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.

My grandparents on the other side were Darwins, my grandfather being Dr. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), physician, poet, and philosopher, and the very reverse of an ascetic or of a Quaker. He was grandfather to me by his second wife; and to Charles R. Darwin (1809-1882), the great naturalist, by his first wife. His hereditary influence seems to have been very strong. His son Charles, who died at the early age of twenty from a dissection wound, was a medical student of extraordinary promise; and the medical sagacity of another son, Dr. Robert Darwin of Shrewsbury, the father of Charles R. Darwin, is amply attested. I stayed for a night or two at the house of the latter while I was a boy and too young to form any opinion of him worth recording; besides, I was rather awe-stricken.

My grandmother Darwin (1747-1832), the second wife of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, was the widow of Colonel E. Sacheverel Chandos-Pole, and, judging from her portrait when young, a lady of remarkable grace and beauty. I saw her in her kindly old age when she lived at the Priory near Derby, but I know little with certainty of her early life and character. She died at the age of eighty-five, her mother at ninety-six. It is perhaps partly through her that the exceptional longevity of my mother and her sons and daughters has been derived. My mother died just short of ninety, my eldest brother at eighty-nine, two sisters, as already mentioned, at ninety-three and ninety-seven respectively; my surviving brother is ninety-three and in good health. My own age is now only eighty-six, but may possibly be prolonged another year or more. I find old age thus far to be a very happy time, on the condition of submitting frankly to its many limitations.

A half-sister of my mother married Captain, afterwards Lord Byron, cousin and successor to the poet in the title. They were very kind to my sisters in their schooldays and after.

Now, as to my two parents and their brothers and sisters. My father, Samuel Tertius Galton (1783-1844), the third in descent of the name of Samuel, was one of the most honourable and kindly of men, and eminently statistical by disposition. He wrote a small book on currency, with tables, which testifies to his taste. He had a scientific bent, having about his house the simple gear appropriate to those days, of solar microscope, orrery, telescopes, mountain barometers without which he never travelled, and so forth. A sliding rule adapted to various uses was his constant companion. He was devoted to Shakespeare, and revelled in Hudibras; he read Tom Jones through every year, and was gifted with an abundance of humour. Nevertheless, he became a careful man of business, on whose shoulders the work of the Bank chiefly rested in troublous times. Its duties had cramped much of the joy and aspirations of his early youth and manhood, and narrowed the opportunity he always eagerly desired, of abundant leisure for systematic study. As one result of this drawback to his own development, he was earnestly desirous of giving me every opportunity of being educated that seemed feasible and right. He was the eldest son.

The second son, Hubert, married a sister of Robert Barclay, the banker. They had three daughters, who all died unmarried—two while young, the other in advanced age.

The youngest son, John Howard, married Isabella Strutt, a lady of considerable fortune, and built Hadzor, near Droitwich, a large house, with much artistic taste. He enjoyed varied society, and made Hadzor an important social centre.

My uncle Howard was father to Sir Douglas Galton, K.C.B. (1822-1899), an eminent authority on engineering, sanitation, and much else. Sir Douglas held a record position in the examination at Woolwich for entry into the Royal Engineers, being first in every subject (see Dict. Nat. Biog.). Curiously enough, though we cousins were both addicted to science, and belonged alike to many scientific societies, and were both Secretaries of the British Association, our paths rarely crossed, except socially, for we were interested in quite different branches of science.

My father’s eldest sister, Mary Anne (1778-1856), was a lady of some note as Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, more briefly known to us by repute as “Aunt Skim.” A most unhappy feud separated her from all the rest of the family. It is not my duty, and it would certainly give me no pleasure, to enter into what the older members of the family conceived to have been frequent and mischievous misrepresentations. I would rather dwell on the facts that she was highly accomplished and handsome, and that she acquired many fast friends, as shown in the Life of the Gurneys of Earlham and in her own Memoirs. Also that she lived in the reputation of much sterling piety at Bristol, and that three of my own friends, of totally different temperaments, who knew her well, and of whom I inquired particularly, all spoke in pleasant memory of her and her eccentric ways. They were Prof. W. B. Carpenter (1813-1885) the physiologist, J. Gwyn Jeffreys (1809-1885), conchologist, etc., and Sir Lewis Pelly, K.C.B. (1825-1892), Indian soldier and diplomatist. She wrote a book on Port Royal, and left a valuable library of Port Royalist literature to Sion College, which Mrs. Romanes told me was of great service to her in writing her recent history of that establishment. For more, see Dict. Nat. Biog.

I wish I could have learnt more details than I possess of another brother of my father, Theodore Galton (1784-1810), who left England for the grand tour, picked up many curios in Spain and Greece, and, returning in health from the East, was placed in quarantine at Malta. The quarantine establishment was attacked by the plague; he caught it and it killed him. He had the highest reputation in the family for his natural gifts, mental and bodily. There is a touching notice of him in the Annual Register.

My mother was A. Violetta Darwin (1783-1874). I have heard from older friends, long since passed away, many charming stories of her as a young bride. She, as I understand, had nothing of the Quaker temperament, but was a joyous and unconventional girl. In her later life she formed the centre of our family during thirty years of widowhood, after my father’s comparatively early death at the age of sixty. She was very methodical in her papers and accounts, and a most affectionate mother to myself. One curious faculty of hers deserves record. It was the ease with which she took in mentally, and afterwards reproduced in rough architectural drawing, the arrangement of any house she knew. Her method was to fold a strip of paper by doubling, quartering, and so on, into sixteen portions of equal lengths, and to use this strip of paper as a sixteen-foot scale wherewith to draw her rude but graphic plans. One of her children, my dear sister Lucy Harriot Moilliet (1809-1848), had an exceptional faculty for perspective drawing; she drew elaborate interiors with very little previous instruction.

As to my other brothers and sisters, they were most diverse in character, yet with a certain common resemblance which struck strangers. I shall have occasion to speak more of them later on in the course of my narrative.

The general result of the foregoing is that I acknowledge the debt to my progenitors of a considerable taste for science, for poetry, and for statistics; also that I seem to have received, partly through the Barclay blood, a rather unusual power of enduring physical fatigue without harmful results, of which there is much evidence when I was young. My father had this power in his early manhood, and it was well marked in my eldest brother and in others of the family. I suffer now from bronchitis with occasional asthma, which has been traced to my great-grandfather, Samuel Galton, and has descended in a greater or less degree through all his children who left issue. My father had a strong constitution otherwise, but he suffered terribly from hay asthma, which first attacked him as a youth. I escaped fairly well from any form of it until I was nearly eighty years old; and it is not hay that especially brings it on now, but warm carpeted rooms. There are few apartments more pleasant to most persons to read in than the drawing-room of the Athenæum Club; I know of none that are now more apt to prove distressing to my throat and lungs.