FOOTNOTES:
[4] The only two entries in the rate-books of Alresford, relating to payments made by “George Mitford—Surgeon,” are, under an assessment at 9d. in the pound, made in 1787—7s.; and, under an assessment at 4½d. in the pound, made in 1790—5s.
[5] Dr. Graham’s “Celestial Bed” for sterile couples is numbered among the astounding frauds of the early nineteenth century. To his “Temple”—first in the Adelphi and later, as he grew wealthy and more daring, to Schomberg House in Pall Mall—there thronged a heterogeneous mass of people, some taking him and his nostrums seriously, while others—the bulk, it is suggested—paid large sums for admission to view Emma Lyon, afterwards Lady Hamilton, pose, in scant drapery, as the Goddess of Hygiene. Not the least of this charlatan’s astounding achievements are his obscene and blasphemous pamphlets on the most delicate subjects, which he circulated broadcast among the class to which he knew they would appeal.
CHAPTER III
READING AND SCHOOL DAYS AT CHELSEA
Dr. Mitford’s spirit was a sanguine one; he could not believe that Dame Fortune intended to frown on him and his for ever. With much to commend it in a general way, the possession of such a spirit may yet be a menace, a positive danger. To a man of Dr. Mitford’s character it was a danger. It led him into the rashest of speculations; it launched him upon the wildest of wild schemes and left him, nearly always, a loser.
On one occasion, however, Fortune smiled on him in so dramatic a fashion that thereafter his belief in himself could never be shaken.
It happened some long time after the family had been settled in the dingy London apartments and, in accordance with his usual practice, the Doctor had taken his little daughter to walk about London—a never-failing source of delight to her, both then and in later life.
“One day”—her own description of the event is so expressive and circumstantial—“he took me into a not very tempting-looking place, which was, as I speedily found, a lottery-office. It was my birthday, and I was ten years old. An Irish lottery was upon the point of being drawn, and he desired me to choose one out of several bits of printed paper (I did not then know their significance) that lay upon the counter.
“‘Choose which number you like best,’ said the dear papa, ‘and that shall be your birthday present.’
“I immediately selected one, and put it into his hand; No. 2,224.
“‘Ah!’ said my father, examining it, ‘you must choose again. I want to buy a whole ticket; and this is only a quarter. Choose again, my pet.’
“‘No, dear papa, I like this one best.’
“‘Here is the next number,’ interposed the lottery-office keeper, ‘No. 2,223.’
“‘Ay,’ said my father, ‘that will do just as well. Will it not, Mary? We’ll take that.’
“‘No!’ returned I obstinately; ‘that won’t do. This is my birthday, you know, papa, and I am ten years old. Cast up my number, and you’ll find that makes ten. The other is only nine.’
“My father, superstitious like all speculators, struck with my pertinacity and with the reason I gave, which he liked none the less because the ground of preference was tolerably unreasonable, resisted the attempt of the office-keeper to tempt me by different tickets, and we had nearly left the shop without a purchase, when the clerk, who had been examining different desks and drawers, said to his principal:—
“‘I think, sir, the matter may be managed if the gentleman does not mind paying a few shillings more. That ticket, 2,224, only came yesterday, and we have still all the shares: one half, one quarter, one eighth, two sixteenths. It will be just the same if the young lady is set upon it.’
“The young lady was set upon it, and the shares were purchased.
“‘The whole affair was a secret between us, and my father, whenever he got me to himself, talked over our future twenty thousand pounds—just like Alnaschar over his basket of eggs.
“Meanwhile time passed on, and one Sunday morning a face that I had forgotten, but my father had not, made its appearance. It was the clerk of the lottery-office. An express had just arrived from Dublin, announcing that No. 2,224 had been drawn a prize of twenty thousand pounds, and he had hastened to communicate the good news.”
Twenty thousand pounds! Dame Fortune was indeed rewarding the optimist. Dr. Mitford was nothing if not magnanimous, and although he had presented the lottery ticket as a birthday present to his daughter, and although it was due to her persistence only that the winning number, 2,224, had been chosen, he at once claimed the success as his own, and, when informing his friends, added that he should settle the whole amount on his daughter.
No trace of any such settlement can be discovered; if it was made it was speedily annulled and in the course of a very few years it had been all squandered in the Doctor’s own reckless fashion.
“Ah, me!” reflects Miss Mitford. “In less than twenty years what was left of the produce of the ticket so strangely chosen? What? except a Wedgwood dinner-service that my father had made to commemorate the event with the Irish harp within the border on one side, and his family crest on the other!”
The infinite possibilities of twenty thousand pounds were not lost on the Doctor. Forthwith he moved with his wife, child and few belongings to Reading, then a fairly prosperous and eminently respectable town, swarming “with single ladies of that despised denomination which is commonly known by the title of old maids.”
At the period of which we are now writing its commerce was practically confined to trading in the products of the rural districts surrounding it—principally in malt, corn and flour. Being on the direct coach-road from London to the West of England, it was, naturally, a great and important centre for the carrying trade, as witness whereof the many quaint old inns still standing. An air of prosperity pervaded the streets, for the ancient borough was just beginning to rouse itself from the lethargy into which it had drifted when its staple trade, the manufacture of cloth, dwindled and died scarcely a century before.
