George Gissing

George Robert Gissing ( ; 22 November 1857 – 28 December 1903) was an English novelist, who published 23 novels between 1880 and 1903. In the 1890s he was considered one of the three greatest novelists in England, and by the 1940s he had been recognised as a literary genius. Gissing's best-known works have reappeared in modern editions. They include The Nether World (1889), New Grub Street (1891), Born in Exile (1892) and The Odd Women (1893). He retains a small but devoted group of followers.

Biography

Early life

Gissing was born on 22 November 1857 in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, the eldest of five children of Thomas Waller Gissing, who ran a chemist's shop, and Margaret (née Bedford). His siblings were: William, who died aged twenty; Algernon, who became a writer; Margaret; and Ellen. His childhood home in Thompson's Yard, Wakefield, is maintained by The Gissing Trust.

Gissing was educated at Back Lane School in Wakefield, where he was a diligent and enthusiastic student. Juvenilia written at this time was published in 1995 in The Poetry of George Gissing. and won many prizes, including the Poem Prize in 1873 and the Shakespeare scholarship in 1875. When his money ran out, he moved to Chicago, where he earned a precarious living writing short stories for newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune. He lived in poverty until he met a travelling salesman in need of an assistant, and Gissing demonstrated his products. These experiences partially inspired his 1891 novel, New Grub Street.|group="nb" One of his friends was a fellow author and Owens College alumnus Morley Roberts, who wrote a novel based on Gissing's life, The Private Life of Henry Maitland, in 1912. He was friends with Eduard Bertz, a German socialist with whom he became acquainted in 1879. He took long walks through the streets of London observing the poor. In his reading, John Forster's Life of Dickens particularly interested him. He wrote in his diary entry for 23 January 1888 that Forster's work was "a book I constantly take up for impulse, when work is at a standstill'.

According to his pupil Austin Harrison, from 1882 Gissing made a decent living by teaching; tales of a fight with poverty, including some of his own remembrances, were untrue. Gissing often claimed poverty to his family, whom he largely supported, in order to discourage them from asking for assistance, and the issue of his supposed poverty may be explained by Gissing's attitude to teaching, which he felt to be an inferior profession, somewhat beneath him. He was also guilty of extravagance and poor management of his finances.

Gissing's next novel, Mrs Grundy's Enemies, remained unpublished like the first, although bought for publication by Bentley & Son in 1882. George Bentley decided against publishing it despite revisions that Gissing made. Before his next novel, The Unclassed, was published in 1884, Gissing and his wife separated, largely because Gissing would not give the time and energy to support her through increasingly chronic ill-health. He continued to pay a small alimony until her death in 1888.

thumb|left|240px|Portrait of Gissing in 1901

The years after the publication of The Unclassed brought great literary activity. Isabel Clarendon and Demos appeared in 1886; Demos began a relationship with Smith, Elder & Co., which published him until New Grub Street in 1891. The novels he wrote in this period depict a conservative view of the working class. Gissing used £150 earned from the rights to The Nether World in 1889 to fund a long-awaited trip to Italy to pursue his interest in the classics.

On 25 February 1891, Gissing married another working-class woman, Edith Alice Underwood. They settled in Exeter but moved to Brixton in June 1893 and Epsom in 1894. They had two children, Walter Leonard (1891–1916) and Alfred Charles Gissing (1896–1975), but the marriage was unsuccessful. Edith did not understand his work and Gissing insisted on keeping them socially isolated from his peers, which exacerbated the problems. Whereas Nell was too sick to complain about his controlling behaviour, some historians believe Edith stood up to him argumentatively. She may have gone into violent, uncontrolled rages as Gissing claimed in letters to Bertz, but the truth is elusive at this distance in time. Gissing took revenge (or acted to protect their older child from continual violent assaults, since he stated in letters his safety was in danger) in April 1896, when Walter was spirited away without Edith's knowledge and sent to stay with Gissing's sisters in Wakefield. Gissing pleaded Edith's violence, but he strongly disliked the way she presented him to his son. Alfred, the younger child, remained with his mother. The couple separated in 1897, though this was no clean break - Gissing spent time dodging Edith and afraid she might seek a reconciliation. In 1902, Edith was certified insane and confined to an asylum. They remained friends for the rest of his life, and after his death she helped to support Edith and the children.

