A CHILD'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
A quaint and charming volume, which has fallen in our way, is Little Charlie's Life, "the autobiography of a child between six and seven years of age, written with his own hand and without any assistance whatever." It was at the urgent request of the gentleman who acted as editor, Rev. W.R. Clark—thus rescuing an inimitable little work from comparative oblivion—that the parents of the youthful author reluctantly consented to the publication of this curious delineation of child-life. From the date of his birth (1833), Charlie must have written his work some forty years ago. How long he was engaged in its composition is not stated, but from the internal evidence yielded by the spelling and the handwriting (for the work is lithographed in exact imitation of the manuscript) we should infer that it occupied two or three years, the handwriting of the first seven chapters being in imitation of ordinary printing, while the remaining chapters appear in an ordinary schoolboy's hand. We may add that it is copiously illustrated by himself, and that the illustrations are worth their weight in gold, supplementing as they do, in a superfluously exact and curiously quaint manner, this most unique work.
He starts with this account of himself: "My name is Charles John Young, and I was born in Amfort, a pretty village in Hampshire, 1833 in July, that pleasant time when the birds sing merrily and flowers bloom sweetly. My father and mother are the kindest in the world, and I love them dearly and both alike. I shall give a description of them by and by. In the mean time I shall just say that my papa is a clergyman."
The earlier chapters describe the various migrations of the family from one parish to another, and from them we have no difficulty in recognizing in "papa" the Rev. Julian Young, who possessed no small share of the talents that distinguished his father, the celebrated tragedian, Charles Young, and which seem to have been transmitted to our author, who, we understand, has honorably served his country in Her Majesty's army. From his earliest years Charlie seems to have been strongly influenced by religious feelings. His creed was a bright and trustful one, a realization of God's presence and of the need of speaking to Him as to one who could always hear and help. When he was about three years old, we are told in the editor's interesting preface, he was often heard offering up little petitions for the supply of his child-like wants. Once, when, his nurse left him to fetch some more milk, his father overheard him saying, "O God, please let there be enough milk in the jug for me to have some more, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen." Many quaint little religious reflections and scriptural allusions are interspersed throughout the book. In one place he declares that "without papa and mamma the garden would be to me what the wilderness was to John the Baptist;" while again he offers up a pathetic prayer for a baby-brother; and throughout we are struck by the fact that his religion was pre-eminently one of love. Charlie's educational advantages were of the noblest and best, home-training largely predominating. In the ninth chapter he refers in a simple matter-of-fact way to his early studies: "Mamma devotes her time in teaching me and in reading instructive books with me. Papa tells me about the productions of the earth, rivers, mountains, valleys, mines, and, most wonderful of all, the formation of the human body." Further on we read: "Nothing of any great importance occurred now for some time. My life was spent quietly in the country, as the child of a Wiltshire clergyman ought, mamma devoting her time in teaching me, and my daily play going on the same, till at last papa and mamma took me to the splendid capital of England." However much this brilliant transition may have dazzled him, he still prefers his quiet country home, arguing thus: "As to living there [in London], I should not like it. The reason why—because its noisy riots in the streets suit not my mood like the tranquil streams and the waving trees I love in England's country.... 'Tis true—oh, how true!—in the poetic words of Mr. Shakespeare, 'Man made the town, God made the country.'"
Despite the stilted style and absurdly pompous descriptions, with an occasional terrible breakdown, Charlie's love of Nature, and especially of the animal creation, seems to have been most genuine. He speaks of "the wide ocean which when angry roars and clashes over the beach, but when calm crabs are seen crawling on the shore and the sun shines bright over the waves," and of "the billows rolling over each other and foaming over the rough stones," with an apparently real enthusiasm. The softer emotions of his nature were engrossed in this way, as we infer from the negative evidence afforded by his autobiography that he reached his seventh year without any experience of the tender passion.
His physiological ideas in the speculations regarding the origin of a baby-brother are naïvely expressed: "One day I was told that a baby was born [this was when he was three years and a half old], and upon going into mamma's bedroom I saw a red baby lying in an arm-chair wrapped in swaddling-clothes. It puzzled me very much to think how he came into the world: it was mysterious, very, and I cannot make it out now. My first thought was, that he must have had airy wings, and after he had come they had disappeared. My second thought was that he was so very little as to be able to come through the keyhole, and increased rapidly in size, just as it says in the Bible that a grain of mustard-seed springs to be so large a tree that the fowls of the air can roost upon it."
In his sixth year Charlie evinced poetic tendencies. We have in one of his poems a description of his grandpapa, "a venerable old gentleman with dark eyes, gray hair, noble features, and altogether very generous aspect." Here is "a song appropriate to him:"
Oh, venerable is our old ancestor—
Cloud on his brow,
Lightning in his eyes,
His gray hair streaming in the wind.
To children ever kind,
To merit never blind,—
Oh, such is our old ancestor,
With hair that streameth wild.
At the head of this poem is a picture of the old ancestor, consisting of a hat, a head, a walking-stick, one arm and two legs, one of which—whether the right or left is doubtful, as their origin is concealed by the aforesaid arm—is much longer than the other, and walking in a contrary direction. The most wonderful feature of this sketch is the "hair streaming in the wind," the distance from the poll to the end of the flowing locks being longer than the longest leg.
We cannot conclude without an extract describing a "dreadful accident" which happened to our youthful author; "perhaps," as he solemnly says, "for a punishment of my sins, or to show me that Death stands ready at the door to snatch my life away:" "One night papa had been conjuring a penny, and I thought I should like to conjure; so I took a round brass thing with a verse out of the Bible upon it that I brought into bed with me. I thought it went down papa's throat, so I put it down my throat, and I was pretty near choked. I called my nurse, who was in the next room. She fetched up papa, and then my nurse brought the basin. Papa beat my back, and I was sick. Lo! there was the counter! Papa said, 'Good God!' and my nurse fainted, but soon recovered. Don't you think papa was very clever when he beat my back? Papa then had a long talk afterward with me about it—a very serious one."
The above pathetic story is accurately illustrated, but we especially regret that we cannot transfer to these pages some of the marvellous delineations of the animals in the Clifton Zoological Garden.
M.S. D.