Richard in Palestine, I am sure some of the present Newcomes would pay
the Heralds' Office handsomely, living, as they do, amongst the noblest
of the land, and giving entertainments to none but the very highest
nobility and elite of the fashionable and diplomatic world, as you may
read any day in the newspapers. For though these Newcomes have got a
pedigree from the College, which is printed in Budge's Landed Aristocracy
of Great Britain, and which proves that the Newcome of Cromwell's army,
the Newcome who was among the last six who were hanged by Queen Mary for
Protestantism, were ancestors of this house; of which a member
distinguished himself at Bosworth Field; and the founder, slain by King
Harold's side at Hastings, had been surgeon-barber to King Edward the
Confessor; yet, between ourselves, I think that Sir Brian Newcome, of
Newcome, does not believe a word of the story, any more than the rest of
the world does, although a number of his children bear names out of the
Saxon Calendar.
Was Thomas Newcome a foundling--a workhouse child out of that village
which has now become a great manufacturing town, and which bears his
name? Such was the report set about at the last election, when Sir Brian,
in the Conservative interest contested the borough; and Mr. Yapp, the
out-and-out Liberal candidate, had a picture of the old workhouse
placarded over the town as the birthplace of the Newcomes; with placards
ironically exciting freemen to vote for Newcome and union--Newcome and
the parish interests, etc. Who cares for these local scandals? It matters
very little to those who have the good fortune to be invited to Lady Ann
Newcome's parties whether her beautiful daughters can trace their
pedigrees no higher than to the alderman their grandfather; or whether,
through the mythic ancestral barber-surgeon, they hang on to the chin of
Edward, Confessor and King.
Thomas Newcome, who had been a weaver in his native village, brought the
very best character for honesty, thrift, and ingenuity with him to
London, where he was taken into the house of Hobson Brothers,
cloth-factors; afterwards Hobson and Newcome. This fact may suffice to
indicate Thomas Newcome's story. Like Whittington and many other London
apprentices, he began poor and ended by marrying his master's daughter,
and becoming sheriff and alderman of the City of London.
But it was only en secondes noces that he espoused the wealthy, and
religious, and eminent (such was the word applied to certain professing
Christians in those days) Sophia Alethea Hobson--a woman who,
considerably older than Mr. Newcome, had the advantage of surviving him
many years. Her mansion at Clapham was long the resort of the most
favoured amongst the religious world. The most eloquent expounders; the
most gifted missionaries, the most interesting converts from foreign
islands, were to be found at her sumptuous table, spread with the produce
of her magnificent gardens. Heaven indeed blessed those gardens with
plenty, as many reverend gentlemen remarked; there were no finer grapes,
peaches, or pineapples in all England. Mr. Whitfield himself christened
her; and it was said generally in the City, and by her friends, that Miss
Hobson's two Christian names, Sophia and Alethea, were two Greek words,
which, being interpreted, meant wisdom and truth. She, her villa and
gardens, are now no more; but Sophia Terrace, Upper and Lower Alethea
Road, and Hobson's Buildings, Square, etc., show every quarter-day that
the ground sacred to her (and freehold) still bears plenteous fruit for
the descendants of this eminent woman.
We are, however, advancing matters. When Thomas Newcome had been some
time in London, he quitted the house of Hobson, finding an opening,
though in a much smaller way, for himself. And no sooner did his business
prosper, than he went down into the north, like a man, to a pretty girl
whom he had left there, and whom he had promised to marry. What seemed an
imprudent match (for his wife had nothing but a pale face, that had grown
older and paler with long waiting) turned out a very lucky one for
Newcome. The whole countryside was pleased to think of the prosperous
London tradesman returning to keep his promise to the penniless girl whom
he had loved in the days of his own poverty; the great country clothiers,
who knew his prudence and honesty, gave him much of their business when
he went back to London. Susan Newcome would have lived to be a rich woman
had not fate ended her career within a year after her marriage, when she
died giving birth to a son.
