Commonplace 144 George & The Shame of Serial Publication.
Poor George. He moaned about not being published then when he was asked for contributions to magazines and periodicals, apart from the Russian experience when he wrote for Turgenev, he complained about being published at all. One of his particular bugbears was the serialisation of his novel A Life's Morning.
Let us begin at the beginning, and here we pay tribute to Michael Collie and his excellent George Gissing: A Bibliography (1975). Here is what he has to say about it:
According to the letters Gissing started to write A Life's Morning in August 1885, though in the Diary he noted that it had been written between September and November of that year. Despite the fact that Smith, Elder liked it, there were snags to be overcome including, according to Roberts, the request that Gissing should rewrite the ending. Eventually it was published in the Cornhill in twelve monthly instalments between January 1888 and December 1888 and in book form on 15 November 1888 (Diary) in what, for Gissing, and Smith, Elder, was a normal edition of 500 copies. Adams confirms that Gissing received £50 for the serial and £50 for the book.
Probably as soon as it was written and certainly by the time it was published, Gissing recognized A Life's Morning as one of his weaker works. The Diary, with the mention of his having received proofs to correct at two quite different times, perhaps provides the clue to the fact that he revised it. If so the novel cannot have been very satisfactory when he wrote it hurriedly in 1885 before beginning Demos. With Isobel Clarendon, A Life's Morning has to be regarded as apprentice work.
'Apprentice work' is probably Collie being kind. A Life's Morning is a slight and unmoving tale containing some pretty rotten purple prose, and some fairly forgettable characters. Pretentious, vapid and boring, would be too harsh, but...
Cornhill magazine was published between 1860-1975, and its name comes from a part of the financial area of the City of London, a ward that has many illustrious associations with the likes of Sir Christopher Wren, Pepys, Mrs Thrale, Samuel Johnson and the Stock Exchange. A link between a Victorian popular magazine with a readership of inquiring minds and the intelligentsia of the previous century was that Cornhill is where the first ever London coffee house was sited in 1652.
Coffee, of course, was the drug of choice back in the days when Samuel Johnson and James Boswell did their thing with Mrs Thrale, and coffee houses were the places revolutionaries and Artists, scientists and philosophers met to introduce the Enlightenment to Britain. Cornhill Magazine maybe did not have such an impact on British cultural life, but, as its first editor was William Makepeace Thackeray, creator of Vanity Fair and Barry Lyndon perhaps it was more dedicated to amusement than George would have liked. Thackeray often went under the pseudonym M.A.Titmarsh, a Freudian slip of a name evoking both Oedipus and breast paraphilia, though maybe he just wanted to be paid to edit and make contributions, and thought the word 'tit' might appeal to a certain readership. The sort of readership that might be described as tits - in English vernacular, a tit is a useless person - usually male, natch. Thackeray's The Snobs of England by One of Themselves click is a satire on all things snobbish, but like many satires, is a secret homage. Free download here click
Cornhill Magazine was published by Smith, Elder, so George didn't have to go far to ply his wares. Serial publication was a good move for writers who found it difficult to find an audience, but George tended to see it as akin to back-door advertising copy. After all, there was no guaranteeing the calibre of its readership, or where that magazine would surface - as periodicals are easy to swap and pass round, they might find their way into some very dubious coat pockets - people who don't know their anapaests click from their elbows (a reference to George's dismissive remarks about the sort of scum who don't understand Greek poetry made to Morley Roberts). But, as all printed matter was expensive, people tended to hang on to the magazines, and pass them round to anyone trusted enough to read them with care. (My inner city junior school gave us a 'how to read a book' lesson designed to teach us how to hold a book, turn a page, and store books - things were SO different in the 1950s!).
To keep their copies in good condition, readers would often have the year's editions bound in hard covers, so as to keep it on a bookshelf. I have a two volume copy of the Cornhill Magazine for 1888, each volume containing 6 months of editions, and the first piece out of the starting block in January is George's first two chapters of A Life's Morning. By February, George's next portion closes the month. The title at the top of the magazine page reads: The Cornhill Magazine January 1888 A Life's Morning by the author of Demos, Thyrza, etc. In pencil, some previous owner has added 'by George Gissing'. To be honest, my copy looks like it's never been read. I wonder why...
