Brougham and Cassell
devour every available book, and borrowed papers from a friendly newsvendor. Then he began to write short articles in the local Press on Trade Unionism, Sanitation, the Cotton Famine, and the like topical subjects, and occasionally broke into poetry on others.
His economic "tract" was dedicated to Lord Brougham. Plummer, of course, had not expected any public allusion to it. When, picking up the Times in his newsvendor's shop, he read Brougham's speech, he was, as he said, "so astonished" that he could hardly believe his senses. "Had I," his rhetorical question ran, "the deaf, lame, neglected boy, the humble toiler, won the approbation of one of our greatest men?" He certainly had, and Brougham's notice was exceedingly useful to him. He was soon able to leave the factory and earn a living with his pen. A poem in a Midland paper took Cassell's fancy, and Plummer was given a place on the staff at La Belle Sauvage. Thence he went to edit a newspaper at Sydney, where he "prospered exceedingly."
Brougham and Cassell met at the Liverpool Congress of the British Association in the same year (1858). The occasion is described by Cassell in a letter to his daughter, then at school in Paris—one of the very few of his letters, by the way, that have been preserved:
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