His thirst for learning struck his teachers; they saw in him the kind of boy who, with the assistance of scholarships, might become a brilliant academic.
His father's death at the age of forty-one in 1870 grieved Gissing deeply and strengthened his determination to forge ahead. First as a boarder, together with his brothers, in a private school at Alderley Edge, Cheshire, and then as a student on his own at Owens College, Manchester, he distinguished himself by his exceptional accomplishments at regional as well as national levels. The many prizes he was awarded took the form of solid tomes that were the cornerstones of his personal library. Among these are his famous eight-volume copy of an 1872 edition of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (17761788), which he received as Extra Junior Classical Prize, and the five-volume Works of Edmund Spenser (1862), awarded to him as winner of the English Poem Prize-both of which he won during the 1872-1873 session.
The worst calamity in his melancholy life occurred in May 1876 when, after having fallen in love with a girl of the streets, "Nell" Harrison, whom he wished to redeem, he was caught stealing some marked money from coat pockets in the college cloakroom.
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