The Newcomes

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