Of Gissing’s first year or so at Owens, after leaving Lindow Grove School at Alderley,[16] we get a few hints in these pages.  Like his ’lonely cerebrate’ hero, Gissing himself, at school and college, ‘worked insanely.’  Walked much alone, shunned companionship rather than sought it, worked as he walked, and was marked down as a ‘pot-hunter.’  He ’worked while he ate, he cut down his sleep, and for him the penalty came, not in a palpable, definable illness, but in an abrupt, incongruous reaction and collapse.’  With rage he looked back on these insensate years of study which had weakened him just when he should have been carefully fortifying his constitution.

[Footnote 16:  With an exhibition gained when he was not yet fifteen.]

The year of this autobiographical record[17] marked the commencement of Gissing’s reclamation from that worst form of literary slavery—­the chain-gang.  For he had been virtually chained to the desk, perpetually working, imprisoned in a London lodging, owing to the literal lack of the means of locomotion.[18] His most strenuous work, wrung from him in dismal darkness and wrestling of spirit, was now achieved.  Yet it seems to me both ungrateful and unfair to say, as has frequently been done, that his subsequent work was consistently inferior.  In his earlier years, like Reardon, he had destroyed whole books—­books he had to sit down to when his imagination was tired and his fancy suffering from deadly fatigue.  His corrections in the days of New Grub Street provoked not infrequent, though anxiously deprecated, remonstrance from his publisher’s reader.  Now he wrote with more assurance and less exhaustive care, but also with a perfected experience.  A portion of his material, it is true, had been fairly used up, and he had henceforth to turn to analyse the sufferings of well-to-do lower middle-class families, people who had ’neither inherited refinement nor acquired it, neither proletarian nor gentlefolk, consumed with a disease of vulgar pretentiousness, inflated with the miasma of democracy.’  Of these classes it is possible that he knew less, and consequently lacked the sureness of touch and the fresh draughtsmanship which comes from ample knowledge, and that he had, consequently, to have increasing resort to books and to invention, to hypothesis and theory.[19] On the other hand, his power of satirical writing was continually expanding and developing, and some of his very best prose is contained in four of these later books:  In the Year of Jubilee (1894), Charles Dickens (1898), By the Ionian Sea (1901), and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903); not far below any of which must be rated four others, The Odd Women (1893), Eve’s Ransom (1895), The Whirlpool (1897), and Will Warburton (1905), to which may be added the two collections of short stories.

[Footnote 17:  Followed in 1897 by The Whirlpool (see p. xvi), and in 1899 and 1903 by two books containing a like infusion of autobiographical experience, The Crown of Life, technically admirable in chosen passages, but sadly lacking in the freshness of first-hand, and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, one of the rightest and ripest of all his productions.]