Commonplace 163  George & HG Wells' Experiment in Autobiography. PART ONE.

With pictures by Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975)

HG Wells is one of the few to write a version of George's life from the perspective of one who was a friend. When it came out, George was already a footnote in literary history, but, then as now, held dear by a loyal few who took the old misery guts to their hearts. Many of his works were out of print, and George's literary legacy was based on one or two of his longer novels - New Grub Street in particular - and his Dickens criticism. Wells' 'Experiment in Biography' was published in 1934, over thirty years after George's death, and contains a smallish chunk of a chapter on their friendship. You can read the whole book here for free click

The Trail Riders 1965

First, we have to go back to George's end. HG Wells (and Morley Roberts) had been summoned by Gabrielle, George's third wife, to what would be George's last few hours. Wells didn't much like Gabrielle for a raft of reasons, but mostly because, being French, she did a very un-British thing and tried to involve the Wellses in her 'marriage' by writing to HG and his wife to pour out all her complaints about this impossible, demanding and ultimately emotionally unavailable man. Despite the reassurances he gave when he lured her into his web, George spent most of his relationship with Gabrielle being his usual selfish, pernickety self, whilst giving her the slip to spend as much time alone as possible.

Train On The Desert 1926 or 1927

When he arrived in France, Wells immediately undermined her control of the situation. According to Gabrielle, it was Wells' regime of forced food and medicines that finished off the dying man, and she made haste to let HG know how she felt. Exasperated by what he saw as her inadequate and over-emotional response to the situation that bordered on neglect, when he felt no more could be done and he was sure Morley Roberts was on his way, Wells left George's side, a decision he would regret for the rest of his life. Wells would forever think he had let down his friend and could have - should have - behaved with more consideration to the woman who was losing her life partner. However, at the time, he was mostly angry with George for putting himself in harm's way by living so far from civilisation and for being such a coward as to not assert himself with Gabrielle or her mother (whose influence George never managed to undermine) by insisting he return to England.

Sheep-herder 1955-60 (Brokeback Mountain ahoy!)

To be fair, HG had gone off George a little, as compared to their heyday of bicycle rides and Omar Khyyam dinners. He disapproved of the way George treated his wife and children, and had begun to suspect lies had been told about Marianne aka Nell, George's first wife, and the legend of poverty and want spread by our man in pursuit of the dreaded sympathy he demanded from anyone he latched on to. Commonplaces 56-61 show this falling out of love with George, according to what HG told his son, Anthony West.

Wells felt guilty that he had left before the very end (and so could not prevent the religiosity of the funeral) and had failed to wrest George from Gabrielle's hands. To make amends, he arranged to petition (along with Edmund Gosse, another George friend) the British government to give the two Gissing boys, Walter and Alfred, Civil List pensions. In order to do this he prepared a biographical sketch that might answer some of the controversial points that had always surrounded George. It was probably widely known that George had been in prison for theft; it was becoming better known that he lived in either a bigamous relationship (if you considered him married to Gabrielle) or an adulterous one (if you considered his wife was still very much alive). And, it was known that George had died of the consequences of syphilis. These were three good reasons for not spending public funds on the boys. Wells had consulted with Frederic Harrison, then a man of great influence, who filled him in on George's early Positivist/Socialist years. It came as a surprise to Wells to hear something more like the truth on the pre-1888 George and the death of his first wife. He patched together a sketch that carefully edited out the very worst of George's behaviour, and made the most of what he introduced as mitigating circumstances. As it happened, he was successful and the boys' education was paid for. Public funds used to finance private education - George would have approved, but would he have thanked the generosity of the tax payers? The hell he would! He would have assumed it was the least the state could do for the sons of such an artist and aristocrat.

Open Country 1952

One useful thing HG did was to try and get some of George's work either published or re-issued. When Veranilda was ready for launch, he offered to make it more marketable by writing an introduction. The Wakefield Gissings were not impressed, but it was Ms Collet who finally put the kibosh on it. This was the Ms Collet who had been George's minion for so long and who had acted out of self interest against Edith, and who probably felt more like George's widow than Gabrielle did. (She had offered to be one of the guardians to the boys so that she would have access to George's family as if they were her own - weird.) In the end, Frederic Harrison was called on to do the preface which was an odd choice but led to the remarkable claim that Veranilda was George's best book! To read this grim offering first would put any new fans off the rest of the works - trust me on that. Anyhoo, the publication of new work was meant to garner as much money as possible towards the Gissing estate; Ms Collet's interference lost the boys income which irked HG and proved to be a step too far. He withdrew from the matter and more or less cut himself off from George's other friends and his family.

West Texas 1952

Wells subsequently published his unwanted preface as 'George Gissing: An Impression' in the August 1904 edition of the The Monthly Review. Between this and Experiment in Autobiography, came two biographies of George in 1912 that claimed to shed light on his life. They both did, in an inaccurate way: Morley Roberts' The Private Life of Henry Maitland' (a semi-fictional account presenting falsehoods, conjecture and hearsay especially about George's first wife, whom he never actually met. Lazy biographers and academics have been copying the lies ever since without checking their facts - you know who you are!). The other was Frank Swinnerton's 'George Gissing: A Critical Study', a scathing commentary that smacks of one who has fallen out of love with a hero. On reviewing the Roberts offering, HG seems to want to prove that he knew George more intimately than did the author. HG describes George as a snob and a humourless prig (pretty much the same conclusion Frank Swinnerton reached in the end); he adds: There was about him something of the magic one finds at times in an ungracious pitiful child. I have no idea what this means but I don't like the sound of it!

JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO READ MORE OF WHAT HGW SAID ABOUT GRG.

Commonplace 162  George & Lou and Liz.

It's Easter weekend and I fancy a bank holiday day trip to somewhere enchanting that might cater to my inner toxophilite. I know, let's go to Rosherville Gardens with Lou and Liz!

Gravesend, just a rail journey or a short voyage away from London.

