Dictionary of Literary Biography 18

                                                                             George Gissing

                                                                                    Jacob Korg
                                                                         University of Washington

* This is a Web version of Professor Jacob Korg's DLB article on George Gissing reproduced by his special permission.

BIRTH
Wakefield, Yorkshire, 22 November 1857, to Thomas Waller and Margaret Bedford Gissing.

EDUCATION
Owens College, Manchester, 1872-1876.

MARRIAGES
27 October 1879 to Marianne Helen Harrison. 25 February 1891 to Edith Underwood; children: Walter Leonard, Alfred
Charles.

DEATH
Ispoure, St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France, 28 December 1903.

BOOKS

   1.Workers in the Dawn: A Novel (3 volumes, London: Remington, 1880; 2 volumes, Garden City: Doubleday, Doran,
     1935);
   2.The Unclassed: A Novel (3 volumes, London: Chapman & Hall, 1884; 1 volume, New York: Fenno, 1896);
   3.Demos: A Story of English Socialism (London: Smith, Elder, 1886; New York: Harper, 1886);
   4.Isabel Clarendon (2 volumes, London: Chapman & Hall, 1886);
   5.Thyrza: A Tale (3 volumes, London: Smith, Elder, 1887);
   6.A Life's Morning (3 volumes, London: Smith, Elder, 1888; 1 volume, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888);
   7.The Nether World: A Novel (3 volumes, London: Smith, Elder, 1889; 1 volume, New York: Harper, 1889);
   8.The Emancipated: A Novel (3 volumes, London: Bentley, 1890; 1 volume, Chicago: Way & Williams, 1895);
   9.New Grub Street: A Novel (3 volumes, London: Smith, Elder, 1891; 1 volume, Troy, N.Y.: Brewster, 1904);
  10.Denzil Quarrier: A Novel (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1892; New York: Macmillan, 1892);
  11.Born in Exile: A Novel (3 volumes, London: Black, 1892);
  12.The Odd Women (3 volumes, London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1893);
  13.In the Year of Jubilee (3 volumes, London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1894; 1 volume, New York: Appleton, 1895);
  14.Eve's Ransom (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1895; New York: Appleton, 1895);
  15.Sleeping Fires (London: Unwin, 1895; New York: Appleton, 1895);
  16.The Paying Guest (London: Cassell, 1895; New York: Dodd, Mead, 1895);
  17.The Whirlpool (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1897; New York: Stokes, 1897);
  18.Human Odds and Ends: Stories and Sketches (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1898);
  19.Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (London: Blackie, 1898; New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898);
  20.The Town Traveller (London: Methuen, 1898; New York: Stokes, 1898);
  21.The Crown of Life (London: Methuen, 1899; New York: Stokes, 1899);
  22.By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy (London: Chapman & Hall, 1901; New York: Scribners,
     1905);
  23.Our Friend the Charlatan (London: Chapman & Hall, 1901; New York: Holt, 1901);
  24.The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (London: Constable, 1903; New York: Dutton, 1903);
  25.Veranilda: A Romance (London: Constable, 1904; New York: Dutton, 1905);
  26.Will Warburton: A Romance of Real Life (London: Constable, 1905; New York: Dutton, 1905);
  27.The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1906; New York: Dutton, 1906);
  28.An Heiress on Condition (Philadelphia: Privately printed for the Pennell Club, 1923);
  29.Critical Studies of the Works of Charles Dickens (New York; Greenberg, 1924);
  30.Sins of the Fathers and Other Tales (Chicago: Covici, 1924);
  31.The Immortal Dickens (London: Palmer, 1924);
  32.A Victim of Circumstances and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1927; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927);
  33.Brownie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931);
  34.Stories and Sketches, edited by A. C. Gissing (London: M. Joseph, 1938);
  35.George Gissing's Commonplace Book (New York: New York Public Library, 1962);
  36.Notes on Social Democracy (London: Enitharmon Press, 1968);
  37.George Gissing: Essays and Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1970);
  38.My First Rehearsal and My Clerical Rival (London: Enitharmon Press, 1970);
  39.London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England: The Diary of George Gissing, Novelist (Hassocks,
     U.K.: Harvester Press, 1978; Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1978);
  40.George Gissing on Fiction (London: Enitharmon Press, 1978).

Although he was once best known as the author of a volume of essays, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903),
George Gissing is now recognized as one of the important novelists of the late Victorian period. His reputation rests on the long
series of novels he wrote between 1880 and 1903, most of them realistic exposures of the injustices of modern industrial
society. His early books, which often dealt with scenes of urban poverty, gave the impression that he was a slum novelist, but in
the second part of his career he turned to middle-class settings and devoted his mature powers to a widely ranging criticism of
ordinary society. Gissing had a special gift for linking private lives with public issues and for showing how sensitive young
people were victimized by social forces. Using this approach, he dealt with such themes as poverty, the social disabilities of
women, the problems of marriage, the vulgarity of contemporary civilization, and the commercialization of literature.

Gissing was an agnostic in religion and a skeptic with regard to social reform. He usually adopted an antidemocratic,
pessimistic, and even fatalistic point of view toward the problems he dramatized. He felt that the nobler human capacities
represented by art and learning were bound to be submerged by the mercenary drives and mass culture of democratic society.
The social problems that afflicted the late nineteenth century provided him with material for showing how unlikely it was that a
civilization free of passion and superstition and devoted to culture would ever emerge. His profound discontent with the
conditions he observed led him to exceptional insights into the spiritual dilemmas of the time.

