"I saw other boys playing after school hours — why was I not to play? In summer-time nearly all the boys went to a little mill-stream to bathe. Why was I not allowed to bathe? I looked forward to this day like a prisoner for his liberty, but when it came it brought no pleasure.
When I took off my shirt and saw, what I had often seen before, that my body, from the shoulders downwards, was mottled with bruises, from dark purple to a greenish yellow in colour, I felt so ashamed for the other boys to see it, that I made an excuse that the water was too cold, and I put on my shirt and returned home, to be flogged for not saying where I had been.
The physical abuse was exceeded by the mental cruelty.
One day, having been tied to a bedpost as a punishment, but managing to wriggle free, he drank from a bottle he found in a cupboard. His uncle flogged him, in the usual manner, but added that the liquid was a poison, and he would be dead by the morning. He made him confess his sins, "which God would now punish", and called in the local coffin-maker:
The coffin man was instructed to measure me for a coffin. He took a rule from his side-pocket, and as he ran it over my body I felt a cold shudder as he called out, "3 ft. 4 in. by 1ft 2 in. across the shoulders, 9 inches deep; three-quarter elm. Ready tomorrow morning."
After a night of terror in which he contemplated an eternity of pain in "the fire which is never quenched", he woke "with my lips glued together, my body hot and feverish, and my eyes bloodshot."
"But there was another stab. My uncle and aunt laughed at my sufferings, and said, jeeringly, that the bottle contained nothing but dill water, and they said it was poison to frighten me and make me a good boy."
"...the apprehended agony of dying before morning no words can describe. I was ordered to bed. I wanted to kiss the baby and ask forgiveness, but this was denied...I was told to prepare for the fire which is never quenched...Did I not hear last Sunday that the Lord had made the wicked for the day of evil, and there was no hope? Every time the church clock"The cruelties inflicted on defenceless, motherless children have never been properly written", he writes.Is it too fanciful to see in these experiences the source of his later career as a tireless campaigner for a universal education in science and art, for free libraries, and for the freedom of all people — particularly children — to play unconfined on Wandsworth Common?