Commonplace 37 George & the Curious Incident of the Police-Sergeant in the Night-Time. PART THREE.

Lambeth crowd and policeman 1892

In Commonplace 35 and 36 we looked at the accusations so frequently made that Marianne aka Nell was a drunkard. I refute the claims because there is no evidence for them. Biographers may choose to repeat what others say but that doesn't make it true.

To briefly recap: on September 24th 1883 George had a visit from a police sergeant who came to tell him Marianne had been attacked by three men. The policeman was really there because he saw an opportunity to make some money in offering his services as a detective to gather information of a detrimental kind so George could move to divorce her. George tells us this is exactly what he thinks is the reason for the call.

In his letter to Algernon, it is clear George is very disturbed by this - despite him writing 'Don't think this upsets me.' It clearly does, because he has already thought it through and formulated a plan. As we know from his reporting of other personal events, George often underplays things probably to convince himself as much as to reassure others. Seeing something in writing externalises the threat and can give us courage, when faced with momentous challenges.

Had George thought about divorcing Marianne before this? Probably. Sadly, he had no further use for her, so if he was a single man again he could  move to find a nice young girl - much as he moved on that adorable tobacconist's daughter, Miss Curtis from Eastbourne, a few months after Marianne's death in 1888 (though no doubt he'd had his eye on that little sweetie for some time and even took Morley Roberts along for a peek at her). In 1883, George was in his prime and understandably needed to satisfy his natural urges. Apart from the odd sexual encounter with Marianne (I suspect he continued enjoy his conjugals when they were separated) he must have longed for the days when he had a woman to both worship and pick up after him, as much as to satisfy his longings for intimacy.

George hints at something by saying he would not divorce Marianne for the money, 'But for quite other reasons'. The 1852 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act only allowed for a husband to divorce his wife if she committed adultery click. Should we presume the police sergeant was trying to suggest Marianne was committing adultery in the form of soliciting when she was attacked? If this odious man really knew Marianne and her movements in the community, and had access to confidential criminal records, then it should have been a doddle to find enough proof to enable George to bring divorce proceedings against his wife. If guilty of adultery, a wife would forfeit her alimony - which is why George says he wouldn't be doing it just for the money; in fact, he says he wouldn't stop paying her, whatever the outcome. Indeed, he mentions in a letter to Algernon of September 29th, that he will continue paying her because he knows she has 'no other means of support'. Good man. The policeman says he thinks he can get the evidence, so they make a deal.

George ends this letter to Alg saying he is going to discuss the matter with Frederic Harrison, his Positivist mentor.


The Wounded Puppy by
Vittorio Corcos 1899

Asking Fred Harrison for advice was an interesting move, and a piece of Machiavellian wizardry both proactive and powerful - albeit in a passive way. Harrison knew many influential people, so if George could get his story in first - Marianne was a wrong 'un who had scuppered his academic career and almost ruined his embryonic literary talent blah blah blah - whatever came out in the press would have already been given the old Gissing spin to Harrison and his influential circle - the people George at that moment wanted to impress. And it gave him the opportunity to gain that precious sympathy he so desperately craved, with the added bonus of being able to describe Marianne as the catalyst in her own downfall, and so justify his abandonment of her - in case the press asked what a middle class literary lion's wife was doing in such dire circumstances.

If Mrs Harrison had helped Marianne find accommodation when the couple stopped cohabiting, George would already have laid the foundations of blaming Marianne for her own predicament. He knew the Positivist's sympathy would be easy to engage: Harrison would be reminded that, in 1824 the founder of Positivism, Auguste Comte lived in an unmarried union with Caroline Massin; she had been accused of being a prostitute. Later, Comte referred to this ‘marriage’ of 18 years as ‘the only error of my life’(which, if it took 18 years for him to work out, was an indicator he can't have been all that positive he ha). During this period Comte supported himself and his partner by tutoring - which he hated. 

Further, by abdicating his responsibility to Harrison for this momentous decision, he could always lay the blame at someone else's feet if his mother and posterity judged him ill for divorcing his wife. 

Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII by Jean Auguste Dominic Ingres 1854

George engaged his private detective/moonlighting police sergeant on Sunday September 9th: 'I had an interview today with the police sergeant who had charge of the case, - the same man who called on me. He was sure there could be no difficulty in procuring quite decisive evidence, & indeed will prepare himself to produce such.'

Marianne was attacked in the street at night, when she was alone and vulnerable, but that does not mean she was up to no good when it happened. Everything we know about Victorian men's attitudes to women and working class women in particular are at play. Women were seen as wilful, wild, slightly mad unreliable creatures by most men (most men think the same today). In the nineteenth century, women's vulnerability to criticism based on their gender and sexuality cannot be over-emphasised. Firstly, there is the criticism that George voices about Marianne being in a place 'where she had no business to be' - despite her being a free agent. Women out of doors alone late at night was anathema to the middle-classes, but let's not forget working class women led very different lives, and there were many reasons to be out of doors after midnight. As a chronically ill person in need of medical attention and medication, there could be pressing reasons for having to be out when you have no man to do such things for you. There is no mention in the letter to Algernon what Marianne's explanation was - unless George withheld this information from his brother. If you choose to frame Marianne as debauched you will think she was up to no good. I choose to frame her as a brave woman forced to take care of herself and standing up to, first of all, three predatory males, and then a police station full of male inquisitors. She will have been aware that to make a formal complaint might lead to accusations of prostitution, and yet she still attempted to get justice. I find that rather heroic. Ask yourself: at a time when the whole of Great Britain was debating the topic and harsh penalties had been introduced to address public concerns, would any woman with a guilty conscience risk bringing her 1.30 am plight to the attention of the police? That she wanted to withdraw the charge when at the police station is understandable; many female victims of crime nowadays can't face the gruelling interrogations and investigations into crimes against them.

George reports in a letter of Monday, October 1st that he met with Harrison again but the older man could not recommend a solicitor to handle the divorce, so he asks if Alg knows of someone who can take on the case. He is very worried: the two assailants were discharged when they went to court because of insufficient evidence and he fears these men will come after him for damages. And he hints at a fear of possible extortion: 'who knows what might happen?' He seems to think the hunt for evidence is in train and what is unearthed will settle the matter of Marianne's guilt, and he is prepared to borrow the money from Harrison to finance it. This is October 1st.

Skull of a girl with a ceramic crown of myrtle. Patras 300-400 BCE 

There are no letters (in the Ohio Press Letters Vol 2) until October 10th when George writes again to his brother: 'I hope it will be possible to establish proof of my respectability with Poole.' (Did he own up to his prison record?) Poole is the man Alg has recommended as a legal representative. He ends the letter by reporting he has been to Aberdeen (550 miles from London), there by boat; back by train. (He mentioned in the October 1st letter: 'Don't be in a hurry to reply. I have to be out of town from Wednesday to Sunday night.') An editors' note to this wee trip to Scotland says, 'This trip to Aberdeen remains one of the most mysterious and fascinating problems in Gissing scholarship'. Well, I may be able to shed a little light:

Scotland operated a system of workhouses and alms-houses, and north-east Aberdeenshire reputedly had the largest contingent of these.
'Buchan, an historic district and earldom at the north-east corner or Aberdeenshire, had one of Scotland's greatest concentrations of parochial poorhouses or almshouses. Many of these appear to have continued in operation after the opening of the Buchan Combination poorhouse in 1869' click. A 'combination poorhouse' was a workhouse shared by two or more parish councils; as with all poor relief accommodation, these were part sheltered housing for the very poor and residential home or hospital for the chronically ill. The alms-houses were small residential units for the chronically ill and elderly overseen by a matron. I suspect George had one of these in mind for Marianne - miles away from London, away from where she might bring him public attention, where she could be supervised - though he would tell  himself it was she was being 'cared for'. The alms-houses required rent as the residents generally did not work for their keep, being too infirm to do so. His £1 alimony would pay for it. It was the equivalent of being sent to a nunnery. The Buchan Combination Poorhouse in Maud was the same sort of set up but much larger. click Interestingly - and we must always remember George's love of appropriating and recycling names - one of the biggest suppliers of residential care to the Scottish indigent poor and chronically ill was... 'The Quarrier Foundation' click based in Renfrewshire. George could have heard about this organisation from the Harrisons and done some research, then gone to Aberdeen to look at a place to commit Marianne. '...I shall do my utmost to find some decent place of abode, & make my future remittance contingent on her abiding there.'

