ABSTRACT
My mother, who had a great, and perhaps not altogether a mistaken opinion of the sovereign efficacy of the touch of gold in certain cases, tried it repeatedly on the hand of the physician who attended me, and who, in consequence of this application, had promised my cure; but that not speedily taking place, and my mother, naturally impatient, beginning to doubt his skill, she determined to rely on her own. On Sir Kenelm Digby’s principle of curing wounds, by anointing the weapon with which the wound had been inflicted, she resolved to try what could be done with the Jew, who had been the original cause of my malady, and to whose malignant influence its continuance might be reasonably ascribed 13 — Accordingly one evening, at the accustomed hour when Simon the old clothes-man’s cry / was heard coming down the street, I being at that time seized with my usual fit of nerves, and my mother being at her toilette crowning herself with roses to go to a ball, she ordered the Jew a to be summoned into the housekeeper’s-room, and, through the intervention of the housekeeper, the application was made on the Jew’s hand; and it was finally agreed, that the same should be renewed every twelve-month, upon condition that he, the said Jew b , should never more be seen or heard under our windows, or in our square. My evening attack of nerves intermitted, as the signal for its coming on ceased. For some time I slept quietly: it was but a short interval of peace. Simon, meanwhile, told his part of the story to his compeers, and the fame of his annuity ran through street and alley, and spread through the whole tribe of Israel. The bounty acted directly as an encouragement to ply the profitable trade, and ‘Old-clothes! ‘Old-clothes!’ was heard again punctually under my window: / and another and another Jew, each more hideous than the former, succeeded in the walk. Jews I should not call them: though such they appeared to be at the time; we afterwards discovered that they were good Christian beggars, dressed up and daubed, for the purpose of looking as frightful, and as like the traditionary representations and vulgar notions of a malicious, revengeful, ominous looking Shylock as ever whetted his knife. The figures were well got up; the tone, accent, and action, suited to the parts to be played; the stage effect perfect, favoured, as it was by the distance at which I saw and wished ever to keep such personages; and as money was given, by my mother’s orders, to these people to send them away, they came the more. If I went out with a servant to walk, a Jew followed me; if I went in the carriage with my mother, or with a friend, a Jew was at the coach-door when I got in, or when I got out: or if we stopped but five minutes at a shop, while my mother went in, and I was / left alone, a Jew’s head was at the carriage window, at the side next me; if I moved to the other side, it was at the other side; if I pulled up the glass, which I never could do fast enough, the Jew’s head was there opposite to me, fixed as in a frame; and if I called to the servants to drive it away, I was not much better off, for at a few paces distance the figure would stand with its c eyes fixed upon me, and, as if fascinated, though I hated to look at those eyes, for the life of me I could not turn mine away. The manner, in which I was thus haunted and pursued wherever I went, seemed, to my mother, something ‘really extraordinary,’ to myself, something magical and supernatural. The systematic roguery of beggars, their combinations, meetings, signals, disguises, transformations, and all the secret tricks of their trade of deception, were not at this time, as they have in modern days, been revealed to public view, and attested by indisputable evidence. 14 Ignorance is always credulous. Much was / then thought wonderful, nay almost supernatural, which can now be explained and accounted for by easy and very ignoble means. My father — for all this time, though I have never mentioned him, I had a father living — my father, being in public life and much occupied with the affairs of the nation, had little leisure to attend to his family. A great deal went on in his house without his knowing any thing about it. He had heard of my being ill and well at at different hours of the day; but had left it to the physicians and my mother to manage me till a certain age: but now I was nine years old, he said it was time I should be taken out of the hands of the women; so he inquired more particularly into my history, and, with mine, he heard the story of Simon and the Jews. My mother said she was glad my father’s attention was at last wakened a to this extraordinary business. She expatiated eloquently upon the medical, or, as she might call them, magical effects of sympathies and antipathies on / the nervous system; but my father was not at all addicted to a belief in magic, and he laughed at the whole female doctrine, as he called it, of sympathies and antipathies: 15 so, declaring that they were all making fools of themselves, and a Miss Molly of his boy, he took the business up short with a high hand. There was some trick, some roguery in it. The Jews were all rascals, he knew, and he would soon settle them. So to work he set with the beadles, and the constables, and the parish overseer. The corporation of beggars were not, in those days, so well grounded in the theory, and so alert in the practice of evasion as, by long experience, they have since become. The society had not then, as they have now, in a certain lane, their regular rendezvous, called the Beggar’s Opera; they had not then, as they have now, in a certain cellar, an established school for teaching the art of scolding, kept by an old woman, herself an adept in the art; 16 they had not even their regular nocturnal feasts, where / they planned the operations of the next day’s or the next week’s campaign, so that they could not, as they now do, set at nought the beadle and the parish-officers: the system of signals was not then perfected, and the means of conveying secret and swift intelligence, by telegraphic science, had not in those days been practised. 17 The art of begging was then only art without science: the native genius of knavery unaided by method or discipline. The consequence was, that the beggars fled before my father’s beadles, constables, and parish overseers; and they were dispersed through other parishes, or led into captivity to round-houses, or consigned to places called asylums for the poor and indigent, or lodged in workhouses, or crammed into houses of industry or penitentiary houses, where, by my father’s account of the matter, there was little industry and no penitence, and from whence the delinquents issued, after their seven days’ captivity, as bad, or worse than they went in. 18 Be that as / it may, the essential point with my father was accomplished: they were got rid of that season, and before the next season he resolved that I should be out of the hands of the women, and safe at a public school, which he considered as a specific for all my complaints, and indeed, for every disease of mind and body incident to childhood. It was the only thing, he said, to make a man of me. There was Jack B , and Thomas D—, and Dick C—, sons of gentlemen in our county, and young Lord Mowbray to boot, all at school with Dr Y— and what men they were already. A respite of a few months was granted in consideration of my small stature, and of my mother’s all-eloquent tears. Mean-time my father took me more to himself, and, mixed with men, I acquired some manly, or what were called manly ideas. My attention was wakened and led to new things. I took more exercise and less medicine; and with my health and strength of body my strength of mind and courage increased. My / father made me ashamed of that nervousness a , of which I had before been vain. I was glad that the past should be past and forgotten; yet a painful reminiscence would come over my mind, whenever I heard or saw the word Jew. About this time I first became fond of reading, and I never saw the word Jew b in any page of any book which I happened to open, without immediately stopping to read the passage. And here I must observe, that not only in the old story-books, where the characters of c Jews are as well fixed to be wicked as the bad fairies, or bad genii, or allegorical personifications of the devils, and the vices in the old emblems, mysteries, moralities, &c, but in almost every work of fiction I found the Jews d represented as hateful beings; nay, even in modern tales of very late years. Since I have come to man’s estate, I have met with books by authors professing candour and toleration — books written expressly for the rising generation, called if I mistake not, Moral Tales for Young People; I and even in these, wherever the Jews are introduced, I find that they are invariably represented as beings of a mean, avaricious, unprincipled, treacherous character. 19 Even the peculiarities of their persons, the errors of their foreign dialect and pronunciation, were mimicked and caricatured, as if to render them objects of perpetual derision and detestation. 20 I am far from wishing to insinuate, that such was the serious intention of these authors. I trust they will in future profit by these hints. I simply state the effect which similar representations in the story-books I read, when I was a child, produced on my mind. They certainly acted most powerfully and injuriously, strengthening the erroneous association of ideas I had accidently formed, and confirming my childish prejudice by what I then thought the indisputable authority of printed books.
