Commonplace 57 George & His Alter Ego: Bad George Gissing. PART TWO - What HG Wells told  his son about George. The Anthony West Account.

Ophelia Among The Flowers
by Odilon Redon 1906

HG Wells was truly the embodiment of what George could only claim to be: a mix of bourgeois and bohemian. In 1913, a sexual dalliance between HG and Rebecca West produced a son, Anthony, born on the day the First World War started. As part of the usual father-to-son retelling of old stories HG talked to his boy about the many friendships he'd had with renowned literary figures, including George. Anthony wrote a biography of his father: HG Wells Aspects of a Life (1984) that includes a chapter on George which is illuminating for us because it reveals that HG came to realise how deceitful and dishonest George had been about what he related of his life story and how heartless and selfish he was in the way he treated his wife Edith and their two children. It describes how HG came to feel let down and betrayed by George when he learnt various strands of truth the hard way, after George's death, from people who knew George well - people like Frederick Harrison and Morley Roberts. I have only recently (last week!) found this book - and I am utterly delighted to have it. What an essential addition to the Gissing biographical canon it is. Published by Random House ISBN: 0-394-53196-5. Go seek it out.

Coast Scene (possibly Capri) by Thomas Fearnley 1833

Now, the Anthony West account of George's friendship with HG pulls no punches. It is not a pleasant bit of puff written by a Gissing devotee who blindly adores his subject; neither is it an account from a literary expert who knows much about George's writing. What it is, is the insider stuff spoken of in the Wells family - the family that knew George intimately. Anthony writes as if he is genuinely voicing what his father told him - it does not seem that he has spent hours and days researching the archives for details and dates, or is trying to put George into an historic context. What he gives us is the flavour of the conversations between himself and his father, about a subject with which HG struggled to find resolution or closure.

In the end, HG was as disappointed in George as Frederick Harrison had been. This view of Gissing might be hard for some biographers to swallow - especially those so blinded by their devotion to their hero that they can't bear anyone saying anything that does not portray him as a gullible fool whose transgressions were all the result of being born in the wrong class, being married to the wrong women (but then being saved by the right one haha!), being an under-appreciated genius and special needs case who cannot possibly be held to account for his misdeeds because he is, in some mysterious way, above reproach, despite evidence of his selfish cruelty to be found emblazoned throughout the primary sources of the Diaries and Letters - albeit jostling for space with misogyny, snobbery and a flirtation with eugenics. (Breathe lol) Is it any wonder the Anthony West account, which runs contrary to the vision of George as a misunderstood genius and all-round good egg, was attacked by certain, blinkered, self-deluded Gissingites when it was released? Let's look at some of the Anthony West account. Words lifted directly from West are in blue.

To recap: When the friendship began, George was already well aware he was doomed to an early death from the lung disease and other serious ailments from which he suffered. His faith in his own literary powers was waning and he had become a man incapable, at times, of rational and reasonable thinking - and of making smart decisions. His marriage to Edith was beyond repair - mainly due to his innate cruelty - and the mistake of having children was on his mind. Not his conscience, just his mind. He was cornered in a situation of his own creation where all his chickens were coming home to roost; worse, it would soon become impossible to maintain the façade of a decent, civilised man to all the people he was lying to. The time had come for some sort of last stand. As ever, George could not endure this struggle alone - someone had to be commandeered into service to make decisions for him: HG Wells and his wife, Jane, were enlisted into the cause.

Portrait of a Knight of Rhodes
by Franciabigio 1514

HG Wells became George's best friend. The other man friends - Eduard Bertz  and Morley Roberts - may both have known George for longer, but neither of these two could provide the hands-on support he so desperately needed in terms of practical help. And, neither could give enough of that catnip George so craved - sympathy. As his powers went into sharp decline, George must have realised Wells, whose own life had been fraught with disappointments and challenges, would only be too willing to take him on and look after him, because HG was a man who wanted to own his feelings, not deny or smother them.

George made use of the Wellses' house to entertain Gabrielle Fleury when he first needed a respectable place to meet her. Within breakneck speed, George reported he had finally found 'Ms Right', and intended setting up home with her. HG sent off a disapproving letter, to which George replied with an explanation that 'my error has been in bearing so long with a woman who has used me so unmercifully'. He does not explain how Edith managed this, as she was, after all, the powerless victim in their relationship, having been preyed on and married under false pretences - those pretences being that George would treat her kindly and honourably as a husband promises to do when he makes his marriage vows. He had lumbered her with their marriage fully knowing how hard he was on women and how little regard he had for her in particular. In no way can Edith ever be described as using him. In fact, the reverse was true: he used her for sex that was devoid of love cloaked by a legal marriage that was a sham on his part as it was always conducted on his terms, never caring for her feelings or wishes. That's the heroic status of George - he marries to make sex accessible and then abandons two children and his legal sex slave when it all gets too annoying. Not very British! No amount of image tarting up can gloss over this, one of George's greatest crimes. George Gissing selfishly abandoned two wives and two children to make his own life easier. Fact. It's in the Letters and Diaries. 

George had been in hiding from Edith for some time, lying to her and his friends, blaming her for the failure of their relationship, treating her appallingly and cruelly, claiming she was not a fit mother. He forced Walter to live in Wakefield when the wee chap was in need of his parents' care, kidnapping him and leaving Edith with no say in the matter. He then abandoned Alfred to Edith's care even though he was doing his best to make his wife known as a totally unsuitable mother who was a danger to her children. He was hoping to drive her into madness by sneaking about, avoiding her and allowing his innate hard-heartedness rule, whilst misrepresenting her to anyone who would swallow it. I am convinced he later rewrote most of his Diary to make sure her character would be as unpleasant as possible to anyone who read it - including his sons.

After the Misdeed by Jean Béraud circa 1885-90

Early on in this new friendship, George moaned to HG and Jane Wells about Edith and what he presented as her general awfulness and they, taking this at face value, willingly stepped in to help him with whatever plan he had to right the great wrong of his life. He told the tale to them this way: he had pined for female company and determined to find the first willing female to marry him. But, Edith (George claimed) quickly revealed herself to be foolish, disobedient, ill-tempered and a scold. According to West, George claimed she had turned to drink, had become unpredictable and he was beginning to wonder if she was completely sane. Any resemblance between this and the character assassination George committed on Marianne aka Nell is not coincidental - George liked stereotyping women as base, ignorant, brainless fiends with no moral compass save for a man using a big stick on them.

