Commonplace 196 George & Theft.

With images from RB Kitaj.

Early in his life, George made the decision that some crimes are justifiable. Of course, some crimes ARE, because we all know what Dickens' Mr Bumble knew - that the Law is an ass, and exists in a world of black and white whilst the rest of the world is shades of grey. But generally, when we are talking about justifiable crime, we are speaking of self-defence, life-saving, or disaster-averting circumstances. When George crossed the line from upright citizen to petty thief, he was turning his back on his upbringing, particularly his parents' moral codes. As for betraying the moral codes of his class - well, members of the middle class favour fraud over theft, and do most of their stealing from a distance, rather than up close and personal from someone's coat pocket hanging in a cloakroom.

The Jewish Rider 1985

A single crime of theft might have been overlooked by both the Owens College authorities and the Law, and George would then have just slipped away to a life toiling away in the service of academia. A single offence is likely to be seen as a 'crime of passion', and might be taken as justifiable. George's decision to commit multiple crimes was the defining moment of his life; he may have been given a month of hard labour as a result, but the effects of being caught lasted for another nearly thirty years. Everything from the moment he decided he was better than the Law was uncontrolled turmoil, self-loathing and self-imposed social exclusion.

Most of his biographers choose to put forth the idea that he took his decision to abandon morality in order to give money to his girlfriend, Marianne aka Nell. There is no evidence for this, no evidence she knew he was stealing, no evidence she ever benefited from any of it. Most of his biographers choose to see George as a hapless fool in love who stole to provide an alternative lifestyle to Nell who was on the verge of a life of prostitution, and who needed to be kept in a certain grand style. They use elements of George's literary output to back this up - usually Arthur Golding from Workers In The Dawn, a hapless fool in love who gets lumbered with the wrong girl, yet stays with her until he is ground down and ends his days plummeting over Niagara Falls. None of which happened to George. Perhaps these biographers are looking in the wrong direction for their inspiration? Maybe they should think less Arthur Golding, and more James Hood: less Workers In The Dawn; more A Life's Morning.

Erasmus Variations 1958

As with much of George's work, A Life's Morning (1888) is about class inequalities and the pressures put on those who try and move up the social ladder. The female at the centre of the tale, Emily, is caught between her loyalty to the lower middle class family she was born into and the aspiration of marrying a man from the middle class. She is a governess and her employer's son falls for her - George's homage to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. From her time hobnobbing with the fine and fancy ways of her employers, Emily loses her sympathy for her own family who begin to appear to her as coarse and crude - as was the fate of George and his feelings for his family. Her father, James, a simple man with little ambition, works in the accounts department of a mill owned by a man called Dagworthy, a Dickensian blackguard creation with the charm of an immoral polecat. On the whole, James Hood has done well in life, and Emily is the apple of his eye. He has always been honest and conscientious, up until the moment he decides to steal a £10 note he tells himself he has borrowed. This failure to accept the truth is called 'rationalisation', one of Sigmund Freud's ego defence mental mechanisms. George was a master of it, himself.

It's easy to see how powerful this mental mechanism force is - when you think you are honest, admitting you have erred causes a loss of face, which is anathema to the ego. George may well have excused his crimes as 'unavoidable' in fact, he blamed his mother for sending him off to Manchester on his own (the sure sign of a spineless mummy's boy!). What pressures could cause such a rift between his moral code as handed down to him by his parents, that justified his breaking the law? In A Life's Morning, we can see how easy this could have come about. James Hood finds a gash £10 note knocking about the office and decides to keep it safe in his pocket while he goes on business to the nearby town. On the train he meets some rough (to George) working class  types (soldiers) who cause him to lose his hat. Now, a man without a hat in George's day was a social outcast - Victorian dress codes were every bit as draconian as any sharia law rule book. Hood 'borrows' the money to buy a new hat; but we are told buying a new hat is an expense James can ill afford, so he borrows the money with full knowledge he might not be able to repay it.

The Neo-Cubist 1976-87

This social crime of being hatless sounds trivial by today's free and easy standards. To be conspicuously different from your tribe is a fear of being judged as inferior which is at the root of fears of being seen as different. When compared to his relatively wealthy peers at Owens College, George's lack of funds would be obvious in his choice of clothing, the condition this was in, how he socialised, what he spent on socialising, and how generous he could be to others. He certainly wasn't poor at College; presumably he received some money from his mother, he had scholarships, and he won money prizes when he entered literary competitions. One of the interesting aspects to this prize-winning was his peers thought this to be a bit naff - did they look down on him because he needed to win money, or did they disapprove of him because he made money the reason he tried so hard to win? Perhaps they thought less well off students should have been given the chance - in fact, George comments himself on having no ill-feeling one time when he comes second because the boy who won really needed the money. If George stole to keep up with his peers, that might explain why the crime spree went on so long.

So far so justified - we can feel sympathy for George's predicament. When James Hood goes on a spending binge in A Life's Morning using some of what's left of the 'borrowed' £10, it's harder to understand his rationale. He doesn't just buy a hat; he takes a cab to the hat shop, something he never would have done in his real (poor) life. Then he goes on a spending binge of living it large and drinking and showing off to the world. Was that really the sort of life Hood would rather be living than the one he had?

Red Banquet 1960

George knew this sort of class conflict predicament well, and the way money figured in the world of status. And the sort of stress brought about by associating with those of a higher social class all the while knowing you are relatively broke will have made his college years a nightmare. The lack of money - which to him meant status - defined him, no matter what talents he had. Would the chasing after prizes been so avid if there was no money attached? He writes this about Hood:
Not only was he weakly constructed, but his incessant ill-fortune had done him that last wrong that social hardship can inflict upon the individual, it had undermined his self-respect. Having so often been treated like a dog, he had come to expect such treatment. He had lost the conscious dignity of manhood; nay, had perhaps never possessed it, for his battle had begun at so early an age. The sense that he was wretchedly poor, and the knowledge that poverty is the mother of degradation, made him at any moment a self-convicted criminal; accused however wrongly, it was inevitable that his face should go against him... For the first time in his life, Hood had used for his own purpose money that didn't belong to him; he did it under the pressure of circumstances and had not time to reflect till the act was irrevocable.

