Commonplace 25   George & His Health. So Much More Than Man Flu.

Aesculapius - Greek God of Healing

George suffered from a range of ailments over his relatively short life, cataloguing them in the Diaries, along with any treatment or intervention used. This might seem like a morbid way of carrying on - guaranteed to depress anyone. Before the time of antibiotics, x-rays and all manner of medicines we now take so for granted, most diseases were not fully understood or diagnosed. Syphilis, the 'great imitator' was often mistaken for cancer or any form of TB. I recently totted up the number of skin lesions syphilis is still routinely mistaken for - and stopped at 28. click and follow link for complete article

In a time of poor standards of health amongst the vast majority of the population, it is easy to see why everyone must have monitored the state of their own health - and that of their associates - obsessively, especially within the middle class who had the education to research their ills and the money to pay for cures. Indeed, over the course of his recorded life-story, so often is George ill, that it is a remarkable thing when he records he feels well.

Over the counter American cure
circa 1878.

One of the first bits of intelligence on record about George's state of health is that infamous letter from John George Black back in the Owens days. John writes not exactly in great distress, to consult George about the state of his penis. It appears George is a penis health expert, having been afflicted with some sort of malady in that direction, himself. Odd that George, ever the prude should discuss his private parts with another fellow (a very modern notion, I always presumed), but there is 'nowt as queer as folk' - as they say in Yorkshire. As George had a background of sorts in medicine by being the son of a dispensing chemist, presumably he was in a good position to feel such matters as sexual health advice were very much his sphere of expertise. We are talking of spring 1876 when George was 18. John is a little older, but a whole lot less knowledgeable because it is the older chap who needs guidance about the blebs on his penis, and some sort of supplementary advice about what George had to do about his own infection - assumed to have been treated by Dr Wahltuch. Was John George what might be termed a bad influence, or was it the other way round?

George had gastric problems which might have been a bit of wheat intolerance.

We know George had phthisis, the pulmonary form of TB, because he tells us he has it. Worries about his chest in the form of bronchitis, catarrh, coughs, sore throats, endless colds - does George hold the record for the number of sore throats suffered by any writer in the English language? A sore throat and a cold seemed to break out at every change in circumstance or fleeting weather condition, change of location, sea voyage, train ride, long walk, lack of long walk.... Wind, sun, rain, snow - all brought George out in some sort of ailment. And then there were the mystery complaints with no real specific features - generalised anxieties, feelings of doom and unwellness, emotional crises, suicidal thoughts, various skin rashes, lumps... All these seemingly trivial ailments could have been systemic TB - but could just as easily have been the signs and symptoms of syphilis. Generalised feelings of unwellness, vague sensations in bodily systems...  mighty suspicious.


George also complained of trouble with 'rheumatism' in his shoulders. Apart from the cold and damp living conditions he sometimes endured, and the wet weather of wherever he walked, the endless weight of wet clothes, also the posture sat at the writing desk, or in an armchair could produce trouble with the joints and muscles. However, in George's day, the term 'rheumatism' meant aches and pains generally and did not refer to a specific condition. Nowadays, there is no such thing as 'rheumatism' as a diagnosis - it is referred to as 'rheumatoid disease'. It is not a result of living on wet foundations or wearing wet clothes or feeling the cold - it is an auto-immune condition with no known aetiology, presenting as swollen and painful joints. Did George have this? Auto-immune disease is not a twenty-first century condition so it is possible he had a form of it, contracted from any one of the predisposing factors of stress, immune reaction to viruses and diseases, even environmental pollutants. click for more

What about his tendency to solitude and solitary fretting?

We know George physically isolated himself from company refusing most of the social invites he received. More pernicious was the removing himself emotionally and sympathetically from his fellow human beings - his loneliness was deep-seated anomie. Such a dislocation of social interactions and the self-imposed solitude must have affected his wellbeing. This is a characteristic of the tertiary stage of syphilis - but there is no hard evidence this was the actual cause of his antisocial tendencies. However, he began this attitude early in his adult life, about the time that syphilis might begin to impact on personality, and so these changes might have alerted him to the possibility he was approaching the latter stages of the disease. He often spoke of dying young - was this because William, his brother, had died very young, and his father, too? Was George afraid the signs of syphilis might prove shameful if his friends discovered them. Whenever there were eruptions or manifestations of systemic disease, it would be embarrassing to turn up for a social event, and have the women scared off by his disease. Men of the world like Frederic Harrison would not have over- reacted, but Mrs Harrison might have had friends she was wanting to shield. Having said that, Harrison probably knew about it and told his wife - they were both intelligent and worldly.

George certainly lived in challenging environments both inside and out of, the home. One thinks of the filth clogging the streets of any large conurbation, the smoke, the cancerous fumes of industry, the filth of the waterways, the dirt of Demos (I am thinking as he would have). Stress will have paid its part in undermining his immune system - something we understand a little of now, but an unknown concept in George's day. Endless worry over real life and making money, fear of his past being exposed, fretting over marital discord, the dreadfulness of servants, the lack of zestful sex, the nationwide lack of interest in Greek poetry, the dread of taint from mixing with inferiors, and the ever-present threat of rain, could have triggered and auto-immune response that brought about the condition, but, what else might it be?


