Commonplace 135  George & Some of His Ilk vs. Mrs Grundy.

If Douglas Adams' ground-breaking The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy click teaches us anything, it is that everything is meshed together by interconnectedness. So it is with Mrs Grundy.

Phryne by Jean-Leon Gerome (1861)

Of all the women in George's life, it could have been Mrs Grundy who gave him the most grief. He often mentions how flabbergasting she is. Such was her power over him that he wrote, but destroyed unpublished, a novel entitled Mrs Grundy's Enemies; no doubt he considered himself in their number. A quick squint at her Wikipedia page click proves how influential she was and how she continues to vex writers in particular. So, who was this femme fatale who so tied George up in knots that his mojo was comprehensively flummoxed?

She first gets a mention in Speed The Plough, a play by Thomas Morton (1764-1838), but she is only present as a 'ghost at the feast' reference and does not make an actual appearance. She is the personification of what is proper and right, and all human doings are judged by her pronouncements. She is an expert on etiquette and social manners - with particular reference to what is or is not, morally decent - and is the standard by which all actions can/should be judged, mostly by those who cannot set their own parameters. Thomas Morton for some time attended a school in Soho Square in central London. Soho Square was a thorn in George's side because he thoroughly disapproved of Marianne aka Nell visiting there to meet her friends. This was probably at what is now known as The House of St Barnabas, but was originally named as The House of Charity, a place of support for the homeless or those in need of support.

The House of Charity opened in 1861, having moved from a building round the corner. 

Of course, George makes this place sound like a hell-hole full of filth and ill-repute but it was a place run by followers of the Church of England, and William Gladstone was a regular supporter. In fact, it was started by The Oxford Movement, and offered a range of services to families and individuals who were in want: 'The House of Charity described itself as one of the few institutions in London where men, women and children of all walks of life, were able to 'apply for aid without a loss of self-respect'. Temporary guests of the House included 'all who found themselves in a condition of friendlessness and destitution that is not the manifest result of idleness or vice.' 

Soho Square was also where the Catholic St Patrick's Church is situated. George was highly critical of Marianne when she said she wanted to take up the Catholic faith - he thought this was a sign she was mad (this says so much more about George than it ever could about Marianne). Perhaps it was the combination of access to a caring, social support system and its potential for influence that spooked him. Add to this the pastoral care offered by the Catholic faith, perhaps he realised his sway over Nell was threatened. At this time, she was seriously ill and receiving all manner of medical interventions. No doubt she gained more compassion from her friends and supporters than she ever did from her husband; we know he was annoyed when her supporters turned up at his door and told him off about his treatment of her. Biographers assume these women were common termagants but maybe they were the equivalent of social workers who visited mean and heartless husbands who didn't treat their wives well. And Marianne could have been offering support when she could to others in similar or worse situations as she found herself. Perhaps the people who supported her viewed George as a wife abuser and encouraged Marianne to leave him when she finally made the break that took her to live in Brixton. 

The entrance to St Patrick's Church click

From 'Speed the Plough', Mrs Grundy reappears in Samuel Butler's 'Erewhon', an 1872 novel about an imaginary place click, not quite a sci fi but more than a fairy tale. Here, Butler turns the name Grundy into an anagram, but Victorians loved word puzzles and puns, and so there was no real mystery. She is described as an 'incomprehensible goddess' - which is exactly what I aspire to be. Samuel Butler was interesting cove who spent time sheep farming in New Zealand, and who loved to live in isolated study of Homer.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was wealthy and so had a few more options than George enjoyed, but they had quite a lot in common. Both were fond of the Classics, both wrote about sex and the Victorians, and both did battle with Mrs Grundy. Butler's later title. The Way of All Flesh (1903) had the double-meaning likely to confuse those hoping to find a saucy read, much as The Odd Women and The Private Papers of.... probably did. Any disappointed readers would have perhaps taken themselves of to specialist bookshops or purveyors of artistic prints - copies of My Secret Life by Anonymous - not the current outfit using that name!! - were available from 1888. This work eventually went to almost a dozen volumes, and is now regarded as a classic of Victorian literature, much more informative of its age than anything produced by George and Mr Butler. To whet your appetite, if you haven't been there already (I know I have!), go to click. We may assume George didn't know it was written by someone who coined the name 'Walter' as a pseudonym, unless he wanted his son to be associated with it.

Erewhon was mistaken as a sequel to Bulwer-Lytton's block-busting Vril: The Power of the Coming Race (1871) - another dodgy title - an early sci-fi/fantasy novel. This misplaced association made it into a best seller, but when the truth was revealed - that Erewhon had nothing to do with Bulwer-Lytton - sales of Butler's book bombed. The fickle reading public, eh? Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) might be remembered as a writer, or even as the originator of phrases such as 'the great unwashed', and 'the pen is mightier than the sword' (though that may have originally been a typo haha) but will always be remembered by half the population as a sexual pervert and wife rapist. It would seem he is also famed for having an influence on those believing the Earth is hollow. And he was embraced by the Theosophists. But there was worse to come.

Cock fight by Jean-Leon Gerome 1846. 