George seeking to justify his actions by putting forward blameless Hood as a victim of circumstance, and, by extension, explaining his own actions. Poverty, he argues, causes degradation, so can you expect anything but stealing from a poor man? Well, Hood meets up with an old acquaintance, Cheeseman - a conman loser who owes Hood £10 from way back, and who inveigles food and ale out of the gullible thief. Now, as stated in the previous post, £10 in 1888 had the buying power in today's money of £900. At the end of the fine dining experience, Hood calculates he has spent £1 all day, so will only have to pay £1 back. He goes back to work on the train. To cut a long story short, he gets found out by his boss; the boss keeps it quiet and suggests to Emily the debt be repaid by her consent to a proposal of marriage, which she turns down. So Dagworthy confronts Hood about the missing bank note, and after a bout of ritually humiliating the poor man into a confession, sacks him. 
Hood feels he has lost everything including the respect of his daughter, and kills himself. Here, we have a totally weird moment of setting up the scene of the suicide: Emily finds her father toying with a bottle: 
'What is that?' Emily asked, noticing his intentness, which in reality had no meaning. 
'This? Oh, cyanide of potassium. I was looking... no, it's  nothing.'
Of course, many pages later, he takes it, after staggering out to the Heath where he is found face down in a ditch by Dagworthy, who is out walking his dog. 

The Killer-Critic Assassinated by His Widower 1997

The reasons for George's thefts remain a mystery, but it is unlikely he stole to give money to his girlfriend. What is more probable is that he wanted to appear to be better off than he was to his peers, and stealing presented an easy way to make the extra money that required. Was the shame of his early beginnings in the lowly chemist's shop in Wakefield so disabling that he chose to rectify the disadvantage of poverty by stealing? Did he crave the good opinion of others enough to abandon his family's moral code? It seems so. He had a whole term to consider his actions, and he carried on with rummaging through others' pockets until he was stopped by the Law. Did he ever consider an alternate way of making money - like getting part-time work? Or giving up the social class pretensions? Neither; lifelong, George would rather starve than get a proper job, and he only developed even more social pretensions based on money equating with worth. He fell into that Odd Men category of being both over-educated for real life situations and bone idle, and he never challenged either. 

Commonplace 195  George & His American Notebook PART TWO.

With images of works by Dame Barbara Hepworth, whose association with Wakefield is memorialised by the Barbara Hepworth Museum situated not far from where George was born click

Bouwe Postmus makes it clear in his introduction to George's American Notebook that most of the notes were made after George returned to the UK in late 1877. He suggests that the first 25 pages (as numbered by our man) are probably authentically 'American', but as George did not use consecutive pages when making his random notes, many of the later entries were made after his return to the UK. To add to the confusion, those entries he made when in America are probably not in chronological order.

The notes are a smorgasbord of quotes netted from his reading of the French and Latin authors and philosophers he admired, plus longer extracts from his wider reading. More importantly for a fan, the book contains random ideas for stories. Who among us wouldn't want to see more from our man Gissing?

Figure In A Landscape 1960

Despite his exposure to the Classical writers he would spend his life studying, George's idea of a successful - and, therefore, respected and well-paid - writer was always going to be Charles Dickens. He had fond memories of his father's love for the author, and a portrait of Dickens had pride of place in the Gissing family home. Dickens loved to invent illustrative names for his characters as a good way to remember who was who in often densely-populated plots. Dickens gave us the likes of Mr Badger, Noddy Boffin, Sgt Buzfuz, Luke Honeythunder, and Mrs Gamp. See this click for more Dickens creations. In the Notebook, we find lists of names with a Dickensian twist (see what I did there haha), that George might use for future projects - Goggin, Flipp, Potwin, and Fitzgerald Fussey. George kept up this sort of homage to Dickens, and his realised characters often have names that show us their personality - such as Whelpdale and Golding, and let us not forget Mr Fadge (sounds like...) and Mr Jedwood (!) from New Grub Street.

Here are some of George's ideas for future works, not necessarily from notes made in America, but included in the American Notebook. These are some of the books that got away:

Trace the gradual seduction of a masculine woman. Echoes of The Odd Women's Rhoda Nunn?

Mother supposed to die in Hospital and leaves child at Deprt'. of Charities. Child adopted by rich people. Mother turns up and claims. Highly unlikely homage to Oliver Twist, so a good idea to abandon it.

Winged Figure 1963

Young, enthusiastic man marries and is deceived by his wife. Loses all faith in women and becomes wild.(?) Woman of the town falls in love with him and reclaims him. A touch of The Unclasseds?

Man becomes adept at poisoning. Teaches his mistress. They poison his wife and then proceed to the other members of the family. The mistress insists on marrying the man, and proceeds to kill her own husband. The man however keeps him alive by antidotes. At length he narrowly escapes poisoning; flees for his life, and lives in constant terror. An intriguing plot that might be influenced by Edgar Allan Poe or Thomas De Quincy or Wainewright The Poisoner. Or a tribute to the case of Mrs Florence Maybrick, imprisoned for poisoning her husband. See click

Old philanthropist who has got so into habit of rebuking people for misdeeds that he can never keep quiet. Early version of Henry Ryecroft?

Monolith Empyrean 1953

Man marries thoughtlessly selfish woman. She drives him to such expenses that he commits a crime to support them. Is discovered and his wife sees her folly. The sort of tosh people mistake for autobiography - all those biographers and literary thesis writers who blame Marianne aka Nell for George's crime spree at Owens College feed off this sort of throwaway line.

