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(illustration)
--BACON.
EDITED BY
(imprint)
Copyright, 1877. By JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO.
UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & CO., CAMBRIDGE.
(preface)
It is my wish, and that of my Executors, that it should be published by
our friends, MESSRS. FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO., of Boston; and
every requisite has been provided for their edition being of a similar
character and quality with the English. Theirs is therefore the edition
authorized by me and my Executors.
HARRIET MARTINEAU.
AMBLESIDE, July 22d, 1869.
(contents)
Mrs. Somerville. Joanna Baillie. Political and scientific men. Sir C. Bell and others. The Artists. Sir A. Callcott. Chantrey. Allan Cunningham. Westmacott. Phillips. Macready. The Kembles. Sir C. Eastlake. Other artists. Blue-stocking parties. Miss Berry's. Lady Mary Shepherd's. Lady Stepney. My own soirées. Intimate friends. Mrs. Marsh's first novel. The Carlyles. Mazzini. John Sterling. Leigh Hunt. Thomas Carlyle. Occasional mornings. Sitting for portraits and casts. Mr. Warburton's Dissection Bill. Mr. Toynbee's request. Professional phrenologists' judgments on me. Coleridge. Godwin. Condition of Woman. Basil Montagu. Morning visitors. Dr. Chalmers. Mr. Chadwick. Rowland Hill. Lord Monteagle. Mr. G.R. Porter. Mr. Urquhart. Other morning visitors. Capel Lofft, junior. The Brownings. Miss Mitford. Talfourd. Mr. H.F. Chorley. Miss Landon. Correspondents. Miss Edgeworth. Fraser's hoax. Miss Kelty. Miss Bremer. Modes of authorship among my acquaintance. 205
(introduction)
the beginning of this last winter, however, I had hopes of being able to unite my political work with this; and on New Year's Day I said to myself that the year must not close without my having recorded the story of my life. I was probably strengthened in this purpose by having for some time past felt that my energies were declining, and that I had no longer a right to depend on being able to do whatever I chose. Two or three weeks more settled the business. Feeling very unwell, I went to London to obtain a medical opinion in regard to my health. Two able physicians informed me that I had a mortal disease, which might spare me some considerable space of life, but which might, as likely as not, destroy me at any moment. No doubt could remain after this as to what my next employment should be: and as soon after my return home as I had settled my business with my Executor, I began this autobiography. I thought it best to rewrite the early portion, that the whole might be offered from one point of view, and in a consistent spirit. Without any personal desire about living a few months or weeks more or less, I rather hope that I may be able to finish my story with my own hands. If not, it will be done by another, from materials of more or less value. But one part which ought to be done by myself is the statement of my reasons for so serious a step as forbidding the publication of my private correspondence; and I therefore stop at the Third Period of my Memoir, to write this Introduction, to the following passages of which I request the reader's earnest attention.
I admit, at the outset, that it is rather a piece of self-denial
in me to interdict the publication of my letters. I have no solicitude
about fame, and no fear of my reputation of any sort being injured by the
publication of any thing I have ever put upon paper. My opinions and
feelings have been remarkably open to the world; and my position has been
such as to impose no reserves on a disposition naturally open and
communicative; so that if any body might acquiesce in the publication of
correspondence, it should be myself. Moreover, I am disposed to think that
what my friends tell me is true; that it would be rather an advantage to me
than the contrary to be known by my
private letters All these considerations point out to me that I am therefore precisely the person to bear emphatic practical testimony on behalf of the principle of the privacy of epistolary intercourse; and therefore it is that I do hereby bear that testimony.
Epistolary correspondence is written speech; and the
onus rests with those who publish it to show
why the laws of honor which are uncontested in regard to conversation may
be violated when the conversation is written instead of spoken. The plea is
of the utility of such material for biographical purposes; but who would
admit that plea in regard to fireside conversation? The most valuable
conversation, and that which best illustrates character, is that which
passes between two friends, with their feet on the fender, on winter
nights, or in a summer ramble: but what would be thought of the
traitor who should supply such material for biographical or other purposes?
How could human beings ever open their hearts and minds to each other, if
there were no privacy guaranteed by principles and feelings of honor? Yet
has this security lapsed from that half of human conversation which is
written instead of spoken. Whether there is still time to restore it, I
know not: but I have done my part towards an attempted restoration by
a stringent provision in my Will against any public use whatever being made
of my letters, unless I should myself authorize the publication of some,
which will, in that case, be of some public interest, and not confidential
letters. Most of my friends have burnt my letters,--partly because
they knew my desire thus to enforce my assertion of the principle, and
partly because it was less painful to destroy them while I was still among
them than to escape the importunities of hunters of material after my
death. Several eminent persons of this century have taken stringent
precautions against the same mischief; and very many more, I fear, have
taken the more painful precaution of writing no letters which any body
would care to have. Seventy years ago, Dr. Johnson said in conversation
"It is now become so much the fashion to publish letters, that, in
order to avoid it, I put as little into mine as I can." Nobody will
question the hardship and mischief of a practice
which acts upon epistolary correspondence as the spy system under a despotism acts upon speech: and when we find that a half a dozen of the greatest minds of our time have deprived themselves and their friends of their freedom of epistolary speech for the same reason, it does seem to be time that those qualified to bear testimony against such an infringement on personal liberty should speak out.
"But," say unscrupulous book-makers and readers,
"there are many eminent persons who are so far from feeling as you do
that they have themselves prepared for the publication of their letters.
There was Doddridge:--he left a copy of every letter and note
that he ever wrote, for this very purpose. There was Madame
D'Arblay:--on her death-bed, and in extreme old
age, she revised and had copies made of all the letters she received and
wrote when in the height of her fame as Fanny Burney,--preparing for
publication the smooth compliments and monstrous flatteries written by
hands that had long become dust. There was Southey:--he too kept
copies, or left directions, by which he arranged the method of making his
private letters to his friends property to his heirs. These, and many more,
were of a different way of thinking from you."--They were
indeed: and my answer is,--what were the letters worth, as
letters, when these arrangements became known? What would fireside
conversation be worth, as confidential talk, if it was known that the
speaker meant to make it a newspaper article the next day? And when
Doddridge's friends, and Southey's, heard that what they had
taken for conversational out-pouring on paper was so much literary
production, to appear hereafter in a book,--what was the worth of
those much-prized letters then? Would the correspondents not as soon
have received a page of a dissertation, or the proof of a review article?
Surely the only word necessary as to this part of the question is a word of
protest against every body, or every eminent person, being deprived of
epistolary liberty because there have been some among their predecessors or
contemporaries who did not know how to use it, or happen to value it.
We are recommended, again, to "leave the matter to the
dis-
cretion of survivors." I, for my part, have too much regard for my Executors to bequeath to them any such troublesome office as withstanding the remonstrances of any number of persons who may have a mind to see my letters, or of asserting a principle which it is my business to assert for myself. If they were to publish my letters, they would do what I believe to be wrong: and if they refused to publish them, they might be subject to importunity or censure which I have no right to devolve upon them. And why are we to leave this particular piece of testamentary duty to the discretion of survivors, when we are abundantly exhorted, in the case of every other, to do our own testamentary duty ourselves,--betimes, carefully and conscientiously?
Then comes the profit argument,--the plea of how much the world
would have lost without the publication of the letters of A. B. and C. This
is true, in a way. The question is whether the world has not lost more by
the injury to epistolary freedom than it has gained by reading the letters
of nonconsenting letter-writers. There will always be plenty of
consenting and willing letter-writers: let society have their
letters. But there should be no others,--at least till privacy is
altogether abolished as an unsocial privilege. This grossly utilitarian
view does not yet prevail; and I do not think it ever will. Meantime, I
claim the sanction of every principle of integrity, and every feeling of
honor and delicacy, on behalf of my practice. I claim, over and above
these, the sanction of the law.--Law reflects the principles of
morals; and in this case the mirror presents a clear image of the right and
the duty. The law vests the right of publication of private letters solely
in the writer, no one else having any such right during the author's
life, or after his death, except by his express permission. On the
knowledge of this provision I have acted, in my arrangements about my own
correspondence; and I trust that others, hitherto unaccustomed to the grave
consideration of the subject, will feel, in justice to myself and others
who act with me, that there can be no wrong, no moral inexpediency, in the
exercise of a right thus expressly protected by the Law. If, by what I have
done, I have fixed attention upon the morality of the case, this will be a
greater social benefit than
the publication of any letters written by me, or by persons far wiser and more accomplished than myself.
I have only to say further, in the way of introduction, a word or two as
to my descent and parentage. On occasion of the Revelation of the Edict of
Nantes, in 1688, a surgeon of the name of Martineau, and a family of the
name of Pierre, crossed the Channel, and settled with other Huguenot
refugees, in England. My ancestor married a young lady of the Pierre
family, and settled in Norwich, where his descendants afforded a succession
of surgeons up to my own day. My eminent uncle, Mr. Philip Meadows
Martineau, and my eldest brother, who died before the age of thirty, were
the last Norwich surgeons of the name.--My grandfather, who was one of
the honorable series, died at the age of forty-two, of a fever
caught among his poor patients. He left a large family, of whom my father
was the youngest. When established as a Norwich manufacturer, my father
married Elizabeth Rankin, the eldest daughter of a sugar-refiner at
Newcastle upon Tyne. My father and mother had eight children, of whom I was
the sixth: and I was born on the 12th of June, 1802.