“Clean, airy, orderly and affluent; well paved, well lighted, well watched; abounding in wide and spacious streets, filled with excellent shops and handsome houses,” is Miss Mitford’s description of it, and she might have added that it was once again comporting itself in the grand manner as was proper to a town whose origin is lost in the mists of antiquity, but whose records, from the twelfth century at least, are records of great doings of both Church and State.
In Miss Mitford’s day there were still many picturesque examples of fifteenth-century domestic architecture bordering the streets, while the ruined magnificence of the Great Abbey, with its regal tomb of Henry I before the High Altar, lent it a touch of dignity the like of which few other provincial towns could assume.
The move from London to Reading took place in 1797, and the house they inhabited was a new and handsome red-brick structure on the London Road, fortunately still standing, and now known as “Kendrick View.” Here, with his phaeton, his spaniels and greyhounds, Dr. Mitford proceeded to enjoy himself with, apparently, no regard whatever for the future. The swarms of old maids excelled in arranging card-parties to which, by inviting the wives, they managed to secure the presence and company of the husbands. At these parties the Doctor was an ever-welcome guest, for, as we have already noted, he was one of the finest whist-players of his time. Everything he did was performed on a lavish scale. His greyhounds, for instance, were the best that money could procure—no coursing meeting either in the neighbourhood or the country for many miles round was considered complete unless the Mitford kennel was represented, nor, as the Doctor was impatient of defeat, did he consider the meeting a success unless the Mitford kennel carried all before it.
Meanwhile, and when not engaged in the mild excitements of cribbage and quadrille, Mrs. Mitford paced the garden at the rear of the house, “in contented, or at least uncomplaining, solitude,” for even now, she could never be certain whether, at any moment, the hazardous life her husband was leading might not plunge them once again into a miserable poverty; “a complaining woman uncomplaining.”
Their daughter’s education now became a matter of moment, for she was in her eleventh year. Accordingly, she was entered as a boarder at the school kept by M. St. Quintin, a French émigré, at 22, Hans Place, Sloane Street, then almost surrounded by fields, and even now, although much altered, a pleasant enough situation.
“Kendrick View,” Reading, where the Mitfords lived, 1797-1805
M. St. Quintin and his wife enjoyed a reputation of no ordinary character, and before venturing on the Hans Place establishment had built up a good connection and secured an equally good name, in the conduct of the Abbey School at Reading in a house adjoining what is known to have been the Inner Gateway of the famous Abbey. In this Abbey School—though not under the tuition of Monsieur and Madame St. Quintin—Jane Austen received much of her education, as did also another famous author, Mrs. Sherwood.
Their reputation in Reading was, doubtless, the deciding factor in favour of sending Mary Mitford to them in London, and that the decision was a happy one there can be no question.
Little Mary, from her very early years, had not enjoyed the best of health. As is common with precocious children, she was somewhat scrofulous; coupled with this she was further disadvantaged by being short and fat. Nor was she pretty. Her portrait, painted when she was three years old, while it depicts an intelligent face, shows nothing of the beauty usual in children of that age. On the other hand, we have it on the authority of those who knew her well, that whatever defects of form and feature she may have suffered were amply compensated by the winsome smile, the gentle temper, keen appreciation of life and all it had to give, and by the silver-toned voice, all of which endeared her to those who came under the spell of her personality.
She was essentially the child of her parents, combining the quiet acquiescent nature of her mother with all the optimistic characteristics of her father; and although, happily, she never gave evidence of emulating her father in his selfishness or those other worse attributes of character which he sometimes displayed, the fact has to be recorded that, occasionally, here and there, among the originals of her letters to her father is to be detected a certain coarseness of thought and expression which go to prove that even she was not altogether proof against the influence of this unwise parent.
Monsieur St. Quintin’s establishment was well calculated to interest the observant child, and of her schoolmaster and his associates she has given us an amusing and picturesque description.
“He had been secretary to the Comte de Moustiers, one of the last Ambassadors, if not the very last, from Louis Seize to the Court of St. James’s. Of course he knew many emigrants of the highest rank, and, indeed, of all ranks; and being a lively, kind-hearted man, with a liberal hand and a social temper, it was his delight to assemble as many as he could of his poor countrymen and countrywomen around his hospitable supper-table. Something wonderful and admirable it was to see how these Dukes and Duchesses, Marshals and Marquises, Chevaliers and Bishops, bore up under their unparalleled reverses! How they laughed and talked, and squabbled, and flirted,—constant to their high heels, their rouge, and their furbelows, to their old liaisons, their polished sarcasms, their cherished rivalries! For the most part, these noble exiles had a trifling pecuniary dependency; some had brought with them jewels enough to sustain them in their simple lodgings in Knightsbridge or Pentonville; to some a faithful steward contrived to forward the produce of some estate, too small to have been seized by the early plunderers; to others a rich English friend would claim the privilege of returning the kindness and hospitality of by-gone years.”
