Commonplace 147  George & The Pig and Whistle.

The Pig and Whistle is one of George's slighter, more unconvincing and improbable short stories, from The House of Cobwebs, the collection published after his death. Nothing much happens in it and no great nuggets of insight or wisdom are imparted - it's a bland piece in a very low key. Download for free here click.

Though it is set in a small country pub, it seems to have been conjured up by someone with limited experience of the publican trade, written for people who have never ventured out of a large conurbation and who probably nurse romantic, idealised views on what constitutes 'country life'. However, it does contain one of those very rare Gissing gems: a more or less happy ending, though the author can't come out and say as much.

It concerns a maths teacher, Mr Ruddiman, who exploits the vulnerability of a thirty-something spinster, Ms Fouracres, who lives in a country pub with her dipsomaniac father, the landlord of the Pig and Whistle. Maths man's strong maths point is setting his pupils problems to solve that focus on budgets and economics. He is generally dissatisfied with his position in life, partly because he has no prospects for advancement in his school, and he is 45 years old. Underachievement is his middle name, but he is shrewd enough to not look a gift horse in the mouth when it arrives in the shape of Ms. Fouracres. He has visited the inn as a day tripper, but then one summer, he decides to spend his holidays in the Pig and Whistle inn, a very small establishment situated on the outskirts of the town of Woodbury. (Presumably, not to be confused with the picturesque Devon village of Woodbury, a place George knew well.) Though Ruddiman - a name guaranteed to be mocked mercilessly by his students - can hardly be said to have his eye on Ms Fouracres at the start of his holiday, he spends quite a bit of time talking to her. His interest is not captured by her physical attributes (she doesn't have any), or her cracking conversation (ditto) but because she can run a small country pub with a certain amount of aplomb. And she always refers to him as 'sir', so she knows her place - or, as George said that his second wife didn't, she 'knew which side of her bread is buttered'.


Old Fouracres has an unbelievable fixed idea that he once met the Prince of Wales, but this part of the story is so dumb and dull, we need not linger on it. It is really only a device to 1) get him out of the pub overnight (and Ruddiman's hair so he can have a turn behind the bar to see if he likes the publican trade); 2) kill him off, and leave the single daughter with the prospect of running the pub on her own. George lets us know Ms Fouracres is a good housekeeper (did he ever see a woman he couldn't classify by her home-making skills??) who can balance the books and work with an eye to eeking out a limited budget - George's kind of gal. She is a Superwoman who can tend the garden and guard the poultry (and despatch them with her bare hands no doubt); according to her creator 'demonstrative mirth was not one of her characteristics'.

On the night the landlord goes off gallivanting after the Prince of Wales, Ruddiman helps out behind the bar. And, when the cat's away, the mice do play. He finds he has a liking for the work. George's usual contempt for shop-keeping doesn't kick in, but we have the snobbery he represents when Ms Fouracres makes the distinction that her father has bad-mouthed the pub by calling it a 'pot-house' whereas she prefers to call it an inn. After all, it has two rooms for rent. Ruddiman, the creep, agrees, because he is a rampant snob like Ms Fouracres (and their creator), and he is on the make. The more he gets his feet under her table, the more he likes the thought of running a country inn.

Then sudden news comes that the father is dead. In what is probably the least convincing element of the tale, old Mr Fouracres has drowned in a pond (what is it with George and drownings?? Many of his tales feature death by water). His daughter hardly misses a beat when she finds out - just a slight touch of weeping, as befits a (would-be) lady. There is no sign she is bereaved or distressed, after she returns from claiming/identifying the corpse. Luckily, distant relations deal with the messy bit of the wake and burial (he owned a pub, died within a day's travel of it, and yet the wake is conducted miles from home!), but maybe Ms F is a cold fish and has no familial feelings.

But George does not allow the grass to grow under Ruddiman's feet. Very swiftly, after assessing that a mere woman can't possibly function without a man and assuming she hasn't got the wit to employ one to do the heavy lifting, he makes her an offer she can't refuse: he will ditch the teaching and join her in running the inn/pot-house as her assistant. She demurs, so he ratchets up the pressure and, though it isn't stated baldly, we assume he proposes marriage, they join together in matrimony or its approximate, and ride off into the sunset, together.

So what are we to make of this tale? Contentment at one's lot in life is not really George's creative world, is it? The Pig and Whistle is a mini Henry Ryecroft scenario - George, convincing himself that he might enjoy a quiet life in the back of beyond selling beer to random tourists and uncouth locals - with a woman he doesn't love by his side. Tosh, of course, because he never sought out such an existence out of the story (with the exception of having a woman he didn't love by his side haha). Unrealistically, how could they make a living - you would expect a mathematical wizard who loved drawing up fictional national budgets might have realised that. Ruddiman seems to like the stronger female - was George ever hankering after an assertive Wonder Woman to become an assistant to himself, a sort of PA to his talent? This story was written when he was shacked up with Gabrielle Fleury, so perhaps he expected her to step up to that particular plate?

What about the coded names? George liked to give his characters names that held a secret insight - Ruddiman could be a red man (ie red-faced, bucolic, a typical country bumpkin) or it could be an allusion to the British swear word 'ruddy' which is an anodyne form of its rhyming swear word, 'bloody'. Fouracres may be a shrunken version of the mythic 'Forty acres and a mule' associated with the emancipation of the slaves in the US click. We never get to know their first names.

And the Pig and Whistle pub name?
Here (click and click) we see these two terms might originate from a number of sources.

