In the Year of Jubilee A Novel George Gissing 9781142012779 Books
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In the Year of Jubilee A Novel George Gissing 9781142012779 Books
The title of this novel refers to the anniversary of Queen Victoria in 1887. Quite appropriate to read it in the year of another such jubilee. Not all protagonists in the novel are very positive about royals though.The book is an interesting glimpse of social mores of the times. Modernity is rushing in. Women are even trying to study for degrees, imagine that. But they are exceptions. As an advertising agent says: 499 of 500 women are fools. The beginnings of consumer society affluence. London expands, which means construction work, roads, speculation, corruption, shoddy work. Gissing is not friendly towards some aspects of modernity.
Heroine is Nancy Lord, a young woman with the unusual wish to be more than a wife or a daughter. She wants to do something. That was not normal for women who were not forced to it by money shortage. Nancy lacks modesty and must be taken down a notch by fate or faults.
She is without doubt a positive figure, but she has her ambiguities and she makes her mistakes. We suffer with her for her mistakes. Repair work here acquires a touch of the unsavory and some moral doubts. Nancy Lord is a well developed contradictory and quite believable protagonist. One can't say the same for all others in here.
Gissing is often too judgmental for my taste. He couldn't stay away from adding his opinion to the descriptions. Example in the first chapter, introduction of three sisters. They are ' the product of sham education and mock refinement grafted upon a stock of robust vulgarity'. On the walls we see 'hideous oleographs'. And so on and so forth. Gissing tended to have strong opinions and he needed to force them on us. His mastery of language was not strong enough to show us what he meant without rubbing our noses in it.
All in all not one of his greatest, but interesting enough.It would be better if Gissing had done without the Victorian novelists' urge to have a will and an old family mystery in the plot. Also, the ending has the usual artificial flavor of many novels of the time. And why did the man have to be such a misanthrope.
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In the Year of Jubilee A Novel George Gissing 9781142012779 Books Reviews
Sad to say, most people, even those who are fans of Victorian-era literature, have probably never heard of George Gissing. Those who do know him think perhaps he was a 'one hit wonder' with New Grub Street. While New Grub Street is a brilliant read, his little known In the Year of the Jubilee (IYJ) is also a gem.
On the surface, IYJ is a story common to Victorian-era novels. People are obsessed with the thought of inheriting money, making sure they are viewed as 'refined' rather than 'working class', and the notion of 'family values' is taken to an extreme. However in IYJ we finally see the emergence of the middle class, people who are in white collar jobs and who see the value in working (rather than living off of someone else's fortune). And most shocking for a Victorian novel, the most forceful character is a young woman who actually seeks out work to keep her life interesting (and not depend on her estranged husband).
IYJ is well-written, thought-provoking without being preachy, and should be held in esteem on par with the works from James, Eliot, Wharton and, indeed, other works from George Gissing.
George Gissing originally titled this 1894 novel with the title of this review, but his publisher persuaded him to use "In the Year of Jubilee" instead. Gissing (1857 -- 1903) was a late Victorian novelist who remains relatively unknown. Among other things, his book are distinguished for their attempts at realism and for their pessimism. I have continued to read and to love Gissing's books over the years. "The Year of Jubilee" is part of what most readers find Gissing's most productive period of writing.
Jacob Korg, a noted Gissing scholar, has well-described the novel as "a sprawling story about marriage problems and the corruption of values in industrial society". The book begins in 1887, with the Jubilee Day for Queen Victoria as its initial focus. Masses of people turn out to celebrate progress and democratization with, in Gissing's view, violence and vulgarization the near consequence. The story soon pivots, however, to the relationship between its two main characters, Nancy Lord and Lionel Tarrant.
Jubilee is an appropriate reference for the book's title, but Gissing's first thought had merit as well. Nancy Lord, 23, is the heroine of this novel, one of Gissing's many inspired women characters. She is a strong figure and strives for personal and sexual independence. Nancy Lord deserves better than what she receives in the book. Camberwell, the other component of Gissing's proposed title, is a London suburb, home in Gissing's day to a rising middle class including the Lord family. Nancy's father was a seller of pianos. His wife had apparently died early. Lord has tried to provide his children, Nancy and Horace, with a strong education and conventional upbringing. Both Nancy and Horace rebel in different ways and strike out for themselves.
