The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes
(1907–21).
Volume XIII. The Victorian Age, Part One.
XIV. George Meredith, Samuel Butler, George Gissing.
§ 13. Gissing.
George
Robert Gissing was born at Wakefield on 22 November, 1857; at school, and
at
Owens
college, Manchester, he worked with a furious energy, and seemed destined
for a
notable
career in the academic world. His course was, however, cut short through
an
ill-starred
marriage in 1875; he fled first to London, where he experienced the poverty
and
wretchedness
described in many of his novels; and, afterwards, in 1876, to America,
making
use of
that adventure in the narrative of Whelpdale in New Grub Street. After
a brief stay in
Germany,
he returned to London, publishing his first novel Workers in the Dawn,
at his own
expense,
in 1880. He made a precarious livelihood by private tuition, going without
sufficient
food,
but steadfastly declining to take up journalism, which offered possible
openings. The
evidence
is a little contradictory; but it seems that by the year 1882 Gissing had
emerged from
the bitterest
of the miseries due to poverty. In 1884 appeared The Unclassed, in 1886
Isabel
Clarendon
and Demos, and, from that year until 1895, he published one or more books
annually;
in 1887 Thyrza; in 1888 A Life’s Morning; in 1889 The Nether World; in
1890, in
which
year he entered upon a second unfortunate matrimonial venture, The Emancipated;
in
1891 New
Grub Street; in 1892 Born in Exile and the short Denzil Quarrier; in 1893
The
Odd Women;
in 1894 In the Year of Jubilee; and, in 1895, four books, Eve’s Ransom,
Sleeping
Fires, The Paying Guest and The Whirlpool. Human Odds and Ends, a collection
of short
sketches, came out in 1898 and in the same year Charles Dickens: A Critical
Study.
Later
writings connected with Dickens were the introductions to the (incomplete)
Rochester
edition
beginning in 1900; Dickens in Memory (1902); the abridgment of Forster’s
Life of
Dickens
in the same year; and a chapter in Homes and Haunts of Famous Authors,
published
in 1906 after his death. Meanwhile, he had written The Town Traveller in
1898,
The Crown
of Life in 1899 and Our Friend the Charlatan in 1901. The two books that
followed
were of the essay kind, By the Ionian Sea (1901) and The Private Papers
of
Henry
Ryecroft in 1903. After his death were published the unfinished Veranilda
in 1904,
Will Warburton
in 1905 and a second volume of short stories, The House of Cobwebs, in
1906.
Gissing died at the age of forty-six at St. Jean de Luz on 28 December,
1903.
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