Commonplace 71 George & The Lie of Hypogamy/Hypergamy.
The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts: Marcus Aurelius.
When George met Edith, she had no underlying mental health difficulties. I take this as read because of the low incidence of mental illness in society in general, and the fact she was 'sane' enough (and that can also be intended ironically!!) to be considered marriageable. As George tended to think all women were mad/unstable/hysterical, he would have been on the lookout for any tell-tale signs of instability. But, Edith had nothing to hide. She was unremarkable in every way - and that's exactly what he wanted. He thought of her as semi-literate, but he would probably say the same about me (and he wood not be rong haha), but that was good, too - no chance of an intellectual debate. He found nothing odd or weird about her - except for the fact she was a woman and so, almost mentally from another planet, as far as he was concerned. Still, with his hand on a woman's tiller (!) he had every confidence he could steer her in the direction he wanted her to go: straight along the passage to the back parlour where she could sit for hours unattended: quiet, unobtrusive, undemanding, invisible. Mrs Yule, Marian's mother, forever expected to be grateful for being yanked from the slum, condemned to a life of being constantly debased.
A suitable for George woman had to be sexually available, able to accompany him when it suited him, stay at home out of the way when he said so, be efficient at home-making, good with servants, well able to know where her bread and butter came from (to almost quote our man). A woman who must put up and shut up, then give it up whenever he felt the need. Not a looker - he didn't want to draw competition from other men, or attention from anyone; besides, plain girls are always grateful, aren't they? He wanted a shy little mouse who would keep him clean, well-nourished and know where his socks were - put him first in all things and step back into the shadows whenever it suited him. In amongst George's many good personal qualities, uxoriousness never reared its pretty, loving head.
George was famous for hypogamy - which is the term used by sociologists to describe marrying beneath you in social class. George always claimed this was purely a financial reality-check decision - that decent women of his own class (to coin his phraseology) would not countenance a union with a man with less than £400 income per annum. Anthony West claimed his father, HG Wells, thought it to be something altogether more sinister - working class women were more likely to put up with George's weirdness, and by this, he implies sexual weirdness - his sadomasochistic tendencies. Maybe so. It might have been his syphilis that kept him from aspiring to women of his own class...
It wasn't that he didn't have options of middle-class-and-above women - the chance to practice a bit of hypergamy (the opposite of hypo). Miss Sichel was a candidate, and, on the surface, was very much what George claimed to find alluring. She was beautiful, intelligent, creative, well-connected to the literati, independently wealthy, interested in him, and available. But, there was a downside: apart from the fact Miss Sichel was Jewish (George was a tad anti-semitic), she towered above him both intellectually and educationally. Forgetting his anti-semitic tendency, was it just a matter of his feelings of inadequacy in the face of competition for top dog spot in a marriage union, that put him off her? Or did she reject his less than compelling personal qualities?
Even with his restricted (self-imposed, of course) social life, George liked a bit of a go on the ladies. Mrs Gaussen, the mother of some of his pupils, was a great influence; was she out of bounds to him? She was certainly above him in all sorts of ways - in class, wealth, age and sophistication. But, she took him on and advised him on decor - George liked nice, decorative things, and she helped him zhoosh up his living space with some interior design tips, and no doubt schooled him in fine manners like flower arranging and in elements of etiquette like how to get a winkle out of its shell with more than a hat pin. She would never have condescended to entertain him any other way - for the middle classes, love might be blind, but it wasn't stupid. George may have carped on about his 'less than £400 a year' salary not attracting the right calibre of wife, but he would have been offended at himself keeping a middle class woman on £500 or £1,000 - much of his self-regard was based on visible status, so much so that a grand a year would not have given him joy, despite what he said. All it would have done would be to increase his irritation at distractions and interruptions, and then accentuate the fact he didn't earn 2 grand a year!
The third 'lady' with whom he had a 'thing', was Mrs Rosalind Williams, a sister of Beatrice Potter who went on to be Beatrice Webb. In some ways, she was the most likely of this trio of posh ladies to consummate a union. She is also the most tragic of the three women.
The Potter family to which Rosie belonged was wealthy and had already produced ten children by the time she arrived in July 1865. The first sadness in her life was that she was born just after her only brother Dicky died; the second was that she was born a girl when her mother really wanted a boy to replace the child she lost. Still, Rosie became her parents' favourite and spent her childhood sheltered away in the vast houses in which the Potters spent their time, never attending school for more than a few months (she couldn't stand the commonness of her peers), but received tutoring at home from a governesses, under the close supervision of her mother. The pressure proved too much and she began to manifest signs of neurosis. She was emotionally needy and highly-strung and developed a series of psychological problems such as anorexia and amenorrhoea, from which she never really recovered. She was particularly close to her father, and had to be physically exiled from him at one point in order to improve her wellbeing.
