Commonplace 228  George & A Very Happy Birthday.

George was born 159 years ago today - November 22. He is famed for his fondness for exuberant fun - not - so let's wish him Many Happy Returns of the Day in mostly humorous stylee!!!!!

It's my birthday, too.

Beyonce stars as Rhoda Nunn in the Broadway production of
Are All The Single Ladies Odd Women? The Musical.

Lentil birthday cake with added self-pity? Yummy! Dig in.

Steinbeck? Sartre? Beckett? Shaw? Yeats? Lessing? Me?
No Gissing?? Shucks... he loved winning prizes 😲😡😢😈.  

If that George Gissing thought of women as inferior, I guess he just associated with the wrong gals.

It's my birthday, too. I'm going to celebrate with some liver and fava beans,
washed down with a nice Chianti. And maybe a slice of lentil cake for pudding.

It's my birthday tomorrow.

Aldous Huxley died the same day as President Kennedy.
CS Lewis died that day, too. November 22nd 1963. 

                      

Who said: My IQ is one of the highest — and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure; it’s not your fault. Was it president elect Forrest Trump or George Gissing??? 

Commonplace 227  George & War on Remembrance Sunday.

It is Remembrance Sunday here in the UK. Go here to find out more click

Walter Leonard Gissing was George and Edith's first-born son. In order to assert his power over Edith, whom he had grown to hate, George stole the boy from her and sent him to Wakefield, to live with his repressed maiden aunts and child abusing grandmother, none of whom wanted the boy. When the Wakefield Gissings felt they could not offer Walter what he needed - stability, understanding and a sense of belonging - he was shipped off to boarding school. George was against providing a suitable-to-their-social-standing education for his two boys, possibly because his own schooling had been of the socially mediocre kind. (And, there is also the fact that he did not want them to be better educated than he had been. He hated anything that showed up his own middling talents.) After their father's death, the boys were sent to a better school to the efforts of HG Wells to secure government funding for them both - the tax payer forked out for the boys' education, which is the sort of 'jobbery' (or 'graft') George claimed to despise yet always made use of when he could.

Walter seems to have more moral fibre than his father, and all signs point to him being on the verge of a good life when he was killed at the Battle of the Somme. He left behind a good reputation for his work in the history of architecture, the beginnings of a passion for photography, and a girlfriend. His younger brother, Alfred, was left to carry the flame for his father, a man who had heartlessly abandoned him to be farmed him out to live with strangers. A little bit of time travel can be found here: click

Queen's Westminster Rifles Officer Uniform of the time.

Positions on July 1st.

Some of the lads

Every one some mother's son.

Gassed by John Singer Sergeant 1919

Commonplace 226 George & The Lie of Hypogamy/Hypergamy.

The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts: Marcus Aurelius.

The Mill At Tidmarsh by Dora Carrington  1917

When George met Edith, she had no underlying mental health difficulties. I take this as read because of the low incidence of mental illness in society in general, and the fact she was 'sane' enough (and that can also be intended ironically!!) to be considered marriageable. As George tended to think all women were mad/unstable/hysterical, he would have been on the lookout for any tell-tale signs of instability. But, Edith had nothing to hide. She was unremarkable in every way - and that's exactly what he wanted. He thought of her as semi-literate, but he would probably say the same about me (and he wood not be rong haha), but that was good, too - no chance of an intellectual debate. He found nothing odd or weird about her - except for the fact she was a woman and so, almost mentally from another planet, as far as he was concerned. Still, with his hand on a woman's tiller (!) he had every confidence he could steer her in the direction he wanted her to go: straight along the passage to the back parlour where she could sit for hours unattended: quiet, unobtrusive, undemanding, invisible. Mrs Yule, Marian's mother, forever expected to be grateful for being yanked from the slum, condemned to a life of being constantly debased.

Les Abeilles by Joseph Cornell 1940 (abeilles = bees?)

A suitable for George woman had to be sexually available, able to accompany him when it suited him, stay at home out of the way when he said so, be efficient at home-making, good with servants, well able to know where her bread and butter came from (to almost quote our man). A woman who must put up and shut up, then give it up whenever he felt the need. Not a looker - he didn't want to draw competition from other men, or attention from anyone; besides, plain girls are always grateful, aren't they? He wanted a shy little mouse who would keep him clean, well-nourished and know where his socks were - put him first in all things and step back into the shadows whenever it suited him. In amongst George's many good personal qualities, uxoriousness never reared its pretty, loving head.

Salammbo by Gaston Bussiere 1907

George was famous for hypogamy - which is the term used by sociologists to describe marrying beneath you in social class. George always claimed this was purely a financial reality-check decision - that decent women of his own class (to coin his phraseology) would not countenance a union with a man with less  than £400 income per annum. Anthony West claimed his father, HG Wells, thought it to be something altogether more sinister - working class women were more likely to put up with George's weirdness, and by this, he implies sexual weirdness - his sadomasochistic tendencies. Maybe so. It might have been his syphilis that kept him from aspiring to women of his own class...

It wasn't that he didn't have options of middle-class-and-above women - the chance to practice a bit of hypergamy (the opposite of hypo). Miss Sichel was a candidate, and, on the surface, was very much what George claimed to find alluring. She was beautiful, intelligent, creative, well-connected to the literati, independently wealthy, interested in him, and available. But, there was a downside: apart from the fact Miss Sichel was Jewish (George was a tad anti-semitic), she towered above him both intellectually and educationally. Forgetting his anti-semitic tendency, was it just a matter of his feelings of inadequacy in the face of competition for top dog spot in a marriage union, that put him off her? Or did she reject his less than compelling personal qualities?

Even with his restricted (self-imposed, of course) social life, George liked a bit of a go on the ladies. Mrs Gaussen, the mother of some of his pupils, was a great influence; was she out of bounds to him? She was certainly above him in all sorts of ways - in class, wealth, age and sophistication. But, she took him on and advised him on decor - George liked nice, decorative things, and she helped him zhoosh up his living space with some interior design tips, and no doubt schooled him in fine manners like flower arranging and in elements of etiquette like how to get a winkle out of its shell with more than a hat pin. She would never have condescended to entertain him any other way - for the middle classes, love might be blind, but it wasn't stupid. George may have carped on about his 'less than £400 a year' salary not attracting the right calibre of wife, but he would have been offended at himself keeping a middle class woman on £500 or £1,000 - much of his self-regard was based on visible status, so much so that a grand a year would not have given him joy, despite what he said. All it would have done would be to increase his irritation at distractions and interruptions, and then accentuate the fact he didn't earn 2 grand a year!

