Commonplace 64 George & Syphilis PART THREE From Paresis To The Ionian Sea and Beyond.

There is no escape for you. From poor you shall become poorer; the older you grow, the lower you shall sink in want and misery; at the end there is waiting for you, one and all, a death in abandonment and despair. This is Hell! - Hell!- Hell! - Mad Jack in The Nether World

The Borghese Gladiator by Agasias of Ephesus c 100 BCE

Syphilis, of course, brings on madness and suffering and eventual death, but between the beginning and the end, something terrific happens to you. You kind of explode in your head and are capable of genius - Susan Sontag.   

Here, Sontag is describing PARESIS the aspect of syphilis known by its mnemonic:
Personality disturbance Affect disturbance Reflex hyperactivity Eye abnormality Sensorium changes
Intellectual impairment Slurred speech

The Dying Gaul
Roman copy of lost Hellenic statue 
from 300 BCE

Of all the insults to the body and mind that syphilis brings, it is the tertiary stage, with its tabes dorsalis and paresis that finally destroys the human in human beings. It can transform a personality beyond all recognition. remove all dignity and purpose, reduce intellect and inculcate madness with terrifying delusions and hallucinations. Friedrich Nietzsche was a suffer and lived locked in an attic for the last several years of his life, blighted by syphilitic disease, avoiding all company, being cared for by his sister, Elizabeth. For a basic exploration of paresis (also known as General Paresis of the Insane) click. In her fascinating book 'POX, Genius, Madness and the Mysteries of Syphilis', Deborah Hayden click (an education in itself, this link) describes the many signs and symptoms of paresis and how it affected the likes of Flaubert, Van Gogh, and Abraham Lincoln.

To briefly recap: Nature has imposed no set rules for syphilis. Not everyone exposed to the bacterium will contract the disease; not everyone who has it will rot away. Some sufferers can go a whole lifetime and not suffer its worst consequences - some work through the disease to its final triumph in a few years. There is no knowing where it will set up home, but untreated, it will gradually take over its host and produce decay. You can almost admire it for its infinite flexibility, its perseverance and the stealth with which it operates. In a time of Darwinian notions of 'survival of the fittest', the Victorians came to realise syphilis was fitter than most for survival in their world.

On the down side of syphilis - apart from being disfigured, contagious and likely to beget children with teratologic deformities - there is a plethora of unwanted, debilitating signs and symptoms: pain, paralysis, headaches, insomnia, fevers, rashes, visual difficulties, gastric upset, cachexia (characterised by weight loss and loss of energy) suppressed immune response, palpitations, indigestion, fits, depression and hypermanic mood swings, aggression, grandiose or paranoid delusions, megalomania , paraesthesia and formication click, nightmares, sensory hallucinations and delusions, poor concentration, sensory overload, obsessional thinking and behaviour, monomania, loss of empathy and affect - or an over-abundance of empathy and affect. Just for starters. And then there is tabes dorsalis and paresis.

Bacchus. Roman copy of Greek statue of Dionysus  200 CE

Paresis is characterised by the way it dominates and destroys the nervous system and brain, affecting the intellect, imagination, personality, memory - all the functions that make up the person. As Susan Sontag suggests (and Deborah Hayden describes), on the way to extinction, a person can rise like a phoenix and exhibit wondrous facility with creative projects, have new ideas, or experience immense transcendent moments of clarity, fuelled by raging, manic highs of gargantuan proportion. Creative blocks fall away - the wildly manic muse moves in and sets up home in the imagination. For some, the mind totally clears, and all plans, fixations, theories, and projects become completable. Nietzsche produced some of his most ground-breaking writings when he was exploding with ideas under the influence of paresis. As for George, was his late flowering brilliance a sign he, too was afflicted with it? As this process seems to have begun in the early 1890s, could paresis be responsible for the excellent work that came after The Nether World - and not to be laid at the door of the sexual release he had with his second wife, Edith (as many claim - they would rather George be taken for a sex god than a sick man)? His Dickens criticism, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, and By The Ionian Sea, short-stories and short and lighter in theme pieces - its the variety of genres and themes, moods and settings, the quantity of excellent work that suggests some sort of radical change has come over him for the last five years of his life. 

Augustus of Prima Porta 100 CE

By The Ionian Sea contains some of George's most personal writing. For those who find the novels not to their taste (idiots! These are the ones who have to be reminded The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is fiction) can find much to admire in his criticism and non-fiction. Apart from the book covering what was, for its author, the realisation of a life's ambition, it is also George wide open to 'being in the moment', to feeling without self-censorship or self-consciousness. He is vulnerable, acutely in tune with his world, and at times, joyful; there are moments when it feels intense and mystical, and you sense he will never be the same again for taking this journey to the place he has spent so much time thinking and dreaming of. There is a moment where he moans that he should have had someone to accompany him (so he could have an audience for all his gushings?) but he never would have written such a good book if he had discharged all that energy in conversation; it needed to be pent up and then allowed to flow when he was back home in his writing chair. Morley Roberts said this trip is what changed George from seeing only in monochrome, to suddenly waking up to a world of colour - and how transformative that was for our man. (It's well worth rereading The Private Life of Henry Maitland again for all the good bits Roberts gives us, in between the toss.) This is a crucial piece of evidence - if George underwent some sort of crisis brought on by tertiary syphilis, in the form of paresis, then a diagnosis becomes clear. Possible signs of paresis are in blue.

Young Roman slave
bronze c 300 CE

It was a trip George made his mind up to take back in August of 1897 when he was enjoying a holiday with Edith and the children in Castle Bolton (I say 'enjoy', but that's not how George saw it, and no-one else was enjoying it, either). It was at this time George reported Walter (who was bused in from Wakefield for the hols) had a fine feeling for Greece - when the little boy mentioned some clouds looking like Greek mountains. The infamous shaving brush argument made its deep impression on George - and Edith had accused him of being in a foul temper for ages, and he resented this feedback. This was August. Let's go back to the beginning of 1897, and take a look at George's health and general wellbeing for signs something syphilitic was brewing in his economy.

The Rothenstein drawing
that George liked.

