Annie Besant : an autobiography ... / [Annie Wood Besant].

  • Annie Besant
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annie Besant : an autobiography ... / [Annie Wood Besant]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    I can remember my mother hovering round the dinner- table to see that all was bright for the home-coming husband ; my brother—two years older than myself— and I watching “ for papa ” ; the loving welcome, the game of romps that always preceded the dinner of the elder folks, I can remember on the ist of October, 1851, jumping up in my little cot, and shouting out triumphantly; “ Papa! mamma ! I am four years old ! ” and the grave demand of my brother, conscious of superior age, at dinner-time : “ May not Annie have a knife to-day, as she is four years old ? ” It was a sore grievance during that same year, 1851, that I was not judged old enough to go to the Great Exhibition, and I have a faint memory of my brother consolingly bringing me home one of those folding pictured strips that are sold in the streets, on which were imaged glories that I longed only the more to see. Far-away, dusky, trivial memories, these. What a pity it is that a baby cannot notice, cannot observe, cannot remember, and so throw light on the fashion of the dawning of the external world on the human con- sciousness. If only we could remember how things looked when they were first imaged on the retinas ; what we felt when first we became conscious of the outer world ; what the feeling was as faces of father and mother grew out of the surrounding chaos and became familiar things, greeted with a smile, lost with a cry ; if only memory would not become a mist when In later years we strive to throw our glances backward into the darkness of our infancy, what lessons we might learn to help our stumbling psychology, how many