Commonplace 98 George & The Foolish Virgin PART TWO.

Illustration for the Kelmscott Press edition of Chaucer's
The Canterbury Tales by Edward Burne-Jones. 1896

In the previous post, we left Rosamund skivvying for the Hallidays. She has offered to work for room and board alone, but the paragon of virtue that is Mrs Halliday insists on paying her £10 per annum. That's about 3/9d a week. That's about 17p in decimal currency. A Snickers bar costs about 60p. I know: it's only a story...

Initially, Rosamund, The Foolish Virgin, thrives with this new regime of hard work and accomplishable, clearly-directed goals. George, her creator, gives her job satisfaction in these menial and trivial tasks - he doesn't expect much of any woman, intellectually (remember that remark he made about women being about as clever as the average male idiot? I know a fair amount of male idiots, and, boy, are they dumb!), so lead blacking and sweeping are about the right level for George's female creations. She has some social intercourse with the Hallidays, but this is introduced to give credence to the conversations between Rosamund and her employer, and to contrast the two women's personalities. Let's see what George says about Mrs H: ... Mrs Halliday had the mind and the temper which enable woman to front life as a rational combatant, instead of vegetating as a more or less destructive parasite. her voice declared her; it fell easily upon a soft, clear note; the kind of voice that expresses good humour and reasonableness, and many other admirable qualities; womanly, but with no suggestion of the female gamut; a voice that was never likely to test its compass in extremes. 

Both 'rational' and 'reasonable' are words George urged on Edith. He found her to be neither - which is rich coming from the man who regularly failed to be either. Now, we know George didn't have much respect for women in general, but... is he talking to Edith again here? When he uses the word 'temper', does he really means 'temperament' - is it another of his Freudian slips? We know he had less than zero regard for Edith by this time. Vegetating. Destructive. Parasite. Really. Mr Gissing. Tut-tut.

He goes on:

A woman of the ignorant class may keep house, and bring up a family, with her own hands; she has to deal only with the simplest demands of her life; her home is a shelter, her food is primitive, her children live or die according to the law of natural selection. Infinitely more complex, more trying, is the task of the educated wife and mother; if to conscientiousness be added enduring poverty, it means not seldom an early death. Edith, if she read this... No wonder she despised him - probably more than he despised her, and with better reason. Does he really believe this? And, if he does, what hope is there for him??

After a particularly trying time of it, Rosamund feels entitled to praise for what she has done - that she has a right to feel myself superior to the ordinary run of girls. She prises some sort of words of appreciation out of the condescending Mrs Halliday, then: Mrs Halliday declared that life had never been so easy for her as now; she knew the delight of rest in which there was no self-reproach. But, for sufficient reasons, she did not venture to express to Rosamund all the gratitude that was due. 

One can only suppose that Mrs Halliday, like her creator, had a lack of people skills exacerbated by deficits in the empathy department. Now, if there's one thing I know about women, it's that we usually feel guilty for not slaving away at something. We find it difficult to do anything even faintly recreational or relaxing all the while there is ironing to be done, or beds to be made. Or men to be served. We would fully embrace the delight of rest in which there is no self-reproach - chance would be a fine thing! 

From William Caxton's 2nd ed.
Canterbury Tales 1483 click

Rosamund, wanting someone to make her feel worthwhile, having had no response from a letter she wrote to Mr Hunt, decides to write to that cad, Mr Cheeseman, who dumped her for a widow woman and made her a laughing stock back in her lodging house. She tells him he should have begged her forgiveness for promising himself to someone else when she was supposed to be his girlfriend. It is a farce worthy of the stage - for Mr Hunt replies soon after she posts the letter (he has been away on business) but there are no words of affection in it - she was slaving to prove her worthiness to Hunt, and she expected him to acknowledge that, and praise her for her determination and self-sacrifice, and maybe make her an offer. Disappointed, Rosamund thinks this is the way her life will go - she will continue as she is, still trying to prove she is worthy. However, Cheeseman gets in touch, worms his way back in with her with guile and emotional blackmail (George's skill-set!). Then, she hears the Hunt is to be married (to a Canadian!) and poor Rosamund is set up for her Second Ritual Humiliation of the piece: when her holiday comes along, she takes herself off to London and fits herself up with a fab new wardrobe of clothes, and then trolls off to Kensington Gardens to meet up with Mr Cheeseman. They both think the other has changed for the better - he sweet talks her into giving him a second chance. George writes this revealing snippet about Cheeseman's tactics in winning her back by: talking of his faults, his virtues, his calamities, and his hopes, like the impulsive, but nerveless fellow that he was (I think here, 'nerveless' means audacious) - which is pretty much the approach George used on Gabrielle Fleury and Miss Collet, is it not?? Anyhoo: At length was uttered the question for which Rosamund had long ago prepared her reply. The widow has renounced her claim to Cheeseman. Poor Rosamund is a sitting duck.

Like a damsel wooed by her knight in shining armour, Rosamund is all aflutter and writes to the smug Hallidays to tend her notice and to tell them she is to be married. It's a nice, open letter, full of honest, girlish enthusiasm. Inwardly, she accepts Cheeseman is not quite the Sir Galahad of her dreams, but he would do if Mr Hunt was unavailable. She did not dislike him - no, she did not dislike him. He would be a very tractable husband. Compared, of course, with --- Isn't 'tractable' what George thought Edith was going to be - about the same time he said she would be acceptable if she lost her hideous London accent?? Of course, maybe this is what Edith thought about George, when he proposed. She did not dislike him... not then. He would give her plenty to dislike him for in the years to come.

