Commonplace 188  George & His and Edith's Son, Walter.

Today (July 1st 2016) is the centenary of the Battle of the Somme. George's son, Walter, serving with the Queen's Westminster Rifles, was killed there. Have a look at Commonplaces 19 and 27 to learn more about Walter.

Walter Leonard Gissing
1891-1916

The Soldier by Rupert Brook (1887 - 1915)

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Commonplace 187 George & Demos (Again) PART TWO.

Oh, dear. The UK Referendum - I am sorry to say the wrong side won, by the barest of majorities. I voted to Remain; it seems the three Rs voted to Leave - that is, the Rich, the Racists and the Reactionaries - leading the way for the Far Right of Europe to step up its game. And for that odious slime mound of self-serving, conniving, unscrupulous egomania that is Boris Johnson to become the next UK Prime Minister. But, as post-French Revolution philosopher Joseph de Maistre once said: in a democracy, people get the leaders they deserve, so shame on us. On behalf of all sane Brits, European Union: I apologise. And to the up and coming generation of Brits who will suffer - I am ashamed of us, the older generation, who have let you down. A sad, sad, awful result.

Anyhoo, back to George & Demos...
Manor Park Cemetery in Newham, lies midway between the centre of London and Romford in Essex, 7 miles north-east of Charing Cross station. George wrote Demos in 1885/6, so he will have been familiar with the cemetery when it was new and still somewhat under construction. It was and still is, a private enterprise operation run by the family who started it. The cemetery website tells us one of Jack The Ripper's victims (Annie Chapman) is buried there; she died in 1888, the same year as George's first wife, Marianne aka Nell, who lies buried south of the River Thames.

The City of London Cemetery c 1855 

I am grateful to the E7 Now & Then website click for this snippet of information: in 1854, the Corporation of the City of London paid £200,000 for 12 acres of land to build a cemetery on. It opened 2 years later to accommodate 6,000 burials a year. Twenty years later this was developed into the Manor Park Cemetery. According to the website, the project went way over budget because the plan was to make it a pinnacle of beauty and restful repose, complete with decorative architectural features, statuary, well-laid out walks and lush planting.

The area had once been a semi-rural paradise of smallholdings and market gardens serving the needs of Londoners, but it was ripe for development when the nineteenth century economic boom arrived, and the demand for workers required to service such expansion saw the demand soar for accommodation for both the living and the dead. In nearby West Ham, the population increased by 240,000 between 1850-1900, thanks to an influx of immigrants and the development of both the London docks and the railways. In Demos, George likens this development to 'the spreading of a disease' (of course), because he hated new-fangledness and change.

Photo by Sue click

The industrial strength new-build of the area was everything George hated about the state of nineteenth century life. Rows of uniform houses all built to a repetitive configuration for people he considered drones. But wasn't it the ancient Romans and Greeks who liked their urban spaces neat and uniform? Town planning aspires to optimise the usage of space, and all those workers providing the likes of George with the trappings of his aspirational lifestyle had to live somewhere cheap and accessible to the workplace, in homes with comfort and security. But, George preferred those he considered his inferiors to be kept well out of sight, preferably well away from his own back yard, so that he could enjoy country rambles and appreciate its 'verdure' - his over-used archaic term for greenery - on those rare occasions he took himself out for a walk. In fact, houses throughout recorded history have been 'jerry built', by speculators who didn't expect their work to last forever. For every historic building we have a thousand others that have crumbled to rubble, and the new build replacing them welcomed as an improvement. The random nature of the historic parts of towns such as York and London testify to speculative schemes operated by anyone with bricks and mortar and a plot of land to build on. But, for George, such places were emblematic of the End of Days - industrialisation and homogeneity defacing the world forever, necessitated by the rise of the Proletariat with money to burn and no sense of aesthetics.

This much-feared blighting of some mythical Albion features in Demos. The working class hero, Richard Mutimer, sets his sights on building a new town for his, workers complete with factories, spanking new homes and loads of educational and cultural places for them to develop themselves - in contrast to the middle class hero, Mr Eldon, who has plans to return it all to rolling countryside when he gets his hands on his (rightful) inheritance, probably make it into a fox-hunting, pleb-baiting outpost, like all posh people want to when they get their hands on 'land'. There seems to be something mythic about owning ground that feeds into the souls of those who want power: a bricks and mortar house is not enough - it has to be the soil it's built on that satisfies them.

Modern map as found on this interesting website click known as Welcome To Manor Park

We know from George's shorter novels and some of his short stories that he had a horror of suburbia, which was at odds with the fact he opted to live in places like Epsom which couldn't have been more suburban if it tried. And, it has to be said, George was a suburbanite through and through, because he was unhappy in the centre of London, and in the relative countryside of Exeter. If the vile Henry Ryecroft is a manifestation of George, it is a portrait of the author, not 'at grass', but in his back garden, tending his roses and moaning about the state of his neighbours' greenfly.

