]
The year of this autobiographical record[17] marked the commencement of
Gissing's reclamation from that worst form of literary slavery--the
chain-gang. For he had been virtually chained to the desk, perpetually
working, imprisoned in a London lodging, owing to the literal lack of the
means of locomotion.[18] His most strenuous work, wrung from him in dismal
darkness and wrestling of spirit, was now achieved. Yet it seems to me both
ungrateful and unfair to say, as has frequently been done, that his
subsequent work was consistently inferior. In his earlier years, like
Reardon, he had destroyed whole books--books he had to sit down to when his
imagination was tired and his fancy suffering from deadly fatigue. His
corrections in the days of _New Grub Street_ provoked not infrequent,
though anxiously deprecated, remonstrance from his publisher's reader. Now
he wrote with more assurance and less exhaustive care, but also with a
perfected experience. A portion of his material, it is true, had been
fairly used up, and he had henceforth to turn to analyse the sufferings of
well-to-do lower middle-class families, people who had 'neither inherited
refinement nor acquired it, neither proletarian nor gentlefolk, consumed
with a disease of vulgar pretentiousness, inflated with the miasma of
democracy.
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