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George Gissing: London's Restless Analyst
The Gissing Journal Volume XL, Number 3, July 2004 “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” Commonplace Book George Gissing (1857-1903): London’s Restless Analyst1 RICHARD DENNIS University College London “Walk with me, reader, into Whitecross Street. It is Saturday night, the market- night of the poor; also the one evening in the week which the weary toilers of our great city can devote to ease and recreation in the sweet assurance of a morrow unenslaved. Let us see how they spend this ‘Truce of God’; our opportunities will be of the best in the district we are entering.” The first words of Workers in the Dawn, the first published novel of the twenty-two-year-old George Gissing. I don’t think its most enthusiastic ad- vocate could claim that Workers in the Dawn is a masterpiece of English literature. But for all its faults it exemplifies a recurring characteristic of Gissing’s work, and the reason why I, as a historical geographer, have be- come a convert and, today, an enthusiastic proselytizer on his behalf. Gissing encouraged his readers to explore and, more than that, to engage with city life. Sometimes, like many earlier writers, he dealt in generic city- scapes—the “East End,” London beyond City Road, is described in the most general of terms—but more often, and especially in his later novels, Gissing’s London is very precisely defined: his characters live in real streets that the author has explored for himself, even in particular buildings. -
NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENDER STUDIES ISSUE 4.1 (SPRING 2008) George Gissing's Manifesto: the Odd Women and the Unclassed
NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENDER STUDIES # ISSUE 4.1 (SPRING 2008) George Gissing's Manifesto: The Odd Women and The Unclassed By Lawton A. Brewer, Georgia State University <1>Jacob Korg, in George Gissing: A Critical Biography, contends that, although the economic circumstances of the Madden sisters, focal characters of The Odd Women, constitute severe challenges to their survival, “[…] Gissing perceives that the most desperate element of their plight is the loneliness and barrenness of lives in which an invitation to tea or a slice of roast beef are events of supreme importance” (188). The sisters long for activities appropriate to their claim to membership in the genteel middle class. Nonetheless, it is the Madden’s poverty that accounts for the social sterility Korg so correctly identifies. Their desire to eat competes with their desire for class inclusion. Consequently, although the book focuses on issues such as marriage, friendship, and kinship, these affiliations are brokered in an economic system in which everything has, quite literally, a price. George Gissing’s The Odd Women, a novel so often seen in terms of its feministic depiction of the “woman problem,”(1) reduces virtually every human relationship to the level of an economic transaction of some sort. Certainly, Gissing does not render every relationship in exclusively economic terms, nor does he stipulate that women or men are economic entities and nothing else. However, the deprived condition endured by the characters regulates many of the decisions, conversations, and commentary in the novel, resulting in discussions which often suggest, explicitly or implicitly, a business deal of some kind. -
George Gissing, Humanist by Stanley Alden
Early Journal Content on JSTOR, Free to Anyone in the World This article is one of nearly 500,000 scholarly works digitized and made freely available to everyone in the world by JSTOR. Known as the Early Journal Content, this set of works include research articles, news, letters, and other writings published in more than 200 of the oldest leading academic journals. The works date from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. We encourage people to read and share the Early Journal Content openly and to tell others that this resource exists. People may post this content online or redistribute in any way for non-commercial purposes. Read more about Early Journal Content at http://about.jstor.org/participate-jstor/individuals/early- journal-content. JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary source objects. JSTOR helps people discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content through a powerful research and teaching platform, and preserves this content for future generations. JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization that also includes Ithaka S+R and Portico. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. GEORGE GISSING, HUMANIST BY STANLEY ALDEN The casual reader of critical reviews must have been struck by the recurrence of the name of George Gissing, a novelist who, in course the normal of things, ought to have been long ago for name a gotten. That the of writer whose career began forty years ago should persist in the columns of the reviewers is enough to establish the assumption that its owner must have in his work something either unique or uniquely said; must have either in trinsic or historical value. -
