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 so