George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

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