Aspirations After a Journalistic Life—A Clerk's Stool in the W.B. Lead
Office—Literary Ambitions—An Accepted Contribution—The Northern
Daily Express and its Editor—Founding a Literary Institute—Letters
from Charles Kingsley and Archbishop Longley—Joseph Cowen and his
Revolutionary Friends—Orsini—Thackeray's Lectures and Dickens's
Readings.
One day, in the summer of 1856, I was walking along Princes Street, Edinburgh, looking with wonder and delight upon the beautiful panorama that was spread before my eyes. I was little for my age, and the gentleman who was my companion, and who was pointing out to me the many famous buildings and monuments that form the glory of the modern Athens, was leading me by the hand.
Probably he thought me still younger than I was, and treated me as a mere child. I had come to Edinburgh on a brief holiday, and was staying at the house of one of my father's friends. By-and-by, having duly fulfilled his duty as showman, my companion, in a kindly, patronising way, sought to draw me out. "And what do you mean to be, my boy, when you grow up?" he asked. My answer was instantaneous and assured. "I mean to be a newspaper editor, sir." My friend flung my hand from him and burst into a roar of laughter, which surprised me even more than it did the passers-by. "A newspaper editor!" he cried, still convulsed by what appeared to me a most unseemly, if not offensive, merriment. "Good heavens! And what in the world has put such a thing as that into the child's head?" My wounded dignity came to my aid. Was I not fourteen? and had I not already left school and begun to earn my own living? "I made up my mind a long time ago," I said in the accents of injured innocence. "When I am a man I mean to be that, and nothing else." I had a sad time of it for the rest of the day, for this worthy gentleman appreciated what he regarded as the joke so keenly that whenever he met a friend he stopped him, and said, "Let me introduce to you a live editor—that is to be some day." He enjoyed the situation more than I did.
But it was quite true. Young as I was, I had made up my mind, and was resolved that nothing should move me from my purpose. Perhaps the printer's ink of the dear old composing room at St. Andrews had inoculated me, and made me proof against the usual temptations by which a boy, dreaming of his future path in life, is beset. Or perhaps it was because printer's ink is in the blood of the family. Whatever may have been the cause, journalism was my first precocious love, and my last; and, looking back across the years of heavy work which now separate me from that June morning at Edinburgh, I see no reason to repent my early choice or the loss of every other chance of success in life.
Yet, at the outset, there were a hundred obstacles barring my way to the door through which I longed to pass. I was already, as I have said, at work. Knowing full well the narrowness of my father's means, I had cheerfully taken a situation as a clerk, and kindly Fortune had smiled upon me in the appointment I secured. Most boys of my time on leaving school went, as it was phrased in those days, "on the quay side" at Newcastle; that is to say, they entered the office of one of the great merchants by whose hands the prosperous trade of the Tyne was carried on. Here their lives were full from morning to night with the business which in such a hive of industry seemed to know no slackening. No doubt, a position in a shipping or colliery office at Newcastle in those days was one to which many advantages were attached. Not a few schoolfellows of my own, starting with no greater advantages than I possessed, have become men of large fortune, have acquired landed estates, have sat in Parliament, have founded county families. But it was not towards these ends that my youthful ambition urged me; and, happily for me, the office to which I went one January morning in the 'fifties, in the humble capacity of junior clerk, had nothing in common with the bustling, worrying places of business on the quay side, where the race for wealth seemed to absorb the thoughts of all, from highest to lowest.
Through the influence of a friend, and chiefly in virtue of my father's name, I secured a place in what was then known as the W.B. Lead Office. There was at that time a certain quality of lead distinguished by these letters which carried off the palm in the lead markets of the world; indeed, its price was constantly from one to two pounds a ton higher than that of any other lead procurable. This lead was obtained from the great mines in Weardale and Allandale, then and for many generations owned by the Beaumont family. Mr. Wentworth Blackett Beaumont was at that time the head of the family. There was no eager bustle, due to the keenness of business competition, in the quiet rooms of the W.B. Lead Office in Northumberland Street, when I entered it as a boy. The whole of the produce of the mines was sold to half a dozen great London firms, and the sales were made in such large quantities that a score of transactions sufficed for a year's work. How great those transactions were may be gathered from the fact that I sometimes had to make out a single invoice in which the sole item stated represented a sum of £40,000.