Anthony reports his father and Jane fell for this version hook, line and sinker: Gissing had so candid a manner, and looked so honest, that it never crossed my father's mind that there might be another side to this story than the one that he had given.  HG and Jane made a home from home for George in their large house, which he could make use of any time he wanted. As he was on the run from Edith, he made enthusiastic use of it. Wells' son makes the point that George always did well with people who took him at face value - if he was challenged in any way he reacted badly, and we know George tended to ditch people when he no longer had a use for them, or if they failed to live up to his expectations.

In good faith, the Wellses agreed to meet up with George in Italy, because George was taking himself off for a trip to his favourite place: Rome. Edith and Alfred, and little Walter, could all go hang: George needed another holiday.

George on the far left; HG on the far right -
obviously they posed the wrong way round!

According to his son, this little snapshot of the group of friends George gathered round him in Italy does not reveal how uncomfortable HG was at being patronised and talked down to by this group of macho literary bods. George did not miss the chance to explain Rome to HG - a man he considered an intellectual inferior, and virtually uneducated. HG was not of the same mindset and seemed to hate the Roman necrophilia George espoused, but he and Jane were too polite and soft-hearted to complain.

Later, back in the UK, HG became very unwell on a bicycling holiday and needed the care of a good physician. George recommended his childhood associate/friend Henry Hick, a doctor situated in New Romney, near Romney Marsh in Kent. In those days patients often lived with their doctor if the illness required special care or extended treatment, or even an operation. Hick's house was large enough to accommodate several fee-paying patients in need of care when convalescing or recuperating.

As it happened, young Walter Gissing was also staying there with the Hicks. George had asked Hick to put the child up for the holidays rather than going to any trouble himself in caring for him - and he certainly didn't want Edith having any contact with the lad. It is tempting to think it crossed George's mind that the Wellses would be a good place to offload Walter permanently - perhaps he hoped they would offer to take both boys into their hearts and homes when they realised how awful their mother was - that is, after he had manipulated their perceptions of her.

He wrote to Jane Wells that Edith was recently put out of her lodgings for attacking her landlady with a stick, requiring the intervention of a policeman. HG was suspicious that there was more to this than George was telling, and so asked Hick for an explanation of what was going on with the Gissings. Hick reluctantly at first began to tell HG what he knew - that George had come to him for advice about how best to abandon Edith to her fate. Any resemblance between this and the advice he sought from Fred Harrison about abandoning Marianne is not coincidental. Having stolen Walter away to

A Young Girl Reading by Jean-Honore Fragonard c 1770

Wakefield, George had been working on a way to trick Edith out of Alfred. Hick said to HG he didn't know Edith well enough to give advice, but he gathered that George had already made up his mind to abandon her. HG said this to his son regarding the conversation Hick had with George: 
... he had gone on to propose the terms of a possible settlement of their affairs... It was to be based on a proposition which consisted in essence of the too simple solution that she should sell Gissing her interest in their two sons. She was to agree to drop out of his life and theirs, in exchange for an allowance of twenty-five shillings a week. Hick had been positively alarmed to discover Gissing's powers of self-deception had become so great that in the course of outlining this far from generous proposal he had managed to persuade himself that the idea hadn't originated with him, and that Hick had suggested it to him as a possible solution to his problem.  Here are echoes of getting Frederic Harrison to suggest he divorce Marianne. Remember, George went to Fred Harrison for the 'decision' to divorce Marianne, after the police sergeant told George she was a 'bad character' (see Commonplace 34-37 for more coverage of this). And can we almost hear him using Miss Clara Collet and Miss Eliza Orme to the same ends - using poor Miss Orme, in particular, to (probably unwittingly) help him drive Edith out of her mind. I will return to this in another post.

Edith smelt a rat when George tried a charm offensive on her - whilst they were en train to Castle Bolton on a small holiday with Alfred. Anthony says Edith wondered why George was being so nice to her after all he had put her through. Her suspicions prevented Alfred being snatched away. Anthony writes: Gissing could not endure having his motives questioned even at the best of times, and now, when his intentions were anything but straightforward, he found Edith's interrogation particularly hard to bear. He took refuge in the mutism that he had always found to be his most effective weapon against her, and she was soon in one of her furies that he used as the basis for his charge that she was as good as mad. This is how control freaks work - they find a weak spot and exploit it, undermining and wearing down the opposition. George, telling everyone his wife is mad, forgetting to add that he is responsible for it - even orchestrating it. By not responding to her with his passive-aggressive mutism, he did all he could to enrage her, and women who express themselves - especially their inner rage at the injustice of their lives - are still regarded as unwomanly and hysterical - flaky and female are synonymous to George and some lower evolutionary orders of men.

Portrait of a Lady 

by Raimundo de Madrazo 1885-90

When George got back from Italy, Edith was still in the dark about what her future - and her children's - was to be. After his return he even went to the length of feeding her false information in the hope of breaking her will to resist before he reopened negotiations with her. This led to the incident of the attack on her landlady...  Anthony says Edith was told Walter was with Algernon, but when she turned up at her brother-in-law's house, she discovered Algernon knew nothing about it. When she got back to London, her landlady wouldn't let her in because the rent needed to be paid in advance and Edith didn't have the money for it. Anthony describes what George paid her as a pittance. Any resemblance between this and the 15/- he paid Marianne is not a coincidence - he tightened the screw of control on his first wife by keeping her impoverished, too, no doubt with the ever-present threat of those funds being withdrawn if she failed to cooperate.

This is an extract from a letter George wrote to Gabrielle Fleury (August 7th 1898) when he was desperate to convince her he was a potential mate: 'To the woman whom I am legally bound to support, (believe me, she has no shadow of moral claim) I shall never give more than the strictly necessary. (It is paid through a solicitor.) To let her have more money than she needs would be to encourage her in all manner of follies and even vices. This has been urged upon me again and again by my friends who know her - good and impartial people.'
Here is George at his worst: lying through his teeth to serve his own purpose by suggesting his second wife was a bad person - reference to her 'moral claim' suggesting she is immoral, implying she is vicious - probably intending it to be taken that she is addicted to drink - and vile in every way and deserving of harsh treatment. This is exactly what he did to his first wife when he sought to have her known as a 'bad character'. There is absolutely no evidence Edith was anything but a badly-treated wife. As for being spendthrift with money, Edith had a decent amount put aside when she was institutionalised having saved what she could - she certainly hadn't frittered it away on 'vice'. George used it to pay for her care. To defame a woman's reputation was the Gissing way. There is an old English saying: 'Give a dog a bad name and you might as well hang him'. There is another: 'There is no smoke without fire'. George made use of both of these platitudes, first, by slyly insinuating, and then by downright proclaiming, his women were responsible for his own 'tragic' plight in life, because they were inferior beings and that he was such a dope he let them walk all over him. The sort of dope who needs a bigger man to fight his fights for him - hence the dragooning of Frederic Harrison and the Wellses to help him sort out his troublesome womenfolk.

