ABSTRACT
Towards the end of 1878 Gissing worked as a temporary clerk at St John's Hospital, London. This experience was the only biographical foundation for a lifelong superstructure of lofty disgust. 'A clerk's life ... that is a hideous fate', cries Widdowson in The Odd Women; cold water flows down Will Warburton's back as he contemplates applying for such work. To Gissing the prospect was literally hellish. In A Life's Morning Hood's 'mercantile clerkships' are described as 'an existence possibly preferable to that of the fourth circle of Inferno'. In Dante the fourth circle harbours Plutus, god of wealth, together with the avaricious and the prodigal, who dance around howling and rolling great weights, which clash together when they meet: an image of endless, fruitless conflict. Gissing's bookish disdain is not, however, reinforced with much practical detail. Hood, he continues with patent impatience, established himself in various businesses, 'vague, indescribable, save by those who are unhappy enough to understand such matters-a commission agency, a life insurance agency and a fire insurance ditto, I know not what'. Commission agents swarm all over Gissing, but their work is invariably dismissed with a snort. 2 Sales jobs, clerkships, shops, counters - all were semi-civilized no-go areas in Gissing's imagination.