The Pig might be a drinking vessel and the Whistle a bastardization of 'to wassail' - meaning to party party. As you can see from the above Butlin's post cards, partying is close to the hearts of all Brits. And, partying was very much the domain of the Butlin's internment - er, I mean holiday - camps click patronised by the working class, back in the day. These were quintessentially British, like Carry On films, Morrissey, the thwack of leather on willow, Wall's ice cream, warm beer, green suburbs, dog lovers, and old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist... oo, er, I'm channeling former PM John Major now. Time to go.

For George Orwell's views on the Great British Pub click

Commonplace 146 George & The German Hospital.

The original building - picture from the Wellcome Collection.

George claimed not to approve of 'jobbery', a term now fallen out of common parlance (if it was ever in common parlance!) often applied to the political arena, that once described graft or nepotism or back-scratching that gave an unfair advantage over those without useful contacts to help them find preference. The Gissing boys were benefactors of how much their father meant to the Wakefield community when enough money was raised by public subscription to pay for them to be boarders at Lindow Grove School, Alderley Edge (click to see how times have changed at Alderley Edge!). If they hadn't had that bit of jobbery to rely on, they might have all found other paths to follow.

Vlad the Jobber.

George would never have admitted that being given financial help of any kind with school fees for himself and his two brothers was preferential treatment, or that his sisters' education with the school where family friend Lucy Bruce was a governor, might constitute jobbery. Neither would he have considered being offered a letter of introduction to the total stranger Lloyd Garrison (when George ended up in the US after his prison stint), but then George never was a man to think anyone might be helping him or doing him a favour.

So it comes as no surprise to find him neck-deep in denial making use of his contacts when he could. One such occasion was the help he received in 1880 from his German uncle, Paul Rahardt, who had a legitimate right to care at the German Hospital in Dalston. Marianne aka Nell had been suffering from the effects of scrofula, a disease she had probably picked up in her childhood, or teens, and probably needed surgery requiring great skill, and nursing care of the highest order. Nell needed treatment for a tumour on her face. Scrofula is the glandular form of tuberculosis; in scrofula, the glands of the face are particularly susceptible to tumours and lesions. As the procedure involved operating on the inside of the mouth and the top of the throat, great skill is required to operate and keep the patient oxygenated. Postoperative care would focus on maintaining airways and not allowing infected matter to travel to the lungs in particular, or infection occurring to any of the cranial nerves, or onward to the brain.

Facial glands according to Gray. Scrofula could affect any or all of them. 

Worldwide, every large city with a significant German population had its German Hospital. In 1845, London's was constructed in Dalston, with a remit of serving the needs of the large German immigrant population of that part of the city, and any locals who were in urgent need of help. The majority of these would be the general urban poor, but the German was a place that excelled in care for women and children. Marianne would have qualified for reasons of gender and not because she was poor, because in 1880, she was living with her husband and they were both earning a living and so could pay. In fact, even the very poor were willing to pay what they could afford - the pride of the working class is legendary. Only the unemployed and really destitute received totally free care, and that would have been a cause of shame to them.

A full account of the early days is to be found in the British National Archives click and here is some of the history as posted on their website, and I thank them for lending it:

Kaiser Wilhelm Stiftung (German Orphanage). Convalescent homes in Dalston, London, and in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. Associated Hospitals: Convalescent Home, Dalston Lane 1883 - 1908. Convalescent Home, Hitchin, Herefordshire 1908 - 1948. The German Hospital For the last forty years newcomers to Dalston have been surprised to learn that there is a hospital building in their midst which is known as the 'German'. Yet for the first 100 years of its existence there was no such surprise. Originally founded 'for the reception of all poor Germans and others speaking the German Language', the German Hospital also cared for the local English-speaking population in the case of emergencies. It was supported by subscriptions and donations, many from Germany or the German community in England, and run by a dedicated band of German nursing sisters and doctors. And when, in 1948 the Voluntary Hospital became part of the NHS, first as a general hospital and more recently as a psychiatric hospital, the 'German' continued to enjoy both in professional circles and among the general public the highest reputation for skilled staff and hospital care. In the 1840s it is estimated that some 30,000 Germans were living in England, making up by far the largest immigrant community. Many of them lived and worked in poor conditions in the East End of London, where poverty and the language barrier left them little chance to make use of the limited medical resources available at that time. The work of a German pastor and a doctor to establish a hospital for 'poor German Sick' was taken up by the Prussian Ambassador, the Chevalier Bunsen, who succeeded in enlisting the support of the rich and influential in Germany and England, including both Royal Houses, so ensuring that the hospital was built. On 15 October 1845 the German Hospital opened, with just 12 beds. An early outstanding feature of the hospital was the nursing care provided by the Protestant Deaconesses from the Kaiserswerth Institute near Wessendorf. It was their example at the German which prompted Florence Nightingale to visit the hospital on two occasions and then to enrol for training at the Institute in Germany in 1851. New hospital buildings, constructed according to the highest standards in hospital design, were opened in 1864 and provided to be invaluable in the epidemics which swept London in the 1860s and 1870s. The German Royal family took a keen interest in the hospital, as did the von Schroder family who were so often to provide funds for the hospital over the years.

A more recent wing built in 1863 - now (of course) made into apartments.

Dalston was a genteel place at the time the German Hospital first opened its doors, and before the arrival of the railway, it was little more than a rural backwater. An association with helping the sick and needy had been established in that area as long ago as the thirteenth century when a leper hospital was opened around what became Dalston Lane. This was eventually affiliated to St Bartholomew's Church and it might well have once existed on the site on which the German Hospital was built - we know that sites associated with sickness and healing were often recycled and re-used for newer establishments. Similarly, hospitals were often built on old plague pits or cholera pits - for example, Exeter used to have an NHS building built on a cholera pit. The Dalston Infant Orphan Asylum stood on the site immediately before the German was constructed.

