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

• 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

=General

• interesting to refract Reardon through Milvain at the start

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

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")
• 21 John Yule calls literary profession "pernicious," reminiscent of Pendennis (Thackeray, 1849)

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

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"