George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

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.