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MlD-VlCTORlAN
MEMORlESjIil
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R,E. FRANC ILLON
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MID-VICTORIAN MEMORIES
MID-VICTORIAN
MEMORIES
BY
R. E. FRANCILLON
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
TO MV NEPHEWS
FRANCIS JAMES, FRANCIS OLIVER, FRANCIS ROBERT
AND FRANCIS EDWARD FRANCILLON
AND TO MY NIECE
LUCY ELIZABETH BERNARD
THESE MEMORIES OF DAYS BEFORE THEIRS
ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
BY
R. E. FRANCILLON
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
Introduction — First impressions — A disciple of Dogberry —
" Jacob "— Confusion of persons— Fighting with shadows — A bene-
diction pp. I-I2
CHAPTER II
Gloucester in the 'Forties— Queen Square, Bloomsbury — Play-
goer and Critic — A Kiss from the Past . , . pp. 13-25
CHAPTER III
My father and his brothers — Serjeant Talfourd — Edward Lear —
Origin of "The Book of Nonsense " — His celibacy . pp. 26-35
CHAPTER IV
Cheltenham in the 'Fifties — "The capital of India" — Colonel
Berkeley — Blues and Yellows — A clerical autocrat — " Speculum
Episcopi " — An imperfect anagram — Sons of Robert Burns — The
" Prance " pp. 36-44
vii
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i
Contents
CHAPTER V
" The Greater Wisdom "—School : old style— The Exhibition
of '51 — Cheltenham College — Some schoolfellows: Lecky, Pro-
fessor H. Jackson, F. W. H. Myers, Briton Riviere, and others
pp. 45-61
CHAPTER VI
A visit to Ireland — Modern language teaching : very old style —
A German tour — Llandudno and Bournemouth in the 'fifties — " Pd
e'en let them bide ■"' — An old-world village . . pp. 62-73
CHAPTER Vn
Trinity Hall— " Ben " Latham— Henry Fawcett— Leslie Stephen
— Alsager Hay-Hill — The Chit-Chat Club — Alfred Ainger —
Robert Romer — Bryan Walker — The original " Tom Brown " .? —
Charles Dilke — Walter Scott Coward— Charles Kingsley's in-
augural lecture — Cambridge : a contrast — Beauty and the Beast
pp. 74-97
CHAPTER Vni
In Hall and Chambers— The Berryer banquet : Brougham and
Cockburn— Gray's Inn — Rushton 7/. Campbell — An inefificient
volunteer — Evenings in Mitre Court — " Atalanta in Calydon " —
"Agag"Stott — Fanatici per la musica . . . pp. 98-116
viii
Contents
CHAPTER IX
The Oxford Circuit— Walter John Huddleston— J. J. Powell-
Henry Matthews — Dr. Kenealy — Quarter Sessions . pp. 117-125
CHAPTER X
' The Just Judge " — The Law Magazine — Miss Cobb— Andrew
Johnson's oath — My first story — John Blackwood — The value of
a name pp. 126-138
CHAPTER XI
France after Sedan— Tracking a King — A suspected spy — At
Meaux— At Lagny — Cool Head and light heart — At Versailles
pp. 139-152
CHAPTER XII
The Globe in the early 'seventies — Dr. Mortimer Granville —
Tom " Purnell, idtimus Boheiiioriiin — John Churton Collins
pp. 153-163
CHAPTER XIII
The " Decemviri" — Algernon Charles Swinburne — James Mac-
Neill Whistler^oseph Knight — The Marston circle — Dante
Gabriel Rossetti — William Morris — Dr. Richard Garnett — Astro-
logy — Philip Bourke Marston — Oliver Madox Brown — Louise
Chandler Moulton — "Fiona Macleod"— Arthur O'Shaughnessy —
"Nelly" — Mrs. Lynn Linton pp. 164-189
ix
Contents
CHAPTER XIV
Marriage — John Barnett, the "Father of English Opera" — The
Abbe Liszt — At Milan in the 'sixties — Arthur Seymour Sullivan —
Frederick Cowen — Mme. Trebelli-Bettini — George Grossmith —
Charles Kensington Salaman — Walter Bache . . pp. 190-201
CHAPTER XV
"Zelda" — Francis Hindes Groom — Gypsies at Mawgan —
Charles Godfrey Leland — The Hardys — John Cordy Jeaffreson —
"Joaquin" Miller— No. 84, Gower Street — Agnes Mary Frances
Robinson — The Esthetes— "Speranza" — Professor William Minto
—Justin M'Carthy pp. 202-214
CHAPTER XVI
The Gentlonaiis — Richard Gowing — David Christie Murray —
Robert Buchanan— Welsh humour — Gustave Dore— Camille Harare
— Karl and Mathilde Blind pp. 215-231
CHAPTER XVII
The Tatler of 1877-8— "Arthur Sketchley "—Swinburne's only
novel — Louis Diston Powles — Twelve years' work — Novels and
their titles — The "Oasis" — The mystery of Archibald MacNeill —
Regent's Park Terrace — Miss Elizabeth Philp — Dr. Franz Huefifer
