Alexander Roob

1) I The London Years (1812-1848)

William James Linton was born in London on December 7, 1812 into a middle class family.  His father was an accountant of Scottish origin and a sympathizer of the republican movement; his mother is characterised as as a pious housewife of Welsh extraction and a rather loyalist attitude. "Some vague remembrance I still have of the house in which I was born  and in which I lived till I was five years old: one of a row of private houses, Ireland's Row in the Mile-End Road, at the east end of London, close to Charrington's brewery,—a brewery I believe still prosperously existing.  The house was in the parish of Stepney, the parish for all folk born at sea.  My real recollections begin with 1820, the year in which George III. ceased to be nominal king of England.  My family was then living at Stratford, some four miles out of what was distinctly London in those days." (W.J. Linton, Memories)