thumb|Gissing at desk

Gissing's work began to be paid better. New Grub Street (1891) brought him £250. In 1892 he befriended and was influenced in his work by a fellow writer, George Meredith. In the 1890s Gissing lived more comfortably on his earnings, but his health suffered, which limited the time he spent in London. Novels from the period include Born in Exile (1892), The Odd Women (1893), In the Year of Jubilee (1894) and The Whirlpool (1897). From 1893, Gissing also wrote short stories, some of which were collected in an 1898 volume, Human Odds and Ends, and others in volumes published after his death. In 1895, he published three novellas, Eve's Ransom, The Paying Guest and Sleeping Fires. This too reflected changing tastes in the reading public, away from three-volume novels.

Later years

thumb|Commemorative plaque, 13 Rue de Siam, Paris 16th: "George Gissing, 1857–1903, English writer, lived here in 1900"

After separating from Edith, Gissing revisited Italy in 1897–1898, as told in a travel book, By the Ionian Sea (1901). While in Siena he wrote Charles Dickens: a Critical Study. In Rome he met H. G. Wells and his wife and did research for a romantic novel set in the 6th century, Veranilda. Meanwhile The Town Traveller, written in the final months of his marriage in 1897, was published. After a short stay with his friend Bertz in Potsdam, he returned to England in 1898 and moved to Dorking in Surrey. Will Warburton was published in 1905, as was his final volume, the short-story collection The House of Cobwebs.

thumb|Commemorative tablet at Gissing's birthplace

Gissing is prominent in Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind. He was also said to be George Orwell’s favorite writer. His conservatism was rooted in his aristocratic sensibility. After a brief youthful flirtation with socialism, Gissing lost faith in the labour movements and scorned the popular enthusiasms of his day. In 1892, he told his sister Ellen, "I fear we shall live through great troubles yet... We cannot resist it, but I throw what weight I may have on the side of those who believe in an aristocracy of brains, as against the brute domination of the quarter-educated mob." In The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, Gissing reflected, "To think I once called myself a socialist, communist, anything you like of the revolutionary kind! Not for long, to be sure, and I suspect there was always something in me that scoffed when my lips uttered such things." In a fictionalised biography of Gissing, The Private Life of Henry Maitland, his friend Morley Roberts commented:<blockquote>He had once, as he owned, been touched by Socialism, probably of a purely academic kind; and yet, when he was afterwards withdrawn from such stimuli as had influenced him to think for once in terms of sociology, he went back to his more natural despairing conservative frame of mind. He lived in the past, and was conscious every day that something in the past that he loved was dying and must vanish. No form of future civilisation, whatever it might be, which was gained by means implying the destruction of what he chiefly loved, could ever appeal to him. He was not even able to believe that the gross and partial education of the populace was better than no education at all, in that it must someday inevitably lead to better education and a finer type of society. It was for that reason that he was a conservative. But he was the kind of conservative who would now be repudiated by those who call themselves such, except perhaps in some belated and befogged country house.</blockquote>

Reception

Gissing's early novels were ill-received, but greater recognition came in the 1890s in England and overseas. The increased popularity affected his novels, the short stories he wrote in the period, and his friendships with influential, respected literary figures such as the journalist Henry Norman, author J. M. Barrie and writer and critic Edmund Gosse. By the end of the century, critics placed him with Thomas Hardy and George Meredith as one of the three leading novelists in England. Chesterton saw in him the "soundest of the Dickens critics, a man of genius". George Orwell admired him and in a 1943 Tribune article called him "perhaps the best novelist England has produced," believing his masterpieces were the "three novels, The Odd Women, Demos, and New Grub Street, and his book on Dickens. [The novels'] central theme can be stated in three words — 'not enough money'."