(illustration)
sinking under diarrhoea. My bad health during my whole childhood and youth, and even my deafness, was always ascribed by my mother to this. However it might be about that, my health certainly was very bad till I was nearer thirty than twenty years of age; and never was poor mortal cursed with a more beggarly nervous system. The long years of indigestion by day and night-mare terrors are mournful to think of now.--Milk has radically disagreed with me, all my life: but when I was a child, it was a thing unheard of for children not to be fed on milk: so, till I was old enough to have tea at breakfast, I went on having a horrid lump at my throat for hours of every morning, and the most terrific oppressions in the night. Sometimes the dim light of the windows in the night seemed to advance till it pressed upon my eyeballs, and then the windows would seem to recede to an infinite distance. If I laid my hand under my head on the pillow, the hand seemed to vanish almost to a point, while the head grew as big as a mountain. Sometimes I was panic struck at the head of the stairs, and was sure I could never get down; and I could never cross the yard to the garden without flying and panting, and fearing to look behind, because a wild beast was after me. The starlight sky was the worst; it was always coming down, to stifle and crush me, and rest upon my head. I do not remember any dread of thieves or ghosts in particular; but things as I actually saw them were dreadful to me; and it now appears to me that I had scarcely any respite from the terror. My fear of persons was as great as any other. To the best of my belief, the first person I was ever not afraid of was Aunt Kentish, who won my heart and my confidence when I was sixteen. My heart was ready enough to flow out; and it often did: but I always repented of such expansion, the next time I dreaded to meet a human face.--It now occurs to me, and it may be worth while to note it,--what the extremest terror of all was about. We were often sent to walk on the Castle Hill at Norwich. In the wide area below, the residents were wont to expose their feather-beds, and to beat them with a stick. That sound,--a dull shock,--used to make my heart stand still: and it was no use my standing at the rails above, and
seeing the process. The striking of the blow and the arrival of the sound did not correspond; and this made matters worse. I hated that walk; and I believe for that reason. My parents knew nothing of all this. It never occurred to me to speak of anything I felt most: and I doubt whether they ever had the slightest idea of my miseries. It seems to me now that a little closer observation would have shown them the causes of the bad health and fitful temper which gave them so much anxiety on my account; and I am sure that a little more of the cheerful tenderness which was in those days thought bad for children, would have saved me from my worst faults, and from a world of suffering.
My hostess and nurse at the above-mentioned cottage was a Mrs.
Merton, who was, as was her husband, a Methodist or melancholy Calvinist of
some sort. The family story about was that I came home the absurdest little
preacher of my years (between two and three) that ever was. I used to nod
my head emphatically, and say "Never ky for tyfles:"
"Dooty fust, and pleasure afterwards," and so forth: and
I sometimes got courage to edge up to strangers, and ask them to give
me--"a maxim." Almost before I could join letters, I got
some sheets of paper,and folded them into a little square book, and wrote,
in double lines, two or three in a page, my beloved maxims. I believe this
was my first effort at book-making. It was probably what I picked up
at Carleton that made me so intensely religious as I certainly was from a
very early age. The religion was of a bad sort enough, as might be expected
from the urgency of my needs; but I doubt whether I could have got through
without it. I pampered my vain-glorious propensities by dreams of
divine favor, to make up for my utter deficiency of
self-respect: and I got rid of otherwise incessant remorse by
a most convenient confession and repentance, which relieved my nerves
without at all, I suspect, improving my conduct.
To revert to my earliest recollections:--I certainly could
hardly walk alone when our nursemaid took us,--including my sister
Elizabeth, who was eight years older than myself,--an unusual walk;
through a lane, (afterwards called by us the
"Spinner's Lane") where some Miss Taskers, acquaintances of Elizabeth's and her seniors, were lodging, in a cottage which had a fir grove behind it. Somebody set me down at the foot of a fir, where I was distressed by the slight rising of the ground at the root, and by the long grass, which seemed a terrible entanglement. I looked up the tree, and was scared at its height, and at that of so many others. I was comforted with a fir-cone; and then one of the Miss Taskers caught me up in her arms and kissed me; and I was too frightened to cry till we got away.--I was not more than two years old when an impression of touch occurred to me which remains vivid to this day. It seems indeed as if impressions of touch were at that age more striking than those from the other senses. I say this from observation of others besides myself; for my own case is peculiar in that matter. Sight, hearing and touch were perfectly good in early childhood; but I never had the sense of smell; and that of taste was therefore exceedingly imperfect. On the occasion I refer to, I was carried down a flight of steep back stairs, and Rachel (a year and half older than I) clung to the nursemaid's gown, and Elizabeth was going before, (still quite a little girl) when I put down my finger ends to feel a flat velvet button on the top of Rachel's bonnet. The rapture of the sensation was really monstrous, as I remember it now. Those were our mourning bonnets for a near relation; and this marks the date, proving me to have been only two years old.
I was under three when my brother James was born. That day was another
of the distinct impressions which flashed upon me in after years. I found
myself within the door of the best bedroom,--an impressive place from
being seldom used, from its having a dark, polished floor, and from the
awful large gay figures of the chintz bed hangings. That day the curtains
were drawn, the window blinds were down, and an unknown old woman, in a mob
cap, was at the fire, with a bundle of flannel in her arms. She beckoned to
me, and I tried to go, though it seemed impossible to cross the slippery
floor. I seem to hear now the paltering of my feet. When I arrived at her
knee, the
nurse pushed out with her foot a tiny chair, used as a footstool, made me sit down on it, laid the bundle of flannel across my knees, and opened it so that I saw the little red face of the baby. I then found out that there was somebody in the bed,--seeing a nightcap on the pillow. This was on the 21st of April, 1805. I have a distinct recollection of some incidents of that summer. My mother did not recover well from her confinement, and was sent to the sea, at Yarmouth. On our arrival there, my father took me along the old jetty,--little knowing what terror I suffered. I remember the strong grasp of his large hand being some comfort; but there were holes in the planking of the jetty quite big enough to let my foot through; and they disclosed the horrible sight of waves flowing and receding below, and great tufts of green weeds swaying to and fro. I remember the sitting room at our lodgings, and my mother's dress as she sat picking shrimps, and letting me try to help her.--Of all my many fancies, perhaps none was so terrible as a dream that I had at four years old. The impression is as fresh as possible now; but I cannot at all understand what the fright was about. I know nothing more strange than this power of re-entering, as it were, into the narrow mind of an infant, so as to compare it with that of maturity; and therefore it may he worth while to record that piece of precious nonsense,--my dream at four years old. I imagine I was learning my letters then from cards, where each letter had its picture,--as a stag for S. I dreamed that we children were taking our walk with our nursemaid out of St. Austin's Gate (the nearest bit of country to our house.) Out of the public-house there came a stag, with prodigious antlers. Passing the pump, it crossed the road to us, and made a polite bow, with its head on one side, and with a scrape of one foot, after which it pointed with its foot to the public-house, and spoke to me, inviting me in. The maid declined, and turned to go home. Then came the terrible part. By the time we were at our own door it was dusk, and we went up the steps in the dark; but in the kitchen it was bright sunshine. My mother was standing at the dresser, breaking sugar; and she lifted me up, and set me in the sun, and gave me a bit of sugar.
Such was the dream which froze me with horror! Who shall say why? But my panics were really unaccountable. They were a matter of pure sensation, without any intellectual justification whatever, even of the wildest kind. A magic-lantern was exhibited to us on Christmas-day, and once or twice in the year besides. I used to see it cleaned by daylight, and to handle all its parts,--understanding its whole structure; yet, such was my terror of the white circle on the wall, and of the moving slides, that, to speak the plain truth, the first apparition always brought on bowel-complaint; and, at the age of thirteen, when I was pretending to take care of little children during the exhibition, I could never look at it without having the back of a chair to grasp, or hurting myself, to carry off the intolerable sensation. My bitter shame may be conceived; but then, I was always in a state of shame about something or other. I was afraid to walk in the town, for some years, if I remember right, for fear of meeting two people. One was an unknown old lady who very properly rebuked me one day for turning her off the very narrow pavement of London Lane, telling me, in an awful way, that little people should make way for their elders. The other was an unknown farmer, in whose field we had been gleaning (among other trespassers) before the shocks were carried. This man left the field after us, and followed us into the city,--no doubt, as I thought, to tell the Mayor, and send the constable after us. I wonder how long it was before I left off expecting that constable. There were certain little imps, however, more alarming still. Our house was in a narrow street; and all its windows, except two or three at the back, looked eastward. It had no sun in the front rooms, except before breakfast in summer. One summer morning, I went into the drawing-room, which was not much used in those days, and saw a sight which made me hide my face in a chair, and scream with terror. The drops of the lustre on the mantle-piece, on which the sun was shining, were somehow set in motion, and the prismatic colors danced vehemently on the walls. I thought they were alive,--imps of some sort; and I never dared go into that room alone in the morning, from that time forward. I am afraid
I must own that my heart has beat, all my life long, at the dancing of prismatic colors on the wall.
I was getting some comfort, however, from religion by this time. The
Sundays began to be marked days, and pleasantly marked, on the whole. I do
not know why crocuses were particularly associated with Sunday at that
time; but probably my mother might have walked in the garden with us, some
early spring Sunday. My idea of Heaven was of a place gay with yellow and
lilac crocuses. My love of gay colors was very strong. When I was sent with
the keys to a certain bureau in my mother's room, to fetch miniatures
of my father and grandfather, to be shown to visitors, I used to stay an
unconscionable time, though dreading punishment for it, but utterly unable
to resist the fascination of a certain watch-ribbon kept in a drawer
there. This ribbon had a pattern in floss silk, gay and beautifully shaded;
and I used to look at it till I was sent for, to be questioned as to what I
had been about. The young wild parsley and other weeds in the hedges used
to make me sick with their luscious green in spring. One crimson and purple
sunrise I well remember, when James could hardly walk alone, and I could
not therefore have been more than five. I awoke very early, that summer
morning, and saw the maid sound asleep in her bed, and "the
baby" in his crib. The room was at the top of the house; and some
rising ground beyond the city could be seen over the opposite roofs. I
crept out of bed, saw James's pink toes showing themselves invitingly
through the rails of his crib, and gently pinched them, to wake him. With a
world of trouble I got him over the side, and helped him to the window, and
upon a chair there. I wickedly opened the window, and the cool air blew in;
and yet the maid did not wake. Our arms were smutted with the blacks on the
window-sill, and our bare feet were corded with the impression of
the rush-buttomed chair; but we were not found out. The sky was
gorgeous, and I talked very religiously to the child. I remember the mood,
and the pleasure of expresing it, but nothing of what I said.