Early works by Bulwer-Lytton include several about Romans - The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) was followed the next year by Rienzi, Last of the Roman Tribunes. Now, I don't know much about (anything haha) opera or the Nazis, but I do know Wagner used the book for the basis of his Rienzi and that Hitler said it was his favourite Wagner work, and that it was a huge influence on his political thinking. However unreadable Veranilda is, at least it didn't kick-start the Holocaust.

Of course, the spectre of Mrs Grundy was usually invoked in order to shame people into appearing to be something they were not - which was whatever the norm was that prudes set for themselves and others. The British have a dual personality that lurches from the bawdy to the prudish in all things, but smut and innuendo, and blatant erotica and pornography, have been staples in the British cultural diet since written records could record them, and illustrators were able to work up the visuals.

Pollice Verso by Jean-Leon Gerome 1872 

When Mrs Grundy was busy making folk feel guilty and shameful about sex, what did she say about the other sort of erotica/porn - that is, violence? The Victorian age is famous for the amount of cruelty it tolerated, but it was also the time when cruelty was beginning to sicken all sectors of the community, and sexual exploitation was beginning to affront the sensibilities of the majority. Risible and annoying as she was, Mrs Grundy had a small part to play in that.

Commonplace 134  George & Role Models PART TWO.

We saw in the last post that George made some interesting political acquaintances when he was in America. Through association with feminist and political activist Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska he met Karl Heinzen, a larger than life cove whose name is largely forgotten except in 'revolutionary' circles. He was already an old man when George met him, and the editor of the revolutionary publication 'Der Pionier'. After success with the Abolitionist Movement, Heinzen moved on to feminism, and women's suffrage at a time when German-speaking peers thought suffrage for women would undermine and ultimately destroy, all forms of culture. His advocacy of violent means of attack to settle political matters was not original, having formed part of a new wave of revolution that worked covertly with maximum impact and minimal resources. Nowadays, we refer to that sort of malarkey as terrorism, and Heinzen is now best known for his advocacy of terrorist means to achieve political ends.

Portrait Of A Revolutionary by François Sablet. 1794

The late nineteenth century was a time of worldwide political strife, and though change for the better seemed inevitable, it was very slow in coming. Vast wealth had been made off the backs of the underprivileged and poor, and workers at the bottom of the social pile were exploited and abused. Greed then, as now, ruled supreme. The slow pace of change was down to the controllers refusing to give up their power and control, and the workers hamstrung with no means of standing up to their oppressors. Karl Heinzen had started out wanting to be a poet, but settled for a small voice in European politics as a pamphleteer who published works arguing for better parity between rich and poor. He took his political zeal with him when he emigrated to America. He spoke against slavery, and for the emancipation of the working person, largely via publications and pamphlets. By the time George met him, he had been advocating terrorism for some time click.

click

Here is an abstract of blurb for the article 'Karl Heinzen and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Terrorism' by Daniel Bessner and Michael Stauch click:
Scholars have long recognized the importance of Karl Heinzen's Mord und Freiheit in the history of terrorist thought. Yet the translation most scholars have relied on—1881's Murder and Liberty—is incomplete. Our new translation reveals four elements omitted from the 1881 translation. First, Heinzen conceived of terrorism as a transnational phenomenon. Second, he provided a material justification for terrorist tactics. Third, Heinzen viewed terrorism as both a tool to impel human society to progress and as a “progressive” tool of violence. Finally, he argued in favour of the primary modern tactic of terrorism—the indiscriminate bombing of civilians.

In December 2015, we know a thing or two about terrorism and the 'indiscriminate bombing of civilians'. In George's day, revolution was, if not an everyday occurrence, still a reality, when there was the IRA bombings in London, there were attempts to assassinate Queen Victoria, and the murders in Phoenix Park, Dublin click show how violence was seen as a justifiable means to an end. If you haven't already done so, take a look at Joseph Conrad's 'The Secret Agent' for a ripping yarn about Victorian terrorism click.
Democracy, of course, is the best way to prevent despotism, and the reason terrorism can never serve or represent democracy is that acts of terror are essentially fascistic and undemocratic.

If you are going to be noticed by any of the nineteenth century revolutionaries, they don't come much better than Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Heinzen met the former, and fell out with the latter. Here is a little bit of history click which sheds a lot of light on Heinzen and his beliefs and methods and is written by Engels. It is a excoriating critique of Heinzen's woolly thinking (see below on Women!). Having read the Woman book, I am apt to agree with Friedrich. Here is a neat summing up in one paragraph that seems to nail him:
With Herr Heinzen, they have neither sense nor reason, because they take the form of quite arbitrarily conceived, obtusely bourgeois visions of putting the world to rights; because there is no mention of a connection between these measures and historical development; because Herr Heinzen is not in the least concerned about the material feasibility of his proposals; because it is not his aim to formulate industrial necessities but on the contrary to overturn them by decree.

