BIOGRAPHIES OF WORKING MEN

by

GRANT ALLEN, B.A.

1884


CONTENTS.


I. THOMAS TELFORD, STONEMASON

II. GEORGE STEPHENSON, ENGINE-MAN

III. JOHN GIBSON, SCULPTOR

IV. WILLIAM HERSCHEL, BANDSMAN

V. JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET, PAINTER

VI. JAMES GARFIELD, CANAL BOY

VII. THOMAS EDWARD, SHOEMAKER


PREFACE.


My acknowledgments are due to Dr. Smiles's "Lives of the
Engineers," "Life of the Stephensons," and "Life of a Scotch
Naturalist;" to Lady Eastlake's "Life of Gibson;" to Mr. Holden's
"Life of Sir William Herschel;" to M. Seusier's "J. F. Millet, Sa
Vie et Ses Oeuvres;" and to Mr. Thayer's "Life of President
Garfield;" from which most of the facts here narrated have been
derived.

G.A.


BIOGRAPHIES OF WORKING MEN.

I.

THOMAS TELFORD, STONEMASON.


High up among the heather-clad hills which form the broad dividing
barrier between England and Scotland, the little river Esk brawls
and bickers over its stony bed through a wild land of barren
braesides and brown peat mosses, forming altogether some of the
gloomiest and most forbidding scenery in the whole expanse of
northern Britain. Almost the entire bulk of the counties of
Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, and Ayr is composed of just such solemn
desolate upland wolds, with only a few stray farms or solitary
cottages sprinkled at wide distances over their bare bleak surface,
and with scarcely any sign of life in any part save the little
villages which cluster here and there at long intervals around some
stern and simple Scottish church. Yet the hardy people who inhabit
this wild and chilly moorland country may well be considered to rank
among the best raw material of society in the whole of Britain; for
from the peasant homes of these southern Scotch Highlands have come
forth, among a host of scarcely less distinguished natives, three
men, at least, who deserve to take their place in the very front
line of British thinkers or workers - Thomas Telford, Robert Burns,
and Thomas Carlyle. By origin, all three alike belonged in the very
strictest sense to the working classes; and the story of each is
full of lessons or of warnings for every one of us: but that of
Telford is perhaps the most encouraging and the most remarkable of
all, as showing how much may be accomplished by energy and
perseverance, even under the most absolutely adverse and difficult
circumstances.

Near the upper end of Eskdale, in the tiny village of Westerkirk,
a young shepherd's wife gave birth to a son on the 9th of August,
1757. Her husband, John Telford, was employed in tending sheep on
a neighbouring farm, and he and his Janet occupied a small cottage
close by, with mud walls and rudely thatched roof, such as in
southern England even the humblest agricultural labourer would
scarcely consent willingly to inhabit. Before the child was three
months old, his father died; and Janet Telford was left alone in
the world with her unweaned baby. But in remote country districts,
neighbours are often more neighbourly than in great towns; and a
poor widow can manage to eke out a livelihood for herself with an
occasional lift from the helping hands of friendly fellow-
villagers. Janet Telford had nothing to live upon save her own ten
fingers; but they were handy enough, after the sturdy Scotch
fashion, and they earned some sort of livelihood in a humble way
for herself and her fatherless boy. The farmers about found her
work on their farms at haymaking or milking, and their wives took
the child home with them while its mother was busy labouring in the
harvest fields. Amid such small beginnings did the greatest of
English engineers before the railway era receive his first hard
lessons in the art of life.

After her husband's death, the poor widow removed from her old
cottage to a still more tiny hut, which she shared with a
neighbour - a very small hut, with a single door for both families;
and here young Tam Telford spent most of his boyhood in the quiet
honourable poverty of the uncomplaining rural poor. As soon as he
was big enough to herd sheep, he was turned out upon the hillside
in summer like any other ragged country laddie, and in winter he
tended cows, receiving for wages only his food and money enough to
cover the cost of his scanty clothing. He went to school, too;
how, nobody now knows: but he DID go, to the parish school of
Westerkirk, and there he learnt with a will, in the winter months,
though he had to spend the summer on the more profitable task of
working in the fields. To a steady earnest boy like young Tam
Telford, however, it makes all the difference in the world that he
should have been to school, no matter how simply. Those twenty-six
letters of the alphabet, once fairly learnt, are the key, after
all, to all the book-learning in the whole world. Without them,
the shepherd-boy might remain an ignorant, unprogressive shepherd
all his life long, even his undeniable native energy using itself
up on nothing better than a wattled hurdle or a thatched roof; with
them, the path is open before him which led Tam Telford at last to
the Menai Bridge And Westminster Abbey.

