BOOK REVIEW:Gissing and the City: Cultural Crisis and the Making of Books in Late Victorian England, edited by John Spiers

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gissing and the City: Cultural Crisis and the Making of Books in Late Victorian England Diana Maltz (bio) Gissing and the City: Cultural Crisis and the Making of Books in Late Victorian England, edited by John Spiers; pp. xiv + 225. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, £50.00, $80.00. These are heady days for Gissing criticism: Gissing and the City follows quickly on the heels of Bouwe Postmus's A Garland for Gissing (2001) and Martin Ryle and Jenny Bourne Taylor's George Gissing: Voices of the Unclassed (2005). This upsurge in essay collections is at least partly explained by two international conferences on Gissing. Like Postmus's book, which gathered talks from the inaugural 1999 conference in Amsterdam, this volume comprises seventeen essays from the 2003 meeting in London. While the focus on Gissing and the urban environment lends the collection a thematic coherence, the term "the city" is a generously multipurpose one, encompassing the map of London with its waterways, tramlines, and mansion flats; the spectrum of urban types from shopgirls to self-conscious bohemians; and the subjective experience of modernity as it elicited anxiety and delirious freedom. A number of essays consider Gissing vis-à-vis the late-Victorian explosion of popular print media. Simon J. James reminds us that as much as Gissing dramatized the psychological invasiveness and moral degradation of newspaper culture—and satirized characters whose low reading tastes were matched only by their greed for publicity—he nevertheless relied on the press to review and market his books and published his short stories in popular periodicals. Postmus further demonstrates the centrality of journalism to Gissing's creative process by foraging through the eclectic contents of the author's Scrapbook. He sensitively reconstructs Gissing's integration of intense research with local and regional wanderings in order to depict settings, occupations, and even slang with accuracy. A concern for the artifacts of print culture extends to Pierre Coustillas's bibliographic retrospective, which traces the rediscovery and reception of Gissing in twentieth-century criticism, beginning with early obituaries by his contemporaries. Several essayists in this collection contextualize themes in the novels by analyzing late-Victorian magazines and newspapers: Meaghan Clarke, for instance, deploys impressive periodicals research to show how savvy women journalists better resembled Jasper Milvain than failed, outmoded writers like Edwin Reardon. Clarke is not alone in weighing the anxieties and ambiguities of Gissing's gender politics in cultural context. Elizabeth F. Evans and Laura Vorachek each examine his discomfort with the self-commodification and exhibitionism inherent in public female [End Page 141] employment, whether in the forum of counter-sales or violin solos. Such displays not only render these women liminal in terms of social class but also destabilize the private sphere once they have married. Evans demonstrates how Gissing's anxious comparisons of shopgirls with prostitutes followed precedents in the periodical press, whose reporters sympathized with girls' endurance of exploitative shop labor but perceived moral dangers in the "living-in" system, girls' mandatory Sundays out, and their ability to marry above their class. Such ambition and the residual taint of the public sphere find a parallel in Alma Frothingham's musical career in The Whirlpool (1897), as Vorachek argues in her essay. Alma's initial choice of violin over the piano indicates her proud renunciation of drawing-room domesticity, but by studying abroad and performing in public she loses status and is subject to advances by men who perceive her as a "player in the market economy" (122). Three papers offer fresh, complex perspectives on Gissing's fictionalized, riotous Bank Holiday and Jubilee celebration. Emma Liggins shows how Gissing's depictions of vulgar working-class leisure reiterated the concerns of social reformers who sought to regulate leisure and cultivate responsible citizens. Carrie Underwood's love of low theatre and Clem Peckover's indifference to "improving" amusements are matched by their propensities for liquor and brutality, through which they forfeit respectability and femininity. Yet Liggins meets these damning scenarios with evidence that Gissing nevertheless empathized with working women's lack of money and leisure time. While Luisa Villa concurs on this point, her essay employs a different feminist methodology altogether, defining characters...