thout 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 w