Commonplace 60 George & His Alter Ego: Bad George Gissing PART FIVE - More of Anthony West's version of George's life.
We have been looking at the Anthony West biography of his father, HG Wells: Aspects of a Life (1984). We have seen how HG Wells came to realise George was not the tragic figure tossed around by Fate that George himself claimed to be; he was, in fact, a ruthless, cruel and selfish man with a tendency to lie in order to manipulate others into serving his purpose, and in order to control their perceptions of him.
To recap: HG Wells started out somewhat hero-worshipping George, and made the first move towards their friendship by inviting the alleged poor, long-suffering one to spend time with the Wellses. As their friendship evolved, HG was brought into the story George told about the trouble he was having with Edith. HG saw no reason to doubt his word - gentlemen don't lie, do they? When George abandoned his two children and ran off with Gabrielle Fleury, HG disapproved and said as much; but he was there when George was near to death, and took it hard when he realised he had not handled the end like a friend should have. To make amends, he decided to write the introduction to Veranilda, George's posthumous (unreadable and irrelevant) historic novel of the Goths doing the Grand Tour (as only real Goths can - with the mayhem dial turned up to 11 haha).
Soon after hearing of George's death, Frederic Harrison had contacted HG to ask for information about it. The two got together and compared notes; Harrison shocked HG with what he revealed about George's early years. This was what started HG off on his quest to find out all he could about the Owens incident and, in particular, George's first wife, Marianne aka Nell or, Mary Ann, as Anthony West refers to her. Frederic Harrison suggested George could not be trusted in his account of his first marriage; HG had already concluded George had lied a good deal about his second. Harrison suggested he speak to Morley Roberts. Remember, this was 1903, long before Roberts' own 1912 biography of our man.
Morley Roberts knew George at Owens, and was a more or less lifelong friend, though they were never 'soul mates'. Roberts did not have a crush on our man the way Eduard Bertz did, and even seemed, at times, ambivalent about George - they often spent many months without communication. George was often dismissive of Roberts, especially as a writer - Morley Roberts' tales are a cross between Algernon Gissing on a typical day and Robert Louis Stevenson on a bad day when his TB is playing up and the creative flux is stagnant. However, Roberts was a man of action (in a small way, and as compared to George) and had come to France to be with George at the end - but missed him by a day, through no fault of his own. Roberts was known to Wells through the Omar Khyyam set, as well as through George, but Wells and Roberts were not close friends. HG hoped to be able to include some of what Roberts told him in the Veranilda introduction. Anthony West's own words are in blue.
To say that my father was upset by what Roberts presently told him about the first marriage and its origins is to put the matter mildly. There was no way in which he could extract a romantic story from the information he as given, and the crassness of its broad outlines as well as of its detail was abrasive. Gissing had not been an innocent wandering out of his depth when he formed the connection. He had already been going to prostitutes for some time when he came across Mary Ann in the front parlour brothel run by a procuress known as 'Mother B'.
He then goes on to reflect that George was dealt with harshly because of this link to a life of vice, and that his prison sentence was harsh because of this piece of information. I disagree with this. Presumably, on being caught red-handed, George confessed and probably admitted to all the thefts; this mini crime spree had been going on for months - in fact, all the academic year 1875/76. It wasn't 'stealing by finding', or an opportunistic crime committed in the heat of the moment. This seems to be forgotten when biographers choose to excuse George for what he did. Remember, he was a serial offender. If he had been stealing (or realising from fencing his stolen goods) even as little as two shillings a week, this is a considerable amount of money. A typical weekly wage for that time was about fifteen shillings for an unskilled labourer working 60 hours; a Bryant and May match girl click earned four shillings for the same amount of hours worked. And. let us not forget there must have been quite a bit of planning and deception involved in the crimes, and a prodigious amount of lying to peers when they complained of missing money or stuff. And the play-acting of pretending not to know anything about it... that was a skill that would come in handy in future life haha.
George got off lightly and got to keep his ill-gotten gains. In fact, it was probably his class that prevented him being punished more harshly.
