Commonplace 155   George & Nell.

With paintings by Henry Charles Bryant (1835-1915). click

Today is the anniversary of Marianne Gissing aka Nell's death.

Birds and Poultry at Portsmouth Market
1883 

February 28th 1888 was the day George travelled over to Lambeth to claim his first wife's emaciated corpse. Not that he took her anywhere to lay in peaceful readiness for her burial; not that he carried out any sacred offices to send her on her way to the hereafter. He paid her landlady to do that. Nell, according to George, died in abject poverty with no coal for cooking and heating and only a stale crust of bread to her name. And she had no bedclothes except for a sheet. This sets the scene to sell the idea that, despite regular payments from him, somehow, Nell mismanaged her finances. Which meant George, husband and provider, couldn't be blamed for her predicament. But, it's not rocket surgery to suspect that any discerning landlady would have removed perishables and the like before the next of kin arrived - items of food and coal were not to be wasted if they could be used and no-one would begrudge that. What would the bereaved widower need of these? And no-one lays out a corpse and covers it in blankets and a quilt - do they? Isn't a sheet the usual way to do it? It was in 1888, and in every hospital I ever worked in.

You would think a woman who was addicted to alcohol - which is what George later claimed - would have already sold everything that could be turned into drink. But there were framed prints on Nell's walls that George recognised, presumably from their time of living together. Framed prints of religious scenes and Landseer studies would have some intrinsic value, which is an anomaly that contradicts the usual story, because, though they weren't worth much, they would have been sellable. When you're an addict, don't you pawn or sell everything worth anything, to get even a few pennies, for your fix? According to George, Nell had pawned her wedding ring and he redeemed the pledge. That might look like a sign she had no regard for it, and that she was so depraved as to trade something so sacred, but what else would pawnbrokers take in? Clothes and jewellery were portable and had some transferable value. She had also pawned a winter coat. George presents this as a sign of her depraved state of mind, being as how it was the depth of winter, but isn't it more likely she was too ill to work to pay the pledge or too ill to go out to do it? That winter of 1887-88 was a very cold one with frequent low temperatures and lots of snow click. She had need of that coat, if she was going out. Maybe she was not going out because she couldn't. In 1888, pawnbroking was a perfectly normal way to raise cash - as it still is today - and makes perfect sense if you have any concerns your stuff might get stolen. A pawnbroker's premises would be fortified like a medieval castle, unlike a small back room in a shared house, and whatever of value you had would be safer with 'uncle' (slang for a pawnbroker's) than tucked away in the bottom drawer of your tallboy.

Poultry Market, Portsmouth 1878

George doesn't mention what happened to his alimony payments in the run up to her death. It's highly unlikely Nell had a bank account, so George paid one of three ways - by postal order which she would cash in at the local post office (which was just around the corner); by cash in person - George could have kept up contact with Nell and seen her regularly to hand over the money and claim any matrimonial services he felt entitled to; payment was made via a third party, such as a solicitor and Nell visited the office to get her money as cash, or someone might drop round with it from the third party's office. If by postal order, maybe Mrs Sherlock cashed them in and took the money for rent and services rendered, then gave Nell what was left. A sick woman required medicine so maybe what was left was spent on this, but, again, would anyone be able to get to the infirmary for her if she couldn't get there herself? And, if there was a few shillings knocking about the room of a dead woman, who is to say no-one else living in the house didn't liberate it, if Mrs Sherlock didn't get to it first? And, if there were any valuables, well, maybe they were claimed to repay financial debts, or as token payment for nursing services rendered.

Maybe George found postal orders and took them back. He wouldn't mention uncashed postal orders in his letters, would he? If he had admitted it, maybe someone would ask why he wasn't monitoring his wife's welfare and keeping an eye on her in case she needed his support. Better to present her as a spendthrift who could have paid for medicines and a doctor if she hadn't wasted all her money on drink. Which is the sort of thing touted by biographers to absolve George of his moral responsibility towards his wife, the woman he knew was chronically ill, and who had no family to support her, who probably couldn't supplement her pittance of alimony with work because she wasn't well enough to earn more than a few coppers; who lived in a single room with no luxuries and couldn't afford any lifestyle choices; who never went on holidays and sat through plays or bought books, or took an after dinner brandy bought in a fancy restaurant, and who couldn't fend off any predatory landlady who sought to exploit her vulnerability. But, then, she had a husband to help her with that, didn't she?

Portsmouth Market

Morley Roberts went with George to view the body, and he scouted ahead to make sure the coast was clear. Was George afraid news of her death was a ruse? And why would he think it was?
Back in 1883, George had been approached by a policeman who claimed Nell was regarded as a 'bad character' in her neighbourhood. How did he know? Because she had been out late at night and on her way through the streets near to her home had been set upon by a gang and assaulted. She went to the police for help and to get the offenders punished. Because she was out late, the policeman assumed she was out at night for immoral purposes. There were lots of reasons she might have needed to be out including to collect medicines from an infirmary, to buy food, or to return home from visiting friends, but the policemen framed her as a wrong 'un, and paid George a visit to offer his services as detective. For pay. George believed what the policemen said, and handed over cash for surveillance services. He was promised enough evidence for a divorce, and off George went to see a solicitor. But, nothing came of it. No evidence against Nell was ever found. Which, if she had any blot on her character, would be extraordinary, because a policeman would have access to a felon's police records, would know the local snitches, and could easily interview the likes of publicans, working girls, disgruntled victims of any destructive or annoying behaviour by a drunken reprobate. Nothing was ever presented. George gave up on the divorce trail, but took the policeman's advice and reduced Nell's alimony by 25% so she had less money to waste if the temptation to become a menace to society reared its ugly head in her. This was an unofficial arrangement because Nell should have gone to court to get a legally binding set amount for her living expenses. As it was, her £1 a week went down to 15/- and it was 15/- when she died from want and disease in 1888. Read all about it in Commonplaces 35-37. That policeman - did he realise George was, in effect, the wrong 'un ex-jailbird of the marriage?? I doubt it, because appearances count for so much in life, don't they?

