1834.

My birthplace.—My father and mother.—Circumstances of their marriage.—Their short married life.—Birth of their child.—Death of my mother.—Her character and habits.—My father as a widower.—Dulness of his life.—Its degradation.

I was born at Laneside near Shaw, which is now a manufacturing town of some importance about two miles from Oldham in Lancashire, and about four miles from Rochdale in the same county.

Laneside is a small estate with some houses and a little cotton-mill upon it, which belonged to my maternal grandfather. The house is of stone, with a roof of stone slate such as is usual in those parts, and it faces the road, from which it is separated by a little enclosure, that may be called a garden if you will. When I was a child, there were two or three poplar trees in that enclosure before the house; but trees do not prosper there, and now there is probably not one on the whole estate. One end of the house (which is rather long for its height and depth) abuts against the hill, and close behind it is the cotton-mill which my grandfather worked, with no great profit to himself or advantage to his descendants. I have mentioned a road that passes the house; it is steep, narrow, and inconvenient. It leads up to an elevated tract of the most dreary country that can be imagined, but there are one or two fields on the Laneside estate, above the stone-quarry, from which there is a good view in the direction of Rochdale.

I never knew my grandfather Cocker, but have heard that he was a lively and vigorous man, who enjoyed life very heartily in his way. He married a Miss Crompton, who had a little property and was descended from the De Cromptons of Crompton Hall. I am not aware that she had any family pride, but, like most people in that neighborhood, she had a great appreciation of the value of money, and when she was left alone with her daughter, in consequence of Philip Cocker's premature death, she was more inclined to favor wealthy than impecunious suitors. My father had come to Shaw as a young attorney some time before he asked for Anne Cocker in marriage. He had very little to recommend him except a fine person, great physical strength, and fifteen quarterings. He had a reputation for rather dissolute habits, was a good horseman, an excellent shot, looked very well in a ball-room, and these, I believe, were all his advantages, save an unhappy faculty for shining in such masculine company as he could find in a Lancashire village in the days of George IV. Money he had none, except what he earned in his profession, at one time rather a good income.

Miss Anne Cocker was a young lady with a will of her own, associated, I have been told (the two characteristics are by no means incompatible), with a very sweet and amiable disposition. At a time when my grandmother still vigorously opposed the match with my father, there happened to be a public charity ball in Shaw, and Miss Cocker showed her intentions in a very decided manner, by declining to dance with several gentlemen until the young lawyer presented himself, when she rose immediately with a very gracious smile, which was observed by all near enough to witness it. This was rather unkind perhaps to the other aspirants, and is, in fact, scarcely defensible, but it was Miss Cocker's way of declaring her intentions publicly. When my father made his offer, he was refused by my grandmother's orders, but received encouragement from her daughter (a tone of voice, or a look, yet more a tear, would be enough for a lover's hope), and counted upon the effects of perseverance. At length, when he and Miss Cocker thought they had waited long enough, they determined to marry without Mrs. Cocker's consent, and the determination was notified to my grandmother in the following very decided terms:—

"DR. Madam,—You are no doubt well aware of the warm attachment which has long existed betwixt your dear daughter and myself. Upwards of twelve months ago our affections were immovably fixed upon each other, and I now consider it my duty to inform you that we are fully engaged, and have finally concluded to be married within a fortnight of the present time.

"I sincerely trust that all your hostile feelings towards me are entirely worn out, and that you will receive me as the affectionate husband of your beloved daughter, and I with great confidence hope we shall be a happy family and live together with peace and harmony.

"At my request your daughter will have all her property settled upon herself, so that I can have no control over it—thus leaving it impossible that I should waste it. And I trust that by an active attention to my profession I may be enabled not inconsiderably to augment it.

"Be assured, Dear Madam, that your daughter and myself feel no little solicitude for your comfort and happiness, and that we shall at all times be most happy to promote them.

"It is our mutual and most anxious wish that you should not attempt to throw any obstacle in the way of our marriage, as the only tendency it could have under present circumstances would be to lessen the happiness and comfort of our union.

