“I was born on October 20th, 1822, at Uffington, Berks, of which village my grandfather was Vicar. He was also a Canon of St. Paul’s, and spent half the year at his house in Amen Corner, with which my first memories of London are connected. It was, till this year, the strangest quiet old nook in the city, behind its big timber gates, within one hundred yards of Fleet street on one side, and Newgate Market on the other, but the distant murmur of life only made the repose more striking in those days. Now they are building some new minor Canons’ houses on the vacant ground beyond which will be opened out towards Newgate street, and the corner will be a thoroughfare. The most remarkable fact of my childhood happened there, as I was in the house (I believe) with Sir Walter Scott, a great friend of my grandfather, on his last sad visit to London.

“My grandmother was a very notable woman in many ways, and a great economist and early riser. She used to take me and my brother out shopping in the early morning, and our excursions extended as far as Billingsgate fish-market, then at the height of the career which has secured for it an unenviable place in our English vocabulary. It was certainly a strange place for a lady and small boys, and is connected with the most vivid of my childish memories. Toddling after my grandmother to the stall where she made her purchases, we came one morning on the end of a quarrel between a stalwart fish-fag and her fancy man. She struck him on the head with a pewter pot which flattened with the blow. He fell like a log, the first blood I had ever seen, gushing from his temples, and the scene is as fresh as ever in my memory at the end of half a century. The narrow courts in that neighborhood are still my favorite haunts in London.

“But my town visits were short. I was a thorough country-bred boy, and passed eleven months in the year at the foot of the Berkshire chalk-hills, much in the manner depicted in ‘Tom Brown.’

“I was sent to school at the early age of eight, to accompany my elder brother. It was a preparatory school for Winchester, and the best feature about it was the Winchester custom, called ‘standing up,’ which means that we were encouraged to learn a great deal of poetry by heart, for which we got extra marks at the end of the half year. We were allowed (within limits) to choose our own poets, and I always chose Scott from family tradition, and in this way learned the whole of the ‘Lady of the Lake,’ and most of the ‘Lay of the last Minstrel’ and ‘Marmion,’ by heart, and can repeat much of them to this day. Milton reckoned highest for marks, but I was prejudiced against him in this wise: Not far from the school was Addington, a place of the then Duke of Buckingham, who was also a friend of my grandfather, who, with my grandmother, paid him a visit at the end of our first half year. We went over to sleep, and travel back home next day with the old folk, and in the morning before starting, the Duchess gave us each a sovereign, neatly wrapped up in white, glossy paper. It was the first piece of gold I ever had, and I kept it in my hand to look at on the journey. I was leaning out of the window of the carriage when my attention was suddenly called to some roadside sight, and I dropped the precious metal. My shout of anguish and dismay brought the carriage to a stand-still, and I had to confess. After some trouble my sovereign was found, and taken charge of by my grandmother, who, in due course, returned it to me, no longer in current coin of the realm, but in the shape of a pocket edition of Milton’s poems, with ‘Thomas Hughes from the Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos’ written on the title page. I still possess the odious small volume, and have learnt to forgive the great Puritan,—indeed, I have read Masson’s life of him with real interest in these latter days. But I never learnt a line of him by heart as a boy, and regret it to this day.

“Those were evil days in Wessex, the time of the Swing riots and machine and rick burning. My father was the most active magistrate in the district, and was constantly in the saddle, keeping the King’s peace. He was an old fashioned Tory, but with true popular sympathies, and had played cricket and football all his life with the men and boys of our village, and it is one of my proudest memories that only one man from Uffington joined the rioters, and he came back after three weeks ashamed and penitent. Amongst other good deeds, my father rode off alone one night and saved the house and chapel of a dissenting minister in a neighboring village from being sacked and burned. Nevertheless I can not pretend to say that I was brought up to look upon dissenters as anything but a stiff-necked and perverse generation.

“At the age of ten, February 1834, I was sent on to Rugby with my brother, as, happily for us, Arnold had been a college friend of my father. Here I stayed till I was nearly nineteen, starting from the bottom and ending in the sixth form, though by no means at the head of the school.

“It was a very rough, not to say brutal, place when I went there, but much mended during those years.

