Commonplace 104 George & Jack the Ripper. Read All About It!! PART TWO.

The Whitechapel Murders, attributed to a single killer referred to as Jack the Ripper, was active in late summer and the autumn of 1888. From August 31st - November 10th, to be precise. Somehow, George found his way into the long list of possible JTR suspects. Which is how we find him in Peter Ackroyd's Dan Leno and The Limehouse Golem' (see Commonplaces 94-96) How did he join this not very illustrious club? A visit to a message board from 2005 on Casebook: Jack The Ripper gives us some information.

This is where the rumour starts:

And this is why, from a post card posted in 1909:

The 17 Oakley Crescent house (now, number 33 Oakley Gardens) where George lodged from September 1882 - May 1884, it is claimed, was also a place where the Duke of Clarence, Prince Albert Victor, grandson of Victoria, once lived at the time of the Whitechapel murders. Somehow, George facilitated this set up.

The allegations about the involvement of the Duke of Clarence in the Whitechapel Murders goes back to the 1970s, when Stephen Knight wrote a book about the Jack the Ripper case being the work of Freemasons. The story goes something like this: the Duke of Clarence was in love with a working class girl, Annie Crook, and married her in secret. They had a child. In a time when the Royal Family was unpopular, the Establishment feared a revolution if this news got out. The Freemasons took on the job of saving the day. Jack the Ripper was a cover for getting rid of the women who knew about this marriage - all friends of the royal wife - and the poor Annie was taken away and dealt with by some sort of brain operation, and the child was smuggled abroad.

Prince Albert Victor - a bit of a lad and a total dimwit, but owner of a fine moustache.

How is the leap made to George? Someone working on a book about Jack the Ripper had suspicions that he was - even before this Oakley Crescent association saw the light of day. A link between George and the murders was made because of the subject matter of George's early novels, and the erroneous belief his first wife was a prostitute. The fact that he also had a criminal record he tried to keep secret gave impetus to his potential for blackmail-ability, and so a suspect was born.

This is from the website message board: 
Pat Pitman, who collaborated with Colin Wilson on an Encyclopaedia of Murder, has even mentioned the idea that Jack was George Gissing, the novelist—while even so benevolent a character as Dr. Barnardo has been named on the grounds that he was devoted to waifs and strays and that most of the unwanted children in his district were the offspring of prostitutes... Obviously Pitman must have had some publication containing the accusation of Gissing and perhaps Barnardo printed sometime between 1961, and 1970. Apart from Gissing, I myself must now admit, that like Gary Rowlands in his superb thesis of Barnardo entitled ‘The Mad Doctor’ printed in The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper (1999), believe and have done so since 1993, that Barnardo was the Ripper... 
Pat Pittman's belief that George Gissing was 'JTR' is stated as a positive fact by Colin Wilson. Wilson states that Pittman's belief regarding Gissing's guilt is based on "no discernible grounds". This statement appears in The Mammoth Book of 'JTR', p. 431.

This follows, regarding author Richard Whittington-Egan (crime author, writer on JTR):


So - assuming that any really old reference is so obscure that he cannot now recall it and no other authority has mentioned it, we have these possibilities of a link to Gissing:
a) the writer was aware of Pat Pittman's view in the 60s (though these apparently had no basis known to her co-author);
b) read R W-E's book at some time (so rare that even though I was deeply interested in JtR when it was published, I have never seen a copy then or since);
c) that it was picked up from McCormick's admittedly popular work at some time post 1970;
d) that it is even more recent, dating from since the Mammoth Book came out (1999).
A recent (last 25 or last 5 years) fraud seems likely to me.
BUT
These links are only to Gissing - they make NO links between Gissing and PAV (Prince Albert Victor)!!
So how was the link made between Gissing (or his residence) and PAV and on what basis?
Are we dealing with:
a) something genuine - a hitherto unknown, roughly period, link between Gissing and PAV known to the writer of the inscription on the face of the card. To me this seems unlikely given what we have deduced about the history and origins of the card, it's sender and recipient;
b)a very well-informed hoax or prank (I discussed the possibility of an in-joke in a previous post) by someone who knows Ripper arcana;
c) a coincidence - the hoaxer knew nothing about the house or Gissing, and simply chose a period p/c of a London house and wrote on it. This too seems unlikely - if that were the case why not chose a p/c of Buckingham Palace, Marlborough House, Sandringham or some such with a known link to PAV? There must be loads of those around. The coincidence seems to me too great to uphold - and thus logically we must assume that whoever wrote the words about the Ripper knew who's house the picture showed, knew Gissing had been suspected and then inferred... what?
The other thing I can't understand, if it is a late hoax based on Gissing having lived in that house, is quite how it happened. Did someone come on this card at random in a postcard album, read the street name and house number, do the same sort of research that's just been done, work out that Gissing had lived in the house briefly, and then hatch the idea of a Ripper hoax, based on some now-forgotten connection between Gissing and the Duke of Clarence? I find that a bit difficult to believe. Or did they work in the reverse order - think up the idea of a hoax, then go in search of a postcard showing a house where Gissing had lived, and miraculously come up with this one? I find that impossible to believe. 

Oakley Gardens today - the blue plaque just visible on the wall beyond the roof of the car.

Then, one of the Casebook posters adds some research done on the pension paid to the Gissing boys after George's death:

The Times 24 June 1904

A pension of £74 a year has been granted to Mr. Walter Gissing and Mr. Alfred Gissing during the minority of either and in recognition of the literary merits of their late father, Mr. George Gissing and of their straitened circumstances. 

The poster wonders why the pensions were paid, and in the realm of the conspiracy theorist, makes it look like these were paid for services rendered by serial killing cover up novelists. To misquote the Divine One, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh. 

It's clearly nonsense. Apart from the fact he was no killer, George was never anywhere near the East End of London at the time of the murders - he was either in Wakefield at home, or on his way to Paris with Mr Plitt. On October 2nd, whilst in Paris, he writes a Diary entry about the crimes, after reading a piece in a French publication:  
Apropos the Whitechapel murders, The Petit Journal says: 'When speaking of France the English affect such prudery that it would seem this country is cursed. But as we have demonstrated time and again, the English have no decency left; they are ignoble exploiters of human flesh. This is new evidence of it'. 
To which George comments: This is the kind of trash a paper of great circulation gives to ignorant reader.

