Commonplace 139 George & The End.

Today, December 28th, is the 112th anniversary of George's death. Legend has it that, already feeling a bit peaky, he insisted on accompanying friends on a strenuous walk in shitty weather; he caught cold and this led to a chest infection that produced some sort of crisis involving his heart. It seems an unlikely medical scenario in a middle-aged man, until a picture of tertiary syphilis is taken into account, as this can eventually lead to devastating effects on the heart. During the year up to his end, he had been growing progressively more frail, spending most of his time apart from Gabrielle and taking things easy whatever way he could. Tertiary syphilis can have devastating consequences on all the bodily systems, though the most fearful of its cruelties is reserved for the brain and nervous system. George's love of Alphonse Daudet's writing will have acquainted him with the pains of paresis, and George's second wife, Edith, was already beginning to manifest the first signs of the brain version of paresis from the infection she had caught from George.

George tended to believe he had been living on borrowed time for years, but also unluckily for him, by the time his own end was nigh, he was living too far from a decent doctor to find the best of cutting edge medicine or treatment. At the back of his mind for most of the time he lived in France with Gabrielle Fleury, he longed to return home to the trappings of his old literary life, but he left it too late, and bad weather finally caught up with him. Ironically, George had spent a lifetime obsessing about weather and its effects on health.

A Street At Night In Wet Weather by Edward Steel Harper II c 1941

In the end, he was proved right. He always dreaded warm and sunny weather, and said he preferred cold climates to temperate. He chased round after what he he was advised was the best sort of weather for his physical complaints. This blaming weather for ill-health seems bonkers, but along with the newish sciences of epidemiology and medicine, the nineteenth century encouraged people to think of themselves as vulnerable to any sort of uncontrollable external influence. Knowledge on diseases was limited, and factors such as heredity and environmental factors affecting physical development and the effects of disease meant people were often unaware of what caused conditions such as tuberculosis, heart murmur, strokes or cancer.

George was often misguided by his own counsel, and was quite capable of making the wrong decision even after wrangling with his conscience or his better judgement. And, once he'd made his mind up, he  rarely changed that mind - typical of those who believe they are in control of all the cards in the deck. The prolonged fatal stay in France is a case in point.

Men of Skagen On A Summer Evening In Good Weather by Martinus Rorbye 1848

Within a few weeks of the 'marriage' union with Gabrielle Fleury, George regretted his decision to leave England. In his biography of his father, HG Wells' son, Anthony West, wrote that George was never happy in France, and quickly realised he had overestimated Gabrielle's wealth, social status and place in the literary set he had planned to be a part of. Anthony West, reporting what his father told him, related a case of both George and Gabrielle somewhat misrepresenting themselves each to the other, George wanting to be seen as a well-respected writer who chose to write books few wanted to read, who blamed his unhappy home life on an evil woman, and blaming an ignorant reading public for his lack of financial success. Gabrielle wanted to be taken for someone with literary friends and who deserved more from life than being a nurse to ailing parents. West suggests George looked at Gabrielle's ailing father as being about to pop his clogs - swiftly to be followed by the aged crone of a mother - which would leave Gabrielle free to be his own exclusive slave and nurse. And, as she would inherit whatever property the Fleurys owned, his future would be solid - money, a housekeeper-cum-nurse-cum-secretary-social hostess to his little literary soirees, in a house he owned care of his common-law wife. (One of his life's ambitions was to own a house.), In this family home, where he was boss and with all his domestic needs catered for, he would be free to spend the money he had saved or earned, and maybe gather strength to finish Veranilda - because what the world lacked more than anything else at that time was another novel about Goths vs Romans. Haha. He assumed Gabrielle would bite off the hand (a quaint English phrase to denote great enthusiasm!) of any man who showed romantic interest in her. She was beaten down by his emotional blackmail, and probably the notion of one day finally having someone to help her look after her aged parents. With great - humongous - reluctance, and after exhausting all her arguments to counter his deluge of neediness, she assented to his request, and George's fate was sealed.

Showery Weather, Dartmoor by Ernest Harrington (Might be Haytor)

He had abandoned his wife Edith to the care of his female minions (Misses Collet and Orme) who policed her with the zeal typical of the lickspittle ratfink snitch class; his abandoned children were living in separate places, being raised by paid carers or inept family members (who had no experience of child-rearing). His past as a sneak-thief wife-beater and wife- and child-abandoner was being airbrushed into the anodyne tosh that suggested he spent his whole life as a victim of circumstance and his struggle had been made worse by the exploitation of family and 'inferior' wives, his only fault being his misplaced heroic idealism. (Utter tosh, but some have fallen for it haha). Was George of the belief that he had finally outrun his demons?

Snow Storm: Steam-Boat Off A Harbour's Mouth by Joseph Mallord William Turner
January 1st 1842

Imagine how difficult it was going to be for George to admit that fleeing from all his many misdeeds and cock-ups, his egregious treacheries and that holing up in obscurity in France was, quite simply, a bad mistake. All his chickens were bound to come home to roost, even if he was abroad; self-imposed exile fooled no-one, because the logical conclusion was that he must have had something to hide from. Well, he had! Many things. Having to admit that he was wrong on so many fronts about his life choices, and the bad decisions that affected the lives of his dependents, plus his lack of insight into his own weaknesses, arrogance and egotism, would have been impossible without the admission that he had made mistakes - REAL mistakes, not the fake and phoney 'blaming others for his problems' sort he usually used. In order to accept his mistakes he would have to accept that some of his troubles were self-inflicted and unnecessary, and that if only he had sought advice, or accepted that he was not an expert on anything, he might have had less driving him towards this disastrous final scene of being away from all that he really wanted. 

