George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

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