Sir Galahad by Edward Burne-Jones 1858

You can see it coming, can't you? Cheeseman has already proved himself a bad lot - to Rosamund and to the widow woman, no doubt, so he's likely to do it for a third time, isn't he? And, as 3 Is A Magic Number click... here is Rosamund's Third Ritual Humiliation. Cheeseman writes to call it off.  

Rosamund is forced to go back to the Hallidays, cap in hand, to ask for her old job back and to own her Foolishness by telling the whole damned sorry tale to her employer. George is very good at humiliating his characters, but this is him at his worst: 

Halliday heard it from his wife, and shook a dreamy, compassionate head.

'For goodness' sake, urged the practical woman, 'don't let her think she's a martyr.' 

'No, no; but the poor girl should have her taste of happiness.'

'Of course, I'm sorry for her, but there are plenty of people more to be pitied. Works she must, and there's only one kind of work she's fit for. It's no small thing to find your vocation - is it? Thousands of such women - all meant by nature to scrub and cook - live and die miserably because they think themselves too good for it.'

Never for a moment think that George was anything other than a misogynist. 

So, if he didn't get his inspiration from the Biblical parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, and Fair Rosamund of the Pre-Raphaelites was not his muse - and, not withstanding the depths of his twisted mind - what was the source of his tale? Geoffrey Chaucer. As well as the Canterbury malarkey, Chaucer wrote a vast amount of poems and stories. One, is the likely model for George's piece, because it is a poem that mocks the very fallacy of the 'Fair Rosamund' of chivalric legend. Here is the translation into modern English.

To Rosamund click

Madame, you are of all beauty the shrine

Within the circle of the mappamund;

For as the crystal glorious you shine,

And like ruby are your cheeks round.

And therewith you’re so merry and jocund

That at a revel when I see you dance,

It is a salve for my every wound,

Though you with me suffer no dalliance.

For though I fill a cask with tears of mine,

Yet that woe may my heart not confound;

Your demi-voice that so small you twine

Makes my thought with joy and bliss abound.

So courteously I go with love bound,

That to myself I say, in penance,

It suffices me to love you, Rosamund,

Though you with me suffer no dalliance.

Never did pike so wallow in galantine

As I in love do wallow, and am wound,

For which full oft I of myself divine

That I am truly Tristan the second.

My love will not grow cold or be unsound;

I burn with amorous pleasure, at every chance.

Do what you will, I will your thrall be found,

Though you with me suffer no dalliance.

We know this was meant as a parody of the Romantic Ballade very popular in Chaucer's time because of the reference to the fish stew - a pike in galantine. A galantine is usually made of boned flesh, then served up cold in a highly decorated way, a bit like a fancy cake. For your recipe click this fascinating site, where there is more galantine-related Chaucer facts. And click to learn more about the poem.

What are we left with? Is George's Foolish Virgin, like the Chaucer, an 'ironic' piece - irony being the description he gave to Gabrielle Fleury to explain his misogyny. Or, is it the unconscious out-pouring of his frustration with the bitterly regretted second marriage that has tipped him into this sort of anti-woman stance? George was always disdainful of women - maybe his father had this sort of suppressed, repressed attitude to his wife, George's mother, and passed on the trait. Throughout his life, George seems to have been angry at women, both real ones and the fictional sort - as soon as he hoists them onto a pedestal, he knocks them off it. Anger at them for being women, and not men; anger for them not sacrificing enough to him; anger that he is not their number one Little Man; anger at their having needs he can't fulfil; anger at them wanting more than he can give; anger at them not appreciating his moods, his obsessions, his demands. Anger at them not falling for his desperate, needy charm.

Remember, George was writing for The Yellow Book, and a mostly male readership expecting something 'out there' and macho. George was not expecting to be read by feminists and emancipators, so perhaps he is over-egging the pudding to impress the boys in the locker room. But, it is a nasty, cruel story, spiteful and unpleasant, and if he thought his fellow-men would agree with the sentiments he put forth, then he really did have a low opinion of the whole human race - not just women. 

Was Rosamund Jewell 'foolish'? Is any woman, who puts her faith in a man?

click

Commonplace 97 George & The Foolish Virgin. PART ONE.

We move from the delicious ghoulishness of Peter Ackroyd's imagination to the more unpleasant and frightening landscape of George's inner workings and thence on to one of his most repellent (in a very tough field!) short stories: The Foolish Virgin.

First, let's consider its origins. It was written between Wednesday, October 30th and Monday, November 4th 1895. Considering the short hours he worked daily, and the full day off he probably allowed himself at the weekend, the payment he received of £25.4.0 was money for jam - and about the same amount he offered as pay a full-time servant for a year's work. George really does take the biscuit every time he lectures someone about work - as well as displaying a serious lack of insight into his own psyche! But, tackle it he does - and harnesses it to another of his favourite hobby-horses: the pitiful aberration that is 'woman'. As he wrote an entire novel on the topic of 'woman and work' (The Odd Women, 1893), he must have believed himself to be an expert in this field. As I say, a serious lack of insight...

