New Grub Street by George Gissing (best mobile ebook reader .txt) 📕
Description
Grub Street is the name of a former street in London synonymous with pulp writers and low-quality publishers. New Grub Street takes its name from that old street, as it follows the lives and endeavors of a group of writers active in the literary scene of 1880s London.
Edwin Reardon is a quiet and intelligent writer whose artistic sensibilities are the opposite of what the London public wants to read. He’s forced to write long, joyless novels that he thinks pop publishers will want to buy. These novels are draining to write, yet result in meager sales; soon Edwin’s increasingly small bank account, and his stubborn pride, start to put a strain on his once-happy marriage.
His best friend, Biffen, lies to one side of Edwin’s nature: as another highly-educated writer, he accepts a dingy, lonely, and hungry life of abject poverty in exchange for being able to produce a novel that’s true to his artistic desires but is unlikely to sell. On the other side lies Jasper Milvain, an “alarmingly modern” writer laser-focused on earning as much money as possible no matter what he’s made to write, as he floats through the same literary circles that Edwin haunts.
The intricately-told tale follows these writers as their differing outlooks and their fluctuating ranks in society affect them and the people around them. Gissing, himself a prolific writer intimately familiar with the London literary scene, draws from his own life in laying out the characters and events in the novel. He carefully elaborates the fragile social fabric of the literary world, its paupers and its barons both equal in the industry but unequal in public life. Though the novel is about writers on the face, the deep thread that runs through it all is the brutality of the modern social structure, where the greedy and superficial are rewarded with stability and riches, while the delicate and thoughtful are condemned to live on the margins of respectable society in grimy poverty, robbed not only of dignity, but of love.
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- Author: George Gissing
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“Read it to us now, Jasper, will you?” asked Dora.
The request was supported by Whelpdale, and Jasper needed no pressing. He seated himself so that the lamplight fell upon the pages, and read the article through. It was an excellent piece of writing (see The Wayside, June 1884), and in places touched with true emotion. Any intelligent reader would divine that the author had been personally acquainted with the man of whom he wrote, though the fact was nowhere stated. The praise was not exaggerated, yet all the best points of Reardon’s work were admirably brought out. One who knew Jasper might reasonably have doubted, before reading this, whether he was capable of so worthily appreciating the nobler man.
“I never understood Reardon so well before,” declared Whelpdale, at the close. “This is a good thing well done. It’s something to be proud of, Miss Dora.”
“Yes, I feel that it is,” she replied.
“Mrs. Reardon ought to be very grateful to you, Milvain. By the by, do you ever see her?”
“I have met her only once since his death—by chance.”
“Of course she will marry again. I wonder who’ll be the fortunate man?”
“Fortunate, do you think?” asked Dora quietly, without looking at him.
“Oh, I spoke rather cynically, I’m afraid,” Whelpdale hastened to reply. “I was thinking of her money. Indeed, I knew Mrs. Reardon only very slightly.”
“I don’t think you need regret it,” Dora remarked.
“Oh, well, come, come!” put in her brother. “We know very well that there was little enough blame on her side.”
“There was great blame!” Dora exclaimed. “She behaved shamefully! I wouldn’t speak to her; I wouldn’t sit down in her company!”
“Bosh! What do you know about it? Wait till you are married to a man like Reardon, and reduced to utter penury.”
“Whoever my husband was, I would stand by him, if I starved to death.”
“If he ill-used you?”
“I am not talking of such cases. Mrs. Reardon had never anything of the kind to fear. It was impossible for a man such as her husband to behave harshly. Her conduct was cowardly, faithless, unwomanly!”
“Trust one woman for thinking the worst of another,” observed Jasper with something like a sneer.
Dora gave him a look of strong disapproval; one might have suspected that brother and sister had before this fallen into disagreement on the delicate topic. Whelpdale felt obliged to interpose, and had of course no choice but to support the girl.
“I can only say,” he remarked with a smile, “that Miss Dora takes a very noble point of view. One feels that a wife ought to be staunch. But it’s so very unsafe to discuss matters in which one cannot know all the facts.”
“We know quite enough of the facts,” said Dora, with delightful pertinacity.
“Indeed, perhaps we do,” assented her slave. Then, turning to her brother, “Well, once more I congratulate you. I shall talk of your article incessantly, as soon as it appears. And I shall pester every one of my acquaintances to buy Reardon’s books—though it’s no use to him, poor fellow. Still, he would have died more contentedly if he could have foreseen this. By the by, Biffen will be profoundly grateful to you, I’m sure.”
“I’m doing what I can for him, too. Run your eye over these slips.”
Whelpdale exhausted himself in terms of satisfaction.
“You deserve to get on, my dear fellow. In a few years you will be the Aristarchus of our literary world.”
When the visitor rose to depart, Jasper said he would walk a short distance with him. As soon as they had left the house, the future Aristarchus made a confidential communication.
“It may interest you to know that my sister Maud is shortly to be married.”
“Indeed! May I ask to whom?”
“A man you don’t know. His name is Dolomore—a fellow in society.”
“Rich, then, I hope?”
“Tolerably well-to-do. I dare say he has three or four thousand a year!”
“Gracious heavens! Why, that’s magnificent.”
But Whelpdale did not look quite so much satisfaction as his words expressed.
“Is it to be soon?” he inquired.
“At the end of the season. Make no difference to Dora and me, of course.”
“Oh? Really? No difference at all? You will let me come and see you—both—just in the old way, Milvain?”
“Why the deuce shouldn’t you?”
“To be sure, to be sure. By Jove! I really don’t know how I should get on if I couldn’t look in of an evening now and then. I have got so much into the habit of it. And—I’m a lonely beggar, you know. I don’t go into society, and really—”
He broke off, and Jasper began to speak of other things.
When Milvain re-entered the house, Dora had gone to her own sitting-room. It was not quite ten o’clock. Taking one set of the proofs of his “Reardon” article, he put it into a large envelope; then he wrote a short letter, which began “Dear Mrs. Reardon,” and ended “Very sincerely yours,” the communication itself being as follows:
“I venture to send you the proofs of a paper which is to appear in next month’s Wayside, in the hope that it may seem to you not badly done, and that the reading of it may give you pleasure. If anything occurs to you which you would like me to add, or if you desire any omission, will you do me the kindness to let me know of it as soon as possible, and your suggestion shall at once be adopted. I am
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