George Gissing and the Place of Realism [1 ed.] 1527569985, 9781527569980

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

George Gissing and the Place of Realism

George Gissing and the Place of Realism Edited by

Rebecca Hutcheon

George Gissing and the Place of Realism Edited by Rebecca Hutcheon This book first published 2021 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2021 by Rebecca Hutcheon and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-6998-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-6998-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Rebecca Hutcheon Chapter 1 .................................................................................................. 14 George Gissing, Geographer? Richard Dennis Chapter 2 .................................................................................................. 36 Workers in the Dawn, Slum Writing and London’s “Urban Majority” Districts Jason Finch Chapter 3 .................................................................................................. 55 Four Lady Cyclists José Maria Diaz Lage Chapter 4 .................................................................................................. 70 Gissing’s Literary (Mis)Fortunes in America: Exile and Transculturalism in the American Short Stories Michele Russo Chapter 5 .................................................................................................. 82 A “Wonderful Awakening”: An Ecocritical Rereading of The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft Adrian Tait Chapter 6 .................................................................................................. 94 The Quarries on the Heath: The Imprint of Place and Gissing’s Wakefield Stories Luisa Villa Chapter 7 ................................................................................................ 114 The Imaginative Delight: A Geography of the Dream in Thomas Hardy and George Gissing Marco Olivieri

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Table of Contents

Chapter 8 ................................................................................................ 128 “A Disturbing Presence”: Unhomeliness and Estrangement in The Odd Women Rebecca Hutcheon Chapter 9 ................................................................................................ 145 “The Way to Literature”: Gissing, Dickens and the Place of Influence Francesca Mackenney Chapter 10 .............................................................................................. 157 Art for Art’s Sake and the World as an Aesthetic Phenomenon: Gissing and Ruskin Jeremy Tambling Notes on Contributors............................................................................. 178 Index ....................................................................................................... 181

INTRODUCTION REBECCA HUTCHEON

What might we mean by the place of realism? In Gissing’s essay of the same name, which interrogates realism as a term and practice, ‘place’ refers to realism’s position as a literary method. But, as Gissing examines artistic perception and representation of the world, ‘the place of realism’ might just as easily include the spatial aspects of fiction. With this in mind, George Gissing and the Place of Realism adopts just this kind of dual focus: situating Gissing’s writings in realism but also the spatialities of his fiction. This kind of concentration on place in realism isn’t as habitual as it might seem. In literary theory, realism has been habitually understood in one of two ways: in its opposition to romance or idealism (a reactionary movement to its Romantic predecessor), or in its commitment to historical veracity.1 So what is generally emphasised, in both interpretations, is teleology. Realism is often understood as documenting or reflecting the here and now: “the representation of experience in a manner which approximates closely to the descriptions of similar experiences in non-literary texts of the same culture. Realistic fiction, being concerned with the action of individuals in time, approximates history” (Lodge, 1989).2 Action, causality, time, history – here realism depends on teleological movement. 1

David Masson’s book, British Novelists and their Styles (1859), which identifies ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ as two opposing trends in the nineteenth-century novel, is just one example of the contemporaneous critical debate initiating the long-lasting binary. The debate continued throughout the period. See, Andrew Lang, “Realism and Romance,” Contemporary Review 52 (1887), Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”, 375-408 in Partial Portraits (1888; repr. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1970), and Stevenson’s reply, “A Humble Remonstrance” (1884) in A Victorian Art of Fiction: Essays on the Novel in British Periodicals, 3 vols, ed. J C Olmsted (vol 1: 1830-1850; vol. 2: 1851-1869; vol. 3: 1870-1890) (New York: Garland, 1979), 285-306; 342-9. For its persistence as a theory, see M H Abrams, Glossary of Literary Terms, 303, Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London: Vintage, 2015), 9-10. 2 David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonym, and the Typology of Modern Literature (1989; repr. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 32, italics original. See also Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious:

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Introduction

But, and as this volume seeks to address, realism is just as concerned with the ‘here’ as the now. For Gissing, as Bouwe Postmus has succinctly demonstrated, imagination has a strong spatial grounding.3 And, as a letter in which Gissing instructs his brother in novel writing registers, rooting narrative in place is also a key aspect of good artistic practice. “Begin”, Gissing advises, “describing Bamburgh under sunset” – start, in other words, with setting and develop characters and action from there.4 Gissing’s spatial descriptions have been periodically associated with a variety of places. For contemporary critics he was the author of slums par excellence. The eminent Victorian sociologist Charles Booth praised Gissing for the efficacy of Demos (1886) as an accurate representation of working-class London, and Arthur Osborne Jay, Vicar of Holy Trinity, Shoreditch, borrowed – though without recognition – Gissing’s description in The Nether World (1889) of winter in Clerkenwell for his own book The Social Problem and Its Solution.5 Where propounders of social science and charitable intervention recognised their regions in his prose, Gissing was also, to other contemporaneous reviewers, “the author of the suburbs”, with one reader dubbing him “the English Balzac of middle-class suburban life”.6 And, as though that weren’t enough, Augustus John Cuthbert Hare used Gissing’s description of the village of West Dene in his 1894 guidebook for Sussex.7 The sheer volume of detected corollaries alone suggests that there is something about Gissing’s prose that captures the essence of place. But the situational, narratorial, and stylistic variety – slum and suburb, city and county; diegesis and mimesis; polemic, high realism, guidebook – also suggests that, when we speak of Gissing’s place, we might more accurately say Gissing’s places. The ‘here’ in literary criticism may routinely have been interpreted as a setting and, as a result, understood as less central than time – the ‘now’. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London and New York: Routledge, 1981), ix, where he cites “Always historicise” as the “moral” of the book. 3 Bouwe Postmus, “George Gissing's Scrapbook: A Storehouse of 'Elements of Drama to be Fused and Minted in his Brain,” in Gissing and the City, ed. John Spiers (Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2005), 199-211. 4 Pierre Coustillas, Paul F. Matthiessen and Arthur C Young, eds. The Collected Letters of George Gissing in 10 vols (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1990-97), 2 (1991), 178. 5 Pierre Coustillas, The Heroic Life of George Gissing in 3 vols (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012), vol. 2, 192. 6 “Unsigned Review of The Paying Guest” 264-5 in Gissing: The Critical Heritage, ed. Pierre Coustillas and Colin Partridge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 264. 7 Augustus John Cuthbert Hare, Sussex (London: George Allen, 1894), 115-16.

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But the now well-established spatial turn, produced by a pan-disciplinary crossover of ideas, has meant that literary place is understood as more complex than a passive backdrop against which action happens. Instead, place and space are seen as dynamic products of cultural movements, encounter and variance. According to Edward Soja, the spatial turn meant a “reassertion of space in critical social theory” and “an uncovering and conflation of hidden spatial narratives persisting under the dominant historical imagination”.8 The present volume aims at just this kind of “uncovering”, exploring as it does the hidden spatial narratives of Gissing’s oeuvre, engaging with the ‘here’ as well as the ‘now’ of his novelistic worlds. The “dominant historical imagination” is evident in early Gissing criticism in readings that were quick to identify him as a realist and, in doing so, drawing attention to the rigorously contemporaneous aspect of Gissing’s work. To H G Wells, Gissing’s novels are “deliberate attempts to present in typical groupings distinct phases of our social order”, their interest being “strictly contemporary”.9 To George Orwell they are “tied more tightly than most […] to a particular place and time” 10, and for Arnold Bennett they are concerned with “all the usual meanness of our daily existence”.11 Typicality, distinctness, social order, particularity, the usual, the quotidian; all this suggests an identifiable, pragmatic and authentic quality in Gissing’s prose and what it describes. There is also, with “strictly”, “order”, and “tightly [...] tied”, a sense of restriction along with an implicit lack of imaginative freedom innate in the form. The recognition of presentness also indicates universality and comparativeness – both Wells and Bennett use the collective pronoun (“our social order”, “our daily existence”). Gissing, they suggest, writes about the here and now, and that here and now is an experiential commonplace. This finds a parallel in what David Lodge describes as the late realists’ “assumption that there is a common phenomenal world that may be reliably described by the methods of empirical history” – as expounded in the fiction of Bennett and Wells.12 In their criticism, Gissing’s realist critics are pursuing signs of a shared whole that aligns with their own artistic practice. 8

Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies (London: Verso, 1989), 12. H G Wells, Contemporary Review, pp. 298-306 in Gissing: The Critical Heritage, 298, 305. 10 George Orwell, “‘Not Enough Money’: A Sketch of George Gissing”, Tribune, 2 April 1943, 45-47 in Works XV: Two Wasted Years, 45. 11 Arnold Bennett, “Mr George Gissing, an Inquiry,” 361-364 in The Critical Heritage, 362. 12 Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing, 47. 9

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Introduction

After all, according to Bennett, realism, as opposed to idealism and romanticism, means taking “the common grey things which people know and despise, and, without tampering, to disclose their epic significance, their essential grandeur” (Bennett, 362). Such profundity is realised in Gissing’s ability to perceive and portray “a large coherent movement”, to evoke “from the most obscure phenomena a large ominous idea”, and to see “broadly, in vast wholes” (Bennett, 363). “[W]ithout tampering” is key. To Bennett, Gissing’s art is successful because it condenses snippets of commonplace material into a collective unit without the interfering influence of idealisation. But when Bennett complains that Gissing’s “pictures have no cynosure for the eye”, that his narratives are a “maze of episodes each interrupting the others”, he identifies a measured narrative programme and isolated singularities at odds with traditional realist structures. Modernist critics, however, far from recognised their own means of aesthetic and formal innovation in Gissing’s works. Virginia Woolf asserts that Gissing “reverenced facts and had no faculty it seems (his language is meagre and unmetaphorical) for impressions”.13 Woolf’s response appears principally determined by a modernist rejection of outmoded ways of writing and its seeming devotion to material culture, akin to the criticism levelled in essays such as “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” and “Modern Fiction”.14 In an effort, perhaps, to emphasise the difference between Gissing’s art and her own, Woolf constructs an amplified binary between fact and impression. But, for all the geographical specificity and documentary exactitude of Gissing’s prose it is all, of course, only an impression of the real. The reader, such as Woolf, may be coaxed into accepting his writing as referential but any such “facts” are selected, selective, subjective and personal. What’s more, the ‘real’ is frequently disrupted by the selfreflexive tendencies of Gissing’s fiction that register a limitation to omniscience. Gissing’s reputation as a composer of documentary-style pseudo-fictions, then, is at least in part a result of a clash between realist and modernist agendas. As John Sloan explains, “his place continues to be that of a literary curiosity who stands between two major periods of literary art”.15 13

Virginia Woolf, “George Gissing,” 222-23 in The Common Reader, Second Series (London: Hogarth Press, 1932), 223. 14 Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” 32-36 in Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008), and “Modern Fiction,” 157-165 in The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4: 1925 to 1928, ed. andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984). 15 John Sloan, George Gissing: The Cultural Challenge (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 1.

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Henry James, having traversed the now well-trodden ground that Gissing’s acquaintance with the lower classes make him “the authority […] on a region vast and unexplored”, moves on to examine that age-old distinction of dialogue and narrative. His complaint is that Gissing “overdoes the ostensible report of spoken words”.16 To James, “colloquy”, or the mimetic reportage of speech, is a problem because it smothers the author’s voice. A vote from James, then, for diegesis and authorial control. But Gissing’s use, or overuse, of direct speech certainly doesn’t mean that the narrative voice has been banished. In fact, the over-saturated quality, and the jarred impression of an author in exile that James identifies, registers an uneasy tension between diegesis and mimesis that is a leitmotif of Gissing’s late realism. In any case, the tendency to rely on dialogue, whether internalised or not, was a stylistic issue that Gissing also registers. New Grub Street (1891), Gissing’s self-referential novel about writing, is disparaging of the overreliance on dialogue as a means of fleshing out the hefty three-volume realist novel. Experiencing writer’s block, protagonist Edwin Reardon resorts to: [d]escription of locality, deliberate analysis of character or motive, demanded far too great an effort for his present condition. He kept as much as possible to dialogue; the space is filled so much more quickly, and at a pinch one can make people talk about the paltriest incidents of life.17

Later, Harold Biffen’s project to reproduce the diction of the working-class “verbatim” receives ironic treatment at the hands of the narrator.18 This draws attention to the artistic vacuity of speech-for-speech’s sake. It also suggests, contra Woolf and James, that Gissing understood successful art, even in the realist tradition, as something quite different to simple “saturated” and unimaginative reproduction. Moving from imaginative exploration to theory, Gissing claimed elsewhere that realism isn’t just “the laborious picturing of the dullest phases of life”.19 He recognised that the word itself was a slippery term: 16

Henry James, Harper’s Weekly, 31 July, 1897, 754, 290-95 in The Critical Heritage, 291; 292 17 George Gissing, New Grub Street (1890; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 110-11. 18 Ibid, 128. 19 George Gissing, “The Place of Realism in Fiction”, 217-21 in Selections Autobiographical and Imaginative from the Works of George Gissing, with Biographical and Critical Notes by His Son, ed. Alfred Charles Gissing (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1929), 218. All further references will be from this edition and given in the text as “Place of Realism”.

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Introduction I observe that the word realistic has, in journalistic language, come to mean simply ‘revolting’ or ‘painful’. In the Star of to-day, March 18, ’89, is an account of a Lancet report on Cradley Heath, & the foll. examples of the word occur: ‘The realistic description of this region is accurate.’ This is not mere tautology, you see. And again: ‘Here is an account, equally realistic, of a house in this blighted region’.20

To Gissing, the term ‘realism’ is overused and misused, having become a synonym for either dreary mimesis or crudeness. And his essay concludes that “it signifies nothing more than artistic sincerity in the portrayal of contemporary life” (“Place of Realism”, 220). The imperative of Gissing’s fictional aesthetic, one that he repeats in his letters, journalism and writings on Dickens, is the vital importance of “sincerity”. Sincerity doesn’t mean a universal accuracy or the presentation of objective truth. There is, after all, “no science of fiction” (“Place of Realism”, 220). Nor does it mean pandering to “the habit of mind which assumes that a novel is written ‘to please people’” (“Place of Realism”, 221). Like Bennett, Gissing views idealism as contrary to realism. Artistic value depends on subjectivity as much as sincerity: “depicting some portion of human life as candidly and vividly as is in the author’s power” (“Place of Realism”, 219; 220). This is a point that Gissing reiterates again and again: the artist sees “only a part of the actual”, “a world of his own”, “that world as it exists to him” (“Place of Realism”, 221). “[A] true artist”, Gissing later contended, “gives us pictures which represent his own favourite way of looking at life”.21 This personal vision of the world is in many ways at odds with the impression of a shared reality that Bennett and Wells conjure up from Gissing’s writings. In fact, Gissing’s writing on writing suggests a commitment to something more layered than material realism’s preoccupation with “the common things” or Woolf’s “facts”. A serious novelist’s aim should be “to expose the secrets of the mind, to show humanity in its external combat with fate” (“Place of Realism”, 218). The external world alone is not a sufficient subject for art since the surface constitutes only part of the real; sincere realism concerns how individual perception conceives of it. The aim to “show”, or to “expose”, the mental landscape corresponds with James’s own belief that fiction must have an “air of reality” connected to “the atmosphere 20 George Gissing, Commonplace Book: A Manuscript in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, ed. Jacob Korg (New York: New York Public Library, 1962), 41. 21 Simon J. James, ed., Collected Works of George Gissing on Charles Dickens, Vol. 2, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, (Surrey: Grayswood Press, 2004), 231.

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of the mind”. Both novelists contend that “the only reason for the existence of the novel” is its “attempt to represent life”.22 Despite all his arguments for personality in the mode of realism, Gissing advocates elements of the impersonal in its execution. “The artist”, he explains “must not come forward among his characters”.23 He frequently expressed frustration at critics that read novels as political polemics, complaining that, in reviews, “the novelist is often represented as holding an opinion which he simply attributes to one of his characters”.24 Elsewhere, Gissing expounds his views on narrative detachment in his advice to his brother Algernon on writing: omit the instructive part of the description. Hints of association are of course needful, but let them only fill up the background […] the secret art of fiction is the indirect. Nothing must be told too plumply […] don’t give hints of what’s to come […] never treat your story as a story, but as a simple narration of facts.25

In his definition of the “secret art of fiction”, Gissing warns against the most diegetic form of writing and the overbearing narratorial technique of selfreflection. This is an instance of Gissing distancing himself from the older school of realism. The newer method of realism, he wrote elsewhere, is “[f]ar more artistic […] merely suggesting” and dealing with episodes, instead of writing biographies. The old novelist is omniscient; I think it is better to tell a story precisely as one does in real life, - hinting, surmising, telling in detail what can so be told, & no more. In fact, it approximates to the dramatic mode of presentation’26

He may, like James, have esteemed the art of suggestion but showing alone is not enough. In 1892, when approaching “the complex life of to-day”, Gissing asserts that: [t]o talk about being “objective” is all very well for those who swear by words. No novelist was ever objective or will ever be. His work is a bit of

22

Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”, 375-408 in Partial Portraits (1888; repr. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1970), 390; 378. 23 George Gissing, “Why I Don't Write Plays”, Pall Mall Gazette, London, 10 Sept. 1892: n.p. British Library Newspapers. Web. 9 November 2020. 24 Collected Letters of George Gissing, 5 (1994), 176. 25 Collected Letters of George Gissing, 2 (1991), 178-79. 26 Collected Letters of George Gissing, 2, (1991), 320.

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Introduction life as seen by him. It is his business to make us feel a distinct pleasure in seeing the world with his eyes’.27

Unlike the full impressions attempted in fact reporting or in the linearity of unabridged biography, then, the novelistic world is one transmuted by the artistic gaze. That “bit of life” consists of a multitude of fragments, consciences, and styles drawn together in one of many possible views. The author is the first among equals, claiming neither truth nor objectivity, but a certain, consciously idiosyncratic take on the world. With this in mind, the chapters in this volume address the difficulties faced when locating Gissing’s writings, their places and how they interrelate. It is a less usual theme, perhaps, since Gissing criticism has tended towards focus on class and gender frequently – though not always – with a biographical slant. You’ll find these themes and approaches in this volume, but with a markedly spatial incline, alongside discussions of Gissing’s position in the history of literature and ideas. Where the first part of the book concentrates on Gissing’s places, and the second on Gissing’s place, the two halves work in tandem. This is because, as Finch’s chapter on Gissing and the slum novel makes clear, discussions of place are often inextricably tied up with discussions of realism. In George Gissing and the Place of Realism, the entire span of Gissing’s career is addressed, from Russo’s examination of the early American stories of Gissing’s time in America through to later works as discussed by Tait and Lage. The volume also covers the array of Gissing’s places – nationally, in the slums and the city, the suburbs, the provinces – and internationally as, for instance, Olivieri examines By the Ionian Sea. Just as wide is the scope of form, with chapters on short stories, on travel writing, on pseudo-autobiography, threevolume novels and novellas. These chapters include new angles on and approaches to Gissing’s most renowned fictions, such as Mackenney’s reading of newness in New Grub Street and Hutcheon’s take on the oddness of The Odd Women, yet also celebrate many of Gissing’s lesser-known works such as Lage’s examination of the New Woman trope in Our Friend the Charlatan and Villa’s piece on provincial-set texts like A Life’s Morning and Denzil Quarrier. What these chapters collectively illustrate is that Gissing, though attentive to contemporary issues, is neither uncomplicatedly realist nor are his writings uncomplicated historical records of place. This volume begins with four chapters on Gissing and what Henri Lefebvre has defined as ‘spatial practice’, the movements of everyday life,

27

George Gissing, ‘Why I Don't Write Plays’, Pall Mall Gazette, London, 10 Sept. 1892: n.p. British Library Newspapers. Web. 9 May 2019

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or, in de Certeau’s terminology, space as ‘tour’.28 Richard Dennis’ chapter, “George Gissing, Geographer?”, examines Gissing’s perception and depiction of place alongside the geographical discipline that emerged in his lifetime. In asking what Gissing’s use of real and thoroughly researched locations signifies, Dennis notes Gissing’s acute sensitivity to the nuances of place, concluding that the novelist can be understood as a natural rather than a theoretical geographer. In terms of space, and its depiction, Dennis focuses on Gissing’s employment of maps and atlases, both in his own practice and in their use by his characters, partly as ways of authenticating their behaviour, and partly as forms of unspoken communication. London’s geography, and how characters move within it, is the key focus of Jason Finch’s chapter “Workers in the Dawn, Slum Writing and London’s ‘Urban Majority’ Districts”. To Finch, the balance of report and invention, of energetic and precise research and its creative rendering in fiction, and – central to the paradox of realism itself – of fact and fiction, creates the ambiguity so frequently identified in Gissing’s works. Finch’s account of the ‘urban majority’ and its interest in the many can help answer for and explain this obliqueness. Where Dennis’s analysis traces movement across space, Finch’s moves inwards examining what has been called the “mania for slumming” of the late 1870s and early 1880s.29 In his appraisal, Finch positions Workers in the Dawn and The Unclassed in the literary and geographical context of the slum. The whole matter, Finch suggests, is closely intertwined with the period's debate over the label “realism”. Continuing the kinetic theme, José Diaz Lage’s “Four Lady Cyclists” examines Gissing and movement by way of the bicycle. Where Dennis and Finch concentrates on the early novels, and the walkable and walked city within – the chance encounters, the permeable boundaries – Lage’s chapter shifts the focus to the latter half of Gissing’s career. Here, Lage asserts, mobility encourages a crossing of boundaries or, perhaps, an unconscious challenge to their implied restrictions. The bicycle is identified as an emblem of modernity connected with the New Women. In Gissing’s narratives Lage recognises a distinction between forms of mobility: the circular movement of exercise and rationality, and the more linear routes of exploration. The latter, associated with independent travel, has more contentious undertones. But, Lage argues, despite being a tool of emancipation, and – in Our Friend the Charlatan specifically – contributing 28 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans by D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, S. Rendall, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117-22. 29 Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 208.

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Introduction

to the surprisingly positive image of the New Women, its potential democratisation is simultaneously undermined – a liberating commodity nevertheless remains a commodity. If, in Gissing’s later works, movement can symbolise caveated freedoms, the post-movement of exile is synonymous with stasis, as Michele Russo explains. In examining Gissing’s early years in America and the writings he composed there, Russo’s chapter “Gissing’s Literary (Mis)Fortunes in America: Exile and Transculturalism in the American Short Stories” registers the displacement of the artistic nucleus. What emerges through Russo’s analysis is that the spatial structure in Gissing is often figured in the juxtaposing forces of the centre and the periphery. In exile, a persistent leitmotif of Gissing’s works, the centre and the self are disconcertingly subverted; England remains at the subjective and artistic centre, and America lies at the alienated peripheries. For Adrian Tait, such propensity to escape is one of inward- rather than outward-looking tendencies. Where the preceding chapters follow the thread of movement in Gissing’s works, Tait’s chapter is concerned with the intrinsic stillness of retirement and the act of scrutiny. From an ecocritical point of view, Tait explains, the keen botanical alertness of The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is less about forgetting others as it is about forgetting the self and can counterbalance contemporaneous (and contemporary) anxieties of the loss of the natural world. Approaching Gissing’s creation from an eco-critical perspective allows Tait to consider how and in what ways Ryecroft truly learns how to ‘dwell’, but also to ask whether the “lustrum of quiet contentment” is itself more accurately regarded as the wishful dream of a deracinated and troubled writer.30 The botanical thread and the spatial construct of the periphery continues in Luisa Villa’s long chapter “The Quarries on the Heath: The Imprint of Place and Gissing’s Wakefield Stories”. Here Villa examines earlier portrayals of the provincial north, offering a re-reading of the marginal places in A Life’s Morning (1888), Born in Exile (1891), and Denzil Quarrier (1892). Through her analysis of A Life’s Morning, Villa expounds the novel’s perspective as essentially that of the returning native. In the portrayal of the atypical provincial and traditional town of Dunfield, with its emphasis on the trivial and partiality, the idea of the local takes on connotations of narrowness and limitation. Yet, Villa posits, another aspect of the provincial emerges in Gissing’s writings: that of the botanist and local scientist. This facet is rendered spatially in the topographies of the quarries, which come to take on elements of the geological sublime. 30 George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (London: Constable, 1929), x.

