He might well have taken to himself the words of Ferdinand, and said:—
“Some kinds of baseness
Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters
Point to rich ends.”
No man, indeed, ever felt more deeply than he did the vast importance of that great part of education, which no examinations can test, and which many examiners and framers of schemes of public competition seem to treat with utter contempt.
The feeling of responsibility which he speaks of did not seem to those who knew him as a child to have been, as he himself says, gradually acquired. It grew, no doubt, with exercise, but it was a part of his inbred worth. “From a very early age,” says one of his brothers, “he felt responsibility in a way none of the others of us did. If anything went wrong it was he who felt it.” He had inherited little of his father’s “buoyant optimism,” and none of his contentedness when things were going wrong. From a very early age his mother began to share with him the troubles that well-nigh weighed her down. They had only grown by her husband’s change of occupation. Matters grew worse and worse as the French War went on. “Never surely yet,” wrote her husband, “was a time when debts were collected with more difficulty, or left uncollected with more danger.” She tried more than one plan to add to the earnings of the family, and every plan she used to talk over with Rowland when he was still a mere child. At times she was terribly straightened. Her brother-in-law, Williams, “a tradesman and a scholar,” as her husband described him, once sent them in their distress a present of five pounds. “The sight of it,” wrote my grandfather, in a letter which I have before me, “produced in both of us mingled emotions of pleasure and pain. Pleasure as a strong, too strong, testimonial of your regard and affection, and pain as it could not but remind us of the toils and privations which you are undergoing to enable you to be generous as well as just. So powerful was the latter impression that our first impulse would have urged us to beg leave to return this too serious mark of affection, adopting the ‘burning words’ of David, ‘Shall we drink the blood of these men?’ but cooler consideration led to the fear that such a measure would give more pain to you than relief to ourselves.”
Others of their friends were ready to help them. One of them, in the hearing of one of her children, said to her, “Now, Mrs. Hill, remember you are never to be in want of money to go to market with.” A strong feeling of independence led her, however, to rely on herself, on her husband, and her children. She had a hatred of debt, and in this hatred every one of her children came to share. “I early saw,” said Rowland, “the terrible inconvenience of being poor. My mother used to talk to me more than to all the others together of our difficulties, and they were very grievous. She used to burst into tears as she talked about them. One day she told me that she had not a shilling in the house, and she was afraid lest the postman might bring a letter while she had no money to pay the postage. She had always been careful to save the rags, which she kept in two bags—one for the white, and the other for the coloured. The white were worth three or four times more than the coloured. It occurred to her that she might sell them, though the bags were not full. I was always sent by her on such errands, and I got this time about three shillings for the rags.”
She persuaded her husband to buy a ruling-machine, which she and Rowland chiefly worked. “That business is not at present well performed by anybody in Birmingham, and so it would be a likely thing for some of the lads to work at,” the father wrote to his brother-in-law. She turned the handle, while her little son, a child of nine, fed the machine. “It interfered largely with my education,” he said. In time he learnt to make the brass pens that were used in ruling, and so earned a little money for himself. They next took to making the copy-books, at first with the help of a bookbinder. But the help of this man the boy before long showed was not needed. “I soon acquired, in its simpler forms, the art of bookbinding—an art which I find I have not yet quite lost, having lately, in my seventy-first year, made up a scrap-book in what is called half-binding for the use of my grandchildren.” Johnson also had learnt in his youth how to bind a book, neither did he in advanced life forget the art. “It were better,” wrote Mrs. Thrale to him, “to bind books again, as you did one year in our thatched summer-house, than weigh out doses of mercury and opium which are not wanted.” There were other plans which Mrs. Hill formed, and carried out with unwearying industry, and in all of these her little son was always ready to take his share.
At the age of eleven his education was still more broken in upon, for he was called upon to assist his father and his elder brothers in teaching. “Young and inexperienced as I was,” he wrote, “I had inferiors both in age and knowledge; some of the pupils not being more than six or seven years old.”[24] At the age of twelve his school education came almost entirely to an end. He was, it is true, somewhat longer enrolled among the boys, and he still received some instruction. But henceforth he was much more a teacher than a pupil. One day in every week, for a few years of his boyhood, his employment lay altogether outside school-work. His second brother, Edwin, had been engaged every Wednesday in the Assay Office. But he got a better appointment. “Rowland,” wrote his father, “succeeds Edwin at the Assay Office. So that you see preferment goes on among us, and I will answer we think ourselves as happy on such occasions as our virtuous Governors fancy themselves, even in their sinecures, which our posts certainly cannot be called.”