In Britain in
the 1880s and 90s there was a perceptible shift in the production and
distribution of literature. The reading
public, who had been increasing incrementally over the previous two centuries,
suddenly expanded as the business of writing and selling books, magazines and
other forms of literary culture was revolutionised. It is in this context that George Gissing
wrote New Grub Street, the novel that would make his name
and come to be regarded as his finest.
The Novel takes as its subject the world of writers around 8-10 years
before it was written. The Gissing
specialist John Goode,
referring to Gissing’s diaries, puts the novel as having fermented over the
course of 1890 before finally being written in the late autumn and early winter
of that year. The novel begins in autumn 1882
with the main plot covering the next 2-3 years up to July 1885, ending with a
short denouement set 12 months after. In essence Gissing is chronicling the
formation of the productive relations that he was working under in 1890 by
excavating their origins in the novel format. The main theme of the
book is Writing in the context of the changing mode of production in
literature, especially the effect of this on the work that writers do and the
daily realities that writers are faced with.
When one takes into consideration that Gissing himself lived through
this period on the bottom wrung of the publishing industry as an impoverished
writer, New Grub Street appears not
so much as fiction but also as auto-biography, cum reportage as well as
advancing a particular aesthetic thesis.
As such, it provides a unique insight for historians of the period
into the experience of those relations of production and consumption by writers
and journalists and it provides insights into the
operation of culture within Late-Victorian capitalism.
In Britain in the 1880s and 90s, this
printed culture of novels, periodicals and magazines was the mass media,
occupying the same place that television does today. Significantly, this was the time in British
history when the novel as a means of cultural transmission was at its zenith,
however its influence was being challenged by a factors emerging from a new
range of conditions of production and consumption.
Although Gissing did not express the process in
economic terms in his fiction, what he is really describing is the
commodification of writing and the intrusion into the writers’ literary
production of the market, reducing the writer to a mere artisan. This change is encapsulated in the first
pages of New Grub Street by the bold
statement that “Literature nowadays is a trade”.
The plot of the novel reflects this in its
structure, which,
“is
based on a common convention in Victorian fiction, which is to have two
independent stories which in narrative terms are largely independent of each
other but which echo and contrast”.
The precise nature of what is echoed and
contrasted in the novel is the lives of two writers, their work, their
relations with women, their attitude to each other and, by extension,
their place in the edifice of literary production. This also leads
concomitantly to their consideration of literary consumption. Specifically, this is the contrast summed up
at the start of the novel by Jasper Milvain, then protagonist of one of the
story threads, in reference to his friend Edward Reardon, the protagonist of
the other;
“The thing you must understand about a man like
Reardon and a man like me is that he is the old type of unpractical artist, I
am the literary man of 1882.”
Milvain then goes on to conceptualise the
difference in their relations to the market;
“He won’t make concessions, or rather, he can’t
make them; he can’t supply the market…your successful man of letters is your
skillful tradesman. He thinks first and
foremost of the markets; when one kind of good begins to go off slackly, he is
ready with something new and appetising”.
In the course of the novel this is just what
Milvain goes on to do by becoming a Journalist, a vulgar populist writer of
ephemera, in contrast to the scrupulousness of Reardon’s devotion to his muse.
The novel also goes into the wider literary
scene through the secondary characters, each of which are involved in the
business of writing in some way. These
include Milvain’s sisters, who he introduces to the trade,
Biffen, a writer, Whelpdale, a failed writer who becomes a literary agent,
Alfred Yule, a man of letters and failed periodical editor and his daughter
Marian, assistant to her father and up-coming woman of letters in her own
right. Each of these characters adds
another facet to the picture of the literary world that Gissing is trying to
paint in the novel. By concentrating on
this circle of friends and acquaintances and their relationships the author
brings into sharp focus the personal cost of the holistic intrusion of market
forces onto the creative intellect, i.e. the way it effects not only the work
of writers but their relationships, personalities, health and behavior.
Implicit in Gissing’s argument is a formulation
we may term as a “Moral-economy of literary production” that was common in the
Fin de Siecle. This is the notion that artistic production
should exist free of any concerns except whatever artistic concerns inspire the
creator. Mainly this refers to the idea
that great art requires freedom from commercial concerns and stems from the
perennial dynamic tension between the personal and social nature of artistic
production, favoring of course the personal to the detriment of the social
location within the capitalist mode of production. Although this, “Moral Economy”, was not
successful or effective in the way the social phenomenon described by E.P.
Thompson was,
we can nonetheless see a constant negotiation of the commercial nature of their
work by artists and writers.
