Commonplace 66 George & Syphilis PART FIVE: Edith's Heroic Life part 1.
In order to address what it was that Edith suffered from in her last years, we need to recap what suggests George was syphilitic. Here are the most obvious clues to a diagnosis of syphilis in our man:
1) George was sexually active at Owens College and was alleged to have visited brothels. He was treated for a venereal disease, possibly by Dr Wahltuch, or by self-medicating from knowledge picked up in his father' chemist's shop, or just street wisdom gleaned from his social set.
2) Experienced alternating periods of system-wide health problems, with remissions and exacerbations of fevers, throat infections, headaches, rheumatism, bowel problems, insomnia. Swellings in groin, and behind ear. Facial lesion. All typical of paresis.
3) Mood swings often with no external impetus, short-lived, and recurrent. Typical of paresis. Personality changes from kind-hearted to hard-hearted, from Socialist to Pessimist. Outgoing to reclusive. Broke with the Positivists and reversed his personal philosophy. All typical of paresis.
4) Four year gap between diagnosis and marrying his first wife, then four years gap between the two children he bore with Edith. As per Dr Fournier's recommendation for the married life of syphilitics.
5) Paretic febrile crises in Cotrone and immediately before death. Florid hallucinations and delusions of grandeur. Typical of paresis. Carried quinine in Italy - a known treatment for syphilitic fevers.
6) Differentiated diagnosis of TB discounted by 3 doctors who examined him on more than one occasion: a chest specialist (Pye-Smith), a doctor who had known him his whole life (Henry Hick), and the doctor in charge of a chest clinic/sanitorium for consumptives (Jane Walker) all did not think he was consumptive.
7) Responded well to iodide of potassium therapy, an anti-syphilitic, especially for tertiary cardiac syphilis.
8) Rapid decline in last two years - incapable of usual workload. Weight loss and fatigue throughout this period. All typical of paresis.
9) Death from damaged heart and pneumonia and from exhaustion following paretic crisis.
10) Edith developed paresis (as early as 1897?) and endured many years of GPI in an institution.
Edith and George had been separated for some time; George's Italy trip (with the Cotrone episode of paretic fever) was a few months back. Edith had been living in various places with Alfred, under the guidance of Miss Orme, with whom they had both been living until Edith fell out with her, back in the February - maybe she talked too freely about George's secret life for Miss Orme's refined tastes. Maybe the physical attributes of her illness were beginning to become visually apparent.
Alfred, at the time of the meeting, was two and a half years old. This would be the last time George ever saw his second son. From that day's Diary entry: I gave her to understand that our parting was final, but that I should not take Alfred away from her as long as keeps well.
What did that mean?
That summer, Edith had upset a number of people, been involved in some low key fracas with a landlord or two, and woken up to the fact Eliza Orme was not the guardian angel she claimed to be. George had been doing his best to make her as miserable as possible and even considered at one time making a public declaration he had died, in order to give her the slip. (Which, in itself, is quite a mentally disturbed thing to do, is it not?) Edith was receiving alimony from her scheming, paranoid, errant husband - through an intermediary - but she was alone in the world, with a small child to care for and another child being held captive half a country away. George should have been with her, but he had deserted her - Edith could have gone to court for his forcible return.
She had no-one to turn to. George's spies were running her life and no doubt middle class Miss Orme and Miss Collet were lecturing her on motherhood - as only childless spinsters can - the irony being that, if either had given birth to children they would have got someone else to do the hands on raising of them - a nanny, for example, or a boarding school. On the level of everyday sorrow, frustration and misery, Edith's dial was switched up to eleven. She had every right to be angry with the two women trampling over her still warm body to get to her husband. However, she was not behaving impulsively and emotionally in this meeting with George. She had made the rational demand the month before of agreeing to a legal separation if she got a house of her own and both of her children - perhaps she had legal advice; if not, this is a very reasonable set of demands, which George could have agreed to if he had wanted to treat her decently. As he did not... On 27th August, George comments on the Bad Eliza Orme postcard Edith sent. Quite a mild rebuke, all things considered, and no doubt a title well-earned by the meddling Ms Orme.
It is worth pointing out that Miss Orme gets quite a bit of credit for her (paid) supervision of Edith, but you have to wonder at her motives. She made is abundantly clear how much she disliked Edith and mocked her mental health and Edith's justifiable anger at being all but confined by a patronising, moralising, nulliparous female who went bleating to the cruel dictator of a husband at the drop of a hat. In a letter to her minion colleague and clone, Miss Collet, she writes:
She is a disappointed child as none of her relatives have invited her to their Xmas parties and in consequence her temper has been very bad. But her appetite is excellent and as far as I can judge the boy is all right. She has cut him off from all communication with us or the servants but I think she will soon grow tired of this... We have had some good laughs over her extraordinary conduct... Perhaps only another woman can detect the sneers here, the nastiness at the bottom of it.
