Letter from H.G. Wells, Sandgate, Kent, to Edmund Gosse, 1904 January 4 : autograph manuscript signed.

A letter summarizing what he knows of the life of George Gissing, opening with the observation that "Gissing was a most amiable decent man but an absolute fool outside the covers of a book in all arrangements and affairs, and there is nothing lurid and bad but much that is pitiful in his life.", and going on to describe Gissings early academic achievements, his passionate love "for a girl on the streets" (Marianne "Nell" Harrison) which led to him stealing money to maintain her, a crime for which he was subsequently caught, tried, and "packed off to America", where he found and lost a job as a tutor in Boston and found work at a newspaper office in Chicago before returning to England and marrying "the girl of the Manchester episode"; adding "all that and a novel he got done before he was one & twenty"; mentioning the death of Nell Gissing as a result of hardship and drink, and Gissing's depression, poverty, and oppression "by the sex necessity" following his wife's death; going on to recount his second marriage to "a servant girl" (Edith Alice Underwood) after allegedly reading "some nonsense of [William Edward Hartpole] Lecky's about younger sons marrying girls of the lower classes", describing his wife's violent rages and abuse of their child which led to him leave her, a reconciliation (contrived, by "Some idiot"), a second child and second separation, etc.; concluding with an account of Gissing's relationship with his translator (Gabrielle Marie Edith Fleury), expressing his opinion that Gissing's sons should be provided for, and advising Gosse to give Prime Minister (Arthur James) Balfour "the square truth" about the author.