Workers in the Dawn was published by Remington in three volumes in 1880, paid for by Gissing himself — he used money from a small inheritance to finance the publication. He was twenty-two years old, recently returned from a desperate year in America (where he had gone to escape the scandal of his expulsion from Owens College), and living in London in conditions of extreme poverty. The novel draws on his experience of slum life with an intensity that compensates for its structural weaknesses.
The protagonist, Arthur Golding, is an orphan raised in the worst slums of east London, rescued by a philanthropist, and educated as an artist. But Arthur cannot escape his origins: he marries Carrie Mitchell, a woman from the slums, in an attempt to redeem her through love and education. The attempt fails — Carrie cannot or will not be saved — and Arthur is dragged down by the same poverty he tried to escape. The ending is bleak: Arthur dies in the slums, his idealism destroyed by the intractability of social conditions.
The novel is unmistakably the work of a young man — it is too long (nearly 300,000 words), too heavily influenced by Dickens and George Eliot, and too willing to editorialize. But it contains passages of genuine power, particularly the descriptions of slum life, which Gissing based on direct observation. The portrait of Whitecross Street (a real London market street) and its inhabitants has a documentary quality that anticipates the social realism of his mature novels.
The autobiographical elements are barely disguised. Gissing’s own relationship with Nell Harrison — the prostitute for whom he had stolen money, whom he married in 1879, and who would drink herself to death in 1888 — is transparently reflected in Arthur’s doomed attempt to rescue Carrie. Gissing would revisit this theme — the educated man destroyed by his connection to a woman from a lower class — in virtually every subsequent novel.
Collecting Workers in the Dawn
First edition (Remington, London, 1880): Three volumes, brown cloth. Published at the author’s expense.
Market values:
- Three-volume first edition: $3,000–$10,000
- Later reprints: $40–$100
Extremely rare — only a small number of copies were printed, and most were lost or destroyed. This is one of the scarcest Victorian first novels by a major author.