George will also have been aware that his relationship with his chief supporters - Mr and Mrs HG Wells - was becoming increasingly strained. In fact, it had been tainted by what was, on the part of the Wells', an increasing anxiety that George had constructed a house of cards of deceit that was about to topple. HG also disapproved of the way George treated Edith and his children. George needed to get back home to mend that rift, and get them back on his side; after all, with Wells becoming increasingly famous as a writer, George never knew when having them in his life might be useful. Then there was the writing of 'Veranilda', which was always going to be a labour of love destined to disappoint because it was out of time with the tastes of the day. George had long ago missed the fad for Roman-centric stories. Add to this a parlous state of health, with little or no chance of an improvement, and you can see how desperate and anxious George was when he went out for that walk in the cold and wind, anxious to prove he was on top of his game - especially to himself.

Sunny Side Up: The Weather Project by Olafur Eliasson  2003 click

As George had spent a good deal of their relationship not actually living under the same roof as his 'wife', perhaps Gabrielle was already aware of what life without him would be like. Gabrielle's mother outlived George, and so he never got Gabrielle's undivided attention, but if he had, he might have gone off her quicker, because he was not one for sticking around when there wasn't much in it for him. Luckily, poor Gabrielle didn't fully understand how bored and disillusioned George really was, and how close she was to being consigned to the ex-wives club. According to HG Wells, whose own inadequate response to George's impending end was to haunt him for the rest of his life, claimed she disintegrated in the face of George's imminent demise. Wells sees this as a weakness (he never much liked Gabrielle), but we all take this sort of serious threat in our own, unique way. Some of us become cool and calm in the face of adversity, whilst others do not. The ones who can cope, do. Those who can't, don't. Failure to cope is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of vulnerability. Being inept at George's death scene doesn't make Gabrielle anything but beleaguered, and in need of sympathy - that great emotional catnip George so demanded from one and all. And, so, it was more a case of 'Poor Gabrielle' almost as much as it was a case of 'Poor George'.  

click

George did some bad things in his life (and sometimes behaved in some pretty unheroic ways), but this does not make him a bad person. Gissing enthusiasts are always happy to cut him some slack. Somewhere, is he sat in his chesterfield armchair, puffing on his pipe, with an open Homer in his lap, surrounded by warm and fuzzy feelings of peace? I certainly hope so.

Not In Vain

If I can stop one heart from breaking, 

I shall not live in vain:
If I can ease one life the aching, 

Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Emily Dickinson click

Commonplace 138  George & Bah! Humbug!


I don't advise. You mustn't give any weight to what I say, except in so far as your own judgement approves it....

Have a Bloody Good Xmas.

Commonplace 137 George & England  PART TWO: Surrey.

George lived in several English towns, but he probably always aspired to a home in Surrey click. In the late 1800s, Surrey was all beautiful rolling hills (some of these known as Downs) and dense woodland, with the benefit of being close enough to London for commuting, and far enough away from the 'Smoke' to be free of the filth and disease of a typical over-populated metropolis. George enjoyed countryside walks and amateur botany, and was always on the hunt for the perfect soil on which to live - click to check out Surrey's geological conditions - but probably one of the most compelling reasons to seek out a Surrey address was that some of the UK's most celebrated, popular and rich authors had chosen that county for their stately homes.

The Roman road of Stane (aka Stone) Street runs through Surrey from London to Chichester on the south coast of West Sussex. Henry VIII built his ill-fated Nonsuch Palace near Epsom click. Magna Carta was signed at Runnymede... which reminds me of the old Christmas cracker joke: Q: Where was Magna Carta signed? A: at the bottom. The Earl of Surrey, Henry Howard (1517-1547), a poet, soldier, patriot and courtier to Henry VIII is a towering presence of the English Renaissance, and gave us almost single-handedly, the sonnet form. Played here with bravura by Glaswegian David O'Hara click.

Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey. Attributed to William Scrots 1546. click In proto-type cycling shorts, flanked by heraldic hoverboards?

So, who followed after Surrey to live in...Surrey? And where did they live? And were any of them associated with George? Of course some of them were.
I am grateful to the late Robert M Cooper for his quaint 'The Literary Guide to Southern England'; Mr Cooper was allegedly born in Manchester, though here click  he writes this about a companion publication:
'This book was written for the person who unabashedly loves travel, loves England, and loves English literature. In short, for somebody remarkably like the person I was when I began to plan my first trip to Britain and looked for just such a book.' Hmm... 

Anyhoo...

Amongst those literary figures linked to Surrey and to George (albeit tenuously!), are: 

Staines is linked to Dr Thomas Arnold, father of Matthew Arnold. The Dr was headmaster at Rugby public school (public school in the UK means privately run as in expensive fee-paying) where Thomas Hughes click was a pupil. Hughes wrote 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' and went to Tennessee to start the colony that Eduard Bertz, George's man-wife, briefly lived click. 

Farnham: JM Barrie and his wife lived in Black Lake Cottage, near to Farnham. They should have taken its name as a sign, because they fell out over an affair she had and JM Barrie divorced her, acrimoniously to the max. George was very drawn to Mrs Barrie himself, and once commented that he didn't know how such a stunner could be married to a weed like Barrie. George, ever the judge of female horseflesh, eh? haha.

Woking: HG Wells lived at 143, Maybury Road. As covered in previous Commonplaces. 

