Globusz^® Publishing 

The past is a foreign country:
they do things differently there.
Leslie Poles Hartley

Fiction is always profoundly connected with its contemporary times. This is certainly true of the Victorian novel, which mirrors the long and significant period in British history from the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837 to the beginning of the 20th century.

Particularly in the mid-Victorian period — from the early 1850s to the early 1870s — Britain benefited from the relative prosperity that was enjoyed by almost all sections of the population. It was, however, a nation where the busy industrial cities of the North and the Midlands contrasted with the quiet countryside blessed by a golden age of successful farming, as it was decribed in Anthony Trollope’s novels.

No doubt the changing economy had serious repercussions on the sociological and psychological make-up of Victorian society. For instance, the ideal of the gentleman was challenged by the new hero of Victorian progress, the entrepreneur, who, once he had become successful, often tended to emulate the gentleman. In mid-Victorian society, though, class conflict was not paramount, because the mobility of individuals up and down the social ladder mitigated it. It was a core of values — self-help, will to succeed, earnestness, hard work, thrift, and respectability — that most characterised Victorian society as a highly moralistic and repressive one.

Tinged with popular, anti-aristocratic overtones, the Victorian values, which had their roots in Methodism and the Evangelical movement of the 18th century, seemed more than ever effective for guaranteeing the preservation of a “righteous” postrevolutionary society. As sexuality and revolution somehow appeared to be linked, it was felt that the best way of keeping revolutionary sentiments at bay was to repress sexuality. Yet, as repression notoriously leads to a more or less covert reaction, the Victorian underworld became a breeding ground for prostitution and scandals. The result was that law-abiding fiction readers grew particularly fond of stories about crime, madness, bigamy, secrecy, unhappy marriages, defrauded inheritances and implicit sexual matter.

When a new genre — the “sensation novel” — was born in 1860 with the publication of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, most of these titillating subjects were in turn tackled, conquering for the first time a wide cross-class readership. The novelty of this genre was the milieu: the stories were about the respectable middle class, who now seemed unusually unsettled and affected by the same troubles as those of the lower classes. Thus, for its readers, literature became a useful way both to explore the disturbing anxiety and preoccupation that were shaping their lives and to release the repressed energies that lay beneath the façade of respectability.

The astonishing success enjoyed by Collins’ novel — and more or less by sensation novels in general — was enhanced by its serialization in a new monthly magazine launched by Charles Dickens, who, having his eyes on sales figures, used sensation as a sort of marketing label. The publication in instalments thrived on complicated plots. All episodes usually ended with cliffhangers in order to keep alive the reader’s expectancy of new twists and turns in the story.

Even so, despite Collins’ attempt at elevating it to an art form, his technique had its drawbacks. Because of its suspense The Woman in white was highly acclaimed in Britain and in America, where even today there is a society of Collin’s fans; still, its stress on an elaborate plot as the main narrative feature prevented the characters from being wholly convincing at the human level. In short, they tended to be rather fixed in their attitudes. They were either too good or too bad.

George Gissing’s New Grub Street, published in 1891 — according to George Orwell, the most impressive of Gissing’s books, written by one of the very few better novelists that England has produced — presents us with a much subtler portrait of Victorian society still in changing mood. Here, with psychological insight replacing sensation, the emphasis is on the human factor — the inner conflicts and interpersonal modifications brought about by the socio-economic changes occurring in Gissing’s times. The late Victorian literary world, following the trail of the contemporary industrial mentality in full pursuit of profit, provides the backdrop of the novel, around which the characters’ anxieties, failures and successes revolve. As the story unfolds, the reader becomes familiar with all-rounded individualities set in a very accurate sociological frame.

* * * * *

Our first encounter is with the young and dashing Jasper Milvain, journalist and literary critic, a “man of his day”, who embodies the entrepreneurial mentality. For him literature is essentially a commodity, a possible source of economic success for those who can exploit its marketable potential. Milvain’s narcissistic nature leads him to pursue only what is likely to bring lustre to his own personality, and this requires that he plan his life carefully, with a good dose of cynicism.

