ABSTRACT
Mr George Gissing has never written a more vigorous or a more depressing story than New Grub Street. As will be inferred from the title, it deals with the lower grades oflife in the world ofcontemporary literature andjournalism, and had the author cared to follow the present fashion of imitative clap-trap nomenclature, he might have called his book 'In Darkest Bohemia.' What makes the novel so unrelievedly melancholy is not so much the prevalence of an atmosphere of sordid misery, though this undoubtedly has its effect in lowering the spirits of the reader; it is the persistent dramatic and narrative vigour with which Mr Gissing embodies his conception of a world in which the man of genius, learning, or fine literary skill is pushed to the wall or trampled Wider foot, while his rival, with nothing but a poor surface cleverness, made effective by dogged, unsensitive, unscrupulous pushing, triumphantly reaches the goal of success. The old Grub Street of