Woking's love of HG made into a War of the Worlds sculpture.

Burford Bridge:
There is that famous story of George attending the meeting of the Omar Khyyam Club at the Burford Bridge Hotel near Dorking held to celebrate the life of Meredith, where the old man who was frail and too ill for much revelry, acknowledged George by personally stopping to greet him - probably the highest point of peer respect George ever enjoyed. Subsequently, George went to tea at Meredith's Box Hill place many times, sometimes uninvited.

The Burford Bridge Hotel - needs a blue plaque? click

Mickleham was the 'Box Hill' where lived George Meredith, in a house named Flint Cottage. Box Hill is a much more historic place than might be expected click and click.

Meredith had lived in other Surrey locations, most of them off the A3, the link between London and Portsmouth, Meredith's shameful to him birthplace, only about an hour down the road. When at Box Hill, where he lived for nearly forty years, Meredith entertained many noted literary figures, including Thomas Hardy (George was jealous of him and mentioned Mrs Hardy's husband-baiting), Alphonse Daudet (George admired and liked his work), and Arthur Conan Doyle, JM Barrie. RL Stevenson (George admitted his harsh criticism of Stevenson was pure jealousy) Henry James (who kind of admired George's writings) and Edith Wharton.    

Dorking: Meredith's ashes were buried with those of his wife in Dorking cemetery in 1909. In 1871, 'The Battle of Dorking' was fought in the pages of the novella by George Tomkyns Chesney, one of a raft of 'Invasion' novels telling of England's vulnerabilities click. Was this an influence on HG Wells? Or to Robert Harris in 'Fatherland' (1992) click, or Ridley Scott and 'The Man In The High Castle' (2015) click.

For George, before Dorking, there was Epsom...

Epsom: click to find out more of its, and Surrey's, affection for George. Not exactly a reliable account, but I blame the sources more than the author of this piece.

Epsom is also famous for its salts click. What an interesting product, useful for treating many ailments including indigestion (a George default complaint), for improving soil, and to ease the pain of sore muscles. It is found in saline springs nearby to the town, where the chalk of the South Downs meets the London clay - a nightmare of geology for those choosing to live for crackpot reasons on the 'right' soil.
As everyone knows, limestone is composed of fossilised marine organisms, indicating the area was once submerged under a watery world. The writer JG Ballard (1930-2009) (a personal favourite of mine) click, who some might think of as a modern Wells, wrote 'The Drowned World' (1962) when he moved to Shepperton, Surrey, the place he remained in for the rest of his life.

Is there something about Surrey that works on the mind of the wordsmith?? Jane Austen, Ian McEwan and JK Rowling have all written books with settings or characters associated with the county. George brings it into 'The Whirlpool', 'In The Year of Jubilee', 'Our Friend The Charlatan', and 'The Paying Guest'. And, Surrey was George's last residence in England before he sailed for France. When he was nostalgic for England, would it have been the back streets of Wakefield, or the leafy lanes of Surrey in his mind's eye?  

Commonplace 136 George & England. PART ONE

2015 has seen the bi-centennial of the publication of the first wondrous and beautiful geological map devised by William Smith (1769-1839) click. Let's take a look at some of the places in England forever associated with George.

(Very Approximate) Key: Pink: Manchester; Orange: Wakefield; Green: London; Blue: Surrey 

Wakefield  is situated at the foot of the Pennine chain of mountains and is now famous for Her Majesty's Prison Wakefield, a maximum security facility housing some of England's worst offenders, and also the Gissing Centre/Gissing Trust. The real fame of the city is its close proximity to the Rhubarb Triangle, a part of England where 90% of the World's forced winter rhubarb was/is produced. Rhubarb, like Marmite click, is an either you love it or hate it commodity - I love both the fruit and the yeast-based spread, though never together. The traditional way to eat rhubarb is in a 'crumble' click for recipe.

Sculpture in Wakefield celebrating the joys of rhubarb.
I 'shit thee not.

Carlton. a small village between Wakefield and Leeds celebrates its role in the Triangle in a more sedate manner:

And to listen to a locally grown homage to the noble fruit click. 

Manchester has been covered in several times in previous posts on account of the influence it had on George's early years. Modern Manchester is famed for its shopping opportunities click, its football, and the popular soap opera, Coronation Street. Oh, and probably the only Mancunian likely to truly find a soul mate in George - the Artist known as Morrissey. Who can forget his immortal line: 'Punctured bicycle on a hillside, desolate. Will Nature make a man of me yet?' click But, 'The Boy With The Thorn In His Side' makes more sense as an homage to our man. Mr Morrissey recently took up writing fiction, after his stonkingly successful autobiography of 2013. It would be safe to say it was not universally applauded. However, The Smiths click are the best thing to come out of Manchester since Mr Gissing was run out of town, IMO click and click - the latter a song about possibly the first thing some British people of a certain age think about when they think of Manchester.

Moz, back in the day. 

London - George had a love/hate relationship with our nation's capital. He lived north of the Thames when he first arrived, and spent a couple of years around the areas broadly near King's Cross railway station, not far from the Regent's Canal. He liked to present himself as a nobly suffering Artist who lived in squalid garrets eating stale bread and scrag end, but he really wasn't all that poor when he was living in King's Cross, or at any other time. The nearest he ever got to deprivation and want was his time in America. He moaned about one time having to eat peanuts for a few days. As peanuts are rich in protein and essential fats as well as vitamins and calcium, and their skins contain roughage, he could have survived on them for quite a while. But he complained of the monotony of eating them for even that short while, which suggests his usual diet was one of choice, and so was not usually confined to only one particular food item - such as bread or gruel, the standard fare in prisons. Here is an interesting thing to do with them click, or maybe just watch this click.

