ABSTRACT
George Gissing lived a notoriously troubled life. A gifted student in his boyhood, he became a pupil at Owens College but was caught stealing from the cloakroom to help a young woman prostitute. Gissing describes the hungry journeyman writer concealed “behind a screen” because he is “unpresentable.” For Gissing's presentation of the most central characters in his novel is set on the precarious line along which the aspiration for pre-sentability lives—behind screens or veils, along boundaries, in unstable apartments—struggling for expression, capable of a joy that is often imaginable only in containment, and always on the verge of being “swept away.” Gissing will suggest that the recognition and distinction Clara seeks are not available to members of her world, that they exceed not only the bounds of gender, but of class. In Gissing's view the very poor lack, among other things, the capacity for “presentability” and are frequently described as members of a mob.