From the Diaries, he reports that on January 25th he has a bad headache. As the year progresses he can't settle to a new writing project - the unknown to us, disappeared, 'Polly Brill'  - a state of affairs that endured throughout late January; from February 10th there is a break in entries of almost four months. On June 2nd, he recounts what has happened: arguments with Edith 'drove him from home' to Romney and his old friend Henry Hick - George was so worried about his health he sought refuge in a place of sympathy. As ever with big decisions - in this case, to abandon Edith forever - he needed someone else to make the decision for him. See Commonplace 57 for what HG Wells said Henry Hick had to say about this. (Was this a paretic crisis where his physical and mental health were reaching some sort of a crescendo?) He stayed there a week, and Hick examined his chest, found it required an expert opinion, and went with George to London to consult Dr Pye-Smith, who told George to go to Devon to recuperate. Off he went to Budleigh Salterton.
He stayed there until May 31st, 'solely attending to my health'. The Whirlpool was published - all 2000 copies sold by the end of May.
Over this period in Devon George was reading about the Ostrogoths and formulating his great opus about Veranilda. (Was this project an example of delusional grandiosity? A preoccupation with gods, royalty, myths and legends, marching triumphal armies all point that way. And, did he pursue his subject to the point of obsession?)
He returned home to Edith and Alfred on May 31st.
June 1st went to Pye-Smith again - who said he was better but must look to live on high, dry soil (not Budleigh, then haha).
June 7th - the Rothenstein drawings are completed (see above). George liked the standing one best.
June 8th thinking up The Town Traveller. Between June 9th and July 14th he averages just under 3 pages of the manuscript a working day - 102 pages in all. Which is a lot of words in George's minute script. Is this a sign of the paresis clearing his mind and providing impetus to complete projects? 
On July7th, he reports he is suffering badly with rheumatism. July 10th, he has been awake all night, but says he doesn't feel any adverse effects. On July 14th, the book is finished and posted off.
August 28th, he has a bad headache.
September 6th he told Edith he was going to Italy (he had been secretly planning it for weeks). This would mean the lease on their house was ended and Edith and Alfred were, effectively, homeless. George notes how distressed she was at this shock news, but he doesn't care. Miss Orme, one of his adoring female easily manipulated minions, is looking for a place for them to live, but then the decision is taken: Edith and Alfred have to go and live with Miss Orme. Evidence of lack of affect and empathy? No, that was always a feature...

Relief of Emperor Lucius Verus c  166-70 CE

Here is the diary of his ailments during the first part of his Italy trip, leading up to the famous febrile crisis:
September
25th sore throat - 'Throat causing much suffering'. Arrived in Siena (where he was to write his Dickens pieces). Suppressed immune response?
26th throat better, cold gone to head.
30th My cold practically gone, but as usual, it has left a bad cough
October
2nd My cough very troublesome
7th Dare not go out in the evening. Yesterday, and in the night, my cough was very bad. I noticed an unmistakable stain of blood on my handkerchief once. (Hemoptysis can be caused by coughing too hard - and isn't always sign of something sinister, However, given the medical history...)
8th Going to take some olive oil every morning; see if it will help me. Bad fit of coughing last night.
10th. Had a bath... and got weighed...77 and 1/2 kilos (12 stone 2 pounds). Still losing from my Budleigh Salterton weight. I have begun to take olive oil, and I think it does me good. Cough very slight now.
On 29th October, George writes this, after a short period of a few hours of not being able to write: Then, to my surprise, I felt able to write again, and by 5.30 had done my second page. How impossible, this, a few years ago! It is strange how much more control I am getting over myself... An example of the effects of paresis removing blocks to creative flow? 
30th Suffering much from diarrhoea. Digestive disorders.
31st Diarrhoea still troublesome.
November
2nd Suffering much from the cold in this sunless room.
3rd Aching fingers. Formication?
7th Suffering much from liver. Unable to walk. This is a profound indicator something is seriously wrong - not with the digestion. Pain over the site of the liver (in the lower back) can be a sign of tabes dorsalis in its early stages. To be rendered immobile could be a sign the spinal cord was involved. All that lumbago he suffered was another sign of this.
15th No appetite and a little feverish.
17th Went to bed with my headache.
22nd George's 40th birthday
27th Towards night felt feverish, and had a very bad night, sleepless.
28th feeling so ill this morning, that, after a short walk, I decided to send for a doctor. He came at 4 o'clock, said I had caught cold, and must go to bed...
29th fever going on... (The doctor) made me take two of my quinine powders...two hours later I had to take another dose. The result of all this quinine was an extraordinary night - reminding me of De Quincey's opium visions. I saw wonderful pictures, beginning with pictured vases, and sepulchral tablets, and passing on to scenes of ancient City life, crowded streets, processions, armies, etc. The remarkable feature was the bright and exquisite colouring of everything. Marvellous detail, such as I could not possibly imagine of myself. Scenes succeeded each other without my ever knowing what would come next. A delight- in spite of my feverish suffering. Lovely faces, on friezes and tombs and vases. Landscape flooded with sunshine. There is a condition caused by quinine overdose - cinchonism -  but what George describes does not fit that picture click. Neither does it fit malaria click You could not have a clearer description of a paretic crisis; grandiosity, hallucinations, sensory overload... as experienced by Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Flaubert et al. 
30th ...Told him (Dr Sculco) of my strange night, and he was much impressed, - looked at me oddly. 
Was this because Dr Sculco assumed George knew he was having a syphilitic paretic crisis which is why he had travelled with a supply of quinine powders of his own with him? Because in quinine was prescribed for syphilitic patients who could not tolerate mercury, and was, by the 1920s, one of the main treatments for the disease click. If Dr Sculco had examined George he would have been able to see signs of the venereal disease, but delicacy might have prevented him from mentioning it to a tourist, passing through. (Or, George could be editing his Diaries to exclude the real problem.) 

Let's pause here to reflect. In the twentieth century, a clear link was established between high fevers and remission from the worst of the symptoms of GPI - General Paresis/Paralysis of the Insane. The only Nobel Prize for Medicine ever awarded to a psychiatrist was given to Austrian physician Julius Wagner-Jauregg who won the Nobel Prize for his invention of malaria therapy (that is, inoculating a GPI sufferer with malaria protozoans) as a treatment for the relief of GPI. 