However, The Aberdeen Royal Mental Hospital in the city of Aberdeen established in 1800 took in people with mental illness and 'nervous diseases' - epilepsy would have been wedged into either category. (This will give you an idea of what the place was like in the 1930s/40s click)  If George had evidence Marianne was living a dissolute or immoral lifestyle but failed to obtain a divorce he could have moved to get her committed to a mental asylum as 'morally insane' click Such thoughts may very well have crossed his mind throughout their relationship, because epilepsy carried such a stigma and was so little understood. He often writes of her as if he considers her to be mentally unstable - but George thought anyone who disagreed with him was suspect in the sanity department. Chillingly, we have to remember Edith and wonder what part he played in having her sectioned. Institutionalising women who did not fit in or comply with societal norms was always a strong feature of mental health services right through to the late twentieth century - Marianne would not be in a strong position to argue.

Helen of Troy by
Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys c1867

It would be fair to assume George met up with Marianne at some time to discuss this incident, if only to wallow in the satisfaction of making her feel even worse than she already did. He could very well have threatened her with Aberdeen if he could prove any sort of guilt on her part. Imagine how terrified she would have been, and, consequently, how pliant. To be banished to a faraway place where you know no-one and have no understanding of the culture - a positively medieval punishment for anyone especially for a 25 year-old, is it not? I've been to Aberdeen - it's lonely, has a tiny population, and is fierce in winter; even today it is backwoods country - very, very far from the sort of life Marianne would have enjoyed: the British equivalent of being sent to Siberia -(sorry, Aberdeen ;). As George destroyed his Diaries for this time, we don't know if something similar was undertaken in order to intimidate her. And, if this was the impetus for him to reduce her alimony by 25% then he will have dealt with her harshly. George was always particularly hard on women. It was not a new phenomenon: The American Notebook is riddled with misogyny and that was put together while he was still a teenager. 

On October 18th he writes this to Algernon:
'I have seen Poole today... He wishes me to put evidence in succinct form, & let him have it. Has no doubt about success. Accordingly, I saw my official acquaintance this afternoon, & he comes to me next Tuesday, with evidence put down. I shall then see Poole again, - But surely it will be his business to see the witnesses & take their evidence?'.

On October 30th, a paragraph in a letter to Alg: 'Sorry to say further difficulties have sprung up on the legal matter. Poole desires clearer evidence than we can offer - a proof of his bona fide. So my friend the inspector is doing what he can.' Now, is it me, or does this seem to be referring to a plot to groom, even manufacture, a witness? The phrase 'proof of his biona fide' suggests to me there is someone in the pipeline who will act as a witness (probably for pay) against Marianne but the solicitor doesn't trust this person and may even by now be suspecting the whole thing has been concocted. Stop for a moment to consider the kind of enterprise George had embarked on: a man who will swear he is Marianne's adulterous lover, is one thing; to claim to be a client who paid for sex is quite another (presumably it would be the latter as the former would be harder to fake). Was there some kind of entrapment enacted to tempt Marianne and catch her taking money for sex? It makes my female blood boil! So, George Gissing, the man who rightly went to prison for the crimes he committed; who returned from America to Marianne's loving arms and married her; who abandoned her when she needed him most through no fault of hers (which he admits in the Letters) - prepared to pay for fabricated evidence that would bring his wife to the precipice of destruction by ruining her good name and labelling her as a whore - a slur that remains to this day? Is this the Heroic Life of George Gissing?


Oedipus and the Sphinx by Gustave Moreau 1864

If Marianne was as conspicuous in her community as George’s detective claimed, wouldn’t there be heaps of evidence around? Not just the physical signs on her person  of a dissolute lifestyle, but proof of the sort of behaviour that would shame her and get her banned from decent lodgings, amiable pubs - would get her insulted in the street. Wouldn't Marianne, at some point, have been arrested and charged? Wouldn't someone close to her lodgings be able to testify to her alleged 'bad character'?

On Saturday, November 24th, George almost hides this paragraph in a long letter to Algernon:
'I regret to have to say that the suit must be given up. Poole was of the opinion that the evidence in connection with the police-court affair was inconclusive. Accordingly I employed the Inspector to look about him for a fortnight, but with no result - save the disbursement of two guineas. That of course could not go on. Well, it matters little. In any case, the weekly payment would have continued, & in other respects, I am entirely independent of the world's judgement.'

And that was that. The Curious Incident of the Police Sergeant in the Night-Time was over.

So, this Inspector (presumably George means the sergeant), in two weeks with access to criminal records, and all the local section beat officers to research leads on who to interview, came up with zilch? That's no neighbours with grievances against her; no 'customers' to say what they had paid for; no-one from the 'neighbourhood' who knew her as 'an habitual drunkard' to complain about her being a sex worker nuisance? No-one from the public-houses regarding her 'as in all respects as a bad character' offering tip offs? And, no criminal record for soliciting or for vagrancy, for being drunk and disorderly in a public place; or for lewd behaviour or begging?

NO. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

This event is always passed off as evidence against Marianne: she is portrayed as the one at fault. This, to me, is the real mysterious and fascinating problem at the heart of Gissing scholarship.

Commonplace 36  George & the Curious Incident of the Police Sergeant in the Night-Time. PART TWO.

Gentle readers, cast your minds back to Commonplace 35. My contention was/is that George framed Marianne aka Nell as an alcoholic/debauched character to suit his own purpose - to justify his abandoning of her because she was too ill for him to care for; too time-consuming for him to maintain, and too likely to draw attention to what he wanted to keep secret. I am not saying he was a bad man - just a selfish one. As he put it on January 19th 1882, 'No-one is called upon to sacrifice everything in life to a weak-minded person's whims, and it is clear that this place cannot possibly be a home for her henceforth.' Somehow, George is allowed to get away with this. What would be the reaction if Gabrielle had said the same thing about our man when he was ailing in France? She would have been burned as a witch! George, as the husband, had a moral responsibility to Marianne - he reneged on the deal. To have and to hold from this day forth, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health... No-one forced him to say those words.

The only reference made, prior to September 1883, linking Marianne to drinking alcohol, was a letter to Algernon in which George wrote of finding a gin bottle in her box (January 16th 1882). Marianne said it was not a new bottle but it had been in her box for some time. If it was unopened, or totally empty (ie just a glass vessel), we don't know - the reality of its contents isn't important to George and his propaganda. It is enough that he links her name with the word 'gin' to establish the idea in Algernon's mind: he knows all the middle class preconceived ideas will coalesce and terraform into the stereotype in his younger brother's consciousness. It had to be this subtle because Alg knew Marianne personally and already had enjoyed a warm relationship with her.