Anthony says George was introduced to the brothel by John George Black, who had told him if he went to Mother B's he would find a beginner there who was hot stuff. This tip had been fatal to Gissing for two reasons: it had been given him, incredibly enough, in a letter; and he had kept it, as he had kept all Black's letters. Now, Anthony could be making use of the actual letters here, as much as recounting what HG told him. (The John George Black letters were first presented to us by Pierre Coustillas in 'Etudes Anglaises' in summer 1963.) He seems to mix up their contents and give an overview of them, rather than exact quotes. However, Anthony suggests the content most damning to George (in HG's eyes), was the visiting of brothels and the catching of a venereal disease. This notion of George: 1) contracting syphilis and 2) contracting it from Marianne, needs to be addressed. As I covered the Black letters in Commonplace 47, I will just state that there is no conclusive evidence that, at this stage in his life, George had venereal disease. And, John George Black may not have suffered from any STD, either. What is described in the letters is not sufficient evidence to make a conclusive diagnosis, but, if the two men were suffering from any form of sexually transmitted disease, there is no reason to think they caught it from Marianne - because the girl in the house may not even have been Marianne. If, as Anthony West suggests, they both went to brothels regularly, there is no reason to assume either caught anything from the girl in 'Mother B's. And, George has already been quoted as saying her met Marianne in the street and wanted to save her from a life of vice. However, there is every reason to suspect George did indeed contract syphilis at some stage in his early adult life.
We read in Morley Roberts' account of George's life (The Private Life of Henry Maitland, 1912) that George once showed him a photo of a girl with long dark hair falling down her back whom he was going to marry - and as she was obviously 'not a lady', Roberts tried to talk him out of it. The accepted line given us by biographers is, that George was overwhelmed by Marianne's sexuality and her gold-digging ways and the poor sap couldn't help himself - he fell in love. However, Anthony says HG told him Roberts said something else: He (HG) asked how this Mary Ann had managed to get such a hold on Gissing, and was given no clear answer. Roberts was not at all sure that it had been like that. He doubted if the girl had been the agent in the disaster. He thought that her role could have been a purely passive one. He couldn't really say, however, because he had never known her. He had sometimes been with Gissing when she was in the same house or flat with them, and as close as the next room, but he had never spoken to her, and he had not seen her until after her death. Gissing had sent for him one day in February 1888, asking him to come to his lodgings. When he got there he found Gissing in a wildly excited condition. He had received a telegram telling him that Mary Ann was lying dead in a house in Lambeth, and asking him to go there at once to make the necessary arrangements for the disposal of her body and her things. He couldn't altogether believe it, and was afraid it might be the bait to some kind of trap. He begged Roberts to go to the address given to find out how the land lay - he couldn't bring himself to go near the place until he had the word of somebody he trusted that the woman was really dead.
Roberts had found a corpse in the house in Lambeth. Whatever chronic ailments the dead woman might have been suffering from, the actual cause of death had been starvation. The body was terribly wasted. This is the account that (almost) opens George's Diaries. The cause of death on the actual death certificate is 'acute laryngitis'. Some biographers insist this is wrong - but they are arrogant fools who think they know better than the attending physician. Marianne died of acute laryngitis exacerbated by underlying tuberculosis (probably in the glandular form, scrofula) and poor physical condition - which is, as we know from George and the feeding up cure at the Naylands sanatorium, a frequent concomitant of TB.