Recent scholarship has convincingly suggested
that the reason why Gissing, and others of his generation, favoured the
personal factor in this creative dialectic as a reaction against an intrusive
and disconcerting nature of the social factor.
For writers in late Victorian England this expressed itself in the form
of the rapidly changing productive relations in literature in the late 19th
century. This was largely distributor led and favored
certain forms and subjects over others
married to an increasing sophistication of publishing practice with its perennial
need to maximise profits. Hence we can
see that the balance of power in this relation between production and
consumption favored the tastes of the distributors, not the producer.
Exemplifying the writers’ Moral economy in the
Novel are the characters of the two novelists, Edwin Reardon and Harold
Biffen. Both are true artists who can’t
adopt themselves to the market. The
difference between them is that Reardon has a family to support which forces
him to try fruitlessly, to adapt to the market. Which in turn leads to the
ruination of his physical and mental health and family, whereas Biffen is
unencumbered, with only himself to look after, and lives at the edge of poverty
but without compromising his art.
Biffen is the purest example of the literary
producer in the novel. He writes his
fiction without reference to the market either in terms of subject, form,
content or potential audience. This is
because the production of literature is everything to him, the end in
itself. Whether or not his efforts are
ever re-numerated are incidental. In a conversation with Reardon he
claims not to expect his novel to even be published.
None the less he pushes himself to the point of starvation and eventually
charges into a burning building to rescue the only copy of his manuscript from
the flames.
Reardon’s position is more complex. The
struggle between Reardon and the hated market constitutes the drama in this
thread of the novel. Before achieving a
degree of literary fame he had lived much as Biffen, but sustained by a job as
a clerk. His day job and lack of
familial commitments mean he is unencumbered by commercial pressures and so is
able to work as he likes. By the
beginning of the action in the novel his writing has brought him with success
the responsibilities of a husband and father.
If Biffen represents the ideal of the writer, Reardon represents
something like the reality as in order to maintain his family he is compelled
not just to write but to write something sellable. Because the money it brings in is a necessity
he has to continually produce in order to survive, even if it means
compromising on the quality of the work itself.
In Gissing’s depictions of Reardon’s struggles it is clear that being
able to create depends on a number of psychological factors an important one
being that forcing yourself to write is destructive of what makes one capable
of it in the first place.
Jasper Milvain is the antithesis of Reardon and
Biffen. He engages with the market as a
professional. He writes only what he can
sell. Although, as is implied in the
novel, he is no less talented or capable of creating great works of art than
Biffen or Reardon, he instead engages with the market by cynically pandering to
vulgar tastes and fashions. Instead of
pushing the medium and creating something unique or original, which is at least
the intention of Biffen, he only seeks to reproduce that which is commercially
reliable. In advising his sisters
as to how to go about writing as a profession, he makes this abundantly clear,
telling them:
“There is a tremendous sale for religious
stories, why not pitch one together?…I tell you writing is a business. Get together half-a-dozen fair specimens of
the Sunday school prize; study them; discover the essential points of such composition;
hit upon new attractions; then go to work methodically, so many pages a day.”
One interesting thing to note in this context
is the ways in which the writer is conceptualised as a tradesman or a
businessman. Some commentators seem to
suggest that because of the emergence of writers unions and the mechanisation
of the industry that writers were becoming proletarianised. Actually the position of the writer appears
closer to a petty bourgeoisie, i.e. those who labour but own their own means of
production. In a sense, if we take
Bourdieu’s description of creativity as a natural resource,
they are comparable to small farmers.
Although Gissing doesn’t employ such metaphors himself, the use of
agricultural metaphors is not uncommon in describing the creative process.
The work cycle of Reardon as laid out in the
novel does have a similarity to that of a small farmer. That is to say, labouring over a novel for an
expected sale at the end of the period of cultivation. For example, borrowing towards the end of
that period when the money from the last harvesting is becoming scarce on the
expectation of selling the product is something that characterised the micro
economics of small holding peasants in pre-famine rural Ireland,
and according to Gissing, the Reardon household towards the end of one of
Readon’s novels. Similarly, a bad (i.e.
unpublishable) novel was disastrous in the same way that as a bad harvest was
disastrous for the small producer.
The mechanical way in which Milvain works and
manages his labour time is among the aforementioned factors which has led
Bowlby amongst others to wrongly assert that writing was proletarianised. Actually since its inception
the term, “Petty Bourgeoisie”, has been taken to infer proletarian forms of
labour, the distinction between the two mainly being the relation to the means
of production and distribution. Hence, the particular mode of
literary production, as depicted in the novel, was both alienating and
mechanistic and self regulated. The
breakdown of Jasper’s working day
is very precise, like a manager’s log, with the total monetary value of the
time worked out to within a couple of guineas.
