Unclassed, Demos, Thyrza, and The Nether World. In each of these novels, Gissing the reformer contends with Gissing the artist; in none of them is the tension resolved satisfactorily.

Workers in the Dawn

Most of the material Gissing used in Workers in the Dawn can be found repeatedly in the other novels of the 1880’s, and most of that material springs from his own experiences. Clearly, his early marriage to a girl from the slums underlined his interest in social themes throughout his life. In the late 1870’s and 1880’s, he had also become enthusiastic about the radical party, read Comte, promoted positivist doctrines, and spoke at various radical-party meetings. Between 1879 and 1880, Gissing began writing Workers in the Dawn, a novel of avowed social protest in which he serves, as he says in a letter of June 8, 1880, as “a mouthpiece of the advanced Radical party.” Equally obvious in the novel, however, is that Gissing is perturbed about placing art in service to political and moral dogma.

Arthur Goldring, the hero of the novel, is both a painter and a social reformer, but he is clearly upset with this duality in his life. Convinced that the aims of his two avocations are antithetical, he looks for consolation from Helen Norman, the woman he loves. Through the mouth of Helen, Gissing propounds the ideas that he had gleaned from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry (1840)—most specifically that art is the true legislator of the moral order. Gissing, however, found it difficult to practice what he held to be intellectually valid; thus, the early Gissing, like Goldring, constantly found difficulty in accepting the tenet that art should not attempt to teach morality directly.

The Unclassed

In The Unclassed, Gissing continued to struggle with the intricacies of the artist’s world. The result was a novel in which the fall of the two artist figures is in one case oversimplified and in the other muddled. Confused and worried about his own failings, Gissing attempted to analyze the artistic temperament and the forces operating against such a temperament by segmenting the artist into Julian Casti and Osmond Waymark. Casti’s story is Gissing’s attempt to depict an artist undone by an overriding sense of moral obligation to a shrewish and possessive woman, Harriet Smales, a character with clear similarities to Gissing’s own wife Nell. Not until the last chapter is the physically debilitated and intellectually frustrated Casti convinced that his moral obligation to Harriet is futile. He leaves for the Isle of Wight, where he quietly spends his last days plaintively talking of the epic he will never write.

The portrait of Waymark is Gissing’s attempt to counterbalance the oversimplified Casti. Waymark is a more complex figure, and his role as an artist is more thoroughly scrutinized by Gissing. Waymark is thwarted in his pursuit of art by a variety of causes: his aborted social consciousness, his vaguely defined ideological tenets, his relationship with women, and his pecuniary predicament. By the end of the novel, after a plethora of complications, Waymark is neither a complete success nor a complete failure. His one published novel receives mediocre reviews, and Waymark himself shows little concern either for its intrinsic value or for its critical reception. By placing his artist-hero in the grips of consuming personal, political, and economic woes, Gissing tries to suggest that art cannot flourish with integrity or purity. The portrait of Waymark, however, is finally very muddled, for it is not clear to which forces Waymark the artist succumbs. Questions about the role of art in the political and moral order continued to dominate Gissing’s thinking in much the same way throughout the 1880’s, and he entered the 1890’s very much in the middle of the two main currents of literary thought, drawn both to the didacticism of the realists and naturalists and to the ivory towers of the aesthetes.

In the 1890’s, Gissing broadened the range of his novels and produced his best work. At the beginning of the decade, he published The Emancipated, the story of a young middle-class widow restricted by religious scruples until she finds release in art. In Denzil Quarrier, Gissing tried his hand at a political novel and produced one of his more popular works. In Eve’s Ransom, a short novel that was first serialized, he focused on the pangs ofunrequited love. In Born in Exile, Gissing examined the life of one born in the lower classes who has the opportunity to rise to a higher socioeconomic level. In The Odd Women, Gissing focused his attention on early feminists, making a careful study of women who never marry but who must support themselves in a male-dominated society.

New Grub Street

The novel on which Gissing’s reputation has most depended is New Grub Street, his full-length study of the artist’s role in society. From Jasper Milvain to Whelpdale to Alfred Yule to Edwin Reardon to Harold Biffin, Gissing offers a finely graduated hierarchy of the late nineteenth century artist. He is particularly interested in characterizing the artist manqué and the forces that have contributed to his failure. Unlike the earlier novels, however, New Grub Street presents a wider-ranging understanding of the artist’s dilemma. It is no longer a simple case of idealized social reform versus an even more idealized artistic purity. In keeping with his social interests of the early 1890’s, Gissing sees the factors operating against the artist arising more from without than from within. He concentrates on two particularly potent forces that militate against the artist and ultimately ensure his downfall.

