Alfred Hopkinson can barely have remembered 39 Rumford Street where he was born and lived until he was four. For him, the family home – the house where he and his brother John spent "our childhood in the provincial, middle-class, Victorian, Puritan home" [1] – was 12 York Place, one of 32 comfortable middle-class homes with gardens standing in a select cul-de-sac. John and Alfred weren't part of the move to spacious Grove House in 1874 because by then they were both married men. Grove House was the home of the younger ones' teenage years.
In Alfred's memoirs there are a few little snippets of life in the nursery. And we can see the constant presence of babies in this anecdote from his granddaughter Mary Hurst
I remember Grandfather once saying that there were no safety-pins in his young days and babies' napkins were always stitched on
The Crimean War (1853-56) even affected the nursery, to Alfred's puzzlement
I remember wondering what was meant by the large red letters in the nursery, "V.R.", and by the great flag waving from my grandfather's house in Skipton [2]
But before long, tales of heroism and gallantry in the War fired the boys' imaginations. They re-enacted the Battle of the Great Redan and the French storming of the Malakoff tower with bricks on the nursery floor. They knew all about Florence Nightingale, "the Lady with the Lamp". They had Lord Tennyson's poem 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' by heart "almost as soon as it was published", said Alfred. [3] They were learning poetry when they were very small – it was published in Maud and Other Poems in 1855 when John was six and Alfred was four.)
The stories from the Crimean War blended with the tales of adventure and derring-do that they loved. They skipped most of The Story of Hedley Vicars: The Christian Soldier, which they were given to read on Sundays. It is an improving tale of a young officer, transformed by the Bible into faith and courage and finally to his death in battle. They just read the bit where the young Captain repels the attack on the British trenches. [4] They liked Robinson Crusoe but preferred the 1821 Swiss spin-off, The Swiss Family Robinson, with the family of boys and their parents making a home on an island in the middle of nowhere. Even better was R M Ballantyne's Coral Island, which came out in 1857 when John and Alfred were aged 8 and 6, and in which all the heroes are boys, shipwrecked together on an uninhabited island. And of course they loved Charles Kingsley's The Heroes, newly come into the bookshops when John was six, with its exciting stories of Perseus, the Argonauts and Theseus. [5]
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| Hiawatha from Project Gutenberg |
Their father used to read the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to them, and they acted out scenes from The Song of Hiawatha, which had come out in the same year as The Heroes. [7]
In the evenings their parents would read aloud to them. Alfred wrote
The more I look back on those old days in our Manchester home, the more I am struck with the wide range that was covered by the reading aloud which we had in the evening [8]
They listened to travel books and to stories of missionaries such as John Williams (killed and eaten by cannibals in the South Pacific). They particularly liked the adventures and the pictures in Dr Livingstone's Missionary Travels, which they called The Lion Book. [9] They listened to chunks of Samuel Smiles' Self Help, published in 1859,and his 1862 Lives of the Engineers, which had the extra interest that their father knew some of the men featured in the book. They listened to The Recreations of a Country Parson by A K H Boyd, which is described by its current publishers as "reflective and often humorous". (Its first chapter is 'Concerning the parson's choice between town and country').[10]
They thoroughly enjoyed it when their father read to them in the Lancashire dialect, reciting to them from the work of Ben Brierley and Edwin Waugh. Waugh's most famous poem is 'Come Whoam To Thy Childer an' Me'
Aw've just mended th' fire wi' a cob;Owd Swaddle has brought thi new shoon;There's some nice bacon-collops o'th hobAn' a quart o' ale posset i'th oon;Aw've brought thi top-cwot, doesto knowFor th'rain's comin' deawn very dree;An th' har'stone's as white as new snow;—Come whoam to thi childer an' me
(You can hear it recited and sung on You Tube). Dialects have slowly become less broad and even then John Hopkinson found his children couldn't understand the work of the 18th century poet and caricaturist John Collier, who wrote under the pseudonym Tim Bobbin. [11]
On Sundays, newspapers and secular literature were put away. The children knew the Bible very well, and were familiar with The Pilgrim's Progress from their earliest days, but, Alfred said
Naturally we skipped some of the long theological discussions and they were never forced upon us. [12]
Milton was read on Sundays and they knew Paradise Lost which seems to have filled their imaginations
I do not think we read or, if we did, that we derived any harm from the long disquisitions in Heaven, but we thoroughly admired the magnificence of Satan [and] had vivid pictures of Moloch and Belial and Beelzebub. [13]
Their mother was passionately attached to poetry and it was poetry that most deeply impressed Alfred
I shall never forget and can still repeat much of the poetry which I thus heard read seventy years ago ... Next to Milton and Scott the poets best known to us were Wordsworth and Coleridge and Cowper. Probably if we had tried to read Wordsworth's longer poems to ourselves the result would have been a failure, but as read aloud by my mother I shall never forget the impression made by The Excursion [14]
