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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Most of George Gissing's social novels bear the mark of an allegiance divided between social reform and art. Each begins by addressing itself to some problem of nineteenth-century civilization, such as poverty, Mammonism, socialism, rack-renting, educational reform, or the position of women, depicting evil conditions with powerful social realism. As the novel proceeds, however, social questions are gradually relegated to the background, and the story becomes a steady and, at best, inevitable unfolding of events whose course is determined in the final analysis by the characters of the people involved in it. There may be frequent reversions to “problems” and these may have some effect on the action, but a dénouement that fails to correspond with the social theme, or even contradicts it, makes it apparent that the novel of plot and character has usurped the place of the novel of protest. This inconsistency may well be one of the reasons why such social novels as Workers in the Dawn (1880), The Unclassed (1884), Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887), and The Nether World (1889) failed to win Gissing any but the smallest public, although they were recognized as faithful and moving portrayals of conditions that demanded reform. One reviewer of The Nether World pointed clearly to the ambiguity characteristic of Gissing's work by saying: “It is difficult to discover whether he hoped to add to that sort of fiction which has at times been more successful than Blue-books or societies in calling attention to evils crying for remedy or whether … the author chose his subject in something like an artistic spirit… His work does not show the energy either of an artist or of an enthusiast …”
1 Frederic Harrison, after reading Workers in lite Dawn, wrote enthusiastically of it to Gissing, saying: “There can be no doubt as to the power of your book. It will take rank amongst the works of great rank of these years” {Letters of George Gissing to Members of His Family, London, 1931, letter of 23 July 1880). Charles Booth, explaining why his vast sociological report on the life of the poor was needed, said : “It is not easy for any outsider to gain a sufficient insight into the lives of these people. The descriptions of them in the books we read are for the most part as unlike the truth as are descriptions of aristocratic life in the books they read… . Something may be gleaned from a few books, such as, for instance, ‘Demos’ ” (Life and Labour of the People in London, 3rd ed., London and New York, 1892–97, I, 157).
2 Athenaeum, 27 July 1889, p. 126.
3 See, e.g., Frank Swinnerton's George Gissing, A Critical Study (London, 1912), and Q. D. Leavis in Scrutiny, CII (1938), 73–81.
4 MS. “John Milton,” Berg Collection, New York Public Library.
8 Letters, 23 March 1879. Some time later he was again preparing to speak on a political subject before a radical audience. See Letters, 24 April 1881.
7 Webb, My Apprenticeship (New York and London, 1926), pp. 173–177.
8 Ruskin, Letter I, “Fors Clavigera,” Works (New York, 1894), I, 4.
9 These remarks from Workers in the Dawn, 2nd ed. (Garden City, 1935) II, 268–269, should be compared with the following passages of “A Defence of Poetry”: “But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life… . Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters” (Prose Works, ed. Harry Buxton Forman, London, 1880, in, 103–104). “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present … the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (ibid., p. 144).
10 Demos (London: Dent, n.d.), p. 125.
11 Unpublished letter, 3 Aug. 1896, Yale Univ. Library.
12 Unpublished letter to Bertz, 4 Sept. 1898, Yale Univ. Library.
13 (London and New York, 1894), p. 405.
14 Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (London, 1898), p. 91.
15 Selections Autobiographical and Imaginative from the Works of George Gissing (New York, 1929), p. 220.
16 Letters, 15 June 1880. The offending review, the first of any work by Gissing, appeared in the Athenaeum, 12 June 1880.
17 Holograph Diary, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, entry of 19 Oct. 1888.
18 Letters, 14 Feb. 1883. Mrs. Grundy's Enemies was set up in type, and Gissing corrected the proofs, but it was never published and no copy of it is known today.
19 Unpublished letter, 16 Feb. 1892, Yale Univ. Library.
20 Unpublished letter to Bertz, 1 May 1892, Yale Univ. Library.
21 Unpublished letter to Bertz, 2 Dec. 1892, Yale Univ. Library.
22 MS. letter to Morley Roberts, 10 Feb. 1895, Berg Collection, New York Public Library.