Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Penguin Classics (1976), Edition: 2nd THUS, Paperback, 560 pages
Description
Hailed as Gissing's finest novel, " "New Grub Street portrays the intrigues and hardships of the publishing world in late Victorian England. In a materialistic, class-conscious society that rewards commercial savvy over artistic achievement, authors and scholars struggle to earn a living without compromising their standards. "Even as the novel chills us with its still-recognizable portrayal of the crass and vulgar world of literary endeavor," writes Francine Prose in her Introduction, "its very existence provides eloquent, encouraging proof of the fact that a powerful, honest writer can transcend the constraints of commerce." This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the text of the 1891 first edition.
User reviews
LibraryThing member Ganeshaka
Once upon a time - a few centuries ago - "Grub Street" was an enclave in London, on the fringes of the publishing industry. Amid the coffeehouses and cheap lodgings, wannabe writers congregated...some to starve in garrets, some to hack (eek!) out a living, and one or two, like Pope and Johnson, to
Fast forward to the late 1880s. "New" Grub Street is George Gissing's contemporary rendering of the Darwinisms of the same industry - and of marriage. True to life, and almost a roman a clef.
In fact, you might skip all the way forward to the 21st Century, and channel hop through episodes of Survivor, The Bachelor, and The Apprentice, to get a flavor of the plot lines of New Grub Street.
Jasper Milvain is an ambitious young journalist, of limited finances, with an eye for women's bottoms...bottom lines. He is responsible for the success of himself and his two younger sisters. As he readily, too readily, admits, he'll marry for money, if that's what it takes to further his career, even if he has to wait til he's fifty. He's tripped up a bit, however, by his admiration and attraction for Marian Yule, who lacks, only, money.
Edwin Reardon is all "ars gratia artis". He refuses to feel comfortable writing merely for lucre. But he's burdened by a young son, and worse, a wife who married him, in large part, for his snob appeal as a serious artist. Overwhelmed by the pressure for product, his imagination falters and he's challenged to try his hand at pulp.
Toss in a circle of literary friends and fringe authors, and the Yule family (which holds out the hope of emotional and financial rescue)...you now have a crackling fire in the fine bones of a Victorian mansion. Can Masterpiece Theatre be far behind?
As it was then, is now, and shall ever after be...where there's a will, there's a way...if the estate has a good executor! If not, there's always Social Darwinism, and its comforting adage "If your shoes fit, you will survive...".
Show More
find fame.Fast forward to the late 1880s. "New" Grub Street is George Gissing's contemporary rendering of the Darwinisms of the same industry - and of marriage. True to life, and almost a roman a clef.
In fact, you might skip all the way forward to the 21st Century, and channel hop through episodes of Survivor, The Bachelor, and The Apprentice, to get a flavor of the plot lines of New Grub Street.
Jasper Milvain is an ambitious young journalist, of limited finances, with an eye for women's bottoms...bottom lines. He is responsible for the success of himself and his two younger sisters. As he readily, too readily, admits, he'll marry for money, if that's what it takes to further his career, even if he has to wait til he's fifty. He's tripped up a bit, however, by his admiration and attraction for Marian Yule, who lacks, only, money.
Edwin Reardon is all "ars gratia artis". He refuses to feel comfortable writing merely for lucre. But he's burdened by a young son, and worse, a wife who married him, in large part, for his snob appeal as a serious artist. Overwhelmed by the pressure for product, his imagination falters and he's challenged to try his hand at pulp.
Toss in a circle of literary friends and fringe authors, and the Yule family (which holds out the hope of emotional and financial rescue)...you now have a crackling fire in the fine bones of a Victorian mansion. Can Masterpiece Theatre be far behind?
As it was then, is now, and shall ever after be...where there's a will, there's a way...if the estate has a good executor! If not, there's always Social Darwinism, and its comforting adage "If your shoes fit, you will survive...".
Show Less
LibraryThing member lucienspringer
Conventional wisdom describes the Victorian era as a golden age of literature, when novelists such as Dickens and Eliot could produce work that was both lasting and lucrative, work that intelligently plumbed the depths of human character and entertainingly splashed in the shallows of high society.
