.. through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.
The one great complaint I have to make with respect to my father and mother, to whom I owe so much, and whose memory I shall ever revere, was that they brought me into the world forty or fifty years too soon. In 1820, when I first saw the light of day, England was in a very poor way. It was what the late Earl of Derby used to call the pre-scientific era. Gross darkness covered the land. The excitement of war was over, and the lavish outlay it occasioned being stopped, life was stagnant, farmers and manufacturers alike were at low-water mark, and the social and religious and political reforms required by the times were as yet undreamed of. However, one good thing my parents did for me. They lived in a country village in the extreme east of Suffolk, not far from the sea, where I could lead a natural life, where I could grow healthy, if not wise, and be familiar with all the impulses which spring up in the heart under the influences of rural life. “Boyhood in the country,” writes William Howitt in his autobiography – “Paradise of opening existence! Up to the age of ten this life was all my own.” And thus it was with me. Existence was a pleasure, and the weather, I believe, was better then than it is now. We had summer in summer time. We had fine weather when harvest commenced, and to spend a day at one of the neighbouring farmers riding the fore horse was a delight which thrilled me with joy; and winter, with its sliding and snowballing, with its clear skies and its glittering snows, rendering the landscape lovelier than ever, made me forget the inevitable chilblains, which was the price we had to pay for all its glories and its charms.
Our little village was situated on the high road between London and Great Yarmouth, along which rolled twice a day the London and Yarmouth Royal Mail, drawn by four horses, and driven by a fat man in red, whom we raw village lads regarded as a very superior person indeed. Behind sat the guard, also in red, with a horn, which he blew lustily when occasion required. There was a time, but that was much later, when a day coach was put on, and, as it changed horses at our village inn, one of our chief delights was to see the tired, heated, smoking horses taken out, and their places filled by a new set, much given to kicking and plunging at starting, to the immense delight of the juvenile spectators. Even the passengers I regarded with awe. In fourteen hours would they not be in London where the King lived – where were the Houses of Parliament, the Bank and the Tower and the soldiers? What would I not have given to be on that roof urging on, under the midnight stars, my wild career! Now and then a passenger would be dropped in our little village. What a nine days’ wonder he was, especially if he were a Cockney and talked in the language of Cockaigne – if he had heard the Iron Duke, or seen royalty from afar. Nonconformity flourished in the village in spite of the fact that the neighbouring baronet, at the gates of whose park the village may be said to have commenced, was Sir Thomas Gooch – (Guche was the way the villagers pronounced his dread name) – for was he not a county magistrate, who could consign people to Beccles Gaol, some eight miles off, and one of the M.P.’s for the county, and did not he and his lady sternly set their faces against Dissent? If now and then there were coals and blankets to be distributed – and very little was done in that way, charity had not become fashionable then – you may be sure that no Dissenter, however needy and deserving, came in for a share.
The churches round were mostly filled by the baronet’s relatives, who came into possession of the family livings as a matter of course, and took little thought for the souls of their parishioners. In fact, very few people did go to church. In our chapel, of which my father was the minister for nearly forty years, we had a good congregation, especially of an afternoon, when the farmers with their families, in carts or gigs, put in an appearance. One of the ejected had been the founder of Nonconformity in our village, and its traditions were all of the most honourable character. A wealthy family had lived in the hall, which Sir Thomas Gooch had bought and pulled down, one of whom had been M.P. for the county in Cromwell’s time, and had left a small endowment – besides, there was a house for the minister – to perpetuate the cause, and it was something amidst the Bœotian darkness all round to have a man of superior intellect, of a fair amount of learning, of unspotted life, of devoted piety, such as the old Nonconformist ministers were, ever seeking to lead the people upward and onward; while the neighbouring gentry and all the parsons round, I am sorry to say, set the people a very bad example. In our time we have changed all that, and the Church clergy are as zealous to do good as the clergy of any other denomination. But that things have altered so much for the better, I hold is mainly due to the great progress made all over the land by Dissent, which woke up the Church from the state of sloth and luxury and lethargy which had jeopardised its very existence. Really, at the time of which I write and in the particular locality to which I refer, decent godly people were obliged to forsake the Parish Church, and to seek in the neighbouring conventicle the aids requisite to a religious life. At the same time, there was little collision between Church and Dissent. The latter had its own sphere, supporting, in addition to its local work, the Bible Society, the Tract Society, the London Missionary Society, and the Anti-Slavery Society. It had also its Sunday-school, very much inferior to what they are now; and, if possible, secured a day school on the British and Foreign plan. Dissenters paid Church rates, which the wealthy Churchmen were not ashamed to collect. They gave the parson his tithes without a murmur, and politically they were all on the side of the Whigs, to whom they were indebted for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts – barbarous laws – which had ostracised intelligent and conscientious Dissenters from all parochial and municipal and Parliamentary life. When I was a boy no one could be a parish constable without going through the hideous farce of taking the Sacrament at his Parish Church. It was the Dissenters who created the public opinion which enabled Sir Robert Peel and the Iron Duke to grant Roman Catholic emancipation. It was they who carried reform and abolished rotten boroughs, and gave Manchester and Sheffield and Birmingham the representatives which the Tories, and especially the parsons, would have denied them. To be a reformer was held by the clergy and gentry to be a rogue and rascal of the first rank. I cannot call to mind any public action taken in support of the suffering and the poor to which the clergy and the gentry in our village, or in any of the villages round, lent any support whatever. As regards the great Anti-Slavery agitation, for instance, the only meeting on the subject was held in our chapel, where a Captain Pilkington came down from London to lecture, and touched all our hearts as he showed the lash and the chains, and the other instruments of torture which that cruel system sanctioned and required, and you may be quite sure that when next day I, with boyish pride, pardonable under the circumstances, was sent round to get signatures for a petition to Parliament on the subject, it was not long before I got my paper filled. Naturally the Dissenters were active in the work, for had not one of their number – poor Smith, missionary at Demerara – been foully murdered by Demerara magistrates and planters because he took the part of the black slave against his white owner and tyrant? Yet I was disgusted, after remembering the effect produced in our Suffolk village by the captain’s eloquence, to read thirty years after in Sir George Stephens’s “Anti-Slavery Recollections,” that “Pilkington was a pleasing lecturer, and won over many by his amiable manners, but that he wanted power, and resigned the duty in about six months.” In our simple village it was enough for us that a lecturer or speaker came from London; or as the country people called it Lunnen. That was a sufficient guarantee for us of his talent, his respectability, and his power. Since then the scales have fallen even from the eyes of the rustic, and he no longer sees men as trees walking. Railways have rendered the journey to London perilously easy. Hodge, in the vain hope to better himself, has left his village home, its clear skies, its bracing air, its healthy toil, its simple hours, and gone to live in the crowded slums. It may be that he earns better wages, but you may buy gold too dear. A healthy rustic is far happier in his village. It is there he should strive to live, rather than in the town; and a time may come when English legislators will have wisdom enough to do something to plant the people on the land, rather than compel them to come to town, to be poisoned by its bad air, its dangerous companionship, and its evil ways.
As regards intelligence, we were in a poor way. On Saturdays The Suffolk Chronicle appeared, much to the delight of the Radicals, while the Tories were cheered by The Ipswich Journal. At a later time The Patriot came to our house, and we got an idea of what was going on in the religious and Dissenting world. Foster’s Essays were to be seen on