[CHAPTER XXIX.]
PERSONAL.
In our house the year 1870, which was to bring death and sorrow to so many homes, and rage and despair to so many hearts, opened cheerlessly indeed. The outlook for my father was dark and gloomy in the extreme. Overweighted with debt, he seemed to be sinking ever deeper and deeper in financial difficulties. The prosecution of the National Reformer, the De Rin and the Razor litigation, had each and all left him more or less deeply involved. The great panic of 1866 had dealt him a serious blow from which he vainly attempted to recover; the identification of "C. Bradlaugh, of 23 Great St. Helen's," with "Bradlaugh, the Atheist lecturer," was fatal to business. The spirit of the boycott existed long before Captain Boycott lived to give it his name. People were much too good to do business with an Atheist, and just as the baker's wife took her custom from the boy coal merchant in 1848, so customers of a different class took their business from the City merchant twenty years later.
My father began to despair of making his business succeed under these conditions, and to think seriously of giving up his City life, and of devoting himself to public work. This course would relieve him from the anxieties of two clashing occupations; moreover, as he said, "while prejudice and clamour bring ruin to me as a business man, they can do me no injury as a lecturer and a journalist."[128]
In addition to all these difficulties—the outcome of his public work—there were others, less serious in some respects, it is true, but far more so in the discredit attaching to them and the anguish they caused. I refer to those home extravagances and home debts, due to my mother's infirmity, which all helped to pile up the total liabilities to unmanageable figures. In March or April a man was put into possession at Sunderland Villa, and remained there for several weeks. My father felt this bitterly, but his course of conduct was now clear before him, and unhesitatingly decided upon; thus once more we see the pressure of money difficulties directly shaping his path. A few personal words in the National Reformer[129] indicated his resolve: "After five years' severe struggle," he wrote, "so severe, indeed, as to repeatedly endanger my health, I find it is utterly impossible to remain in business in the City in the face of the strong prejudice excited against me on political and religious grounds. I have determined to entirely give up all business, and devote myself to the movement. I have, therefore, taken steps to reduce the personal expenditure of myself and family to the lowest possible point, in order that I may set myself free from liability as early as I can, and I shall be glad now to arrange for week-night lectures in any part of Great Britain."
Hence, when these people, moved by their "political and religious" prejudices, drove Mr Bradlaugh from the City, and prevented him from making a livelihood in the ordinary way of business, they were unconsciously forging a weapon against themselves. Instead of giving a small portion of his time to writing and speaking against Theology, and on behalf of Radicalism and Republicanism, my father henceforth devoted the whole of his life to that work.
In accordance with his determination to reduce his personal expenditure to the lowest point, in the middle of May—before his words could have been read by those to whom they were addressed—my mother, my sister, and myself went to Midhurst, to find a home in my grandfather's little cottage, and my father set aside a modest sum weekly for our board and clothing. My brother remained with Mr John Grant of the Grenadier Guards for tuition, and Mr Bradlaugh himself took two tiny rooms at 3s. 6d. a week, at 29 Turner Street, Commercial Road, in the house of a widow who had been known to our family from her early girlhood. The size and style of these rooms may be guessed from the neighbourhood in which they were situated, and from the weekly rental asked for them. Within a few days or so from our leaving London, our household effects at Sunderland Villa were sold, my father retaining a few of the least saleable articles of furniture to supply what was necessary for his two rooms.
Instead of taking the most comfortable bedstead, he took the one which had been used by us little girls, and this was the bed upon which he slept until a year before his death, when I removed it without his knowledge during his absence in India, and put a more comfortable one in its place. Our nursery washstand, a chest of drawers, a writing-table, and half-a-dozen chairs comprised all the furniture he thought necessary for his use. My mother was not allowed to take anything whatever with her beyond our wearing apparel and a few trifles of small actual worth, but which she specially valued. My father's books, of course, he took with him, these, and one other thing which I had almost forgotten. The bedroom and sitting-room at Turner Street communicated, and the walls of both were covered with shelves, except just over the bed-head, which was reserved for the one other treasure brought from home. This was a large canvas painted in oils for Mr Bradlaugh by an artist friend, Emile Girardot. The subject was very simple, being nothing more than a tired hurdy-gurdy boy sleeping in a doorway, with a monkey anxiously watching. Whatever the intrinsic value of the picture might be, to my father it was above all price. He had quite a love for it, and often spoke of it—even in his last illness he talked of it, and wondered where it was, and longed for it, for by that time it had gone out of his hands.
So by the end of May we were all adrift and separated—my father in his small book-lined rooms in the east end of London; my brother Charlie with the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards, wherever it happened to be; my mother, sister, and self vegetating in a Sussex hamlet. But bad as all this was, 1870 held still worse things in store for us. In June my brother was taken ill with a mild attack of scarlatina, of which we knew nothing until he came home to us for his holidays on the 20th of the month. Due precautions had been neglected, and almost immediately after he reached us kidney disease began to manifest itself. From this he died on the 15th July, and he was buried exactly a month from the day on which he came home. The shock of his death was terrible to all of us, and not least so to my father. Although barely eleven years old at his death, Charlie was a lad full of promise, quick to learn and to comprehend, amiable, honourable, and generous; and of these traits I can recall many little instances. I have a photograph of him taken at the age of seven or eight, and as I look at it I see his eyes gaze out from under his square brow with a wonderfully clear and fearless look.
He was buried on the 20th day of July in Cocking Churchyard, my grandfather's cottage at Cocking Causeway (Midhurst) being in the parish of Cocking. Of course, we had to submit to the Church of England service, for it was before the Burials Act was passed, but the Rev. Drummond Ash was a kindly, courteous gentleman, and he made things as easy as the circumstances would allow. The burial would have taken place at the Brookwood Necropolis had my father been able to afford the expense. As he was not, Charlie was laid perforce in consecrated ground at the foot of the South Down Hills with Christian rites and ceremonies.