Commonplace 33    George & The Story He Did Write.  PART TWO: The Diaries Version.

In Commonplace 31, I gave a fictional version of Marianne aka Nell's death. In Commonplace 32, I covered George's account based on his letter to Algernon dated March 1st 1888.

Now, let's look at George's version, taken from the Diaries.

The Diary entry background detail: George was on holiday in Eastbourne, joined briefly by Morley Roberts - Roberts plays fast and loose as usual with the facts in his account of this in 'Henry Maitland', but George was alone when he returned to his seaside lodgings to find the telegram: 'Mrs Gissing is dead. Come at once.'

We don't know who sent the telegram - we assume it was the landlady, Mrs Sherlock (I tend to think it was) on finding his address in Marianne's effects. If he was still paying Marianne/Nell directly himself by postal order (as he states in the Letters Vol. Two) and not making use of a solicitor, unless he paid her in cash face-to-face (which he might have done), then George will have been sending her letters every week. There is no reason to suggest these envelopes contained just the PO - there could have been friendly chat to which Marianne replied in letter form. I have always thought he stayed in touch with Marianne because he liked to have female acolytes and Marianne no doubt worshipped the ground he stood on. Paying her directly indicates a significant level of contact with Marianne largely overlooked (ie ignored) by biographers. George kept many valued friendships alive via letters, so writing to Marianne - and receiving her replies - right up to the time of her death, is not what many wish to consider. It would be a way of managing their relationship without either party totally losing out on whatever tenderness had brought them together but minus the need to address realities. We know she often made small needlework items for George and his brothers - and there is no reason to think this stopped when she was living alone - especially as she was beholding to him for her income and would want to celebrate xmas and his birthday.

Would it have come as a shock to him to learn she had been unwell? I doubt it. Lifelong chronic ill-health could only be expected to worsen. This might indicate George was fully aware of just how much her health had declined; though perhaps he didn't realise just how ill she was. And, if Marianne had no time to alert him to the sudden health crisis that claimed her he would be none the wiser about her perilous situation while he took the sea air on the south coast, buying tobacco from the too young Miss Curtis (thirteen years too young but living in a nice house in Eastbourne), aided and abetted for a while by Morley Roberts

Putting his address on the envelope would guarantee the envelope be returned if for some reason it was undelivered. As George makes no mention of uncashed money orders in the list he gives of her effects it suggests these were being regularly cashed by someone. There was a Post Office Receiving House round the corner from Lucretia Street at 151 Waterloo Road, mentioned in the Kelly's of 1859, so this might have been the place Marianne went to cash the orders. There is still a post office on the same site, though nowadays it's a modern parcel office building. Here it is: Weirdly, almost opposite this building both now and in Marianne's day is Holmes Terrace. Mrs Sherlock? Holmes Terrace? A Study in Scarlet (the first Sherlock Holmes outing) was published in 1888... A coincidence? Or is Mrs Sherlock a character in a fiction?

 George's account from the Diary:

Thursd March 1. At 8.30 Roberts and I started for Lambeth. I felt an uncertainty about the truth of the telegram, and Roberts offered to go alone to 16, Lucretia Street, Lower Marsh, to make inquiries. I waited for him, walking up and down by Waterloo Station. He came back and told me that she was indeed dead. Thereupon we both went to the house: a wretched, wretched place. The name of the landlady, Sherlock. She told us that M H G died at about 9.30 yesterday morning, the last struggle beginning at 6 o'clock. They found my Eastbourne address in a drawer. I went upstairs to see the body; then Roberts accompanied me to the doctor who had been called in, name: McCarthy. Westminster Bridge Road. He gave us a certificate. Immediate cause of death, acute laryngitis. Roberts took his leave, and I returned to the house. Then a married daughter of Mrs Sherlock went with me to see the undertaker, of whom a coffin had already been ordered, - a man called Stevens, whom we found in a small beer-shop which he keeps, 99 Princes Rd, Lambeth. Arranged for a plain burial which is to cost 6 guineas. Leaving him, we went to the Registry Office, Lambeth Square, and registered the death. Thence to Lucretia Street again, where I arranged with the Sherlocks that they should attend the funeral. I am to give them £3 to buy mourning and pay their trouble and various expenses of late. After discussing these things, I went up to her room, to collect the things as I desired to take away.

Now, to state it plainly, I do not think this Diary entry was written on March 1st 1888. I think George wrote an account in a March 1st 1888 diary - just not this one. We know George destroyed his diaries and many letters. I believe at a time of his life when he knew his health was failing, he decided to rewrite various scenes from memory to better present himself to posterity, and possibly to save the feelings of Walter and Alfred. If not but to manage our perceptions of both himself and his first wife, why would George have destroyed everything pretty much up to her death, and yet kept this, the longest entry of the first few pages? Why mention it at all when other references to her were expunged? I think it was to sow the seeds of what is now mistaken for fact by most biographers (all biographers?), which is: that George Gissing was not a cruel and unfeeling, selfish egoist who abandoned his first wife; Marianne was responsible for her own demise; that it was a sordid demise, and George could do nothing about it - see how hard he tried! - but it was Fate, that cruel, inexorable destiny that snarls at us all from birth to the grave.


Now, the novel written immediately after Marianne's death was The Nether World, George's last and possibly best-loved working class novel. Gentle reader, do you recall Mad Jack? Like some chorus in a Greek tragedy, Jack tells it like it is - here is an extract that could have been lifted right out of the March 1st Diary:
'A deranged creature, Mad Jack, at one point exclaims, 'There is no escape for you. From poor you shall become poorer; the older you shall grow the lower you shall sink in want and misery; at the end, there is waiting for you, one and all, a death in abandonment and despair. This is Hell- Hell - Hell!''
Which came first? The Diary entry for March 1st - or this snippet from Workers? I believe the Diary version followed Mad Jack by ten years at least - the rewritten entry is George as Mad Jack making it clear Marianne was doomed - doomed - doomed! But, the key word here is 'abandonment'. Because that's what George did to Marianne - though some carry on pretending he didn't.