Brixton's Electric Avenue in 1904

When George and Edith and first born, Walter, relocated back to civilization from George's self-imposed exile in Exeter, Brixton was the choicest of locales. This was possibly because of its excellent rail links to the centre of London, or maybe even for its impressive library, and its sleepy backwater suburban vibe. As seen here in the 1889 Booth Map, it was a good place to live:

It was also the place where Marianne aka Nell went to when she moved out of the home they shared, at Christmas-time 1882. George does not tell us why she moved out - he destroyed all his Diaries up to her death in 1888 - but he claimed in a letter to his brother, Algernon, that she took half their furniture though it's difficult to imagine what else they had apart from bookcases which he obviously would have arm-wrestled her for. Of course, if you want to paint Marianne as a drunken whore, you conjure up pictures of her wantonly flitting to a foul nest of filth and debauchery, but Brixton was sedate and tranquil, and there is no reason to suspect she didn't have to go there to get nursing care as she had just been released from hospital. 1882-3 was an exceptionally cold winter click, so she probably needed to be warmer than George would want to be; moving to somewhere better suited to her physical needs would have been an important part of her recovery. And taking the furniture may have been to save money as unfurnished lets are always cheaper. Still, Gissing biographers willing to do his dirty work and present her as a bad sort are always happy to add to the infamy by portraying her as a waster. Shame on them! My own view is that Marianne had finally had enough of his canoodling with Mrs Coward, the landlady he had an affair with - see Commonplaces 73 and 74. Maybe he bought Mrs C an xmas present less in keeping with his role as lodger and more in keeping with his role as Mr Loverman click. Shabba indeed. Of course, that's a less than heroic action on the part of a husband, but there we have it.

Nowadays, Brixton is often associated with gun crime and drugs, and the odd riot. Progress of a kind, I suppose. But it is also still the place where a fabulous library provides enlightenment for a vibrant and multi-cultural community, and where all manner of good things go on click.

Surrey has always been a place beloved of the wealthy, one of England's most exclusive places to live. In George's day, it was seen as somewhere people might retire to at the end of a long and full life of achievement and wealth-gathering. What on earth was George doing there?

JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO LOOK AT WHAT GEORGE ASPIRED TO WHEN HE MOVED TO SURREY.

Commonplace 135  George & Some of His Ilk vs. Mrs Grundy.

If Douglas Adams' ground-breaking The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy click teaches us anything, it is that everything is meshed together by interconnectedness. So it is with Mrs Grundy.

Phryne by Jean-Leon Gerome (1861)

Of all the women in George's life, it could have been Mrs Grundy who gave him the most grief. He often mentions how flabbergasting she is. Such was her power over him that he wrote, but destroyed unpublished, a novel entitled Mrs Grundy's Enemies; no doubt he considered himself in their number. A quick squint at her Wikipedia page click proves how influential she was and how she continues to vex writers in particular. So, who was this femme fatale who so tied George up in knots that his mojo was comprehensively flummoxed?

She first gets a mention in Speed The Plough, a play by Thomas Morton (1764-1838), but she is only present as a 'ghost at the feast' reference and does not make an actual appearance. She is the personification of what is proper and right, and all human doings are judged by her pronouncements. She is an expert on etiquette and social manners - with particular reference to what is or is not, morally decent - and is the standard by which all actions can/should be judged, mostly by those who cannot set their own parameters. Thomas Morton for some time attended a school in Soho Square in central London. Soho Square was a thorn in George's side because he thoroughly disapproved of Marianne aka Nell visiting there to meet her friends. This was probably at what is now known as The House of St Barnabas, but was originally named as The House of Charity, a place of support for the homeless or those in need of support.

The House of Charity opened in 1861, having moved from a building round the corner. 

Of course, George makes this place sound like a hell-hole full of filth and ill-repute but it was a place run by followers of the Church of England, and William Gladstone was a regular supporter. In fact, it was started by The Oxford Movement, and offered a range of services to families and individuals who were in want: 'The House of Charity described itself as one of the few institutions in London where men, women and children of all walks of life, were able to 'apply for aid without a loss of self-respect'. Temporary guests of the House included 'all who found themselves in a condition of friendlessness and destitution that is not the manifest result of idleness or vice.' 

Soho Square was also where the Catholic St Patrick's Church is situated. George was highly critical of Marianne when she said she wanted to take up the Catholic faith - he thought this was a sign she was mad (this says so much more about George than it ever could about Marianne). Perhaps it was the combination of access to a caring, social support system and its potential for influence that spooked him. Add to this the pastoral care offered by the Catholic faith, perhaps he realised his sway over Nell was threatened. At this time, she was seriously ill and receiving all manner of medical interventions. No doubt she gained more compassion from her friends and supporters than she ever did from her husband; we know he was annoyed when her supporters turned up at his door and told him off about his treatment of her. Biographers assume these women were common termagants but maybe they were the equivalent of social workers who visited mean and heartless husbands who didn't treat their wives well. And Marianne could have been offering support when she could to others in similar or worse situations as she found herself. Perhaps the people who supported her viewed George as a wife abuser and encouraged Marianne to leave him when she finally made the break that took her to live in Brixton. 

