ABSTRACT
The publication of Thyrza has definitely revealed to the public the authorship of Demos, although for readers of George Gissing's earlier works the identity of the writer can hardly have been an unfathomable mystery. For Demos emphatically displays all the qualities which distinguished Workers in the Dawn and The Unclassed from the ordinary three-volume novel of the day, and it is unspoiled by Inany of the defects of its predecessors. It is equal to them in vivid description, in courageous presentation of truth, in profound and sympathetic knowledge of the lives of the London poor; it surpasses them in artistic completeness and in literary finish. As a novelist George Gissing has undoubtedly advanced in his art; but it is not as a novelist, in the narrow sense of the word, but as a social reformer and as an eager student ofsocial life, that he occupies so important a place among living writers. For putting aside Isabel Clarendon, which seems to us curiously inferior to his other work, and leaving Thyrza for later consideration, the three novels mentioned above may all be classed as books with a purpose. Let not the intending reader take alarm at this definition. It is not a case ofunwelcome moral platitudes being dragged
in when least required, or ofan impossible story specially invented for the elucidation of the author's favourite hobby. They are novels with a purpose, in the same sense as Balzac's Comedie Humaine are novels with a purpose. They are dramatic expositions of nl0dern life in all its pathos and often in all its hideousness, left to point its own inevitable moral. Workers in the Dawn and Demos both deal with different aspects of that ever-present problem, the condition of our working classes. The Unclassed deals with a subject which most novelists deem advisable to leave untouched, but which the author rightly believes cannot possibly be left on one side, ifany truthful picture is to be given ofcity life. Ladies in their drawing-rooms Inay persistently shut their eyes to what they prefer to ignore, but the position of their fallen sisters is brought every hour of the day before the eyes of the working classes, and on the whole Mr Gissing is to be congratulated on the manner in which he has fulfilled his task. No one, had they never extended their acquaintance with London beyond that small section familiarly spoken of as the West-end, could doubt the truth of his descriptions, and for those who possess some knowledge of the localities he describes, the accuracy is only the more striking.