So too for Marian Yule, who at one point
fantasises about a literary machine; “some automaton to supply the place of
creatures such as herself, to turn out books and articles”. The mechanised process of literary production
is described in the same terms as “only to throw in a given number of old
books, and have them reduced, blended, modernised into a single new book”. Jasper describes his method of working up new
articles thus;
“From five to half past I read four news papers
and two magazines, and from half past to quarter to six I jotted down several
ideas that had come to me while reading”.
Between these two sections from the text we can
observe something at the heart of Gissing’s conceptualisation of this mode of
consumption, i.e. that where this writing comes from isn’t the heart of the
writer or their observation of real life, which would give it some sort of
higher relevance, but from other writing alone.
This isn’t creation, the act of a creative mind, but more akin to recycling,
the shuffling around of pre-existing writing that has relevance only to and of
itself. While the product may be
entertaining or well written, it doesn’t further human culture. This is what Milvain means when he refers to
his day’s work as having literary value, “equal to the contents of a mouldy
nut”.
This explosion in the consumption and
production of literature that constituted the crisis, as Gissing saw it, was
facilitated by a number of factors.
Firstly there were technological advances in the mechanisation of
printing as well as more efficient paper making processes. Also, the repeal of Stamp Tax in 1855 and
Paper Duty in 1860 had removed one non-material barrier to the mass production
of paper
and encouraged a great expansion of the News Paper industry that had also been
gathering pace incrementally over the preceding centuries.
The main factor however, as perceived at the
time, was the education acts of the 1870-90s, which gradually introduced
universal primary education. Literacy
had been increasing incrementally over the preceding centuries,
but the acts expanded the reading public to an extent unheard of, creating for
the first time a literate reading public.
The effect that this Cultural Revolution and
the sort of reading it engendered had on those already literate classes was the
unleashing of a storm of reactionary ire and condescension. In the organs of the literary establishment
the “disease” of “unproductive reading” by this upstart literate mass reading
public was lamented and tied into contemporary discourses on degeneration,
and critics of the time were horrified at the national out pouring of grief at
the death of the revered and popular poet Tennyson. This indeed could be said to be the period
that saw, to paraphrase Thompson, The Making of the English Literary
Intelligentsia.
At the time when Gissing was writing New Grub Street the production and
distribution of novels in Britain was mired in an archaic system of private
lending libraries, the most important of which being Mudies, which has been
described as having a “grip on the fiction industry”. Unlike America
and France, where the advances
in printing had meant the sale of literature directly to consumers, in Britain the
novels were mainly produced as three volumes, so called, “Three Deckers”. These were mainly sold to circulating
libraries which the would-be consumer of literature had to subscribe to to use. For the author this meant that the crucial
notion of what was saleable, or permissible to print, rested in the hands of
the small group of owners of these lending libraries and not the reading public
at large. Mudies in particular was
notorious for its conservatism. This is also one of the main reasons why
British literature appears stuffy and repressed with regards to its content and
themes, especially in comparison with French literature of the same period.
It also created the precarious position of the
author’s finances, i.e. the way the novelist could only really expect
re-numeration for their labour at the point of sale to his publisher because
then, as now, sales generate royalties, not the rental of an already sold item. It would also seem that when the reading
public purchased books in the 1880s-early 1890s, they were generally bought
second hand, as is most of Reardon’s personal library.
This particular system of distribution would
eventually be swept away, but not until after New Grub Street was published, although we can see the beginnings
of this process in Gissings depiction of the literary world of the 1880s. The way they are depicted in the novel is
interestingly catastrophic. Just as In TheYear Of The Jubilee prefigures the
Baudrillardian critique of consumerism,
the depiction of the mass culture prefigures the 20th century
debates around the degradation of society and the inner life of the individual. He also harks back to Matthew Arnold’s notion
of culture as an expression of all that’s pure and good in society, extending
the arguments of Culture and Anarchy
into the decades after Arnold’s
death. Arnolds contribution to what I have referred
earlier as a “Moral Economy” of literary production was a mid 19th
century positivism with regards to perfection and the perfectibility of society
through Culture. Arnold is a pervasive but unacknowledged
presence in the novel. Reardon in
particular can be described as having distinctly Arnoldian tendencies is his view
of art and his taste in Hellenic culture and civilization, something
undoubtedly shared by his creator.
