worthy of his
fortune, so the use which he makes of it in communicating the means
^ rnhlic Characters of 1803-4, p. 35.
1 66 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
of comfort to all around him endears him to a very extensive circle,
&c. Although he has long ceased to regard the accumulation of wealth
as productive of happiness, &c., &c., yet he has not lost the habit ot
minute attention to his finances. His mansion is the residence of
hospitality, but unencumbered with any ostentatious display of retinue.
He never retires into the impenetrable recesses of his house, inacces-
sible to the modest petitioner, &c., but his ear is at all times open to
the suit of the meanest, &c., &c., &c."
And now to go into detail : —
"All public institutions of extensive utility find in Sir Robert Peel
an active and powerful patron. Among others we distinguish the
following : — Christ's Hospital, of which he is a governor ; the Literary
Fund, of which he is Vice-President ; and the Society for bettering the
Condition of the Poor, the fund of which he augmented in the year
1 80 1 by a donation of a thousand pounds. He has been lately chosen,
in the most flattering manner. President of the House of Recovery in
Manchester" — presumably what would now be called a "Convalescent
Hospital"— "and he makes annual donations of large sums to the poor
of Tamworth in Staffordshire, as well as to those of Bury in Lanca-
shire" — the claims of the old home not being forgotten, though the
new was a grander one.
"Among innumerable acts of benevolence," &c., &c., here are a
few : — "A rectory in his estate having become vacant, he solicited the
Chancellor, with every prospect of success, to bestow it on the Rev.
James Hargrcaves, M.A., a gentleman every way worthy, &c., &c.
The seals, however, having been suddenly entrusted into the hands of
commissioners, the desired appointment did not take place ; but to
alleviate the mortification of disappointment. Sir Robert Peel pur-
chased for, and presented to, his friend a living of equal value. "
More striking is what follows : —
"Three years have not elapsed since a house of the first consequence
in the cotton trade, by imprudently extending its speculations beyond
its capital, was, from some unforeseen circumstances, on the eve of
bankruptcy. Informed of their pressing exigency, and convinced of
the honour and integrity of the parties, Sir Robert Peel rescued them
from their impending calamity by an immediate loan of ^^14,000.
Reluctant favours are ungracious, &c., &c. This house had been long
an obstinate rival to his own, and an opportunity now offered of
witnessing its fall and of rising in its ruins. But Sir Robert Peel,
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 67
rather than elevate himself by the misfortunes of others, generously
extended the hand of friendship, and nobly supported his com-
petitor."
In conclusion : —
"Very few (not four) years since, a family, consisting of two sons
and three daughters, all whose property, which was very considerable,
had been embarked in trade, was reduced, by adverse and unforeseen
circumstances, to a complete wreck ; the daughters having entrusted
their property, which was not less than ^^5000 each, to their brothers,
participated in their misfortunes. Sir Robert Peel, with his character-
istic liberality, respecting ' the Corinthian pillar of polished society
even in the dust,' obtained an honourable and lucrative appointment
for each of the sons, and presented ;^iooo to each of the daughters!
These are plain unvarnished facts, which panegyric cannot embellish,
nor malice attribute to unworthy motives."^
True, but none the less is it a relief to turn from this to
a portraiture by a very different biographical artist, although,
unfortunately, he does not, like the other, go into detail.
Says Sir Lawrence Peel of his father's brother : —
*' He was an ambitious man. He loved money, but he loved it
principally as an instrument of power. He was the very reverse of a
selfish man. He possessed a genial, generous nature ; he loved young
people, and loved to see all about him happy. He was eager to
diffuse happiness. He was at all times bountiful, and often munifi-
cient in his gifts. As his possessions were great, it was his duty to
give largely ; but still, even so viewed, his was a bountiful hand. He
dealt with money as one who, if he knew its value, with how mucli
toil and anxiety it had been won by him, felt also that God has
impressed wealth with a trust, and that the trustee must pass his
accounts. He gave much, and by preference he gave in secret. He
gave also with delicacy of manner, and the nice feelings of a gentle-
man. His was no narrow nor one-sided beneficence. He knew no
distinction of politics or creed where a man needed help. He was
grave in exterior, yet a humorous man, with a quiet relish of fun. He
had small respect for a man of idle life, for any one in short who was
not useful, and neither fashion nor rank, without good service of some
sort, won any allegiance from him. He was a moral and religious
Public Characters of 1803-4, p. 39-42.
1 68 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
man. I am aware that some who attach a literal meaning to
figurative expressions will doubt the religious mind of a millionaire.
But when will men of religious earnestness learn the truth, that true
religion has many sides and many coverings ? The temptations of riches
are so truly and constantly insisted upon in Holy Writ, that we are
apt to forget the scriptural instances of men rewarded with riches for
their trust in God, &c., &c."^
Soon after receiving his baronetcy, Sir Robert had lost
his wife, the first love of his youth — the faithful partner of
his matiirer years. Chronicling her marriage some twenty
years before, his biographer of 1803-4 discourses in this
wise: — "Although his table has been already surrounded
with olive-branches nearly as numerous as years have since
elapsed, so profuse has nature been of her endowments, that,
notwithstanding the amiable female has been the mother as
well as the nurse of eleven very fine children, she yet ap-
pears but the eldest sister of the family." Alas ! a year or
so after this was written came the death of the graceful and
beautiful lady, who when a child had sat upon the knee of
her father's lodger, little anticipating the destiny in store
for them. " It is said that London fashionable life — so
unlike what she had been accustomed to at home — proved
injurious to her health ; and old Mr. Yates used to say,
' If Robert hadn't made our Nelly a Lady, she might have
been living yet ' " ^ — though, as the reader has seen, the bio-
grapher of 1803-4 found nothing amiss, but the contrary,
with the looks of the baronet's wife. Not long after her death,
Sir Robert Peel married again (October 18, 1805), choosing
in his old Bury circle a second wife, of whom little more is
recorded than that she was " Miss Susanna Clarke, a sister
of the rector of his parish at Bury, the late Rev. Sir William
Henry Clarke, Bart. This lady died September 19, 1824,
in her seventy-second year, leaving no issue." The year
before Sir Robert retired into private hfe, his second son,
1 Sketch, p. 36. - Self- Help, p. 71.
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 69
William Yates Peel, Byron's Harrow friend, had become
the husband of an earl's (the Earl of Mountcashell's) sister.
The )'ear afterwards, 1820, Robert, the nascent statesman,
wedded the daughter of a general, and so the Bury calico-
printer's children went on marrying into the aristocracy —
one of them, Laurence, in 1822, even winning the hand
of a sister of the Duke of Richmond of the day.
"He," the first Sir Robert, "did not live to see his son Prime
Minister, but he lived long enough for the gratification of a not im-
moderate ambition. His son had gradually risen, had done his work
well, and had advanced in the world's esteem, performing as the chief
minister of the Crown in the House of Commons, in a time of unex-
ampled bitterness, a painful task, with full command over himself, and
with great ability. He had risen, but not yet had he risen to the
height of his full stature — the greatest was yet behind. If he could
have looked into the womb of time, the old man would have seen
amongst his descendants new honours crowning that descent. I cannot
call to mind any instance in any one prosperous family of an industrious
career longer pursued. Three of his sons rose to be privy counsellors,
of whom one was Prime Minister and declined a peerage, another was
a Cabinet Minister, and a third Under-Secretary of State. In the next
generation one grandson has been Under-Secretary of State, and
another earned honour, rank, and an undying fame in the naval service
of his country ; so that, counting from Sir William Peel to his great-
grandfather," our Founder of the Peel Family, " there have been in
this family four generations of hard-working men, each of whom had
his appointed aim, worked hard to reach, and reached it." ^
Yes, returning to office as Home Secretary in 1S22, under
his old patron, the Earl of Liverpool, and after the death
of Canning, so prominent that the Government, formed and
headed by the Duke in 1828, was called the Wellington-
Peel Ministry, old Sir Robert's son and heir became in his
father's lifetime, " Chief Minister of the Crown in the House
of Commons." The year 1S29 saw the steadfast opponent
of the Catholic claims astonish his father and his friends by
proposing Catholic Emancipation, which must, one would
» Sketch, p. 55.
I/O LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
think, have been a greater blow to the old gentleman of
seventy-nine than the change of opinion, ten years before,
on the currency question. But no : —
"I have read that the late Sir Robert Peel remained unforgiven by his
father for his conduct on the Catholic question ! It was not, however,
in his father's heart to doubt his son. The relation of father and son
grew in a manner to be reversed — the father reverenced where he had
at first only loved. He retained his own opinion on this solemn ques-
tion, and he gave to his son the credit of purity and disinterestedness.
Implacability was not in the father's nature, and he died at peace with
all mankind. He had nothing to forgive in his son, and extended no
forgiveness where there had been no offence. "
It was in 1829 that Catholic Emancipation was consum-
mated, and the previous year had witnessed an interesting
event at Drayton Manor. In patriarchal fashion the old
gentleman gathered round him on his seventy-eighth birth-
day his children and grand-children, to the number of fifty,
as if he had a presentiment that his latter end was ap-
proaching, and he gave each of them a silver medal struck
in honour of the grave occasion. The end was not for
some two years more, the 3rd of May 1830. It was pre-
ceded by a characteristic incident and remark, which "his
nephew, Mr. Willock, who was present on the occasion,"
remembered and reported. " A few days before his death,
the first Sir Robert Peel, feeling himself more than usually
alert, invited three of his nephews to dine with him. At
dinner he asked if the champagne was good, and being told
that it was, he drank a glass of it. The wine raised his
spirits, and he conversed with much animation about past
times. After dinner they played at whist, and after a rubber
or two, Mr. Willock, perceiving that his uncle's hand shook
a little as he dealt the cards, offered to deal for him. ' No,
no, Robert,' he said, ' if I cannot deal my own cards it is
time to give up the game,' and with this characteristic
speech he broke up the game. He survived but a few
THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. I71
days." Though he had given much during his lifetime,
settHng ^4^9000 a year on his eldest son when entering the
House of Commons, the wealth which he left behind him
was enormous. Says another of his biographers : —
" We shall insert an abstract of the will of Sir Robert Peel, not to
gratify idle curiosity, but to illustrate the great value of the cotton
manufacture, and to show how great are the prizes to be gained by
energy, enterprise, and intelligence in a free and commercial country.
After entailing Drayton Park and the other large estates in Stafford-
shire and Warwickshire, it proceeds to recite sums, to the amount of
nearly a quarter of a million, previously advanced to or settled upon his
several children (not including ^9000 per annum settled upon his eldest
son), and then bequeathes above ;i{^6oo,ooo more, making the portions
of his five younger sons ;^io6,ooo each, and those of his daughters
;^53,ooo each. He leaves to a chapel erected by him at Fazely, in
Staffordshire, ;^ 1 000 (afterwards revoked, because he had endowed it
with lands), and £,(iOOO to a school established by him in the said
village ; to the Infirmary and Lunatic Asylum in Manchester, and the
Lying-in-Hospital in Salford, ;^ioo each.
"The will is dated July 27, 1S20. By a codicil, of February ir,
1S25, the portions of his younger sons were increased tO;^i35,ooo;
and of the residue, which is said to have exceeded half-a-million, four-
ninths are bequeathed to the present Baronet," — the second Sir Robert,
the statesman, — " and one-ninth to each of his five younger sons. The
personal property was sworn at what is technically called 'upper
value,' which means that it exceeded ;/^900,ooo, and was the first
instance of the scale of duties extending to such a sum. The probate-
stamp was fifteen thousand pounds, and the legacy duties amounted to
about ten thousand pounds more." ^
These are dazzling figures, but they have since been
surpassed, and, in any case, they testify little or nothing
to the genuine worth of the man of whose wealth they are
representative. It is not as a millionnaire that the first Sir
Robert Peel claims a prominent place among modern
Lancashire Worthies. He was only one of many success-
ful industrialists whose energy, skill, and luck evolved
large fortunes out of the cotton manufacture suddenly
^ Cooke Taylor, i. 35.
1/2 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
developed by Hargreaves, by Arkvvright, and by Crompton.
Other wealthy Lancashire manufacturers of the first Sir
Robert Peel's day and generation rose from small begin-
nings to purchase landed estates, to found families, and to
be members of parliament. But of none of them is there
any such record as that which makes the first Sir Robert
Peel estimable and admirable for his patriotism and bene-
ficence. His loyalty to Pitt, his dedication of his eldest
son to the service of his country, his protest against the
Corn Bill, his factory legislation, raise him far above the
vulgar crowd of pushing and successful money-makers. He
combined, in a remarkable degree, warm-heartedness with
long-headedness, and private with public munificence.
Were it only that he, an opulent manufacturer, was the first
to prepare and to carry a measure of any kind for the pro-
tection of the young employed in factories, his memory
would deserve to be held in honour. What he did to make
a statesman of his eldest son has been seen ; and quite as
much as the second Pitt, though in a different way, was
the second Sir Robert Peel indebted for his success in
public life to the proverbial fact that he " had a father
before him."
IV.
THOMAS PERCIVAL*
READERS of De Quincey's early autobiography may
remember a mention there of Dr. Thomas Percival,
the founder of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical
Society, now in the ninety-fifth year of its age. At the time
to which he refers, the English Opium-eater was a little
boy, living with his widowed mother at Greenheys, whence
he had nothing, he says, but "a solitary road to traverse"
all the way to " Princess Street, then the termination, on
that side, of Manchester " ! Speaking of a story which
made a deep impression on the juvenile minds of himself
and his sister, De Quincey thus rambles on in his own
peculiar and discursive fashion. " From what quarter the
story comes originally was unknown to us at the time, and
I have never met it since ; so that, possibly, it may be new
to the reader. We found it in a book, written for the use
of his own children by Dr. Percival, the physician who
* The Works, Literary, Moral, and PJiilosophkal, of Thomas Percival,
M.D. To which are prefixed Memoirs (by his Son) of his Life and
Writings, and a Selection from his Literary Correspondence. A New
Edition. 2 Vols. (London, 1S07). IJcnjaiiiin Franklin, Works, by
Jared Sparks (Boston, 1840). Thomas De Quincey Autobiographie
Sketches (Edinburgh, 1863). Ilalley's Lancashire, its Fnritanisni and
A^onconformity, err., er=f.
174 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
attended at Greenhay," which, according to De Quincey,
was the name of his mother's mansion, built not long before
as a country-house by his father, and from which, he avers,
the Manchester suburb of Greenheys derived its name.
" Dr. P.," continues De Quincey, diverging into episodical
reminiscence, " was a literary man, of elegant tastes and
philosophic habits. Some of his papers may be found in
the Manchester Philosophic Transactions, and these I have
heard mentioned with respect, though, for myself, I have no
personal knowledge of them. Some presumption meantime
arises in their favour, from the fact that he had been a
favoured correspondent of the most eminent Frenchmen at
that time who cultivated literature jointly with philosophy.
Voltaire, Diderot, Maupertuis, Condorcet, and D'Alembert
had all treated him with distinction ; and I have heard my
mother say, that in days before I or my sister could have
known him, he attempted vainly to interest her in these
French luminaries by reading extracts from their frequent
letters ; which, however, so far from reconciling her to the
letters, or to the writers of the letters, had the unhappy effect
of riveting the dislike (previously budding) to the doctor as
their receiver, and the proneur of their authors. The tone
of the letters — hollow, insincere, and full of courtly civilities
to Dr. P. as a known friend of ' the tolerance ' (meaning, of
course, of toleration) — certainly was not adapted to the
English taste, and in this respect was specially offensive to
my mother, as always assuming of the doctor, that by mere
necessity, as being a philosopher, he must be an infidel.
Dr. P. left that question, I believe, in medio, neither assent-
ing nor denying \ and undoubtedly there was no particular
call upon him to publish his Confession of Faith before one
who, in the midst of her rigorous politeness, suffered it to
be too transparent that she did not like him. It is always
a pity to see anything lost and wasted, especially love ; and
THOMAS PERCIVAL. 1 75
therefore it was no subject for lamentation that too probably
the philosophic doctor did not enthusiastically like her. But
if really so, that made no difference in his feelings towards
my sister and myself. Us he did like ; and as one proof of
his regard, he presented us jointly with such of his works
as could be supposed interesting to two young literati,
whose combined ages made no more at this period than a
baker's dozen. These presentation copies amounted to two
at the least, both octavos, and one of them, entitled The
Father's — something or other; what was it? Assistatit
perhaps."^
No, the book which Dr. Percival gave some ninety years
ago to the little De Quinceys must have been his once well-
known work, A Father's Instructions, partly original, partly
selected. And in it, certainly, is the story (from RoUin) of
" A Generous Return for an Injury," — " A Noble Revenge "
(De Quincey calls it), — the English Opium-eater's imagi-
native rendering of which, in old age, is rather curiously
characteristic of his autobiographic ways, and will be worth
further notice when we come to that Lancashire Worthy.
But there is not in Percival's works and correspondence, or
anywhere else, so far as one has been able to ascertain, the
slightest trace of the " infidelity " imputed to him by De
Quincey's mother, or of the epistolary communication
which, according to De Quincey himself, he kept up with
the leading French sceptics of his time, or of any sympathy
with their heterodox speculations. Percival, it is true, was
a Unitarian, but the distance between Unitarianism and
" infidelity " was considerable in those days, even more than
in these ; and, indeed, the tone of his writings is decidedly
anti-sceptical. He was a man, too, of a very practical turn
of mind ; and though, of course, an opponent of the Test
and Corporation Acts, he took much greater interest in
' Autobiographic Sketches, p. 123-4.
176 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
sanitary reform, and in what is now called " secondary
education," and so forth, than in the revolt of the French
Free-thinkers against continental priestcraft. The account
of Dr. Percival, said to have been given by De Quincey's
mother, was probably the more or less unconscious product
of her son's imagination, dealing with some fragments of
hazy reminiscence. In the present day, to designate
this Lancashire worthy, as he was sometimes designated
in his own, " the illustrious Percival," would be exaggera-
tion. Yet his worth and his merit, his services to Man-
chester, were by no means small, and he ought not to be
remembered only by the indifferent likeness of him, as of
a tedious and conceited free-thinking bore, preserved in De
Quincey's autobiography.
Thomas Percival was born at Warrington in 1740. He
came of a Cheshire stock, and his ancestors long cultivated
in that county what his son grandly calls " the patrimonial
estate," though, on further definition, this turns out to have
been nothing more than " a farm of moderate extent." His
grandfather Peter (a younger son) was the first of the family
to quit the Cheshire homestead, and he fixed his residence
at Warrington, where he practised physic. Peter's eldest
son, Thomas, followed his father's profession in his father's
adopted town (he had been a pupil of Boerhaave), but a
love of learned ease contracted the sphere of his professional
exertions. The father of our Percival was a third son of
Peter's, and seems in character to have resembled his
brother the physician. " His native disposition was averse,"
we are told, " from the pursuit of fame and fortune, and he
appears to have sought his happiness in the tranquil enjoy-
ment of an easy and respectable station." It is one of the
misfortunes of this grandiloquent school of biography that
it rarely condescends to humble matters of fact. We want
to know what Thomas Percival's father was, and we are
THOMAS PERCIVAL. IJJ
tendered the vague information : " At different periods he
engaged in various branches of commerce, and transmitted
to his posterity, in the example of upright and benevolent
conduct, the fairest portion of his inheritance," from which
it may be surmised that he left his children rather badly off.
Thomas, the youngest and only surviving son, lost both
father and mother before he was three, and his upbringing
devolved on an elder sister, a superior and affectionate
woman. She had him properly grounded, and then sent to
the Free Grammar School of Warrington, where he distin-
guished himself by his ability and industry. When he was
ten an uncle died, leaving the clever little boy a small com-
petency wherewith to obtain a liberal education, and to
follow any profession for which he had a fancy. The fame
of his physician-uncle was cherished in the family, and the
studious nephew seems soon to have resolved to become a
medical man.
Percival was seventeen, and had learned all that could be
learned in the Free Grammar School of his native town,
just about the time of the establishment of the once
celebrated Warrington Academy, still faintly remembered
as having had Priestley and Gilbert Wakefield among its
teachers. It was founded partly to give a solid ai^d useful
education to the youth of the Northern Counties, but above
all, to furnish candidates for the Dissenting ministry with
the freer theological instruction thought needful at a time
when English Presbyterianism was being gradually trans-
formed into Unitarianism. Percival's family had ere this
left the Church, and he is said to have been the first student
enrolled by the Warrington Academy when it opened its
doors in 1757. The teaching of the Academy was not of a
kind to lead the inquiring youth of seventeen back to the
Anglican Church. He had cherished a desire to complete
his studies at the University of Oxford, but before he could
z
lya LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
enter it a theological subscription was necessary, Percival
looked into the matter with diligence and earnestness, and
found that he could not conscientiously sign the Thirty-nine
Articles. When this conclusion was deliberately arrived at,
he gave up his Oxford aspirations, and proceeded to the
University of Edinburgh, there to study medicine. At
Edinburgh he resided in the house of a sister of Robertson
the historian, a Mrs. Syme (her daughter became the mother
of Henry Brougham), who, in point of fact, did neither
more nor less than take boarders. In her house and other-
wise, he was thrown among the best literary and scientific
society of the Scottish capital ; Robertson and David Hume
were among his intimate acquaintances. His relations with
Robertson survived his departure from the Modern Athens.
Years afterwards it was from Robertson, as Principal of
Edinburgh University, that the friendly intervention of
Percival obtained their Doctor's degrees for Priestley,
Aikin, Enfield (of The Speaker), and other tutors of the
Warrington Academy.
In the midst of his Edinburgh studies, Percival stole a
year's hohday, which he spent in London and the scientific
circles of the great metropolis. There and then he was
elected a fellow of the Royal Society, through the influence
of its Vice-President, Hugh, Lord Willoughby, of Parham,
the representative of a peerage now extinct,^ a promoter (in
fact he was its first president) of the Warrington Academy,
who was not ashamed to remain a " Protestant Dissenter,"
as his fathers had been, though in the days, indeed, before
English Presbyterianism began to develop into Arianism.
After finally leaving Edinburgh, Percival made a tour on
the Continent, and having completed his medical studies at
^Concerning what is alleged to have been his "supposititious"
peerage (though he was Chairman of Committees of the House of Lords),
see a note in Halley's Lancashire r»ritanis»i, ii. 397.
THOMAS PERCIVAL. 1 79
Leyden, he took his degree there in 1765. Returning to
Warrington, he married, and remained in his native town
for a couple of years, contributing medical and scientific
papers to the Philosophical Transadiojis, and to suitable
periodicals. Learned in all the medical lore of his time,
Percival now looked forward to establishing himself in
London as a physician. He thought, however, that before
taking this step it was desirable to acquire some preliminary
experience and reputation. In 1767, accordingly, he went
to Manchester, and he never left it.
With such professional knowledge and skill, such culture
and manners as his, Percival soon took the highest position
among the physicians of Manchester, and abandoned his
intention of settling in London. Beyond the limits of Lan-
cashire, too, his name was made known to the profession
and to the general scientific world by three volumes of
Essays Medical afid Experimental (partly a reproduction of
contributions to the Philosophical Transactions), the first of
which was issued in 1767, the last in 1776. The year be-
fore the issue of the final instalment of the Essays there
appeared ("dedicated to the Countes." of Stamford") the
first of three parts (the concluding one was not published
until 1800) of A Father's Instructions, the book which De
Quincey has referred to, and which testified to the fact that
a young family was growing up about him. But it is less
by his literature, medical or parental, than by the zeal with
which he devoted himself to promoting in every way the
improvement of the town of his adoption that Percival de-
serves to be held in remembrance. Another man might
have been content to enjoy professional success and social
eminence, restricting his philanthropy to the relief of indi-
vidual cases of disease and distress in humble life ; but Per-
cival was fortunately animated by a rare and disinterested
zeal for the welfare of the poor, and may claim to be re-
l80 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
garded as a founder of that admirable school of physicians
of whom, in more recent days, the late Dr. Alison of Edin-
burgh was a prominent type — men who, while reaping
wealth by caring for the ailments of the rich, explore, with-
out encouragement from Governments, central or local, the
dark abysses where poverty welters in the company of
disease, and who bring their personal and social influence,
and their scientific knowledge, to bear on the improvement
of the sanitary condition of the neglected poor. Without
fee or reward, without hope of or wish for either, and long
before the bare idea of the existence of such a functionary
was dreamt of, Percival constituted himself Medical Officer
of Health for Manchester. He settled there, moreover, just
when the presence of a philanthropic and public spirited
physician could be most useful, — in 1767, as already said,
by which time Hargreaves had perfected his spinning-jenny;
and thus on the eve of that expansion of the cotton manu-
facture which has converted what was then a second-rate
country town into one of the great cities of the empire.
Seven years later Percival was able to note "the rapid
growth of Manchester and Salford," the population of which
had increased from some 20,000 in 1757 to some 27,000
in 1773, and in those quiet old days this was considered,
and rightly considered, a wonderful phenomenon. Even
with this trifling increase new sanitary needs had arisen,
and Percival set to work to investigate the vital statistics
of the place, and to compare them with those of the
scantily-populated Manchester of the past, as of other
towns and of non-manufacturing districts. In the very
year, as it happened, of Percival's arrival in Manchester,
appeared a work which directed public attention to the im-
portance of vital statistics, and which founded on them as
a sure basis the modern scientific system of life assur-
ance. This was the "Treatise on Reversionary Payments"
THOMAS PERCIVAL. l8l
of Dr. Price, the dissenting minister, whose sympathy with
the first French Revohition became one of the texts of
Burke's "Reflections," and who aided Pitt to institute, witli
the best intentions, what proved to be a futile sinking fund.
Price's book was studied by Percival, and no doubt partly
stimulated him to write his " Proposals for Establishing
more Accurate and Comprehensive Bills of Mortality in
Manchester." In this tractate he suggested that detailed
lists of christenings, marriages, and burials, with a register
of the causes of death, &c., &c., should be kept in every
church and chapel \ and having been delivered at stated
times to the clerk of each parish church, should be formed
into one general table to be published periodically. Speci-
men tables were appended, intelligible to the meanest
capacity. Percival's modest " Proposals " may raise a smile
in these days of general figuring, when, not to speak of
Registrars-General and decennial censuses, of deputy-regis-
trars spread all over the land, and of a universal and compul-
sory system of registration of births and deaths, Manchester
has a Statistical Society all to itself; but they were then as
novel as they proved to be useful. His plan, we are told,
" was approved by able judges, and was in great measure
adopted by the superintending officers of the police of Man-
chester," and by other towns both in Lancashire and Cheshire.
It was about the time of the issue of these " Proposals"
that Percival drew up his " Observations on the State of
Population in Manchester and other adjacent places," which
appeared in the Philosophical Transactions for 1774-5. He
sent a copy to Benjamin Franklin, then {cetat. 67) Agent
in England for the colonies, destined three years afterwards
to become the United States of America. Franklin received
the tractate in the September of 1773, in the December of
which year " Boston harbour was black with unexpected
tea," and the revolt of the American colonies was about to
I 82 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
begin. He passed its summer and early autumn at Lord
De Spencer's seat of High Wycombe, philosophising, ex-
perimenting, and even, strange occupation for that American
sage, " abridging some parts of the Book of Common Prayer."
There the congenial communication of his Manchester
correspondent was promptly acknowledged in a note begin-
ning, " Dear Sir, I have received here your favour of the
1 8th, enclosing your very valuable paper of the enumeration
of Manchester. Such enquiries may be as useful as they
are curious, and, if once made general, would greatly assist
in the prudent government of a state." Then follow some
remarks on the odd plan of census-taking adopted in China,
and the penalty exacted there for false returns. " Perhaps,"
he adds, " such a regulation is scarcely practicable with us "
— " us," he writes, since Franklin was still a British subject,
" But," this is Percival's comment on the American sage's
remark and remarks — " an enumeration of the people of
England, similar to that lately executed at Manchester, could
not be so difficult an undertaking as may at the first view
be imagined. And if accurate and comprehensive Bills of
Mortality were universally established, they would admirably
coincide with the views of such enquiries, and give precision
and certainty to the conclusions deduced from them." All
of which, since Percival's time, has been and is being
done.
This "enumeration" of the Manchester of 1773 was
made, one little doubts, at the instance of Percival himself;
though in the " Observations," which are partly based on it,
he does not claim to have originated it. These first " Obser-
vations" of 1773 were followed by " Further Observations"
of not much later date, and along with the facts given inci-
dentally in the " Proposals," they constitute Percival's chief
contributions to the vital statistics of the Manchester of his
day and generation. They are valuable not only for their
/
THOMAS PERCIVAL. 1 83
facts, but for the judgment with which these are surveyed,
and inferences drawn from them. Percival, indeed, not
only led the way for the more accurate statistics of later
days, but in his disquisitions he supplied a philosophy of
statistics, without which the most accurate figures may mis-
lead instead of instructing. Thus he pointed out that a low
death-rate is not necessarily an indication of the general
good health of the locality in which it occurs. For
instance, he found by an interesting enquiry that the death-
rate of the Manchester Quakers, an eminently temperate
and well-conditioned body, was actually somewhat higher
than that of the rest of the community, and he attributed
the apparent anomaly to the circumstance that a constant
influx of adult health and strength from the country
districts into Manchester supplied the waste caused by town
and manufacturing life, while the Quaker body was mainly
recruited from its own births. With the increase of the
])opulation consequent on the development of the manu-
facturing industry of Manchester and Salford, from some
20,000, as already stated, in 1757, to some 27,000 in 1773,
the average annual mortality had fallen from i in 257 to
I in 28'4. This decrease, however, of the death-rate was
not altogether, Percival concluded, to be ascribed to an
improvement in the health and sanitary condition of the
inhabitants of the two towns, but mainlv to the influx from
the rural districts.^ " Half of all that are born in this town,"
^ Referring to the number of public-houses in ^^anchester, Percival
cites the opinion of a still remembered ecclesiastical economist on the
effect of this influx in the case of a great West of England mart and
haven : — "The Rev. Dr. Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, informs me
that were it not for the daily arrival of recruits from Uie country, his
parish (St. Stephen's in Bristol), and indeed Bristol in general, would
be left in a century without an inhabitant, unless the people should
betake themselves to better courses than that of drunkenness." — Ferci-
val's JVoris, il. 355i note.
184 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
— Manchester — Percival said in his " Proposals," " die under
five years old." Nevertheless, the duration of life and
the death-rate in Manchester, when Percival wrote, contrast
favourably with those in London, Liverpool, and Edin-
burgh, if unfavourably with those in agricultural countries
abroad and counties at home. " In the Pays de Vaud,"
says Percival in the " Proposals," " the proportion of inhabi-
tants who attain the age of 80 is i in 2i| ; in Brandenburg,
I in 2 2^-; in Norwich, i in 27; in Manchester, i in 30 ;
in London, i in 40 ; and in Edinburgh, i in 42." Again,
if when Percival wrote the annual average mortality of
Stoke Damarel in Devonshire was only i in 54, while in
Manchester it was i in 28, it was higher in Liverpool, being
T in 27, and in London, where it was i in 21. Moreover,
though ascribing the decrease of the death-rate in expand-
ing Manchester between 1757 and 1773 mainly to the influx
from the rural districts, Percival admitted that with the
development of its manufactures there had been a coinci-
dent improvement in its general health. " However," he
says in the Observations, "exclusive of this consideration"
— the influx from the country — " there is good reason to
believe that Manchester is more healthy now than formerly.
The new streets are wide and spacious ; the poor have
larger and more commodious dwellings, and the increase of
trade affords them better clothing and diet than they before
enjoyed. I may add, too, that the late improvements in
medicine have been highly favourable to the preservation of
life. The cool regimen in fevers and in the small-pox, the
free admission of air, attention to cleanliness, and the
general use of antiseptic remedies and diet, have certainly
mitigated the mortality of some of the most dangerous and
malignant distempers to which mankind are incident."^ In
1873, a hundred years after these lines were written, and
1 Works, ii. 323.
THOMAS PERCIVAL. 185
with an increase of the population of Manchester and Sal-
ford during the intervening century from some 27,000 to
some 460,000, the death-rate of Manchester was i in 33
instead of i in 28 as in 1773. It may be hoped and
believed that this decrease in the death-rate has been pro-
duced, not merely by an influx of adults from elsewhere, but
by causes akin to those to which Percival ascribed a part at
least of the diminution of mortality in Manchester between
1756 and 1773.
In 1768^ the year, as it chanced, after Percival's settle-
ment in Manchester, and some time before the rise of the
factory system, Arthur Young visited Manchester. It was
an incidental visit paid during the course of his " Six
Months' Tour in the Northern Counties " to investigate
the state of their agriculture and agricultural population.
Arthur turned aside to Manchester episodically, partly from
a curiosity to see something of what was even then con-
sidered a very rising and notable manufacturing town,
partly that he might inspect the Duke of Bridgewater's
much-talked-of canal operations at Worsley. Speaking of
Manchester, Arthur says, " I enquired the effects of high or
low prices of provisions, and found that in the former the
manufacturers " — by whom he means what we should now
call operatives — " were industrious, and their families easy
and happy, but that in times of low prices the latter starved,
for half of the time of the father was spent at the ale-house,"
— a statement which suggests another striking contrast be-
tween the Manchester of then and of now. Five or six
years later Percival noted that among the church and chapel
goers of the country districts round Manchester, with the
same climate and. the same manufactures, the death-rate
was exactly one-half of that of Manchester itself, — a differ-
ence which he attributed to the " luxury, irregularity, and
intemperance of large towns." In the parish of Manchester
2 A
1 86 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
of that day, he counted " 193 licensed houses for retailing
spirituous and other liquors, and 64 in the other townships
of the parish." In 1788, it appears that the population of
Manchester and Salford was a mere 50,000. Eight years
afterwards, however, when the inventions which made
modern cotton-spinning what it is, when Hargreaves'
spinning-jenny, Crompton's mule, and Arkwright's water-
frame had fairly developed their productiveness, Manchester
was, for those days, a great manufacturing town. The
unregulated apprenticeship system was in full vigour of
action, and Percival, who had long filled a principal posi-
tion in the Manchester Infirmary, had ere this been sum-
moned to report on the outbreak of fever among the
apprentices at the first Sir Robert Peel's Radcliffe mill, —
the event which, as has been already shown, primarily and
ultimately produced the earliest of all factory bills, the
Apprentices Act of 1802, a measure, it may be added,
regarded by Percival as far from sufficiently stringent. In
Manchester itself, with an expanding population, came
overcrowding, while higher wages produced dissolute
living among an uneducated population, which spent its
earnings in ways not conducive to well-being and to health.
The constant supply of labour from the country-districts
concealed the ravages caused by avoidable disease, but at
last contagious maladies broke out, which spared the rich
as little as the poor, and then, indeed, the instinct of self-
preservation roused the upper classes of Manchester
from lethargy to exertion. Public meetings were held ; a
local committee was appointed to institute enquiries, to
suggest remedies, and to enforce them in conjunction with
the authorities. This committee became in reality, as in
name, a Board of Health, chiefly through the strenuous
appeal made to it by Percival. In a document which is
still extant, he called on the board and the authorities to
THOMAS PERCIVAL. 1 8/
compel ventilation and cleanliness in the dwellings of the
poor; to cleanse streets and remove nuisances ; to establish
both special fever-wards and a house of recovery (our
modern " convalescent hospital ") ; to have the cotton-
factories inspected, and to procure returns of the condition,
ages, hours of work, and so forth, of those employed in
them, more particularly of the parish apprentices ; to limit
the number and to regulate the internal economy of common
lodging-houses ; to establish what he called " caravanseries"
for the reception of those who came to Manchester, un-
known and unrecommended, in quest of employment ; and
last, not least, he insisted on the establishment of public
baths. The most important of our modern sanitary, and
some of the most important of our modern social, reforms
were anticipated in the statement of the measures with
which Percival energetically and not unsuccessfully urged
the Manchester of 1796 to repress the diseases ravaging
its population. Indeed, Percival may be regarded as one
of the parents of factory legislation. In another document,
also still extant, dated 25th January 1796 (six years before
the first Sir Robert Peel introduced his Apprentices Bill),
and addressed to the Manchester Committee, or Board of
Health, then just formed, Percival drew up a series of
resolutions on certain evils which had been developed by
the growth of the factory system. These resolutions affirmed
the disposition of children and others to catch and propa-
gate contagious diseases, the injury to their health from
long and close confinement, — especially the bad effects of
the then general system of working through the night, — and
the ignorance of every kind in which they were growing up.
The last resolution went the length — a great one in those
days — of recommending legislative interference with the con-
ditions of factory labour. " From the excellent regulations,"
thus it ran, "which subsist in several cotton factories, it ap-
1 88 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
pears that many of these evils may, in a considerable degree,
be obviated ; and we are therefore warranted by experience,
and are assured that we shall have the support of the liberal
proprietors of these factories, in proposing an application
for Parliamentary aid (if other methods appear not likely
to effect the purpose), to establish a general system of laws
for the wise, humane, and equal government of all such
works." ^
Here, so far as one has been able to ascertain, is the first
discoverable germ of modern factory legislation, and had
Percival done nothing more than write those lines, his
memory would deserve to be honoured in Lancashire and
out of it. Be it noticed, moreover, that all these efforts and
exertions of Percival seem to have sprung from a sense of
duty, which warmed a man otherwise of serene, not to
say cold, disposition, into something of a fervid energy.
Percival's was not one of the ardent temperaments which
impel many men, with time hanging heavy on their hands,
to careers of public usefulness. Pie appears to have been
a somewhat stately physician of the old school, who would
have been perfectly happy practising his profession among
the wealthier classes, experimenting, philosophising, and
compiling and writing rather vapid books for young people.
His public spirit seems really to have been developed out
of a strong sense of duty. His son expresses a feeling of
the kind when, referring to Percival's philanthropic schemes,
the filial biographer says, in his own peculiar style : " His
perseverance in accomplishing designs of this nature was
prompted by a spirit of zeal and resolution which other
occasions rarely excited, while the interest he continued to
feel for their prosperity was more lively than a sentiment
of benevolence usually betrays in the most sanguine cha-
racter." 2
^ History of the Factory Movement, p. 29.
^ Two names deserve mention as those of zealous fellow-wovkers
1
THOMAS PERCIVAL. I 89
For his efforts to forward the culture of Manchester, as
well as to improve the physical and sanitary condition of
its working population, a debt of gratitude is also due to
Percival. He was in the habit of holding at his house
weekly meetings for conversation on any topic which was
not frivolous. These were attended by his own friends, in
whom the principal inhabitants in the town were included,
and by occasional strangers. Singular as it may seem,
Manchester in those days had visitors, who came not only
to inspect the manufacturing marvels of the place, but for
purposes of classical study. One educational establishment
with Pevcival in the estabhshment of the Manchester Board of
Health. Dr. John Ferriar, who, like Percival, was one of the physi-
cians of Manchester Infirmary, is otherwise remembered as the author
of the "Illustrations of Sterne," a book full of the results of curious
reading, and written to prove that the author of Tristram Shandy
sedulously acted on Moliere's maxim, Je prends mon bien oil je le tivuvc.
Dr. Ferriar was one of the founders of the Manchester Board of Health,
— indeed, in his " Medical Histories," he claims to have been the first
to recommend the establishment of an institution of the kind, and
certainly he contributed greatly to its success, and laid down for its
guidance, and for that of the Manchester police authorities, a useful
code of sanitary reform and precaution. Another coadjutor of Percival
meriting mention, was Thomas Butterworth Bayley, an affectionate
memoir of whom he contributed to the Transactions of the Manchester
Literary and Philosophical Society. This forgotten worthy was a
country gentleman, of great public spirit and energy, who became
chairman of the Lancashire Quarter Sessions. He zealously co-operated
in the establishment of the Manchester Board of Health, and laboured
for the improvement of the workhouses of the county. He also
devoted much attention to the improvement of prisons and prison dis-
cipline. After meeting with considerable opposition, he procured the
erection, in 17S7, of what in those days was considered a "very com-
modious and well- ventilated prison " for Manchester and Salford, the
arrangements of which were praised by the philanthropic Howard.
"By the unanimous vote of the magistrates" it was called after him
the New ]!ayley, though careless or ignorant topographers spell it
" New Baz'ley, " and thus, instead of commemorating the name of it."
founder, it has been supposed to have been so designated in antithesis
to the London Old Bailey.
190 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
of the kind (that of the Rev. Ralph Harrison) was so
famous that for its sake the first Marquis of Waterford, as
he became (then, however, merely Earl of Tyrone), sent to
Manchester his eldest son. Lord De La Poer, accompanied
by a tutor, Charles De Polier, a cultivated Swiss, of whom
there is an affectionate record from Percival's pen in an
early volume of the Transactions of the Manchester Lite-
rary and Philosophical Society. It was from the weekly
meetings at Percival's house that this society took its rise.
As the gatherings became larger and more interesting, the
l)lace of meeting was removed to a tavern ; a few rules were
drawn up; and at last, in 1781, the Literary and Philoso-
phical Society of Manchester was formally instituted, with
a local habitation of its own. Among the first of its mem-
bers were Dr. Darwin, Priestley, Watson, Bishop of Llandaff,
Josiah Wedgwood, and two famous foreigners, " Monsieur
Lavoisier," the Newton of modern chemistry, and " Mr,
Alexander Volta, professor of experimental philosophy at
Como " (as he is styled in the original list), the inventor of
the Voltaic pile. Percival was one of the first two joint-
presidents, and on the death of his colleague he became
sole president of the society, which, in the days of Joule
and Angus Smith, worthily preserves the European reputa-
tion which it gained in those of Dalton and of Henry,
When the first publication of its memoirs was made, Per-
cival wrote to Pitt, as Prime Minister, to ask leave to dedi-
cate them to George HL, and in 1785 they appeared with a
dedication, of which the opening words were, " To the
King" — an exordium more impressive then than now.
In his attempts to establish in Manchester two other
institutions, Percival was not so successful, though at least
one of them deserves grateful recognition, while the other
contributed to the means of subsistence of a memorable
and struggling cultivator of science. In 1785, Percival's
THOMAS PERCIVAL. 191
alma mater as it were, the Warrington Academy, was
clearly, and for various easily understood causes, on its last
legs. In combination with " Protestant Dissenters " in
Lancashire and elsewhere, Percival contrived to found an
institution of the same kind in Manchester, which will
always be remembered from the circumstance that during
six years John Dalton was its "tutor in mathematics and
natural philosophy." Like its Warrington predecessor,
however, it did not permanently flourish. By 1802 it had
fallen into a deep decline, for which change of air was pre-
scribed, and it migrated to York. The second institution
which Percival and his friends also managed to found in
Manchester, but which enjoyed only a very brief existence,
was a College of Arts and Sciences, intended for young
men who, having finished their ordinary education, were
about to "go into business." They were to attend lectures
on mathematics, chemistry, the fine arts, and so forth, but
above all on commerce and manufactures, their historj^,
laws, and even ethics, at home and abroad. "After two
winters, however, of unfavourable trial, the undertaking was
found to decline, and was at length reluctantly abandoned."
The voluntary principle proved to be insufiicient. The muni-
ficence of an Owens was needed to establish a suitable Man-
chester University. Percival's scheme, we are told, was " so
approved by Dr. Franklin," that his friend, the American sage,
is said " to have left a considerable sum of money for the
establishment of a similar institution in America ; " but there
is no trace of any such bequest in Franklin's published will.
With the promotion of enterprises like these to fill up
the intervals of his professional life, Percival's days flowed
on equably, pleasantly, and profitably. The fame of his
usefulness and abilities had been diffused far beyond the
sphere in which they were immediately conspicuous.
Many of the wise and distinguished in his own profession
192
LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
and out of it were among his correspondents : Lettsom and
Heberden, Beattie and Parr ; Howard, the philanthropist,
and Hannah More ; Robertson the historian, and Madame
Necker ; Watson, Bishop of Llandafif, and Paley, to the
last of whom Mrs. De Quincey's " infidel " referred his son
when beset by the doubts which had prevented the father
from going to Oxford ; but which did not prevent the
younger Percival from becoming a clergyman of the Church
of England.^ The chief drawback to his happiness in
1 In one of his letters to this son, Percival says in language which
amply refutes the Opium Eater's insinuations : — "Your attachment to
Butler's Analogy is very satisfactory to me. To no book am I undei
so great obligations, for by the attentive perusal of it my full conviction
of the truth of Christianity was restored." Percival's letter to Paley
(dated Manchester, January 20, 1788), on his son's doubts or dubita-
tions may be worth giving, as characteristic of the time, and exhibiting
the position then occupied by that now slighted and neglected Arch-
deacon of Carlisle. After apologies for troubling the great man,
Percival proceeds: — "My eldest son, whom I intended for the
profession of physic, by his residence at St. John's College, Cambridge,
and connections in Cambridge, has had his views changed, and is now
strongly inclined to go into the Church. But previous to his final
decision he wishes to settle his mind on several important topics com-
prehended in the articles of faith. The chapter on Religious Estab-
lishments in your excellent system of Moral and Political Philosophy
has had great weight with him, and he has this morning expressed to
me an earnest desire to have the benefit of your personal instructions,
on points so interesting to his future peace, prosperity, and usefulness.
Is it possible for him to enjoy this singular privilege for the space of a
few weeks ? I shall cordially acquiesce in any terms that you may pre-
scribe, and with a grateful sense of obligation to you ' — which is rather
delicately put. "I am a Dissenter," Percival adds, "but actuated by
the same spirit of Catholicism which you possess. An establishment I
approve, the Church of England in many respects I honour ; and
should think it my duty to enter instantly into her communion, were
the plan which you have proposed in your tenth chapter carried into
execution." This is the chapter on Church Establishments, in which
Paley recommends that the yoke and burden of tests and subscrip-
tions should be made as easy and light as possible, and "adapted
THOMAS PERCIVAL. 1 93
later years arose from defective eye-sight, caused, it is said,
by his habit of constant reading in his carriage when
driving about on his professional visits. The young men,
however, who were admitted as pupils to be inmates of his
house, and whose studies he directed, read to him and
acted as his amanuenses — one of them, Dr. Henry, the
father of the well-known chemist, with him in this way
for five years, has left on record his keen sense of Per-
cival's amiabiUty and kindness.
Thomas Percival died at Manchester on the 30th of
August 1804, in the sixty-fourth year of his age. A Latin
epitaph by the mighty Dr. Parr is inscribed in the church
at Warrington, his native place, where he was buried ; and
over the president's chair in the hall of the Manchester
Philosophical and Literary Society, a mural tablet was
erected to his memory. A glowing panegyric on him was
contributed a few weeks after his death to the pages of
Sylvanus Urban, by Magee (already of the Atonement, but
not yet Archbishop of Dublin), who had married a niece
of Percival's, and knowing him well, admired him much.
Percival is certainly a man who ought to figure prominently
to the var)'ing sentiments and circumstances of the Church," (Src, <S:c.
Mr. Archdeacon responded graciously to Percival's epistle, but "the
state of his engagements" did not permit him to accept the offered
visit. However, for the young gentleman's sake, and for the honour
done him by the young gentleman's father, he favoured them with an
expansion of his short chapter on "Subscription," and did his best to
smooth the way for the anxious enquirer's entry into the ministry of
the Church of England. You must look to the intentions of the
authorities when subscription was imposed. They were not to ex-
clude from communion with the Church persons either of Percival
senior's or of Percival junior's mode of thinking, which had not come
into vogue in those days. No, the articles were aimed at Popery,
the tenets of the Continental Anabaptists, and so forth. Paley's
reasoning proved effective. Percival junior took orders, and was ap-
pointed Chajjlain of the British Factory at St. Petersburg.
•2 B
194
LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
in that competent account of English Medical Biography,
the continued absence of which from our literature is far
from creditable to the profession. Even as things are,
he has not been consigned to total professional oblivion.
So late as 1849, his little work on "Medical Ethics,"
intended to be a sort of vade tneawi for the conscientious
physician (it first appeared in 1803), was re-published and
re-edited by the well known Dr. Greenhill of Oxford, who
in his preface declared it to be " commonly quoted as a
work of authority not only in this country but also in
America." But it is as a public-spirited denizen of the
town of his adoption, always foremost in promoting its
varied social interests, that Percival chiefly claims remem-
brance. His services to Manchester, and thus indirectly to
his country, were, it will have been seen, neither few nor
inconsiderable.
CAPTAIN JAMES KING*
COMPANION of Captain Cook in the third and last
of his voyages, and part-historiographer of that
famous expedition, James King was born at Clitheroe, in
1750. He came of a Yorkshire stock — a "respectable
and ancient family, long resident at Skellands, in the
Deanery of Craven." His father, curate of Clitheroe at
the time of his birth, rose afterwards to be Chaplain
to fhe House of Commons, and Dean of Raphoe in
Ireland. His mother was " Anne, daughter and co-heiress
of John Walker, of Hungrill, in the parish of Bolton ; "
and he was the second of five sons. Thomas, the eldest,
and Walker, the third brother, entered the Church.
Thomas became a Prebendary of Canterburj'^ ; Walker
was one of the intimate friends and executors of Edmund
* Memoir of King in Baines's History of the County Palatine oj Lan-
caster (first edition), iii. 218, &c. (where it is said to have been "com-
piled chiefly from materials supplied to Mr. Whatton by Dr. Walker
King, elder brother of the Captain, and late Bishop of Rochester").
Alice King (a kinswoman of the navigator), A Cluster of Lives
(London 1874). § Captain Cook's Companion. A Voyage to the Pacific
Ocean fofornu'd under the direction of Captains Cook, Clerke, and Gore,
in 1776-80, in vols. 15-17 of Robert Kerr's General History and
Collection of Voyages and Travels, (Edinburgh, 1S24). Madame
D'Arblay's Diary and Letters (London, 1842), <S;c., &c.
196 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Burke, and died Bishop of Rochester. The fourth son,
Edward, Hved to be Vice-Chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster. The 5'^oungest, John, went to the bar, which
he quitted in 1789 for an official career. He was
successively Under-Secretary of State, Secretary of the
Treasury, and Comptroller of Army Accounts. Thus the
curate of Clitheroe and his sons made, all of them,
more or less, some figure or reached some altitude in the
world.
Of King the father, one, and that a characteristic,
anecdote has been preserved. As he rode soberly on his
wedding-day to the church where his bride was to await
his coming, the hunt swept past. He could not resist the
temptation of joining it (in those days the clerical Nimrod
was a familiar figure in the hunting field), and he was soon
foremost in the chase. He pulled up, however, in time to
be at the altar by the appointed hour;^ otherwise this
memoir might have remained unwritten. When promoted
from the Clitheroe curacy to the Raphoe Deanery, he took
his family to Ireland, but the boys were sent to school
in England, and as they visited home regularly with their
holidays, James had to cross the sea several times a year,
and he seems to have taken a liking for it. As a proof of
his early fondness for the water and interest in things
nautical, it is recorded that once when the brothers had
made the passage to Dublin instead of, as was usual, to
Belfast, James was sometime after the landing nowhere to
be found. Search having been made for the truant by the
servant who had the boys in charge. Master James was at
last descried in the twilight aboard a boat mid-way in the
Liffey. When he landed his little money was gone ; he
had spent it to enjoy — for nearly a whole day — the pleasure
of crossing and re-crossing the river with the ferryman,
1 Alice King, p. 139.
CAPTAIN JAMES Kh\G, 1 97
from whom he had learned the name and destination of
every vessel in the harbour. ^ No wonder that he is next
heard of as asking to be sent to sea, and to sea he went.
At the age of twelve he entered the navy as a midshipman,
"under the patronage of his near relative, Captain Norton,
a brother of the first Lord Grantley." It was about the
time when, with the seven years' war coming to a close,
the world was to enjoy a little peace, so that there were no
laurels to be gained by the British midshipman just then,
" During the peace," says King's brother and biographer,
"which followed the accession of George III. to the
throne, he served successively under the command of
Lord Rodney, Sir Hugh Palliser, and the Earl of St.
Vincent. By those distinguished officers he was patronised
and highly esteemed, and by the last he was promoted to
the rank of lieutenant." After twelve years of it the young
lieutenant seems to have grown tired of a life on ship-
board in time of peace, and he was of a studious and in-
quiring turn. In 1774 he left active, or inactive, service,
and proceeded to Paris, to learn French and improve
himself in science. His younger brother. Walker, was then
a member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and by his
influence the studious young lieutenant of four or five and
twenty was permitted, after the sojourn in France, to
reside in that college, and there still further repair the
deficiencies of his early-arrested education. He was poor,
and his fare at Oxford was not sumptuous. " His scout is
said every evening to have called out for his supper from
the college buttery in these words : ' A farthing bread, a
farthing cheese, and a farthing small, Mr. King ! '" 2 But
he studied hard, all the harder perhaps because his rations
were scanty. His mathematical enthusiasm and proficiency
attracted the attention of the University Professor of
1 Alice King, p. 143. ^ lb., p. 146.
IQ8 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Astronomy, Dr. Hornsby ; and it was not long before King
unexpectedly reaped some acceptable fruit from his meri-
torious application and zeal for self-improvement.
Two years after King's migration from Paris to Oxford,
it was resolved by the Admiralty to fit out an expedition
for the discovery of the North-west (or of a North-east)
passage. Like a Sindbad of real life, Captain Cook (cetat.
48) was then resting on his laurels in a snug berth, with
which he had been rewarded in Greenwich Hospital, for
the toils endured and the discoveries made in his famous
voyages of 1767-71, and 1772-74. The promoters of the
expedition could not bring themselves, much as they
wished for his services, to invite him to leave his well-
earned haven of repose, and face the perils of Arctic
voyaging. But to consult him concerning the project and
the agent fittest to undertake it was another matter, and
he formed one of a dinner-party given by the First Lord of
the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich (Wilkes's friend — and foe —
a free-living and free-thinking but capable man), to discuss
the objects and prospects of the expedition. As the talk
went on, and the promise and magnitude of the scheme
unfolded themselves, the heart of the stout navigator began
to burn within him like that of the Tennysonian Ulysses,
and starting to his feet he vowed that he would command
the expedition. The off"er was joyfully accepted, and
forthwith all the needful arrangements were gone into.
\mong them was the nomination of a person qualified to
make the observations, nautical and astronomical, indis-
pensable to the programme of such an expedition. Captain
Cook, and Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, the former
a self-taught scientific observer, the latter one of the
creators of modern nautical astronomy (and then just on
the point of starting the Nautical Almanack), were com-
missioned, in conjunction with the Board of Longitude, to
CAPTAIN JAMES K/XG. 1 99
choose the man for the job. The young lieutenant's hour
was come. The Professor of Astronomy at Oxford was
consulted, and he recommended the accomplished mathe-
matician, the naval inmate of Corpus Christi. King eagerly
closed with the offer, which was all the more readily made
to him that he was a naval officer ; the British tar having
been found on former voyages handier in scientific work
when ordered about by a naval man than by a land-lubber,
pure and simple, and however versed in nautical astronomy.
On the nth of July 1776, the Resolution (of only 460 tons
burden) sailed from Plymouth,^ with King on board as
second lieutenant, and commanded by Captain Cook, who
was destined never to return. The companion-vessel, the
Discovery, followed on the arrival of its commander.
Captain Clerke, whose last (and uncompleted) voyage this
was also to be.
At the beginning of 1777, the Discovery and Resolutio7i,
in pursuance of instructions, were skirting the southern
shores of Van Dieman's Land, our Tasmania, Tasmania
is now a pleasant English colony, in a state of arrested
development, but none the less pleasant, perhaps, on that
account ; and not long since there appeared a little volume,
"The Last of the Tasmanians," chronicling the extinction
1 A week after the American Declaration of Independence. "It
could not but occur to us as a singular and affecting circumstance,"
writes Cook in the journal of his stay at riymouth, " that a*- the
very instant of our departure upon a voyage, the object of which was to
benefit Europe by making fresh discoveries in North America, there
should be the unhappy necessity of employing others of His Majesty's
ships, and of conveying numerous bodies of land forces to secure the
obedience of those parts of that continent which had been discovered
and settled by our countrymen in the last century. On the 6th his
Majesty's ships Diamond, Ambuscade, and Union, with a fleet of
transports, consisting of sixty-two sail, bound to America, with the last
division of the Hessian troops, and some horse, were forced into the
Sound by a strong N.W. wind."
200 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
of its aboriginal population. A hundred years have passed
since this visit of Cook's to it, and then he did not know
it to be an island, but fancied it to be the southern extre-
mity of Australia, his New Holland. Not a European was
settled in it, and the naked blacks who peopled it, in the
lowest stage of savagery, a very little higher than the
brutes, were objects of great astonishment to King and his
fellow-officers, when they landed occasionally in quest of
wood or water. From Van Dieman's Land to New
Zealand, the voyagers sailed next, and convinced them-
selves of the cannibalism of the New Zealanders, progenitors
of the troublesome Maories of to-day. Away, then, north-
wards, the little barks careered, cruising about among
"summer isles of Eden lying in dark purple spheres of
sea," until sailing towards the Tropic of Cancer, a
new archipelago was discovered by the delighted Cook,
and the grateful commander christened it, as a memorial
of the First Lord of the Admiralty at home, the Sandwich
Islands. Away again, far northwards went the Resolution
and Discovery, through Behring's Straits to Cape North.
The ice barred their further progress, and they had to
return, — Cook gladly availing himself of this compulsion to
revisit his new discovery, the Sandwich Islands. When
they arrived in Karakakooa Bay, off Owhyee, the modern
Hawaii, a thousand canoes were paddled round the ships,
" most of them crowded with people, and well-laden with
hogs and other productions of the island." "I had
nowhere," says Cook, " in the course of my voyage, seen so
numerous a body of people assembled at one place. For,
besides those who had come off to us in canoes, all the
shore of the bay was crowded with spectators, and many
hundreds were swimming round the ships like shoals of
fish. We could not but be struck with the singularity of
this scene ; and perhaps there were {tv^ on board who now
.CAPTAIN JAMES XING. 201
lamented our having failed in finding a northern passage
homeward last spring. To this disappointment we owed
our having it in our power to revisit the Sandwich Islands,
and to enrich our voyage with a discovery which, though
the last, seemed in many respects to be the most important
that had hitherto been made by Europeans throughout the
extent of the Pacific Ocean."
Curiously enough, these are the final words in Cook's
journal of his proceedings. The remainder of the classic
record which chronicles his voyages is from the pen of his
then second lieutenant, who all the time since the Resolu-
tion weighed anchor in Plymouth Sound had been busy,
scientifically and practically, determining the longitude " by
the watch" and lunar observations, recording the dip of
the magnetic needle, the variations of the compass, and
all the rest of it, in the intervals of a lieutenant's ordinary
business aboard ship and on shore ; trafficking with the
natives for provisions, and superintending detachments of
men sent from the ship to hew wood and draw water.
King's disposition was mild and amiable, as his com-
mander's was stern and rather harsh. Cook's sternness
had worked wonders with the natives of Oceania, but he
exhibited it once too often. After a few weeks of fer.stincr
and kindly intercourse with the Sandwich Islanders, the
ships took leave, as they thought, of the bay, looking up
to a rising ground of cultivated fields and groves of cocoa-
nut, near which King had erected his astronomical obser-
vatory. The natives were not sorry to get rid of the
visitors, whose consumption of pork and sweet potatoes
had been large ; and to such guests nothing could be
refused. After they had left, however, a gale came on,
which damaged the masting and rigging of the Resolutmi,
and it was found necessary to run in somewhere and
refit. In an unlucky hour Cook determined to return to
2
202 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Karakakooa Bay, and when the ship arrived there, all was
changed. No longer were there swarms of canoes and
swimmers to greet the white man, but silence and solitude ;
and, on inquiry, it was found that the chiefs and priests
had placed the bay under taboo, the one word with which
the dialect of the Sandwich Islands has enriched our noble
English tongue. Then began pilfering by the natives and
retaliation by the crews — stone-throwing of the dusky
islanders, answered by musketry -shot from the white
strangers. Tlie seizure of the Discovery s cutter brought
Cook himself into action, and he landed, clumsily sup-
ported by the boats behind, to be murdered by the crowd
of savages on shore, whom the death of one of their chiefs,
from a stray musket shot, had exasperated into madness.
King was standing, with half a dozen marines, in guard of
the observatory, which he had anew erected, a short mile
from the scene of the catastrophe, and saw distinctly the
"immense crowd collected on the spot where Captain
Cook had just before landed." " We heard," he says,
" the firing of the musketry, and could perceive some
extraordinary bustle and agitation in the multitude. We
afterwards saw the natives flying, the boats retire from the
shore, and passing and repassing in great stillness between
the ships. I must confess that my heart soon misgave
me ; " and with reason, for Cook was being butchered.
The tragedy which closed the life of the great navigator
was enacted on the 2d of July 1778. Again, a hundred
years have elapsed since the Sandwich Islands were first
visited by Europeans, and already Cook's prediction is
fulfilled. Honolulu is becoming a great oceanic entrepot,
and a Queen from the Sandwich Islands — Christianised,
civiUsed, and constitutionalised after a fashion — was not
so very long ago one of the lions or lionesses of a London
.season.
CAPTAIN JAMES KING. 203
King himself escaped from terra firma to ship-board not
without difficulty and danger, and became first lieutenant
of the Resolution by the removal of his senior to the com-
mand of the Discovery, vacated by Captain Gierke, who
was now at the head of the expedition. Once more they
steered to the north, and once more passed through Beh-
ring's Straits, only to be driven back a second time by
continents of floating ice. Returning by the coast of
Kamskatchka, Captain Clerke died of a lingering con-
sumption, and first -lieutenant King, of the Resolution,
became commander of the Discovery. Clerke's death
befell in the August of 1779. Towards the end of Sep-
tember they reached Macao, and heard for the first time,
from the Portuguese governor, of the War of American
Independence, of war between Great Britain and France;
and the gallant King describes the feeling of "poignant
regret" which filled the English hearts of officers and
crews "at finding ourselves cut off, at such a distance,
from the scene, where, we imagined, the fate of fleets and
armies was evc-ywhere deciding." Unmolested and un-
molesting — for the French Government had given orders
that the vessels of the great Captain Cook's expedition
should be allowed to pass everywhere, without let or
hindrance — they steered for home. On the 4th of October
1780, the Resolution and Discovery once more floated in
British waters, and dropped anchor at the Nore, after an
absence of rather more than four years.
The officers of the expedition, with the sketches and
curiosities which they brought back, were, of course,
objects of interest in London. Fanny Barney's was an
older and a stronger interest than most people's, since the
first-lieutenant of the Discovery, when it sailed, was her
brother "Jem" — the Admiral Burney of later days, and
of Charles Lamb's varied and pleasant circle. Fanny has
204 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
chronicled in her diary her inspection of the drawings (for
an artist — a Mr. Webber — had accompanied the expedi-
tion), an episode in a day's visit to Sir Joshua, who was
"fat and well." Fanny was at an age and in the mood to
be pleased with an agreeable and intelligent young naval
officer, and thus she records the impression made on her by
the lieutenant and the collection : "We then went to Mr.
Webber's to see the South Sea drawings. Here we met
Captain King, who chiefly did the honours in showing the
curiosities and explaining them. He is one of the most
natural, gay, honest, and pleasant characters I ever met
with. We spent all the rest of the morning here much to
my satisfaction. The drawings are extremely well worth
seeing ; they consist of views of the country of Otaheite,
New Zealand, New Amsterdam, Kamskatchka, and parts
of China, and portraits of the inhabitants done from the
life." ^ About the same time Fanny records that her own
and Dr. Johnson's dear friend, Mrs. Thrale, went to Court in
a dress "woven at Spitalfields from a pattern of Owhyee
manufacture," brought thence by Captain Burney.
The patriotic aspirations which had fired Captain King
at Macao were gratified not long after he returned home,
crowned with a mild glory of his own, which might have
been more brilliant but for the general excitement caused
by a war with the American colonies, with France, and
with Spain. His claims were not to be gainsayed, and he
was appointed to the command of the Crocodile sloop of
war, and afterwards to that of the Resistance^ a 46-gun
frigate. Of his very first cruise in the Resistance a most
striking episode is thus chronicled on unexceptionable
authority : —
"In the former vessel" — the Crocodile — "he was employed during
the war in the Channel service, and during the command of the latter "
' Diary of Madame D^Arblay, ii. 13.
CAPTAIN JAMES A'/XG. 205
the Resistance — " ^ singular opportunity was afforded him of demon-
strating the immense importance of scientific nautical knowledge;"
and those who in our own day sneer at it, may take note of its use to
King.
"He received orders from the Board of Admiralty to convoy a large
fleet of merchantmen, consisting of nearly 500 vessels, from the Channel
to the West Indies, accompanied by a sloop of war and a smaller
armed vessel. It was known that a small French squadron had sailed
from Brest a short time before, with a design, as was supposed, of
intercepting this fleet.
"During his course towards Jamaica, which island he was directed
first to make, he received frequent intelligence of the squadron, greatly
superior to his, having been seen steering the same course. lie had the
good fortune, however, not to fall in with the enemy ; but when he had
arrived, as was concluded, within about one hundred and fifty leagues
from the island, he learned that the French fleet had been seen the day
before, nearly at the same place where he then was with his convoy.
He directed his course, however, during the remainder of the day towards
the island, and at dusk believed himself to be, according to his own
reckoning, within about fifty leagues from the coast, the wind blowing
a fresh gale. He then made signals for the masters of all the mer-
chant vessels to repair on board the Resistance with their respective
reckonings. Upon the examination of these, he found that his distance
from the coast was in many of them made to be not more than twelve
leagues, and in none more than twenty. The question now was whether
to make for the island, or to lay- to till break of day. The commanders
of the merchantmen strongly insisted upon the danger of approaching
a lee shore during the night, with a strong wind and so heavy a sea.
On the other hand, the capture of the fleet, if it did not soon reach the
harbour, was scarcely doubtful.
"The responsibility thus imposed upon Captain King, in cither
alternative, was awful and peculiarly distressing. If he had given way
to the pressing remonstrances of the commanders of the merchantmen,
though the commerce of the countiy might have received a violent
shock, and though its marine would have lost the service, at an
important crisis, of so large a body of seamen, and its government
have been condemned for committing the safety of so valuable a fleet
to a convoy so inadequate to its protection ; yet, tlie concurring result
of the log-books of the ships would, in the eyes of the world, have
been a sufficient justification of his conduct ; but the Captain would
hardly have escaped the rcpro.iches of his own conscience for having,
through want of firmness, brought so disastrous a calamity upon liis
country. Again, if he had been, in fact, so near the coast as, by tho
206 LAXCASHIRE WORTHIES.
reckoning of the merchantmen, he was supposed to be, his perseverancc-
in the resolution which he had formed would most probably have
been attended with the shipwreck of the convoy, and with the loss,
]ierhaps, of every man of their crews. The disaster would have been
attributed to his obstinacy, his vanity, and his presumption ; and what
to a noble mind would have been more painful, together with himself
would have perished all possible means of rescuing his character from
reproach, by a reference to the observations and calculations upon
which his opinions might have been excusably, though erroneously,
founded.
"In these straits he adopted a measure which, however hazardous
it might be to his personal safety, afforded, perhaps, the best possible
chance of saving the fleet. After notifying to his own officers and to
the commanders of the merchantmen his intention of going on board
the small armed vessel, and keeping so far ahead of the fleet that her
liglits might be seen, or at least her signal guns heard, he left orders
that, upon observing any fixed signals of distress, they should immedi-
ately disperse and endeavour to save themselves with such assistance
as the King's ships might have any opportunity of affording them.
"Relying, therefore, with a confidence justified by a long course of
the most satisfactory experience, upon the accuracy of his own astro-
nomical observations and reckoning, Captain King directed the fleet,
in opposition to the strong and reiterated remonstrances of all the
masters of the vessels, to follow him and hold on the same course
during the night, assuring them that at daybreak they would see the
coast, many leagues to leeward, ahead of them.
"The event verified the accuracy of his reckoning, and the next
morning the fleet had no sooner got safe within the harbour of Kingston
than the enemy's squadron was seen not many leagues to windward,
and succeeded in capturing several of the merchantmen, who had,
through a confidence in their own reckoning, ventured to disobey
Captain King's orders. Thus was this valuable fleet saved from almost
certain destruction.
"A singular circumstance has been related to me," Whatton, writer
of the biographies in Baines's Lancashire, " by a near relative of
Captain King" — Dr. Walker King, no doubt : — -"Upon his return to
England, it was remarked by his family that the hair of his head,
which had been brown, had become very grey ; one of the officers of
his ship assured them that this change had been observed a few days
after the arrival of the Resistarue at Kingston, and had been attributed
to his extreme anxiety during the night in which his ship and convoy
had been making for the harbour. "
CAPTAIN JAMES KING. 20/
A most gallant feat ; all the more interesting that it
exhibits the noble courage of the British naval commander
guided by scientific knowledge, and quite as notable as
many a more famous achievement in the way of boarding
and cutting out. The biographer in Baines had the story,
of course, from Walker King, the brother of its hero, who
doubtless heard it from King's own lips. The histories of
the British navy and of Jamaica have been searched for
a confirmation of the narrative, but there is no mention of
King's convoying expedition to be found in them. The
following is the only record preserved anywhere of his
West Indian career in the Resistance, and though not very
significant, it may be worth giving in the dearth of infor-
mation concerning the naval doings of this Lancashire
Worthy. Sark's Island is one of the most easterly of the
Bahama group, and the date of King's exploit is two or
three weeks before Rodney's famous victory over De
Grasse, whose nephew had thus a foretaste of his uncle's
coming discomfiture : —
"The 2d of March" 17S2 "His Majesty's ship Resistame, of
44 guns, commanded by Captain King, coming through Sark's
Island passage in company with the Du Guay Trouitt sloop, discovered
two ships at anchor, which, on seeing them, cut their cables, got under
weigh, and stood to the southward. The Resistance immediately gave
chase to the sternmost, a 20-gun ship, which, by carrying a press of
sail, soon lost her maintop-mast, and then hauled her wind. She " —
the Resisiance — "quietly came up with her" — the anonymous 20-giin
ship — "and on firing a few shots at her, she struck. Leaving her to
be picked up by the sloop. Captain King pushed on after the headmost
of the enemy's ships, which soon began to fire her stern-chase guns,
and continued to do so for a quarter of an hour, when, ranging up
alongside of her to leeward, she struck her white flag, after discharging
her broadside. Possession was then taken of L<i Coquette, a royal
French frigate of 28 guns, but mounting only 23, her other 5 guns
having been landed on Sark's Island. She had 200 men, and was
commanded by the Marquis de Grasse, nephew to the Admiral Comte
208 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
de Grasse. The Resistance fired only a few guns, and had two of her
officers wounded by the enemy's fire. " ^
King returned to England at the close of the war in
1782, with his health much impaired by the hardships of
six years of such voyaging and such cruising. Symptoms
of consumption displayed themselves, and he lived only a
year or two after his return. He left, however, ready for
publication, the narrative of the last voyage of the Rcsolu-
tion and Discovery, of which he wrote (at Woodstock) the
continuation from the point where the hand of Captain
Cook had paused for ever. The two journals were pub-
lished in 1784. The style of his instalment, though grave
and precise, is easier and pleasanter than that of his great
commander and predecessor, with whom to be thus asso-
ciated in the authorship of so enduring a record of famous
voyaging secures permanence for King's modest reputa-
tion.
