The Irish-born George Moore was provoked into becoming a writer by his seven years at Oscott, which he called "a vile hole, a den of priests",[100] turning to Byron and Shelley and noting that "it pleased me to read 'Queen Mab' and 'Cain' amid the priests and ignorance of a hateful Roman Catholic college".[101] His early novels – particularly his 1885 work A Mummer's Wife, which dealt with alcoholism and the seedy underside of theatrical life – "opened up new possibilities for the novel in English",[102] being the first to break away from the literary conventions of the Victorian style under the influence of the naturalism of Émile Zola.[103] Moore constantly developed the form of his literary self-expression, with his later novels having a more fragmented, tapestry-like structure.[103] He was a pivotal figure in the transition from Victorian to modern fiction,[104] and a particular influence on James Joyce: the critic Graham Hough wrote that "neither the title nor the content of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would have been quite the same in 1916 if it had not been for the prior existence of George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man in 1886."[102] "The Dead", the final story of Joyce's Dubliners, was directly inspired by Moore's 1891 novel Vain Fortune.[103] The eccentric novelist and artist Frederick Rolfe studied at Oscott from 1887, but left after it was decided he was an unsuitable candidate for the priesthood.