As he regards poverty as the root of all social ills, he feels he has to rise from the economic restrictions he had experienced with his mother after his father’s death. Utterly confident in his own wits, he looks forward to nothing but a brighter, prosperous future. And since the death of his mother, this proposition has included his younger sisters, of whom he has become the unofficial guardian. But, thinking of money as a priority, he views love as a possible obstacle in the way of his major plans, something that must be kept within the limits of convenience. The only concession he is prepared to make to his emotional life is the choice of a rich wife, whose wealth would be an asset in his race for success and prestige.

Milvain’s clear consciousness of his stance on life prevents him from falling prey to inner conflicts. He is perfectly aware that not every man shuns romantic love as he does, and that not all writers, such as his friend Edwin Reardon, are willing to tailor their writing to the market. In fact, Milvain and Reardon display opposite characters in the novel: confident, extrovert and rather superficial, the former; reflective, melancholic and rather impervious to change, the latter.

In Milvain’s view, Reardon is a talented writer who has made only half a success by publishing two books, but whose luck in the future would be possible only by a necessary change in his style, which is too learned to please the new mass readership, the by-product of industrialisation on which the editorial market predominantly was feeding at the time. But who was that readership?

To answer the question we have to look back at the 1850s, when urbanisation saw the inclusion of women as a substantial part of that readership. That was one aspect of a wider phenomenon. It was since then that lower middle class men and women, who had worked together in family enterprises, had been separated by urban occupations. Not uncommonly, they were country people who had gone into towns to work as servants, clerks and petty professionals. The men now would leave their women — mothers, sisters, wives — alone at home to try to create their own social connections once determined by family networks. The result was that unmarried women, who were deprived of opportunity for new encounters in the alienating urban life, became anxious and competitive in their search for prospective husbands, as their choices were made more puzzling by an environment novel to them.

At the same time, in the new middle class, men were now engaged in managerial and technical jobs that had not existed even half a generation earlier. They, too, were confronted with new careers and uncertainties about what their new social role was. So, women of modest education who turned to them in order to climb the social ladder grew particularly concerned about their love conundrums, thus becoming avid readers of advice columns as well as domestic issues in papers and magazines. Both men and women, however, sought escapism in novels that, on the one hand, represented fictionally their new social anxieties and, on the other, were not so realistic as to spoil their dreams of self-improvement.

* * * * *

Milvain feels confident and determined enough to produce fashionable “commonplace stuff”— mainly articles for magazines and newspapers apt for the “coarse tastes” of the lower classes as well as that suitable to a pseudo-intellectual upper middle class unable to “distinguish between stone and paste”. He is also keen on using new technology — namely the typewriter — while Reardon still submits his manuscripts in a way that was customary in the old Grub Street, the place in London that was mentioned by the eclectic writer Samuel Johnson (1709—1784) as the area where many poor writers would live on hackwork. So, in Milvain’s opinion, people like Reardon, who do not adapt themselves to suit the masses’ tastes, are likely to be stuck in a new Grub Street, which, in his characteristic poverty, would reproduce the old one.

Reardon has the soul of a classical scholar who, since he was a teenager, has revelled in writing essays on Latin and Greek authors and literary criticism. At nineteen, after his father’s death, which followed that of his mother four years later, he found himself with a very small inheritance that ran out quickly. Obliged to take on a casual job to survive and confined to compulsory loneliness, as poverty prevented him from making friends, he lived through literature his fantasies about the ancient, classical world he so admired. Like his father, a photographer who “had never done much more than earn a livelihood”, Reardon is a dreamer. And similarly to many creative writers, he had always unconsciously found in literary activity a way of staving off the many fears of life — death, meaninglessness, sense of inadequacy, limitations and duties imposed by society. As Freud himself noticed, writers never stop to be children, who instinctively keep alive imaginary worlds through their own creativity.