Extra-pulmonary (ie, not situated in the lungs) TB of the bones: Pott's Disease. What George describes as being located in his shoulders, was probably a problem in his spinal column -  Pott's affects the major bones but the thoracic vertebrae are a common seat of degeneration. Towards the end of his life, George was plagued with what he termed 'sciatica' - again, this could be Pott's Disease of the lower back, long leg bones, and the hip girdle. Added to the phthisis symptoms of bronchitis and colds, the bouts of diarrhoea and pains in the groin (inflammation of the testicles 05/10/95!!) - a diagnosis of TB in many of its forms is probable - the skin lesion on his forehead, the problems with his heart - almost every ailment he suffered from can be laid at the feet of TB. And syphilis.

Cures Consumption???

When he was on his 1897 tour of Italy, George contracted what he initially reported as a severe cold but which was, in fact, an exacerbation of his phthisis in the right lung - 'that old enemy' is how he describes it. His physician, Dr Sculco, recommended a double dose of quinine powders, which George took - and then tripped out on the side effects. he suffered fever and
delirium:
I saw wonderful pictures, beginning with pictured vases, and sepulchral tablets, and passing on to scenes of ancient City life, crowded streets, processions, armies etc. The remarkable feature was the bright and exquisite colouring of everything. Marvellous detail, such as I could not possibly imagine of myself. Scenes succeeded each other without my ever knowing what would come next. A delight - in spite of my feverish suffering. Lovely faces, on friezes, tombs, and vases. Landscape flooded with sunshine.

Perhaps quinine working on the brain - or was it perhaps the beginnings of the brain variant of TB that pre-empted his first wife's heroic struggle or the neurosyphilis/paresis I suspect caused Edith's mental collapse? Quinine was routinely prescribed for syphilis in its tertiary stage; symptoms of tertiary syphilis, with a slow onset, might explain George's frequent severe headaches, the insomnia that left him exhausted, the lack of application to his work, the obsession with Veranilda and its research, the lack of feeling for his fellow beings (but not animals) the depression of affect that dogged him and made life so difficult - even his deteriorating eyesight. it would explain why he tried so many cures - all the latest fads he followed - from creosote to cod liver oil, from vegetarianism to cold baths - and all the stuff Gabrielle recommended in her letters. Who knows how he contracted TB - probably way back in his childhood, in those Wakefield chemist shop days, perhaps, or walking the spit-streaked streets of Manchester, London, Boston, Chicago. He contracted syphilis at Owens College - when he was not much more than a boy. No wonder he was messed up in his mind about so many things - Fate had dealt him a severe blow.

Say 'Ah'.

Like many men, George was not mentally equipped to handle ill-health, despite his close association with it, and his home circumstances did not support adequate nursing care. This is what did for Marianne, of course: chronic illness played out in an environment of great adversity. I wonder if he ever gave her a second thought after her death? When he was laid up in agony and lonely fear of death, did he ever wish he had been more supportive - more sympathetic - to her? Did he come to understand her more deeply? Towards the end of his life, those last few years with Gabrielle, when he had ensured he had a helpmate to care for him, did he ever wish he had been more... kind-hearted... to his first wife? Marianne was denied nursing care at the end: 15/- a week does not stretch to paid staff. As he revised and cut and paste his diaries, did he consciously expunge the entries that demonstrated his lack of feeling towards her? Did shame for how he treated her bring him to decide to destroy all reference to Marianne - not because of her past but because of his heartlessness? Of course, that self-serving stage-managed description of the pathos of her Dickensian death scene and burial arrangements was kept in (probably reworked for maximum effect) so that posterity might be led to believe he did all he could for her. Frankly, Mr Gissing: No, you didn't. At your end you had friends and loved ones around you. Heroic Marianne had no-one.

World TB Day is always March 24th - to commemorate the discovery of the TB bacillus by Robert Koch (1882).
For fascinating info on TB:
http://tbsymptoms.net/
AND
http://www.slideshare.net/ashrafeladawy/history-of-tb

All medicine ads come from the Wellcome Institute website http://www.wellcomecollection.org/tonics-and-curatives/?image=25

George's Diary is the usual one with the very long title ed. Pierre Coustillas, bless him.

Commonplace 24         George & Finding the Muse of Henry Ryecroft.



George led something of a sheltered life and so the dictum 'write about what you know' severely hampered the breadth of his subject matter. As a perpetual outsider and voyeur of life; as a solitary reader and a lonely boulevardier in cities, and sometime solo country rambler, George was not best equipped to write tales of human interaction. As a man habituated to not expressing his feelings and thoughts, yet adept at inventing his own history and glossing over his actions, perhaps the novel was the only way to externalise the inner dialogue that, at times, threatened to destabilize his mental wellbeing.

His stories tell of small lives lived intimately in terms of physical space; often, characters are not able to break out emotionally or psychically into full life. The sheer weight of mundane, trivial events bears down on some characters driving them to fatal plunges into waterfalls or lonely relocations to moribund places (as in his Art so in his life) where death will come as a relief in the end - anything to break the dreadful spectre of ennui. Henry Ryecroft, I suspect, was not far from self-murder when he conceived of his memoir - a long suicide note, if ever there was one: the pointlessness of it all, the cod sum of it all wisdom which was really nothing more than banal musings of a conservative and closed-off made-up mind purloining ideas from Ruskin and Japanese haiku and then transplanting them to a fake rural idyll. Maybe £300 pa does buy you nothing more than mediocrity. And, if Ryecroft has a point it is that the artist needs the grit of adversity to make the pearl of a work of art - having an income behind him stopped George's flow of artistic juices, as much as did a decline in health. Or, was it that George was, after all that fuss, a natural born reader, not a natural born writer? 