Newcome had a nurse for the child, and a cottage at Clapham, hard by Mr.
Hobson's house, where he had often walked in the garden of a Sunday, and
been invited to sit down to take a glass of wine. Since he had left their
service, the house had added a banking business, which was greatly helped
by the Quakers and their religious connection; and Newcome, keeping his
account there, and gradually increasing his business, was held in very
good esteem by his former employers, and invited sometimes to tea at the
Hermitage; for which entertainments he did not, in truth, much care at
first, being a City man, a good deal tired with his business during the
day, and apt to go to sleep over the sermons, expoundings, and hymns,
with which the gifted preachers, missionaries, etc., who were always at
the Hermitage, used to wind up the evening, before supper. Nor was he a
supping man (in which case he would have found the parties pleasanter,
for in Egypt itself there were not more savoury fleshpots than at
Clapham); he was very moderate in his meals, of a bilious temperament,
and, besides, obliged to be in town early in the morning, always setting
off to walk an hour before the first coach.
But when his poor Susan died, Miss Hobson, by her father's demise, having
now become a partner in the house, as well as heiress to the pious and
childless Zachariah Hobson, her uncle Mr. Newcome, with his little boy in
his hand, met Miss Hobson as she was coming out of meeting one Sunday;
and the child looked so pretty (Mr. N. was a very personable,
fresh-coloured man himself; he wore powder to the end, and top-boots and
brass buttons, in his later days, after he had been sheriff indeed, one
of the finest specimens of the old London merchant); Miss Hobson, I say,
invited him and little Tommy into the grounds of the Hermitage; did not
quarrel with the innocent child for frisking about in the hay on the
lawn, which lay basking in the Sabbath sunshine, and at the end of the
visit gave him a large piece of pound-cake, a quantity of the finest
hothouse grapes, and a tract in one syllable. Tommy was ill the next day;
but on the next Sunday his father was at meeting.
He became very soon after this an awakened man; and the tittling and
tattling, and the sneering and gossiping, all over Clapham, and the talk
on 'Change, and the pokes in the waistcoat administered by the wags to
Newcome,--"Newcome, give you joy, my boy;" "Newcome, new partner in
Hobson's;" "Newcome, just take in this paper to Hobso
n's, they'll do it,
I warrant," etc. etc.; and the groans of the Rev. Gideon Bawls, of the
Rev. Athanasius O'Grady, that eminent convert from Popery, who,
quarrelling with each other, yea, striving one against another, had yet
two sentiments in common, their love for Miss Hobson, their dread, their
hatred of the worldly Newcome; all these squabbles and jokes, and
pribbles and prabbles, look you, may be omitted. As gallantly as he had
married a woman without a penny, as gallantly as he had conquered his
poverty and achieved his own independence, so bravely he went in and won
the great City prize with a fortune of a quarter of a million. And every
one of his old friends, and every honest-hearted fellow who likes to see
shrewdness, and honesty, and courage succeed, was glad of his good
fortune, and said, "Newcome, my boy" (or "Newcome, my buck," if they were
old City cronies, and very familiar), "I give you joy."
Of course Mr. Newcome might have gone into Parliament: of course before
the close of his life he might have been made a baronet: but he eschewed
honours senatorial or blood-red hands. "It wouldn't do," with his good
sense he said; "the Quaker connection wouldn't like it." His wife never
cared about being called Lady Newcome. To manage the great house of
Hobson Brothers and Newcome; to attend to the interests of the enslaved
negro; to awaken the benighted Hottentot to a sense of the truth; to
convert Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Papists; to arouse the indifferent and
often blasphemous mariner; to guide the washerwoman in the right way; to
head all the public charities of her sect, and do a thousand secret
kindnesses that none knew of; to answer myriads of letters, pension
endless ministers, and supply their teeming wives with continuous
baby-linen; to hear preachers daily bawling for hours, and listen untired
on her knees after a long day's labour, while florid rhapsodists
belaboured cushions above her with wearisome benedictions; all these
things had this woman to do, and for near fourscore years she fought her
fight womanfully: imperious but deserving to rule, hard but doing her
duty, severe but charitable, and untiring in generosity as in labour;
unforgiving in one instance--in that of her husband's eldest son, Thomas
Newcome; the little boy who had played on the hay, and whom at first she
had loved very sternly and fondly.