The Woodgrange Estate in the Forest Gate area close to Manor Park was one of those suburban developments George so hated, but, it seems his assessment is unfair. According to the local council historical perspective:

The basic designs used on the Estate are repetitive, but the varied uses of standard details created an interesting variety while retaining the uniform overall character. These details include the use of different types of brick, iron front railings and gates and other ornamental ironwork, stucco and artificial stone decorative features. A distinctive feature was the glazed canopies to frontages (some of the larger houses also had canopies and loggias to the rear). These canopies, with their ornamental iron columns and valences, provided an architectural link to the railway stations of Forest Gate and Manor Park. Corbett was responsible for securing new and improved road bridges over the railway, the rebuilding of Forest Gate Station in the early 1880s and the negotiations with the Great eastern Railway for special "workmen's" fares from Manor Park Station. The larger houses to the west had servant's quarters attached, set back slightly from the main house frontage.  Corbett also attempted to landscape his "villas" by providing traffic islands in Richmond Road planted with trees and front gardens with hedges and lime trees were also planted. Added to these, 50 street trees were planted in Balmoral Road. Some of the shops on Woodgrange Road were also built as part of the development, adding to the already thriving trade on Woodgrange and Romford Roads. 'Corbett' was Thomas Corbett, a devout Scots land developer and architect of model housing schemes.

Frontage of the estate homes.  

So, we see a clear decision to bring a good quality of life to the area, with consideration of open spaces and well laid out thoroughfares, and the application of ordered principles of design. Shops and the sort of infrastructure all villages require were incorporated into the plans, an ideal setting in which the lower middle class could live and prosper.

And, so to the Manor Park Cemetery of George's Demos. This extract is rightly famed as one of his gems. Demos was written before George morphed into the dark, reactionary snob he became in the 1890s. Imagine what he could have produced if he had managed to retain this light. If you haven't read Demos, get you here click for a free copy. Notes: Jane Vine is the sister of the badly-treated working class angel heroine Emma, jilted by her fiance, Richard Mutimer, who has taken up with middle class girl, Adela. Jane has died of rheumatic fever brought on by poverty and over-work. A 'foss' is a ditch.

Jane Vine was buried on Sunday afternoon, her sisters alone accompanying her to the grave. Alice had with difficulty obtained admission to her mother's room, and it seemed to her that the news she brought was received with little emotion. The old woman had an air of dogged weariness; she did not look her daughter in the face, and spoke only in monosyllables. Her face was yellow, her cheeks like wrinkled parchment.

Manor Park Cemetery lies in the remote East End, and gives sleeping-places to the inhabitants of a vast district. There Jane's parents lay, not in a grave to themselves, but buried amidst the nameless dead, in that part of the ground reserved for those who can purchase no more than a portion in the foss which is filled when its occupants reach statutable distance from the surface. The regions around were then being built upon for the first time; the familiar streets of pale, damp brick were stretching here and there, continuing London, much like the spreading of a disease. Epping Forest is near at hand, and nearer the dreary expanse of Wanstead Flats.

Not grief, but chill desolation makes this cemetery its abode. A country churchyard touches the tenderest memories, and softens the heart with longing for the eternal rest. The cemeteries of wealthy London abound in dear and great associations, or at worst preach homilies which connect themselves with human dignity and pride. Here on the waste limits of that dread East, to wander among tombs is to go hand in hand with the stark and eyeless emblem of mortality; the spirit falls beneath the cold burden of ignoble destiny. Here lie those who were born for toll; who, when toil has worn them to the uttermost, have but to yield their useless breath and pass into oblivion. For them is no day, only the brief twilight of a winter sky between the former and the latter night. For them no aspiration; for them no hope of memory in the dust; their very children are wearied into forgetfulness. Indistinguishable units in the vast throng that labours but to support life, the name of each, father, mother, child, is as a dumb cry for the warmth and love of which Fate so stinted them. The wind wails above their narrow tenements; the sandy soil, soaking in the rain as soon as it has fallen, is a symbol of the great world which absorbs their toil and straightway blots their being.

It being Sunday afternoon the number of funerals was considerable; even to bury their dead the toilers cannot lose a day of the wage week. Around the chapel was a great collection of black vehicles with sham-tailed mortuary horses; several of the families present must have left themselves bare in order to clothe a coffin in the way they deemed seemly. Emma and her sister had made their own funeral garments, and the former, in consenting for the sake of poor Jane to receive the aid which Mutimer offered, had insisted through Alice that there should be no expenditure beyond the strictly needful. The carriage which conveyed her and Kate alone followed the hearse from Hoxton; it rattled along at a merry pace, for the way was lengthy, and a bitter wind urged men and horses to speed. The occupants of the box kept up a jesting colloquy.