Rosie was an outsider in the family of girls and spent a good deal of time alone, watercolour painting landscapes. When it was time to marry, she chose badly - or was steered in the wrong direction by sisters anxious for her to be married off - to a man who was not only totally unsuited to her emotional and physical needs, but was also suffering from tertiary syphilis' tabes dorsalis which he kept a secret until their wedding night. Dyson Williams was a bounder and a cad.
He insisted on my drinking some glasses of champagne which added to the one I had at breakfast had considerable effect on me. Over dinner he told me about his past life - the many affairs he had with women of all classes both married and single. His latest was the wife of a well-known Member of Parliament, a friend of the Courtneys in which he narrowly missed being co-respondent in a divorce case which would have caused a great scandal and perhaps prevented out marriage... Dyson then begged my forgiveness for his past life and promised always to be faithful to me, a promise he kept substantially during our short married life...
Needless to say, hers was not a happy marriage, and Dyson broke his word on the faithfulness front. Their only child, Noel, was born in 1889. Soon after, Dyson developed immense pain in his legs for which he took morphia and chloroform. From 1894, he was paraplegic. Rosie helped nurse him, but not very effectively or empathically. She was jealous by nature and soon developed a hatred for her husband's nurse. Noel was a sickly child and also required nursing care. Later, Rosie was to claim she virtually starved her husband to death to speed along his passing, and she felt the remorse and horror of it haunt her last years. She suffered a complete breakdown after he died, and needed full nursing care.
She met her prospective next husband very soon after this, a doctor who liked her and her son, and he soon proposed marriage. But she found him repugnant physically and sexually, and so turned him down, even though her family were desperate for her to remarry - they were of the belief all Rosie needed was regular, therapeutic sexual intercourse and her mental problems would solve themselves. After a period of reflection, Rosie came to agree with them but said she also realised this could be accomplished without getting married. She then embarked on a two-year whirlwind grand tour of Europe and romance - with intimate liaisons with friends of the family, school headmasters, random tourists. In Capri, legend has it that she tipped the head waiter of her hotel to seat her next to handsome men at dinner, and there she met George Cumberland Dobbs. They became an item. Rosie knew he was smitten.
That afternoon in a fit of repentance and rather hysterical emotion I confided all to GCD and told him the story of the past three years of my life, and so forged a link between us that ultimately sealed our fate. He was evidently shocked by my story for though he himself was my lover he did not know that I had others, and though no puritan, he was a clean-minded young man and had strict Irish ideas about the purity of women.
George Dobbs had to return home to Ireland, and Rosie was alone and vulnerable to temptation. Enter George Gissing.
1898 - George was in Rome on the run from Edith and hobnobbing with his pals HG wells and co, and suffering from lumbago and diarrhoea. The next day (March 23rd) he met Rosie Williams; in the Diary:
Mrs Williams, widow with little boy, sister of Mrs Sidney Webb (Beatrice Potter). Unfavourable impression; loud; bullies waiters; forces herself into our conversations.
This didn't stop George going to the Barberini and Medici Gardens with her on March 26th. And on March 29th, to the Vatican Sculpture Galleries; on the 30th, to the Colosseum, and later that day, to a party with her at the Cafe Nazionale. March 31st was rain all day. On April 1st, Mrs Williams left for Venice - but she gets a mention in the Diaries! And she writes to him the moment she gets to Venice. Tellingly, there is no mention of his reply. That's a lot of one-on-one for a woman he didn't like.
April 22nd, back in London, he dines with Mrs Williams... at her rented home.
July 26th, Gabrielle Fleury visits George to discuss translating New Grub Street for him.
July 31st - Lunched and dined with Mrs Williams, at Holmwood, where she has a cottage for the summer.
August 14th Lunched at Mrs Williams' ...
November 3rd Mrs Williams came for the afternoon.
On November 17th, a letter from her tells George she has scarlet fever. He sends her a parcel of books on November 18th. This is the last time she gets a mention in the Diaries. George had been corresponding with Gabrielle Fleury and they are an item, so Mrs Williams is cast out.
