New Grub Street - Third eBook

The milieu of the poor writer, admirably sketched in the 18th century by the satirist Tobias Smollet, relives more than a hundred years later in George Gissing’s fiction. Another place, another time…and yet his masterly work resembles a media scenario of our own day, with the same contrast between the idealist and the pushy, the romantic and the cynic, the generous and the selfish, the thoughtful and the flippant, the stylist and the pedantic. Yes, its players seem to anticipate the main ingredients of the present literary world, from the brutality of the market to the hardship of intellectual life to the poverty of mass taste to such controversial issues as women’s rights. No wonder George Orwell regarded Gissing as one of the most fascinating Victorian novelists and New Grub Street as one of most poignant novels in the history of English literature.

George Robert Gissing (1857-1903) was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire. He was educated at a boarding school in Cheshire and at Owen’s College, Manchester, from which, caught stealing, he was expelled. He was then prosecuted and sentenced to one month’s term in prison. Before moving to London in 1877 he lived in America for one year. He was twice unhappily married. In 1880 he published his first novel, Workers in the Dawn. Other novels followed, before the publication of his masterpiece, New Grub Street, in 1891. His other famous portraits of poverty and misery include Born in Exile (1892) and The Odd Women (1893). Among his later works there is a critique, Charles Dickens (1898) and his autobiographical The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903). George Gissing died in Saint-Jean de Luz, France, where he published a very successful French edition of New Grub Street.