Gissing, George. New Grub Street. Pub. 1891. Ed. Katherine Mullin. Oxford World's Classics, 2016.

Notes

starts 1882, and this temporal fixity is key
interesting to refract Reardon through Milvain at the start
10 milvains bourgeois (but not too comfortable)
13 a distinct meritocratic strain to milvain's bourgeois perspective, "we people of brains"
14 jasper remembers meeting Yule at the British Museum reading room
the Yules are "dwellers in the valley of the shadow of Books"
- 18 this jasper says specifically means BM Reading Room
29 striking description of jasper and Marian watching the train pass from a bridge

Themes

12 market for children's fiction and religious stories
22 Yule presents an anti "spreading civilization" arg about literary trade, in line with moral concerns about novel reading
25 Marian misquotes Alfred Tennyson about ash trees (from Princess not Idylls)
27 Reardon distinct from "ordinary circulating novel" (i.e. mudie's cf Cambridge History of Libraries et al)
35 Yule's mind "a literary cyclopedia"
49 Amy advises Edwin to write stories, which are becoming more popular in periodicals

6 reardon's missed expectations of "geometrical increase" in his fortunes after publishing one novel
8 "Literature nowadays is a trade" -- whole para
- vs "unpractical artist"
- cont on 12: a decisively anti romantic view (he as much as says "we can't all be George Eliot")
- Amy echoes on 46, "this is the age of trade" (while it's true there were socioeconomic shifts there had been tradesman novelists, Trollope or even Reynolds, in previous generations)
21 John Yule calls literary profession "pernicious," reminiscent of Pendennis (Thackeray, 1850)
27 "Men won't succeed in literature that they may get into society, but will get into society that they may succeed in literature"
- reverse of, say, Dickens (less so Thackeray or Bulwer)
44 Reardon's "morbid conscientiousness" (amy's words) that keep him in writer's block

8-9 milvain associated "magazines and newspapers and foreign publishers" with the market, with which a successful writer of 1882 must associate himself
20 Yule mentions the same periodical reviewing the same novel twice, good and bad (note says this happened to NGS in Saturday Review) -- a bookish scandal (cont 33)
33 Yule: "the evil of the time is the multiplication of ephemerides."
- technical bibliographical term for letters, diaries, here for fragmentary essayistic journalism

6 touches of "decorative spirit of 1882" at Milvains', i.e. William Morris aestheticism
17 Yules a stationer family. eldest brother John Yule became a wealthy paper manufacturer
- 21 Jasper thanks John for cheap paper, this a different state of affairs than in the 1850s with taxes on knowledge