ABSTRACT
The Nether World-a world which no one understands so well as Mr Gissing; a world with which he has the very keenest sympathy; a world of darkness, of sorrow, ofvice, ofnever-lifting blackest fog, of direst want, and bitterest suffering. This is the 'Nether World' of which Mr Gissing writes, in which he places the characters ofhis story, and from which he never once wanders throughout the course of it. And all this of which he writes so clearly and ke~nly is surging and heaving under the other life of ease and luxury, ofwanton waste, and wilfullest squandering which is led by those whom an accident of birth has placed in the upper world. 'But for God's grace, there goes Richard Baxter!' said that thorough-going old Calvinist, as he saw a man led out to execution, and it is this feeling which prompts Mr Gissing to do what he can for his suffering fellows. Such books as this one do an infinitude of good: they depict human life and human suffering with its marvellous power of endurance in true colours. There is no affectation, no prudishness; no glossing over the horrors of whole families penned in one room; of the circumstance which makes those who are 'born in God's image' resemble the brute beast ofearth in everything save power ofspeech, and yet there is nothing degrading and disgusting, nor anything to revolt those fine 'susceptibilities' of which we of the upper world are so proud, and which we use merely as a cloak for the selfishness and enervation bred of comfort and luxury, in this wonderful story of life amongst the sweater's victims. Mr Gissing devotes his time to a study of this life, and his energies in trying to better it, and to bring home to the rich the reality of 'how the poor live.' There is an immense amount of good done in the present day by philanthropists and others, but so far as it has gone it is only like the pebble wall the child erects on the beach in the innocent hope of stopping the flow of the tide. Mr Gissing's story is a sad one, because it is so terribly true, and we rise from a perusal ofhis book with
