On Thursday 7th October, we had the grim satisfaction of discussing Gissing's first novel, Workers in the Dawn (1880), in the vicinity of the Reading Room he made his own in New Grub Street - grim, in that the Bloomsbury he offered us was generally rainy, alcoholic, and with few obvious means of amelioration; satisfying, in that the convivial atmosphere of the Old Sanskrit Library meant that by constrast we felt noticeably less alienated and desperate than the protagonist Arthur Golding does towards the end of the novel. We had the pleasure of comparing London Library editions with the new paperback out in Broadview Press, another plug for which excellent commodity seems justified, seeing as one of our regulars, Professor Richard Dennis, has contributed a map to it...
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