It was at Sheffield, in the county of Yorkshire, already famous
in the annals of crime as the county of John Nevison and Eugene
Aram, that Peace first saw the light. On May 14, 1832, there was
born to John Peace in Sheffield a son, Charles, the youngest of
his family of four. When he grew to boyhood Charles was sent to
two schools near Sheffield, where he soon made himself
remarkable, not as a scholar, but for his singular aptitude in a
variety of other employments such as making paper models, taming
cats, constructing a peep-show, and throwing up a heavy ball of
shot which he would catch in a leather socket fixed on to his
forehead.

The course of many famous men's lives has been changed by
what appeared at the time to be an unhappy accident. Who knows
what may have been the effect on Charles Peace's subsequent
career of an accident he met with in 1846 at some rolling mills,
in which he was employed? A piece of red hot steel entered his
leg just below the knee, and after eighteen months spent in the
Sheffield Infirmary he left it a cripple for life. About this
time Peace's father died. Peace and his family were fond of
commemorating events of this kind in suitable verse; the death of
John Peace was celebrated in the following lines:

"In peace he lived;
In peace he died;
Life was our desire,
But God denied."