JOHN POUNDS.
In 1837 there lived at Landport and Portsmouth two notable shoemakers. The Landport man combined with his daily task as a shoemaker the delightful occupation of sketching and painting, and obtained a local fame as an artist. The Portsmouth man found in the work of teaching poor ragged children to read and write and cipher his greatest relaxation from the drudgery of daily toil and his purest enjoyment, and has become known, we may safely affirm, throughout the Christian world, as a philanthropist, and one of the first men in this country who conceived and carried out the idea of Ragged Schools. The shoemaker-artist had a great admiration for the shoemaker-philanthropist and painted a picture representing him in his humble workroom, engaged in his double occupation as shoemaker and schoolmaster, with a last between his knees and a number of children standing before him receiving instruction. The artist’s name was Sheaf, and his interesting picture represented John Pounds occupied in his benevolent work as a gratuitous teacher of the neglected children of his native town. Sheaf sold his picture to Edward Carter, Esq., of Portsmouth, a warm admirer of John Pounds, and one of his best friends and helpers in his work. This picture was afterward engraved by Mr. Charpentier of Portsmouth, and it is to a copy of the engraving the renowned Dr. Guthrie of Edinburgh refers in the following story:
“It is rather curious, at least it is interesting to me, that it was by a picture that I was first led to take an interest in Ragged Schools—a picture in an old, obscure, decayed burgh, that stands on the shore of the Firth of Forth. I had gone thither with a companion on a pilgrimage; not that there was any beauty about the place, for it had no beauty. It has little trade. Its deserted harbor, silent streets, and old houses, some of them nodding to their fall, give indications of decay. But one circumstance has redeemed it from obscurity, and will preserve its name to the latest ages. It was the birthplace of Thomas Chalmers. I went to see this place. It is many years ago, and going into an inn for refreshments, I found the room covered with pictures of shepherdesses with their crooks, and tars in holiday attire, not very interesting. But above the chimney-piece there stood a large print, more respectable than its neighbors, which a skipper, the captain of one of the few ships that trade between that town and England, had probably brought there. It represented a cobbler’s room. The cobbler was there himself, spectacles on nose, an old shoe between his knees, the massive forehead and firm mouth expressing great determination of character, and below his bushy eyebrows benevolence gleamed out on a number of poor ragged boys and girls who stood at their lessons around the busy cobbler. My curiosity was excited, and on the inscription I read how this man, John Pounds, a cobbler in Portsmouth, taking pity on the poor ragged children, left by ministers and magistrates, and ladies and gentlemen, to run in the streets, had, like a good shepherd, gathered in the wretched outcasts; how he had brought them to God and the world; and how, while earning his bread by the sweat of his brow, he had rescued from misery, and saved to society, not less than five hundred of these children.”[51]
The biography of some of the best and most useful men the world has known may be written almost in a sentence. In the Old Testament there is a biography of this kind in the words, “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.”[52] In the New Testament there is another of a similar character in the brief sentence, “There was a certain man in Cæsarea called Cornelius, a centurion of the band called the Italian band, a devout man, and one that feared God with all his house, who gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God alway.”[53] The life-story of John Pounds is told in the last sentence of Dr. Guthrie’s narrative; yet a few farther details of the life and work of this noble-hearted man will be read with interest by all who venerate true worth and take pleasure in contemplating acts of Christ-like charity and mercy.
John Pounds was born at Portsmouth on the 17th of June, 1766. He was only twelve years old when his father, a sawyer employed in the government dockyard, had him bound apprentice as a shipwright in the same yard. He was then a strong active boy, and worked with his father in the yard until an accident maimed him for life, and made him incapable of working as a shipwright. He fell into a dry-dock and broke one of his thigh-bones, at the same time dislocating the joint. Whether the fracture was neglected or not we do not know; but, from some cause or other, poor Pounds went lame ever after. From the art of making ships he was now fain to turn to that of making shoes, and finding an old man in High Street, Portsmouth, who was willing to give the needful instruction, John Pounds, at the age of fifteen, became a shoemaker. Indeed, he would scarcely have claimed that title of dignity for himself; for his chief thoughts were given to other affairs, so that he was never an adept at his craft, and would in all probability have preferred to be set down as “only a cobbler.” It was not until 1804, when Pounds was thirty-eight years of age, that “he ventured to become a tenant on his own account of the small, weather-boarded tenement in St. Mary’s Street.” It was in this humble abode that John Pounds lived and worked and carried on his benevolent labors for thirty-five years. The room appears to have been about the size and shape of an open third-class railway carriage, and the entire tenement had more the appearance of a shanty or hut than an ordinary dwelling-house. Yet it was amply sufficient for the poor cobbler’s purposes, and served as the field of operations in all his benevolent enterprises.
Pounds lived alone in his snug little home; and as his earnings, though small, were more than enough to meet the requirements of a bachelor, he felt it right to do something to assist his poor relatives. He had a brother—a seafaring man—whose family was large and stood in need of assistance. John accordingly proposed to take one of his brother’s children and clothe, board, and educate him as if he had been his own. With characteristic generosity of spirit, he selected a poor little fellow who was a cripple. The child’s feet turned inward, and, as he walked, he had to lift them one over another. The tender-hearted cobbler could not endure to see the deformity, and soon devised the means of remedy. A neighbor’s child who suffered in the same way had been provided by a surgeon with a set of irons which straightened his feet and enabled him to walk properly. Unable to purchase irons for his own little charge, Pounds set to work to construct something in lieu of them to answer the same purpose. His apparatus, made out of old shoe soles, answered admirably, and he soon had the gratification of seeing the little fellow entirely cured of his defect. This boy grew up under his uncle’s care, was put apprentice to a fashionable shoemaker, and lived with Pounds till the time of his death.
When his nephew was old enough to begin to learn to read, John Pounds resolved to do the work of a schoolmaster himself; and, thinking that his little pupil would get on better if he had a companion, he began to look round for some one to share the benefit of his instructions. He selected a poor little urchin, “the son of a poor woman who went about selling puddings, her homeless children, unable to accompany her, being left in the open street amid frost and snow, with no other shelter than the overhanging shade of a bay-window.”[54] Other pupils were added in course of time, and the shoemaker soon began to take great delight in the work of teaching. It was not very difficult in Portsmouth to find plenty of children whose education and training were entirely neglected by their parents, and who were suffered to run about the streets in the most ragged and destitute condition. The sight of these children moved him to pity; and, once embarked on the enterprise of reforming and teaching them, Pounds could not rest content with having half a dozen or a dozen of them under his care, but went on gathering them into his room until he had, in the later years of his life, an average of forty poor children under his charge at a time. He loved his work all the more because it was entirely gratuitous, and because he knew that if these poor children were not thus taught they would never be taught at all, but grow up in ignorance, misery, and vice. No amount of pains, self-sacrifice, and anxiety was too much for this true disciple of Christ to pay for the satisfaction of doing such children good, and enriching and ennobling all their future lives.
The editor of the “Memoir of John Pounds” thus describes the cobbler in the midst of his scholars: “His humble workshop was about six feet wide and about eighteen feet in depth, in the midst of which he would sit on his stool, with his last or lapstone on his knee, and other implements by his side, going on with his work and attending at the same time to the pursuits of the whole assemblage—some of whom were reading by his side, writing from his dictation, of showing up their sums; others seated around on forms or boxes on the floor, or on the steps of a small staircase in the rear. Although the master seemed to know where to look for each and to maintain a due command over all, yet so small was the room, and so deficient in the usual accommodation of a school, that the scene appeared to the observer from without to be a mere crowd of children’s heads and faces.”[55]