No Home-Like Place: Delusions of Home in Born in Exile

Abstract

George Gissing was obsessed with the question of ‘home’, in his own restless mobility as well as that of his characters, whose domestic circumstances he invariably enumerated in detail. Gissing's Born in Exile moves between real and fictional locations in London, Exeter, and the industrial north of England, but also between a variety of lodgings, chambers, and houses which accommodate, constrain, and only occasionally liberate their occupants. Their contradictory and volatile attitudes to these ‘homes’ parallel Gissing's unstable reactions to his own lodgings and highlight the relative nature of locations between town and country as well as differences in perception of the same physical surroundings. Descriptions of and debates about ‘home’ in Born in Exile provide a prelude to Gissing's later, more dogmatic pronouncements in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, also penned – in fiction – from the perspective of the country around Exeter.