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New Grub Street is set in the literary and journalistic circles of 1880s London. In the 18th century, Grub Street became synonymous with hack literature, and though the street no longer existed in 1880s, hack-writing certainly did. The two central characters are a sharply contrasted pair of writers: Edwin Reardon, a novelist of some talent but limited commercial prospects, and a shy, cerebral man; and Jasper Milvain, a young journalist, hard-working and capable of generosity, but cynical and only semi-scrupulous about writing and its purpose in the late Victorian world.
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Presents a major social document and a story that draws us into the twilit world of Edwin Reardon, a struggling novelist, and his friends and acquaintances in Grub Street including Jasper Milvain, an ambitious journalist, and Alfred Yule, an embittered critic.
Set in London’s Grub Street, famous for the large number of ‘hack writers’ and mediocre publishers who resided therein, New Grub Street tells a tale of stark contrast: of Edwin Reardon, a critically acclaimed but not commercially successful novelist, and of his friend Jasper Milvain, a decent writer who cares more about money than the craft. Reardon’s marriage to the sophisticated Amy Yule is precariously close to failing: he married her through the merit of his literary successes, but he is not earning nearly enough money to support the two of them. Tensions are high, and at some point things must come to a head. And so the stage is set… New Grub Street is semi-autobiographical, drawing on Gissing’s own experiences as an author in literary circles of the time. George Gissing was a 19th century British author best remembered for his novels New Grub Street and The Odd Women and his criticism and analysis of Charles Dickens’ works. Part of the Naturalist literary movement, he was considered one of the finest English novelists of his time and was praised by his contemporaries, including G.K. Chesterton and George Orwell.
First published in 1972, this is the first detailed study of the milieu of the eighteenth-century literary hack and its significance in Augustan literature. Although the modern term 'Grub Street' has declined into vague metaphor, for the Augustan satirists it embodied not only an actual place but an emphatic lifestyle. Pat Rogers shows that the major satirists - Pope, Swift and Fielding - built a potent fiction surrounding the real circumstances in which the scribblers lived, and the importance of this aspect of their writing. The author first locates the original Grub Street, in what is now the Barbican, and then presents a detailed topographical tour of the surrounding area. With studies of a number of key authors, as well as the modern and metaphorical development of the term 'Grub Street', this book offers comprehensive insight into the nature of Augustan literature and the social conditions and concerns that inspired it.
Reproduction of the original.
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This book examines the conditions of authorship and the development of publishing and journalism during the nineteenth century. It provides a detailed account on the social, cultural, and economic factors that control literary activity, and determine literary success or failure. There are chapters on the place of women and working-class writers in a predominantly male, middle-class publishing industry; on literary clubs, societies, and feuds; on patronage, charity, and state support for writers; on literary journalists and the development of the bohemian character; on the facts that inspired the fictional world of Thackeray's Pendennis and Gissing's New Grub Street; and on the long-running debates on the status of writers and the state of literature. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary sources, The Common Writer adds substantially to our understanding of nineteenth-century literary history and culture.
The story is about the literary world of late-Victorian London that Gissing inhabited, and its title, New Grub Street, alludes to the London street, Grub Street, which in the 18th century became synonymous with...