East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations

by J. Ewing Ritchie

As was to be expected, the reading of the village was of the most limited description. It is true we children jumped for joy as once a month came the carrier’s cart from Beccles, with the books for the club—the Evangelical Magazine, for all the principal families of the congregation, and the Penny Magazine and Chambers’s Journal—then but in their infancy—for ourselves; but, apart from that, there was no reading worth mentioning. That which most astonishes the tourist in Ireland is the way in which people read the newspapers. In our Suffolk village the very reverse was the case, partly because there were few newspapers to read, partly because there were few to read them, and partly because they were dear to buy. The one paper which we took in was the Suffolk Chronicle, which made its appearance on Saturday morning, the price of which was sixpence, and which was edited by a sturdy Radical of the name of King, who to the last held to the belief that to have a London letter full of literary or critical talk for the Suffolk farmers was, not to put too fine a point on it, to throw pearls before swine. And perhaps he was right. I can well remember, when one of my early poetical contributions appeared in its columns, how a fear was expressed to me by a farmer’s widow in

our parish, lest ‘it had cost me a lot o’ money’ to have that effort of my muse in print. Mr. Childs, of Bungay, had many experiences, equally rustic and still more illustrative of the simplicity of the class. Once upon a time one of them came in a great state of excitement for a copy of the ‘Life of Mr. General Gazetteer.’ On another occasion a farmer’s wife came in search of a Testament. She wanted it directly, and she wanted it of a large type. A specimen was selected, which met with the worthy woman’s approval. But the question was, could she have it in half an hour, as she would be away for that time shopping in the town, and would call for it on her return. She was told that she could, and great was her astonishment when, on calling on her return for the Testament, there it was, printed in the particular type she had selected, ready for her use.

I have a very strong idea that the calm of the country and the peaceful occupations of the people had not a very rousing influence upon the intellect. I may go further, and say that the cares of the farm, when high farming was unknown, did not much lift at that time the master above the man. The latter wore a smock-frock, while the former, perhaps, sported a blue coat with brass buttons, and had rather a better kind of head-dress, and

ambled along on a little steady cob, that knew at which ale-house to call for the regular allowance, quite as well as his master. But as regards talk—which was chiefly of bullocks and pigs—well, there really was no very great difference after all. To such religion was the mainspring which kept the whole intellect going; and religion was to be had at the meeting. And I can well remember how strange it seemed to me that these rough, simple, untutored sons of the soil could speak of it with enthusiasm, and could pray, at any rate, with astonishing fervour. Away from the influence of the meeting-house there existed a Bœotian state of mind, only to be excited by appeals to the senses of the most palpable character, a state of mind in which faith—the evidence of things not seen, according to Paul—was quite out of the question; and I regret to say that, notwithstanding the activity of the last fifty years and the praiseworthy and laborious efforts of the East Anglian clergy in all quarters, suitably to rouse and feed the intellect of the East Anglian peasantry, a good deal yet remains to be done. Only a year or two ago, riding on an omnibus in a Suffolk village, the driver asked me if people could go to America by land. ‘Of course not,’ was my reply. ‘Why do you ask such a

question?’ Well, it came out that he had ‘heerd tell how people got to Americay in ten days; and he did not see how they could do that unless they went by land, and had good hosses to get ’em there at that time.’ On my explaining the real state of affairs, he admitted, by way of apology, that he was not much of a traveller himself. Once he had been to Colchester; but that was a long time ago.

But to return to the Suffolk Chronicle. It was my duty as a lad, when it had been duly studied at home, to take it to the next subscriber, and I fancy by the time the paper had gone its round it was not a little the worse for wear. But there were other political impulses which tended to create and feed the sacred flame of civil and religious liberty. In one corner of the village lived a small shopkeeper, who stored away, among his pots and pans of treacle and sugar and grocery, a few well-thumbed copies, done up in dirty brown paper, of the squibs and caricatures published by Hone, whom I can just remember, a red-faced old gentleman in black, in the Patriot office, and George Cruikshank, with whom I was to spend many a merry hour in after-life. This small shopkeeper was one of the chapel people—a kind of superintendent in the Sunday-school, for which office he

was by no means fitted, but there was no one else to take the berth, and as the family also dealt with him in many ways, I had often to repair to his shop. It was then our young eyes were opened as to the wickedness in high places by the perusal of the ‘Political House that Jack built,’ and other publications of a similar revolutionary character. Nothing is sacred to the caricaturist, and half a century ago bishops and statesmen and lords and kings were very fair subjects for the exercise of his art. In our day things have changed for the better, partly as the result of the Radical efforts, of which respectability at that time stood so much in awe. London newspapers rarely reached so far as Wrentham. It was the fashion then to look to Ipswich for light and leading. However, as the cry for reform increased in strength, and the debates inside the House of Commons and out waxed fiercer, now and then even a London newspaper found its way into our house, and I can well remember how our hearts glowed within us as some one of us read, while father smoked his usual after-dinner pipe, previous to going out to spend the afternoon visiting his sick and afflicted; and how such names as Earl Grey, and Lord John Russell, and Lord Brougham—the people then called him

Harry Brougham; it was a pity that he was ever anything else—were familiar in our mouths as household words.

In another way also there came to the children in Wrentham the growing perception of a larger world than that in which we lived, and moved, and had our being. One of the historic sites of East Anglia is Framlingham, a small market town, lying a little off the highroad to London, a few miles from what always seemed to me the very uninteresting village of Needham Market, though at one time Godwin, the author of ‘Caleb Williams,’ preached in the chapel there. There is now a public school for Suffolk boys at Framlingham, and it may yet make a noise in the world. Framlingham in our time has given London Mr. Jeaffreson, a successful man of letters, and Sir Henry Thompson, a still more successful surgeon. In my young days it was chiefly noted for its castle. The mother of that amiable and excellent lady, Mrs. Trimmer, also came from Framlingham; and it is to be hoped that the old town may have had something to do with the formation of the character of a woman whom now we should sneer at, perhaps, as goody-goody, but who, when George the Third was King, did much for the education and improvement

of the young. I read in Mrs. Trimmer’s life ‘that her father was a man of an excellent understanding, and of great piety; and so high was his reputation for knowledge of divinity, and so exemplary his moral conduct, that, as an exception to their general rule, which admitted no laymen, he was chosen member of a clerical club in the town (Ipswich) in which he resided. From him,’ continues the biographer of the daughter, ‘she imbibed the purest sentiments of religion and virtue, and learnt betimes the fundamental principles of Christianity.’ Well, it is hoped Mr. Kirby did his best for his daughter; but, after all, how much more potent is the influence of a mother! And hence I may claim for Framlingham a fair share in the formation of even so burning and shining a light as Mrs. Trimmer.