When I think of all the sorrow and the barrenness that has been wrought in my life by want of a few more pounds per annum than I was able to earn, I stand aghast at money’s significance.

Gissing is registering, with characteristic bleak clarity, how small economic shortfalls can deform an entire life. The phrase “a few more pounds per annum” stresses that the difference between stability and misery may be marginal, yet its consequences—“sorrow” and “barrenness”—are existential: diminished opportunities, strained relationships, curtailed intellectual and artistic development. “I stand aghast at money’s significance” is not admiration but horror at a social order in which money functions as a gatekeeper to dignity and possibility. The line encapsulates a recurring Gissing theme: the moral and psychological costs of poverty in modern urban society, and the way material constraint can hollow out inner life.