— Ralston — Miss Sheddon — " Hugh Conway " — After-dinner
speakers: Sir F. Leighton, Edwin Arnold, Hepworth Dixon —
Mrs. Charles Dickens pp. 232-254
CHAPTER XVIII
The Graphic — Arthur Locker — The Globe ag.iin— Captain Car-
lisle, and others — The Marvin case — A small beer chronicle :
Fog: Fire: "G, A. S." pp. 255-269
X
Contents
CHAPTER XIX
The White Rose of Wynnstay — Order of the White Rose— The
prohibited Mass — The Stuart Exhibition— Whistler a Jacobite —
Charles Augustus Howell — The Sobieski Stuarts — Rise and spread
of interest in the House of Stuart— Helps to history pp. 270-293
CHAPTER XX
Quasi-reminiscences : political ; royal ; dramatic— Some con-
trasts—Human limpets — " Let who will be clever" — A memorable
decade — Conclusion pp. 294-307
XI
CHAPTER I
Introduction — First impressions — A disciple of Dog-
berry — "Jacob" — Confusion of persons — Fighting with
shadows — A benediction
Everybody who has survived two generations
ought to write, and, if possible, to get published,
his recollections of them. If, rightly or wrongly,
he thinks these to be of any public value, the
duty is of course clear ; if, in his own opinion,
they are of little or none, his neglect of it is not
excused by a self-estimate which may be but
indolence in disguise. He must not be put off it
even by the sincerest conviction that he is a No-
body. He must not say to himself, " Who am
I, that my memories should possess the faintest
interest for any fellow-creature, man, woman, or
child ? " Even though he be actually a Nobody —
then he is all the more likely to reflect the period
to which he belongs. The interest attaching to
the Somebodies of a period, its makers and its
influences, is personal to themselves : for that we
have all we need in the way of history, biography,
correspondence, recollection, criticism : and often,
B
Mid-Victorian Memories
in the case of the men and women who hav6
" caught on," much more than we need.
But, in getting the impression of a period, it
is just its minnows that matter. It is they who
in the main compose it ; it is they who undergo
its influences ; it is they who represent it. So
our typical Nobody will do well to say : " It is
true that I am not an interesting person — except,
of course, to myself, and to perhaps the few more,
old or young, on whom the least interesting of us
can scarcely, thank Heaven, fail to reckon. But
I have lived through an interesting time ; through
what Charles Reade called (in his biggest capitals)
This Gigantic Age. To get at the atmosphere
of any period, the one and only way is to collect
the impressions of those who breathed it : and
so here are mine."
But, as no two pairs of eyes see alike, and as
all of us use some sort of glasses with lenses
ground and tinted by all manner of optical in-
fluences — inherited or original bias, education,
character, environment, temperament, bodily
and mental health, with all the thousand and one
other circumstances that distinguish man from
man and woman from woman — such observations
are of little or no value unless we know some-
thing about the eyesight, and a great deal about
the spectacles, of the observer. He may be
2
Introduction
near-sighted or long-sighted in his outlook : his
vision may be wide or narrow in its range. His
glasses may be of the magnifying, or of the
diminishing, or of the distorting order : they may
be rose-pink, or smoky, or grey, or green. So
this same typical Nobody of ours must duly
preface his " So here are mine " with " So here
am I." " Know thyself" may be a counsel of
perfection, but one must be singularly stupid if
one does not get a good way towards it by a
good way short of seventy years.
Mine, then, are the eyes, the spectacles, and
the point of view of a mid-Victorian who has not
cared to move with the times : who dislikes all
change, and is hard to convince that any given
case of it can be for the better : who, without
being by any means an indiscriminate praiser of
the past, fails to find that the world (so far as he
knows it) is either wiser, or happier, or nearer
Heaven than, say, fifty years ago, or, maybe,
many more — and what else really matters ?