The German Hospital is above the word Bartholomew in this Booth Map of 1898

The level of care provided at the German was considered to be of the very best. Miss Nightingale (as all nurses of a certain age hopefully still address Florence Nightingale) was so impressed with the model of care employed there, that she travelled to Kaiserswerth click in Germany and enrolled in the Deaconesses' Institute to learn their craft. From this training she formulated her own approach to nursing care - and the rest, as they say, is history...

According to the website click Lost Hospitals of London:

A Hospital with a particularly complicated history, it was founded in 1845 in Dalston Place, on the south side of Dalston Lane.  It offered free treatment to German-speaking immigrants, regardless of religion or origin, many of whom worked and lived in poor conditions in the East End of London, although it did not discriminate and also cared for English-speakers in emergencies.  In fact, most of its out-patients were the English poor. The Hospital occupied three houses converted from the Dalston Infant Orphan Asylum, and had 12 beds.  By 1850 the building of the North London railway track had progressed through the area; the cutting ran behind the Hospital, severing it from its garden.  This no doubt stimulated the Governors to build new premises in the garden.  The new building opened in 1864, and the Dalston Lane frontage was rented out. The Hospital now had 100 beds with a front entrance in Alma Road (which was renamed  Ritson Road in 1877). Access from Dalston Lane was restored in 1867, when a bridge was built over the railway line.  

This shows part of the existing German Hospital site, and gives a flavour of its size. 

1888 click

Commonplace 145  George & Demos' Alleged Failure to Appreciate The Arts.

The Agony In The Car Park by Grayson Perry 2012

George was of the opinion that the only 'culture' of any merit was the stuff appreciated by the middle and above classes. or those exposed to the influence of the Greeks - though where he stood on the cultural sensibility of the working class Greeks is unknown haha, except we know he considered that Italian 'peasants' were innately much better than their British equivalents. This is an odd point of view, for, as in the case of the visual Arts before his own time, as now, many artists came from humble beginnings, yet made stonking work. In fact, during the Renaissance, the production of painting and sculpture was considered as part of the realm of crafts and artisan services, much as wheelwrighting, shepherding, and straw thatching, and so those who practiced it were not generally assumed to be from wealthy, 'aristocratic' beginnings.

Lais of Corinth by Hans Holbein 1526

It was only with the rise of a nouveau riche middle class, with its greater disposable income, and with more bare walls to fill (and more social peers to impress), that Art fell victim to those with snobbish, reactionary tendencies that see things in terms of sorting culture into high and low, good and bad, worthy and vile. In reality, it became a sheep and goats division into worth money or not; only hardcore aficionados realised or admitted we all either like a work of Art, or we don't, we appreciate what it does to us, or we don't, and any other division is largely bullshit. I can admire the work of certain Artists, without liking their work and so never seek it out - Cezanne, for example, leaves me cold, but I admire his craft and value his contribution to Modern Art. However, I would never have a Cezanne print on my wall. But I would have a Tretchikoff to accompany my Flandrin, Warhol, Hockney, Corbet, Rodchenko, Kahlo, Blake, Paul Nash, Chapman Brothers, Van Gogh, Beuys, Turner, Grant Wood and Durer posters. If there was wall space.

Chinese Girl aka The Green Lady
by Vladimir Tretchikoff 1952-3

This insistence that we have to apply a monetary value to Art is a form of cultural fascism, and has reduced most of us to only appreciating Art that is promoted as 'good' by the likes of dealers who price the work, or whoever it is that decides what should be allotted gallery space in the latest blockbuster mega exhibition at the Tate Gallery (or whatever equivalent capital city's main gallery). Sadly, the general public rarely gets to see works that are truly representative of what is 'Art', now, and don't have a say in what shows are mounted at major galleries. Anything challenging or revolutionarily new is frozen out and kept marginalised, for fear it won't put bums on seats and make money for the gallery. This sort of excluded Art is then assumed to be unpopular and that's the Catch 22 justification for not putting on shows that are mainly about making money comes into play. But how can it become popular if no-one gets to view it? Anyhoo, Art is further commodified by those who choose what sponsorship underpins all large Art shows, ensuring Art becomes nothing more than a master-stroke of advertising copy for Big Corporations. Shame on us all.

Of course, this is another way of separating a group of people into 'them' and 'us' - a necessary thing to do only for those usually insecure types with a need to manifest their social status. To some, having a refined sensibility for Art is dubiously seen as a marker of 'aristocracy' in the sense that George meant it (as in superior to his fellows), but the fact is the producers of Art rarely see themselves as anything like aristocratic. In fact, most Artists want to be democratically available to the widest possible audience, and shudder at the sort of elitism George championed. But George used his affection for Art as a cloak to mask his less than refined credentials - his very humble beginnings could not be exculpated by wealth (he didn't have money) and his lack of literary success could not be addressed by his own talents, neither could he demonstrate any superior attributes (not having any!) so the only place he could make a stand was in proclaiming himself to be an Artist, above the ordinary and commonplace, with special talents only a few could appreciate. As it turned out, very few. But the ego is a very diligent Jiminy Cricket on our shoulders, and so he couldn't help himself out of this world view, once he was in it. Poor George seems to have missed out on all the modern Art he might have viewed in his travels, presumably because it was radical and challenging and required the viewer to form new patterns of thinking about all things creative - ideas being one of the modern concepts inherent in the new work. George was not one to stick his neck out and pronounce an opinion, for fear of being wrong. But, old masters/mistresses of Art were universally acclaimed and so George just hitched himself to their wagon, knowing his opinion was not expected to be original or intrinsically his own point of view. In fact, to deviate from the received wisdom amounted to cultural heresy, and George would never have sanctioned that.

