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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
George Gissing's "The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories" presents a compelling collection of narratives that delve into the intricacies of human relationships and the socio-economic challenges of late Victorian England. Gissing's adept use of naturalism sheds light on the harsh realities faced by his characters, illuminating the struggles against societal constraints. With richly textured prose and a keen eye for detail, Gissing weaves a tapestry of everyday life marked by disappointment and resilience, all framed within the atmospheric settings that echo the constraints of the time. Gissing, a prominent literary figure, drew from his own experiences as a working-class intellectual in a rapidly industrializing society. His personal hardships, including struggles with poverty and societal alienation, heavily influenced his writing. His background allows a unique authenticity to permeate the stories, as he challenges the reader to consider the often-overlooked narratives of those marginalized by society. For readers seeking a profound exploration of human nature against a backdrop of societal critique, "The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories" is highly recommended. Gissing's work invites a deep reflection on the moral complexities of life, making it an essential read for those interested in the interplay between individuality and the harsh realities that shape existence. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author volume presents George Gissing’s The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories as a concentrated survey of his shorter prose, designed to show the breadth of his art beyond the novels for which he is best known. It brings together a sequence of self-contained tales alongside an extended, chaptered narrative, and augments them with reference materials under The Work of George Gissing and A Chronological Record. The purpose is twofold: to offer an accessible entry point into Gissing’s imagination at shorter length, and to situate these pieces within the arc of his career, enabling readers to connect themes and methods across his body of work.
The contents here are predominantly prose fiction: short stories of varying scale and mood, together with one longer tale presented in four chapters under the title Topham’s Chance. The supplementary materials supply a bibliographical overview and a chronological listing, assisting readers in placing these narratives among Gissing’s wider publications. There are no plays, poems, letters, or diaries in this collection; rather, the emphasis rests on compact storytelling and contextual apparatus. The mix of brief sketches and an extended piece allows the volume to demonstrate the flexibility of Gissing’s fictional practice, from swift, incisive studies to more spacious, structurally articulated narrative.
Taken together, these works reveal Gissing’s abiding concerns with precarious respectability, the burdens of conscience, and the moral weather of everyday life. He observes the pressures of work and want, the allure and cost of gentility, and the tangle of duty, pride, and sympathy that binds people in cities and small communities alike. Lodgings, libraries, back streets, and public houses recur as charged spaces where chance meetings and small decisions alter a life’s course. The result is a quietly intense social realism, attentive to fragile hopes and compromised choices, and striking for its refusal of easy consolation or melodrama.
Stylistically, the stories display Gissing’s economy of means and his meticulous social detail. He favors a restrained, lucid narrative voice that allows irony and feeling to accrue through situation and gesture rather than overt commentary. Characters are delineated with psychological exactness, their motives shaded by class anxieties and personal scruples. Settings are concrete and functional, yet suggestive: rooms, streets, and thresholds mirror inner states without symbolic overstatement. In the short form he exploits compression, while the chaptered structure of Topham’s Chance permits a measured unfolding of incident and consequence, testing how his realism adapts from vignette to extended design.
The collection’s significance lies in its composite portrait of late-Victorian and early-Edwardian social experience, presented without sensationalism and with steady ethical curiosity. These are not merely adjuncts to the novels but independent inquiries into the same terrain: how people contend with limited means, fragile health, uncertain employment, and the competing claims of self-improvement and obligation. The stories retain their relevance for readers attuned to economic precarity and the moral ambiguities of help, merit, and chance. By pairing the fiction with career overviews, the volume also invites reflection on continuity and variation within Gissing’s oeuvre, sharpening a sense of his artistic development.
Variety within coherence is a defining strength here. Titles such as A Lodger in Maze Pond, A Daughter of the Lodge, and The Pig and Whistle suggest domestic and public interiors where manners and necessity meet; others—A Capitalist, The Scrupulous Father, Miss Rodney’s Leisure—imply conflicts of money, principle, and time. Christopherson and Humplebee evoke singular temperaments, while Fate and the Apothecary hints at professional and accidental intersections. The four-part Topham’s Chance anchors the volume with sustained narrative breadth. The Work of George Gissing and A Chronological Record frame these pieces, guiding readers through contexts without dictating interpretations.
