Written in 1891, this naturalist satire of struggling writers is often deemed Gissing’s best novel. The question of money– and more importantly the lack of it– animates much of the drama.Two main characters, Reardon and Milvain, embody the contradiction between literature for its own sake and writing for the market. While Milvain clearly represents an ascendant capitalist type, in a meaningful sense his quest to acquire prestige and wealth by producing whatever the semi-educated masses desire was already characteristic of an earlier era. In the early 18th century the actual Grub Street was known for its high concentration of penurious hacks. Well over a century later an increase in literacy unleashed a deluge of words: journalism, criticism, short stories, society gossip, 3 volume novels, etc. That situation bears a striking resemblance to our own post-literate period when an endless and confounding cascade of images, sound bytes, memes, and other audio-visual debris chokes consciousness. The marriage plot figures prominently in New Grub Street’s moral economy, though not precisely as we might expect.