His father, Thomas Vernon Harris, had risen through the ranks of Her Majesty's Coast Guard from cabin boy to command of a revenue cutter that operated off the coast of Ireland. A stern and severely strict parent with rigid Nonconformist beliefs, he taught his son duty and religion through fear and corporal punishment. Harris's mother, Anne Thomas Harris, was from Pembrokeshire and was the daughter of a Baptist preacher. She had a sweet temperament and was a comforting mother to her five children (Frank was the fourth) before dying of tuberculosis in 1860. Harris was then sent to a succession of different schools in England, finally ending up in Ruabon Grammar School in Wales. Small, bright, defensively egocentric, unhappy, and rebellious, at the age of fifteen he ran away from school, using some prize money he had won to book steerage passage to America.
From 1871 to 1872 Harris worked as a bootblack, construction worker, and hotel clerk in New York and Chicago and as a freightman and butcher in Colorado and Kansas. Joining his two older brothers in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1872, he became a businessman, read law, and was admitted to the Kansas bar in 1875. He attended lectures at the University of Kansas and came under the spell of Byron Smith, a brilliant young teacher of classics who had also absorbed the writings of Karl Marx.
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