Boy and Dog by Jean Michel Basquiat 1982

To hijack culture and introduce artificial parameters and boundaries and to make hard and fast rules about what is accepted as good/bad, or valuable/worthless, is a thought crime. I can't think of a single Artist I have ever read about who is made or is making work for the enjoyment of a few rich toffs, no matter how 'cultured' these toffs be. Yes, they want to make a living from Art, but few want to appeal to people who don't genuinely 'get' them and their work. And, as aesthetic sensibility is cultural and not genetic, anyone can be a receptive and appreciative audience for Art, as long as they are exposed to it, and get to see a lot of it - and from an early age - and providing no-one puts them off by criticising their personal preferences. Most ordinary folk don't 'get' Art because no-one has ever talked them through an Artwork, and opened up its possibilities, perhaps because the self-proclaimed 'aristocrats' want to keep it all for themselves.

Portrait of Peter Higgs (he of the boson and shared winner with Francois Englert of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics) by Ken Currie 2008 click

And, so, the bottom line is, you either like Art, or you don't; liking it is not a sign of special skills or uncanny capabilities, inborn nobility or intellectual insights, just as not liking Greek poetry or football or oysters is not a sign you are a numbskull dingbat. Because, what we are really talking about here is TASTE - which means preference.

Laying Down the Law by Sir Edwin Landseer 1840

However there is one group who probably find Art quite a challenge to truly understand, and that is your sociopath. These are the outlaws from society who find it difficult to empathise and identify with their peers, and who have to struggle to make emotional life compute; the sort of people who make unsuccessful petty thieves, occasional wife beaters, some-time adulterers, habitual liars, who are self-centred and secretive and who are generally incapable of holding down a steady job. Hmm...

Commonplace 144  George & The Shame of Serial Publication.

Poor George. He moaned about not being published then when he was asked for contributions to magazines and periodicals, apart from the Russian experience when he wrote for Turgenev, he complained about being published at all. One of his particular bugbears was the serialisation of his novel A Life's Morning.

Effie Gray (reading the Cornhill) by her husband,
John Everett Millais 1877

Let us begin at the beginning, and here we pay tribute to Michael Collie and his excellent George Gissing: A Bibliography (1975). Here is what he has to say about it:
According to the letters Gissing started to write A Life's Morning in August 1885, though in the Diary he noted that it had been written between September and November of that year. Despite the fact that Smith, Elder liked it, there were snags to be overcome including, according to Roberts, the request that Gissing should rewrite the ending. Eventually it was published in the Cornhill in twelve monthly instalments between January 1888 and December 1888 and in book form on 15 November 1888 (Diary) in what, for Gissing, and Smith, Elder, was a normal edition of 500 copies. Adams confirms that Gissing received £50 for the serial and £50 for the book.
Probably as soon as it was written and certainly by the time it was published, Gissing recognized A Life's Morning as one of his weaker works. The Diary, with the mention of his having received proofs to correct at two quite different times, perhaps provides the clue to the fact that he revised it. If so the novel cannot have been very satisfactory when he wrote it hurriedly in 1885 before beginning Demos. With Isobel Clarendon, A Life's Morning has to be regarded as apprentice work.

'Apprentice work' is probably Collie being kind. A Life's Morning is a slight and unmoving tale containing some pretty rotten purple prose, and some fairly forgettable characters. Pretentious, vapid and boring, would be too harsh, but...

Cornhill magazine was published between 1860-1975, and its name comes from a part of the financial area of the City of London, a ward that has many illustrious associations with the likes of Sir Christopher Wren, Pepys, Mrs Thrale, Samuel Johnson and the Stock Exchange. A link between a Victorian popular magazine with a readership of inquiring minds and the intelligentsia of the previous century was that Cornhill is where the first ever London coffee house was sited in 1652.

This is allegedly the site
of the original coffee house, click

Coffee, of course, was the drug of choice back in the days when Samuel Johnson and James Boswell did their thing with Mrs Thrale, and coffee houses were the places revolutionaries and Artists, scientists and philosophers met to introduce the Enlightenment to Britain. Cornhill Magazine maybe did not have such an impact on British cultural life, but, as its first editor was William Makepeace Thackeray, creator of Vanity Fair and Barry Lyndon perhaps it was more dedicated to amusement than George would have liked. Thackeray often went under the pseudonym M.A.Titmarsh, a Freudian slip of a name evoking both Oedipus and breast paraphilia, though maybe he just wanted to be paid to edit and make contributions, and thought the word 'tit'  might appeal to a certain readership. The sort of readership that might be described as tits - in English vernacular, a tit is a useless person - usually male, natch. Thackeray's The Snobs of England by One of Themselves click is a satire on all things snobbish, but like many satires, is a secret homage. Free download here click

Cornhill Magazine was published by Smith, Elder, so George didn't have to go far to ply his wares. Serial publication was a good move for writers who found it difficult to find an audience, but George tended to see it as akin to back-door advertising copy. After all, there was no guaranteeing the calibre of its readership, or where that magazine would surface - as periodicals are easy to swap and pass round, they might find their way into some very dubious coat pockets - people who don't know their anapaests click from their elbows (a reference to George's dismissive remarks about the sort of scum who don't understand Greek poetry made to Morley Roberts). But, as all printed matter was expensive, people tended to hang on to the magazines, and pass them round to anyone trusted enough to read them with care. (My inner city junior school gave us a 'how to read a book' lesson designed to teach us how to hold a book, turn a page, and store books - things were SO different in the 1950s!).