The scene had been a pitiful and disturbing one, but what struck Roberts was the number of elements in it that were discordant with Gissing's account of the woman as a drunken virago, lost to all sense of decency, who had hated him. In the bowl along with the pawn tickets Roberts had found a number of temperance pledge cards signed at the proscribed monthly intervals, evidence that Mary Ann had been fighting against her worst failing to the last. Other things did not jibe with the specification. She had kept every letter she had ever had from her perplexing husband, and along with those letters, his photograph, and two engraved reproductions of portraits of the poets he had idolised in his youth, Byron and Tennyson. It was the presence of these things that had made it possible for him to make a positive identification of the body. There had been nothing about the thing itself to relate it to the lively-looking young animal of sixteen or seventeen, with her mass of glossy hair tumbling down her back, whose photograph Gissing had shown him, to give him an idea of what she had been like. Gissing himself was faced with the same difficulty when he had at last been convinced that he could safely come into the room. The mummy-like cadaver, so small, so slight, had not reminded him of anyone - but there were his letters, and that was his photograph - and he recognised the engravings. The body, or so it seemed, had to be hers. In the course of this macabre recognition scene, Roberts' suspicion that however great a disaster his first marriage might have been for Gissing, it had been an even greater misfortune for poor Mary Ann, became a certainty.
HG then compared what Frederic Harrison and Morley Roberts had told him about George's first marriage, and matched this to what had been told him by George about his second. HG concluded how much they had a lot in common. In each case Gissing's choice had fallen upon someone who might have been specified as hopelessly wrong for him, and in each case he had started to treat the girl as if she had done him some monstrous wrong by becoming his wife as soon as the knot was tied. To avenge it he had inflicted a kind of social death on each partner, keeping her out of sight of the world at large and of his intimates. He had spoken of his wives to some of his closest friends, but it had only been to complain of them, and of their behaviour.
Gissing had developed a formula that provided, in his eyes, a perfectly reasonable explanation for his extraordinary treatment of these unlucky women. Unpresentable as they had been to start with, they had become very much more so after he had married them. The trouble hadn't had its origins in their obvious defects, indeed it might have given rise to some of them. It wasn't just that he had picked on ill-bred, uneducated, and uncouth young women to marry... they could easily have overcome these handicaps once he had lifted them from the squalid surroundings in which they had been brought up if they had wanted to - the horrifying truth was that it had been his misfortune to be married, twice, to women who were teetering on the brink of madness... Or, so Roberts said.
HG thought this didn't add up. My father's feeling was that there was something suspicious, if not altogether unlikely, about this case of lightening striking in the same place twice was in the back of his mind as he immersed himself in the body of Gissing's writings before settling down to the task of writing the introduction to Veranilda. He was surprised to find how much plainly sadistic and paranoid fantasy had been blended in with the sober realism of most of his work.
Anthony then goes on to explain how HG was beginning to doubt everything he knew about George, and what he found out for himself, he didn't like. Despite consulting with 'experts' who claimed they knew George well, there were so many discrepancies that he didn't know what to believe. For example: In the space of the relatively brief period in which he had been at work, my father had been told with assurance that Gissing's original meeting with his second wife had taken place in the Marylebone Road, in Oxford Street, and in a tea shop. This small point bothered him, since he had a perfectly clear recollection of having been told, and by Gissing himself, that the encounter had taken place in Regent's Park. Anthony goes on to say: These discrepancies, while unimportant in themselves, added up, little by little, to a startling total. In the end, my father found himself confronted by two largely unrelated characters - one of them the candid, good-natured and thoroughly likeable man he had known, and the other a veiled and secretive fraud who had, for whatever reason, been virtually incapable of telling anyone the truth about anything more important than the state of the weather.
JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 61 AND FIND OUT WHAT GEORGE REALLY THOUGHT ABOUT HIS WOMEN. AND THAT CHARGE OF BEING A SYPHILITIC.
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| Garden in Shoreham by Samuel Palmer c 1855 |
To recap: HG Wells started out somewhat hero-worshipping George, and made the first move towards their friendship by inviting the alleged poor, long-suffering one to spend time with the Wellses. As their friendship evolved, HG was brought into the story George told about the trouble he was having with Edith. HG saw no reason to doubt his word - gentlemen don't lie, do they? When George abandoned his two children and ran off with Gabrielle Fleury, HG disapproved and said as much; but he was there when George was near to death, and took it hard when he realised he had not handled the end like a friend should have. To make amends, he decided to write the introduction to Veranilda, George's posthumous (unreadable and irrelevant) historic novel of the Goths doing the Grand Tour (as only real Goths can - with the mayhem dial turned up to 11 haha).