Ennui by Walter Sickert 1909

Of course, some readers think Ryecroft is autobiography and good luck to them if they do. Some people want to believe that was how George really saw his life. But, to withdraw from the world is the dream of a person desperately seeking to gain control of what he cannot conquer and rule - if you can't beat 'em: avoid 'em. Might it not be better to address the control freakery and change the mindset? George did admit in his later life - to Gabrielle - that he was wrong about some things (that 'love' between man and woman was the 'Crown of Life' - what risible tosh! Was he really such a chronic under-achiever??) but maybe only because he desperately needed a nurse companion to get him through to the end, and so he had to counter all her reservations especially regarding the emancipation of women.


Often in George's stories there is no place of intimate connections to an emotional human landscape. Characters are suffocated as much by their relationships as by their constrained surroundings of space and poverty. This forms part of the meta text of George's writings - the big issues are class and money, failed ambition and being born at the wrong time in the wrong place; beneath this is the personal ordeal of lack of meaning and connection; disappointment and compromise. Lack of direction is also a defining feature for some male characters - Piers Otway, Waymark, Rolfe, for example, don't really have a life plan - they drift through events in a state of existential torpor until something happens for them to react to, often because they have money to see them through. Decisions - affirmative action - are denied them, mainly because they have removed themselves from the mainstream of life - not to complete some higher aim but to avoid occupying some less than satisfying other mental place. George's characters are often victims of their own failure to engage with Life, sterile of dynamic masculine intention. Often, it is only the women who put up a fight - Ida Starr, for example. But George has to punish her for this rebellion - she must comply if she is to be brought into the fold - she must be made to feel inferior (in a way doing Harriet Smales' work for her) before she can be allowed to rise above it. 

Boy by the Sea by Hippolyte Flandrin 1864

 Making decisions in his real life deeply influenced this need to make his characters suffer. In an age than valued success (in a very twenty-first century way) a man who made wrong choices would have felt emasculated: a failure. George made many bad choices and was 'punished' severely for them. The ramifications of defeat warped him, and turned him from a brave idealist to a cringing cynic whose dream (if Ryecroft is real) was to hide and fade away. Standing and fighting was not George's style (as some critics who knew him observed). Only in his writing does he attempt to engage - in an environment entirely controlled by himself - his individuality in asserting itself. His public persona is all about conformity: if you look the part, you are the part. George recognised this in himself - he wasn't stupid! All through his Paris holiday with Mr Plitt he moans about his own lack of assertiveness; his diaries are cross-referenced admissions of contradictions between what he thinks and what he says out loud; what he wants to do and what he actually does. His mind never rests; he never seems at peace with himself. Ryecroft was his imaginary world where all this was resolved; where harmony was restored. But, it wasn't real. What is omitted is the burden of guilt for wrong deeds done from selfish motives - of acts of treachery and stupidity and mindful resentments. Ryecroft a true story?  

The Muses. From the left: Calliope, Clio, Euterpe, Erato, Melopomene. Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, Urania. Where are they when you need them? Women, eh!! Up the Mall shopping for caligae. This is Roman 2nd century CE from the Louvre.

Making the choice to write for a living was a decision that may not have worked in George's favour. It is tempting to view him as not a naturally creative character - his early successes at school and college were often the product of sheer hard graft and did not require more divine inspiration. Application was not a problem, but the arduous duty of it tended to reinforce the most rigid of his personality traits, rather than liberate the muse of creativity. Fiction writing was not necessarily his first skill because it seems George was a talented painter when younger (some of his most immersive writing is painterly descriptive. almost filmic), and a gifted critic of Dickens. He liked ideas - often his stories are set slightly in the past so his audience would already have the information in their heads before he took them on the journey not as a pioneer explorer but as a thinking person's tour guide. Instead of bringing new points of view, he debated what was already common currency. Even Morley Roberts sometimes tired of the endless chat about the 'intellectual' subjects George preferred; did he ever stand his ground and say 'For feck's sake, Gissing: lighten up!'? 

In the 'whirlpool' of late Victorian life, George took us to that little house and garden where Ryecroft sheltered awaiting death. The world was out of control around him (another twenty-first century notion) and so he disappeared into a quiet backwater retreat. In reality, George did no such thing: he started a new life in France (another bad decision, but what can you do when circumstances dictate?) and tried to offset the effects of deteriorating health by focusing on Veranilda, a project of personal joy. That little house in the country would not have suited him, even if it had been in leafy Devon. George was not cut out for happiness. Adversity was his domain, his default action was to battle through. As Oscar Wilde says: There are only two tragedies in Life: one is not getting what one wants; the other is getting it.' 

Henry Ryecroft lived here and went mad, eventually blowing his brains out with a revolver. You can just make out the mush of his medulla oblongata adorning the inside of the windows to the rear façade, very much in the spirit of William Morris. Here, creepy Thomas Kinkade offers, for the aesthetically infertile and visually impaired, all that is ersatz about Ryecroft - in a jigsaw.

Commonplace 23     George & Gabrielle - Happy Birthdays Yous Twos!

                Gabrielle was born on November 21st; George on November 22nd.

George always remembered birthdays, though he didn't much mark his own except in a doomy sort of way.



