ABSTRACT
I George Gissing wrote five novels which deal specifically with working-class life: Workers in the Dawn (r88o), The Unclassed (1884), Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887) and The Nether World (1889). When studied in chronological order they testify to a consistently serious attempt to break with static literary conventions; a struggle with the problem of how to establish a balance between a personal social viewpoint and artistic objectivity when writing about the working classes. These were tasks for which Gissing felt himself peculiarly fitted. 'I have a book in my head,' he wrote in 1886, 'which no one else can write, a book which will contain the very spirit of London working class life.'1 This sense of personal association with the working classes was unlike that experienced by any other novelist so far discussed. Gissing's own background was conventionally middle class, but the series of events which began with his expulsion from Owen's College in 1876 and culminated in the publication of his first novel four years later, turned him into a social outcast, a position which he seemed uncertain whether to glorify or deplore. Married to an alcoholic prostitute and forced to live in the slums (at least partly because of genuine poverty), he tended to view his own intellectually outcast position and the suffering of the slum populations as brought about by the same hostile society. His flirtation with social-reform movements was brief but deeply felt. As the author
ofWorkersintheDawnheproclaimedhimself'amouthpieceof theadvancedRadicalparty',2andvowedtousehisnovelsto arousepublicinterestinsocialissues:
Imeantobringhometopeopletheghastlycondition (material,mentalandmoral)ofourpoorclasses,toshowthe hideousinjusticeofourwholesystemofsociety,togivelight upontheplanofalteringit,and,aboveall,topreachan enthusiasmforjustandhighidealsinthisageofunmitigated egotismand'shop.'3