In Barbara Caine's account of the Potter sisters, Destined to Be Wives: The Sisters of Beatrice Webb, she writes:
After Rosie met Dobbs, she had an affair with George Gissing, to whom she was also strongly attracted. Gissing and Dobbs represent the essential conflict which underlay Rosie's life at this stage and subsequently - and which she never managed to resolve. She always wanted to marry a man who would be comparable to her brothers-in-law, and who would 'have some real and permanent interest in life and be doing something in the world'. Moreover she sought a mentor and intellectual guide.
Barbara follows this with the words often quoted from Rosie herself:
Since my first great affection and intimacy with my father I have had a great longing to understand and enter into the mind of some man who was my intellectual superior and to make my mind as if it were a mirror of his. I have little or no independent intellectual life or originality of my own, and am, in fact, a sort of mental parasite and when I have no one to cling to my mind sinks into a sort of stupor.
Barbara makes the point that our George was looking for an open marriage on account of Edith being his legal wife, but Rosie was not prepared to flout convention openly. There is doubt over the consummation of this relationship - of course, George doesn't mention anything. Rosie wrote that the sexual side of her relationship with him was not quite all she wished. As he was constantly plagued with the effects of his paresis throughout his time with her, maybe she knew what she was potentially going to be up against if she did nail her colours to his mast (!). As George probably had some of the life story that George Dobbs had been treated to, he may have realised Rosie was emotionally fragile; and, as it is reported he did not like her son Noel - the one on whom she doted - and as he already had two surplus sons going abegging, George was not likely to want to set up home with Rosie, whatever her yearly income. Besides, the substantial weight of the Potter family women was more than the average chap could bear. So, he settled for Gabrielle Fleury, and died three years later. Rosie married George Dobbs, who died in 1946.
It seems our man had a lucky escape - because Rosie's mental decline was so severe over the forthcoming years, her sister Beatrice wrote this about her:
Another tragedy of a worse kind is the torture of George Dobbs. Mad or bad is his wife or both. She never had any good and now she is developing positive evil. Sounds like our Mr Gissing had a very lucky escape indeed!
The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts: Marcus Aurelius.
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| The Mill At Tidmarsh by Dora Carrington 1917 |
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| Les Abeilles by Joseph Cornell 1940 (abeilles = bees?) |
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| Salammbo by Gaston Bussiere 1907 |
George was famous for hypogamy - which is the term used by sociologists to describe marrying beneath you in social class. George always claimed this was purely a financial reality-check decision - that decent women of his own class (to coin his phraseology) would not countenance a union with a man with less than £400 income per annum. Anthony West claimed his father, HG Wells, thought it to be something altogether more sinister - working class women were more likely to put up with George's weirdness, and by this, he implies sexual weirdness - his sadomasochistic tendencies. Maybe so. It might have been his syphilis that kept him from aspiring to women of his own class...
It wasn't that he didn't have options of middle-class-and-above women - the chance to practice a bit of hypergamy (the opposite of hypo). Miss Sichel was a candidate, and, on the surface, was very much what George claimed to find alluring. She was beautiful, intelligent, creative, well-connected to the literati, independently wealthy, interested in him, and available. But, there was a downside: apart from the fact Miss Sichel was Jewish (George was a tad anti-semitic), she towered above him both intellectually and educationally. Forgetting his anti-semitic tendency, was it just a matter of his feelings of inadequacy in the face of competition for top dog spot in a marriage union, that put him off her? Or did she reject his less than compelling personal qualities?
The third 'lady' with whom he had a 'thing', was Mrs Rosalind Williams, a sister of Beatrice Potter who went on to be Beatrice Webb. In some ways, she was the most likely of this trio of posh ladies to consummate a union. She is also the most tragic of the three women.
The Potter family to which Rosie belonged was wealthy and had already produced ten children by the time she arrived in July 1865. The first sadness in her life was that she was born just after her only brother Dicky died; the second was that she was born a girl when her mother really wanted a boy to replace the child she lost. Still, Rosie became her parents' favourite and spent her childhood sheltered away in the vast houses in which the Potters spent their time, never attending school for more than a few months (she couldn't stand the commonness of her peers), but received tutoring at home from a governesses, under the close supervision of her mother. The pressure proved too much and she began to manifest signs of neurosis. She was emotionally needy and highly-strung and developed a series of psychological problems such as anorexia and amenorrhoea, from which she never really recovered. She was particularly close to her father, and had to be physically exiled from him at one point in order to improve her wellbeing.