As for his sentimental and erotic life, Reardon from the start displaced the psychic energy springing from them, too, on his love of literature. But the unnatural suppression came to an end when, after publishing two books with which he made his name as a writer, he met the beautiful and intelligent Amy Yule through common literary friends. She had shown admiration for his promising career, and interest in him. Flattered by this unexpected stroke of luck, he fell for her at first sight: she was his first love. Without a second thought, they were married in their early twenties. The birth of a baby boy followed soon after.

It is not by chance that Reardon, given his temperament and idealistic tendency, is also one who — as Freud metaphorically noticed in a few of his patients— unconsciously would have been unwilling to leave his mother’s breast. He would have been happily “nourished” by someone else ¬— as he was when his father died, thanks to his modest inheritance — so that he might devote himself entirely to his intellectual activity. Instead, by becoming the breadwinner of his young family, Reardon starts to have doubts about his capacity of making a living through his writing, which is now imposed on him by need rather than the joy of pure aesthetic pleasure. So, when he sets out to write his third novel in three volumes (as the market required at the time) trying to produce something profitable, he suddenly finds himself devoid of any inspiration, unable to follow the strict writing routine he has imposed on himself. Depression develops, prompted by the awareness of his failure to pursue what is expected of him and by the even more acute economic problems he has to face. His once happy marriage to Amy, after mutual attempts at meeting each other’s expectations, ends up in a crisis that can now only exacerbate the profound differences of their personalities.

* * * * *

Amy is a middle class woman, reasonably educated, determined, proud, socially ambitious, and down-to-earth. She is the prototype of a new generation of women who, at the end of the 19th century, were more or less directly influenced by the ideas, filtering through society, of the Utilitarian philosopher and economist J.S. Mill and other thinkers, who believed in freedom of thought, civil rights and better education for women as well as equality between the sexes. It can be added that the reform of the Divorce Law in 1857 had made it relatively easier (although still difficult by our modern standards) for a woman to break an unhappy marriage.

To be sure, Amy’s attitude to life is by no means so imbued with feminist ideas as to refuse a traditional role within marriage. Even so, she has developed a markedly assertive nature, perhaps because of the support of her mother’s unconditional love since childhood — an experience that she has in common with Milvain. Conscious of her charm and worth, she has grown up sure to be loved and to have a good place in society. But she is not a sentimentalist; still less is she prone to wallow in self-pity. This is what makes it difficult for her, an efficient problem solver but a poor analyst, to understand her husband’s fits of self-doubt and his struggle with the demands of their family life.

That is why when she has to face the fact that he is incapable of going on with his writing smoothly enough to prevent their family from total descent into destitution, she typically focuses on the visible cause of the problem — the nervous breakdown of an overworked man. Her suggestion is equally of a practical nature: a temporary separation from her husband, whereby she and their baby would go back to live more comfortably with her mother to relieve him of the financial burden of providing for the whole family. In the meantime, he, living on the last money they have, could spend a few months at the seaside to recuperate and dedicate himself entirely to write for the market.

But Amy misses the point. For Reardon this is tantamount to being misunderstood and virtually abandoned by a wife who is not devoted enough to share his life’s hurdles with him. Even more so because she rejects his alternative idea of reducing their expenses by moving to a cheaper flat, and is even more vigorously opposed to him taking up a clerical job to make ends meet. In her mind, this would diminish their social status; she does not accept social regression. Most of all, she does not recognise the man she fell in love with any more.

The crisis between Amy and Reardon gets worse, reaching very dramatic tones. Increasingly, her prosaic attitude clashes with his idealism. While she reveals herself as selfish and mainly preoccupied with social propriety, he fails to find in her a “maternal” acceptance of the limits of his creative impulse, which is virtually the expression of himself. In reality, Reardon’s ideal “persona” (just to use a Jungian term for the role expected of him to play in society) is at odds with his inner self. So, his persona becomes for him just a painful mask, which he refuses to wear. But it is just this lack of compromise between two conflicting inner forces — self and social role — that causes him a serious neurosis.

Things do not get any better after his separation from Amy. Now living alone and working as a clerk to survive, he is unable to resume his writing. His already precarious health gets worse, while his mind undergoes a form of regression into a childish state: he ends up disowning any feelings of adult love, sex or paternal instinct and becomes unreasonably jealous. How could he love his own child who has taken his place in his wife’s heart?

