Pox, Prose, and Prostitution: Masculine Anxiety, the Myth of the Male Author, and the Late-Victorian ‘Exchange Economy’ in George Gissing’s New Grub Street

Abstract

George Gissing’s friend and fellow novelist, H. G Wells, would remember the ‘last decade of the nineteenth century’ as ‘an extraordinarily favourable time for new writers’(H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries of a Very Ordinary Brain, Volume II (Since 1866) (London: Gollancz, 1934), p. 506.). His experience fits neatly with the myths of the successful Victorian male author that were in circulation throughout the century. For the vast majority of writers, however, the reality was quite different. As many scholars have recognized, George Gissing’s 1891 novel, New Grub Street, presents a realistic portrayal of the travails of the average writer trying to live by their pen at the turn of the century. Nonetheless, little work has examined these economic travails against the backdrop of nineteenth-century images of male authorship. Bringing together work on Victorian masculinities, research on cultural depictions of syphilis, and work on the nineteenth-century marketplace alongside current Gissing scholarship and primary sources, this article will argue that Gissing’s novel foregrounds the shared ‘exchange economy’ of prostitution and the literary market to explore specifically masculine anxieties around the male author at the fin de siècle (Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture: Medicine, Knowledge and the Spectacle of Victorian Invisibility (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 131.). In tracing the interconnections of pox, prose, and prostitution, this article re-negotiates the novel’s relationship with other images of Victorian authorship, as well as using work on cultural depictions of syphilis to position the text in a new field.