Lenin speaking before the workers of the Putilov factory in Petrograd
by Isaac Izrailevich Brodsky 1870

Apart from annoying genuine radicals and dabbling in the promotion of violence, Heinzen hitched his horse to the wagon of feminism. Uninvited, of course, and incompetently. He wrote the wonderfully-titled 'The Rights of Women and the Sexual Relations', click which really underestimated the struggle women have, and over-values gallantry as a male default that will automatically kick in when the day comes for women to assume their freedom/emancipation. Heinzen claims women can't be fully emancipated while any man lives in bondage or oppression, whilst refusing to give a timeline for the ending of this situation. He urges women to support men in their struggle to win their rights, because then men will return the favour and help women win their liberty from oppression. Like that would ever happen haha! It is easy to mock the piece, as the author has what can only be described as misplaced well-meaning intentions. But these are still as sexist as any other form of alleged feminist rhetoric of the time, because we still have the patronising suggestion that women are natural home makers who 'love gee-gaws' and who do not make natural murderers. Of course, it all depends on what you mean by 'natural'! And what they've done to warrant homicide.

The preface to this edition of 1891 click mentions Ms Zakrzewska and her 1860 work 'Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor' (sic), click which was, and I quote 'A book that ought to be read by anybody interested in the solution to the woman question'. The solution to the woman question reminds me of the old feminist joke that goes something like: If they can put a man on the moon, why can't they put them all there?'.

 

Neal Armstrong - the first of many??

When George came back to the UK and started mixing with intellectuals who dabbled in politics, imagine how impressive it would have sounded when he told them he knew the likes of Garrison, Zakrzewska and Heinzen. Perhaps he laid it on thickly to create a buzz around his travels and time in the wilderness, after bigging up his time on the mean streets of Manchester, in the role of a Robin Hood figure redistributing wealth in his own, small way. His time as a political activist was short and not particularly influential. But he kept a copy of Heinzen's 'The Rights of Women' on his bookshelf, probably catalogued under 'humour'. It resides with George's Pierre Coustillas now, which somehow seems fitting.

Commonplace 133  George & Role Models. PART ONE.

One of the many enigmas of George Gissing is that though he mixed occasionally with fairly left wing revolutionary figures, none of the belief that things had to change in favour of democracy rubbed off on him. In fact, as the modern Conservatives and Neocons know (see Commonplace 121) his political trajectory was unremittingly downhill towards the right wing. Why is this? Was it the throwback thinking of one out of step with his times who couldn't square the circle of modern life, and so scurried back to ancient despotic regimes - the Romans - for his moral compass? Or was it something more personal? Was the experience of being a convicted thief who had served time such a personal burden to carry, and did it afflict him like stigmata marking him out to himself as inferior, when he compared himself to the people he wanted to impress? Was that few weeks in prison enough to reduce him to a craven heap who had to out-conservative the conservatives in order to prove his worth to them? Or to himself? Hmm.

A George lookalike??

George's father proved himself a liberal with strong sympathy for the disadvantaged. Politics gave Mr Gissing Snr a platform to demonstrate his concern for disadvantaged women - girls who had fallen through the cracks because they lacked support systems. Perhaps George arrived in Manchester fired with liberal zeal to do good, but it soon waned and dribbled away. Some do-gooders expect gratitude and recognition for their good deeds. Maybe if George crowed about his social work people might ask awkward questions about how he was funding his philanthropy. Perhaps it had all been guilt at his father's death that led him to want to carry on the good work in his father's footsteps. The legend has it that he only broke the law to help someone in want, which is a massive rationalization: getting a job and earning the same trifling amount that he stole was a viable option to one brimming over with energy and capability. Maybe he thought the class he aspired to join settled their financial problems by stealing from others? Maybe they do haha. Still, the greatest 'sin' he committed was getting caught... according to those who choose to let him off the hook and blame Marianne aka Nell for his crime spree. That's spree - he stole many times, and it wasn't just money.

Apart from his father, who were the other good influences he might have chosen as role models but didn't, but was able to make some use of?

Proposed Monument to the Peterloo fallen designed by Artist and Satirist George Cruikshank  (1792-1878) - it's weird to think he was alive the same time as George. click for more.

Manchester, where George went to study in preparation for an academic life, was already famed for its links to political thought. In George's time, you couldn't throw a stick without hitting someone with a revolutionary bent in Manchester, that hotbed of left wing political activism. It had been on the cutting edge of the Rise of Demos for over a hundred years click. Fred Engels had lived and worked in Manchester; the Co-operative movement was started here; the Unitarian Movement was formed in Manchester, and the infamy of the Peterloo Massacre click helped ensure the city and Political Activism would be forever united. Hell, on the road where George once lived there is even a bar called Revolution, so maybe things haven't changed. George's general practitioner, Adolphe Wahltuch, whose practice was just up the road from George's Oxford Road digs, and who probably treated George for syphilis, was a famous dissenter and rebel. Here is his 1907 obituary, so you will see how he was a quietly revolutionary figure who did not let adversity warp his dedication to making a difference to his community:

After prison, George was offered the support of well-wishers - both friends of the family and Manchester people who sympathised with his plight - to start afresh in a new country: America. Boston was to be his destination. It was considered the most civilized city in the US, so he was off to a good start in a place where his natural interests might be appreciated and developed. HG Wells, who got to know George reasonably well, claimed George actually thought up the scheme himself, and volunteered to go, always intending to make it a flying visit. As George always had an inflated opinion of his own capacity to outdo his peers, he may well have thought he could make a killing either financially or in terms of fame, and return from the States in triumph as a total success, his failure at Owens College behind him and his decision to move towards criminal activity vindicated.

