The Fiction of George Gissing: A Critical Analysis

Gissing And The Imagination

The late Victorian novelist George Gissing (1857 -- 1903) has attained increased critical stature since the 1960s. Many readers become interested in Gissing through learning of his life. It is easy and tempting to see the details of Gissing's own life in reading the novels and, thus, to consider his writings as primarily autobiographical. For readers new to Gissing, here are a few aspects of his life.

Born to modest means, Gissing attended Owens College with financial assistance where he loved the Greek and Latin classics. Gissing was expelled from Owens when he stole money to give to a young prostitute, Nell, with whom he had become involved. He served a month in jail. After his release from jail, he spent a year in the United States where he began to write stories. Upon his return to London in 1877, Gissing married Nell, and the marriage proved catastrophic. Gissing lived a poor life in East London supporting himself by tutoring. He began to write novels, beginning with a focus on the life of the lower classes. He wrote prolifically, producing 23 novels and several other works, and ultimately achieved a degree of critical success. After the death of Nell, Gissing made another unhappy marriage to a woman of the lower classes which likewise ended badly. Near the end of his life, he enjoyed a somewhat better relationship with a French woman, Gabrielle Fleury. Gissing's novels begin with works describing and criticizing the condition of the lower classes, such as "The Nether World". They gradually expand their themes and focus as Gissing himself became more successful. A small number of late works come close to the spirit of romance or comedy.

Gissing's novels can be seen as reflecting the details of his sad and difficult life, especially in their focus on the alienated intellectual with no money and no particular way of supporting himself. Gissing himself rejected this way of understanding his work. And in this new book published by McFarland Publishing, "The Fiction of George Gissing", Lewis Moore shows the importance of the imaginative, in addition to the autobiographical aspects of Gissing's fiction. Moore is a retired professor of English who taught at the University of the District of Columbia for 30 years.

Almost all of Gissing's novels are set in the late Victorian England in which he lived. Moore carefully develops themes in Gissing's fiction to show that the novels offer a way of imaginatively recreating the London of his day. As Moore points out, the mindset and character of Victorian England are difficult for contemporary readers to understand. Gissing's novels, when combined with sensitive and careful reading, offer a way of insight into this lost time.

Moore's study begins with a discussion of the imagination in literature, focusing on its role in the English romantic poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. The emphasis these writers placed on the imagination, Moore argues, is useful for approaching Gissing and understanding his textures and themes.

The body of the study is in three large parts, in which Moore discusses Gissing's novels and "The Social Imagination", "The Personal Imagination", and "The Cultural Imagination". In part one, Moore develops themes such as violence, class structure, progress and science, marriage and family, politics, and education as they appear in Gissing. In part two, Moore similarly develops themes including money, romance, women, and the individual's relation to society in the novels. In part three, Moore discusses urban and rural scenes in Gissing's fiction, nationalism and imperialism, and religion and morality as they appear in Gissing's work. This part also includes an interesting section on autobiography as it appears in Gissing's "New Grub Street", "The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft" and in the first biography of Gissing, "The Private Life of Henry Maitland" (1912) by Gissing's friend Morley Roberts.The book is cast in the form of a novel. In his treatment of these three books, Moore combines his themes of imagination and autobiography in reading Gissing's fiction.

With the exception of the first section of Part 1, which is an essay on Gissing's "New Grub Street" the study is arranged by themes rather than by novels. Thus, Moore, takes a topic and explores the way Gissing treated it in the course of his writings. Moore's approach has the advantage of showing the continuity of themes in Gissing's fiction and how his approach to his themes developed over the years. Moore's approach also allows consideration of many of Gissing's works which remain obscure and are read far less frequently than his better-known works. The disadvantage of the approach is that it results in a somewhat choppy approach to the novels, as Moore concentrates on aspects of each book to develop his theme. Readers not already familiar with many of the works he discusses may have a difficult time following Moore's details.

I think Moore succeeds in showing that Gissing's novels have value far beyond their autobiographical components. The attempt to see Gissing as an "imaginative" writer within the terms of the English romantic poets is somewhat strained. The comparison tends to overlook Gissing's efforts at realism and to describe honestly the world that he observed. Moore shows that Gissing's books offer one approach to the understanding of Victorian England. But it bears emphasis that Gissing's books explore themes such as commodification, gender, alienation, and integrity that have an importance to the 20th and 21st Centuries as well as to Gissing's own world. I thing Gissing's thoughtful consideration of these and other themes, rather than either autobiography or Victorian England are the major source of his interest to today's readers.

This book will be of most appeal to readers with some prior familiarity with Gissing's life and novels. It should encourage the exploration of the works of this great and still too-little-read writer.

Robin Friedman