George Robert Gissing was of provincial and middle-class origin, the oldest of the five children of a pharmaceutical chemist
who lived over his shop in the main square of Wakefield in Yorkshire. He attended the local school until his father's death,
when George was thirteen; he was then sent to Lindow Grove School in Cheshire, and after two years entered Owens College
in Manchester. His literary tastes became clear while he was at school and college: he wrote poetry as a child, and studied
classical and modern languages and literature. During this time he gained the knowledge of Greek and Roman culture which
became a lifelong interest and one of his deepest sources of pleasure. As a student he was a hard worker and compiled a
brilliant record, earning high grades and winning numerous prizes and scholarships, and it seemed likely that he would continue
his studies at Oxford or Cambridge after taking his degree.

But his career was interrupted in the spring of 1876, when he was eighteen and in his last year at Owens, by a shocking
development. He had fallen in love with a seventeen-year-old girl named Marianne Helen Harrison (called "Nell") who was
poor and without family and who frequented the pubs near the college, resorting to occasional prostitution to support herself. In
an effort to keep her from the streets and enable her to earn an honest living, Gissing turned to the desperate expedient of
stealing books, money, and clothes from the common room at the college. He was caught, arrested, expelled, and imprisoned
for a month at hard labor. After his release he fled the scene of his disgrace by going to America in September 1876. This
episode had a profound effect on the man and his work. It ended any possibility of an academic career; it forced him to begin
life as a social exile and to regard himself as an outsider. More fundamentally, the indefensible violation of ordinary moral
standards generated a sense of guilt which became one of the sources of his self-defeating behavior and his despairing vision of
life.

Gissing spent a year in America, a time of restlessness and exile that was also, paradoxically, the time of his first modest literary
successes. After a month in Boston, where he placed his first publication -- a short article on some paintings in the museum -- in
a local periodical, he moved to Waltham, Massachusetts, to take a position in the high school as a teacher of French, German,
and English. In March 1877 he left suddenly for Chicago and, in desperate need of money, wrote a number of short stories
which he succeeded in selling to the Chicago Tribune and other periodicals. There is an accurate account of this and
subsequent episodes in New Grab Street (1891), where many of Gissing's experiences in America are assigned to a character
named Whelpdale. This was Gissing's real beginning as a writer of fiction. In July he moved to New York City, and then,
finding that a newspaper in Troy, New York, had plagiarized one of his stories, he went there in the hope of being hired to
write more. But he was rejected, and after drifting about New England for several months as an assistant to a traveling
photographer, he returned to England in October 1877.

He lived in various poor lodging houses in London, where he was soon joined by Nell, whom he married in 1879. During this
period, which is described in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, he was in a state of precarious poverty and supported
himself by teaching occasional pupils and taking other irregular jobs while working seriously at a novel. When this first
manuscript failed to find a publisher, he wrote another, but again met only with rejections. At last, in 1880, he published this
second effort at his own expense with the title Workers in the Dawn, using some money from a legacy left by his father. The
book attracted little attention and few copies were sold; but Gissing sent a copy to Frederic Harrison, the president of the
Positivist Society. Gissing was at that time enthusiastic about Auguste Comte and his positivist philosophy and was an attentive
reader of Frederic Harrison's articles. The heroine of his novel turns to positivism as one of several alternatives to conventional
Christian faith, and Gissing no doubt hoped that Harrison might be interested in this aspect of his book. Harrison was strongly
impressed by the novel, though he took exception to its ideas, and sent Gissing a letter praising it; he also introduced him to
John Morley and other literary people and hired him as tutor to his two sons.

Workers in the Dawn is a rambling, heavy-handed novel of social protest that has far too many scenes, characters, and
situations but nevertheless conveys a burning sense of indignation in its descriptions of poverty and exhibits a firm intellectual
grasp of some of the contemporary theories of social reform. Gissing draws on his own experiences in telling the story of Arthur
Golding, a youth born in the slums of London, who is torn between becoming a painter and devoting himself to political action
on behalf of his fellow workers. His marriage to Carrie Mitchell, a young prostitute addicted to alcohol whom he rescues from
the streets and tries to reform, is an obvious reflection of Gissing's own marital situation. Nell was an alcoholic, and her physical
ailments, restlessness, and disobedience made Gissing's life miserable. It was characteristic of him to exploit these sufferings by
making her the center of the most powerful scenes of his novel. Golding later falls in love with Helen Norman, a middle-class
girl who teaches him that his artistic and political aims can be reconciled with each other. A number of solutions to the problems
of the poor are investigated, but all seem futile, and the story ends as Golding, in a sequence that again follows Gissing's life,
goes to America in the final chapter and after a time commits suicide by throwing himself into Niagara Falls. As Gissing later
acknowledged, the form of his novel imitated George Eliot's, with their realistic descriptions, intricate psychological analyses,
authorial comments, and multiple plots.

Eduard Bertz, German socialist writer who was Gissing's friend and correspondent for over twenty years

In spite of the failure of Workers in the Dawn, Eduard Bertz, German socialist writer who was Gissing's friend and
correspondent for over twenty years Gissing's prospects seemed promising, for the people he had met through Harrison offered
him work as a journalist. But he rejected most of these opportunities and clung to the life of a struggling novelist, writing
industriously in poor lodgings, and supporting himself by tutoring. He had many handicaps to contend with, including the
behavior of his wife, who often created crises in the slum neighborhoods where they lived. During this period, he formed two
friendships that were to last for the rest of his life. One was with Eduard Bertz, a German socialist in exile who became a writer
when he returned to Germany in 1884 and corresponded with Gissing until Gissing's death. The other was with Morley
Roberts, a fellow student from Owens College, who was also a novelist and was to write a fictionalized biography of Gissing,
The Private Life of Henry Maitland (1912).

By 1882, Gissing found that he could no longer live with Nell and sent her to live elsewhere, paying her a small regular
allowance. In spite of the troubles he experienced at this time, he wrote several short stories and longer narratives but did not
succeed in publishing any of them until he was fortunate enough to have his novel The Unclassed (1884) evaluated by George
Meredith, who was a reader for Chapman and Hall. Meredith saw the virtues of the original and rather uncertain story, advised
Gissing to make some revisions, and approved the novel for publication in 1884.

