I now come to my father. My object is not to write his life. I have not sufficient materials, nor would it be worth recording at any length, but I should like to preserve the memory of a few facts which are significant of him, and may explain his influence upon me.
He was born in 1807, and was eight years old when his father died: his mother died seven years earlier. He had a cruel step-mother, who gave to her own child everything she had to give. He was educated at the Grammar School, but the teaching there, as I have said, was very poor. The step-mother used to send messages to the head master begging him soundly to thrash her step-son, for he was sure to deserve it, and school thrashing in those days was no joke. She also compelled my father to clean boots, knives and forks, and do other dirty work.
I do not know when he opened the shop in Bedford as a printer and bookseller, but it must have been about 1830. He dealt in old books, the works of the English divines of all parties, both in the Anglican Church and outside it. The clergy, who then read more than they read or can read now, were his principal customers. From the time when he began business as a young man in the town he had much to do with its affairs. He was a Whig in politics, and amongst the foremost at elections, specially at the election in 1832, when he and the Whig Committee were besieged in the Swan Inn by the mob. He soon became a trustee of the Bedford Charity, and did good service for the schools. In September 1843, the Rev. Edward Isaac Lockwood, rector of St. John’s, in the town, and trustee of the schools, carried a motion at a board meeting declaring that all the masters under the Charity should be members of the Church of England. The Charity maintained one or two schools besides the Grammar School. The Act of Parliament, under which it was administered, provided that the masters and ushers of the Grammar School should be members of the Church of England, but said nothing about the creed of the masters of the other schools. The consternation in the town was great. It was evident that the next step would be to close the schools to Dissenters. Public meetings were held, and at the annual election of trustees, Mr. Lockwood was at the bottom of the poll. At the next meeting of the board, after the election, my father carried a resolution which rescinded Mr. Lockwood’s. The rector’s defeat was followed by a series of newspaper letters in his defence from the Rev. Edward Swann, mathematical master in the Grammar School. My father replied in a pamphlet, published in 1844.