As already mentioned, his younger brother, Walker, was a
friend of Edmund Burke, and was indeed for a season
private secretary to that statesman's political patron. Lord
Rockingham. Liirke seems to have extended to the older
the friendship which he undoubtedly felt for the younger
brother, and it is said that from the time when the symp-
toms of the consumption of which he died were first con-
spicuous, James King "was an almost constant inmate in
the house of Mr. Burke." Dr. Walker King contributed to
the first edition of Baines's History of Lajicaslnre materials
for the brief memoir of James King, published in that work
in its original form, and in it the following passage is
given as a quotation from a letter of Burke's. Due search
has been made in Burke's published correspondence, but
neither these nor any other traces of the statesman's friend-
^ Beatson's Naval and Military Memoirs of Great Britain from 1727
to 17S3 (London, 1804), v. 534.
CAPTAIN JAMES KING. 209
ship for the voyager are to be found in it, though it contains
ample indications of his intimacy with Walker King. " In
truth," Burke is described as writing to a common friend
soon after the death of the navigator, " in truth, James
King was made and singularly framed to inspire confidence
and attachment. His temper was admirable. He recon-
ciled to him the people wherever he went. There was
hardly an island visited by Cook in which the natives did
not press him to remain with them. At the Cape of Good
Hope he made an excursion deep into the country. There,
too, he made his way, as he did everywhere, without design
or effort. He became intimately acquainted with the
principal planter of the country, who, observing to him
that his constitution seemed weak, and that their country
made people healthy and robust, advised him to take up
his residence there. For the purpose of inducing him to
stay, this respectable gentleman offered him a considerable
plantation as a settlement, and one of his daughters in
marriage." After his last return home, according to the
latest of his biographers, " he wooed and won the Lady
Anne O'Brien, the daughter of the Marquis of Inchiquin," ^
but his illness and death prevented the marriage. Says
Edmund Burke again in the letter already quoted from :
" He was nursed in the declining state of his health by my
wife with more assiduity than success. Her task was at
last taken up by Trevanion and Young, who accompanied
him to Nice, to which place he removed by the advice of
his medical friends in the autumn of 1783. These two
gentleman, of whom the former had accompanied him in
his voyage round the world, and the latter been his frequent
messmate during the early period of his naval service, con-
tinued to attend him with an affection rarely to be found
in friendships connected by the common occurrences of
^ Alice King, p. 158.
2 D
2IO LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
life. They left all their own pursuits, pleasures, and
consolations, and cherished him to the moment of his
death, and did not leave Nice till they had done the last
duties to the memory of their friend, and engraved their
testimony on his tomb." At the early age of thirty-two, in
the October of 1784, James King died and was buried at
Nice. In Clitheroe Church, the parish church of his native
town, and in which, too, his father had ministered, a tablet,
with a suitable inscription, briefly commemorates the
merits of this Lancashire Worthy, cut off prematurely in
his prime.
VL
GEORGE ROMNEY.*
TO strangers the mention of Lancashire suggests for the
most part a region of dismal uniformity, devoid of
natural beauty, and shrouded in perpetual smoke. The
district of Furness, however, teems with wild grandeur and
romantic loveliness, though it has been from of old the seat
of an iron mining and manufacturing industry, now become
very considerable. This Calabria of England, as it has
been called, gave birth to George Romney, whom Flaxman
pronounced to be in poetic dignity of conception the
greatest of all British painters.
He was born on the 15th of December 1734, and was
thus some ten years younger than Sir Joshua Reynolds, of
whom, as a portrait painter, he became the successful rival.
His birth-place was Beckside, near Dalton, the ancient
capital of Furness, and his father combined the trades of
carpenter, joiner, and cabinetmaker with a success which
rendered him, for that sphere of life, a comparatively wealthy
man. After the fashion of the district, the eldest son re-
ceived a superior education, to fit him for a profession ; but
* Rev. John Romney (son of the painter), Memoir of the Life and
Works oj George Romney (l.or\Aon, 1830). William Ilayley, The Life
of George Rofnttey, Esq. (Chidiester, 1809). Allan Cunningham, Lives
of the most Emitient British Painters, &^c. (London, 1832), § Romney.
Cowper's Works (by Southey). Cumberland's Memoirs, dr'f., (Sr'r.
212 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES
George, displaying no great aptitude for learning, and a
considerable turn for mechanics, was withdrawn from school
in his eleventh year, and placed in his father's workshop.
A genius above the ordinary operations of his handicraft
soon displayed itself in the lad. He carved figures in wood,
and constructed violins, on which a neighbour taught him
to play. Born a painter, he drew his fellow-workmen in
various attitudes, and his artistic tendencies were strength-
ened and developed by the early possession of an illustrated
copy of Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting. His birth-
place, with its picturesque environment and rustic denizens,
was his drawing academy, and the instinct implanted in
him by Nature kept him at work. " When Romney," says
Flaxman, " first began to paint, he had seen no gallery
of pictures, nor the fine productions of ancient sculpture ;
but then women and children were his statues, and all ob-
jects under the cope of heaven formed his school of paint-
ing. The rainbow, the purple distance, or the silver lake
taught him colouring ; the various actions and passions of
the human figure, with the forms of clouds, woods, and
mountains, or valleys, afforded him studies of composition.
Indeed, his genius bore a strong resemblance to the scenes
he was born in : like them it partook of the grand and
beautiful; and, like them, also, the bright sunshine and
enchanting prospect of his fancy were occasionally over-
spread with mist and gloom." The persons by whom he was
surrounded were the ordinary inhabitants of an English vil-
lage, but the scenery which met his eyes, from the time when
they were first opened, was singularly and variedly pictur-
esque. His father's house stood on a sort of terrace facing
the west, and commanding an extensive view of the Irish
Sea. From the hill behind, a noble panorama was un-
folded. Northward was the estuary of the Duddon (after-
wards Wordsworth's Duddon), which, with every tide,
GEORGE ROMNEY. 2I3
showed like a fine lake, and was studded with sails. Behind
the well-cultivated high grounds on the Cumberland side,
and their white farm-houses, rose Black Comb with its
mist-clad summit, and to the south-east of this region was
the background of mountains which are the pride and glory
of Furness. Few painters have grown up in a district more
fitted to create and foster a love for the beautiful and
sublime in Nature. Nevertheless, his first powerful impulse
to painting what he saw around him was received not from
the beautiful in Nature, but the odd in humanity. He him-
self used to relate that " one day in church he saw a man
with a most singular face, from which he could never take
his eye. He spoke of it when he went home, and his parents
desired him to describe the man. He took a pencil,
and from memory delineated the face so skilfully, and with
such strength of resemblance, that they immediately named
the person he meant ; and the boy was so pleased with this
that he began to draw with more serious application."
Many a deal-board in the paternal workshop had been
covered with likenesses of its occupants by Romney's
youthful hand, when a portrait-sketch which he made of a
lady of some position attracted the attention, and procured
him the encouragement, of a superior in station. His father
was now induced to allow his son to follow painting as a
profession, and an opening was not far to seek. There
was then at Kendal a wild, dissipated, hair-brained, but
clever artist of the name of Steele, whose fineiy and airy
pretentiousness of demeanour had led the Westmoreland
people to dub him Count Steele. The Count wanted a
pupil, young Romney a master; and at nineteen he was
indentured to this worthy for four years, on payment of a
premium of twenty pounds, to learn " the art or science
of painting, and to obey all lawful and reasonable com-
mands." From the Count, Romney gained little more than
214 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
a certain proficiency in the art of colour-grinding, and out
of the domain of art nothing that was good. Presently the
teacher eloped to Gretna with an heiress : and, smitten by
the attractions of a respectable young woman in Kendal,
Romney solaced himself in his master's absence by marry-
ing off-hand Miss Jenny Abbott, of Kirkland. She had
been well brought up and was well-conditioned and amiable,
but the match was naturally disapproved of by his parents,
and with it all chance of aid from his father seems to have
ceased. Romney was soon thrown upon his own resources.
The Count resolved to go with his bride to Ireland, and
when his apprentice declined to follow him thither he
accepted ten pounds in lieu of further service, and the in-
dentures were cancelled. Meanwhile Romney had been
working hard and forming a style of his own. He started,
accordingly, as a portrait-painter, seemingly alternating
between Lancashire and Kendal, and receiving a very fair
amount of patronage, especially from the Westmoreland
squires. He cultivated at the same time original composi-
tion, and exhibited a collection of his paintings in the Town
Hall of Kendal, afterwards disposing of them by raffle,
for which eighty tickets were taken at half-a-guinea apiece.
The subjects of two of them were from King Lear — Lear
Wakened by Cordelia, and Lear in the Storm tearing off his
Robes — Mrs. Romney having sat as the model for Cordeha.
Another was a Shandean piece, representing Dr. Slop,
splashed with his journey, on his arrival in the parlour of
Shandy Hall, where Mr. Shandy and Uncle Toby are dis-
coursing on the nature of woman. As it happened, between
Count Steele's return with his bride to work and his depar-
ture for Ireland, he spent a few months professionally in
York, with Romney as his assistant. Sterne, who was then
Rector of Sutton, an hour's ride from the ancient city, came
to Steele's studio and had his portrait painted. Yorick's
GEORGE ROMNEY. 21 5
latest biographer therefore fancies that as Romney was then
in York, of which city the original of Dr. Slop was a well-
known denizen, the figure of that obstetrical gentleman in
the Shandean piece may have been a more or less faithful
reproduction of the reality. It has been fondly fancied,
too, that Sterne was struck with the young Romney, and
was kind and friendly to him. Romney, however, told
Hayley that he had received from Sterne nothing but the
" usual civilities " which a reverend gentleman would show
to the intelligent assistant and colour-grinder of the artist
who was painting his portrait. Tristram Shandy was just
then beginning its career, and from this piece and a subse-
quent one. The Death of Le Fevre, also painted by
Romney, it is clear that the young artist knew and relished
both the humour and the pathos of Sterne. Yorick's gospel
of " sensibility " found, as will be seen hereafter, in the
young colour-grinder of York, only too ardent a believer.
But this is a digression. The exhibition of his pictures at
Kendal shows Romney bent on acquiring a little distinction,
— if only in that remote part of the country, — as something
more than a mere portrait-painter. As his reputation
increased, his thoughts turned London-wards, and after a
few years of hard work, painting portraits in the North, he
had scraped together a hundred pounds. Leaving seventy
of them to his wife, he started in his twenty-eighth year for
the great city with the remainder, and without a single
letter of introduction.
According to their son (an infant when Romney went to
London), it was with Mrs. Romney's full consent to the
arrangement that her husband set forth alone to the metro-
polis. But, in any case, it is certain that after his arrival
in London he passed himself off as an unmarried man, and
never acknowledged that he had left behind him, at Kendal,
a faithful and affectionate wife, the mother of his children,
2l6 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
of whom, by the way, only a son seems to have survived to
maturity. An error committed at the beginning of his
London career might be excused, but it was unpardonable
in him to continue it when he rose to fame and fortune ;
and he displayed disgraceful moral cowardice in not avowing
to his friends and to the world a connection of which he
had no other reason to be ashamed than that he had once
concealed it. Hayley, his friend and biographer, the friend
and biographer, too, of Cowper, ascribes Romney's reti-
cence and deception to an exquisite sensibility. Romney
was undoubtedly sensitive, and he was also wayward,
moody, suspicious of his friends, morbidly apprehensive of
poverty, but his conduct to his wife was simply inexcusable.
His exquisite sensibility too much resembled that of Jean
Jacques Rousseau, with whom Hayley was fond of com-
paring him intellectually, and who huddled his infant off-
spring away among the Enfants Trouves rather than be bur-
dened with their upbringing. But, it must be added, how-
ever disgraceful his treatment to his wife, Romney provided
suitably for the education of their son, who corresponded
with him, sometimes visited him, and lived to write an
admiring and affectionate biography of him, in which his
treatment of his wife is extenuated as much as it could be.
Romney was well punished for his misconduct, and much
of his unhappiness may be traced to the folly and wicked-
ness with which he deliberately and persistently deprived
his wife of a husband and himself of a home.
Meanwhile his rise was rapid. He began in London at
a time when there was a strong disposition to encourage
native art, when Hogarth had secured fame, and Wilson and
Gainsborough were appreciated, and Reynolds was reaping
a golden harvest as a portrait painter. The Royal Academy
did not yet exist, but the Society of Arts was then fulfiUing
the promise of its name, and giving considerable encourage-
GEORGE ROMNEV. 21/
ment to young painters, sculptors, and architects. Its
second prize of fifty guineas was awarded to Romney in
1763 for his "Death of Wolfe;" and though the award
was afterwards cancelled, it made his name known. On
arriving in London he had pitched his tent near the Man-
sion House. Presently he migrated to Charing Cross, and
raised his price for a portrait to five guineas. A little later
he removed to Great Newport Street, a few doors from Sir
Joshua himself. He ran over to Paris, and much improved
his style by an inspection of the Rubenses in the Luxem-
burg Gallery. His imaginative pictures attracted attention
enough to stimulate his friend Cumberland, the dramatist,
to bepraise him in rhyme. When at the age of thirty-nine,
with an income of twelve hundred a year, he paid the indis-
pensable visit to Italy. He brought back with him new
knowledge of his art, and a passionate admiration of " the
Correggiosity of Correggio." Soon after his return he took
a house in Cavendish Square, since tenanted by Sir Martin
Archer Shee, and sitters flocked to him in the belief that
successful as he had been before, his skill as a portrait
painter was vastly enhanced by his Italian tour. Sir Joshua
himself was doomed to see the favour of the town shared
with him by Romney, and to hear that Lord Thurlow had
said — " There are two factions in art, and I am of the
Romney faction." Reynolds's latest biographer doubts the
truth of the traditional report that he showed his dislike of
his rival by speaking of him habitually as "the man in
Cavendish Square." There is little reason, however, to
doubt that Romney was not elected an Academician or
even an Associate simply on account of Sir Joshua's dislike
for him. Romney repaid the slight by never sending his
pictures to the Academy, but it is creditable to him that he
always did justice to Sir Joshua's genius. When some of
his friends had been criticising the President's Infant Her-
2l8 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
cules, "Gentlemen," Romney struck in, "I have listened
to all you have said ; some observations are true, and some
are nonsense, but no other man in Europe could paint such
a picture." Again, on being told by Hayley that a whole
length of Mrs. Siddons which he had begun was thought
superior to Sir Joshua's picture of her as the Tragic Muse,
he repHed, " The people know nothing of the matter, for it
is not."
Romney's and Hayley's was an early and a late friend-
ship ; perhaps on the whole it was injurious to the painter.
The poet, too, was a man of feeling, who had separated
from his wife when her society began to pain his exquisite
sensibility, and from him Romney never heard the plain
language of wholesome admonition. But the fantastic and
flighty Hayley was withal a warm-hearted man. He loved
Romney as well as admired his pictures, and for twenty-
seven years the lonely artist recruited his health and spirits
by passing a portion of the autumn with Hayley at Eartham
in Sussex. It was at Eartham, beautiful Eartham, about
mid-way between Chichester and Arundel — looking from the
south downs over woodland and meadow to the sea — and
at the home which Gibbon, who had been there as Hayley's
guest, called a " little Paradise," that Romney executed
his noticeable portrait of Cowper. The hypochondriacal
poet and the hypochondriacal painter took to each other at
Eartham ; and when Cowper returned to Bucks and Weston,
he rewarded the artist by sending him this graceful and
doubly-grateful
"SONNET TO GEORGE ROMNEY, ESQ.
On his portrait of ine, in crayons, drawn at Eartham, in the months
of August and September, 1792.
Romney ! expert infallibly to trace
On chart or canvas, not the form alone
And semblance, but, however faintly shown,
The mind's impression, too, on every face,
GEORGE ROMNEY. 219
With strokes that time ought never to erase :
Thou hast so pencilled mine, that though I own
The subject worthless, I have never known
The artist shining with superior grace.
But this I mark, that symptoms none of woe
In thy incomparable work appear :
Well ! I am satisfied, it should be so,
Since on maturer thoughts the cause is clear ;
For in my looks what sorrow could'st thou see,
When I was Hayley's guest and sat to thee ? " '
This was in 1792, a few months after the death of Sir
Joshua. In 1785 Romney's earnings by portrait-painting
amounted, for a single year, to a sum nearer four than three
thousand pounds. All the great and notable people of the
time were among his sitters, from Chatham and Burke —
nothing need be said of peers and peeresses — to Paley
and John Wesley, and he who had painted the portrait of
Cowper was persuaded " by a believer from Manchester " to
limn the features of Tom Paine.^ In the meantime, Romney
' "It was likely enough," says Southey, commenting on tlie sonnet
and on Hayley's prose-praises of the picture, "that Cowper would per-
ceive no vestige of melancholy in this portrait, the expression being
nothing more than what he was accustomed to see every morning when
he looked in the glass ; but it seems strange that Hay ley and Romney
could mistake for the light of genius what Mr. Leigh Hunt has truly
and forcibly described as ' a fire fiercer tlian that either of intellect or
fancy, gleaming from the raised and protruded eye.' It was no ideal
frenzy which had given it a character so decided and s(j strongly
marked, that perhaps there is no other portrait, taken from a living
subject, which is so painful to contemplate. And yet this renders it the
more valuable, because it is a sure test of its truth." — Cowper's Works,
(by Southey) iii. 87.
* "It is one of the finest heads," says the Rev. John Romney, "ever
produced by pencil, both for professional skill and physiognomical
expression. The character is simple, but vulgar ; shrewd, but devoid
of feeling." " It is much more," Allan Cunningham adds, " it expresses
deep and almost scowling malignity : did a painter desire to limn the
looks of a fiend of the lowest order, he might adopt those of the arch-
apostle of misrule."
220 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
was constantly projecting, and partly executing works in a
higher department of art than what he called " this cursed
portrait-painting." His affluence of conception was bound-
less, and his desire to be a great painter, not merely of por-
traits, was intense ; but he lacked perseverance and concen-
tration, and only sometimes completed what he had begun.
For Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery he was to have done
great things (" Mr. Romney," said one day to him his
truculent patron, Lord Thurlow, " before you paint Shake-
speare, I would advise you to read him "), but he finished
only two pictures for it. He worked hard — often thirteen
hours a day, indeed — and about the only piece of good
advice ever given him by Hayley was against his " intem-
perance of labour." Almost as soon as he began to be
successful, melancholy seems to have marked him for her
own, and he suffered much from hypochondria. Hard
work aggravated this state of things; he was rich and
famous, but he was miserable. He tried to soothe his ex-
quisite sensibility by indulging in raptures over the inno-
cence and grace of other people's children, and in a senti-
mental worship of the lovely but shameless woman, who
afterwards became famous and infamous as Nelson's Lady
Hamilton, and whom Romney painted in every possible
attitude, and in every possible character, from Circe to St.
Cecilia. Far away, in the north, was his own wife, unac-
knowledged and neglected, who might have brought light
and cheerfulness into the house in Cavendish Square, where
the painter moaned and groaned over the state of his nerves,
and could find no enjoyment in his wealth and fame. At
last he fancied that matters would be mended if he migrated
to the purer air of Hampstead. He built himself a mansion
there with a studio and gallery, and before the walls were
dry rushed from the house in Cavendish Square, which he
had occupied for one-and-twenty years. He fondly hoped
ll
GEORGE ROMNEV. 221
that on the heights, which looked down on London over a
sloping expanse of green and pleasant meadow-land, not,
as now, annexed by the great Babylon, he would be enabled
to execute the splendid pictorial projects of which his brain
was full. But both mind and body were giving way, and
in his sorrow over broken health and faltering hand, he
bethought him of the wife of his youth. Without confiding
his intention to any one, in the summer of 1799, he took
coach for the North, and after a desertion of nearly thirty-
seven years, rejoined, a broken-down old man of sixty-
five, the vvife whom, at eight-and-twenty, full of hope and
strength, he had left behind in the Kendal where once more
he sought her. With even greater than a woman's tender-
ness and capacity for forgiveness, she pardoned, welcomed,
and nursed him. Feeble as he was in mind and in body,
he understood the happiness within his reach, bought a
house where he was, and ordered the sale of the Hamp-
stead mansion.
At last Romney had a home. In his letters to Hayley
he spoke of the attentions of his wife with affectionate grati-
tude. He was failing fast when his eldest brother, who had
risen to be a colonel in the East India Company's army,
returned to England and hastened to Kendal. Romney
had looked forward with pleasure to the meeting, but his
mind was setting even faster than his life. " Brother," said
the soldier, " do you not know me ? " Romney gazed at
him, wept bitterly, and murmured some barely intelligible
recognition, the last effort of his waning intellect. After
a period of bodily torpor and mental imbecility, he died on
the 15th of November 1802, and was buried where he had
been born, at Dalton. In person he was tall and strongly
made ; his head was massive, his countenance manly in its
expression ; he was dark-complexioned, and his eyes were
large and penetrating. His talk was vivid, and Cumber-
222 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
land, who did not flatter him after death as in hfe, says in
an otherwise rather disparaging account of him socially and
intellectually, "When in company with his intimates, he
would give vent to the effusions of his fancy, and harangue
in the most animated manner upon the subject of his art,
with a sublimity of idea, and a peculiarity of expressive lan-
guage that was entirely his own, and in which education
or reading had no share. These sallies of natural genius,
clothed in natural eloquence, were perfectly original, very
highly edifying, and entertaining in the extreme. They were
uttered in a hurried accent, an elevated tone, and very com-
monly accompanied by tears, to which he was by constitu-
tion prone," — a trait which affords a key to much otherwise
mysterious in Romney's character and career. In spite
of his strange conduct to his wife, he seems to have been in
the main of a kindly and generous disposition. Though he
never belonged to, or exhibited in, the Academy, and does
not appear to have associated much with his fellow artist^
yet he was always ready to encourage and aid struggling
merit : he was among the first to recognise the genius of
Flaxman, and to procure for it the recognition of others.
Romney's reputation has sunk considerably since his own
day \ and so far as there is what can be called a general
opinion on the merits of a painter whose works are rather
scantily and imperfectly represented in the more accessible
of our art-collections, it is expressed in Mr. Redgrave's
pithy criticism, " Whatever he did, Reynolds did better."
Yet the author of A Century of Fahiiers admits that " there
is a pleasing breadth, almost amounting to grandeur, in
some of his works." A less recent, but, perhaps, more im-
partial because an unprofessional art-critic, the late Allan
Cunningham, says of him : — " In his portraits, Romney
missed certainly the grace and ease, and the fine flush of
colouring which have brought lasting fame to Reynolds.
GEORGE ROMNEY. 223
There appear, however, traces of great dignity and manliness
in all his heads, and in some a certain touch of poetic lofti-
ness of which Reynolds has hardly furnished an example."
Respecting Romney's ideal and historical pieces, " honest
Allan " opines that " some of them are equal in loftiness of
thought and in simplicity of conception to any productions of
their class in the British School." Mention has been already
made of the verdict pronounced by the grateful Flaxman on
our Lancashire Painter ; and since, quite recently, Rom-
ney's pictures have emerged from private galleries, and in
rather unusual numbers, to contribute to the attractions of
the Royal Academy's annual Winter Exhibitions, for instance,
there has been a certain reaction in his favour, with a wider
and greater knowledge of his works. It seems now to be
thought that, overpraised in his life-time, Romney has since
his death been unduly depreciated and neglected.
VII.
HENRY CORT*
THE county which has been so long the chief seat of
the cotton manufacture, and which was the cradle
of the canal system of the United Kingdom, can also boast
of having produced the inventor through whose labours the
British iron trade has attained its present enormous mag-
nitude and importance. Henry Cort, too, was a Lancashire
man, though his native county does not seem ever to have
been the scene of the operations which made his name
conspicuous in the history of the iron trade. It might be
agreeable to believe that he inherited with his Lancashire
blood the industrial ingenuity and energy which, exerted
for centuries, have made his county what it is, and that to
his early years having been spent in a part of England then
and long before noted for its manufacturing successes, is to
be ascribed his subsequent career as an inventor. Unfor-
tunately, however, little is known of Henry Cort beyond
his inventions and calamities ; the vast utility of the former,
and the sorrowful severity of the latter, stamping him as the
Crompton of the iron manufacture.
* The Case of Hinry Cort and his Inventions in the Manufacture of
British Irott, by Thomas Webster, M.A., F.R.S., &c., Barrister-at-
Law (in Mechanics' ATagazine for 1859). Percy's Metallurgy : Iron and
Steel (London, 1864), § Puddling. Scrivener's History of the Iron
Trade (London, 1854), &c., &c., &c.
HENRY CORT. 225
Concerning Cort's connection with his native county,
nothing more has been discovered than that he was born
in 1740, at Lancaster, and that there his father carried on
the trade of a builder and brickmaker. The antecedents of
his family, how long they had been settled in Lancaster,
what were the upbringing, education, and the early char-
acter and pursuits of Henry Cort, are altogether unknown.
His biography jumps at one bound from the meagre record
of the date and place of his birth and of his father's trade,
to his twenty-fifth year, when he is found in Surrey Street
of the great metropolis, carrying on the business of a navy
agent, in all probability one conducted then very much as it
is now. Cort is understood to have been successful in this
vocation, and in 1768 he married Elizabeth Heysham, " the
daughter of a solicitor in Staffordshire, and steward of the
Duke of Portland." During the first twenty years of their
marriage she bore him no fewer than thirteen children,
three of whom survived almost to our own day, having
inherited little more than their father's name and the
memory of his wrongs and calamities, while colossal fortunes
were being accumulated out of the results of his skill and
industry. Very possibly the pressure of a rapidly-increasing
family led Henry Cort to think of some extraneous means
of adding to his income as a navy agent, and the state of
the British iron manufacture was then such as to appear to
promise ample rewards to the ingenuity which could improve
certain of its principal processes. In the decade between
1770 and 1780 the iron trade of Great Britain had begun
to recover from the depression to which it sank in the
middle of the eighteenth century. This recovery was
mainly due to the success which had at last attended the
endeavour to smelt iron ore by coal or coke, instead of by
wood or charcoal. In these days we speak of the two
great sources of our industrial prosperity, " coal and iron,"
2 F
226 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
as indissolubly connected ; but theirs was a long and fitful
courtship, an engagement frequently broken off, and appa-
rently destined to come to nothing, before they were joined
at last in the bonds of permanent and productive wedlock.
In the earlier period of the British iron manufacture, wood
alone was employed to reduce and smelt the ore, and thus
leafy and richly-timbered Sussex, from the amount of poten-
tial fuel which it offered in proximity to beds of iron,
became in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries one of the
chief seats of the English iron trade. It was early in the
seventeenth century, and long before the removal of the
general prejudice against the use of coal for domestic pur-
poses, that ingenious men seem to have begun the attempt
to smelt iron with coal instead of wood. The first success
attained was that of the well-known Dud Dudley, one of the
illegitimate children of the Lord Dudley of that day, and
who was born in 1599. Lord Dudley was the owner of
iron-works, and all about Dudley Castle there were iron-
workers, whose business had begun to languish through the
scarcity of fuel, produced by the voracious appetite of the
furnaces for wood. Coal, however, abounded in the neigh-
bourhood, and Dud Dudley, when quite a young man, set
about attempting to make the mineral useful to the metal.
For more than forty years he prosecuted his operations,
through all sorts of interesting vicissitudes, — compromised
by his loyalty during the great civil war, and after the
Restoration harassed and persecuted by the charcoal iron-
masters and their workmen, whose processes he threat-
ened to revolutionise. He seems to have succeeded in
turning out a marketable pig-iron with the aid of coal, but the
quality at the best was indifferent, and the make was small.
More powerful blowing furnaces than were known in his
long day were needed, and the sulphur of the coal, brought
in its crude state into contact with the metal, proved in-
HENRY CORT. 22/
jurious to the iron. There was nothing for it but the old
process of smelting by charcoal, and as the demand for
iron increased with the growth of industry and population,
the supply of wood for fuel diminished with the destruction
of our Sylva. The production of English iron continued
steadily to decline. In 1720-30 there were only ten fur-
naces in blast in the whole Forest of Dean, where the iron
smelters were satisfied to work up the cinders left by the
Romans. A writer of the time states that we then bought
between two and three hundred thousand pounds worth of
foreign iron yearly, and that England was the best customer
in Europe for Swedish and Russian iron. By the middle
of the eighteenth century the home manufacture had so
greatly fallen off, that the total production of Great Britain
is supposed to have amounted to not more than 18,000
tons a year, four-fifths of the iron used in the country being
imported from Sweden.
It seems to have been about 1757 that pit-coal was again
employed successfuUv and on a large scale for smelting iron
at the famous iron-works of Coalbrooke-dale, in Shropshire,
among the spurs of the Wrekin. Abraham Darby, the
Quaker, originally from the neighbourhood of Dudley, had
settled in Coalbrooke-dale in 1709, and as the oak and
hazel woods of the beautiful valley were devoured by their
furnaces, he and his successors thought and worked out the
problem of smelting iron with coal, or rather with its much
purer form as coke. By 1760, probably, the operation was
practised largely; and in that year, through the exertions
of Dr. Roebuck (John Arthur's grandsire), the Carron Iron-
works were established, and the improved machinery applied
in them for blowing furnaces gave a great stimulus to the
manufacture of iron by coal or coke. Eight years later,
James Watt went over from Glasgow to Kinneil, and told
his friend and coadjutor, Dr. Roebuck, the happy news
228 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
that their steam-engine was at last successful. In the fol-
lowing year, 1769, a memorable one in many ways, the
specification of James Watt's steam engine was lodged, and
Richard Arkwright took out a patent for his spinning-
machine. With the steam-engine there came in turn new
and vastly more powerful machinery for blowing the iron
furnaces, and the British iron trade gained the start which it
has never lost. Meanwhile, in 1765, with a sort of presen-
timent of what was coming, Mr. Anthony Bacon had taken,
at what now seems an incredibly small rental, — ;^2oo
a year, — the lease of the forty square miles of country sur-
rounding the then insignificant hamlet of Merthyr Tydvil.
Seventeen years later he retired with a large fortune from
the iron-works which he had erected, and sublet his realm
of coal and iron to four men of enterprise. One of them
was Richard Crawshay, of famous industrial memory, — he
who became a millionnaire, and was known as the " iron
king," thanks chiefly, perhaps, to poor Henry Cort.
In 1782 " the Cyfartha flitch of the great Bacon domain,"
as it has been called, came into the hands of this Mr.
Richard Crawshay, the son of a small Yorkshire farmer,
and who began life as an errand-boy in an ironmonger's
shop at the east end of London. In 1783, Henry Cort
took out his first patent. Its object was to secure the
benefit of a discovery for the conversion of pig or cast
iron into what is variously termed wrought, malleable, and
bar iron. This conversion was, at the time when Cort took
out his first patent, one of the weakest points in the iron
manufacture of Great Britain. Charcoal " fineries " had
still to be employed, and the hammer was the chief machine
used in effecting the conversion. In 1787, Richard Craw-
shay himself could with difficulty turn out ten tons of bar
iron weekly; in 181 2, through the application of Cort's
inventions, his production of it was at the rate of ten thou-
HEA^RY CORT. 229
sand tons a year. While the manufacture of pig or cast
iron was progressing rapidly in Great Britain, for malleable
iron we seem to have been almost entirely dependent on
the foreigner and his furnaces fed by charcoal. At one
time, war time, too, the Russian Government threatened to
raise the price of its bar iron to an exorbitant height, be-
lieving that in this department of production we were com-
pletely at its mercy.
Possibly it was as a navy agent that Cort had his atten-
tion first drawn to the demand for malleable iron, to the
insufficiency of its domestic supply, and to our dependence
on the foreigner for a manufactured article, the raw material
of which abounded in Great Britain. In 1775, moreover,
began the revolt of the American Colonies, soon followed
by a war between England and France, and supplies of iron
for naval purposes were wanted more than ever. How-
ever this may have been, it is pretty certain that Cort's
peculiar business brought him into contact and connection
with one Adam Jellicoe, " chief clerk in the pay branch of
the Treasurer of the Navy," the author, direct and indirect,
of all his woes. To Jellicoe Cort seems to have confided
his iron-secret, and by Jellicoe its value was appreciated,
all the more that his own official position, in those days of
general official jobbery and corruption, could enable him to
turn it to account. An agreement was concluded between
Cort and Jellicoe by which the latter was to advance
;j^2 7,000 on a security of the assignment of the patent, —
Jellicoe to receive one-half of the profits, and his son
Samuel, a clerk in the Navy Pay-office, to be partner with
Cort. The partnership seems to have been known to the
Navy Board, and there is even reason to surmise that the
advance of ^27.000 to Cort was made by Jellicoe with its
sanction. Cort removed to works which he had erected at
Fontley, on the Titchin river, in the parish of Fareham,
230 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
near Portsmouth, and nearer Gosport. The supply of
malleable iron for the construction of anchors and other
naval purposes was one of his objects, and the advantage
of proximity to a great naval arsenal was obvious. Henry
Dundas, afterwards Viscount Melville, was appointed Trea-
surer of the Navy in 1782, and the American war came to
a close in the year of Cort's first patent, dated the 17th
January 1783. The gist of this first patent was, that the
iron, in the final stage of manufacture, should be passed
through grooved rollers instead of being hammered as
formerly. In Cort's second patent, taken out in the year
following, is described the famous operation of puddling,
one which was now to precede the passing of the iron
through the grooved rollers, the earlier of the two processes
being the main subject of the later of the two patents.
Originalities they could neither of them be strictly called ;
but Cort was the first to make them of permanent utility,
and to unite them with other ingenious processes, old and
new, so as to produce available bar iron, not once in a way,
or experimentally and fitfully, but continuously, persistently,
and profitably. By the puddling process, conducted in a
reverberating furnace, the flame only of a coal-fed furnace
melted the impure pig iron which did not come into con-
tact with the fuel and receive new impurities from it.
Puddling consists in the continued and skilful stirring of
tlie molten mass, in which the iron particles are gradually
dissociated from the impurities contained in the pig, and
gathered together in balls by the puddler. These balls,
after being subjected to other manipulations for the removal
of any impurities adhering to them as they come from the
furnace, are passed through the grooved rollers, an opera-
tion which completes, in a general way, the process of
purification, and turns out the bar-iron of commerce. The
importance of Cort's invention lay in the substitution of
HENRY CORT. 23 I
ordinary coal for cliarcoal in the process of refining the pig
and converting it into wrought, malleable, or bar iron. It
rendered England, with her coal, able to compete with and
to excel in the manufacture of iron, other countries possess-
ing more abundant supplies of wood or charcoal. And it
allowed, what might otherwise have been impossible, the suc-
cessful and profitable working of such inferior ores as those
of the Cleveland district of Yorkshire. It has indeed been
doubted whether, even with an unlimited supply of charcoal,
but without the puddling process, such ores could be sufii-
ciently purified from their sulphur, and, above all, from their
phosphorus. "Although these" — sulphur and phosphorus —
says a recent and high authority on the subject, "are combus-
tible substances, they are not fully removable from iron by
merely burning out. Large quantities may be considerably
reduced thereby, but the last residues of their impurities hold
to the iron so firmly that we may burn all the iron itself into
an oxide without removing them by the simple action of
oxygen. Their removal is nevertheless quite necessary to the
production of good iron, as sulphur renders iron ' red short,'
i.e., brittle when heated, and thus unfit for forging ; and phos-
phorus makes it ' cold short,' that is brittle when cold. -j-oViJ
of phosphorus renders steel quite unfit for tools with keen
edges, and about double this quantity of sulphur is ruinous
to iron that has to be forged to any considerable extent." ^
^ Lectures on Iron and Steel, by W. Matthieu Williams (in foiirnal of
the Society of Arts, 28th July 1876). The effect of tlie puddling
process in eliminating the impurities of the iron is mechanical as
well as chemical. It was long thought to be chemical merely, and
the result of oxidation taking place through the exposure of the
metal to the flame and air by the working of the rabble, or through
the evolution of oxygen from the oxides of iron with which the
furnace is "fettled." When Mr. Bessemer, however, on forcing
atmospheric air through molten iron, found that though silicon and
carbon might be completely removed, scarcely any of the sulphur and
232 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
There was thus a twofold benefit conferred by Cort's
invention of puddling. It wedded the coal of England to
her iron, so as to make them produce good bar-iron, and it
facilitated the profitable manipulation of those ores from
which, inferior and impure though they may be, our chief
supplies of commercial iron are derived. When Cort took
out his patents, England imported her best iron ; ninety
years afterwards her exports of manufactured iron amounted
in value to nearly ;^38,ooo,ooo. The bulk of the malleable
iron produced in this country is still (though of course
with improvements in the construction of the furnaces and
so forth) puddled and rolled by the processes described in
Cort's two patents ; and though various attempts have been
made to supersede his hand-puddling by mechanical pudd-
ling, none of them seem to have been successful.^
phosphorus escaped, that explanation was proved to be defective. The
following is the theory of the authority (Mr. Matthieu Williams), already
cited: — "i. Pure iron, itself practically infusible, becomes, when
sufficiently heated, soluble in its own more fusible compounds, such as
its silicides, carbides, phosphides, &c., and pig iron is mainly composed
of such a solution. 2. The carbon and silicon are oxidised in the
early stages of puddling, and thus the solvent is diminished, and the
iron is precipitated as granules ; but it is not yet pure, each granule
being enveloped in fusible sulphide and phosphide, too small in quantity
to effect solution of the iron, but adhering to it so firmly as to resist oxida-
tion. 3. When the iron is ' coming to nature ' the puddler washes
this adhering film of sulphide and phosphide into the cinder, just as a
laundress washes adhering greasy dirt from the solid fibres of linen, &c.,
into soapy or alkaline water, grease being diffusible in such water, as
liquid sulphides and phosphides of iron are diffusible in the cinder.
This diffusibility is proved by analysis of the cinder wherein the phos-
phides and sulphides are afterwards found, just as the dirt from the
clothes is found in the soapy water that has been used by the laundress.
The action of the squeezer, hammer, and rolls, in removing the still
adhering portions of fusible cinder is thus strictly analogous to the
' wringing ' of the laundress."
1 Respecting Cort's other invention, or realisation of an invention,
the grooved rollers, Mr. Scrivener says, in his History of the Iron
HENRY CORT. 233
The Navy Office, of course, had its attention soon called
to Cort's inventions, and its heads forthwith commissioned
competent employes to report on their promise and utility.
The specification of the first patent was enrolled in the
May of 1783, and in the following month, some of the
officials of the Portsmouth Dockyard visited the Fontley
works ; and saw fragments of old and drossy iron converted
into good, strong, and available metal by being melted in
an air furnace, and either welded by a hammer, or better still,
passed between the patented rollers. After the addition
of the preliminary puddling process, many experiments
were made in our dockyards, and in 1787 the results of
some of them were recorded in " A brief state of facts
relative to the new method of making bar-iron with raw pit
coal and grooved rollers, discovered and brought to per-
fection by Mr. Henry Cort." The anchors made by his
process from old ballast iron were reported to be superior
to those of the best Swedish iron, and the great Scotch
chemist. Dr. Black, certified the correctness of these
reports. Capitalists now began to be convinced of the
value of the new processes. In this same year of 1787,
Richard Crawshay, ever vigilant and alert, had found his
way from Cyfartha to Fontley, and arranged with Cort for
the use of the patents, in consideration of the payment of a
royalty of los. a ton on all iron to be manufactured' in
accordance with them at his Glamorganshire works, a pretty
Trade {'^. 121), " To give some idea of the importance of Mr. Cort's
invention of the rollers, it may be as well here to mention that, previous
to their introduction, the smallest size drawn under the hammer was
three-quarters square, all below that size were cut in the splitting-mill ;
and it required the hammer to be kept constantly at work to draw
20 cwt. of average sizes in twelve hours, while, with the rollers, they
can manufacture, in the same time, with one jiair of rollers, about 15
tons, which, in a work in full operation, are kept constantly employed,
day and night, during six days of the week."
'1 li
234 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
sufficient recognition, by a most competent authority, both
of the legal validity of the patents, and of the value of the
processes described in them. At the same time friend
Jellicoe pulled the wires skilfully at the Navy Pay-office.
On the 1 6th of April 1789, a Government advertisement,
inviting tenders of iron for the use of the navy, contained
the intimation, which reads so strangely in our day : — " No
tenders for iron will be regarded but from persons who
prove that they make it agreeable to Cort and Jellicoe's
patent." After years of anxious labour, and the expendi-
ture of all the savings of his navy-agency, Cort seemed at
last on the high road to fortune.
A few months more and he was a ruined man. On the
30th of August 17S9, Adam Jellicoe died at Ishngton,
" after a fortnight's illness," and it was discovered that he
was a public defaulter to the amount of more than
;^39,ooo. The ;^27,5oo advanced to the Cort partnership
had been taken from the Government-monies in his hands,
and to that extent Cort and his partner were considered,
justly no doubt, debtors of the Crown. Then, however,
comes the mystery — one which will probably never be
unravelled. The works at Fontley were worth a consider-
able sum, and two years' yield of the patent dues from the
contracting ironmasters would alone have more than repaid
the ;^27,5oc advanced by Adam Jellicoe to the Cort
partnership. But no mercy was shown, no delay was
granted, to the unfortunate inventor. The breath was
scarcely out of Adam Jellicoe's body, when, on the ist of
September, an affidavit was made by Alexander Trotter,
the paymaster of the Navy, afterwards famous for his con-
nection with Lord Melville's alleged official misdoings, that
it was a case of urgency, and that Cort was in distressed
circumstances. "An extent" was issued against the
property of the firm, the patent rights included. Everything
HENRY CORT. 235
was seized by the Crown ; Cort found himself thrown upon
the world penniless and resourceless, while, strangest incident
of all, Adam Jellicoe's son, Samuel, was placed in possession
of the works at Fontley, and remained there undisturbed
for long years afterwards. No attempt was made to realise
then or subsequently the patent dues from the ironmasters,
which Cort could not now claim, and which the Crown
allowed to lapse. Those, therefore, who take the darkest
view of poor Cort's sad story may almost be excused if
they hint a belief that somehow the great ironmasters
contrived to bribe persons in authority, so that they might
not be asked to pay the royalties legally due for their use
of patented processes which were already helping to enrich
them. The names both of Lord Melville and of Trotter
have been mentioned in connection with these disreputable
doings, but, in the absence of documentary evidence, it is
impossible to pronounce a verdict, and all the records of
their reciprocal transactions were destroyed by themselves
about the time of Lord Melville's impeachment. The first
re-appearance of Cort after his ruin is in 1791, when, in
answer to an appeal from him, the Commissioners of the
Navy instruct one of their subordinates coldly and almost
ironically to inform him that " your inventions appear to
them of that utility as to induce them to give encourage-
ment to the manufacture of British iron performed according
to the methods that have been practised by you." Three
years later, we find eminent London merchants and others,
in a memorial to the Government of the day, stating that
they have entered into a subscription to provide for the
temporary relief of Cort and his destitute family, a wife
and twelve children — and praying that, as a permanent
provision for him, he should receive "some situation in one
of her Majesty's dockyards, the Customs, Excise, or any
other office or place in which his talents and industry may
236 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
prove useful to the public and himself." This appeal
procured him a pension of nominally ^200 a year, but
owing to reductions, the actual receipt was only
Poor Cort did not long trespass on the munificent
bounty of his country, dying wretched and obscure, in
1800, while the Crawshays and other great ironmasters
were making colossal fortunes by the gratuitous use of
his inventions. He was buried in Hampstead church-
yard, where his grave, with an inscription, in compara-
tively recent years made legible again by one of his
sons, may still be seen. The truth, the whole truth, of
"the case of Henry Cort," will probably never be dis-
covered in this world, but enough of it is known to give
him a very prominent place among the martyrs of modern
industrial discovery and invention.^
^ After Cort's death, his widow memorialised the Government on behalf
of herself and her children. The Comptroller of the Navy reported in
November 1801 that she and her family were genuine objects of national
interest, and she received a pension of ^1^125, which was reduced by
official deductions to £,\2o. Ten years afterwards, the great iron-
masters, on an application from her, considered her case, and raised
for her a subscription which came to ;^87i. Of this sum thirty
guineas were contributed by the Crawshays, from which firm alone, if
Cort had not been cruelly wronged, he would have received under their
contract with him ;^25,ooo. In the following year, 1812, a petition
from Coningsby Cort, the inventor's second son, setting forth the claims
of his mother and her ten children, was presented to the House of
Commons by command of the Prince Regent, who recommended it to
the consideration of the House. A Select Committee was appointed
to enquire into the matter, but the official element was strong in it,
and one of its members was a son of the inculpated Lord Melville, and
himself First Lord of the Admiralty. In opposition to the favourable
testimony of competent ironmasters, among them Mr. Benjamin Hall,
father of the late Lord Llanover, one witness, a Mr. Samuel Homfray,
gave evidence to the effect that Cort's inventions were known and in
use before the patents of 1 783-4. Homfray "s assertions have since
been proved by letters from his own firm, and from ironmasters
HENRY CORT.
237
conversant with its history and operations, to be a tissue of false-
hoods. With his evidence, however, the Committee seem to have
suddenly closed the enquiry. They reported that they could not
satisfy themselves that either of the two inventions, the puddling
process or the grooved rollers, was "so novel in principle or application
as fairly to entitle the petitioner to a parliamentary reward." They
recommended, however, that he should be reimbursed the money
which he had expended in prosecuting the petition. But an applica-
tion made to the Treasury for a grant was refused, and the petitioner
found himself mulcted in the sum of ^250.
Some forty years afterwards, there survived of the numerous family
of Cort only three of his children, his youngest son, Richard, and two
daughters ; their united ages amounting to nearly 290 years. Cort's
widow had received her pension until her death in i8i6, after which
one of;^25, 6s. was granted to each of her spinster daughters. In 1856,
the inventor's sole surviving son, Richard, then an old man of seventy-
two, who had for fifty years filled offices of trust in various mining com-
panies, memorialised the Treasury on his own and his sisters' claims,
and received a refusal of any further consideration of them. But
influential men, though not in office, and both in and out of Parliament,
were induced to look into the matter, and saw that grave injustice had
been done. Richard Cort found friends and supporters, and leading
newspapers pleaded his cause. A national subscription was opened,
which amounted in 1858 to ;^50o, and to which the Queen contributed.
Lord Palmerston discovered that the Treasury had been too hasty, and
having referred the case to Sir Roderick Murchison and Dr. Percy, he
gave Richard Cort, in consequence of their report, a pension of ;(^5o.
Finally, soon after the late Lord Derby's accession to the Premiership,
a grant of £100 from the Royal Bounty Fund was made to the
inventor's two surviving and aged daughters. In asserting, and not
altogether unsuccessfully, his own and his sisters' claims, Richard Cort
had the further satisfaction of making it clear to the public mind that
his father had been shamefully treated, and that the report of the
House of Commons' Committee of 1812 was based on gross misrepre-
sentations and on a gross misunderstanding of the facts of the case.
VIII.
THE TOWNELEYS OF TOWNELEY*
THE Towneleys, of Towneley Hall, in the neighbour-
hood of Burnley, are well known to be old among the
oldest of Lancashire families, and if certain fond genealogies
could be believed, theirs would be an antiquity almost
unexampled in England. To be able to boast of an ances-
tor who came over with the Conqueror satisfies the cravings
of the most ambitious pretenders to length of lineage. But
the Towneley pedigree, or rather one Towneley pedigree,
taking us back to the time of King Alfred himself, finds
* Whitaker's History of Whalley, Third Edition (London, 1818).
The Visitation of Lancashire, A.D. 1533. By special commission of
Thomas Bennet, Clarencienx, edited by William Langton (being vol.
xcviii. of the Chetham Society's publications). Ormerod's Tracts
Relatiitg to Military Proceedings in Lancashire during the Great Civil
War (being vol. ii. of the Chetham Society's publications). The
Jacobite Trials in Manchester, 1694, edited by William Beamont (being
vol. xxviii. of the Chetham Society's publications). Hibbert-Ware's
Lancashire Memorials of the Rebellion, 171 5 (being vol. v. of the
Chetham Society's publications) ; and his History of the Foundations
in Manchester (London and Manchester, 1834), vol. ii. Collectanea
Relating to Manchester and its Neighbottrhood, by John Harland (being
vol. Ixviii. of the Chetham Society's publications). Nichols's LIlus-
trations of the Litei-ary History of the Eighteenth Century (London,
1818), vol. iii., § Memoirs of Charles Towneley, Esq. Baines's Lanca-
shire, vol. iii., &c., &c.
THE TOWNELEYS OF TOWN RLE Y. 239
the founder of the family in a certain Spartlingus, a con-
temporary of that memorable monarch, and said to be the
first of those singular personages, half-lay, half-clerical, the
hereditary Deans of Whalley and lords of the manor thereof,
transmitting from father to son both a spiritual and a tem-
poral jurisdiction. However this may be, and whether his
descent from Spartlingus is accepted or not, pretty certainly
one of these Deans, "Geoffrey the elder," received "the
vill of Tunleia" from his father-in-law, Roger de Lacy,
"between the years 11 93 and 12 11." A female descen-
dant of Geoffrey, " Cecilia de Thonley," married, " about 4
Edward III.," a Del Legh, and their posterity took her
name, with the lands of which she had come to be the
heiress. From this Dame Cecilia have sprung all the Lan-
cashire Towneleys. The seat of the main branch of the
family, Towneley Hall, is still in the domain which Roger
de Lacy gave to Geoffrey the elder in the days of bad King
John. It stands among noble woods of ancient oak, over-
looking ample greensward, and itself overlooked by hills
behind — a venerable pile, with many later additions and
alterations — towered, buttressed, and showing on one side
thick walls of rude masonry, indicating a great antiquity.
It is just the place which Sir Walter Scott would have de-
lighted to describe, discoursing the while on th? fortunes of
its successive owners, of whose portraits it contams an
unbroken series from the time of good Queen Bess almost
to our own.
The first Towneley mentioned in general or local history
is Sir Richard, said to have been knighted by the Lord
Stanley (the first Stanley, Earl of Derby, of a former series
of Lancashire Worthies), on Hutton Field, " at a great
review of the army returning from the campaign in Scotland,
22d August 1482." ^ Of him little else has been recorded.
' Visitation of Lancashire, p. 44.
240 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Of his son, Sir John, however, who was " Sheriff of Lanca-
shire from 23d to 32d Henry VIII.," some more or less
curious and copious notices survive. An active, acquisi-
tive, long-hved knight, he increased the family estates by
pui chase and otherwise. It was he who enclosed the park
of Hapton, then the largest in Lancashire, Knowsley ex-
cepted, and who built the domestic chapel at Towneley.
It is of him and one of his outlying manors that there is this
brief record in Leland's Itinerary : — "Within a good mile or
I came to Worksop, I rode through a parke of Mr. Townle's,
a knyghte for ye most part abyding in Lancastershyre ; and
in this parke is a very praty little house," which no doubt
owed much of its " pratyness " to Sir John. Eager in getting
and improving, Sir John was otherwise a thrifty man, and
cared little, it would seem, to spend money on that which did
not profit him directly. In the course of a heraldic visita-
tion of Lancashire, in 1533, a deputy of Clarencieux found
his way to Towneley Hall, but was far from satisfied with
his reception and treatment. " I made no great inquisi-
tion," quoth the worthy herald (with his spelling modern-
ised) of Sir John, " for he would have no note taken of
him, saying that there was no more gentlemen in Lanca-
shire but my Lord of Derby and Monteagle." Evidently
Sir John either had not heard of, or did not believe in,
or did not care about, the descent from Spartlingus tejnp.
Alfred the Great. " I sought him all day," says in con-
tinuation this deputy of Clarencieux, " riding in the wild
country, and his reward was two shillings, which the guide
had the most part, and I had as evil a journey as ever I
had," ^ in the pursuit of heraldic knowledge under diflii-
^ Visitation of Lancashire, p. 43. "The disclaimer of gentility,"
says Mr. Langton (p. 46), " is amusing ; for if ancient descent and
hereditary possessions confer such distinction, of no family in Lanca-
shire can it be more truly said, nascimtiir geiie7-osi''
THE TOWNELEYS OF TOWNELEY. 24 1
culties. It was the enclosing zeal of this practical and penu-
rious Sir John which in all probability gave rise to the legend,
long rife among the peasantry of the district, that the wraith
of a Towneley of Towneley was doomed to wander over his
old domains, exclaiming dolefully and remorsefully :
** Lay out, lay out,
Horelaw and Hollinghey Clough ! " ^
" By 'lay out,' " adds the historian of Whalley, "is meant the
reverse of take in, to throw open, that is, or disappropriate."
The sleek clerical gentleman speaks, too, of the legend as
due to " the malice " as well as to " the superstition " of
"the common people." But as, according to Whitaker's
own subsequent showing, the enclosure of Horelaw was
clearly an illegal encroachment. Sir John got off very easily,
with no other punishment than that inflicted by a posthu-
mous legend. The reverend doctor, snug and cozy in his
comfortable vicarage, could not of course understand the
bitterness with which poor sixteenth century Lancashire
peasants saw their old liberties of commonage and pasturage
abridged by the high-handed and probably hard-hearted
Knight of Towneley.
Sir John lived to see his grandson and heir. Sir Richard
Towneley (knighted at the siege of Leith), wed the heiress
of the Lincolnshire Wimbishes, one of the many marriages
by which the Towneleys added to their possessions.
He himself, after having two wives, took in his declining
years a mistress, a certain Jennet Ingham, the sister, it is
presumed, of the John Ingham whom he had presented to
his chantry in Burnley Church as early as 15 Henry VII. ;
" so that," says Doctor Whitaker, " he seems by a very
unhappy and preposterous arrangement to have chosen out
of the same house the chaplain of his youth and the mistress
^ Whitaker, ii. 342.
2 II
242 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
of his old age." Verging on seventy, Sir John died about
1541, some years after the suppression of the Pilgrimage of
Grace, participation in which he had skilfully avoided, thus
escaping the ruin in which that insurrectionary protest
against the suppression of monasteries involved several of his
friends. The Reformation had come or was coming. The
Towneleys, of Towneley Hall, like many other old Lanca-
shire families, clung to the ancient creed, and have remained
Roman Catholics to this day. As a natural consequence
they adhered, more or less conspicuously, to the House of
Stuart — from the first assault on it by the Long Parliament,
to the final extinction of its hopes on the field of CuUoden.
When simple recusancy was penal, the Towneleys did not
flinch from the consequences or abandon their faith. The
encloser of. Horelaw left orders in his will for " one
hundred masses of the five Wounds of our Lord to be said
for his soul." The John who was Towneley of Towneley
fifty years afterwards had to suffer severely for the assertion
of his belief in the efficacy of masses. In Doctor Whita-
ker's day there hung in the library of Towneley Hall a
portrait of this persevering and persecuted Papist, to which
was affixed a contemporary inscription, containing a brief
and pointed biography, if not autobiography, of the original.
A curious memorial it is of an old and now scarcely con-
ceivable past. " This John," so ran the record, written in
the year of the insurrection and execution of Essex (and of
which, too, the spelling is here modernised), "This John,
about the sixth or seventh year of her Majesty that now is,
for professing the Apostolic Catholic Roman faith, was
imprisoned first in Chester Castle, then sent to Marshalsea,
then to York Castle, then to the Blockhouses in Hull, then
to the Gatehouse in Westminster, then to Manchester, then
to Broughton in Oxfordshire, then twice to Ely in Cam-
bridgeshire, and so now of seventy-three years old and
THE TOWNELEYS OF TOWN E LEY. 243
blind, is bound to appear and keep within five miles of
Towneley his house, who hath since the statute of '23 paid
into the Exchequer ;^2o the month, and doth still; [so]
that there is paid already above ^5,000. 1601." There
is a certain pathos in these short and simple annals of the
imprisonments of poor John Towneley, " old and blind."
Yet, despite their unflinching adherence to dangerous and
desperate causes, the Towneleys seem to have escaped all
along anything like confiscation of their estates, in Lanca-
shire at least. So far they have been more fortunate than
several families of the same county and of the same tenacity
of opinion. And even the persecuted John aforesaid, it
may be added, found a good and influential friend in his
uterine brother, a son, by her first marriage, of his father's
second wife and his own mother. This was Alexander
Nowell, a notable Lancashire worthy, who after having been
persecuted in Mary's reign, became Dean of St. Paul's in
Elizabeth's, and was not only the author of the first form of
our Church Catechism, but discovered the merits of bottled
ale to boot. In sundry letters from the Lords of the
Council to the Earl of Derby and the Bishop of Chester of
his day, Nowell figures as interceding on behalf of his
"brother Towneley." On one occasion the object of his
intercession is that John Towneley, then imprisoned at
Manchester for recusancy, should be allowed to proceed
to London, " he having fallen," say my Lords (from infor-
mation furnished by Nowell), " into certain diseases, whereof
he is desired to be cured here, where it is supposed that
best advice and help may be had. We have been contented
to yield some favour unto him in that behalf, and therefore
pray your Lordships to give order that he may be sent up
hither in the company of some trusty person whom you
shall appoint, to the intent," — on the understanding — " he
be not suffered to go out of the way to any other house be-
244 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
sides the ordinary inns, but come directly hitherto in such
sort as the state of his body may conveniently bear. And
at his coming we mind to take further order what shall be
done with him." Which letter the Bishop of Chester
(Chadderton), smelling a rat, docketed thus : " For Mr.
Towneley to be sent up by reason of a feigned information
given by the Dean of Paul's of his sickness." On another
occasion, and doubtless through the same friendly interven-
tion, my Lords direct the Earl of Derby and the Bishop to
allow John Towneley to leave prison for a time " upon his
own bond in a good sum of money," on his plea that he has
in hand " great causes and suits for land, a marriage to be
made in Lincolnshire for his daughter." They are the
more inclined to grant him this favour because they are
" informed that the said Towneley (his religion excepted)
doth carry himself dutifully and quietly." Finally (5th
July 1584) they order his release because he has "paid the
money appointed and limited by statute," and as justice
ought to be done even to recusants, it is not fair to inflict a
double punishment.^
Charles and Christopher, two of the grandsons of this
much-suffering John, became more or less distinguished,
though in very different ways. The younger, Christopher,
was the first of the family to achieve a certain reputation
out of the sphere of mere Lancashire squirism, and irre-
spectively of loyalty to unsuccessful causes, religious and
political. He was the friend and correspondent of Crab-
tree, who was the friend and correspondent of Jeremiah
Horrocks, and he thus belonged to the remarkable little
group of astronomical and scientific observers and students
in the northern counties, the members of which were
busy with their tranquil pursuits when our great civil war
^Peck's Desiderata Curiosa, p. 134, 147, &c.
THE TOWNELEYS OF TOWNELEY. 245
of the seventeenth century began.^ Christopher, too, de-
voted himself to antiquarianism even more than to science.
He was the friend and coadjutor of Dr. Kuerden, whose
MS. collections are so well known and so often referred
to, and in conjunction with whom he planned a history of
Lancashire — never completed. Some thirty volumes of
Christopher's collections are now at Towneley ; and they
yielded a great deal of fruit to Dr. Whitaker when com-
posing his history of Whalley ; though, after the death of
their original compiler, his worldly goods coming to be
inventoried and appraised, they were put down as " several
manuscripts, valued at iis." — such being the slender esti-
mate formed in 1674 of the value of poor Christopher's
almost life-long labours towards a history of his native
county ! Christopher died quietly in his bed, years after
the Restoration of his Majesty Charles II. The doom of
his elder brother, the squire of Towneley, was a bloody
one. When the civil war broke out, Charles Towneley
was foremost among the loyalist Lancashire squires who
joined the royal standard. He was with the Royalists
who, under the seventh Stanley, Earl of Derby, made, in
September 1642, the unsuccessful assault on Puritan and
Parliamentarian Manchester, chronicled in a former volume.
In an official account of the storm of Preston by a Par-
liamentary force sent from and by Manchester, in the
February of 1643, " Master Towneley of Towneley" is de-
scribed as having narrowly escaped, and among the ladies
who were then taken prisoners was his wife. He escaped
from Preston only to find a soldier's death eighteen
months later in the fiercely-contested battle of Marston
Moor, where Lieutenant-General Cromwell put to flight
Prince Rupert and the flower of the cavaliers.
^ See Lamashire Worthies, First Series, p. 77, Note.
246 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
A generation passed away, and William the Dutchman
occupied the throne of the Stuarts ; but the Towneleys re-
mained true to the cause of hereditary right. Twenty-seven
years after the Charles Towneley, who fell on Marston Moor,
narrowly escaped with his life from the storm of Preston,
another Charles of Towneley Hall (presumably his grandson)
had shown himself, with the Revolution of 1688, so de-
voted to the fallen James II., that, on the passing of the
Indemnity Act of 1690, he was expressly excepted from its
provisions. He participated, or was charged with partici-
pating, in the so-called "Lancashire Plot" of 1691, and in
some of the informations taken by the authorities, he is
represented as enlisting troops for King James, and em-
ploying carriers to convey from Barnet to his house in Lan-
cashire boxes " full of swords, pistols, and carbines," nay, as
purchasing " kettle-drums and jack -boots " to be helpful in a
Jacobite insurrection which did not then come off. He was
not, however, among the eight Lancashire gentlemen who
were tried at Manchester in 1694 for alleged complicity in
that alleged plot of 1691, and all of whom were acquitted.^
Then again, twenty years after the Manchester trial,
Charles's son and heir, Richard, the new squire of Towne-
ley, fighting, or ready to fight for the Stuarts, was among
the Jacobites beleaguered in Preston itself by the forces
of his Majesty George the First. This was during the
1 Beamont's jfacobite Trials in Manchesttr, 1694, p. 35, &c. This
Towneley was probably the Charles (i 658-171 1) who succeeded Richard
(1628-1706), the son and heir of the Towneley killed at Marston Moor.
Richard had scientific tastes, and was a friend and correspondent of
Thoresby, who in his Diary has given an account of a visit to him at
Towneley Hall. Mr. Beamont (p. Ixiv. of introduction) thinks that
tlie Towneley of the plot of 1691, is the same person as the Richard
Towneley whose story is about to be told. But if Whitaker's dates in
his genealogical tree of the Towneleys are correct, such identity is im-
possible, since he represents the Towneley who was tried in 1716 as
born in 1687, only four years before the alleged plot of 1691.
THE TOWNELEYS OF TOWNELEY, 247
Derwentwater rising, sometimes dignified with the appel-
lation of "the Rebellion of 1715." The movements of
King George's troops were directed from a distance by the
great Duke of Marlborough,^ from whose eyes the tears of
dotage had not yet begun to flow, and "proud" Preston,
skilfully invested, was surrendered by the rebels. Richard
Towneley of Towneley was one of the captured and the
tried. It was proved that he had raised a body of men
called Towneley's troop, quite a family affair, since the
coachman, butler, and postillion of Towneley Hall were
enrolled in it. But he was fortunate in being tried after
Derwentwater and scores of other Jacobites had been
condemned and executed. The London jury who dealt
with him were tired of convicting and of hanging. They
accepted his plea that he had been forced into the " rebel-
lion," and acquitted him through sheer good-nature, a piece
of lenity for which they were sternly rebuked by the pre-
siding judge.
The Towneley who escaped the gallows after the Der-
wentwater rising of 1715 died in 1735, and his eldest son,
the heir of Towneley, died in 1742, leaving in his turn an
eldest son, a child of eight, to inherit the Towneley estates,
and to become celebrated as the collector of the Towneley
marbles. Thus when three years afterwards the rebellion of
1745 broke out, Towneley of Towneley Hall was a boy of
eleven, for whom participation in the last of the Jacobite
risings was impossible. But this boy's uncle, Francis, one
of the younger sons of the Towneley who took part in the
"rebellion" of 17 15, was in 1745 a man of si.x-and-thirty,
and, unfortunately for himself, he became a prominent
champion of the Stuart cause in the rebeUion of 1745.^
' Hibbert-Ware's Lancashire Memorials of 1715, p. 103 and no.
' A good sketch of the career of Francis Towneley, and' of that of
his Manchester regiment, is given, rather unexpectedly, by Hibbert-
248 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Born in 1709, Francis was a gallant young gentleman of
nineteen when, in 1728, "by course of misfortunes in his
family," he was led to make France his home, and " being
a man of spirit," was taken notice of at the court of the
young Louis Quinze. He received a commission in the
French army, and fought at the siege of Philipsburg in
1734 under Marshal Berwick, when and where a cannon-
ball killed that son of James II. by Marlborough's sister
Arabella Churchill, who had risen to eminence in the mili-
tary service of France. We hear next of Francis Towneley
living a retired life in Wales, until the Rebellion of 1745
was being planned. Then Towneley left his retirement and
went to Manchester to consult and concert with the leading
men of the party, in what was at that time a hotbed of
Jacobitism. John Byrom was one of them, and it was
during this visit of Towneley's to Manchester that his habit
of profane swearing provoked the friendly and ardently
Jacobitical, but religious and straight-laced, Byrom into this
characteristic expostulation : —
" O that the Muse might call without offence
The gallant soldier back to his good sense !
His temporal field so cautious not to lose.
So careless quite of his eternal foes.
Soldier, so tender of thy prince's fame,
Why so profuse of a superior name ?
For the king's sake the brunt of battles bear,
But — for the King of kings' sake — do not swear I "
The scene of their Jacobite conferences, at which Towne-
ley's oaths so shocked the worthy Byrom, is said to have
been " a small public-house near the village," as it was then,
" of Didsbury, adjoining a well-known ferry named Jack-
son's Boat."
Ware in his History of the Foundations of Manchester, vol. ii. p. 97, &c.
Much use has been made of it in the text.
THE TOWNELEYS OF TOWNELEY. 249
In his southward march to " raise " England (which
turned out to be quite an unsuccessful undertaking), after
his victory of Prestonpans, Charles Edward entered Carlisle
on the 17th of November 1745, where and when Towneley
seems to have joined him. There are traces of Towneley's
presence at Preston with the young Pretender's army about
the 26th of November, and to this date belongs the inci-
dent recorded in the following rather curious narrative : —
"At this time," while at Preston for a day or two, "it is conjectured
Colonel Towneley paid hasty visits to several of his old neighbours,
the heads of the county families in the district, and amongst others there
is a tradition that he visited Gawthorpe Hall, the seat of the Shuttle-
worths, between whom and the Towneleys of Towneley there had long
existed much friendship and intimacy. What was his real errand there
it is not difficult to conjecture. But if it were to incite the Shuttle-
worths of the day, with their tenants and dependants, to join in the
rebellion, his arguments were unsuccessful, and he left the house with-
out any succour, or the promise of future aid. But a few years ago,
during an extensive repair and renovation of Gawthorpe Hall, the
panelling of a window-sill in one of the chambers was removed, and
then there was found benenth the sill a sum of money in gold, of which
only a few were of English coinage, the others being chiefly Spanish
pieces, and, it is said, none of later date than 1745. On examining
the window-sill panelling, it was found that after the wood had been
forced up, apparently wth a dagger-blade, and the money hidden, the
panel had been driven into its place again with the pommel of the
dagger, which had left its dints in the wood. The reasonable and
indeed the most probable conjecture is that Colonel Towneley, about to
go southward on a perilous expedition, and perhaps apprehensive of
robbery while travelling alone through a disturbed district, had con-
cealed this sum, said to be about ;^i50 or £\(iO, in a place where he
rightly deemed it would be secure and undiscovered ; with the intention,
when peaceful times returned, or when opportunity served during the
struggle about to commence, to possess himself of it again, but that
The people of " Proud Preston " received Charles Edward
and his little army with acclamations, the first that he and
' Harland, p. 227.
•1 1
2 50 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
his adherents had heard since they crossed the Border,
But no recruits would enlist, and the young Pretender was
fain to assure his disappointed Scotch councillors and
officers that his English friends would join him as soon as
he reached Jacobite Manchester. It was probably the
reputation of Manchester for its Jacobitism which led to
the singular expedition of a sergeant in the regiment of the
Chevalier Johnstone, who has thus recorded it : —
"One of my sergeants, named Dickson, whom I had enlisted from
among the prisoners of war at Gladsmuir, ri young Scotchman, as
brave and intrepid as a lion, informed me on the 27th, at Preston,
that he had been beating up for recruits all day without getting one.
He had quitted Preston in the evening with his mistress and my
drummer ; and having marched all night, he arrived next morning
at Manchester, and immediately began to beat up for recruits for ' the
yellow-haired laddie.' The populace at first did not interrupt him,
conceiving our army to be near the town ; but as soon as they knew
that it would not arrive until the evening, they surrounded him in a
tumultuous manner, with the intention of taking him alive or dead.
Dickson presented his blunderbuss, which was charged with slugs,
threatening to blow out the brains of those who first dared to lay
hands on himself or the two who accompanied him ; and by turning
round continually, facing in all directions, and behaving like a lion,
he soon enlarged the circle, which a crowd of people had formed round
him. Having continued for some time to manoeuvre in this way,
those of the inhabitants of Manchester who were attached to the house
of Stuart took arms and flew to the assistance of Dickson, to rescue
him from the fury of the mob, so that he had soon 500 or 600 to aid
him, who dispersed the crowd in a very short time. Dickson now
triumphed in his turn, and putting himself at the head of his followers,
he proudly paraded undisturbed the whole day with his drummer,
enlisting all who offered themselves. On presenting me with a list of
180 recruits, I was agreeably surprised to find that the whole amount
of his expenses did not exceed three guineas. This adventure of
Dickson gave rise to many a joke at the expense of the town of Man-
chester, from the singular circumstance of its having been taken by a
sergeant, a drummer, and a girl." ^
^ The Chevalier Johnstone's Memoirs, p. 48-9 (quoted in Sir Walter
Scott's Talcs of a Grandfather, Third Series, chap. 79).
