Commonplace 122    George & Money PART ONE

It was The Beatles who first brought to my attention the joys of having loads of money click. It was my secondary school that introduced me to St Francis of Assisi (my school was not a religious one, it was located in Francis Avenue) and his views on poverty. And, then my Pentecostal Sunday school teacher pointed out that money is not the root of all evil - it's the love of money that makes money so dangerous. Lessons learnt young, and I have been conflicted about the topic ever since.

George had money on his mind all of the time. All that he was to himself, depended on it. It was the chief reason he wrote - because he was the sort of writer who created until he had a large enough income to be able him to give up the work. The pursuit of money, the spending of it, the lack of it, the earning of it, the value of it to your self-image if you had it or lacked it, the doling out of it to 'dependants' were his major preoccupations. Any pleasure George derived from the imaginative creative process was offset by the misery of having to do the thing he found difficult, claimed he didn't much enjoy, and which was innately poorly paid.  Fear of Freedom meets Masochism - see previous Commonplaces! Drawing to himself financial burdens like his wider family ensured he was forced to keep at it, 'nose to the grindstone', which was itself a valuable thing as it gave him something to moan about, rebel against, and resent. He had contempt for women... he had contempt for women whom he considered 'wasted their husband's money' (I will let that pass just this once!) on fripperies and then himself went out and bought books by the tonne, tobacco and evening dress suits when he claimed to have no social life.

St Francis: one of the more lovely saints 

If you dabble in online quotes searches, George has three about money:
1) Time is money says the proverb, but turn it around and you get a precious truth. Money is time.

George enjoyed quite a lot of 'time' - if by the word he means bits of life spent not actually working. He may have lacked the funds to do all the things he wanted to do, but he never stinted himself on time spent reading; even time he could have spent writing things that made him more money (magazine articles, for example) couldn't entice him away from the solitary vice of reading books. In fact, it could be argued that he worked to pay for time to read. Nothing in George's life ever gave him the pleasure that reading did. Even when he was low in funds and living with Marianne aka Nell, he kept them both (he claimed) half-starved in order to buy books. This is not rational behaviour. Which is why it stinks of untruth. We know he greatly exaggerated his poverty - Austin Harrison (son of Frederic) blew this claim out of the water early when he described George as being reasonably well paid for his tutoring, and never really poverty-stricken - that his claims to poverty were 'a fiction of fictions'. Roger Milbrandt has made a study of George's bogus claims to poverty, published in the Gissing Journal of October 2007 click and makes the point that, even when George was as his lowliest paid (1877, newly arrived in London and working as a clerk for St Vincent Mercier), he was likely to be sharing wage-earning with Marianne aka Nell. She might have worked as a seamstress though we don't know enough about her to be sure of her source of income. It seems the only mention we have of her possibly being in the needle trade is the John George Blacks' letter telling George about the struggle he had moving a sewing machine - George was clearly not involved in this venture and there is no evidence this was Nell's sewing machine, and though Morley Roberts tells us George bought her a sewing machine, he is wrong on so many things, he should not be trusted on specifics, considering he never actually met Nell in the flesh, and so had no experience of her as a real person, and wrote his self-serving fake biography in 1912, nine years after George died. But, this alleged 'buying of a machine for her' is touted as evidence she sponged off George and forced him into becoming a thief, but, really...? As if...

Dollar Signs by Andy Warhol 1891

Maybe Marianne did make money sewing - as ten of thousands of women had to and still do - but there were hundreds of factories in Manchester and London that needed employees to do piecework and make all manner of items, and work doled out on a 'first come first served' basis to those queuing outside factories at the start of the shift made earning a day's wage not too difficult, so it could have been employed at any sort of unskilled factory work. In fact, when George was working as some sort of clerk, there were probably a variety of jobs he could have taken, if he had parked his aspirations to be considered bona fide middle-class. However, he no doubt lacked the strength and temperament for hard labour and would have starved if all he had to rely on was manual skills, so presumably that will have impacted on his sense of masculinity. Not that we often associate him with that trait.

It is considered a bonus if you enjoy your money-making activity click - and being happy in your working life is still an aspiration worth advocating: 'it doesn't matter what you do as long as you feel fulfilled, enjoy it and by honesty, it pays the bills' it is not a bad bit of advice to give to young folk setting out on their career journey. Doing well in education is touted as a way to guarantee more options, and help avoid working as a toilet attendant, but being a toilet attendant who loves their work is a happier bunny than a university don who loathes her/his post. Choice is a huge part of happiness, it seems. Which leads us to this George quote:


2) Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman.
 In fact, George did very little actual 'work' - if we take that to be activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a result. Most of his 'effort' went into walking around thinking over the detail, and the agonising about the execution, and then the grovelling to publishers to get the work to its final destination, the small, select, aristocratic (haha) reading public he craved.   

The Moneylender and His Wife by Quentin Metsys 1514

3) That is one of the bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be generous.

On the surface, it's hard to know how he came to this conclusion - after all, he was raised in a Christian tradition and would have heard the parable of The Widow's Mite click. However, it is a line lifted from The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Winter III); taken out of its context, it can be misread. George is talking about how, when he was poor, he had feelings of dread when giving to beggars because he might one day be in a position where he had to beg, himself. He rightly notes giving is an empowering enterprise, and in the rest of the paragraph extols his own generosity (as Ryecroft, he gives away £50 to a needy friend) and sings his own praises and declares 'I feel myself a man' when he gives. Freud would no doubt concur. However, George's view that giving is impossible to do when one is poor, is not borne out by the statistics click. This article suggests poor people identify with the struggling disadvantaged and so give more in order to distance themselves from the calamity of being identified as needy themselves. 

JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO TEST BOB DYLAN'S ASSERTION THAT 'MONEY DOESN'T TALK, IT SWEARS'.

Commonplace 121 George & Conservatism.

In the UK, Guy Fawkes click (1570-1606) and his ill-fated attempt to stage a coup and overthrow the state is commemorated with a ritual called (in the back lanes of George's home town of Wakefield in Yorkshire) 'Plot Night' but is more widely referred to throughout the land as 'Bonfire Night' or 'Guy Fawkes Night' click. Burning an effigy (in days gone by sadly filled with live cats), fireworks, special sweet treats click and spicy drinks are on offer. Gone are the days when ragamuffin children made effigies called 'guys' and stood on street corners asking for pennies, with their cheery cries of 'Penny for the guy, mister/missus'. The amount paid by the mister or missus was strictly commensurate with the quality of effort and creativity that had gone into making the effigy. In my day, we would have been insulted at anything less than a threepenny bit, and we occasionally aspired to a sixpence. Where you pitched your guy was crucial, and railway stations or the Dockyard gates were fought-over spots. Having a girl on your team is always a wise move - big blue eyes, and a winning smile and all that - but in a good way! Definitely not Maiden Tribute territory click.

Nowadays, the British state is allegedly opposed to children on street corners asking for money, though you would never know that from their unfair treatment of the poor or low paid (or asylum seekers, refugees etc) and their fight to smash the working class with their evil 'austerity' policies. As many members of the British working class don't vote, and state education rarely educates children about politics (which would arm them with the knowledge required to make a choice) it's easy to trample on their rights and entitlements.

From the 1920s - before my time!

Anyhoo, Bonfire Night is November 5th. In the Devon town of Ottery St Mary click, not far from Exeter, they celebrate this with a spot of tar barrelling - where the young men and women race down a hill with barrels aflame with burning pitch, after carrying these health and safety threats on their shoulders through the streets click. It is a time of tricks and japes - the last tar barrelling I witnessed resulted in the exhaust pipe of my car being stuffed full of bananas, rendering the car un-driveable! Hilarious (not!), and a very good way of getting revenge. For maximum effect, peel the bananas and insert one at a time - about half a dozen should do it nicely.

Ottery St Mary is a very pretty place. It has many historical associations and I recommend it to you for its beauty, quietude and for the fact that this is where Samuel Taylor Coleridge click was born. What has this to do with George? Apart from the fact he lived up the road in Exeter for a few years, US economist Russell Kirk linked George to Coleridge in his doctoral dissertation The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (1953), subsequently published and enlarged in book form. Kirk writes about both Coleridge and George as Conservative (with a large 'C') writers. 

In these post-Nazi Party days, most of us don't really know what a Conservative is; we are not talking smarmy Tory self-serving Daily Mail reading twits here. Well, we are, but it's bigger than that! Conservatism is a worldwide phenomenon that rears its ugly head in many Western states - chiefly, the USA, the UK, France, and many countries with self-aggrandizing ways. However, let us not be naive - as History and George Orwell have shown us, you can't get much more 'Conservative' than Joseph Stalin!

Kirk makes use of George's The Unclassed, but he makes the common mistake of assuming everything George wrote was autobiographical - whereas 'spin' might be more like it. George was writing The Unclassed when he was tired of caring for his first wife, Marianne aka Nell, and he was moving in elite circles cultivated to further his social and artistic ambitions. He did not want Nell but he couldn't divorce her. He wanted to turn his back on his feeble attempt at being a bohemian but how could he ditch the ailing wife and keep every decent person's good opinion? After all, her prognosis was an inevitable slow, lingering squalid death, whilst his trajectory must have seemed potentially stellar (George always thought he was a genius!) - it might seem a bit immoral, cruel and unheroic to walk away from a woman in need. And so he had to stage-manage perceptions of Nell in order to justify abandoning her. And he did this by demonising her, and that work has been carried on by most of his biographers ever since. He couldn't actually lie to anyone's face about her - because he might get caught out - but he could drop hints, claim he was in some way indisposed by his home life, unable to extend hospitality... you will recognise these if you are familiar with the Letters Volume I. Of course, if you haven't got true faults to write about, you make them up - and a good venue to showcase these is a novel. Harriet Smales is portrayed as a sordid mess of a woman, but how do we know this is this based on Nell? Epilepsy is all they seem to share, in my reading of the available detail. But George links epilepsy to vicious behaviour and a vile personality, and so that is applied to the real-life Nell. Epilepsy was (and still is in some quarters) a frightening and embarrassing condition, and in George's day, a source of shame. It's an insult to epileptics to portray it as vicious - and ridiculous, reductive logic in the macho minds of George's biographers to assume Nell was in any way a bad sort just because Harriet was. And, does George really want to be taken as Julian Casti - that spineless, under-achieving doofus who hides his light so successfully under a bushel? Poor Julian - sacrificing himself for his woman the horrible Harriet because he is decent and noble. What utter tosh! As we have seen in Commonplaces 120-121, there is nothing noble or heroic in 'Fear of Freedom' click which is what all the characters in The Unclassed seem to suffer. Heavens! Is George really Osmund Waymark?? Who goes to live on an island in the end, thus constricting his freedom even more!! Hopefully when Ida took up her pen at the end: Reader, she ditched him in the Solent haha!