Style

The traditional view of critics is that Émile Zola was a primary influence on Gissing, but Jacob Korg suggests that George Eliot was a greater influence.

The Gissing Journal

The Gissing Journal, a quarterly single-author journal devoted to the life and works of George Gissing, publishes essays, and book reviews. It appeared in January 1965, with Jacob Korg of the University of Washington as editor until December 1968. He was followed from January 1969 to April 2013 by Pierre Coustillas, emeritus professor of English at the University of Lille, and from July 2013 by Malcolm Allen of the University of Wisconsin. However, Allen was only able to produce six issues and it ceased publication in December 2014. Markus Neacey, a regular contributor and independent Gissing scholar, restarted The Gissing Journal as editor in January 2017. He had in 2016 written a history and index of The Gissing Journal.

The Gissing Journal is indexed by the Modern Language Association, reviewed annually by The Year's Work in English Studies and regularly mentioned in the Times Literary Supplement. The contents up to 2008 can be read on The Gissing in Cyberspace website.

Works

;Novels

Workers in the Dawn, 3 vols, 1880
The Unclassed, 3 vols, 1884
Isabel Clarendon, 2 vols, 1885
Demos, 3 vols, 1886
Thyrza, 3 vols, 1887
A Life's Morning, 3 vols, 1888
The Nether World, 3 vols, 1889
The Emancipated, 3 vols, 1890
New Grub Street, 3 vols, 1891
Denzil Quarrier, 1892
Born in Exile, 3 vols, 1892
The Odd Women, 3 vols, 1893
In the Year of Jubilee, 3 vols, 1894
Eve's Ransom, 1895
The Paying Guest, 1895
Sleeping Fires, 1895
The Whirlpool, 1897
The Town Traveller, 1898
The Crown of Life, 1899
Our Friend the Charlatan, 1901
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, 1903
Veranilda, 1904 (unfinished)
Will Warburton, 1905 (published posthumously)

;Travel

By the Ionian Sea, 1901

;Criticism

Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, 1898

;Short story collections

Human Odds and Ends, 1898 (short stories)
The House of Cobwebs and other stories, 1906 (15 short stories)
Letters to Edward Clodd, 1914
Letters to an Editor, 1915
The Sins of the Fathers and Other Tales, 1924
The Immortal Dickens, 1925
A Victim of Circumstances and Other Stories, 1927
A Yorkshire Lass, 1928
Brownie, 1931 (seven stories for the Chicago Tribune, –1877)
Stories and Sketches, 1938 (with preface by Alfred C. Gissing)
Essays and Fiction, 1970
My First Rehearsal and My Clerical Rival, 1970

Selected short stories

"Lou and Liz," The English Illustrated Review, Vol. X, 1893
"Our Mr. Jupp," The English Illustrated Review, Vol. XI, 1894
"The Pessimist of Plato Road," The English Illustrated Review, Vol. XII, 1894
"A Capitalist," The National Review, Vol. XXIII, 1894
"The Poet's Portmanteau," The English Illustrated Review, Vol. XII, 1895
"In Honour Bound," The English Illustrated Review, Vol. XIII, 1895
"The Foolish Virgin," The Yellow Book, Vol. VIII, January 1896
"Great Men in Little Worlds," Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, The English Illustrated Review, Vol. XV, 1896
"The Light on the Tower," The English Illustrated Review, Vol. XVI, 1897
"Spellbound," The English Illustrated Review, Vol. XVIII, 1897
"One Way of Happiness," The English Illustrated Review, Vol. XIX, 1898
"A Despot on Tour," Strand Magazine, Vol. XV, 1898

Notes

References

Citations

Bibliography

Mabel Collins Donnelly (1954). George Gissing, Grave Comedian. Cambridge: Harvard University Press
John Halperin, (1982). Gissing: A Life in Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press

External links

George Gissing Collection. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Obituary (The New York Times)
A Hyper-Concordance to the Works of George Gissing
The George Gissing Collection, 1870–1999 at John Rylands Library, Manchester.