Impossible to read the burial service over each of the dead separately; time would not allow it. Emma and Kate found themselves crowded among a number of sobbing women, just in time to seat themselves before the service began. Neither of them had moist eyes; the elder looked about the chapel with blank gaze, often shivering with cold; Emma's face was bent downwards, deadly pale, set in unchanging woe. A world had fallen to pieces about her; she did not feel the ground upon which she trod; there seemed no way from amid the ruins. She had no strong religious faith; a wail in the darkness was all the expression her heart could attain to; in the present anguish she could not turn her thoughts to that far vision of a life hereafter. All day she had striven to realise that a box of wood contained all that was left of her sister. The voice of the clergyman struck her ear with meaningless monotony. Not immortality did she ask for, but one more whisper from the lips that could not speak, one throb of the heart she had striven so despairingly to warm against her own.

Kate was plucking at her arm, for the service was over, and unconsciously she was impeding people who wished to pass from the seats. With difficulty she rose and walked; the cold seemed to have checked the flow of her blood; she noticed the breath rising from her mouth, and wondered that she could have so much whilst those dear lips were breathless. Then she was being led over hard snow, towards a place where men stood, where there was new-turned earth, where a coffin lay upon the ground. She suffered the sound of more words which she could not follow, then heard the dull falling of clods upon hollow wood. A hand seemed to clutch her throat, she struggled convulsively and cried aloud. But the tears would not come.

No memory of the return home dwelt afterwards in her mind. The white earth, the headstones sprinkled with snow, the vast grey sky over which darkness was already creeping, the wind and the clergyman's voice joining in woeful chant, these alone remained with her to mark the day. Between it and the days which then commenced lay formless void.

Commonplace 186 George & Demos (Again) PART ONE

Today, we Brits (well, us lot who have the vote) go to the polls to decide to either Remain or Leave the European Union. I am confident we will vote to Remain. Why? Because, as demonstrated so eloquently in WWII, we Brits are not a nation of quitters. And, because the sometimes apathetic working class, socially engineered to feel powerless by a ruling class determined to keep them ignorant, will rise up, get off its arse, switch off the tv, put down the lager bottle, and march to the polling stations to ensure its Human Rights are not removed. A vote to Leave plays directly into the hands of our despotic rulers, amounting to a coup designed to bring on a silent revolution against the interests of the working class and poor. The primary function of any political party is to counter the effects of want, before any other agenda rises up. Sadly, we nowadays have returned to the scaremongering of the 1930s, and racism is once more centre-stage on the political hustings. As we saw in the twentieth century, the poor can be manipulated into conflict by those determined to divide and conquer and ultimately dominate, the working class, that most valuable resource of any economy and nation. We must resist the tyranny of the rich and support each other by sticking together, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender or skin tone - or nationality. As ever, the fight for freedom from any form of oppression starts with a war against poverty.

Rosa Luxembourg daughter of the Revolution click

It's at times like these (and entirely for the purposes of this blog post) that I stop and ask: 'What would George do?' Would he vote to Leave or Remain? To save the suspense, I suspect he would vote to Leave. He was a modern thinker in terms of literature, and he deplored blind nationalism, but his Conservative mindset would have prevailed, and he would have agreed with those who think Britain should remain aloof, and continue to think of itself as an elite. In his later years, he had grown too cynical to have faith in any agency but his own power of mind, but in his youth, for a brief time, George followed the path of Socialism. He was not a conspicuous political animal, but his father had been somewhat left of centre in matters of local politics back home in Wakefield, so maybe George felt he was honour-bound to appear to make a contribution to a cause. He attended meetings and explained himself in correspondence with his brothers, and tried to convince himself that Socialism was the best path, but it all fizzled out. George was never what you might term a 'joiner' of anything that did not serve his ambitions, or reflect well on his curriculum vitae, and he did not support any cause in particular, save that of his own self-service. Perhaps he saw that the battle lines had finally been drawn - the rich versus the poor - and he didn't want to end up on the wrong side, because most social revolutions tend towards meeting out harsh treatment to collaborators on the losing side.

John Tenniel's cartoon published in Punch. Tenniel also illustrated Alice In Wonderland and
Alice Through The looking Glass click. The battle was between party leaders Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone - Tories versus Liberals. 

In George's day, very few British people had the vote. The Reform Act of 1867 was a milestone as it introduced the right to vote for some of the male working class - those wealthy enough and in careers stable enough to enable them to be home owners and thus, rate payers. But the Act's lack of precision meant it was still a many-flawed piece of legislature, open to exploitation by unscrupulous politicians. No-one knew if there would be anarchy following the implementation of the Act in a time when monarchy was not popular (Victoria was in deep mourning for her consort and had withdrawn from public life) and Revolution was in the air. In fact, the Act let down the ordinary person because it introduced the need for politicians to pick a side (previously, parties had worked together) and then spend vast amounts of money on campaigning, thus excluding the poorer classes from putting themselves up for candidature. However, it produced a surge in numbers eligible to vote, almost trebling in the fist ten years of the Act. George was a potential rate payer, so would have had the right to vote if he had ever owned a house or a flat of his own.