And, then there is the matter of this immense falsehood: 'This has been urged upon me again and again by my friends who know her - good and impartial people.'  This is a total lie. These people did not exist. FACT. George had no friends (apart from the Wellses and the Harrisons) that he would have spoken to about his home circumstances. And, we know the opposite occurred - George and HG fell out over the way he treated Edith and the boys. There is no evidence Edith was anything but an abused wife who retaliated when she could against the tyranny rolled out by her heartless husband, and who had few around her to lend her support - because everyone he allowed her to know had been poisoned against her by George. But, we know George also did the same sort of character assassination job on his first wife, Marianne - and she had even less people around her to see the truth and tell it to the world. George Gissing: 'Heroic'? Don't make me laugh!

Later, when George was living with Gabrielle, he wrote to HG to tell him Edith had been placed into psychiatric care. George was quick to write this to HG: I need not tell you that, on the whole, I regard this as a good thing for the woman herself, who was merely leading a brutal life, causing everybody connected with her a great deal of trouble. She will now be taken care of in a proper way, at less expense to me than before. Little Alfred is to be sent to a farmhouse in Cornwall... My mind is enormously relieved. I have always felt myself guilty of a crime in abandoning the poor little fellow. He will now have his chance to grow up in healthy and decent circumstances. I cannot tell you how greatly I am relieved. Indeed I believe this event is already having a good effect upon my health.

Anthony makes the point that here we see George, more concerned about the money poor Edith would save him now he had driven her mad and into an asylum. Anthony then writes: The next thing to be expected after this would be the news that Gissing was making some sort of effort to make a home for the two boys. But Gissing went on from there to say that he and Gabrielle were thinking of moving on from the Gironde to one of the smaller resort towns behind Biarritz on the French slopes of the Pyrenees. He was aware that this would entail certain inconveniences, but he did not seem to reckon that distancing himself still further from his children would be among them. 'It is a grave decision to settle so far from England', he wrote, 'where I can get no books without buying them'. 
Here, George is more concerned about the distance between himself and a free lending library than the one (both geographic and psychological) between himself and his boys. And, it seems, HG Wells was beginning to see George for what he really was: selfish, unfeeling and brutal. Sending Alfred to live with strangers in Cornwall was indefensible, and Anthony is clear HG strongly disapproved of it.

In the interests of fairness, it must be stated that, from the letters between George and Gabrielle before they lived together, it seems she was willing and hoping to have a hand in the care of the Gissing boys. There is no reason to suspect her motives as being anything other than kindness. But, having the boys under her wing would have given her a great deal of power over George - which is probably why he denied her access to them. After all, she would have been harder to abandon (and we know this was already on George's mind to do shortly after he ran off to France to be with her) if it meant uprooting the boys from France and taking them back to England, wouldn't it? And, he couldn't possibly - being a proper card-carrying member of the bourgeoisie - bring his sons to live with his mistress. How could he get that past the Wakefield guardians of decency?

The Scapegoat by William Holman Hunt 1854-6

JOIN ME IN PART THREE FOR HG'S INSIGHTS INTO GABRIELLE, PLUS THE LIES GEORGE TOLD TO COVER HIS LESS THAN HEROIC TRACKS.

Commonplace 56 George & His Alter Ego: Bad George Gissing. PART ONE.

Louise Bourgeois by Robert Mapplethorpe 1982

Biography of a literary figure is a strange beast. Which comes first - a liking for the works or a fondness for the author? The one often leads to the other - when famous people you like turn to writing, you go along with them. When you really like a book, you can't help but want to know more about the author. So, what do we want from biography? What I want is authenticity and a sense the biographer has a unique, but accurate, insight into my adored subject, based on truth and hard facts. I want information from the primary sources; opinion is interesting, and interpretation can be enlightening, but, what I want is insider stuff from the horse's mouth with the biographer stood as close to the horse as possible.

Take all the biographies of George. Considering his relatively modest output and claim to fame, there seems a disproportionate amount of accounts of his life, with most written by those who came after - long after - and who never met their man. Only one or two are written by people who actually knew him, or knew someone who knew him. These rare fragmentary 'intimate' accounts are like precious cyphers helping us decode the enigma - we want to know what they know about the real George: the George behind the mask.

Self Portrait by Andy Warhol 1981

This need for authenticity is the appeal of the Diaries and Letters - they are primary sources, and seem authentic (seem, being the operative word). But, we must beware. George redacted the Diaries as he knew these would be scrutinized after his death - after all, he was a prominent literary figure and we, his public, would want to do homage to his remains, but we could not have been entrusted with truth! That had to be managed and made sanitary, or the precious heritage would be scuppered. We know this because of the shameful way he writes about his wives - and reduces them to transgressing recidivist or demented harridan as he expunged all but the death scene of Marianne aka Nell and rewrote the entries for Edith to reflect his need to justify why he was so vile to them before abandoning both to their fate. And then the way he sacrificed his two children with little thought of what was to become of them whilst he swanned off to France to shack up with another poor, unsuspecting woman - if he couldn't constantly bleat about having the boys' best interests at heart, we would never have realised what a good father he was. Not.

Unfortunately, in The Private Life of Henry Maitland, Morley Roberts, himself a far from good writer of even trite and dull stories, gives us a strange hybrid of fiction (aping The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, George's fake autobiography) and biographical legerdemain, written nine years after George's death by the person who considered himself to be his oldest, best friend. This was not George's view of Roberts. On more than one occasion, George commented on the misreading and inaccuracy of Roberts' understanding of the novels; and George told Gabrielle Fleury the two were not as close as Roberts claimed they were. Much of Maitland is gussied up to reflect well on Roberts himself and reinforce his claim at the forefront of Gissing scholars. He claims influence in events in which he did not take part, gives wrong information, meddles with half-baked literary criticism and is generally regarded as a risible unreliable source - unless modern biographers want to make use of him to back up their own prejudices, when he suddenly becomes unimpeachable (you should know who you are but insight is not gifted to everyone, is it?). This is clearly seen with regard to the death of George's first wife, Marianne, and various entries Roberts made about her, despite never having met her in person - which is odd, considering he was at Owens with George when Marianne was, according to some biographers, anybody's.

