A Sad Heart at the Late-Victorian Culture Market: George Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee

Jubilee, like New Grub Street, deals with the relationship of culture and society, but emphasizes consumers rather than producers, and mass culture rather than literature. The novel centers around estrangement in marriage, with differences in cultural taste playing the decisive role. Specifically, Gissing blames late-Victorian schools for producing half-educated women. Yet a pattern of references to popular songs and advertising suggests that mass culture provides an unofficial education in false values. The full texts of the many songs briefly alluded to reveal the discrepancy between their sentimental idealizations of love and the brutal realities of the novel's sexual relationships. For example, the humiliation of the pregnant Nancy by her husband's desertion across the ocean is counterpointed by reference to a sailor's tender love song for his girl on shore. Advertising, highly developed by 1894, plays a role in Jubilee similar to popular songs. By praising shoddy products as masterworks, advertisers train the characters in the arts of insincerity. Gissing's study of cultural consumers is flawed at the close, when Nancy submits to her husband because of his greater cultivation. She is morally his superior, and, as Gissing admitted, the ending "is not a piece with what comes before."