Yorkshire Almanac Samuel Jackson of Green Hammerton (Harrogate) writes to his 18-year-old son, John Hughlings Jackson, a student at York Medical and Surgical School

17 March 1854: Samuel Jackson of Green Hammerton (Harrogate) writes to his 18-year-old son, John Hughlings Jackson, a student at York Medical and Surgical School

Macdonald Critchley and Eileen A. Critchley. 1998. John Hughlings Jackson. New York: Oxford University Press. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

As to your general conduct, I have not the least fault to find. It has been to this date as good and exact as I would wish. I believe you have always kept yourself respectable and done your duty to your master and I am led to believe to his satisfaction and hope will do to the end of your pupillage which will be a cause of great satisfaction to me and must to you be a gratifying feeling.
That said John there are many things to do, to guard against, which young men often never think about at least in such a way as to make them firm to do, or, to leave undone. The giving way to improper company, I mean juvenilian company, company likely to take quite an improper tone to a persons desires and impulses. He may be compelled to associate with people whose habits of expenditure is greater, and perhaps not improper on their parts (on account of the means they possess). In such a case it requires a great firmness to resist spending as they do and thus getting into habits that common sense says can not be carried out without sooner or later taking away independence of feeling and with that contentment and happiness. It is a mistake that many young men make that to be respectable, to be respected it is necessary to pay like a man of property pays. I mean pay more than prudence dictates and might have a claim in the main idea that people will respect a man for it. It is the most absurd notion that can be. A certain class (the receivers) may fawn upon you, the wise and sensible will ridicule or scorn a person doing so for his lack of common sense. I write these last few lines because I feel it to be true indeed I know it to be so. I have often seen it and sometimes seen people laughed at when their backs were turned. A young man that pays what is right and sees that he pays no more than he should is in truth more respected and looked upon in a better light by those he should wish to please and whose esteem he ought to gain than the person that pays like a fool through pride and vanity. You have got a calling in life if not all honey has in prospect a good share of it. Only be content to go steadily to work patiently waiting your time and taking hold of every handle to help you. Trust not to the chapter of accidents but be always strong and speaking so as to gain the respect of all, more particularly those that may be able to lift you up in the stern realities of life’s struggle. John do not deceive yourself. There are stern realities in a successful progress more particularly in the beginning and one of these is to learn that money spent is not in the pocket, and although so clear a truism [fear] not as if it was so. Begin now to set habits of strict carefulness. Now begin to resist every desire. Ask yourself can I do without it, or is it requisite I should have it. If so get it, but not for the sake of some sudden desire. Do not lay out money that in a few days you feel would have been as such, better, in your possession.
One way in which you lay out more cash than wise is in articles of dress. If you get a neck tye and you afterwards do not like it is that a reason why you should not wear it? Some people such as they would not be worn again. I sometimes think you do not take that care of your clothes you might.
As you have not many faults and those not great ones I shall say no more upon that save only I should wish you have a greater respect for money. Rest assured it is a truer friend than most for it will help you in … and most others and others leave you. Just then and only then and if fortune a second time shines upon a person then those friends like a swallow once again, but only then, of course their own time. Lasting friends, perhaps not much seen or notice taken of till the end of time comes.
As to your music I do not say or indeed wish you to give it up. I will just make these remarks. 1st do you attend punctually to your classes or do you not? 2nd do you feel it is your fate and that you will some day make something out. 3rdly have you time to attend to classes and lastly if you feel you would like to give up do so before a 1/4 begins. Do not misunderstand me I leave it to yourself.
I cannot write as I would wish to. I cannot express myself as I could like. I should have liked to have put my words together better, more clearly, but somehow I cannot. I feel it is far from a good letter and does not contain my ideas as I could have wished. Still you will I think make them out. To your good sense, to your knowledge of what is right and seemly I leave it. Let your own mind make out and follow what you feel I should have said and be determined to follow not a foolish sensation but care nothing what the world will say as long as you act right and manfully do your duty to all around and to yourself. You are now just at the age when young people give a cast to their character. Recollect that habits bad or extravagant, false notions John, made now are hard to shake off. Be careful not to get a habit of being too sarcastic. It will not only lose friends but get enemies.
Hoping you will help the writer in expressing himself by your careful reading and lending your reason not to show cause against but to try to come to a proper decision is the wish of
your affectionate Father
Saml Jackson
P.S. 1st He is a happy man that learns by other peoples folly.
2nd He is a wise man that learns by his own folly and
3rd He is a fool that learns nothing by his own folly nor other peoples.
I hope your next 1/2 years tailors bills will be “nil” except for repairs, as the last was nearly as large as a year’s ought to be. S.J.
I hope you attend a place of worship every Sunday, at night always.
Also, I hope you will for future take great care of your books. There is a book shelf in the place why not use it. Books abused now will cut a poor figure in days to come in a good bookcase. S.J.
I expect yet to hear you have run the race and won too. What if you do not? People do not always expect to win, a good second is no disgrace.
Common prudence will tell you to take care of this note or put it in the fire.
How many specimens of bad spelling are there in this letter. At a guess I say 8 or 9 at least. S.J.
I hope you told Mrs. Anderson that Sister was better. She felt much gratified and thankful for Mr. and Mrs. A.’s kindness. I hope you gave her Ann’s note. Knowing Ann’s having had a stroke will excuse her writing.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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19 September 1866: Ostentatiously breaking with medical tradition, Clifford Allbutt, physician, and Claudius Galen Wheelhouse, surgeon, cooperate at Leeds Infirmary to cure a pericarditis