'You want a 'Full English' as a birthday treat? Is that a euphemism for bum sex?' she ejaculated.

'Not in Wakefield, it isn't, madam!' came the indignant reply. 

Famously, George moaned about the food Gabrielle served up in France (and such small portions!). Did he never think to cook his own viands?? Or was what he wanted unavailable in the shops? What he wanted was the Roast Beef of Old England, by Hogarth:

This is Hogarth's comment on his second visit to France in the summer of 1748, when he was arrested as a spy while sketching the arms of England on the old city gate at Calais. The contemporary diarist George Vertue records in August 1748 that Hogarth and Francis Hayman were 'attempting to draw some Views of Fortifications &c. were surprized & clapt into the Bastile. from whence they were soon glad to return to England' ('Vertue Note Books III', Walpole Society, vol.22, Oxford 1934, p.142). Hogarth took his revenge with this painting. The title was taken from a popular tune of the day, which extolled roast beef as the symbol of Britain's wealth and power.

Numerous xenophobic references indicate Hogarth's low opinion of the French. The huge side of British beef at the exact centre of the picture, destined for the English inn at Calais, is neatly balanced by the scrawny French soldier at the other side of the drawbridge. A fat friar, the only well-nourished Frenchman in the picture, covetously pokes the beef. In the right foreground, a starving Jacobite sits with his pathetic meal of an onion and a piece of bread, his overturned cup beside him. The Jacobites, the Scotsmen who fled to France after the unsuccessful Scottish rebellion of 1745, are further symbolised by the black crow which perches atop the stone cross above the drawbridge. In the tableau framed by the gate, a white dove hangs on an inn sign above the cross - a satirisation of the Catholic Church. The fish-wives in the left foreground ridicule a skate whose unpleasantly human features resemble their own. To the left of the gate, framed by vegetables, sits Hogarth himself. As he sketches the drawbridge, the arresting officer's hand clasps his shoulder. (Tate Gallery online catalogue)

This is Douglas Adams - he would have made George smile, and he would have made him realise the Interconnectedness of absolutely everything. 'The Roast Beef of Old England' was a song written in 1731 by Henry Fielding for 'The Grub Street Opera'. See? The Interconnectedness of everything.

When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman's food,

It ennobled our brains and enriched our blood.

Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good

Oh! the Roast Beef of old England,

And old English Roast Beef!

But since we have learnt from all-vapouring France

To eat their ragouts as well as to dance,

We're fed up with nothing but vain complaisance

Oh! the Roast Beef of Old England,

And old English Roast Beef!

Our fathers of old were robust, stout, and strong,

And kept open house, with good cheer all day long,

Which made their plump tenants rejoice in this song--

Oh! The Roast Beef of old England,

And old English Roast Beef!

But now we are dwindled to, what shall I name?

A sneaking poor race, half-begotten and tame,

Who sully the honours that once shone in fame.

Oh! the Roast Beef of Old England,

And old English Roast Beef!

When good Queen Elizabeth sat on the throne,

Ere coffee, or tea, or such slip-slops were known,

The world was in terror if e'er she did frown.

Oh! The Roast Beef of old England,

And old English Roast Beef!

In those days, if Fleets did presume on the Main,

They seldom, or never, return'd back again,

As witness, the Vaunting Armada of Spain.

Oh! The Roast Beef of Old England,

And old English Roast Beef!

Oh then we had stomachs to eat and to fight

And when wrongs were cooking to do ourselves right.

But now we're a . . . I could, but goodnight!

Oh! the Roast Beef of Old England,

And old English Roast Beef!

HG Wells said (rather ungallantly for a such an old flirt) Gabrielle had a 'letterbox' mouth:

A bit harsh, HG

The Kiss by Rodin. A lesser-known version.

 

Members of the Portsmouth Branch of the George Gissing Appreciation Society at the annual meeting to commemorate the birth of their hero, November 2014. 'A Fan' is seated far left.



Commonplace 21  George & The Odd Men   

Eiffel Tower July 1888 George
did not approve of this erection.  

George went to Paris and Italy with Plitt. Just 'Plitt' - actually Ernst Konrad Plitt, a German chum of sorts.

On the day before this, October 10th 1888, George records his disgust at his companion wanting to eat at a working man's eating-house full of working classes. It is as good an example of the Gissing joke as we ever going to get:
'Plitt, much astonished that I object to dine in a dirty little eating house, solely frequented by working-people, cries out against my prejudices, 'I don't understand how you ever got any knowledge of workpeople!'  Suppose I had answered: 'I am studying the type at this moment'?

The same day, George records an incident whereby he recommends Gaboriau's 'Petit Vieux des Batignolles' to Plitt, who dismisses it as mere pulp fiction. This is a detective story written in 1876, told from the standpoint of a doctor who assisted a brilliant freelance detective - ten years before Watson assisted Holmes in 'A Study in Scarlet' (Sherlock Holmes' first outing, written in '86, published in 1887); George had noted an account of the 'Jack the Ripper' case in the Petit Journal on October 2nd, so murder was on his mind - Plitt being the reason, no doubt! George admired Petit Vieux' twists and turns - it is a great little read, well worth a look.