The Isle of Wight - Osmund Waymark's existential Alcatraz. 

By claiming Osmund Waymark's thoughts were George's, we can see Kirk fails to realise how manipulative this type of alleged introspective self-revelation could be. George wanted to be taken seriously as a writer, but also as a thinker. In fact, he didn't have a wide enough peer group in which to debate his own ideas to their conclusion - which could be why he never comes up with solutions to problems, and is generally behind the times with his current affairs. So, what is it Kirk wants us to understand, and how does it fit with the George Gissing we know and love? From the wiki page click

Kirk developed six "canons" of conservatism, which Russello (2004) described as follows:

1. A belief in a transcendent order, which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or  natural law;
2. An affection for the "variety and mystery" of human existence;
3. A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions;
4. A belief that property and freedom are closely linked;
5. A faith in custom, convention, and prescription, and a recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.

Anyone who knows George and his preoccupations will recognise some of him in this. I am no political theorist, so I took guidance from someone who is: Aaron McLeod and this publication click which gives us a Kirk 'condensation' published by the Alabama Policy Institute.

This is lifted from Aaron McLeod's essay (pages 51-52) and I thank him/them for it:
That connoisseur of misery, George Gissing, is discussed in the second section of this chapter. Gissing once resided in the poorest, grimiest sections of London, and so to him Kirk looks to understand the currents of proletarian politics from this time. Gissing knew the poor—he had been one of them, and he knew the socialists because he had given their speeches. It was not long, however, before experience with the socialist agenda and its effects on the working class caused him to repent, and he became an eloquent conservative. The same man who wrote Workers in the Dawn, who aspired to be the mouthpiece of the Radicals, examined his folly four years later in The Unclassed, writing,

"I often amuse myself with taking to pieces of my former self. I was not a conscious hypocrite in those days of violent radicalism, workingman’s-club lecturing, and the like; the fault was that I understood myself as yet so imperfectly. That zeal on behalf of the suffering masses was nothing more nor less than disguised zeal on behalf of my own starved passions. I was poor and desperate, life had no pleasures, the future seemed hopeless, yet I was overflowing with vehement desires, every nerve in me was a hunger which cried out to be appeased. I identified myself with the poor and ignorant; I did not make their cause my own, but my cause theirs. I raved for freedom because I was myself in the bondage of unsatisfiable longing."
Now that Gissing had abandoned socialism, he began to speak of duty; the only reform possible and really worthwhile was reforming one’s character. Gissing saw no shelter from the harsh realities of life on the lowest rung of the economic ladder except that of stoic endurance and self-amendment. In the world of Gissing, the whole duty of man, Kirk relates, “is to stand siege within the fortress of his character.” Unlike his socialist counterparts, Gissing believed the only proper channel for real improvement in society was improving the character of the educated and the leaders of society. Unfortunately, he had little hope. 

Kirk finds a nagging doubt in Gissing’s later thought that the beauty in literature and philosophy would withstand the attack from modern secularism, and that the new collectivism, by whatever name, would fail to erase the variety and individuality that make life tolerable. Instead, his advice to those who would fight the good fight is to cling to what remains of a better world with the tenacity of men over an abyss. The chiefest protection against a fiery end in anarchy, he thought, lay in reconciling the British aristocratic ideal with the “grey-coated multitude.” But whether such reconciliation occurs, or is even possible, Kirk gives much the same counsel as Gissing: “Such of us as still are men, then, will hold fast by shaken constitutions and fading beauties so long as there is breath in us.”

So, George the Conservative is what he is often remembered as, but that is a shame because Conservatism is a perspective populated by such dreadful backward-looking specimens of life. History has been warning us to beware the influence of them since records began. Again from the Aaron McLeod piece: Kirk said that Christianity and Western Civilization are "unimaginable apart from one another" and that "all culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief."

I salute Khaled al-Asaad: A True Hero click 

Commonplace 120 George & Heroism PART TWO The Romantic Hero

Ossian Receiving The Ghosts of The French Heroes by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussey-Trioson 1800-1802

In Commonplace 119 we looked at a definition of Classical Heroism, as practiced by the Greeks and Romans, and applied that to what we know about George. Classical heroism didn't seem to fit the 'heroism' given to George in the title of one of the biographies. Perhaps he might fit with the concept of the 'Romantic' hero - as in the likes of Byron and Thomas Paine. Again, from here click we find a guide to what constitutes The Romantic Hero:

Characteristics of a Romantic Hero:

	1)Birth and class are unimportant: the individual transcends society
	2)The battle is internal: it is a psychological war won by the “courage to be me”.
	3)Moral codes are eccentric–heroes make their own rules
	4)Passions are outside of individual control
	5)Self-knowledge is valued more than physical strength or endurance (physical courage is de-valued)
	6)The hero is moody, isolated, and introspective
	7)Loyalty is to a particular project and to a community of like-minded others

Self Portrait by Arnold Boecklin 1872

Let's run through these and see if George can be classified as a 'Romantic' hero:

1) For starters, George was obsessed with class and social ranking, making him cripplingly conscious of what others thought of him, which is why he was such a control-freak, if not open dictator to his wives and children, in particular. It's worth spending some time thinking about what is meant by this term, and from whence it might originate in a personality.