In The Unclassed, Gissing, who had apparently made some progress while writing the many stories he had been unable to sell,
demonstrates better control than he does in Workers in the Dawn; he limits himself to fewer themes and characters, embodies
his protest in his story instead of expressing it directly, and arrives at a happy ending. Its hero, Osmond Waymark -- a poor
young intellectual living in the slums of London, the author of an unsuccessful novel, who shares Gissing's social theories and
ideas about art and even resembles him closely in physical appearance -- is the most autobiographical of Gissing's figures. He
also shares Gissing's sexual dilemma, for he would like to marry the respectable middle-class Maud Enderby but is also
attracted to Ida Starr, an implausibly intelligent and altruistic girl of the streets, who is no doubt an idealization of Nell. Through
Waymark and his friends, Gissing attacks the competitiveness of modern society and its failure to make a place for gifted young
people like himself. In the course of the story, Waymark, who begins as an idealist, learns that the slums and their people are
beyond redemption, and turns to the view that art should be detached and objective, but insists that it must express misery
because "misery is the key-note of modern life." Nevertheless, the novel ends optimistically as Ida Starr, after being imprisoned
on a false charge, is discovered to be the granddaughter of a wealthy owner of slum houses, inherits his wealth, becomes a
benefactress of the poor, and accepts Waymark when he turns to her.

In these first novels, Gissing denounces poverty but paradoxically expresses considerable hostility toward the poor themselves.
He was recording the disillusionment he suffered during his first years in London as a social observer. He had romanticized the
poor at first, but quickly learned that working people could not be taught to share his love of art, learning, and classical
civilization; instead, they insisted on pursuing the way of life they had learned in the slums. Accordingly, he began to shift his
stance as a social critic. He was now less interested in exposing poverty than in defending intellectual values against threats that
arose both from the barbarism of the slums and the philistinism of the middle class. And he came to recognize that his true
subject was not the proletariat but the intelligent young man who was not equipped to compete in industrial society. Some years
later he wrote to Morley Roberts, "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.

By 1884, Gissing's income had improved enough to enable him to lease a flat near Regent's Park, which became his first
permanent home. He thought he had discovered the kind of environment congenial to cultural values on his visits to the country
houses of the wealthy people whose children he tutored; and his next novels employed settings of this kind, turning on an
interplay between the worlds of poverty and privilege. He wrote three stories in which young people plan to escape urban life
by marrying into the landed gentry. Isabel Clarendon (1886) tells of a bookish young man who takes refuge from the turmoil
of London in a country cottage and falls in love with a wealthy young widow who owns a mansion in the neighborhood. Instead
of achieving his ideal of a life of the mind through marriage, however, he meets defeat and is forced to go into trade by making
his living as a bookseller. In A Life's Morning (1888), a poor young governess discovers the beauty of country life as Gissing
himself did, by teaching the children of wealthy parents. She experiences joy and serenity of mind when she leaves her narrow
home life for the tasteful and orderly surroundings of a well-appointed mansion. Her engagement to a son of the family is
disrupted when her father's employer seeks to force her into marriage by threatening to reveal a theft her father has committed
and the father, unable to withstand the pressure of the scandal, kills himself. As a result, the heroine is unable to marry and to
enter upon the life of cultivation for which she yearns until she meets her old lover by chance six years later.

Though it was completed in 1885, A Life's Morning was not published until 1888; by that time Gissing had written and
published three other novels. The first of these, Demos (1886), boldly argues that plebeian life has a corrupting effect on
character and follows the argument into its social, moral, and political implications. Richard Mutimer, a clever young socialist
leader, comes into a fortune, converts the factory he owns to socialist methods of production, and marries into a higher social
class. But he never overcomes the faults of character he brings from his proletarian origin and cannot hold the love of his wife,
retain control of his socialist movement, or pass a moral test to which the plot subjects him. A newly found will deprives him of
his property; he sinks into poverty and is killed by a stone thrown from a mob of his own followers. At the novel's end, the
countryside, desecrated by his factory, reverts to its former beauty and quiet.

Demos is perhaps the first novel in which Gissing exhibits full confidence in his talent. It employs a wide range of skills, including
realistic description, psychological analysis, and the creation of mood and atmosphere, and gives full development to a great
variety of scenes and characters. The accounts of life among the poor of London are exceptionally authentic and intimate and
express considerable sympathy. There are animated, colorful descriptions of socialist meetings based on actual observation.
The novel as a whole makes a powerful, if somewhat eccentric, political statement: it condemns social democracy as a
manifestation of the greed and egoism of the working-class mind and awards approval to patrician attitudes concerned with
aestheticism and the preservation of cultural values. Because of the innate strength of its story and character-depiction and its
controversial treatment of current social questions, Demos was a distinct success both with the public and with the critics.
Though published anonymously, it soon became known as Gissing's work and established his position on the contemporary
literary scene as a novelist who was to be taken seriously.

Meredith had warned Gissing not to abandon "low-life scenes," and his success with this material in Demos must have
convinced Gissing that Meredith was right; for his next novel, Thyrza (1887), is set for the most part in a poor London
neighborhood and depicts with insight and understanding the lives of working people. The heroine, an idealized figure of a
working girl, is not convincing; but Gilbert Grail, the man who loves her -- a factory worker with a devotion to books, who
knows that he will never be able to free himself from a life of labor and monotony -- is one of Gissing's most pathetic and
authentic characters. The idea of the novel is embodied in the experience of its male protagonist, Walter Egremont, a member
of the landed gentry who comes to the slums to spread culture and enlightenment and falls in love with the heroine. As in
Gissing's earlier novels, the love that crosses class divisions proves to be destructive. Egremont finds that the poor cannot be
redeemed, that it would be a mistake for him to marry Thyrza, and that, in effect, each segment of society should keep to itself
and follow its own ways. As the novel ends, he decides to marry a girl of his own class; but the heartbroken Thyrza, whom he
has been forced to abandon, dies of grief.