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The spatial constructs of nostalgia also inform Marco Olivieri’s chapter “The Imaginative Delight: A Geography of the Dream in Thomas Hardy and George Gissing”. Where the provincial is caught up in personal history, Olivieri examines the spatialisation of collective memory via a comparative analysis of George Gissing and Thomas Hardy. Both writers look to the ancient world not only as an intellectual desire, but as a unique ‘dream’ moment of History: Gissing retraces the cultural signs of Magna Graecia in a memorable journey to southern Italy told in By the Ionian Sea (1901); Hardy conceives of Wessex and the vestiges left by the Romans as a magical and ritual mindset in which the natural cycles of Time blend with old legends and superstitions. Hardy’s Wessex and the Magna Graecia as described by François Lenormant (whose path Gissing faithfully follows), become the archetypical scenario acting as a symbolic remedy against the threat of the new technological inventions that undermine the traditional values of the past. To Olivieri, the constantly changing geography of human agency is actually connected to the heterotopy of imagination, a place that unravels myths, reinvents them, and finally avoids the catastrophe of History that forgets itself harnessed by the new demands of modernity. The following two papers return focus to Gissing’s London locations, starting with a reappraisal of suburbia in Rebecca Hutcheon’s response to the uncanny domestic in The Odd Women (1893). Here the conflict between movement and stasis come into sharp relief when positioned along the often-gendered lines of the late-Victorian city. Hutcheon pitches the novel’s meticulous depictions of public spaces, streets, and parks against the private spaces of the home from which, when read alongside Gissing’s narrative of place as diegesis, metaphorical qualities arise. In The Odd Women domestic space is particularly multifarious, at times idealised, at times demonised, but most frequently rendered with an irony with draws these seeming antipodes together. This eliding of opposites results in a fraught spatial dialectic, alive with hostilities and subversions and, with it, the divided and often strange identities of the characters are embodied and revealed. Francesca Mackenney’s chapter “‘The Way to Literature’: Gissing, Dickens and the Place of Influence” also explores conflict, this time between newness and originality, recognising in the former a recurrent parody of the new sitting uncomfortably beside a post-Darwinian anxiety of lack of originality which manifests itself, in part, in the intense ambivalence of the latter. Focusing on New Grub Street and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, Mackenney explores how Gissing’s invocations of Charles Dickens in his descriptions of London reflect his developing interest in the nature of literary association and artistic influence, and the artistic value of

Introduction

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‘newness’ and ‘originality’. In both his writing on Dickens and his fiction, Gissing turned his attention to what he calls, in his essay on ‘The Homes and Haunts of Charles Dickens’ (1902), Dickens’s own “way to literature”: the places and literary ‘associations’ which had in turn shaped him as a writer. Although Gissing’s narratives have been read as signalling a ‘new’ approach to the ‘new’ London of the late nineteenth century, this chapter will discuss two novels which reflect Gissing’s developing scepticism with regard to a market-led demand for new and yet newer books. Also locating Gissing, though this time in the history of ideas as well as of literature, Jeremy Tambling’s closing chapter, “Art for Art’s Sake and the World as an Aesthetic Phenomenon: Gissing and Ruskin” gives a monumental account of the double spanning Gissing’s literary career from Workers in the Dawn (1880) and The Unclassed, via New Grub Street and By the Ionian Sea, and ending with Ryecroft. Tambling demonstrates how the infinite splitting of the self, prevalent in the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, is also a persistent and enduring theme in Gissing’s works. Gissing’s artist characters – Golding, Waymark, Reardon – in their search for the desire for beauty – undergo a Schopenhauerean division and subsequent weakening of the will which leads to a rejection of the possibility of social improvement. To Tambling, a passage in Ryecroft perfectly explicates Gissing’s divergence from the Ruskinian emphasis on the social importance of art: One obvious reason for the long neglect of Turner lies in the fact that his genius does not seem to be truly English. Turner's landscape, even when it presents familiar scenes, does not show them in the familiar light. Neither the artist nor the intelligent layman is satisfied. He gives us glorious visions; we admit the glory – but we miss something which we deem essential. I doubt whether Turner tasted rural England; I doubt whether the spirit of English poetry was in him; I doubt whether the essential significance of the common things which we call beautiful was revealed to his soul. Such doubt does not affect his greatness as a poet in colour and in form, but I suspect that it has always been the cause why England could not love him. 31

Ryecroft notes a strangeness in Turner’s sense of place, as compared to Constable’s – something that is not quite English and for this reason Turner’s art cannot be termed patriotic. Perhaps this sense of strangeness can be said, too, of Gissing’s places. At times, and particularly from exile, England or home is celebrated and coveted for its homogeneity and stability 31

Gissing, Ryecroft, 149.

George Gissing and the Place of Realism

13

and yet, elsewhere, it is ironised. Any sense of constancy, in Gissing, is fundamentally unachievable. Together, the chapters of this volume register how discussions of Gissing’s writings are bound up with place and placing: in time, in space, in perception. George Gissing and the Place of Realism re-examines Gissing’s work and world as “that bit of life seen by him”, a writer alert to the very real geographical or spatial implications of class, gender and selfhood, and how place and realism are received and conceptualised critically. It recognises that there is more to Gissing’s artistic worlds than a mere transposition of the commonplace. These chapters reveal that frequently in Gissing’s works locations are charged with recurring emblematic significance, modified by imagination and fraught with irony. This multitudinous aspect has been aptly identified by Christine Huguet. On the one hand, Huguet explains “the reportage elements in Gissing’s vision […] bear witness to his lifelong allegiance to realist art” as seen in the “veridictory modalities” of his writings. But, as Huguet goes on to clarify, such “real” elements “coax the reader into acceptance of the mimesis” thus constituting a “referential illusion”.32 Shaped by subjectivity, the “conscientious empiricism” of Gissing’s worlds are, of course, all a guise. And, more than this, “the world as it appears to him” is not always the world according to Gissing. Subjectivity, it emerges, is not simply a case of uncomplicatedly presenting the perspective of writer. In fact, it is mobile, shifting between different consciences so that the sincerely wrought “parts of the actual” are imagined perspectives exposing the secrets of the mind.

32 Christine Huguet, “‘Muddy depths’: The Thames in Gissing’s Fiction,” 162-170 in Gissing and the City, 162.

CHAPTER 1 GEORGE GISSING, GEOGRAPHER? RICHARD DENNIS

Half a century ago, C.J. Francis, then a regular contributor to the recently established Gissing Newsletter, penned a series of short essays on “Gissing’s Characterisation,” in which he addressed themes of “Heredity,” “Environment,” and “Temperament”.1 Discussing “Environment,” Francis was most concerned with the social and psychological circumstances with which Gissing surrounded his characters, especially penury (or wealth) in the case of the early “slum novels,” and “religious upbringing,” for example in the case of Miriam Baske in The Emancipated. These were circumstances which constrained characters’ behaviour if not determined their fate. Francis contrasted “the romantic novelist, who believes, for instance, that virtue will always triumph over adversity, and the realist who believes that constant adversity will eventually diminish virtue.” Francis highlighted “the special effect of poverty” and in particular its “depressing and disabling effect” as common to the interests of “most realists,” among whom he counted Gissing.2 The environments in which Gissing set his stories were not abstractly “rich” or “poor,” or “liberal” or “puritanical”; they were physical landscapes and cityscapes. In these cases, environment was variously natural, socio-economic, and also geometric. Gissing’s letters, diaries and scrapbook as well as his fiction offer substantial evidence of his sensitivity to weather, flora and fauna, geology and the morphology of landscape. They also demonstrate his acute awareness of the status connotations of place, both as he observed them himself and as they were recorded by social investigators such as Charles Booth, whose Life and Labour of the People 1

C.J. Francis, “Gissing’s Characterisation: I. Heredity,” Gissing Newsletter 3, no. 1 (April 1967): 1-5; “II. Environment,” Gissing Newsletter 3, no. 2 (June 1967): 3-7; “III. Temperament,” Gissing Newsletter 3, no. 3 (September 1967): 1-6. 2 Francis, “Environment,” 4.

George Gissing, Geographer?

15

in London was published when Gissing was in mid-career.3 Gissing was also meticulous in plotting spatial relations – the distances and routes between locations, their relative accessibility, the time and the transport networks needed to get between different places. All of this suggests an intimate link between Gissing as a realist novelist and geography as a subject concerned with the “real”: the hard facts of environment and space. Yet, as the historical geographer Hugh Prince noted in 1971, long before the “cultural turn,” geography is concerned not only with “real” but also with “imagined” and “abstract” worlds.4 More elaborately, Henri Lefebvre’s discussion of “the production of space” highlighted three ways of thinking about space: as conceptualised, perceived and lived.5 In his novels, Gissing was a consummate “producer of space” and he recognized symbolic, unstable and personally differentiated characterisations of space. In his own volatile spatial history, and at a variety of scales, environments that at one moment seemed ideal quickly became oppressive. Moving into 7K Cornwall Residences, a purpose-built flat behind Baker Street Station, Gissing first expressed his enthusiasm for flatliving but soon discovered the downside and ended up (in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, but certainly expressing his own opinion) by castigating flats and their inhabitants.6 Near-slums in which he lived in London in the late 1870s acquired the patina of nostalgic sanitation by the time he wrote Ryecroft. Even if we deny the equivalence of Ryecroft with his creator, there are numerous instances of Gissing contradicting himself in his correspondence with his friends and family. “Myriad-voiced London,” which “every year” offered him “more opportunity for picturing” was simultaneously a place he hated more and more, from which he longed to escape.7 He moved to Exeter, to a situation which “could not be better,” and a city with “a fairly good Public Library, […] a more than fairly good Museum, [and] tolerably alive to intellectual interests,” but within months 3

Kevin Bales, “Charles rswe’s survey of Life and Labour of the People in London 1889-1903,” in The Social Survey in Historical Perspective 1880-1940, edited by Martin Bulmer, Kevin Bales and K.K. Sklar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 66-110. 4 Hugh C. Prince, “Real, imagined, and abstract worlds of the past,” Progress in Geography 3 (1971): 4-86. 5 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 6 Richard Dennis, “Buildings, Residences, and Mansions: George Gissing’s ‘prejudice against flats’,” in Gissing and the City, ed. John Spiers (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 41-62. 7 Paul F. Matthiessen, Arthur C. Young and Pierre Coustillas, eds., The Collected Letters of George Gissing (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1990-1996), 3, 139 (July 25, 1887).

16

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he was lamenting the lack of books, the cold and wind, and the “unintellectual population”.8 Writing on “The Place of Realism in Fiction,” Gissing himself acknowledged that “What the artist sees is to him only a part of the actual.”9 Mary Hammond, discussing Ryecroft, concludes that “true realism is actually all about individual perception.”10 Aaron Matz, paying most attention to Gissing’s practice, especially in New Grub Street, but also alluding to his essays on Dickens, “The Hope of Pessimism,” and “The Place of Realism,” explores the tensions and complementarities between realism and satire, and between “realistic” and “idealistic” modes of writing. With regard to “place” we might argue that Gissing uses both real and “imagined” places, realistically described, to legitimate his satire – “The realism of detail thereby leads to a satire of scope.”11 For example, it was no coincidence that he chose the real Adam & Eve Court to open his first published novel, Workers in the Dawn, or that, in Thyrza, he approached Lambeth by way of the equally real Paradise Place, noting that “[t]he name is less descriptive than it might be.” But if no appropriate toponyms were available, he was not averse to inventing them – “Litany Lane” and “Jubilee Court” in the slums of Westminster in the first edition of The Unclassed.12 Gissing was clear that his kind of realism did not imply objectivity. At the very least, writers select places appropriate to their needs, and they select the attributes of those places worth conveying to their readers. In Matz’s words, “Realism does not have to be a synonym for objectivity; it can be another name for a writer’s very personal and even partisan audacity.”13 Nor does the use of “real” places described in factual detail imply an absence of moral idealism: “showing” – exposing inequality and “hideous injustice” – implies the need for reform, even if Gissing is unsure, and indeed cynical, about the range of possible solutions.14 Recently, 8 Collected Letters, 4, 261 (January 20, 1891), 257 (January 19, 1891); 5, 83 (December 30, 1892). 9 George Gissing, “The Place of Realism in Fiction,” in Selections Autobiographical and Imaginative (New York: Jonathan Cape, 1929), 219. 10 Mary Hammond, “‘Amid the Dear Old Horrors’: Memory, London, and Literary Labour in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft,” in Gissing and the City, 177. 11 Aaron Matz, “George Gissing’s Ambivalent Realism,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 59, no. 2 (2004): 212-48, 232. 12 Richard Dennis, “‘Would you Adam-and-Eve it?’ Geography, Materiality, and Authenticity in Novels of Victorian and Edwardian London,” in The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History, edited by Lieven Ameel, Jason Finch, Silja Laine and Richard Dennis (New York: Routledge, 2019), 158-76. 13 Matz, “Realism,” 222. 14 Matz, “Realism,” 242.

George Gissing, Geographer?

17

Rebecca Hutcheon has explored the complexity of Gissing’s writings about place, questioning a received wisdom that Gissing’s work can be categorised chronologically into successive phases of writing about slums, suburbs and the rural, and arguing against both “biographical” readings of Gissing’s fiction and a cartographic mimesis which elevates “real streets and buildings” over “imaginary locations”.15 In doing so, she aligns her critique with the new cultural geography exemplified by geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan, Edward Relph, Denis Cosgrove and Ed Soja.16 All of this suggests that Gissing was, in practice, an imaginative and well-informed cultural geographer, but it is to assume a twenty-firstcentury understanding of geography. My aim in this essay is to situate Gissing in the context of nineteenth-century theory and practice of geography, a subject which was much closer to the “absolute realism” which Gissing satirized, but also to an environmental and spatial determinism which attracted an earlier generation of literary geographers to the regional novels of, for example, Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, and D.H. Lawrence.17 Drawing on Gissing’s observations about the use, and drawing, of maps, and aligning his own practices of walking and note-taking (in his Scrapbook, Commonplace Book and sometimes very lengthy diary entries) with geographical practices of fieldwork, I note how these practices were transferred to characters in his fiction. Finally, I consider an extreme example of an “imaginary location” – Polterham in Denzil Quarrier – as an illustration of how Gissing created “realist(ic)” environments for his stories.

Gissing and School Geography What would Gissing have thought of as “Geography” and would he have self-identified as a geographer? At Lindow Grove School, Alderley Edge, aged 14, he gained a certificate for “Physical Geography (first class, 15

Rebecca Hutcheon, Writing Place: Mimesis, Subjectivity and Imagination in the Works of George Gissing (New York: Routledge, 2018). 16 For a useful survey of cultural geography, see Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift, eds., Handbook of Cultural Geography (London: SAGE, 2003). For an alternative literary perspective, see also Jason Finch, Deep Locational Criticism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016). 17 See the bibliography of “literary geographies” online at https://literarygeographies.wordpress.com/. Early works on Hardy and Bennett include H.C. Darby, “The Regional Geography of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex,” Geographical Review 38, 3 (1948): 426-43; John Barrell, “Geographies of Hardy’s Wessex,” Journal of Historical Geography 8, 4 (1982): 347-61; B.J. Hudson, “The Geographical Imagination of Arnold Bennett,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 7, 3 (1982): 365-379.

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elementary stage)”.18 The following month he sat (and was placed 12th out of 1,082 candidates, but first of all the candidates in the Manchester district) in the Oxford Junior Local Exam, in which Geography and English History were components.19 However, Pierre Coustillas interprets “[t]he certificates for geography, acoustics and theoretical mechanics which he received” not as evidence of his flair for these subjects but “in the light of his grim determination to succeed.”20 Two years later, sitting his Matriculation Exam at Owen’s College, Manchester, which would qualify him to be a nonresidential student of the University of London, Geography was again a required element. He wrote to his friend, Arthur Bowes: Can you inform me of a plan of getting up Geography in a night? I find some is required for Matric., & longer than two hours I cannot possibly devote.21

This suggests a disdain for school Geography on a par with that of the young Jack Bunce, in Thyrza, who much prefers his private chemistry tuition with Ackroyd to his homework for school: “Lessons! Do them in half a crack before breakfast. Why, there’s nothing but a bit of jography, and some kings, and three proportion sums, and a page of -----.”22

Much later, in 1893, when Gissing’s sister Ellen wrote seeking advice on the teaching of Geography, he replied at length, admitting that “[t]he geographical question is a very difficult one.” He was not aware of “any small book that is of much use for your purpose” and this seems to conform to the consensus of opinion at the time.23 The Oxford historian, J.R. Green, in his “Introduction” to A Short Geography of the British Islands (1879) observed that: No drearier task can be set for the worst of criminals than that of studying a set of geographical text-books such as children in our schools are doomed to use. […They] are simply appeals to the memory; they are

18 Pierre Coustillas, The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part I: 1857-1888 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 333, n.17. 19 Coustillas, Heroic Life I, 64. 20 Coustillas, Heroic Life I, 61. 21 Collected Letters, 1, 32 (May 24, 1874). 22 George Gissing, Thyrza: A Tale (London: Smith, Elder, 1892), 411. 23 Collected Letters, 5, 170 (December 31, 1893).

George Gissing, Geographer?

19

handbooks of mnemonics; but they are in no sense handbooks of Geography.24

Gissing’s prescription is worth quoting in full: 1) Never let geogy be learnt from a book alone, but always from the map. Let maps be constantly drawn by pupils. 2) Absolutely no learning by rote. It is useless. No profit in saying off lists of bays, capes, &c. 3) Take one country – or continent – at a time, & spend weeks over it. Talk with pupil of imaginary journeys, from England, & in the country itself. Get a Bradshaw, & make use of the list of steamboat voyages at the end. Insist on clear ideas of distances. Make it under[stood] how long a steamer takes to cross the Atlantic, for instance. (This you will find in Whitaker’s Almanack, stated at the end of his information about each foreign country.) 4) Do not separate geography from history. No use in learning about places merely as places. 5) Get, from the Mechanics’ or elsewhere, books of travel concerning the country in hand. Read them, & talk about what you learn therefrom. Your ideas will be much clearer & more interesting than any to be gathered from professed treatises on geography.25

Much of this is reflected in his own practice, both in fiction, where his characters frequently consult timetables, maps and atlases, and in writing to his own young son, Walter, who was by then living with his aunts and grandmother. One letter described a trip Gissing had made to Boston in Lincolnshire, concluding “someone will show you Boston on the map”; and when a visit by Walter and one of his aunts to Budleigh Salterton, where Gissing was currently staying, was proposed: “Ask grandmother to show you on the map the way that you will come from Wakefield into Devon.”26 More challenging for a child not yet five was his father’s account of the strong winds then buffeting his house in Epsom: “These winds are the equinoctial gales; they blow at the end of March, & the end of September, which times are called the equinox, because then the day & night are just of the same length. […] Aunties will tell you more about this”!27

24 J.R. Green and A.S. Green, A Short Geography of the British Islands (London: Macmillan, 1879), vii-viii. See also Rex Walford, Geography in British Schools 1850-2000 (London: Woburn Press, 2001), 35-48. 25 Collected Letters, 5, 170-71 (December 31, 1893). 26 Collected Letters, 6, 152 (July 11, 1896), 262 (April 3, 1897). 27 Collected Letters, 6, 173 (September 26, 1896).

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His advice also echoed the prefaces of many contemporary textbooks which then, in practice, did offer long lists of factual information and “exercises” which demanded rote learning. Robert Sullivan’s Geography Generalized, first published in 1842, but still in print after numerous revised and expanded editions when Gissing was at school in the 1870s, was reviewed at length in The Athenaeum in January 1843: This is a good schoolbook, and is particularly entitled to commendation, as more bad books have been written on geography than on any other subject; and the very worst are those destined for the use of schools. Mr Sullivan treats geography as a science, which, like all sciences, must be taught on the principles of classification and comparison.28

Sullivan claimed to be against “the old and absurd method of teaching Geography by rote.” He provided “Questions for Examinations” which teachers should expect their students to answer in their own words.29 He also distanced himself from the interminable listing of facts and statistics: Instead of dividing the attention, and oppressing the memory of the young student, by obliging him to learn and recollect the unconnected facts and innumerable details with which this, the most extensive of all the sciences, abounds, the essential facts and leading principles have been presented to his view under general and separate heads.30

Yet, even Sullivan’s book, and even more so, his briefer Introduction to Geography, mainly consisted of lists and classifications – lists of islands, sand banks, capes, bays and roadsteads, mountains, etc., and classifications of the world’s rivers into ten classes by length, and of mountains into ten classes by height. The 92nd edition of Sullivan’s Introduction, by now extending to 216 pages, appeared in 1869, about the time Gissing would have needed a geography textbook. We know that he was familiar with the book thanks to a somewhat opaque comment in his Commonplace Book, dated by the editors to around 1896-7:

28

Athenaeum, no. 794 (January 14, 1843): 37. Robert Sullivan, An Introduction to Geography: Ninety-second Edition (Dublin: Sullivan, Brothers, 1869), vi. 30 Robert Sullivan, Geography Generalized: Twenty-seventh Edition (Dublin: Marcus and John Sullivan, 1861), iii. 29

George Gissing, Geographer?

21

“Sullivan’s Introduction to Geography.” My old expectation of finding the end of the Introduction & beginning of the Book.31

Long before, in December 1878, barely a year after arriving in London, and living in two rooms in Gower Place, Bloomsbury, one of the first books Gissing requested from home was his “large illustrated Geography”: “I shouldn’t think anyone is using it at home, & it would be of very great use to me.”32 Sullivan’s book hardly meets this description: it contained maps and line drawings, but at 5¾ inches x 3¾ inches it was hardly “large”. Instead, we might speculate that the “large illustrated Geography” was an atlas, an illustrated gazetteer, or a travel book. In his 1893 letter to his sister, Gissing had especially commended Annie Brassey’s A Voyage in the ‘Sunbeam’, which recounted – and lavishly illustrated – a journey around the world in 1876-77.33 But this was too newly published to be the book requested in 1878. In September 1887, midway through his tenure in 7K Cornwall Residences, Gissing took receipt of “my Hogarth & Atlas,” delivered by his brother, Algernon, on a visit to London.34 These books, originally in his father’s library, were especially treasured by Gissing. Pointing to a reference in Gissing’s Scrapbook, coupling together “The Hogarth and Keith Johnstone,” Bouwe Postmus infers that the family’s atlas was one of the atlases published by Edinburgh mapmakers, W. and A.K. Johnston.35 Their Royal Atlas, first published in 1861, would seem to have been the most likely, its issue corresponding to Thomas Gissing’s growing prosperity and status in Wakefield in the 1860s. Moreover, the atlas was always titled on its embossed cover as Keith Johnston’s Royal Atlas of Modern Geography.36

31 Jacob Korg, ed., George Gissing’s Commonplace Book (New York: New York Public Library, 1962), 38. 32 Collected Letters, 1, 135 (December 17, 1878). 33 Mrs Brassey, A Voyage in the ‘Sunbeam’: Our home on the ocean for eleven months (London: Longmans, Green, 1878). 34 Collected Letters, 3, 149 (September 11, 1887). 35 Bouwe Postmus, ed., George Gissing’s Scrapbook (Amsterdam: Twizle Press, 2007), 467. 36 Alexander Keith Johnston, The Royal Atlas of Modern Geography (Edinburgh: W. & A.K. Johnston, 1861). The 1879 edition is available online at https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10450850.

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Chapter 1

Maps and Atlases Maps and atlases feature prominently in several of Gissing’s novels, even as instruments of flirtation. The materiality of the map was something dear to Gissing, not only atlas plates, but also more functional Ordnance Survey maps. When he first became infatuated with the Surrey countryside, courtesy of the time he spent at the Harrisons’ out-of-town home, Sutton Place, near Guildford, he wrote to Algernon asking how, and at what price, he could obtain the Ordnance Map of Surrey.37 His request was penned from home – Chelsea at the time – and for somebody so familiar with London bookshops, we might have thought he would have known where to get an OS map. Perhaps, at this early stage in his career, he was familiar only with secondhand and antiquarian booksellers, or perhaps he thought that Algernon’s interests in the countryside would make him more familiar with topographical maps. Later, planning a trip to the north, his next request of Algernon was for the loan of “any decent Lake-guide, – the less bulky the better” – evidently intended for consultation in the field.38 Elsewhere in his correspondence, there are references to Baedeker guides to Italy, to the map of Naples in Cook’s Guide, and to Charles Dickens Junior’s Dictionary of London, of which Gissing owned copies for both 1880 and 1883. On his return to London from Exeter in 1893, he borrowed a more up-to-date Guide to London from Clara Collet. But most poignant was his regret expressed to Algernon that before leaving London for Exeter, “in the time of great stress at the end of last year all my ordinance [sic] maps had to be sold.”39 Isabel Clarendon, written in the context of Gissing’s invitations to the Harrisons’ and Gaussens’ country houses, opens with Kingcote on the road to Winstoke. Despite “rambling aimlessly” and “loiter[ing]” in Salcot, he is also sufficiently prepared to set off after tea on the next stage of his ramble “after a survey of his Ordnance map.” As he walks, he continues to consult the map: “When he had been walking for a couple of hours, his thoughts began to turn to his plans for the following day; he took the map out again, and examined it as he proceeded.” Then, realising he has had his money stolen when he was jostled leaving a public house in Salcot, “[h]e reopened his map, and began to calculate the possibility of walking straight on to London. There was no possibility in the matter.”40

37

Collected Letters, 2, 141 (June 22, 1883). Collected Letters, 2, 237 (July 24, 1884). 39 Collected Letters, 4, 311 (July 25, 1891). 40 George Gissing, Isabel Clarendon (London: Chapman and Hall, 1886), Volume One, 1, 2, 3, 6, 8. 38

George Gissing, Geographer?

