New Grub Street as a Microcosm of English Victorian Life Essay

New bum Street presents the reader with an accurate and blanket(prenominal) picture of late victorian society, despite the fact that it predominantly focuses yet on a small group of literary men and women. At first, one may have difficulty locating Gissings voice deep down the narrative. The perspective leaps from character to character, without establishing any clear candidates for the readers sympathies. Jasper Milvain is ambivalently portrayed, despite the fact that his example and literary values were anathematic to Gissing. This is but one example of ambiguity in a novel that is filled with confusion and inversions of the natural order. The world of New Grub Street is one where the unscrupulous Jasper Milvain triumphs, the mediocre Whelpdale stumbles upon commercial success, while others such as Edwin Reardon, Alfred Yule, and Harold Biffen undisputedly become casualties in the battle of manners. What is Gissing trying to submit about Victorian England? (Or is literar y life his sole intended survey?) Throughout this chaos of view-points are interwoven the themes of money, straighten out, and sex. Yet it is precisely the ubiquity of these themes, and the prevalent disorder of the world that makes the novel reflective of late Victorian society. Whether or not Gissing intended his novel to be purely a study in the changing literary life of the late nineteenth century, New Grub Street is effectively a microcosm of English life in the closing years of Victorias reign. New Grub Street depicts both(prenominal) of the consequences of the structural and compositional changes that were - and had been - taking place in the social and class structures of Victorian England. The increasing size of the middle class1, the reductions in working hours2, an... ... Unwin, London, 1968, p. 154. 5 Gross, John, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters English Literary smell Since 1800, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 220. 6 Altick, p. 61. 7 Gissing, George, Ne w Grub Street, Wordsworth, Hertfordshire, 1996, ch. XXXIV, p. 393. 8 Gross, p. 220. 9 Gissing, ch., XIV, p. 146. 10 Cited in Gross, pp. 220-1. 11 Ibid., p. 221. 12 Gissing, ch. XIV, p. 146. 13 Gross, p. 149. 14 Gissing, ch. XXXV, p. 402. 15 Ibid., p. 400. 16 Ibid., ch. XXXVII, p. 422. 17 Ibid., Introduction. 18 Ibid., ch. VII, p. 74. 19 Ibid., ch. XXXV, p. 401. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., ch. XIV, p. 151. 22 Ibid., ch. XXVII, p. 301. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., ch. XXXV, p. 403. 25 Fowles, John, The French Lieutenants Woman, Vintage, London, 1996, p. 445. 26 Ibid., p. 283. 27 Altick, p. 17.