As an ensemble, the collection offers a disciplined exploration of work, dwelling, aspiration, and contingency—the elements from which Gissing constructs his moral landscapes. It is curated to display how small-scale forms can crystallize a writer’s preoccupations with particular clarity, and how a longer tale can deepen them. New readers gain a focused introduction to his idiom; returning readers encounter familiar concerns refreshed by different lengths and angles of approach. The contextual materials underscore the place of these stories within a larger career, while the fiction itself demonstrates why Gissing’s keen, unsentimental realism continues to compel attention.
Historical Context
George Gissing (1857–1903), born at Wakefield, Yorkshire, wrote across the final decades of the Victorian era into the dawn of Edwardian Britain. Trained at Owens College, Manchester, he was expelled in 1876, spent a year in the United States, and settled in London from 1877. The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories appeared posthumously in London in 1906 (Constable), drawing chiefly on tales written in the 1890s–1903. Its vignettes of clerks, shopkeepers, minor professionals, and lodging-house dwellers reflect Gissing’s hallmark realism. The inclusion of apparatus such as The Work of George Gissing and A Chronological Record situates the collection within an effort to order and memorialize his career soon after his death at Saint-Jean-de-Luz.
Late Victorian London—administered by the new London County Council from 1889—provides the social topography for many of these stories. The expansion of railways and the Underground (City and South London Railway, 1890; Central London Railway, 1900) fueled suburban growth, while older districts decayed. Charles Booth’s poverty maps (1889–1903) documented stark gradations from squalid courts to respectable streets. Settings such as lodging-house quarters near Guy’s Hospital at Maze Pond (Southwark) or bookish haunts around Charing Cross Road (opened 1887) and Paternoster Row anchor Gissing’s characters in real geographies. The contrast between villa suburbs on the fringes of Middlesex and Surrey and inner-city tenements shapes the moral and economic pressures that recur throughout the volume.
Gissing’s protagonists move within the expanding world of white‑collar labor. Between the 1870s and 1900s, clerks multiplied in banks, insurance offices, the General Post Office, and the City. Periodic crises—above all the Baring collapse of 1890—exposed the fragility of savings and small investments, while speculative waves in mining shares during the mid‑1890s and the South African War years unsettled many. The legal framework of joint‑stock enterprise (notably the Companies Act of 1862) and the spread of limited liability widened middle‑class participation in finance. Stories invoking precarious respectability, cautious thrift, and sudden windfalls sit within this urban economy, where a chance promotion or a failed investment could reorder an entire household’s fortunes.
Victorian debates over poverty and philanthropy inform the collection’s ethical atmosphere. The New Poor Law of 1834 still governed relief, stigmatizing the workhouse, while the Charity Organisation Society (founded 1869) promoted ‘scientific’ casework and moral scrutiny of applicants. Settlement houses such as Toynbee Hall (1884) in Whitechapel and reformers like Octavia Hill sought to improve housing, dovetailing with the Housing of the Working Classes Act (1890). Gissing’s characters navigate this landscape of means tests, subscription charities, and self-help associations. Their anxieties about debt, reputation, and assistance reflect a culture that distinguished harshly between the ‘undeserving’ and the ‘respectable poor,’ intensifying the personal stakes of small inheritances, modest salaries, and carefully guarded domestic routines.
Shifts in education, gender, and family life shape the social codes that govern these tales. The Elementary Education Act (1870) and the 1891 measure making elementary schooling free expanded literacy, feeding aspirations among clerks and shop assistants. Women’s legal and economic status changed under the Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882) and the growth of office work created new roles for typists and shopgirls, intensifying debates on the ‘New Woman.’ Leisure itself became a social marker as cycling, seaside excursions, and suburban domesticity spread after the Bank Holiday Act (1871). Courtship, inheritance, and propriety—central to many plots—are thus played out against evolving expectations of female autonomy and male respectability in late Victorian households.