So, go with me on this. Let us look at the above Diary segment.
If this Diary entry is contemporaneous, why use 'MHG' instead of a first name or even 'my wife'? After all, he knew who she was, and didn't need her whole name for clarification in initials form. A simple Nell or Helen or N or H would have sufficed. In fact, he doesn't refer to Marianne by name at all on March 1st. He even refers to her as 'poor thing' and 'poor creature' - two rather unpleasant nouns that follow his dehumanizing trend. Not a person but a 'thing' or a 'creature'...
It reads as if he knows whoever reads it after his death - when literary fame finally arrives? - will require all the gruesome details if they are to do his bidding and write his account in their biographies and critical reviews. Why else would he make all those bits of information read like a forensic witness statement? It's as if he is concentrating on shoving everything in mistakenly believing that adding minute specific detail confers authenticity. Did he learn nothing from 'Crime and Punishment' - that too much detail is suspicious? It certainly makes it read cold and distant - twelve years distant, IMO!

Why does George say Morley Roberts left him to it? Was it to ensure he did not have to account for an eyewitness whose version might be at variance with his own? I imagine he discussed his literary legacy with Roberts - perhaps the latter promised to clear up any ambiguities (by writing an ambiguous biography in 'Henry Maitland' haha) and make the best fist of the available biographical information. Morley Roberts was an odd creature (a future post for this one), but he was loyal to George. Perhaps George underestimated the quantity of evidence amassed and then much later to become available to dedicated Gissing scholars and random devotees over the coming years.  

I covered 'acute laryngitis' in the previous post - a perfectly understandable cause of death. Mrs Sherlock had already arranged for the coffin - thus depriving George of the opportunity to waste good money on a posh one. That would leave plenty of  cash to pay Mrs Sherlock £3 for her mourning outfit and for her daughter's (a Mr Sherlock is not mentioned, but he could have existed), and to offset expenses for attending Marianne's funeral. There might also have been other lodgers in 16, Lucretia Street - we don't know. Is there evidence Mrs Sherlock spent the £3 on black outfits? George would never know as he did not stick around for the funeral. George had been deeply traumatized at his father's interment and he didn't attend Will's funeral, so we can deduce he found such ceremonies too distressing. There is no reason to think Marianne shared a pauper's grave as a pauper's grave was for a pauper - which, clearly, Mrs Gissing was not. Later in the Diary, George mentions the burial cost 6 guineas. He says he visited Mr Stevens (the man who supplied the coffin) personally; we can assume he got what he paid for. A basic funeral was a working class funeral; it might take one of the Bryant and May girls (about to strike later in that year) 25 weeks to earn enough to pay for it. link  Let us hope Mrs Sherlock was an upright citizen in this, did the decent thing and gave Marianne a fine send off.

To continue...

'Let me describe this room. It was the first floor back; so small that the bed left little room to move. She took it unfurnished for 2/9d a week; the furniture she brought was: the bed, one chair, a chest of drawers, and a broken deal table. On some shelves were a few plates, cups, etc. Over the mantelpiece hung several pictures, which she had preserved from the old days. There were three engravings: a landscape, a piece of Landseer, and a Madonna of Raphael. There was a portrait of Byron, and one of Tennyson. There was a photograph of myself, taken 12 years ago, - to which the landlady tells me she attached special value, strangely enough. Then there were several cards with Biblical texts, and three cards such as are signed by those who 'take the pledge', - all bearing date during the last six months. 
On the door hung a poor miserable dress and a worn out ulster; under the bed was a pair of boots. Linen, she had none; the very covering of the bed had gone save one sheet and one blanket. I found a number of pawn tickets, showing that she had pledged these things during the last summer, - when it was warm, poor creature! All the money she received went in drink; she used to spend my weekly 15/- the first day or two that she had it. Her associates were women of so low a kind that even Mrs Sherlock did not consider them respectable enough to visit her house. 
I drew out the drawers. In one I found a little bit of butter and a crust of bread, - most pitiful sight my eyes ever looked upon. There was no other food anywhere. The other drawers contained a disorderly lot of papers: there I found all my letters, away back to the American time. In a cupboard were several heaps of dirty rags; at the bottom had been coals, but none were left. Lying about here and there were medicine bottles, and hospital prescriptions.'
Let us consider this part. Marianne's small back-bedroom in a pale blue (on the Charles Booth map; see Commonplace 32) area sounds simple and basic - a typical working class back-bedroom, but not quite what is sometimes referred to as a 'box' room. Even though smallish, it still contained a bed, deal table, chair and a chest of drawers. As poor people didn't own many clothes, there was no need for a wardrobe. She might have had a wash stand as the house would not have stretched to a bathroom. What else did a single woman need? Did Marianne cook and make tea on her fire or down in the house kitchen? George mentions her deal table was broken - it adds to the shabby feel of the place, handy if you want to describe somewhere awful. He mentions the pictures - a photo of himself taken in 1876 ,'to which she attached special value strangely enough'. Was this phrase designed to make it obvious to us that she had no bad feelings toward him? I'm not suggesting she did - in fact, I believe both were much closer, emotionally, than is generally allowed for, and that their affection for each other endured. up to the end. It seems to be a ploy to make us believe he had always treated her well and she thought fondly of him, and she had no complaints. She did always have fond feelings for him, but I'm not sure he can lay claim to the other things.
The Biblical texts and the pledges - I suggest in my fictional version (Commonplace 31) that these were the result of Marianne attending a Christian-based Temperance group for more or less social reasons. I believe these pledges are taken by biographers exactly as George intended when he dropped them into his account - as evidence Marianne drank to excess. I disagree with this interpretation. In fact, signing the pledge was a typical thing for working class women to do - my old mother 'signed the pledge' in around 1934, when she was about 14. Pledge-signing (she told me) was a common feature of Sunday School attendance, often aimed at young women who were obviously vulnerable to being plied with alcohol and seduced by opportunistic youths. By signing, you demonstrated you were mindful of the risks of drink - hence the pledge card that you could flash at any predators. Girls were encouraged to sign up. Temperance was a sophisticated and holistic enterprise. It offered social gatherings, nourishing food, social housing, education, and free health advice and care. It was particularly popular with young people as it offered the chance to meet with persons of the opposite sex in safety because the boys had signed the pledge, too, and all were being monitored for propriety as much as sobriety by the Temperance staff.  What the social side did was effectively provide 'pubs with no beer', a concept now rolled out in the UK by the NHS. Marianne could well have signed these pledges to gain access to a world of socialising and comfort she could not otherwise afford. It is lazy and unfair to limit this, as some do, to proof of drunkenness or alcoholism. In an age where there were huge levels of deprivation, the charitable sector plugged the gaps and often spearheaded the drive to social reform, but they were wise enough to know you couldn't ignore the needs people have for human interaction and the benefits of social attachment groups. Good food, pleasant company, music and warmth were free if you signed, and brought you a group who cared about you and your wellbeing, and demonstrated this in practical ways. The activities also catered for children and parents, so it was a microcosm for modelling good family values - a bit of an obsession in the nineteenth century. George mention these pledges were all dated within the past 6 months - I suspect to reinforce the notion Marianne was a heavy drinker immediately before her death. Signing the pledge to gain access to hot food and warmth, company and free or cheap medicine makes common sense. We know Eduard Bertz was, for a while, a member of the Blue Ribbon Army - for which he would have had to 'sign the pledge'. Does that mean he was an alcoholic?