Cup of Coffee by
Victor Gabriel Gilbert c 1890

When Marianne attended hospital for her various health conditions, she was out from under the Gissing thumb. She made friends; they chatted, much as women do, swapping life stories, beauty tips, cake recipes, ways to keep a man happy... we girls discuss the same things, today. Women are the main carriers of language to children but men are the self-appointed moderators of what we should be talking about. He writes to Algernon on May 18th 1881 '...I am convinced the atmosphere of vulgar gossip is congenial to her'. Now, George liked gossip himself - when he was in charge of it and it featured his own information. He was quick to gossip about Thomas Hardy, for example, and JM Barrie... and his letters are riddled with posh people's doings - he loved being able to name drop, which is a form of gossip. So, it was just women's gossip, and working class women's gossip - which meant he was absolutely against Marianne doing it. But that does not make her debauched. It makes her a communicator and quite NORMAL. In a June 19th 1881 letter to Alg, George makes this harsh remark about Marianne: '... she has about as much idea of entertaining a visitor (his grandfather) as my writing-chair has, - indeed, the chair would do it better, at least being able to keep from foolish & prejudicial gossip'. ...' What a dick he could be!

To recap: there is no evidence in the Letters (Vols 1&2) that Marianne drank alcohol to excess. There is one mention of a gin bottle, one of associating with drunken girls (with no mention of Marianne being drunk), then comes the Curious Incident of the PS in the N-T. After this, there is the mention (which I believe was fabricated) from Mrs Sherlock that Marianne spent all her money on drink, and then the ridiculous nonsense of George telling Clara Collet (February 1897) his wife was a drunk who died in 1881/2. George mentions all sorts of maladies and spells in hospital or convalescing - but never mentions Marianne drank in his presence or was ever drunk in his presence.

Rape of the Sabine Woman
by Giambologna 1583

At the end of December 1882, George and Marianne finally stopped living together. In his letter to Algernon (December 27th 1882) George does not say it was because Marianne was drinking to excess; in fact, she had just been discharged from Westminster Hospital (admission date November 7th according to a letter to Alg written on November 2nd.) and had come home on December 15th to recuperate from an operation on her arm. In the November 2nd letter, George mentions asking Mrs Fred Harrison to find Marianne lodgings; we don't know if this was to be the accommodation Marianne moved to on December 27th - which was in Brixton.

There is no mention of Marianne again in the Letters until The Curious Incident of the Police Sergeant in the Night-Time. (This does not mean there was no contact between them, just that we don't have the evidence for it.) On Monday, September 24th, 1883 George wrote this to his brother:

  'I have very loathsome matters to write to you about. I address you as my legal advisor. Bad as they are, they may prove the beginning of a day of freedom for me.

  I was visited this evening by a sergeant of police, who informed me that my wife had preferred a charge of criminal assault against three men, two of whom had been taken into custody, - the other escaping. These two were remanded until next Thursday. He came to ask me what light I could throw upon the prosecutor's character.

  As it proved, the light came rather from him. He told me she was described in the neighbourhood, as an habitual drunkard, well known in all public-houses, & generally regarded as in all respects a bad character. The assault took place at 1.30 am., in a place where business could not possibly have taken her. At the station she wished to back out of the charge; but of course was not allowed to. The officer told me he very much doubted her innocence. In any case, her bad character will go against her. Either the men will be discharged on Thursday, or committed. Of course the case will be in the papers.

  Now, you see what all this points to. I think there is little doubt that the man called on me in the idea that I might employ him to collect evidence, with view to a divorce. He smiled at my folly in allowing her a pound a week. Doubtless he will call on me again, &, if he does, I shall certainly make enquiries to see whether I can afford to employ him. He said that he thought the matter would not be very difficult.'

Selling Violets
by Victor Gabriel Gilbert c, 1897?

Before we go on, let's look at this part.
Here's what I think:
George was told by a police sergeant that Marianne had been attacked. George admits himself he thinks the police sergeant is opportunistically hoping to be hired for pay to help George procure a divorce. Here we have a public official touting for work and attempting to make money on the back of a crime victim's suffering. What a cowardly, felonious blackguard.

We don't know the location of this incident or Marianne's address, so how far she was from home when this happened is unclear. She moved to Brixton in December 1882, but we don't know if she stayed there. George says it was in a 'place where business could not have taken her', but this is worthless as evidence because this might just mean in a residential street local to her home, her own street, or where shops were shut. Some might take this as Marianne doing something illicit but that is misogyny and the infamous determination to always see Marianne as at fault. She may very well have been on her way back from a hospital, following another admission, or from a dispensary after buying medication. She might have been enjoying a night out with her pals to the music hall or theatre; perhaps she was visiting a sick friend. She was a free agent living in a democracy where she could, but for the constraints of social norms, please herself where she went. In thinking anything other than an innocent reason for her being out of doors at 1.30 am is the same as blaming the victim for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, much as women are today often blamed for inciting lust in rapists by wearing certain clothing. Or walking home alone.

There is every chance Marianne could have been recovering from an epileptic fit and trying to get home to safety when she was set upon by three men. As women usually get the blame for men abusing them (see above), it is clear Marianne was behaving with great courage in following the crime through to the point of two of the attackers being taken to the police station. It was not a sexual assault as some biographers claim (physical assault and sexual assault are different charges), but it might have headed in that direction if help had not been on the scene quickly. There attack might have been discovered by a passing beat constable because one of the men ran off and only two were arrested. Of course, if the man who ran off was innocent of any crime, why didn't he stick around to defend his good name and that of his friends?

Hercules Killing the Hydra
by Antonio del Pollaiolo c1452



Now, why might Marianne have wanted to get out of bringing charges when she got to the police station?
1. The attackers would be able to know her identity and them come after her for revenge.
2. Being a grass is not a good idea when you have no-one to back you up.
3. The men might defend themselves by claiming she was soliciting. This might lead to her being forced to undergo a gynaecological exam, which would have been distressing.
4. It was 2 against 1 plus the police officers were all men. Only another woman would really understand how intimidating that might be.
5. Would they believe her? She was poor and working class and at the bottom of the power league - not a strong place from which to mount an attack on assailants.
6. She must have been extremely frightened by the experience and desperate to get home. The adrenalin would have been wearing off and she might even have been afraid she might have a seizure. If she was seen as incapable she might have been locked up or sent to an asylum.
7. If she was unwell, perhaps she couldn't think through her statement coherently. Epilepsy causes a range of cognitive difficulties, and Marianne might have thought she would not be able to remember everything that happened if she had to appear as a witness. Remember, epilepsy was seen by the ignorant as libidinous in origin and even a sign of having indulged in masturbation, and a person pre- or post-seizure is particularly vulnerable to being mistaken for being inebriated. click
8. She got talked out of it. Perhaps she was told if she lost in court she would be in serious trouble and face prison or some sort of fine for wasting police and court time.
9. She acted to protect George. If it went to court, George's name might be reported in the press. Marianne might have preferred to withdraw her charges to prevent his criminal past from being exposed or exploited by blackmailers.
10. She might have preferred George not to know about it - if Marianne thought George might have at some point wanted a reconciliation, this sort of business would have put him off.



