Commonplace 40 George & Egoism PART TWO: The Owens Incident.
George was arrested and charged with theft on 31st May 1876. He was 18 years and 6 months old. Some argue that he was sent straight to prison on remand, but that is unlikely as this period of incarceration would have been deducted from the length of his sentence, making his release date around July 1st, instead of the date we know he was discharged, which was July 5th. Still, a month of prison would have been a monumental shock to his constitution and his psyche. If George had been enjoying his adolescent carefree hedonistic heyday, Bellevue would have signalled that phase of his life was over. Was he ever again carefree?
This is the biographers' collective party line: George stole money (and possibly books) from his fellow students to give money to Marianne aka Nell, his girlfriend. Remember, this is the party line, so we must ask: is it true that he did it for her? My answer is: it's not. I suggest it is, at worst, propaganda put about by the Gissing Massive to explain their homie's transgressions; at best, it is supposition, but it isn't fact: there is no evidence Marianne benefited from the crimes or even knew what George was up to.
At some point I presume, the Massive posse members have asked themselves: what was a middle class boy doing committing a working class crime? And, then they might well conclude what is so easy and what has been done since the Garden of Eden: it can't have been his fault; there must have been a woman behind it. Some even claim that, in his own head, George believed himself innocent of any crime because he didn't benefit from it directly. If he really did think this, well, that just shows how naïve and arrogant George was (and presumes he didn't spend the money on himself). I rail against the injustice of World Poverty, but I'm not stealing to send money to anyone in need. And, if I did, I could hardly blame the starving in Africa for making me do it! Of course, this view that George was able to rationalise his crimes away is pure supposition, as there is no record of his true motives - though it serves to make Marianne look like the person who profited from it, thus blackening her good name once again.
Owens College Principal decreed George had been living 'a life of immorality and dissipation'. Lordy knows what this means - one person's concept of immorality and dissipation is another's idea of a good night out. However, we assume they were referring to George being a 'bit of a lad'. As he was 18, this is not exactly unexpected, but 'rules is rules' and no doubt the College felt it had cause to feel affronted. George was officially a bad influence. And a jailbird. Actually, George was let off pretty light in prison as flogging was often a punishment added to incarceration, particularly with new offenders who needed to be shocked into being good. Maybe his class and his sheepish, craven attitude prevented him from being taken for a hardened criminal, and they took pity on his lower middle class ass.
Is there any other possible explanation for this sort of maladjusted juvenile delinquent behaviour? Let us think for a moment about free will and free action again - for revision: click It can be argued (Hobbes, Hume) that free will leads to free action. But there are forces that impede this process: external force such as moral imperatives and legal and cultural restrictions - so, is free will always free?
George had free will to steal. Did he exercise free action? He was not compelled to steal by outside forces such as hunger, or having someone threaten to shoot his cat if he didn't (which would render it a not free action); it was a choice. His personal morality allowed him to set his own boundaries (unless he deferred to a Dice Man style Fate!). The Law usually acts to stop us, if Karma/God is watching us/social embarrassment/shame don't override free will and stop us. The perpetrator commits the crime and suffers the consequences. There is one general exception in Law: if the criminal was not 'compos mentis' - in full control of her/his mind - when the act was committed, then she/he is not considered responsible.
Ellen claimed George suffered from depression throughout his life. If we take depression in its everyday sense (ie not as a clinical diagnosis) we can say it is extreme unhappiness. Was George unhappy at Owens? He had (according to the legend) a fun social life, a sexy girlfriend, he found his studies a doddle, he didn't have his mother to censure his every move, he had an income from his prizes, and he was on the threshold of greatness. Was he not, therefore, deeply happy? Do happy people steal? Well, according to The Association of Psychological Science, yes, they do. click They tell us: '... positive affect (happiness, in everyday terms) could lay the groundwork for dishonesty by altering how individuals evaluate the moral implications of their behaviour'. Certainly in the term leading up to the fall from grace, George was on top of the world. His performance in his studies, the debates he chaired and participated in, and the sheer audacity of his flagrant disregard for college rules, were the endeavours of a happy egoist.
Perhaps George didn't think his actions would ever be uncovered. Academic success may have gone to his head and convinced him that he was on a roll in life and nothing could stop him. Judging from the banter in the letters to George from John Black they both had scant respect for their tutors, and deceiving them and playing tricks was the norm. Trips to Southport presumably with Marianne (we must be wary as this is supposition!) and the general social mayhem worked by a typical undergraduate (at least in my day whoohoo!) can be quite challenging to the cloistered world of a college - and George gave a good account of himself. However, he was not really cut out for the role of Victorian Rebel Without a Cause; he was more a flashy Icarus who flew too close to the Sun.