 |
| Self Portrait (at age 21) by Samuel Palmer 1826 |
Soon after hearing of George's death, Frederic Harrison had contacted HG to ask for information about it. The two got together and compared notes; Harrison shocked HG with what he revealed about George's early years. This was what started HG off on his quest to find out all he could about the Owens incident and, in particular, George's first wife, Marianne aka Nell or, Mary Ann, as Anthony West refers to her. Frederic Harrison suggested George could not be trusted in his account of his first marriage; HG had already concluded George had lied a good deal about his second. Harrison suggested he speak to Morley Roberts. Remember, this was 1903, long before Roberts' own 1912 biography of our man.
Morley Roberts knew George at Owens, and was a more or less lifelong friend, though they were never 'soul mates'. Roberts did not have a crush on our man the way Eduard Bertz did, and even seemed, at times, ambivalent about George - they often spent many months without communication. George was often dismissive of Roberts, especially as a writer - Morley Roberts' tales are a cross between Algernon Gissing on a typical day and Robert Louis Stevenson on a bad day when his TB is playing up and the creative flux is stagnant. However, Roberts was a man of action (in a small way, and as compared to George) and had come to France to be with George at the end - but missed him by a day, through no fault of his own. Roberts was known to Wells through the Omar Khyyam set, as well as through George, but Wells and Roberts were not close friends. HG hoped to be able to include some of what Roberts told him in the Veranilda introduction. Anthony West's own words are in blue.
To say that my father was upset by what Roberts presently told him about the first marriage and its origins is to put the matter mildly. There was no way in which he could extract a romantic story from the information he as given, and the crassness of its broad outlines as well as of its detail was abrasive. Gissing had not been an innocent wandering out of his depth when he formed the connection. He had already been going to prostitutes for some time when he came across Mary Ann in the front parlour brothel run by a procuress known as 'Mother B'.
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| A Church by Samuel Palmer c 1830 |
George got off lightly and got to keep his ill-gotten gains. In fact, it was probably his class that prevented him being punished more harshly.
Anthony says George was introduced to the brothel by John George Black, who had told him if he went to Mother B's he would find a beginner there who was hot stuff. This tip had been fatal to Gissing for two reasons: it had been given him, incredibly enough, in a letter; and he had kept it, as he had kept all Black's letters. Now, Anthony could be making use of the actual letters here, as much as recounting what HG told him. (The John George Black letters were first presented to us by Pierre Coustillas in 'Etudes Anglaises' in summer 1963.) He seems to mix up their contents and give an overview of them, rather than exact quotes. However, Anthony suggests the content most damning to George (in HG's eyes), was the visiting of brothels and the catching of a venereal disease. This notion of George: 1) contracting syphilis and 2) contracting it from Marianne, needs to be addressed. As I covered the Black letters in Commonplace 47, I will just state that there is no conclusive evidence that, at this stage in his life, George had venereal disease. And, John George Black may not have suffered from any STD, either. What is described in the letters is not sufficient evidence to make a conclusive diagnosis, but, if the two men were suffering from any form of sexually transmitted disease, there is no reason to think they caught it from Marianne - because the girl in the house may not even have been Marianne. If, as Anthony West suggests, they both went to brothels regularly, there is no reason to assume either caught anything from the girl in 'Mother B's. And, George has already been quoted as saying her met Marianne in the street and wanted to save her from a life of vice. However, there is every reason to suspect George did indeed contract syphilis at some stage in his early adult life.