George mentions the small Art gallery Marianne owned. Not garish Herr Plitt-type cheapo adverts but classy stuff - portraits of poets and reproductions of classical paintings (and fashionable Landseer), all framed. Eminently pawn-able? If Marianne required funds for drink, why weren't these things in hock? He mentions the miserable clothes remaining - no doubt not pawn-worthy, but too good to throw away - possibly kept for recycling as patches. You hock what you don't really need and what will bring you the most money. As I suggest in my fictional account - how do we know Mrs Sherlock didn't sort through Marianne's possessions the minute she died and remove the things worth stealing? Clothes, bedding, knick-knacks, jewellery, coal, food, savings... we don't know if someone stripped Marianne's room bare of anything of value, thinking George would never notice or care - do we?

Pub landlords often provided a range of services. The March 1st version tells us Marianne's coffin was supplied by a Mr Stevens of a small beer-shop at 99, Princes Road. This was a far-ish hop from Lucretia Street, known as The Princes (sic) of Wales Beer House here . Princes Road where was where the new Lambeth workhouse (since demolished) was sited. see more here 

George tells us 'all her money went in drink'. How could he possibly know this for sure? Did Mrs Sherlock really say it - as he claims? Did he have some other intelligence to go on? Did the landlady make it up? Or, did George use it to embellish the revised version? If he wants us to absolve him of his part in Marianne's dire situation, he needs us to think the worst of her. Doesn't it seem a little too convenient - a little too contrived - to be authentic? And, to make use of Mrs Sherlock to say it for him - a clever ploy to add a corroborating witness for his campaign to impugn Marianne's good name?
He adds: 'Her associates were women of so low a kind that even Mrs Sherlock did not consider them respectable enough to visit her house.' Now, we know George always disapproved of Marianne's friends. He did not like women, in general, to foregather together in the name of social intercourse, often remarking how disgusted he was at female 'gossip'. (Let us pass over the fact that he loved male gossip, and his letters are riddled with it. And that he adored Dr Johnson, Boswell and Mrs Piozzi. The very idea of  a writer not liking gossip is frankly ridiculous!) But George had a dread of Marianne letting the cat out of the bag about the Owens days (and maybe even his treatment of her), leaving him open to bad press or even blackmail from her associates. Some of Marianne's friends once berated him for not looking after her properly - so any friend she made would be a threat to him. It was similar with Edith - he disapproved of her family and friendships she made with neighbours. Consider, if Mrs Sherlock really said it, might this not be to cover up her possible neglect of Marianne, her possible crimes of stealing, and to make sure George didn't ask difficult questions of Marianne's friends? Because their account of how she cared for Marianne might not have shown her as a paragon of virtue. If Mrs Sherlock was charging Marianne for nursing services rendered that were not delivered (and perhaps that is where all the 15/- went and why those prescriptions hadn't been used), then Marianne's friends might have had something to say to George about it. A working class woman telling a middle-class man his wife had been a drunk who consorted with immoral influences would have been deeply embarrassing to a husband. It would also guarantee he would hang around as little as possible, and not ask awkward questions about, for example, why his wife's room was so pathetically bereft of possessions. So, were Marianne's friends really beyond the pale? Isn't it far too coincidental to have the landlady make the exact same comment as George does in his letters - namely, that all Marianne's friends are vile?

It was strange that the room was full of medicine bottles and not gin bottles - if Marianne was supposed to be a drunkard. 'Lying about here and there were medicine bottles, and hospital prescriptions'. In fact, George makes no mention of any form of spirits or beer bottles in her room. One can assume then that there weren't any, because he would have mentioned it, don't you think? So, were there none sneaked away under the bed, or squirrelled away in the drawer under the dirty rags? He skates over the presence of medicine bottles and unused prescriptions, but the fact they were there does not indicate a life of dissipation, but a life of extreme ill-health. And, if the prescriptions were unused, an indication that she didn't have the money to pay for that vital treatment. Or that she couldn't get to the dispensary and her landlady couldn't be bothered to do it for her?

George made the most of this Dickensian scene, but he lacks the maestro's compassion and skill with sincerely meant heart-wrenching pathos. At the back of George's piece is a critical, coldly analytical self-serving sensibility. Charles Dickens would have made use of the relics of a life tragically cut short, to lead us to conclude we are all, at the bottom of it, the same under the skin. One is reminded of this piece written by Dickens about his favourite festival:  

“I have always thought of Christmastime, when it has come round...as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

Poor thing... Poor creature...

Of course, George's motives for describing in detail Marianne's death scene are not outward-going and for our moral and spiritual edification. They are to protect him from the charge that his neglect of his first wife was infamous and deeply unkind. And not manly or even mildly 'heroic'.

Gentle reader, read on...

'She lay on her bed covered with a sheet. I looked long, long at her face, but could not recognize it. It is more than three years, I think, since I saw her, and she had changed horribly. Her teeth all remained, white and perfect as formerly.
I took away very few things, just a little parcel: my letters, my portrait, her rent-book, a certificate of life assurance which had lapsed, a copy of my Father's "Margaret" which she had preserved, and a little workbox, the only thing that contained traces of womanly occupation."
George says it has been three years since he saw her - but had it been so long? If he was writing to her, sending the money regularly, might he not have passed her house to check she was still alive and his money orders were getting through to the right person? I am not suggesting they had a sexual relationship at this time - though I believe they had a marital relationship for years after they finally stopped co-habiting - however, it seems unrealistic to think he sent money out and hadn't bothered to follow it up. And, we have this: 'The other drawers contained a disorderly lot of papers;  there I found all my letters, away back to the American time.' The phrase 'all my letters' suggests he had a regular correspondence with Marianne - and in these there must have been enough of worth for her to want to keep them and re-read them. Through all her ill-health and the direst of predicaments and situations, Marianne had clung to the days when George was a different person - maybe a kinder, better one. Considering he had abandoned her fully knowing how things would go for her, she still had love in her heart for him right to the end. And, he loved her, as much as he could ever love anyone.

