Memories of My Life

CHAPTER I. Parentage

PARENTAGE

Birthplace—Grandparents—Dr. Erasmus Darwin—Lunar Society—Captain Barclay Allardice—Mrs. Schimmelpenninck

Just before the arrival of the letter in which my publisher asked me to write the memories of my life, I happened to be reading Shakespeare’s Henry IV. and laughing over Falstaff’s soliloquy after the gross exaggerations by Justice Shallow of his own youthful performances. It contained the sentence, “Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!” Feeling the truth of his ejaculation, I headed the first page of my memorandum-book with those words as a warning, knowing how difficult it is to be veracious about long-past events, threads of imagination insinuating themselves among those supplied by memory and becoming indistinguishable from them.

Many old notebooks and letters are, however, in my possession which have helped me; but my two latest surviving sisters, whose minds were sure storehouses of family events, and to whom I always referred whenever I wanted a date or particulars of a long-past fact, are now both dead, the one at the age of ninety-three and the other at ninety-seven, each with a clear and vigorous mind to nearly the very end of her life. I have hardly any contemporary friends left who could aid in recalling the circumstances of my childhood and boyhood. With rare exceptions, “All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.”

I was born on February 16, 1822, at the Larches, near Sparkbrook, Birmingham, with which town my father Samuel Tertius, my grandfather Samuel John, and my great-grandfather Samuel Galton, were all closely connected. Different members of the family had resided or were resident at various points beyond the circumference of the town, in houses then amidst green fields, but now overspread beyond recognition by its hideous outskirts.

My grandfather’s place was at Duddeston, then commonly written “Dudson.” Its gardens had been charmingly laid out by my great-grandfather and improved by my grandfather. The house, which was once a centre of refined entertainment, gradually lost its charm of isolation; later on, it wholly ceased to be attractive as a residence. It was then leased by my father to the proprietor of a lunatic asylum, because, as he remarked, no one in his senses would live in it. It is now turned into St. Anne’s School, with its porticoes and other outer adornments shorn off, and with its once beautiful gardens changed into the sites of railway sidings and gasworks. I remember it distinctly in its beauty in the year 1830, which was two years before my grandfather’s death.

The Larches, where I was born, had some three acres of garden and field attached to it, with other fields beyond; it was a paradise for my childhood. Its site is now covered with small houses. The two fine larches that flanked it gave me a love for that tree, which persists and is still recognisably associated with its origin.

My six nearest progenitors, namely the two parents and four grandparents, were markedly different in temperament and tastes, and they have bequeathed very different combinations of them to their descendants. I can only partly touch on these.

My grandfather, Samuel John Galton (1753-1832), was a scientific and statistical man of business. He was a Fellow of the provincially famous Lunar Society, whose members met at one another’s houses on the day and night of the full moon, and which, though small in numbers, was so select as to include Priestley, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, Keir the chemist, Withering the botanist, Watt, and Boulton. Full particulars of the Lunar Society are to be found in Smiles’ Life of Boulton, and elsewhere.

I may mention that the late Sir Rowland Hill, of penny-postage fame, told me that the event which first gave him a taste for science was the present of a small electrical machine made to him when a boy, by my grandfather.

Samuel John Galton was very fond of animals. He kept many bloodhounds; he loved birds, and wrote an unpretentious little book about them in three small volumes, with illustrations. He had a decidedly statistical bent, loving to arrange all kinds of data in parallel lines of corresponding lengths, and frequently using colour for distinction. My father, and others of Samuel John Galton’s children, inherited this taste in a greater or less degree; it rose to an unreasoning instinct in one of his daughters. She must have been an acceptable customer to her bookbinder on that account, as the number of expensively bound volumes that she ordered from time to time, each neatly ruled in red, and stamped and assigned to some particular subject or year, is hardly credible. I begged for a bagful of them after her death, to keep as a psychological curiosity, and have it still; the rest were destroyed. She must have collected these costly books to satisfy a pure instinct, for she turned them to no useful account, and rarely filled more than a single page, often not so much of each of them. She habitually used a treble inkstand, with black, red, and blue inks, employing the distinctive colours with little reason, but rather with regard to their pictorial effect. She was perhaps not over-wise, yet she was by no means imbecile, and had many qualities that endeared her to her nephews and nieces.

Samuel John Galton was a successful man of business. He was a manufacturer, and became a contractor on a large scale for the supply of muskets to the army during the great war. Birmingham offered at that time a good field for the business of a contractor, because its manufactories were many and of moderate size, and central organisations were wanting. The Soho works of Boulton and Watt for steam-engines were almost the only large works at that time. My grandfather prospered in his business as a “Captain of Industry,” to use the phrase applied to him in a book treating of Birmingham. He founded a Bank to help it, which was gradually brought to a close some few years after the war had ceased. He died in 1832, leaving a fortune of some £12,000 a year, of which about a quarter went to each of his three sons, of whom my father was the eldest, and the rest between his three daughters.

The Galton family had been Quakers for many generations. They came to Birmingham from Somersetshire, in the time of my great-grandfather, Samuel Galton (1720-1799). Some of its earlier members are buried at Yatton. There is a hamlet in Dorsetshire called Galton, adjacent to Owre Moigne, with which one at least of our name, and apparently a far back relative, was connected many generations ago.

My grandmother Galton (1757-1817) was also of Quaker stock, being daughter of Robert Barclay of Ury, a descendant of Robert Barclay (1648-1690) “the Apologist,” as he used to be named from his work, Barclay’s Apology, which, to quote the Dictionary of National Biography, is the standard exposition of the tenets of his sect, of which the essential principle is that “all true knowledge comes from divine revelation to the heart of the individual.”

My grandmother’s half-brother, Robert Barclay Allardice (1779-1854), commonly known as “Captain Barclay,” was a noted athlete and pedestrian, and in later years an active agriculturist. When upwards of seventy years old he was dining at my father’s house in Leamington, and on being asked, while sitting at dessert, whether he still performed any feats of strength, he asked my eldest brother, then a fully adult man of more than 12 stone in weight, to step on his hand, which he laid palm upwards on the floor by slightly bending his body. My brother was desired to steady himself by laying one finger on Captain Barclay’s shoulder, who thereupon lifted and landed him on the table. I was not present at the feat, but heard it often described by word and gesture. However, the Captain rather strained his shoulder by performing it, as he confessed to my father afterwards. Captain Barclay’s endurance of long continued fatigue was exceptional to a very high degree. The memoirs of his life are well worth reading.

My grandmother’s half-sister was wife of Hudson Gurney (1775-1864), “antiquary and verse writer, friend of Lord Aberdeen,” to again quote the Index to the Dict. Nat. Biog. He was a man of large fortune, and my two sisters, Bessy and Emma, paid long visits to his house in St. James’s Square, where his wife was very kind to them, and where they saw much good London society.

My grandfather and grandmother Galton were practically Quakers all their lives, and so was one of their daughters, but the rest of their children fell off and joined the Established Church. Still, we saw not a little of our Quaker relations. A story was current in our family about myself, as a shy and naughty child, being quite subdued by the charm of Mrs. Fry (1780-1845). She did not even look at me, but merely held out her open hand with comfits in it, and went on speaking to others in her singularly sweet voice. I gradually worked my way nearer to her; then she quietly took me on her knees, where I sat for long in perfect content.

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