George Gissing first encountered Dostoevskii in the late 1880s; like Stevenson, he read The Insulted and Injured and Crime and Punishment in French translation. His reaction was overwhelmingly positive: Crime and Punishment was ‘magnificent […] one of the greatest of modern novels’ he
12 Helen Muchnic, Dostoevsky’s English Reputation (1881-1936) (Northampton, MA, 1939), p.
13 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, in his The Strange Case 173.
of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror (London, 2002), hereafter Jekyll and Hyde, pp. 2-70 (p. 7).
14 Stevenson, Jekyll and Hyde, p. 6.
15 Ibid., p. 22.
Crime and Publishing 153 wrote in 1887.16 Two years later, the book was still a ‘marvellous’ triumph of psychology and realism; Gissing felt himself to be ‘deeply in sympathy with Dostoievsky’.17 Later, he told his friend Eduard Bertz: ‘The more I read of him, the more I want to read; he appeals to me more distinctly than the other Russians, & more perhaps than any modern novelist’.18 In 1899, only 4 years before his death, he still considered Crime and Punishment to be ‘marvellous’.19 The career of this Yorkshire-born novelist, best known for his portrayal of the suffering of the working classes and lower-middle-class outsiders in London’s Victorian slums, was thus influenced by Dostoevskii throughout his career. In his important ‘character study’ of Dickens in the context of 19th-century European realism, published in 1898, Gissing argues that Dostoevskii’s accuracy, humour, and sense of the grotesque all exceed Dickens’s. There are obvious thematic convergences between Gissing and Dostoevskii, such as the recurrence of prostitute characters, the fixation on economic hardship and social isolation, even the thread of sympathy for Russia that runs through Gissing’s novels: in The Crown of Life (1899), the wealthy heroine demonstrates her inclination for her lower middle-class suitor by learning to read Tolstoi in Russian. I turn now to Gissing’s most famous adaptation of a Dostoevskian motif: the hero of Born in Exile (1892), who is essentially the same type of moral transgressor as Raskol’nikov.
Although George Orwell considered Born in Exile potentially Gissing’s best novel, he also confessed that he had never read it.20 This was regrettable:
Orwell had much in common with Gissing’s hero Godwin Peak. All three—
Orwell, Gissing, and Peak—were scholarship boys who narrowly missed the chance to attend university and were forced to define themselves on their own merits against a financially punishing, rigidly hierarchical, and frequently hypocritical class system: all were ‘proud natures condemned to solitude’.21 There is a real, if facile, parallel here with Raskol’nikov’s
16 George Gissing, undated letter to Mary E. Carter, in The Collected Letters of George Gissing, eds. Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas, III (Athens, Ohio, 1992), p. 160.
17 Gissing, letter to Eduard Bertz, 4 November 1889, in Collected Letters, IV, pp. 139-41 (p.
140).
18 Gissing, letter to Eduard Bertz, 16 December 1891, in Collected Letters, IV, pp. 342-4 (p.
343).
19 Gissing, letter to Eduard Bertz, 22 October 1899, in Collected Letters, VII, pp. 388-90 (p.
389).
20 George Orwell, ‘George Gissing’, in Pierre Coustillas (ed.), Collected Articles on George Gissing (London, 1968), pp. 50-7 (p. 54).
21 George Gissing, Born in Exile (London, 1985), p. 51.
situation at the beginning of Crime and Punishment. Godwin Peak, from wounded pride, spurns the chance of an academic career; Raskol’nikov rejects his friend Razumikhin’s practical plan to earn his own way through university. Instead, the maximalist Raskol’nikov decides on murder in order to gain the money necessary to underwrite his family’s security and his own path to social distinction: he is convinced that the benefit to society will outweigh the initial crime. Additionally, he will thus prove himself to be a Napoleon, rather than a ‘louse’. Peak’s crime is less bloody but, on a personal level, equally destructive. Having earned a place in the lower middle classes and gained a reputation as a polemical Radical, he still covets the luxury and leisure enjoyed by higher social ranks. As he reflects after meeting an old school-friend’s family, the Warricombes:
This English home, was it not surely the best result of civilisation in an age devoted to material progress? Here was peace, here was scope for the kindliest emotions. Upon him – the born rebel, the scorner of average mankind, the consummate egoist – this atmosphere exercised an influence more tranquillising, more beneficent, than even the mood of disinterested study. […] Heroism might point him to an unending struggle with adverse conditions, but how was heroism possible without faith? Absolute faith he had none; he was essentially a negativist, guided by the mere relations of phenomena. Nothing easier than to contemn the mode of life represented by this wealthy middle class; but compare it with other existences conceivable by a thinking man, and it was emphatically good. It aimed at placidity, at benevolence, at supreme cleanliness, – things which more than compensated for the absence of higher spirituality.22
Peak thus convinces himself that the greater good—that is, the intellectual attainment made possible by material comfort—lies through a minor and ultimately meaningless ethical compromise. His rhetoric echoes Raskol’nikov’s insistence that the evil of murder committed for gain (a murder that is virtually ethically neutral, since the victim was a parasite on society) will be cancelled out by the future benefit to humanity from Raskol’nikov’s subsequent career. The irony, of course, is that neither man possesses the opportunity—nor the moral resilience—to sustain their defiance of accepted ethics.
