New Grub Street and the Survival of Realism

The story that literary history tells about change and transition from one period to another relies on a theory, more or less explicit, of generic exhaustion. In the language of the Russian Formalists, genres become "abandoned, old, archaic devices [that have] lost their own vitality" and are "enduring by a strong inertial force"; ¹ Fredric Jameson argues in The Political Unconscious that older genres turn into a "brand-name system" that is inimical to genuine art and simply produces "subliterary" texts; ² and Franco Moretti, who describes the life cycle of genres as "the hidden thread of literary history," argues that genres thrive because of their "artistic usefulness" and die when that usefulness goes away. ³ All three find very different reasons for generic exhaustion—from routinization to the changes in the material base to a recurring "generational mechanism"—but all tell the story of literary history by tracking the rise and fall of its genres. ⁴ We can see this narrative of exhaustion particularly clearly in conventional accounts of the Victorian realist novel, which by its very name implies that genres can be placed in time as easily as a monarch's reign. As the nineteenth century ends, so the story goes, realism is either giving way to naturalism or living on in a debased, trivialized form. ⁵

In this version of literary history, transitional works—those texts that sit uncomfortably between two different periods—are read as indicators of one genre's decline or another's birth. And George Giss-ing's New Grub Street would seem to be an ideal seismograph, measuring the enormous disturbances in the literary field and the collapse of Victorian realist fiction. The writers in the novel are either noble failures whose attempts at serious art (notably Harold Biffen and his daring naturalist experiment Mr. Bailey, Grocer) result in catastrophe or shameless hacks pandering to the worst in the reading public. There seems to be no place for serious, successful literature in New Grub Street. Thus Martin Ryle calls the novel "a classic statement of the opposition between commercial and literary value"; ⁶ Patrick Brantlinger argues that Gissing's work pursues a "doomed realist paradigm" that simply can't succeed for much longer; ⁷ and Eitan Bar-Yosef claims that Gissing had to write "in the shadow cast by eminent predecessors who seemed to have exhausted realism's array of conventions and contradictions." ⁸ The novel documents, in these interpretations, an impossible choice of options for the ambitious novelist: trivial and exhausted realism or ambitious but unprofitable naturalism.

But on closer inspection, New Grub Street resists this account of literary history. In fact, the closer we look, the more peculiar the novel appears. It is a financially successful work of serious fiction that describes a world where poverty inevitably awaits the writers of serious fiction. Greeted by very positive reviews—the Whitehall Review declared, for example, that the novel was a "literary triumph" and a "singularly skilful piece of work"—New Grub Street presents a world where critics persistently misinterpret and scorn the most ambitious fiction. ⁹ Gissing's reviewers appreciated the novel as a success on its own terms, with the Spectator praising it as a work of "relentless realism." ¹⁰ And the irony extends to the structure of the novel itself; it is a triple-decker whose most admirable writers rail against the triple-decker. The puzzle, then, is this: why does Gissing imagine a literary marketplace with no room for a writer like himself? Why does the novel accomplish something its characters cannot?

We can account for this problem by characterizing Gissing's novel in two ways. His own skillful use of the realist form is an assertion that the Victorian novel was neither dead nor dying. And his presentation of failed writers makes more sense when we understand these characters as cautionary tales and not idealized novelists. Nicholas Dames in The Physiology of the Novel describes this attitude nicely as "mixed hatred and affection," the product of a situation in which Gissing aims to "protect the novel from the depredations of its consumers"—and, we may...