John Lane of the quarterly periodical, The Yellow Book, asked George to write some short stories, and The Foolish Virgin was published in Volume VIII in January 1896. Presumably George was happy to know Boston would be kept up to date with the doings of the young man who had rocked up there back in 1876, almost fresh from Manchester's Belle Vue Gaol.

So, what is The Foolish Virgin by our man all about? First, let's dispense with the Biblical parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins - it is not based on that. He sort-of took the term and monkeyed with it, maybe to attract a male readership drawn to anything with the word 'virgin' in the title - The Yellow Book click had a reputation for filth...er, adult content. Maybe he thought ecclesiastical types were avid readers of such publications, and so would mistake it for a treatise on eschatology.

George's Foolish Virgin is called Rosamund. We know George liked clever-dick allusions in the names he gave to some characters; Rosamund was a figure in early English literature, clearly linked to knights in shining armour, ladies in ivory towers, and valour and nobility - which destined her to be a lady beloved of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Fair Rosamund by Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
(For a key to the symbolism of her red thread: click)

                               
Who was this literary, mythic 'Fair Rosamund'? Rosamund - 'Rose of the World' - was Rosamund Clifford, a consort to King Henry II. When his wife, Queen Eleanor, found out, Rosamund was given a choice between taking poison or stabbing herself: she chose poison. Well, that's the legend, embroidered to sell ballades and make English history even more romantically bloodthirsty than it was. It was just the sort of thing that appealed to the necrophile Pre-Raph Brethren, hence the many versions of her they committed to canvas. And she is the subject of many representations in Art throughout the Middle Ages. It will have appealed to George because the fable set two women against each other, with the wronged wife torturing the vanquished other women in vile and cruel ways - in some versions, Rosamund is boiled or roasted alive. We know George believed women were preternaturally cruel to their own sex whenever they got the chance, so his ears will have pricked up on hearing the tale. And he would have seen many of the paintings. By the time the Pre-Raphs had turned her story into a cliché of love and martyrdom, the Fair Rosamund had become a familiar short-cut to what was seen as an ancient, immutable English past, but which was, more or less, a conceit made up to authenticate a form of Englishness of myth, not reality, and a template for all that was feminine in womanhood, hoping to attract a lordly suitor.

So, is George's Rosamund based on this tale? No, I don't think so - it is too romantic and tragic and we can't help but have sympathy for the girl who is so badly treated. George has no sympathy whatsoever for his girl - in fact, the tale he tells is one where he sadistically sets her up for several humiliations which are delivered with all the spiteful glee George can muster.

Queen Eleanor and The Fair Rosamund
by Evelyn de Morgan - that red thread, once more 

George's The Foolish Virgin tells the story of a girl who has very few options. She has made bad choices and keeps on making them throughout the tale, for a number of reasons that George finds hard to forgive: 1) she is poor; 2) she is a woman 3) she hasn't got a job. The story opens with the fellow-lodgers in her boarding house discussing the behaviour of one of their number, the absent Mr Cheeseman - who has just gotten engaged to be married. It's clear they all know Rosamund thought she had first dibs on Mr Cheeseman: Humiliation Number One. She is, in fact, an Odd Woman - and, as George put it in a letter to Eduard Bertz apropos the theme of that novel: It deals with the women, who, from the marriage point of view, are superfluous. Poor Rosamund: superfluous.

George has an odd relationship with his creation: he describes her as being a...tall, slim person, with unremarkable, not ill-moulded features. Nature meant her to be graceful in form and pleasantly feminine of countenance; unwholesome habit of mind and body was responsible for the defects that now appeared in her.  It's that male gaze once more (see Commonplaces 85-87) deciding what a woman should be like. 
What is the 'unwholesome habit'? Failing to use a handkerchief? Not subscribing to George's narrow view of womanhood? Masturbation? 

Fair Rosamund and Queen Eleanor
by Frank Cadogan Cowper 

For a start, she is hoping to find a husband to support her, for she is without a sufficient independent income, and so is dependent on her brother. Now, in Isabel Clarendon, it's acceptable to the author to have a woman dependent on her brother - Mary ends up (after the usual ritual humiliation piled on her by her creator, the author) living in Norwich with her brother Bernard (what she has ever done to deserve Norwich is never explained haha!) But, The Foolish Virgin is considered a freeloader because she gets an allowance from her brother. Maybe this is a coded message for Algernon, who always required financial support from his older brother, though I wonder if George's little brother could be bothered to read these downbeat, unpleasant short stories. See Commonplace 11 for an explanation of how George's criminal past might have affected Algernon's ability to earn a living.
When the allowance is removed, Rosamund the Foolish V is forced to fall back on her own problem-solving skills.

Of course, George can't stop himself preaching on the faults of woman:
Her affections suffered, but that was not the worst. Her pride had never received so cruel a blow. After a life of degradation which might have unsexed her, Rosamund remained a woman. The practice of affectations numberless had taught her one truth, that she could never hope to charm save by reliance upon her feminine qualities. Boarding-house girls, such numbers of whom she had observed, seemed all intent upon disowning their womanhood; they cultivated masculine habits, wore as far as possible male attire, talked loud slang, threw scorn (among themselves at all events) upon domestic virtues; and not a few of them seemed to profit by the prevailing fashion. Rosamund had tried these tactics, always with conscious failure.

