Commonplace 34 George & The Story He Did Write PART THREE
In Commonplaces 31-33 I suggest the version we have of Marianne Helen aka Nell's death is a largely a work of fiction manufactured by George to manipulate posterity's view of the part he played in her life and sad end. After all, what was the world he left behind after his own death to make of a man who abandons a sick wife to her own devices? Not very British; not very noble. In order to manipulate our perceptions of the shameful aspects of both his nature and his actions, George set out to paint a picture of his first wife as a self-destructive dissipated wastrel whose self-inflicted inevitable decline led to a lonely, sordid death. Unfortunately, Gissing biographers have been only too happy to repeat the lies; furthermore, they seek to justify every wrong thing he did, and frame this in terms of how Marianne/Nell (or, subsequently Edith) ruined his life.
George wrote this in his Critical Life of Charles Dickens: 'As soon as a writer sits down to construct a narrative, to imagine human beings, or adapt those he knows to changed circumstances, he enters a world distinct from the actual, and, call himself what he may, he obeys certain laws, certain conventions, without which the art of fiction would not exist. Be he a true artist, he gives us pictures which represent his own favourite way of looking at life; each is the world in little, and the world as he prefers it. So that, whereas execution may be rightly criticized from the common point of view, a master's general conception of the human tragedy or comedy must be accepted as that without which his work could not take form.'
On March 2nd 1888, George returned to 16, Lucretia Street to bid farewell to Marianne - though, by now, she was 'H'. As I suggest in my last post, I don't believe the account of March 1st is a contemporaneous entry but a rewritten piece put down on paper much later, possibly when George first lived with Gabrielle - not to save his third wife's feelings (as some suggest) but because, with the spectre of his own death haunting him, he had the time to reflect on his literary legacy and how he might stage-manage it for posterity. The fact he dehumanizes Marianne on March 1st by referring to her as a 'poor thing' and a 'poor creature', and yet on March 2nd mentions her as 'H' reinforces this belief.
'Friday, March 2. In morning arranged my books roughly on the shelves; during papering etc. they have been lying in a great heap on the floor. In afternoon went to Lucretia Street, and saw her in the coffin. The face seemed more familiar to me. Gave Mrs Sherlock the promised £3; funeral will be Monday at 2 o'clock. A daughter accompanied me to a low public house, where the landlady had a pawn-ticket for H's wedding-ring, security for a debt of 1/9d. I paid the debt, and redeemed the ring, from the broker's. Cut a little hair from the poor head, - I scarcely know why, alas!
Here, we have the symbolic act of putting his house in order. It adds weight to my claim the sham manifesto ('Henceforth I never cease to bear testimony' etc) is more like a wake-up call to get on with it. As I wrote in Commonplace 33, his March 1st letter to Algernon does not include this cod manifesto, but talks about having to get to work on clearer tasks - I suggest these were making money and not frittering away time. And, trying to find a new wife. This would explain the Miss Curtis incident, where he may have proposed marriage to the young daughter of his Eastbourne tobacconist in April 1888.
Putting his books in order after a period of chaos (the decorators were in) would normally have been a pleasure for George - a chance to idle through the volumes and relive those familiar smells he is so often quoted on Google as enjoying. Books is disarray must have seemed like the library of his mind was disturbed; a reflection on regaining the order of things externally was a metaphor for calming the interior turmoil brought about by Marianne's death. As stated in recent posts, I believe George and Marianne enjoyed a mutually loving relationship of sorts right up to her death. Biographers might deny this but it explains the depth of his grief reaction in the coming months. In the March 2nd entry, he is not attempting to manage our perceptions; he is downbeat, already beginning the grieving process.
'The face seemed more familiar to me.' When George first viewed Marianne's body on March 1st he writes in this contrived account that he 'scarce recognized ' her face. My view is that the claim made on March 1st that he hasn't seen her in three years is false; seeing her now, when both scrofula and rigor mortis have done their work shocked him to the core because he had seen her fairly recently, and the change was a shock.
Scrofula is the endocrine system (lymphatic system) form of tuberculosis. It is characterised by large, swollen lesions growing on lymph nodes and in glands; as the lymphatic system serves the whole body, these become easily transferred to every other organ in the body. The face and throat are rich in lymph nodes, so the disease often sets up most noticeably in the face and throat, causing eruptions of lymph (clear cell-rich fluid) that scab over and scar.