The entrance to St Patrick's Church click

From 'Speed the Plough', Mrs Grundy reappears in Samuel Butler's 'Erewhon', an 1872 novel about an imaginary place click, not quite a sci fi but more than a fairy tale. Here, Butler turns the name Grundy into an anagram, but Victorians loved word puzzles and puns, and so there was no real mystery. She is described as an 'incomprehensible goddess' - which is exactly what I aspire to be. Samuel Butler was interesting cove who spent time sheep farming in New Zealand, and who loved to live in isolated study of Homer.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was wealthy and so had a few more options than George enjoyed, but they had quite a lot in common. Both were fond of the Classics, both wrote about sex and the Victorians, and both did battle with Mrs Grundy. Butler's later title. The Way of All Flesh (1903) had the double-meaning likely to confuse those hoping to find a saucy read, much as The Odd Women and The Private Papers of.... probably did. Any disappointed readers would have perhaps taken themselves of to specialist bookshops or purveyors of artistic prints - copies of My Secret Life by Anonymous - not the current outfit using that name!! - were available from 1888. This work eventually went to almost a dozen volumes, and is now regarded as a classic of Victorian literature, much more informative of its age than anything produced by George and Mr Butler. To whet your appetite, if you haven't been there already (I know I have!), go to click. We may assume George didn't know it was written by someone who coined the name 'Walter' as a pseudonym, unless he wanted his son to be associated with it.

Erewhon was mistaken as a sequel to Bulwer-Lytton's block-busting Vril: The Power of the Coming Race (1871) - another dodgy title - an early sci-fi/fantasy novel. This misplaced association made it into a best seller, but when the truth was revealed - that Erewhon had nothing to do with Bulwer-Lytton - sales of Butler's book bombed. The fickle reading public, eh? Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) might be remembered as a writer, or even as the originator of phrases such as 'the great unwashed', and 'the pen is mightier than the sword' (though that may have originally been a typo haha) but will always be remembered by half the population as a sexual pervert and wife rapist. It would seem he is also famed for having an influence on those believing the Earth is hollow. And he was embraced by the Theosophists. But there was worse to come.

Cock fight by Jean-Leon Gerome 1846. 

Early works by Bulwer-Lytton include several about Romans - The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) was followed the next year by Rienzi, Last of the Roman Tribunes. Now, I don't know much about (anything haha) opera or the Nazis, but I do know Wagner used the book for the basis of his Rienzi and that Hitler said it was his favourite Wagner work, and that it was a huge influence on his political thinking. However unreadable Veranilda is, at least it didn't kick-start the Holocaust.

Of course, the spectre of Mrs Grundy was usually invoked in order to shame people into appearing to be something they were not - which was whatever the norm was that prudes set for themselves and others. The British have a dual personality that lurches from the bawdy to the prudish in all things, but smut and innuendo, and blatant erotica and pornography, have been staples in the British cultural diet since written records could record them, and illustrators were able to work up the visuals.

Pollice Verso by Jean-Leon Gerome 1872 

When Mrs Grundy was busy making folk feel guilty and shameful about sex, what did she say about the other sort of erotica/porn - that is, violence? The Victorian age is famous for the amount of cruelty it tolerated, but it was also the time when cruelty was beginning to sicken all sectors of the community, and sexual exploitation was beginning to affront the sensibilities of the majority. Risible and annoying as she was, Mrs Grundy had a small part to play in that.

Commonplace 134  George & Role Models PART TWO.

We saw in the last post that George made some interesting political acquaintances when he was in America. Through association with feminist and political activist Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska he met Karl Heinzen, a larger than life cove whose name is largely forgotten except in 'revolutionary' circles. He was already an old man when George met him, and the editor of the revolutionary publication 'Der Pionier'. After success with the Abolitionist Movement, Heinzen moved on to feminism, and women's suffrage at a time when German-speaking peers thought suffrage for women would undermine and ultimately destroy, all forms of culture. His advocacy of violent means of attack to settle political matters was not original, having formed part of a new wave of revolution that worked covertly with maximum impact and minimal resources. Nowadays, we refer to that sort of malarkey as terrorism, and Heinzen is now best known for his advocacy of terrorist means to achieve political ends.

Portrait Of A Revolutionary by François Sablet. 1794

The late nineteenth century was a time of worldwide political strife, and though change for the better seemed inevitable, it was very slow in coming. Vast wealth had been made off the backs of the underprivileged and poor, and workers at the bottom of the social pile were exploited and abused. Greed then, as now, ruled supreme. The slow pace of change was down to the controllers refusing to give up their power and control, and the workers hamstrung with no means of standing up to their oppressors. Karl Heinzen had started out wanting to be a poet, but settled for a small voice in European politics as a pamphleteer who published works arguing for better parity between rich and poor. He took his political zeal with him when he emigrated to America. He spoke against slavery, and for the emancipation of the working person, largely via publications and pamphlets. By the time George met him, he had been advocating terrorism for some time click.

click

Here is an abstract of blurb for the article 'Karl Heinzen and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Terrorism' by Daniel Bessner and Michael Stauch click:
Scholars have long recognized the importance of Karl Heinzen's Mord und Freiheit in the history of terrorist thought. Yet the translation most scholars have relied on—1881's Murder and Liberty—is incomplete. Our new translation reveals four elements omitted from the 1881 translation. First, Heinzen conceived of terrorism as a transnational phenomenon. Second, he provided a material justification for terrorist tactics. Third, Heinzen viewed terrorism as both a tool to impel human society to progress and as a “progressive” tool of violence. Finally, he argued in favour of the primary modern tactic of terrorism—the indiscriminate bombing of civilians.

