The Abbotts were, as I understand, an old family of yeomen and farmers in Dorsetshire. I have seen a pamphlet concerning the great George Abbott, Archbishop of Canterbury, who bravely withstood James I. in the matter of the Essex divorce, showing that he was of the same family. I hope it may be so. My father used to laugh at genealogy, but for my part I rather like to speculate on pedigrees and family history. It is pleasant to trace one’s line back to tanners and farmers and attorneys, even with a dash of the Church thrown in. The ancestry of the horse and the greyhound is a study for every gambler on the course, and why should not a student of eugenics be interested in the evolution of the entries for the human race?
Whilst he was in a merchant’s office my father attended classes at the Aldersgate Institution, a valuable educational society promoted by Lord Brougham, and he became a constant attendant at a debating club held there. He was a great believer in orderly debate as a method of education,
and was always ready to discuss with me the subject of debate in my School Society. The art of speaking he thought should be equally a part of elementary education with reading and writing, and his view was that if such were the case the charlatan and the windbag would have less chance of capturing the ear of the public.
From the merchant’s stool he found his way to the British Museum, where he was an assistant for some years, and formed a lasting friendship with Anthony Panizzi, who was then keeper of the printed books. I remember Richard Garnett showing me one of the slips in the catalogue in my father’s handwriting in the days before that great work was printed. All this time he was reading for the Bar and taking an active interest in the political movements of the day. George Jacob Holyoake remembers him as a young law-student at No. 5, Gray’s Inn Road. He describes him as a stalwart, energetic platform speaker, and notes that he ultimately acquired two styles like O’Connell, the more gaseous of which he retained solely to illuminate electors.
In 1842, the year before he was called, he was one of the most active members of the Moral Force Chartists. Hanging on my walls in a dark, old-fashioned veneered frame is a large print in many colours of the famous Charter—a harmless exploded torpedo nowadays no doubt—but in 1842 the symbol of a grave reality. For Chartism, as Carlyle pointed out, was “the bitter discontent grown
fierce and mad, the wrong condition therefore, or the wrong disposition of the Working Classes of England.” With the ring of the true prophet in his words he foresaw in 1842 that Chartism “did not begin yesterday; will by no means end this day or to-morrow … new and ever new embodiments, chimeras madder or less mad have to continue.”
My father’s part at this time was the editing of a magazine called the National Associations Gazette. The problem it set itself out to deal with was why when all kinds of property were recognised and protected the property which a man has in his labour was to be unsupported and unrepresented. The political programme, in the “order of going in,” so to speak, was (1) the Charter; (2) Universal Suffrage of men and women; and (3) National Education. I have often heard my father in argument with other reformers laying down—too dogmatically as I thought—that National Education before Suffrage was the cart before the horse. If you educate masses to think and deny them the power of practically endeavouring to translate their thought into national action it is bound to break out into anti-national actions. Who shall say in regard to recent events in England and India that there was not much good sense in his reasoning.
From my very earliest childhood I seem to have heard of Chartists and Chartism and the “Condition of England,” question which, after all, remains with
us to-day turbulently unanswered. Very often of a Sunday afternoon we would drive over to some obscure lodgings in Paddington to see Mr. William Lovett. I remember him as a mild, amiable, white-haired old gentleman who had a wonderful facility for making models, and whilst he and my father talked of the old days of the National Complete Suffrage Union and Birmingham meetings, I used to inspect with ardent curiosity some ingenious model of Windsor Castle upon which Mr. Lovett was at work. I think my father and some others assisted Mr. Lovett, and I know that he had a great admiration and affection for him, which continued until his death in 1877. I stood in great awe of Mr. Lovett, for I knew that he had been heavily fined for refusing to serve in the Militia in days long ago, and had suffered imprisonment in Warwick gaol for his protest against the unconstitutional employment of the Metropolitan police in Birmingham. This frail, delicate old man, with the cunning fingers building quaint models in a back parlour in Paddington, the sweetest and friendliest of human beings, had been, in the eyes of the government, a revolutionist. I was always ready to go with my father to see him. I liked the mystery of him.
The energy my father displayed in his early years at the Bar must have been considerable. He was much in demand as a lecturer, and as he told me, for a year or two his main source of income was the delivery throughout England of his lectures on the Oratory of the Bar, the Pulpit and the Stage, and