A New Toy  

Perhaps it wasn't fear of exploitation but fear of blackmail that aroused George's suspicions. Imagine the furore if the writer who gave the Victorians 'The Nether World' and 'Workers In The Dawn' had been so mean-hearted and cruel that his neglected, abandoned wife starved and eventually succumbed to a disease made worse by poor nutrition and cold? How would it pan out if someone decided to use that knowledge to squeeze money from George? With a threat of going to the press if he didn't pay up - and this was the sort of story the legendary W T Stead would have loved to make front page news - then George would have been a sitting duck. There would have been a good deal of Nell's friends to come out of the woodwork and add to the outcry - long before the end, these women were critical of the way George neglected his first wife, and paid him visits to make their feelings known. And then there was the truth about his fall from grace at Owens college that might leak out to the press.

Poor George - no wonder he didn't have the balls to knock on the door of 16 Lucretia Street and walk up the stairs to her bare, freezingly cold room. Too much of a mealy-mouthed unheroic wimp to ever do his own dirty work, George sent his stunt double, Morley Roberts, in his place. Roberts reported back the coast was clear - there were no friends lying in wait; no reckoning was coming George's way. And, yet... George Gissing would never be able to claim the moral high ground again. Sneaking into the cloakroom and thieving paltry sums of small change from his chums at Owens College was not the worst of his crimes, and though there is something particularly mean about this sort of act - and stealing is a kind of psychic assault - but it might be explainable in terms of immaturity or stupidity. Shameful as it is to be a thief, and to be a jailbird, there can be mitigating circumstances taken into account. Young people do daft things - that's their job as young people. Old people should cut them some slack - sometimes. Contributing to the suffering of your wife by abandoning her to her fate is such an egregious act, it's no wonder George's biographers prefer to frame Nell for it.

Cattle by the Roadside 1870

That Nell was blamed for George's crime spree at Owen's College is abominable, but that's the way George's biographers will have it told. There is no evidence she knew he was stealing. Perhaps George rationalized his immoral behaviour, but he was that arrogant that it wouldn't be far fetched to think he considered himself above the law. He must have assumed he was cleverer than his peers - because he fooled them and deceived them until he was caught red-handed. That smacks of a sort of delusional egotism that is every bit as morally bankrupt as the many thefts he committed, but blaming Nell for his actions - or, to be more accurate, allowing others to blame her - in a feeble attempt to make himself look more like Robin Hood and less like a common-or-garden juvenile delinquent is exactly the sort of behaviour that George displayed throughout his life. Self-serving and cowardly; arrogant and quick to let others carry the rap; impulsive, irrational, egocentric and devious; he always considered himself better than other people and that vile word 'aristocratic' dripped from him so readily. Is it 'aristocratic' to be a thief? Of course not - if he had truly wanted to emulate the Greeks, he would have fallen on his sword or taken hemlock, not scuttled off to the States.

The point is, there are other possible explanations that deviate from the Gissing party line touted by lazy biographers who just rehash what previous lazy biographers have written - that Nell brought about her own downfall, and it was nothing to do with the alleged heroic George. Some might argue (you know who you are, and I have the emails to prove it!) that it doesn't matter if Nell is misrepresented. They tell me no-one cares if she is presented as a whore, and a gold-digging drunk who ruined George's life by making herself the centre of his world for a few brief months. Why not blame her for his fall at Owen's College? Why not make her the reason he stole money, did his bird click, and gave up a chance for greater things? Who cares if she is made to carry the can for it? I do, and anyone would who took the time to do some research and failed to find any evidence to back up the claims. Who was there, in 1888, to care what the truth really was?

Nell died of acute laryngitis. It's written clearly on the death certificate, but some biographers still tell us she died of alcohol and syphilis. Acute laryngitis is still a very dangerous and potentially lethal condition that comes on very quickly and can kill in hours - so Nell wouldn't have stood much of a chance. See Commonplaces 49-46 for more information. She had suffered from scrofula (a form of TB) for most of her life, and that would have made the acute laryngitis almost impossible to withstand.

Nell gets a very rough deal from the squad of Gissing biographers who make money from repeating the false claims. In fact, we know very little about her, because George destroyed all his pre 1888 diaries - the ones that might have given us more information. What we do have are the letters, particularly those George exchanged with his brother, William. If you want to find out more about her, read these. They show how likeable and vulnerable she was, and how William would have been a much better mate for her. You'll find references to these letters throughout the blog - particularly Commonplaces 109 and 110. To find out more about Nell's death see Commonplaces 32-34 and 41.

In the end, it matters what lies are told about Nell, because there is a degree of sexism at play, and that must always be resisted. There is no shame in having to survive by selling your body. What is shameful is that people (not just women) have to resort to it because they have no other choices, and because no-one steps in to help. Those who make accusations that Nell was an alcoholic have no proof, but defame her character and destroy her good name to save George's reputation. But it was George who had the criminal record, who destroyed the lives of two wives and blighted his children's upbringing. And he is hailed (by some) as a hero! Nell deserved a better life than the one she got and deserves to be treated in death, with impartial honesty. When it comes to heroism, Nell's the one who can legitimately claim that crown. 

Commonplace 154  George & Nietzsche's Greek Musings.

With pictures by Bernard Buffet (1928-99) click.

