Collected Letters of Gissing

ELT: VOLUME 34:4, 1991 Collected Letters of Gissing The Collected Letters of George Gissing: Volume One. 1863-1880. Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, Pierre Coustillas, eds. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990. xiv + 334pp. $49.95 "MORE THAN most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me." Affixed to the masthead of The Gissing Journal (formerly The Gissing Newsletter), the novelist's appeal has not been ignored by ELT, which in 1989 devoted an issue to him. This new edition of his correspondence should generate more of the sympathy he needed. Reviewing the long gestation of their project, Paul F. Mattheisen and Arthur C. Young explain that after Young published The Letters of George Gissing to Eduard Bertz in 1961, with Mattheisen's assistance, they decided to supplant the bowdlerized collection of Gissing's family letters published in 1927 by Algernon and Ellen Gissing, his brother and sister. But though blessed by Gissing's son Alfred, the proposal met only rebuffs from publishers. Renewing their efforts about a decade ago, by which time Gissing studies were in full swing, they were persuaded by Ohio University Press to undertake an edition of all the extant Gissing letters, which will require up to nine volumes. In the attractive format of the book before us, with its eight pages of illustrations and full scholarly apparatus, we see the press's commitment to high aesthetic and editorial standards. The scale of the enterprise led almost inevitably to the appointment of a third editor, Pierre Coustillas, the French scholar known to all students of Gissing. In their General Introduction, Mattheisen and Young spell out the new division of responsibilities, identify the major repositories of Gissing's correspondence, and explain editorial procedures: the provenance for each letter will be given, and annotation to aid understanding without "elevating the principle of the exiguous into the category of the virtuous." For the present we cannot know how many Gissing letters await us, or how many we will be seeing for the first time. In addition to his correspondence with individuals drawn upon by biographers and critics, and the volume of his correspondence with Bertz, we already have collections of his letters to H. G. Wells (edited by Royal A. Gettman also in 1961) and to Henry Hick, Thomas Hardy, Edward Clodd, W. H. Hudson, Edith Sichel, and Gabrielle Fleury (all thanks to the indefatigable 458 Book Reviews Coustillas). The collected letters will not only incorporate all this correspondence but include some letters to Gissing as well. Thus, even more than the modern collections of letters by George Eliot, Hardy, Tennyson, Morris, Darwin, and Dickens, this new edition illustrates what Professor Gloria Fromm has recently called the "current rage for completeness." She worries about the tendency to regard such comprehensive collections as truly complete, despite editorial disclaimers. Whether or not students of Gissing share her concern, they can at least take comfort in the thought that he is now in excellent company. Adding to the comprehensiveness of the volume before us is Coustillas's twelve-page survey of Gissing's ancestors. It discloses the occasional incidence of affluence and local prominence among them but also their general lack of intellectual achievement. One exception was his father, Thomas Waller Gissing, a pharmacist who published botanical treatises and poetry, and took an interest in politics. His death when Gissing was thirteen meant a deprivation of love and guidance the novelist would often lament. Only two letters from Gissing to his mother during the period covered here have survived. Written when he was fourteen and fifteen and living at Lindow Grove, the Quaker boarding school in Cheshire to which he and his younger brothers William and Algernon were sent after their father's death, they are rather impersonal. In the first, he marvels at how fast the term is going ("I suppose it is having so many Exams.") and in the second he describes an amazing two-day, 67-mile tramp, partly in Wales. His later correspondence with his brothers contains numerous references to Mrs. Gissing and her two daughters, who remained in the family home in Wakefield, for he did not let distaste...