Towards all the characteristic and paramount
interests of my present contemporaries — natural
science, machinery, sport, games, and advertise-
ment — I am in the position of an outer barbarian.
My blank ignorance of each and all is of the
hopeless sort that comes from lack of the least
desire for knowledge. This is no boast : I fully
3
Mid-Victorian Memories
agree that " Soyez de votre siecle " is the acme of
practical wisdom, that everybody ought to know
everything, and sympathy to be universal. I
merely wish to add a very necessary item to the
long list of my limitations, so that any reader who
cares to assist at my exercise of memory may the
better estimate what sort of spectacles he will
have to assume. I will not even promise that
the glasses shall never be without a blur. I have
never kept a diary, or made notes of happenings,
and have preserved but few letters — or rather the
accidents and chances of an untidy workshop
have spared but few. The result will, I therefore
expect, be rather the impression of an atmosphere
as experienced by one to whom it is still the
breath of life as no fresher air can be ; by one of
the diminishing few who, though the twentieth
century is in its teens, are mid-Victorians still.
My first inhalation preceded Edward VI I. 's by
rather more than seven months, being on the 25th
of March, 184 1 ; my lease of life thus appropriately
dating from a recognised quarter-day. It occurred
in Berkeley Street, in the city of Gloucester, at
one of two houses on the west side afterwards
united, and occupied together as the Stamp
Office. Berkeley Street was, at any rate within
a year ago, a narrow by-way of presumably
early Georgian architecture, such as is passed
4
First Impressions
or traversed without any particular notice in
almost any town old enough to possess it. It
started southward from hard by the Shire Hall
in Westgate Street, which one had but to cross
in order to find entrance into the College Green,
with its almost too sudden and close a revelation
of what I wish I could claim as the first of my
Reminiscences in time as well as in permanent
supremacy — the Cathedral. I ought to be able
to begin them with what ought to have been
the first impression of one of the noblest of
English Cathedrals upon a child born almost
under its tower. I am however bound to confess
that the child in question was not affected in this
matter by any impression sufficiently conscious to
harden into a memory. No doubt I was too familiar
from the earliest moment possible with the sight
of my majestic neighbour to bestow on it more
attention than on anything else that is a part of
one's days from their beginning. My very
earliest reminiscence is of much too common-
place a kind to have been an afterthought or
an imagination from hearsay, as the reported
recollections of infancy so frequently are. It is
merely of being held in a nursemaid's arms at
a window and seeing some pigeons in a yard ;
and it is still as distinct as if I had nothing else
to remember. I record it for the sake of its
5
Mid- Victorian Memories
bearing upon the earliest possible dawning of
conscious memory, for it is certain, from circum-
stantial details, that I could not have been more
than twelve months old. But I cannot altogether
accept as conclusive my younger brother's im-
pression, however vivid, that, at less than sixteen
months old — he could not have been more — he
saw a man hanged. I do not mean that so
gruesome a first experience of life was probably
but an antedated dream. A certain back room
on the top floor of the house in Berkeley Street
commanded a view of the county gaol, with its
stage for the public and popular entertainment
known as the Last Penalty of the Law. On such
occasions, our mother used to lock the door of the
room and remove the key. Now of course It
may be that, despite precautions, one of the
maids, inspired by curiosity, may have gained
access to the room, and had no scruple in holding
up to share the sight a child whom she might
justly think too young to make head or tail of
what he might not even observe. At any rate,
an actual man was actually hanged in public at
the date to which my brother's memory refers.
But then the potential spectacle of Capital
Punishment from one window, unlike that of a
few pigeons from another, would be a matter of
after-talk ; and the effect of even a chance word
6
A Disciple of Dogberry
on such a topic upon the sensitive imagination
of a child old enough to catch it up is easy to
suppose.
My own subsequent recollections up to my sixth
birthday, whence they start unbroken, are of the
character of occasional flashes, with long lapses
into forgetfulness between. To the passages of
oblivion belongs my inability, or indeed anybody
else's, to remember when I could not read. For
that matter, I must confess myself strongly dis-
posed to agree with Dogberry that reading,
however it may be with writing, comes by nature.