The absences from lectures George racked up are illuminating - he seems to have had an awful lot of time off for piffling illnesses - does this suggest he was not fully engaged in the learning process? If we compare this performance to the boy who walked to school with a fishbone in his throat, George may well have gone off the boil where the studies was concerned. Or had he been leading a much broader life of immorality and dissipation than he usually given credit for, sleeping with as many girls as he could lay hands on, drinking like a fish, necking laudanum and visiting all the flesh pots that would permit him entry, so lectures will have seemed a little tame. Few young people seem to be preoccupied with illness believing as they do that they are immortal (which they are, right up to the day they die!), however, George was a bit of a hypochondriac, so petty illnesses could have preoccupied him and made him stay off college at the first sign of a sniffle. Sad or lonely people seem to fret more about their health than do those tripping over friends and company, so maybe he was feeling lost in the big city and sometimes felt he couldn't drag himself out of bed for a lecture he probably knew as much about as his tutor. This is also a sign of depression - it's called 'somatising': unconsciously converting one's mental health into a physical state.
Stealing - especially trifling amounts - is nowadays seen as a sort of cry for help - external signs of inner conflict. Was George enduring mental suffering brought about by missing his family, working too hard, the shock of hormones finally rising to the surface, the over-stimulation of a massive machine of a city breaking over him like a psychic tsunami? Many students have caved in under similar circumstances. Petty theft can, therefore, be a release of tension - the thrill of the crime can release endorphins that soothe and calm. Stealing from people you know can also be an act of power if you feel powerless. Was George self-medicating with small crimes as a means of offsetting the lack of power he felt at having equals or even betters as rivals for the money prizes?
Powerlessness would have been extra hard for George to tackle as he had always been powerful - oldest child, successful scholar, top of the form etc etc. He had not really had much competition in life - certainly not from Will or Alg. Maybe he unconsciously relieved the pressure of now having equals to compete with in the symbolic act of small thefts that he thought would get one over on the competition, and besides, no-one would care about a few shillings. Not from a point of view that he was above the law, then, but because the endorphins soothed him and he could always deal with the guilt later. It may even have been that he didn't spend the money - perhaps he gave it away to charity or threw it in the Irwell on the way home. Those unfortunate to self-medicate with shoplifting often steal things they don't want and then bin them on the way home.
In Manchester, George was a very small minnow in a massive pond - bereft of anyone to love him except for the woman he had promised to care for. Perhaps this is why he so desperately wanted someone like Marianne on whom to focus his attention. My contention has always been that George sought out a girl who was ailing, lonely, desperate to be cared for when he found her. One of the interesting things about the role of carer - we are often drawn to caring for others because it is a way of caring for ourselves. Working on someone else (in the psychodynamic sense of the word, to 'work' means to address psychological issues usually in 'group') allows us to work on ourselves - as in to deal with our own psychological issues. Or it saves us from working on them, because it appears to the world we have no issues to deal with which is what enables us to set ourselves up as experts on the issues of others.
This might go some way to explaining why George felt so disinterested when Marianne's illnesses inevitably worsened. She had once been a form of therapy to divert him from inner and external torments of his life, but as he piled up success in the world that he wanted to inhabit - middle class aspirations on track, novelist ambition in train, intellectual equals engaged - he no longer had need of her because his destiny as an intellectual now became his therapy. Having a failed project like Marianne dogging his steps on the road to stardom was a shameful burden he had to jettison. He was an apprentice in a new milieu where success depended on impressing his new friends, not on impressing Marianne. Novels became the new cause and the therapy of choice; one where his efforts might lead to success, unlike poor Marianne, who, through no fault of her own, had failed him. And so the pure egoist was born.
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| Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich 1817 |
The Owens Incident is often viewed as the defining moment of George's life. Before these thefts his life seemed to be on a steady course to success; after, life was a vortex of turmoil out of which he never really dragged himself. Anyone embarking on an understanding of George and his works has to spend time thinking about what happened at Owens, and why a seemingly upright young citizen could go so far astray. George was arrested and charged with theft on 31st May 1876. He was 18 years and 6 months old. Some argue that he was sent straight to prison on remand, but that is unlikely as this period of incarceration would have been deducted from the length of his sentence, making his release date around July 1st, instead of the date we know he was discharged, which was July 5th. Still, a month of prison would have been a monumental shock to his constitution and his psyche. If George had been enjoying his adolescent carefree hedonistic heyday, Bellevue would have signalled that phase of his life was over. Was he ever again carefree?