Show More
Those who love the triple-decker masterpieces of this era may well enjoy this briefer work that illuminates the conditions under which those masters labored. Gissing's juxtaposed tales of success and failure are an excellent reminder of the ways in which his time was much like our own; then, as now, glibness and topicality paid the rent better than integrity and truth. His characters, like us but unlike most literary figures, think daily about their economic constraints and possibilities. By the end of "New Grub Street," we know all too well the price art exacts on the heart and on the pocketbook. Gissing's view may focus on the rougher side of his profession, but the flaws his harsh light exposes on the Victorian antiques make them seem all the more human and all the more valuable. Show Less
LibraryThing member Welshwoman
A great classic which continues to resonate even today. Gissing always strikes me as a really modern author; poverty, greed, money, sex, sexual equality (or the lack of it), love, lust - all of these are subjects with which we can identify.
LibraryThing member bjbookman
First read this novel around 1974. I never forgot this novel, it was my first introduction to George Gissing. I have just re-read it and all the memories I felt then, came back to me.One of my favorite Victorian novel and author.
Another five stars from me.
Another five stars from me.
LibraryThing member markbstephenson
Absolutely Phenomenal- straight from the heart- writers Reardon and Milvain are great foils for each other and the Victorian literary scene.
LibraryThing member patrickgarson
This tale of literary paupers deals with poverty in an atypically clear-eyed way, but Gissing does have some weaknesses playing against this strength.
Pity those educated without means; forbidden from pursuing humble but lucrative occupations (and not content with them, anyway), yet clinging to
New Grub Street catalogues the incestuous London literary scene, using Jasper and Edward as fulcrums for its story. The threat of poverty is omnipresent in the novel, but not in cariacuture, as Dickens was wont to slip into, or grand guignol like Zola. It's real, it's visibility, and its disturbingly close when one indifferent book or bad review can sideline a career.
Gissing's own experiences in this sub-culture give the book a veracity that can't be denied, and his sympathy for the characters - "good" and "bad" alike, gives the book a modulation that can be missing in Victorian novels.
Jasper, Edward, and everyone in their circle may be infuriating, but they are always understandable, and their desperation and fears are well-grounded.
The novel is propelled almost wholly through dialogue. Gissing has a gift for it, but it can give the book a skeletal feel at times, and if you don't respond to dialogue-heavy books, think twice.
As a corollary to this, the narrative does stutter a little at points, predominantly because anyone familiar with Victorian novels will see a few, heavily foreshadowed developments a long way off.
Thankfully, Gissing engenders a warm sympathy with his very human characters, and even if you know where they are headed, spending time with them is no chore. An interesting and worthy addition to the Victorian canon.
Pity those educated without means; forbidden from pursuing humble but lucrative occupations (and not content with them, anyway), yet clinging to
Show More
respectability by the slimmest of margins. The caustic effects of poverty can destroy those with a weak constitution, those like Edward Reardon, the sensitive novelist who needs to take a leaf from the book of his ambitious friend Jasper. New Grub Street catalogues the incestuous London literary scene, using Jasper and Edward as fulcrums for its story. The threat of poverty is omnipresent in the novel, but not in cariacuture, as Dickens was wont to slip into, or grand guignol like Zola. It's real, it's visibility, and its disturbingly close when one indifferent book or bad review can sideline a career.
Gissing's own experiences in this sub-culture give the book a veracity that can't be denied, and his sympathy for the characters - "good" and "bad" alike, gives the book a modulation that can be missing in Victorian novels.
Jasper, Edward, and everyone in their circle may be infuriating, but they are always understandable, and their desperation and fears are well-grounded.
The novel is propelled almost wholly through dialogue. Gissing has a gift for it, but it can give the book a skeletal feel at times, and if you don't respond to dialogue-heavy books, think twice.
As a corollary to this, the narrative does stutter a little at points, predominantly because anyone familiar with Victorian novels will see a few, heavily foreshadowed developments a long way off.
Thankfully, Gissing engenders a warm sympathy with his very human characters, and even if you know where they are headed, spending time with them is no chore. An interesting and worthy addition to the Victorian canon.
Show Less
LibraryThing member jwhenderson
New Grub Street presents in a realistic narrative, the contemporary working conditions of a new class, the professional author. George Gissing, born the son of a chemist in 1857, was as an author breaking important new ground, as well as responding to significant cultural change in the literary
The eponymous hero of David Copperfield is also a writer, but Dickens focuses primarily, and in some detail, on Copperfield's childhood, not his career as a novelist. He does not delve into the gritty world and threadbare texture of Victorian literary life. This may be partly due to the social and cultural upheavals inspired by changes in the culture of British education in the latter decades of the Victorian era. George Gissing's career as a man of letters was the product of this. For the rest of the century, the lives of writers and readers would undergo a profound transformation which would permanently reshape the British literary landscape. Henceforth, high and low literary culture would increasingly diverge. This is one of the main themes in John Carey's important critical study The Intellectuals and the Masses. It is also the animating idea of New Grub Street.
