Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
Victorian age in literature
Victorian age in literature
Essay about the victorian era in literature
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
New Grub Street as a Microcosm of English Victorian Life
2417 Words5 Pages
Recommended: Victorian age in literature
New Grub Street presents the reader with an accurate and comprehensive picture of late Victorian society, despite the fact that it predominantly focuses only on a small group of literary men and women. At first, one may have difficulty locating Gissing's voice within the narrative. The perspective leaps from character to character, without establishing any clear candidates for the reader's 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 about Victorian England? (Or is literary life his sole intended subject?) Throughout 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 prevalent disorder of the world that makes the novel reflective of late Victorian society. Whether or not Gissing intended his novel to be purely a study 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 Victoria's reign.
New Grub Street depicts some of the consequences of the structural 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...
... middle of paper ...
... Unwin, London, 1968, p. 154.
5 Gross, John, The Rise 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 Lieutenant's Woman, Vintage, London, 1996, p. 445.
26 Ibid., p. 283.
27 Altick, p. 17.