Mr. Thomas Newcome, the father of his wife's twin boys, the junior
partner of the house of Hobson Brothers and Co., lived several years
after winning the great prize about which all his friends so
congratulated him. But he was, after all, only the junior partner of the
house. His wife was manager in Threadneedle Street and at home--when the
clerical gentlemen prayed they importuned Heaven for that sainted woman a
long time before they thought of asking any favour for her husband. The
gardeners touched their hats, the clerks at the bank brought him the
books, but they took their orders from her, not from him. I think he grew
weary of the prayer-meetings, he yawned over the sufferings of the
negroes, and wished the converted Jews at Jericho. About the time the
French Emperor was meeting with his Russian reverses Mr. Newcome died:
his mausoleum is in Clapham Churchyard, near the modest grave where his
first wife reposes.
When his father married, Mr. Thomas Newcome, jun., and Sarah his nurse
were transported from the cottage where they had lived in great comfort
to the palace hard by, surrounded by lawns and gardens, pineries,
graperies, aviaries, luxuries of all kinds. This paradise, five miles
from the Standard at Cornhill, was separated from the outer world by a
thick hedge of tall trees, and an ivy-covered porter's-gate, through
which they who travelled to London on the top of the Clapham coach could
only get a glimpse of the bliss within. It was a serious paradise. As you
entered at the gate, gravity fell on you; and decorum wrapped you in a
garment of starch. The butcher-boy who galloped his horse and cart madly
about the adjoining lanes and common, whistled wild melodies (caught up
in abominable playhouse galleries), and joked with a hundred cook-maids,
on passing that lodge fell into an undertaker's pace, and delivered his
joints and sweetbreads silently at the servants' entrance. The rooks in
the elms cawed sermons at morning and evening; the peacocks walked
demurely on the terraces; the guinea-fowls looked more Quaker-like than
those savoury birds usually do. The lodge-keeper was serious, and a clerk
at a neighbouring chapel. The pastors who entered at the gate, and
greeted his comely wife and children, fed the little lambkins with
tracts. The head-gardener was a Scotch Calvinist, after the strictest
order, only occupying himself with the melons and pines provisionally,
and until the end of the world, which event, he could prove by infallible
calculations, was to come off in two or three years at farthest.
Wherefore, he asked, should the butler brew strong ale to be drunken
three years hence; or the housekeeper (a follower of Joanna Southcote)
make provisions of fine linen and lay up stores of jams? On a Sunday
(which good old Saxon word was scarcely known at the Hermitage) the
household marched away in separate couples or groups to at least half a
dozen of religious edifices, each to sit under his or her favourite
minister, the only man who went to church being Thomas Newcome,
accompanied by Tommy his little son, and Sarah his nurse, who was, I
believe, also his aunt, or at least his mother's first cousin. Tommy was
taught hymns, very soon after he could speak, appropriate to his tender
age, pointing out to him the inevitable fate of wicked children, and
giving him the earliest possible warning and description of the
punishment of little sinners. He repeated these poems to his stepmother
after dinner, before a great shining mahogany table, covered with grapes,
pineapples, plum-cake, port wine, and Madeira, and surrounded by stout
men in black, with baggy white neckcloths, who took the little man
between their knees, and questioned him as to his right understanding of
the place whither naughty boys were bound. They patted his head with
their fat hands if he said well, or rebuked him if he was bold, as he
often was.
