George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

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.