ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the experience of several equally extraordinary working-class boys who embarked on autodidactic quests, but whose journey per ardua ad astra never quite got off the ground. Charles Manby Smith freed from his apprenticeship, had moved to London. It was as a journeyman compositor in a London printing house that he encountered a truly ragged-trousered classicist. The ragged Grecian turned out to be a slower worker than Charles Manby Smith initially thought. Andrew Donaldson’s literalist interpretation of the scriptures, especially when he brandished a weapon, could cause serious bodily harm to those with whom he felt righteously angry.
