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Publisher: Dodd, Mead ... Read more

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The Paying Guest
The still underappreciated novelist George Gissing (1857 - 1903) is best known for his books cast in the three-volume Victorian mold, such as "New Grub Street". Gissing's books explore themes of class structure, commercialism, love, and failure. In 1895, Gissing temporarily abandoned the three-volume convention and published three short, highly readable novels: "Eve's Ransom", "Sleeping Fires" and the book under review, "The Paying Guest", each of which offers a distinctive approach to Gissing's characteristic themes. Of the three books, "Eve's Ransom" is one of Gissing's best works. The other two are good but less significant.I have been enjoying revisiting Gissing by rereading these three short works of 1895 and by reviewing them here on Amazon with the hope of interesting other readers in exploring Gissing.

"The Paying Guest" is unusual among Gissing's output in its lightness of touch and in its comedy.The book tells of the encounter of a rising middle-class suburban British family with a young girl, caught between two suitors, of a distinctly different background.Clarence Mumford, age 35, and his wife Emmeline, just under 30, live in rural Sutton in a home they call "Runnymede", about 15 miles from London with their two-year old son and their three domestics.In order to secure supplemental income, they advertise for a boarder, a "paying guest". The guest they receive will soon disrupt their peaceful routines.

Louise Derrick is a young woman of 22 with no education. no skills, a temper, and a taste for frivolity. She is looking for a place to live due to difficulty with her mother, with her stepfather, Higgins, and with her stepsister, Cecily Higgins, age 26.A young man named Bowling is courting Cecily Higgins, but he appears to prefer Louise.Higgins wants Louise to leave home and agrees to pay her expenses to avoid discord between Louise and Cecily and to allow Bowling's courtship of Cecily to proceed forward without a rival for his attentions.Besides Bowling's interest, Louise is also being courted by a man named Cobb, a working-class person with a good income and prospects.Cobb has a rough, possibly violent, disposition and his courtship of Louise is a stormy, on-again, off-again affair. Louise does not seem to know her own mind but wants to marry.With some trepidation, the Mumfords accept Louise as a boarder.

Louise's temper, what the Mumfords perceive as her vulgarity, and her attempts to draw the Mumfords into her relationship with her family and with Cobb lead to discord between the couple.They repent of their paying guest and try to find a tactful way to get her to leave. As the story develops, Louise has a private meeting with Mumford at Mumford's railway commuting station which provokes jealousy in Mrs. Mumford. Louise, thinking that Bowling's relationship with Cecily is at an end, encourages his matrimonial advances. Cobb pays an unannounced visit to Runnymede to pursue Louise and, as a result of a foolish accident, sets the drawing room of the home on fire, resulting in an injury which leaves Louise bed-ridden for several weeks.Mrs. Mumford, in her refinement, and Mrs Higgins, in her vulgarity, exchange pleasantries which ends forever Louise's stay in the house.Ultimately, Cobb winds up with Louise, with an uncertain future in store, and the Mumfords try to piece together their domestic life.

The humor of the book results from the interaction between the Mumfords, with their snobbery and attempted refinement, and their well-meaning but foolish boarder Louise, and withher mother, stepfather and Cobb. In its portrayal of the effects of class and money on human relations, this book offers a short, upbeat introduction to Gissing's themes. Gissing's portrayal of women is among the strongest features of his work, and his novels frequently, as in "The Odd Women" address issues involving feminism. By portraying Louise in her shallowness in "The Paying Guest" Gissing stresses the need for expanding educational expectations for women if men and women are to have full intimate and rewarding lives together. The book can be read in a single sitting.While far from the best of Gissing, this book is enjoyable. With its two companion novels of 1895, especiallythe outstanding "Eve's Ransom", the book offers a good short introduction to Gissing for the newcomer. Readers who love the Gissing of "New Grub Street","The Odd Women", or"Born in Exile" will gain a broader understanding of the author from these too-little known books in a shorter, more modern format.

Robin Friedman
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Customer Reviews (3)

Very Well-Written, Interesting
I have been a fan of Victorian novelist George Gissing for many years. His novels were often difficult to obtain, but are increasingly available in paperback and also other digital forms.

For writers and aspiring writers, I especially recommend Gissing's novel "New Grub Street," showing a group of Victorian writers struggling with dramatic changes in their profession as the old "circulating libraries" lose their power, and the new mass media of newspapers and magazines arrives, a change similar to the arrival of the internet today.

Gissing's detailed, intricate portrayals of Victorian England are unsurpassed for interest and realism. Readers who do not find Charles Dickens' jokes, puns, and exaggerated comic characters and villains of much interest will be happier with Gissing, who was a realistic writer in the tradition of Maupassant, Flaubert, and Zola.

Gissing's own tragic life is as fascinating as any of his novels. I am now re-reading the biography for the second time. It is so well-written and detailed that I am enjoying picking up on items I missed the first time. I anticipate reading it again in the future. You will not regret purchasing this book.

While the book is of especial interest to writers, artists, and other creative people for its portrayal of a tormented novelist and short story writer, it will also be of interest for anyone fascinated by Victorian England.

A New Biography of Gissing
Most readers find over time authors that speak directly and intimately to them. For me, one such writer is George Gissing (1857 - 1903), whom I have read for most of my adult life. Gissing has always been an author more admired than read, and for many years most of his books were difficult to find.Fortunately, with the advent of digitalization that situation has changed. Gissing continues to attract a good deal of critical attention, both for his works and for his life.Among recent works on Gissing this new biography "George Gissing: A Life" by Paul Delany should become the standard account of Gissing's life due to its sympathetic understanding of its subject and to its erudition.Delany taught at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, for many years.He has written about D.H. Lawrence, Rupert Brooke, and the photographer Bill Brandt.

As do most students of Gissing, Delany finds his novels and stories largely autobiographical in character. Thus, Delany makes great use of them in describing the life. His biography also draws heavily upon Gissing's letters and diary and other primary biographical sources.Gissing's difficult, tortured and overworked brief life emerge in this study, with Delany showing effectively how many of the author's problems were of his own making. Delany gives a great deal of attention to Gissing's relationship with his family, his mother, his brother Algernon, and his two unmarried sisters, Ellen and Margaret. Throughout his adult life, Gissing's difficult financial situation was exacerbated by the responsibility he felt to support his family. But the focus of Delany's book is on Gissing's mistakes as a young man and on his lifelong difficulty with women and sexuality. Thus the book is organized around Gissing's three failed relationships with the important women in his life which, for the benefit of those readers unfamiliar with Gissing, I will touch upon below.

Born in Wakefield, Gissing was a prize student at Owens College when he became romantically involved with Nell Harrison, a young prostitute. Gissing was caught stealing for Nell, expelled from college, and sentenced to a month in jail at hard labor where he almost starved. After a year in the United States which included additional romantic difficulties, Gissing returned to London and attempted to make his way as a novelist. He had a stormy, unhappy marriage with Nell whom he continued to support until her death in 1888.Delany suggests that Gissing contracted syphilis from Nell which ultimately killed him. Unhappy as the relationship with Nell was, it became the source of Gissing's early novels of low London life, including "The Nether World", "Demos", and "Thyzra."

Gissing repeated his mistake when he impulsively married another working woman, Edith Underwood, who may also have been a prostitute, following Nell's death. The couple fought bitterly until they separated in 1897.During his time with Edith, Gissing wrote his best-remembered works, including "New Grub Street" and "The Odd Women."

For the last part of his life, Gissing lived with a French woman, Gabrielle Fleury, whom he had met through her translation of"New Grub Street". This relationship proved more successful than the earlier marriages, but it was plagued by Gissing's dislike of living in France, by ill health, and by the dominating, intrusive presence of Garbrielle's mother.

Delany offers a convincing portrait of a neurotically troubled individual and a great writer and novelist of ideas.Although his book is not a critical study, Delany describes each of Gissing's 22 novels, his travel book "By the Ionian Sea", his voluminous short stories and other writings in some detail. He discusses Gissing's relationships with his publishers who frequently took advantage of him, thus keeping him in poverty.He gives the reader a picture of a lonely life, bound by the subject's own mistakes and sensitivities and by the sexual mores of Victorian England. I felt the garrets, shabby streets and poverty that cry out from Gissing's own writings.Delany offers a philosophical understanding of Gissing's pessimism and of the influence of Darwin and Herbert Spencer on his thought. Delany also shows how difficult the process of writing was for Gissing.Although he wrote quickly and prolifically, he had long periods of dry spells.He also was a severe critic of his own work, abandoning many novels including some that were completed or on the verge of completion. I felt a sense of loss in not having some of these books.

As with most good biographies, Delany's begins with a thoughtful Introduction summarizing the view of Gissing he develops, and it concludes with an Afterword offering comments on the nature of Gissing's achievement. Here are some of Delany's thoughts from the Afterword that I found noteworthy.

"Where other novelists take it as given that individuals seek their own fates, Gissing shows that, most of the time, their fates are made for them."

"This tension between personal will and the force of circumstances has informed my biography of Gissing.... What seemed to be the greatest misfortunes of his life - his two disastrous marriages - were also what made him an exceptional man, and an artist."

"That was Gissing's calling as a writer: to walk the streets, to see and hear the people, to record it all in sorrow and in pity."

I learned a great deal from this book about Gissing, and I will return to it often as I continue to read him. But another important point of Delany's Afterword is that "reading Gissing is not a comfortable experience". For readers wanting to know something of this too-little appreciated author, Delany's book is a good place to start.

Robin Friedman

An Illuminating Biography
As a coherent account of Gissing's life, this book supplants the earlier biographies by Korg, Tindall, Colie and Halperin. Stylistically Delany writes with an easy facility that makes the text a pleasure to read. At points the book's a trifle repetitive, though his view that Gissing had syphilis is a case that probably needs to be made forcefully. For a comprehensive and astute picture of Gissing's self-destructive history, though, it's hard to beat. ... Read more

Product Description
A novel of social realism, The Odd Women reflects the major sexual and cultural issues of the late nineteenth century.Unlike the "New Woman" novels of the era which challenged the idea that the unmarried woman was superfluous, Gissing satirizes that image and portrays women as "odd" and marginal in relation to an ideal.Set in a grimy, fog-ridden London, Gissing's "odd" women range from the idealistic, financially self-sufficient Mary Barfoot to the Madden sisters who struggle to subsist in low paying jobs and have little chance for joy. With narrative detachment, Gissing portrays contemporary society's blatant ambivalence towards its own period of transition. Judged by contemporary critics to be as provocative as Zola and Ibsen, Gissing produced an "intensely modern" work as the issues it raises remain the subject of contemporary debate. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Excellent creatures, but useful for nothing
During the late 19th century, Britain experienced a serious demographic imbalance, when the sex structure of the population had a substantial majority of females. An estimate of 500,000 is mentioned. These `surplus' women were not `pairable' and were called `odd women'. The ambivalence of the word must surely have motivated Gissing to use the word for his title. The novel focuses on the changing role of women in the social fabric.
The `normal' role for women, as defined by the middle class point of view, was the housewife and mother, without education, without income, without own head. A single woman, a working woman, an educated woman was an abnormality. The fate of married women was some kind of lottery as well. Their normal lot was obedience.Divorce was ruled out, property rights were shaped after the male interest, child custody was always with the men in case of breakup of a family.

