What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

One does not traverse well nigh four score years without having experienced longings for the unattainable on several occasions. But I have no remembrance of any such eager, craving longing as the chronic longing of those days to make one of the great-coated companies who were departing to their various destinations by those “Telegraphs,” “High-Flyers,” “Magnets,” and “Independents.” (The more suggestive names of the “Wonder,” and its rival the “No Wonder!” once celebrated on the north-western road, belonged to a later day.) Had I been offered a seat on any of these vehicles my choice would have been dictated solely by considerations of distance—Falmouth for choice, as the westward Ultima Thule of coaching experience. With what rapture should I have climbed, in my little round jacket as I was, and without a thought of any other protection, to the roof of the Falmouth mail—the mail for choice, the Devonport “Quicksilver” being then in the womb of the future—and started to fetch a forgotten letter (say) of the utmost importance, with strict injunctions to bring it back by the returning coach! I don’t think my imagination had yet soared to the supreme glories of the box seat. That came later. To have been a booked passenger, that that horn should have sounded for me, that I should have been included in the guard’s final and cheery assurance, that at length all was “right”—would have been ample enough for an ecstasy of happiness. What an endless vista of ever-changing miles of country! What an infinite succession of “teams!” What a delicious sense of belonging to some select and specially important and adventurous section of humanity as we should clatter at midnight, or even at three or four o’clock in the morning, through the streets of quiet little country towns, ourselves the only souls awake in all the place! What speculations as to the immediate bestowal and occupation of the coachman, when he “left you here, sir!” in the small hours! What a delightful sense of the possible dangers of the undertaking as testified by many eagerly read narratives of the disasters of the road. Alas! I had no share in it all, save to stand on the curbstone amid the crowd of Jew boys selling oranges and cedar pencils sixpence a dozen, and hurrying passengers and guards and porters, and look on them all with envious longing.

Nota bene. On such an occasion at the present day—if it be possible to conceive such an anachronism—the Jew boys above referred to would be probably Christian boys, and the object of their commerce, the evening papers. But I have no recollection of any such element in the scene at the White Horse Cellar some sixty-eight years since.

Occasionally when a holiday from lessons occurred—I am afraid most probably in consequence of my father being confined to his bed with headaches, which even at that early day, and increasingly, as years went on, afflicted him—we, my brother Henry and I, obtained permission for a longer ramble. I have no recollection that on these occasions either the parks (unless perhaps sometimes St. James’s Park), or Kensington Gardens, or Hampstead, or Highgate, or any of the places that might be supposed to be attractive had any attractions for us. Our faces were ever turned eastward. The city with its narrow mysterious lanes, and still more mysterious wharves, its quaint secluded churches, its Guildhall, and its Gog and Magog, the queer localities of the halls of its Companies, and specially the abstruse mystery of that venerable Palladium, the London stone, excited in those days an irresistible influence on my imagination. But above all else the grand object of a much-planned eastern pilgrimage was the Docks!—with the out-going ships bearing, tied to their shrouds, boards indicating their destinations. Here again was unsatisfied longing! But it was a longing more tempered by awe and uncertainty. I am not sure that I would, if it had been offered to me, have stepped on board an East Indiaman bound for Bombay as eagerly as I would have climbed a coach starting for the Land’s End. But it was a great triumph to have seen with our own eyes the Agra (or some other) Castle majestically passing through the dock gates, while passengers on deck, men and women, whose feet would absolutely touch land no more till they stopped at far Bombay on the other side of the world, spoke last farewells to friends standing on the dock walls or even on the gates themselves.

But I can recall no less vividly certain expeditions of a kind which appeared to our imaginations to be—and which perhaps really were in some degree—fraught with a certain amount of peril. Stories had reached us of sundry mysteriously wicked regions, where the bandit bands of the great city consorted and lived outlaw lives under circumstances and conditions that powerfully excited our young imaginations. Especially accounts of a certain lane had reached us, where it was said all the pocket handkerchiefs stolen by all the pickpockets in London were to be seen exposed in a sort of unholy market. The name of this place was Saffron Hill. Whether any such place still exists, I know not. It has probably been swept away by the march of recent improvement. But it did in those days veritably exist. And to this extraordinary spot—as remote and strange to our fancy as the realms of Prester John—it was determined after protracted consideration by my brother and myself, that our next long ramble should be devoted. We had ascertained that the dingy land of our researches lay somewhat to the westward of Smithfield—which had already been the object of a most successful, adventurous, and delightful expedition, not without pleasurable perils of its own from excited bullocks, still more excited drovers and their dogs—and by dint of considerable perseverance we reached it, and were richly rewarded for our toil and enterprise. Report had spoken truly. Saffron Hill was a world of pocket-handkerchiefs. From every window and on lines stretched across the narrow street they fluttered in all the colours of the rainbow, and of all sizes and qualities. The whole lane was a long vista of pennon-like pocket-handkerchiefs! We should have much liked to attempt to deal in this strange market, not so much for the sake of possessing any of the articles, as with a view of obtaining experience, and informing ourselves respecting the manners and customs of the country. But we were protected from the possibly unpleasant results of any such tentative by the total absence from our pockets of any coin of the realm. We doubtless had pocket-handkerchiefs, and I have no recollection of their having been stolen. Probably it was ascertained by the inhabitants that they were not worth their notice.

