CHAPTER THIRD EPHEW appears upon the scene in 1817, having emerged from the chrysalis condition of apprenticeship to the ampler dignity of a Freeman in the Stationers' Com pany, of which important organization he became a Liveryman in 1848. His portrait, painted when he was sixty, by Mrs. Furnival, and presented to the Company by his children, hangs in the Stationers' Hall. In 1817, Matthew Wood being Lord Mayor, he took up his Freedom of London City. We find him in 1824 a partner in the Chiswick Press. The Nephew bore the name of his grandfather, the Caludon farmer. He was born at Mitcham in Surrey, on October 30th, 1795. His father, the Uncle's brother Samuel, was a nurseryman, who removed, sometime after his son's birth, to Peace Bridge, in Middlesex. At the age of fifteen, Charles Whittingham the Nephew was apprenticed to Charles Whittingham the Uncle, Citizen and Liveryman, on the second day of October, 1810, the fiftieth year of the reign of King George III. The Uncle, having previously charged himself with the education of this lad, had sent him for his lore to the Reverend John Evans, who had a prosperous Academy in Pullin's Row, in the sweet suburb of Islington. The Reverend John Evans had also an amazing capacity for authorship and compilation. After a careful journey through the Chiswick ledgers I am prepared to maintain that no other man in England had been, down to the year of our Lord 1827, directly responsible for so much printed matter as this tireless Unitarian, who could not be restrained in his love of ink. Sermons, guide-books, commentaries, lamentations, adulations, depreciations, harmless tales for youth, exhortations to the aged: there is no end to the printed utterances of this worthy man, who, in the midst of his scribbling, found time for pedagogy. The reverend gentleman had been among the early patrons of Uncle Charles. His name appears as far back as 1793, in the Dean Street |