Critical Survey with Illustrations

George Gissing's fiction is broadly naturalistic and anti-romantic in flavour and exclusively urban in setting. At its most characteristic, his prose is most distinctive: melancholy, ruminative and confiding. He rarely permitted himself a set-piece scene or a purple passage: his tones are shades of grey. But he is certainly capable of high notes of indignation or exaltation on occasion: the suicide of Biffen in New Grub Street is a very  touching example of the latter. As one of his early admirers said, "Gissing set himself a legitimate artistic effort: the representation of modern life in a certain aspect, seen under a certain mood. It is London, not in the glories of starlight or sunset, but under the leaden sky of a cold November afternoon. The vision does not even possess the sense of magic and mystery of twilight and gathering night. The universe is simply raw and wretched, with a wind scattering the refuse of the gutter, and, too hideous and grotesque even to evoke compassion, a few old tramps and forlorn children shivering in the cold". (CFG Masterman, 'George Gissing' in "In Peril of Change" [1905]. This is certainly a good description of the typically Gissingesque manner, but his scope, in the novels he wrote in the 1890s, is much wider than is implied by this. And mournful and dispiriting though he may be, he is a writer of peculiar charm. We read and enjoy him because he is such a personal writer who seems, more than most, to be speaking into the reader's ear.  

GISSING AND THE POOR 

His early novels are set mostly among the London slums, where Gissing himself perforce lived for some years after his return from exile in America. They 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. Unlike Dickens, Gissing never resorts to melodrama and sentimentality; indeed, some passages contain strong elements of patrician disgust and biting irony. But pathos is never too far away. His treatment of the burial of Jane Vine (in Demos) is an especially moving piece, where Gissing reflects sadly on the utter obliteration of the poor from the collective memory as soon as they are dead and buried. 

Gissing's attitude to the poor was, in a word, complicated. In his earliest days he was an avowed socialist, but that was a passing phase: he subjected his own early political idealism to a relentless, many-sided analysis in Demos: A Story of English Socialism (1886). He was certainly no friend of 'the people' in the abstract. His final position stabilised as a most peculiar mixture of sympathy for the 'deserving' poor (but only considered as individuals) and a scornful loathing of the rest. A question asked over and over in his 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? The answer is: Not much. Though he often puts contemptuous sentiments about the effects of compulsory education on the lower orders into the mouths of his characters, he does paint 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, his position was that poverty corrupts any sensitive soul but that social reform is likely to lead to mere demagoguery, and that most philanthropy is sentimental nonsense. We see this attitude best in The Nether World (1889), a masterpiece of minute, unsentimental observation set exclusively in the slums. 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.

It is never difficult to spot when a character is articulating the attitudes that Gissing himself held dear, and where he uses an impersonal narrator there is no reason ever to doubt that it is the voice of the author himself. Gissing was a deeply conservative man, in love with order and tradition, a yearner after a quiet and ordered life; yet these sat oddly with other aspects of his personality: neurotic, ironical, self-punishing and restless to a fault. He was out of tune with all the popular enthusiasms of his day. He distrusted science and technology, never giving them their due. He condemned the proponents of progress, mocking them vigorously at every opportunity.  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. Advertising, the emerging mass media, and particularly the newspapers of his day, he thoroughly detested. This outburst against newspapers from Piers Otway in The Crown of Life is undoubtedly Gissing's own view. He hated Jingoism and nationalism, predicting all too accurately where they would lead. He was blankly indifferent to party politics, but he liked to draw make a mocking study of characters who dabble in politics -- almost invariably to expose their hypocrisy, egotism, self-deception and an eye for the main chance. However, the brutal realism of the character Denzil Quarrier (in the novel of that name) does seem to carry some weight of approval. Almost despite himself, Gissing seems to admire the thrust towards material advancement in characters he otherwise treats as contemptible: Jasper Milvain in New Grub Street is the obvious example. 

Gissing had conservationist leanings. He hated London and industrial centres, deplored the destruction of the adjacent countryside and urban sprawl, and takes his characters into a rural setting whenever he can, although as he said himself, he needed the streets for inspiration. All his best fiction has urban settings, nearly always London. On the positive side, Gissing's aristocratic sensibility shows itself at its best in his musings on the history and literature of the remote past. Gissing had a sensibility almost mawkishly in love with the past, especially the 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. His love of classical literature is to be found everywhere, and he is not averse to quoting in Greek and Latin without translation.  

Gissing's scholarly conservatism and anti-democratic bias never prevented him from being a perceptive and informed cultural diagnostician of his own age. In fact, the best part of Gissing's work is that which deals with social issues of the day in one shape or another, and in the most perceptive way. 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 social themes are class climbing in Born in Exile and the immoral lives of the fashionable, artistic middle classes in The Whirlpool. A much-repeated theme which pops up in different forms in several novels, is that of the 'dirty little secret', some unavowable item or detail which haunts the protagonist. In Denzil Quarrier, for instance, it is that the hero, canvassing to get elected MP of a small town, isn't actually married to his wife. This nearly destroys his ambitions, until his wife drowns herself just in time -- a drastic solution. In Born in Exile Peak pretends to have orthodox religious beliefs though he has written a freethinking article. Eventually he is exposed as a social and intellectual fraud and driven off. In Will Warburton it is that the hero has secretly opened a grocer's shop to support his mother and sister; in A Life's Morning a character keeps money belonging to his boss, is discovered and has to kill himself for shame, and so on. 

