Henry Parkes - Early Years

Early Years

Parkes was born in Canley, Warwickshire (now a suburb of Coventry), England and christened in the nearby village of Stoneleigh. His father, Thomas Parkes, was a small-scale tenant farmer. Of his mother, little is known, although when she died in 1842, Parkes would say of her that he felt as if a portion of this world's beauty was lost to him forever. He received little schooling, and at an early age was working on a rope-walk for four pence a day. His next work was in a brickyard, and later on he tells us he "was breaking stones on the Queen's highway with hardly enough clothing to protect me from the cold". He was then apprenticed to John Holding, a bone and ivory turner at Birmingham, and probably about the year 1832 joined the Birmingham political union. Between that year and 1838 he was associated with the political movements that were then endeavouring to better the conditions endured by the working classes.

He was steadily educating himself, too, by reading assiduously, including the works of the British poets. In 1835, he addressed some verses, afterwards included in his first volume of poems, to Clarinda Varney, the daughter of a local butler. On 11 July 1836 he married Clarinda Varney and went to live in a single room. Parkes commenced business on his own account in Birmingham and had a bitter struggle to make ends meet.