Commonplace 156 George & The Day of Silence
With images by Helen Chadwick (1953-1996).
Death. As we all are, George was obsessed with it, being both attracted to and repelled by it. Freud postulates a 'death drive' - Thanatos, named after the Greek personification of death. See Commonplace 130 for more on this. In George's time, death was not the one-step-removed experience we have of it today - at least, here in the West. It was ever present and in your face. George grew up in the back rooms of a shop that sold medicine and remedies. Not quite the sort of place we think of today as a pharmacy/chemist's, where the main worker has a degree in pharmacology or chemistry and has undertaken many science courses to gain the role. This was a shop on a street of other shops, serving a mixed community of poor more than rich.
In Commonplace 2 there is an account of how the late Victorian chemist shop worked. It was, first and foremost, a shop, and often something one step removed from a place of science. There were patent medicines for sale - some of them quack remedies click, that made ridiculous claims for their efficacy but which were little more than syrup or chalk; folk remedies that everyone used such as witch hazel for bruises and cloves for toothache; and genuine scientifically proven treatments such as aspirin and carbolic. Some of the shopkeepers extended their range by making up their own preparations, using centuries-old remedies with recipes from sources such as Nicholas Culpeper click. For this, George's father turned to botany - or, his love of botany drew him to apothecary work in order to make a living. Either way, he was a businessman who might have used plants to make cures he sold in a shop to the sick and dying, in all their icky horribleness. Which meant George was up close and very personal with people suffering the sort of ailments that often led to death. Quite a lot for a child to deal with.
When George's father died, the lad was thirteen. A very delicate age for a youth, but as Gissing Snr was often an absent presence in the home (due to work and civic responsibilities towards the needy), and as George tended to look down on his father as an unsophisticated amateur scholar and part-time poet, there will have been deep psychological and emotional forces of conflict and guilt working in the boy's mind upon the news that his main male role-model had gone. Death, in the form of a parent laid out in the best room, surrounded by medicines on sale in the shop - a line of products his medical expert father should have been able to use to save himself - brought on a severe reaction that made a lasting impression on George's fertile mind. The triad of civic duty towards the needy, lack of faith in the salvation promised by science, and untimely death were central themes in George's writings and certainly coloured his adult thinking. Add to it his contempt for shopkeeping, and you can see how many of what became George's more Conservative and reactionary values were formed with his father's passing.
The Day of Silence is a short story first seen in the collection 'Human Odds And Ends, Stories and Sketches by George Gissing' published by Lawrence and Bullen, Ltd, in 1898. It starts with a gloriously sunny summer's day, a Friday, but not the sort of fine day a person can trust or enjoy. George hated hot weather for its impact (or so he thought) on his health. In the story, we are introduced to sunny weather as a threatening, living, entity suffocating and poisoning as it stalks the crowded neighbourhoods of the overcrowded city. Not the benign and healing stuff of dreamy days spent basking by cool pools in the countryside, where all aches and pains can be eased, and where perfect rest can be found. In George's world - but only when we are in Britain (Italian heat is OK with George) - a hot day's foul malodorous miasma (a Peter Ackroyd favourite word!) clogs the vital functions and renders all food foul and lethal. Smells become offensive and oppressive; all activity slows to a sweat-laden slumping on cool pavements. Butter liquefies. George suffered from hyperhidrosis - excess sweating - on even a mild day, so the heat of London will have driven him to distraction. The city architecture of tall buildings forbade any breeze and even the Thames smelt bad, and would not have offered relief from the temperatures. But, it was tempting to think it might offer some blessed relief.
We are introduced to Billy, an angel of a working class boy - everyone loves him for his innate goodness and intelligence (he's a natural born aristocrat like his creator, of course, but named after George's dead brother) - a typical George type of 'hero' - born amongst the degradation of the back streets of a slum, and yet transcendent over it all. He is exceptional in every way - even the rage of the sun can't phase him as he remains untrammelled by the sweltering heat. Poverty can't blemish the glow of natural health he exudes. But then we discover he has a dark side (just to make him seem less of a pansy) personified by a handy way with his fists when he loses his temper. Very manly! A wife beater and child abuser sociopath in embryo - just like George haha. Something of a bully, we learn Billy is the natural leader of the boys in his neighbourhood. Much as George was to his siblings.