Is it me, or is George obsessed here with cross-dressing? Has he had some sort of encounter that shook his sense of masculinity? Transvestism was a music hall staple act, but cross-dressing of female to male in the street (we are in Sarah Walters/Peter Ackroyd country here) in the name of style or fun was no doubt one of the many thrills George observed in his perambulations about London town (or Brighton!). And what on earth are we to make of: After a life of degradation which might have unsexed her, Rosamund remained a woman? It is a common trick employed by George - to appear more gnomic than he really is. Maybe he thought it gave him gravitas. Is this some special code only a man would understand?

Fair Ros again - by George Woolliscroft Rhead Jr

George's Rosamund (he gives her the surname 'Jewell', but this is obviously meant to be a sarcastic joke) has to formulate a plan. Cheeseman had been a rotter - but she was once drawn to a Mr Hunt. She moves to reignite this relationship, but it soon emerges he is not interested in her in her present form: she must, she thinks, change! Become the woman he might find acceptable. And, what is that? She asks him for advice: ... I am trying to find some way of being useful in the world. I am tired of living for myself. I seem to be such a useless creature. Surely even I must have some talent, which it's my duty to put to use? Where should I turn? Could you help me with a suggestion? 

How does he respond? - well, George has him think this:

... he took it for granted, however, that Miss Jewell frequently used this language; doubtless it was part of her foolish, futile existence to talk of her soul's welfare, especially in tête-à-tête with unmarried men. Gnomic once more, with so much disdain for women thrown in for good measure.

She goes on:
... I fear I have never had a purpose in life - I'm sure I don't know why. Of course, I'm only a woman, but even women nowadays are doing so much. You don't despise their efforts, do you?

Mr Hunt replies: Not indiscriminately. He then goes on to tell her about a woman he knows who would be an excellent role model because she knows her purpose is : To keep house admirably, and bring up their children as well as possible, on an income which would hardly supply some women with shoe-leather. This paragon is married to a Mr Halliday and they would be the happiest couple in England if they had any money... They can't afford to engage a good servant (if one exists nowadays), and cheap sluts have driven them frantic, so that Mrs Halliday does everything with her own hands.
(Misogynist Novelist's note to wife, Edith: I'm thinking about you here, so think on, lady.) 

Rosamund has a moment of inspiration - the sort that George had, then acted on, usually to bring about a worse situation and more problems to sort out for all involved. She writes to Hunt to let him know her financial predicament and make him give her the Hallidays' address so she can apply to them to be their servant. She tells him: No, I can't do anything but work with my hands. I am no good for anything else. Foolishly (!), she thinks this will make her a better woman in Mr Hunt's eyes. He writes back: If you are willing and able to carry out this project... You will have done your part towards solving one of the gravest problems of the time.

FR In Her Bower by William Bell Scott

Now, George could have set this up so that he can deliver a story with a happy ending - Rosamund learns home-craft skills, develops self-esteem, earns an independent income, and wins a happy life based on what is natural justice - great suffering demands great salvation - despite men, not because of them. She could have been a success for other women to respect, a beacon of light to guide them on to realise there are alternatives to marriage and a life of under-achieving being beholden to a man who treats you like a chattel. But, then George would have to be a different person to do that! Rosamund doesn't understand the letter, and neither do we, the dozy readers, so George explains:
Rosamund did not at once understand; when the writer's meaning grew clear, she kept repeating the words, as though they were a new gospel. Yes! She would be working nobly, helping to show a way out of the great servant difficulty. It would be an example to poor ladies, like herself, who were  ashamed of honest work.

So, no redemption through self-actualisation for Rosamund; only through being an over-worked, under-paid, under-appreciated slave. It says so much about George, don't you think? The world needs servants to keep house for men more than it needs to maximise the potential locked up inside a woman's mind?

JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO SEE HOW THIS PANS OUT AND TO EXPLORE GEORGE'S INSPIRATION FOR THE STORY.
 

Commonplace 96 George & Dan Leno & The Limehouse Golem PART THREE. With illustrations from William Blake.

William Blake's LONDON -
an influence on the novel

Dan Leno And The Limehouse Golem by Peter Ackroyd is being made into a movie. It is a compelling tale of murder and mayhem in the foggy London areas George once knew so well. It has touches of the sort of shock! horror! story so popular in the Victorian age - probably being more of an homage to Thomas De Quincey and his highly entertaining tales of cut throats and stabbings. The Ratcliffe Murders formed three essays De Quincey wrote about the crimes collectively now known as 'On Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts', but it is his novella 'The Avenger' that is probably more like 'Dan Leno'. This is a stirring mystery tale of bloody revenge and scores settled following antisemitic persecution, with a tall, dark, handsome young man the least likely crime suspect in a tale of slashings and crucifixions... The antisemitic element is touched on in 'Dan Leno', much as it was when the crimes of Jack the Ripper infected the streets of Whitechapel in 1888.

