He was only there a year, but it was an eventful one in William Pearson's life. He made the acquaintance of Benjamin Gough, the blind botanist, and it is possible that he was led by him into enquiry not only into the wonders of plant life, but of the life of that most delicate of all plants, the religious faith of the human soul. It is certain that during this year William Pearson's chief study was the study of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Church Doctrine, and the end of it was that he reasoned and read himself out of Episcopalianism into Unitarianism, as his father had in the past done before him. He found rest to his young soul in the thought of the great Fatherhood of God, and worshipped in the old Presbyterian Meeting House, where sometimes in after years Wordsworth also worshipped, and near by which lie the ashes of the James Patrick of Kendal, who was the original of the Wanderer in The Prelude. It may be fancy, but I like to think that it was in that chapel that the young lad first saw the man whose writings did more for him all through life than any other—I mean William Wordsworth.
From Kendal, William went, as was the wont of many a Kendal apprentice, to a grocer's shop in London, and at the end of three months he returned to the Winster Vale, broken in health from the stifle of London air, and the fact that he had no better resting place after long days of work in a city store than a shake-down underneath the counter. He was now in his twenty-third year. The 'poddish' and fresh air of the Yews set him 'agate' again, and he determined to try Manchester life, and on the 16th March, 1803, he set out for that metropolis of the North. He obtained a situation on the next day after his arrival as clerk in the bank of James Fox & Company, in King Street, and for the next seventeen years he endured
'The fierce confederate storm
Of sorrow barricadoed evermore
Within the walls of cities.'
How simple and frugal his life was there, we may gather from the fact that out of his first year's stipend of £75 he sent back a deposit to one of the Kendal banks. He was not very happy. He wanted friends of his age 'who united,' as he tells us, 'those first of blessings, virtue and knowledge,' and they were not. 'Indeed, sir,' he writes to James Watson of Kendal, 'I think Manchester, in proportion to its population, very deficient in men of cultivated understanding. Immersed in business, or carried down the stream of dissipation, slaves to "Mammon" and to "Bacchus," they have seldom time for the rational amusement of reading or for the calm pleasure of reflection.'
This seems somewhat priggish, but it was the real and earnest William Pearson who spoke. Sociable as he was, fond of seeing a good play, his chief delight, if he was not out in the fields, was a book that would set him thinking or a poem that would touch his imagination, and Pearson was old beyond his years. He joined the Didactical Society, the Mosley Street Library, subscribed to the News Room and made one or two friends for life.
There in most uncongenial surroundings for seventeen years he stuck to 'the drudgery at the desk's dead wood' with one thought, that a time would arrive when he could come back to his native vale, and live a student's and a naturalist's life in simple competence. As a matter of fact his health broke down after five years of Manchester smoke, and he had to come back in 1808 to the Yews in his native vale for country air and restoration.
He was at this time nothing if not a keen sportsman, and he was, if one may judge from a letter he sent at this time to a Kendal paper, vexed at heart by the vigorous application of the game laws as enforced by the worthies of the local bench. Three young men, who, with nothing but a knob-stick, could run down a hare, had been caught hunting on Cartmel Fell. 'We must pity the Robinsons,' he says, 'young men who can run down a hare, an animal that often escapes the fleetest greyhound, who pursued their sport without fear in the open day, and so generously, that they left a hare with the farmer on whose ground they happened to take it. These fine young men have been made to pay £3 13s. 6d. for their sport. The age of chivalry is indeed gone. The ancient Greeks would have crowned them with laurel, but this is the age of taxation and little men. We are fallen on evil days; we only wish the surveyor and commissioner had heard them at their joyous sport, and had heard their shouts, as we did, which made the old mountains ring again even to Gummershow, to be echoed back from the far-off Coniston Fells.'
It was during his Manchester residence that he became a student of William Wordsworth. It was not fashionable then to care for Wordsworth's poetry, but William Pearson was never without the Lyrical Ballads of 1805, or his copy of Poems by William Wordsworth, of 1807. The young bank clerk, who was often heard muttering, 'I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh aid,' felt in these poems 'all the beauty of a common dawn.' He knew that Wordsworth walked on the shining uplands of a noble aspiration, and was the apostle, in a time 'that touched monied worldlings with dismay,' of the simpler life of honest poverty and high endeavour. He felt that in Wordsworth he could find that sympathy with all things, that
'Look to the Uncreated with a countenance
Of admiration and an eye of love.'