Le Clown 1957

Even though they never met, George and Friedrich Nietzsche were 'brothers of another mother' in quite a few ways. For one thing, they both had luxurious facial hair. And both had syphilis which biographers try to claim as something more sanitised and less common-or-garden and not sex-related. As if some terminal neurologically catastrophic illnesses are nicer or more acceptable than others! No-one wants to contract syphilis and anyone who does is unlucky, not depraved.

Oh, and both adored the Greeks.

'Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks' is an unfinished work by Friedrich Nietzsche. It was put together in 1873, worked on for a while, abandoned and then published after his death. It contains his thoughts on several of the lesser known (to the average person) Greek philosophers, and would have included several more if the author had finished it. 

Death 1999

George would have enjoyed a long chat about the Greeks with Nietzsche though he would have been wary of the German's startlingly superior intellect. In his limited social circle, Eduard Bertz, the German man-wife and devoted fan, was the one George probably regarded as almost his intellectual equal, though he never was really likely to truly think so. Morley Roberts was never in the running for that role, but he was sometimes geographically closer at hand; Bertz gets the long letters from George full of notes about what he's been reading and his constant grumbles about the world, life and all living things he meets.  

Anyone would be intimidated by Fred Nietzsche, firstly for the originality of his ideas, but also the force with which he usually delivered them. George was neither original nor forceful, but would have liked to be either. He did not like to mix with anyone smarter or with more inventive, creative ideas, but he would have liked to compete with Fred to prove his own vast knowledge of the Greeks, a source of immense personal pride. In fact, it could be argued that all George's self esteem was rooted in his extensive reading of the Greeks (and Romans); but as knowledge does not always transmute into wisdom, he didn't always benefit from what he knew. 

Nietzsche is always worth taking a look at because he is a Titan of philosophy and in the range and scope of his thinking, speaks deep truths. Even when he is talking like a paretic madman - which he was apt to do - he makes us think. Perhaps he and George would have compared notes on their shared experience of syphilis; luckily for George, his ate at his heart more than his brain, and he was spared what Fred had to endure. 

La Chauve-souris 1997

The 1870s were a busy time for both Nietzsche and George. Nietzsche served as a medical orderly in a war, contracted syphilis, took up teaching, published his first book, saw a decline in his health and fell in and out of love with Richard Wagner and Arthur Schopenhauer, whilst mixing with philosophers and intellectuals. George went to prison, spent a gap year in America, contracted syphilis, got married, took up teaching, published his first book, saw a decline in his health, fell in love with Schopenhauer, and mixed with philosophers and intellectuals. Nietzsche worked on establishing the Bayreuth Festival, but eventually became disillusioned with the way German nationalism was being confused with German culture, and he despised both as concepts. George became disillusioned with almost everything and was never a nationalist, though he did feel he was an expert on all things the very best in culture - as long as it was the sort of thing a small minority of 'aristocrats' could enjoy. The sort of aristocrats whose fathers ran shops in industrial small towns.

Tower Bridge 1960

Both George and Fred spent a good deal of their time chasing the optimum weather to ameliorate their various physical ailments, and moved from place to place to get the perfect wholesome home. Both suffered from a range of problems - on top of those brought on by their syphilis - and were always sick or worried about their health. Fred and George were conflicted about their attachment to their sisters, and both relied on the support of their mothers, whilst despising them. Both had what might be termed 'contempt' for women, mostly because both craved the love, adoration and support of them but hated to admit it. There was never enough love in any woman for either of them - and both thought any woman would be content to sacrifice herself just to be chosen as a mate. Both fell in love with girls who turned down marriage proposals from them and both felt hard done by because of it. Both dabbled in poetry of the Greek bent. Both used the word 'eheu' to express dismay. Nietzsche, in one of his most paretic moments, claimed to be the entity from which Shakespeare, Dionysis, Julius Caesar and the Buddha were reincarnated (or transmogrified); George claimed to be an undervalued and under-appreciated creative genius born with special 'aristocratic' genes. Both were delusional, bordering on the grandiose at times, but then, both were men. Haha.

The Giantess 1968

In his 'Birth of Tragedy' (1872) Fred gives us the dualism of Apollo and Dionysus, the Greek gods he said exemplified the human condition, the former being all about considered reason and mental wisdom under control, with the latter being all about spontaneous and sensual reflexes. Nietzsche puts forth the argument that both have to be in balance in order to be truly human, and if we snuff out the Dionysian in our souls, we lose half of ourselves. As much as he advocated Dionysus, he abhorred alcohol for its power to numb emotional pain. For him, suffering is what makes us full human beings because the human condition is defined by pain. George would agree. 

Amongst the many gems that spilled from Nietzsche's big beautiful bonkers at times brain that George might have wished he had written is this, taken from 'The Will to Power' (1901): 

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities - I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not - that one endures." 

How George would have agreed! Suffering is what much of his work is about - and his life was riddled with self-inflicted torture - loneliness, unhappy marriages, failure, penny-pinching, disillusionment, lack of recognition... It's there in the constant themes of George's work but it's what makes George such a fascinating writer. And, in his autobiographical works, it makes him more of a real human being, and less of a figment of some biographer's florid imagination. George, for all his whingeing and pussying about knew a thing or two about endurance. But, isn't this one of the truly over-estimated personal qualities? Endurance is not always the best way to deal with life - as organised religion has taught us - suffer now to get a reward later is such a pants rip off scam! Endurance smacks of an inability to effect change, or to strive towards empowerment. Not that we have to be empowered but endurance is not the stuff of self-actualisation. It is the stuff of masochism and the acceptance of the status quo; of complacency and self-pity. It is the realm of Bad Faith, as Sartre sees it. Not that I want to argue with Friedrich Nietzsche!!

Self Portrait 1981

Handy Nietzsche websites don't get much better than these: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHWbZmg2hzU

http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/correspondence/eng/nlett-1889.htm  

http://www.iep.utm.edu/nietzsch/.  

