The year of this autobiographical record[17] marked the commencement of Gissing's reclamation from that worst form of literary slavery--the chain-gang. For he had been virtually chained to the desk, perpetually working, imprisoned in a London lodging, owing to the literal lack of the means of locomotion.[18] His most strenuous work, wrung from him in dismal darkness and wrestling of spirit, was now achieved. Yet it seems to me both ungrateful and unfair to say, as has frequently been done, that his subsequent work was consistently inferior. In his earlier years, like Reardon, he had destroyed whole books--books he had to sit down to when his imagination was tired and his fancy suffering from deadly fatigue. His corrections in the days of _New Grub Street_ provoked not infrequent, though anxiously deprecated, remonstrance from his publisher's reader. Now he wrote with more assurance and less exhaustive care, but also with a perfected experience. A portion of his material, it is true, had been fairly used up, and he had henceforth to turn to analyse the sufferings of well-to-do lower middle-class families, people who had 'neither inherited refinement nor acquired it, neither proletarian nor gentlefolk, consumed with a disease of vulgar pretentiousness, inflated with the miasma of democracy.' Of these classes it is possible that he knew less, and consequently lacked the sureness of touch and the fresh draughtsmanship which comes from ample knowledge, and that he had, consequently, to have increasing resort to books and to invention, to hypothesis and theory.[19] On the other hand, his power of satirical writing was continually expanding and developing, and some of his very best prose is contained in four of these later books: _In the Year of Jubilee_ (1894), _Charles Dickens_ (1898), _By the Ionian Sea_ (1901), and _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_ (1903); not far below any of which must be rated four others, _The Odd Women_ (1893), _Eve's Ransom_ (1895), _The Whirlpool_ (1897), and _Will Warburton_ (1905), to which may be added the two collections of short stories. [Footnote 17: Followed in 1897 by _The Whirlpool_ (see p. xvi), and in 1899 and 1903 by two books containing a like infusion of autobiographical experience, _The Crown of Life_, technically admirable in chosen passages, but sadly lacking in the freshness of first-hand, and _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_, one of the rightest and ripest of all his productions.] [Footnote 18: 'I hardly knew what it was to travel by omnibus. I have walked London streets for twelve and fifteen hours together without even a thought of saving my legs or my time, by paying for waftage. Being poor as poor can be, there were certain things I had to renounce, and this was one of them.'--_Ryecroft_. For earlier scenes see _Monthly Review_, xvi., and _Owens College Union Mag_., Jan. 1904, pp. 80-81.]