What happens when there are suddenly thousands of single women who have no provider, no fortune, no training, and no prospects? The novel goes into the sociology and economics of the life of single women, but don't be afraid of a pamphlet. This is a very strong piece of social writing from the late Victorian period. It was published 1892. Gissing was socially conscious, but neither was he a democrat, nor did he honestly sympathize with the fate of the poor classes. At least he was decent enough to reject the term `lower classes', but he didn't seem to realize the contradiction that this produced, as his middle class heroines are just as poor as working class women, and surely just as miserable. His sympathies were with the `de-classed', impoverished middle classes. He had contempt for the uneducated proletarian underdog. He was not in all respects an admirable person.

The novel begins with the introduction of a family with 6 daughters. The father, a widower and a moderately viable provincial medical doctor, dies of an accident without having secured any financial provision for his girls. They have virtually no future other than employment as governesses, companions, shop girls. Marriage, the traditional way, is not a realistic option. Poverty and disease are guaranteed.
The daughters in their helplessness are contrasted with a pair of active, dynamic, independent women, who make a career for themselves and try to help other women. The novel gives us a typology of single women in their attitudes and choices. We also follow different types of marriages and thoughts about marriage.

I find it surprising and disappointing that only about a handful of Gissing's novels are currently in print in decent editions.

Gissing Greatness
"A vain and miserable life is the lot of nearly all mortals.Most women, whether they marry or not, will suffer and commit endless follies." Gissing "The Odd Women"

Yet another classic piece of literature that most people aren't even aware of, let alone have ever read. What a writer this Gissing guy was!If you haven't discovered him yet, then I am pleased to make the intro.Start, as I did, with "New Grub Street" (one of my all-time favorites!) and if you enjoy that adventure, then definitely give this one a look-see as well.Gissing reminds me a bit of H. James, Maugham, and Dreiser all rolled into one.

The story takes place in late 19th century England. It is essentially the tale of a group of `odd' women who are ailing as outcasts, simply because they are not married.Oh the horrors of being a single woman in the prim and proper Victorian world!But no need to fret, because these dainty, displaced dames all have someone to turn to in our main protagonist Rhoda Nunn. Before there was Mary Tyler Moore, there was Rhoda. The latter being a fearless feminist whose life work is to educate and motivate these spinsters to live independent lives sans men.However, Rhoda's mission takes a bit of a tumble when love finally comes a knocking upon her door.Will Rhoda toss in the towel and marry?Will she abandon her life work for a man and love?Order the book and find out!

This beautiful book, like his above-mentioned classic, tells many stories within his main story.I also enjoy writers who love their characters and want you to love them too (i.e. Austen, Steinbeck, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dickens, et al...) and Gissing definitely falls into that category. His focus is almost entirely on people and what impels them (primarily, love and human relationships) to do what they do.He digs deep into his protagonist's hearts and minds and draws vivid, penetrating portraits of their souls. His writing is relatively easy to digest and straightforward.His prose does not venture off onto lavish descriptions of landscapes and characters, rather, like Dreiser, he slowly unravels his creations dynamic nature upon each page turned.

A novel that was way ahead of its time in its criticism of a male-dominated, often times cruel society that had no problem oppressing women, especially single women.Gissing writes women like G. Eliot and Austen write men - exceptionally well.You can really tell that he himself spent a lot of time trying to understand the feminine mystique.It is also a novel that examines the dilemmas of the constant battle going on in us all - that perpetual see-saw we are all riding - opting between on our own desires and our own principles.

An EXCELLENT READ!4.7 STARS!!!

great social commentary
This is a lesser-known classic that deserves more recognition that it gets.It is a novel about the plight of single "old maid" women during the victorian era.Back then, women who would not or could not get married were condemned to a life of poverty and despair.They survived only by working in sweat shops and nearly starving to death.They were the objects of ridicule and amusement, fear and anxiety.This book delves into all of these facets and also that of the misery of married women who marry a man only to avoid being single.Although the book has a strong feminist bent, it is still good reading and opens one's eyes to the ill treatment that women formerly underwent in times past and the shocking attitude of society.

An honest portrait of modern and antiquated women
Mr. Gissing's tome of feminine insanity:the fickleness,
the crass behavior, and women's inability to balance mind and matter:All encompass how women have not changed through time.

This book is truly remarkable.
If you haven't already, read this book NOW. It is as relevant today as it was the day it was written, the day I first read it as a ninth-grader, and the 5-10 times I've read it since. I have been recommending this remarkable book to serious readers for 25 years and have never heard anything but praise for this incisive social commentary that is as important a work as all the "important" books everybody has heard of (think Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, etc.) except most people have never heard of it. Read and recommend! ... Read more

Product Description
New Grub Street (1891), George Gissing's most highly regarded novel, is the story of men and women forced to make their living by writing. Their daily lives and broken dreams, made and marred by the rigors of urban life and the demands of the fledgling mass communications industry, are presented with vivid realism and unsentimental sympathy. Its telling juxtaposition of the writing careers of the clever and malicious Jaspar Milvain and the honest and struggling Edward Reardon quickly made New Grub Street into a classic work of late Victorian fiction. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Literary Life and Death
"New Grub Street" is considered to be George Gissing's finest novel, and it is indeed a unique piece of Victorian literature.Gissing perfectly captured the hopes and dreams of writers who struggled to make their living through their literature in the 1880s."New Grub Street" evokes the time and temper of the period perfectly and allows readers to follow the trials and tribulations of a variety of characters, almost all of whom are actually rather hard to like.

The main plot focuses on Jasper Milvain and Edwin Reardon.Milvain has great plans for his life and fully expects to carry them out, if only he could have the money to do so.Sponging off his near-destitute mother at the expense of his sisters, Milvain devotes his London life to research and writing for periodicals.Steadily and slowly, he manages to make a name for himself, but continues to pursue the hope of attaining money quickly - by marrying a woman of means.His friend, Edwin Reardon, is the opposite of Milvain.He has experienced success as an author of novels, married a woman he loves desperately, but now has found himself at a dead end, out of creative juice.Writing for him has become a tedious task that causes him to question whether he wants to live or not.Money would certainly make his life easier, but Reardon is rather simple-minded when it comes to financial matters, and not malicious like Milvain.Added into the mix is Alfred Yule, a man who struggles to write literary critiques for the papers with the help of his daughter Marian, a beautiful girl who captures Milvain's eye (but not necessarily his heart), and Reardon's wife, Amy, a woman who finds the possibility of encroaching poverty horrible and coldly helps to seal her husband's sad fate.The majority of these characters, while vividly drawn and extremely realistic, are also highly unlikable.Indeed, the only truly likable character is the extremely poor writer, Harold Biffen, who knows and accepts his place within society even if it might lead to a bitter end.

"New Grub Street" is an intriguing look at what happened to the novelists and journalists at the end of the nineteenth century in England as the country embraced popular journalism and mass communication.Some writers could adapt themselves to meet this change while others could not.Gissing was an intelligent writer: his novel is peppered with allusions and obscure references and imagery that is almost reminiscent of Dante at times.Gissing perfectly captured the elation and despair of his wide cast of characters, staying true to the realities of the people and the time rather than romanticizing what their lives might have been like.

New Grub Street = New Digital Convergence
Gissing carves his characters in extraordinary and engaging relief.Characters are marked, formed by the social dictates of their times, a manner of determined description found in the early writing of Huxley, who was clearly influenced by Gissing (in his very first novels -- before he became a visionary/prophet).One can see a Gissing character amongst one's ownrelationships and acquaintances, so little has changed in actual fact (amazingly so) in terms of social and economic and class positioning. New Grub Street is the New Digital Convergence for the current creative/writerly class.

It is telling, so telling of the facts of the industry of culture of which Gissing was so perceptively critical and insightful of, thathis writing was forgotten, ignored, generally unavailable for quite awhile. Great that Oxford press is putting out this new edition. I wish I had read his books earlier.

One of Gissing's greatest
Not for Gissing the frivolities of gossipy goings on in picturesque country towns. "New Grub Street" is the
story of what faced the majority of writers in the latter part of the 19th Century - writing for Mudies, the
huge circulating library and trying to pad out slight novels into three volumes. Interestingly, by the end of
the 1890's (1897) only 4 novels appeared in the 3 volume edition but in 1894, 184 three volume novels appeared.
So when Gissing wrote "New Grub Street" in 1891 heprobably couldn't see the end in sight.
I have read this book a few times and Reardon is a character who has always irritated me. The main theme running
through the book is the folly of a struggling writer marrying a girl of a higher class (or in Yule's case
marrying at all). The struggle that Reardon goes through trying to find the creative power to finish his book
(a potboiler as it turns out) before the Christmas rent is due is harrowing and extremely realistic to the
reader. Until the end of the book, when Gissing snatches away the sympathy he had given Amy - she comes across
as a practical wife, who is a wonderful mother to their little boy Willie. Granted, she doesn't have the deep
feeling to be a consolation to Reardon, but he goes through a lot of the book selfishly questioning her love
for him. He even resents the little boy. But "ten weeks thereafter, Miss Yule became Mrs. Reardon" - so Reardon
himself was not prudent. He also gave up his job to write full time. He had come into a small inheritance and
decided to travel, then to come back and write - but then he met Amy and married her almost immediately. I
think his problems started when he left his hospital position. "On Neutral Ground" his one success, had been
written when he was employed and there was no stress about money.
Amy's male equivilant, Jasper Milvain is a likable opportunist. Of course he is the villain of the book because
of his treatment of Marian Yule, but they were never suitable partners and there is a passage at the beginning
of Vol. 2 which shows Marian had so little self confidence that she had built Jasper's compliments up to mean
more thanhe really meant. However, when Marian finds that she is to receive an inheritance her confidence
grows. To Gissing wealth equates with power and confidence. Marian also has problems with her father, Alfred
Yule, easily the most dislikable character in the book. He has married "beneath" him - a woman who is not his
intellectual equal and whose working class relatives are introduced in a frightening scene with Yule
(frightening, when you realise how he is going to behave to Marian and her mother). This, actually, causes a
turning point between the father and daughter's relationship. Like many of Gissing's characters, he constantly
needs praise and the low point of his character is when he tries to force Marian to use her inheritance to
finance a magazine of which he will be the editor. Marian, knowing her father's temperament, knows it will be
doomed to failure.
Gissing seemed to change Amy's character from one of sympathy to one of hardness almost in the last few pages.
Amy, though, had always admired Jasper but when Reardon died some of her finer feelings surfaced, also her
sympathetic treatment of Biffen. Marian, also bought out Jasper's finer nature. There is a little speech he
gives, just before he breaks his engagement when he says that it is knaves and hypocrites like him who
succeed and idealists who fall by the wayside. Certainly in the book's last scene Jasper and Amy are complacent
and comfortable with each other - they were destined for each other.
I was wondering whether Jedwood is based on the publisher John Maxwell, who was involved with Mary Elizabeth
Braddon, one of the most popular "sensation" novelist of the day. There was a comment about his wife's novels
being "what the public like". ... Read more

Product Description
In "New Grub Street" George Gissing re-created a microcosm of London's literary society as he had experienced it. His novel is at once a major social document and a story that draws us irresistibly into the twilit world of Edwin Reardon, a struggling novelist, and his friends and acquaintances in Grub Street including Jasper Milvain, an ambitious journalist, and Alfred Yule, an embittered critic. Here Gissing brings to life the bitter battles (fought out in obscure garrets or in the Reading Room of the British Museum) between integrity and the dictates of the market place, the miseries of genteel poverty and the damage that failure and hardship do to human personality and relationships. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

Missing Link
I always wondered what the missing link between Dickens and Orwell might have been. There was clearly an evolution, but how did it move forward, or rather, sorry, how did it get from one to the other? (I expect that hundreds if not thousands of people have answered this question before, but since I am purely an amateur lit-historian, I needed to find out first hand myself.)
Now I would put my first bet on Mr.Gissing. There is so much that Gissing and Orwell share.