December
1st Beginning to feel better, There has been a good deal of congestion of the that old enemy, the right lung...
2nd Much better...Doctor often refers to my 'visions' as he calls them. Is the doctor suspicious? Perhaps he wasn't sure George knew his diagnosis.
3rd All fever gone. Able to get up.
4th Able to get up... Doctor called for the last time and gave me a prescription for a 'cure' of the right lung. If Dr Sculco realised George was suffering from latent syphilis, this prescription might have been something to deal with this. George's lung problems are always assumed to by phthisis but might very well have been syphilitic in origin. George does not say what Dr Sculco had diagnosed as the problem in the lung or the nature of the 'cure'.  
5th I myself feel inwardly better but a little shaky.
6th Have a slight cold in the head,
7th Cricelli took me lastly to a chemist's shop.
No entries regarding health until...
26th Cold very severe. No doubt as a result of it, I have a swollen gland behind the right ear - very painful. Gummas are painful swellings associated with all stages of secondary and beyond syphilis: The course of the gummata is very chronic. This syphilide may occur on the scalp, the face or the neck; its favorite sites are on the extremities, near the joints, the back more frequently than the chest, very often upon the gluteal regions, rarely upon the lower part of the abdomen, never on the palms or soles. click 

In October 1902, George wrote to Henry Hick: By the bye, you remember that patch of skin-disease on my forehead? Nothing would touch it; it has lasted for more than 2 years, and was steadily extending itself, when at last, a fortnight ago, I was advised to try Iodide Potassium. Result - perfect cure after one week's treatment! I had resigned myself to being disfigured for the rest of my life; the rapidity of the cure is extraordinary. I am thinking of  substituting Iodide of Potassium for coffee at breakfast and wine at the other meals. I am meditating a poem in its praise.

Henry Hick replied that a 'half educated' person would know this to be a treatment for syphilis. Now, biographers of a certain persuasion might reject this remark as Hick being facetious... For example, one biographer states emphatically that George had a patch of psoriasis - not syphilitic lesion - on his forehead, and that iodide of potassium would remove this. Well, the fact is, iodide of potassium is more likely to cause psoriasis than cure it click. This abstract outlines research suggesting psoriasis is actually aggravated by the drug. So it seems Dr Hick's was the more accurate diagnosis. 


JOIN ME IN PART FOUR FOR THE SAD STORY OF EDITH GISSING AND HER FATE AT THE HANDS OF SYPHILIS

Commonplace 63 George & Syphilis PART TWO How it Blighted Him

Self Portrait with Carnation
by Otto Dix 1912

In Commonplace 62 we looked at the John George Black letter sent to George that addressed his own venereal infection, and the one George had contracted earlier. I suggested the JGB description of his own ailment plus the evidence available in the first of the set of letters presents a picture of a secondary syphilitic infection. This indicates JGB did not catch it when he visited the girl in the boarding house (the girl that George had his eye on), because he would have already had it for some weeks, based on his symptoms. However, there is no way of knowing what George's infection was, based on JGB's infection (unless they slept with each other haha.) However, it doesn't discount that possibility. Of them having the same sort of infection - not of them sleeping together!

My own contention is that George caught an infection of some sorts probably in about November 1875. Two reasons suggest this: 1) by the time of the JGB second letter George was already familiar with the treatment, and so probably caught his infection (if it was syphilis) about 3-4 months earlier than the letter was written (March 26th). And JGB is asking if theirs are the same - if they had both caught it from the same person, he would not need to ask that question. 2) November 22nd 1875 was George's 18th birthday, that time when childhood has officially, legally ended. He was not old enough to vote, but he was old enough to assume some of the responsibilities of adulthood. It was also the age at which he moved out of Alderley Edge school, where he had boarded and worked part-time as a teacher, and into digs in Manchester. What better way to celebrate your 18th, than by casting your fate to the wind? Like most of us do when we are desperate to prove to the world (and ourselves) that we are all grown up. For the purposes of this section, let's assume it was syphilis - based on the reasons given in the previous post.

Sunrise by Otto Dix 1913

A few months after the first John George Black letter, George was arrested and sent to prison. As a brand-new prisoner, he would have been processed and documented. The prison admission record is where a prisoner's physical condition is noted - all identifying scars, signs of illness and disabilities or deformities would be logged. This was not just to make sure any ailments are treated, but to stop the spread of infection and disease, and to prevent any attempt at blaming the institution for any disease or injury that might emerge whilst in custody. There is, on record, mention of George's physical condition in terms of a general description of him (height, distinguishing features - moles, etc) when he was processed at Belle Vue, but no mention of disease or incapacity. If George had been treated with mercury within the past several months before admission to prison, there would probably be physical signs apparent of both the mercury and the disease itself still apparent - we would expect to find that in the prison record. If it is not there, then the disease (if present) had progressed beyond the secondary, very visible, stage, and gone underground to do its tertiary worst. If he has signs of syphilis, these would have been logged. Chancre leaves a scar on the affected site of infection - if George had been thoroughly examined, this should have been logged. Is absence of this evidence also evidence for absence of syphilis?

The Match Seller by Otto Dix 1920

It is interesting to consider that George's decision to settle down and to find himself a girlfriend and so give up his philandering ways might have been a reaction to the fact he had contracted a venereal disease - and not because he fell madly in love, as some biographers and romantics suggest. It would seem to be a pragmatic, cool-headed decision; if he looked for a girlfriend it was to keep him on the straight and narrow and out of harm's way, and not because he was a hopeless doofus who fell in with a scheming female, a poor wee sap who gave it all up for love. As Anthony West says, Marianne aka Nell came a cropper when she met George - she was singled out for disaster.

We know (if Anthony West's account of what HG Wells told him about it is correct) John George Black recommended a place where George could find a girl with little or no sexual experience. Would this mean, to George, she might fit the bill as wife? He certainly always spoke of the girl he was interested in as 'wife material', but was it - as it was with Edith - the fact that any girl would do, and it didn't really matter who she was as a person? Did he think: 'Any girl who is not too picky, is what's required - a middle class one would find syphilis a bit too much of a challenge to accept - but a working class girl won't be so choosy - she'll thank her lucky stars to be picked by one who is her social better. And the working classes are enured to venereal disease - at least, the ones who came into father's shop were'. If this was George's rationale, it might throw some light on why he considered middle class women out of his range as potential mates - the shame of an incurable venereal disease would put them off. (His notion no decent woman would marry a man who earned less than £400 pa is a crock as women are very sympathetic to the pathetic in a man... look to yourselves, boys!!)

Portrait of Max John
by Otto Dix 1920

In George's time, attitudes to the sexes commingling (that's the google approved spelling of co-mingling, apparently) amongst the working class were not as driven by fears of the stigma of promiscuity, when compared to the strict segregation practiced by the middle classes. Indeed, part of George's attraction for mixing with the working classes could have been to have informal and free and easy access to girls. But that does not mean women who socialised freely worked as prostitutes. In fact, you only have to read George's Workers In The Dawn, Thyrza, The Nether World, etc, to appreciate how the sexes met and mingled and socialised - and very few of the women were ever paid, or charged a fee for it. Maybe the fixation amongst Gissingites that George married a prostitute is a male myth (or fantasy! You know what Freud would say about it haha) made flesh? As Jerry Hall notoriously said: My mother said it was simple to keep a man; you must be a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom. Is this how George saw it? It seems to sum up all he expected from Edith!

