George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

Commonplace 172  George & Owens College. PART ONE

The death of George's father in 1870 left the family in financial dire straits. Thomas Gissing had not paid more than interest on loans and so the chemist's shop had to be sold and the family had to move to smaller accommodation. Fortunately for the Gissing children, family friends arranged by public subscription finances for their education - a similar fate would be dealt to George's two sons, Walter and Alfred, who needed assistance from government pensions to fund their education - there's one rule for the rich and another for the poor etc etc. Through the sort of jobbery George later claimed to detest (though rarely failed to exploit haha) a place was found for him at Lindow Grove School at Alderley Edge in Cheshire (his brothers William and Algernon would follow in his footsteps a little later).

Three Clerical Scholars by Thomas Rowlandson 1789

Of course the loss of a father has a huge impact on a child, and George was no exception. He was overcome with grief, and so sending him away to school will have been an attractive prospect for a mother who needed to keep the other children on an even keel and herself afloat, emotionally and practically. But the impact of this fracture from all he knew on top of the experience of grief and its ramifications may have been responsible for three of his deepest-held beliefs: that he was always hard done by; that he was materially poor; and that his mother never understood his real needs or provided him with love. These three underpinned much of what happened throughout his life, and influenced many of his worst, most damaging decisions, both for himself and those close to him.

After academic success at Lindow Grove it must have seemed logical to place him in further education. It would have been apparent that he lacked the necessary chops to follow his late father into 'trade'. His pride would have chafed at the thought of becoming a clerk or a general non-entity pen-pusher, so a future in some higher profession probably looked to be a better option, more in keeping with his 'artistic', sensitive nature. George's ego was boosted by being academic Top Dog at Lindow, a feat of effort rather than of raw talent. Was it guilt at his father's death perhaps spurring him on to apply himself to his studies forcing him beyond what was a healthy norm for a youth in his developing years? Or, as some biographers suggest, his at best just above mediocre talents being boosted by the extra encouragement he received from the headmaster, conspiring to make George believe he was exceptional. It must be remembered the headmaster was ambitious to have academic successes to advertise to prospective fee-paying parents, so George's need to prove to a father-figure that he was better than the other boys was easy to exploit.

Scholars Attending a Lecture
by William Hogarth 1736

This 'hot-housing' did George irreparable harm, because it created in him a false sense of higher academic ability that perpetuated a general feeling he was better than others. This pattern had been established in childhood, when the Gissing family were forced to live above the shop in the heart of the industrial town of Wakefield, surrounded by the poorer classes and all the degradation that brought to a chemist's shop's door. Being good at study offset any claim that these lowly beginnings marked George down as socially inferior. Lifelong, part of his mental landscape depended on feeling superior to others, but we can see a pattern started at home, continued at school and on into university and young adulthood, always supported by an over-estimation of his intellect. In fact, George was always a 'big fish in a small pond'. He intentionally kept his list of contacts small, usually limiting his friendship group to those he thought intellectually inferior. You might argue that his choice of writing as a career was made precisely because it would always guarantee he was mistaken for being exclusive and above the ordinary, to be enjoyed by a few who were in on the secret talent he presented. It also offered something of a fall-back position of being able to claim he was the misunderstood artist whose critics were beneath him. And if his books didn't sell, that could be blamed on an ignorant reading public, and a facet of the hell-in-a-handcart times. Brain surgeons never have that luxury, do they?

Manchester's Owens College was where George had a greater opportunity to demonstrate his talents and an awful lot is made by biographers of his success there, but it is important to see the institution in its context to partly get an understanding of how George's success came about. Read more about the rise of the university here click. Manchester was the dynamic heart of the English Industrial Revolution, and the second wealthiest city after London. Science and cheap labour was what made the Victorian Age, and Manchester was full of both, but it needed a university to develop its potential as the pre-eminent centre of scientific exploration and research. Oxford and Cambridge universities both lacked geographic proximity to the factories and mills afforded by Manchester, and neither had access to vast numbers of cheap labourers, money-rich entrepreneurs and business-minded innovators.

