Analysis of George Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 21, 2025

Often referred to as George Gissing’s first novel, Workers in the Dawn is actually his first published novel, one Gissing himself supported with a £150 investment. Not at all popular with reviewers, who criticized its excessive pessimism, attacks on organized religion, and satire on the lifestyle of the wealthy, the novel languished for decades, at last revived later in the 20th century with a renewed interest in Gissing.

With the effects of fate and the dissipation caused by alcohol as prominent themes, the plot relates the story of Arthur and Carrie, who share an unloving marriage fated to fail from the beginning. The characters are based on Gissing and his first wife, Marianne Helen Harrison, called Nell. Like Arthur, Gissing was easily attracted to pretty female faces, and he could not resist Nell, despite her obvious “low breeding” and eventually fatal alcoholism.

As the two novel characters suffer through disagreements and disappointments, fated by Carrie’s flawed heredity and Arthur’s poor judgment to fail, so did Gissing and Nell experience the raw reality that followed his flight of fantasy regarding his ability to “raise” his wife to his own level. Carrie’s conduct grows from that of Nell, as does her incorrect manner of speaking, her duplicity toward her husband, and her habit of spending time with other women like herself.

Arthur also suffers from hereditary problems, on his part a nervous fragility that counteracts his natural intelligence and desire to succeed. He ends up a failure, despite a heroic struggle against inevitable defeat. Arthur does have a love interest in Helen, a woman who follows the philosophy of Schopenhauer, as did Gissing, but she exhausts herself trying to teach illiterate adults to read and eventually contracts consumption and dies.

The novel may be viewed as a bildungsroman and is one of the few Gissing works in which a child, in this case Arthur as a youth, receives a considerable amount of attention. It includes an entire initiation/coming-of-age story prior to its consideration of Arthur as an adult. Reviewers note similarities between the boy Arthur and Charles Dickens’s characters, such as Oliver Twist and Pip. While he belongs in a high social class, he does not fit there, and outside forces intervene to block his reentry.

Gissing basically focuses on failures in this first published of 32 novels—the failure of society as well as individuals. In one early passage, the kindly Mr. Tollady discusses the burning of martyrs with Arthur, arguing against admiring them simply because their bodies suffered. He explains, “I esteem all alike as involuntary agents in the hands of a great power which most call Providence, but which I prefer to call the inexplicable spirit of the world.”

He also has an answer for the younger man’s question as to why one does not just sit still and watch the world go by, if the world pursues a “certain path which has been foreordained.” Tollady answers that we do not sit still and watch “because we cannot!” We cannot choose what we do, but we can choose how we do it. That philosophy sums Gissing’s own.

Bibliography

Coustillas, Pierre. Introduction to Workers in the Dawn, by George Gissing. Brighton Sussex, England: The Harvester Press, 1985, ix–xxxii.
———, and Colin Partridge, eds. Gissing: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1972.