There are many closely woven theories of what leads to control-freakery in a personality, but the basic concept comes from the notion (partly derived from the work of psychologists such Winnacott and Fromm) that there are antagonistic forces at work in a personality that vacillate between freedom and restraint, with freedom being the more threatening to the psyche. From what we know of George's early life, there is a fit. Between his behaviour at Owens College, his gap-year in the States, and the early days in London, George does seem to suffer from a 'Fear of Freedom' in the sense that he did not make the most of the oyster that was his world. He had been handed free of charge advantages that he should have capitalised on, but we find he ballsed them up. He appears to work hard to succeed in his studies, but his shenanigans during term-time and his lack of respect for the learning experience, display a reckless streak that risked everything that he had going for him. 

Far from being a bohemian on the verge of a world of opportunity, he increasingly narrowed his options with bouts of self-destructive, if rather conservative, tame behaviour. He makes mention of this when he moaned about being let loose in Manchester as a youth with no supervision, and where some might revel in that freedom, George raced towards external restraints to feel safe - prison, being the most obvious manifestation of that. Poverty was another restraint he put on himself and choosing to write books few wanted to read was another. He knew a small readership would never make him money and he always equated money and freedom together, but he never adapted his snobbish tendencies to make a decent living from his work and reach a wider audience, which would have given him extra freedom. Marrying two women who were never going to live up to his expectations was one of the more destructive elements of this need to be restrained or constricted. Denying himself a social life by choosing what he considered to be socially inferior wives, whom he considered a social liability, which led to him keeping himself beyond the social pale, demonstrates how deeply-grained the process was in his make-up. It was only by focusing his drives on writing (where he had safe control over characters and events, by the means of a strict system - syntax and grammar) that he could emerge and feel free. And then there is class - he never felt middle class because he so closely paired that with income, but he would not have felt at all comfortable if he had been middle class in every way, because that would have freed him from restraints that being out of that class imposed.

In 'Fear of Freedom' (1941), Erich Fromm describes two states of freedom as 'positive' and negative'. This is paraphrased from the wiki page click:

Fromm distinguishes between 'freedom from' (negative freedom) and 'freedom to' (positive freedom). The former refers to emancipation from restrictions such as social conventions placed on individuals by other people or institutions. The second is to act spontaneously and with authenticity. In the process of becoming freed from authority, we are often left with feelings of hopelessness (he likens this process to the individuation of infants in the normal course of child development) that will not abate until we use our 'freedom to' and develop some form of replacement of the old order. However, a common substitute for exercising "freedom to" or authenticity is to submit to an authoritarian system that replaces the old order with another of different external appearance but identical function for the individual: to eliminate uncertainty by prescribing what to think and how to act. He characterises this as a dialectic historical process whereby the original situation is the thesis and the emancipation from it the antithesis. The synthesis is only reached when something has replaced the original order and provided humans with a new security. Fromm does not indicate that the new system will necessarily be an improvement. 

The Battle of Trafalgar by JMW Turner  1823

 2)Did George ever win this battle? I don't think so. He was never happy with his situation, circumstances or opportunities and right up to the end, wanted to move back to the UK from France - which would mean leaving Gabrielle behind to nurse her mother. In fact, this bout of 'itchy feet' probably started from the time he found out his second wife, Edith, had been locked up in a psychiatric hospital in January 1902, and therefore, removed from the streets and from access to annoying him. He would not have made a clean break with Gabrielle - he tried to make it when he entered the Nylands Sanatorium and allowed the Wells' to take the blame for insisting he stay in England a little while longer than planned. He would have told Gabrielle a relocation was for the sake of his health (and his Art!); that he would wait for her there and she could join him when her mother died; that he had no choice to do it.... but, of course, he would have been delighted to have given her the slip and then moved back to Blighty where he could roam free of any female - even the minions, Collet and Orme. Miss Collet would be clearly aware he was unavailable on the mating front because he was still spoken for, but she would have been kept on the back burner in case Gabrielle ever refused to cross the Channel. As he didn't really have the inner resources to be 'free' in this Fromm sense, he would have continued being miserable and blaming the world for his predicament, fussed over by well-wishers with masses of 'sympathy'.

3)George probably did believe this, that 'genius' makes up its own rules. (As this might also be a definition of a psychopath...!) He was wrong to think the quality of his own genius was robust enough or deep enough to mark him out as exceptional as a writer. George was a follower, not a leader, in the style of his writing, and the weirdness of Henry Ryecroft and the peculiarity of the short stories cannot save him from that. Of course, the term 'genius' means something different nowadays - in George's days, it meant something less grandiose and pretentious and referred more to a unique perspective in creative imagination, and not a mind-blowing ability to think out of the box (- what box? they ask) that transcends normal human abilities.

4)Passion, in George, was a secretive thing, and a force of threat. He claimed to value 'reasonableness'. When he though Edith wasn't being so, he tightened the screws on her, often refusing to answer her in discussions and intentionally winding her up with brute dumb insolence. This is not the behaviour of one who finds expression of any emotion easy or acceptable; it is the action of one determined to close down another's right to communication. What makes it so sinister is that he knew how much it upset her and he used it freely to undermine her mental health and give her opportunities to act like a madwoman. Miss Orme shared this cruelty - writing to him about Edith being upset over festivities at Christmas not going her way. The triumvirate of Gissing, Orme and Collet have much on their conscience where Edith is concerned. 

