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Page 3
His regular schooling was of the scantiest. For two years, from the
age of eight to ten, he was at the Ealing school. It was a semi-public
school of the old unreformed type. What did a little boy learn there?
The rudiments of Latin, of arithmetic, and divinity may be regarded as
certain. Greek is improbable, and, in fact, I think my father had no
school foundation to build upon when he took up Greek at the age of
fifty-five in order to read in the original precisely what Aristotle
had written, and not what he was said to have written, about his
dissection of the heart.
For the rest, his experience of such a school, before Dr. Arnold's
reforming spirit had made itself felt over the country, is eloquent
testimony to the need of it.
Though my way of life [he writes] has made me acquainted
with all sorts and conditions of men, from the highest to the
lowest, I deliberately affirm that the society I fell into at
school was the worst I have ever known. We boys were average
lads, with much the same inherent capacity for good and evil
as any others; but the people who were set over us cared about
as much for our intellectual and moral welfare as if they were
baby-farmers. We were left to the operation of the struggle
for existence among ourselves; bullying was the least of the
ill practices current among us.
One bright spot in these recollections was the licking of an
intolerable bully, a certain wild-cat element in him making up for
lack of weight. But, alas for justice, "I--the victor--had a black
eye, while he--the vanquished--had none, so that I got into disgrace
and he did not." A dozen years later he ran across this lad in
Sydney, acting as an ostler, a transported convict who had, moreover,
undergone more than one colonial conviction.
This brief school career was ended by the break-up of the Ealing
establishment. After Dr. Nicholas's death, his sons tried to carry on
the school; but the numbers fell off, and George Huxley, about 1835,
returned to his native town of Coventry as manager of the Coventry
Savings Bank, while his daughters eked out the slender family
resources by keeping school.
Meantime, it does not seem that the boy Tom, as he was generally
called, received much regular instruction. On the other hand, he
learned a great deal for himself. He had an inquiring mind, and a
singularly early turn for metaphysical speculation. He read everything
he could lay hands on in his father's library. We catch a glimpse
of him at twelve, lighting his candle before dawn, and, with blanket
pinned round his shoulders, sitting up in bed to read Hutton's
_Geology_. We see him discussing all manner of questions with his
parents and friends; and, indeed, his eager and inquiring mind made it
possible for him to have friends considerably older than himself. One
of these was his brother-in-law, Dr. Cooke of Coventry, who married
his sister Ellen in 1839. Through Dr. Cooke he became, as a boy,
interested in human anatomy, with results that deeply affected his
career for good and for evil.
The extraordinary attraction [he writes] I felt towards the
intricacies of living structure proved nearly fatal to me at
the outset. I was a mere boy--I think between thirteen and
fourteen years of age--when I was taken by some older student
friends of mine to the first _post-mortem_ examination I ever
attended. All my life I have been most unfortunately sensitive
to the disagreeables which attend anatomical pursuits, but on
this occasion my curiosity overpowered all other feelings,
and I spent two or three hours in gratifying it. I did not cut
myself, and none of the ordinary symptoms of dissection-poison
supervened; but poisoned I was somehow, and I remember sinking
into a strange state of apathy. By way of a last chance, I
was sent to the care of some good, kind people, friends of
my father's, who lived in a farmhouse in the heart of
Warwickshire. I remember staggering from my bed to the window,
on the bright spring morning after my arrival, and throwing
open the casement. Life seemed to come back on the wings of
the breeze, and to this day the faint odour of wood-smoke,
like that which floated across the farmyard in the early
morning, is as good to me as the "sweet south upon a bed of
violets." I soon recovered; but for years I suffered from
occasional paroxysms of internal pain, and from that time
my constant friend, hypochondriacal dyspepsia, commenced his
half-century of co-tenancy of my fleshly tabernacle.
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