George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

Commonplace 96 George & Dan Leno & The Limehouse Golem PART THREE. With illustrations from William Blake.

William Blake's LONDON -
an influence on the novel

Dan Leno And The Limehouse Golem by Peter Ackroyd is being made into a movie. It is a compelling tale of murder and mayhem in the foggy London areas George once knew so well. It has touches of the sort of shock! horror! story so popular in the Victorian age - probably being more of an homage to Thomas De Quincey and his highly entertaining tales of cut throats and stabbings. The Ratcliffe Murders formed three essays De Quincey wrote about the crimes collectively now known as 'On Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts', but it is his novella 'The Avenger' that is probably more like 'Dan Leno'. This is a stirring mystery tale of bloody revenge and scores settled following antisemitic persecution, with a tall, dark, handsome young man the least likely crime suspect in a tale of slashings and crucifixions... The antisemitic element is touched on in 'Dan Leno', much as it was when the crimes of Jack the Ripper infected the streets of Whitechapel in 1888.

In fact, the Whitechapel Murders form a sort of watershed in British cultural life especially in terms of what we now think of as 'The Press'. The sort of reporting we now regard as 'tabloid journalism' had its beginnings in the late Victorian age. For an interesting overview of this, click to see Professor Christopher Frayling's documentary on this very subject. Despite the amount of stuff written by authors since 1888, very few have accepted that the 'Jack the Ripper' persona is a myth - a brand; a means of selling newspapers. It wouldn't take a modern-day Sherlock Holmes (just someone with access to youtube haha) to work out that the 'signature' so typical of serial killers is absent in the five canonical 'Ripper' murders. For an exhaustive overview of Jack the Ripper, go here click and immerse yourself in the gore.

The Number Of The Beast Is 666 

We must remember, Dan Leno & The Limehouse Golem is a novel, and not one of Peter Ackroyd's 'historic' biographies. Like his earlier 'Last Testament of Oscar Wilde', he has taken characters and invented situations in which they can operate to illustrate historic events, and give an authentic-sounding voice to what they might have said. Peter Ackroyd's 'historic' biographies tend to involve his 'heroes'. William Blake is his number one hero - Oscar Wilde, is high up the list, too. As both of these are my top 'heroes', anything Peter Ackroyd writes interests me. Blake is a genius so celestial that it is impossible to do him justice with mere words. Lambeth's No. 13 Hercules Buildings (no longer there) is where William and Catherine Blake lived and where he produced many of his greatest works, including 'The Songs Of Innocence And Experience'.

The Great Red Dragon And The Woman Clothed With The Sun

Who doesn't love a Victorian Murder Mystery? Jack the Ripper is so much a part of the fear we have of urban landscapes at night - just as the Ratcliffe Murders were in De Quincey's days. Much as the 1888 press whipped up fear and mass hysteria in the name of selling copies, and thousands of newspapers carried the gruesome details of each murder within hours of their commission, Peter Ackroyd's choice of the new-fangled technology of the Babbage Engine reflects the fear aroused when the World Wide Web was a baby, and no-one knew what it might grow into. No-one knew then what impact such accessible tools might have on the 'dark side' of the human mind; what with its file-sharing systems and facility for downloadable content, the speed at which it operated and the total meltdown we experience when our computer technology fails... Now we know how the web can be harnessed for bad things - an invisible Golem we all fear when terrorism and sexual exploitation makes use of it. But it can also bring us this click.

It's difficult to know why George is included in the cast list of Dan Leno and The Limehouse Golem - apart from the fact he was alive at the time the story is set (1880), and made use of the British Library Reading Room. I suspect it is because Peter Ackroyd likes George but accepts the market is fairly well off for George Gissing biographies; by adding him to Dan Leno, he offers a kind of homage. In fact, using the notion of George researching the Babbage Engine is really a delivery system to work the invisible reason and mechanical sentience of the Machine into the story - and hint at the innate creepy quality Stephen Hawking recently highlighted about Artificial Intelligence click being a threat to humans' World Dominance click

William Blake's Dante's Hell X Farinata -
looking very much like London

Of course, it makes me cross to see that George's first wife, Marianne aka Nell is of course portrayed as a prostitute. I shall never tire of challenging this falsehood - there is no evidence she ever worked as a prostitute. I suppose anyone who researches George Gissing will read this sort of claptrap and assume it is correct - I once believed it, too. But I took the trouble to look for the origins of the claim and still can't find them. So, don't take anyone's word that she was. Go and look for the origins of the claim yourself and see what isn't there!

Ackroyd presents Marianne/Nell as a comic book harridan and common slut - which maybe says more about Peter Ackroyd than it ever could about Nell. He also has it that the Dan Leno George Gissing blames Marianne/Nell for his struggle in life. Well, let's hope this is artistic license, too, because it is utter tosh. I don't think George blamed her, because he was too egotistical to admit anyone - especially a working class uneducated girl - had any influence over him. He was 'all his own work'. The fact that he ditched her at the first sign she was more trouble than he thought she was worth, before he had any acclaim and before he had hardened into the George Gissing who went looking for a second wife to persecute, shows the true extent of her influence as nil. George's version of his life as being a poverty-stricken nightmare was debunked in the early twentieth century by his pupils and associates, and his failure to achieve more acclaim for his writing is down to his lack of flexibility, his pride, and the luck of the market. He made very bad choices and lived by ridiculous, illogical rules and these all failed to make him an Artist or a more popular writer. No-one made him a thief; or a monster of cruelty to two wives and two children. There are some of George's supporters who blame Marianne and Edith for everything bad in Gissing's life, which really detracts from the amount of effort George put in to secure his own miserable existence. Perhaps the movie will reflect some of his complex and flawed character and not present him as a hard-done-by, hopeless dingbat.

The Red Dragon And The Beast From The Sea ?1805

Films made from novels tend to open up a new audience for the books - so maybe we will see a huge rise in George's star. His writing is not the greatest - he lacks spontaneity and empathy even with characters he has invented - even when he is privy to their inner workings, he doesn't seem to know his characters very well. There is a tendency for him to preach - his own misanthropic, misogynistic stuff gets snuck into his novels (and more obviously there in his weirdly unsettling short stories) because George really did lack the machismo to state his point of view assertively. In Dan Leno, we have this: He had always believed that his purpose was to endure life with as little suffering as possible, and to think of death with affection... - which is a mini definition of Schopenheurian Pessimism. It was Schopenhauer who really did for George and his chance for happiness, and once he had got into bed with Arthur, George simply couldn't break away.