The Story of the House of Cassell/Part 1, Chapter 1

CHAPTER I

FACTORY HAND AND TEMPERANCE REFORMER

 

John Cassell was born on January 23, 1817, and died on April 2, 1865. Though he accomplished many things, the principal achievement of his forty-eight years was the building of the publishing house that bears his name.

Cassell was a living paradox. He surpassed probability, defied heredity, rose superior to environment. A poor boy without material resources, he came to deal in extensive enterprises and control what were, in his day, large capitals. Uneducated himself, he did more than most men of his time to promote the higher education of the English masses. The son of a publican, he was an ardent teetotaller and a powerful advocate of temperance reform. A mechanic by training, he devoted his life to purely intellectual labour. Hardly anything John Cassell did was what he might have been expected to do.

Little is known of his family. His great-grandfather was a Worcestershire man who had migrated into Kent. He died at Beckenham in 1760. William Cassell, his son, married a farmer's daughter, a Miss Matthews, whose family had occupied the same homestead for more than a century. They were blessed with many children, of whom the youngest, Mark, broke away from the Kentish associations and from agriculture, and became the landlord of the Ring o' Bells Inn at No. 8 Old Churchyard, Hunt's Bank, Manchester. He had chosen his wife, however, from the rural stock; her father was a farmer in the Nuneaton country.

This Boniface of an industrial suburb was John Cassell's father, and it was at the Ring o' Bells that John Cassell was born. The family enjoyed fair comfort during the first ten years of the boy's life; but Mark Cassell, disabled by a fall, became a helpless invalid, lingered so for three years, then died. Mrs. Cassell courageously faced the heavy burden of maintaining the family. She was a capable and resourceful woman, who had somehow acquired skill in upholstery, and at that craft she contrived to earn a living. But so laborious a life left her little time for the care of her son, who went to factory work. His "education" had been meagre. It is thought that before his father's death he had attended one of the schools of the British and Foreign Society, then largely used by the children of Nonconformist parents. The little knowledge thus acquired was eked out at a Sunday school conducted by the Rev. Dr. McAll. And this was the sum of his schooling.

The lot of the unlettered poor in the Lancashire of the early nineteenth century was vividly described by Thomas Whittaker ^[1], a friend of Cassell in his youth:

"The food had to come through the fingers of the family—as soon as a shilling or two could be earned by any of us we had to help. My term of toil began when just over six years old, and from that moment continued, either in print shops or cotton mills. The hours were long and the work hard, so that often, when in the midst of my work, I fell fast asleep, standing bolt upright, and was not infrequently awakened by the man whose help I was knocking me down like a dead fish on the floor. I had to rise not later than five, walk a mile to the mill, where I was kept going with very little intermission for meals. I did not get home until 8 p.m., when I would drop asleep from sheer exhaustion and weariness."

Cassell entered on this Calvary probably at a little earlier age than Whittaker, and soon revolted from it. He first tried working for Mr. Phythian, who made tape and the like things, but being discontented, he went on to a more genteel manufacturer of velveteen, who paid higher wages,—and was still discontented. A boy of lively spirit and curious mind, he loathed the dreary prospect of life as a factory hand. He detested the monotonous work, hated the dull confinement of the mill, was oppressed by the sordid conditions of the mean streets about him. By the age of sixteen he had abandoned it all and set out on a desultory search for more pleasant employment.

By accident he became a carpenter. His Odyssey in the streets of Manchester brought him to a carpenter's shop, where he stood watching the men make the plain deal tables used in artisans' kitchens. Presently he remarked that he thought he could make a table if they would let him try. With mingled good-humour and scorn the master carpenter invited him to begin. He took off his coat and set to work. It was said by uncritical friends that his first table was almost as good as the work of an old hand. But the master carpenter perceived that he had a youth of energy, determination and ideas to deal with, and offered him a job at the bench at weekly wages.

Before long he found carpentering hardly more satisfying than tape making as an outlet for his abounding mind. Cassell was a born reformer—an apostle of discontent with things as they are, an evangelist of better things.

It happened that the first reforming movement which caught him up and bore him along was temperance. Livesey's "teetotal" campaign had just begun. The new doctrine of total abstinence as the only real cure for the social evil of drink was not easy to practise nor popular to preach. For the working masses tea and coffee were at almost prohibitive prices; milk was a luxury. Beer was the cheapest drink, the most attainable; even children were suckled on small ale. The crusader against beer had these practical obstacles to face, and his converts were called upon for high self-denial and strength of will. None the less, the movement grew, and it was fortified by the support of a number of medical men, who added scientific physiological arguments to the crusaders' moral and religious pleas.

