Lives of Illustrious Shoemakers

by W. E. Winks

Cooper stayed with Clarke for a year and a half, and, after a brief interval, went to work with a “first-rate hand,” who was known in the shoemaking fraternity as Don Cundell. Here the youth, more expert at his craft than many of his companions, learned before the age of nineteen to make “a really good woman’s shoe.”[61] During this period he seems to have settled in good earnest alike to his daily occupation and the work of self-culture. Under the guidance of a friend named Macdonald, who lent him books, he read such works as Robertson’s “Histories of Scotland,” “America,” and “Charles the Fifth,” Neale’s “History of the Puritans,” and a little theology. Like multitudes of youths in a position similar to his, Thomas Cooper derived much benefit from a Mutual Improvement Society which was started in Gainsborough about this time by a friend of his, a draper’s assistant named Joseph Foulkes Winks. In this society papers were read and discussions held on all imaginable subjects, literary, historical, and religious. “This weekly essay-writing,“ he says, ”was an employment which absorbed a good deal of my thought, and was a good induction into the writing of prose, and into a mode of expressing one’s thoughts.” On one occasion a prize was offered for the best essay on “The Worst King of England.” The tug of war lay between Winks, who chose as his subject James II., and Cooper, who eventually was adjudged the victor, and had taken William the Conqueror as his ideal of a bad king. The friendship thus commenced in amicable rivalry lasted, as we shall see, through life. Not content with self-improvement, these youths, with Macdonald and Wood, banded themselves together in a resolve to instruct others less favored than themselves, and an “Adult School” was formed. This was one of the first if not the first school of the kind in Lincolnshire, and must have proved a great benefit to the illiterate poor of the town, for by the end of the following year, when this branch was admitted into “The Adult Schools Society,” the numbers on the books were 324. Friendships with two other young men brought such books in his way as Sibley’s famous illustrated work on astrology, over which he wasted much valuable time, Volney’s “Ruins of Empires” and Voltaire’s “Philosophical Dictionary,” over which his time was worse than wasted. But the best piece of good fortune in the way of reading came to him in the discovery that one “Nathaniel Robinson, mercer,” “had left his library for the use of the inhabitants of the town.” It seems that this boon had been neglected or forgotten by the good folk of Gainsborough. Once known to the ardent young shoemaker, it was not neglected nor forgotten, at all events as far as he was concerned. He pounced upon it with the avidity and excited joy of a naturalist who lights upon a new or rare specimen. We must let him speak for himself in the matter, and describe this precious “find” in his own words. He says: “I was in ecstasies to find the dusty, cobwebbed shelves loaded with Hooker, and Bacon, and Cudworth, and Stillingfleet, and Locke, and Jeremy Taylor, and Tillotson, and Bates, and Bishop Hall, and Samuel Clarke, and Warburton, and Bull, and Waterland, and Bentley, and Bayle, and Ray, and Derham, and a score of other philosophers and divines, mingled with Stanley’s ‘History of Philosophers,’ and its large full-length portraits; Ogilvy’s ‘Embassies to Japan and China,’ with their large curious engravings; Speed’s and Rapin’s folio Histories of England, Collier’s ‘Church History,’ Fuller’s ‘Holy War,’ Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs,’ the first edition, in black letter, with its odd rude plates, and countless other curiosities and valuables.”

Cooper now settled to reading in desperate earnest, and with something like a fixed purpose to become a scholar, and perhaps a writer, or a great political or religious orator, or, more probable than all things else—for the poetic fervor was very strong just now—a poet! Yet he had no very definite notions of what he was to be. All he was certain about was that he must and would study, and fit himself for some higher walk in life when the time came to enter on it. Let the reader keep this fact in mind while reading the story we have to tell of close application to study, lofty aspirations, and great attainments as a scholar. Thomas Cooper during his shoemaker’s life, in which he laid the foundation of rare scholarship, never earned more than ten shillings a week—scarcely enough to buy food and clothes. He had not become an apprentice, and therefore the laws of the trade prevented the best masters employing him. One “Widow Hoyle, who sold her goods in the market cheap,” was his only employer, so long as he remained at the trade. If he was not, in these days of lowly toil and lofty thoughts,

“Checked by the scoff of Pride, by Envy’s frown,”

he well knew what it was to feel the restraint of

“Poverty’s unconquerable bar.”