George would have been familiar with this very visual condition, both in Marianne and in any of his father's customers. It was a common disease, little understood, incurable and what treatment there was often did more harm than good. I think the rigor mortis might have presented him with the more terrible shock, reminding him of his father's corpse. If the basic time-frame of the March 1st entry is correct, he viewed Marianne's body about 24 hours after she died. Rigor sets in about 2-4 hours after death and can take up to 12 hours to produce the 'rigid state' which then subsides after up to another 18 hours. It is caused by the body not producing adenosine triphosphate (ATP) - this is the substance that makes the muscles supple. The speed of the process is affected by a number of factors: state of the body at death; cause of death, gender, ambient temperature, if the body been covered over. The small muscles of the face, neck and shoulders are the first to be transformed. What are termed as 'last offices' are performed to prevent the corpse looking too affected by these chemical changes, and, in Marianne's day, these would have included tying-up of the jaw with a bandage or strip of cloth (knotted on top of the head) to keep the mouth from gaping wide, and the placing of pennies over the eyes to keep them closed. If we assume Marianne died in a cold room (which might have slowed the process), and if she wasn't found until the rigid state process had started, George may very well have viewed her with her mouth gaping and eyes wide open - a dreadful prospect - as there would be no possibility at that stage of the mouth and eyes being closed. By the afternoon of March 2nd, the worst of the rigor would have subsided, and Marianne would have returned more or less to a more peaceful prospect - hence George's entry of her looking more familiar.
more info here
'A daughter accompanied me to a low public house, where the landlady had a pawn-ticket for H's wedding-ring, security for a debt of 1/9d. I paid the debt, and redeemed the ring, from the broker's.' It would be easy to take this at face value, and this seems to be how biographers view it. An estranged wife pawning her wedding ring might suggest to some that she had no fond attachment to it - or her marriage. It is also used against Marianne as a means to demonstrate she was only interested in his money and had no regard for him or their relationship, and, being desperate to fund her alleged dissipated lifestyle, had sunk so low as to pawn the symbol of the love he had for her and the sacrifice he made for her at Owen's. If you want to blame Marianne, this is your script.
A moment now to think of the place the pawn shop had in the lives of the poor. Only those who have never had recourse to use one think they are a sign of poverty and feckless financial incompetence. Rich and poor people use them, some seeing it as a way of saving. And, valuable items in hock are not subject to tax as the money given for them is generally less than the face value. For the poor in Marianne's day, when no-one loaned money in the absence of equity, the pawn shop was a way to eke out funds when times were hard or when unexpected financial outlays called for instant cash. There are more ways of doing it now, but there are still pawn-brokers and shops where you can leave property and draw cash on its value. If Marianne was doing this it will not have been unusual and is no indicator she was funding 'bad' habits, or that she was feckless with money and frittered it away. However, bearing in mind Marianne's epilepsy led to her being sometimes unconscious or unable to look after herself, it makes perfect sense to put a precious ring in hock - where it will be safe from thieving hands. If the people with whom she shared the house were light-fingered, perhaps it was best kept out of their reach.
So, we have this old pub landlady of dubious provenance - according to George. Perhaps she was an old friend of Marianne's who was less than welcoming when the errant husband turned up. It seems Marianne had pawned the ring and then gave the pledge ticket as security on a loan of 1/9d - possibly a lot less than the value of the pledge. Maybe this landlady was disappointed he turned up to reclaim it - if she knew Marianne was dead, she might have thought she could reclaim the ring herself. The points I am making, are, there is more than one explanation for Marianne pawning the ring, and the fact she made use of pawn-broking at all was perfectly normal behaviour for working class people with no access to other formal forms of credit.
We return to the March 2nd Diary entry:
'Cut a little hair from the poor head, - I scarcely know why, alas!' We know George was a big fan of hair and saw long, luxuriant hair as a healthy sign of female sexuality. Marianne's hair was long and dark, very much what George found attractive - blondes do not figure much in his characterisations of women. The Victorian fad for post-death hair mementos is well-known - rings, brooches, necklaces and even picture for walls were made of the deceased's tresses. Taking this small token is typical of a man who wants to remember a love - what he is going to do with it is probably why he wrote the second part of the sentence. Did he keep it safe in his person papers and effects or was it discarded at some later date? That is immaterial: he took it and lets us know he did.
