George Robert Gissing was a thoroughly earnest and amazingly prolific writer, producing twenty-two novels, many works of nonfiction, and more than a hundred sketches and tales during his twenty-six-year career (the exact number of his stories is still unknown, since many of the early ones were published anonymously). Even so, from his day to the present, Gissing's standing among critics has remained equivocal and his following relatively small. Practically venerated by a few scholars and certainly appreciated by others, he is still untaught in many survey courses and often ignored by both Victorianists and critics of early modern British literature. Among general readers his name is barely recognized. This continuing obscurity is perhaps not surprising, for Gissing's works are clearly uneven, generally caustic, and almost unrelentingly grim, focusing obsessively on the victims and victimizers produced by a morally bankrupt society. Gissing's themes are relatively few, and his characterizations...