Character - Beautiful face, with insipid character. Sleeping Fires' illegitimate son with 'silky pencillings' for a moustache and the totally unbelievable name of Lou Reed. (RIP, Lou.)

Father's treatment of son when he gets to a reasonable age. Later on, George's treatment of his own two sons would fall so far below what was good parenting that his biographers have felt compelled to sweep it all under the carpet and blame his second wife, Edith. He began a long campaign to drive her mad and remove his first son from her care by accusing her of beating the child. He never offered any witnesses or proof. As for the second son - he did not speak to him at all on his last meeting with the lad. Some father he made! And, yet, he commented on the sin of bad parenting in several of his novels - The Whirlpool, for example. 

Family of Man by Dame Barbara Hepworth 1970

Bastard in love, rejected on account of his birth. George was a little bit obsessed with illegitimacy - see Piers Otway (Crown of Life); Sleeping Fires' Lou Reed again. Maybe George had skeletons he was keeping in his own cupboard?

Ugly, despised and miserable man has trances in which he seems to possess love and treasures. Sees a girl who resembles something seen in dreams. Pursues her, and her scorn kills him. Homage to Victor Hugo?

Plot - 'In Search of a Friend'. Man leaves his mistress, of whom he has become tired because she is not intellectual, and forms an idea that friendship, devoid of passion, is true happiness. Travels in search of a friend.
His mistress, who loves him, laments his desertion and rejects addresses of another suitor. This suitor eventually falls in with the former and becomes his friend. They return together to the town and have eclaircissement (an unnecessarily poncy word for 'clarification'). Later gives up his love (whom he has at length persuaded to marry him). Former recovers his lost affection. Everything you need to know about George and his attitude to women - he writes about a character who leaves a woman he has kept as a mistress because she isn't intellectual enough? Why had it taken him so long to work that out?? Was he so busy having sex that he forgot to have a conversation with her?

Plot - Two young people marry and live in poor lodging house. Man becomes dissipated and leaves his wife, who, through strange circumstances, rises high in society and has good offer of marriage. Husband returns. Live together again, and husband by his dissipation brings wife to suicide. Strange ideas about crossing class barriers was a bit of an obsession for George who struggled with his own humble origins. One way he asserted his class credentials was to marry women he considered inferior. See Commonplace 71.

Man marries wife and leaves her. Gets rich, and returns with mistress. Wife regains influence, but mistress murders him for his money, which he has left her by will. Definitely not George's sort of thing except as a piece that might sell. 

Young man leaves his family in the country and goes to city. Gets good position in merchant's office.
After a time hears that father is on point of being ruined for want of a small sum of money. Steals it and sends. Is discovered. The father visits him in prison, and commits suicide. Again, when biographers cherry-pick George's notes for clues to his personality and motivation, this sort of thing figures in their final drafts as 'George stole money whilst he was a student' gets turned into 'George stole money to give to his girlfriend, Marianne aka Nell' - yet there is no proof she even knew he was stealing. In fact, George stole money over several months, and also stole books, so the stealing was habitual. Petty theft in adolescence is often an unconscious solution to pressures of anxiety. Ask yourself, what is more likely - 1) by stealing enough money to splash about as if he had plenty to spend he eased the pressure on his self-image caused by being in a world populated by higher class peers with lots of cash; 2) he ran a mistress with expensive tastes? At no time in the Letters (especially from George's brother, William) does Nell ever come across as a spendthrift or a gold-digger, except in the minds of biographers with issues of their own who insist that she was. 
Excusable theft is a major part of A Life's Morning, and guess what happens to the old chap who steals to buy himself a hat because his is lost? George's rationalisation is that Mr Hood (see that thing about illustrative names at work?) is too SHY to be seen without a hat because everyone would stare at him. Better to be a thief than to be hatless?? He 'borrows' the £10 required to buy a hat - but £10 was a fortune in 1888, when the book was first serialised in Cornhill Magazine. This website click suggests it was worth over £900 in today's values. If it's a short step between that kind of social awkwardness and self-justification of larceny for a character, then the same could be true for the author.

JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 196 TO EXPLORE THIS CRIME AND PUNISHMENT MOMENT.

Commonplace 194  George & His American Notebook PART ONE.

One of the great myths about George is that he was a 'victim of circumstance', and battled insurmountable foes that saw his literary talents wrecked on the shores of adversity. This is simply not true. It suited George to create the impression he was a victim and to let others think he had faced unique challenges no man could overcome, despite his best efforts. He had, what is termed in common parlance, a 'chip on his shoulder', because life didn't go the way he wanted, and rather than use his abilities to abide such experiences, he threw in the towel and put everything down to 'fate', thereby exonerating himself whilst abdicating his responsibility for his own predicament. If you ever doubt this, then think again about that lifelong craven need he had for 'sympathy', voiced when he once included in his Commonplace Book this: More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me. Why is he especially deserving? No idea; and George gives us no clues as to why he is a special needs case.

Cupid's Span by Claes Oldenburg and Coojse van Bruggen 2002

This plea for special treatment was the work of a major psychological game-player who needed, possibly more than anything else, to manage how the public formed its opinion of his persona. Why? Because the reality was too out of sync with what educated, middle class intellectuals were thinking and putting into action, at that time. His private life - his real Private Life, and not that odious pile of tosh that is The Private Life of Henry Ryecroft - was informed by a nature that was spiteful, selfish, spineless, ruthless, vengeful, mean-hearted, secretive, petty-minded and self-serving, and, at times, amoral. George was living at a time when men were beginning to abandon such barbarism, but he could not evolve and join the social revolution. Even in his own lifetime, George was an anachronism.   