Demos is George's 1886 novel about Socialism and the vileness of the working class when compared to the holiness of the genteel middle class. Actually, many of George's books include his thoughts on the dreadfulness of the poorer classes, but Demos sets out to put any notions that the working class could ever be elevated to an order of gentility themselves firmly into place as a socialistic pipe-dream enjoyed by well-to-do enlightened folks - like William Morris - who lived in a world of unreality fuelled by wealth and privilege. For more about the novel see Commonplaces 12 &13.

Mary Harris Jones co-founder of the Wobblies -
the Industrial Workers of the World group click.

Demos is one of my favourite George novels, because it reveals the author's real self as a backward-looking snob and passive aggressive paranoid Tory. He doesn't bring us imagined biographies of complex, fully-formed characters: he provides us with taxonomies of stereotypical types classified to demonstrate his strongly-held point of view. The whole thing is annoyingly didactic and shallow in its understanding of psychology - it is definitely no Crime and Punishment!! It seems unable to make its mind up about what it wants to be remembered for - too many subplots, is one of my memories haha - but it moves along at a brisk pace, which must have been a boon if you were reading the three volume edition hot off the press. But George is not reaching out to a readership of the oppressed; he wants to speak to those in power, to reassure them the working class couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery because 1) they are incapable of working selflessly for a common goal; 2) they are essentially venal and would drink all the beer; 3) the natural order would prevail and the rich would win in the end. It is an ambitious work, and because it is his third novel, it is still full of bits of authentic George, before he covered over his soul and turned into that odious creep, Henry Ryecroft.

The Belgian Revolution by the splendidly-named Egide Charles Gustave Wappers 1834

In Demos, everyone is pulled in to serve a purpose - the trophy bride bought as much as wooed; the scheming mother intent on arranging a good marriage; the dumped, innately saintly true love who really believes love means letting his woman go, the ambitious worker with an intriguing, entrepreneurial, skill-set but a hole where his moral compass should be; the dumped girlfriend with the heart of gold; the flighty girl seduced then broken like a butterfly on a wheel by being too free with her favours; the middle class girl whose inner grace is tested but always rises to the occasion; the common man a shallow step up from the beasts always returning to type at the drop of a hat; the undeserving baddie inheriting riches he is not entitled to at the expense of the man who should have them; the innate, lack of integrity at the dishonest heart of the common man (skating on thin ice for an author who'd done porridge with hard labour for stealing haha); the mob intent on mayhem for no good purpose; the stupid grasping nature of the poor; the amalgamated mass of meat that is the lumpen proletariat; the jealousy of the grasping have-nots intent on dragging their betters down into the mire; the violence held deep inside the average man's heart; the chance of redemption only possible through death, or religious conversion, or public humiliation... Demos has all of this, and more. It's Dallas and The Forsyte Saga and King Vidor's movie The Crowd all rolled into one soupy tale where the hero gets offed for no good reason and the wrong people prosper. Inevitably, the moral tones of the thing drag it down to the floor, but there are luminous moments - such as the famous 'Manor Park Cemetery' scene.

JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO EXPLORE THAT.

Commonplace 185  George & His Childhood Holidays In The Lake District.

Cumbrian coast St Bees 

A house above/behind a shop in Wakefield was not the ideal place to raise a family of five children, but Mr and Mrs Gissing had enough money to provide them with a good education and enough money left over for holidays to the seaside and trips to London on the train.
George had a reasonably comfortable childhood until the age of thirteen when his sense of security was changed forever. His father died, leaving the family rudderless; without the leadership every stable, productive lower middle class Victorian household required. George was forced to become the Man of the Family - never his most comfortable, natural, role. His resentment at having to abnegate his own needs to those of others was a trait that festered throughout his adult years, and when he had a family of his own, all that rancour quickly surfaced and blighted his relationship with his sons.

Anyone interested in poetry - as was George's father, something of a poet himself - is drawn to the majesty of the Lake District, if only to pay homage to William Wordsworth who was born in Cockermouth in 1770. Wordsworth is a god of English poetry, and no one should go through life without a working knowledge of at least The Prelude, which, in my youth, was a staple of the English Year 9 curriculum. To read it, click.

Dove Cottage in Grasmere, where Wordsworth lived with his sister, Dorothy. Thomas De Quincey moved in when they moved out.