Published in Massachusetts c 1850

It was in Boston that he came under the influence of William Lloyd Garrison. Being under Garrison's wing would have been a great opportunity to study politics. He joined the anti-slavery movement when he was 25, and went on to become a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society. After success in that cause, Garrison moved on to the cause of the suffragists. He is also remembered as a celebrated newspaper man, being the editor of pro-abolitionist The Liberator. His anti-slavery stance often brought him close to personal danger, and accusations that he was a traitor. In 1877, Garrison visited England for the last time; George came back from America late that summer, never to set foot across the pond again.

Through Garrison, George met Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska, a physician specialising in paediatric and women's health, at a time when female doctors were rarities, and women's and children's health was not seen as something in need of a specialism. This interesting website click gives an impression of a woman who marched to the beat of her own drum, a pioneer of feminism who was intellectually far superior to most of the men she met, George included. Her grave marker states: Skilful and humane physician. Founder of the New Hampshire Hospital For Women and Children. What a gal.

According to the Heroic Life Volume One, she ran something of a salon with many intellectuals in attendance and George enjoyed himself in this small group, no doubt flagged as the celebrated academic from Manchester, which may or may not have been a good thing - meeting anyone who had intel on his life of crime would have been embarrassing - and who is to say this didn't happen, because something sent him fleeing off from Waltham (See Commonplace 77).

It might be argued that, in relation to these people who made such an impact on their times and who worked for the greater good, the paltry work of a middle-brow English writer seems to pale into insignificance. After all, George had showed such promise both at school and at Owens College, enough for Great Things to be expected of him. What George lacked was commitment - to a cause, an ideal, to the wonder of life in all its infinitely perverse varieties. Should we blame it on the Pessimists, or was George always going to be a fence-sitter? It seems such a waste of potential. However, that is the Joy of George - he speaks for the fence-sitting, pessimistic, non-joiner in who can't summon up enough gumption to follow a cause because he has faith in nothing, not even his own abilities, and wouldn't waste his time on following anyone who might have helped him out of his moral ambiguity.

It was through Ms Zakrzewska that George met another activist, Karl Heinzen, a man so stuffed full of commitment and enthusiasm for change, the write ups couldn't possibly do him justice click. However, not all of George's associates were the sort of role model to be followed. Perhaps some of George's fence-sitting was down to mixing with the likes of Heinzen.

JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO TAKE A SQUINT AT HEINZEN'S MISGUIDED THOUGHTS ON THE REVOLUTION, AND WHAT HE THOUGHT WOMEN NEEDED. THAT'S RIGHT; ANOTHER MAN TELLING US WHAT WE NEED.

Commonplace 132  George & His Contemporaries - Paul Gauguin.

When appraising their contribution to whatever it is that we call their endeavours, writers are usually compared to other writers; George called writing 'Art', and so it is. In a time of such creative ferment as was the late nineteenth century, when all manner of forms of self-expression and creativity were being extended, painters often offer an interesting insight to the prevailing ideas and attitudes of the time. Paul Gauguin, who died in the same year as George, and probably from the same cause, is possibly the most obvious of his contemporaries from the visual Arts to explore. The two had a great deal in common, and maybe both have left behind a similar quality of artistic legacy: not quite top tier, but on the way to it. Just as our man is no George Eliot, and Gauguin is no Vincent van Gogh, for both lacked what might be termed 'true genius', both our George and Paul Gauguin offer much to learn about how artists involve themselves in the noble struggle to make a living from Art, whilst delivery the very best they can do with the talents they have.

Self Portrait 1893

Everyone knows Gauguin's style: his luscious Tahitian girls with their inscrutable faces and exploited nudity, their skimpy sarongs and unselfconscious sexuality, are always popular. We have the idea Gauguin loved the islands he painted; that he was some sort of artistic David Attenborough visiting remote places for inspiration and to bring back visual truths for our edification; we, who will never visit these remote places might learn something of the ethnography of the place, and maybe even something spiritual from the work. Utter tosh, of course. Remember the Slumming in Commonplace 128. George enjoyed and the use he made of his anthropological excursions? Gauguin travelled to Polynesia to pursue subjects for his painting, but was not totally happy there. The Eden-like beauty he expected to find had been adulterated by the intrusion of western capitalism, disease, and resource exploitation click. However, he was galvanized by the women and the simplicity of their sexuality. He returned to France, and worked for a few years increasingly at odds with his peers. By 1893, he had no choice but to return to Polynesia, and spend the last years of his life as something of a local attraction, but impoverished. Money was so tight he had to work as a clerk to make ends meet, and relied on donations from friends to maintain his existence.

