CHAPTER II.
THE STRICKLANDS

Reydon Hall – The clergy – Pakefield – Social life in a village.

As I write I have lying before me a little book called ‘Hugh Latimer; or, The School-boy’s Friendship,’ by Miss Strickland, author of the ‘Little Prisoner,’ ‘Charles Grant,’ ‘Prejudice and Principle,’ ‘The Little Quaker.’ It bears the imprint – ‘London: Printed for A. R. Newman and Co., Leadenhall Street.’ On a blank page inside I find the following: ‘James Ewing Ritchie, with his friend Susanna’s affectionate regards.’ Susanna was a sister of Miss Agnes Strickland, the authoress, and was as much a writer as herself. The Stricklands were a remarkable family, living about four or five miles from Wrentham, on the road leading from Wangford to Southwold, at an old-fashioned residence called Reydon Hall. They had, I fancy, seen better days, and were none the worse for that. The Stricklands came over with William the Conqueror. One of them was the first to land, and hence the name. A good deal of blue blood flowed in their veins. Kate – to my eyes the fairest of the lot – was named Katherine Parr, to denote that she was a descendant of one of the wives of the too-much-married Henry VIII., and in the old-fashioned drawing-room of Reydon Hall I heard not a little – they all talked at once – of what to me was strange and rare. Mr. Strickland had deceased some years, and the widow and the daughters kept up what little state they could; and I well remember the feeling of surprise with which I first entered their capacious drawing-room – a room the size of which it had never entered into my head to conceive of. It is to the credit of these Misses Strickland that they did not vegetate in that old house, but held a fair position in the world of letters. Miss Strickland herself chiefly resided in town. Agnes, the next, whose ‘Queens of England’ is still a standard book, was more frequently at home. The only one of the family who did not write was Sarah, who married one of the Radical Childses of Bungay, and who not till after the death of her husband became respectable and atoned for her sins by marrying a clergyman. Kate, as I have said, the fairest of the whole, married an officer in the army of the name of Traill, and went out to Canada, and wrote there a book called ‘The Backwoods of Canada,’ which was certainly one of the most popular of the four-and-sixpenny volumes published under the auspices of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge. Our friend was Susanna, who wrote a volume of poems on Enthusiasm, and who seemed to me, with her dark eyes and hair, a very enthusiastic personage indeed. The reason of her friendship with our family was her deeply religious nature, which impelled her to leave the cold and careless service of the Church – not a little to the disgust of her aristocratic sisters, who, as of ancient lineage, not a little haughty, and rank Tories, had but little sympathy with Dissent.. Susanna was much at our house, and when away scarcely a day passed on which she did not write some of us a letter or send us a book. Then there was a brother Tom, a midshipman – a wonderful being to my inexperienced eyes – who once or twice came to our house seated in the family donkey-chaise, which seemed to me, somehow or other, not to be an ordinary donkey-chaise, but something of a far superior character. I have pleasant recollections of them all, and of the annuals in which they all wrote, and a good many of which fell to my share. Like her sister, Susanna married an officer in the army – a Major Moodie – and emigrated to Canada, where the Stricklands have now a high position, where she had sons and daughters born to her, and wrote more than one novel which found acceptance in the English market. The Stricklands gave me quite a literary turn. When I was a small boy it was really an everyday occurrence for me to write a book or edit a newspaper, and with about as much success as is generally achieved by bookmakers and newspaper editors, whose merit is overlooked by an unthinking public. Let me say in the Stricklands I found an indulgent audience. On one occasion I remember reciting some verses of my own composition, commencing,

 
‘I sing a song of ancient men,
Of warriors great and bold,
Of Hercules, a famous man,
Who lived in times of old.
He was a man of great renown,
A lion large he slew,
And to his memory games were kept,
Which now I tell to you,’
 

which they got me to repeat in their drawing-room, and which, though I say it that should not, evinced for a boy a fair acquaintance with ‘Mangnall’s Questions’ and Pinnock’s abridgment of Goldsmith’s ‘History of Rome.’ Happily, at that time, Niebuhr was unknown, and sceptical criticism had not begun its deadly work. We had not to go far for truth then. It was quite unnecessary to seek it – at any rate, so it seemed to us – at the bottom of a well; there it was right underneath one’s nose – before one’s very eyes in the printed pages of the printed book.

