The downfall of a pessimist

In some moods, I would rather read George Gissing than any other 19th-century English novelist. In the 1890s he was ranked with Hardy and Meredith, at a time when they had finished writing novels and he was only just getting into his tortured stride. Orwell called The Odd Women ‘one of the best novels in English’. But somehow Gissing has fallen off the shelves, not out of print but of public regard, fatally obscured by a reputation for gloom and pessimism. Gissing — the very word is like a South London street on a wet Monday. He himself rather revelled in that reputation. When he discovered that the next tenant in his old lodgings in Brixton had killed himself, he noted in his diary: ‘The atmosphere I left behind me, some would say, killed the poor man.’

Yet reading any of his best novels — New Grub Street, Born in Exile, In the Year of Jubilee — is in fact an exhilarating experience, like splashing through icy puddles with the rain in your face. They move at a breakneck pace, partly because he wrote them at unbelievable speed, making other famously facile writers like Trollope and Simenon look positively constipated. He finished The Odd Women — 336 pages in the Virago edition — in 50 days. His mind was always bubbling with new plot-lines, which generated any number of false starts. In the year after finishing Born in Exile, he began and then abandoned at least nine other novels. It comes as a shock, though it shouldn’t, that someone who wrote so much about defeated people — struggling writers, devitalised shop assistants, unloved spinsters — could himself master anything he tried his hand at. The son of a Suffolk pharmacist with literary tastes who migrated north to Wakefield, George Gissing passed out top in the whole country in English and Latin when he sat his London BA at Owens College, Manchester, a feat never achieved before.