He now took a small shop, fourteen miles from Nottingham, at an annual rent of twenty shillings, and “in one day became the most eminent bookseller in Southwell,” but he still lived at Nottingham. “During the rainy winter months,” he says, “I set out from Nottingham at five every Saturday morning, carried a burthen of from three to thirty pounds’ weight to Southwell, opened shop at ten, starved it all day upon bread, cheese, and half a pint of ale; took from 1s. to 6s., shut up at four, and by trudging through the solitary night and the deep roads five hours more, I arrived at Nottingham by nine, where I always found a mess of milk-porridge by the fire, prepared by my valuable sister. But nothing short of resolution and rigid economy could have carried me through this scene.”
There was little profit, however, in such a life, laborious as it was, and in 1750 he made an exploring journey to Birmingham, where he found there were only three booksellers—Warren, Aris, and Wollaston, and here he resolved to settle, hoping that he might escape the envy of “the three great men.”
He obtained the use of half a little shop for the moderate premium of one shilling per week, but he had as yet to find wherewith to stock it. On a visit to Nottingham, he met a friendly minister, who asked, for the weather was inclement, why he had ventured so far without a great-coat, and who on receiving no reply, shrewdly guessed Hutton’s impoverished condition, from his draggled, thread-bare garments, and offered him a couple of hundred-weight of books at his own price, and that price to be postponed to the future, and by way of receipt the young bookseller gave him the following: “I promise to pay to Ambrose Rudsall £1 7s., when I am able.” The debt was speedily cancelled.
His period of probation was sufficiently severe: “Five shillings a week covered all my expenses, as food, washing, lodging, &c.,” but by degrees the better-informed and wealthier of the young clerks and apprentices began to frequent his shop, and were attracted by his zeal, and his evident love for the books he sold. With his skill in binding, he could furbish up the shabbiest tomes, and greatly increase their marketable value. By the end of his first year he found that he had, by the most rigid economy, saved up twenty pounds. Things were brightening, but the overseers, who at that time possessed a terrible power over the poorest classes, ostensibly dreading lest he should become chargeable to the parish, refused his payment of the rates, and bade him remove elsewhere. In this strait he exhibited much worldly wisdom, and invested half his little hoarding in a fine suit of clothes, purchased from one of the overseers, who happened to be a draper.
In the following year, 1751, he took a better shop, next door to a Mr. Grace, a hosier, and in a quiet, undemonstrative manner, fell in love with his neighbour’s niece. “Time gave us,” he says, “numberless opportunities of observing each other’s actions, and trying the tenour of conduct by the touchstone of prudence. Courtship was often a disguise. We had seen each other when disguise was useless. Besides, nature had given to few women a less portion of deceit.” The uncle at length consented to the match, and, with Sarah, Hutton received a dowry of £100; and, as he had already amassed £200 of his own, from this happy moment his fortunes ran smoothly upwards.
He now increased an otherwise profitable trade by starting a circulating library—perhaps the first that was attempted in the provinces; and about this same time, 1753, he acquired a very useful friend in the person of Robert Bage, the paper-maker, and undertook the retail portion of the paper business. “From this small hint,” he says, “I followed the stroke forty years, and acquired an ample fortune.” And yet, though waxing yearly richer and richer, he adds, “I never could bear the thought of living to the extent of my income. I never omitted to take stock or regulate my annual expenses, so as to meet casualties and misfortunes.” By degrees he became invested with civic dignities, and little by little he acquired the standing of a landed proprietor. Without neglecting his business he now found leisure for literary composition; and in his last work—“A Trip to Coatham”—he tells us, “I took up my pen, and that with fear and trembling, at the advanced age of fifty-six, a period when most would lay it down. I drove the quill thirty years, during which time I wrote and published thirty books.”
His first work, the “History of Birmingham,” appeared, and these thirty tomes of verse and prose followed in quick succession.
In 1802 he published his best-known work, the “History of the Roman Wall.” Antiquarians had, before this, described the famous line of defence, but hitherto no one had attempted a personal inspection. Seventy-five years old, still hale and hearty, with an enthusiasm akin to that of youth, he started on foot for Northumberland, accompanied by his daughter on horse-back. Intent upon reaching the scene of his antiquarian desires, “he turned,” writes his daughter, “neither to the right nor the left, except to gratify me with a sight of Liverpool. Windermere he saw, and Ullswater he saw, because they lay under his feet, but nothing could detain him from his grand object.” On his return journey, after every hollow of the ground, every stone of the Wall, between Carlisle and Newcastle, had been examined, he was bitten in the leg by a dog, but even this did not restrain him. Within four days of home “he made forced journeys, and if we had had a little further to go the foot would have knocked up the horse! The pace he went did not even fatigue his shoes. He walked the whole 600 miles in one pair, and scarcely made a hole in his stockings.”
Almost to the last he preserved his physical powers comparatively intact. When he was eighty-eight, he writes—“At the age of eighty-two I considered myself a young man. I could, without fatigue, walk forty miles a day. But during the last few years I have felt a sensible decay, and, like a stone rolling downhill, its velocity increases with its progress. The strings of the instrument are one after another giving way, never to be brought into tune.” Yet he did not die till 1815, at the ripe old age of ninety-two.
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