[Footnote 2: Three vols. 8vo, 1880 (Remington). It was noticed at some
length in the _Athenoeum_ of June 12th, in which the author's philosophic
outlook is condemned as a dangerous compound of Schopenhauer, Comte, and
Shelley. It is somewhat doubtful if he ever made more for a book than the
L250 he got for _New Grub Street_. L200, we believe, was advanced on _The
Nether World,_ but this proved anything but a prosperous speculation from
the publisher's point of view, and L150 was refused for _Born in Exile_.]
To the Ercles vein of these Titans of fiction, Gissing was a complete
stranger. To the pale and fastidious recluse and anchorite, their tone of
genial remonstrance with the world and its ways was totally alien. He knew
nothing of the world to start with beyond the den of the student. His
second book, as he himself described it in the preface to a second edition,
was the work of a very young man who dealt in a romantic spirit with the
gloomier facts of life. Its title, _The Unclassed,_[3] excited a little
curiosity, but the author was careful to explain that he had not in view
the _declasses_ but rather those persons who live in a limbo external to
society, and refuse the statistic badge.
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