business; he was jeweller to the king, and lent considerable sums of money to the government. Being a freeman of the city of London, Child was elected a member of the court of common council in 1681; in 1689 he became an alderman, and in the same year a knight. He served as sheriff of London in 1691 and as lord mayor in 1699. His parliamentary career began about this time. In 1698 he was chosen member of parliament for Devizes and in 1702 for the city of London, and was again returned for Devizes in 1705 and 1710. He died on the 4th of October 1713, and was buried in Fulham churchyard. Sir Francis, who was a benefactor to Christ’s hospital, bought Osterley Park, near Isleworth, now the residence of his descendant the earl of Jersey.
Child had twelve sons. One, Sir Robert, an alderman, died in 1721. Another, Sir Francis (c. 1684–1740), was lord mayor of London in 1732, and a director of the East India Company. He was chosen member of parliament for the city of London in 1722, and was member for Middlesex from 1727 until his death. After the death of the younger Sir Francis at Fulham on the 20th of April 1740 the banking business passed to his brother Samuel, and the bank is still owned by his descendants, the principal proprietor being the earl of Jersey. Child’s Bank was at first conducted at the Marygold, next Temple Bar in Fleet Street, London; and the present bank occupies the site formerly covered by the Marygold and the adjacent Devil tavern.
CHILD, FRANCIS JAMES (1825–1896), American scholar and educationist, was born in Boston on the 1st of February 1825. He graduated at Harvard in 1846, taking the highest rank in his class in all subjects; was tutor in mathematics in 1846–1848; and in 1848 was transferred to a tutorship in history, political economy and English. After two years of study in Europe, in 1851 he succeeded Edward T. Channing as Boylston professor of rhetoric, oratory and elocution. Child studied the English drama (having edited Four Old Plays in 1848) and Germanic philology, the latter at Berlin and Göttingen during a leave of absence, 1849–1853; and he took general editorial supervision of a large collection of the British poets, published in Boston in 1853 and following years. He edited Spenser (5 vols., Boston, 1855), and at one time planned an edition of Chaucer, but contented himself with a treatise, in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for 1863, entitled “Observations on the Language of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” which did much to establish Chaucerian grammar, pronunciation and scansion as now generally understood. His largest undertaking, however, grew out of an original collection, in his British Poets series, of English and Scottish Ballads, selected and edited by himself, in eight small volumes (Boston, 1857–1858). Thenceforward the leisure of his life—much increased by his transfer, in 1876, to the new professorship of English—was devoted to the comparative study of British vernacular ballads. He accumulated, in the university library, one of the largest folklore collections in existence, studied manuscript rather than printed sources, and carried his investigations into the ballads of all other tongues, meanwhile giving a sedulous but conservative hearing to popular versions still surviving. At last his final collection was published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, at first in ten parts (1882–1898), and then in five quarto volumes, which remain the authoritative treasury of their subject. Professor Child worked—and overworked—to the last, dying in Boston on the 11th of September 1896, having completed his task save for a general introduction and bibliography. A sympathetic biographical sketch was prefixed to the work by his pupil and successor George L. Kittredge.
CHILD, SIR JOHN (d. 1690), governor of Bombay, and in fact if not in name the first governor-general of the British settlements in India, was born in London. He was sent as a little boy to his uncle, the chief of the factory at Rajapur; and in 1682 was appointed chief of the East India Company’s affairs at Surat and Bombay, while at the same time his brother, Sir Josiah Child (q.v.), was governor of the company at home. The two brothers showed themselves strong men and guided the affairs of the company through the period of struggle between the Moguls and Mahrattas. They have been credited by history with the change from unarmed to armed trade on the part of the company; but as a matter of fact both of them were loth to quarrel with the Mogul. War broke out with Aurangzeb in 1689, but in the following year Child had to sue for peace, one of the conditions being that he should be expelled from India. He escaped this expulsion by his death in 1690.
CHILD, SIR JOSIAH (1630–1699), English merchant, economist and governor of the East India Company, was born in London in 1630, the second son of Richard Child, a London merchant of old family. After serving his apprenticeship in the business, to which he succeeded, he started on his own account at Portsmouth, as victualler to the navy under the Commonwealth, when about twenty-five. He amassed a comfortable fortune, and became a considerable stock-holder in the East India Company, his interest in India being accentuated by the fact that his brother John (q.v.) was making his career there. He was returned to parliament in 1659 for Petersfield; and in later years sat for Dartmouth (1673–1678) and for Ludlow (1685–1687). He was made a baronet in 1678. His advocacy, both by speech and by pen, under the pseudonym of Philopatris, of the East India Company’s claims to political power, as well as to the right of restricting competition with its trade, brought him to the notice of the shareholders, and he became a director in 1677, and, subsequently, deputy-governor and governor. In this latter capacity he was for a considerable time virtually the sole ruler of the company, and directed its policy as if it were his own private business. He and his brother have been credited with the change from unarmed to armed traffic; but the actual renunciation of the Roe doctrine of unarmed traffic by the company was resolved upon in January 1686, under Governor Sir Joseph Ash, when Child was temporarily out of office. He died on the 22nd of June 1699. Child made several important contributions to the literature of economics; especially Brief Observations concerning Trade and the Interest of Money (1668), and A New Discourse of Trade (1668 and 1690). He was a moderate in those days of the “mercantile system,” and has sometimes been regarded as a sort of pioneer in the development of the free-trade doctrines of the 18th century. He made various proposals for improving British trade by following Dutch example, and advocated a low rate of interest as the “causa causans of all the other causes of the riches of the Dutch people.” This low rate of interest he thought should be created and maintained by public authority. Child, whilst adhering to the doctrine of the balance of trade, observed that a people cannot always sell to foreigners without ever buying from them, and denied that the export of the precious metals was necessarily detrimental. He had the mercantilist partiality for a numerous population, and became prominent with a new scheme for the relief and employment of the poor; it is noteworthy also that he advocated the reservation by the mother country of the sole right of trade with her colonies. Sir Josiah Child’s eldest son, Richard, was created Viscount Castlemain in 1718 and earl of Tylney in 1731.
See also Macaulay, History of England, vol. iv.; R. Grant, Sketch of the History of the East India Company (1813); D. Macpherson, Annals of Commerce (1805); B. Willson, Ledger and Sword (1903). (T. A. I.)
CHILD, LYDIA MARIA (1802–1880), American author, was born at Medford, Massachusetts, on the 11th of February 1802. She was educated at an academy in her native town and by her brother Convers Francis (1795–1863), a Unitarian minister and from 1842 to 1863 Parkman professor in the Harvard Divinity School. Her first stories, Hobomok (1824) and The Rebels (1825), were popular successes. She was a schoolmistress until 1828, when she married David Lee Child (1794–1874), a brilliant but erratic Boston lawyer and journalist. From 1826 to 1834 she edited The Juvenile Miscellany, the first children’s monthly periodical in the United States. About 1831 both she and her husband began to identify themselves with the anti-slavery cause, and in 1833 she published An Appeal for that Class of Americans called Africans, a stirring portrayal of the evils of slavery, and an argument for immediate abolition, which had
