Progress was unexpectedly rapid. On 9 May he was able to inform his friend Eduard Bertz that ‘I have got to work again, quite seriously, and have done three chapters of my new book’. There were more domestic upheavals, sparked by Edith’s habit of conducting shouting-matches with the servants, but after a family holiday at the end of July, Gissing was back in the routine of his eight-hour working days: most of The Whirlpool’s 180,000 words were written by the middle of December. If this should seem an extraordinary rate of production, even by late-Victorian standards, then New Grub Street (1891) had been finished in a bare six weeks. The manuscript was enthusiastically received by Gissing’s publishers, Lawrence & Bullen, rated an advance of 150 guineas – a 50 guinea increase on his last novel, The Paying Guest – enjoyed a modest commercial success and – a mark of Gissing’s growing prestige among the upmarket reading public – attracted many substantial reviews. One rather mixed notice came from Henry James, who admitted to a ‘persistent taste’ for Gissing while wondering why ‘in going so far he persistently refuses to go further’.

In the letter to Bertz which advertises the book’s commencement, Gissing – always punctilious about his motivation – notes that ‘the theme is the decay of domestic life among certain classes of people, and much stress is laid upon the question of children’. But while there are several gloom-laden aphorisms on the inadvisability of marriage, and some poignant scenes that clearly reflect Gissing’s attachment to his elder son, very little of The Whirlpool is straightforwardly autobiographical, if only because it is set in a social sphere several rungs above the one which Gissing himself inhabited. As such it belongs to the second, or even third phase of his career. Gissing’s early novels – Workers in the Dawn (1880) say, or The Nether World (1889) – are essentially pieces of slum reportage. The clutch that followed them, notably New Grub Street (1891) and Born in Exile (1892), are largely about humbly born but intellectual types trying ineffectually to tug free from the shackles that constrain them, a task rendered doubly dangerous by its social dimension. From the angle of the late-Victorian reviewer – never someone in whose company Gissing was entirely comfortable – The Whirlpool is outwardly a more conventional work: a story of middle-class manners, and middle-class morals, with a hero to match. Diffident Harvey Rolfe, with his £900 a year – twice as much as Gissing was earning throughout most of the 1890s – and his library full of books is not so much Gissing himself as the person that Gissing wanted to be, and the upper-bourgeois world whose margins he laconically treads is clearly one that his creator knew only at a distance. There is, consequently, something rather self-conscious about the paraphernalia of the novel’s drawing-room scenes, its string quartets on genteel display, and its accounts of society – even society of a rather questionable kind – in action, the thought of newspaper gossip columns and musical gazetteers being robbed for supporting detail.

On the other hand it would be a mistake to assume that Gissing was ignorant of the world on which he sardonically reports: despite a personal reserve that very often shaded into aloofness, he was a more social animal than he is sometimes given credit for: even here in the mid 1890s he found relief from domestic turmoil in visits to George Meredith and dinners with the Omar Khayyam Club. Rather, it is a mark of his artistic conscientiousness, his determination to tether his characters to the world of which he imagined them to be a part, and his interest in how much money a ‘lady’ might spend in keeping up her wardrobe in 1886, the year in which the novel is set, stems from the same impulse that led him to file the forensic reports on how to live miserably on nothing a year that are such a feature of The Odd Women (1893). At the same time, the world in which The Whirlpool is established – the world of gentlemen’s clubs, West End bun-fights and private incomes, where ‘art’ tends to be practised for non-artistic reasons – offers a perfect vehicle for some of the anxieties he had begun to cultivate about the moral direction of late-Victorian life and its effect on the individual sensibilities gathered up in its slipstream. G. K. Chesterton once said that nearly every writer will at some point in his career produce a book whose title sums up his attitude to life. Dickens’s, naturally, was Great Expectations; Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather. Judged by this yardstick, Gissing’s is Born in Exile – a phrase that all too faithfully conveys his sense of having been detached by circumstance from the life he most wanted to lead – but The Whirlpool, with its homilies on the precariousness of human existence, the constant danger of being swept away into a maelstrom from which there is no return, runs it a very close second. Unusually for Gissing, who generally avoids prompt-cards of this kind, the words of the title echo through the book. At an early stage in the proceedings Rolfe assures his friend Hugh Carnaby that he feels ‘as if we were all being swept into a ghastly whirlpool which roars over the bottomless pit’. Later on his wife refers half-jokily to their rented house at Pinner, a convenient 30-minute train-ride from the West End, as being ‘on the outer edge of the whirlpool’. When Rolfe makes the unwelcome discovery that for the first time in his life he has financial cares to worry him he talks immediately of ‘being drawn into the whirlpool’. Finally there is a dramatic exchange between Carnaby and Rolfe, after the former has accidentally killed a man he wrongly believes to have seduced his wife: ‘The whirlpool!’ Carnaby laments. ‘It’s got hold of me, and I’m going down, old man – and it looks black as hell.’

Each of these signature remarks gives the novel a terrific feeling of suppressed anxiety, the thought of people who fear the future, whose security is constantly imperilled, whose assumption that their comfortable existences are in danger is heightened by their inability to anticipate precisely what form the danger will take. Part of this nervousness is simply a general presentiment of doom, the suspicion that life is changing for the worse, and at such a rapid rate that it is beyond the capacity of the average human being to resist it. As Rolfe puts it to Carnaby in one of their meditative conversations: ‘There’s something damnably wrong with us all – that’s the one thing certain.’ Another part is to do with an awareness of England’s changing place in the world, and the call of an Imperial destiny – a subject which Gissing, as an arch-liberal and Kipling-mocker in the field of foreign policy, can be wonderfully ironic. But a third arises from the characters’ sheer inanition. A few domestic servants excepted, nearly everyone in The Whirlpool is either a member of the leisured classes or clinging desperately to their subsidized fringes.