His doting mother is only moderately (as George puts it) clean - in her way, a good housewife. George hates to accord the working class with middle class hygiene standards; he considered these beyond the sensibilities of the poor, because it requires innate grace to want to wash (or even notice that you need to!), according to our man. Billy's ma is forty and worn down by a lifetime's poverty, but she has survived as a decent and simple soul whose priorities have always been family and home. She works several menial jobs to keep the family going as her husband isn't well paid. However, some invisible disease threatens to finish her off but she does her best to play it down to her son. She is weakened by it - even drawing water (that mysterious substance that should be a friend) from the street pump drains her of energy. Water can be so treacherous, can't it? Her husband, Solomon is a moderately good sort and the couple are good together - Burden and his wife were regarded by the neighbours, and rightly, as an exemplary pair; they never came to blows, never to curses, and neither of them had ever been known to make a scene in public. Making a scene in public was one thing George dreaded in his typical British fuddy-duddy way. Anyhoo, they do their best to care for Billy and all their efforts are rewarded by the child's beauty and grace, this imp who skips over the filth on the streets like a wee cherub and whose natural wisdom and charm mark him out as exceptional. (If this isn't George also describing himself, I don't know what is!).
So we have Billy Burden - children were always seen as a burden, to George, especially his own two - an angel from a solid family, with everything to live for and full of beans. Loved, loveable, well fed, happy - obviously, in a George Gissing outing, he is headed for a fall.
Solomon comes home from work that hot Friday all sweaty and tells his wife he has been invited to go with a friend who has access to a boat, for a trip on the river the next day. The friend is scathingly referred to as 'Old Four 'arf' - which was the title of a cheap beer-based beverage not unlike the modern British (not the American version, as it uses beer and whiskey) cocktail known as a Boilermaker, a mix in equal proportions of stout, such as Guinness, and mild beer, such as Burton's, best served at room temperature. This chap's nickname hints at what's to come. And doesn't Old Four 'arf sound mighty like the nautical terms 'fore' and 'aft' (front and back) of a boat? Wheels within wheels...
Mrs Burden (wives are burdens, too, in George World) can't go as she is skivvying, and besides, it's really a man's sort of outing - they will be swimming. Nude swimming even in public parks like the Serpentine click or Hampstead Ponds click was not uncommon in George's day. Mrs B wouldn't want to be part of that horror show, would she? Besides, she'll be skivvying that day, too, and won't be available for fun. Father and son will have to go without her. They spend what will be their last evening together in their disparate ways - Billy playing out with his pals, Mother Burden dozing on the door stoop, and the old man on his usual stroll round the 'hood to see what's doing. A decent family doing decent enough things. Billy goes to bed; his parents end the day with a drink of beer to ease their night's rest.
The next day, all three prepare for their various commitments. Mrs B makes it clear to her husband that he must take very good care of Billy, and not trust him to swim in the water, no matter how tempting that might be, no matter how hard the boy pleads for it. Solomon gives his word that he won't. He sets off for work and Mrs Burden gets ready for a full day's job at cleaning. Billy will be alone all morning waiting for his father to finish work at one o'clock; children are used to caring for themselves when their parents are absent.
The scene is set for a tragedy - why else bring us in this direction if not to make us readers suffer? The father, weak and feckless, is talked into taking a glass of ale or several provided by the borrower/owner of the boat, who quips that the drinks cans he carries are actually full of water - from the Lambeth Water Company. This was the company set up in reaction to the cholera outbreaks of the 1800s to supply clean water to the south of England and took water as far south as the Downs above Eastbourne that George so loved. The LWC was situated where Hungerford Bridge now stands - not a million miles from where Marianne aka Nell died in Lucretia Street, now called Grindal Street. See Commonplace 32 for a better view of the area. It was also the main supplier of water for the Lion Brewery (see Commonplace 91) which adds a level of irony to the story, as the brewery was sited more or less next door to the water works. Beer is 90-95% water.
