"Hapless flies caught in
a huge web"?
Gissing resources on the Internet
In the Gissing Journal for October 1996, Jacob Korg reported usefully on his "random
explorations" for Gissing on the Internet. This article tries to deal more
systematically with the topic. I made an initial survey in December-January
1996-7, publishing the findings in the Gissing Journal for May 1997. I
am upgrading it regularly, and welcome additional information. My contact
details are here.
The untutored student who goes on his own hunt through the Web is likely
to be sympathetic to Marian Yule�s plight in New Grub Street as she labours at
her father�s behest in the
British Museum; indeed, he must soon feel himself like the creature of Marian�s headachy fantasy, "a
black, lost soul, doomed to wander in an eternity of vain research".
Fortunately, users, unlike poor Marian, have the search engines to do their
work for them. A thorough search using five major engines reveals that the
total number of distinct references to our author on the Web is around 200. The
vast majority, however, are trivial. Some are just items in the new-accessions
lists of libraries and the catalogues of publishers. Then again, many
universities are gradually putting all their syllabuses, and their faculty
members� bibliographies, on
to the Web. Naturally Gissing is required reading for many Victorian literature
and history courses, and these make up the bulk of the references. They have no
external interest, except to confirm what everyone knows already: that New
Grub Street and The Odd Women are running neck and neck as the most
popular texts for tertiary study, and that the other titles are rarely, if
ever, set.
The beginning student-reader eager to secure some basic facts about
Gissing�s life and writings
has only a few sites to visit at present. The site of first resort for all
matters of 19th century British history and literature, the Victorian Web at Brown University, contains an area on
Gissing based on material from this present site. The student can read the on-line
entry from the Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia
which despite its brevity contains an error (that Gissing studied at
Other substantial secondary, critical materials are thin at present but
slowly increasing. One can read Prof. Jacob Korg�s two solid reviews (here and here) of the first six volumes of the Letters, and one can
read about the prize which the editors were justly awarded for their
labours by the MLA in 1995. But there are few lengthy critical essays available
on-line, or considered discussions of any of the
novels. One is a long, solid biographical/critical
essay, illustrated with photographs, by Jacob Korg,
reprinted from the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Another is Paul
Delany's essay on In the Year
of Jubilee, originally published as the introduction to the Dent edition of
1994. The most recent development is the on-line publication of Portraits in Charcoal: George Gissing's image of
woman, a book-length study by James Haydock, late of
the
If you wish to search for secondary materials on Gissing (books,
articles, dissertations), a new powerful bibliographical tool is the Victorian Database Online at the
If your interest in Gissing is more bibliographical than critical, then
you are catered for. If you are in the market for a first edition of Workers
in the Dawn, a copy of this rare book is for sale along with another
179 items for $US28,000. If you are not quite in that
league, try the fabulous resources of Powell�s, who boast of
being the largest bookstore in
Perhaps you have a query about Gissing or would like to identify a
reference. In that case you should do what Michele Kohler did when she tried to
trace the intriguing, lost 30 letters concerning Gissing: she circulated a
request for information to all the members of a Listserv called Ex Libris. The best chance of getting more general queries
answered is to post them on the only Listserv where information about Gissing
appears regularly. This is Victoria, which, as its
name suggests, is a discussion group dealing with every aspect of that era:
most of the contributors are teachers of history and literature. Go to this
site for a full discussion of how it operates, and how to join it.
What about other Listservs? The search engine Deja News indexes a vast
archive of material which has appeared on hundreds of other Listservs,
but I uncovered only eight minor Gissing items. One, however, offers a snippet
of information that was new to me. It is that the word paparazzi
is derived from the name of Gissing�s landlord, Coriolano
Paparazzo, at
Odd items like this reward anyone who trawls through the Web. The most sheerly unexpected Gissing reference which I found was a
quotation ("For the man sound in body and serene of mind there is no such
thing as bad weather; every sky has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood
do but make it pulse more vigorously") which I guess is from Ryecroft. I found it being used as an epigraph to details of a university course on the atmosphere
of the planet Jupiter. Perhaps there is a Gissing fan in the Astrophysics
Department of MIT!
Peter
Morton,