Two writers, one who can produce what sells and one who cannot, and the woman who married the second on the strength of his reviews. Gissing lost a brilliant academic career at eighteen for stealing to keep a prostitute he later married, and knew the reading room, the pawnshop and the three-volume deadline from the inside. The literary life has not had a more truthful account. Fifty-four plates spanning 1837 to 1914, from Carl Spitzweg's The Poor Poet to George Cole's landscapes, picture the wider world of nineteenth-century art that Gissing's struggling writers could only dream of entering.
