George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

Commonplace 165  George & His Humble Start In Wakefield

George was born into a lowly social position and spent most of his life trying to deny it, a legacy passed down to some of his more deluded biographers. There is something cringeworthy in it, but the conservative mind is always competitive and ruthless in the pursuit of its goals, and so we should not be surprised to discover George did everything he could to reject his humble roots. The obvious way for a lower middle class boy to appear to be middle class is to receive a private education. George and his two brothers all went to private boarding schools; their sisters did not. Another way to prove middle class credentials is to go on to have a profession that can not be confused with the stereotypical existence of the working class. When they left school, his brother William became a bank clerk, his brother Algernon a solicitor; George's sisters had a stab at teaching. And George? He became a jailbird. The demographic of a typical lower middle class family with social pretensions, some might say. But, their father, Thomas Waller Gissing, would never evolve beyond the lowly status of a man who ran a chemist's shop, but his children did well for themselves, considering their initial handicap of a lowly birth - which is how George saw being from such humble beginnings. And George, to his shame, said he did not want his own sons educated and so it fell to the state - the ordinary folk - to pay for their private education via government pensions after George's death. The sort of pension that was not available to poor kids.

OMFG!!!! I live above a chemist's shop in Wakefield!!! The horror!!!

Sadly, George regarded his hard-working father as unsophisticated, and uncultured. Because George over-valued the Classics, he considered Mr Gissing Snr's un-Classical learning as not more than pedestrian. Naturally, George despised his father's shop-keeping position in life. Throughout his fiction, George makes it clear the sort of person who works in a shop - even as its proprietor - is way beyond the social pale. It makes you wonder if this wasn't the initial appeal of friendship with HG Wells who had been an (extremely unhappy) apprentice in a draper's shop, working long hours with the endless boredom and futility making it a demanding, all-encompassing nightmare. George would have felt mighty superior about that, and the fact that Wells' parents were staff to a middle class employer. We also know how George took against his own relatives when his Uncle Paul Rahardt asked George's first wife, Marianne aka Nell, to work in his Peckham shop, proudly called the Noted Little Provision Shop - see Commonplaces 148 and 149 for more. How George would have cringed at the thought of his wife working in a shop - this might have been the real reason he fell out with his uncle and stopped all contact. And how irrationally scathing he was of the enterprise - he demonstrates how spitefully dismissive he was of it in his letters to his brother, Algernon. Remember the unjust treatment of the uncle who opened a cafe near to Godwin Peak's college in Born in Exile? Peak thinks his world has ended and all his social contacts will ostracise him if they find out he has family more or less 'in trade' right at the college gate.

The shop still operating as a chemist's in 1928 click

And so to the chemist's shop in Wakefield. There is every reason to assume the claim that the Gissing chemist's shop was the main one in the town is wrong - as claimed in the often fanciful Coustillas biography Vol 1. As you can see from the abstract below from the 1858 White's Leeds, Halifax, Huddersfield and Wakefield Directory click, there were many chemist's in the centre of Wakefield - all highlighted in blue. It is a stretch to think the one at 55 (now 60) Westgate, was the main one - meaning the most important and biggest - from this sort of evidence. It was one of twenty, all in the central Wakefield area. In fact, there was also a chemist's at number 20, Westgate, so it wasn't even the only one that end of the street (Westgate was and is quite long).

At its eastern end, Westgate becomes Kirkgate so there were several chemist's closer to the main business part of the town than the one Thomas Waller Gissing ran. Judging by the photographs, and the fact the building remains extant, it was a modest shop, unless it subscribed to the TARDIS rules of time and space. If it was the main chemist's, then the others must have been minuscule - kiosks, more than shops haha.

