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!
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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!
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| 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?? |
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| 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.
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| Dressed as the travestie of Claudian click |
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.
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| Beer Street and Gin Lane by William Hogarth 1751 |
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 |
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?
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| The Cafe Chantant at Rosherville Gardens c 1893 |
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
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