New Grub Street's Ecologies of Paper

Abstract

This essay argues that George Gissing's novel New Grub Street (1891)—long noted for its powerful, if gloomy, representation of late-Victorian authorship and publishing—not only presupposes but also critically incorporates the era's epochal transition from rag paper to paper made from harvested esparto grass and wood pulp. In Gissing's treatment of industrialized publishing, the trade in printed writing takes on central features of the thriving paper industry carefully placed in the novel's background, including its linking of overproduction via inexpensive inputs to the specter of wholesale devastation. Reading New Grub Street as a novel on paper draws our attention to the resource ecologies and even the natural histories of late-nineteenth-century authorship, media, and print capitalism.

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