Leaning Fork With Meatball and Spaghetti by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen 1994

George spent a little over a year in America (1876/7) after he was released from prison having served a sentence for stealing from fellow Owens College students. Despite making good money from winning cash prizes, and no doubt receiving some sort of financial support from his mother, George felt the need to steal money and books, and probably anything he could lift without getting caught. Those who think George was some kind of innocent dope who stole for the good of others are in denial. He stole for his own purposes - because at the bottom of it, even if he had stolen money Robin Hood style to give to the poor, giving other people's money away serves the giver's purpose (in feeling powerful) first and the recipient's, second. This is an early example of how George's primary defenders smooth over the cracks in their hero's facade. They tell us he stole to give the money to his girlfriend to prevent her from being a prostitute, but they have no proof of his motivation or what he spent the money on, or even if his girlfriend knew he was a thief. And, more importantly, there is no proof that she ever considered a career in the sex trade.

Floor Cake by Claes Oldenburg 1962

Whilst in America, George kept a small book of jottings known now as The American Notebook. Like many of his personal ideas notebooks, it reveals more about his inner workings than he probably ever thought it might. Let's start at the beginning, with an extract from its introduction by renowned Gissing scholar, Bouwe Postmus, who warns us that the book's contents don't really live up to the hype - most of the jottings were written after George's return to the UK. Already we see the emergence of a conflict between the reality and the myth - so often with George, what you see/read is not what you get. Take, for example, that part where Mr Postmus gives us what he refers to as the 'riddle' of George's claims to have been dirt poor in America, to the point of near starvation. He writes:
One wonders whether these particular hardships - so frequent and constant a feature of Gissing's life over the years - were in any way based upon the young writer's own serious shortage of funds. For, let us consider the evidence: A conservative estimate of Gissing's income for the period January-September 1877 alone amounts to a sum of around $500. There was his teacher's salary for January and February, $130 for two months, plus the proceeds of the twenty short stories he published (estimated at ca $325) and the sum of $45 that he received for the sketch he wrote for Appleton's Journal, which comes to a grand total of $500. If we leave out of account any additional income he may have earned from his photographic 'efforts', the fact remains that $500 ought to have been more than sufficient to keep a single person. If we put the rate of exchange in 1877 at £1=$4.80, Gissing's American income would have been equivalent to ca £105 in nine months. Now, with regard to the size of incomes in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in England, it has been established that the average earnings of a working-man's family of four and a half persons was reckoned at about 30s a week (£78) in 1882. In 1875, of the 215 white-collar workers employed by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, in middle-class occupations, such as commercial clerks, accountants, cashiers and book-keepers, 179 received no more than £150. and 96 of these were in receipt of less than £100. Furthermore, to put Gissing's 'poverty' into perspective, the average salary of a professor at Owens College in 1875 was £500. And, to end with a striking example of the level of contemporary American incomes, the first Secretary and Acting Librarian of the Chicago Public Library, who entered upon his duties in July 1872, was appointed on a salary of $600 per annum. 

Gissing in his first letter from America reported to his brother William that he paid $10 per week for room and board. And, after his move to Waltham, he found himself a very comfortable place, living with a private family, for which he only paid $8 a week, including washing. Given Gissing's fairly minimal needs, one is hard put to account for the persistent complaints about threatening bankruptcy, actual or imagined. Or should we resort to educated guesswork in order to explain his poverty, such as his continuing to send money to Nell in Manchester? Or, missing a month's salary in Waltham, as a result of his sudden departure? The riddle remains.

Flying Pains by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen  2000

So here we have a distinct difference between how George presented his economic situation, and the facts. Of course, to be taken for a hero, one has to overcome great trials - it's just George didn't really have any, except for those he courted by his own inherent weakness of character or the ones he invented. Poverty in America just didn't happen, yet he dined out on that myth and used the lie to create his 'hard done by' persona. Perhaps he thought it would sell more books - after all, his early works were set in the worst neighbourhoods of the most impoverished parts of London. But, back to George being an anachronism - he was competing with the likes of James Greenwood, the famous 'Amateur Casual' journalist who disguised himself as a pauper to report back to the legendary Pall Mall Gazette on what life was like in a workhouse or on the mean streets. It was one of the first 'undercover' investigations, akin to the Maiden Tribute undertaken by WT Stead (See Commonplace 180). But Greenwood had done it 1866, fourteen years before the publication of George's first novel, 'Workers in the Dawn'. Maybe George saw his own USP as pretending at being The Authentic Voice Of One Who Has Endured Great Suffering And Want and that would be what sold his books to the discerning reading public.

This publicity stunt only lasted until he grew fed up with imagining the doings of the poor, but by then, he simply couldn't jettison it for fear of being revealed as a hypocrite and a liar as well as a thief, which is why he clung to it until the day he died, ending his days in relative financial security, yet leaving his sons to be educated thanks to the public purse. Not very noble; definitely not heroic!

As for the suggestion George was sending money back from America to England to pay for Nell's upkeep.... more of this in PART TWO.

Commonplace 193 George & His Contemporaries: Rudyard Kipling.

Apart from both sporting magnificent moustaches, George and Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) seem to have little in common. In fact, there were stark differences: Kipling loved children, respected the working class, and believed the world was a better place if Great Britain ruled it. George didn't. They both would lose a son in WW1, but George was dead and beyond the realm of emotional pain that Kipling endured  when his son was killed at the Somme. George was an amateur poet, whilst Kipling wrote one of Britain's favourite poems (If... click), won a Nobel Literature prize (1907) and is buried in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. George is buried in a small backwater in France. However, both have a uniquely, contrasting 'English' quality - George with his reticent, reserved and formal stiffness of thought and behaviour, and Kipling, with his ebullient sentimentality freely flowing heart on his sleeve 'what you see is what you get' directness of thought.

