New Grub Street presents the reader with an accurate and comprehensive picture of late Victorian society, despite focusing predominantly on only a small group of literate men and women. At first you may have difficulty locating Gissing's voice within the narrative. Perspective jumps from character to character, establishing no clear candidate for the reader's sympathies. Jasper Milvain is portrayed ambivalently, despite the fact that his moral and literary values ​​were anathema to Gissing. This is but one example of ambiguity in a novel full of confusion and reversals of the natural order. The world of New Grub Street is one in which the unscrupulous Jasper Milvain triumphs, the mediocre Whelpdale stumbles upon commercial success, while others such as Edwin Reardon, Alfred Yule and Harold Biffen become unquestionably casualties in the battle of life. What is Gissing trying to say about Victorian England? (Or is literary life his only subject?) In this chaos of points of view are intertwined the themes of money, class and sex. Yet it is precisely the ubiquity of these themes and the prevailing disorder of the world that makes the novel a mirror of late Victorian society. Whether or not Gissing intended his novel to be purely a study of the changes in literary life of the late 19th century, New Grub Street is effectively a microcosm of English life in the final years of Victoria's reign. New Grub Street describes some of the consequences of the structural and compositional changes that were – and had taken place – in the social and class structures of Victorian England. The growing size of the middle class1, the reduction of working hours2, a...... middle of paper...... Unwin, London, 1968, p. 154.5 Gross, John, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life Since 1800, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 220.6 Altick, p. 61.7 Gissing, George, New Grub Street,worth, Hertfordshire, 1996, ch. XXXIV, page. 393.8 Gross, p. 220.9 Gissing, chap., XIV, p. 146.10 Cited in Gross, pp. 220-1.11 Ibid., p. 221.12 Gissing, ch. XIV, page. 146.13 Gross, p. 149.14 Gissing, ch. XXXV, page. 402.15 Ibid., p. 400.16 Ibid., ch. XXXVII, page. 422.17 Ibid., Introduction.18 Ibid., chap. VII, page 74.19 Ibid., ch. XXXV, page. 401.20 Ibid.21 Ibid., chap. XIV, page. 151.22 Ibid., ch. XXVII, page. 301.23 Ibid.24 Ibid., chap. XXXV, page. 403.25 Fowles, John, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Vintage, London, 1996, p. 445.26 Ibid., p. 283.27 Altick, p. 17.