Many of them eked out a precarious living by teaching languages, fencing, dancing and music; while some, like Monsieur St. Quintin, were fortunate in being able to found and carry on an educational establishment on a somewhat large scale.
Although shy and awkward, home-sick and lonely, little Mary soon found much in the Hans Place establishment to interest and amuse her. Like all other similar establishments, it contained an element of exclusiveness fostered by the snobbish half-dozen great girls who, being “only gentlemen’s daughters, had no earthly right to give themselves airs.” These the little country girl did not take seriously enough to give her cause for trouble. But she noticed them, nevertheless, and watched with youthful contempt their successful attempts to ostracize other less-favoured girls than themselves. Her memories of such incidents are epitomized very charmingly in her Recollections, wherein she records the pathetic story of Mademoiselle Rose, and the triumph over her tormentors of the neglected, snubbed and shy poor Betsy. It reads almost like a “moral tale,” but is saved from the general mediocrity of such effusions by its honest ring of indignation, of sweet girlish sympathy with the suffering of her fellow-pupil and governess, and of denunciation of the thoughtless ones.
Mademoiselle Rose was the granddaughter of an aged couple among the émigrés who gathered at Madame St. Quintin’s supper parties. They bore noted names of Brittany and had possessed large estates, but now having lost these and their two sons and been driven from their country, they were dependent on the charity of others, and on what their granddaughter Rose could earn by straw-plaiting to make into the fancy bonnets then in vogue. Mademoiselle Rose deserves to live in our minds, she was so brave. “Rose!” says Miss Mitford; “what a name for that pallid drooping creature, whose dark eyes looked too large for her face, whose bones seemed starting through her skin, and whose black hair contrasted even fearfully with the wan complexion from which every tinge of healthful colour had flown!” Even when she accompanied her grandparents to the supper parties she always brought her work, and rarely put it down during the whole evening, so ceaseless was the toil by which she laboured to support the aged couple now cast upon her duty and her affection.
At length it became necessary to find some other means of income apart from the straw-plaiting, and so Mademoiselle Rose was installed as a governess in the St. Quintin establishment, “working as indefatigably through our verbs and over our exercises as she had before done through the rattle of the tric-trac[6] table and the ceaseless chatter of French talk,” now and again putting in a word for her straw-plaits which in these new circumstances had to be made during a scanty leisure, and her insistent desire for the sale of which she made no effort to conceal.
At this juncture arrived Betsy, a child of nine, the daughter of a cheese-merchant in the Borough, and therefore considered as fair game by the vulgar and vain daughters of gentlemen. She came with her father, who although he stayed but five minutes, was so typical a John Bull in voice and bearing that the elegant French dancing-master who received him shrugged himself almost out of his clothes with ill-concealed disgust. “I rather liked the man,” says Miss Mitford; “there was so much character about him, and, in spite of the coarseness, so much that was bold and hearty.”
The disgust of the dancing-master was not lost upon him, for his parting injunction to the mistress of the establishment was “to take care that no grinning Frenchman had the ordering of his Betsy’s feet. If she must learn to dance, let her be taught by an honest Englishman.”
The conduct of both parent and dancing-master was a cue indeed for the gentlemen’s daughters, of which they quickly took advantage, to the great discomfort of poor Betsy, who, discarding Mary Mitford’s advances, sought and found silent comfort with Mademoiselle Rose. It was only silent comfort she obtained, the comfort of suffering souls in sympathy with each other, for neither knew the other’s language, and the only solace they obtained was in working together over the straw-plaits, in which Betsy quickly became adept. By some means the child was made aware of Mademoiselle Rose’s story, which had then become more poignant by reason of the fact that, although an opportunity had presented itself, by arrangement with the First Consul, for the re-admission of her grandparents to France and possibly for the ultimate recovery of some of their property, it could not be grasped, as they were all too poor to bear the expense. So poor Rose sighed over her straw-plaits, and submitted. Shortly afterwards Betsy was summoned home and begged permission to take one of Rose’s bonnets to show her aunt, with a view to purchase, a request which was granted. Two hours later Betsy reappeared in the schoolroom together with her father. The scene which ensued must be told in Miss Mitford’s own words.
“‘Ma’amselle,’ said he, bawling as loud as he could, with the view, as we afterwards conjectured, of making her understand him—‘Ma’amselle, I have no great love for the French, whom I take to be our natural enemies. But you’re a good young woman; you’ve been kind to my Betsy, and have taught her how to make your fallals; and, moreover, you’re a good daughter, and so’s my Betsy. She says that she thinks you’re fretting because you can’t manage to take your grandfather and grandmother back to France again; so, as you let her help you in that other handiwork, why you must let her help you in this.’ Then throwing a heavy purse into her lap, catching his little daughter up in his arms, and hugging her to the honest breast where she hid her tears and her blushes, he departed, leaving poor Mdlle. Rose too much bewildered to speak, or to comprehend the happiness that had fallen upon her, and the whole school the better for the lesson.”