We see that javascript is disabled or not supported by your browser - javascript is needed for important actions on the site. Read more

What's New - Home - Login

Member $avings: $81,547,047.95 | Books Available: 800,553 | Members Online: 218

Swap Used Books - Buy New Books at Great Prices!

How To Swap Books Sign Up Search submenu

PBS Market (New Books)

Gift Buying Guide

Book Browser Advanced Search Books Posted Today Member Book Reviews Award Winning Books NYT Best Sellers Amazon Best Sellers Most Traveled Copies Club Wish List

Discussion Forums Book Lists

Club Lists My Book Lists My Watched Lists Create a List

Blog Donations

School Donation Program In Memory of... Military Donation Program Friends of PBS

Box-O-Books Maps The Eclectic Pen Fun Stuff

20 Questions Sudoku Bookmark Creator

Top 100

Requests Posts Swappers Referrers Reviewers

Pulse of PBS Spread The Word

Invite Friends Bookmarks Facebook Page Facebook App More Ways...

Photo Gallery Recipes Club Tag Cloud Member Testimonials

Help Center submenu

How To Swap Books Browse Help Docs Ask the Librarian PBS Member Icons Live Help

Kiosk

PBS Market (New Books) Go Shopping Buy Credits Buy PBS Money Upgrade Membership Gift Certificates Transfer Credits

Need Help?

Search - The House Of Cobwebs

The House Of Cobwebs
Author: George Gissing

The terms book and novel became almost synonymous in houses which were not Puritan, yet where books and reading, in the era of few and uilfree libraries, were strictly circumscribed. George Gissing was no exception to this rile. The English novel was at the summit of its reputation during his boyish days. As a lad of eight or nine he remembered ... more »the parts of Our Mutual Friend coming to the house, and could recall the smile of welcome with which they were infallibly received. In the dining-room at home was a handsomely framed picture which he regarded with an almost idolatrous veneration. It was an engraved portrait of Charles Dickens. Some of the best work of George Eliot, Reade, and Trollope was yet to make its appearance Meredith and Hardy were still the treasured possession of the few the reigning models during the period of Gissings adolescence were probably Dickens and Trollope, and the numerous satellites of these great stars, prominent among them Wilkie Collins, William Black, and Besant and Rice. Of the cluster of novelists who emerged from this school of ideas, the two who will attract most attention in the future were clouded and obscured for the greater period of their working lives. Unobserved, they received, and made their own preparations for utilising, the legacy of the mid- Victorian novel-moral thesis, plot, underplot, set characters, descriptive machinery, landscape colouring, copious phraseology, Herculean proportions, and the rest of the cumbrous and grandiose paraphernalia of Chuszlemt, Penden, and ilfiddlemarch. But they received the legacy in a totally different spirit. Mark Rutherford, after a very brief experiment, put all these elaborate properties and conventions reverently aside. Cleverer and more docile, George Gissing for the most part accepted them he put his slender frame into the ponderous collar of the author of the Mill on the Floss,and nearly collapsed in wind and limb in the heart-breaking attempt to adjust himself to such an heroic type of harness. The distinctive qualities of Gissing at the time of his setting forth were a scholarly style, rather fastidious and academic in its restraint, and the personal discontent, slightly morbid, of a self-conscious student who finds himself in the position of a sensitive woman in a crowd. His attitude through life was that of a man who, having set out on his career with the understanding that a second-class ticket is to be provided, allows himself to be unceremoniously hustled into the rough and tumble of a noisy third. Circumstances made him revolt against an anonymous start in life for a refined and educated man under such conditions. They also made him prolific. He shrank from the restraints and humiliations to which the poor and shabbily dressed private tutor is exposed-revealed to us with a persuasive terseness in the pages of The Unclassed, Veru Gmrb Street, RyecroJ1, and the story of Tophams Chnnce...

ISBN-13: 9781443760898
ISBN-10: 1443760897
Publication Date: 10/6/2008
Pages: 356
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Seabrook Press
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Back to the Top ↑

Search - The House Of Cobwebs

Loading...