Kipling in 1915

Kipling was born in Bombay/Mumbai, then dragged away from his family aged nearly 6 and forced to live with a heartless pair of paid carers in Southsea, the posh part of Portsmouth, down in Hampshire, in the UK. This house was within easy walking distance from the one Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used for his GP practice (1892-1890), and just up the road from where HG Wells was forced into his apprenticeship in the drapery shop (1880-1883), both sites close to where George Meredith was born and partly raised (1828-1840) near to where Walter Besant grew up. A short ride on the omnibus from there will take you to where Charles Dickens was born in 1812. There is something in the water in Southsea - contemporary writer Neil Gaiman was born there, too.

The Kiplings were not wealthy, but Rudyard's father was appointed Professor of Architecture at the newly formed Bombay School of Art, so a modest salary went a long way in India and provided for a lifestyle they could not have afforded back home. Rudyard's parents did what was considered the right thing at the time - they found someone back home in the UK to take over the care of their two children. The mother found digs for Rudyard and his sister at Lorne Lodge, Campbell Road, living with a retired merchant seaman, Captain Harry, and Mrs Rosa Holloway, and the two children were sent back to Blighty for the remainder of their childhood. The early beginnings were good - the Cap'n liked young Ruddy; but when the old sea dog passed away, Rosa took to thrashing the boy, and Kipling would always subsequently refer to this home as 'The House of Desolation'. He was punished by having his books withdrawn, and was humiliated by having to go to school with the word 'liar' printed on a label attached to his coat. As I said, there is something in that Southsea water... Later, Kipling was to write of this shaming experience: If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day’s doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture—religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort.

A British favourite and nothing to do with Rudyard.
Not suitable for vegetarians. 

George would have empathised with the origins of Kipling's literary effort - already by the time he was a student at Owens College, George was an accomplished and experienced liar. From the small amount of information there is relating to his early days, George is clearly seen to be lying to tutors when he goes off sick - he has a good deal of time off his college studies and some of the excuses are pathetic - 'burnt hand' being one memorable line. He also lied about why he went to Southport on his little holiday, with a girlfriend always assumed, but not proven to be, Nell. And there are numerous examples throughout his letters and Diaries where he lies to everyone sooner or later - he even lied to Clara Collet about how long his first wife had been dead, claiming he couldn't remember the exact YEAR she died! He lied to his second wife about having syphilis and about what would happen to their son, Walter, when George forced him to go and live in Wakefield. And he lied repeatedly to Gabrielle Fleury in his letters to her - about his health, his family, his wife, his money. Still, if he was just lying in the name of literary effort...

Andromeda by Sir Edward Poynter 1869

George would have envied Kipling's artistic family heritage - Sir Edward Burne Jones and Sir Edward Poynter were uncles; future prime minster Stanley Baldwin was a cousin. When he reached his teens, Kipling was sent to a United Services College in Westward Ho! in north Devon, and would have followed that with military service but his father found him a job back in India, and so RK sailed from England aged 16. He was initially disappointed about the decision and always regretted not having a university education - something George would have understood. The job his father found for him was as a reporter on an English language newspaper, and RK would apply his literary talents to the trade of journalist by day, whilst practising the dark art of story-writing in his spare time. His first book in prose was published in 1888 - 'Plain Tales from The Hill'. Eight years after going back to India, with a growing literary reputation under his belt, Kipling came back to England (via Burma, Malaya, Hong Kong, Japan and San Francisco) intending to make a name for himself as a teller of ripping yarns.

Travel, they tell us, broadens the mind. In Kipling's case, this might not have been true. He thought little of the intellect of the indigenous people he had known in India. Of the Chinese, he wrote in 1899, that it was ...justifiable to kill him (the Chinaman). It would be quite right to wipe the city of Canton off the face of the earth. Maybe he had received bad service in a restaurant there. Initially for America, he reserved special disdain. He derided San Francisco's infrastructure, saying it would only take a 'couple of gun boats' to retake it for the Empire. He described Americans as being lawless, ignorant, ill-mannered, badly dressed, boastfulness and hated their tendency to gob everywhere - pretty much what the world holds against Americans nowadays haha. On the plus side, he liked the relaxed social milieu and the scenery and the women. It was eventually the American women who would win him over, as he married one.

Commemorating the nightmare.

Luckily for him, when he arrived in England in 1889, Kipling was already a household name. Then in 1890-2, he published a collection of prose, ballad lyrics and poetry that would cement his place in the hearts of all true Brits: The Barrack-room Ballads which gave us his poem in celebration of 'Gunga Din' click and 'Tommy' click, the ordinary soldier. It also gives us some of the most cringeworthy casual racism so beloved of the Brits, certainly those old school racists of my parents' generation who assumed everyone born outside the Home Counties click was a dodgy foreigner. George reports in his Diary that he read Barrack-room in September, 1892, but he passes no comment - though he redacted many entries, so there might have been some remark which he later excised. It was infamous for its use of salty colloquial language and was considered a 'men only' read. A bit like an Austin Allegro Repair Manual.

George does not pass comment on what he thought of Kipling's work, but it's clear from the Diary entries that he kept his eye on Kipling's progress. But of the 7 entries where he mentions Kipling, two are for gossip-related purposes. George, who completely opposed either Marianne aka Nell or Edith making friends with their neighbours for fear they might gossip, thoroughly enjoyed passing round tidbits of information especially if they presented his rivals in a controversial light. He mentions
(May 1896) Kipling taking a brother-in-law to court for attempting to murder him. In December 1898 George writes he has lunched with, amongst others, a Mrs Clifford who dated the young Kipling. She gave up the goss on how Kipling once read his short story Without Benefit of Clergy click to her, and when he reached the pathos of the conclusion, he grabbed her hand and started to cry. To offset claims that Kipling was a racist comes this tale of inter-faith and inter-racial true love that ended in tragedy. Nothing is ever simple, is it?

