Commonplace 216 George & The Muse of Poetry.

Lyric Poetry by Henry Oliver Walker 1896

Like any good song - or Art work in general - a poem is an immediate ping of recognition, as if thoughts (and, more often, feelings) have coalesced, and things unexpressed in the reader or hearer have suddenly been revealed by another. As someone who has never written a poem - ever - I wonder: what is it that tells a poet to go fetch a pen? However, I do read poetry - not academically, or with any subtextual literary overview of the genre - but poems are my go-to when I need a certain resolution to a mood, much like I turn to Leonard Cohen when flirting with the Darkness (not the rock band) is required, and I want a bit of a nostalgic sing-along.

Erato

George liked to show off his knowledge of the workings of poetry; he thought it tragic that some of us don't know the following information about lyric poetry - that it all hangs on meter and stress of syllables. As poetry is meant to be read out loud, the structure, like a good sentence with punctuation in the;right:places' helps us scan the piece. Is this useful when it comes to reading it, or only when writing it? According to this click lyric poetry can be divided into:

• Iambic – two syllables, with the short or unstressed syllable followed by the long or stressed syllable.
• Trochaic – two syllables, with the long or stressed syllable followed by the short or unstressed syllable. In English, this metre is found almost entirely in lyric poetry.^[3]
• Pyrrhic – Two unstressed syllables
• Anapestic – three syllables, with the first two short or unstressed and the last long or stressed.
• Dactylic – three syllables, with the first one long or stressed and the other two short or unstressed.
• Spondaic – two syllables, with two successive long or stressed syllables.

Some forms have a combination of meters, often using a different meter for the refrain.

Polyhymnia

The Muses were female personifications of aspects of the Arts in Ancient Greece. These sculptures of the three responsible for poetry, are shown with their associated symbols - Erato, the Muse of lyric poetry, is shown with a lyre - lyric poetry was often sung; we get the word 'lyrics' from her. Polyhymnia, the Muse of sacred poetry, is seen with a veil, or dancing. Calliope is the Muse of epic poetry and appears carrying a writing tablet.

In common parlance, a muse is (usually) a woman with very great presence who exerts a sensual, sensory, or psychic influence over another - usually, a man. Women could not be permitted access to the power of making Art (women have babies; men have Art), but the passive role of being a catalyst in the creative process and facilitator of creativity, men consider acceptable. Even now, women Artists tend to be the exception, and their creations are generally looked down on by the mainly male Art Establishment.

George was a poet who needed his Muse. His first wife, Marianne aka Nell, was that person for a little while - for a year or two. I doubt if Edith was freighted in to fulfil that role, and poor Gabrielle Fleury was not really muse material. He made use of women to spark him into action, but he was so conflicted about how to deal with his emotions, he really wasn't able to woo a woman in anything like a romantic, non-needy way - he seemed to frighten off girls who might have developed an interest in him (Miss Curtis, Miss Ash) possibly because of his emotional and intellectual intensity.

Here is a poem by one of George's favourite poets, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856);
            I love this white and slender body

           I love this white and slender body,
            These limbs that answer Love's caresses,

Passionate eyes, and forehead covered

With heavy waves of thick, black tresses.

You are the very one I've searched for

In many lands, in every weather.

You are my sort; you understand me;

As equals we can talk together.

In me you've found the man you care for.

And, for a while, you'll richly pay me

With kindness, kisses and endearments -

And then, as usual, you'll betray me. 

Calliope

In essence, this is George's ideal girl - pale-skinned, raven-haired, fragile, needy, sympathetic... and then because George is a pessimist by nature, and a Masochist by inclination, his dream can only end in bitter regret. His faith in women was less than zero, which is only to be expected as he did not think his mother loved him enough, and that she was a cold and distant presence in his life. But he employed a 'get them before they get you' attitude and always dealt the first blow in any battle with his womenfolk, usually inflicting maximum harm with all-out war the inevitable consequence. In fact, it was a 'betray them before they betray you' situation and it was only death that stopped him turning on wife number 3, after the first two Mrs Gissings were routed..

In 1883, he wrote 'Hope in Vain', at a time when his relationship with Marianne/Nell appeared to be over - they were living apart and Marianne was making no effort to return. George regarded himself as a single man. According to the Coustillas biography Volume 1, it was written after a trip to Hastings. Now, we know George liked the south coast seaside towns (see Commonplaces 90 and 91) and Hastings was where he had sent Marianne (back in the days they lived together) to a private arrangement which sounds like a single patient lunacy home, possibly a place that specialised in epileptic care. When he went back there on one of his little breaks, did he have the strength to reflect on his failed love affair with Marianne?

