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When the going was bad

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From: The Spectator
Date: 19961109
Author:Taylor, D J

Wanting to condition myself for Pat Jalland's compendious study of Victorian attitudes to death, I hauled a novel at random off the shelf - George Gissing's New Grub Street as it happened - and did a little amateur research. Even allowing for Gissing's notorious pessimism - his are the kind of books in which a slight cough nearly always means consumption three chapters later - the picture of the lateVictorian world it conjures up is of a kind of frightful sink of suffering and despair.

No sooner has the novel begun than we get the impression that Mrs Milvain, mother of the ambitious Jasper, ...

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