Gissing was hardly alone in finding the role and conduct of the modern writer an urgent topic in late Victorian literary London. A year before New Grub Street, Henry James also published a novel, The Tragic Muse, about "the conflict between art and 'the world'", though James focused on painting and the stage more than literature. Even in our era with the internet revolution promoting another paradigm shift, Gissing's subject remains as topical as ever, and addresses timeless themes in the everyday life of the full-time, professional writer.
In New Grub Street, the narrative is set in the literary world with which Gissing himself was intimately familiar; the title refers to the London street that, in the eighteenth century world of Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne, was synonymous with hack writing. By the 1890s, Grub Street no longer existed, though hack writing, of course, never goes away, with timeless imperatives. As one character puts it: "Our Grub Street of today is supplied with telegraphic communications, it knows what literary fare is in demand in every part of the world, its inhabitants are men of business, however seedy." (p 9)
The novel's protagonists are a contrasted pair of writers: thoughtful Edwin Reardon, a shy "literary" novelist with few commercial prospects; and Jasper Milvain, a hard-driving young journalist who treats his writing as the means to an end in a ruthless literary marketplace. "I speak," he says, "only of good, marketable stuff for the world's vulgar." Reardon will face continual difficulties while Milvain will flourish in literary London ("I write for the upper-middle-class of intellect, the people who like to feel that what they are reading has some special cleverness").
New Grub Street is Victorian in its realist depiction of a society in transition, but modern in the way it harks forward to the imminent new century with its portrait of the artist as an existential character making his solitary way in the world. For example Reardon ponders on memories of moments with his wife Amy on their honeymoon, remembering their voices:
"The voices seemed to be lingering still, in a sad, faint echo, so short a time it was since those words were uttered.
His own fault. A man has no business to fail; least of all can he expect others to have time to look back upon him or pity him if he sink under the stress of conflict. Those behind will trample over his body; they can't help it; they themselves are borne onwards by resistless pressure." (p 212)
The resistless pressure of life is ultimately too much for Gissing's sad protagonist. He is like the hero of Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy's final novel; Jude Fawley is a working-class boy who dreams of becoming an Oxford scholar. Hardy's Jude is Reardon's West Country equivalent. While Gissing's natural world is depressing his literary depiction of it is brilliant - a truly great novel.
Show More
generation after Dickens and Thackeray. His naturalistic style provides an urban alternative to the rural novels of Thomas Hardy.The eponymous hero of David Copperfield is also a writer, but Dickens focuses primarily, and in some detail, on Copperfield's childhood, not his career as a novelist. He does not delve into the gritty world and threadbare texture of Victorian literary life. This may be partly due to the social and cultural upheavals inspired by changes in the culture of British education in the latter decades of the Victorian era. George Gissing's career as a man of letters was the product of this. For the rest of the century, the lives of writers and readers would undergo a profound transformation which would permanently reshape the British literary landscape. Henceforth, high and low literary culture would increasingly diverge. This is one of the main themes in John Carey's important critical study The Intellectuals and the Masses. It is also the animating idea of New Grub Street.
Gissing was hardly alone in finding the role and conduct of the modern writer an urgent topic in late Victorian literary London. A year before New Grub Street, Henry James also published a novel, The Tragic Muse, about "the conflict between art and 'the world'", though James focused on painting and the stage more than literature. Even in our era with the internet revolution promoting another paradigm shift, Gissing's subject remains as topical as ever, and addresses timeless themes in the everyday life of the full-time, professional writer.
In New Grub Street, the narrative is set in the literary world with which Gissing himself was intimately familiar; the title refers to the London street that, in the eighteenth century world of Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne, was synonymous with hack writing. By the 1890s, Grub Street no longer existed, though hack writing, of course, never goes away, with timeless imperatives. As one character puts it: "Our Grub Street of today is supplied with telegraphic communications, it knows what literary fare is in demand in every part of the world, its inhabitants are men of business, however seedy." (p 9)
The novel's protagonists are a contrasted pair of writers: thoughtful Edwin Reardon, a shy "literary" novelist with few commercial prospects; and Jasper Milvain, a hard-driving young journalist who treats his writing as the means to an end in a ruthless literary marketplace. "I speak," he says, "only of good, marketable stuff for the world's vulgar." Reardon will face continual difficulties while Milvain will flourish in literary London ("I write for the upper-middle-class of intellect, the people who like to feel that what they are reading has some special cleverness").
