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New Grub Street (1891) by George Gissing is the most accurate portrait of the literary marketplace ever written — a Victorian novel about the collision between artistic integrity and commercial necessity, organized around two novelists in 1880s London whose different responses to that collision define the novel's moral argument. Edwin Reardon is a serious novelist who cannot write to please the market and is slowly destroyed by poverty and the pressure to commercialize. His friend Jasper Milvain is a born journalist who has no illusions about literature as commerce and who succeeds precisely because he has none. The novel traces both men's careers over several years, showing how the literary world's economy rewards Milvain's calculating professionalism and punishes Reardon's integrity. Gissing himself was a writer of Reardon's temperament forced to live by his pen in precisely the conditions the novel describes, and the accuracy of his portrait is the accuracy of someone who lived it.
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New Grub Street (1891)
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New Grub Street
George Gissing·1891
New Grub Street — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Grub Street, and why is the title 'new' Grub Street?
Grub Street was a real street in London (now renamed Milton Street) that was, in the eighteenth century, the home of hack writers who produced cheap journalism, dictionaries, and low-quality commercial writing for the booksellers. Samuel Johnson defined 'Grub Street' in his Dictionary as 'originally the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems, whence any mean production is called grubstreet.' By the time Gissing was writing, Grub Street as a place had been transformed, but the condition it named — writing for money rather than for art — had intensified as the mass market for cheap fiction and journalism had grown. Gissing's 'new' Grub Street is the 1880s literary world of popular fiction, literary journalism, and the three-volume novel system — the conditions in which he himself worked.
Is New Grub Street autobiographical?
Substantially yes — not in its events (Gissing did not have Reardon's specific biographical circumstances) but in its conditions and its emotional truth. Gissing was a serious novelist who needed to write popular fiction to survive; he lived in the poverty and relative obscurity that Reardon inhabits; he was surrounded by the commercial literary world he describes. The accuracy of New Grub Street's portrait of 1880s publishing, journalism, and the economic conditions of literary production comes from direct experience. Reardon's temperament — his integrity, his inability to compromise, his being destroyed by that inability — is Gissing's own self-portrait, though Gissing ultimately survived longer than his character does.
How does New Grub Street end?
Reardon dies in poverty, his marriage to Amy having collapsed under the financial strain — Amy, whose social ambitions require money that Reardon cannot earn, leaves him and takes their son. Milvain, having successfully climbed the literary journalism ladder, marries Amy after Reardon's death. The novel's ending is deliberately and carefully unjust: Milvain gets the girl, the career, the money, and the comfortable life; Reardon gets an early death and a posthumous critical reputation that will come too late to help him. Gissing is too honest to offer redemption or consolation for his story's brutal economic logic.
Who else wrote about the Victorian literary marketplace?
Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1875) portrays the intersection of literary journalism with financial speculation. Thackeray, who worked in journalism before becoming a novelist, wrote about it with a more comic tone in Pendennis (1850) and its sequel. Henry James wrote about the literary world in several stories ('The Figure in the Carpet,' 'The Lesson of the Master') with more irony than Gissing's direct realism. Balzac's Lost Illusions (1837-43), which Gissing certainly knew, is the greatest predecessor to New Grub Street in its portrait of how the literary market corrupts artistic ambition.
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