George's was not an expansive, generous nature (though he was giving with small amounts of money when it suited him - usually with people who might judge him for his generosity or lack of it); even what he wrote is not zestfully spontaneous or giving. Some of his early novels contain longer descriptive pieces that seem to use bile as their fuel, with a less than impartial sense he is decrying, rather than describing, what he wants the reader to see. We are sometimes aware he is disgusted by his own work; and this suggests he wrote the kind of books he would have hated to read.

5)George did have a lot to deal with in his physical health, but you could never say he bore this with grace or suffered in silence. We know as much as we do about his parlous health because he moaned about it all the time in his Diaries and Letters. That might sound harsh - he must have been frightened of the prognosis of his more serious complaints; syphilis, for example, generally ended very badly. It's impossible to gauge what personal enlightenment he achieved because his self-pity makes trivial things seem enormous and huge things he lays at the feet of fate or the 'accursed' order of things that really have no metaphysical cause but are always man-made. Such as Marianne aka Nell starving to death on his alimony of 15/- a week. 

Lord Byron in Albanian Costume by Thomas Phillips 1813

6)At Last!! Signs George was a Romantic Hero emerge!! He WAS moody, isolated and introspective. Always. Is there any point to introspection unless it produces insight? It seems George might have reached this very late in life - The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is an attempt to blur the edges of his many, many mistakes, self-pity, misanthropy and misogyny - unconvincingly. He was incapable of setting the record straight, confessing his shortcomings or admitting he was often wrong, but that is an ego state - admitting it would have been too threatening to his self-image.

7)Loyalty...? There is evidence George found this concept moveable, Eduard Bertz, Morley Roberts, HG Wells - he wrote some quite unpleasant things about them in his Letters and Diaries, and had no real respect for their work or minds. Henry Hick seems to emerge unscathed, but that relationship was not very close and personal. George's clanship with his family members is based on fealty, rather than affection - if we are to believe the things he told Mrs Gaussen or wrote to Gabrielle Fleury in his letters. This very complicated situation was never resolved, and he spent a good deal of time reluctantly, resentfully, filling their needs. Again, this is a choice of lack of freedom which he fails to take, because he didn't have to spend so much time with them or have as much contact via letters, or allow them to exert as much influence as they did over his life. He dumped Frederic Harrison, despite all the help he received from him; he abandoned wives and children when it suited him. It doesn't get much more disloyal than that! 
Class was where George allowed his capacity for loyalty to reside. Being thought of by the world as 'middle class' was of utmost importance to George. He could get away with his lack of social connections by assuming the mantle of 'artist', and from there, he could look down on the plebs and underline their shortcomings, whilst adopting middle class attitudes to reinforce the separateness, keeping his lower middle class son-of-a-shopkeeper roots a secret. He was way behind the times in many things, which is typical of the middle class love of all things past. Henry Ryecroft opines for a world that no longer exists and he can only survive by removing himself to a tiny world of his own in some godforsaken hole where he doesn't have to face reality. Like a coward. HOWEVER, George was loyal to one cause - Veranilda. But he had missed the boat of conquering the literary world via Classical History fiction; as others were looking to the future and all that it might be, George was rebuilding the sacking of the Roman Empire, and his history tale must have seemed out of synch with the times. If it had been finished, would it ever have found a publisher? It had a curiosity USP value after he died, because he had died - but would it have passed muster if he had been in the land of the living? Maybe George realised this book was going to bomb; which is why he couldn't get it finished. 

So, does George deserve the epithet 'Heroic'? And was that the way he conducted his life? Was he admirable, courageous, chivalrous, honourable, and true? I wonder what Nell would say to that. Or Edith.

Thracian Girl Carrying The Head of Orpheus On His Lyre 1865 by Gustave Moreau

Commonplace 119 George & Heroism. PART ONE The Classical Hero

As well as being the actual day Marty McFly and Doc turn up in their 'Back to the Future' travels, today (October 21st 2015) is the day Daisy died. It is also the 210th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar and the death of Horatio Nelson. Nelson is a British National Hero - possibly our greatest - and we should have a bank holiday to commemorate his life, and the sacrifices made by those brave boys who fell in battle. I am partial, of course, as I come from Portsmouth, and live a short way from where Nelson last sailed from England - which is a few yards from the place where Thomas Wainewright (see Commonplace 95) was ferried onto the convict ship Susan that transported him to Tasmania in late 1837 - the dockside is situated just opposite the corner where George Meredith's birthplace once stood.

Truly Heroic Horatio Nelson click

Nelson has never been featured on a UK banknote, but he should be. The tradition of putting heroic figures on banknotes here in the UK is relatively new - the first £20 note with a famous face on the reverse was the William Shakespeare issue from about 50 years ago click. Here is a list of heroines and heroes who have been featured:

• Charles Dickens (writer)
• Sir Edward Elgar (composer)
• Michael Faraday (scientist)
• Sir John Houblon (first Governor of the Bank of England)
• Sir Isaac Newton (scientist)
• Florence Nightingale (nursing and statistical s )
• William Shakespeare (poet/playwright)
• George Stephenson (engineer)
• 1st Duke of Wellington (general/statesman)
• Sir Christopher Wren (architect)

Currently on our notes, we have:
Elizabeth Fry (social reformer and prison reformer)
Charles Darwin (naturalist and author of On The Origin of Species)
Adam Smith (one of the fathers of economics)
Matthew Boulton and James Watt (worked together on the first steam engine)

A public vote was undertaken click this year to replace the famous face on the next issue of the £20 note (Jane Austen will appear on the next £10 and Winston Churchill on the £5 from 2016). I would like one of my heroes chosen - Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Alan Turing, Edith Cavell, George Orwell, Rosalind Franklin, Thomas Paine, or William Blake would suit me. (Oscar Wilde was Irish, but he would be my top choice if he had qualified.) Of course, whoever is chosen might not last long as our queen makes way (one way or another) for King Charles III or even King William V. Whatever, when all the bank notes and coins have to change again, I will bet good money (haha) George Gissing's jolly old eek click will never appear on any of them - possibly to avoid any confusion with Rudyard Kipling, his doppelgänger - and probably because he was never heroic . 