“I was a very idle boy so far as the regular lessons were concerned, and I expect I should have been advised to go elsewhere early in my career but for a certain fondness for history and literature which Arnold discovered in me and which (I fancy) covered a multitude of sins. He first struck it at a monthly examination of the Shell, then the form intervening between the fourth and fifth. He asked the head boy why it was the Romans had so specially rejoiced over the terms of a certain treaty with the Parthians (we were reading Horace, I think). It came all down to the lowest bench where I was, and I said, ‘because they got back the eagles taken from Crassus,’ and sent a gleam of pleasure into the Doctor’s face which was getting rather grim. Up I went to the top of the form, and from that time he often asked me questions outside the text book and specially by way of illustration from Scott’s novels, to which he was fond of referring. I could generally come to the point, having them at my fingers’ ends, and was proud of my consequent recognition. To this day I remember the feeling of grief and humiliation which came across me when I failed him on a critical occasion. It was years after the above event when I was in the sixth, and some distinguished visitor (Bunsen, I think it was) was present at the lesson. We were reading the passage in Aristotle about old age, (is it in the Ethics or Politics? I’m sure I forget) and he asked the head of the school to illustrate from Scott’s novels what Aristotle says about the characteristic of old age, to be absorbed in petty interests and to be careless about great contemporary events. Down came the question, past some very able and some very studious boys, since distinguished one way or another—past John Connington, Matt. Arnold, Sir R. Cross, to me—and then the Doctor paused for several seconds with a confident look. But no response came and he passed on, ‘and I was left lamenting.’ No one answered, and he had to remind us of the old Abbot, pottering away in his garden on the border, when Mary and her defeated followers ride up before Crossing, and the old monk leans on his spade and looks after them, saying, ‘I could pity this poor Queen and these Lords, but what are these things to a man of four score—and it’s a fine growing morning for the young kale-wort’—and so goes to his spading again.

“I cannot help to this day wondering at the patience and forbearance both of him and my tutor, Cotton, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, over my frightful copies of verses, and Greek and Latin prose. As I was head of the eleven at cricket, and of bigside at football, I naturally had but small leisure to devote to such matters, and consequently my copies were notorious for the number of picture frames they were certain to contain,—picture frames being the strong black marks which the Doctor used to make round bad, false concords munus hospitalis or quantities munera stare

“He used to do it slowly and grimly, his under lip seeming to grow out as the pen went deliberately round the wretched words, and one did not feel good during the operation. But as no boy enjoyed the sausage seller’s buffooneries, or Socrates’ banters more than I, (tho’ I made sad hashes in construing them) I remained in favor, tho’ incorrigible, till the end.

“I carried away from Rugby dreadfully bad scholarship, but two invaluable possessions. First, a strong religious faith in and loyalty to Christ; and secondly, open mindedness. It was said (and is still said, I believe,) of Arnold, by way of censure, that to him everything was an open question every morning of his life. And though he never made any direct effort to unsettle any of our convictions that I can remember, we went out into the world the least hampered intellectually of any school of English boys of that time. To this day I am always ready to change an old opinion the moment I can get a better one, and so I think it has been with many of my old school-fellows, though we believed ourselves to be a thorough true blue school.

“Perhaps I also owe to Rugby my strong democratic bias, but I don’t think it. I guess I was born so (or barn-zo, as Wessex chaw-bacon pronounced it in the famous story). As a little scrap in petticoats nothing pleased me so much as playing with the village children, and I could never understand why they shouldn’t have all the things I had. At any rate it was at Rugby that I first was able to indulge my radical propensities. Up to my time, the school-close (or playgrounds) was kept as sacred ground, no ‘lout’ (as we politely called the neighboring lieges) being allowed to set foot within the precincts, and I had often noticed the insolent airs with which casual intruders in fustian or corduroy had been extruded. So when I became head of the eleven (and so a sort of constitutional monarch in the close) I asked the best cricketers amongst the ‘louts’ to come in and practice with me on summer evenings, and got up matches with their club, to the great advantage, I still believe, of school as well as town.

