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public at large." No doubt he deserves attention. "With such writers,"
Virginia Woolf noted, "we establish a personal rather than an artistic rela–
tionship. We approach them through their lives as much as through their
work. "
Gissing's life seems a summation of what was worst in late-Victorian
England . He emerges from these pages trapped by circumstance and self, in a
manner that has a great deal in common with all the elements of Greek
tragedy . The story that Ms. Tindall unfolds is fascinating for the quality of
mundane perversity which ruled Gissing's fate. He was a product of a dis–
tinctly lower-middle-class milieu, his father a chemist who kept a shop in
Wakefield . Even here, he seems the born victim. In a society as class-obsessed
as late nineteenth-century England, it is impossible to think that the romantic
aspirations that sent him into two disasterous marriages could have withstood
life in a different class. Had he been truly working class, he would have had
few illusions about prostitutes-not , at least, ifhe had survived to adulthood.
The manner in which he ruined a brilliant scholarly career at its outset when
he was caught stealing in Manchester in order to help a local prostitute, Nell
Harrison, reflects a romanticism that is strikingly adolescent. Exiled to
America, he returned to England and rashly married the girl, one more
would-be male savior who was not granted a reprieve until Nell Harrison
finally died of drink and syphilis. All through this period, Gissing was
creating some of his more ambitious novels; at the same time, he was trying to
keep his head above water. Poverty is a threat to anyone, but it must be a
particular threat to the aspiring writer whose own class origins are that one step
above bottom.
It
is also a peculiar fascination, for Gissing seems to have been
afflicted, much like Otwell is in
Down and Out in Pans and London,
with a
built-in receptivity for poverty, as if he had to guarantee it as part of his fate
even as he cried out against it.
His experiences with Nell Harrison apparently taught him little, except
that he had not yet exhausted his capacity for victimization. If, as Ms. Tindall
writes, it "is impossible to separate" sex and class in Gissing's fiction, she
shows us that it is equally impossible to separate them in his life. Having
stolen for a prostitute, having "disgraced his family and himself by doing
something not just against the law but utterly out of keeping with the class
with which the whole Gissing household fervently wished to be associated,"
he now married a woman he had picked up on Oxford Street, the daughter of
a stone mason. Edith Undetwood was no improvement on Nell Harrison,
ending her life in an insane asylum.
For the American reader, Gissing 's life is particularly interesting. Like so
many other English writers of the nineteenth century, he suffered the stain of
class in a way that is difficult for us to understand. Class as categorization has