As his diary shows, Gissing was an extraordinarily steady worker. Immediately after completing a novel, he turned to a new
one and seldom went a day without either planning his work or actually writing. But he suffered from failures of motivation,
indecision, and a lack of self-confidence. He often changed from one project to another, canceled many chapters of writing,
and even left whole books unpublished. He had an especially trying period of indecision after completing Thyrza in January
1887. He wrote steadily as usual, completing or nearly completing four novels in the following fourteen months, but nothing
written during that time achieved publication. This period of frustration came to an end in March 1888, when he was notified
that Nell had died. He went to make the funeral arrangements and found that she had been living in desperate poverty. While he
looked at her body lying in the squalid room where she had lived, he experienced a renewal of the resentment and despair with
which he had responded to social injustice during his early years in London' immediately afterward, he wrote his last and most
pessimistic novel of poverty.

There is no contrast between wealth and poverty in The Nether World (1889). It is an unrelieved accumulation of images from
slum life, and while certain gradations of misery are evident, the ultimate effect is one of crushing hopelessness. The poor try to
escape their plight by seeking employment, by crime, by politics; outsiders try to help with charity and education. But the
vicious qualities of character bred in the slums cannot be extirpated, and the people make a hell of their environment with their
drunkenness, violence, cruelty, and dishonesty. The characters who bring strength and courage to their struggle are submerged
by the social forces raging in the slums. Gissing was powerfully motivated in writing this novel, but he displayed a new
sophistication by channeling his feelings into literary workmanship instead of venting them in strident protest as he had when he
first began to write. Slum scenes and people are rendered with an accuracy that shows patient observation, the effects of
environment and experience on character are displayed in logical fashion, and the quality of lower-class life is projected through
a number of eloquent descriptions.

In September 1888, Gissing took a vacation from his uninterrupted work of the last eight years and fulfilled a long-standing
ambition by traveling on the Continent for five months. After a month in Paris with an uncongenial companion who had decided
to join him, he went alone to Naples, Rome, Florence, and Venice. The main attractions of Italy for Gissing were the relics and
ruins connected with Roman antiquity. He paid his respects to the art and architecture of the Renaissance but insisted that they
had far less meaning for him than Roman remains. He also enjoyed observing contemporary Italian life, however, and recorded
many details of street activities and daily behavior in the diary he kept.

The Italian visit had an immediate influence on his writing. He made use of some Italian scenes in his next novel, The
Emancipated (1890), but the more important effect of the trip was to mark a sharp division between the two main phases of
his career. After this journey, Gissing turned from the realistic treatment of poverty that had been his main strength up to this
time to novels of middle-class life. He was still interested in social conditions, but he now focused on the psychological analyses
of middle-class people who encountered the problems of an increasingly industrialized and democratic society. There was a
parallel change in his style. He left behind the tones of fierce indignation and quiet despair that accompanied his treatment of
poverty and began to cultivate an understated, objective style of neutral realism that varied from flat statement to quiet irony and
could serve as a devastating medium of social criticism. The Emancipated deals with people who are wealthy enough to travel
in Italy, and who rebel, in various ways, against conventional moral, aesthetic and religious standards. One of its central
characters is a young widow who comes from a narrow Evangelical society and is taught, by the cultural experiences she has in
Italy, to open herself to aesthetic feelings and to love. Placed in symmetrical opposition to her is an "emancipated" young
woman who is well-educated and free to marry as she chooses, but uses this freedom unwisely. This dichotomy brings forward
a theme that was becoming increasingly prominent in Gissing's novels, the problem of the social position of women.

He seems to have intended to deal with this theme in his next novel; for after completing The Emancipated, he planned a story
called "The Headmistress" and read materials on women in the British Museum. Before completing the story, he left London in
November 1889 for a second Mediterranean trip. This time he went first to Greece, and after a month in Athens, revisited
Naples, where he stayed until 20 February. While he was in Naples, he had the first touch of the lung disease that was to lead
to his death and had to spend a week in bed in his lodging house. Soon after his return to London at the beginning of March
1890, he began to work not on "The Headmistress" but on the novel that ultimately turned out to be New Grub Street. For
many months, however, he was unable to make any progress, switched from one plan to another, canceled many pages, and
wrote in his diary that he felt "desperation" and even "madness." Although he had always cultivated seclusion, Gissing also
suffered intensely from loneliness, and his unhappiness had become so intense that he was unable to work effectively. He often
said, both in his novels and in letters about his own case, that a poor hut educated man could not expect a woman who was his
equal to share his poverty, and the idea dominated his thoughts about marriage. Consequently, when he decided to put an end
to his frustration, he offered marriage -- as he later admitted -- to the first woman he met. This was Edith Underwood, a
respectable but ignorant girl of proletarian background. Gissing thought she would be pliable and would adapt herself to his
habits, but he could hardly have been more wrong. She turned out to be evil-tempered, incompetent, and violent, a cameo of all
the qualities he hated in working people.