George's short stories give us a real insight into the inner workings of our man's ever-increasingly misanthropic mind. Lou and Liz was written in April 1893. around the time 'The Odd Women' was published, and just before Clara Collet hove into view.  He was sick to his back teeth of being lumbered with a wife he couldn't stand and a child he didn't want, but he had to provide for them so making a living from writing was a priority. He turned to short stories for an income. Lou and Liz was intended for inclusion in The English Illustrated magazine, and was immediately accepted and appeared in the August 1893 issue. Coincidentally, that month the Illustrated Police News carried this front page:

Duel Between Work-Girls
had they been to Rosherville??

Lou and Liz opens with the line: The great bell at Westminster was striking nine. This is the iconic bell inside the Elizabeth Tower of the Houses of Parliament, fondly known as Big Ben. (Many people think the tower is called Big Ben, but it's not.) Westminster was the seat of British democracy - but that's a dirty word for George, who was not a fan of 'one person one vote'. (Lordy knows what he would make of Brexit!! click) Nowadays it is the seat of English democracy only, to be 100% correct.

Elizabeth Tower. 

Anyhoo, Lou and Liz are two young women planning and then enjoying a bank holiday day trip to the pleasure gardens in Gravesend. The town's name will have appealed to George's ironic sense of humour - grave's end=death, ergo Rosherville=death. To find out why the town has this name, click. Rosherville was a British version of Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens click. If he had travelled there for fun he might have formed a better view of how ordinary people enjoy their leisure time. But then he would have to rewrite himself as a fairer-minded human being than he was.

The women are living together for reasons of friendship and economic necessity, as neither has a man providing for them. Of course, they live in a garret - George's lazy shorthand for nasty living accommodation he thought was so beloved of the very poor. It's clear the two are common as muck guttersnipes - George embarrasses himself with a phonetic car crash piss-take of their 'Cockerney' accents. Whereas Thomas Hardy gets away with his efforts attempting to phonetically recreate the argot of Wessex, George cannot do London accents on paper. But, as he despised his wife's London accent so much perhaps he was exorcising a demon there. As he also detested common working class music so much (unless it was the sound of a barrel organ), our intro to Lou is her rendition of 'The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo', a very popular song in 1893. (Some claim it detailed the exploits of gambler Charles Wells but others say it is about 'famed art historian' Kenneth Clark's grandfather click.) Patronisingly, George comments that Lou thinks she is singing about a bank robber who gets the better of dumb policemen - a sign of her total lack of education, and her working class love of crime - a bit rich for a man who has done time in gaol himself for theft.

Lou has a regular job and Liz works from home in order to look after her child, Jacky, an infant who throughout the story has no real character or personality except as a bellowing annoyance, and is included to provide a drag and drain on resources and energy and to suggest the innately dissolute nature of the mother, who is not married to the child's father. As a counterpoint, Lou is married but separated. But she is also dissolute - she breaks a hand mirror then boasts she can always buy a new one for sixpence, showing she has no respect for money, despite being the one toiling for it. Lou is made to make use of another music hall song reference - she uses the phrase 'what's the odds as long as you're happy'. There was a popular song of the same name of about 1884, so this is introduced to let us know George's views on the working class vernacular being heavily influenced by what he considers to be trash. Talk about hell in a hand cart - only the likes of George will keep the flame of English language burning in his Little England world - a language that is made up of Latin, Greek, Norse, French, German, Punjabi, Urdu... Argot is OK with George as long as it's Shakespeare's.

Dressed as the travestie of Claudian click

Jacky, the poor child born into this lumpen proletarian moshpit is also 'the future' according to George - again, this is him warning us we are on the road to hell if Demos ever takes charge. Like Hogarth's 'Gin Lane' (see Commonplaces 88 and 89), the baby will inevitably come to grief because of the feckless waster behaviour of the common as muck mother. George was justified in deriding the sentimentalising of the poor (a Victorian tendency), but all he offers is the polar opposite told in crass stereotypes and negatives.

Lou, the elder of the two, works as a book folder (the closest she gets to reading, we can hear George chortle) and earns 11/- a week - six days work, probably 12 hours a day. Liz works from home making quill toothpicks - which paints a particularly unpleasant image of what is done with her handiwork after point of sale - for a shilling a day. He could have given her any one of a number of piecework jobs to do - making silk flowers, sewing, beadwork - but he is emphasising how vile is her home-life. And yet he resents her day off in Gravesend. His short stories always reveal more about George than he realised! The pooled resources mean they can all live not in comfort, but in some sort of ease. George refers to this pooling of money as 'pure communism' - which I think here means common ownership. Jacky might fit into this set up as a shared item.

At one point there is a reference to Lou 'going back to her old calling'. Following the tragic death of her child and after being (we assume) deserted by her husband Lou 'went back to her old calling'. George did not regard a child's death as a tragedy - he made several references to children being better off dead, and their parents being spared the trouble and expense. Now, we have been told Lou works in book folding. There is nothing in the story to let us know she is new to it, so what is this 'calling' reference meant to mean? Is this included to suggest she has worked as a prostitute? The term could be taken as Victorian fiction shorthand for prostitution; however, the clergy often claim they follow some sort of calling, and the sort of profession that makes huge demands but offers few rewards is often referred to as a 'calling' - as in teaching or nursing. We know George means prostitution, because he never was one to think out of the box when it came to clichéd women's politics, but why introduce a term as freighted with negativity? What does it really tell us about Lou? Nothing, really. At no stage is it relevant to anything that unfolds - is it introduced to give her justification for her struggle to appear 'decent' by clinging to her married status? She carries her marriage lines everywhere she goes, maybe as a reminder to keep to the straight and narrow? Here we see the male misconception that women turn to prostitution because of nymphomania.

Beer Street and Gin Lane by William Hogarth 1751 

These two women are depicted as gormlessly childlike - they spar and tease like pubescent siblings, and mock fight and then make up with no recriminations or malice. They are a million miles away from George's two sisters, Madge and Nelly, who were never going to be found bitch-slapping each other in a scrap over combs or mirrors. Lou shares her income with Liz which allows us to understand Lou's slightly superior position - she is younger, legally (she thinks) married and is not encumbered by a child. She had a child, but it died. As this is never mentioned in terms of emotional impact can we assume George is implying that the infant was not mourned? If so, he is guilty of underestimating the mother-child bond - something that allowed him to wrench his son Walter from his mother's arms and farm him out to the frigid Gissings in Wakefield. And the manner in which he did this - kidnapping the boy and rejecting all of his wife's feelings on the subject - is one of many infamous, unheroic deeds he committed. The Shameful Life of George Gissing would make a good 3 volume biography title.

