A Critical Survey with Illustrations
Gissing's
fiction is broadly naturalistic and anti-romantic in flavour and exclusively
urban in setting. His early novels are set among the
A
typical piece of scene-painting, showing what an excellent eye for detail
Gissing had even at the start of his career, is the night market which opens
Workers in the Dawn (1880). No other writer of the time was better at conveying
the drab squalor of poor
Gissing
was a deeply conservative man, in love with order and tradition, yet these sat
oddly with his personality, which was neurotic, self-punishing and restless to
a fault. He was out of tune with all the popular enthusiasms of his day. He distrusted
science and condemned the proponents of progress, mocking them vigorously. He
was blankly indifferent to party politics. He scoffed at Christianity as a
secular institution, and indeed seemed to regard the religious impulse itself
as an unfortunate innate infirmity of the human mind. The worlds of trade and
industry rarely figure in any positive light in his novels, though he can draw
a successful capitalist or man of business with a half-admiring horror. He
hated Jingoism and nationalism, predicting all too accurately where they would
lead. All his best fiction is urban-centred, yet he had little good to say of
Gissing's
attitude to the poor, whose lives he examines minutely in his first novels, was
complicated. In his earliest days he was an avowed socialist, but that was a
passing phase. His final position stabilised as a most peculiar mixture of
sympathy for the 'deserving' poor and a shuddering distaste for the rest. A
question several times raised in the novels of lower-class life is: How useful
is it for the well-meaning middle-classes to help working people's struggle for
self-advancement through education? Though Gissing often puts contemptuous
sentiments about the effects of compulsory education on the lower orders into
the mouths of his characters, he paints sympathetically the aspirations of
those who, like Gilbert Grail in Thyrza, can retain some intellectual curiosity and
ambitions after a 13-hour factory day. Roughly speaking, the novels present the
view that poverty corrupts any sensitive soul but that social reform is likely
to lead to mob rule and most philanthropy is sentimental nonsense. We see this
attitude in the best of his slum novels, The Nether World (1889), a masterpiece
of minute, unsentimental observation. A wonderfully vivid episode, describing a bank holiday outing to the
On the
positive side, Gissing's was an aristocratic sensibility, a sensibility almost
mawkishly in love with the past, especially the remote past of the classical
world: the art and literature of
However,
Gissing's scholarly conservatism never prevented him from being a perceptive
and informed cultural diagnostician of his own age. In fact, the best part of
Gissing's work, including the slum novels, is that which deals with social
issues of the day in one shape or another. In In the
Year of Jubilee (1894) he indicts vulgar working-class upstarts who, eager to
ape the middle classes, have acquired a thin veneer of suburban gentility. In the
same novel he also takes up the late-Victorian 'marriage-debate' (this is
mentioned further in Paul Delany's essay): the same theme
appears repeatedly in Gissing's 90's novels, especially The Odd Women, and in
different places he dramatises both radical and conservative solutions to it. Other
themes are class climbing in Born in Exile and the immoral lives of the
fashionable, artistic middle classes in The Whirlpool.
Gissing
is never guilty of writing essays disguised as novels. Abstract social and
political philosophising bored him: he always explores his subject within the
individualised context of sex, class and money - the three poles around which
all his work revolves. He integrated the three most successfully in his most
famous novel, New Grub Street (1891). Here the production and consumption of
'literature' - where what should be a joy feeds on and consumes the lives of
the characters - is a metonymy for the Victorian economic system itself. The
hero Edward Reardon's agonised attempt to earn a living in this Darwinian world
in the only way he knows how, by spinning fictions out of his tired brain, are
painfully described. Here the writer is a labourer like
any other, with nothing to sell but his daily toil;:
oppressed by his masters the publishers and the libraries, hard-driven, starved
of affection and poor.
Gissing's
characters are usually drawn carefully and their interior lives mapped closely:
sometimes too closely to hold the attention firmly. His range is not wide. The
male protagonists are nearly always studies in partial self-portraiture, and
the females belong to a few types who appear repeatedly. He is most effective
when he is dealing with the fortunes of people belonging to a special class
which he made peculiarly his own. He defined this territory in a letter to his
friend Morley Roberts, quoted in the latter's biography of his friend:
My books
deal with people of many social strata; there are the vile working class, the
aspiring and capable working class, the vile lower middle, the aspiring and
capable lower middle, and a few representatives of the upper middle class. My
characters range from the vileness of 'Arry Parsons
to the genial and cultured respectability of Mr. Comberbatch.
There are books as disparate as The Nether World and The Unclassed.
But what I desire to insist upon is this, that the most characteristic, the
most important, part of my work is that which deals with a class of young men
distinctive of our time - well-educated, fairly bred, but without money.
These
impecunious young men are the typical Gissing anti-heroes, very like their
creator in many ways, but rarely displaying his capacity for dogged endurance
and hard work. Some of them, like Reardon in New Grub Street, are notably weak;
so weak that their creator seems to half-despise them himself. However, they
have a mirror image; another male type who also appears regularly, concluding
with Ryecroft, the author "at grass" of The
Private Papers. Langley, the hero of the novella Sleeping Fires (1895) may
stand as one of these dream-heroes; he is in his
forties, a man of the world though of bookish tastes and retiring habits;
single but with an intriguing love interest in his past; skeptical;
leisured with an adequate private income; equally fond of country life and the
Mediterranean shore; faultlessly the English gentleman: in short, the mature
Gissing as he would have liked to be.
Gissing
was no experimenter in fictional technique, and Dickens and Eliot and Meredith
are his benchmarks in fiction, not James or Conrad. Though he was interested in
the conception of the novel as 'high art', and flattered himself that he
practised it on occasion, in fact his novels are remarkably devoid of any dense
symbolic significance or patterning, rich allusions or motifs; indeed, on the
rare occasions when he includes a scene or detail which clearly carries some
metaphorical resonance, the reader is almost shocked. The French and Russian
realists - Flaubert, Zola, Daudet, Turgenev, Tolstoy -
influenced him more strongly that most of his contempories
and immediate predecessors in
His
novels are conventional products of the late Victorian literary marketplace; a
market which Gissing well understood and deplored, but which he could not
afford to ignore. His earlier novels are nearly all too long,
to fit the exigencies of the circulating libraries, and sometimes their
material is beaten out thin. His plots, though neatly contrived and well-paced,
suffer from melodramatic intrusions. At any rate, it was the financial power of
publishers and the libraries that he most resented. There is no particular
evidence that he resented those who were keeping literature in
For all
his faults, Gissing is a writer of peculiar charm. We read and enjoy him
because he is such a personal writer who seems, more
than most, to speak to each reader. It is largely a question of style. Gissing
expended much effort on his style, though ocasionally
its tangled pomposity makes one wonder if he had enough self-critical sense:
George Orwell, indeed, called his prose "often disgusting", and backed
his opinion with a couple of painful examples. Nevertheless, Gissing's style is
extremely distinctive. It is a melancholy, ruminative, confiding style, full of
the most acute, if occasionally laboured, psychological analysis,
varied by excellent lively dialogue and shot through by flashes of dark, mordant,
saturnine humour. He rarely permitted himself a set-piece scene or a purple
passage, but he is certainly capable of high notes of indignation or
exaltation: the suicide of Biffen in New
Grub Street is a very characteristic and touching example of the latter.
Gissing
has had no very obvious literary descendents, although George Orwell's early
novels, which chart some of the same terrain several decades later, are clearly
indebted to him, as is implicit in what Orwell had to say about his predecessor
in a review-essay. A remoter
influence may perhaps be traced in the class-conscious, broadly realistic
'condition of
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