The central figure Osmond Waymark
is of course Gissing himself. Like his creator, raving at intervals under
the vile restraints of Philistine surroundings and with no money for
dissipation, Osmond gives up teaching to pursue the literary vocation. A
girl named Ida Starr idealises him, and is helped thereby to a purer life.
In the four years' interval between this somewhat hurried work and his
still earlier attempt the young author seems to have gone through a
bewildering change of employments. We hear of a clerkship in Liverpool, a
searing experience in America (described with but little deviation in _New
Grub Street_), a gas-fitting episode in Boston, private tutorships, and
cramming engagements in 'the poisonous air of working London.' Internal
evidence alone is quite sufficient to indicate that the man out of whose
brain such bitter experiences of the educated poor were wrung had learnt in
suffering what he taught--in his novels. His start in literature was made
under conditions that might have appalled the bravest, and for years his
steps were dogged by hunger and many-shaped hardships. He lived in cellars
and garrets. 'Many a time,' he writes, 'seated in just such a garret (as
that in the frontispiece to _Little Dorrit_) I saw the sunshine flood the
table in front of me, and the thought of that book rose up before me.
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