"New Grub Street" by George Gissing

The classic late-Victorian novel about those who toil in the "valley of the shadow of books". Rated by Robert McCrum 28th in The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time. 

New Grub Street is set in a world of impoverished literary men, a world in which it is normal for an author to sell (or hope to sell) all his copyright in a book for a fixed lump sum, in which the alternative of a share in the profits (if any) is frowned upon, a world in which the royalty system is just about to struggle into birth. As a consequence Jasper, a wannabe journalist, can't afford to get married unless it is to an heiress. Edwin, who married on the back of a successful novel, cannot keep up the quality output need to avoid his family sinking into squalid destitution. And Alfred, an experienced journalist with a wife and daughter who just keeps his head above water at the moment, is terrified of losing his sight. Some people make money, for example the man who sets up a prototype literary agency. The rest go hungry.

The plot follows the trials and tribulations of these three main characters and their families and friends.

The theme (the world of literature being merely the context) is the degrading and demoralising effects of poverty:

• “He knew what poverty means. The chilling of brain and heart, the unnerving of the hands, the slow gathering about one of fear and shame and impotent wrath, the dread feeling of helplessness, of the world's base indifference.” (Ch 5)
• “Poverty will make the best people bad, if it gets hard enough.” (Ch 6)
• “They lived in dread of the pettiest casual expense, for the day of pennilessness was again approaching.” (Ch 15)
• “The curse of poverty is to the modern world just what that of slavery was to the ancient. Rich and destitute stand to each other as free man and bond. You remember the line of Homer I have often quoted about the demoralising effect of enslavement; poverty degrades in the same way.” (Ch 15) (When reading this, one must be aware that the writer, with his classical education, is blind to the chattel slavery of the transatlantic trade but is referencing the slavery of the Roman and Ancient Greek worlds.)

The author's purpose may be to condemn poverty but he isn't really worried about ordinary poor people, just the literati. He can be quite snobbish: “Mrs Yule’s speech was seldom ungrammatical, and her intonation was not flagrantly vulgar, but the accent of the London poor, which brands as with hereditary baseness, still clung to her words, rendering futile such propriety of phrase as she owed to years of association with educated people.” (Ch 6)

The author appears to be more liberated in terms of sexual equality. It is made clear that Jasper's sisters and Mr Yule's daughters can all make money at writing, which seems to be the key yardstick (artistic pretensions are limited to Edwin and his even-more impoverished mate Biffen).

It's basically one of those books in the realist tradition in which the plot involves heaping more and more misery onto the characters until they broke (in this sense it reminded me of Germinal by Emile Zola or Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood). The most interesting relationship is between Edwin and his wife who react to his increasing poverty in different ways although their son Willy is treated as no more than a pawn in the battle between man and wife.

Overall the book was a very readable description of the corrosive effects of poverty; thank goodness that we nowadays have some form of safety net in the Welfare State.

Selected quotes:

• “Who is it that reads most of the stuff that's poured out daily by the ton from the printing-press?Just the men and women who ought to spend their leisure hours in open-air exercise; the people who earn their bread by sedentary pursuits, and who need to live as soon as they are free from the desk or the counter, not to moon over small print.” (Ch 2)
• “You understand that ... I mean marketable literary work. The quantity turned out is so great that there's no hope for the special attention of the public and less one can afford to advertise hugely. ...the novel I'm speaking of was practically forgotten a year after its appearance; it was whelmed beneath the flood of next season’s literature.” (Ch 3)
• “His disposition was the reverse of democratic, and he could not make acquaintances below his own intellectual level.” (Ch 5)
• “When already there was more good literature in the world than any mortal could cope with in his lifetime, here was she exhausting herself in the manufacture of printed stuff which no one ever pretended to be more than a commodity for the day's market.” (Ch 8)
• “Scarcely had he done a chapter or two when all the structure fell into flatness.” (Ch 9) As a novelist myself, I know this problem!
• “A charity whose moderate funds were largely devoted to the support of gentleman engaged in administering it.” (Ch 10)
• “Blessed money! root of all good, until the world invent some saner economy.” (Ch 11)
• “She could labour on in the valley of the shadow of books, for a ray of dazzling sunshine might at any moment strike into its musty gloom.” (Ch 14)
• “He thought of the wretched millions of mankind to whom life is so barren that they must needs believe in a recompense beyond the grave.” (Ch 17)
• “She did not aim at intimacy with her superiors; merely at superiority among her intimates.” (Ch 18)
• “Like her multitudinous kind, Mrs Yule lived only in the opinions of other people. What others would say was her ceaseless preoccupation.” (Ch 18)
• “In certain natures the extreme of self-pity is intolerable, and leads to self-destruction; but there are less fortunate beings whom the vehemence of their revolt against fate strengthens to endure in suffering. These latter are rather imaginative than passionate; the stages of their woe impress themselves as the acts of a drama which they cannot bring themselves to cut short, so various are the possibilities of its dark motive.” (Ch 25)
• “Croydon isn't the most inviting locality.” (Ch 25) Plus ca change. On the other hand, Eastbourne is mentioned as a (cheap) holiday destination even back in 1891.
• “A man must indeed be graciously endowed if his personal appearance can defy the disadvantage of cheap modern clothing worn into shapelessness.” (Ch 25)
• “The art of writing for such papers - indeed, for the public in general - is to express vulgar thoughts and feeling in a way that flatters the vulgar thinkers and feelers.” (Ch 28)

September 2024; 551 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God