Boreas by
John William Waterhouse 1903

Marianne wasn't allowed to back out of it, says George in the letter. Well, perhaps she was induced to pursue it by a policeman who thought the case had a chance in court. The police sergeant with the moonlighting job as a private detective needed to make Marianne look (to George) like she would lose on account of her 'notoriety' - which he proceeded to fabricate.

George said the police sergeant arrived at the door to ask 'what light I could throw upon the prosecutor's character'. As the man goes on to tell George about Marianne's alleged bad reputation, it seems he didn't really need to come to George at all.
'He told me she was described in the neighbourhood, as an habitual drunkard, well known in all public-houses, & generally regarded as in all respects a bad character'. This is just a corrupt policeman trying to give a husband ammunition with which to divorce a wife he no longer wants. To be known in all public-houses just meant she went into pubs. Pubs were more than purveyors of alcohol - they did all kinds of services. For example, George redeemed the wedding ring pawn ticket in one, so Marianne had borrowed money in a pub. When I was a child growing up, people used pubs for all sorts of what now seem bizarre things: to deliver life assurance payments; to leave and collect dry cleaning; to make use of the Provident savings scheme; to swap paperback books; to leave football pools coupons; to place orders for Xmas hampers; to use the telephone; to buy potatoes in bulk. Many of these transactions I had to do as part of my chores duties - so I was well-known in public-houses. There is no reason to assume because Marianne went into pubs that she emerged from them drunk. Unless you choose to make that assumption to paint her as debauched.

The policeman already knew about the class difference between George and Marianne and would be able to conjure up in his mind all the possible problems that might engender. By playing to that he could widen that gap with some scandalous claptrap that would underline the need for a George to proceed with a divorce. Claiming someone has a bad character is an easy thing to say and never really requires proof - give a dog a bad name and you might as well hang him, as they say. Of interest is the fact that obviously Marianne didn't have a criminal record for vagrancy or drunk and disorderly conduct in a public place or anything else (such as theft or soliciting or vagrancy). In fact, it was the husband, not the wife, who had the criminal record - makes you wonder what the policeman would have made of that if he'd known about it! I suspect the 'evidence' the policeman wanted paying for was precisely this sort of stuff about searching criminal records, as he would have bought time to go away and check the files for Marianne's name.  

Do you really believe Marianne had become a 'bad character'  in the space of a few months? Whatever that phrase means (and the term seems very much like something George would think up), there is nothing in the Letters to suggest she was anything but the opposite. She got on well with his brothers - particularly William - liked poetry, read books, had done her best to fit in with George's high standards. Their relationship did not fail because she was a 'bad character'; it failed because she was an invalid whose husband did not want to care for her in any way but financially. And he didn't do a very good job of that!
 
'The officer told me he very much doubted her innocence'. Whoa! Marianne is the victim, here, not the accused!! This is outrageous and George should never have stood for it - if it is an accurate account of what the policeman said. He follows this with 'In any case, her bad character will go against her'. What bad character is this? The one the policeman has just constructed! We have the word of a corrupt policeman touting for business as a moonlighting private detective prepared to sell confidential government information - and he has the cheek to say Marianne has a bad character!! Would you take his word for it? How can he be trusted to report accurately on anything? Following it up with the suggestion it might be mentioned in the press was obviously to reinforce the notion George should file for divorce and would have need of evidence, but may also have hinted at something else. The crime of extortion comes from Latin extortionem, “a twisting out.” The crime involves obtaining something, usually money, from a person by force or wrongful use of authority or power. That's what is going on here. click 

The Fury of Achilles by Charles-Antoine Coypel 1737

George mentions the policeman commenting on the £1 a week he allows his wife. He doesn't 'allow' her, of course - it is alimony. Why did they discuss this? What business was it of the policeman's? As I said in Commonplace 32 Marianne could have gone to court to be officially paid alimony and she might very well have been awarded more than £1 and certainly more than the 15/- he was paying her at her death. Perhaps this is George opportunistically using the policemen to mouth the words he wants to hear - cut her alimony. Reducing it by 25% was not the act of a poor man but a mean one, but, as usual with George, he abdicates his responsibility (see the next instalment in Commonplace 37 for more of this sort of malarkey) to someone else's shoulders to come up with it. Sadly, this begs the question: was this the start of him dropping the payment to 15/-? If so, Marianne subsisted on 15/- a week for four and a half years. Which is heart-rending, isn't it? That's about £45 a week by the year 2007's equivalents click. £45 for everything, regardless of her health or the season of the year or what clothing etc needs replacing. And this was while George was hobnobbing with his toffs and holidaying at the drop of a silk hat, buying books and smoking cigars. Imagine what his middle-class friends would have said about it - George's shameful scandal wasn't that he'd been to prison for theft or that he married a working class girl. It was that he kept his wife in dire poverty and condemned her to a miserable existence so that he might dabble with his bourgeois notions of Art.

The Rape of the Sabine Women by Pablo Picasso 24/10/62 

JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 37 FOR PART THREE





Commonplace 35   George & the Curious Incident of the Police Sergeant in the Night-Time. PART ONE.

There are many myths about George's first wife, Marianne aka Nell. One of the most damning is that she was an alcoholic. I happen to believe what is offered as evidence for this claim is nothing of the sort - it is lazy re-writing of other people's work mixed with good old-fashioned misogyny and a sprinkling of well-meaning, if partisan, Gissing cult worship - biographical legerdemain generally delivered with such authoritative tone as to be taken by the gullible as gospel. The fable of The Emperor's Clothes springs to mind.


Repose by Edouard Manet 1870

I blame George for all this. He was the one, Iago-like, to drip honey into Algernon's ear about finding a gin bottle in Marianne's box back in January 1882. He was the one to virtually open his Diaries with Mrs Sherlock's (alleged) claim Marianne was a drunk. And it was George who wrote this to Miss Clara Collet in February 1897:
'My first wife was a hopeless drunkard, & died miserably in 1881 or 2, I forget the year.' On the last one alone, he proves himself to be a liar and propagandist of immense proportions - o, the colossal moral expedience of rewriting history with such skill proves he could be, at times, nothing short of a Machiavellian schemer blackguard!

Think about it - how could he get it wrong? He might be a year out, but seven???? Why, to win Miss Collet's sympathy and manipulate her emotionally and practically (he needed help with Edith), of course. After all, he famously said, 'More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.' And the worst, it seems.

However, I think the seeds of this truly shocking piece of dissembling had its origins in... The Curious Incident of the Police Sergeant in the Night-Time.


Woman With Fans
by Edouard Manet 1873

But first...

I believe George originally set out to suggest his first wife was a heavy drinker to justify his heartless abandonment of her and to draw down sympathy for himself from gullible well-wishers (see above).