Very soon I found that my chief duty as junior clerk in this eminently sedate and respectable establishment was to read the Times to my immediate superior. This gentleman I must always remember with a lively sense of gratitude. His name was Fothergill, and, like myself, he had little taste for mere business avocations. He was a student, a lover of literature, a collector of books, and a writer of verse. Fortunate was it for me to meet with such a companion at that stage in my life—the stage when one is most susceptible to outside influences. For five years we sat opposite to each other in the same quiet room, and never once did I hear fall from his lips an unworthy idea or suggestion. He suffered from serious weakness of the eyes, and it was for this reason that so much of my spare time (and it was nearly all spare time there) was devoted to reading aloud to him. He had only a clerk's income, small enough in all conscience, but he never wanted money to spend on a book or a magazine. I remember his delight when the first number of the Saturday Review, to which he had subscribed on its appearance, was placed in his hands. From that time forward my daily readings of the leaders in the Times were varied by weekly readings of the brilliant sarcasm and invective which then distinguished the new review that had entered the field of journalism with so bold a mien, and was holding its own so fearlessly against all comers. With such a friend, always ready to give me of his best—alas, at the time, in my youthful ignorance of men, I failed altogether to appreciate my good fortune in meeting a companion like this—my mind rapidly expanded, and before I was half way through my teens I was learning to put boyish things behind me. Although Fothergill did not encourage my precocious affection for the press, wisely holding that a literary life was one reserved only for the few, and, like matrimony, not to be "taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly," he did not, as so many men in his place might have done, stamp ruthlessly upon my aspirations or subject them to that cruel sarcasm which is so killing to the ambitions of the young. This, it is true, was done by another person in the same office—the manager; but, fortunately, that gentleman was altogether so obnoxious to me for many reasons that his special dislike of my literary bent, and the sneers with which he greeted my early appearances in print, did not affect my purpose in the slightest degree.
I could say much of those five years of my life spent in the W.B. Lead Office, but I must not weary my readers with that which would be at best a humdrum tale. My education went on apace. In the evenings I took lessons at home, and during the day, when I was not otherwise engaged, I had always a book or a pen in my hand. How high one's aspirations soar in that season when everything seems possible to the unfledged soul! The glory of Milton itself seemed hardly beyond attainment, and I nursed the illusion that within me lay the potentiality of a new Scott, or Dickens, or Thackeray. Happy, foolish dreams, from cherishing which no man has ever been the worse! A hundred times I essayed to produce something worthy of being printed. But the stories, the essays, and—save the mark!—the poems I attempted had a knack of remaining unfinished, or, when finished, were so obviously bad, even to my untrained judgment, that they were promptly destroyed. When at last I did taste the fearful joys of a first appearance in print, it was on a very humble stage. A great controversy was raging in Newcastle in 1857 over the appointment of the then vicar to another living in the town; an appointment that was obnoxious not only because it was a clear case of pluralism, but because the vicar himself belonged to the then unpopular High Church party. I read the articles in the papers, and the letters in which my indignant fellow-townsmen gave expression to their views, with keen interest, and at last I was myself prompted to join in the fray. Having carefully composed a letter to the editor of the Northern Daily Express, which I signed "A Bedesman," I furtively dropped it into the letter-box at the newspaper office, and tremblingly awaited the result.
I had not long to wait. The next morning, as I was on my way to the office, I chanced upon a contents bill of the Express, and there, with dazzled eyes, the testimony of which I could hardly believe, I read the announcement that the paper of the day contained a letter by "A Bedesman." And here I must make a humiliating confession. The price of the paper was a penny, and at that particular moment I discovered that I had not a penny in the world. My weekly pocket-money was sixpence, and it generally went at one of the old bookstalls in the market before the week was far advanced. But I could not face the day before me with the dreadful uncertainty weighing upon my soul as to whether another person might not have adopted the same signature as myself, and whether, consequently, I might not be labouring under a fond delusion. I turned and fled home (fortunately I always started for work in good time), and asked my mother to lend me the penny I needed. In a broken whisper I confided to her the fact that I believed there was really a letter of mine in that morning's Express. I got my penny, and in a few minutes I was feasting my eyes upon that sight—dearer than any other the world can show to the young literary aspirant—my first printed composition. I had then just entered my fifteenth year.
Not one writer in a thousand has stopped at a first book, and not one newspaper contributor in a million has stopped at a first letter to the editor. Like much better people, I had made the discovery that whilst my opinions regarding the Genius of Shakespeare, the Art of Fiction, and the Character of Cromwell were not wanted by anybody, there were some questions cropping up, as it were, at my own door, about which I might, if I liked, give an opinion that some persons at all events would think worth printing. In short, I was enabled to see that though I could not fly, I might at least walk. How eagerly I turned to profit the discovery I had thus made need not be told here. For the moment my ambitious designs were laid on one side. I no longer dreamed of an Epic that should rival "Paradise Lost" or a novel that might outshine "Vanity Fair"; but I prepared to discuss the local questions of the hour, the site of a post office, the opening of a hospital, the grievance of some small public official, with the zest which I had only felt hitherto when dealing with the great literary and social problems, to the discussion of which my untrained intelligence could contribute nothing of value. What I wrote on such topics as those I have named I cannot pretend to remember; but there must have been some little promise in my contributions to the Express, for one memorable day, when I got home from work, my father told me that he had received a visit from Mr. Marshall, the chief proprietor of that paper, and that this visit closely concerned me. Mr. Marshall had inquired as to my age and occupation, and having suggested that my leaning towards journalism ought not to be repressed, had offered to have me taught shorthand by the reporter of the Express. Finally he had left with my father half a sovereign, which he desired me to accept in payment of my various contributions to the paper. So, whilst I was still a mere boy, not having as yet entered on my sixteenth year, I found myself enrolled among the more or less irregular camp-followers of journalism.