Lou's age and financial superiority, plus her legally married status makes Liz somewhat beholden and in no position to fall out with her friend or do anything to threaten the support she gets. Lou's name is first in the title, also emphasising her superior status - is she the prime focus of the tale; the 'coming' woman who will end civilisation as we know it if she ever gets the upper hand? From his account, Edith, his second wife, gave him earache on a regular basis so this might be revenge for a battle he knew he couldn't win alone (enter Ms Collet, desperately seeking a life partner). In fact, Lou helps to care for Jacky with a willing heart. She helps with child-rearing duties the way ordinary people do - which is a sign of a worldwide tendency for adults to nurture children whoever they belong to, though George presents it as a comment on the fluidity of family affinities amongst the lower orders, and the dire consequences this has on progeny and the future of the race.

So the women go with young Jacky to Rosherville Gardens, a place of rare delight for anyone whose daily life lacks colour and excitement. We can see from the ads it was full of drinking alcohol, fairground rides, dancing, shopping, eating, gawping at amazing things, socialising with members of the complementary gender, showing off and relaxing. And there was a bear - Rosie.

The poor creature in the Rosherville bear pit click

We all know the highlight of the average worker's dreary round is a well-spent bank holiday, partly because it is a day when attractions and celebrations have been specifically invented to astound and divert (and also to part customers from their heard-earned dosh) and who doesn't enjoy a day of chilling? In George's day, workers were not paid wages for taking bank holidays, and employers were often opposed to the business lost and the outputs curtailed. Workers would have to save extra money to offset the drop in wages whilst stashing away enough to do the day justice. George chooses to focus on the day trip to a pleasure garden because it provides a mass of working class folk free of the restraints of their employers, their daily timetable and the fear of being made jobless. But, when they do get 'freedom' (of a kind), what do they do? Get pissed, that's what. Only cut-off-from-his-fellow-human-being George would not understand the need for this - he'd never had a real job, so he never knew the physical toll heavy labour takes on the bodies of those who work 60 hour weeks as a norm. And he would never have experienced how truly awful it is to have very limited time and opportunity to unwind - is it any wonder people want what is easy and right under their noses? We know George hated working people cluttering up the place - think of the In The Year of Jubilee.

In fact, exactly the same thing happens all over the world on feast days and bank holidays when the workers get a day off - a day which is normally a working day. I'm no archaeologist, but wasn't the Colosseum built for that purpose? If it held 80,000 people weren't most of them plebs who had time off to use up? And weren't they getting drunk, eating junk food and buying souvenirs and tat? Just like the Londoners who spent a day at Rosherville. We know the Colosseum was the beginning of the end for the Romans - is George telling us the end of the British Empire starts with Rosherville?

The Cafe Chantant at Rosherville Gardens c 1893

George is not beyond sarcasm when he describes the attractions of the pleasure gardens. He lists the things they will eat - some brought along as a picnic to save money - and then Before and after, those great mugs of ale which add so to the romance of Rosherville. As if he never drank beer! Or never got drunk!!

George visited (strictly in the name of research) the place on April 3rd 1893 - he was up in London on business (and pleasure). A half day in Rosherville, alone and refusing to share the mood will have unfolded, and would do little more than reinforce his already nasty views on Demos. He writes in his diary that the weather was glorious. Did he partake of any of the amusement or was he wearing his usual anthropologist-on-an-expedition-to-uncover-behaviours-of-primitive-tribes-hat? It comes as a consolation to know that he probably hated every minute of it. He will have been sweating like a pig, too, in all that glorious hot, sunny, weather. Not that living pigs sweat, of course: it's a phrase related to iron smelting.


To cut a short story shorter Lou's husband is coincidentally (deus ex machina Number 1) also at Rosherville. Lou bumps into him on the dance floor and he is interested in her, after commenting on her good looks. Initially, she rejects him, but of course, Lou is flattered and begins to thaw. Liz looks on and fears she will be abandoned because there is a possibility Lou might dump her and go back to her husband. Luckily, Liz meets a woman who knows the varmint ratbag is not the man Lou thinks he is (deus ex machina 2) - he has lied about his name (and so Lou isn't Mrs Bishop - a religious knock at the hypocrisy of the church) and was already married when he married her, so he is a bigamist. As George would go on to be a sort of bigamist himself, maybe he is practising his moves here. Liz can't wait to tell Lou and ruin the reunion. The ratbag is confronted and slinks away. The point of this is the speed with which Liz tells Lou the news, and the partisan motivation behind it. Is it from jealousy that she wants to destroy Lou's dreams of a happier life (though we all know the fellow is a blackguard), or is she acting to protect her own interests and those of her child? Usually in life, things are not black and white they are a mixture of muddy brown.

They go home, and the old life resumes as it was, except for what is not stated - Liz may have gained some level of self esteem knowing Lou isn't really married. In fact, the two women are married to each other - perhaps George is signalling his approval of women-only/men-only marriages
(like the one he shared with Eduard Bertz, his man wife and constant pen pal??). Coming together with a woman for sex only would have been right up his alley, though maybe he underestimated how many women would forgo the pleasures of the male and stick to their own kind in the sexual intercourse department haha. Liz shows sympathy for her friend, but George has already sullied her sincerity with self-interest, so how authentic is it? A drunk outside is slaughtering The Man Who Broke The Bank; Lou quotes the Evergreen Chappie's wise words once more: the circle is restored. They both look on the bright side - at least Lou is free to marry anyone she wants now. There is talk of setting the law on the errant Bishop, but they probably won't, partly because it has been a humiliation for Lou - something George did not consider when he left Gabrielle to explain to one and all (including his family) the true nature of their relationship after he died. Was he an adulterer or a bigamist? Which is more heroic?