Rudyard Kipling by John Collier 1891
Britain's favourite poet?

You may know of the biographies of George that are given the Title: The Heroic Life. Of all the English words I might consider to describe George, 'heroic' would be so far down the list as to be below 'vampiric' and 'necromancer'. What on earth did he do to win the title 'heroic'? And, what constitutes 'heroism'? I can't answer the first part of these (I've tried to, but I just can't explain how the words 'Gissing' and 'Heroic' could ever feature in a sentence - unless it was 'Gissing wasn't at all heroic in any shape or form'), but let's turn to the Classics and the Romans and Greeks to see what George might have used as role models, if he hadn't been using Schopenhauer and Darwin. 

We all know the Greeks and Romans wrote legends celebrating the achievements of their Heroes (they didn't have bank notes haha). This piece is lifted from this website and I thank them for it click, and I'm sure there are many interesting points they cover on other topics:

Here are the main characteristics of the epic classical hero of Greek and Roman literature:

	He is of royal birth or even, like the Titan Prometheus, half mortal, half god.
	He must perform extraordinary feats.
	His is a noble character which is close to perfectly ideal but for a fatal flaw.
	The suffering of the character is physical.
	Death must occur in an unusual way.
	The hero fights for his own honour; his deeds belong to the community only after his death.

The notion of virtue implicit in these characteristics is implicit in the philosophy of the time. Reading Plato’s Republic, Aristotle's Ethics, and the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, for instance, what comes through is that only the well born can be thought to be virtuous – heroism is only for the few – slaves, artisans, and ordinary plebs have no business studying ethics and cannot be successful at turning themselves into heroic types. The virtues include courage, pride, honour, justice, magnificence – things to watch out for are shame, cowardice, intemperance, foolishness...

The Oath of the Horatii by Jacques-Louis David 1785

How does George fare in this? 
Well, he was never a Titan of Literature but he did write a short story entitled 'Phoebe' - she was a Titan. He was not half mortal, half god - but he did suffer delusions of grandeur when he considered himself to be 'aristocratic'. Quelle absurdité!
He never performed extraordinary feats - well, not in a good way. In fact, he spent a good deal of his energy on avoiding any situation where he might be called upon to be 'heroic' - usually delegating the difficult tasks, or weaselling his way out of confrontation and responsibility. If that is heroic, I'll eat mon chapeau.
He did not have a 'noble character'. He was weak, self-serving, apt to excuse his own failings, envious, cruel and egoistical, only concerned with his own gratification in the areas he was concerned about. In trivial matters he could appear to be magnanimous, but this was a pose put on to manipulate people and situations round to his advantage. And he was a thief and a liar, a snob, a serial wife and child abandoner, and a man not afraid to exploit the weakness of others. In fact, he was the opposite of 'heroic' - il était un goujat!
Maybe these were the 'fatal flaw', as all the shenanigans culminated in him finding himself 800 miles from home with no decent medical care or. Quelle cauchemard!
The suffering of the character is physical - well, he was a martyr to many maladies, including syphilis. He tended towards introspection, and was never happier than when he was miserably examining his ,any small ills and whipping them up into big ones. Of course, iffy health meant no-one could expect anything of him. In fact, he was what was termed neurasthenic click as well as syphilitic. Pauvre Georges.     
Death must occur in an unusual way - he didn't throw himself off Niagara Falls or poison himself, or drown in a pool (except in his fiction) and he died at home in his bed. He was in the full-flow of paresis, and chanting and raving about Rome and the Barbarians just before he went.  
Did he fight for his own honour or did he make use of others to do it for him? Throughout his life, he moaned about being alone but he was surrounded by people - he told Gabrielle Fleury he had no emotional ties to his family, so that she would take him on, and so make her responsible for his care. George seems to regard his own honour as a moveable thing, and if a word might be used to describe this it would be opportunistic. 

Rosa Luxemberg (1871-1919)
click

As for the broader aims - 
...only the well born can be thought to be virtuous – heroism is only for the few – slaves, artisans, and ordinary plebs have no business studying ethics and cannot be successful at turning themselves into heroic types. This is the basis of George's hatred of Demos, but, as with most major negative reactions, it is the likeness to our real selves they represent that makes us over-react. Why else is George always described as the son of a chemist/botanist and not son of a shop-keeper? He wanted to be thought of as better than a shop-keeper, and spent most of his life trying to act like he wasn't. But, he was, at times, very working class - think of what he ate and yet he complained of the working class not knowing how to prepare decent food and stuffing their faces on cakes and treacle - when he stuffed his face on whatever was stuffed in the pot that he cooked over the fire when Morley Roberts turned up. And the lentils he made Nell eat - he no doubt kept up his tobacco quotas as they starved. 