What on earth would he have made of this scurrilous association made by the website?? Or, of anyone thinking he might have something to talk about with Prince Albert Victor, a man with no love of academic subjects, and with no love of Art. The Prince was popular with his wide group of friends and was a notorious party animal. He was thought of as a supporter of the Liberals. There were rumours he was bisexual (when the Cleveland Street scandal blew up, he was at the heart of the scrum click), and amongst his friends were a few Jack the Ripper suspects in their own right (J K Stephen and Walter Sickert, to name but two). 

He died in 1892 of pneumonia as a complication of influenza. He was just 28. George was living in darkest Devonshire, with his second wife and new baby boy. Never a Royalist, George makes no mention of the Prince's passing in his Diary.

Commonplace 103 George & Jack the Ripper. Read All About It!! PART ONE.

On the 31st August 1888, the body of a murdered woman was found in Whitechapel, one of the poorest areas of the East End of London. It kick-started a torrent of weirdness that has now become part of the fabric of British culture; it has established a world-wide preoccupation with homicide, and has spawned an entire branch of tourism for London. Paris may have its tours of the sewers click, but London has its Ripper Walks click.

Sites of the five canonical killings.

Murder of women by men was not an uncommon offence in the East End of that time, and often, the means of murder was stabbing and throttling, but the incidence was never as frequent as the Free Press of the time would allow. That a number of murders of women occurred in fairly quick succession within the district of Whitechapel, was cause for alarm. And, though all shared a common finding - that the deceased had been stabbed repeatedly - there was no consistent pattern or modus operandi. The women victims have been lumped together under the term ‘prostitute’, but there is no clear evidence they were all soliciting at the time they were attacked. However, the Press, eager to sell newspapers, invented a single perpetrator of these attacks and gave us the legend of Jack the Ripper, a name almost certainly invented by a journalist.

The context for these attacks is crucial in understanding how the disparate crimes were grouped together to be classified as the work of a single perpetrator. The capital city’s problem of cramming poor people into places where there was limited opportunity for employment, leaving them not much choice but to turn to crime, had been a national scandal for decades. The English northern cities had work opportunities for the poorest, in factories and mills, and in the manufacturing trades; London had no such infrastructure.

Reformers and social campaigners had been highly critical of the State’s lack of leadership on the matter of poverty in London, and the impact this had on the lives of women. In an age when women received a fraction of the wage of a man even when they did the same sort of work, was a national disgrace, and contributed to many women having to supplement their incomes with prostitution. Amongst the endeavours to address these iniquities was the campaign lead by Josephine Butler click to over throw the Contagious Diseases act of 1853, and the scandal attendant on WT Stead's, editorials in the Pall Mall Gazette, entitled 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon' of 1885 click.

Stead was a big fan of George's early works, mistaking him for a kindred spirit; Stead, a man much too straight-talking to appreciate George's 'irony' (which is how George described his writing to Gabrielle Fleury) thought our man cared about those poor folks in Whitecross Street. Anyhoo, in 1894, Stead wrote to George asking him, in his capacity as one of the foremost novelists of Great Britain (Stead played him like a violin haha), to sign a bid to support the proposal to have a monument to the International Peace cause. Of course, George, all modesty cast aside, signed it.

Stead had refused to report the grisly details of the five murders. In 1890, he resigned from the PMG and set up the Review of Reviews with Sir George Newness, whom he swiftly bought out to take sole charge of it. In 1893, Stead visited the World's Trade Fair in Chicago (a place George knew a little) to study the appalling spiritual and temporal conditions there. This was the same year that Chicago-based Herman Webster Mudgett, better known as HH Holmes took advantage of the Fair to murder his victims (a possible candidate to be Jack The Ripper, too click), and we can look forward to Martin Scorsese teaming up with Leonardo DiCaprio again to tell this bloody tale.

In that late summer and autumn of 1888, five 'canonical' victims were identified as being killed by a single assailant. A series of confessional letters from a wide variety of sources arrived at various newspaper desks, including the News Desk of the Central News Agency, some written by mischief makers, some done by attention-seeking blackguards, all of them contributing to boosting the circulation of newspapers. Letters written in fake blood, some claiming to have committed the crimes, were eventually trumped by the arrival of a portion of human kidney in a box, sent to the man organising the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. Many letters poked fun at the police for not being able to catch the murderer. This sort of malarkey was copied in the Yorkshire Ripper case of the 1980s and '90s, with tape recorded 'confessions' sent to taunt the policeman in charge of the investigation. These claimed to be by the murderer, but turned out to be written by a wannabe fantasist who subsequently had blood on his conscience as the police followed his Geordie accent to Newcastle, and ignored the Bradford-born real perpetrator, thus allowing him to carry on killing.

Mitre Square site of one victim's death.

Depressing as it is, there were some who suggested at the time that Jack the Ripper was a social reformer. We should take 'social reformer' to mean more than one who makes the lot of the disadvantaged better. The dreadful events of that time proved every worse thing the middle and above classes thought about poor people. It was as if all the talk about poverty, vice and destitution had burst at the seams, and spilled out into the public consciousness in one short season. It looked like they were right to blame the poor for their own predicament when they were all murderous drunken whores or predators. But, there was a backlash as readers of newspapers became bored of the Shock! Horror! accounts of grisly deaths. The vast majority of the population were sickened into apathy about the murders, and lost their salacious interest in crime and poverty and despaired of reforming the lower orders. Is this why George never again wrote about the poor after The Nether World - not because of the catharsis of Marianne aka Nell's death, but because the reading public had suffered a surfeit of reportage from the front line of deprivation? If he couldn't sell books about the poor, then George would have to make a detailed study of the next strata up - but that would mean fishing around for middle-class bods to observe.