THE TOWN E LEYS OF TOWNELEY. 25 I
These i8o recruits, procured by the intrepid Dickson,
became the nucleus of Towneley's famous Manchester
regiment. On the 29th of November Charles Edward
entered Manchester in triumph, and forthwith Towneley
was invested with the command of the regiment raised, and
to be raised, in the town — Dickson's recruits being handed
over to him as its colonel. Charles Edward's secretary,
Lord George Murray, issued commissions in Manchester,
French commissions, like Towneley's own, so that if the
worst happened, the officers who bore them might claim to
be treated as prisoners of war in the service of the King of
France, not as rebels to King George. The upper classes
of Manchester, however strong their Jacobitism, and how-
ever fervent their joy over Charles Edward's advent, dis-
played considerable caution, and contributed to Towneley's
regiment but very few officers, among them, by the way,
"Jemmy" Dawson, the hero of Shenstone's ballad, a
young gentleman of respectable family, and an alumnus
of St. John's College, Cambridge. When all was said
and done, the strengtn of the completed regiment amounted
to only 300 rank and file, many of them, it seems, not
Manchester men ; and English friends, there or elsewhere,
did not, as he had fondly hoped, flock in numbers to poor
Charles Edward's standard. On Sunday, November the
30th, being St. Andrew's Day, the Scottish chiefs of his
army had "prayers read to them, in their own way, in the
Collegiate Church, at an unusual hour." The Manchester
regiment was then mustered in the churchyard, and reviewed
by the Prince himself. " On this occasion each officer
appeared in a plaid-waistcoat, and with a white cockade,
wearing also a sword by his side, with a brace of pistols
attached to his girdle ; while Colonel Towneley, as a badge
of his superior authority, displayed in addition a Highland-
plaid sash, lined with white silk. The flag of the regiment
252 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
had on one side of it ' Liberty and Property,' and on the
other * Church and Country.' "
Towneley and his newly-raised regiment set forth with
the rest of the force at the beginning of December
on the famous march to Derby. When the still more
famous retreat from that town northwards began, the men
of the Manchester regiment were found to be the only
Englishmen who had openly declared in favour of Charles
Edward. On their way back to Manchester officers and
men were very dispirited, and desertions became frequent.
On the 8th of December the retreating army re-entered Man-
chester, not at all in triumph, and were assaulted and pelted
here and there by the mob. The town was punished by
having to pay ;^2,5oo (twice the sum first demanded), and
the officers of the Manchester regiment had to assist in
collecting it. The news of the approach of the Duke of
Cumberland by forced marches hastened Charles Edward's
departure, and Manchester was evacuated two days after it
was re-entered. Carlisle, where Towneley had first joined
the young Pretender, was reached on the 19th of December,
by which time desertion had reduced the Manchester
regiment to nearly a third of its original strength. It was
decided that the Manchester men, who grumbled at the
prospect of retreating into Scotland, should be left to
garrison Carlisle with between 200 and 300 of the rest
of the force. Towneley, with his men, was to command
in the town ; Colonel Hamilton, with some companies of
the Duke of Perth's regiments, was to hold the castle ; and
Charles Edward took formal leave of them, with the assur-
ance that he would come to their assistance in a i^w days.
It was a final leave-taking. On the 21st the Duke of
Cumberland appeared before Carlisle, and invested the
town on all sides. The besieged kept up an ineffective
fire on him for days, until a battery of six i8-pounders
THE TOWNELEYS OF TOWNELEY. 253
was brought to bear on them. Then Hamilton was for
surrender ; Towneley for a gallant defence. " Better," he
is reported to have said to his disheartened fellow-com-
mander, "better to die by the sword than fall into the
hands of these d — d Hanoverians." But Hamilton was
resolved on submission, and Towneley had to yield. The
only terms which the Duke of Cumberland would grant
were that the garrison should not be put to the sword, but
be reserved for his Majesty's pleasure. These hard terms
were accepted, and so ended the military career of the
Manchester regiment, which, when it surrendered, had
dwindled to 93 — officers and men.
The officers were conveyed in waggons to London, and
lodged in Newgate. Colonel Towneley's was at the head
of the hst of names of those whom the French Government
(France and England were at war) demanded by cartel.
The demand was made in vain. In prison (where Jemmy
Dawson was writing verses on his betrothed) " Colonel
Towneley, for some reason or other, had no relish for the
society of his late companions in the campaign, and
showed much hauteur. He conversed with no one but
Mr. Saunderson, his Roman Catholic priest and confessor."
The trial of the officers of the Manchester regiment began
on the 1 6th of July 1746, in the "Court-House at St.
Margaret's Hill," Southwark, before a High Commission
appointed for the purpose. Colonel Towneley was the
first of the prisoners arraigned. His counsel pleaded that
as he had been sixteen years in the service of France, and
while with the rebels had held a French commission, he
was entitled to the cartel. The Court, however, declared
that this was an aggravation of his offence, "as no man
who was by birth a liege-subject of His Majesty was justi-
fied in taking up arms and acting in the service of a prince
at war with His Majesty." In ten minutes the jury found
254
LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
him guilty. "The behaviour of Colonel Towneley
during the trial was firm and undaunted, and when sen-
tence of death was passed against him, he was not in the
least discomposed, nor did his countenance undergo any
change of colour." With Towneley, six captains (Jemmy
Dawson among them), two lieutenants, and one ensign,
all of the Manchester regiment, were condemned to die.
The others were reprieved, to be imprisoned or trans-
ported. On the day of execution the condemned were
conveyed on hurdles from "the new gaol at Southwark"
to Kensington Common, where gallows had been erected,
and a fire was lighted as a prelude to the barbarous opera-
tion of disembowelling. " At the end of five minutes after
suspension had taken place, Colonel Towneley, even before
signs of life had ceased to be extinct, was cut down and
stripped. Being laid on the block, the hangman with a
cleaver severed his head, and put it into a coffin ; then
taking out his bowels and heart, he threw them into the
fire," and so with the others. "When the heart of the
last was thrown into the fire, the executioner cried out :
*■ God save King George,' and was answered by the specta-
tors with a loud shout." In his contemporary report,
Sylvanus Urban tenders the information that "three of
their heads are to be set up, viz., Morgan's upon Temple
Bar, Towneley's at Carlisle, and Syddall's at Manchester ; "
and it is even sometimes said that Towneley's head was
actually " set up " at Temple Bar. Not so. " At the
intercession of friends, this part of the Colonel's sentence
was remitted ; an undertaker at Pancras being allowed to
take charge of his corpse, and by him it was interred. Cap-
tain Fletcher's head alone was placed on Temple Bar."^
1 This Captain Fletcher (atat. 28, when he enlisted at Man-
chester) was "a linen-draper living near Salford Bridge, and con-
ducting the business for his mother, who on her knees entreated him
THE TOWNELEYS OF TOWNELEY. 255
And SO vanish from history and biography the Manchester
regiment and its ill-fated Colonel.^ The rebellion of
1745 was at an end, and with it the participation of the
Towneleys in public affairs. The Stuart cause was lost
for ever, and the Towneleys had to content themselves with
cherishing the religious creed of King Alfred and Spartlingus.
not to connect himself with the insurgents. He paid ;^50 for his com-
mission" (Hibbert-Ware, ii. loi).
^ Towneley's fate, like Jemmy Dawson's, became the theme of a
ballad, though one of which the style is very different from Shenstone's.
Here it is, " William " being, of course, the Duke of Cumberland : —
TOWNLEV'S GHOST.
When Sol in shades of night was lost,
And all was fast asleep,
In glided Townley's murdered ghost,
And stood at William's feet.
" Infernal wretch ! away I" he cried,
" And view the mangled shade,
Who in thy perjured faith relied,
And basely was betrayed.
" Embraced in bliss, embraced in ease,
Though now thou seem'st to lie,
My injured shade shall gall thy ease,
And make thee beg to die.
" Think on the hellish acts you've done.
The thousands you've betrayed :
Nero himself would blush to own
The slaughter thou hast made.
" Nor infants' shrieks, nor parents' tears.
Could stop thy bloody hand ;
Not even ravished virgins' tears
Appease thy dire command.
" But oh ! what pangs are set apart
In hell thou'It shortly see ;
When even all the damned will start.
To view a friend like thee."
With speed, affrighted William rose,
All trembling, wan, and pale,
And to his cruel sire he goes
And tells the dreadful talc.
" Cheer up, my dear, my darling son,"
The bold usurper said ;
"Never repent of what you've done,
Nor be at all dismayed.
I
256
LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Two Towneleys now remain to be spoken of before our
" abstract and brief chronicle " of the sayings and doings of
this noticeable Lancashire family can be closed. John, an
elder brother of Francis, the ill-fated Jacobite beheaded on
Kensington Common, was born at Towneley in 1697. He
is said " to have been originally intended for the bar, and
to have been placed in the office of the famous Salkeld."
Like his brother Francis, however, he settled early in
France, but of his career there little is known. He became a
Knight of St. Louis, and probably spent in Paris, and in the
best society, most of his later life, — a long one, for he died
at the ripe age of eighty-five.^ The story runs, that being in
" If we on Stuart's throne can dwell.
And reign securely here ;
Thy uncle Satan's king of hell,
And he'll protect us there."
A more fervid than felicitous effusion of the Jacobite muse. "Who
was the author of the lines may never be ascertained ; but it is not
a little remarkable that they should have been deemed worthy of
transcription by a lady, the wife of a clergyman of the Church of
England. Yet I am assured that the MS. is in the handwriting of
Mrs. Kenyon, wife of the clergyman of that name, resident a century
ago in Salford, and incumbent of Trinity Chapel " (Harland, p. 234).
The ballad seems to have been first printed in James Hogg's Jacobite
Relics of Scotland (Edinburgh 1821), song xcvii., where it appears as
"Towly's Ghost." In a note (p. 370) the Ettrick Shepherd says:
"I copied this song from the Honourable Miss RoUo's papers, and
though I got several other copies, yet the name in them all is ' Towly.'
I, however, find no such name among those who followed Prince
Charles. There was a Colonel Francis Towneley who led the 200 men
that joined the Highland army at Manchester." An old MS. copy of
the ballad, with the correct title, is among the family papers now at
Towneley Hall, and has been described in the Report — for 1874 — of
the Historical Manuscripts Commission.
^ Whitaker, confounding him with his brother Francis, goes on to
say that he not only received a commission in the French army, but
fought under Berwick at the siege of Philipsburg, &c., &c. These
facts in the biography of Francis were adduced as evidence at his trial
in 1746.
THE TOIVNELEYS OF TOWNELEY. 25/
company with Voltaire, he heard the French wit declare it
to be impossible to turn Hudibras into French so as to
preserve in the translation the peculiar humour of the
original. Thereupon, it is said, John Towneley tried liis
hand at a translation of detached passages, and with such
satisfaction to himself that he completed a French version
of the whole work. Except in this vague tradition, how-
ever, there is no mention anywhere of an acquaintance be-
tween Voltaire and Towneley. The probability is, that if
an external hint did incite Towneley to his singular task,
he found it in Voltaire's Letters on England, in which the
famous Frenchman criticises Hudibras in his own fashion,
pronouncing it to be neither translatable nor worth trans-
lating, but admitting its possession of esprit, and giving, in a
French rhymed version of his own, the first four hundred
lines of Hudibras, while considerately, as he deems Butler
to be a tedious poet, condensing them into eighty. What-
ever the origin of Towneley's rendering of Hudibras in a
French metre, as nearly as may be resembling that of the
original, executed it was, and published in 1757. It has
always been deemed a marvel of translating skill. Indeed,
when extracts from it were first printed in England, the
reviewers of the day refused to believe in the existence of
the version as a whole, and declared the announcement of
its publication to be a hoax.^
^ " Hudibras ; poeme ecrit dans le temps des troubles d' Angleterre
ct traduit en vers fran9ais," is the title of the book, which has the
imprint " Londres, 1757," but of course was published in Paris. The
translator does not give his name, and says in a modest (French) pre-
face, " What the English style 'humour' is very untranslatable, and
as it is this which constitutes the principal beauty of the jioem, it can-
not be anticipated that those who read it in French will find in it as much
«/nV as Monsieur de Voltaire did." The English original is printed
with the French translation, and an anonymous commentator has
added a number of elucidatory notes. A reprint appeared in 1S20,
2 K
258 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Last in our catalogue of the Towneleys comes the origi-
nator of the sculpture-gallery which bears his name, and by
which this will be preserved while the British Museum
exists, Charles Towneley of Towneley, born there in 1737,
at Paris. The copy of the first edition, in the Library of the British
Museum, was presented by Charles Towneley of the Marbles, with this
inscription : Musjeo Britannico Carolus Towneley dicat banc versionem
avunculi sui." It may be worth while to give as a specimen the open-
ing lines of Towneley's version, with those of the original : —
" When civil dudgeon first grew high,
And men fell out, they knew not why ;
When hard words, jealousies, and fears.
Set folks together by the ears.
And made them fight, like mad or drunk,
For Dame Religion as for punk.
Whose honftsty they all durst swear for.
Though not a man of them knew wherefore ; —
When Gospel-trumpeter surrounded
With long-eared rout to battle sounded,
And pulpit drum-ecclesiastic,
Was heard with fist instead of a stick ;
Then did Sir Knight abandon dwelling.
And out he rode a-colonelling.
Which Towneley renders thus : —
'• Quand les hommes en d^sarroi
Se brouillaient sans savoir pourquoi,
Quand gros mots, craintes, jalousies,
Causaient partout des batteries,
Et les gens en dissension
Pour la Dame Religion
Se chamaillaient dans la dispute
Comme gens ivres font pour pute,
Dont chacun disait tant de bien.
Sans que personne y connflt rien ;
Quand la trompette d' Evangile
Sonnait la charge par la viUe ;
Et pour tambour la chaire au loin
Retentissait a coups de poing :
Lors le Chevalier prit le large
Et de colonel fit la charge.
How conspicuously inferior is Voltaire's rendering (in the Lettrcs
sur les Anglais) of the same lines, beginning thus : —
" Quand les profanes et les saints
Dans r Angleterre etaient aux prises ;
1
THE TOWNELEYS OF TOWNELEY. 259
was a grandson of the lucky Richard who escaped the
gallows in 17 16, and a nephew of the unlucky Francis who
fell a victim to the rebellion of 1745. His mother was the
daughter and heiress of Ralph Standish of Standish, the
representative of another ancient Roman Catholic and Lan-
cashire house. Inheriting the family creed with the family
estates, Charles Towneley was educated at the famous
Romish seminary of Douai, " where," we are told, " he was
introduced to most of the young men of rank and property,
the heirs of the Roman Catholic gentry in England." He
went thence to Paris, and entered the best French society
under the auspices of his uncle, the translator of Hudibras.
Such was the effect of this long training in France, that late
in life he felt it difficult, he used to avow, to express himself
with as much ease in English as in French. During the
course of a tour in Italy, Charles Towneley made the
acquaintance of Sir William Hamilton, afterwards the hus-
band of Nelson's Lady Hamilton, then English Minister at
Naples, and in his and other similar society the Lancashire
squire was smitten by a passion for the collection of antiques,
in days, too, when there was still a rich and rare harvest of
them to be reaped by exploration and excavation. Between
1768 and 1778, he had accumulated by real labour and
enterprise, not merely by signing cheques, a great part of
the noble collection now in the British Museum, and which,
with others there and elsewhere, has done so much for art,
and for our aesthetic appreciation of the antique world.
Towneley was no mere collector. He enjoyed with the
Quand on se battait pour des eglises
Aussi fort que pour des catins ;
Lorsqu Anglicains et puritains
Faisaient une si rude guerre
Et qu' au sortir du cabaret,
Lcs oratcurs de Nazareth
Allaicut battre la caisse en chaire, &c., &c."
260 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
utmost zest the exquisite objects of which he became pos-
sessed ; and in his house in Park Street, Westminster, they
were so arranged, and with such accompaniments, " that
the interior of a Roman villa might be inspected in our own
metropolis." While cultivating these exotic tastes, he did
not neglect Towneley Hall, where he regularly spent some
of the summer months of every year, embellishing its grounds
and forwarding the interests of his tenantry. Though lavish
in his expenditure on the beautiful and the useful, he was
personally frugal, and is said never even to have kept a
carriage. Dignified, amiable, cheerful, accomplished, unit-
ing to a care for his tenantry and the poor of his estates a
splendid cultivation of the beautiful, the figure of Charles
Towneley appeals to the imagination as almost that of an
ideal English gentleman of the eighteenth century. He
died in 1805, and so left his collections that the marbles and
terra-cottas, which formed a very precious part of them, were
acquired by the nation for the comparatively trifling sum
of ;^2o,ooo. The contents of the Towneley Gallery are
now amongst the most valuable and valued art-treasures of
the British Museum. In a general way Lancashire is
thought of chiefly as a county which has made important
contributions to machinery and manufactures. It is plea-
sant to remember that for the enjoyment of such works of
art as the Capitoline Venus and the other beautiful and
noble sculptures which compose the Towneley Gallery, the
thanks of the nation are due to the taste, energy, enter-
prise, and liberality of a Lancashire Worthy.
IX.
JOHN D ALTON*
BY birth, the originator of the Atomic theory belongs
not to Lancashire, but to tlie neighbouring county of
Cumberland. Dalton's scientific fame is, however, so inti-
mately associated with the city of his adoption, that the
omission of his name would leave an unseemly blank in
any comprehensive catalogue of Lancashire Worthies.
Fifty of the seventy-eight years of John Dalton's life were
spent in Manchester. It was there that he made his great
discovery, and it was first communicated to the world of
science in the Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical
Society of Manchester. The city in which he had lived and
died bestowed on him the rare honour of a public funeral.
Statues of Dalton adorn its public spaces and institutions.
One of its principal streets is called by his name. The
local university of Manchester, Owens' College, has its
Dalton scholarships and Dalton prizes. Though born and
* Dr. R. Angus Smith's Memoir of John Dalton and History of the
Atomic Theory up to his time (Manchester, 1856). Dr. W. C. Henry's
Memoirs of Dalton, in the Cavendish Society's publications (London,
1854). Dr. Henry Lonsdale, The IVorthies of Cumberland {LoniXon,
1874), § John Dalton. Professor Roscoe, yoh?i Dalton and his Atomic
Theory, being No. 2 of Sixth Series of Scimce Lectures for the PeopU
(Manchester, 1874), &c., &c.
262 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
bred elsewhere, John Dalton may be regarded as almost a
" Manchester man," and by his contemporaries he was often
spoken of as " The Manchester Philosopher."
The 6th of September 1766 was the day, and Eagles-
field, a hamlet some three miles south-west of Cocker-
mouth, was the place of John Dalton's birth. He was thus
by twenty-three years the junior of Lavoisier, and twelve
years Humphrey Davy's senior, while by an interesting
coincidence Dalton's birth-year was also that of WoUaston,
the chief populariser of the atomic theory. Dalton's father
came of a family of Cumberland yeomen, who in the pre-
ceding generation had joined the Society of Friends. At
the time of John's birth he was a woollen weaver, earning
by the produce of his hand-loom a scanty livelihood. The
elder Dalton, according to the latest of his biographers —
some of the earlier speak of him more favourably — was a
man of no intelligence, and inert even in his trade, but his
wife was active-minded and energetic. John and his elder
brother Jonathan were sent to a Quaker school, kept in the
meeting-house of the society at Eaglesfield by an excellent
teacher. John's intelligence attracted betimes the attention
of the chief man in Eaglesfield, a worthy and opulent
Quaker of scientific tastes and pursuits, Elihu Robinson ;
and he invited the boy to share, among his books and ap-
paratus, the evening studies of a youth in his service, whom
he wished to improve. Dalton's progress was so great that
at twelve he started a small school of his own, first in his
father's cottage, and then in the Friends' Meeting House.
The pupils were of all ages, and the older and stronger of
them, it is said, sometimes challenged their boy-teacher to
fight when he insisted on preserving order. After two
years of this primitive pedagogy, he seems to have done
occasional farm-work. Health of body, a rugged independ-
ence of character, the habit of solving difficult problems by
JOHN D ALTON. 263
and for himself, along with the faculty of imparting what
he knew to others, were the chief acquisitions of the little
Cumberland boy among his native hills, and they served
him in good stead during his subsequent career.
When nearly sixteen, Dalton joined his brother Jonathan
as an assistant in a school, kept by one of their cousins at
Kendal. The removal to that quaint old town proved of
great importance to him, for there he made the friendship
of a Mr. Gough, who, though blind from childhood, was a
zealous and instructed cultivator of science, and possessed
of means, apparatus, and leisure for scientific study and
investigation. Of this Gough there is a sketch in the
Excursion, and in humbler prose Wordsworth pronounced
him to be " a most extraordinary person." From him
Dalton learned to make meteorological observations, and
a scientific library and apparatus were at the command
of the student. Meanwhile their cousin gave up the
school to the two brothers, and in 1785 they announced
the fact to '* their Friends and the Public in General." The
proprietorship of the school did not place them in posses-
sion of an El Dorado. They had to try to add a few
pounds to their income from it by collecting rents, searching
registers, and even making wills. In an "N.B." added to
the circular which they issued in the second year of their
partnership, they took with considerable naivete, the world
of Westmoreland into their confidence : — " The Public may
also be informed," said the brothers in all simplicity of
heart, " that they could conveniently teach a considerable
number more than at present." To say the truth, Dalton
Brothers were exceedingly uncouth young men, and the
elder one was dreadfully severe. John was milder than
Jonathan ; and, indeed, was often so occupied during school
hours with his own mathematical studies as not to notice
the shortcomings of his pupils. When flogging-time came
264 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
it was John's duty merely to hold the boys while his brother
whipt them, and on one occasion the amount of punish-
ment bestowed caused considerable local discussion. More
congenial occupation, he solved mathematical and other
problems for prizes in the Gentlemen's a?id the Ladies'
Dia7'y. He accumulated and philosophised on meteoro-
logical observations in that rainy district, and delivered sub-
scription lectures at the school. He made barometers and
thermometers of his own, experimented on hygrometers of
whipcord ; he botanised and collected butterflies. And
something told the young schoolmaster that mere peda-
gogy could not be his be-all and his end-all. When he
was twenty-four he even ventured to hint at his ambition to
a Quaker-uncle, a Mr, Thomas Greenup, whose rebuke of
his too aspiring nephew happens to have been preserved.
John had hinted that he would like to study physic or law.
Law and physic, Mr. Greenup rejoined, in a decidedly crusty
letter, are " totally out of the reach of a person in thy cir-
cumstances. If thou art tired of being a teacher, and
wishes to change it for some more lucrative or agreeable
employment, and couldst be content, instead of becoming
a physician or barrister, to move in the humbler sphere of
apothecary or attorney, thou mightest perhaps be able, with
a little capital and great industry, to estabHsh thyself in one
of these." But for neither apothecaryship nor attorneyship
had young Dalton the slightest inclination.
A few years later and his modest ambition was suitably
gratified. The Manchester New College, long ago removed
elsewhere, was then a comparatively flourishing institution.
As has been already chronicled,^ it had grown out of the
once famous Warrington Academy, where Priestley, Aikin,
Enfield, and Gilbert Wakefield taught. His friend Gough,
of Kendal, having been asked to recommend it a tutor in
^ Ante, p. 190-91.
JOHN D ALTON. 265
mathematics and natural philosophy, Dalton was named
and appointed. With his acceptance of the post, in 1793,
began his long residence in Manchester, terminating only
at his death. He remained tutor in the college for six
years, teaching mathematics, natural philosophy, and chem-
istry, and using for this last science, among other text
books, the Elements of Lavoisier, who, after revolutionising
chemistry, fell a victim to the French Revolution during the
Reign of Terror. In the final year of his tutorship, Dalton
had twenty-two students. " Although Manchester is now
multiplied by four, it cannot show the same number, and I
fear that the love of external things has overpowered the
love of science." Such, in mentioning the fact, is the
significant comment of Dr. Robert Angus Smith (writing,
however, it must be added, more than twenty years ago), an
eminent cultivator of Dalton's own science, who, like him,
made Manchester the city of his adoption, and who has
written an excellent memoir of Dalton.
After the close of hi; tutorship in the New College, Dal-
ton supported himself chiefly by private teaching and by
making analyses. He was, says Dr. Smith, " probably the
earliest in the district, of that class of scientific men called
' professional chemists,' who have arisen as a necessity of
the time, and, by private establishments, have made some
compensation for the lack of public institutions and pro-
fessorships." Dalton's gains could not have been great.
*' He gave lessons for very small fees, from is. 6d. to 2s. 6d.
a lesson." His charge was half-a-guinea for an ordinary
chemical analysis, which would now cost ten guineas. But
his wants were few, his habits were frugal, and he always
contrived to save something towards a provision for old
age. Soon after arriving in Manchester, he published (in
1793) his first book, the Aleteorological Essays and Observa-
tions, and in the following year he was elected a member of
2 L
266 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society ; his
proposers being Thomas Henry, Dr. Percival, and Robert
Owen, not yet of New Lanark. His first paper was read to
it in the month of his election, and was on colour-blindness,
a peculiarity of vision observed in himself and others, which
is sometimes called after him Daltonism. He became
successively its secretary, vice-president, and president, and
early in the course of his connection with it, a portion of
its room was placed at his disposal as a laboratory, a courtesy
which he repaid by making the Society his confidant
throughout his scientific career, and its Memoirs the con-
temporaneous record of most of his researches and dis-
coveries.
Dalton passed from mathematics through meteorology to
chemistry, and his greatest achievements bear the impress
of his earlier studies. His first papers, read from 1794 to
1803 before the Manchester Literary and Philosophical
Society, include the results of enquiries into the dynamics
of gases and elastic vapours, and especially the action of
heat on them. Some of the discoveries communicated in
these papers were of the most remarkable kind, and,
through the publicity they received in the Memoirs of the
Society, his name became familiar to the savaiis of Europe.
The first hint of the Atomic theory was given in almost an
appendix to a paper read before the Literary and Philo-
sophical Society, on the 21st of October 1803, treating of
"the absorption of gases by water, and other liquids."
After maturing his hypothesis into a theory, Dalton com-
municated it in conversation to Dr. Thomson, by whom,
and not by the originator, it was first published in its total-
ity to the world. Intimations of the Atomic theory are to
be found in the writings of predecessors, but to Dalton
belongs the glory of having given it completeness of form
and immutable stability. Dalton's great theory was elabo-
JOHN D ALTON. 267
rated three years before Davy's brilliant discovery of the
metallic basis of the alkalis, and "on that as on all previous
and subsequent chemical discoveries it bestows a value
which would otherwise have been wanting. Dalton, it is
now generally admitted, first made chemistry a science
when he proved that the primary atoms of which the uni-
verse is hypothetically composed combine (i) in constant
proportions ; for instance, that water, wherever it is found,
consists of exactly the same weight of oxygen in combination
with the same weight of hydrogen ; (2) in multiple propor-
tions, that is, that when one body combines with another in
several proportions, the higher ones are multiples of the
first and lowest ; and (3) in reciprocal proportions, so that
if two bodies combine in certain proportions with a third,
they combine in the very same proportions with each other.
Speaking of the atomic theory and the "grand idea" given
by it of the " law and order which prevail in Nature," that
enthusiastic expositor of chemical science, the late Dr.
George Wilson, exclaims : — " In the light of it there is no-
where any ' fortuitous concourse of atoms,' as the Roman
poet proclaimed of old ; no crash or collision, no strife or
warfare, when they meet together, as Milton sang, in relation
to the embryo atoms of his chaos. According to this view,
the courses of the planets around the sun are not more
surely ordered than the movements of these invisible
spheres round the centres of force which they obey. Arc-
turus and Orion know not their places better than each tiny
gold or hydrogen atom which adds its weight to swell the
sum total of the universe. And if poets of old have sung of
the music of the spheres which the telescope unfolds to us,
poets, we doubt not, will yet be found to sing of the har-
mony, as true and as wonderful, which attends the move-
ments of those which the finest microscope will never
reveal."
268 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Speaking in a lower key, Professor Roscoe says : — " Of
the scientific importance of this discovery there can be no
question ; indeed, chemistry could hardly be said to exist as
a science before the establishment of the laws of combina-
tion in multiple proportions, and the subsequent progress of
chemical science materially depended upon the determina-
tion of these combined proportions or atomic weights of the
elements first set up by Dalton. So that amongst the founders
of our science, next to the name of the great French philo-
sopher, Lavoisier, will stand in future ages the name of
John Dalton, of Manchester. Even from a practical and
business point of view the discovery of these combining
proportions is of the greatest value. Thus, for instance, in
the manufacture of oil of vitriol, a substance which is re-
quired in thousands and thousands of tons every year for
different industrial purposes ; before John Dalton had deter-
mined how much sulphur, and how much oxygen, and how
much hydrogen combine together to form this sulphuric acid
or oil of vitriol, no manufacturer could tell, except by rule of
thumb, how much of each particular constituent had to be
brought together. It was necessary, in order that the
chemical manufacturer should be able to prepare this sub-
stance economically, that he should be able to ascertain,
with the greatest precision, how much sulphur he must
burn, how much air he must use, and how much w^ater he
must add in order with the greatest economy to produce
this product for the market. It is the same with every
chemical action that occurs, and it is to John Dalton — who
made his living by giving private lessons at half-a-crown
each— that we owe this knowledge which has made the
fortunes of thousands, because he first told us the laws
which govern these chemical actions."
While the atomic theory was slowly making way, Davy
himself being at first among the sceptics, the man whose
JOHN D ALTON. 269
name was soon to be recognised as one of the foremost in
the history of science, was quietly plodding on in Manches-
ter. He boarded in George Street with the Rev. W. Johns,
formerly a colleague at the New College, and his choice of
a residence was characteristic. " In the autumn of 1804,
Miss Johns saw him casually pass, and asked him why he
never came to see them. Dalton said, ' I do not know, but
I will come and live with you if you will let me.' He did
so, and took possession of the only bed-room at liberty,
sitting with the family. In this family he lived for twenty-
six years in the greatest amity, until Mr. Johns, giving up
the school, sought a purer air in the suburbs of the town."
Dalton's day went like clock-work. He rose early, pro-
ceeded from his lodging in George Street to the room pro-
vided for him by the Manchester Literary and Philosophical
Society. There he lighted his own fire, dusted the desks
for his pupils, and then went home to breakfast. The stroke
of nine found him ready for his pupils, whom he taught till
twelve or one, mathematics, science, cyphering, anything
and everything.! If he had an interval of leisure before his
one o'clock dinner, he would read the newspapers at the
Portico. After a hurried dinner, at which he drank only
^ "Mons. Pelletan, of Paris, visited Manchester in 1820, for the sole
purpose of paying his respects to the founder of the atomic theory. lie
fancied that Dalton would be occupying a professor's chair, surrounded
by adepts in science and hundreds of ingenuous youths ; residing in a
handsome mansion in a handsome square in the city, or enjoying his
otium aim digiiitate in a suburban villa, with roses embellishing its
porch ; in short, the great representative man of Manchester, and well
known and appreciated by every citizen. Judge of his surprise when
Monsieur Dalton k Fhilosophe could only be found after much enquiry,
and when found was engaged looking over the shoulders of a boy
figuring numbers on a slate. The Frenchman, doubting his senses,
asked the grey-headed gentleman if he really had the honour of ad-
dressing Monsieur Dalton. ' ' Yes," replied Dalton ; "will you sit down
till I put this lad right about his arithmetic." — Lonsdale, p. 245.
270 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
water, he returned to his laboratory, then as always, if there
were pupils in attendance, managing to pursue his own
researches or meditations by giving them problems to solve.
At five came a cup of tea, followed by a return to the labo-
ratory, presumably pupilless, at six. When the labours
of the day were over, a light supper at nine preceded a
pipe, and at ten it was time to go to bed. This life was
diversified by an afternoon game at bowls once a week,
and an annual excursion in the summer to the hills of his
native Cumberland. Dalton never married, though he
seems to have been once in love, or very near it, with a fair
Quakeress of Lancaster. But, as became a philosopher,
he took the complaint in its mildest form, and does not
appear to have suffered from it a second time.
He had delivered lectures at the London Royal Institu-
tion in 1803-4, in Edinburgh in 1807, and again in London
in 1809, during which visit he writes to Mr. Johns, "Davy
is coming very fast into my views on chemical subjects."
But his greatest (in every sense) journey from home was
that which he made to Paris in 1822. This was the year in
which the Royal Society gave its first tardy recognition of
his merits, by spontaneously electing him a member. Pre-
viously, the only notice taken of him in " high quarters " had
been a sort of offer, made through Sir Humphrey Davy (in
1 818), and declined by Dalton (who was now in the fifties),
that he should undertake the scientific department of one
of Sir John Franklin's Polar expeditions. Meanwhile, the
French Academy of Science had elected him a corres-
ponding member, and on his visit to Paris, of which he
always spoke afterwards with delight, he received the most
cordial welcome from the scientific celebrities of France,
from Laplace and Cuvier, as from Arago and Biot. In
1826, the Royal Society made some amends by voting
him the first of the gold medals, just then founded, as
JOHN D ALTON. 2/1
annual scientific prizes, by George IV., and on this occa-
sion Davy, who had become a convert, spoke of the
atomic theory in language worthy of it and of himself.
Four years later, the French Academy of Sciences elected
him, in succession to Sir Humphrey, one of its eight
foreign associates, an honour that speaks for itself; and
at the second — the Oxford — meeting of the British Asso-
ciation, in 1832, even the ancient university by the Isis
paid him the compliment of making him a D.C.L., along
with Brewster, Faraday, and Robert Brown. These were
distinctions, no doubt, but Dalton was sixty-six, and en-
tirely dependent on his own resources. Accordingly in-
fluential men solicited a pension for him, and after the
usual struggle, one of;^i5o a year was granted in 1833,
increased to ;^3oo a year in 1836. In the interval, friends
and admirers in Manchester gained courage from the un-
mistakeable recognition of Dalton's merit in the high places
of the world, to promote, in 1834, a subscription for the
statue by Chantrey which stands now in the entrance-hall
of the Manchester Royal Institution. It was in the same
year that he was presented at Court, wearing the scarlet
robes of a Doctor of Laws over his Quaker dress. His
part in the ceremony had been carefully rehearsed before
he appeared at St. James's, and his successful performance
of it was watched with great gusto by Mr. Babbage. " I
heard," says the inventor of the calculating machine, " one
officer say to another : ' who the d — 1 is that fellow whom
the king keeps talking to so long.?'" In the autumn of
that year, too, Jonathan Dalton died, leaving his brother
everything he possessed. With this inheritance, his savings,
and his pension, he was now well off, and " considered him-
self rich enough to buy a full set of silver spoons for dinner,
dessert, and tea service." His modest prosperity did not
come much too soon, for in 1837 Dalton had an attack of
2/2 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
paralysis, and his strength gradually declined, so that when
in 1842 the British Association held its meeting at Man-
chester, he was not in a state to discharge the duties of
president, and the office was assigned to the Earl of EUes-
mere. He died on the 24th of May 1844, and then, Dr.
Angus Smith remarks, " as is usually the case on the death
of an eminent man, the first proof was furnished to many
persons that he was once alive." Although the Society of
Friends protested against such pomps and vanities, the
authorities of Manchester gave him a civic and a public
funeral. His remains were placed in the Town Hall, and
in one day more than 40,000 visitors defiled before them
and the " beautiful mahogany coffin " in which they were
enclosed. On the 12th of August they were removed to
their final resting place in Ardwick Cemetery, followed by
a funeral train a mile long, past crowds of lookers-on, and
through streets in which all business was suspended. A
bronze statue, copied from Chantrey's marble, shares with
those of Peel, Wellington, and Watt, the distinction of a
place in front of the Manchester Infirmary. Better still, a
sum of upwards of ;^3,ooo was raised, with which Dalton
scholarships and Dalton prizes were founded in Owens'
College, to encourage and reward original chemical research.
John Dalton was of the middle size, and, in his prime,
athletic and muscular. His forehead and the upper part
of his face bore a strong resemblance to Newton's, and
the British Association, at its Cambridge meeting in 1833,
is said to have been much impressed by his likeness to
Roubilliac's statue of Sir Isaac in Trinity College Chapel.
In demeanour he was calm and undemonstrative. His
voice was gruff, and he was no great talker. Altogether he
seems to have been a homely man of somewhat prosaic, as
well as of pure, honourable, and independent character. His
genius for discovery culminated in the atomic theory. He
JOHN DALTON. 273
did not advance with the progress of his science, and in his
self-absorption and indifference to the achievements of his
fellow-workers, as in his disinterested and unflagging devo-
tion to one pursuit, Dalton, the chemist, resembled another
famous Cumberland man, his contemporary, Wordsworth,
the poet.
M
X.
WILLIAM EOSCOE*
AFTER Roscoe worked his way to distinction, a
friendly professional genealogist of eminence en-
deavoured to trace a pedigree for him, but without the
slightest success. The zeal, industry, and best wishes of
"Garter Principal King at Arms" himself could discover
nothing to embellish the modest truth that " the family of
Mr. Roscoe, for a considerable period before his birth, had
been settled in the central part of Lancashire, where they
lived in humble circumstances." His father kept a tavern
— the "Bowling Green" — at Mount Pleasant, then on
the outskirts of the Liverpool, which, when William Roscoe
was born there in the March of 1753, did not contain
20,000 inhabitants ! The " Bowling Green" was a favourite
resort of the townspeople, and Roscoe's father added to the
profits of his tavern by cultivating a large market-garden : —
so lowly were the origin and earliest associations of the
historian of Lorenzo, the magnificent Medici. The elder
Roscoe was a man of great bodily strength, given to field-
sports and athletics ; it seems to have been from his
mother, " a woman of superior mind and strong affections,"
* The Life of William Roscoe, by his son Henry Roscoe (London, 1838).
J. A. Picton, Memo7-ials of Liverpool, Historical attd Topographical .
Second Edition (London, 1875), &c., &c.
WILLIAM ROSCOE. 2/5
that William inherited his refinement and ardour of
intelligence.
From a dame's school, he was sent, at the age of six, to
a day-school, where he learned what little was taught in
it. He was fond of books, however, and one of his
teachers had a small library of the best English authors of
the period, which he eagerly devoured. His mother, too, did
her best to cultivate his taste for reading, and to make him
a good little boy. In an autobiographical fragment, Roscoe
has recorded, among his early peculiarities, " a decided
aversion to compulsion and restraint." "According to my
best recollection," he adds, " I was at this period of my life
of a wild, rambling, and unsocial disposition, passing many
of my hours in strolling along the shore of the river Mersey,
or in fishing, or in taking long walks alone." At twelve ht
left school with a tolerable knowledge of the three R's, and
this was all his education. Fortunately, he was not allowed,
or asked, to have anything to do with the paternal hostelry.
" Having quitted school," he says, " and committed my
English Grammar to the flames, I now began to assist my
father in his agricultural concerns, particularly in his busi-
ness of cultivating potatoes for sale, of which he every year
grew several acres, and which he sold, when produced early
in the season, at very advanced prices. His mode ot cul-
tivation was entirely by the spade, and when raised early,
they were considered in that part of Lancashire as a
favourite esculent. When they had attained their proper
growth, we were accustomed to carry them to the market
on our heads, in large baskets, for sale, when I was generally
entrusted with the disposal of them, and soon became a
very useful assistant to my father. In this, and other
laborious occupations, particularly in the care of a garden,
in which I took great pleasure, I passed several years of my
life, devoting my hours of relaxation to reading my books.
2/6 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
This mode of life gave health and vigour to my body, and
amusement and instruction to my mind ; and to this day I
well remember the delicious sleep which succeeded my
labours, from which I was again called at an early hour.
If I were now asked whom I consider to be the happiest of
the human race, I should answer those who cultivate the
earth by their own hands." Before this time, too, the happy
boy had become " a tolerable joiner," and made himself
a " book-case with folding-doors, which served me for many
years, and which I filled with several volumes of Shakespeare,
a great part of whose historical plays I committed to
memory ; to these were added the Spectator, and other valu-
able works, which I perused with great pleasure." Close,
moreover, to his father's "property," — as with a touch of that
pomposity which characterised him throughout life, he calls
the market-garden, — there was a large manufactory of British
china-ware, which gave occupation to " artistic talent."
Among the people so employed in it was a " painter," one
Hugh Mulligan, who was also a copper-plate engraver ; and
in his society Roscoe learned to take an interest in pictures
and engravings. In Roscoe's case, the seeds of literature
and art were early scattered on a kindly, if uncultivated,
soil, which contained in itself considerable fertilising powers,
and did very fairly without artificial manure.
Several years of boyish life had thus passed happily and
profitably, when it was decided that Roscoe should make
choice of a profession. The reading boy thought that it
would be very pleasant to be a bookseller, and he was
accordingly placed in the shop of a respectable Liverpool
bibliopole. A month, a little month, of practical experi-
ence sufficed to cure him of his fancy for " the trade," and
at sixteen he was articled to an attorney. He worked hard
at what was to him always an uncongenial profession, and
was the more diligent in business, because, from some
WILLIAM ROSCOE. 2//
unexplained circumstances, a father and a sister were to be
dependent on the fruits of his exertions. Leisure, however,
he had, or made, for reading and writing other print and
manuscript than law-books and law-papers. Even in the
Liverpool of those days there were clever and cultivated
young men, with whom the studious and poetic lawyer's
clerk could congenially associate. One of them directed
his attention to Italian literature, and it harmonised
completely with the rather stately mind which nature
had implanted in the tavern-keeper's son ; nay, during
those early Italian studies the notion of one day writing
a biography of Lorenzo de Medici already dawned on
him. Before he completed his term of clerkship, he
aided in founding a Society for the Encouragement of
Art, in Liverpool ; and, still greater achievement, he
]uiblished a volume of poems, which, as Art was among
iheir themes, he sent to Sir Joshua Reynolds, and they
were praised by the great and kindly painter. Love was
the only thing wanting to complete the circle of the young
Roscoe's thoughts and feelings, and that, too, came when
he was three or four and twenty. The favoured maiden
was a Miss Jane Griffies, the daughter of " a respectable
tradesman of Liverpool," and every way fitted for her
future husband. Specimens of their correspondence are
printed in Roscoe's biography, and if they raise an occa-
sional smile, it is not of the kind which plays even about
the lips of a judge when love-letters are read in court
during an action for breach. These are the terms in which
the excellent William moralises to the equally excellent Jane
when suggesting to her that each should keep a journal
and communicate its contents to the other : — " I cannot
help pleasing myself with the reflection, what an infinite
variety of subjects this intercourse would give rise to.
Convinced of the perfect confidence which subsists between
278 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
US, how freely might our thoughts expand themselves !
The desire of pleasing might cause some little attention
to mode of expression, whilst the certainty of a natural
indulgence would prevent us from being apprehensive
about trivial inaccuracies. I own this scheme begins to
grow a favourite with me, and I beg my dearest Jane
will not overthrow my expectations." So Sir Charles
Grandison might have written to his elegant Harriett, and,
if ever addressed in the accents of earthly love, the
saintly Hannah More might have listened with approval
to such a suggestion. For a time marriage was not to be
thought of, except as in the distance. The amiable
William was a full-fledged attorney some time before he
could support a wife, and even the thought that he had
been able " so far to screen a helpless parent and a deserv-
ing sister from the hardships of an unfeeling world," did
not always reconcile him to the continuance of a celibate
existence. In moments of despondency he fears the very
worst, and breaking into rhyme, attempts to counterfeit
submission to the decrees of Providence, when
" Some happier youth
(Oh, may he equal me in truth !)
Born under favouring stars, shall gain
That heart thy Roscoe loved in vain. "
Before many years, however, these gloomy forebodings were
dissipated. Roscoe prospered in the business which he
dishked. In 1781 he married his " dearest Jane," and it
proved a happy, a long, and a fruitful union.
Roscoe's first appearance as a public man was made with
his pen, and in opposition to the slave trade. It was in the
years immediately preceding the first French Revolution
that Clarkson and his friends banded themselves together for
organised action to suppress the slave trade, and great was
WILLIAM ROSCOE. 279
their delight when Roscoe began in prose and verse to issue
protests against it from the very town which profited most
by the ugly traffic. He became known to a still wider
circle when, after the breaking out of the French Revolution,
he figured as the Liverpool laureate of the new European
movement, writing the song " O'er the vine-covered hills
and gay valleys of France " (which was a favourite lay of
Robert Burns) : venturing to assail the great Mr. Burke him-
self ; taking the lead in local opposition to the anti-Gallican
and repressive policy of the Government, and in every way
approving himself a staunch and fearless friend of " civil
and rehgious liberty all over the world." The Roscoe of
those days must have been a much-occupied man, conducting
a considerable business, pamphleteering and poetizing, active,
in local as in general politics, writing the life of Lorenzo de
Medici, for which a friend at Florence helped him with
material ; and working energetically, withal, to carry out a
scheme for the reclamation of Chat Moss, — a project to
which he may in some degree have been stimulated by his
early experiences in his father's market-garden and potato-
ground. The biography of Lorenzo was published in 1795,
and was at once successful. Most cultivated people in those
days took a considerable interest in Italian art, literature,
and history. Old Horace Walpole, king of the English
dilettanteism of the day, and verging towards his latter end,
bestowed his warm approval, — and praise from my Lord of
Orford was at that time praise indeed. The Life of Lo-
renzo went rapidly through several editions, and was trans-
lated into Italian and German. As the eighteenth century
drew to its close, Mr. William Roscoe of Liverpool, attorney-
at-law, found himself quite a celebrated man, the friend and
correspondent of Lords Lansdowne and Holland, as of
good Dr. Aiken, and of the awful Dr. Parr.
Attorneyship had naturally been always distasteful to
2 So LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Roscoe, and having, after twenty years of it, secured inde-
pendence, he quitted it in 1796 for ever. Not long after-
wards he bought a little estate, AUerton Hall, near Liverpool,
and withdrew from business to combine, as he thought, the
cultivation of literature and art with agriculture and garden-
ing. Three years later, in an unlucky hour, he fancied
himself bound by the claims of friendship to exchange his
"retired leisure" for the hazardous business of banking. The
friend to whose researches at Florence, Roscoe owed much
of the original material worked up in his Life of Lorenzo,
was one of the chief partners in a Liverpool private banking
house, the affairs of which became embarrassed at the
close of the century. This friend died, and on the extrica-
tion of the firm from its embarrassments depended the
future of his family. The partners asked for, and received
Roscoe's confidential assistance, and he rescued them from
immediate danger. It was then proposed that he should
become an active partner in the bank, and from a feeling
of regard for his friend's family he assented, and became
** Mr. Roscoe, the celebrated banker." When a busy banker,
just as when a busy attorney, he stole moments for litera-
ture, and in 1805 appeared his life of Lorenzo's son, Leo X.,
Luther's Pope, — a work which was also very successful,
though not so much so as its predecessor. In the following
year the Liberals of Liverpool invited him to stand for the
borough, and he was returned by a large majority, due, doubt-
less, to the general respect in which he was held as much as
to sympathy with his political views, or with his steady
hostility to the slave trade. During his short parliamentary
career, he had the satisfaction of lifting up his voice in the
House of Commons, as member for Liverpool, against the
traffic on which the prosperity of his constituents was sup-
posed to rest, and of thus helping to procure at last the
passing of the Act which for ever abohshed the slave trade.
WILLIAM KOSCOE. 28 1
His support, however, of this measure, and of the " CathoHc
claims," enabled his political opponents to get up a formid-
able opposition to him in the borough. When he made a
public entry into Liverpool after the dissolution of Parliament
in 1807, they organised a riot, in which the principal part
was played by " strong parties of seamen, chiefly consisting
of the crews of vessels lately engaged in the African trade,
armed with bludgeons and other weapons." The refined
Roscoe shrank from such a contest, and declined to become
a candidate again.
The next nine years of Roscoe's life passed happily and
busily. No great literary work occupied him, but his leisure
was devoted to political correspondence, to bibliography
and botany, to increasing his library, to collecting pictures
and engravings, to promoting schemes for the cultivation of
literature and art in Liverpool, and to experiments for tlie
reclamation of Chat Moss, the last an enterprise which led
to a friendship with Coke of Holkham, Possibly, however,
the expenditure of money on this particular object was one
of those investments of " considerable sums of money in
landed and mining property " which involved Roscoe's bank
in difficulties, when, after the peace of 18 15, a great demand
for capital was created by " the opening of the American
trade," and cash became extremely scarce. In the January of
1 8 1 6, Roscoe and his partners suspended payment. When its
affairs were investigated, the house seemed to be solvent,
at least on paper, and a majority of the creditors assented
to Roscoe's proposal that he should continue to manage the
business, and that six years should be allowed him in which
to discharge its liabilities, principal and interest. One of
his first steps was to apply his private property in liquida-
tion of the debts of the bank. He sold the library and
art-collections which he had been nearly half a century
in bringing together. Characteristically, he took great pains
282 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
with the compilation of the sale-catalogue, which was an ela-
borate bibliographical and critical performance. But the
blow of parting with his beloved books was softened by the
delicate liberality of his friends. They purchased all of his
library which had been collected for his two chief literary
undertakings, and which might be afterwards useful to him
when correcting, revising, or further illustrating his biogra-
phies of Lorenzo de Medici, and of Leo X. These volumes,
reserving to him their use and removal from the institution
during his lifetime, they presented as a separate collection to
the Liverpool Athenaeum, which twenty years before he had
aided energetically in founding. At this very time, too, while
struggling to retrieve the affairs of the bank, he co-operated
with his friend Dr. Traill (afterwards editor of the Encyclo-
pcedia Britannicd) in the establishment of the well-known
Royal Institution of Liverpool, of the committee of which
he became chairman, and the opening of which he " inaugu-
rated " by a lecture on the origin and vicissitudes of literature,
science, and art. He began, moreover, a series of publica-
tions on penal jurisprudence and prison discipline, advo-
cating the reformatory as opposed to the vindictive principle
in the treatment of criminal offenders, quite in the spirit of
the efforts of Mackintosh and Romilly. At last, in 1820,
it became painfully evident that the debts of the bank could
not be paid off, and that there was nothing for it but the
Bankruptcy Court. A small minority of ill-conditioned
creditors contrived to delay the grant of a certificate, which
the great majority assented to ; so, in order to save himself
from arrest, Roscoe retired for a little to the seclusion of his
farm on Chat Moss, respecting which, and the whole enter-
prise of its attempted reclamation, one cannot help wishing
that more were known. When the certificate was issued,
Roscoe finally retired from business. Many offers of
literary employment had been made him, and .he saw a
WILLIAM ROSCOE. 283
reasonable prospect of supporting himself by his pen. Some
kind friends easily raised the sum of ^2500 for his benefit
and that of his family ; nor is there any symptom that his
later years were clouded by poverty.
It must have been about the time when Roscoe returned
from Chat Moss to Liverpool, freed from the fear of arrest,
that he was seen by Washington Irving, and made the
theme of the graceful and feeling paper, " Roscoe," which
appeared in the earliest numbers of " The Sketch Book."
It was in the Liverpool Athenaeum (of which Roscoe was
one of the founders in 1797) that the attention of the then
young American enthusiast was attracted " to a person just
entering the room. He was advanced in life, tall, and of a
form that might once have been commanding, but it was a
little bowed by time, perhaps by care. He had a noble
Roman style of countenance, a head that would have pleased
a painter; and though some slight furrows on his brow
showed that wasting thought had been busy there, yet his
eye still beamed with the fire of a poetic soul. There was
something in his whole appearance that indicated a being
of a different order from the bustling race around him. ]
enquired his name, and was informed that it was Roscoe. I
drew back with an involuntary feeling of veneration. This,
then, was an author of celebrity ; this was one of those men
whose voices have gone forth to the ends of the earth ; witli
whose minds I have communed, even in the solitudes of
America."
The chief, or the most conspicuous of Roscoe's later
literary labours was his edition of the works of Pope,
to which he prefixed a life of the poet. It was in
his latest years that Mrs. Hemans recorded her impres-
sions of him thus : " He is a delightful old man, with
a fine Roman style of head, which he had adorned
with a green velvet cap to receive me in j because.
284 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
as he playfully said, ' he knew I always admired him in it.'
Altogether he put me in mind of one of Rembrandt's pic-
tures ; and as he sat in his quiet study, surrounded by
busts, and books, and flowers, and with a beautiful cast of
Canova's Psyche in the back-ground, I thought that a
painter, who wished to make old age look touching and
venerable, could not have had a better subject." His
declining years flowed on in industrious serenity, and when
at seventy-eight, he died of paralysis in the June of 1831,
he left behind him many friends and not a single foe. At
the time of his death, his residence was " a modest brick
house in Lodge Lane, near the end of Bentley Road."
His funeral was attended by men of all parties, political
and religious. He lies buried in the graveyard behind the
Unitarian Chapel, in Renshaw Street, — he had belonged to
that communion through life, — and within doors there is a
marble bust of him with a commemorative inscription.
Time may have dimmed the lustre of Roscoe's literary
works, but its flight ought to increase rather than diminish, —
at least in the estimation of Liverpool or Lancashire men, —
the force of the eulogium passed on him so many years ago
by his young American admirer, Washington Irving : —
" Born in a place apparently ungenial to the growth of
literary talent • in the very market-place of trade ; without
fortune, family connection, or patronage ; self-prompted,
self-sustained, and almost self-taught, he conquered every
obstacle, achieved his way to eminence, and having become
one of the ornaments of the nation, turned the whole force
of his talents to advance and influence and embellish his
native town." " The respect which he won from distin-
guished men at home and abroad, encouraged his fellow-
citizens to pay homage to intellect, and, directly as well as
indirectly, he contributed powerfully to the advancement
of culture in Liverpool. As the great mart on the Mersey
WILLIAM ROSCOE. 285
grew in magnitude, population, and wealth, it was chiefly
through the influence of Roscoe that it became studded
with institutions which fostered something more refining
than the love of wealth. The Botanic Garden was almost
entirely his handiwork, while the Academy of Arts, the
Athenaeum, the Royal Institution, the Literary and Philo-
sophical Society, were deeply indebted to him. His private
beneficence was great, and he was ever ready to encourage
struggling and obscure merit. It was Roscoe who dis-
covered the genius of John Gibson, when that famous sculp-
tor, after having been apprentice to a Liverpool cabinet-
maker, was elaborating mantlepieces and funeral monuments
for a firm of superior builders and plasterers. Through
Roscoe's kindness he was enabled to settle in Rome, and he
never forgot his early benefactor. The bust of Roscoe, which
he executed and presented to the Liverpool Royal Institution
in 1827, is an enduring monument of his gratitude. Of the
regard of his fellow-townsmen for Roscoe's memory, there
is a memorial in the marble statue of him by Chantrey, the
result of a public subscription, and placed in 1841 in the
Gallery of Art attached to the Royal Institution, of which
he was one of the founders.
XL
FELICIA HEMANS*
GERMANY and Ireland, Venice and Lancashire, con-
tributed, all four of them, to the being of this
interesting and gifted woman, and it might amuse a
fanciful critic to discover in her poetry traces of elements
so different. Her father, Mr. Browne, a Liverpool merchant
of some eminence, was of an Irish family in which
the Celtic element had been doubtless interfused with
the original Saxon, which his surname indicates. Her
mother, who bore before marriage the unmistakably
German name of Wagner, was "of mingled Italian and
German descent," and "daughter of the Imperial and
Tuscan Consul at Liverpool" by a wife whose maiden
name was Haddock, "a good and ancient one among the
yeomanry of Lancashire."
Felicia Dorothea Browne, afterwards Hemans, was bom
on the 25th of September 1793, in Duke Street, Liverpool;
but, since through one of her grandmothers she inherited
Lancashire blood, her connection with the county does not
altogether arise from the circumstance that the great city on
the Mersey was her birthplace. Little more is recorded of
the father than that, like Dogberry, he "had losses," in
consequence of which he broke up his establishment in
Liverpool when Felicia was a mere child, and removed him-
self and his family to Gwrych, on the Denbighshire coast.
* Works, with a Memoir of her Life, by her Sister (London, 1839).
H. F. Chorley, Memorials of Mrs. Hemans (London, 1836), &c.
FELICIA HEMANS. 28/
As you whirl along from Chester towards Holyhead, a mile
past Abergele Station (once the scene of a too famous rail-
way accident), you see on the left what the guide books call
"a prominent object," an enormous modern "castellated
edifice," displaying a very indifferent taste in architecture.
This is " Gwrych Castle," — near it, in the olden times,
were fought various fierce battles between English kings and
Welsh princes, — and on its site stood the more modest man-
sion in which, about the beginning of the present century,
Mr. Browne, of Liverpool, took refuge with his wife and
family when fallen from his pristine estate. Ultimately, we
are told, he " again engaged in mercantile pursuits," went
out to Quebec, and there died. His wife was a superior
and accomplished, though simple-minded, woman, to whom
Felicia was passionately attached. The future Mrs. Hemans
was the fifth of seven children, but she soon became by death
the eldest daughter, and her mother did her best to educate
her at home. She was never sent to school, but there were
plenty of old-fashioned books at Gwrych, while behind her
were the mountains and before her was the sea. At six
she delighted in Shakespeare, reading him in " a secret
haunt of her own — a seat amongst the branches of an old
apple tree." At eleven she was taken to London by her
father and mother, a visit repeated in the following year,
and she never saw the great metropolis again. Among the
earliest of her rhymes are some verses written from London
to one of her brothers. The child-poetess and early lover of
nature expresses in them her longing to return to her dear
Welsh home, " and wander through the well-known vale,"
or " view the ships that swiftly glide," hand in hand again
with her beloved brother.
She was a girl of remarkable beauty as well as precocity,
and of course her family and friends were very proud of
her. She had reached the ripe age of fourteen, when
288 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
they were foolish enough to collect some of the verses
which she was always throwing off, and print them
in a quarto volume ! The earliest of her ventures in
print was also, perhaps happily, the most unsuccessful.
An ill-natured critic laughed at the quarto, and she felt
the ridicule bitterly, at least " for a few days ; " after
which, with the irrepressibility of true authorship, she
began to rhyme again as flowingly as ever, but not for
four years did she appear in print a second time, with
" The Domestic Affections and other Poems," a volume of
much less pretentious dimensions than its predecessor.
Meanwhile, new objects and interests were engaging and
engrossing her young heart and soul. Two of her elder
brothers were in the Welsh Fusiliers. One of them was
fighting in Spain, under Sir John Moore, and the imagina-
tive girl became enthusiastic for the deliverance of Spain by
British valour. She wrote a poem on " England and Spain,"
and it was at the height of her enthusiasm in the cause
that her dreams became, as she fancied, embodied in flesh
and blood. There arrived on a visit in the neighbourhood
a Captain Hemans, presumably young, handsome, and in-
telligent, and an officer in the 4th, or King's Own Regiment.
He was introduced to the family at Gwrych, and to the
young poetess, " then in the full glow of that radiant beauty,
which was destined to fade so early. The mantling
bloom of her cheeks was shaded by a profusion of natural
ringlets, of a rich golden brown, and the ever-varying ex-
pression of her brilliant eyes gave a changeful play to her
countenance, which would have made it im.possible for any
painter to do justice to it." Captain Hemans of the 4th
did ample justice to it. He fell in love with it and with
her. The love was returned by the ardent girl of fifteen —
all the more warmly that she did not see much of him, as
he was soon ordered to proceed with his regiment to Spain,
FELICIA HEMANS. 289
a destination which gave him an additional interest in the
eyes of the romantic Felicia. Friends on both sides shook
their heads, and hoped that the young people would forget
each other, as the match was not recommended by what
are called " prudential considerations ; " but their hopes
were disappointed.
Soon after the fascinating warrior's departure, and with
or without the society of Paterfamilias, the date of whose
migration to Canada is shrouded in a certain obscurity, the
Browne family removed from Gwrych to Bronwylfa, near
St. Asaph, in Flintshire. Here, with her Peninsular enthu-
siasm still strong upon her, Felicia learned Spanish and
Portuguese, sketched and played upon harp and piano,
nourished her love of the romantic past by excursions to
Conway Castle, and wrote an abundance of verses, serious
and gay, some of w-hich were published in the volume of
" Domestic Affections." Those were happy days, and
followed by a still greater, though, alas ! a short-lived
happiness, when, within two years from the removal to
Bronwylfa, and nearly three after they had fallen in love,
Captain Hemans reappeared upon the scene. He was, or
seemed, more interesting than before, for he had been in
the retreat from Corunna, and made one of the disastrous
expedition to Walcheren. The young people were as fond
as ever of each other, and they married in the summer
of 181 2. The Captain took his lovely young bride to
Daventry, where he had to do duty as adjutant of the
Northamptonshire Militia. The change from mountainous
Wales to the tame country in which Daventry lies was not
a pleasant one for the young bride and poetess. However,
Fawsley Park was there to enrich her mind and memory
with the images of a noble old English domain ; and she
did not remain long at Daventry. Within twelve months
from the birth of a first son, the Northamptonshire Militia
290 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
was " reduced " or disbanded, and Captain Hemans ceased
to be its adjutant. The young wife was naturally anxious
to return to her beloved Wales, and her still more beloved
mother. The Captain did not object, probably because
he knew not what else to do with himself, or where else
to go. The retreat from Corunna and the expedition to
Walcheren are charitably said to have enfeebled his con-
stitution ; and the young couple were soon domiciled at
Bronwylfa, clearly without the society of Mr. Browne,
senior, who was by that time again engaged in mercantile
pursuits at Quebec, and appears no more upon the bio-
graphic scene.
For five years this state of things remained unaltered.
Four more children, all of them sons, were born to the
Hemanses, under the roof of Mrs. Browne, near Bronwylfa.
Mrs. Hemans read, studied, and wrote as dihgently as
ever. At this time, her tendency was to classical or quasi-
classical themes, and her " Modern Greece " was pro-
nounced by Byron " a good poem, very : " — Who can tell
but that it may, in some slight way, have influenced his
choice of a final career ? But now an event occurred which
saddened her for life, so far as anything could sadden
one who was by nature full of vivacity, as well as of ardour
and enthusiasm. Captain Hemans's health was not good,
and he resolved to try the effects of a southern climate.
He left Bronwylfa for Rome, and he never returned from
Rome to Bronwylfa, or to England ; in fact, he never saw
his wife again. Friends said that the education of the
children, and the " literary pursuits " of their mother, made
it desirable that she should remain in England. There
were, however, it is well known, other reasons for the sepa-
ration, but they have never been stated, and can only be
inferred. The pair communicated with each other respect-
ing the education of their sons, the two eldest of whom
FELICIA HEMANS. 29 1
once paid their father a visit, but the burden of educating
and supporting them seems to have been left to the disen-
chanted poetess at Bronwylfa. She grappled with her task
like a brave woman, but it was a difficult one, and its
severity bore heavily upon her, just when the circumstances
under which it was imposed began to cloud more or less the
remainder of her life. From classical themes she turned to
religious, and wrote "The Sceptic," with the occasional
counsel of her friend and neighbour, the kind old Bishop
of St. Asaph, Dr. Luxmoore. It was to her pen that she
had to look for the performance of her maternal duty, and
while " The Sceptic " was being written, she competed,
successfully, for a prize of ;£so offered by a patriotic Scot
for the best poem on " The Meeting of Wallace and Bruce
on the banks of the Carron." Soon afterwards she made
the acquaintance and gained the friendship of the good
Reginald Heber, who sometimes visited his father-in-law,
the Dean of St. Asaph, He encouraged her in the grave
design of writing a poem on " Superstition and Revelation,"
which was to pourtray the workings of all the religions of
the world, and to contrast them with Christianity. A
magnum opus of this or some other kind remained to the
end of her days an object of Mrs. Hemans's ambition ; but
there were five boys to bring up and to educate, and ela-
borate poems would do less for this object than popular
verses and the composition of successful tragedies. It was
a happy day for her when, in 182 1, she received the an-
nouncement that the Royal Society of Literature had
assigned her the prize for a poem on Dartmoor, — all the
happier that, when the joyful news reached Bronwylfa, her
son Arthur sprang up from his Latin exercise and shouted
aloud, " Now I am sure mamma is a better poet than
Lord Byron ! " She was less fortunate with her tragedy,
the " Vespers of Palermo," which failed at Covent Garden
292 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
in 1823, and of which high hopes had been entertained in
the little circle near St. Asaph. But the name of Felicia
Hemans was becoming known ; and though the tragedy
failed, John Murray agreed to give her two hundred guineas
for the copyright. Removing, in 1825, from Bronwylfa to
Rhyllon (only a quarter of a mile distant), she had scarcely
settled in her new home when she received the pleasant
tidings from beyond the Atlantic that a complete edition
of her works was asked for in the States, where her vague
imaginativeness was prized much more widely than in
England, and every newspaper delighted to reprint her last
magazine verses.
But another great blow soon befell her. In 1826 came the
death of her mother, with whom she wholly, and her children
for the most part, had lived since the separation from her
husband, who had relieved her of much domestic care, and
who, when she was scarcely qualified to make one for her-
self, had given her a happy home, or at least a home as
happy as it could be under the circumstances. After this
loss, her health — it had long been delicate — suffered greatly
from the neglect of precautions which her mother had in-
sisted on, and her struggle became more trying than ever.
Fortunately her fits of depression, whether caused by
melancholy or ill-health, were always broken by periods of
buoyancy and of high spirits that nothing could extin-
guish. Even sorrow and sadness, too, could be transmuted
into poetry, and at the very worst she was solaced by a
piety fervid though unpretending. Not long after her
mother's death, partly for the sake of the education of her
sons, and partly for that of the society of some dear friends,
she removed from her beloved Wales to Wavertree, near
Liverpool. The change did not prove a pleasant one. The
people of Wavertree stared at her as a curiosity, or pestered
her with compliments, and were surprised when " the cele-
FELICIA HEMANS. 293
brated poetess " insisted on talking like anybody else about
common things, and declined to do her part of an ordinary
conversation in metre or high-flown prose. From Waver-
tree, she was happy to escape on two flying and delightful
visits to Scotland and the Lakes. To Scotland she went
(in 1829) as the guest of the author of " Cyril Thornton/'
and under his roof she was the neighbour of Sir Walter
Scott, who took to her at once, as she did to " the dear old
gentleman." In Edinburgh she found herself a lioness,
welcomed by the Man of Feeling, by Mrs. Grant of Laggan,
and most cordially by Jeffrey. Scarcely had she returned
to Wavertree, when the Edinburgh Review appeared with
a graceful and very laudatory article on her poetry, from
the pen of the arch-critic himself After launching (in the
summer of 1830) her " Songs of the Affections," she carried
out an old wish to visit Wordsworth, who appreciated her as
highly as did his enemy Jeffrey, and there were then few
poets or poetesses of whom that could be said. It was clear
that Mrs. Hemans was never to settle at Wavertree, a place
which she found so disappointing and unsatisfactory, even
as regarded the education of her boys. At one time she
thought of removing permanently to Edinburgh, but her
physicians declared that a year in the " grey metropolis of the
North " would be death to her. A visit to Ireland, where she
had kind friends, and where her brother occupied an oflficial
post, decided her in favour of Dublin, and there, in 1831,
she settled for the last time on this side the grave. Her
health was breaking fast, and few could have recognised in
the worn and wasted woman, not yet forty, the lovely
Felicia of Gwrych. Yet she wrote on and on ; little volume
after volume appearing from her pen ; her very sufferings fur-
nishing raw material for a series of sonnets, " Thoughts
During Sickness." The education of her son Charles was
superintended under her own eye, and the future of his
294 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
brothers sedulously cared for. What kindness could do for
her was done, and every friendly attention was paid her by
Archbishop Whately and his wife, who placed their country
seat at her disposal. As her end approached, the serenity
which marked her later years was disturbed by anxiety re-
specting the career of her son Henry, whom she had educated
at Shrewsbury, and who was ready for the battle of life.
Without Mrs. Hemans's knowledge, a steadfast lady friend
exerted herself in high places, and Sir Robert Peel was then
Prime Minister. One day, to the suffering mother's surprise
and delight, arrived a letter from Sir Robert, "appointing
her son to a clerkship in the Admiralty, and accompanied
by a most munificent donation, which, emanating from such
a quarter, could create no feelings but those of heart-felt
thankfulness, unmingled with any alloy of false delicacy or
mistaken pride." It is her sister who says this. Mrs. He-
mans did not long survive the reception of Sir Robert's
bounty, dying in her lodgings at Dublin, on the i6th of
May 1835. She was buried in St. Ann's Church of the
city of her death, and there is a memorial tablet erected to
her in the Cathedral of St. Asaph.
Her poetry contains too little thought, or too little picture,
for the new generation, which would be surprised if it knew
the depth and extent of the influence exerted in her own
day by Felicia Hemans. But the slighest inspection of her
writings reveals singular grace and tenderness, a faultless
taste, a great variety of music, and an ardent sympathy with
whatever is noble, heroic, and holy in man, or beautiful and
expressive in nature. Her struggle in life would have been
a hard one for a prosaic or strong-minded woman ; it was still
harder for a sensitive and suffering poetess. But she never
flinched from the performance of her duty ; she never re-
pined ; and her sorrows were breathed out in song to charm
her readers, not vented in private to harass her friends. She
FELICIA HEMANS. 295
could be, and often was, cheerful, animated, and even gay.
Of one fault, said to be peculiarly feminine, Felicia Hemans
seems to have been entirely devoid — nowhere in her works
and correspondence is there the slightest trace of vanity-
She must have been no ordinary woman who won the ad-
miration and friendship of men so dissimilar as Scott and
Wilson, Heber and Whately, Wordsworth and Jeffrey.
XII.
JOHN DRINKWATER-BETHUNE*
THE Drinkwaters were a respectable Cheshire family,
of which the main line seems ultimately to have been
settled at Latchford, near Warrington. Whether by marriage,
or otherwise, they rose somehow in the world, and the John
Drinkwater who represented them between lyiSand 1760
"inherited considerable property in Cheshire, Lancashire,
and Northamptonshire." Unfortunately he "wasted the
whole of it," and the sins of the father being visited on the
children, his extravagance, we are told, "entailed great
embarrassment on the family." Therefore, presumably, it
was that his second son, also a John, found himself restricted
to the career of surgeon in the navy, one at that time {teste
Tobias Smollett) much more than now unprofitable and
repulsive. Born in 1740, he entered at eighteen the medical
service of Britannia as Ruler of the waves, and saw some
fighting during the last years of the war waged by Chatham
in alliance with Frederick the Great, — England " conquering
America in Germany " and elsewhere. As Surgeon of the
Ripon, of sixty guns, he was at the capture of Guadaloupe in
i759j the year in which Wolfe fell victorious on the Plains of
* Burke's History of the Comvwnejs of Great Britain and Ireland
(London, 1836), vol. iii.,§ Drinkwater of Salford. Gentleman'' s Magazine
for April, 1844. Baines's Lancashire (first edition), &c., &c.