Commonplace 153  George & Homer. Doh!

The Geeks er, the Greeks were not famed for their humour, bar the odd theatrical production about amphibians. Which makes it all the more ironic that when the name 'Homer' is mentioned these days it is the yellow chubster cartoon character who springs to mind. And I, for one, prefer it that way.


George liked to invoke the spirit of the Ancient Greeks when he wanted to define his own version of social classification. He claimed there is an 'aristocrat' sensibility in some persons based on a liking for books and the Sublime which makes them innately superior. These people use for a moral compass the Ancient Greeks and Romans; they prefer to hark back to the good old days of the Romano-Greek empires as being the template of how to live a life. These aristocrats are almost superhuman, not in the Nietzschean sense of 'Superman', but in the sense of them having arcane superior interests - like Sport, Art and statutory violence - aka the Olympic games, the Venus de Milo and the Coliseum.

In George's world of writing books this aristocratic type usually presents as a male protagonist displaying a narcissistic mix of over-educated, under-employed, whingeing, generally impotent, self-regarding snob. (They do say writers should write about what they know haha!) Mere mortals are 'the others' - the lumpen proletariat which might include millionaires if they display philistine thinking; these are the sort of folk who never read the Greeks and possibly never read anything - he might be talking about YOU! However, as George's father was nothing grander than a shop-keeper (a class of persons George always despised which Freud would tell us is revealing!), he was compelled to invent this aristo uber-class to cover his own humble origins. In a Gissing book, a sure sign of a soul worth saving is a member of the lumpen proletariat with a book in his hand, unless he is a rampant Socialist like Richard Mutimer (from George's 'Demos') who was the devil incarnate because he was that most dangerous of beasts (to George) - an educated working class hero with plans to overthrow the social status quo.

George tended to read something Greek or Roman every day. As a resource of guidance, he referred to these old writers; however, there is a million miles between reading wise words and acting on them. Anyone not over-familiar with what the Greeks and Romans offer in terms of wisdom might look at George's life and conclude that whatever he read went in one ear and out the other. Either that, or the Greeks and Romans were utter cack. Here are some Homer quotes that George might have learnt from:

A sympathetic friend can be quite as dear as a brother. There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends. The first part is true - but Eduard Bertz was George's lifelong man-wife, the significant other George should have married. George might have paid lip service to the 'man and wife part' but none of his women filled this role, mainly because he never really believed women could be up to the intellectual standard of the male - one of George's choicer quotes (said to his sister!) was that he thought the average male idiot is smarter than the average female. 

Hateful to me as are the gates of hell, is he who, hiding one thing in his heart, utters another. Not exactly Mr Truthful, George often told blatant lies to gain his own ends, and certainly rewrote some of his Diary entries to airbrush out the bits he didn't like - all of the Diaries pre 1888 when his first wife died were destroyed. You should read his letters to Gabrielle Fleury and Clara Collet if you don't believe his pants were on fire quite a lot of the time.  

Each man delights in the work that suits him best. George hated to have to work - after all, aristocrats from the ancient world didn't have to, they just sat around reading and philosophising and drinking wine. He hated writing and was never happy with what he wrote. You might try and pass this off as his rampant perfectionism, but you'd be wrong. Some say he would have been happy as a college don - tosh because he couldn't stand teaching, and as he would be required to support the Christian doctrines - in 1871 over half of all teaching staff in the main universities were either clergy or working towards being clergy - he would have been expected to be celibate until the 1882 rules changed click.  

And his good wife will tear her cheeks in grief, his sons are orphans and he, soaking the soil red with his own blood, he rots away himself—more birds than women flocking round his body! His own death was a shambolic affair with the wrong people round him and the wrong religious overtones on display. And he was not happy about dying in France - that was never part of the Gabrielle Fleury plan!

Ah how shameless – the way these mortals blame the gods. From us alone they say come all their miseries yes but they themselves with their own reckless ways compound their pains beyond their proper share. George liked to blame fate for his shortcomings whilst blinding himself to his own role in events. One such was that his first wife had died in poverty and want which was the accursed hand of fate but which was, in reality, his neglect of her and his failure to pay adequate alimony.

It behoves a father to be blameless if he expects his child to be. It's difficult to assess exactly the psychological damage George did to his children. In modern terms, he would be classified as an abuser. Child abuse can be sexual, physical, emotional, and neglect. Though he was not guilty of the first, he certainly was of the third and last and probably the second. Heroic? Non! 

Any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again. George did think we are all doomed but he never was one to really enjoy the moment. When he does record his moments of wonder it is usually at Nature but his tendency is to have moments of wonder about how awful things are not how sublime they are. 

Scepticism is as much the result of knowledge, as knowledge is of scepticism. To be content with what we at present know, is, for the most part, to shut our ears against conviction; since, from the very gradual character of our education, we must continually forget, and emancipate ourselves from, knowledge previously acquired; we must set aside old notions and embrace fresh ones; and, as we learn, we must be daily unlearning something which it has cost us no small labour and anxiety to acquire. Once George had made his mind up on a topic it remained fixed even in the face of evidence suggesting he was wrong. He had a closed mind more than an inquiring one despite all the reading he did, because he seemed to prefer to find things that backed his own point of view, rather than set off looking for fresh insights. And he was too swift to dismiss things he didn't like the sound of, despite his lack of knowledge - science, for example, bored him! 

If only he had been born in the times of Homer J Simpson, he might have done better with his life. Here are some of the other Homer's wiser words:

Discover more great Homer and Homer quotes at 
https://www.goodreads.com

Commonplace 152  George & The Spectre of the Workhouse.

