The Unclassed by George Gissing

Shuffling towards realism in Victorian England

As an admirer of Naturalism—the realist literary movement spawned by Emile Zola and taken up by writers like Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London—I have been looking for other Naturalist writers outside of France and the United States. Such researches brought the name George Gissing to my attention. Gissing (1857–1903), though by no means a household name in English literature, is frequently cited as the author most exemplifying Naturalism in Great Britain (Ireland’s George Moore is another). In Victorian England, it shouldn’t have been too hard to distinguish oneself as a Naturalist; just simply write about people who work for a living, which hardly anyone else in English lit was doing. That’s exactly what Gissing does in his novel The Unclassed, first published in 1884. Though clearly influenced by Zola (Naturalism is even mentioned once in the text), in this novel Gissing presents a uniquely British form of realism that’s a compromise between Zola’s pursuit of the ugly truth and Victorian England’s adherence to propriety.

I’m not sure exactly what the title The Unclassed is supposed to mean. The characters in this novel are not quite bourgeois and not quite proletariats—they straddle the line between lower middle class and working class—so perhaps that might be the implication. These people work for a living and mostly survive from paycheck to paycheck, but they’re not below the poverty line. The cast includes a pharmacist, a writer, a laundress, a teacher, a governess. The main characters are three classmates recently graduated from a girls’ school: Ida, Maud, and Harriet; Harriet’s cousin Julian; and Julian’s best friend Osmond Waymark. The latter character seems an at least partially autobiographical surrogate for Gissing himself.

Via a meandering plot, the lives of these characters intertwine through various coincidental meetings, and they get involved in friendships, romances, business dealings, and the like. The most surprising element in the book is that one of the women, to support herself financially through hard times, was forced to work as a prostitute or at least a kept mistress. Through Gissing’s depiction of her, he asserts that having resorted to this necessity does not make her a loose woman, an evil person, or a trashy element of society (though she’s not exactly presented as marriage material either). In fact, one “proper” woman is presented as more wicked than the former prostitute in question. The first half of the novel primarily consists of the terrible woman making everyone’s lives unreasonably miserable. The second half of the book focuses mostly on one man deciding who he should marry. Although later in the novel Gissing does include some descriptions of the living conditions of the urban poor and does address some social issues, for the most part the plot of the book relies more on romantic melodrama than the Naturalist literature coming out of France and America. This novel only dabbles in the evolutionary theory, determinism, and atheism characteristic of Zola’s naturalism.

Victorian fiction almost invariably adheres to the social conventions and mores of its time and place. For example, it was considered improper or even scandalous for a man and woman to be alone in a room together, and if a gentleman kissed a woman, he was obligated to marry her. In this novel, some characters take such conventions deadly seriously, while others adopt a more bohemian attitude and regard such restrictions as optional. That’s hardly the realistic depiction of sexuality that one finds in French literature of the time, but it’s a progressive step forward from typical Victorian romances. One also finds in Gissing’s novel, however, familiar melodramatic tropes that depart from what we would consider realism nowadays, such as people being conveniently rescued by inheritances or spontaneously dropping dead from sadness.

In summation, The Unclassed is a welcome step towards Naturalism and Realism in English literature, but it still has one foot firmly stuck in the conventional mud of Victorian romance. This is only Gissing’s second novel, out of two dozen, so perhaps over the course of his career he moved in a more realistic direction. While at times I was bored and disappointed with The Unclassed, I still think Gissing might be worth a second chance.