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| Boreas Abducting Orithyia by Peter Paul Rubens 1615 (she doesn't look too bothered here!) |
He insisted on my drinking some glasses of champagne which added to the one I had at breakfast had considerable effect on me. Over dinner he told me about his past life - the many affairs he had with women of all classes both married and single. His latest was the wife of a well-known Member of Parliament, a friend of the Courtneys in which he narrowly missed being co-respondent in a divorce case which would have caused a great scandal and perhaps prevented out marriage... Dyson then begged my forgiveness for his past life and promised always to be faithful to me, a promise he kept substantially during our short married life...
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| The Triumph of St Perpetua by Eric Gill 1928 |
She met her prospective next husband very soon after this, a doctor who liked her and her son, and he soon proposed marriage. But she found him repugnant physically and sexually, and so turned him down, even though her family were desperate for her to remarry - they were of the belief all Rosie needed was regular, therapeutic sexual intercourse and her mental problems would solve themselves. After a period of reflection, Rosie came to agree with them but said she also realised this could be accomplished without getting married. She then embarked on a two-year whirlwind grand tour of Europe and romance - with intimate liaisons with friends of the family, school headmasters, random tourists. In Capri, legend has it that she tipped the head waiter of her hotel to seat her next to handsome men at dinner, and there she met George Cumberland Dobbs. They became an item. Rosie knew he was smitten.
That afternoon in a fit of repentance and rather hysterical emotion I confided all to GCD and told him the story of the past three years of my life, and so forged a link between us that ultimately sealed our fate. He was evidently shocked by my story for though he himself was my lover he did not know that I had others, and though no puritan, he was a clean-minded young man and had strict Irish ideas about the purity of women.
George Dobbs had to return home to Ireland, and Rosie was alone and vulnerable to temptation. Enter George Gissing.
1898 - George was in Rome on the run from Edith and hobnobbing with his pals HG wells and co, and suffering from lumbago and diarrhoea. The next day (March 23rd) he met Rosie Williams; in the Diary:
Mrs Williams, widow with little boy, sister of Mrs Sidney Webb (Beatrice Potter). Unfavourable impression; loud; bullies waiters; forces herself into our conversations.
This didn't stop George going to the Barberini and Medici Gardens with her on March 26th. And on March 29th, to the Vatican Sculpture Galleries; on the 30th, to the Colosseum, and later that day, to a party with her at the Cafe Nazionale. March 31st was rain all day. On April 1st, Mrs Williams left for Venice - but she gets a mention in the Diaries! And she writes to him the moment she gets to Venice. Tellingly, there is no mention of his reply. That's a lot of one-on-one for a woman he didn't like.
April 22nd, back in London, he dines with Mrs Williams... at her rented home.
July 26th, Gabrielle Fleury visits George to discuss translating New Grub Street for him.
July 31st - Lunched and dined with Mrs Williams, at Holmwood, where she has a cottage for the summer.
August 14th Lunched at Mrs Williams' ...
November 3rd Mrs Williams came for the afternoon.
On November 17th, a letter from her tells George she has scarlet fever. He sends her a parcel of books on November 18th. This is the last time she gets a mention in the Diaries. George had been corresponding with Gabrielle Fleury and they are an item, so Mrs Williams is cast out.
In Barbara Caine's account of the Potter sisters, Destined to Be Wives: The Sisters of Beatrice Webb, she writes:
After Rosie met Dobbs, she had an affair with George Gissing, to whom she was also strongly attracted. Gissing and Dobbs represent the essential conflict which underlay Rosie's life at this stage and subsequently - and which she never managed to resolve. She always wanted to marry a man who would be comparable to her brothers-in-law, and who would 'have some real and permanent interest in life and be doing something in the world'. Moreover she sought a mentor and intellectual guide.
Barbara follows this with the words often quoted from Rosie herself:
Since my first great affection and intimacy with my father I have had a great longing to understand and enter into the mind of some man who was my intellectual superior and to make my mind as if it were a mirror of his. I have little or no independent intellectual life or originality of my own, and am, in fact, a sort of mental parasite and when I have no one to cling to my mind sinks into a sort of stupor.
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| The Fairytales of Kings by Mikalojus konstantinas Ciurlionis 1909 |
It seems our man had a lucky escape - because Rosie's mental decline was so severe over the forthcoming years, her sister Beatrice wrote this about her:
Another tragedy of a worse kind is the torture of George Dobbs. Mad or bad is his wife or both. She never had any good and now she is developing positive evil. Sounds like our Mr Gissing had a very lucky escape indeed!
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