George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

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.