George paid 6 guineas for the funeral and £3 for mourning clothes and accoutrements. When George wrote to Algernon on August 8th 1881 he mentioned the gravestone put up for his brother, William: 'I am glad to hear you like the memorial which has been put up at Wilmslow. The very plainest & simplest in such cases is always the best, if there must be one at all. I personally should prefer none at all, but that is a matter of opinion & sentiment.' We learn from the editors' footnotes that William's gravestone read: 'William Whittington Gissing - Died April 16th 1880 - aged 20 years.' As far as we know, George did not pay for a headstone for Marianne; this has been left to her well-wishers to provide. The cemetery is in Blackshaw Road, Lambeth. Her grave number is 731 3J CONS.
look at more GF Watts pictures
George wrote this in his Critical Life of Charles Dickens: 'As soon as a writer sits down to construct a narrative, to imagine human beings, or adapt those he knows to changed circumstances, he enters a world distinct from the actual, and, call himself what he may, he obeys certain laws, certain conventions, without which the art of fiction would not exist. Be he a true artist, he gives us pictures which represent his own favourite way of looking at life; each is the world in little, and the world as he prefers it. So that, whereas execution may be rightly criticized from the common point of view, a master's general conception of the human tragedy or comedy must be accepted as that without which his work could not take form.'
 |
| Found Drowned by George Frederick Watts 1848-50 |
 |
| Love and Death by GF Watts 1885 |
Here, we have the symbolic act of putting his house in order. It adds weight to my claim the sham manifesto ('Henceforth I never cease to bear testimony' etc) is more like a wake-up call to get on with it. As I wrote in Commonplace 33, his March 1st letter to Algernon does not include this cod manifesto, but talks about having to get to work on clearer tasks - I suggest these were making money and not frittering away time. And, trying to find a new wife. This would explain the Miss Curtis incident, where he may have proposed marriage to the young daughter of his Eastbourne tobacconist in April 1888.
Putting his books in order after a period of chaos (the decorators were in) would normally have been a pleasure for George - a chance to idle through the volumes and relive those familiar smells he is so often quoted on Google as enjoying. Books is disarray must have seemed like the library of his mind was disturbed; a reflection on regaining the order of things externally was a metaphor for calming the interior turmoil brought about by Marianne's death. As stated in recent posts, I believe George and Marianne enjoyed a mutually loving relationship of sorts right up to her death. Biographers might deny this but it explains the depth of his grief reaction in the coming months. In the March 2nd entry, he is not attempting to manage our perceptions; he is downbeat, already beginning the grieving process.
 |
| Orpheus and Eurydice by GF Watts 1890 |
Scrofula is the endocrine system (lymphatic system) form of tuberculosis. It is characterised by large, swollen lesions growing on lymph nodes and in glands; as the lymphatic system serves the whole body, these become easily transferred to every other organ in the body. The face and throat are rich in lymph nodes, so the disease often sets up most noticeably in the face and throat, causing eruptions of lymph (clear cell-rich fluid) that scab over and scar.
George would have been familiar with this very visual condition, both in Marianne and in any of his father's customers. It was a common disease, little understood, incurable and what treatment there was often did more harm than good. I think the rigor mortis might have presented him with the more terrible shock, reminding him of his father's corpse. If the basic time-frame of the March 1st entry is correct, he viewed Marianne's body about 24 hours after she died. Rigor sets in about 2-4 hours after death and can take up to 12 hours to produce the 'rigid state' which then subsides after up to another 18 hours. It is caused by the body not producing adenosine triphosphate (ATP) - this is the substance that makes the muscles supple. The speed of the process is affected by a number of factors: state of the body at death; cause of death, gender, ambient temperature, if the body been covered over. The small muscles of the face, neck and shoulders are the first to be transformed. What are termed as 'last offices' are performed to prevent the corpse looking too affected by these chemical changes, and, in Marianne's day, these would have included tying-up of the jaw with a bandage or strip of cloth (knotted on top of the head) to keep the mouth from gaping wide, and the placing of pennies over the eyes to keep them closed. If we assume Marianne died in a cold room (which might have slowed the process), and if she wasn't found until the rigid state process had started, George may very well have viewed her with her mouth gaping and eyes wide open - a dreadful prospect - as there would be no possibility at that stage of the mouth and eyes being closed. By the afternoon of March 2nd, the worst of the rigor would have subsided, and Marianne would have returned more or less to a more peaceful prospect - hence George's entry of her looking more familiar.
