George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

 Commonplace 2        George & Sickness

George Gissing thought you had to be hard to survive in the survival of the fittest world he discovered when he read Charles Darwin. But he was wrong. You have to be tough, George not hard.

George, who never had more than four weeks of what might be termed a ‘proper job’ (i.e. one of manual labour, long hours, dirty, deplorable tasks and with no freedom to stop or go to the toilet or sit down when you want to or go home when you feel fed up), had no sympathy for anyone who completed all those unpleasant little tasks so necessary in making a writer’s life possible – the bookbinder, the docker unloading the tobacco and the coffee, the man who bottled the ink… Each has his/her place in the order of things - Fate reigns supreme sort of thing. When writing his own legend, he claimed living in London slums shaped him to think harshly of the poor, but I think the seeds of his fear of and loathing for the working classes were sown in the early Wakefield days above the chemist’s shop.

George was the son of a pharmaceutical chemist who kept a shop in Westgate in the centre of Wakefield, Despite the pretentions, this was being 'in trade', as Mr Thomas Gissing was a shop-keeper. Wakefield was then a smallish town (it became a city in 1888) with a population recorded in the 1891 census of 23,000. (The 2011 census revealed the population then was 325, 800.) The 1891 figure represents a virtual doubling of the population in forty years from that recorded in the 1851 census.

As can be imagined, this sudden rise in population was a result of the town’s increasing need for a labour force to service the burgeoning industrial landscape. 

To anyone not familiar with English geography and its impact on industry the wetter area to the west of the Pennine range is suited to the cotton industry, the eastern area favoured the wool trade. Wakefield was built on wool and its associated trade in meat, coal (the present day National Coalmining Museum for England is situated in Wakefield), and all forms of heavy and light industry. Wages were just above subsistence level in all industrial cities, and workers were perpetually underfed. Despite the boom times, there was a severe recession in 1867 and many workers were laid off. Typical towns like Wakefield with their speculative schemes thrown up to house the workers, the inadequate provision of sanitation and the lack of free at point of delivery health care suffered from a failing in infrastructure that exacerbated the effects of poverty and deprivation. A chemist’s shop was not just a place to buy medicines it was also a substitute for an expensive doctor, and a dispenser of hope. As the grandson of a Portsmouth chemist puts it:

“Grandfather [Percy Tremlett], when they started up in the early days [1903], they were dentists, opticians and pharmacists all rolled into one. They were a poor man’s doctor is what it boiled down to. They would make the pills and potions and lotions and all the rest of it and extract teeth and sort eyes out at the same time. That all rapidly changed in the 1920s, but the pharmacists had to choose between being a dentist or an optician or a pharmacist.” Bill Tremlett (pharmacist).

Medieval guide to diagnosing wounds 



Thomas Gissing’s clientele would have expected him to examine, diagnose and prescribe for whatever ailed them, and demonstrate the same range of skills as Mr Tremlett. A gifted botanist and a lover of science, George’s father would have made his own medicines according to recipes laid down in commonly available pharmacopoeias, and sell a range of proprietary cures over the counter. 

There was little distinction between mild and severe diseases and conditions, and George would have been exposed to all manner of common ailments, wounds, deformities and physical complaints such as contagious diseases - there were cholera epidemics in Wakefield in 1832 and 1849 - and typhus, diphtheria and measles claimed lives in every large town. George would have seen people with consumption, hideous skin diseases like erysipelas and the results of various industrial accidents, on a daily basis. Surrounded by the poorest in society who would have been visibly unkempt, dirty, malnourished and diseased, it was natural for Gissing and his siblings to keep apart from the customers from fear of catching something.

Gissing’s father died of lung disease in 1870, and William, his brother, died of a pulmonary aneurysm in 1880. George was plagued with bronchitis and a weak chest and developed phthisis (pulmonary tuberculosis) which may have been a contributory cause of his death. His first wife Marianne - known for some of their time together as Nell - died of scrofula that had infected her throat (typical tumour-like lesions on the larynx, inflammation of the tonsils and infection caused tissue swelling that would eventually suffocate the victims), her eyes and bones, and probably her brain.

TB, in particular, was a dreaded disease because of its association with decline and death amongst fairly young victims. Little was known until the twentieth century about the aetiology of the disease, and there were no effective cures until the discovery of antibiotics in the mid-twentieth century. It was said to run in families - Gissing’s second wife, Edith, was horrified when George came back from his doctor and told her he had slight tuberculosis. It was a disease often associated with dirt and poverty, and Edith may well have felt offended on behalf of her own family, who seem to have been taint-free, judging by her claim that George had brought it ’into the house’. It is, of course, as George discovered, no respecter of class. 

The results of scrofula to the face -
permanent scars.
 and further TB