Commonplace 213 George & The British Library Reading Room.
Of all the institutions George entered, the British Library's Reading Room was possibly where he felt most at home. Nowadays, it is a bright, airy and fully digitized palace, but in George's day, it was a womb of a room - dark, musty and full of exotic smells - of paper, book-bindings and human exhalations. The introduction of coal gas to illuminate this inner sanctum would have enhanced the miasma of the air. A strong immune system was required to combat the various noxious elements in the atmosphere, and a keen pair of eyes to utilize the dimmest of artificial lights, amidst the fog-stained light permeating the oriole windows. I'm channelling Peter Ackroyd here, who has written so frequently and lovingly of London and its inhabitants click
The British Museum, the first of its kind, opened in 1753 to 'all studious and curious persons' who had applied for tickets and then successfully passed the rigorous entry vetting. In its early days, women were allowed to attend 'in pairs' - which is a sign of the increasing support of women's education, and reminds us that the age before the Victorians often gave women encouragement towards self-development - as long as they were chaperoned (for the sake of propriety - the museum did not want to be confused with a bawdy house!), and, just as the men, carried a letter of recommendation.
This letter was important; without it, there was no entry to the centre of all knowledge and learning. It had to be provided in order to demonstrate the person seeking to make use of the free library was of 'good character' - was not a blackguardly thief or liar. However, George, the convicted thief, managed to obtain one, by lying. This is how it happened:
George was employed as a very part-time tutor to a chap named St Vincent Mercier who was trying for his matriculation (to gain entry to a university or government department) while he worked at St John's Hospital in Leicester Square. Either George asked him to do it, or St Vincent volunteered (as George was manipulative by nature, St V may have been inveigled into it via emotional blackmail) to ask his father (an artist and former soldier) to write the required letter of recommendation for that coveted library pass. According to the Heroic Life (sic haha): ...his pupil's father turned out to be exactly the sort of man whose name the Principal Librarian wished to see below that of the applicant.
Captain Mercier was a painter (click for a slideshow of his work). Here is his painting of Charles Reade, the prolific writer (he wrote The Cloister and the Hearth) that he did in 1870. Nice touch with the faithful little Samoyed.
George misrepresented his age as over 21 on his application. Some might see this as a small 'white lie', but George's immorality is what we are looking at here. We can see that a lack of a moral compass is already deeply entrenched in his character at age 19 - he is already a convicted thief who has done time in gaol - his family had to send him abroad to save him from himself - and he lies at the drop of a hat. We know from official records of his days at Owens that he lied easily then - to explain his frequent absences, and to deceive his tutors. In all the claptrap talked about his 'Heroism', the baser elements of his character are frequently ignored or glossed over, and yet it is patently clear lying is a constant throughout George's life. His fall from grace at Owens College is usually offered by biographers as the defining moment that ruined his chances, but as he lied almost as a default, he was doomed anyway, because this sort of amorality generally ends badly. No wonder he was secretive, even paranoid at times - afraid all his lies would be found out, or that he might forget what he had said. In fact, you only have to read his letters to Gabrielle Fleury towards the end of his life to see that the depths of his mendacity were pathological.
So, George lied to Captain Mercier about his age - he was, in fact, 19, but very soon to be 20, when he applied for the pass; St Vincent was about the same age. Perhaps George lied when he applied for the tutor position and thought he would have more gravitas if he were taken for an older man. Now, a realist can understand him not owning up to his rap sheet, or fibbing about his age to get work, but we must not forget these are still deceits. But to pose as what you are not - an honest and upright fellow - when asking someone to stand for your good name is to display a defect of honour. It is indicative of a person so conceited and arrogant as to think normal morality does not apply to them. If anything untoward had occurred, and this deception had been discovered, Captain Mercier would have been deeply embarrassed, and compromised. George didn't care about that. So far in George's life, he has proved himself to be self-serving, arrogant, manipulative, deceitful, dishonest, treacherous. Call me old-fashioned, but is it acceptable for certain biographers to gloss over this by passing the responsibility for George's decision to defraud the Library to a nameless, blameless library clerk? In the Heroic Life Part One we find a defence for it: Perhaps encouraged to do so by some accommodating clerk... So, according to some, George was a liar and a fraud because some library assistant put him up to it... The same biographers blame Marianne aka Nell for making George steal from his fellow-students at Owens College. Is it right for biographers to massage what should be sacredly true biographical facts in this way? George was not a feeble-minded person or a child when he did these things. He was his own man, responsible for making his own choices - even bad ones. To steal; to lie: all his own work
Today, George would be labelled as a having a sociopathic personality - an 'antisocial personality disorder'. Here's a selection from a diagnostic checklist from this site click:
At this time, George was living in Colville Place, a mere few hundred yards from the British Library. Here it is under this green arrow:
Colville Place was an ordinary sort of small residential street with ordinary folk living there. Now, in George's day, poor housing stock (unless it was part of a block owned by a single landlord) rarely got 'gentrified' if it became too vile - it got demolished and rebuilt. So, there is every chance the 1880 place where George and Marianne lived was much the same as the one in the 1889 Poverty Map. True, in the twentieth century it might have seen better days, but being so central and in what has always been a popular area, it was still considered good enough housing stock to resist demolition and redevelopment. Here it is now, obviously much made-over:
Anyhoo, George was allowed into the British Museum's Reading Room with his fraudulently acquired pass. Here is great site about the architecture of the Museum and Library click.