Hope In Vain
Mine O love, you were mine for an hour,

You and the world for an hour were mine;

For the world with its beauty and joy and power

Lay there, flung at my feet as dower,

In the hour when life had grown divine,

And you, O love, were mine, all mine.

Flowers of face and fire of soul,

Breath of your life for an hour was mine;

And the gods of gods in whose control

Is the lightening flash and the thunder’s roll

Knew never a joy that was more divine,

Than mine in the hour when I call’d you mine.

Honey of lips and the bosoms beat,

And the warm, soft arms for an hour were mine,

And the eager pulse of hastening feet

Whose echoes the words of love repeat,  

And the sweet, low voice, and the eyes’ star-shine

All of them, all, for an hour were mine.

All that the years to come could show

throng’d in the hour when you were mine;

Rapture of meeting and parting’s woe

Tears and passion’s sunset glow,

Till I drank the wine of a death divine,

from the lips whose kisses were mine, all mine.

Alas, alas, that it all was a dream,

Only a dream that you were mine,

And the one hour with its golden gleam,

Floated past, like a rose on the stream,

Tells me that never an hour shall shine,

Never for ever, to make you mine

His biographer, when explaining the background to the poem, claims 'the inspiration is unknown, but... isn't it obvious?

Rapture of meeting and parting’s woe

Tears and passion’s sunset glow,

Till I drank the wine of a death divine,

from the lips whose kisses were mine, all mine.

Isn't this  a line about falling in love with Nell and then having to leave her when he was in America? And, the tears and passion is the falling out of love, and is the 'wine of a death divine' a reference to her incurable scrofula that cost Marianne her beauty, and, eventually, her life?

Heinrich Heine 

Here is one of Heine's about something similar - but shorter and more punchy:

I can’t forget I had you,

Dear woman, sweet to hold,

That I once possessed you,

Your body, and your soul.

I still want your body,

That body young and true,

They can bury your soul, love,

I’ve soul enough for two.

I’ll cut my soul in pieces,

And breathe half into you,

And hug you: we must be, yes,

One soul and body too.          

And, here is one of Heine's most famous works:

Death and His Brother Sleep (Morphine).           

           There’s a mirror likeness between those two

           shining, youthfully-fledged figures, though

           one seems paler than the other and more austere,

           I might even say more perfect, more distinguished,

           than he, who would take me confidingly in his arms –

           how soft then and loving his smile, how blessed his glance!

           Then, it might well have been that his wreath

           of white poppies gently touched my forehead, at times,

           and drove the pain from my mind with its strange scent.

           But that is transient. I can only, now, be well, 

           when the other one, so serious and pale,

           the older brother, lowers his dark torch. –

           Sleep is good, Death is better, yet

           surely never to have been born is best. 

For more Heine click

And, speaking of Muses, here is Marianne Faithfull's version of her own and Mick Jagger's song: Sister Morphine click 

George wrote quite a lot of verse. And much of it is rather forgettable, and long. But, he was never short of cock-sureness when it came to poetry; after all, he had won prizes at Owens for his 'Ravenna' (not to be confused with the Divine Oscar Wilde's prize-winning work) which made his reputation there - before that other matter went and rewrote it haha. Anyhoo, George's father was a poet, and so his boy had something to prove. Besides, George was not one to ever hide his light under a bushel, and, so, in 1883, he wrote to Algernon Swinburne asking for an honest appraisal of his work. 

Algernon Swinburne in the 1890s - nominated 4 times for a Nobel Prize!

Commonplace 215  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 214   George & Pounds, Shillings and Pence.

The Moneylender And His Wife by Quentin Matsys 1514

George had money on his mind all of the time. All that he was to himself, depended on it. It was the chief reason he wrote - because he was the sort of writer who created until he had a large enough income to be able him to give up the work. The pursuit of money, the spending of it, the lack of it, the earning of it, the value of it to your self-image if you had it or lacked it, the doling out of it to 'dependants' were his major preoccupations. Any pleasure George derived from the imaginative creative process was offset by the misery of having to do the thing he found difficult, claimed he didn't much enjoy, and which was innately poorly paid.  Fear of Freedom meets Masochism - see previous Commonplaces! Drawing to himself financial burdens like his wider family ensured he was forced to keep at it, 'nose to the grindstone', which was itself a valuable thing as it gave him something to moan about, rebel against, and resent. He had contempt for women... he had contempt for women whom he considered 'wasted their husband's money' (I will let that pass just this once!) on fripperies and then himself went out and bought books by the tonne, tobacco and evening dress suits when he claimed to have no social life. If you dabble in online quotes searches, you might find these George quotes on money:

1) Time is money says the proverb, but turn it around and you get a precious truth. Money is time.