So, we have young George, a veteran of venereal disease and fresh from prison. There is one strong piece of evidence that might indicate George did suffer from syphilis at that time. According to Anthony West, George willingly went to America and even thought up the idea. A question always worth asking is, why didn't Marianne go with him? The answer generally given is that George's sponsors would not have been too keen on paying for her one-way ticket. This is rubbish. If he was going to America forever, what did they care if he took her with him? The few extra pounds her fare would cost would be a bargain if it got him off on the right footing in his new homeland - after all, they wouldn't want him getting lonely and getting himself in trouble. And, he had promised to marry Marianne - and that was seen as a completely binding contract at the time - you will recall when he had promised to marry Edith and Morley Roberts' rescue plan for George marrying one of Roberts' sisters was scuppered because George took his promise - morally binding - seriously. George and Marianne were seen as a partnership, even if his mother disapproved of his choice, and it makes no sense to keep Marianne in England. Was it to break them up? He was already damaged goods - Mrs Gissing would accept he couldn't marry anyone from his own class; in America, the young couple could start together with a clean slate and build some social credibility in a more democratic society. Did his mother know about his infection? Was that second letter from JGB made known to her?

Prage Strasse by Otto Dix 1920

Some suggest Marianne stayed behind in England to get 'finished' in the middle class sense of being made socially acceptable. Remember, at this time, she already was socially acceptable - to George - and would have been acceptable to the more democratic Americans. My theory is that the decision George (though probably not in consultation with Marianne) took to separate and spend time apart was based on him having a syphilitic infection that he did not want to pass on to Marianne - or any children they might have. For some time before the 1870s, many (predominantly male) sufferers, following infection with the disease, made the decision to abstain from sex and deny themselves marriage, for the whole of their lives, a decision taken on the recommendation of medical experts. As more came to be known about the highly contagious primary and secondary stages of syphilis, and the relatively benign later stages, it was determined that, after a reasonable period free from overt signs of disease, a person might be able to marry - when the dreaded secondary stage was completed and the sufferer was no longer able to pass on the disease. This appropriate length of this period was debated, but four years was considered a reasonable benchmark - two years for the disease to fully pass both its two worst stages and two years to prove the disease was definitely absent in its contagious form. In 1880, Alfred Fournier, the renowned French syphilologist, delivered his ground-breaking Paris lecture on 'Syphilis and Marriage', advocating the length of abstinence from marriage for syphilitics as four years - which became the standard advice given by physicians from then on. So, if George contracted his syphilis in November 1875, then he would be eligible to marry four years later in around November 1879. And, when did George and Marianne get married? 27th October 1879.

Working Class Boy by Otto Dix 1920

We know George and Marianne split up and eventually, she died of acute laryngitis in 1888. In Commonplaces 31-34 I state as firmly as I can that I do not think Marianne ever contracted syphilis, because of what George describes at her death scene and the diagnosis she had of scrofula, a form of TB that attacks the glands. Syphilis and TB are so similar, it is possible to confuse them in terms of how they present (see previous post) - differentiation is always tricky, even today, if you factor out modern blood testing as a diagnostic tool. However, there isn't any hard evidence Marianne ever contracted the disease, but we do have George's letter to Algernon mentioning she has TB in the form of scrofula. Of course, she might have had both diseases, but there is no evidence for this. At her death, she was cachexic but her teeth were perfect - according to George. Treatment for syphilis was very hard on teeth and tended to rot the gums - the correct dose of mercury was assessed by its effect on the gums - teeth became loose and often wobbled and then fell out when too much mercury was administered, or the correct dose was used, but treatment given for too long. The physician attending Marianne's death did not attribute her death to syphilis, which he would have done if that had been the cause of death, or a significant contributory cause. In 1888, causes of deaths were required to be reported for statistical purposes to the parish health board (and contagious diseases in particular), so if the disease contributed to her death, it would have been described as such on the death certificate. Both Morley Roberts and Pierre Coustillas suggest 'acute laryngitis' is a euphemism for syphilis - which is a leap of imagination from two non-medical minds who bat for George with good, if misguided, intentions.

Skat Players by Otto Dix 1920

After Marianne's death. George began to pine for female company. When she was alive, this loneliness wasn't mentioned. Was this because he still had a sexual relationship with her almost up until the end of her life, because he was legally entitled? (That would explain why news of her death was such a shock). It is unlikely he was entirely celibate during all this time - he was young, and vigorous in the days before the decline set in. In The Odd Women (1893), George put these words in Rhoda Nunn's mouth: 'What man lives in celibacy? Consider that unmentionable fact.'

If he contracted syphilis in 1875, then by 1888 he had gone 13 years with the threat of it emerging in its tertiary stage. When he went to Paris with Plitt... did he take in all the sights and experience all the sensual pleasures of this zestful city? Plitt liked Italy (but not Rome - the philistine! haha) possibly because it afforded unlimited sex - did he show George the places he knew of in Paris and did George imbibe? (Was this why George disliked Paris with Gabrielle? Everything so near, yet so far...) Because, it is possible to contract a second dose of syphilis - you are not immune just because you already have it in its third stage. It seems quite likely that he was, for some time throughout the 1890s, suffering from the exacerbations and remissions typically associated with the disease. Take his trip to Italy and the time he wrote about being treated with quinine - for malaria?

JOIN ME IN PART THREE FOR MORE ABOUT THIS ITALIAN BUSINESS AND HOW IT POINTS TO A DIAGNOSIS OF SYPHILIS.

Commonplace 62   George & Syphilis PART ONE  Sooner or later, with George Gissing, all roads lead to Syphilis.

One of the most contested notions in the whole realm of Gissing studies is that George suffered from venereal disease. To say the camp is divided is to say a mouthful. As ever with George, there is a lack of hard evidence and a lot of supposition, but no overview of his life and works can escape the issue, because, if he suffered from it, much will be explained (and even forgiven); if he didn't, then that's a whole new Gissing to consider. Of course, we have no way of knowing for sure either way, but we do have tantalising clues and some documented information to help us make up our minds - or leave us sitting squarely on the fence.

