"Edwardian Fiction": Be Warned!

WARNING

In 1997 Oxford University Press (no less) published a reference book: "EDWARDIAN FICTION: AN OXFORD COMPANION".

This work contains an entry on George Gissing which must set some sort of record for the number of factual errors which it manages to introduce into a short article. Among many other absurdities, it manages to get the death dates wrong of both Nell Gissing and Charles Dickens. It invents 'problems' in the basic facts of Gissing's biography which have never existed and, in short, is totally untrustworthy.

Given the status of OUP, and the consequent fact that Edwardian Fiction was supposed to be a standard reference text, I expressed my disquiet in a letter to the editors which I reprint below.

OUP did not favour me with a reply, but I heard this reference tome suddenly went out of print shortly afterwards.

15 January 1998

Dear Editors:

As an admirer of Gissing's work, I turned to your Companion with interest to study an authoritative outline of his life and works -- in short, to see how a reference book with the kind of credentials normally guaranteed by the imprint of OUP would evaluate Gissing's reputation in the 1990s.

I was amazed and appalled. It would have been hard for your writer (who wisely remains anonymous) to pack more factual errors into this short space allotted to him or her. Speaking of that, there is the question of the kind of judgement implicit in the space you give him. Gissing, by common consent, is not in the first rank but he has a high place in the second rank of late Victorian/Edwardian writers. He is certainly worth one of your longest entries. Yet compare the space he is given with the immediately preceding entry, on his brother Algernon Gissing. The younger Gissing is utterly forgotten and is worthless as a novelist. Most literature academics have certainly never heard of him. The vast majority even of those who specialise in this period have probably never wasted ten minutes on him, and rightly so. Yet his entry is not much shorter than his famous brother's! The shade of George Gissing, who sustained his feckless brother’s career with many an unreturned loan, would surely smile ironically at this turn of fate.

When I turned to the content, I could hardly believe my eyes. I can't be bothered to list all the errors of omission and false emphasis, but I'll restrict myself to the purely factual errors of commission. These are the more peculiar because they waste valuable space inventing out of nothing problems that never existed. We are told solemnly that "it is not clear when he began to live with the woman who became his first wife". The simple and rather sensational facts of Gissing's early biography have been readily available for a very long time. Your writer could have consulted even Morley Roberts' Private Life (1912) and obtained them. He or she needed only to check Roberts against Korg or John Halperin, the standard biographers, to discover that Gissing sought out Nell Harrison immediately after his return to England and that she came from Manchester to live with him in London shortly after his arrival. We are told "It is not clear. . . whether he had known her before he left for America". Yet everyone knows, since Roberts, that it was she for whom he stole from his College companions, to rescue her from prostitution. It is ridiculous, in fact it's absurd, to claim that "it is not clear. . . whether she was involved in any way with his early theft". Of course she was: Gissing went to prison for trying to be a Robin Hood to her. Nell "seems to have been ill", we are told, around the time when they parted in 1882. This is an odd way of describing someone who is recorded in the letters as tubercular (spitting blood) and a hopeless alcoholic who degraded herself to get drinking money and who constantly needed medical attention, including an eye operation, at Gissing’s considerable expense.

Next we are told that "in 1891 [Gissing] moved to Exeter, where he married another working-class girl". Everyone interested in Gissing knows that his second wife Edith Underwood was London born and bred, and they married at St Pancras registry office, after, according to the famous account, Gissing had picked her up in Marylebone Road. They went to live in Exeter for a while after their marriage.

It hardly seems necessary to go on; but, to cap things off, admirers of Charles Dickens will be keen to find out, after reading in this article that the novelist lived from 1812 to 1880, what he wrote in the hitherto unknown last decade of his life! Is Oxford UP still employing proof-readers, I wonder?

These factual errors are all the more egregious because we are not dealing here with some virtually unknown writer, of the kind for which some of your other contributors have done sterling service in recovering forgotten biographical details. Gissing has two solid biographies and a memoir by a close friend; several volumes of his letters have appeared even before the recent superb Collected Letters.

If students can't go to an OUP reference book for some basic, accurate facts about a well-known writer, where can they go?