George had played a blinder in appointing her as Edith's gaoler - it was calculated to annoy his wife and wear her down; well, to be supervised by a smug, middle class do-gooder would inflame the feelings of any red-blooded woman - or is it just me that thinks that?? Anyhoo, daily reports could be gathered and broadcast back with the added bonus of Miss Orme being seen by all and sundry as an impartial, well-meaning outsider. Of course, she was no such thing. She knew what George wanted and she was happy to give it to him - intelligence on Edith that would give him reasons for labelling his wife as a mentally defective bad mother, not fit to look after her children. And Miss Orme's reward was the title of George's confidante - one in the eye for Miss Collet! Remember what George used to say about how he thought women were all back-stabbing cows to each other? Neither Miss Orme nor Miss Collet would have known that, of course - he wouldn't have passed that snippet on to them haha!
Just as he told lies to Miss Collet about Marianne aka Nell (claiming she died five years before she did, for an example), was George terraforming Miss Orme's mental landscape into believing Edith was some sort of diseased wretch? His treatment of his wife was cruel and calculated to undermine her sanity - was he preemptively seeking to blame Edith for any sickness she might manifest, because further down the line, he knew she would very probably be fully paretic, and someone, sooner or later, would be asking awkward questions - like, from where had she contracted her disease? If he paved the way for Miss Orme - probably with little or no experience herself of syphilis and its consequences - to assume that, if Edith became syphilitically ill, then she must have caught it after the marital separation? If so, that might explain the extraordinary story he told in 1899, when he claimed to have received an anonymous letter accusing Edith of having an affair. (We might pause here to recall the Mysterious Case of the Policeman in the Nighttime - when a policeman came to tell George Marianne was in trouble. Commonplaces 35-37 deal with this.) Creepily, George advertised for more info (he could be quite the little Mr Grundy at times). By miring Edith's name in a sex scandal, was he really making sure no-one would suspect him of infecting her with syphilis, because this alleged affair was 'proof' she was sleeping with other men? No smoke without fire, what! Of course, nothing came of it - because it was a ridiculous notion only a chump would believe. But, George had done his usual thing and lied to manage the perceptions of his friends, and involve others who were only too willing to do his dirty work for him or come up with ideas to solve his problems. Frederic Harrison was set up to do the same with Marianne. Henry Hick was used similarly with Edith. Morley Roberts, ditto.
Pause for a moment and consider how vile an act this would be, if true. He has given his wife syphilis, cast her aside with his children, moved on to another female and then, the cherry on the cake: told a pack of lies to frame his wife for her paresis. You couldn't make this wickedness up, could you? Well, perhaps you could, if you were a fading late Victorian writer. Heroic? Non.
That phrase - 'as long as she keeps well' - implies that she has been ill. George tends to think all women are mad, but is he hinting at the paresis that he knows has made Edith unpredictable and, at times, aggressive and irrational, and likely to be progressively worse fairly quickly? He knows about the mental effects of paresis - some of the most famous people of the age were fellow-sufferers, and he read about their sad ends - Jules de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, Arthur Schopenhauer, Heinrich Heine (a particular hero of his), Arthur Rimbaud, to name but a few. The man who spent a lot of time in libraries would have had access to all manner of research items to broaden his knowledge. He had visited a mad house himself when in Paris, where syphilitics would have made up a fair proportion of the patients, and paretics would be roaming the streets of all the big cities, rubbing shoulders with the uninfected - so plenty of evidence of mental meltdown for him to see where Edith might be inevitably heading. Marylebone workhouse would have a special wing for them - and adverts for syphilis cures would hound him from their hoardings. This September meeting was the last time George and Edith were together. Was she beginning to look like a woman with paresis?
This threat to remove her child - she knows he means it - he has form on the child abduction front. No concern for the children, of course; even as he and his wife sit talking over their marriage, he is planning his rout of Gabrielle and her total capitulation to the old Gissing charm offensive (or, is that offensive charm??) because the clock is ticking and he needs a nurse for his last years. How far he has come from that dopey dingbat who trolled along the Oxford Road in Manchester looking for girl action. From those idealistic days when he had goodwill in his heart to the creature engineering Edith's downfall whilst manipulating his way round Gabrielle is a mighty fall. As Alphonse Daudet put it: Men grow old, but they do not ripen.