George enjoyed quite a lot of 'time' - if by the word he means bits of life spent not actually working. He may have lacked the funds to do all the things he wanted to do, but he never stinted himself on time spent reading; even time he could have spent writing things that made him more money (magazine articles, for example) couldn't entice him away from the solitary vice of reading books. In fact, it could be argued that he worked to pay for time to read. Nothing in George's life ever gave him the pleasure that reading did. Even when he was low in funds and living with Marianne aka Nell, he kept them both (he claimed) half-starved in order to buy books. This is not rational behaviour. Which is why it stinks of untruth. We know he greatly exaggerated his poverty - Austin Harrison (son of Frederic) blew this claim out of the water early when he described George as being reasonably well paid for his tutoring, and never really poverty-stricken - that his claims to poverty were 'a fiction of fictions'. Roger Milbrandt has made a study of George's bogus claims to poverty, published in the Gissing Journal of October 2007 click and makes the point that, even when George was as his lowliest paid (1877, newly arrived in London and working as a clerk for St Vincent Mercier), he was likely to be sharing wage-earning with Marianne aka Nell. She might have worked as a seamstress though we don't know enough about her to be sure of her source of income. It seems the only mention we have of her possibly being in the needle trade is the John George Blacks' letter telling George about the struggle he had moving a sewing machine - George was clearly not involved in this venture and there is no evidence this was Nell's sewing machine, and though Morley Roberts tells us George bought her a sewing machine, he is wrong on so many things, he should not be trusted on specifics, considering he never actually met Nell in the flesh, and so had no experience of her as a real person, and wrote his self-serving fake biography in 1912, nine years after George died. But, this alleged 'buying of a machine for her' is touted as evidence she sponged off George and forced him into becoming a thief, but, really...? 

Marianne probably made money sewing - as ten of thousands of women had to and still do - but there were hundreds of factories in Manchester and London that needed employees to do piecework and make all manner of items, and work doled out on a 'first come first served' basis to those queuing outside factories at the start of the shift made earning a day's wage not too difficult, so she could have been employed at any sort of unskilled factory work. In fact, when George was working as some sort of clerk, there were probably a variety of jobs he could have taken, if he had parked his aspirations to be considered bona fide middle-class. However, he no doubt lacked the strength and temperament for hard labour and would have starved if all he had to rely on was manual skills, so presumably that will have impacted on his sense of masculinity. Not that we often associate him with that trait.It is considered a bonus if you enjoy your money-making activity click - and being happy in your working life is still an aspiration worth advocating: 'it doesn't matter what you do as long as you feel fulfilled, enjoy it and by honesty, it pays the bills' it is not a bad bit of advice to give to young folk setting out on their career journey. Doing well in education is touted as a way to guarantee more options, and help avoid working as a toilet attendant, but being a toilet attendant who loves their work is a happier bunny than a university don who loathes her/his post. Choice is a huge part of happiness, it seems. 

2) Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman.
 In fact, George did very little actual 'work' - if we take that to mean activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a result. Most of his 'effort' went into reading, a solitary activity guaranteed to appear to be self-improving, but which really kept him away from the sort of people he didn't want to be with. He once opined that his life had been led in the sort of company he found 'inferior', and that was his great tragedy. The business of writing was little more than a means to an end - the end being the solitary life. 
George was a classic case of under-achiever, whether from design as a product of deep-rooted anxieties about being judged by his peers and found wanting, or because his natural haughty temperament kept his sense of self safe from outside influence. His fiction is a psychodrama hard copy of this sensibility. One comment we frequently see about his style is the intellectual distance he puts between himself and his creations; another is the failure to express any opinions or explain the inner workings of his characters' minds. All his posturing about being an impartial observer when describing events that unfurl for his characters is in fact, George showing us his reaction to the sort of person he really wouldn't have wanted to associate with if they were real living, breathing people. And, remember: without his self-inflicted financial hardships, George would have had very little to complain about - and complaining is what kept him going. Lack of money was the metaphorical grit in his oyster that made him do more than sit about reading and smoking and reflecting on his wasted genius. Perhaps we should take him at face value when he told Gabrielle Fleury he had no respect for his own works, and that they were all inferior.

3) That is one of the bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be generous.

