The Gentleman Cadet / His Career and Adventures at the Royal Military Academy Woolwich

The following pages contain a history of the life of a Woolwich Cadet as it was about thirty years ago. The hero of the tale is taken through the then usual routine of a cram-school at Woolwich, and from thence passed into the Royal Military Academy. The reformation that has taken place—both in the preparatory schools and also at the Academy—may be judged of by those who read this book and are acquainted with existing conditions. The habits and life of a Cadet of the present day are well known, but the singular laws and regulations—written and unwritten—in former times may not be so generally understood; and, as memory of the past fades away, the following pages have been penned, to give a history of the singular life and manners of the old Cadet. The work has no other pretensions than to give this history, and to afford amusement to the young aspirant for military glory.
Southsea, September , 1874.

On the borders of the New Forest, in Hampshire, stands an old-fashioned thatch-roofed family-house, surrounded by cedars and firs, with a clean-shaved, prim-looking lawn opposite the drawing-room windows, from which a magnificent view was visible of the forest itself and the Southampton waters beyond. In that house I was born; and there I passed the first fourteen years of my existence in a manner that must be briefly recorded, in order to make the reader acquainted with my state of education previous to a somewhat eventful career in a more busy scene.
My father had been intended for the Church, but having at Cambridge taken a dislike to holy orders, and finding himself left, by the death of my grandfather, sole possessor of a sum of about thirty thousand pounds invested in Consols, he decided to live an easy life, and enjoy himself, instead of taking up any profession—an error that caused him to be what may be called “a mistake” all his life, and which was the cause of much suffering to me.
Having devoted some eight or ten years to travelling and seeing the world, my father married, and selected for his wife the youngest of seven daughters of a very worthy but very poor clergyman in Wiltshire, who bore him two daughters and myself; after which she sickened and died at the early age of twenty-six.