Sidonia von Borcke
by Sir Edward Burne-Jones 1860

George didn't think much of any author who was popular - he often conflated the two terms 'popular' with 'populist' and tended to look down on anyone who was widely read on the Clapham Omnibus. Kipling was so popular that many of his books and poems have become synonymous with British Empire and nationalism, but his children;s books are triumphs of  wonder and adventure. A quick list of his best known children's works: The Jungle Book; Just So Stories; Stalky & Co; Captains Courageous; Kim... in fact, his bibliography click is worth a look just for the size of the bibliography. (George's own bibliography is somewhat more modest.) Rudyard Kipling has the 

Kipling Society to further interest his readers. George has the Gissing Journal.

Kipling gave us several well-known English phrases - 'the law of the jungle'; 'the white man's burden'; 'Lest We Forget'. That last one was part of the work he did for the War Graves Commission, the organisation which oversees the remembrance of fallen service personnel. He took a very close interest in this because his son, John, was killed at the Battle of Loos in September 1915. The boy's body was not recovered in his father's lifetime. For Kipling, grief was made worse by guilt; despite him having been turned down for the Royal Navy and various branches of the army, because his eyesight was appalling, Kipling pulled some strings to get his son into the Irish Guards. This terrible blow turned Kipling against the conflict, and produced the famous line about WW1: If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied. If he had lived to see it, George might very well have agreed with that. On July 1st 1916, his first born son, Walter, died at the Somme, thirteen years after his father's own end in France. Both Gissings are buried 'in some corner of a foreign field that is forever England'.

Commonplace 192 George & His Preoccupation With Younger Women.

With images from the Tate's collection of Cindy Sherman.

George was about 18/19 when he met Nell aka Marianne, his first wife, and she was a year younger. By the time she died in abject poverty caused by his neglect, he was 31. They had been living apart for 5 years, but remained married. The general thought from biographers is that George was celibate throughout this time, despite his firm belief that what used to be called 'living in sin', was no sin, and that a bohemian lifestyle was the ideal. 

Untitled 1979-1998

It is taken as gospel truth in Gissing biographies that George wooed girls from a working class background because he felt any 'decent' woman would not live with a man who earned less than £400 a year - the Edwin Reardon delusion. Rather than amend his own behaviour and get a proper job that paid £401 pa, George down-sized his marital expectations to accommodate any girl from a class who would recognise she had won the lottery when she was targeted by a man from a naturally superior caste; he believed that to drag her up by her bootstraps to the life of the middle class would render her grateful and beholden and biddable, She would know her place and never challenge his authority. A sort of Mail Order Bride click, and perhaps he got the idea for that when he was in the States 1876-77. Such a young woman would be used to the hardships of living with no fancy frills or niceties, and would have thrift running through her like words in a stick of Brighton rock. That way he accomplished two financial coups - he could cut back on hiring housekeepers and domestic servants and he could siphon off the saved cash for his own selfish needs.

However, as much as that theory holds water, we have to remember that George was a syphilitic. It could be argued that to be in George's social strata and to suffer from chronic venereal disease was every bit as disabling as to be middle class and have no money. If we substitute syphilis in the 'No decent woman would marry a man...' sentence, it becomes clear George had removed himself from the option of a 'suitable' marriage. Presumably he was of the belief a working class woman wouldn't mind. Scientific knowledge about the disease was in its infancy and there was no cure. The disease itself becomes dormant, invisibly wreaking havoc not just on the nervous system in particular, but every organ of the body. Whether or not this developed into the catastrophic paresis of tertiary syphilis was very much a game of chance.

Untitled 1975

A woman uneducated in the signs and symptoms of the disease would probably accept his general explanation that his various visible ailments - skin rashes, night sweats, bulbous lumps on the skin that healed very slowly - were due to tuberculosis. However, it's clear his second wife, Edith, found out the real cause of his problem and gave him absolute hell for cheating her out of marriage to a man who would not infect her with his disease. He mentions as much in his letters when he complains about her lack of sympathy (!) for his phthisis - he always referred to his venereal disease as phthisis which is understandable, because the lay person would accept what he told them and many doctors would find a differential diagnosis between tuberculosis and syphilis a challenge. George and Edith's first child was born with facial lesions, was fretful and failed to thrive - classic signs of a baby born of a syphilitic parent. The doctor attendant at Edith's accouchement may very well have pointed out to her that she needed medical assistance for the disease. That would explain why George had to take her to see a specialist in London a few weeks later. They were living in Exeter at the time and they were already something of a pair of sore thumbs sticking out in that small (and some might say small minded) community; add to that the news that they were tainted with syphilis and they would probably been driven out like pariahs. And syphilis probably explains why the infant was sent to a wet nurse way out in the country to be nursed until he was over the first signs of the disease. For more on this see Commonplaces 62-69. More tellingly, Dr Jane Walker, George's TB specialist at Nayland's sanatorium, where he was a patient in 1901, did not find any evidence of tuberculosis.

Edith was a woman with very few options and George will have played these up to persuade her she would never get a better offer. She could not have predicted what a terrible life she would have from the day she met him. Badly treated by George, physically and psychologically abused, and made to feel like a social pariah were just the opening salvos of the man who eventually would steal her first child away to live with his family in Wakefield and who infected her with the disease that made her go mad. 

Untitled 1975

To refer to George's life as 'heroic' is to pour scorn on women's rights and to condone abuse on many levels, conducted over his entire adult life. If this seems a bit of a harsh judgement then consider what Anthony West reported in his biography of his father, 'HG Wells, Aspects of a Life' on George's predilection for young girls. West says his father told him that, back in the Owens College days, George and his friend John George Black liked to frequent the sort of places where very young, sexually inexperienced girls could be entertained and seduced. HG Wells was of the opinion Nell was one of these girls, and George decided to set her up for his exclusive use. As included in Commonplace 60: Anthony says George was introduced to the brothel by John George Black, who had told him if he went to Mother B's he would find a beginner there who was hot stuff. This tip had been fatal to Gissing for two reasons: it had been given him, incredibly enough, in a letter; and he had kept it, as he had kept all Black's letters.

