[2] It was entitled _Workers in the Dawn_, and is distinguished by
the fact that the author writes himself George Robert Gissing; afterwards
he saw fit to follow the example of George Robert Borrow, and in all
subsequent productions assumes the style of 'George Gissing.' The book
begins in this fashion: 'Walk with me, reader, into Whitecross Street. It
is Saturday night'; and it is what it here seems, a decidedly crude and
immature performance. Gissing was encumbered at every step by the giant's
robe of mid-Victorian fiction. Intellectual giants, Dickens and Thackeray,
were equally gigantic spendthrifts. They worked in a state of fervid heat
above a glowing furnace, into which they flung lavish masses of unshaped
metal, caring little for immediate effect or minute dexterity of stroke,
but knowing full well that the emotional energy of their temperaments was
capable of fusing the most intractable material, and that in the end they
would produce their great, downright effect. Their spirits rose and fell,
but the case was desperate, copy had to be despatched for the current
serial. Good and bad had to make up the tale against time, and revelling in
the very exuberance and excess of their humour, the novelists invariably
triumphed.
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