 |
| Girl Standing by Samuel Palmer c 1826 |
We read in Morley Roberts' account of George's life (The Private Life of Henry Maitland, 1912) that George once showed him a photo of a girl with long dark hair falling down her back whom he was going to marry - and as she was obviously 'not a lady', Roberts tried to talk him out of it. The accepted line given us by biographers is, that George was overwhelmed by Marianne's sexuality and her gold-digging ways and the poor sap couldn't help himself - he fell in love. However, Anthony says HG told him Roberts said something else: He (HG) asked how this Mary Ann had managed to get such a hold on Gissing, and was given no clear answer. Roberts was not at all sure that it had been like that. He doubted if the girl had been the agent in the disaster. He thought that her role could have been a purely passive one. He couldn't really say, however, because he had never known her. He had sometimes been with Gissing when she was in the same house or flat with them, and as close as the next room, but he had never spoken to her, and he had not seen her until after her death. Gissing had sent for him one day in February 1888, asking him to come to his lodgings. When he got there he found Gissing in a wildly excited condition. He had received a telegram telling him that Mary Ann was lying dead in a house in Lambeth, and asking him to go there at once to make the necessary arrangements for the disposal of her body and her things. He couldn't altogether believe it, and was afraid it might be the bait to some kind of trap. He begged Roberts to go to the address given to find out how the land lay - he couldn't bring himself to go near the place until he had the word of somebody he trusted that the woman was really dead.
Roberts had found a corpse in the house in Lambeth. Whatever chronic ailments the dead woman might have been suffering from, the actual cause of death had been starvation. The body was terribly wasted. This is the account that (almost) opens George's Diaries. The cause of death on the actual death certificate is 'acute laryngitis'. Some biographers insist this is wrong - but they are arrogant fools who think they know better than the attending physician. Marianne died of acute laryngitis exacerbated by underlying tuberculosis (probably in the glandular form, scrofula) and poor physical condition - which is, as we know from George and the feeding up cure at the Naylands sanatorium, a frequent concomitant of TB.
The scene had been a pitiful and disturbing one, but what struck Roberts was the number of elements in it that were discordant with Gissing's account of the woman as a drunken virago, lost to all sense of decency, who had hated him. In the bowl along with the pawn tickets Roberts had found a number of temperance pledge cards signed at the proscribed monthly intervals, evidence that Mary Ann had been fighting against her worst failing to the last. Other things did not jibe with the specification. She had kept every letter she had ever had from her perplexing husband, and along with those letters, his photograph, and two engraved reproductions of portraits of the poets he had idolised in his youth, Byron and Tennyson. It was the presence of these things that had made it possible for him to make a positive identification of the body. There had been nothing about the thing itself to relate it to the lively-looking young animal of sixteen or seventeen, with her mass of glossy hair tumbling down her back, whose photograph Gissing had shown him, to give him an idea of what she had been like. Gissing himself was faced with the same difficulty when he had at last been convinced that he could safely come into the room. The mummy-like cadaver, so small, so slight, had not reminded him of anyone - but there were his letters, and that was his photograph - and he recognised the engravings. The body, or so it seemed, had to be hers. In the course of this macabre recognition scene, Roberts' suspicion that however great a disaster his first marriage might have been for Gissing, it had been an even greater misfortune for poor Mary Ann, became a certainty.
 |
| The Lonely Tower by Samuel Palmer 1879 |
Gissing had developed a formula that provided, in his eyes, a perfectly reasonable explanation for his extraordinary treatment of these unlucky women. Unpresentable as they had been to start with, they had become very much more so after he had married them. The trouble hadn't had its origins in their obvious defects, indeed it might have given rise to some of them. It wasn't just that he had picked on ill-bred, uneducated, and uncouth young women to marry... they could easily have overcome these handicaps once he had lifted them from the squalid surroundings in which they had been brought up if they had wanted to - the horrifying truth was that it had been his misfortune to be married, twice, to women who were teetering on the brink of madness... Or, so Roberts said.
HG thought this didn't add up. My father's feeling was that there was something suspicious, if not altogether unlikely, about this case of lightening striking in the same place twice was in the back of his mind as he immersed himself in the body of Gissing's writings before settling down to the task of writing the introduction to Veranilda. He was surprised to find how much plainly sadistic and paranoid fantasy had been blended in with the sober realism of most of his work.
 |
| A Hilly Scene by Samuel Palmer c 1827 |
JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 61 AND FIND OUT WHAT GEORGE REALLY THOUGHT ABOUT HIS WOMEN. AND THAT CHARGE OF BEING A SYPHILITIC.
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