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New Grub Street
(1891)
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Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
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Gissing's accents
Gissing seems very good at portraying accents. For example, when Mrs Yule speaks I can instantly imagine how she sounds: with an old-fashioned, slightly gentrified, cockney accent. Her husband speaks in a rather blustering, educated accent. Harold Biffen enunciates very clearly. Jasper Millvain speaks very urbanely. Whelpdale has a very gentlemanly accent. Most of the characters would have spoken Received Pronunciation. The problem is, I wonder whether the accents I am attributing them are correct. There are not many tape recording from the 1880s. Most RP accents from film recordings of the mid-20th century are a bit different to how I imagine Biffen and Whelpdale and Alfred Yule speaking. Many of those accents, especially women's cut-glass accents, set my teeth on edge. When I do read a book by a British author from the mid-20th century, such as Lord of the Flies, A Town Like Alice, or even Watership Down, the characters do seem to speak with those mid-20th century RP accents. Incidentally, when modern British actors speak in historical costume dramas like Downton Abbey, they usually do not seem quite right to me. Their accents seem too modern. On the other hand, I wonder whether RP accents from the 1880s were actually like RP accents from the 1940s. They may have evolved quite a bit. I may have to track down a recording of George Bernard Shaw. He was Irish, but he wrote Pygmalion, which was about teaching a working class girl a middle-class accent. He was also on the committee of the early days of the BBC when they decided to adopt RP as their preferred accent. He lived such a long time, that he may actually have had a late Victorian RP accent. Interestingly, I found this article that referred to lost RP accents, which mentioned George Gissing, New Grub Street and Mrs Yule.
Posted By kev67 at Sat 30 Mar 2013, 9:20 AM in New Grub Street || 3 Replies
Grub Street economics
New Grub Street is pretty useful for information on Victorian economics. In chapter 31 impoverished writer, Harold Biffen has only two pence and two farthings to buy a loaf. Luckily he remembers a baker's that sells bread for that price. In decimal currency two old pence and two farthings is about 1p, and the cheapest loaf you can buy now is probably about £1 if it's a small one. In the same chapter Biffen asks his friend Reardon to lend him ten shillings. This amount is described as a half sovereign. Ping, I googled sovereign, and wikipedia says that in 1895 a sovereign had a face value of £1 but the purchasing power of £150 in 2007. That sort of makes sense. A middle class living income was £150, which corresponds to £22,500, about right. Ed Reardon is offered a job for £150 a year, which his wife Amy is not exactly thrilled about. Alfred Yule complains that he has never earned more than £250 a year, and most years a lot less. £250 would equate to £37,500 in 2007, so that sounds about right. £400 a year is described as a comfortable standard of living. However, when you get to working class incomes, the equation seems to break down. The minimum living income for a single person appears to be £50 a year. This is what Ed Reardon earns when he worked as a clerk at a hospital.Incidentally, £50 a year is also what George Gissing gave his estranged first wife after they had separated. £7,500 a year would have been a very small amount to live on in 2007. It's way below minimum wage on a 40 hour working week. Would it have been possible to rent a bedsit and afford to eat? There are some complicating factors. Most middle class homes employed at least one servant. Even Ed and Amy Reardon when they were struggling to live in a garret on Ed's income could employ a young servant girl. The Yule household appears to employ at least one adult servant. Also, taxes were comparatively low, and I think rents were relatively low too. Food was probably comparatively expensive compared to now. Next to the poorhouse there was very little social welfare. The sort of poverty that Biffen suffers is pretty rare today, I think. I don't think there are many people who have to pawn their clothes and not eat some days. However, Biffen's poverty does not sound all that unusual among the working class for those days. I read in a biography of Gissing that when he went to see his recently deceased first wife's room, the only possessions he could find was her dress hanging on the door, and some bread crusts and some of his letters in a drawer. It seems that to live a middle class standard of living required a lot more money than a working class standard of living. Keeping things clean took a lot more effort. I suspect the working class were a lot dirtier than the middle class. I think this explains a lot about the class society back then. The middle classes must have lived in dread of poverty. No wonder they sent their children to private schools, spent whatever money they had on keeping up appearances, and were reluctant to marry beneath themselves. No wonder so many 19th century novels were about women marrying richer men.
Posted By kev67 at Fri 29 Mar 2013, 8:24 PM in New Grub Street || 1 Reply
New Grub Street - making a living from writing in the 1880s
I have just started reading this. I was rather annoyed to find some student had underlined a number of passages in pencil, but I have rubbed them out now. So far I have only read the introduction and the first chapter. It seems like a somewhat cynical, comic novel. The introduction has some interesting information regarding costs and standards of living during the Victorian period. Gissing says somewhere that you needed £400 a year to have a comfortable standard of living, presumably supporting a wife and family. There was not much inflation before the 20th century, but Pip in Great Expectations had an annual allowance of £500, of which he gave away half to Herbert. Maybe he was not quite so profligate after all. New Grub Street is a book about struggling writers. During the late Victorian period, so I gather, literature was beginning to separate into quality and popular fiction. Before that, popular writers, such as Dickens, were also considered the best. George Elliot apparently earned £9000 from her work, which was an awful lot of money back then. By the 1880s more people were reading, but there were more authors trying to scrape a living from writing. Some were prepared to make compromises; some were not, and some could not even if they wanted to. I read a book last year by David Lodge about Henry James titled Author Author that covered some of the same ground. The introduction had some interesting information about the cost of books. The most popular format during the 1800s was the three volume book, which cost £1 11s 6d or £1.57 in new money. That is the equivalent of £125 according to the price of gold, or more like £400 comparing standards of living. This was way out of the purchasing power of ordinary people. Libraries bought the books and loaned them out, or magazines would publish the stories serially before the books were published.
Posted By kev67 at Mon 4 Mar 2013, 1:42 PM in New Grub Street || 8 Replies
Ed Reardon's Week
Apparently, some of the characters in the BBC radio programme, Ed Reardon's Week are based on characters from this book. I used to think that programme was quite funny. Well, well, well, I may have to put this on the reading list. George Gissing himself seems to have led a shortish but interesting life.
Posted By kev67 at Sat 16 Jun 2012, 6:17 PM in New Grub Street || 4 Replies