Complete and unabridged, with 54 full-page plates by Marianne North, Arthur Streeton and Hubert von Herkomer. 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.