JOHN DRINKWATER. 297
Abraham, wresting Canada from the French. His father
died in the following year, 1760, and therefore, perhaps, it
was that in 1761, before the war was fairly over, he returned
home and married " Elizabeth Andrews, of Salford, in Lan-
cashire." Soon afterwards he established himself in Sal-
ford as a medical man (in 1783 he obtained the diploma
of M.D.), and lived there and thus up to his death in 1797.
By this his (first) wife he had several children. The eldest
son, John Drinkwater, the historian of the Siege of Gibraltar,
was born in the June of 1762, at the Latchford aforesaid.
Probably the family retained there some little property,
saved from the wreck of the prodigal Drinkwater's patri-
mony.
Of the early years of the Historian of the Siege of
Gibraltar nothing has been chronicled until he reached the
age of fifteen. Possibly in the dull old Salford of those
days he listened with interest to paternal anecdotes of
adventure on the Spanish Main, and was thus smitten with
a love for a martial life. At any rate, this was the career
chosen by him, under circumstances which kindled a blaze
of warlike ardour in Manchester and his native Salford.
When John Drinkwater was a boy of fifteen there came
from beyond the Atlantic news of a great disaster suffered
by the British arms. It was the year before the American
Declaration of Independence, and General Burgoyne (au-
thor of various dramatic pieces) had surrendered himself
and army at Saratoga to the Yankee General Gates. No-
where did the tidings of the calamity produce a greater
impression than in King George the Third's loyal town
of Manchester. At the commencement of the American
war the inhabitants of Manchester had voted an address to
the throne, in which "His Majesty was assured that his
people were ready to support him with their lives and for-
tunes in the prosecution of this just and necessary contest,
2 P
298 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES
for the punishment of rebels instigated by the artful designs
of a discontented faction." ^ The news of the disaster of
Saratoga increased instead of diminishing the warhice zeal
of Manchester. A fund was at once eagerly subscribed by
the loyal Manchester of 1777 to raise a regiment of volun-
teers who might be employed against the American "rebels."
This "fine body of men" was called the 72nd Regiment of
the Line, or Royal Manchester Volunteers. It was raised
in three months at a cost of about ;^8,ooo, wholly by
voluntary subscription, and it was then a thousand strong.
j^tat. 15, young John Drinkwater, the doctor's son of Sal-
ford, joined as an ensign the Manchester Regiment, and
was thus enabled to become the historian of a most
notable episode in British military history.
The 72nd were not sent to America after all ; work nearer
home was cut out for the Manchester Regiment. War be-
tween England and France (who took her revenge for the
loss of Canada and so forth by aiding and abetting the
American "rebels") had virtually commenced. It was
probable that Spain would join France, and it was therefore
deemed prudent to strengthen the garrison of Gibraltar.
To Gibraltar, accordingly, the gallant Manchester Volun-
teers were dispatched, and with them Ensign John Drink-
water, probably as clear-headed and diligent a young officer
and gentleman as the British army then contained. The
news of the Convention of Saratoga decided the wavering
policy of Spain. She offered to mediate between France
and England, but on a basis which she knew could not be
accepted by King George's Ministers. They rejected the
offer, and, in the June of 1779, Spain, too, declared war
against England, chiefly with the hope of recovering Gib-
raltar, and the rock-fortress was at once attacked by land
and sea. The memorable siege began in the June of 1779,
^ Baines, ii. 310.
JOHN DRINKWATER. 299
and ended in the February of 1783, with the negotiation of
a general peace — and Gibraltar still untaken. For more
than three years and a half a httle British force of 5,000 men
successfully resisted a Spanish-French army of 30,000, pro-
vided with the most powerful ordnance, and often com-
manding the sea, blockading as well as bombarding. From
the time of his landing on the famous Rock to that of its
deliverance, the methodical young Lancashire ensign, little
more than a school-boy, steadily jotted down what he saw
and heard throughout a siege, in its duration as in the fre-
quent fierceness of the attack and the courage, persistence,
and patience under privation of the defenders, then almost
unparalleled. The result was, in after years, " A History
of the Siege of Gibraltar, 1 799-1 783, with a description
and account of that Garrison, from the earliest periods. By
John Urinkwater, Captain in the late Seventy-second Regi-
ment, or Royal Manchester Volunteers," a little military
classic deserving a place on the same shelf with Caesar's
Commentaries, or Xenophon's Anabasis, clear and calm like
them, though it was the production of quite a young man,
and " our special correspondent " of to-day might turn with
a shrug and a yawn from its lucid simplicity of style and
treatment. Once only in the course of his narrative (how
unlike " our special correspondent ") does Drinkwater
refer to himself, and it is in a mere note, towards
the close, too, of the volume. To his description of one
of the later and almost desperate assaults of the besiegers
by land and sea, with artillery and mortar-boats, along the
whole hne of the British defence, Drinkwater makes the
following incidental appendage :— " It was during this attack
that the materials from which this work is compiled were in
the most imminent danger of being entirely destroyed. A
13-inch shell from the enemy's mortar-boats, falling above
the camp-guard, rolled along the road leading from Buena
300 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Vista and entered the author's marquee, brushing the pillow
of his bed, and lodging close by under the corner of the
bedstead. Though lighted when it entered, and though its
force must have been greatly spent in the ricochets before
it entered, the fuse luckily broke as it lodged within, and
the marquee and its contents by that fortunate circumstance
was preserved." Such is Drinkwater's solitary reference to
himself, and indulged in solely because the event recorded
connected itself with the very existence of his book. A few
weeks after the incident, peace came ; Gibraltar remaining
British. The 72nd were ordered home, with Drinkwater
no longer an ensign, but, as has been seen, a captain. On
their return to England, says the historian of Lancashire,
they were " received in Manchester with enthusiasm, and
their colours were deposited with much ceremony in the
Collegiate Church ; from thence they were removed to the
College, where they still remain as trophies of the gallantry
of the regiment and the patriotic fervour of the town."
The people of Manchester were greatly elated by this
display, and in an ode written on the occasion they are
eulogised thus : —
" But Britain, in this race of fame,
Which of thy daughter-towns may claim
The greater share of glory for the whole ?
'Tis Manchester that claims the share,
'Twas Manchester re-urged the war,
'Twas Manchester re- waked the British soul."
Some strange old memories are "re-waked," and some
rather interesting reflections are suggested, by this jingle
of ninety and more years ago.
Soon after their return to England and their warm
welcome by Manchester, the 72nd were disbanded.
During the two or three years that followed, Drinkwater
occupied himself in compiling from his memoranda and
JOHN DRINKWATER. 3OI
in preparing for the press (how unlike the hurry of " our
special correspondent," and his intense eagerness for a
cheque from his publisher !) the history of the Siege. It
seems to have been first published in 1785, with a dedica-
tion, by permission, " to the King." It went through its
four editions in as many years, and at once stamped its
young author as an officer of merit and promise. Mean-
while, in 1787, he purchased a company in the second
battalion of the ist or Royal Regiment of Foot, which,
as it chanced, was stationed at Gibraltar. He thus saw the
old Rock again, and its old Governor, Lord Heathfield,
who had been raised to the peerage for the successful
defence, and who, on Drinkwatefs arrival, publicly thanked
him for his record of the services of the garrison. " Dur-
ing his second stay at Gibraltar," be it noted as a decidedly
interesting little fact, " he planned and carried into
execution the measures for establishing the Garrison
Library. This institution," our authority adds, *' has since
become very important, and has been the model for
forming similar establishments in many of the British
foreign garrisons ; " perhaps in our home garrisons and
barracks also. After the breaking out of the war of the
French Revolution, Drinkwater found himself at Toulon,
on its occupation by the English ; and as military secretary
there, despatched on special missions thence, he led a
stirring and eventful life for several years. Among his
other posts was that of Secretar}' for the Military Depart-
ment in Corsica, when, with the Scotch Sir Gilbert Elliot
for its viceroy, the First Napoleon's island-birthplace came
into the temporary possession of England at the invitation
of the anti-Gallican General Paoli — Boswell's venerated
hero, and "the Corsican landlouper" of Boswell's growling
old father. In 1794, he became (by purchase) Major,
and in 1796 Lieutenant-Colonel of his regiment. He was
302 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Still attached to the service of Sir Gilbert Elliot, when, after
the English evacuation of Corsica, he found himself, early
in 1797, sailing homeward from the Mediterranean in
the Minerve, a frigate hoisting the pendant of no less a
person than Commodore Nelson, even then a distinguished
naval ofhcer, though not nearly so famous as he afterwards
became. Drinkwater and Nelson had formed a close
intimacy during the English occupation of Corsica, and to
a book of the soldier's, much less known than his " Siege
of Gibraltar," — indeed, scarcely known at all, — we owe some
traits and anecdotes, not to be found elsewhere, of "the
greatest sailor since the world began," As the Minerve
steered westward from Gibraltar, she was followed by two
Spanish line-of-battle ships, and Nelson had her decks
cleared for action. " At this period," says Drinkwater, " I
was walking with Commodore Nelson, commenting on the
probability of the enemy's engaging the Minerve, and his
words and manner of uttering them made a strong
impression upon me. He said that he thought an
engagement very possible, as the headmost ship appeared
to be a good sailer, but (continued he), looking up at his
broad pendant, ' before the Dons get hold of that bit of
bunting, I will have a struggle with them ; and sooner than
give up the frigate, I'll run her ashore.'" In this cruise
Drinkwater was sleeping in a cot beside Sir Gilbert's, when
Nelson woke him at dead of night with the alarming news
that they were in the very midst of the Spanish fleet. The fog
and the darkness, however, favoured the brave, and they got
clear through, with interesting tidings of the strength and the
whereabouts of the enemy for Sir John Jervis, whom they
joined at the appointed rendezvous off Cape St. Vincent.
After much entreaty, Sir Gilbert Elliot procured per-
mission for himself and suite to see from the deck of
the Lively (they had been transferred to it on joining
JOHN DRINKWATER. 303
the fleet) the great battle of St. Vincent, which gave
its name to the title rewarding the successful admiral
commanding. The Lively acted as a repeating frigate
during the engagement. On that Valentine's Day of 1797
Drinkwater was all eye and ear, and when it was over and
a magnificent victory had been won by Nelson's daring
disregard of orders, he diligently compared his own notes
with those of others, thus qualifying himself to become its
historian,
Drinkwater landed with his chief at Plymouth, on Sunday
the 5th of March, bringing, as they thought, joyful news, but
nobody would beheve them, and everybody was sad. It
was impossible for any English fleet, the Plymouth people
said, to stand against the combination, then and there
reported and believed in, of the Spanish and French fleets.
The news of the suspension of cash payments, too, had
just arrived, and it was with difficulty that Drinkwater
could raise, in incredulous and panic-stricken Plymouth,
fifteen golden guineas wherewith to enable the party to
carry to London intelligence of the splendid victory off
Cape St. Vincent, in which fifteen sail of the line and four
frigates, but with a Jervis to command them and a Nelson
to disobey him, had beaten twenty-seven Spanish sail of
the line and ten frigates, — capturing four of the former,
two of them three-deckers. For this great victory Sir
John Jervis was made Earl St. Vincent, and Nelson
Knight of the Bath. But Nelson was not mentioned in
the published despatches, and it seemed to Drinkwater and
several others that the commodore's services on the
occasion were under-estimated. Accordingly, the Historian
of the " Siege of Gibraltar " set to work and wTote his
" Narrative of the Battle of St. Vincent," the piece already
referred to as little known, though a perfect model of naval
historiography. He published it anonymously, because he
304 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
fancied that it might be thought presumptuous in him,
a soldier and a landsman, to describe and criticise naval
operations— modesty which "our special correspondent"
would laugh at very heartily. Full justice was done in it
to Nelson, and the great sailor appreciated the landsman's
labour of love. "The first time," says Drinkwater,
speaking of himself in the third person, "that he met
Lord Nelson, after the battle of Aboukir, the Admiral
approached with the eagerness which always characterised
him, and shaking the author by the hand, exclaimed,
'Why were you not with us at Aboukir? ' "
By Sir Gilbert Elliot Drinkwater was strongly recom-
mended to Pitt, who persuaded him to undertake the
arrangement and settlement of the complicated accounts
v/hich had sprung out of the British occupation of Toulon
and Corsica. His personal knowledge of the matters was
great, but he accepted the employment with a sigh, since
on undertaking it he was placed on the half-pay list, and
ever afterwards he was connected with the purely civil
administration of the army. Had fate ordered it otherwise,
and had he remained on active service to the end of the
struggle, which was closed at Waterloo, Drinkwater might
have been one of our best military historians. As it was,
employment after employment in the civil administration
of the army rewarded his diligence and ability. In 1807,
he was even offered (by Mr. Windham) the Under-
Secretaryship of State for War and Colonies, but he de-
clined it. Four years later, he was appointed one of the
two Comptrollers of Army Accounts, and in this office
he remained for a quarter of a century or so, until it was
abohshed in 1835. The duties of his post left him little
leisure for authorship. Some years after his forced
withdrawal from the ComptroUership, however, he re-
published (in 1840), with the authorship now avowed, and
JOHN DRINKWATER. 305
in aid of the fund for the Nelson testimonial, his early
"Narrative of the Battle of St. Vincent," adding to it
various new and interesting Nelsoniana. He was busy
with an enlarged edition of the "History of the Siege
of Gibraltar," of the gallant defenders of which he was
then the sole survivor, when he died on the 6th of January
1844, at Thorncroft, near Leatherhead, in Surrey, at the
advanced age of eighty-one.
Colonel Drinkwater, — he had been a colonel since the
time when he was placed on half pay, — took the name of
Bethune after his withdrawal from public life and on the
death of his brother-in-law, whose property (Balfour Castle
in Fifeshire) his wife inherited. The State gained a
good and faithful servant in Drinkwater, who, when his
office of comptroller was abolished, proved, in an elaborate
document, that while he held it he had saved the country
a very considerable sum. But what the State gained was
perhaps a loss to the military literature of a country which
has produced many more great commanders than men
competent or even willing to commemorate their exploits.
Under other circumstances the Historian of the "Siege
of GibraUar" might have been the worthy chronicler of
the war against the first Napoleon.
2q
XIIT,
THE TWO THOMAS WALKERS*
THE father of Thomas Walker, the reformer, and grand-
father of Thomas Walker, author of " The Original,"
was a Bristol merchant, who claimed descent from a Mon-
mouthshire family of gentle blood. In the last decade of
the first half of the eighteenth century, apparently, he re-
moved to Manchester, and certainly it was after that re-
moval that his eldest son, the first Thomas Walker, the
reformer, was born, on the 3d of April 1749. Con-
cerning the Bristol merchant, who founded a Lancashire
family, next to nothing is known or has been recorded ;
but "his wife," we are told, "was the first person who
carried an umbrella in Manchester, and was mobbed for
her pains ; " indeed, as has been elsewhere mentioned, it
was not until 1758 that any one actually in business
ventured to set up a carriage in Manchester.^ The hus-
band of this innovating lady died, at the age of seventy,
in 1786, by which time his eldest son, celat. 36, was, "as
* A Rezicw of some of the Political Events which have occurred in
Manchester during the last Five Years, by Thomas Walker (the elder),
(London, 1794). The Original, by Thomas Walker (the younger), edited
by Blanchard Jerrold, 2 vols. (London, 1874). Baines's Lancashire {iviil
edition), &c., &c.
"^ First Series, p. 305.
THE TWO THOMAS WALKERS. 307
a merchant, a leading figure in the town, a gentleman
prosperous and of high position, with Barlow Hall for his
summer residence, and a house in South Parade, St.
Mary's, for the winter." Two years before his father's
death, the first Thomas Walker had become a conspicuous
public man in the town of his father's adoption. In
1784, as has been previously chronicled,^ Pitt im-
posed the "Fustian Tax," which naturally roused the
discontent and vehement opposition of the Lancashire
manufacturers, an opposition fomented and championed
by Fox and the Whigs to damage their political enemy,
the triumphant Pitt. It was the Lancashire agitation
against the Fustian Tax which brought both the first Sir
Robert Peel and the first Thomas Walker before the pub-
lic, and the Manchester merchant even more prominently
than the Bury calico-printer. Thomas Walker and a
certain Thomas Richardson, being " two of the principal
merchants of Manchester," were sent to London to
protest against the Fustian Tax. The movement was, as
the reader knows, completely successful, and Pitt, who
had imposed the obnoxious tax, moved and carried its
repeal, Fox seconding the motion : the two great political
rivals being equally anxious to conciliate the rising
cotton interest. "The joy excited by this triumph of
sound pohcy was manifested in a splendid public pro-
cession in honour of the delegates, on their return to
Manchester, to each of whom was presented a superb
cup and stand, bearing an inscription expressive of the
feelings of gratitude entertained towards them by their
fellow-citizens." ^
In all probability Walker was already a Foxite, and certainly
the part which he played in the opposition to the Fustian Tax
brought him into personal relations with the Whig leaders
^ Ani:, p. loi. ' lidJinGs's Lancashire, ii. 312.
308 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
in Lancashire and London. These were made closer and
more cordial by the combined resistance of manufacturing
Lancashire, for its own supposed interests, and of the
Whigs, for political and party purposes, to Pitt's Irish pro-
positions, the story of which has been already told.^ The
modern conjunction of political with commercial Liberalism
was unknown in those days. Throughout his career,
Thomas Walker, the ardent political reformer, was neither
more nor less than what at a later date was called a Pro-
tectionist. He opposed Pitt's Irish propositions. He was
unfriendly to Pitt's Commercial Treaty with France, and
while admitting that the opinion of Manchester was " almost
universally in favour of it as advantageous to the industry-
of the locality," he protested against its alleged reciprocity
in quite modern phraseology as " Irish, I suppose, with the
advantage all upon one side." Nay, when in the last years
of his life the famous Corn Bill was introduced, and was
opposed by the first Sir Robert Peel and the manufacturing
interest, Thomas Walker was as strongly in favour of the
" Bread Tax " as, at the outset of his public career, he was
hostile to the Fustian Tax. In 1816, the veteran Radical
reformer wrote thus to his son : — " A principal object of
the clamour that has been raised against the Corn Bill is to
prevent a union between the landed and commercial inte-
rests in favour of reform, and against the authors and sup-
porters of the late sanguinary, expensive, and unnecessary
war, the origin of which, at present, seems to be entirely
lost sight of by the simple and undiscerning people. We
must not go into the Baltic for our loaf, when, if agriculture
is only properly encouraged, we may always have it
cheaper at home ;" a sentence which might have come
from the pen or the lips of a Protectionist of thirty years
later. But when Walker first became a public man,
^ Ante, p. loi, &c.
THE TWO THOMAS WALKERS. 309
the Whigs were fierce opponents of the Free Trade,
or quasi-Free Trade, poHcy which Pitt had learned from
Adam Smith. Walker's readiness, after the repeal of the
Fustian Tax, to become the mouth-piece of the Lanca-
shire manufacturers in their opposition to Pitt's Irish pro-
posals, made him more acceptable than ever to the Whig
chiefs. The leading Whig nobleman of Lancashire, the
Earl of Derby of that day, writes to him sympathetically in
the August of 1785 about "this unhappy business," Pitt's
Irish project ; and a month later invites Walker to
Knowsley to meet Charles James Fox, who strenuously
opposed in the House of Commons Pitt's commercial
policy towards Ireland, and, indeed, his Liberal commercial
policy generally. Three years later the same Lord Derby
became god-father to one of Walker's sons, and exerted
himself to have his friend, the Manchester merchant, elected
a member of the Whig Club.
This was in 1788, with the first French Revolution at
hand, which was to throw for the time being commercial
questions into the shade, and to efface them by the substi-
tution of much fiercer issues of political controversy. But
party-spirit seemed to slumber in Manchester until 1787,
and there was probably no strong feeling of dissatisfaction
evoked anywhere in the town when, in 1788, the Manches-
ter Whigs celebrated with a sumptuous public banquet, at
which Thomas Walker took the chair, the first centenary of
the glorious Revolution of a hundred years before. On the
5th of November 1788, one hundred and thirty of the prin-
cipal gentlemen of Manchester sat down to dinner, after the
anniversary of the landing of King William had been other-
wise duly commemorated by " the ringing of bells and the
firing of the military in St. Ann's Square." The night before
" a ball and supper were given at the Assembly Rooms, on
310 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
which occasion the ladies displayed orange-coloured rib-
bons." ^ But questions soon arose, and startling political
events soon occurred, which divided Manchester, with the
rest of the kingdom, into two hostile camps, and which split
up even the Whigs, who had been unanimous in their de-
votion to the glorious memory. On the 8th of May, in the
year following the first centenary of the arrival of William
III. in these islands (and a few days after that meeting of
the States-General at Versailles, with which the first French
Revolution began), there was a debate in the House of
Commons on the Test and Corporation Acts. The motion
to repeal them was rejected by a majority of only twenty
votes. The cry of the " Church in danger " was raised in
Manchester as elsewhere, and the Whig Churchman could
no longer fraternise with the Whig Dissenter. In Man-
chester was formed a " Church and King Club," the mem-
bers of which displayed on their buttons an engraving of
the Old Church. In opposition to this club, Thomas
Walker and his friends founded the Constitutional Society,
the chief original object of which seems to have been to
support the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. This
was but the beginning of the end. Thomas Walker
still stood so high in the general favour and esteem of his
townsmen, that in 1790 he received from them the greatest
honour that could be conferred on a Manchester man
as such. Then, and for many years afterwards, Man-
chester was neither a corporate town nor represented in
the House of Commons. Its chief civic officer was still,
as in olden times, the borough-reeve {biirg-graf), or head-
borough, who had come to be a sort of mayor without a
town council, and who, with two (!) constables, was ap-
pointed annually (in October) by *' a jury of the leet sum-
1 Baines, ii. 313.
THE TWO THOMAS WALKERS. 3II
moned by the Lord of the Manor." In 1790 their choice
fell on Thomas Walker.^
But as the French Revolution proceeded in its course,
political controversies aggravated, or rather absorbed, the
ecclesiastical quarrel in Manchester. In the May of 1792,
the Constitutional Society called for a reform of Parlia-
ment ; only a few months later the first French Republic
was proclaimed, and the Reign of Terror had begun. Man-
chester was by this time thoroughly Tory. In many of the
taverns of the town, boards were suspended bearing the in-
scription, " No Jacobins admitted here." War with France
was imminent. A day meeting was held in Manchester on
the nth of December (1792) to excite the inhabitants against
the French Republic, and to support the anti-Gallican policy
of the Government. At night the Church and King mob
attacked the houses of several leading Manchester " Libe-
rals," and among them the warehouse of Thomas Walker.
Walker was prepared, and had firearms ready, with which,
though not until after a fourth attack, he fired over the heads
of the mob. The assailants retired, and in the morning
renewed the attack, which he seems to have repelled with
nothing harder than oral expostulation. He was now a
marked man, on whom spies and informers had their eyes.
1 In spite of his reforming zeal, Walker was perfectly satisfied with
this obsolete arrangement. When he wrote his Review, in 1794, the
ardent Parliamentary reformer thus defended the government of Man-
chester by a borough-reeve of feudal origin. " If this," he says, " were
the proper place, I think I could show that the town of Manchester
owes much of its wealth and importance to its unincorporate character,
and that by the above-mentioned system " — of a borough-reeve and a
couple of constables — "public order might be as fully maintained as it
ever was in the best-regulated corporations in England. It has been
observed with great truth that towns where manufactures are most
flourishing are seldom bodies corporate, commerce requiring universal
encouragement instead of exclusive privileges to the natives and freemen
of a particular district." — Review, p. 23.
312 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
It was not, however, until the April of 1794 that the autho-
rities could collect evidence on which plausibly to arraign
him, and then he and several others were tried at Lancaster
for a conspiracy to overthrow the Government. The prin-
cipal witness for the Crown was a certain Dunn, who swore
that he had heard treasonable expressions used at meetings
of the Constitutional Society, and that he had seen men
drilling in Walker's warehouse. The prosecution was con-
ducted by Law (afterwards Lord EUenborough) as Attorney-
General for the county palatine ; Walker was defended by
his friend Thomas Erskine. It was easily proved that there
was not a word of truth in Dunn's evidence. Law threw up
the case, the judge remarking that Mr. Attorney " acted
very properly," and Dunn was committed, to be afterwards
condemned, on a charge of perjury. Within eight years
from the time of the " splendid pubhc procession " and the
presentation of the " superb cup and stand " to the success-
ful opponent of the Fustian Tax, Thomas Walker had
learned something of the vicissitudes of public and of pri-
vate opinion.
On his acquittal, Walker was warmly congratulated by
Charles James Fox and others of the leading Whigs, who
had not, hke Burke, recoiled into support of Pitt and
liis strong government, from the shock given by the
development of the French Revolution. But when, years
afterwards, Fox and Erskine acceded to power, Thomas
Walker did not share, however slenderly, in the material
results of their triumph. He had remained in the interval
an ardent and laborious " friend of the people," though,
what with the expenses of his trial and other circumstances,
which have not been recorded, he was sinking into poverty.
Lord Grenville's short-lived ministry of All the Talents,
came into being in the February of 1806, with Erskine for
its Lord Chancellor, and Fox as Foreign Secretary and vir-
THE TWO THOMAS WALKERS. 313
tual Premier. " It was shortly before the death of Fox,"
in the September following, " that Mr. Walker was encour-
aged to hope that his broken fortunes (his trial alone, in
1794, cost him ;^30oo) would be mended somewhat by a
Government appointment." In May 1806 (cetat. 57), he
wrote to Fox, claiming his influence (which Fox had cordially
promised him) to obtain one of the Commissionerships of
Customs for the port of London, — a position for which his
extensive knowledge and life-long pursuits eminently quali-
fied him. He wrote also to Lord Erskine. The Commis-
sionership of Customs having eluded his grasp, he wrote, in
the July of the same year, to Erskine to aid him to obtain a
vacant commissionership for auditing the public accounts,
adding that Fox was too ill to receive any application on the
subject. For the second, and last time — so far as any record
remains — he failed.^ In old age he remained, what he had
been at first, a Reformer, and something of a Protectionist,
as is shown by his latest political utterance (already
quoted) when the Corn Bill of 1816 was being discussed.
He died at Longford in the following year, 2d February
1817, and was buried "at St. Clement's Church, Chorlton-
cum-Hardy, Lancashire." It is pleasant to know that his
last years were not embittered by poverty. A private
friend, " Felix Vaughan," who had been one of his counsel
at the trial of 1794, was, in death as in life, faithful to him.
" Had it not been for the noble legacy which his affectionate
friend and defender, Felix Vaughan, left him, he would have
died in poverty. Vaughan bequeathed his fortune to the
wife of Mr. Walker, and then to the wife of his brother
Richard, and this god-send kept the Longford family to-
gether for many years after the death of the first Thomas
Walker." 2
* Blanchard Jerrold, i. 115. ' lb., p. 116.
2r
314 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES,
11.
The lesson of his father's life was perhaps laid to heart
by the second Thomas Walker, the author of " The Original,"
in whose writings (seldom or never professedly political)
there is not to be found the slightest trace of the spirit of
the Manchester Constitutional Society. He was born at
Barlow Hall, on the loth of October 1784, the eldest boy
in a family of six children, three sons and three daughters,
"who were all remarkable for great personal beauty, and
created a sensation when they drove into Manchester in the
family carriage, drawn by four horses, or when they appeared
at the theatre." According to his own statement, he was
a sickly child, whose life was frequently despaired of, and
on this account he was brought up at home. The earliest
glimpse we have of him is at the age of fourteen, in a letter
written, apparently from Lancaster, to his mother, during a
trip in which he accompanied the good friend of the family,
Felix Vaughan, then on circuit. It is the letter of an
intelhgent and lively boy, who thinks Plutarch " one of
the most entertaining books I ever read," and, what is still
more noticeable, he is already a severe critic of provender.
"The fare here," writes Master Tom, cetat 14, "is not of
the best kind. I have my dinners from the inn ; yesterday
I had some st-nk-g trout (I dare not put that word in full
for fear of Miss Walker) and some salmon, which was pretty
good. The butter is very bad, but this morning it was
worse than ever ; however, I managed to eat one piece
with washing it down with tea." Without ever having been
at a public school, he was sent in due time to Trinity Col-
THE TWO THOMAS WALKERS. 315
lege, Cambridge, where he took his degree, and in 181 2 he
was called to the bar at the Inner Temple. He did not
practise much, and this was of less consequence as, in 181 9,
he succeeded to the estate at Longford. With his settle-
ment there he began two classes of experiments, one on
himself, the other on the pauperism of his district. It was
soon after taking possession of Longford that he received
the impression, and came to the resolution, which he thus
chronicled long afterwards for the edification of the readers
of "The Original." "One day," he told them, "when I
had shut myself up in the country, and was reading with
great attention Cicero's treatise, De Oratore, some passage,
I quite forget what, suggested to me the expediency of
making the improvement of my health my study. I rose
from my book, stood bolt upright, and determined to be
well. In pursuance of my resolution, I tried many extremes,
was guilty of many absurdities, and committed many errors,
amidst the remonstrances and ridicule of those around me ;
I persevered, nevertheless, and it is now (1835), ^ beheve,
full sixteen years since I have had any medical advice or
taken anything by way of medicine." His experiments for the
diminution of pauperism began at the same time, and their
character and results are pretty fully described in a pamphlet
which he published in 1826, entitled "Observations on
the Nature, Extent, and Effects of Pauperism, and on the
means of Remedying it." He dealt with the pauperism of
Stretford in accordance with views which he seems to have
embraced very early in life, — views which he was never
wearied of enforcing. Poor-laws he held in abhorrence.
Pauperism Walker believed to be, in nine cases out of ten,
the result of the pauper's own misconduct, fostered by a
legal provision for his support, while the tenth case ought to
be dealt with by private charity. Stretford was then " a
district partly manufacturing but principally agricultural, and
3i6
LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
containing about 2000 acres of land and as many inhabi-
tants." According to his own account, Walker found the
paupers of Stretford banded together to extort as much as
they could from the rates, and practising " all sorts of tricks
and impositions for that purpose." He, however, seems to
have been too much for them. He procured the adoption
" of somewhat the same plan as Mr. Sturges Bourne's Select
Vestry, not then legalised," and began openly a reform by
refusing to admit families to the workhouse. The paupers
tried to outwit him and to weary him out, but in vain. "I
spent almost my whole time," he says, " for some months, in
visiting the labouring classes, — in making myself master of
their habits, in explaining to them the causes of their dis-
tress, and in enforcing, as occasions arose, the doctrines of Mr.
Malthus, which I took care to put in the most familiar and
pointed manner I was able." By degrees he ingratiated
himself with the poor of Stretford, who came to look upon
him, not as a foe, but as a friend and adviser. They
learned to depend more on themselves ; the league of
paupers was broken up, and in three years the amount of
money paid to the poor of the district in outdoor relief sank
from ;^8oo to ;^35o. As to indoor relief, when Walker
ceased from his labours as an amateur poor-law guardian,
the number of inmates of the Stretford Workhouse was
reduced to eight, " viz., six aged persons and two young
women, — one of the latter half idiotic, and the other labour-
ing under severe disease. Three of the old men broke
stones for the road, and the idiotic girl maintained herself.
In fact, a workhouse was become quite unnecessary." After
profiting by four years of this disinterested exertion, grate-
ful Stretford presented him with a testimonial ; and when,
ten years later, he paid the township a casual visit, he
found the impulse which he had given still so successfully
active that, whereas in 181 7 the monthly payments to
THE TWO THOMAS WALKERS. 317
regular poor had been p{^68, they were in 1828 only ^\i,
and that in spite of a great increase of population.
Why or when Walker left Longford for London we are
not told. So early as 1823 he was certainly in communi-
cation on the subject of pauperism and poor-laws with
the second Sir Robert Peel, then Home Secretary, and pos-
sibly his doings and writings recommended him for official
employment. As already said, he published the pamphlet
on pauperism in 1826 (that of 1831 is little more than a
new edition of it), and three years later, in 1S29, Walker
was appointed a stipendiary magistrate in Whitechapel,
then, as now, one of the poorest and most populous districts
of the great metropolis. He became a year or two after-
wards one of the magistrates of the Lambeth Police Office,
the post which he filled till his death. In both offices he
had ample opportunities for revising his rigid view of the
impolicy of a poor law, but he remained faithful to it all
his days, which, be it remembered, were those of the old
not of the new poor law. Nothing more than that he
was a " worthy magistrate " would have been known of
him to the general public, had he not, in the year 1835,
determined on the unmagisterial proceeding of starting a
weekly periodical. On INIay 20, 1835, appeared No. i of
" The Original, by Thomas Walker, M. A., Trinity College,
Cambridge, Barrister-at-Law, and one of the Police Magis-
trates of the Metropolis ; published every Wednesday, at
12 o'clock, price 3d." Walker was his own proprietor, his
own editor, his own contributor, and much of " The
Original " was devoted to himself. Papers on " The Art of
Health," as exemplified by his own experience ; on " The
Art of Dining," similarly illustrated, with extracts from his
diaries of foreign travel, and an occasional criticism, literary
or dramatic, constituted the lighter portions of the fare which
he offered weekly to his readers. The piece de resistance
3lS LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
consisted of disquisitions on local self-government, and on
those, to him, inexhaustible and ever-interesting themes,
pauperism and the poor laws. The little sheets seem to
have taken amazingly, from the writer's good sense, know-
ledge of man and of the world, as well as pleasant and gos-
siping egotism. It was impossible not to court the further
acquaintance of a writer on the art of living, who was able to
report that by care he had brought himself into such a condi-
tion of glowing health that he could not look dirty if he tried.
" By way of experiment," he confided to his readers, " I did
not wash my face for a week, nor did any one see, nor I feel
any difference." The papers on the art of dining are full of
racy instruction as well as of a delightful gusto. Let one
specimen suffice : — " I now wish," he says, " to add about
a page, and, as like other people, I suppose I can write
more easily about what is freshest in my mind, I will give
you, dear reader, an account of a dinner I have ordered this
very day at Lovegrove's, at Blackwall, where, if you never
dined, so much the worse for you. This account will serve
as an illustration of my doctrine on dinner-giving better
than a long abstract discourse. The party will consist of
.seven men beside myself, and every guest is asked for some
reason, upon which good fellowship mainly depends ; for
people brought together unconnectedly had, in my opinion,
better be kept separate. Eight I hold to be the golden
number, never to be exceeded without weakening the effi-
cacy of concentration. The dinner is to consist of turtle,
followed by no other fish but white-bait, which is to be
followed by no other meat but grouse, which are to be suc-
ceeded simply by apple fritters and jelly, — pastry on such
occasions being quite out of place. With the turtle, of
course, there will be punch, with the white-bait, champagne,
and with the grouse, claret ; the two former I have ordered
to be particularly well iced, and they will all be placed in sue-
THE TWO THOMAS WALKERS. 319
cession upon tlie table, so that we can help ourselves as we
please. I shall permit no other wines, unless, perchance, a
bottle or two of port, if particularly wanted, as I hold variety
of wines a great mistake. With respect to the adjuncts, I
shall take care there is cayenne, with lemons cut in halves,
not in quarters, within reach of every one, for the turtle,
and that brown bread and butter in abundance is set upon
the table for the white-bait. It is no trouble to think of
these little matters beforehand, but they make a vast differ-
ence in convivial contentment. The dinner will be followed
by ices, and a good dessert, after which coffee and one glass
of liqueur each, and no more ; so that the present may be
enjoyed rationally without inducing retrospective regrets.
If the master of a feast wishes his party to succeed, he must
know how to command, and not let his guests run riot, each
according to his own wild fancy. Such, reader, is my idea
of a dinner, of which, I hope, you approve ; and I cannot
help thinking that if Parliament were to grant me ^^i 0,000
a year, in trust, to entertain a series of worthy persons, it
would promote trade, and increase the revenue more than any
hugger-mugger measure ever devised." Clearly the mantle of
his father, the political reformer, had not fallen on the
magisterial bon vivant of the Lambeth Police Office.
It does jar a little, perhaps, upon the nerves of the reader
of sensibility, when turning the page after such a passage as
that just quoted, he comes upon a vigorous denunciation of
a legal provision for pauperism, and of the impostures and
worthlessness of paupers. Our own copy of " The Original "
teems with such marginal notes as " hard-hearted brute ! " the
handiwork of a previous philanthropic and anti-Malthusian
owner and commentator. Yet it was for the sake of the
poor themselves, especially of the industrious and self-
reliant poor, robbed and liable to be degraded by the pro-
fessional and hereditary pauper, that Walker declared him-
320 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
self an enemy of the old system of indiscriminate poor-law
relief. Nor was his own plan of dealing with the poor one
at all consistent with a lazy indifference on the part of the
rich. On the contrary, his notion of local self-goverment,
including the management of the poor, was based on the
active exertion of many more persons than troubled them-
selves then, or, in truth, trouble themselves now, about the
administration of local affairs. Walker recommended a sub-
division of the kingdom into comparatively small districts,
with a sufficient number of local managers in each, instead
of the old or present system of parishes, often huge and
unwieldy, where the guardians or other authorities cannot
possibly overtake or feel a personal or local interest in the
business of the district. At the same time, he suggested
that to allure the able and ambitious to take part in
the management of local affairs, a much wider authority
should be given the local functionaries than they possessed
in his time or possess at present, when it was and is only
some fraction of administration that is committed to any
one body. With more manageable areas of local adminis-
tration, and greater power entrusted to the local function-
aries. Walker urged that the best class of men would be
attracted to the conduct of local affairs. He even suggested
proved local usefulness as a better stepping-stone than
any other to a parliamentary life, and looked forward to a
time when " representation might be the extraction of the
choicest of the land." The worthy magistrate does not
forget among the attractions to be held out to the local
authorities of the future, entertainments at the public ex-
pense, but " in refined moderation and with simple refresh-
ments, particularly ivith suppers to induce occasional inspection
of the parish at tmcertain hours of the night, — a regulation
I ktiotv to be of the greatest efficacy"
"The Original" had gone on successfully for more than
THE TWO THOMAS WALKERS. 32 1
six months, when its editor, proprietor, and solitary contri-
butor announced, in the number for the 2d of December,
1835, his intention of suspending it "till the first Wed-
nesday in March." *' London living and authorship," he
informed his readers in his usual confidential way, " do
not go on well together. My writings," he added, " have
latterly drawn upon me more numerous and cordial invita-
tions than usual, which is a gratifying sign of approbation,
but of somewhat ruinous consequences. Conviviality,
though without what is ordinarily called excess, during the
greater part of the week, and hard fagging during the re-
mainder, with a sacrifice of exercise and sleep, must tell ;
and if I was to go on without intermission I must make
myself a slave, with at the same time great danger of falling
off." No other number of " The Original " appeared.
Before the 2d of March, fixed for the resumption of his
periodical. Walker was in his grave. He died suddenly ot
pulmonary apoplexy, at Brussels, on the 20th of January
1836, at the age of fifty-two. In the pride of his later
health and self-acquired strength, Walker professed to fear
for the constitution of his brother Charles, who survived
him, however, for many years, and died recently at Man-
chester, much respected and regretted, in extreme old age.
For some days before Thomas Walker's death, he had, as
usual, when absent from home on a holiday, been visiting
gaols and houses of detention to increase his knowledge of
prison discipline, respecting which, characteristically, he
held the penal and deterrent rather than the reformatory
view.
There are works of far greater didactic pretensions and
fame than " The Original," which are much inferior to it in
wisdom, and it is no small praise to say of it that its con-
tents do not belie its title. After a period of comparative
neglect, its first popularity seems to be in some measure
•1 s
322 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
reviving, and two new editions of it have been published
within the last few years, one of them prefaced by memoirs
of the two Walkers (from family papers), of which ample use
has been made in this sketch. Very probably, Walker's
pamphleteering and other labours contributed to the much-
needed amendment of the old poor-law. In spite, too,
of occasional eccentricities of treatment, his expositions
of the value of good local administration are sound and
sensible, and deserve to have attention pointed to them at
a time and in a country when and where an exaggerated
importance is still attached to what is called "Imperial"
legislation and the possession of a seat in the House of
Commons. With every year Parliament does less and talks
more. How to attract the best men to the work of local
administration, ever increasing as it is in amount and im-
portance, is a problem for the solution of which Walker's
disquisitions may still be usefully consulted.
XIV.
MARIA JANE JE WSB UR Y.
THE gifted lady who died Mrs. W. K. Fletcher, but
who was better known and is better remembered
under her maiden name, was born on the 25th of October
1800, the eldest child of a large family. At the time of her
birth, her father was engaged in the cotton manufacture,
which he had learned from the first Sir Robert Peel. Her
mother was a clever, bright, and, for those days, an accom-
plished woman, graceful, refined, of cultivated artistic taste
and skill, and an excellent housewife withal. Their eldest
daughter was sent betimes to a country boarding-school,
but a severe attack of fever compelled her parents to re-
move her at fourteen, and the rest of her education was
given her chiefly by herself. Some other instruction, how-
ever, she received at home, as is testified by this reminis-
cence of one who taught her, seemingly after her return
from school : —
"I found her rather backward as to solid information, and as to
the well grounding and the disciplining of the mind for study, or for
accuracy of reflection or discriminating judgment, but the imaginative
and inventive powers lively, and, as I afterwards learned from herself,
in continual exercise ; for, unknown to her parents, she used to sit up
in her chamber in light evenings or early mornings to indulge in reveries,
and in compositions of a kind to give scope for those qualities. Among
324 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
these, I believe, were a few small poems, the fragment of a play, and
one or two short sketches of tales or novels. By this habit she rather
injured her health, and enfeebled the powers of her mind ; but, being soon
convinced of her error after she had communicated the circumstance
to me, I believe she entirely discontinued the practice, and never rose
before five or six in the morning. For a considerable time the patient
application of her mind to the quiet matter-of-fact studies of grammar,
right reasoning, and history was irksome to her ; but her good sense
and desire for improvement convinced her of the necessity, and she
certainly used every exertion to compel her mind to forego its appetite
for high-seasoned and effervescing aliment, if I may so term it."
" I was nine years old," she herself afterwards recorded,
■■'when the ambition of writing a book, being praised
publicly, and associating with authors, seized me as a
vague longing." But her early circumstances were not
favourable to the gratification of any of these desires. The
Staffordshire village of Measham, where she was born and
spent most of her girlhood, was one of the dullest of places,
and her chief companions, out of her family circle, were
a few books and her own thoughts. Nor, as regarded self-
culture and society, were matters greatly mended when, at
the age of nineteen, she removed with her parents to Man-
chester, a change of residence due to losses which at that
time ot general couuiieiciai ueprcbbiun licr lailier had sus-
tained in business and otherwise. Manchester was a much
more stirring place than Measham ; it offered libraries and
cultivated society. But heavy domestic duties were soon
imposed — to some extent they were self-imposed — on the
ardent and aspiring maiden of nineteen. Soon after the arri-
val of the Jewsbury family in the town, with which some of
its members have ever since been pleasantly identified, the
mother died, leaving a baby of a month old and six other
children, of whom, as already said, the future authoress was
the eldest. Of the sons, two were youths of sixteen and
seventeen, but the rest almost formed a second family, there
being a difference of many years between the eldest of the
MARIA JANE JEWSDURY. 325
younger group and the youngest of the older one. To the care
and education of these younger children, the eldest of them
being a girl of six,^ Miss Jewsbury, herself only nineteen,
devoted all her time, thought, and energies. She had, also,
to be the counsellor as well as the companion of her father,
and, hardest task of all, to struggle with the difficulties
presented by a large household and a small income. It
was a trying position, the more trying that she never re-
covered from the effects of her early illness, and her health
was always delicate. Her own tastes and aspirations, too,
had for a time at least to be sacrificed. Some of those who
knew her then have recorded their wondering admiration of
what a strong sense of duty enabled her to do and to suffer.
After a year or two, however, Miss Jewsbury succeeded
in snatching a little time for self-culture. She repaired her
neglected education by hard study ; and reading much, she
began to write a little. The poetry of Wordsworth opened
up to her a new and welcome region of thought and feeling,
and at this time, apparently, she addressed him a letter,
which resulted in the establishment of a correspondence
between the poet-philosopher of Rydal and his fair Man-
chester admirer. At last, loo, came an opening into that
world of authorship, to be a denizen of which had been one
of the dreams of her childhood. In 1824, Mr. Alaric A.
Watts, then a young man of five-and-twenty, returned to
Manchester to undertake the editorship of the newly-
established Mmichestcr Courier. Mr. Aston, the Editor of
the Ma7ichester Gazette, was an acquaintance of her father's,
and had published a little of her poetry in his paper.
He now introduced her to Mr. Watts and his wife, the latter
a sister of Wiffen the translator of Tasso and historian of
the House of Russell. Mr. Watts soon recognised Miss
Jewsbury's intellectual gifts. Very possibly she practically
' The present Miss (Geraldine) Jewsbur}'.
326 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
confirmed his impression of them by contributions to
the Courier or to the Literary Souvenir, an annual which he
was also then editing. In any case, it was through the kind-
ness of this editorial friend that an arrangement was made
with a London publishing firm for an original work from her
pen, to consist of poems, tales, sketches, essays, criticisms,
and on what, for an altogether unknown author, were con-
sidered liberal terms. The glowing visions of girlhood
could now be realised. The young authoress set to work
full of hope and confidence, and in 1825 appeared, modestly
anonymous, two volumes of " Phantasmagoria, or Sketches
of Life and Literature." The contents were marked by
a wide range of thought and feeling, and by a combina-
tion of the poetic with the playful, of seriousness and
sentiment with satire. There is a freshness and brightness
in the volumes that make them pleasant reading even now.
Domestic cares and worries had not destroyed a natural
buoyancy of spirit, and her first work is full of cheerful
vivacity. One great pleasure which the authoress herself
derived from its appearance was, that she was thus enabled
to give public expression to her admiration of Wordsworth,
whose poetic greatness was not then generally recog-
nised, and to whom " Phantasmagoria " was dedicated in
graceful and grateful verse. The dedication led to a per-
sonal acquaintance with the poet and his family, and this
ripened into an intimacy which ended only with Miss
Jewsbury's life. During a visit paid by her to Rydal,
Christopher North caught a glimpse of her in the company
of her poetic guide, philosopher, and friend, and he has
recorded it in the Nodes AmhrosimicR. The whole of the
passage is worth giving as a testimony to the literary repu-
tation which she had acquired in four years after the pub-
lication of "Phantasmagoria." The Nox is one of the
March of 1829. Christopher and the Shepherd are planning
MARIA JANE JEWSBURY. 327
a banquet at which female as well as male genius is to be
present, and in the course of the dialogue the Shepherd
puts the question : —
"But wunna you ask Miss Jewsbury to the first male and female
Noctes? She is really a maist superior lassie.
A^orth. Both in prose and verse. Her ' Phantasmagoria,' two mis-
cellaneous volumes, teem with promise and performance. Always
acute and never coarse.
Shepherd. Qualities seldom separable in a woman. See Leddy
Morgan.
North. But Miss Jewsbury is an agreeable exception. Always
acute and never coarse, this amiable and most ingenious young lady.
Shepherd. Is she bonny ?
North. I believe she is, James. But I do not pretend to be positive
on that point, for the only time I ever had the pleasure of seeing Miss
Jewsbury, it was but for a momentary glance among the mountains.
Mounted on a pretty pony, in a pretty rural straw hat, and pretty rural
riding-habit, with the sunshine of a cloudless heaven blended in her
countenance with that of her own cloudless soul, the young author of
'Phantasmagoria' rode smilingly along a beautiful vale, with the illus-
trious Wordsworth, whom she venerates, at her side, and pouring out
poetry in that glorious recitative of his, till the vale was overflowing
with the sound. Wha, Jamie, wouldna ha' looked bonny in sic a pre-
dicament? "
"Phantasmagoria" seems to have been successful, and
from the time of its publication Miss Jewsbury followed
Literature as a profession, more or less. Early in her new
career, however, her health broke down again under the
double pressure of domestic and literary labour. It was
partly, and only partly, restored by a visit to Leaming-
ton, and the medical treatment there of the famous phy-
sician. Dr. Jephson. During her slow convalescence she
wrote at Leamington her " Letters to the Young," published
in 1828, and which, she said, in a prefatory notice,
" comprise a real and not fictitious correspondence." Ill-
ness had evidently deepened her religious impressions, and
the tone of the letters is uniformly serious and devout.
The little volume becoming at once popular with the
328 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
religious world, went quickly through several editions, and
is still, it seems, cherished by the class of readers for whom
it was written. Seriousness, not to say sadness, pervades,
too, her "Lays of Leisure Hours," published in 1829, and
dedicated to Mrs. Hemans. The dedication is, it says,
" in remembrance of the summer passed in her society,"
the summer of 1828, after the visit to Leamington. Miss
Jewsbury and Mrs. Hemans had corresponded for some
years previously, and the junior had introduced her senior
to the poetry of Wordsworth. But it was not until this
summer that they met. On her return to Rhyllon, near St.
Asapli, at the end of July, Mrs. Hemans found Miss Jews-
bury domiciled in a cottage not far off her own abode.
"The place," says the affectionate sister and enthusiastic biographer
of Mrs. Hemans, "was as little attractive as a cottage in Wales could
well be ; but it possessed the advantage of being not more than half
a mile from Rhyllon, and it had its little garden, and its roses
and its green turf, and pure air ; and these, to an inhabitant of
Manchester, which Miss Jewsbury then was, were things of health and
enjoyment. Thither then she repaired, with the young sister and
brothers to whom she had long and well performed the duties of a
mother ; and there Mrs. Hemans found her established. ... It was
scarcely possible to imagine two individual natures more strikingly con-
trasted : the one" — Mrs. Hemans — "so entirely feminine, so suscep-
tible and imaginative, so devoted to the tender and the beautiful ; the
other endowed with masculine energies, with a spirit that seemed born
for ascendancy, with strong powers of reasoning, fathomless profundity
of thoughts and feelings like those of her own Julia" — of whom more
anon — " 'flashing forth at intervals with sudden and Vesuvian splen-
dour, making the beholder aware of depths beyond his vision.' . . .
She came into Wales, indeed, completely as an invalid, but was soon
sufficiently recruited to enter with full enjoyment into all the novelties
around her" — in spite of the aforesaid "fathomless profundity of
thought" and other rather alarming characteristics — "to pass long
mornings in the dingle, to take distant rides on her donkey, surrounded
by a troop of juvenile knights-errant, and to hold levees in the tent she
had contrived as a temporary addition to her tiny dwelling, whose wicket
gate can now never be passed by those still left to remember the converse
of those bright liours, without a gusli of mournful recollections."
MARIA JANE JEWSBURY. 329
From 1825 onwards, Miss Jewsbury had also been
contributing frequently to the Annuals of that day and
generation, and to the AthencBum, from the time when it
passed into the hands of Mr. Dilke, who became its editor
as well as its proprietor. Occasionally, moreover, she
seems to have visited London, and to have mixed in its
literary society. It is possible that in the social whirl of
London, so striking a woman, and one whose conversation
was so vivid, may have been visited by transient impulses
of social ambition, alternating with that contempt for such
aspirations which philosophy, religion, and sharp feminine
insight into character could scarcely fail to engender
in reflective moods and moments. If there was in Miss
Jewsbury's mind and heart any conflict of the kind, it
ended as became the disciple of Wordsworth and the writer
of the "Letters to the Young." Some traces of the
struggle may perhaps be discovered in the latest of her
completed works, " The Three Histories," published appar-
ently about 1 83 1. These are imaginary biographies of an
Enthusiast, a Nonchalant, and a Realist, and they proved
that her mind had recovered its balance, and that while
still earnest and reflective, she could pass from the grave
and serious to the gay and the satiric. In her sketch of
the character and career of Julia, the Enthusiast, ardent,
ambitious, impulsive, and impetuous, Miss Jewsbury un-
doubtedly worked up some memories and impressions
of her early life; whether it should be regarded as em-
bodying any passing moods of her later self cannot be
determined. But while Julia, disappointed and solitary,
is left to roam about the world in wayward idleness, the
purposes and destiny of the authoress are expressed and
foreshadowed in the happier finale of the heroine's successful
rival for the love and hand of the hero. He accepts a
chaplaincy in India, that he may aid in the missionary work
•1 T
330 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
proceeding there, and she accompanies her husband to
the far East. When Miss Jewsbury finished the com-
position of the "■ Three Histories," her mind was doubtless
made up. After the pubUcation of the tale, thus distinctly
indicating her own setded resolve, she married, in 1832
(being of the same age as the century), the Rev. William
Kew Fletcher, a Chaplain in the then East India Company's
service. The husband was in every way worthy of her, and of
his excellence and earnestness, his urbanity and amiability,
his surviving friends still speak with regretful admiration.
They were married at Penegoes in Montgomeryshire, on
the ist of August 1832, in " a little quiet church among the
Welsh mountains," the ceremony being performed by the
vicar, the husband of Mrs. Hemans's sister and biographer,
whose happy home Penegoes then was. In the September
the newly-wedded pair sailed for India, whence the wife
was never to return.
The writer of this sketch has been favoured with a peru-
sal of Mrs. Fletcher's MS. Journal of her voyage to and
residence in India. It is full of the results of a vivid and
sympathetic observation of the novel aspects under which
Nature was now presented to her, and of the practical good
sense which, born with her, had been developed by the
training of her earlier womanhood. She enjoyed the
voyage, during which she made and chronicled lively and
shrewd remarks on life at sea, and was, as might be expected
from a woman of her poetic temperament, greatly im-
pressed by the grandeur of Ocean in movement and repose.
The Fletchers landed at Bombay in the March of 1833.
Mr. Fletcher had been " gazetted " to Sholapore, but for
some reason or other he proceeded to Kurnee, on the
Malabar Coast, near Severndroog, once the scene of a
famous English naval victory, and where his peculiar charge
was to be that of " the society in camp at Dapoolie," and
MARIA JANE JEWSBURY. 33 1
then the head- quarters of Anglo-Indian military invalids.
The Chaplain and his wife reached their destination a few
weeks after the landing at Bombay, and on the 24th of April
the English lady, half-crying, half-smiling, thus diarizes her
impressions of India, and of her new, strange home : —
" Here is an interregnum ! I have debated the matter long, and I
now think I shall tell it by speaking the truth, since granting my im-
pressions of this date wrong, I can correct them in a future one. Well,
then, the interregnum has been spent in conjugating the verb "I hate
India," in every mood, form, tense, and person, in lavishing so much
good abuse upon it that either it, or I, are very bad. That the fit is
somewhat passed is proved by my setting pen to paper again — but to
my retrospect. We remained in Bombay, alias biscuit-oven, alias
brick-kiln, alias burning Eabel, alias Pandemonium, alias everything
hot, horrid, glaring, barren, dissonant, and detestable, till the morning
of the 27th March, when, in a very melancholy state both of mind and
body, I was put on board the Pattamar, or country vessel, hired to take
us and our households to this place We anchored off
Sevemdroog at one in the morning, and at seven I was carried in my
palanquin to the Travellers' Bungalow, and in the morning slept in our
pitched tents, with an enormous banyan tree spreading its green arms
over us ; my old friend the sea rolling and roaring past in front, and on
two sides forts and rocks, black and barren ; to the back, one or two
European houses scattered about My first ride was a
melancholy one, reminding me of Milton's lines : —
' The lonely mountains o'er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament.
" The sea-side (except in a watering-place, is always one of Nature's
solemn shrines, and the route I took lay along that part which is scat-
tered over with tombs, Moorish, Catholic, Protestant, Hindoo, the dead
of many creeds, the sleepers after many sorrows, the graves varying
from square solid structures of granite to single slabs with head and foot
stones, and pillars surmounted by crosses. But only the Europeans
have inscriptions, and after turning from the massy Mahometan struc-
ture, with its white flag placed in a tree over it, or looking in an open
shed at a coarse image of some Hindoo god, it is painfully touciiing to
read an English inscription, ' To the beloved wife of so and so, aged
18' — a fact of common occurrence in this land of death. The first
night I felt and saw only the better part of all this ; and as one inevit-
332
LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
ably is most disposed to wish for death when least in the state to be fit
for such a change, I believe I
' Wished to be with them and at rest.'
To use a terribly graphic expression that I once heard Mr. Fletcher apply
to some one, I was 'drunk with discontent.' I could see nothing
but in the black aspect of desolation." . , . But things and moods had
mended a little before the poor lady sat down to her Diary. " I now
often ride on this part of the shore, and the blackened tombs, almost
washed by the rolling tides, looked down upon by high barren hills —
no shrub or flower about them, nothing but salt, sand, sea-shells, and
wild onions — now strike me as picturesque."
The aspects of man in that desolate region were as unat-
tractive as those of nature, though at last Mrs. Fletcher
grew almost reconciled to those as to these. The popula-
tion about her was mostly one of poverty-stricken and
crouching ryots, given over to a debased and debasing
idolatry, in which the most cosmic philosopher could
discover nothing good, and which appeared inexpressibly
repulsive and shocking to a cultivated and devout Christian
gentlewoman. How to reach the benighted native mind,
how to break down the barriers interposed by immemorial
custom between the native and the European, was a problem
that much perplexed Mrs. Fletcher, as it has perplexed
— ^before and since — many other Anglo-Indian well-wishers
to the Hindoo. "I declare," she exclaims once, "if
I had, which I have not, the spirit of a missionary, I
should be utterly at a loss how to set about teaching these
people." Meanwhile she tried to win her way into their
confidence, beginning with the children, who appreciated
little gifts and kindnesses. In the intervals of his direct
professional engagements, the husband was learning
Mahratta to enable him to hold converse with the natives.
And both took little trips into the country behind their
tented home, visiting temples, becoming guests at native
entertainments, and otherwise trying to familiarise them-
MARIA JANE JEWSDURY. 333
selves with the people among whom their lot seemed to be
cast. Scarcely two months after her " I hate India," Mrs.
Fletcher diarizes thus cheerfully and rationally.
" Setting aside the terrible trial of first encountering the climate, I
now perceive that the great cause of my utter wretchedness on first
settling down in India arose from disappointment in not finding Eng-
lish pleasures, English habits, and English conversation, or rather
conversation about English things. Much of our unhappiness arose
from being unreasonable ; just as much as my present reconciliation to
the country is attributed to my having consented to judge it by itself,
and require from it interests of its own growth. Figs, I find, will only
grow on fig-trees. It is only England that can be English ; India must
be Indian. Therefore, throwing aside as much as may be all pinings
after what is 15,000 miles off, and throwin;; myself as much as possible
into the scenes and occurrences round one, striving to observe and
understand them, I do find the remark verified that ' India has plea-
sures of its own.' To Bombay, or to a station possessing what is
called a large society, I should never grow reconciled, but a situation
that many would call banishment is to me absolutely interesting. I
believe there is something in me either of the wild ass or the wild Arab,
for our tents and our camp furniture {Anglid, three cups and saucers,
with a similar proportion of plates and dishes) I prefer to what is
termed 'a regular establishment.'"
'-&"'
Just, however, when the Fletchers were growing used
and even attached to Kurnee, they were ordered off to their
original destination, Sholapore. Mrs. Fletcher regretted
the change, since, though with her customary dislike for
communities or groups of Anglo-Indians, she never even
visited Dapoolie, yet she had formed some friendships
at Kurnee, and tears flowed on both sides when she
mounted the " palanquin dressed as a bed " that bore her
away from that barren, barren shore. At the beginning of
May (1833) they were at Mahabuleshwar,the " Montpellier of
Bombay," and soon on the march again towards Sattara, a
place with the name of which the English public became
afterwards wearisomely familiar. The life of palanquin by
day and of tent by night seems to have exhilarated Mrs.
334 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Fletcher, and her some-time silent muse burst forth into
cheerful song, as in these verses beginning —
" Ay, up with the tent-pegs,
And down with each wall,
'Tis evening, 'tis sunset,
March forward, march all !
" Very fair was this shelter.
With tank and with tree,
I leave it my blessing.
Yet leave it with glee.
" The bullocks are laden.
And pleasantly ring
Their bells, as their patient heads
To and fro swing.
" And yonder the Coolies
In dark groups defile.
Human bearers of burdens
For long mile and mile."
A pleasant and an India-suggested chaunt, not one inspired
by sentimental or sorrowful reminiscence of home and
England.
Sattara was reached on the 6th of May, and after a
month's repose at the Residency, the march began again.
On the loth of June the travellers were at "Mussoor-
Peloune " (?), where the Journal contains the ominous jot-
ting : — " I had an attack of semi-semi cholera, only demi-
semi." Still more ominous are the two entries made in
the Journal at Sholapore, divided as they are by an interval
of three months. The destination of the travellers, or
what they thought to be their destination, was reached on
the 17th of June, and this is a part of the day's dismal
record : — " Entered, to breakfast — heart sinking lower every
step. . . , drought — famine sweeping off the natives — a
people of skeletons — a land that looks covered with the
curses of Jeremiah and Ezekiel." The next entry is dated
"Sholapore, September i6th," and runs thus : — "An inter-
MARIA JANE JEWSBURY. 335
regnum of three months ; how spent few words may tell.
Fever — sadness — discontent — workmen — bungalow made
comfortable — charity for natives instituted by Mr. Fletcher
— the dart of death shaken over him—stvtn weeks' struggle
— climate pronounced the cause — medical certificate —
journey to Kurnee sanctioned — preparations for another
journey." " On march " is the next entry — " Babelgaum (?),
September 26, 1833" — and it shall be quoted as the poor
lady's very last : —
"I remember when about sixteen (an age when one generally likes
finery of all kinds), thinking these two lines of poor Kirke White
very fine : —
' Once more, and yet once more,
I give unto my harp a dark-woven lay."
(( '
'I commence with them a new journal-book and a new journey.
Our three months at Sholapore seems nothing but a hurried dream,
and coming this morning over the very ground when going to it,
merely with this difference, that the earth was then one dust, and is
now, owing to the monsoon, one mud, I felt emphatically a stranger
— a pilgrim, at least. The novelty, too, is gone off travelling ; except
we go Dak (having Hamals posted, so as to proceed without stopping),
I feel as if travelling through a country known to me from childhood.
The draperied women, carrying water vessels on their shoulders, and
having rings in their noses, are no longer strange ; and the brown and
half-naked artizan fills up his village-place, in my eye, as the black-
smith, and baker, and cobbler in England. This, a fresh Durma
villa — where we have halted to take a very primitive breakfast— no
longer excites or shocks me by its stone images, its monkey god, and
elephant god and gods. ... I enjoy this rough marching without
servants, your materials for a hasty meal hanging to your palanquin,
better than the train of baggage when you march with tent and by
stages. The monsoon not being over, the roads are often mid-leg deep
in mud. The nullahs are often swimmablc. The rivers are full, and
extra palanquin-bearers are needed to meet the extra exertion. We
have thirty-two for our two palanquins ; they are to carry us the
remainder of forty miles before ten to-night. We left Sholapore about
one this morning. What marvellous animals these natives are ! The
Hammal branch, especially stupid, slow, tiresome about other things,
but walking a distance with a load over roads that no stout English
beef-eater dare look at.
336 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
" One new feature in this journey is a new companion, though an
old pet, in the shape of a superb China cockatoo."
And here the record abruptly ends. " More," adds the
hand of the sorrowing husband, "my beloved one never
wrote. Eight days after this the spirit became a glorified
saint." Scarcely seven months had elapsed since the
landing at Bombay when — on the 4th of October 1833 —
Mrs. Fletcher died, of cholera, at Poonah, and there she
was buried.
News from India travelled slowly in those days, and,
Mrs. Hemans, according to her biographer, did not receive
the sad intelligence until the summer of 1834.
"I was indeed," she wrote to some one who belonged both to Mrs,
Fletcher's and to Wordsworth's circle, "deeply and permanently
affected by the untimely fate of one so gifted and so affectionately
loving as our poor lost friend. It hung the more solemnly upon
my spirits, as the subject of death and the mighty future had so many,
many times been that of our most confidential communion. How
much deeper power seemed to lie coiled up, as it were, in the recesses
of her mind than was ever manifested to the world in her writings !
Strange and sad does it seem that only the broken music of such a
spirit should have been given to the earth — the full and finished har-
mony never drawn forth. Yet I would rather a thousand times that
she should have perished thus in the path of her chosen duties, than have
seen her become the merely brilliant creature of London literary life, at
once the queen and slave of some heartless coterie, living upon those
poor succ^s de sociite, which I think utterly ruinous to all that is lofty,
and holy, and delicate in the nature of a highly-endowed woman. I
put on mourning for her with a deep feeling of sadness, I never
expected to meet her again in this life, but there was a strong chain of
interest between us, that spell of mind ott mhid, which, once formed,
can never be broken. I felt, too, that my whole nature was under-
stood and appreciated by her, and this is a sort of happiness which I
consider the most rare in all earthly affection. Those who feel and
think deeply, whatever playfulness of manner may brighten the surface
of their character, are fully unsealed to very few indeed, '
Then follows this touching episode of Mrs. Fletcher's
last stay at Sholapore, only a few weeks before her death,
MARIA JANE JEWSBVRY. 337
during the famine, to which a brief, sad reference in her
Diary has been already quoted : —
"Will you tell Mr. Wordsworth this anecdote of poor Mrs. Fletcher?
I am sure it will interest him. During the time that the famine in the
Deccan was raging, she heard that a poor Hindoo had been found
lying dead in one of the temples at the foot of an idol, and with a
female child, still living, in his arms. She and her husband immedi-
ately repaired to the spot, took the poor little orphan away with them,
and conveyed it to their own home. She tended it assiduously, and one
of her last cares was to have it placed at a female missionarj' school, to
be brought up as a Christian." ^
Wordsworth no doubt received, and was touched by,
this anecdote of Mrs. Fletcher's last days. He himself
has left a record, both in prose and verse, of his admira-
tion and friendship for her. The whole of his poem of
"Liberty" (dated 1829) is addressed to her. It turns
upon the transfer of some gold and silver fish (apos-
trophised in a previous poem) from their glass globe
indoors to a pond in the grounds of Rydal Mount.
There is a reference to Cowley, " the tried servant of a
thankless Court," seeking in old age true liberty; "to
you," — the muses, —
"The remnant of his days at least was true."
The poet then proceeds : —
" Far happier they who, fixing hope and aim
On the humanities of peaceful fame,
Enter betimes with more than martial fire
The generous course, aspire and still aspire ;
Upheld by warnings, heeded not too late,
Stifle the contradictions of their fate,
And to one purpose cleave, their Being's god-like mate.
" Thus, gifted Friend, but with the placid brow
That woman ne'er should forfeit, keep thy vow ;
^ Memoir of Mrs. Hemans, by her Sister, p. 276.
2u
338 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
With modest scorn reject whate'er would blind
The ethereal eyesight, cramp the winged mind.
Then with a blessing granted from above
To every act, word, thought, and look of love.
Life's book for thee may lie unclosed, till age
Shall with a thankful tear bedrop its latest page."
In a note, Wordsworth adds : —
"There is now, alas ! no possibility of the anticipation, with which
the above epistle concludes, being realised ; nor were the verses ever
seen by the individual for whom they were intended. She accom-
panied her husband, the Rev. William Fletcher, to India, and died of
cholera, at the age of 32 or 33 years, on her way from Sholapore to
Bombay, deeply lamented by all who knew her. Her enthusiasm was
ardent, her piety steadfast, and her great talents would have enabled
her to be eminently useful in the difficult part of life to which she had
been called. The opinion she entertained of her own performances,
given to the world under her maiden name, Jewsbury, was modest and
humble, and indeed far below their merits ; as is often the case with
those who are making trial of their powers, with a hope to discover
what they are best fitted for. In one quality, viz., quickness in the
motions of her mind, she had, within the range of the author's
acquaintance, no equal."
This is high praise from one so little given as Words-
worth was to public acknowledgment of the merits of
his contemporaries. Of Mrs. Fletcher's " modest and
humble " estimate of her own performances, there may be
added the following illustration, in a letter to a friend,
written not long before her departure to India, and
pathetically foreshadowing her approaching end : —
"I have done nothing to live, and what I have done must pass
away with a thousand other blossoms, the growth, the beauty, and
oblivion of a day. The powers which I feel, and of which I have
given promise, may mature, may stamp themselves in act, but the
spirit of despondency is strong upon the future exile, and I fear they
never will.
' I feel the long grass growing o'er my Heart.'
MARIA JANE JEWSBURY. 339
In the best of everything I have done, you will find one leading idea,
Death ; all thoughts, all images, all contrasts of thoughts and images,
are derived from living much in the valley of that shadow."
Mr. Fletcher survived his wife many years, and died of
"malarious Indian fever," at Worthing, in 1867.
XV.
HENRY LIVERSEEGE*
THREE years or so after the birth of Frank Stone at
Manchester, came that of another artist whom
Lancashire may well be proud to have produced. Henry
Liverseege was born there on the 4th September 1803, but
to him was not granted the length of days enjoyed by his
senior, and he died just when his powers were beginning
to be fairly developed and conspicuously recognised.
With his very birth, indeed, he seemed destined to be short-
lived. From his cradle he was sickly and deformed, and an
organic disease of the chest rendered him early a victim to
asthma. It was on this account, it has been said, that, as
he grew in years, a marked dislike for him was evinced by
his father, who was " a joiner and mechanic." The elder
Liverseege has been written of as a coarse-minded and
ill-conditioned man, who saw in the weakly boy a burden
and nothing more. If so, he little thought that he himself
would be remembered, and remembered only, for his
cruelty to a child who should have been cherished all the
* Library of the Fine .^;Yj (London, 1832), vol. iii., "Memoir of the
late Henry Liverseege." Allan Cunningham's Lives of the most eminent
British Painters, &'c. (London, 1833), vol. vi., § Liverseege. The
Works of Henry Liverseege, with a Memoir by George Richardson
(London, 1875).
J
HRXRY LIVERSEEGE. 34 1
more warmly that nature had dealt with him so unkindly.
In after-years, according to one account, Liverseege never
spoke of his father without emotion, and it was emotion in
which gratitude neither found nor deserved to find a place.
But his latest biographer contradicts these statements
emi)hatically. " We are desirous," he says, " to correct a
common impression that the elder Liverseege had an anti-
pathy towards his son. We knew the father well, and the
report is utterly unfounded. The father was a taciturn,
simple, and harmless old man, and proud of his son."
However this may have been, a kind uncle and aunt did
much for the deformed and sickly boy. The good souls seem
almost to have adopted him, and, on finding that he was
unfitted for business, encouraged him to draw and paint,
as soon as it became clear that he was an artist born. The
first glimpse we have of Liverseege is afforded by one of
his early friends, who remembered him " occupying a room
in the mill of his uncle, in Canal Street," reading Shake-
speare with the keenest enjoyment, throwing off, for amuse-
ment, sketches to illustrate his favourite poet, and painting
for profit, miniatures on ivory. When young he was fond,
passionately fond, it seems, of private theatricals, a taste
which harmonised well with the essentially dramatic char-
acter of his genius in art. He did not disdain sign-paint-
ing under special circumstances ; and when the late Mrs.