The Workhouse. There are few words that personify the lives of the poor in Victorian times with more intensity. Or, more precisely, fear of the workhouse - for the threat to the poor of being incarcerated in one was enough to impel some to prefer to die of starvation or cold on the cruel cobbled streets, or out in the fields under a hedge. George often mentioned his 'fear' of falling so low in life that the workhouse was his only option. This was total tosh, of course, because he would never have allowed himself to do such a thing - and there would be no need as he could always ask for help from his family, or even go back home to Wakefield to live with them. George's sense of his own hard-done-to-ness in life always leaks out in his letters and writing and marks him as a self-pitying whinger. Perhaps he kept mentioning his fear to deter his brother Algernon from asking for a loan, as was his wont. If so, it didn't work. But as his own chances of ever being admitted to a workhouse were virtually nil, George proves his own lack of empathy for those who had no other choice, and who could not use allusions to it for their own ironic ends.

The Whitechapel Workhouse in the twentieth century -
 the Kray twins were born just round the corner.

In aesthetic terms, there is nothing romantic to be gleaned from a workhouse - unlike debtors' prison, which could be invoked as a sign of extended suffering - Dickens, for example, would never have been the writer he was if his father hadn't sentenced the family to a spell of confinement in the Marshalsea click. The workhouse was a kind of social bogeyman intended to motivate the poor to keep going on despite starvation and disease, because what it offered them there was even worse than what their poverty and disease doled out. Fear is what the rich use to control the poor - the poor can take deprivation and disease, but they can't take lack of any connection to their world or any form of autonomy. 'All hope abandon ye;' as Dante didn't write click. over the Gates of Hell, should have been inscribed above every workhouse door. What it did not offer, was any notion of comfort or a home from home; poverty was a sin and a crime; no-one was allowed to benefit from it. Keeping the perceived underclass in fear was a Victorian social norm.

The Marshalsea Prison complex. Paupers shared premises with traitors and similar felons.

Because of the concentration of paupers in urban areas, the role of the workhouse in rural life is often overlooked. Then, as now, the countryside harbours immense pockets of deprivation that can rival any to be found in cities; lives blighted by poverty, lack of employment opportunities, dependence on social welfare, lack of transport and high costs of housing, exacerbated by poor infrastructure and facilities and then made worse by social isolation and loneliness make living in the countryside deeply unpleasant unless you have the advantage of heaps of money. No amount of the 'sublime', in the Romantic sense, can fill up a soul that is living in want or enduring the kind of anomie that arises from the mismatch between the dream and the reality of life. If you disagree with this, you have never been truly poor. Which was George's situation.

To really understand how the threatening presence of the workhouse rose up to subdue and terrify the poor, you have to get a sense of how and why these correctives were instituted. The poor have always been dependent on and beholden to, those with money; after all, money has always equated with power. Following the Black Death (the plague that decimated much of the world in the fourteenth century) the subsequent drop in the numbers of agricultural workers became a serious threat to national survival, so pervasive that it required state intervention. That came in England with the Poor Law Act of 1388. It was required because the poor had, for once, the upper hand. They could ask for more pay if there were fewer of them to work the fields - and of they didn't get it, they could move on to an employer who could afford to pay what they asked for. The Poor Law Act did not set out to give the poor more rights - it set out to stop their movements so they couldn't up sticks and seek out better pay. What it offered as a palliative to this was some form of relief from want, in the form of a limited amount of support from the local state. It was upgraded when forced to do so by the mass unemployment of troops and sailors returning from the Napoleonic Wars. The New Poor Law of 1834, promoted by Earl Grey (he of the tea and a fondness for Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire aka Keira Knightley) came into being and wreaked its own form of social havoc.

An alternative to the workhouse - but not an improvement. A Salvation Army women's shelter c1892 click

The New Poor Law did not offer much of an improvement on living conditions, though it was considered by some to be too generous to the poor. The crux of the matter was that the poor were considered to have brought about their own dire straits, and so helping them out was tantamount to encouraging them to fail in life and stop trying to better themselves and pay their own way in life. , To offer them welfare (as we know it) would rob them of the motivation to find work and fend for themselves. O, would that it were that easy to explain! You hear this as an argument still, but very few opt to or prefer to remain on the reliance of hand-outs from their state. It is often seen by the recipients as demeaning and insulting, which is why we can be fairly certain George would never have allowed himself to make use of that sort of support.

We can assume that his first wife, Marianne aka Nell did not have to use the services of the workhouse because she was legally entitled to maintenance payments from her husband. Victorians took a very dim view of a working class man who would not support his wife even if they were estranged; a middle class man doing so would be publicly outed and shunned. This was why many supporters of the anti-suffrage movement were opposed to female emancipation - they feared that feckless men of all classes would abandon their financial responsibilities and refuse to pay for their wives and children. It was not always female power they were wary of but men's feckless weakness and innate misogyny.

Opponents of the New Poor Law give some of their reasons. 1837

As alternatives to the workhouse morphed into a more humane service, many of the massive buildings were converted into hospitals. All workhouses had their own infirmaries, and these always had an infectious ward and one for sick children. Upgrading these buildings to hospitals was fairly straightforward in the days before advances in medical technology made purpose-built hospitals a necessity. Many retained the original features of over-large rooms that could be easily turned into wards. In that 1980s short-sighted drive that sought to make the NHS a corporate business, whilst making millions of £s for developers via the old boys' network of graft so beloved by the British middle classes, many of these older buildings were sold for development as private housing.

For a while, George had lived very close to the Marylebone workhouse. It was revamped twice as St Marylebone Institution and then Luxborough Lodge before being demolished in 1965 to make way for the Polytechnic of Central London. Now, it's the site for Westminster University. Progress, of a sort - the rich have colonised all those ghettos and slums once so feared by the bourgeoisie that created them; the rich have reclaimed their land and erected Babylon on the graves of the poor.

The rich have always liked the poor to be subservient, grateful and craven. 'To smile and be condescending..'

