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The Eye as Motor: Gissing and Speed-Reading (Accelerated Form)

Nicholas Dames

in The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction

This chapter explores the coalescence of two key moments in the history of novel reading: the period in the 1890s which saw not only the collapse of the three-volume novel in Britain, a relatively ... More

This chapter explores the coalescence of two key moments in the history of novel reading: the period in the 1890s which saw not only the collapse of the three-volume novel in Britain, a relatively well-studied moment, but also the effloresence of ophthalmologic physiology and its attendant techniques for measuring and accelerating the rates of readers, which has remained almost completely neglected. It will do so through the unlikely figure of George Gissing, who, perhaps most stubbornly among major British novelists of the late nineteenth century, held out against the pressure to decrease the size, or increase the speed, of his narratives. In Gissing's fiction, an acute awareness of the acceleration of reading rates — in fact, accelerations of perception generally — is set alongside a wounded self-consciousness about changes in publishing formats and changes in the composition of the audience for novels.Less

Pseudonymity, Third‐personality, and Anonymity as Disturbances in fin de siècle Auto/biography: ‘Mark Rutherford’, George Gissing, Edmund Gosse and Others

Max Saunders

in Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature

This is the first of four chapters exploring the turn‐of‐the‐century disturbances in the relation between life‐writing and fiction. It argues that ‘autobiography’ begins to seem a problematic ... More

This is the first of four chapters exploring the turn‐of‐the‐century disturbances in the relation between life‐writing and fiction. It argues that ‘autobiography’ begins to seem a problematic category in the period, and gets displaced towards fiction. The chapter focuses on ‘Mark Rutherford’, not just for his autobiography, but for his later inclusion of the story ‘A Mysterious Portrait’. The concept of the heteronym is introduced, to be developed in Chapters 7 and Chapter 8. Other authors discussed here include George Gissing (The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft), H. G. Wells (Boon), Henry Adams, Samuel Butler (The Way of All Flesh), and Edmund Gosse (Father and Son). The various displacements of auto/biography are shown to complicate Lejeune's concept of the autobiographic contract guaranteeing the identity of author, narrator, and subject.Less

The Kingdom of Shadows: The Infernal Underground of George Gissing

in Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf

This chapter examines the works of George Gissing with respect to the London Tube. It explains that Gissing made key cultural references to the underground railway in the 1880s with novels such as ... More

This chapter examines the works of George Gissing with respect to the London Tube. It explains that Gissing made key cultural references to the underground railway in the 1880s with novels such as Demos and Thyrza and he shifted to depicting the real underground as a key part of a new urban circulatory system in the 1890s with novels such as New Grub Street and The Odd Women. This chapter also explores other cultural tendencies that gave the underground a much higher profile and outlines the changing relationship between women and urban transit.Less

Harsh Sounds: George Gissing’s Penetrating Literary Voice

Penelope Hone

in Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film

This chapter tracks the emergence of a distinctive critical discourse in the 1890s intent on distinguishing the acoustic particularities of the literary voice. Taking the uneven oeuvre of George ... More

This chapter tracks the emergence of a distinctive critical discourse in the 1890s intent on distinguishing the acoustic particularities of the literary voice. Taking the uneven oeuvre of George Gissing as its focus, this chapter positions his work as exemplary of this preoccupation with the problems of hearing the ‘right’ critical voices above the noise of non-literary discourse. It has long been acknowledged that Gissing’s antagonistic relationship to his subject––the English lower middle classes––renders reading his writing an unpleasant, discomforting task: as Virginia Woolf was to observe in 1912, Gissing’s hatred for the poor is ‘the reason why his voice is so harsh, so penetrating, so little grateful to the ears.’ The harsh penetration of Gissing’s literary style is largely understood as a reflection of his politics (Jameson) and, in turn, of his commitment to a ‘vitriolic’ and ‘aggressive’ realism (Matz). Complicating such critical approaches, this chapter thinks through how this literary dissonance might be understood as a reflection of the tensions between Gissing’s political impulse to show, and his aesthetic investment in a more (technically) restrained literary voice.Less

New Women and Neurasthenia: Nervous Degeneration and the 1890s

Jane Wood

in Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction

This chapter discusses nervous degeneration and its literary representation in the 1890s. Much of the fiction of the 1890s self-consciously engages with the physical and medical sciences to configure ... More

This chapter discusses nervous degeneration and its literary representation in the 1890s. Much of the fiction of the 1890s self-consciously engages with the physical and medical sciences to configure the new disease of ‘neurasthenia’, a nervous malady which came to be both casually and symbolically linked to the period. George Gissing's The Whirlpool and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure are novels which situate narratives of nervous breakdown at the problematic intersection of biological theories of determinism and cultural anxieties about the alleged deleterious effects of modern life. The aim of this chapter is to look beyond the particulars of plot and personality which link these books thematically to New Woman fiction in order to reveal the extent of the influence of the biological and physical sciences in creating a culture of unease around the issue of sexual equality.Less