"We trust therefore that your regard for your daughter's happiness will induce you at once to give your full assent to the fulfilment of our engagement, as you would thereby divest our marriage of all that could possibly lessen the happiness we anticipate from it.

"I know that your principal objection to me has been on account of my unsteadiness, and I deeply regret ever having given you cause to raise such an objection; but I trust my conduct for some time back having been of a very different character, will convince you that I have seen my error. The gayety into which I have fallen may partly be ascribed to the peculiarity of my situation; having no relations near me, no family ties, no domestic comforts, &c., I may be the more excusable for having kept the company of young men, but I can assure you I have lost all inclination for the practice of such follies as I have once fallen into, and I look to a steady, sober married life as alone calculated to afford me happiness.

"I will wait upon you on Monday with most anxious hopes for your favorable answer.

"I am, Dear Madam,

"Yours most respectfully,

"JOHN HAMMERTON.

"Shaw, June 1st, 1833."

The reader may be surprised by the double m in the signature. It was my father's custom to write our name so, for a reason that will be explained in another chapter. The letter itself is rather formal, according to the fashion of the time, but I think it is a good letter in its way, and believe it to have been perfectly sincere. No doubt my father fully intended to reform his way of life, but it is easier to make a good resolution than to adhere to it. I do not know enough of the degree of excess to which his love of pleasure led him, to be able to describe his life as a young man accurately, but as my mother had been well brought up and was a refined person for her rank in society, I conclude that she would not have encouraged a notorious evil-liver. Those who knew my father in his early manhood have told me that he was very popular, and yet at the same time that he bore himself with considerable dignity, one old lady going so far as to say that when he walked through the main street at Shaw, it seemed as if all the town belonged to him. It is difficult for us to understand quite accurately the social code of the Georgian era, when a man might indulge in pleasures which seem to us coarse and degrading, and yet retain all the pride and all the bearing of a gentleman.

The marriage took place according to the fixed resolution of the contracting parties, and their life together was immensely happy during the short time that it lasted. Most unfortunately it came to an end after little more than one year by my mother's lamentably premature death. I happen to possess a letter from my father's sister to her sister Anne in which she gives an account of this event, and print it because it conveys the reality more vividly than a narrative at second hand. The reader will pardon the reference to myself. It matters nothing to a dead man—as I shall be when this page is printed—whether at the age of fourteen days he was considered a fine-looking child or a weakling.

"Friday Morning.

"MY DEAR ANNE,—You will not calculate upon so speedy an answer as this to your long and welcome epistle, nor will you calculate upon the melancholy intelligence I have to communicate. Poor John's wife, certainly the most amiable of all woman-kind, departed this life at twenty minutes past eleven last night. Her recovery from her confinement was very wonderful, we thought, but alas! it was a false one. The Drs. Whitaker of Shaw, Wood of Rochdale, and Bardsley of Manchester all agree in opinion that she has died of mere weakness without any absolute disease. She has been very delicate for a long time. Poor dear John—if I were quite indifferent to him I should grieve to see his agonies—he says at sixty it might have happened in the common course of things and he would have borne it better, but at twenty-nine, just when he is beginning life, his sad bereavement does indeed seem untimely. It is a sore affliction to him, sent for some good, and may he understand and apply it with wisdom! They had, to be sure, hardly been married long enough to quarrel, but I never saw a couple so intent on making each other happy; they had not a thought of each other but what tended to please. The poor little boy is a very fine one, and I hope he will be reared, though it often happens that when the mother is consumptive the baby dies. I do hope when John is able to look after his office a little that the occupation of his mind will give him calm. He walks from room to room, and if I meet him and he is able to articulate at all, he says, 'Ah! where must I be? what must I do?' He says nobody had such a wife, and I do think nobody ever had. He wanted me not to write till arrangements were made about the funeral. I thought you would be sorry to be informed late upon a subject so near John's heart, and that it was too late for Mr. Hinde [Footnote: The Rev. Thomas Hinde, Vicar of Featherstone, brother-in-law of the writer of the letter.] to come to the funeral. I have really nothing to say except that our poor sister was so tolerable on Wednesday morning that I went with the Milnes of Park House to Henton Park races, which I liked very well, but as things have turned out I heartily repent going. Ann was, we hoped, positively recovering on Monday and Tuesday, but it seems to have been a lightening before death. She was a very long time in the agonies of death, but seemed to suffer very little. Our afflicted brother joins me in best love to you and your dear children. Kind compliments to Mr. Hinde.