New Grub Street is late-Victorian naturalism. It lacks the humor of Dickens (but is not entirely unfunny) and is too bulky for Orwell's times (which had commercial reasons that are explained in the book as well as in the introduction.) One might say that Orwell's aspidistra hero is derived from good Edwin of this Gissing novel, while Jasper's sisters moved straight from Gissing to Orwell's Clergyman's Daughter, however without keeping up their dignity quite as well intact as they did in Gissing.

The introduction to this Penguin edition calls Gissing a very good second rank writer. While that sounds a little mean, it is, in fact, the truth. No first rank writer would be quite so keen on introducing his protagonists with straightforward physical description, right up to giving physiognomic interpretations. A better writer stays away from that and wraps up whatever description is needed in bits and pieces strewn all over the place, so that you, the reader, wonder in the end, why you have such a clear idea of a person that you know only from a book or play.
Gissing's prose was not admirable, you could not lose yourself in it with rapture, but at least he was not cursed with being funny at all cost, which is a major drawback in many English writers (as Orwell himself also said in his 1948 essay about Gissing.) He had a keen eye and ear and he understood social relations. If you want to have a fuller picture of London in the 1880s, this book is right for you.

I read Gissing now mainly because an amazon friend has reviewed a whole lot of Gissing's books, until I gave in and bought one, at random. The New Grub Street is considered GG's masterpiece by some, also by Orwell.I enjoyed it. It is worth my time. I learned from it. (Would you believe that even families that considered themselves 'poor' in this novel have servants working for them?) I do believe it is not top notch though. In other words, make this a 5 star (minus) rating. I have found often that interesting but flawed books provide very profitable investments of my time!

The book is in essence a juxtaposition of 2 contrarian characters from the `literary world'.
Jasper is the calculating, ambitious, scheming, opportunistic, insincere would-be writer who plans to skim the market. What a fool, but he succeeds. We hate him.
Edwin is the idealistic, conceited, clumsy, overly honest, rather pretentious, stubborn `artist', who wants to succeed by shear honest work. What a fool. We can't quite like him.
There is a version Edwin II, in the person of the aging and failing writer Alfred, who is thoroughly dislikable, but who provides the plot with his lovely daughter, who is our main hope for humanity in the story. Her fate is tragic, she would have deserved so much better.

Should writers marry? If so, what kind of woman? This is all too biographical for my taste. Gissing proposed the principle that writers should shun the book market and in order to do so they should marry working class girls who will not distract them by unnatural middle class ambitions. Or marry rich, then the problem walks away. Well, well.
In fact, the whole book moves on the edge of autobiography, more than is good for it. My suggestion: it is better to ignore whatever you know of Gissing's odd personal life.

Gissing's social views were not necessarily in line with his underclass observations. His criticism of certain social facts did not make him a social critic, he was by no means a socialist. He makes a few social statements that may be worth debating, though they don't automatically define his position.
The relatively poor are so much worse off than the absolutely poor. (Another touch of Orwell here!)
Education to them (the relatively poor) is in most cases a mocking cruelty.
Poverty does not allow of honorable feeling.
These are all observations which could be called realistic, not necessarily reactionary. But then there are also some aspects that rather irritate me. Throughout the book, teaching is considered and commented upon as the lowest possible occupation for a human being. I do not find here an explanation for this odd attitude. It must come from some experience, which may be shared elsewhere.
Similarly, his condescending observations about working class women are irritating. Take good Mrs.Yule; she is shown in her family life, where husband and daughter treat her like a pariah, and she fully accepts this role in life. The thing is, GG himself takes the husband's side unfailingly, despite his criticism of social snobbery. When we watch her reading something, we learn about her `slow apprehension, the heart's good-will thwarted by the mind's defect'. Hm.
Not sure I would have liked George Gissing had I met him.

Medical Care is Better Now. Otherwise, the Literary Life...
NEW GRUB STREET is a well made novel that focuses on three interacting families. These are the Milvain family, young migrants to London who are desperate for money, status, and success; the Yule family, an older couple and their twenty-something daughter that depend on the father's toil and modest success in London's cut-throat periodical business; and the Reardon family, a young couple and their baby that must cope with the downward spiral of the husband's literary career.

NEW GRUB STREET is well made because Gissing makes the stories of these very different families pivot on the same few issues. These are money and marriage, ambition, and responsibility within families. When examining ambition, for example, Gissing shows Jasper Milvain's shrewdness, Yule's thwarted ambition and consequent cruelty, and the discordant literary ambitions of Reardon and his wife. Similarly, when examining money and marriage, Gissing shows Jasper's determination to find a wealthy wife, Yule's regret at marrying a poor woman, and Amy Reardon's horror of marriage without money and distinction. NGS is fine work because Gissing keeps his narrative focused on these few issues, without ever preaching about the decisions of his characters. Ultimately, they are all sympathetic, even his selfish winners.

Usually, NGS moves forward through the dialogue of highly articulate characters who explain their point of view with great precision. In general, characters are saying the equivalent of: "In other words, what you're telling me is..." "I have frequently expressed my position, which is..." I suppose the book shows that a skilled author can produce a fine novel while ignoring the show-don't-tell dictum now taught in creative writing 101.

In many ways, NGS is a brutal story, with great success going only to the talented knaves in the literary world of 1885 London. Love and compassion only flower with money... is the novel's harsh message. Still, this is an involving (albeit longish book) and is recommended.

Gissing's shade would smile
Poor Gissing! I suspect his miserable, self-destructive life fuelled his wonderful novels much as (we now know) Dickens's traumatic "blacking-factory" experienceexplains so much of the nightmare world of those gargantuan fictions.Gissing greatly admired Dickens, and like Dostoyevsky, seems to have appreciated the grim side of Dickens most.Not much humor in Gissing; but there is the same shabby poetry one used to see in Bloomsbury back in the 1960s.The same wonderful appreciation of futile, obsessive scholarly lives.Gissing is a great poet and sometimes a rather fine moralist.His pictures of London rival those of the Master (Dickens --and Dore).Don't miss him.Start with "Workers in the Dawn" and "The Nether World"--his passion more than compensates for his crudities.Remember:he was also a very accomplished classicist--more of a scholar than any other major Victorian novelist!A not insignificant fact.

Doesn't deserve obscurity
I recently read New Grub Street, and I must say I was stunned by how much I enjoyed it. Gissing's prose and characterization hold up remarkably well. He's sort of an urban Hardy, though far more accessible to today's reader. I'd recommend this to any serious reader. Oh, and this novel is ripe for adaptation. A BBC miniseries would be great.

Insightinto the Victorian Writing/Publishing Scene
I'm beginning to realize that George Gissing is an author who is relatively unknown by the general public but who is frequently studied/referenced by academics.The main reason why I think this is true (and this relates to the book at hand) is that Gissing himself had more of an academic temperament than a writing temperament.He was very adept at analyzing the world around him and commenting on it to a point of depressing realism, but he wasn't a storyteller.In fact, he struggled with creating enough storylines in order to support himself.Thus, while his books give impressive looks at Victorian life, they don't always leave a reader fully satisfied.

Why do I say this so confidently?Well, as Gissing was particularly self-aware and as he was particularly oppressed when writing "New Grub Street," in this novel he writes about what it's like to be a writer in London in the 1880's and 1890's.He essentially writes about his own life and those he find around him, all of whom are trying to make a living on writing.

Gissings seems to portray himself through the main character, Reardon. When the story opens, Reardon is struggling.His sophisticated wife is getting fed up with their impoverished lifestyle and with her husband's inability to write decent material.Reardon, a sensitive soul, is floundering under mounting pressure and stress.He is torn between his desire to write sophisticated, meaningful material and the public demand for "fluff."The more stressed laid on him, the less he is able to create and stick with any plausible fiction novel.He becomes more and more fererish and unable to work, and he is devastated as he loses his wife's love and respect.

Around this central character Reardon, Gissing builds a very full and weighty cast of characters.A small sampling of these characters are:
- The embittered, older column writer/reviewer, Yule, whose temperament has made so many enemies during his career that he is still laboring hard to support his small family at the end of his life.
- Yule's daugher, Marion, who is very clever but who is also very vulnerable.Her education has made her too good for many positions and marriages but her lack of money makes her a poor match for the educated class.
- Reardon's friend Milvain, who is an ambitious young man who has no problem writing exactly what the masses want.He knows his talents, he knows the market, and he knows his stuff won't last for posterity.But he is determined to live a comfortable life, make a strategic marriage and become a semi-respected man.
- Biffen, another friend of Reardon's, sympathizes most with Reardon's situation and condition.Two peas in a pod, these men spend long hours discuss meter, prose and ancient poetry.

I found myself continually amazed at Gissing's amazing ability to get into the head of many individuals in his large cast and to see how the world makes sense through each's eyes.Gissing also provides us with a wealth of information about the Victorian publishing scene.It was amazing to read that writers and publishers then were struggling with the same issues writers and publishers are struggling with today.

Additionally, Gissing gives you an unglorified look at poverty and the impoverished educated class of London at that time.While Dickens' works on the poor is idyllic and sentimental, Gissing simply relates the life he has known.There is nothing exceptional or amazing, and Gissing seems to argue that poverty takes character out of a man rather then build up a man's character.

Overall, I found this to be a fascinating piece...though perhaps a slow read.For those interested in publishing, writing, realistic portrayals of Victorian England, or other such topics, this is a fantastic work. ... Read more

Product Description
The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Fiction / Classics; Fiction / Literary; Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Social Science / Poverty; ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The Nether World
In his novel "The Nether World", George Gissing offers an unsentimental, grim, and uncompromising portrayal of life in the London slums in the last third of the nineteenth century.Gissing (1853 -- 1903) was a late Victorian English novelist who deserves to be better known. As a promising young student, Gissing fell in love with and stole to support a prostitute, Helen Harrison ("Nell").After a prison term and a subsequent stay in the United States, Gissing returned to England and married Nell in what proved to be a stormy and unhappy relationship for both parties. Nell died in 1888 after she and Gissing had been separated for six years. When Gissing saw the conditions of the foul room in which Nell lived, he vowed to write a book in her memory to expose the abysmal character of London slum life. The result was "The Nether World" (1889). It is Gissing's seventh novel and his fifth and final book set in the London slums. Together with "New Grub Street", "The Odd Women", and "Born in Exile"it is among Gissing's best novels. Unlike most of Gissing's books, it is generally in print and accessible.