In this state of mind Reardon becomes intensely close (a fraternal friendship, with an almost homoerotic charge) to his literary friend Harold Biffen, another very poor young author who struggles to survive by teaching composition to mature students and whose literary endeavour consists of writing a novel, Mr Bailey, grocer, inspired by the rediscovery of the ordinary — a theme hardly appealing to the socially rising working class. Philosophical about his misfortune and realist by nature, Biffen becomes Reardon’s confidant as well as his “conscience” by constantly reminding him of the full life he has left behind — the precious bond with an attractive and intelligent wife that could be restored if he only wished.

Nothing, though, seems to relieve Reardon from his dark mood. Nonetheless, encouraged by the prospect of getting a slightly better remunerated but still modest clerical job, he tries his luck again with Amy by meeting her at her mother’s place, in the hope that he can persuade her to go back to live with him. Not only does he meet Amy’s coldness, but also her implicit loss of respect for him. From her newly restored comfortable position, it has become easier for her to compare her respectable, conventional and fairly well off friends to her down at heel husband, who, to her mind, is now more than ever a weak man, incapable of adapting to the demands of reality. He is no longer her bid for success and social enhancement; he has just become the symbol of her wrong choice, a diminution of her own self.

Amy has also explored a new path toward emancipation: cultivating new intellectual interests, different from her husband’s — mainly articles on popularised social science of which would-be intellectuals were fond. This somehow overshadows the fact that he had been an essential vehicle for her intellectual improvement. An enlightened woman, she is also aware of her rights within a marriage that is suddenly meaningless to her; she even talks of legal separation in her conversation with Reardon. But she is not bold enough to cut herself off from her traditional role of a wife in a society that still disapproves of marriage break-ups; and following the legacy she has received after the death of an uncle, she eventually decides, after many objections, to go to live with him again.

Reardon is unimpressed by Amy’s resolution: he knows it is dictated by mere concession to social propriety. He feels resentment towards a kind of behaviour so alien to his idea of conventional femininity; he feels helpless and angry. In the heat of the moment, he goes as far as to envy those men who used to keep women in subjection. This time it is he who rejects her surrender to him.

The overevaluation of the sexual object that Freud sees as the necessary condition of love has gone between them, at least at a conscious level. Amy’s newly acquired financial independence and her proposal to provide for the family while he could try again his success as a writer do not change Reardon’s feelings. He cannot have the only thing he wants: Amy’s unconditional love and acceptance independently of their financial and social position.

A sudden change in the situation occurs when Willy, the couple’s baby, falls ill with diphtheria and Amy calls for Reardon. In fear of losing her son, she abandons coldness and selfishness and is suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of guilt — as if she deserved punishment for having left her husband in the lurch. Finally, at last, her maternal sense is extended from her baby to the father of her baby. But it is too late: Reardon’s body subsides to material deprivation (he has been sharing all the money he earned with Amy) and illness. All the same, he responds to Amy’s call and, in very poor condition, reaches her. On this occasion, he feels the return of her tenderness and consideration for him and, while he is taken care of completely by her in the last moments of his life, he sees his desire for protection and reassurance come true.

On his deathbed, Reardon does not forget Biffen’s loyalty and friendship toward him, and tells Amy that he wants to see him again. When the two friends are reunited, a very poignant scene follows. In a haze of delirium, Reardon reminds Biffen of his plan to go to Greece with him. That was the last dream of a man who did not want to outgrow his world of fantasy, and paid the price for failing to adapt to his environment.

Biffen’s attitude to life is apparently different. Unlike Reardon, he is not a depressive: optimism keeps him going. He is the desperate fighter who once, against all the odds, even risked his life to save his book’s manuscript from fire, hoping that the bundle of sheets could change his life for the better. As a realist, he does not disown sentimental and sexual longings, of which he feels painfully deprived by poverty. Paradoxically, though, in a tragic twist of events, he is defeated by the most ideal feeling known to a human being: love. Obsessed by the impossibility of winning widowed Amy’s heart (a desire he had always secretly nurtured) and, by extension, losing hope to win any woman’s love, Biffen suddenly feels his life is meaningless. Confronted with the death of hope, he takes his own life.

