What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

I remember another eccentricity in which the vicar indulged. He said the contact of a knife’s edge with earthenware, or porcelain, was extremely disagreeable. He caused, therefore, a number of dinner plates to be made with a little circular depression some two inches in diameter and about as deep as a crown piece in the centre, and had some round pieces of silver to fit into these receptacles, on which he cut his meat.

He was withal a very popular man, a good scholar, with decidedly scholarly tastes, much of a mathematician, a genuine humourist, with a sort of Horatian easy-going geniality about him, which was very charming even to us boys.

My brother Henry was one year my junior; my brother Anthony, with whom the world subsequently became acquainted, was five years younger than I. Henry, therefore, was the companion of all the London rambles which have been mentioned. I think we were tolerably good boys, truthful and obedient to legitimate authority. I was, however, if nursery traditions of a somewhat later day may be accepted as embodying real facts, rather too much given to yielding obedience only on reason shown; to “argify,” as certain authoritarians are wont to call it; and to make plenary submission only when consciously defeated in argument.

We had little or nothing of the “amusements” nowadays so liberally supplied to children. There was the pantomime at Christmas, intensely enjoyed. And I remember well pondering on the insoluble question, why my parents, who evidently, I thought, could if they chose it, go to the theatre every night of their lives, should abstain from doing so.

I do not remember any discontented longings for more or other amusements than we had. I was a thoroughly well constituted and healthy child, but without the smallest pretention to good looks, either in esse or in posse; sturdily built, with flaxen head, rosy cheeks, and blue eyes; broad of hand and foot; strong as a little pony—a veritable Saxon in type. I seem to my recollections to have been somewhat bravely ready to accept a life, in which the kicks might be more superabundant than the halfpence, not without complacent mental reference to the moral and physical breadth of shoulders, ready for whatever fate might lay on them. The nature of my childish mind, as I remember, was to place its ideas of heroism in capacity for uncomplaining endurance, rather than in capability for mastering others.

All the usual childish complaints and maladies touched me very lightly. I was as indifferent to weather, wet or dry, wind or shine, as a Shetland pony. Feet wet through had to remain in statu quo till they were dry again. Assiduously taught by my mother, I read at a very early age. Her plan for teaching the letters was as follows. She had a great number of bone counters with the alphabet in capitals and small letters on either side printed on them; then having invited a charming little girl, the daughter of a neighbour—(Katie Gibbon, laid to rest this many a year under the yew tree in the churchyard of the village of Stanton, near Monmouth)—who was just my own age, she tossed the counters broadcast over the floor, instituting prizes for him, or her, who should in crawling races over the floor, soonest bring the letter demanded. Reading thus began to be an amusement to me at an unusually early age. I believe I gave early indications of possessing a certain quantum of brain power; but had no reputation for cleverness. Indeed, had my parents ever formed the opinion that any one of their children was in any way markedly clever, they would have carefully concealed it from the subject of it. I take it, I was far from being what is called a prepossessing child. I had, I well remember, a reputation for an uncompromising expression of opinion, which was not altogether admirable. My mother used to tell in after years how, when once I had been, at about four years old, attentively watching her dressing for dinner, while standing on a chair by the side of her dressing table, I broke silence when the work was completed to say very judicially, “Now you have made yourself as fine as poso—(possible)—and you look worse than you did when you began!”

I am tempted to insert here a letter to my father from Dr. Williams, my old Winchester master, which (amusingly to me) illustrates what I have here written of my nursery tendencies. It belongs to a later date, when I was within half a year of leaving Winchester. I had not found it among my papers when I wrote the passage to which it is now appended. But I place it here in homage to the dictum that the child is father to the man.

“I have the pleasure,” Dr. Williams writes, “to express my approbation of your son’s conduct during the last half-year. His firmness in maintaining what was right and putting down what was wrong was very conspicuous in the early part of that time; not that I imagine it was less afterwards, but occasion did not call it forth so much.”

What the occasion was I entirely forget; evidently he refers to some exercise of my power as a Prefect.

“I have remarked to you before that he is fond of having a reason assigned for every thing; but he must take care that this do not degenerate into captiousness. His temper is generally good, but a little too sensitive when he fancies a smile is raised at his expense.”