Study at a Reading Desk by Sir Frederick Leighton 1877

To keep their copies in good condition, readers would often have the year's editions bound in hard covers, so as to keep it on a bookshelf. I have a two volume copy of the Cornhill Magazine for 1888, each volume containing 6 months of editions, and the first piece out of the starting block in January is George's first two chapters of A Life's Morning. By February, George's next portion closes the month. The title at the top of the magazine page reads: The Cornhill Magazine January 1888 A Life's Morning by the author of Demos, Thyrza, etc. In pencil, some previous owner has added 'by George Gissing'. To be honest, my copy looks like it's never been read. I wonder why...

The Japanese Mask
by Gustave Claude Coutois 1884

On this first page, we have one of George's more purple passages, and, sadly, a sign of what is to come in the rest of the thing, which, in the case of the magazine version, will take a whole year to unfold. Will George's reading public have been on tenterhooks queuing at WH Smith's each month eager to purchase the latest edition?? You be the judge: George writes, on the first page (the second paragraph!!) apropos the male protagonist, Wilfred:
He had been delicate in childhood, and the stage of hardy naturalism which interposes itself between tender juvenility and the birth of self-consciousness did not in his case last long enough to establish his frame in the vigour to which it was tending. There was nothing sickly about him; it was only an excess of nervous vitality that would not allow body to keep pace with mind. He was a boy to be, intellectually, held in leash, said the doctors. But that was easier said than done. What system of sedatives could one apply to a youngster whose imagination wrought him to a fever during a simple walk by the seashore, who if books were forcibly withheld consoled himself with the composition of five-act tragedies, interspersed with lyrics to which he supplied original strains.  Well, there was obviously one thing Wilf could have tried... but his parents might not have wanted to catch him doing it.

Fortunately, Cornhill Magazine did not rely on George's offering for its continuing success. After the first installment finally closed, readers could enjoy a piece on the evolution (!) of the Theory of Evolution. melding fact with mild satire, but linking Charles Darwin to his grandfather, Erasmus, via the interesting things both had to say about plants - Erasmus helped translate the works of Linnaeus and everyone knows about him click. Then there is a short story about a girl from the Hard, the seafaring side of Portsmouth, who exudes charm, sass and intelligence. Cass, for that is her name, meets a sad end when she tries to save a love rival in a lodgings fire, only to find her friend has already departed, having rushed out of the building without raising the alarm. Alas, Cass is too late to save herself. It is a competent and diverting short story in two brief chapters - handy if you only have a few moments to invest in your reading, written in plain prose with no pretensions, and Cass has a touch of George's Hester from Fleet-Footed Hester about her. A case of in and out with a thought-provoking tale ably delivered, with no sign the author has swallowed a dictionary.

The Three Sisters by Balthus 1954

Among those of George's peers who made contributions to the Cornhill was Arthur Conan Doyle. Remembered now mostly for his Sherlock Holmes, Doyle himself was more interested in writing historical fiction. Though not attributed as its author, Doyle's short story 'John Huxford's Hiatus' appeared in June 1888. To read it and so much more about ACD, click. Doyle was a committed magazine contributor, having written to augment his meagre doctor's salary when he was a GP in Portsmouth - at a house not far from The Hard. By the time this story was published, Doyle had been a doctor on a whaling expedition, had worked in many medical settings including as a surgeon in ophthalmology, lived in Germany for a year, been to university, worked on a ship that went to Guinea in West Africa, married, become a spiritualist, and brought the world Sherlock Holmes. In short, Doyle had given himself something to write about. If George has any literary faults (haha) it is that much of what he wrote came from a very limited perspective. He had not really lived enough or extended himself enough to write truly captivating scenes, and his social circle was extremely limited, so his creations were often stifled and restrained. And he sometimes focused on subjects that were going out of fashion. As Morley Roberts and even, to some extent, George's brother Algernon, proved, there was a broad interest in adventure stories and mysteries and a growing band of potential readers desperate for something engaging to read, people who would not have climbed over the likes of Doyle in order to get their mitts on A Life's Morning, even in manageable bite-sized monthly chunks. Poor George was too preoccupied and hamstrung by his need to produce 'Art' to give us something a little more... accessible/entertaining than this...

THREE Volumes!!!!!!

Commonplace 143  George & His Contemporaries: Anthony Trollope.

With images from Augustus Edwin Mulready (1844-1905).

George could have learnt a lot from reading a biography of Anthony Trollope (1815-1882). Born into a modest family but with financial 'expectations' (in the Dickens sense) to a mother who never bonded with him, and a father who was severe and aloof, young Anthony and an older brother were subjected to the humiliation of being sent to a public school as day-boys - the sorts of pupils who were obviously too poor to board/pay fees. They were also poorly dressed and wore shoddy shoes and both were ritually humiliated for it by their peers.

Flower Seller 1882

Mr Trollope Snr's expectations were eventually dashed and he had to carry on failing to make a living in Law. He did not do well, mainly because he was a truculent sort of cove who did not make enough contacts to earn a living at his calling. But Mrs Trollope – Fanny to her friends - was a woman in love with spending money; she sent Anthony and his brother to Winchester school, a prestigious establishment that routinely prepared young men for Oxford universities. Tom, the older of the Trollopes, was made a prefect. Encouraged by their mother to make himself responsible for Anthony’s behaviour, Tom applied daily thrashings and generally made his little brother’s life a misery, and Anthony never forgave him or their parents, for making his early years so unhappy.

