Will Warburton

"Will Warburton", George Gissing's last novel, was published in 1905, three years after Gissing's death.

Will Warburton is a young gentleman of means, a man of commerce, who, losing everything in speculation, is forced into the life of a grocer, a thing he finds, at first, enormously tragic.

Will keeps his fate secret from his friends and his family and lives a life of humiliation and privation. It is only when the woman with whom he is falling in love with discovers he's a grocer -and throws him over- that Will realizes that there is no shame in being a grocer.