23

At the end of Thyrza we encounter Egremont, returned from America to Brighton and planning a visit to Eastbourne: “the thought of going thither on foot came to him as he glanced at a map of the coast whilst at breakfast. The weather was perfect, and the walk would be full of interest.” As he proceeds – through Rottingdean, Newhaven, Seaford and across the Cuckmere – he checks the “notes of his track” that he had made earlier.41 In practice, the walk proves not only interesting but climactic. And perhaps Gissing is remembering the loss of his own Ordnance Survey maps when, in Born in Exile, he describes Peak’s reception in the Warricombe household outside Exeter, where “a small canvas on which a landscape [painted by Sidwell Warricombe, the object of Peak’s infatuation] was roughed in” casually “lay on a side table […] half concealed by an ordnance map, left unfolded.”42 To misquote Anthony Powell, “Maps do furnish a room.”43 The humble OS map also plays a vital, if understated, part in Everard Barfoot’s wooing of Rhoda Nunn when they meet at Seascale on the Cumbrian coast, a place familiar to Gissing from family holidays in his childhood. Everard proposes an elaborate day out: “A man I talked to in the train told me of a fine walk in this neighbourhood. From Ravenglass, just below here, there's a little line runs up Eskdale to a terminus at the foot of Scawfell, a place called Boot. From Boot one can walk either over the top of Scawfell or by a lower track to Wastdale Head. It's very grand, wild country, especially the last part, the going down to Wastwater, and not many miles in all. Suppose we have that walk tomorrow? From Wastdale we could drive back to Seascale in the evening, and then the next day -- just as you like.” “Are you quite sure about the distances?” “Quite. I have the Ordnance map in my pocket. Let me show you.” He spread the map on the top of a wall, and they stood side by side inspecting it.44

The phrase “Let me show you” hints at the masculinity of the map. And over the following pages, as they discuss their future together, “[d]elighting in her independence of mind, he still desired to see her in complete

41

Gissing, Thyrza, 482, 484 (Chapter 41). George Gissing, Born in Exile (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1892), 172. 43 Anthony Powell, Books do Furnish a Room (New York: Little, Brown, 1971). 44 George Gissing, The Odd Women (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1893), Chapter 25. 42

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subjugation to him” and “must have the joy of subduing her to his will.” Yet, to Everard, Rhoda had “made him her obedient slave.”45 In other novels, too, if more benignly, men show women, just as adults show children, where places are. Gilbert Grail has been teaching Thyrza history – she had learnt about the Battle of Hastings, and that William the Conqueror came from Normandy in France – and he has shown her France on the map. Yet that was a “dry symbol” compared to the reality of visiting Eastbourne and understanding that France was “right over the sea yonder.”46 Grail needs only a map to bring history to life; Thyrza needs to see the places for herself. In The Whirlpool, Alma’s invitation to Harvey to show her where he is contemplating moving to – somewhere “far off, but not too far” – initiates the dialogue leading to their engagement: “Didn't you say you were going to some beautiful spot in Wales?” Harvey reflected. “I wonder whether you would like that -----” “We are only supposing, you know. But show me where it is. If you wait a moment, I'll fetch a map.” She rose quickly. He had just time to reach the door and open it for her; and as she rapidly passed him, eyes averted, the faintest and sweetest of perfumes was wafted upon his face. There he stood till her return, his pulses throbbing. “This is my old school atlas,” she said gaily; “I always use it still.” She opened it upon the table and bent forward. “North Wales, you said? Show me -----” He pointed with a finger that quivered. His cheek was not far from hers; the faint perfume floated all about him; he could imagine it the natural fragrance of her hair, of her breath. “I see,” she murmured. “That's the kind of place --- far off, but not too far. And the railway station?” As he did not answer, she half turned towards him. “The station? --- Yes. ----- Alma!”47

In the following chapter, the atlas continues to mediate between them, but now under Alma’s control. She is “reluctant to fix a day, or even the month, for their wedding.” Harvey responds that the house will be ready by early December:

45

Gissing, Odd Women, Chapters 25 and 26. Gissing, Thyrza, 184-85. 47 George Gissing, The Whirlpool (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1897), 121. 46

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“After that, it rests with you to say when you will enter into possession. I promise not to speak of it again until, on coming into the room, I see your atlas lying open on the table; that shall be a sign unto me.”48

Soon afterwards Alma invites him to lunch: When he entered the room, the first object his eye fell upon was the old school atlas, lying open on the table at the map of England and Wales. And the day appointed was the twentieth of December.49

Although these passages restore the balance of power in the woman’s favour, they still labour under the limitations of a small-scale school atlas rather than the complexity of a large-scale topographical map. Earlier in The Whirlpool, when Alma learns that Harvey has been taken ill in La Roche Chalais, a small town in the Dordogne, she: got out a map of France, and searched for La Roche Chalais; but the place was too insignificant to be marked.50

Gissing had employed almost identical words when Rhoda, back in Chelsea after Everard has been accused of an affair with Monica, learns that he is now staying in Arromanches: Arromanches, in Normandy ----? On Sunday she sought the name on a map, but it was not marked, being doubtless too insignificant.51

As witness to Gissing’s care over details, it is worth noting that neither La Roche Chalais nor Arromanches are marked on what is a quite detailed map of France in Keith Johnston’s Royal Atlas!52 The use of maps by Gissing’s characters is accurately realistic, but replete with meaning that extends far beyond the information inscribed on them. The association of maps and atlases with schoolwork and children is a frequent trope in Gissing’s novels. In Thyrza, the schoolroom acquired by Egremont for use as a mechanics’ library is “cheerless beyond description,” barely relieved by the maps and diagrams that still hung on the walls. Even on a bright day “the place still kept much of its chill and gloom” and Thyrza

48

Gissing, Whirlpool, 126. Gissing, Whirlpool, 127. 50 Gissing, Whirlpool, 89. 51 Gissing, Odd Women, Chapter 27. 52 Johnston, Royal Atlas, Plate 10 (France). 49

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spends only “a few moments” looking at the maps and diagrams.53 In The Unclassed, in the Brixton school where Waymark is a teacher, a room which doubled as staff common room and teaching room was almost as cheerless: This retreat was not remarkable for cosiness, even when a fire burnt in the grate and the world of school was for the time shut out. The floor was uncarpeted, the walls illustrated only with a few maps and diagrams.54

But Ryecroft recalls his similarly equipped old school-room with the aroma of nostalgia: I can smell the school-room odour -- a blend of books and slates and wall maps and I know not what.55

In The Whirlpool, both Harry Morton and Hughie Rolfe are pictured with their atlases: Harry, who loved no book so much as the atlas, abounded in schemes of travel, and had already mapped the grand tour on which the whole family was to set forth when he stood head-boy at the Grammar-School.56

Hughie’s fascination with maps is more bitter-sweet, as it provokes memories for his mother of what might have been if, before she had married Harvey, she had taken up Cyrus Redgrave’s invitation to join him at his continental retreat in Riva: Hughie had begun to learn the maps of countries, and prided himself on naming them as he turned over an atlas. One day, about this time, she looked over his shoulder and saw the map of Italy. “Those are lakes,” said the child, pointing north. “Tell me their names, Mother.” But she was silent. Her eye had fallen upon Garda, and at the head of the lake was a name which thrilled her memory. What if she had gone to Riva? Suddenly, and for the first time, she saw it as a thing that might have happened; not as a mere dark suggestion abhorrent to her

53

Gissing, Thyrza, 106, 152. George Gissing, The Unclassed (London: Chapman and Hall, 1884), Book II, Chapter 3. 55 George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (London: Constable, 1903), Summer XI. 56 Gissing, Whirlpool, 325 54

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thought. Had she known the world a little better, it might have been. Then, how different her life!57

Most of these (and other) interactions with atlas maps were, ostensibly, purely for purposes of education and information, yet it is the memories, experiences and associations they afford which matter to Gissing. He wrote as somebody for whom maps were themselves stories. Gissing was also alert to more purposeful map-making and mapreading. As she prepares for philanthropically inspired “slumming,” Helen Norman earnestly consults a map of London each morning to plan walks alone “choosing in preference those districts which she knew by reputation as mean and poverty-stricken.”58 Twenty years later she would have been able to consult Charles Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty, with which Gissing himself became familiar, reading at least the first two volumes of Booth’s survey, and including in his Scrapbook a lengthy review of the completed project (dated 22 August 1903, so one of the last entries that Gissing must have made in the scrapbook).59 But Booth is foreshadowed by Baxendale, planning his electoral campaign in Dunfield in A Life’s Morning: “Now look at this map of the town; I've coloured it with much care. There you see the stronghold of the Blues. I'm working that district street by street -- a sort of moral invasion.”60

In The Crown of Life, Lee Hannaford collects maps and diagrams of warfare;61 in Will Warburton, Warburton’s office in Whitechapel was papered with maps relevant to his business: If his eye strayed to one of the walls, he saw a map of the West Indies; if to another, it fell upon a map of St. Kitts; if to the third, there was before him a plan of a sugar estate on that little island.62

57 Gissing, Whirlpool, 418. It is worth noting that Riva is marked on the map of Italy in Johnston’s Royal Atlas (Plate 13), even though, prior to 1918, it was just across the border into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 58 George Gissing, Workers in the Dawn (London: Remington, 1880), Part II, Chapter I. 59 Scrapbook, 335-38. 60 George Gissing, A Life’s Morning (London: Smith, Elder, 1890), 218. 61 George Gissing, The Crown of Life (London: Methuen, 1899), 16. 62 George Gissing, Will Warburton (London: Constable, 1905), 17.

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Dearest to Gissing’s own heart, however, would have been the maps in Mr Warricombe’s study in Born in Exile: The library abounded in such works as only a wealthy man can purchase, and Godwin, who had examined some of them at the British Museum, was filled with the humaner kind of envy on seeing them in Mr Warricombe's possession. Those publications of the Palaeontological Society, one volume of which (a part of Davidson's superb work on the Brachiopoda) even now lay open within sight -- his hand trembled with a desire to touch them! And those maps of the Geological Surveys, British and foreign, how he would have enjoyed a day's poring over them!63

“[P]oring over the map of Devon,” planning out a possible “expedition,” Ryecroft declared, “how I love a good map!”64 Egremont preferred to trust the verities of the map rather than ask a stranger for directions. Visiting the Bunces in the back streets of Lambeth, we are told of Egremont that “[i]t was his habit to discover places by the aid of a map alone, and, thus guided, he found the house.”65 Acknowledging the dangers of the biographical fallacy, everything we know about Gissing from his diary and correspondence suggests that these were practices that Gissing shared with his protagonists. Gissing’s own use of maps, rather than mere possession of them, is evident early on. Aged 15 and staying in Colwyn Bay, he walked first in the company of a friend along the coast to Bangor and the Menai Strait, and then, on his own, over the course of one full day and two half-days, the 67 miles back across North Wales and Cheshire to Alderley. At the end of a breathless, excited account of what he had seen, he assured his mother that “When I come home again I hope to have the pleasure of going over this with you on a map.”66 And when he arrived in London, he sought out places he had read about in Dickens’ novels: I now had leisure to wander among the by-ways, making real to my vision what hitherto had been but names and insubstantial shapes. A map of the town lay open on my table, and amid its close-printed mazes I sought the familiar word; then off I set, no matter the distance, to see and delight myself.67 63

Gissing, Born in Exile, 211-12. Gissing, Ryecroft, Spring XVII. 65 Gissing, Thyrza, 251. 66 Collected Letters, 1, 12-14 (April 19, 1873). 67 George Gissing, “Dickens in Memory,” in Collected Works of George Gissing on Charles Dickens, Volume 1: Essays, Introductions and Reviews, edited by Pierre Coustillas (Grayswood: Grayswood Press, 2004), 49. 64

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Gissing had advised Ellen that her pupils should not only learn from maps, but draw them too: “Let maps be constantly drawn by pupils.”68 To that end, Sullivan provided a simple map of “Geographical Terms Illustrated,” replete with an island, continent, channel, peninsula, isthmus, ocean, sea, straits, bay or gulf, river, lake, mountains, and desert as an encouragement to students to draw and label their own maps. Contrasting “a ground-plan of the school-room,” drawn to a fixed scale, with “a picture of the inside of the school as it would appear to a person looking in from the door,” Sullivan introduced the concept of perspective.69 The 12 year old Gissing instructed his own student, his 9 year old brother, Algernon, how to sketch a landscape – start by standing up and partly closing your eyes so that you can identify and outline the principal features, such as mountains. Then open your eyes and put in smaller details like gates, posts, fields. “Of course,” he added, “you will have heard of such a thing as Perspective.”70 Days later, George sent his own sketches, including one of Gosforth Church, near Seascale on the Cumbrian coast where he was staying, back to his father in Wakefield.71 On visits to Italy, Greece and the Channel Islands, he included sketches in his diary, often of architectural and human details, but also panoramic views: Vesuvius and Pozzuoli Gulf from the Vomero hill; “Porta San Giovanni and the shapes of the Alban Hills beyond” (my emphasis); “Soracte, from Railway”; “Taygetos from Sea”.72 Sketching was not an unusual skill for a nineteenth-century traveller in an age before snapshot photography, but sketching the morphology of distant landscapes was especially associated with geologists and physical geographers seeking to understand the history of landscape evolution.73 More aesthetic sketching is a recurrent pastime of Gissing’s characters. In Workers in the Dawn, when Helen Norman remains in Tübingen, the historic university town on the Neckar, she wishes her guardian, the artist Mr. Gresham, “had remained long enough to paint views of the beautiful old place.” She is inclined to make her own sketches “before 68

Collected Letters, 5, 170 (December 31, 1893). Sullivan, Introduction, 13-15. 70 Collected Letters, 1, 6 (December 28, 1869). 71 Collected Letters, 1, 9 (January 17, 1870). 72 Pierre Coustillas, ed., London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England: The Diary of George Gissing, Novelist (Hassocks: Harvester, 1978), 82 (November 29, 1888), 112-13 (December 29, 1888), 174 (November 18, 1889). 73 Richard J. Chorley, Antony J. Dunn and Robert P. Beckinsale, The History of the Study of Landforms, Volume One (Methuen: London, 1964) and Volume Two (Methuen: London, 1973). Volume One includes discussions of Buckland (99-124) and Lyell (140-190), whose ideas are central to Born in Exile. Volume Two focuses on W.M. Davis (1850-1934), a leading advocate of field-sketching. See esp. 388-95. 69

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the rich autumn hues have quite died away from the trees and the hillsides” and “should like to sketch the whole town as it creeps in terraces up the mountain to the grey old towered and moated stronghold of Hohentübingen.” Arthur Golding is better equipped to seize the moment; he takes his sketchbook and pencils with him in a little shoulder-bag when he sets off on a walk over Hampstead Heath.74 In Isabel Clarendon we first discover Ada Warren sketching the “cottage of ideal rusticity” which is soon to become Kingcote’s home. Later, she gives up pencil and water colour and turns to word pictures, publishing her “little sketch” called “River Twilight” in The Tattler, not unlike Gissing’s own sketch, “On Battersea Bridge,” in the Pall Mall Gazette.75 In The Emancipated, Cecily Doran makes a drawing of the view to Capri, “a poor little daub, but it will be precious in bringing back to my mind all I felt when I was busy with it,” a sentiment that perhaps also applied to Gissing’s own sketches of Capri and Amalfi.76

Geography in Theory and Practice The most elaborate illustration in both of Sullivan’s Geography textbooks was the frontispiece, placing east and west hemispheres in competition with one another for the highest mountains and longest rivers. But where Geography Generalized went far beyond the Introduction and, one assumes, beyond the requirements of the matriculation syllabus, was in its allusions to and quotations from both scientific and classical literature – references to Virgil and Homer, to Gibbon, to Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner,” to Lyell’s Geology and, most often and of most relevance to us, to Alexander von Humboldt, the pioneer of modern environmental geography. There was no mention of Humboldt in Sullivan’s Introduction to Geography, but in Geography Generalized his name appeared fifteen times. In the chapter on “Zones – Climates – Temperatures,” there are references to Humboldt’s theory of climatic and vegetation zones, developed on Tenerife and in the Andes; in “Tides and Currents Explained” there is a reference to Humboldt’s work on ocean currents; in “Distribution of Vegetables” there are notes about Humboldt’s plant geography developed during his exploration of the Orinoco, and more generally to his studies of the global distribution of plant species; and in an “Introduction to Geology,” Humboldt and Lyell are both featured.77 Two of the references to Humboldt specifically mention his 74

Gissing, Workers, Part I, Chapter XIV; Part II, Chapter V. Gissing, Isabel Clarendon, Volume One I, 9 (Chapter 1); Volume Two, 194-95; “On Battersea Bridge,” Pall Mall Gazette (November 30, 1883): 4. 76 George Gissing, The Emancipated (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1893), 24. 77 Sullivan, Geography Generalized, passim. 75

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major, multi-volume work, Cosmos. Gissing’s father, Thomas, owned a copy of Cosmos. When, in 1887, Thomas Gissing’s books were divided among his children (when Ellen, the youngest, reached adulthood), George laid claim to Humboldt’s Cosmos, unsurprisingly given his enthusiasm for German historical and philosophical scholarship.78 Disappointingly, he doesn’t seem to have owned or read works by other German geographers, such as Carl Ritter (1779-1859) who, with Humboldt, is often regarded as a founder of a modern, scientific geography, and Friedrich Ratzel (18441904), who focused on human geography and the connections between geography and anthropology, producing a major work on Anthropogeographie, of which the first volume appeared in 1882, maybe a little after Gissing’s principal phase of reading German thinkers.79 Gissing was more attracted to works of geology (such as Lyell) and, following in his father’s footsteps, of botany, both subjects explored at length in Born in Exile.80 Gissing’s Geography was not, therefore, very theoretically informed; it was, rather, based on his love of exploring new places, both in nature and in urban environments. Walking could be touristic – as in Naples in November 1888, from where he penned lengthy letters and diary entries describing his walks.81 Or it could be for purposes of research – as in the time Gissing spent in Lambeth, Clerkenwell or “the east-end”.82 Or househunting – as in London suburbs in 1894 before settling on Epsom as a place to live.83 Or for reasons of thrift – to visit friends or tutees without wasting money on public transport: walking two evenings a week from his lodgings in Islington to visit his friend, Bertz, in Tottenham, about six miles each way; or from a variety of inner north London lodgings to teach students who typically resided in the West End or Knightsbridge.84 Yet, even these walks 78

Coustillas, Heroic Life I, 21, 284; Collected Letters, 3, 75 (January 10, 1887). Robert E. Dickinson, The Makers of Modern Geography (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) devotes concise chapters to Humboldt, 22-33, Ritter, 34-48, and Ratzel, 62-76. Major works by Ritter were translated into English by W.L. Gage as Geographical Studies (1861) and Comparative Geography (1864). 80 Within a week of joining Exeter Free Public Library, Gissing had borrowed Lyell’s Elements of Geology, Hugh Miller’s Testimony of the Rocks and Grant Allen’s Evolutionist at Large, all presumably as part of his preparation for writing Born in Exile. See Diary, 239-40 (February 17-23, 1891). 81 Diary, 60-72 (October 31 – November 16, 1888); Collected Letters, 3, 284-295 (November 9, 1888). 82 Collected Letters, 2, 121 (February 27, 1883); 3, 47-9 (July 31, 1886); 3, 139 (August 25, 1887); 3, 145 (August 27, 1887). 83 Diary, 345-46 (August 27-30, 1894); Collected Letters, 5, 231-2 (September 11, 1894). 84 Collected Letters, 1, esp. 215 (November 3, 1879), 247 (March 11, 1880). 79

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offered useful thinking time. Walking every morning from 7 to 8, he pondered “the chapter of the day,” which he would write from 9 to 2: “I find that I always invent best in walking; solvitur ambulando.” His evening walks to and from Tottenham were “precious”: “it is on the walk out & back that most of my happy ideas come to me. If I am puzzling long about some knotty point, I generally conclude by putting it off to one of those evenings, when I am sure to have the matter settled ambulando.”85 Almost all these walks and reasons for walking found their way into Gissing’s fiction. But Gissing also created walks in imagined spaces which do not seem to have any “real” equivalent. In all the debates over Gissing’s selection of imagined or real toponyms, mostly focused on urban (real) v. rural (imagined), or south (real) v. north (imagined) binaries which, Aunt Sally-like, are sitting targets for demolition, little attention has been paid to imagined places which are not simply locations – Bloomford, Greystone, Wattleborough et al. – but which possess a complex internal geography of their own. Discussing “maps of fictional spaces,” Michael Irwin notes how “Anthony Trollope mapped his imaginary Barsetshire and George Eliot sketched a working map for Middlemarch.”86 These were maps purely for the authors’ utility, unlike other more famous fictional maps – Morrison’s “Jago,” Hardy’s “Wessex” – which were published to inform or amuse curious readers. They were made to set parameters of time and distance constraining what it was possible for characters to undertake, effectively to authenticate the realism of authors’ stories. There are no surviving Gissing maps of this kind, nor even any reference to map-making in his Diary to match the careful enumeration of how many pages he wrote each day. Yet, at least in the case of Denzil Quarrier, written between September and November 1891 while Gissing was resident in Exeter, there is an imagined geography which merits reconstruction.

Denzil Quarrier: An Imagined Geography Most of Denzil Quarrier takes place in the town of Polterham, which critics have assumed to owe most to Exeter, but also to Wakefield, the two midsized towns of which Gissing had most personal experience. Polterham is not a cathedral city, as Exeter was, and, when the novel is set, at the time of the 1880 general election, Wakefield’s parish church had not been elevated

85

Collected Letters, 1, 247 (March 11, 1880); 1, 278-79 (May 30, 1880). Michael Irwin, “Maps of Fictional Space,” in Literature & Place 1800-2000, edited by Peter Brown and Michael Irwin (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), 25. 86

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to cathedral status. Polterham is also more industrialised than Exeter.87 But some incidents in the story, including the establishment of rival – Christian and secular – literary societies, derive from Exeter’s history; and the only distinctive placename – “Salutary Mount,” where the bumptious Mayor of Polterham has his private residence, matches the only Salutary Mount listed in the nineteenth-century census, in the Exeter suburb of Heavitree.88 The only streets to which Gissing attaches names are High Street, Water Lane and Rickstead Road, but locations – the station, the Town Hall, the Courthouse, the Literary Institute, St Luke’s Church, and the homes of the principal characters are defined by their distance from one another, as often measured by the time taken to walk or travel by cab between them as by their distance in miles. These details imply realism and set constraints if we attempt to reconstruct the map which, presumably, only existed in Gissing’s head. The greatest challenge is presented by St Luke’s Church, where Eustace Glazzard marries Serena Mumbray, the rebellious daughter of the mayor.89 St Luke’s is evidently not the mayor’s local church, yet the mayor’s house is in the same suburb as the house occupied by the Liversedges, who regularly attend St Luke’s. When Quarrier moves from London into a house on the outskirts of Polterham, it attracts gossip that he, too, attends St Luke’s rather than his local parish church, but this choice is justified by the fact that Quarrier is Mrs Liversedge’s brother, so it is understandable that he should attend the same church as her. A complicating factor is that the church seems to be located part way along the road from the railway station to Quarrier’s house. We also learn that Quarrier lives on the opposite side of the town, at least 30 minutes rapid walk from Pear-tree Cottage, the modest out-of-town home of feminist young widow, Mrs Wade; and in the fields behind her cottage is Bale Water, a popular venue for skating in winter, but also accessible from the town by rowing up a small tributary of the River Bale. Presumably, this is also the river referred to when Quarrier’s partner, Lilian, goes canvassing on his behalf in Water 87 See Luisa Villa’s chapter later in this book, “The Quarries on the Heath,” for a discussion of Denzil Quarrier from the perspective of Wakefield. 88 George Gissing, Denzil Quarrier (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1892). On the relationship between Polterham and Exeter, see Richard Dennis, “Gissing and Exeter, Part Two: Reading Between the Lines,” Gissing Journal 53, no. 4 (October 2019), 27-40 and “Gissing and Exeter, Part Three: Man About Town,” Gissing Journal 54, no. 1 (January 2020), 15-32. 89 Neither Exeter nor Wakefield boasted a St Luke’s within their continuous builtup areas, but both had relatively new St Luke’s churches in nearby villages, Sharlston near Wakefield and Countess Wear near Exeter, within walking distance for an enthusiastic walker like Gissing, but too remote to provide a precise model for St Luke’s Polterham.

