humiliation could still draw tears
from me: that epoch in my life is marked in my memory as the epoch when
I could weep.

"At last, I gave way before difficulty, and conceded the first step to
the calamity which had stood front to front with me so long. I left the
neighbourhood where I was known, and assumed the name of a schoolfellow
who had died. For some time this succeeded; but the curse of my
father's death followed me, though I saw it not. After various
employments--still, mind, the employments of a gentleman!--had first
supported, then failed me, I became an usher at a school. It was there
that my false name was detected, and my identity discovered again--I
never knew through whom. The exposure was effected by some enemy,
anonymously. For several days, I thought everybody in the school treated
me in an altered way. The cause came out, first in whispers, then in
reckless jests, while I was taking care of the boys in the playground.
In the fury of the moment I struck one of the most insolent, and the
eldest of them, and hurt him rather seriously. The parents heard of it,
and threatened me with prosecution; the whole neighbourhood was aroused.
I had to leave my situation secretly, by night, or the mob would have
pelted the felon's son out of the parish.

"I went back to London, bearing another assumed name; and tried, as a
last resource to save me from starvation, the resource of writing. I
served my apprenticeship to literature as a hack-author of the lowest
degree. Knowing I had talents which might be turned to account, I tried
to vindicate them by writing an original work. But my experience of the
world had made me unfit to dress my thoughts in popular costume: I could
only tell bitter truths bitterly; I exposed licenced hypocrisies too
openly; I saw the vicious side of many respectabilities, and said I saw
it--in short, I called things by their right names; and no publisher
would treat with me. So I stuck to my low task-work; my penny-a lining
in third-class newspapers; my translating from Frenchmen and Germans,
and plagiarising from dead authors, to supply the raw material for
bookmongering by more accomplished bookmongers than I. In this life,
there was one advantage which compensated for much misery and meanness,
and bitter, biting disappointment: I could keep my identity securely
concealed. Character was of no consequence to me; nobody cared to know
who I was, or to inquire what I had been--the gallows-mark