I expect she had 'changed horribly' - half a lifetime of scrofula will do that to a face. George is careful not to qualify this with an description or explanation - he could have so easily remarked on the ailments, listing them and accrediting them with the appropriate nomenclature. He knew the disorders from which Marianne suffered and he knew these were all chronic and eventually, life-threatening. Again, he is vague about what ailed her because he wants the reader to carry on thinking Marianne was a dissipated drunk. However, a key phrase sheds light on her actual bodily situation: 'Her teeth all remained, white and perfect as formerly.' What can this tell us? Well, it suggests that Marianne was not a smoker, and that she never suffered from syphilis or alcoholism. The two ailments most often used to explain the poor state of her health both have devastating effects on the teeth. The acids in alcohol are enough to destroy the enamel and rot the gums, leading to tooth damage and loss. Syphilis itself very often is transmitted orally - and then frequently sets up home in the mucous linings of the mouth, where the gums perish, leading to tooth decay, and eventual bone loss. We have all seen those terrible anatomical illustrations where patients have horrendous loss of tissue to their mouths. Treatment in the days before antibiotics for any stage of syphilis was drastic - mercury was the standard. One way of checking the right amount was being used was the state of the patient's gums. The optimum dosage was achieved when the gums were bright red, but the teeth didn't wobble in their sockets. If they did wobble, the dosage was adjusted down until the gums recovered, then gradual increased doses of mercury was recommenced. One of the lasting side effects was tooth discolouration - teeth take on a blue-green tinge in the presence of mercury. It is plain, if Marianne's teeth were sound and white, it was because she did not have an illness that destroys teeth the way syphilis and alcoholism do. If you don't believe me click these:
info on mercury discolouration Slide 7
info on alcohol and teeth
info on syphilis and teeth

So, we have Marianne dead and George already feeling sorry for himself. You will know that online quote so often featured in GRG google searches: “Life, I fancy, would very often be insupportable, but for the luxury of self-compassion.” George has plenty of self-compassion with regard to Marianne's death. Much of the pity George wants us to feel when we read of it, is for him, not her.

He concludes this black day's entry:
'Came home to a bad, wretched night. In nothing am I to blame; I did my utmost; again and again I had her back to me. Fate was too strong. But as I stood beside that bed. I felt that my life henceforth had a firmer purpose. Henceforth, I never cease to bear testimony against the accursed social order that brings about things of this kind. I feel that she will help me more in her death than she balked me during her life. Poor, poor thing!

Here, we have one of the biggest lies George ever told: 'Henceforth, I never cease to bear testimony against the accursed social order that brings about things of this kind.'

Now, this is taken as a manifesto that informed the rest of George's writing career. Where is the evidence he lived up to this?  When, exactly, did he 'never cease to bear witness' ? If this entry was written in 1888 - where is all this testimony? He had 15 more years to come up with it - if the entry was written in 1888. Most of his post-1888 work concerned the lower middle classes and above. The Nether World and some tepid short-stories were produced focusing on the lives of the poor, but the vast body of work after 1888 was not about 'the accursed social order' of the ordinary people like Marianne. Of course, by 1900, and with the literary legacy to manufacture, it might have been better to pass off many of his failings - and particularly the Owens debacle - as social science gone awry. His letter to Algernon of March 1st only says, 'Well, now it behoves me to get to work. I have a somewhat clearer task before me than hitherto, & one that will give me enough to do for many years'. this is not a manifesto for a personal philosophy: it is a manifesto about seizing the day - making enough money to live on in the full knowledge his phthisis would eventually kill him the way Marianne's TB had killed her.   

Poor George - a sleepless night after seeing the dead body of the woman he once risked it all for and turned out into this bleak world, alone. Poor, poor George. Written down for posterity so suckers swallow it hook, line and sinker.



'In nothing am I to blame; I did my utmost; again and again I had her back to me. Fate was too strong.' Was it fate that did for Marianne? Or the wilful acts of an egoist carelessly abandoning a chronically sick dependent for purely selfish and amoral reasons? George wrote to Algernon on January 19th 1882, just over two years after marrying Marianne:

'I don't know that she is to be blamed for all this, seeing that, without a doubt, her mind is affected. Still, no-one is called upon to sacrifice everything to a weak-minded person's whims; & it is clear that this place cannot possibly be a home for her henceforth.' 

George's biographers have very little time for Marianne. Pierre Coustillas, in the Heroic Life of George Gissing vol 1 sees it thus: 

'Indeed, Gissing had nothing for which to blame himself. For several years he had given proof of rare patience, keeping Nell with him to the prejudice of his work and of his legitimate ambition. After they had parted he had paid her with the strictest punctuality her weekly alimony which she would hasten to squander in the vilest dramshops. Many in Gissing's place would have yielded to resentment or anger, but now that she was dead his sole reaction was one of pity...' 

'... keeping Nell with him to the prejudice of his work and his legitimate ambition.' Only a man could write that.

'After they had parted he had paid her with the strictest punctuality her weekly alimony which she would hasten to squander in the vilest dramshops'... How on earth could Mr Coustillas know what Marianne spent her money on? Isn't biography meant to be an attempt at historic accuracy and objective truth? 

PLEASE JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 34 WHERE WE LOOK AT THE NEXT PART OF GEORGE'S VERSION.

All these lovely photos are by the pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

See more here

The Diaries

London and The Life of Literature in Late Victorian England: The Diary of George Gissing Novelist. ed Pierre Coustillas. 1978; The Harvester Press.

http://www.angelpig.net/victorian/mourning.html for fascinating information on exactly what it says in the link title.

Commonplace 32    George & The Story He Did Write. PART ONE: The Letters Version.

The previous post, Commonplace 31, is an alternate take on that dreadful time George went to see Marianne's dead body. I believe my version is as legitimate as George's: both are mostly fabrication. Some of the detail we employ is accurate - we both know accomplished liars base their untruths on nuggets of reality. Whereas mine is an exercise in challenging received wisdom, George's is an exercise in spin designed to absolve himself for the part he played in his wife's tragic decline and lonely death.