The above is a snippet from the poem of the same name. The urban poor have always poked fun at themselves, with the music halls helping out with comic songs and turns. This poem was often hijacked as a monologue performed on the stage to audiences who encouraged the turns to incorporate their own amusing, scatalogical verses to lighten the mood of the piece. Similarly, it became a sort of ongoing joke to lampoon meagre meals and living conditions by referring to the opening stanza when mocking suffering of a trivial kind - like not enough sugar in your tea. As used by, the Tommies at the Front 1914-1918 and any subsequent British armed service usually abroad on active service. Please watch this click for verification. Well said, my son. The poem was written by George R Sims and many of his MS are currently held at the John Rylands Library in Manchester University, the place that holds so many documents relating to George and the Gissings. Sims is described as an 'author, playwright, journalist, philanthropist'. A life lived to the full, eh?

George Robert Sims (1847-1922)

Commonplace 151 George & The Man Who Gave Us The Angel In The House PART TWO.

In the previous Commonplace we took a look at Coventry Patmore's poem The Angel in The House, where the poet gives us his roadmap for creating a woman fit for purpose to the average middle class man.

There is something of Patmore in George, with George sometimes being a junior version of the older man. Coventry Patmore was a critic as well as a poet. This is not an easy cv to maintain; if you are a middle-of-the-road poet, you need incredible chutzpah to pull off the role of critiquing other poets' work. Or a massive lack of insight into your own mindset. George was in a similar position when he undertook the work of revising Forster's Life of Dickens - but on George's side was devotion (not of the blind variety, for he saw flaws in Dickens' work) to the man whose stories made such an impression on all the Gissings when George was a child. Patmore, did not have the benefit of foresight as to which poets would become legends, and who would fall by the wayside, so to read him now is to constantly think 'That Coventry Patmore's a ****' under your breath. As we shall see. 

Patmore, bless him, had not much connection with the poets on whom he passed judgement. This was partly because of the arrogance of the older man reviewing the younger. And, because he didn't 'get' the poets, he tended to think they were second-rate. We know this because of Patmore's collection of essays, Principle in Art, first published in 1879. You can read the 1889 edition here for free click

Principles does not confine itself to Art alone, but introduces a range of political and social musings to back up the curious notion George shared, that only 'aristocratic' males truly appreciate Art. Patmore takes it further and says it's only those in this special club who can appreciate anything, even human interaction, history or cheese. (Maybe he didn't mention cheese - I made that bit up). As he's so soften so wrong, Principles can be viewed more as a curiosity than a road map for appreciating Victorian poetry and culture. It is evidence for a mindset that would never willingly relinquish the reins of taste to new blood. 

Hestia, Goddess of the Hearth - the prototype Angel In The House. Egyptian tapestry C6th. click 

For a start, Patmore disliked science (as did George) because he thought the curiosity to explore the natural world is to rob it of its mystery. He was a religious man who thought his creator made things complex for a reason - so humans would remain perplexed about the wonder of the Cosmos. If we have learnt anything from television it is that science actually never disappoints our expectations and hopes for mystery and wonder. If Max Planck, Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan have taught us anything, it's that science is all about the mystery and wonder click. But Patmore would see it this way (page 206):
Without disrespect to Mr Huxley, Mr Herbert Spencer, and Professor Muller, we may affirm that the man who knew Plato, Homer and Aeschylus rightly, and knew little else, would know far more than he who knew all that these great scientists could teach, and knew nothing else.

Did Homer predict the Higgs Boson? To find out more click. Doh!

Henry Huxley click was fundamental to the understanding of Natural Selection; Herbert Spencer click coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest'; I am assuming Muller is Hermann Muller click a pioneer of genetics. Or maybe Max Muller, the man who wrote about the so many things click. Only the average British public school system can produce this level of arrogant ignorance and want of intelligence in its alumni as Coventry Patmore displays.

Of course, Coventry Patmore was a Tory of the old school. He had George's contempt for Demos and Democracy. Our man would have understood and appreciated this passage (page 216) and possibly stole it to include in his novel, Demos:
The intercourse between the gentleman and his hind or labourer is free, cheerful and exhilarating, because there is commonly in it the only equality worth regarding, that of goodwill; whereas the commands of the sugar-boiler or the screw-maker to their brother are probably given with a frown and received with a scowl.
For an alternate view, have a look at this click.  

Principles makes most of its author's insider knowledge of poetry, as Patmore considered himself an authority based on his own good-standing in that domain. Being a self-appointed elder statesman of culture, he allows himself to make some pretty sweeping and bonkers reflections. Take this one (p51), with regard to the difference between pity and pathos: ...perhaps the most intense touch of pathos in all history is that of Gordon murdered at Khartoum.
Where could we begin to deconstruct that tosh? And this from the man who loved the Ancient Greeks so much! Here are some of Patmore's thoughts on what are now considered to be towering legends of poetry.
Thomas Hardy (p54) he praises for his ability to be brief about describing moments of pathos in his novels. Pathos is good; it seems holy when described by Patmore. He decries Dickens and his handling of distressing scenes for their verbiage which dilutes the impact - and cites Little Nell's death as his example - of course. George could go off on one and overdo the words, but we forgive him his little creative foibles. Only his little ones, mind.

Patmore's view of Keats differs from George's, if we are to believe our man meant it when he said this: To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity. Patmore regards Keats as over-rated and facile at times, with the vast bulk of his work mostly worthless. He defends this by saying Keats would agree with him. He makes reference to what he regards as femininity in Keats and apparent in his verse, obvious to the expert because the poems are constructed with too much of a love of beauty, and beauty, to Patmore, should be accidental, and not consciously intended, and is the quintessential female trait. He ends the chapter with this:
It is a fact that the observation of which is as old as the mythology which attributed the parentage of heroes in whom the intellectual powers prevailed in the union of gods with women, while those who distinguished themselves by more external and showy faculties were said to have been born of the commerce of goddesses with men. As I said, you find yourself saying to yourself: 'That Coventry Patmore was a ****'. 