Yet he had courage, an indispensable quality in a youth so situated, and it was the courage that “mounteth with the occasion,” and all these bars to self-culture only acted as a stimulus to more resolute toil. Strange to say, one of his greatest incentives to study at this time was an account of the life of Dr. Samuel Lee, Professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge, which the young student had read in the Imperial Magazine, then edited by another of our illustrious shoemakers, Samuel Drew. Lee had been a carpenter, ignorant of English grammar, had bought Ruddiman’s Latin Rudiments, and having mastered the book, had learned to read Cæsar and Virgil, and had taught himself Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac by the time he was six-and-twenty years of age! Cooper said within himself, “If one man can teach himself a language, another can.” So he went to work, following in Lee’s steps so far as to take Ruddiman’s book and commit “the entire volume to memory—notes and all!” Then came the study of Hebrew with the help of Lyon’s small grammar, bought for a shilling at an old bookstall; and a year after he was busy at Greek, and created for himself a pleasing diversion by the comparatively easy task of mastering French. All this time his general reading was not neglected. By the advice of a valued friend, John Hough, he fortified his mind against the sceptical thoughts which previous reading had awakened by going carefully through the chief works on Christian evidences. Few divinity students at the end of their course have read more carefully or extensively than this occupant of a cobbler’s stall had done by the time he was twenty-three years old. Paley’s “Horæ Paulinæ,” “Natural Theology,” and “Evidences,” Bishop Watson’s “Apologies,” Soame Jenyns’ “Internal Evidences,” Lord Lyttleton’s “Conversion of St. Paul,” Sherlock’s “Trial of the Witnesses,“ besides profounder works like Butler’s ”Analogy,” Bentley’s “Folly of Atheism,” Dr. Samuel Clarke’s “Being and Attributes of God,” Stillingfleet’s “Origines Sacræ,” and Warburton’s “Divine Legation of Moses,“ were as familiar to him as the ”Paradise Lost” and most of the plays of Shakespeare were to his companion Thomas Miller.[62] The labors of this period, from 1824 to 1828, were tremendous, or, as one of Sir Walter Scott’s characters was wont to say, “prodigious.” Cooper had left Don Cundell’s, and now worked at home, so that he could arrange his time for study and work as he pleased. Like Drew, he had learned to do a fair day’s work and not to neglect the means of earning his daily bread for the more fascinating occupations of reading and study. But if ordinary work was not neglected, it must be confessed that the work of the scholar was overdone. No one can live as Cooper lived from the age of nineteen to twenty-three without incurring fearful risk to body and mind. Rising at three, or four at the latest, he read history, or the grammar of some language, or engaged in translation till seven, when he sat down to his stall. At meal-times he attempted the double task of taking in food for the body and the mind at the same time, cutting up his food and eating it with a spoon that he might not have occasion to take his eyes off the book he held in his hand; at work till eight or nine, he was all the while committing to memory and reciting aloud passages from the poets, or declensions and conjugations, or rules of syntax; and when he rose from his stool, it was only to pace the room, while he still went on with his studies, until at last he dropped into bed utterly exhausted. This was his method in spring and summer, but even in winter his hours were just as long, and study in the early morning was not accompanied by the invigorating influence of walking exercise and fresh air; for he says, “When in the coldness of winter we could not afford to have a fire till my mother rose, I used to put a lamp on a stool, which I placed on a little round table, and standing before it wrapped up in my mother’s old red cloak, I read on till seven, or studied a grammar or my Euclid, and frequently kept my feet moving to secure warmth or prevent myself from falling asleep.”[63] In this way Latin was so far mastered that Cæsar’s “De Bello Gallico” could be read “page after page with scarcely more than a glance at the dictionary,” and the “Eneid” of Virgil became an intellectual love that lasted for life. We have no space to describe the vast amount of historical and miscellaneous reading done at this time. It was surely no small feat for a shoemaker, working hard for twelve or thirteen hours in the day, to go in a few years through Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall,” Sale’s “Preliminary Discourse to his Translation of the Koran,“ Mosheim’s ”Church History,” all the principal English poets from Shakespeare to Scott and Keats; to read the “Curiosities of Literature,” “Calamities” and “Quarrels of Authors,“ Wharton’s ”History of Poetry“ and Johnson’s ”Lives of the Poets,“ Boswell’s ”Life of Johnson“ and Landor’s ”Imaginary Conversations,“ Southey’s ”Book of the Church,” and Lingard’s “Anglo-Saxon Antiquities,” besides a host of books of travel, and quarterly and monthly magazines innumerable.