To find out more about Rosherville Gardens, go here click

Commonplace 161  George & God.

I share three things with the late, great Christopher Hitchens: a birthday, a birthplace and that clarity of thinking that is Antitheism. If I only I had his brains click. (Not his literal brains, you damned fool!) And his courage click. Anyone who 'vibrates' to Marxism - as he put it - is all right with me. I am sure there was no cowardly last minute scramble for redemption at his end. What a loss was his passing.

God Blessing The Seventh Day by William Blake c 1805

At George's death (see Commonplace 139), there was a kerfuffle about religion, which can be summed up as 'what form did George want his send off to take?'. In his day, and with his background, the assumption would be that some sort of Christian religious rite would be involved. Gabrielle Fleury, George's third wife, was on the scene, so we may assume her wishes were taken into account, and that she was acting on his wishes, perhaps guided by some arrangement made when George was compos mentis enough to make decisions. Just to recap, George was in the final throes of heart disease brought on by paresis - a complication of tertiary syphilis. Not every Gissing scholar wants to believe George had contracted this disease, but I do because: 1) I'm not a scholar; 2) all evidence points in that direction. His Owens College friend, John George Black wrote letters about it, HG Wells knew about it, as did Morley Roberts; Frank Swinnerton pulled no punches on it. See Commonplaces 62-69.

So, there George was, desperate to come home to England (his long-term plan, alas left too late), but too ill to travel. He knew a thing or two about illness, and death had been courting him for years, but now, he no doubt felt the end was nigh. He would have recognised the lack of adequate medical and nursing care that surrounded him would be the death of him. His friends were sent for - Morley Roberts and HG Wells were summoned by Gabrielle. It's worth saying that HG Wells had a low opinion of Gabrielle based on a series of long and needy letters she wrote on the subject of George and his unreasonable, selfish and somewhat flaky behaviour. We will return to these letters in a future post, because they shed much light on George. She is the only wife to get a hearing, after all. She had already been driven to distraction by trying to satisfy his very odd requirements and when he was obviously on his last legs, she was coping more or less alone, and facing a dismal future, fairly broke, well past her prime, and continuing to care for her ageing mother.

God Judging Adam by William Blake 1795

Both of these friends did their best to get to the distant part of France that George was holed up in. If only he'd settled for northern France, like many British and Irish ex-pats such as Oscar Wilde or Joseph Sickert because then it would have been a hop, skip and a jump back to Blighty for help. Or even Paris, with its expertise on all things syphilis.

Ispoure.

In his 'Experiment in Autobiography', Wells says:

He had been writing with deepening distress to Morley Roberts in November. Just on the eve of Christmas came telegrams to both of us: “George is dying. Entreat you to come. In greatest haste.”

When he arrived, HG was shocked at the state of the place in terms of Gabrielle's provision of care. He took the matter in hand: There was however a good little Anglican parson about, with his wife, and they helped me to get in a nurse. 

Wells knew his friend was dying, but he had never witnessed death before, and it shocked him. George's delirium produced hallucinations and delusions:

"What are these magnificent beings!” he would say. “Who are these magnificent beings advancing upon us?” Or again, “What is all this splendour? What does it portend?” He babbled in Latin; he chanted fragments of Gregorian music. All the accumulation of material that he had made for Veranilda and more also, was hurrying faster and brighter across the mirrors of his brain before the lights went out for ever.

The Anglican chaplain, whose wife had helped with the beef-tea, heard of that chanting. He allowed his impression to develop in his memory and it was proclaimed later in a newspaper that Gissing had died “in the fear of God’s holy name, and with the comfort and strength of the Catholic faith.” This led to some bitter recriminations. Edward Clodd and Morley Roberts were particularly enraged at this “body-snatching” as they called it, and among other verbal missiles that hit that kindly little man in the full publicity of print were “crow,” “vulture” and “ecclesiastical buzzard.” But he did not deserve to be called such names. He did quite honestly think Gissing’s “Te Deums” had some sort of spiritual significance.

But, according to Wells, Gissing, like Gibbon, regarded Christianity as a deplorable disaster for the proud gentilities of classicism.

Jupiter and Io
by Antonio da Correggio 1532-3

It's doubtful if George would ever have consented to a overtly religious ceremony of any stripe, though nothing of the kind can be totally ruled out. His whole writing life he sat on a fence about the topic, leaning more to the agnostic side. He was sceptical of anyone who lived their life by religious tenets, and many times castigated his sister Madge for her devotion to her god. He was too much of an iconoclast (albeit in a modest, repressed British Victorian way) to follow formats for how to live life - he was very dismissive when his younger brother, William, took up the best-seller of the age, 'Self-Help' by Samuel Smiles, described as 'the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism'. In his early days, George was much taken with Arthur Schopenhauer who had a fondness for Buddhism, and George did his best to absorb those ideas - much as did Friedrich Nietzsche - and make sense of the world through introspection and intellectual distance. 'Be of the moment' says Buddhism, but that doesn't put a vegetarian nut-roast on the table when the means of production is in the wrong hands. As it still is. Anyhoo, when pressed, George, in a piece of 100% solid George Gissing over-complicated over-thought intellectual fence-sitting, once said he was most in sympathy with Manicheism. WTF is that, I hear you ask. Well, it's the ideal religion/system for anyone who can't make up her/his mind but has a long night of the soul realisation judgement day is just around the corner and wants to cover all bases just in case there really is a god.