I must have been a remarkably religious child, for the only
support and pleasure I remember having from a very early age was from that source. I was just seven when the grand event of my childhood took place,--a journey to Newcastle to spend the summer (my mother and four of her children) at my grandfather's; and I am certain that I cared more for religion before and during that summer than for anything else. It was after our return, when Ann Turner, daughter of the Unitarian Minister there, was with us, that my piety first took a practical character; but it was familiar to me as an indulgence long before. While I was afraid of everybody I saw, I was not in the least afraid of God. Being usually very unhappy, I was constantly longing for heaven, and seriously, and very frequently planning suicide in order to get there. I knew it was considered a crime; but I did not feel it so. I had a devouring passion for justice;--justice, first to my own precious self, and then to other oppressed people. Justice was precisely what was least understood in our house, in regard to servants and children. Now and then I desperately poured out my complaints; but in general I brooded over my injuries, and those of others who dared not speak; and then the temptation to suicide was very strong. No doubt, there was much vindictiveness in it. I gloated over the thought that I would make somebody care about me in some sort of way at last: and, as to my reception in the other world, I felt sure that God could not be very angry with me for making haste to him when nobody else cared for me, and so many people plagued me. One day I went to the kitchen to get the great carving knife, to cut my throat; but the servants were at dinner, and this put it off for that time. By degrees, the design dwindled down into running away. I used to lean out of the window, and look up and down the street, and wonder how far I could go without being caught. I had no doubt at all that if I once got into a farm-house, and wore a woollen petticoat, and milked the cows, I should be safe, and that nobody would inquire about me any more.--It is evident enough that my temper must have been very bad. It seems to me now that it was downright devilish, except for a placability which used to
annoy me sadly. My temper might have been early made a thoroughly good one, by the slightest indulgence shown to my natural affections, and any rational dealing with my faults: but I was almost the youngest of a large family, and subject, not only to the rule of severity to which all were liable, but also to the rough and contemptuous treatment of the elder children, who meant no harm, but injured me irreparably. I had no self-respect, and an unbounded need of approbation and affection. My capacity for jealousy was something frightful. When we were little more than infants, Mr. Thomas Watson, son of my father's partner, one day came into the yard, took Rachel up in his arms, gave her some grapes off the vine, and carried her home, across the street, to give her Gay's Fables, bound in red and gold. I stood with a bursting heart, beating my hoop, and hating every body in the world. I always hated Gay's Fables, and for long could not abide a red book. Nobody dreamed of all this; and the "taking down" system was pursued with me as with the rest, issuing in the assumed doggedness and wilfulness which made me desperately disagreeable during my youth, to every body at home. The least word or tone of kindness melted me instantly, in spite of the strongest predeterminations to be hard and offensive. Two occasions stand out especially in my memory, as indeed almost the only instances of the enjoyment of tenderness manifested to myself individually.
When I was four or five years old, we were taken to a lecture of Mr.
Drummond's, for the sake, no doubt, of the pretty shows, we were to
see,--the chief of which was the Phantasmagoria of which we had heard,
as a fine sort of magic-lantern. I did not like the darkness, to
begin with; and when Minerva appeared, in a red dress, at first extremely
small, and then approaching, till her owl seemed coming directly upon me,
it was so like my nightmare dreams that I shrieked aloud. I remember my own
shriek. A pretty lady who sat next us, took me on her lap, and let me hide
my face in her bosom, and held me fast. How intensely I loved her, without
at all knowing who she was! From that time we knew her, and she filled a
large space in my life; and above forty years after, I had the honor of
having her for my
guest in my own house. She was Mrs. Lewis Cooper, then the very young mother of two girls of the ages of Rachel and myself, of whom I shall have to say more presently.--The other occasion was when I had a terrible ear-ache one Sunday. The rest went to chapel in the afternoon; and my pain grew worse. Instead of going into the kitchen to the cook, I wandered into a lumber room at the top of the house. I laid my aching ear against the cold iron screw of a bedstead, and howled with pain; but nobody came to me. At last, I heard the family come home from chapel. I heard them go into the parlor, one after another, and I knew they were sitting round the fire in the dusk. I stole down to the door, and stood on the mat, and heard them talking and laughing merrily. I stole in, thinking they would not observe me, and got into a dark corner. Presently my mother called to me, and asked what I was doing there. Then I burst out,--that my ear ached so I did not know what to do! Then she and my father both called me tenderly, and she took me on her lap, and laid the ear on her warm bosom. I was afraid of spoiling her starched muslin handkerchief with the tears which would come; but I was very happy, and wished that I need never move again. Then of course came remorse for all my naughtiness; but I was always suffering that, though never, I believe, in my whole childhood, being known to own myself wrong. I must have been an intolerable child; but I need not have been so.
I was certainly fond of going to chapel before that Newcastle era which
divided my childhood into two equal portions: but my besetting
troubles followed me even there. My passion for justice was baulked there,
as much as any where. The duties preached were those of inferiors to
superiors, while the per contra was not
insisted on with any equality of treatment at all. Parents were to bring up
their children "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord," and
to pay servants due wages; but not a word was ever preached about the
justice due from the stronger to the weaker. I used to thirst to hear some
notice of the oppression which servants and children had (as I supposed
universally) to endure, in regard to their feelings, while duly clothed,
fed, and taught: but nothing of the sort ever came; but instead, a doctrine of passive obedience which only made me remorseful and miserable. I was abundantly obedient in act; for I never dreamed of being otherwise; but the interior rebellion kept my conscience in a state of perpetual torture. As far as I remember my conscience was never of the least use to me; for I always concluded myself wrong about every thing, while pretending entire complacency and assurance. My moral discernment was almost wholly obscured by fear and mortification.--Another misery at chapel was that I could not attend to the service, nor refrain from indulging in the most absurd vain-glorious dreams, which I was ashamed of, all the while. The Octagon Chapel at Norwich has some curious windows in the roof;--not skylights, but letting in light indirectly. I used to sit staring up at those windows, and looking for angels to come for me, and take me to heaven, in sight of all the congregation,--the end of the world being sure to happen while we were at chapel. I was thinking of this, and of the hymns, the whole of the time, it now seems to me. It was very shocking to me that I could not pray at chapel. I believe that I never did in my life. I prayed abundantly when I was alone; but it was impossible to me to do it in any other way; and the hypocrisy of appearing to do so was a long and sore trouble to me.--All this is very painful; but I really remember little that was not painful at that time of my life.--To be sure, there was Nurse Ayton, who used to come, one or two days in the week, to sew. She was kind to me, and I was fond of her. She told us long stories about her family; and she taught me to sew. She certainly held the family impression of my abilities,--that I was a dull, unobservant, slow, awkward child. In teaching me to sew, she used to say (and I quite acquiesced) that "slow and sure" was the maxim for me, and "quick and well" was the maxim for Rachel. I was not jealous about this,--it seemed to me so undeniable. On one occasion only I thought Nurse Ayton unkind. The back of a rickety old nursing-chair came off when I was playing on it; and I was sure she could save me from being scolded by sewing it on again. I insisted that she could sew anything. This made my mother
laugh when she came up; and so I forgave nurse: and I believe that was our only quarrel.
My first political interest was the death of Nelson. I was then four
years old. My father came in from the counting-house at an unusual
hour, and told my mother, who cried heartily. I certainly had some
conception of a battle, and of a great man being a public loss. It always
rent my heart-strings (to the last day of her life,) to see and hear
my mother cry; and in this case it was clearly connected with the death of
a great man. I had my own notions of Bonaparte too. One day, at dessert,
when my father was talking anxiously to my mother about the expected
invasion, for which preparations were made all along the Norfolk coast, I
saw them exchange a glance, because I was standing staring, twitching my
pinafore with terror. My father called me to him, and took me on his knee,
and I said "But, papa, what will you do if Boney comes?"
"What will I do?" said he, cheerfully, "Why, I will ask
him to take a glass of Port with me,"--helping himself to a
glass as he spoke. That wise reply was of immense service to me. From the
moment I knew that "Boney" was a creature who could take a
glass of wine, I dreaded him no more. Such was my induction into the
department of foreign affairs. As to social matters,--my passion for
justice was cruelly crossed, from the earliest time I can remember, by the
imposition of passive obedience and silence on servants and tradespeople,
who met with a rather old-fashioned treatment in our house. We
children were enough in the kitchen to know how the maids avenged
themselves for scoldings in the parlor, before the family and visitors, to
which they must not reply; and for being forbidden to wear white gowns,
silk gowns, or any thing but what strict housewives approved. One of my
chief miseries was being sent with insulting messages to the
maids,--e.g., to "bid them not be so like carthorses
overhead," and the like. On the one hand, it was a fearful sin to
alter a message; and, on the other, it was impossible to give such an one
as that: so I used to linger and delay to the last moment, and then
deliver something civil, with all imaginable sheepishness, so that the
maids used to look at one another
and laugh. Yet, one of my most heartfelt sins was towards a servant who was really a friend of my mother's and infinitely respected, and a good deal loved, by us children,--Susan Ormsby, who came to live with us just before James was born, and staid till that memorable Newcastle journey, above four years afterwards. When she was waiting at dinner one day, I stuck my knife upright, in listening to something, so that the point cut her arm. I saw her afterwards washing it at the pump; and she shook her head at me in tender reproach. My heart was bursting; but I dared not tell her how sorry I was. I never got over it, or was happy with her again; and when we were to part, the night before our journey, and she was kissing us with tears, it was in dumb grief and indignation that I heard her tell my mother that children do not feel things as grown people do, and that they could not think of any thing else when they were going a journey.
One more fact takes its place before that journey,--the awakening
of a love of money in me. I suspect I have had a very narrow escape of
being an eminent miser. A little more, or a little less difficulty, or
another mode of getting money would easily have made me a miser. The first
step, as far as I remember, was when we played cards, one winter evening,
at our uncle Martineau's, when I was told that I had won twopence.
The pavement hardly seemed solid when we walked home,--so elated was
I. I remember equal delight when Mrs. Meadows Taylor gave us children
twopence when we expected only a halfpenny, to buy string for a top:
but in this last case it was not the true amor
nummi, as in the other. The same avarice was excited in the same
way, a few years later, when I won eighteen-pence at cards on a
visit. The very sight of silver and copper was transporting to me, without
any thought of its use. I stood and looked long at money, as it lay in my
hand. Yet I do not remember that this passion ever interfered with my
giving away money, though it certainly did with my spending it otherwise. I
certainly wa very close, all my childhood and youth. I may as well mention
here that I made rules and kept them, in regard to my expenditure, from the
time I had an allowance. I believe we gave away
something out of our first allowance of a penny a week. When we had twopence, I gave away half. The next advance was to half-a-guinea a quarter, to buy gloves and sashes: then to ten pounds a year (with help) for clothes; then fifteen, and finally twenty, without avowed help. I sewed indefatigably all those years,--being in truth excessively fond of sewing, with the amusement of either gossiping, or learning poetry by heart, from a book, lying open under my work. I never had the slightest difficulty in learning any amount of verse; and I knew enough to have furnished me for a wandering reciter,--if there had been such a calling in our time,--as I used to wish there was. While thus busy, I made literally all my clothes, as I grew up, except stays and shoes. I platted bonnets at one time, knitted stockings as I read aloud, covered silk shoes for dances, and made all my garments. Thus I squeezed something out of the smaller allowance, and out of the fifteen pounds, I never spent more than twelve in dress; and never more than fifteen pounds out of the twenty. The rest I gave away, except a little which I spent in books. The amount of time spent in sewing now appears frightful; but it was the way in those days, among people like ourselves. There was some saving in our practice of reading aloud, and in mine of learning poetry in such mass: but the censorious gossip which was the bane of our youth drove prose and verse out of the field, and wasted more of our precious youthful powers and dispositions than any repentance and amendment in after life could repair. This sort of occupation, the sewing however, was less unfitting than might now appear, considering that the fortunes of manufacturers, like my father, were placed in jeopardy by the war, and that there was barely a chance for my father ever being able to provide fortunes for his daughters. He and my mother exercised every kind of self-denial to bring us up qualified to take care of ourselves. They pinched themselves in luxuries to provide their girls, as well as their boys, with masters and schooling; and they brought us up to an industry like their own;--the boys in study and business, and the girls in study and household cares. Thus was I saved from being a literary lady who could not sew; and when, in
after years, I have been insulted by admiration at not being helpless in regard to household employments, I have been wont to explain, for my mother's sake, that I could make shirts and puddings, and iron and mend, and get my bread by my needle, if necessary,--(as it once was necessary, for a few months), before I won a better place and occupation with my pen.