Inherent in this idea is a particularly elitist
notion of what constituted good literature. Culture
and Anarchy is actually where the English usage of the word ‘Philistine’ is
used in the pejorative sense of someone who is not just un-enlightened, but
actually oppositional towards the Arts.
In New Grub Street
Philistineism is most directly associated with the manufacturing end of book
publishing, specifically in the character of John Yule who we meet in the
second chapter.
The arguments he articulates in his exchange with Milvain and his brother
Alfred are the direct opposite of Arnold’s
in Culture and Anarchy. Yule, has little appreciation of the
literature he publishes (reading little besides papers),
little sympathy with the authors (including his nieces, husband, Edwin Reardon,
who he says he’d pay not to write)
and would rather people spent their leisure time on the outdoors. He even goes so far as to wish to see “the
business of literature abolished”. That his trade is the manufacture of paper is
indicative of Gissing’s more general association of mass production with
philistinism. This is evident in the
exchange between Milvain and John Yule when Milvain remarks about paper that;
“‘if that article (i.e. paper) were not so
cheap and so abundant, people wouldn’t have so much temptation to scribble’”
It is because of this dilution of the Arnoldian
ideal of the improving mission of writing by the mass education and mass
culture - which was driven, as Gissing clearly saw it by the philistine owners
of the means of book production - that his reaction to the very forces which
would remove the system of book production that he struggled under would be so
completely pessimistic.
To begin with a new generation of publishers
was arising to challenge the established publishing houses and orthodox
publishing methods. This was to provide
a new space for innovations in the production and distribution of literature,
as Jonathan Rose points out, in late Victorian Britian, “often the most innovative
authors are taken on by the most aggressive entrepreneurs, those who are ready
to adapt to and exploit a changing literary marketplace”. In New Grub Street this particular form of
Victorian capitalism is embodied in Jedwood, a publisher who has only recently
come into the business after a marriage to a rich woman
has begun to take risks and overturn some of the publishing practices that
emerged under the established houses.
Jedwood is very much the new type;
“He talked much of ‘The New Era’, foresaw
revolutions in publishing and book selling, tried every week a score of untried
ventures that should appeal to the democratic generation just maturing”.
Those revolutions weren’t complete at the time
of publication, New Grub Street
itself was a Three Decker that was first sold to the lending libraries, they
would be completed by the middle years of the decade,
and would have been noticeably well under way to a professional novelist like
Gissing. And yet in the novel this
development, and all the others that would change the literature industry,
objectively for the better, is treated with horror or disdain. The description of Jedwood is hardly
flattering, the idea that he’s married into money, rather than having had the
decency to be born to it, carries the implication of gold-digging.
Another factor that had revolutionised the
consumption of literature was the mass transit system. Again Gissing seems to regard this as a
negative development. One of the main
themes of New Grub Street is the rise
of the relative importance of the magazine in relation to the novel and the
related process of degeneration of the novel itself
because of these conditions. The rail
networks provided short intervals of time when the urban commuter could snatch
a little reading time. It was soon
recognised that the commuter was an important market for publishers, as near to
a captive audience as one could wish for, hence bookshops and stalls were
opened in railway stations (this is how the high street chain WH Smiths began). Magazines full of short articles that would
only take the length of a train journey to read were produced, with great
success - Newne’s Tit-Bits in
particular, which;
“From
its inception…was denounced as the bastard offspring of the commodification of
literature:… exploiting readers with limited literacy and short attention
spans.”
The arguments around this development
are dramatised by Gissing in a three-way exchange between Jasper Milvain, his
sister Dora and Whelpdale. Whelpdale
proposes a plan for a new magazine that a Victorian audience would have
understood as a none-too subtle proxy of Tit-Bits.
The magazine and it’s audience are described in terms which explicitly links
its format to educational standards and a debased type of reading related to
the use of public transport;
“I would have the paper address itself to the
quarter educated…the great new generation that is being turned out by the Board
Schools, the young men and women who can just read but are incapable of
sustained attention. People of this kind
want something to sustain them on trains and on Buses and ‘trams...Everything
must be short, two inches at the utmost; their attention can’t sustain itself
beyond two inches.”
Jasper approves of the project, calling it
half-ironically, “one of the most notable projects of modern times”. Dora on the other hand objects to the project
on the grounds that, “Surely these poor silly people oughtn’t to be encouraged
in their weakness”,
and is only placated by the notion that even reading such fare as Chit-Chat on
the train is better than reading nothing, “So long as they only read the paper
at such times”.
