Commonplace 57 George & His Alter Ego: Bad George Gissing. PART TWO - What HG Wells told his son about George. The Anthony West Account.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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?
JOIN ME IN PART THREE FOR HG'S INSIGHTS INTO GABRIELLE, PLUS THE LIES GEORGE TOLD TO COVER HIS LESS THAN HEROIC TRACKS.
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| Ophelia Among The Flowers by Odilon Redon 1906 |
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| Coast Scene (possibly Capri) by Thomas Fearnley 1833 |
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.
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| Portrait of a Knight of Rhodes by Franciabigio 1514 |
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.
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After the Misdeed by Jean Béraud circa 1885-90 |
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.
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| George on the far left; HG on the far right - obviously they posed the wrong way round! |
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
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| A Young Girl Reading by Jean-Honore Fragonard c 1770 |
... 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.
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Portrait of a Ladyby Raimundo de Madrazo 1885-90 |
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?
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| The Scapegoat by William Holman Hunt 1854-6 |
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