Fletcher (the Maria Jane Jewsbur}' of the preceding memoir)
wrote a brief biography of him after his death, in 1832, she
recorded that two of his signboards, " a Saracen's Head
and an Ostrich, yet hang up at two obscure public-houses
in Manchester.^ The Ostrich," she added, "is bad, the
"That of the Saracen was the first. It was painted upon a flag
weighing several hundred weight. The owner and, of course, landlord,
Mr. Williams, is still at the same tavern in Rochdale Road, where the
sign may be seen, though it is now inside the house." — Richardson.
342 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES,
Saracen's Head is well done ; and he always spoke of them
with interest." This sign-painting, however, was occasional,
not customary ; and the Saracen's Head, it appears, on
other authority, brought Liverseege ten guineas — a very
fair price for a tavern-sign. In truth, Liverseege's portraits
soon became famous in his native town ; and had he
chosen to devote himself to that branch of art, he need
never have been without profitable employment. But the
spirit of the true painter was strong within the deformed
and sickly young man. Moreover, though affectionate and
even genial to his friends, he had a somewhat peevish and
irritable temper, the result, no doubt, of his physical de-
fects and complaints, and it can easily be imagined that he
grew wearied of the complaisances required from the por-
trait-painter and of the whims and caprices of exacting
sitters. Untaught though he was, he was impelled irresis-
tibly upward to higher regions. His first contribution to
the Manchester Exhibition seems to have consisted of three
small pictures of Banditti, in 1827. They did not easily
find purchasers, and the price given was not a large one.
By and by, however, a picture which he painted of Adam
Woodcock, from Sir Walter's "Abbot," was praised and
purchased by the Earl of Wilton, and then (as is the manner
of this world), a nobleman having led the way, others
began to wonder and admire. His first picture in the
Royal Academy Exhibition was also from a work of Sir
Walter's, "The Black Dwarf" The painting was small,
but graphic and vivid ; the scene chosen is that where the
Recluse unsheathes his dagger on being told by the heroine
of her marriage on the morrow, while Isabella starts in
alarm at the act. It is characteristic of Liverseege's
thoroughness as a painter, that not being able to find a
living model for the Black Dwarf, he made one of clay.
Unpleasing as was the subject of "Isabella and the Recluse,"
HENRY LIVERSEEGE. 343
the talent displayed in the picture was undeniable. Lord
Wilton's verdict was confirmed by connoisseurs, and at five
and twenty or thereabouts, Liverseege found himself "a
rising young man."
To London of course he went, in or about 1827, — though
not to settle, but merely to draw and study for two or
three months in each spring and summer. The kindly and
generous Sir Thomas Lawrence welcomed him and gave
him a letter which, but for some informality in the presen-
tation, would have admitted him a probationer of the
Royal Academy. He drew, however, at the British
Museum, and copied at the British Institution. In copy-
ing the great masters his rapid dexterity was wonderful ;
and of a particular reproduction of Rubens he said to a
friend, with an emphasis which was justified by the merit of
the workmanship : " Sir, they could not tell one from the
other," — the copy from the original. During a visit to
London, he lodged, with Lancashire shrewdness, at a
famous printseller's in the Strand : a choice of residence
which gave him great opportunities for copying prints and
drawings. After each of these visits, he returned to Man-
chester and to the warm home which was always ready for
him under the roof of his uncle and aunt. There he
planned, sketched, and worked. His tendencies and his
ambition may be gathered from a remark which he made
to a friend when standing before Wilkie's " Village Festival,"
in the National Gallery. Liverseege expressed his ardent
desire that some patron of art would give him a commis-
sion to execute a work of the same character as that admir-
able picture. He would be content with a bare subsistence,
he said, while he worked at it, and then he would never paint
more. For landscape he had no turn. To him, human
life, in its infinite variety, was all in all. In treating the
main subject and the accessories, he laboured to attain the
344 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
most scrupulous fidelity. " He never worked upon any
design without having the objects before him in the exact
order in which he wished to represent them." The model
which, when he could find none in real life, he made of
the Black Dwarf has been already mentioned. Another
example of his realism is furnished by the amusing story
which one of his biographers has told. He was to paint
Christopher Sly and the Hostess, from the " Taming of the
Shrew " of his darling Shakespeare, a large one-volume
edition of whom he had always on his table, calling it his
work-day Bible. Liverseege looked about him long before
he could light upon any one fit to sit for the drunken
Christopher. At last he found a cobbler whom he fancied
would suit ; and having seated him in the studio, he placed
a bottle of strong gin before him, saying : " Drink whenever
you please." "The liquor vanished in a short time; the
spirit of the cobbler refused to stir ; he sat as sober as a
judge on the circuit. Another bottle of gin was brought :
it went the same way in course of time, and the son of
Crispin sat as steady as ever. ' Begone,' cried the painter in
a passion, ' it will cost me more money to make you drunk
than the picture will fetch.' "
In 1830, Liverseege contributed to the Society of British
Artists and to the British Institution three pictures, which,
if not the best that ever came from his easel, are amongst
the most characteristic of his works. They were " The
Enquiry," " Cobbett's Register," and "The Recruit."
Allan Cunningham's criticism on all three has the merit
(for our purposes) of brevity ; to " The Enquiry," however,
he scarcely does sufficient justice. It represents, he says,
" a simple country lad with a present of game in his hand,
inquiring his way of a pompous and supercilious porter,
standing at the door of his master's house. There seems
nothing more aimed at than a delineation of a real scene ;
I
HENRY LIVERSEEGE. 345
the swollen turkey-cock air of the one, and the timid awe-
struck simplicity of the other, are happily hit off. Of a
similar character in point of literal delineation from life is
'The Cobbler reading Cobbett's Register.' You see at
once that the son of Crispin is spelling his way, though he
is putting on a look of wondering sagacity. It is a happy
little picture. ' The Recruit ' is another of those natural and
striking things. This is a wonderful performance. Within
that range of subjects nothing has been produced which
surpasses it. The expressive attitude and general air of
the perplexed recruit ; the free and devil-may-care bearing
of the soldier, are admirable and truly depicted, and no less
so the anxious attitude and imploring look of the female.
He has introduced an incident which adds considerably to
the interest of the work : in the background is represented
an old woman watching beside an old, infirm soldier,
whose shattered body and wooden leg tell the story of his
life. The painting is clear and light, and the handling
beautifully free. These three pictures are all the offspring
of the painter's own observation or fancy, and bear upon
them the marks of a mind which studied the workings of
the human heart." Thus far " honest " Allan, always ap-
preciative, always trustworthy. The three pictures were
in the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1S57.
They were exhibited in London, as already said, in 1830.
1 83 1 was the last year of Liverseege's life, and in it some
of the best of his works were produced or made known.
It was in this year that he sent to the Royal Academy
" Sir Percy Shafton " and " Mysie Happer," from Sir
Walter's " Monastery," and " Hamlet and his Mother in
the Closet," from Shakespeare ; to the Exhibition of the
Society of British Artists, " The Grave-diggers " from Ham-
let, " Catherine Seyton " from the Abbot, and a work of
fancy, "The Benedicite or Holy Daughter;" while in the
2x
34^ LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
August of the same year, of new pictures alone, he contri-
buted to the Exhibition of his native city, " Don Quixote
in his Study," and " The Fisherman." The excellence of
almost all of these pictures is considerable, and the very
titles of them show that Liverseege's range was widening.
" The Grave-diggers " and " The Fisherman " belong to
the same class as the " Register " and the " Recruit," but
he rises into a far higher sphere of delineation in the
" Hamlet," which has " all the feeling and poetry of Fuseli,
without his extravagance," and in the " Don Quixote,"
thought to be the best picture he ever painted, with dignity
and magnanimity thrown into the wasted and care-worn
visage, in which the imagination of most painters seems
capable of seeing only the lanthorn-jaws. The rising man
of 1828 had fairly risen in 1830. For the "Recruit"
Liverseege received a hundred and thirty guineas ; his fame
was established in art-circles, and the Duke of Devonshire
was becoming his patron. His stay in London was pro-
tracted longer than usual into the summer of 183 1, because
this nobleman wished to see him. The irritable Liverseege
was growing angry at the delays interposed to the interview,
but it came at last, and he had every reason to be satisfied
with it. The Duke told him (his Grace had bought the
" Mysie Happer " for fifty guineas) that when he had any-
thing to dispose of he would always find a purchaser at
Devonshire House, and great was Liverseege's delight, the
delight of a true artist, to think that works of his might be
hung among those of the old masters which he then and
there inspected in the company of their owner. A proud
and happy man, he returned to Manchester from the last
visit which he was to pay to London.
To his friends, who used to console him with the saying,
"a rickety hinge holds longest together," and even to
himself, his health seemed to have improved and his
HENRY LIVERSEEGE. ZA7
Strength to have increased in the sunshine of prosperity and
recognition. Formerly, when he visited any of his artist-
intimates (David Roberts was one of them), who lived up
two pair of stairs, he had been carried to his destination :
latterly, he could walk some distance without fatigue. But
these were deceitful appearances, delusive preludes to the
fast approaching doom. After his return to Manchester in
1 83 1, he seemed gloomier and more irritable than usual.
He still resided with his uncle and aunt, to whom he was
always grateful and attached, and their care of his health
was aided by his own. Yet a presentiment of what was
coming flitted before him. He spoke of death, and spoke
of it from the point of view of an artist who lived only for
his art. " I care not," he used to say, " for what is called
dying, for I have no enjoyment in life save what is derived
from success in my pursuit ; yet I should not like to die
until I had done some great work to immortalise my name
— to be remembered after death is indeed a great consola-
tion." As winter approached, he was sketching and painting
as earnestly as ever, with Shakespeare, Scott, and Cervantes
beside him, when a lethargic feeling came over him, and
his legs began to swell. The day before his death, he
arranged for the purchase of a pony ; in the evening he
sat before the fire, heavy and dozing. Rousing himself,
he asked the day of the month, and then said to the ever
kind relative who was with him : " Aunt, if anything should
happen to me, take care of all my pencil sketches ; they
will be valuable." Next morning, as he did not seem
astir, his sister went up into his room, and found him
quietly sleeping. A considerable time elapsed ; she re-
turned, and saw him motionless, widi face strangely altered.
The doctor was sent for, and he immediately administered
restoratives. Liverseege just opened his eyes, turned round,
threw his arms across his chest, and died, without the least
348 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
apparent pain or struggle. " In the moment of expiring,"
it is added, '' his countenance was overspread with a dig-
nity and nobleness of expression which astonished every
one present." K\. \\\q post-mortaji examination it was dis-
covered that his left lung, having never been exercised,
had become apiece of solid muscle; the right one had dis-
tended until at last it burst. Liverseege died on the 13th
of January 1832, at the early age of twenty-eiglit. On the
19th, the graveyard of Old St. Luke's, Chorlton-on-Medlock,
received the remains of one who, if longer life had been
granted him, might have ranked among the masters of
the British school of painting. When the new church was
built, the painter's body was exhumed and placed under
pew 51 leading to the chancel. A brass plate records
his resting-place, and at the east end of the chancel there
is a white marble tablet to his memory with a suitable in-
scription.i
In person, Liverseege was below the middle height, and
his left shoulder showed the deformity which was born
with him. His forehead was " ample and serene," his
irritability and peevishness were the result of disease and
malformation, and were seldom visited on his friends,
though even with them he was rather exacting, and com-
plained bitterly if they were any length of time without
coming to see him. His innate disposition was generous
and friendly ; his manner and appearance those of a gentle-
man. In society he was excellent company, lively and
sprightly ; and his greatest delight was to play the host to
a merry set of brother-artists, and to enjoy their enjoyment.
His region of art may not have been the highest, but was
not very far below it. If, with such gifts as his, with his
1 "John Edward Taylor, Esq., of the Manchester Gnardiajt, was
the gentleman who was chiefly instrumental in raising this graceful
tribute to the memory of Henry Liverseege." — Kuhardson.
HENRY LIVERSEEGR. 349
Strong love of improvement, and his purely artistic ambi-
tion, he had been granted the ordinary span of human
life, it is probable that the names of few modern English
painters would have been better known than that of Henry
Liverseege.
XVI.
S/J? JOHN BARRO W*
HALF a mile from the busy little town of Ulverstone,
the capital of Furness (which district of North Lan-
cashire gave birth to Romney the painter), Hes the obscure
village of Dragley Beck. Here still stands, or lately stood,
the little cottage in which John Barrow was born, on the
19th of June 1764. For nearly two centuries his mother's
progenitors had been owners of the cottage which went
with her to her husband, one of the sons of "an extensive
farmer." Some of the brothers occupied large holdings,
but John's father was content to cultivate the few fields
attached to the cottage, and on which grew grain and vege-
tables, with the grass for two or three cows. Fortunately,
however, John was an only child, and the little property
being their own, his parents seem to have been comfort-
able, without pretensions to opulence. Of anything Hke
struggle and hardship in their life and lot there is no men-
tion in the son's autobiography. At eight John was sent to
a small endowed school in the neighbourhood, which was
* An Autobiographical Memoir of Sir John Barrccv, Bart., late of
the Admiralty ; including Reflections, Observations, and Reminiscences
at Home and Abroad, f7vtn early Life to advanced Age (London, 1847).
Gentleman'' s Magazine for January 1S49, &c., &c.
S/A' JOHN BARROW. 35 I
taught by an excellent master and man, the Rev. William
Walker, a son of the Robert Walker, incumbent of Seath-
waite, who brought up eight children on a stipend of jQi 7
a year, and whose long life of beneficence, frugality, in-
dustry, and primitive simplicity, has been commemorated
by Wordsworth, Under Walker the little Barrow remained
for five years, and learned something of the classics, English
as well as ancient. What proved of more use to him, John
also benefited by the lessons of an old gentleman, " a sort
of perambulating instructor," who for three months in the
year taught arithmetic and mathematics in a separate room
of the Town Bank school to all whose parents chose to pay
for these " extras." " From him," says Barrow, " I received
instruction in those branches of mathematics which are
most easily attained under a master, such as algebra,
fluxions, and conic sections. Euclid needed no master," —
a statement which shows the boy's strong bent for mathe-
matical study.
The knowledge thus acquired was soon and unexpectedly
turned to practical account. The agent of a neighbouring
landed proprietor asked the master of the Town Bank
school to recommend him two competent pupils to assist
him in making a survey of an extensive estate near Ulver-
stone. Walker recommended his own nephew and young
Barrow. They entered upon their task, and while perform-
ing it Barrow derived what he calls " incalculable benefit "
from the lessons in land-surveying received under skilful
superintendence, and from a practical knowledge of the
theodolite and the other mathematical instruments of his
immediate employer. A certain good fortune, indeed, seems
to have accompanied Barrow through life ; and whatever he
learned or did, proved, sooner or later, useful to him when
he least expected it. The almost accidental study of
astronomy, to which he devoted some of his time on leaving
352 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
school, turned out, long afterwards, an important aid in his
career. " Five or six of the upper boys agreed to subscribe
for the purpose of purchasing a celestial globe, and also a
map of the heavens, which were lodged in the mathematical
apartment of Town Bank school, to be made use of jointly
or separately, as should be decided on. Our cottage at
Dragley Beck was distant a mile or more, yet such was
my eagerness of acquiring a practical knowledge of the
globe and the map, that I never omitted a starlight night
without attending to the favourite pursuit of determining
certain constellations and their principal stars, for one, two,
or three hours, according as they continued above the
horizon. It was a pleasure then, and a profit thereafter,"
as will be seen by and by. Moreover, finding himself
occasionally puzzled by a difficult geometrical problem, he
resolved to consult an old farmer of the name of Gibson,
living " among the hills," varying his agriculture with the
study of mathematics and astronomy, and called the " wise
man " by his simple neighbours, who wonderingly related
of him that he made his own almanacs and could calculate
an eclipse. Gibson gave the perplexed and ardent young
student a hearty welcome, enlightening his ignorance then,
and keeping him afterwards in mind, at a time when a re-
membrance of him determined for good Barrow's whole
subsequent career.
Meanwhile, a varied probation and training in practical
life, with the discipline which they usefully enforced on him,
awaited the young mathematician and star-gazer. His
parents, simple and zealous church-people, wished their
clever son to be a clergyman, but, to say nothing of economic
obstacles to the attainment of a '' college education,"
Barrow, "though," he says, " of a serious turn of mind,"
felt no inclination for the clerical profession, and therefore 1
very properly shirked compliance with the parental pro-
5/A' JOHN BARROW. 353
posal. But something had to be done ; he was too well
educated for cow-keeping, ploughing, and vegetable-growing.
Yet other opening there seemed none, and at fourteen he
could not remain living in idleness on his father. At this
juncture came a call at the Draglej' Beck cottage from a
Liverpool lady, who had heard in the neighbourhood a good
character of the young Barrow. Her husband was the
" proprietor of a considerable iron-foundry in Liverpool,"
his chief assistant in superintending the workmen and keep-
ins: the accounts of which was old and infirm. An active
and intelligent youth was wanted to learn the work, and
then take the entire charge of it. He would live with the
family, and give lessons to a weakly son, a boy of ten. He
was to serve for three years, with a salary just sufficient to
provide clothes and a little pocket-money. Barrow accepted
the proposal cheerfully, and did his duty so satisfactorily
that at the end of two years his master, whose health was
precarious, talked of retiring and of making his young
assistant the active partner in a new firm, of which the son
should be the nominal head. But he died before the
arrangement was completed. The widow decided on part-
ing with the business, and Barrow " thought it best " to
decline the offer to continue in it made by the new-comer,
who was a perfect stranger to him, and from whom he could
not expect the friendly treatment to which he had been ac-
customed. He happened, however, to become acquainted,
at the house of his defunct master's widow, with an invalid
gentleman, who was in partnership with some Liverpool
merchants concerned in the whale fishery, and who had
been recommended by his physician to take a voyage to
Greenland. Seeing that Barrow was out of employment,
and would be an intelligent and agreeable companion,
Captain Potts invited him to join him in such a voyage, and
the invitation was accepted with eagerness. " Being natu-
2 Y
3 54 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
rally of an inquisitive turn," Barrow utilised his opportuni-
ties to learn as much as he could of the art and practice of
navigation, and to take and work observations. This know-
ledge, with the interest which the voyage gave him in the
Arctic regions, was not unproductive, though many years
passed away before their results became visible.
On returning from Greenland, Barrow hastened to Ulver-
stone to see his parents and old friends, after so considerable
an interval of absence and varied employment. He arrived
in time to attend the funeral of his worthy master, Walker,
and he saw the venerable incumbent of Seathwaite, "with his
flowing locks white as snow," weep and pray over the new-
filled grave. He paid a visit to his old friend Gibson, the
mathematical farmer, who advised him to pursue the study
of nautical astronomy, and talked to him of the field pre-
sented to a young man by London, where he himself had
two prosperous sons, one of them high in the service of the
Bank of England. Barrow's ambition was stimulated by this
talk, but how to gratify it was a problem. In the mean-
time he prosecuted his studies in melancholy mood, and
trimmed up the little garden of the parental cottage, while
pining for active and independent employment. Just when
he was prepared to accept almost any honourable occupa-
tion, his friend Gibson received from the son in the Bank of
England an application to recommend a " north country
youth " qualified to teach mathematics to the upper boys in
a large '* academy " at Greenwich. Gibson proposed Barrow ;
and he, with his usual prudence, accepted an offer which at
least promised to bring him into proximity to the great
metropolis. He took coach to London, and going with
the junior Gibson to Greenwich, found the principal to be
a clergyman with a pleasant family, and sons of Lord Anson
and of Lord Leveson Gower among his pupils. He was
forthwith installed in his new post, and one of the first
S/J? JOHN BARROW. 355
employments of such leisure as he had at command was to
utilise the knowledge of mathematical instruments which
he had acquired when a boy in the survey of the Coniston
estate. " On arriving in London," he says, " I extended
my knowledge of them, so as to draw up and publish a
small treatise to explain the practical use of a case of mathe-
matical instruments, being my first introduction to the press,
for which I obtained twenty pounds, and was not a little
delighted to send to my mother."
Barrow seems to have worked out his engagement at the
Greenwich school, and when it came to an end he was far
from being left resourceless. His pupils were attached to
him, and at their two half-yearly vacations he was fre-
quently asked to their parents' houses, thus forming a toler-
ably large circle of more or less advantageous acquaint-
ances. When he left Greenwich he was asked to give
lessons, " and to such as were well advanced in years and
knowledge I had no objection," he having learned much
himself while teaching others. In this way he passed
several years serenely in London, not forgetting to pay an
annual visit to his parents at Ulverstone, whom he found
" happy and well " in their old age. He was becoming
known in his own modest department, and was gaining
friends, when something welcome occurred, which, if not
very striking, proved to be the turning point of his career.
"One day," he writes, "on my return to town, I was honoured with
a visit from Sir George Staunton, a gentleman with whom I had not
yet had the good fortune to meet, and who introduced himself by saying
he was acquainted with several of my friends, and mentioned Dr.
Gillies in particular," — an industrious author of good repute in that
day, — " and some others who were accustomed to meet at the West-
minster Library. He said the object of his visit was to know if I had
leisure time, and was willing to bestow a portion of it to give instruc-
tion in mathematics to an only son, between the age of ten and
eleven years, wlio had been studying the classics under a German gen-
356 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
tleman residing in the house ; that his son was a lively, animated boy,
with more than average abilities, and great docility. ' And, ' he added,
' from the character I have heard of you, I think you both would be
disposed to a mutual attachment.' I thanked him for the obliging
offer, and the friendly and courteous manner in which it was introduced,
and was ready and most willing to afford his son my best assistance.
'I suppose,' he said, 'you are practically acquainted with astronomy,
and know the constellations and principal stars by name? I am a
great advocate for practical knowledge. ' I answered in the affirmative ;
and the constellations and astronomy brought vividly to my mind my
old friend Mr. Gibson, and the globe and the map of Town 13ank
school, and I was more than ever persuaded that all is for the best."
An arrangement was made, which turned out well, espe-
cially for Barrow. Had it not been for this introduction to
Sir George Staunton, he might have remained a teacher all
his life, with no episode in his biography more vivid than
the possible success of a mathematical treatise and school-
book or two. Both Sir George and his son liked Barrow ;
and through this acquaintance his fortunes took a new and
surprising start. He had gone on for some little time teach-
ing the young Staunton, and was on the point of accom-
panying an English family to Italy, when he received from
Sir George an invitation to join him in a far greater expe-
dition. For various reasons, among them the ill-treatment
to which the factors employed by the East India Company
were subjected in China from the lack of anything like
official communication between the British Government
and the authorities at Pekin, the Ministry had decided on
sending Lord Macartney as ambassador-extraordinary and
plenipotentiary to China, and with a suite and presents ap-
propriate to the dignity of the mission. Lord Macartney
appointed his old friend of Indian days. Sir George Staunton,
Secretary of Embassy, and Barrow's pupil was also to go as an
attache. Father and son wished Barrow to accompany them,
and Sir George had recommended him to Lord Macartney
as a most useful addition to the suite. It was news almost
SIR JOHN DARROW. 357
too good to be true, thought the whilom assistant in the
Liverpool iron-foundrj-, who had been glad even to make a
voyage to the Arctic regions in a Greenland whaler. After
a week or two of anxious expectation, the news turned out
to be true. Barrow was nominated to the suite as " Comp-
troller of the Household ;" and Lord Macartney gave him,
at an interview, a list of the mathematical, philosophical, and
scientific instruments and of the works of art which he was
to procure as presents for the Emperor of China. The
grass, we may be sure, did not grow under the feet of the
happy Comptroller of the Household, and soon his com-
mission was deftly executed.
" Non aiivis homini contittgit adire Pekinum,"
he exclaimed with delight when he was first informed of his
good fortune. And just while the September massacres of
1792 were running their course of carnage in Paris, with
Europe on the eve of a long and terrible war, Barrow bade
adieu to the revolutionary West, and sailed from Portsmouth
for the empire that knows no change.
The mission was not unsuccessful, and Barrow played his
part in it with his usual industry, prudence, and skill. He
saw the presents committed to his care, globes, clocks,
glass lustres, and so forth, unpacked and arranged in an
Imperial palace near Pekin, without a single loss through
negligence, theft, or breakage. Going and returning, as
the Embassy traversed the Flowery Land, he kept his
sharp eyes well open to all the novelties, singularities, and
wonders that met him at every turn, and qualified himself
to aid, when at home again, in the preparation of Sir
George Staunton's ofliicial history of the Embassy. On
their arrival in England in the September of 1794, two
years after they had left it, Sir George Staunton bade
Barrow make a home of his house, and promised that
35^ LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Lord Macartney and himself would take care to find
employment for the ex-Comptroller of the Household— facts
that testify to Barrow's successful and acceptable discharge
of his duties. But first he asked leave to pay a few weeks'
visit to Ulverstone, where his parents received him with
delight, and the inhabitants were lost in wondering pride
over the Chinese travels of this son of their own remote
district. Back in London again, Barrow soon found em-
ployment cut out for him. The Cape of Good Hope had
been wrested by England from the Dutch, and Henry
Dundas was the new Secretary for the Colonies. That
long-headed Scot knew the Dutch to be a peculiar and a
refractory people, and judged that a "civilian" of high
rank and character would be more acceptable to the con-
quered colony than the military man then commanding
there. Lord Macartney was offered the appointment of
Governor of the Cape, and he accepted it, at least experi-
mentally. He appointed Barrow one of his private Secre-
taries, and in the May of 1797 they landed at Cape Town.
On their arrival they found the Dutch Boers in a state
of semi-revolt against the new English rule, as well as of
warfare with the encroaching Kaffirs. Lord Macartney at
once despatched the solid and trustworthy Barrow on a
mission, partly of pacification, partly of geographical explora-
tion ; tliere being then no map embracing a tenth of the
area of the colony. With a scanty equipment, most of it
scientific, Barrow began the first of a series of missions and
of explorations of the Cape Colony, which, when all was
done, enabled him to say: — "Between the ist of July
and the iSth of January I had traversed every part
of the colony of the Cape of Good Hope, and visited
the several countries of the Kaffirs, the Hottentots, and
the Bosjesmen ; performing a journey exceeding 3000
miles on horseback, on foot, and very rarely in a covered
S/J? JOHN BARROW. 359
waggon, and full one half of the distance as a pedestrian."
In his dealings both with natives and Boers, Barrow
appears to have been highly successful. As soon as his
official reports of his missions reached home, they were
published at the suggestion of Dundas, who saw that their
author was a capable man, deserving and likely to repay
promotion. Lord Macartney rewarded him with the ap-
pointment of Auditor-General of the Cape Colony. After
another and a military mission, Barrow settled down to the
duties of his new office, and fancying that his wanderings
were at an end, he married, in August 1799 {atat. 35), a
well-connected Dutch lady. But by the peace of Amiens
the Cape was restored to the Dutch, and Barrow's occupa-
tion was gone. He returned to England, and found Henry
Dundas out of office, yet ready to be civil to a man whose
services might be useful when he reassumed it. Barrow
dined in Pitt's company at Dundas's soon after his return.
Pitt received him cordially, and while praising Barrow's
book to its author, as corroborating the opinion which he
had given in Parliament, that the Cape of Good Hope
ought never to be parted with, the patriotic statesman
characteristically "suggested that I had left rather short
one portion of the subject which he had always considered
of vast importance to this country, and that was, its geo-
graphical position with reference to India, as a half-way
house between our settlements there and England ; as a
place of refreshment for our shipping and troops ; its capa-
bilities for supplying all kinds of produce 3 its ports and
harbours, along a great extent of sea-coast, favourable to
commercial enterprise." From such a quarter a hint was
to be taken almost as a command, and, says Barrow, " I
speedily produced a second volume, detailing the political,
geographical, and commercial advantages of this southern
part of Africa, which had the effect of producing a second
360 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
edition of the first volume," — so felicitous in every way was
the statesman's suggestion.
Pitt was soon in office again as Prime Minister, with his
right-hand man, Dundas, for First Lord of the Admiralty ;
and Barrow's claims were at once remembered. He was
appointed, in 1804, second Secretary of the Admiralty. In
1806 the Whig Ministry of All the Talents acceded to office,
and Barrow was displaced to make room for d. protege of the
new First Lord's, who had, as the saying is, " claims upon
the party." But the recapture of the Cape by England drew
attention to Barrow, who knew so much of that colony.
The Whig ministers promised that he should not be for-
gotten, and encouraged him to present a memorial of his
services, which procured him a pension of ^^looo a year,
to be abated, however, out of the emoluments of any office
which he might afterwards hold. The Ministry of All the
Talents came to an untimely end, after an existence of
little more than a year, and its successors reinstated Barrow
in his former office, with John Wilson Croker for First
Secretary. He held it without another intermission until
1845 (in all, forty years, save the one during which All the
Talents were in power), and under some twelve adminis-
trations. The office is one of those called permanent, but
such permanence as this is rare, and proves that Barrow
could make himself generally agreeable as well as gener-
ally useful.
Barrow's official life was left unwritten by himself when
he composed his autobiography, and what seems best
known or most remembered about it is, that he was a zeal-
ous promoter of Arctic voyages of discovery, his inte-
rest in them having perhaps been heightened by that early
trip of his from Liverpool in the Greenland whaler. A
history of Arctic voyaging was one of the rather numerous
contributions which he contrived to make to nautical and
Sf/a JOHX BARROW. 36 1
naval literature, in spite of the laborious duties of his
office. Croker (whose sister married Barrow's son and
heir, the second baronet) wrote about everything but the
navy ; not so Barrow. His lives of Lord Anson and Lord
Howe are the standard biographies of those naval heroes.
His life of Lord Macartney is an affectionate memoir of
an excellent and amiable man, and his volumes of Chinese
travel form a pleasant and instructive supplement to Sir
George Staunton's official history of the Embassy. Barrow,
too, was almost from its establishment a steady contributor
to the Quarterly Review, for which he wrote, from first to
last, no fewer than 195 articles, never political, and gener-
ally in the department of voyages and travels. In 1835,
William IV. (who, as Lord High Admiral, had been brought
into official and personal relations with him) bestowed on
him a baronetcy rather against his will, and ten years later,
at the age of 80, he retired from the office of Second
Secretary of the Admiralty, full of honours as of years.
Within a year after his resignation, the indefatigable old
man sent forth a volume on the history of Polar voyag-
ing; and of the many testimonies borne to his official
merits on his withdrawal into private life, none pleased him
more than the presentation of a piece of plate, subscribed
for by officers who had served in Arctic expeditions, and
accompanied by a letter from Parry and Franklin, Ross
and Back, thanking him for the "talent, zeal, and energy"
which he had "displayed in the promotion of Arctic dis-
covery." A year later appeared his autobiograph}'. He
died in London on the 23d November 1849, in the 87th
year of his age. He had never forgotten the spot that
gave him birth. In his will he left directions that the
annual subscription which he had given for many years
to the school in which he was educated should be con-
tinued, and his mother's cottage at Dragley Beck was as-
2 z
362 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
signed in perpetuity to trustees, who were to appropriate the
rent derived from it to educate poor children under its roof.
Others have exerted themselves to keep his memory alive
in his native district. There is a monument to him in the
church at Ulverstone, and as the railway traveller approaches
that town from the east, he sees on the right hand another
and most conspicuous one, a hundred feet high, " in imita-
tion of Eddystone Lighthouse," erected, by subscription,
on Hood Hill, to the memory of the man who went forth
from its neighbourhood to keep the accounts of a Liver-
pool foundry, and who rose to become what has been
seen even in this brief sketch of his industrious, successful,
and protracted life.
XVII.
WILLIAM WHEWELL*
THE historian of the Inductive Sciences was the son
of a house-carpenter of Lancaster, and was born on
the 24th of May 1794, in that old metropolis of the county
palatine, ten years afterwards the birth-place also of Richard
Owen. His father is said to have been " a man of probity
and intelligence," and his mother, it seems, was a really
superior woman, of considerable cultivation for the sphere
in which she moved. "To both his parents he was always
dutiful and affectionate." A remarkably strong and healthy
man in later years, Whewell was a sickly child, and, with
the usual result, that of being debarred from mingling in
the sports of other children. From his earliest years he was
a voracious reader. He soon exhausted the treasures of
his father's slender library, the Spectator among them, and
learned all that was to be learned at the Grammar School of
* William Whewell : In Memoriam, by W. G. Clark, M.A., Tublic
Orator in the University of Cambridge ^Macmillan's Magazine for April
1866). Proceedings of the Royal Society (London, 1S68), vol. xvi.
Obituary Notices of Fellnvs Deceased, 1865-7, § Whewell (by Sir John
Herschel). Saturday Review of loth March, 1866, "Dr. \\Tiewell."
I. Todhunter, William Whewell, D.D., Master of Trinity College,
Cambridge: An Account of his Writings, with Selections from his
Literary and Scientific Correspondence, 2 vols. (London, 1876), &c., &c.
364 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
his native town. His obligations to its master for the sound
training which he received in arithmetic and practical geo-
metry, he publicly acknowledged at the opening of a new
Lancaster Grammar School half a century or so after he
first went to the old one, and when his fame had become
European. Parents and teachers doubtless thought that
such a young glutton of books and knowledge was too
good for the carpenter's bench, and should be sent to a
university. Fortunately it occurred to one or other of them
that not far away, over the borders of Westmoreland, there
was a school which offered its successful pupils an exhibi-
tion to Trinity College, Cambridge. This was at Hever-
sham (in the parish of which name Milnthorpe is situated),
where some beneficent Christian of a by-gone generation
had thus endowed the school, afterwards taught by the
father of Bishop Watson, and to which that episcopal anta-
gonist of Tom Paine owed his start in life, a sub-sizarship
of Trinity. To Heversham the studious Lancaster boy
was sent. He went, he saw, he conquered ; at eighteen, like
Watson before him, he gained the Heversham exhibition
of ;^5o a year, and, in the October of 181 2, he, too, pro-
ceeded to Cambridge as a sub-sizar of Trinity. Under any
circumstances, Whewell's energy and capacity would pro-
bably have gained him a name ; but it was to the forgotten
benefactor of Heversham school that he was indebted for the
opportunities of wide and liberal culture denied to Dalton,
and for an escape from the long drudgery which crippled
the activity, cramped the character, and stunted the intel-
lectual growth of the originator of the Atomic theory.
There still survive early university associates of Whewell's,
who remember him as he looked when, fresh from rustic
Heversham, he made his first appearance at Cambridge —
" a tall, ungainly youth, with grey worsted stockings and
country-made shoes." The uncouth son of the Lancaster
WILLIAM WHEW ELL. 365
joiner rapidly distinguished himself, however, in the arena
where intellectual force and perseverance are the weapons
of battle — in the race which is always to the swift and the
sturdy, whatever the texture of their stockings or the shape
of their shoes. " He soon became known in the college as
the most promising man of the year." Elected to a founda-
tion sizarship and to a scholarship, he gained in his second
year the Chancellor's prize for the best English poem on
the subject of Boadicea, said to be a very spirited perform-
ance, and of a merit far above the average of academic
])rize poems. This seems a curious prelude to his subse-
quent mathematical and scientific triumphs ; but there really
was a strong vein of poetry in Whewell, which may be
seen cropping out in the lyrical prose scattered through
some of his profoundest disquisitions ; and to say nothing
of the many metrical effusions of his later years, his
remains include a good many pieces of juvenile verse, one
of them being an address to the Muse, who is apostrophised
as, "Friend of my youth, my dearest, earliest, best!"
Among his academic seniors, Sir John Herschel, and
among his contemporaries and coevals of the University,
Julius Hare, were of the more intimate of his friends.
When he graduated in 181 6, it was as second wrangler and
second Smith's prizeman, the first honours in both competi-
tions being won by a Mr. Jacob (son of the political econo-
mist), who went to the bar and died early. The result was
unexpected in the University, and probably by Whewell him-
self. He took his defeat quietly, remarking, with humour, —
not one of his prominent characteristics, — " Is he not rightly
named Jacob, for he hath supplanted me these two times?"
The year after that in which he took his B.A. degree, the
distinguished and prominent young man was elected a
Fellow of his college — the first in Cambridge— and in 1818
he was appointed its lecturer in mathematics, with what
3^<5 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
seems the very modest stipend of ^75 a year. The post
was offered him by Mr. Monk, then a tutor of Trinity,
afterwards Bishop of Gloucester and biographer of Bentley.
Six years later, in 1824, he became full tutor of one of the
" sides " of the college, his colleagues on the other " side "
being successively Dr. Peacock, afterwards Dean of Ely,
and Perry, afterwards Bishop of Melbourne. As a tutor,
Whewell was not popular ; and indeed it was only with his
later years that he ever acquired a university popularity. His
manner was haughty as well as uncouth : his mind ranged
far and wide over the whole universe of knowledge and
speculation, and he could not fix it on those personal de-
tails of tutorial duty, the pleasant adjustment of which by
a college tutor affects so greatly the feeling of his pupils
towards him. Yet his reputation attracted them to him in
crowds, and he did his duty by them in his own way,
though it is characteristically recorded of him that he often
forgot their faces, and was thought to slight them by a failure
to recognise them. But during his fifteen years of tutor-
ship he did much for Cambridge, and helped to efface from
the University the reproach into which it had fallen, of
lagging behind the age in its own special studies. " During
the period," says his friend. Sir John Herschel, " when he
was pursuing his studies at Cambridge, the mathematical
department of the University curriculum was in what might
be called a traditional state. A perception had begun to
be entertained of the absolute necessity of including within
its range a knowledge of those powerful methods of investi-
gation so familiar to the Continental mathematicians, but
which could hardly be said to be known in England, and
which at Cambridge had by some even been regarded with
dislike as innovational. In this latter feeling, in common
with most of its younger members, he was far from partici-
pating; but, on the contrary, was only desirous to forward
WILLIAM WHEWELL. 367
the movement which he saw commencing." According to
the same high authority, something of this deficiency had
been repaired by the translation which Peacock and his
coadjutors made of the treatise of Lacroix on the differential
and integral calculus, published in 1816, followed in 1820
by a copious collection of examples illustrative of its appli-
cation to problems of pure mathematics and the theory of
curves. But the want of readable elementary works (Sir
John's own phrase), based on the new analysis, it was
Whewell who supplied, in a series, which began with the
"Elementary Treatise on Mechanics," pubUshed in 1819,
and ended in 1837 with the "Mechanical Euclid," works
either obsolete or superseded now, but of great use in their
day and generation. The year after the publication of the
first of these, he was elected {cetat. 26) a Fellow of the
Royal Society. Meanwhile he was active in all university
business, and was one of the founders, in 181 9, of the
Cambridge Philosophical Society, to the Transactions of
which he became an indefatigable contributor. In 1826 he
began his co-operation with the present Astronomer Royal,
in experiments (at a Cornish mine) for ascertaining the
mean density of the earth. In 1828 he was chosen Pro-
fessor of Mineralogy, a post which he filled for four years,
and he threw himself heartily into the work of the British
Association, of which he was President in 184 1. To its
reports he contributed, from time to time, valuable papers
on the Tides, and on the Mathematical Theories of Heat,
Magnetism, and Electricity.
In 1825, six years after taking his M.A. degree, Whewell
was ordained deacon, and priest in 1826, becoming, in
due course Doctor of Divinity. He never, however, ac-
cepted a college or other Hving, though, as will be seen
hereafter, he once, and seemingly only once, was inclined
that way, and had he entered on an ecclesiastical career,
368 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
he would, doubtless, like his predecessor at Heversham,
Richard Watson, have risen to the Episcopal Bench.
Whewell's orthodoxy and Churchmanship were unimpeach-
able, but he fought shy of the cure of souls, probably from
an inherent disinclination for such an employment, and he
solaced himself with the reflection that he would do more
good by remaining at academic work, and improving
the studies and culture of the University. His tutorial
duties, not surrendered until 1839, did not prevent him
from prosecuting private studies, which left no region of
knowledge, especially of science, unexplored, and which,
in their range and depth, were unparalleled in the Eng-
land of his time. *' A more wonderful variety and amount
of knowledge," says Sir John Herschel, " in almost every
department of human enquiry, was perhaps never in the
same interval of time accumulated by any man, embracing
not only mathematical and physical science in all its forms,
but extending over classical and Continental literature,
metaphysics and history, ethics, social and political economy,
together with botany, architecture, engineering, and a host
of other subjects — and that not by merely a general and
superficial acquaintance, but one which an exact and con-
scientious application, such as most men devote to some
favourite branch of study, alone can give." " Science," said
Sidney Smith of Whewell some time afterwards, "is his forte,
and omniscience his foible." A good story is told of the
failure of an attempt once made to pose the all-knowing
tutor. One of the fellows of Trinity determined to get up
a subject which would be beyond the range of even
Whewell's ubiquitous and omnivorous reading. He pitched
upon Chinese music, and adroitly started the topic at one
of those reunions after " Hall," at which even Dons relax
and unbend. To the great astonishment of the conspirators
— for several of the fellows had been taken into the secret.
WILLIAM WHEWELL, 369
and played their parts accordingly — Whewell showed that
he knew a great deal more of the matter than his chal-
lenger, and it turned out that he was the author of the very
article in an encyclopaedia to which his baffled colleague had
betaken himself to '' cram " for the occasion ! The sickliness
of his boyhood seems to have long before disappeared, and
a robust health enabled him to prosecute with impunity his
gigantic labours of research and of reflection. For with
Whewell reading was no mere act of reception, enriching
the memory alone. His comprehensive and powerful mind
was for ever fusing and purifying the crude ore which he
gathered from books, and casting it into forms impressed
with his own stamp. When he was nearly forty, the world
outside the walls of Trinity and the University received the
assurance that Cambridge contained a man who added to
profound scientific acquirements a keen and vigorous intel-
lect and a powerful imagination ; the master, too, of an im-
pressive and animated style, which rose at times into a
noble eloquence. The application of the famous Bridge-
water bequest for the production of a series of treatises
'' on the power, wisdom, and goodness of God, as mani-
fested in the Creation," was left to Davies Gilbert, at that
time President of the Royal Society ; and acting on the
advice of Blomfield, then Bishop of London, Whewell was
commissioned, in 1830, to contribute the volume on " Astro-
nomy and General Physics considered with reference to
Natural Theology." The work, the first of the series, ap-
peared in 1833 ; Whewell having in the preceding year
resigned his Professorship of Mineralogy. Despite the
abstruse character of the theme, it went rapidly through
several editions, and Whewell's fame was no longer aca-
demic but national. Subject, of course, to the objections
which can generally be urged against such disquisitions,
Whewell's treatise displayed merits of a rare order, and, in
3 A
370
LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
spite of all that had been written on Natural Theology, a
very considerable originality both of conception and of
detail. The chapter on " Cosmical Arrangements " belongs
to the highest class of thinking and writing by which the
science of Natural Theology has as yet been illustrated and
enriched.
His Bridgewater Treatise created the reputation which
was strengthened and extended by the publication, in 1837,
of his great and greatest work, through which mainly he has
procured himself an enduring fame. To be the accurate
and philosophical historian of any one science is honour
enough for most men, and has given a high rank among
intellectual producers to the Delambres and Montuclas.
But, in "The History of the Inductive Sciences " (dedicated
to his early friend, Sir John Herschel, then at the Cape),
Whewell was the first to attempt to chronicle the origin and
development of all science, physical and natural, from its
earliest dawn in the dogmatic guesses of the ancient philo-
sophers of Hellas, to the latest theories of the cultivators of
the youngest of the sciences, geology. That in a survey
of science from Thales to Sir Charles Lyell, including
characteristics of, and criticisms on, the discoverers and
aspirants of all ages, and tracing the development of human
study of the external world through so many centuries of
intellectual effort and struggle, there should be some errors,
is not surprising ; the wonder is that they are so few. The
effect produced by the affluence of knowledge, the universal
grasp which, the work displays, is seldom marred by faults
of manner, and some grave defects might have been par-
doned under the circumstances. The narrative flows on-
ward in a broad, clear, and equable stream, and it can well
be believed that after long preliminary labour and reflec-
tion, it poured from its author's mind like molten metal
from the furnace. " We learn, on good authority, that it
WILLIAM VVHEWELL. 37 1
was sent to the press chapter by chapter as it was written."
Remarkable as the book was in many respects, it was in
few more remarkable than in this, that in it, almost for the
first time, a high scientific authority of encyclopaedic attain-
ments set himself to establish our knowledge of nature on
a deeper foundation than the empirical philosophy of Locke
and his disciples. In the course of his multifarious studies,
Whewell had mastered the Kantian philosophy, and his
manuscript-remains were found to include an epitome of
the Krttik der reineti Vernunft. In " The History of the
Inductive Sciences," and still more elaborately, though not
more strikingly, in his subsequent and less successful work,
"The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences," Whewell
seems to have foreseen the influence, and by anticipation
to have resisted the victory, of that able expositor of an
anti-spiritual philosophy, the late John Stuart Mill.
In 1837, the year which witnessed the publication of his
tnagfmm opus, Whewell preached before the University
four sermons on the Foundation of Morals, which, like
Butler, he based on the dictatorship of conscience. He
seems to have been now disposed to throw himself into
ethics, and to give it a supremacy over physical science in
the sphere of his intellectual activity. In 1838, accordingly,
he accepted the University Professorship of Moral Philo-
sophy, as he called and made what was nominally that of
*' Moral Theology or Casuistical Divinity." The chair had
previously been a sinecure, but this it ceased to be as
soon as it was occupied by Whewell, and, indeed, the year
after his appointment to it, he withdrew, at the height of his
fame, from the exercise of his tutorial functions.
As was natural in a spiritualist, he detested the utilitarian
ethics of Paley, whose " Moral Philosophy " was the text-
book at Cambridge, a position from which he succeeded in
banishing it. He laboured to replace Paley's doctrine by a
372
LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
system in which a supreme divinely-implanted Conscience
was exhibited as at once legislator and judge in the domain
of human action and of moral sentiment. Here again, as in
the metaphysics of science, the influence of the materialist
school was combated by Whewell. Altogether, the most
important tendency of his later labours at Cambridge was
to counteract the influence of the school which, under the
leadership of Stuart Mill, became so powerful in the uni-
versities and out of them. In 1840 appeared " The Philo-
sophy of the Inductive Sciences," in which his apphcation
of idealism to them is elaborately worked out.
The succeeding year, 1841, was an important one in
Whewell's biography. It saw him married and Master of
Trinity. It was probably with a view to marriage, that at
the beginning of the year he thought of accepting the
college living, then vacant, of Measham, in Yorkshire. He
even paid it a visit, but he '' found it," he says in a letter
to a friend, " too laborious," and that it would interfere with
what he called " my purpose of employing myself about my
professorship," that of Moral Philosophy to wit. Neverthe-
less he married, in October, Miss Cordelia Marshall, of the
well-known family of Leeds and flax-spinning. The wed-
ding was scarcely over when Dr. Wordsworth resigned the
Mastership of Trinity. Sir Robert Peel at once and spon-
taneously advised the Queen to bestow it on Whewell, and
the son of the Lancaster carpenter found himself, cetat. 47,
in possession of the highest of academic dignities. Mrs.
Whewell was an excellent lady; and among the first of
many illustrious guests to whom she did the honours of her
husband's new household, were the Queen and the late
Prince Consort. Not very popular as a tutor, Whewell
was at least at first scarcely more so as Master of his
renowned College. He had taken with him to Cambridge
a certain Lancashire downrightness, which he never lost ;
WILLIAM W HE WELL. 373
and though he had his sovereign for a guest, and twenty
years afterwards obeyed a requisition of her husband to
deliver, for the express instruction of the young Prince of
Wales (then a student at Cambridge), a short course of
lectures on Political Economy, it would have been im-
possible to convert him into a successful courtier. The
fortiter in re, much more than the suaviter in modo, was
Whewell's characteristic. In conversation he was loud
and dogmatic, as well as fluent and pointed, recalling the
traditions of Samuel Johnson's talk. " When are you
coming," Sydney Smith once wrote to him — "when are
you coming to thunder and lighten at the tables of the
metropolis?" In consideration of his great intellectual
excellence and merits, his thoroughly upright and honour-
able character, his colleagues might forgive his faults ; but
justice to Whewell was scarcely to be expected from the
undergraduates, who, from his position and authority in the
University, regarded him as the author of every regulation
and proceeding that was obnoxious to them. " At one time
his appearance in the Senate-house was always the signal
for a storm of disapprobation from the galleries. He bore
all these insults with unflinching scorn. Inwardly, it may
be, he was wounded more than he dared to show," But as
years wore on, he came to be thought of only as the pride
and ornament of the University, " and the sight of his
white head towering above the rest was always greeted with
loud applause." On one occasion, before this happy era
had arrived, and when he exercised the austere functions of
Vice-Chancellor, " he had nerved himself to face the usual
demonstrations." To his surprise, the undergraduates
" received him with profound silence, and then suddenly
burst into enthusiastic cheering." He had just lost his
wife, who died in the December of 1855, ^^i*^ whom he had
anxiously tended during several years of painful illness. It
374 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
is recorded that this reception "completely overcame him,
and he wept." Whewell was really a man of sensibility, as
well as of science ; and for months after the death of his
wife, " he used to be seen going alone to the Cemetery, to
weep there."
It was two years or so before the death of his first wife,
and possibly in order to find in work a relief from his alarm
about her health,^ that Whewell composed the most generally
read, perhaps, of all his writings, although, at the same time,
it is the only one of which he never publicly acknowledged
the authorship — to his friends in his correspondence and
otherwise, however, he made no secret of it. This was " The
Plurality of Worlds" (pubUshed towards the end of 1853),
on which disputed question he took the negative side with
a vigour and buoyancy not in the least suggestive of sick-
room vigils, or of mental anxiety. Bringing all his astro-
nomical and varied scientific lore to bear upon the pro-
blem, Whewell demonstrated to his own satisfaction that
the probabilities were against the existence of intelligent
beings in the planets and the stars, and there was a touch
of the transcendental comic in the sketch which he drew of
the necessarily grotesque plight of their denizens, if denizens
they contained. The book, Whewell thought, demolished
the arsfument to confute which had been one of the main
objects of Chalmers's Astronomical Discourses. Man, in-
stead of being dwarfed by the spectacle of the Immensities^
was, after the appearance of " The Plurality of Worlds," to
regard himself with considerable complacency as the chief
of created intelligent and sentient beings ; while his earth,
though small in size, was the masterpiece of the universe,
1 Mr. W. G. Clark, in his interesting paper, speaks as if the
" Phuality of Worlds " had been written as a distraction from sorrow,
just after the first Mrs. Whewell's death, but a comparison of dates
shows this supposition to be baseless.
WILLIAM WHEWELL. 375
as the only orb prepared to be the home of thought and
feehng. The next step was to acknowledge the truth of the
epigram which, in playful reference to a certain self-
sufficiency rather appropriate than otherwise to so mighty a
Cambridge Don, declared that there was nothing in infinity
like the Master of Trinity ! ^
Whewell {cEtat 64) married again in 1858. His second
wife was Lady Affleck, widow of Sir Gilbert Affleck, and
sister of the able and accomplished Robert Leslie Ellis (he
died, much regretted, in 1859), one of Mr. Spedding's co-
adjutors in editing Bacon. She is said to have "won all
hearts by her gentleness and kindness," and at her death,
seven years afterwards, the grief of her husband, then a for-
lorn old gentleman on the verge of seventy, is described as
"sad to witness." He did not long survive her, dying from
the effects of a fall from his horse (riding was the only
exercise for which he ever cared), on the 6th of March
1866. He had recovered some of his buoyancy before his
death; and a magazine for the very month in which it
happened contained an article from his pen on Comte and
Positivism. In this he paid some graceful compliments to
his old antagonist, Stuart Mill, who had been beforehand
with him in the pleasant rivalry of an exhibition of courtesy,
and an expression of reciprocal admiration, by men vehe-
mently opposed to each other in philosophy. In the preface
to his Logic, Mill made the acknowledgment that " with-
^ There are several versions of this epigram, which, it is understood,
was by Sir Francis Doyle, now (1876) Professor of Poetry at Oxford.
The following is the version given by a correspondent of A'otes and
Queries for September 23, 1876, who says that the original was entitled
•' A Short Analysis of the Plurality of Worlds, written by Dr. Whewell :
" Should man thro' the stars to far galaxies travel,
And of nebulous films the remotest unravel,
He still could but learn, having fathomed infinity,
That the great work of God was the Master of Trinity.'
376 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
out the aid derived from the facts and ideas contained
in Dr. Whewell's ' History of the Inductive Sciences/ the
corresponding portion of this work would probably not have
been written." In the magazine-article, which was published
only a few days before his death, Whewell spoke of Mill's
" profound philosophical thought and wide sphere of know-
ledge," of his "love of truth and fearlessness of conse-
quences," and congratulated the electors of Westminster on
having, by sending him to the House of Commons, "fully and
practically adopted the great Platonic maxim, that it will
never go well with the world till our rulers are philosophers,
or our philosophers rulers." The article appeared on the
ist of March, and before a week elapsed, Whewell was no
more. If he had survived a few months longer he would
have been seventy-two. He died as he had lived, at Trinity.
He had been heard to say that the sky always seemed to him
brighter when framed by the walls and turrets of the Great
Court of his beloved College, and in his last hours he
desired to have the blinds raised that he might look once
again on this familiar scene, so fair and pleasant to his eye.
He was buried with great pomp and ceremony in the ante-
chapel of Trinity, at the feet of the statues of Newton and
Bacon, the latter his own gift to the College. Among the
mourners were his former pupil, the Duke of Devonshire,
Sir John Herschel, and the Astronomer- Royal.
He left no children to whom to bequeath his wealth, and
both the University and the College which he loved in life,
and which had done so much for him, were not to be
forgotten after death. To his College he left a large and
valuable space of adjacent ground, and a considerable
sum wherewith to erect new buildings on it. To the Uni-
versity he bequeathed a noble legacy to found a chair of
International Law, with scholarships for students of the
subject. In the course of his ethical studies he was led to
WILLIAM WHEWELL. 377
that of International Law, and he had pubhshed an abridged
translation of the work of Grotius. He died, too, when
the American Civil War had come to a close, with its
disastrous bequest of the Alabama controversy, partly due
to the absence of a well-defined and self-subsistent Inter-
national code.
In person Whewell was a tall, broad-shouldered, large-
headed, and large-limbed man, ungainly in his movements
and in his gestures. His forehead was broad and massive ;
his eye bright and benevolent, and a pleasant smile
sometimes lighted up an otherwise stern countenance,
overhung by bushy eye-brows. The story is told that
when once Whewell, Peacock, and Sedgwick, the observed
of all observers, were standing at the steps of the Senate
House to receive the Prince Consort, Peacock, who
loved a joke, remarked that the trio were accounted the
three ugliest men in Cambridge. Sedgwick smiled, but
Whewell rejoined with a disapproving frown, " Dean, speak
for yourself." He was temperate in his habits, and an early
riser and worker. Of his intellect and its accumulations
and achievements it is enough, in conclusion, to say that
what he was in life entitled him to the position which he
occupies in death, that of reposing by the feet at least of
the statues of Bacon and of Newton.
3 B
XVIII.
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y*
ADE QUINCEY seems to have come from France
to England with William the Conqueror, and from
him, nearly eight centuries afterwards, our Thomas De
Quincey claimed to be descended. There are places
named Quincy scattered through the North of France, but,
contrary to De Quincey's own assertion, none of them
are in Normandy. The modern French writer Quatre-
mere de Quincy may or may not be of the same stock as
the Opium Eater, but it is very probable that from the
family founded in England at the Conquest sprang the
well-known American Quincys of Massachusetts. Saier
De Quincey, a descendant of the companion of the Con-
queror, was created Earl of Winchester in 1207, but on
the death, in 1264, of his son and successor, Roger, without
male heirs, ^the peerage reverted to the Crown. ^ The earl-
* De Quincey's Writings, passim. Quarterly Revieiv for July l86r,
§ Thomas De Quincey (by Mr. T. K. Kebbel). Atlantic Monthly
for September 1863, § Thomas De Quincey. By Henry M. Alden. The
Admission-Register of Manchester ScJiool {\'i'](:>), vol. ii. (being vol. Ixxiii.
of the Chetham Society's Publications). Mrs. Gordon's Christopher
North; a Memoir of John Wilson, by his Daughter (Edinburgh, 1862).
John Hill Burton, The Book- Himteri^(Xv!xh\xx^, 1862). Charles Knight's
Passages of a Working Life during Half a Ceittury {London, 1864), &c. &c.
\ Concerning Saier De Quincey (or Seher de Quinci), his Scotch mar-
riage and possessions in Scotland, there are many controversial and
other disquisitions in Notes and Queries, Fourth Series, vols, x., xi., and xii.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. "^"JCi
dom of Winchester was revived by Edward II., and con-
ferred on his ill-fated favourite, Hugh Le Despenser. The
holder of this second earldom was not, however, in the least
related to the holders of the first, and our De Quincey was
altogether mistaken when he spoke of his alleged ancestors,
" the Earls of Winchester," as " coming to grief," and of
De Quinceys, purely imaginary " descendants from the
guilty earl," whoever he may have been, projecting them-
selves, as he phrases it, " by successive efforts, from the
smoking ruins of the great feudal house ; stealthily through
two generations creeping out of their lurking holes ; timidly,
when the great shadows from the threatening throne had
passed over, re-assuming the family name," and so forth.
The De Quinceys, Earls of Winchester, did not " come to
grief," and their peerage died out from natural causes.
Whether collateral descendants or not of the De Quin-
ceys, Earls of Winchester, temp. John and Henry III., the
Opium Eater's modern progenitors were Quinceys without
the De, and this aristocratic prefix was first resumed, or
assumed, by himself. Thomas De Quincey's father, born
about 1752, and who became a linen merchant in Man-
chester, called himself plain Thomas Quincey. According
to his son, he began life with a fortune of ;^6,ooo, and
marrying a lady of station superior to his own, he em-
barked in trade or commerce, not only because he was a
man of active disposition, but that he might raise his in-
come to a height commensurate with his wife's antecedents.
As it happens, however, there is a record of him as engaged
in trade before his marriage ; the record being neither more
nor less than the newspaper-announcement of this impor-
tant event in his biography. In November 17S0, when he
was eight-and-twenty or so, a Manchester paper printed
the following intimation : — " Wednesday last, was married,
at St. George's, Queen Square, Mr. Thomas Quincey, linen
380 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES,
merchant in this town, to Miss Penson, of North Street,
London." ^ " My father," De Quincey writes in one of his
autobiographic sketches, " was a merchant ; not in the
sense of Scotland, where it means a retail dealer — one, for
instance, who sells groceries in a cellar ; but in the English
sense, a sense rigorously exclusive ; that is, he was a man
engaged in foreign commerce, and no other ; therefore in
wholesale commerce, and no other ; which last limitation of
the idea is important, because it brings him within the
benefit of Cicero's condescending distinction : " — Cicero, it
is added in a note, once speaking " of trade as irredeem-
ably base, if petty, but as not so absolutely felonious if
wholesale." Unfortunately for this pretension of the
Opium Eater's, there is the best evidence, the father's own
to wit, that for three years after marriage he sold retail as
well as wholesale. The following advertisement, sent to
the Manchester newspaper, is " copied from his autograph : "
— " Manchester, December 2, ^2,2^. Thomas Quincey, intend-
ing very shortly to decline all retail trade, is now selling off on
low Terms his Prints, Muslins, Table-Linens, Gauzes, Lutes,
&c., of all sorts, with all his act Goods, of whatever kind,
and Haberdashery Articles in general. N.B. — The Irish-
Linen, Scotch, &c.. Trades in the Wholesale Line, he will
continue as usual." ^ He was not a clever man, his son
admits,* but he was an honest and even a scrupulous one.
Occasionally, after his death, a stranger would say to the
Opium Eater, " Sir, I knew your father ; he was the most
upright man I ever met with in my life." He was in the
West India trade, but only in its " honourable branches,"
the son is careful to add. He would have nothing to do
with the trafific in negroes; and, indeed, after Clarkson's
^ R. W. Vrocter, A/emorMs 0/ Afanckesier S^reeis {Manchester, 1874),
p. 261.
^ Admission- Register of Alanchester School, ii. 226.
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 38 1
proclamation of a crusade against slavery, he " strictly
abstained from the use of sugar," because a product of
slave-labour, " in his own family." He possessed, too,
some artistic and literary taste ; at least a small collection
of paintings by old Italian masters was scattered about his
house ; and his library, according to the same filial authority,
included " the whole genuine literature both of England
and Scotland for the preceding generation." The elder
Quincey even wrote a book, a description of a tour in
the Midland Counties, which is highly praised by his son,
and the first form of which, after a long hunt in search of
any form of it, does seem to have been at last discovered.^
^ By Mr. James Crossley, of Manchester, wlio announced the dis-
covery in the following communication to Notes and Qturies (November
20, 1875) •■—
"De Quincev's Father: 'Tour in the Midland Counties
IN lT]2.' — Who was the author of ' A Tour in the Midland Counties of
England, performed in the Summer of 1772 (by T — Q — ),' which ap-
peared in the Gentleman's Magazitie of 1774 (vol. xliv. p. 206, continued
in four following numbers), and which, the editor tells us in a note,
' was the first production of the writer's pen?' I should at once have
ascribed it, as the initials agree, to Thomas Quincey, the father of the
Opium Eater, who published, his son tells us, a similar tour, but which,
notwithstanding a long-continued quest by myself and others, has not
yet turned up. As, however, he would only be nineteen when the tour
was made, and twenty-one when it was printed in the Gentleman's
Magazine, the doubt is whether the composition is exactly that which
so young a person would be likely to have produced. The style would
rather seem to indicate the writer to have been a man of mature years
and experience. Still, this is not conclusive as an objection, as early
acquaintance with the world and its business ripens the mind quite as
much as advance of years. Thomas Quincey's success in mercantile
pursuits — he died at the age of thirty-nine — and the codicils to his will,
giving directions as to the carrying on and disposal of his business, are
suflicient to show that he was by no means an ordinary person, and his
son tells us that he had been a great traveller. The ' Tour in the
Midland Counties' appears to have been made from London, to wliich
the tourist returned on its conclusion. Thomas Quincey had not then
382
LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
It is not the production of a man of shining parts, but its
writer evidently kept his eyes well about him, and occa-
sionally philosophised on what he observed. The wife
seems to have been not without character. Her father had
"at one time held an office under the king," and was re-
membered among his friends by " the magical versatility of
his talents and his power of self-accommodation to all
humours, tempers, and ages," characteristics inherited in
some degree by his grandson, the Opium Eater. Of herself
her son expressly records that she was "high-bred and
polished," and that she " spoke and wrote English with
settled in Manchester, and accordingly his name is not found in the
Directories of 1772 and 1773. If the 'Tour' in the Gentletfian's
Magazine was really written by him, the probability is that his son,
though aware of the fact of his father having composed such a journal,
did not know where it had appeared, otherwise it would be difficult to
account for his having barely noticed the existence of a production in
which he might have taken a just pride, and which would have afforded
him a paternal peg which he might have hung many a digression and
disquisition upon. ... I ought, perhaps, to mention that in the
' Tour ' the writer has a good deal to say in the description of Boston,
in Lincolnshire, and I find in the will of Thomas Quincey that Henry
Gee, of Boston, Merchant, was appointed one of his trustees, and that
a legacy is given to ' his respected friend and kinsman John Oxenford,'
who resided in that neighbourhood.
"Jas. Crossley."
Mr. Crossley's case is rather stronger than he seems to think it. The
truth is that De Quincey did more than " barely notice the existence"
of his father's little work, and, indeed, wrote of it and its scope with
considerable exaggeration. But the passage in which this was done
he pared down to next to nothing when he revised for the col-
lective English (or Scotch) edition of his works his Autobiographic
Sketches, which first appeared in Tait's Magazine. As will be occa-
sionally noted hereafter, some interesting information, not to be found in
the Autobiographic Sketches of the English editions, lies buried in the
" Sketches of Life and Manners, from the Autobiography of an English
Opium Eater," the first instalment of which was published in Tail for
February 1834.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 383
singular elegance," and in these respects the son resembled
her also. Incidentally, it is discoverable that she was
an affectionate and generous mother, and of strictly reli-
gious principles, belonging to a school which was then being
only revived in the Church of England, namely, the Evan-
gehcal. With this devotional turn she combined a love of
house-building, and the two tendencies combined to start
her once on a rather strange tour in search of a site for a
home : —
" Taking with her," says De Quincey, " two servants and one of my
sisters, my mother entered upon z.periplus, or systematic circumnaviga-
tion of all England. . . . My mother's resolution was to see all England
with her own eyes, and to judge for herself upon the qualifications of
each county, each town (not being a bustling seat of commerce), and
each village (having any advantages of scenery), for contributing the
main elements towards a home that might justify her in building a
house. The t^ualifications insisted on were these five — good medical
advice somewhere in the neighbourhood, first-rate means of education,
elegant (or what most people might think, aristocratic) society, agree-
able scenery, and so far the difticulty was not insuperable in the way ot
finding all four advantages concentrated. But my mother insisted on a
fifth, which in those days insured the instant shipwreck of the entire
scheme ; this was a Church of England parish clergyman, who was to
be strictly orthodox, faithful to the Articles of our English Church, yet
to these Articles as interpreted by Evangelical divinity. My mother's
views were precisely those of her friend Mrs. Hannah More, of Wilber-
force, of Henry Thornton, of Zachary Macaulay (father of the historian),
and generally of those who were then known amongst sneerers as ' the
Clapham Saints.' This one requisition it was on which the scheme
foundered. And the fact merits recording as an exposition of the
broad religious difference between the England of that day and of this.
At present no difficulty would be found as to this fifth requisition.
' Evangelical ' clergj-men are now sown broad-cast ; at that period,
there were not on an average above six or eight in each of the fifty-two
counties " — a contrast worth noting.
Such were the parents of Thomas De Quincey. He was
their second son, and was born on the 5th of August 1785,
at " The Farm," which he speaks of as " a pretty rustic
3S4 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
dwelling, occupied by my father in the neighbourhood of
Manchester." But six or seven years after his birth, the
Quincey household migrated to Greenhay, as he spells
it. Greenhay {Jiaie, hedge) had been built by his father in
1 79 1, under the controlling superintendence of his archi-
tectural mother, and with its grounds and garden was then
a solitary house, " a clear mile from the outskirts of
Manchester," From this mansion of the Quinceys the
Manchester suburb of Greenheys, according to the Opium
Eater, derives its name. It was standing, " sadly shorn of
its former beauties, in the year 1852, when it and its sur-
rounding grounds, about three acres in extent, were razed,
and became the site of hundreds of miserable dwellings,
bounded by the modern Pigot Street on the one side, and
Embden Street on the other." ^ The father's business was
carried on in Market Street Lane, and in a warehouse of
his own which was " absorbed in the improvement of
Market Street under the Act of 182 1." 2 But the elder
Quincey saw little or nothing of his family during what were
his later and his second son's earlier years. He was then
dying slowly of consumption, and he tried to escape the foe
by taking refuge in southern lands and regions, in the West
Indies, and on the coast of Devonshire. De Quincey's first
remembrance of him was when, he himself being a child of
about eight, his father returned to Greenhay to die. He
languished for weeks upon a sofa, and from the " repose of
manner" which already distinguished the little boy, his second
son was a privileged visitor to him throughout his waking
hours. " I was also present at his bedside " — the little boy,
become a man of nearly fifty, remembered and wrote — " in the
closing hour of his life, which exhaled quietly, amidst snatches
of delirious conversation with some imaginary visitors. He
^ Admission- Register of Manchester Grammar School, ii. 226,
^ lb., p. 225.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 385
died in the summer of 1793. leaving an unencumbered
estate worth exactly ;/{^ 1,600 a year. Each of the boys was
to have ;^i5o a year, and Tom's interests during his
minority were to be cared for by four guardians. One of
them, probably the most active of them, was the Rev.
Samuel Hall, then apparently a curate in Salford, but
afterwards the first incumbent of St. Peter's, Manchester.
At the death of its head, the Quincey family con-
sisted of the mother and six children, three girls and three
boys, of whom Thomas was the second. Two daughters
had died before their father. The death of the second of
them happened when De Quincey was a boy of six, and,
according to his own account, in a passage of his auto-
biography, full of solemn and pathetic beauty, grief for this
favourite and beloved sister, at her death a girl of nine, made
a profound and lasting impression on his mind and heart.
This was the clever sister to whom and to her precocious
little brother Tom (their " combined ages," he says, " made
no more at this period than a baker's dozen"). Dr. Percival,
the medical attendant of the family, presented, as formerly
mentioned,^ a copy of his " Father's Instructions." When
the fact was recorded, the promise was made that it should
be reverted to — and with sufficient reason, since thus
it is possible to compare at least one small reality of De
Quincey's childhood with the ideahzed representation of
it given by him long afterwards in his autobiography.
Goethe, in old age, writing memoirs of himself, frankly
called them " Wahrheit und Dichtung," — Fact and Fancy,
— for he knew that when memory seeks to recall from
a long- vanished past, the incidents, the thoughts and
feelings of early years, they become transfigured by the
imagination. How much of fact and how much of fancy
there is in De Quincey's autobiographic reminiscences it is
1 Ante, p. 175.
3c
386 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
of course impossible to determine, but the contrast between
the text of this one little story in Percival's compilation,
and his poetic version of it in later years, is curious and in-
structive. Here, from Percival's book, is the anecdote,
of which De Quincey says in his autobiography that the
impression made by it on himself and his sister was " deep
and memorable." " My sister wept over it, and wept over
the remembrance of it, and not long after carried its sweet
aroma off with her to heaven ; while I, for rrfy part, have
never forgotten it." Percival entitles it
'o^
"A GENEROUS RETURN FOR AN INJURY."
" WTien the Great Conde commanded the Spanish army, and laid
siege to one of the French towns in Flanders, a soldier being ill-treated
by a general officer, and struck several times with a cane, for some dis-
respectful words he had let fall, answered very coolly that he should
soon make him repent of it. Fifteen days afterwards, the same general
officer ordered the colonel of the trenches to find a bold and intrepid
fellow to execute an important enterprise, for which he promised a
reward of a hundred pistoles. The soldier we are speaking of, who
passed for the bravest in the regiment, offered his services, and going
with thirty of his comrades, whom he had the liberty to make choice
of, he discharged a very hazardous commission with incredible courage
and good-fortune. Upon his return, the general officer highly com-
mended him, and gave him the hundred pistoles which he had promised.
