Tag Archives: George Gissing New Grub Street

Fiction will tell you better what the past was really like.

 

I was a history major in college. The past has always fascinated me. Especially the Middle Ages. I had an exciting history teacher in high school, Paul Tedesco, who stimulated an interest on my part in American history. And, it was my very good fortune to have had a great medieval history professor in college, Norman F. Cantor.

I never actually never learned that much history, from the point of view of factual knowledge. What I most liked, especially in the college courses I took, was great historical writing from the aesthetic point of view.

Be that as it may, I would like in this post to “expound” briefly on something that has occurred to me from time to time.

History is all well and good — and necessary (I don’t mean to show ignorance by detracting from it) — but if you want to know what the past was really like, fiction is the best, without question. It can tell you better than a nonfiction monograph, better than a work of scholarship, about the past, not only make you feel like you are there, but feel what it was like, experience it vicariously, and learn all sorts of little things about how those times were different, from how people behaved to their households and customs. There is no comparable way to experience and know the past; there’s no comparison.

 

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To give an example, I have been reading Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837).

In Chapter V, Mr. Pickwick and his companions hire a post-chaise to take them from the town of Rochester to Dingley Dell manor, a distance of fifteen miles. “It was a curious little green box on four wheels,” Dickens writes, “with a low place like a wine-bin for two behind, and an elevated perch out front, drawn by an immense brown horse.”

That’s how gentlemen traveled in those days.

There is not enough room in the post-chaise for the entire party of four, so one of them, Mr. Winkle, has to travel on horseback. Mr. Winkle experiences difficulty mounting his horse, and it runs away. The other horse runs off with the chaise, which eventually crashes into a wooden bridge. The party end up walking the distance, leading by its harness “a dreadful horse that [the party of travelers] can’t be got rid of.”

The scene, as told by Dickens, is hilarious. And it illustrates what traveling was like in the English countryside in the early nineteenth century. You had to hire a coach and driver or rent your own horse to ride. (And people as a matter of course could ride on horseback in those days.) But, hiring the horse was often a problem. Yes, coaches would ply the streets of London, but, depending on your transportation requirements and where you were, you might have to find a hosteler. Then, travelling by horseback or coach was much, much slower than traveling nowadays. In Chapter IX, Mr. Pickwick hires a coach to pursue the fleeing scoundrel Alfred Jingle:

‘Pretty situation,’ thought Mr. Pickwick, when he had had a moment’s time for reflection. … Pickwick Club. Damp chaise — strange horses — fifteen miles an hour — and twelve o’clock at night!’

Also, in Chapter V, there is a description of the interior of a roadside public-house in a small town:

a large apartment, with a red brick floor and a capacious chimney; the ceiling garnished with ham, sides of bacon, and ropes of onions. The walls were decorated with several hunting-whips, two or three bridles, a saddle and an old rusty blunderbuss….

And, “an old eight-day clock.” This refers to a clock that could run for eight days without having to be wound. It feels so nineteenth century and unlike any lodging one would stay at in one’s travels nowadays. Certainly not a Ramada or Holiday Inn!

 

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Reading a novel can often, in some respects, be like traveling back in time. For instance:

 

Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)

life in seventeenth-century London

 

Jane Austin, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

family life in an early nineteenth century English village

 

Balzac, Père Goriot (1835)

early 19th century Paris

 

Walt Whitman’s newly discovered novel Life and Adventures of Jack Engle (1852)

early 19th century Manhattan

 

Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1878)

upper class life in prerevolutionary Russia

 

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883)

boyhood in an 18th century English seacoast town

 

George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891)

London near the end of the Victorian era

 

Arthur Henry’s little known novel The Unwritten Law (1905; Henry was a friend of Theodore Dreiser’s who influenced and encouraged the latter in his early writing career)

turn of the century Washington Square

 

Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (1934)

life in the Lower East Side for Jewish immigrants

 

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

1930’s London

 

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

the Dust Bowl during the Depression

 

J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956)

Manhattan in the post-World War II period

 

Edwin O’Connor, The Last Hurrah (1956)

1950’s Boston

 

All wonderful books, all of which, I am proud to say, I have read.

 

— Roger W. Smith

   March 2018

an exchange of emails about George Gissing

 

Roger W. Smith to Charles Davenport, Jr.

August 6, 2017

 

Dear Mr. Davenport,

You wrote: “In the realm of fiction, George Gissing is in a league of his own; no other author even comes close.”

— Charles Davenport Jr., “I am what I read,” Greensboro News and Record, August 6, 2017

http://www.greensboro.com/opinion/columns/charles-davenport-jr-i-am-what-i-read/article_aceca4ab-fab8-501f-aa2d-7c01f199a6bc.html

I am thrilled to find that someone else shares my high opinion of Gissing. Some of his novels are still popular, as you know, but I feel that he does not get — by any measure — the recognition he richly deserves.

I am a long time fan of his and have read many of the novels plus “The Private Papers of Henry Rycroft.”

Thanks for bringing this to your readers’ attention.

Sincerely,

Roger W. Smith

New York, NY

P.S. You might get a kick out the following posts of mine:

“George Gissing, book covers”

George Gissing, book covers

“Roger Smith, translation into Spanish of passage from George Gissing’s ‘The Private Papers of Henry Rycroft’ ”

Roger W. Smith, translation into Spanish of passage from George Gissing

 

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Charles Davenport, Jr. to Roger W. Smith

August 7, 2017

 

Mr. Smith,

It’s a rare and high honor to hear from a fellow Gissing enthusiast! You’ve made my day. “The Private Papers” is probably my all-time favorite book: I weep on one page, and collapse in laughter on the next! No other writer has moved me as deeply or as often as Gissing. I just finished Paul Delany’s “George Gissing: A Life,” which is brilliant, but profoundly sad. It’s hard to believe a writer so gifted — it’s nothing short of necromancy — struggled to pay his bills (and the bills of family members). It’s a cruel, unjust world.

I can’t wait to read the links you provided. How did you hear of my News & Record piece up there in New York?

Cordially,

Charles Davenport Jr.

 

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Roger W. Smith to Charles Davenport, Jr.

August 7, 2017

 

Dear Mr. Davenport,

Thanks much for your email. I was very glad to hear from you.

Thank you so much for telling me about Paul Delany’s biography of Gissing. I did not know about it.

You undoubtedly know about Gissing scholar Pierre Coustillas. He has published a three volume biography of Gissing, which is intended to be the definitive biography. I have purchased only the first volume so far. I made several stabs at reading it. It is incredibly detailed and also dry. I could not get past the first hundred pages or so.

Like you, I love “The Private Papers of Henry Rycroft.” The diarist is — I am certain — Gissing, which is to say, the book is autobiographical. Among other things, I admired Gissing’s prose style.

I have some difficulty keeping the many novels of Gissing that I have read separate in my mind. They are all good. The starving writer in “New Grub Street” is, of course, Gissing. Has there ever been a truer picture of the literary vocation?

I am eager to read “Workers in the Dawn,” which I understand to have been Gissing’s first novel. I just ordered a copy from an on line bookseller.

I have revised my post

“Roger W. Smith, translation into Spanish of passage from George Gissing.” It is at

Roger W. Smith, translation into Spanish of passage from George Gissing

Thanks again for responding to my message.

 

Sincerely,

Roger W. Smith

 

note: Mr. Davenport, a long time Gissing enthusiast, is a member of the Editorial Board of the Greensoboro News & Record in Greensboro, NC.

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   August 2017