However, the first results of his friendship with her were favorable. A week after he met her he began to make progress with
New Grub Street, even deciding on its title; a little more than two months later he completed it, in sharp contrast to the
confused and ineffectual efforts of the preceding months. The book written at such speed is closely modeled on his own
experiences, expresses some of his strongest personal convictions, and is generally considered his finest novel. There had been
earlier books about novelists, such as Thackeray's Pendennis (1849-l850) and Dickens's David Copperfield (1850), but
New Grub Street was the first to treat the occupational problems of the writer with candor. It describes the failure of a novelist
who is unable to survive the competition of the literary marketplace or to fulfill the demands of a bourgeois marriage, and it
exposes the way in which the mercenary standards of modern society corrupt literature and social life. When its protagonist,
Edwin Reardon, finds that he is unable to continue writing, his wife advises him to produce whatever the publishers will accept.
"Art," she says, "must be practiced as a trade, at all events in our time. This is the age of trade." But Reardon cannot adjust
himself to his age, and is forced to give up his claim to be a novelist, take a position as a clerk, and move to a humble flat. His
wife refuses to follow him into poverty; and in an ironic conclusion, after Reardon has died, she marries the enterprising
journalist who has always admired him but has made his fortune by practicing literature as a trade. Reardon's frustrations, fear
of poverty, and feelings of helplessness are presented with a special intimacy; many of them were no doubt drawn from
Gissing's own experiences. His mastery of realistic detail enabled him to sketch the general scene of working London writers,
centering it in the reading room of the British Museum, and portraying a wide variety of types. The authenticity of these figures
was widely recognized. "I know them all, personally," said one reviewer, . . . and the fidelity of Mr. Gissing's portraits makes
me shudder."

But New Grub Street is more than a lament over the commercialization of literature. It condemns the democracy of taste and
the industrial standards that transform literature into a commodity through mass publication and shows how similar forces
pervert human relations in love, marriage, and family life. Its people meet defeat not only in trying to defend the integrity of
literature but also in their moral and spiritual conflicts. The London literary scene is only a setting in which a fate hostile to art,
love, and idealism in general leads the characters to disaster. Contemporary reviewers sometimes complained that New Grub
Street exaggerated the evils it described, and deplored its crushing pessimism; but they acknowledged its skillful realism, its
honesty, and the sympathy with which Gissing entered into the lives of his characters. Since Gissing's death it has been
recognized as his masterpiece; it has undergone many reprintings, and critical opinion places it far above his other novels.
"Alone among Gissing's books," wrote Irving Howe, "New Grub Street survives as a classic, a work of abiding value and
power." Modern critics value it not only for its penetrating insight into the pernicious influence of mass culture but for its
translation of Gissing's personal resentments into a striking and plausible vision of life.
 

  First page of the manuscript of New Grub Street (1891), widely regarded as Gissing's masterpiece (Berg Collection,
 New York Public Library)
 

When he married Edith in February 1891, Gissing left the noise and turmoil of London behind and set up his new household in
the placid little city of Exeter. Within six months of his marriage he wrote Born In Exile (1892), a novel which uses Exeter as a
locale and is concerned with nineteenth-century moral issues on a more fundamental level than any of Gissing's other works. Its
protagonist, a boy of humble origins named Godwin Peak, leaves his college voluntarily in an episode that is a disguised version
of Gissing's expulsion from Owens College. A freethinker of scientific interests, he falls in love with Sidwell Warricombe, a girl
of good family, and in an effort to conceal his agnosticism, pretends to be a theological student. He justifies his dishonesty by
telling himself that a man who has no principles is free to do as he pleases. In this way, Gissing opens the door to the
existentialist Vision of a world without authority, in which each man is allowed to create his own morality and must bear the
responsibility for it. When his deception is exposed, Peak realizes that his crime has made him an "exile" from the class he tried
to enter as surely as his birth did and blames his proletarian ancestry for his moral failure. Born in Exile is perhaps Gissing's
most profound study of spiritual conflict and owes something to his admiration for Dostoevski, Turgenev, and other Continental
authors.

In 1892, in response to a request from the new publishing firm of Lawrence and Bullen, Gissing broke with the tradition of the
three-volume novel that had dominated Victorian fiction and for the first time wrote a novel in one volume. The new form
naturally enabled him to employ a more unified and focused plot and fewer characters and also encouraged him to adopt the
more objective or "dramatic" manner that was coming into fashion. Denzil Quarrier (1892), which is about a politician who has
entered into an irregular union and suffers serious consequences when his secret is exposed, warns both of the repressive
power of convention and of the danger of violating it. Quarrier is unable to marry Lilian, the woman he presents as his wife,
because she was married earlier to a man who was arrested immediately after the wedding ceremony, and whom she has not
seen since. The missing husband, Arthur Northway, is hired to turn up in the town and claim his wife in order to spoil Quarrier's
chance of election. Because the secret is never actually made public, Quarrier wins his seat in Parliament, but fear of exposure
drives Lilian to drown herself, and he is forced to admit the usefulness of such established customs as marriage.

Among his other views, the hero of Denzil Quarrier favors women's rights. This theme, which occupied a minor place in a
number of Gissing's earlier novels, became the subject of his next book, The Odd Women (1893). He had always felt that the
social inferiority of women was responsible for much suffering and injustice. In The Odd Women he deals -- pessimistically, as
usual -- with women who try to cope with their difficulties in a variety of ways. At the center of the novel is a society set up to
train women for work and prepare them for a moderate form of liberation. The heroine, Rhoda Nunn, is torn between her
loyalty to this organization and a lover whom she is tempted to marry. The main plot is accompanied by a number of case
histories, including those of two middle-aged sisters, Alice and Virginia Madden, who are forced to live at a level of bare
survival because they are unemployable, and that of their pretty younger sister, Monica, who marries to escape the drudgery of
working in a shop and reaps the consequences. The novel's verdict on life transcends the limits of the social problem, but it
offers sensitive insights into the dilemmas women faced in striving for social and economic independence; it has become known
as one of the most objective and penetrating treatments of the subject.

In 1893 Gissing, who was now the father of a son, moved his family to London. "I want the streets again," he wrote to Bertz.
For nearly a year he was unable to make progress with a new novel, but another avenue was opened to him when an editor
asked him to write some short stories for periodicals. Gissing had not written short stories for years, but he now found that he
could succeed with them, while his efforts to write a full-length novel constantly failed. They were also a welcome source of
income, for he was paid well for them, while the sales of his novels continued to be slow. At this time the public was beginning
to demand shorter forms, as Gissing himself had noted in New Grub Street, and changing publishing conditions were leading to
the disappearance of the three-volume novel.