Eventually, things deteriorated further. The family went to America to make money and poor Anthony was left behind alone in the UK, more or less to take care of himself. Disaster struck when his school fees were not paid and all credit in shops was stopped, leaving Anthony homeless during the holidays and all but destitute. In his autobiography, Anthony says he contemplated suicide as a way out of his dire situation. Anthony was removed from Winchester and returned to Harrow, where he was bullied once more, his studies suffered, and he became withdrawn and miserable. Fortunately, Fanny Trollope (one of the great names of Eng. Lit) managed to write some best-selling books and saved the day. However, much of that money she made was eaten up by creditors, and the Trollopes had to decamp to Belgium to escape them – after leaving Anthony alone in the UK once more.

Little Flower Sellers 1887

When he left school, Trollope was virtually uneducated, and academically unfit for most work – far too undeveloped for university. When he was 19, his mother found him a place in the Post Office, as a clerk. Initially, he was over-worked and well under-paid, like thousands of young men in similar positions. For example, William, George's brother, who worked in a Manchester bank, wrote in his letters that he worked sometimes 16-hour days and wasn't paid enough to keep himself in decent clothes and had to borrow from his mother - he earned about as much as Trollope, who once wrote how he found it difficult to '...live in London, keep up my character as a gentleman, and be happy, on £90 a year'. George was never, ever, that hard up, yet he harped on about his years of poverty haha. 

Anthony stayed with the Post Office for most of his working life, but he was lucky to find relief from the monotony by being appointed as Post Office Surveyor's clerk in Ireland, a job where he was able to mix office duties with official expeditions to places of natural beauty. He found a wife, settled to family life, and took up writing. He moved back to England, and it was when in Salisbury in Wiltshire that he found the inspiration for the first of what would become known as the Barchester novels. He maintained a gruelling daily round of being at his writing desk for 5.30am, stopped at 9.30, 2,500 words later, to take breakfast. He then travelled to London to do his day job, working at his Post Office desk from 11.30am-5pm, before setting off for an evening's socialising. Imagine George putting in that amount of effort! We know he resented working at proper jobs that took up his precious reading time, and even the few hours a day he did at teaching irked him beyond belief. 

A London Jo at The End of the Day 1884

Of the Salisbury visit, the source of the fictional Barchester, in 1852: '...wandering there one summer evening ... I conceived the story of The Warden' (the first Barchester novel) but later said it might have been based on any cathedral town like Hereford, Exeter, Gloucester or Canterbury. whatever the geographical source, these novels proved very popular, and moved Trollope into the main league of literary lions, though he never made a terrific fortune from his work. He kept up his Post Office work, so he was never financially hard up, but in an age when success was purely measured in monetary worth, it bothered him to know he was not as rich as Wilkie Collins, or Charles Dickens. He married and had two sons - the marriage was to last until his death, but he took up with a young woman, Kate Field, an American actress, journalist and pioneering feminist; it was a platonic friendship, conducted mainly by letter, Trollope's rival for Kate Field's affections was his literary rival, Wilkie Collins. To find out more about this fascinating woman, here is a free copy of a biography written in 1899 by one of her friends click. 

Uncared for 1871

Trollope is famed for his satirical stories critiquing society's ordinary people, whatever their class. 

Writing successful novels came a little too easy to him, and so he grew restless for more fame and renown. In 1867, he resigned from the Post Office after taking up the editorship of the monthly St Paul's Magazine, where he remained for 4 years. He made many short story contributions to the magazine, as did Fanny (who went on to write over 40 novels herself), but the magazine failed. Maybe the readership grew tired of all that work by the Trollopes? Undeterred, Anthony took up politics - the Liberal cause. It ended badly, of course.   

A London Newsboy c 1884

In 1875, Trollope wrote probably his most famous novel: 'The Way We Live Now'. Of which, he said:

Nevertheless a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. Instigated, I say, by some such reflections as these, I sat down in my new house to write The Way We Live Now.

Listen to the novel here, as a free download click. And think of Dyce Lashmar (George's Our Friend the Charlatan).

Anthony Trollope is not widely read now, though, like George, he has his dedicated followers who guard their much-loved volumes like rare treasures. In the www world of quotes, here are a few of Trollope's which might have guided George through the choppy waters of his life's voyage. Some actually sound as if George had said them! From this site click

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

This habit of reading, I make bold to tell you, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.

Of all needs a book has, the chief need is to be readable.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

Little bits of things make me do it; — perhaps a word that I said and ought not to have said ten years ago; — the most ordinary little mistakes, even my own past thoughts to myself about the merest trifles. They are always making me shiver.

AND, FINALLY... George, summed up in a few words:

Throughout the world, the more wrong a man does, the more indignant is he at wrong done to him.

Commonplace 142 George & Experts on Women.

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth. Simone de Beauvoir.

The Caress by Fernand Khnopff 1896

George consulted many male thinkers about the thorny issue of how to win the hearts and minds of women. One of the many things he seemed most convinced of was that he could add to this debate. This, in the face of some spectacular failures in the cases of his first two wives. And despite his pronouncement that the average woman was about as clever as a male idiot. And he was the man who wrote to his sister. February 3rd 1883 (when she was 15 and he was 25):  You girls nowadays have astonishing advantages over your mothers and grandmothers; it is only to be hoped you will make use of it for the only real end of education - improvement of character. If you only could know how much of the wretchedness of humanity is occasioned by the folly, pig-headedness, ignorance, incapacity of women you would rejoice to think of all these new opportunities for mental & moral training.

Knowledge of human psychology was not one of George's specialisms, and he didn't develop much of a sympathy for human beings in general. In the absence of experienced peers to consult - remember, in his early twenties, the closest confidant with whom he could discuss these things was man-wife Eduard Bertz, a man with very limited knowledge of the subject - George turned to published authors who claimed to be experts. Dipping into some of these works proves these men were no such thing.

