Workers in the Dawn, Slum Writing and London’s “Urban Majority” Districts

The purpose of this essay is to reappraise Gissing’s slum writings and Gissing’s own status as a slum writer. I apply to his earliest fiction the most recent urban theory, developed to understand and critique developments in cities worldwide since the late twentieth century. This casts new light on Gissing but also calls into question the temporal narratives used in twenty-first century radical urban theory, suggesting alternatives to those.