The third 'lady' with whom he had a 'thing', was Mrs Rosalind Williams, a sister of Beatrice Potter who went on to be Beatrice Webb. In some ways, she was the most likely of this trio of posh ladies to consummate a union. She is also the most tragic of the three women.

The Potter family to which Rosie belonged was wealthy and had already produced ten children by the time she arrived in July 1865. The first sadness in her life was that she was born just after her only brother Dicky died; the second was that she was born a girl when her mother really wanted a boy to replace the child she lost. Still, Rosie became her parents' favourite and spent her childhood sheltered away in the vast houses in which the Potters spent their time, never attending school for more than a few months (she couldn't stand the commonness of her peers), but received tutoring at home from a governesses, under the close supervision of her mother. The pressure proved too much and she began to manifest signs of neurosis. She was emotionally needy and highly-strung and developed a series of psychological problems such as anorexia and amenorrhoea, from which she never really recovered. She was particularly close to her father, and had to be physically exiled from him at one point in order to improve her wellbeing.

Boreas Abducting Orithyia by Peter Paul Rubens 1615 (she doesn't look too bothered here!)

Rosie was an outsider in the family of girls and spent a good deal of time alone, watercolour painting landscapes. When it was time to marry, she chose badly - or was steered in the wrong direction by sisters anxious for her to be married off - to a man who was not only totally unsuited to her emotional and physical needs, but was also suffering from tertiary syphilis' tabes dorsalis which he kept a secret until their wedding night. Dyson Williams was a bounder and a cad.
He insisted on my drinking some glasses of champagne which added to the one I had at breakfast had considerable effect on me. Over dinner he told me about his past life - the many affairs he had with women of all classes both married and single. His latest was the wife of a well-known Member of Parliament, a friend of the Courtneys in which he narrowly missed being co-respondent in a divorce case which would have caused a great scandal and perhaps prevented out marriage... Dyson then begged my forgiveness for his past life and promised always to be faithful to me, a promise he kept substantially during our short married life...

The Triumph of St Perpetua
by Eric Gill 1928

Needless to say, hers was not a happy marriage, and Dyson broke his word on the faithfulness front. Their only child, Noel, was born in 1889. Soon after, Dyson developed immense pain in his legs for which he took morphia and chloroform. From 1894, he was paraplegic. Rosie helped nurse him, but not very effectively or empathically. She was jealous by nature and soon developed a hatred for her husband's nurse. Noel was a sickly child and also required nursing care. Later, Rosie was to claim she virtually starved her husband to death to speed along his passing, and she felt the remorse and horror of it haunt her last years. She suffered a complete breakdown after he died, and needed full nursing care.

She met her prospective next husband very soon after this, a doctor who liked her and her son, and he soon proposed marriage. But she found him repugnant physically and sexually, and so turned him down, even though her family were desperate for her to remarry - they were of the belief all Rosie needed was regular, therapeutic sexual intercourse and her mental problems would solve themselves. After a period of reflection, Rosie came to agree with them but said she also realised this could be accomplished without getting married. She then embarked on a two-year whirlwind grand tour of Europe and romance - with intimate liaisons with friends of the family, school headmasters, random tourists. In Capri, legend has it that she tipped the head waiter of her hotel to seat her next to handsome men at dinner, and there she met George Cumberland Dobbs. They became an item. Rosie knew he was smitten.
That afternoon in a fit of repentance and rather hysterical emotion I confided all to GCD and told him the story of the past three years of my life, and so forged a link between us that ultimately sealed our fate. He was evidently shocked by my story for though he himself was my lover he did not know that I had others, and though no puritan, he was a clean-minded young man and had strict Irish ideas about the purity of women.

George Dobbs had to return home to Ireland, and Rosie was alone and vulnerable to temptation. Enter George Gissing.

1898 - George was in Rome on the run from Edith and hobnobbing with his pals HG wells and co, and suffering from lumbago and diarrhoea. The next day (March 23rd) he met Rosie Williams; in the Diary:
Mrs Williams, widow with little boy, sister of Mrs Sidney Webb (Beatrice Potter). Unfavourable impression; loud; bullies waiters; forces herself into our conversations. 

This didn't stop George going to the Barberini and Medici Gardens with her on March 26th. And on March 29th, to the Vatican Sculpture Galleries; on the 30th, to the Colosseum, and later that day, to a party with her at the Cafe Nazionale. March 31st was rain all day. On April 1st, Mrs Williams left for Venice - but she gets a mention in the Diaries! And she writes to him the moment she gets to Venice. Tellingly, there is no mention of his reply. That's a lot of one-on-one for a woman he didn't like.
April 22nd, back in London, he dines with Mrs Williams... at her rented home.
July 26th, Gabrielle  Fleury visits George to discuss translating New Grub Street for him.
July 31st - Lunched and dined with Mrs Williams, at Holmwood, where she has a cottage for the summer. 
August 14th Lunched at Mrs Williams' ...
November 3rd Mrs Williams came for the afternoon. 
On November 17th, a letter from her tells George she has scarlet fever. He sends her a parcel of books on November 18th. This is the last time she gets a mention in the Diaries. George had been corresponding with Gabrielle Fleury and they are an item, so Mrs Williams is cast out.

In Barbara Caine's account of the Potter sisters, Destined to Be Wives: The Sisters of Beatrice Webb, she writes:
After Rosie met Dobbs, she had an affair with George Gissing, to whom she was also strongly attracted. Gissing and Dobbs represent the essential conflict which underlay Rosie's life at this stage and subsequently - and which she never managed to resolve. She always wanted to marry a man who would be comparable to her brothers-in-law, and who would 'have some real and permanent interest in life and be doing something in the world'. Moreover she sought a mentor and intellectual guide.

Barbara follows this with the words often quoted from Rosie herself:
Since my first great affection and intimacy with my father I have had a great longing to understand and enter into the mind of some man who was my intellectual superior and to make my mind as if it were a mirror of his. I have little or no independent intellectual life or originality of my own, and am, in fact, a sort of mental parasite and when I have no one to cling to my mind sinks into a sort of stupor. 