In December 2015, we know a thing or two about terrorism and the 'indiscriminate bombing of civilians'. In George's day, revolution was, if not an everyday occurrence, still a reality, when there was the IRA bombings in London, there were attempts to assassinate Queen Victoria, and the murders in Phoenix Park, Dublin click show how violence was seen as a justifiable means to an end. If you haven't already done so, take a look at Joseph Conrad's 'The Secret Agent' for a ripping yarn about Victorian terrorism click.
Democracy, of course, is the best way to prevent despotism, and the reason terrorism can never serve or represent democracy is that acts of terror are essentially fascistic and undemocratic.

If you are going to be noticed by any of the nineteenth century revolutionaries, they don't come much better than Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Heinzen met the former, and fell out with the latter. Here is a little bit of history click which sheds a lot of light on Heinzen and his beliefs and methods and is written by Engels. It is a excoriating critique of Heinzen's woolly thinking (see below on Women!). Having read the Woman book, I am apt to agree with Friedrich. Here is a neat summing up in one paragraph that seems to nail him:
With Herr Heinzen, they have neither sense nor reason, because they take the form of quite arbitrarily conceived, obtusely bourgeois visions of putting the world to rights; because there is no mention of a connection between these measures and historical development; because Herr Heinzen is not in the least concerned about the material feasibility of his proposals; because it is not his aim to formulate industrial necessities but on the contrary to overturn them by decree.

Lenin speaking before the workers of the Putilov factory in Petrograd
by Isaac Izrailevich Brodsky 1870

Apart from annoying genuine radicals and dabbling in the promotion of violence, Heinzen hitched his horse to the wagon of feminism. Uninvited, of course, and incompetently. He wrote the wonderfully-titled 'The Rights of Women and the Sexual Relations', click which really underestimated the struggle women have, and over-values gallantry as a male default that will automatically kick in when the day comes for women to assume their freedom/emancipation. Heinzen claims women can't be fully emancipated while any man lives in bondage or oppression, whilst refusing to give a timeline for the ending of this situation. He urges women to support men in their struggle to win their rights, because then men will return the favour and help women win their liberty from oppression. Like that would ever happen haha! It is easy to mock the piece, as the author has what can only be described as misplaced well-meaning intentions. But these are still as sexist as any other form of alleged feminist rhetoric of the time, because we still have the patronising suggestion that women are natural home makers who 'love gee-gaws' and who do not make natural murderers. Of course, it all depends on what you mean by 'natural'! And what they've done to warrant homicide.

The preface to this edition of 1891 click mentions Ms Zakrzewska and her 1860 work 'Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor' (sic), click which was, and I quote 'A book that ought to be read by anybody interested in the solution to the woman question'. The solution to the woman question reminds me of the old feminist joke that goes something like: If they can put a man on the moon, why can't they put them all there?'.

 

Neal Armstrong - the first of many??

When George came back to the UK and started mixing with intellectuals who dabbled in politics, imagine how impressive it would have sounded when he told them he knew the likes of Garrison, Zakrzewska and Heinzen. Perhaps he laid it on thickly to create a buzz around his travels and time in the wilderness, after bigging up his time on the mean streets of Manchester, in the role of a Robin Hood figure redistributing wealth in his own, small way. His time as a political activist was short and not particularly influential. But he kept a copy of Heinzen's 'The Rights of Women' on his bookshelf, probably catalogued under 'humour'. It resides with George's Pierre Coustillas now, which somehow seems fitting.

Commonplace 133  George & Role Models. PART ONE.

One of the many enigmas of George Gissing is that though he mixed occasionally with fairly left wing revolutionary figures, none of the belief that things had to change in favour of democracy rubbed off on him. In fact, as the modern Conservatives and Neocons know (see Commonplace 121) his political trajectory was unremittingly downhill towards the right wing. Why is this? Was it the throwback thinking of one out of step with his times who couldn't square the circle of modern life, and so scurried back to ancient despotic regimes - the Romans - for his moral compass? Or was it something more personal? Was the experience of being a convicted thief who had served time such a personal burden to carry, and did it afflict him like stigmata marking him out to himself as inferior, when he compared himself to the people he wanted to impress? Was that few weeks in prison enough to reduce him to a craven heap who had to out-conservative the conservatives in order to prove his worth to them? Or to himself? Hmm.

A George lookalike??

George's father proved himself a liberal with strong sympathy for the disadvantaged. Politics gave Mr Gissing Snr a platform to demonstrate his concern for disadvantaged women - girls who had fallen through the cracks because they lacked support systems. Perhaps George arrived in Manchester fired with liberal zeal to do good, but it soon waned and dribbled away. Some do-gooders expect gratitude and recognition for their good deeds. Maybe if George crowed about his social work people might ask awkward questions about how he was funding his philanthropy. Perhaps it had all been guilt at his father's death that led him to want to carry on the good work in his father's footsteps. The legend has it that he only broke the law to help someone in want, which is a massive rationalization: getting a job and earning the same trifling amount that he stole was a viable option to one brimming over with energy and capability. Maybe he thought the class he aspired to join settled their financial problems by stealing from others? Maybe they do haha. Still, the greatest 'sin' he committed was getting caught... according to those who choose to let him off the hook and blame Marianne aka Nell for his crime spree. That's spree - he stole many times, and it wasn't just money.

Apart from his father, who were the other good influences he might have chosen as role models but didn't, but was able to make some use of?

Proposed Monument to the Peterloo fallen designed by Artist and Satirist George Cruikshank  (1792-1878) - it's weird to think he was alive the same time as George. click for more.