Moral Perfectionism, Optatives, and the Inky Line in Besant’s All in a Garden Fair and Gissing’s New Grub Street

Tom Ue

in Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform

This chapter argues for the importance of moral perfectionism to the life of writing depicted in Besant’s All in a Garden Fair (1883) and Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891). Scholarship by Andrew H. ... More

This chapter argues for the importance of moral perfectionism to the life of writing depicted in Besant’s All in a Garden Fair (1883) and Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891). Scholarship by Andrew H. Miller has identified our desire to improve as ‘a defining aspect of modernity’. Miller’s terms explain a good deal about these novels, in both of which characters routinely (aspire to) improve themselves by means of comparing themselves with others. In All in a Garden Fair, for example, Claire rejects Allen by imagining untoward future outcomes, prospects cancelled by their decisions in the present. Meanwhile, New Grub Street opens with Milvain referring to a man who is being executed: his self-conceptualization arises out of an understanding of who he is not, or at least not yet. My aim, in the first half of this essay, is to show how the two works articulate a larger, Victorian conversation regarding moral perfectionism. In the second half, I concentrate on Besant’s and Andrew Lang’s conversation about New Grub Street in the Author, and Gissing’s responses, revealing how they reenact some of the novels’ debates.Less

The Space of Optimism: State Fantasy and the Case of Gissing's The Odd Women

Zarena Aslami

in The Dream Life of Citizens: Late Victorian Novels and the Fantasy of the State

Chapter 4 argues that George Gissing's The Odd Women critiques the state's encroaching powers, both actual and imagined. In particular, through the description of how municipal spaces shape ... More

Chapter 4 argues that George Gissing's The Odd Women critiques the state's encroaching powers, both actual and imagined. In particular, through the description of how municipal spaces shape characters' interiority, Gissing expresses the fear that the state, as mediated through local government, was in the process of appropriating marriage and culture. As the lynchpins of nineteenth-century bourgeois liberal individuality, these institutions furnished imagined sites from which one could both escape and critique the political. Gissing's novel registers the subtle process by which, through common law courts, the state began converting marriage's religious identity into a primarily civil one. The novel also records the state's active provision of education and public spaces, seen as the incubators of culture, to the masses. This chapter proposes that The Odd Women expresses Gissing's anxiety that the institutions of marriage and culture were becoming disarmed as traditional liberal sites of opposition to the state. In their place, he describes a model of critical consciousness based on novel reading, which comes to offer British subjects a possible position outside of the state.Less

Conclusion

Leah Price

in How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

This concluding chapter looks at George Gissing's New Grub Street (1985). Gissing's satire identifies a diffuse threat: that the book might become a vector for the social entanglements from which ... More

This concluding chapter looks at George Gissing's New Grub Street (1985). Gissing's satire identifies a diffuse threat: that the book might become a vector for the social entanglements from which it's supposed to provide an escape. By the nineteenth century, the emotions generated by shared reading were coded less positively. Today, a gulf separates any literary critic's description of his own reading of a particular text—whose interest lies in its atypicality, even its perverseness—from a scholar's description of readings that are removed from his own world and whose agent is imagined as either collective or representative. In recent memory, that gulf has mapped on to a division of labor between two disciplines, literary criticism and cultural history.Less

Introduction

in Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about the depiction of the London Underground in the works of several English authors. This volume examines the relevant works of ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about the depiction of the London Underground in the works of several English authors. This volume examines the relevant works of George Gissing, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf and George Orwell and discusses the myth surrounding the Tube that can be found in cultural deposits. It also argues that underground writing and reading has made the Tube a ‘knowable community’ because every generation of Tube users is materially rooted in certain locations whether they be stations or lines and came to identify with them in certain ways.Less

Orpheus in the city

Daniel Karlin

in Street Songs: Writers and urban songs and cries, 1800-1925

Chapter 1 begins with a primal myth transposed to the city. William Wordsworth’s ‘Power of Music’ represents street music as an unqualified blessing: in proclaiming his fiddler ‘An Orpheus!’, the ... More

Chapter 1 begins with a primal myth transposed to the city. William Wordsworth’s ‘Power of Music’ represents street music as an unqualified blessing: in proclaiming his fiddler ‘An Orpheus!’, the poet summons the miraculous and sacred power of music and song, but any allusion to Orpheus is shadowed by his tragic fate. Wordsworth’s poem recalls, by inversion, William Hogarth’s famous print, ‘The Enrag’d Musician’ (1741), in which a mob of urban noise-makers (including rival and degraded forms of street music and song) advance on the ‘classical’ violinist, himself a bathetic version of divine harmony. Hogarth’s urban ‘soundscape’ reappears in James Clarence Mangan’s poem ‘Khidder’ (1845), which likewise brings the fate of Orpheus, rather than his power, into focus. The violence with which street singers are faced is evident in George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889), whose title indicates that Orpheus will descend in vain into the hell of the city.Less

Authorial Integrity and the Threat of Mechanical Writing

Katherine Mullin

in Working Girls: Fiction, Sexuality, and Modernity

This chapter examines how fictions by Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, George Gissing, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and James Joyce took telegraphists, then typists, as thrilling new ... More

