Dr. Robert Chambers.
1802–1871.
After months of pence-scraping and book-hoarding, Robert succeeded in collecting a stock worth about forty shillings; and with nothing but these, his yearning for independence, and his determination to write books by-and-by, and at present to sell them, the young boy of sixteen opened a little shop or stall in Leith Street. His brother William, after serving an apprenticeship to a Mr. Sutherland, also started as a bookseller and printer in the immediate neighbourhood; and from this time forward—a time when most boys were cursing the master’s ferule and the Latin syntax—they were both independent. Of this period Robert gives the following graphic and almost painfully accurate account in a letter to Hugh Miller, written in 1854:—
“Your autobiography has set me a thinking of my own youthful days, which were like yours in point of hardship and humiliation, though different in many important circumstances. My being of the same age with you, to exactly a quarter of a year, brings the idea of a certain parity more forcibly upon me. The differences are as curious to me as the resemblances. Notwithstanding your wonderful success as a writer, I think my literary tendency must have been a deeper and more absorbing peculiarity than yours, seeing that I took to Latin and to books both keenly and exclusively, while you broke down in your classical course, and had fully as great a passion for rough sport and enterprise as for reading, that being again a passion of which I never had one particle. This has, however, resulted in making you, what I never was inclined to be, a close observer of external nature—an immense advantage in your case. Still I think I could present against your hardy field observations by frith and fell, and cave and cliff, some striking analogies in the finding out and devouring of books, making my way, for instance, through a whole chestful of the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” which I found in a lumber garret. I must also say that an unfortunate tenderness of feet, scarcely yet got over, had much to do in making me mainly a fireside student. As to domestic connections and conditions, mine being of the middle classes were superior to yours for the first twelve years. After that, my father being unfortunate in business, we were reduced to poverty, and came down to even humbler things than you experienced. I passed through some years of the direst hardship, not the least evil being a state of feeling quite unnatural in youth, a stern and burning defiance of a social world in which we were harshly and coldly treated by former friends, differing only in external respects from ourselves. In your life there is one crisis where I think your experiences must have been somewhat like mine; it is the brief period at Inverness. Some of your expressions there bring all my own early feelings again to life. A disparity between the internal consciousness of powers and accomplishments and the external ostensible aspect led in me to the very same wrong methods of setting myself forward as in you. There, of course, I meet you in warm sympathy. I have sometimes thought of describing my bitter painful youth to the world, as something in which it might read a lesson; but the retrospect is still too distressing. I screen it from the mental eye. The one grand fact it has impressed is the very small amount of brotherly assistance there is for the unfortunate in this world.... Till I proved that I could help myself, no friend came to me. Uncles, cousins, &c., in good positions in life—some of them stoops of kirks, by-the-by—not one offered, nor seemed inclined to give, the smallest assistance. The consequent defying, self-relying spirit in which, at sixteen, I set out as a bookseller with only my own small collection of books as a stock—not worth more than two pounds, I believe—led to my being quickly independent of all aid; but it has not been all a gain, for I am now sensible that my spirit of self-reliance too often manifested itself in an unsocial, unamiable light, while my recollections of ‘honest poverty’ may have made me too eager to attain and secure worldly prosperity.”
This period of struggle, however, opened his heart in after-life to all who were battling in like circumstances, for those who knew him well say that “many young literary men owed much to his help, for he was ever ready with kindly counsel as well as in more solid assistance when needed.” It is pleasant to think that his little ciphering book, still in existence (the handwriting of which is extremely neat, so neat indeed that the young penman was employed by the civic authorities to engross on vellum the address presented to George IV. on his visit to Edinburgh in 1822), containing his first year’s account of profit and loss, shows a balance small, certainly, but amply sufficient for his modest wants, for their united daily household expenses did not exceed one shilling.
