I, Jonathan Blue

About the Book

My name is Jonathan Blue. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, I worked many hours each day for acceptance as a writer. In my youth, I dreamed of becoming a classical scholar at Oxford or Cambridge. When the fantasy was shattered by a stupid excess of emotion, I attempted to begin a new life in America. A year later, I was living in a London slum with a drunken wife. In grim poverty, I wrote about poor people struggling to survive in slums among the worst in the world. They were my neighbors, and from them came inventive and motive force. In maturity I lived with a delicate and beautiful woman, but in failing health for a short time. Then like a turbulent river, I dashed unimpeded to the sea.

About the Author

As a graduate student James Haydock wrote his doctoral dissertation on George Gissing. When bound and placed in the university library to be used as a reference work, it was a volume nearly three inches thick. Now more than half a century later, Gissing as Jonathan Blue tells the remarkable story of a life bravely lived though not entirely well.