On the surface, it's hard to know how he came to this conclusion - after all, he was raised in a Christian tradition and would have heard the parable of The Widow's Mite click. However, it is a line lifted from The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Winter III); taken out of its context, it can be misread. George is talking about how, when he was poor, he had feelings of dread when giving to beggars because he might one day be in a position where he had to beg, himself. He rightly notes giving is an empowering enterprise, and in the rest of the paragraph extols his own generosity (as Ryecroft, he gives away £50 to a needy friend) and sings his own praises and declares 'I feel myself a man' when he gives. Freud would no doubt concur, because to him man is the symbolic giver, woman the receiver.. However, George's view that giving is impossible to do when one is poor, is not borne out by the statistics click. This article suggests poor people identify with the struggling disadvantaged and so give more in order to distance themselves from the calamity of being identified as needy themselves. George's belief that money wouldn't solve the poor's problems misses the point that, what really will help us all is the spirit of generosity inherent in giving - that by showing we notice the suffering of others and make a financial gesture of support is as important as the monetary value of what is donated.

Dollar Signs by Andy Warhol 1981

Commonplace 213 George & The British Library Reading Room.

Of all the institutions George entered, the British Library's Reading Room was possibly where he felt most at home. Nowadays, it is a bright, airy and fully digitized palace, but in George's day, it was a womb of a room - dark, musty and full of exotic smells - of paper, book-bindings and human exhalations. The introduction of coal gas to illuminate this inner sanctum would have enhanced the miasma of the air. A strong immune system was required to combat the various noxious elements in the atmosphere, and a keen pair of eyes to utilize the dimmest of artificial lights, amidst the fog-stained light permeating the oriole windows. I'm channelling Peter Ackroyd here, who has written so frequently and lovingly of London and its inhabitants click

From above.

The British Museum, the first of its kind, opened in 1753 to 'all studious and curious persons' who had applied for tickets and then successfully passed the rigorous entry vetting. In its early days, women were allowed to attend 'in pairs' - which is a sign of the increasing support of women's education, and reminds us that the age before the Victorians often gave women encouragement towards self-development - as long as they were chaperoned (for the sake of propriety - the museum did not want to be confused with a bawdy house!), and, just as the men, carried a letter of recommendation.

This letter was important; without it, there was no entry to the centre of all knowledge and learning. It had to be provided in order to demonstrate the person seeking to make use of the free library was of 'good character' - was not a blackguardly thief or liar. However, George, the convicted thief, managed to obtain one, by lying. This is how it happened:

George was employed as a very part-time tutor to a chap named St Vincent Mercier who was trying for his matriculation (to gain entry to a university or government department) while he worked at St John's Hospital in Leicester Square. Either George asked him to do it, or St Vincent volunteered (as George was manipulative by nature, St V may have been inveigled into it via emotional blackmail) to ask his father (an artist and former soldier) to write the required letter of recommendation for that coveted library pass. According to the Heroic Life (sic haha): ...his pupil's father turned out to be exactly the sort of man whose name the Principal Librarian wished to see below that of the applicant. 

Captain Mercier was a painter (click for a slideshow of his work). Here is his painting of Charles Reade, the prolific writer (he wrote The Cloister and the Hearth) that he did in 1870. Nice touch with the faithful little Samoyed.

George misrepresented his age as over 21 on his application. Some might see this as a small 'white lie', but George's immorality is what we are looking at here. We can see that a lack of a moral compass is already deeply entrenched in his character at age 19 - he is already a convicted thief who has done time in gaol - his family had to send him abroad to save him from himself - and he lies at the drop of a hat. We know from official records of his days at Owens that he lied easily then - to explain his frequent absences, and to deceive his tutors. In all the claptrap talked about his 'Heroism', the baser elements of his character are frequently ignored or glossed over, and yet it is patently clear lying is a constant throughout George's life. His fall from grace at Owens College is usually offered by biographers as the defining moment that ruined his chances, but as he lied almost as a default, he was doomed anyway, because this sort of amorality generally ends badly. No wonder he was secretive, even paranoid at times - afraid all his lies would be found out, or that he might forget what he had said. In fact, you only have to read his letters to Gabrielle Fleury towards the end of his life to see that the depths of his mendacity were pathological.