The holidays the Gissing family enjoyed (often without father as he was too busy in the shop to take time off) were to genteel, modest, salubrious, countrified places, like Seascale and St Bees at the coast side of the Lake District, in what was then known as the county of Cumberland (now called Cumbria), a journey of about 200 miles from Wakefield. Nowadays, the Lake District is a National Park click attracting tens of thousands of visitors, but travel was more costly and more protracted, with far less transport links in George's day. The journey there and back by train, with a couple of changes along the way, would have been an adventure in itself, passing through the splendour of the Yorkshire Moors, some of England's most beautiful landscape. George was, at this, impressionable age, a dedicated artist and watercolourist, hoping to eventually make a living from it. George was always a sincere and very focused competitor in any enterprise he undertook, though he covered up his failures by pretending he didn't care about the outcome; in his teens, he entered his paintings into competitions that he occasionally won. (He would later make money at Owens College entering literary competitions.) A holiday in the Lake District will have delighted him, as Artists had been visiting there since the Romantics discovered the wonders of mountains and waterfalls, secluded valleys and precipitous rock outcrops. But, thanks to the often violently changeable weather, it is the light playing on the verdant hillsides, and the often louring and oppressive skies that galvanise the Artistic temperament into producing visual celebrations of the Sublime.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
often depicted deep in contemplation, as here. 

If you haven't heard of the term 'Sublime', consider this, from Wikipedia, complete with their links:

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is a 1757 treatise on aesthetics written by Edmund Burke. It was the first complete philosophical exposition for separating the beautiful and the sublime into their own respective rational categories. It attracted the attention of prominent thinkers such as Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant.

In short, the Beautiful, according to Burke, is what is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, whereas the Sublime is what has the power to compel and destroy us. The preference for the Sublime over the Beautiful was to mark the transition from the Neoclassical to the Romantic era.

To further explain - there is a difference between enjoying a nice view from a high place and the sensation of unreality that brings on an urge to jump from it. The sort of state of mind engendered by Edvard Munch in that famous Scream painting, when he was trying to depict the effects on his consciousness of Nature's threatening presence descending through the darkening shadows of twilight. Or, as Munch put it:

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

West door to St Bees Priory

George, the young artist and lover of all things Sublime/Romantic, will have swanned about looking dreamy and preoccupied, stopping to capture the fleeting light and the way it fell on natural forms, probably with a large drawing board and easel, and a more subtle little pocket sketch book. Impromptu visual notes, a few drawn lines swiftly committed to paper as an aide-memoire for future meisterwerks - JMW Turner, an artist not thoroughly appreciated by George (ever the one to have pedestrian Artistic taste) used to make notes and drawings and colour studies of particular things he wanted to include in his paintings in a series of books that are a delight to behold click. Turner used to tie himself to ships' masts so that he could capture the light of storms at sea on canvases strapped down with weights, ever delighted at a near-death experience in the English Channel, or around The Solent, exulting in downpours and Force Nine gales. The German Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), a prominent painter of what we know as The Sublime, produced canvases so large and detailed that the Sublime slaps you in the face and overwhelms, even in an Art gallery space click. Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), a German working in America, did something similar when he gave us the archetypal Sublime picture in his epic...

Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains 1868

Another influence on George was John Ruskin, a Lake District aficionado who wrote about the immense beauty to be enjoyed in secluded walks among the hills and dales of the Lakes. He wrote: An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome. click

Ruskin poured scorn on the painter John Martin who almost single-handedly put the willies up anyone not used to a nice view with his The Great Day of His Wrath, a colossal 11x8 feet canvass depicting the pessimism of eschatology. If you ever get to see it at Tate Britain, stand really close to get the full shock and awe.

1851-3

To gentler stuff.
The coastal village of St Bees in particular, will have appealed to George's interest in old buildings, particularly churches. By the time he visited the village, the theological college housed in the Priory had been in operation for  fifty years, churning out Church of England clergy, who enjoyed lectures inside the restored chancel, made over as a lecture theatre. A small village adjacent to the sea and at the foot of the Lake District fells was not/is still not the most exciting of holiday destinations, but if you like long walks on the beach, collecting flowers, sketching, picnics, tea shops and yomps over hilly ground, then this part of the world is for you. And me.

The Gissings enjoyed the quiet life on their holidays, and we know from George's travels in Italy that he more or less visited all destinations as if they were St Bees and the Lake District. All aspects of architecture seemed to interest him and he often visited churches to admire the history and the buildings, if not to take advantage of the spiritual offerings. As George was living in the time just after the full impact of Gothic Revival (largely thanks to the efforts of  Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin 1812-1852) you couldn't move through England (and the World) without bumping into some sort of Gothic erection, from the UK Houses of Parliament, to the more modest church Pugin designed for the congregation of St Xavier's in Berrima, New South Wales, Australia. Gothic and The Sublime go hand-in-hand to impress us with their power and might, but they often both lack that one essential factor that sustains us: joy. George's childhood holidays were times of joy for the family before the disaster of Thomas Gissing's untimely death took the sheen off it all. George never really recaptured those carefree moments spent idling among the rock pools of Seascale, though he tried. The closest he came to it was walking the byways of The Ionian Sea, his account one of his precious Italian holidays. If you read nothing else of his, do read it click because it's the closest he gets to happy.

Pugin's St Xavier's wouldn't be out of place in Penrith.