"I remain,

"Your affectionate Sister,

"M. HAMMERTON."

The letter is without date, but it bears the Manchester postmark of September 27, 1834, and the day of my birth was the tenth of the same month. The reader may have observed a discrepancy with reference to my mother's health. First it is said that the doctors all agreed in the opinion that she died of mere weakness, without any absolute disease, but afterwards consumption is alluded to. I am not sure, even yet, whether my mother was really consumptive or only suffered from debility. Down to the time when I write this (fifty-one years after my mother's death) there have never been any symptoms of consumption in me.

No portrait of my mother was ever taken, so that I have never been able to picture her to myself otherwise than vaguely, but I remember that on one occasion in my youth when I played the part of a young lady in a charade, several persons present who had known her, said that the likeness was so striking that it almost seemed as if she had appeared to them in a vision, and they told me that if I wanted to know what my mother was like, I had only to consult a looking-glass. She had blue eyes, a very fair complexion, and hair of a rich, strongly-colored auburn, a color more appreciated by painters than by other people. In the year 1876 I was examining a large boxful of business papers that had belonged to my father, and burning most of them in a garden in Yorkshire, when a little packet fell out of a legal document that I was just going to throw upon the fire. It was a lock of hair carefully folded in a piece of the bluish paper my father used for his law correspondence, and fastened with an old wire-headed pin. I at once took it to a lady who had known my mother, and she said without a moment's hesitation that the hair was certainly hers, so that I now possess this relic, and it is all I have of my poor mother whose face I never saw, and whose voice I never heard. Few people who have lived in the world have left such slight traces. There are no letters of hers except one or two formal compositions written at school under the eye of the mistress, which of course express nothing of her own mind or feelings. Those who knew her have told me that she was a very lively and amiable person, physically active, and a good horsewoman. She and my father were fond of riding out together, and indeed were separated as little as might be during their brief happiness. She even, on one occasion, went out shooting with him and killed something, after which she melted into tears of pity over her victim. [Footnote: A lady related to my mother shot well, and killed various kinds of game, of which I remember seeing stuffed specimens as trophies of her skill.]

The reader will pardon me for dwelling thus on these few details of a life so sadly and prematurely ended. The knowledge that my mother had died early cast a certain melancholy over my childhood; I found that people looked at me with some tenderness and pity for her sake, so I felt vaguely that there had been a great loss, though unable to estimate the extent of it. Later, when I understood better what pains and perils Nature inflicts on women in order that children may come into the world, it seemed that the days I lived had been bought for me by the sacrifice of days that my mother ought to have lived. She was but twenty-four when she passed away, so that now I have lived more than twice her span.

The effect of the loss upon my father was utterly disastrous. His new and good projects were all shattered, and a cloud fell over his existence that was never lifted. He did not marry again, and he lost his interest in his profession. My mother left him all her property absolutely, so he felt no spur of necessity and became indolent or indifferent; yet those who were capable of judging had a good opinion of his abilities as a lawyer. Just before his wife's death, my father had rather distinguished himself in an important case, and received a testimonial from his client with the following inscription:—

Presented to Mr. Hammerton, Solr, by his obliged client Mr. Waring, as a token of Esteem for his active services in the cause tried against Stopherd at Lancaster, in the arrangement of the argument arising thereon at Westminster, and his successful defence to the Equity Suit instituted by the Deft. 1834.

