What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

I was born in the year 1810 at No. 16, Keppel Street, Russell Square. The region was at that time inhabited by the professional classes, mainly lawyers. My father was a barrister of the Middle Temple to the best of my recollection, but having chambers in the Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn. A quarter of a century or so later, all the district in question became rather deteriorated in social estimation, but has, I am told, recently recovered itself in this respect under the careful and judicious administration of the Duke of Bedford. The whole region appeared to me, when I was recently in London, about the least changed part of the London of my youthful days. As I walked up Store Street, which runs in a line from Keppel Street to Tottenham Court Road, I spied the name of “Pidding, Confectioner.” I immediately entered the shop and made a purchase at the counter. “I did not in the least want this tart,” said I to the girl who was serving in the shop. “Why did you take it, then?” said she, with a little toss of her head. “Nobody asked you to buy it.” “I bought it,” rejoined I, “because I used to buy pastry of Mr. Pidding in this shop seventy years ago.” “Lor’, sir!” said the girl, “did you really?” She probably considered me to be the Wandering Jew.

I remember well that my father used to point out to me houses in Russell Square, Bedford Square, and Bloomsbury Square in which judges and other notable legal luminaries used to live. But even in those days the localities in question, especially the last named of them, were beginning to be deserted by such personages, who were already moving farther westward. The occasion of these walks with my father through the squares I have named—to which Red Lion Square might have been added—was one the painful nature of which has fixed it in my memory indelibly.

“Infandam memoria jubes renovare dolorem.”

For the object of these walks was the rendering an account of the morning’s studies. I was about six years old, when under my father’s auspices I was first introduced to the Eton Latin Grammar. He was a Wykehamist, had been a fellow of New College, and had held a Vinerian Fellowship. And his great ambition was, that his eldest son, myself, should tread in his steps and pursue the same career. Dîs aliter visum!—as regards at least the latter stages of that career. For I did become, and am, a Wykehamist, as much as eight years at Coll. B. M. Winton prope Winton can make me.

Of which more anon.

For the present I see myself alone in the back drawing-room of No. 16, Keppel Street, in which room the family breakfast took place—probably to avoid the necessity of lighting another fire in the dining-room below—at 7 A.M., on my knees before the sofa, with my head in my hands and my eyes fixed on the Eton Latin Grammar laid on the sofa cushion before me. My parents had not yet come down to breakfast, nor had the tea urn been brought up by the footman. Nota bene.—My father was a poor man, and his establishment altogether on a modest footing. But it never would have occurred to him or to my mother that they could get on without a man-servant in livery. And though this liveried footman served a family in which two tallow candles with their snuffer dish supplied the whole illumination of the evening, had the livery been an invented one instead of that proper to the family, the circumstance would have been an absurdity exciting the ridicule of all the society in which my parents lived. Tempora mutantur! Certainly at the present day an equally unpretending household would be burthened by no footman. But on the morning which memory is recalling to me the footman was coming up with the urn, and my parents were coming down to breakfast, probably simultaneously; and the question of the hour was whether I could get the due relationship of relative and antecedent into my little head before the two events arrived.

And that, as I remember it, was the almost unvaried routine for more than a year or two. I think, however, that the walks of which I was speaking when this retrospect presented itself to me must have belonged to a time a little, but not much later; for I had then advanced to the making of Latin verses. We used to begin in those days by making “nonsense verses.” And many of us ended in the same way! The next step—Gradus ad Parnassum—consisted in turning into Latin verse certain English materials provided for the purpose, and so cunningly prepared as to fall easily and almost inevitably into the required form. And these were the studies which, as I specially remember, were the subject of rehearsal during those walks from Lincoln’s Inn to Keppel Street.

My father was in the habit of returning from his chambers to a five o’clock dinner—rather a late hour, because he was an industrious and laborious man. Well! we, that is my next brother (not the one whose name became subsequently well known in the world, but my brother Henry, who died early) and myself, used to walk from Keppel Street to Lincoln’s Inn, so as to arrive in time to walk back with my father. He was a fast walker; and as we trotted along one on each side of him, the repetition of our morning’s poetical achievements did not tend, as I well remember, to facilitate the difficulty of “keeping our wind.”

But what has probably fixed all this in my mind during nearly three quarters of a century was my father’s pat application of one of our lines to the difficulties of those peripatetic poetizings. “Muse and sound of wheel do not well agree,” read the cunningly prepared original, which the alumnus with wonderful sagacity was to turn into, “Non bene conveniunt Musa rotæque sonus.” “That,” said my father, as he turned sharp round the corner into the comparative quiet of Featherstone Buildings, “is exactly why I turned out of Holborn!”

I do not know whether children of eight years old, or thereabouts, would at the present day be allowed to range London so freely as we were. But our great amusement and delight was to take long exploring walks in as distant parts of the huge (though then comparatively small) city as could be compassed within the time at our disposition. One especially favourite excursion, I well remember, was to the White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly to see the coaches start or arrive. I knew all their names, and their supposed comparative speed. By this means, indeed, came my first introduction to English geography. Formal lessons on such a thoroughly “commercial academy” subject were not, of course, thought of for an aspiring Wykehamist. But for the due enjoyment of the White Horse Cellar spectacle it was necessary to know the whereabouts of the cities, their distance from London, and the routes by which they were reached. It thus came to pass that our geographical notions were of a curiously partial description—tolerably copious and accurate as regards the south and west of England, far less so as regards the north. For the north country coaches did not start from Piccadilly. On the opposite side of the way to the White Horse Cellar there was another coaching inn, the White Bear, on which I remember we used to look with much contempt, from the belief, whether in any degree well founded I know not, that the coaches which stopped there on their way out of town, or arrived there, were mainly slow coaches.