THOMAS COOPER.
“The Lord’s will be done! I don’t think He intends thee to spend thy life at shoemaking. I have kept thee at school, and worked hard to get thee bread, and to let thee have thy own wish in learning, and never imagined that thou wast to be a shoemaker. But the Lord’s will be done! He’ll bring it all right in time.” Such were the words with which the worthy and excellent mother of Thomas Cooper gave her consent to her boy’s proposal that he should go and learn “the art, craft, and mystery of shoemaking.” He had no particular love for the craft, but he was anxious to do something for a livelihood, and desirous of helping his widowed mother; and, above all, he was ashamed of being pointed at by his neighbors as “an idle good-for-nothing.” That never was true of Thomas Cooper either in school or out, at work or recreation; and now that he had left school and was turned of fifteen years of age, he could not brook the insinuation that he was unwilling to work; so, good scholar as he was, and zealous for learning, and not without ambition, he resolved on doing something, however humble, to earn his bread, in order to shut the mouths of tattling neighbors. His mother had tried to get him apprenticed as a painter or a merchant’s clerk, and failed for want of a premium; and he had made a brief experiment at sailoring down at Hull, and had come home again utterly loathing the cruelty and abuse to which a sailor-boy of those days was subjected; so there was nothing for him now but to take the first chance of learning any trade that came in his way. He was an only child, and his mother had been a widow eleven years, getting her living as a dyer, in which occupation she had assisted her husband during his lifetime. In the pursuit of his trade as a dyer he had moved about from town to town, and had met with his wife at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. Not long after their marriage Mr. and Mrs. Cooper removed to Leicester, and took a house in Soar Lane, conveniently situated by the river Soar. Here Thomas, their only child, was born on the 20th of March, 1805. Twelve months afterward they went to live at Exeter, where the father died when his little boy was but four years old. After this his mother at once went back to old Gainsborough, where she would be near her relatives. Here she remained for the rest of her life, and here the first twenty-nine years of Thomas Cooper’s life were spent.
The signs her boy had given of mental powers above the average were quite enough to warrant Mrs. Cooper’s pathetic speech when he sought permission to become a shoemaker. His memory was remarkably retentive, and dated from a period which must be regarded as exceptionally early. On the day that he was two years old he fell into a stream that ran in front of his father’s house, and was nearly drowned. He declares that he distinctly remembers being led by his father’s hand over St. Thomas’s Bridge on the afternoon of that same day, and how the neighbors “chucked him under the chin, and said, How did you like it? How did you fall in? Where have you been to?“ Writing in 1871 he says, ”The circumstances are as vivid to my mind as if they only occurred yesterday.” Reading came to him almost by instinct, and at three years of age his schoolmistress set him on a stool to teach a boy more than twice his own age the letters of the alphabet. At the same age he could repeat several of Æsop’s fables. On their removal to Gainsborough he was seized with small-pox, which fearful complaint marred his visage for life. This was followed by other complaints which kept him an invalid for a year. On his recovery he had to bear the annoyance, so bitterly painful to a child, of being either scouted or pitied for his altered looks. But the kindness he failed to find out-of-doors was more than doubled at home. The heart of a true mother and a right noble woman warmed toward the child in his weakness and sad disfigurement. Never had needy child a more devoted parent. It was hard work for the solitary woman to make a living and pay her way, yet she bore up bravely and did the best she could for her child. The picture which is given by Thomas Cooper in his Autobiography of his home at this time, and of his own and his mother’s position, has a pre-Raphaelite simplicity about it, and well deserves a moment’s attention. “Within doors there was no longer a handsome room, the cheerful look of my father, and his little songs and stories. We had now but one chamber and one lower room, and the last-named at once parlor, kitchen, and dye-house: two large coppers were set in one part of it; and my mother was at work amid steam and sweat all the day long for half of the week, and on the other half she was fully employed in “framing,” ironing, and finishing her work. Yet for me she had ever words of tenderness. My altered face had not unendeared me to her. In the midst of her heavy toil, she could listen to my feeble repetitions of the fables, or spare a look, at my entreaty, for the figures I was drawing with chalk upon the hearthstone.”[59] Returning to school again, he was, at five years of age, his teacher’s favorite pupil, for he could “read the tenth chapter of Nehemiah, with all its hard names, like the parson in the church, as she used to say, and spell wondrously.” Wandering through the woods with his mother, or going with her on her country business rounds when the weather was fine; poring over Baskerville’s quarto Bible with its fine engravings from the old masters, when compelled on wet Sundays to stop indoors, the sensitive mind of the eager child received its first impressions of the beautiful in nature and art. When he was eight years of age his mother succeeded in getting him admitted to a new Free School, recently opened in the town, and little Tom was placed upon the foundation as a “Bluecoat” scholar. The course of instruction at this school was neither varied nor profound, consisting entirely of Scripture reading, writing, and the first four rules of arithmetic; but its frequent repetitions of spelling and ciphering lessons were good as a beginning, and laid a fair basis for future learning. Obliged to attend the parish church with the rest of the “Bluecoats,” he became enamoured with the stately service of the Church of England, the superior singing, and the grand old organ; and great was his delight when he was chosen, on account of his good voice and musical ear, to sit with six other boys in