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.

Yes I started this book - a highly regarded work. I didn't get very far into it though, not on account of the writing, just on account of me really as I'm not reading much fiction these days, aside from shorts or poetry here and there, due to other pursuits. I have started Constable on the Hill by Nicholas Rhea, the series of books which was the basis for Heartbeat - this is because I am obsessed with Heartbeat at the moment, so I have let that one through for now. I've also read the book Author Author. In terms of a comfortable standard of living, you have to keep in mind it is quite a relative term as well. Was the £9000 the sum of George Elliot's work or from a single work? £9000 is a lot yes.

Regarding George Elliot's £9000, it is what Middlemarch earned her from 1872 to 1879.

I have reached the first scene change. The has story moved from one character, Jasper Milvain, to another, Edwin Reardon. Jasper Milvain is a self-confident, young man with plans to make money from publishing magazine stories, penny dreadfuls, hack work, etc. Ed Reardon is a struggling author suffering writer's block. He knows he's not the most talented out there, but he cannot bear to write material that is not the best that he can do. He has started several books before abandoning them. This seems like Gissing himself. According to the introduction, Gissing spent about a year starting books before abandoning them. Luckily for Gissing, he did get some books published that were good enough to be read by people like me 130 years later. I will be surprised if Ed Reardon does.

I am not quite sure what to make of this book yet. The late Victorian period seems so different to Dickens and the Brontës' time. I think it's the trains. It somehow seems more modern. Gissings' characters seem mostly to be economically distressed gentlefolk. In the previous chapter, I thought there was a bit of a clunk when the author suddenly started explaining a family history. There was quite a bit to memorize: three brothers, rich one, dead one, literary one. Dead one has a daughter, Amy, married to struggling author, Reardon; literary one has a single daughter; rich one has no children but is hostile to literature. I thought it was odd the way this information was just written out, not explained by one of the characters or introduced bit wise. Another bit I thought did not ring true was when Reardon's wife urges him to just write down any old rubbish that will sell because they are desperate for the money while Reardon explains how he just cannot make himself to do so. It seemed a bit untrue because it seemed more like an internal argument an author would have with himself than with a partner.

This book reminds me a bit of Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell. Both Gordon Comstock from KTAF and Ed Reardon are impoverished writers struggling to produce high quality work. Both refuse to prostitute their art. Both behave selfishly to their women. Both are depressed by the poor taste of the majority of the book reading public. There seemed to be a high demand for trashy books back then. Maybe this was due to the lack of alternative forms of entertainment.

*** SPOILERS ***

Another book that New Grub Street has started to remind me of is The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. The Philanthropists dealt with impoverished, working class painter-decorators. New Grub Street is dealing with nearly as impoverished, middle class writers. I suppose a lot of people in the UK are struggling now, but I doubt many are missing meals and pawning their coats. The characters in both books seem very life like. They sometimes laugh and joke and enjoy each others' company. As this is a book about book writers, I have learnt that this style of writing is called realism. My favourite character so far has been Mrs Yule. She was a working class girl with a poor education. Her writer husband married her when young because his lack of money meant no middle class woman would accept him and he couldn't wait. Later he regrets the decision because she does not have the social graces to host or attend dinner parties with influential men who could help his career. In the mean time, Mrs Yule's sister's family accuse her of talking posh when she comes to visit them, and think she is being tight when she can only give them half-a--crown.

I made the mistake of reading the appendix which gave away much of the plot. It's another miserable book. I am beginning to wonder whether all significant books written in Britain between 1880 and 1910 were miserable. I have read three Joseph Conrad books - Lord Jim, The Secret Agent and Heart of Darkness which were all miserable. I would be very surprised if any of Conrad's books had a happy ending. Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy and Daisy Miller by Henry James had sad endings. I did not get to the end of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, but a lot of that was bleak.No wonder the book reading public wanted to read escapist trash - all the quality literature was depressing.

New Grub Street does remind me a lot of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. The characters are from different social classes, and there is about fifteen to twenty years difference in time, but they are both describe poverty. Both authors were writing from experience. Both books are good at describing camaraderie among male friends, while at the same time showing up smugness and hypocrisy in other individuals. I like Ed Reardon's friends, especially Biffen. Gissing is not quite as angry as Robert Tressell (author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists). He can sympathise with the points of view of all his characters. I think I like New Grub Street more than The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. The Philanthropists started off brilliantly but became repetitive and tedious and I gave up about half way. New Grub Street did not start quite as well but it is warming up.

