George Orwell hailed George Gissing as 'perhaps the best novelist England has produced'. Gissing became poor by bad luck and bad judgement; he came to believe that political solutions were unlikely to abolish human misery, and declared that the great subject of his novels was the situation of educated people with 'not enough money'. Gissing was a neurotic writer, and everything in his later life was determined by the twin disasters of his imprisonment and his marriage to Nell Harrison. Gissing the novelist gives us better than anyone the flavour of London in the 1880s and 1890s: a compound of wet streets, fog, coal-smoke, narrow horizons, and an imagination equal to it all. In Paul Delany he has found the perfect biographer.