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Lane, one of half-a-dozen streets down by the river in the “poorest parts of the town”. There are factories in Polterham – blanket factory, sugar refinery (from which the Quarrier family has made its money), jam factory, and one or more soap works (both the Liversedges and the Mumbrays are associated with soap-boiling) – but these are on the opposite side of town from Rickstead Road, where Pear-tree Cottage is situated, and, by implication, from the suburb inhabited by the Liversedges, the Mumbrays, “and other distinguished folk”.90 Gissing tells us enough to tempt us into reconstructing his mental map of Polterham, but not quite enough for us to succeed in doing so! Yet the climax of the story, as characters move to and fro between the station, Quarrier’s house, Pear-tree Cottage, Bale Water, and the town centre, depends on our trusting his geography. The (imagined) geographical detail authenticates the story. Irwin connects “Hardy’s interest in maps” to his bird’s eye-view descriptions, also noted by Andrew Thacker in comparing the allencompassing “view from above” with the constrained protagonist’s “view from below,” where all we can see, from a character’s perspective, is our immediate surroundings.91 We can see the former in The Nether World, when Sidney Kirkwood takes responsibility for the Hewett family by renting a one-storey cottage in the suburbs of north London: Look at a map of greater London, a map on which the town proper shows as a dark, irregularly rounded patch against the whiteness of suburban districts, and just on the northern limit of the vast network of streets you will distinguish the name of Crouch End. Another decade, and the dark patch will have spread greatly further; for the present, Crouch End is still able to remind one that it was in the country a very short time ago.92

Gissing’s geography was about maps, about journeys, and about history. In these respects, it connected closely with the kind of geography presented in the better nineteenth-century school textbooks. Yet, from a 90

Gissing, Denzil Quarrier, passim. Quotations are from Chapters XVIII and IX. Irwin, “Maps,” 40; Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 29-36. See also Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 91-93, 117-22. 92 George Gissing, The Nether World (London: Smith, Elder, 1889), 364. Michelle Allen, Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2008), 140-41, differentiates two ways of representing urban experience, encapsulated in two phrases in The Nether World: “Look at a map” and “Let us follow”. 91

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twenty-first century perspective, he was also a socio-cultural geographer, alert to the “power of place,” to the symbolism and multiple meanings of different places, and to maps as metaphors. Looking closely into [Mr Wyvern’s] face was like examining a map in relief; you saw heights and plains, the intersection of multitudinous valleys, river-courses with their tributaries. It was the visage of a man of thought and character.93

93 George Gissing, Demos: A Story of English Socialism (London: Smith, Elder, 1886), 72.

CHAPTER 2 WORKERS IN THE DAWN, SLUM WRITING AND LONDON’S “URBAN MAJORITY” DISTRICTS JASON FINCH

The purpose of this chapter is to reappraise Gissing’s slum writings and Gissing’s own status as a slum writer. I apply to his earliest fiction the most recent urban theory, developed to understand and critique developments in cities worldwide since the late twentieth century. This casts new light on Gissing but also calls into question the temporal narratives used in twentyfirst century radical urban theory, suggesting alternatives to those. The geographer AbdouMaliq Simone offers the phrase ‘urban majority’ to conceptualize changes in post-colonial cities of today’s Global South. Districts of cities in Latin America, Africa and Asia, Simone argues, grew in the twentieth century which “served as interstices between the modern city of cadastres, grids, contractual employment, zoning, and sectorial, demarcated institutions and […] zones of temporary, makeshift, and largely impoverished residence”.1 In Pradeep Sangapala’s paraphrase, the concept of urban majority as shaped by Simone “is not a demographic fact or a political identity but refers to the residents who live in between strictly poor and middle class”, people who “shape the city by occupying and changing its spaces in their everyday practices”.2 As Maxwell Woods (2018) shows, recent theorizations such as those of Simone, Ananya Roy, Alexander Vasudevan and others enable “new forms of urban subjectivity, agency and citizenship” to emerge in the encounter between different levels, 1

AbdouMaliq Simone, “Designing Space for the Majority: Urban Displacements of the Human,” Cubic Journal 1.1 (2018): 126; see also Simone, “Cities of Uncertainty: Jakarta, the Urban Majority, and Inventive Urban Technologies,” Theory, Culture and Society 30.7–8 (2013). 2 Pradeep Sangapala, “Simone on Jakarta, Between Near and Far,” Space and Culture, 2016, https://www.spaceandculture.com/2016/11/28/book-review/

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including between elite academic researchers and non-elite ‘slum’ residents.3 Such theorizations, Woods argues, enable improved understanding of past as well as present urban formations. Gissing’s first novel Workers in the Dawn (hereafter Workers) represents wealth levels in the city as graded, spanning the range between the very poorest and the prosperous. I argue that the “majority” districts lauded by Simone find a comparison in the London portrayed by Gissing, but only if Gissing’s London is seen via connections between people of different social classes and wealth levels, not via divisions. Alongside Simone’s recent conceptual work, I use some classic studies of Victorian London by the likes of H.J. Dyos, Raphael Samuel, Gareth Stedman Jones and Jerry White, which alike develop from ‘new Left’ political positions in late-twentieth-century Britain. These analyses produced between the 1960s and the 1980s develop within a national narrative of British history. Resituated in a supra-national – even planetary – frame, they would gain new explanatory power. Beyond Gissing, the method also involves by dipping into the evidence for London’s cultural history across a period that could be labelled a ‘long Victorian age’, spanning approximately the timespan between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the end of World War Two, evidence provided by various sorts of narratives and documents including literary fiction. Along the way, the chapter alludes to the paradoxical and uncomfortable position of literary realism in 1880s Britain. This was a time when prominent novelists such as George Meredith and Mary Augusta Ward were certain that the novel should be a complex and artistic effort in what we now call realism. That is to say, it should be set in the present day of writers and readers, contain multiple references to objects and places of that present day, and exclude the supernatural and fantastic. But the noun ‘realism’, often in its French form (le) réalisme, denoting a specific literary movement originating in 1850s France, was used as virtually a swear word in late Victorian England. It suggested writing on the borderline of what was legally defined in the United Kingdom as obscenity. There is a strong link between this ambivalent position of realism and the concept of the slum, which emerged as a way of identifying “three-

3

Maxwell Woods, “Can the Slumdweller Speak?: James Joyce and Mediating Dublin Slum Discourse,” City (2018). See also Ananya Roy, “Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.2 (2013) “Dis/possessive Collectivism: Property and Personhood at City’s End.” Geoforum 80 (2017), and Alexander Vasudevan, “The Makeshift City: Towards a Global Geography of Squatting,” Progress in Human Geography 39.3 (2015).

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dimensional obscenity”.4 However, unlike in twentieth-century London slum writing by the likes of Ada Chesterton and Marie Paneth, the components of such obscenity, for example incest or proximity to excrement, could only be stated through allusion, through hints which worldly-wise readers would catch onto but others miss.

Gissing the Slum Writer and His ‘Harsh Prose Epic’ The details of London often seemed mysterious to mid-Victorian novel readers. A sort of glamour or fame (combined with denominational Christian morality) grew up around the parts of the city that had the worst reputations. Acts of naming are key in establishing the myths of a city at times of rapid population expansion, and the names of particular neighbourhoods could become synonymous with urban deprivation, overcrowding, crime and vice.5 Such a perspective is apparent in 1850s to 1880s novels about the Anglican clergy by Anthony Trollope and Mary Augusta Ward. Trollope’s Obadiah Slope pursues clerical wealth and power through machinations in a cathedral city but he is described as “raked up […] from the gutters of Marylebone”, a parish peripheral to fashionable portions of London which was notorious for pockets of poverty.6 In Ward’s influential Robert Elsmere (1888), the title character “recovers his lost faith” confronted with the empty churches of London’s East End while the poor suffer outside their doors.7 Both novelists position London at a distance, as somewhere hard to comprehend which could be a key to what is happening outside it. Gissing began his literary career presenting himself as an expert on London seen thus, a free-thinking advanced moralist who knew “the back streets and alleys of London” personally.8 An anonymous reviewer in the 4

H J Dyos, “The Slums of Victorian London,” in Exploring the Past: Essays in Urban History by H.J. Dyos, ed. David Cannadine and David Reeder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 132. 5 Jason Finch, “How Cultural? How Material? Rereading the Slums of London, 1820-1850,” In Imagining Spaces and Places, ed. Saija Isomaa, et al. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 90–91; Finch, “Literary Excavations in London’s St Giles: Writing the Rookery, Past and Present,” Yhdyskuntasuunnittelulehti / The Finnish Journal of Urban Studies 54.2 (2016): 81. 6 Anthony Trollope [1857], Barchester Towers, ed. John Bowen (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 42. 7 Peter Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), 123. 8 Pierre Coustillas and Colin Partridge, eds., Gissing: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 61.

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Spectator of 25 September 1880 felt certain that “[…] it is the world of poverty and misery, and the dark side of human nature, with which Mr Gissing is best acquainted”.9 Reviewing Demos in 1886, another anonymous reviewer thought the novel “evidently written by a man who has a very intimate knowledge of the working classes”.10 Until the 1960s, writers on Gissing concurred. The likes of Virginia Woolf and George Orwell presented him as a novelist of the London underworld. This contrasts with the view of him developed during the last half century which has instead emphasized the more middle-class and tonally nuanced writings of the 1890s. Critical readings of Gissing’s urban or working-class novels of the 1880s, meanwhile, have tended to work with a binary opposition between the rich and the poor. In The Nether World, described by one critic as “Gissing’s most sustained study of slum life”, Gissing himself encouraged this by dividing Victorian London into two parts, an upper and a lower.11 However, his earlier 1880s works aim to write the truth about non-elite London precisely without reducing it to an opposition between upper and lower. The Trent sisters of Thyrza and the Mutimers of Demos are by no means members of the poorest or most degraded classes in 1880s London. As E.M. Forster would put it in 1910, perhaps, they are “not in the abyss” but are close enough to it to “see it” and have acquaintances who have “dropped in, and counted no more”.12 Most of the working-class characters of Thyrza (with the exception of the idealised heroine) are “skilfully placed in a social hierarchy”.13 Workers in the Dawn represents the most wide-ranging and polycentric compendium of non-wealthy London among all Gissing’s works, even though it was his first. Readings of it have often concentrated on the opening chapter, in which a description of a Saturday-night market in a London slum district, Whitecross Street, is followed by a scene of death in a garret recalling Newgate novels of the 1830s such as Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and W. Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard.14 Accounts of the actual Whitecross Street Market show that while Gissing opened the novel with what seemed a showpiece of realist reportage, he equally used “a 9

Coustillas and Partridge, Critical Heritage, 61. Coustillas and Partridge, Critical Heritage, 82. 11 Keating, Working Classes, 83. 12 E M Forster [1910], Howards End, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (New York: Norton, 1998), 35. 13 Keating, Working Classes, 79. 14 Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 104–05; Keating, Working Classes, 1979, 60. 10

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topographical misnomer”.15 This was to place the street “very far off in that shocking East End”16 rather than, as it seemed to an 1870s observer, particularly “bewildering” on account of its situation “almost in the very centre of City life”.17 The most attentive and comprehensive study of urban space in Workers is by Richard Dennis, who carefully pursues the real-life originals of Gissing’s textual slums whilst noting the novel’s artistic distortions of London topography: “the more geographically central the location, the more precisely Gissing delineated it”.18 Matthew McKean is among those critics who have noticed the comparison between 1880s and 1890s London slum writing and accounts of the non-European other in writings from the same period. He compares Gissing’s Whitecross Street to “[Joseph] Conrad’s unearthly jungle” in Heart of Darkness.19 Conrad’s novella was published nearly twenty years after Workers, so perhaps Conrad was deliberately drawing on established notions of urban darkness when he portrayed the interior of Africa. Workers may, in the terms of P. J. Keating, be a novel of social and moral “extremes” in comparison to Thyrza, written some years later when Gissing had gained more control over his writerly powers.20 But it is rich in urban variety and its social range, rather than examples within it of the demonised or exoticized figure of the slum dweller as developmental throwback, makes it a site in which a late Victorian “urban majority” can be sought.21 The search will need to venture beyond the opening into the more elusive productions of city space found throughout the novel. Earlier studies focusing on urban atmospheres in Gissing could help, such as Louis Cazamian’s 1920s account. Gissing’s best novels are those in which he has most strictly focused his attention on the classes whose intimate knowledge and haunting horror he preserved in himself; whether the poverty studied is that of the London slums (Demos, The Nether World), or of starving writers (New Grub Street); or whether, crossing the limit between the two worlds, 15

Peter T A Jones, “Redressing Reform Narratives: Victorian London’s Street Markets and the Informal Supply Lines of Urban Modernity,” London Journal 41.1 (2016): 66. 16 George Gissing [1880], Workers in the Dawn, ed. Debbie Harrison (Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2010), 57; all further references are to this edition and given parenthetically in the text as Workers. 17 J. Yeames, Life in London Alleys, qtd. in Jones, “Redressing Reform Narratives”. 18 Richard Dennis, “Mapping Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn,” Gissing Journal 46.4: 1–20 (2010): 6. 19 Matthew McKean, “Rethinking Late-Victorian Slum Fiction: The Crowd and Imperialism at Home,” English Literature in Transition 54.1 (2011): 35. 20 Keating, Working Classes, 79. 21 McKean, “Rethinking”, 37–38.

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he relates the adventurous career of a son of the people, who through no means but his ambitious intelligence, wins acceptance for himself among the elect (Born in Exile). On one occasion he was attracted by a special problem, the woman question, and treated it from the point of view of the middle classes (The Odd Women). With varying concentration and intensity, the same heavy atmosphere hangs over those tales; they are, as it were, the several episodes of one harsh prose epic, that of the suffering implied in the social order, or in human nature. 22 As a French scholar, Casamian no doubt knew the pessimistic citybound realism of Zola, Maupassant and others. The notion of urban majority brings together the slums with the other of the “two worlds” Cazamian mentions, that of “the middle classes” which includes the subject material of both New Grub Street and The Odd Women. The commonality accounts for “the same heavy atmosphere” which Cazamian, astutely, finds as a shared quality (“the several episodes of one harsh prose epic”) of Gissing’s “best” fictions. Cazamian’s penetrating remarks apparently sparked off the whole career of Gissing’s biographer and the long-time leader of Gissing scholarship, Pierre Coustillas. They end with a subtle expression of a key uncertainty in Gissing studies: “the suffering implied in the social order, or in human nature”.23 Indeed, this phrase expresses a broader uncertainty in understanding the mental world of Victorian urbanity. Is what we see in the ‘abyss’ a result of specific policies, or a measure of human nature as a whole? Perceptive though he is, Cazamian exaggerates the emotional monotony, or topographic monochrome to be found in Gissing. Laughter – if indeed mostly “harsh” – is important in Gissing’s writing.24 Early Gissing, then, needs reappraising in relation to what Seth Koven (without mentioning Gissing) calls the “mania for slumming” of the late 1870s and early 1880s.25 Such a reappraisal would involve both relating his writings to those of other novelists active at the time (for example Ward, Walter Besant, Henry James, or Margaret Harkness) and to the specifics of London place (East End versus West End ‘slums’), including the subtleties of districts’ magnitudes, shifting 22 Cazamian, qtd. in Hélène Coustillas, “How a French Scholar Set a Young Student on His Own Scholarly Career,” Gissing Journal 53.4 (2019): 23. 23 Ibid 24 See Jason Finch, “The Many-Sided Comedy of George Gissing’s The Nether World,” in Renaissance Man: Essays on Literature and Culture for Anthony W. Johnson, ed. Tommi Alho, Jason Finch and Roger D. Sell (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2019), 173-96. 25 Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

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names, borders and reputations. In line with the interests of the present collection, the period’s debate over the label ‘realism’ should inform such a reappraisal.

Defining the Slum in Literary Urban Studies ‘Slum’ is a strongly negative term for urban housing arrangements judged unacceptable. In it, both material and emotional qualities are important. What seems unacceptable in different times and places varies. Understandings of ‘slum’ as a concept classically found it on the history of the term.26 Bearing critiques of Eurocentricism in mind, infrastructure or supply crises and notions of the lowest zones in a city of course did not begin in London then get exported elsewhere. Yet the origin of the word as a breath from the underworld, a sound of otherness, deserves note. Other words (‘booze’; ‘crib’) came from the same cant into the broader language, but they remained slang. Only ‘slum’ ever became part of legal and parliamentary discourse. The term ‘slum’ carries a stronger emotional than do labels like ‘schlechten Viertel’ – bad quarters – or “housing evils”.27 The emotional quality of the word might make it seem a totally subjective concept. Hence, perhaps, the determination of some scholars to exclude the term ‘slum’ from analyses of global conditions and formulation of objectives such as that of the United Nations.28 Yet the term retains potency, as easily demonstrated via anecdote. The power of a word to make individual people feel a certain way, to have what they take to be gut responses, its power to connect with them personally, is a rhetorical or even a literary quality. In this particular chapter, I would like to concentrate on a neglected ambiguity inherent in the concept of the slum. This is its simultaneous link to narratives of urban growth or improvement and to urban decline or decay. 26

See, for instance, Dyos, “Slums”; Alan Gilbert, “The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter?,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31.4 (2007): 699, 707; Alan Mayne, Slums: The History of a Global Injustice (London: Reaktion, 2017). 27 Engels [1845], “Die großen Sädte,” Seitenzahlen verweisen auf: Karl Marx Friedrich Engels - Werke. Berlin (DDR): Dietz Verlag. Vol. 2 (1972): 256; Harland Bartholomew, Problems of St. Louis (St. Louis: St. Louis City Plan Commission, 1917), 95–97, Archive.org. https://archive.org/details/problemsstlouis01bartgoog. 28 Pushpa Arabindoo, ‘Beyond the Return of the “Slum,” City 15.6 (2011): 631–35. doi: 10.1080/13604813.2011.644750; Gilbert, “Return of the Slum”; Mayne, Slums; UN-Habitat United Nations Human Settlements Programme. 2003. The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements (London: UN-Habitat / Earthscan, 2003).

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The concept of the slum emerged as a means of criticizing and legitimising the removal of urban modes of living that had previously seemed unremarkable. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London, for instance, urban living was often coterminous with temporary lodgings in places that had poor sanitation, with older buildings repurposed for nonwealthy incomers.29 The concept of the slum emerges in early nineteenthcentury London within a notion of urban improvement containing components both material (numbers of people per room; mortality rates) and immaterial, such as an idea of quarters that are devoted to vice or crime.30 An ideal of improvement was what drove the notion of the slum forward to prominence in later nineteenth-century London, not the actual pressure of population increase, which had been much greater at a time (the second half of the eighteenth century) when no such idea was current. The notion of the slum emerged alongside a sense of urban pre-eminence, of London as the city marking the direction that other cities would afterwards take, as in Engels’s essay on “The Great Towns”, and an understanding that its growth would continue. But the notion of the slum, conversely, is linked with those of decay and decline, often specifically that of the built environment. As a physical environment, the term ‘slum’ is typically applied to buildings at the end of their natural lives or needing complete rebuilding. Literary narratives such as Gissing’s are rich but in no way unproblematic sources when it comes to assessing the history and experiential qualities of areas labelled ‘slums’ in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury London. Texts such as Workers need both to be “grasped as material objects” and understood “as reflections on urban materialities”.31 They also exemplify a massive over-representation among literary accounts of urban experience of world cities which act as magnets for writers and artists: cities such as London, in which Gissing like many other writers was a migrant. “Most city dwellers”, after all, “experience their cities as somehow secondary to other, bigger or more famous cities”.32 In his own time, conversely, Gissing was noteworthy for narrating in a vivid and convincing 29

Dorothy M George [1925], London Life in the Eighteenth Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976); Finch, “Literary Excavations”. 30 Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God. London: Vintage, 2008), 10–35. 31 Ameel, Lieven, Jason Finch, Slija Laine and Richard Dennis, “Urban History and the Materialities of/in Literature,” in The Materiality of Literary Narratives of Urban History, ed. Lieven Ameel et al. (New York: Routledge, 2020), 2. 32 Jason Finch Lieven Ameel and Markku Salmela, “The Second City in Literary Urban Studies: Methods, Approaches, Key Thematics,” in Literary Second Cities, ed. Jason Finch et al. (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 5.

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fashion aspects of city life that had been beyond the scope of most midnineteenth-century London novelists who had never known life in the city’s plebeian quarters for themselves. In that regard, he himself worked to contest aspects of underrepresentation of what seemed urban peripheries to early readers such as the1880 Spectator reviewer of Workers or the novelist George Meredith.33 Literary urban studies as practiced in the present chapter draws on work in the field since 2010 which has illuminated these topics of materiality, representation and marginality.

1880s London, Gissing, and the Urban Majority of Simone: Capable of Being Related? Studies in working-class writing and culture by their nature divide the urban environment into strata, emphasizing one on the grounds that it has traditionally been neglected. Manual workers and their families undoubtedly formed a numerical majority in Victorian and post-Victorian London, but this is not the same thing as Simone’s concept of urban majority. Seeking ‘the perspectives and voices of the working classes’ or identifying the way that “a working-class voice” is concealed in the work of a canonical elite poet such as T.S. Eliot are necessary and valuable literary critical actions.34 Simone redefines multiple groups of people together as an “urban majority” for different ends than those of advancing the claims of individuality of groups earlier excluded from a full politics of recognition as critics focused on class, or gender and sexuality.35 The aim is to question the division of citizens into groups defined on an identitarian basis and, beyond that, the idea of individuality itself. Sensitive as they are to social inequality and the suffering of many citizens, standard accounts of nineteenth-century London, conceiving the city as a meaningful whole, cleave to traditional liberal models of the city in which ‘poverty’ or ‘crime’ or ‘housing’ are recorded as social problems

33

Coustillas and Partridge, Critical Heritage, 60–65; Ameel et al., Literature. Ben Clarke and Nick Hubble, “Introduction,” in Working-Class Writing, ed. Ben Clarke and Nick Hubble (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 3; Luke Seaber, “Kings in Disguise and ‘Pure Ellen Kellond’: Literary Social Passing in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Working Class Writing, ed Clark and Hubble, 90. 35 Koven, Slumming; Ellen Ross, Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007); Judith R Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 34

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therefore classifiable as urban abnormality.36 Simone’s notion of urban majority by contrast takes those who struggle, those who are not advantageously placed, as the norm. Whitecross Street indeed seems repulsive in Workers, in the novel’s opening chapter, but even more so in Chapter 11, when the protagonist Arthur Golding revisits it as a very young man, apprenticed to the West End radical artisan Samuel Tollady. One potential challenge to an urban majority reading of 1880s London comes from the historian Gareth Stedman Jones (1983) who traced in latenineteenth-century London the breakdown of an earlier political alliance between lower- and middle-class Londoners in the shape of artisan radicalism. Stedman Jones’s reading arises from a 1980s British political context in which opposition to the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher was weak and divided. Reading Workers with Stedman Jones, the virtuous artisan Tollady can be seen pointing out the horrors of the lowerlower-class streets and courts around Whitecross Street to Arthur, on one of their regular pedestrian lowlife tours through the metropolis’s worst neighbourhoods. Stedman Jones’s interest is in the emergence of divisions within working-class and lower-middle-class London, including Labour versus Liberal voting patterns, and right-wing gentile versus left-wing Jew in the East End. Divisions within lower London are comparably apparent in the Workers when Tollady, part of plebeian London himself, points out to Arthur the baroque hideousness of the people around them, for instance a dwarfish old woman or a boy smoking a cigar (Workers, 121–22). The title of Chapter 11 is “A Double Life”, and the doubleness referred to is the choice between lives: that of the artist and that of the philanthropist, a dichotomy important to any understanding of early Gissing.37 The concept of urban majority could provide a framework for understanding a city in which aestheticism and philanthropy co-exist, rather than seeing their relationship as one versus the other. Arthur’s tragedy, culminating in a leap to his death “into the abyss” of Niagara Falls shouting the name of his beloved Helen, herself both freethinker and slum philanthropist, is that he cannot manage the relationship between the two (Workers, 600). In fact, both Tollady and Helen Norman are engaged in what Simone calls the key task of an urban majority: that of “working with and through uncertainty to deliver ways of life that skirt precarity”. Helen 36 Richard Dennis, “‘Would you Adam-and-Eve-it?’ Geography, Materiality, and Authenticity in Novels of Victorian and Edwardian London,” in The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History, ed. Ameel, Lieven, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 158–76; White, London in the Nineteenth Century. 37 Diana Maltz, “Practical Aesthetics and Decadent Rationale in George Gissing,” Victorian Literature and Culture 28.1 (2000): 55–71.