I think he chose to present her as a drunkard for these reasons:

1) By labelling Marianne a drunk George was able to squirm out of his responsibilities to her, and to suggest to his Positivist friends - big fans of Charles Darwin - that she was, in some fundamental way, defective. Alcoholism was a scandalous cliché easily understood by the middle-class set with whom he began to fraternise: his nascent social ascendency runs parallel with his decreasing willingness to support Marianne.
2) Labelling her as a drunk to himself - to his own mind - would justify why he felt he could not foresee a life with her. How could he take an ailing, epileptic working class girl to high tea with the Frederic Harrisons? He obviously didn't factor that in at Owens when he chased after a chronically unwell girl from the working class. An ambitious networker and acclaim junkie like George always knew his new friends would judge him as being non-U if his wife was seen that way: his new bezzies were more bourgeois than demi monde, and George. himself, was never a true bohemian.
3) His shameful past (prison for theft) might catch up with him if Marianne ever met anyone outside a situation he could control. Having to explain how he came to be living with a working class woman and admit it was his selfishness that had dragged Marianne out of her milieu and forced her into his - for his own wilful purpose - might have to include details from the Owens days, Better by far to keep his influential friends from knowing he had already failed in his own personal experiment in social engineering. All he had to say, was: 'My wife is indisposed', or 'My wife is unwell' and they would all know what to think, and feel sympathy for him, then he could have the best brought out of him. Bless. Isn't this the one-sided inference Morley Roberts drew when he paid George and Marianne a visit and noted the dirty boots under the sofa?
4) An habitual drunk was not seen as a victim of substance dependency; they were viewed as someone morally weak, indulging in the behaviour of an inferior being with a weakness of the mind and flesh, lacking in social breeding and self-control - and probably indicative of a person from evolutionary backward stock. Special opprobrium was reserved for a woman who drank to excess, because women are supposed to be better than men on the moral, self-control level. Women are still expected to not succumb to temptations of the flesh - after all, God gave us the wombs because He clearly couldn't trust men with childbearing duties. This means we have always to act better than, and to accept being treated worse than, you chaps. So it goes I suppose.
5) Alcoholism was (inaccurately) viewed as entirely self-inflicted - after all, no-one holds the glass to the alcoholic's lips, do they? Who could blame a husband for the morally degenerate behaviour of his foolish wife if she turned to drink? In fact, wouldn't he be the one to warrant the sympathy, and not her? Isn't that the typical biographer's stance? Poor George - it's always Poor George. Isn't the party line: He did the right thing in ditching her; she was dragging him down to her level and interfering with his Art. Wouldn't any right man do the same'...? Darwin might have slapped him manfully on the back; Schopenhauer would have nodded, philosophically - much as philosophers do. Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer would have cringed. In an age when women could be institutionalised for so-called deviant behaviour such as dysmennorhoea, being orgasmic and wanting to walk out minus a bonnet, any woman embarrassing her nearest and dearest by daring to succumb to substance dependency faced exile of a real kind, for life and not just for a gap year bumming round the States. In reality, you could be as drunk as a skunk 24/7, parade around in the nude and off your face on laudanum all the live-long day as long as you kept it behind closed doors - much as did the Empress of India, herself. Public displays of loss of control - such as those experienced by epileptics - were what scandalised your Victorians: Marianne's epilepsy caused a public display of loss of control: George was a Victorian.
6) Who was there to argue with it? Who was there who could stand up for Marianne? William was dead; Algernon was unlikely to disagree with Big Brother, busy rewriting history. To coin a phrase George used about Edith, Alg knew which side his bread was buttered.
7) George did not take kindly to being thwarted in anything - remember, the word he used on Marianne when reporting her death in the faked Diary entry of March 1st was 'balked'; chosen to make it look like he wrangled with Marianne over her behaviour, but lost the contest to 'Fate' - that old Get Out of Jail Free card he liked to play. Failure to cooperate; things not going his way; expressions of ideas with which he disagreed... a control freak is a control freak is a control freak. Marianne's health was beyond his control and so he began to resent the time and money these cost him - he knew she was an incurable invalid, but he did not want to waste his valuable reading and writing time on her. Art was his calling and how he resented any diversion from it! But, it was his moral weakness and selfishness that did for their relationship every bit as much as her illnesses. George framed what ailed her as 'alcoholism' to deflect his moral responsibility and to stop his smart friends (and posterity) from thinking, 'What a cad - he should have stood by her.' However: what a cad you were - you should have stood by her, Mr Gissing. 

Berthe Morisot (the artist's true love) With a Bouquet of Violets
by Edouard Manet 1872

I have this image in my head of George sitting down one day and making a very cool-headed decision to reject Marianne because what he put in did not equal what he would ever be able to take out. He could not work and nurse her; she was not progressing in the way he wanted her to by any of the indicators he used to judge her; she was not breeding material; she may not even have been sexual outlet material (if her scrofula had disfigured her face and body - though the eruptions had remission periods). To put it plainly, she had outlived her usefulness. The great social engineering experiment had failed and George wanted to move on. This young man so used to winning prizes, so sure he was cut out for glory, so vexed at being balked or thwarted, so lacking in inner resources - did he fear he might wither away under constant exposure to the person who personified everything that he failed at?

There is, of course, the chance George genuinely (if mistakenly) thought Marianne was a drunkard. I think there was a sort of arrogance to early George that assumed he was always right about things, and this is why he distanced himself so fiercely from his failures. This is a feature of his single-minded ambition to succeed in academic attainment, but this drive was not all it was cracked up to be in the real world - with real people. When he began to suspect life with Marianne was going to be too much of a challenge, he would be on the lookout for things to hold against her (his nit-picking with Edith is a heads-up to this sort of malarkey). Letters to Algernon show him becoming increasingly hard and selfish - more worried about himself than her. This would become a vicious circle - the more he found to criticize in her the more he criticized, and the more he thought of Marianne as a rebel if she did not comply. He seems to have crossed a line when he wrote to Algernon saying he had locked her in the house to stop her going out (January 1882) - and, yet, he never says she put up a fight or argued with him or slandered him or complained. And there is no evidence in the Letters to suggest drunkenness was the cause of her 'balking' him. She does not appear to have 'balked' him with malice aforethought or intent to annoy - because he would have told us if she was in any way 'uppity'. Uppity women were not George's thing (see Marianne; Edith; all landladies; Maman; Madge and her devotion to her God; Ellen, when it suited her; most women, in fact). She fussed over the right gloves with her costume; she wanted to go out to meet friends; she was miserable and unhappy and wanted to convert to Catholicism; she went shopping when he forbade it. This is not the work of a dissipated alcoholic hell-bent on securing another drink! When she lived apart from him, she associated with women he didn't like. This is an ordinary woman wanting to be free to make her own choices about the most mundane of things and to have some autonomy. By his disapproval and controlling actions, he lays claim to be morally entitled to make Marianne's decisions for her. Biographers are the ones who frame Marianne's small attempts at freedom of choice as examples of wantonness and dissipation without acknowledging the unreasonableness of George's treatment of her. George hated to be thwarted with anything, and so a woman who did not comply with his regime would be a threat to his fragile male egotism. He was an egotist as much as an egoist!

A Portrait of Madame Levy
by Edouard Manet 1881

The Letters are dotted with references to Marianne's health problems: her face, eyes and arm were affected by what was probably the scrofula he tells us she contracted in childhood. She also suffered from rheumatism and insomnia and the more systemic problems relating to the scrofula mean Marianne suffered a good deal of pain. Scrofula can spread around the body via the lymph system more info to affect most of the major organs as variants of TB. One of the most devastating variants is meningeal TB more info, which may been what gave Marianne epileptic seizures. This form of TB affects the sites of the pineal, thalamus, hypothalamus and pituitary glands in the brain, leading to systemic problems producing tumour-like growths that damage delicate structures and impede function.

