George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

Commonplace 214   George & Pounds, Shillings and Pence.

The Moneylender And His Wife by Quentin Matsys 1514

George had money on his mind all of the time. All that he was to himself, depended on it. It was the chief reason he wrote - because he was the sort of writer who created until he had a large enough income to be able him to give up the work. The pursuit of money, the spending of it, the lack of it, the earning of it, the value of it to your self-image if you had it or lacked it, the doling out of it to 'dependants' were his major preoccupations. Any pleasure George derived from the imaginative creative process was offset by the misery of having to do the thing he found difficult, claimed he didn't much enjoy, and which was innately poorly paid.  Fear of Freedom meets Masochism - see previous Commonplaces! Drawing to himself financial burdens like his wider family ensured he was forced to keep at it, 'nose to the grindstone', which was itself a valuable thing as it gave him something to moan about, rebel against, and resent. He had contempt for women... he had contempt for women whom he considered 'wasted their husband's money' (I will let that pass just this once!) on fripperies and then himself went out and bought books by the tonne, tobacco and evening dress suits when he claimed to have no social life. If you dabble in online quotes searches, you might find these George quotes on money:

1) Time is money says the proverb, but turn it around and you get a precious truth. Money is time.

George enjoyed quite a lot of 'time' - if by the word he means bits of life spent not actually working. He may have lacked the funds to do all the things he wanted to do, but he never stinted himself on time spent reading; even time he could have spent writing things that made him more money (magazine articles, for example) couldn't entice him away from the solitary vice of reading books. In fact, it could be argued that he worked to pay for time to read. Nothing in George's life ever gave him the pleasure that reading did. Even when he was low in funds and living with Marianne aka Nell, he kept them both (he claimed) half-starved in order to buy books. This is not rational behaviour. Which is why it stinks of untruth. We know he greatly exaggerated his poverty - Austin Harrison (son of Frederic) blew this claim out of the water early when he described George as being reasonably well paid for his tutoring, and never really poverty-stricken - that his claims to poverty were 'a fiction of fictions'. Roger Milbrandt has made a study of George's bogus claims to poverty, published in the Gissing Journal of October 2007 click and makes the point that, even when George was as his lowliest paid (1877, newly arrived in London and working as a clerk for St Vincent Mercier), he was likely to be sharing wage-earning with Marianne aka Nell. She might have worked as a seamstress though we don't know enough about her to be sure of her source of income. It seems the only mention we have of her possibly being in the needle trade is the John George Blacks' letter telling George about the struggle he had moving a sewing machine - George was clearly not involved in this venture and there is no evidence this was Nell's sewing machine, and though Morley Roberts tells us George bought her a sewing machine, he is wrong on so many things, he should not be trusted on specifics, considering he never actually met Nell in the flesh, and so had no experience of her as a real person, and wrote his self-serving fake biography in 1912, nine years after George died. But, this alleged 'buying of a machine for her' is touted as evidence she sponged off George and forced him into becoming a thief, but, really...? 

Marianne probably made money sewing - as ten of thousands of women had to and still do - but there were hundreds of factories in Manchester and London that needed employees to do piecework and make all manner of items, and work doled out on a 'first come first served' basis to those queuing outside factories at the start of the shift made earning a day's wage not too difficult, so she could have been employed at any sort of unskilled factory work. In fact, when George was working as some sort of clerk, there were probably a variety of jobs he could have taken, if he had parked his aspirations to be considered bona fide middle-class. However, he no doubt lacked the strength and temperament for hard labour and would have starved if all he had to rely on was manual skills, so presumably that will have impacted on his sense of masculinity. Not that we often associate him with that trait.It is considered a bonus if you enjoy your money-making activity click - and being happy in your working life is still an aspiration worth advocating: 'it doesn't matter what you do as long as you feel fulfilled, enjoy it and by honesty, it pays the bills' it is not a bad bit of advice to give to young folk setting out on their career journey. Doing well in education is touted as a way to guarantee more options, and help avoid working as a toilet attendant, but being a toilet attendant who loves their work is a happier bunny than a university don who loathes her/his post. Choice is a huge part of happiness, it seems. 

2) Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman.
 In fact, George did very little actual 'work' - if we take that to mean activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a result. Most of his 'effort' went into reading, a solitary activity guaranteed to appear to be self-improving, but which really kept him away from the sort of people he didn't want to be with. He once opined that his life had been led in the sort of company he found 'inferior', and that was his great tragedy. The business of writing was little more than a means to an end - the end being the solitary life. 
George was a classic case of under-achiever, whether from design as a product of deep-rooted anxieties about being judged by his peers and found wanting, or because his natural haughty temperament kept his sense of self safe from outside influence. His fiction is a psychodrama hard copy of this sensibility. One comment we frequently see about his style is the intellectual distance he puts between himself and his creations; another is the failure to express any opinions or explain the inner workings of his characters' minds. All his posturing about being an impartial observer when describing events that unfurl for his characters is in fact, George showing us his reaction to the sort of person he really wouldn't have wanted to associate with if they were real living, breathing people. And, remember: without his self-inflicted financial hardships, George would have had very little to complain about - and complaining is what kept him going. Lack of money was the metaphorical grit in his oyster that made him do more than sit about reading and smoking and reflecting on his wasted genius. Perhaps we should take him at face value when he told Gabrielle Fleury he had no respect for his own works, and that they were all inferior.

3) That is one of the bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be generous.

On the surface, it's hard to know how he came to this conclusion - after all, he was raised in a Christian tradition and would have heard the parable of The Widow's Mite click. However, it is a line lifted from The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Winter III); taken out of its context, it can be misread. George is talking about how, when he was poor, he had feelings of dread when giving to beggars because he might one day be in a position where he had to beg, himself. He rightly notes giving is an empowering enterprise, and in the rest of the paragraph extols his own generosity (as Ryecroft, he gives away £50 to a needy friend) and sings his own praises and declares 'I feel myself a man' when he gives. Freud would no doubt concur, because to him man is the symbolic giver, woman the receiver.. However, George's view that giving is impossible to do when one is poor, is not borne out by the statistics click. This article suggests poor people identify with the struggling disadvantaged and so give more in order to distance themselves from the calamity of being identified as needy themselves. George's belief that money wouldn't solve the poor's problems misses the point that, what really will help us all is the spirit of generosity inherent in giving - that by showing we notice the suffering of others and make a financial gesture of support is as important as the monetary value of what is donated.

Dollar Signs by Andy Warhol 1981