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may be protected from the abyss by a fortune, but Tollady has known precarious existence, as he reveals in telling the story of his earlier life to Arthur in Chapter 22 of Workers (Workers, 248–61). Having inherited £1,000 on turning 21, Tollady recounts, he left the provincial English town among whose respectable tradespeople he was raised, to travel the world. Returning to England, his money exhausted, he traced his widowed mother to “a poor quarter in the East End” to which she had removed in the hope of earning a living by sewing, faced starvation, then died in the workhouse infirmary (Workers, 254). The West End semi-slums of Workers, as discussed below, are not given the same graphic street descriptions as the streets to their east: indeed, they can seem physically repetitive and anonymous rather than squalid. But it is West End slum lives that contain the most casually shocking and unmoralised moments of everyday horror, often told in a bald, undramatic way similar to Tollady’s account of discovering his mother’s death. The maniacal ranting associate of Tollady’s John Pether tells Arthur (who finds himself “thrilled […] with horror”) of earlier days in which Pether’s mother killed “a man she lived with – perhaps my father” (Workers, 271–73). Another member of the group, Mark Challenger, recalls the fates of his wife and daughter: “The one starved to death, and the other—well, well, I mustn’t think of all that” (Workers, 347). Carrie Mitchell, the girl of the streets whom Arthur marries, holds a dead child while begging in the snow outside a theatre (Workers, 333). Pether himself is later found by his neighbours in bed, close to death from starvation (Workers, 336–37). Such passages underline the fact that to label Workers as an “urban majority” novel is not to claim it takes a blandly undifferentiating view of Londoners. Gissing in Workers might not seem to valorise what Simone calls the contributions of an “urban majority”’ to his own modern urbanity in London.38 Still, the novel depicts the co-existence in the inner city of a considerable range of lifestyles, opinions and wealth levels with what an early reviewer in the Manchester Examiner and Times described as an “almost overwhelming earnestness”.39 Just as accounts of London in the nineteenth century based on hierarchical divisions between social classes or the notion of a nether world as opposed to an upper world conceal the existence of a Simonean urban majority, so does the apparently formal and transactional nature of housing in the Victorian metropolis. Simone’s account was formulated to describe cities in which large numbers of people live in the informal sector, in selfbuilt housing, often on land to which they have no stable legal right. Surely 38 39

Simone, “Designing Space, 124. Coustillas and Partridge, Critical Heritage, 57.

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Victorian London was not like that, whatever squalid conditions its slum dwellers inhabited. London residents of whatever class seem to have lived overwhelmingly in the formal housing sector, even if they rented a room from someone who rented or leased a whole house, themselves paying rent or ground rent to a landlord situated elsewhere. To be sure, there were entities resembling shanty towns on the peripheries of Victorian London. Take the zone around Bangor Street in Kensington, then on the outer western fringes of built-up London, where seasonal workers including gypsies camped and lived-in cottages.40 There are literary representations of such settlements in more than one of Dickens’s novels, notably Staggs’s Gardens in Dombey and Son, directly equivalent to what Simone calls “informal shack settlements”,41 but also, placed considerably further from central London, the brickfields of Bleak House. But the essential nomadism and extreme residential instability of London residents in this period goes beyond such settings. Life in central working-class districts filled with houses let room-by-room which readily became labelled as slums often, throughout the period from the 1830s until the 1950s, involved many moves between lodgings within a small geographical area.42 A move to the suburbs was in relation to this life a move into comparative stability of tenure and, probably, extended duration of residence in the same place, as is marked out in twentieth-century London slum memoirs and novels by the likes of A.S. Jasper and Simon Blumenfeld. As Simone writes of “majority districts” which are shared by those with a wide range of wealth levels, “the densities of living-with ensure circulations of stories, rumours, and information. There are so many people passing through, staying long, coming in and out, that it is never really clear who is who, what is what”.43 This passage provides an important means for rereading 1880s novels by Gissing and contemporaries such as Besant, James and Harkness. Attaching importance to acts of ‘coming in and out’ it connects to the notion of comers and goers central in Raphael Samuel’s account of what Henry Mayhew in the 1850s called London’s “wandering tribes” (with Samuel’s attention being given not to the city’s inner districts 40

Raphael Samuel, “Comers and Goers,” in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, ed. H.J. Dyos, and Michael Wolff, two vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), I.123–60; White, London in the Nineteenth-Century, 88. 41 Simone, “Designing Space,” 127. 42 David R Green and Alan Parton, “Slums and Slum Life in Victorian England: London and Birmingham at Mid-Century,” in Slums, ed. S. Martin Gaskell (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), 17–91; A S Jasper, A Hoxton Childhood (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1969); Jerry White, The Worst Street in North London: Campbell Road, Islington, Between the Wars (London: RKP, 1986). 43 Simone, “Designing Space,” 132.

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but to traffic across its outer perimeter).44 Simone’s account here of “circulations of stories” and uncertainties of identity find striking parallels in the way that people of multiple social levels interact in environments such as the Whitecross Street slum and the West End semi-slums where Arthur lives, ultimately with Tollady, after leaving Whitecross Street as a boy, and in the Lambeth of Thyrza. Readings of the urban environments described in these novels can assume that “well-to-do Londoners” like Helen Norman (or Egremont in Thyrza, or even Waymark in The Unclassed) active as “urban explorers” were outsiders completely alien to the life of the slum.45 Still, slum visitors themselves came from highly varied backgrounds connected only by the fact that “they commanded resources entitling them to gawk at or help the poor”.46 Simone’s description of “majority districts”, it is true, builds on specific “vertical complexes” in Jakarta characterised by “mostly ‘silent’ contestations among various kinds of residents and lifestyles (Islamic, LGBT, young professionals, nascent (barely) middle class families, immigrants, sex workers) for control over floors in specific building”.47 And yet it describes what is going on in the Lambeth Walk area of Thyrza or the Tottenham Court Road and Whitecross Street areas of Workers in the Dawn, and it does so at least as well as existing accounts of those novels built on notions of social division. Those accounts in a conventional contextualising practice are inclined to build dichotomies in a way that draws on the vocabularies of Gissing’s own time and place for explanatory tools. Why not, instead, use explanatory tools that are taken from elsewhere? Without denying that the likes of Waymark or Egremont were to an extent predatory in their acts of slumming or social “passing”, it would be possible to see what Simone calls “a sense of being-in-concert” in the plebeian environments of Gissing’s first two novels plus Thyrza. Less so but still to some extent the same kind of class inter-penetration can be detected in The Nether World, but it exists hardly at all in Demos. I would like to contrast these – so to speak – interpenetratory views of unofficial or non-elite London with a major strand in the period’s publications, the effort to identify and potentially treat ‘problem’ areas. This, for example, was the impetus behind both the surveys of the likes of Beatrice Webb, and the maps of Charles Booth. The latter have in our own times often been taken for what they never were intended to be: a statement of the rich social variety of late-Victorian London. 44

Samuel, “Comers and Goers”. Koven, Slumming, 1; Walkowitz, Dreadful Night, 18. 46 Koven Slumming, 10. 47 Simone, “Designing Space,” 132. 45

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From Whitecross Street to Tottenham Court Road: Baroque to Unremarkable While the extreme slum of the novel’s first chapter, revisited and viewed differently in Chapter 11 of Workers, has continued to attract critical attention,48 the range and variety of plebeian London indicated by Gissing in Workers is still under-explored, with rare exceptions.49 The range amounts to an artistic survey of London “majority districts”. It sweeps from Whitecross Street westwards and then northwards through Seven Dials, once London’s most notorious area, to the narrow streets west of Tottenham Court Road where Tollady and his confederates operate and finally moving north to Huntley Street, east of Tottenham Court Road, a pretentious and utterly unintellectual corner of Bloomsbury. The London of slums includes the sweep in and out of actual slums: it includes a world in which slums can be entered and exited. Arthur’s father declined to a death in a garret; Helen and Tollady visit slums with good intentions. The slums stain and discolour the whole city, on this view: sucking people into them; coughing people out who can threaten other regions.50 Tollady himself has both inherited a fortune and lost a mother to starvation (Workers, 250–55). This is a world in which such things happen. The importance of this urban range to a reading of Workers in the Dawn is concealed by the fact that Gissing’s set-piece descriptions of Whitecross Street and surroundings make that zone more vivid and colourful than those which lie outside the abyss. Whitecross Street on Christmas Eve has an “infernal reek” and contains characters who are “bestially drunk” (Workers, 65): it has an unpleasant atmosphere but also an aspect of the carnivalesque.51 Significantly, in Thyrza, Gissing made his cultivated artisan character Gilbert Grail walk through Lambeth Walk market on Christmas Eve too, indicating a link between such sites and the sense that a key might be found somewhere to a hidden London, festive and with ancient popular roots. (Gissing in both The Unclassed and Thyrza 48

Eliza Cubitt, Arthur Morrison, the Jago, and the Realist Representation of Place, PhD thesis, University College London (2016), https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1493459/, 122; Dennis’ “Would you Adamand-Eve-it?,” 160–64. 49 Dennis “Mapping Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn”. 50 Those, perhaps, like Trollope’s Slope, as the heroine of Barchester Towers Eleanor Bold partly apprehends: ‘In encountering such a man she had encountered what was disagreeable, as she might do in walking the streets. But in such encounters she never thought it necessary to dwell on what disgusted her.’ (Trollope [1857]: 228). 51 Finch, “Many-Sided Comedy”.

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found suggestions of such a key or connection in the sound of children’s songs heard on the lowest London streets). Gissing’s topographical labelling of Whitecross Street as “very far off in that shocking East End” is complex and perhaps deliberately deceptive.52 This sounds like Gissing mimicking the voice of a West-Ender who does not really know that “far off” East End (classically the zone east of Aldgate and the Tower of London) at all. Arthur is transferred from Whitecross Street to what are clearly the semi-slums of the West End. This is an area much more colourless, characterised by repetition and sameness. Mike Rumball’s shop on Little St. Andrew Street, Seven Dials, is ‘one of the many similar for which the district was noted’ (Workers, 65). Tollady may represent more morally and intellectually elevated company for Arthur but his physical environs are similarly dull: The window certainly had no tempting prospect. It looked into a paved back yard, with a cistern in one corner of it, the principal variety in the scene being afforded on those days when the yard was thickly hung with newly-washed linen (Workers, 86–87).

This conveys non-squalid ordinariness. Tollady’s is a “gloomy neighbourhood” but above all an anonymous one (Workers, 92). In comparison, Seven Dials had its canaries, bringing a kind of pastoral into the slums that enables Gissing’s portrayal of them to be seen in Bakhtinian terms as not only carnivalesque but dialogic (Workers, 76). There are constant passages across boundaries of what needs to be seen as a city whose parts entirely interpenetrate one another, not one in which the lives of rich and poor are invisible to one another. Significantly, Workers is set in the past, with Arthur’s childhood unfolding in the 1860s, when “there were no schoolboards” to stop Arthur being set to work as a child beggar by the villainous Bill Blatherwick of Whitecross Street, or an apprentice cat’s meat man by Rumball (Workers, 69). Simone, comparably, formulates his notion of urban majority in relation to what replaces it, the “new modalities of interconnectivity and recognition” he associates with “social media and computation”.53 Emphasising the walked city, Workers exists on the temporal brink of what Gissing would chart in his 1890s fiction, a vastly far-flung city connected above all by suburban rail and street-bound public transport networks.54 52 Dennis, “Mapping Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn”; Jones, “Redressing Reform Narratives”. 53 Simone, “Designing Space,” 126. 54 Dennis, “Would you Adam-and-Eve-it?”.

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Workers contains numerous acts of social boundary-crossing or even “passing”,55 but the interrelations of classes in it go beyond the efforts at philanthropy of Tollady in Whitecross Street or Helen in a less clearlydefined East End (Workers, 119–27; 193–208).56 Tollady’s shop emphasizes the mundanity of city route-finding on foot, in which one street name continually gives way to another and walkers by chance stumble on places they did not previously know. Gresham finds the shop by accident when, a skilled pedestrian, he is cutting through back streets from the Strand towards Portland Place: “he took a short cut out of Oxford Street by way of Rathbone Place, which brought him to Charlotte Place and past Mr Tollady’s shop door” (Workers, 167). Both he and Arthur, earlier (Workers, 82) find Tollady’s shop by chance, while walking in the West End. The premises are physically close to social levels that are radically other to it, and discoverable by pedestrianism. Within the history of mobilities, the railway era is distinguished as one in which “new ways of moving, socialising, and seeing” came into being, but it could also be seen as one in which certain ways disappeared.57 Among them, perhaps, was the sort of encounter between groups within the city, some precarious, others protected by money, which is enacted when both Arthur and Gresham discover Tollady’s shop. Moreover, Tollady is positioned differently in relation to Arthur from his position vis-à-vis Gresham: to the latter, a tradesman, hoping for customers; to the former, a philanthropic mentor as well as an employer. This emphasizes how city identities change relationally rather than being cast in static oppositions such as Gissing would suggest in The Nether World (you are of the upper world; you are of the lower). There are other aspects of multiplicity in the urban space of Workers which likewise point to the urban majority status of its cast of characters and the status of the zones they occupy as, on Simone’s terms, “majority districts”. The novel contains a multiplicity of artist figures, themselves occupying different social levels. These range from Arthur himself to Gresham and down to Tuck the pavement artist (“an idle, drunken, good-for-nothing fellow enough, but now and then he had a few ideas somewhat above the level of his surroundings”), with whom Arthur shares the multiply occupied space of Mike Rumball’s house in Seven Dials (Workers, 77). A further aspect of multiplicity is one that, like the Christmas Eve street market and like the power relations inside the house in multiple occupation, Gissing would rework some years later in Thyrza. This is the 55

Seaber, “Kings in Disguise”. Dennis, “Mapping Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn,” 3–7. 57 Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm,” Environment and Planning A 38 (2006): 216. 56

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narrative act of transfer between districts of the city as an effort to escape cruelty or unfairness. The heroine of Thyrza does this when she runs from Lambeth her reputation in tatters after having been seen alone with a wealthy male companion, seeking refuge off the Caledonian Road in an equally plebeian district which yet has its own character as a modern inner suburb reached by tram rather than a food-bound world.58 Arthur’s arrival in the house of Mike Rumball comes through a random encounter with another of its inhabitants, the “baked-potato man” Ned Quirk (Workers, 61). The boy, still only eight, has rebelled against his captor Bill Blatherwick, a denizen of the court off Whitecross Street where Golding senior had been found dead. Arthur knocks the violent beggar down into the slush while the latter is near-insensibly drunk and running off with his takings, a bag of coppers, then spending those on warming alcoholic drinks in a lowlife pub and, having become drunk himself, collapsing outside. This happens on the streets somewhere near Saffron Hill (where Dickens had positioned Fagin’s den in Oliver Twist), Blatherwick preferring “these backways to the more open thoroughfares” (Workers, 61–62). In terms of the overall map of London, these events unfold on a roundabout westward route between the City and West End, with Whitecross Street a slum area of the former and Seven Dials of the latter. Arthur wakes in an unknown room, in an unknown house and an unknown portion of the inner metropolis, “on a straw mattress, well covered up with warm clothes, in a little room directly under the rafters of the house” (Workers, 63). Thus transformations happen in the precarious struggles of majority districts. There is not space in the present chapter to handle Arthur’s courtship of Carrie in the colourless surroundings of an urban home that is less materially deprived than those of Charlotte Place, St Giles or Whitecross Street, that of the pretentious and trashy Pettindund family in western Bloomsbury (Workers, 312–41), itself also part of ‘majority’ London. An aspect of urban space handled masterfully in Thyrza is the inside of a house in multiple occupation, with its meeting points, borders and uncertain relations of private and public, and Gissing had earlier constructed versions of the same site in Workers. Both the Pettindunds’ house (where Carrie lodges and pushes a note under the door of Arthur’s room) and Tollady’s present urban majority existence in this context of parallel domesticities, thinking of Simone on Jakarta.59

58

George Gissing [1887], Thyrza, ed Pierre Coustillas (Brighton: Victorian Secrets 2013), 340–41. 59 Simone, “Designing Space,” 132; 325; 249.

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Conclusion The concept of urban majority explains aspects of Workers which readers have noticed without finding them easy to explain. From the earliest reviewers of the novel onwards, the fact that it was neither clearly a novel of low-class London nor of high-class London surprised and puzzled commentators, and Gissing has been accused of being unable to “get really inside” Londoners of either sort.60 Then there is the imaginative geography of the novel. For Dennis, Gissing’s way of conceptualising the metropolis […] is a kind of map projection that exaggerates the area between the river and Euston Road, and between the West End and the City, but marginalises everywhere beyond those limits, a nineteenth-century equivalent to the famous London Underground map designed by Harry Beck in 1933, in which east and south-east London hardly exist at all, and the distance between middle-class suburbs (especially to the north-west) and the centre seems no greater than one side of the Circle Line to the other.61

Put another way, this is an account of a city before its metro rail network, built to connect the city and its increasingly distant suburbs, became the most widespread graphic image of the city itself as a whole. It represents a magnifying-glass view of the walkable city that would become, in the eyes of later periods, the city centre. This is the site of “majority districts”, where rich and poor can live close by one another, segregated yet forever with the potential to encounter one another on the street. And it is so because, for all its brutal reality, this is a large walkable urban area in which members of different classes constantly encounter one another. As Keating’s account of them indicates, there is a range of perceptions and positions in the ‘slum’ writings of Gissing which, here, I have placed in Simonean majority districts. The latter urban place label itself illuminates the social variety of both slummers and slum dwellers insisted upon by Koven.62 While Demos comes to seem much narrower than some of the other perspectives found in early Gissing, the literary masterpiece of The Nether World is not a richer account of the city than some texts that might seem not to be artistic successes at all, notably Workers. This chapter has only surveyed a small proportion of the urban scenes in the novel. Notably it has not been able to pay much attention to the division of the novel’s plot during the years of Arthur’s childhood and 60

Keating Working Classes, 57. Dennis “Mapping Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn,” 7. 62 Koven, Slumming, 10–11. 61

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youth, in which the “majority district” London settings analysed here alternate with a plot in something closer to high society. Gissing was offended by early reviewers’ claims that he could not accurately render this stratum of English society whereas they constantly (including those who encouraged him like Frederic Harrison and George Meredith) sensed that his portrayal of the lower strata of London life was the result of extended immersion in them.63 Victorian thinking about the city rested on goals of improvement and progress. One inheritance of such ideas is the view that there is nothing much to mourn about Victorian London. The tendency to see it as monumentally squalid and characterised by beggar children or the crimes of Jack the Ripper while the rich, sinfully and hypocritically, lived it up, has persisted. But perhaps there is something to mourn. What it is emerges from an understanding of Workers as a portrait of a threatened London in which different social classes met one another through pedestrianism and random encounters. While Gissing’s own routes through urban space have often been pursued by scholars, meanwhile, there has been little attempt since Keating to document them in any systematic as opposed to impressionistic fashion.64 Keating’s approach itself remains tied to twentieth-century notions of social stratification by seeking to sift out representations of the working class, despairing of Gissing for producing so few actually workingclass heroes. What happens in late Victorian London, on this view and somewhat modifying the view, again class-based, taken by Stedman Jones, is that in the words of Simone “long traditions of mutual accommodation” find themselves “upended”.65

63

Coustillas and Partridge Critical Heritage, 60. Keating, Working Classes, 53–92. 65 Simone, “Designing Space,” 128. 64

CHAPTER 3 FOUR LADY CYCLISTS JOSÉ MARIA DIAZ LAGE

The arrival of the New Woman in the popular imagination of the last decades of the nineteenth century was heralded by a number of emblems. She was associated with social debates such as the right to the vote and access to higher education, but also with a large number of objects, habits and practices which are constantly tossed about in the satirical press.1 In narrative, these emblems often act as shorthand to signify that a female character should be understood as belonging to the category of New Womanhood.2 Some, perhaps most, of those emblems derived their controversial power from the fact that they were perceived as masculine objects or activities appropriated by women: smoking, trousers (including mainly divided skirts and bloomers), toothpicks, latchkeys, spectacles. The case of the bicycle is different because it is not an appropriated ‘male’ object: the safety bicycle, in its nearly definitive shape, was invented by John Kemp Starley in 1885; the pneumatic tyre, arguably one of the most important 1

Patricia Marks, Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers. The New Woman in the Popular Press (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990); Angelika Köhler, “Charged with Ambiguity. The Image of the New Woman in American Cartoons”, in New Woman Hybridities. Femininity, Feminism and International Consumer Culture, 1880-1930, ed. Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham (London: Routledge, 2004); Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, “Introduction”, in The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact. Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 12-13 and 24-28; Talia Schaffer, “‘Nothing but Foolscap and Ink’: Inventing the New Woman”, in The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact. Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 39-42. 2 Chris Willis, “‘Heaven Defend Me from Political or Highly-Educated Women!’: Packaging the New Woman for Mass Consumption”, in The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact. Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 53.

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contributions to the popularity of the bicycle, was patented in October 1888; by 1891, the bicycle boom was discernible.3 These dates are roughly contemporaneous with the arrival of the New Woman: although she was given her name in the 1894 exchange between Sarah Grand and Ouida, important and influential novels and articles presenting her position had been appearing for a few years.4 This is the case of Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), Mona Caird’s “A Defence of the so-called ‘Wild Women’” (1892) and “Marriage” (1888) or Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). The outrage over women’s use of the bicycle, then, did not come from the same place as, say, the one concerning their smoking. Bicycles were not an exclusively male domain which women gradually invaded: the two sexes accessed the vehicle simultaneously. Whereas the smoking woman was usually portrayed as mannish or unwomanly, the cycling woman was an entirely different type of character. This is in keeping with one of the most remarkable traits of the New Woman: her protean, frequently paradoxical nature (Ledger 1997, 9-34, especially 10, 16; Richardson and Willis 2002, 12-13).5 Even if we leave aside the vexed question of whether any actual women identified themselves as New Women, the matter is made complex by the differences between the New Woman in ‘New Woman’ novels and in the mainstream press. It is not at all surprising that she was frequently taken to be a purely fictional creature: this is the view taken by Mrs Morgan-Dockrell in “Is the New Woman a myth?”, published in 1896 (Schaffer 2002, 39) and by Sarah Grand in her 1898 article “The New Woman and the Old” (Richardson and Willis 2002, 13). Amongst all these articulations, the dialectic between lady and woman is one of the keys to this issue (Marks 1990, 5, 92): the New Woman is often called unwomanly or unfeminine, but also, very frequently, unladylike. If this chapter refers to lady cyclists it is not because such figures were universally acknowledged as ladies – they were not – but because when discussing “A Daughter of the Lodge” attention is drawn to the importance of class in this issue. The term is also used in homage to early 3 David V. Herlihy, Bicycle: The History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 251-282. 4 Tara MacDonald, “Gissing’s Failed New Men: Masculinity in The Odd Women”, in George Gissing and the Woman Question. Convention and Dissent, ed. Christine Huguet and Simon J. James (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 43; Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 9. 5 See Lyn Pykett, “Foreword,” in The New Woman, ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, xii.

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endorsers of cycling for women, such as Mrs Mary Edward Kennard, author of Guidebook for Lady Cyclists (1896) Lillias Campbell Davidson, author of Handbook for Lady Cyclists (1896) and F.J. Erskine, author of Bicycling for ladies (1896) and Lady Cycling (1897).6 Gissing was no stranger to bicycles, and they occasionally appear in his fiction. Leaving aside the three texts with which this chapter is concerned, in The Whirlpool (1897) Hugh Carnaby becomes a partner in a bicycle factory based in Coventry and is later entangled in a protracted lawsuit regarding a patent. Gissing’s choices of business, location and legal difficulties were topical and would have been recognized as such at the time. The following year, not too long after the beginning of their friendship, H.G. Wells – an accomplished and eager cyclist – decided to encourage Gissing to start cycling. Many years later, in 1934, Wells would give an account of this episode in a well-known section of Experiment in Autobiography: He talked very much of ill health and I tried to make him a cyclist, for he took no exercise at all except walking, and I thought it might be pleasant to explore Surrey and Sussex with him, but he was far too nervous and excitable to ride. It was curious to see this well-built Viking, blowing and funking as he hopped behind his machine. “Get on to your ironmongery,” said I. He mounted, wabbled a few yards, and fell off shrieking with laughter. “Ironmongery!” he gasped. “Oh! riding on ironmongery!” and lay in the grass at the roadside, helpless with mirth.7

In his letters to Wells and in his own diary, Gissing chronicles his cycling progress: in a letter dated 26 June 1898, he mentions that, although the medical examination he is undergoing is “rather discouraging”, “cycling in moderation is strongly recommended”.8 In a diary entry for 3 July, he notes: “in morning began to learn bicycle, on hired machine. Tumbles and bruises, but managed to ride a little”.9 The following day, he writes: “sore from head 6

Interestingly, in 1885 Erskine had published Tricycling for Ladies. Tricycles were initially suggested as a more appropriate vehicle for ladies, and their popularity was bolstered in 1881, when Queen Victoria purchased two (Herlihy 2004, 212). However, they were eventually abandoned in favour of the safety bicycle: Erskine’s publishing career reflects this process. 7 Herbert George Wells, Experiment in Autobiography. Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866), vol. 2 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984), 584. 8 Royal A. Gettmann, ed., George Gissing and H.G. Wells. Their Friendship and Correspondence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 102. 9 George Gissing, London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England. The Diary of George Gissing, Novelist, ed. Pierre Coustillas (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1978), 496.

