George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

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.