New Media, New Journalism, New Grub Street

Abstract

Critics have often recognized George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) for its rich treatment of late-Victorian authorship and publishing. Moreover, it is particularly notable for its self-consciousness about the social and cultural determinants of its own production as a three-volume novel and a work in print. This chapter argues that the novel’s bracing and disenchanted account of print culture emerges from the prospect of a media ecology in which print becomes just another -graphy. In this world of mediated distraction and disposability, print’s material dimensions would become intrusively noticeable, even as different formats tweak the affordances of print to target different readerships. The vision of print among other media haunts New Grub Street, but it was fully embraced by George Newnes’s wildly successful Tit-Bits, the real-life journal that (as “Chit-Chat”) inspires the novel’s most cutting satire of mass publishing.