Plitt annoys George almost hourly. Plitt says he deplores English as a poor language for pathos - good for science and business and comic plays and not much else, he reckons. 'An English tragedy is impossible', George records him saying. 'What price Shakespeare?' you can almost George ask. In the same entry, George muses on his own 'weakness' when it comes to standing up for himself when dealing with others - always letting others' wishes outflank his own. He is still doing the washing up, and waiting outside shops when Plitt is buying cheap tat - he writes: 'I never dare say what I think, for fear of offending him, or causing a misunderstanding. And this has so often been the case my whole life. Therefore, it is that I am never at peace save when alone.' This is a contributory cause for so much of the bother George experiences in life - and it's such an English affliction - always reluctant to give offence or complain, or to say truths when white lies seem best. The concept of good manners demands it. But, 'suffering in silence' is a fast track to neurosis and a killing spree with an AK47, as we twenty-first century folks know only too well.

The Louvre was a consolation. He hated this by Alphonse Marie Adolphe de Neuville:

But this gave him 'pleasure';

This, I feel, says more about George and his love of all things Rome rather than his rather predictable taste in Art. Are there enough ladies to go round here? I suspect George is the lonely figure on the far left, much as Morley Roberts described our hero at their first meeting: sat on a table, swinging his legs.

By October 16th, George is back with a sore throat and a cold - his last bout of this sort of thing was September 26th, less than three weeks before. Something is very wrong with George's health - these colds and sore throats could be caused by smoking his infernal pipe, or from being a mouth breather (not everyone breathes through their nose if the nose if damaged or affected by changes such as nasal polyps); it might also indicate a lowered immune system caused by stress; or bacterial infection from, for example, tooth decay or poor oral hygiene. (There is also the possibility of more serious causes, but I will save that for another post.) He tells us it is so bad he has to get up and 'make hot water' - boil a kettle, to you and me. To this he adds ammonia - a commonly-used (what we now call) antibacterial used to clean things - this tended to also apply to its medicinal uses: if people wanted to clean themselves out either end! 

Mr Plitt faints clean away at being asked to do the washing up.

Monsieur Gissing 

Plitt once again annoys by saying he would rather see the New Circus that the Oedipus play George has been to see, and by looking in more second-hand shops. Plitt is definitely ahead of his time - Dadaism and the 'Ready Mades' of Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, the collages of Braque and sculpture of Picasso, the works of Joseph Cornell and the assemblages of Robert Rauschenberg and Peter Blake, the ephemera collections of Andy Warhol and the re-imaginings of Goya by the Chapman Brothers would have appealed to him. George would poke his own eyes out rather than look at any of that (how very Oedipal) crappola!

George bought a little copy of this to send to Madge for her birthday. Doesn't the lion look like George?
La Cruche Casee by Greuze.

There is an incident with manky jam (can jam go manky?) that sends Plitt to spit in the fireplace and George to reflect on how awful and common he is - Plitt has been relegated to be George;s view of the epitome of the common oik. It is a failure of interpretation rather than a misuse of sociology - did George ever ask Plitt why he collected scraps of ephemeral tat? Did he ever ask him why he holds ideas that so radically differ from his own? Not as a complaint but as a genuine fact-finding mission? To know someone else, we have to have more than our own subjective information - though George is not good at this side of the social sciences. You don't even need empathy to ask a question. 'Live and Let Live' is not George's style, is it?

'Plitt rather more endurable this evening, soothed by a purchase he has made of some execrable chromos. A vulgar nature notably reveals itself in the want of suavity where trifles are concerned'. If only George had thought about this and applied it to himself!

On a more serious note, it does illustrate how tension rises in George (already the world's most uptight individual) when he is up against anything he cannot 'tame'. How picky he becomes, how mean-spirited, unpleasant, judgemental, critical, dismissive, negative, cruel, spiteful - imagine how Marianne aka Nell and Edith had to cope alone with him (at least Gabrielle had Maman). Everything they thought or did or said must have been subjected to the closest scrutiny and judgement by one who thought he was the arbiter of all taste and ideation. And then, subjected to change, of course - modified to conform to George's ideal of what things should be. Did he sit them down and give them feedback? The old 'praise sandwich' - 'I liked the thing you did with the lentils, but you are still a bit short of a good standard with your reading aloud of Tennyson and making effective use of RP, however, on the good side once more, your ironing was spot on'. No wonder they rebelled and no wonder he tried to use force on them - male ego force (I'm not suggesting he hit them but I am sure he considered it as a 'language they would understand' - as a wife beater might justify it. Maybe he did...). One thinks of the misguided, heartless Widdowson (The Odd Women) and to a certain degree, the (vile, to my mind) oleaginous Harvey Rolfe (The Whirlpool) as George's mouthpieces for a force of 'superior' (but only in the physical) strength when affection and charismatic charm would have moved mountains and gotten them all much further.

George continues his solo outings to the Louvre.

This is the Madonna with the Donors by Van Dyke that George writes about in his diary on Thursday October 25th:

'Looked long at the Van Dyke in the last section of the Grande-Galerie; a burgher and his wife kneeling before the Madonna and child; the man kisses the child's hand. The couple have good, honest faces; the husband oldish and world-worn, something pathetic in his look and attitude. The Madonna's face very beautiful, and the kind of beauty that I like; of course not describable.'

