New Grub Street by George Gissing (best mobile ebook reader .txt) 📕
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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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Jasper had to look in this morning for a hurried consultation of certain encyclopaedic volumes, and it chanced that Marian was standing before the shelves to which his business led him. He saw her from a little distance, and paused; it seemed as if he would turn back; for a moment he wore a look of doubt and worry. But after all he proceeded. At the sound of his “Good morning,” Marian started—she was standing with an open book in hand—and looked up with a gleam of joy on her face.
“I wanted to see you today,” she said, subduing her voice to the tone of ordinary conversation. “I should have come this evening.”
“You wouldn’t have found me at home. From five to seven I shall be frantically busy, and then I have to rush off to dine with some people.”
“I couldn’t see you before five?”
“Is it something important?”
“Yes, it is.”
“I tell you what. If you could meet me at Gloucester Gate at four, then I shall be glad of half an hour in the park. But I mustn’t talk now; I’m driven to my wits’ end. Gloucester Gate, at four sharp. I don’t think it’ll rain.”
He dragged out a tome of the Britannica. Marian nodded, and returned to her seat.
At the appointed hour she was waiting near the entrance of Regent’s Park which Jasper had mentioned. Not long ago there had fallen a light shower, but the sky was clear again. At five minutes past four she still waited, and had begun to fear that the passing rain might have led Jasper to think she would not come. Another five minutes, and from a hansom that rattled hither at full speed, the familiar figure alighted.
“Do forgive me!” he exclaimed. “I couldn’t possibly get here before. Let us go to the right.”
They betook themselves to that tree-shadowed strip of the park which skirts the canal.
“I’m so afraid that you haven’t really time,” said Marian, who was chilled and confused by this show of hurry. She regretted having made the appointment; it would have been much better to postpone what she had to say until Jasper was at leisure. Yet nowadays the hours of leisure seemed to come so rarely.
“If I get home at five, it’ll be all right,” he replied. “What have you to tell me, Marian?”
“We have heard about the money, at last.”
“Oh?” He avoided looking at her. “And what’s the upshot?”
“I shall have nearly fifteen hundred pounds.”
“So much as that? Well, that’s better than nothing, isn’t it?”
“Very much better.”
They walked on in silence. Marian stole a glance at her companion.
“I should have thought it a great deal,” she said presently, “before I had begun to think of thousands.”
“Fifteen hundred. Well, it means fifty pounds a year, I suppose.”
He chewed the end of his moustache.
“Let us sit down on this bench. Fifteen hundred—h’m! And nothing more is to be hoped for?”
“Nothing. I should have thought men would wish to pay their debts, even after they had been bankrupt; but they tell us we can’t expect anything more from these people.”
“You are thinking of Walter Scott, and that kind of thing”—Jasper laughed. “Oh, that’s quite unbusinesslike; it would be setting a pernicious example nowadays. Well, and what’s to be done?”
Marian had no answer for such a question. The tone of it was a new stab to her heart, which had suffered so many during the past half-year.
“Now, I’ll ask you frankly,” Jasper went on, “and I know you will reply in the same spirit: would it be wise for us to marry on this money?”
“On this money?”
She looked into his face with painful earnestness.
“You mean,” he said, “that it can’t be spared for that purpose?”
What she really meant was uncertain even to herself. She had wished to hear how Jasper would receive the news, and thereby to direct her own course. Had he welcomed it as offering a possibility of their marriage, that would have gladdened her, though it would then have been necessary to show him all the difficulties by which she was beset; for some time they had not spoken of her father’s position, and Jasper seemed willing to forget all about that complication of their troubles. But marriage did not occur to him, and he was evidently quite prepared to hear that she could no longer regard this money as her own to be freely disposed of. This was on one side a relief but on the other it confirmed her fears. She would rather have heard him plead with her to neglect her parents for the sake of being his wife. Love excuses everything, and his selfishness would have been easily lost sight of in the assurance that he still desired her.
“You say,” she replied, with bent head, “that it would bring us fifty pounds a year. If another fifty were added to that, my father and mother would be supported in case the worst comes. I might earn fifty pounds.”
“You wish me to understand, Marian, that I mustn’t expect that you will bring me anything when we are married.”
His tone was that of acquiescence; not by any means of displeasure. He spoke as if desirous of saying for her something she found a difficulty in saying for herself.
“Jasper, it is so hard for
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