Commonplace 6 George & His Second Wife: the much maligned Edith. Not a comprehensive bio just random thoughts.
George's second wife, Edith, didn't really stand a chance. The day she collided with him - either literally (as in some accounts) or metaphorically, she was as good as done for. The road to perdition starts with one step.
What do we know about her? She was ten years, more or less, younger than George (the same age as his little sister Ellen) and met him when she was 22. She was born in north London, the daughter of either a plasterer or a 'sculptor' in plaster or a stonemason, depending on whose account you read. Most descriptions of her are that she was a 'work girl' meaning, I presume, working class. As her father was in trade, then his social 'status' might have been considerably higher (on a par with Thomas Gissing, for example, who had been 'in trade' in Wakefield) than some biographers would allow. One writer is convinced she was some sort of prostitute when she met George which is ridiculous. There is a Grundyesque current flowing through Gissing studies that seems to equate working class women with sexual vice - then all the other vices, in quick succession. Every unchaperoned girl who meets a man socially must be a whore, they think (they wish?); any woman who seeks out male company must be on the game. It is a snide combination of misogyny and class warfare - or some Freudian reaction formation thing. Another biographer claims Edith probably slept with George before she married him, just because she went to his rooms. Nonsense! After all, did Mrs Gaussen sleep with him when she introduced him to the world of scatter cushions? George was enough of a gentleman to think this sort of behaviour (two adults of any gender alone together) showed emancipated 'pluck' and not a tendency to depravity, and he would be a safe companion with whom to share some couples time without the need for Mrs Grundy to get her knickers in a twist. Of course, if you want to dehumanise Edith, then frame her in terms of vice. That is how biographers justify the vilification of Nell, too.
We know from the biographies that George was lonely and sex starved, and in a previous post I mentioned the possible link between tuberculosis, impotence and enhanced libido. Although it is clear he never loved Edith - and didn't even like her or value her in any way other than as a repository for his sex needs - she was game enough (or foolish enough) to take him on. Did he persuade himself he was in love (as he did with Gabrielle) and did her try to convince her he was (ditto)? He probably made a quick assessment of her (lack) of attributes - applying some sort of Schopenhauerian schema to mark her out of ten, and thought she would be biddable, simple-minded and meek. I am rather glad she was not.
Of course, what he really wanted in a woman (if a middle-class partner was denied him) was a housekeeper with benefits, thereby setting a very low bar for the job of life partner. She just had to have the three things he required - an ability to manage servants, a cooperative nature, and a vagina - and that was enough. He did say this: 'When I have accustomed her to speak without the vile London accent, she will have a reasonably refined mode of speech. I can say with certainty that her instincts are anything but vulgar.' What a snob/knob.
George always thought he knew best: this was possibly his 'grand delusion'. His ideal relationship with anyone was to take base materials and subject them to the Gissing Method for self-improvement, and mould them into the sort of person he thought they should be. No wonder he turned to teaching haha. He did this with his sisters (not much success with Madge so she was sacked off the scheme), with Marianne aka Nell (peremptorily dumped when she failed the course) and anyone he considered to be weaker than himself. I think he deliberately looked for someone vulnerable - as Marianne was - so he could fashion her into 'Nell'. This was the deal: he would save her from herself if only she comply with the programme; she couldn't come up to standard, so he moved on. Incidentally (and to be covered fully in future posts) I do not buy the propaganda that he stopped Marianne being a prostitute. The phrase used is generally he 'saved' her, but saved also means to prevent. I think he thought she might have no other destiny but prostitution because of her dire work situation (the cotton industry was in dire straits so less fabric to sew) so he stepped in to prevent this from happening.
Edith probably wanted a home of her ownto leave home. Single women living at home were tied to the house and the daily grind of home-centric duties must have been depressing. She lived at home with her father, brother and sister and both girls looked after the house, so there would have been little chance to have a life of her own. Like George, she would not have wanted to marry anyone of a lower social class, and so the options for meeting husband material were limited. Nice girls had few social outlets in which to meet prospective beaus, and, on paper, George must have seemed a catch. He was a good-looking young man, still full of vigour and already a published author. My guess is, he will have lied about Marianne, and presented her heroic struggle to his own advantage whilst editing out his contribution to her demise. Still, Edith sensed some troubles ahead - and we know her father wasn't keen on George. This could have been because (as one biographer suggests) marriage would deprive him of his little housekeeper, but I don't agree as her father still had one daughter left to pick up after him. Again, it is lazy of biographers to propose that all working-class motives are selfish and vile. But, then, I would say that as I am from the working-class, myself. I think Edith's father could have intuited George's tendency to a lack sympathy with the 'lower classes' - he might even have borrowed 'Demos' from the library - and also been suspicious of why a mature middle-class aspirational snob might want to marry a humble girl like his daughter.