The collection belongs to a magazine age. The collapse of the three‑volume novel in the mid‑1890s—accelerated by Mudie’s changing policies—shifted prestige and income toward one‑volume fiction and short stories. Mass literacy, cheaper paper, and the ‘New Journalism’ (W. T. Stead’s campaigns in the 1880s) enlarged periodical markets such as the Strand (from 1891) and the English Illustrated Magazine. Gissing, long preoccupied with professional authorship (famously in New Grub Street, 1891), wrote stories that often turn on reading, manuscripts, publishers, and second‑hand booksellers. The presence of The Work of George Gissing and A Chronological Record in this volume reflects a burgeoning bibliographical consciousness and the posthumous effort of publishers and friends to stabilize his oeuvre for new readers.
Public sociability and respectability—two poles of urban life—frame several recurring milieus. Public houses with names like the Pig and Whistle were regulated by the Licensing Act of 1872 and, later, the Licensing Act of 1904, while the temperance movement and the Salvation Army (founded 1865) pressed for sobriety. Recreation broadened through municipal parks, suburban commons, and cheap rail excursions to resorts such as Margate or Brighton. The codes of masculinity and class display—signified by riding, club membership, and dress—coexisted with the modest pastimes of clerks and shopkeepers. These changing norms of leisure and conduct, and the social surveillance accompanying them, underpin the tensions among pride, pleasure, and prudence that animate Gissing’s urban and suburban scenes.
Professionalization and public policy on health and efficiency supply another layer of context. The Medical Act (1858) and the institutional world around Guy’s Hospital structure urban encounters with illness, while the Pharmacy Act (1868) and later Poisons and Pharmacy Act (1898) defined the apothecary’s responsibilities amid expanding regulation. The South African War (1899–1902) triggered anxieties about ‘national efficiency,’ feeding inquiries into poverty, housing, and physical deterioration that culminated in early Edwardian reforms (1906–1911). Gissing died in 1903, just after Victoria’s death (1901) and the accession of Edward VII. The stories gathered in 1906 therefore face both backward to late‑Victorian constraint and forward to new schemes of reform, capturing a society in wary transition.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Work of George Gissing
A brief critical overview of Gissing’s career, outlining his chief themes, methods, and place in late-Victorian fiction.
A Chronological Record
A timeline of Gissing’s life and publications that situates the stories within his personal and literary development.
The House of Cobwebs
A struggling man seeks refuge in a decaying suburban house and, amid its solitude and secrets, finds an unexpected opening toward work and attachment.
A Capitalist
After a modest windfall, a cautious clerk recasts himself as a 'capitalist,' only to discover how money anxieties and social pretensions distort ordinary life.
Christopherson
An impoverished bibliophile, devoted to his books and invalid wife, faces displacement; the narrator’s attempt to help reveals the frailty of comfort built on cherished possessions.
Humplebee
A timid city clerk falls into an idealized infatuation and quietly reorganizes his hopes around it, testing the limits of self-respect and romantic illusion.
The Scrupulous Father
A conscientious parent confronts a tempting shortcut to advance a child’s prospects and must choose between ethical rigor and worldly advantage.
A Poor Gentleman
A once-genteel man reduced to shabby circumstances navigates pride, employment, and the thin line between dignity and desperation.
Miss Rodney's Leisure
A wealthy spinster’s efforts to fill her idle hours with culture and good works expose the contradictions of leisure and dependence.
A Daughter of the Lodge
At a country estate’s gate-lodge, the keeper’s daughter draws a visitor into a circumscribed romance shaped by class and convention.
The Riding-Whip
The gift and misuse of a riding-whip ignites a social tangle, revealing vanity, temper, and the small tyrannies of polite society.
Fate and the Apothecary
A cautious apothecary’s ordered life collides with chance and misunderstanding, altering his fortunes in unexpected ways.
Topham's Chance (Chapters I–IV)
An unremarkable man is offered a rare opportunity for advancement and affection, and must balance ambition with loyalty as the consequences of his 'chance' unfold.
A Lodger in Maze Pond
In a South London lodging-house, a reserved newcomer subtly disrupts household routines, bringing buried grievances and hopes to the surface.
The Salt of the Earth
A vignette of humble steadfastness that honors the quiet virtues of ordinary people sustaining family and community amid hardship.
The Pig and Whistle
Set around a village inn, intertwined lives and small decisions chart the moral weather of provincial society.
