Memoirs and letters of Sir James Paget / edited by Stephen Paget, one of his sons.

  • Paget, James, Sir, 1814-1899.
Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Memoirs and letters of Sir James Paget / edited by Stephen Paget, one of his sons. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    cricketer, a good speaker, gentle, calm, busy all day, and always seeming to love more than any¬ thing the quiet of his home. He was then a prosperous man, rich, very busy as a brewer and large ship-owner, and a man of influence in the town; in which he had lately, at great cost, built and furnished a very handsome house. He had risen to his good position by his own power and character. His father, I have heard, was an idle and rather dissolute man, from whom he derived no money or help in either teaching or example; his mother was prudent, gentle, affectionate, helpful even in the business of his early life. My father’s school-education, I think, did not extend beyond the teaching of reading, writing, and some little arithmetic; but in these he became by self-education faultless—certainly, within the range of his business and of home affairs, one of the best letter-writers I have ever known. After leaving school, he became clerk to a Mr. Kerridge, a merchant of some kind in the town. When he was 17, his master, who held a contract for the supply of provisions to the North Sea fleet when they came into Yarmouth Eoads, died suddenly. Here was an opportunity. At that time, lads of 17 were much nearer to full mental manhood than they are now: but even then it must have needed rare resolution for any lad to do as, I have heard, my father did. He started at once for London. The journey was then nearly twenty-four hours long, and he had never seen the huge place—as huge then in comparison with Yarmouth as it is now: seeming as boundless, as crowded and con-