you think,” said the manager of one of the theatres most warmly patronised by the working classes, to a clerical friend of mine—“don’t you think that I am doing good in keeping these people out of the public-house all night?” and my friend was compelled to yield a very reluctant consent. When I first knew London the music-hall was an unmitigated evil. It was there the greenhorn from the country took his first steps in the road to ruin.
CHAPTER VIII.
My Literary Career.
I drifted into literature when I was a boy. I always felt that I would like to be an author, and, arrived at man’s estate, it seemed to me easier to reach the public mind by the press than by the pulpit. I could not exactly come down to the level of the pulpit probationer. I found no sympathetic deacons, and I heard church members talk a good deal of nonsense for which I had no hearty respect. Perhaps what is called the root of the matter was in me conspicuous by its absence. I preached, but I got no call, nor did I care for one, as I felt increasingly the difference between the pulpit and the pew. Now I might use language in one sense, which would be—and I found really was—understood in quite an opposite sense in the pew. My revered parent had set his heart on seeing me a faithful minister of Jesus Christ; and none can tell what, under such circumstances, was the hardness of my lot, but gradually the struggle ceased, and I became a literary man—when literary men abode chiefly
in Bohemia, and grew to fancy themselves men of genius in the low companionship of the barroom. Fielding got to a phase of life when he found he had either to write or get a living by driving a hackney coach. A somewhat similar experience was mine.
It is now about sixty years since I took to writing. I began with no thought of money or fame—it is quite as well that I did not, I am inclined to think—but a new era was opening on the world, a new divine breath was ruffling the stagnant surface of society, and I thought I had something to say in the war—the eternal war of right with wrong, of light with darkness, of God and the devil. I started a periodical. In the prospectus I stated that I had started it with a view to wage war with State Church pretensions and class legislation. I sent some copies of it to Thomas Carlyle—then rising into prominence as the great teacher of his age. He sent me a short note back to the effect that he had received and read what I had written, and that he saw much to give his cordial consent to, and ended by bidding me go on and prosper. Then I sent Douglas Jerrold a paper for his Shilling Magazine, which he accepted, but never published it, as I wanted it for a magazine which came out under my own editorship. One of my earliest patrons was Dr. Thomas Price, the editor of the Eclectic, who had formerly been a Baptist minister, but who became secretary
of an insurance society, and one of a founders of the Anti-State Church Association, a society with which I was in full accord, and which, as I heard Edward Miall himself declare, owed not a little to my literary zeal. We had a fine time of it when that society was started. We were at Leicester, where I stayed with a dear old college friend, the Rev. Joseph Smedmore, and fast and furious was the fun as we met at the Rev. James Mursell’s, the popular pastor of the Baptist Chapel, and father of a still more popular son. Good company, good tobacco, good wine, aided in the good work. Amongst the company would be Stovel, an honoured Baptist minister Whitechapel way, at one time a fighter, and a hard hitter to the end of his lengthy life; John Burnett of Camberwell, always dry in the pulpit, but all-victorious on the public platform, by reason of his Scotch humour and enormous common-sense; Mursell in the Midlands was a host in himself; and Edward Miall, whose earnestness in the cause led him to give up the Leicester pulpit to found the London Nonconformist. John Childs, the well-known Bungay printer, assisted, an able speaker himself, in spite of the dogmatism of his face and manner. When the society became rich and respectable, and changed its name, I left it. I have little faith in societies when they become respectable. When on one occasion I
put up for an M.P., I was amused by the emissary of the society sending to me for a subscription on the plea that all the Liberal candidates had given donations! “Do you think,” said I, “that I am going to bid for your support by a paltry £5 note? Not, I, indeed! It is a pity M.P.’s are not made of sterner staff.” One of my intimate friends at one time was the late Peter Taylor, M.P. for Leicester. He was as liberal as he was wealthy, yet he never spent a farthing in demoralising his Leicester constituents by charity, or, in other words, bribery and corruption. The dirty work a rich man has to do to get into Parliament—especially if he would represent an intelligent and high-toned democracy—is beyond belief.
The ups and downs of a literary career are many. Without writing a good hand it is now impossible to succeed. It was not so when I first took to literature; but nowadays, when the market is overstocked with starving genius in the shape of heaven-born writers, I find that editors, compositors, readers, and all connected with printing, set their faces rigidly against defective penmanship. I look upon it that now the real literary gent, as The Saturday Review loved to call him, has ceased to exist altogether; there is no chance for him. Our editors have to look out for articles written by lords and ladies, and men and women who have achieved
some passing notoriety. They often write awful stuff, but then the public buys. A man who masters shorthand may get a living in connection with the Press, and he may rise to be editor and leader-writer; but the pure literary gent, the speculative contributor to periodical literature, is out of the running. If he is an honourable, if he is a lord or M.P., or an adventurer, creditable or the reverse, he has a chance, but not otherwise. A special correspondent may enjoy a happy career, and as most of my work has been done in that way, I may speak with authority. As to getting a living as a London correspondent that is quite out of the question. I knew many men who did fairly well as London correspondents; nowadays the great Press agencies keep a staff to manufacture London letters on the cheap, and the really able original has gone clean out of existence. Two or three Press agencies manage almost all the London correspondence of the Press. It is an enormous power; whether they use it aright, who can say?
I had, after I left college, written reviews and articles. But in 1850 Mr. John Cassell engaged me as sub-editor of the Standard of Freedom, established to promote the sale of his coffees, or rather, in consequence of the sale of them—to advocate Free Trade and the voluntary principle, and temperance in particular, and philanthropy in general. In time I became