Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing Paul Delany (bio) Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing, by Simon James; pp. viii + 200. London: Anthem Press, 2003, £45.00, £14.95 paper, $75.00, $19.95 paper. What does it mean to tell a story about money? In Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928), money can be one of the "lacks" that sets the plot in motion. A poor boy falls in love with a nobleman's daughter, but has no hope of marrying her unless he can find a pot of gold. In Simon James's impressive study of George Gissing, he notes that most Victorian novels follow this folktale convention. Heroes may find their pot of gold, but they rarely get it by steady work, one sovereign at a time. Victorian novelists, and Charles Dickens especially, favor romantic plots where the hero gets his beloved in the last chapter thanks to the timely appearance of a legacy or a long-lost, wealthy relative. Gissing, however, refuses to settle for romance. In New Grub Street (1891), the hero wins his bride by promising to deliver a bag of gold through his success as a writer. But his novels don't sell enough copies, his wife leaves him, and he dies; later she marries someone who knows the way to bags of gold. In Gissing's plots, lack of money is more likely to generate a terminal illness than a happy ending. Gissing's project, as James defines it, works by negation. Although Gissing greatly admired Dickens and wrote some brilliant criticism of his predecessor's work, his aim as a novelist was to break away from the earlier model. If his protagonists have virtue, it will not be rewarded: "Throughout [Gissing's] early novels, the consolations of Dickens's fictive remedies of coincidence, benevolence and the legacy are comprehensively [End Page 690] refused" (63). James argues this case convincingly, but is left with the problem of defining Gissing's positive aims. If the world, and the monetary system in particular, does not reward virtue, then what does it do? One might suggest that it rewards hard work and economic rationality, but Gissing didn't want to say that either. Nor did he want to be a rigid social determinist, like Émile Zola or his own character Biffen in New Grub Street. Gissing's fictional world may be predictable, but it is not systematic. James recognizes that money, or the lack of it, cannot be a complete explanation for the distinctive quality of Gissing's novels. Dickens's use of coincidences and rewards assumes a web of connections between the individuals and classes who make up the great national family. But in Gissing's The Unclassed (1884), as in other of his novels, money is the instrument of disconnection. Provided you have enough of it, you need not care if others are starving in their garrets a mile away. Society is no longer an organism linking all its members; one could even say that Gissing anticipates Margaret Thatcher's claim that "there is no such thing as society." James concludes that Gissing's social vision is not a theory but an attitude, "Schopenhauerian pessimism" which forbids "any totalizing answer to social problems...[or] simple endings to his fiction" (90). One is left with a chronic bleakness in Gissing's fiction. James keeps returning to Gissing's "self-negating qualities," which make him both dissatisfied with his fictional world and eager to force that dissatisfaction on his readers too. If he gave up his moroseness in favor of an uplifting ending in the style of Dickens, that would be another kind of negation, of everything he had said up to that point about the way of the world. It may seem that Gissing can only say one thing over and over: that money rules all, and the devil take those who don't have any. Yet he is a more interesting novelist than this; and one of the virtues of James's study is to show that the Gissing "problem" has several possible solutions. James suggests that Gissing's...