To illustrate this point, here is the letter George Bernard Shaw wrote to The Star, on September 24th, 1888:

SIR,-- Will you allow me to make a comment on the success of the Whitechapel murderer in calling attention for a moment to the social question?  Less than a year ago the West-end press, headed by the St. James's Gazette, the Times, and the Saturday Review, were literally clamouring for the blood of the people--hounding on Sir Charles Warren to thrash and muzzle the scum who dared to complain that they were starving--heaping insult and reckless calumny on those who interceded for the victims--applauding to the skies the open class bias of those magistrates and judges who zealously did their very worst in the criminal proceedings which followed--behaving, in short as the proprietary class always does behave when the workers throw it into a frenzy of terror by venturing to show their teeth. Quite lost on these journals and their patrons were indignant remonstrances, argument, speeches, and sacrifices, appeals to history, philosophy, biology, economics, and statistics; references to the reports of inspectors, registrar generals, city missionaries, Parliamentary commissions, and newspapers; collections of evidence by the five senses at every turn; and house-to-house investigations into the condition of the unemployed, all unanswered and unanswerable, and all pointing the same way. The Saturday Review was still frankly for hanging the appellants; and the Times denounced them as "pests of society." This was still the tone of the class Press as lately as the strike of the Bryant and May girls. Now all is changed. Private enterprise has succeeded where Socialism failed. Whilst we conventional Social Democrats were wasting our time on education, agitation, and organisation, some independent genius has taken the matter in hand, and by simply murdering and disembowelling four women, converted the proprietary press to an inept sort of communism. The moral is a pretty one, and the Insurrectionists, the Dynamitards, the Invincibles, and the extreme left of the Anarchist party will not be slow to draw it. "Humanity, political science, economics, and religion," they will say, "are all rot; the one argument that touches your lady and gentleman is the knife." That is so pleasant for the party of Hope and Perseverance in their toughening struggle with the party of Desperation and Death!

However, these things have to be faced. If the line to be taken is that suggested by the converted West-end papers--if the people are still to yield up their wealth to the Clanricarde class, and get what they can back as charity through Lady Bountiful, then the policy for the people is plainly a policy of terror. Every gaol blown up, every window broken, every shop looted, every corpse found disembowelled, means another ten pound note for "ransom."  The riots of 1886 brought in £78,000 and a People's Palace; it remains to be seen how much these murders may prove worth to the East-end in panem et circenses. Indeed, if the habits of duchesses only admitted of their being decoyed into Whitechapel back-yards, a single experiment in slaughterhouse anatomy on an aristocratic victim might fetch in a round half million and save the necessity of sacrificing four women of the people. Such is the stark-naked reality of these abominable bastard Utopias of genteel charity, in which the poor are first to be robbed and then pauperised by way of compensation, in order that the rich man may combine the idle luxury of the protected thief with the unctuous self-satisfaction of the pious philanthropist.

The proper way to recover the rents of London for the people of London is not by charity, which is one of the worst curses of poverty, but by the municipal rate collector, who will no doubt make it sufficiently clear to the monopolists of ground value that he is not merely taking round the hat, and that the State is ready to enforce his demand, if need be. And the money thus obtained must be used by the municipality as the capital of productive industries for the better employment of the poor. I submit that this is at least a less disgusting and immoral method of relieving the East-end than the gust of bazaars and blood money which has suggested itself from the West-end point of view.--Yours, 

Shaw had in mind the demonstration attended by William Morris in 1885 (see Commonplace 99)
The Socialist Worker website archive on William Morris' political activism click, contains a mention of George:
On one occasion Morris was arrested and charged with hitting an officer. But the magistrate, confronted with a furious and unrepentant Morris, was forced to drop the charges. This episode scandalised Morris’s respectable contemporaries. The writer George Gissing moaned, “It is painful to me beyond expression. Why cannot he write poetry in the shade?”

We know George's sympathies were not on the side of Demos, unless they were meek and mild, uncomplaining and accepting of their lowly lot in life. In and amongst the claims the Ripper was a man from the mean streets of Whitechapel, there was the solid belief that he was really an outsider from the middle classes - hence the suggestion James Maybrick was a possible candidate. Likely candidates from the Queen's physician, to Freemasons' conspiracies and back to the Royals for the Duke of Clarence, Prince Albert Victor. So, when did our George become a suspect in these dreadful crimes?

JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 104 TO FIND OUT MORE.

Commonplace 102 George & Mrs Florence Maybrick

Mrs and Mr Maybrick

In the previous post, we looked at the entries on genetics and eugenics George wrote in his Commonplace Book. This book was a place he recorded things he had read, ideas he had been thinking about, and ideas for characters and stories. These often involve broad topics that were being considered in the wider world, which George might have accessed from reading the newspapers and periodicals he took regularly, and some were pithy words of wisdom gleaned from deeper reading from Classical sources. Occasionally, there are Alan Bennett-like recording of things he had overheard ordinary folk saying - these are usually backed up with George's scathing, sarcastic, observations.

One of the entries (page 24) in George's book is of interest because it is a carefully thought-out argument that might have stood as a draft for one of his longer essays. It concerns the conclusions he reached after thinking about the nature of capital punishment. This was sparked off by the trial and conviction of Mrs Florence Maybrick, a woman found guilty of poisoning her husband.

Florence Maybrick's husband, James, was a wealthy cotton merchant from Liverpool. In 1874 - before they met - Maybrick went to Norfolk, Virginia, to further his interests in cotton. In America, he contracted malaria, for which he was given quinine - but this proved ineffective and so he dosed himself with a mixture of strychnine and arsenic. Arsenic was used to cure many ailments, and it underwent something of a vogue as a tonic, but it is addictive, requiring ever stronger or more frequent (or both) doses. Its use as an aphrodisiac - or, more accurately, an early form of Viagra - added to its popularity with men. It was also used in the treatment of syphilis.

Paris Green also known as Arsenic Green
complete with appropriate health warning!

In 1880, Maybrick came back to Britain, and on the return voyage, he met his future wife, Florence, twenty four years his junior. She was the daughter of an American well-to-do family, and her widowed mother had remarried into minor European aristocracy. The Maybricks subsequently spent their time living in Britain and the US, but the cotton industry proved to be notoriously problematic and unpredictable, and James became concerned for his livelihood. This caused him to become increasingly irritable and unpleasant, with an addiction to self-medicating heavy metals to add to his woes. His relationship with his wife suffered, and he became physically abusive to her. And, yet, when he became ill in spring 1889, Florence decided to nurse him mostly by herself. This was to lead to her downfall.

James died in mid-May, and Florence was accused by the nurse in attendance and a servant of the house, of poisoning him. The evidence against her was entirely circumstantial. James was buried, but the rumours circulated against Florence by the nurse and maid gathered momentum, and she was confined to her home whilst a police investigation was carried out. At the end of May, police decided to exhume James' body, and toxicology tests were carried out suggesting he had died of arsenic poisoning. Florence was arrested and appeared in Court on June 30th. Despite no hard evidence, and because of testimony against her by a range of self-interested parties, she was found guilty and sentenced to hang.