Nurse Sarah or Aunt Sarah would have died had she remained many years in
that stifling garden of Eden. She could not bear to part from the child
whom her mistress and kinswoman had confided to her (the women had worked
in the same room at Newcome's, and loved each other always, when Susan
became a merchant's lady, and Sarah her servant). She was nobody in the
pompous new household but Master Tommy's nurse. The honest soul never
mentioned her relationship to the boy's mother, nor indeed did Mr.
Newcome acquaint his new family with that circumstance. The housekeeper
called her an Erastian: Mrs. Newcome's own serious maid informed against
her for telling Tommy stories of Lancashire witches, and believing in the
same. The black footman (madam's maid and the butler were of course
privately united) persecuted her with his addresses, and was even
encouraged by his mistress, who thought of sending him as a missionary to
the Niger. No little love, and fidelity, and constancy did honest Sarah
show and use during the years she passed at the Hermitage, and until
Tommy went to school. Her master, with many private prayers and
entreaties, in which he passionately recalled his former wife's memory
and affection, implored his friend to stay with him; and Tommy's fondness
for her and artless caresses, and the scrapes he got into, and the howls
he uttered over the hymns and catechisms which he was bidden to learn (by
Rev. T. Clack,, of Highbury College, his daily tutor, who was
commissioned to spare not the rod, neither to spoil the child), all these
causes induced Sarah to remain with her young master until such time as
he was sent to school.
Meanwhile an event of prodigious importance, a wonderment, a blessing and
a delight, had happened at the Hermitage. About two years after Mrs.
Newcome's marriage, the lady being then forty-three years of age, no less
than two little cherubs appeared in the Clapham Paradise--the twins,
Hobson Newcome and Brian Newcome, called after their uncle and late
grandfather, whose name and rank they were destined to perpetuate. And
now there was no reason why young Newcome should not go to school. Old
Mr. Hobson and his brother had been educated at that school of Grey
Friars, of which mention has been made in former works and to Grey Friars
Thomas Newcome was accordingly sent, exchanging--O ye Gods! with what
delight!--the splendour of Clapham for the rough, plentiful fare of the
place, blacking his master's shoes with perfect readiness, till he rose
in the school, and the time came when he should have a fag of his own:
tibbing out and receiving the penalty therefore: bartering a black eye,
per bearer, against a bloody nose drawn at sight, with a schoolfellow,
and shaking hands the next day; playing at cricket, hockey, prisoners'
base, and football, according to the season; and gorging himself and
friends with tarts when he had money (and of this he had plenty) to
spend. I have seen his name carved upon the Gown Boys' arch: but he was
at school long before my time; his son showed me the name when we were
boys together, in some year when George the Fourth was king.
The pleasures of this school-life were such to Tommy Newcome, that he did
not care to go home for a holiday: and indeed, by insubordination and
boisterousness; by playing tricks and breaking windows; by marauding upon
the gardener's peaches and the housekeeper's jam; by upsetting his two
little brothers in a go-cart (of which wanton and careless injury the
present Baronet's nose bears marks to this very day); by going to sleep
during the sermons, and treating reverend gentlemen with levity, he drew
down on himself the merited wrath of his stepmother; and many punishments
in this present life, besides those of a future and much more durable
kind, which the good lady did not fail to point out that he must
undoubtedly inherit. His father, at Mrs. Newcome's instigation, certainly
whipped Tommy for upsetting his little brothers in the go-cart; but upon
being pressed to repeat the whipping for some other peccadillo performed
soon after, Mr. Newcome refused at once, using a wicked, worldly
expression, which well might shock any serious lady; saying, in fact,
that he would be deed if he beat the boy any more, and that he got
flogging enough at school, in which opinion Master Tommy fully coincided.
The undaunted woman, his stepmother, was not to be made to forgo her
plans for the boy's reform by any such vulgar ribaldries; and Mr. Newcome
being absent in the City on his business, and Tommy refractory as usual,
she summoned the serious butler and the black footman (for the lashings
of whose brethren she felt an unaffected pity) to operate together in the
The Newcomes Page 3