So, George lied to Captain Mercier about his age - he was, in fact, 19, but very soon to be 20, when he applied for the pass; St Vincent was about the same age. Perhaps George lied when he applied for the tutor position and thought he would have more gravitas if he were taken for an older man. Now, a realist can understand him not owning up to his rap sheet, or fibbing about his age to get work, but we must not forget these are still deceits. But to pose as what you are not - an honest and upright fellow - when asking someone to stand for your good name is to display a defect of honour. It is indicative of a person so conceited and arrogant as to think normal morality does not apply to them. If anything untoward had occurred, and this deception had been discovered, Captain Mercier would have been deeply embarrassed, and compromised. George didn't care about that. So far in George's life, he has proved himself to be self-serving, arrogant, manipulative, deceitful, dishonest, treacherous. Call me old-fashioned, but is it acceptable for certain biographers to gloss over this by passing the responsibility for George's decision to defraud the Library to a nameless, blameless library clerk? In the Heroic Life Part One we find a defence for it: Perhaps encouraged to do so by some accommodating clerk...  So, according to some, George was a liar and a fraud because some library assistant put him up to it... The same biographers blame Marianne aka Nell for making George steal from his fellow-students at Owens College. Is it right for biographers to massage what should be sacredly true biographical facts in this way? George was not a feeble-minded person or a child when he did these things. He was his own man, responsible for making his own choices - even bad ones. To steal; to lie: all his own work

Today, George would be labelled as a having a sociopathic personality - an 'antisocial personality disorder'. Here's a selection from a diagnostic checklist from this site click:

• Superficial charm and good intelligence
• Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking
• Unreliability
• Untruthfulness and insincerity
• Lack of remorse and shame
• Poor judgement and failure to learn by experience
• Pathological egocentricity and incapacity for love
• General poverty in major affective reactions
• Specific loss of insight
• Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations
• Suicide threats rarely carried out
• Sex life impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated
• Failure to follow any life plan

Make of this what you will, but it sounds mighty familiar.

If Mercier Sr had known about George's criminal past, would he have: 1) employed him or allowed his son to employ him; 2) written any sort of reference? By misrepresenting himself to Captain Mercier, George betrayed his referee who took him at face value and believed what he was told; but George also secretly made a fool of the man. When we deceive, we assume we are cleverer than the one we cheat - and this is one of George's lifelong character flaws: he thought he was cleverer than anyone else.

At this time, George was living in Colville Place, a mere few hundred yards from the British Library. Here it is under this green arrow:

And, while we are on the subject of fibs, below is Colville Place on the Booth Poverty Map of 1889 click. Either Colville Place has gone up amazingly well in the socio-economic world, or been misrepresented by George as a slum - it is pink on the key: Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings. He did something similar with Lucretia Street, where Marianne/Nell died. See Commonplace 32. Perhaps Miss Collet, who assisted Charles Booth, noted the anomaly when she worked on it? He also told Miss Collet his first wife died several years before she did. 

Colville Place was an ordinary sort of small residential street with ordinary folk living there. Now, in George's day, poor housing stock (unless it was part of a block owned by a single landlord) rarely got 'gentrified' if it became too vile - it got demolished and rebuilt. So, there is every chance the 1880 place where George and Marianne lived was much the same as the one in the 1889 Poverty Map. True, in the twentieth century it might have seen better days, but being so central and in what has always been a popular area, it was still considered good enough housing stock to resist demolition and redevelopment. Here it is now, obviously much made-over:

Anyhoo, George was allowed into the British Museum's Reading Room with his fraudulently acquired pass. Here is great site about the architecture of the Museum and Library click.

Here is the reading part of the Library - 'under the dome' - that George would have known. The tiers of shelves were augmented by special collections such as erotica, or precious illuminated manuscripts, historical and legal documents. You filled in a request for these and a librarian went and found the resource you wanted, and delivered it to your table. Nowadays, it is much the same click.

Over the years, many writers have fondly remembered their time in the Reading Room. The wikipedia list click: Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Hayek, Bram Stoker, Mahatma Gandhi, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Vladimir Lenin (using the name Jacob Richter^[1]), Norbert Elias, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, H. G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Karl Marx ... Hmm.... Karl Marx...The British Library Reading Room...Peter Ackroyd...George Gissing... have a look at Commonplaces 94-96 to explore Peter Ackroyd's 'Dan Leno and The Limehouse Golem', which includes George and Karl Marx as fictional characters in a serial killer tale.

Commonplace 212  George & The Odious Mr Ryecroft.

With the help of Paul Gauguin 1848-1903

Towards the end of his life, George began to realise he was running out of time. His creative energy was waning fast as the effects of syphilis began to disable him, and most of the strength he had was needed for everyday survival; whatever was left over went into writing shorter, lighter and more readable to the general public books, as well as gathering together the various strands of his legacy - both personal and literary.