The Fairytales of Kings by Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis 1909

Barbara makes the point that our George was looking for an open marriage on account of Edith being his legal wife, but Rosie was not prepared to flout convention openly. There is doubt over the consummation of this relationship - of course, George doesn't mention anything. Rosie wrote that the sexual side of her relationship with him was not quite all she wished. As he was constantly plagued with the effects of his paresis throughout his time with her, maybe she knew what she was potentially going to be up against if she did nail her colours to his mast (!). As George probably had some of the life story that George Dobbs had been treated to, he may have realised Rosie was emotionally fragile; and, as it is reported he did not like her son Noel - the one on whom she doted - and as he already had two surplus sons going abegging, George was not likely to want to set up home with Rosie, whatever her yearly income. Besides, the substantial weight of the Potter family women was more than the average chap could bear. So, he settled for Gabrielle Fleury, and died three years later. Rosie married George Dobbs, who died in 1946. 

It seems our man had a lucky escape - because Rosie's mental decline was so severe over the forthcoming years, her sister Beatrice wrote this about her:
Another tragedy of a worse kind is the torture of George Dobbs. Mad or bad is his wife or both. She never had any good and now she is developing positive evil. Sounds like our Mr Gissing had a very lucky escape indeed!

Commonplace 225 George & Dan Leno & The Limehouse Golem PART TWO The Tale of Elizabeth Cree.

Dan Leno on the left

Apart from drawing on a rich seam of horror in Victorian (and earlier) fiction, Peter Ackroyd makes use of various real-life characters to populate his story. Karl Marx, an intended victim who escapes this fate by accident, is a reader in the British Library Reading Room (see Commonplace 93) sitting in close proximity to the novel's male murderer, John Cree, and our man, George Gissing - George is reading an article he has written for the fictitious Pall Mall Review when he is introduced to us. References to Charles Dickens, Thomas De Quincey, the Ratcliffe Murders, Grimaldi, the birth of Charlie Chaplin (who may have actually been born in the Midlands click) abound. Product placement of patent medicines give the narrative an authentic feel - as do the little psychogeography tours around the mean streets of Limehouse, Low Marsh and Lambeth made by the killer, and the tours of the music halls made by the performers.

It starts with the execution of Elizabeth Cree, former music hall star and friend of Dan Leno, for the murder of her husband whom she believes to have been a serial killer. As Elizabeth is a hard-hearted, scheming and seemingly homicidal character herself, her influence adds a macabre feel to the general atmosphere of evil stalking the London streets. She marries a man who works as a journalist then writes a diary full of horrible things he does to his victims, so we know he is bad and we are saved the bother of having to work that out. But Elizabeth has relished the death of her much-hated mother and even hastened it, so we know she has the potential to be a nasty piece of work, too.

The Playhouse in Craven Street where Elizabeth Cree makes her debut.

There are similarities to this tale and the case of Florence Maybrick as told in the fictional 'Diary of Jack the Ripper' published in 1992. The real Florence was convicted of murdering her husband in 1889 (the year after the Whitechapel Murders) though she always denied killing him.
The fake 'Diary' suggests her husband, James Maybrick, as Jack the Ripper, was poisoned by his wife after he begged her to put him out of his misery - and left her the Diary to read. In real life, Florence Maybrick was convicted of poisoning her husband, James, because she was suspected of wanting to be with another man. James was cruel to her, kept mistresses and was addicted to drugs to the extent that he could not function and their livelihood was jeopardised. One of his favourite drugs was arsenic. Arsenic was the basis of patent medicines, cosmetics and could be bought as rat poison. Its beauty as a murder weapon is that it is odourless and tasteless, and so can be easily ingested by a potential victim without them suspecting. The smart way to do it is to give small doses to begin with, then increase the dosage until the full effect is achieved.

As James Maybrick regularly took all manner of poisons for their therapeutic effects, it would seem a logical way to murder him. As well as regular doses of arsenic, he took strychnine; it was easily obtained in chemist's shops, and cheap - nowadays, arsenic and strychnine are hard to come by, though derivatives are available. For example, the homoeopathic remedy nux vomica contains strychnine and has to be taken with caution. But we have a much better potentially fatal poison at our fingertips - well, those of you who smoke, do! Nicotine is more toxic than arsenic and a lethal dose can be extracted from a packet of 20 cigarettes and injected into a potential victim. Only an autopsy will undo you! Disclaimer - I am not suggesting you do it; it's just information.

Here is a bit of Difference Engine.

In 'Dan Leno', the destructive impulse of the Golem swirls around Limehouse unseen but felt by all involved in the vortex of metropolitan life. The Reading Room at the British Library is where George is to be found preparing an article on Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, by way of Jeremy Bentham's 'Felicific Calculus'. What the heck are these?

The information the fictional George might have unearthed might include... hang on, you can read all about him here click on wikipedia - what more fitting an homage to the programmable computer inventor can there be?

In the story, George is writing a follow-up to his previous offering 'Romanticism and Crime', which highlighted his thoughts on the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 click. This was a series of very brutal murders written of with relish by Thomas De Quincey in his 'On Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts', a series of three essays about the crimes, the first published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1827. De Quincey was one of George's favourite reads - click to read it.

Jeremy Bentham, the father of Utilitarianism, devised the algorithm 'Felicitous Calculus' to estimate the amount of pleasure/good to be found in any particular experience. There is a lot of sense in what this is about, so click to find out more. Now, like I say, I'm no techie... and neither was George. He suspected science of being a portal to Hell requiring maths skills - and he wasn't much interested in maths. But he was interested in Comte and the new science of sociology and that requires a lot of statistics, and so he would have found a computer a vital tool in his studies.

Jeremy Bentham at UCL
click 

According to the narrator of 'Dan Leno', in the Reading Room, overlooked by the serial killer, George transcribed this into his notebook: The quest for machine intelligence must arouse fresh speculation in even the most orthodox mind; think of all the calculations which might be performed in the field of statistical enquiry, where we might find ourselves able to make many very intricate deductions. How George came to be writing an account of it is something even Peter Ackroyd can't explain because anyone even remotely acquainted with George's interests would not send him off on a quest to research the 'Babbage Analytical Engine' - and he was famously snooty about journalism and being commissioned to do articles. Still, it is a novel and it all makes for a denser narrative. There is mention of Workers in The Dawn - the famous 'Walk with me, reader, into Whitecross Street' opening line - the best of George's barnstorming openers; Karl Marx owns a copy (in the novel!) and the serial killer notes it.