“I was dreadfully loath to leave, and when I was obliged, (as nineteen is the limit of ages) was much averse to going up to Oxford. I knew that my scholarship was too weak to allow me to take anything like high honors, and so, as my profession was to be the Bar, I wanted to go up to London at once and enter at an Inn of Court. My father, however, after consulting his legal friends, decided that I should go to Oxford, and accordingly I went up to his old College, Oriel, in February, 1842. My first year at Oxford was utterly wasted, except that I learned to pull a good oar, and perfected myself in boxing, which was then much in vogue, several prize-fighters being generally kept in pay by the under-graduates. The lectures were perfectly easy to me as I had read all the books at Rugby, and I employed no private tutor. I knew I couldn’t take high honors, (or at any rate choose to think so) and as I happened to fall into an idle, fast set, just did as the rest, and made a fool of myself in all the usual ways. But I never much enjoyed that kind of thing and got very sick of it by the time I had taken my little-go, and towards the end of my second year, just before I was of age, the most important event of my life happened, for in the long vacation I became engaged to my wife, then a schoolgirl, the great friend of my only sister. This pulled me up short. Our parents very properly said we were silly young people and must not see one another for years, or correspond, that we might see whether we really knew our minds. I went back to Oxford quite a new man, knocked off all not absolutely necessary expense, and lived decently and soberly for the rest of my time, taking my degree the first moment I could without coaching, by which I saved money. Consequently, with the help of a small legacy of £200, which came to me at twenty-one from an old great-aunt, I came away quite out of debt and with some small balance towards furnishing chambers in London, which was fairly creditable, as, there being three of us up at once, my father only allowed us £200 a year each. This was supposed to be too small for a fellow to live on!! Alas, it is even worse now, I fear!

“I had the good luck to be under Clough (the poet) and Fraser, now Bishop of Manchester, who were Oriel tutors at that time, and the latter of whom is still one of my closest friends. I went up, as I have said, believing myself still a Tory, but left Oxford a Radical. Something of the change was owing to the insolence of undergraduate life at that day, but more to a tour I took with a pupil through the North in the long vacation of my third year. My pupil was the son of a neighboring Berkshire squire, and all his father wanted was that I should keep him out of mischief. If he could be interested or taught anything, so much the better. We happened to stop at a Commercial hotel in Lancashire on our way North, and in the bagman’s room I got into an argument with some of the North county travellers on the subject of the Corn Laws, then prominently before Parliament. On this first night I came speedily to the conclusion that I knew very little about the matter, and before I returned to Oxford for Michaelmas term I had become a good free-trader.

“I was nearly twenty-two when I went up to London, straight from Oxford, to begin my legal career. My father kindly suggested that I should take a run on the Continent before settling down, to get up my French and German to the point at any rate of tolerably fluent small talk, and here again I have no doubt but he was right, as the want of early training of ear and tongue has left me a helpless mortal ever since. However, I was determined to lose not a month or a week if I could help it, and soon found myself in small rooms on the third floor at No. 15 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, from the windows of which, on a fine day, I could see the Surrey hills. I paid £30 a year for the chambers, and lived in them for another £70, keeping down my whole expenditure within £100 a year, a feat I am still rather proud of. I never could have done it but for a glorious old woman who kept the house, and did for all the inhabitants, of whom only two lived in their chambers. She had come up from Devonshire as a girl some fifty years before to that house where she had been ever since, and in all that time had never seen the Thames, which is, as you know, not five minutes’ walk from Lincoln’s Inn Fields; nor St. Paul’s, except the dome, from the top windows of No. 15. She still spoke with a delightful Devonshire accent, all her U’s being as soft as if she had left Torquay yesterday, and I won her heart at once by professing, or I should say acknowledging, a passion for junket, which she prepared in a reverent and enthusiastic manner on the slightest excuse. As my wife that was to be lived in Devonshire, the coincidence was peculiarly grateful to me, and the dear old woman, Roxworthy by name, could not have had my interests more at heart had I been her own son.