Gissing is never guilty of writing essays disguised as novels. Abstract social and political philosophising meant nothing to him after his very first years as a novelist: 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 Edwin 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. 

CHARACTERISATION 

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 own 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) is 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 (firmly if regretfully put aside long since); 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. Several times Gissing draws a male character of this type; one who lives on money derived at one or more removes from the labours of others, leaving him free to cultivate his soul as a dilettante. In The Crown of Life, as soon as Piers Otway has made a sufficient success of his Russian import-export business, he hands it over to a manager and lives at ease on the proceeds, doing little but mooning after Irene Derwent. In Will Warburton Warburton despises his grocer's trade and spends less and less time behind the counter as soon as he can afford assistants to do the hard work -- it is clear by the end that he is destined to be a sleeping partner eventually, drawing his income from 'trade' while resuming life as a gentleman. In The Emancipated one feels that all the main group of characters would be happier, or at least less self-obsessed, if they were obliged to turn their hands to earning their living. Edward Spence, in that novel, is yet another example. Spence is seen living in Naples at leisure, and we hear that 'On the occasion of his marriage, three years ago, [he] relinquished his connection with a shipping firm... . He was not wealthy, but had means sufficient to his demands and prospects. Thinking for himself in most matters, he chose to abandon money-making at the juncture when most men deem it incumbent upon them to press their efforts in that direction; business was repugnant to him, and he saw no reason why he should sacrifice his own existence to put a possible family in more than easy circumstances. He had the inclinations of a student, but was untroubled by any desire to distinguish himself; freedom from the demands of the office meant to him the possibility of living where he chose, and devoting to his books the best part of the day instead of its fragmentary leisure'. Such a life Gissing dreamed about enjoying himself, but it remained a fantasy. His relationships with the main three women in his life, and his two marriages and two sons, made it impossible.  

Gissing was strongly attracted to women (and especially, perhaps, to women of the lower classes, even to prostitutes) but he was no libertine or a sexual radical. In fact, at least in his writings he was something of a puritan. He had plenty of reasons to complain about publishers, but 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 England "at nurse": he was not very interested in testing the boundaries of toleration. He had scant sympathy with Hardy's essays in that direction. He deals often, 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. (Curiously, there is a scene of fairly overt lesbianism in Demos involving a passionate night-time kiss, which Gissing would never have shown between a heterosexual couple, even if they were married!) He is absurdly coy about pregnancy and childbirth, and certainly 'never talked obstetrics when the Little Stranger came'. In The Emancipated there is an amusing scene where a decent, self-educated factory owner suddenly discovers that many of the classics --which public schoolboys and university men were soaked in (and even -- horror -- intellectual young women) are frequently obscene. It is not quite clear how far Gissing himself shared his character's closing sentiment in this extract. 

TECHNIQUE AND STYLE

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, of rich allusions or motifs; indeed, on the rare occasions when he includes a scene or detail which carries some mild metaphorical resonance, like the rushing of the steam train under a bridge early in New Grub Street, the reader is almost startled. The French and Russian realists - Flaubert, Zola, Daudet, Turgenev, Chekhov - influenced him more strongly that most of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors in England. 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 have some obvious weaknesses. They are nearly all too long, to fit the exigencies of the circulating libraries, and sometimes their material is beaten out thin. His plots, though usually neatly contrived and well-paced, are sometimes over-complicated and suffer from melodramatic intrusions and (occasionally) wild coincidences which make one gasp. For example, in A Life's Morning there are two. The hero, going absolutely by chance for a stroll in Bushey Park, just happens to run into Emily Hood, also there by chance, whom he has not seen for years -- yet she is the one person in the world he wants to find. Then again, Beatrice Redwing, having gone to her MP lover's business office hoping to spot some private letters, spots a package in a drawer that is casually opened in her presence, and knows instantly, for no good reason at all, that these are the very letters! This kind of thing is all the more surprising in that Gissing himself complained that in Dickens' Bleak House 'arbitrary coincidence takes the place of well-contrived motive'.  

Gissing expended much effort on his style, though occasionally 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. A Life's Morning, for example, contains pages and pages of minute and tedious psychological analysis which tests the patience. Even then, he never really convinces you that the saintly Emily Hood, whose father has stolen money and killed himself -- Emily has been blackmailed over this secret -- would really be capable of dismissing the only man in the world important to her without a word of explanation except for a lying 'I never loved you' (and sticking to it for years). 

His dialogue varies a good deal, from the entirely natural and down to earth -- even racy -- to the preposterously pompous. At best it can be lively, colloquial and humorous, shot through, like Gissing's best narrative, by flashes of darkly saturnine humour. At other times, especially when socially superior characters are speaking intimately to each other, he makes them talk in a stodgy, laborious English, as though they are bureaucrats addressing a committee. (The Crown of Life is especially bad in this regard.) A man may tell his lover, not that he will get her a cab, but that he will attempt to secure a conveyance. 

Gissing has had no very obvious literary descendants, 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 his two essays on him. A remoter influence may perhaps be traced in the class-conscious, broadly realistic 'condition of England' fiction popular in the 1960s and 70s by Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Margaret Drabble 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, and all are available online, 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 much the same quality in their different ways.