Although Nell's death moved Gissing to write this novel, little in it is autobiographical. Gissing had lived in the slums of London he describes after his return from the United States. He was a compulsive and inveterate walker of city streets and a detailed observer of what he saw. He also did a great deal of reading, both of novels and of studies of the urban poor, that found its way into "The Nether World."

The book is lengthy and densely plotted. It is set in its entirety in a small area called Clerkenwell with few scenes of life outside the slum.On first blush, the novel can be read as a series of scenes and episodes of slum life and of characterizations of the varied residents of Clerkenwell. The elaborate plot initially appears hazy but emerges as the book proceeds.The novel includes an extended group of characters who are carefully dilineated. The novel centers on a young man, Sidney Kirkwood and a younger woman, Jane Snowdon. As with other Gissing male lead characters, Kirkwood has a degree of artistic and intellectual interests that makes him restless. He has a steady job setting jewelry which places him on the higher levels of the nether world. Jane Snowdon is a young girl of 13 when the story begins and suffers from abusive treatment from the owners of a cheap rooming house, Clem Peckover and Clem's mother. Jane is rescued from the worst of the abuse by John Hewitt, an aging and struggling worker who rooms with his large family in the Peckover house.

The plot centers upon the appearance of an aged man, Jane's grandfather, Michael Snowdon, and separately upon the appearance of Jane's father, John Snowdon, a wastrel who abandoned Jane when she was young to the cruelties of the Peckovers for whom she works as a scullion. Michael Snowdon has lived in Australia and rumors, which prove to be well-founded, circulate throughout the nether world that he has become wealthy. The plot revolves around Michael's wealth and his will, as John Snowdon and the Peckovers scheme, together and against one another, to take the old man's money upon his death. Their attempts are vicious and low in the extreme. As Jane reaches the age of 16-17, she and Kirkwood fall in love. Kirkwood plans to marry her but backs off because he does not wish to be seen as scheming for Michael's money and because Michael has planned to use his money for charitable purposes only to be administered by Jane and by Sidney. Sidney marries the daughter of John Hewitt, Clara who had spurned him years earlier.Talented, ambitious, and selfish, Clara had run off from Clerkenwell in the hopes of becoming an actress.A rival had thrown acid in Clara's face permanently disfiguring her, and Clara had returned to her father in Clerkenwell because she had no other place to go. Largely out of a sense of duty, Sidney marries Clara in a relationship that proves depressingly unhappy.

Scenes of Clerkenwell, the streets, the garment factories, the fetid, crowded and unsanitary dwellings, the criminality, the hopelessness, and the venality of the residents are tightly drawn without hint of sentimentality or idealism, unlike, for example, Dickens.The descriptive scenes of the novel include a chapter called "Io Saturnalia!", which is a description of the poor masses during a bank holiday.Another chapter "The Soup Kitchen" describes the response of the Clerkenwell residents to attempted charity.

Among the many characters in the novel is a young woman named Pennyloaf Candy who marries Bob Hewitt, the rootless and ultimately criminal son of John.Pennyloadf is subjected to endless abuse which she endures unstintingly.Another figure from Clerkenwell is Mad Jack who functions as a prophetic figure. In a chapter "Mad Jack's dream" late in the book, Mad Jack exclaims:" This life you are now leading is that of the dammed; this place to which you are confined is Hell! There is no escape for you! From poor you shall become poorer; the older you grow, the lower shall you sink in want and misery; at the end there is waiting for you, one and all, a death in abandonment and despair.This is Hell -- Hell-Hell!"

Gissing's portrayal of the nether world is bleak and grim. From this novel, he sees no hope of redemption, either in the form of education, charity, or social change. His attitude towards his characters is a difficult mixture of sympathy and hopelessness."The Nether World" is Gissing at his harshest and most pessimistic. A difficult novel, "The Nether World" succeeds in capturing the world of a woman Gissing loved, Nell Harrison.

Robin Friedman

Don't buy this edition
I'm not commenting on the novel itself here (although it is an interesting, if problematic, look at London's underworld), but I do want to warn readers against buying this Echo Library edition.There is no contextual material (no intro, afterword, or notes), which would have been useful, but more annoying is the fact that the copy editor for this press appears to have been asleep while editing this edition.There are three or four major typos on every page (glaring typos-- periods in the middle of words, apostrophes instead of commas, mispelled words).Sometimes there are even words missing, which makes the prose difficult to follow.This novel is worth reading, but try to find a different edition. ... Read more

Product Description
A novel of social realism, The Odd Women reflects the major sexual and cultural issues of the late nineteenth century.Unlike the "New Woman" novels of the era which challenged the idea that the unmarried woman was superfluous, Gissing satirizes that image and portrays women as "odd" and marginal in relation to an ideal.Set in a grimy, fog-ridden London, Gissing's "odd" women range from the idealistic, financially self-sufficient Mary Barfoot to the Madden sisters who struggle to subsist in low paying jobs and little chance for joy.With narrative detachment, Gissing portrays contemporary society's blatant ambivalence towards its own period of transition. Judged by contemporary critics to be as provocative as Zola and Ibsen, Gissing produced an "intensely modern" work as the issues it raises remain the subject of contemporary debate. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Excellent creatures, but useful for nothing
During the late 19th century, Britain experienced a serious demographic imbalance, when the sex structure of the population had a substantial majority of females. An estimate of 500,000 is mentioned. These `surplus' women were not `pairable' and were called `odd women'. The ambivalence of the word must surely have motivated Gissing to use the word for his title. The novel focuses on the changing role of women in the social fabric.
The `normal' role for women, as defined by the middle class point of view, was the housewife and mother, without education, without income, without own head. A single woman, a working woman, an educated woman was an abnormality. The fate of married women was some kind of lottery as well. Their normal lot was obedience.Divorce was ruled out, property rights were shaped after the male interest, child custody was always with the men in case of breakup of a family.

What happens when there are suddenly thousands of single women who have no provider, no fortune, no training, and no prospects? The novel goes into the sociology and economics of the life of single women, but don't be afraid of a pamphlet. This is a very strong piece of social writing from the late Victorian period. It was published 1892. Gissing was socially conscious, but neither was he a democrat, nor did he honestly sympathize with the fate of the poor classes. At least he was decent enough to reject the term `lower classes', but he didn't seem to realize the contradiction that this produced, as his middle class heroines are just as poor as working class women, and surely just as miserable. His sympathies were with the `de-classed', impoverished middle classes. He had contempt for the uneducated proletarian underdog. He was not in all respects an admirable person.

The novel begins with the introduction of a family with 6 daughters. The father, a widower and a moderately viable provincial medical doctor, dies of an accident without having secured any financial provision for his girls. They have virtually no future other than employment as governesses, companions, shop girls. Marriage, the traditional way, is not a realistic option. Poverty and disease are guaranteed.
The daughters in their helplessness are contrasted with a pair of active, dynamic, independent women, who make a career for themselves and try to help other women. The novel gives us a typology of single women in their attitudes and choices. We also follow different types of marriages and thoughts about marriage.

I find it surprising and disappointing that only about a handful of Gissing's novels are currently in print in decent editions.

Realistic, and ahead of its time
Gissing is always an engaging storyteller, and in this book he writes with sympathy and unflinching honesty about the agonizing choices facing the lower middle class, especially women.Alice and Virginia have little education and no work qualifications so struggle to support themselves as governesses or ladies' companions.Monica has a clerk's schedule with brutal hours and demands so must decide whether to escape to marriage to a man she doesn't love.Some characters are luckier, or make better choices, than others.As is usually the case with Gissing, be prepared for a somewhat depressing but well written and gripping story about believable flesh-and-blood characters.

`I am no tyrant, but I shall rule you for your own good.'
The novel opens in 1872, with Dr Madden and his six daughters living together in a form of domestic harmony which has not prepared the daughters for independent life outside their childhood home.

Alas, this harmony is quickly destroyed.When the need arises for the sisters to earn an income, they face a number of challenges.It is hard for them to reconcile their middle-class respectability and their lack of employment related training with their need to earn income. Marriage is unlikely to be an option for at least two of the sisters because of their relative disadvantage in a society with an oversupply of females relative to males.As the sisters are grappling with this new and harsh reality, an acquaintance of theirs - Rhoda Nunn and her friend Mary Barfoot are assisting women to train for employment.The contrast between the hindrances of the old and the possibilities of the new world for women could not be greater.Are the Madden sisters able to rise to the challenge, and adapt?Is it possible for women to be both married and independent?

I enjoyed this novel for three main reasons.Firstly, the novel explores a number of important class and gender issues in late Victorian culture.Secondly, none of the characters is without flaw.While it is possible to prefer one set of choices over another, no choice is without some cost. Finally, the writing itself guides rather than chides the reader through a story that represents the beginning of an enormous social change - for both men and women.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

"Middlemarch" meets "Taming of the Shrew"
A tale of two romances: 1) a stern rigid older man marries a young woman just at the moment of her awakening to her own identity, a marriage regarded as a mistake by many of their acquaintances, and 2) two prideful, willful people, both intelligent and morally ambitious, both of whom have been scornful of conventional marriage, struggle against being "in love". And that, dear readers, is all I intend to offer in precis of this book.

But wow! I'm agog! I thought, with all the arrogance of Alexander, that there were no more great 'Victorian' English novels to conquer. I was premature; "The Odd Women" is deep, well-constructed and entertaining, a veritable Platonic Form of the 19th C novel of manners. It's a didactic, reformist novel -- what else? -- but its moral tenor is well incorporated into its character development and its reformism is neither pious nor dogmatic. The subject IS marriage and the liberation of women from patriarchal inanition; George Gissing certainly presented himself as a advocate for "the new woman" of self-reliance and unconventionality. Nonetheless, he was an Englishman of his times, highly sensitive to social class, burdened with assumptions and prejudices of class; he positioned himself at the forefront ofprogressive opinion, no doubt, but still within the spectrum thereof.

Gissing bears comparison in many ways to the American novelist Henry James. Gissing was 14 years younger than James, though one would not easily guess it from their novels, yet died a decade earlier. James was by far the more adventurous stylist, but Gissing's characters are more flesh-and-blood, more likely to compel a reader's empathy. Gissing is also a plainer story teller, less susceptible to parentheses and adverbial subtleties. The comparison to the late novels of George Eliot, especially "Middlemarch", probably gives a better idea of Gissing's literary manner, but his psychological insights match those of James and Thomas Hardy. Anyway, that's the 'company' he will keep from now on, on my mental bookshelf.

"The Odd Women" is an ambiguous title - deliberately, I think - referring to the demographic imbalance between the sexes in late 19th c England, with half a million more women than men of marriageable age, but slyly also to the blunt truth that the 'liberated' women of the novel would surely have been regarded as "odd" by many. Gissing portrays women very plausibly, and unlike many 19th C novelists, he gives us women of quite distinct individuality. In this book, and in the one other Gissing book I've read, the women are more vital, more appealing, more substantial than the men, but those men are no mere cartoons. They're also flesh-and-bloody, though they tend to be bloody fools. My one previous Gissing novel was "The Nether World", an earlier production, quite interesting but not nearly as well-crafted as "The Odd Women." My thanks to amazoo cagemate Robin Friedman for badgering me to read this unfairly neglected author. Now let's see what other titles by Gissing are in print ... ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Far, Far Away
When the 22 year old George Gissing (1857 -- 1903) published his first novel in 1880, he was in the midst of a troubled life.A scholarship student at Owens College, Gissing had been expelled and served a month in prison after he had been caught stealing to support a young prostitute, Nell.Gissing then lived in the United States unhappily for a year. He returned to England and married Nell. With Nell's alcoholism, illnesses, and prostitution and the couple's repeated moves from one dreadful apartment to another, the marriage was deeply unhappy. Gissing wanted to support himself as a writer. He worked fervishly on his novel during 1879. It is, in part, a fictionalized account of his relationship with Nell.

