Excerpt
JEMMY STUBBINS, OR THE NAILER BOY.
Before I left America in 1846, in order to gratify the wish that had long occupied my heart, of visiting the motherland, I formed for myself a plan of procedure to which I hoped to be able rigidly to adhere. I determined that my visit to England should bring me face to face with the people; that I should converse with the artizan in his workshop, and lifting the lowly door-latches of the poor, should become intimately acquainted with their life—with their manners, and it might be, with their hopes and sorrows.
TUESDAY, JULY 21st, 1846.—After a quiet cosy breakfast, served up on a little round table for myself alone, I sat down to test the practicability of the plan I had formed at home for my peregrinations in England:—viz., to write until one, P.M., then to take my staff and travel on, eight or ten miles, to another convenient stopping-place for the night. As much depended upon the success of the experiment, I was determined to carry the point against the predictions of my friends. So at it I went, con amore. The house was as quiet as if a profound Sabbath was resting upon it, and the windows of my airy chamber looked through the foliage of grave elms down upon a green valley. I got on swimmingly; and after a frugal dinner at the little round table, I buckled on my knapsack with a feeling of self-gratulation in view of the literary part of my day's work. Having paid my bill, and given the lady a copy of my corn-meal receipts, I resumed my walk toward W----.
I was suddenly diverted from my contemplation of this magnificent scenery, by a fall of heavy rain drops, as the prelude of an impending shower. Seeing a gate open, and hearing a familiar clicking behind the hedge, I stepped through into a little blacksmith's shop, about as large an American smoke-house for curing bacon. The first object that my eyes rested on, was a full-grown man nine years of age, and nearly three feet high, perched upon a stone of half that height, to raise his breast to the level of his father's anvil, at which he was at work, with all the vigor of his little short arms, making nails. I say, a full-grown man; for I fear he can never grow any larger, physically or mentally. As I put my hand on his shoulders in a familiar way, to make myself at home with him, and to remove the timidity with which my sudden appearance seemed to inspire him, by a pleasant word or two of greeting, his flesh felt case-hardened into all the induration of toiling manhood, and as unsusceptible of growth as the anvil block. Fixed manhood had set in upon him in the greenness of his youth; and there he was, by his father's side, a stinted, premature man with his childhood cut off; with no space to grow in between the cradle and the anvil-block; chased, as soon as he could stand on his little legs, from the hearth-stone to the forge-stone, by iron necessity, that would not let him stop long enough to pick up a letter of the English alphabet on the way. O, Lord John Russell! think of this. Of this Englishman's son, placed by his mother, scarcely weaned, on a high, cold stone, barefooted, before the anvil; there to harden, sear, and blister his young hands by heating and hammering ragged nailrods, for the sustenance those breasts can no longer supply!...