In the Year of Jubilee, completed, after much labor, in April 1894, was the last of Gissing's novels to be published in three
volumes. Its central character is a young woman who compromises her freedom by marrying, but is forced to bear her child
and support herself while living apart from her equally independent-minded husband. The main story line is submerged by a
large number of subordinate plots and characters loosely linked with each other in situations that expose the evils of modern
society. Gissing calls special attention to the dangers of mass culture as they are exhibited in the behavior of the crowds at the
celebrations of Victoria's jubilee year: illiterate democracy, vulgar advertising, unscrupulous opportunism, and coarse manners
are all brought forward. But matrimonial dissension remains the center of the story. Married life is presented as a squalid trap;
yet living separately, as the heroine does, has its own dangers.

Perhaps because he felt that as a married man he had to have a more secure income, perhaps because he accepted the view of
the literary marketplace presented in New Grub Street, Gissing now began to adopt some of the methods of 'the age of trade"
and to approach his occupation with more professionalism. He joined the Society of Authors, employed a literary agent, and
willingly accepted writing assignments, especially for short stories or shorter novels. His active participation in the publishing
scene led him to open himself to friendships and social engagements, especially among writers and editors. He joined the
Authors' Club and the Omar Khayyam Club, accepted dinner invitations, and even spent weekends with sociable groups; he
saw the aged Meredith again, and formed friendships with H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Edward Clodd, and other men of
letters. Those who met him at this time found it hard to believe that he had ever been poor or a recluse.

Between 1894 and 1897 Gissing turned aside from his usual themes to write four short novels, Eve's Ransom (1895),
Sleeping Fires (1895), The Paying Guest (1895), and The Town Traveller (1898). All were written to fulfill commitments to
publishers or editors and were slight productions in which Gissing exhibited an unexpected gift for comedy and a deft touch for
developing ironic situations. They could be marketed effectively and continued to be successful in reprints and translations. In
The whirlpool (1897), Gissing returned to a novel of serious social observation, undertaking to handle settings and situations
that were entirely new to him. His characters are leisured, fashionable people and his protagonist is a bookish man who marries
a talented but neurotic member of this group and takes her to live in the country. He cannot, however, escape the destructive
influences that radiate from the turbulent centers of London society and feels the effects of financial disasters, suicides, and
jealousy. Ultimately, his marriage fails and his wife dies. After these encounters with the blind forces that rage through the social
world, the hero is glad to withdraw to a secluded life and to seek satisfaction in his relations with his little son -- a conclusion
that reflects Gissing's own concern for his older son. The whirlpool is a powerful performance in which Gissing made excellent
use of the skills he had acquired in writing the more dramatic and direct narratives of his short stories and short novels. Partly
because his shorter books had caught the public's attention, partly because of its own merits, The Whirlpool sold better than
any of his previous works, and the critics belatedly discovered that he was a superb realist who was capable of depicting
modern life with candor and authenticity.

In the meantime, his second marriage became as unhappy as his first had been. Edith, who eventually died in a lunatic asylum,
began to show signs of her disorder a few years after the marriage. In his letters and diary Gissing complained that she
neglected the children, quarreled with the servants -- often driving them away -- and disrupted the household with her fits of
temper. She was abusive to Gissing, and there was so much turmoil and tension in the house that Gissing took his older son to
live with his family in Wakefield, feeling pity for "this child, born of a loveless and utterly unsuitable marriage," as he wrote in his
diary. He left Edith abruptly in February 1897, after a particularly violent dispute with her. There was a brief reconciliation, but
a permanent separation took place as Gissing left for another visit to Italy in September 1897. The results of this trip were his
first work of nonfiction, Charles Dickens. A Critical Study (1898), which was completed while he was living in Siena; and By
the Ionian Sea (1901), a travel book written some years later with material gathered at this time. The book on Dickens was
the first serious full-length study of its subject and has had a permanent influence on Dickens criticism. It offers a perceptive
analysis of the divided motives behind Dickens's treatment of middle-class characters and excellent appreciations of his humor,
characterization, and treatment of women. In subsequent years Gissing became known as an expert on Dickens and wrote a
number of introductions to his novels for a collected edition; but only six of the novels appeared, and the remaining
introductions went unpublished until 1924.

After completing Charles Dickens, Gissing traveled to southern Italy in order to spend some time in Calabria, the Magna
Graecia of the ancient world, where the Greek and Roman civilizations had met. He went to sites few travelers had visited in
order to capture their associations with classical personalities and events. After the Calabrian tour, he spent about a month in
Rome, where he did research for the novel about ancient Rome that he was planning to write, and met a number of English
friends, including Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells and his wife. on his way back to England he made a detour to Berlin to
spend a few days with his old friend Eduard Bertz.

               Gissing, E. W. Hornung, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells in Rome in 1898

Gissing arrived in England in the middle of April 1898, rented a house in the town of Dorking and resumed his writing. He lived
alone, for Edith was established in London with his younger son, while the older one remained in Wakefield, where he had been
sent to live with Gissing's mother and sisters. He was now occupied with the Dickens prefaces, short stories, and an abortive
attempt to write a play, and saw something of H. G. Wells, who lived nearby. In June, a Frenchwoman named Gabrielle Fleury
wrote to him for permission to translate New Grub Street. She came to see him the following month and visited him for a week
in the fall. Gissing for the first time fell in love with a woman of refinement and intelligence who could sustain his idealistic
conception of love. He was unable to secure a divorce and contract a formal marriage, but in the spring of 1899 moved to
Paris to live with her. Both Gissing and Gabrielle were conservative enough to regard their union as a daring break with
convention, although it was fully approved by Gabrielle's mother, who lived with them. Gissing now entered a new life, in which
he had a few years of comparative happiness. Before leaving England he had completed The Crown of Lift (1899), a novel
about a middle-class couple who agree to marry only after eight years of hesitation and misunderstanding; it expresses some of
Gissing's idealistic views of love and reflects new concerns with inter national politics and British imperialism.
 