There was a Tate Gallery exhibition of Gauguin's work entitled 'Gauguin: Man and Myth' in 2010-11. Its rationale was to suggest Gauguin developed a legend of being a 'noble savage' with innate, primal talents for painting, and he did this so he would be taken as a savant of modernism, and therefore sell a shed-load of paintings. Whereas, in reality, Gauguin was an errant bourgeois capitalist who had abandoned his family to live life of an Artist and who made the most of his talent by mystifying everyone about his early life and an over-valued idea of his own importance. (Sound familiar?) By claiming to have an appreciation of the pagan and primitive of Tahitian society, he could easily be mistaken for a man in touch with spiritual truths about the exotic lives lived there. Many who have admired his work would be surprised to learn he did some of the famous paintings in his Paris studio, between trips to Polynesia.

1889 (and see more at click)

In the UK, the dominance of the formal, staged 'Academy' picture was stifling creativity - fame and payment depended on being approved of in the market place of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Secretly, all Artists who reckon they have as much ability and talent as Turner, or Moore, or Hepworth - even the 'New Brits' who are now really 'Old Brits': immensely rich and irrelevant - want to be accepted into the Summer Show. It's like winning an Oscar. But, the real cutting edge Art is never suitable for a Summer Show unless it reduces itself down to something in a picture frame. Just imagine the struggle Marina Abramovic has fitting her thing into a frame.

It would both naive and wrong to think painters such as van Gogh were not also business people. The letters we have from van Gogh's correspondence with his art dealer brother Theo are full of ideas about marketing the works, and prices and costs of materials. As van Gogh had himself starting out trading in Art, he knew how fashion and financial considerations fuel the Art market. The knock-on effect of this is that dealers often play it safe and stick to what is middle of the road, which makes it difficult for new and unknown Artists to break through, especially if they are attempting something avant garde or challenging. Both van Gogh and Gauguin were up against this sort of brick wall. If we think of the difficulty George experienced in getting his first work published, eventually having to fund publication himself, it's clear that there are correlations between visual Arts and literary Arts, where the work has to pass through an agent as intermediary. It is the same in all the Arts, with safe work much easier to sell and even display, than cutting edge work. Event the Tate having a Gauguin exhibition is a nod to this, being as it was a very safe money-spinning show, and has very little to do with what is going on in Art, now.

PG in 1891 taken by click

Gauguin shared George's fondness for redacting his diaries and jotting journals. Both wanted to build a reputation they chose, rather than let posterity discover their inner workings authentically, from an original source. Gauguin had a keen eye on his legacy, and made many jokes and references to it in his diaries. In around 1886, when he took up pottery, he thought his work was exceptional, but would be too 'artistic' to be understood or sold. Shades of George, here, who was convinced of something similar when his own work didn't sell.

These two share a sensibility that seems contemptuous of women: here is Gauguin:
I work and live more or less alone. That's to say, for a model I have a young girl... aged 14 - weight about 150lbs - who is very good at making a fire, doing the washing and smoking cigarettes. (It's pointless asking any more of a Tahitian woman.) George would have thought pretty much the same thing about any 'home-grown exotic' working class girl.

Marriage was a kind of Hell for both men. Both rationalised their motives for rejecting and abandoning bourgeois normality, but both was deeply conservative at heart. For all his time spent living in basic conditions, Gauguin was happy to return to Paris and live a conventional life there. George's brush with bohemianism lasted a couple of college terms. In this way both were very like the sorts of young men George criticised as being pointless, but both turned to the Arts to make themselves appear to not be superfluous or banal, adopting intellectual personae to camouflage their inadequacies. Both were reasonably successful at this.

Vincent van Gogh Painting Sunflowers by Paul Gauguin 1888

Gauguin dabbled in writing and publishing, taking after his own father, who was for a time, a journalist. His illustrated books and jottings perform the function of his Commonplace Book - the sort of thing George made use of. As do all discerning sorts who can read and write. These include revelations of the tricks he used to attract interest, even controversy, in his work, by making the titles intentionally mysterious or paradoxical, and very little to do with what he was painting or sculpting - which tended to be much more 'painterly' and not fixed by subject. There is a sense he is taking the piss here, and relishing the confusion or effort people will have to waste to understand the title of the piece by looking for clues in the painting. A prototype Surrealist or Dadaist? George always thought up odd names (after an earlier trend much over-used by Charles Dickens) and this is similar territory - making fun of readers he thinks are dumber than they are, by making them wonder about choices and meanings, or undercutting their own ideas about characters and their story arcs, or sharing in jokes with the educated who get his Classical references in a way a typical Mudie's library reader might not. 

What George might have lacked was someone he could bounce ideas off - that is, someone he saw as an equal, but there is no-one of that ilk ever mentioned in the written accounts of his doings. Imagine how Gauguin and van Gogh debated Art, and the sort of topics they covered. Or, go and watch this click. 

Commonplace 131  George & Bad Faith.

George would have hated Existentialism. Simone de Beauvoir would have outwitted his whingeing self-pity with her thoughts on Ambiguity click; Albert Camus would have bored him with tales of great football matches he had played, having just revealed that your life is blessed if you don't want to ditch it all and kill yourself click. And Jean Paul Sartre would have challenged him over his willingness to let his whole life be one long demonstration of Bad Faith. Nothing sums up our man better than this, and, as much as George Orwell's assertion that all George's stories are about 'Not enough money' is correct, in fact what the fictional work is primarily about, is Bad Faith.

