Robert Burns, poet of the downtrodden, once considered moving to the West Indies to be a plantation overseer (of slaves) and later worked as an exciseman, a job much condemned as oppressive of the poor.  Joe Phelan comments:

The negotiation of such contradictions is one of the severest tests imposed on the working-class writer.

The near-miss on the overseer job

serves as a stark reminder of the moral compromises forced on people in Burns’s social position by the overriding need to make a living.

Forced?  No one in Burns’s social position ever refused such a compromise?

This is hardly to blame Burns.  The first stone finds few to cast it.  But the reviewer oughtn’t do such excusing.  This is in Times (of London) Literary Supplement, whose strength lies in its analysis on literary and scholarship grounds, not in lecturing readers on the human condition as seen from a strongly class-conscious point of view.