It was a teetotal doctor who brought Cassell in. He "signed the pledge" at a meeting held by Mr. Thomas Swindlehurst, to whose son he related the story in a letter long after:

"17th July, 1861.

"The circumstances under which I identified myself with the Temperance movement were, that I was attracted to the Tabernacle, Stevenson Square, Manchester, by a course of lectures which were given by Dr. Grindrod. I was fully convinced of the truth and importance of the question under Dr. Grindrod's lectures, and I did not sign any declaration until your father came and delivered a lecture in the same building as that in which I heard Dr. Grindrod."

Livesey's reminiscences give us a glimpse of the John Cassell of eighteen. Livesey first saw him listening to one of his lectures at Oak Street Chapel, Manchester. He well remembered Cassell " standing on the right, just below or on the steps of the platform, with fustian jacket and a white apron on." Thomas Whittaker adds features to the portrait. Cassell, he says, was " a marvellous man, young, bony, big, and exceedingly uncultivated. ... I was his model man as an orator; and, as he subsequently told me ... it was his desire to be like me that determined him to take to the road and the platform. He never let go the desire to be somebody and to do something from that moment."

The total abstinence movement it was, undoubtedly, that awoke John Cassell's latent powers. He was about eighteen when he became involved in it. From that time onward he closely observed the habits and conditions of the industrial mass. He perceived its blank ignorance. Its grey life moved his sympathy and anger. He had already resolved to emancipate himself. He now determined to release as many others as he might. To this end he slaved untiringly at "self-education." Somehow—by what actual means there is no knowing—he acquired a wide, discursive knowledge, a liberal if chaotic education. Probably he used the mechanics' institutes, by that time set up in most industrial centres largely by force of the compassionate enthusiasm of Brougham, who later on was to become a powerful influence in Cassell's life. Hardly anywhere else could he have made his acquaintance with French and obtained those peeps into science whose fascinations in after years prompted some of the features of his famous "Popular Educator."

From 1835 to the autumn of 1836 he was hot-gospelling for teetotalism in the Manchester district. Then a restless desire for larger experiences set in, and he fared forth on foot to London. He made his great walk a missionary temperance tour, lasting about sixteen days. He spoke to any audience he could get in any town or village, and eked out his little store of money by doing odd jobs of carpentering. When he reached London his wealth totalled threepence. On the evening of his arrival he went to the New Jerusalem schoolroom, near the Westminster Road, where a meeting was being held.

"There were not more than fifty persons present," says Mr. J. P. Parker, who was there; "and, as we were glad to get help from any advocate who offered his services, when Mr. Cassell gave his name he was readily accepted. He stood on the little daїs, a gaunt stripling, poorly clad and travel-stained. He was plain, straightforward, and earnest, but very broadly provincial in speech. At the end of a few minutes he stopped abruptly. Somebody in the meeting cried out 'Go on!' 'How can a chap go on when he has no more to say? ' was the reply; and honest John gave in. A few years ago, in the course of conversation with Mr. Cassell, I reminded him of the fact that I have stated, and this was his reply: 'I was very low in pocket and mind that night; for I had not the money to pay for a lodging, and being too proud to ask for help, I walked the streets of London all night.'"

There was, however, in the chair at this meeting a man prepared to befriend him. It was Mr. John Meredith, the honorary secretary of the New British and Foreign Temperance Society. He and the Rev. W. R. Baker, a Congregational minister, sometime travelling secretary of the society, conceived a warm interest in this lonely young man with a mission when he called on them at their office in Tokenhouse Yard. Mr. Baker's sister, who saw him there, said there was nothing particularly prepossessing about him except " his simple and candid manner of expressing himself." And she adds, in her own homely style: "He had but little book education, and hands accustomed to labour, but he had a mind bent on improvement and a heart filled with love towards his deluded fellow-countrymen. My brother saw that he possessed considerable natural talent waiting opportunities to develop itself. He encouraged him, introduced him to many meetings, and met him at many more. From that time, whenever he required counsel or friendly sympathy, John Cassell knew where to seek it, and thus . . . my brother had the satisfaction of seeing, after a lapse of a few years, the same individual rise to an enviable position in our great metropolis."

