Christopher Crayon's Recollections. The Life and Times of the late James Ewing Ritchie as told by himself. James Ewing Ritchie
a leading man in London literary society. One of the best-known men in East Anglia was Allan Ransome, of Ipswich, the young Quaker, who was on very friendly terms with the Strickland family, who cultivated literature and business with equal zest. Nor, in this category, should I pass over the name of George Bird, of Yoxford, a local chemist, who found time to write of Dunwich Castle and such-like East Anglian themes – I fancy now read by none. A Suffolk man who was making his mark in London at that time was Crabbe Robinson, the pioneer of the special correspondent of our later day. And just when Queen Victoria began to reign, Thomas Woolner, the poet-sculptor, was leaving his native town of Hadleigh to begin life as the pupil of Boehm, sculptor in ordinary to the Queen. And yet East Anglia was by no means distinguished, or held to be of much account in the gay circles of wit and fashion in town. The gentry were but little better than those drawn to the life in the novels of Fielding and Smollett. I am inclined to think there was very little reading outside Dissenting circles – where the book club was a standing institution, and The Edinburgh Review was looked up to as an oracle, as indeed it was, sixty years ago. There was little encouragement of manly sports and pastimes – indeed, very little for any one in the way of amusement but at the public-house. Not that any one was ever drunk, in the liberal opinion of the landlord of the public-house, only “a little fresh,” and the village policeman was unknown. It is true there might be a constable, but he was a very mythical person indeed. Everybody drank, and as a rule the poorer people were the more they drank.
One of the early temperance lecturers in the district, Mr. Thomas Whittaker, who was mobbed, especially at Framlingham, tells us Essex and Suffolk are clayey soils, in some districts very heavy and not easily broken up, and the people in many cases correspond. It was due to Mr. Marriage, of Chelmsford, a maltster, who turned his malting house into a temperance hall, and Mr. D. Alexander, of Ipswich, that the temperance reformers made way; and at that time James Larner, of Framlingham, aided by young Mr. Thompson (now the great London surgeon, Sir Henry Thompson), was quite a power. But the difficulties were great in the way of finding places for meetings, or of getting to them in muddy lanes, or of getting the anti-teetotalers to behave decently, or of the lecturers finding accommodation for the night. Education would have been left almost alone, had not the Liberals started the British and Foreign schools, which roused the Church party to action. The one village schoolmaster with whom I came into contact was – as were most of his class – one who had seen better days, who wore top boots, and whose chief instrument in teaching the young idea how to shoot was a ruler, of which he seemed to me to take rather an unfair advantage. The people were ignorant, and, like Lord Melbourne, did not see much good in making a fuss about education. They could rarely read or write, and if they could there was nothing for them to read – no cheap books nor cheap magazines and newspapers. Now we have run to the other extreme, and it is to be hoped we are all the better. Cottages were mostly in an unsanitary state, but the labourer, in his white smock, looked well on a Sunday at the village church or chapel, and the children at the Sunday-school were clean, if a little restless under the long, dry sermon which they were compelled to hear, the caretaker being generally provided with a long stick to admonish the thoughtless, to wake up the sleepy, to prevent too much indulgence in apples during sermon time, or too liberal a display of the miscellaneous treasures concealed in a boy’s pocket. Perhaps the most influential person in the village was the gamekeeper, who was supposed to be armed, and to have the power of committing all boys in undue eagerness to go bird-nesting to the nearest gaol. He was to me, I own, a terror by night and by day, as he was constantly in my way – when tempted to break into the neighbouring park in search of flowers or eggs. The farmer then, as now, was ruined, but he was a picture of health and comfort as he drove to the nearest market town, where after business he would spend the evening smoking and drinking, with his broad beaver on his head, his fat carcase ornamented with a blue coat with brass buttons, and his knee breeches of yellow kerseymere. It was little he read to wake up his sluggish intellect, save the county newspaper, which it was the habit for people to take between them to lessen the