MARRIAGE OR CAREER? DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY in GEORGE GISSING's the ODD WOMEN by KUO-WEI HSU Presented to the Faculty of the Gradua
MARRIAGE OR CAREER? DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY IN GEORGE GISSING’S THE ODD WOMEN by KUO -WEI HSU Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ART S IN ENGLIGH THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON August 2005 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, to Dr. Martin Danahay, my thesis advisor, goes my deepest gratitude for his conscientious directing and correction on my thesis. Without his insightful instruction, this thesis would be laden with flaws. Next, I am also indebted to Dr. Jacqueline Stodnick and Dr. Kevin Gustafson, whose valuable suggestions improve the reading of this thesis. Besides, I would like to thank my parents for their financial assistance so that I can pursue my studies without being troubled by monetary matters. In addition, I am very grateful to my sister who generously gives her warm care for me while I stay at her place to refresh myself from academic studies. Finally, I thank all my friends for their kind support and concern for me when I was in difficulties. Without their help, this thesis could not come into being. May 2, 2005 ii ABSTRACT MARRIAGE OR CAREER? DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY IN GEORGE GISSING’S THE ODD WOMEN Publication No . ______ Kuo-wei Hsu, M.A. The University of Texas at Arlington, 2005 Supervising Professor: Martin Danahay Although George Gissing is acclaimed for his progressive thoughts on liberating women from patriarchy by establishing financial independence, s ome critics challenge such praise for Gissing by arguing that he is still confined within patriarchal thinking because he still adheres to domestic ideology, which advocates that women should stay within the domestic sphere and be protected from co rruption of the outside world. -
"Gissing's Address Book," by Pierre Coustillas Notes and News Recent
Contents "An Impossible Act to Follow!" 3 "Gissing's Address Book," by Pierre Coustillas 21 Book Review, by Simon J. James 46 Notes and News 49 Recent Publications 51 ISSN 017-0615 The Gissing Journal Volume 49, Number 3, July 2013 "More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me." Commonplace Book "An Impossible Act to Follow!" The title to this brief introduction of myself as the Journal's new editor is taken from a note sent to me by one of the eighteen friends, colleagues, and fellow-Gissingites of Pierre and Helene Coustillas whose praise, memories, and grateful acknowledgements of help unstintingly given are to be found below. (I did not, actually, need to be told that Pierre would be a hard act to follow. What I needed to be told was that the disparity betweenhim and his successor would not always be too embarrassingly obvious. But my correspondent meant well.) There is no need to review Pierre's achievements in Gissing studies here. Many of them are referred to below in a compilation of comments and accounts expressing respect and friendship, a compilation that yet can never do justice to Pierre's work and influence over the last half-century or so. In addition, those contributors who have formally reviewed various of Pierre's books, especially the primary bibliography, the nine volumes of collected letters he co-edited, or the magisterial three-volume biography will have celebrated those achievements in the appropriate scholarly journals. 3 My own modest history in Gissing studies will hardly compare with Pierre's but it may give an idea of my experience of what, generally speaking, is a pleasant and courteous area of literary studies in which to labour. -
The Gissing Newsletter
THE GISSING NEWSLETTER “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ********************************** Volume III, Number 2 June, 1967 ********************************** -- 1 -- Denzil Quarrier and the Woman Question James Haydock Wisconsin State University The importance of the woman question in Gissing’s work is undisputed. Scholars generally agree that Gissing had much to say about the subject in The Emancipated, The Odd Women, In the Year of the Jubilee, and The Whirlpool. Yet one other novel – of paramount importance in this connection – seems to have been overlooked. That novel is Denzil Quarrier (1892). It has more on the woman question than any of Gissing’s previous novels, and it presents for the first time an utterance that later becomes the informing idea of The Odd Women (1893). Denzil Quarrier’s address to the Polterham voters, entitled “Woman: Her Place in Modern Life,” is that part of the novel where Gissing’s views are most accurately reflected. In the town of Polterham even a passing mention of the woman question is enough to bring heated discussion. When the townsmen hear that Quarrier is the radical candidate for membership in Parliament, one of them asks “whether Mr. Quarrier is disposed to support the Female Suffrage movement.” Another retorts that if such be the case, “he mustn’t expect my vote and interest. We’ve seen enough in Polterham lately of the Female question” (first edition, ch. IV, p. 47). Then, commenting as author, Gissing adds: “The Woman question was rather a dangerous one in Polterham just now; that period of Revivalism (in which the women made fools of themselves), and the subsequent campaign of Mrs. -