Gissing first called his book "Far, Far Away" after a street-song of the London slums quoted during the story.He later adopted the more evocative title "Workers in the Dawn."The novel was rejected by several publishers before it was accepted on condition that Gissing pay the publication and printing costs. Gissing did so using the proceeds of a small inheritance. The book sold poorly and was not reprinted until an American edition appeared in 1935. The book was reissued in 1985 and has now been reissued again in this new edition published by Victorian Secrets, edited and introduced by Debbie Harrison, and with a Preface by the leading scholar of Gissing, Pierre Coustillas.

"Workers in the Dawn" was a young man's book and a first novel. It is a long and wordy book of 600 pages.Although there are some highly impressive passages much of the book is written in a prolix and sometimes stilted writing style. The plot is complex and implausible in places, relying a great deal on coincidence.Some of the climactic scenes in the novel fall flat. There are a great many characters in the book of varying degrees of development, most of whom owe a great deal to Dickens.Gissing's own voice in the story, with his observations, editorializing, and preaching tends to be intrusive. Thus, there are reasons for the neglect of this novel.

With all its faults, I would not part with this book. The book is the first of a series of novels in which Gissing examined the lives of the London poor. The work is written in a tone of seriousness. It is in part a novel of ideas with broad reference to religious and social issues.It captures a degree of rootlessness and restlessness in its characters that has a modernistic tone and that Gissing would develop in his subsequent works.The book deals frankly with issues of sexuality. It is the story of people who are essentially loners.Gissing explores the tensions between a life devoted to art as compared to a life devoted either to social causes or to commercial success.The novel is deeply pessimistic. All told,it was a good effort by its struggling young author.

The novel tells the story of a young man named Arthur Golding from the death of his dissolute father in the London slums when the boy was 8 until Golding's suicide by throwing himself into Niagra Falls at the age of 23.When Golding's father dies, a friend, a country minister named Edward Norman of skeptical tendencies, accepts responsibility for the boy and attempts to educate him in a peaceful rural setting.But Arthur escapes and runs back to London to search for the grave of his father. He becomes irremediably involved in low life. Consumptive and weak, Edward Norman dies young without finding Arthur again, but he leaves Arthur a subsequent bequest in his will which the boy is to receive upon turning 21.After returning to London, Arthur is rescued a life on the streets by a poor printer named Samuel Tollady who esssentially adopts him, teaches him a trade, educates him and encourages the boy in his obvious artistic gift. Arthur ultimately studies art with a friend of Edward Norman, Gresham, who is a successful society painter and the guardian of Norman's daughter Helen.

There are two primary women in Golding's life.The first is Helen Norman, Edward's daughter, a wealthy, idealistic social reformer, and the second is Carrie Mitchell, a working girl and a young prostitute. Early in the book Helen and Arthur develop a romantic interest but they lose track of each other following Tollady's death.Arthur meets and becomes involved with Carrie while she is carrying a child out of wedlock who soon dies. Arthur saves Carrie's life and marries her, but the two do not get along. Arthur cannot resist trying to improve Carrie by educating her and Carrie turns inexorably to alcohol and to prostitution. When Carrie leaves Arthur, Helen and Arthur begin a relationship which Helen ends abrubtly when she learns that Arthur is married.A broken man at the age of 22, Arthur sails to the United States where he wanders aimlessly for a year before killing himself at Niagra Falls.

Gissing is at his best in this novel when he writes of what he knows well: the streets of the London slums and its people, some of the characters, and the plagued relationship between Arthur and Carrie. Gissing has a feel for the life of the poor in London in the 1860s and 1870s.In this book, he describes their lives with passion. In "Workers in the Dawn" Gissing seems to advocate education, of the type Helen Norman tries to carry on, and social activism as a slow but possibly effective cure for the evils of slum life. Arthur's suicide is told dramatically and effectively.The scenes when a young Helen Norman studies philosophy in Germany and develops her social idealism also are presented well and effectively.Helen's ideals of a life of moral activity without religion are central to "Workers in the Dawn."The sections of the book set in rural England outside London and in the middle upper class areas of London tend on the whole to drag. The love affair between Helen and Arthur, and Helen's moral probity and rigidity, tend to be awkward and unconvincing.

This is a book that demands a devoted reader eager to work through it. It will be of most interest to readers with a passion for Gissing: those who have read several of his better-known books and who know something of his life and preoccupations and who wish to see him at his literary near-beginning.Although this book is in a class by itself in some ways, many of Gissing's themes are stated in "Workers in the Dawn." I would not willingly have passed by this book and new edition.

Following "Workers in the Dawn", Gissing would not publish his second novel, "The Unclassed" for four years (1884).The latter book is also set among the London poor and includes among its main characters a struggling young man with literary ambitions who is torn between his feelings for a prostitute and for a prim woman.But the tone of the book differs significantly from the earlier novel. Gissing would proceed with a series of several additional proletarian novels before moving to other social settings later in his life.

The publication of "Workers in the Dawn" by Victorian Secrets making it easily accessible to current readers was an event. This small publisher will be issuing several other rare early novels by Gissing and other neglected Victorian writers in the next few years. Besides the prefaces and notes, this book includes a useful chronology of Gissing's life.The book also includes a map called "Arthur Golding's London" which shows the reader the places Gissing mentions in his story. Many of the landmarks of the London poor quarters were demolished after Gissing wrote. The map is a valuable addition to a volume I will treasure.

Robin Friedman

Thanks Victorian Secrets
First, a thank you for publisher Victorian Secrets for publishing hard to find victorian novels. I was impressed with the foward by Debbie Harrison, extensive notes and the over all quality of this book. Purchaser of Broadview Press, Zitlaw and Valancourt books will welcome this new publisher of Vitorian novels.
I don't feel I can review Gissing novel with any sort of expertise. I just know what I like and this novel had all the tragedy and melodrama that makes Victorian novels so enjoyable.There is no tea parties,no grand room balls, just the gritty, dirty streets of London's poor. If you enjoy the greats, Dickens, Eliot, Collins, try George Gissing, in my opinion a overlook master.
... Read more

Product Description
Most of George Gissing's 23 novels have a certain air of autobiography, despite Gissing's frequent arguments that his fictional plots bear little resemblance to his own life and experiences. Starting with Workers in the Dawn (1880), almost all of Gissing's fictional works are set in his own time period of late-Victorian England, and five of his first six novels focus on the working-class poor that Gissing would have encountered frequently during his early writing career.

While most recent criticism focuses on Gissing's works as biographical narratives, this work approaches Gissing's novels as purely imaginative works of art, giving him the benefit of the doubt regardless of how well his books seem to match up with the events of his own life. By analyzing important themes in his novels and recognizing the power of the artist's imagination, especially through the critical works of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, the author reveals how Gissing's novels present a lived feel of the world Gissing knew firsthand. The author asserts that, at most, Gissing used his personal experiences as a starting point to transform his own life and thoughts into stories that explain the social, personal, and cultural significance of such experiences. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Gissing and the Imagination
The late Victorian novelist George Gissing (1857 -- 1903) has attained increased critical stature since the 1960s. Many readers become interested in Gissing through learning of his life. It is easy and tempting to see the details of Gissing's own life in reading the novels and, thus, to consider his writings as primarily autobiographical. For readers new to Gissing, here are a few aspects of his life.

Born to modest means, Gissing attended Owens College with financial assistance where he loved the Greek and Latin classics.Gissing was expelled from Owens when he stole money to give to a young prostitute, Nell, with whom he had become involved. He served a month in jail. After his release from jail, he spent a year in the United States where he began to write stories.Upon his return to London in 1877, Gissing married Nell, and the marriage proved catastrophic. Gissing lived a poor life in East London supporting himself by tutoring.He began to write novels, beginning with a focus on the life of the lower classes.He wrote prolifically, producing 23 novels and several other works, and ultimately achieved a degree of critical success.After the death of Nell, Gissing made another unhappy marriage to a woman of the lower classes which likewise ended badly. Near the end of his life, he enjoyed a somewhat better relationship with a French woman,Gabrielle Fleury. Gissing's novels begin with works describing and criticizing the condition of the lower classes, such as "The Nether World".They gradually expand their themes and focus as Gissing himself became more successful. A small number of late works come close to the spirit of romance or comedy.

Gissing's novels can be seen as reflecting the details of his sad and difficult life, especially in their focus on the alienated intellectualwith no money and no particular way of supporting himself.Gissing himself rejected this way of understanding his work.And in this new book published by McFarland Publishing,"The Fiction of George Gissing", Lewis Moore shows the importance of the imaginative, in addition to the autobiographical aspects of Gissing's fiction. Moore is a retired professor of English who taught at the University of the District of Columbia for 30 years.

Almost all of Gissing's novels are set in the late Victorian England in which he lived. Moore carefully develops themes in Gissing's fiction to show that the novels offer a way of imaginatively recreating the London of his day. As Moore points out, the mindset and character of Victorian England are difficult for contemporary readers to understand. Gissing's novels, when combined with sensitive and careful reading, offer a way of insight into this lost time.

Moore's study begins with a discussion of the imagination in literature, focusing on its role in the English romantic poetry of Woordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. The emphasis these writers placed on the imagination, Moore argues, is useful for approaching Gissing and understanding his textures and themes.

The body of the studyis in three large parts, in which Moore discusses Gissing's novels and "The Social Imagination", "The Personal Imagination", and "The Cultural Imagination".In part one, Moore develops themes such as violence, class structure, progress and science, marriage and family, politics, and education as they appear in Gissing. In part two, Moore similarly develops themes including money, romance, women, and the individual's relation to society in the novels.In part three, Moore discusses urban and rural scenes in Gissing's fiction, nationalism and imperialism, and religion and morality as they appear in Gissing's work. This part also includes an interesting section on autobiography as it appears in Gissing's "New Grub Street", "The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft" and in the first biography of Gissing, "The Private Life of Henry Maitland" (1912) by Gissing's friend Morley Roberts.The book is cast in the form of a novel. In his treatment of these three books, Moore combines his themes of imagination and autobiography in reading Gissing's fiction.

With the exception of the first section of Part 1, which is an essay on Gissing's "New Grub Street" the study is arranged by themes rather than by novels.Thus, Moore, takes a topic and explores the way Gissing treated it in the course of his writings. Moore's approach has the advantage of showing the continuity of themes in Gissing's fiction and how his approach to his themes developed over the years. Moore's approach also allows consideration of many of Gissing's works which remain obscure and are read far less frequently than his better-known works. The disadvantage of the approach is that it results in a somewhat choppy approach to the novels, as Moore concentrates on aspects of each book to develop his theme. Readers not already familiar with many of the works he discusses may have a difficult time following Moore's details.

