‘The Decently Ignoble — or, the Ignobly Decent?’: George Gissing’s Fictional Clerks

Abstract

George Gissing’s position as the foremost chronicler of the late Victorian clerk in British fiction appears an undisputed one. No other writers of this era shared Gissing’s interest and energy in documenting the emergence of the modern white-collar workers and their particular social class. The following Spectator review of his novel In the Year of Jubilee (1894) confirms a truth that had become self-evident: Fifteen or twenty years ago, there was a vacant place in English fiction, waiting for a competent writer to fill it…. The class which waited for a delineator was a large and important one, — that vaguely outlined lower middle section of society… The families of the imperfectly educated but fairly well-paid manager or clerk, of the tradesman who has ‘got on’ pecuniarily but hardly ‘gone up’ socially, and, to speak generally, of the typical ratepayers in an unfashionable London suburb, had not, perhaps, been entirely neglected, for Dickens and others had given them occasional attention; but they lacked a novelist of their own who should devote himself mainly or exclusively to them, and do for them what had been done by others for the classes and the masses. They have at last found one in George Gissing, who, for some years, and in various volumes, has delineated the members of this particular social grade — their manners and customs, their modes of thought and life, their relations to each other and to those who stand just above or just below them on the social ladder.1 KeywordsOffice WorkLiterary CultureLower Middle ClassSocial GradeNegative IdentificationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.