Iris by John Atkinson Grimshaw 1886

Sometimes, the Victorian age seems to be little more than an endless parade of autistic savant detectives, midnight throat slashings and Hannah with her banner - and where would English literature be without them? But, there is a special place in nineteenth century popular culture for syphilis. This is because it was (and still is) such a monster, producing visible horror and decay, with the added terror of being, for long stretches, a silent invasion force capable of fatally overwhelming its host at any given moment, either a swift end or a long, drawn-out and truly terrifying slow meandering slog to madness and disability. Neurosyphilis, the most destructive form, can eat a brain in a couple of years, and on the way, render you blind, insane and immobile. And, then there is the pain it can cause. Some of George's real-life heroes suffered from the 'French disease' (or, the English disease', if you lived the other side of the Channel haha) - Alphonse Daudet, Fyodor Dostoevsky, to name but two. Daudet suffered very badly - read Julian Barnes' account of poor Alphonse's struggle with it: In The Land Of Pain.

As ever, the Wellcome Collection is an invaluable tool for anyone seeking to know more on the subject click  (strapline: The free destination for the incurably curious). However, anyone thinking syphilis is a thing of the past, would do well to take their misguided arse off here click.

 

Lady of The Lilacs by Thomas Hughes
1863

Let us explore the evidence that might lead us to confirm or disconfirm that George was syphilitic. You will have to make up your own mind. Let's gather information.

In order to appreciate the challenges of treating the disease in George's time, we have to accept there was no way then for science to identify the bacterium treponema pallidum responsible for it and still no worldwide clear consensus on what constituted the disease or how it progressed throughout what was termed the 'economy' - an old-fashioned term for the body and its systems. Much of the work towards understanding disease was carried out by individual doctors who dabbled in medical research as a sort of hobby - many specialists were self-taught or picked up what tuition they could along the way. Take Arthur Conan Doyle. He qualified as a general practitioner in 1882, worked as a GP, then went to Vienna to study ophthalmology in 1890 - just in case the writing career didn't last (notes to Gissing: proper day jobs are not a threat to creativity and writing books people want to read is not a thing of shame).

Because there are so many computations to an exact prognosis - ranging from a long life free from overt disease, then a swift decline into immobility and madness, to a raging secondary phase that ate the brain and killed you quickly, to a full life lived with the disease in remission - you begin to appreciate how tricky this disease can be to diagnose, especially in the days before effect blood tests and powerful microscopes. The more a physician came into contact with sufferers, the better able they were to make accurate diagnoses. Needless to say, doctors in towns with a high population of serving armed forces personnel were likely to have good knowledge of venereal disease, as were those doctors who worked in inner city areas. 

Girl With Golden Rod
by Charles Courtney Curran 1915

 The London Hospital was considered England's best place for cutting edge research and regularly staged symposia to train doctors in diagnostic techniques, as well as supporting its physicians to publish works on their studies. Of particular note is the work of Frederick Treves, he of the help to and support of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. Paris possessed a strong contingent of expertise - Jean Alfred Fournier, for example - but, as ever with medical advances, disease recognises no borders and so all countries produced their experts, and their own approaches to treatment.

In the 1860s, the fear of syphilis as an engine of social disorder prompted a particularly savage approach in the form of the Contagious Diseases Act click. The London Lock Hospital had been instituted in the eighteenth century to treat sufferers - but it was the Victorians who made the worst use of it by forcibly incarcerating and treating women if they became infected. Only a woman could truly appreciate the hypocrisy of locking up sick women while infected men roamed free. This is a fascinating story, and anyone who wants to know more should look up WT Stead click and Josephine Butler click. For an overview of how France reacted to a rise in incidence of syphilis click

Syphilis is a very clever little fellow. The old saw is that syphilis was considered to be 'the great imitator' because, its signs and symptoms were easily confused with other severe ailments. What was presented by a patient's condition could be baffling to all but the very experienced physician, and so cases often went undiagnosed, misdiagnosed or inadequately (even iatrogenically) treated - which often resulted in a set of problems of its own. The main challenges to accurate diagnosis were: the various signs of infection could be visually mistaken for similar conditions; a new infection quickly went 'underground' (creating the mistaken belief it had cured itself), often before the sufferer sought help; it presented without pain and so went unnoticed; the seat of infection could lurk out of sight - in the mouth, rectum or vagina, for example, and so only became apparent when severe damage was done; embarrassment kept people from seeking help, and drove them to seek out useless do-it-yourself remedies from chemist's shops or even by mail order. An obvious, but not very accurate way of diagnosing syphilis was trial and error dosing with the treatments (note: not cures) available, then waiting for a result. What made this less reliable for diagnostic purposes was that the alleged cures, such as mercury and iodide of potassium, were toxic even in small quantities; much of the damage done to bones and teeth, the nervous system and in particular, the brain, could be laid at the door of mercury, strychnine, antimony and arsenic - all used in patent syphilis cures. Something for you to think about: as so many cases of syphilis went misdiagnosed or undiagnosed in the late nineteenth century, there could be a much higher incidence of the disease in the population than we generally think. There is every chance your antecedents suffered from it! Here is a letter published in the British Medical Journal of December 1913, which relates to military personnel, not civilians, but it gives some idea how difficult it still was then to identify a cure even when the famous 'magic bullet' of Salvarsan click had been developed.

THE ROYAL COMMISSION ON VENEREAL DISEASES. SIR, I have noticed in the JOURNAL of November 29th certain extracts from the official report on the above subject in which it is stated that Colonel Scott gives the following statistics of venereal disease from 1888 to 1912 - namely: 1888 - Admissions into hospital  224.5 per 1,000 1912- Admissions into hospital in 56.6 per 1,000 and in India the reduction had been still more marked. Colonel Scott attributed this diminution to greater temperance and care of the soldier, etc., with which I in part cordially agree, but surely there must be something more to explain this extraordinary decrease as shown by statistics, which can so often be fallacious. Let me suggest one explanation. I believe I am correct in stating that before I left the service in 1891 the practice l had begun of not always admitting men into hospital with primary diseases, but treating some of them in barracks with subcutaneous injections of mercury, etc., whilst doing light duty, or, if admitted in the first place, were, later on treated in barracks and not readmitted. If this be true such action must considerably affect statistical returns. Whilst I am on this subject, with a past experience of thousands of cases treated by mercurial inunction and otherwise, it is a source of great regret to me to find that salvarsan is becoming so much adopted by the profession in preference to mercury, although I have no right to express an opinion on the new treatment, having no personal experience of it. But mercury has stood the test of generations whilst arsenic has yet to stand the test of experience, and, already, I see antimony suggested in its place, and my firm belief is that the day will come when mercury will regain its well-merited position in the past as the best treatment for syphilis in its primary stage.