On this first page, we have one of George's more purple passages, and, sadly, a sign of what is to come in the rest of the thing, which, in the case of the magazine version, will take a whole year to unfold. Will George's reading public have been on tenterhooks queuing at WH Smith's each month eager to purchase the latest edition?? You be the judge: George writes, on the first page (the second paragraph!!) apropos the male protagonist, Wilfred:
He had been delicate in childhood, and the stage of hardy naturalism which interposes itself between tender juvenility and the birth of self-consciousness did not in his case last long enough to establish his frame in the vigour to which it was tending. There was nothing sickly about him; it was only an excess of nervous vitality that would not allow body to keep pace with mind. He was a boy to be, intellectually, held in leash, said the doctors. But that was easier said than done. What system of sedatives could one apply to a youngster whose imagination wrought him to a fever during a simple walk by the seashore, who if books were forcibly withheld consoled himself with the composition of five-act tragedies, interspersed with lyrics to which he supplied original strains. Well, there was obviously one thing Wilf could have tried... but his parents might not have wanted to catch him doing it.
Fortunately, Cornhill Magazine did not rely on George's offering for its continuing success. After the first installment finally closed, readers could enjoy a piece on the evolution (!) of the Theory of Evolution. melding fact with mild satire, but linking Charles Darwin to his grandfather, Erasmus, via the interesting things both had to say about plants - Erasmus helped translate the works of Linnaeus and everyone knows about him click. Then there is a short story about a girl from the Hard, the seafaring side of Portsmouth, who exudes charm, sass and intelligence. Cass, for that is her name, meets a sad end when she tries to save a love rival in a lodgings fire, only to find her friend has already departed, having rushed out of the building without raising the alarm. Alas, Cass is too late to save herself. It is a competent and diverting short story in two brief chapters - handy if you only have a few moments to invest in your reading, written in plain prose with no pretensions, and Cass has a touch of George's Hester from Fleet-Footed Hester about her. A case of in and out with a thought-provoking tale ably delivered, with no sign the author has swallowed a dictionary.
Among those of George's peers who made contributions to the Cornhill was Arthur Conan Doyle. Remembered now mostly for his Sherlock Holmes, Doyle himself was more interested in writing historical fiction. Though not attributed as its author, Doyle's short story 'John Huxford's Hiatus' appeared in June 1888. To read it and so much more about ACD, click. Doyle was a committed magazine contributor, having written to augment his meagre doctor's salary when he was a GP in Portsmouth - at a house not far from The Hard. By the time this story was published, Doyle had been a doctor on a whaling expedition, had worked in many medical settings including as a surgeon in ophthalmology, lived in Germany for a year, been to university, worked on a ship that went to Guinea in West Africa, married, become a spiritualist, and brought the world Sherlock Holmes. In short, Doyle had given himself something to write about. If George has any literary faults (haha) it is that much of what he wrote came from a very limited perspective. He had not really lived enough or extended himself enough to write truly captivating scenes, and his social circle was extremely limited, so his creations were often stifled and restrained. And he sometimes focused on subjects that were going out of fashion. As Morley Roberts and even, to some extent, George's brother Algernon, proved, there was a broad interest in adventure stories and mysteries and a growing band of potential readers desperate for something engaging to read, people who would not have climbed over the likes of Doyle in order to get their mitts on A Life's Morning, even in manageable bite-sized monthly chunks. Poor George was too preoccupied and hamstrung by his need to produce 'Art' to give us something a little more... accessible/entertaining than this...
Poor George. He moaned about not being published then when he was asked for contributions to magazines and periodicals, apart from the Russian experience when he wrote for Turgenev, he complained about being published at all. One of his particular bugbears was the serialisation of his novel A Life's Morning.