   First page of Gissing's reply to Gabrielle Fleury, who had inquired about translating New Grub Street into French
 (Berg Collection, New York Public Library)
 

While Gissing was at last living with a woman he genuinely loved and who was his social and intellectual equal, the relationship
was a troubled one. There were disagreements about meals and other domestic matters; Gissing did not like living in a Paris
flat; and he was in ill health and pressed for money to support the family he had left in England. He now made use of the diary
he had kept during his Calabrian trip to write By the Ionian Sea, which is one of the most direct expressions of his tastes and
personality. This was followed by a novel, Our Friend the Charlatan (1901), a minor work with comic overtones which
attacks the application of evolutionary theories to social questions. Then came another nonfiction work, The Private Papers of
Henry Ryecroft, a series of short meditative essays on such subjects as nature, books, solitude, poverty, and Puritanism.
Writing through a fictional figure closely resembling himself, Gissing was able to express the opinions about religion, democracy,
leisure, and learning that he had formulated late in life. These sometimes correspond with the attitudes of his novels, and many
of the essays reveal personal thoughts or experiences that are the bases of episodes in his books. But the most attractive
element of the Ryecroft papers is the personality that speaks through them: that of a gentle old man who is conscious of his
weaknesses and admits that he has accomplished little, yet is able to find serenity in his quiet life of books, observation of
nature, and introspections about the past. The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft became Gissing's most popular book; he
was identified with it in the public mind, and its popularity ironically tended to obscure his reputation as a novelist.

                                                                                  Gissing in 1901

Gissing had suffered for some years from a lung condition diagnosed as emphysema and became a semi-invalid compelled to
give up his work for long periods of rest. In 1901 he spent a month at a sanatorium in Suffolk; and in 1902 he was forced to
move to the neighborhood of St.-Jean-de-Luz in the south of France, which had a climate better suited to his health. He then
wrote the last novel he was able to complete, Will Warburton (1905), a book which represents a return to some of his old
interests but with a completely different emphasis. In it a middle-class businessman loses his money and is forced to become a
grocer, a trade which allows him to escape the destructive competitiveness of commerce and to find an unexpected happiness.
Gissing seems to have perceived that his old attachment to privileged leisure was deceptive, and that it is possible to find firmer
grounds of love and friendship in a humble condition of life.

For a number of years, Gissing had been planning to write a book on a subject very different from his usual ones, a historical
novel about sixth-century Rome. He had taken extensive notes for this, and during his last trip to Italy had visited the Abbey of
Monte Cassino, where some of the scenes of the story were to take place. Veranilda (1904) is a story of adventure and
intrigue that moves slowly, emphasizing the characters and their thoughts; its observations of scenes in the cities and countryside
of ancient Rome include details that only close students of the period would appreciate. Gissing did not live to complete it, and
it was published after his death with the last five chapters missing.

Gissing died as a result of his lung condition on 28 December 1903 at Ispoure in St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, the town near
St.-Jean-de-Luz, where he and Gabrielle were living. He lingered for a week, and H. G. Wells and Morley Roberts were
summoned from England to his bedside. Roberts arrived the morning after he died, but Wells came in time to see the dying man
and recorded the scene in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934). Gissing's death was surrounded by considerable
controversy. Wells felt that Gabrielle was not caring for the sick man properly and had two nurses brought in, the first a French
nun, the second an Englishwoman. He thought that the light meals prescribed for the patient were insufficient and took it upon
himself to give him more food, a step which Gabrielle declared led directly to his death. The English chaplain who had been
asked to sit with Gissing published a report that he had embraced Christianity before his death. This was based on a
misunderstanding of the dying man's delirious talk, and Roberts, after gathering information from Gabrielle and the English
nurse, issued an energetic denial. Gissing was buried in the English cemetery at St.-Jean-de-Luz.

                                                                     Sketch of Gissing by G. H. Wells

Two of Gissing's novels were published posthumously, the unfinished Veranilda, which appeared with a preface by Frederic
Harrison, and Will Warburton, the last completed novel. His numerous short stories provided material for three collections,
The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories (1906), A Victim of Circumstances and Other Stories (1927), and Stories and
Sketches (1938), and the introductions written for the Rochester edition of Dickens's novels were collected in Critical Studies
of the Works of Charles Dickens (1924) and The Immortal Dickens (1924). The stories Gissing had published in Chicago
newspapers were identified and reprinted in Sins of the Fathers (1924) and Brownie (1931), and two stories, one
unpublished and one reprinted, appeared in My First Rehearsal and My Clerical Rival (1970). Unpublished materials,
including stories, essays, notes, and letters, have been brought out in George Gissing's Commonplace Book (1962), George
Gissing: Essays and Fiction (1970), and George Gissing on Fiction (1978), which also reprints two essays previously
published. In 1978, the diary which Gissing kept for many years, and in which he recorded his writing and his travels, was
published as London and the Life of Literature in late Victorian England. The Diary of George Gissing, Novelist.

Gissing's early novels, with their elaborate descriptions, passages of personal comment, and artificial, sometimes sensational
plots, correspond to practices prevalent in the mid-century English novel. His development paralleled the shift in taste that
accompanied the broadening of the reading public and the demise of the three-volume novel, and his later books are more
economical, more objective, and more simply constructed. While his novels adhere closely to the spirit of realism dominant in
Victorian fiction, he was never a dogmatic realist. He made his novels expressions of his own views, and many autobiographical
elements appear in them. Far from denying that his work had a personal bias, he often insisted, in contradiction to the
conception of realism that prevailed toward the end of the century, that a novel should bean expression of its author's attitudes.
"No novelist," he wrote, "ever was objective or ever will be. His work is a bit of life as seen by him. It is his business to make
us feel a distinct pleasure in seeing the world with his eyes." He rejected the idea that a novel should be an impersonal
representation of reality, just as he rejected the notion that it should be written to please the public. He felt that what the novelist
needed was not a capacity for reportorial accuracy but "the spirit of truthfulness," and he redefined realism as "artistic sincerity
in the portrayal of contemporary life."