One real person mentioned in the novel is the fascinating Thomas Griffiths Wainewright who was an artist and critic (champion and defender of William Blake), a poet, a raconteur, as well as a forger who died in Tasmania, Australia after being transported for forgery. Apart from being a dandy and a bit of a genius, he was the subject of a January 1889 piece 'Pen, Pencil and Poison: A Study in Green' in the Fortnightly Review by the divine Oscar Wilde click to read it. Wainewright was a lad after George's heart who valued the Greeks highly, and who loved Italy, and he, too, was someone who turned to crime without properly thinking things through. He was a poet, critic, style guru, Artist, and possible homicidal poisoner. He was definitely a forger who was transported to Australia for his crimes, though he claimed to be totally innocent as the money he embezzled was his own. His adopted several nom de plumes, including Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot and Cornelius van Vinkbooms to write some very scathing criticism of Art and aesthetics. I don't know about you, but I love him for this, if for nothing else! He was a friend to the great persons of his day, including Sheridan and Lamb, and knew William Blake, personally, and admired his work; his best friend was Fuseli.

Silence by John Henry Fuseli  1799-1801

A Wainewright watercolour
(one of the less graphic of his Romantic views)  

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright would make a very good subject for one of Peter Ackroyd's semi-fictional biographies. However, there has already been a very good one done by Andrew Motion whose book on Wainewright came out in 2000 click. It's a 'faction' style biography giving words for TGW to speak - very much as Ackroyd did with 'The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde'. I would recommend you rush out and find a copy and set about reading it straight away - it's fab, and makes you realise how good of a novelist a former Poet Laureate can be. Go on, off you trot to the bookstore; it really is excellent!

George, himself already the subject of fictional biographies haha - and half made-up autobiographies! - has probably missed the Ackroyd/Motion boat.

Commonplace 224 George & Dan Leno & The Limehouse Golem. PART ONE.

Peter Ackroyd's 1994 novel of a fictitious Victorian serial killer is about to be made into a movie. George Gissing fans will already be familiar with the book, as George is one of the principal characters. Some of us will love it, some will hate it; all will wonder what George would have made of it. Would he have been flattered to be included in the venture? Not much.

The book's author is one of the UK's most widely-read authors, who has enjoyed great success over a long career in all genres of writing, but is probably most associated with a string of biographies of British cultural icons. Chaucer; Chatterton: Dickens; Wilde; Milton; Shakespeare; Alfred Hitchcock and (a personal favourite of mine), William Blake. The one consistent feature they share, according to Mr Ackroyd, is that they all have a close relationship with London click. It seems fitting that he turn his spotlight on George, with our man's strong connections with the capital.

Maybe Mr Ackroyd has picked up on the contradictions, the falsehoods and the downright lies George told, so he only has himself to blame, because our man is represented in a fairly poor light. But it is a made up story, dependant on real characters - Karl Marx also appears - to bring the grand guignol story to life. It does not claim to be 'faction' - that genre invented by Truman Capote to tell the story of the Clutter murders that is 'In Cold Blood', where he embroidered scenes and conversations around what was known in order to give an authentic feel and to explain the actions of Hickock and Smith, the murderers.  

First of all, what does the novel's title mean? To anyone not familiar with British cultural history: who was Dan Leno? Born George Wild Galvin, he was a phenomenon of the music halls - a now defunct cultural form - for the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. This is from the wikipedia page:
Music hall is a type of British theatrical entertainment popular between 1850 and 1960. It involved a mixture of popular songs, comedy, speciality acts and variety entertainment. The term is derived from a type of theatre or venue in which such entertainment took place. British music hall was similar to American vaudeville, featuring rousing songs and comic acts, while in the United Kingdom the term "vaudeville"' referred to more working-class types of entertainment that would have been termed "burlesque" in America.

Dan Leno (1860-1904) was a child stage star, who performed with his parents, then made the transition to success as a solo adult act, becoming one of the most celebrated musical hall stars of his age - in fact, he was one of the first 'celebrities' who could command high rewards for his unique, acrobatic, idiosyncratic work, and whose life was occasionally ruined by being regularly pursued through the streets by fans. Physical comedy, comic roles and songs, juggling, acrobatics, skits, pastiches, droll feats of verbal legerdemain - there was no end to the man's versatility. 

One of Dan's most renowned characters was in the 1901 show Bluebeard; Sister Anne was a surreal confection of bizarre elements: 

The Times drama critic noted: "It is a quite peculiar and original Sister Anne, who dances breakdowns and sings strange ballads to a still stranger harp and plays ping-pong with a frying-pan and potatoes and burlesques Sherlock Holmes and wears the oddest of garments and dresses her hair like Miss Morleena Kenwigs, and speaks in a piping voice – in short it is none other than Dan Leno whom we all know" click Sounds creepy to me, but I'm no authority. Morleena Kenwigs was a reference to the Dickens character from Nicholas Nickleby. This is an interesting link to the works of Kate Dickinson who wrote this: click.

Sister Anne

However, such gifts do not come cheap and Dan Leno eventually cracked under the pressure of his calling, and succumbed to alcoholism, then mental illness of such a degree that he required institutional care. Backstage gossip suggested it was his role in Mother Goose that did for him, but, Dan wanted to be taken for what he was - an extremely talented performer who could extend his range into straight roles, if given the chance. But he was never allowed to rise above burlesque, partly because of his status as a star, and partly because his core audience were not play-goers. His fellow London stage comic talent, Charlie Chaplin (not actually born in London, so no chance of an Ackroyd biog) had the same problem, but was lucky enough to be able to exploit the new technology of film to broaden his audience. 

Dan became increasingly erratic and volatile - alcoholism and mental illness were exacerbated by a fall in popularity. His star waned, and after an abortive comeback, he died aged 43.

Limehouse is one of the most historic and renowned - even notorious - areas of London, taking up a large chunk of space on the north bank of the Thames, and adjacent to areas such as Whitechapel, Stepney, and the Thomas de Quincey (also mentioned in the novel) featured badlands of Ratcliffe click. It was the first London canal waterway to connect with the River Lea and up and on to the counties north of the capital, past the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield - where the gun that won the British their empire was made click.
At the time of the novel - 1880 - Limehouse was an industrial area run on heavy industries, and home to a population of poorer workers. Here is the 1889 Charles Booth map of the area:

Sites along the waterfront, the dry docks, and landing quays of the Thames produced work for thousands, and polluted the waters they serviced. The atmosphere of the air - one of Peter Ackroyd's favourite words is 'miasma' - was acrid, chemically tainted and foul: if you had good lungs when you arrived in this part of London, that might very soon change. In fact, George's phase of exploring the rotten streets of the poorer areas of London could never have brought him to the real heart of the horrors of Limehouse: there were streets here into which not even policemen patrolling in pairs dared to venture.