What was it George really feared from an 'equal' marriage partner? This is a huge topic for another day, but why did he feel he had to take a blank canvass and paint in his version of what a woman should be? Was he really so grossly mechanistic as to think a person can be refashioned, like a Comtean social science experiment? He certainly didn't see others in terms of his fulfilling of their needs for nurture - financial support he readily offered, but not love. When wooing Gabrielle Fleury, he mentions 'love' so often as to render it meaningless save as a ploy to manipulate her into sharing her life with him. Did Edith ever get the chance to say how she resented his patronizing, confidence-eroding, self-esteem shattering criticism of her over trifling things like accent or with whom she socialised? Did he ever listen to anyone - ever?
Edith married George possibly thinking she could survive his funny little ways, and make a life for herself by his side. George seems to have given scant thought to how she might emotionally survive in a loveless environment, especially cut off from her friends and family. They lived in Exeter, initially, which must have been a close-minded little place quite backward compared to the hustle and bustle of London (I lived in Exeter for 10 years, so I know haha) - and chances for Edith to make friends were few. George, who so often complained that it was his lot in life to be lonely and miserable, seems to have not cared about Edith's social needs.
It is very difficult to understand how any woman would fare in his company - again, his arrogant ego probably told him any woman should be grateful to be plucked from the ranks of the lower class to join the lower middle-class. As if this would be every woman's crown of life! But his want of empathy - no doubt fostered by the silly Schopenhauer and vile Pessimism - left him deeply emotionally vacant. If most of the male protagonists in his books share any of the author's characteristics, it is this want of empathy, and perhaps this is why so many think his heroes are autobiographical. They are mostly cold fish who are hugely improved by their women - Ida Starr is the making of Osmond Waymark, for example. But it is rare that a woman is elevated to a higher state of joy or fulfilment by associating with a man in a Gissing outing. In fact, most of his heroines are dragged down by their men, even to the point of suicide. Or madness?
The wooing of Edith consisted of day trips to Richmond Park, rowing (as opposed to 'rowing' as in arguing! That came after the wedding) and the obligatory reading poetry out loud to her - stirring stuff from Browning and Tennyson. There is evidence that the first few months of the marriage were reasonably harmonious. So, what went wrong? Edith was unlucky enough to fall pregnant within the first month, so whatever qualms she felt at the start of the enterprise, she was now, with a child to consider, fully committed to George. Then, there is George, himself: a man used to getting his own way in the household, with scant regard for a wife's tender feelings, someone who thought he knew how to do everything that Edith should have been left to get on with; a man who loathed the 'common' (as he saw it) neighbours, who generally thought a woman's place is wherever her man tells her it is, who thinks women are frivolous, stupid and mostly annoying - a veritable old fogey before his time, who no doubt counted all the pennies (like he did with Marianne) and who probably had a tendency to overrule Edith's every decision - or, at the very least, vet them before she was allowed to follow them through - who no doubt said things like 'Mother always does it this way; Mother thinks ___ about ____.' A man who thought you could live on lentils; who wanted solitude for 15 out of 16 hours waking time, and who probably left his wife feeling lonely and demoralised, rejected and bored, most days; forbidden to socialise or make any sort of noise. A man who consciously and unconsciously employed elements of emotional blackmail and passive aggression to get his way, who probably refused to 'discuss' things because he would regard that as a common 'argument'. A man who must have corrected Edith's every utterance and fed her constant criticism dressed up as improving 'education', making her feel inferior because, to him, she was. That she never throttled him or battered him is a miracle. Perhaps she tried to. Perhaps he wanted her to. His mother would not have stood for it from his father. If one were a hard core Freudian, one would wonder if maybe that was the appeal of Edith - he could punish her when he really wanted to punish his mother.
However, the first major setback to their fraught union seems to have been the birth of Walter in December 1891. After a labour of excruciating suffering, Edith had mastitis and found she couldn't feed her babe. She seems to have been post-partum depressed, but it was Walter's appearance that probably troubled her the most, and I believe set her on a downward spiral to the alleged virago we know from her later years. The wee boy was born looking anything but endearing or cherubic. He had a severe skin rash that gave him enough trouble to ruin his sleep and make him tetchy; a skin lesion or growth over his right eye that made him look ugly, and he was fretful and demanding and always hungry. George implies the poor child's appearance scared the neighbours!