'Epilepsy' is an umbrella term for a series of brain wave events, rather than a single condition. The episodes of unconsciousness and insensibility in public places brought about by the convulsions Marianne suffered would likely have had a fugue state - a build-up to the actual fit - and a post-fit phase of automatism both producing a wide variety of signs and symptoms many of which, like the fits themselves, might be mistaken for drunkenness. Because neuroscience was in its infancy, knowledge of the nervous system, especially to the lay person, was basic. George might not even have realised the convulsions belonged to a specific diathesis in its own right, requiring very specific treatment and management. He could have misinterpreted episodes of insensibility as signs of drunkenness and so might the neighbours and shopkeepers in the areas where they lived.

Marianne had been unwell ever since George first met her in Manchester, when she was about sixteen or seventeen. For years, there had been a debate in the medical profession about the causes and prognosis of both scrofula and epilepsy: some thought the former was a stand-alone disorder; others saw it (rightly) as a precursor to systemic tuberculosis. The latter was taken as a sign of moral turpitude. I think the condition of her physical state was one of the things that attracted George to her, but ultimately, repelled him. George's brother, William, died in April 1880, and George would have known about the debate connecting scrofula to phthisis. His father had died of some chest weakness, too, and it was believed TB ran in families. In 2010 click a familial link was discovered for pulmonary TB (phthisis aka consumption).

In the connection George made, he might have seen all Marianne's sufferings and decided he wanted to abandon her so as he could avoid TB himself. Her declining health both exasperated and frightened him. The monitoring of his health was a life-long preoccupation and despite lying to Gabrielle about it, George suffered many of the signs of impending consumption: bouts of colds, 'flu, coughs, sore throats, fevers, and malaise. Finally, there came the diagnosis of phthisis that he was dreading, back in the days when he was married to Edith. Earlier, knowing Marianne was scrofulous might have alerted him to the fact he was living closely with a disease that he rightly feared and so getting rid of her was simple act of primeval self-interest.


Portrait of Eva Gonzales (Berthe's rival in love)
by Edouard Manet 1870

Weird as it might seem today, tuberculosis was once seen as a style statement. Consumptive adults were usually thin, pale, ethereal, with deep-set, limpid pools for eyes, prone to swoonings and emotional crises at the sight of the sublime - if they could pluck up the energy to respond. At least, that's the Pre-Raphaelite and bohemian version. The fad for 'consumptive chic' - young anorectic men and women, tiny-boned, pale, thin, wan - was associated with asceticism and aestheticism. (George was very afraid of getting fat and seems to have, at times, intentionally kept himself underweight.) He subscribed to the adoration of this ideal - the look of a starving waif  reminiscent of Mimi in 'La Bohème' would have suited him down to the ground. Gabrielle was a slight and slender-framed damsel, but it's difficult to assess Edith from the one photo I've seen. I suspect she was quite a bit shorter than George, and she looks slender in the snap of her looking slightly grumpy (she had a lot to be grumpy about IMO). A strapping lass of the order of Totty Nancarrow would have eaten George for breakfast - did he not say somewhere he really liked Totty? (Pun intended haha  - Totty is English slang terminology for sexy girls.) Anyway, finding Marianne, a tiny bird of a girl, vulnerable and aflutter at his attentions must have seemed like a dream come true for Manchester Uni's Quixotic Lothario.

Portrait of Berthe Morisot Reclining
by Edouard Manet 1873

In the absence of the missing diaries biographers look to the fiction George produced (in spite of him advising against this very thing) for the details of these phase of his life and his dalliance with love and gratified erotic desire. However, let us look slightly to the side - to one of his heroes, Dostoevsky and The Insulted and Injured (sometimes also called Humiliated and Insulted) of 1861. First serialised in monthly instalments in the fortnightly periodical 'Vremya', it in part tells the story of a poor young orphan of the streets who is prevented from being a prostitute when the hero, Vanya, rescues her from the clutches of an evil procuress. (Note: a 'person of the street' in UK English idiom is not a prostitute as in 'streetwalker'; it is someone who is homeless.) The girl's name is Elena - Vanya suggest she give herself a new name to mark the difference between the old life and the new - and she chooses Nell as her new name. Nell suffers from epilepsy. Vanya takes her to his room and looks after her - no hanky-panky (Vanya is an intellectual and all-round good egg) - and she thrives. Vanya begins to teach her the ways of a middle-class life with help from his love interest, a girl who is marrying someone else. Nell responds well, helps the plot along with some homely wisdom and housekeeping skills before an untimely death from heart failure. What a coincidence, I hear you say. I can imagine George reading this in his Owens days and hoping some young Elena/Helen might drop into his lap just waiting to be rebranded as a Nell... And, we know George read it: in a letter of November 4th 1889, he recommends it to Eduard Bertz. read the novel for free here


The Railway by Edouard Manet 1873

Marianne's health seems to have deteriorated fairly quickly in her time living with George, requiring from him strength of character, a bucket-load of empathy and some heroic unselfishness. None of these, alas were George's strong suits. It's plain to see Marianne was the 'behind every successful man there stands a woman' kind of a gal: when she was on holiday with William in Wilmslow, she had to send George a reminder to water the plants and information about where to find his socks. This is very much what George cried out for - a mother-figure (as HG Wells put it); a home-maker with benefits, who made no demands on him whatsoever. In a middle-class world, a husband would never be expected to nurse a sick wife - all that gunge to clear up and the endless giving out of sympathy, and the sheer effort of trying to come up with practical solutions to physical problems. Every illness Marianne evidenced must have reinforced his general uselessness. The deal was supposed to be that the wife looked after the husband - this role reversal I suspect undermined George's innate sense of masculine superiority. This led him to resent Marianne and think in disciplinarian terms when his rational, inflexible, inept approach failed. To be fair, a young man who has led a sheltered life in the real world, and who focuses on the (male) Greeks for guidance in matters of married bliss has no practical skills to bring to the table of altruism. George focused too much on the higher notions of life and less on the fundamentals that might have helped him organise his responses to Marianne' sufferings. And, he had the selfish genie living in his soul - never a good tenant to my lily-livered do-gooding-philanthropic-once-a-hippie-always-a-hippie mind. Added to that must have been the feeling he had sacrificed too much to gain too little.

Gabrielle described him as impractical and useless in even trivial, mundane mini crises, so the burden of having a human disaster to deal with most days must have been a threat to his mental equilibrium. There is an old saying (I think I read it first in Samuel Richardson's 'Clarissa') that 'Those who can bear great trials generally get them'. George provides the exception to that rule.

JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 36 FOR

PART TWO - and that contemptible police sergeant

Commonplace 34   George & The Story He Did Write      PART THREE

In Commonplaces 31-33 I suggest the version we have of Marianne Helen aka Nell's death is a largely a work of fiction manufactured by George to manipulate posterity's view of the part he played in her life and sad end. After all, what was the world he left behind after his own death to make of a man who abandons a sick wife to her own devices? Not very British; not very noble. In order to manipulate our perceptions of the shameful aspects of both his nature and his actions, George set out to paint a picture of his first wife as a self-destructive dissipated wastrel whose self-inflicted inevitable decline led to a lonely, sordid death. Unfortunately, Gissing biographers have been only too happy to repeat the lies; furthermore, they seek to justify every wrong thing he did, and frame this in terms of how Marianne/Nell (or, subsequently Edith) ruined his life.

George wrote this in his Critical Life of Charles Dickens: 'As soon as a writer sits down to construct a narrative, to imagine human beings, or adapt those he knows to changed circumstances, he enters a world distinct from the actual, and, call himself what he may, he obeys certain laws, certain conventions, without which the art of fiction would not exist. Be he a true artist, he gives us pictures which represent his own favourite way of looking at life; each is the world in little, and the world as he prefers it. So that, whereas execution may be rightly criticized from the common point of view, a master's general conception of the human tragedy or comedy must be accepted as that without which his work could not take form.'