Fate, that demon devil that dogs our footsteps (well, not mine!) finally enters, stage right. Being a man, Solomon is useless at impromptu risk assessments for children's play activities. As he becomes more chilled under the influence of beer, father's grip on accountability slackens. He lets Billy take a swim off the side of the boat. To cut a short story shorter, Billy drowns - of course. Solomon does his best to save him but he too, drowns. The boat borrower/owner and beer provider takes his vessel home, solo.
Meanwhile, Mrs B struggles back from her day's work, much afflicted by the pain from her serious but invisible physical ailment. She decides to visit the surgery at Guy's Hospital when it opens again after the weekend to ask the doctor for something for her pain. She has previously ignored his warnings to take things easy - what choice did she have but to forget what he said? At St Bride's Churchyard click she stops to rest and ease the pain in her side. A slight shiver of unease crosses her mind - Billy is safe on the water with his father, isn't he? Yes, his father will protect him, won't he, St Bride? St Bride is patron saint of many things - including boatmen. However, she must have been taking the day off, and has not looked out for Billy and his pa.
Mrs Burden, is observed slumped on the bench. She is not resting, but dying. She goes softly, peacefully. On dry land, but St Bride's is situated in Fleet Street, named after the river of the same name. Typical George: hoping it all has symbolic meaning for those with a good education - or access to google.
The story ends with Old Four 'arf visiting the Burdens' house looking for the (now dead) widow to tell her the bad news. He lets himself in, and finds no-one home. All is silence. So, not really a Day of Silence - more an evening of it.
George had a bit of a thing about drowning. His man-wife, Eduard Bertz once saved someone from drowning in the Thames, and George. who was with him at the time, was mightily impressed. It's almost impossible to think of George acting as decisively - he would have dithered about shouting suggestions, then left them to their fate! But he liked watersports (stop it now haha!) and often took his women for boat rides - possibly to tip them in, of course, and claim they fell haha. He inflicts death by drowning on several of his characters - notably Arthur Golding in Workers In The Dawn. Arthur's friend, Mark Challenger (an odd cove and a wee bit fake) has previously mentioned it as a reasonable way to go. He says: It is a rare death, drowning. You feel the water, at first deadly cold, grow warmer and warmer, and a kind of music in your ears lulls you to sleep.
Well, is that true? Not according to this website The Biology of Drowning click. From which I quote:
Upon submersion, the victim holds his breath until forced to inhale. He gulps water. The water induces spasms of the larynx, which closes of the trachea to protect the lungs. Little water enters the lungs. With the trachea blocked by laryngospasms, no fresh air enters the lungs and the supply of oxygen begins to fail. Lack of Oxygen, anoxia, affects the brain within 30 seconds the laryngospasms begin to weaken with imminent brain failure.
The victim then inhales again, this time aspirating water into the lungs before a fresh spasm closes the trachea again but for a shorter duration. With each successive inhalation, more water is aspirated; anoxia increases, and laryngospasm duration decreases until they are finally abolished and the lungs are filled with water.
And...
The studies indicated that the main cause of death from drowning in fresh water is the explosive dilution of the blood with water from the lungs. This dilution resulted in rapid failure of the bloods ability to carry oxygen resulting in oxygen deprivation in critical areas and asphyxiation. The studies showed dilution occurred so quickly that after three minutes of submersion, the blood of experimental animals was diluted with an equal volume of water. In salt-water submersion, an opposite effect occurs. The brine in the lungs acts through osmotic pressure to remove large amounts of water from the blood. In three minutes, experimental animals loss 40% of the normal water volume in their blood. This over concentration of blood can cause heart failure. Additionally, seawater chemicals pass quickly into the blood stream through the lungs disrupting normal fluid balances. In either case, death from submersion occurs quickly, often in two minutes or less, depending on the physical status of the victim and other factors. In many instances, victims removed from the water alive later die from the delayed effects of submersion.