expense. A newspaper was sevenpence, of which fourpence went to pay for the stamp. Everything was dear – the postage of a letter was 10d. or 1s. The franking of letters by Members of Parliament existed at that time; they could receive an unlimited number of letters free of postage, of any weight, even a pianoforte, a saddle, a haunch of venison, and they might send out fourteen a day. Loaf sugar was too dear to be in daily use; tea and coffee were heavily taxed; soap was too dear to use; and wearing apparel and boots and shoes very expensive; even if you went for a drive there was the turnpike gate, and a heavy toll to pay. As to geography, it was a science utterly unknown. Poor people when they talked of the Midland Counties called them the Shires, and I have heard serious disputes as to whether you got to America by sea or land. The finest men in East Anglia were the sailors at the various sea-ports along the coast, well-shaped, fair-haired, with grand limbs and blue eyes, evidently of Saxon or Norse descent, and their daughters were as handsome as any girls I ever saw. The peasant had his little bit of garden, where he could keep a pig and grow a few vegetables and flowers, but much of the furniture was of the poorest description, much inferior to what it is now, and his lot was not a happy one. As to locomotion, it did not exist. To go a few miles from home was quite an event; on the main roads ran coaches, with two, or three, or four horses, but the general mode of conveyance was the carrier’s cart, sometimes drawn by one horse and sometimes by two. Some of the happiest days of my life were spent in the carrier’s cart, where the travellers were seated on the luggage, their feet well protected by straw, where we were all hail fellows well met, and each enjoyed his little joke, especially when the rural intellect was stimulated by beer and baccy. The old village inn where we stopped to water the horses and refresh the inner man seemed to me all the more respectable when compared with the pestiferous beershops that had then begun to infest the land, to increase the crime, the misery, the pauperism of a district which already had quite enough of them before.
But to return to locomotion. A post-chaise was generally resorted to when the gentry travelled. It was painted yellow and black, and on one of the two horses by which it was drawn was seated an ancient, withered old man, generally known as the post-boy, whose age might be anywhere between forty and eighty, dressed in a jockey costume, in white hat and top boots; altogether, a bent, grotesque figure whom Tennyson must have had in his eye when he wrote – for the post-boy was often as not an ostler —
Wrinkled ostler, grim and thin,
Here is custom come your way;
Take my brute and lead him in,
Stuff his ribs with mouldy hay.
CHAPTER II.
A life’s memories
Long, long before John Forster wrote to recommend everyone to write memoirs of himself it had become the fashion to do so. “That celebrated orator,” writes Dr. Edmund Calamy, one of the most learned of our Nonconformist divines, “Caius Cornelius Tacitus, in the beginning of his account of the life of his father-in-law, Julius Agricola (who was the General of Domitian, the Emperor, here in Britain, and the first who made the Roman part of Britain a Præsidial province), excuses this practice from carrying in it anything of arrogance.” This excellent example was followed by Julius Cæsar, Marcus Antoninus, many emperors who kept diaries, Flavius Josephus, St. Gregory of Nazianzen, St. Augustine, to say nothing of Abraham Schultetus, the celebrated professor at Heidelberg; of the learned Fuetius; of Basompierre, the celebrated marshal of France; of the ever-amusing and garrulous Montaigne; or of our own Richard Baxter, or of Edmund Calamy himself. The fact is, it has ever been the fashion with men who have handled the pen freely to write more or less about themselves and the times in which they lived, and there is no pleasanter reading than such biographical recollections; and really it matters little whether on the world’s stage the actor acted high tragedy or low comedy so that he writes truthfully as far as he can about himself and his times. If old Montaigne is to be believed there is nothing like writing about oneself. “I dare,” he writes, “not only speak of myself, but of myself alone,” and never man handled better the very satisfactory theme. If I follow in the steps of my betters I can do no harm, and I may do good if I can show how the England of to-day is changed for the better since I first began to observe that working men and women are better off, that our middle and upper classes have clearer views of duty and responsibility, that we are the better for the political and social