The Nemesis of Neglect
Contemporary Punch illustration

That leaves us the Golem. According to the Jewish Virtual Library entry, the term 'Golem' is Hebrew for a 'shapeless man' - a made-up entity conjured by magic to help the person who brings it to life.  It goes about the business of its creator - for instructions of how to make yours (preferably from red clay) click - a sort of Frankenstein's creature mixed with The Hulk, apt to be violent, unstoppable and very clumsy. DL&TLG is a story of a serial killer who may or may not have access to a virtual (in the parlance of our times) accomplice, mingled with some pretty hefty name-dropping to add gravitas to the proceedings. All in the name of fun, not biography.

Film poster for the film 
directed by Paul Wegener 1920

The dark spectre of antisemitism lowers over the story, much as it prowled around the London streets in George's time - a Golem all of its own. Antisemitic feeling in Britain was practised less rabidly than on the European mainland, and so the UK attracted a large number of Jews who integrated into public and private life, influencing and enriching the culture - such as Simeon Solomon the painter, a Pre-Raphaelite confrère of the likes of William Holman Hunt and Edward Burne-Jones. As we saw in Commonplace 82, Israel Zangwill was a serious player on the political stage, and a man George turned to for sympathy. Perhaps George felt the cliché of the persecuted Jew fitted his own persona - which would be a sad indictment of a man who over-emphasised his own meagre suffering, and never really counted his blessings.

Bacchus by Simeon Solomon 1867

Most of the time, a 'live and let live' ambiance prevails in Britain - we are not a rich ground in which irrational hate groups find it easy to prevail. Most Brits are far too lazy to hate amorphously; we prefer things on a deep, one-to-one basis - then, we get downright medieval. Limehouse, with its opportunities for work and commerce was popular with all immigrants, as it contained cheap lodgings and a ready-made market for trading. It was essentially a maritime sort of place, with boat-building and repairs, and all the jobs associated with servicing one of the world's great ports. Warehousing goods and the distribution of imports and exports attracted a workforce of skilled and unskilled trades. Limehouse was a hub of commerce, and a place of cultural integration.

DL&TLG is story that more than tips its hat to the Victorian horror genre. The spectre of Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) and Wilkie Collins' 'Woman in White' (1859) still prowled the book shops when Bram Stoker was thinking up Dracula (1897). Conan Doyle was giving Holmes his right to catch monstrous villains; RL Stevenson's Dr Jekyll joined us in 1886. The British horror tradition so memorably coalesced by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley with Frankenstein (1818) is celebrated throughout Peter Ackroyd's novel, Popular stories such as 'Varney the Vampyre or The Feast of Blood: A Romance' click from the 1840s had set the century's tone for tales of weird creepiness and sexual impropriety (or your free copy click) and DL&TLG pays homage to all these. Thomas De Quincey is never far from its pages.

So, where does George fit in to all this? In the novel, he is for a short time, suspected of being the serial killer.

JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO EXPLORE THIS FANTASY OF GEORGE AND THE GOLEM.

Commonplace 223 George & Experts on Women.

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth. Simone de Beauvoir.

The Caress by Fernand Khnopff 1896

George consulted many male thinkers about the thorny issue of how to win the hearts and minds of women. One of the many things he seemed most convinced of was that he could add to this debate. This, in the face of some spectacular failures in the cases of his first two wives. And despite his pronouncement that the average woman was about as clever as a male idiot. And he was the man who wrote to his sister. February 3rd 1883 (when she was 15 and he was 25):  You girls nowadays have astonishing advantages over your mothers and grandmothers; it is only to be hoped you will make use of it for the only real end of education - improvement of character. If you only could know how much of the wretchedness of humanity is occasioned by the folly, pig-headedness, ignorance, incapacity of women you would rejoice to think of all these new opportunities for mental & moral training.

Knowledge of human psychology was not one of George's specialisms, and he didn't develop much of a sympathy for human beings in general. In the absence of experienced peers to consult - remember, in his early twenties, the closest confidant with whom he could discuss these things was man-wife Eduard Bertz, a man with very limited knowledge of the subject - George turned to published authors who claimed to be experts. Dipping into some of these works proves these men were no such thing.

I Lock My door Upon Myself by Fernand Khnopff 1891

Henry Thomas Buckle (see previous Commonplace) was far from alone when he argued that the Greeks and Romans tended to regard women as chattels, and so using the Classics to provide any sort of understanding about how to treat women would be ill advised (click for free download). George's love of all things Roman and Greek must have fed into his attitudes to females. Add to this the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer, and things do not look good for any woman who came into his orbit. On this topic, Schopenhauer makes the Romans and Greeks look like emancipated liberals.

I have covered the dire influence of Schopenhauer in previous posts - see Commonplace 4 for exactly what that odious little imp - a man made bitter by his lack of success with the ladies, especially one thirty years his junior - had to say on the complementary gender. On the plus side, he liked dogs.

In Commonplaces 116 and 117, we looked at what John Ruskin had to say on the subject of women. When George was in the States, he met a charlatan called Heinzen (see Commonplaces 133 and 134) who aimed to spout on the subject of suffrage. But, there were two other influences George soaked up. First, Charles Darwin.

The English Woman
by Fernand Khnopff 1898

Popular understanding says that Darwin had some pretty bad things to say about women: that it was preferable to have a wife than a dog for company, being one of them. He tended to think adult females were perennially more like the infant of its species, and so a woman's brain would always be biologically underdeveloped and undevelopable. However, what Darwin said in his public utterances and the beliefs he held in private, were contradictory, and... evolved over time. Here, explored in this Cambridge University Research video click. But, George would not be privy to the secret thoughts of Charles Darwin, and so what he understood about the biology of women's brains, and their potential for any sort of development, would depend on what he thought Darwin had gleaned from his studies. See Commonplace 101 for George's studies of female brain size, and how wrong he was on this topic.

Another influential voice in how to create a world better suited to sharing it in equality, men with women, George delved into when he was in the throes of wooing Gabrielle Fleury, was the work of an influential French historian. In December 1898, George reads Jules Michelet's 'L'Amour'. Michelet wrote on a range of more sociological subjects. 'L'Amour' was followed the next year by 'La Femme' (can you spot a trend?).