So much for progress.

Back to George, in particular. To tease out the facts, we have to appreciate George's health was always a preoccupation for him, but in an age with few cures for many diseases, many people would have worried about their twinges and lumps and bumps, and rushed to the doctor at the first sign of a sniffle - if they could afford it. The poor had to struggle on with their folk remedies but the fear of starvation kept them upright. In a time of advertising freedom, any ridiculous claim could be made in order to sell a medicinal product, and patent medicines were often shamelessly marketed as cures for all sorts of incurable diseases. Like his younger brother, William, George always followed health trends - for a man so unimpressed by science, George showed remarkable interest in the latest developments in cures. Of course, a preoccupation with health is not necessarily proof of chronic, incurable disease, but it is an indicator that something was worrying him. As an impulsive sort of chap (after periods of drawn-out contemplation, George often then went off and did the first thing that came into his head) we can imagine him window shopping in the local chemist's and then popping in to buy whatever took his fancy, healthwise. Maybe this is why he hated street advertisements so much - he knew they did their job and did it well! We know he enjoyed the fads of the time for creosote and cod liver oil; the nastier it tasted, the more efficacious the result! For a diverting overview of why we choose what we buy click

We can confidently claim George had two recurring themes in his medical record: what appeared to be neurosis, and the pulmonary form of tuberculosis. The 'neurosis' took many forms, one of which was the manifestation of seemingly trivial ailments - man flu, breathing difficulties, stomach problems, diarrhoea, insomnia, skin rashes, excess sweating aka hyperhidrosis, malaise and chills - all could have been psychosomatic in origin - certainly Gabrielle thought so. We must not assume psychosomatic disorders are a form of malingering. The mind (for want of a better term) seeks to defend itself from perceived threat by any means necessary. Deflecting the stress of a threat you cannot run from has to be sublimated into a survivable situation - minor illness concentrates the conscious mind and relieves the pressure of built-up anxiety. As the impetus to do this is deep in the unconscious, the sufferer is unaware the symptoms might be auto-generated. Neurosis is a survival mechanism, and a very good one, democratic and reliable. However, all of the above listed manifestations of it are also typical symptoms of real physical disease: latent stage syphilis.

We know George had phthisis - which we now call tuberculosis - and claimed to have suffered from it for most of his life. TB as we know it, was not fully understood in the nineteenth century in terms of aetiology or progression through the body, and so no specific, reliable cure had been developed - that wouldn;t come along until the rise of the antibiotics during WWII. We now know it is a system-wide infection caused by mycobacterium, usually mycobacterium tuberculosis. Pulmonary TB - which is located in the lungs and respiratory tract - was what made George so short of breath, and William, his brother, and Marianne spit blood (haemoptysis) - and George checked his sputum every day (every cough?). TB may have caused him all sorts of associated problems, including, if the infection became system-wide, heart disease, brain disorders, skin lesions, reproductive problems, bone decay, cachexia and, eventually, multiple organ failure. More things to confuse with syphilis.

The Flower Girl by Emile Vernon 1904

TB was more likely to be mistaken for syphilis (and vice versa) than any other disease. To differentiate TB and syphilis was tricky and fraught with potential error. A serious threat to accurate diagnosis was lack of continuity of care in medical supervision - George and Marianne had frequent changes of address and used different physicians and, in Marianne's case, hospitals. Consistency of medical opinion might have provided a medical history - consulting with random doctors would just produce medical notes, which were not shared with other professionals. This often allowed different doctors to makes different diagnoses yet based on the same medical evidence. And, as patients don't always know how to accurately explain what ails them, and rarely know the correct jargon or appropriate medical terms, they can fail to do justice to what they are trying to describe. When the causes and prognosis of both TB and syphilis were virtually unknown quantities, is it any wonder they were so often confused with each other?

So, what do we have that points to an undifferentiated diagnosis of syphilis in our man? Well, we have the letters of John George Black. The first letter describes JG's physical reaction to being caught fraternising with the girl George fancies - he is overcome with embarrassment. He talks about how ill he feels. He mentions how weak and feverish he's been, how debilitated, and how he had to confine himself to bed. In a second letter, he asks about poorly penises. John George writes to his 'Adonis' (his pet name for George - bless his cotton socks; George does so often bring out the bromantic in a fellow!):

The irritation continued growing worse, & on examination, I found the prepuce swollen, & on turning it down, I found the whole of the inside salmon-coloured, as you would call it, only little spots as though the skin had been eaten away so as to show the flesh, & almost looked as though were bleeding. I applied a little of the subtilissimus, but the end continues to be irritated. The prepuce is a little hard as well; & there was a drop or two of yellow matter near the red spots. I don’t know what an ulcer should look like. Are these anything like the symptoms of soft chancre? Or, is it like your inflammation? Or do you think it is only balanitis? 

He then adds: Should the subtilissimus go a bright green?*

*I have a theory about this. Many patent cures were thrown together to appear to work - visually - as much as to effect a cure. Copper, often used for its cleansing antibactericidal properties, can turn skin green. click In a patent medicine, one of the advantages to a green colour on the skin, is that it cancels out the redness of the irritation - thus making it look less inflamed - in the same way green make-up works on flushed complexions to reduce the pinkness.  

Thanks to the power of google images, and with your own innate curiosity, you can look at pictures of the above venereal conditions (warning! google images search results are quite scary and will involve cocks and suchlike). As I have done (I'm fearless). It would seem - from the above quoted section - that John George is not describing balanitis click (as claimed by one of George's biographers - who does not mention this second letter at all in his biography of George, which is an odd editorial decision - he includes some utter claptrap he can't prove but leaves out some primary evidence  It's as if he doesn't want to be impartial haha. You have to go the the first volume of the Letters of GG to find the John George Black letter,  or to the John Rylands click collection in Manchester), which has no blebs (the correct term for weeping red spots). Soft chancre (also known as chancroid), you will see if you look click, is a more or less round or ragged hole, Soft chancre is the non-syphilitic version of a chancre, caused by the bacterium haemophilus ducreyi - not syphilis. Syphilitic chancre click produces round ragged holes. Chancres seems too large to be mistaken for spots. From what is described (red spots forming crusts) - is JG describing condylomata lata, a common feature at the secondary stage - see these images: click

Some things about the John George letters leap out: 

1) In the first (apologetic) letter, John George seems to be describing the typical symptoms of secondary syphilis - fever and malaise and a general feeling of unwellness are not features of primary syphilis.   

