The Working Class Library Episode 1: New Grub Street by George Gissing

Listen to "New Grub Street by George Gissing" on Spreaker.

The Working Class Library is the Bee’s podcast. Each month Richard Benson, editor of The Bee, and Claire Malcolm, CEO of New Writing North, invite a writer to discuss a book and decide whether it deserves a place on the shelves of the Working Class Library – our imaginary library of great books by and about ordinary people.

For our first episode, Richard and Claire are joined by Simon James, Professor of English Literature at Durham University, and George Gissing expert, to consider Gissing’s 1891 novel New Grub Street.

Gissing wrote New Grub Street to skewer the new literary crowd and their readers as books and magazines were exploding in popularity following the arrival of mass education in Britain. What can it teach us about book publishing, the British class system and working-class writers today?

If you have any thoughts or comments on the show, please come and chat to us on our social media channels.

Books Mentioned

John Carey – The Intellectuals and the Masses
Charles Dickens – Oliver Twist
EM Forster – Howards End
George Gissing – Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, New Grub Street, The Nether World, The Odd Women, Workers in the Dawn
Christine Huguet & Simon J James – George Gissing and the Woman Question
Simon J James – Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing
George Orwell – Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Jonathan Rose – The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
Douglas Stuart – Shuggie Bain
Flora Thompson – Lark Rise to Candleford
Raymond Williams – Culture and Society

Other Links

For each episode of the Working Class Library podcast, we commission a contemporary working-class writer to write about some of the issues raised by the book we’ve been discussing. For New Grub Street, Damian Kerlin asks why publishers are making it more and more difficult for writers to be paid money owed to them.