George cited Marianne's demise as the epiphany moment responsible for a turning point in his work; now, he has broken free from his past and has a clearer direction for both his life and his Art. What a load of baloney! It was a wake up call to the fact he was alone in the world without a woman to care about him (albeit from a distance) - or to blame for holding him back in life. For the first time since his Owens days he was partnerless. It was also a portent of things to come. Obscurity, Poverty and Solitude were George's greatest fears - if he didn't write better books, his legacy might be scuppered into literary oblivion; if more marketable books (I avoid the term 'commercial') couldn't be produced, he risked dying in poverty and of the same diseases that killed Marianne. And, if he didn't have a woman to nurse him when his health began to decline he might die alone in miserable circumstances.

I believe George's account is self-serving in intent as it seeks to manipulate our perceptions of his marriage and the character of his first wife. He seeks to absolve himself of his moral responsibility to her, and to do this, he presents Marianne as the architect of her own downfall. Egregiously, fully knowing George is not above lying or exaggerating facts to serve his own ends when discussing aspects of his personal history, Gissing apologists repeat these falsehoods, eager to do their master's bidding and ensure everything written about Marianne feeds into this false version of her life.


George's Diary entry gives a fuller account of Marianne's death but I will come to that in Commonplace 33. First, let's look at the letter to brother Algernon of March 1st 1888. George is writing to say a telegram arrived at the Eastbourne accommodation address advising him of Marianne's death:
'No need to pain you by describing the wretched place to which I was summoned; I have seen much poverty & wretchedness, but never anything that so assailed me. Of course there was no excuse for her being in such a place; she had money enough, but I hear that it was all spent the day she received it, week after week. The people of the house are not vile; I have been able to make decent arrangements with them.'

Algernon was one of the few in George's circle who actually met Marianne. According to the various letters extant, they enjoyed a good, warm relationship. So, let's look at this quoted paragraph more closely. Marianne lived in Lambeth at 16, Lucretia Street. Lambeth was one of the poorer districts of south London, but in actual fact, Lucretia Street was not one of the slummier streets. In the Charles Booth map of 1891 - only three years after Marianne died - it is coloured light blue. The map key indicates this means 'Poor. 18s to 21s a week for a moderate family.'

Lucretia Street on the Booth Map of 1891

As you can see from the key, there are two categories below pale blue - indicating the conditions were not as bad as George suggests especially when you note some of the surrounding properties are pink and red on the map. Shortly after Marianne's time there, Lucretia Street was renamed Grindal Street (its name today) in order to avoid confusion with nearby Lucretia Road. As house numbers start at the end of the street nearest the local post office, beginning with the left-hand side as you turn in from Lower Marsh (the street immediately below the H on the map), it's possible that Marianne's house is one of the two remaining - the rest have been swallowed up by the development of the Waterloo Station area. See Modern Grindal Street by clicking here

Marianne  paid 2/9d a week rent for an unfurnished room. According to

victorianlondon.org a 'mechanic' (unskilled machine worker or labourer, usually male, but this could apply to a needleworker like Marianne) would pay between 3-6 shillings for a single room in London. The site doesn't mention board as part of that deal, but it might be fair to assume men generally expected a room to be furnished and some food and laundry services provided. If Marianne was self-catering, 2/9d is far from being an unreasonably low rent to pay for an unfurnished room, especially when George mentions in the Diaries that the room is very small. So there is no substantiating evidence here that her room was the slum George would have us believe (de-ja-vu for Colville Place and his claims of poverty there? I thought he claimed that as the most sordid place he knew of?). As a comparison, in March 1881, George and Marianne had moved to Wornington Road, Westbourne Park which cost 7/- a week for two rooms in a red area click (now entirely redeveloped).  

Biblis by William-Alphonse Bouguereau 1884 (Biblis is a girl's name and means swallow (as in the bird) and is pronounced 'Bibbly'.)

Another warning sign that George has exaggerated Marianne's situation is the lack of vileness in the Sherlocks: 'The people of the house are not vile'. So, it's just Marianne, then? George believed the Sherlocks were capable of acting as his agent and 'making decent arrangements' - so why would such a family tolerate Marianne if she was not good enough to be their lodger? They had not evicted her, so the Sherlocks must have been satisfied with her behaviour. Would a decent landlady in a pale blue household put up with a dissipated slut for a lodger when there would be plenty more decent girls to let the room to? I think not; which means Marianne was not a debauched waster, as biographers maintain. George cannot have it both ways: he can't have Marianne in self-inflicted direst poverty and depravity living in the same house as the 'un-vile' Sherlocks who are good enough to represent him with the funeral and trustworthy with the money he paid them - all living in a pale blue house. If he had written it in a novel, it would have irked its readership and been rightly criticized as lazy background research. 

Wax anatomy model by Clemente Susinis from the Morbid Anatomy website.

See more here





Let's look at that 15/- a week. An equivalent sum in 2007 was... £45 in £sd. click for the converter details. And, as that was before the 2008 crash, it would no doubt be worth less today.

George writes to Algernon that Marianne spent all her money the day she received it, 'week after week'. He is careful not to mention on what. This sin of omission shows he is keen to shape how Alg processes this piece of information; he boldly asserts: 'she had money enough'. But, did she? Her financial outgoings would include rent, food, clothing and shoes, soap, candles and lamp oil, laundry, coal, transport, needlework materials (when she could work) and medicines - all from 12/3d left from the 15/- he paid her. When a bottle of typical over-the-counter medicine such as J Collis Browne's cost 4/9d, you have some idea why her money might not go far. In this letter, George carefully makes no mention of Marianne's many ailments - her scrofula had no doubt progressed to the various systematic versions of tuberculosis. TB has the potential to infect every organ of the body, and was, in Marianne's time incurable; it could persist for many years before it killed its host. These chronic conditions never resolve; there might be occasional remissions, but exacerbations would follow and in fact, would have worsened year-by-year. I believe Marianne was afflicted with epilepsy caused by the scrofula that eventually progressed to the brain variant of TB, and had been epileptic since before she met George. I will return to this in another post when I address epilepsy in more depth.

It would not be unreasonable to suggest Marianne paid out a good part of her weekly 15/- on medicines and medical care. However, George is careful to imply she frittered the money away. Does he want Algernon to infer she spent it on alcohol? In this letter, I believe not. If he did want Alg to think she was a drunk, he would have stated it plainly - remember, George had already played the 'alcohol' card in a letter written six years earlier on 16th January1882 when he told Alg he found a gin bottle in Marianne's box - another finely crafted piece of spin in my opinion. (There was also an unproven accusation that she was a drunkard made by the police sergeant who notified George on September 24th 1883 that Marianne had been assaulted - I am going to cover this in Commonplace 35 as I think it deserves to be anatomized.) A woman who drank alcohol to excess was a scandalous and harshly-criticized sort in the times we are discussing. Even today, women are judged more cruelly than men for drunkenness and excess gaiety whilst under the influence - are they not? This dual-standard cut much deeper in George's time - and he certainly thought a female drunk was a pathetic disgrace - Virginia Eade in the Odd Women, for example, who drinks a whole bottle of gin one evening, is portrayed as a pathetic creature whom it might be argued the author despises. A life of drink is one of the dire consequences George predicts for a woman who is not accounted for by marriage - hilarious!