The same day, George goes looking for a sculpture Bertz asked him to look up - an allegorical piece about 'the soul combating with the flesh'. George assumes it will be a 'nymph in the hands of a satyr'; this is what it turns out to be:

Not sure what this says about George or Eduard. However, the encounter with it empowers our man and he, for once, stands up for his rights with Mr Plitt. He refuses to add another two weeks to their stay in Paris (as Plitt suggests) - he is aching for Italy. Reading Goethe has been enticing him to get a move on and get there. Plitt annoys him some more and they eventually leave Paris on the way south. George's first trip to Italy - an event of such magnitude he never really got over it - in a good way!


They set sail from Marseilles on October 28th and arrived in Naples on the 30th. They did not share a bunk. Or a bunk up.

Commonplace 19           George & Remembrance Sunday.  For Walter.

Queen's Westminster Rifles Officer Uniform of the time.

Positions on July 1st.

Some of the lads.

Every one some mother's son.

Gassed by John Singer Sergeant 1919

Commonplace 18        George & His Genius - His Short Stories Are So...

I'm not averse to pondering the flaws in George's alleged 'heroic' status - to me, making fanciful claims he was anything but an ordinary man struggling like most of us, sometimes failing, sometimes falling, sometimes flying like a bird, seems to diminish him, rather than exult him. If George is 'heroic' then we all are. Artists - and George considered himself an artist so we can take it that he was - don't need to be eulogised - their work represents the best of them; their lives shine a light, (sometimes a very dim one) on the artistic process, but the impulse, the genie of creation cannot be defined except by the work itself. And, I am against the fetish for perfection in all things. Whoever said Art (or a life) has to be perfect or fully-formed? George's flaws are more interesting than his triumphs. Take the short stories, for example.  

Perverse, creepy, spiteful, unpleasant, petty, cruel, snobby, vengeful, some of them so downright peculiar, you wonder what kind of mind could come up with them - and then, what possessed that misanthropic mind to write them down. Very odd, some of them, and, I suspect, not necessarily intentionally so. However, one of the joys of George - and possibly his greatest strength - is his ability to send the reader off into realms of inner and outer exploration and inquiry. You simply can't take George 'lying down' - you have to intellectually and emotionally 'engage'; you have to work at him, or he will seem bleak, pessimistic and mundane, and you need to think! Only an illiterate fool would describe him as a 'minor' English writer.  

Fleet-Footed Hester, is well worth looking at more closely. George's possible starting point was the mythic. Is Hester based on Esther of Jewish lore who was forced to compete in a beauty contest to win the hand of a king, and who turned out to be the ultimate heroine who saved her people? Or is she based on Ovid's Metamorphoses - the myth of Atalanta and Hippomenes? The poet Algernon Swinburne, in his 'Atalanta in Calydon' (1865) wrote this line: 'Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid '. Perhops George wanted to pay homage to Swinburn the classicist. Perhaps he wanted to impress Clara Collet, who was (unlikely as it might seem) a famed runner in her youth - he wrote the story about the same time he and Clara were getting to know each other. 

In , Atalanta made her suitors compete at her sport (which John does not do in the short story) and Hippomenes tricks her into losing - which John, again, does not. In fact, he is open and honest with her, and we have no sign of him being a sportsman on any level. Hester is, in F-FH, a 'noble savage'. She is 17, working class, physically mature for her age and much admired with suitors prepared to lose their front teeth in a fight defending her honour - and she is the girl who expects them to. Her father is a sergeant in the army. At the time the story is set, the area where Hester lives was home to the 2nd Tower Hamlets Militia Rifles, and there was a Militia Barracks off Brougham Road. He did not get permission to marry his wife. This implies an illicit union - then as now, service personnel have to ask for permission to wed or live off barracks - so maybe papa lived out of the home.

Hester hails from Hackney - not 'ackney' because we are told her speech is refined-ish (George so hated the London accent that he tried so hard to beat out of Edith - not literally, we hope!). She has an 'elemental', not a 'degraded', mind (no idea what that is); is not well educated, or even bright, she has no sense of humour (do any of George's women ever have a sense of humour? It's by virtue of a sense of humour that most women manage to put up with their men!) and works in a pickle factory (odd to think you could work in a pickle factory and not have a sense of humour!). This implies the working class stink of vinegar George so hated. There was a pickle factory in Hackney's Chatham Street not far from the town hall, named rather amusingly Brother Bungs (since demolished and the site now used as a housing estate) - perhaps Hester worked here.

Of course, she is not an everyday work girl. She is unconventional in manner and dress - and is what would now be termed, 'feisty'. She likes her men tall dark and handsome, but above all, he who would win her heart must be well-endowed - financially, at least. Running was her thing - improbable as that may sound, to the point of being highly unbelievable, but we go with it. She competed with men runners at London Fields - this is the chunk of countryside where the herds and flocks of animals travelling from the farms were rested on their way to the slaughterhouses of the East End - a sign of future calamity? Hester, we learn, has the appetite of a ploughboy - we assume we are talking food. She is clean, dresses demurely and 'respects her body'. Tellingly, Hester cannot be bothered with domestic chores like ironing and starching - positively sluttish, in the world of George, tantamount to a doxy lost cause reprobate off to Hell in a handcart. Boy, does this girl need taming!

