ABSTRACT
Nothing infuriates Gissing’s Henry Ryecroft more than the sight of foreign butter in a shop window. ‘This is the kind of thing that makes one gloom over the prospects of England. The deterioration of English butter is one of the worst signs of the moral state of our people’ (Gissing 1987, p. 152). The day has long gone, he complains, when an honest chap could expect to enjoy an ‘honest chop’ at an English inn (p. 78). At first glance, this glooming over butter and chops might seem like the Gilbert and Sullivan version of degeneration theory. But Ryecroft can be distinguished from the degenerationists by his aversion to apocalyptic thinking (pp. 40, 64), and from the regenerationists by his aversion to ‘busy patriotism’ (p. 174).
