Will Warburton

Will Warburton: A Romance of Real Life was George Gissing's last novel. It was published in 1905, two 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 discovers he is a grocer, and throws him over, that Will realizes that there is no shame in being a grocer.