Equivalent VIII by Carl Andre 1966

Roberts had planned to write his version of George's life but claimed to have been waiting for the right moment before committing. That right moment came in 1912 when he got wind of the fact a rival was about to publish a biography: Frank Swinnerton, a more respected critic, planned to release George Gissing: A Critical Study. It seems Roberts asked to meet with Swinnerton to compare notes. The upshot was Roberts' desperate drive to get his book out complete with a Unique Selling Point to distinguish his biography from his rival's. No doubt this is why there are so many fanciful accounts of things Roberts can only be speculating about, or downright lying about. Regard for most of George's posthumous and late work was reasonably high when both books appeared. The keepers of George's literary flame were his family (particularly Ellen and Algernon), Gabrielle and both of George's sons, Walter and Alfred - who were old enough to weather some little storm in a teacup of controversy if it should arise. However, the main revelation openly expressed (which had been known to a few behind closed doors) contained in both books was the suggestion that George was afflicted with syphilis - which would have come as quite a shock to all of the family, as you might imagine. More of this later. Let's go back to HG Wells.

Untitled by Martin Kippenberger 1987

Wells wrote reviews of George's novels long before they physically met, and displayed a good deal of insight into the secretive, murky world of Mr. Gissing's mind and oeuvre. Here is a piece of Wells on George, written in April 1895 as a review of Eve's Ransom. It is one of the best summations of George's work and the lure of his mercurial genius and if anyone asks you why he is such a compelling writer still worth reading, just point them at this:
'The horror of being hard up, the fixed idea of the dismalness of middle-class life, is not only the keynote of this book, but of all his work; it reduces it from the level of a faithful presentation of life to genre. It is the genre of nervous exhaustion, just as the Restoration drama is the genre of witty immorality. Only the Restoration drama was exhilarating. This is neither exhilarating nor morally helpful... nor terrifying, nor sedative. It is miserable. And yet we must needs admire it because it is so remarkably well done, and we must needs read it to its bitter end for the grim interest of it that never fails.'

Parrot For Juan Gris by Joseph Cornell 1953

George and HG finally collided at the Omar Khayyam dinner in November 1896 held to celebrate the life of George Meredith. They became firm friends. In 1903, HG rushed to the bedside (but left before witnessing the last breath) to do what he could to save George from the inadequacy of the nursing provided by Gabrielle and the French medical team. On January 4th, 1904, several days after George's sad, unnecessary end, Wells replied to a letter from Edmund Gosse, a poet and writer (but not a very esteemed one) who, in 1902 had been made Librarian to the House of Lords. Gosse was writing to request  some insider gen on George to see if the Great British Nation could show their appreciation for a dead writer, not with a plaque in Westminster Abbey click but by stumping up a pension for Walter and Alfred (it never has been what you know - it's always been a case of who you know; not that anyone would grudge it them). Gosse said this in his letter to HG: 'Were there not quite a number of events in his life which have to be treated gingerly?' Apparently, the prime minister Arthur Balfour knew some of the rumours (thefts at Owens, for example, and maybe the living in bigamous sin - sans any actual sin - with Gabrielle. And maybe the syphilis claim to be revealed by Roberts and Swinnerton eight years later) and was leery of making an award if something dark lurked in George's woodshed.

Dead Hare by Joseph Beuys 1965

In reply, Wells wrote: 'Gissing was a most amiable decent man but an absolute fool, outside the covers of a book, in all arrangements and affairs, and there is nothing lurid and bad but much that is pitiful in his life. Here is the worst I know, and I think all that matters.'
He goes on to detail some of George's passion for 'a girl on the streets' (meaning Marianne), gives some sketchy bits about the Owens incident, cobbles together something about Marianne dying in a hospital of lung trouble, hardship and drink, makes a few remarks about a second marriage to another unsuitable girl who went mad and outlines how Gabrielle Fleury fitted into the scene. He then says: 'It's not a story of magnificent artistic vice, is it? That's really every scrap I know. I think the boys ought to be provided for in the scale of his education and quality.' Wells suggests the prime minister be given 'the square truth'. He then ends with this description of his friend: 'He was one of the most clean minded and decent of men.'

A little later, at the end of January 1904, HG Wells was approached by George's old friend and mentor, saviour and then dumped personal advisor, Frederic Harrison. He wrote asking about George's last years, and said he had received a French mourning card from 'Madame Georges Gissing' - which was at odds with his expectations as George had told Mrs Harrison he had married an 'English farm girl' (meaning Edith?). Fred Harrison then added: 'Has he left a real autobiography?'

What an interesting question! What did he mean by 'real'? More of this later.

Cape Siren by Philip Taaffe 2007

To the reply Wells made to this initial letter (February 4th 1904), Harrison writes:
'I am perhaps the only living person who really knows his story, and I am glad that nothing about it will be made public - certainly not by me even to his intimate friends. I am amused to read the various myths which his younger admirers and readers are putting about. They are mostly mere romances. George Gissing passed through a year or two of acute pressure and dreadful suffering - for which he alone was responsible. To the age of 18 he had a perfectly comfortable, easy, successful, and even brilliant life, with every prospect of a fine career. Then he threw it away and smarted horribly for some years.' 
There follows some details about George as the Harrison boys' tutor. Then:
'The stories put about of 'grinding poverty', 'solitude', 'hunger', 'neglect', etc, etc, etc, form a myth which has grown up 1. partly, as to 1/5th out of the acute suffering of 2 or 3 years - self-imposed. 2. partly, as to 2/5ths from the younger men assuming Henry Ryecroft and other books to be real autobiography, whereas they are romances based on detached and occasional experiences, and psychological dreams. 3. mainly - as to 2/5ths (or more) from his curious idiosyncrasy - his taste for a solitary life, and for trying what misery was like. He was a sort of amateur Fakir of modern slum life. Do not suppose I am, or ever was, unfriendly or unsympathetic towards him. I am sure I was the most useful friend he ever had, and the one who knew him best. I understood and respected his idiosyncrasy from the first - and giving full allowance for that, I did not complain of his habit of mind so utterly alien to my own. I admired his genius as something so rare. I was on terms of the most perfect confidence and familiarity with him. And I used sometimes to rally him as being the most hardened egotist and the most refined sybarite I knew. What surprises me is that with all this roaring of the young lions about him no one seems to know his earliest and in many ways his best book - savage and foul as it is - the Workers in the Dawn. 4 vols!' 

More of this in Commonplace 58.

