When he was 18, he was offered the opportunity to leave home and see something of the world by becoming tutor to James Wedderburn-Webster. The family lived in Clapham, just outside London, with a summer house at Shenley, Hertfordshire. His employer was David Webster, London merchant of a sugar trading house, with family connections through the Wedderburn baronets to the plantations of Jamaica. Living in this wealthy household, the young Campbell saw a different world, and it didn't impress him: the commercial conversation and gossip of "West India merchants and East India captains" created an atmosphere "irksome" and "unbearable". His pupil James was about ten years old, and as yet ignorant of Latin, which Campbell himself had learned at school in Cupar.