Anyhoo, Wakefield had the potential for large numbers of customers and so the competition must have been fierce. George's father was also an amateur botanist, so maybe he sold his own cures based on plants and folk cures. The reasonably large population, with many citizens employed in difficult, dangerous work, will have led to many being in need of medicine and treatment; and then there were the consequences of the usual diseases of poor and insanitary living conditions, made worse by the effects of a sparse and limited diet. Old-fashioned remedies from recipes handed down through generations would have been cheap to make and easy to sell. Real money could be made from the many fads for new patent medicines such as hypophosphites, cod liver oil and heavy metal-based medicines such as arsenic, strychnine and mercury, available as pills, potions, steam vapour rubs, drinks, sweets and to be worn as charms or jewellery. Mr Gissing's USP may have been that he was also offering his services as a wine merchant, not a big leap as wine was considered a tonic and restorative and many medicines had to be taken in alcohol to potentiate their effects. Do not try that at home!

Yorkshire is a very wet and cold place for a good part of the year, so basic creature comforts that usually support good health - warmth and a dry home - were and still are beyond the means of the poorer classes. There was also the quality of the River Calder water to bring the threat of disease and pollution to every household. Even George's father was a victim of constant ill-health and finally succumbed to some sort of chest problem exacerbated by cold and wet. He could have also caught something nasty from being across the counter from the 'great unwashed' - an occupational hazard even for the upper classes like Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the wife abusing sodomite who coined that phrase.

Chocolate-coated heavy metalloids and toxic plant extracts -Yummy!!

Nowadays, the social standing of people who make a living from selling medicine to folks (Class A suppliers exempted haha) are accorded a higher status than they were in George's day. Before regulation, a dispensing chemist made up doctors' prescriptions and wasn't expected to be an expert qualified chemistry buff. She or he was, essentially, a salesperson with a specific set of products to offload. An added feature of being a chemist was (and still is) the ad hoc advice expected by the customers. A basic knowledge of disease was a bonus, but not fundamental to the task because medicines were targeted with specific ailments in mind. A chemist would order what sold, not necessarily what was best. A good advertising campaign aimed at a scared, scarcely knowledgeable public went a long way to produce a demand for a product - the rise in popularity of cod liver oil is a case in point. It was too expensive to produce for use as a fuel so new ways of making money from this by-product of the fishing industry was invented. A publicity campaign with unregulated advertising copy making wild claims as to its efficacy fooled a gullible public into thinking cod liver oil was the universal panacea for all ills. The toilet paper industry must have been delighted at the rage for supping a natural laxative like it was ambrosia!

1928

Running a small shop was not the epitome of success in life, but it would have been enough of a status marker to keep the Gissing family from fitting in with their neighbours. George's father seems to have been a liberal man with a social conscience towards the disadvantaged which is why he spent a good deal of his spare time working in public service. Can we assume the social pretensions of the Gissing family were the realm of Mrs Gissing? She was a stern and strict enforcer of corporal punishment, a firm believer in organised religion, and no doubt considered her children better than rest of the Westgate urchins. Allowing them to play out on the streets might have been a step too far, but the shop was close to tracts of open countryside click and the railway station was near by. George liked to roam about the lanes - a lifelong pursuit - and he followed his father's love of botany albeit in a very minor way. The use of plants as medicines is an ancient art - click to learn about the Chelsea Physic Garden and its work. 

1954 still a chemist's but the building to the right is now a bank

One of the more sobering aspects of life lived amongst the poorer class was the need for the family to make use of the public baths. George's brother William wrote to him about the joys of being in 'new' water there - meaning used before anyone else had a go in it. Only the very rich had bathrooms and very few households had their own running water supply, or the means to heat large amounts of water was beyond most ordinary households. George and his family will have mostly washed and bathed in cold water, but the public bath house would have been provided with warm water. Such bathing arrangements persisted well into the twentieth century - I never had to use one myself, but I went to school with kids who did. To save money they would take a towel and their own soap, and one of the joys of it 1960s style was you had a bath to yourself and didn't have to share the water.

Nowadays, we take for granted a clean water supply to our taps, but in George's time, public pumps were much in use. The infamous cholera outbreaks highlighted by Jon Snow in his 'ghost map' of 1854 click demonstrates the disadvantages to this and makes us realise this was the sort of disaster that could strike anywhere - and the sad reality of life for those who do not have access to clean supplies click.

Here is the Gissing shop today, now part of a bank. It's the 4-windowed red brick TARDIS in the middle.