more info here
 |
| The Recording Angel by GF Watts 1890 |
A moment now to think of the place the pawn shop had in the lives of the poor. Only those who have never had recourse to use one think they are a sign of poverty and feckless financial incompetence. Rich and poor people use them, some seeing it as a way of saving. And, valuable items in hock are not subject to tax as the money given for them is generally less than the face value. For the poor in Marianne's day, when no-one loaned money in the absence of equity, the pawn shop was a way to eke out funds when times were hard or when unexpected financial outlays called for instant cash. There are more ways of doing it now, but there are still pawn-brokers and shops where you can leave property and draw cash on its value. If Marianne was doing this it will not have been unusual and is no indicator she was funding 'bad' habits, or that she was feckless with money and frittered it away. However, bearing in mind Marianne's epilepsy led to her being sometimes unconscious or unable to look after herself, it makes perfect sense to put a precious ring in hock - where it will be safe from thieving hands. If the people with whom she shared the house were light-fingered, perhaps it was best kept out of their reach.
So, we have this old pub landlady of dubious provenance - according to George. Perhaps she was an old friend of Marianne's who was less than welcoming when the errant husband turned up. It seems Marianne had pawned the ring and then gave the pledge ticket as security on a loan of 1/9d - possibly a lot less than the value of the pledge. Maybe this landlady was disappointed he turned up to reclaim it - if she knew Marianne was dead, she might have thought she could reclaim the ring herself. The points I am making, are, there is more than one explanation for Marianne pawning the ring, and the fact she made use of pawn-broking at all was perfectly normal behaviour for working class people with no access to other formal forms of credit.
Now, let's take a sideways step: Have you ever noticed how what are termed 'McGuffins' loom large in the constructing of Marianne's narrative? In the Owens days we have two: the sewing machine and George's father's watch. The writer of the Black Letters - John George - mentions he helps hump a machine down some stairs. What sort of machine and who owned the stairs, he doesn't say. What became of the machine, we don't know. This is the paltry evidence used by biographers to state emphatically, that generous George shelled out for a sewing machine for gold-digger Marianne. How on earth does she figure in this? How do we know it was a sewing machine? Black's exact words are: 'I am nearly slain; the gross man of cowardly kind came to help with that machine & I forced him to go first. About half way down I saw his eyes begin to roll & his face look apoplectic; so I tugged with all my might, careless of brace buttons, or any mortal thing, and thus prevented the thing from running down, & making a jelly of the clod. Only one limb was broken ie of the machine.' How is this about George at all? We have no idea who owned the machine, what sort of equipment it was, why Black was involved, why he was telling George, or any piece of information that in any way affects Marianne. Now, Morley Roberts in Henry Maitland says George bought her a new sewing machine. Is this the origin of the sewing machine myth? It comes from the man who made up a good deal of information about his friendship with George (for all sorts of reasons). I suspect it is false because George, being a canny Yorkshireman, would not waste good money on new when he could have acquired a perfectly serviceable second-hand one; after all, Manchester was full of them as women had few alternative means of earning a living. And, sewing machines could be rented, so why the need to buy a new one? Something that makes me doubt this Black reference is about a sewing machine, is: unless the two men were total wimps, a treadle sewing machine is not a particularly heavy piece of kit. The actual base is the heaviest part, being wrought iron and a bit of wood. If two chaps couldn't bring this down some stairs, it's a sad indictment of late Victorian masculine prowess. And, if they didn't have the wit to detach the machine from the base to make it lighter... so, I suspect they were not carrying a sewing machine. It is certainly not hard evidence Marianne was given any sort of sewing machine by anyone. However, if you follow the view that she was the reason George stole money, you might need there to be something for him to spend it on. Likewise, Marianne is blamed for George selling his father's watch - which is ludicrous and there again, done to make her look bad and offer evidence he was under some sort of sorceress's spell. There is simply no evidence for it - well not in all the published materials I have read. Did he sell the watch? Did he lose it? Was it stolen off him? Did he give it away? Who knows?
 |
| Study for The Court of Death by GF Watts 1896 |
'Cut a little hair from the poor head, - I scarcely know why, alas!' We know George was a big fan of hair and saw long, luxuriant hair as a healthy sign of female sexuality. Marianne's hair was long and dark, very much what George found attractive - blondes do not figure much in his characterisations of women. The Victorian fad for post-death hair mementos is well-known - rings, brooches, necklaces and even picture for walls were made of the deceased's tresses. Taking this small token is typical of a man who wants to remember a love - what he is going to do with it is probably why he wrote the second part of the sentence. Did he keep it safe in his person papers and effects or was it discarded at some later date? That is immaterial: he took it and lets us know he did.
 |
| Time, Death and Judgement by GF Watts 1900 |
On Saturday, March 3rd 1888, George wrote this in a letter to Algernon:
'You must not exaggerate the painfulness of the mere business. I always feel very much at home amid those surroundings of squalor. The people at the house I have found good honest creatures, & and I have done my best to repay them for their trouble. I shall not accompany them to the funeral, which is on Monday, at Tooting, but I have paid for their mourning dresses &c, & with the strange delight of such people in mortuary affairs they are more than contented.'