A 'beginner' might be one word to describe the child that was Mary McCulloch Barnes, the girl George was supposed to have run away from in America (see previous post) who was 18 and fresh off the farm - and vulnerable, as she was one of his pupils. He will have seen her as in need of 'improving' and saving from a dull provincial life in a cultural backwater.   

Untitled 1978

His second wife, Edith, whom he seems to have stalked after cruising the London streets looking for a suitable female victim to seduce put up a struggle by refusing to live in sin with him - George moaned about that and offered her marriage as a last resort. He had no care for any potential damage done to her reputation if she had consented to living in sin, neither did he care about Gabrielle Fleury's reputation, when he made his move on her. When Gabrielle was sharing an adulterous relationship with him (Edith was still alive), she did not realise how disposable she was. Legal marriage had not stopped him abandoning his first wife, but he was forced to pay alimony for her upkeep until the day she died in poverty and squalor. With no legal ties binding him, he was free to run off whenever it suited him. HG Wells was of the opinion he was always thinking of coming back to Britain from his self-imposed exile in France, but not with Gabrielle in tow. The Gissings in Wakefield would have curled up and died at the thought of that!

By his own admission, because of his unsatisfied sexual needs, George prowled the places where young girls felt safe when approached by older men - public parks, tea shops, open-air dances. Poor Edith - how different her life might have been if she had the courage to turn him down. And in between Nell and Edith, we know he pursued a young tobacconist in Eastbourne, and one of his sister's young female friends, back in Wakefield. Both of these young women had the sense to listen to their family's counsel on George's suitability as a husband. Edith's father didn't like George but Edith was headstrong, and underestimated her suitor's controlling and tyrannical nature, traits which eventually led to her downfall.

When George, aged 40, finally snared Gabrielle Fleury and conned her into being his third 'wife' (they were never legally married) he broke a tradition going back to his Owens College days for pulling girls far too young for him. I am talking chronological age - if I were judging by life experience, then GF would be in that group, and George will have not broken his run. She was seen by him as desperate - she was already a thirty-year old spinster with not much hope of finding a husband - and as the seduction side of the affair was conducted by post will have never seen his skin rashes and the other signs of his disease. By this time, George knew his days were numbered, so he was compelled to find a carer, more than a mate. He will have known the tertiary stage of syphilis is not contagious and this is probably why he makes several clumsy, veiled reference to their future sex life. She seems lukewarm towards him so poor George has to turn up the charm dial to 11, doing his best to seduce her by post, which she seems to have been shocked at judging by the back-pedalling he is forced to do in later letters.   

#92 1981

Then there is an intriguing mention of a young woman he finds attractive in the Naylands sanatorium where he went for the feeding cure so fashionable at that time as a panacea for all chronic ills. He had his eye on a young woman with TB, Ms Rachel Evelyn White, a Classics don from Newnham College, the women only college founded in 1871 by Suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Ms White was more than ten years younger than him, and he wrote this about her: ...a very vigorous type, who will serve me one of these days. Humorous, erudite, smokes cigarettes - the friend of everybody one can mention. 'Serve me one of these days' is an odd phrase, even when we know he means he will base a fictional character on her, He can't quite bring himself to think of her as an equal, and he would not have been able to resist the macho challenge of proving he was smarter than her. He corresponded with her for a short while, probably behind Gabrielle's back, but he was too ill to mount a frontal attack. Lucky her. Lucky, because of the probability he was thinking of leaving Gabrielle and returning to England. His stock was rising on the UK literary scene and he wanted to be back to bask in that glory. So, he would need some sympathetic woman to help him accomplish that, wouldn't he? A single, educated, monied, desperate to wed spinster who had fallen for his bookish charms, preferably suffering from a wasting disease that might lead to a hasty demise, leaving a well-off widower to grieve alone? Must have been a temptation for him to see if that had legs. But he quickly became too infirm, and all that remained was the boredom and sterility of living in a place he didn't much like with a woman he didn't much care for, with a massive amount of dark stuff in his autobiography that would see the light of day at his demise. He spent much of his last couple of years redacting his Diaries and throwing away any incriminating letters and documents that would reveal his true nature. Little thought was given to his two sons back in England, his wife incarcerated in a mental hospital, and his live-in 'wife' being left destitute. When his last will and testament was read, Gabrielle didn't get a mention - it was as if she never existed. 

Commonplace 191 George & His Manifest Destiny PART THREE.

George spent from September 1876 to October 1877 in the States. This was his first experience of the real world, a scary place far removed from his sheltered beginnings in Wakefield. Nothing he had experienced at private school in Cheshire, or as a student at Manchester's Owens College will have compared to the US in 1876. When he set foot in his new homeland, he was ill-equipped practically and psychologically for what he might find there. But George's self-belief was not dimmed by his experience on the wrong side of the law (and morality). He was one of those people who always think they are right, and so whatever course of action he employed was acceptable, and if the World didn't agree, then it was the World that was wrong. It wasn't until he craved recognition as a writer that the shame of being exposed as a thief and, subsequently, forever regarded as an ex-jailbird who destroyed the good name of his family in their hometown, and that he had ruined his chances for an influential place in the world of academia made his secretive nature even more guarded as he struggled to control his public persona. More than this, he struggled with the knowledge he suffered from syphilis, a disease not fully understood in his time, and one that, in an age before an effective cure was found, recurred over a lifetime to blight all intimate relationships.

