ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Thyrza and on George Gissing's depiction of Egremont, who experiments with teaching working-class men and who, by reading Walt Whitman's poetry, eventually unlearns the habits and theories he was taught at Oxford. It also focuses on what is often overlooked in scholarship on Thyrza and what links Gissing to the other writers in this study: Gissing's exploration of the idea of unteaching through literature in the upper-middle class character of Egremont. Gissing's social vision encompasses educational models for a range of classes as part of his study of the intellectual who exists as neither an insider nor outsider of educational institutions. Gissing's work as a teacher and tutor most likely influenced his ideas about education. After being expelled from Owens College, he went to the United States where he found work as a teacher at Waltham High School in Massachusetts for two months.
