Excerpt from Edward Clodd: A Memoir Edward Clodd that the romance of his career, the quality of his work, and the exceptional charm of his personality make a memoir of him very desirable. Few of the outstanding men of the late Victorian period had quite so interesting a development. One would almost venture to describe his story as a modern version of the legend of Dick Whittington. From a somnolent little town on the east coast he comes, a boy adventurer of fourteen, to the city of London, and he attains, by industry and integrity, a posi tion which he would surely not have exchanged for that of the Lord Mayor. He becomes the intimate friend of an unusually large group of the most distinguished representatives of letters, science, and art, a respected figure in the financial world, an anthropologist of note, a writer whose works appear in a dozen languages. One might call him the last of the merchant adventurers, in the Cultural sense, of the nineteenth century the successor of Bagehot, Avebury, and Laing, one. 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 historical works.