So, George off in France with Gabrielle, and Edith, in England with Alfred, overwhelmed by her situation, becoming increasingly isolated and unable to cope, is invisible. She is the block to George's marriage to Gabrielle, but she does not exist to him and neither do his sons. Money and the odd letter to Walter, are all they get from him. George's health declines rapidly from the day he sailed for France. Edith, her dreadful plight undocumented, is finally too ill to carry on looking after Alfred.
There are psychiatric medical records that give tantalising clues to Edith's mental state during the last years of her life, and point us in a certain direction. These notes were presented in the Gissing Journal of July 2010 Vol XLVI Number 3 (sadly, not yet available online) by long-time Gissing family researcher and all-round esteemed Wakefield historian, Anthony Petyt.
JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 67 FOR PART TWO OF EDITH'S HEROIC LIFE AND THE DECODING OF THOSE MEDICAL RECORDS.
All the illuminated illustrations are by an unknown artist, taken from an edition of Giovanni Boccaccio's, “De Mulieribus Claris,” c1440 British Library click for more.
In order to address what it was that Edith suffered from in her last years, we need to recap what suggests George was syphilitic. Here are the most obvious clues to a diagnosis of syphilis in our man:1) George was sexually active at Owens College and was alleged to have visited brothels. He was treated for a venereal disease, possibly by Dr Wahltuch, or by self-medicating from knowledge picked up in his father' chemist's shop, or just street wisdom gleaned from his social set.
2) Experienced alternating periods of system-wide health problems, with remissions and exacerbations of fevers, throat infections, headaches, rheumatism, bowel problems, insomnia. Swellings in groin, and behind ear. Facial lesion. All typical of paresis.
3) Mood swings often with no external impetus, short-lived, and recurrent. Typical of paresis. Personality changes from kind-hearted to hard-hearted, from Socialist to Pessimist. Outgoing to reclusive. Broke with the Positivists and reversed his personal philosophy. All typical of paresis.
4) Four year gap between diagnosis and marrying his first wife, then four years gap between the two children he bore with Edith. As per Dr Fournier's recommendation for the married life of syphilitics.
5) Paretic febrile crises in Cotrone and immediately before death. Florid hallucinations and delusions of grandeur. Typical of paresis. Carried quinine in Italy - a known treatment for syphilitic fevers.
6) Differentiated diagnosis of TB discounted by 3 doctors who examined him on more than one occasion: a chest specialist (Pye-Smith), a doctor who had known him his whole life (Henry Hick), and the doctor in charge of a chest clinic/sanitorium for consumptives (Jane Walker) all did not think he was consumptive.
7) Responded well to iodide of potassium therapy, an anti-syphilitic, especially for tertiary cardiac syphilis.
8) Rapid decline in last two years - incapable of usual workload. Weight loss and fatigue throughout this period. All typical of paresis.
9) Death from damaged heart and pneumonia and from exhaustion following paretic crisis.
10) Edith developed paresis (as early as 1897?) and endured many years of GPI in an institution.
On September 7th 1898, Edith arrived unannounced at George's secret hideaway - 7, Clifton Terrace, Dorking. Not exactly Shangri La, or Xanadu, was it? More of a compound in Abbottabad. He had been feeling poorly all day and was enjoying a lay down on the sofa - we can presume he was exhausted from wooing Gabrielle Fleury via the extraordinarily long letter he wrote her that day, full of loved up yearnings and asking for her reassurance she was hot for him - not that he could tolerate hot (haha), because the weather had been scorching that day and he was physically drained by it. Bless.
Edith and George had been separated for some time; George's Italy trip (with the Cotrone episode of paretic fever) was a few months back. Edith had been living in various places with Alfred, under the guidance of Miss Orme, with whom they had both been living until Edith fell out with her, back in the February - maybe she talked too freely about George's secret life for Miss Orme's refined tastes. Maybe the physical attributes of her illness were beginning to become visually apparent.
Alfred, at the time of the meeting, was two and a half years old. This would be the last time George ever saw his second son. From that day's Diary entry: I gave her to understand that our parting was final, but that I should not take Alfred away from her as long as keeps well.
What did that mean?
She had no-one to turn to. George's spies were running her life and no doubt middle class Miss Orme and Miss Collet were lecturing her on motherhood - as only childless spinsters can - the irony being that, if either had given birth to children they would have got someone else to do the hands on raising of them - a nanny, for example, or a boarding school. On the level of everyday sorrow, frustration and misery, Edith's dial was switched up to eleven. She had every right to be angry with the two women trampling over her still warm body to get to her husband. However, she was not behaving impulsively and emotionally in this meeting with George. She had made the rational demand the month before of agreeing to a legal separation if she got a house of her own and both of her children - perhaps she had legal advice; if not, this is a very reasonable set of demands, which George could have agreed to if he had wanted to treat her decently. As he did not... On 27th August, George comments on the Bad Eliza Orme postcard Edith sent. Quite a mild rebuke, all things considered, and no doubt a title well-earned by the meddling Ms Orme.
