New Grub Street (Penguin Classics)

I recently read New Grub Street, and I must say I was stunned by how much I enjoyed it. Gissing's prose and characterization hold up remarkably well. He's sort of an urban Hardy, though far more accessible to today's reader. I'd recommend this to any serious reader. Oh, and this novel is ripe for adaptation. A BBC miniseries would be great.

George Gissing's 1891 novel, "New Grub Street," is likely one of the most depressing books I've ever read. Certainly, in its descriptions of literary life, be it in publishing, or in my own realm of graduate scholarship, the situations, truths, and lives Gissing portrays are still all too relevant. "New Grub Street" itself points to the timelessness of Gissing's portrayals - as Grub Street was synonymous, even in the eighteenth century with the disrepute of hack writing, and the ignominy of having to make a living by authorship. One of Gissing's primary laments throughout the novel is that the life of the mind is of necessity one which is socially isolating and potentially devastating to any kind of relationships, familial or otherwise. "New Grub Street" gives us a world where friendship is never far from enmity, where love is never far from the most bitter kinds of hatred. The anti-heroes of "New Grub Street" are presented to us as the novel begins - Jasper Milvain is a young, if somewhat impoverished, but highly ambitious man, eager to be a figure of influence in literary society at whatever cost. His friend, Edwin Reardon, on the other hand, was brought up on the classics, and toils away in obscurity, determined to gain fame and reputation through meaningful, psychological, and strictly literary fiction. Family matters beset the two - Jasper has two younger sisters to look out for, and Edwin has a beautiful and intelligent wife, who has become expectant of Edwin's potential fame. Throw into the mix Miss Marian Yule, daughter of a declining author of criticism, whose own reputation was never fully realized, and who has indentured his daughter to literary servitude, and we have a pretty list of discontented and anxious people struggling in the cut-throat literary marketplace of London. Money is of supreme importance in "New Grub Street," and it would be pointless to write a review without making note of it. As always, the literary life is one which is not remunerative for the mass of people who engage upon it, and this causes no end of strife in the novel. As Milvain points out, the paradox of making money in the literary world is that one must have a well-known reputation in order to make money from one's labours. At the same time, one must have money in order to move in circles where one's reputation may be made. This is the center of the novel's difficulties - should one or must one sacrifice principles of strictly literary fame and pander to a vulgar audience in order to simply survive? The question is one in which Reardon finds the greatest challenges to his marriage, his self-esteem, and even his very existence. For Jasper Milvain and his sisters, as well as for Alfred and Marian Yule, there is no question that the needs of subsistence outweigh most other considerations. "New Grub Street" profoundly questions the relevance of classic literature and high culture to the great mass of people, and by proxy, to the nation itself

"New Grub Street," published in three volumes in 1891, is George Gissing's grimly realistic exploration of literary life in 1880s London. While it is a remarkably vivid novel, it is also an accurate and detailed depiction of what it was like to be a struggling author in late nineteenth century England, "a society where," as Professor Bernard Bergonzi points out in his introduction, "literature has become a commodity, and where the writing of fiction does not differ radically from any other form of commercial or industrial production.""New Grub Street" is the contrapuntal narrative of two literary figures, Edwin Reardon, a struggling novelist who aspires to write great literature without regard to its popular appeal, and Jasper Milvain, a self-centered, materialistic striver whose only concern is with achieving financial success and social position by publishing what the mass public wants to read. As Milvain relates early in the novel, succinctly adumbrating the theme that winds through the entirety of "New Grub Street":"Understand the difference between a man like Reardon and a man like me. He is the old type of unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won't make concessions, or rather, he can't make them; he can't supply the market. I-well, you may say that at present I do nothing; but that's a great mistake, I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skillful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets. . . . Reardon can't do that kind of thing, he's behind his age; he sells a manuscript as if he lives in Sam Johnson's Grub Street. But our Grub Street of today is quite a different place: it is supplied with telegraphic communication, it knows what literary fare is in demand in every part of the world, its inhabitants are men of business, however seedy."Gissing brilliantly explores this theme through the lives of his characters, each drawn with stunning depth and verisimilitude. There is, of course, Reardon, whose failure as a novelist and neurasthenic decline destroys his marriage and his life. There is also Reardon's wife, Amy, a woman whose love for Reardon withers with the exsanguination of her husband's creative abilities. While the manipulative and seemingly unfeeling Milvain pursues his crass aspirations, he also encourages his two sisters, Dora and Maud, to seek commercial success as writers of children's books. And intertwining all of their lives are the myriad connections each of the characters has with the Yule family, in particular with the nearly impoverished Alfred Yule, a serious writer and literary critic, and his daughter and literary amanuensis, Marian. It is Marian--struggling to reconcile the literary demands and expectations of her father with the desire to lead her own life, struggling to escape the claustrophobic world of the literary life--who ultimately, pessimist

New Grub Street, written by the (now) relatively unknown George Gissing, is a dark story concerning struggling writers in the late 19th century. One set of writers believe in writing for the pure intellectual fulfillment with little/no regards of monetary reward, the other believing in simply writing whatever drivel society will buy just to get oneself rich. Compounding this is a very moving sub-story on the issue of marriage and (the lack of) divorce in late Victorian society.Much of New Grub Street is very depressing, with haunting descriptions of poverty, starvation, illness .. and writer's block. However just when I thought it would all spiral into a sad melodrama George Gissing's strength of capturing genuine emotion between the chief protaganists saves the day. More than that, he produced a novel I will not forget (.. and I read 50-100 novels per year!).New Grub Street is perfect for those who love fine Victorian-era writers such as George Eliot; that is, it is brilliantly written but not "over-written" (like works from Henry James). No need to grapple with your dictionary to enjoy this gem.

"(W)e must be thankful for the piece of youthful folly which turned him aside from a comfortable middle-class career and forced him to become the chronicler of vulgarity, squalor and failure." --George OrwellNew Grub Street, a novel set in the literary-journalistic world of 1890s London, charts the effects of genteel poverty on a writer's imagination and personal relationships. Edwin Reardon, a talented but luckless and ineffectual character (whose life and fortunes were patterned to a degree upon Gissing's) has had a minor critical success with a novel and has married a handsome, socially ambitious young woman with whom he has nothing in common. Poverty, the torturing necessity of keeping up a respectable appearance, fading hopes of literary success, and the advent of crippling writer's block devastate the Reardons' already shallow relationship. He cannot write another good book, but forced by the exigencies of the lending-library market to produce the requisite number of volumes he writes some dreadful rubbish. Gissing focuses mainly on Edwin's excruciating plight, but does justice to Amy Reardon as well; although she is not an especially attractive character, her motivations and her exasperation are rendered with some sympathy and made perfectly understandable.Gissing is always serious in his description of human suffering, but in New Grub Street he managed to combine seriousness with the blackest of black humor in the subplot involving Jasper Milvain, a young man who possesses negligible literary talent but a deep understanding of the market. Armed with this sure-fire formula for success, the engaging rotter moves upward in society as Reardon goes down. Milvain sponges off his mother, supplies his sisters Dora and Maud (nice Tennysonian names) with literary hack-work so he won't have to support them, engages himself to a guileless young lady and ditches her without remorse when her fortune evaporates, and finally marries the widowed Amy Reardon (who, by coincidence, has come into some money.) Probably the closest Gissing, a very depressing writer in general, ever came to gaiety was in his treatment of Milvain's unreflecting baseness, and the thrill of his transgressions affords some relief to the gloom of the Reardon chronicle. This is a highly worthwhile book, and a necessity for devotees of vulgarity, squalor and failure.