George Gissing’s essays contain his poor academic life and his deep love for nature. He describes the pain and ideals of life with a calm and mature writing style that moves and touches the reader.
George Gissing’s “The Spring Beauty” was originally the first part of his long essay “The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft”. This memoir is an autobiographical account of a fictional character named Henry Ryecroft and is divided into four parts: spring, summer, fall, and winter.
Written in the first person and based on the protagonist’s sketch of his private life, describing his feelings, memories and hopes at the time, it is often confused with the autobiography of the author George Gissing. It goes without saying that the protagonist of this work is not the author himself. However, it cannot be said that this work is unrelated to the life and thoughts of the artist, and it cannot be denied that the past, reality and dreams of the artist’s private life are reflected in the life depicted in this work.
Generally speaking, the past life recalled by the protagonist of this work is the actual experience of the artist, and the present life of the protagonist can be seen as the ideal life he longed for and wished for. The main character of this work has been wandering in poverty and anxiety for 30 years since he embarked on the path of self-reliance in the 16th century, relying on a pen to make money for the sole purpose of making money, but now he has received an unexpected inheritance and is about to get rid of his poverty and enjoy the leisure and leisure of the village headman. However, author George Gissing could not escape poverty and adversity until his death at the young age of 46, and such a leisurely life in a country cottage was just an ideal life that he always kept in mind.
George Gissing (1857-1903) was a famous Victorian novelist from England. He was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, the son of a poor chemist. He lost his father at a young age and was educated at Owen’s College, Manchester University, where he was recognized as a classical scholar. As can be seen from his handwritten notes, his dream of the classical world as a classical scholar had a profound effect on his life, and he grew up acutely aware of the conflict between such an ideal dream and the misery of a modern industrial city. It can be interpreted that he fell in love with a young prostitute when he was in school and stole money from the school with the intention of “saving” her, which was a manifestation of his self-destructive consciousness.
He was expelled for this crime and served a short jail sentence. His dreams for the future were shattered, and he left for the United States to make a new start. He suffered many hardships and wandered until 1877. The circumstances of this time are reflected in his novel “The Unclassed” New Grub Street. After returning from the United States, he married the prostitute who had caused his misfortune, but he was still unhappy. His third marriage to an intellectual woman in France brought him some satisfaction, but he was already a consumptive patient.
Even in the misery of his failed marriage and his poverty that led to near starvation, he continued to write novels as a means of earning money to make ends meet, but his efforts were not very successful.
Most of his novels realistically depict the miserable real life of the poor. In this respect, he was greatly influenced by Charles Dickens, but he did not reach the level of Charles Dickens, and he is compared to Émile Zola for his naturalistic methods, but he lacks the same cold and objective depictions of Émile Zola, and his own hobbies, prejudices, and opinions are exposed. Ultimately, his novels sought to expose the sick underbelly of society, including abject poverty, plague-ridden crowds, and sordid affairs, but he failed to produce a representative work of the period because of his melodramatic stories, unnecessary characters, and subjective descriptions of events and characters.
He did not become an excellent realist writer, but left behind the image of an intellectual aristocrat who admired only the classics, and his appearance is clearly revealed in his collection of essays, “The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft”. And George Gissing’s name shone brighter in a single collection of essays than in his twenty novels and travelogues, and it remained in the minds of readers.
One thing that makes his essays so impressive to readers is that they are based on his own experience of living in poverty. When I read the passage where he talks about his own experience and says, “I stood in front of the bookstore again and again, torn between my spiritual desires and my physical needs,” I feel a thrill in my heart, as if I were peering into the troubled mind of a poor scholar who loved a classic. He was a scholar and aristocrat who was able to maintain a high scholarly worldview and artistic pride even while experiencing poverty to the point of starvation.
Secondly, the charm of his essays lies in the fact that he describes nature with a passion for nature rather than for man, and that he talks about the transition of British society from a civilized perspective. The protagonist of this work laments that he can no longer eat British beef and lamb, and says that the deterioration in the quality of British butter shows the decline in the morals of the British people. It is a critique of man and nature as corrupted by industrial civilization.
More than the thematic appeal of George Gissing’s essays, it is the charm of his calm and mature writing style that captivates the reader. Reading his essays, one feels the leisure of a warm spring day and the warm and gentle atmosphere of a home by the fireplace. His writing reveals a mature harmony of clear yet unobtrusive, thoughtful yet not boring, calm yet not stagnant, and passionate yet sober intellect. And you come face to face with the calm gaze of an intellectual who calmly hopes for the gap between ideals and reality and, while experiencing reality, notices the joy of life in every corner of it.