I doubt if reading, when consciously learned, ever
becomes quite the real thing : the real thing,
where books are concerned, being a matter rather
of instinct than of reason, of love than of know-
ledge, of heart than of brain. The fewness of
those who will be able to make head or tail of
what I can possibly mean, now that something
called Reading has been made virtually universal,
emphasises, I consider, the soundness of Dog-
berry's contention and mine. As I am trying,
however, to write for as many readers as I can,
I will recur at once to such occasional flashes of
recollection as convince the most sceptical of us
that we, even we our own very selves, are the
selfsame persons who were once upon a time
less than six years old. This will be the easier,
7
Mid-Victorian Memories
as they are both vivid and few. There were the
two girls, quite big girls, who blew kisses to my
brother and myself from an opposite window —
whether we returned them or not I cannot recall.
A much more interesting experience than any
flirtation, however one-sided, I found after our
removal from dark and narrow Berkeley Street
to a gardened house in the suburban parish of
Kingsholm St. Mary. This was my sole right
and title to the ownership of a brown owl,
Jacob by name, who at first lived in the corner
of a cellar, but was afterwards more suitably
lodged in an ivy-mantled shed in the garden. I
was fascinated by his ceaseless blink, but I don't
think that our intercourse ever got farther than
his blink and my stare. Did anybody, I wonder,
ever get further with an owl ? I have always,
however, taken a sort of sympathetic interest in
the mysterious race of Jacob. It was he, I have
little doubt, who indirectly and long afterwards
became answerable for a certain " Tale from
Blackwood " entided " A Story of Eulenburg."
What became of Jacob is among his obscurities.
Then there was my first visit to a place of worship
— the Unitarian chapel which my mother, whose
family was of that denomination, attended —
where I distinguished myself by suddenly setting
up a loud wail in the middle, I think, of the
Confusion of Persons
sermon, and proclaiming to the congregation
that my foot had gone to sleep. What I most
likely said was not "my," but "your" foot; for
instead of "I," "me," and "my," it was my
way at that period to say "you" and "your"
— a confusion of persons without division of
substance apt to cause misunderstandings. There
was a detestable superstition in those days,
now happily extinct, that the supremely honour-
able titles of "Father" and "Mother" were
"unofenteel" — that was the odious term. So
" Merriman," I remember saying to the man who
did the garden work, " Papa says you are a very
lazy gardener " — whereas it was of my own
delinquency, or at any rate of the grievance of
being charged with it, that I wanted to make
frank confession to friendly ears. "That /am a
very lazy gardener " was what I meant him to
understand ; and Merriman's complaint to my
father of an unjust accusation behind his back
was not, I believe, wholly satisfied by an
attempted explanation of my peculiar and, so
far as I know, entirely original views of meta-
physical grammar. My skin was uncomfortably
thin in those days — indeed I doubt its having
properly thickened, even in these ; and I dis-
tinctly remember something far beyond a mere
misunderstanding — a downright violent quarrel
9
Mid- Victorian Memories
that came to blows. My opponent was nothing
less formidable than my own shadow. I had
been presented with one of those brooms made of
shavings that used to be hawked about by wan-
dering women from Germany or the Netherlands
to one invariable tune :
Ach lieber Augustin,
Augustin, Augustin,
Ach lieber Augustin,
Alles ist wag,
ran, as I learned later, the invariable words. The
" Buy-a-Broom" woman deserves a niche in the
reminiscences of all who can remember her, for
her cuckoo-like arrival with the spring from
apparently nowhere was among the few pic-
turesque features of an essentially unpicturesque
period ; and she has long been as extinct as her
wares. I doubt if a specimen of these is to be
found even in the most exhaustively miscellaneous
collection of samplers, warming-pans, snufters,
smock-frocks, and such-like common objects of
her time. I am at any rate quite sure that no
less fit for an archaeological museum would be a
child who, with all modern toy-land and book-
land for his pasture, could be made happy with a
broom of shavings, or a sixth perusal of" Even-
ings at Home." I was qualifying for the museum
by sweeping the parlour carpet with the industry
10
Fighting with Shadows
that I had evidently not spent upon the garden.
It was by candle-light, and I was presently aware
of another person, close against the wall, occupied
in the same way. He amused me for a while,
but his persistence in imitating my every move-
ment seemed at last like deliberate mockery.
I tried to baffle him by sudden attitudes and
antics such as I fancied he must fail to follow, but
in vain. Finally, irritated beyond endurance, I
went for him, first with broom and then with
fists ; and so, when my knuckles met the wall,
learned how fighting with shadows mostly ends.
