New Grub Street (Gissing, 1891)

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

• pub 3 volumes 1891 by Smith, Elder

Notes

General

• interesting to refract Reardon through Milvain at the start
  • omniscient focalization switches to Amy Reardon in ch 4
• starts 1882, and this temporal fixity is key
• 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
• 69 Reardon a disappointed scholar
• 91 class difference and the tenuousness of Yule's scholarly identity played out in correcting his working class wife's speech
• 106 nuancing Jasper's self serving vanity a bit with self awareness
• 149 the time signals are awkward: a little bit ago it was "now we've caught up to milvain's mother dying," now "a month earlier Milvain called on Marion"
  • 182 again confusing chronology (rushed)
• ch 13-14 controversy over whether Milvain wrote a bad review of Yule's book (he says he didn't on 163)

Themes

Reading/Writing

• 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
• 62 Amy reads a mudie's volume
• 75 Marian is presented with an"essay on the historical drama" for her father by the author st the BM (who dismisses it on 80, until he sees he's flattered in its pages)
• 94 Marian thinks "she was not a woman but a mere machine for reading and writing. did her father never think of this?" And ff on 95, the folly of writing about writing and the BM as "a trackless desert of print". Almost a bookish version of Dorothea wanting to live a passionate life in Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)
  • anticipating Maud Bailey's "matrix for the susurration of texts" in Possession by 100 years
  • "literary machine" on 96
• 110-12 extended description of Reardon suffering through his writing process
• his habit of carrying little classical volumes around: "...my bookish habits didn't promise much for my success as a novelist"
• 124 Reardon selling books secondhand
• 126 Reardon and Biffen the poor pawning scholars, talking about their Greek scholarly editions
• 128 they talk about realism and the difficulty of representing poverty, "the ignobly decent life" with ref to Zola and dickens
• 134 mudie's
• 142 Reardon decided not to write a three-decker: "advertisements informed him that numbers of authors were abandoning that procrustean system"
  • 180 "a triple-headed monster"
• 178 "It doesn't look like a book that fails, does it?"

Authorship

• 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
• 52-3 Reardon visits a famous novelist to get a recommendation for the BM (as GG did Thomas Hardy) -- their mtg highlights the difficult position for authors of "solid literary criticism" before the full institutionalization of English studies
• 66 "I have been collecting ideas, and ideas that are convertible into the coin of the realm, my boy" (jasper)
• 70 "a man who can't journalise, yet must earn his bread by literature, nowadays inevitably turns to fiction, as the Elizabethan men turned to the drama. "
• 175-6 Reardon bemoaning how easy it is for authors to sink into poverty
• 190-2 Whelpdale and the professionalization of authorship

Journalism/periodicals

• 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
• 72 Alfred and Marian Yule living on anonymously published periodical literary criticism
  • Here and ff: Marian as her father's literary secretary
• 93 ageism (and lack of connections) in Yule getting passed over for editorship of The Study
• 143 Milvain offers to grease the wheels by reviewing reardon's novel
• 148 Yule writes a diatribe against journalism as the death of prose style

Materiality

• 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

Shakespeare

• 12 "We talk of literature as a trade, not homer, Dante, or shakespeare"
• 66 Milvain says "tis my vocation, Hal" in talking with Reardon about the journalism he's doing -- falstaff in 1 Henry iv
• 68 Milvain again "there is a tide" Brutus in Julius Caesar
  • then suggests Reardon title his new novel The Weird Sisters (Macbeth)
• 168 "kind of fighting" to describe reardon's insomnia hamlet
• 180 caviare to the General hamlet