Native Readers: Acorn, Hillyer
Acorn, George. One of the Multitude. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1912.
1. A cabinet-maker; born and grew up in south-east London in severe poverty, the whole family (eventually six children) living for a while in one room (43, 68). At school from age of 3 to 12 (1, 105); learnt to read and write early; but parents were illiterate (4). He joined the school library: despite limited time "I read an extraordinary number of books, and -- quite unaided in my choice -- many masterpieces." And read some of the books to his parents. The first age he mention is 9, when he was reading "all sorts and conditions of books, from 'Penny Bloods' to George Eliot. I particularly remember Treasure Island, which I thought was the usual penny blood sort of story, with the halo of greatness about it. Rising nine in age, I was presumptuous enough to consider that the author had the makings of a great writer within him!" (49-50). He mentions that Stevenson died this year (1894: hence Acorn was born c. 1885). "George Eliot in those days I read solely for the story. I used to skip the parts that moralized, or painted verbal scenery, a practice at which I became very dextrous" (50). In passages earlier in the book he mentions having read Uncle Tom's Cabin (14) and David Copperfield (i.e., this reading probably occurred at or before age nine).
2. He describes how he came to buy David Copperfield which he had seen in a tattered copy, lying in a shop window: priced at 4d, he was allowed to buy it for 3½d, which was all he had. He began reading it at once in the street: "I read the first few chapters with absorbed attention" (32). Eventually he read it to his family: "we all cried together at poor old Peggotty's distress! The tears united us, deep in misery as we were ourselves. Dickens was a fairy musician to us, filling our minds with a sweeter strain than the constant cry of hunger, or the howling wind which often, taking advantage of the empty grate, penetrated into the room" (35).
3. At about the age of 12, after winning at throwing cigarette cards he had made 9d, and was able to buy a complete Shakespeare for 6d, as well as visit the local music-hall (99).
4. After he began work as a joiner, he became a member of a local club and cadet force, the Webbe Institute (140). He continued to use their library after giving up the cadet force, where he "read, I believe, every interesting book it contained, from the Boys' Own Paper to Thackeray, and the Waverley Novels to George Eliot" (155). A little later he speaks of "reading Smiles's Self-Help in the small hours of the morning, and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus by day." He "fancied himself a Teufelsdrockh" and dreamed of becoming either "a second Shakespeare, or a Prime Minister," or perhaps outdoing Dickens (193).
Hillyer, Richard. Country Boy. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967.
1. Hillyer born c. 1900, his father a cowman in a poor Northamptonshire village, Byfield near Billington. He attended elementary school in the village until about 11 years old. Hillyer says the lessons meant nothing to him, but the teacher, Mr Wickens, had a question period on Wednesday afternoons. Hillyer asked what a poet laureate was, a term he had seen in a newspaper. The question interested Wickens, "So, for ten minutes, he let himself go on it, and education began for me. There was Ben Jonson, the butt of canary wine, birthday odes and all the rest of it. I was fascinated. My mind was being broken out of its shell. Here were wonderful things to know. Things that went beyond the small utilities of our lives, which was all that school had seemed to concern itself with until then. Knowledge of this sort could make all times, and places, your own" (29).
2. In addition, the children were allowed to choose from a small library of books for half an hour of reading on Friday afternoon. "Among them were a few poems of Tennyson, printed on brittle, brownish paper, with a gaudy cover. It said on the title page that he was 'Poet Laureate' and that set me wanting to read them. The coloured words flashed out and entranced my fancy. They drew pictures in the mind. Words became magical, incantations, abracadabra which called up spirits. My dormant imagination opened like a flower in the sun. Life at home was drab, and colourless, with nothing to light up the dull monotony of the unchanging days. Here in books was a limitless world that I could have for my own. It was like coming up from the bottom of the ocean and seeing the universe for the first time" (30).
3. Other reading followed, adventure books, Dickens, whose novels he borrowed from other houses in the village, "knocked about old copies that had been picked up at a rummage sale for a penny, or thrown in with a heap of odds and ends to make a bargain for sixpence" (31). He also enjoyed the Bible for its stories and language.