But the subject reminds me of an experience of the pocket-picking world which occurred to me some twenty years later. It was at Naples. People generally in those days carried silk pocket-handkerchiefs instead of the scraps of muslin which are affected nowadays. And five silk pocket-handkerchiefs were abstracted from my pockets during my walks abroad in as many days. I then took to wearing very common ones, and lost no more! An American then at Naples, whose experiences of the proclivities of that population had been similar to mine, was not so fortunate in the result of the defensive measures he adopted. He sewed strongly into the interior of his pocket a large fish-hook. The result which he anticipated followed. The thief’s hand was caught, and the American, turning sharply, seized him by the wrist and held him in a grasp like a vice till he could hand him over to a gendarme. But within a fortnight that American was stabbed to the heart one night as he was going home from the theatre. The light-fingered fraternity, it would seem, considered that such a practice was not within the laws of the game; whereas my more moderate ruse did not offend their sense of justice and fair play.

My brother and I reached home safely enough after our expedition to thief-land; and were inexhaustible in our accounts of the wonders we had witnessed. For it formed no part of our plan, and would not have been at all in accordance with the general practice of our lives to conceal the facts from our parents. Probably we had a sufficient suspicion of the questionable nature of the expedition we contemplated to prevent us from declaring it beforehand. But our education and habits would have forbidden any dream of concealing it.

As far as my recollection serves me, our moral and religious education led us to consider the whole duty of boy to be summed up in the two precepts, “obey,” and “tell no lies.” I think there was a perfunctory saying of some portion of the catechism on a Sunday morning. But I am very sure that in our own minds, and apparently in those of all concerned, the vastly superior importance of the Virgil lesson admitted of no moment’s doubt. But it must not be imagined from this that my parents were more irreligious people than their neighbours; still less that they were not most affectionately and indeed supremely solicitous for the well-being and education of their children. My father was the son of a priest of the Church of England, and my mother the daughter of another, the Rev. William Milton, Vicar of Heckfield, a New College living not far from Reading. Their associates were mainly barristers or clergy. My father was wholly and absolutely free from the prevailing vice of the time, and I never remember to have seen him in any slightest degree the worse for drink. And in the whole manière d’être of the house and home there was no note or symptom of any life save one of the most correct respectability and propriety, fully up to the average of the time. But my parents were by no means what was called in the language of the time “evangelicals.” And in the social atmosphere of those days, any more decided and marked amount of religious instruction and teaching would have unmistakably indicated “evangelical tendencies.” Moreover, though I cannot remember, and it is exceedingly improbable, that any ideas were directly instilled into our minds on the subject, it certainly is the fact that I grew into boyhood with the notion that “evangelicalism” or “low churchism” was a note of vulgarity—a sort of thing that might be expected to be met with in tradesmen’s back parlours, and “academies,” where the youths who came from such places were instructed in English grammar and arithmetic, but was not to be met with, and was utterly out of place, among gentlemen and in gentlemanlike places of education, where nothing of the kind was taught.

All this to mark the change of tempora and mores, in these as in so many other respects, since George the Third was king.

Among the few surviving remembrances of those childhood’s years in Keppel Street, I can still recall to the mind’s eye the face and features of “Farmer,” the highly trustworthy and responsible middle-aged woman who ruled the nursery there, into which a rapid succession of brothers and sisters was being introduced in those years. Farmer, as I remember her, inspired more awe than affection. She was an austere and somewhat grim sort of body. And somehow or other the obscurely terrible fact that she was an Anabaptist (!) had reached the world of the nursery. I need hardly say that the accusation carried with it no sort of idea whatever to our minds. I don’t think we had any knowledge that the mystic term in question had reference to any forms or modifications of religious belief. But we were well assured that it implied something mysterious and terrible. And I am afraid that we gracelessly availed ourselves of what we should have considered a misfortune, if we had at all known what it meant, to express on occasions of revolt against discipline, our scorn for an individual so disgraced by nature. I have still in my ear the lilt of a wicked chorus the burthen of which ran:—

“Old Farmer is an Anabaptist!
When she is gone, she will not be missed!”