This was not always so. The experience of a few well-known scholars will illustrate. “From my infancy,” says Benjamin Franklin, “I was passionately fond of reading, and all the money that came into my hands was laid out in the purchasing of books. I was very fond of voyages. My first acquisition was Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes. I afterwards sold them to enable me to buy R. Burton’s Historical Collections. They were small chapmen’s books, and cheap; forty volumes in all. My father’s little library consisted chiefly of books in polemic divinity, most of which I read. I have often regretted that at a time when I had such a thirst for knowledge more proper books had not fallen in my way, since it was resolved I should not be bred to divinity. There was among them Plutarch’s Lives, which I read abundantly, and I still think the time spent to great advantage. There was also a book of Defoe’s called ‘An Essay on Projects,’ and another of Dr. Mather’s, called ‘An Essay to Do Good,’ which perhaps gave me a turn of thinking that had an influence on some of the principal future events of my life. This bookish inclination at length determined my father to make me a printer.... I stood out some time, but at last was persuaded, and signed the indenture when I was yet but twelve years old.... I now had access to better books. An acquaintance with the apprentices of booksellers enabled me sometimes to borrow a small one, which I was careful to return soon, and clean. Often I sat up in my chamber the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned in the morning, lest it should be found missing.... About this time I met with an odd volume of the ‘Spectator.’ I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished if possible to imitate it. With that view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiments in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, tried to complete the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should occur to me. Then I compared my ‘Spectator’ with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them....
“Now it was, that, being on some occasions made ashamed of my ignorance in figures, which I had twice failed learning when at school, I took Cocker’s book on Arithmetic, and went through the whole by myself with the greatest ease. I also read Seller’s and Sturny’s book on Navigation, which made me acquainted with the little geometry it contains; but I never proceeded far in that science. I read about this time ‘Locke on the Human Understanding,’ and the ‘Art of Thinking,’ by Messrs. de Port Royal.
“While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English Grammar (I think it was Greenwood’s), having at the end of it two little sketches on the ‘Arts of Rhetoric and Logic,’ the latter finishing with a dispute in the Socratic method. And soon after, I procured Xenophon’s ‘Memorable Things of Socrates,’ wherein there are many examples of the same method. I was charmed with it, adopted it, dropped my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer.”[19]
Hugh Miller, that most admirable Scotchman and self-made man, relates a similar experience: “During my sixth year I spelled my way through the Shorter Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New Testament, and then entered upon the highest form in the dame’s school as a member of the Bible class. But all the while the process of learning had been a dark one, which I slowly mastered, in humble confidence in the awful wisdom of the schoolmistress, not knowing whither it tended; when at once my mind awoke to the meaning of the most delightful of all narratives,—the story of Joseph. Was there ever such a discovery made before! I actually found out for myself that the art of reading is the art of finding stories in books; and from that moment reading became one of the most delightful of my amusements. I began by getting into a corner on the dismissal of the school, and there conning over to myself the new-found story of Joseph; nor did one perusal serve;—the other Scripture stories followed,—in especial, the story of Samson and the Philistines, of David and Goliath, of the prophets Elijah and Elisha; and after these came the New Testament stories and parables. Assisted by my uncles, too, I began to collect a library in a box of birch bark about nine inches square, which I found quite large enough to contain a great many immortal works: Jack the Giant-Killer, and Jack and the Bean-Stalk, and the Yellow Dwarf, and Blue Beard, and Sinbad the Sailor, and Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, with several others of resembling character. Those intolerable nuisances, the useful-knowledge books, had not yet arisen, like tenebrious stars on the educational horizon, to darken the world, and shed their blighting influence on the opening intellect of the ‘youthhood;’ and so, from my rudimental books—books that made themselves truly such by their thorough assimilation with the rudimental mind—I passed on, without being conscious of break or line of division, to books on which the learned are content to write commentaries and dissertations, but which I found to be quite as nice children’s books as any of the others. Old Homer wrote admirably for little folk, especially in the Odyssey; a copy of which, in the only true translation extant,—for, judging from its surpassing interest, and the wrath of critics, such I hold that of Pope to be,—I found in the house of a neighbor. Next came the Iliad; not, however, in a complete copy, but represented by four of the six volumes of Bernard Lintot. With what power and at how early an age true genius impresses! I saw, even at this immature period, that no other writer could cast a javelin with half the force of Homer. The missiles went whizzing athwart his pages; and I could see the momentary gleam of the steel, ere it buried itself deep in brass and bull-hide. I next succeeded in discovering for myself a child’s book, of not less interest than even the Iliad, which might, I was told, be read on Sabbaths, in a magnificent old edition of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ printed on coarse whity-brown paper, and charged with numerous wood-cuts, each of which occupied an entire page, which, on principles of economy, bore letter-press on the other side....