Cassell spent six months in London, holding temperance meetings wherever he could get anybody to listen to him. One of the early teetotal reformers was John Williams, w^ho had been a chief carpenter in the Navy, but in the 'thirties was in business as carpenter and undertaker in Duke Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, now Sardinia Street. Williams was a devout Methodist, zealous for missionary work in such unpromising regions as Clare Market, and had helped to start one of the first total abstinence societies in London. To him Cassell brought an introduction from a tradesman of the same craft in Manchester, and they joined forces at once. Williams's grandson, Mr. Farlow Wilson, late printing manager at La Belle Sauvage, thus describes their methods in his "Recollections of an Old Printer":

"Their plan of operation was this: Some half-dozen Temperance advocates would assemble near to a public-house, my Uncle Alexander . . . would play a tune or two on his flageolet, and when this had attracted a group of listeners, the real proceedings would begin with a brief prayer by my grandfather, this being followed by an energetic address from John Cassell. Those were rough times, and that was a rough neighbourhood, and it not infrequently happened that the speaker and his associates would be assaulted and driven away with such missiles as the street afforded. They were, however, not the men to be daunted; they persevered, obtained the sympathy of the women, who were the greatest sufferers, and ultimately established a society numbering some hundreds of total abstainers. "I well remember to have been taken by John Williams and John Cassell to a meeting held in a hall at Milton Street, Finsbury, at which they both delivered addresses, and while returning we met a drunken man staggering from side to side along the footpath. Cassell, as was his wont, improved the occasion by expressing hope that when I became a man I would never be a slave to 'the cursed drink.' "

Mr. Farlow Wilson, visiting his grandfather in the year 1850, mentioned that he was in the employment of John Cassell. Someone present remarked: "Cassell was only a carpenter, I think?" "Only a carpenter!" cried the old man. "Tell me, lad, who is there need be ashamed of being a carpenter, or a carpenters son?"

Cassell became, in April, 1837, a recognized agent of the newly formed National Temperance Society. In its interests he travelled all over England. To carry out the arduous programme of this ardent society a man wanted skill as a speaker, ingenuity as an organizer, but, above all, courage and tireless endurance. Cassell possessed all these qualities, and he succeeded. In two months he took 550 pledges.

He had no pre-arranged programme. As he passed from town to town he attracted attention by twirling a large rattle, and the crowds of curious men and women who assembled were soon entertained by his vigorous speech and infectious earnestness. It was characteristic of his curious, acquisitive mind that when in Wales he picked up enough Welsh to wind up his addresses with something in that language.

Not infrequently the publicans organized opposition to temperance speakers. Mr. Arthur Humphreys, in the Manchester Guardian (January 23, 1917), recalled a lively meeting held by Cassell at Shaftesbury.

"Amidst the row I was the first to sign the pledge," said Charles Garrett, then a boy of thirteen, who lived to become president of the Wesley an Conference, and was one of the founders of the cocoa-house movement—the first effort to provide "counter-attractions" to the public-house. Another of Cassell's converts was the late T. H. Barker, who became secretary of the United Kingdom Alliance.

The character and quality of this earliest phase of the teetotal movement may be summed up in a few sentences from a letter written by Richard Cobden to Livesey. Cobden was personally one of the "moderates," but his words show the tendency of the temperance man to become a teetotaller. Temperance reform, he said, lay at the root of all social and political progression in this country. English people were in many respects the most reliable of all earthly beings; but he had often been struck by the superiority that foreigners enjoyed because of their greater sobriety, which gave them higher advantages of civilization even when they were far behind us in the average of education and in political institutions:

"If you could convert us into a nation of water-drinkers, I see no reason why, in addition to our being the most energetic, we should not be the most polished people, for we are inferior to none in the inherent qualities of the gentleman—truthfulness and benevolence.

"With these sentiments, I need not say how much I reverence your efforts in the cause of teetotalism, and how gratified I was to find that my note (written privately, by the way, to Mr. Cassell) should have afforded you any satisfaction.

"I am a living tribute to the soundness of your principles. With a delicate frame and nervous temperament I have been enabled, by temperance, to do the work of a strong man. But it has only been by more and more temperance. In my early days I used sometimes to join with others in a glass of spirit and water, and beer was my everyday drink. So that you see, without beginning on principle, I have been brought to your beverage solely by a nice observance of what is necessary to enable me to surmount an average mental labour of at least twelve hours a day. I need not add that it would be no sacrifice to me to join your ranks by taking the pledge."

1. Thomas Whittaker, a well-known Temperance advocate, sometime Mayor of Scarborough.