New Grub Street

"Caught between art and money, the dilemma of the Victorian writer Through the foggy gloom of the British Museum Reading Room and the garrets of London's Tottenham Court Road, New Grub Street follows a collection of hack journalists, aspiring newcomers and embittered veterans through the literary world of the 1880s. The novelist Edwin Reardon is trying vainly to balance his literary ideals against the financial demands of a genteel wife; his shrewd friend Milvain is eager to make the most of his own talents as a magazine writer. Alfred Yule is conscious of waning powers in a crowded marketplace, and the half-starved Biffen fancies himself as the English Zola. All are bitterly conscious of the debasement of their art into a commodity with the power to change their own emotional lives. Inextricably linked to Gissing's own inner confusion, New Grub Street is both a panorama of Victorian literary life and one of the great masterpieces of the late nineteenth century. A comprehens