The last of these very early recollections that I
shall record is of a different order. In a country
lane with my father and mother, we met a stately-
looking old gentleman who, by something pecu-
liar about his dress, and a great deal about his
bearing, impressed me, even at my then age, as
Somebody. He stopped to talk, and at the end
of the talk laid a hand upon my head and solemnly
blessed me. It was James Henry Monk, Bishop
of Gloucester, one of the last of the prelates who
owed their mitres to their Greek — a race for
whom more and better is to be said than is
fashionable, now that a Bishop, instead of being
the fixed centre of his diocese, is expected to be
always here, there, and everywhere at once : not
only the centre, but every point in the circum-
II
Mid-Victorian Memories
ference and in the area as well. I wish I had
been old or extravagantly precocious enough to
appreciate such a moment of intimacy between
myself and the author of the Life of Bentley :
that most entertaining of classics, which further-
more brought forth one of the ablest of De
Quincey's biographical reviews. At any rate, this
is no mere second-hand reminiscence adopted
from hearsay. Though the figure of the Bishop
is somewhat hazy, it is inseparable from the clear
recollection of the profusion of convolvulus
blossom among the hedges along the lane.
12
CHAPTER 11
Gloucester in the 'Forties — Queen Square, Bloomsbury-
Playgoer and Critic — A Kiss from the Past
The Gloucester that I remember is scarcely
recognisable as the same Gloucester that I still
occasionally see. What is now little else than
a big railway station, with its attendant factories,
its tram-laid thoroughfares, and a bustling popula-
tion of nearly fifty thousand, where the very
Cathedral, though, of course, "restored," has the
air of an anachronism, was, as I can remember,
a quiet, not to say dull, county town, inhabited
by some fourteen thousand folk according to the
census in which I was just in time to get counted.
As to its place in the railway system, I believe
that not till some while later did the Great
Western line reach from Paddington in that
direction farther than Cirencester, whence a
stage coach completed the route. Indeed I
have something like a personal remembrance
of such a journey : but am not sure. It is just
the sort of experience that one is told of, vividly
13
Mid- Victorian Memories
realised, and thenceforth adopted, with continually
growing certainty, as one's very own. The only
industry of any importance represented the historic
repute of Gloucester for the manufacture of pins.
The City walls that so stoutly resisted King
Charles I. as to decide the event of the Great
Rebellion were scarcely traceable except here
and there ; the ancient Cross had left its name
alone to the starting-point of the four main
streets, Northgate, Southgate, Eastgate, and
Westgate ; and the Gates also nothing but their
names. But what with the Cathedral and its
precincts ; the five old parish churches within
so small a space — they were eleven, it is said,
before the siege — the old grammar schools and
other foundations, the old inns and taverns, old
nooks and by-ways, all running over with almost
visible history, and steeped in an atmosphere of
yet older and older worlds, the ancient British
City of Caerloew between the Severn and the
Cotswolds was as good a gateway into larger
life as anybody with a grain of imagination in
him could desire — then.
Thus far, the scene of my first memories
conforms pretty closely to the general character
of the Cathedral cities of those days, and still,
to some diminishing extent, of these, in cases
of slower and gentler transformation. No two
14
Gloucester in the 'Forties
were essentially alike : history, tradition, natural
and other local influences prevented that, and
gave to each a strongly marked personality of
its own. My impression is that the Genius loci
of the city where Hooper was burned and White-
field born and bred was still of the Puritan sort
that had turned the tide against King Charles.
Nonconformity abounded : the Quaker dress was
too agreeably familiar for notice — who, remem-
bering it, fails to regret the weak-kneed deference
to worldly fashion that has let it go ? But the
predominance of Deans and Chapters, the re-
semblance of one ancient corporation to another,
the persistent appearance of the same surnames
in the same set of civic annals, the same mode
of life, and the same general impression of com-
fortable and respectable leisure, created a common
type out of any amount of individual variety.
Gloucester, however, though farther from the
sea than is London Bridge from the Nore, shared
with London the otherwise unique peculiarity
of being at once a seaport and an inland town :
thus, in one notable respect, departing from the
Cathedral City type, to which it none the less
definitely belonged. The tidal and navigable
Severn had stamped it with this distinctive
feature before its recorded history begins : and,
many years before the outset of mine, the nearly
15
Mid- Victorian Memories
parallel Canal from Sharpness led into the Basin
where ships of many nations — French, Italian,
Russian, conspicuously the last — unloaded their
cargoes, mainly of corn. The corn-merchants
constituted a kind of hatcte bourgeoisie. The con-
siderable trade with Russia virtually vanished
at the outbreak of the Crimean War : the
development of Sharpness as a more convenient
and accessible port at the entrance of the Canal