George Gissing (1857-1903) the renowned Victorian novelist, lived as a boy behind his father's chemist's shop in Thompson's Yard. Although he left Wakefield as a young man, his early experiences in Wakefield are often reflected in his writing. He wrote 23 novels, short stories, and two studies of Charles Dickens.

The Gissing Trust was founded in 1978 by Wakefield Historical Society, Wakefield Civic Society and others to acquire and preserve the childhood home of George Gissing in Thompson's Yard, where family memorabilia, books and an exhibition are housed.

The New Exhibition
This year's modest but fascinating exhibition at the Gissing Centre features the work of George Gissing's father, brother Algernon, sister Ellen, and son Alfred. Like George, Algernon took to writing novels but his best works, arguably, are his topographical works, The Footpath Way in Gloucestershire (1924) and accounts of the Cotswold town of Broadway (1904), where he had gone to live, and of Ludlow (1905) Algernon and one of his two sisters, Ellen, worked together on a collection of The Letters of George Gissing to his Family, which was first published in 1927. Ellen continued to live in Wakefield with her mother after her brothers had left. Differing from some of her free-thinking family, she became a regular attender at Wakefield Cathedral and wrote two religious books which were published by SPCK (The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge), and which feature in the exhibition, Angels and Men, and The Hidden Life of the Blessed Virgin. The last of the writers to be included in the exhibition is Alfred Gissing (1896-1975), George's second son. He too produced a collection of George Gissing's writings, Selections Autobiographical and Imaginative from the Work of George Gissing (1929). In addition to a copy of this, the exhibition includes his 1936 biography of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Holman Hunt.