The Angel In The House by Julia Margaret Cameron 1879

He goes on to dismiss Shelley more or less for being too passionate. He mentions Shelley's rustication for writing controversial views - well, his promotion of Atheism. Patmore quotes Shelley's biographer, Professor Dowden: ...good feeling would not have punished so severely what was more an offence of the intellect than of the heart and will.  If only George's fall from grace at Owens College had been framed thus! Patmore ends his piece on Shelley by conceding that he does have a not unimportant place in English literature.

As for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Patmore dismisses Rossetti's want of English as a first language as the reason for him not being a supreme English poet. Rossetti was 3/4 Italian by heritage, his mother was half Italian and half English. As Rossetti's maternal grandmother was English, then Patmore is wrong; it's not called 'mother tongue' for nothing. She will have taught Rossetti's mother to speak, and his mother would have carried it to him. But, Patmore thinks Rossetti is tainted with too flash a way of concentrating on emotions, and he disapproves of the painter's eye for detail. As Rossetti was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose works were big on the minutiae of Nature and the visible world's reality, for him to not make use of this in his poetry would have been a sin.

One of Patmore's most egregious lapses of judgement and taste is served up in his musings on the poetic work of William Blake. The chapter on Blake (p97) opens:
Blake's poetry, with the exception of four or five lovely lyrics and here and there in other pieces a startling gleam of unquestionable genius, is mere drivel.
He makes the claim that Blake's visual Art is over-rated and will not last the course because it is already out of fashion. Patmore has viewed a bit of a Blake retrospective and says he is unimpressed by a great many works shown together. In Commonplace 149, we saw how Peckham loomed large in the Blake legend by delivering him of a vision of Angels - not the sort you find cluttering up your house looking zoned out on legal highs. Blake has always been in fashion with intellectuals and Artists - you don't have to understand the titles to appreciate the pictures. Much of modern Art has words attached (as titles or as motifs, as part of the piece) that make no rational sense, so the argument Patmore puts forward that the impetus for the pictures is meaningless religious mania, is sterile.

The River of Life by William Blake c 1805

Patmore makes the mistake of thinking Blake is mad and therefore, out of control in his mind all of the time - which he likens to a sort of random imbecility that is devoid of intentional action. He never explains why he thinks the thoughts of the mad are worthless. (Ironic, considering his religious views are, to me, a sign on incipient dementia haha.) He points out that the public (whoever they are, he doesn't identify) mistake madness for genius because both are aberrations; but genius, for Patmore, is not a stream of consciousness touched by revelation moved by the moment event; it is controlled, managed - cold. It is Patmore whose days are numbered - William Blake went on to influence every generation that came after him.

How wrong Patmore was to think posterity would not embrace William Blake as one of the pre-eminent Artists of his or any other day! Who in the UK reads Coventry Patmore these days (though there might be a Commonplace blogger reflecting on him somewhere - yikes!!)? And whose heart hasn't soared to the strains of Sir Hubert Parry's rendering of Blake's Jerusalem (for some of us, THE British national anthem click). When we think of Coventry, we think of the cathedral, the Luftwaffe, the birthplace of Philip Larkin, not Mr Patmore. Coventry who??

Commonplace 150  George & The Man Who Gave Us The Angel In The House. PART ONE

Lady Godiva by John Collier 1897. (Why the horse white? click)

Brooklyn Beckham and Chelsea Clinton can always be proud that their names are associated with celebrated places. But we can assume Coventry Patmore (1823-1896), a particularly dull windbag of a poet touched by the logorrhea stick, was not conceived in that titular West Midlands city forever proudly associated with Lady Godiva click. He might have displayed more humour if he had.

Probably his most remembered work is the epic poem 'The Angel in the House' a song of praise to his ideal woman - wife number one, Emily. Here is a picture of that concept captured in oil paint by friend to the Patmores, John Everett Millais; you can she that she probably was an angel. An angel whose face is much in need of a smile. It is probably worth remembering Satan was an angel, too, and I think I know which one I'd rather have round for tea. That is, as long as he didn't leave sulphur stains all over the Chesterfield.

The Angel, personified. 

The Angel In The House was first ejected from Patmore's poetical womb in 1854, but took another eight years to fully form as a finished entity. Which gives you some idea about how tedious it is. Only someone with a massive ego could think their work demanded eight years to finish, especially as it was written with a pen on paper. Not exactly the Sistine Chapel or the Pyramids. Anyhoo, Patmore was a poet who loomed over the nineteenth century. You can tell from his portrait what a good portraitist John Singer Sargent is, and that Patmore feels entitled to his position in the social order which recognises him as a person deserving of a study from the most eminent portraitist of his age. Patmore considered himself an authority on all things Art, particularly poetry, but the visual Arts were not safe from his musings. More of this in PART TWO.

Patmore's Angel arrived at a time when the social order was about to be, if not overthrown, then modified. Most men were understandably rattled by the possibility of being in free and open competition with women's minds. That they were physically stronger, there could generally be no doubt, but men knew that women's intellects had never been extensively unleashed on the world before, and Patmore was one of a band of reactionaries who thought women's emancipation would have a negative effect on the lives of men and children. Femininity, he believed, would be transformed into a butch and unsexy variant of monstrous oestrogen wrapped in human ham if women ever got their emancipated rights.         