Travelling was no easy matter in those days. My mother, our dear,
pretty, gentle aunt Margaret, sister Elizabeth, aged fifteen, Rachel,
myself, and little James, aged four, and in nankeen frocks, were all
crammed into a post-chaise, for a journey of three or four days.
Almost every incident of those days is still fresh: but I will report
only one, which is curious from showing how little aware we children were
of our own value. I really think, if I had once conceived that any body
cared for me, nearly all the sins and sorrows of my anxious childhood would
have been spared me; and I remember well that it was Ann Turner who first
conveyed the cheering truth to me. She asked me why my mother sat sewing so
diligently for us children, and sat up at night to mend my stockings, if
she did not care for me; and I was convinced at once;--only too happy
to believe it, and being unable to resist such evidence as the
stocking-mending
at night, when we children were asleep. Well: on our second day's journey, we stopped at Burleigh House, and the three elders of the party went in, to see the picture gallery.--Children were excluded; so we three little ones were left to play among the haymakers on the lawn. After what seemed a long time, it suddenly struck us that the elders must have forgotten us, and gone on to Newcastle without us. I, for my part, was entirely persuaded that we should never be missed, or remembered more by any body; and we set up a terrible lamentation. A good-natured haymaker, a sunburnt woman whose dialect we could not understand, took us in hand, and led us to the great door, where we were soon comforted by my mother's appearance. I remember wondering why she and aunt Margaret laughed aside when they led us back to the chaise.
Of course it was difficult to amuse little children so cooped up for so
long. There was a little quiet romping, I remember, and a great deal of
story telling by dear aunty: but the finest device was setting us to
guess what we should find standing in the middle of grandpapa's
garden. As it was something we had never seen or known about, there was no
end to the guessing. When we arrived at the gates of the Forth, (my
grandfather's house) the old folks and their daughters came out to
meet us, all tearful and agitated: and I, loathing myself for the
selfishness, could not wait, but called out,--"I
want to see what that thing is in the garden." After an enlightening
hint, and without any rebuke, our youngest aunt took me by the hand, and
led me to face the mystery. I could make nothing of it when I saw it. It
was a large, heavy, stone sundial. That dial is worth this much mention,
for it was of immeasurable value to me. I could see its face only by
raising myself on tiptoe on its step: and there, with my eyes on a
level with the plate, did I watch and ponder, day by day, painfully forming
my first clear conceptions of Time, amidst a bright confusion of notions of
day and night, and of the seasons, and of the weather. I loved that dial
with a sort of superstition; and when, nearly forty years after, I built a
house for myself at Ambleside, my strong wish was to have this very dial
for the platform below the terrace: but it was not
to be had. It had been once removed already,--when the railway cut through the old garden; and the stone mass was too heavy, and far too much fractured and crumbled for a second removal. So a dear friend set up for me a beautiful new dial; and I can only hope that it may possibly render as great a service to some child of a future generation as my grandfather's did for me.
It seems to me now that I seldom asked questions in those days. I went
on for years together in a puzzle, for want of its ever occurring to me to
ask questions. For instance, no accounts of a spring-gun answered to
my conception of it;--that it was a pea-green musket, used only
in spring! This absurdity at length lay by unnoticed in my mind till I was
twenty! Even so! At that age, I was staying at Birmingham; and we were
returning from a country walk in the dusk of the evening, when my host
warned us not to cross a little wood, for fear of spring-guns; and
he found and showed us the wire of one. I was truly confounded when the
sense of the old mistake, dormant in my mind till now, came upon me. Thus
it was with a piece of mystification imposed on me by my
grandfather's barber in 1809. One morning, while the
shaving-pot was heating, the barber took me on his knee, and
pretended to tell me why he was late that morning. Had I ever heard of a
failing star? Yes, I had. Well: a star had fallen in the night; and
it fell in the Forth lane, which it completely blocked up, beside Mr.
Somebody's orchard. It was quite round, and of the beautifullest and
clearest crystal. "Was it there still?" O yes,--or most of
it: but some of the crystal was shivered off, and people were
carrying it away when he arrived at the spot. He had to go round by
Something Street; and it was that which made him late. "Would there
be any left by the time we went for our walk?" He hoped there might.
I got through my lessons in a fever of eagerness that morning, and engaged
the nurse maid to take us through that lane. There was the orchard, with
the appletree stretching over the wall: but not a single spike of the
crystal was left. I thought it odd; but it never occurred to me to doubt
the story, or to speak to any body about it, except the
bar-
ber. I lay in wait for him the next morning; and very sorry he professed to be;--so sorry that he had not just picked up some crystals for me while there were so many; but no doubt I should come in the way of a fallen star myself, some day. We kept this up till October, when we bade him good bye: and my early notions of astronomy were cruelly bewildered by that man's rhodomontade. I dare not say how many years it was before I got quite clear of it.
There is little that is pleasant to say of the rest of that absence from
home. There was a naughty boy staying at my grandfather's, who caused
us to be insulted by imputations of stealing the green fruit, and to be
shut out of the garden, where we had never dreamed of touching a
gooseberry: and he led little James into mischief; and then canted
and made his own part good. Our hearts swelled under the injuries he caused
us. Then, we were injudiciously fed, and my nightmare miseries were
intolerable. The best event was that my theological life began to take
form. I had a prodigious awe of clergymen and ministers, and a strong
yearning towards them for notice. No doubt there was much vanity in this;
but it was also one investment of the religious sentiment, as I know by my
being at times conscious of a remnant of the feeling now, while radically
convinced that the intellectual and moral judgment of priests of all
persuasions is inferior to that of any other order of men. The first of the
order who took any direct notice of me was, as far as I know, good Mr.
Turner of Newcastle, my mother's pastor and friend before her
marriage. At Newcastle, we usually went to tea at his house on Sunday
evenings; and it was then that we began the excellent practice of writing
recollections of one of the sermons of the day. When the minister preaches
what children can understand, this practice is of the highest use in fixing
their attention, and in disclosing to their parents the character and
imperfections of their ideas on the most important class of subjects. On
occasion of our first attempt,--Rachel's and mine,--I felt
very triumphant beforehand. I remembered the text; and it seemed to me that
my head was full of thoughts from the sermon. I scrawled over the whole of
a large slate,
and was not a little mortified when I found that all I had written came into seven or eight lines of my mother's handwriting. I made sure that I had not been cheated, and then fell into discouragement at finding that my grand "sermon" came to nothing more. However, my attempt was approved; I was allowed to "sit up to supper," and the Sunday practice was begun which continued till I grew too deaf to keep up my attention successfully. For some years of that long period, our success was small, because Mr. Madge's, (our minister's) sermons conveyed few clear ideas to children, though much sweet and solemn impression. Dr. Carpenter's were the best I ever listened to for the purpose:--so good that I have known him carry a "recollection" written by a cousin of mine at the age of sixteen, to Mrs. Carpenter, as a curiosity,--not a single sentence of his sermon being altogether absent from the hearer's version of it.--Another religious impression that we children brought from Newcastle is very charming to me still. Our gentle, delicate aunt Mary, whom I remember so well in her white gown, with her pink color, thin silky brown hair, and tender manner towards us, used to get us round her knees as she sat in the window-seat at the Forth, where the westerly sun shone in, and teach us to sing Milton's hymn "Let us with a gladsome mind." It is the very hymn for children, set to its own simple tune; and I always, to this day, hear aunt Mary's weak, earnest voice in it. That was the gentle hymn. The woe-breathing one was the German Evening Hymn. The heroic one, which never failed to rouse my whole being was "Awake, my soul; stretch every nerve," sung to Artaxerxes. In those days, we learned Mrs. Barbauld's Prose Hymns by heart; and there were parts of them which I dearly loved: but other parts made me shiver with awe. I did not know what "shaking bogs" were, and was alarmed at that mysterious being "Child of Mortality." On the whole, however, religion was a great comfort and pleasure to me; and I studied the New Testament very heartily and profitably, from the time that Ann Turner went south with us, and encouraged me to confession and morning and nightly prayer.