* * * * *

Money and love also have a fundamental impact on the life of Marian Yule, the other main female character of the novel. Marian is Amy’s first cousin, but apart from being related, they could not be more different. Marian is sensitive, intellectual and unpretentious, but, unlike Amy, she lacks conventional physical charm, does not shine socially and has learnt to repress her emotions since childhood. This can partly be explained by the nature of her upbringing: she is the only child of an ill-assorted and unhappy marriage.

Her father, Alfred Yule, is a pedantic and disillusioned critic, learned but unhappy at his treatment by the literary establishment with which he is always at odds. Totally and uniquely absorbed in intellectual activity, he gives vent to his insensitivity by taking out his frustrations on his family, in particular on his uneducated but devoted, compassionate wife. Never reconciled with his association with her, Alfred Yule sees his wife as the symbol of his professional failure, as she had been the only marital choice open to an unsuccessful and impecunious young bachelor. Surrendering to necessity does not make it any easier for him to forget that he would have indeed deserved a culturally and socially better wife. So, Yule’s morally sadistic behaviour toward his wife — which often finds expression in humiliating remarks about her working class origin and disapproval of her contacts with her relatives — is the manifest form of his inner feelings of self-deprecation and self-assertiveness. Trying to control this contrast has made him, who is introverted by nature and too exclusively keen on brainwork, harsh and unsympathetic towards the external world. For her daughter, though, he has respect and a deep, albeit undemonstrative, kind of affection.

Marian has inherited her father’s intellectuality, which he has nurtured like a tender plant ever since it manifested itself at a very early age. First, totally disregarding his wife’s maternal feelings, he had sent Marian to a day school from infancy in order to isolate her from the influence of her mother’s coarse working class accent. And secondly, he had trained her in the art of writing and doing research at the British Library since adolescence. Now, at twenty-three, Marian is regularly ghost writing and devilling for her father, who does not fail to recognise her talent. But her life of sacrifice and isolation, that seems to go forever unchanged among economic restrictions and bookish daily activity, is far too unnatural for a woman of her age not to produce emotional consequences. As a defence, she has suppressed any ambition and feminine vanity, but, at the same time, she is in danger of making wrong choices. And this is what happens when self-confident Milvain crosses her path through her father’s acquaintance with him: she falls for the first man who, taking an interest in her discreet charm and intelligence, awakens her femininity.

Milvain’s feelings towards Marian are of a different nature. As ever turning situations to his own advantage, he proposes to her after learning that she, like Amy, will have a share in their dead uncle’s legacy. On the practical side, though, things do not go so smoothly for Marian as they go for Amy. To start with, Marian’s share would be much smaller than Amy’s, although consistent enough to help Milvain’s plans. On the personal front, too, the situation becomes critical for Marian. Her father, upset by her engagement to Milvain — and also suspecting him to be an adversary of his professionally — becomes even ruder than usual toward both her and her mother. But in handling the impasse Marian this time emerges as a new, more assertive woman. Made stronger by the swooning force of love and the awareness of her proximate financial independence, she stands up for what she believes and confronts her father’s bullying behaviour in the family. But, unfortunately, her future independence is seriously undermined: the firm responsible for the payment of her legacy has gone bankrupt, and she is left with the only choice of taking legal action to recuperate at least some of the money due to her. So, she cannot leave her parents’ home as she wished; her marriage plans have to be altered.

The terrible blow for Marian comes from Milvain himself, who cannot easily disguise his disappointment in the matter of the contested will: she is not rich enough for him. Nevertheless, he struggles with himself to keep to his engagement, as if at this point he feels burdened by the weight of a moral duty toward a woman who devotes herself to him in a way that he, initially flattered by her admiration and passion, cannot reciprocate. Despite his intention to control his real feelings, they betray themselves in the form of uncouth remarks and the indelicate suggestion of exploiting her passionate nature as a source of inspiration for writing marketable romances. This makes it even easier for the sensitive girl to detect the truth. Her love relationship with him, which has brought light into her dull life, turns into perplexity and doubt about a marriage which she understands will rest only on lopsided sentiments. Disappointed and deeply wounded by Milvain’s ambiguous behaviour, she eventually breaks their engagement.