The soldier presently distributed them among his comrades, saying he
did not serve for pay, and demanded only that if his late action seemed
to deserve any recompense, he would make him an officer. ' And now,
Sir,' adds he to the General, who did not know him, ' I am the soldier
whom you abused so much fifteen days ago, and I then told you I
would make you repent of it.' The General, in great admiration,
and melting into tears, threw his arms around his neck, begged his
pardon, and gave him a commission that very day." — Rollin?-
Observe now^ how this bald little anecdote, as told by the
late Monsieur Rollin, — once, but no longer, a classic of the
English governess and her girl-pupils, — becomes expanded,
transformed, and glorified in De Quincey's memory.
^ Percival's Works, i. 23.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 387
" Here," he says, " is Dr. Percival's story " rendered into the
" impassioned prose " of which De Quincey was so proud : —
"A young officer (in what army, no matter) had so far forgotten
himself, in a moment of irritation, as to strike a private soldier full of
personal dignity (as sometimes happens in all ranks) and distinguished
for his courage. The inexorable laws of military discipline forbade to
the injured soldier any practical redress ; he could look for no retaliation
by acts. Words only were at his command ; and in a tumult of indig-
nation, as he turned away, the soldier said to his officer that he would
'make him repent it.' This, wearing the shape of a menace, naturally
rekindled the officer's anger, and intercepted any disposition which
might be rising within him towards a sentiment of remorse ; and thus
the irritation between the two young men grew hotter than before.
Some weeks after this, a partial action took place with the enemy.
Suppose yourself a spectator, and looking down into a valley occupied
by the two armies. They are facing each other, you see, in martial
array. But it is no more than a skirmish which is going on ; in the
course of which, however, an occasion suddenly arises for a desperate
service. A redoubt, which has fallen into the enemy's hands, must be
recaptured at any price, and under circumstances of all but hopeless
difficulty. A strong party has volunteered for the service ; there is a
ci-y for somebody to head them ; you see a soldier step out from the
ranks to assume this dangerous leadership ; the party moves rapidly
forward ; in a few minutes it is swallowed up from your eyes in clouds
of smoke ; for one half-hour, from behind these clouds, you receive
hieroglyphic reports of bloody strife ; fierce repeating signals, flashes
from the guns, rolling musketry, and exulting hurrahs, advancing or
receding, slackening or redoubling. At length all is over : the redoubt
has been recovered ; that which was lost is found again ; the jewel
which had been made captive is ransomed with blood. Crimsoned
with glorious gore, the wreck of the conquering party is relieved, and
at liberty to return. PVom the river you see it ascending. The plume-
crested officer in command rushes forward, with his left hand raising
his hat in homage to the blackened fragments of what was once a flag,
whilst, with his right hand, he seizes that of the leader, though no
more than a private from the ranks. That perplexes you not ; mystery
you see none in that. For distinctions of order perish, ranks are con-
founded, 'high and low,' are words without a meaning, and to wreck
goes every notion or feeling that divides the noble from the noble, or
the brave man from the brave. But wherefore is it that now, when
suddenly they wheel into mutual recognition, suddenly they pause?
388 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
This soldier, this officer — who are they ? O reader ! once before they
had stood face to face. The soldier it is that was struck ; the officer it
is that struck him. Once again they are meeting ; and the gaze of
armies is upon them. If for a moment a doubt divides them, in a
moment the doubt has perished. One glance exchanged between them
publishes the forgiveness that is sealed for ever. As one who recovers
a brother whom he had accounted dead, the officer sprang forward,
threw his arms around the neck of the soldier and kissed him, as if he
were some martyr glorified by that shadow of death from which he
was returning; whilst, on his part, the soldier, stepping back and
carrying his open hand through the beautiful motions of the military
salute to a superior, makes this immortal answer — that answer which
shut up for ever the memory of the indignity offered to him, even whilst
for the last time alluding to it: 'Sir,' he said, 'I told you before
that I would make you repent it.' " ^
An effective and striking bit of writing, in De Quincey's
best narrative-style, but certainly this is noi " Dr. Percival's
story." And the reader, or the writer, who studies De
Quincey's autobiography to extract from it the truth about
his life, whether outward or inward, must take into account
the Opium Eater's habit of allowing fancy, as in the fore-
going version of Rollin's anecdote, to magnify, transmute,
and beautify fact. Yet some reminiscence of the fact was
present in the autobiographer's mind. Probably he had not
seen Percival's book since he was a child. He might
easily have evolved a small romance without ever referring
to Percival, and the reference proves in its own way that if
his autobiography is not all fact, neither is it by any means
all fancy.
With no companions but younger sisters and brothers,
the little De Quincey was growing up in that solitary and
secluded mansion a shy, sensitive, and dreamy boy. Sud-
denly he was made to feel the sway of a more vigorous will
and temperament than his own, and was brought into rude
contact with a fraction of the busy industrial world — so near
1 IVorA-s (Second Edinburgh edition of 1863-71), xiv. 125.
THOMAS DE QUINCEV. 389
and yet so far — that lay beyond the pleasant grounds and
gardens and green lanes of still Greenhay. With their father's
death came the return home of little Tom's elder brother,
some five or six years older than himself, and then, there-
fore, about thirteen or fourteen. Master William Quincey,
having been found at an earlier stage unmanageable at home,
was sent to the Grammar School of Louth, in Lincoln-
shire, from which he returned, full of boyish vigour of all
kinds, to domineer over the inmates of the school-room and
nursery at Greenhay. He was not a reading boy like his
younger brother, who, to say nothing more of Dr. Percival's
juvenile literature, had already fed upon a "vast nursery
collection of books," — ■ among them a favourite '* Bible
illustrated with many pictures " — and who had advanced so
far in criticism as to challenge the preference given by Mrs.
Barbauld to Sindbad and Aladdin over the other stories of
the Arabian Nights. But the turbulent, mischief-loving,
and despotic new-comer from the Lincolnshire school and
its pugilistic encounters, was not without an odd intellec-
tuality and imaginativeness of his own. He delivered
lectures on Natural Philosophy in the nursery. He pro-
pounded plans for walking, like the flies, on the ceiling, and
was more successful in the manufacture of fire-balloons.
He had opinions of his own on every subject, from the
Thirty-nine Articles to necromancy, and frightened his
brothers and sisters by the profundity of his knowledge of
the world of ghosts. He wrote a tragedy called "Sultan
Amurath," which he compelled them to perform, and in
which the dramatis personae of each act were slaughtered
off to make room for a new set in the next. By way of
varying his amusements, he created an imaginary kingdom
of which he was the ruler, and kindly permitted his younger
brother to indulge a similar fancy. But the junior found
that even in the realms of imagination he was domineered
390 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
over by his imperious senior. His own kingdom was an
island of Gombroon, the whereabouts of which he carefully
concealed until he knew that of his brother's. When Will
announced that the capital of his dominions was in the high
latitude of 65 degrees north, Tom "smacked" his little
island-kingdom 10 degrees south of the line, in the hope
that his brother would not dream of fitting out a naval
expedition against distant and insignificant Gombroon.
But as soon as the whereabouts of Gombroon was fixed
upon the map. Will discovered that though his metropolis
was so far north, yet his sway extended southward some 80
or 90 degrees ! The acme of Tom's regal anxieties was
reached when, after an accidental dip into the book in
which that strange Scotchman, Lord Monboddo, asserted
man to be a variety of the ape, and to have at one time
possessed a tail, Will suddenly announced that Tom's
Gombroonian subjects were still in the tail-wearing stage.
There was no end to the ridicule and reproach which the
elder brother heaped upon the younger for this backward
condition of the Gombroonian development. Long after-
wards De Quincey remembered and half-pathetically re-
corded what he suffered on this account, and the cir-
cumstantiality of the record goes to prove that the little
boy of eight or nine, who could thus torment himself, must
have been already morbidly sensitive.
These were merely mental torments, but physical pains
and penalties v/ere added by the enfa7it terrible of an elder
brother to embitter poor Tom's existence. The two boys
went daily from Greenhay to Salford, where lived their
tutor, the Rev. Mr. Hall, of whom mention has been made
as one of Tom's guardians. De Quincey's own account of
the circumstances out of which this new trouble arose is
worth giving for its topographical and in some degree for its
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 391
social interest. He is describing Manchester as it was in
1792, or thereabouts : —
"Greenhay, a country-house, newly built by my father, at that time
was a clear mile from the outskirts of Manchester ; but in after years
Manchester, throwing out the tentacula of its vast expansion, absolutely
enveloped Greenhay ; and for anything I know the grounds and gardens
which then insulated the house may have long disappeared. Being a
modest mansion, which (including hot walls, ofifices, and gardener's
house) had cost only six thousand pounds, I do not know how it should
have risen to the distinction of giving name to a region of that great
town — however, it has done so ; ^ and at this time, therefore, after changes
so great, it will be difficult for the habitue of that region to understand
how my brother and myself could have a solitary road to traverse
between Greenhay and Princess Street, then the termination on that
side of Manchester. But so it was, Oxford Street, like its namesake
in London, was then called the Oxford Road ; and during the cur-
rency of our acquaintance with it, arose the first three houses in
its neighbourhood ; of which the third was built for the Rev. S. H." —
Samuel Hall — "one of our guardians, for whom his friends had also built
the Church of St. Peter's — not a bowshot from the house. At present,
however, he resided in Salford, nearly two miles from Greenhay ; and
to him we went over daily for the benefit of his classical instructions.
One sole cotton- factory had then risen along the line of Oxford Street,
and this was close to a bridge, which also was a new creation ; for pre-
viously all passengers to Manchester went round by Garrat. This
factory became to us the ojjicina gentium, from which swarmed forth
those Goths and Vandals that continually threatened our steps ; and
this bridge became the eternal arena of combat, we taking care to be
on the right side of the bridge for retreat, i.e., on the town side, or the
country side, accordingly as we were going out in the morning, or
returning in the afternoon. Stones were the implements of warfare ;
and by continual practise both parties became expert in throwing
them.
"The origin of the feud it is scarcely requisite to rehearse, since the
1 In one of those notes — of which De Quincey was so fond, — ex-
panding, qualifying, or illustrating his text, he adds: "Greenheys with
a slight variation in the spelling, is the name given to that district of
which Greenhay formed the original nucleus. Probably it was the
solitary situation of the house which (failing any other grounds of
denomination) raised it to this privilege."
392 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
particular accident which began it was not the tnie efficient cause of cur
long warfare, but simply the casual occasion. The cause lay in our
aristocratic dress. As children of an opulent family, where all pro-
visions were liberal, and all appointments elegant, we were uniformly
well dressed ; and in particular, we wore trousers (at that time unheard
of, except among sailors), and we also wore Hessian boots— a crime
that could not be forgiven in the Lancashire of that day, because it ex-
pressed the double offence of being aristocratic and being outlandish.
We were aristocrats, and it was vain to deny it ; could we deny our
boots? whilst our antagonists, if not absolutely sattsculoties, were
slovenly and forlorn in their dress, often unwashed, with hair totally
neglected, and always covered with flakes of cotton. Jacobins they
were not," — a remark worth noting, — "as regarded any sympathy with
the Jacobinism that then desolated France ; for, on the contrary, they
detested everything French, and answered with brotherly signals to the
cry of 'Church and King,' or, 'King and Constitution.' But, for all
that, as they were perfectly independent, getting very high wages, and
these wages in a mode of industry that was then taking vast strides
ahead, they contrived to reconcile this patriotic anti-Jacobinism with a
personal Jacobinism of that sort which is native to the heart of man,
who is by natural impulse (and not without a root of nobility, though
also of base envy) impatient of inequality, and submits to it only through
a sense of its necessity, or under a long experience of its benefits.
"It was on an early day of our new tyrociniu??i, or perhaps in the
very first, that, as we passed the bridge, a boy happening to issue from
the factory sang over to us derisively ' Hulloa, Bucks ! ' In this the
reader may fail to perceive any atrocious insult commensurate to the
long war which followed. But the reader is wrong. The word
'dandies,' which was what the villain meant, had not then been born,
so that he could not have called us by that name, unless through the
spirit of prophecy. Buck was the nearest word at hand in his Man-
chester vocabulary ; he gave all he could, and let us dream the rest.
But in the next moment he discovered our boots, and he consummated
his crime by saluting us as ' Boots ! Boots ! ' My brother made a dead
stop, surveyed him with intense disdain, and bade him draw near that
he might 'give his flesh to the fowls of the air.' The boy declined to
accept this liberal invitation, and conveyed his answer by a most
contemptuous and plebeian gesture, upon which my brother drove him
in with a shower of stones." ^
This was the young De Quincey's introduction to Man-
^ Wo}-ks, xiv. 48.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 393
Chester Industrialism and the factory system. The quiet,
dreamy, sensitive little boy had no taste for encounters with
the rude sons of the mill, but his impetuous and aggressive
brother insisted on his active alliance, offensive and de-
fensive, and daily he had to assist in a battle of which
" stones, fragments of slate, and a reasonable proportion of
brick-bats were the weapons." Thrice he was captured by
the foe ; once he made his escape ; the second time he was
dismissed with kicks and an insolent message to his brother,
who reviled him for transmitting it ; a third time he was
delivered into the custody of the girls of the factory, who
connived at his flight. At last, one of the boys' guardians
interfered. He happened to be a magistrate, and thus to
possess some weight with the proprietors of the factory.
But the juvenile mill-hands were so independent of em-
ployers, and so careless of their displeasure, that the only
means discoverable for putting an end to the warfare was
an alteration of the hours at which the two young gentlemen
came and went between Greenhay and Salford. Even this
arrangement was proving ineffective for the preservation of the
peace, when the elder of the brothers was summoned away to
a distance. Among William Quincey's accomplishments
was that of drawing. Some of his sketches were shown to
De Lotherbourg, the academician, who pronounced them
promising. With a fee of a thousand guineas, at least so
says De Quincey, he was sent as a pupil to the artist, in
whose house at Hammersmith he died of typhus at seventeen.
The news of his death does not seem to have been received
by his junior with any of the transcendent grief which De
Quincey represents himself to have felt at the death of his
elder sister, and a reference to "horrid pugilistic brothers"
once occurs in his autobiography. The daily combats with
factory lads may not have been agreeable to the sensitive
boy, but a little, not too much, of what is called roughing it
3 D
394 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
at a public school, would probably have done him good
then and in after life.
When he did go to a public school, it was not a whole-
some ordeal to which he was exposed. He was placed at
the Grammar School of Bath, to which town, cetat. 13, he
migrated with his mother and her household. De Quincey
had made progress under the Rev. Samuel Hall, though he
speaks of the first incumbent of St. Peter's as a dull man,
and remembered sadly when he wrote his autobiography,
his weekly task of having to reproduce every Monday to the
best of his ability the sermon which his clerical tutor
preached on the Sunday. His aptitude for learning was
great, and if it was only later that he became a good
Grecian, his skill in Latin verse-making was already so con-
siderable, that the master of the Bath school used to re-
proach his bigger and biggest boys with being outdone by
this little fellow, who, with his diminutive stature, looked even
younger than he was. The seniors resented the comparison,
and made poor De Quincey's school-life very uncomfortable
to him. After a year or two he had to leave in consequence
of an accident, which led the doctors to fear that his skull
was fractured. During his illness his mother read to him
Hoole's Tasso, and he first read for himself the Paradise
Lost, of which great poem his profound admiration and
knowledge are visible throughout his writings. When he
was well again, some adult local admirers asked that he
might be allowed to return to the school where he had dis-
tinguished himself. " But," says De Quincey, " it illustrates
my mother's moral austerity, that she was shocked at my
hearing compliments to my own merits, and was altogether
disturbed at what doubtless these gentlemen expected to
see received with maternal pride. She decHned to let me
continue at the Bath school; and I went to another, at
Winkfield, in the county of Wilts, of which the chief
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 395
recommendation lay in the religious character of the
master."
At Winkfield, under its religious master, De Quincey
remained about a twelvemonth, and of his experiences there
his autobiography contains no record. Then, in his fifteenth
year, the schoolboy was suddenly admitted to glimpses of
the great world, and brought into contact more or less
close with people of rank and fashion. He received an
invitation to accompany, on a visit to Ireland during the
summer and autumn, a "young friend" of his own age,
Lord Westport, the son of Lord Altamont, afterwards first
Marquis of Sligo. Of the origin of the friendship between
the son of the Manchester linen merchant and the young
Irish nobleman, De Quincey simply says : " My acquaint-
ance with Lord Westport was of some years' standing.
My father, whose commercial interests led him often to
Ireland, had many friends there. One of these was a
country gentleman connected with the west, and at his
house I first met Lord Westport." Lord Westport was at
Eton, and in the spring of 1800 De Quincey went to join
him there. The young nobleman's mother was a daughter of
the great Admiral, Earl Howe, and was intimately known
to the royal family, and Lord Westport at Eton was therefore
favoured with the special notice of George III. at Windsor.
During one of their walks in the grounds of Frogmore, the
two boys were amusing themselves throwing pebbles almost
when the King came upon them. After a little conversa-
tion with Lord Westport, the good-natured monarch spoke
to his companion, and was doubtless amused when, in
reply to the question whether the Quinceys had settled
in England on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the
boy plunged into a genealogical account of his family,
asserting with some eagerness that they were not French,
but had come to England at the Conquest, and quoting
39^ LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Robert of Gloucester in proof of their mediaeval eminence.
In May, De Quincey saw for the first time, though but
for a day (most of it given to St. Paul's), the mighty
London which he was to revisit under very different
circumstances. In June the two young friends were with
Lord Altamont in Dublin. Ue Quincey's stay in the Irish
capital was made at an interesting time, for those were the
last days of the legislative independence of Ireland ; and
with Lord Altamont for his host, he saw everybody and
everything worth seeing. He was present in the Irish
House of Lords on the death-day of the Irish Parliament,
when the Union Bill received the Royal assent. The
observant boy remarked with wonder at the time, and
recorded long years afterwards, the curious fact that there
was not the slightest sign of excitement in the crowd
of legislators and privileged spectators when the fateful
words le rot le veult tolled the knell of Ireland's separate
legislation. " The man who presented his robes to Lord
Altamont seemed to me," he says, " of all whom I saw on
that day, the one who wore the face of deepest depression.
But whether this indicated the loss of a lucrative situation,
or was really disinterested sorrow, growing out of a patriotic
trouble at the knowledge that he was now officiating for
the last time, I could not guess." From Dublin, De
Quincey accompanied Lord Westport and Lord Altamont
to the family seat in county Mayo, and saw a good deal
of the domestic life of the old Irish resident nobility, an
experience novel and interesting. At Westport House
he found himself near the centre of the second Irish
insurrection of 1798, and only eleven miles from Castle-
bar, to which town the French expeditionary force, sent
under General Humbert to assist the rebels, had "ad-
dressed their very earliest efforts." " Records there
were on every side, and memorials even in our bed-
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 39/
rooms, of this French visit; for at one time they had
occupied Westport House in some strength." The con-
versation often turned on the doings of those eventful
days, and the intelligent and inquisitive young gentleman
learned all that was to be learned about them from people
some of whom had witnessed the insurrection, while others
of them had played a part in it. The events recorded in the
chapters of his autobiography devoted to the two Irish
insurrections of 1798 lie away from the story of De
Quincey's life, but his chronicle of them combines vigour
and picturesqueness with all that subtle analysis in the
presentment of detail which characterises him as a nar-
rator.
From the west of Ireland, with its jovial gentry and
smouldering ashes of insurrection, the young De Quincey
passed as a guest to Laxton, a country-house in Northamp-
tonshire. One of his sisters was there, visiting a certain
Lady Carbery, a young and beautiful peeress, who was an
intimate friend of his mother's, and who had known him-
self when a child. In Ireland he had, of course, played a
part subordinate to his young friend, Lord Westport. At
Laxton he found himself somebody. When he arrived,
Lord Carbery was absent, and Lady Carbery had for
guests a Lord and Lady Massey. Lord Massey, an Irish
peer, had been roused from a life of ennui and torpor by
an attachment to the fair young Irishwoman whom he
married, and whose fascinations of person, disposition,
and manner, exercised after marriage the same spell on
him as before it. But there were no males to keep him
company and to amuse him in those two terrible post-
prandial hours during which custom banished the ladies
from the dining-room. De Quincey had no sooner entered
the house than Lady Carbery, who was deeply attached
to Lady Massey, took him into her confidence, and
39S LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
asked him to entertain, in the intellectual sense of the
word, the young nobleman after dinner. The young
gentleman cheerfully consented to do his best. His
Irish visit had rubbed off some of his shyness, and sup-
plied him with topics of conversation interesting to an
Irish peer. " I could talk," he says, " upon innumerable
subjects," and "with the aid of three or four glasses of
wine" he made himself an agreeable companion. From
amusing his fellow-guest De Quincey took to instructing
his fair hostess. His mother had made Lady Carbery
religious after her own fashion, and she and her young
friend were soon engaged in theological discussion. One
great advantage the boy had over the woman in these
friendly debates. He knew the original language of the
New Testament, and Lady Carbery willingly accepted his
offer to teach it her. The needful books were ordered
from Stamford, and under the guidance of her youthful
tutor she became an adept in New Testament Greek. He
was urging on her the pleasure which she would derive
from reading Herodotus in the original, when Lord Car-
bery appeared on the scene, and De Quincey left it.
His guardians had decided that he should enter the
Manchester Grammar School, and try for one of those
exhibitions at Brasenose, which were open to pupils of three
years' standing at Bishop Oldham's Foundation. Each exhi-
bition yielded jQ^o a year, and this would have raised De
Quincey's patrimonial income of ^£"150 to ;^2oo at Oxford.
There is some justice in De Quincey's complaint that the
proposed arrangement ought to have been tried when he was
younger. He was now half-way between fifteen and sixteen,
and he would remain a school-boy until he was half-way
between eighteen and nineteen. After his free and quasi-
virile life in Ireland and Northamptonshire, his soul
sickened at the thought of the Manchester Grammar
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 399
School. To it, however, he was consigned, and after an
examination, he was placed in the highest class. The
head master, whose boarder he became, was not the man
to reconcile him to his new lot. Mr. Lawson was a con-
scientious, a too conscientious, teacher. He cut down the
hours traditionally allowed for meals and recreation, and
added them to school-time. De Quincey's health suffered ; —
though his organisation was frail, yet in ordinary circum-
stances and with plenty of exercise, he never knew illness —
but at the Manchester Grammar School, according to his
account, exercise was out of the question. As the months
rolled on, the state both of his body and mind rendered
the school insufferably repulsive. In some respects, on
the other hand, there was much to make his new school-
life pleasant. He had a room to himself; his mother
presented him with an admission to a Manchester hbrary,
on the literary stores of which he fastened with keen enjoy-
ment; and he was fortunate in his school-fellows of his
own age or standing. One of his chief friends among
them — the "G." of his autobiography — was the amiable
and excellent Gilbert, afterwards Bishop of Chichester.
In his retrospect, moreover, of those days, and of the
older or riper among his school-fellows, De Quincey lays
stress on the rather striking as well as creditable fact, that
the reproach to which the training given and the studies pur-
sued at most other public schools were liable — that, namely,
of a neglect of our own literature — could not be brought
against the Manchester Grammar School. At this school,
indeed, he says, speaking of himself and his companions : —
" It happened that most of us sought for the ordinary subjects of
our conversational discussions in literature, viz., in our own native
literature. Here it was that I learned to feel a deep respect for my
new school-fellows — deep it was then, and a larger experience has
made it deeper. I have since known many literaiy men ; men whose
400 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
profession was literature, and who sometimes had with some cnc
special section or little nook of literature an acquaintance critically
minute. But amongst such men I have found but three or four who
had a knowledge which came as near to what I should consider a
comprehensive knowledge, as really existed amongst these boys col-
lectively. What one boy had not, another had ; and thus, by con-
tinual intercourse, the fragmentary contributions of one being integrated
by the fragmentary contributions of others, gradually the attainments
of each separate individual became, in some degree, the collective
attainments of the whole senior common room. It is true, undoubt-
edly, that some parts of literature were inaccessible to boys at school —
for instance, Froissart in the old translation by Lord Berners, now
more than three centuries old ; and some parts were to the young
essentially repulsive. But measuring the general qualifications by
that standard which I have since found to prevail amongst professional
litterateurs, I felt more respectfully towards the majority of my senior
school-fellows than ever I had fancied it possible that I should find
occasion to feel towards any boys whatever. My intercourse with
those amongst them who had any conversational talents greatly stimu-
lated my intellect. " ^
It is a pity that De Quincey, with his passion for discus-
sive philosophising, did not broach a theory to account for
this striking difference between the Manchester school and
public schools elsewhere. However, it is creditable to him
that, with all his classical scholarship, he ever upheld the
greatness of our own rich and noble literature, and main-
tained its superiority as a whole to that of Greece and Rome,
It was while at the Manchester school that De Quincey
first made the acquaintance of two, then new and young,
English writers, who both personally and intellectually were
destined to affect his career most powerfully. In 1798 had
appeared, anonymously, the first edition of the "Lyrical
Ballads," Wordsworth's (chiefly) and Coleridge's, a volume
which opened with " The Ancient Mariner," and closed
with the " Lines written a itw miles above Tintern Abbey."
^ Confessions of an Opium- Eater, in vol. i. of Works (edition of
1863), p. 57-
THOMAS DB QUINCRY. 4OI
The sale of the work was so inconsiderable, that when its
publisher, Cottle, the Bristol bookseller, transferred his
copyrights to the Longmans, the value of this one copyright
was formally estimated as "nil"/ By degrees, however,
the new poetic and philosophic music found an audience,
fit, though few, and in 1801 a second edition was called for.
A copy of it fell into the hands of the schoolboy De
Quincey, and acted on his susceptive mind almost like a
revelation. Deep was his disappointment when, at this
time, reading it aloud, " with a beating heart," to Lady Car-
bery, she scoffed at the Ancient Mariner as an " old quiz" !
For De Quincey was cheered during his stay at the Man-
chester Grammar School with the occasional society of the
fair peeress who had been his pupil at Laxton. A former
governess and dear friend of Lady Carbery's, who had
settled near her, and was afflicted with some painful disease,
decided on going to Manchester for a time to profit by the
professional advice of one of its denizens, Charles White,
at this time the most eminent surgeon in the North of
England. Lady Carbery and the Laxton household, Lord
and Lady Massey included, migrated with her to Man-
chester, — a town, according to De Quincey, little fitted
then for the reception of aristocratic visitors.
"Gloomy they " — the streets of Manchester — "were at that time,
mud below, smoke above, for no torch of improvement had yet ex-
plored the ancient habitations of the Lancashire capital. Elsewhere ^
^ " Elsewhere " is in the "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater "
(p. 45), where, speaking of the alumni of the Manchester Grammar
School, De Quincey says : "I had lived familiarly with boys gathered from
all quarters of the island at the Bath Grammar School, and for some
time (when visiting Lord Altamont at Eton) with boys of the highest
aristocratic pretensions. At Bath and at Eton, though not equally,
there prevailed a tone of higher polish ; and in the air, speech, de-
portment of the majority, could be traced at once a premature know-
ledge of the world. They had indeed the advantage over my new
3e
402 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
I have expressed the inexhaustible admiration which I cherish for the
moral qualities, the unrivalled energy and perseverance, of that native
Lancashire population, as yet not much alloyed with Celtic adulteration.
My feelings towards them are the same as were eloquently and impres-
sively avowed by the late eminent Dr. Cooke Taylor, after an official
inquiry into their situation. But in those days the Manchester people
realised the aspiration of the noble Scythian ; not the place it was that
glorified them, but they that glorified the place. No great city (which
technically it then was not, but simply a town or large village) could pre-
sent so repulsive an exterior as the Manchester of that day. Lodgings of
any sort could with difficulty be obtained, and at last only by breaking
up the party. The poor suffering lady, with her two friends. Lady
Carbery and my mother, hired one house. Lord and Lady Massey
another, and two others were occupied by attendants, — all the servants,
except one lady's maid, being every night separated by a quarter of a
mile from their mistresses. " ^
Most welcome to De Quincey was the presence of the
beautiful and friendly peeress, with her conversation " so
friends in graceful self-possession ; but, on the other hand, the best of
them suffered by comparison with these Manchester boys in the qualities
of visible self-restraint and of self respect. At Eton high rank was
distributed pretty liberally, but in the Manchester school the parents of
many boys were artizans, or of that rank ; some even had sisters that
were menial servants ; and those who stood higher by pretensions of
birth and gentle blood, were at the most the sons of rural gentry or of
clergymen. And I believe that, with the exception of three or four
brothers, belonging to a clergyman's family at York, all were, like
myself, natives of Lancashire, At that time my experience was too
limited to warrant me in expressing any opinion, one way or other,
upon the relative pretensions — moral and intellectual — of the several
provinces in our island. But since then I have seen reason to agree
with the late Dr, Cooke Taylor, in awarding the pre-eminence, as
regards energy, power to face suffering, and other high qualities, to the
natives of Lancashire, Even a century back they were distinguished
for the culture of refined tastes. In musical skill and sensibility no
part of Europe, with the exception of a few places in Germany, could
pretend to rival them ; and, accordingly, even in Handel's days, but
for the chorus-singers from Lancashire, his oratorios must have remained
a treasure, if not absolutely sealed, at any rate most imperfectlj re-
vealed."
^ Works, xiv, 429.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 403
bold, SO novel, and so earnest," and every afternoon he was
allowed to spend some hours in her drawing-room. But
even her society did not cure his dispiritment and depres-
sion, as one little incident testifies. During the stay of
the Laxton party in Manchester occurred a Christmas, and
according to old custom there was an oratorical display at
the Grammar School on the breaking up for the holidays.
As one of the three boys who composed the head class, De
Quincey was called on to take part in the proceedings,
and Lady Carbery, with a large party of friends, was among
the auditors. According to his own account, he had to
recite a copy of Latin verses on the recent capture of Malta,
Melita Britannis subacta} His declamation was received
with loud applause, but long afterwards he remembered how
** furious" was his "disgust," and how "frantic" was his
" inner sense of shame at the childish exhibition." Morbid,
indeed, must have been the state of mind of the clever
boy of fifteen, when feelings like these quenched the natural
glow of juvenile vanity. In after-years he came to the
conclusion that much of his suffering might have been re-
moved by the timely administration of a few doses of
calomel. But the medical adviser, with whom his guardians
allowed him to run up a bill, was an aged apothecary who
dosed him with drastic medicines, and these merely aggra-
vated his complaint. When Lady Carbery and the Laxton
household left Manchester, De Quincey was reduced to
despair. He opened negotiations with one of his guardians
for a removal from school ; but the guardian thought, not
unnaturally, that as the young gentleman had completed
^ Here, again, the fact of the declamation is confirmed by evidence,
while, in regard to its theme, memory had played him false. "At the
annual speech day in December iSoo, Thomas De Quincey took part,
reciting a Latin exercise on this text, ' Dolor ipse disertum fecerat.' " —
Admission- Register of Manchester Grammar School, ii. 225.
404 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
one half of the term requisite for an exhibition, he had
better stay out the other half, unless he had some more
valid excuse for departure than a morbid mood of mind or
a hability to bilious attacks. When this last hope of release
from the bondage of school was destroyed, De Quincey
resolved to " elope," as he phrases it, — in plain English, to
run away. At first his unrest pointed in the direction of
the Lakes, where was the abode of his idolised Words-
worth. But on reflection he decided not to present him-
self for the first time to the poet in the undignified character
of a runaway and impecunious schoolboy. Ultimately he
fixed on North Wales as his destination, partly because his
way to it lay through Chester, where lived his mother, whom
he was unwilling to alarm by disappearing into space,
leaving not a trace behind. She had grown tired of Bath,
and had migrated to Chester, and St. John's Priory, without
the walls of the ancient city. Having bought the Priory, she
had added to it, with her usual love for building, and was
hving there with her younger children and a brother, a retired
East Indian officer. Her son's decision taken, he wrote to
Lady Carbery, asking for a loan of five guineas, and after
a week he received a letter enclosing ten. A rather curious
incident further helped to drive him Chester-wards. Through
some mistake of the post-oflfice, he received a letter addressed
" A Monsieur De Quincey, Chester." It contained a draft
for forty guineas, and, as afterwards appeared, was intended
for a French e7nigre at Chester, unknown to the postal
authorities there, who accordingly forwarded it to a De
Quincey whom they did know of. To return it to the
Chester Post-office was an additional inducement to make
for the city on the Dee, and early on a July morning of
1802, before the Lawson household was astir, the young
gentleman bade a silent and secret farewell to the Man-
chester Grammar School, and launched on a career of
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 405
Strange vicissitude and adventure. " I set off on foot," he
says, " carrying a small parcel with some articles of dress
under my arm, a favourite English poet in one pocket, and
an odd volume, containing about one-half of Canter's
Euripides, in the other."
Of course the news of her son's flight reached his mother
some time before the truant could arrive at Chester on foot.
On his arrival there, he managed to have the \vrongly-
delivered letter, with its enclosure, handed over to the
postal authorities, and he despatched a note to one of his
sisters asking her to meet him in the ruins of the near
Priory which gave its name to her home. Instead of the
sister, who was off in a post-chaise to the Lake country in
search of her vanished brother, the " bronzed Bengal uncle "
kept the appointment, and Master Tom was soon in the
presence of his anxious and austere mother. Fortunately
for him, the uncle was a man not only of the world,
but of "even morbid activity," who rather sympathised
with his nephew's preference of locomotion among the
Welsh mountains to school and school-books. At his in-
stance the mother consented that the young gentleman
should be allowed a guinea a week to make a pedestrian
tour in Wales. The uncle pleaded for a larger allowance,
but the mother refused, urging, " most reasonably," De
Quincey admitted in his maturer years, that an increase
" would be only a proclamation to his two younger brothers
that rebellion bore a premium, and that mutiny was the
ready road to ease and comfort."
Behold the young De Quincey, then, just entering his
eighteenth year, permitted to taste the sweets of perfect
freedom amid the beautiful scenery of North Wales ! For
a few weeks he lived in lodgings at Bangor, the Bishop of
which, as it happened, was Master of Brazenose, the very
Oxford college to which De Quincey might have gone had
406 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
he remained at the Manchester Grammar School. His
Bangor landlady had been in the Bishop's service, and in
the course of condescending conversation with her, his
lordship warned her to be careful to whom she let her
lodgings, and hinted that her young lodger might be an
adventurer. The good woman reported the conversation
in a style too matter-of-fact for the taste of De Quincey,
who left the house forthwith. In his autobiography he
speculates extensively on the happy results that might have
followed if he had written the good Bishop an expostula-
tory letter in Greek, which must have attracted the prelate's
attention to the writer and his story, and perhaps have pro-
cured him his patronage then and there, and afterwards at
Oxford. However, he did not write the Greek letter, and
he quitted Bangor for Carnarvon and " Snowdonia," in
which region, on his guinea a week, he led for some time a
delightful and rambling life, thus, with the long-vanished
and enviable tourist-aspects of the Principality during the
first years of the century, pleasantly and characteristically
described in the " Confessions " : —
"There were already, even in these days of 1802, numerous inns,
erected at reasonable distances from each other, for the accommodation
of tourists, and no sort of disgrace attached in Wales, as too generally
upon the great roads of England, to the pedestrian style of travelling. In-
deed, the majority of those whom I met as fellow-tourists in the quiet little
cottage-parlours of the Welsh posting-houses were pedestrian travellers.
All the way from Shrewsbury, through Llangollen, Llanwrst, Conway,
Bangor, then turning to the left at right angles through Carnarvon, and so
on to Dolgelly (the chief town of Merionethshire), Tan-y-Bwlch, Harlech,
Barmouth, and through the sweet solitudes of Cardiganshire, or turning
back sharply towards the English border through the gorgeous wood
scenery of Montgomeryshire — everywhere at intermitting distances of
twelve to sixteen miles, I found the most comfortable inns. One fea-
ture, indeed, of repose in all this chain of solitary resting-houses, viz.,
the fact that none of them rose above two stories in height, was due
to the modest scale on which the travelling system of the Principality
had moulded itself in correspondence to the call of England, which
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 407
then (but be it remembered this then was in 1802, a year of peace)
threw a very small proportion of her vast migratory population annually
into this sequestered channel. No huge Babylonian centres of com-
merce towered into the clouds on these sweet sylvan routes ; no hurri-
canes of haste, or fever-stricken armies of horses and flying chariots,
tormented the echoes in these mountain recesses. And it has often
struck me that a world-wearied man, who sought for the peace of
monasteries separated from their gloomy caj^tivity — peace and silence
such as theirs, combined with the large liberty of Nature— could not do
better than revolve amongst these modern inns in the five northern
Welsh counties of Denbigh, Montgomery, Carnarvon, Merioneth, and
Cardigan. Sleeping, for instance, and breakfasting at Carnarvon ; then
by an easy nine-mile walk, going forwards to dinner at Bangor ; thence
to Aber — nine miles — or to Llanberis ; and so on for ever, accomplishing
seventy to ninety or one hundred miles in a week. This, upon actual
experiment, and for week after week, I found the most delightful of
lives. Here was the eternal motion of winds and rivers, or of the
Wandering Jew liberated from the persecution which compelled him to
move, and turned his breezy freedom into a killing captivity. Happier
life I cannot imagine than this vagrancy, if the weather were but toler-
able, through endless successions of changing beauty, and towards
evening a courteous welcome in a pretty rustic home, that, having all
the luxuries of a fine hotel (in particular some luxuries that are almost
sacred to Alpine regions), was at the same time liberated from the in-
evitable accompaniments of such hotels in great cities or at great travel-
ling stations, viz. , the tumult and the uproar.
"Life on this model was but too delightful ; and to myself especially,
that am never thoroughly in health unless when having pedestrian exer-
cise to the extent of fifteen miles at the most, and eight to ten miles at
the least. Living thus, a man earned his daily enjoyment. But what
did it cost ? About half-a-guinea a day, whilst my boyish allowance
was not a third of this. The flagrant health — health boiling over in
fiery rapture — which ran along side by side with exercise on this scale,
whilst all the while from morning to night I was inhaling mountain air,
soon passed into a hateful scourge " — presumably from the costly appe-
tite thus produced. "Perquisites to servants and a bed would have
absorbed the whole of my weekly guinea. My policy therefore was, if
the autumnal air were warm enough, to save this expense of a btd and
the chamber-maid by sleeping amongst ferns and furze upon a hill-side ;
and perhaps with a cloak of sufficient weight as well as compass, or an
Arab's burnoose, this would have been no great hardship. But then
in the day-time what an oppressive burden to carry ! So perhaps it
was as well that I had no cloak at all. I did, however, for some weeks
408 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
try the plan of carrying a canvas tent, matnufactured by myself, and not
larger than an ordinary umbrella, but to pitch this securely I found
difficult, and on windy nights it became a troublesome companion. As
winter drew near, this bivouacking system became too dangerous to
attempt. Still one may bivouack decently, barring rain and wind, up
to the end of October. And I counted, on the whole, that in a fort-
night I spent nine nights abroad. " ^
Of congenial society De Quincey found no lack among
the tourists who lingered in and about Snowdonia, and who
were interested by the conversation of the polished, well-
read, and reflective young gentleman. Indeed, during these
rambles it was that De Quincey, brought into commune with
all sorts of minds, developed and cultivated the singular col-
loquial powers for which he afterwards became famous. One
of his temporary companions, a " Mr. De Haren,"an accom-
plished young German, who had held a commission in the
British navy, even gave him some lessons in German, and
excited his curiosity respecting such great Germans as Kant
and Jean Paul Richter, whose names he then heard for the
first time. From the same associate he derived the hum-
bler knowledge that there was an inn ten or twelve miles
south of Dolgelly where the charge for "a really elegant
dinner " was only sixpence, and the youthful philosopher
took care to test the accuracy of the information. De
Quincey says that he " alternately sailed upon the high-
priced and the low-priced tack." By living in cottages he
could, on three weeks expenditure, save two guineas out of
his three, and spend the third where society and conversa-
tion were to be had. " In some families," he adds, '^ raised
above dependence upon daily wages, when I performed
any services in the way of letter-writing, I found it imprac-
ticable at times to force any money at all upon them." But
winter was approaching, when bivouacking would be imprac-
ticable, and it would be difficult to eke out the weekly guinea
* Confessions of an Opium- Eater, p. 130-2.
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 409
SO as to cover the expenses at inns where society and conver-
sation were to be found. What was to be done ? He was now
accustomed to be his own master, and never seems to have
thought of returning home. Suddenly the strange notion
occurred to him that he would rush off to London and try to
borrow ^200 on the security of his " expectations." In four
years more he was to attain his majority, and his little patri-
mony would be at his own disposal. He entered into elabo-
rate calculations with himself — for however deficient in prac-
tical, De Quincey was always a master of theoretical, finance
— to prove that he could live comfortably in London lodgings
for ;^5o a year. Two friendly Welsh lawyers started him
for the metropoUs with a loan of twelve guineas. Reaching
Shrewsbury on foot, he caught the Holyhead mail, and in
eight and twenty hours the adventurous youth of seventeen
was alone in the wilderness of the Great Babylon.
At ten o'clock on the morning of his arrival, De Quincey
presented himself to a London usurer. When in Wales, he
had, with some forethought, communicated by letter his wants
and his expectations to several worthies of this class, and
the money-lender to whom he first applied had, he says,
verified certain of his statements. But this particular money-
lender did not grant personal interviews, and referred him
to one of his jackals, a broken-down attorney, who called
himself Mr. Brown, and occupied a ramshackle house,
almost bare of furniture, in Greek Street, Soho. Mr. Brown
professed to give loans on personal security, but his own,
in the non-financial sense of the words, was limited, since
he lived in frequent fear of arrest. Brown, however, was a
well-educated man, and loved knowledge and literature.
This formed a bond of personal union between him and
his juvenile acquaintance, and as matters turned out, very
fortunately for the foolish De Quincey. The remaining
guineas of the twelve, with the aid of which the young
3 F
410 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
gentleman exchanged Wales for London, disappeared in a
few weeks. He might have been absolutely homeless, had
not Brown given him gratuitous lodgings, without board,
in the roomy and sparsely-tenanted mansion of Soho.
Here he found for his chief companion a poor friendless
girl of ten, who acted as a sort of servant to Mr. Brown
during the day, and it was only during the day that this
singular money-lender was visible, or invisible, in Greek
Street. De Quincey's interviews with him and conversations
on classical and other literary topics were chiefly at his
breakfast, any occasionally remaining fragments of which
meal were appropriated by the hungry and destitute youth.
When the varied, but always disreputable business of his
host's day began, the young gentleman took his walks abroad,
only to return to sleep, on the floor, as it chanced, with a
bundle of law-papers for a pillow, and the scantiest of dis-
coverable bed-clothes. In his night-rambles, till it was time
for him to take shelter in this strange home, De Quincey be-
came familiar, innocently familiar, he says, with some of the
class of "female peripatetics," as he styles them, whom he re-
garded as " simply sisters in calamity." With one of them, a
girl scarcely sixteen, whom he knew only as Ann, " for many
weeks he had walked at night, up and down Oxford Street,
or had rested with her on steps or under the shelter of
porticoes," when there befell the incident which, so long
as the " Confessions of an Opium- Eater " are read, will
keep alive the dim, sad memory of this poor Magdalen.
Hers was otherwise the usual story, but however sternly
moral and unsentimental or anti-sentimental, what reader of
that unique book can forget De Quincey's record of this
episode in their nocturnal wanderings, or has not been
touched by the apostrophe with which it closes ? —
" One night, when we were pacing slowly along Oxford Street, and
after a day when I had felt unusually ill and faint, I requested her to
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 4T I
turn off with me into Soho Square. Thither we went ; and we s.it
down on the steps of a house, which to this hour I never pass without
a' pang of grief, and an inner act of homage to the spirit of that un-
happy girl, in memory of the noble act which she then performed.
Suddenly, as we sat, I grew much worse. I had been leaning my
head against her bosom, and all at once I sank from her arms, and fell
backwards on the steps. From the sensations I then had, I felt an
inner conviction of the liveliest kind, that, without some powerful and
reviving stimulus, I should either have died on the spot, or should at
least have sunk to a point of exhaustion from which all re-ascent
under my friendless circumstances, would soon have become hopeless.
Then it was in this crisis of my fate that my poor orphan-companion,
who had herself met with little but injuries in this world, stretched out
a saving hand to me. Uttering a cry of terror, but without a moment's
delay, she ran off into Oxford Street, and in less time than could be
imagined, returned to me with a glass of port wine and spices, that
acted upon my empty stomach (which at that time would have rejected
all solid food) with an instantaneous power of restoration ; and for this
glass the generous girl, without a murmur, paid out of her own humble
purse, at a time, be it remembered, when she had scarcely wherewithal
to purchase the bare necessaries of life, and when she could have no
reason to expect that I should ever be able to reimburse her. O youth-
ful benefactress ! how often in succeeding years, standing in solitary
places, and thinkingof thee with grief of heart and perfect love, how often
have I wished that as in ancient times the curse of a father was believed
to have a supernatural power, and to pursue its object with a fatal
necessity of self-fulfilment, even so the benediction of a heart oppressed
with gratitude might have a like prerogative ; might have power given
it from above to chase, to haunt, to waylay, to pursue thee into the
central darkness of a London brothel, or (if it were possible), even into
the darkness of the grave, there to awaken thee with an authentic
message of peace and forgiveness, and of final reconciliation ! " ^
What a descent from the society of Lady Carbery and
Lord Westport to that of London Magdalens and bankrupt
attorneys, — or even from the inns and cottages of Snowdonia
and bivouacking in the soft, pure summer-air, to vagrancy
and semi-starvation in the purlieus of Soho ! It was a
change, too, worked by his own folly, and his wretchedness
was continued by his own puerile obstinacy. He had but
^ Confessions of an Opium-Eater, p. 171.
412 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
to write to his mother, or the bronzed Bengal uncle, and the
prodigal would have been doubtless forgiven, or at least duly
cared for. How he lived at all is a mystery, which he did
not choose to clear up in the " Confessions ; " probably he
contrived to borrow a little from old friends or acquaint-
ances at a distance, who were not known to his family, or
likely to communicate with it. When he came in after
years to record this miserable episode of his career, De
Quincey expressed his own wonder that he had never
thought of trying to gain a livelihood, say, by becoming a
corrector of Greek proofs, or otherwise turning his talents
and accomplishments to account, and well might he
wonder. Borrowing on his " expectations " was the only
expedient that occurred to him ; and his last hope of success
in this direction vanished soon after his misery reached its
acme on the steps of that house in Soho Square. " A
gentleman of his late Majesty's household," who had
received hospitalities from the De Quincey family, met
him, he says, in Albemarle Street, and challenged him on
the strength of his family-likeness. De Quincey confessed
who he was, and on receiving a pledge that he should not
be betrayed to his guardians, gave his address in Greek
Street. Next day came a bank-note for ten pounds. It
so happened that at the same time a Jew usurer had
satisfied himself as to the ''expectations" of Thomas De
Quincey, second son of Thomas Quincey of Manchester.
But was the present applicant really the Thomas De Quincey
who he pretended to be ? De Quincey produced sundry
letters in proof of his identity, among them several which,
when in Wales, he had received from his young friend.
Lord Altamont, as the whilom Lord Westport had now
become. More to secure a business-connection with the
heir to a peerage, than for the sake of the profit derivable
from this particular transaction, the usurer offered to ad-
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 413
vance two or three hundred pounds on De Quincey's per-
sonal security, provided Lord Altamont would guarantee
repayment on their joint-coming of age. With what
remained of the ten pounds after satisfying the preliminary
demands of the Jew and the Jew's representive, his host,
Mr. Brown, De Quincey improved his shabby personal
appearance, gave a guinea to Ann, and took coach for
Eton, where he supposed Lord Altamont to be. On reach-
Eton he found that Lord Altamont had migrated to Jesus
College, Cambridge. De Quincey then bethought him of
another young acquaintance of his at Eton, Lord Desart, on
whom he called. Lord Desart received him kindly, and
asked him to breakfast. The meal seemed " magnificent,"
and was the first plenteous one that he had tasted for months.
The young nobleman heard his story, and after a legitimate
hesitation to be mixed up with money-lenders, very good-
naturedly promised his signature, "under certain conditions."
De Quincey returned to London, but the Jews scrupled to
accept Lord Desart's " conditions." Ann, too, was lost to
him. She had seen him part of the way to the mail on the
evening of his departure for Eton, promising to look for him
on the fifth night after their parting, and every night after-
wards until they did meet, at the corner of a street agreed
on. De Quincey kept his appointment, but no Ann appeared
then or any more. Every enquiry he made for her, — and
he made many, — was altogether fruitless : —
"To this hour I have never heard a syllable about her. This,
among such troubles as most men meet with in this life, has been my
heaviest affliction. If she lived, doubtless we must have been some-
times in search of each other, at the very same moment, through the
mighty labyrinths of London ; perhaps even within a few feet of each
other— a barrier no wider, in a London street, often amounting in the
end to a separation for eternity ! During some years I hoped that she
dtd live ; and I suppose that, in the literal and unrhetorical use of the
word myriad, I must, in my different visits to London, have loohed
into many myriads of female faces, in the hope of meeting Ann. I
4H LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
should know her again amongst a thousand, and if seen but for a
moment. Handsome she was not ; but she had a sweet expression of
countenance, and a peculiarly graceful carriage of the head. I sought
her, I have said, in hope. So it was for years ; but now I should fear
to see her ; and her cough, which grieved me when I parted with her, is
now my consolation. Now I wish to see her no longer, but think of her,
more gladly, as one long since laid in the grave— in the grave, I would
hope, of a Magdalen ; taken away before injuries and cruelty had blotted
out and transfigured her ingenuous nature, or the brutalities of ruffians
had completed the ruin they had begun. " ^
Hopeless as well as penniless, De Quincey, though he
owns it not, gave in. His own account of what happened
is brief, and vague as it is brief. " Suddenly at this crisis,"
he says, "an opening was made, almost by accident, for
reconciliation with my guardians. I quitted London in
haste, and returned to the Priory ! "
It was the summer of 1802 that De Quincey spent
rambling in Wales, and the winter of 1802-3 vagabond-
ising in London. By the April of 1803 he had returned
to the Priory. How his mother and the bronzed Bengal
uncle received the prodigal he does not say. But he hints
that he was looked on — he a young man of nearly eighteen
— as " a child in disgrace." This was not a position which
he cared to accept, and being at a disputatious age, with
a great deal more of book-knowledge than either of them,
he held his own rather too vigorously on all sorts of con-
troverted topics against both his mother and uncle. One
day, after about nine months of home, he took to criticising
De Foe's " Memoirs of a Cavalier," and the criticism had
a singular result. " My uncle, who had an old craze in
behalf of the book, opposed me with asperity; and in
the course of what he said, under some movement of ill-
temper, he asked me, in a way which I felt to be taunting,
* How I could consent to waste my time as I did.'" This
is the account given in the Autobiographic Sketches ; but
^ Confessions of an Ophim- Eater, p. 187.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 415
in its first published form^ the uncle is represented as
saying that he would be ashamed to be tied to his mother's
apron string, " Without any answering warmth, I explained
that my guardians, having quarrelled with me, would not
grant for ray use anything beyond my school-allowance of
;^ioo per annum. 'But was it not possible that even
this sum might, by economy, be made to meet the neces-
sities of the case?' I replied, 'that from what I had
heard, very probably it was.' 'Would I undertake an
Oxford life upon such terms?' 'Most gladly,' I said.
Upon that opening, he spoke to my mother; and the
result was, that within seven days from the above con-
versation I found myself entering that time-honoured
University." In the original report ^ of his colloquy with
his mother, she is heard telling him that his guardians
would continue at the University his school-allowance of
jQioo a year. "She did not," she explained, "increase
it out of her own purse, because his sisters were a heavy
expense to her. However, he was free to pass in her
house his vacations and any other time he pleased; and if
he thought that a ;^ioo a year would suffice for him at
Oxford, he was welcome to it."
Among De Quincey's contributions to the Edinburgh
magazine are several papers entitled " Oxford," which
have not been reprinted (indeed, they were scarcely worth
reprinting) in either of the EngUsh (or Scotch) editions of
his collected works. They are written in De Quincey's
most rambling and least instructive manner, and throw
very little light on his university life and studies. But
they do record a few incidents and anecdotes, which are
the better worth reproducing that he has left this important
section of his biography so dark. He arrived at Oxford
late in the December of 1803, and the day after he sum-
1 Tail's Magazine for January 1835. • lb.
4I<5 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
raoned *' a conclave of friends," among them no doubt
old school-fellows of the Manchester days, to discuss the
question which college he should join. At last he fixed
on Christ Church, and even had an interview with its Dean
(Cyril Jackson) on the subject of his intentions. When it
came to the point, however, it turned out that "the expenses
of an Oxford Inn, with almost daily entertainments to young
friends, had run away with the bulk of the fifty guineas
brought with him to Oxford for preliminary expenses," and
he had not enough left to provide what he calls the
caution-money required at Christ Church. He was fain,
therefore, to enter himself at Worcester, a college which
charged in that way much less than Christ Church did.
In spite of his elaborate calculations on paper to demon-
strate that he could live on p^^ioo a year at the University
— he had once satisfied himself, it will be remembered,
that he could live in London on ;^5o a year — De Quincey
was soon, and literally, out at elbows. He was not dis-
sipated or extravagant, but throughout life he was the
worst of economists, and always, if left to himself, care-
less in his dress, infinitely preferring books to clothes
when he had spare cash to spend on either. At last the
shabbiness of his habiliments became so conspicuous, that
an "ofliicial person" of his college sent him "a message of
courteous remonstrance," by which he resolved to profit.
He kept his resolution so badly, however, that one day
he went to dine in hall without a waistcoat, a deficiency
which he tried to conceal by buttoning up his coat to the
neck, and pulling his academic gown closely round him !
The absence of the waistcoat was none the less discovered,
and poor De Quincey was doomed to hear an ironical
dialogue proceed between two of his neighbours, one of
whom gravely asked the other if he had seen the last
Gazette, as it was understood that it contained an inter-
THOMAS DR QUINCEY. 41/
diet on waistcoats. The reply was in the afifirmative, and
added the expression of a hope that there would be a
similar interdict on breeches, as they were still more
difficult to pay for ! It was not always, moreover, by
economies of this odd kind that De Quincey, at Oxford?
endeavoured to have some money in hand for books or
other expenditure, which he preferred to the payment of
a tailor's bill. In the " Confessions of an Opium Eater "
he admits that eighteen months after entering at Worcester
he negotiated with one of his old Jew friends in London
a loan of ;^25o, receiving about ^^150, and paying only
seventeen and a half per cent, per annum on the whole
sum ! Of his studies at the University he says next
to nothing, though he complains bitterly of the almost
total ignorance and neglect of English literature, in his time,
at Oxford, His first and last conversation with his tutor was
held when he was reading Parmenides on his own account.
"What have you been lately reading?" asked the tutor.
" Paley," said the undergraduate, not caring to confess
to Parmenides. " Paley," was the rejoinder — " an excellent
author ; but be on your guard as to his style — he is very
vicious there."
In default of autobiographic reminiscences of De Quia-
cey's Oxford career, there may be quoted an interesting
sketch of it, in a paper on his life and writings, which
appeared in the Quarterly Rroicw for July 1S61. The
reviewer was "indebted for the following particulars to
the kindness of Dr. Cotton, Provost of Worcester Col-
lege:"-
" Of his Oxford life he has left us few memorials. He appears to have
resided there from 1803 to 1808 ; that is, from his eighteenth year to his
twenty-third. But of his own obligations to that University he says not
one syllable. Whether he read or whether he idled we are left to
conjecture. And this is the more singular, because the two favourite
3g
41 8 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
pursuits of De Quincey are also the studies most prized in the Uni-
versity of Oxford, namely, elegant scholarship and metaphysics. The
modern examination-system was also introduced during these years,
and we should have been glad to hear what De Quincey thought of
the Reform, and what he heard said about it among older men than
himself. But his Oxford life is an unwritten chapter of the Auto-
biography," except to the extent previously mentioned.
"It is curious, indeed, that it should be so; his career at Oxford
having been, according to the testimony of contemporaries," as repro-
duced by the College dignitary aforesaid, "highly characteristic of the
man, and one which nobody who took the public into his confidence
so freely as De Quincey did need have shrunk from describing. He
was admitted a member of Worcester College, and matriculated on
the 17th of December 1S03, and his name remained upon the College
books for seven years, being removed from them on the 15th December
1 810. During the period of his residence, he was generally known as
a quiet and studious man. He did not frequent wine parties, though
he did not abstain from wine ; and he devoted himself principally to
the society of a German named Schwartzburg, who is said to have
taught him Hebrew. He was remarkable, even in those days, for his
rare conversational powers, and for his extraordinary stock of informa-
tion upon every subject that was started. There were men, it would
appear, among his contemporaries who were capable of appreciating
him, and they all agreed that De Quincey was a man of singular
genius as well as the most varied talents. His knowledge of Latin
and Greek was not confined to those few standard authors with which
even good scholars are or were accustomed to content themselves.
He was master of the ancient literature ; of all of it, at least, which
belongs to what is called pure literature. It appears that he brought
this knowledge up to Oxford with him, and that his university studies
were directed almost wholly to the ancient philosophy, varied by
occasional excursions into German literature and metaphysics, which
he loved to compare with those of Greece and Rome. His knowledge
of all these subjects is said to have been really sound, and there can
be no doubt that he was capable of reproducing it in the most brilliant
and imposing forms. It was predicted, accordingly, by all who knew
him, that he would pass a memorable examination ; and so indeed he
did, though the issue was a somewhat different one from what his
admirers had anticipated. The class list had lately been instituted ;
and there seems no reason to doubt that, had De Quincey's mind been
rather more regularly trained, he would have taken a first-class as
easily as other men take a common degree. But his reading had
THOMAS DR QUINCEY. 419
never been conducted upon that system which the Oxford examina-
tions — essentially, and very properly, intended for men of average
abilities — render almost incumbent upon every candidate for the
highest honours. De Quincey seems to have felt that he was deficient
in that perfect mastery of the minuter details of logic, ethics, and
rhetoric, which the practice of the schools demanded. With the
leading principles of the Aristotelian system he was evidently quite
intimate. But he apparently distrusted his own fitness to undergo a
searching oral examination in these subjects, for which a minute
acquaintance with scientific terminology, and with the finest dis-
tinctions they involve, is thought to be essential. The event was
unfortunate, though so agreeable to De Quincey's character that it
might have been foreseen by his associates, as by one of them it
really was. The important moment arrived, and De Quincey went
through the first day's examination, which was conducted upon paper,
and at that time consisted almost exclusively of scholarship, history,
and whatever might be comprehended under the title of classical
liteiature. On the evening of that day, Mr. Goodenough, of Christ-
church, who was one of the examiners, went down to a gentleman
then resident at Worcester College, and well acquainted with De
Quincey, and said to him, ' You have sent us to-day the cleverest
man I ever met with; if his vivd voce examination to-morrow corres-
ponds with what he has done in writing, he will carry everything before
him.' To this his friend made answer that he feared De Quincey's
vivd voce would be comparatively imperfect, even if he presented him-
self for examination, which he rather doubted. The event justified
his answer. That night De Quincey packed up his things and walked
away from Oxford, never, as far as we can ascertain, to return to it.
Whether this distrust of himself was well founded, or whether it arose
from the depression by which his indulgence in opium was invariably
followed, we cannot tell. So early even as his Oxford days, De
Quincey, we are told, was incapable of steady application without
large doses of opium. He had taken a large dose on the morning of
his paper work, and the reaction that followed in the evening would,
of course, aggravate his apprehensions of the morrow. Be that as it
may, he fairly took to his heels, and so lost the chance, which, with
every drawback, must have been an extremely good one, of figuring
in the same class list with Sir Robert Peel, who passed his exami-
nation in Michaelmas 1808 ; which was, no doubt, the era of De
Quincey's singular catastrophe.**
Yes, already, only twenty-three, De Quincey had acquired
420 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
the fatal taste, if not as yet the fatal habit ; and thus, at
the outset of his career, it helped whatever was defective
in his character to destroy his university prospects. Had
he taken his degree and not fallen a victim to opium, he
would doubtless have gained a college-fellowship; and,
with his unambitious disposition and love of reading and
reflection, he would, as the fellow of a college, have been
one of the happiest of men. But, on the other hand, it
is also true he might have been content to study, medi-
tate, and talk all the days of his life ; and, without external
stimulus to exertion, he might not have enriched the
literature of his country with sixteen volumes of ingenious
and interesting prose.
De Quincey introduced himself to opium the very year
after his admission to Worcester College, and when he was
only eighteen. The following is his own account of this
cardinal event in his biography. From an early age he had
been accustomed to wash his head in cold water at least once
a day. Being suddenly seized with toothache, when in bed,
and during one of his frequent flying undergraduate-visits
from Oxford to London, he fancied that the attack might be
due to a casual intermission of the practice. He jumped out
of bed, plunged his head into a basin of cold water, and
with wetted hair went to sleep. Next morning he awoke
with "excruciating rheumatic pains" in head and face,
which tormented him for weeks almost without cessation.
While the attack was still plaguing him, he met accidentally a
college acquaintance, who recommended him to try opium
for relief, and De Quincey's fate was sealed. He bought and
took some laudanum, " and in an hour, O heavens ! what a
revulsion ! what a resurrection, from its lowest depths, of
the inner spirit ! What an apocalypse of the world within
me ! That my pains had vanished, was now a trifle in my
eyes ; this negative effect was swallowed up in the immen-
THOMAS DE QU/NCEY. 42 I
sity of those positive effects which had opened before me,
in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed.
Here was a panacea, a pa^/Aa/co^ vri'^rniki, for all human woes;
here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers
had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered ; happi-
ness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the
waistcoat pocket ; portable ecstasies might be had corked
up in a pint bottle ; and peace of mind could be sent down
by the mail." ^ These were the pleasures of opium-taking,
and to De Quincey they seemed celestial. Its pains and
agonies, its infernal punishments, were to come.
But this introduction to opium, though the most memor-
able, was not the only important episode of his college life.
The year before that in which he quitted Oxford, he made
the acquaintance of Coleridge, his admiration of whom and
of Wordsworth had increased with time, and was not in the
least diminished by his wide range of academic and other
study at the university. In 1806 the young gentleman had
attained his majority, and seems to have come into what of
his patrimony survived the preliminary borrowings at Oxford
from London Jews. Money for locomotion was in his pos-
session, and in the Long Vacation of 1807 he visited the
Bristol Hot Wells; perhaps because his mother, who certainly
did settle for some time in that neighbourhood, had already
migrated thither from Chester. At Bristol the young en-
thusiast heard with inexpressible joy that the great Coleridge
was within forty miles of him, at the little town of Nether
Stowey, among the Quantock Hills, — the guest of a Mr.
Poole. " In that same hour " the eager hero-worshipper
was on his way to Nether Stowey and his hero. When he
arrived Coleridge was absent, but Mr. Poole received De
Quincey kindly and hospitably, and started him on horse-
back to Bridgewater, whither the erratic and devious genius
' Confessions of an Opium-Eatcr, p. 195.
42 2 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
had been tracked As soon as he saw his idol, he knew
that Coleridge was before him.
"I had received directions for finding out the house where Coleridge
was visiting ; and in riding down a main street of Bridgewater, I
noticed a gate-way corresponding to the description given me. Under
this was standing and gazing about him a man, whom I will describe. In
height he might seem to be about five feet eight (he was in reality about
an iach and a half taller, but his figure was of an order which adorns
the height) ; his person was broad and full, and tended even to cor-
pulence ; his complexion was fair, though not what painters technically
style fair, because it was associated with black hair ; his eyes were
large and soft in their expression ; and it was from the peculiar
appearance of haze or dreaminess which mixed with their light, that I
recognised my object. This was Coleridge. I examined him stead-
fastly for a minute or more ; and it struck me that he saw neither my-
self nor any other object in the street. He was in a deep reverie ; for
I had dismounted, made two or three trifling arrangements at an inn-
door, and advanced close to him, before he had apparently become
conscious of my presence. The sound of my voice, announcing my
own name, first awoke him : he started, and for a moment seemed at
a loss to understand my purpose or his own situation ; for he repeated
rapidly a number of words whicli had no relation to either of us.
There was no mauvaise honte in his manner, but simple perplexity, and
an apparent difficulty in recovering his position amongst day-light
realities. The little scene over, he received me with a kindness of
manner so marked that it might be called gracious. The hospital^le
family with whom he was domesticated was distinguished for their
amiable manners and enlightened understandings : they were descend-
ants from Chubb, the philosophic writer, and bore the same name.
For Coleridge they all testified deep affection and esteem — sentiments
in which the whole town of Bridgewater seemed to share ; for, in the
evening, when the heat of the day had declined, I walked out with
him, and rarely, perhaps never, have I seen a person so much inter-
rupted in one hour's space as Coleridge, on this occasion, by the
courteous attentions of young and old. All the people of station and
weight in the place, and apparently all the ladies, were abroad to enjoy
the lovely summer evening ; and not a party passed without some mark
of smiling recognition ; and the majority stopping to make personal
inquiries about his health, and to express their anxiety that he should
make a lengthened stay among them. Certain I am, from the lively
esteem expressed towards Coleridge at this time by the people of
Bridgewater, that a very large subscription might, in that town, have
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 423
been raised to support him amongst them, in the character of a
lecturer, or philosophical professor."^
Facts very creditable to the Bridgewater of 1808, since,
though Coleridge had his ardent admirers, the young De
Quincey among them, the British reading public was then
for the most part indifferent to him and his verse.
The philosopher was five and thirty, and the disciple
two and twenty, at the time of this their first interview.
The two were soon in the drawing-room of the house in
which Coleridge was staying, and De Quincey received an
invitation, which he gladly accepted, to remain to dinner.
" That point being settled, Coleridge, like some great river,
the Orellana or the St. Lawrence, that, having been checked
and fretted by rocks or thwarting islands, suddenly recovers
its volume of waters, and its mighty music, swept at once,
as if returning to his natural business, into a continuous
strain of eloquent dissertation, certainly the most novel,
the most finely illustrated, and traversing the most spacious
fields of thought, by transitions the most just and logical,
that it was possible to conceive." For " about three hours "
he continued to talk, " and in the course of this perfor-
mance he had delivered many most striking aphorisms,
embalming more weight of truth, and separately more deserv-
ing to be themselves embalmed than would easily be found
in a month's course of select reading." Once only the
conversation was briefly interrupted by the entrance of Mrs.
Coleridge, in whose face De Quincey discerned only " some
prettiness of rather a common-place character," while in her
husband's manner to her he detected a marital indifference,
founded, he afterwards discovered, on nothing worse than
the " want of sympathy " with which men of genius are apt
to reproach their wives. At dinner " Coleridge talked," but
"with effort," before a numerous company invited to hear
^ Works, ii. 51.
424 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
him talk, and seemed to his vigilant young admirer "stru<To-
ling with gloomy thoughts." The impression he produced
on De Quincey was that of a blighted being, and the philo-
sopher's own avowal confirmed the impression. " At
night he entered into a spontaneous explanation of this
unhappy over-clouding of his Hfe, on occasion of my saying
accidentally that a toothache had obliged me to take a few
drops of laudanum. At what time, or on what motive, he
had commenced the use of opium he did not say, but the
peculiar emphasis of horror with which he warned me
against forming a habit of the same kind, impressed upon
my mind a feeling that he never hoped to liberate himself
from the bondage," to which his listener had not himself
yet completely succumbed. After this interesting day, De
Quincey walked, to calm his excitement, forty miles back
to Bristol through the pleasant summer night, musing in
sorrowful admiration over the just-seen " sad spectacle of
powers so majestic already besieged by decay." He
enquired forthwith whether Coleridge's state of mind had
not been caused or hurried forward by pecuniary embarrass-
ments. On learning that his surmise was correct, the
ardent and devoted young man " contrived that a par-
ticular service should be rendered to Mr. Coleridge a week
after, through the hands of Mr. Cottle of Bristol " (the pub-
hsher of the first and valueless edition of the " Lyrical
Ballads "), " which might have the efiect of liberating his
mind from anxiety for a year or two, and thus rendering
his great powers disposable to their natural uses. That
service was accepted by Coleridge. To save him any feel-
ings of distress, all names were concealed ; but in a letter
written by him about fifteen years after that time, I found
that he had become aware of all the circumstances, perhaps
through some indiscretion of Mr. Cottle." £,Z'^o was the
sum thus generously and delicately given by the hero-
THOMAS DE QUINCF.Y. 425
worshipper of twenty-two, out of not at all ample means,
from the purest and most disinterested of motives, to pro-
mote the happiness of a man of thirty-five, who, with industry
but without opium, might have been earning a tolerable in-
come. De Quincey's own financial laxity became in time
considerable : let this munificence to Coleridge plead for
him with the stern critic of his beggings and borrowings.
His other, and still more venerated idol, Wordsworth,
the young De Quincey had not yet seen. They were, how-
ever, in a manner known to each other by correspondence.
" As early as the spring of 1803," presumably just after the
prodigal's return to the Priory from his winter of vagrancy
in London, De Quincey had written to Wordsworth. No
doubt the letter expressed that ardent admiration of his
poetry which Wordsworth loved at all periods of his life, and
which must have been doubly welcome at a time when he
felt so deeply the neglect of the public and the contumely
of the critics, as to place on the title-page of the second
edition of the " Lyrical Ballads " the resentful epigraph,
*' Quani nihil ad genium, Papiniane, tiiu??i ! " ^V'ordsworth
sent his youthful admirer a long reply, which contained a
standing-invitation to the poet's home. It was long before
use was made of the invitation, but De Quincey's apparent
neglect to act upon it was due to the veneration that
he felt for the inviter. Awe was so blended with ad-
miration of the poet that "the very image of Words-
worth, as I prefigured it to my own planet-struck eye,
crushed my faculties as before Elijah and St. Paul." He
actually made two long journeys from Oxford to the neigh-
bourhood of Wordsworth's home, and then, from mere
reverential dread, returned without having dared to venture
into the presence of the idol : —
"Twice did I advance as far as the I^ke of Coniston, which is
about eight miles from the Church of Grasmere, and once I absolutely
3h
426 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
went forwards from Coniston to the very gorge of Ilammerscar, from
which the whole vale of Grasmere suddenly breaks upon the view in a
style of almost theatrical surprise, with its lovely valley stretching
before the eye in the distance, the lake lying immediately below, with
its solemn ark-like island of four and a half acres in size seemingly
floating on its surface, and its exquisite outline on the opposite shore,
revealing all its little bays and wild sylvan margin feathered to the
edge with wild flowers and ferns. In one quarter, a little wood,
stretching for about half a mile towards the outlet of the lake : more
directly in opposition to the spectator, a few green fields ; and beyond
them, just two bow-shots from the water, a little white cottage gleaming
from the midst of the trees, with a vast and seemingly never-ending
series of ascents rising above it to the height of more than three
thousand feet. That little cottage was Wordsworth's from the time of
his marriage, and earlier ; in fact, from the beginning of the century to
the year 1808. Afterwards for many a year it was mine. Catching
one hasty glimpse of this loveliest of landscapes, I retreated like a
guilty thing, for fear I might be surprised by Wordsworth, and then
returned faint-heartedly to Coniston and so to Oxford, reinfectd." ^
A personal acquaintance with Wordsworth, however, soon
followed that formed with Coleridge, and followed in a
measure through it. A few weeks after De Quincey's visit
to the philosopher at Bridgewater, Coleridge came with
his wife and children to the Bristol Hot Wells, where De
Quincey was staying, and the worshipper, in some respects
a little disenchanted perhaps, but still a worshipper, was
forthwith in the company of his hero. He found Coleridge
in one of his usual perplexities. The sage had been
engaged to deliver at the Royal Institution in London
a winter-course of lectures, and was embarrassed how to
convey his family to Keswick, where they were to find a
home with his brother-in-law, Southey. The enthusiastic
De Quincey at once offered to convey them to the Lakes
"in a post-chaise," and Coleridge cheerfully assented.
