This was Gissing’s final novel, written when he was dying and published in 1905, two years after his death (at 46) in 1903.
Will Warburton, a young man from a good but modest family, runs a sugar exporting company with his friend and business partner Godfrey Sherwood, but when a better business opportunity comes along he invests all of his, and his family’s (his mother’s and sister’s) fortune in it, only to lose everything when Sherwood embezzles the funds and gambles them all away.
Will is forced to start work as a grocer and loses all his social respectability and class status. He is scorned by those who once would have respected and welcomed him, and is considered “common” and unworthy of all that was previously his social due. He works hard and honestly at his new trade and treats people with kindness and generosity, and is (somewhat unbelievably) able to keep his reduced circumstances a secret from his mother and sister and close friends, but is disheartened and exhausted by living a false life. He loses a woman he thinks he loves when his true identity is revealed, and finds himself in love with a better woman who loves him for who he is rather than what he does.
Will Warburton is a novel about class and its effect on social relationships and romance in English society at the turn of the previous century. Will is a wonderfully sympathetic and admirable character: honest, brave, generous to a fault, good-humored, faithful, and hard-working, and the characters that surround him are varied and all vividly evoked, and I enjoyed reading this novel very much. Gissing has an engagingly straightforward style that is a pleasure to read.
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