How it must have terrified the Victorian middle class male when he realised he wouldn't stand a chance against the average female mind, especially where the Arts are concerned. George's New Grub Street's Edwin Reardon is a mostly mediocre writer whose wife is well aware of that fact. He suffers writers' block, obviously a metaphor for sexual impotence. But Reardon would prefer her to be blissfully unaware of this fact, or at least, to pretend she is. As with George, it becomes imperative for Edwin to shove the responsibility for his state of mind onto the shoulders of his wife. Amy Reardon thus becomes a ball-breaker of a harriden - well, George's stilted version. He portrays her as a woman too much in love with socialising and with some sort of abnormal, weird love of money and status - as if these two were not the basis of all creative human activity. Alma Frothingham from The Whirlpool suffers the same slow death by George's rampant misogyny. Because, it's all right for a man to want to be wealthy and at the top of the tree, but when a woman wants to be surrounded by nice things and have a financial cushion to fall back on, yet is dependent on a man for her livelihood, then she is seen as a gold-digging shallow spendthrift. George is one of those men who blame a man's failures on a woman. If Amy was a ball-breaker (and to more or less quote Basil Fawlty - she would have had to stitch them back on before she ripped them off) Edwin Reardon wallowed in masochistic misery quite happily, because it wasn't his fault, it was Amy's. Much as George did with both his first and second wives.

Evening by James Tissot 1885

That is the tragic element here: it's not that Edwin and George lost their creative mojo. It is that both equate creative power with machismo. To lose this is to lose sex superiority. NGS is really George crying out for that dreaded sympathy he craved so forcefully, saying to Edith (his second wife, who may have read the MS ) 'Behind every great man should be an Angel In The House'. . . support me in my genius, you low, witless cow. After all, I pay the bills'. Edith no doubt had the measure of George's work as did Mrs Reardon, but was probably tempted to use the MS to start a fire in the hearth haha ! And Edith seems to be the one with the cojones in their relationship, with George only having the upper hand because of the social bent of the times towards patriarchy and his capacity for earning money - the same two determinators in our own time. Part of his hatred towards her was rooted in the fact she was more of a man than he was!

Women, as we all know, are the carriers of language and culture, and men are the carriers of heavy things; women are good at engaging with the human race and men are good at opening jars. It's the same the world over. Over thousands of years, much energy had gone into suppressing women - and the thought of transferring that energy into something more creative put the willies up the average Victorian man, George and Coventry Patmore, included. In more than one way, the two share quite a bit of common ground. Patmore once wrote:

I have written little but it is all my best; I have never spoken when I had nothing to say, nor spared time or labour to make my words true. I have respected posterity; and should there be a posterity which cares for letters, I dare to hope that it will respect me.

George might well have written these words. 

We turn to Jerry Hall (the future Mrs Rupert Murdoch, may her soul rest in peace when she goes) for help here.

Patmore was of the opinion the best way to keep a man was to be an angel in the living room, and angel in the kitchen and an angel in the bedroom. Here is the Wikipedia page for the poem which will, if you so desire to go there, shed some light on it click. And, here is an extract:
The Wife's Tragedy

Man must be pleased; but him to please
Is woman's pleasure; down the gulf
Of his condoled necessities
She casts her best, she flings herself.
How often flings for nought, and yokes
Her heart to an icicle or whim,
Whose each impatient word provokes
Another, not from her, but him;
While she, too gentle even to force
His penitence by kind replies,
Waits by, expecting his remorse,
With pardon in her pitying eyes;
And if he once, by shame oppress'd,
A comfortable word confers,
She leans and weeps against his breast,
And seems to think the sin was hers;
And whilst his love has any life,
Or any eye to see her charms,
At any time, she's still his wife,
Dearly devoted to his arms;
She loves with love that cannot tire;
And when, ah woe, she loves alone,
Through passionate duty love springs higher,
As grass grows taller round a stone.

And, this:

Mother, it's such a weary strain
The way he has of treating me
As if 'twas something fine to be
A woman; and appearing not
To notice any faults I've got!

Which is the nub of the problem. On superficial reading, Patmore's poem might seem to be a celebration of women. In reality, it is a means of exoticizing us as unlike men, and inferior to them in all ways except as the role men establish for us. To be feted as mythical - angels, are not real - is insulting. Virginia Woolf, too, had a problem with the sort of female Patmore suggests should be an ideal aspiration for fellow females. Here click, Ms Woolf is quoted as saying of this Angel: 

intensely sympathetic. . . . immensely charming. . . . utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draft she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all—I need not say it— she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty—her blushes, her great grace. In those days—the last of Queen Victoria—every house had its Angel.

Well, not every house. Woolf is really only speaking about the middle classes. Many of George's novels are about trying to instil/shove/beat this concept of the pure Angel into lower class women. For George, the labouring poor female was alluring in her feistiness and raw sexuality, but she was useless in her very untamed raw energies when introduced into middle class company. Not that he tried to, because he kept both Marianne aka Nell and Edith from meeting too many of his friends and family. In fact, his first two marriages were wrecked on the shallows of this shore, as he tried to bully them both into complying with his stance on how they should behave. Marianne and Edith were reared in a world where women could not afford to be Angels in the Patmore sense, because they ran a great risk of being exploited and taken advantage of. Ironically, it was exploitation that George brought with him to all three of his marriage beds, not love. Wives 1&2 were women who suited his purpose - Marianne because he wanted to trade on having married a working class woman and therefore, demonstrating his bohemian credentials; and Edith, because he was sex-starved, and also needed a whipping post. Wife 3 was George's last ditch attempt at finding a nurse for his final days. 
Angels, you see, are delicate and sensitive creatures easily tarnished and ruined by harsh and cruel treatment - that's why they live with god in heaven and rarely come to Earth to mix with men. 

JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO EXPLORE COVENTRY PATMORE'S VIEWS ON WILLIAM BLAKE, ROSSETTI, KEATS AND SHELLEY.