the choir by the organ up in the gallery of the church. During these three years, from the age of eight to eleven, he began to read for pleasure or profit such books as the immortal “Pilgrim’s Progress,” or Baines’s “History of the War,” “Pamela,” and the “Earl of Moreland,” and to revel in such ballads as “Chevy Chase,” which were committed to memory and repeated when alone, and served to stir up in his young heart the poetic or the warlike spirit. But these were years of severe trial too, for the great wars were then raging on the Continent; taxes pressed with terrible weight on all classes, but especially on the poor; and, added to these troubles, were the evils of bad harvests and winters unusually severe. It was hard indeed for his mother to make a living in such times, and to provide the barest subsistence for herself and child. “At one time,” he says, “wheaten flour rose to six shillings per stone, and we tried to live on barley-cakes, which brought on a burning, gnawing pain at the stomach. For two seasons the corn was spoiled in the fields with wet; and when the winter came, we could scoop out the middle of the soft distasteful loaf, and to eat it brought on sickness. Meat was so dear that my mother could not buy it, and often our dinner consisted of potatoes alone.” In three years the little Bluecoat boy had grown weary of the monotonous round of teaching at the Free School, and got his mother’s consent to attend a better class of school for boys, kept by a man who was known among his pupils and the neighbors as “Daddy Briggs.” Here there was talk of such abstruse subjects as mensuration and algebra; “Enfield’s Speaker” was used for reading, and the scholars went deeply into the histories of Greece and Rome and England, led on by that profound and original historian, Goldsmith! However, the school was an immense advance on the one just left, and offered certain opportunities of intercourse with boys of better position and culture than Tom had known before.
The boy must have made good use of his time at the Free School, for, it seems, he went to Daddy Briggs’ academy as much in the character of a teacher as that of a pupil; and he says of this good-natured but not very accomplished master: “He took no school-fees of my mother, but employed me as an assistant, for about an hour each day, in teaching the younger children. He treated me less as a pupil than as a companion, and I became much attached to him. Yet he was never really a teacher to me. I made my way easily without help through Walkinghame, part of Bonnycastle, and got a little way into algebra before I left school.” By this time he had acquired an intense thirst for reading, and eagerly sought out every book within reach. Now he borrowed the school-books of his companions and read them through, and now he resorted to the “circulating library,” at the shop of an old lady who supplied him with writing materials, and, as a great favor, was allowed to read such books as were not immediately required for circulation; or, again, he seized upon the cheap issues of educational works which were beginning to make their appearance about this time, and were sold at the doors of the good Gainsborough folk by that important personage “the number man.” At twelve years of age he had thus made the acquaintance of the classic English poets, had read “Cook’s Voyages,” the “Arabian Nights,” the “Old English Baron,” besides “a heap of other romances and novels it would require pages even to name.”
At thirteen years of age the poetry of Byron made a deep impression on his mind. Nothing in poetry but “Chevy Chase” had ever moved his heart before. Of “Childe Harold” and “Manfred” he says, “They seemed to create almost a new sense within me.” Poetry was henceforth a passion with him; but few subjects came amiss: he read everything he could lay hold of.
About this time, too, he showed tendencies in two directions, which were strongly developed subsequently, and, in fact, formed the main features of his character in after-years. The conversation of certain working-men politicians in a neighboring brush manufactory, and the loan of “Hone’s Caricatures“ and ”The News,” set him off in the direction of politics, and made him, of course, a disciple of Radicalism. But the other change in the current of his thoughts, which came a little later on, was more important, if not more profound and lasting. Deeply emotional and imaginative as a child, having also a strong sense of moral right and wrong, he was easily moved by religious appeals. A band of Primitive Methodists having come to the town, he was caught up by their enthusiasm and zeal, and resolved to join them. After much religious emotion, ending in no very settled state of mind, he left them and united with the Wesleyan Methodists, whose services and preaching were more to his mind. This brings us up to the time of his leaving school at the age of fifteen, and his entrance on the sterner work of life as a shoemaker. True, he had not done anything very marvellous at present, but he had fine abilities, a warm emotional nature, a rare poetic taste, a thorough craving for books, and no little perseverance and industry. Good Mrs. Cooper, therefore, showed something more than a mother’s fond fancy when she said, “The Lord’s will be done; I don’t think He intends thee to spend thy life at shoemaking.”
The society in John Clarke’s garret, where young Cooper sat down to learn his trade, was, like that of many similar places, rather literary. This man Clarke, true to the reputation of the followers of St. Crispin, was thoughtful and fond of reading. The conversation ran on the poetry of Shakespeare and Byron, and the acting of Kemble and Young and Mrs. Siddons—the stars of that day in the theatrical world. One of the fruits of this new poetic impulse was Cooper’s first poem, made one spring morning in his fifteenth year, as he walked in the fields near Gainsborough. Quoting this short piece in his Autobiography, he says: “I give it here, be it remembered, as the first literary feat of a self-educated boy of fifteen. I say self-educated, so far as I was educated. Mine has been almost entirely self-education all the way through life.” Great merit or promise is not claimed for these lines, yet they are worth quoting, if only for the sake of comparing them with the first attempt of another young shoemaker, Bloomfield.[60]
A MORNING IN SPRING.
“See with splendor Phœbus rise,
And with beauty tinge the skies.