When Tam had gradually eaten his way through enough thin oatmeal
porridge (with very little milk, we fear) to make him into a hearty
lad of fifteen, it began to be high time for him to choose himself
a final profession in life, such as he was able. And here already
the born tastes of the boy began to show themselves: for he had no
liking for the homely shepherd's trade; he felt a natural desire
for a chisel and a hammer - the engineer was there already in the
grain - and he was accordingly apprenticed to a stonemason in the
little town of Lochmaben, beyond the purple hills to eastward. But
his master was a hard man; he had small mercy for the raw lad; and
after trying to manage with him for a few months, Tam gave it up,
took the law into his own hands, and ran away. Probably the
provocation was severe, for in after-life Telford always showed
himself duly respectful to constituted authority; and we know that
petty self-made master-workmen are often apt to be excessively
severe to their own hired helpers, and especially to helpless lads
or young apprentices. At any rate, Tam wouldn't go back; and in
the end, a well-to-do cousin, who had risen to the proud position
of steward at the great hall of the parish, succeeded in getting
another mason at Langholm, the little capital of Eskdale, to take
over the runaway for the remainder of the term of his indentures.

At Langholm, a Scotch country town of the quietest and sleepiest
description, Tam Telford passed the next eight years of his
uneventful early life, first as an apprentice, and afterwards as a
journeyman mason of the humblest type. He had a good mother, and
he was a good son. On Saturday nights he generally managed to walk
over to the cottage at Westerkirk, and accompany the poor widow to
the Sunday services at the parish kirk. As long as she lived,
indeed, he never forgot her; and one of the first tasks he set
himself when he was out of his indentures was to cut a neat
headstone with a simple but beautiful inscription for the grave of
that shepherd father whom he had practically never seen. At
Langholm, an old maiden lady, Miss Pasley, interested herself
kindly in Janet Telford's rising boy. She lent him what of all
things the eager lad most needed - books; and the young mason
applied himself to them in all his spare moments with the vigorous
ardour and perseverance of healthy youth. The books he read were
not merely those which bore directly or indirectly upon his own
craft: if they had been, Tam Telford might have remained nothing
more than a journeyman mason all the days of his life. It is a
great mistake, even from the point of view of mere worldly success,
for a young man to read or learn only what "pays" in his particular
calling; the more he reads and learns, the more will he find that
seemingly useless things "pay" in the end, and that what apparently
pays least, often really pays most in the long run. This is not
the only or the best reason why every man should aim at the highest
possible cultivation of his own talents, be they what they may; but
it is in itself a very good reason, and it is a sufficient answer
for those who would deter us from study of any high kind on the
ground that it "does no good." Telford found in after-life that
his early acquaintance with sound English literature did do him a
great deal of good: it opened and expanded his mind; it trained his
intelligence; it stored his brain with images and ideas which were
ever after to him a source of unmitigated delight and unalloyed
pleasure. He read whenever he had nothing else to do. He read
Milton with especial delight; and he also read the verses that his
fellow-countryman, Rob Burns, the Ayrshire ploughman, was then just
beginning to speak straight to the heart of every aspiring Scotch
peasant lad. With these things Tam Telford filled the upper
stories of his brain quite as much as with the trade details of his
own particular useful handicraft; and the result soon showed that
therein Tam Telford had not acted uncannily or unwisely.