We have said that Cooper overdid the work of study. Like Kirke-White, he was so completely absorbed with the passion for learning, that he set all the laws of health at defiance, and had to pay the penalty. Having a stronger constitution than the Nottingham youth, Cooper managed to escape with his life, and, after a period of bodily and mental prostration, with all his old vigor restored to him; but it was a narrow escape. These excessive labors, coupled with the effects of scanty fare, brought him to a state of extreme weakness. He says, “I not unfrequently swooned away and fell all along the floor when I tried to take my cup of oatmeal gruel at the end of my day’s labor. Next morning, of course, I was not able to rise at an early hour; and then very likely the next day’s study had to be stinted. I needed better food than we could afford to buy, and often had to contend with the sense of faintness, while I still plodded on with my double task of mind and body.”[64] At length, after many premonitory symptoms, came a crisis. One night he had to be carried to bed in a dead faint, and for nine weeks he left his bed but for a short time each day. The greatest fears were felt for his safety; the doctor had little hope, and once he was so prostrate, that a friend who was called in sadly told his mother that the pulse had ceased to beat, and he was dead! This was at the end of 1827; by the spring of the following year he had recovered sufficiently to begin to think of going to work again. A brief spell at his old occupation was enough to satisfy him that it would not suit him in his altered state of health; and, after a short rest and more complete recovery, he took the welcome advice of two friends and agreed to open a school. He had now done forever with the trade of a shoemaker, after giving to it eight years of the best part of his early life. These he confesses to have been, on the whole, most happy years, and of the last four he says with enthusiasm, “What glorious years were those years of self-denial and earnest mental toil, from the age of nearly nineteen to nearly three-and-twenty, that I sat and worked in that corner of my poor mother’s lowly home!” He had certainly made wondrous progress as a self-taught scholar, and now he was prepared to enter the world and make his own way in it, with such a stock of learning and culture as few young men in England, in his position, could boast of. We scarcely dare venture to estimate his acquirements at this time. The reader can easily judge from our account of his studies how considerable they must have been. In English literature, from Spenser and Shakespeare to the essayists and poets, such as De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb, or Byron, Campbell, and Moore, he was well versed. He had read extensively in history, philosophy, theology, and Christian evidences. As to mathematics, he had gone pretty deeply into algebra and geometry; and in the languages, besides his “easy” French, he had done something in Hebrew, could read his Greek Testament, and found delight in the Latin authors, such as Cæsar, Virgil, Tacitus, and Lactantius. This is no mean story to tell of the accomplishments of a self-taught shoemaker, who has never earned more than ten shillings per week.

School-teaching was a congenial employment for one so fond of study and so apt to teach as Thomas Cooper. He threw his whole soul into the work, and succeeded in establishing a first-rate school of its class; and that class of school was certainly a vast improvement on the Free School of his own early days. Everybody in Gainsborough knew the studious shoemaker who had learned four languages at the cobbler’s stall, read as much, or more, than any one in the town of his own age, had a marvellous memory, and could repeat the whole of Hamlet and the first four books of the “Paradise Lost!” Besides all this, he was known and esteemed for a steady young man, who, though he might incur a little suspicion among the strictly religious folk by his neglect of public worship, was guilty of no waste of time or money in vicious company and riotous living. And so pupils flocked in; a hundred names were entered on his books by the end of the first year, and the school prospered to his heart’s content. Nor was the confidence of parents misplaced; never, surely, did a teacher give himself more completely to his work. He gave even more than was bargained for, drilling all the boys in Latin grammar, and carrying them on as far as possible in the higher branches of arithmetic. Five years were thus spent most usefully and happily at Gainsborough, after which he removed from the old town and settled in the cathedral city of Lincoln.

But before quitting Gainsborough a vital change had taken place in his thoughts and mode of life. Brought face to face with death in his recent illness, the most serious thoughts had been aroused within his mind, and on his recovery he was not the man to abandon or drown such thoughts because the immediate fear of death had passed away. The earnest conversations he held with the young curate of the parish, “the pious and laborious Charles Hensley,” and his two former friends, Hough and Kelvey, strengthened his resolve to seek for peace of mind in the belief of gospel truth and entire devotion to a religious life. In January, 1829, he joined the Methodist Society. The perusal of Sigston’s “Life of William Bramwell” fired his soul with a passion for holiness, and such was his intensity of religious fervor for a time, that he is constrained to say in his Autobiography: “If throughout eternity in heaven I be as happy as I often was for whole days during that short period of my religious life, it will be heaven indeed. Often for several days together I felt close to the Almighty—felt I was His own and His entirely. I felt no wandering of the will and inclination to yield to sin; and when temptation came, my whole soul wrestled for victory till the temptation fled.” Entered on the local preachers’ plan, he turned his rare gifts to good account in ministering to the congregations which formed the Gainsborough “circuit,” and developed that faculty of eloquent speech which in later years has delighted the thousands who gathered to hear his political orations as an advocate of the “People’s Charter” or his grand lectures on the evidences of the Christian religion. Driven away from his old home by unhappy disturbances in the Wesleyan Society, he went, as we have said, in November, 1833, to live at Lincoln, where once more he occupied himself as a schoolmaster.