As George did not attend William's funeral, it is not surprising he could not attend Marianne's. There may well have been a religious element to her ceremony as Marianne seems to have been religious - even earning George's scorn once for thinking of converting to Catholicism. As for the line, 'I always feel very much at home amid those surroundings of squalor.' - Lordy knows what this means as it is the total antithesis of everything he had ever - or would ever - say. You wouldn't catch Henry Ryecroft mouthing those words! I presume he is speaking figuratively, as a writer.
He goes on...
'Some day I will picture that bedroom as it looked when I first entered.' Now, in the Letters vol three, there is a footnote indicating this room gets a mention in chapters 8 and 37 in the descriptions of Mrs Candy's squalid room in The Nether World (the book George wrote immediately after Marianne's death). Try as I might, I cannot see any connection whatsoever between the room Marianne died in and the one Mrs Candy is situated in. Poor Mrs Candy lives in abject squalor - no pictures, no poetry books, no scripture texts... the description George gives in the Diary for March 1st bears no relation to the Nether World and Mrs Candy. Again, biographers' propaganda against Marianne rears its ugly head. Mrs Candy's room is nothing like what Mrs Sherlock -
that 'good honest creature' provided for her lodger. Go read for yourself, and ask why the editors of Letters Vol 3 have dropped this fantastic connection into our minds - if not to frame Marianne and sully her name? It's conspiracy stuff - I would call it Orwellian, if I had less regard for Mr Orwell.
'I saw her yesterday in the coffin, & had a wonderful sense of rest and peace in looking at her. No more wretched blind struggling for her, no more suffering under the world's curses.' Marianne had endured a lifetime of struggle against the various aliments that eventually killed her: if you map all of the signs and symptoms George has listed in his letters, it is feasible Marianne suffered from systemic TB resulting from her childhood scrofula, such as: Pott's disease of the spine; phthisis; possible meningeal TB that could have caused her epilepsy way back in childhood; ocular TB that resulted in her eyes being operated on; possible gynaecological problems. The epilepsy itself guaranteed she was an outcast to anyone ignorant of the disorder. The world's curses were poverty, loneliness and the degradation of being an abandoned wife. That she struggled for so long was truly heroic.
'For me there is yet work to do, & this memory of wretchedness will be an impulse such as few men posses.' This is not the quotidian sham manifesto I believe was fabricated much later than George claims as his entry for March 1st. The 'memory of wretchedness' I think refers to the state of his finances and, therefore, his future as a writer. If no-one read his books in his lifetime, how was he to stand side-by-side with George Meredith or Thomas Hardy? If he still had not achieved glory for his Art - after so many books published - then what was the point of the Owens debacle? I see this as George saying it was time to stop being a dilettante and to start producing great fiction.
'I had to redeem the wedding ring - first from the publican who held the pawnticket for a small sum, then from the pawnbroker himself.' Is this George looking for sympathy - 'She pawned my ring, Alg - she didn't really love me after all' sort of thing? Or, is it his relationship with Marianne now come full-circle? It started with a determination to have her as his wife and ended with him holding the symbolic ring to keep as a token of that union and his love for her.
My contention is that George loved Marianne more than he ever loved anyone else. His grief at her death - which quickly metamorphosed into depression - is not the reaction of a man who thinks he is well rid (as they say in Yorkshire). It is the grieving of a man who has to accept the love of his life has gone forever. He desperately wanted to be loved by a woman - and this is why he thrashes desperately about with Eastbourne ingenues and friends of his sister Nelly's. Eventually, he committed a terrible error and foisted himself on Edith Underwood - poor, poor girl.
George paid the Sherlocks to represent him at the funeral. We can only hope they honoured their sacred duty and gave Marianne an appropriate and dignified send off.
 |
| The Tooting Cemetery where Marianne is buried. |
look at more GF Watts pictures
No comments:
Post a Comment