It is surprising that Tressell insisted on The Philanthropists being so long, as the book industry had not long escaped the necessity of having to stretch books out to fit the three volume format that Ed Reardon complains about so much in New Grub Street. I remember reading Tressell felt he had to keep repeating his message, but it turned me off after a while. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists could really have done with being cut down IMO.

Another similarity between New Grub Street and The Philanthropists is the main protagonists' attitude to religion. There seems to have been an outbreak of atheism in the late 19th century. Robert Owen from The Philanthropists is a non-believer, as is Ed Reardon, as was Angel Clare from Tess of the d'Urbervilles. That seems to have changed from the mid 19th-century novels in which Christian belief was implicit.

I am enjoying this book, in a way. Gissing is the missing link between Dickens and Orwell. Like Dickens, there are some times when I fear to start the next chapter because of the emotional content. Unlike Dickens, he is not at all sentimental.

I was interested to read that when Gissing translated his book into French, which he did himself being so clever, he trimmed a lot of the book out. He cut out some of the padding, autobiographical stuff, and some of the minor characters. Apparently, he said he wished he could have applied the same treatment to all of his books. He did not think his books were as good as they could be, because he was always writing in haste and because he had to comply with the three volume format that the publishers preferred. I would be interested to read the shortened book, but my reading list is already too long. I wondered which minor characters he cut out. I hope it was not Whelpdale or Biffen, as they are my favourite characters, especially Whelpdale.

The chapter I have just read, A Woman's Property, was interesting, but I suspect this is one of the chapters that would have been trimmed. It seems to describe a lot of Gissing's views, not Amy Reardon's. It comments on the then recent change in the law enabling a woman to keep possession of her property after marriage instead of it all becoming her husband's. It also talks about Amy's interests in 19th century thinkers such as Herbert Spencer (who I have never heard of before but who sounds interesting) and Charles Darwin. Amy and a friend discuss novels and Amy wonders why they are all about love and rich people - this has to be Gissing talking.

Something else I like about the story is that Gissing tries to get under the skin of all the major characters, even the not very likeable ones, such as Alfred Yule. Alfred Yule is quite an unpleasant man, but Gissing invites you to sympathise with him. There are few outright villains, only John Yule really, and few saints, just Biffen and possibly Marian, and maybe Marian's mother too.

I am putting voices to some of the characters. They sound rather like characters from a Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell movie. Alfred Yule would look and sound similar to the actor who plays Colonel Blimp. Jasper Millvain would sound very urbane. I was actually put in mind of one of the characters from film called Metropolitan by Whit Stilman in 1990 set in New York, who speaks in the similar well-educated, self-aware, sardonic way.

I am about 80% through this book now. Although Gissing's style is realistic, or naturalistic, that does not mean you cannot tell who is going to have a happy outcome and who is going to die, face down, in the gutter, to be hardly missed by anybody. My favourite character is Alfred Yule. He really is a horrible man, but Gissing does not give up on him. Gissing was a big fan of Dickens. Maybe Alfred Yule is like one of Dickens' complex characters: deeply flawed but motivated by strong emotions and harsh formative experiences. My second favourite is Whelpdale, who is like one of Dickens' likeable comic characters. John East, Amy Reardon's brother, is similar to Dicken's not evil, but shallow, selfish and unthinking characters. I am not sure what sort of Dickensian character Ed Reardon would be, as he is a sort of hero but doomed to fail. In fact I have given up on Ed Reardon. If he is going to make things hard on himself then what can you do? I am not sure what sort of Dickensian character Jasper Milvain would represent either. I am not sure Dickens liked his heroes so knowing and self-sufficient.

I wonder if this book could be turned into a decent television mini-series.

I have only one chapter to go. I have enjoyed it. The characters really came alive.

I wonder what the publishing world made of the book when it came out. Gissing seemed to have a jaundiced view of publishers and the reading public. I felt a bit criticized myself. I will try to like Umberto Eco's next impenetrable tome. I will try to read Finnegan's Wake.

I may read some of Gissing's other books, probably The Odd Women and The Nether World. The Odd Women is a book about women trying to live an independent life, while The Nether World is about the London poor. Which other Victorian author makes feminist and Marxist analyses of his work so easy?