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to foot, but progress with bicycle. Wells a good and patient teacher” (ibid.) and, the day after that, “learnt to mount and dismount. Aching terribly” (Gissing 1978, 497). On 7 July, he notes: “much progress with bicycle” (ibid.) and the following day he purchases one: “rode in morning with Wells and Mrs W. to Epsom, and ordered a machine, at Hersey’s, for ǧ14” (ibid.). The shop in question is the Epsom Cycle Works in South Street, whose proprietor was Thomas Hersey. On 9 July he rides back to Dorking with Wells and his wife: “utterly worn out, but very glad to have achieved this business. Can descend hill with feet on rests” (ibid.). Back in Dorking, Gissing kept up his practice (see diary entries for July 10, 11, 12, 16, etc., Gissing 1978, 497) and in a letter to Wells dated 16 July, he reports: “I can now ride perfectly with one hand, waving the other wildly, or even extracting things from pocket. Fly in the eye has happened, and been overcome without pause” (Gettmann 1961, 106). In the diary entry for 2 August, he writes “went to Epsom, and came back on my new bicycle, cost ǧ14” (Gissing 1978, 499) and, in the one for 9 August, “in morning to Epsom, to get a new bar on my bicycle—the old one too low” (ibid.). In a letter dated 20 August, he tells Wells: “I have had my new bicycle for 3 weeks. An excellent machine. It is already paid for. Hersey was very complying on the matter of proof-corrections— I mean, alterations of the bar, saddle, etc.” (Gettmann 1961, 116). Subsequent entries from the same year occasionally mention riding it, and he also refers to cycling in some of his letters to Wells, after which the subject never crops up again; maybe because the hobby did not become a stable habit with him, or perhaps because, after a serious illness, Wells himself was forced to quit cycling at about this time.10 A few years later, just as Gissing was about to start working again on Our Friend the Charlatan (at that time still called The Coming Man), Eduard Bertz published Philosophie des Fahrrads. Upon reading it, Gissing wrote to him on 7 May 1900, and discussed the book in some detail. In one respect it has surprised me, being far more practical than I had expected. Indeed, it is a guide to the use of the bicycle. But of course it is also far more than that. As you told me, you have put into this book a great deal of your mature thoughts on the gravest of modern subjects. 10 In The War of the Wheels: H.G. Wells and the Bicycle (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), Jeremy Withers addresses the importance of cycling for Wells and the different ways in which it appears in his writing. Before leaving Wells aside for what remains of this chapter, I should like to thank Simon J. James and Gareth Reeves, both of whom drew my attention to Wells’s The Wheels of Chance (1896), a crucial text regarding the 1890s bicycle boom.

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First of all, the practical details. In reading you, I reviewed all my own experience as a cyclist, during that summer at Dorking, & found all sorts of little things which I had had occasion to think about. The great question of health preponderates. You know that I rather fear I did myself harm by the exercise, & simply because I exaggerated it.11

Gissing then moves on to discuss topics such as the convenience of special attire for cycling, the extent to which women ought to practice it and the suitability of cyclists using the pavement rather than the road (footnote on Belgian bike paths). Those are all issues that Bertz seems to have discussed in his book. Indeed, reviewers were struck – not always positively – by the sheer breadth of his approach; the review that appeared in the 28 May issue of the Wiener Abendpost is an apt illustration: Bertz, he [the reviewer] said, has done all that can be done on the subject— its history, its social significance, etc.—and done it so thoroughly that one is overcome more than once with a mild feeling of irritation. It is amusing that a highly gifted and educated man should waste his time in this way, but “If a philosophy of the bicycle was to be written at all, then Bertz has delivered it.” (Matthiessen et al. 1996, 93)

Even if it is tempting to think that Bertz’s book led Gissing to introduce cycling in the novel on which he was just then resuming work, there is no evidence to suggest this. We can at most say that Philosophie des Fahrrads made him look back on his experience as a cyclist and also reflect on some of the issues associated to cycling, not least those which concerned the propriety of cycling as a pastime for women. Gissing’s experience on a bicycle would have been completely different to that which a woman could expect to have at the time. A cycling woman was engaging in a form of physical exercise that, like any form of physical exercise practiced by women, was initially frowned upon by the patriarchal establishment. The usual fears and anxieties were mobilized against it: it would harm women’s reproductive functions;12 it would bring the decadence of civilization (this argument was typical of readers of Herbert Spencer and was in all likelihood related, in the collective imagination, to Max Nordau’s hugely popular book on degeneration, translated into English in 1895); it would cause a gender transference

11

Paul F. Matthiessen, Arthur C. Young and Pierre Coustillas, eds., The Collected Letters of George Gissing, vol. 8 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996), 44. 12 Christopher Thompson, “Un troisième sexe? Les bourgeoises et la bicyclette dans la France fin de siècle”. Le Mouvement Social 192 (2000), 26.

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whereby men would become physically insignificant and subordinate to women (see Marks 1990, 178-179; MacDonald 2013, 46). It may be noted that these are unstable anxieties: women are purportedly fragile beings whose reproductive systems may be undermined by physical exercise, and sometimes potential threats to the alleged physical superiority of men. The same instability reappears when the arguments against female cycling focus on physical danger. Lady cyclists are alternately seen as agents and victims of danger, i.e., often they are portrayed as irresponsible individuals who are liable to cause accidents and hurt innocent passers-by; more frequently they are presented as potential victims of accidents, theft and physical assault.13 The cycling woman generated a specific set of anxieties that did not apply, for instance, to women who played tennis. She was independent in an unprecedented way: freed in many cases from the presence of a chaperone, she could go unchecked wherever she liked. This fact was not only decried by the establishment: it was also celebrated by feminists. Interviewed by Nellie Bly for New York’s The World in 1896, Susan B. Anthony is quick to point out that bicycling “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. [...] It gives woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent”.14 Sarah Grand, in turn, not only adopted the bicycle in the 1890s, but was even featured in the cycling magazine The Hub in 1896.15 Part of the problem was that lady cyclists usually dressed in clothes that were more practical for exertion than approved female attire: divided skirts and bloomers were not universal, but they were extremely frequent. This in turn relates the use of bicycles to the controversies about rational dress (see Thompson 2000, 18-22; Wintle 2002, 74; Marks 1990, 148-150). More than once, feminist reformers saw the bicycle as a catalyst for the abandonment of traditional female clothing in favour of less constrictive 13

An outstanding source regarding this topic is The Illustrated Police News and its ilk. See, for instance, the compilation collected by Bob Nicholson in storify.com/ DigiVictorian/tit-bits-from-the-illustrated-police-news. For vulgar allusions and general caricature, see “The New Woman Again in Trouble” (1895), “Laughable Adventure of Lady Cyclists” (1897) or “The Cyclist’s Rest” (1898); for lady cyclists as potentially dangerous, see “The New Woman – She Shows Fight” (1895), “She was Learning to Ride” (1896) or “Thrashed by a Lady Cyclist” (1899); for lady cyclists as potential victims, see “Attack on a Lady Bicyclist” (1895), “Sad Death of a Lady Cyclist” (1896), “Atrocious Assault on a Lady Cyclist” (1897) or “The Mob Object to a Lady Wearing Socks” (1897). 14 Nellie Bly, “Champion of her Sex,” The World, February 2, 1896, 10. 15 Sarah Wintle, “Horses, Bikes and Automobiles: New Woman on the Move,” in The New Woman, ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, 66.

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and harmful garments: thus Anthony, in the aforementioned interview, and Frances Willard in her remarkable book A Wheel within a Wheel (1895): If women ride they must, when riding, dress more rationally than they have been wont to do. If they do this many prejudices as to what they may be allowed to wear will melt away. Reason will gain upon precedent, and ere long the comfortable, sensible, and artistic wardrobe of the rider will make the conventional style of woman’s dress absurd to the eye and unendurable to the understanding.16

The possibility that women, dressed in garments that were considered revealing, could ride away on their own and go wherever they liked was the source of an enormous anxiety about the upheaval of sexual manners. Two aspects of this anxiety are pertinent here: the first is the possibility that the relaxed etiquette of the cycling world might prove stronger than established proprieties (see Marks 1990, 174). The second is the even more alarming possibility that the exercise itself, along with the posture required by cycling, might prove sexually stimulating to women. In “Auto-Erotism: a Study of the Spontaneous Manifestations of the Sexual Impulse”, the first chapter of volume I of Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1899), Havelock Ellis addresses this issue: I find on inquiry that with the old-fashioned saddle, with an elevated peak rising toward the pubes, a certain degree of sexual excitement, not usually producing the orgasm (but, as one lady expressed it, making one feel quite ready for it), is fairly common among women.17

Ellis is, however, quick to point out that “with the improved flat saddles, however, constructed with more definite adjustment to the anatomical formation of the parts, this general tendency is reduced to a negligible minimum” (ibid.). Of the three texts discussed in this chapter, “The Schoolmaster’s Vision” is the only one that predates Gissing’s own involvement with cycling. It is also the only one where the association between cycling women and changing sexual mores is featured. In this story, originally published in 1896 in The English Illustrated Magazine, the routine of the titular schoolmaster, Mr. Donne, is upset by the appearance of a pupil’s 16

Frances E. Willard, A Wheel within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, with Some Reflections by the Way (New York, Chicago and Toronto: Fleming H. Revell, 1895), 39. 17 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis, 1910), 178.

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mother, Mrs. Argent, who arrives riding a bicycle: “she was dressed, too, in an unfamiliar costume, with curiously short skirts”.18 (The short skirts are also remarked upon in “A Daughter of the Lodge” when describing Hilda Shale’s outfit.) She is “an unusual sort of person [...] of the newest type, I presume” (Gissing 1896, 490). That this novelty arrived astride another novelty – Mr. Donne does not cycle, blaming his “neglect of rational exercise” (Gissing 1896, ibid.) – is enough to throw the schoolmaster into disarray. “To him,” the narrator explains, “Mrs. Argent was indeed of a new type; and no woman had ever so wrought upon his imagination” (Gissing 1896, 491). The young widow having departed, he goes rambling, is forced to sleep in a pub and is that night overcome by a bizarre erotic reverie in which sexual anxiety and desire are conflated into cycling, sometimes successfully, most often not: thus, at first, Beside him sped—not a person, but a voice. A woman’s voice, clear as a silver bell, ever rising to the note of merry laughter. And it seemed to urge him on, until the exhausting violence of his efforts made him aware that he was neither running nor flying, but-riding on a bicycle. He marvelled at his sudden skill in the management of this machine. “Do I ride well?” he shouted, against the wind that all but stopped his breath. And the answer was a gay, echoing laugh, which shook him with such delirium of passion that he started up from the bed, and half awoke. (Gissing 1896, 491-3)

However, a moment later, the elation subsides, substituted with anxiety: He was once more on the bicycle, but this time had no control of it; he wriggled, tumbled, could not advance a yard, and fumed in the anguish of feeling himself, of making himself ridiculous. Near him stood Mrs. Argent, holding her own machine as he had seen her just before she mounted to ride away from the school; but she wore a magnificent dress, such as would have become her on some brilliant occasion of festivity, her bosom bare, save for gleaming jewels, and her arms a glory of living flesh. She was beginning to show impatience. “Oh, can’t you do better than that? You really must be quick; I can’t wait for you.” He made a desperate attempt to mount, but his eyes would not turn from the woman’s beauty, and again he came ignominiously to the ground. (Gissing 1896, 493)

The most interesting aspect of this story is not the association between cycling and sex, which is so popular as to be expected. There is frequently an undercurrent of innuendoes in the satirical press and other mass-culture 18 George Gissing, “The Schoolmaster’s Vision,” The English Illustrated Magazine 15 (September 1896), 488.

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artefacts relating lady cyclists to lax morals indulged in deserted country lanes.19 But in Gissing’s story, as elsewhere, one gets the impression that the real eroticism at play is of the scopophilic variety; that is, that the real threat posed by women on bicycles is not that they are going to experience a higher sexual drive or indulge in it, but that the men watching them are. The apparition of Mrs. Argent triggers a libidinal reaction in Mr. Donne that prevents him from fulfilling his tasks and makes him physically sick: it is what the narrator calls an “erotic fever” (Gissing 1896, 494). Interestingly, the dominant and urgent sexual drive is that of the riding female, which the hopelessly inadequate man tries to match.20 Perhaps more important than the sexual excitement felt by Mr. Donne is the fact that it manifests itself in a reverie where he plays the submissive part. The problem with lady cyclists was only superficially related to the consequences for women themselves: the real conflict was related to the consequences for the patriarchal value system. In the narrative universe of Our Friend the Charlatan (1901), which is largely populated by female characters, there are two lady cyclists. Even though critics mention May Tomalin more frequently than Constance Bride, particularly germane here is the contraposition of the two characters borne out, in part, in their attitude to cycling. May Tomalin is essentially the foolish and pedantic caricature of the New Woman that the satirical press often presented: there is a frequently-quoted passage – probably the most quoted passage from the novel – where she explains her philanthropic crusade to bring culture to the working classes: I know a family – shockingly poor, living, four of them, in two rooms– who have promised me to give an hour every Sunday to ‘Piers the Plowman’; I have made them a present of the little Clarendon Press edition, which has excellent notes”.21

Although Gissing’s touch is lighter in this novel than elsewhere, he spares no effort to let readers know that they are confronted with a half-wit. 19

Risqué postcards frequently feature this sort of material. For an example taken from the French context, see Thompson 2000, 23; see also “The Cyclist’s Rest” (cf. note 3 above). 20 The physical superiority of the woman in Mr. Donne’s reverie reminds one of some mid-1890s bicycling posters which were keen to make the same point in an effort to attract female customers; very often their protagonists were attired in remarkably risqué attire and attitudes, which in turn seem calculated to excite male interest in women cyclists: see Thompson 2000, 35. 21 George Gissing, Our Friend the Charlatan, ed. Pierre Coustillas (Hassocks: The Harvester Press, 1976), 154.

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May’s first appearance characterizes her as an aspiring intellectual whose missionary zeal is misguided, and whose knowledge is wide-ranging but superficial. Her aspect upon arriving is telling: she is “passably, not well, dressed”, wears a “slightly inappropriate hat”, “brown shoes which overasserted themselves”, “an ill-made little bow of red”. More importantly, “about her neck hung a pair of eye-glasses; to her waist were attached a silver pencil-case and a small ivory paper-knife” (Gissing 1976, 150). The reference to a pencil-case and paper-knife seems too deliberate to be casual, and it makes one think that these two objects must also be intended as New Woman emblems. Much of May Tomalin’s character is meant to be read against that of Constance Bride. Indeed, the latter can also be classified as a New Woman, but one belonging to a completely different stereotype. Her eyes are “suggestive of anything but a sentimental nature” (Gissing 1976, 7). Where May’s attire is over-assertive and ill-made, hers “declared the practical woman, who thinks about her costume only just as much as is needful” (ibid.). Constance has studied pharmaceutics and worked as a hospital dispenser before becoming Lady Ogram’s secretary.22 At some point she entertains the idea of studying further and becoming a doctor: her employer seems to support the idea sometimes (Gissing 1976, 56) and sometimes dismiss it (Gissing 1976, 74). Her philanthropic efforts are much more pragmatic than May’s, who is presented as a dilettante by contrast. This contrast is likewise conveyed by the two women’s attitude to cycling. Neither uses the bicycle as a means of transport but rather as a source of physical exercise; however, the bicycle symbolises something different for each. For May, the bicycle seems to be one of the necessary accoutrements of her self-image and little more. When she first appears in Rivenoak, she says: “I make a point of physical exercise; it is a part of a rational education”. Asked by Constance whether she cycles, she enthusiastically answers: “indeed I do! The day before yesterday I rode thirty miles”, but she immediately adds: “not scorching, you know; that’s weakminded”. During the bicycle boom of the 1890s, scorchers were those cyclists who rode quickly and recklessly and were more concerned with speed than with proper posture and leisurely cadence. The danger they posed to pedestrians, vehicles and other cyclists was a frequent topic in the press. When Lady Ogram asks her whether she has brought her bicycle with her, May haughtily replies: “I’m not a slave to it” (Gissing 1976, 153). 22 In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, hospital dispensaries had gradually become an established area of employment for women, particularly after 1894: see Ellen Jordan, The Women’s Movement and Women’s Employment in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1999), 177-178.

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Her inconstancy is designed as a counterpart to Constance’s dedication: as befits her name, Constance addresses cycling with the same seriousness as everything else. In her case, the bicycle is a way of asserting her independence. In this sense, she embodies one important trend of women cyclists: the way in which cycling went beyond physical exercise and became a tool for emancipation. During the bicycle boom of the 1890s it was observed that women engaged in cycling were quite indifferent to matters of conventional manners and chivalry, as Herlihy points out: Should a man, for example, tip his hat when passing a lady, even at the risk of losing control of his machine? Should he offer to push her wheel if she appeared exhausted? Should he stop to repair her flat tire? And should she even accept such propositions from a perfect stranger? One expert suggested the matter was perhaps a bit academic, since women appeared surprisingly less receptive to conventional male courtesies when they were on their wheels as opposed to exercising on a golf course or the tennis court. (Herlihy 2004, 271)

A woman riding a bicycle is not forced to heed a man’s attentions: she can simply glide by. On two occasions, Constance passes Dyce without stopping. Thus, in chapter VI, when approaching Dyce, who is on foot, “she did not slacken her pace; clearly she would not stop”; “she had swept past, leaving in Dyce a sense of having been cavalierly treated” (Gissing 1976, 71). A few chapters later, Dyce tries to get her to give up that day’s cycling, which she refuses: “the exercise is necessary for me”; “the morning is too fine and the roads too good”. With this she departs: “she sprang into the saddle and was off— much to Dyce’s mortification. He had not dreamt that she could refuse his request” (Gissing 1976, 141-142). Cycling is a device whereby the reader is shown that Constance lives in a world in which she can afford to pass men by and refuse their requests. Remarkably, Dyce is allowed into this world as long as he accepts her terms: in chapter VI she had asked him whether he cycled, to which he had answered, “I never felt tempted” (Gissing 1976, 71). Ten chapters later – as their engagement progresses – Constance convinces Dyce to take cycling lessons and soon he, “on a brand-new bicycle of the most approved make, accompanied his nominally betrothed about the country ways. Constance evidently enjoyed their rides together” (Gissing 1976, 233). There is a scene in this chapter which marks the point where the sham engagement between Dyce and Constance comes closest to reality, at least on her part. As they shelter from the rain with their bicycles on a disused summerhouse, she seems to display genuine affection that he is only able to interpret in terms of the gain she hopes to acquire. What makes this

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scene so interesting is not the situation itself, but the fact that when Dyce displaces his attentions towards May, he tells her to meet him at the same spot in the early morning and take her bicycle with her “as if you were going for a spin before breakfast” (Gissing 1976, 279). This parallel is symbolic of Dyce Lashmar’s ever-increasing deception and self-deception. By this point of the plot, cycling is a mere pretext. In chapter XXIV May disappears from the action when she is expelled from Rivenoak: “the girl burst into an hysterical laugh, and ran from the room” (Gissing 1976, 351). Thus does the novel’s ostensible New Woman exit. But herein lies the rub: it is a mistake to read May as the New Woman in Our Friend the Charlatan, because Gissing is contrasting two different types of woman who could be recognized as a New Woman. May is the familiar caricature, and is treated accordingly by the narrative, but in Constance Gissing produces a character that illustrates what the New Woman could represent beyond the framework of patriarchal distortion. She shares many of the traits of Gissing’s 1890s female protagonists as analyzed by Constance Harsh. These characters “understand the world in which they are situated at a level of sophistication comparable to that of their male counterparts, and their self-evident flaws do not put them beyond the pale of narrative sympathy”.23 Constance Bride belongs to the same lineage of female characters that “are taken seriously by their narratives” (ibid.). Her last conversation with Dyce is an excellent instance of this: when, realizing that Constance has inherited practically the whole of Lady Ogram’s fortune, he proposes to her, his argument is the old patriarchal cliché, the great woman behind every man: “I have always seen in you just the kind of woman who would understand me and help me” (Gissing 1976, 380). It is her answer that goes against the grain of gender conventions: “My vanity will grant you that,” replied Constance. “But for the moment I want you to inquire whether you are the kind of man who would understand and help me—You are surprised. That’s quite a new way of putting the matter, isn’t it?” (ibid.)

This final conversation is closed by Constance with the words “we may be friends yet—when you have come to understand that you are not so very, very much my superior” (Gissing 1976, 383) but of course that is an impossibility. The whole narrative revolves around how Dyce cannot come 23 Constance Harsh, “Gissing and Women in the 1890s: The Conditions and Consequences of Narrative Sympathy,” in George Gissing and the Woman Question: Convention and Dissent, ed. Christine Huguet and Simon J. James (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 31.

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to understand such a thing, which is why he must end in abject failure, married to Iris Woolstan, a woman whom he despises but who does certainly think of him as very much her superior. The last text to be addressed here is “A Daughter of the Lodge”, a short story that Gissing published, also in 1901, in the Illustrated London News. Gissing wrote the story in May 1900, a few weeks before he resumed work on Our Friend the Charlatan. In the same 7 May 1900 letter to Bertz in which he discusses Philosophie des Fahrrads, Gissing remarks: “I have a short story to write before I leave Paris—that is to say, if I can get hold of one”.24 The story was originally written for the Universal Magazine under the title “The Rash Miss Tomalin”, but when it finally appeared in the Illustrated London News its title had been changed, since in the interim Gissing had used the surname Tomalin in Our Friend the Charlatan.25 “A Daughter of the Lodge” concerns mainly the confrontation between two young women: Hilda Shale, daughter of the owners of Brent Hall, and May Rockett, one of the daughters of the lodge-keepers. May, who has displayed intellectual talent enough to pursue her studies beyond school, has taken up a position as secretary to a lady involved in the Women’s Movement. She is spending a few days with her family, which she treats in a markedly patronizing manner, and has ideas above her station—or rather, above her family’s station. When May’s younger sister fails to hear Hilda Shale’s bicycle bell, and does not open the gate so that she can enter the estate without dismounting her bicycle, the whole family is thrown into worry and turmoil except for May, who is glad of this temporary suspension of privilege. Like so many of Gissing’s characters, she seems to feel that, by virtue of her intellectual ability, she is Hilda Shale’s equal, and seems to resent her family’s subaltern status. The two young women meet at the house of a lady called Mrs. Lindley, to whom May has introduced herself because they share an interest in the Women’s Movement. When her mother intimates that she thinks this unwise, May responds by asserting her own importance: “you do amuse me, mother. When will you come to understand what my position is?”26 Indeed May is very well received by Mrs. Lindley, about whom the reader is told 24 Russell Price and Francesco Badolato, “Social Subordination and Superiority in Gissing’s ‘A Daughter of the Lodge’,” in A Garland for Gissing, ed. Bouwe Postmus (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001), 246; the quotation is taken from Matthiessen et al. 1996, 42. 25 Matthiessen et al. 1996, 50, n1. 26 George Gissing, “A Daughter of the Lodge,” in The House of Cobwebs (London: Constable, 1919), 181.

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that “a new religion or a new cycling-costume stirred her to just the same kind of happy excitement” (ibid.). It would seem that the Women’s Movement has the power to overcome class barriers: the daughter of the lodge and the well-to-do lady can get along through their mutual interests. This would suggest a wider potential for inter-class collaboration than was usually acknowledged.27 When Hilda Shale arrives, she checks the progress of this anarchic encounter and restores the class distinctions that had provisionally been suspended. This is done by means of an exchange about bicycles: “Do you cycle, Miss Rockett?” asked Mrs Lindley. “No, I don’t. The fact is, I have never found time to learn.” A lady remarked that nowadays there was a certain distinction in not cycling; whereupon Miss Shale’s abrupt and rather metallic voice sounded what was meant for gentle irony. “It’s a pity the machines can’t be sold cheaper. A great many people who would like to cycle don’t feel able to afford it, you know. One often hears of such cases out in the country, and it seems awfully hard lines, doesn’t it?” (Gissing 1919, 182-183)

The enmity being now overt, on her way back May deliberately neglects to open the gate for Hilda when she approaches on her bicycle, so that she must dismount to open it herself. The latter is incensed and asks, “didn’t you hear me ask you to open?”, to which May replies: “I supposed some servant of yours was in sight” (Gissing 1919, 184). This gesture is catastrophic: the Rocketts are dismissed from their position and from the lodge. May must humiliate herself by going to the hall to apologize. Only by begging for her family to be allowed to stay can she prevent their expulsion. In the end the Rocketts are allowed to stay but she herself is forever banned from the premises. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this rather cruel story is that the promise of democratization represented by a shared interest in the Women’s Movement is shattered, and order restored, by precisely one of the New Woman’s main emblems: the bicycle. This is a welcome corrective to some of the most optimistic assessments of the importance of cycling for women; very often critics unduly stress the universal nature of the bicycle, which – so the argument goes – was available to everyone because its price

27 See Emma Liggins, “At High Pressure? The Spinster and the Costs of Independence in Gissing’s Short Stories, 1894-1903,” in George Gissing and the Woman Question: Convention and Dissent, ed. Christine Huguet and Simon J. ec (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 79, for a very different reading of this scene.

