His education led him into the sciences, however--eventually, after preparation at Malvern College, into the honors school of chemistry at Owens College, Manchester. After spending only two years as an undergraduate, Abercrombie left without a degree in 1902 to pursue his literary interests more seriously, and perhaps also to remove some of the burden on his family's finances, which had considerably diminished during the Boer War. Literary ambition and financial necessity were to remain the major, usually conflicting, forces in Abercrombie's career. At this period, he met his financial needs by working briefly as a quantity surveyor and later as a literary journalist based in Liverpool.
Abercrombie's first literary success came after he had moved to Birkenhead and met a Liverpool art student named Catherine Gwatkin, whom he married in 1909. Through his fiancée, Abercrombie came in contact with Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, a scholar at Cambridge who, in 1907, used his influence to have Abercrombie's poems placed in the Independent Review and the Nation and eventually published by John Lane in the volume Interludes and Poems (1908). Though sales were not large (444 copies by the end of June 1908), this volume immediately won respect for Abercrombie in literary circles.
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