Will Warburton

George Gissing

Jan 2011 · The Floating Press

About this ebook

In the later years of his career, popular Victorian-era writer George Gissing turned his attention to the social ills and challenges of the time. His last published novel, Will Warburton, is a prime example of social realism. The story following the travails of the title character, whose fortune is depleted through a series of shady business deals and who is subsequently forced to go into business as a shopkeeper.

About the author

George Robert Gissing was born on November 22, 1857, and died on December 28, 1903. He was an English novelist who published 23 novels between 1880 and 1903. Recent years have seen a strong revival of interest in Gissing, many of whose novels are now available in reprints. A bridge between late Victorianism and early modernism, Gissing's novels combine two essential themes of the period; the isolation and struggle of the artist and the economic bondage of the proletariat. New Grub Street (1891) and his own indirect autobiography, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), reveal the close connection in Gissing between fiction and autobiography. Workers in the Dawn (1880) and Demos: A Story of English Socialism (1892) dramatizes Gissing's conviction that economic and class divisions are central to human character and individual destiny. Gissing died from emphysema at age 46 after catching a chill on an ill-advised winter walk. Verinilda was published incomplete in 1904. He is is buried in the English cemetery at Saint-Jean-de-Luz.