2) John George does not mention pain at the site of the problem - lack of pain is typical of the symptoms of syphilis and atypical of other venereal diseases 

3) blebs are typical of secondary stage infection, however, gonorrhoea can produce something called penile pyodermal lesions - pus-filled spots on the penis. And herpes produces crusty blebs. My own feeling is that the latter two are unlikely candidates - based on what John George goes on later to share 

4)  'I applied a little of the subtilissimus' - this was a herbal ingredient often used to offset the irritation of mercury on delicate skin, and to soothe irritation

5) After the anxious first two letters, the tone of the last two is quite perky. It's almost as if nothing has bothered JG about his health. The secondary stage of syphilis sometimes passes quickly and leaves few visible signs it was ever present, which can lead to the false belief it is cured, frequently with some sufferers abandoning treatment or failing to follow medical advice

6) he mentions George's 'inflammation'. There is no way to diagnose George from JG's symptoms!! Inflammation, when the term is used correctly, is a localized physical condition in which part of the body becomes reddened, swollen, hot, and often painful, especially as a reaction to injury or infection.

Girls Putting Flowers In Their Hats
by Auguste Renoir 1893

From this we can deduce that John George Black was probably suffering from secondary stage syphilis. But - this was contracted long before he visited the lodgings where he had some sort of encounter with a girl George was interested in - who is presumed by biographers to be Marianne (despite a lack of evidence), the girl whom they wrongly suggest passed on a venereal infection to both boys. The symptoms John George describes are not consistent with a picture of primary syphilis, but do fit a picture of secondary - which means he will have contracted it at least a month before his visit to the place Anthony West refers to as Mother B's. Anyone who has read Commonplace 60 focusing on Anthony West's biography of his father, HG Wells, will recall how he was told by HG that John George Black said, apropos recommending George visit Mother B's house: he would find a beginner there who was hot stuff. This is a predatory statement, if true; it has the sense of a man promoting the defiling of innocence - and of pimping. 'A beginner' presumably means either a virgin or a girl with limited sexual experience. It takes the business of paying for sex to a particularly low, immoral state, especially in our modern social climate where we are sensitised to child exploitation - but, the age of consent in 1876, was 12. (Imagine the misery of this in real terms - and how easy it would be for a vulnerable child to be seduced into sexual exploitation. In the UK, we know only too well how this happens.) And,, let us not forget, then, as now, there is a myth that sleeping with a virgin cures syphilis - but this was probably not what JG had in his mind when he passed on this useful nugget of information to our man, because he didn't realise he had the infection. He claims.

The girl John George visits in lodgings is not seen by him as George's exclusive girlfriend, and so this suggests George's relationship with her is new and still tentative at this stage. As John George clearly states, in mitigation, George has mentioned an interest, but not strongly enough to be taken seriously. George staked an exclusive claim to the girl in the boarding house with his letter to John George - this letter elicited the guilty, apologetic response from JG - so George must have only recently met the girl. This means George could not have contracted a disease from the girl in Mother B's - because the timeline is all wrong. His infection had been or was still being treated and that indicates infection going back some weeks, possibly months. An important point here: John George having syphilis does not mean our George had it - JG is comparing and contrasting, not claiming the two problems are the same. But, if George had contracted syphilis during his time in Manchester it is clear he caught it much earlier in the academic year - John George Black's first (apologetic) letter was written 1st March 1876, and George is already familiar with the treatment and so must have had his disease for a few months, at least. My own view is that he contracted it in around November or December 1875 - join me in Part Two for an explanation of why I think this.

                                                                            

Commonplace 61 George & His Alter Ego: Bad George Gissing PART SIX - The Last Part of Anthony West's version of George's life.

Anthony writes that, when researching our man's life, the more his father (HG Wells) found out about George, the less he liked him. HG struggled to reconcile the man he thought he knew, and the seeming stranger other associates described. Anthony's words are in blue.

Untitled Film Still (#30) by Cindy Sherman 1979

The Gissing he had known had, for instance always been firmly on the right side on the increasingly important woman question. He had recognised that women were potentially men's peers, and that their appearance of being something a good deal less than that was a product of their gross abuse by the law and the mores of Victorian society. He had written with sympathy and understanding of their disadvantages. It was difficult to relate the Gissing who argued on this side of the great question with the man who took pride in having learned, in the course of breaking in two wives, that a man who found himself short of a cane when he wanted to give a woman a good thrashing need never be at a loss in a house with a carpeted staircase - there was nothing to equal a stair rod for that purpose. The Gissing who had made this discovery had also been capable of passing the tip on to a friend as one that any married man would be sure to find useful. 

Club Night by George Bellows 1907 click

This issue of George being a wife-beating abuser of Marianne aka Nell and Edith is not news. It is generally dealt with by biographers as being a misreading of a reference George made in a letter to Algernon, of stair rods still being in place on the stairs. Algernon had been to stay and noticed the stair rods were missing or loose on some of the steps. After an anecdote about how generally awful women/landladies are, George mentions the rods and the stairs. But, in Anthony's account, we find someone closely linked to the Gissing circle making the same claims and making a very specific reference, long before the wider publication of George's letters in the 1990s. Was George a wife beater? We know his mother made use of corporal punishment and there is a link between what a child experiences and what that child grows up to do click. He locked Marianne in the house to stop her going out, and experienced extreme anger towards both her and Edith. He treated them both with cruel contempt, and his relationship with Walter was fraught with conflict. Edith is supposed to have beaten the boy - but was it really George who used violence against him? George made good use of his knowledge of psychology on Edith and Marianne. As previously mentioned in Commonplace 60, he claimed both women were mad. This is the way many difficult or inconvenient women were dealt with, though, as ever, George was behind the times, as public attitudes to mental illness by the 1880s were turning in favour of the sufferer/victim and it was becoming difficult to institutionalise a person without good reason (more of this in a future post). However, by constantly undermining and criticizing Edith, by lying to her and passive aggressively refusing to speak to her, stealing her child away and generally making her utterly miserable, did he eventually manage to drive her insane - with the help of his do-gooding spinster minions, of course? Or, was she also blighted by the disease he caught when he was at Owens?

The Giant aka Colossus by Francisco de Goya 1814-1818

In Commonplace 26 we looked at George's tendency to masochism. It is worth recalling that masochism is not nowadays seen as a stand alone state but forms a union with sadism, so that the term sado-masochism is the more appropriate nomenclature.

