I have
walked London streets for twelve and fifteen hours together without even a
thought of saving my legs or my time, by paying for waftage. Being poor as
poor can be, there were certain things I had to renounce, and this was one
of them.'--_Ryecroft_. For earlier scenes see _Monthly Review_, xvi., and
_Owens College Union Mag_., Jan. 1904, pp. 80-81.]
[Footnote 19: 'He knew the narrowly religious, the mental barrenness of the
poor dissenters, the people of the slums that he observed so carefully, and
many of those on the borders of the Bohemia of which he at least was an
initiate, and he was soaked and stained, as he might himself have said,
with the dull drabs of the lower middle class that he hated. But of those
above he knew little.... He did not know the upper middle classes, which
are as difficult every whit as those beneath them, and take as much time
and labour and experience and observation to learn.'--'The Exile of George
Gissing,' _Albany_, Christmas 1904. In later life he lost sympathy with the
'nether world.' Asked to write a magazine article on a typical 'workman's
budget,' he wrote that he no longer took an interest in the 'condition of
the poor question.']
Few, if any, of Gissing's books exhibit more mental vigour than _In the
Year of Jubilee_.
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