The Unclassed

A schoolmaster, a slum landlord's daughter, and a woman who has been on the streets — three people outside every class the age recognised, trying to make lives that do not fit the categories. Gissing's academic career ended at eighteen when he was caught stealing to support a young prostitute he then married; this 1884 novel is the closest he came to writing that directly, and he cut it heavily for a later edition. Fifty-seven plates, from Luke Fildes to John Collier, gather portraits of the unplaced and the overlooked across two centuries, the visual counterpart to Gissing's own outsiders.