Middle-class families in those days followed current affairs very closely and the children were told of great events in the news, suitably edited. Little Liberal and Nonconformist children, they were all for freedom – "imbued", Alfred remembered, "with the desire for national freedom all over the world". [15]
(His niece Katharine Chorley wrote that the Hopkinson brothers "shared the Liberal sympathy for the struggles of oppressed peoples for freedom" – excluding the Irish nationalists – but that they didn't "include in the sweep of their generous indignation the economic serfdom on their own doorsteps".[16])
They followed the struggle for Italian unity and Garibaldi was their hero. They were delighted when Austria ceded Venetia to Italy.[17] They collected foreign postage stamps and pasted into their collections examples from the little European states that were disappearing so fast – the Austrian stamps used in Lombardy and Venetia, stamps from the Papal States, Tuscany, Sardinia and the tiny kingdoms of Germany, and they looked up the countries on the maps at home and learned where they were. In the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 they took the Prussian side partly because they were Protestants.
They had been thrilled by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which came out when young John was three, and Alfred always remembered one breakfast-time in April 1861 when he was not yet ten years old
I shall never forget the serious look on my father's face when he read at breakfast one morning that the first shot had been fired at Fort Sumter in the American Civil War [18]
They followed the course of the war on a map and, like good Lancashire Liberals, supported the North
In spite of the misery caused in Lancashire by the blockade of the Southern ports and a natural leaning to the weaker side, and though all admired the fine characters of such men as Stonewall Jackson and Lee, we wished success to the North. When told that Lincoln had proclaimed the liberty of the slave, though only schoolboys, we received the news with the keenest joy [19]
(Alfred heartily approved of the use of maps in education from an early age, as an aid to imagination and memory – he himself knew all the counties of England, Scotland and Ireland, the Provinces of France and Spain and the cantons of Switzerland before he was eight years old. [20])
Their father followed scientific developments with keen interest and he talked about them to his children. So they learned, for example, of the laying of the Atlantic cable (finally successful in 1866) and how the first telegraph contact with the USA was made. As they walked in the hills and countryside, he encouraged their interest in natural history. "Thus we learned," wrote Alfred
to know every British butterfly and carefully collected a number of specimens; some which we wanted were added by a workman – a fitter in my father's works – who lived in a back street off Rochdale Road, Manchester, and had a wonderful collection of British moths and butterflies which he had himself found [21]
But surely the most distinctive features of the Hopkinsons' house were the children's workshop in the cellar and the little science lab in the attics. His daughter Mary remembered
We learned from Father the use of tools and he planned a workshop for us in the cellar at York Place and had it fitted with a joiner's bench [22]
One of John's sayings, according to Alfred, was
Do not complain of your want of tools and material. The best thing to train a boy is to give him a penknife and let him see what he can make with it [23]
His children were able to do practical science in their own home, as Alfred explained:
In a small storeroom at the top of the house he collected some apparatus that would be helpful to us: a glass cylinder and rubber for generating electricity; the Leyden jar that was charged from it; a stool with insulating glass legs, on which we sometimes stood and our hair was uplifted as the cylinder revolved; magnets, a few retorts, test-tubes, blow-pipes, and chemical reagents which we were encouraged to use, and other simple appliances, including cog-wheels, which we fitted to a crane and so lifted our toys from basement to attic. [24]
Young John and Alfred used to amuse themselves up in the storeroom – in John's case, of course, it was to lead to much greater things. When they needed a galvanic battery (a voltaic cell), the battery cells were cast in the firm's works and young John went there "to wind coils for galvanic machines". Their new device was very popular at bazaars in aid of the chapel or Sunday School:
Someone clutched each of the handles of the machine and then a circuit was formed of young men and maidens, and sometimes old people too, taking hands, which were vigorously and affectionately squeezed under the influence of the galvanic current which was made stronger and stronger as long as the arms and fingers could bear it. [25]
All of this is from Alfred's account, and his memories were of course of the long-ago happy times he spent with his elder brother John, lost so suddenly and appallingly in the dreadful accident in the Alps in 1898. Their youngest brother Albert wrote in his obituary of Alfred in the Alpine Journal [26]
One of the most charming traits in Alfred's character was his loyalty to and admiration for John.
