SOURCE: An introduction to The House of Cobwebs, in Gissing: The Critical Heritage, edited by Pierre Coustillas and Colin Partridge, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972, pp. 509-17.
In the following excerpt, which was originally published as the introduction to the 1906 edition of The House of Cobwebs, Seccombe surveys the distinctive qualities of Gissing's fiction and places him in context with other nineteenth-century English authors.
