My Days of Adventure | Page 4

and four sons--my father, Henry
Richard, and my uncles James, Frank, and Frederick Whitehead
Vizetelly.
Some account of my grandfather is given in my father's "Glances Back
through Seventy Years," and I need not add to it here. I will only say
that, like his immediate forerunners, James Henry Vizetelly was a
printer and freeman of the city. A clever versifier, and so able as an
amateur actor that on certain occasions he replaced Edmund Kean on
the boards when the latter was hopelessly drunk, he died in 1840,
leaving his two elder sons, James and Henry, to carry on the printing
business, which was then established in premises occupying the site of
the Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street.
In 1844 my father married Ellen Elizabeth, only child of John Pollard,
M.D., a member of the ancient Yorkshire family of the Pollards of
Bierley and Brunton, now chiefly represented, I believe, by the Pollards
of Scarr Hall. John Pollard's wife, Charlotte Maria Fennell, belonged to
a family which gave officers to the British Navy--one of them serving
directly under Nelson--and clergy to the Church of England. The
Fennells were related to the Brontë sisters through the latter's mother;
and one was closely connected with the Shackle who founded the
original John Bull newspaper. Those, then, were my kinsfolk on the
maternal side. My mother presented my father with seven children, of
whom I was the sixth, being also the fourth son. I was born on
November 29, 1853, at a house called Chalfont Lodge in Campden

House Road, Kensington, and well do I remember the great
conflagration which destroyed the fine old historical mansion built by
Baptist Hicks, sometime a mercer in Cheapside and ultimately
Viscount Campden. But another scene which has more particularly
haunted me all through my life was that of my mother's sudden death in
a saloon carriage of an express train on the London and Brighton line.
Though she was in failing health, nobody thought her end so near; but
in the very midst of a journey to London, whilst the train was rushing
on at full speed, and no help could be procured, a sudden weakness
came over her, and in a few minutes she passed away. I was very young
at the time, barely five years old, yet everything still rises before me
with all the vividness of an imperishable memory. Again, too, I see that
beautiful intellectual brow and those lustrous eyes, and hear that
musical voice, and feel the gentle touch of that loving motherly hand.
She was a woman of attainments, fond of setting words to music,
speaking perfect French, for she had been partly educated at Evreux in
Normandy, and having no little knowledge of Greek and Latin
literature, as was shown by her annotations to a copy of Lemprière's
"Classical Dictionary" which is now in my possession.
About eighteen months after I was born, that is in the midst of the
Crimean War, my father founded, in conjunction with David Bogue, a
well-known publisher of the time, a journal called the _Illustrated
Times_, which for several years competed successfully with the
Illustrated London News. It was issued at threepence per copy, and an
old memorandum of the printers now lying before me shows that in the
paper's earlier years the average printings were 130,000 copies
weekly--a notable figure for that period, and one which was
considerably exceeded when any really important event occurred. My
father was the chief editor and manager, his leading coadjutor being
Frederick Greenwood, who afterwards founded the Pall Mall Gazette. I
do not think that Greenwood's connection with the Illustrated Times
and with my father's other journal, the Welcome Guest, is mentioned in
any of the accounts of his career. The literary staff included four of the
Brothers Mayhew-- Henry, Jules, Horace, and Augustus, two of whom,
Jules and Horace, became godfathers to my father's first children by his
second wife. Then there were also William and Robert Brough,

Edmund Yates, George Augustus Sala, Hain Friswell, W.B. Rands,
Tom Robertson, Sutherland Edwards, James Hannay, Edward Draper,
and Hale White (father of "Mark Rutherford"), and several artists and
engravers, such as Birket Foster, "Phiz." Portch, Andrews, Duncan,
Skelton, Bennett, McConnell, Linton, London, and Horace Harrall. I
saw all those men in my early years, for my father was very hospitably
inclined, and they were often guests at Chalfont Lodge.
After my mother's death, my grandmother, née Vaughan, took charge
of the establishment, and I soon became the terror of the house,
developing a most violent temper and acquiring the vocabulary of the
roughest market porter. My wilfulness was probably innate (nearly all
the Vizetellys having had impulsive wills of their own), and my
flowery language was picked up by perversely loitering to listen
whenever there happened to