In fact, the Whitechapel Murders form a sort of watershed in British cultural life especially in terms of what we now think of as 'The Press'. The sort of reporting we now regard as 'tabloid journalism' had its beginnings in the late Victorian age. For an interesting overview of this, click to see Professor Christopher Frayling's documentary on this very subject. Despite the amount of stuff written by authors since 1888, very few have accepted that the 'Jack the Ripper' persona is a myth - a brand; a means of selling newspapers. It wouldn't take a modern-day Sherlock Holmes (just someone with access to youtube haha) to work out that the 'signature' so typical of serial killers is absent in the five canonical 'Ripper' murders. For an exhaustive overview of Jack the Ripper, go here click and immerse yourself in the gore.

The Number Of The Beast Is 666 

We must remember, Dan Leno & The Limehouse Golem is a novel, and not one of Peter Ackroyd's 'historic' biographies. Like his earlier 'Last Testament of Oscar Wilde', he has taken characters and invented situations in which they can operate to illustrate historic events, and give an authentic-sounding voice to what they might have said. Peter Ackroyd's 'historic' biographies tend to involve his 'heroes'. William Blake is his number one hero - Oscar Wilde, is high up the list, too. As both of these are my top 'heroes', anything Peter Ackroyd writes interests me. Blake is a genius so celestial that it is impossible to do him justice with mere words. Lambeth's No. 13 Hercules Buildings (no longer there) is where William and Catherine Blake lived and where he produced many of his greatest works, including 'The Songs Of Innocence And Experience'.

The Great Red Dragon And The Woman Clothed With The Sun

Who doesn't love a Victorian Murder Mystery? Jack the Ripper is so much a part of the fear we have of urban landscapes at night - just as the Ratcliffe Murders were in De Quincey's days. Much as the 1888 press whipped up fear and mass hysteria in the name of selling copies, and thousands of newspapers carried the gruesome details of each murder within hours of their commission, Peter Ackroyd's choice of the new-fangled technology of the Babbage Engine reflects the fear aroused when the World Wide Web was a baby, and no-one knew what it might grow into. No-one knew then what impact such accessible tools might have on the 'dark side' of the human mind; what with its file-sharing systems and facility for downloadable content, the speed at which it operated and the total meltdown we experience when our computer technology fails... Now we know how the web can be harnessed for bad things - an invisible Golem we all fear when terrorism and sexual exploitation makes use of it. But it can also bring us this click.

It's difficult to know why George is included in the cast list of Dan Leno and The Limehouse Golem - apart from the fact he was alive at the time the story is set (1880), and made use of the British Library Reading Room. I suspect it is because Peter Ackroyd likes George but accepts the market is fairly well off for George Gissing biographies; by adding him to Dan Leno, he offers a kind of homage. In fact, using the notion of George researching the Babbage Engine is really a delivery system to work the invisible reason and mechanical sentience of the Machine into the story - and hint at the innate creepy quality Stephen Hawking recently highlighted about Artificial Intelligence click being a threat to humans' World Dominance click

William Blake's Dante's Hell X Farinata -
looking very much like London

Of course, it makes me cross to see that George's first wife, Marianne aka Nell is of course portrayed as a prostitute. I shall never tire of challenging this falsehood - there is no evidence she ever worked as a prostitute. I suppose anyone who researches George Gissing will read this sort of claptrap and assume it is correct - I once believed it, too. But I took the trouble to look for the origins of the claim and still can't find them. So, don't take anyone's word that she was. Go and look for the origins of the claim yourself and see what isn't there!

Ackroyd presents Marianne/Nell as a comic book harridan and common slut - which maybe says more about Peter Ackroyd than it ever could about Nell. He also has it that the Dan Leno George Gissing blames Marianne/Nell for his struggle in life. Well, let's hope this is artistic license, too, because it is utter tosh. I don't think George blamed her, because he was too egotistical to admit anyone - especially a working class uneducated girl - had any influence over him. He was 'all his own work'. The fact that he ditched her at the first sign she was more trouble than he thought she was worth, before he had any acclaim and before he had hardened into the George Gissing who went looking for a second wife to persecute, shows the true extent of her influence as nil. George's version of his life as being a poverty-stricken nightmare was debunked in the early twentieth century by his pupils and associates, and his failure to achieve more acclaim for his writing is down to his lack of flexibility, his pride, and the luck of the market. He made very bad choices and lived by ridiculous, illogical rules and these all failed to make him an Artist or a more popular writer. No-one made him a thief; or a monster of cruelty to two wives and two children. There are some of George's supporters who blame Marianne and Edith for everything bad in Gissing's life, which really detracts from the amount of effort George put in to secure his own miserable existence. Perhaps the movie will reflect some of his complex and flawed character and not present him as a hard-done-by, hopeless dingbat.

The Red Dragon And The Beast From The Sea ?1805

Films made from novels tend to open up a new audience for the books - so maybe we will see a huge rise in George's star. His writing is not the greatest - he lacks spontaneity and empathy even with characters he has invented - even when he is privy to their inner workings, he doesn't seem to know his characters very well. There is a tendency for him to preach - his own misanthropic, misogynistic stuff gets snuck into his novels (and more obviously there in his weirdly unsettling short stories) because George really did lack the machismo to state his point of view assertively. In Dan Leno, we have this: He had always believed that his purpose was to endure life with as little suffering as possible, and to think of death with affection... - which is a mini definition of Schopenheurian Pessimism. It was Schopenhauer who really did for George and his chance for happiness, and once he had got into bed with Arthur, George simply couldn't break away.

