[Footnote 18:  ’I hardly knew what it was to travel by omnibus.  I have walked London streets for twelve and fifteen hours together without even a thought of saving my legs or my time, by paying for waftage.  Being poor as poor can be, there were certain things I had to renounce, and this was one of them.’—­Ryecroft.  For earlier scenes see Monthly Review, xvi., and Owens College Union Mag., Jan. 1904, pp. 80-81.]

[Footnote 19:  ’He knew the narrowly religious, the mental barrenness of the poor dissenters, the people of the slums that he observed so carefully, and many of those on the borders of the Bohemia of which he at least was an initiate, and he was soaked and stained, as he might himself have said, with the dull drabs of the lower middle class that he hated.  But of those above he knew little....  He did not know the upper middle classes, which are as difficult every whit as those beneath them, and take as much time and labour and experience and observation to learn.’—­’The Exile of George Gissing,’ Albany, Christmas 1904.  In later life he lost sympathy with the ‘nether world.’  Asked to write a magazine article on a typical ’workman’s budget,’ he wrote that he no longer took an interest in the ’condition of the poor question.’]

Few, if any, of Gissing’s books exhibit more mental vigour than In the Year of Jubilee.  This is shown less, it may be, in his attempted solution of the marriage problem (is marriage a failure?) by means of the suggestion that middle class married people should imitate the rich and see as little of each other as possible, than in the terse and amusing characterisations and the powerfully thought-out descriptions.  The precision which his pen had acquired is well illustrated by the following description, not unworthy of Thomas Hardy, of a new neighbourhood.

’Great elms, the pride of generations passed away, fell before the speculative axe, or were left standing in mournful isolation to please a speculative architect; bits of wayside hedge still shivered in fog and wind, amid hoardings variegated with placards and scaffoldings black against the sky.  The very earth had lost its wholesome odour; trampled into mire, fouled with builders’ refuse and the noisome drift from adjacent streets, it sent forth, under the sooty rain, a smell of corruption, of all the town’s uncleanliness.  On this rising locality had been bestowed the title of “Park.”  Mrs. Morgan was decided in her choice of a dwelling here by the euphonious address, Merton Avenue, Something-or-other Park.’

Zola’s wonderful skill in the animation of crowds has often been commented upon, but it is more than doubtful if he ever achieved anything superior to Gissing’s marvellous incarnation of the jubilee night mob in chapter seven.  More formidable, as illustrating the venom which the author’s whole nature had secreted against a perfectly recognisable type of modern woman, is the acrid description of Ada, Beatrice, and Fanny French.