Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

They were all our heroes then, and if Time has not left the place of all unshaken, enough remain to form such a goodly company as no later hour can boast. And this is so far acknowledged by the youth of a younger generation that I find those of quickest appreciation in poetry and fiction constantly tempted to steal my heroes and set them above their own.

Already at school I had made acquaintance with the poems of Wordsworth, a strange choice for a boy; and the circumstances of his life, and the revolution which he partly headed, drew me quickly to others of the group until all lesser admiration was finally merged in my worship of Keats. It was only in later days that I brought myself to the study of the poets of the intermediate time between the Elizabethans and the close of the eighteenth century, and I will confess that even now I have no great zest for them.

But turning aside for the moment from the things that already interested me most, I remember being vividly impressed by some events that occurred in the City during the period of my apprenticeship. The sudden transition from private school to the Stock Exchange presented points of interest that could not fail to attract a boy, even though his ambition was otherwise engaged.

I was in the City in the year 1867, the year of the great financial crisis which is associated with the name of Overend Gurney. The streets and narrow lanes round about the Stock Exchange during that turbulent time presented many picturesque sights, and within the Stock Exchange itself were daily scenes of almost maddening excitement.

One day I waited outside a great bank, one of a seething crowd of many hundreds, in momentary expectation that the doors would be closed, but the minutes and the hours passed, and as four o’clock approached it became known that the danger had been averted. Many similar scenes were to be witnessed at that time, but, although they provided me with excitement enough and to spare, even these vivid incidents in the career into which I had been thrust did not induce me to swerve from the resolution I had already secretly formed, not to remain in the City when the days of my apprenticeship were concluded.

I think, however, that, notwithstanding the distaste I had for my work, I performed my task zealously enough. So, indeed, it must have been, for when I finally announced to the firm my intention to retire, one of the partners asked me to reconsider my decision, holding out to me the inducement that if I would remain till I was twenty-one there would be a good prospect of my being promoted to a junior partnership.

But my choice had already been made, and I was in no mind to change it. Still secretly nursing the thought of a literary career, it was, nevertheless, clear to me that, for the time at any rate, I must adopt a more definite occupation. I therefore made up my mind to study for the Bar. My only trouble was to know how to announce this decision to my dear father, who had spent his hardly-earned money in giving me this first and great chance in the world, and to whom I knew the resolution at which I had arrived would be a source of bitter disappointment and regret.

And so, indeed, it was! But he was the widest-minded and the most liberal-hearted of men, and, when at last I found the courage to break it to him, he hardly allowed me to perceive the deep disappointment which I knew he was suffering. For my own part I have never regretted those days passed in the City, though at the time I felt them to be barren and wasted. Perhaps I learned as much as I should have acquired at Cambridge, though it was learning of a different sort. Some knowledge of men I certainly gained, some knowledge also of the habit of work which no career, however detached from business, can afford to dispense with.

Certainly, if there had not been some such obstacle in my path, I should not have thrown myself into the life I had chosen with the same keenness and persistence. The opposition which these earlier years set in the way of the calling I most wanted to pursue nerved and stiffened my resolution. I did a prodigious amount of reading in those late nights after the strenuous days in the City, and I think the fact that I had broken away from the life that was laid out for me gave me a higher courage to try and succeed in the life of my own choosing.

Already, before I had made my change of view known to my father, I had resolved to matriculate at the London University in preparation to becoming a student for the Bar, and, when the break came, I at once joined the classes at University College and assisted myself further by private tuition in several branches of knowledge which I had to take up for examination.