Love's Shadow by Frederick Sandys 1867

Her beau is John Rayner. Described as her 'male complement' (though that is hard to swallow as he is a bit of a macho lump with Cro-Magnon ideas of feminism), described by his creator as intelligent, but ill-educated, handsome and butch, full of 'animal passions' (can we take this to mean sexually potent if not predatory?), initially, not a reprobate (because he keeps his addictive personality/demons in check) earns good money, and would be an average Joe except for one thing: 'for him to fall in love meant something beyond the conception of common men'. Only uncommon men like George, could possibly feel true love - and no species of woman. John Rayner (we are never told Hester's second name) is capable of 'fiery worship' (!) which puzzles Hester, who is 'as yet by no means ripe for respondent passion' (George has such odd ideas about real people - coming from his lack of ever meeting any, I suppose).

Female athletes early 4th c Villa Romana del Casale Piazza Armerina Sicily

John is a gas works foreman, so we can presume he worked for the real world Imperial Gas Works, but we don't know if he worked in the Regents Canal site or the one on Gloucester Street (this one is now Haggerston Park) - these two were within spitting distance of each other. Gas was replacing whale oil as a source of lighting fuel (and helped save the whale from extinction) so both sites would have used cutting edge technology born of industrial nous and science, two of George's tender spots. All that burning of coke and the allied industries of chemical manufacture was a Vulcan-like existence not unlike a forge or a furnace, very 'dark satanic mills' territory. It was noisy, dirty and smelly, and required the constant traffic of raw materials along the Regents Canal - a filthy soup of effluent and industrial waste. Burning day and night, spewing smoke and dust, the gas works would have been a polluting and chest-aggravating soupy-aired environment of carcinogenic toxins. The gas works is not far from Wilton Square where Richard Mutimer was born and raised - just a bit along the canal towpath. In the other direction, is the Cat and Shoulder of Mutton Bridge.

The Cat and Shoulder of Mutton pub at the bridge. Hester is bound to have run past or even popped inside.

Hester is drawn to John because he earns £4 a week, is much stronger, better-looking and more 'authoritative' than his competitors. When does George ever stop banging on what women are drawn to? Did he ever, I wonder, sit one of us down and ask her what she wanted? Money equates to sexual potency to Mr Gissing - pure Freudian projection, of course, but this is George's world of reality, not mine. Schopenhauer had told him - along with Comte, Nietzsche, Darwin, Rousseau, Ruskin, Michelet et al that women need to be dominated (which is biblical and misogynistic more than it is scientific or sociological but it suited George to think it was deeply philosophical). £4 a week is worth, in terms of wages about £50k today - not bad for a single chap of the working class with no expensive vices to fund.

John is up front/straight with his gal: no more running races for you, lady, and no more pickle factory! She agrees. Then she rebels. Then she defies him. He is incensed; they fall out. They reunite but John has become a suspicious, possessive control freak (that is, more of a control freak) and he suspects a rival: 'a paper-hanger's assistant smelling of hair oil and insolence' (I bet George loved writing that) - a weed of a man, and not a big butch gas worker with a very large income. He is the subsequent loser of teeth, one Albert Bachelor. Hester dangles Albert in front of John to make him jealous. It works. She tells John to be less up himself and control freaky (in the parlance of our times) but this makes him angrier. They fall out and she throws her engagement ring at him (sounds unlikely as, legally, she would be allowed to keep it and sell it - still, she is headstrong... and they are in Victoria Park.) He demands she return his letters and gifts (typical!). What was in those letters? Details of the fiery worship practices he wanted to visit upon her?

 

Neither does well out of this stalemate. Hester becomes a fleet-footed floozy (attending the Standard Theatre) and John becomes a splenetic malcontent at work, eventually being sacked, then descending through a drunken haze down the ranks to the level of the lowest of the low, a loader of coke (a stoker, really) and then, a dirty, coarse, violent, blackguard who sleeps rough in Victoria Park - during the day. It is implied that Hester either doesn't care about this or is quite triumphant at it.



Hester visited this theatre when enjoying a night out.  Famed for having real boats and real waterfalls, live horses and special FX in its plays and shows.



When they randomly meet, she shuns him. He despairs, but an associate of his and a friend of Hester's updates his 'profile page' regularly and tells the fleet-footed one that John really cares for her, and that she - the speedy minx - is to blame for his decline. (It is always the woman's fault, is it not? Ironical!)

'He's awfully fond of you'.

'How do you know?'

'Why, cos he always says he don't care for you not a bit'. (This IS love beyond the conception of common men. And women. And George when he erased Nell from his diary.) 

Long short story short, John is about to leave 'for the Cape', Hester finds out and sees the error of her ways, finally allowing the reader to understand the need for speed in the story - she runs all the way to Waterloo Station double quick to meet him and tell John she wants to marry him. We are treated to the drama and excitement of her route, the obstacles she bests (are these the golden apples Atalanta is charmed by when Hippomenes lays them for her to find?), her desperate struggle to win the race with destiny. Finally, Evolution prevails: she arrives, breathless, on the right platform, having run like the wind. She finds him because he finds her. 'She caught him by the hand in which he held his stick' is how George symbolically defines her total capitulation and his acceptance of the right to subjugate her - a sign of his male authority and a weapon with which to beat her if she steps out of line? Or simply his (pre-Freud) phallus? She blurts out her proposal of marriage. Taking advantage of her winded state - the final acceptance of her inferior weakness (see, running is bad for you, you little fool!) and her fate - he seizes the initiative buys her a ticket, sweeps her aboard the train and she wakes up to this new reality as they pass through Vauxhall (where the highly gorgeous Regency pleasure gardens once amused and entertained the whole world, but by Hester's time, an area of slums and a small, tatty park - a metaphor for her impending, inevitable misery?). The sun rises in the east, behind them. Ominously?