Women Bathing 1885

One of his most pressing tasks was overhauling his image by putting together a sanitised version of his life, safe for public consumption. Being a secretive and duplicitous sort of cove with plenty of metaphorical skeletons hiding in his metaphorical cupboard, he was well aware that many of his past actions would be seen for what they truly were by the world he tried so hard to deceive - acts of cruelty, dishonesty and self-serving capriciousness.

His sons were going to inherit nothing much but their father's 'good name', but George had spent thirty years lying about his prison sentence for theft. His cruelty to his wives and the real reasons he abandoned his children needed to be expunged and whatever the cost to integrity, he needed to be blameless when their stories were told. Between the lies and the subterfuge, the thieving and the gaol time, the public would see emerge a bitter and resentful man who was too lazy to realise his full potential, too superior to accept he was a middling talent, too irrationally conceited to celebrate the wonders of the human race, and too envious of his peers' success to give credit where it was due.

A starting point for this piece of mass public and personal image manipulation was writing 'The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft', a work finished for four-part serialisation as 'An Author at Grass' in 1901, then published in one volume in 1903. It was George's equivalent of a psy-ops operation - he intentionally muddied the historical waters by suggesting there were elements of autobiography in the piece. TPPOHR enthusiasts have long been captivated by the tale of this battle-weary scholarly writer who never had the breaks in life because he was always too hard up to give all his attention to his talent and consequently, had to see his potential frittered away. The smug, self-obsessed, odious Ryecroft needs that thing George most craved: sympathy. And his cringeworthy emotional manipulation and passive-aggressive whining reveals more about George's Machiavellian strategy to control others' perceptions than some readers might like to admit - or recognise.

Winter Landscape 1879

In Ryecroft, the conceit is that the author is 'at grass', an English phrase that comes from working animals being allowed a happy retirement in the fields rather than a swift jog to the abattoir. It implies Ryecroft - and George, by extension -  has been an industrious and productive unit, a noble beast of burden who has seen his lifetime's energies spent on selfless, back-breaking work. Nothing could be further from George's own life as the biggest sweat he ever worked up was digging his back garden cabbage patch. George spent his life blaming 'poverty' for his lack of social contacts but he was never truly poor. His lack of money was a self-inflicted act, but even at his lowest, he always had his family to borrow from. When, as a young man, he inherited a sizeable chunk of change, he frittered it away on vanity publishing his first (unwanted, then unread) novel. If he had spent that money wisely, his life would have taken a different route. In fact, everyone associated with him post 1879 would have been better off, too.

Ryecroft is lucky enough to inherit a modest annuity which allows him to live without poverty dogging his heels. So, what is the first thing he does? Well, it isn't realise his creative potential to write the sort of book he claimed poverty prevented him from writing! Neither was it an urge to do justice to his talents. He withdraws to a small rural location in Devon (a place George once lived in and came to dislike) to live the ascetic life as a reader of books, but with a housekeeper who keeps quiet and invisibly cares for his daily needs behind the scenes. From his armchair, Ryecroft treats us to his cod philosophy about the state of the world and how it is going to hell in a handcart, but not in the way of one who has ever made a contribution to redeeming it, but as one who stood on the sidelines moaning about the state of it all, with a sort of Eeyorish glee.

Gauguin's mother 1889

Now, anyone who knows anything about George Gissing knows that withdrawing to a small rural setting to live the ascetic life as a reader of books, with a housekeeper who keeps quiet and invisibly cares for his daily needs behind the scenes, was his life's dream. Everything he did that wasn't whoring after payment for work he considered rubbish (his own opinion of his books) was about pursuing the dream of living the ascetic life reading books, with a woman quietly behind the scenes making his life possible by taking on all the nasty, boring tasks he didn't want to do. That's why George got through three wives. In TPPOHR there is no acceptance of the faults of the man, himself, or the part he played in his creative demise; it is little more than a sanitised rationalisation that blame circumstances that let him down, and the misguided notion that his mind is too pure, too much at home in the ancient time of the Roman and Greek Classics, and too aesthetically refined to fit in with the world in which he finds himself. In fact, he claims to be a man out of his time.

It's no surprise 'The Private Papers' fools many into thinking George was Ryecroft because this was the intention. A harmless old codger with a sad past and a fondness for nature, a lover of books and learning is how George would have liked to be remembered. Not as the petty thief wife abuser-cum-child-abandoner of reality. If George's life was blighted it was because of his own character flaws, but his constant lack of insight led him to blame poverty and women for his misery.

