This chapter argues that Gissing’s novels offer significant and philosophically sophisticated engagements with the novel of ideas. Gissing’s study of Schopenhauer’s works led him to take a keen interest in post-Kantian idealism and in fundamental questions regarding the irreconcilability of the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’. These concerns are reflected in the novels Gissing wrote in the 1880s – these books satirize the idealist pretensions of social reformers, and they demonstrate that the philanthropic ideals of the Settlement Movement were bound to fail when confronted with the complex and harsh reality of London’s East End. Gissing’s novels are animated by a set of questions that bear directly on the history of the novel of ideas: are aspirational ideals necessarily external and alien to the literary work, or is it possible for them to be assimilated into the medium of literary form? Is it possible for these ideals to become artistically productive?

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, both medical and literary writers sought to come to terms with the perceived problems of modernity, exploring the consequences for both body and mind of the emerging forms of a pressured, deracinated society. With her ‘fits of nervous dread’ and descent into mental turmoil, George Eliot’s heroine Gwendolen Harleth, from Daniel Deronda (1876), becomes a key figure in late-Victorian representations of the over-stimulated, nervous, and rootless creature of the age. George Gissing, in The Whirlpool (1896), similarly explores the life of a nervous young woman, Alma Fotheringham, caught up in the trammels of late-century city life. This essay focuses on Eliot’s and Gissing’s engagement with medical discourses of the era in their pessimistic case studies of the ways in which pathological forms of economic and social life are imprinted on the mind and body, from the gambling salon and debased culture of the health spa in Eliot’s novel to Gissing’s explicit deployment of fin-de-siècle discourses of degeneration. It also overturns commonly held assumptions that we need to wait until Modernism for a thorough diagnosis of the diseases of modernity.

This chapter locates a new cultural anxiety in the late nineteenth century about the woman who under-identifies, that is, refuses or is simply incapable of a feminine standard of emotional identification with literature. The expression of this anxiety, in New Woman novels of the fin de siècle and George Gissing’s New Grub Street and The Odd Women, reveals the ways in which identification can both reinforce and subvert gender categories. In these novels, and in sources ranging from proceedings of the British Medical Association to humor magazines, Victorian commentators blamed women’s apparent detachment from literary identification on the professionalization of their reading, and attributed its symptoms to a kind of sickness or blighted fertility. Women’s emotional disinvestment from literature was depicted as not merely wayward but pathological. More than a century of overt crises about the management of female identification culminated in the fear that women might not emotionally identify with literature at all, validating the book’s larger argument that irrational identification had come to define femininity itself.

This essay considers some of the spectacular events of 1887, ranging from Queen Victoria’s Jubilee procession in June to the ‘Bloody Sunday’ protests in November, taking in the opening of the People’s Palace, the Lord Mayor’s Day parade, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, the Military Tournament and the Hippodrome Circus. It notes the construction in the same year of two large venues designed for the production of visual entertainments (Earls Court and Olympia) and asks what constituted ‘spectacle’ at this time. A brief coda examines the ways in which the spectacles of 1887 were represented in the works of three writers: George Gissing, Margaret Harkness and William Morris.

Critics have often recognized George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) for its rich treatment of late-Victorian authorship and publishing. Moreover, it is particularly notable for its self-consciousness about the social and cultural determinants of its own production as a three-volume novel and a work in print. This chapter argues that the novel’s bracing and disenchanted account of print culture emerges from the prospect of a media ecology in which print becomes just another -graphy. In this world of mediated distraction and disposability, print’s material dimensions would become intrusively noticeable, even as different formats tweak the affordances of print to target different readerships. The vision of print among other media haunts New Grub Street, but it was fully embraced by George Newnes’s wildly successful Tit-Bits, the real-life journal that (as “Chit-Chat”) inspires the novel’s most cutting satire of mass publishing.

This chapter argues that the British 1880s sees the emergence of powerful forces of political idealism, sceptical of evangelical calls to religious salvation but offering, instead, uplifting forms of ‘discursive Christianity’ in which high-minded routes to social salvation draw on Christian ideals but are modified to address the social problems of the day. The play of such a diffused Christianity is examined in the fiction of William Hale White (‘Mark Rutherford’). It then examines how George Gissing, with his commitment to realism in the novel, faces the aesthetic challenge of representing, authentically, political idealism, as expressed through polemic and forms of speech-making. Gissing’s solution is an ‘impersonal’ mode of presentation and an increasingly satiric treatment of vocal performance. Gissing’s scepticism about the limits of oratorical performance is seen as symptomatic of a wider artistic disenchantment with the strategies of Victorian high-mindedness, as in the satiric proto-modernism of late Hardy. In the light of the modernist diffusion of aesthetic and cultural detachment from the ethical and political imperatives of late-Victorianism into the inter-war period, it falls to later twentieth-century criticism to re-start serious evaluation of the innovatory character of the interplay of social, political and aesthetic life in the British 1880s.