"As a matter of derivation, Mr Gissing, in his earlier essays in fiction, owed more to Dickens than to any realistic novelist. ... The inspiration was indirect. Mr Gissing had not the master-faculty of 'Martin Chuzzlewit,' and he did not counterfeit it. But in studying the works of Dickens, he appears to have seen how much of the real gloom had been left out of the picture of the London populace; how much what was eccentric and humorous had been insisted upon, and how much what was joyless, and yet equally representative, had been omitted; and this darker and more unrelieved side of lower London life Mr Gissing determined to describe."