My father began to feel the sane and healthy Gissing of his first impressions had been an invention of his own. It had been Gabrielle Fleury's great offence that she had tried to tell him so. In more than one of those infuriatingly mannered letters that he had dreaded, she had done her best to make him see the darker reality. 'I know how impossible it is to feel absolutely sure and safe with him,' she had said in one of them, 'on account of ... an extraordinary, terrible, and perhaps morbid unstability (sic) in mind, views, decision (and) feelings'. My father had rejected all such formulations out of hand at the time, assuming that they rose from nothing more than an emotional woman's tendency to make the most of trifles. All that she had truly been aware of, he had thought, had been an absolute incompatibility of temperament. He could now see that she had been on the right track. 
Is this a reference to George beating her? Or, is the inability to feel sure and safe with him referring to his tendency to run away or drop with man flu at the first sign of a challenge?

Summer in the City by Edward Hopper 1949

His new-found knowledge of the coldly considered cruelties that had been the staple of so large a part of Gissing's transactions with his women, put beside the latent sadism of so many of his imaginings, had brought my father a desolating sense that his friend had been badly damaged somewhere along the line of his development - the eagerly and joyously sensual being that he could so easily have been had been crippled and transformed into something devious and crabbed, a man who could only deal with a woman who was at a disadvantage, and who was compelled, even then, to teach her, by the most brutal possible means, that he was not to be counted upon for anything.

Biographers may not like this description of George, but it fits with what we know. George, being short on friends, uses his writings to have a conversation with himself about his ideas - and his characters are the manifestations of his inner jaundiced world view. They are all punished in some way for wanting something; they die, kill themselves, get rejected, never reach their goals, never find happiness, have to compromise and settle for less, get abandoned, orphaned, ripped off, humiliated, betrayed, usurped, persecuted... and the babies are wished to have never been born. This is not the writing of a man who isn't afraid to abuse his woman. Of course, he claimed to Gabrielle that he was ironic but irony is a manifestation of a passive aggressive mindset. It is designed to tell truths by the back door - and not cleanly, assertively or authentically. It is a weak way of speaking one's mind but it allows you to think anyone who does not agree with what you say is inferior. I am not sure George used irony much in his fiction, at all. So much of what he thought was even in late Victorian times, considered reactionary and unpopular, so he rarely wanted to fully state what his thoughts were - after his climb downs from movements like Positivism and Socialism, he did not want to have a label others could know him by. He was an adept manipulator of other people's perceptions, particularly of himself. Irony is a trick used to make sure you can tease out other people's reactions to what you say but without doing damage to yourself in their eyes, because you can then retract your point of view if they don't like it, and then claim they don't see the joke. This kind of semantic legerdemain is tantamount to dishonesty and would have confounded anyone with a simpler way of communicating - Marianne and Edith, for example, perpetually condemned to feeling inferior. Sadly, irony is a very British art form.

Pornocrates by Felicien Rops 1878

The usurpation of his mind by this new image of Gissing made it difficult for my father to write the wholeheartedly enthusiastic tribute to the man and his work that he intended the introduction to Veranilda to be. He did his best to be tactful and to avoid all mention of Gissing's darker secrets, but the burden of his knowledge could not be cast off and the essay came out as an apologia for a gifted writer whose promise and potential had not fully been realised. This was not at all to the liking of Gissing's family, whose members were united in their expectation of a eulogy.

HG's version was dumped and Frederic Harrison was brought in to replace him. Harrison praised Veranilda so much that whatever he said in George's biographical favour would easily have been overlooked - he describes Veranilda as George's best book. This was a great shame because, if you recall from the last post, HG Wells wanted to secure a better financial future for the two Gissing boys, and having a run on the Gissing back catalogue might have garnered more royalties. Being directed to Veranilda as George's best offering would have put the uninitiated right off the canon!

Gabrielle Fleury was also upset by the memoir, even though she was never to read it. Gissing had been selectively secretive with her as with his family, though about different things. He had never told her of his expulsion from Owens College, or what had occasioned it, for an instance. When a version of the memoir, purged, as he thought, of everything that had offended the Gissings, at length appeared in The Monthly Review, someone was kind enough to tell her that it was still loaded with transparent references to such matters. It was then that she declared she would never be able to bring herself to read anything that my father might write about either her husband, as she was still firm in calling him, or his work. He (George) had, she said, told her, not just once but several times, that he had never thought much of my father as a critic, or believed that he understood what his literary intentions were.

HG was not going to miss friendship with Gabrielle, and he was not surprised the Gissings were not keen to have George revealed as a different person and not the misunderstood genius they thought they were harbouring. My father had foreseen these reactions, but he was surprised when he found that he had given grievous offence in another quarter altogether. When Dr Hick saw the revised preface in The Monthly Review, he blew up. He read its references to Gissing's persistent ill health in the light of his own intimate knowledge of the case, and took it that anyone else who came across it would be able to do the same - the article then would be as good as a public announcement that Gissing had been a syphilitic... His fury knew no bounds, and under its influence he not only denied ever having said that Gissing had become infected by the disease but even went so far as to deny the fact. His surviving correspondence with Gissing shows that he was not in a position to do so, and my feeling is that the violence of his anger stemmed in part, though only in part, from guilty knowledge - he had indeed been indiscreet in talking of Gissing's private affairs with my father. (Remember, HG and HH discussed George's marriage etc when HG was staying with HH at New Romney.)

Allegory of Sculpture
by Gustav Klimt 1889

My father had liked Dr Hick, and was much wounded by some of the things that he felt called upon to say in his anger. He was particularly hurt by the doctor's observation that the memoir was just about what he should have expected from a man with my father's background. 

This is a fine place to stop and pause - because these thoughts about class and biographical accounts might well sum up the reaction to Anthony West's account of George from hard core Gissingites. In January 1985, the book was reviewed by the Gissing Newsletter click to read and it did not go down well with the fans. However, that was thirty years ago, and perhaps it is time to review all the monomaniacal outpourings of a single biographer and inject some fresh thinking into Gissing studies. Just sayin'. Like, ironically haha.

Syphilis! Dash it all! I have run out of space!

JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 62 FOR A FULL ACCOUNT OF GEORGE AND HIS LEGENDARY PENIS INFECTION AND THE WHAT WE KNOW NOW COMPARED TO THE WHAT WE KNEW THEN OF IT ALL.