These two Michelet works were derided by his fellow-French readers, but maybe George was reading all things contemporary French so as to have something to say to Ms Fleury, and to prove he was in touch with his feelings for what makes women happy. We know Gabrielle had strong reservations about 'marrying'George, and he has to make a determined effort to allay her anxieties by bluntly (and dishonestly, deceitfully) denying what he is famed for having said about women. He blames the excesses of his misogyny on some sort of creative fictive, a million miles from what he really believed. Tosh, of course, said to persuade Gabrielle into risking herself to his care. He kept from her his track record, defaming his wife, Edith, whilst air brushing out his first wife from the record - much as he did when he was making abid for Miss Collet's sympathy.

 Michelet's work was well-known even in England, so George was probably familiar with his work, and possibly agreed that (in Michelet's opinion) women were perpetual invalids, victims of their bodily functions particularly menstruation, which was, to the deluded Frenchman, a state of eternal malady. He went so far as to suggest it is this weakness that makes women suited to domestic chores and home-making, and that women are really only happy when we are keeping house, because any other sphere would distract us from dealing with our physical disadvantages. He is building on the work of Paracelsus (1493-1541) here, who thought a woman's womb as a house within her, and so this makes her very home-centric click.

Incense by Fernand Khnopff 1898

His next book was about witches click and so it's clear Michelet had met some very interesting girls in his time - or fantasized about meeting them! 'La Sorcerie' the Witch of the Middle Ages' of 1863 set out to explain that women's close experience of illness and infirmity has equipped us with special powers to heal and treat the sick - hence the association between the healing wise woman and the spell-casting witch. Michelet sees witchcraft as a positive thing, and an exemplification of the way women are persecuted for our vulnerabilities by men who abuse their power.

What did George take away from his studies on this topic? Returning to Schopenhauer, he will have been familiar with that philosopher's 'Will to Life' theory, that says we must look for complements in prospective partners in order to balance our innate faults, because if we don't, our children might manifest inherited intensified versions of our faults. So, if a man is of an intellectual bent, he needs to find a woman who is not, in order to have well-rounded children. Might this belief in Schopenhauer be part of the reason George went looking for a woman as unlike him as Edith? We know he delved into the new pseudoscience of eugenics, but science never held sway with George the way philosophy did - especially German philosophy. Take a look at this click to see a whitewashed view of the old Teutonic misogynist and see how deeply George absorbed his ideas.

Commonplace 222 George and Marianne PART TWO:  The John George Black letters.

The John George Black letters are some of the most fascinating documents relating to George's early days at Owens College in Manchester. To unravel the facts from the often repeated supposition we have to go to the matter of how these was interpreted by the Owens principal, the college authorities, and the Gissing industry. All these letters are reproduced in The Collected Letters of GG Vol One click


The Promise by Henry Scott Tuke 1888

The four letters are a real nightmare for anyone who seeks to see George as some sort of studious idiot savant autisitcally gifted dough bag who led a monastic, sheltered life at Owens. He is not, it seems, a special needs case after all. Rather, he was a typical youth of his Age and age when he was at Owens. He developed the carapace of solitary, pessimistic obdurate self pity after things in life did not go as planned. But, at Owens, he was the real George - who made bad choices as often as good ones - as behoves a youth of 18.


Helen Vary (detail)
by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 1889

George made much of his brush with the lives of the poor, but the wilder claims of his life of want and deprivation have long ago been debunked as nonsense by those who had a more balanced view of him (Austin Harrison, his pupil; and Bouwe Postmus, a renowned Gissing scholar). He never knew poverty in its truest sense - because poverty does not mean choosing to live on lentils while you smoke and buy books; it does not mean having to live in a squalid garret when you have a nice bedroom waiting for you any time you choose in Wakefield. It does not mean choosing to live among poor people when you can up sticks and go home to mother. You can't claim to be starving when your employer feeds you slap up dinners after you've taught his children for a few hours. George Orwell knew this when he set off to Paris and Wigan, and kept this very much in his mind when he washed pots and pans or dossed in spikes with itinerants. George's poverty is as meaningless as his alleged bohemianism - farcically shallow but they look good on the old cv. Apart from his year in America when he might have been hard up (but which according to Bouwe Postmus in George's 'American Notebooks' - page 13 - was much exaggerated) Marianne was the only legitimate link he had to a world of deprivation that wasn't self-inflicted. Marianne's experience of poverty was authentic, and there was no Romance (in the aesthetic sense) in it. No doubt her version of it informed George's writing and allowed him to describe elements of it - from her life story, certainly not his!

However, the biographers who want George to be a victim, who prefer to think George was living in some sort of precarious second inner circle of hell in a squalid slum while he was in Manchester, need only look at this click to realise it was not a sordid, failing neighbourhood when George lived there. The authorities at Owens said Marianne lived in a house of ill repute - but what evidence is there for this other than the landlady allowed male guests to visit and sit in a reception room? Should we not factor in the prejudices of straight-laced narrow-minded middle class tutors and a principal who taught exclusively male students, in order to understand their stance on the subject? Anywhere that allowed young people to mix socially would have been considered a place of 'ill-repute' to these cloistered tutors who probably feared the wrath of parents who might seek to blame the college if their sons went off the rails. We know the whole topic of Owens' student accommodation was being debated at this time, so the college authorities were probably fearful a scandal involving this sort of malarkey would not look good in the press. But, once again, if you want to frame Marianne as a prostitute, then you say she lived in a cat house.

Two Male Models
by Fyodor Bruni 1813
What are they up to?

The Black letters demonstrate George might have been as a vital, energetic, rambunctious young hedonistic, irresponsible, amorously predatory, sexually experienced young ruffian; a boy who courted controversy and was not afraid to baulk authority, an arch manipulator, a liar and a delinquent who had scant respect for his teachers and the authorities of the college. So far, a typical undergraduate with 'street' credentials and brains.

Today, George would be the sort of student who skipped lectures, went out on the piss as often as his student loan would allow, poured scorn on the establishment, ate on the hoof, slept until noon, tossed off a brilliant essay by the last seconds of the deadline, showed off at every opportunity, had no plans for the future, valued his social life over all else, could charm the birds off the trees, and who was a 'ledge' - as in 'legend' - to all who came within his orbit. No wonder John George Black adored him!