A Divorced Man... by Robert Indiana 1961

Wells was asked to write a preface for the book George had been writing for most of his life: Veranilda. Despite it being reasonably laudatory, Algernon and Ellen Gissing (and no doubt Mother) were miffed at it and so Frederic Harrison - he who claimed to know George better than anyone else - stepped into the breach and wrote one that they did like. HG's work was later published in the Monthly Review in August 1904. We are going to look at the HG Wells version; or, one aspect of it, the choice of which which will later become clear.
In the opening section, HG makes this reference apropos George and his literary reputation:
'He has been likened to Zola (which would have incensed George because he thought Zola a pornographer and said so to Wells!), a well-nigh incredible feat of criticism; and a legend of him as a prowling figure gathering 'copy' - they always call it 'copy' - 'among the barrows of the East End costermongers', and in the galleries of 'slum side theatres', has been the imaginative response to this illuminating comparison. His life and these inventions lie patent for the Griswolds* of our time; and there is the clear possibility of an English parallel to that cairn of misrepresentation and ugly falsehood which the Americans have deemed a fitting monument to their Poe. For the proper reading of Veranilda, if for no other reason, this growing legend must be resolutely thrust aside.'

*The volume 'George Gissing and HG Wells: Their Friendship and Correspondence', from which the above comes, carries a footnote about Rufus W Griswold and his legendary spat with Edgar Allen Poe click for a full account. Basically, Rufus Wilmot Griswold (which is a name you couldn't make up and is not to be confused with the family in a certain amusing Chevy Chase flick) seemed to be in love with the same woman and, as rivals, did their macho testosterone posturing in bouts of mutual loathing in literary form. When Poe died, Griswold wrote this obituary: 'Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.' Griswold then set about inveigling his way to being Poe's literary executor, and, from this, he began to demolish Poe's good name and artistic legacy. He told lies about Poe's life, misrepresented events to make them appear criminal and amoral, actively slandering him at every opportunity. Because this sort of thing sells, the Griswold version of Poe's life was taken as the most accurate for many years to come. To some, the damage to Poe's reputation has been so great that an authentic account of his life is still not possible. 

Puppy by Jeff Koons 1992 (and forever, if looked after right)

So, we see a little of what HG was afraid of, should someone decide to do a job on George's reputation and maybe uncover some of the lurid details - assuming there might be any to uncover. Quite unconsciously, HG seems to be sending us off to look for them! As in, the sort of stuff Griswold might have hoped to find in his investigation into Poe's biography, snuffling about for juicy gossip or evidence of aberrant behaviour. Little did HG realise it would be his own son, Anthony West, who would really spill the beans on George.

JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO FIND OUT WHAT ANTHONY WEST SAID HIS FATHER TOLD HIM ABOUT GEORGE. 

Commonplace 55 George & The 1870 Education Act PART TWO

As Jacques Brel so rightly wrote, in this rough translation of his song Sons Of: 

Sons of the thief, sons of the saint

Who is the child with no complaint?

Sons of the great or sons unknown

All were children like your own

The same sweet smiles, the same sad tears

The cries at night, the nightmare fears

Sons of the great or sons unknown

All were children like your own...

click and click

You would think advances in a society's educational attainment would be taken as a good thing. Think again! As George so ably demonstrates, those who feel entitled to rule the masses fear the masses much more than the masses fear their masters (or mistresses!). Sameness in a society - where lines of difference are not demarcated by artificial boundaries like money or assumed or inherited 'aristocratic' superiority - threatens the status quo. In the early nineteenth century, money was becoming increasingly the big social class divider and the rise of technological innovation allowed the rise of the middle classes; if you make things, you need to have a steady supply of customers to buy them so you can make some more... But, those whose hold on notions of superiority realised their stability was built on very shaky ground - after all, what goes up, must come down - eventually.

The Westbury Horse by Eric Ravilious 1939

It might be said that the late Victorian artisan class had skills and few aspirations; the middle class had aspirations but few skills: this is the world George was born into. Chasing the means to make money was probably one of the most challenging aspects of Victorian life for anyone not ground down by and therefore, habituated, to poverty - that is, anyone who felt entitled to more than a crust of bread and a hovel to live in. What good was George to the world - being just another unskilled labourer who didn't want to work hard for a living? What, exactly, was he able to do that would fund the lifestyle he esteemed? That George chose writing as a mode of money generation seems entirely fitting to a man who didn't want a proper job - his skills set was virtually worthless. His need for control over every aspect of his world meant working as part of a team was simply not an option open to him - which is why he would never have survived in the academic world of a school or university. However, it is very hard to see George as anything more than an opportunist writer - using what few skills he had to earn a living, much as a window cleaner utilises a bucket and a strong right arm haha. Of course, he fought this notion his whole life, preferring to think he was an Artist and therefore, one of the 'chosen' ones. But, the labour intensive product he at times turns out (Workers in the Dawn must have been as arduous to write as it is to read haha) does not give us 'l'art pour l'art'. True genius doesn't come along very often, and cannot be manufactured. 

Rythme by Sonia Delaunay 1938

The 1870 Education Act, brought in to raise the literacy and numeracy of the average artisan and to create a more versatile workforce able to adapt to technological challenges, was a revolution in the possibility of change, but was more a process than an event. It takes time to up-skill a workforce and even longer to build it into a social group with the degree of discernment that leads to love for all things culture. However, this Act did not usher in a new world where everyone wanted to read novels - let alone write them. The bar was set very low for standards of educational attainment. Take a look at the levels proposed in the first revision of the Act click in 1872 and you see the highest level (standard VI) aspired to this abstraction:

Reading	To read with fluency and expression.
Writing	A short theme or letter, or an easy paraphrase.
Arithmetic	Proportion and fractions (vulgar and decimal).

Nowadays, this might be a Level 1 standard for adults, or the work of Year 4 in primary school.

From The Hundred Mile Walk by Richard Long 1971-72

Then, as now, anyone wanting more was obliged to set off on their own solitary journey into knowledge, or was able to join in adult learning - evening classes, very similar to those offered by Walter Egremont in Thyrza, but also such as those delivered in conjunction with the local Mechanics Institute at Owens College click back in George's day. None of this education was free (it still isn't in the UK as it is paid for by taxation). Charities stepped in and delivered education, then as now, with many schools being run by the church or other religious groups. There was also the continuing work of the Ragged Schools click such as the embryonic one started by the truly heroic John Pounds in Portsmouth in the 1830s. He was there teaching young paupers to read and write when George Meredith was a little 'un playing further up along the High Street.