Commonplace 95 George & Dan Leno & The Limehouse Golem PART TWO The Tale of Elizabeth Cree.

Dan Leno on the left

Apart from drawing on a rich seam of horror in Victorian (and earlier) fiction, Peter Ackroyd makes use of various real-life characters to populate his story. Karl Marx, an intended victim who escapes this fate by accident, is a reader in the British Library Reading Room (see Commonplace 93) sitting in close proximity to the novel's male murderer, John Cree, and our man, George Gissing - George is reading an article he has written for the fictitious Pall Mall Review when he is introduced to us. References to Charles Dickens, Thomas De Quincey, the Ratcliffe Murders, Grimaldi, the birth of Charlie Chaplin (who may have actually been born in the Midlands click) abound. Product placement of patent medicines give the narrative an authentic feel - as do the little psychogeography tours around the mean streets of Limehouse, Low Marsh and Lambeth made by the killer, and the tours of the music halls made by the performers.

It starts with the execution of Elizabeth Cree, former music hall star and friend of Dan Leno, for the murder of her husband whom she believes to have been a serial killer. As Elizabeth is a hard-hearted, scheming and seemingly homicidal character herself, her influence adds a macabre feel to the general atmosphere of evil stalking the London streets. She marries a man who works as a journalist then writes a diary full of horrible things he does to his victims, so we know he is bad and we are saved the bother of having to work that out. But Elizabeth has relished the death of her much-hated mother and even hastened it, so we know she has the potential to be a nasty piece of work, too.

The Playhouse in Craven Street where Elizabeth Cree makes her debut.

There are similarities to this tale and the case of Florence Maybrick as told in the fictional 'Diary of Jack the Ripper' published in 1992. The real Florence was convicted of murdering her husband in 1889 (the year after the Whitechapel Murders) though she always denied killing him.
The fake 'Diary' suggests her husband, James Maybrick, as Jack the Ripper, was poisoned by his wife after he begged her to put him out of his misery - and left her the Diary to read. In real life, Florence Maybrick was convicted of poisoning her husband, James, because she was suspected of wanting to be with another man. James was cruel to her, kept mistresses and was addicted to drugs to the extent that he could not function and their livelihood was jeopardised. One of his favourite drugs was arsenic. Arsenic was the basis of patent medicines, cosmetics and could be bought as rat poison. Its beauty as a murder weapon is that it is odourless and tasteless, and so can be easily ingested by a potential victim without them suspecting. The smart way to do it is to give small doses to begin with, then increase the dosage until the full effect is achieved.

As James Maybrick regularly took all manner of poisons for their therapeutic effects, it would seem a logical way to murder him. As well as regular doses of arsenic, he took strychnine; it was easily obtained in chemist's shops, and cheap - nowadays, arsenic and strychnine are hard to come by, though derivatives are available. For example, the homoeopathic remedy nux vomica contains strychnine and has to be taken with caution. But we have a much better potentially fatal poison at our fingertips - well, those of you who smoke, do! Nicotine is more toxic than arsenic and a lethal dose can be extracted from a packet of 20 cigarettes and injected into a potential victim. Only an autopsy will undo you! Disclaimer - I am not suggesting you do it; it's just information.

Here is a bit of Difference Engine.

In 'Dan Leno', the destructive impulse of the Golem swirls around Limehouse unseen but felt by all involved in the vortex of metropolitan life. The Reading Room at the British Library is where George is to be found preparing an article on Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, by way of Jeremy Bentham's 'Felicific Calculus'. What the heck are these?

The information the fictional George might have unearthed might include... hang on, you can read all about him here click on wikipedia - what more fitting an homage to the programmable computer inventor can there be?

In the story, George is writing a follow-up to his previous offering 'Romanticism and Crime', which highlighted his thoughts on the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 click. This was a series of very brutal murders written of with relish by Thomas De Quincey in his 'On Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts', a series of three essays about the crimes, the first published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1827. De Quincey was one of George's favourite reads - click to read it.

Jeremy Bentham, the father of Utilitarianism, devised the algorithm 'Felicitous Calculus' to estimate the amount of pleasure/good to be found in any particular experience. There is a lot of sense in what this is about, so click to find out more. Now, like I say, I'm no techie... and neither was George. He suspected science of being a portal to Hell requiring maths skills - and he wasn't much interested in maths. But he was interested in Comte and the new science of sociology and that requires a lot of statistics, and so he would have found a computer a vital tool in his studies.

Jeremy Bentham at UCL
click 

According to the narrator of 'Dan Leno', in the Reading Room, overlooked by the serial killer, George transcribed this into his notebook: The quest for machine intelligence must arouse fresh speculation in even the most orthodox mind; think of all the calculations which might be performed in the field of statistical enquiry, where we might find ourselves able to make many very intricate deductions. How George came to be writing an account of it is something even Peter Ackroyd can't explain because anyone even remotely acquainted with George's interests would not send him off on a quest to research the 'Babbage Analytical Engine' - and he was famously snooty about journalism and being commissioned to do articles. Still, it is a novel and it all makes for a denser narrative. There is mention of Workers in The Dawn - the famous 'Walk with me, reader, into Whitecross Street' opening line - the best of George's barnstorming openers; Karl Marx owns a copy (in the novel!) and the serial killer notes it.