So, not quite an easypeasy ride after all. Maybe George was letting Mark Challenger's reassurance pave the way for such a serious decision, and to tip off the readers that there is to be no suffering when death comes for dopey Arthur Golding whom so many confuse with George, himself. As if George could ever be so damned gullible. But, it suits those who like to portray him as a dingbat doughboy who was the innocent victim of a scheming slut who did him wrong. Or a martyr. Note to self: George Gissing: The Martyred Life would make a good title for a three volume biography. Three volumes!! Mudie's would have turned it down haha.
The Day of Silence is a slight fable, predictable to the max, and plainly told. George's disdain for the poor is much in evidence - he sounds like an anthropologist bringing back data on an indigenous tribe from a distant land, amazed that they have feelings in common with white folks. 'Them and Us' - one of George's tropes. And it's clear George wants to steer the story towards a scenario where he won't have to discuss their grief or sadness. That would humanize them too much, and by 1898, he was way beyond wanting to do that. Using the church of St Bride even slides in his mistrust of organised religion. If only he had chosen to set that bench Mrs Burden so needed in St Nicholas' churchyard along the river in Chiswick. St Nicholas is patron saint of, amongst other things, sailors and children. And William Hogarth, one of George's heroes, is buried there.
With images by Helen Chadwick (1953-1996).
 |
| Self Portrait 1991 |
In Commonplace 2 there is an account of how the late Victorian chemist shop worked. It was, first and foremost, a shop, and often something one step removed from a place of science. There were patent medicines for sale - some of them quack remedies click, that made ridiculous claims for their efficacy but which were little more than syrup or chalk; folk remedies that everyone used such as witch hazel for bruises and cloves for toothache; and genuine scientifically proven treatments such as aspirin and carbolic. Some of the shopkeepers extended their range by making up their own preparations, using centuries-old remedies with recipes from sources such as Nicholas Culpeper click. For this, George's father turned to botany - or, his love of botany drew him to apothecary work in order to make a living. Either way, he was a businessman who might have used plants to make cures he sold in a shop to the sick and dying, in all their icky horribleness. Which meant George was up close and very personal with people suffering the sort of ailments that often led to death. Quite a lot for a child to deal with.
 |
| Of Mutability 1984-86 |
When George's father died, the lad was thirteen. A very delicate age for a youth, but as Gissing Snr was often an absent presence in the home (due to work and civic responsibilities towards the needy), and as George tended to look down on his father as an unsophisticated amateur scholar and part-time poet, there will have been deep psychological and emotional forces of conflict and guilt working in the boy's mind upon the news that his main male role-model had gone. Death, in the form of a parent laid out in the best room, surrounded by medicines on sale in the shop - a line of products his medical expert father should have been able to use to save himself - brought on a severe reaction that made a lasting impression on George's fertile mind. The triad of civic duty towards the needy, lack of faith in the salvation promised by science, and untimely death were central themes in George's writings and certainly coloured his adult thinking. Add to it his contempt for shopkeeping, and you can see how many of what became George's more Conservative and reactionary values were formed with his father's passing.
The Day of Silence is a short story first seen in the collection 'Human Odds And Ends, Stories and Sketches by George Gissing' published by Lawrence and Bullen, Ltd, in 1898. It starts with a gloriously sunny summer's day, a Friday, but not the sort of fine day a person can trust or enjoy. George hated hot weather for its impact (or so he thought) on his health. In the story, we are introduced to sunny weather as a threatening, living, entity suffocating and poisoning as it stalks the crowded neighbourhoods of the overcrowded city. Not the benign and healing stuff of dreamy days spent basking by cool pools in the countryside, where all aches and pains can be eased, and where perfect rest can be found. In George's world - but only when we are in Britain (Italian heat is OK with George) - a hot day's foul malodorous miasma (a Peter Ackroyd favourite word!) clogs the vital functions and renders all food foul and lethal. Smells become offensive and oppressive; all activity slows to a sweat-laden slumping on cool pavements. Butter liquefies. George suffered from hyperhidrosis - excess sweating - on even a mild day, so the heat of London will have driven him to distraction. The city architecture of tall buildings forbade any breeze and even the Thames smelt bad, and would not have offered relief from the temperatures. But, it was tempting to think it might offer some blessed relief.
