“My mother,” he said, “worked in a manufactory from a very early age.  She was clever and industrious, and, moreover, she had the reputation of being virtuous.  She was regarded as an excellent match for a working man.  She was married early.  She became the mother of eleven children:  I am the eldest.  To the best of her ability she performed the important duties of a wife and mother.  But she was lamentably deficient in domestic knowledge.  In that most important of all human instruction—­how to make the home and the fireside to possess a charm for her husband and children—­she had never received one single lesson.  She had children apace.  As she recovered from her lying-in, so she went to work, the babe being brought to her at stated times to receive nourishment.  As the family increased, so everything like comfort disappeared altogether.  The power to make home cheerful and comfortable was never given to her.  She knew not the value of cherishing in my father’s mind a love of domestic objects.  Not one moment’s happiness did I ever see under my father’s roof.  All this dismal state of things I can distinctly trace to the entire and perfect absence of all training and instruction to my mother.  He became intemperate; and his intemperance made her necessitous.  She made many efforts to abstain from shop-work; but her pecuniary necessities forced her back into the shop.  The family was large; and every moment was required at home.  I have known her, after the close of a hard day’s work, sit up nearly all night for several nights together washing and mending clothes.  My father could have no comfort there.  These domestic obligations, which in a well-regulated house (even in that of a working man, where there are prudence and good management) would be done so as not to annoy the husband, were to my father a sort of annoyance; and he, from an ignorant and mistaken notion, sought comfort in an alehouse.  My mother’s ignorance of household duties; my father’s consequent irritability and intemperance; the frightful poverty; the constant quarrelling; the pernicious example to my brothers and sisters; the bad effect upon the future conduct of my brothers,—­one and all of us being forced out to work so young that our feeble earnings would produce only 1_s_. a week,—­cold and hunger, and the innumerable sufferings of my childhood, crowd upon my mind and overpower me.  They keep alive a deep anxiety for the emancipation of thousands of families in this great town (Birmingham) and neighbourhood, who are in a similar state of horrible misery.  My own experience tells me that the instruction of the females in the work of a house, in teaching them to produce cheerfulness and comfort at the fireside, would prevent a great amount of misery and crime.  There would be fewer drunken husbands and disobedient children.  As a working man, within my own observation, female education is disgracefully neglected.  I attach more importance to it than to anything else; for woman imparts the first impressions to the young susceptible mind; she models the child from which is formed the future man.”