Commonplace 184 George & A Tribute To Mr Murphy And The Blue Ribbon Army

Anyone interested in George and his carefully stage-managed web of relationships will wonder what the heck was going on when he hooked up with Eduard Bertz, his German man-wife and long-time correspondent. It is worth starting out with the knowledge that they met after Eduard placed a lonely hearts ad in a newspaper and George saw it and responded. It was 1879 - George was 22, Bertz was four years older and in exile from his native Germany for being a political activist for the wrong side. Though there seems to be no written record of either the ad or the correspondence it elicited, this is how a similar fictional account is depicted in 'The Unclassed' (1883/4) as a device for bringing together Osmund Waymark (Man of the World) and Julian Casti (Ingénue):

'Wanted, human companionship. A young man of four-and-twenty wishes to find a congenial associate of about his own age. He is a student of ancient and modern literatures, a free-thinker in religion, a lover of art in all its forms, a hater of conventionalism. Would like to correspond in the first instance. Address O. W., City News Rooms, W.C.' (Note: WC means a West Central London district, not a water closet!)

Of course, Eduard’s ad was probably cloaked in similar faux intellectual claptrap about lonely single man seeks intellectual equals to discuss Socialism and similar nerdy stuff, but Eduard was a closet gay man at a time when the contributory bases responsible for gender were being explored, and there were few ways for gay men to meet similar types in a place where a man could be tripped up over failings in his knowledge of the social mores of the new country. 

by Tom of Finland

Morley Roberts, that most unreliable of memoirists and sometime contributor to the creation of George’s legend (there are quite a few of those haha), claimed Marianne aka Nell didn’t much like Bertz, and resented the friendship between the two men, but as Roberts never met Nell in person, his views are invalid; after all, how could he possibly know what she thought about anything if he had never discussed events with her? Maybe she was one of those women gifted with the infamous sense known as ‘gaydar’ – the ability to spot a gay man at a thousand paces – and knew dopey George would not have worked it out himself; perhaps she sensed something in George that might have wholeheartedly responded positively to homosexual advances, and she feared for her marriage, and, by extension, her financial security. Perhaps Eduard treated her like an inferior and made her feel uncomfortable. Maybe she just didn’t like him. Maybe she and Eduard got on like a house on fire and George got so jealous he told Morley Roberts a lie about what she thought of the German, as an act of revenge. Who knows? The story of it is usually told by biographers to make it look like Nell was a jealous fiend who ruined all George’s chances of socialising, even of making a Man Friend, so make your own judgement.

Pledge designed by Walter Crane ( 1845-1915)

Incapable of what might be seen as intimate relationships – that is, liaisons that brought him emotional closeness – George maintained his friendship with Eduard for over twenty years, mainly because they spent very little of that time actually enjoying face-to-face contact. Theirs was a love match shared in the many letters in which George presents his most reasoned and rational persona, but also his most anodyne, and most censored one. No confessions of wife abuse, offspring abandoning, syphilis, or the torment he visited upon his second wife. No talk of the cruel abandoning of his first wife, or his shameless exploitation of his third or the hate campaign he conducted towards his second. Nothing but carefully edited highlights reflecting well on George in his role of the put upon husband, undiscovered literary national treasure and all-round martyr. 

Francis Murphy cabinet card

It would be easy to misread the length of their friendship as a sign of a meeting of equals, or even of a meeting of minds, but George told Gabrielle Fleury that Bertz did not understand him, and that he did not feel their relationship was particularly close or simpatico. Of course, George never said this to Eduard's face, and the letters they wrote each other give no indication that George did not welcome and value feedback from his German friend, or ask for that dreaded catnip he was so addicted to – sympathy – which Eduard gave freely, always offering consolation to George for some complained of annoyance or setback. George returned the favour and encouraged the somewhat depressive Bertz when life got him down, and praised his endeavours and achievements. 

Cheers!

One interesting chapter in Eduard's life occurred not long after his June 1883 return to London from the Rugby Settlement (see See Commonplace 8 for more on this). In a letter to his brother Algernon (September 2nd 1883) George writes: I could tell a sad story about poor Bertz. To my amazement he has drifted over to the religious revivalists, has joined Blue Ribbon Army, Young Men's Christian Association, and I know not what. He spends his days & nights at Salvation Army meetings, & the like. Whether this means weakening of the brain, I can't say; I stand & marvel but protest has been in vain. 

So, who do we have to thank for The Blue Ribbon Army? Francis Murphy (1836-1907), that's who. He was an Irish immigrant to the US who started his own Evangelical Temperance Movement taking the blue ribbon motif from a verse in the Old Testament Bible: Numbers 15:38-39: Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments, throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribband of blue: and it shall be unto you for a fringe, that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the Lord, and do them. He toured extensively in the States, Australia and Europe, and maybe Eduard went to a Temperance meeting when he lived in the Rugby Colony in Tennessee from 1881-3. 

