On ‘Thin Air’: Money, Metaphoricity & Metatheatre (Essay)

Last year, I gave a talk on literature, money, and trust in George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) which the MotL Editorial Collective kindly shared as a podcast. Gissing’s novel tells the story of a group of writers struggling to survive in the harsh literary marketplace of the 1880s, one in which artistic merit seems to count for very little and authors who wish to achieve success must regard literature as a trade. The two characters who most clearly embody the plight of the artist who cannot ‘supply the market’, Edwin Reardon and Harold Biffen, both die in poverty by the end of the book and, significantly, both recite the same lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest as they approach death: ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.’ This is not simply a coincidence; Biffen is present at the moment of Readon’s death and he later recalls his friend’s last words as he reaches the end of his own life. However, I find the appearance of these lines in this text especially intriguing because they point towards a set of pressing issues in our present-day debates surrounding money.