The first force is “the woman,” and her influence on the artist is subtle, pervasive, and lasting. Often sensitive and frequently lonely, the nascent artists of Gissing’s Grub Street are prime targets for the love of a good woman. She appeals particularly to the psychologically insecure artist, promising a lifetime of emotional stability. At the outset, she is a source of inspiration, yet time and disillusionment reveal more distressing realities. It is the age-old femme fatale who lures the artist away from his art into an emotionally draining existence, thwarting his inclination and energy for production. It is “the other woman” who instigates a complicated triangle with like results. It is the husband-hunting woman who tantalizes the frustrated artist with the attraction of domestic security, but soon she either stifles that inexplicable drive to write for the sake of writing or provides a marriage so socially disadvantageous that advancement is precluded.

Economics is the second, equally potent, force militating against the three failed artists (Reardon, Biffen, Yule) of New Grub Street. While the force of woman is chiefly felt on a psychological level, her destructive influence within the economic sphere is evident. After all, the necessity of supporting a wife and children increases the financial difficulties the artist must face. Monetary matters also prove a problem in and of themselves. An artist such as Biffen easily falls victim to the myth of so many struggling artists, convinced that poverty and hardship are essential in the experience of any would-be writer. In the portrait of Reardon, however, one quickly sees the artist at odds with real poverty, rarely an inspiration and usually a deterrent to his work.

Edwin Reardon is the novel’s central character, and it is Reardon who is subjected to the greatest number of debilitating forces. When he is introduced, it is immediately clear that his marriage to Amy has entangled him in a finely woven web. At the outset, Reardon is thirty-two years old, has been married two years, and has a ten-month-old child. None of his decisions, artistic or otherwise, can be wholly unaffected by this domestic responsibility. Gissing makes his viewpoint clear in the very first scene with Reardon and Amy. In this scene, largely a heated discussion over Reardon’s approach to writing, Amy chides her husband for not compromising his artistic integrity and forcibly reminds him that “art must be practised as a trade, at all events in our time. This is the age of trade.” Thus, in this one early scene, the two powerful influences of woman and commerce come together, and there is little doubt that they will take a heavy toll on Reardon the artist. Reardon’s failure as an artist, both aesthetically and materially, runs in direct proportion to the failure of his marriage and the decline of his economic status.

Obviously lending itself to autobiographical interpretation, the artist-novel is the means by which the real-life writer works out—or fails to work out—his own aesthetic and personal conflicts. New Grub Street, like Gissing’s earlier novels, has its share of autobiographical elements, but the author’s analysis of his emotional and intellectual condition is far more perceptive. He has gained tighter control on the raw materials of the artist’s world, which are treated ambiguously in the early novels. The eleven years between Workers in the Dawn and New Grub Street were the training ground for an increased self-insight and a more encompassing, objective portraiture of the artist figure and the gray areas with which he must cope.

Late novels

The work Gissing wrote in the last half of the 1890’s has not generally contributed to his critical reputation. Part of his later years he spent on a variety of projects that are not especially characteristic of his overall career. He worked on a historical novel that was never completed but was published posthumously as Veranilda in 1904. The novels that Gissing published in his last years are for the most part undistinguished and often are reworkings of his earlier themes. The Whirlpool is a study of marriage in the “whirlpool” of modern life. The Crown of Life is his paean to the perfect marriage, significantly begun shortly after he met Gabrielle Fleury in 1898.

In 1900, Gissing did most of the writing of The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, though it was not published until 1903. Pretending to be merely the book’s editor, Gissing provides a short preface saying that he has come across the papers of his friend, Henry Ryecroft, and has ordered them in an arbitrary way. There are four main sections, each labeled with one of the seasons, beginning with spring and ending with winter. The book is a mixture of autobiography and reverie, providing the author a platform on which he can discuss sundry subjects. Thus, there are memories of childhood, of poverty in London, of peaceful trips to Italy. There are descriptive sketches of rural scenes in England. There are short essays on philosophical ideas and terse confessions of various preferences, ranging from food to countries. The book provides delightful if not exciting reading and gives a memorable portrait of the aging author who has retired to the calmness of Exeter to ruminate.

When Gissing died in 1903, he left behind an impressive corpus, but the reputation he had at the time of his death did not continue to grow. By some, he was criticized as being too ponderous and undramatic, inclined to publish an analytical study rather than a dramatized story. By others, he was accused of being melodramatic, relying too exclusively on the contrivances of the Victorian “triple-decker.” In the second half of the twentieth century, however, especially during the last two decades, Gissing attracted more attention in academic circles. His seriousness as a novelist has slowly been recognized, both for his historic role in the heyday of English realism and for his integrity as an individual novelist.