Morley Roberts, a college friend and a fellow writer, confirmed in his fictionalized biography of Gissing,
The Private Life of Henry Maitland (1912), that "among books he lived, and among them he would have died."
Gissing devoted his life's work to literature, and the books he read, whether he owned them or borrowed them from libraries, are inseparable from his writings. He found in them "inspiration," situations that he reworked, or, as in the case of John Forster's The Life of Charles Dickens (18721874), what he once called in a letter to Thomas Hardy, "onward help." The broad lines of his tormented life are well known. Born to a father whose passion for culture and social justice impressed him durably and to a mother whose lack of intellectual curiosity irked him, he was an extremely precocious child bent on writing, reading, and sketching at an age when his schoolfellows were mainly interested in games and marbles. He was also an exacting child who satirized his brothers because they did not share his obsession with the passing of time and were too often content to idle the hours away.
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