laid on her lap, up the long dusty road that leads from the church to the little white-painted house on the cliff-top. Naturally, she received heartfelt sympathy from her friends and neighbours in Sandchurch. To return husbandless, and with a fatherless child! All about the village, heads could not stop shaking in disbelief at the double calamity. The general commiseration was received by my mother with genuine gratitude, for the sudden death of the Captain had been a severe shock to her, despite his inadequacies as a husband.
All these things I came to know much later, after my mother’s death. I pass now to my own memories of my childhood at Sandchurch.
We lived quietly enough – my mother and I, Beth, and Billick, a grizzled old salt, who chopped wood, tended the garden, and drove the trap. The house faced south across a stretch of soft turf towards the Channel, and from my earliest years the strongest memory I have is of the sound of waves and wind, as I lay in my cradle under the apple-tree in the front garden, or in my room, with its little round window set above the porch.
We had few visitors. Mr Byam More, my mother’s uncle, would come down from Somerset two or three times a year. I also have a clear memory of a pale, sad-eyed lady called Miss Lamb, who sat talking quietly with my mother whilst I played on the rug before the parlour fire, and who reached down to stroke my hair, and ran her fingers across my cheek, in a most gentle and affecting way. I can recall it still.
For a period of my childhood, my mother suffered from severe depression of spirits, which I now know was caused by the death of her childhood friend, Laura, Lady Tansor, whose name was also unknown to me until after my mother’s death. Her Ladyship (as I later learned) had discreetly supported my mother with little gifts of her own money, and other considerations. But when she died, these payments ceased, and things went hard for Mamma, the Captain’s paltry legacy to her having long since been exhausted; but she determined that she would do all in her power to maintain us both, for as long as possible, in the house at Sandchurch.
And so it came about that the publisher, Mr Colburn, received on his desk in New Burlington-street a brown- paper package containing
Mr Colburn duly replied to the lady with a courteous two-page critique of its merits and demerits, and concluded by saying that he would be happy to arrange for publication, though on terms that provided for my mother’s contributing towards the costs. This proposal she accepted, using money with which she could ill afford to speculate; but the venture was successful, and Mr Colburn came back gratifyingly quickly with a request for a successor, on much improved terms.
So began my mother’s literary career, which continued uninterruptedly for over ten years, until her death. Though the income derived from her literary efforts kept us safe and secure, the effort involved was prodigious, and the effects on my mother’s constitution were only too apparent to me as I grew older and observed her slight hunched form forever bent over the big square table that served her for a desk. Sometimes, when I entered the room, she would not even look up, but would speak gently to me as she continued to write, her face close to the paper. ‘What is it, Eddie? Tell Mamma quickly, dear.’ And I would say what I wanted, and she would tell me to ask Beth – and off I would go, back to the concerns of my own world, leaving her to scratch away in hers.
At the age of six, or thereabouts, I was put into the pedagogic care of Thomas Grexby. When I joined it, Tom’s little school consisted of himself, a plump, blank-faced boy called Cooper, who appeared to find even the most elementary branches of learning deeply mystifying, and me. Master Cooper was set exercises in basic schooling that required him to pass long hours on his own in strenuous concentration, tongue lolling out with the effort, leaving Tom and me to read and talk together. I made rapid progress, for Tom was an excellent teacher, and I was exceedingly eager to learn.
Under Tom’s care I quickly mastered my reading, writing, and numbers; and, on the firm foundations thus laid down, he encouraged me to build according to my own inclinations. Every subject, and every topic within every subject, to which Tom introduced me assailed me with a keen hunger to know more. In this way, my mind began to fill up with prodigious amounts of undigested information on every conceivable topic, from the principles of Archimedes to the date of the creation of the world according to Archbishop Ussher.*
Gradually, however, Tom began to impose some rigour on this habit of mental acquisitiveness. I settled down to gain a thorough mastery of the Greek and Latin tongues, as well as a solid grounding in history, and the main vernacular literatures of Europe. Tom was also a dedicated bibliophile, though his attempts to assemble a collection of fine editions of his own were severely curtailed by his always limited means. Still, his knowledge and connoisseurship in this area were considerable, and it was from him that I learned about incunabula and colophons, bindings and dentelles, editions and issues, and all the other minutiae beloved of the bibliographical scholar.
And so things went on until I reached the age of twelve, at which point my life changed.
On the day of my twelfth birthday, in March 1832, I came down to breakfast to find my mother sitting at her work-table with a wooden box in her hands.
‘Happy birthday, Eddie.’ She smiled. ‘Come and kiss me.’
I did so most willingly, for I had seen little of her in recent days as she struggled to finish yet another work for Mr Colburn and his increasingly demanding deadlines.
‘This is for you, Eddie,’ she said quietly, holding out the box.
It was deep, hinged, about nine inches square, and made of a rich dark wood, with a band of lighter wood running round an inch or so above the base. The lid had raised angled sides and was inlaid on one of the faces with a coat of arms. Two little brass handles were set on each side, and on the front face was a shield-shaped escutcheon. For several years it stood on my mantel-piece in Temple-street.
‘Open it,’ my mother said gently.
Inside nestled two soft leather purses, each containing a large quantity of gold coins. I tumbled them out onto the table. They amounted to two hundred sovereigns.*
Naturally, I could not comprehend how so much money could suddenly find its way to us in this way, when my mother’s poor drawn face told so eloquently of what necessity required her to do, constantly and with no prospect of cessation, in order to keep our little family safe from want.
‘Where has all this money come from?’ I asked in astonishment. ‘Mamma, is it yours?’
‘No, my love,’ my mother replied, ‘it is yours, to do with as you like. A present from an old, old friend, who loved you very much, but who will never see you again. She wished for this to be given to you, so that you may know that she will think of you always.’
Now, the only friend of my mother’s that I could think of was sad-eyed Miss Lamb; and so for some years I cherished the belief, never contradicted by my mother, that
