George Gissing: Voices of the Unclassed (review)

George Gissing: Voices of the Unclassed is the third collection of essays on Gissing within six years, testifying to his continuing—even growing—vitality. Thirty years on from the Gissing boom of the 1970s, editors have an opportunity to review a significant critical story. This Martin Ryle and Jenny Bourne Taylor undertake with an incisive charting of the shifts and turns in Gissing criticism and a suggestive introduction to the work of their own contributors. The first three chapters concern "Gissing as social investigator and cultural anthropologist," with essays focussing on changing attitudes to philanthropy, women, work, public exposure, and the cultural codes of food and eating. The next four chapters examine the novels of the 1890s, especially New Grub Street (1891), Born in Exile (1892), In the Year of Jubilee (1894), and The Whirlpool (1897); the final three chapters treat Gissing and his audience, the fragmentation of the readership in the cultural marketplace, and the varied ways in which he has been a touchstone for later novelists.

Diana Maltz considers the extent to which Gissing mobilised his interest in the Charity Organisation Society as well as the settlement movements from the 1870s in his fiction and the possible impact of the views of two women with whom he was in correspondence from the late 1880s, Edith Sichel and Clara Collet. Maltz acknowledges that "Gissing's responses to institutional philanthropy were complex and inconsistent" (26) but, of course, Gissing was under no obligation as a novelist to offer a consistent position. Maltz shrewdly points out that Gissing appears imaginatively drawn to the idea of "settlement" which embodied "the ultimate communal life that Gissing envied of University men" (25). Maltz shows that the settlements were colonised by the new independent women whose aspirations Gissing admired and understood. Emma Liggins's contribution investigates the much-studied challenge of representing women in the urban space who press against and disrupt conventional boundaries and categories. Liggins considers two of Gissing's female protagonists (not usually yoked together), Alma Rolfe in The Whirlpool and Clara Hewitt in The Nether World (1889). Like Maltz, Liggins is keen to establish how much Gissing borrows from contemporary social investigators and observers to show just how far he is aware of "prevalent fears about sexual objectification and loss of respectability" (43) surrounding women moving and working in public.

Scott McCracken takes the presence of food in Gissing's texts to investigate a cluster of central ideas by which Gissing can be productively read. This is an important essay because it does more than thematise the subject, pointing up, rather, that dialectic in Gissing's method between the denotative and the performative. While Gissing relays how late-nineteenth-century material abundance draws attention to Malthusian lack and Darwinian "brute necessity" (51), he also shows an anthropological awareness of "the symbolic role of food in the rituals of everyday life" (51). Giving special attention to Eve's Ransom (1895), McCracken shows how food can measure a shift from production to consumption in Gissing's later work: food is transformed out of the category of "biological necessity" through the recognition of "food's capacity to act as a form of display in consumer culture" (55). Deborah Parsons is also concerned with identifying the limits of and possibilities beyond strategies of naturalism. Within the Gissing oeuvre, "it is The Whirlpool, once again, which most extends and complicates literary naturalism's pseudo-scientific claim to empirical exactitude" (107). She skilfully affiliates Gissing, Emile Zola, and Benito Perez Galdós with the "sociological impressionism" of George Simmel to show how their novels "eschew a crudely deterministic scientific ideology in their ambivalent fascination with the phantasmagoria of urban modernity" (107). Taking her cue from Simmel's now celebrated essay, "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903), Parsons shows how, in each case, "young female protagonists" experience the states of "hypersensitivity, neurasthenia and ennui that Simmel identifies with the mental life of the reified world of modernity" (112).

David...