All of this was wearing on Edith's fragile post-natal nerves, but I think the first real insult to her mental equilibrium came when she subsequently developed toothache and then neuralgia so severe it required a visit to a doctor in London; from Exeter, a long way to go for something trivial, so it must have been serious. Was this a touch of scrofula, contracted from George? Scrofula is the glandular for of TB and often first appears in the salivary parotid, sublingual and submandibular of the cheeks and jaw. Glandular TB might even have caused Edith's later and fatal breast tumours, though these were more likely to have been something more sinister.
What did the doctor tell her? That she was diseased? That it was incurable? That the weakened state of her immune system after Walter's birth had precipitated the disease? Did she come to blame Walter and even think he had some form of hereditary taint? Later, when George finally told her he had been diagnosed with 'phthisis' (consumption/TB), he reported that she was most unsympathetic. Bringing TB into the house was a huge issue in the days before a cure - and it was often taken as a sign of low breeding, incestuous coupling and general 'common' lower class filth-ridden behaviour. It is frequently exacerbated by poor diet and weak immunity; Edith would have been horrified to know she had been reduced to it. And, she must have wanted to punish George for not warning her of his illness, or at least, the possibility of it, as his first wife died from the complications of scrofula. She will have lost respect for him if she discovered he lied about his condition before the marriage. If she had thought he loved her, she might have found it bearable; that she knew he didn't, and she was left diseased, that would have been enough of an explanation for the mental illness she subsequently suffered. A mental illness probably caused by the brain variant of TB she caught from George - or a sign of syphilitic paresis?
Did Edith ever ask about Marianne, George's first wife? Did she ever want to know why she died so young, and what she thought of Life With George? What did George tell her?
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| This is what living with George did to a woman |
What do we know about her? She was ten years, more or less, younger than George (the same age as his little sister Ellen) and met him when she was 22. She was born in north London, the daughter of either a plasterer or a 'sculptor' in plaster or a stonemason, depending on whose account you read. Most descriptions of her are that she was a 'work girl' meaning, I presume, working class. As her father was in trade, then his social 'status' might have been considerably higher (on a par with Thomas Gissing, for example, who had been 'in trade' in Wakefield) than some biographers would allow. One writer is convinced she was some sort of prostitute when she met George which is ridiculous. There is a Grundyesque current flowing through Gissing studies that seems to equate working class women with sexual vice - then all the other vices, in quick succession. Every unchaperoned girl who meets a man socially must be a whore, they think (they wish?); any woman who seeks out male company must be on the game. It is a snide combination of misogyny and class warfare - or some Freudian reaction formation thing. Another biographer claims Edith probably slept with George before she married him, just because she went to his rooms. Nonsense! After all, did Mrs Gaussen sleep with him when she introduced him to the world of scatter cushions? George was enough of a gentleman to think this sort of behaviour (two adults of any gender alone together) showed emancipated 'pluck' and not a tendency to depravity, and he would be a safe companion with whom to share some couples time without the need for Mrs Grundy to get her knickers in a twist. Of course, if you want to dehumanise Edith, then frame her in terms of vice. That is how biographers justify the vilification of Nell, too.
We know from the biographies that George was lonely and sex starved, and in a previous post I mentioned the possible link between tuberculosis, impotence and enhanced libido. Although it is clear he never loved Edith - and didn't even like her or value her in any way other than as a repository for his sex needs - she was game enough (or foolish enough) to take him on. Did he persuade himself he was in love (as he did with Gabrielle) and did her try to convince her he was (ditto)? He probably made a quick assessment of her (lack) of attributes - applying some sort of Schopenhauerian schema to mark her out of ten, and thought she would be biddable, simple-minded and meek. I am rather glad she was not.
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| Sorrow by Vincent van Gogh 1882 |
George always thought he knew best: this was possibly his 'grand delusion'. His ideal relationship with anyone was to take base materials and subject them to the Gissing Method for self-improvement, and mould them into the sort of person he thought they should be. No wonder he turned to teaching haha. He did this with his sisters (not much success with Madge so she was sacked off the scheme), with Marianne aka Nell (peremptorily dumped when she failed the course) and anyone he considered to be weaker than himself. I think he deliberately looked for someone vulnerable - as Marianne was - so he could fashion her into 'Nell'. This was the deal: he would save her from herself if only she comply with the programme; she couldn't come up to standard, so he moved on. Incidentally (and to be covered fully in future posts) I do not buy the propaganda that he stopped Marianne being a prostitute. The phrase used is generally he 'saved' her, but saved also means to prevent. I think he thought she might have no other destiny but prostitution because of her dire work situation (the cotton industry was in dire straits so less fabric to sew) so he stepped in to prevent this from happening.
