In a short and simple way, then, and without any desire ostentatiously to “chronicle small beer,” as Iago sneers it, I suppose it proper to state very briefly when and where I was born, with a word as to my parentage.  July 17, 1810, was my birthday, and No. 20 Devonshire Place, Marylebone, my birthplace, at that time the last house of London northward.  My father, Martin Tupper, a name ever honoured by me, was an eminent medical man, who twice refused a baronetcy (first from Lord Liverpool, and secondly, as offered by the Duke of Wellington); my mother, Ellin Devis Marris, being daughter of Robert Marris, a good landscape artist, of an old Lincolnshire family, and made the heiress, as adopted child, of her aunt, Mrs. Ellin Devis, of Devonshire Place and Albury.

My father’s family have sojourned 336 years in Guernsey, having migrated thither from Thuringia, via Hesse Cassel, owing to religious persecution in the evil days of Charles V., our remote ancestors being styled Von Topheres (chieftains, or head-lords) of Treffurth (as is recorded in the heraldic MSS. of the British Museum), that being the origin of our name.

Of my mother’s family (in old time Maris, as “of the sea,” with mermaids for heraldry), I have the commissions of one who was an Ironside cavalry officer, signed by Cromwell and Fairfax; and several of her relatives (besides her father) were distinguished artists.  In particular, her uncle (my wife’s father), Arthur William Devis, the well-known historical painter, and her great-uncle, Anthony Devis, who filled Albury House with his landscapes.

Some of our old German stock crossed the Atlantic in Puritan times, and many of the name have attained wealth and position both in Canada and the United States; notably Sir Charles Tupper northwards, and sundry rich merchants in New York, Virginia, and the Carolines southwardly.

Of my infancy let me record that I “enjoyed” very delicate health, chiefly due, as I now judge, to the constant cuppings and bleedings whereby “the faculty” of those days combated teething fits, and (perhaps with Malthusian proclivities) killed off young children.  I remember, too, that the broad meadows, since developed into Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill, then “truly rural,” and even up to Chalk Farm, then notorious for duels, were my nursery ramblings in search of cowslips and new milk.  Also, that once at least in those infantile days, my father took me to see Winsor’s Patent Gaslights at Carlton House, and how he prognosticated the domestic failure of so perilous an explosive, more than one blowing-up having carelessly occurred.

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