s and the downtrodden Smike.

[Footnote 5: _Isabel Clarendon_. By George Gissing. In two volumes, 1886
(Chapman and Hall). In reviewing this work the _Academy_ expressed
astonishment at the mature style of the writer--of whom it admitted it had
not yet come across the name.]

In the summer of 1870, Gissing remembered with a pious fidelity of detail
the famous drawing of the 'Empty Chair' being framed and hung up 'in the
school-room, at home'[6] (Wakefield).

[Footnote 6: Of Gissing's early impressions, the best connected account, I
think, is to be gleaned from the concluding chapters of _The Whirlpool_;
but this may be reinforced (and to some extent corrected, or, here and
there cancelled) by passages in _Burn in Exile_ (vol. i.) and in
_Ryecroft_. The material there supplied is confirmatory in the best sense
of the detail contributed by Mr. Wells to the cancelled preface of
_Veranilda_, touching the 'schoolboy, obsessed by a consuming passion for
learning, at the Quaker's boarding-school at Alderley. He had come thither
from Wakefield at the age of thirteen--after the death of his father, who
was, in a double sense, the cardinal formative influence in his life. The
tones of his father's voice, his father's gestures, never departed from
him; when he read aloud, particularly if it was poetry he read, his father
returned in him. He could draw in those days with great skill and
vigour--it will seem significant to many that he was particularly
fascinated by Hogarth's work, and that he copied and imitated it; and his
father's well-stocked library, and his father's encouragement, had
quickened his imagination and given it its enduring bias for literary
activity.' Like Defoe, Smollett, Sterne, Borrow, Dickens, Eliot, 'G.C.' is,
half involuntarily, almost unconsciously autobiographic.]

'Not without awe did I see the picture of the room which was now
tenantless: I remember too, a curiosity which led me to look closely
at the writing-table and the objects upon it, at the comfortable
round-backed chair, at the book-shelves behind. I began to ask myself
how books were written and how the men lived who wrote them. It is my
last glimpse of childhood. Six months later there was an empty chair
in my own home, and the tenor of my life was broken.

'Seven years after this I found myself amid the streets of London and
had to find the means of keeping myself alive. What I chiefly thought
of was