Orwell on Gissing (1943)

“Not Enough Money” : A Sketch of George Gissing.

This essay, Orwell's first on Gissing, appeared in Tribune, 2 April 1943.

All books worth reading “date”, and George Gissing, perhaps the best novelist England has produced, is tied more tightly than most writers to a particular place and time. His world is the grey world of London in the ’eighties, with its gas lamps flickering in the everlasting fog, its dingy overcoats and high-crowned bowler hats, its Sunday gloom tempered by drunkenness, its unbearable “furnished apartments”, and, above all, its desperate struggle against poverty by a middle class which was poor chiefly because it had remained “respectable”. It is hard to think of Gissing without thinking of a hansom cab. But he did more than preserve an atmosphere which, after all, is also preserved in the early Sherlock Holmes stories, and it is as a novelist that he will be remembered, even more than as an interpreter of the middle-class view of life.

When I suggest that Gissing is the best novelist we have produced I am not speaking frivolously. It is obvious that Dickens, Fielding and a dozen others are superior to him in natural talent, but Gissing is a “pure” novelist, a thing that few English writers have been. Not only is he genuinely interested in character and in telling a story, but he has the great advantage of feeling no temptation to burlesque. It is a weakness of nearly all the characteristic English novelists, from Smollett to Joyce, that they want to be “like life” and at the same time want to get a laugh as often as possible. Very few English novels exist throughout on the same plane of probability. Gissing solves this problem without apparent difficulty, and may be that his native pessimism was a help to him. For though he certainly did not lack humour, he did lack high spirits, the instinct to play the fool which made Dickens, for instance, as unable to pass a joke as some people are to pass a pub. And it is a fact that The Odd Women, to name only one, is more “like life” than the novels of bigger but less scrupulous writers.

At this date Gissing’s best known book is probably The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, written towards the end of his life when his worst struggles with poverty were over. But his real masterpieces are three novels, The Odd Women, Demos and New Grub Street, and his book on Dickens. In an article of this length I cannot even summarise the plots of the novels, but their central theme can be stated in three words – “not enough money”. Gissing is the chronicler of poverty, not working class poverty (he despises and perhaps hates the working class) but the cruel, grinding, “respectable” poverty of underfed clerks, downtrodden governesses and bankrupt tradesmen. He believed, perhaps not wrongly, that poverty causes more suffering in the middle class than the working class. The Odd Women, his most perfect and also his most depressing novel, describes the fate of middle-class spinsters flung on to the world with neither money nor vocational training. New Grub Street records the horrors of free-lance journalism, even worse then than now. In Demos the money theme enters in a somewhat different way. The book is a story of the moral and intellectual corruption of a working-class Socialist who inherits a fortune. Writing as he was in the ’eighties, Gissing shows great prescience, and also a rather surprising knowledge of the inner workings of the Socialist movement. But the usual shabby-genteel motif is present in the person of the heroine, pushed into a hateful marriage by impoverished middle-class parents. Some of the social conditions Gissing describes have passed away, but the general atmosphere of his books is still horribly intelligible, so much so that I have sometimes thought that no professional writer should read New Grub Street and no spinster The Odd Women.

What is interesting is that with his all his depth of understanding Gissing has no revolutionary tendency. He is frankly anti-Socialist and anti-democratic. Understanding better than almost anyone the horror of a money-ruled society, he has little wish to change it, because he does not believe that the change would make any real difference. The only worth-while objective, as he sees it, is to make a purely personal escape from the misery of poverty and then proceed to live a civilised, aesthetically decent life. He is not a snob, he does not wish for luxury or great wealth, he sees the spuriousness of the aristocracy and he despises beyond all other types he go-getting, self-made business man; but he does long for an untroubled, studious life, the kind of life that cannot be lived on less than about £400 a year. As for the working class, he regards them as savages, and says so with great frankness. However wrong he may have been in his outlook, one cannot say of him that he spoke in ignorance, for he himself came of very poor parents, and circumstances forced him to live much of his life among the poorest of the working class. His reactions are worth studying, even at this date. Here was a humane, intelligent man, of scholarly tastes, forced into intimacy with the London poor, and his conclusion was simply this: these people are savages who must on no account be allowed political power. In a more excusable form it is the ordinary reaction of the lower middle class man who is near enough to the working class to be afraid of them. Above all, Gissing grasped that the middle classes suffer more from economic insecurity than the working class, and are more ready to take action against it. To ignore that fact has been one of the major blunders of the Left, and from this sensitive novelist who loved Greek tragedies, hated politics and began writing long before Hitler was born, one can learn something about the origins of Fascism.