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| Urizen in Chains by William Blake 1794 |
At some point I presume, the Massive posse members have asked themselves: what was a middle class boy doing committing a working class crime? And, then they might well conclude what is so easy and what has been done since the Garden of Eden: it can't have been his fault; there must have been a woman behind it. Some even claim that, in his own head, George believed himself innocent of any crime because he didn't benefit from it directly. If he really did think this, well, that just shows how naïve and arrogant George was (and presumes he didn't spend the money on himself). I rail against the injustice of World Poverty, but I'm not stealing to send money to anyone in need. And, if I did, I could hardly blame the starving in Africa for making me do it! Of course, this view that George was able to rationalise his crimes away is pure supposition, as there is no record of his true motives - though it serves to make Marianne look like the person who profited from it, thus blackening her good name once again.
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| Mark Twain |
Is there any other possible explanation for this sort of maladjusted juvenile delinquent behaviour? Let us think for a moment about free will and free action again - for revision: click It can be argued (Hobbes, Hume) that free will leads to free action. But there are forces that impede this process: external force such as moral imperatives and legal and cultural restrictions - so, is free will always free?
George had free will to steal. Did he exercise free action? He was not compelled to steal by outside forces such as hunger, or having someone threaten to shoot his cat if he didn't (which would render it a not free action); it was a choice. His personal morality allowed him to set his own boundaries (unless he deferred to a Dice Man style Fate!). The Law usually acts to stop us, if Karma/God is watching us/social embarrassment/shame don't override free will and stop us. The perpetrator commits the crime and suffers the consequences. There is one general exception in Law: if the criminal was not 'compos mentis' - in full control of her/his mind - when the act was committed, then she/he is not considered responsible.
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| Dolmen by Alfred Kubin 1902 |
Perhaps George didn't think his actions would ever be uncovered. Academic success may have gone to his head and convinced him that he was on a roll in life and nothing could stop him. Judging from the banter in the letters to George from John Black they both had scant respect for their tutors, and deceiving them and playing tricks was the norm. Trips to Southport presumably with Marianne (we must be wary as this is supposition!) and the general social mayhem worked by a typical undergraduate (at least in my day whoohoo!) can be quite challenging to the cloistered world of a college - and George gave a good account of himself. However, he was not really cut out for the role of Victorian Rebel Without a Cause; he was more a flashy Icarus who flew too close to the Sun.
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| The Sun or The Fall of Icarus by Merry-Joseph Blondel 1819 |
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Melancholy (L) and Raving Madness (R) by Caius Gabriel Cibber c 1646 These two chaps were formerly on the gates of Bedlam - the old name for Bethlehem Hospital (now the Imperial War Museum). Marianne lived just round the corner from Bethlehem Hospital, but the statues were removed in 1815 and put in storage, so she wouldn't have been terrified by them.
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Powerlessness would have been extra hard for George to tackle as he had always been powerful - oldest child, successful scholar, top of the form etc etc. He had not really had much competition in life - certainly not from Will or Alg. Maybe he unconsciously relieved the pressure of now having equals to compete with in the symbolic act of small thefts that he thought would get one over on the competition, and besides, no-one would care about a few shillings. Not from a point of view that he was above the law, then, but because the endorphins soothed him and he could always deal with the guilt later. It may even have been that he didn't spend the money - perhaps he gave it away to charity or threw it in the Irwell on the way home. Those unfortunate to self-medicate with shoplifting often steal things they don't want and then bin them on the way home.
In Manchester, George was a very small minnow in a massive pond - bereft of anyone to love him except for the woman he had promised to care for. Perhaps this is why he so desperately wanted someone like Marianne on whom to focus his attention. My contention has always been that George sought out a girl who was ailing, lonely, desperate to be cared for when he found her. One of the interesting things about the role of carer - we are often drawn to caring for others because it is a way of caring for ourselves. Working on someone else (in the psychodynamic sense of the word, to 'work' means to address psychological issues usually in 'group') allows us to work on ourselves - as in to deal with our own psychological issues. Or it saves us from working on them, because it appears to the world we have no issues to deal with which is what enables us to set ourselves up as experts on the issues of others.
This might go some way to explaining why George felt so disinterested when Marianne's illnesses inevitably worsened. She had once been a form of therapy to divert him from inner and external torments of his life, but as he piled up success in the world that he wanted to inhabit - middle class aspirations on track, novelist ambition in train, intellectual equals engaged - he no longer had need of her because his destiny as an intellectual now became his therapy. Having a failed project like Marianne dogging his steps on the road to stardom was a shameful burden he had to jettison. He was an apprentice in a new milieu where success depended on impressing his new friends, not on impressing Marianne. Novels became the new cause and the therapy of choice; one where his efforts might lead to success, unlike poor Marianne, who, through no fault of her own, had failed him. And so the pure egoist was born.
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Cimon and Pero by Peter Paul Rubens c 1630 (The role of the prison visitor was much changed by the time George got to Belle vue!)
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