Portrait of a Child

Coggin — By Ernest Oldmeadow

We have more than once entertained a suspicion that Mary hated her little lamb and could not bear the way it persisted in running after her, rocking along on its little grey-white legs, stopping dead for a moment, and then rocking along again. As to the time when it followed her to school, we imagine that really was the last straw, and no doubt she joined the other children laughing and sporting at sight of the silly little thing standing in the doorway with its blue bow and its mild eyes…. But of page 147 late years we have been called upon to play the pet lamb to so many young authors that the tables are turned—so much so that our bleat is become a positive groan of dismay when Mary or her little brother drags us off to school. And if that school be moreover a public school, and the child a well-fed, chubby little child fresh from the bosom of his upper middle-class family—if we are called upon to share once more the feelings of the new boy—why, then we are hard put to it not to turn into lions and devour our leaders.

But Mr. Oldmeadow makes no such demands on behalf of his little hero, Harry Coggin, aged ten years and eleven months, son of William Coggin, marine-store dealer, the Canal Bank, Bulford-on-Deme. It is true Harry does go to school and he is a new boy, but there his resemblance to those other children ends. This strange, extraordinarily attractive little personality is Mr. Oldmeadow's discovery, and from the moment we meet him talking to George Placker, we are prepared to follow him to school or anywhere he may like to take us.

Coggin is an only child. His father calls himself a marine-store dealer, but he is in fact a rag-and-bones man, and—the time being 1851, and school inspectors unknown plagues—his son is more or less a working partner in the firm. But among the rubbish there were often torn books and papers, and these attracted little Coggin—so much so that he got a man at the sawmills to teach him to read for a shilling, paid for out of his pocket money of one penny a week. Having learned to read he becomes his own schoolmaster, and at the time he talks to George Placker at the canal-side he knows enough to be eligible for the Samuel Robson Scholarship which would admit him to the Bulford Grammar School. Placker is the leader of the atheists, Chartists, infidels and traitors in the town, and he determines that Harry Coggin shall win that scholarship to spite the governing classes and give the rich a fright.

So the unprecedented thing happens. Harry enters for page 148 the scholarship; is examined, in the absence of the headmaster, by the rector, and, in the face of the most violent opposition on the part of the same headmaster and three-fourths of the town, the rector judges him the successful candidate. There follows a strange, deep disturbance in the town, and all caused by little Coggin, with his white face and large grey-blue eyes, his boots that are much too big, and his clothes that are too heavy. He is thrown by Placker and Company into the quiet pool, and great, widening ripples flow away and away from him, and are not quietened when the book ends. But it is Coggin who matters—Coggin, meeting the rector the morning after the scholarship and explaining that he taught himself writing and Latin.

What made you skip the first declensions? … And why did you skip the cardinal numbers? … and you seem to have passed over the fourth conjugation of verbs.

In his desire to be deferential Coggin rose from his seat and stood beside the pile of planks:

I am very sorry, sir (he said). I could not learn the parts of the book you mention because these pages were torn out…. When books come to our yard my father lets me look at them, and if they are very old and torn I can keep them. My Latin grammar has no covers, but I think it would be a very good one if eleven pages were not torn out….

The novel as a whole lacks proportion. The closing scenes, with the rector for principal figure, are far too drawn out; they are, to our thinking, a grave blemish. The author throws all restraint to the winds, and indulges in such an outpouring of sentimentality that it is a wonder his hero is not submerged. But the waters do not touch him, and he remains in our memory a child unlike other children, a careful, solitary little figure, forlorn on the fringe of life.