Here is the reading part of the Library - 'under the dome' - that George would have known. The tiers of shelves were augmented by special collections such as erotica, or precious illuminated manuscripts, historical and legal documents. You filled in a request for these and a librarian went and found the resource you wanted, and delivered it to your table. Nowadays, it is much the same click.
Over the years, many writers have fondly remembered their time in the Reading Room. The wikipedia list click: Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Hayek, Bram Stoker, Mahatma Gandhi, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Vladimir Lenin (using the name Jacob Richter[1]), Norbert Elias, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, H. G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Karl Marx ... Hmm.... Karl Marx...The British Library Reading Room...Peter Ackroyd...George Gissing... have a look at Commonplaces 94-96 to explore Peter Ackroyd's 'Dan Leno and The Limehouse Golem', which includes George and Karl Marx as fictional characters in a serial killer tale.
Of all the institutions George entered, the British Library's Reading Room was possibly where he felt most at home. Nowadays, it is a bright, airy and fully digitized palace, but in George's day, it was a womb of a room - dark, musty and full of exotic smells - of paper, book-bindings and human exhalations. The introduction of coal gas to illuminate this inner sanctum would have enhanced the miasma of the air. A strong immune system was required to combat the various noxious elements in the atmosphere, and a keen pair of eyes to utilize the dimmest of artificial lights, amidst the fog-stained light permeating the oriole windows. I'm channelling Peter Ackroyd here, who has written so frequently and lovingly of London and its inhabitants click
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| From above. |
This letter was important; without it, there was no entry to the centre of all knowledge and learning. It had to be provided in order to demonstrate the person seeking to make use of the free library was of 'good character' - was not a blackguardly thief or liar. However, George, the convicted thief, managed to obtain one, by lying. This is how it happened:
George was employed as a very part-time tutor to a chap named St Vincent Mercier who was trying for his matriculation (to gain entry to a university or government department) while he worked at St John's Hospital in Leicester Square. Either George asked him to do it, or St Vincent volunteered (as George was manipulative by nature, St V may have been inveigled into it via emotional blackmail) to ask his father (an artist and former soldier) to write the required letter of recommendation for that coveted library pass. According to the Heroic Life (sic haha): ...his pupil's father turned out to be exactly the sort of man whose name the Principal Librarian wished to see below that of the applicant.
Captain Mercier was a painter (click for a slideshow of his work). Here is his painting of Charles Reade, the prolific writer (he wrote The Cloister and the Hearth) that he did in 1870. Nice touch with the faithful little Samoyed.
George misrepresented his age as over 21 on his application. Some might see this as a small 'white lie', but George's immorality is what we are looking at here. We can see that a lack of a moral compass is already deeply entrenched in his character at age 19 - he is already a convicted thief who has done time in gaol - his family had to send him abroad to save him from himself - and he lies at the drop of a hat. We know from official records of his days at Owens that he lied easily then - to explain his frequent absences, and to deceive his tutors. In all the claptrap talked about his 'Heroism', the baser elements of his character are frequently ignored or glossed over, and yet it is patently clear lying is a constant throughout George's life. His fall from grace at Owens College is usually offered by biographers as the defining moment that ruined his chances, but as he lied almost as a default, he was doomed anyway, because this sort of amorality generally ends badly. No wonder he was secretive, even paranoid at times - afraid all his lies would be found out, or that he might forget what he had said. In fact, you only have to read his letters to Gabrielle Fleury towards the end of his life to see that the depths of his mendacity were pathological.