There was a gap in age of 23 months between the brothers and they appear constantly as a pair in the edited letters and Alfred's memoirs.
Alfred had the misfortune to cut his heel rather deeply with a mussel shell yesterday. Johnnie carried him home from the place where the accident happened. The lads are very true to each other [27]
wrote Alice to John from Sunderland Point in 1862.
We have a couple of depictions of the older children. In a letter from about 1857, a friend wrote to Alice
How I should enjoy one of our quiet chats. I want to hear how young Johnnie's idiosyncracies develop themselves, what has become of the picture boy's wild luxuriance, how Nellie grows in word and deed, the pranks of merry mischievous Charles and what of the fair pale Alice.[28]
(The "picture boy" is Alfred)
A few years later, on 7 March 1861, Alice described her children to a "beloved friend":
You know that I have now eight children, seven on earth and one in heaven. I will give you, as well as I can, a family picture.
John is now eleven and a half; he has been at a boarding school near Manchester during the past year. We sent him from home hoping that he would be benefited in health by the change. The result has been a very decided improvement. He is a dear loving boy, intelligent and industrious; he makes very satisfactory progress in his studies. His manners are rather brusque, but he is a true honest lad. Oh how I long to see him give his heart to Christ.
Alfred, nine and a half, is a very nice looking boy. He has good abilities but has not such steady application and industry as John. He loves fun and has decided poetical taste. He has often a very serious expression, indeed I cannot doubt that the Spirit often works in his heart.
Ellen, a little over seven, is an interesting child, both in appearance and character. She is a very thoughtful, very sensible, dear child. She loves the name of Jesus, she has such sweet thoughts I often learn from her. Oh pray that these sweet blossomings may be the precursors of fruit to be hereafter borne to the praise and glory of God.
Charles, over six, is a simple hearted loving child, very quiet, loving and kind.
Then comes my little Ally, my little glorified one. It is now nearly three years since this lovely flower was transplanted.
Mary Jane, three and a half, comes next. I often call her "little sunshine"; she has such a bright, beaming face. She is an amusing child, full of humour.
Edward, a year and nine months, is a noble looking little fellow; curly hair, expressive eyes and altogether nice features. His character is not yet developed sufficiently for me to form an opinion. He is now a very observant child.
Then comes baby (Elizabeth Lilian). She is a sweet baby, a household pet.[29]
After Lily would come Gertrude in May 1862, Albert in October 1863 and May in December 1864. Lastly came the baby William Henry who died soon after birth in September 1866, and everyone's pet, little Harry, who was born in 1868 and died in 1877.
Such large families each have their own dynamic, in play, in alliances and in competition. I don't know whether the Hopkinson children generally paired off together or which children were particularly close to each other. Ellen Ewing tells us that by 1864 the children were dividing into groups of "elder ones" and "little ones" and that Alice wanted Charlie, who was three years younger than Alfred and five years older than Edward, to spend as much time with the elder ones as possible.
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| Alfred at about 16 & Albert aged about 4 |
taught me as a small boy to love the stories of classical mythology and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey became an early delight. Kingsley's Heroes and Cox's Tales were made special favourites.
(Cox's Tales was Tales of Gods and Heroes by the Revd G W Cox, which was published in 1862 when Alfred was eleven).
We only have a few glimpses of the younger children together. On 11 April 1865 Alice wrote to John about 18 month old Albert
John and Alfred are amusing themselves with Albert, lifting him in and out of the dining room window. They seem quite to enjoy the jolly little fellow[30]
On 19 May 1865 she wrote
The chicks are all out except Edward; he set out for school but returned making some complaints against Nelly and Charley. Believing the little gentleman to be chiefly in fault, I am administering a little punishment, confining him to his room for the afternoon, employing him in dusting, doing sums, etc. I think it will prove a correction for the future [31]
(Edward was six, Nelly was twelve and Charles was eleven)
.JPEG) |
| Edward and Charles in 1867 or 1868 |
Notes
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