Demos

by George Gissing

edited by Debbie Harrison

Subtitled ‘A Story of English Socialism’, Demos is set in the London of 1885-6, during a period of great social unrest. Gissing’s authenticity in describing working-class life was commended by Charles Booth, and the Trafalgar Square riots of the following year compounded the novel’s topicality.

Although Gissing intended to offer a critique of socialism, the novel’s strength lies in his own ideological contradictions with which he struggles and articulates through his characters. The plot combines Gissing’s predominant themes of class, sex and money, centred around the inheritance of a mining estate, which ends up in the hands of a young proletarian socialist.

Demos has been described as one of Gissing’s finest novels, and this will be the first critical edition since 1982.

The text is that of the first edition published by Smith, Elder in 1886, and will also include:

• a critical introduction
• further reading
• George Gissing chronology
• explanatory notes

Debbie Harrison is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London, where she is currently working on her monograph, A Victorian Hangover: Narratives of Addiction 1830-1900. Her research focuses on the interface between literature, medicine and social science in the nineteenth century.

Forthcoming in Autumn 2010.

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Victorian Secrets also publishes Workers in the Dawn.