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.