Nor did he read only; he wrote too - verses, not very good, nor yet
very bad, but well expressed, in fairly well chosen language, and
with due regard to the nice laws of metre and of grammar, which is
in itself a great point. Writing verse is an occupation at which
only very few even among men of literary education ever really
succeed; and nine-tenths of published verse is mere mediocre
twaddle, quite unworthy of being put into the dignity of print.
Yet Telford did well for all that in trying his hand, with but poor
result, at this most difficult and dangerous of all the arts. His
rhymes were worth nothing as rhymes; but they were worth a great
deal as discipline and training: they helped to form the man, and
that in itself is always something. Most men who have in them the
power to do any great thing pass in early life through a verse-
making stage. The verses never come to much; but they leave their
stamp behind them; and the man is all the better in the end for
having thus taught himself the restraint, the command of language,
the careful choice of expressions, the exercise of deliberate pains
in composition, which even bad verse-making necessarily implies.
It is a common mistake of near-sighted minds to look only at the
immediate results of things, without considering their remoter
effects. When Tam Telford, stonemason of Langholm, began at
twenty-two years of age to pen poetical epistles to Robert Burns,
most of his fellow-workmen doubtless thought he was giving himself
up to very foolish and nonsensical practices; but he was really
helping to educate Thomas Telford, engineer of the Holyhead Road
and the Caledonian Canal, for all his future usefulness and
greatness.

As soon as Tam was out of his indentures, he began work as a
journeyman mason at Langholm on his own account, at the not very
magnificent wages of eighteenpence a day. That isn't much; but at
any rate it is an independence. Besides building many houses in
his own town, Tam made here his first small beginning in the matter
of roads and highways, by helping to build a bridge over the Esk at
Langholm. He was very proud of his part in this bridge, and to the
end of his life he often referred to it as his first serious
engineering work. Many of the stones still bear his private mark,
hewn with the tool into their solid surface, with honest
workmanship which helps to explain his later success. But the
young mason was beginning to discover that Eskdale was hardly a
wide enough field for his budding ambition. He could carve the
most careful headstones; he could cut the most ornamental copings
for doors or windows; he could even build a bridge across the
roaring flooded Esk; but he wanted to see a little of the great
world, and learn how men and masons went about their work in the
busy centres of the world's activity. So, like a patriotic
Scotchman that he was, he betook himself straight to Edinburgh,
tramping it on foot, of course, for railways did not yet exist, and
coaches were not for the use of such as young Thomas Telford.

He arrived in the grey old capital of Scotland in the very nick
of time. The Old Town, a tangle of narrow alleys and close
courtyards, surrounded by tall houses with endless tiers of floors,
was just being deserted by the rich and fashionable world for the
New Town, which lies beyond a broad valley on the opposite
hillside, and contains numerous streets of solid and handsome stone
houses, such as are hardly to be found in any other town in
Britain, except perhaps Bath and Aberdeen. Edinburgh is always,
indeed, an interesting place for an enthusiastic lover of building,
be he architect or stonemason; for instead of being built of brick
like London and so many other English centres, it is built partly
of a fine hard local sandstone and partly of basaltic greenstone;
and besides its old churches and palaces, many of the public
buildings are particularly striking and beautiful architectural
works. But just at the moment when young Telford walked wearily
into Edinburgh at the end of his long tramp, there was plenty for a
stout strong mason to do in the long straight stone fronts of the
rising New Town. For two years, he worked away patiently at his
trade in "the grey metropolis of the North;" and he took advantage
of the special opportunities the place afforded him to learn
drawing, and to make minute sketches in detail of Holyrood Palace,
Heriot's Hospital, Roslyn Chapel, and all the other principal old
buildings' in which the neighbourhood of the capital is particularly
rich. So anxious, indeed, was the young mason to perfect himself by
the study of the very best models in his own craft, that when at the
end of two years he walked back to revisit his good mother in
Eskdale, he took the opportunity of making drawings of Melrose
Abbey, the most exquisite and graceful building that the artistic
stone-cutters of the Middle Ages have handed down to our time in all
Scotland.