I think Moore succeeds in showing that Gissing's novels have value far beyond their autobiographical components. The attempt to see Gissing as an "imaginative" writer within the terms of the English romantic poets is somewhat strained. The comparison tends to overlook Gissing's efforts at realism and to describe honestly the world that he observed. Moore shows that Gissing's books offer one approach to the understanding of Victorian England. But it bears emphasis that Gissing's books explore themes such as commodification, gender, alienation, and integrity that have an importance to the 20th and 21st Centuries as well as to Gissing's own world.I thing Gissing's thoughtful consideration of these and other themes, rather than either autobiography or Victorian England are the major source of his interest to today's readers.

This book will be of most appeal to readers with some prior familiarity with Gissing's life and novels. It should encourage the exploration of the works of this great and still too-little-read writer.

Robin Friedman

... Read more

Product Description
The Nether World (1889), generally regarded as the finest of Gissing's early novels, is a highly dramatic, sometimes violent tale of man's caustic vision shaped by the bitter personal experience of poverty.This tale of intrigue depicts life among the artisans, factory-girls, and slum-dwellers, documenting an inescapable world devoid of sentimentality and steeped with people scheming and struggling to survive.With Zolaesque intensity and relentlessness, Gissing lays bare the economic forces which determine the aspirations and expectations of those born to a life of labor. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

The Nether World
In his novel "The Nether World", George Gissing offers an unsentimental, grim, and uncompromising portrayal of life in the London slums in the last third of the nineteenth century. Gissing (1853 -- 1903) was a late Victorian English novelist who deserves to be better known. As a promising young student, Gissing fell in love with and stole to support a prostitute, Helen Harrison ("Nell").After a prison term and a subsequent stay in the United States, Gissing returned to England and married Nell in what proved to be a stormy and unhappy relationship for both parties. Nell died in 1888 after she and Gissing had been separated for six years. When Gissing saw the conditions of the foul room in which Nell lived, he vowed to write a book in her memory to expose the abysmal character of London slum life. The result was "The Nether World" (1889). It is Gissing's seventh novel and his fifth and final book set in the London slums. Together with "New Grub Street", "The Odd Women", and "Born in Exile" it is among Gissing's best novels. Unlike most of Gissing's books, it is generally in print and accessible.

Although Nell's death moved Gissing to write this novel, little in it is autobiographical. Gissing had lived in the slums of London he describes after his return from the United States. He was a compulsive and inveterate walker of city streets and a detailed observer of what he saw. He also did a great deal of reading, both of novels and of studies of the urban poor, that found its way into "The Nether World."

The book is lengthy and densely plotted. It is set in its entirety in a small area called Clerkenwell with few scenes of life outside the slum. On first blush, the novel can be read as a series of scenes and episodes of slum life and of characterizations of the varied residents of Clerkenwell. The elaborate plot initially appears hazy but emerges as the book proceeds. The novel includes an extended group of characters who are carefully dilineated. The novel centers on a young man, Sidney Kirkwood and a younger woman, Jane Snowdon. As with other Gissing male lead characters, Kirkwood has a degree of artistic and intellectual interests that makes him restless. He has a steady job setting jewelry which places him on the higher levels of the nether world. Jane Snowdon is a young girl of 13 when the story begins and suffers from abusive treatment from the owners of a cheap rooming house, Clem Peckover and Clem's mother. Jane is rescued from the worst of the abuse by John Hewitt, an aging and struggling worker who rooms with his large family in the Peckover house.

The plot centers upon the appearance of an aged man, Jane's grandfather, Michael Snowdon, and separately upon the appearance of Jane's father, John Snowdon, a wastrel who abandoned Jane when she was young to the cruelties of the Peckovers for whom she works as a scullion. Michael Snowdon has lived in Australia and rumors, which prove to be well-founded, circulate throughout the nether world that he has become wealthy. The plot revolves around Michael's wealth and his will, as John Snowdon and the Peckovers scheme, together and against one another, to take the old man's money upon his death. Their attempts are vicious and low in the extreme. As Jane reaches the age of 16-17, she and Kirkwood fall in love. Kirkwood plans to marry her but backs off because he does not wish to be seen as scheming for Michael's money and because Michael has planned to use his money for charitable purposes only to be administered by Jane and by Sidney. Sidney marries the daughter of John Hewitt, Clara who had spurned him years earlier. Talented, ambitious, and selfish, Clara had run off from Clerkenwell in the hopes of becoming an actress. A rival had thrown acid in Clara's face permanently disfiguring her, and Clara had returned to her father in Clerkenwell because she had no other place to go. Largely out of a sense of duty, Sidney marries Clara in a relationship that proves depressingly unhappy.

Scenes of Clerkenwell, the streets, the garment factories, the fetid, crowded and unsanitary dwellings, the criminality, the hopelessness, and the venality of the residents are tightly drawn without hint of sentimentality or idealism, unlike, for example, Dickens. The descriptive scenes of the novel include a chapter called "Io Saturnalia!", which is a description of the poor masses during a bank holiday. Another chapter "The Soup Kitchen" describes the response of the Clerkenwell residents to attempted charity.

Among the many characters in the novel is a young woman named Pennyloaf Candy who marries Bob Hewitt, the rootless and ultimately criminal son of John. Pennyloaf is subjected to endless abuse which she endures unstintingly. Another figure from Clerkenwell is Mad Jack who functions as a prophetic figure. In a chapter "Mad Jack's dream" late in the book, Mad Jack exclaims:" This life you are now leading is that of the dammed; this place to which you are confined is Hell! There is no escape for you! From poor you shall become poorer; the older you grow, the lower shall you sink in want and misery; at the end there is waiting for you, one and all, a death in abandonment and despair. This is Hell -- Hell-Hell!"

Gissing's portrayal of the nether world is bleak and grim. From this novel, he sees no hope of redemption, either in the form of education, charity, or social change. His attitude towards his characters is a difficult mixture of sympathy and hopelessness. "The Nether World" is Gissing at his harshest and most pessimistic. A difficult novel, "The Nether World" succeeds in capturing the world of a woman Gissing loved, Nell Harrison.

Robin Friedman

Looking Down
George Gissing despised poverty and loathed the poor, an odd paradox from reader's perspective in 2010 but rather fundamental to late 19th C 'Progressivism". The poor of London, in Gissing's novel "The Nether World" and perhaps in Gissing's reality as well, were abject, vicious, improvident, and sickly - degenerate both morally and physically - but it wasn't their fault. Poverty made them what they were. Gissing, as an ardent Progressive, believed that society could and should remedy the diseases of capitalism:

""Well, as every one must needs have his panacea for the ills of society, let me inform you of mine. To humanise the multitude two things are necessary -- two things of the simplest kind conceivable. In the first place you must effect an entire change in economic conditions: a preliminary step of which every tyro will recognise the easiness; then you must bring to bear on the new order of things the constant influence of music. Does not the prescription recommend itself? It is jesting in earnest. For, work as you will, ther is no chance of a new and better world until the old be utterly destroyed."

An entire change in economic conditions! Oh, of course, no sweat! I could effect that in my sleep. Yes, yes, Gissing IS being sarcastic, but his vision of curing the ills of society DOES begin with better wages and working conditions, and with regulating the greed of Capitalism. It includes 'urban redevelopment' also - the resettling of the poor in more healthful rural locales where they will reacquire teh moral strengths of 'country folk.' Gissing hated cities. He also hated the 'recreations' of the poor, especially drinking. His recipe for moral and physical regeneration of the poor did include 'healthy' doses of higher culture, whether they liked it or not: concerts, books, lyceums, etc.

Don't get the idea that Gissing was a revolutionary or a utopian, however. As I said, he was a "Progressive" in the lineage of Jane Addams, Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt, and Frank Llloyd Wright, the visionary of the "garden suburb". Those names are all Americans; alas, I know nothing about the British equivalent of the Progressive movement in America, but Gissing is ample evidence that such ideas were transatlantic.

It's worth wondering whom Gissing wrote for, who his audience might have been. By his own account, it couldn't have been the Poor, not even the respectable working poor; they weren't readers, that was part of their malady. But Gissing wasn't the only novelist to sell books to the 'better classes' on the basis of rather lurid, sensational portrayals of lower class hardships and vices. Dickens's "Hard Times" and other novels, Gaskell's "North and South", Crane's "Maggie, Girl of the Streets" all come quickly to mind, among writers roughly contemporary to Gissing. And the genre wasn't new; Fielding, Defoe, and Richardson had cultivated the same market niche. Is it that comfortable middle class readers find voyeuristic thrills in reading about the "poor, confused, abused, misused, strung out ones and worse"? The taste hasn't faded in our times; novels about fringe-dwellers outsell novels about upstanding citizens. Or is the impetus simply "there but for fortune go you and I"?

Gissing was a craftsman of a novelist. "The Nether World" bears comparison to novels by Dickens and Gaskell in its fecundity of description. It has a well-shaped plot and a cast of characters both sympathetic and revolting. Gissing lacked Dickens's flamboyant sense of humor, but to his credit, he also lacked Dickens's commitment to the mandatory improbable "happy ending". The Nether World ends with painful plausibility, as it should, given Gissing's sociological stance. Some critics seem to regard Gissing as a harbinger of 20th C literary styles, linking him to Thomas Hardy and George Orwell. I wouldn't agree. His 'omniscient' narrative structure and his High Victorian syntax read more like works written before 1889 (the publication date of Nether World) than after. This is the only novel of his that I've read, however; perhaps later works were more stylistically adventuresome. Comparison to the French writer Emile Zola makes more sense; Gissing is not as powerful and affective a writer as Zola, but close enough to be worth re-discovery. After all, the stock of great 19th C novels in English is large but not infinite; after you've read Eliot, Thackery, Trollope, Gaskell, and Dickens, you should be heartened to realize that Gissing is in the queue.

Another True Glimpse at Victorian Times
In "The Nether World," Gissing gives you another one of his hard, realistic looks at life in London in Victorian times.This time he focuses on the poorest of the poor in the Clerkenwell area of London.These are people whom England's infantile labor laws generally can't help.If/When they can find work, they often work 16 hours per day all week, and the wages they earn hardly cover rent for a very small room in disreputable housing.It's a world where unwanted children multiply like rabbits, and the death of any family member is usually seen as a relief of one less mouth to feed.

For all these reasons, this world - this nether world - is a world about which the upper and middle classes are happily ignorant.Those born into these lowest levels of humanity often rail about the injustice of being born into such circumstances.However, their cries for social reform, their desperate attempts to better themselves, and their pitiful needs for simple pennies are never really heard or understood by those more comfortably off.

Within this novel, then, Gissing explores the lives of a range of characters as they deal with being born in the nether world.While he focuses on the heart-warming characters of Jane Snowdon and Sidney Kirkwood, Gissing competently develops the storyline of a large number of other Clerkenwell characters whose lives intertwine with Jane's and Sidney's.In his distinct manner, Gissing is mercilessly honest and yet generally compassionate with the characters whose lives he examines.Thus, he offers a glimpse of the slums - full of love, ambition, corruption, greed, and despair - in a manner that many of us would never know otherwise.

