Simon J. James is Lecturer in Victorian Literature in the Department of English Studies at the University of Durham. His research interests include Victorian fiction, masculinity in literature and contemporary writing.

Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction: Telling Money; 2. Dickens in Memory: Gissing's Critical Writing; 3. Poverty and Imagination: The Early Novels; 4. The Price of Culture: Gissing's Major Phase; 5. Gissing's City of Women: The Later Novels; Notes; Bibliography; Index

Simon J. James examines how Gissing's work reveals an unhappy accommodation with money's underwriting of human existence and culture, and how daily life in all its forms - moral, intellectual, familial and erotic - is transcended or made irrelevant by its commodification.