New Grub Street as a Microcosm of English Victorian Life Essay

stark naked Grub thoroughfare presents the reader with an accurate and comprehensive control of late straightlaced society, despite the fact that it predominantly focuses only on a small group of literary men and women. At first, genius may have difficulty locating Gissings voice within the narrative. The emplacement leaps from character to character, without establishing any clear candidates for the readers sympathies. Jasper Milvain is ambivalently portrayed, despite the fact that his moral and literary values were anathematic to Gissing. This is but one example of ambiguity in a novel that is filled with confusion and inversions of the natural order. The world of New Grub Street is one where the unscrupulous Jasper Milvain triumphs, the mediocre Whelpdale stumbles upon commercial success, while others such as Edwin Reardon, Alfred Yule, and Harold Biffen undisputedly become casualties in the battle of life. What is Gissing trying to say round Victorian England? (Or is lit erary life his sole intended subject?) end-to-end this chaos of view-points are interwoven the themes of money, class, and sex. Yet it is precisely the ubiquity of these themes, and the public disorder of the world that makes the novel reflective of late Victorian society. Whether or not Gissing intended his novel to be purely a piece of work in the changing literary life of the late nineteenth century, New Grub Street is effectively a microcosm of English life in the closing years of Victorias reign. New Grub Street depicts some of the consequences of the morphological and compositional changes that were - and had been - taking place in the social and class structures of Victorian England. The increasing size of the middle class1, the reductions in working hours2, an... ... Unwin, London, 1968, p. 154. 5 Gross, John, The nobble and Fall of the Man of Letters English Literary Life Since 1800, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 220. 6 Altick, p. 61. 7 Gissing, George, New Grub Street, Wordsworth, Hertfordshire, 1996, ch. XXXIV, p. 393. 8 Gross, p. 220. 9 Gissing, ch., XIV, p. 146. 10 Cited in Gross, pp. 220-1. 11 Ibid., p. 221. 12 Gissing, ch. XIV, p. 146. 13 Gross, p. 149. 14 Gissing, ch. XXXV, p. 402. 15 Ibid., p. 400. 16 Ibid., ch. XXXVII, p. 422. 17 Ibid., Introduction. 18 Ibid., ch. VII, p. 74. 19 Ibid., ch. XXXV, p. 401. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., ch. XIV, p. 151. 22 Ibid., ch. XXVII, p. 301. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., ch. XXXV, p. 403. 25 Fowles, John, The French Lieutenants Woman, Vintage, London, 1996, p. 445. 26 Ibid., p. 283. 27 Altick, p. 17.