Confessions of a Tradesman

Standing, as I am now (as far as my story is concerned), on the threshold of the Bankruptcy Court, I wish to disavow the idea of having any quarrel with individuals, or, of any...

I suppose that there are few things more demoralising to an assimilative mind than the association with places of a demoralising tendency. Which I do not intend as a profound re...

Now from the foregoing chapter it will be gathered that all unconsciously I was drifting into the habit of writing, in a literary and journalistic sense, for payment. It was a t...

From the foregoing chapter the reader might hastily arrive at the conclusion that I was certainly qualifying for inclusion in the ranks of criminal classes, since I had arrived...

A keen sense of humour is one of my richest blessings, one that I prize more than I can tell, but never before have I felt so keenly the great desirability of being able to expr...

"Heart failure; mustn't hurry or you'll die; must eat more, whether you've any appetite, or means to get it or not; must rest and take things quietly," and so on, and so on. Bit...

It must not be supposed that in other directions my affairs had got any smoother as time went on; nor that, although I worked as hard as flesh and blood would permit, that I suc...

Last chapter closed with a bitter confession of incompetence on my part that I would not make if I could help it, but alas it is too true. Account for it I cannot, except by say...

Splendid and universal as are the attainments of seamen, it is only the bare truth to say that one of the rarest qualifications to find among them is commercial aptitude. There...

The emphatic declaration I made at the end of the last chapter seems to demand an explanation forthwith, but the reader, if he has had patience to follow me so far in my recital...

Undoubtedly there was a good deal of mystery about the proceedings which closed the last chapter, but I was in those days very little concerned with causes, I had enough trouble...

This, the most momentous move of my life, as I think, was made on a Monday in the autumn of about 1890. The year doesn't matter anyhow. I know that it was about sixteen or seven...

By some strange freak of good fortune to which I was totally unaccustomed, the very next day after my summary dismissal from the trunk-maker's, I got a job in a big dairy compan...

There must have been in the minds of those who have read so far, and who have had some practical experience themselves, a dim enquiry, how did this feeble tradesman keep out of...

With the causes of my first plunge into the troubled waters of trade at the early age of nine I have here nothing to do. It must suffice to say that one spring morning, over for...

Now indeed I began to realise, in spite of what I so often read in the daily papers, something of the optimistic pushfulness of the commercial traveller. The shop had not been o...

The appetite grows by what it feeds upon, says the proverb, and this is indubitably true of extra work. No matter what the auxiliary business may be, or how sorely it may press...

This loving stranger in a strange land was consumptive, racked with an awful cough, and lived like a dog--aye, worse than many dogs I know. By all theories he should not have li...

greatly matter how late I opened my shop or how early I closed it. That I had to carry my materials home from the city was due to the facts of my position being so bad that I co...

There was no especial reason as far as I know for closing that last chapter, and commencing a new one, except that it was getting too long in my opinion. For the story I was tel...

confronted by the cheap frames made by the gross and sold by the drapers and fancy goods people at a few pence and some farthings each, less in fact than I could buy the materia...