George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

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.