This visit to Eskdale was really Telford's last farewell to his old
home, before setting out on a journey which was to form the
turning-point in his own history, and in the history of British
engineering as well. In Scotch phrase, he was going south. And
after taking leave of his mother (not quite for the last time) he
went south in good earnest, doing this journey on horseback; for
his cousin the steward had lent him a horse to make his way
southward like a gentleman. Telford turned where all enterprising
young Scotchmen of his time always turned: towards the unknown
world of London - that world teeming with so many possibilities of
brilliant success or of miserable squalid failure. It was the year
1782, and the young man was just twenty-five. No sooner had he
reached the great city than he began looking about him for suitable
work. He had a letter of introduction to the architect of Somerset
House, whose ornamental fronts were just then being erected, facing
the Strand and the river; and Telford was able to get a place at
once on the job as a hewer of the finer architectural details, for
which both his taste and experience well fitted him. He spent some
two years in London at this humble post as a stone-cutter; but
already he began to aspire to something better. He earned first-
class mason's wages now, and saved whatever he did not need for
daily expenses. In this respect, the improvidence of his English
fellow-workmen struck the cautious young Scotchman very greatly.
They lived, he said, from week to week entirely; any time beyond a
week seemed unfortunately to lie altogether outside the range of
their limited comprehension.

At the end of two years in London, Telford's skill and study began
to bear good fruit. His next engagement was one which raised him
for the first time in his life above the rank of a mere journeyman
mason. The honest workman had attracted the attention of competent
judges. He obtained employment as foreman of works of some
important buildings in Portsmouth Dockyard. A proud man indeed was
Thomas Telford at this change of fortune, and very proudly he wrote
to his old friends in Eskdale, with almost boyish delight, about
the trust reposed in him by the commissioners and officers, and the
pains he was taking with the task entrusted to him. For he was
above all things a good workman, and like all good workmen he felt
a pride and an interest in all the jobs he took in hand. His sense
of responsibility and his sensitiveness, indeed, were almost too
great at times for his own personal comfort. Things WILL go wrong
now and then, even with the greatest care; well-planned undertakings
will not always pay, and the best engineering does not necessarily
succeed in earning a dividend; but whenever such mishaps occurred to
his employers, Telford felt the disappointment much too keenly, as
though he himself had been to blame for their miscalculations or
over-sanguine hopes. Still, it is a good thing to put one's heart
in one's work, and so much Thomas Telford certainly did.

About this time, too, the rising young mason began to feel that he
must get a little more accurate scientific knowledge. The period
for general study had now passed by, and the period for special
trade reading had set in. This was well. A lad cannot do better
than lay a good foundation of general knowledge and general
literature during the period when he is engaged in forming his
mind: a young man once fairly launched in life may safely confine
himself for a time to the studies that bear directly upon his own
special chosen subject. The thing that Telford began closely to
investigate was - lime. Now, lime makes mortar; and without lime,
accordingly, you can have no mason. But to know anything really
about lime, Telford found he must read some chemistry; and to know
anything really about chemistry he must work at it hard and
unremittingly. A strict attention to one's own business, understood
in this very broad and liberal manner, is certainly no bad thing for
any struggling handicraftsman, whatever his trade or profession may
happen to be.

In 1786, when Telford was nearly thirty, a piece of unexpected good
luck fell to his lot. And yet it was not so much good luck as due
recognition of his sterling qualities by a wealthy and appreciative
person. Long before, while he was still in Eskdale, one Mr.
Pulteney, a man of social importance, who had a large house in the
bleak northern valley, had asked his advice about the repairs of
his own mansion. We may be sure that Telford did his work on that
occasion carefully and well; for now, when Mr. Pulteney wished to
restore the ruins of Shrewsbury Castle as a dwelling-house, he
sought out the young mason who had attended to his Scotch property,
and asked him to superintend the proposed alterations in his
Shropshire castle. Nor was that all: by Mr. Pulteney's influence,
Telford was shortly afterwards appointed to be county surveyor of
public works, having under his care all the roads, bridges, gaols,
and public buildings in the whole of Shropshire. Thus the Eskdale
shepherd-boy rose at last from the rank of a working mason, and
attained the well-earned dignity of an engineer and a professional
man.