“There I lived for two years and upwards pleasantly enough, for several old school and college friends had chambers in the neighborhood. My engagement was a constant stimulus to work and economy, and made me indifferent as to society. I just visited two or three family friends on Sundays, and for the rest did very well without it. From my own experience I would have every youngster get engaged by the time he is twenty-one, though I am not prepared to maintain that a long engagement is so good for girls as for boys. Mine at any rate was the making of me. My democratic instincts grew in strength during these years, notwithstanding the failure of my first practical endeavors to act up to them. One of these I will mention. Every house in the Square was entitled to a key of the five gardens, in which I spent most of the long summer evenings; and, seeing the number of ragged children who came round the railings and looked wistfully through at the lawns and beds within, I extended my privilege to them and used to let them in by the scores, and watch them tumbling on the grass and gathering the daisies with entire satisfaction. From the first, this outrageous proceeding greatly scandalized the Beadle, whose remonstrances I entirely disregarded, until at last a notice came from the Trustees of the Square that the key of No. 15 would be called in. This threat so alarmed poor Mrs. Roxworthy that I was fain to promise amendment, and so ceased myself to frequent the gardens. At the end of thirty years a strong effort is being made, as you may see in the papers, to throw the gardens open; so I live in hopes before long of seeing my revenge on the ghost of the Beadle of my day.

“I read hard at the law, but it was very much against the grain, and my endeavors to master the subtleties of contingent remainders, executory devises, the scintilla juris, and all the rest of it, were only partially successful. I sometimes think I might have taken con amore to common law and to criminal business, but conveyancing and real property law had no attractions for me, beyond the determination, if I could, to make a living by them. I read with a very able conveyancer and kindly old gentleman, who did his best to impart the mysteries to some six pupils. He soon found where my strength, such as it was, lay, and employed me in the preparation of deeds—such as appointments of new Trustees, where the operative part was quite simple common form, but long statements of fact had to be made in the recitals. These I rather excelled at, and on the whole, by the time I was of standing to be called to the Bar, was probably about as fit for that ceremony as the average of my cotemporaries.

“Three months before it took place I was married, the probation which my wife’s parents had very properly insisted on, having expired at the beginning of 1847, and we being found entirely in the same mind after our three years of separation. Most of our friends thought us mad, as we started on the vast income of £400 a year. It was confidently foretold that we should be living on our friends or in the workhouse before long, which prophesies however were entirely falsified. We started in tiny lodgings, almost opposite the house we now live in, and always managed to pay our way in the worst of times. And though I admit the experiment was a risky one, I have never repented it.

“The year of my call, 1848, was the year of revolutions, and on the 10th of April I paraded, like the rest of respectable society, as a special constable, though with shrewd misgivings in my own mind that the Chartists had a great deal to say for themselves. In which belief I soon found sympathizers. Frederick Maurice had recently been appointed Chaplain of Lincoln’s Inn, and was gathering round him a number of young Barristers and Students, whom he was putting to work in their spare time at a ragged school, and visiting the poor in a miserable district near Lincoln’s Inn. Contact with our wretched clients soon made it clear to us that something more radical and systematic was needed to raise them to anything like independence. They were almost all in the hands of slop sellers, chamber masters, or other grinders of the faces of the poor. What could be done to deliver them? In the autumn, one of our number spent some time in Paris and came back full of the material and moral effects of association amongst the workmen there.

“We resolved to try the experiment and accordingly formed ourselves into a society for promoting Workingmen’s Associations, with Maurice as president. The idea grew on us apace, and soon called out an amount of enthusiasm which surprised ourselves. We were all busy men, tied to offices from ten till five, so we met at six in the morning and eight at night to settle our rules, and organize our work. We were all poor men too, but soon scraped together enough money to start our first Association. This we resolved should be a tailoring establishment, for which we could ourselves, with the help of our friends, find sufficient custom in the first instance. We had no difficulty in hiring good airy workshops, but how to fill them was the rub. We were now in communication with a number of poor workpeople, especially amongst the Chartists, and, to cut a long story short, started our Association with a slop-worker who had been in prison as manager, and some dozen associates of kindred opinions in the workroom.

“I needn’t trouble you with any details of the Christian Socialist movement, of which this was a beginning, and which made a great noise in the press and elsewhere at the time. It has survived any number of follies and failures, and has gradually spread till there is a union of Societies all over the kingdom, doing a work for our poorer classes which one can only wonder at and be thankful for.

