ABSTRACT
Mr Gissing is one of those persons for whom the heart of the sensitive reviewer feels a certain sorrow. His book is in every sense an extravagant one. He has got into his head the very common notion that social order as at present established is the root of all evil, and he writes a long (a very long) novel to illustrate this notion. Nearly all his people of the upper class are foolish or wicked, and nearly all those of the lower are wretched and wronged. Yet, oddly enough, the bad ends to which nearly all, rich and poor, come are occasioned almost in every single instance by some personal error or folly which it is difficult to connect with the social system at all. Nor has Mr Gissing been fortunate enough to make his portraits, at all events in the case of the upper classes, in the least life-like. Yet when the necessary and important deductions have been made for all these shortcomings, there remains something to be said for the author. He possesses sincerity, which is a great thing, and imagination which is a greater. Although any reader of some little experience will know that his pictures are partly false and partly exaggerated, yet his book leaves on the mind a certain 'obsession'-there is no word for it in English, though neither thing nor term is specially or properly French-which merely insignificant work never produces. It ought to be mentioned, perhaps, that Workers in the Dawn is not exactly intended for the well-known young ladies whose bread is cut in the equally well-known tartines. There is nothing in the least unclean in Mr Gissing's handling of his subjects, but in his choice of them he is more adventurous than is usual with the English novelist.
