SETH THOMPSON, THE STOCKINGER;
OR,
"WHEN THINGS ARE AT THE WORST,
THEY BEGIN TO MEND."
Leicestershire stockingers call that a false proverb. "People have said so all our lives," say they; "but, although we have each and all agreed, every day, that things were at the worst, they never begun to mend yet!" This was not their language sixty years ago, but it is their daily language now; and the story that follows is but, as it were, of yesterday.
Seth Thompson was the only child of a widow, by the time that he was six years old, and became a "winding boy," in a shop of half-starved framework-knitters at Hinckley,—a kindred lot with hundreds of children of the same age, in Leicestershire. Seth's mother was a tender mother to her child; but he met tenderness in no other quarter. He was weakly, and since that rendered him unable to get on with his winding of the yarn as fast as stronger children, he was abused and beaten by the journeymen, while the master stockinger, for every slight flaw in his work,—though it always resulted from a failure of strength rather than carelessness,—unfeelingly took the opportunity to "dock" his paltry wages.
Since her child could seldom add more than a shilling or fifteen-pence to the three, or, at most, four shillings, she was able to earn herself,—and she had to pay a heavy weekly rent for their humble home,—it will readily be understood that neither widow Thompson nor Seth were acquainted with the meaning of the word "luxury," either in food or habits. A scanty allowance of oatmeal and water formed their breakfast, potatoes and salt their dinner, and a limited portion of bread, with a wretchedly diluted something called "tea" as an accompaniment, constituted their late afternoon, or evening meal; and they knew no variety for years, winter or summer. The widow's child went shoeless in the warm season, and the cast-off substitutes he wore in winter, together with lack of warmth in his poor mother's home, and repulses from the shop fire by the master and men while at work, subjected him, through nearly the whole of every winter, to chilblains and other diseases of the feet. Rags were his familiar acquaintances, and, boy-like, he felt none of the aching shame and sorrow experienced by his mother when she beheld his destitute covering, and reflected that her regrets would not enable her to amend his tattered condition.
Seth's mother died when he reached fifteen, and expressed thankfulness, on her death-bed, that she was about to quit a world of misery, after being permitted to live till her child was in some measure able to struggle for himself. In spite of hard usage and starvation, Seth grew up a strong lad, compared with the puny youngsters that form the majority of the junior population in manufacturing districts. He was quick-witted, too, and had gathered a knowledge of letters and syllables, amidst the references to cheap newspapers and hourly conversation on politics by starving and naturally discontented stockingers. From a winding-boy, Seth was advanced to the frame, and, by the time he had reached seventeen, was not only able to earn as much as any other stockinger in Hinckley, when he could get work, but, with the usually improvident haste of the miserable and degraded, married a poor "seamer," who was two years younger than himself.
Seth Thompson at twenty-one, with a wife who was but nineteen, had become the parent of four children; and since he had never been able to bring home to his family more than seven shillings in one week, when the usual villainous deductions were made by master and manufacturer, in the shape of "frame-rent" and other "charges,"—since he had often had but half-work, with the usual deduction of whole charges, and had been utterly without work for six several periods, of from five to nine weeks each, during the four years of his married life,—the following hasty sketch of the picture which this "home of an Englishman" presented one noon, when a stranger knocked at the door, and it was opened by Seth himself, will scarcely be thought overdrawn:—
Except a grey deal table, there was not a single article within the walls which could be called "furniture," by the least propriety of language. This stood at the farther side of the room, and held a few soiled books and papers, Seth's torn and embrowned hat, and the mother's tattered straw bonnet. The mother sat on a three-legged stool, beside an osier cradle, and was suckling her youngest child while she was eating potatoes and salt from an earthen dish upon her knee. Seth's dish of the same food stood on a seat formed of a board nailed roughly across the frame of a broken chair; while, in the centre of the floor, where the broken bricks had disappeared and left the earth bare, the three elder babes sat squatted round a board whereon boiled potatoes in their skins were piled,—a meal they were devouring greedily, squeezing the inside of the root into their mouths with their tiny hands, after the mode said to be practised in an Irish cabin. An empty iron pot stood near the low expiring fire, and three rude logs of wood lay near it,—the children's usual seats when they had partaken their meal. A description of the children's filthy and bedaubed appearance with the potatoe starch, and of the "looped and windowed" rags that formed their covering, could only produce pain to the reader. Seth's clothing was not much superior to that of his offspring; but the clean cap and coloured cotton handkerchief of the mother, with her own really beautiful but delicate face and form, gave some relief to the melancholy picture.
Seth blushed, as he took up his dish of potatoes, and offered the stranger his fragment of a seat. And the stranger blushed, too, but refused the seat with a look of so much benevolence that Seth's heart glowed to behold it; and his wife set down her porringer, and hushed the children that the stranger might deliver his errand with the greater ease.