It is worth pointing out that Miss Orme gets quite a bit of credit for her (paid) supervision of Edith, but you have to wonder at her motives. She made is abundantly clear how much she disliked Edith and mocked her mental health and Edith's justifiable anger at being all but confined by a patronising, moralising, nulliparous female who went bleating to the cruel dictator of a husband at the drop of a hat. In a letter to her minion colleague and clone, Miss Collet, she writes:
She is a disappointed child as none of her relatives have invited her to their Xmas parties and in consequence her temper has been very bad. But her appetite is excellent and as far as I can judge the boy is all right. She has cut him off from all communication with us or the servants but I think she will soon grow tired of this... We have had some good laughs over her extraordinary conduct... Perhaps only another woman can detect the sneers here, the nastiness at the bottom of it.
George had played a blinder in appointing her as Edith's gaoler - it was calculated to annoy his wife and wear her down; well, to be supervised by a smug, middle class do-gooder would inflame the feelings of any red-blooded woman - or is it just me that thinks that?? Anyhoo, daily reports could be gathered and broadcast back with the added bonus of Miss Orme being seen by all and sundry as an impartial, well-meaning outsider. Of course, she was no such thing. She knew what George wanted and she was happy to give it to him - intelligence on Edith that would give him reasons for labelling his wife as a mentally defective bad mother, not fit to look after her children. And Miss Orme's reward was the title of George's confidante - one in the eye for Miss Collet! Remember what George used to say about how he thought women were all back-stabbing cows to each other? Neither Miss Orme nor Miss Collet would have known that, of course - he wouldn't have passed that snippet on to them haha!
Just as he told lies to Miss Collet about Marianne aka Nell (claiming she died five years before she did, for an example), was George terraforming Miss Orme's mental landscape into believing Edith was some sort of diseased wretch? His treatment of his wife was cruel and calculated to undermine her sanity - was he preemptively seeking to blame Edith for any sickness she might manifest, because further down the line, he knew she would very probably be fully paretic, and someone, sooner or later, would be asking awkward questions - like, from where had she contracted her disease? If he paved the way for Miss Orme - probably with little or no experience herself of syphilis and its consequences - to assume that, if Edith became syphilitically ill, then she must have caught it after the marital separation? If so, that might explain the extraordinary story he told in 1899, when he claimed to have received an anonymous letter accusing Edith of having an affair. (We might pause here to recall the Mysterious Case of the Policeman in the Nighttime - when a policeman came to tell George Marianne was in trouble. Commonplaces 35-37 deal with this.) Creepily, George advertised for more info (he could be quite the little Mr Grundy at times). By miring Edith's name in a sex scandal, was he really making sure no-one would suspect him of infecting her with syphilis, because this alleged affair was 'proof' she was sleeping with other men? No smoke without fire, what! Of course, nothing came of it - because it was a ridiculous notion only a chump would believe. But, George had done his usual thing and lied to manage the perceptions of his friends, and involve others who were only too willing to do his dirty work for him or come up with ideas to solve his problems. Frederic Harrison was set up to do the same with Marianne. Henry Hick was used similarly with Edith. Morley Roberts, ditto.
This threat to remove her child - she knows he means it - he has form on the child abduction front. No concern for the children, of course; even as he and his wife sit talking over their marriage, he is planning his rout of Gabrielle and her total capitulation to the old Gissing charm offensive (or, is that offensive charm??) because the clock is ticking and he needs a nurse for his last years. How far he has come from that dopey dingbat who trolled along the Oxford Road in Manchester looking for girl action. From those idealistic days when he had goodwill in his heart to the creature engineering Edith's downfall whilst manipulating his way round Gabrielle is a mighty fall. As Alphonse Daudet put it: Men grow old, but they do not ripen.
So, George off in France with Gabrielle, and Edith, in England with Alfred, overwhelmed by her situation, becoming increasingly isolated and unable to cope, is invisible. She is the block to George's marriage to Gabrielle, but she does not exist to him and neither do his sons. Money and the odd letter to Walter, are all they get from him. George's health declines rapidly from the day he sailed for France. Edith, her dreadful plight undocumented, is finally too ill to carry on looking after Alfred.
JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 67 FOR PART TWO OF EDITH'S HEROIC LIFE AND THE DECODING OF THOSE MEDICAL RECORDS.
All the illuminated illustrations are by an unknown artist, taken from an edition of Giovanni Boccaccio's, “De Mulieribus Claris,” c1440 British Library click for more.
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