ABSTRACT
In the eighties, the two writers most associated with the novel of working-class life were Walter Besant and George Gissing. The first was immensely popular, his best-selling novels widely discussed and influential in serving the cause of philanthropic schemes, as well as encouraging the tone of a new kind of workingclass romance. The other was almost entirely ignored by the general reading public, and although his novels were praised by a small group of London intellectuals, and acknowledged by Charles Booth as being especially valuable for their trustworthy picture of working-class life, 1 they appear to have had little practical or literary influence. Twentieth-century critical opinion has reversed this bias. Besant's peculiar amalgam of aristocratic slum missionaries and cheerful, misunderstood working men, eliminating class divisions in a Palace of Delight, seems for the modern reader to be totally inappropriate, and has been largely ignored by critics. On the other hand, Gissing's studies of isolated intellectuals waging uneasy war with ubiquitous social and democratic forces, have been increasingly recognized as reflecting an important stage in the development of twentieth-century literature and thought.
