Newcomes;
with placards ironically exciting freemen to vote for Newcome and
union--Newcome and the parish interests, etc. Who cares for these local
scandals? It matters very little to those who have the good fortune to be
invited to Lady Ann Newcome's parties whether her beautiful
daughters can trace their pedigrees no higher than to the alderman their
grandfather; or whether, through the mythic ancestral barber-surgeon,
they hang on to the chin of Edward, Confessor and King.
Thomas Newcome, who had been a weaver in his native village,
brought the very best character for honesty, thrift, and ingenuity with
him to London, where he was taken into the house of Hobson Brothers,
cloth-factors; afterwards Hobson and Newcome. This fact may suffice
to indicate Thomas Newcome's story. Like Whittington and many other
London apprentices, he began poor and ended by marrying his master's
daughter, and becoming sheriff and alderman of the City of London.
But it was only en secondes noces that he espoused the wealthy, and
religious, and eminent (such was the word applied to certain professing
Christians in those days) Sophia Alethea Hobson--a woman who,
considerably older than Mr. Newcome, had the advantage of surviving
him many years. Her mansion at Clapham was long the resort of the
most favoured amongst the religious world. The most eloquent
expounders; the most gifted missionaries, the most interesting converts
from foreign islands, were to be found at her sumptuous table, spread
with the produce of her magnificent gardens. Heaven indeed blessed
those gardens with plenty, as many reverend gentlemen remarked; there
were no finer grapes, peaches, or pineapples in all England. Mr.
Whitfield himself christened her; and it was said generally in the City,
and by her friends, that Miss Hobson's two Christian names, Sophia
and Alethea, were two Greek words, which, being interpreted, meant
wisdom and truth. She, her villa and gardens, are now no more; but
Sophia Terrace, Upper and Lower Alethea Road, and Hobson's
Buildings, Square, etc., show every quarter-day that the ground sacred
to her (and freehold) still bears plenteous fruit for the descendants of
this eminent woman.
We are, however, advancing matters. When Thomas Newcome had
been some time in London, he quitted the house of Hobson, finding an
opening, though in a much smaller way, for himself. And no sooner did
his business prosper, than he went down into the north, like a man, to a
pretty girl whom he had left there, and whom he had promised to marry.
What seemed an imprudent match (for his wife had nothing but a pale
face, that had grown older and paler with long waiting) turned out a
very lucky one for Newcome. The whole countryside was pleased to
think of the prosperous London tradesman returning to keep his
promise to the penniless girl whom he had loved in the days of his own
poverty; the great country clothiers, who knew his prudence and
honesty, gave him much of their business when he went back to
London. Susan Newcome would have lived to be a rich woman had not
fate ended her career within a year after her marriage, when she died
giving birth to a son.
Newcome had a nurse for the child, and a cottage at Clapham, hard by
Mr. Hobson's house, where he had often walked in the garden of a
Sunday, and been invited to sit down to take a glass of wine. Since he
had left their service, the house had added a banking business, which
was greatly helped by the Quakers and their religious connection; and
Newcome, keeping his account there, and gradually increasing his
business, was held in very good esteem by his former employers, and
invited sometimes to tea at the Hermitage; for which entertainments he
did not, in truth, much care at first, being a City man, a good deal tired
with his business during the day, and apt to go to sleep over the
sermons, expoundings, and hymns, with which the gifted preachers,
missionaries, etc., who were always at the Hermitage, used to wind up
the evening, before supper. Nor was he a supping man (in which case
he would have found the parties pleasanter, for in Egypt itself there
were not more savoury fleshpots than at Clapham); he was very
moderate in his meals, of a bilious temperament, and, besides, obliged
to be in town early in the morning, always setting off to walk an hour
before the first coach.
But when his poor Susan died, Miss Hobson, by her father's demise,
having now become a partner in the house, as well as heiress to the
pious and childless Zachariah Hobson, her uncle Mr. Newcome, with
his little boy in his hand, met Miss Hobson as she was coming out of
meeting one Sunday; and the child looked so pretty
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