A whole novel about authors with no sample of their writing in it. I doubt Gissing was avoiding the challenge; his aspiring London authors aren't especially aesthetic, they talk about the shocking or saleable content of their work, not its style. Gissing's own prose is plain, the conversations conventionally novelistic.
The other convention is that those who have money, or are ruthless enough to fake it, win success; the others starve, die of consumption, or commit suicide. I was continually struck by their assumptions about the labor opportunities in London. It's not surprising that writing was the only chance at independence for women, but it was surprising that the possible incomes for men were so discontinuous. Clerks could support themselves, but couldn't afford weekly clean linen for a wife; and it was widely assumed (by the characters) that once a woman had descended to the unwashed, she was no longer respectable, and therefore she and her husband couldn't expect to rise again. One of the nicer characters assumes that he will never, not possibly, be able to marry, because he will never earn enough money to support a wife, much less children.
I don't know whether this all-or-nothing labor market was the actual case, or whether Gissing's contemporaneous readers would have seen it as self-defeating stupidity in the unworldly characters, or what. I think it was mostly the case, though. It fits 's description of Victorian London as a giant class-sorting machine, and goodness knows people who preached about contentment in the class to which God has called you had a great excuse to combine against pay raises for the less blessed.
Another convention in novels of the era was that big new money came from the manufacturing towns. See North and South, for instance. There was manufacture in London too, but provincial society had less strength to shut out new men. Someone must have sifted thousands of wills and worked out how much this was really true; To Find. Probably combined with theories of center vs. periphery. The center is not where everything is made, but where everything is made into money; or as Making Light says, of the New New New Grub Street, Your agent lives in New York so that you don't have to.
It was surprising (back to New Grub Street) that the successful writers made so much money; newly cheap and popular printing, or editorships subsidized by rich patrons or wives. and did earn themselves handsome incomes.
Project Gutenberg #1709
So wrote clew in Fiction (19th c.). | TrackBack