Telford had now a fair opportunity of showing the real stuff of
which he was made. Those, of course, were the days when railroads
had not yet been dreamt of; when even roads were few and bad; when
communications generally were still in a very disorderly and
unorganized condition. It is Telford's special glory that he
reformed and altered this whole state of things; he reduced the
roads of half Britain to system and order; he made the finest
highways and bridges then ever constructed; and by his magnificent
engineering works, especially his aqueducts, he paved the way
unconsciously but surely for the future railways. If it had not
been for such great undertakings as Telford's Holyhead Road, which
familiarized men's minds with costly engineering operations, it is
probable that projectors would long have stood aghast at the
alarming expense of a nearly level iron road running through tall
hills and over broad rivers the whole way from London to
Manchester.

At first, Telford's work as county surveyor lay mostly in very
small things indeed - mere repairs of sidepaths or bridges, which
gave him little opportunity to develop his full talents as a born
engineer. But in time, being found faithful in small things, his
employers, the county magistrates, began to consult him more and
more on matters of comparative importance. First, it was a bridge
to be built across the Severn; then a church to be planned at
Shrewsbury, and next, a second church in Coalbrookdale. If he was
thus to be made suddenly into an architect, Telford thought, almost
without being consulted in the matter, he must certainly set out to
study architecture. So, with characteristic vigour, he went to
work to visit London, Worcester, Gloucester, Bath, and Oxford, at
each place taking care to learn whatever was to be learned in the
practice of his new art. Fortunately, however, for Telford and for
England, it was not architecture in the strict sense that he was
finally to practise as a real profession. Another accident, as
thoughtless people might call it, led him to adopt engineering in
the end as the path in life he elected to follow. In 1793, he was
appointed engineer to the projected Ellesmere Canal.

In the days before railways, such a canal as this was an
engineering work of the very first importance. It was to connect
the Mersey, the Dee, and the Severn, and it passed over ground
which rendered necessary some immense aqueducts on a scale never
before attempted by British engineers. Even in our own time, every
traveller by the Great Western line between Chester and Shrewsbury
must have observed on his right two magnificent ranges as high
arches, which are as noticeable now as ever for their boldness,
their magnitude, and their exquisite construction. The first of
these mighty archways is the Pont Cysylltau aqueduct which carries
the Ellesmere Canal across the wide valley of the Dee, known as the
Vale of Llangollen; the second is the Chirk aqueduct, which takes
it over the lesser glen of a minor tributary, the Ceriog. Both
these beautiful works were designed and carried out entirely by
Telford. They differ from many other great modern engineering
achievements in the fact that, instead of spoiling the lovely
mountain scenery into whose midst they have been thrown, they
actually harmonize with it and heighten its natural beauty. Both
works, however, are splendid feats, regarded merely as efforts of
practical skill; and the larger one is particularly memorable for
the peculiarity that the trough for the water and the elegant
parapet at the side are both entirely composed of iron. Nowadays,
of course, there would be nothing remarkable in the use of such a
material for such a purpose; but Telford was the first engineer to
see the value of iron in this respect, and the Pont Cysylltau
aqueduct was one of the earliest works in which he applied the new
material to these unwonted uses. Such a step is all the more
remarkable, because Telford's own education had lain entirely in
what may fairly be called the "stone age" of English engineering;
while his natural predilections as a stonemason might certainly
have made him rather overlook the value of the novel material. But
Telford was a man who could rise superior to such little accidents
of habit or training; and as a matter of fact there is no other
engineer to whom the rise of the present "iron age" in engineering
work is more directly and immediately to be attributed than to
himself.

Meanwhile, the Eskdale pioneer did not forget his mother. For
years he had constantly written to her, in PRINT HAND, so that the
letters might be more easily read by her aged eyes; he had sent her
money in full proportion to his means; and he had taken every
possible care to let her declining years be as comfortable as his
altered circumstances could readily make them. And now, in the
midst of this great and responsible work, he found time to "run
down" to Eskdale (very different "running down" from that which we
ourselves can do by the London and North Western Railway), to see
his aged mother once more before she died. What a meeting that
must have been, between the poor old widow of the Eskdale shepherd,
and her successful son, the county surveyor of Shropshire, and