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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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