Author Description

Excerpt from Newman Hall: An Autobiography The first use of my pen on this morning of my eighty-first birthday (May 22, 1897) is to commence a narration which has often been solicited by personal friends, and which may interest and possibly benefit others to whom my name is more or less familiar. On this day what more natural than reference to the parents to whom I owe my birth, and whose character has influenced my whole life? Even a stream, small and insignificant, with no place in history or atlas, may irrigate some meadow where sheep and cattle quietly pasture and where daisies smile - a silent stream, fringed here and there with forget-me-nots, helping to swell the river in which it seems to be lost on its way to the ocean. The character of the parents influences that of the children. My father, John Vine Hall, was born in a cottage home at Diss, in 1774, and at eleven years of age was sent as an apprentice to Mr. Blake, bookseller and printer at Maidstone, and proprietor of the Maidstone Journal, the oldest Tory paper in Kent. How he became chief assistant there, took a business in Worcester, won for his wife Miss Mary Teverill, and in 1814 returned to Maidstone, where I was born, as proprietor where he had begun life as junior servant - all this has been described in his autobiography. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historic