Arguably the most important thing Sartre ever gave us was this concept. In a nutshell, it refers to conscious and unconscious lies we tell ourselves to prove we don't have life choices. Because of this blocking of our options, we miss out on all the things we really want to experience, and deny all the things we want to feel. We do it for several reasons, the most obvious being fear of change, fear of failure, and plain and simple laziness. In psychotherapeutic approaches, change is seen as the most problematic challenge to us all, because we prefer to dwell in our own safe comfort zones. We go out of our way to sabotage the actions of others that might lead to their change so that we don't have to.

Twentieth century Humanists put forward the notion of 'authenticity' as a state of highest consciousness, and this is akin to Good Faith - as in, being what we are, not what we are not, warts and all. There is nothing wrong with any of our authentic feelings or emotions, even the less than flattering ones, or our survival strategies. Knowing oneself and one's motivations is the basis of authenticity, but if these insights lead us to contemplate bad actions, it is the job of free will to decide which ones to follow through on, and which ones to suppress. Morality leads us to make the decisions we deem best, unless religious faith of some kind is our guiding light, in which case, we follow dogma. Knowing our real selves, being aware of our rationalisations and strategies for lying to ourselves, and our acceptance of the place of abdicating free will in the process, all contribute to authentic behaviour. As in the work of Erich From in his 'Fear of Freedom', and with a nod to Karl Marx, we have nothing to lose but our chains.

Sartre came up with his notion of Bad Faith in 1943's 'Being and Nothingness'. George had an inkling of it sixty years before, when he wrote about characters who find it impossible to benefit from their social advantage, or who struggle to follow their preferred life's purpose. His people are often trapped inside prisons of their own lack of imagination, where they can't see alternatives to the misery they endure. Here are a few examples:

In The Whirlpool, Harvey Rolfe feels incapable of realising his potential, though he knows he is not happy or fulfilled. His wife, Alma, can only play a role in her own life, and is forced to exist in a world of surface and veneer (partly because her creator disapproves of her), and aches to break out and explore something more authentic, which is why she is so seduced into flirting with the demimonde dark side of illicit fast company. What should be - to men - her life's purpose (ie  motherhood) leaves her cold. The agony of hopelessness she feels when she has to face up to her inauthentic life makes her realise she feels inadequate to the struggle and can only achieve authenticity by committing suicide - possibly the ultimate act of Good Faith - or accidental overdose. In fact, accidental overdose makes her death all the more emblematic of Bad Faith. Rolfe's life of Bad Faith becomes more deeply ingrained and he lives on, even more of a hollow vessel, because his hard-won insights don't produce positive change - but he endures without a wife to blame it all on.


'Born in Exile' is all about its male protagonist's battle to attain a state of mind where his comprehensive Bad Faith is overcome. Godwin Peak finds Sidwell Warricombe attractive because of her unaffected authenticity, such a contrast to his self-aware, negative and nihilistic nature. He wants to be saved from himself, and has insight into his own lack of Good Faith, but falsely invests his energies in the wrong direction. He wrongly assumes her social position is what makes her so authentic, and fails to see the real girl behind the façade of class. In spite one of the novel's premises being his congenital aptitude for falsehood, Godwin is essentially truthful to himself, but his misreading of situations - particularly his underestimation of Sidwell's truly authentic nature - leads to his downfall. He wrongly assumes people are puppets playing a part that only he can see is a false one - whilst being the most false of them all. Again, this inner struggle ends in death.

As George couldn't square the circle in his own life - how to live the authentic life always eluded him - it's understandable that he couldn't bring this sort of resolution to his characters. That mish-mash of guff that is 'The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft' is riddled with Bad Faith, and it is almost impossible to conceive of any other better demonstration of the concept in a piece of fiction. Examples of what has stopped Ryecroft (and George) from living the authentic life: lack of money; lack of recognition; lack of a good housekeeper; lack of tasty food; being misunderstood and underestimated; lack of a soul mate or simpatico like-minded educated friends; indifferent health; inclement weather; too much sunshine; geography; ennui; being out of the times/fashion; not living in a dead culture spouting a dead language; lack of affect... every page has an example or two, so choose your own. Even when Ryecroft pretends authenticity - his much-vaulted appreciation of his good fortune in having a regular income; his luck in having an excellent housekeeper; the flowers in the lane; coal in the fireplace; solitude - you know he should be quietly screaming inside raging against this total lack of meaning his life has, now he has no grit in his oyster. It is the equivalent of having your mind slowly erased, like some wayward Hal 9000 computer, singing 'Daisy' as you die click. After all is said and done, if that paltry amount of dosh (£300) gave Ryecroft his 'freedom', why on earth didn't he put some effort into earning that amount - with his brains and capabilities? Was it Bad Faith or bone idleness at play (in character and author)? Which is the other thing that explains some of George's massive under-achieving.