Let's look at in from a learned perspective such as click, where light is shed (see what I've done there haha you have to read the link to get that) on the funeral practices of Manicheans in long ago China, a place where the teachings made a great impact, but also gave rise to resentment amongst Buddhists and Confucians who persecuted Manicheans wherever they could:

The list of scriptures shows that the Manicheans in south China still retained scriptures, which were clearly translated in the T'ang era even though new ones might have been added. The officials were particularly concerned about the well-organized sects whom they vaguely labelled as "Vegetarian demon worshippers" (ch'ih-ts'ai shih-mo). As one Confucian official would memorialise: "The sect of the 'demon worshipping vegetarians (sic)' is strictly prohibited by the laws. Even the family members of the offenders who are not privy to their crime are exiled to distant lands and half of the offender's property would be awarded to the informer and the rest confiscated. Nevertheless the number of followers has increased in recent times. The sect originated in Fukien and spread to the Province of Wen and the two Che Provinces (i.e. eastern and southern Chekiang). When Fang La rose in rebellion, the followers of the sect incited each other to rebel everywhere. It is said that their rules prohibit the eating of meat and the drinking of wine. They do not worship spirits or Buddhas or ancestors. Nor do they entertain guests. When [a member of the sect] dies he is first laid out fully clothed and capped, and then buried naked. Two fellow members of the sect then sit beside the corpse and one of them will ask: 'Did he come with a cap?' and the other will reply: 'No, [he did not].' They then proceed to take off his cap and in similar fashion they remove one by one his other items of clothing, until nothing is left. One of them will then ask: 'What did he wear when he first came?' The other will answer: 'Placenta [i.e. the clothes of the womb].' They then put the corpse into a cloth...

Their refusal to pay respects to their ancestors and their practice of naked burial are detrimental to public morals. They also assert that human existence is full of misery. Hence, to terminate it by killing is to relieve misery. This is what they call 'deliverance,' and he who 'delivers' many will become a Buddha. Therefore, once their numbers increase, they will take advantage of political chaos and rise in revolt. Their greatest crime is the pleasure they take in killing. They hate Buddhism in particular because its prohibition of killing is an offence to them.

Maybe George didn't read the fine print about not eating meat or drinking wine or killing folk, but was attracted to the bit about 'life being full of misery' - he certainly tried to live up to that, and make sure that others followed his lead. Perhaps that's why he left his first wife to starve and die in abject poverty - which according to George was how he found her after her death - in order to 'deliver' her. No, that wasn't from any religious conviction or spiritual path following, but old-fashioned selfishness that allowed George to be so cruel. The sort of thing religion - god - is supposed to be pretty judgemental about.

Did Nell get any religious rites at her passing? She was, by George's account, a person of faith who considered converting to Catholicism, much to his amusement/derision. George ended his days dragged unwittingly into a religious tradition he claimed to despise, but if he had been sent off in Manichean style he would have been buried bollock naked, so maybe he was better off in the arms of Jesus after all.

Manichean temple in Jinjiang showing Buddha of Light 

Commonplace 160  George & Children PART TWO

From the miserable Dickensian early start of a poor unloved waif, through to the neglect foisted on offspring by indifferent parenting, children fare no better than adults in any Gissing outing. Not only are their lives designated as miserable, unhappy and futile when they are small, all will end up disillusioned, unfulfilled and wasted in their adult lives because of early setbacks. Even when he had children of his own - particularly when he had children of his own! -  George failed to recognise that he was the least suited to either father children or influence their upbringing. Being too selfish, emotionally constipated, misanthropic and pessimistic to offer a small person a decent role model of happiness and what we now term 'centredness', strangely, George considered himself a student of child psychology.

Madonna and Child
by Pietro Torrigiano c 1525

Was it the learned hard-heartedness of the disappointed person whose life had been a series of self-inflicted disasters, or an innate lack of emotional intelligence that rendered George incapable of identifying with his own children? After all, it doesn't take a genius to work out those things that make an adult unhappy are likely to have an even deeper impact on a developing mind. What made him miserable as a child could make any child, at any time, anywhere, equally as sad. But, empathy was never George's strong suit. Let's take a look at a few of his literary child victims.

Arthur Golding in Workers In The Dawn.
If ever the spectre of Charles Dickens reared up as the Ghost of Childhood Past in George's canon, it is with young Arthur. Of course, Dickens was walking the walk - he had been on the receiving end of genuine poverty as a child, and the experience of the blacking factory with its bullying, deprivation and loneliness informed many of his characters and stories. George had never lived through such hardship, and so through Arthur Golding, all of his early love of Dickens (which rapidly left him when he was a grown up) poured out in what is clichéd, sentimental but ultimately banal. If Monty Python had been writing a book about Victorian orphans, they would have invented Arthur click. For starters, he makes his début in a squalid garret rugged and sloped from one side down to the other (rugged as in having an uneven surface, or was it covered in rugs??) found sleeping next to his dying father by Edward Norman, an old friend of the sick man. Naturally, he is an angel of a child not at all marked by the vicious surroundings - a quick 'lick and a promise' (as my old mother used to say) and he will clean up nicely. Please see Commonplace 156 and the sad tale of Billy Burden for more of the same. When Arthur is finally left fatherless (his whorish mother is already gone), he clings to the corpse with all the determination of a small Scottish terrier click. 

Fast forward a few months and the wee lad, after a social experiment phase that backfired when he was semi-adopted by Norman (a man who owns an exquisite little copy of Horace, so we know he is a typical George superior male), is up to his arm pits in classic Victorian slum fiction world - bullied, exploited, unclean, unloved and on the brink of becoming the new Artful Dodger. But he rises above - of course, he is your actual natural aristocrat. What are the chances of that in a novel written by a chap who considered his own humble origins as a freakish error of lineage, as if the stork had dropped him off at the wrong residence? On the plus side, Arthur is as gentle as a girl. Not sure George realised how that would scan. Arthur rejects the financial and social advantages Norman offers and sets off on his own voyage of self-discovery back in the streets of his birth. 

If all this sounds preposterous and silly, we must recall the intrinsic harm this trite, over-long book has done in cementing the George Gissing myth that he was a superior sort of chap dragged down by associating with inferior women. Many of the claims made by biographers that they know who George was - and know his first wife, too - are based on Arthur's father and Arthur, himself, and the deplorable portrayal of women in this book. You would have to be a real dufus to fall for it, but they do! It may well have been the myth George wants us to believe, but that doesn't make it true.