Walton Gaol where Florence was held.

There followed a public outcry - the lack of evidence and the facts about the James Maybrick's self-medicating of dangerous medicines impressed those who thought Florence had been poorly represented in Court, and the Home Secretary had to intervene to examine the evidence. He reported back that it was clear Florence tried to murder her husband, but that there was no evidence the arsenic killed him. And, so, her sentence was commuted to a prison term, from which she was eventually released in 1911, after which she went back to America. where she died in 1941.

George writes in his Commonplace Book: The condemnation of a woman (Mrs Maybrick) to death, has made me think much of the death-penalty. I instinctively revolt against it, & here I will analyze (sic) my calmer thoughts on the subject.

He goes on to detail the vulgar belief is that hanging is approved by the masses because: morally, the Old Testament approves it; politically, because the state thinks of it as a deterrent. The former involves the possibility of perpetual damnation in Hell - which smacks, to George, of Revenge, which he considers to be barbarous. The latter view of capital punishment as utility - in the Jeremy Bentham sense - which suggests hanging is good for mankind (and womankind, here!) because of its deterrent effect on the incidence of murder. It inspires fear, but it does not produce deterrence, if history is to be believed. 

So far, so simple.

It gets more complicated, George thinks, when the matter is considered in the light of pure reason.
If I understand him right, then to promote its utility value, one has to 1) accept there is no higher point to existence than existence, itself; therefore, there is no God giving us guidelines to be followed (and, possibly, probably, no God at all); 2) that it cannot be proven to be a deterrent. If neither point is satisfied, then capital punishment can only be about Revenge, and is barbarous. He goes as far as to invoke Shelley who said a death penalty was likely to increase the incidence of murder as the State sets a very bad example by sanctioning judicial murder.

Grey Electric Chair by Andy Warhol 1964

So, do we have the right to kill our fellow humans (George asks). The answer will depend on the individual's way of regarding life in its relation to death. George then outlines 4 states:
1) It is wrong to cut short a life and disallow an individual the right to reform and be redeemed in their lifetime. 
2) We can't be sure there is an hereafter, but, if there is, it is wrong to influence a person's chance for a shot at heaven by removing an option for redemption. 
3) Uncertainty about the nature of the hereafter means death might be a reward for murder, not a punishment, or, what comes in the afterlife might be a fate worse than death and so an unfairly harsh punishment. 
4) By killing a murderer, you either help him (if he is a nihilist or suicidal) when he should be punished, or unfairly punish him if he has to give up his one and only shot at existence. In the former case, the proceeding is irrational; in the latter, the punishment is monstrous arbitrariness, unjustifiable to reason. It would be the same for the victim. 

In a time of limited forensic science, George did not have access to knowledge about the ways evidence can be twisted and corrupted to serve to act against an innocent party. Miscarriages of justice were not unknown, but the State was considered more or less above making mistakes, and summary execution did not offer enough time to question verdicts. (In the last blog post, we looked at the case of George Edalji whose case - not for murder - Arthur Conan Doyle took up. That took several years to overturn - and even then, it wasn't fully considered to be a case of wrongful prosecution).

The Third of May 1808 by Francisco Goya 1814

What are the modern arguments? The BBC has this click, about the ethics involved, and here is a summary:
1) Life is valuable. (Sadly, we are only talking human life here, not animals)
2) Everyone has a right to life, even ratbags.
3) Some innocent people get executed because of human error.
4) Retribution is wrong.
5) Revenge is what it is, and that is wrong
6) Murdering a murderer is the only time the punishment is the same as the crime - which is an anomaly.
7) Hanging's too good for some ratbags.
8) How the punishment is applied depends on where you live - which is unfair.
9) It is not a deterrent, and so is, by implication, revenge.
10) It is wrong for a State to kill its citizens
11) It makes people vengeful and cruel.
12) The State, the People and the Law are diminished by judicial murder.
13) It lowers the tone of societies - it is a primitive solution to a complex problem, and not one made out of reason.
14) Some people are mentally deranged when they kill, yet have to struggle to avoid execution.
15) It is applied unfairly - the different penalties of various US states, for example.
16) Cruel, humane and degrading means of execution, with no guarantee the methods are 100% effective instantaneously to reduce suffering.
17) There's no coming back when forensics prove you were innocent after all.
18) There is no such thing as 'free will' and so we are all victims of the crimes we commit, and we should not be killed because of our actions.
19) It is not cost effective.
20) Jurors in some places are selected because they are 'death eligible' - they would apply a death penalty if the accused is found guilty, and would not fail to convict for their own anti-capital punishment reasons. This unfairly loads the jury in favour of judicial murder.
21) A defence is really only as good as the lawyer. What if the defence lawyer is rubbish and fails to present the proper evidence??
22) If you kill the bad people you can't learn anything more about their motivations and rationales - which you might have been able to use to prevent further crimes.

Study For the Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots by Ford Maddox Brown 1841

George never wrote much about crime, possibly because he was reluctant to reflect on his own experience of prison, and so didn't want any adverse publicity from those who knew about his past life. He did make use of Algernon's basic knowledge, by presenting scenarios for him to supply the legalese and specific points of Law. However, there isn't much he couldn't have researched himself, so maybe he asked Algernon for help in order to allow his brother to feel he was earning the financial help he was getting. Algernon's failed legal career is often presented as a sign Alg was somehow inadequate. This is unfair. Law was (and still is) a case of 'who you know', and being lucky enough to be 'called to the Bar' click.

Apart from being a victim in a murder trial, James Maybrick is probably best known nowadays as a possible suspect in the 1888 Whitechapel Murders. A diary he is supposed to have written emerged via the press in 1992. In it, he details how he carries out the crimes and why he is committing them. Of course, it was soon debunked as a fake. An odd coincidence is that, the judge at Florence's trial was Mr Justice Fitzjames Stephen, father to J K Stephen, another one-time Jack the Ripper suspect. And, though it might come as a shock, for one brief moment, George was thought to be the serial killer - which is where Peter Ackroyd found his source for Dan Leno and The Limehouse Golem (see Commonplaces 94-96).

JOIN ME IN THE NEXT POST TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS AUTUMN OF TERROR - written on the one hundred and twenty-seventh anniversary of the first outrage!

Commonplace 101 George & Eugenics.

