“Her watchword, like Miss Buss’, was Duty. I once answered, in real fright, ‘Oh, aunt, I am sure I cannot!’ She replied, ‘Child, never say I cannot, when called to any duty, but do the best you can!’ The devoted love that her children bore her was only the due return for her unwearied care of, and tenderness to, them in every detail of their life.”
Her family regard it only as traditional that their mother was descended from Mrs. Fleetwood, the daughter of Oliver Cromwell; but I had it as an accepted fact from one of the undoubted members of that family, who was proud to claim even so remote a connection with one whom she had so much admired. Miss Andrews must have been educated at Mrs. Wyand’s school, in the generation preceding Miss Buss, and she probably spoke with authority on the matter. She also had remarkable power as a teacher, with quite original views on education, a fact interesting as throwing a sidelight on the school in which Miss Buss was educated, the best in the neighbourhood of Mornington Crescent.
In a book of “Memories,” compiled for the family circle of Dr. Henry Buss—the “Uncle Henry” to whom, as a girl, “Fanny” owed some of her first holiday trips abroad—we find it recorded that “in 1689, William and Mary brought in their train from Holland a Mrs. Buss, who held the post of nurse to the Princess Anne, afterwards queen.”
The descendants of Mrs. Buss settled chiefly in the county of Kent. At Bromley, in 1775, we find one of them, Robert Buss, holding a post in the Excise. He afterwards became a schoolmaster at Tunbridge. His son, William Church Buss, became known as “a skilled engraver,” and, marrying “pretty Mary Anne Starling,” made his home, in 1803, in Jewin Street, Aldersgate.
We must dismiss entirely all our present associations with Aldersgate, and go back to the beginning of the century, to the description given by Dr. Buss of the city at the time when his parents made their home there—
“At this time the city itself was separated by fields from the village of Islington. It was the custom for pedestrians, especially after dark, to collect at Aldersgate-bars in sufficient force to protect each other from footpads, while crossing the fields to this village.
“The site of the existing City Road Basin was a market garden, thus utilized when the Grand Junction Canal Company extended their waterway through the city to the Thames. From the village of Islington to Highgate and Hampstead it was nearly all fields. Copenhagen House stood in the midst of cornfields. This spot is now the centre of New Smithfield Cattle Market.... The river Fleet was then as wide as the New River, and was supplied with boats for rowing. Excepting the Thames, it was the nearest river, and also a favourite bathing-place for the youth of London.”
There was probably no great change, as it was still before the days of steam and rail, when the little granddaughter of William Church Buss was sent to visit her grandparents, who had then removed to Newgate Street. Her maternal grandparents still lived in Clerkenwell, near the market gardens there.
William Church Buss was a very skilful engraver, and his son, Robert William Buss, was trained by him, and was a clever engraver before he became a painter, and subsequently a well-known etcher on copper and steel, and draughtsman for wood-engravers. Working in this way, he illustrated the novels of Mrs. Trollope and Captain Marryat, and other writers, and two of the first etchings for “Pickwick” were his doing. For Charles Knight he illustrated “Chaucer,” helping also in the “Shakespeare,” “London,” and “Old England,” issued by that publisher. Many of his own original pictures were engraved and had wide sale, such as “Soliciting a Vote,” “The Musical Bore,” “Satisfaction,” “Time and Tide,” etc. And, with all this, he still found time for lectures on “The Beautiful and Picturesque,” on “Fresco,” and on “Comic Art”—this last re-written at the close of his life, and dedicated to his daughter, under the title of “Graphic Satire.”
It was when on a visit to her paternal grandparents, in Newgate Street, that the future Educationalist made her first acquaintance with school-life, after a very quaint fashion, as she thus tells us—