Size Matters: George Gissing's Microscript and the Late-Victorian Print Market

Abstract

Abstract:Considering George Gissing's manuscripts housed in the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, this essay explores how Gissing managed the expectations and pressures of publication by adopting his signature microscopic handwriting in the late 1880s. The miniaturized form draws attention to larger structures through relief—the line, the paragraph, and the page. Likewise, Gissing's microscopic handwriting as a form points outside itself and himself to the exteriorized world of authorship and print culture. H.G. Wells claimed that Gissing's adoption of a microscopic hand allowed him to visually conceptualize and measure the length of a manuscript as he was in the process of drafting it. In this way, Gissing's compositional form that ostensibly standardized word count per page reflects his ambivalent loyalty and hesitant conformity to the reigning system of the three-volume or triple-decker novel, which relied on pure quantity of words as a standard. At the same time, Gissing's compositional format subverts the commodification of literature by limiting writing's scope, stalling the rapid consumption of the text, and forcing print to indeterminably reproduce the logic of the author's microscopic hand. Gissing's handwriting simultaneously represents an acquiescence to treating literary labor as a financial enterprise and a refusal to treat professional novel-writing as an industry.