They caution against shame, cowardice  intemperance and foolishness. Say no more.

George did not want to be a hero and he would have been highly critical if the term had been applied to anyone who did not warrant it. He was not one to want to deceive himself, even when he was striving to deceive others. As much as he wanted to be highly regarded, he would want it to be for the right things, for the things that were true of him. It is preposterous and patronising to apply a term so wide of the mark on anyone, and I'm sure George would agree with me on this. 
Last word goes to George Bernard Shaw: 
Every reasonable man (and woman) is a potential scoundrel and a potential good citizen. What a man is depends upon his character; what a man does, and what we think of what he does, depends upon his circumstances. Wise words, Mr Shaw; wise words. 

JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO CHECK OUT GEORGE'S ROMANTIC HERO CREDENTIALS.

Commonplace 118 George & A Letter To His Sister, Margaret. November 2nd 1883.

Madge aged 16-17 years

Of his two sisters, George claimed he felt less attached to the elder of them, Margaret - known as Madge. She was six years younger than George, and, as the older of the two girls, may well have been closest in outlook to their mother, identifying with her and adopting some of her attitudes to George's unconventional lifestyle. In turn, George will have transferred much of how he felt about his mother onto Margaret, and seen her as a mother-surrogate in temperament and character. Her closeness to the parent figure made her less malleable than Ellen, and George did not like to waste energy on women who were not under his sway, and so the encouragement to think independently he encouraged in Ellen was never manifested in his mentoring relationship with Madge.

She seems to have been the most religious of the Gissing siblings, and the one who derived the most consolation from her faith. Unfortunately, she suffered chronic bouts of ill-health and this tended to undermine her attempts to lead an independent existence. The bid to become a teacher/governess had to be abandoned because of her health, and she then set up the school in Wakefield with Ellen that so disastrously failed to do justice to Walter's potential. Neither girl married or even seemed to consider it.

1883 was the year when George set about trying to get over his split from Marianne aka Nell. Despite appearances, he was in turmoil. His first self-published book, Workers In The Dawn, was met with less than jubilation from a reading public that was tired of three-volume humongous doorstops - hard to carry on the Clapham omnibus to and from the office or department store workplace - and the work he had been doing for another novel 'Mrs Grundy's Enemies' fell below George's own rigorous standards and eventually got shredded (well, 'lost' - burnt, used as kindling?).

Santa Rosa by Pierre and Gilles 1990s

There is evidence of a frenzied whirl of social outings - Bertz came back from America in the June, but the Dynamic Duo was a thing of the past - the German commune-dodger had seen the Light and come back touched by Glory, and devoted to the world of evangelical teetotalism and tambourine-bashing. George was appalled, of course, and wondered if Bertz were mad. George suspected lunacy in many of those he disagreed with especially the women (including Nell, Madge, and Edith), so Bertz, his former man-wife, would not have been surprised had he found out about this allegation. The Hughes-run commune was a cult, and so Bertz probably just needed a bit of de-programming to become rehabilitated back into normal life, and he did go on to lead a relatively normal life when he returned to Germany.

We saw in Commonplaces 76 that, in 1883, George had dreams of becoming a Stage Door Johnny to Miss Julia Gwynne and considered himself something of a budding playwright, thanks to a few trips to the theatre and an over-estimation of his abilities. In 1894, he was to write 'Madcaps' (I told you he was obsessed with people being insane haha!) but it never saw the light of day. To be fair, 1883 was the same year the Divine Oscar Wilde (it's Oscar's birthday today, October 16th - Happy Birthday, Dear Boy!!) gave us 'Vera', which bombed. That George went on to be a committed novelist and Oscar went on to be a committed legend, is theatrical and every other kind of history.

From 'An Ideal Husband' 1895 (ironic, considering the sort of husband George made haha)

So, 1883 was a formative year for our boy. For a start, he ditched the 'R' in his signature and stopped being George Robert Gissing (not to me, he didn't!). He was 'delighted beyond all utterance' at an exhibition of Rossetti pictures - and had begun to talk like he'd been whacked over the head with the 'aesthetic poseur' stick. By good fortune, he had been living with a very accommodating, obliging and sexually frustrated landlady (see Commonplaces 72-74) for some time, and his shoes were, as they say, well and truly under her particular table. Her husband worked away from the family home, so George was king of the heap.- or, cock of the walk! George became a devoted fan of Gilbert and Sullivan (for which there was no cure!) and raced about advising his siblings on what to read, say and think - poor Algernon came within the direst influence as he spent some time living with and visiting George whilst studying for his exams. He locked horns with Frederic Harrison and never again treated his former mentor with total deference. Weirdly, for one who hated journalism, he thought of setting up a periodical with Algernon, but confessed he couldn't do it for less than £3 a week salary. He wrote poetry. It got published. He name-dropped that his pupils, The Lushington Girls' portrait was in the Royal Academy Show; he went on and on about Julia Gwynne, and dissed Mrs Bernard Beere (who had taken on some of Julia's roles) but as Ms Beere stood by Oscar in his hour of need, we shall praise her name here, as a pillar of generosity and devotion. And good taste. The summer saw him 'seedy' and fleeing to Hastings but his health was never going to be the same again. He doted on Ruskin, and advised his siblings on all things as if he was some sort of expert on anything.

click

In the late summer he had what he thought was a chance to divorce Nell for good and all. See Commonplaces 35-37. The only cause for divorce open to him was if he could prove she was committing adultery. He was approached by a policeman and presented with a wicked scheme to surveil her and gather evidence that she was soliciting or behaving in a bad way. No evidence was ever found, and so George very quickly dropped the plan. I firmly believe he never had any real interest in divorcing Nell - after all, he didn't object to paying alimony, though he claimed the policeman told him he paid her too much. And he may have paid her visits and demanded his conjugal rights from time to time. He never lost contact with her during their separation, and destroyed all reference to her in his pre-1888 diaries probably in order to obscure his exact relationship with her (and his treatment of her) after she was cast out to survive by her own devices.