Hughie Rolfe in The Whirlpool
Poor Hughie. Brought into the novel to help George explain how he will someday abandon his own child, Walter, whilst putting the blame for that onto the boy's mother. Hughie's father, Harvey Rolfe, one of George's vilest creations, in an unlikely conversation of indelicate intimacy with the odious Ms Abbott, a self-proclaimed governess/educator (and not at all like his sexy wife, Alma) offers the chance for George to justify his own heartless actions whilst appearing to be an appreciator of the put upon, low born woman. In conversation these two:
...spoke of the people who were so anxious to be relieved of their children.
'One lady wrote to me that she would pay almost anything if I would take her little boy and keep him all year round; she only has a small house, and the child utterly upsets her life.' Says Ms Abbott.
This was published in 1893, when George was unhappily married to Edith and young Walter was a toddler. Already, the seeds of the boy's downfall were being sown; George didn't carry his plan out until he had worn down his second wife and she was in no position to complain, but George it seems always planned to take Walter away from her and send him to his two spinster sisters and child abusing mother in Wakefield. Because it is clear from the way he wrote about Walter in his Diaries that the boy very much 'upset' his father's life. Poor Hughie is seen to be a victim of a mother's neglect, and eventually dies. This is what is termed an 'Easter egg' in modern parlance when films and their trailers contain hints as to future productions, especially for cinematic universe renditions of superhero comics. Such as this click. Harvey, the boy's father is absolved of his neglect but of course, Alma, the alleged bad mother, has to be punished. It's what the Greeks would have wanted haha.

Identical Twins by Diane Arbus 1967

The eponymous Whirlpool is Modern Life (1897-stylee) with its social demands and capitalist fancies, and the whole world conspiring to keep a man from his Homer. Did George live in a Whirlpool? Not judging by the endless moaning he did about a lack of social life, if we are to delve into the Diaries and Letters. But, if George's life was a Whirlpool, then mine is a veritable Charybdis - no doubt George got his title/concept from the Greek legend click.

George's ideal holiday 

The Madden Sisters in The Odd Women.
Six girls whose mother is already dead (Mrs Madden, having given birth to six daughters had fulfilled her function in this wonderful world). Father intends to insure his life for £1K in order to provide for them, but suffers what will be a fatal RTA the day before he sets this plan in motion. The fickle finger of fate once more enters into George's realm. He nails his colours to the mast in the opening chapter when old Madden says: ...nothing upsets me more than those poor homes where wife and children are obliged to talk from morning to night of how the sorry earnings should be laid out. No, no; women, old or young, should never have to think about money... George claimed to be making use of irony (when he was schmoozing Gabrielle Fleury and she queried his misogyny) in his writing and so we can assume, here, he is not referring to his first wife's death in poverty brought on by his meagre alimony payments! That would require a level of insight George did not possess. He writes on: Human beings are not destined to struggle for ever like beasts of prey. 'Beasts of prey'?? Doesn't he mean 'beasts of burden'? Or does he mean prey in general as in a lion's dinner?? Maybe his version is some lost to us Victorian phrase - but I doubt it.

So, these orphans are left with £800, a little over £7K in today's money. If a single word could sum them up in their childhood, it would be 'mediocre'. Nothing beautiful about them - looks and charm being bankable skills - with the exception of baby Monica. Which we can predict will be punished and ruined over the course of the book - every temptress gets a whacking in a Gissing outing (Alma in The Whirlpool?? So, guess what becomes of Monica?). She might be the salvation of the group if she can marry well, which means finding a man with money. That is held against her when she chooses it. But, as a baby, she is just a liability; another mouth to feed. Only Alice, the eldest, reared to be their surrogate mother, is strong-minded enough to pull it all together and get them through.

We are never told how their childhoods unfurled, but we can guess the girls were raised by women not unlike Ms Abbott from The Whirlpool - unsuited to the task, indifferent to the outcome, but in need of the money. Not unlike the Gissing sisters. The Maddens set out as young adults to make a living in a world not set up to accommodate single girls. Monica's marriage - doesn't Widdowson treat her the way George treated Edith? By reminding her he was the one with the power because he had the money, and that she should know 'which side of her bread is buttered' - as George did to Edith? Of all George's novels, The Odd Women is his most contentious and open to interpretation. I am always amazed when it is seen as a novel about the emancipation of women when all I read is George's misogyny, unchained. He sees women as their own worst enemies, and it is innate weakness of mind that leads to their downfall. Did he ever stop to ask what is the fundamental aspect of the debate: exactly what will men get out of women's emancipation? A loss of power would be inevitable if women worldwide were ever truly emancipated, so why would men ever want to relinquish the upper hand to a tribe of competitors? Does George expect women to be more like men in order to fit into a man's world? Until women are freed of sex slave status and incubators to children, we will never be equal. And, when we are free of our sexual functions and gynaecological entrapments, men will kill us as superfluous to their needs and because we pose a threat to diminishing natural resources. But that's another post!

Bubbles: Children At Play by Charles Dawson Watson 1856

Commonplace 159   George & Children PART ONE

Follower of the Master of the Dangolsheim Madonna, 
South German, Virgin and Child, late 15th–early 16th century,

What was George thinking of when he fathered two children? He didn't ever want to be a man encumbered by dependents of any age or capability, and he was never in love with his second wife, Edith, so bringing two defenceless mites into that hot mess of anger and resentment is bordering on the psychotic. As he was the one (he) considered to have the brains in the relationship, the blame lays fairly and squarely at his door.

First son, Walter, came along nine months after the wedding day - of course. George complained, during their 'courting' days Edith was not amenable to 'living in sin', and he put this down to her conservative nature. Did he really have the cheek to ask her to? I doubt that very much - I expect he raised the topic obliquely and she leapt back in horror. His wooing of her was low-key and raised no hope of romance or passion - it was to be a practical arrangement based on Edith understanding he was the boss, the one with his hands on the financial reins, and all she had to do was cooperate and he would drag her out of the social slime of Camden Town from where she was spawned. He must have promised things he didn't/couldn't deliver in order to trick her into it.  He, rightly, realised she didn't have too many options in her life, and marriage to a chap of a slightly higher social class who was not in trade was a step up in life for her. I presume Kate Middleton was on the receiving end of similar counsel haha.

