George Gissing: the last great Victorian novelist?

George Gissing’s The Whirlpool was originally published in 1897. In this shortened version of the foreword to the new Penguin Classics edition, D.J. Taylor argues that its author is ‘the last great Victorian novelist.’

In the early summer of 1896, hard at work on the manuscript of what was to become The Whirlpool, George Gissing struck up a connection with the Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill. A natural solitary, wary of unburdening himself even to the friendliest male associate, Gissing seems to have decided that Zangwill, author of the best-selling Children of the Ghetto, was a suitable repository for his confidence. The fascinated account that Zangwill gave to his friend Montagu Elder of the evening on which Gissing ‘poured out his sad soul’ offers a horribly accurate precis of some of the personal demons that threatened to drag him down.

‘He is a handsome youthful chap but seems to have bungled his life in every possible way, and after a terrible uphill fight to be still burdened with some woman who, I suspect, breaks out in drink.