For many years past, my amazement has been continually on the increase
that Unitarians can conceive that they are giving their children a
Christian education in making their religious training what it is. Our
family certainly insisted very strongly, and quite sincerely, on being
Christians, while despising and pitying the orthodox as much as they could
be despised and pitied in return; while yet, it must have been from
wonderful slovenliness of thought, as well as ignorance, that we could have
taken Unitarianism to be Christianity, in any genuine sense,--in any
sense which could justify separate Christian worship. In our particular
case, family pride and affection were implicated in our dissent. It was not
the dissent that was to be wondered at, but its having degenerated into
Unitarianism. Our French name indicates our origin. The first Martineaus
that we know of were expatriated Huguenots, who came over from Normandy on
the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. They were, of course,
Calvinists,--so fully admitting the Christian religion to be a scheme
of redemption as to deserve, without limitation or perversion, the title of
Christians. But their descendants passed by degrees, with the congregations
to which they belonged, out of Calvinism into the
pseudo-Christianity of Arianism first, and then of Unitarianism,
under the guidance of pastors whose natural sense revolted from the
essential points of the Christian doctrine, while they had not learning
enough, biblical, ecclesiastical, historical or philosophical, to discover
that what they gave up was truly essential, and that the name of
Christianity was a mere sham when applied to what they retained. One
evening when I was a child, I entered the parlor when our Unitarian
minister, Mr. Madge, was convicting of error (and what he called idiotcy)
an orthodox schoolmaster who happened to be our visitor. "Look
here," said Mr. Madge, seizing three wine-glasses, and placing
them in a row: "here is the Father,--here's the
Son,--and here's the Holy Ghost; do you mean to tell me that
those three glasses can be in any case one? 'Tis mere
nonsense." And so were we children taught that it was "mere
nonsense." I certainly wondered exceedingly that so vast a majority
of the people of Norwich could accept such nonsense,
and so very few see through it as the Unitarians of the city: but there was no one to suggest to me that there might be more in the matter than we saw, or than even our minister was aware of. This was pernicious enough: but far worse was the practice, necessarily universal among Unitarians, of taking any liberties they please with the revelation they profess to receive. It is true, the Scriptures are very properly declared by them to be not the revelation itself, but the record of it: but it is only through the record that the revelation can be obtained--at least by Protestants: and any tamperings with the record are operations upon the revelation itself. To appreciate the full effect of such a procedure, it is only necessary to look at what the Unitarians were doing in the days of my youth. They were issuing an Improved Version, in which considerable portions were set aside (printed in a different type) as spurious. It is true, those portions flatly contradicted some other portions in regard to dates and other facts; but the shallow scholarship of the Unitarians made its own choice what to receive and what to reject, without perceiving that such a process was wholly incompatible with the conception of the Scriptures being the record of a divine revelation at all. Having begun to cut away and alter, there was no reason for stopping; and every Unitarian was at liberty to make the Scriptures mean what suited his own views. Mr. Belsham's Exposition of the Epistles is a remarkable phenomenon in this way. To get rid of some difficulties about heaven and hell, the end of the world, salvation and perdition, &c., he devised a set of figurative meanings which he applied with immense perseverance, and a poetical ingenuity remarkable in so thoroughly prosaic a man; and all the while, it never seems to have occurred to him that that could hardly be a revelation designed for the rescue of the human race from perdition, the explanation of which required all this ingenuity at the hand of a Belsham, after eighteen centuries. I as a deeply-interested a reader of those big volumes as any Unitarian in England; and their ingenuity gratified some of my faculties exceedingly; but there was throughout a haunting sense of unreality which made me uneasy,--a consciousness that this kind of solemn amusement was no
fitting treatment of the burdensome troubles of conscience, and the moral irritations which made the misery of my life. This theological dissipation, and the music and poetry of psalms and hymns, charmed away my woes for the hour; but they were not the solid consolation I needed. So, to work I went in my own way, again and again studying the New Testament,--making "Harmonies," poring over the geography, greedily gathering up every thing I could find in the way of commentary and elucidation, and gladly working myself into an enthusiasm with the moral beauty and spiritual promises I found in the Sacred Writings. I certainly never believed, more or less, in the "essential doctrines" of Christianity, which represent God as the predestinator of men to sin and perdition, and Christ as their rescuer from that doom. I never was more or less beguiled by the trickery of language by which the perdition of man is made out to be justice, and his redemption to be mercy. I never suffered more or less from fear of hell. The Unitarianism my parents saved me from that. But nothing could save me from the perplexity of finding so much of indisputable statement of those doctrines in the New Testament, nor from a covert sense that it was taking a monstrous liberty with the Gospel to pick and choose what made me happy, and reject what I did not like or could not receive. When I now find myself wondering at Unitarians who do so,--who accept heaven and reject hell,--who get rid somehow of the reign of Christ and the apostles on earth, and derive somehow a sanction of their fancy of a heaven in the stars, peopled with old acquaintances, and furnished for favourite pursuits, I try to recal the long series of years during which I did the same thing, with far more, certainly, of complacency than of misgiving. I try to remember how late on in life I have said that I confidently reckoned on entering the train of Socrates in the next world, and getting some of his secrets out of Pythagoras, besides making friendship with all the Christian worthies I especially inclined to. When I now see the comrades of my early days comfortably appropriating all the Christian promises, without troubling themselves with the clearly-specified condition,--of faith in Christ as a Redeemer,--I remind
myself that this is just what I did for more than the first half of my life. The marvel remains how they now, and I then, could possibly wonder at the stationary or declining fortunes of their sect,--so evidently as Unitarianism is a mere clinging, from association and habit, to the old privilege of faith in a divine revelation, under an actual forfeiture of all its essential conditions.
My religious belief, up to the age of twenty, was briefly this. I
believed in a God, milder and more beneficent and passionless than the God
of the orthodox, inasmuch as he would not doom any of his creatures to
eternal torment. I did not at any time, I think, believe in the Devil, but
understood the Scriptures to speak of Sin under that name, and of eternal
detriment under the name of eternal punishment. I believed in inestimable
and eternal rewards of holiness; but I am confident that I never in my life
did a right thing, or abstained from a wrong one from any consideration of
reward or punishment. To the best of my recollection, I always feared sin
and remorse extremely, and punishment not at all; but, on the contrary,
desired punishment or any thing else that would give me the one good that I
pined for in vain,--ease of conscience. The doctrine of forgiveness on
repentance never availed me much, because forgiveness for the past was
nothing without safety in the future; and my sins were not curable, I felt,
by any single remission of their consequences,--if such remission were
possible. If I prayed and wept, and might hope that I was pardoned at
night, it was small comfort, because I knew I should be in a state of
remorse again before the next noon. I do not remember the time when the
forgiveness clause in the Lord's Prayer was not a perplexity and a
stumbling-block to me. I did not care about being let off from
penalty. I wanted to be at ease in conscience; and that could only be by
growing good, whereas I hated and despised myself every day. My belief in
Christ was that he was the purest of all beings, under God; and his
sufferings for the sake of mankind made him as sublime in my view and my
affections as any being could possibly be. The Holy Ghost was a mere
fiction to me. I took all the miracles for facts, and contrived to
worship the letter of the Scriptures long after I had, as desired, given up portions as "spurious," "interpolations" and so forth. I believed in a future life as a continuation of the present, and not as a new method of existence; and, from the time when I saw that the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul could not both be true, I adhered to the former,--after St. Paul. I was uncomfortably disturbed that Christianity had done so little for the redemption of the race: but the perplexity was not so serious as it would have been if I had believed in the perdition of the majority of men; and, for the rest, I contrived to fix my view pretty exclusively on Christendom itself,--which Christians in general find a grand resource in their difficulties. In this way, and by the help of public worship, and of sacred music, and Milton, and the Pilgrim's Progress, I found religion my best resource, even in its first inconsistent and unsatisfactory form, till I wrought my way to something better, as I shall tell by and by.
When I was seven years old,--the winter after our return from
Newcastle,--I was kept from chapel one Sunday afternoon by some
ailment or other. When the house door closed behind the
chapel-goers, I looked at the books on the table. The
ugliest-looking of them was turned down open; and my turning it up
was one of the leading incidents of my life. That plain, clumsy,
calf-bound volume was "Paradise Lost;" and the common
blueish paper, with its old-fashioned type, became as a scroll out
of heaven to me. The first thing I saw was "Argument," which I
took to mean a dispute, and supposed to be stupid enough: but there
was something about Satan cleaving Chaos, which made me turn to the poetry;
and my mental destiny was fixed for the next seven years. That volume was
henceforth never to be found but by asking me for it, till a young
acquaintance made me a present of a little Milton of my own. In a few
months, I believe there was hardly a line in Paradise Lost that I could not
have instantly turned to. I sent myself to sleep by repeating it: and
when my curtains were drawn back in the morning, descriptions of heavenly
light rushed into my memory. I think this must have been my first
expe-
rience of moral relief through intellectual resource. I am sure I must have been somewhat happier from that time forward; though one fact of which I am perfectly certain shows that the improvement must have been little enough. From the time when Ann Turner and her religious training of me put me, as it were, into my own moral charge, I was ashamed of my habit of misery,--and especially of crying. I tried for a long course of years,--I should think from about eight to fourteen,--to pass a single day without crying. I was a persevering child; and I know I tried hard: but I failed. I gave up at last; and during all those years, I never did pass a day without crying. Of course, my temper and habit of mind must have been excessively bad. I have no doubt I was an insufferable child for gloom, obstinacy and crossness, Still, when I remember my own placability,--my weakness of yielding every thing to the first word or tone of tenderness, I cannot but believe that there was grievous mistake in the case, and that even a little more sympathy and moral support would have spared me and others a hideous amount of fault and suffering.
How I found my way out we shall see hereafter: meantime, one small
incident, which occurred when I was eleven years old, may foreshadow my
release. Our eldest brother, Thomas, was seven years older than myself. He
was silent and reserved generally, and somewhat strict to us younger ones,
to whom he taught our Latin grammar. We revered and loved him intensely, in
the midst of our awe of him: but once in my childhood I made him
laugh against his will, by a pun in my Latin lesson (which was a great
triumph) and once I ventured to confide to him a real
difficulty,--without result. I found myself by his side during a
summer evening walk, when something gave me courage to ask him--(the
man of eighteen!)--the question which I had long been secretly
revolving:--how, if God foreknew everything, we could be blamed
or rewarded for our conduct, which was thus absolutely settled for us
beforehand. He considered for a moment, and then told me, in a kind voice,
that this was a thing which I could not understand at present, nor for a
long time to come. I dared not
remon-
state; but I was disappointed: and I felt that if I could feel the difficulty, I had a right to the solution. No doubt, this refusal of a reply helped to fix the question in my mind.
I have said that by this time I had begun to take moral or spiritual
charge of myself. I did try hard to improve; but I fear I made little
progress. Every night, I reviewed the thoughts and actions of the day, and
tried to repent; but I could seldom comfort myself about any amendment. All
the while, however, circumstances were doing for me what I could not do for
myself,--as I have since found to be incessantly happening. The first
great wholesome discipline of my life set in (unrecognized as such) when I
was about eight years old. The kind lady who took me upon her lap at Mr.
Drummond's lecture had two little girls, just the ages of Rachel and
myself: and, after that incident, we children became acquainted, and
very soon, (when the family came to live close beside us in Magdalen
Street) as intimate as possible. I remember being at their house in the
Market Place when I was seven years old; and little E. could not stand, nor
even sit, to see the magic-lantern, but was held in her papa's
arms, because she was so very lame. Before the year was out, she lost her
leg. Being a quiet-tempered child, and the limb being exceedingly
wasted by disease, she probably did not suffer very much under the
operation. However that might be, she met the occasion with great courage,
and went through it with remarkable composure, so that she was the talk of
the whole city. I was naturally very deeply impressed by the affair. It
turned my imagination far too much on bodily suffering, and on the peculiar
glory attending fortitude in that direction. I am sure that my nervous
system was seriously injured, and especially that my subsequent deafness
was partly occasioned by the exciting and vain-glorious dreams that
I indulged for many years after my friend E. lost her leg. All manner of
deaths at the stake and on the scaffold, I went through in imagination, in
the low sense in which St. Theresa craved martyrdom; and night after night,
I lay bathed in cold perspiration till I sank into the sleep of exhaustion.
