ABSTRACT
In 1867 a crisis occurred in John Pearman’s life. He had by this time been stationed at Eton for four years, and life was reasonably comfortable, though the children (five of them by 1867) had been ill off and on all through the previous year. In August 1867, the oldest boy caught scarlet fever, and the events that followed on this were the dramatic enactment of the ideas that John Pearman later came to articulate in his ‘Memoir’. In the longest autobiographical piece in the second half of the notebook, he told the story, which involved being told to leave town by the Master of Eton for fear of his family infecting the students, having great difficulty in finding both a place to take the children and transport to get them there, and a dramatic and bitter exchange on the road to Winkfield with the doctor of that place, who tried to prevent them from reaching the inn where Pearman had found a refuge for them all. [‘Memoir’, pp. 215–21]