These letters do reveal embarrassing facts about the sort of time George was having in between the easy-peasy odds and ends of college work he managed to trot out and the vast amounts of girl action he pursued. John George Black was an older fellow who seems to have genuinely worshipped George as some sort of hero figure, and there is a touching hint of mild homoeroticism about his devotion - though we only have John's POV. As most boarding school boys will have been exposed to boy-on-boy crushes and emotional intrigues, this is not surprising, and in no way should be interpreted as signs of overt homosexuality - in fact, this gushing stuff (!) is rather endearing. John has only recently become friends with his hero - he states in the first letter, 'My dear fellow, you don't know me yet, you don't know how I have felt towards you. Gradually we have come together, & gradually an affection has sprung up in me for you such as I never felt for any other...'  Perhaps no-one was ever more in love with George than JGB - except for that old repressed queen, Eduard Bertz!! However, we must bear in mind, John was writing to wriggle out of a deeply embarrassing situation, and his prime motive is to keep in with George - the hero he worships. Can we rely on him to be 100% truthful?


The Green Waterways by Henry Scott Tuke 1926

Letter 1. Dated February 30th (!) but probably March 1st 1876.
The first of these letters John concerns some sort of encounter with a girl George fancied. By letter (being the passive-aggressive that he is, avoiding a face-to-face confrontation) George has restated an interest which John previously did not take seriously, and John is panicking. 'I have suffered in body, and now that I receive your letter, I am utterly downcast & full of anguish at its tone', he writes. John wants to apologise and make George believe spending time with the girl was not his fault, he was persuaded to stay by the girl (the girl is always to blame is she not?), and now he desperately wants to make amends for what might be seen as disloyalty in muscling in on his hero's squeeze. It went like this:

Probably on Monday, February 21st 1876, John called at a house in Water Street, allegedly hoping to find George there, possibly visiting a girl. He writes that, on arrival at the house, 'I felt unusually miserable and ill (you will hear more of this)'. He goes on: 'They told me there she had gone out with a young person.' He is told to come back in an hour when the girl is due back for her tea. When he returns, the landlady shows him in and John can see George is not in either of the reception rooms. Then John decides he wants to spend time with the girl, and she 'came up' to the reception room. They chatted and she lets John know that George confided in her that he was an Owen's student, which John hurriedly denies - he thinks George 'could not have known what you were doing'.

He does not say exactly what happened. 'I had no desire for her, - I never felt so peculiar in my life; my head swam, & I hardly knew what I was doing. I am not saying this in excuse, for I saw no reason then why you should care in the least. I had great difficulty in leaving her; & as I was going, she made me promise I would say nothing to you.' (Obviously he is not a man of his word as here he is telling George all about it.)
'On Tuesday, after getting home (John lived in Crumpsall, about 3 miles north of George's digs), I felt peculiarly weak & went to bed early. In the morning I woke with my heart beating hard, & had just strength to call before I fainted away. What is the matter with me, I don't know; but I tremble, cannot eat, & am utterly prostrated, whether from the effects of Monday night or not, I cannot say: I fear I have caught some disease, & intended coming down to see you & let you know all about it to-day...'

The Genius of Art by Karl Brullof 1817-1820

Some points to remember:
1) John George turned up at the girl's house feeling 'unusually miserable and ill', so he is clearly coming down with something before he sets foot inside the door. This is important because it suggests whatever subsequently ailed him was already making him ill before he visited the girl - so, it can't be that the girl he visited was to blame for whatever sickness he had.
2) The reference to having 'caught some disease' is usually taken to mean he caught an STD - however, if this supposition is correct - then it can't possibly be anything to do with this girl as no STD flares up before you do anything. There is always the possibility John was a serial chaser after girls, in which case he might have contracted an STD any time prior to visiting the girl, from someone else. Or, that George told John he was on familiar terms with the girl and John wanted to try his luck with her - and so he is being disloyal.
3) It is always assumed by biographers that sexual intercourse occurred but John does not say what went on. What he describes is his somatic reaction to an experience, but is this any more than guilt for what he was doing after realising George was interested? Maybe what really happened is that he got so excited by being in the presence of a girl that he didn't need sexual intercourse after all. This kind of unplanned event might have been a deep shock to his young mind - akin to being caught masturbating. We know the Victorians worked themselves up into all sorts of states of combustion about young people having sexual feelings, and, even worse, sexual experiences. Nocturnal emissions were considered a sickness - and it was termed 'spermatorrhoea' to give it a medical name. Masturbation was seen as a sign of perversion aligned to madness, and all young men would have been drilled in the evils of 'self abuse' at school. A whole industry had grown up around tackling this 'vice', and it would all sound terribly amusing if we didn't know the amount of cruelty, torture and assault that went into the 'treatment' of this healthy and zestful behaviour. For example, Kellogg - he of the famous breakfast food - advocated female genital mutilation and male circumcision without anaesthetic for girls and boys caught masturbating, or even to deter them from contemplating it.
4) The ailment John complains of  - palpitations, syncope (fainting), anorexia, malaise... it sounds like textbook anxiety state, to me click. John does not emphatically link his illness to the visit - 'whether from the effects of Monday night or not, I cannot say.' We don't know to which part of Monday night he refers, but the encounter with the girl is clearly not the reason he is feeling unwell - because he has already told us he felt ill when he arrived at the house. He seems to need to let George know he is being punished for betraying the friendship he values, but as this is self-serving it is impossible to know how truthful it is.
5) 'I fear I have caught some disease...' John's concerns might be linked to some sexual matter, but that does not have to involve sex with a girl - any girl. Think of all those conflicted feelings coursing round a young mind - girls were so near, and yet so far away. The body was not always under the control of the mind - it did strange, wanton things to humiliate and shock. Shame and fear of exposure must have been unbearable - at least girls are afforded some secrecy because they don't manifest clear outward signs of arousal. One of the ways Victorians terrified their young over sexual matters was to emphasise the lethal results of unclean sex - and sexual thoughts. John wants to be seen as being deeply affected by it in a negative way - how true this is we don't know - but he cleverly incorporates a little histrionics into his performance when he says, 'I have almost felt the pangs of death to-day when I fainted again.... You must forgive everything now you see how it happened.' Is this an authentic account of what went on, or a desperate bid to dig himself out of a hole?

Inject into the !?

