Novel
New Grub Street
George Gissing · 1891
Opening lines
As the Milvains sat down to breakfast the clock of Wattleborough parish church struck eight; it was two miles away, but the strokes were borne very distinctly on the west wind this autumn morning.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
London, 1882. Edwin Reardon, a respected novelist, lives with his wife Amy in a flat beyond his means near Regent's Park, and she bears the hardship ever less well. He has to deliver a new novel in three volumes and can no longer find anything to write. Jasper Milvain, a young journalist, has no illusions and tells anyone who will listen: he writes what sells and cultivates those who commission. Not far away, Marian Yule copies for her father, an embittered man of letters whose eyesight is failing, in the reading room of the British Museum.
Context
The novel appeared in 1891 in three volumes, that is, in the very format that holds its characters in its grip: the three-volume novel sold at thirty-one shillings and sixpence, a price beyond the reach of a private buyer, which the lending libraries bought in quantity and lent out one volume at a time. It describes advances, deadlines, journalism paid by the line. A publisher had turned down one of its author's early novels, judging it too painful to please the ordinary reader. The format collapsed from 1894, and only a few appeared in 1897.
Who it is for
About five hundred pages in the English edition; translated into French as early as 1902, then in 1978 and in 2024.
Prizes and reception
A book about the system that published it, issued in the very form it describes, shortly before that form disappeared.
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