All this is detestable to think of now; but it is a duty to relate the
truth, because
parents are apt to know far too little of what is passing in their children's imaginations, unless they win the confidence of the little creatures about that on which they are shyest of all,--their aspirations. The good side of this wretched extravagance of mine was that it occasioned or strengthened a power of patience under pain and privation which was not to be looked for in a child so sensitive and irritable by nature. Fortitude was in truth my favorite virtue; and the power of bearing quietly a very unusual amount of bodily pain in childhood was the poor recompense I enjoyed for the enormous detriment I suffered from the turn my imagination had taken.
This, however, is not the discipline I referred to as arising from my
companionship with E. In such a case as hers, all the world acquiesces in
the parents' view and method of action: and in that case the
parents made a sad mistake. They enormously increased their
daughter's suffering from her infirmity by covering up the fact in an
unnatural silence. E.'s lameness was never mentioned, nor recognized
in any way, within my remembrance, till she, full late, did it herself. It
was taken for granted that she was like other children; and the delusion
was kept up in play-hours at my expense. I might almost say that
from the time E. and I grew intimate, I never more had any play. Now, I was
fond of play,--given to romp; and I really wonder now when I look back
upon the many long years during which I stood, with cold feet and a longing
mind, with E. leaning on my arm, looking on while other children were at
play. It was a terrible uneasiness to me to go walks with her,--shy
child as I was,--fancying every body in the streets staring at us, on
account of E.'s extreme difficulty in walking. But the long
self-denial which I never thought of refusing or grumbling at, must
have been morally good for me, if I may judge by the pain caused by two
incidents;--pain which seems to me now to swallow up all that issued
from mere privation.--The fatigue of walking with E. was very great,
from her extreme need of support, and from its being always on the same
side. I was never very strong; and when growing fast, I was found to
growing sadly crooked, from E.'s constant tugging at one arm.
I cannot at all understand how my mother could put it upon me to tell E.'s mother that I must not walk with her, because it made me crooked: but this ungracious message I was compelled to carry; and it cost me more pain than long years of privation of play. The hint was instantly taken; but I suffered the shame and regret over again every time that I saw E. assigned to any one else; and I had infinitely rather have grown crooked than have escaped it by such a struggle.--The other incident was this. We children were to have a birthday party; and my father gave us the rare and precious liberty to play hide-and-seek in the warehouse, among the packing-cases and pigeon-holes where the bombasines were stored. For weeks I had counted the days and hours till this birthday and this play; but E. could not play hide-and-seek; and there we stood, looking at the rest,--I being cold and fidgety, and at last uncontrollably worried at the thought that the hours were passing away, and I had not had one bit of play. I did the fatal thing which has been a thorn in my mind ever since. I asked E. if she would much mind having some one else with her for a minute while I hid once,--just once. O no,--she did not mind; so I sent somebody else to her, and ran off, with a feeling of self-detestation which is fresh at this day. I had no presence-of-mind for the game,--was caught in a minute; and came back to E. damaged in self-respect, for the whole remaining course of our friendship. However, I owe her a great deal; and she and her misfortune were among the most favourable influences I had the benefit of after taking myself in hand for self-government. I have much pleasure in adding that nothing could be finer than her temper in after life, when she had taken her own case in hand, and put an end, as far as it lay with her to do so, to the silence about her infirmity. After I wrote my "Letter to the Deaf," we seemed to be brought nearer together by our companionship in infirmity. Years after that, when I had written "The Crofton Boys," and was uneasy lest my evident knowledge of such a case should jar upon her feelings,--always so tenderly considered,--I wrote her a confession of my uneasiness, and had in reply a most charming letter,--free, cheerful, magnanimous;--
such a letter as has encouraged me to write as I have now done.
The year 1811 was a marked one to me,--first, by my being sent into
the country for my health, for the whole summer and autumn; and next for
the birth of the best-beloved member of my family,--my sister
Ellen.--It was not a genuine country life in a farm-house, that
summer, but a most constrained and conventional one, in the abode of a rich
lawyer,--a cousin of my father's, who sent a daughter of his to
our house for the advantage of city masters, in exchange for me, who went
for health. I was not, on the whole, happy them:--indeed, it is
pretty clear by this time that I was not happy anywhere. The old fancy for
running away came back strongly upon me, and I was on the very point of
attempting it when a few words of concession and kindness upset my purpose,
as usual. I detested the governess,--and with abundant reason. The
very first day, she shut me up and punished me because I, a
town-bred child, did not know what a copse was. "Near yonder
copse," &c. She insisted that every body must know what a copse
is, and that therefore I was obstinate and a liar. After such a beginning,
it will be easily conceived that our relations could not be cordial or
profitable. She presently showed herself jealous of my being in advance of
her pupils in school-room knowledge; and she daily outraged my sense
of justice, expressly, and in the most purpose-like manner. She was
thoroughly vulgar; and in a few weeks she was sent away.--One
annoyance that I remember at that place was (what now appears very strange)
the whispers I overheard about myself, as I sat on a little stool in a
corner of the dining-room, reading. My hostess, who might have said
anything in her ordinary voice without my attending to her, used to whisper
to her morning visitors about my wonderful love of reading,--that I
never heard anything that was said while I sat reading, and that I had
written a wonderful sermon. All the while, she pretended to disguise it,
winking and nudging, and saying "We never hear any thing
when we are reading:" "We have written a
sermon which is really quite wonderful at our age,"
&c. &c. I wished that sermon at Jericho
a hundred times; for in truth, I was heartily ashamed of it. It was merely a narrative of St. Paul's adventures, out of the Acts; and I knew it was no more a sermon than a string of parables out of the Gospels would have been.
There were some sweet country pleasures that summer. I never see
chestnuts bursting from their sheaths, and lying shining among the autumn
leaves, without remembering the old Manor-house where we children
picked up chestnuts in the avenue, while my hostess made her call at the
house. I have always loved orchards and apple-gatherings since, and
blossomy lanes. The truth is, my remembrances of that summer may be found
in "Deerbrook," though I now finally, (as often before,)
declare that the characters are not real. More or less suggestion from real
characters there certainly is; but there is not one, except the hero, (who
is not English,) that any person is justified in pointing out as
"from the life." Of the scenery too, there is more from Great
Marlow than from that bleak Norfolk district: but the fresh country
impressions are certainly derived from the latter. It was there that I had
that precious morsel of experience which I have elsewhere
detailed;*--the first
putting
my hand in among the operations of Nature, to modify them. After a morning
walk, we children brought in some wild strawberry roots, to plant in our
gardens. My plant was sadly withered by the time we got home; and it was
then hot noon,--the soil of my garden was warm and parched, and there
seemed no chance for my root. I planted it, grieved over its flabby leaves,
watered it, got a little child's chair, which I put over it for
shelter, and stopped up the holes in the chair with grass. When I went at
sunset to look at it, the plant was perfectly fresh; and after that, it
grew very well. My surprise and pleasure must have been very great, by my
remembering such a trifle so long; and I am persuaded that I looked upon
Nature with other eyes from the moment that I found I had power to modify
her processes.
In November came the news which I had been told to expect. My sister
Rachel had been with us in the country for a
fort-
___________________* Household Education,
p.152
Page 39
night; and we knew that there was to be a baby at home before we went back; and I remember pressing so earnestly, by letter, to know the baby's name as to get a rebuff. I was told to wait till there was a baby. At last, the carrier brought us a letter one evening which told us that we had a little sister. I still longed to know the name, but dared not ask again. Our host saw what was in my mind. He went over to Norwich a day or two after, and on his return told me that he hoped I should like the baby's name now she had got one;--"Beersheba." I did not know whether to believe him or not; and I had set my mind on "Rose." "Ellen," however, satisfied me very well. Homesick before, I now grew downright ill with longing. I was sure that all old troubles were wholly my fault, and fully resolved that there should be no more. Now, as so often afterwards, (as often as I left home) I was destined to disappointment. I scarcely felt myself at home before the well-remembered bickerings began;--not with me, but from the boys being troublesome, James being naughty; and our eldest sister angry and scolding. I then and there resolved that I would look for my happiness to the new little sister, and that she should never want for the tenderness which I had never found. This resolution turned out more of a prophecy than such decisions, born of a momentary emotion, usually do. That child was henceforth a new life to me. I did lavish love and tenderness on her; and I could almost say that she has never caused me a moment's pain but by her own sorrows. There has been much suffering in her life; and in it I have suffered with her: but such sympathetic pain is bliss in comparison with sack feelings as she has not excited in me during our close friendship of above forty years. When I first saw her it was as she was lifted out of her crib, at a fortnight old, asleep, to be shown to my late hostess, who had brought Rachel and me home, The passionate fondness I felt for her from that moment has been unlike any thing else I have felt in life,--though I have made idols of not a few nephews and nieces. But she was a pursuit to me, no less than an attachment. I remember telling a young lady at the Gate-House Concert, (a weekly undress concert) the next night, that
I should now see the growth of a human mind from the very beginning. I told her this because I was very communicative to all who showed me sympathy in any degree. Years after, I found that she was so struck by such a speech from a child of nine that she had repeated it till it had spread all over the city, and people said somebody had put it into my head: but it was perfectly genuine. My curiosity was intense; and all my spare minutes were spent in the nursery, watching,--literally watching,--the baby. This was a great stimulus to me in my lessons, to which I gave my whole power, in order to get leisure the sooner. That was the time when I took it into my head to cut up the Bible into a rule of life, as I have already told; and it was in the nursery chiefly that I did it,--sitting on a stool opposite the nursemaid and baby, and getting up from my notes to devour the child with kisses. There were bitter moments and hours,--as when she was vaccinated or had her little illnesses. My heart then felt bursting, and I went to my room, and locked the door, and prayed long and desperately. I knew then what the Puritans meant by "wrestling in prayer."--One abiding anxiety which pressed upon me for two years. or more was lest this child should be dumb: and if not, what an awful amount of labour was before the little creature! I had no other idea than that she must learn to speak at all as I had now to learn French,--each word by an express effort: and if I, at ten and eleven, found my vocabulary so hard, how could this infant learn the whole English language? The dread went off in amazement when I found that she sported new words every day, without much teaching at first, and then without any. I was as happy to see her spared the labour as amused at her use of words in her pretty prattle.