Marian will meet other stumbling blocks in her life — her father’s blindness and death, absolute poverty, as well as her own nervous stress to cope with all this — before settling down in a provincial town working as a librarian to support her mother and herself.

As observers, we certainly cannot define her life fulfilled, yet her struggles show how education and intellectuality increased the chances of leading an independent life at a time when women were still very dependent mentally and emotionally on men. In a sense, Marian is much nearer to a 20th century woman than to a Victorian maiden passively dominated by the events. She is also ahead of Amy who, on the one hand, is eager to appear unconventional through her criticism of love as the focus of a woman’s life, and, on the other, cannot completely sever her ties from the basic values of a bourgeois mentality. Instead Marian, even when overwhelmed by grief over the fall of her romance, can still rely on the resources of her rational mind. Untamed by consuming worldly ambitions, she strikes us as a very rich personality.

* * * * *

Reardon’s death and Milvain’s regained sentimental freedom bring Amy and Milvain together. While she was mourning her husband and son, Milvain, in a noble act of friendship toward his late colleague, published a second edition of Reardon’s two successful books in memory of him. Amy, favourably impressed by this, resumes her friendship with Milvain, which had been previously interrupted by Reardon’s jealousy of her admiration for his successful friend. But if practicalities act just as catalysts for Milvain and Amy to create a liaison in the new situation, the real reason why they are drawn to each other is that they have striking similarities: with their ambition, self-love and self assurance they are the mirror image of each other. For two narcissistic personalities, it is blissful to hear the echo of each other’s aims and passions. And it is with a predictable outcome — Amy and Milvain’s marriage — that the novel ends.

New Grub Street is a novel of no heroes. Nonetheless Gissing, an omniscient narrator who seeps into the actions as well as into the minds of all its characters, implicitly ranks them as winners or losers: those who have the instinct to struggle, compete and prevail in the rat race as opposed to those who do not and perish. No wonder we can detect a touch of Darwinian philosophy in this: The Origin of Species had been published in 1859 and since then the idea of a social kind of evolution had became interwoven into the canvas of society, influencing the assessment of ethical values.

Gissing, however, does not adopt a supercilious attitude in the fashion of earlier Victorian novelists. Like other late 19th and early 20th century writers, he exchanges typology for the examination of the individual and his motivations, which, at some point, he can also share. We can hear his voice when, taking Reardon and Biffen as examples, he even makes a plea for our sympathetic understanding of writers who are despised because of their inability to make money, claiming that their “imaginative virtues” could be fully exploited if they were “gifted with independent means”. Gissing includes himself here, as he had been a bit of a loser before meeting with success and, like Reardon, the most autobiographical character of New Grub Street, was a depressive who had found it difficult to adapt to the demands of the market.

We can also sense that Gissing ultimately believes in intellectual qualities. They can raise individuals, whatever their temperament and socio-economic condition, to a higher sphere where sensitivity and creativity reign. As for the winners in life — like Milvain and Amy — efficiency makes them prevail and, satisfied by success, they may even become more sympathetic to the losers, although their “virtues”, prompted by material wealth and fashions, are volatile.

Whether we agree with Gissing’s world view or not, we can conclude by saying that New Grub Street gives the modern reader substantial ground for reflection and precious detailed information about a fascinating era that is long gone. Of course, we may resent some undemocratic customs and attitudes contained in the novel — for instance, the exploitation of domestic servants by the insensitivity of the Victorian matron to their most basic needs, or the class biased value judgements uttered by the characters that are unacceptable by today’s standards. But we have to keep in mind that even our moral sense, like our biology, has undergone transformations through the millennia. Humanity is never totally severed from a legacy deeply rooted in the past, and the present is nothing but an evolved version of the past.

Laura Maffey

Colchester, UK