’We bookish people have our connotations for the life we do not live. 
    In time I came to see London with my own eyes, but how much better
    when I saw it with those of Dickens!’

Tired and discouraged, badly nourished, badly housed—­working under conditions little favourable to play of the fancy or intentness of the mind—­then was the time, Gissing found, to take down Forster and read—­read about Charles Dickens.

’Merely as the narrative of a wonderfully active, zealous, and successful life, this book scarce has its equal; almost any reader must find it exhilarating; but to me it yielded such special sustenance as in those days I could not have found elsewhere, and lacking which I should, perhaps, have failed by the way.  I am not referring to Dickens’s swift triumph, to his resounding fame and high prosperity; these things are cheery to read about, especially when shown in a light so human, with the accompaniment of so much geniality and mirth.  No; the pages which invigorated me are those where we see Dickens at work, alone at his writing-table, absorbed in the task of the story-teller.  Constantly he makes known to Forster how his story is getting on, speaks in detail of difficulties, rejoices over spells of happy labour; and what splendid sincerity in it all!  If this work of his was not worth doing, why, nothing was.  A troublesome letter has arrived by the morning’s post and threatens to spoil the day; but he takes a few turns up and down the room, shakes off the worry, and sits down to write for hours and hours.  He is at the sea-side, his desk at a sunny bay window overlooking the shore, and there all the morning he writes with gusto, ever and again bursting into laughter at his own thoughts.’[7]

[Footnote 7:  See a deeply interesting paper on Dickens by ‘G.G.’ in the New York Critic, Jan. 1902.  Much of this is avowed autobiography.]

The influence of Dickens clearly predominated when Gissing wrote his next novel and first really notable and artistic book, Thyrza.[8] The figure which irradiates this story is evidently designed in the school of Dickens:  it might almost be a pastel after some more highly finished work by Daudet.  But Daudet is a more relentless observer than Gissing, and to find a parallel to this particular effect I think we must go back a little farther to the heroic age of the grisette and the tearful Manchon de Francine of Henri Murger. Thyrza, at any rate, is a most exquisite picture in half-tones of grey and purple of a little Madonna of the slums; she is in reality the belle fleur d’un fumier of which he speaks in the epigraph of the Nether World.  The fumier in question is Lambeth Walk, of which we have a Saturday night scene, worthy of the author of L’Assommoir and Le Ventre de Paris in his most perceptive mood.  In this inferno, amongst the pungent odours, musty smells and ’acrid exhalations from the shops