Early Life
The son of Harry Parkes, founder of the firm of Parkes, Otway & Co., ironmasters, he was born at Birchills Hall, in the parish of Bloxwich in Staffordshire, England. When he was four years old his mother died, and the following year his father was killed in a carriage accident. Left an orphan, he found a home with his uncle, a retired naval officer, at Birmingham. He received his education at a boarding-school at Balsall Heath, and in May 1838 entered King Edwards Grammar School.
Read more about this topic: Harry Smith Parkes
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“I do believe that the outward and the inward life correspond; that if any should succeed to live a higher life, others would not know of it; that difference and distance are one. To set about living a true life is to go on a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men; and as long as the old are around me, I know that I am not in any true sense living a new or a better life.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)