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was extremely accessible.28 This may have been true later in subsequent decades, but certainly not in the 1880s, 1890s and very early twentieth century. Using an inflation calculator, 29 the following prices can be established: an 1887 advertisement for the Cogent bicycle of Wolverhampton quotes a bit over £12, which would be equivalent to a little more than £1,400 in today’s money. As we have seen, Gissing paid £14 for his bicycle in early July 1898. Price and Badolato (2001, 241) give £650 as the present-day equivalent, although the inflation calculator suggests that it would be more than £1,600. This was a fairly high price, but by no means exceptional: an 1896 S.H. Justin catalogue includes a Spitfire “King of Racers” whose price is £26 (roughly equivalent to £3,100), albeit including Dunlop pneumatic tyres. If this matter is more than anecdotal, it is because it allows us to see that the emancipation that cycling brought to women was gradual and asymmetrical: liberating commodities are still commodities and they cannot be accessed by all social classes at the same time, as Hilda Shale is keen to point out at the expense of May Rockett. It is, in other words, a salutary reminder that the crucial role played by the bicycle in women’s emancipation was by definition limited to women belonging to social classes which could afford to purchase one. Here, too, there is a sharp distinction between women cyclists and lady cyclists.

28 See, for instance, Marks 1990, 184, and Wintle 2002, 68. Lena Wånggren, “The ‘Freedom Machine’: The New Woman and the Bicycle,” in Transport in British Fiction. Technologies of Movement, 1840-1940, ed. Adrienne E. Gavin and Andrew F. Humphries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) offers a much more realistic assessment of this point. 29 I have used the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, available at www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/Pages/resources/inflationtools/calculator/ind ex1.aspx. Because this is not completely accurate, equivalences should be treated with extreme caution.

CHAPTER 4 GISSING’S LITERARY (MIS)FORTUNES IN AMERICA: EXILE AND TRANSCULTURALISM IN THE AMERICAN SHORT STORIES MICHELE RUSSO

Introduction When Gissing set off on his journey to America from Liverpool in 1876, he started a long itinerary, in search of a more fertile literary ground. Charged with larceny and arrested in Manchester, Gissing had to leave his native land and go overseas, starting a “rootless” existence, almost as an exile.1 In spite of his expectations of new perspectives imagined in the New World, he earned a precarious living and was compelled to return to England the following year. During this period of mobility, he absorbed elements from different social environments. The expression of various identities and voices stands out in the writer’s early American short stories. As “pieces” of the different dramatic vicissitudes experienced, both abroad and in the motherland, they embody his “melting pot of ideas in embryo, to be given flesh, radically reformed, and regenerated as major themes in his mature novels and short fiction”. 2 Such stories are the very first “sketches” of English life and, although mainly set in England, they constitute the first narrative experiments that define him as a European novelist, a British

1 Cf. Markus Neacey, “George Gissing’s Voyage to America and the Hazardous Career of the ‘Good Ship Parthia,” The Gissing Journal 46: 3 (2010): 23 and David Grylls, “The Heroic Life of George Gissing,” Études Anglaises, 67: 1 (2014): 116. 2 Barbara Rawlinson, “Buried Treasure: George Gissing’s Short Fiction,” in A Garland for Gissing, ed. Bouwe Postmus (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 34.

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writer of short stories, a traveller and, last but not least, an exile3. The short stories are the first steps that contributed to the writer’s formation and style, narrative “exercises” which, by mixing sensational, sentimental and apologetic elements, serve the purpose to “sharpen” his technique. They are “fragments” of a big mosaic of various contexts and imaginary places4. Among the countries that Gissing trod, America embodies the first “mooring” harbour of his overseas itinerary, the space which forged his literary background5. The land of new opportunities came to stand for the ideal place for a young man like Gissing who, at nineteen, was “in flight from some very grim experiences in England.” 6 Gissing’s American short stories are mainly characterized by the everyday events of English provincial life.7 They are not concerned with American places or people directly but are set in the spaces and landscapes of the English background. They often dwell on their characters’ harsh lives and a constant sense of melancholy pervades. The bleak American environment exists only as a reflection of the writer’s state of mind and many disappointments. Despite focusing on the space-time dynamics that manage 3

It is worth recalling what Coustillas writes about Gissing as a European artist, according to whom he “was more at ease in the better kinds of environments than in his own country, […] he often felt closer to intelligent Europeans (in his sense of the word) than to the average intellectual Briton” (Pierre Coustillas, “Gissing the European,” in Postmus, Garland for Gissing, 9). 4 Cf. Grylls, “The Heroic Life,” 115-116 and Susan Bassnett, et al, eds., George Gissing. Racconti americani (Roma: Nova Delphi, 2019), 13. 5 Cf. Barbara Rawlinson, “George Gissing, Journalist, Political Correspondent for the Russian Journal Vyestnik Evropy,” in Writing Otherness: The Pathways of George Gissing’s Imagination, ed. Christine Huguet (Haren: Equilibris, 2010), 1113. 6 Jacob Korg, “George Gissing and America,” The Gissing Journal 41: 4 (2005): 1. As Korg writes, “[…] it seems that during his three months in Boston, Gissing knew many people of literary tastes, and was open, cheerful, and gregarious – a style of life that contrasted sharply with his life in England before and after the American visit” (Korg, “George Gissing,” 3). Gissing was ready to adapt to a new context and to adopt an American perspective; although the overall experience did not pay off, Gissing, on his arrival in Boston, enjoyed the democratic atmosphere of the city and was amazed by the accessibility of public libraries and the lively cultural setting. He unexpectedly found, at the beginning of his American route, a motivating and solid cultural context, where he could draw the necessary inspiration to compose his first writings, in order to recall his missing life in his native country (cf. Roger Milbrandt, “An Introduction to Gissing’s ‘The Hope of Pessimism’,” The Gissing Journal 49: 3 (2017): 2). 7 Cf. Robert L. Selig, “Three Stories by George Gissing: Lost Tales from Chicago,” English Literature in Transition (1880-1920) 33: 3 (1990): 277-80.

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the relationships of local ordinary people, the American writings conceal certain references to an international atmosphere that places them between the “limited” British spaces and the wide American ones. In the light of such introductory remarks, the aim of this chapter is to go beyond the borders of the narrow contexts depicted by the writer, and to pinpoint certain transcultural elements, visible in the descriptive overtones. How does Gissing register biographical events in his stories? How does he express the bleakness of the American life? How does he deal with the hard process of border-crossing that finally leads to a transnational identity? Rather than proposing a detailed analysis of the literary devices employed in the stories, I mean to discuss the value of spaces in Gissing’s American narratives. The latter are metaphysical dimensions which originate from an implicit comparison between the European and the American settings and, therefore, lend themselves to analysis from a transcultural perspective.8 Such spaces will be considered as bordered areas crossed by cultural identities.

“A Test of Honour,” “An English Coast-Picture,” “The Artist’s Child (Version One)” and “The Mysterious Portrait” Owing to its imperceptible links with the American world, “A Test of Honour” (1877) deserves major attention. The story is signed G. R. Gresham, Gissing’s American alter ego. Set in the wide green areas of the British countryside, the story concerns an ex-convict, Mr Woodlow, who returns to his wife “after fifteen years’ imprisonment for a crime committed when Edith [his daughter] was an infant”.9 Mrs Woodlow sends her husband away, since she cares for her family’s honour and wishes to hide the truth from Edith about her father. As a matter of fact, when George, Edith’s fiancé, asks about her father, all she can say is that “he was a prosperous man of business” (Gissing 1992, 48) and that “he died when I was hardly three years old” (Gissing 1992, 48). Although the story mainly takes place in the countryside area of the Woodlows, and the reader can only catch a brief glimpse of the ex-convict (forced to go away with the purpose of 8 Cf. Constance D. Harsh, “Gender, Type, and Individual Identity in Isabel Clarendon,” The Gissing Journal 52: 2 (2018): 28. 9 Robert L. Selig, ed., George Gissing. Lost Stories from America. Five Signed Stories Never Before Reprinted, a Sixth Signed Story and Seven Recent Attributions (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 52. All subsequent quotations from George Gissing. Lost Stories from America will refer to this edition; page numbers are given parenthetically in the text.

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preserving the family’s balanced routine), the shadow of the “dead” father stands out and speaks from a mysterious past. Mr Woodlow’s presence in the story is limited to the short conversation with his wife and to the casual encounter with his daughter outside her house, to whom he says he is “a distant relative” (Gissing 1992, 51). Mr Woodlow’s fleeting visit, which does not exert any significant change on the lives of the two women, is an emblem of the complex condition of Gissingian exile.10 Like other characters in the writer’s stories and novels doomed to lead miserable lives as a consequence of their misplacement, the protagonist in “A Test of Honour” has lost his past condition of wealth, and is divested of his right to enjoy family life and to fulfil the task of being a good father.11 After the secret is disclosed to Edith and her fiancé, the family looks in vain for their “heartbroken father” (Gissing 1992, 53), who has disappeared, “victimized less by his own criminal act than by his wife’s social cowardice” (Gissing 1992, 44). Mr Woodlow tries to set his dark past aside, but he has to assuage the guilt of murder. The Woodlows’ house is an area which rejects any contamination from the father’s crime. It is, in fact, a sort of Heaven, where the arrival of an “outsider” condemned to exile and alienation cannot subvert the everyday flowing of life. It is a private space, where the invasion from the process of the “othering” is repulsed to preserve the integrity of the Woodlows’ microcosm.12 Likewise, for Gissing America is the promised land of expectations, but it soon turns out to be an unsuitable place and becomes, therefore, the symbol of disillusionment. The New World is the specular expression of Gissing’s motherland, but one in which the conflicting effects of industrialization are even more remarkable, and the “whirlpool” of modern life swallows everyone’s lives in the struggle for survival.13 Not only are both Great Britain and America invaded by the 10

Chialant’s description of Maurice Hilliard in Eve’s Ransom represents Gissing’s condition as an exile as well: “[…] the elements that make an exile of him are his frustrated artistic aspirations, his lack of money and a strong idealism as regards the possibility of changing individuals as well as society” (Maria Teresa Chialant, “Eve’s Ransom: Narrative Strategies and Politics of Gender,” RSV 9: 17 (2004): 101). 11 Cf. Pierre Coustillas, “‘Human Odds and Ends’: A Historical, Structural and Aesthetic Approach to Gissing’s Twenty Sketches,” RSV 9: 17 (2004): 25. Cf. also Pierre Coustillas, “Gissing’s Variations on Urban and Rural Life,” in Victorian Writers and the City, ed. Jean Paul Hulin and Pierre Coustillas (Lille: Pubs de l’Univ. de Lille III, 1979), 134. 12 Cf. Simon J. James, “Travelling with the Other: George Gissing and the Railway Carriage,” in Huguet, ed., Writing Otherness, 60. 13 Cf. Francesco Marroni, Victorian Disharmonies. A Reconsideration of NineteenthCentury English Fiction (Rome: The John Cabot University Press, 2010), 139 and

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industrial expansion and, therefore, the advancing contamination of the anthropic activity; they also comprise wide countryside areas, whose narrative function is to compensate for the sense of loss and homelessness originating in the city life. Exile, as a moment of departure and expulsion, is the condition that involves the writer and his alter ego, who are both motivated by the desire to begin a new life and to forget the “sins” committed in the past. As we have seen, forgiveness is denied; if Mr Woodlow’s story is the paradigmatic expression of the events that characterized Gissing’s life, it seems that the puritan American society refuses the arrival of a “repentant”. The author and his character mean to re-write new pages of their lives, but their “promised lands” do not ensure dream fulfilment. Their difficult situation stands, in religious terms, for Adam’s prototypic expulsion from Heaven, where hope has no root. As with the Woodlows’ house, so too is America the spaces of false hopes. Woodlow’s misadventures, in sum, express the writer’s failing aspiration and consequent disillusionment.14 An attentive analysis of the relationship between the British and American context shows how America represents the writer’s first important transitional route. By harbouring in different cultural spaces, Gissing “works” his way into the overseas environment and, in a figurative sense, carries out a “synecdochic” process of cultural expansion. He marks a passage from the narrow spaces of his British cultural identity (and the individual dimension of his experience) to the wider American multicultural setting – the collective sphere that introduces the writer into a cosmopolitan, heterogeneous space. He accomplishes such a process by crossing the real and imaginary territories of America, with the evocative tools of the stories and the historical references derived from his native country. The transcultural dimension of the stories is strictly connected with the concept of exile and the problems that it involves. One could argue that, during his journey to America, traditionally considered “[…] a country combining a Arlene Young, “Character and the Modern City: George Gissing’s Urban Negotiations,” English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 49: 1 (2006): 49. 14 As to the autobiographical elements in Gissing’s works, Neacey claims that “The fictive disguise of a confessional narrative does not hide its autobiographical qualities. […] for in England everyone enjoys it when the author hides himself in his works or at least masks himself. […] this evident need to merge the fictional and the real, to merge them into an inseparable mixture, […] differentiates Gissing from the majority of English pen pushers” (Markus Neacey, “All Quiet on the German Front? George Gissing, the German Critic, and the German Soldier,” The Gissing Journal 53: 1 (2019): 21. Cf. also Amanda Kotch, “George Gissing and the Fictional Work of Biography,” SEL Studies in English Literature 55: 4 (2015): 881).

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tumult of picturesque peculiarities, mixed with taboos, prejudices, commonplaces, and desuetude, but also boasting a weary cosmopolitism,”15 Gissing took his condition of isolation with him. Therefore, writing of the known and evoking the British setting in the American stories counters his sense of rootlessness. “An English Coast-Picture,” published in Appletons’ Journal in July 1877, deals with the representation of outer spaces and thus lends itself to an international discourse. The first-person narrator depicts wonderful images of the Bamborough area, in Northumberland, with the consequent effect that the story reads like a guidebook. “An English Coast-Picture” is lyrical travel writing that foreshadows By the Ionian Sea (1901), describing Gissing’s travel around the Magna Graecia, in that it focuses on the county’s prominent historical markers, such as the castle. The narrator describes a journey around the area in recollection and, as he contemplates the enchanting landscape, emphasizes his status as an exile immersed in the American world. As a result, Britain is evocative, distanced and reproduced. As he writes at the end of the story here in the New World I often sit and think of Bamborough, with its quite streets, its lordly castle, and its little churchyard where sleeps the brave maiden; […] of the fishy little port of North Sunderland; and of the dark, gloomy Farne Islands, the land of gulls and guillemots (Gissing 1992, 94).

His friend Jack’s sketches and pictures immortalise the beauty of this part of English coast. The British landscape is viewed through the lens of art, which adds a further layer of distance. The narrative structures space as a small circle within a bigger one. The former is the image of the British space, the latter is the American space. The tale, as a portrayal of the British context, symbolizes the “propeller” which, grafted onto the larger American world, stirs the whole Anglo-American “framework” and propagates, from its limited and central area, elements of Gissing’s natural and cultural background throughout the vast American continent.16 Gissing’s cultural spaces, characterized by their internal differences and distinctions, are “blurred” by an overlapping process, thus completing a route that takes the 15

Ruxandra Cesereanu, “Homo Viator in Transition Travelling through and with Céline, Nabokov, Kerouak,” Cahiers de l’Echinox 11 (2006): 36. 16 As to the theory of interacting spaces, cf. Jurij M. Lotman and Boris A. Uspenskij, Tipologia della cultura, eds. Remo Faccani and Marzio Marzaduri (Milano: Bompiani, 1975), 152-65. On the concept of spaces, frontiers and limits, cf. Jason Finch, “The Peripheries of London Slumland in George Gissing and Alexander Baron,” in Literature and the Peripheral City, eds. Jason Finch, Markku Salmela and Lieven Ameel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 69-71.

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writer from the microareas of the British world to the macroareas of the American context.17 To return to the concept of the “synecdochic” process, the American world takes on a wider meaning, since it represents a metatemporal dimension. This allows the author to redefine his quintessential identity and experience the act of writing on his country in different surroundings. Jack’s pictures, by means of repeated brush strokes, represent the granularity of the exile’s memories. Art, therefore, is another means by which the writer can set up a dialogue with a physically absent space. The memories evoked by means of the pictures transcend cultural borders and generate a transcultural communication that connects Gissing’s background in the New World with his homeland. Such a dialogic relationship seems to reverse the international theme of Jamesian roots, in that Gissing, as Korg suggests, “was ready at an early age to think of America as a cradle of unspoiled nature and unpolluted air, free of crass materialism, and opening unlimited vistas.”18 As the months went by, Gissing moves away from such a utopian view of the New World and, by depicting the beauty of the British landscapes, seems to emphasise the opposition between the calm and quiet English countryside and the American urban-scape of cities such as Boston and Chicago. Considered as the land of plenty and future promises, America supposedly offered endless opportunities, but it soon became a hostile environment, which prevented Gissing from taking root. By employing the potentialities of art, the author illustrates a similar route through different, but imaginary and more meaningful spaces, in “The Artist’s Child (Version One)” (1877). The dramatic story tells of Julius Trent, “an artist; talented, without doubt, but unsuccessful. […] one of those men whose curse is to be born with great ideas, but without the energy necessary to put them into execution” (Gissing 1992, 59).19 The artist’s wife’s death, soon after their baby Ida’s birth, thwarts his life. Such an event, however, does not erase his ambitions, since: 17 Cf.

Mark Stein, “The Location of Transculture,” in Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, eds. Frank Schulze-Engler, et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 253-54. 18 Korg, “George Gissing,” 2. 19 As Selig suggests, “Gissing himself had a gift for drawing, and his very first publication was an art review for Boston’s Commonwealth. Throughout his career he filled his fiction with many painter-characters” (Selig, “Three Stories,” 277). Moreover, in this regard, in his analysis of “The Artist’s Child (Version Two),” Harrison writes that “[…] the narrative is framed in a manner which stresses the ongoing centrality of art dealing” (Andrew Harrison, “Art and Money: George Gissing, D. H. Lawrence and the Literary Marketplace,” Gissing Journal 45: 1 (2009): 40).

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his genius was truly creative, and his fancy revelled in all the glories of form and colour. Lovely faces, exquisite forms, luxuriant growths of every kind, boundless skies, illimitable distances, landscapes bathed in living light; all were present before his inward eye. But as soon as he raised his hand to the canvas they were gone (Gissing 1992, 61).

In spite of the problems Trent has to deal with when painting, owing to the mourning that has affected him and his daughter, he manages to be a good artist. The text ends with the girl’s death, whose health has been poor since her birth. All that remains of her is Trent’s portrait. The whole story centres around the memory conjured up by the painting, whose subject has a “round face, childish in its beauty, but already displaying signs of superior intelligence; the rows of golden curls; the wide blue eyes, so full of light and love; - and all so exquisitely drawn, so perfect in its finish” (Gissing 1992, 59). The perfection of the picture symbolizes the artist’s talent and the denial of the recognition of his skills “in a retired part of London” (Gissing 1992, 59). The daughter’s death prevents the girl from achieving her dream to follow her father’s footsteps. The spaces of art in the text represent the heterotopic dimension of memory, in as much as they are “sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society.”20 The painting evokes memories of past moments and stands for a symmetrical reality which, though impalpable and unreachable, offers a direct route to the past. The work of art reproduces the girl’s real features since: As Ida lay, forever cold and silent, upon her death-bed, her father painted the picture that you see there. He did not paint his daughter’s likeness as he then beheld her, but as she had been a few years before; aiding his memory, so far as outline went, with glances at the dead face, but filling it in with the hues of childhood and of health (Gissing 1992, 64).

The painting is even more beautiful and poignant because it portrays Ida’s lively outlines after she has passed away. Viewed from this angle, the story incorporates different heterotopic spaces; it “is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.”21 The picture makes the spaces of life and death overlap, since it evokes a dead girl with the features of a living creature. As 20 Jay Miskowiec (transl.) and Michel Foucault, “Texts/Contexts. Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16: 1 (1986): 24. As regards the relationship between travelling and time, cf. Emanuela Ettorre, “George Gissing’s ‘Nomadic Thought’ and the Vibrant Experience of By the Ionian Sea,” The Gissing Journal 51: 4 (2017): 4. 21 Miskowiec and Foucault, “Texts/Contexts,” 25.

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such, it is “an astonishing creation” with “very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings.”22 It is a complex process of “transculturation” leading to new horizons, a consequence of the transoceanic passage.23 To this end, it would be useful to go beyond the ekphrastic leitmotif of the paintings and to focus on a new “image” of transculturalism in Gissing’s American stories as an extension of the concept of culture. Culture is made up of symbols and meanings that are never “fixed or solidified”; likewise, transculturalism emphasises the temporary character of culture, its fluidity and changeable nature stimulated by different social contexts and phenomena.24 The space of migration is, in Gissing’s writings, an “osmotic” area that is subject to a constant process of interaction and space-time communication, by means of which the author is able to retrace his origins in the bleak, boundless lands of America. The identification of American elements as symbolic representations of his native place characterises the transcultural value of the American spaces. The British setting, its natural perspectives, as well as the everyday objects and places that “compose” Gissing’s narrative depictions, such as paintings and rooms, are parts of a wide metaphorical context, originated in America, that form the author’s identity, with its “‘assemblage’ of images and meanings.” 25 The American stories highlight the dynamic character of the two cultural dimensions, by means of a transcultural interaction among the English and American elements. The stories reveal the “consonant, disjunctive, overlapping, contentious, continuous, or discontinuous” aspect of both the European and transatlantic universes, alongside their “transitional, transformative, open, and unstable” peculiarity.26 The painting, in particular, re-discusses and re-elaborates the cultural meanings that the writer takes with him along his passage; it translates, transposes and transacts the source culture with the target setting. As a result, it overcomes the previously established boundaries, keeping, at the same time, the main aspects of the author’s native culture, thus outlining 22

Miskowiec and Foucault, “Texts/Contexts,” 25. Soto explains, from a modern perspective, the complex concept of transculturation and analyses the different meanings of the prefix trans- in its various semantic contexts (cf. Michael Soto, “Transculturalism and the Discourse of American Modernism,” in Sites of Ethnicity: Europe and the Americas, eds. William Boelhower, Rocío G. Davis and Carmen Birkle (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004), 150-51). 24 Cf. Jeff Lewis, “From Culturalism to Transculturalism,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 1 (2002): 22-6. 25 Lewis, “From Culturalism,” 22. 26 Lewis, “From Culturalism,” 23. 23

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a reality that is constantly in fieri. As it happens, where in “A Test of Honour” the Woodlows’ house represents the American space of hope and illusion, in “The Artist’s Child” Ida’s portrait symbolizes an illusory place of compensation which makes up for the tragic loss. However, “A Test of Honour” “draws” the real physical movements of the man seeking forgiveness, whereas “The Artist’s Child” is developed within the imaginary trajectories of the painting, which stands for the artistic space of exile, as well as a link with the abstract dimension of escapism. The protagonist’s contemplation of the painting sets up a relationship of mutual correspondence between reality and the surreal dimension that the portrait arouses. If the process of contemplation (the imaginary interaction between Julius Trent’s present life and the dead girl’s “frozen” beauty) is extended to Gissing’s American experience, the picture takes on further symbolic interpretations. The perspective from which the painting is viewed takes the protagonist into the American spaces, where the appealing cultural facilities and the illusion of a better life, represented by his daughter’s beauty, project the writer into the longed-for world of “redemption”. “The Artist’s Child” is characterized by a nihilistic reality, failure and frustration, versus the heavenly dimension of the portrait, which preserves the cherished memories of the dead girl and keeps alive the writer’s hopes for a successful life in the new continent. The portrait is a specular space, the reflection of a superior space-time dimension; it offers the protagonist the chance to dwell on the bygone times and, at the same time, stands for the writer’s unfulfilled dream to set up a new life overseas. As such, it assumes an “epiphanic” function, in that it conveys the quintessential sense of the author’s experience, the real and full meaning disclosed by contemplating the portrayed image.27 The real spaces of England described in “A Test of Honour” assume an imaginary entity in the painting of “The Artist’s Child”; such abstract spaces, which identify themselves with the writer’s search for new hopes in America, are unknown territories which seemingly deny all expectations. Although the two places are physically separate in the stories, they are steadily linked by the effect of a mutual transcultural communication. Among the many stories centred around misunderstandings generated by paintings, “The Mysterious Portrait,” published in the Chicago Daily News on July 1877, is also worth mentioning. A client commissions 27 As Pordzik writes about Gissing’s short stories, “It is the internally experienced ‘fullness’ of a concrete and revealing situation which makes the reader ‘understand’ life in its embodiedness, its actuality and experiential vibrancy” (Ralph Pordzik, “Narrating the Ecstatic Moment: George Gissing and the Beginnings of the Modern Short Story,” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28: 2 (2003): 352).