Henry Ryecroft Meets Henry Maitland: George Gissing in and on Bloomsbury
Henry Ryecroft meets Henry Maitland: George Gissing in and on Bloomsbury Richard Dennis Dept of Geography, UCL [email protected] Introduction George Gissing is not normally associated with Bloomsbury. He is a man of the slums, or on the margins, or maybe a cynical observer of the nouveau riche, but never a Bloomsbury academic or intellectual. And yet Bloomsbury featured prominently in both his own life and his work. In this paper I want to focus on (1) Gissing’s relationship with the British Museum; (2) his use of the streets and squares of Bloomsbury; (3) his own residence in various lodgings in Bloomsbury and how this translated into his novels; and (4) to reflect on his overall personification of Bloomsbury, including scenes from his novels that were apparently NOT based on his own particular experiences. The British Museum Gissing obtained his reader’s ticket for the British Museum Reading Room in November 1877, the day after his 20th birthday.1 In New Grub Street Edwin Reardon applies for his reader’s ticket on his 21st birthday, for which he needed “the signature of some respectable householder”.2 Gissing himself seems not to have had any difficulty getting his ticket, notwithstanding both his youth (he must have misrepresented his age and claimed to be 21) and his recently obtained criminal record.3 The British Museum was central to Gissing’s life in London, both as an impoverished writer, as a source of heat, light and running water as well as a site for research, and as a classical scholar. -
Place and Class in George Gissing' S "Slum" Novels, Part I, by Pat Colling 3
Contents Knowing Your Place: Place and Class in George Gissing' s "Slum" Novels, Part I, by Pat Colling 3 Gissing Reviewed on Amazon, by Robin Friedman 19 Notes and News 42 Recent Publications 43 ISSN 017-0615 The Gissing Journal Volume 50, Number 1,January 2014 "More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me." Commonplace Book Knowing Your Place: Place and Class in George Gissing's "Slum" Novels, Part 1 PAT COLLING The Gissing Trust Between 1880 and 1889 five of Gissing' s seven novels Workers in the Dawn (1880), The Unclassed (1884), Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887), and The Nether World (1889)--were set in deprived neighbourhoods. All were concerned with life in penury, and had major characters who were working class. Contemporarynovelists and readers tended to see the poor as a cause; by the time Thyrza was published in 1887 George Gissing did not. By then he was not romanticising the working classes, nor presenting them as victims, nor necessarily as unhappy, and in this he can seem, to the reader expecting the established Victorian norm of philanthropic compassion, uncaring, even contemptuous. But his distinct representation of the poor-good, bad, and average-as they are, in the same way that novelists were already presenting the middle and upper classes, is respectfulrather than jaundiced. He sees them as individuals with differing characteristics, values, abilities, and aspirations, not as a lumpenproletariat in need of rescue and redemption. Gissing goes further than other novelists in 3 being willing to criticise the inhabitants as well as the slums, and he differs from them in his frequent presentation of the family as a scene of conflict rather than as the more familiar Victorian ideal of refuge. -
The Gissing Newsletter
THE GISSING NEWSLETTER “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ********************************** Volume IX, Number 4 October, 1973 ********************************** -- 1 -- The Guilty Secret Gillian Tindall [This is an extract from chapter III of a book about Gissing to be published next spring by Maurice Temple Smith in London and probably by Harcourt Brace in America. The title, the author told me some months ago, is to be George Gissing, Writer. Gillian Tindall has made herself an enviable reputation among modern English novelists with a number of stories like The Youngest, Someone Else and Fly Away Home, the last of which was awarded the 1972 Somerset Maugham Award. She recently published a collection of short stories, Dances of Death (Hodder & Stoughton). There have been translations of her novels into Polish, Italian and French. – P.C.] *************************************************** Editorial Board Pierre Coustillas, Editor, University of Lille Shigeru Koike, Tokyo Metropolitan University Jacob Korg, University of Washington, Seattle Editorial correspondence should be sent to the editor: 10, rue Gay-Lussac, 59110-La Madeleine, France, and all other correspondence to: C. C. KOHLER, 141 High Street, Dorking, Surrey, England. Subscriptions Private Subscribers: £1.00 per annum Libraries: £1.50 per annum *************************************************** -- 2 -- Of the various personal themes which run like significant, persistent yet often irrelevant threads through Gissing’s novels and stories, that of the Guilty Secret is perhaps the most ubiquitous and at the same time the most elusive. You can read a number of his books before even spotting it as a theme, yet, once noticed, it makes its presence felt everywhere. -
