New Grub Street by George GissingPublished in 1891, New Grub Street tells the story of a group of struggling London writers winning or losing in a world of journalism and publishing that was rapidly modernising - from the days when learned papers on obscure aspects of classical literature would be ‘accepted’ by fusty periodicals to one in which magazines addressed a growing working class and female audience.
The trend is exemplified by the broadening of the appeal of a magazine called Chat by renaming it Chit-Chat and giving it a Twitter-like format: “no article in the paper is to measure more than two inches in length, and every inch must be broken into at least two paragraphs.” The audience will be “the quarter-educated …the great new generation that is being turned out by the Board schools, the young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention. People of this kind want something to occupy themselves in trains and on ‘buses and trams.”
Gissing provides authoritative detail on the expenses of living in London, the requirements of the publishers of novels (three volumes preferred) and the exact pay for various literary endeavours. Against this is set a discussion by his characters of the right way to conduct themselves: whether to churn out ‘rubbish’ in the hope of better sales or to maintain their artistic integrity like the tragic character Biffin who is determined to complete his social realist novel depicting every boring detail in the daily life of a grocer and who likes nothing better than discussing “a difficulty in one of the Fragments of Euripides.”
Money is the perennial theme and New Grub Street becomes more like many of its contemporaries when wills, inheritance and marital prospects dominate the plot in the second half of the book. But its characters are so well established and their responses to somewhat conventional dilemmas are nuanced - with Gissing avoiding the temptation to make each represent a type - that even the somewhat melodramatic events which energise the story towards its conclusion keep the reader fully engaged and guessing who will come out on top.
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