 |
| Piss Flowers 1991-92 |
His doting mother is only moderately (as George puts it) clean - in her way, a good housewife. George hates to accord the working class with middle class hygiene standards; he considered these beyond the sensibilities of the poor, because it requires innate grace to want to wash (or even notice that you need to!), according to our man. Billy's ma is forty and worn down by a lifetime's poverty, but she has survived as a decent and simple soul whose priorities have always been family and home. She works several menial jobs to keep the family going as her husband isn't well paid. However, some invisible disease threatens to finish her off but she does her best to play it down to her son. She is weakened by it - even drawing water (that mysterious substance that should be a friend) from the street pump drains her of energy. Water can be so treacherous, can't it? Her husband, Solomon is a moderately good sort and the couple are good together - Burden and his wife were regarded by the neighbours, and rightly, as an exemplary pair; they never came to blows, never to curses, and neither of them had ever been known to make a scene in public. Making a scene in public was one thing George dreaded in his typical British fuddy-duddy way. Anyhoo, they do their best to care for Billy and all their efforts are rewarded by the child's beauty and grace, this imp who skips over the filth on the streets like a wee cherub and whose natural wisdom and charm mark him out as exceptional. (If this isn't George also describing himself, I don't know what is!).
 |
| Cacao 1994 |
So we have Billy Burden - children were always seen as a burden, to George, especially his own two - an angel from a solid family, with everything to live for and full of beans. Loved, loveable, well fed, happy - obviously, in a George Gissing outing, he is headed for a fall.
Solomon comes home from work that hot Friday all sweaty and tells his wife he has been invited to go with a friend who has access to a boat, for a trip on the river the next day. The friend is scathingly referred to as 'Old Four 'arf' - which was the title of a cheap beer-based beverage not unlike the modern British (not the American version, as it uses beer and whiskey) cocktail known as a Boilermaker, a mix in equal proportions of stout, such as Guinness, and mild beer, such as Burton's, best served at room temperature. This chap's nickname hints at what's to come. And doesn't Old Four 'arf sound mighty like the nautical terms 'fore' and 'aft' (front and back) of a boat? Wheels within wheels...
Mrs Burden (wives are burdens, too, in George World) can't go as she is skivvying, and besides, it's really a man's sort of outing - they will be swimming. Nude swimming even in public parks like the Serpentine click or Hampstead Ponds click was not uncommon in George's day. Mrs B wouldn't want to be part of that horror show, would she? Besides, she'll be skivvying that day, too, and won't be available for fun. Father and son will have to go without her. They spend what will be their last evening together in their disparate ways - Billy playing out with his pals, Mother Burden dozing on the door stoop, and the old man on his usual stroll round the 'hood to see what's doing. A decent family doing decent enough things. Billy goes to bed; his parents end the day with a drink of beer to ease their night's rest.
The next day, all three prepare for their various commitments. Mrs B makes it clear to her husband that he must take very good care of Billy, and not trust him to swim in the water, no matter how tempting that might be, no matter how hard the boy pleads for it. Solomon gives his word that he won't. He sets off for work and Mrs Burden gets ready for a full day's job at cleaning. Billy will be alone all morning waiting for his father to finish work at one o'clock; children are used to caring for themselves when their parents are absent.
 |
| Meat Abstract 1989 |
Fate, that demon devil that dogs our footsteps (well, not mine!) finally enters, stage right. Being a man, Solomon is useless at impromptu risk assessments for children's play activities. As he becomes more chilled under the influence of beer, father's grip on accountability slackens. He lets Billy take a swim off the side of the boat. To cut a short story shorter, Billy drowns - of course. Solomon does his best to save him but he too, drowns. The boat borrower/owner and beer provider takes his vessel home, solo.
 |
| Meat Abstract 2 Tongues 1989 |
Mrs Burden, is observed slumped on the bench. She is not resting, but dying. She goes softly, peacefully. On dry land, but St Bride's is situated in Fleet Street, named after the river of the same name. Typical George: hoping it all has symbolic meaning for those with a good education - or access to google.
