Recent Work and Close Prospects in Gissing Studies: A Bibliographical Survey

Recent Work and Close Prospects in Gissing Studies: A Bibliographical Survey PIERRE COUSTILLAS Université de Lille FIFTY YEARS AGO, on the eve of the second World War, writing a report on the status of Gissing in the history of the English novel would have been simple. Interest in his life and works was at a low ebb. New editions were issued sporadically by publishers who cared enough about him to purchase rights of reproduction, and on occasion articles appeared in the major journals and periodicals. His brother and literary executor, Algernon Gissing, did not help matters by doing his best to prevent the publication of the Collected Works which several firms had offered to undertake, and only a few of the novels remained in print. In the next decade, World War II and its sequels accelerated the process of disinterest. Not a single new edition or impression is known to have appeared between 1939 and 1947. So Russell Kirk could well ask publicly in 1950: "Who Knows George Gissing?"1 Indeed by then he had virtually sunk into oblivion. The revival of interest began in the late 1950s, and it has been developing steadily ever since. This rebirth is so substantial that reviewing the developments in detail would only be feasible in a book-length study. It may not be overly ambitious, however, to chart the main achievements of Gissing scholarship and their foundations in the last decade within the limits of this essay. From the viewpoint of the late 1980s, it may seem odd that access to Gissing's works was for a time only open to those libraries that could afford to pay the steep prices asked for the eighteen volumes of the AMS Press edition published from 1968 to 1971. Greater access was later facilitated by a number of publishers, mostly English. The Harvester Press, with its record of thirteen critical editions, not to speak of the publication of Gissing's diary,2 up to the late 1970s, made substantial progress towards the completion of its programme—the reissue of all the novels. The Town Traveller and Will Warburton became available in 1981, The Paying Guest and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft in 1982, A Life's Morning in 1984, Workers in the Dawn in 1985 and the story of Roman and Goth, Veranilda, in 1987. Five of these seven critical editions included studies of the manuscripts , and the last two were by far the most thorough: many hand407 COUSTILLAS: Recent Work and Close Prospects in Gissing Studies written pages of Workers were cancelled by young Gissing in the spring of 1880, and the manuscript of his historical novel similarly shows substantive differences with the version which in 1904 the printers made authoritative, that of the now lost typescript. During the same period the Harvester Press reprinted some of its earlier Gissing titles, either in hardback or in paperback or in both formats, Isabel Clarendon, Demos and The Nether World in 1982, The Unclassed and Henry Ryecroft in 1983, Thyrza and The Whirlpool in 1984, Denzil Quarrier and The Crown of Life in 1987. Whether the only three titles not yet included in what was to be a collected edition, New Grub Street, The Odd Women and Eve's Ransom, will eventually appear is doubtful. The new management of the Harvester Press—a division of Simon and Schuster—has shown no sign of interest in Gissing. Several titles have already run out of print.3 A similar situation on a smaller scale has recently occurred with the Hogarth Press which, after publishing a paperback of The Whirlpool introduced by Gillian Tindall in 1984, announced a collected paperback edition. Three titles duly appeared in the next year—The Emancipated, Born in Exile, and Will Warburton*—but though In the Year of Jubilee and Denzil Quarrier were scheduled for 1987, only the former was published.6 The fate of the Hogarth Press having been uncertain in the last few years, the grand Gissing project, although widely publicized, has now been abandoned. Competition with other publishers thus remained a predictable yet unrealized prospect since the Hogarth titles corresponded to hardcover Harvester volumes while complementing the handful of titles brought...