Once a bookseller, Robert speedily found opportunity to become an author, and he undertook the editorship of a small weekly periodical called the Kaleidoscope; while his brother William, in order to do all the manual work connected with it, taught himself the art of printing, and with an old fount of type, and a clumsy wooden press, which he had purchased for three pounds, composed and worked off all the impressions; his own contributions, some of them poetical, “finding their way into the stick without the intervention of copy.” Here he was often seen, “a slim, light-eyed boy in his shirt-sleeves, tugging away with desperate energy at his old creaking press.” When his very small and imperfect fount was inadequate to the demand for larger letters, he would sit up, after his long day’s labour for half the night, carving the requisite capitals out of a piece of wood with his penknife. This first venture was necessarily short-lived, and died in the January of the year 1822—at which date they both gave up their bookstalls and took regular shops.
Nothing daunted by the untimely fate of his first effort, Robert entered the field again, and from his connection with the Tweed, and with the assistance of friends from that quarter, who aided him in the identification of some of Scott’s characters, he produced a book that seemed likely to be popular—“Illustrations of the Author of Waverley,” consisting of descriptive sketches of the supposed originals of the great novelist. The book was a success, not so much from a pecuniary point of view, but as introducing the author to the kindly notice of several literary men, and gaining him the friendship of Scott, still the anonymous “Wizard of the North,” who mentions him in his diary as “a clever young fellow, but spoils himself by too much haste.”
In the following year, when he was still only twenty years of age, he produced the “Traditions of Edinburgh”—a book that is, of his many contributions to the social and antiquarian history of his native land, still, perhaps, the most popular. Every type of it was set up, every sheet of it pulled at press, by his brother, and the first edition, dated 1823, presents a curious contrast to the handsome copy published in 1869. The Traditions was a book the immediate popularity of which raised the author in public esteem, though its value is greater still at the present day, when many of the interesting associations connected with scenes and places are rapidly changing their character, or have been swept away altogether. Others than Scott even then expressed their wonder “where the boy got all his information.” In a sketch of Robert Chambers, by the son of one of his earliest friends, that appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine for July, 1871, an amusingly frank letter is quoted, which shows that the young writer was already getting into the “swim” of authorship:—“You may depend upon a copy of the ‘Traditions of Edinburgh,’ and a review of them as soon as they are ready. I am busy just now in writing reviews of them myself, for the various works I can get them put into, being now come to a resolution that an author always undertakes his own business best, and is indeed the only person capable of doing his work justice. I stood too much upon punctilio in my maiden work, the ‘Illustrations,’ and left the review of it to fellows who knew nothing about the subject, at least had not yet thought of it half so much as I had, who was quite au fait with the whole matter.”
From this period Robert Chambers’ books were marketable productions, and publishers began to seek out the young author. On the occasion of the great fires in November, 1824, when hundreds of poor families were rendered destitute, having no money wherewith to aid the victims, he wrote an account of the historical “Fires in Edinburgh,” and assigned the profits, which were considerable, to the fund collected for the benefit of the sufferers; and from this time books flowed from his pen in rapid succession. In 1825, he composed, for a bookseller, his “Popular Walks in Edinburgh,” partly the result of rambles in the nooks and corners of the quaint old city, in company with Sir Walter Scott. In 1826, he published his “Popular Rhymes of Scotland,” and then started on foot, as if to cure his ailment by pedestrianism, on a rambling journey through the country, and published the result of his explorations in his “Pictures of Scotland,” which passed through several editions, and is still a lively companion to the tourist. In this same year, 1827, he contributed to Constable’s Miscellany the five volumes containing his “Histories of the Scottish Rebellion”—of which, that concerning the affairs of 1845, while true to facts, had all the glowing charms of a romance—and a “Life of James I.,” in two volumes. Next appeared three volumes of “Scottish Ballads and Songs,” followed by a “Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen”—the four volumes being commenced in 1832 and concluded in 1835—one of the most trustworthy and most entertaining books of reference in existence. A supplementary and fifth volume was afterwards added by the Reverend Thomas Thomson. Besides writing these various works, and giving some attention to his ordinary business, he found time to act as editor of the Edinburgh Advertiser.
In 1829, Robert Chambers married Miss Anne Kirkwood, of Edinburgh, a lady of very congenial qualities and attainments, and whose musical accomplishments constantly supplied him—after his heavy daily labours—with the recreation essential to one so passionately fond of music.