Who cares for these local scandals?
It matters very little to those who have the good fortune to be invited to Lady Ann Newcome's parties whether her beautiful daughters can trace their pedigrees no higher than to the alderman their grandfather; or whether, through the mythic ancestral barber-surgeon, they hang on to the chin of Edward, Confessor and King.
Thomas Newcome, who had been a weaver in his native village, brought the very best character for honesty, thrift, and ingenuity with him to London, where he was taken into the house of Hobson Brothers, cloth-factors; afterwards Hobson and Newcome.

This fact may suffice to indicate Thomas Newcome's story.

Like Whittington and many other London apprentices, he began poor and ended by marrying his master's daughter, and becoming sheriff and alderman of the City of London.
But it was only en secondes noces that he espoused the wealthy, and religious, and eminent (such was the word applied to certain professing Christians in those days) Sophia Alethea Hobson--a woman who, considerably older than Mr.Newcome, had the advantage of surviving him many years.

Her mansion at Clapham was long the resort of the most favoured amongst the religious world.

The most eloquent expounders; the most gifted missionaries, the most interesting converts from foreign islands, were to be found at her sumptuous table, spread with the produce of her magnificent gardens.