The word "home" aroused nothing but unpleasant associations.

In the low wages of his father, and of other men in the same walk in life, he found sufficient reason for branding wife and children as encumbrances and causes of masculine misery.

An unconscious hedonist, utterly unmoral and materialistic, he sought the greatest possible happiness for himself, and found it in drink.
A young sot; a premature wreck; physical inability to do a stoker's work; the gutter or the workhouse; and the end--he saw it all as clearly as I, but it held no terrors for him.

From the moment of his birth, all the forces of his environment had tended to harden him, and he viewed his wretched, inevitable future with a callousness and unconcern I could not shake.
And yet he was not a bad man.

He was not inherently vicious and brutal.
He had normal mentality, and a more than average physique.