New Grub Street was published by Smith, Elder in three volumes in 1891, and it remains the most important English novel about the literary profession — a work that strips away every romantic illusion about the writer’s life and shows literature as it actually functions: as an industry governed by market forces, where talent is no guarantee of success and commercial instinct is more valuable than genius.
The novel centers on two contrasting figures. Edwin Reardon is a serious novelist whose first book won critical acclaim but whose subsequent work has been crushed by the pressure to produce commercially viable fiction. He is married to Amy, who loves him but cannot bear the poverty that his artistic principles entail. His decline — from literary promise through hack work to destitution and death — is one of the most painful narratives in Victorian fiction, largely because Gissing refuses the consolation of martyrdom: Reardon is not destroyed by a hostile world but by his own inability to adapt to the world as it is.
Jasper Milvain is Reardon’s opposite: a young journalist who has no illusions about literature and no commitment to art. He sees the literary world as a marketplace and approaches it with the ruthless efficiency of a businessman. He cultivates useful connections, writes what editors want, and marries (eventually) Reardon’s widow Amy, whose modest inheritance gives him the capital to establish himself. Milvain is not villainous — he is charming, intelligent, and entirely honest about his motives — and Gissing’s refusal to condemn him is one of the novel’s most disturbing features.
The title refers to the original Grub Street — the London street where impoverished hack writers lived in the eighteenth century — and Gissing’s argument is that the “new” Grub Street of the 1880s, for all its pretensions to professionalism and literary merit, is governed by the same brutal economics. The three-volume novel system (which was collapsing as Gissing wrote), the circulating libraries (which controlled what was published), and the review pages (which could make or destroy a career) are all depicted as parts of a machinery that has little to do with literary quality and everything to do with money, connections, and the willingness to give the public what it wants.
Gissing drew heavily on his own experience. He was a brilliant scholar who had been expelled from Owens College (later the University of Manchester) for stealing money to support a prostitute, and who spent most of his career in the kind of grinding poverty he depicts in the novel. The bitterness of New Grub Street is personal, but it is transformed by Gissing’s novelistic skill into something larger: a portrait of a society in which culture is a commodity and the serious artist is an economic anomaly.
Collecting New Grub Street
First edition (Smith, Elder, London, 1891): Three volumes, dark blue cloth.
Market values:
- Three-volume first edition, good condition: $2,000–$8,000
- One-volume reprint (1893): $100–$300
- Later editions: $10–$25
The three-volume first is one of the great Victorian first editions — scarce, significant, and increasingly expensive. Single-volume reprints from the 1890s are the more practical collecting option.