Manchester, where George went to study in preparation for an academic life, was already famed for its links to political thought. In George's time, you couldn't throw a stick without hitting someone with a revolutionary bent in Manchester, that hotbed of left wing political activism. It had been on the cutting edge of the Rise of Demos for over a hundred years click. Fred Engels had lived and worked in Manchester; the Co-operative movement was started here; the Unitarian Movement was formed in Manchester, and the infamy of the Peterloo Massacre click helped ensure the city and Political Activism would be forever united. Hell, on the road where George once lived there is even a bar called Revolution, so maybe things haven't changed. George's general practitioner, Adolphe Wahltuch, whose practice was just up the road from George's Oxford Road digs, and who probably treated George for syphilis, was a famous dissenter and rebel. Here is his 1907 obituary, so you will see how he was a quietly revolutionary figure who did not let adversity warp his dedication to making a difference to his community:

After prison, George was offered the support of well-wishers - both friends of the family and Manchester people who sympathised with his plight - to start afresh in a new country: America. Boston was to be his destination. It was considered the most civilized city in the US, so he was off to a good start in a place where his natural interests might be appreciated and developed. HG Wells, who got to know George reasonably well, claimed George actually thought up the scheme himself, and volunteered to go, always intending to make it a flying visit. As George always had an inflated opinion of his own capacity to outdo his peers, he may well have thought he could make a killing either financially or in terms of fame, and return from the States in triumph as a total success, his failure at Owens College behind him and his decision to move towards criminal activity vindicated.

Published in Massachusetts c 1850

It was in Boston that he came under the influence of William Lloyd Garrison. Being under Garrison's wing would have been a great opportunity to study politics. He joined the anti-slavery movement when he was 25, and went on to become a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society. After success in that cause, Garrison moved on to the cause of the suffragists. He is also remembered as a celebrated newspaper man, being the editor of pro-abolitionist The Liberator. His anti-slavery stance often brought him close to personal danger, and accusations that he was a traitor. In 1877, Garrison visited England for the last time; George came back from America late that summer, never to set foot across the pond again.

Through Garrison, George met Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska, a physician specialising in paediatric and women's health, at a time when female doctors were rarities, and women's and children's health was not seen as something in need of a specialism. This interesting website click gives an impression of a woman who marched to the beat of her own drum, a pioneer of feminism who was intellectually far superior to most of the men she met, George included. Her grave marker states: Skilful and humane physician. Founder of the New Hampshire Hospital For Women and Children. What a gal.

According to the Heroic Life Volume One, she ran something of a salon with many intellectuals in attendance and George enjoyed himself in this small group, no doubt flagged as the celebrated academic from Manchester, which may or may not have been a good thing - meeting anyone who had intel on his life of crime would have been embarrassing - and who is to say this didn't happen, because something sent him fleeing off from Waltham (See Commonplace 77).

It might be argued that, in relation to these people who made such an impact on their times and who worked for the greater good, the paltry work of a middle-brow English writer seems to pale into insignificance. After all, George had showed such promise both at school and at Owens College, enough for Great Things to be expected of him. What George lacked was commitment - to a cause, an ideal, to the wonder of life in all its infinitely perverse varieties. Should we blame it on the Pessimists, or was George always going to be a fence-sitter? It seems such a waste of potential. However, that is the Joy of George - he speaks for the fence-sitting, pessimistic, non-joiner in who can't summon up enough gumption to follow a cause because he has faith in nothing, not even his own abilities, and wouldn't waste his time on following anyone who might have helped him out of his moral ambiguity.

It was through Ms Zakrzewska that George met another activist, Karl Heinzen, a man so stuffed full of commitment and enthusiasm for change, the write ups couldn't possibly do him justice click. However, not all of George's associates were the sort of role model to be followed. Perhaps some of George's fence-sitting was down to mixing with the likes of Heinzen.

JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO TAKE A SQUINT AT HEINZEN'S MISGUIDED THOUGHTS ON THE REVOLUTION, AND WHAT HE THOUGHT WOMEN NEEDED. THAT'S RIGHT; ANOTHER MAN TELLING US WHAT WE NEED.

Commonplace 132  George & His Contemporaries - Paul Gauguin.

When appraising their contribution to whatever it is that we call their endeavours, writers are usually compared to other writers; George called writing 'Art', and so it is. In a time of such creative ferment as was the late nineteenth century, when all manner of forms of self-expression and creativity were being extended, painters often offer an interesting insight to the prevailing ideas and attitudes of the time. Paul Gauguin, who died in the same year as George, and probably from the same cause, is possibly the most obvious of his contemporaries from the visual Arts to explore. The two had a great deal in common, and maybe both have left behind a similar quality of artistic legacy: not quite top tier, but on the way to it. Just as our man is no George Eliot, and Gauguin is no Vincent van Gogh, for both lacked what might be termed 'true genius', both our George and Paul Gauguin offer much to learn about how artists involve themselves in the noble struggle to make a living from Art, whilst delivery the very best they can do with the talents they have.