Anyhoo, it's clear from his letters and Diaries that George was not ecstatic or in celebratory mood at the thought of impending fatherhood, although the paucity of information in the Diaries (heavily edited by George, etc) doesn't allow for a true reflection - May 4th 1891, a visit from the doctor, presumably to see Edith, may refer to the pregnancy diagnosis. If he had come to see George, more would have been made of it! By May 11th, the phrase he uses is 'Edith's illness'. By the time of the birth: So, the poor girl's misery is over, and she has what she earnestly desired'. In fact, her troubles were just beginning. And the fact she had what she 'earnestly desired' would eventually be used against her

Ushering In Banality by Jeff Koons 1888

George was not best pleased at the amount of disruption the infant caused his daily routine. Even for George, a man who could have moaned for England if that had been an Olympic sport, the amount of droning on about how put out he was by the new infant, the added fussing from servants and the needs of an ailing wife, pissed him off just as much as having to shell out for the medical bills and staff wages. The noise of the crying baby, the coming and going of inadequate domestic help, and with Edith too ill to supervise - in fact, her attempts were seen by George as interfering - got in the way of the reading. His unreasonable unreasonableness is a sign of how self-centred he was - his attitude was that of one who thought of bringing a child into the world should not have been more than a blip on his radar.

Floating Baby by Marc Quinn 2013 click and click

Although he does mention the level of suffering his wife endured during childbirth, and he acknowledges that she really wanted to be a mother (presumably she assumed that role would fill her life with the love she missed out on as a wife), his first impressions of his first born were dire. For a start, the child had a conspicuous birthmark on his face: The baby has a very ugly dark patch over right eye, Don't know the meaning of it.

Now, as we know, George often mulled over the works of the dreaded eugenicists (see Commonplace 101). Perhaps the shock of seeing the fruit of his loins in some way blemished was a shock, and may have caused him some sort of negative reaction based on what he saw as the boy being genetically inferior. After all, his own claim at being 'aristocratic' was based on innate superiority, so having a child who was less than perfect will have been seen by George as... Edith's fault. Obviously she being working class - though her father ran his own business much like George's father, who ran a shop - would carry the taint, never George, the intrinsically superior special one he always considered himself to be.

Did giving birth to a faulty child signal the end of Edith? Though George didn't know her that well - whirlwind courtship (NOT romance!) and nine months together in Exeter making a new life for themselves with George insisting she leave all her family behind. Much to George's dismay, one of Edith's family members turned up cold calling on April 18th 1891 to find out if Edith was still alive and kicking, so long had it been since she had been in touch with her family - hardly secure footings for a lifelong union.

Hopefully, son Walter never read the Diaries and uncovered what his father really thought of him, because at one point, George says the neighbours are scared of him when he is taken out in his pram.

A Girl by Ron Mueck 2006

George's own childhood was reasonably comfortable, with domestic servants to do the skivvying, a reasonable education, and a typically distant Victorian set of parents. His mother was a fan of child abuse - as in corporal punishment - for transgressions against her rules. Presumably, being headstrong, defiant and ever resentful of constrictions imposed by those he considered his intellectual inferiors, George must have been on the receiving end of that sort of correction. He described himself as being in need of discipline so we can assume he was somewhat indulged and allowed a certain amount of freedom to please himself with his spare time, then beaten when he stepped out of line. You need opportunities to be bad in order to earn punishment, and George saw himself as a natural leader of the gang, but playing out and making friends with the local children was never on the cards. Henry Hick, a childhood friend from Wakefield, once said George and the Gissing children rarely mixed with their peers. It is difficult to see George playing conkers and swapping marbles or chalking a hopscotch court to use with others over a shared bag of bullseyes (the sweet, not the animal organs haha).

Minty bullseyes - yum!

So, when the little nipper with the blemish turned up, his mother exhausted, his father inadequate to the task, he was farmed out (for the first but not the last time) to a family of strangers. Things were different then so maybe it didn't seem so counter-productive to get others to raise your child out in some country backwater instead of in the bosom of its secure loving family. George realised he couldn't cope with two rivals for his time - Edith was suffering post-partum, and Walter was a sickly babe with complex nursing needs. Instead of George stepping up and offering his fatherly services as childminder and chief carer, precious bonding time was wasted both for the parent-child relationship, and for the wife/husband thing. They should have set out in their family adventure as a little group, with their capable leader - George! - at the head of the team.

JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO EXPLORE GEORGE'S PESSIMISM ABOUT CHILDREN - WHOM HE DID NOT SEE AS 'THE FUTURE'.

Commonplace 158   George & The Genius of the Crowd PART TWO

With the weird and fab paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) click

Autumn 1573

George, if he had been alive in the late twentieth century and if he had done some serious introspective thinking precipitated by mind altering substances and 'ardent' beverages, would perhaps have been intrigued by the work of Charles Bukowski. He would certainly have found an affinity there. Apart from both being rampant misogynists who paraded as the opposite, they both dabbled in painting (hopefully, George's works were better than CB's truly dreadful daubs click); they both hated proper work (as in the sort that makes you break a sweat), and then there is their shared disdain for all things 'Demos' - or, as Bukowski described it, the 'Crowd'. How they both needed to prove they were above the everyday person - a sure sign of some inner battle with feelings of inferiority. How they both raged against their mediocrity!

From Bukowski's wikipedia page:
His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. His work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work.

Vertumnus click c 1590

George's work is generally about the social, cultural and economic ambience of London; his early writing concerns the lives of the poor working class and then the poor middle class - as George Orwell summed it up, our man always wrote about 'not enough money'. He was preoccupied with the technical business of writing (and when he wasn't doing books he was scribbling letters and diaries), and each book seems to have been dragged out of him (that's how stagnant his creative flow could become), but it was all insignificant when compared to the amount of reading he did. He lived to read, and that solitary vice kept him from achieving his full potential. Reading is essentially a passive act, and is always a good excuse to be alone and not be forced to socialise. George read in order to study his contemporaries and learn his craft from these experts, but his own 'voice' was never easy or natural. Though he was a massively uptight cove, so perhaps it was!

