Page:The Story of the House of Cassell (book).djvu/32



or five years after his appointment as agent of the National Temperance Society, Cassell had developed from an ill-paid, ill-lettered and obscure itinerant missioner into a celebrity who hobnobbed with celebrities. His house in St. John's Wood was the meeting place of writing people, artistic people, reforming people; he was the constant host of George Cruikshank, Mrs. Henry Wood, and the Howitts.

The transformation was due to his own quality, undoubtedly; but it was speeded up by the good fortune which, in 1841, during one of his temperance tours in the Eastern counties, threw him into the company of a Lincolnshire woman, Mary Abbott. She was a few years older than Cassell, a calm-eyed, discerning, managing woman. Fit mate for the ambitious and high-spirited man who fell in love with her, she was equally enamoured of him. In less than a year after their meeting they were married, had spent a short honeymoon in Wales, and settled down to housekeeping in London.

The house in St. John's Wood had been impossible to Cassell at the age of twenty-four but for the little fortune his wife inherited from her father. This was, in fact, the original material basis of all Cassell's enterprise, for it enabled him to begin doing business for himself and reaping the fruits of his own boundless energy applied to his own penetrating observation. The habits, tastes and views of the people were an open book to Cassell. From his boyhood he had keenly interested himself in every social phenomenon that came within his view. One of the facts he had noticed, as a traveller and a teetotaller, was that he could get tea and