In the Year of Jubilee was published by Lawrence and Bullen in three volumes in 1894, and it is Gissing’s most sustained study of the English lower middle class — the world of clerks, shopkeepers, and small businessmen whose desperate respectability masks a spiritual and cultural emptiness that Gissing found both fascinating and appalling.
The novel is set in Camberwell, a south London suburb, in the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (1887). The Jubilee celebrations — street parties, fireworks, crowds — provide a background of national self-congratulation against which Gissing sets his characters’ petty dramas of social climbing, sexual competition, and financial anxiety. The ironic contrast between the public celebration of empire and the private misery of the characters is sustained throughout the novel.
The central character is Nancy Lord, a young woman of the lower middle class who is intelligent enough to see through the pretensions of her social world but not strong enough to escape them. Her marriage to Lionel Tarrant — a charming, irresponsible man who refuses to support her or acknowledge their child — is one of Gissing’s most painful studies of the way Victorian marriage law left women economically dependent on men who might be feckless, cruel, or simply absent.
The novel’s satirical portraits of suburbia — the Peachey family with their status anxiety, the French sisters with their cultural pretensions, the various entrepreneurs and swindlers who orbit the main characters — anticipate the suburban satire of H.G. Wells, the Grossmiths (Diary of a Nobody), and later writers like John Betjeman and Kingsley Amis. Gissing was the first English novelist to take the suburbs seriously as a subject, and his portrait of lower-middle-class life remains one of the most acute in the language.
Collecting In the Year of Jubilee
First edition (Lawrence and Bullen, London, 1894): Three volumes, green cloth.
Market values:
- Three-volume first edition: $400–$1,500
- One-volume reprint: $30–$80
- Later editions: $5–$15