Peak’s route to the greater good lies through marriage with the eldest Warricombe daughter, Sidwell. Convinced that she will only overlook their class difference if he becomes a parson, Peak announces his intention to
22 Gissing, Born in Exile, pp. 170-1.
Crime and Publishing 155 study for Holy Orders—thus framing his own hypocrisy for inevitable public exposure. Like Raskol’nikov, Peak suffers intense attacks of self-doubt and self-contempt in which he passionately repents his moral relativism; also like Raskol’nikov, Peak confesses his crime to the woman he loves (although Sidwell forgives him, she does not follow him into his subsequent ‘exile’). But unlike his Russian predecessor, Peak is a sexual trophy-hunter: Sidwell, as a delicately reared English rose, is both his true love and the supreme symbol of social success. Both men are sent into exile:
Raskol’nikov’s Siberia is echoed by Peak’s voluntary year of low-paid work in a ‘vile manufacturing town’ in the North of England.23 Peak’s crime is self-conscious ‘charlatanism’, by Adrian Poole’s definition, making his duplicity both more conscious and less ideological than Raskol’nikov’s.24
Gilbert Phelps and others have identified traces of both Raskol’nikov and Sonia in some of Gissing’s earlier novels;25 Jacob Korg has discussed the thematic overlap between Crime and Punishment and Born in Exile in some detail, arguing that in the case of both Raskol’nikov’s crime and Peak’s charade, ‘ostensible motivation was far less important than the ‘theory’
behind it’.26 Both critics overlook, however, the evidence that Gissing, like Stevenson, has also adapted other significant aspects of Dostoevskii’s narrative. Peak and his equally underprivileged former schoolmate Earwaker, who becomes a newspaper editor, replicate the relationship between Raskol’nikov and Razumikhin. Earwaker chooses Razumikhin’s path of gradualism and hard work, with commensurate reward; he is also the closest equivalent to a confidant that Peak permits. Both Raskol’nikov and Peak are betrayed by an article. Peak is outed as an atheist when his authorship of an anonymous, pro-evolutionary piece in The Critical Review is revealed to the Warricombes; Raskol’nikov’s Napoleon complex is quoted back to him by Porfirii Petrovich, who has read his article on moral elitism in The Periodical Review. In a final, melodramatic scene from Born in Exile, a minor character intervenes to stop a carter from forcing a horse to
‘drag a load beyond its strength’ and is accidentally killed by a blow from
23 Gissing, Born in Exile, p. 482.
24 For Adrian Poole’s discussion of ‘charlatanism’ in the context of Peak, Raskol’nikov and Dickensian hypocrites, see his Gissing in Context (London, 1975), pp. 171-3.
25 Gilbert Phelps, The Russian Novel in English Fiction (London, 1956), p. 164; see also Muchnic, Dostoevsky’s English Reputation, p. 171.
26 Jacob Korg, ‘The Spiritual Theme of ‘Born in Exile’’, in Pierre Coustillas (ed.), Collected Articles on George Gissing (London, 1968) pp. 131-42 (p. 138).
the animal’s hooves; this obviously echoes both Raskol’nikov’s dream of the horse and the death of Marmeladov.27
While the majority of Gissing’s protagonists face social exclusion and some degree of poverty, Peak’s resort to charlatanry is exceptional among them. Piers Otway in The Crown of Life, for example, overcomes problems almost identical to Peak’s through hard work and rigid honesty. Of all Gissing’s fiction, only Born in Exile is unambiguously in dialogue with Crime and Punishment; Godwin Peak is his response to Raskol’nikov.