Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet by Charles Kingsley

My triumph had received a cruel check enough when just at its height, and more were appointed to follow. Behold! some two days after, another -- all the more bitter, because my conscience whispered that it was not altogether undeserved. The people's press had been hitherto praising and petting me lovingly enough. I had been classed (and heaven knows that the comparison was dearer to me than all the applause of the wealthy) with the Corn-Law Rhymer, and the author of the "Purgatory of Suicides. " My class had claimed my talents as their own -- another "voice fresh from the heart of nature," another "untutored songster of the wilderness," another "prophet arisen among the suffering millions," -- when, one day, behold in Mr. O'Flynn's paper a long and fierce attack on me, my poems, my early history!

How he could have got at some of the facts there mentioned, how he could have dared to inform his readers that I had broken my mother's heart by my misconduct, I cannot conceive; unless my worthy brother-in-law, the Baptist preacher, had been kind enough to furnish him with the materials. But however that may be, he showed me no mercy. I was suddenly discovered to be a time-server, a spy, a concealed aristocrat. Such paltry talent as I had, I had prostituted for the sake of fame. I had deserted The People's Cause for filthy lucre -- an allurement which Mr. O'Flynn had always treated with withering scorn -- _in print_. Nay, more, I would write, and notoriously did write, in any paper, Whig, Tory, or Radical, where I could earn a shilling by an enormous gooseberry, or a scrap of private slander.