Self Portrait 1893

Everyone knows Gauguin's style: his luscious Tahitian girls with their inscrutable faces and exploited nudity, their skimpy sarongs and unselfconscious sexuality, are always popular. We have the idea Gauguin loved the islands he painted; that he was some sort of artistic David Attenborough visiting remote places for inspiration and to bring back visual truths for our edification; we, who will never visit these remote places might learn something of the ethnography of the place, and maybe even something spiritual from the work. Utter tosh, of course. Remember the Slumming in Commonplace 128. George enjoyed and the use he made of his anthropological excursions? Gauguin travelled to Polynesia to pursue subjects for his painting, but was not totally happy there. The Eden-like beauty he expected to find had been adulterated by the intrusion of western capitalism, disease, and resource exploitation click. However, he was galvanized by the women and the simplicity of their sexuality. He returned to France, and worked for a few years increasingly at odds with his peers. By 1893, he had no choice but to return to Polynesia, and spend the last years of his life as something of a local attraction, but impoverished. Money was so tight he had to work as a clerk to make ends meet, and relied on donations from friends to maintain his existence.

There was a Tate Gallery exhibition of Gauguin's work entitled 'Gauguin: Man and Myth' in 2010-11. Its rationale was to suggest Gauguin developed a legend of being a 'noble savage' with innate, primal talents for painting, and he did this so he would be taken as a savant of modernism, and therefore sell a shed-load of paintings. Whereas, in reality, Gauguin was an errant bourgeois capitalist who had abandoned his family to live life of an Artist and who made the most of his talent by mystifying everyone about his early life and an over-valued idea of his own importance. (Sound familiar?) By claiming to have an appreciation of the pagan and primitive of Tahitian society, he could easily be mistaken for a man in touch with spiritual truths about the exotic lives lived there. Many who have admired his work would be surprised to learn he did some of the famous paintings in his Paris studio, between trips to Polynesia.

1889 (and see more at click)

In the UK, the dominance of the formal, staged 'Academy' picture was stifling creativity - fame and payment depended on being approved of in the market place of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Secretly, all Artists who reckon they have as much ability and talent as Turner, or Moore, or Hepworth - even the 'New Brits' who are now really 'Old Brits': immensely rich and irrelevant - want to be accepted into the Summer Show. It's like winning an Oscar. But, the real cutting edge Art is never suitable for a Summer Show unless it reduces itself down to something in a picture frame. Just imagine the struggle Marina Abramovic has fitting her thing into a frame.

It would both naive and wrong to think painters such as van Gogh were not also business people. The letters we have from van Gogh's correspondence with his art dealer brother Theo are full of ideas about marketing the works, and prices and costs of materials. As van Gogh had himself starting out trading in Art, he knew how fashion and financial considerations fuel the Art market. The knock-on effect of this is that dealers often play it safe and stick to what is middle of the road, which makes it difficult for new and unknown Artists to break through, especially if they are attempting something avant garde or challenging. Both van Gogh and Gauguin were up against this sort of brick wall. If we think of the difficulty George experienced in getting his first work published, eventually having to fund publication himself, it's clear that there are correlations between visual Arts and literary Arts, where the work has to pass through an agent as intermediary. It is the same in all the Arts, with safe work much easier to sell and even display, than cutting edge work. Event the Tate having a Gauguin exhibition is a nod to this, being as it was a very safe money-spinning show, and has very little to do with what is going on in Art, now.

PG in 1891 taken by click

Gauguin shared George's fondness for redacting his diaries and jotting journals. Both wanted to build a reputation they chose, rather than let posterity discover their inner workings authentically, from an original source. Gauguin had a keen eye on his legacy, and made many jokes and references to it in his diaries. In around 1886, when he took up pottery, he thought his work was exceptional, but would be too 'artistic' to be understood or sold. Shades of George, here, who was convinced of something similar when his own work didn't sell.

These two share a sensibility that seems contemptuous of women: here is Gauguin:
I work and live more or less alone. That's to say, for a model I have a young girl... aged 14 - weight about 150lbs - who is very good at making a fire, doing the washing and smoking cigarettes. (It's pointless asking any more of a Tahitian woman.) George would have thought pretty much the same thing about any 'home-grown exotic' working class girl.

Marriage was a kind of Hell for both men. Both rationalised their motives for rejecting and abandoning bourgeois normality, but both was deeply conservative at heart. For all his time spent living in basic conditions, Gauguin was happy to return to Paris and live a conventional life there. George's brush with bohemianism lasted a couple of college terms. In this way both were very like the sorts of young men George criticised as being pointless, but both turned to the Arts to make themselves appear to not be superfluous or banal, adopting intellectual personae to camouflage their inadequacies. Both were reasonably successful at this.

Vincent van Gogh Painting Sunflowers by Paul Gauguin 1888

Gauguin dabbled in writing and publishing, taking after his own father, who was for a time, a journalist. His illustrated books and jottings perform the function of his Commonplace Book - the sort of thing George made use of. As do all discerning sorts who can read and write. These include revelations of the tricks he used to attract interest, even controversy, in his work, by making the titles intentionally mysterious or paradoxical, and very little to do with what he was painting or sculpting - which tended to be much more 'painterly' and not fixed by subject. There is a sense he is taking the piss here, and relishing the confusion or effort people will have to waste to understand the title of the piece by looking for clues in the painting. A prototype Surrealist or Dadaist? George always thought up odd names (after an earlier trend much over-used by Charles Dickens) and this is similar territory - making fun of readers he thinks are dumber than they are, by making them wonder about choices and meanings, or undercutting their own ideas about characters and their story arcs, or sharing in jokes with the educated who get his Classical references in a way a typical Mudie's library reader might not. 

What George might have lacked was someone he could bounce ideas off - that is, someone he saw as an equal, but there is no-one of that ilk ever mentioned in the written accounts of his doings. Imagine how Gauguin and van Gogh debated Art, and the sort of topics they covered. Or, go and watch this click.