George took a great deal of interest in the new 'science' of sociology; much of the impetus for this came from his involvement with Frederic Harrison and the Positivists.

You can't have sociology without statistics, and you can't have statistics without visual aids, and so these twin disciplines became the arena for the development of a range of systems of presentation of information - Florence Nightingale and her Crimean War Coxcomb pie charts, and the Poverty Maps of James Booth come to mind.

One of Miss Nightingale's 'Coxcomb' Charts of 1858
Here, emphatically demonstrating that disease killed more soldiers than war wounds. 

With advances in science seeming to be heading towards a new Golden Age of Prosperity and Happiness For All (as long as we all knew our place and kept to it!), statisticians turned their maths brains to tackling the causes of inequality - though they skipped past the evils of Capitalism to arrive at the inadequacies of the individual as being responsible for his/her failure to thrive. One debate centred on identifying traits that explained why some people were what might be termed Winners and some, Losers. Class - to George - was a marker for worth: the higher your class, the more valuable you were to society, as long as you had the right sensibility. He placed Artists very high up in this taxonomy of aesthetics, with denizens of the Nether World of London at the bottom, below the quaint 'peasants' he met on his south European wanderings, and the noble savages who played barrel organs.

In order to establish a concept of Worthiness, you need its opposite, Unworthiness, to act as your baseline. George, himself, was in a tricky position: he was born quite low down the heap, but clawed his way up, but never really ever as far as he thought was his comfort zone. He based this on, amongst other things, his annual income. He was never one to count his less monetary blessings, being a bit of a serial whinger when it came to adversity. But, one of his rock-solid core beliefs was that he embodied some quality of 'aristocracy' deep within himself, and that he was, therefore, better than the sum of his beginnings, and so, life owed him something.

The Cholmondeley Women c 1600 Artist unknown. Spot the difference.

George's jottings in his Commonplace Book show he was deeply interested in the new science of heredity; he makes notes based on his reading of Theophule Ribot's work: 'L'hereditie psychologique' - available here translated into English click. There are brief notes on a variety of topics - one specific entry concerns 'Idiocy', a very specific archaic term for what we now refer to as learning disability. In fact, an 'idiot' was defined (in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act) as being intellectually superior to an 'imbecile', and could function with support and would have some independent life skills, if not totally able to self-support. The category 'feeble-minded' was a person who was incapable of independent living or training for any purpose. A 'moral imbecile' was usually a young person who had been accused of behaving in sexually uninhibited ways or had committed small crimes of, for example, theft. If George's mother had thought of it, George could have been labelled a 'moral imbecile' after his Owens escapades and first marriage, and then had him institutionalised for it.

George includes what we now know to be inaccurate claims about various bits and pieces of genetics, one of which might have given him significant pause for thought: An intelligent father who has worked too hard may have a son whose faculties seem worn out.  Did this prey on his mind? He wasn't what you might call a hard worker at your actual work, but he did make life difficult for himself most of the time, and did not have the inner resources to cope with most threats; he exemplified what my old mother used to refer to as 'his own worst enemy'. He believed he worked hard, because writing novels did not come easily to him. Did he ever think Walter, his first son, carried some kind of taint caused by his father's over-work? That might go some way to explaining why his bond with Walter was problematic - whereas his relationship with his second son was almost non-existent. 

Las Meninas by Francisco Goya 1656 

George has something to say about 'animal instinct', with regard to humans:
In the original man, animal instinct must have largely survived. Gradually, reason abolished it. Now-a-days, we still have instincts, for instance - that of decency, & we see how by intense reasoning about such instinct, it can be practically destroyed.  George selected his first wife, Marianne aka Nell because she was an undeveloped resource ripe for his social experiment of 'civilizing' her. That she resisted his influence is always held against her, but those who think so must be of the mindset that she was inferior in some way at the outset. Of the two, Marianne seems the more stable and authentic, and, dare I say it: heroic. How George, the congenital liar-cum-jailbird wife-beating future adulterer and child abandoner, self-pitying manipulator and misogynist snob could ever feel in a position to mould another human being into what he considered to be an 'acceptable' shape, is the triumph of blind ego over commonplace reality HAHA.

George doesn't define 'decency' - does he mean knowing the difference between right and wrong? If so, then he is thinking of the learned or innate behaviour question - what is termed 'nature versus nurture' - a phrase invented by one of the nineteenth century's great statistics boffins, Francis Galton, the 'father' of eugenics.

Galton (1822-1911) was a man who had many strings to his bow click. He invented weather maps, but is probably best known for his views on heredity and for coining the term 'eugenics' - and for giving us 'nature versus nurture' as an explanation for what might most influence human traits and characteristics. Are we born a certain way or do we learn it? Galton used a variety of statistic gathering instruments including the questionnaire and the survey, and the psychometric test (which he invented), in an attempt to find an accurate way to assess intelligence. Now, we realise intelligence is not a single state of being - there are many ways to be intelligent and it has very little to do with IQ. For proof of this, enjoy a visit here click to explore all kinds of stupid.

Of significance, perhaps, is that Galton had a mental breakdown when he was at university, so severe that he failed to finish his degree. Whether or not this affected his view of life is unclear. Did proving to be good enough obsess him? He viewed racial stereotyping as a science that could provide accurate indicators of intelligence, and, more alarmingly, of worth. For example, in 1873, he wrote to The Times to say he thought the Chinese were 'backward' because of bad leadership and that the whole race should translocate to Africa to displace the 'inferior' indigenous population. click to read a facsimile of this letter, and the spirited response from Mr Gilbert Malcolm Sproat who questioned Galton's views on African people as inferiors, because his own experience contradicted this.

The motto on the left is 'I only know what I know'.

In the spirit of Galton's work on intelligence, click think about the question it poses: 'Are Victorians more intelligent than us?' And fathom how they managed to verify the accuracy of the Victorians' test subjects. I am not convinced, anyway.