The Last of England by Ford Maddox Brown 1855

 George wrote Fleet-Footed Hester in 1893 when he and Edith and little Walter were living in deepest Brixton 'sarf' of the river. Any hope of harmony between the couple would have been laid to rest by now, and the awful truth for both of them would have dawned.  



That's the way to do it - this is how to use a stick, Mr Punch.



What is Fleet-Footed Hester about? Did George base his tale on Ovid's, or was he reflecting on his own life? This, perhaps..:

John (George) and Hester (Nell) meet and are mutually attracted (maybe he more than she). He values her innocent beauty, her innate grace, and the 'force of Nature' she represents. All the lads admire her and so to win her will demonstrate to his peers his superior qualities - in a  way that literary prizes cannot. She likes the thought of his financial security (he always seems to be buying drinks for people and his shopaholic book-buying is almost pathological) and she thinks (knows) she won't get a better offer. He is a bit up himself, way too serious, and always quoting poems and reading books at her, but she can live with a bit of weirdness. His sense of humour is very dry (he's from Yorkshire) and often involves Greek poets - in Greek! - and he doesn't get her jokes, but he is good-looking and better than the ordinary men she meets (and he has a position in a gas works - obviously a university place ha ha) and there is a little boy lost quality about him that tugs at her heartstrings. And, she does want to get out of the poorly paid and hateful job she has, so she lets him chat her up, flirt a little, buy her a small glass of port. She feels she can warm to his love - which is weirdly obsessive and ardently direct - but at least he has clean habits. He just needs a bit of mothering to make him a really normal, affectionate, loving chap. Trouble is, he is a bit of a know-all when it comes to women. He has read books on them. He 'knows' they have strong undercurrents of savagery that need taming - which he can only erotically fantasize about unless he wins one of his own to experiment on - and so he sets a very high standard for her (which he does with the best of intentions) which involve her giving up fun. When she tries to sneak in a bit of fun behind his back he gets all extra possessive and hyper control freaky - it's his way of proving he's a real man; he's just using the wrong parameters. They argue; she dumps him. He goes to the dogs, and his work suffers for it. A broken heart is a poorly heart. She shows off in public to inflame his jealousy, knocks about with a rival (Mr Bachelor/John George Black?) to make him see what he's missing. It works - he suffers more. There is a showdown between the rutting males - the rival is vanquished, albeit passively, not aggressively. She is quite pleased they both think she is worth fighting over. Still, she has to make a stand and remains cool towards her victorious suitor, agreeing to a little holiday in Southport strictly on her terms. Nothing is promised. Then, one day, she hears he has become quite deranged with what he feels is unrequited love for her, and has fallen so low that his studies are in disarray. Now, he is in prison. She knows how bad he must be feeling . Did he steal money to impress his friends and to win her from his rivals? Well, if he did, then he is a bigger idiot than she thought he was, because she didn't need him to be flash with his cash - all she wanted was him to be more understanding, to be less controlling, to be thoughtful and loving... He now needs her more than she needs him - but it's okay, because she is kind-hearted and realises she loves him. She makes her mind up to be there for him when he comes out. When he is released, she goes to him, but there are obstacles put in her way! His family don't approve of her - they think she isn't good enough for him - the cheek! They would do anything to keep them apart - they blame her for his downfall - o, the injustice! Her good name is besmirched as his family and their supporters try to find ways of putting him off her - they still do! But she is determined to prove his love for her is worthwhile, that it is a thing of beauty the like of which he will never know again. She fights her way to be by his side and finally meets him face to face and tells him she loves him and will do anything for him - and that he did not love her in vain. They plight their troth. He has no choice but to go 'to the colonies' to earn his living as so many disgraced young men have done before. He will send for her when he is established and has the money for her fare... he can't spend what he has been kindly given by well-wishers on a ticket for her. He knows she will wait for him - he carries with him the 'stick' of her guilty conscience and gratitude for what he has sacrificed for her - he knows he can use it against her whenever he chooses. She won't let him down. 

In the myth, Atalanta and Hippomenes ultimately pay a high price for their love and get turned into lions. As the Greeks believed lions could not mate with each other (only with leopards) they were punished for the love they had for each other in a sexless union - Nell's illness and maybe George's?

Is there a moral intended in this tale? Is George musing on his current marriage and comparing what he has with Edith - whom he never loved and by 1893, possibly had begun to hate - with the true love he had with Nell? By this time, he had become the fatalist who chose to think it was the 'cursed nature of things' that determines events - his own version of the Greek goddesses who punish wayward mortals. George had been - let us call it what it was - deranged by his love for Nell but that had been tarnished by adversity and Nell's illnesses - the Fates exerting retribution. And what of the mistakes he made that contributed to the breakdown of his first marriage? Was he, in this story, developing insight? Is he reflecting on the futility - even the immorality - of forcing anyone (even himself) to change what is their nature; when, in trying to  'master' a nature, you risk destroying what it is that you love? But, he had loved and he was loved, by Nell, that pretty little noble savage he never felt he managed to 'civilize'. Did he finally now know he never should have tried? That he loved Nell because she was a force of Nature, not despite it. Fleet-Footed Hester is George reliving the splendour of the time when he was optimistic, tender - and possibly, even a little bit heroic.