The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak

by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

She was born April 20, 1826, at Stoke-upon-Trent, one of the chief manufacturing towns of Staffordshire, England. Staffordshire is the central county of England, and has many curious and interesting features. It forms the sloping base of a long chain of hills, where in countless ages the sea, sometimes covering the land and again driven away from it by the upheaval of a great body of earth and stone, has worn down the grit and limestone rock into clay. Did you know that all clay was mud made by the washing away of rocks? Just think how many hundreds of years it took to make the little ball of clay you model with!

Well, the people who lived in this country found out, eighteen hundred years ago, that they could mould their clay into pots and basins, even if they could not make things grow in it; so they dug up the clay, shaped it with their hands, and baked it in the sun, making jars, bowls, and other useful things which they sold to farmers in exchange for food.

About that time there came marching over the thickly wooded land, companies of Roman soldiers, who took all the clay bowls they wanted for their own use, and showed the potters how to make better ones. They also compelled them to make floors, roofs, and wall ornaments of clay baked in very hot ovens, called kilns. Much of this old Roman pottery was, of course, broken and lost, but still, if you should ever go there, you would find pieces of it in the banks of the little rivers and brooks near the clay pits, pieces more than a thousand years old.

Because it is so full of clay—dark blue clay, and red and yellow ochres, used for coloring and painting, as well as red and black chalk—the country seems to have been made for potteries. Besides this, there used always to be plenty of wood to keep the kilns hot, for a great forest covered nearly all the land. This was a continuation of the Forest of Arden, about which you will read some day, as well as about Sherwood Forest, which sheltered Robin Hood and his merry men.—Have you heard about them yet?—Later, when better fuel was needed, two great coal fields were discovered underlying the county, one of them twenty miles long by two broad. Here, then, where all was so perfectly prepared for his work, it was natural that the greatest potter of modern times, and one of the greatest of all times, should be born—Josiah Wedgwood, who lived for many years in the very town where Mrs. Craik was born. He not only loved to make dishes and jars of all kinds as perfect as possible, but while shut in with a long illness he studied the chemistry and the arithmetic needed in his trade. In years of hard labour and close study he so mastered his trade that he made it both a science and an art. He, more than any other, turned the county into one of the busiest places in the world, where thousands of men work from morning till night to supply the whole world with every sort of thing that can be made out of clay. Perhaps on the bottom of your plates at home you may find printed the words "Staffordshire, England."

Before Wedgwood's time—in 1653, to be accurate—Stoke-upon-Trent was a small group of thatched houses and two pot-works, gathered around the ancient parish church. In 1762, thirty-two years after Wedgwood's birth, it had a population of 8,000, of whom 7,000 were employed, in one way or another, in the pottery trade. The whole country-side is now black with smoke from the many factories. At one time, when the potters used salt to glaze their ware—that is, to put a bright polish on it—they used to open up their huge ovens every Saturday morning, between the hours of eight and twelve, and cast in salt. It would then melt, and run over the surface of the clay jugs and things inside, and leave a smooth, shining surface. If you let some salt and water, very strong of salt, boil over an old crock of your mother's, when the fire is making the stove red-hot, you will see how it works. Indeed, it was through an accidental boiling-over of this sort that salt-glaze was discovered. On Saturdays, when the salt was cast into the kilns, it made great clouds of smoke and vapor, filling streets and houses, and spreading far out into the country, so heavy that travelers to town lost their way, and persons in the street ran against each other.

Here lived, and preached, and argued, and laid down the law, a brilliant, enthusiastic Irishman, named Thomas Mulock, the father of the woman who wrote this book. He was a minister, but one who did not agree with any of the other ministers around him. He had a warm, eager nature, and a temper to match, and as the second of twenty-two children must have exercised from his early childhood all that power of domineering which made Lord Byron nickname him "Muley Mulock." By this name he was known over half of Europe, but for all that he was much loved and admired, and moved in the same circle as Byron, Scott, Southey, and Wordsworth. From him, Mrs. Craik undoubtedly inherited her gifts as a writer.

Her mother was a daughter of Mr. Mellard, a tanner and a member of the Reverend Thomas Mulock's congregation. She was one of three sisters who used to talk with the young minister over the wall that separated their gardens. There is a legend that he went all in white to the wedding, his shoes being of white satin; but this is very likely only a picturesque bit of gossip, kept alive by the fact that Mr. Mulock was quite romantic enough and independent enough to have done such a thing if it had happened to strike his fancy. His wife was a frail little woman, and the troubles which soon beset her husband on account of his strong, new opinions, were hard for her to bear, as was also the way in which he, like a hot-blooded Irishman, sure that he was right and all the rest of the world wrong, marched straight into the thick of any theological fight that might be going on. Dinah, at last, although merely an inexperienced girl, persuaded her mother to go with her to London, to seek a little peace and quiet, leaving the father to fight out his battles alone in the country place he found—or made—so full of strife.

This was a tremendous responsibility for a young girl with no means to speak of and only an ordinarily good education, such as was given to young ladies in the girls' schools of those days. At school she seems to have been a great favorite, and is described as being always the center of a bevy of girls, who hung round her lovingly, and for whom she prophesied the most wonderful things. She was always sure they had great abilities, but seemed to be quite unconscious that she herself was the most gifted of them all, and would be remembered when they were forgotten.

Even after she came to London, she made friends among other girls, and in spite of her unceasing and exacting work, seems always to have had time to enjoy them and make them enjoy her. She was only twenty years old when, in 1846, she went to London, and undertook the main support of her mother and the two young brothers who soon joined them. She did everything her pen could find to do, writing stories for fashion books and other periodicals, and had the satisfaction, finally, of knowing that she had succeeded in caring for her aged mother to the end of her life.

Of the two brothers, the elder, Thomas, Jr., true son of his father, took part in some act of rebellion while studying at the Royal Academy. His father sided with the principals of the school and approved of the son's being expelled, his own heart aching, most probably, while he did what he thought was his duty. The son's heart, in turn, was sore at what he must have thought unloving conduct on the father's part. At any rate, he decided soon after to go to Australia, and, as he was about to board the ship, fell off the quay and was killed.