Morning Scene Three Ladies c 1818

It could be argued that, in a few miserable weeks, he had fallen so low from a place so high that he never quite got over the humiliation. But that process started in the winter of 1875/6 when he made the fateful decision to supplement his already adequate income with petty theft. Like so many who break the law, he seems to have regretted being caught more than committing the crimes. 

With a letter of introduction to the renowned abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison in his pocket George arrived in Massachusetts. In his Gissing biography, Pierre Coustillas is dismissive of Garrison and fails to do justice to the lifetime's work the man put into the battle for social justice. The old campaigner may have been in his less than imposing glory days, but his track record as a defender of the weak and a promoter of human rights deserves better treatment. George was lucky to have met such a courageous and probably the most hard-working chap he would ever meet.   

Boston in 1876 (then and now, of course) was a very sophisticated place with a rich and vibrant cultural life. George, through the contacts with William Lloyd Garrison's son, Frank, mixed with the sort of people who might offer him a leg up in the world of writing. Frank Garrison worked for the publishing house H.O. Houghton. George was already schmoozing his way round looking for anyone who might help him on his road to literary fame. He would employ the same tactics throughout his life - when he was desperate to publish his first novel, he ingratiated himself with the Positivist movement's Frederic Harrison, but quickly ditched him when useful contacts did not emerge. 

Marimaid by Mary An Willson 1820
 go check her work now! click

When George finally came by work it was found for him by friends of friends. He managed to secure a temporary teaching job, and it looked like he was set up for a new life. He lodged with Reverend Benton Smith in a private house, living as part of the family. In typical early George style, he wrote to his brother that Waltham was bedazzled by him: 'Everyone is astonished at me'. However, the recollection of one of his less than astonished pupils suggested otherwise: Most teachers are popular or unpopular, but Gissing was neither, and never the subject of ridicule. His classes were well conducted and he was most competent in conducting them', he wrote about our man. Then, suddenly and with no explanation, George ran away. 

What can have happened to make him let everyone down - all those who had supported him, vouched for him, helped him? Pierre Coustillas says in his biography: The scarcity of biographical material is too great for a definite explanation to be possible. That doesn't stop him, though. In his coverage of the incident, he starts the section with: Nell, across the Atlantic, continued to be a source of trouble through the letters she sent him. How does he know? We are always told George destroyed all her letters and there are none published for us to check if Coustillas is right. Nell is always to blame, to the Frenchman; he has an obsession with her that borders on the pathological, and Gissing studies is blighted by it. His version is always that Nell ruined George's life. No, George Gissing was never a man to be swayed by anyone unless it suited him - to say anything less is to insult him, and to wilfully misinterpret his actions. So what might have caused him to let everyone down and run off?

To quote from that Commonplace post: To Waltham folks, he was something of a curiosity, drawing down much local interest as being a former Owens College alumnus - not a good idea when you are running from your past. By March 1st 1877, already run off to America, George failed to honour the trust the new connections had placed in him and he acted entirely selfishly with scant regard for how others might feel or how it would impact their lives. Running away was to become a lifelong reflex when he lost the power of control over a situation, and it has it's beginnings in this event. 

The Lincoln Children by Susan Walters 1845

It could have been that his Manchester reputation caught up with him. That might sound far-fetched, but New England and Manchester shared many connections, both being centres of the cotton textile trade. And there were cultural connections via the thriving social movements both cities developed, where emancipation of the workforce, and the rise of civil rights were becoming established. Then there was the rise in the need for cutting edge technology in both highly industrialised centres where typical Owens College graduates - a college famed for its R&D and science teaching - might be turning up in all the wrong places. Imagine George's horror if one of his old college crowd had turned up when the locals were busy being astonished. Awkward, or what! 

Lady In A Yellow Dress by Elizabeth Glaser c1830

We are told by those who publish on George and who have seen the primary evidence that all the letters George wrote or received from February-December 1877 have not survived (hence the scarcity of biographical material, as mentioned in the first of the three volumes of biography). But that doesn't stop Pierre Coustillas filling in the gaps with his own propaganda. And it will come as no surprise to discover this involves the bane that he believes Marianne aka Nell to be. M. C makes the claim that George left Waltham in a hurry because he fell in love with another girl, Martha McCulloch Barnes, an eighteen year-old from a middle class family - one of his students - and he was afraid he might abandon Nell as a consequence. Of course, this is utter tosh. George was a serial offender when it came to abandoning those who needed him - he went on to abandon two wives and two children. I'm more inclined to think George's syphilis was emerging to present with physical signs that would make it clear why he left the UK in the first place - not to start a brave adventure, but to escape the shame for his family of having the disease. He had contracted it in his Owens College days and I would go so far as to suggest that is why he confined his sexual activity to Nell, and later, Edith, both working class girls, who would overlook (he assumed) such a flaw in a man's marital eligibility. By the time he was teaching in Waltham, he had probably been in the secondary phase for upwards of a year, and in this stage, the physical signs of facial rash and oral lesions can re-emerge at various times until the latent stage kicks in. It seems obvious that a highly shaming, visually apparent disease would ruin all George's chances of a life in Boston, and at the first sign of the infection returning, George really had no choice but to run away. 

His voyage to the West Coast never happened, but he did get to Chicago. He came back to the UK late in 1877, convinced he had it in him to become a writer. With syphilis in its latent, even tertiary phase, all physical signs of infection will have disappeared. He probably assumed he had beaten the disease - most medical books will have told him so. But he was never physically well again, and he would suffer recurring bouts of the disease which would eventually kill him. That demands sympathy - and he deserves it for that. 

FOR MORE ON GEORGE AND THE ANTHONY WEST BIOGRAPHY AND GEORGE AND SYPHILIS THIS LOOK AT COMMONPLACES 56-61 and 62-69.