Meetings of the BRA generally included food and hot beverages (such as tea from packets as above at 6d a quarter pound), whilst providing a community focal point with opportunities to socialise and give and receive support, with all areas of life covered by a web of helpers and enablers. There was also a chance to worship in the Evangelical tradition, with singing and prayer added to well-received testaments to sobriety. Here is a taster of what was on offer: 

THE TEMPERANCE CRUSADE IN DUNDEE

Last night a farewell tea meeting was held with Mr Francis Murphy, the American Apostle of Temperance, who has during the last five weeks, in conjunction with the temperance party, carried on a gospel temperance crusade in Dundee. The meeting was held in the drill hall, where upwards of 3000 persons partook of tea. A choir of over 100 voices led the singing of hymns. Provost Moncur occupied the chair, and on the platform were many clergymen and others. Mr Murphy leaves Dundee for Manchester, where he is to begin a crusade. In the course of his address, the Provost, on behalf of the Executive Council, presented Mr Murphy with an address, expressing their deep sense of indebtedness to God for having directed Mr Murphy to Dundee, and their gratitude to Mr Murphy for his extraordinary labours, which had bean unparalleled in result. The committee also recorded that during the campaign of a month, 32,000 persons had taken the pledge of abstinence, and at least 40,000 had donned the “blue ribbon” badge of union in the work. Mr Murphy, in acknowledging the address, expressed his sincere gratitude for the manner in which he had been assisted in his work, and for the very great kindness he had experienced . He promised, if spared, to return to Dundee after his work in Manchester was finished, and to carry on the work until it was finished. Speeches were delivered by various gentlemen.

A Dundee Newspaper, 30th January 1882

Eduard may have made use of the wider remit of the Blue Ribbon lot offering beds for the homeless, which would be invaluable to a man with few contacts and friends returning to London from the States. He didn't stay in England for long. After a brief spell of real poverty, he eventually found work at the British Library (he'd worked in the Rugby settlement as a librarian) which provided him with the means to try his hand at children's fiction, producing 'The French Prisoners: A Story For Boys', published in 1884 and available here for free click. Bertz finally returned to Germany in early 1884, when it was safe to come home from exile, and remained there until his death in Potsdam in 1931. 

To find out more about The Blue Ribbon Army click

The Blue Ribbon Army is celebrated in the memorable poem by the mighty William McGonagall:

A Tribute to Mr Murphy and the Blue Ribbon Army

All hail to Mr Murphy, he is a hero brave,
That has crossed the mighty Atlantic wave,
For what purpose let me pause and think-
I answer, to warn the people not to taste strong drink.

And, I’m sure, if they take his advice, they never will rue
The day they joined the Blue Ribbon Army in the year 1882;
And I hope to their colours they will always prove true,
And shout, Hurrah ! for Mr Murphy and the Ribbon of Blue.

What is strong drink? Let me think– I answer ’tis a thing
From whence the majority of evils spring,
And causes many a fireside with boisterous talk to ring,
And leaves behind it a deadly sting.

Some people do say it is good when taken in moderation,
But, when taken to excess, it leads to tribulation,
Also to starvation and loss of reputation,
Likewise your eternal soul’s damnation.

The drunkard, he says he can’t give it up,
For I must confess temptation’s in the cup;
But he wishes to God it was banished from the land,
While he holds the cup in his trembling hand.

And he exclaims in the agony of his soul –
Oh, God, I cannot myself control
From this most accurs’d cup!
Oh, help me, God, to give it up!

Strong drink to the body can do no good;
It defiles the blood, likewise the food,
And causes the drunkard with pain to groan,
Because it extracts the marrow from the bone:

And hastens him on to a premature grave,
Because to the cup he is bound a slave;
For the temptation is hard to thole,
And by it he will lose his immortal soul.

The more’s the pity, I must say,
That so many men and women are by it led astray,
And decoyed from the paths of virtue and led on to vice
By drinking too much alcohol and acting unwise.

Good people all, of every degree,
I pray, ye all be warned by me:
I advise ye all to pause and think,
And never more to taste strong drink.

Because the drunkard shall never inherit the kingdom of God
And whosoever God loves he chastens with his rod:
Therefore, be warned, and think in time,
And don’t drink any more whisky, rum, or wine.

But go at once– make no delay,
And join the Blue Ribbon Army without dismay,
And rally round Mr Murphy, and make a bold stand,
And help to drive the Bane of Society from our land.

I wish Mr Murphy every success,
Hoping he will make rapid progress;
And to the Blue Ribbon Army may he always prove true,
And adhere to his colours– the beautiful blue.

Commonplace 183  George & Eugenics' Little Brother, Phrenology PART TWO

Phrenology is covered well in a number of websites, including this one click, John van Wyhe's Phrenology On The Web, which is a treasure trove - a fecking treasure trove! - of stuff.