For nearly two years after our return from that country visit, Rachel
and I were taught at home. Our eldest brother taught Latin, and the next
brother, Henry, writing and arithmetic: and our sister, French,
reading and exercises. We did not get on well, except with the Latin. Our
sister expected too much from us, both morally and intellectually; and she
had not been herself carried on so far as to have much resource as a
teacher. We owed
to her however a thorough grounding in our French grammar (especially the verbs) which was of excellent service to us afterwards at school, as was a similar grounding in the Latin grammar, obtained from our brother. As for Henry, he made our lessons in arithmetic, &c. his funny time of day; and sorely did his practical jokes and ludicrous severity afflict us. He meant no harm; but he was too young to play schoolmaster; and we improved less than we should have done under less head-ache and heart-ache from his droll system of torture. I should say, on their behalf, that I, for one, must have seemed a most unpromising pupil,--my wits were so completely scattered by fear and shyness. I could never give a definition, for want of presence of mind. I lost my place in class for every thing but lessons that could be prepared beforehand. I was always saying what I did not mean. The worst waste of time, energy, money and expectation was about my music. Nature made me a musician in every sense. I was never known to sing out of tune. I believe all who knew me when I was twenty would give a good account of my playing. There was no music that I ever attempted that I did not understand, and that I could not execute,--under the one indispensable condition, that nobody heard me. Much money was spent in instruction; and I dislike thinking of the amount of time lost in copying music. My mother loved music, and, I know, looked to me for much gratification in this way which she never had. My deafness put an end to all expectation of the kind at last; but long before that, my music was a misery to me,--while yet in another sense, my dearest pleasure. My master was Mr. Beckwith, organist of Norwich Cathedral;--an admirable musician; but of so irritable a temper as to be the worst of masters to a shy girl like me. It was known that he had been dismissed from one house or more for rapping his pupils' knuckles; and that he had been compelled to apologize for insufferable scolding. Neither of these things happened at our house; but really I wondered sometimes that they did not,--so very badly did I play and sing when he was at my elbow. My fingers stuck together as in cramp, and my voice was as husky as if I had had cotton-wool in my throat.
Now and then he complimented my ear; but he oftener told me that I had no more mind than the music-book,--no more feeling than the lid of the piano,--no more heart than the chimney-piece; and that it was no manner of use trying to teach me any thing. All this while, if the room-door happened to be open without my observing it when I was singing Handel by myself, my mother would be found dropping tears over her work, and I used myself, as I may now own, to feel fairly transported. Heaven opened before me at the sound of my own voice when I believed myself alone;--that voice which my singing-master assuredly never heard. It was in his case that I first fully and suddenly learned the extent of the mischief caused by my shyness. He came twice a week. On those days it was an effort to rise in the morning,--to enter upon a day of misery; and nothing could have carried me through the morning but the thought of the evening, when he would be gone,--out of my way for three days, or even four. The hours grew heavier: my heart fluttered more and more: I could not eat my dinner; and his impatient loud knock was worse to me than sitting down in the dentist's chair. Two days per week of such feelings, strengthened by the bliss of the evenings after he was gone, might account for the catastrophe, which however did not shock me the less for that. Mr. Beckwith grew more and more cross, thinner and thinner, so that his hair and beard looked blacker and blacker, as the holidays approached, when he was wont to leave home for a week or two. One day when somebody was dining with us, and I sat beside my father at the bottom of the table, he said to my mother, "By the way, my dear, there is a piece of news which will not surprise you much, I fancy. Poor John Beckwith is gone. He died yesterday." Once more, that name made my heart jump into my mouth; but this time, it was with a dreadful joy. While the rest went on very quietly saying how ill he had looked for some time, and "who would have thought he would never come back?"--and discussing how Mrs. B. and the children were provided for, and wondering who would be organist at the Cathedral, my spirits were dancing in secret rapture. The worst of my besetting terrors was over
for ever! All days of the week would henceforth be alike, as far as that knock at the door was concerned. Of come, my remorse at this glee was great; and thus it was that I learned how morally injured I was by the debasing fear I was wholly unable to surmount.
Next to fear, laziness was my worst enemy. I was idle about brushing my
hair,--late in the morning,--much afflicted to have to go down to
the apple-closet in winter; and even about my lessons I was
indolent. I learned any thing by heart very easily, and I therefore did it
well: but I was shamefully lazy about using the dictionary, and went
on, in full anticipation of rebuke, translating
la rosée the rose,
tomber, to bury, and so on. This shows that
there must have been plenty of provocation on my side, whatever mistakes
there may have been on that of my teachers. I was sick and weary of the
eternal "Telemachus," and could not go through the labours of
the dictionary for a book I cared so little about. This difficulty soon
came to an end; for in 1813 Rachel and I went to a good day-school
for two years, where our time was thoroughly well spent; and there we
enjoyed the acquisition of knowledge so much as not to care for the
requisite toil.
Before entering on that grand new period, I may as well advert to a few
noticeable points.--I was certainly familiar with the idea of death
before that time. The death of Nelson, when I was four years old, was
probably the earliest association in my mind of mournful feelings with
death. When I was eight or nine, an aunt died whom I had been in the
constant habit of seeing. She was old-fashioned in her dress, and
peculiar in her manners. Her lean arms were visible between the
elbow-ruffles and the long mits she wore; and she usually had an
apron on, and a muslin handkerchief crossed on her bosom. She fell into
absent-fits which puzzled and awed us children: but we heard
her so highly praised (as she richly deserved) that she was a very
impressive personage to us. One morning when I came down, I found the
servants at breakfast unusually early: they looked very gloomy; bade
me make no noise; but would not explain what it was all about. The shutters
were half-closed;
and when my mother came down, she looked so altered by her weeping that I hardly knew whether it was she. She called us to her, and told us that aunt Martineau had died very suddenly, of a disease of the heart. The whispers which were not meant for us somehow reached our ears all that week. We heard how my father and mother had been sent for in the middle of the night by the terrified servants, and how they had heard our poor uncle's voice of mourning before they had reached the house; and how she looked in her coffin, and all about the funeral: and we were old enough to be moved by the sermon in her praise at chapel, and especially by the anthem composed for the occasion, with the words from Job,--"When the ear heard her then it blessed her," &c. My uncle's gloomy face and unpowdered hair were awful to us; and, during the single year of his widowhood, he occasionally took us children with him in the carriage, when he went to visit country patients. These drives came to an end with the year of widowhood; but he gave us something infinitely better than any other gift or pleasure in his second wife, whose only child was destined to fill a large space in our hearts and our lives.--Soon after that funeral, I somehow learned that our globe swims in space, and that there is sky all round it. I told this to James; and we made a grand scheme which we never for a moment doubted about executing. We had each a little garden, under the north wall of our garden. The soil was less than two feet deep; and below it was a mass of rubbish,--broken bricks, flints, pottery, &c. We did not know this; and our plan was to dig completely through the globe, till we came out at the other side. I fully expected to do this, and had an idea of an extremely deep hole, the darkness of which at the bottom would be lighted up by the passage of stars, slowly traversing the hole. When we found our little spades would not dig through the globe, nor even through the brickbats, we altered our scheme. We lengthened the hole to our own length, having an extreme desire to know what dying was like. We lay down alternately in this grave, and shut our eyes, and fancied ourselves dead, and told one another our feelings when we came out again. As far
as I can remember, we fully believed that we now knew all about it.
A prominent event of my childhoOd happened in 1812, when we went to
Cromer for the sake of the baby's health. I had seen the sea, as I
mentioned, when under three years old, as it swayed under the old jetty at
Yarmouth: and I had seen it again at Tynemouth, when I was
seven: but now it was like a wholly new spectacle; and I doubt
whether I ever received a stronger impression than when, from the rising
ground above Cromer, we caught sight of the sparkling expanse. At
Tynemouth, that singular incident took place which I have elsewhere
narrated,*--that I was shown
the sea, immediately below my feet, at the foot of the very slope on which
I was standing, and could not see it. The rest of the party must have
thought me crazy or telling a lie; but the distress of being unable to see
what I had so earnestly expected, was real enough; and so was the amazement
when I at last perceived the fluctuating tide. All this had gone out of my
mind when we went to Cromer; and the spectacle seemed a wholly new one.
That was a marvellous month that the nursemaid and we children spent there.
When we were not down on the sands, or on the cliffs, I was always perched
on a bank in the garden whence I could see that straight blue line, or
those sparkles which had such a charm for me. It was much that I was happy
for a whole month; but I also obtained many new ideas, and much
development;--the last chiefly, I think, in a religious direction.
In the preceding year another instance had occurred,--a most
mortifying one to me,--of that strange inability to see what one is
looking for (no doubt because one looks wrongly) of which the Tynemouth
sea-gazing was a strong
illustration.+ When the
great comet of 1811 was attracting all eyes, my star-gazing was just
as ineffectual. Night after night, the whole family of us went up to the
long windows at the top of my father's warehouse; and the
exclamations on all hands about the comet perfectly exasperated
me,--because I could not see it! "Why,
___________________* Letters on the Laws of
Man's Nature and Development, p. 161.
___________________+ Ibid.
Page 46
there it is!" "It is as big as a saucer." "It is as big as a cheese-plate." "Nonsense; you might as well pretend not to see the moon." Such were the mortifying comments on my grudging admission that I could not see the comet. And I never did see it. Such is the fact; and philosophers may make of it what they may,--remembering that I was then nine years old, and with remarkably good eyes.