For Gissing, sincerity meant a vision of life that was, on the whole, pessimistic if not despairing. His world is blighted by injustice
to the poor, to women, and to artists. It suffers from evils generated by competition, science, religion, commercialism, and
egotism. None of the remedies proposed for eliminating social injustice seemed viable to him, and the industrialization and
democratization which most people welcomed as signs of progress threatened the fragile humanism he valued. His own ideals
offered no solution to the evils he lamented. But his sustained examination of the failure of society to encourage what he
considered to be the best potentialities of human nature makes him one of the most sensitive and conscientious observers of
social life among the English novelists.

Gissing's contemporaries often complained of his pessimism and his unsympathetic treatment of working-class characters, but
they eventually recognized his technical mastery and the authenticity of his scenes of modern life. The Private Papers of Henry
Ryecroft, which was mistakenly regarded as autobiographical, won much praise for its excellence of style and serenity of spirit
and came to be his best-known book. More recent criticism often emphasizes Gissing's perceptive rendering of Victorian social
life and examines the paradoxes involved in his effort to express his intense personal convictions through the medium of the
realistic novel. In an article appearing in the Times Literary Supplement of 11 January 1912, Virginia Woolf wrote: "Naturally
Gissing practised what is generally called the English method of writing fiction. Instead of leaping from one high pinnacle of
emotion to the next, he filled in all the adjoining parts most carefully. It is sometimes very dull. The general effect is very low in
tone. You have to read from the first page to the last to get the full benefit of his art. But if you read steadily the low almost
insignificant chapters gather weight and impetus; they accumulate upon the imagination; they are building up a world from which
there seems to be no escape. . . . He had a world of his own as real, as hard, as convincing as though it were made of earth
and stone -- nay, far more so -- but it was a small world." P. J. Keating observes, in The Working Classes in Victorian
Fiction (197 1): "Gissing is the first Victorian novelist, whose efforts can be traced through a series of novels, to struggle
seriously with the artistic problems involved in the presentation of the working classes in fiction." He adds that Gissing's novels,
"when studied in chronological order ... testify to a consistently serious attempt to break with static literary conventions; a
struggle with the problem of how to establish a balance between a personal social viewpoint and artistic objectivity when
writing about the working classes."

                                     Gabrielle Fleury, with whom Gissing lived for the last five years of his life

In spite of some differences of opinion, Gissing's critics give him a high ranking. George Orwell wrote in 1943 that "merely on
the strength of New Grub Street, Demos, and The Odd Women, I am ready to maintain that England has produced very few
better novelists." In The English Novel (1954), Walter Allen says: "Gissing is not a great novelist hut he is considerably more
than a minor one. He is one of those imperfect artists whose work inevitably leads one back to the writer in person. His fiction
is not, except in perhaps three instances, sufficiently detached from its creator; it is too personal, the powerful expression, one
cannot help feeling, of a grudge. The grudge expressed is a common one today, though Gissing was the first novelist directly to
manifest it; and this in a way does universalize his work, in spite of its lack of objectivity." And John Halperin, in Gissing: A
Life in Books (1982), after maintaining that Gissing wrote an unusually large number of excellent novels and one -- New Grub
Street -- better than any but the best-known Victorian novels, declares, "Gissing is a major novelist; his themes are important
ones, treated with sensitivity and intelligence; his perception of things is acute and detailed, his people and their problems real,
relevant,' both for his time and for ours.
 

                       First page of the manuscript of Gissing's unfinished last novel
 
 

Other

   1.The Rochester Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens, introductions by Gissing (9 volumes, London: Methuen,
     1900-1901);
   2.Forster's "Life of Dickens," abridged and revised by Gissing (London: Chapman & Hall, 1903).

Letters

   1.Letters of George Gissing to Members of His Family, edited by Algernon & Ellen Gissing (London: Constable, 1927;
     Boston: Mifflin, 1927);
   2.The Letters of George Gissing to Eduard Bertz 1887-1903, edited by Arthur C. Young (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
     University Press, 1961);
   3.Gissing and H. G. Wells: Their Friendship and Correspondence, edited by R. A. Gettmann (Urbana: University of Illinois
     Press, 1961; London: Hart-Davis, 1961);
   4.The Letters of George Gissing to Gabrielle Fleury, edited by Pierre Coustillas (New York: New York Public Library,
     1964).

Bibliographies

   1.Joseph J. Wolff, ed., George Gissing: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings about Him (Dekalb: Northern Illinois
     University Press, 1974);
   2.Michael Collie, George Gissing: A Bibliography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975).

References

   1.Pierre Coustillas and Colin Partridge, eds., Gissing: The Critical Heritage (London & Boston: Routledge & Kegan
     Paul, 1972);
   2.Mabel Collins Donnelly, George Gissing: Grave Comedian (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954);
   3.John Halperin, Gissing: A Life in Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982);
   4.Jacob Korg, "George Gissing," in Victorian Fiction: A Second Guide to Research, edited by George Ford (New
     York: Modern Language Association, 1978);
   5.Korg, George Gissing: A Critical Biography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963);
   6.Korg, "George Moore; George Gissing," in Victorian Fiction: A Guide to Research, edited by Lionel Stevenson
     (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964);
   7.Morley Roberts, The Private Life of Henry Maitland (London: Nash, 1912);
   8.Gillian Tindall, The Born Exile: George Gissing (London: Temple Scott, 1974).

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