Wealth & Money Quote by George Gissing

Money becomes a kind of clock you can actually own, and Gissing is blunt about the humiliation on the other side of that transaction. The line pivots on a stark inversion: time is usually the one resource that levels everyone, yet here it’s for sale. What makes the sentence sting is the moral clarity of its grammar. “With money I buy” is plain, almost transactional; then Gissing spikes it with “cheerful use,” a phrase that sounds modest until you hear its real claim: joy itself requires insulation from need. Not luxury, just the basic ability to decide how a day is spent.

The subtext is less “money is power” than “poverty is captivity.” His “hours” are not merely lost to work; they are “not in any sense be mine,” as if the self can’t fully exist without discretionary time. The final clause turns the screws: time, romanticized as freedom, becomes a master. “Bondsman” drags in the language of servitude, making the labor economy feel feudal in emotional effect even if it’s modern in structure. Gissing isn’t celebrating wealth; he’s diagnosing dependence.

Context matters: Gissing wrote from inside late-Victorian London’s grinding class stratification, with intimate knowledge of precarious authorship and urban wage life. The quote reads like a protest against the era’s moralizing about thrift and character. He implies that virtue can’t compete with arithmetic: without money, even your hours don’t belong to you; they belong to whoever can pay for them.