The roads to Gissing’s Grub Street: An interview with Christopher Douglas

Abstract Gissing’s 1891 novel New Grub Street follows the careers and personal lives of a number of writers, including Edwin Reardon and Jasper Milvain, as they negotiate with the increasingly globalized publishing industry of Victorian England. BBC Radio 4’s latest adaptation is in two 58-minute episodes that aired on 3 and 10 September 2016. Earlier dramatizations include three one-hour episodes, on 13, 20 and 27 August 1972, produced by Jane Morgan and adapted by Gabriel Woolf (Coustillas 1972: 19); and on 8, 15 and 22 September 2002, produced by Janet Whitaker and dramatized by Tony Ramsay (Coustillas 2002: 21). The latter adaptation was uniformly praised by Paul Bailey in the TLS (11 October 2002): ‘Tony Ramsay’s three-part serialization of Gissing’s dank masterpiece was exemplary in every particular, and Janet Whittaker’s production could not be faulted’. Harold Pinter performed the role of the narrator in this adaptation. Bailey calls attention to the resonance that the novel has for those in the literary world, both in the nineteenth century and beyond: ‘Tony Ramsay’s brilliant adaptation told Radio 4’s substantial audience many salutary truths about the lives of those writers who weren’t Dickens or Thackeray or George Eliot. I hope, too, that it caused them to realize that nothing much has changed in what is known as the “literary world”’. Directed and produced by Gary Brown, BBC Radio 4’s new adaptation of New Grub Street was recorded at BBC Drama North’s studios in Salford Quays in Manchester from 5–8 July 2016. It stars adaptor Christopher Douglas as Gissing; Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Milvain; Sam Alexander, Reardon; Emily Pithon, Amy and Edith; and Olivia Hallinan, Marian. Since 2005, Douglas has co-written and starred in Ed Reardon’s Week, which won the Radio Programme of the Year in 2005 and again in 2010 at the Broadcasting Press Guild Awards. A novelization of the first series appeared in 2005. A prolific writer, Douglas has worked on theatre, radio, television, books and journalism, and his credits include How to be Eighteenth Century (2006) for BBC4 and BBC2 and How to be Edwardian (2007) for the former. As I have suggested in my article on Gissing’s revival in the TLS (6 October 2016), Douglas imaginatively brings together Gissing the man and his oeuvre, a link established, for instance, by the doubling of Pithon as Reardon’s wife Amy and Gissing’s second wife Edith Underwood. Douglas makes a number of fresh in-roads into the novel: it is never clear with which writer character Gissing identifies. Here, Gissing is visibly juggling between three (i.e., Milvain, Reardon and Alfred Yule). In the following interview, I discuss with Douglas his research into Gissing, the synergies between fact and fiction that are brought to bear in this adaptation and the storylines that he retains and omits from New Grub Street.