George's Commonplace Book entries about the comparative size of brains equating with higher or lower intelligence concerns the brains of French men - a subject I know nothing about. However, most of us women have found out in life, size isn't everything, and it's not what you've got, it's what you do with it that counts, whatever your nationality. But, George claims the brains of Parisians, when compared between the 12th century and the 19th, had grown by 35 cubic centimetres. That would be .075 of a pound (34 grams) in weight, according to my calculations. How this sort of daft statistic is arrived at is one of the obvious flaws built in to assessing things by so-called 'systems' of data measurement and then copying them into your Commonplace Book. Who weighed those 12th century brains, recorded their findings and under what conditions were the brains stored? What about environmental factors affecting nutrition and ageing, hydration and degeneration? George also claims (still from his reading on the subject) that modern educated Parisian brains can be enlarge by as much as 80 cubic centimetres by education and heredity (and he has not yet discovered the work done on adequate nutrition and physiology, or the place of vitamins in neurone development, or mentioned any other test nationality). However, in the next entry, George mentions that education is 'the merest varnish' and a born brute will always revert to type in the end (the voice of experience there?). So brain size can't be an indicator of what George understands as 'intelligence'. Perhaps George believed that nurture counted for very little, and that nature reigned supreme. We now know it is a range of environmental factors combined with inherent traits, with the term 'environmental' covering everything that isn't heritable. Environment would include the encouragement of our family, teachers and peers in our developmental years. And good mental health in childhood, sustained by the love of parents and carers.

To be fair, Galton's ideas, and the work George is quoting is stuff from the frontier of what was known as science at that time, though they seem laughable to us now. Take this one: A very rare case is that of 'heredity of influence'; where the child of a woman by a second husband resembles her first husband. Has been well documented in animals.  How this might happen even in animals is not outlined in the Commonplace Book, but it is dead wrong - as presumably everyone and my cat know - for how this definitely won't ever happen, click. And I don't even have a cat; it is an imaginary one, used for dramatic effect. An imaginary cat... that I keep in a box with a radioactive source click  

However, these bonkers ideas serve to underline the superficial nature of much of George's self-directed study, and how certain key notions he holds can be completely wrong, wonky science. Take this one:
Seeing that the man of highest refinement has so many points of contact with the savage, & even with the animal, how can we expect even average civilization of those beneath the average in brain and culture?  Now, where he's gone wrong here, is ... well, you figure it out! Have a look at this to get the brain thing into shape click.

Lastly, George's daftest entry, totally unsullied by any insight into the workings of his own mind:
One cause of national degradation, now-a-days, is the success of medicine in keeping alive the unfit. The man with the chronic hypochondriasis, who would neck any remedy going, and who spent a good deal of time consulting doctors, and who was a martyr to the man flu could think this? Give me strength!

click for more. I would add the concept of the 'soul' to this parade of tosh.

Commonplace 100 (Woo Hoo!! Party Party!) George & Arthur. And God.

Gissing fans celebrate the 100th Commonplace blog with their interpretation of
The Nether World via the medium of The Frug click.   

In time-honoured tradition, when the party gets mellow, musings on the meaning of life rear their heads. Is all blind chance? Is all the clash of unconscious forces? Or, are we sentient toys of an almighty power that sports with our agony? - as asked by Annie Besant click. Is the meaning of life more than 42, or was Douglas Adams right? click

There is soon to be a television film version of Julian Barnes' 2005 book 'Arthur and George'. This is an account of a notorious miscarriage of justice that so appalled Arthur Conan Doyle, that he summoned all the Holmesian detective skills he had built up writing about imaginary crime to the task of exonerating Mr George Edalji, a vicar's son who was sent to prison for crimes he did not commit. Mr Edalji was a Christian, a son of a minister, but his father had been born a Parsee; George Edalji had an Indian father and a Scots mother - and Arthur's 'Mam' was Scots, too. Doyle was of the opinion the case was riddled with the taint of racism, though Mr Edalji was reluctant to accept that might be the case, and worked enthusiastically to right the great wrong. Doyle's forceful campaigning lead to the formation of the UK Courts of Criminal Appeal. For more on this click.

The Great Wyrley Outrages and the fate of George Edalji was only one of Arthur Conan Doyle's 'causes' - he tended to immerse himself completely in most of his interests, sometimes controversially - for example, the infamous 'Cottingley Fairies' episode, and his involvement in Spiritualism might be seen as signs of enthusiasm getting the better of reason/intellect. However, Doyle was living at a time when new ideas of what is termed 'being and reality' were being discussed and explored; delving into what might constitute the hereafter was a logical extension of what was being revealed about consciousness and the inner workings of the mind, as explained by Sigmund Freud et al. Doyle was one of the first true followers of Spiritualism; he promised to appear before a crowd after his own passing, and this event is mentioned in Julian Barnes' novel. Not many experienced Doyle's spirit if it it did return - maybe he is still around, biding his time before making a spectacular comeback. I wonder if he met up with our George in the Otherworld?

Elsie Wright's Evidence of the Cottingley Fairies? 
click

Our George rarely took up 'causes', not because he was mean-hearted (he might have been a misguided misanthrope, but he wasn't totally mean-hearted), but because he preferred to stay on the periphery looking in on events; he could never really summon up what it took to be an activist. For that, he would have needed to be more of an optimist, and less of a Pessimist.

Though George knew Arthur Conan Doyle via the Omar Kayaam dinners they would not have had much in common - apart from very fine moustaches, George wasn't very keen on successful writers. George didn't need an Arthur in his life - he had already given his heart to one: Herr Schopenhauer.

Amen to that!

In Commonplace 4, there is ample evidence for how much Schopenhauer's own unpleasant take on 'Woman' wormed its way into George's thinking. Pessimism - you can tell from the nomenclature that it isn't going to be an easy ride. In 1880, George wrote to his brother William, urging him towards Schopenhauer, but William wasn't a masochist, and so he no doubt passed on that heads up. But, there is more to the unlucky in love Arthur Schopenhauer from Danzig than his woman-hating ways. His legacy is more than persecuting his neighbour (a woman) and believing women were primitives with no real worth unless one was bestowed on her by a man: Freud, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche were influenced by Schopenhauer, and many Artists and writers have wrangled with his ideas on Art being the great compensator. Schopenhauer's philosophy is more about Buddhism than Christianity, even going as far as to suggest there might be a state akin to Nirvana.

Kamakura Buddha Japan c 13th Century  

Possibly Schopenhauer's most acclaimed work is 'The World As Will and Representation', published in 1818. Perhaps our man read it in the original German - though he never could get his head round the German Fraktur typeface click possibly because he was short-sighted and needed spectacles, and Fraktur is a myopic's nightmare. However, a three-volume edition in English translated by Haldane and Kemp entitled 'The World as Will and Idea', appeared in 1883. What is it all about? Something to do with the self and subjective vs. objective reality and the tussle between the will and our perceptions of the world. Have a look at this click for an easy to understand introduction to it from the renowned theologian Don Cupitt. Made in 1984, a reminder of how far we have fallen in the television calibre department. For all the Sea of Faith series click. Part 5 contains the Schopenhauer film. Nietzsche appears in Part 6. And to find out about Don Cupitt's very working class Oldham, Lancashire roots click. 

