’When I was a very little child, I used to amuse myself and my brothers with inventing stories, such as I read.  Having, as I suppose, naturally a restless mind and busy imagination, this soon became the chief pleasure of my life.  Unfortunately, my brothers were always fond of encouraging this propensity, and I found in Taylor, my maid, a still greater tempter.  I had not known there was any harm in it, until Miss Shore [a Calvinist governess], finding it out, lectured me severely, and told me it was wicked.  From that time forth I considered that to invent a story of any kind was a sin.  But the desire to do so was too deeply rooted in my affections to be resisted in my own strength [she was at that time nine years of age], and unfortunately I knew neither my corruption nor my weakness, nor did I know where to gain strength.  The longing to invent stories grew with violence; everything I heard or read became food for my distemper.  The simplicity of truth was not sufficient for me; I must needs embroider imagination upon it, and the folly, vanity and wickedness which disgraced my heart are more than I am able to express.  Even now [at the age of twenty-nine], tho’ watched, prayed and striven against, this is still the sin that most easily besets me.  It has hindered my prayers and prevented my improvement, and therefore, has humbled me very much.’

This is, surely, a very painful instance of the repression of an instinct.  There seems to have been, in this case, a vocation such as is rarely heard, and still less often wilfully disregarded and silenced.  Was my Mother intended by nature to be a novelist?  I have often thought so, and her talents and vigour of purpose, directed along the line which was ready to form ’the chief pleasure of her life’, could hardly have failed to conduct her to great success.  She was a little younger than Bulwer Lytton, a little older than Mrs. Gaskell—­but these are vain and trivial speculations!

My own state, however, was, I should think, almost unique among the children of cultivated parents.  In consequence of the stern ordinance which I have described, not a single fiction was read or told to me during my infancy.  The rapture of the child who delays the process of going to bed by cajoling ‘a story’ out of his mother or his nurse, as he sits upon her knee, well tucked up, at the corner of the nursery fire—­this was unknown to me.  Never in all my early childhood did anyone address to me the affecting preamble, ‘Once upon a time!’ I was told about missionaries, but never about pirates; I was familiar with hummingbirds, but I had never heard of fairies—­Jack the Giant-Killer, Rumpelstiltskin and Robin Hood were not of my acquaintance; and though I understood about wolves, Little Red Ridinghood was a stranger even by name.  So far as my ‘dedication’ was concerned, I can but think that my parents were in error thus to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts.  They desired to make me truthful; the tendency was to make me positive and sceptical.  Had they wrapped me in the soft folds of supernatural fancy, my mind might have been longer content to follow their traditions in an unquestioning spirit.