George Gissing's Narrative and Late Nineteenth-Century Literary Trends
GEORGE GISSING'S NARRATIVE AND LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERARY TRENDS. It is often difficult and unconvincing to identify a writer's work with a particular literary movement. George Gissing is no exception to this. The following pages will indicate the similarities between his work and the main literary trends of the late nineteenth century, without, however, attempting to label it. In order to do this it will be useful to have a brief look at those trends —namely, Aestheticism, the continuation of The Great Tradition and English Naturalism'—. In this, the aim of these notes is not to break new ground but deal only with some aspects of the subject already well-known to literary criticism. Critics have often associated Aestheticism with Pre-Raphaelite tastes, while stressing the differences between them. For them, Pre-Raphaelism was a movement with clearly artistic aims, while the term Aestheticism referred not so much to a movement as to a group of writers who shared similar aesthetic ideals'. Walter Pater, for instance, in his Essay on Style, proposed the search for the exact term, in order to create beauty rather than to achieve greater clarity in the message. That is, he sought to reduce language to its purely poetic' function. And Oscar Wilde, as the extreme defender of the concept of art for art's sake', was absolutely opposed to the idea that language should be used only to further social or political causes3. With the death of George Eliot, in 1880, and of Trollope, in 1882, it seemed as if the era of the great Victorian novel had begun to enter a decline. -
George Gissing and the Place of Realism
George Gissing and the Place of Realism George Gissing and the Place of Realism Edited by Rebecca Hutcheon George Gissing and the Place of Realism Edited by Rebecca Hutcheon This book first published 2021 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2021 by Rebecca Hutcheon and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-6998-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-6998-0 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Rebecca Hutcheon Chapter 1 .................................................................................................. 14 George Gissing, Geographer? Richard Dennis Chapter 2 .................................................................................................. 36 Workers in the Dawn, Slum Writing and London’s “Urban Majority” Districts Jason Finch Chapter 3 .................................................................................................. 55 Four Lady Cyclists José Maria Diaz Lage Chapter 4 .................................................................................................. 70 Gissing’s Literary -
Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Journal
ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING JOURNAL “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ***************************** Volume XXXIII, Number 4 October, 1997 ****************************** Contents The Forthcoming Gissing Conference: First Announcement 1 George Gissing, Henry James and the Concept of Realism, 2 by Janice Deledalle-Rhodes Gissing and the Paparazzi, by Francesco Badolato and 29 Pierre Coustillas “Far, Far Away”: George Gissing’s Passion for the Classics, 35 by Ayaka Okada Book Review, by William Greenslade 37 Notes and News 43 Recent Publications 47 -- 1 -- First Announcement Gissing Conference 9-11 September 1999 English Department, University of Amsterdam Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam The Netherlands Preparations are under way for an international Gissing Conference to be held at Amsterdam in the late summer of 1999. The organizers have gratefully accepted the offer made by the English Department in the University of Amsterdam to host this first major conference to focus on the works of the novelist, whose reappraisal has been intensified by and has greatly benefited from the recently completed publication of his collected correspondence. The conference will be held at the newly restored Doelenzaal, a splendid example of seventeenth-century Dutch architecture, in the heart of the old city. Within walking distance are some of the world’s greatest art collections, housed in the Rijksmuseum, the Municipal museum and the Van Gogh museum. The members of the organizing Committee are: Prof. Martha S. Vogeler (USA), Prof. Jacob Korg (USA), Prof. Pierre Coustillas (France), Dr. David Grylls (England) and Drs.