So, in the March 1st letter to Alg, George does not suggest Marianne has squandered her money on drink - remember this as it is important when we come to consider the Diary account in Commonplace 33. George, understandably, could not acknowledge to himself - and certainly not admit it to his brother - his own contribution to her lonely death by not giving her enough money to live on. I further suggest that this realisation - that he had left Marianne in want while he swanned about buying books and hob-nobbing with toffs - caused such a guilt reaction that it became part of the reason he so freely gave money to support Algernon and his family in the coming years, and, on April 16th, 1888 sent 10/- to Morley Roberts: 'I thing I cannot afford, and have no business whatever to do. But he seems in dire straits' he writes in the Diary. 

Victorian Anatomical Wax Model for teaching purposes. See more here:

In his letter to Algernon, George says, 'Of course there was no excuse for her being in such a place'. This is said to reinforce the notion she lived in abject conditions (which I refute), and to state explicitly that this state of affairs was self-inflicted from some kind of choice. But, how easy would it have been for Marianne to find lodgings anywhere? She had been an invalid for years, and her health was fragile even back in the days when she lived with George. The epilepsy would have worsened in both severity and frequency of incidence, following a lifetime of it damaging her brain. The side effects of any medication she used in an attempt to manage it would have damaged her wider system (what was termed 'the economy' in the nineteenth century and before). George wrote to Algernon on November 3rd 1880 that he knew Marianne had scrofula. It was a common disease but little understood, but we now know it is the glandular form of tuberculosis. Even by 1880 it had probably infected her body widely enough to produce the epilepsy that afflicted her most of her life. Of itself, epilepsy is a disabling condition, but with the added burden of its causes being so misunderstood in the nineteenth century (even by neurologists) it presented as a mysterious condition that frightened people. And, of course, there was no cure or effective treatment in Marianne's day. Laughable as it now seems, epilepsy even in the early twentieth century, was thought by some to be a result of masturbation or excessive libido. Considering the tendency for lay and informed people to misinterpret the signs and symptoms of the condition and label these as auto-erotic and generally sexual in nature, it is easy to see how epilepsy was often labelled as  a form of moral insanity. The Victorian dread of loss of control in public and the fear of sexual promiscuity (falsely attributed to the disorder) and madness in general - well, not every landlady would welcome an epileptic into her house. That Mrs Sherlock tolerated all this is a sign Marianne was modest and comported herself with dignity, and did nothing to draw attention to herself and bring embarrassment down on her landlady. Added to the TB and epilepsy was damage scrofula might have done to Marianne' face; it would certainly have produced smelly, ulcerating lesions - which she had suffered from most of her life. If Marianne was an invalid in 1883, imagine the damage 5 years had wrought. If a lodger had no family to support her when she was ill, many landladies would turn such as Marianne away fearing she might not be able to care for herself or work to pay her rent. Some might even be afraid she would bring disease to the house. As I suggest in my fictional post, maybe Marianne paid Mrs Sherlock for some nursing duties - that is not an unreasonable suggestion. So, fifteen shillings, not being made of elastic, would not stretch very far, would it? Perhaps George, gazing down at Marianne's poor, disease-wracked body, had the shock realisation that he had not paid her enough alimony; dire want had played its part in her tragic death. This was too much to take on in terms of accountability and would have conflicted with George's self-image as a kind, tolerant, generous man like his father had role-modelled him to be. This would have been a profound blow. We know the mental mechanisms later outlined by Sigmund Freud would have kicked in to protect George's sense of self and allow him to blame Marianne for her own predicament.

The Autopsy by Enrique Simonet 1890 from the Wellcome Collection (see above)

A point to raise here: the money George paid Marianne is often termed by biographers as an 'allowance' (George terms it thus in the 'assault' letter of 1883) which makes it sound condescendingly redolent of charity and effusive generosity on George's part. If biographers want to present St George the Martyr, they use these payments as a weapon against Marianne, as if she is a vampire sucking him dry of funds. In fact, George had a legal responsibility - let's set aside the moral one - to support Marianne financially. In the days before state benefits, a working husband had to support his wife and if he didn't, he might face prison. A wife was (is) a dependent, and there were laws to protect wives and to force husbands to pay for their upkeep. If Marianne had taken George to court for payment, she might have been awarded more than a pound and then 15/- a week from his income. That she did not do so is probably down to the fact she didn't want to drag him through the courts and embarrass him if it got into the press - which might risk exposure of his criminal record. One might argue that this is why he paid her - to keep her silent - but as I believe he had much more physical contact with Marianne after their split than he admits, and that he still loved her, George willingly paid it. But, when the amount was reduced, Marianne could have sued for more as she was George's prime dependent, and not Algernon or the Gissings in Wakefield. Money diverted to his wider family could have been legally sent her way, if she had chosen to challenge it. I think this shows that Marianne was no grasping gold-digger at all, but a generous and loving wife who did all she could to not be a trouble to her inadequate husband. She knew him well, and recognised his weakness of character and his need to be protected. She no doubt also realised he was not equipped with the selflessness nor the compassion to endure her many illnesses and her lost beauty.

 

SEE YOU IN PART TWO - Commonplace 33

Commonplace 30    George & Rene Magritte - They Never Met Until Today.  

Magritte 's pictures often remind me of George - or aspects of him. Magritte was prolific and one of the most influential twentieth century artists, especially for the worlds of graphics and advertising. Everywhere there are homages to his vision. Go to http://www.musee-magritte-museum.be/Typo3/ to find out more.

Not in chronological order we have:

Homesickness 1940. After America, the inhibitive fear of metaphorically soiling his own back yard made sure the life of a small town pen-pusher or teacher was not for George. How could he grow within Wakefield's tight confines after the Owens debacle? Yet again we turn to Morrissey: 'Every day is like Sunday - every day is silent and grey... come, come Armageddon, come'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf6Xwb03jTE.   

The Tomb of the Wrestlers 1960. 

