New Grub Street
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Average rating4
15
Ratings2
Average rating4
New Grub Street (1891), generally regarded as Gissing's finest novel, is the story of the daily lives and broken dreams of men and women forced to earn a living by the pen. With vivid realism it tells of a group of novelists, journalists, and scholars caught in the literary and cultural crisis that hit Britain in the closing years of the nineteenth century, as universal education, popular journalism, and mass communication began to leave their mark on the life of intellectuals. Projecting a strong sense of the London in which his characters struggle, Gissing also illuminates `the valley of the shadow of books', where the spirit of alienation that created modernism was already stirring.
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I'm really loving Gissing and the way he focuses on the lives of lower-middle and middle-middle class Londoners - I find this stuff so much more relatable than most of his contemporaries with their focus on landed gentry.
The characters' problems are all so familiar: the rents are too high, the wages are too low, the air is polluted, chronic bronchitis, everyone is an artist, every artist is either starving or floated by a rich daddy, everyone's back hurts, the dating scene is all grifters and golddiggers. A character casually invents Twitter in chapter 33, gets funded, goes on to a startup life. In 1883! London really is eternal.