Agnes Strickland did all she could to confer reputation on her native county. The tall, dark, self-possessed lady from Reydon Hall was a lion everywhere. On one occasion she visited the House of Lords, just after she had written a violent letter against Lord Campbell, charging him with plagiarism. Campbell tells us he had a conversation with her, which speedily turned her into a friend. He adds: ‘I thought Brougham would have died with envy when I told him the result of my interview, and Ellenborough, who was sitting by, lifted his hands in admiration. Brougham had thrown me a note across the table, saying: “So you know your friend Miss Strickland has come to hear you.”’ Miss Strickland often visited Alison, the historian, at Possil House. He says of her that she had strong talents of a masculine rather than feminine character – indefatigable perseverance, and that ardour in whatever pursuit she engaged in without which no one could undergo similar fatigue. On one occasion she was descanting on the noble feeling of Queen Mary, ‘That may all be very true, Miss Strickland,’ replied the historian; ‘but unfortunately she had an awkward habit of burning people – she brought 239 men, women, and children to the stake in a reign which did not extend beyond a few years!’ ‘Oh yes,’ was her reply, ‘it was terrible, dreadful, but it was the fault of the age – the temper of the times; Mary herself was everything that is noble and heroic.’ Such was her feminine tendency to hero-worship. Another tendency of a feminine character was her love of talking. ‘She did,’ instances Sir Archibald, ‘not even require an answer or a sign of mutual intelligence; it was enough if the one she was addressing simply remained passive. One day when I was laid up at Possil on my library sofa from a wound in the knee, she was kind enough to sit with me for two hours, and was really very entertaining, from the number of anecdotes she remembered of queens in the olden time. When she left the room she expressed herself kindly to Mrs. Alison as to the agreeable time she had spent, and the latter said to me on coming in, “What did you get to say to Miss Strickland all this time? She says you were so agreeable, and she was two hours here.” “Say!” I replied with truth; “I assure you I did not say six words to her the whole time.”’ Agnes was a terrible one to talk – as, indeed, all the Stricklands were. In Suffolk such accomplished conversationalists were rare.

It must have been, now I come to think of it, a dismal old house, suggestive of rats and dampness and mould, that Reydon Hall, with its scantily furnished rooms and its unused attics and its empty barns and stables, with a general air of decay all over the place, inside and out. It had a dark, heavy roof and whitewashed walls, and was externally anything but a showy place, standing, as it did, a little way from the road. It must have been a difficulty with the family to keep up the place, and the style of living was altogether plain; yet there I heard a good deal of literary life in London, of Thomas Pringle, the poet, and the Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, whose ‘Residence in South Africa’ is still one of the most interesting books on that quarter of the world, and of whom Josiah Conder, one of the great men of my smaller literary world at that time, wrote an appreciative biographical sketch. Mr. Pringle, let me remind my readers, was the original editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, a magazine which still maintains its reputation as being the best of its class. Mr. Pringle, I believe, at some time or other, had visited Wrentham; at any rate, the Stricklands, especially Susanna, were among his intimate friends, and, from what I heard, I could well believe, when, at a later period, I visited his grave in Bunhill Fields, what I found recorded there – that ‘In the walks of British literature he was known as a man of genius; in the domestic circle he was loved as an affectionate relative and faithful friend; in the wide sphere of humanity he was revered as the advocate and protector of the oppressed,’ who ‘left among the children of the African desert a memorial of his philanthropy, and bequeathed to his fellow-countrymen an example of enduring virtue.’ At the home of the Pringles the Stricklands made many literary acquaintances, such as Alaric Watts, and Mrs. S. C. Hall, and others of whom I heard them talk. At that time, however, literature was not, as far as women were concerned, the lucrative profession it has since become, and I have a dim remembrance of their paintings – for in this respect the Stricklands, like my own mother, were very accomplished – being sold at the Soho Bazaar, a practice which helped to maintain them in the respectability and comfort becoming their position in life. But in London they never forgot the old home, and wrote so much about it in their stories, that there was not a flower, or shrub, or tree, or hedge, or mossy bank redolent in early spring of primroses and violets, to which they had not given, to my boyish eyes, a glory and a charm. This reference to painting reminds me of a feature of my young days, not without interest, in connection with the name of Cunningham – a name at one time well known in the religious world.