The Odd Women is where George struggles to deconstruct the elements of Bad Faith that make up the average woman's lot in life, and contrasts it with that of men who have either no moral compass (Everard Barfoot - not a very subtle allusion to his place in the story!) or no insight into their own Bad Faith (Edmund Widdowson - another clunky name trick). Women have always had to suppress and repress all manner of desires in order to live under the protection of men. George considered himself a bit of an expert on Woman (I know, it's laughable, but there you have it; he really did think he was entitled to a voice on this topic), and never missed a chance to tell us girls where we are going wrong. At every turn, women who strive for self-improvement (which would lead to independence and possibly Good Faith) are punished for it in George's fiction. Here, we have Monica Madden forced to suffer under the control-freakery of Edmund Widdowson, who inveigles her into a marriage they both know will be disastrous, because he himself is unable to recognise his own true feelings and thus find authentic ways to express them. Bad Faith on both parts brings them to misery. Monica is mangled in a relationship she saw as a sanctuary from loneliness and want, but found to be a prison; Widdowson suffers because he was unaware of his true feelings (such as his tendency to be a control freak martinet) and finally loses the thing he really wants because he doesn't know how to win her heart - guess how it gets resolved?

Death is the only outcome George can offer Monica, though she is spared suicide in favour of death from childbirth. Widdowson, now living up to his name, goes to live with a rich man friend called Newdick. (Newdick?! Paleeze.) The baby girl gets lumbered with two sisters who think because they can read and write they can run a school - just like George's own sisters did; shades of George's first son, Walter. Makes you wonder if that wasn't always George's plan for the boy, even in the days before he blamed it all on his second wife, Edith, and that the poor lad wasn't always destined to be a little income for the Gissing girls. The Odd Women was written long before he snatched the child away from his mother and foisted him on unwelcoming aunts and grandmother in Wakefield. Maybe in The Odd Women George sowed the seeds for Ellen and Madge to get their heads round the idea of school-teaching as a way to ensure they were never his financial dependants.

It's as if he's been reading my mind!

Authenticity is all about empowerment, and empowerment is the most political of human aspirations. Women will always be up against the lack of power they experience, which feeds into and forms the personal empowerment - or lack of it - that leads to Good Faith behaviours and thoughts. When we are financially dependent on men; when we are victims of our biology (not my phrase); when crackpot religion keeps us in slavery, we are eternally damned to be to blame for everything that goes wrong with anything, anywhere, and we are framed by imagined inadequacy. But, consider this: is there really any chance men will ever willingly relinquish the power they have? Or will we have to pry it from their cold, dead hands? That might have been an interesting inclusion in the works, Mr G.

For the sublime Bill Murray's take on it click. What a fella. 

Alain de Botton does a very good job explaining Bad Faith here click - for Dummies like me.

To get more of Albert Camus: click

Commonplace 130  George & The Death Drive aka The Death Wish.

The Power of Death by William Holbrook Beard 1890

There's a lot of death in George's writing. People die from sickness, neglect, from suicide by drowning, from old age, in accidents and by murder - sometimes, it feels like George doesn't want anyone to get out alive. There is enough of it in his work to conclude he had a bit of a Freudian Death Drive going on. This is not surprising in one so given over to control-freakery; by its very randomness, death always throws a spanner in the works of the control freak, and drives them neurotic. Feeling un-powerful in his real life, George could manage all things on his own terms in his creations, including when to terminate them. Much as he did with wives.

It would be wrong to think an abundance of Death Drive makes us all court death and disaster, or that it makes us all reckless and feckless. Some of us react this way to its influence; others are made fearful and cautious and live life avoiding exposure to any form of danger or threat. It was identified by Sigmund Freud in 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' (1920). Freud puts forward the notion that there are two influences that dominate our psychology - the Life Drive and the Death Drive. These exert a powerful hold over human psychology, and, by extension, all our endeavours. Drives are adaptive behaviours, and not instinctual states. It is to be remembered that the Ego protects our inner selves from threats, sometimes by anticipating them, sometimes in 'real time' by dealing with them, and then retrospectively by mopping up situations we find troublesome. Freud studied the way children role play imagined threatening situations - such as fear of storybook giants coming to life - in order to develop coping strategies for future use. In 'The Uses of Enchantment' (1976), Bruno Bettleheim makes a similar point about why fairy stories, myths, legends and sagas are so important to us all in allowing us to imagine horrors and challenges we would feel inadequate to in real life, and to equip us with intellectual skills to overcome our foes, even when these are internal and not external in nature. No doubt the worldwide cultural obsession with Superheroines and Superheroes, Wizards and Vampires, also speaks to our need to confront and conquer the real world threats that frighten us.

From The Triptych 
Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation
by Hans Memling 1485 

George is sometimes presented as suffering from bouts of depression that might have led him to consider suicide. I doubt this very much. There used to be a (possibly over-simplified) way of quickly diagnosing what type of depression someone suffered from - it was said that neurotic/reactive depressives blame outside forces for their predicament; psychotic/endogenous depressives blame themselves. As George frequently blamed others for his lot in life - such as it was his mother's fault he went off the rails at Owens College in Manchester because she sent him to live in digs there (as if she made him and it wasn't his choice!), to publishers not wanting to pay top dollar for his novels; likewise, his health, his lack of social mobility, his place of domicile, his lack of recognition, his inability to find people of a similar bent to talk to - everyone but George was to blame for it. And, though it is possible behind closed doors (away from biographers' eyes) it was different, the only time he was ever linked to suicide was probably nothing of the sort at all, but was the actions of a writer working out the dynamics of a special act of self-destruction. Would he have really been so callous as to actually attempt to cut his throat in front of a child?

