By the Southern Sea : Gissing's meridian flight from the realm of modernity

Abstract

Around the tum of the 19th century, after the flocks of eminent Victorians had invaded Italy, but essentially stayed north-west of Naples, George Gissing rambled through the regions south-east of that city. It was that part of the Italian Mezzogiomo called Magna Graecia, which unlike the profoundly industrialised late Victorian England, was barely touched by the so-called Second Industrial Revolution underway at that time. The author of Nether World and New Grub Street was in flight from his second failed marriage, but above all in flight from the Victorian world. Apparently, those who reacted against the dominant Victorian culture, its cult of money and progress, its workhouses and asylums, its shops and factories, needed to move towards the deeper South. George Gissing was certainly among these and probably the least biased.