Forgotten Victorian

Not so long ago, Charles Dickens was the 19th-century British novelist. The others—Austen, the Brontë sisters, Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope, Hardy—were his contemporaries and predecessors and successors and rivals. They were judged against him and considered in his light. In the view of Edmund Wilson, Dickens was “the greatest writer of his time.”

George Gissing, 1890

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Then something happened. The population of critics ceased being so exclusively composed of sensitive, liberal men who’d survived difficult childhoods. Feminist critics emerged, along with Marxists. Warm-hearted depictions of the family were judged to be dated and passé, and sentimental humor was written off as the province of television. Female critics, it turned out, were vexed by the absence of sympathetic adult women in Dickens’s novels, while female readers balked at his lack of romance and glamor, qualities more often encountered in Austen, Thackeray, and Trollope.

What this ongoing shift in taste and sensibility has not done is increase the degree of attention given to a Victorian author who, at his best, wrote with as much understanding and insight about women as Jane Austen, and as much knowledge of politics and commerce as Anthony Trollope: George Gissing (1857-1903).

Indeed, even those who praise Gissing present him as an important writer for his time, a significant contemporary to his friendly rivals Thomas Hardy and George Meredith, or a useful source of information about everyday life in late Victorian London.