“In process of time, I devoured, besides these genial works, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Ambrose on Angels, the ‘judgment chapter’ in Howie’s Scotch Worthies, Byron’s Narrative, and the Adventures of Philip Quarll, with a good many other adventures and voyages, real and fictitious, part of a very miscellaneous collection of books made by my father. It was a melancholy library to which I had fallen heir. Most of the missing volumes had been with the master aboard his vessel when he perished. Of an early edition of Cook’s Voyages, all the volumes were now absent, save the first; and a very tantalizing romance, in four volumes,—Mrs. Radcliffe’s ‘Mysteries of Udolpho,’—was represented by only the earlier two. Small as the collection was, it contained some rare books,—among the rest, a curious little volume entitled ‘The Miracles of Nature and Art,’ to which we find Dr. Johnson referring, in one of the dialogues chronicled by Boswell, as scarce even in his day, and which had been published, he said, some time in the seventeenth century by a bookseller whose shop hung perched on Old London Bridge, between sky and water. It contained, too, the only copy I ever saw of the ‘Memoirs of a Protestant condemned to the Galleys of France for his Religion,’—a work interesting from the circumstance that, though it bore another name on its titlepage, it had been translated from the French for a few guineas by poor Goldsmith, in his days of obscure literary drudgery, and exhibited the peculiar excellences of his style. The collection boasted, besides, of a curious old book, illustrated by very uncouth plates, that detailed the perils and sufferings of an English sailor who had spent the best years of his life as a slave in Morocco. It had its volumes of sound theology, too, and of stiff controversy,—Flavel’s Works, and Henry’s Commentary, and Hutchinson on the Lesser Prophets, and a very old treatise on the Revelations, with the titlepage away, and blind Jameson’s volume on the Hierarchy, with first editions of Naphtali, The Cloud of Witnesses, and the Hind Let Loose.... Of the works of fact and incident which it contained, those of the voyages were my special favorites. I perused with avidity the Voyages of Anson, Drake, Raleigh, Dampier, and Captain Woods Rogers; and my mind became so filled with conceptions of what was to be seen and done in foreign parts, that I wished myself big enough to be a sailor, that I might go and see coral islands and burning mountains, and hunt wild beasts, and fight battles.”[20]
William and Robert Chambers, the founders of the great publishing-house of W. & R. Chambers, Edinburgh, were self-educated men. “At little above fourteen years of age,” writes William, “I was thrown on my own resources. From necessity, not less than from choice, I resolved at all hazards to make the weekly four shillings serve for everything. I cannot remember entertaining the slightest despondency on the subject.... I made such attempts as were at all practicable, while an apprentice, to remedy the defects of my education at school. Nothing in that way could be done in the shop, for there reading was proscribed. But, allowed to take home a book for study, I gladly availed myself of the privilege. The mornings in summer, when light cost nothing, were my chief reliance. Fatigued with trudging about, I was not naturally inclined to rise; but on this and some other points I overruled the will, and forced myself to rise at five o’clock, and have a spell at reading until it was time to think of moving off,—my brother, when he was with me, doing the same. In this way I made some progress in French, with the pronunciation of which I was already familiar from the speech of the French prisoners of war at Peebles. I likewise dipped into several books of solid worth,—such as Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations,’ Locke’s ‘Human Understanding,’ Paley’s ‘Moral Philosophy,’ and Blair’s ‘Belles-Lettres,’—fixing the leading facts and theories in my memory by a note-book for the purpose. In another book I kept for years an accurate account of my expenses, not allowing a single halfpenny to escape record.”
And Robert, the younger brother, confirms the story, with even more accurate attention to details. “My brother William and I,” he says, “lived in lodgings together. Our room and bed cost three shillings a week.... I used to be in great distress for want of fire. I could not afford either that or a candle myself; so I have often sat by my landlady’s kitchen fire,—if fire it could be called, which was only a little heap of embers,—reading Horace and conning my dictionary by a light which required me to hold the books almost close to the grate. What a miserable winter that was! Yet I cannot help feeling proud of my trials at that time. My brother and I—he then between fifteen and sixteen, I between thirteen and fourteen—had made a resolution together that we would exercise the last degree of self-denial. My brother actually saved money out of his income. I remember seeing him take five-and-twenty shillings out of a closed box which he kept to receive his savings; and that was the spare money of only a twelvemonth.”[21]
Rev. Robert Collyer, whose name is known and honored by every American scholar, says: “Do you want to know how I manage to talk to you in this simple Saxon? I will tell you. I read Bunyan, Crusoe, and Goldsmith when I was a boy, morning, noon, and night. All the rest was task work; these were my delight, with the stories in the Bible, and with Shakspeare when at last the mighty master came within our doors.... I took to these as I took to milk, and, without the least idea what I was doing, got the taste for simple words into the very fibre of my nature. There was day-school for me until I was thirteen years old, and then I had to turn in and work thirteen hours a day.... I could not go home for the Christmas of 1839, and was feeling very sad about it all, for I was only a boy; and, sitting by the fire, an old farmer came in and said, ‘I notice thou’s fond o’ reading, so I brought thee summat to read.’ It was Irving’s ‘Sketch Book.’ I had never heard of the work. I went at it, and was ‘as them that dream.’ No such delight had touched me since the old days of Crusoe. I saw the Hudson and the Catskills, took poor Rip at once into my heart, as everybody has, pitied Ichabod while I laughed at him, thought the old Dutch feast a most admirable thing; and long before I was through, all regret at my lost Christmas had gone down the wind, and I had found out there are books and books. That vast hunger to read never left me. If there was no candle, I poked my head down to the fire; read while I was eating, blowing the bellows, or walking from one place to another. I could read and walk four miles an hour. I remember while I was yet a lad reading Macaulay’s great essay on Bacon, and I could grasp its wonderful beauty.... Now, give a boy a passion like this for anything, books or business, painting or farming, mechanism or music, and you give him thereby a lever to lift his world, and a patent of nobility, if the thing he does is noble.”