SOURCE: “Jerusalem Artichokes in Gissing's Garden: A Postscript to the Allegorical Readings of ‘House of Cobwebs’,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. IX, No. 1, Winter, 1972, pp. 86-9.

In the following essay, Ware expounds on the allegorical meaning of the Jerusalem artichokes in “The House of Cobwebs.”

In her recent note in Studies in Short Fiction,¹ Miss Elsie B. Adams convincingly makes the point that in “The House of Cobwebs” George Gissing's principal theme is the difficulty (perhaps even the inability) of the artist's survival in the rank domesticity of the middle-class world. Such a world is symbolized in this work by the “cobweby and decaying house,” inhabited—but only on leasehold—by the kindly bourgeois Mr. Spicer, who offers an impoverished young writer a haven while he works on his novel. I would like to suggest that Mr. Gissing, who was not simply the flat realist nor the...