Owens was a new college, started in 1851, firstly sited in what had been Sir Richard Cobden's House click. Cobden had been a successful cotton merchant and philanthropist, and a leading light in Liberal politics. John Owens was a wealthy merchant who left most of his fortune to build the college for the local young men. This website will tell you more click. Owens College set out not just to compete with Oxford or Cambridge, but also to rival the Manchester New College, which had been for some time based in York (also see the London establishment click) and which upheld the Unitarian faith, preparing candidates for its ministry; Owens was to be proudly non-affiliated to any form of organised religion. The emphasis was to be on high academic attainment, but there is no denying its prime purpose was to develop scientific breakthroughs through research and development in order to raise the standards of engineers and scientists countrywide and to make money for the capitalists who funded them. In this environment, the Arts must have seemed almost sissy-like and self-indulgent to the engineers and physicists. 

Medieval Woman Teaching Geometry 

George would have reacted keenly to this ready-made battle of Vulcan versus Apollo. This fey, weak and flimsy young man who saw himself as a refined, cultured sensibility, a fledgling poet, would have recognised the Industrialisation enemy from the Wakefield days, and known it to be formidable. He didn't mind benefiting from its technological advances, but he didn't want to know how they came about. Science, George always claimed, never interested him, but this was disingenuous because he always commented on this sort of thing - and he often researched scientific and pseudo-scientific topics such as nutrition, pharmacology, psychology, eugenics, phrenology, meteorology... he just didn't like admitting he was doing it. How best to demonstrate to the world your apartness from this oafish and oppressive force? Become a Bohemian; grow your hair; moon about reading 'precious little volumes' of arcane noodling, sigh a good deal, and pretend you are not made of mortal flesh and maybe deny your true nature, which is one of the precepts of all ascetic belief systems, along with 'know thyself'. In fact, 'know thyself then deny thyself' seems to sum up most faiths haha. 

We know that student George demonstrated talents for writing and for memorising great chunks of Shakespeare and the works of various epic poets, and he shamelessly showed these skills off at public speaking events. But, it has to be wondered if a science-heavy institution could attract the necessary humanities and Arts students to really offer George competition adequate enough to challenge his 'genius'. He later showed, via his Diaries, that story writing did not come easy, and that some creative projects were difficult enough to drive him to deep bouts of self-doubt, even depression, when they failed to ignite into finished flame. He was not a 'natural' at writing, and some of his early work (Workers In The Dawn, for example) drones on and preaches, and he often fails to self-edit when a descriptive phrase would have more power than a whole stodgy paragraph, but he had an almost forensic eye for detail, and boy, did he make use of it to describe the degradation of the poor! But, at Owens, was there the calibre of peer group to truly determine what his talents were? Again, when success came and the world of Owens saw him win cash prizes for his English studies, being a big fish in a little pond went to his head and convinced him he was better than others, maybe even that he was at least equal to his heroes, Dickens and Keats.

One of the Owens buildings around 1876

Anyhoo, Owens College was ground-breaking in that it did not provide residential accommodation. This meant students had to find digs and fetch for themselves for their meals, and every other kind of domestic arrangement. In later life, George laid the blame for his failure to succeed at Owens fair and square at the door of his mother (what did Freud tell us??) who in his opinion should never have agreed to this sort of malarkey - a youth let loose with no guidance (except for the teachers) and no form of support (except for the College). What was she thinking of sending a boy out into the world of Manchester's back streets, pubs and dance halls, all alone with few social skills for making friends? Why had she allowed him all that freedom? Had she no understanding of his tender, impressionable nature? She should have seen he was heading for a fall, shouldn't she, and stopped it before it started. That's what George thought, after it all went tits up.

In fact, George fit right in and was, from all accounts, a regular part of the social whirl, and enjoyed dances, drinking in pubs, mixing with girls, and spending every penny he had. He did just enough work to keep on the right side of the tutors, won lots of money in literary competitions and attended just enough lectures to show he was still alive and kicking. From his letters to his friend John George Black, he was often to be found skipping lectures and taking the piss out of his teachers, and doing all the things that would mark him out as a Rebel Artist Genius Bohemian and not one of those lumpen science student drones. But that impending fall was about to bite him in the bum.

JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO SEE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT.