 Thomas Federer characterised Gent as the pre-eminent producer of chapbooks in Yorkshire during his career.Gent's poetry was of an uninspired quality, Tedder describes it as ""beneath criticism"", Gent's own woodcuts were also primitive.He is best known for his local histories of Hull and York and Ripon, which contain information not noted elsewhere, and are the earliest discrete histories of those towns; Gent's works are considered to be based on genuine research, observation or recording, and not based on a regurgitation of other accounts, and contain descriptions of objects not extant at the time of writing of later histories.