No Mere Potboilers

George Gissing's disparagement of his short fiction is well known. Editor Christine Huguet reminds us in her introduction that Gissing qualified his short stories as everything from "paltry" and "scrappy" to "apprentice-work" and "miserable trash." In fact, on one occasion he "masochistically condemned the entire lot as mere pot boilers." The stories in this new collection, which Huguet dubs an "anthology-cum-critique," along with the insightful close readings that accompany them, may entice readers to dismiss the author's harsh self-assessments.

Spellbound, George Gissing. Volume One: The Storyteller. Volume Two: A Twenty-First Century Reappraisal—unfortunately a rather awkward and misleading title—combines two independently paginated volumes: "The Storyteller," a selection of eleven of Gissing's one hundred and fifteen stories in critically established texts (some with original illustrations), and "A Twenty-First Century Reappraisal," eleven corresponding scholarly essays, many of whose authors have book-length Gissing studies to their credit. Moreover, this collection is particularly valuable because some stories have not been published in many years. "A Mid-summer Madness" and "By the Kerb" have not been reprinted since their appearance in magazines in 1894 and 1895, and "Gretchen," "The Pig and Whistle," and "Spellbound" were last published in 1924, 1954, and 1979 respectively; this is also the first unbowdlerized publication in book form (accompanied on facing pages by a German translation) of "Phoebe's Fortune." Each story is preceded by a short introduction contextualizing it by means of its composition and publication history.

Although space prohibits giving plot summaries for each story or detailed synopses of their accompanying essays, it might be useful to provide thumbnail sketches of the latter—if only to whet readers' appetites for the stories themselves. Diana Maltz examines the literary and cultural texts informing "Gretchen" (1877), which she sees as critiquing "social myths of [Paris] bohemia"; Bouwe Postmus outlines the remarkable parallels between "An English Coast-Picture" (1877) and Augustus Hare's Handbook for Travellers in Durham and Northumberland to reveal Gissing's strict adherence to verisimilitude; Markus Neacey compares the original manuscript (1883) of "Phoebe's Fortune" to the story's serialization in Temple Bar (1884) and reprinting in Stories and Sketches (1938) and provides a German translation, "Phöbes Glück" (1891), based on the 1883 and 1884 versions, which "can be regarded as a third version of the story"; Robert Selig examines the ironic use of popular culture and its implications in "Lou and Liz" (1893) via allusions to commonplace song lyrics (quoted in full); using Gissing's letters and diary, John Sloan traces the genesis of "The Day of Silence" (1893) and shows how its "elements of reportage and realism … undergo a process of imaginative heightening and transformation"; Barbara Rawlinson examines the themes of "jealousy and hysteria, the inevitable consequences of drunken excess" in "A Midsummer Madness" (1894); Christine DeVine uncovers the ambiguities in that "tiny experimental gem," "By the Kerb" (1895), which utilizes Flaubert's trademark style indirect libre; Constance Harsh demonstrates how Gissing's sole Yellow Book contribution, "The Foolish Virgin" (1896), can be read as a "moral exemplum"; David Grylls traces the origins of the protagonist's reading addiction in "Spellbound" (1897) to Gissing's brief American sojourn as a nineteen-year-old and concludes that the character's "weakness perhaps contains an element of [Gissing's] self-loathing"; M. D. Allen sees the Chesney Wold of Bleak House as prefiguring "A Daughter of the Lodge" (1901) and suggests that the story "is a great Dickensian's mordant rewrite of one of that novel's major themes, showing the degradation visited upon England since it first saw publication"; and Christine Huguet finds that "The Pig and Whistle" (1904), the only story in this collection with a happy ending, "reflects a whole-hearted, quintessentially Dickensian, yearning for prelapsarian plenitude."

Of course this skims the surface of essays that often provide thematic parallels to Gissing's other stories or to the novels, parallels to incidents...