The Dude abides...

In his Commonplace Book, George startlingly George reveals that, if pressed he would describe his religion as Manichaeism. Why is this such a shock? Well, it is one of the Gnostic religions, whose basic tents include, according to Tobias Churton, an expert on all such things click philanthropy to the point of personal poverty, sexual abstinence (as far as possible for hearers (disciples/followers), entirely for initiates) and diligently searching for wisdom by helping others. We all know George is not famed for these personal qualities. 

And, yet, in other ways, it makes perfect sense for George to claim to be a Manichaen - this ancient Middle-Eastern faith has the added allure of being the sort of religion a somewhat pretentious academic would follow. It was once a main competitor to early Christianity in its zeal to rid the world of paganism, flirts with some of the Eastern philosophy so beloved of Schopenhauer, by way of Plato, and requires hours of solitary reading research to reanimate the lost texts. Basic concepts: Existence is the perpetual struggle between Light (spiritual things) and Dark (base, physical stuff). Good vs Evil is the basis of most religions, but Sigmund Freud, himself much influenced by Schopenhauer, would be right at home. The religion was started by Mani a third century AD Persian, and seems to have pulled together bits of Christianity, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Babylonian folklore click - something there for Friedrich Nietzsche. 

In Manichaeism, the woes of the world started after a mighty kerfuffle kicked off when the Prince of Darkness invaded the Realm of Light - shades of the Asgardians vs the Frost Giants here, in the canon of Stan Lee's reworking of the Norse Legends. For a comprehensive, and highly fascinating, account of Manichaeism, I urge you to click. This is a strange place for an Atheist to send you, but I am a complex creature (though not a gullible one haha). 

So, was our George ever a Manichaean? Well, if you have to practice a faith to own it, then the answer would be a resounding No. George was not the sort to follow any other man's calling - he might have started his own religion (and who says he didn't haha) if he'd had enough interest in the Soul of Woman/Man - but he didn't care much about saving anyone. The dualism of Good vs Evil was a popular theme of late Victorian discourse, exemplified by Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde - animal versus spiritual, rich versus poor, industrial versus bucolic, old versus new, Britain versus the Rest of The World, Capitalism versus Socialism, faith versus proof - and, in the case of Arthur Conan Doyle, alive versus dead. 

To many Atheists, one of the central flaws of all faiths is the 'In Crowd' scenario - 'if you are not with us, you are against us'. In George's time, a more sinister concept - one that exemplifies Dark versus Light - was beginning to muster on the battlefield of morality (one trait shared by the religious and the non-believers is morality). This was the 'worth versus non-worth' debate. The spectre of eugenics was stalking the mental landscape. 

JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 101 TO EXPLORE WHAT GEORGE THOUGHT ABOUT THIS.

Commonplace 99 George & His Contemporaries: William Morris.

If ever there was an 'heroic' Brit, William Morris stands head and shoulders above flimsy pretenders to that crown. Forget the affected and elitist twaddle his name now represents (wallpaper £45-60 a roll!!) - William Morris is the man who said: "The most grinding poverty is a trifling evil compared with the inequality of classes." 
Now, what would George have made of that??!!

In February 1883, George wrote to Algernon recommending Morris' Earthly Paradise, an epic poem that was widely popular and that time, though not as celebrated now as perhaps it should be. He said: This is poetry you will really like; all old stories told in Chaucerian style, and abounding in the quaintest anachronisms. The mix of Greek and Scandinavian legends it detailed appealed to the both of them, as Algernon had a romantic streak, and a love of all things English historical. click to see if you like it. Oddly, he wrote to Algernon again, in May 1884 asking him if he had heard of the work, so maybe Algernon did not follow up that lead. 

In June, 1884, George wrote this to Algernon: I grieve to see Morris in the companionship of Secular Review, & men like Ingersoll & the rest. It is deplorable. I confess I get more & more aristocratic in my leanings, & cannot excuse faults of manner in consideration of the end. More evidence for delusions of grandeur from the Wakefield shopkeeper's son?? 

In September, 1884, George went to the Gaussen familys' country house for a day which turned into an overnight visit. It blew his social climbing mind. He gives an excruciatingly lickspittle account of this, but there are two memorable highlights. George and some Gaussens took a walk over to Kelmscott, William Morris' house: This was sacred ground for me. The family were at home or we could have gone over the house (much as Lizzie Bennett and her family looked round Mr Darcy's mansion, Pemberley, and then found Colin Firth coming out of a duck pond looking both wet and hot simultaneously - the mark of a truly great actor haha!). However, back home at the Gaussen house, there was an astonishing piece of news - Mrs William Morris was in the Gaussen's drawing-room. George readied himself, and when he entered the room... discovered it was a Miss Gaussen dressed in aesthetical costume - her hair, black and glossy, George thought was astonishing. Then we went in to dinner, where I delivered an extempore lecture on aesthetic attire, to the general entertainment. I wonder what Algernon made of all this? And George was never the acme of sartorial fashion himself, so where he got this knowledge from is a mystery.

Kelmscott Manor click

In September 1885, he writes this to Algernon:
Do you see the report of the row the Socialists have had with the police in the East End? Think of William Morris being hauled into the box for assaulting a policeman! (Think of George Gissing being hauled into the box for stealing from his friends at Owens College!) And the magistrate said to him: 'What are you?' - Great heavens! Morris answered: 'I am an artist & man of letters, I believe tolerably (sic) well known throughout Europe.' Of course, he should not have said that, but it was enough to drive him to it. But. alas, what the devil is such a man doing in that gallery? It is painful to me beyond expression. Why cannot he write poetry in the shade? He will inevitably coarsen himself in the company of ruffians. Is it necessary to point out George's hypocrisy here? He is writing to his brother, a man fully-conversant with George's jailbird past, but he seems to be oblivious to his own lack of insight into his psyche. 