Garden in Vaugirard (Painter's Family in the Garden at Rue Carcel) 1881

We are never treated to the chance to make our own minds up about Ryecroft because the preface tells us what we should think of him. This is George at his most self-aware, knowing and controlling, manipulating us into offering up sympathy on his terms. George had very little insight into what the general public knew about him - he probably didn't realise many literary people knew about his past - his prison past - and that they openly discussed him and his secretive, aberrant, deviant ways. He probably didn't know how badly regarded he was by his old mentor, Frederic Harrison, or how much HG Wells had gone off him, partly for the cruel way he treated Edith, the second wife, and how Wells disapproved of George making use of physical abuse to intimidate her. Both of them would spill the beans after his death. George thought his syphilis was a secret. and that no-one would ever discover the truth if he just kept on claiming he had TB. But his old Wakefield childhood friend and occasional GP, Dr Henry Hick had already suggested to him that the chronic lesions on his patient's forehead were syphilitic, not tubercular - as George claimed. After George's death, Hick would compare notes with Dr Jane Walker, George's medical TB specialist at the Suffolk sanatorium, Nylands click, who blew apart the contention George suffered from any form of tuberculosis, because she never found any evidence for it in 1901. George's end of life task was to bury these unpalatable things and lie to re-imagine and explain the ones he couldn't inter. Such as not being able to recall the year his first wife died in dire poverty after he abandoned her to her sad fate. Sins of commission and omission. No wonder he hoped Ryecroft would be a smokescreen.

Commonplace 211 George & Poetry.

Swinburne, aged 52 in 1889

In late 1883, George wrote to fellow-poet Algernon Swinburne for an appraisal of his work. At least, that was the cover story - surely George already believed in his own talent? After all, he paid his way through Owens College by winning prizes for his poems, and George was never one to lean towards either modesty or away from self-belief. So, was it a case of exploiting Swinburne's 'sympathy' in the hope the great man would be a useful contact and means of spreading the word about George's undiscovered genius? That sounds more like our man, does it not?

Sappho of Eresos
Roman copy of Greek work
Swinburne was a fan. 
As was Leopardi.

Born into a wealthy, genuinely middle class family, Swinburne went to Eton, then Oxford, from where he was rusticated for his political views. Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909) was possibly the poet George wanted to be. This piece is from this website click:

Swinburne was one of the most accomplished lyric poets of the Victorian era and was a pre-eminent symbol of rebellion against the conservative values of his time. The explicit and often pathological sexual themes of his most important collection of poetry, Poems and Ballads (1866), delighted some, shocked many, and became the dominant feature of Swinburne's image as both an artist and an individual. Nevertheless, critics have found that to focus exclusively on the sensational aspects of Swinburne's work is to miss the assertion, implicit in his poetry and explicit in his critical writings, that his primary preoccupation was the nature and creation of poetic beauty. 

The most important and conspicuous quality of Swinburne's work is an intense lyricism. Even early critics, who often took exception to his subject matter, commended his intricately extended and evocative imagery, metrical virtuosity, rich use of assonance and alliteration, and bold, complex rhythms. At the same time, the strong rhythms of his poems and his characteristic use of alliteration were sometimes carried to extremes and rendered his work highly susceptible to parody. Critics note that his usually effective imagery is at times vague and imprecise, and his rhymes are sometimes facile and uninspired. After establishing residence in Putney, Swinburne largely abandoned the themes of pathological sexuality that had characterized much of his earlier poetry. Nature and landscape poetry began to predominate, as well as poems about children. Many commentators maintain that the poetry written during the years at Putney is inferior to Swinburne's earlier work, but others have identified individual poems of exceptional merit among his later works, citing in particular "By the North Sea," "Evening on the Broads," "A Nympholept," "The Lake of Gaube," and "Neap-Tide." ...

Throughout his career Swinburne also published literary criticism of great acuity. His familiarity with a wide range of world literatures contributed to a critical style rich in quotation, allusion, and comparison. He is particularly noted for discerning studies of Elizabethan dramatists and of many English and French poets and novelists. In response to criticism of his own works, Swinburne wrote essays, including Notes on Poems and Reviews (1866) and Under the Microscope (1872), that are celebrated for their wit and insight. Swinburne also published one novel, Love's Cross-Currents (1901), serially under a pseudonym, and left another, Lesbia Brandon, unfinished at his death. The first attracted little notice other than some speculation about its authorship. Some critics have theorized that Lesbia Brandon was intended as thinly disguised autobiography; however, its fragmentary form resists conclusive interpretation.

