Gissing was an agnostic in religion and a skeptic with regard to social reform. He usually adopted an antidemocratic, pessimistic, and even fatalistic point of view toward the problems he dramatized. He felt that the nobler human capacities represented by art and learning were bound to be submerged by the mercenary drives and mass culture of democratic society. The social problems that afflicted the late nineteenth century provided him with material for showing how unlikely it was that a civilization free of passion and superstition and devoted to culture would ever emerge. His profound discontent with the conditions he observed led him to exceptional insights into the spiritual dilemmas of the time.
George Robert Gissing was of provincial and middle-class origin, the oldest of the five children of a pharmaceutical chemist who lived over his shop in the main square of Wakefield in Yorkshire. He attended the local school until his father's death, when George was thirteen; he was then sent to Lindow Grove School in Cheshire, and after two years entered Owens College in Manchester. His literary tastes became clear while he was at school and college: he wrote poetry as a child, and studied classical and modern languages and literature.
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