Besides De Quincey, the party consisted of Mrs. Coleridge
and three children, Hartley, then nine, Derwent, eight, and
^ Works, ii. 125.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 427
the " beautiful " little Sara, five, who, in her reminiscences,
has recorded the joumey and the fact of De Quincey's
escort. In due course they reached Grasmere (for eji route
to South ey Wordsworth was to be visited), and, after a
shock of the old panic, De Quincey found himself inside the
little white cottage which he knew by sight, and in the
presence of the man whom in all the world he most wished
and yet most feared to see. In an hour, however, he
was at his ease, and chatting freely on poetry and things
poetical with Wordsworth, dignified but affable — with his
wife, *' a tallish young woman, wearing the most winning
expression of benignity upon her features," — and with his
sister, of "gipsy tan complexion," her eyes "wild and
startling and hurried in their motion," her manner *' warm
and even hearty," springing from " excessive organic sensi-
bility." In a day or two the Coleridges proceeded to
Keswick, which, in the company of Wordsworth, De
Quincey visited soon afterwards, and there he made the
acquaintance of the admirable Southey. The Wordsworths
seem to have taken to the scholarly and well-bred young
gentleman, full of poetry, philosophy, and enthusiasm, —
ready to listen as well as to talk. He remained for a week
the guest of Wordsworth, and a partaker of the poet's modest
hospitality, and then he returned to Oxford, carr}'ing with
him the best impression of his host. *' The spiritual being
whom I had anticipated," he says, — " for like Eloisa,
'My fancy framed him of th' angelic kind,
Some emanation of th' all-beauteous mind,' —
this ideal creature had at length been seen — seen with
fleshly eyes ; and now, if he did not cease for years to wear
something of a glory about his head, yet it was no longer
as a being to be feared, it was as Raphael, the 'affable'
angel, who conversed on the terms of man with man."
4^8 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Another year, and De Quincey was paying a second and
a much longer visit to the Wordsworth-household, which
had meanwhile migrated from the little white cottage to a
larger abode, a mile off, in the vale of Grasmere. Flying
from Oxford and the viva voce examination at the Michael-
mas of 1808, De Quincey seems to have made for the
poet's home, and to have remained under Wordsworth's
roof until the February of the following year. The friend-
ship of the Wordsworths for him must have been at this
time fast and firm ; and breaking loose, as he was, from
Oxford, De Quincey decided on settling in their neighbour-
hood. " Upon Miss Wordsworth happening," he says him-
self, "to volunteer the task of furnishing for my use the
cottage so recently occupied by her brother's family, I took
it upon a seven years' lease." ^ The furnishing was con-
summated in the summer, and the following November,
that of 1 8 10, beheld the happy De Quincey the successor
of Wordsworth as occupant of the cottage "smothered
with roses," which had once been the goal of all his
thoughts. Writing of the abode which has had two such
tenants, and in which Wordsworth passed the first years
of his married life and wrote much of his earlier verse,
the poet's nephew and biographer says that " it still,"
i.e., in 1851," retains the form it wore then." It "stands,"
he continues, " on the right hand, by the side of the then
coach-road from Ambleside to Keswick, as it enters Gras-
mere, or as that part of the village is called. Town End.
The front of it faces the lake : behind it is a small plot of
1 This statement and another which soon follows it respecting Miss
Wordsworth's helpfulness, are made in the first form of the auto-
biography as published in Taifs Magazine, and are not to be found in
the revised " Autobiographic Sketches " of the British editions of De
Quincey's collected writings. In these, too, he suppressed mention
of the long visit to Wordsworth in the winter of 1808-9.
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 429
orchard and garden-ground, in which there is a spring and
rocks ; the enclosure shelves upwards towards the woody-
side of the mountains above it." ^ Miss Wordsworth sought
out a suitable servant for the young bachelor, and doubtless
both she and her sister-in-law were delighted at the pros-
pect of securing for " William," at only a mile's distance,
the companionship of so profound an admirer of his poetry,
and so intellectual, accomplished, and appreciative a neigh-
bour as this young gentleman of five and twenty. His
books, a library of 5,000 volumes, were around him in the
little cottage. He could have society or solitude, as he
pleased. He could commune with all that is grandest and
loveliest in nature, and with some of the most gifted of
then living Englishmen. The Wordsworths were always
near him ; near him, too, was the accomplished and refined
Charles Lloyd, the associate of Coleridge, Southey, and
Charles Lamb in their early author-efforts, — and all the
more interesting because " somewhat too Rousseauish."
Within easy reach was the noble-minded Southey. Much
nearer was beautiful Elleray, the frequent home of the
gifted, glowing, and large-hearted John Wilson. He and
De Quincey had been contemporaries at Oxford, but it was
Wordsworth, whom they both worshipped, that first made
them known to each other, and thus originated a life-long
intimacy.^ On the banks of Windermere, too, lived a man
of some intellectual and scientific distinction, and in point
of mere rank a greater than any of these, the once-famous
Dr. Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, who seldom or never went
near his diocese, — the refuter of Tom Paine, yet who, in
spite of his official orthodoxy, " talked openly, at his own
table, as a Socinian ; ridiculed the miracles of the NewTesta-
^ Christopher Wordsworth, Memoir of William Wordsworth (Lon-
don, 1851), i. 156.
* Mrs. Gordon's Christopher North, ii. 89
430 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
ment, which he professed to explain as so many chemical
tricks or cases of legerdemain ; and certainly had as little
of devotional feeling as any man that ever lived." This
strange non-resident bishop of a bygone generation, im-
possible now, spent part of his days in grumbling that his
country had done nothing more than give him five thousand
a year with which to enjoy himself on the banks of beauti-
ful Windermere ; he was pompous withal, but nevertheless,
De Quincey avers, "a joyous, jovial, and cordial host,"
" pleasant and even kind in his manners ; " and " most
hospitable in his reception of strangers, no matter of what
party." There were many other residents in the Lake
country, unknown to fame, but genial, hospitable, and
cultivated, and De Quincey, when tired of his books or
sated with the contemplation of nature, had ample society
within reach, and could find listeners or talkers, as he
wanted either. Coleridge left the Lakes about the time
of De Quincey's settlement at Grasmere. He had gone
thither in the winter of 1809 to be the guest of his very
unlike friend, the frugal, temperate, and dignified Words-
worth. He seems to have remained there till about the
close of the following year, in the late autumn of which De
Quincey entered on the occupancy of the Grasmere cottage.
During this his last sojourn among the Lakes, Coleridge
was engaged in composing and superintending the publica-
tion (at Penrith) of his notable periodical, The Friend, an
enterprise which De Quincey, himself not the most prac-
tical of men, pronounced to be " as a pecuniary speculation
the least judicious t)Oth for its objects and means I have
ever known." That done with, Coleridge winged his way
London-wards from the Lake region, never to revisit it. So
lax was the sage in all his ways, that the disenchantment of
the disciple had been very rapid. If De Quincey con-
tinued to admire Coleridge the philosopher and poet, his
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 43 I
feeling soon became one nearly akin to contempt for Cole-
ridge the man.
In his little nest at Grasmere — with occasional flights
to London, to Wales, and to the south of England — thus
placed, thus neighboured, and thus surrounded, De Quincey
might have been a very happy man. All the conditions of
his life, to a casual observer, must have seemed to realise
the ideal of a young philosopher's existence. One thing
only may have appeared wanting in that tranquil mountain-
home, overlooking that placid lake — a wife, and she, too,
came some nine years after he pitched his tent in the lovely
valley. Early in 1817 ^ he was married at the parish church
of Grasmere, to " iMiss Margaret Simpson," whose " arms
like Aurora's," whose " smiles like Hebe's," and still more,
whose womanly devotion to him in pain and sorrow,
brought on both of them by himself, the husband has cele-
brated in poetic and grateful prose. His poor wife's
miseries began almost with her wedding-day, if indeed they
had not begun before. Four years prior to his marriage,
he was attacked, he says, " by a most appalling irritation of
the stomach," and he flew for relief to more copious appli-
cations of the perilous anodyne with which he was already
too familiar. Ever since his introduction to the pleasures
of the fatal drug, he had indulged in occasional or even
periodical opium-debauches. But with 1813, and the in-
ternal irritation aforesaid, he became a " regular and con-
firmed, no longer an intermittent, opium-eater." Opium-
eater he called himself, but strictly speaking he was a
laudanum- taker. The crude opium requiring hours to pro-
duce its effects, and those of laudanum being much more
speedy, he exchanged the solid for the liquid form of the
drug, and thus made matters worse, since he swallowed a
considerable amount of alcohol as well as of opium. In-
^ I5ih February. Admission-Register of MancJuster School, ubi stipriX.
432 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
creasing his doses, as the reaction of torment after tem-
porary rehef became more intense, he at last arrived at a
stage when eight thousand drops of laudanum were his
daily ration I In this frightful bondage he seems to have
lain enslaved at the time of his marriage, and to have
remained for two years, during what ought to have been one
of the happiest periods of his life. The newly-wedded wife
had to play the part of nurse to the husband whose worst
malady was of his own engendering. What she did and
suffered for him then is shadowed forth in the affectionate
and grateful apostrophe which he addressed to her in later
years : — " Thou thoughtest not much to stoop to humble
offices of kindness, and to servile ministrations of tenderest
affection, to wipe away for years the unwholesome dews
upon the forehead, or to refresh the Hps, when parched and
baked with fever ; not even when thy own peaceful slumbers
had by long sympathy become infected with the spectacle
of my dread contest with phantoms and shadowy enemies,
that oftentimes bade me ' sleep no more ' — not even then
didst thou utter a complaint or any murmur, nor withdraw
thy angelic smiles, nor shrink from thy service of love."
" For nearly two years," is his confession of his helplessness
at this period, " I believe that I read nothing and studied
nothing." Before he became the slave of opium, he had
been a diligent student of Kant and of German philosophy,
and after much meditation was constructing and elaborating
a magmnn opus, for which he borrowed the " title of an
unfinished work of Spinoza's, viz., De Emendatione Htimojii
IntcUectfis." But opium made all persistent and continuous
intellectual exertion impossible. " In this state of im-
becility, I had," he says, " turned my attention to political
economy "-—(what a compliment to the " dismal science ! ")
and in 1818 he was fairly roused from his torpor by the
perusal of Ricardo's " Elements," which came upon him
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 433
as an economic apocalypse, with the new " Doctrine of
Rent" revealed in it. Some important truths, however, it
seemed to him, had escaped even the eye of Ricardo. He
began, accordingly, to dictate to his wife a " Prolegomena
to all Future Systems of Political Economy," in which his
own discovered truths were to be expressed or illustrated
*' briefly and elegantly by algebraic symbols." The work,
with this high sounding title, was thus to have " barely
reached the bulk of a pamphlet." His faithful wife acted
as his amanuensis, and the treatise, no doubt substantially
the same as that which he published many years afterwards
as " The Logic of Political Economy," seems to have been
almost ready for the press. But nothing came of it : —
" This exertion was but a momentary flash, as the sequel showed.
Arrangements were made at a provincial press, about eighteen miles
distant, for printing it," the Prolegomena. " An additional compositor
was retained, for some days, on this account. The work was even
twice advertised ; and I was in a manner pledged to the fulfilment of
my intention. But I had a preface to write, and a dedication, which I
wished to make impressive, to Mr. Ricardo. I found myself quite
unable to accomplish all this. The arrangements were countermanded,
the compositor dismissed, and my ' Prolegomena ' rested peacefully by
the side of its elder and more dignified brother," the De Emendatione.
In after-years De Quincey tried, perhaps too successfully,
to make opium-eating, or laudanum-taking, interesting and
even poetic. He painted attractive pictures of his West-
moreland interior and of himself with a decanter of ruby-
coloured laudanum before him, and a book of German
metaphysics by its side. He amused himself and his readers
with jocose accounts of the quantity that he could take,
and he reproduced in vivid and impressive prose those
wonderful and gorgeous dreams and visions of the night
which the drug inspired. He pretended even that his
addiction to opium had prevented him from falling a victim
to pulmonary consumption. But in one brief passage he
3 1
434 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
has recorded the misery that he suffered, and against a
great deal of fine writing about the raptures of opium let
the following confession be weighed by any disposed even
to dally with the thought of imitating De Quincey. It
comes after the account of the break-down of the " Pro-
legomena to all Future Systems of Political Economy :" —
"In thus describing and illustrating my intellectual torpor, I use
terms that apply, more or less, to every part of the years during which
I was under the Circean spells of opium. But for misery and suffering,
I might, indeed, be said to have existed in a dormant state. I seldom
could prevail on myself to write a letter ; an answer of a few words, to
any that I received, was the utmost that I could accomplish ; and often
that not until the letter had Iain for weeks, or even months, on my
writing-table. Without the aid of M " — Margaret, the poor wife —
" my whole domestic economy, whatever became of political economy,
must have gone into irretrievable confusion. I shall not afterwards
allude to this part of the case ; it is one, however, which the opium-
eater will find in the end most oppressive and tormenting, from the
sense of incapacity and feebleness, from the direct embarrassments
incident to the neglect or procrastination of each day's appropriate
labours, and from the remorse which must often exasperate the stings
of these evils to a conscientious mind. The opium-eater loses none of
his moral sensibilities or aspirations ; he wishes and longs as earnestly
as ever to realise what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by
duty ; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely
outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of proposing or
willing. He lies under a world's weight of incubus and nightmare; he
lies in sight of all that he would fain perform, just as a man forcibly
confined to his bed by the mortal languor of paralysis, who is compelled
to witness injury or outrage offered to some object of his tenderest love
— he would lay down his life if he might but rise and walk ; but he is as
powerless as an infant, and cannot so much as make an effort to move." ^
The man must surely have died, or gone mad, had he not
paused in his headlong career. Efforts, supreme efforts,
however, he seems to have made, and after occasional
abstinence from opium, he found, on relapsing into its use,
that not only were smaller doses effective, but that if he
^ Confessions of an Opium- Eater, p. 256.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 435
attempted to renew the old doses, he was punished by an
irritation on the surface of the skin which became insup-
portable. Thus " in about four years," he says, " without
any further eftbrts, my daily ration had fallen spontaneously
from a varying quantity of eight, ten, or twelve thousand
drops of laudanum to about three hundred." And it was
high time that he should be in a state of body and mind to
exert himself. To earn money by work was at last becom-
ing a necessity for him. What his financial position was
when he settled at Grasmere he has nowhere disclosed, but
it is probable that for years he lived partly at least upon
the principal of his little patrimony, and that after a decade
or so it was nearly exhausted. Borrowed, no doubt, he had
right and left in Westmoreland, as from his mother in the dis-
tance ; and both Wordsworth's slender, and Wilson's for a
time better-filled purse, occasionally contributed to keep the
wolf from his door. But there was a limit to borrowing, or to
other people's lending, and with 1815, Wilson's fine fortune
collapsed. However careful the domestic arrangements of
his wife, want began to stare De Quincey in the face, and
children were growing up round his knees. He resolved to
visit London in search of literary employment, leaving his
family behind him in the cottage of which, through many
vicissitudes of circumstance and changes of abode, he seems
to have remained the nominal tenant until 1836. With a
letter of introduction from Wordsworth to Talfourd, then a
rising youngbarrister, combining literature with law, De Quin-
cey came to town to write for money. " In 182 1," he says,
" I went up to London avowedly for the purpose of exercising
my pen, as the one sole source then open to me for extri-
cating myself from a special embarrassment, failing which
case of dire necessity, I believe that I should never have
written a line for the press." ^ He was now about thirty-six,
1 Autobiography, in 7 ait's Magazine for December 1840. The state-
436 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
a late age at which to begin a literary career, and his only
experiment in authorship had been the abortive Prolego-
mena. However, the attempt had to be made. As it hap-
pened there was just then an "opening" for him. About
the time of his arrival in the great Babylon was established,
or re-established, the London Magazine, a periodical of
higher pretensions than the others of its class then published
in England. Its projectors seem to have hoped, indeed,
that it would be a southern rival of Blackwood, which Lock-
hart and De Quincey's friend, John Wilson, were making
famous by the youthful exuberance of their differing talents.
To the London of those years (with Tom Hood for its sub-
editor), Charles Lamb contributed his charming Elia-essays,
Hazlitt his vigorous and racy monologues, Allan Cunningham
his Scottish tales and sketches, Carey, the translator of Dante,
biographies of poets and criticisms on poetry, while the light
and airy man-about-town department was in the hands of
Janus Weathercock, the nom-de-phime of Wainwright, a lively
coxcomb, who afterwards became famous and infamous by
a career of poisoning, which sent him at last a convicted
criminal to the antipodes. In short, the London Magazine
was for those days a periodical of more than ordinary mark
or promise, and De Quincey was rather fortunate in his
introduction to it. His very first contribution was a
success, since he began with the famous " Confessions of
an Opium-Eater," the opening instalment of which appeared
in the number for September 1821. Here, in his own
peculiar style, full-formed — for, was he not a man of thirty-
six? — tortuous, parenthetical, and episodical, but subtle,
felicitous, rich, and sometimes finely-eloquent, he told much
of the story which the reader has been listening to. His
sojourn at the Manchester Grammar School, his Welsh
ment does not reappear in the Autobiographic Sketclies of the British
editions of his collected writings.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 437
rambles, his vagabond life in London, were recorded in
detail ; but of his life at Grasmere only so much was hinted
at as seemed necessary to illustrate the chronicle of his bond-
age to opium. An imaginative was added to the singular
personal interest of these fragments of autobiography by
the reproduction, in his own " impassioned prose,'' of
dreams and visions of the night which had come to him
when under the influence of opium, and these descriptions
indicated that a writer had arisen capable of enriching
English literature with a new poetic prose of great beauty
and melody. Here are two of them, which follow each
other in the " Confessions," and are excellent specimens
of the whole; the picturesqueness passing into pathos,
of the first, the stormy orchestral march and tumult of
the second being almost without a parallel in English
prose : —
" I thought that it was a Sunday morning in May ; that it was Easter
Sunday, and as yet very early in the morning. I was standing, as it
seemed to me, at the door of my own cottage. Right before me lay
the very scene which could really be commanded from that situation,
but exalted, as was usual, and solemnised by the power of dreams.
There were the same mountains, and the same lovely valley at their
feet ; but the mountains were raised to more than Alpine height, and
there was interspace far larger between them of savannahs and forest
lawns ; the hedges were rich with white roses, and no living creature
was to be seen, excepting that in the green churchyard there were cattle
tranquilly reposing upon the verdant graves, and particularly round
about the grave of a child whom I had once tenderly loved, just as I
had really beheld them, a little before sunrise, in the same summer
when that child died. I gazed upon the well-known scene, and I said
to myself, ' It yet wants much of sunrise, and it is Easter Sunday, and
that is the day on which they celebrate the first-fruits of resurrection.
I will walk abroad ; old griefs shall be forgotten to-day, for the air is
cool and still, and the hills are high and stretch away to heaven, and
the churchyard is as verdant as the forest lawns, and the forest lawns
are as quiet as the churchyard, and with the dew I can wash the fever
from my forehead, and then I shall be unhappy no longer.' I turned,
as if to open my garden gate, and immediately I saw upon the left a
438 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
scene far different, but which yet the power of dreams had reconciled
into harmony. The scene was an oriental one, and there also it was
Easter Sunday, and very early in the morning. And at a vast distance
were visible, as a stain upon the horizon, the domes and cupolas of a
great city — an image or faint abstraction, caught perhaps in childhood
from some picture of Jerusalem. And not a bow-shot from me, upon
a stone, shaded by Judean palms, there sat a woman ; and I looked,
and it was Ann ! She fixed her eyes upon me earnestly, and I said to
her at length, ' So, then, I have found you at last.' I waited, but she
answered me not a word. Her face was the same as when I saw it
last ; the same, and yet, again, how different ! Seventeen years ago,
when the lamp-light of mighty London fell upon her face, as for the
last time I kissed her lips (lips, Ann, that to me were not polluted !),
her eyes were streaming with tears. The tears were now no longer
seen. Sometims she seemed altered — yet, again, sometimes not altered
— and hardly older. Her looks were tranquil, but with unusual solem-
nity of expression, and I now gazed upon her with some awe. Sud-
denly her countenance grew dim, and, turning to the mountains, I
perceived vapours rolling between us. In a moment all had vanished,
thick darkness came on, and in the twinkling of an eye I was far away
from mountains, and by lamp-light in London, walking again with
Ann — ^just as we had walked, when both children, eighteen years be-
fore, along the endless terraces of Oxford Street."
Almost without a pause the music changes, and from
the orchestra peals forth this tempestuous and piercing
strain : —
" Then suddenly would come a dream of far different character — a
tumultuous dream — commencing with a music such as now I often heard
in sleep — music of preparation and of awakening suspense. The undu-
lations of fast-gathering tumults were like the opening of the Coronation
Anthem, and, like that, gave the feeling of a multitudinous movement,
of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies.
The morning was come of a mighty day — a day of crisis and of ulti-
mate hope for human nature, then suffering mysterious eclipse, and
labouring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, but I knew not
where — somehow, but I knew not how — by some beings, but I knew
not by whom — a battle, a strife, an agony was travelling through all
its stages — was evolving itself, like the catastrophe of some mighty
drama, with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from
deepening confusion as to its local scene, its cause, its nature, and its
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 439
undecipherable issue. I (as is usual in dreams where, of necessity, we
make ourselves central to every movement) had the power, and yet
had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise
myself, to will it ; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of
twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt.
'Deeper than ever plummet sounded,' I lay inactive. Then, like a
chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake,
some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded or trumpet
had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms, hurryings to and fro,
trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I knew not whether from the
good cause or the bad ; darkness and lights, tempest and human faces,
and at last with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the fea-
tures that were worth all the world to me ; and but a moment allowed,
and clasped hands with heart-breaking partings ; and then, everlasting
farewells ! and, with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the
incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was
reverberated— everlasting farewells ! and again, and yet again rever-
berated — everlasting farewells !
"And I awoke in struggles and cried aloud, ' I will sleep no more.' " ^
So vivid a romance of reality and strange self-revelation
as the " Confessions of an Opium- Eater," told in a style thus
original and striking, at once made a sensation, and they
were soon reprinted in a detached volume.^ De Quincey
might have been a small lion in the circle of London magazin-
ists, but neither his temperament, health, nor circumstances
inclined him to play that part. According to a brief notice
1 Confessions of an Opium- Eater, p. 270.
2 The " Confessions " were so much talked of, indeed, that Maginn
made their author sit for No. I. ot the " Humbugs of the Age," a series of
papers projected for a short-lived periodical. The John Bull Magazine.
The notice of " The Opium-Eater " is in the number for July 1824. It
is a ribald production, of which this description of De Quincey's
person may suffice as a specimen : — "Conceive an animal about five
feet high, propped on two trap-sticks, which have the size but not the
delicate proportions of rolling-pins, with a comical sort of indescribable
body, and a head of most portentous magnitude, &c., &c. As for the
face, its grotesqueness and inanity is totally beyond the reach of the
pen to describe. It is one in which George Cruikshank would revel ;"
&c., &c.
440 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
of him by the kind Barry Cornwall, who seems to have met
him then at dinners given by the proprietors of the Londofi
to contributors, his face wore a rather peevish expression,
and he did not contribute much to the cheerfulness of the
company. The literary success of the " Confessions," how-
ever, made him a somewhat valued contributor, and for
several years his pen was pretty busy for the Lo7idon Maga-
zine. His knowledge of German literature — a knowledge
much rarer then than it afterwards became — was brought
rather prominently into play. Among his contributions are
translations from Kant and Jean Paul Richter, and, indeed,
Richter's first introduction to the reading public of England
was made by De Quincey. It has been said of De Quin-
cey, by an enthusiastic admirer, that his " logic cuts like a
razor ; his imagination glows like a furnace," and certainly
it is indicative of the range of his intellectual gifts and sym-
pathies that in German literature he admired those two
great but antipodal originalities, the severely logical Kant
and the transcendentally imaginative Richter. Curiously
enough, too, one of his fellow-contributors to the Lon-
don Magazine was the man who was to eclipse the inter-
mittent and irregular De Quincey as an interpreter and
expositor of German literature in general, and of Jean Paul
Richter in particular, to the English public. This was
Thomas Carlyle, some ten years De Quincey's junior, and
who, like him, was just beginning a literary career, having
decided not to enter the Scottish Kirk, for which he was
bred. Carlyle, likewise, had been studying German litera-
ture, and was naturally attracted to a periodical in which
certain sections of it were being elucidated, however fitfully,
by a contributor of De Quincey's evident talent and accom-
plishment. Part I. of what became afterwards Carlyle's
first book — his "Life of Schiller" — was printed in the
London Magazine for October 1823, and the number for
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 44 1
the August of 1824 contained De Quincey's review of Car-
lyle's translation of Goethe's " Wilhelm Meister's Appren-
ticeship." It was a satirical review, making fun of the
novel, and in a less degree of its translator. De Quincey's
connection with the magazine lasted a year or so longer than
Carlyle's, and closed at the end of 1825. Carlyle was tend-
ing towards Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Review; De Quincey
towards John Wilson and Blackwood's Magazine.
By 1825 De Quincey was a man of forty, and some five
and thirty years of life lay before him. But of his biography
during this considerable period of his existence there are
only the scantiest traces discoverable. His professed auto-
biographic sketches close with his settlement at Grasmere,
and his autobiographic indications in the " Confessions of
an Opium-Eater," go no further, of course, than the time
of its composition, and his arrival in London in 182 1, to
become at thirty-six an author by profession, — he who
had never before earned a farthing, and had lived only
to enjoy books and talk, nature and opium. The key-
note of much of the second section of his life is struck in
the following passage of a letter to John Wilson, written in
the February of 1825, and which explains itself only too
distinctly : —
. . . "As to myself, — though I have written not as one who labours
under much depression of mind, — the fact is, I do so. At this time
calamity presses upon me with a heavy hand ; I am quite free of
opium ; but it has left the liver, which is the Achilles' heel of almost
every human fabric, subject to affections which are tremendous for the
weight of wretchedness attached to them. To fence with these with
the one hand, and with the other to maintain the war with the wretched
business of hack- author, with all its horrible degradations, is more than
I am able to bear. At this moment I have not a place to hide my head
in. Something I meditate, — I know not what, — * Itaque e conspectu
omnium abiit.' With a good publisher, and leisure to premeditate
what I write, I might yet liberate mysclt", after which, having paid
3k
442 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
everybody, I would slink into some dark corner — educate my children
— and show my face in the world no more.
" If you should ever have occasion to write to me, it will be best
to address your letter either ' to the care of Mrs. De Quincey, Rydal
Nab, Westmoreland ' (Fox Ghyll is sold, and will be given up in a few-
days), or 'to the care of M. D. Hill, Esq., ii King's Bench Walk,
Temple,' — but for the present I think rather to the latter, — for else
suspicions will arise that I am in Westmoreland, which, if I were not,
might be serviceable to me ; but, if, as I am in hopes of accomplishing
sooner or later, I should be, might defeat my purpose."
Yes, much of De Quincey's life was to be spent in flying
from creditors and out-manoeuvring bailiffs, with " nowhere
to hide his head in," tormented by physical agony, the only
relief from which was through a return to the use of the
fatal drug, the cause of all, or of most of his woe, while,
with a wife and children dependent on him, he, the thinker
and refined scholar, had to toil as a " hack-author." There
are some glimpses of him in 1825 and the preceding year,
given by Charles Knight, which confirm the truth of the
picture of himself in that sad letter to Wilson. Knighfs
Quarterly Magazine, to which the young Macaulay, Praed,
John Moultrie, and Derwent Coleridge contributed, was
then in course of appearing, and its publisher and editor
was in communication with De Quincey : —
' ' When the fifth number of the Magazine was published, in July
1824, I had become acquainted with Mr. De Quincey, and he had con-
tributed a paper translated, as he purported, from the German of Laun,
called 'The Incognito.' It was a very lively and pleasant paper ; but
as to the strict fidelity of the translation I might have had considerable
doubts. He could not go about this sort of work without improving all
he touched. In November he was engaged upon a translation of
'Walladmor,' which some Curl of Germany advertised as the transla-
tion of a suppressed work of Sir Walter Scott. Messrs. Taylor and
Hessey put the German hoax into the hands of De Quincey to be retrans-
lated. I saw him groaning over his uncongenial labour, by which he
eventually got very little. It was projected to appear in three volumes.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 443
He despairingly wrote to me, ' After weeding out the forests of rubbish,
I believe it will make only one decent volume.' " ^
This was a pretty task for a man of genius to be engaged
in, and one who had been, or was to be, quizzing " Wilhelm
Meister." De Quincey, however, quizzed himself about it, and
when sorely pressed for a paper of literary reminiscences, told
frankly and jocosely the story of his share in the evolution
of the English Walladmor.^ But worse is what follows : —
"At that time he was direly beset with visitations more terrible than
the normal poverty of authors. A little before I knew him, he had
come one morning to my friend Hill, wet and shivering, having slept
under a hay-rick in the Hampstead fields. I have a letter from him of
this period, in which he says, ' Anxiety, long-continued with me, o\'
late years — in consequence of my opium-shattering,' — {sic) 'seizes on
some frail part about the stomach, and produces a specific complaint,
which very soon abolishes all power of thinking at all." '
The acquaintance between Knight and De Quincey
ripened quickly into intimacy. The publisher became the
host of the author, and to this we owe the following traits
and anecdotes of De Quincey in 1825 : —
" De Quincey, vast as were his acquirements, intuitive as was his
appreciation of character and the motives of human actions, unembar-
rassed as was his demeanour, pleasant and even mirthful his table-
talk, was as helpless in every position of responsibility as when he
nightly paced ' stony-hearted Oxford Street ' looking for the lost one.
He was constantly beset by idle fears and vain imaginings. His sensi-
tiveness was so extreme, in combination with the almost ultra-courtesy
of a gentleman, that he hesitated to trouble a servant with any personal
requests without a long prefatory apology. My family were in the
country in the summer of 1825, when he was staying at my house in
Tall Mall East. A friend or two had met him at dinner, and I had
walked part of the way home with one of them. When I returned, I
tapped at his chamber-door to bid him good-night. He was sitting at
the open window, habited as a prize-fighter when he enters the ring.
^ Charles Knight's Passages of a Working Life, i. 326.
' The paper is reprinted in Works, xvi. p. 255. ' Knight, p. 327.
444 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
'You will take cold,' I exclaimed. 'Where is your shirt?' '1 have
not a shirt ; my shirts are unwashed.' ' But why not tell the servant
to send them to the laundress ? ' ' Ah ! how could I presume to do
that in Mrs. Knight's absence ? '
"One more illustration of the eccentricity of De Quincey. I had
been to Windsor. On my return I was told that De Quincey had taken
his box away, leaving word that he was gone home. I knew that he
was waiting for a remittance from his mother, which would satisfy some
clamorous creditors, and enable him to rejoin his family at Grasmere.
Two or three days after, I heard that he was still in town. I obtained
a clue to his hiding-place, and found him in a miserable lodging on the
Surrey side of Waterloo Bridge. He had received a large draft on a
London banker at twenty-one days' sight. He summoned courage to
go to Lombard Street, and was astonished to learn that he could not
obtain the amount till the draft became due. A man of less sensitive
feelings would have returned to Pall Mall East, and have there waited
securely and comfortably till I came. How to frame his apology to our
trusty domestic was the difficulty that sent him into the den where I
found him. He produced the draft to me from out of his Bible, which
he thought was the best hiding-place. ' Come to me to-morrow
morning and I will give you the cash.' 'What! how? Can such a
thing be possible ? Can the amount be got before the draft is due ? '
' Never fear ; come you, and then get home as fast as you can. ' " ^
So the mother was still alive, and her purse was still at
the command of her unpractical and impecunious son.
De Quincey doubtless returned to Westmoreland, but
whether or not, he certainly set to work again. His con-
nection with the Londo7i ended, as has been said, with the
close of 1825, but in the following year he opened another,
and a long one, with a much more famous and successful
periodical, Blackwood s Magazine. In the December of
1825, John Gibson Lockhart took leave of Edinburgh, and
came to London to edit the Quarterly Review. With his
departure, the friendly Wilson became the presiding spirit
of the northern magazine, and as often as De Quincey chose
to work and to write, he was pretty sure to find a customer
in Blackwood. In 1826, he began in it a "Gallery of
^ Knight, i. 327.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 445
German Prose Classics," and if this closed with Kant
and Lessing, for many years afterwards he was among its
occasional contributors. To Edinburgh De Quincey began
to gravitate, chiefly because in Edinburgh was the friendly
Wilson. According to a passage about to be quoted, he
was there during 1827-9, ^'^'^ i^ the last of these years
traces of his pen are to be found in a short-lived and for-
gotten periodical, the Edinburgh Literary Gazette. But in
the summer of 1829 he was certainly in Westmoreland, and
at least temporarily prosperous, and even joyous. He had
not forgotten his old and hospitable friend, Charles Knight,
and to this remembrance we owe another and a decidedly
curious glimpse of De Quincey defying and making game
of his creditors — triumphant over fortune, for the time,
and revelling in the bucolic products of his beloved
Grasmere : —
" I occasionally," says Charles Knight, " had a warm-hearted letter
from him ; but our correspondence, after a year or two, had ceased. I
was delighted at its renewal, in July 1829, when he wrote me the most
pressing invitation from Mrs. De Quincey and himself to come with my
wife and children to visit them. He had quitted his home on the
Lakes in 1827, to remain in Edinburgh for two years, writing, but
separated for the greater part of the time from his family. Wonder-
fully characteristic are some passages of this letter. ' Well, by good
management and better luck, I contrived early in this present year to
silence vies Anglais (as the French do, or did use, to entitle creditors).
This odious race of people were silenced, I say, or nearly so ; no inso-
lent dun has raised his disgusting voice against me since Candlemas
1829. They now speak softly, and as if butter would not melt in their
mouths ; and I have so well planted my fire-engines, for extinguishing
this horrid description of nuisance, that if by chance any one should
smoulder a little too much (flame out none durst for shame), him I shall
souse and drench forthwith into quietness.' Whilst ' this great opera-
tion,'" Charles Knight adds, "was in progress, he had been nego-
tiating for the purchase of a rich farm-house, ' flowing with milk and
honey, with mighty barns and spacious pastures,' in the vicinity of
his cottage at Grasmere. 'Purchasing,' you say, what tlie devil?
44^ LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Don't swear, my dear friend ; you know there is such a thing as buying
a thing and yet not paying for it, or, at least, paying only the annual
interest. Well, that is what, / do, can do, and will do. For, hear,
finally, that the thing is done.' To this farm of Rydal Hay," Charles
Knight continues, " from which he had written to me, were we to be
welcomed. Mighty was the temptation, but mightier the difficulty in
the days before railways. ' And now, my friend, think what a glorious
El Dorado of milk, and butter, and cream-cheese, and all other dairy
products, supposing that you like those things, I can offer you, morn-
ing, noon, and night. You may absolutely bathe in new milk, or even
in cream, and you shall bathe if you like it. I know that you care not
much about luxuries for the dinner-table, else, though our luxuries are
few and simple, I could offer you some temptations, — mountain lamb
equal to Welsh ; char famous to the antipodes ; trout and pike from
the very lake within twenty-five feet of our door ; bread, such as you
have never presumed to dream of, made of our own wheat, not doctored
and separated by the usual miller's process into fine insipid flour, and
coarse, that is, merely dirty-looking white, but all ground down to-
gether, — which is the sole receipt {experto crede) for having rich, lus-
trous, red-brown, ambrosial bread ; new potatoes, of celestial earthiness
and raciness, which, with us, last to October ; and finally, milk, milk,
milk, — cream, cream, cream, (hear it, thou benighted Londoner !), in
which you must and shall bathe. ' " ^ And not a word about the supply of
laudanum !
But this idyllic felicity was probably only transient. To
John Wilson — to Edinburgh and literary work there — De
Quincey kept gravitating, gravitating, and at last he settled
down in the neighbourhood of both the friend and the
city. He was certainly living in Edinburgh about 1832-3,
meipso teste. For the writer of this sketch, then a very
small boy indeed, and living at the western extremity of the
Queen Street of the Modern Athens, remembers being, in
that region, and in what must have been one of those
years, the accidental playfellow of two other and also
very small boys, flaxen-haired, fair-complexioned, with
angelic looks and English accent, who told him that their
name was De Quincey. Their papa, they said, lived in
^ Knight, i. 340.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 447
an adjacent street, and was "an author" — a statement
which struck their small auditor with admiring wonder,
little thinking that he would one day write, however imper-
fectly, the life of that very " author." In fact, De Quincey
was then composing, for money merely, his " Klosterheim
a Masque," a "sensational" story of those days, and pub-
lished in 1832 by an Edinburgh firm. The angelic-looking
little boys soon and suddenly vanished in the train, no
doubt, of their migratory father. He was given to disap-
pearing, it has been seen, without as well as with cause, and
even John Wilson sometimes knew not of his whereabouts.
"From I S09," writes Wilson's daughter, " when he," De
Quincey, " was his," Wilson's, " companion in pedestrian
rambles and the sharer of his purse, till the hour of his
death, their friendship remained unbroken, though some-
times, in his strange career, months or years would elapse
without my father seeing or hearing of him." When he did
reappear, however, he was given to making amends for his
absence. Probably it was not far off the very period of his
biography now reached that befell what Wilson's daughter
and biographer thus pleasantly narrates — and her picture
of the English Opium-eater under the roof of Christopher
North is well worth reproducing : —
•' I remember him coming to Gloucester Place," an Edinburgh abode
of Wilson's, "one stormy night. He remained hour after hour in vain
expectation that the waters would assuage and the hurly-burly cease.
There was nothing for it but that our visitor should remain all night.
The Professor ordered a room to be prepared for him, and they found
each other such good company that this accidental detention was pro-
longed, without further difficulty, for the greater part oi a year. During
this visit some of his eccentricities did not escape observation. For
example, he rarely appeared at the family meals, preferring to dine in
his own room, at his own hour, not unfrequently turning night into
day. His tastes were very simple, though a little troublesome, at least
to the servant who prepared his repast. Coffee, boiled rice and milk,
and a piece of mutton from the loin, were the materials that invariably
448 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
formed his diet. The cook, who had an audience with him daily,
received her instructions in silent awe, quite overpowered by his
manner, for had he been addressing a duchess he could scarcely have
spoken with more deference. He would couch his request in such terms
as these : ' Owing to dyspepsia afflicting my system, and the possibility
of any additional disarrangement of the stomach taking place, conse-
quences incalculably distressing would arise, so much so, indeed, as to
increase nervous irritation, and prevent me from attending to matters
of overwhelming importance, if you do not remember to cut the mutton
in a diagonal rather than in a longitudinal form.' The cook, a Scotch-
woman, had great reverence for Mr. De Quincey as a man of genius ;
but after one of these interviews, her patience was pretty well exhausted,
and she would say, ' Weel, I never heard the like o' that in a' my days ;
the bodie has an awfu' sicht o' words. If it had been my ain maister
that was wanting his dinner, he would ha' ordered a hale tablefu' wi'
little mair than a waff o' his haun, and here's a' this claver aboot a bit
mutton nae bigger than a prin. Mr. De Quinshey would mak' a gran'
preacher, though I'm thinking a hantle o' the folk wouldna ken what
he was driving at.' Betty's observations were made with considerable
self-satisfaction, as she considered her insight of Mr. De Quincey's
character by no means slight, and many was the quaint remark she
made, sometimes hitting upon a truth that entitled her to that shrewd
sort of discrimination by no means uncommon in the humble ranks of
Scottish life. But these little meals were not the only indulgences that,
when not properly attended to, brought trouble to Mr. De Quincey.
Regularity in doses of opium were even of greater consequence. An
ounce of laudanum per diem prostrated animal life in the early part of
the day. It was no unfrequent sight to find him in his room, lying
upon the rug in front of the fire, his head resting upon a book, with his
arms crossed over his breast, plunged in profound slumber. For several
hours he would lie in this state, until the effects of the torpor had passed
away. The time when he was most brilliant was generally towards the
early morning hours, and then more than once, in order to show him
off, my father arranged his supper parties so that, sitting till three or four
in the morning, he brought Mr. De Quincey to that point at which, in
charm and power of conversation, he was so truly wonderful. " ^
Wilson himself knew De Quincey's conversational powers
from of old, and from 1830 onwards the English Opium-
eater figures occasionally in ihtNoctes Ambrosiance, his subtle
^ Mrs. Gordon's Christopher North, ii. 155, &c.
THOMAS DE' QUINCEY. 449
talk, linked sweetness long drawn out, signally contrasting
with the rough, homely vigour, and broad humour of the
Ettrick Shepherd's vernacular utterances.
In 1834, established partly on the basis of a prior
periodical, appeared Taifs Magazine, Radical as Black-
wood was Tory, and which, at subsequent stages of its
career, owed much to the patronage of the Anti-Corn-
Law League and of Lancashire Radicalism. It was
edited by a clever and appreciative woman, Mrs. John-
stone, herself an authoress of some little note, and De
Quincey formed a connection with it. Probably he was
then living in or about Edinburgh, and his old fame as the
author of the " Confessions of an Opium-Eater " was kept
alive there by his contributions to Blackwood, and by the
colloquial powers which he displayed, though very fitfully,
one can fancy, in the literary circles of the Modern Athens,
where, as has been seen, Wilson made up parties to enjoy
his discursive talk and voice of silvery tone. His first
contributions to Tail were what he entitled " Sketches of
Life and Manners from the Autobiography of an English
Opium-Eater," whom everybody knew to be Thomas De
Quincey. They seem, particularly when he came to
record his personal reminiscences of men like Wordsworth
and Coleridge, then risen into renown, to have attracted
much attention in all parts of the English-speaking world,
especially in the United States. Between 1825 and 1849
he contributed some fifty papers to Blackwood, and between
1834 and 1 84 1 about as many to Tail, with which, in 1845,
he resumed a connection that had lapsed for some years.
If he began professional authorship late in his career, all the
greater were the stores of reading, reflection, and reminis-
cence which he brought to it. Regard being had to the life
he led, and the laudanum he took, the quantity of more or
less thoughtful writing which he produced is marvellous.
3l
450 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
While contributing to Tait and to Blackwood, he also
wrote in 1838-9, and for the seventh edition of the Encyclo-
pcedia Brita7inica (published by an Edinburgh firm), critical
biographies of Shakespeare and Pope, Goethe and Schiller.
That on Shakespeare he " re-composed three times over."
And in 1844 appeared his almost solitary book, the "Logic
of Political Economy," probably based, as already con-
jectured, on the tractate which he had prepared for the
press more than a quarter of a century before, during a
lucid interval of opium-prostration, in the Grasmere cottage.
The tenancy of that cottage he surrendered in 1836 ; latterly,
he lived in another abode of the same kind, " Mavis Bush,"
at pretty Lasswade, some seven miles from Edinburgh,
the village in which Sir Walter Scott passed several happy
years of early married life. But before thus settling at Lass-
wade, where his domestic economy was skilfully and affec-
tionately presided over by one of his daughters, his life in and
about Edinburgh was of the most irregular kind, and varied
by flights further afield to escape from creditors. In the May
of 1843 (the year before De Quincey showed himself such
a master of the " Logic of Political Economy," while
ignorant how to manage his own economics) Charles
Knight crossed the Tweed to investigate the problem,
"Did Shakespeare visit Scotland?" He sought out his
old friend and found him sadly fallen; not now defying
duns, not now commanding the pastoral wealth of a farm
of his own. "From some information," says Knight, "Pro-
fessor Wilson gave me, I found out De Quincey, who
was in hiding in Glasgow. He looked better than he
had done twelve years before, but he had a beard a foot
long, (an unusual appendage to the face of an English-
man twenty years ago,) the cultivation of which, he said,
was necessary to his health:" perhaps he fancied that it
helped to disguise him. " Nothing could exceed the afifec-
THOMAS DR QVINCEY. 45 I
tion with which he received me. It was the last time I
saw him." ^ Here, again, is a sketch of him and his mode
of existence, taken in those years by his friend John Hill
Burton, the historian of Scotland, and which is perfect in
its completeness and finish. Mr. Burton is describing
the race of book-hunters, and book-collectors, and biblio-
philes. No portrait in all his gallery is more lovingly or
accurately done than this of De Quincey, — " Thomas
Papaverius j" Thomas of the opium-yielding Poppy.
" The next slide of the lantern is to represent a quite peculiar and
abnormal case. It introduces a strangely fragile, unsubstantial, and
puerile figure, wherein, however, resided one of the most potent and
original spirits that ever frequented a tenement of clay. He shall be
called, on account of associations that may or may not be found out,
Thomas Papaverius. But how to make palpable to the ordinary human
being one so signally divested of all the material and common charac-
teristics of his race, yet so nobly endowed with its rarer and loftiei
attributes, almost paralyzes the pen at the very beginning.
' ' In what mood and shape shall he be brought forward ? Shall it
be as first we met him at the table of Lucullus, whereto he was seduced
by the false pretence that he would there meet with one who entertained
novel and anarchical opinions regarding the Golden Ass of Apuleins?
No one speaks of waiting dinner for him. He will come and depart
at his own sweet will, neither burdened with punctualities nor burden-
ing others by exacting them. The festivities of the afternoon are far
on when a commotion is heard in the hall as if some dog or other
stray animal had forced its way in. The instinct of a friendly guest
tells him of the arrival — he opens the door and fetches in the little
stranger. What can it be? a street boy of some sort? His costume, in
fact, is a boy's duffle great-coat, very threadbare, with a hole in it, and
buttoned tight to the chin, where it meets the fragments of a parti-
coloured belcher handkerchief ; on his feet are list-shoes, covered with
snow, for it is a stonny winter night ; and the trousers — some one sug-
gests that they are inner Unen-garments blackened with writing ink,
but that Papaverius never would have been at the trouble so to disguise
them. What can be the theory of such a costume? The simplest
thing in the world — it consisted of the fragments of apparel nearest at
hand. Had chance thrown to him a court single-breasted coat, with
^ Kni;;ht, ii. 306.
452 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
a bishop's apron, a kilt, and top-boots, in them he would have made
his entry.
*' The first impression that a boy has appeared vanishes instantly.
Though in one of the sweetest and most genial of his essays he shows
how every man retains so much in him of the child he originally was —
and he himself retained a great deal of that primitive simplicity — it was
buried within the depths of his heart — not visible externally. On the
contrary, on one occasion when he corrected an erroneous reference to
an event as being a century old, by saying that he recollected its occur-
rence, one felt almost a surprise at the necessary limitation in his age,
so old did he appear with his arched brow loaded with thought, and
the countless little wrinkles which engrained his skin gathering thickly
round the curiously expressive and subtle lips. These lips are speedily
opened by some casual remark, and presently the flood of talk passes
first from them, free, clear, and continuous — never rising into declama-
tion, never losing a certain mellow earnestness, and all consisting of
sentences as exquisitely jointed together as if they were destined to
challenge the criticism of the remotest posterity. Still the hours stride
over each other, and still flows on the stream of gentle rhetoric, as if it
were labitiir et labehir in omne volubilis ccvuni. It is now far into the
night, and slight hints and suggestions are propagated about separation
and home-going. The topic starts new ideas on the progress of civilisa-
tion, the effect of habit on men in all ages, and the power of the domestic
aff'ections. Descending from generals to the special, he could testify
to the inconvenience of late hours ; for was it not the other night that,
coming to what was, or what he believed to be, his own door, he
knocked and knocked, but the old woman within either couldn't or
wouldn't hear him, so he scrambled over a wall, and having taken his
repose in a furrow, was able to testify to the extreme unpleasantness of
such a couch ? The predial groove might indeed nourish kindly the
infant seeds and shoots of the peculiar vegetable to which it was appro-
priated, but was not a comfortable place of repose for adult man.
" Shall I try another sketch of him, when, travel-stained and foot-
sore, he glided in on us one night like a shadow, the child by the fire
gazing on him with round eyes of astonishment, and suggesting that he
should get a penny and go home — a proposal which he subjected to
some philosophical criticism very far wide of its practical tenor ? How
far he had wandered since he had last refreshed himself, or even
whether he had eaten food that day, were matters on which there was
no getting articulate utterance from him. Though his costume was
muddy, however, and his communications about the material wants of
life very hazy, the ideas which he had stored up during his wandering
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 453
poured themselves forth as clear and sparkling, both in logic and lan-
guage, as the purest fountain that springs from a Highland rock.
" How that wearied little worn body was to be refreshed was a difficult
problem : soft food disagreed with him : the hard he could not eat.
Suggestions pointed at length to the solution of that vegetable unguent
to which he had given a sort of lustre, and it might be supposed that
there were some fifty cases of acute toothache to be treated in the house
that night. How many drops ? Drops ! nonsense. If the wine-glasses
of the establishment were not beyond the ordinary normal size, there
was no risk — and so the weary is at rest for a time."
After an account of him and his odd careless ways in
a library, Mr. Burton goes on to indicate how entirely he
stood apart among his fellows — " divested of the ordinary
characteristics of social man — of those characteristics
without which the human race, as a body, could not get on
or exist."
"For instance, those who knew him a little might call him a loose
man in money matters ; those who knew him closer laughed at the idea
of coupling any notion of pecuniary or other like responsibility with
his nature. You might as well attack the character of the nightingale,
which may have nipped up your five-pound note and torn it to shreds
to serve as nest-building material. Only immediate craving necessities
could ever extract from him an acknowledgment of the common vulgar
agencies by which men subsist in civilized society ; and only while the
necessity lasted did the acknowledgment exist. Take just one example,
which will render this clearer than any generalities. He arrives very
late at a friend's door ; and on gaining admission — a process in which
he often endured impediments — he represents, with his usual silver
voice, and measured rhetoric, the absolute necessity of his being then
and there invested with a sum of money in the current coin of the
realm — the amount limited, from the nature of his necessities, which he
very freely states, to seven shillings and sixpence. Discovering, or
fancying he discovers, signs that his eloquence is likely to be unpro-
ductive, he is fortunately reminded that should there be any difficulty
in connection with security for the repayment of the loan, he is at that
moment in possession of a document, which he is prepared to deposit
with the lender — a document calculated, he cannot doubt, to remove
any feeling of anxiety which the most prudent person could ex-
perience in the circumstances. Afier a rummage in his pockets, which
develops miscellaneous and varied, but as yet by no means valuable,
454 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
possessions, he at last comes to the object of his search, a crumpled bit
of paper, and spreads it out, — a fifty pound bank-note .' The friend
who knew him well was of opinion that had he, on delivering over the
seven shillings and sixpence, received the bank-note, he never would
have heard anything more of the transaction from the other party. It
was also his opinion that before coming to a personal friend, the owner
of the note had made several efforts to raise money on it among persons
who might take a purely business view of such transactions ; but the
lateness of the hour and something in the appearance of the thing alto-
gether, had induced these mercenaries to forget their cunning and de-
cline the transaction.
" He stretched, till it broke, the proverb. Bis dat qui ciib dat. His
giving was quick enough on the rare occasions when he had wherewithal
to give, but then the act was final, and could not be repeated. If he
suffered in his own person from this peculiarity, he suffered still more in
his sympathies, for he was full of them to all breathing creatures, and,
like poor Goldy, it was agony to him to hear the beggar's cry of dis-
tress, and to hear it without the means of assuaging it, though in a de-
parted fifty pounds there were doubtless the elements for appeasing
many a street wail. All sums of money were measured by him through
the common standard of immediate use ; and with more solemn pomp
of diction than he applied to the bank-note. Might he inform you
that, with the gentleman opposite, to whom he had hitherto been en-
tirely a stranger, but who happened to be nearest to him at the time
when the exigency occurred to him, he had just succeeded in negotiat-
ing a loan of 'twopence'? He was, and is, a great authority in poli-
tical economy. I have known great anatomists and physiologists as
careless of their health as he was of his purse, whence I have inferred
that something more than a knowledge of the abstract truths of politi-
cal economy is necessary to keep some men from pecuniary imprudence,
and that something more than a knowledge of the received principles
of physiology is necessary to bring others into a course of perfect
sobriety and general obedience to the laws of health.
" Peace be with his gentle and kindly spirit, now for some time
separated from its grotesque and humble tenement of clay. It is both
right and pleasant to say that the characteristics here spoken of were
not those of his latter days. In these he was tended by affectionate
hands ; and I have ahvaj's thought it a wonderful instance of the
power of domestic care and management that through the ministrations
of a devoted offspring, this strange being was so cared for, that those
who came in contact with him then, and then only, might have admired
him as the partriarchal head of an agreeable and elegant household."^
^ The Book-Himtcr, p. 30, &c.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 455
Taifs Magazine died in or about 1859, and even before
John Wilson's death in 1854, ceased what had become an in-
termittent connection of De Quincey with Blacktvood. His
latest contributions to it were the Suspiria de Profundis —
dream-sohloquies in " impassioned prose." During the
closing years of his life, however, he wrote a good deal in
an Edinburgh periodical, Hoggs Instructor, a title after-
wards exchanged for one both less prosaic and more
ambitious. Titan. Although with the exception of " Klos-
terheim " and the " Logic of Political Economy," no book
of his had been published since his early " Confessions of
an Opium-Eater," and many of his contributions to periodi-
cals were anonymous, yet his name and peculiar merits
had gradually become known both at home and in the
United States, a circumstance partly due, doubtless, to the
fact that his papers in Tait were always printed as "by
the English Opium-Eater," or " by Thomas De Quincey."
In the United States, the interest "taken in his writings was
so considerable that, in 185 1, a Boston firm began the
attempt to republish them in a collective form. One of
the members of the firm, whether then in the Old Country
on other business or not, paid a visit to De Quincey at
Lasswade in that year, possibly to confer with him respect-
ing the American edition, and on the aid to be expected
from him in the difficult task of extricating his papers from
the periodicals of thirty years.^ He welcomed the American
1 De Quincey seems to have done little or nothing for this American
edition, in which will be found his autobiographic papers just as they
appeared in Tait. " It was," says the writer in the Atlantic Monthly,
"no uncommon thing for him to forget his own writings. In one case
it is known that for a long time he persisted in disowning his produc-
tion. His American editor— a fact which is little known — selected
from among the mass of periodical writings in the various magazines for
which De Quincey wrote, those which, having no other clue to guide
him than their peculiar style, he judged to have proceeded from De
456 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES,
publisher cordially at Lasswade, and a slight account of
the visit was afterwards given in an American magazine.
Such was the seclusion in which he then lived, that " Mr.
T.," no doubt Mr. Ticknor of Ticknor & Fields, the
Boston firm aforesaid, " found but one person in Edin-
burgh who could inform him definitely as to De Quincey's
whereabouts." When it was discovered, and De Quincey
communicated with, he wrote thus, giving the topography
of his abode and offering his convoy to the American visitor :
" The Dalkeith railway, from the Waverley Station, brings
you to Esk Bank . . . precisely two and three-quarter
miles from Mavis Bush,^ the name of our cottage. Close
to us, and the most noticeable object for guiding your
enquiries, is Mr. Annandale's paper mills." Though sixty-
six, De Quincey was still a good pedestrian, and the note
Quincey's pen. In one instance, as to the " Traditions of the Rabbins,"
after considerable examination, he still hesitated, and finally wrote to
De Quincey, to set himself right. The latter disowned the essay; he had
forgotten it. Mr. T., however, after another examination, concluded
that, notwithstanding De Quincey's denial of the fact, he must have
written it ; accordingly, at his own risk, he published it. Afterwards
De Quincey owned up, and ever after that referred all disputed cases
of this nature to his Boston publishers." Did he really "own up," or
simply succumb to the importunity of his friendly American editor? It
has since been proved that " The Traditions of the Rabbins " was not
De Quincey's. The settlement of the point is due to Mr. Richard
Garnett of the British Museum, a scholar and a poet, and to whose
great courtesy and extensive knowledge of books all inquiring visitors
to the Museum Reading- Room, of which he is superintendent, are
much indebted. From the evidence of style, Mr. Garnett (a nephew,
by the way, of a former editor, for many years, of the Manchester
Guardian), satisfied himself that the paper could not have been written
by De Quincey. Mr. Garnett corresponded on the subject with the
publishers of Blackwood's Magazine, in which the "Traditions of the
Rabbins " originally appeared, and on referring to their registers, they
ascertained that beyond a doubt the late Dr. Croly was the author of
the disputed paper. See the Athenaum for June 28, 1873.
^ A pretty name for a niral cottage ; "mavis" is Scotch for thrush.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 457
expressed his willingness, if it did not rain, to meet the
visitor, " at your hotel in Edinburgh, any time after 1 1
A.M., and walk out the whole distance, seven miles from the
Scott monument." On his arrival, Mr. T. found his host
awaiting him at the door of the cottage, and was received
" with a certain boyish awkwardness of manner, but with a
most urban-like courtesy and affability." If " business "
was talked of, nothing is said of it, and the American was
delighted with his host's conversation : —
" When, however, it was absolutely necessary to be going, De
Quincey forthwith insisted on accompanying his guest. What then was
to be done ? Ominously the sky looked down upon them, momently
threatening a storm. No resource was there but to give the man his
way, and accept his offer of companionship for a short distance, painfully
conscious though you are of the fact, that every step taken forward must,
during the same August night, be retraced by the weary-looking old
man at your side, who now lacks barely four years of life's average
allotment. Thus you move on ; and the heavens move on their hurri-
cane by nearer approaches, warnings of which propagate themselves
all around you in every sound of the wind and every rustle of the forest
leaves. Meanwhile, there is no rest to the silvery vocal utterances of
your companion ; every object by the way furnishes a ready topic for
conversation. Just now you are passing an antiquated old mansion,
and your guide stops to tell you that in this house may have been com-
mitted most strange and horrible murders, that, in spite of the tempestuous
mutterings heard on every side, ought now and here to be specially and
solemnly memorialized by human relation. A woman passes by, a
perfect stranger, but De Quincey steps entirely out of the road to one
side, takes off his hat, and in the most reverent attitude awaits her
passage, and you, poor astonished mortal that you are, lest you should
yourself seem scandalously uncourteous, are compelled to do likewise.
In this incident, we see what infinite majesty invested the very semblance
of humanity in De Quincey's thoughts. . . .
" Onward you proceed, one, two, three miles, and you can endure
no longer the thought that your friend shall go on further, increasing
thus at every step the burden of his journey back. You have reached
the Esk-bank, and the bridge which spans the stream ; the storm so
long threatened begins now to let loose its rage against all unsheltered
mortals. Here De Quincey consents to bid you good-bye — to you his last
good-bye ; and as here you leave him, so is he for ever enshrined in your
o M
45'^ LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
thoughts, together with the primal mysteries of night, and of storm, of
human tragedies, and of the most pathetic human tenderness !"^
The issue of the American edition of De Quincey's
writings naturally led to an English, or a Scotch, enterprise
of the same kind, and in 1853 the proprietor of Hoggs In-
structor began the publication of an edition in fourteen
volumes, all but the very last of which seem to have been
produced under De Quincey's supervision. In preparing
or revising this edition, it has been seen, he both excised and
modified statements, which had been made in his autobio-
graphic sketches contributed to Tait, and some whole papers,
such as those entitled " Oxford," he suppressed. The issue of
this first Edinburgh edition was not completed until i860, and
De Quincey died in the December of 1859. His youngest
daughter, who had presided over his modest establishment
at Lasswade during his later years, and had made his life
settled and comfortable, tended him during his last illness,
being joined towards its close by her sister, "the wife of Mr.
Robert Craig of Ireland." A third daughter, also married,
and the wife of Colonel Baird Smith, a distinguished officer of
Engineers, was with her husband in India. Of De Quincey's
last days and hours, an account was sent by one of the
daughters then with him to a friend in the United States,
and extracts from it are given in the following narrative fur-
nished to the American magazine already quoted from : —
" During the last few days of his life, De Quincey wandered much,
mixing up real and imaginary, or apparently imaginary things. He
complained one night that his feet were hot and tired. His daughter
arranged the blankets around them, saying, 'Is that better, papa?'
when he answered, ' Yes, my love, I think it is. You know, my
dear girl, these are the feet that Christ washed.'
" Everything seemed to connect itself in his mind with little children.
He aroused one day, and said suddenly, ' You must know, my dear,
^ Atlantic Monthly for September 1863, § Thomas De Quincey.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 459
the Edinburgh cabmen are the most brutal set of fellows under the sun.
I must tell you that I and the little children were all invited to supper
with Jesus Christ. So, as you see, it was a great honour. I thought I
must buy new clothes for the little ones, and — would you believe it pos-
sible ? — when I went out with the children, the wretches laughed at
their new dresses.'
"Of my brothers he often spoke, both those that are dead and those
that are alive, as if they were his own brothers. One night he said,
when I entered the room,
" 'Is that you, Horace?'^
•' ' No, papa.'
*' 'Oh, I see ! I thought you were Horace ; for he was talkbg to
me just now, and I suppose has just left the room.'
" Speaking of his father one day, suddenly and without introduction,
he exclaimed, ' There is one thing I deeply regret, that I did not know
my dear father better ; for, I am sure, a better, kinder, or juster man
could never have existed.'
"When death seemed approaching, the physician recommended that
a telegram should be sent to the eldest daughter, who resided in Ire-
land, but he forbade any mention of this fact to the patient. De
Quincey seemed to have a prophetic feeling that she was on her way to
him, saying, ' Has M. got to that town yet that we stopped at when we
went to Ireland ? How many hours will it be before she can be here ?
Let me see, — there are eight hours before I can see her, and three added
to that.' His daughter came sooner than the family expected ; but the
time tallied very nearly with the computation he had made. On the
morning his daughter arrived occurred the first intimation his family
had seen that the hand of death was laid upon him. He had passed a
quiet, but rather sleepless night, appearing much the same, yet more than
ordinarily loving. After greeting his child, he said, 'And how does
mamma's little girl like her leaving her?' ' Oh, they were very glad
for me to come to grandpapa, and they sent you this kiss, which they
did of their own accord.' He seemed much pleased. It was evidence
that M. presented herself to him as the mother of children, the constant
theme of his wanderings. Once, when his daughter quitted the room,
he said, ' They are all leaving me but my dear little children.' I heard
him call one day, distinctly, ' Florence ! Florence ! Florence ! Flor-
^ " Horace," who had entered the navy, was at this time dead. Of
De Quincey's two then surviving sons (doubtless the writer's playmates
of more than five-and-twcnty years before), one was in the Indian army ;
the other and elder, John Francis, was a physician, and settled jn Brazil,
where he died.
460 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
ence !' and again, 'my dear, dear mother !' and to the last he called us
' my love,' and it sounded like no other sound ever uttered. I never
heard such pathos as there was in it, and in every tone of his voice.
It gave me an idea of a love that passeth all understanding,
"During the next night he was thought dying, but he lingered on
and on till half-past nine the next morning. He told me something
about to-morrow morning, and something about sunshine ; but the
thought that he was talking about what he would never see drove the
exact idea out of my head, though I am sure it was morning in another
world he was talking of.
" There was an extraordinary appearance of youth about him, both
for some time before and after death. He looked like a boy of fourteen,
and very beautiful. We did not like to let in the morning light, and
the candle was burning at nine o'clock, when the post brought the fol-
lowing letter, which my sister and myself glanced over by the candle-
light, just as we were listening to his decreasing breath. At the moment
it did not strike me with the astonishment, at such an extraordinary
coincidence, that when we came to read it afterwards it did : —
• Brighton, December 7, 1859.
* My Dear De Quincey, — Before I quit this world, I most ardently
desire to see your handwriting. In early life, that is, more than sixty
years ago, we were school-fellows together, and mutually attached ;
nay, I remember a boyish paper (The Observer) in which we were
engaged. Yours has been a brilliant literary career, mine far from
brilliant, but I hope not unuseful as a theological student. It seems a
pity we should not once more recognize one another before quitting the
stage. I have often read your works, and never without remembering
the promise of your talents in Winkfield. My life has been almost a
domestic tragedy. I have four children in lunatic asylums. Thank
God, it is now drawing to a close ; but it would cheer the evening of
my days to receive a line from you, for I am, with much sincerity,
your old and attached friend, E. H. G.'
•' I do not remember the name of G., but the name of Edward con-
stantly recurred in his wanderings.
" Half an hour after the reading of that letter we heard those last
pathetic sighs, so terrible from their very softness, and saw the poor,
worn-out garment laid aside. Just before he died, he looked around
the room, and said very tenderly to the nurse, the physician, and his
daughters, who were present, ' Thank you all — thank you all ! ' Sen-
sible thus, to the very last, of kindness, he breathed out his life in
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 46 1
simple thanks, swayed even in death by the spirit of profound courtesy
that had ruled his life," ^
So ends the simple and touching record of the closing
days and hours of this unique Lancashire Worthy. It was
on the 8th of December 1859, that De Quincey died, in his
seventy-fifth year. He was buried in the graveyard of St.
Cuthbert's, Edinburgh, where a tombstone with a brief
inscription marks the place of his interment. In person
he was " a slender little man, with small, clearly-chiselled
features, and a remarkably high square forehead."
1 AtlanlK Monthly for September 1863.
XIX.
SAMUEL BAMFORD*
VERY different from the childhood of Thomas De
Quincey was that of Samuel Bamford, last of our
Lancashire Worthies. He was the son of a hand-loom
weaver at Middleton, who figures in his earhest remin-
iscences of home as " pale, stooping, and attenuated,
probably from scanty fare as well as repeated visitations
of sickness." Bamford's father had in his youth, however,
been stalwart and strong, one of the best pugilists in
Middleton ; until, visited by religious impressions, he for-
swore lax courses and became a Methodist. The elder
Bamford seems to have been no ordinary man. He was
a reader, and, in his own way, a thinker. He played and
sang ; he composed both music and verse. His wife,
too, was a superior woman, and their son might reckon
himself fortunate in his parents.
Samuel Bamford was born at Middleton on the 28th of
February 1788. The year after came the first French
Revolution, followed by a depression of trade which brought
scarcity into the Bamford household. The political effects
of that great event were felt even in remote Middleton.
Bamford's father became what would now be called a
* Bamford's Writings, passim, ^^c, <5r»f.
SAMUEL BAMFORD. 463
Radical, and what was then called a Jacobin. He
formed one of a little knot of Middletonians who met at
each other's houses to talk politics and indylge in dreams
of parliamentary reform. He wrote a People's Anthem,
" God Save the Poor," which his son has printed, and in
which dehverance from "placemen" and taxation was
prayed for. Samuel was thus born and bred a Radical,
and in times when Radicalism could not even be called
popular. Among his earliest remembrances was that of the
rabble at Middleton-wakes, flinging stones and firing off
pistols at a lay-figure in a cart, — supposed to represent
Tom Paine, — amid such cries as " Deawn wi' a' th' Jacobins."
Other and pleasanter reminiscences were those of Middleton
before it was modernised by the factory system. The Irk
was then a crystal stream, in the neighbourhood of woods,
and pastures, and green fields, which long since have been
devoured by brick and mortar, and have ceased to be the
haunts of the fairies and " boggarts," with tales of whose
doings the little Sam's childish imagination was fed. It
was a different nourishment that it received when having
been taught to read by his father at the loom, he made the
acquaintance of the " Pilgrim's Progress," and heard it
expounded by his parents, whose dreary lot in this life
deepened the attractions of the goal reached at last by the
much-suffering Christian and his wife.
In Sam's sixth year, however, the Bamford household
was visited by a gleam of sunshine, the precursor of
happier times. One day, a stranger made an unexpected
appearance, on a welcome errand, in the cottage of the
Middleton muslin-weaver. He was a churchwarden of
Manchester, and came to offer the elder Bamford the
superintendence of the manufacturing operations per-
formed by some of the pauper inmates of the workhouse
there. The offer was gladly accepted, and Sam's father
464 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
gave such satisfaction that he was soon appointed Governor,
or Master, of the Workhouse, with his wife for Mistress.
The Bamfords now exchanged penury for comfort, and
Sam, cottage-hfe in quiet Middleton for the bustle of a
populous workhouse in busy Manchester. The father and
mother were indefatigable in the discharge of their duties,
but small-pox broke out and carried off two of their little
ones. Then came an outbreak of fever which prostrated
Sam, and was fatal to his mother. Sent to Middleton
to recover, he was on his return to the workhouse placed
at the Manchester Grammar School. Till then he had
been fonder of play than of books, but at this school his
dormant faculties were awakened. He became the head
boy of the first English class, spending his spare pence
on story-books and ballads, and acquiring what he learned
to feel to be the " blessed habit of reading." But when the
time came for passing into a higher class, and for being
taught Latin, the father stopped the way. " Latin," he said,
"was of no use to any but boys destined for one of the
professions," and Sam's school progress was arrested by the
paternal fiat. In after years Bamford looked back with
regret to his father's prohibition. If allowed to learn
Latin, " I should not," he said, " have stopped short of
the university, I think."