Dynamism of a Soccer Player
by Umberto Boccioni 1913

George and his cronies thought this sort of aspiration for learning would lead to a diminishing of quality culture - but he and they failed to understand everyone has their own, personal version of culture, just as viable and rich as anyone else's; it is the flux of cultural life and its accessibility to all that keeps the various levels relevant and creative. For example, to like opera in the UK is an elitist conceit, rarely manifested by the working class; for everyone in Italy, a love of opera is a patriotic duty! George only had one blueprint for what was acceptable as culture - the kind of thing of which he approved. The fundamental tenet of elitism is that you don't want your passions shared with anyone you consider inferior, or shared with too many, because, if it's all the rage, can it really be any good? Certainly, making culture appear more elitist and to a degree, mystifyingly arcane, seems like a good way of ensuring the working classes won't want to access it. As an example, take the current visual Arts scene - how much of it is aimed at 'the masses' when most Art is bought for private enjoyment and not put on public display? And much of the really good stuff is locked away in bank vaults, far away from the perishing Medusa-like gaze of Demos!

The Rt Hon Ernest Bevin by Jacob Epstein 1943

So, here we have the lasting fundamental flaw to the 1870 Act, one that George feared would be the thin end of the wedge: it would breed discontent. Look at what it had done for the servant problem! Poor George lusted after a decent housekeeper as much as he lusted after... whatever it was he lusted after. By training up your workforce to be able to raise in them an expectation of work, you have to deliver the sorts of  jobs they want to do - does anyone really want to keep house for someone like Mr Gissing? Whilst being paid a pittance? Someone with reading and 'riting and 'rithmatic is not likely to want to be a street sweeper, either. Likewise, someone with dyscalculia or dyslexia isn't likely to do well as a clerk. A similar thing occurs now, with so many leaving university with expectations of work commensurate to their abilities and preferences only to find the sort of job available is in the service sector. Not that there is anything wrong with the service sector, but it isn't what you rack up a massive student loan debt for, is it? George pondered this with regard to women's education for those women likely to aspire to more than skivvy to an old curmudgeon. He feared women would not want to waste their lives on marriage or breeding - especially to and with old curmudgeons - and he was not wrong. If you raise your levels of attainment, we women will grow more disgruntled and eventually (a hundred years after the Act) come to believe we are entitled to more than the role of professional doormat/courtesan/breeding unit/housekeeper/general whipping post, and then who will be blacking the boots, frying the eggs and bacon and servicing the men's peculiar sexual needs?

Epiphany by Richard Hamilton 1964

And, so, the 1870 Act inadvertently supported the drive to elitism by introducing a range of measures and checks on the quality of your educated artisan end product, by endlessly testing levels of attainment. No one was allowed to evolve from one class to another without the Cerberus of the exam system hunting them down and finishing them off just as they emerged from childhood. And, if you haven't attained the arbitrary required level, you are out on your arse in life. In the UK, a public school education will always be in and of itself, a passport to a world of privilege and preference even when the dimmest dunce has graduated from it; but a failed state school kid stands no chance at all in the open market of unskilled work - all the university graduates have grabbed the service industry jobs! The sinister side of this is that those at the bottom of the attainment heap are disenfranchised on every level - marked out as losers and failures and little more than collateral damage cannon fodder in life - for the whole of their life. Progress?

Woman In The Bath by Edgar Degas 1886

One of the more dangerous long-term aspects of the standardisation of education was that it was for the first time possible to judge children as successes or failures based on an arbitrary set of principles devised by 'experts' that took no account of what they were capable of as individuals. This was a retrograde step, and we have never fully recovered from this great wrong. Suddenly, we were on our way to IQ tests and anyone who didn't come up to standard might be deemed surplus to requirements. (From the work of Howard Gardiner click we can see there is much more to intelligence than book smarts.) It is a very short step to eugenics - but more of that another time.

Commonplace 54 George & The 1870 Education Act PART ONE Sounds Dull But Read On...

Expulsion From Number 8 Eden Close (Tapestry) by Grayson Perry 2012

Despite his revulsion for teaching (possibly brought on by the fact it was a real job, and therefore soaked up precious reading time... or 'writing' time, as he described that haha), George made a very good teacher. In some ways, he sounds uncharacteristically modern - making use of humour, passionate about his subjects, creative, and spontaneous... loveable, even. Possibly more like the George we hear about in escapades like the HG Wells and the cycling high jinx? Most of the time, this ebullient George was suppressed - the fun in life carefully edited out and crafted into misery in order to reinforce his self-imposed role as tortured creative poverty victim dependent on sympathy to bring the best out in him (doesn't that need for sympathy apply to us all, George?). Austin Harrison praised him highly and spoke of him fondly as a teacher - and we all love the teachers who set us off with a glad heart on the path of life (Mr Walters, Mrs Marshall, Mrs Chick, Mrs Roper, Miss Sawyer, Mr Galloway - wherever you are, I love you still...).

George's monstrous misogyny towards women who were or were not educated, is a topic for another post. He once said the average woman had the mental capacity of a male idiot - so don't set your hopes on George having something positive to add to the women's education debate! And, yet, it seems some people still put him forward as an emancipator of women. Ha fecking ha to that! We know George had very strong ideas about education especially the education of women, and took a keen interest in the schooling of his sisters. Not in the sense of wanting them to achieve their potential, in the modern Humanist sense, but in order for them to demonstrate competence in a range of social engineering exercises approved of by George - a knowledge of Greek and Latin, ease with German and French sums it up.

What Ellen and Madge were being educated for, was another matter - certainly not to find fulfilling lives and happy families of their own. That these two turned to teaching - whilst failing so spectacularly to educate young Walter or even manage (or even intuit) his traumatised and emotionally scarred psyche - is to say they were out of their depth... If they were infected with George's distaste for the ordinary people, and his loathing of mass education, then imagine the damage they did to innocent minds.

The Annunciation of The Virgin Deal (Tapestry) by Grayson Perry 2012

And, so, to the Act. click for the actual Hansard record of the debate - o, the power of the internet!

Briefly, the 1870 Education Act introduced school boards to standardise access to education for children of 5-13 in England and Wales. William Edward Forster was a Liberal MP for Bradford in Yorkshire (not far from George's Wakefield), who came from Quaker roots to triumph as an industrialist and philanthropist who made money from wool - Bradford celebrates his life in a grotty way with Forster Square 'Retail Park', but in a more respectful way in the naming of its railway station. Education for all - in the three 'R's of reading, writing and arithmetic (I know it doesn't scan but it's a British idiom thing click) mainly to serve the needs of industry and the increase of mechanised production - you need to be able to read and write and add up to function in a mechanical world. A similar drive took place in the UK in the 1990s when the new fangled Information and Computer Technology boom required adults to be computer literate. In the 1990s as much as the 1890s the government feared Britain would be left behind in the drive for World Domination if the standards of its maths and English lagged behind its worldwide competitors. This is true, but the downsides are also similar - if you don't have those essential skills, you can't access work opportunities, and true democracy eludes you - which political parties actively encourages the working classes to vote these days (in the UK)? Ukip and the EDL, that's who. Added to this nowadays is the dilemma of the situation where, if you don't have English to a reasonable level, you can't access much of what is online, meaning you are well down the pecking order in life, my friend. Not you, obviously, as you are reading this despite English maybe not being your mother tongue! We no longer judge others' worth by their ability to recognise dochmos, er dochom, er dochmiacs: now, we note if apostrophes are correct haha. Talk about dumbing down, eh George!