17 October 1887: John Hughlings Jackson, late of York, uses recollections of the minster to illustrate the double mental vision displayed by punsters

16 February 1886: Clifford Allbutt explains to James Crichton-Browne why three years later he was to trade a lucrative medical consulting career in Leeds for a less well paid Commissionership in Lunacy in London

25 September 1066: The Stamford Bridge massacre by Harold Godwinson’s army of Harald Hardrada and Tostig Godwinson’s force – symbol of the end of the Viking Age

14 April 1792: The ballad of Spence Broughton, hung this day at the York Tyburn for robbing the Sheffield and Rotherham mail

21 April 1883: Peter Inchbald observes nightingales at Harrogate for the first time, but their popularity is their undoing

2 August 1680: William Dolben, perhaps reluctantly, condemns Thomas Thwing to death at York for his part, without co-conspirators, in a fictitious conspiracy – the Popish Plot

7 September 1801: Painter Joseph Farington feels overcharged by his Ripon landlord

7 January 1813: In a novelisation of the Luddite murder of Marsden textile manufacturer William Horsfall, a local Baptist minister, Abraham Webster, reports on his execution-eve visit to George Mellor in York Castle

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Some background to the novel:

D. F. E. Sykes, a Huddersfield solicitor married to the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, focused in Ben o’ Bills, The Luddite, which the author claimed to be based on oral testimony and ‘mostly true’, on a fictional family, the Bamforths, connected with the Particular Baptists at Powle Moor, near Slaithwaite, where the minister, Abraham Webster, was so decidedly against the new machines that old Mrs Bamforth ‘died in the belief that the curse of Scripture was upon them’. George Mellor, a cousin of the Bamforths in the novel, enters the story on Christmas Eve, 1811, intoning the first verse of ‘Christians Awake’. He goes along with the rest of the family to Christmas morning service at Slaithwaite Church, where ‘near all Slaithwaite’ had gathered ‘Methodies and Baptists and all; and even folk that went nowhere, Owenites they called them’, who ‘made a point of going to church that one morning of the year’. Mellor, who occasionally speaks in moderate tones, but elsewhere gives vent to Painite anti-clerical and republican sentiments, is portrayed presiding at a Luddite oath-taking ceremony with a Bible to hand. He refers to Benjamin Walker, the accomplice who betrayed him, whose family Sykes also links with the Baptists at Powle Moor, as a ‘Judas’, He is visited twice in his York prison cell by Abraham Webster, who prays with him on the eve of his execution. According to Sykes, this final pastoral visit inspired Mellor to offer words of forgiveness for his enemies from the scaffold, though Sykes was clearly using dramatic licence in allowing Webster to lead the singing of a Methodist hymn at Mellor’s execution, since all the contemporary accounts record this as a feature of the execution of another group of Luddites. At the end of the novel, Soldier Jack, a former militia-man-turned-Luddite, reflecting on Mellor’s fate, philosophizes: ‘”Yo’re dissenters at th’ Powle … an’ … if there’d been no dissenters there’d been no Luds, ‘an George Mellor ‘d noan ha’ danced out 0′ th’ world on nowt”‘.

Much of the background to Sykes’s novel is authentic, as are several of the key characters, including Abraham Webster, the Baptist minister at Powle Moor, the Reverend Charles Chew, the curate at Slaithwaite and the Luddites George Mellor and Benjamin Walker. A succession of popular evangelical Calvinistic Anglican curates in the Venn tradition at Slaithwaite and the reluctance of the earls of Dartmouth to release land on their estates for the building of Nonconformist places of worship had delayed the local development of both Wesleyanism and Dissent, a factor of which Sykes was clearly aware in his reconstruction of popular religion in the Colne Valley. In fact, no Wesleyan chapel was built at Slaithwaite until 1839, though a chapel had been opened in 1810 at Linthwaite, the first to be built in the Colne Valley, and cottage meetings were begun at Marsden in the same year. The Baptist secession had occurred as recently as 1787 and the Powle Moor Chapel was built· three years later on moorland waste in the neighbouring township of Scammonden, having been denied building land on the Dartmouth estates in the Colne Valley. The most recent historians of the chapel have, however, found no evidence in the chapel records to corroborate the links between Sykes’s characters and the chapel and dismissed Sykes’s account as purely fictional.
(Hargreaves 1990)

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