Meanwhile, the father had married again, expecting
that his second wife would, hke his first, become Mistress
of the Workhouse. But the post was given to a former
female functionary. The Master and she first quarrelled
with each other, and then with the controlling authorities,
who at last discharged both of them. His father and step-
mother were afterwards appointed Master and Mistress of
Salford Workhouse, but in the interval, seemingly, Sam and
a brother were sent to an uncle at Middleton, a weaver,
to learn his trade. Sam's progress in learning at the
SAMUEL BAM FORD. 465
Middleton Grammar School was marred by his aunt, who
kept him at the bobbin-wheel till he was transferred to a
loom. He was now a lad of fourteen or fifteen, and had
already fallen in love with a little Middleton lass, the
•' Mima" of his " Early Days," and of whom more hereafter.
From Middleton he returned to Manchester to live with
a sister, and to become warehouseman to a Mr. Spencer.
He had to sweep the rooms, light the fire, and fodder his
master's horse, only doing a little business proper when
his employer was out ; his wages were six shillings a week.
Here he had glimpses of the proceedings of a Scotch firm,
then in its infancy, but which afterwards became famous in
more than one way. " Opposite to our warehouse," he says,
" was the establishment of Messrs. Grant & Brothers, who
had just opened a warehouse in Manchester. They soon
showed their English neighbours the way to do business ;
they were indefatigably on the alert for customers; and
■whilst other tradesmen stood at the doors bowing to
country buyers — for it was not then the custom to stop
them and ask them in — the Grants with quick eyes were
on the look-out, and seldom permitted a stranger to pass
without offering him the inspection of their 'stock of
unequalled prints, at the lowest prices.' Whilst others
looked coldly on, they were often successful in making a
sale, and thus, by means of an innovation on the old form
of trading, they, notwithstanding some ludicrous mistakes
in their solicitations, soon established a good connection,
and laid the foundation of their subsequent extraordinary
and deserved popularity "^ — as The Brothers Cheeryble and
otherwise.
From this warehouse the young man passed to another
belonging to a Bury firm. The manager of its business in
Manchester, a Mr. W , was a bit of a dandy, who
' Early Days, p. 189.
3n
466 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
initiated the new warehouseman into the art and mystery of
making blacking and boot-top liquid, and taught him to be
a dexterous boot-cleaner. Partly from pride, partly be-
cause his services in this department were never rewarded
with anything more substantial than thanks, Bamford at
last rebelled against such an addition to his normal duties.
The rebellion was successful ; nevertheless, when the busi-
ness came into the hands of Mr. W , the services of
the rebel were retained. Bamford still kept up the " blessed
habit of reading," and was now a student of Pope's Iliad,
of Milton's poems, and of Shakespeare's plays. But the
temptations of Manchester were too much for him, and
there supervening an unfortunate love affair, in which
Mima was for the time forgotten, he contracted other habits,
not at all blessed. " He was ripening," he admits, " into a
graceless young scoundrel," when he suddenly resolved to
return to Middleton, where the weaving trade was pros-
perous, and to work at the loom in the house of an old
acquaintance. At Manchester Mima had reappeared on
the scene, and she was at Middleton when he went back to
it. But in his new home and employment Bamford went
from bad to worse. A connection with a Yorkshire lass
rendered him amenable to the parish authorities, and he
sacrificed at the shrine of Bacchus as well as at that of
Venus. He became "strangely unsettled," and having
again left Middleton, he chanced to see in the streets of
Manchester bills intimating that young men were wanted
for the coasting-trade between South Shields and London.
He engaged himself forthwith, and took farewell of Mima,
who was "almost broken-hearted," and of his worthy
father, still at the Salford Workhouse, who, he says,
"went down upon his knees, and prayed earnestly that
God would recall me from sin." Reaching South Shields
with his companions, mostly factory lads, he engaged
SAMUEL BAMFORD. 467
to serve on board for three years at ;^20 per annum, and
embarked in the brig Eneas, bound for London with a
cargo of coals.
The ex-weaver and ex-warehouseman, a tall, stalwart
young fellow of eighteen or so, seems to have taken to his
new vocation, and he thought himself rewarded when, at
the end of his first trip, the Eneas made its way up the
Thames through an avenue of shipping, and at last mighty
London burst on him. The first day allowed on shore
was spent in seeing such of the sights of London as
could be seen on a Sunday, and the young sailor before
the mast of the South Shields collier was soon in West-
minster Abbey gazing at the memorials of favourite poets.
Bamford appears to have become a good and expert sailor,
but after half a dozen or so trips between South Shields and
London, he grew tired of the life and resolved to run
away. He took his measures with some precaution, and
one summer day, leaving the brig in the Thames, he soon
found himself, with seven shillings in his pocket, on the
great North Road, with Manchester for his goal, and his
feet for conveyance. Sleeping in outhouses or in hay-
fields, once (at Leicester) selling his woollen drawers for
sixpence, occasionally helped by good Samaritans, and
encountering by the way all sorts of odd acquaintances
and adventures, the pedestrian, footsore and faint, at la^t
reached Manchester, and was welcomed by his father and
his friends, Mima among them, there and at Middleton.
Bamford's nautical experiences and the privations ex-
perienced on his journey had a sobering effect on him. He
returned to his old calling, and found employment in a
warehouse in Peel Street belonging to Hoole, Wilkinson,
& Gartside, a firm of calico-printers at Chorley. Here
his duties were more responsible than they had been in
former sim.ilar situations, and he discharged them steadily
468 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
and successfully. His mind may have been powerfully
affected by Cobbett's prose and Burns's poetry, with both
of which he now first became acquainted ; but he worked
on persistently, and his wages were raised from i8s. to 20s. a
week. He spent his leisure hours no longer at taverns,
but in reading and writing, seeing himself in print for the
first time when Harrofs Mafichester Mercury published
some verses of his, " The Snowdrop," evidently suggested
by Burns's " Daisy ; " and, best of all, he married Mima, his
faithful and affectionate wife for many, many years. After
a little, he purchased looms of his own, bespoke work for
himself and wife, and returned to Middleton with a joy-
ous sense of emancipation, and of being his own master.
The pair had plenty of employment, and were as happy as
possible. Why this sort of life did not last is left unex-
plained. " Afterwards," says Bamford, rather too concisely,
" we went to reside with my wife's uncle and aunt, she
assisting the old people in the house and shop, and I, on
the recommendation of Mr. Hoole " — of the firm in whose
employment he had been a warehouseman — "taking the
situation of putter-out to weavers at Middleton for Messrs.
Dickens & Wilde. Subsequently, for a short time I was
engaged in the bookselling or publication line of business"
— an episode of which we could have wished to know
more — "and in 18 16 I was member of a committee of
parliamentary reformers, and Secretary to the Hampden
Club at Middleton."
Yes ; with the restoration of peace after the victory of
Waterloo came agricultural and commercial distress, and
a widespread agitation for parliamentary reform. In the
November of 18 16 Cobbett began a cheap issue of his
" Political Register," which was thus brought within the
reach of the multitude, and, with Henry Hunt's orator}',
gave a great impetus to the new or reawakened move-
SAMUEL BAMFORD. 469
ment, one directed in London by Sir Francis Burdett,
Lord Cochrane, afterwards Earl of Dundonald, and the
simple-minded Major Cartwright, brother of the inventor
of the power-loom. Hampden Clubs for the promotion
of parliamentary reform were formed throughout the land,
and were regarded by the Government with suspicion and
alarm. Spies were employed to watch and report on the
proceedings of the reformers, and some of them, pretend-
ing to be friendly to the movement, seem to have instigated
the more ignorant and reckless of the working-class politi-
cians to violent courses or dangerous designs. What is now
called Manhood Suffrage, with electoral districts and annual
parliaments, formed the chief demands of the reformers.
If parliamentary reform could be procured, everything, they
were satisfied, would be put to rights ; and Bamford and
his friends did not trouble themselves, in the meantime,
about the details of the legislation which was to follow the
triumph of the cause. The Hampden Ciub of Middleton,
with its active and enthusiastic secretary, soon became
prominent, and the secretary himself was sent to London,
early in 1817, to represent it at a convocation of delegates
summoned from all parts of the country to arrange tlie
preliminaries of a Reform Bill to be introduced in the
House of Commons. Bamford's last sight of the metro-
polis had been when he ran away from the South Shields
collier. He now revisited London on a political mission,
and found himself somebody. At a meeting of the dele-
gates he ventured to oppose even Cobbett, who wished
to substitute Household for Manhood Suffrage, and Bam-
ford carried his point. He saw, heard, and was brought
into contact with Hunt and Cobbett, the proud and cold
Sir Francis Burdett, and the cordial and unaffected Lord
Cochrane. He visited the haunts of working-class poli-
ticians, and was struck by the folly and rashness of some
470 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
of their artisan leaders. On his return to Middleton,
and while supporting parliamentary reform with unabated
enthusiasm, he lifted up his voice against the silly pro-
ject of the " Blanketeers " to march to London, each
carrying a blanket for his nightly bivouac on the road;
and in after years he recorded with complacency the fact,
that not a man from Middleton joined the expedition,
which turned out an ignominious failure. Bamford's
sagacity and goodness of heart made him recoil alike
from rash and from wicked enterprises. While his honest
zeal kept him faithful to the cause, he became more and
more painfully aware that among its promoters there were
men capable of any atrocity. With the suspension of the
Habeas Corpus Act (March 1816), and the passing of a bill
to restrain seditious meetings — measures sanctioned by a
Parliament terrified at the magnitude of the new political
organisation, at the language used and the treasonable
enterprises said to be contemplated by some of its leaders —
the more desperate spirits among the Lancashire working-
class reformers became uncontrollable. Bamford was
actually asked to join in an incendiary night- attack,
which was to make "a Moscow of Manchester," and he
at once and indignantly refused his co-operation to what
he denounced as " unlawful, inhuman, cowardly." Not
long afterwards he was asked by another reformer to join
in a plot for the assassination of the Ministers, and
again and at once he indignantly refused participation in
.such villainy. But, with schemes like these afloat, and
spies busily informing against the innocent as well as the
guilty, it is little wonder if Bamford became " suspect,"
though he had carefully avoided attending any of the
secret meetings, which were frequented by too many of
his associates. In the March of 181 7, he, with his friend,
"Dr." Healey, a vain, scattered-brained medical quack,
SAMUEL BAMFORD. 47 1
and five others, were arrested (29th March 181 7), and,
after a day's detention in the Salford New Bailey, were
conveyed to London to be examined before the Privy
Council on a charge of high treason. Their first experience
as political prisoners on leaving the Salford gaol in the
charge of two Queen's messengers was not a disagreeable
one. An excellent breakfast was given them at Disley,
which Healey enjoyed so much as to declare, that if "this
was being a state-prisoner, he wished he had been one
five years before ! " In London they were placed in Cold
Bath Fields prison, and were treated with great considera-
tion by its officials, and, indeed, by all the persons in
authority with whom they were brought into contact.
After several examinations before the Privy Council,
Bamford was set free with a kindly warning from Lord
Sidmouth, at that time Home Secretary. Bamford's
demeanour, at once manly and respectful, had evidently
impressed the Privy Council. During one of his exami-
nations, he harangued them on the necessity for reform,
but it was evident that he had nothing of the dangerous
conspirator about him. " Mr. Bamford, I wish you well,
I assure you I wish you well," were the Home Secretary's
parting words to him, " and I hope this is the last time I
shall ever see you on an occasion like the present." Of
the sojourn at Cold Bath Fields . Bamford says: "So far
as diet was concerned, we lived more like gentlemen than
prisoners." Just before leaving London for home, he was
asked to luncheon by one of the Queen's messengers who
had convoyed him from the North, and who, besides the
luncheon, gave him " a handsome present of clothes."
On returning to Middleton, he seems to have published
the "Account of the Arrest and Imprisonment of Samuel
Bamford on suspicion of High Treason," written by him-
self, a thin octavo, which bears the imprint " Manchester
472 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
1817," and which tells the story also of his London ex-
periences. He had formed some resolutions during his
imprisonment to forswear meddling with politics, but they
did not long survive his return to Lancashire.
"I now went to work," he says, "my wife weaving beside me, and
my little girl, now become doubly dear, attending school or going
short errands for her mother. Why was I not content? why was not
my soul filled and thankful ? what would I more ? what could mortal
enjoy beyond a sufficiency to satisfy hunger and thirst — apparel to
make him warm and decent — a home for shelter and repose, and the
society of those he loved ? All these I had, and still was craving —
craving for something for the nation, for some good for every person,
forgetting all the time to appreciate and to husband the blessings I
had on eveiy side around me, and, like some honest enthusiasts of
tlie present day, supervising the affairs of the nation, to the great
neglect of my own. . . . But it was not with us then as it is
now, and we have that excuse to plead. We had none to direct
or oppose us, except a strong-handed Government, whose politics
were as much hated as their power was dreaded. We had not any
of our own rank with whom to advise for the better ; no man of
other days who had gone through the ordeal of experience, and whose
judgment might have directed our self-devotion, and have instructed us
that before the reform we sought could be obtained and profited by,
there must be another, a deeper reform, emerging from our hearts, and
first blessing our households by the production of every good we could
possibly accomplish in our humble sphere ; — informing us also, and con-
firming it by all histoiy, that governments might change from the
despotic to the anarchical, when, as surely as death, would come the
despotic again, and that no redemption for the masses could exist save
one that should arise from their own knowledge and virtue ; that king-
tyranny and mob-tyranny (the worst of all) might alternately bear
sway, and that no barrier could be interposed save the self-knowledge
and self-control of a reformed people. . . .
" In the absence, therefore, of such wholesome monition, in the ardour
also and levity of youth, and impelled by a sincere and disinterested
wish to deserve the gratitude of my working fellow-countrymen, it is
scarcely to be wondered at that I soon forgot whatever merely prudent
reflections my better sense had whispered to me whilst in durance, and
that, with a strong though discreetly tempered zeal, I determined to go
forward in the cause of parliamentary reform.
"And so, as it were, like another Crusoe, I lay with my little boat in
still water, waiting for the first breeze to cany me again to the billows."
SAMUEL BAMFORD. 473
The breeze soon began to blow. With the year that fol-
lowed that of Bamford's return to Middleton, Habeas Cor-
pus was restored and the agitation for parliamentary reform
recommenced. While avoiding plots, plotters, and secret
assemblages, Bamford was soon, oratorically and otherwise,
a prominent politician in his own district. He spoke at
pubHc meetings. He wrote a " Lancashire Hymn " of re-
form, " originally intended for being sung to one of the finest
of trumpet-strains, at a meeting in Middleton of perhaps two
thousand people ; " but the intention was not carried out,
some brother reformers to whom the hymn was submitted
not caring to have it sung. Their " insusceptibility," wrote
the disappointed poet long after\vards, " could not find any
charm in music," and to them " no sounds were so fasci-
nating as their own voices uttering interminable harangues."
With the beginning of 18 19, moreover, Henry Hunt ap-
peared in Lancashire. Bamford was still a zealous believer
in him, and with nine picked men from Middleton formed
a bodyguard to protect the demagogue from anti-reforming
insult. It was resolved that a monster meeting of reformers
should be held in the coming August. In order that they
might not this time be jeered at as a chaotic mob, those
who were to take part in it were drilled during the months
which preceded the gathering. Old soldiers of the line or of
the militia gave their assistance, and Bamford was active in
organising the Middleton contingent. The original object
of the meeting, which was first fixed for the 9th of August,
was to elect a "legislatorial attorney" for Manchester, then
unrepresented in parliament. A meeting for this purpose was,
however, declared to be illegal, and it was arranged that it
should be held, on the 19th of August, simply to petition for
parliamentary reform. On the morning of that day the
Middleton men were formed into a hollow square, and were
addressed by Bamford, who earnestly admonished them to
be peaceable, and not to oppose even violence by violence.
3
474 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
No weapons were carried, and only a few aged and infirm
members of the procession kept their sticks. A band
played, and a hundred or two young women, mostly
wives (Bamford's own among them), led the way towards
the too famous field of Peterloo. The story of the rest of
that unhappy day is well known, and need not be retold.
Hunt was arrested on the hustings, and Bamford a week or
so later. After another visit to the Salford New Bailey, he
found himself in Lancaster gaol. His sojourn here, too,
was not an unpleasant one. "We were all," he says,
" young men and full of life and spirits. We chatted, sang,
told stories, had hopping and leaping matches, and walked
in the yard." When the trial came, for a misdemeanour
(the Government gave up a first intention of prosecuting
for high treason), the accused "traversed" to the next
assizes. Bamford was liberated on bail, which was partly
found him by an ardent and generous reforming baronet.
Sir Charles Wolseley, who in July had been chosen "■ legis-
latorial attorney " for Birmingham. Ultimately, at the re-
quest of Hunt, who had, says Bamford, " a horror of
Lancashire juries and Lancashire gaols," the scene of the
trial was transferred to York, where it was to come off at
the spring assizes of 1820.
Early in the year of Peterloo, Bamford had published a
small collection of his verse. It was "printed at the
Observer Office" (Manchester), with the title, "The
Weaver Boy ; or. Miscellaneous Poetry. By Samuel Bam-
ford." The slender contents were varied, verses hurling
defiance at oppressors alternating with peaceful effusions
inspired by love and the beauties of nature. There was a
prose preface dated " Middleton, February 17, 18 19," in
which Bamford pleaded his position in life as an excuse for
the shortcomings of his poetry, and spoke of his attachment
to "liberty." An "N.B." contained the intimation: —
i^AMUEL BAMFORD. 4/5
"The author intends printing a pamphlet similar to this once
a fortnight or once a month, as circumstances permit, until
the best of his productions have all appeared." But " cir-
cumstances," seemingly, did not permit the author to fulfil
his intention. On his return to Middleton from Lancaster
gaol, however, came Bamford's introduction to the press.
There was an inquest being held at Oldham (presumably
on one of the victims of Peterloo), to report the proceedings
at which — such was the interest excited in the metropolis by
the Lancashire reform movement — Barnes had been sent
down from the Times, and a certain Irish Peter Finnerty
from the Mornifig Chronicle. The reporters were ordered out
of court by the coroner, but Bamford was allowed to remain
and take notes, because, he urged, they might be of use to
him at his coming trial at York. Finnerty persuaded him
to allow his notes to be sent to the Morniyig Chronicle, and
suggested that Bamford might obtain employment on that
journal. The kind Sir Charles Wolseley encouraged the
suggestion, and invited Finnerty and Bamford to Wolseley
Hall. After a visit which Bamford found rather unsatisfac-
tory — for while the Irish reporter enjoyed himself in the
parlour with Sir Charles, the Lancashire weaver was rele-
gated to the society of the housekeeper, the lady's maid,
and the French cook — the ill-matched pair proceeded in a
gig towards London. Finn.erty made himself so little
agreeable that at Oxford Bamford parted company with
him, and wended his way on foot to London. V/hen he
called at Peter's house, he was summarily dismissed, after a
walk round the square, with a " Good morning, Bamford.
I shiU be seeing you in town some of these days ;" and so
ended the hope of a connection with the Morning Chronicle.
Bamford's expenditure on the joint-section of their trip was
not reimbursed by the Irish reporter, and he had come to
his last shilling. At this crisis Hunt's solicitor, who had
476 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
seen a good deal of him in Lancashire, and recognised his
worth, offered him employment as a copying-clerk. But a
day of the employment, supervening on previous sufferings,
prostrated Bamford. Fortunately a fund had been raised
in London for the relief of the sufferers by Peterloo, and a
timely donation of ^^lo from it enabled him to return
home, rather disgusted with journalism and journalists.
His disenchantment with his political leader was completed
by the vanity and selfishness which Hunt displayed during
the trial at York, which began on the i6th of March 1820.
Bamford defended himself with temper and ability. Scar-
lett, who conducted the prosecution for the Crown, com-
plimented him both on the manner and the matter of his
defence, and he produced witnesses to prove his pacific de-
meanour and advice on the day of Peterloo. The presiding
judge, Mr. Justice Bayley, summed up strongly in his favour,
laying stress on the admonition against violence which he
had given to the Middleton column, on its peaceable and
almost festive aspect during the march, on the absence of
weapons from its ranks, and the fact that many of the men
were followed by their female belongings, which showed
that they had no intention of committing a breach of the
peace. The jury, however, found all the defendants guilty
of a seditious misdemeanour. They were ordered to renew
their recognisances, and appear for judgment in the Court
of King's Bench in London at the ensuing Easter term.
When the time approached for his appearance in London,
Bamford prepared to foot it to his destination. With ^3
from the Manchester relief fund, he bought a pair of strong
shoes and two pairs of hose, and set forth from Middleton.
His departure was almost unnoticed ; the contribution of
the Middleton reformers to the expenses of his journey
amounted to the sum of one shilling, and he started full of
sad reflections on the contrast between the joyous march to
SAMUEL BAMFORD. 47 J
Peterloo and the neglected loneliness in which he was
entering on his present expedition. He had a pleasant
walk of it, however, and one diversified by agreeable as
well as odd adventures on the road. But with his arrival
in London his money was once more nearly gone. In the
hope of raising a few pounds, he tried publisher after pub-
lisher with his MS. poems, but none of them would look
at his manuscript, few of them at himself, and one bibliopole
added insult to injury by advising him to "return home
and remain at his loom." " To be sure," he says, " the book-
sellers were not entirely blamable ; my appearance was, no
doubt, somewhat against me. My clothes and shoes were
covered with dust, my linen soiled, and my features brown
and weathered like leather, which circumstances, in com-
bination with my stature and gaunt appearance, made me
an object not of the most agreeable or poetical cast. Still,
I thought, these booksellers must be very owls at mid-day,
not to conceive the possibiHty of finding good ore under a
rude exterior like mine. And then I bethought me, and
comforted myself therewith, inasmuch as others had trodden
the same weary road before me, of Otway, and Savage, and
Chatterton, and of the great son of learning, as ungainly as
myself — Samuel the lexicographer — and I might have added
of Crabbe, and others of later date, but their names had
not then caught my ear." Poor Bamford had need of
whatever philosophy he could muster, when seeking a
night's shelter, and being told that eighteenpence was the
price of a bed, he could produce only one and fivepence,
his last coins, which, however, were accepted as sufficient.
He had called on Orator Hunt, who gave him one meal of
bread, butter, and corn-coffee, and the invitation, passing
disagreeably from precision to vagueness, " Come to-
morrow, come any time." In this emergency, Bamford
bethought him of a baker on the Surrey side of the river,
47S LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
who had been kind to him during his last visit to London.
He resolved to call on him — at the worst it would be only
one disappointment more. The baker received him cor-
dially, and soon discovering his plight, behaved to him like
a good Samaritan, satisfying his immediate wants, physical
and pecuniary, and inviting him to take all his meals there.
About the same time came another donation of ^\o from
the relief fund, and Bamford went up for judgment. It
was about the time of the trial of Thistlewood and his
associates in the Cato Street conspiracy to assassinate the
Ministers, and Themis did not just then incline to mercy's
side. Perhaps Bamford scarcely improved matters when,
in a manly speech, and after declaring that he had preached
peace and order to the Middleton men on the day of
Peterloo, he added, that he would never again give the
same advice until every drop of blood shed on that day
had been amply atoned for. He and several others, his
old associate Healey among them, were sentenced to one
year's imprisonment in Lincoln gaol; Hunt to two years
and a half in that of Ilchester.
Bamford's imprisonment at Lincoln was preceded by a
short detention in the King's Bench with Orator Hunt
and company. On the very evening of his arrival there,
he was joined by Sir Charles Wolseley, who had been
sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment in Abingdon
gaol for attending a reform meeting at Stockport. Through
the kindness of Sir Charles, and still more of his Middleton
friends, roused at last to sympathetic action, Bamford found
himself pretty comfortable financially during his incarcera-
tion at Lincoln, where the governor of the gaol and the
visiting magistrates seem to have done their utmost to make
his stay as pleasant as it could be under the circum-
stances. All along, indeed, Bamford's imprisonments were
far less disagreeable episodes of his career than might be
SAMUEL BAMFORD. 479
supposed. At Lincoln, it is true, he had a rather severe
pulmonary attack, but this arose, according to his own ad-
mission, from his habit of lying on the grass in the open
air, and taking a nap after he had been heated playing
at football, and other athletic games in the prison-yard.
During his illness he received, by permission of the autho-
rities, a visit from his wife, who was allowed a room in the
prison, and by this incident hangs a tale. After she had
gone home again. Orator Hunt wrote to him from Ilchester
gaol, strongly advising him to urge on the authorities a re-
quest for a second visit from his dear Jemima, and even
offered to subscribe handsomely for her maintenance at
Lincoln. This seemingly friendly interest in Bamford's
happiness turned out to be inspired by motives the most
purely selfish. When Jemima did arrive on a second visit
to her husband. Hunt's munificence dwindled to next to
nothing, and his wrath was great that his own suggestion
should have been carried out, while he himself was not al-
lowed at Ilchester the company of his mistress, a favour which
he thought would have been granted as a corollary from Mrs.
Bamford's visit to her husband at Lincoln. " Surely," says
Bamford, " there is some difference between being per-
mitted to have one's own wife with one, and being permitted
to have another man's wife with one, in a prison." There
was an angry correspondence on the subject between Bam-
ford and the "Orator," in which Hunt cuts a very shabby
figure, and the conduct of Healey, too, was of a kind to
give Bamford an additional disgust for some of the Reformers
with whom he had been most closely associated. At last
came the hour of Bamford's deliverance, not merely from
Lincoln gaol, but from associating and co-operating with the
Hunts and Healeys. He took a friendly farewell of the
prison authorities, from the governor to the turnkey, and in
the company of his faithful wife set forth on a pedestrian
480 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
journey to Middleton, With blistered feet, but thankful
hearts, they reached once more their Lancashire home, and
Bamford now thought less of avenging the blood shed at
Peterloo, or of reforming the state, than of earning an
honest living and leading a peaceful Hfe.
When Bamford settled down again at Middleton, the
kind Sir Charles Wolseley supplied him with a small sum
of money ''to commence making goods on his own account."
"This," he says, speaking of himself in the third person,
" he found he could not do and compete with the large
manufacturer without the dishonest means of purchasing
cheap remnants of weavers' material and working them
into his own goods. This he would not do." Probably
he returned to the loom. The next occurrence of any
interest in his biography was in 1 82 6, when he prevented
a contemplated raid of machine-breakers who had planned
the destruction of the steam-looms of Heywood, Rochdale,
and Middleton, In the same year he became a Lancashire
correspondent of the Morning Hei-ald, in which afterwards
appeared, suggested by the death of Canning, his rather
striking poem, " The Pass of Death." " By this time," he
says, " he had ' ceased to be a weaver,' " and was even
" regarded as an alien by his class," presumably because he
had opposed machine-breaking and formed a connection
with a London Tory paper. In 1832 he was appointed
constable of Middleton, in discharging the duties of which
post he offended the local Radicals. In 1839, when
physical-force Chartism was dangerously active, the man
who had once been suspected of high treason and im-
prisoned for sedition was a leader of special constables at
Middleton, and a champion of law and order ! Not long
afterwards he went to reside in a " cottage at Charlestown,
in the township of Blackley," where he " memoriaHsed the
Postmaster-General for a receiving-office for letters," and
SAMUEL BAMFORD. 48 I
he was successful in his appHcation. Meanwhile, he had set
his pen in motion to admonish and warn the physical-force
Chartists. He made a verse-translation (not a very happy
one) of Beranger's La Lyotifiatse, suggested by the Lyons
insurrection of 1834. Be'ranger's lyric is scarcely that of a
peacemaker, but Bamford added to his metrical version of
it a prose homily of his own, reminding the Chartists of the
fate of the Lyons' insurgents, and predicting that any
attempt of theirs to use physical force would only be
repressed and sternly punished. The prose-and-verse pam-
phlet was inscribed to Ebenezer EUiott, and addressed
"to the handloom weavers of Lancashire, and to the
persons styled Chartists." It seems to have been pub-
lished by subscription, and to have had a considerable sale.
It was at this time, when the rise and growth of Chartism
recalled to him the wild and stormy Radicalism of twenty
years before, that the thought of writing reminiscences of
those days of enthusiasm and suffering occurred to him.
He was further incited to attempt something of the kind,
because the Manchester newspapers, for which he seems to
have acted as a local reporter of occurrences in his own
district, so modified their arrangements just then as to
give him more leisure than before, and, he adds, " fewer
means for enjoying it." He began to write the book, and
unable to find in Manchester or elsewhere any one who
would risk the cost of publishing it, he resolved to publish
it himself. He went over to Heywood, — the town, — and
commissioned a printer to work off 500 impressions of the
first sheet, with covers for them. Bamford folded the sheets,
his wife covered them, and then going about among his
friends and the subscribers to the translation of La Lyon-
naise, the author-publisher soon found the whole impression
disposed of. Sheet after sheet was thus printed and dis-
posed of, Bamford composing one while selling that just
3r
482 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
printed. This task of at once writing and distributing,
Bamford says, he found to be a "serious employment."
Much of the book was mentally composed while he was
abroad on his hawking expeditions, and written down at
night, or when the weather kept him at home. Success,
however, did attend the primitive publishing-process. The
first sheet was printed in the November of 1839, ^"^ in the
July of 1840, Bamford found the sale so considerable as to
warrant him in having 1,200 copies of each new sheet worked
off, while the earlier sheets were being reprinted. When
the whole at last appeared as a book in bound volumes,
the metropolitan press began to notice it. It reached
a third edition in 1843, and in the October of 1844 the
Quarterly Review itself devoted a long, and on the whole
a friendly, article to the "Passages in the Life of a
Radical," giving a good many characteristic extracts from
it. Scarlett, who had conducted the prosecution against
Bamford and the other accused at York, was now Lord
Abinger, and was much interested by the work, the
demeanour of the author of which he well remembered.
He introduced it to the notice of appreciative men of rank.
The late Earl of Ellesmere, then Lord Francis Egerton,
wrote graciously about it to his humble brother of the
pen, and a late (the third) Lord Ashburton, the friend of
several of the most distinguished men of letters of his time,
sent him (so Bamford once intimated to the writer of this
memoir) a present of ;i^ioo. Bamford had much reason,
therefore, to be satisfied with the reception of his book,
though, when telling its story in a supplementary chapter to
the later editions of the " Passages," he made the remark,
that whatever encouragement was bestowed on him by
others, he received little from the "Liberal" M.P.s of his
own county. Here is the closing passage of the article in
the Tory Quarterly: —
SAMUEL BAMFORD. 483
"Of Mr. Bamford's poetry we have read only the few specimens in
this autobiography, and we are forced to acknowledge that, judging
by them, the London booksellers acted prudently in declining his ad-
vances. . . . But his prose, surely, is remarkable. With a sufficient
spice of the prevailing exaggeration, and here and there a laughable
touch of the bathos, his language is on the whole clear, lively, nervous,
— worthy of the man. That such English should be at the command
of one who, it must be supposed, seldom conversed during his prime
except in the dialect of Doctor Healey, is a fact which may well give
pause to many of those whose 'houses are like museums.' But the
great lesson is to be drawn from the incidents themselves of his story —
the small incidents especially — and the feelings and reflections which
these are seen to have excited in the narrator. No kindness, no mark
or token of human sympathy and good-will, appears ever to have been
thrown away upon Bamford. He was betrayed by youthful vanity
into unhappy and all but fatal delusions and transgressions; he still,
according to our view, labours under the misfortune of a false political
creed. But he never was, never could have been, at heart a Radical.
We see no traces in him of anything like a cold-rooted aversion for the
grand institutions of England. There are, we sincerely believe, among
the more intelligent of his class, few, very few, whose minds would not
be found open to salutary impressions on the subjects as to which they
have been most generally led astray, were they but approached and
dealt with by their superiors in worldly gifts with a little more of that
frankness and confidence which made Samuel Bamford take leave of
the Lincoln magistrates ' with tears in his eyes.' He admits in his
closing chapter that things are in this respect mended since 1820, and
surely his book ought to accelerate the improvement which it acknow-
ledges."
The success of the " Passages " no doubt encouraged
Bamford to his other literary ventures. In 1843 he published
a volume of "Poems," and in 1844 his prose "Walks in
South Lancashire." These are descriptions of the homes,
the life, and manners of the working classes of his district,
sometimes made sombre by the manufacturing distress
prevalent when he wrote several of them, and by laments
over the passing away of the "good old times." But this
occasional gloom is relieved by the geniality of the writer,
and his determination to look at the good as well as the
484 LAXCASHIRE WORTHIES.
bad side of things. The Anti-Corn Law League was then
in full career, and Bamford sympathised with its object,
though he does not seem ever to have taken a personal
part in its operations. In more than one of the didactic
passages of the " Walks " he rebukes the Chartists for their
opposition to Corn Law Repeal. " We won't have cheap
bread unless we have the whole Charter also;" this, he
tells them, is equivalent to saying, " We won't have to-
day's dinner until to-morrow's breakfast is ready." But
for " Friend Acreland " he has a word of monition as
well as for the misguided Chartist. " Be just towards
them," the working classes, "in respect of their civil
rights, and fear not." "You need not hesitate; they will
never be like a French mob. There is more of an aristo-
cratic spirit in the commonalty of England than in any
other people ; there is indeed too much of it. They are
as regularly stratified as are the rocks of our island, and
they won't be disrupted except by great and long-con-
tinued ill-usage." Or leaving what are now obsolete
politics, let us quote (all the more readily because the
book itself is "out of print") a passage descriptive of
the South Lancashire scenery, with which Bamford was
most familiar. Whatever can contribute to make the
picture pleasant is detected with an eye of eager vigi-
lance, and made the most of by the loving painter.
There may be a monotony of flatness from Liverpool to
Manchester, but it is far otherwise, Bamford opines, from
Manchester to Todmorden : —
" Take a sheet of stiffened paper, crumple it up in your hand, then
just distend it again, and you will have a pretty fair specimen of the
surface of the northern part of South Lancasliire. The hills are chiefly
masses of valuable stone and coal ; on the north, some heath lands
overlap them, but their sides are often brilliant with a herbage that
yields the best of milk and butter, whilst, of all the valleys, you shall
traverse none where a stream of water does not run at your side, blab-
SAMUEL BAMFORD. 485
bing all manner of imaginary tidings, and asking unthought of and un-
answerable questions. To be sure, during six days out of the seven,
the brooks and lowland waters are often turgid and discoloured with
the refuse of manufactures, but steal along one of these quiet dells on a
Sunday morning, go over the shallows where the loaches used to lie
basking, and look into the deeps, and qu'et pools, and shady spots,
where the trout were wont to be found ; creep under the owlers, and
through the hazels, when their golden blossoms are hung in the sun ;
go plashing among the willows, and over the hippin-stones, and along
the gravel-beds, where the pebbles lie as white as hail turned to stone ; —
go maundering, solitary, and thoughtful, for an hour or two, amid these
lonely haunts, and you shall confess that our county is not reft of all
its poetry, its fairy dells, and its witching scenes.
" Then the meadows and fields spread fair and green between the
towns. Clean, sleek milk-kine are there, licking up the white clover
and tender grass. Small farms are indicated by the many well-built
and close-roofed homesteads, contiguous to which are patches of
potatoes, corn, and winter food for cattle. A farmer's man is never met
with here whose cheek does not show that he lives far above want, and
that, if he dines not on delicacies, he feeds on rude plenty.
"The smoke of the towns and manufactories is somewhat annoying
certainly, and at times it detracts considerably from the ideality of the
landscape; but, bad as it is, it might have been a great deal worse ; for
we may observe that the smoke only goes one way at one time ; that
the winds do not divide and scatter it over all the land ; it sails far
away in streams, towards the north, east, west, or south, and all the
remainder of sky, and hill, and vale, are pure and cloudless.
" From the top of one of the moor-edges, Old Rinkle, for instance,
on a clear day, vviih the wind from the south-west, we may perceive
that the spaces between the large towns of Bury, Bolton, Manchester,
.Stockport, Ashton, Oldham, Rochdale, Middleton, and Ileywood, are
clotted with villages and groups of dwellings, and white detached
houses and manufactories, presenting an appearance somewhat like
that of a vast city scattered amongst meads and pastures, and belts of
woodland, over which, at times, volumes of black furnace-clouds go
(railing their long wreaths on the wind.
" Such is the appearance of the country to the east and south of
where we stand (Old Rinkle) ; whilst the aspect of that to the west and
north is more strongly marked by nature, being ridged with high moor-
land-hills, dark and bleak, and furrowed by deep valleys and precipitous
dells, which are swept by brooks and mill-streams, and enlivened by
nooks of evergreen pasture, and groups of cottages and far-detached
486 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
dwellings. Here also is generally found the eternal money-making
mill, the heart-work, the life-organ, the bread-finder, and the deformiiy
of the place."
Four or five years after the completed publication of the
" V¥alks," Bamford set to work on another instalment of
his autobiography. This was the little volume of " Early
Days," which has been summarised in the opening pages
of the present memoir, and which was published, or issued,
in 1849. The " Passages from the Life of a Radical" con-
tained little more than his autobiography from 18 16 to
182 1 ; the "Early Days" filled the blank for the previous
period ; and the rather meagre " Reminiscences " given in
an edition of his "Poems," which appeared in 1864, tell,
though very briefly, and sometimes very vaguely, the chief
incidents in his career between his thirty-third and his
seventy-sixth year. When the volume of " Early Days " was
issued, Bamford had reached his sixty-second year. He was
hale and vigorous, but old age was advancing on him, and
there seemed nothing before him but the everlasting trudge,
trudge, — tramp, tramp, — day after day, year after year,
with the wallet containing his own books, to be offered to
those who would, and, alas! too often — who would not,
buy them. An old Reforming friend or admirer, Mr. John
Wood, was then Chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue,
and, with or without sohcitation, he offered Bamford a
small berth in his department. It was a " certainty," and
Bamford, accepting the offer, found himself a warehouse-
man once more, though this time it was in the " warehouse
department " of his Sovereign's Board of Inland Revenue.
From the warehouse department he was transferred to that
of newspaper and pamphlet registration ; and to this period
of his career belong the following brief reminiscences of
him : —
"I had known Bamford for several years previously in Manchester,"
SAMUEL BAM FORD. 487
writes a friend, "and had visited hin;i occasionally at his snug
cottage in the Boggart Old Clough, a picturesque dell some three
miles from Manchester, and near the old village of Blackley.
These were chiefly occasions %vhen, in the Manchester circle to
which I belonged, little parties were made up to pay him an
afternoon visit, especially if there had come from London any
stranger who cared to know Bamford and whom Bamford might care
to know. His hospitality was simple and homely, but profuse, and his
kindly little wife, the Mima of his autobiography, with her tea and
cakes, looked and was a gem of a hostess. Bamford himself, erect and
sturdy, with original opinions on most questions, — courteous, but holding
his own whatever might be the fame and position of any of his guests,
it was impossible not to respect and admire, and nobody came away
from that humble cottage without the feeling that here abode a true and
genuine man. I saw more of him, however, afterwards in London,
where we had many a pleasant little chat and symposium. If I remember
rightly, he lodged, when he first came to London, somewhere in the
Hampstead Road. His lodgings were much better furnished than his
homely cottage in the Boggart Old Clough had been, and his salary was
an ample one for a couple of his and his wife's modest wants and
habits. It was easy to see, however, that they felt like fish out of
water, and missed their old Lancashire haunts, neighbours, and friends.
Bamford was not a man much given to grumbling or complaining, but
he owned to a dislike of his occupation and companions at Somerset
House. His fellow employis, he gave me to understand, were young
and underbred Cockneys, who laughed at his Lancashire accent and
phraseology, and were it not for the salary, he was ready any day to
take himself back to the old county. But the thought of his wife and
his unprovided-for old age restrained him."
While in the newspaper and pamphlet registration
department of Somerset House, Bamford came into col-
lision with its head, and refusing— the sturdy and down-
right Lancashire man— " certainly," he admits, "in a not
respectful manner" — to apologise for something he had
said — he was transferred to the Voucher Office in the City.
After one or two changes more, he found himself serving
Her Majesty in making out a catalogue of more than
20,000 volumes of accounts, some of them of very ancient
date, and all of which, he seems to have thought, might.
488 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
without much detriment to the nation, have been sold
for waste paper. As he toiled at his uncongenial task,
Bamford even took the liberty of wondering at what
he boldly opined to be the " fatuity " which had for
centuries accumulated and stored this mountain of use-
less rubbish. His friend and patron, Mr. Wood, died in
the sixth year of his servitude, and when a seventh had
been completed, he resolved, at all hazards, to break
his chains, return to Lancashire, and spend his last days
in his native county and the neighbourhood of his old
haunts. In the April of 1858 he resigned his situation
in the Inland Revenue Office, and persisted in resigning,
though one of the Commissioners, Sir Alexander Duft
Gordon, pressed him to reconsider his resolve, and
kindly hinted that, if he would remain, the "Department"
might find other and more congenial occupation for him
than that of cataloguing old and worthless account-books.
In the June of 1858, tetat. 70, he returned to Lancashire,
and settled near Manchester, at Moston, Harpurhey. He
had hopes of obtaining a provision for old age by memorial-
ising the Government to compensate him for past and
wrongful imprisonments, but the upshot of all his efforts
in this direction was a donation of £^^0 from the Royal
Bounty Fund. Meanwhile, he endeavoured to eke out an
income by giving readings and recitations from his own
and from others' writings, and in 1864 he published a new
edition of his " Poems," adding to them the later auto-
biographical indications already referred to. His closing
years might have been harassed by penury had not his
friends exerted themselves on behalf of the aged Lanca-
shire Worthy, and raised for him a fund, delicately admini-
stered, which made him comfortable for the rest of his
life. His faithful Jemima, who was about his own age,
died in the October of 1862. He survived her nearly
SAMUEL BAMFORD. 489
ten years ; and of Bamford at home during the last decade
of his existence there has been preserved this interesting
sketch : —
"In his younger days Bamford must have been a very fine and
powerful man, for there are yet remaining many traces of it in the tall,
broad-shouldered, straight-limbed old veteran of eighty. But let us
enter his cottage, where he is always delighted to see his friends, for
the failing of his eyesight has deprived him of the pleasure of reading,
consequently he has to depend now upon those who drop in to see him
for information as to passing events, as well as for readings from his
favourite authors. The first sight that attracts the visitor beyond the
poet himself, is the vacant arm-chair placed opposite to where he sits,
with the word ' Mima ' carved in Old English capitals upon the back.
No one attempts to occupy this seat uninvited, and very few obtain the
honour, for it is held sacred to the memory of his dead wife.
" Hanging on one side of his fireplace is a reduced cast of the face of
Napoleon Bonaparte, taken after his death. On this Bamford appears
to set great store ; there is little doubt that it really is a reduction from
the original mask ; and the old man is very particular in pointing out —
what certainly must strike everybody that carefully examines it — the
idea of death that the small rough moulding conveys. . . .
" There is also in the cottage a easeful of carefully selected books,
poetry principally, of one of which the old man is very proud — a pre-
sentation copy of Tennyson's poems sent him by the Laureate. This
has also a little history connected with it. Bamford for a long time
was puzzled to know why Tennyson should single him out for such a
favour, but it appears that at a literary meeting Bamford recited the
'Dream of Fair Women,' and in a conversation afterwards expressed
himself very strongly in praise of Tennyson generally, and of this poem
in particular. The late Mrs. Gaskell was one of the company, and she
kindly informed the Laureate of Bamford's estimate of this poem, and
the result was that this copy was sent down to the old man with the
poet's autograph.
" But the chief attraction in the house is the poet himself, seated in
his chair, which is similar to the vacant one, and has the word ' Sam '
cut in the back of it lie has latterly allowed his hair to grow at its
pleasure, and it now hangs in long silver bars about his shoulders ; his
beard and moustaches, white as snow, have also attained a great length,
covering a goodly part of his ample chest ; his straight lower limbs are
enclosed in a pair of drab gaiters, and on his head, in the house, he
wears constantly a peculiar square cloth cap, which, with his long
3q
490 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
flowing locks and his beard, quite gives him the appearance of an old
Druid.
" We have frequently watched him admiringly when speaking either
about the history of Wales, which he considers the finest poetical mine
in the three kingdoms, or of the ancient Romans and their roadmaking
propensities— particularly the road they made from Manchester to York,
■which he traced with great enthusiasm : — ' Bi th' owd church, along th'
Millgate, then bi th' river Irk along bi Newtown, up Collyhurst Road,
and along Rochdale Road to Valentine Brow, but not deawn. Keep
up a little past wheer th' Romish chapel's built into Blackley ; up th'
chapel soide, through Crab and Crab Head, past Lichford Ho, to
Alkrington,' &c. Or of the division of the Saxon Heptarchy, on which
old Sam holds very peculiar views. He says that HoUinwood and
Newton Heath belonged to a different kingdom than Middleton and
Rochdale, and supports his argument philologically. ' Neaw if yo'U
notice a Middleton chap pronounce the word wheat, he coo's it whee'at,
but a HoUinwood mon would co th' same word wet or whet.' Very
many other instances he gives in a very dogmatic sort of way, which it
is just as well to receive without questioning, unless you desire to see
the deep-set eyes illumined with a light calculated to dispel all opposi-
tion on favourite topics of his own.
" Many of our Bennett Street friends, living now in the immediate
neighbourhood of the old man, have kindly read to him extracts from
those later publications of Tennyson which he is, on account of his
failing eyesight, unable to read for himself. The 'Idylls of the King'
have been read to him in this way, to his great delight ; for the Laureate,
in treating of Arthur and his Round Table, is treading on that ground
which Bamford looks upon as essentially poetical and almost holy. It
was no less a treat to the reader ; for the old poet went with him heart
and soul into the achievements of Arthur's knights, frequently inter-
rupting, and desiring to hear over again some passage of great beauty, or
noticing Tennyson's introduction of some old Saxon word like ' liefer,'
which is in common use at present amongst Lancashire country people,
and altogether showing a considerable power of poetical criticism. On
these occasions the hard, deep-lined face becomes expressive of deep
internal feeling, and the eye, so mild and serene before, becomes fired
with poetic fancies, which his tongue falters in expressing. . . .
"One little matter we must not omit to mention in reference to Old
Sam, and that is, his great love for the company of little children, for
whom, in the winter-time, when he is unable to go outside, he provides
all kinds of sweatmeats and cakes, which he doles out daily to his little
visitors ; and in the summer we have many, many times seen him sur-
rounded by his young friends at the tail of the fruit-waggon, buying,
SAMUEL BAMFORD. 49 I
and giving direct to the good 'chikler,' but not forgetting 'th' bad
uns,' their share being only temporarily withheld. On these occasions
some such conversation as the following would be heard passing between
the old man and the children : —
" ' Here, Dan, what was that row tha was makin' this momin', when
tha wur havin' thi face weshed?'
" 'Eawr Jane, Mester Bamford, put some soap i' mi een.*
" 'Ay, well, tha wur loike to skroik then, for sure; here's thi orange.
And thee, Jem ; I wur watchin' thee feight t'other mom, when it wur
rainin'. I saw thee through the chamber window. Aw'm goin' to
have no feighters here. What wur it o' about?'
" 'Well, he knocked eawr Mally down i' th' slutch, and gan me a
beawster a' th' side o' th' yed. An' aw'll warm him agean, that aw will.'
" 'Here's thi orange. Tha perhaps did quite reet to leather him.
When tha sees him next time, tell him that aw want him.'
"And so on, till all the company were served, both bad and good."^
Bamford had been bedridden for eighteen months, but
retained all his mental faculties before his death, at Moston,
on the 13th of March 1872, just as he was entering his
eighty-fifth year. Something like a pubHc funeral was
given him when, a week after his death, on a Saturday
afternoon, his remains were laid beside those of his wife,
in the burial-ground adjoining the parish church of his
native Middleton. Round the grave were strewn — a sight
that would have rejoiced the old man — primroses, lilies,
and sprigs of holly. Thronging crowds from Manchester,
Oldham, Bury, Rochdale, from all the surrounding country,
assembled to do him honour in death. The ministering
clergyman, the rector of the parish, so far infringed on
precedent as to deliver from the pulpit, before the funeral
service, an address on the merits of the venerable Radical ;
and seldom in Lancashire has there been anything of the
kind more genuine than the tribute then paid by men of
all classes and parties to the manly, sterling, and genial
worth which disappeared with Samuel Bamford.
^ Manchester City Ntivs of January 10, 1S74.
APPENDIX.
NOTE ON THE CHEVALIER TOWNELEY
AND HUDIBRAS.
(Page 256-58.)
In the second volume of the new edition (1872-76) of
Whitaker's Whalley (p. 547, note), there is printed for the
first time the following letter from Charles Towneley (of
the Marbles), giving some account of his uncle the Chevalier
Towneley, and of the French version of Hudibras. This
rather interesting letter is dated "30th September 1800,"
and it is stated, " was bound up with Dr. Whitaker's copy
of the 3d edition " of his History of Whalley. It confirms,
as will be seen, the theory broached in the text respecting
the origin of the French version of Hudibras : —
" My late uncle," Charles Towneley writes, " was about
the year 1715, entered of Gray's Inn, and filled the place
of clerk under Mr. Salkeld, succeeding therein the late
Lord Chancellor Hardwick. He soon quitted that employ,
and entered into the French service, which at that time the
subjects of England were allowed to do. In 1748, he was
admitted into the military order of Knights of St. Louis.
He fixed his abode in Paris about thirty years. He there
frequented some of the Rendezvous of the Literati, who
are accustomed in that city to assemble in a social manner
in the evenings at the houses of antiquated ladies of fashion,
who were opulent and polite, and who gained respect by
494 APPENDIX.
seeing such company. Literature was the prevailing topic
of conversation, mingled with wit and the amusements
of social intercourse. On the publication of Voltaire's
' Thoughts on the poem of Hudibras,' every real or pretended
man of letters chattered on the subject of Hudibras, which
was praised by some and vilified by others. My uncle,
being almost an adorer of that famous work, was irritated,
and for the vindication of his favourite and for the amuse-
ment of one of these societies, Madame Dublay's, I think,
produced to them a translation of about sixty or one hun-
dred verses from some chosen passage. They excited great
surprise and pleasure in the company, and invitations to
bring them more. He occasionally amused himself and
his friends in that manner, without having the least thought
of completing the translation. After a year or two, Mr.
Needham, the naturalist, and friend of Buffon, entreated
my uncle to fill up the chasms which he had omitted, and
at length obtained the donation of the manuscript, with re-
luctant permission from my uncle to publish it, but without
a name. My uncle wrote a short preface, or rather an
apology for the attempt, signed The Translator, and Mr.
Needham compiled explanatory notes for the assistance of
the French readers. My uncle was born at Townley," the
old spelling of the place and name, now converted into
Towneley, — " 1697, and died at Chiswick, 1782."
John Hey wood, Printer, Manchester.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. FIRST SERIES.
UNIFORM WITH SECOND SERIES, PP. 469.
CONTENTS.
I. The First Stanley Earl of Derby.
II. The Founder of the Manchester Grammar School.
III. John Bradford, Saint and Martyr.
IV. Jeremiah Horrocks.
V. Humphrey Chetham.
VI. The First Member for Manchester.
VII. James Stanley, Seventh Earl of Derby.
VIII. Booth the Player.
IX. John Byrom.
X. John Collier ("Tim Bobbin").
XI. The "Great" Duke of Bridgewater.
XII. John Kay and James Hargreaves.
XIII. Richard Arkwright.
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS, &c., on the First Series.
" Brightly and pleasantly written." — Daily News.
" An interesting volume. . . . His story" — the story of Arkwright —
"is the most interesting of an interesting series." — Athenaum.
"Mr. Espinasse has gained a good reputation in the world of letters
by his ' Life of Voltaire, ' and the volume before us is likely to enhance
xC'— Pall Mall Gazette.
"Mr. Espinasse, in preparing for publication his agreeable anthology
of Lancashire Worthies, doubtless enjoyed the double advantage of
abundant materials at his disposal and of a grateful special public in
prospect. And he has chosen the subjects of his biographical sketches
with sufficient judgment to entitle him to expect a wide circle of readers.
Of course when the heroes of a series of popular biographies range from
John Bradford, 'Saint and Martyr,' to Richard Arkwright, whose
martyrdom consisted in the loss of his patent, and who is still considered
so far from a saint that Mr. Tom Taylor has recently brought him on
the stage, there is not much difficulty in producing a book of varied
interest. There are many kinds of bookmaking ; and Mr. Espinasse's
deserves to be classed as one wholly unobjectionable. Eschewing all
attempts at originality in his comments, he has, so far as we have
observed, been careful as to correctness in his facts. Thus, as he has
evidently been a diligent reader of a considerable range of authorities,
he has produced a very readable volume, in which it is satisfactory to
meet with nothing that is offensive, little that is tedious, and much that
is interesting. In these days of ready-made biography, it is refreshing
to find a writer, whose sketches are obviously designed for popular read-
ing, abstain from empty phrases and forcibly-feeble flights of rhetoric.
. . . We shall, we hope, be pardoned for having called particular
attention among Mr. Espinasse's sketches to one descriptive of so calm
and unpretending a life as that of John Byrom. There are other figures
recalled by this book on which it would be pleasant to dwell. Hugh
Oldham, the founder of the Manchester Grammar School, and
Humphrey Chetham, the founder of the Chetham Hospital, and,
by a bequest of money, the originator of the fine library belonging to
that institution, are not forgotten among those who have in their
generation done as good service to their native city as the builder of
the biggest warehouse which ever eclipsed all its predecessors, in order
to be eclipsed in its turn. The authors of the manufacturing industry
and commercial prosperity of the county of course claim their share in
any list of Lancashire Worthies ; and the history of the Bridgewater
Canal, as well as a long narrative of ' Arkwright's Case,' may be once
more read in Mr. Espinasse's pages. He has also found room for a
curious sketch of the life of ' the first member for Manchester,' Charles
Worsley, who was one of Oliver Cromwell's major-generals, and, if
the very probable conjecture of the Dean of Westminster be correct, is
the solitary regicide whose remains at this day continue to repose in
Westminster Abbey. A hero of a different kind, likewise buried in
Westminster Abbey, is Barton Booth, the actor who performed the
part of Cato on the famous night of the production of Addison's
tragedy. Mr. Espinasse's book is therefore sufficiently full of variety,
and may be safely recommended to readers in and out of Lancashire,
who like their history in small slices. " — Saturday Review.
" A valuable contribution to literature, and certainly ought to take
its place on the shelves of every Lancashire Library." — The Inquirer.
" Mr. Espinasse has not attempted to exhaust his subject. His
volume comprises only thirteen lives, and whether it is to be regarded
as a complete work or as a first series, is not stated. We hope that its
reception by the public may be such as to induce its author to continue
his labours. Mr. Espin?.sse writes with a care and sobriety which form
an agreeable contrast to the provincial vulgarity which sometimes marks
the biographer of county worthies. There is no disposition to exalt
persons because they were connected with Lancashire, but an evident
desire to ascertain the exact facts of cacli case. He also shows a laud-
able anxiety to give credit to each writer from whom he quotes." —
Academy.
"A painstaking, entertaining, and well-written production." —
Bookseller.
" With a freer and finer literary touch, the author of the ' Life of
Voltaire ' has done for the Worthies of Lancashire what Dr. Lonsdale
has done for the Worthies of Cumberland. Mr. Espinasse is evidently
accustomed to literary and antiquarian research, and has a keen eye for
local humours, as they are called, and special types of character. The
county on which he has chosen to exercise these gifts is one in all re-
spects worthy of consideration. There is scarcely a department of
intellectual or moral enterprise in which Lancashire has not sent a man
to the front. True, she has been stronger in the more masculine, if less
itfined, pursuits of science and industrial improvement than in literature
and art ; but even in these Mr. Espinasse adduces ample evidence that
tl e faculties for producing first-rate work have not been wanting, but
have been deflected into more absorbing channels. . . . Lancashire
appears in his pages, if sometimes an ' arida nutrix,' at all times a
' nutrix leonum,' and the reader gazes on this portrait and on that with
divided feelings — now recognising the slow rise of worth by poverty
depressed — now seeing craft and boldness win the day — now finding
that genius and patience have had their reward deferred till after their
forthputter's death. In this respect Mr. Espinasse's work is a much
healthier one than ' Smiles's Self-IIelp,' which seems written to apoth-
eosise mere 'success,' taking no account of the noble failures of which
all history is full. His ' Lancashire Worthies,' in fact, are an excellent
study for youth, teaching how to bear the clouds and how to enjoy the
sunshine of fortune. The sketches of the First and of the Seventh Earl
of Derby are exceedingly interesting, apart from, but still more in con-
nection with, the political career of their last two descendants ; while
the lives of the ' great ' Duke of Bridgewater, of John Kay and James
Hargreaves, and lastly of Richard Arkwright, are admirable specimens
of industrial biography. Our medical readers will be interested in the
sketch of John Byrom ; and readers of every degree will find much to
entertain and little less to instruct in each chapter of ' Lancaslijre
Worthies.' Would that every English county had as effective a bio-
3r
grapher as Mr. Espinasse ; would that every English county deserved
it like Lancashire." — The Lancet.
" An infinite amount of patient industry and indefatigable research
has been well expended on the work, and we are grateful to the author
for the useful and entertaining volume that he has produced. . . . We
can recommend ' Lancashire Worthies ' as a very valuable and interest-
ing book." — Court Circular.
" A valuable contribution to Lancashire Biography." — Colonel Fish-
wick's Lancashire Library (London, 1875).
" In a volume, certainly not too large for its subject, Mr. Espinasse
has given us sketches of the lives of some famous Lancashire men. As
often as possible Mr. Espinasse lets tiiese men tell their own story, or
at least makes their friends and contemporaries perform the office of
biographer. His part of the task has been mainly that of selection and
condensation, and it has been done with his habitual care. His ' origin-
ality ' is chiefly to be found in his painstaking industry. He has read
much and judiciously for each life, and he has furnished us in most cases
with materials for the twofold study of the man in the epoch and of the
epoch in the man. This holds true more particularly of the longer
lives : in some few the account has been limited by the want of trust-
worthy sources of information, and the author has been able to do little
more than tell us that our curiosity cannot be satisfied. But, when he
writes most copiously, Mr. Espinasse is never tedious, and :n the sketches
of his more considerable personages he seems to have hit the exact mean
between brevity and diffusiveness. In this respect he would be a useful
model for many biographers who, like the novelists, whatever the little-
ness of their subject, feel bound to produce a big book. . . . Enough
has been said to show the interesting character of the book. Mr.
Espinasse almost invariably makes the best use of the limited space at
his command. He tries to show us something of every side of his sub-
ject, and we are enabled to see his characters in domestic as well as in
public life. The sketches of Lancashire and especially of Manchester
manners, and in each of the four centuries immediately preceding our
own, are among the most entertaining parts of a volume in which there
is not one dull page." — Manchester Guardian.
"The title of this book, though quite pertinent to the subject of its
biographical sketches, is nevertheless to a certain extent misleading.
It will probably suggest to many readers a collection of biographies
compiled after a well-known and often employed model. But it would
be a mistake to judge Mr. Espinasse's interesting book by the standards
of these monuments of industry without investigation. In ' Lancashire
Worthies ' we have a series of valuable and caiefully-wiitlen memoirs,
some ot vvliich approach to historical importance, and instead of being
content with the opinions and inferences of previous writers, Mr. Espin-
asse has in all possible cases made a careful examination of original
documents as well as of the published writings of previous authors, and
the lists of books consulted indicate the judiciousness and extent of his
surveys. . . . We have not attempted to give an adequate idea of the
extent of interest suggested by this volume, but possibly we have said
enough to induce those of our readers who are interested in the great
deeds of men who have helped to make the county famous to read for
themselves. Many of them will probably agree with us that there is no
reason why Mr. Espinasse should not give us a volume of * Modem
Worthies. ' " — Manchester Examiner and Times.
" Lancashire men are justly proud of their native county. Leaving
London out of the question, and perhaps also excepting Devonshire, no
other county has produced so many remarkable men or so many men
who have exercised an influence upon the history of the nation. At the
present time the influence of the county is, it must be admitted, mainly
derived from its commercial and manufacturing importance. In the
past, however, men from Lancashire were in every walk of life engaged
in what Mr. Carlyle calls 'making history.' It was a happy thought
therefore of Mr. Espinasse to pick out a baker's dozen of these worthies
and to tell the stories of their lives. Possibly there is not much in
these biographies which may not be found in a printed form elsewhere,
but the greater part of the matter of which they are composed is in-
accessible to the general reader. To him it will be a boon of no small
magnitude and value to have so much scattered information brought
into a convenient form, and told with all that grace of style of which
Mr. Espinasse is so consummate a master. . . . His book may be safely
and cordially recommended, and will, we have no doubt, be gratefully
received in many tliousands of patriotic Lancashire houses during the
present season." — Manchester Courier.
"The history of Lancashire industry, in a popular as distinguished
from a technical form, has yet to be written, but a beginning has been
successfully made in the volume of biography just issued. Mr. Francis
Espinasse in two of the chapters of his ' Lancashire Worthies ' has told,
in an attractive and readable way, the story of the rise of the cotton-
manufacture in England during the eighteenth century. The vicissi-
tudes and trials in the lives of the early pioneers give to the narrative
some of the main elements of romance, and the small beginnings from
which the trade had its origin, and the primitive surroundings in the
midst of which it grevv and gathered strength, present a startling con-
trast to the gigantic expansion of the present day. Mr. Espinasse, in
his record of the careers of Kay, Hargreaves, and Arkwright, and in
his endeavours to discover the rightful claims and merits of each, has
threaded his way through conflicting evidence with wonderful industry
and patience." — Manchester City News.
" Eminently readable and instructive." — Liverpool Albion,
"A gallery which includes such portraits as those of John Bradford,
Jeremiah Horrocks, Humphrey Chetham, Booth the Player, John Byrom,
John Collier ('Tim Bobbin'), the 'great' Duke of Bridgewater, James
Hargreaves, and Richard Arkwright, must have a special charm for
Lancashire readers. In the volume before us there is no pretence of
doing anything beyond telling the simple history of the ' Worthies ' com-
prised within its pages. Not one word of preface, and but few words
of comment, have been added by the pen of the compiler. He has
found profuse and interesting incident in the lives of his subjects, and
has noted it down in such a pleasant vein that we could quote from it
by the column without wearying the reader." — Liverpool Alercury.
"This is a pleasant, well-written, readable book, abounding with
valuable information, and full of interest to the people of Lancashire.
The ' Worthies,' or eminent men, whose memoirs are here briefly and
tersely chronicled, embrace a wide range of character and pursuits, and
have claims of various descriptions to be enrolled in such a distinguished
category. . . . Mr. Espinasse has done his work carefully and well.
Abundant research has been bestowed upon the collection of the
materials, and his authorities are quoted and acknowledged to the
fullest extent. The materials when obtained have been skilfully ar-
ranged ; and the biographer writes with ease and elegance in most
passages, but, where necessaiy, with freedom and force as well. His
style is perspicuous, and his diction equally commendable, both being
lucid rather than ornate. There is a vast quantity of material of the
same description to work upon before the list of even Lancashire
Worthies can be exhausted, and we hope that some day Mr. Espinasse
will give us some further gleanings from the same fertile field." — Liver-
pool Courier.
"Mr. Francis Espinasse has written a volume of Lancashire bio-
graphies, which fairly deserves to be placed, as a piece of literary work-
manship, on a level with the very best of its kind. In his hands the
almost lost art of compilation is revived with wonderful skill, force, and
effectiveness. Apart altogether from the subject of his narrative, it is
simply a delight to watch how the narrative is put together ; to note
how the abundant materials are handled and set in orderly array ; and
to observe how tlie author threads his way through dry and musty
records, and, by sheer power of the literary art, breathes into them the
breath of life. The result is a book that is at once singularly accurate
in its details, picturesque and eminently readable as a narration, and
effective in its final impression. The story of each life is not only
pleasantly conveyed to the mind of the reader as he progresses through
it, but it leaves an indelible impress upon his memory. You know at
the end everything that can be known, and which is at the same time
material to an adequate apprehension of the career and character of
the subject under review, and all this in the briefest possible space
consistent with the nature of the materials. The tireless industry which
has gone to the making of such a result will be obvious to any one who
considers for a moment the wide range of ' authorities ' consulted and
collated during the process. The French author, M. Bastiat, wrote a
brochure on political economy, which he entitled, ' What is Seen and
what is not Seen.' We should be inclined to say of Mr. Espinasse's
volume, that what is not seen of the labour and skill which he contri-
buted to its production is far in excess of what is seen ; and in this, it
seems to us, consists the first and most essential merit of the art of
compilation. The author, with infinite trouble, extracts the dross, and
casts it away ; the reader receives the ore only, but in a setting which
enhances its value, and gives it permanent worth. . . . We have now
said sufficient to indicate the merits of this contribution to biographical
literature. The interest of its materials, as we have already observed,
transcends the limits of the county to whose worthies it is devoted, and
the grace and picturesqueness of its style, its historical and anecdotal
lore, and the thorough soundness and honesty of the workmanship,
ought to secure for the volume a wide circle of readers." — Yorkshire
Post.
" All Lancashire men who interest themselves in local literature and
antiquities will find the 'Worthies' an exquisite bonne-bouche." —
Glasgow A^ews.
London : Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., Stationers' Hall Court.
Manchester : All Booksellers.
John Heywood, F> inter, Maiiduster.
3
Palin, W. Henry, Esq., Town Hall, Manchester.
Peakse, Percival, Warrington.
Ross, Roger Rowson, Esq., 12 Cecil Street, Greenheys.
RiGBY, S., Esq., Bmche Hall, Warrington.
Rylands, J. P., Esq., F.S.A., Highfields, Thelwall.
Rylands, W. H., Esq., Highfields, ThelwalL
Sewell, Rev. E., M.A., Ilkley Cottage, Ilkley.
Shackleton, W., Esq., Vale Manse, Todmorden.
Thomas, Mrs., Wilderpool, Warrington.
Waugh, Edwin, Esq., 27 Sagar Street, Manchester.
Williams, Jacob, Esq., 4 Chorlton Buildings, Cooper Street, City.
Whatmough, J. Riley, Esq., Chapel Allerton, Leeds.
Woods, Henry, Esq., J. P., Gillibrand Hall, Chorley.
Young, Henry, Esq., Bagot Street, Wavertree, Liverpool.
Young, Miss, Wavertree, Liverpool.
LIST OF BOOKSELLERS
WHO HAVE SUBSCRIBED TO THE LARGE PAPER IMPRESSION OF
THE SECOND SERIES OF
LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.
Abbott, Thomas, Bolton.
Barlow, W. S., Bury.
Bentley, John, Todmorden.
BuRGHOPE & Strange, Messrs., Burnley.
Clegg & Lee, Messrs., Oldham.
Day, T, J., Market Street, Manchester.
Deane, G., Greengate, Salford.
Dooley, H., Stockport.
Hardman, J., Tyklesley.
Harrison, J., Staley Bridge.
Haworth, Henry, Poolstock, Wigan.
Hill & Son, J., Bury.
Kenyon, W., Newton Heath.
Pearse, Percival, Sankey Street, Warrington.
Smith & Son, Messrs., Brown Street, Manchester.
Winterburn, G., Bolton.
Young, H., Liverpool.
LIST OP SUBSCEIBERS
TO THE LARGE PAPER IMPRESSION
OF
THE SECOND SERIES OF
LANCASHIRE WORTHIES,
Arnold, Henry, Esq., Blackley.
AsHWORTH, Adam, Esq., Brookshaw Terrace, Bury.
BoTSFORD, J. W., Esq., Manchester.
BouLTON, Isaac Watt, Esq., Stamford House, AsIitou-undcr-Lyiie.
Brooks, Thomas, Esq , Barkby Hall, Leicester.
Cooling, Edwin, Junior, Esq., 42 St. Mar/s Gate, Derby.
Crane, Newton, Esq., United States' Consul, Manchester.
Dale, Thomas, Esq., J. P., F.G.H.S., Bank House, Eomiley, Cheshire.
Draper, T., Esq., Lymm.
Ellershaw, John, Esq., Kirkstall, near Leeds.
Fairclough, Richard, Esq., Woolston.
FiLDES, James, Esq., 44 Spring Gardens, Manchester.
Garnett, William, Esq., Queenmore Park, Lancaster.
Gillespie, Thomas J., Esq., Park House, Ne\Yt()u-Ie-Willo\vs,
Green ALL, Captain G., Greenall.
2
Gkeenall, Sir Gilbert, Bart., Walton Hall, Warrington.
Greenall, Thomas, Esq., Warrington.
Greenhalgh, J. DoDsoN, Gladstone Cottage, Haulgh, Bolton.
Grundy, Alfred, Esq., Whitefielcl, near Manchester.
Hadfield, Henry, Furness Vale, Derbyshire.
Hodgson, F. Esq., St. Helens'.
Holt, David, Feen Hill Gate, Rumworth, Bolton.
Hornby, Major, Dalton Hall, Burton.
Ho WORTH, James, Esq., Waterfoot, Manchester.
HoYLE, James, Esq., Lemanshill House, Tottington.
HoYLE, Isaac, Esq., The How, Sedgeley Park, Prestwich.
Jenkins, Thomas H., Esq., Holly House, Higher Broiighton.
Johnson, C. K, Esq., Abbey Grove, Eccles.
Jones, H. W., Esq., The Old Bank, Chester.
Kenyon, William, 47 Church Street, Newton Heath,
Kershaw, John, Esq., Manufacturer, Ptumworth, Bolton.
KiRKPATRiCK, E., Esq., 12 York Street, Manchester.
Lancaster, John, Esq., J. P., Bilton Grange, Rugby,
Leyland, John, Esq., The Grange, Hindley, near Wigan.
Lord, Edward, Esq., Adamroyd, Todmorden.
Macmartin, James, Esq., Yew Tree Cottage, Cheadle Heath, Manchester.
M ARSON, James, Esq., Prospect Hill, Hill ClifFe, Warrington.
Morgan & Co., Messrs. W., Scotland Road, Liverpool.
Moore, ^Mrs., 2 Darling Place, Higher Broughton,
Neevers, Richard, Esq., Woningworth, Fulwood Park, Preston.
Owen, Willum, Esq., F.R.S., B.A., Warrington.
SUPPLEMENTARY LIST OF SUBSCRIBERS
TO THE LARGE PAPER IMPRESSION
OF
"LANCASHIRE WORTHIES," SECOND SERIES.
The Right Honourable the EARL OF DERBY, Kiiowsley.
P. B. ALLEY, Esq., Cross Street, ]\raiicliester.
A. E. DAVIES, Esq., F.L.S., Overton, Frodsliain.
Mr. ROBERT ROBERTS, 150 Oldfield Road, Salfor.l.
G. Y. VERNON, Es(|., F.R.A.S., Old Trafiord, .Muiichesler.
S. WARBURTON, Esq., TuiiuyluU, Crump.sall.
RICHARD WOOD, Es(i., John Street Mills, Ikywood.
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