This book examines the conditions of authorship and the development of publishing and journalism during the nineteenth century. It provides a detailed account on the social, cultural, and economic factors that control literary activity, and determine literary success or failure. There are chapters on the place of women and working-class writers in a predominantly male, middle-class publishing industry; on literary clubs, societies, and feuds; on patronage, charity, and state support for writers; on literary journalists and the development of the bohemian character; on the facts that inspired the fictional world of Thackeray's Pendennis and Gissing's New Grub Street; and on the long-running debates on the status of writers and the state of literature. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary sources, The Common Writer adds substantially to our understanding of nineteenth-century literary history and culture.

George Gissing’s The Odd Women dramatizes key issues relating to class and gender in late-Victorian culture: the changing relationship between the sexes, the social impact of ‘odd’ or ‘redundant’ women, the cultural impact of ‘the new woman,’ and the opportunities for and conditions of employment in the expanding service sector of the economy. At the heart of these issues as many late Victorians saw them was a problem of the imbalance in the ratio of men to women in the population. There were more females than males, which meant that more and more women would be left unmarried; they would be ‘odd’ or ‘redundant,’ and would be forced to be independent and to find work to support themselves. In the Broadview edition, Gissing’s text is carefully annotated and accompanied by a range of documents from the period that help to lay out the context in which the book was written. In Gissing’s story, Virginia Madden and her two sisters are confronted upon the death of their father with sudden impoverishment. Without training for employment, and desperate to maintain middle-class respectability, they face a daunting struggle. In Rhoda Nunn, a strong feminist, Gissing also presents a strong character who draws attention overtly to the issues behind the novel. The Odd Women is one of the most important social novels of the late nineteenth century.

Grub Street was a real place, a place of poverty and vice. It was also a metaphor for journalists and other writers of ephemeral publications and, by implication, the infant newspaper industry. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, journalists were held in low regard, even by their fellow journalists who exchanged torrents of mutual abuse in the pages of their newspapers. But Grub Street's vitality and its battles with authority laid the foundations of modern Fleet Street. In this book, Bob Clarke examines the origination and development of the English newspaper from its early origin in the broadsides of the sixteenth century, through the burgeoning of the press during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to its arrival as a respectable part of the establishment in the nineteenth century. Along the way this narrative is illuminated with stories of the characters who contributed to the growth of the English press in all its rich variety of forms, and how newspapers tailored their contents to particular audiences. As well as providing a detailed chronological history, the volume focuses on specific themes important to the development of the English newspaper. These include such issues as state censorship and struggles for the freedom of the press, the growth of advertising and its effect on editorial policy, the impact on editorial strategies of taxation policy, increased literacy rates and social changes, the rise of provincial newspapers and the birth of the Sunday paper and the popular press. The book also describes the content of newspapers, and includes numerous extracts and illustrations that vividly portray the way in which news was reported to provide a colourful picture of the social history of their times. Written in a lively and engaging manner, this volume will prove invaluable to anyone with an interest in English social history, print culture or journalism.

A novel of literary New York follows the lives of a cast of characters including editors, writers, and their friends over a five year period.

First published in 1972, this is the first detailed study of the milieu of the eighteenth-century literary hack and its significance in Augustan literature. Although the modern term 'Grub Street' has declined into vague metaphor, for the Augustan satirists it embodied not only an actual place but an emphatic lifestyle. Pat Rogers shows that the major satirists - Pope, Swift and Fielding - built a potent fiction surrounding the real circumstances in which the scribblers lived, and the importance of this aspect of their writing. The author first locates the original Grub Street, in what is now the Barbican, and then presents a detailed topographical tour of the surrounding area. With studies of a number of key authors, as well as the modern and metaphorical development of the term 'Grub Street', this book offers comprehensive insight into the nature of Augustan literature and the social conditions and concerns that inspired it.