Page:The Life of Francis Place.djvu/20

2 EARLY LIFE eighteenth-century Radicalism, that history is of great and immediate usefulness to a politician; and being himself a maker of history, he was sensible of a moral obligation to leave authentic records of the public work in which he had borne a hand. From 1813 to 1850 he carefully kept and indexed his political letters; and in 1823, under the persuasion of Bentham, he commenced an autobiography for publication. The result was what might have been expected from a man whose sense of the importance of facts made him over-anxious to record every possible detail. The autobiography, which never was, and never will be, published, branched off into a series of long and unwieldy monographs on the Westminster Elections, the repeal of the Combination Laws, the Reform Agitation of 1830-32, and the numerous other public and private enterprises in which he took part, and was accompanied by huge collections of illustrative documents. No less than seventy volumes make up in this way the "Place Manuscripts" in the British Museum. Other volumes are in the possession of his family. But besides the facts which he was so diligent to collect, these volumes contain the history of an extraordinarily interesting man, who, from 1793, when he became Secretary to the Leather-breeches Makers' Trade Club, to 1838, when he drafted the "People's Charter," was a master in the inception and execution of those difficult and uncertain reforms which we have now come to think of as having been from the first easy and irresistible.

Francis Place was a Londoner; he was born on November 3, 1771, in a "sponging house," or private debtor's prison, in Vinegar Yard, near Drury Lane, kept by his father, Simon Place, who was at that time a bailiff to the Marshalsea Court. Francis was lucky enough to be sent regularly to some sort of school from the age of four till he was nearly fourteen. The private adventure schools