The diversification in literature is another
part of the process that would end the Three Decker novel system, and like
magazines and the new publishing houses, would be subtly railed against by
Gissing in New Grub Street. One of the
most notable and historically significant parts of this process, was the
emergence of a degree of gendering in the market. This was essentially the beginning of an
identity consumerism where instead of trying to address the whole reading
public the publishers found it more profitable to create books for sale to a
specific niche.
This practice was directly contradictory to Arnold’s vision of a
Culture that “seeks to do away with classes”
to create a singular culture for everyone to partake in, which in practice
meant a monolithic cannon. Gissing seems
to have taken a particular exception to this in the form it took when targeting
an emerging generation of newly literate women as a particular niche
market. This is certainly the most
common form of niche marketing that we encounter in the novel. When Milvain first suggests his sisters take
up writing to supplement their income, it is this sort of gender-specific
writing that he has in mind. There is of course an undertone of misogyny
to this as well. As Carey has observed,
Gissing found the new generation of women that had benefited from the education
acts contemptible and pretentious. Although this strain of Gissing’s isn’t so
evident in New Grub Street, the
refrain that semi-educated women, who are incapable of being more than that are
imperiling the health and well being of the nation is evident in his other
novels. That said however, in the novel professional
writing is presented as differently for women, who are not allocated the same
status as the male writers. Milvain’s
sisters do the sort of hack writing described above, but for a specifically
female audience. Marian’s literary
endeavors are all in the service of her father and are almost a form of
parental abuse that exploits the subject and is detrimental to her femininity.
One conclusion that we can draw from the novel
is that the products of print culture, novels, magazines and newspapers
have a dual existence as commodities and as cultural artifacts. These two lives that books have are almost,
but not entirely independent of one another.
Pierre Bourdieu has given us the useful notion of a Field of Cultural
Production, a sort of idea-space for the functioning of the creative mind that
is framed within the productive relations of its time but not dictated by them. We might say that the Writer’s Moral Economy,
as exemplified in the novel by Reardon and Biffen, is the mentality of the
field of cultural production. Milvain’s
perspective is also within the field of cultural production but it is more of
the productive relations that frame it than the field itself. These two positions representing a continuum
of thought and behavior, in the field channeling different currents to
different ends.
The way in which the field of cultural
production expresses itself in material reality is in the production of a
symbolic configuration on a material form.
By which I mean that at its most basic level, the act of filling the
pages of a book with words and pictures is commodity fetishism on a grand
scale, quite literally imbuing an object with a symbolic meaning beyond its
materiality. However this isn’t quite
the same thing, as it is from the symbolic content of a printed commodity that
its use-value is derived.
However the commodity fetishism of printed
culture expresses itself in other ways.
Advertising and the reputation of the author are also important factors,
ones that Gissing spends some time over.
For example, near the beginning of the novel, Milvain spells out the
importance of having money and a presence in society, to getting published. Also, the importance of favorable reviews in
imbuing a book with a saleable value is another recurring concern that comes up
at several points in the novel. At one
of these points Milvain observes that in the, “struggle for existence among
books”,
good reviews were necessary for a novel’s success as a saleable commodity.
The physical form of the novel, the binding,
typography and illustration etc. is no less important to the novel as a
consumer item. Although the success of a
cultural commodity might not be predicated on this “Packaging”, Maura Ives work
on the production of the novels of George Meredith have shown how the physical
presentation of novel acts to bolster its appeal. For example in the typeface, the size of the
print etc. recreates the identity of the author and itself acts as a form of
advertising
and that the watermark and indenting the first page with the author’s initials
acts as a physical connection between the author and consumer.
Finally, what New Grub Street demonstrates human experience of the changing
dialectic relation between the consumption and production of literature in the
1880s and 90s. Although Gissing has a
particularly singular vision of this world, one of his skills as an author is
to present an argument or debate from both sides and to make the two as real as
to have an equal emotional truth.
Although there are some exceptions to this, when Gissing sets up an
opposition he can present both sides so as to make them credible and articulate. For as much as Milvain is the authors wry
mouthpeice for everything he saw wrong with modern literature, Jasper Milvain
still has a real emotional life and our sympathies. Although we know from biographical
information which side of the fence he was on, a purely textual reading could
put Reardon and Milvain on a par, or even put Milvain as the most favoured out
of the two, since he both survives the novel and gets the girl in the end. It is for this reason that the book was, and
continues to be, a useful indication of the interior life of writers living in
the new Grub Street of Britains
Fin-de Seicle.
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