Gissing's fiction is broadly naturalistic and anti-romantic in flavour and exclusively urban in setting. His
early novels are set among the London slums and deal with the life there in remorseless and penetrating,
but not very sympathetic, detail. 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 London and the
dreary lives of its inhabitants: this example from the early Thyrza, is typical in containing strong elements
of patrician disgust and biting irony.

Gissing's work, like its creator himself, is a mass of contradiction. He was a deeply conservative man, in
love with order and tradition; his sensibility was aristocratic, and he was almost mawkishly in love with
the past, especially the remote past of the classical world. The art and literature of Greece and Rome sent
him into an aesthetic swoon, and, indeed, seemed almost to supply this most unyielding agnostic with a
substitute religion. In a touching scene in New Grub Street, the failing novelist Reardon's memory of a
sunset at Athens, as described to his even poorer friend Biffen, serves to dispel the London gloom for a
while. Even more telling is his account in By the Ionian Sea of the wonderful visionary scenes from
antiquity which accompanied his ten days of fever at Cotrone.

As might be expected of such a man, Gissing 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. He had little good to say of London, hated the relentless expansion
of the suburbs and the resulting destruction of the adjacent countryside, and celebrates the rural idyll
whenever he can. Yet at the same time nearly all his scenes are set in contemporary London, and his
attention to topographical detail -- especially its cultural significance -- is more accurate than any other
Victorian novelist except Dickens. Modern photographs can reveal how accurate his verbal painting was
of shabby-genteel streetscapes, in Thyrza and New Grub Street, for example, or of the workrooms of
Clerkenwell in The Nether World, which have remained quite unchanged since Victorian times.

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 this one: 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 Crystal Palace, captures
well the mature Gissing's peculiar mixture of disdain and sympathy for the poor.

Indeed, it is more broadly true that Gissing's natural 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. He had no taste for abstract social and
political philosophising. 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 or symbolic 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 England.
Constance Harsh has discussed Gissing's links with the Naturalism movement. But Gissing is unlike the
European Naturalists in that he did not resent those who were keeping literature in England "at nurse". He
was not interested in testing the boundaries of toleration. He had scant sympathy with Hardy's essays in
that direction. He often deals, of course, with sexual transgressive behaviour, but except for a single,
rather remarkable exception, where Tarrant and Nancy Lord enjoy unmarried, al fresco sex in In the Year
of Jubilee, his treatment is never explicit even by the prevailing standards of the day (although Orwell,
rather oddly, claimed otherwise). It was the financial power of publishers and the lending libraries that he
most resented, not their censorious power.

Gissing's novels are conventional products of the late Victorian literary marketplace; a market which he
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.

Yet for all these 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, somberly rhythmic, 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 England' fiction by Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Margaret
Drabble, David Lodge and others. Gissing's reputation has fluctuated over the decades but he has
received plenty of critical attention over the last 20 or 30 years and his place now seems assured as the
most interesting, if also the most exasperating, late Victorian novelists of the second rank. It is unfortunate
that though most of his novels are in print, only New Grub Street and The Odd Women are well-known
and widely read. Three others at least, The Nether World, The Whirlpool and Born in Exile, are of nearly
the same quality.

URL: http://www.flinders.edu.au/topics/Morton/Gissing/CriticalSurvey.htm