I Lock My door Upon Myself by Fernand Khnopff 1891

Henry Thomas Buckle (see previous Commonplace) was far from alone when he argued that the Greeks and Romans tended to regard women as chattels, and so using the Classics to provide any sort of understanding about how to treat women would be ill advised (click for free download). George's love of all things Roman and Greek must have fed into his attitudes to females. Add to this the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer, and things do not look good for any woman who came into his orbit. On this topic, Schopenhauer makes the Romans and Greeks look like emancipated liberals.

I have covered the dire influence of Schopenhauer in previous posts - see Commonplace 4 for exactly what that odious little imp - a man made bitter by his lack of success with the ladies, especially one thirty years his junior - had to say on the complementary gender. On the plus side, he liked dogs.

In Commonplaces 116 and 117, we looked at what John Ruskin had to say on the subject of women. When George was in the States, he met a charlatan called Heinzen (see Commonplaces 133 and 134) who aimed to spout on the subject of suffrage. But, there were two other influences George soaked up. First, Charles Darwin.

The English Woman
by Fernand Khnopff 1898

Popular understanding says that Darwin had some pretty bad things to say about women: that it was preferable to have a wife than a dog for company, being one of them. He tended to think adult females were perennially more like the infant of its species, and so a woman's brain would always be biologically underdeveloped and undevelopable. However, what Darwin said in his public utterances and the beliefs he held in private, were contradictory, and... evolved over time. Here, explored in this Cambridge University Research video click. But, George would not be privy to the secret thoughts of Charles Darwin, and so what he understood about the biology of women's brains, and their potential for any sort of development, would depend on what he thought Darwin had gleaned from his studies. See Commonplace 101 for George's studies of female brain size, and how wrong he was on this topic.

Another influential voice in how to create a world better suited to sharing it in equality, men with women, George delved into when he was in the throes of wooing Gabrielle Fleury, was the work of an influential French historian. In December 1898, George reads Jules Michelet's 'L'Amour'. Michelet wrote on a range of more sociological subjects. 'L'Amour' was followed the next year by 'La Femme' (can you spot a trend?).

These two Michelet works were derided by his fellow-French readers, but maybe George was reading all things contemporary French so as to have something to say to Ms Fleury, and to prove he was in touch with his feelings for what makes women happy. We know Gabrielle had strong reservations about 'marrying'George, and he has to make a determined effort to allay her anxieties by bluntly (and dishonestly, deceitfully) denying what he is famed for having said about women. He blames the excesses of his misogyny on some sort of creative fictive, a million miles from what he really believed. Tosh, of course, said to persuade Gabrielle into risking herself to his care. He kept from her his track record, defaming his wife, Edith, whilst air brushing out his first wife from the record - much as he did when he was making abid for Miss Collet's sympathy.

 Michelet's work was well-known even in England, so George was probably familiar with his work, and possibly agreed that (in Michelet's opinion) women were perpetual invalids, victims of their bodily functions particularly menstruation, which was, to the deluded Frenchman, a state of eternal malady. He went so far as to suggest it is this weakness that makes women suited to domestic chores and home-making, and that women are really only happy when we are keeping house, because any other sphere would distract us from dealing with our physical disadvantages. He is building on the work of Paracelsus (1493-1541) here, who thought a woman's womb as a house within her, and so this makes her very home-centric click.

Incense by Fernand Khnopff 1898

His next book was about witches click and so it's clear Michelet had met some very interesting girls in his time - or fantasized about meeting them! 'La Sorcerie' the Witch of the Middle Ages' of 1863 set out to explain that women's close experience of illness and infirmity has equipped us with special powers to heal and treat the sick - hence the association between the healing wise woman and the spell-casting witch. Michelet sees witchcraft as a positive thing, and an exemplification of the way women are persecuted for our vulnerabilities by men who abuse their power.

What did George take away from his studies on this topic? Returning to Schopenhauer, he will have been familiar with that philosopher's 'Will to Life' theory, that says we must look for complements in prospective partners in order to balance our innate faults, because if we don't, our children might manifest inherited intensified versions of our faults. So, if a man is of an intellectual bent, he needs to find a woman who is not, in order to have well-rounded children. Might this belief in Schopenhauer be part of the reason George went looking for a woman as unlike him as Edith? We know he delved into the new pseudoscience of eugenics, but science never held sway with George the way philosophy did - especially German philosophy. Take a look at this click to see a whitewashed view of the old Teutonic misogynist and see how deeply George absorbed his ideas.

Commonplace 141 George & History.

George liked the past. Not his own, perhaps, but the past as recreated by middle class and above male academics, who cherry-picked the bits they wanted to preserve. The best of them were serious-minded explorers who trawled the original sources to find accounts of what had gone before, representing prior times as best they could with what they had found in their research. Of course, most of what was written about in British history, even what was based on primary sources, is skewed in favour of the white, male middle-class and above; women, children and the poor were never fully or fairly represented. In George's day, the British Empire ruled in much of the world - but few historians wanted to view that empire from the position of its subjugated peoples; women, too, were a species beyond the ken of the average male historian.

Sandal Castle near George's home town of Wakefield, West Yorkshire. click

History can be seen as a study in interpretation. Who really knows what motivated Henry VIII to disdain Anne of Cleves? What did he stand to gain from Thomas Cromwell's execution? Did he really write 'Greensleeves'? (Well, no, he didn't, but it is presented as fact in some history books and is often touted in dramatisations of his life.) Was he a good or bad ruler? Was Elizabeth I better? We read the biographies and fall back on making up our own minds, regardless of what we have read. I prefer Elizabeth to Henry, but is that because she's a woman? I always think of her as courageous and a good role model to women who want to live in spite of men, not because of them; whereas Henry seems to be self-indulgent and spendthrift of his talents. Perhaps it's all about identification - I identify with the sort of woman who proves she is as able as any male counterpart.