One real person mentioned in the novel is the fascinating Thomas Griffiths Wainewright who was an artist and critic (champion and defender of William Blake), a poet, a raconteur, as well as a forger who died in Tasmania, Australia after being transported for forgery. Apart from being a dandy and a bit of a genius, he was the subject of a January 1889 piece 'Pen, Pencil and Poison: A Study in Green' in the Fortnightly Review by the divine Oscar Wilde click to read it. Wainewright was a lad after George's heart who valued the Greeks highly, and who loved Italy, and he, too, was someone who turned to crime without properly thinking things through. He was a poet, critic, style guru, Artist, and possible homicidal poisoner. He was definitely a forger who was transported to Australia for his crimes, though he claimed to be totally innocent as the money he embezzled was his own. His adopted several nom de plumes, including Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot and Cornelius van Vinkbooms to write some very scathing criticism of Art and aesthetics. I don't know about you, but I love him for this, if for nothing else! He was a friend to the great persons of his day, including Sheridan and Lamb, and knew William Blake, personally, and admired his work; his best friend was Fuseli.

Silence by John Henry Fuseli  1799-1801

A Wainewright watercolour
(one of the less graphic of his Romantic views)  

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright would make a very good subject for one of Peter Ackroyd's semi-fictional biographies. However, there has already been a very good one done by Andrew Motion whose book on Wainewright came out in 2000 click. It's a 'faction' style biography giving words for TGW to speak - very much as Ackroyd did with 'The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde'. I would recommend you rush out and find a copy and set about reading it straight away - it's fab, and makes you realise how good of a novelist a former Poet Laureate can be. Go on, off you trot to the bookstore; it really is excellent!

George, himself already the subject of fictional biographies haha - and half made-up autobiographies! - has probably missed the Ackroyd/Motion boat.

JOIN ME IN PART THREE TO EXPLORE MORE OF THIS FASCINATING WORK.

Commonplace 94 George & Dan Leno & The Limehouse Golem. PART ONE.

Peter Ackroyd's 1994 novel of a fictitious Victorian serial killer is about to be made into a movie. George Gissing fans will already be familiar with the book, as George is one of the principal characters. Some of us will love it, some will hate it; all will wonder what George would have made of it. Would he have been flattered to be included in the venture? Not much.

The book's author is one of the UK's most widely-read authors, who has enjoyed great success over a long career in all genres of writing, but is probably most associated with a string of biographies of British cultural icons. Chaucer; Chatterton: Dickens; Wilde; Milton; Shakespeare; Alfred Hitchcock and (a personal favourite of mine), William Blake. The one consistent feature they share, according to Mr Ackroyd, is that they all have a close relationship with London click. It seems fitting that he turn his spotlight on George, with our man's strong connections with the capital.

Maybe Mr Ackroyd has picked up on the contradictions, the falsehoods and the downright lies George told, so he only has himself to blame, because our man is represented in a fairly poor light. But it is a made up story, dependant on real characters - Karl Marx also appears - to bring the grand guignol story to life. It does not claim to be 'faction' - that genre invented by Truman Capote to tell the story of the Clutter murders that is 'In Cold Blood', where he embroidered scenes and conversations around what was known in order to give an authentic feel and to explain the actions of Hickock and Smith, the murderers.  

First of all, what does the novel's title mean? To anyone not familiar with British cultural history: who was Dan Leno? Born George Wild Galvin, he was a phenomenon of the music halls - a now defunct cultural form - for the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. This is from the wikipedia page:
Music hall is a type of British theatrical entertainment popular between 1850 and 1960. It involved a mixture of popular songs, comedy, speciality acts and variety entertainment. The term is derived from a type of theatre or venue in which such entertainment took place. British music hall was similar to American vaudeville, featuring rousing songs and comic acts, while in the United Kingdom the term "vaudeville"' referred to more working-class types of entertainment that would have been termed "burlesque" in America.

Dan Leno (1860-1904) was a child stage star, who performed with his parents, then made the transition to success as a solo adult act, becoming one of the most celebrated musical hall stars of his age - in fact, he was one of the first 'celebrities' who could command high rewards for his unique, acrobatic, idiosyncratic work, and whose life was occasionally ruined by being regularly pursued through the streets by fans. Physical comedy, comic roles and songs, juggling, acrobatics, skits, pastiches, droll feats of verbal legerdemain - there was no end to the man's versatility. 

One of Dan't most renowned characters was in the 1901 show Bluebeard; Sister Anne was a surreal confection of bizarre elements: 

The Times drama critic noted: "It is a quite peculiar and original Sister Anne, who dances breakdowns and sings strange ballads to a still stranger harp and plays ping-pong with a frying-pan and potatoes and burlesques Sherlock Holmes and wears the oddest of garments and dresses her hair like Miss Morleena Kenwigs, and speaks in a piping voice – in short it is none other than Dan Leno whom we all know" click Sounds creepy to me, but I'm no authority. Morleena Kenwigs was a reference to the Dickens character from Nicholas Nickleby. This is an interesting link to the works of Kate Dickinson who wrote this: click.