This is how George liked his women - indoors and beautifully available; exhibits, not real people. He tended to keep his female characters in similar confines. Ida Starr, the most 'modern' of his heroines, had to be locked up in a cell in order to become acceptable and win her man. I loved that girl from the off when she threw that slate! But to degrade her from the unique, special creature she starts out as by subjecting her to the self-recrimination, unfair punishment and ritual humiliation inflicted on her by our man's cruel pen, shows just how George (not for the only time with Ida) punishes the women of his dreams. Just as he was penalised for his sexual desires, he punishes any character who feels anything below the belt - particularly the women.

 

The Lovers I 1928. George would have married a lamp post if he thought he could have sex with it and it would run a tight ship below stairs. Relationships are lucky dips with consequences, but the aim is to shorten the odds not lengthen them - hence the period of courtship. With no chance of an in-depth reconnoitring of the terrain except for boats rides, Tennyson readings, elocution lessons, and the joys of frugal dining, Edith was never really in a strong position to make an adequate assessment of our man's marriageability. If Edith had insisted on the old practice of 'bundling' she would have been able to test drive George before marriage and then got out whilst the getting was good. One night would have sorted it.   

Time Transfixed 1938. The classic Surrealist image, the train in the fireplace is that paradox at the heart of the absurd: two items that should not be together existing together. Magritte tiptoes between the playful exuberance of Dada and the knowing slickness of Surrealism. Here, we might have George, pondering his future with Gabrielle. His declining health (time/the clock) will be stopped in its tracks by the effects on his manhood (the train) of finding a loving destination in Gabrielle's warm female parts (the fireplace).

L'Homme Au Chapeau Melon 1964. George hated the thought of war, though it seems unclear what war and why. For someone so obsessed with a violent, belligerent, acquisitive people - the Romans - he viewed empire-building in a very poor light. As much as he railed against 'progress' especially science and technology, he seemed to forget all ages have benefited from science. The Romans were mad for it, after all, and gave us all those great inventions - flushing toilets, central heating and opus caementicium. Where would Maximus Decimus Meridius have been without opus caementicium I ask?

Olympia 1948. One of the odd things about Magritte is, the pictures look technically bad when you view them as reproductions, but when you see them in the flesh (so to speak) they are extremely proficient and weirdly perfect. Here we have a variation of Pandora's box. The shell is her box. Women are mysterious destroying angels to some men. Men are rapacious murdering rapists to some women. Is there a middle path? Pandora's Box as womb of the world - all the evils (mankind) issue from here. Not strictly her fault of course - she was set up by the gods which is why she was not punished for peeking in that container. George had an ongoing debate with himself over the English divorce laws - New Grub Street's Amy is a good example of a character mouthing his own ideas and arguments. Was his participation in the Emancipation debate nothing more than a ploy to spawn a call for a revised set of divorce laws? It seems hard to resign oneself to the notion that the world then, as now, is set up to favour men economically, socially, politically, and the price men pay for these freedoms is to have women and children dependent on them, yet most men resent this and regard their dependents as leeches and liabilities.

The Reckless Sleeper 1928. George had terrible problems sleeping throughout his adult life. Little was known in the nineteenth century about the need for adequate refreshing sleep - we now know, for example, one of the causes of obesity is inadequate sleep. One insidious complication of sleep deprivation is anhedonia - the inability to feel pleasure. Unsmiley face syndrome (I  made that up, don't google it) affected George from time to time and he remarked that few things gave him real pleasure. Ryecroft is one long drawn out textual version of unsmiley face syndrome - at least, that's what it feels like to me.

The Giantess 1929. Tiny man takes on the might of 'Woman'. She is the normal one here, he the Incredible Shrinking Man (remember that fab film? Now, that was Surreal! take a look at the last scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp3iHjGBfT4 George felt his power beginning to ebb away from his early thirties - as Roy Batty gets told in 'Blade Runner': 'The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long'.
 

The Wonders of Nature 1953. George went to America to start a new life, but I feel sure he had no intentions of staying there a moment longer than he had to. Of course Marianne gets the blame for him returning, but he hated America and the ordeal of it. If there wasn't enough money for her fare, and he hated it in the States, it was better for him to return. One wonders what would have become of both George and Marianne aka Nell if the reception in Wakefield had been better.    

The Great War 1964. George and Mrs Gaussen - did he make a move on her and was he rejected? Did she make a move on him and disgust him? He went off her pretty fast. A man scorned... and a man unmanned... George was often so dismissive of the women he knew who would have made perfectly suitable wives - that is, they would have maintained the upper hand and not entertained his hysterical shenanigans - I mean the true hysteria of the somatic disorder form, not silly tantrums. George would have worshipped a dominant female to take him on and shape his desires. He chose less powerful women for the opposite reason - so that those desires never raised their beautiful/ugly heads. Strong women like his mother were both an aphrodisiac and an inhibitor to his libidinous self that brought conflict and impotence. He both feared and worshipped the maternal as much as the Magdalene, in woman.  It was desire: satisfied that got him into so much trouble at Owens, the one time in his life he gave himself up to it, only to be punished and rejected for it.  

The Son of Man 1967. George told Gabrielle he was a mixture of bourgeois and bohemian. He didn't furnish the specs, but I suspect it was always 99% bourgeois.  What might have passed for 1890s street cred was negligible and built on such flimsy footings the whole house collapsed pretty quickly in the face of a seducing challenge like fancy dinners and hobnobbing with Fred Harrison. George liked theories and ideas but realties dragged him down.  

The Balcony 1950. George's three wives. Is that his mother lurking in the background, or the idealised 'woman' of his deepest fantasies - always judging him, preventing him from being free? George was very hard on New Grub Street's Amy Reardon for her lack of support for Edwin's work. Writing is a metaphor for masculine sexuality; Amy doesn't realise this, and Edwin doesn't tell her - maybe he doesn't know himself as we are pre-psychoanalysis. His performance anxiety undermines any work he attempts and in the end fear of failure produces writer's block. Maybe he didn't want to succeed.

