He certainly wrote more than any of them.
Success was particularly important to him because of a grinding sense of failure in his childhood. The narrative shape that he gives to his life in his Autobiography is the story of an ugly duckling who through great trials and great feats came to be recognized as a swan. His childhood was unhappy, by his own account miserable. His father was a down-at-heel gentleman and scholar who failed at the law, failed at scholarship, and then took to farming and failed at that, too. Anthony was sent as a day student to Harrow, where the boarders sneered at him for the muddy boots he incurred by his long walk to school; then as a boarder to Winchester, where he was often beaten; and then back to Harrow. He was insufficiently supplied with money and suffered deep embarrassment among his peers and before the masters. Though coveting popularity, he felt like a pariah, and left school with the conviction that he had "been flogged oftener than any human being alive."
During his school years the family was in poor circumstances.
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