Page:The Story of the House of Cassell (book).djvu/23



was born on January 23, 1817, and died on April 2, 1865. Though he accomplished many things, the principal achievement of his forty-eight years was the building of the publishing house that bears his name.

Cassell was a living paradox. He surpassed probability, defied heredity, rose superior to environment. A poor boy without material resources, he came to deal in extensive enterprises and control what were, in his day, large capitals. Uneducated himself, he did more than most men of his time to promote the higher education of the English masses. The son of a publican, he was an ardent teetotaller and a powerful advocate of temperance reform. A mechanic by training, he devoted his life to purely intellectual labour. Hardly anything John Cassell did was what he might have been expected to do.

Little is known of his family. His great-grandfather was a Worcestershire man who had migrated into Kent. He died at Beckenham in 1760. William Cassell, his son, married a farmer's daughter, a Miss Matthews, whose family had occupied the same homestead for more than a century. They were blessed with many children, of whom the youngest, Mark, broke away from the Kentish associations and from agriculture, and became the landlord of the Ring o' Bells Inn at No. 8 Old Churchyard, Hunt's Bank, Manchester. He had chosen his wife, however, from the rural stock; her father was a farmer in the Nuneaton country.