Found Drowned by George Frederick Watts 1848-50

On March 2nd 1888, George returned to 16, Lucretia Street to bid farewell to Marianne - though, by now, she was 'H'. As I suggest in my last post, I don't believe the account of March 1st is a contemporaneous entry but a rewritten piece put down on paper much later, possibly when George first lived with Gabrielle - not to save his third wife's feelings (as some suggest) but because, with the spectre of his own death haunting him, he had the time to reflect on his literary legacy and how he might stage-manage it for posterity. The fact he dehumanizes Marianne on March 1st by referring to her as a 'poor thing' and a 'poor creature', and yet on March 2nd mentions her as 'H' reinforces this belief.

Love and Death by GF Watts 1885

'Friday, March 2. In morning arranged my books roughly on the shelves; during papering etc. they have been lying in a great heap on the floor. In afternoon went to Lucretia Street, and saw her in the coffin. The face seemed more familiar to me. Gave Mrs Sherlock the promised £3; funeral will be Monday at 2 o'clock. A daughter accompanied me to a low public house, where the landlady had a pawn-ticket for H's wedding-ring, security for a debt of 1/9d. I paid the debt, and redeemed the ring, from the broker's. Cut a little hair from the poor head, - I scarcely know why, alas! 

Here, we have the symbolic act of putting his house in order. It adds weight to my claim the sham manifesto ('Henceforth I never cease to bear testimony' etc) is more like a wake-up call to get on with it. As I wrote in Commonplace 33, his March 1st letter to Algernon does not include this cod manifesto, but talks about having to get to work on clearer tasks - I suggest these were making money and not frittering away time. And, trying to find a new wife. This would explain the Miss Curtis incident, where he may have proposed marriage to the young daughter of his Eastbourne tobacconist in April 1888.
Putting his books in order after a period of chaos (the decorators were in) would normally have been a pleasure for George - a chance to idle through the volumes and relive those familiar smells he is so often quoted on Google as enjoying. Books is disarray must have seemed like the library of his mind was disturbed; a reflection on regaining the order of things externally was a metaphor for calming the interior turmoil brought about by Marianne's death. As stated in recent posts, I believe George and Marianne enjoyed a mutually loving relationship of sorts right up to her death. Biographers might deny this but it explains the depth of his grief reaction in the coming months. In the March  2nd entry, he is not attempting to manage our perceptions; he is downbeat, already beginning the grieving process.

Orpheus and Eurydice by GF Watts 1890

'The face seemed more familiar to me.' When George first viewed Marianne's body on March 1st he writes in this contrived account that he 'scarce recognized ' her face. My view is that the claim made on March 1st that he hasn't seen her in three years is false; seeing her now, when both scrofula and rigor mortis have done their work shocked him to the core because he had seen her fairly recently, and the change was a shock.
Scrofula is the endocrine system (lymphatic system) form of tuberculosis. It is characterised by large, swollen lesions growing on lymph nodes and in glands; as the lymphatic system serves the whole body, these become easily transferred to every other organ in the body. The face and throat are rich in lymph nodes, so the disease often sets up most noticeably in the face and throat, causing eruptions of lymph (clear cell-rich fluid) that scab over and scar.
George would have been familiar with this very visual condition, both in Marianne and in any of his father's customers. It was a common disease, little understood, incurable and what treatment there was often did more harm than good. I think the rigor mortis might have presented him with the more terrible shock, reminding him of his father's corpse. If the basic time-frame of the March 1st entry is correct, he viewed Marianne's body about 24 hours after she died. Rigor sets in about 2-4 hours after death and can take up to 12 hours to produce the 'rigid state' which then subsides after up to another 18 hours. It is caused by the body not producing adenosine triphosphate (ATP) - this is the substance that makes the muscles supple. The speed of the process is affected by a number of factors: state of the body at death; cause of death, gender, ambient temperature, if the body been covered over. The small muscles of the face, neck and shoulders are the first to be transformed. What are termed as 'last offices' are performed to prevent the corpse looking too affected by these chemical changes, and, in Marianne's day, these would have included tying-up of the jaw with a bandage or strip of cloth (knotted on top of the head) to keep the mouth from gaping wide, and the placing of pennies over the eyes to keep them closed. If we assume Marianne died in a cold room (which might have slowed the process), and if she wasn't found until the rigid state process had started, George may very well have viewed her with her mouth gaping and eyes wide open - a dreadful prospect - as there would be no possibility at that stage of the mouth and eyes being closed. By the afternoon of March 2nd, the worst of the rigor would have subsided, and Marianne would have returned more or less to a more peaceful prospect - hence George's entry of her looking more familiar.  
more info here

The Recording Angel by GF Watts 1890

'A daughter accompanied me to a low public house, where the landlady had a pawn-ticket for H's wedding-ring, security for a debt of 1/9d. I paid the debt, and redeemed the ring, from the broker's.' It would be easy to take this at face value, and this seems to be how biographers view it. An estranged wife pawning her wedding ring might suggest to some that she had no fond attachment to it - or her marriage. It is also used against Marianne as a means to demonstrate she was only interested in his money and had no regard for him or their relationship, and, being desperate to fund her alleged dissipated lifestyle, had sunk so low as to pawn the symbol of the love he had for her and the sacrifice he made for her at Owen's. If you want to blame Marianne, this is your script.

A moment now to think of the place the pawn shop had in the lives of the poor. Only those who have never had recourse to use one think they are a sign of poverty and feckless financial incompetence. Rich and poor people use them, some seeing it as a way of saving. And, valuable items in hock are not subject to tax as the money given for them is generally less than the face value. For the poor in Marianne's day, when no-one loaned money in the absence of equity, the pawn shop was a way to eke out funds when times were hard or when unexpected financial outlays called for instant cash. There are more ways of doing it now, but there are still pawn-brokers and shops where you can leave property and draw cash on its value. If Marianne was doing this it will not have been unusual and is no indicator she was funding 'bad' habits, or that she was feckless with money and frittered it away. However, bearing in mind Marianne's epilepsy led to her being sometimes unconscious or unable to look after herself, it makes perfect sense to put a precious ring in hock - where it will be safe from thieving hands. If the people with whom she shared the house were light-fingered, perhaps it was best kept out of their reach.
So, we have this old pub landlady of dubious provenance - according to George. Perhaps she was an old friend of Marianne's who was less than welcoming when the errant husband turned up. It seems Marianne had pawned the ring and then gave the pledge ticket as security on a loan of 1/9d - possibly a lot less than the value of the pledge. Maybe this landlady was disappointed he turned up to reclaim it - if she knew Marianne was dead, she might have thought she could reclaim the ring herself. The points I am making, are, there is more than one explanation for Marianne pawning the ring, and the fact she made use of pawn-broking at all was perfectly normal behaviour for working class people with no access to other formal forms of credit.