A preoccupation with death in the 1890s is not the same as one evidenced in the twenty-first century. In the 1880s, there were few cures for major diseases and life-threatening conditions, and without the support of antibiotics to cure even simple infections, any sign of illness must have raised concern that something might deteriorate into a more sinister problem. And, in the case of a predisposition to a condition - such as congenital weakness of the heart - any defect would cast a dark shadow over living a normal life. The business of being ill was nothing like what we experience now - when we in the UK still have an NHS to care for us free at point of delivery (which is not the same as free health care please note - those with an income pay for everyone's health care in their taxes) we should stop and appreciate what it must have been like to be ill with no-one to care for us. George must have missed Marianne aka Nell's ministrations when his ailments were playing up, and no doubt made a replacement wife an attractive prospect when he found himself single again.

We are much more squeamish about death these days and it is kept out of our sight. In George's day it was common for corpses to remain in the room where they died, with the body laid out on show for several fays prior to burial. People were brought to view the body and often, a posed photograph of the corpse with living relatives was taken as a memento. We find this sort of thing ghoulish, but in a time when photographs were expensive and not an everyday item for most people, a lasting image of a deceased loved one was a special celebration to mark a life.

The impact of his father's death and funeral was profound, particularly for the boys, but George's father does not come across as a particularly diligent parent - he spent too long out of the home, for a start, and access to his physical presence was limited. He worked in his shop then did his Wakefield civic duty by participating in the town's political life - the family seems to have come third in his list of priorities. He left the child-rearing to Mrs Gissing, but George did not have much respect for either of his parents as he felt intellectually superior to them. And then there was that dratted need to identify with those who were his social superiors, which must have made him look down on their parochial ambitions. If ever there was a lad who thought he had been abandoned on the doorstep like a character in a fairy tale, it was George. His reactions of extreme grief at his father's graveside were as much to do with mourning his lack of prospects as it was mourning his lack of a father.

There is a modern term that mixes what we covered of 'slum tourism' in Commonplace 128 (George & Slumming) with a similar fixation on death, known as Dark Tourism. Let's face it, anything these days with the word 'dark' in it is going to be bad - this is the rise of interest in holidays visiting places where very bad things happened. And we are not talking small-scale day trips to see where Jack the Ripper is alleged to have supped a shandy, but sites where atrocities were carried out. Not necessarily formal museums, such as Auschwitz click, or WW1 battlefields; we are talking Srebinitza, torture chambers, mass killing sites and disaster areas such as New Orleans' most flood-damaged places click. Some like a week's camping in St Ives or Babbacombe click; others prefer looking at piles of skulls and cattle prods. Hmm.

Death and Life by Gustav Klimt 1910

It cannot be imagined what impact the diagnosis of syphilis would have on anyone back in the days when there was no cure. By the time George contracted it, there were milder strains that did not always destroy the appearance of sufferer before killing them. Tertiary syphilis could lay dormant for a decade or more, and so the percentage to die entirely from syphilis was limited (in 1868 click) to less than 1 per week in a population in London of 3 million. It was the fear of what syphilis could do that galvanized the popular imagination - and its association with illicit sex that classified it as shameful. One advantage to modern thinking on epidemiology is that there are no shameful diseases - anyone can catch anything, if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time - unless they are immune.

In all his writings on death and the dead, one of the most affecting is his description of Emma Vine visiting the corpse of Richard Mutimer, the man she loved and who had betrayed her for another woman:
She was alone again with the dead. It cost her great efforts of mind to convince herself that Mutimer really had breathed his last; it seemed to her but a moment since she heard him speak, heard him laugh; was not a trace of the laugh even discernible on his countenance? How was it possible for life to vanish in this way? She constantly touched him, spoke to him. It was incredible that he should not be able to hear her.
Her love for him was immeasurable. Bitterness she had long since overcome, and she had thought that love, too, was gone with it. She had deceived herself. Her heart, incredible as it may seem, had even known a kind of hope - how else could she have borne the life which fate laid upon her? - the hope that is one with love, that asks nothing of the reason, nor yields to reason's contumely. He had been smitten dead at the moment she loved him dearest.

Tristan and Isolde Death by Rogelio de Egusquiza 1901 click for a bit of Furtwangler und Flagstad.

Commonplace 129 George & His Birthday.

Today (November 22nd) is George's birthday. Let's mark this in style.

George Gissing said women are about as smart as male idiots?
What a silly twit!

Young George in the Owens College Refec.  

George Gissing Tribute Act
Re-living the moment George discovered Pessimism
(actually the legend that is Nick Offerman click and click)

Steering from behind - why George learnt to ride a bike.

Exeter urchins celebrate Grumpy Gissing's return to London.

Edith wishing George Many Happy Returns.


Keep your hands on your halfpennies - the other George is in the cloakroom.


GG meets GG - both wanted to be alone.


Happy Birthday, Mr Gissing.