In manner, George Stephenson was simple, modest, and unassuming, but always manly. He was frank and social in spirit. When a humble workman, he had carefully preserved his sense of self-respect. His companions looked up to him, and his example was worth much more to many of them than books or schools. His devoted love of knowledge made his poverty respectable, and adorned his humble calling. When he rose to a more elevated station, and associated with men of the highest position and influence in Britain, he took his place among them with perfect self-possession. They wondered at the quiet ease and simple dignity of his deportment; and men in the best ranks of life have said of him that "he was one of Nature's gentlemen."
Probably no military chiefs were ever more beloved by their soldiers than were both father and son by the army of men who, under their guidance, worked at labors of profit, made labors of love by their earnest will and purpose. True leaders of men and lords of industry, they were always ready to recognize and encourage talent in those who worked for and with them. Thus it was pleasant, at the openings of the Stephenson lines, to hear the chief engineers attributing the successful completion of the works to their assistants; while the assistants, on the other hand, ascribed the principal glory to their chiefs.
George Stephenson, though a thrifty and frugal man, was essentially unsordid. His rugged path in early life made him careful of his resources. He never saved to hoard, but saved for a purpose, such as the maintenance of his parents or the education of his son. In his later years he became a prosperous and even a wealthy man; but riches never closed his heart, nor stole away the elasticity of his soul. He enjoyed life cheerfully, because hopefully. When he entered upon a commercial enterprise, whether for others or for himself, he looked carefully at the ways and means. Unless they would "pay," he held back. "He would have nothing to do," he declared, "with stock-jobbing speculations." His refusal to sell his name to the schemes of the railway mania—his survey of the Spanish lines without remuneration—his offer to postpone his claim for payment from a poor company until their affairs became more prosperous, are instances of the unsordid spirit in which he acted.
Another marked feature in Mr. Stephenson's character was his patience. Notwithstanding the strength of his convictions as to the great uses to which the locomotive might be applied, he waited long and patiently for the opportunity of bringing it into notice; and for years after he had completed an efficient engine, he went on quietly devoting himself to the ordinary work of the colliery. He made no noise nor stir about his locomotive, but allowed another to take credit for the experiments on velocity and friction which he had made with it upon the Killingworth railroad. By patient industry and laborious contrivance he was enabled, with the powerful help of his son, almost to do for the locomotive what James Watt had done for the condensing engine. He found it clumsy and inefficient, and he made it powerful, efficient, and useful. Both have been described as the improvers of their respective engines; but, as to all that is admirable in their structure or vast in their utility, they are rather entitled to be described as their inventors. They have both tended to increase indefinitely the mass of human comforts and enjoyments, and to render them cheap and accessible to all. But Stephenson's invention, by the influence which it is daily exercising upon the civilization of the world, is even more remarkable than that of Watt, and is calculated to have still more important consequences. In this respect it is to be regarded as the grandest application of steam-power that has yet been discovered.
George Stephenson's close and accurate observation provided him with a fullness of information on many subjects which often appeared surprising to those who had devoted to them a special study. On one occasion the accuracy of his knowledge of birds came out in a curious way at a convivial meeting of railway men in London. The engineers and railway directors present knew each other as railway men and nothing more. The talk had been all of railways and railway politics. Stephenson was a great talker on those subjects, and was generally allowed, from the interest of his conversation and the extent of his experience, to take the lead. At length one of the party broke in with, "Come, now, Stephenson, we have had nothing but railways! can not we have a change, and try if we can talk a little about something else?" "Well," said Stephenson, "I'll give you a wide range of subjects; what shall it be about?" "Say birds' nests!" rejoined the other, who prided himself on his special knowledge of the subject. "Then birds' nests be it." A long and animated conversation ensued: the bird-nesting of his boyhood—the blackbird's nest which his father had held him up in his arms to look at when a child at Wylam—the hedges in which he had found the thrush's and the linnet's nests—the mossy bank where the robin built—the cleft in the branch of the young tree where the chaffinch had reared its dwelling—all rose up clear in his mind's eye, and led him back to the scenes of his boyhood at Callerton and Dewley Burn. The color and number of the birds' eggs—the period of their incubation—the materials employed by them for the walls and lining of their nests, were described by him so vividly, and illustrated by such graphic anecdotes, that one of the party remarked that, if George Stephenson had not been the greatest engineer of his day, he might have been one of the greatest naturalists.
His powers of conversation were very great. He was so thoughtful, original, and suggestive. There was scarcely a department of science on which he had not formed some novel and sometimes daring theory. Thus Mr. Gooch, his pupil, who lived with him when at Liverpool, informs us that when sitting over the fire, he would frequently broach his favorite theory of the sun's light and heat being the original source of the light and heat given forth by the burning coal. "It fed the plants of which that coal is made," he would say, "and has been bottled up in the earth ever since, to be given out again now for the use of man." His son Robert once said of him, "My father flashed his bull's eye full upon a subject, and brought it out in its most vivid light in an instant: his strong common sense and his varied experience, operating on a thoughtful mind, were his most powerful illuminators."
The Bishop of Oxford related the following anecdote of him at a recent public meeting in London: "He heard the other day of an answer given by the great self-taught man, Stephenson, when he was speaking with something of distrust of what were called competitive examinations. Stephenson said, 'I distrust them for this reason—they will lead, it seems to me, to an unlimited power of cram;' and he added, 'Let me give you one piece of advice—never to judge of your goose by its stuffing!'"
George Stephenson had once a conversation with a watchmaker, whom he astonished by the extent and minuteness of his knowledge as to the parts of a watch. The watchmaker knew him to be an eminent engineer, and asked how he had acquired so extensive a knowledge of a branch of business so much out of his sphere. "It is very easily to be explained," said Stephenson; "I worked long at watch-cleaning myself, and when I was at a loss, I was never ashamed to ask for information."
His hand was open to his former fellow-workmen whom old age had left in poverty. To poor Robert Gray, of Newburn, who acted as his brideman on his marriage to Fanny Henderson, he left a pension for life. He would slip a five-pound note into the hand of a poor man or a widow in such a way as not to offend their delicacy, but to make them feel as if the obligation were all on his side. When Farmer Paterson, who married a sister of George's first wife, Fanny Henderson, died and left a large young family fatherless, poverty stared them in the face. "But ye ken," said our informant, "George struck in fayther for them." And perhaps the providential character of the act could not have been more graphically expressed than in these simple words.