“We wrote tracts, and started a small paper, ‘The Christian Socialist,’ and were soon at open strife with nearly the whole of our press, both the ‘Edinburgh’ and the ‘Quarterly’ condescending to bestow on us contemptuous, but very angry articles, in which they were joined by weeklies and dailies innumerable. But we were young, saucy, and so thoroughly convinced we were right that ‘we cared, shall I say, not a d—n for their damning.’

“Most of my friends looked very serious, and prophesied that my prospects at the Bar would be ruined by my crotchets, and indeed I was dreadfully afraid of this myself. But the state of things in England was so serious, and I was so thoroughly convinced of the necessity of work in this direction, that I couldn’t give it up. No doubt I lost some business by it, but other business came, as I was wonderfully punctual at Chambers and soon got to be friends with my few clients, who even got to pardon, with a shrug of the shoulders, the queer folk they often found there. And queer no doubt they were for a Chancery barrister’s chambers, as emissaries from the tailors’, shoemakers’, printers’, and builders’ Associations (we had a dozen of them going by this time) were often in and out about their rules and accounts and squabbles. I only remember one instance in which I really suffered. A dear old gentleman, a family friend of ours, had managed with much difficulty to persuade his solicitor to give me some business. That most respectable of men, head of a firm which could have made any young barrister’s fortune, arrived one afternoon at my chambers with a brief, and was asked by my clerk to sit down for a moment till I was disengaged. This he did, graciously enough, though no doubt with the thought ‘how little I could know my business to keep him waiting even for a moment,’ when my door opened, and a full-blown black person (lately from the West Indies in quest of advice and aid for the freedmen there) walked out. This was too much for my intending client, who hurried away, saying he would call again, but I never saw his brief or him.

“So things went on for some years during which I managed to maintain my growing family without dropping my work for the Associations. We had migrated to Wimbledon, for health’s sake, where we built a house side by side with one of the other Promoters, which had one large room common to both houses, the subject of much chaff and fun to our visitors and acquaintance. Our garden was also in common, and both arrangements, I think, answered well.

“About this time Maurice became convinced that if Associations of working people were to succeed, the men must be better educated in the highest sense. So he set to work to establish the Workingmen’s College, of which he was the first and I am the present Principal. It is a very noteworthy institution, at which, by the way, Emerson and Goldwin Smith, besides Stanley, Kingsley, Huxley, and other eminent Englishmen, have delivered opening addresses, at the beginning of the academical year, in October.

“I found it at first very hard to discover my mission at the college. I tried lectures on the law of combination and association, but they did not draw, and all the other classes for which I was competent, were filled by much better teachers from amongst our number. So, noting how badly set up the men were with round shoulders, and slouching gait, and how much they needed some strong exercise to supple them, I started a boxing class, and had some horizontal and parallel bars put up in the back-yard. These proved a great success, and at last it became clear to me, that all my Oxford time spent on such matters had not been thrown away. In connection with the boxing and gymnastic classes, we started social gatherings for talk and songs, over a cup of tea, which also were wonderfully successful. I remember Hawthorne coming to one of them; brought by his friend, H. Bright, of Liverpool, and quite losing his shyness and reserve for the evening.

“By this time we had a boy of eight, and, thinking over what I should like to say to him before he went to school, I took to writing a story as the easiest way of bringing out what I wanted. It was done mainly in the long vacation of 1856, but wasn’t published till early in the next year, and made such a hit that the publishers soon betrayed the secret, and I became famous!

“Whereupon arose again the professional bugbear, now set at rest for years. I had managed to get over and live down Christian Socialism, but who on earth would bring business to a successful author! I considered whether I shouldn’t throw over Lincoln’s Inn and take to writing, but decided that the law was best for me, and determined to stop writing. This good resolution held for two years, when the Berkshire festival of scouring the White Horse, (an old Danish or Saxon, certainly Pagan figure, still left on our chalk-hills,) came round, and my old country friends made such a point of having an account of it from me that I gave in and wrote my book No. 2.