Sister Anne

However, such gifts do not come cheap and Dan Leno eventually cracked under the pressure of his calling, and succumbed to alcoholism, then mental illness of such a degree that he required institutional care. Backstage gossip suggested it was his role in Mother Goose that did for him, but, Dan wanted to be taken for what he was - an extremely talented performer who could extend his range into straight roles, if given the chance. But he was never allowed to rise above burlesque, partly because of his status as a star, and partly because his core audience were not play-goers. His fellow London stage comic talent, Charlie Chaplin (not actually born in London, so no chance of an Ackroyd biog) had the same problem, but was lucky enough to be able to exploit the new technology of film to broaden his audience. 

Dan became increasingly erratic and volatile - alcoholism and mental illness were exacerbated by a fall in popularity. His star waned, and after an abortive comeback, he died aged 43.

Limehouse is one of the most historic and renowned - even notorious - areas of London, taking up a large chunk of space on the north bank of the Thames, and adjacent to areas such as Whitechapel, Stepney, and the Thomas de Quincey (also mentioned in the novel) featured badlands of Ratcliffe click. It was the first London canal waterway to connect with the River Lea and up and on to the counties north of the capital, past the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield - where the gun that won the British their empire was made click.
At the time of the novel - 1880 - Limehouse was an industrial area run on heavy industries, and home to a population of poorer workers. Here is the 1889 Charles Booth map of the area:

Sites along the waterfront, the dry docks, and landing quays of the Thames produced work for thousands, and polluted the waters they serviced. The atmosphere of the air - one of Peter Ackroyd's favourite words is 'miasma' - was acrid, chemically tainted and foul: if you had good lungs when you arrived in this part of London, that might very soon change. In fact, George's phase of exploring the rotten streets of the poorer areas of London could never have brought him to the real heart of the horrors of Limehouse: there were streets here into which not even policemen patrolling in pairs dared to venture.

The Nemesis of Neglect
Contemporary Punch illustration

That leaves us the Golem. According to the Jewish Virtual Library entry, the term 'Golem' is Hebrew for a 'shapeless man' - a made-up entity conjured by magic to help the person who brings it to life.  It goes about the business of its creator - for instructions of how to make yours (preferably from red clay) click - a sort of Frankenstein's creature mixed with The Hulk, apt to be violent, unstoppable and very clumsy. DL&TLG is a story of a serial killer who may or may not have access to a virtual (in the parlance of our times) accomplice, mingled with some pretty hefty name-dropping to add gravitas to the proceedings. All in the name of fun, not biography.

Film poster for the film 
directed by Paul Wegener 1920

The dark spectre of antisemitism lowers over the story, much as it prowled around the London streets in George's time - a Golem all of its own. Antisemitic feeling in Britain was practised less rabidly than on the European mainland, and so the UK attracted a large number of Jews who integrated into public and private life, influencing and enriching the culture - such as Simeon Solomon the painter, a Pre-Raphaelite confrère of the likes of William Holman Hunt and Edward Burne-Jones. As we saw in Commonplace 82, Israel Zangwill was a serious player on the political stage, and a man George turned to for sympathy. Perhaps George felt the cliché of the persecuted Jew fitted his own persona - which would be a sad indictment of a man who over-emphasised his own meagre suffering, and never really counted his blessings.

Bacchus by Simeon Solomon 1867

Most of the time, a 'live and let live' ambiance prevails in Britain - we are not a rich ground in which irrational hate groups find it easy to prevail. Most Brits are far too lazy to hate amorphously; we prefer things on a deep, one-to-one basis - then, we get downright medieval. Limehouse, with its opportunities for work and commerce was popular with all immigrants, as it contained cheap lodgings and a ready-made market for trading. It was essentially a maritime sort of place, with boat-building and repairs, and all the jobs associated with servicing one of the world's great ports. Warehousing goods and the distribution of imports and exports attracted a workforce of skilled and unskilled trades. Limehouse was a hub of commerce, and a place of cultural integration.

DL&TLG is story that more than tips its hat to the Victorian horror genre. The spectre of Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) and Wilkie Collins' 'Woman in White' (1859) still prowled the book shops when Bram Stoker was thinking up Dracula (1897). Conan Doyle was giving Holmes his right to catch monstrous villains; RL Stevenson's Dr Jekyll joined us in 1886. The British horror tradition so memorably coalesced by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley with Frankenstein (1818) is celebrated throughout Peter Ackroyd's novel, Popular stories such as 'Varney the Vampyre or The Feast of Blood: A Romance' click from the 1840s had set the century's tone for tales of weird creepiness and sexual impropriety (or your free copy click) and DL&TLG pays homage to all these. Thomas De Quincey is never far from its pages.

So, where does George fit in to all this? In the novel, he is for a short time, suspected of being the serial killer.

JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO EXPLORE THIS FANTASY OF GEORGE AND THE GOLEM.

Commonplace 93 George & The British Library Reading Room. Liar! Liar! Pants on fire!!!!!

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!!!!

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...

JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 94 TO LOOK AT PETER ACKROYD'S DAN LENO AND THE LIMEHOUSE GOLEM!