6) and 7) are two small points worth mentioning: there is no proof the girl in the Water Street lodgings was Marianne, and there is no talk of money or payment in kind changing hands. The girl is never named or described, so she could be any girl George took a shine to. The girl doesn't seem to know George very well, so, if the letter is written on March 1st - and if it is Marianne - this means she and George are only recently acquainted. If so, then how come she is blamed for the mini crime spree that Morley Roberts states plagued the college locker rooms - thefts of books, coats and money- all term? Pierre Coustillas in the Heroic Life Vol 1 states the thefts went on throughout the winter of 1875-6. If George had only just met Marianne (if she was the girl in Water Street), then Marianne can't have been the reason he stole. And, why had she been crying? Did it have anything to do with  George?

Letter 2. Dated March 23rd.
Three weeks later, another letter concerns two important schemes - the first is George's plan for a holiday in Southport over Easter; John sends suitable addresses of landladies (he knows Southport well). He then tells the amusing tale of nearly damaging himself over moving this machine with another chap. This is always assumed to be a sewing machine that George bought for Marianne, and this has the added value for biographers of making it seem that George stole from his peers to subsidise her wanton lifestyle. John writes: 'I am nearly slain; the gross man of cowardly kind came to help with that machine & I forced him to go first. About half way down I saw his eyes begin to roll & his face look apoplectic; so I tugged with all my might, careless of brace buttons, and any mortal thing, and thus prevented the thing from running down, & and making a jelly of the clod. Only one limb was broken, ie of the machine.'
Now, it is obvious John is helping to carry a machine down, not up. So, is it being bought or sold? We simply don't have enough information to make any conclusion. Why is John doing it and not George - if it involves Marianne? If it did involve her, you would think John would want to avoid anything to do with her for fear of inciting his true love's ire. And, why buy an expensive machine when you can rent? We know all manner of things could be rented in those days - much later, George hired a piano, and whilst on holiday, a pram for Walter. Perhaps this sewing machine belonged to an employer of a totally different girl. Maybe if it was Marianne's, she rented it or paid for it herself. The first mention of it (as far as I know) is in the Henry Maitland fantasy, but its inclusion in this questionable account could well have been used to make us think his knowledge of George's life and friendship with him at Owens ran deeper than it did, and he could have learned about it much later than 1876 - he wrote Maitland in 1912.

Reclining Nude on a Sofa by Sergei Semenovich Egornov 1907

Letter 3. 26th March
This is the one that has caused the most uproar. John asks George for advice about some small blebs on his penis. This letter comes about five weeks after the encounter with the girl. JGB says: 'The irritation continued growing worse, & on examination, I found the prepuce swollen, & on turning it down, I found the whole of the inside salmon-coloured, as you called it, only little spots as though the skin had been eaten away so as to show the flesh, & almost looked as though it were bleeding. I applied a little of the subtilissimus, but the end continues to be irritated. The prepuce is a little hard as well; & there was a drop or two of yellow matter near the red spots. I don't know what an ulcer should look like. Are these anything like the symptoms of soft chancre? Or is it like your inflammation? Or do you think it is only balanitis?'  

Subtilissimus is a very old treatment for syphilitic chancre, made from a desert-dwelling plant, much used as a complement to ingested mercury (it helps offset the gastro-intestinal side effects of mercury) or mixed with animal fat to make an ointment in its own right. John asks for George's doctor's address. Dr Wahltuch click was a Russian émigré who had a practice in George's neighbourhood. Perhaps he favoured the old-fashioned cures, but we cannot assume this medication was prescribed for venereal disease. Many medications have more than one use - think of aspirin and we use it in pain, fever, to reduce swelling and to thin blood. A heart patient and someone with a sprained ankle might both be prescribed aspirin. Perhaps subtilissimus is just very good with penis problems of all stripes. And, mercury was prescribed for more than syphilis - it is still used in the proprietary medicine Mercurochrome, marketed as a topical antiseptic used for 'minor cuts and scrapes'. click

The three main venereal disease contenders are syphilis, gonorrhoea and herpes. (Some biographers have suggested George suffered from syphilis, and this is an old claim going back to Morley Roberts and Frank Swinnerton and the Gissing Biography wars of 1912. Much more on this in future posts!!) The Complete Letters editors have added a footnote to this March 26th letter saying what John describes is 'nonspecific balanitis' and I tend to agree (wow! Am I losing my touch?). What he describes does sound more like balanitis than an STD. It can be caused by poor personal hygiene particularly when a prepuce is too tight, but can also be caused by too much attention to personal hygiene or by excessive masturbation (define 'excessive', I hear you ask). For a look at a penis afflicted by balanitis click  (no-one can say I don't bring you educational content!) Soft chancre is (I am lifting this more or less entire from here click) 'a usually painless local genital ulcer that follows an infection by Haemophilus ducreyi. It is accompanied by suppuration of the inguinal lymphatic nodes, or inguinal buboes. Complications may include phimosis, urethral stricture or fistula, and marked tissue destruction'. What John describes is not this - he would be very aware of a bubo if he had one, and he doesn't mention pain. The remark about 'yellow matter near the red spots' is probably referring to the exudate of white blood cells that accumulate as they rid the wound of waste cells - a good sign of healing. However, JGB's query 'is it like your inflammation or only balanitis?' suggests George suffered from something else - ie, something known to be not balanitis. 

Used as a genital wash.

Whether or not George contracted a venereal disease at Owens or anywhere else is a contentious issue amongst Gissing scholars. The word JGB uses to identify George's problem is 'inflammation' - but this is a generic word used for redness and swelling, sometimes involving infection. George might have been, like guilty John, afraid any sexual experience might infect him with an STD and as a consequence of this vigilance, he might have been over-enthusiastic with his personal hygiene. Plenty of over-the-counter medicines and preparations played into this guilt with sexual matters, many of them were toxic or caustic and did more harm than good.



Letter 4, Dated April 11th 1876.
John writes in an amusing vein to ask 'What art thou doing? My soul desireth thee as the bird does the mountain.' Easter that year was 14-16th April, so vac has already started, and John is anxious to see his true love before going to Blackpool for a weekend of dissipation. Then as now, Blackpool was the Las Vegas of England, and a  step down from snooty Southport. This is a jokey letter about George being missed from lectures by his tutors, it lampoons teetotallers, and ends with: 'Let me hear from you, I beseech, I shall be gone on Thursday; so write instanter. Delicacy forbids me to commend myself to anyone but yourself, I suppose.' It seems John has lost touch with his best friend. Six weeks later, George would be wrenched from his bosom when he was arrested for theft.

Blackpool before the electric lights went up.