The House of Cobwebs

The House of Cobwebs and
Other Stories, by

George Gissing, et al
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Title: The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories
Author: George Gissing
Release Date: March 16, 2004 [eBook #11603]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE HOUSE OF COBWEBS
AND OTHER STORIES
BY
GEORGE GISSING
1906

TO WHICH IS PREFIXED THE WORK OF GEORGE GISSING AN
INTRODUCTORY SURVEY BY THOMAS SECCOMBE

CONTENTS
THE WORK OF GEORGE GISSING
A CHRONOLOGICAL RECORD
THE HOUSE OF COBWEBS

A CAPITALIST
CHRISTOPHERSON
HUMPLEBEE
THE SCRUPULOUS FATHER
A POOR GENTLEMAN
MISS RODNEY'S LEISURE
A CHARMING FAMILY
A DAUGHTER OF THE LODGE
THE RIDING-WHIP
FATE AND THE APOTHECARY
TOPHAM'S CHANCE
A LODGER IN MAZE POND
THE SALT OF THE EARTH
THE PIG AND WHISTLE

THE WORK OF GEORGE GISSING
AN INTRODUCTORY SURVEY
'Les gens tout à fait heureux, forts et bien portants, sont-ils préparés
comme il faut pour comprendre, pénétrer, exprimer la vie, notre vie si
tourmentée et si courte?'
MAUPASSANT.
In England during the sixties and seventies of last century the world of
books was dominated by one Gargantuan type of fiction. The terms
book and novel became almost synonymous in houses which were not
Puritan, yet where books and reading, in the era of few and unfree
libraries, were strictly circumscribed. George Gissing was no exception
to this rule. The English novel was at the summit of its reputation
during his boyish days. As a lad of eight or nine he remembered the
parts of Our Mutual Friend coming to the house, and could recall the
smile of welcome with which they were infallibly received. In the
dining-room at home was a handsomely framed picture which he
regarded with an almost idolatrous veneration. It was an engraved
portrait of Charles Dickens. Some of the best work of George Eliot,
Reade, and Trollope was yet to make its appearance; Meredith and
Hardy were still the treasured possession of the few; the reigning
models during the period of Gissing's adolescence were probably
Dickens and Trollope, and the numerous satellites of these great stars,

prominent among them Wilkie Collins, William Black, and Besant and
Rice.
Of the cluster of novelists who emerged from this school of ideas, the
two who will attract most attention in the future were clouded and
obscured for the greater period of their working lives. Unobserved, they
received, and made their own preparations for utilising, the legacy of
the mid-Victorian novel--moral thesis, plot, underplot, set characters,
descriptive machinery, landscape colouring, copious phraseology,
Herculean proportions, and the rest of the cumbrous and grandiose
paraphernalia of _Chuzzlewit, Pendennis_, and Middlemarch. But they
received the legacy in a totally different spirit. Mark Rutherford, after a
very brief experiment, put all these elaborate properties and
conventions reverently aside. Cleverer and more docile, George
Gissing for the most part accepted them; he put his slender frame into
the ponderous collar of the author of the Mill on the Floss, and nearly
collapsed in wind and limb in the heart-breaking attempt to adjust
himself to such an heroic type of harness.
The distinctive qualities of Gissing at the time of his setting forth were
a scholarly style, rather fastidious and academic in its restraint, and the
personal discontent, slightly morbid, of a self-conscious student who
finds himself in the position of a sensitive woman in a crowd. His
attitude through life was that of a man who, having set out on his career
with the understanding that a second-class ticket is to be provided,
allows himself to be unceremoniously hustled into the rough and
tumble of a noisy third. Circumstances made him revolt against an
anonymous start in life for a refined and educated man under such
conditions. They also made him prolific. He shrank from the restraints
and humiliations to which the poor and shabbily dressed private tutor is
exposed--revealed to us with a persuasive terseness in the pages of
_The Unclassed, New Grub Street, Ryecroft_, and the story of
_Topham's Chance._ Writing fiction in a garret for a sum sufficient to
keep body and soul together for the six months following payment was
at any rate better than this. The result was a long series of highly
finished novels, written in a style and from a point of view which will
always render them dear to the studious and the book-centred. Upon the
larger external rings of the book-reading multitude it is not probable
that Gissing will ever succeed