Upper Class At Bay (Tapestry) by Grayson Perry 2012

As we know, George bemoaned the lack of scholarship mass education involved; and then, there was his 'rise of Demos getting above its station' obsession. One of George's morbid fixations was the fear the masses might rise up like the French had done. The cruelties of the Second Commune and the barbarity of the Drownings at Nantes chilled the average Brit to the bone and showed definitively, that class alone would not save the intelligentsia, come the revolution. It's the sort of thing you think would never happen - after all, we need brainy types, don't we? If nothing else, the Victorian age gave us a new way of looking at cleverness. For the first time, innovations in science and technology were the dominant influence of society and nationhood - and so we see the beginnings of the departing of the ways between brainy types who were creatives/artists and brainy types who were science boffins. Rarely were the two intellectual/intelligent types to be found in one mind - Leonardo da Vincis don't come along very often and neither do your Gunther Von Hagens. However, the twentieth century saw the banning of Art and the mass extermination of intellectuals in some countries, amongst others, Germany, Cambodia, Russia  - and it was the boffins who were spared and co-opted into government positions (though Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and Stalin seem to have killed anyone with a mind). The post-WW2 Operation Paper-clip click allowed Dr Wernher von Braun to avoid the Nuremberg noose - would they have done that for Arno Breker had he wanted to leave his former Nazi homeland? click Mind you, the Moon would probably have been left in peace if von Braun had been brought to book for his crimes against humanity.

Vote Alan Measles For God by Grayson Perry 2007

George was not alone in his fear of the 'masses' - HG Wells was also not a fan of what he thought of as the lower orders reproducing willy nilly - the downside to better nutrition and adequate disease control being a rise in population. Of course, he was really only thinking about cities - you can go for miles in the UK and not pass a soul - the UK is a land full of uninhabited (except for wildlife) countryside. Heck, it's all green on the map! But over-population in the UK was a serious concern to the late Victorian/Edwardian, and would lead to the rise of eugenics - more of this in another post.

This vast, new unsophisticated readership - a nation of readers buys books - disgusted George's tender sensibilities. He didn't want any Tom, Dick or Harriet reading his novels - he wrote for the intellectual reading public haha - basically a handful of like-minded chums, selected members of his family, anyone he wanted to suck up to, those he could show off to (his intellectual inferiors - Morley Roberts, for example), homoerotically repressed uber fan Eduard Bertz. It's always weird when George gives a recently published book as a gift, when he didn't rate the books highly, himself. It seems an odd way of bringing joy into someone's life - with a 'worthless' present! How preposterous that pose is; but it looks like his wish has come true, now that few libraries carry his works, and even show little interest in cataloguing him at all. Which reader now finds George except on a college course or by word of mouth? Or voodoo?

Map of Truths and Beliefs by Grayson Perry 2011

In one of his typical snobbish outbursts, George makes snide remarks about the hugely popular Robert Louis Stevenson (June 20th 1888): 'A paper on Stevenson I cannot read; my prejudice against the man is insuperable, inexplicable, painful; I hate to see his name, and certainly shall never bring myself to read one of his books. Don't quite understand the source of this feeling'. In 1902 when he was busy redacting the Diaries (and expunging all trace of Marianne aka Nell), he reread this entry and added the note: 'Was this mere jealousy? Of course I have long ceased to be capable of such feeling'. George never trifled with popularity himself and seemed to resent anyone who did - but, why write if you don't want to be read? Obviously, the gent who brought us Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, A Child's Garden of Verses (click for more about RLS) didn't see things the same way. Stevenson seems to enjoy writing his stories, in a way George only ever did when he was writing about the Ionian Sea. None of George's written words flow freely; even his letters and diaries are redolent of struggle with arduous labour, dredged up painfully in his typically masochistic way - face it, if George had caught himself actually enjoying the act of writing, he would have given it up! And, then, we have The Town Traveller - which is easy to read, but of course, was dismissed by George himself. Too much Schopenhauer in his developing years, if you ask me; if ever there was a man more likely to assume we all need to suffer for our pleasure, it was our boy!

Red Alan's Manifesto by Grayson Perry 2014 (Note Number 9!!!)

There does seem to have been a golden moment around the mid- to late-nineteenth century when paper became cheap, technology mass produced quality text and illustrations, railways shifted books far and wide, literacy became a realistic attainment for the majority, leisure time for ordinary workers became more than a dream, and better lighting indoors meant you could stay up late and relax with a ripping yarn. And people could begin to have expectations of a better life, if not for themselves, then for their children. This kind of optimism was not seen again in the UK until the 1950s. My own memory of the Carnegie Library I spent all my spare time in as a child - when I wasn't out playing on WW2 bomb sites - is that I went every Saturday morning as soon as it opened and exchanged my books - two fiction and two non-fiction and I always took the four (the non-fiction for the pictures as much as the text), and had them all finished by the following Tuesday. O, the glee with which I skipped the two miles to the library! Mudie's must have had that effect on some of those shop girls and boys and the pen-pushing clerks George so wanted to avoid. How joyous it is to find a new book to read - and this is a universal feeling felt by anyone who likes reading, whatever the social class of the reader and the subject matter being read, wherever the place. I am thankful to be an indirect beneficiary of the 1870 Act - it just took a while for the social advancement that mass education promised to percolate down to the bottom of the heap where I dwell haha.

JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO SEE THE ANOTHER (LESS INSPIRING) EFFECT OF THE 1870 ACT.

Commonplace 53 George & His Inner Circle. George and HG Wells. PART TWO

In some ways, George and HG Wells were opposite ends of the spectrum - George, self-absorbed, dissatisfied pessimist whose fatalism coloured his every move and forced him to avoid life vs HG, the outward-looking optimist activist who thought destiny was in our own hands in a world with which he engaged joyfully. Was there a genuine meeting of minds, or did George tug at HG's sentimental heart-strings? HG seems to have had a lot of sympathy to give - as did Mrs Wells. Did George waltz in and greedily guzzle it all up?

