GEORGE

See also:

• ROBERT
• ROBERT (1275—1343)
• ROBERT, HUBERT (1753-1808)
• ROBERT, LOUIS LEOPOLD (1794-1835)

ROBERT

See also:

• GEORGE ROBERT GISSING (18J7-1903)

GISSING (18J7-1903)  , English novelist, was born at Wakefield on the 22nd of November 1857 . He was educated at the Quaker boarding-school of Alderley Edge and at Owens College, Manchester . His life, especially its earlier period, was spent in great poverty, mainly in London, though he was for a time also in the United States, supporting him-self chiefly by private teaching . He published his first novel, Workers in the Dawn, in 1880 . The Unclassed (1884) and Isabel Clarendon (1886) followed . Demos (1886), a novel dealing with. socialistic ideas, was, however, the first to attract attention . It was followed by a series of novels remarkable for their pictures of lower middle class life . Gissing's own experiences had pre-occupied him with poverty and its brutalizing effects on character . He made no attempt at popular writing, and for a long time the sincerity of his work was appreciated only by a limited public . Among his more characteristic novels were: Thyrza (1887), A Life's Morning (1888), The Nether World (1889), New Grub Street (1891), Born in Exile (1892j, The Odd Women (1893), In the Year of Jubilee (1894), The Whirlpool (1897) . Others, e.g . The Town Traveller (1901), indicate a humorous faculty, but the prevailing note of his novels is that of the struggling life of the shabby-genteel and lower classes and the conflict between education and circumstances .

The quasi-autobiographical Private Papers of

Henry Ryecroft (1903) reflects throughout Gissing's studious and retiring tastes . He was a good classical scholar and had a minute acquaintance with the late Latin historians, and with Italian antiquities; and his posthumous Veranilda (1904), a historical romance of Italy in the time of Theodoric the Goth, was the outcome of his favourite studies . Gissing's powers as a literary critic are shown in his admirable study on Charles Dickens (1898) . A book of travel, By the Ionian Sea, appeared in Igor . He died at St Jean de Luz in the Pyrenees on the 28th of December 1903 . See also the introductory essay by T . Seccombe to The House of Cobwebs (1906), a posthumous volume of Gissing's short stories .