“By this time my clients had become case-hardened, and finding no particular ill effects from my previous escapades, I gave in in a weak moment to a tempting offer of Macmillan’s, and wrote ‘Tom Brown at Oxford,’ for his magazine. Moreover, I had now made a plunge into public life, and was one of the leaders of a semi-political party. This is how it came about: There had been roused in me lively sympathies with the Abolitionists, and I had followed eagerly the progress of events through the Fugitive Slave, and Free Soil agitations. There was no warmer sympathizer with Garrison and John Brown and Levi Coffin, in England; so when the Lincoln election came, and South Carolina led off the seceding states with jubilant applause of society in England, I went at once fiercely into the other camp. You may judge of the difficulty of getting our public men of note to take active sides with the North (tho’ many of them didn’t conceal their sympathy, and were ready to speak in Parliament, and write,) by the fact that I was about the most prominent speaker at the first great public meeting, which was held in London. This proved to be such an extraordinary success, that there was no further effort on the part of the jingoes (that name hadn’t yet been invented, but it was precisely the same party,) to demonstrate publicly in the metropolis. In other centres there was need of such work, and I went to Birmingham and Liverpool to speak and deliver lectures on the war and its causes and issues. It was supposed that there was to be a row at the latter place, which was the stronghold of the Rebels; but all went off quietly.

“It was mainly in consequence of these doings that I was asked by the working folk in South London to stand for Lambeth in 1865. I did so, and was brought in triumphantly at the head of the Poll, and almost all the expense paid by subscription. From that time I gradually gave up legal business, and in 1868 took silk, as it is called, i. e., became a Queen’s Counsel. In 1869 I wrote ‘Alfred the Great’ for Macmillan’s Sunday Series. I now made it my chief business to attend to Social-Political questions in Parliament; sat on two Trades Unions Commissions; got amendments to the Industrial and Friendly Societies Acts through the House, but never took to party politics.

“In 1870, as I hope you remember, I paid my delightful visit to America.

“In 1872 I lost my dear eldest brother, and soon after wrote the memoir of him for my family. Maurice also died, and I became Principal of the Workingmen’s College.

“Before the next election (1874) the Co-operative question had come to the front. The success of the Upper Class London Supply Societies [copies of our working-class Associations in their main principle and features] had roused the tradesmen throughout the country. I was a candidate for Marylebone, and was fiercely opposed by the tradesmen, and supported by the professional and working classes. There were three Liberal candidates for only two seats, so it was agreed to refer it to the Attorney General to say who should retire, and he decided that I had the worst chance of winning the seat (on one-sided and insufficient evidence, as my supporters maintained, and I think rightly). I therefore retired, and got no chance of entering that Parliament. For by this time the Trades Protection Society had been organized, to fight against neither small nor great, but only against those accursed revolutionists who had supported the Co-operative movement, and refused to flinch from it.

“So it happened that I was again thrown out at the election this year. I had consented, on the unanimous and unsolicited request of the Liberal party in Salisbury, to stand there, and all went well till just before the election, when the Trades Protective people permitted the party organization to throw me over. I doubt if I shall ever return to the House, as my views on the Church question make me an almost hopeless candidate in the North of England, and my support of Co-operation a perfectly hopeless one at present in the South. I care, however, very little about it, having plenty to do outside in keeping irons hot, especially that most interesting of all my irons, the Tennessee settlement, which I hope to keep very hot indeed, and look upon as about the most hopeful of the many New Jerusalems which have attracted me during my pilgrimage. I am off to open Chapter II. of that Romance [Chapter I., the getting the titles clear, buying the land, &c., having taken some two years.] on the 12th of next month, and I can’t tell you how much my heart is in it.

“And so end my confessions. The only other points of interest, omitted above, are the publication of the ‘Old Church,’ in 1877, when the disestablishment movement began to get serious, and ‘The Manliness of Christ,’ this Spring, (1880), which latter has been already republished on your side in four different forms; and lastly, my share in the Volunteer movement, which I joined at its start in 1859. The Workingmen’s College raised a corps of two companies at once, of which, after serving for a few weeks as private, I was made Captain. It soon swelled into a regiment, the 19th Middlesex, of which I became Colonel, and served in it twelve years.”