This chapter examines how fictions by Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, George Gissing, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and James Joyce took telegraphists, then typists, as thrilling new heroines of modernity. It argues that their vocational proficiencies prompted imaginative speculations on the extent and uses of professional, emotional, and sexual knowledge. Those speculations were manifest in tensions between clerical and sexual reproduction, in questions of integrity arising from those tensions, and, ultimately, in plots haunted by sexual blackmail. The preoccupation with blackmail is one particularly conspicuous dramatization of the authorial unease typists and telegraphists inspired. These Working Girls could be seen as allegorical doubles for writers struggling with the pressures of originality and creative integrity. They helped to articulate anxieties about textual pollution in fictions often composed under duress, and betraying fretfulness about plagiarism, commercial expedience, and creative exhaustion in both their plots and their form.Less

The Incontinent City: Sewers, Disgust and Liminality

Haewon Hwang

in London's Underground Spaces: Representing the Victorian City, 1840-1915

The first chapter on the sewers links the construction of the first underground drainage system with the sanitary discourse of ‘circulation’ that removed human waste from the city centre in an ... More

The first chapter on the sewers links the construction of the first underground drainage system with the sanitary discourse of ‘circulation’ that removed human waste from the city centre in an outward centrifugal movement. This displacement is then mapped onto distinct populaces of the city with the closest affiliation to the sewers- the ‘lower orders’, prostitutes and foreigners. Although the sewers are never explicitly mentioned, its omnipresence is captured in the aura of filth, from mud and fog, to ‘dust’ and slums, captured in Dickens, Gissing and Stoker. The selection of texts reflects the preoccupation with filth from the realist and the Gothic tradition, and how it serves as a structuring absence and an unknowable presence throughout the depictions of London. The polluting and purifying power of the sewers then reveals the contradictions inherent in the city, the subversive nature of the underground, and the buried anxieties in the Victorian imagination.Less

Tubing It: Speeding through Modernity in the London Underground

Haewon Hwang

in London's Underground Spaces: Representing the Victorian City, 1840-1915

The second chapter on the underground railroad builds on the theme of repulsion and attraction encountered in the sewers but highlights the ways in which the subterranean space was eventually ... More

The second chapter on the underground railroad builds on the theme of repulsion and attraction encountered in the sewers but highlights the ways in which the subterranean space was eventually assimilated into the rhythms of everyday life. The ease and affordability of riding the underground train is contrasted with the spectre of disaster, while the compression of time and space eventually led to a democratisation of movement in the metropolis. In fiction, the underground railway, for the most part, remained as fleeting snapshots of encounters and transgressions, as the carriage offered both a public and private space for negotiations. The chapter argues that in the late nineteenth century, the underground railway did not receive direct treatment, but appeared as Derridean traces haunting the lives of urban dwellers, especially women, as they began to explore the city through this new medium. The selection of texts traces this trajectory from the underground railway as an object of technological terror to a modernist vision of speed and efficiency.Less

Reception

Michael Ruse

in Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution

From the first, the claims of the Origin and the Descent engendered reaction. Some welcomed Darwin’s message. Some did not. But everyone knew that what Darwin said was important and both novelists ... More

From the first, the claims of the Origin and the Descent engendered reaction. Some welcomed Darwin’s message. Some did not. But everyone knew that what Darwin said was important and both novelists and poets wanted to work through the implications. Some, like Gissing, accepted the Darwinian struggle and consequent selection but were keen to show that how these processes work among humans can be subtle and unexpected. Some, like Kingsley and Kipling, accepted evolution but as the main force for change were more inclined to Lamarckism, the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Others, notably George Eliot in Middlemarch, were favorable to a Herbert Spencer kind of organicism. And then there were those with religious commitments trying to balance these with their acceptance of some form of Darwinism. Tennyson wrestled with the worry that natural selection made unlikely the happy upward rise to humankind that he had endorsed in his pre-Darwinian writings.Less

Waiting in the Restaurant

Brenda Assael

in The London Restaurant, 1840-1914

Chapter 3 focuses on the waiter, exploring the reality behind his representation in popular culture as marginal, disenchanted, and melancholy. While real-life waiters were often keen to share a ... More

Chapter 3 focuses on the waiter, exploring the reality behind his representation in popular culture as marginal, disenchanted, and melancholy. While real-life waiters were often keen to share a variety of grievances about their working conditions, they were not universally degraded victims of exploitation. Some waiters were able to capitalize on the open and dynamic nature of the restaurant service economy, which created opportunities for mobility and reward. Tipping, which remained an ongoing bone of contention, for both waiters and those they served, could prove to be an important source of supplementary income. For all the idiosyncrasies of the waiter’s position, he represented the broader significance of the service sector in the shaping of London in this period. The extensive public attention given to foreign-born waiters and (newly emergent) waitresses underlines the heterogeneity that characterized, not merely the restaurant, but the wider metropolitan culture in which it was located.Less