The story ends with Old Four 'arf visiting the Burdens' house looking for the (now dead) widow to tell her the bad news. He lets himself in, and finds no-one home. All is silence. So, not really a Day of Silence - more an evening of it.
George had a bit of a thing about drowning. His man-wife, Eduard Bertz once saved someone from drowning in the Thames, and George. who was with him at the time, was mightily impressed. It's almost impossible to think of George acting as decisively - he would have dithered about shouting suggestions, then left them to their fate! But he liked watersports (stop it now haha!) and often took his women for boat rides - possibly to tip them in, of course, and claim they fell haha. He inflicts death by drowning on several of his characters - notably Arthur Golding in Workers In The Dawn. Arthur's friend, Mark Challenger (an odd cove and a wee bit fake) has previously mentioned it as a reasonable way to go. He says: It is a rare death, drowning. You feel the water, at first deadly cold, grow warmer and warmer, and a kind of music in your ears lulls you to sleep.
 |
| Helen Chadwick click |
Upon submersion, the victim holds his breath until forced to inhale. He gulps water. The water induces spasms of the larynx, which closes of the trachea to protect the lungs. Little water enters the lungs. With the trachea blocked by laryngospasms, no fresh air enters the lungs and the supply of oxygen begins to fail. Lack of Oxygen, anoxia, affects the brain within 30 seconds the laryngospasms begin to weaken with imminent brain failure.
The victim then inhales again, this time aspirating water into the lungs before a fresh spasm closes the trachea again but for a shorter duration. With each successive inhalation, more water is aspirated; anoxia increases, and laryngospasm duration decreases until they are finally abolished and the lungs are filled with water.
And...
The studies indicated that the main cause of death from drowning in fresh water is the explosive dilution of the blood with water from the lungs. This dilution resulted in rapid failure of the bloods ability to carry oxygen resulting in oxygen deprivation in critical areas and asphyxiation. The studies showed dilution occurred so quickly that after three minutes of submersion, the blood of experimental animals was diluted with an equal volume of water. In salt-water submersion, an opposite effect occurs. The brine in the lungs acts through osmotic pressure to remove large amounts of water from the blood. In three minutes, experimental animals loss 40% of the normal water volume in their blood. This over concentration of blood can cause heart failure. Additionally, seawater chemicals pass quickly into the blood stream through the lungs disrupting normal fluid balances. In either case, death from submersion occurs quickly, often in two minutes or less, depending on the physical status of the victim and other factors. In many instances, victims removed from the water alive later die from the delayed effects of submersion.
 |
| Wreath of Pleasure 1992 click |
The Day of Silence is a slight fable, predictable to the max, and plainly told. George's disdain for the poor is much in evidence - he sounds like an anthropologist bringing back data on an indigenous tribe from a distant land, amazed that they have feelings in common with white folks. 'Them and Us' - one of George's tropes. And it's clear George wants to steer the story towards a scenario where he won't have to discuss their grief or sadness. That would humanize them too much, and by 1898, he was way beyond wanting to do that. Using the church of St Bride even slides in his mistrust of organised religion. If only he had chosen to set that bench Mrs Burden so needed in St Nicholas' churchyard along the river in Chiswick. St Nicholas is patron saint of, amongst other things, sailors and children. And William Hogarth, one of George's heroes, is buried there.
 |
| Hogarth's tomb in Chiswick See Commonplaces 88 and 89. |
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