hen one is about to write the biography of a certain person, it seems
but fair to give as its background such facts concerning the hero's
antecedents as place the details of his life in their proper setting. And
so, having the honour to be the juvenile biographer of Mr. Clive Newcome,
I deem it wise to preface the story of his life with a brief account of
events and persons antecedent to his birth.

Thomas Newcome, Clive's grandfather, had been a weaver in his native
village, and 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-manufacturers; afterwards Hobson & Newcome. When Thomas
Newcome had been some time in London, he quitted the house of Hobson, to
begin business for himself. And no sooner did his business prosper than
he married a pretty girl from his native village. What seemed an
imprudent match, as his wife had no worldly goods to bring him, turned
out a very lucky one for Newcome. The whole countryside was pleased to
think of the marriage of the prosperous London tradesman with 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, and Susan Newcome would have been the wife of a
rich man had she not died a year after her marriage, at the birth of her
son, Thomas.

Newcome had a nurse for the child, and a cottage at Clapham, hard by Mr.
Hobson's house, and being held in good esteem by his former employers,
was sometimes invited by them to tea. When his wife died, Miss Hobson,
who since her father's death had become a partner in the firm, met Mr.
Newcome with his little boy as she was coming out of meeting one Sunday,
and the child looked so pretty, and Mr. Newcome so personable, that Miss
Hobson invited him and little Tommy into the grounds; let the child frisk
about in the hay on the lawn, and at the end of the visit gave him a
large piece of pound-cake, a quantity of the finest hot-house grapes, and
a tract in one syllable. Tommy was ill the next day; but on the next
Sunday his father was at meeting, and not very long after that Miss
Hobson became Mrs. Newcome.

After his father's second marriage, Tommy and Sarah, his nurse, who was
also a cousin of Mr. Newcome's first wife, were transported from the
cottage, where they had lived in great comfort, to the palace hard by,
surrounded by lawns and gardens