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| Effie Gray (reading the Cornhill) by her husband, John Everett Millais 1877 |
Let us begin at the beginning, and here we pay tribute to Michael Collie and his excellent George Gissing: A Bibliography (1975). Here is what he has to say about it:
According to the letters Gissing started to write A Life's Morning in August 1885, though in the Diary he noted that it had been written between September and November of that year. Despite the fact that Smith, Elder liked it, there were snags to be overcome including, according to Roberts, the request that Gissing should rewrite the ending. Eventually it was published in the Cornhill in twelve monthly instalments between January 1888 and December 1888 and in book form on 15 November 1888 (Diary) in what, for Gissing, and Smith, Elder, was a normal edition of 500 copies. Adams confirms that Gissing received £50 for the serial and £50 for the book.
Probably as soon as it was written and certainly by the time it was published, Gissing recognized A Life's Morning as one of his weaker works. The Diary, with the mention of his having received proofs to correct at two quite different times, perhaps provides the clue to the fact that he revised it. If so the novel cannot have been very satisfactory when he wrote it hurriedly in 1885 before beginning Demos. With Isobel Clarendon, A Life's Morning has to be regarded as apprentice work.
'Apprentice work' is probably Collie being kind. A Life's Morning is a slight and unmoving tale containing some pretty rotten purple prose, and some fairly forgettable characters. Pretentious, vapid and boring, would be too harsh, but...
Cornhill magazine was published between 1860-1975, and its name comes from a part of the financial area of the City of London, a ward that has many illustrious associations with the likes of Sir Christopher Wren, Pepys, Mrs Thrale, Samuel Johnson and the Stock Exchange. A link between a Victorian popular magazine with a readership of inquiring minds and the intelligentsia of the previous century was that Cornhill is where the first ever London coffee house was sited in 1652.
 |
| This is allegedly the site of the original coffee house, click |
Cornhill Magazine was published by Smith, Elder, so George didn't have to go far to ply his wares. Serial publication was a good move for writers who found it difficult to find an audience, but George tended to see it as akin to back-door advertising copy. After all, there was no guaranteeing the calibre of its readership, or where that magazine would surface - as periodicals are easy to swap and pass round, they might find their way into some very dubious coat pockets - people who don't know their anapaests click from their elbows (a reference to George's dismissive remarks about the sort of scum who don't understand Greek poetry made to Morley Roberts). But, as all printed matter was expensive, people tended to hang on to the magazines, and pass them round to anyone trusted enough to read them with care. (My inner city junior school gave us a 'how to read a book' lesson designed to teach us how to hold a book, turn a page, and store books - things were SO different in the 1950s!).
 |
| Study at a Reading Desk by Sir Frederick Leighton 1877 |
 The Japanese Mask by Gustave Claude Coutois 1884 |
He had been delicate in childhood, and the stage of hardy naturalism which interposes itself between tender juvenility and the birth of self-consciousness did not in his case last long enough to establish his frame in the vigour to which it was tending. There was nothing sickly about him; it was only an excess of nervous vitality that would not allow body to keep pace with mind. He was a boy to be, intellectually, held in leash, said the doctors. But that was easier said than done. What system of sedatives could one apply to a youngster whose imagination wrought him to a fever during a simple walk by the seashore, who if books were forcibly withheld consoled himself with the composition of five-act tragedies, interspersed with lyrics to which he supplied original strains. Well, there was obviously one thing Wilf could have tried... but his parents might not have wanted to catch him doing it.
Fortunately, Cornhill Magazine did not rely on George's offering for its continuing success. After the first installment finally closed, readers could enjoy a piece on the evolution (!) of the Theory of Evolution. melding fact with mild satire, but linking Charles Darwin to his grandfather, Erasmus, via the interesting things both had to say about plants - Erasmus helped translate the works of Linnaeus and everyone knows about him click. Then there is a short story about a girl from the Hard, the seafaring side of Portsmouth, who exudes charm, sass and intelligence. Cass, for that is her name, meets a sad end when she tries to save a love rival in a lodgings fire, only to find her friend has already departed, having rushed out of the building without raising the alarm. Alas, Cass is too late to save herself. It is a competent and diverting short story in two brief chapters - handy if you only have a few moments to invest in your reading, written in plain prose with no pretensions, and Cass has a touch of George's Hester from Fleet-Footed Hester about her. A case of in and out with a thought-provoking tale ably delivered, with no sign the author has swallowed a dictionary.
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| The Three Sisters by Balthus 1954 |
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| THREE Volumes!!!!!! |
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