Poetry 
by Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema 

When George wrote to him, Swinburne was already a legend, and George held him in high regard. In ‘George Gissing at Work: Extracts From My Reading’ (p. 40) he describes, in 1883, how he thinks Ruskin’s prose is the best there is, and Swinburne is a poetic version of Ruskin. George sent his poetic hero a presentation copy of 'The Unclassed' - sending a gift copy of his latest novel was a typical gesture from our man when he wanted to curry favour especially when he sought out praise and recognition from those he considered his equals. But by 1888, he had stopped being a fan; and yet, when Swinburne’s star was once more in the ascendant, and the death of Tennyson necessitated a new Poet Laureate, George said he backed Swinburne for the job - at least, that's what he told the Idler magazine. So, here is George always following, never leading, aesthetic opinion. He subsequently references Swinburne in his short story 'The Honeymoon', one of the most odious of all George's perverse short stories. There might be a smidgen of jealousy creeping in, and a touch of schadenfreude for Swinburne's fall from favour by mentioning him here.

Swinburne suffered from a strange malady that sometimes resembled epilepsy, which was really the easiest-to-deal-with part of his unique physical and mental condition - a madness possibly brought on by substance abuse. He was friends with the Rossettis and moved in the Pre-Raphaelite wider circle, but he fell under the spell of drink and narcotics, and, for a while, spiralled down into a state of disarray and futility. He was rescued by an intriguing cove called Theodore Watts-Dunton, a renowned lawyer (he represented Swinburne), critic and literary commentator who took Swinburne in to his home and reformed him. A life of decadent excess had worn out the poet, and he needed to be saved from himself. If ever there was a role model George might have made use of, we can be glad it wasn't Swinburne, though it must have been tempting. Perhaps not having much money saved George from this fate! The Divine Oscar said Swinburne was "a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestialiser." Probably not for want of trying, Oscar haha.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Theodore Watt-Dunston  at 16 Cheyne Walk by Henry Treffry Dunn

Swinburne replied to George on October 29th 1883. He had subbed out the task of critiquing to Watts-Dunton, then taken a look himself at the poems George submitted. Which was generous of the pair of them. He wrote that he believed George had genuine power of language... As to the so-called pessimism of some parts of your work, the one objection that occurs to me is that critics and readers generally will accuse you of treading in the steps of James Thomson, himself a disciple of Leopardi’s, but for this you will probably be prepared. This wasn't exactly fulsome praise, until you understand how immensely talented pessimist Leopardi was, and how downbeat Thomson's more famous works usually turned out to be.

Leopardi (1798-1837) was an Italian talent whose life and work are too immense to go into here, but have a look at this click. He was a polymath and poet who tended towards the darker side of things and his bleak world view would have been a home from home for George. Swinburne translated him into English.

James Thomson (1834-1882) - there is usually BV after his name - BV is for Bysshe Vanolis, the name he adopted as a pseudonym to distinguish him from other poets called James Thomson - was raised in the Holloway Orphanage, an institution set up to care for Scottish children left parentless by the Napoleonic Wars. It was situated in the locale just round the corner from where George lived in Islington, and gave the name to the district of the Caledonian Road click. Thomson was a friend of Charles Bradlaugh's (founder of the National Secular Society and famous for not swearing on the Bible when in Court). One of his most famous poems is 'The City of Dreadful Night'. Here are a couple of verses of the poem that could be about George, and his brooding, misanthropic pessimism:

(From The City of Dreadful Night)

Some say that phantoms haunt those shadowy streets
And mingle freely there with sparse mankind,
And tell of ancient woes and black defeats,
And murmur mysteries in the grave enshrined:
But others think them visions of illusion, 
Or even men gone far in self-confusion;
No man there being wholly sane in mind.

And yet a man who raves, however mad,
Who bares his heart and tells of his own fall,
Reserves some inmost secret good or bad:
The phantoms have no reticence at all:
The nudity of flesh will blush though tameless
The extreme nudity of bone grins shameless,
The unsexed skeleton mocks shroud and pall.

For the complete work click

Presumably, the 'steps' of Thomson's that George was following in were the bleaker thoughts on humanity, urban spaces, psychogeography, pessimism and nihilism. It would seem Swinburne, in passing this remark, was familiar with George's novels, because our man's poems tend to be a bit more upbeat, if a tad fey, in comparison. One of George's failings (as a poet!) is he seems too wedded to the mechanics of poetry and he frequently fails to deliver any money shot - which is really everything a poem is about. All that acquired knowledge about verse construction and Greek composition seems to have smothered creativity and emotional strength. His longer poems are workmanlike but ultimately, unsatisfying in emotional terms.

Thomson became increasingly disillusioned with the lack of recognition for his work, and sank into depression and alcoholism. George, increasingly disillusioned with the lack of recognition for his work, sank into self-pity and moved to France.