Dickens at work, alone at his writing-table, absorbed in the task of
the story-teller. Constantly he makes known to Forster how his story
is getting on, speaks in detail of difficulties, rejoices over spells
of happy labour; and what splendid sincerity in it all! If this work
of his was not worth doing, why, nothing was. A troublesome letter has
arrived by the morning's post and threatens to spoil the day; but he
takes a few turns up and down the room, shakes off the worry, and sits
down to write for hours and hours. He is at the sea-side, his desk at
a sunny bay window overlooking the shore, and there all the morning he
writes with gusto, ever and again bursting into laughter at his own
thoughts.'[7]

[Footnote 7: See a deeply interesting paper on Dickens by 'G.G.' in the New
York _Critic_, Jan. 1902. Much of this is avowed autobiography.]

The influence of Dickens clearly predominated when Gissing wrote his next
novel and first really notable and artistic book, _Thyrza_.[8] The figure
which irradiates this story is evidently designed in the school of Dickens:
it might almost be a pastel after some more highly finished work by Daudet.
But Daudet is a more relentless observer than Gissing, and to find a
parallel to this particular effect I think we must go back a little farther
to the heroic age of the _grisette_ and the tearful _Manchon de Francine_
of Henri Murger. _Thyrza_, at any rate, is a most exquisite picture in
half-tones of grey and purple of a little Madonna of the slums; she is in
reality the _belle fleur d'un fumier_ of which he speaks in the epigraph of
the _Nether World_. The _fumier_ in question is Lambeth Walk, of which we
have a Saturday night scene, worthy of the author of _L'Assommoir_ and _Le
Ventre de Paris_ in his most perceptive mood. In this inferno, amongst the
pungent odours, musty smells and 'acrid exhalations from the shops where
fried fish and potatoes hissed in boiling grease,' blossomed a pure white