New Grub Street is Victorian in its realist depiction of a society in transition, but modern in the way it harks forward to the imminent new century with its portrait of the artist as an existential character making his solitary way in the world. For example Reardon ponders on memories of moments with his wife Amy on their honeymoon, remembering their voices:
"The voices seemed to be lingering still, in a sad, faint echo, so short a time it was since those words were uttered.
His own fault. A man has no business to fail; least of all can he expect others to have time to look back upon him or pity him if he sink under the stress of conflict. Those behind will trample over his body; they can't help it; they themselves are borne onwards by resistless pressure." (p 212)
The resistless pressure of life is ultimately too much for Gissing's sad protagonist. He is like the hero of Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy's final novel; Jude Fawley is a working-class boy who dreams of becoming an Oxford scholar. Hardy's Jude is Reardon's West Country equivalent. While Gissing's natural world is depressing his literary depiction of it is brilliant - a truly great novel.
Show Less
LibraryThing member BeaverMeyer
Man, this book is powerful and emotional. It sucks you in and drags you into the depths of this agonizing world. I absolutely loved it and I will get around to reading it again someday. I hope.
LibraryThing member franoscar
Tale of modern life & new journalism. The strivers get ahead, the truly talented & idealistic fall by the wayside. It is a lot of fun to read.
LibraryThing member GeorgeBowling
This is a strangely lifeless account of the sub-culture of hack writers who scraped a living in late nineteentyh century London by providing a constant stream of material to the new "mass" periodicals serving a population growing more literate, especially after the Education Act of 1870.
They lead
Dickens - per the introduction a great hero of Gissing - imbued his accounts of early nineteenth century London with life, drama and pathos. Even incidental characters - one feels - have a life outside the paragraphs in whih they briefly appear; have fears and aspirations, a past and a future, friends and family. Two guys on a train playing cards in New Grub Street are just two guys who irrationally irritate the characted who observes them. When little Jow dies of want in Bleak House it is a dramatic - not to say over-the-top - event. The demise of one of Gissing's folk is downbeat and depressing.
No doubt this "not with a bang, but a whimper" is more realistic - but it is adeal less satisfyong.
They lead
Show More
larely deperate lives, always only a commission away from the gutter. But it is hard to warm to them or even feel much interested. By and large we are not told what they are writing - what were the subjects of Reardon's two successful novels, of his third unsuccessful one. It would have been nice to know.Dickens - per the introduction a great hero of Gissing - imbued his accounts of early nineteenth century London with life, drama and pathos. Even incidental characters - one feels - have a life outside the paragraphs in whih they briefly appear; have fears and aspirations, a past and a future, friends and family. Two guys on a train playing cards in New Grub Street are just two guys who irrationally irritate the characted who observes them. When little Jow dies of want in Bleak House it is a dramatic - not to say over-the-top - event. The demise of one of Gissing's folk is downbeat and depressing.
No doubt this "not with a bang, but a whimper" is more realistic - but it is adeal less satisfyong.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Schmerguls
I found this late Victorian novel worth reading but confess i found the main character's whining non-attractive.
LibraryThing member jmoncton
This very long classic is an interesting look at the lives of struggling writers during the Victorian era. What I found fascinating, is that the writers fell into 3 categories: successful 'literary' writers, writers who made a living by churning out articles and books that would appeal to the
Show More
masses, and writers who wrote carefully crafted works, but either lacked talent, or were never discovered, and basically were starving artists. In many ways, the art of writing has not changed. Today, we have those few successful literary writers who might win recognition with Pulitzers, Mann Booker awards, or other coveted prizes. And then there are those financially successful writers who churn out many books a year and have a staff of writing assistants who help them produce these instant best sellers. But the majority of writers, go unrecognized and do not make money. The only thing that has changed from Gissing's era is that now people can be self-published pretty easily. Although I found the topic interesting, I thought the flow of this book was slow and it lacked the charm or emotional tug of a Trollope or a Dickens. I don't know why this is on the list of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die; I could have skipped this one, but, at least it's checked off. Show Less
LibraryThing member Kristelh
This is a story that encompasses changes in the art of writing. Paper is becoming easier to make and print and books are able to be marketed to the "vulgar". The story contrasts the writer who is till trying to be literary and the one that writes to "make money". It also explores the plight of
Show More
females and their efforts to be more independent and make a living. I enjoy the author's writing. This is the second book by him and it is the last of the books that Gissing has on the 1001 list. Show Less
Subjects
Awards
Language
Original publication date
1891
Physical description
560 p.; 7.64 inches
ISBN
0140430326 / 9780140430325
Local notes
The Penguin English Library