Many compare or try to compare this kind of honest look at the rougher side of London with Dickens.However, it is important to note that Dickens tended to idealize poverty and always brought things to a hopeful, positive ending.Gissing does no such thing.Though an educated man, Gissing himself suffered cruelly from poverty and mixed with these classes as he struggled to support himself as an author (see "New Grub Street").Thus, he has no idealist views of poverty and simplistic lives.

Additionally, Gissing has a penchant for realistic storylines.It is unnerving to read his books, actually, because you can't rest on the fact that he will work everything out nicely in the end.In fact, he usually doesn't.He is courageous enough to write true-to-life outcomes to very frustrating, dispiriting circumstances.It is probably why he never became a popular author as readers often want happy endings - with a Ghost of Christmas Past if necessary - in order to relieve their consciences.

All in all, another great work by Gissing.He does get a bit preachy (even as he reveals the preachiness of others as futile), but that is easily overlooked.The accurate historical glimpse of London that he gives is invaluable.And I imagine that his brutally honest portrayal of life might speak to the impoverished among us today

Typical Depressing times
I read this book for a class. I found it interesting, but it is certainly not one I would pick for a little weekend reading. It is very heavy, and depressing -- which is very typical of the British Victorian Era (when discussing the working class). It traces the lives of a number of working class people and their trials. Being that life for them was not a very optomistic place it is easy to understand why this book is rather dark. It took a while to get into, but once into it I did enjoy it. (as much as possible). ... Read more

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The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Switzerland; ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

This is a good solid Gissing read
Being a shorter than many of Gissing's other novels, this might be an easier read. Missing are the numerous subplots and detailed character development, but still a fine novel.

One of the characters in Gissings "New Grub Street" is a penniless writer working tirelessly on a novel about a grocer, that was sure to bomb with readers. I found myself thinking that I'd quite like to read the fictional "Mr. Bailey, Grocer" and here it is... in a way.

The story is of a comfortable upper-class financier who loses his money in one bad business deal. In order to make a living for himself and his mom/sister, Will Warburton decides to buy a grocery store and work there. This was a big deal in Victorian times, because a grocer was a big step down in the class hierarchy for an upper class man.

By teaming up with the very-working class Allchin, the grocery is a modest success from day one. Slowly Will comes to terms with his new occupation, and works up the courage to think about marriage.

A parallel plot involves Norbert Franks, a struggling artist who makes it big. Will Mr. Franks and his wife allow the now working-class Will Warburton to sit in their parlor? be introduced to their friends? These are the dilemmas of the Victorian class system.

Gissing's Romance of Real Life
George Gissing's (1857 - 1903) last completed novel "Will Warburton: a Romance of Real Life" was published posthumously in 1904. Frequently overlooked or downplayed among his works, "Will Warburton" shows marked shifts for Gissing.Moving from his characteristic pessimism, Gissing's novel is indeed a romance that ends happily in a successful courtship and marriage between two people much in love. In the book, Gissing's hero moves from the ranks of the upper-middle class to a lower social strata. The novel is set in London against the background of greed, business speculation and financial ruin.Thus it has a disquietingly contemporary feel.

As the book opens, Will Warburton, young, open-hearted and generous,is in the business of refining sugar with his improvident and scheming friend Godfrey Sherwood.With the businese experiencing difficulties, Sherwood proposes that the pair cut their losses in sugar refining and become involved instead in the manufacture of jam. Warburton acquires the necessary capital from his aging mother and his sister, who sell a treasured family property to finance the venture. To keep them from penury, Warburton plans on paying his mother and sister a varying share of interest from the profits of the jam business. Alas the business comes to naught.Sherwood quickly loses Warburton's capital, as well as his own, in a stock market speculation. Warburton is ruined.

With his small remaining funds and the assistance of a man named Allchief, a brusque individual who tends to engage in fighting when unoccupied with work, Warburton opens a small grocery store under the name of Jollyman. Gissing makes much of Warburton giving up his business dress and wearing instead the apron of a grocer as reflective of his diminution in class. Warburton keeps his new occupation, a distinct step down in his own eyes and in the eyes of others, a secret in order to save his mother and sister from embarrassment.The shop prospers and Warburton is able to pay his mother and sister the promised minimal return on their capital. But Warburton remains ashamed and ambivalent about his new career. He also feels guilty over his secrecy and deception.

The novel sets off Warburton's upper class friends with his newly-acquired friends to the detriment, on the whole, of the former.Warburton's story is contrasted with that of a young painter and friend, Norbert Franks, whose efforts Warburton had encouraged at an early stage of Frank's career with loans.Franks had aspired to serious art, but he becomes a portrait painter who achieves great financial success with no artistic distinction. In his poor days, Frank had tried to win the love of a beautiful amateur painter, Rosamund Evan, who accepts his marriage proposal but then jilts him.Frank then courts a poor but talented artist, Bertha Cross.With the seeming end of the relationship between Franks and Rosamund, Warburton cautiously tries to court Rosamund. She is responsive at first but ends the relationship abruptly when she visits the grocery store andsees that Warburton is the proprietor, Jollyman. Rosamund then returns to Franks whom, up until the discovery of Jollyman, she had continued to spurn. Franks is all-too-willing to leave Bertha for the beautiful Rosamund, even though Rosamund had earlier abandoned him. Warburton begins courting Bertha who is able to look to his heart and not to his grocer's apron. She accepts him.Warburton continues his modest life as a grocer with its independence.He becomes free of social cant and open and accepting about his position in life. The married couple, Franks and Rosamund want little to do with their former friend Warburton, and Gissing is emphatic that Warburton is well rid of them.

In Gissing's best-known novel, "New Grub Street", which tells of literary life in Victorian London, Gissing draws a portrait of a poor, serious writer, Biffen, who does not write to please the multitudes.Biffen works diligently on a work of social realism that has no chance of achieving popularity, a novel called"Mr Bailey: Grocer". The novel explores the lives of those whom Biffen calls the "ignobly decent".In a climactic scene in "New Grub Street", Biffen rushes into a burning building to save the manuscript of "Mr. Bailey:Grocer" from destruction."Will Warburton" is Gissing's own "Mr. Bailey: Grocer" with its portrayal of the unglamorous but stolidly honest life of the hero. In its portrait of love and romance, "Will Warburton" also bears resemblances to another earlier Gissing work, the short novel "Eve's Ransom"(1895)in which the young protagonist, Maurice Hilliard, loses the woman he loves to a wealthier man but finds peace and independence for himself.

Unfortunately little read today, "Will Warburton" explores Gissing's familiar themes of love relationships, art, and commerce, with a light, humorous touch and, most importantly, a great deal of hope. Gissing ended his career fittingly with this novel."Will Warburton" deserves to be remembered and read.

Robin Friedman

Coda
This novel examines the qualities of character that lifted (or sank) persons of the working and monied classes of Victorian England.It is similar in tone to Gissing's "Eve's Ransom" in that it observes how a principled young man might navigate difficult dilemmas.It is similar to that book also because it uses romance among the young adults as a way of forwarding the plot.

This was written during Gissing's final months, when he was dying of emphysema.It was published posthumously.The author's struggles with energy are evident in the short chapters and in the somewhat under-developed story.On the other hand, the spare, straight-ahead quality of the novel give it a briskness and tempo missing in the more philosophical novels like *Born In Exile.*Even in these compromised writing conditions, Gising's talent shines bright.I found it difficult to put the book down, especially in the second half. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a basic work on Charles Dickens by Dickens's most ardent post-Victorian defender, the "Chronicler of Grubb Street." Still an important study for all who wish to know Dickens better.

THIS TITLE IS CITED AND RECOMMENDED BY:Books for College Libraries; Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature; Catalogue of the Lamont Library, Harvard College. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Charles Dickens A Critical Study
SINCE I OWN THE 104 YEARS OLD SET OF BOOKS, I ENJOYED READINGTHIS AND WRITING NOTES [IN THE MARGINS] FOR SCHOOL CLASSES.THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE WITH THE OLD BOOKS..IT WOULD DESTORY THEM...AND AMAZON WILL FIND A BOOK FOR ANYONE IF THE QUESTION IS ASKED. THANKS AMAZON FOR RESEARCH...DORAN E. FIGART ... Read more

Product Description
Publisher: Manchester University PressPublication date: 1922Subjects: Gissing, George, 1857-1903Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there. ... Read more

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For more than a week my pen has lain untouched. I have written nothing for seven whole days- not even a letter. (Excerpt) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Look back in ambiguity
Pondering about the New Grub Street experience as a free writer after surviving it (contrary to the hero of Gissing's novel New Grub Street), Gissing's protagonist here remembers the hunger and the hard labor and the miserable lodgings, but also the freedom and the delight in books.

Henry Ryecroft is a man in his 50s, a former professional writer who barely survived the life style. Then he made an unexpected inheritance and a moderate allowance allows him a comfortable solitary silent life in Devon, attended by an elderly helper.
He watches nature and listens to birds and he thinks about the world and he remembers his life, and the result is a `novel' in a diary/memoir/essay/aphorism style.

The man is an elitist and an anti-democrat:
`I am no friend of the people. Every instinct of my being is anti-democratic.'
`Man is not made for peaceful intercourse with his fellows.'
At the same time he is anti-intellectual: `Intelligence of the heart is spoiled by too much education.'
He is in his own assessment much older than his years, both mentally and physically.
He has always been a loner:
`There have always been two entities: myself and the world. The normal relationship between these two was hostile.'
And yet, he also regrets his isolation.
He reads less and thinks more, but then doubts the value of thinking in his situation:
`What is the use of thought which can no longer serve to direct life? Better to read incessantly, losing one's futile self in the activity of other minds.'
Hm, food for thought.

In other words, this is a realistic picture of an aging man with two minds about himself. Without liking Henry, I like the book a lot. Henry's deep cultural pessimism reminds me of Thomas Bernhard: how would TB have written this rant? I am not implying that Bernhard would have done it better; he would just have used the same man and come up with a Bernhardian lament.

The material is structured in 4 about equal sections called after the seasons. That seems to be mainly related to the subjects of Henry's nature observations, but I can't exclude a deeper allegorical meaning. I am still thinking about that. Each section has chapters of various lengths, which adds to the aphoristical character of the book.

I am deducting a star not for any fault of Gissing's, but for my unhappiness with this edition. It is a bare-nekkid edition. You don't even get basic information about the publishing history, nor any notes, say translating the foreign language text morsels that Henry injects. My Latin is not solid enough to do without. I usually just figure out what it is about, but can't really grasp the point.
Furthermore, the paper is dirt cheap. The cover card boards curl up on you, which is a disgusting thing to do for a book cover.

Henry Ryecroft
"The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft" (1903) was once the most widely-read work of the English novelist George Gissing (1857 - 1903). It was Gissing's own favorite among his works. The book appeared in the year of Gissing's death. Gissing lived a difficult life which became the basis for much of his over 20 novels. As a youth, he was expelled from an exclusive school and imprisoned for stealing to support a prostitute, with whom he subsequently made an unhappy marriage.He lived in squalor for many years in the garrets of London while writing prolifically.His early novels deal with the urban poor while the latter books include a broader spectrum of characters as Gissing's own situation improved.He writes of the commodification of art and of the difficulty of achieving personal autonomy in a commercial culture and in a state of poverty.Today, Gissing's most famous work is "New Grub Street", a pessimistic story of London literary life.