The day after the trial, which had discharged Morris but convicted his less influential and less wealthy, middle-class confrères, The Daily News of September 22nd, 1885 published a letter from Morris, who alleged the police were brutal with the demonstrating Socialists - which is why he had been arrested for retaliating and defending protesters by twatting one of the offending officers (in the parlance of our times!). The Pall Mall Gazette of September 21st also contained an account and comment on the right to free speech so brutally denied the demonstrating Socialists.

On his twenty-eighth birthday, George was about to delve more deeply into the Morris style of Socialism click in the name of research - he was up to his nethers in writing Demos at the time. He was off to a lecture at William Morris' home, to his shed-cum-lecture theatre. George did not get to see the great man in person, despite wanting to. He wrote to his little sister, Ellen (aged about 18), re Morris: His taking on Socialism is extraordinary, seeing that the man's life has hitherto been devoted to Art, & his poetry is of the same school as Rossetti. He makes no mention of which Rossetti he means - Mr or Ms - or why Morris' Socialist leanings are 'extraordinary'. And, to say Morris's life had been devoted to Art is like saying Stephen Hawking's life has been dedicated to IT. But, it shows how out of touch George was with radical thinking - Morris had been renowned for his interest in proto-type socialist movements (for example, the Democratic Federation started in 1881) for more than a decade before he formed the Socialist League in 1884. Is it any wonder George needed a crash course in politics in order to write the novel he was working on - which has nothing to do with anything like the Socialist movements of the time, and makes use of politics as simply a plot device, put in place to highlight the author's own negative, prejudiced views on the differences between social classes. 

Jane Burden aka Mrs William Morris 

George went again to Kelmscott for a meeting of the Socialist League, where he got to see Morris's daughter. He writes to Algernon: There was Miss Morris - the secretary of the Branch - talking familiarly with the working men. She is astonishingly handsome; pure Greek profile, with hair short on her neck; wore a long dark fur-trimmed cloak, & Tam O'Shanter cap of velvet. Unmistakenly like her mother,  - the origin of Rossetti's best type... What George might not have known, was that the mother - Mrs Jane Morris - was the daughter of a stableman and a laundress, and had been raised in very humble circumstances, unlike her husband, who was a bona fide middle-class toff. Or, if George did know about Jane's origins, did he wonder at how Morris had been so fortunate? 

George goes on:
I am very busy with Socialism at present, as 'Demos' is much concerned with it. There is a Socialist candidate standing for Hampstead (some things never change haha! The former actress (now returned to her first calling - hooray!) Glenda Jackson was Labour MP for the safe seat of Hampstead and Highgate from 1992-2015). I heard him ranting in the street on Sunday morning; - the roughest type of working man, & - ye Gods! - breathing maledictions. He described the H. of Commons as a 'decrippled institootion!' 

Glenda Jackson, Socialist.

Makes you cringe, doesn't it, when George sneers so exuberantly. Without the likes of John E Williams to kick-start the shift to a fairer system of representation, Keir Hardie would never have emerged to lead a united band of Socialists and form The Labour Party click.
To read the manifesto William Morris' constructed for the the Socialist League click. And, click for more.

There are many excellent William Morris quotes; here are a few that would not have passed muster with our man:

I DO NOT WANT ART FOR A FEW, ANY MORE THAN EDUCATION FOR A FEW, OR FREEDOM FOR A FEW. George would never have signed up for this sort of thing. He believed Art was for an elite; that 'good' culture could only be understood and appreciated by a gifted and talented special group; and that social class was a sort of natural selection separating the wheat from the chaff of life. The irony here is that George, himself, was from the lower middle classes, and any social advantage he had in life was despite his origins and not because of them. Even his place in the school that made him, Alderley Edge, was won by the financial support of others: A fund was raised by public subscription is how it is described in Volume 1 of the Pierre Coustillas biography. The natural selection part holds true though - George, having a particularly useful skill-set that he managed to exploit at Owens College; in an age of high crime, the boy with a distinct lack of moral compass clambered over the more honest fellow-students of his set, to rise triumphant in Belle Vue Gaol. That selfish and conniving, lying and self-serving tendency saved him on more than one occasion throughout his life, so maybe he is one of Darwin's exemplars. But, if George had not been taken up as a good cause, and if that public fund had not been raised (for all three Gissing boys - and later, another one started for the education of George's two sons), and if he had been left by the wayside of life unable to flourish, then by natural selection, he would have ended his days scratting round Wakefield looking for a proper job.

WHATEVER YOU HAVE IN YOUR ROOMS THINK FIRST OF THE WALLS; FOR THEY ARE THAT WHICH MAKES YOUR HOUSE AND HOME. George liked to fill his wall spaces with bookcases full of smelly, ancient books. Morley Roberts didn't think much of his friend's taste in décor and complained at how depressing George's rooms were. Notoriously, the letting agents of Cornwall Residences complained to their tenant that his windows were a filthy disgrace and ordered him to clean them - so one can imagine the build-up of nicotine and the dirt George found acceptable. As George was a great believer in domestic chores being a woman's duty, we can assume he was not one to pick up after himself. 

William Morris Peacock wallpaper - imagine pasting and aligning the repeat pattern!

I CANNOT SUPPOSE THERE IS ANYBODY HERE WHO WOULD THINK IT EITHER A GOOD LIFE, OR AN AMUSING ONE, TO SIT WITH ONE’S HANDS BEFORE ONE DOING NOTHING – TO LIVE LIKE A GENTLEMAN, AS FOOLS CALL IT. George's ideal was to be thought of as a successful middle-class patriarch with no financial constraints. He seems to have resented every moment of time he wasn't engaged in self-directed work - which he sought to justify as all part of his creative process. But, was the choice of writing as an occupation just a smokescreen to get him time alone, away from the world he knew he found too complex and beyond his control? He chose what he thought would be a doddle of a job, which would pay well - then came a cropper when he failed to deliver what people wanted to publish/read. He failed to make his work commercial enough for great success, or to write pieces that would make him money. This kind of perversity smacks of masochism, but also ensured his home-life remained pinched - which would have increased the unhappiness of his two wives. This situation of misery he then exploited to excuse his character flaws to his associates and allow him two scapegoats to blame for his failings.

IF A CHAP CAN'T COMPOSE AN EPIC POEM WHILE HE'S WEAVING TAPESTRY, HE HAD BETTER SHUT UP, HE'LL NEVER DO ANY GOOD AT ALL.

Wise words from Mr Morris!