“Let fear once get possession of the soul, and it does not readily yield its place to another sentiment.
Sebastopol by Leo Tolstoy”
― Leo Tolstoy, Sebastopol in December    

The Threatened Assassin 1926.A much creepier sight in the flesh as it is quite large.
It's all here - the bare boards are George's brief stint with self-inflicted poverty; the three men are the phases of George's life with his wives. Centre: Marianne. He gazes into her beautiful intimate parts for the sweet joy of love music. Left: Edith. Brandishing the male weapon of dominance over her - the phallus and the cudgel. Right: Gabrielle. He is equipped with the net to capture her by stealth and persistence. In the faraway scene: the mountains are both bringers of joy and death. The snow looks like the sheet coverings Magritte used on The Lovers - is this the white sheet/George gazing down on the dark sheet/Marianne's corpse as she lays beneath the shroud of the lower white peak? The suitcase: George eternally on the move like a sea creature washed by the tide. When a storm hit, he uprooted and relocated. Did ever a man take so many holidays? Trouble was, wherever he went, he had to take himself along. The coat and hat: needed for all those tramps around in search of material for novels and to keep his feet warm. Was ever a man as dedicated to being on the move? The three men watching: the three Gissing boys. George looked after Algernon from filial duty and, perhaps, to compensate his brother for sullying the good name of the Gissings which might have impacted on Alg's self-confidence and work prospects. George must have missed William, his Samuel Smiles-inspired unconditionally supportive younger brother who always had good if not revolutionary advice to offer. The gramophone represents George's love of music and the sex of women. The table is the cheap deal one he wrote 'Workers' on, back in the good old days of his life. It was a very clear sign aspirations towards bohemia were over the day he bought a writing block in the early Exeter days of his marriage to Edith. Step back and the two men either side of the tableaux wait in ambush for young George, stood innocently thinking life is going to be all aesthetics and lady love... his future lives will kidnap him and turn him into one of them. To the left is Life and the way it beats you down; to the right, the entrapments that stop us from being free (if we let them). Or are these two the detectives at Owens waiting to spring their trap? The dead woman, the victim of the crime: George never stopped loving Marianne. His treatment of her may have been, for some Gissing fans (not me) understandable but that doesn't make them acceptable. I think more than any other aspect, it was guilt for what he did to Marianne that kept him plugging away at the writing - to vindicate his actions and to reassure himself that sacrificing her had been for Art, not for his own selfish reasons. Part of his life's anguish was the insight that his not quite Titanic genius did not warrant such a move - the end did not justify the means after all. Ryecroft is contrived wishful thinking - not the wee house in the country and the income bit but the fantasy that his life had been harmless: the spin version of his less than heroic Life.  

 Philosophy Of the Bedroom 1947. We know from his attitude to Edith and Gabrielle that George employed an unsubtle approach to courting. Unrelenting, may be a better term. I suspect his approach to trapping Marianne was exactly the same. By possessing extraordinary determination, George had demonstrated to himself that sheer force of will wins the day. With his superior firepower in linguistics, his ability to manipulate others to his bidding (the weak person's skillset) an arsenal of Romantic poetry, funds (!), good-looks, clean habits (except for the smoking, drinking, lady chasing and whatever else he tried at Owens), the absolute certainty he knew what was best for her, topped of with the way he would fix her with his baby-blue needy puppy gaze - how could Marianne resist? Even when he changed her name to Nell... A woman responds to attention, to the masculine gaze. He entraps her by promising he will always be there for her, to protect and shelter her from life's storm.

 

 Not to be Reproduced aka Reproduction Prohibited (Portrait of Edward James) 1937. It always makes me think of George looking for himself and never finding himself. The book on the mantelpiece is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe. Weirdly, the story outline reads just like the love child of an HG Wells/Morley Roberts tale with added Poe insane magic: A sailor on a whaling ship goes voyaging, gets involved in misadventures like shipwrecks and cannibalism and ends up discussing the Hollow Earth theory with some people of colour. Considered seminal but even for its time, racist. Edward James, of course, is the Edward James - fan of Surrealism, writer, metaphysician. 

The Treason of the Pictures (This is Not a Pipe) 1928. As they always tell you at Art school - no, it's a representation of a pipe. George was a committed pipe man but was not averse to cigars and cigarettes. His characters can be divided into pipe vs cigar men, with pipes being honest, reliable and earthy; cigars being relaxed, urbane and more outward-going. George was fascinated by women who smoked and young female tobacconists represented a fetish combined with a fetish-once-removed? Oral fixation or just a means to smoke tobacco?

The Castle in the Pyrenees 1959. George believed (because someone told him) high altitudes and dry air would help his phthisis - that was why he planned to live in Switzerland when he finally left England for good and all to live with Gabrielle. He crossed the Pyrenees to visit Spain for a holiday with her. It was after a walk in mountains that he finally succumbed to whatever it was that did for him.

Rape 1945. This painted hair looks like George's lovely locks. George was obsessed with hair. All his woman are defined by their hair and how they wear it. In New Grub Street we know Marian Yule is doomed to spinsterhood on account of her short hair. Amy Reardon is thus described: The hue of her hair was ruddy gold; loosely arranged tresses made a superb crown to the beauty of her small, refined head. Marian 0 - Amy 2. Very early on in their relationship(day 2?) George commented on how excited he was when Gabrielle returned after freshening up with her hair looking rearranged and beautiful. Gabrielle adds the comment that all she had done was remove her hat. Within weeks of them meeting George sends a lock of his hair and asked for one of hers that he then claims gives off a lovely perfume. And let us not forget he took a lock of Marianne's hair at the death scene. George, balding, would have been a very different man.

Still Life 1963. Is this a representation of the female  genitals? Is that tree her pubic hair? A slight frisson of fear permeates the scene. When mentioning the terrible to-do over John Ruskin's divorce from Effie Gray, George explained it simply in terms of them being incompatible, though he must have heard the rumours. Considering how simple would have been the remedy if those rumours had been true... no doubt George was right.

The Pebble 1948. Another woman graduates from Sex Objectification school. George once returned from a dinner at JM Barrie's to marvel at how such a suave and beautiful woman as Mrs Barrie could be married to such a lightweight (and JM was just over 5 feet tall and balding). This tells us much more about George than it reveals about Mrs and Mr Barrie, doesn't it? His own concept of the 'trophy' wife makes it clear how George objectified women - something easier to deny if you concentrate on his imaginary female characters. His unrealistically specific standards crashed to the ground when he realised time was running out. Would Gabrielle have passed muster ten years earlier? George did not live long enough to see the dreadful falling out of Mr and Mrs Barrie, when Peter Pan's father dragged his wife through the divorce courts for his wife's infidelity. Now, if George had just made a move on her when he had the chance...

To find out more about Magritte go to:


http://www.mattesonart.com/1926-1930-surrealism-paris-years.aspx