George was lucky to be born in Yorkshire, a place chockablock with history. Apart from the Vikings, the War of the Roses, and the effects of the English Civil War, (not to mention the Industrial Revolution), one of Yorkshire's most famous claims to historical fame is the Battle of Towton where 28,000 men were killed in one day. If you are fortunate enough to be able to visit the battlefield, you will get some idea of how massive the fray must have been click and how terrain and luck were two of the most significant factors, but not as important as weather. (Remember George's obsession with weather and how it finished him off? Commonplace 139).

Towton Cross battlefield marker.click

Of all the historians George admired, Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) click was probably his favourite. Gibbon's 'The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' was a treasure he clung to and reread many times, often using what he found there as inspiration. On a slightly lighter note, he admired John Ruskin, though he went off Ruskin, possibly because of the casual display of wealth Ruskin employed in his writing. For example, in February 1889, when in Venice, George was reading Ruskin's highly-regarded 'The Stones of Venice', a treatise on the Art and architecture of that city. In his diary, George writes:
By the bye, why does Ruskin invariably address himself to rich people? In "S. Mark's Rest", eg, when speaking of the Pillars, he tells you to imitate the capitals by cutting "a pound of Gruyere cheese". Then again "From the Grand Hotel, or the Swiss Pension, or the duplicate Danieli with the drawbridge, or whatever else among the palaces of resuscitated Venice you abide", etc. - This is a great fault. He then goes on to demolish Ruskin and point out the mistakes made in these few extracts (eg no drawbridge at Danieli). Spite and envy, two of George's dark traits, come into play here. Though he admired Ruskin, in secret, George was jealous of the ability, the vision, and the money Ruskin could draw on to swan about writing readable, inspired books. Deep down, George would have liked to be Ruskin, which made jealousy and eventual falling out of love as the only way for him to deal with his feelings of envy. He is being a tad hypersensitive here - Ruskin in using cheese for non-cheese illustrative purposes, and so it cannot be viewed literally. 

Richard Plantagenet 
(Richard III's father click).

In this rant against Ruskin, George goes on:
This fault of temper leads him into other errors. Speaking of the Rialto: "You will probably find it very dirty, - it may be indecently dirty, - that is modern progress, and Mr Buckle's civilization". Absurd; old Venice was vastly dirtier, as we well know. Do we? 

Anyhoo, this chap Buckle; who was he and what was George reading him for?

According to his Wikipedia page (all the greats have Wiki pages haha), and as mentioned by George in September 1889, Henry Thomas Buckle gave us his life's work in the form of his 'History of Civilization' (click for free download). This is not to be confused with Sir Kenneth Clark's opus on all things Art: 'Civilization', (made into a groundbreaking tv series click -everyone should see it), who is not to be mistaken for Ken Clarke, the MP and so-called 'big beast' of the Tory party click, considered left-wing by hard-line Tories. Much as Mao might be seen as to the left of Stalin?? Anyhoo...

Mr Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862) was a chap who was too ill for much school learning when he was a child, but managed to become an expert historian, thanks to the 10-hour days of self-imposed study he put into learning all about it. He inherited enough money to travel and fund the writing of his comprehensive overview of whatever he thought might be termed 'Civilization'. In a time when science was highly regarded, and when every discipline required a testable application of some sort of scientific principle, Buckle was of the opinion that history has a similar set of predictable and quantifiable, principles. In this, he skates closely to the Positivist creed set down by Auguste Comte, and followed by George for a brief while when he was hobnobbing with Frederic Harrison. To Buckle, external factors such as climate, agriculture and weather have as much impact on civilization as the acts and behaviour of people. He also thought wealth is the basis of culture (which is the bedrock of civilization) - which predates the work of Abraham Maslow click by a century. (It was Maslow who gave us the Hierarchy of Needs that suggest the attainment of self-actualization can only take place in the absence of financial insecurity.) 

Richard III much maligned and much loved by 21st century folks
Born: 1452  Died: 1485. State burial: 2015 click 

Some of Buckle's most ambitious ideas are well worth taking a look at. He held that religion, literature and government are, at the best, the products and not the causes of civilization. (This fits in with generally held twentieth century view that the Arts tend to follow trends, not set them. Artists are observers and interpreters, not innovators.) Another is (from the Wiki page):
That the progress of civilization varies directly as "scepticism," the disposition to doubt and to investigate, and inversely as "credulity" or "the protective spirit," a disposition to maintain, without examination, established beliefs and practices. Buckle was sceptical about the so-called civilizing effects of organised religion, which again is a reasonable view based on what we now know about the terror and bigotry exemplified by religious fundamentalism of all stripes. 

Facial reconstruction of Richard III click

Buckle also wrote for periodicals and his 'The Influence of Women On The Progress of Knowledge' was published by Fraser's Magazine in April of 1858 (the year George's first wife Marianne aka Nell was born). We know George read many books about the 'problem' of women possibly to help him flesh out his female characters, but mostly to give him a template for managing the women in his life. He was spectacularly ignorant of what women are really like, but he wrote confidently about how we should be 'managed', and gave us plenty of tips for how we should behave in a more emancipated climate. None of his relationships with the women in his life were particularly successful - according to George, even his mother wasn't keen on him! He was smart enough to realise that the shoe would soon be on the other foot, and women would be claiming their rights, having waited in vain for men to gift them, and so his study of what were the current trends in suffrage developments was all about self-preservation.