My father's practice at that time was beginning to be lucrative, and would no doubt have become much more so in a few years; but the blow to his happiness that occurred in the September of 1834 produced such discouragement that he sought relief from his depression in the society of lively companions. Most unfortunately for him, there was no lively masculine society in the place where he lived that was not at the same time a constant incitement to drinking. There were a few places in the Lancashire of those days where convivial habits were carried to such a degree that they destroyed what ought to have been the flower of the male population. The strong and hearty men who believed that they could be imprudent with impunity, the lively, intelligent, and sociable men who wanted the wittiest and brightest talk that was to be had in the neighborhood, the bachelor whose hearth was lonely, and the widower whose house had been made desolate, all these were tempted to join meetings of merry companions who set no limits to the strength or the quantity of their potations. My poor father was a man of great physical endowments, and he came at last to have a mistaken pride in being able to drink deeply without betraying any evil effects; but a few years of such an existence undermined one of the finest constitutions ever given to mortal man. A quarryman once told me that my father had appeared at the quarry at six o'clock in the morning looking quite fresh and hearty, when, taking up the heaviest sledge-hammer he could find, he gayly challenged the men to try who could throw it farthest. None of them came near him, on which he turned and said with a laugh of satisfaction, —"Not bad that, for a man who drank thirty glasses of brandy the day before!" Whether he had ever approached such a formidable number I will not venture to say, but the incident exactly paints my father in his northern pride of strength, the fatal pride that believes itself able to resist poison because it has the muscles of an athlete.

It was always said by those who knew the family that my father was the cleverest member of it, but his ability must have expended itself in witty conversation and in his professional work, as I do not remember the smallest evidence of what are called intellectual tastes. My mother had a few books that had belonged to her family, and to these my father added scarcely anything. I can remember his books quite clearly, even at this distance of time. One was a biography of William IV., another a set of sketches of Reform Ministers, a third was Baines's "History of Lancashire," a fourth a Geographical Dictionary. These were, I believe, almost all the books (not concerned with the legal profession) that my father ever purchased. His bookcase did not contain a single volume by the most popular English poets of his own time, nor even so much as a novel by Sir Walter Scott. I have no recollection of ever having seen him read a book, but he took in the "Times" newspaper, and I clearly remember that he read the leading articles, which it was the fashion at that time to look upon as models of style. This absence of interest in literature was accompanied by that complete and absolute indifference to the fine arts which was so common in the middle classes and the country aristocracy of those days. I mention these deficiencies to explain the extreme dulness of my poor father's existence during his widowhood, a dulness that a lover of books must have a difficulty in imagining. A man living alone with servants (for his son's childhood was spent elsewhere), who took hardly any interest in a profession that had become little more than nominal for him, who had not even the stimulus of a desire to accumulate wealth (almost the only recognized object in the place where he lived), a man who had no intellectual pursuits whatever, and whose youth was too far behind him for any joyous physical activity, was condemned to seek such amusements as the customs of the place afforded, and these all led to drinking. He and his friends drank when they were together to make society merrier, and when they happened to be alone they drank to make solitude endurable. Had they drunk light wines like French peasants, or beer like Germans, they might have lasted longer, but their favorite drink was brandy in hot strong grogs, accompanied by unlimited tobacco. They dined in the middle of the day, and had the spirit decanters and the tobacco-box on the table instead of dessert, frequently drinking through the whole afternoon and a long evening afterwards. In the morning they slaked alcoholic thirst with copious draughts of ale. My father went on steadily with this kind of existence without anything whatever to rescue him from its gradual and fatal degradation. He separated himself entirely from the class he belonged to by birth, lived with men of little culture, though they may have had natural wit, and sacrificed his whole future to mere village conviviality. Thousands of others have followed the same road, but few have sacrificed so much. My father had a constitution such as is not given to one man in ten thousand, and his mind was strong and clear, though he had not literary tastes. He was completely independent, free to travel or to make a fortune in his profession if he preferred a sedentary existence, but the binding force of habit overcame his weakened will, and he fell into a kind of life that placed intellectual and moral recovery alike beyond his reach.