in which the elder Hood is recorded to have been
active was the opening of the English book-trade with America. He
married a sister of the engraver Mr. Sands, and had by her a large
family; two sons and four daughters survived the period of childhood.
The elder brother, James, who died early of consumption, drew well, as
did also one or two of the sisters. It would seem therefore, when we
recall Thomas Hood's aptitudes and frequent miscellaneous practice in
the same line, that a certain tendency towards fine art, as well as
towards literature, ran in the family. The consumption which killed
James appears to have been inherited from his mother; she, and two of
her daughters, died of the same disease; and a pulmonary affection of a
somewhat different kind became, as we shall see, one of the poet's most
inveterate persecutors. The death of the father, which was sudden and
unexpected, preceded that of the mother, but not of James, and left the
survivors in rather straitened circumstances.

Thomas, the second of the two sons, was born in the Poultry, on or
about the 23d of May, 1799. He is stated to have been a retired child,
with much quiet humor; chuckling, we may guess, over his own quaint
imaginings, which must have come in crowds, and of all conceivable or
inconceivable sorts, to judge from the products of his after years;
keeping most of these fancies and surprises to himself, but every now
and then letting some of them out, and giving homely or stolid
bystanders an inkling of insight into the many-peopled crannies of his
boyish brain. He received his education at Dr. Wanostrocht's school at
Clapham. It is not very clear how far this education extended:[1] I
should infer that it was just about enough, and not more than enough,
to enable Hood to shift for himself in the career of authorship,
without serious disadvantage from inadequate early training, and also
without much aid thence derived--without, at any rate, any such rousing
and refining of the literary sense as would warrant us in attributing
to educational influences either the inclination to become an author,
or the manipulative power over language and style which Hood displayed
in his serious poems, not to speak of those of a lighter kind. We seem
to see him sliding, as it were, into the profession of letters, simply
through capacity and liking, and the course of events--not because he
had resolutely made up his mind to be an author, nor because his
natural fa