as an excellent match for a working man. She was
married early. She became the mother of eleven children: I am the
eldest. To the best of her ability she performed the important
duties of a wife and mother. She was lamentably deficient in
domestic knowledge; in that most important of all human instruction,
how to make the home and the fireside to possess a charm for her
husband and children, she had never received one single lesson. She
had children apace. As she recovered from her lying-in, so she went
to work, the babe being brought to her at stated times to receive
nourishment. As the family increased, so any thing like comfort
disappeared altogether. The power to make home cheerful and
comfortable was never given to her. She knew not the value of
cherishing in my father's mind a love of domestic objects. Not one
moment's happiness did I ever see under my father's roof. All this
dismal state of things I can distinctly trace to the entire and
perfect absence of all training and instruction to my mother. He
became intemperate; and his intemperance made her necessitous. She
made many efforts to abstain from shop-work; but her pecuniary
necessities forced her back into the shop. The family was large, and
every moment was required at home. I have known her, after the close
of a hard day's work, sit up nearly all night for several nights
together washing and mending of clothes. My father could have no
comfort here. These domestic obligations, which in a well-regulated
house (even in that of a working man, where there are prudence and
good management) would be done so as not to annoy the husband, to my
father were a source of annoyance; and he, from an ignorant and
mistaken notion, sought comfort in an alehouse.

"My mother's ignorance of household duties; my father's consequent
irritability and intemperance; the frightful poverty; the constant
quarrelling; the pernicious example to my brothers and sisters; the
bad effect upon the future conduct of my brothers; one and all of us
being forced out to work so young that our feeble earnings would
produce only 1_s._ a-week; cold and hunger, and the innumerable
sufferings of my childhood, crowd upon my mind and overpower me.
They keep alive a deep anxiety for the emancipation of the thousands
of families in this great town and