Despite Percy Bunting's highly prestigious position at Lincoln's Inn, he ‘never attained high place at the Bar nor gained a great practice’. Nonetheless, he earned a good income through conveyancing, and the family was very comfortable by the standards of the day. His middling performance as a barrister may have been because ‘he possessed too much versatility and did not sufficiently concentrate on his legal profession’. Instead, like his father Thomas, he ‘drifted into literature’. In 1882 he became editor of the prestigious Contemporary Review, founded in 1862 by Alexander Strahan. With an editorial style deemed ‘consistently moderate and judicious, eschewing sensationalism of any kind’, he held the position for the rest of his life. He used his position as editor to ensure that issues he felt were important were given their just due and discussed from a variety of angles and viewpoints, helping to shape the intellectual, religious and political debates of the day.

The Buntings moved again, this time to 18 Endsleigh Gardens in leafy Bloomsbury. The family was moving up in the world. Although Methodists and other Nonconformists still faced social disadvantages, the Buntings’ religious beliefs and championing of unpopular causes did not deny them a secure niche in late nineteenth-century English society. Endsleigh Gardens lay just south of and parallel to Euston Road, off Upper Woburn Place, across from the imposing six-columned St Pancras Parish Church. The houses there were much larger and grander than their first home at Oakley Square. The Bunting household had grown.