Novel about London slum life in the 1870s and 1880s. Raw, Unsentimental, offering little comfort, viewing the working classes as condemned to a life in hell via industrialization, a life from which there is no hope of escape. It is one man's mordant vision--shaped by bitter personal experience of poverty--of the quality of life endured by a variety of characters in the nether world. With Zolaesque intensity and relentlessness, Gissing lays bare the economic forces which determine the aspirations and expectations of those born to a life of labour. This is a tale of intrigue, as rapacious schemers try to wrest a fortune out of a mysterious old man who has returned to their midst, and of thwarted love.