I recognise myself in most of George Gissing's novels.
There will be more on George Gissing in coming Sunday's
Book Club on Radio 4.
Oh, and after that programme there's
Poetry Please with rare archive material of the Welsh poet WH Davies introducing and reading his poem
Leisure.
Oh WH Davies,
William Henry Davies was born in lowly circumstances in Portland Street in the Pill district of Newport, the son of an iron-moulder who died when he was two years old.
His mother remarried and left her three children to be adopted by their grandparents, who ran the nearby Church House Inn.
Badly behaved as a teenager, Davies joined a shoplifting gang and was given the birch for stealing two bottles of perfume.
On leaving school he began work as an ironmonger before signing up as apprentice to a picture frame maker.
But Davies was dissatisfied with life in Newport, leaving first for London, then Bristol, and eventually the USA in 1893.
He spent the next six years intermittently working and begging his way across North America, occasionally working his passage back to the UK as a sailor on cattle ships.
Being jailed for vagrancy was an occupational hazard which at least offered a few days' shelter.
Davies documented this period of his life in his acclaimed memoir Autobiography of a Super-Tramp although the book may be short on facts and long on embellishment.
The turning point in his life was the loss of a leg after he was dragged under the wheels of an express train he'd tried to jump onto at Renfrew, Ontario.
Unfit for manual labour or life on the road, Davies turned to writing and returned to London where working-class poetry was all the rage and his memorable, accessible verse found favour.
But the bohemian boy from Pill felt out of place in Edwardian London's literary circles.
At the age of fifty he married Helen Payne, a prostitute thirty years his junior, leaving the city to move first to Sussex and later Gloucestershire.
Davies continued writing and an account of his marriage was eventually published in 1980 as Young Emma.
He returned to his native Newport in September 1938 for the unveiling of a plaque in his honour at the Church House Inn with an address given by the Poet Laureate John Masefield.
But Davies was unwell, and this proved to be his last public appearance. His health deteriorated, not helped by the weight of his wooden leg, and he died in September 1940
A statue inspired by his poem Leisure can be seen in Commercial Street in Newport.