Nancy has three suitors in the course of the book Lionel Tarrant, an egotistical young man born to wealth who doesn't want to work or marry beneath himself, Luckworth Crewe, an ambitious man of the lower middle class who is working himself up to the main chance through the advertising business, and Samuel Barmby, Lord's business partner, who is pretentious, full of himself, and a fool. In a frank scene, for its day, Nancy has sex with Tarrant. She is not an innocent, but is instead both seductress and seduced. The couple then marry. Nancy's father dies leaving a will forbidding Nancy to marry until she reaches the age of 26 under pain of disinheritance. Nancy and Tarrant agree to try to conceal the marriage. Nancy is also pregnant.
Tarrant, a caddish figure, disappears to America for a year. Nancy grows in stature during this time, as she struggles to have her baby, find independence, and do some writing on her own. She remains faithful to Tarrant who is not faithful to her. Nancy is on the verge of throwing Tarrant over, but he returns and says he wants to pursue the marriage. The book settles unsatisfactorily with a near traditional wife's role for Nancy although at Tarrant's insistence both parties to the marriage are to have "space".
As so often with Gissing, the secondary characters are more interesting than the main story. Gissing is at his best when his passions are aroused, as is the case when he describes with disdain the rising lower middle class and its foibles. He describes numerous failed relationships and characters, including the French sisters, Fanny, Ada, and Beatrice. Nancy's brother is smitten with Fanny, who is a femme fatale. Ada is the shrewish wife of Arthur Peachey who eventually throws her over. Beatrice is a businesswoman who sells shoddy dresses to women who imagine themselves fashionable. The rising Luckworth Crewe does Beatrice's advertising and becomes her dominating business partner. Other important characters include Nancy's friend Jessica, who studies and has academic ambitions to no clear purpose, and a Mrs. Damerel, a mysterious character who presents herself as Nancy's and Horace's aunt.
"In the Year of Jubilee" is an ambiguous, highly mixed book that straddles Victorianism and modernism. Gissing as well seems to be of many minds about the situations he describes, about women in particular. His dislike for commercialism, advertising, the masses, and economic growth without wisdom remain clear. The book is marred by too many characters, lack of focus and probably by the figure of Lionel Tarrant who, in spite of some good qualities, remains highly dislikable and a poor reward for Nancy.
"The Year of Jubilee" deserves a modern edition. The last edition of "In the Year of Jubilee" was published in 1994 by "Everyman", with an excellent introduction by Paul Delany that may be found and read online. I was fortunate to find a reading copy of the first American edition of 1895, which was available for about the same price as the current offprint copies. I reviewed the first American edition separately here on , In the Year of Jubilee [1st American Edition] for those readers who may be interested.
Robin Friedman
The Forgotten Books version of this title looks terrible and is virtually unreadable looks like a bad photocopy done on a copier that was running out of ink. Gissing deserves better than this.
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The title of this novel refers to the anniversary of Queen Victoria in 1887. Quite appropriate to read it in the year of another such jubilee. Not all protagonists in the novel are very positive about royals though.
The book is an interesting glimpse of social mores of the times. Modernity is rushing in. Women are even trying to study for degrees, imagine that. But they are exceptions. As an advertising agent says 499 of 500 women are fools. The beginnings of consumer society affluence. London expands, which means construction work, roads, speculation, corruption, shoddy work. Gissing is not friendly towards some aspects of modernity.
Heroine is Nancy Lord, a young woman with the unusual wish to be more than a wife or a daughter. She wants to do something. That was not normal for women who were not forced to it by money shortage. Nancy lacks modesty and must be taken down a notch by fate or faults.
She is without doubt a positive figure, but she has her ambiguities and she makes her mistakes. We suffer with her for her mistakes. Repair work here acquires a touch of the unsavory and some moral doubts. Nancy Lord is a well developed contradictory and quite believable protagonist. One can't say the same for all others in here.
Gissing is often too judgmental for my taste. He couldn't stay away from adding his opinion to the descriptions. Example in the first chapter, introduction of three sisters. They are ' the product of sham education and mock refinement grafted upon a stock of robust vulgarity'. On the walls we see 'hideous oleographs'. And so on and so forth. Gissing tended to have strong opinions and he needed to force them on us. His mastery of language was not strong enough to show us what he meant without rubbing our noses in it.
All in all not one of his greatest, but interesting enough.It would be better if Gissing had done without the Victorian novelists' urge to have a will and an old family mystery in the plot. Also, the ending has the usual artificial flavor of many novels of the time. And why did the man have to be such a misanthrope.
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