George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

Commonplace 95 George & Dan Leno & The Limehouse Golem PART TWO The Tale of Elizabeth Cree.

Dan Leno on the left

Apart from drawing on a rich seam of horror in Victorian (and earlier) fiction, Peter Ackroyd makes use of various real-life characters to populate his story. Karl Marx, an intended victim who escapes this fate by accident, is a reader in the British Library Reading Room (see Commonplace 93) sitting in close proximity to the novel's male murderer, John Cree, and our man, George Gissing - George is reading an article he has written for the fictitious Pall Mall Review when he is introduced to us. References to Charles Dickens, Thomas De Quincey, the Ratcliffe Murders, Grimaldi, the birth of Charlie Chaplin (who may have actually been born in the Midlands click) abound. Product placement of patent medicines give the narrative an authentic feel - as do the little psychogeography tours around the mean streets of Limehouse, Low Marsh and Lambeth made by the killer, and the tours of the music halls made by the performers.

It starts with the execution of Elizabeth Cree, former music hall star and friend of Dan Leno, for the murder of her husband whom she believes to have been a serial killer. As Elizabeth is a hard-hearted, scheming and seemingly homicidal character herself, her influence adds a macabre feel to the general atmosphere of evil stalking the London streets. She marries a man who works as a journalist then writes a diary full of horrible things he does to his victims, so we know he is bad and we are saved the bother of having to work that out. But Elizabeth has relished the death of her much-hated mother and even hastened it, so we know she has the potential to be a nasty piece of work, too.

The Playhouse in Craven Street where Elizabeth Cree makes her debut.

There are similarities to this tale and the case of Florence Maybrick as told in the fictional 'Diary of Jack the Ripper' published in 1992. The real Florence was convicted of murdering her husband in 1889 (the year after the Whitechapel Murders) though she always denied killing him.
The fake 'Diary' suggests her husband, James Maybrick, as Jack the Ripper, was poisoned by his wife after he begged her to put him out of his misery - and left her the Diary to read. In real life, Florence Maybrick was convicted of poisoning her husband, James, because she was suspected of wanting to be with another man. James was cruel to her, kept mistresses and was addicted to drugs to the extent that he could not function and their livelihood was jeopardised. One of his favourite drugs was arsenic. Arsenic was the basis of patent medicines, cosmetics and could be bought as rat poison. Its beauty as a murder weapon is that it is odourless and tasteless, and so can be easily ingested by a potential victim without them suspecting. The smart way to do it is to give small doses to begin with, then increase the dosage until the full effect is achieved.

As James Maybrick regularly took all manner of poisons for their therapeutic effects, it would seem a logical way to murder him. As well as regular doses of arsenic, he took strychnine; it was easily obtained in chemist's shops, and cheap - nowadays, arsenic and strychnine are hard to come by, though derivatives are available. For example, the homoeopathic remedy nux vomica contains strychnine and has to be taken with caution. But we have a much better potentially fatal poison at our fingertips - well, those of you who smoke, do! Nicotine is more toxic than arsenic and a lethal dose can be extracted from a packet of 20 cigarettes and injected into a potential victim. Only an autopsy will undo you! Disclaimer - I am not suggesting you do it; it's just information.

Here is a bit of Difference Engine.

In 'Dan Leno', the destructive impulse of the Golem swirls around Limehouse unseen but felt by all involved in the vortex of metropolitan life. The Reading Room at the British Library is where George is to be found preparing an article on Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, by way of Jeremy Bentham's 'Felicific Calculus'. What the heck are these?

The information the fictional George might have unearthed might include... hang on, you can read all about him here click on wikipedia - what more fitting an homage to the programmable computer inventor can there be?

In the story, George is writing a follow-up to his previous offering 'Romanticism and Crime', which highlighted his thoughts on the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 click. This was a series of very brutal murders written of with relish by Thomas De Quincey in his 'On Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts', a series of three essays about the crimes, the first published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1827. De Quincey was one of George's favourite reads - click to read it.

Jeremy Bentham, the father of Utilitarianism, devised the algorithm 'Felicitous Calculus' to estimate the amount of pleasure/good to be found in any particular experience. There is a lot of sense in what this is about, so click to find out more. Now, like I say, I'm no techie... and neither was George. He suspected science of being a portal to Hell requiring maths skills - and he wasn't much interested in maths. But he was interested in Comte and the new science of sociology and that requires a lot of statistics, and so he would have found a computer a vital tool in his studies.

Jeremy Bentham at UCL
click 

According to the narrator of 'Dan Leno', in the Reading Room, overlooked by the serial killer, George transcribed this into his notebook: The quest for machine intelligence must arouse fresh speculation in even the most orthodox mind; think of all the calculations which might be performed in the field of statistical enquiry, where we might find ourselves able to make many very intricate deductions. How George came to be writing an account of it is something even Peter Ackroyd can't explain because anyone even remotely acquainted with George's interests would not send him off on a quest to research the 'Babbage Analytical Engine' - and he was famously snooty about journalism and being commissioned to do articles. Still, it is a novel and it all makes for a denser narrative. There is mention of Workers in The Dawn - the famous 'Walk with me, reader, into Whitecross Street' opening line - the best of George's barnstorming openers; Karl Marx owns a copy (in the novel!) and the serial killer notes it.

One real person mentioned in the novel is the fascinating Thomas Griffiths Wainewright who was an artist and critic (champion and defender of William Blake), a poet, a raconteur, as well as a forger who died in Tasmania, Australia after being transported for forgery. Apart from being a dandy and a bit of a genius, he was the subject of a January 1889 piece 'Pen, Pencil and Poison: A Study in Green' in the Fortnightly Review by the divine Oscar Wilde click to read it. Wainewright was a lad after George's heart who valued the Greeks highly, and who loved Italy, and he, too, was someone who turned to crime without properly thinking things through. He was a poet, critic, style guru, Artist, and possible homicidal poisoner. He was definitely a forger who was transported to Australia for his crimes, though he claimed to be totally innocent as the money he embezzled was his own. His adopted several nom de plumes, including Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot and Cornelius van Vinkbooms to write some very scathing criticism of Art and aesthetics. I don't know about you, but I love him for this, if for nothing else! He was a friend to the great persons of his day, including Sheridan and Lamb, and knew William Blake, personally, and admired his work; his best friend was Fuseli.

Silence by John Henry Fuseli  1799-1801

A Wainewright watercolour
(one of the less graphic of his Romantic views)  

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright would make a very good subject for one of Peter Ackroyd's semi-fictional biographies. However, there has already been a very good one done by Andrew Motion whose book on Wainewright came out in 2000 click. It's a 'faction' style biography giving words for TGW to speak - very much as Ackroyd did with 'The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde'. I would recommend you rush out and find a copy and set about reading it straight away - it's fab, and makes you realise how good of a novelist a former Poet Laureate can be. Go on, off you trot to the bookstore; it really is excellent!

George, himself already the subject of fictional biographies haha - and half made-up autobiographies! - has probably missed the Ackroyd/Motion boat.

JOIN ME IN PART THREE TO EXPLORE MORE OF THIS FASCINATING WORK.