HG was a generous cove who knew, possibly better than any other of George's circle, what it meant to be born into the obscurity of the lower middle classes. Allegedly better than the working classes, but with no money to afford the outward shows of worthiness displayed by the middle classes, both writers started out in a social no-man's land. The conceit of a society divided into classes, by the time George and HG rocked up on the scene, was drawn along lines demarcated by money; part of the rationale being that, if you had any value in you, it could be exemplified by how much you could exploit your talents for pay. HG made loads of the stuff and spread it around; George made sure he hardly made a bean, but spread around what he had. Very few even of the educated lower middle classes ever achieved recognition in a world that was very much about who you knew, rather than what you knew. A fairly poor background and dire private education left HG virtually uneducated for social advancement; like George, he came to see writing - a great democratic leveller, contrary to what George might think - as a way for a boy from humble beginnings to work his way up the social ladder.

In 1879, HG had been taken on as a pupil-teacher at a school in Wookey (the place of the famous Hole) in Somerset; circumstances conspired to end this and he moved on to Midhurst to become a chemist's apprentice - you can imagine him comparing notes with George on this one, and how superior George must have felt at having come from a family who employed such lowly sorts. By 1881, HG had arrived in Southsea to begin a four-year apprenticeship as a draper at Hyde's Drapery Emporium in King's Road. Drapery is fabrics, notions, haberdashery - lovely words we rarely use nowadays. It might seem to us as a dead-end job for an eager young man; but, it would have afforded HG almost unlimited access to women. One's haberdasher was an intimate advisor - much as ladies' hairdresser's are today (for some women). Advising on home decor and on the various dress materials on sale would have given HG a lot of time in the company of elegant and stylish girls and their mamas - his love of the the fairer sex would have been nurtured in such an environment! Even at a time when mail order catalogues were popular - meaning much of the clothing was pret-a-porter, many costumes were tailor-made just as cheaply - the garment trade has always been a scandalous exploiter of cheap labour.

A visit to the haberdasher was an event for ladies of a certain sort. Often, tea would be provided; there would be sumptuous surroundings to best show off and display the fabrics; assistants would personalise the care they delivered to their customers. Human mannikins might parade wearing the latest styles. A haberdasher would have been a skilled operative, and not just a person behind a counter. Advice on interior design required knowledge of the science of fabric production and use, including cleaning and the dynamics of fabric - how cloth behaves in a garment is a science in itself; aesthetic knowledge was required to keep the customer in style; a certain degree of psychology would be required to manage customers' dreams; maths, to quickly assess the yardage and the cost - a range of skills we now don't usually see in a general department store.
By the time HG took up working in a shop, it was clear window-dressing as an Art form could make or break a store's reputation. By the end of the century, in 1897, L. Frank Baum (he of the Wizard of Oz) began a window dressing journal in the US - The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors click and in 1900, The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors: A Complete Manual of Window Trimming, Designed as an Educator in All the Details of the Art, According to the Best Accepted Methods, and Treating Fully Every Important Subject followed. This upsurge in the need for more artistic and scientific interior display standards was due to the emerging use of electric lighting in shops, and the new dyes bringing a broader range of colours to fabrics. 

An apprenticeship to such a trade would have equipped HG to find work in a range of situations; George had none of what is now termed 'transferrable skills' - apart from his ability to read and write! - to help find him work, though his ridiculous snobbery prevented him from ever considering a real job. HG found drapery dull and Southsea boring - he left after two years. But, he made use of his experience in The Wheels of Chance and Kipps in 1896 and 1905, respectively, both popular Wells novels.

In some small way, L Frank and HG were men ahead of their time - many of Baum's books invent new technologies and fantastic worlds - both writers were interested in science and new ideas. George claimed not to be interested in science, but that was a pose as he took advantage of new technologies - he sometimes used a car, had electricity and gas installed, was a keen train passenger, advocated the use of various medicines - and then there was his devotion to Darwin and the 'science' of sociology, as exemplified by the Positivists. However, a love of science demands optimism and George never liked to flirt with that. Science and technology were never George's love, maybe because he didn't understand much of it - he tended to only involve himself in things he found easy. If he had struggled with learning Greek George would have ended his days doing something very different to writing books hardly anyone has read - or, he might have had more success as a writer (much as HG thought!) because his unrealistic snobbery for mainstream fiction and journalism might not have kicked in. As seen in Commonplace 52, HG thought George was 'hopelessly mis-educated', and this consolidated the early Wakefield upbringing of remaining separate from so-called 'inferiors' in the members of the local community. This early misdirection of all democratic feeling was every bit as much a dark influence on George's development as was prison. 

Of all George's friends, HG Wells seems to have been his closest - Morley Roberts never seemed up to George's standards and Eduard Bertz became someone to humour rather than an equal in whom to confide; it was Wells who arranged a venue for George to meet Gabrielle; it was Wells who bailed him out of various health crises, who cheered him up, tolerated his constant condescension when intellectual topics were discussed, and who rushed to be by his side at the end. Which means all Gissing fans have a very soft spot for HG. However, HG was not an unconditional lover of our man. He wrote some of the most critical and negative of reviews of George's work, and even after death, pulled no punches. The preface HG wrote for the posthumous publication of Veranilda famously offended the Gissing siblings; other writings were equally controversial. I think of all George's friends, HG knew him best - but he had only the approved by Gissing version of George to go by. George rarely divulged the truth (possibly didn't even recognise it, at times), and tried never to reveal his real self. Sentimental anecdotes about George failing to ride a bike with ease might be amusing (in a Last of the Summer Wine sort of way), but if HG's son, Anthony West is to be believed... but that's another post! 

For HG biography, there are plenty of good film clips on youtube - he would have loved the thought of t'internet! Take a look at this 3-parter, slightly unsubtle but worthy click click click . Note the risible use of quill pens!

In this film footage click we see HG himself, sending us a message he would be delighted to know we received in the www weirdness of now.

This excellent article click by two behemoths of modern writing ably explains the appeal of HG. This is the first time in my life I have ever written the word 'behemoth'. I knew it would come in handy one day.


All these images are paintings that have been made on an ipad by David Hockney - a man not afraid to use technology for his Art. For more click

The town of Woking honours HG Wells in this War of the Worlds effigy.

JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 57 WHEN WE LOOK AT HG'S VERSION OF GEORGE'S LESS THAN HEROIC LIFE - AS REVEALED BY ANTHONY WEST, HG'S SON.