We were horribly nervous, the first day we went to school. It was a very
large vaulted room, whitewashed, and with a platform for the master and his
desk; and below, rows of desks and benches, of wood painted red, and carved
all over with idle boys' devices. Some good many boys remained for a
time; but the girls had the front row of desks, and could see nothing of
the boys but by looking behind them. The thorough way in which the boys did
their lessons, however, spread its influence over us, and we worked as
heartily as if we had worked together. I
remember being somewhat oppressed by the length of the first morning,--from nine till twelve,--and dreading a similar strain in the afternoon, and twice every day: but in a very few days, I got into all the pleasure of it, and a new state of happiness had fairly set in. I have never since felt more deeply and thoroughly the sense of progression than I now began to do. As far as I remember, we never failed in our lessons, more or less. Our making even a mistake was very rare: and yet we got on fast. This shows how good the teaching must have been. We learned Latin from the old Eton grammar, which I therefore, and against all reason, cling to,--remembering when we recited all that Latin, prose and verse, which occupied us four hours. Two other girls, besides Rachel and myself, formed the class; and we certainly attained a capability of enjoying some of the classics, even before the two years were over. Cicero, Virgil, and a little of Horace were our main reading then: and afterwards I took great delight in Tacitus. I believe it was a genuine understanding and pleasure, because I got into the habit of thinking in Latin, and had something of the same pleasure in sending myself to sleep with Latin as with English poetry. Moreover, we stood the test of verse-making, in which I do not remember that we ever got any disgrace, while we certainly obtained, now and then, considerable praise. When Mr. Perry was gone, and we were put under Mr. Banfather, one of the masters at the Grammar-school, for Latin, Mr. B. one day took a little book out of his pocket, and translated from it a passage which he desired us to turn into Latin verse. My version was precisely the same as the original, except one word (annosa for antiqua) and the passage was from the Eneid. Tests like these seem to show that we really were well taught, and that our attainment was sound, as far as it went. Quite as much care was bestowed on our French, the grammar of which we learned thoroughly, while the pronunciation was scarcely so barbarous as in most schools during the war, as there was a French lady engaged for the greater part of the time. Mr. Perry prided himself, I believe, on his process of composition being exceedingly methodical; and he enjoyed above every thing initiating us into
the mystery. The method and mystery were more appropriate in our lessons in school than in his sermons in chapel;--at least, the sermons were fearfully dull; whereas the lessons were highly interesting and profitable. The only interest we could feel in his preaching was when he first brought the familiar fore-finger into play, and then built up his subject on the scaffolding which we knew so well. There was the Proposition, to begin with: then the Reason, and the Rule; then the Example, ancient and modern; then the Confirmation; and finally, the Conclusion. This may be a curious method, (not altogether apostolic) of preaching the gospel; but it was a capital way of introducing some order into the chaos of girls' thoughts. One piece of our experience which I remember is highly illustrative of this. In a fit of poetic furor one day we asked leave for once to choose our own subject for a theme,--the whole class having agreed before-hand what the subject should be. Of course, leave was granted; and we blurted out that we wanted to write "on Music." Mr. Perry pointed out that this was not definite enough to be called a subject. It might be on the Uses of Psalmody, or on the effect of melody in certain situations, or of martial music, or of patriotic songs, &c. &c.: but he feared there would be some vagueness if so large a subject were taken, without circumscription. However, we were bent on our own way, and he wisely let us have it. The result may easily be foreseen. We were all floating away on our own clouds, and what a space we drifted over may be imagined. We came up to Mr. P.'s desk all elate with the consciousness of our sensibility and eloquence; and we left it prodigiously crest-fallen. As one theme after another was read, no two agreeing even so far as the Proposition, our folly became more and more apparent; and the master's few, mild, respectful words at the end were not necessary to impress the lesson we had gained. Up went the fore-finger, with "You perceive, ladies" ......... and we saw it all; and thenceforth we were thankful to be guided, or dictated to, in the choice of our topics. Composition was my favourite exercise; and I got credit by my themes, I believe. Mr. Perry told me so, in 1834, when I had just completed the publication of my Political Economy
Tales, and when I had the pleasure of making my acknowledgments to him as my master in composition, and probably the cause of my mind being turned so decidedly in that direction. That was a gratifying meeting, after my old master and I had lost sight of one another for so many years. It was our last. If I remember right, we met on the eve of my sailing for America; and he was dead before my return.
Next to Composition, I think arithmetic was my favourite study. My
pleasure in the working of numbers is something inexplicable to
me,--as much as any pleasure of sensation. I used to spend my play
hours in covering my slate with sums, washing them out, and covering the
slate again. The fact is, however, that we had no lessons that were not
pleasant. That was the season of my entrance upon an intellectual life. In
an intellectual life I found then, as I have found since, refuge from moral
suffering, and an always unexhausted spring of moral strength and
enjoyment.
Even then, and in that happy school, I found the need of a refuge from
trouble. Even there, under the care of our just and kind master, I found my
passion for justice liable to disappointment as elsewhere. Some of our
school-fellows brought a trumpery charge, out of school, against
Rachel and me; and our dismay was great at finding that Mrs. Perry, and
therefore, no doubt, Mr. Perry believed us capable of a dirty trick. We
could not establish our innocence; and we had to bear the knowledge that we
were considered guilty of the offence in the first place, and of telling a
lie to conceal it in the next. How vehemently I used to determine that I
would never, in all my life, believe people to be guilty of any offence,
where disproof was impossible, and they asserted their
innocence.--Another incident made a great impression on me.--It
happened before the boys took their final departure; and it helped to make
me very glad when we girls (to the number of sixteen) were left to
ourselves.
Mr. Perry was one day called out, to a visitor who was sure to detain
him for some time. On such occasions, the school was left in charge of the
usher, whose desk was at the farther end of the great room. On this
particular day, the boys would not let
the girls learn their lessons. Somehow, they got the most absurd masks within the sphere of our vision; and they said things that we could not help laughing at, and made soft bow-wows, cooings, bleatings, &c., like a juvenile House of Commons, but so as not to be heard by the distant usher. While we girls laughed, we were really angry, because we wanted to learn our lessons. It was proposed by somebody, and carried unanimously, that complaint should be made to the usher. I believe I was the youngest; and I know I was asked by the rest to convey the complaint. Quite innocently I did what I was asked. The consequence,--truly appalling to me,--was that coming up the school-room again was like running the gauntlet. O! that hiss! "S-s-s--tell-tale--tell-tale!&r dquo; greeted me all the way up: but there was worse at the end. The girls who had sent me said I was served quite right, and they would have nothing to do with a tell-tale. Even Rachel went against me. And was I really that horrible thing called a tell-tale? I never meant it; yet not the less was it even so! When Mr. Perry came back, the usher's voice was heard from the lower regions--"Sir!" and then came the whole story, with the names of all the boys in the first class. Mr. Perry was generally the mildest of men; but when he went into a rage, he did the thing thoroughly. He became as white as his powdered hair, and the ominous fore-finger shook: and never more than on this occasion. J.D., as being usually "correct," was sentenced to learn only thirty lines of Greek, after school. (He died not long after, much beloved.) W.D., his brother, less "correct" in character, had fifty. Several more had from thirty to fifty; and R.S. (now, I believe, the leading innkeeper in old Norwich)--"R.S., always foremost in mischief, must now meet the consequences. R.S. shall learn SEVENTY lines of Greek before he goes home." How glad should I have been to learn any thing within the compass of human knowledge to buy off those boys! They probably thought I enjoyed seeing them punished. But I was almost as horror-struck at their fate as at finding that one could be a delinquent, all in a moment, with the most harmless intentions.
An incident which occurred before Mr. Perry's departure from
Norwich startled me at the time, and perhaps startles me even more now, as showing how ineffectual the conscience becomes when the moral nature of a child is too much depressed.--All was going on perfectly well at school, as far as we knew, when Mr. Perry one day called, and requested a private interview with my father or mother. My mother and he were talking so long in the drawing-room, that dinner was delayed above half-an-hour, during which time I was growing sick with apprehension. I had no doubt whatever that we had done something wrong, and that Mr. Perry had come to complain of us. This was always my way,--so accustomed was I to censure, and to stiffen myself under it, right or wrong; so that all clear sense of right and wrong was lost. I believe that, at bottom, I always concluded myself wrong. In this case it made no difference that I had no conception what it was all about. When my mother appeared, she was very grave: the mood spread, and the dinner was silent and gloomy,--father, brothers and all. My mother had in her heart a little of the old-fashioned liking for scenes: and now we had one,--memorable enough to me! "My dear," said she to my father, when the dessert was on the table, and the servant was gone, "Mr. Perry has been here." "So I find, my love." "He had some very important things to say. He had something to say about--Rachel--and--Harriet." I had been picking at the fringe of my doily; and now my heart sank, and I felt quite faint. "Ah! here it comes," thought I, expecting to hear of some grand delinquency. My mother went on, very solemnly. "Mr. Perry says that he has never had a fault to find with Rachel and Harriet; and that if he had a school full of such girls, he should be the happiest man alive." The revulsion was tremendous. I cried desperately, I remember, amidst the rush of congratulations. But what a moral state it was, when my conscience was of no more use to me than this! The story carries its own moral.
What Mr. Perry came to say was, however, dismal enough. He was no man of
the world; and his wife was no manager: and they were in debt and
difficulty. Their friends paid their debts (my father taking a generous
sham) and they removed to
Ipswich. It was the bitterest of my young griefs, I believe,--their departure. Our two years' schooling seemed like a lifetime to look back upon: and to this day it fills a disproportionate space in the retrospect of my existence,--so inestimable was its importance. When we had to bid our good master farewell, I was deputed to utter the thanks and good wishes of the pupils: but I could not get on for tears, and he accepted our grief as his best tribute. He went round, and shook hands with us all, with gracious and solemn words, and sent us home passionately mourning.--Though this seemed like the close of one period of my life, it was in fact the opening of its chief phase,--of that intellectual existence which my life has continued to be, more than any thing else, through its whole course.
After his departure, and before I was sent to Bristol, our mode of life
was this. We had lessons in Latin and French, and I in music, from masters;
and we read aloud in family a good deal of history, biography, and critical
literature. The immense quantity of needlework and music-copying
that I did remains a marvel to me; and so does the extraordinary bodily
indolence. The difficulty I had in getting up in the morning, the
detestation of the daily walk, and of all visiting, and of every break in
the monotony that I have always loved, seem scarcely credible to me
now,--active as my habits have since become. My health was bad,
however, and my mind ill at ease. It was a depressed and wrangling life;
and I have no doubt I was as disagreeable as possible. The great calamity
of my deafness was now opening upon me; and that would have been quite
enough for youthful fortitude, without the constant indigestion, languor
and muscular weakness which made life a burden to me. My religion was a
partial comfort to me; and books and music were a great resource: but
they left a large margin over for wretchedness. My beloved hour of the day
was when the cloth was drawn, and I stole away from the dessert, and read
Shakspere by firelight in winter in the drawing-room. My mother was
kind enough to allow this breach of good family manners; and again at a
subsequent time when I took to newspaper reading very
heartily. I have often thanked her for this forbearance since. I was conscious of my bad manners in keeping the newspaper on my chair all dinner-time, and stealing away with it as soon as grace was said; and of sticking to my Shakspere, happen what might, till the tea was poured out: but I could not forego those indulgences, and I went on to enjo