4. His sensitivity to words is shown in another incident. At the village flower show he overheard in a conversation the word "autumnal." "Autumnal! I had never heard the word before. It had a good sound, a golden sound, a sound of colour, and ripeness, and the maturity of things" (58). His father also appreciated the sound of words: "Somebody told him once that the railway lines at Crewe were like a spider's web. He was fascinated with the thought. . . . The thought of railway lines being like that quite entranced him" (58-9). With words, he adds, "You just had to let them have their way with you. They were spells to call up glowing visions. They goaded the imagination. They could bring together shreds and remembered pieces of scattered pleasures, and make them into one, delightful whole" (59).
5. At about the age of 11 he began doing odd jobs in the house of a middle class inhabitant of the village, Mrs Blore. One day she gave him a broken-backed book as paper to light a fire: he saw that it was Waverley. He had read a chapter or two of it in school on Fridays, "and I was passionate for the rest. You don't use gold mines to light fires with. I laid this one down, where I thought she wouldn't spot it, and got the blaze started without it." Discovered by Mrs. Blore, he is allowed to take the book home. His mother patched it up. "It was the first real book of my own that I ever had, and I have it still" (85). Mrs Blore went on to lend him the rest of the Waverley novels.
6. A year or so later, after he had left school and was working as a labourer on a local farm, he was in the habit of visiting the local market town Billington on Saturday evenings where he had a shilling a week to spend. He soon found a secondhand furniture shop where there were a few old books: the first one he bought was a volume of Shelley for 3d. One of his next purchases was a four-volume set, Half Hours with Best Authors. This find, he says, was an epoch in this life: it "opened to me the sweep and grandeur of English literature better than most professional teachers would have done. It was literature itself, not talk about literature. It made its own impact, spread the goods out in front of me, and let me make my choice. Nobody told me what I ought to like, it was just there for me to like, if I wanted to. All the great people were there, from Chaucer to Tennyson, in passages which were supposed to take half an hour to read; and there was one for every day of the year, with a gossipy little introduction to each which gave all that was needed to be in the picture" (134-5).
7. The furniture shop owner was a socialist and wanted Hillyer to read Robert Blatchford. But "Poor Cowper, with his madness, and his pets, and his moralising, was what I wanted, and beyond the man himself, the sweet flow of his verse. Then it was Sir Thomas Browne, and then somebody else, so that I never had time to get round to Blatchford's theories about socialism. I was splashing about in language just then, the pictures that lie behind words, information was less important" (136-7).
8. Eventually Hillyer found some old Latin primers among junk that arrived at the furniture shop, including a dictionary and selections from Virgil and Caesar. He began to teach himself Latin (148-9). His mother happened to be mending his Latin dictionary one day when the rector came in and saw the book. After interviewing Hillyer, he undertakes to give him lessons in Latin and later in Greek. Hillyer relates how he finally won a scholarship to Durham University to study classics.
Notes
Acorn: Treasure Island (1883); Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852); David Copperfield (1849-50): Peggotty's distress: when his daughter Em'ly is abducted by Steerforth, he goes in search of her; Boys' Own Paper (1879-1967); Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair (1847-48), etc.; Waverley Novels by Scott; Smiles, Self-Help (1859); Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1833-34): Teufelsdrockh (professor of the symbolism of clothes).
Hillyer: Pseudonym of Charles James Stranks, b: Hardwick, Buckinghamshire, 1901.
Half Hours with Best Authors (first published about 1850): "Authors include Locke, Milton, Fielding, Hawthorne, Coleridge, Cowper, Wharton, Keats, Audubon, Wordsworth, Shelley, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Dante, Lord Bacon, Jane Austen, Daniel Webster, Pascal, Plutarch, Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, Longfellow, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Walpo[le] and Pliny" (list from book catalogue on Abebooks.com).
Waverley (1814) by Scott; Robert Blatchford (1851-1943), Merrie England (1894); William Cowper (1731-1800), The Task (1784); Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82), Religio Medici (1643).
For extracts from other accounts in addition to these, see Native readers.
Document prepared October 25th 2004 / Revised October 24th 2005