human
--were so unfriendly toward him. He was not of their set, and some of them regarded him as a sort of literary Ishmael, who had his hand raised against all his contemporaries, a quarrelsome and cantankerous although very able man, and therefore to be ignored or sat down upon whenever possible. He once said,
gpt
I don't know a man on the press who would do me a favor. The press is a great engine, of course, but its influence is vastly overrated. It has the credit of leading public opinion, when it only follows it; and look at the rag-tag-and-bobtail that contribute to it. Even the London 'Times' only lives for a day. My books have made their way in spite of the press.
human
They want all the fat, and they all lie about their sales. Unless you have somebody in the press-room to watch, it is almost impossible to find out how many copies of a book they print. Then there is a detestable fashion about publishers. I had to fight a very hard battle to get the public to take a novel published by Trübner, simply because he was not known as a novel-publisher; but I was determined not to let Bentley or any of his kidney have all the fat any longer.