Gissing: A Life in Death — A Cavalcade of Gissing Criticism in the Last Hundred Years

Abstract

Surveying the work which has been devoted to George Gissing and his achievement since his death in 1903 is bound to generate as much hope as disappointment, but temporal distance, while it blurs so many things, at least enables us to put in perspective the ups and downs of Gissing’s reputation and the changing tastes of the reading public and the critics. For a long-vanished author perhaps more than for one still living, posthumous survival largely depends on the activity of his publishers, and it is significant that when Gissing temporarily ceased to be published, from 1940 to 1946, the hitherto steady flow of critical estimation of his work ran down to a trickle. As the latter half of the twentieth century was in sight, optimism about the fate of his work seemed to be rash. Very few people in England and America showed interest in him and they were not conspicuously articulate. Yet Gissing remained the man to whom, only a few weeks before death overtook him, H. G. Wells wrote: “Your fame in England grows steadily and you are the most respectable and respected of novelists next to Hardy, Meredith and James. You should come and savour it.”¹ The success of The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft had been immediate, and the book was to prove a steady seller on both sides of the Atlantic, and even more, as far away as Japan.