George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

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.