'I was repelled at home, rather than encouraged to read, and I never remember to have seen a book in my elders' hands. Literature was limited to the "Daily Telegraph". To read in secret I escaped to the washhouse, and I well remember during my early apprentice days at Spitalfields, my grandfather, catching a sight of me reading there a copy of Dicks's shilling edition of Shakespeare - the whole, a marvellous feat of cheap publishing -sternly reproachful, exclaimed: "Ah, Tom, that'll never bring you bread and cheese!"'