One of the more bizarre aspects of the fad for the pseudo-science of phrenology was the way various religious groups took its claims as gospel, and latched on to the opportunity to categorise people into good and bad types... o, hang on, that's exactly what all religions do, isn't it? Silly me! Anyhoo, when Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) developed his system of reading the character, mind and personality via the brain and head, there were few takers in the international scientific community -  those with the correct shape of the rational part of their brain were not convinced. In 1815, The Edinburgh Review published a scathing report on it. Gall's colleague and compatriot, JG Spurzheim fought back, making a very well-publicised rebuttal which, in the end did more to promote the cause of phrenology than any amount of books on the subject could have. At a time when the exploration of science was a discerning gentleman's hobby, any new-fangled theory about how the human body and mind worked was bound to attract amateur experts. Gall believed the brain contained 27 different organs which controlled various psychological, emotional, intellectual functions. Phrenology became a fashionable area of study, whilst enjoying a secondary life as a popular social activity. Mesmerism enjoyed a similar rise in public interest as an amusement as much as a medical tool.


In the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, science was a whole world of entertainment and wonder to anyone with an enquiring mind or an interest in novelty and creepiness. There was something about a system that claimed to explain the mind that appealed to the Gothic mindset, in the days when psychological factors of human motivation were being explored. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with its reanimated Creature thrilled all sectors of society. Ghosts, witches, public hangings, seances, the French Revolution and the horrors of the Napoleonic War, the upsurge in body-snatching for medical research, world-changing scientific discoveries and a public hunger for demonstrations of scientific experiments, was compounded by a world of uncertainty brought about by terrifying illnesses like syphilis and cholera which ensured there was always a market for weirdness. When phrenology became more than a parlour game and began to be taken seriously, some of its more sinister aspects were more akin to eugenics than psychology.

Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) kick-started the debate into how humans related to animals. Notions of Determinism, the philosophy that tells us that all things everywhere arise in answer to some sort of need, which means everything is predictable and inevitable, suggested human traits and characteristics also subscribed to limited, fixed states. Phrenology promoted the notion that the physiological explains the psychological. The down side to this is that these simplistic views can be manipulated into a system that compares racial features and by loading these with negative attributes and meanings, can claim to provide evidence that some races are irrefutably better than others. Utter tosh, but there we are. Phrenology maintained that there was an ideal 'healthy' type (obviously a white, British middle class male etc etc) that all others should be judged by. The ideal Brit was intelligent, noble, resilient, creative, industrious... all the good things - again, people can be judged by it. If you can plot these characteristics to various parts of the skull - intelligence to the forehead - then any measurements deviating from the norm will be deficient or the opposite: for example, a high brow means intelligence, a low one means idiocy.

In fact, the pseudo-science of phrenology probably did more to promote racial, gender, and class stereotyping that any branch of study, and still informs racists who think in primitive, uneducated, reductive ways. For example, even the title of this one makes the flesh crawl: Combe's Popular Phrenology, Exhibiting The Exact Phrenological Admeasurements (sic) of Above Fifty Distinguished and Extraordinary Personages, of Both Sexes With Skulls of the Various Nations of the World click. It reminds us there was a time when perfectly sane usually men collected the skulls of different peoples of the world to exhibit in their drawing rooms as conversation piece curios to promote chitchat with guests. I refer you here click to boggle your mind. And here click.

In How To Read Character: A New, Illustrated Hand-book of Phrenology and Physiognomy For Students and Examiners by Samuel R Wells (1870) click is a particularly odious example of the kind of book published on the subject. Even when phrenology was being dismissed as errant claptrap, Wells was selling the sort of guff that claimed to be able to reduce people to types of mainly good vs bad, attractive vs unattractive qualities. When Professor Joseph Blackburne delivered his temperance talks with a phrenology twist, he did so with utter sincerity and good-intention. Any new medical theory put together by sincere persons who want to offer the human race a bit of help. even when it works out to be rubbish, is worth consideration. Unfortunately, phrenology lends itself well to being abused by charlatans who seek to exploit the desperate and vulnerable, or those who simply place their faith in science.

The full results of George's test by Professor Blackburne can be found at the Beinecke Library at Yale University under this heading:

Blackburne, phrenologist. "The Phrenological Sketch of Master [George] Gissing 13," Wakefield. Autograph manuscript. Accompanied by a phrenological chart and register of George Gissing, 1870 Oct and a printed form filled in by Professor Blackburne.

The first volume of the Coustillas biography has an extract:
...it observed that the boy was fit to make a good officer, a good doctor or to take up chemistry. He also deduced George would always be something of a social misfit, restless and fond of travel, he would not always be a good judge of his own conduct, but would always have a strong sense of justice. Not sure about the 'strong sense of justice' part. I would love to know what the biography has redacted - did it mention George's propensity for self-delusion, petty-mindedness, vengeance, secrecy, self-pity, cruelty.... I could go on, but I won't.

A visual aid phrenology teaching set click