So, George lied to Captain Mercier about his age - he was, in fact, 19, but very soon to be 20, when he applied for the pass; St Vincent was about the same age. Perhaps George lied when he applied for the tutor position and thought he would have more gravitas if he were taken for an older man. Now, a realist can understand him not owning up to his rap sheet, or fibbing about his age to get work, but we must not forget these are still deceits. But to pose as what you are not - an honest and upright fellow - when asking someone to stand for your good name is to display a defect of honour. It is indicative of a person so conceited and arrogant as to think normal morality does not apply to them. If anything untoward had occurred, and this deception had been discovered, Captain Mercier would have been deeply embarrassed, and compromised. George didn't care about that. So far in George's life, he has proved himself to be self-serving, arrogant, manipulative, deceitful, dishonest, treacherous. Call me old-fashioned, but is it acceptable for certain biographers to gloss over this by passing the responsibility for George's decision to defraud the Library to a nameless, blameless library clerk? In the Heroic Life Part One we find a defence for it: Perhaps encouraged to do so by some accommodating clerk... So, according to some, George was a liar and a fraud because some library assistant put him up to it... The same biographers blame Marianne aka Nell for making George steal from his fellow-students at Owens College. Is it right for biographers to massage what should be sacredly true biographical facts in this way? George was not a feeble-minded person or a child when he did these things. He was his own man, responsible for making his own choices - even bad ones. To steal; to lie: all his own work
Today, George would be labelled as a having a sociopathic personality - an 'antisocial personality disorder'. Here's a selection from a diagnostic checklist from this site click:
- Superficial charm and good intelligence
- Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking
- Unreliability
- Untruthfulness and insincerity
- Lack of remorse and shame
- Poor judgement and failure to learn by experience
- Pathological egocentricity and incapacity for love
- General poverty in major affective reactions
- Specific loss of insight
- Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations
- Suicide threats rarely carried out
- Sex life impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated
- Failure to follow any life plan
Make of this what you will, but it sounds mighty familiar.
If Mercier Sr had known about George's criminal past, would he have: 1) employed him or allowed his son to employ him; 2) written any sort of reference? By misrepresenting himself to Captain Mercier, George betrayed his referee who took him at face value and believed what he was told; but George also secretly made a fool of the man. When we deceive, we assume we are cleverer than the one we cheat - and this is one of George's lifelong character flaws: he thought he was cleverer than anyone else.At this time, George was living in Colville Place, a mere few hundred yards from the British Library. Here it is under this green arrow:
And, while we are on the subject of fibs, below is Colville Place on the Booth Poverty Map of 1889 click. Either Colville Place has gone up amazingly well in the socio-economic world, or been misrepresented by George as a slum - it is pink on the key: Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings. He did something similar with Lucretia Street, where Marianne/Nell died. See Commonplace 32. Perhaps Miss Collet, who assisted Charles Booth, noted the anomaly when she worked on it? He also told Miss Collet his first wife died several years before she did.
Colville Place was an ordinary sort of small residential street with ordinary folk living there. Now, in George's day, poor housing stock (unless it was part of a block owned by a single landlord) rarely got 'gentrified' if it became too vile - it got demolished and rebuilt. So, there is every chance the 1880 place where George and Marianne lived was much the same as the one in the 1889 Poverty Map. True, in the twentieth century it might have seen better days, but being so central and in what has always been a popular area, it was still considered good enough housing stock to resist demolition and redevelopment. Here it is now, obviously much made-over:
Anyhoo, George was allowed into the British Museum's Reading Room with his fraudulently acquired pass. Here is great site about the architecture of the Museum and Library click.
Over the years, many writers have fondly remembered their time in the Reading Room. The wikipedia list click: Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Hayek, Bram Stoker, Mahatma Gandhi, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Vladimir Lenin (using the name Jacob Richter[1]), Norbert Elias, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, H. G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Karl Marx ... Hmm.... Karl Marx...The British Library Reading Room...Peter Ackroyd...George Gissing... have a look at Commonplaces 94-96 to explore Peter Ackroyd's 'Dan Leno and The Limehouse Golem', which includes George and Karl Marx as fictional characters in a serial killer tale.
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