Edith probably wanted a home of her ownto leave home. Single women living at home were tied to the house and the daily grind of home-centric duties must have been depressing. She lived at home with her father, brother and sister and both girls looked after the house, so there would have been little chance to have a life of her own. Like George, she would not have wanted to marry anyone of a lower social class, and so the options for meeting husband material were limited. Nice girls had few social outlets in which to meet prospective beaus, and, on paper, George must have seemed a catch. He was a good-looking young man, still full of vigour and already a published author. My guess is, he will have lied about Marianne, and presented her heroic struggle to his own advantage whilst editing out his contribution to her demise. Still, Edith sensed some troubles ahead - and we know her father wasn't keen on George. This could have been because (as one biographer suggests) marriage would deprive him of his little housekeeper, but I don't agree as her father still had one daughter left to pick up after him. Again, it is lazy of biographers to propose that all working-class motives are selfish and vile. But, then, I would say that as I am from the working-class, myself. I think Edith's father could have intuited George's tendency to a lack sympathy with the 'lower classes' - he might even have borrowed 'Demos' from the library - and also been suspicious of why a mature middle-class aspirational snob might want to marry a humble girl like his daughter.
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| Off by Edmund Blair Leighton c. 1889 She dumped him, poor chap! |
Edith married George possibly thinking she could survive his funny little ways, and make a life for herself by his side. George seems to have given scant thought to how she might emotionally survive in a loveless environment, especially cut off from her friends and family. They lived in Exeter, initially, which must have been a close-minded little place quite backward compared to the hustle and bustle of London (I lived in Exeter for 10 years, so I know haha) - and chances for Edith to make friends were few. George, who so often complained that it was his lot in life to be lonely and miserable, seems to have not cared about Edith's social needs.
It is very difficult to understand how any woman would fare in his company - again, his arrogant ego probably told him any woman should be grateful to be plucked from the ranks of the lower class to join the lower middle-class. As if this would be every woman's crown of life! But his want of empathy - no doubt fostered by the silly Schopenhauer and vile Pessimism - left him deeply emotionally vacant. If most of the male protagonists in his books share any of the author's characteristics, it is this want of empathy, and perhaps this is why so many think his heroes are autobiographical. They are mostly cold fish who are hugely improved by their women - Ida Starr is the making of Osmond Waymark, for example. But it is rare that a woman is elevated to a higher state of joy or fulfilment by associating with a man in a Gissing outing. In fact, most of his heroines are dragged down by their men, even to the point of suicide. Or madness?
 |
| The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis by Cornelius van Haarlem 1593 |
However, the first major setback to their fraught union seems to have been the birth of Walter in December 1891. After a labour of excruciating suffering, Edith had mastitis and found she couldn't feed her babe. She seems to have been post-partum depressed, but it was Walter's appearance that probably troubled her the most, and I believe set her on a downward spiral to the alleged virago we know from her later years. The wee boy was born looking anything but endearing or cherubic. He had a severe skin rash that gave him enough trouble to ruin his sleep and make him tetchy; a skin lesion or growth over his right eye that made him look ugly, and he was fretful and demanding and always hungry. George implies the poor child's appearance scared the neighbours!
 |
| Weeping Woman by Pablo Picasso 1937 (All of his women tended to weep.) |
What did the doctor tell her? That she was diseased? That it was incurable? That the weakened state of her immune system after Walter's birth had precipitated the disease? Did she come to blame Walter and even think he had some form of hereditary taint? Later, when George finally told her he had been diagnosed with 'phthisis' (consumption/TB), he reported that she was most unsympathetic. Bringing TB into the house was a huge issue in the days before a cure - and it was often taken as a sign of low breeding, incestuous coupling and general 'common' lower class filth-ridden behaviour. It is frequently exacerbated by poor diet and weak immunity; Edith would have been horrified to know she had been reduced to it. And, she must have wanted to punish George for not warning her of his illness, or at least, the possibility of it, as his first wife died from the complications of scrofula. She will have lost respect for him if she discovered he lied about his condition before the marriage. If she had thought he loved her, she might have found it bearable; that she knew he didn't, and she was left diseased, that would have been enough of an explanation for the mental illness she subsequently suffered. A mental illness probably caused by the brain variant of TB she caught from George - or a sign of syphilitic paresis?
Did Edith ever ask about Marianne, George's first wife? Did she ever want to know why she died so young, and what she thought of Life With George? What did George tell her?
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