1 - Disruption
Summary
William King's partial memoir ‘Quædam vitæ meæ insignora’ offers an account of the young man's struggles learning to read, or, rather, his ‘utter refusal to learn … notwithstanding’ his school mistress ‘urging me to learn with whippings, but in vain, so that through weariness she desisted’. Recalling those years, King remembered ‘often I wept in solitude, and accounted that it was from an evil mind and hatred towards me that my parents compelled me to learn letters’, but he knew ‘I was not dull, as I could make some progress in subjects of which I understood the reasonableness, notwithstanding their difficulty’. This emphasis on ‘reasonableness’ by the older King looking back indicates the importance he placed on this attribute above all others, and even allowing for the retrospective reordering of memory King's recounting of his almost instantaneous learning to read underpins this perspective:
It happened on a certain Lord's day, that I was walking about with a woman in the garden, and we entered the wood and sat down together; she was reading the Holy Scriptures, and whilst reading sleep stole over her, I took the book from her hands, and by enumerating the letters, according to my habit, I pronounced the words in its beginning, and immediately perceived it to contain some sense.
Starting ‘in the beginning’, King found himself able to read and understand.
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- A Political Biography of William King , pp. 11 - 46Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014