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BEGINNINGS

scholarship, though he won several prizes, including one for mathematics in his last year; but he endeared himself to his masters by his humour and character, and by his precocious talent for drawing, which earned him the school prize (a portrait of himself by Herbert Dicksee, the drawing master, which seems not to have survived). His caricatures of the masters were so successful that he was asked to repeat one of Rushbrooke on the blackboard for the benefit of the whole form.

With all his high spirits, Arthur Rackham was a delicate boy, and at the end of 1883 Dr (later Sir) Samuel Wilks recommended that he should leave school and accompany two family friends, Miss Liggens and Mrs Merryfield, who were emigrating to Australia. Accordingly he sailed with them from Plymouth in the S.S. Chimborazo of the

The five sketches of men in the margins are reproduced from original drawings in one of Rackham’s scrap-books, and are dated 4 December 1892.

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