Many readers see "Ryecroft" as at least partially autobiographical. The book is cast in an unusual form.It opens with a Preface by Gissing himself ("G.G.") which gives the outline of the life of his fictional protagonist. For more twenty years, Gissing tells the reader, Ryecroft had labored in obscurity in the poor quarters of London attempting to made a living by his pen. At the age of 50, Ryecroft received an unexpected testamentary gift which enabled him to leave London and retire to a modest cottage in Exeter accompanied only by an elderly woman domestic. Ryecroft enjoyed a few years of peace and contentment in the country before dying of a heart ailment. Then, the story goes, the narrator went through Ryecroft's papers and found a diary of his observations and meditations which the narrator edited, organized, and published as Ryecroft's "Private Papers." The body of the work is organized into four chapters, titled "Spring", "Summer", "Autumn" and "Winter" of Ryecroft's meditations and thoughts. Each of these chapters is, in turn, organized into a number of short chapters, some interconnected and some rambling and discrete.

Ryecroft muses about his life in the country and how he has found a measure of peace at last.Although he is a different type of person in many ways, I thought of Thoreau and Walden in reading Ryecroft's fictitious diary. Both Ryecroft and Thoreau love solitude and both spend much time in long walks through the country observing flowers, rivers and meadows, and birds. Both characters, Ryecroft more than Thoreau, are highly bookish. Many of the memorable passages in Gissing's book describe his characters love for books, especially the classics and his experiences in purchasing books as a struggling writer in his garret, carrying them home, reading them and, on occasion, being forced to sell them. Ryecroft in his solitude remains enamored of his books, not only with rereading them but with their mere sight and even with their smell.Ryecroft's musings also involve, as Thoreau's do not, his life as a young writer in London.Ryecroft recalls with life of poverty, struggle, and pain, as he tried to eke out a living as a writer.

There is a great deal in Ryecroft about the hardships of poverty which sometimes imparts a materialistic cast to the work. But Ryecroft is unending in his criticism of a commercial, competitive urban society which, he believes, forces some people to live in squalor and prohibits the development of the mind and heart. When he retires to the country, Ryecroft is not wealthy. But he does have the means he finds necessary for a life of freedom and independence.

In the book, Ryecroft offers his thoughts on many subjects including England, which for all the fault he finds in it he loves dearly, class structure,democracy (which he dislikes), the United States, the rise of science, history, nature, his childhood, philosophy, his attitude towards death, books, friendship, and much else. Interestingly, there is little in the book on relations with women and on the sexuality which proved to be a source of the highest difficulty for Gissing in his own life.The meditations in the book are of a distinctly mixed quality.The sections that for me detracted markedly from the book were those at the beginning of the final "Winter" chapter in which Ryecroft talks interminably of his fondness for English beef and of the qualities of a good pat of butter. This gourmandizing is off-putting in the context of the book.Some readers also find a defensive, critical and defeated tone in Ryecroft.On the whole, I think the book tells of a successful effort to attain peace and to accept one's past.

I have returned to Ryecroft and to Gissing frequently over the years. Ryecroft remains an unusual book about a difficult character who resists easy conceptualization.On my latest reading of Ryecroft, I concluded with some reluctance that it was not the equal of the best of Gissing in books such as "New Grub Street", "Born in Exile" or "The Odd Women". I was less taken with the book in my most recent reading than when I first encountered the book years ago. Even so, the writing in the book is eloquent, ornate and most of the time moving.I enjoyed reentering Ryecroft's world, hearing his voice again, and sometimes taking issue with him.

Robin Friedman ... Read more

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First published 1885 ... Read more

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Leaving his lowly Midlands home to pursue his career as a journalist among the free-thinkers of London, Godwin Peak's origins and poverty hinder him at every turn. Publishing an article attacking the hypocrisy of the Victorian Church gives him his break, but the roseate future blackens when he falls catastrophically in love with the devout Sidwell Warricombe. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Finding a place in "soiciety"
As some of the other reviewers mentioned, this novel is concerned with the rigid class system of Victorian times, and also the changing attitudes towards religion. This makes it a somewhat ponderous read these days. You sort of need to know what was a conventional view or both religion and society in those days, and what wasn't.

The novel is about a middle class man who wants desperately to fit in to upper class society. This was easier said than done in those days. He might be an atheist, who believes in evolution... but still he wants gain favor with the "right people." In fact he wants it so bad, that he pretends to be something he is not, and goes so far as to begin studying for the priesthood. Well, when he starts a-courtin' one of the upper class ladies her family finds him out.

Peak feels that he was `born in exile' because he feels he should have been born to the upper classes--in spite of his modern and radical views. He does a lot of crummy things to people around him to gain entrance to "society." So the novel is really about conventions, belief and hypocrisy.

Overlooked Novel
It seems astounding to me that Gissing is so over-looked, as he has much to offer readers.It seems that his body of work is unjustifiably ignored even by afficianados of Victorian fiction and persons interested in the transformations from late 1800s into the modern, industrial 20th century.Gissing was a writer who did not feel compelled to make genteel his understanding of human nature and romanticize the characters in his plots.He seemed intent on reflecting the temperaments, divided interests, internal conflicts, fickleness, aspirations, and behaviors of his flawed, realistic players.He did not play to the emotions as much as Dickens-- Gissing was prone to reality-based turns of events and did not sensationalize the tragedy.Instead, he was attuned to a more realistic psychology.His characters' goals AND subconscious motivations fuel the plots.He had much to observe about social mores of his time and about changes in religion, philosophy, social strata, and gender roles.Born In Exile, like The Odd Women, is not as tragic or uncomfortable as one might expect from the press Gissing has gotten.I highly recommend these books for serious readers.

a slow yet thought-provoking slice of 1890s Britain..
While Born in Exile is certainly a novel, it is actually a study of the spiritual/social upheavals during 1890s Britain.The aristocracy was losing its hold on power in the media, government and the church to the 'radicals', namely the emerging working class in democratic society.The main character in this novel is caught in the crossroads.On the one hand he aspires for the wealth and prestige found in the aristocracy, yet his background is humble and his spiritual beliefs are very modern (eg, he believes in evolution).His disgust of his working-class family and friends drive him to become a country 'gentleman' at all costs ... to the extent of becoming a complete charleton, abusing people's kind graces and forfeiting his own strongly-held religious beliefs.The end result is not entirely predictable.

Born in Exile is a very intense read.It does plod along with excessive philisophical bantering.But the second half does move along at a reasonable pace and, overall, it is a worthy read.

Bottom line: Gissing fans will love Born in Exile.George Gissing newbies should first read New Grub Street, his masterpiece.

Our friend, the Charlatan.
George Gissing is not a name most people would recognize as one of the great Victorian novelists.Though always admired by those who experienced his powerful and original work,he never achieved the wide readership that the critically underrated Trollope has,let alone the perennial favorites-the Brontes and Dickens.Even obviously lesser yet talented authors such as Wilkie Collins,Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Marie Corelli are certainly more read today than Gissing.Yet he was best English novelist(along with Thomas Hardy and Robert Louis Stevenson) of the late Victorian era with his unsparing realism and trenchant observations on class and manners filtered through a nervous and uncertain sensibility.His comparative obscurity may be due to the reputation his work has for being depressing(it is not)and his iconoclasm-he was an agnostic maverick whose criticisms of capitalism,religion and sex still will unease those seeking in Victorian literature an escape to simpler,kinder times.What is most remarkable about George Gissing(and sometimes most poignant)is that he had no set philosophy and was himself unable to extract concrete and assuring meanings from life even as he attempted to depict and explicate it."Born in Exile" tells the story of one Godwin Peake,a poor,socially insecure but brilliant college graduate whose yearnings to belong to the "respectable" world clash with his intellectual rejection of its conservatism. Peake,an atheist,shares little sympathy with his poor religious family and is humiliated by the "commoness" of some of his relations' work.Overly sensitive and with only his intelligence to support his pride,Peake happens to be invited to the home of a good natured but popular college hero,whose wealth and breeding expose him to a world he has only dreamed about.Peake there meets his kind studious clergyman father and beautiful graceful sister,and being subjected for the first time to respect,interest and charm,he begins to find himself doing anything to fit in-including initiating a series of lies to mask his radical opinions."Born in Exile" powerfully portrays the complexities of living a double life;its critical yet sympathetic treatment of its protagonist humanely examines the limited and cloudy choices of "this prison called life" and the merciless and clearcut repercussions that entail.In addition,"Born in Exile" is autobiographical-a similiar situation happened to Gissing in reality. George Gissing wrote many great novels in the 1890's-this is an excellent and memorable place(if you are a neophyte )to start.END ... Read more

Product Description
Half biography and half critical study, this bookabout George Gissing is for the general reader. It draws a parallel between thewomen in Gissing's life and the women in his novels. His books span the lasttwo decades of the nineteenth century and are memorable for their portraits ofwomen. Only a few women played active roles in Gissing's life, but all exerteda lasting influence. Their imprint allowed him to portray women vividly andwith unerring realism, though at times in variable tones of gray...in charcoal.Gissing's feminine portraiture, rendered in shades of somber experience, is oneof the most striking features of his work and one of the most valuable for thereader of today. It derived from his intense and abiding interest in the womenof his time and the way they lived their lives. His portraits of women, warmand human, were shaped in all their detail by an essential sympathy that madethem neither topical nor contemporary but timeless. Some of the women in hislife became models for fictional women as alive today as when he first createdthem. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

an essential book to understanding Gissing
George Gissing wrote about vital, memorable women. From Pennyloaf Candy,
the slum girl who triumphs in spite of her circumstances in "The Nether
World", Cecily Doran, a beautiful girl, classically educated, who finds
out about the sordid side of life in "The Emancipated" to Nancy Lord,
another girl whose world crashes down around her in "In the Year of
Jubilee". His women seem to memore developed and three dimensional than
most other Victorian novelists.
This book is quite essential to anyone wanting to understand Gissing. Not
really a biography - more a critical study. The part I found most
interesting is that at the end of his life when he achieved (he felt) a
lasting happiness his books suddenly became run of the mill. Gissing
needed stress and anxiety in order to write at his brilliant best. "New
Grub Street", "The Odd Women" and "In the Year of Jubilee" arguably three
of his best books were written at a time in his life when he was battling
with his extremely unstable 2nd wife (she eventually ended up in an insane
asylum).
There is a long analysis of "The Crown of Life" and how he came to write
it. In most of the articles I have read about Gissing there is never much
written about the book - critics did not like it. It definately doesn't
sound as interesting or exciting as his other books. I have read "The Born
Exile" by Gillian Tindall and that is a highly recommended biography but
Haydock's "Portraits in Charcoal: George Gissing's Women" is a wonderful
companion piece that fills in some missing pieces. ... Read more

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The Paying Guest. please visit www.valdebooks.com for a full list of titles ... Read more

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At breakfast her behaviour was marked with excessive decorum. To the ordinary civilities of her host and hostess she replied softly, modestly, in the manner of a very young and timid girl; save when addressed, she kept silence, and sat with head inclined; a virginal freshness breathed about her; she ate very little, and that without her usual gusto, but rather as if performing a dainty ceremony. Her eyes never moved in Mumford's direction. ... Read more