BEGINNINGS
In this house all their twelve children were born. The two eldest, both boys, died young. Then, in 1866, came Margaret, a clever girl, who studied at Bedford College and became an examiner in the King’s College Civil Service classes. Arthur, the subject of this biography, was born on 19th September 1867. Harris was born in 1868, and after a brilliant career at the City of London School and Christ’s College, Cambridge, was elected to a classical fellowship at Christ’s in 1894. The next two children, a girl and a boy, both died in their infancy. In 1873 Winifred was born; she became a school-teacher and married Herbert Edward Adams, who taught mathematics at Dulwich College. Another girl, who survived only a few months, was born in 1875. The tenth child, Bernard, born in 1876, was to become Keeper of the Department of Ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum and an outstanding authority on his subject. Two more boys completed the family – Stanley, born in 1877, who studied agriculture, and farmed in Canada; and Maurice, who was born in 1879 and in 1901 joined the Admiralty Registry.
This, then, was a typical middle-class Victorian family of the best sort. The father, himself a man of distinction, had at least three unusually distinguished sons – Arthur, Harris and Bernard. Certain characteristic strains ran through the lives of most of his children. There was a didactic, discriminating, scholarly strain; a strain of cheerful humour; an artistic strain; a conscientious strain, born perhaps of legal precision, which showed itself in strict application to business and financial matters. Arthur Rackham combined these qualities to a marked degree.
As a child in the house in South Lambeth Road, Arthur showed a precocious talent for drawing, and especially for fantastic subjects. Put to bed early, he smuggled paper and pencil with him and drew24