Then we have George's relationships with women - always problematic and unsatisfactory on every level. Indeed, much of his anger was directed against the sex in general because he perennially felt we had let him down - typical of a man who seeks to make women objects of veneration and cannot accept us as equal human beings. And he held women accountable for forcing men to fritter away their talents in providing for dependents - New Grub Street's Amy Reardon is seen as some sort of a harpy because she requires food and a decent roof over her head - all is put in jeopardy by her husband's all-round impotence. In a world where she was unable to work for a living (for want of jobs for women of her class) - but could no doubt have turned her hand to anything if she had to - she was forced, by traditional gender roles, to rely on her man - the father of her child - for support. That dependency was part of the marriage set-up, and, to be fair to her, what had been promised in the marriage contract. Edwin's anger at what he sees as her unreasonableness is just his spite - he has reneged on his responsibilities as husband, father and writer, and yet it is somehow all Amy's fault! At the bottom of it, his fear of expressing his jealousy towards the child is what keeps him trapped in a cycle of bad faith, all the while blaming her demands for support of al kinds for his inertia. The death of the child liberates him - just as sending Walter off to live with his family in Wakefield (much to his wife's horror and dismay) allowed some of the rage to leak out of him like pus from a zit.

Alas also for George, marriage was the contract he signed up for. He never took his vows seriously. One has only to think of the silly fake ceremony he went through with Gabrielle to understand how little time he had for promises he had no intention of keeping. (I bet he stood next to her with his fingers crossed behind his back haha.) And he famously said that no-one should be expected to sacrifice themselves for someone else - which is, surely, his misunderstanding of a loving relationship such as husband and fatherhood? Well, he reneged on all his commitments in order to fulfil his own 'genius'. If only he and his talent had been worthy of the ordeals they had to suffer.

And then there is the ludicrous stance of preferring to starve rather than lower himself to take up a proper job. Bukowski was a postal worker for many years and hated it; George was a teacher who hated teaching. How tragic to be born without an independent income! What exactly did George have against work? Well, it got in the way of reading, but it also brought him that thing he so dreaded - a boss. He hated to think anyone was better than he was at anything, and voiced the opinion he loathed being told what to do. And then there was the company you are usually forced to keep when you work, over which you have no control. Is it any wonder folk sometimes 'go postal'? click

One of Charles Bukowski's most celebrated poems in this one: and click to hear the man reciting it, and below is the text.

The Genius of the Crowd

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average

human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it

and the best at hate are those who preach love

and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god

those who preach peace do not have peace

those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers

beware the knowers

beware those who are always reading books

beware those who either detest poverty

or are proud of it

beware those quick to praise

for they need praise in return

beware those who are quick to censor

they are afraid of what they do not know

beware those who seek constant crowds for

they are nothing alone

beware the average man the average woman

beware their love, their love is average

seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred

there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you

to kill anybody

not wanting solitude

not understanding solitude

they will attempt to destroy anything

that differs from their own

not being able to create art

they will not understand art

they will consider their failure as creators

only as a failure of the world

not being able to love fully

they will believe your love incomplete

and then they will hate you

and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond

like a knife

like a mountain

like a tiger

like hemlock

their finest art

Is the term 'genius' to be taken as the older definition - the one George used? To the ancient Romans:
the genius (plural in Latin genii) was the guiding spirit or tutelary deity of a person, family (gens), or place (genius loci).^[2] The noun is related to the Latin verb genui, genitus, "to bring into being, create, produce". Because the achievements of exceptional individuals seemed to indicate the presence of a particularly powerful genius, by the time of Augustus the word began to acquire its secondary meaning of "inspiration, talent".^[3] The term genius acquired its modern sense in the eighteenth century, and is a conflation of two Latin terms: genius, as above, and ingenium, a related noun referring to our innate dispositions, talents and inborn nature.^[4] Beginning to blend the concepts of the divine and the talented, the Encyclopédie article on genius (génie) describes such a person as "he whose soul is more expansive and struck by the feelings of all others; interested by all that is in nature never to receive an idea unless it evokes a feeling; everything excites him and on which nothing is lost." ^{[5]  
Thank you wikipedia.} 

Whimsical Portrait 

On the surface, this genius Bukowski invokes is a malodorous, malign influence for harm, being skewed towards the darker side of the human mind. George was of the opinion the world and its humans were hypocritical and vicious, though where he found such misanthropic views - as with Bukowski - is hard to explain. Neither had lived a life of hardship that hadn't been self-inflicted; both hid their inadequacies behind a veneer of cod philosophical distance, but both were really angry children moaning about not having had enough love, or attention - personified as food and drink? 

A mob may be ruled with treachery hatred violence absurdity. George's fear of Demos was based on his belief that the average human being is capable of all three as default and is only kept in bay by the endeavours of their superiors - ie the likes of his own class (whereas poverty and want, ignorance and fear are better at controlling the masses, and have usually been the weapons of choice in the class war). And George was of the opinion the whole world is absurd, so he was in agreement there.

Bukowski wrote:

I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas... How can I be concerned with the murder of one man when almost all men, plus females, are taken from cribs as babies and almost immediately thrown into the masher?

George would have agreed. His bleak view was that children were a curse and a burden, destined as they were for lives of misery whatever their class, and he would not have had any if Edith (his second wife) hadn't needed them to get her through being married to him. He never really stepped up to the plate of fatherhood, and found it difficult to love either of his boys - with Walter being a disappointment to him and Alfred being virtually a stranger. Bukowski had a daughter, Marina, and said he loved her. Here is a poem he wrote for her:

What were these two men so afraid of? Being average, and the awful realisation they weren't special enough for greatness to come easy to them? 

From Bukowski's The Strongest of the Strange.

you won’t see them often
for wherever the crowd is
they
are not.

those odd ones, not
many
but from them
come
the few
good paintings
the few
good symphonies
the few
good books
and other
works.

and from the
best of the
strange ones
perhaps
nothing.

they are
their own
paintings
their own
books
their own
music
their own
work.

'nuff said.