Now, let's take a sideways step: Have you ever noticed how what are termed 'McGuffins' loom large in the constructing of Marianne's narrative? In the Owens days we have two: the sewing machine and George's father's watch. The writer of the Black Letters - John George - mentions he helps hump a machine down some stairs. What sort of machine and who owned the stairs, he doesn't say. What became of the machine, we don't know. This is the paltry evidence used by biographers to state emphatically, that generous George shelled out for a sewing machine for gold-digger Marianne. How on earth does she figure in this? How do we know it was a sewing machine? Black's exact words are: '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, or any mortal thing, and thus prevented the thing from running down, & making a jelly of the clod. Only one limb was broken ie of the machine.'  How is this about George at all? We have no idea who owned the machine, what sort of equipment it was, why Black was involved, why he was telling George, or any piece of information that in any way affects Marianne. Now, Morley Roberts in Henry Maitland says George bought her a new sewing machine. Is this the origin of the sewing machine myth? It comes from the man who made up a good deal of information about his friendship with George (for all sorts of reasons). I suspect it is false because George, being a canny Yorkshireman, would not waste good money on new when he could have acquired a perfectly serviceable second-hand one; after all, Manchester was full of them as women had few alternative means of earning a living. And, sewing machines could be rented, so why the need to buy a new one? Something that makes me doubt this Black reference is about a sewing machine, is: unless the two men were total wimps, a treadle sewing machine is not a particularly heavy piece of kit. The actual base is the heaviest part, being wrought iron and a bit of wood. If two chaps couldn't bring this down some stairs, it's a sad indictment of late Victorian masculine prowess. And, if they didn't have the wit to detach the machine from the base to make it lighter... so, I suspect they were not carrying a sewing machine. It is certainly not hard evidence Marianne was given any sort of sewing machine by anyone. However, if you follow the view that she was the reason George stole money, you might need there to be something for him to spend it on. Likewise, Marianne is blamed for George selling his father's watch - which is ludicrous and there again, done to make her look bad and offer evidence he was under some sort of sorceress's spell. There is simply no evidence for it - well not in all the published materials I have read. Did he sell the watch? Did he lose it? Was it stolen off him? Did he give it away? Who knows? 

Study for The Court of Death by GF Watts 1896

 We return to the March 2nd Diary entry:
'Cut a little hair from the poor head, - I scarcely know why, alas!' We know George was a big fan of hair and saw long, luxuriant hair as a healthy sign of female sexuality. Marianne's hair was long and dark, very much what George found attractive - blondes do not figure much in his characterisations of women. The Victorian fad for post-death hair mementos is well-known - rings, brooches, necklaces and even picture for walls were made of the deceased's tresses. Taking this small token is typical of a man who wants to remember a love - what he is going to do with it is probably why he wrote the second part of the sentence. Did he keep it safe in his person papers and effects or was it discarded at some later date? That is immaterial: he took it and lets us know he did.


Time, Death and Judgement by GF Watts 1900

On Saturday, March 3rd 1888, George wrote this in a letter to Algernon:

'You must not exaggerate the painfulness of the mere business. I always feel very much at home amid those surroundings of squalor. The people at the house I have found good honest creatures, & and I have done my best to repay them for their trouble. I shall not accompany them to the funeral, which is on Monday, at Tooting, but I have paid for their mourning dresses &c, & with the strange delight of such people in mortuary affairs they are more than contented.'

As George did not attend William's funeral, it is not surprising he could not attend Marianne's. There may well have been a religious element to her ceremony as Marianne seems to have been religious - even earning George's scorn once for thinking of converting to Catholicism. As for the line, 'I always feel very much at home amid those surroundings of squalor.' - Lordy knows what this means as it is the total antithesis of everything he had ever - or would ever - say. You wouldn't catch Henry Ryecroft mouthing those words! I presume he is speaking figuratively, as a writer.  

He goes on...

'Some day I will picture that bedroom as it looked when I first entered.' Now, in the Letters vol three, there is a footnote indicating this room gets a mention in chapters 8 and 37 in the descriptions of Mrs Candy's squalid room in The Nether World (the book George wrote immediately after Marianne's death). Try as I might, I cannot see any connection whatsoever between the room Marianne died in and the one Mrs Candy is situated in. Poor Mrs Candy lives in abject squalor - no pictures, no poetry books, no scripture texts... the description George gives in the Diary for March 1st bears no relation to the Nether World and Mrs Candy. Again, biographers' propaganda against Marianne rears its ugly head. Mrs Candy's room is nothing like what Mrs Sherlock - 

that 'good honest creature' provided for her lodger. Go read for yourself, and ask why the editors of Letters Vol 3 have dropped this fantastic connection into our minds - if not to frame Marianne and sully her name? It's conspiracy stuff - I would call it Orwellian, if I had less regard for Mr Orwell.  

'I saw her yesterday in the coffin, & had a wonderful sense of rest and peace in looking at her. No more wretched blind struggling for her, no more suffering under the world's curses.'  Marianne had endured a lifetime of struggle against the various aliments that eventually killed her: if you map all of the signs and symptoms George has listed in his letters, it is feasible Marianne suffered from systemic TB resulting from her childhood scrofula, such as: Pott's disease of the spine; phthisis; possible meningeal TB that could have caused her epilepsy way back in childhood; ocular TB that resulted in her eyes being operated on; possible gynaecological problems. The epilepsy itself guaranteed she was an outcast to anyone ignorant of the disorder. The world's curses were poverty, loneliness and the degradation of being an abandoned wife. That she struggled for so long was truly heroic.

'For me there is yet work to do, & this memory of wretchedness will be an impulse such as few men posses.'  This is not the quotidian sham manifesto I believe was fabricated much later than George claims as his entry for March 1st. The 'memory of wretchedness' I think refers to the state of his finances and, therefore, his future as a writer. If no-one read his books in his lifetime, how was he to stand side-by-side with George Meredith or Thomas Hardy? If he still had not achieved glory for his Art - after so many books published - then what was the point of the Owens debacle? I see this as George saying it was time to stop being a dilettante and to start producing great fiction.

'I had to redeem the wedding ring - first from the publican who held the pawnticket for a small sum, then from the pawnbroker himself.' Is this George looking for sympathy - 'She pawned my ring, Alg - she didn't really love me after all' sort of thing? Or, is it his relationship with Marianne now come full-circle? It started with a determination to have her as his wife and ended with him holding the symbolic ring to keep as a token of that union and his love for her.  

My contention is that George loved Marianne more than he ever loved anyone else. His grief at her death - which quickly metamorphosed into depression - is not the reaction of a man who thinks he is well rid (as they say in Yorkshire). It is the grieving of a man who has to accept the love of his life has gone forever. He desperately wanted to be loved by a woman - and this is why he thrashes desperately about with Eastbourne ingenues and friends of his sister Nelly's. Eventually, he committed a terrible error and foisted himself on Edith Underwood - poor, poor girl.

George paid the Sherlocks to represent him at the funeral. We can only hope they honoured their sacred duty and gave Marianne an appropriate and dignified send off.

The Tooting Cemetery where Marianne is buried. 

George paid 6 guineas for the funeral and £3 for mourning clothes and accoutrements. When George wrote to Algernon on August 8th 1881 he mentioned the gravestone put up for his brother, William: 'I am glad to hear you like the memorial which has been put up at Wilmslow. The very plainest & simplest in such cases is always the best, if there must be one at all. I personally should prefer none at all, but that is a matter of opinion & sentiment.'  We learn from the editors' footnotes that William's gravestone read: 'William Whittington Gissing - Died April 16th 1880 - aged 20 years.' As far as we know, George did not pay for a headstone for Marianne; this has been left to her well-wishers to provide. The cemetery is in Blackshaw Road, Lambeth. Her grave number is 731 3J CONS.



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