On this police spy's advice, he subsequently reduced her alimony by 25% from £1 to 15/- a week. Remember, he told Algernon he couldn't live on less than £3 a week himself, so to give her a quarter of that to live on - with all her medical bills - was hardly generosity personified. In fact, it's worth remembering he was paying alimony here - a legal requirement - and not doling out free money. Nell could have sued for more - theirs must have been an informal arrangement, and she probably never realised she could have legally bound him to pay more. But I think she never took him to court in order to spare him another performance in the dock. Incidentally, on January 11th 1884, George writes to Algernon about a message he received from Poole, the solicitor he had engaged to represent him against Nell if it came to a divorce court:
A note from Poole, expressing his regrets, & saying he has no charges to make. So much the better.
This is after the firm arranged for their spy to gather evidence against her which was an investigation that had carried on from the previous late September click. Which means this alleged prostitute and drunk had not transgressed any laws in four months, had not come to anyone's attention, and hadn't made anything like a scene or any form of trouble in her neighbourhood, or amongst the locals such as publicans; she had not fallen out with or offended her landlady... does it seem likely to you that if she was, as biographers claim, a working girl with a drink problem, that she would be so invisible in her community and beyond the reach of a police investigator? We are talking post-Maiden Tribute, Contagious Diseases Act London here. The lies told about Nell to make George look better... do the research yourself. See if you can find that single, verifiable source that proves she was ever a prostitute and a drunk and make me into a liar! Nell was to remain on 15/- for the next 5 years, right up to the time she died of acute laryngitis in 1888. HG Wells maintained she had starved to death.

Joan of Arc by John Everett Millais 1865 (the year of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies!)

November 2nd 1883:
Madge has recently moved to work as a governess in 'Gladstone' country (ie where Gladstone retired to Hawarden near Chester) George approves of this:
... one always likes to get a glimpse of people who are of the inner brotherhood of those who rule the world, - after all a vastly simpler, & easier business than one is apt to think.
This is an odd statement - Gladstone was a Tory, who reclaimed monies lost when the slave trade was abolished (something he opposed) and who worked as minister of war, and of course, campaigned against the interests of the common woman and man. And, what is this 'world'? Talk about a Little Englander! George was 26 when he wrote this, and he moved ever closer to the political Right until the day he died. The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft could not have been written without this sort of tosh deeply ingrained in George's mind - some bohemian, eh? Haha. However, that 'inner brotherhood of those who rule the world' - was George alluding to the Illuminati who are now suspected of ruling everything - and who are alleged to have amongst their number our own HRH? As if...

Her Maj - an Illuminati Satanist or a cuddly, if occasionally grumpy, very wealthy great-gran? 

He goes on in his letter to Madge:
You remind me...of Charlotte Bronte. She had that same shrinking from people who might be supposed to look down upon her, & the same half-defiant withdrawing into herself. I myself understand it also. Still, I repeat: there can be doubt that that person who commands most respect who stands simply on his or her dignity as a human being, &, through pretending nothing, disguises & yields nothing. In very deed, this is what is meant by 'good breeding'. The well-bred creature is perfectly at ease, I suppose in any kind of company. 'Any kind of company'?? Not working class company, or course.

I actually think he was much more fond of Madge than he liked to admit - she was his type (small, sickly, unspectacular) and should have worshipped him if his judgement of female horse flesh was accurate. Which means her censure of his many foibles and flaws must have irked him and made him want to lash out; and she might have been indifferent to his pleas for sympathy, which would have vexed him. Was his lack of connection a subterfuge to get her to make more effort to adore him, like younger sisters are supposed to do?

St Margaret of Cortona by Jacopo Alessandro Calvi - she is the patron saint of
those ridiculed for their faith, those falsely accused; orphans; the insane; and the sexually tempted. 

As 1883 dragged to its close, George had to defend his novel The Unclassed (by the publishers Bentley & Co) from the charge it was a sewer of filth. George was outraged at such philistinism; Margaret would never have read it - Unclassed's Ida Starr was the opposite end of the spectrum, even after her stint in a laundry trying to wash her soul clean. Madge would never have taken to children the way Ida did - with open arms and a spare handkerchief for snotty noses - but she might have differed from her mother, and known George well enough to not blame Nell for his disgrace at Owens College.

In the UK, we have been enjoying a poetry season on the BBC. To join in with this and to celebrate the life of the Divine Oscar, here is Paul Muldoon's The Gate (about Oscar's release from prison) from the year 2000, which I feel Margaret would have understood.

THE GATE

As I roved out between a gaol
and a river in spate
in June as like as January
I happened on a gate
which, though it lay wide open,
would make me hesitate.
I was so long a prisoner
that, though I now am free,
the thought that I serve some sentence
is so ingrained in me
that I still wait for a warder
to come and turn the key.