Orwell and George Gissing

Abstract The Victorian novelist who meant the most to Orwell and who left the most profound impression on his own work was George Gissing. ‘Perhaps the best novelist England has produced’, Orwell wrote in a Tribune essay from 1943. Compliments to Gissing are scattered through Orwell’s writings like confetti at a wedding, and Orwell repeatedly proselytized on the earlier writer’s behalf. This chapter considers the implications of Orwell’s esteem, and reflects on the Gissing novels he read; on his own writings about Gissing; and on Gissing’s influence on Orwell’s fiction. There were significant gaps in Orwell’s knowledge of Gissing’s writing. However, a Gissing ‘presence’ in Orwell’s fiction is undeniable, as A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Coming Up for Air (1939), and Animal Farm (1945) make clear. In the end, though, all these occasional diggings beneath the topsoil of Gissing’s work are overshadowed by a wider and more ideological debt—itself all the more remarkable in that Gissing’s ideological tendencies, such as they are, sharply opposed almost everything Orwell held dear. Gissing realized, as Orwell himself was to do, that economic insecurity hits the petit bourgeoisie far more than the working classes, for the thing that is taken away from them in times of crisis is their respectability, the sense of who they are. In Gissing’s gloomy back-streets and depressed lower-middle-class interiors, which were to prove so important for Orwell, the seeds of totalitarianism take root and flourish.