The second or heart's idol was Charles Dickens--Dickens as
writer, Dickens as the hero of a past England, Dickens as humorist, Dickens
as leader of men, above all, Dickens as friend of the poor, the outcast,
the pale little sempstress 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.
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