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a picture of his dead daughter based on his description. Harry, the artist, realizes that the description of the dead girl is very similar to his wife Helen and paints her. When the client sees the portrait, he recognizes his daughter. Later the truth the client was looking for is disclosed: Helen is his dead daughter’s child, his granddaughter, whom he has been seeking for months and considers his daughter. The paintings and the portraits, with their pictures of doubles shot through with déjà vu, reawaken old memories and resemblances. They both generate and resolve doubts of identity. The imaginary mazes represented in the paintings unravel through certain details and minutiae of aesthetic memories, borrowing from them such clues as the paradigmatic element of the beauty of landscapes and portraits.28 Gissing, by means of art, corroborates his “appreciation and understanding of the beautiful, typified by botany, and recognition of other natural wonders.”29 The employment of artistic symbols in the writings allows him to explore the deepest strata of the specular reality, which is imperceptibly evoked in the American stories.30 The shifting and blurring features of art serve as functional elements in Gissing’s American writings, since they pave the way for the transcultural passage through different social worlds; they outline the awareness of the acquisition of various possible identities.31

Conclusion The implication of the paintings assumes more complexity in light of Gissing’s travelling throughout Europe and America. The ambiguous role of the portraits, as well as the doubts that arise, is connected to Gissing’s status as an exile during his stay in America, a time when disorientation made it difficult for him to grasp the real identity of the places he crossed. Likewise, the complex clues represented in the portraits, such as resemblances and hazy images of existing places and people, exemplify Gissing’s effort to facilitate a gradual process of passage into a new cultural phase, a process requiring the willingness to accept the new milieu of the “host” country. The 28

Cf. Diana Maltz, “George Gissing as Thwarted Aesthete,” in Postmus, Garland for Gissing, 203. 29 Maltz, “George Gissing,” 210. 30 Harrison claims that “Gissing was convinced by Schopenhauer’s insistence on the place of art as the only sublime force for good in a world that was otherwise doomed to insignificance” (Debbie Harrison, “The Triumph of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism Over Comte’s Positivism in George Gissing’s Early Writing,” Literature Compass 9: 11 (2012): 833). 31 Cf. Christine Huguet, “Art et Histoire: L’Excès dans Demos de George Gissing,” Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardines 63 (2006): 111-13.

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confounding portraits, as mirrors reflecting manifold images, symbolize the different cultural references; their manifold messages solve, at the same time, identity issues and introduce Gissing into a transcultural dimension. Although the writer depicts the setting of his American stories within the bounds of the British milieu, he is subject to a process of cultural “intersection” and acquires different representations of his persona. Such split identities are not only reflected by the multiple images illustrated in the paintings, but also by the misunderstandings generated by the webs of events told in the stories. The reflecting games of the paintings in his stories, as mirrors of decomposed identities and heterotopic places, prove Gissing’s sense of displacement in the New World. Moreover, the constant leitmotif of travelling and wandering in such stories as “A Test of Honour” and “An English Coast-Picture” testify to the writer’s sense of homelessness and the search for cultural roots. The hard route across the Northern American continent retraces his exile: the stories convey that the latter is characterized by “its pain-dulling infinity, […] its forgetfulness, detachment, indifference, […] its terrifying human and inhuman vistas for which we’ve got no yardstick except ourselves.”32 The American experience marked the passage from Gissing’s individual and cultural universe to the transcultural world of the American setting. It is the primordial ground of Gissing’s European macrotext, its symbolic setting, and a necessary passage towards the transcultural dimension of the writer’s later oeuvre.

32 Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 33.

CHAPTER 5 A “WONDERFUL AWAKENING”: AN ECOCRITICAL REREADING OF THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF HENRY RYECROFT ADRIAN TAIT

In The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, published just before his death in 1903, George Gissing offered his readers a very different kind of novel to the sepulchre tales of urban life with which he had become associated. Ryecroft is a writer who, aged fifty, finds that he has been bequeathed “a life annuity of three hundred pounds”.1 After years “beset by poverty” (Gissing 1987, 5), he is freed from “mere hack-work” (Gissing 1987, 5), and the constant need to make ends meet. Retiring to the country, he starts up a new life, immersed in the seasons; now, he is able to write freely and fully without ever needing “to please editor, publisher, public” (Gissing 1987, 22). In death, Ryecroft leaves behind these “private papers” as a partial account of his life as a writer, and his retirement in Devon. Discovered by a friend whose initials are Gissing’s own (“G.G.”), it is decided that this “irregular diary […] had human interest” (Gissing 1987, 8), and might, after all, be worth printing. Perhaps ironically, this slim little volume proved to be amongst the most popular works that Gissing ever published.2 From an ecocritical perspective, and perhaps surprisingly, it is also amongst the most interesting. Ryecroft’s account of his own “wonderful awakening” (Gissing 1987, 23) touches on questions that are central to literary representations of the environment, and in particular, the translation of “environment” into problematic but influential constructions such as “Nature”. Still more 1

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, ed. Mark Storey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 6. Subsequent references to this edition will be found in the text. 2 John Halperin, George Gissing: A Life in Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, repr. 1987), 217.

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significantly, The Private Papers also draws on the “specifically literary tradition” of the pastoral, a convention that embodies an important if often oblique comment on the ills of a deracinated urban existence.3 Writing at a moment in human history when industrial modernity was becoming dominant, Ryecroft’s “retreat from city to the countryside” – and the contrast his private papers draws between urban squalor and rural ease – suggest a powerful critique of the pattern of development then being taken by British society, and since reproduced globally.4 As this chapter also sets out to show, the question is whether that retreat is itself an act of evasion that obscures the lived realities of country life, and ignores the necessary relationship between Ryecroft’s new-found freedom, and economic exploitation. In its first section, however, the essay discusses what is meant by ecocriticism, and how and in what ways Ryecroft’s private papers might be reread from an ecocritical perspective.

Environmentalism and the ecocritic “[F]limsy” as the “tools of cultural analysis” might seem when confronted with problems on the scale of today’s ecological crises, the aim of ecocriticism is to challenge the way in which humankind relates to and represents the more-than-human world, and to suggest new ways in which to conceive of that relationship.5 As Richard Kerridge explains: The ecocritic wants to track environmental ideas and representations wherever they appear, to see more clearly a debate which seems to be taking place, often part-concealed, in a great many cultural spaces. Most of all, ecocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis.6

Several points follow from Kerridge’s summary. Although pervasive, environmental concerns are often “part-concealed”. Consequently, environmental ideas and representations may be encoded in texts which do not, on the surface, appear to be “about” the environment, but which nevertheless reflect the fact that environmental crisis has its origins in almost every aspect of what today constitutes life in the developed world. Environmental crises are rooted not only in the emergence of industrial modernity, but in the role of capital as a dominant driver in the shaping of 3

Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2012), 37. Garrard, 37. 5 Garrard, 16. 6 Quoted in Garrard, 4. 4

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modern society. They are also linked to the replacement of what Carolyn Merchant describes as “the image of an organic cosmos” with “a mechanistic world view in which nature was reconstituted as dead and passive, to be dominated and controlled by humans”.7 Consequently, modern science is itself implicated in crisis, as at once “both a producer of environmental hazards and a critical analyst of them”.8 As Kerridge’s observations suggest, the difficulty may be that these drivers of crisis have over time been normalized, constituting themselves as the unexceptional ground of human existence. Few would argue that money is a necessary part of modern life or suggest that there are alternatives to it. Fewer still would take exception to the work of the selfsame science that makes it possible to understand – with ever increasing degrees of certainty and accuracy – the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the climate. Even industrial modernity is today increasingly unquestioned, as developing countries seek to emulate the paths taken by the developed world. It therefore follows that whilst the ecocritic is most interested in the extent to which a given text responds to environmental crises, its silence on the subject may be equally compelling. It also follows that, in considering the interaction between the material world and the world of ideas, the ecocritic is interested not only in the way a text represents the world beyond itself, but in the world that text itself creates. As the “material turn” within the humanities has underlined, what we call a “world” is itself a material-discursive formation, coconstituted by people and place. Nineteenth century notions of “Nature” (note the capital letter) as benign and beneficent, even as a source of spiritual solace, are an instance of this co-construction of the material and the discursive. “Nature” in the sense that it was often understood in the nineteenth century is by no means an accurate representation of the morethan-world as it would be understood by ecologists today, but a reverence for “Nature” undoubtedly played an important part in the emergence of the conversation movement. At the same time, the idea of “Nature” as something distinct from the realities of an everyday human ecology also enables it to be ignored, overlooked, and marginalized; as Timothy Morton has argued, “the very idea of ‘nature’ […] is getting in the way of a properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art”.9

7 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990), xvi. 8 Garrard, 9. 9 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1.

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How, then, might such “figural or constructed interpretations” be applied to The Private Papers?10 Ryecroft’s response to the rural delights of Devon suggest a strong indebtedness to contemporary notions of “Nature”. Equally, it might be argued that Ryecroft’s desire to seek a new way of life in the countryside echoes the ecocritical preoccupation with what Greg Garrard calls “dwelling”, a literary trope that explores the possibility of living “on the earth in a relationship of duty and responsibility”.11 At the same time, however, it is plain that Ryecroft has no intention of immersing himself in a lived and working relationship with the land: he stands aloof, ever the man of letters. But in this respect, another of Garrard’s “ecocritical tropes” suggests itself: the pastoral, a “deeply entrenched” but also “deeply problematic” construction of country life as an alternate to (or escape from) the city, which has in turn played an important part in shaping an environmental discourse that today promotes the possibility of living in harmony with nature.12

The Private Papers as pastoral As Terry Gifford explains, three forms of pastoral may be distinguished: the classical tradition of literature “about life in the country, and about the life of the shepherd in particular”; a more general literary tradition that contrasts rural with urban, and assumes a “delight in the natural”; and the pastoral as a pejorative term denoting an escapist literature that idealises rural life whilst concealing the labour on which it is based.13 Ryecroft’s own private papers are clearly indebted to the second understanding of pastoral. As this chapter goes on to discuss, the question is whether Ryecroft is also and in effect promoting the third form of pastoral: a falsification of the lived realities of rural existence, which also conceals the realities on which his own life of leisure depends. This last understanding of the pastoral (as pejorative) is particularly important to what Garrard calls “eco-Marxists”, who see in the operations of industrial capital a mechanism that exploits both people and the environment.14 From the eco-Marxist perspective, capital works to the advantage of a privileged few, at the expense of both the impoverished majority and an equally impoverished environment. From the perspective of the pastoral, there are two aspects to Ryecroft’s retreat from the city to the countryside, and the contrast it creates. 10

Garrard, 16. Garrard, 117. 12 Garrard, 17, 37, 38. 13 Terry Gifford, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999, repr. 2010), 1, 2. 14 Garrard, 31. 11

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One is spatial, between “town (frenetic, corrupt, impersonal) and country (peaceful, abundant)”, and the other is temporal, between “past (idyllic) and present (“fallen”)”.15 On the one hand, therefore, Ryecroft contrasts the privations of his life in London with the pleasures of his new life in the country. For him, city life meant extreme poverty and “pestilential conditions” (26): it meant hunger, deprivation, isolation, and illness. “Nature took revenge now and then. In winter time I had fierce sore throats, sometimes accompanied by long and savage headaches” (27). Nature’s revenge was, perhaps, linked to Ryecroft’s experience of the “London fog” (26) which we would now recognise as a harbinger of a changed climate: a smoke-filled micro-climate that periodically blotted out all light for days on end. Ryecroft himself remembers “three successive days [when] my lamp had to be kept burning; when I looked through the window, I saw, […] for the most part nothing but a yellowish darkness” (26). “I think of it”, he wrote, “as always foggy and gas-lit” (25). Atmospheric pollution is only one aspect of a degraded environment. At a time when cholera outbreaks were not unknown, Ryecroft is lucky to have survived his penurious life in London (the “worst that befell me was a slight attack of diphtheria” [26]). Now, “gracious silence” (49) and the polite pastoral of “blossomed valley” (35) has taken the place of “dust and toil” (32): “[n]ear me, a bee was humming; not far away, a cuckoo called; from the pasture of the farm below came a bleating of lambs” (35). By contrast with the city, the countryside offers “blessed silence” (13), long walks, and the pleasures of “herb-gathering” (14): “I love to come upon a plant which is unknown to me, to identify it with the help of my book, to greet it by name when next it shines beside my path” (14). Nature, he observes, is truly a “great Artist” (14). On the other hand, Ryecroft’s notes also embody a temporal dimension, shaped by an apparently paradoxical element. Looking back on his years in London, Ryecroft regards life there with a strong element of nostalgia, rooted in his regret at the loss of the energy and ambition that he possessed when still young. These qualities enabled him to endure the worst that life could throw at him: “the struggle against starvation has its cheery side when one is young and vigorous” (21); “I had nothing much to complain of except my poverty. You cannot expect great comfort in London for four-and-sixpence a week” (26). This use of the pastoral has several consequences for Ryecroft’s musings. The first is that, in spite of the interest he shows in naming and classifying it, nature often represents a backdrop to Ryecroft’s reflections rather than an integral part of his life. “From the outset,” Garrard notes, the 15

Garrard, 39.

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pastoral “used nature as a location or as a reflection of human predicaments, rather than sustaining an interest in nature in and for itself”.16 Content to invoke the conventional construction of “Nature” as beautiful but essentially passive and static, Ryecroft shows little awareness that this more-than-human world is itself agential and dynamic, or that its operations are as likely to be cruel as they are to be kind. Moreover, Ryecroft appears to take little or no notice of the fact that the Devon countryside is not an unpeopled wilderness. It is rather a worked and working land, constituted in part by the operations and activity of what he denotes as “Nature”, but also by human activity, and in particular, by a life of labour. Yet those who work the land, Ryecroft observes, are “nothing to me, and the less I see of them the better I am pleased” (72). A second point also emerges from Ryecroft’s reliance on the conventional, classical pastoral contrast of country and city life. By invoking the backwards glance – the nostalgic stance of age reliving youth – Ryecroft frequently downplays, even normalizes the deprivation which he experienced in the city, and the environmental degradation which was its concomitant. “As human happiness goes,” he remarks, looking back, “I am not sure that I was not then happy” (20). Rather than being “moved to any sort of bitterness” (24), he even considers going back to London to “spend a day or two amid the dear old horrors” (24). There is, however, a second, more subversive strand at work within the narrative, and one that tends to undermine its casual complacency, its solipsism, and its introversion: Ryecroft’s thoughts and feelings are nothing if not conflicted. As the next section of the chapter discusses, this second strand points to the potential of pastoral as itself a form of what Morton has called “ecocritique”: left-leaning, self-reflexive, dialectical, and able to see beyond “Nature” as a “transcendental, unified, independent category”.17

The pastoral as ecocritique Ryecroft’s desire to reengage with “Nature”, although couched in conventional terms, is nevertheless an honest reflection of what might broadly be described as “the feelings of loss and alienation from nature […] produced by the Industrial Revolution”.18 But whilst the Romanticised language that Ryecroft invokes is itself a response to that feeling of alienation, this kind of language is also a symptom of what has been lost: those who are truly “immersed in nature” feel no need to celebrate it or mourn its passing, or 16

Garrard, 39. Morton, 13. 18 Garrard, 44. 17

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indeed, create a language that distinguishes “Nature” as itself something distinct or separate.19 This is the problem identified by Timothy Morton, whose own concept of an ecological thought is founded on an explicit rejection of what he terms the “paradoxical act of sadistic admiration” embodied in the very word “Nature”.20 Ryecroft is himself well aware of the power of discourse to shape our experiences. “Think merely how one’s view of common things is affected by literary association”, he remarks (82). There was a time, he adds, when “I found more pleasure in Nature as represented by art than in Nature herself” (57). For Ryecroft, the related difficulty is in finding a way of expressing what he feels when what he can say is constrained by the language in which he is steeped; trapped within that discursive structure, the very fact that he is a writer works against him. But Ryecroft’s response is most vivid, most authentic, not when he falls back on the conventions of nature writing – that is, of describing nature as “transcendental, unified, independent” and, in Ryecroft’s case, as something to be objectified and classified – but when he describes his own, newly realised dependency on and intra-action with it. “[Y]ears of London had obscured all my earlier life”, he notes; “I was like a man town-born and bred” (22). But when he finds the funds for a holiday, and on a whim goes to Devon, it is as if he steps “into a new life” (23). Suddenly, he is made aware of his immersion in his environment. In the springtime sunshine of that trip – a trip which presages his later retirement to the same part of the country (22) – he realises the delight of going bare-headed in the sunshine, recognises the “intoxicating fragrance” of the earth, and starts in a sudden awareness of the beauty of “plants and flowers” (23) about which he has hitherto cared barely at all. “To me the flowers became symbolical of a great release”, he writes: “I suddenly entered into conscious enjoyment of powers and sensibilities which had been developing unknown to me” (23). Not the least of those sensibilities is his heightened responsiveness to the more-than-human world. As he reflects on his London life, Ryecroft recalls that there, “the seasons passed over me unobserved” (20). Now, “the procession of the year” influences his writings so strongly that “G.G.” organises the private papers according to the seasons (8). Indeed, the papers begin with spring, a season which does not so much symbolize Ryecroft’s renewal as enact it. “Spring”, he writes, “has restored to me something of the long-forgotten vigour of youth; I walk without weariness; I sing to myself like a boy, and the song is one I knew in boyhood” (15). Difficult as he might find it to describe his experience, Ryecroft therefore recognises it as a “healthful 19 20

Garrard, 49. Morton, 5.

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time” (24). His pleasure “in the beautiful world about me” is so intense that even he, “egoist in grain”, forgets himself (24). Ryecroft’s pleasure in that beauty is, nevertheless, one sided; he remains his own real subject, without wider concern for the “human ecology” of country life, the encroachments of modernity, or the link between the exploitation of labour and the degradation of the environment.21 Yet Ryecroft’s experience itself suggests that, even in the midst of this celebration of a sanitized rural way of life, the private papers (like the pastoral itself) might nonetheless embody a “utopian and proleptic” dimension.22 It is, of course, the unexpected annuity that makes permanent Ryecroft’s release from the horrors of a poverty-stricken urban existence. Without that annuity, he would still be city-bound, and struggling to make a living from his pen. Even in comfortable retirement, he is haunted by his own poverty, and the effect of it. It impossible to live a good, whole, meaningful life in poverty, he concludes, which is also to say that many good lives are ruined by poverty. “I think it would scarce be an exaggeration to say that there is no moral good which has not to be paid for in coin of the realm”, he observes (18). Even as he looks back to his younger years, he begins to see the “sordid strife” beyond that “spectacle of rare vitality” (27). Would I live it over again, that life of the garret and the cellar? Not with the assurance of fifty years’ contentment such as I now enjoy to follow upon it! With man’s infinitely pathetic powers of resignation, one sees the thing on its better side, forgets all the worst of it, makes out a case for the resolute optimist. Oh, but the waste of energy, of zeal, of youth! (27)

It is, he now realises, a “bitter wrong” (27), and a profound injustice. In a century characterized by “money-making” (81), it is also a general one; but as Ryecroft adds, “[t]he vast majority […] are unconscious of lost opportunity, unaware of degradation suffered” (28). Whilst Ryecroft claims not to seek “for Utopia”, there is a strong element of that desire for a better world in what he then writes (27). “[T]hink what a man’s youth might be”, he says (27), “if human reason were at the service of human happiness” (28). Ryecroft is not, by any means, a revolutionary (74). He has no interest in rising up, nor any fellow-feeling for what he calls the “thickwitted multitude” (28) who shared his “pangs of famine” (29) but not his intellectual aspirations. Ryecroft is “vehemently an individualist” (74). But 21 22

Garrard, 42. Garrard, 42.

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through his insistence on the importance of the material conditions of his existence, Ryecroft unexpectedly aligns himself with Marxist thinking. As Terry Eagleton points out, Marx was apparently contemptuous of philosophy, but only because the “fashionable [idealist] philosophy of his day” ignored the “whole set of relations, material conditions, social institutions” that made it possible.23 “Consciousness”, Marx insisted, “can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process”.24 But whilst Marx therefore insisted on the material entanglements that bind people to their material circumstances, and which we would today conceive of in terms of material-discursive formations, he also regarded freedom as “a kind of creative superabundance over what is materially essential”.25 In other words, Eagleton argues, “we are most human […] when we produce freely, gratuitously, independent of any immediate material need”.26 This describes Ryecroft’s life of retirement almost exactly. For him, liberty from care means, above all, freedom from penury, from poverty. This and this alone, he insists, shaped the horror of his early years, “battling for dear life; on most days I could not feel certain that in a week’s time I should have food and shelter” (20). Now, he is at last able to say “exactly what he thought” (8), and in turn free to appreciate the importance of the more-than-human world to his own health and well-being, and not simply as the exquisite spectacle suggested by “Nature”, with its initial capital letter. The difficulty, as Marx also insisted, is that Ryecroft’s leisure nevertheless “has only one parent, and that is labour – which for [Marx] is equivalent to saying, exploitation” (8). Does Ryecroft ever question the origin of the fortune that sustains him in his retirement? Does it ever occur to him that it might be founded on the same kind of exploitation to which he was himself exposed? As Eagleton remarks, there is always “some kind of blind spot” that makes it impossible for thought “to grasp […] the history that produced it”.27 Yet here is Ryecroft himself, struggling (if often failing) to see his historical moment in some wider perspective; here is Ryecroft, perpetually musing on the corrosive effect of capital on human relations, even as capital supplies him with the physical means that enable that thinking: the “rustic housekeeper”; “the plain little house amid its half-wild garden”; the “cosy book-room with its fine view” (6). Dialectics emerge

23

Terry Eagleton, Marx and Freedom (London: Phoenix, 1997, repr. 1998), 5, 6. Quoted in Eagleton, 6. 25 Eagleton, 6. 26 Eagleton, 6. 27 Eagleton, 9. 24

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from the conditions they themselves overturn; Marxism “as a discourse emerges when it is both possible and necessary for it to do so”.28 Plainly, Marxism is not what Ryecroft is offering us, as he regales the reader with stories of his rambles “in lanes and meadows” (6), but he is alert to poverty wherever he finds it. Moreover, he finds it even amidst the apparent abundance of the countryside: his private papers record one such incident, when he finds a young lad distraught because he has lost “sixpence to pay a debt” (15). Ryecroft is shaped by his own material history: money is never far from his mind. As he continues: You tell me that money cannot buy the things most precious. Your commonplace proves that you have never known the lack of it. When I think of all the sorrow and the barrenness that has been wrought in my life by want of a few more pounds per annum than I was able to earn, I stand aghast at money’s significance. (17)

“The earning of money should be a means to an end”, Ryecroft writes; “for more than thirty years […] I had to regard it as the end itself” (11). For Ryecroft, liberty from care means, above all, freedom from penury. In spite, therefore, of Ryecroft’s own innate conservatism and selfcentredness, his contention – that a virtuous and healthy society is one that is free from poverty – represents its own challenge to the laissez faire ethos of his day. Indeed, Ryecroft suggests his own alternative to the “anxious toil” (11) that has marked his life. “How well would the revenues of a country be expended,” he writes (17), “if, by mere pensioning, one-fifth of its population could be induced to live as I do!” Ryecroft, it should be emphasized, already considers himself old; in the absence of a state pension (not introduced until 1908), his suggestion would seem to be directed at the elderly. His real intention is, nevertheless, to provide the population – albeit just a proportion of it – with the chance to live “as becomes a civilized being” (16). Certainly, Ryecroft means that when lives are safeguarded from poverty, and money no longer dominates them, the individual is able to locate his or her own meanings, and live life well. But as the whole thrust of Ryecroft’s memoirs underlines, real health and wellbeing is inseparable from a healthy environment; “tranquillity of mind and condition” (6) depends on it. Ryecroft does not, of course, draw the same explicit connections that an eco-Marxist might, between the role of capital and the systematic degradation of the life-support systems provided by a functioning ecosystem. Important as the more-than-human world might be to his “lustrum 28

Eagleton, 9.

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of quiet contentment” (7), it does not occur to him that the same socioeconomic formations that exploited him also exploit the environment, whilst simultaneously discounting the long-term health of both. Nevertheless, the immediacy of his experience of place, and in particular of the morethan-human (or “natural”) world as an integral part of it, implies an ecological dimension to his argument. Specifically, it suggests ecocritique, dialectically bending back “upon itself”, but only to then look forward.29 More and more aware of “the unspeakable blessedness of having a home!”, Ryecroft the outsider finds that he is no longer apart from the loveliness he describes, but entangled with it (73). Imperceptibly, “nature” has ceased to a mere backdrop, but become a focal point in itself.30 Pastoral idyll has given way to a meaningful form of dwelling, in which Ryecroft’s emotional investment in place has spontaneously generated an ethic of care: When one is at home, how one’s affections grow about everything in the neighbourhood! I always thought with fondness of this corner of Devon, but what was that compared with the love which now strengthens in me day by day! […] Every tree and shrub in the garden is my beloved friend […] (73)

As Ryecroft’s affection for the more-than-human world grows with the intimacy of his association with it, it is perhaps worth noting that whilst the words utopia and eutopia are commonly conflated, because homophonous, their meanings are in fact opposed: the former is a no-place, the latter a place where life may be lived well (the Greek İ੣ means “good” or “well”). Consequently, it might be argued that the ecocritical relevancy of Ryecroft’s private papers lies not only in the way they adopt the oblique commentary of a pastoral, but in the way they outline a companionable mode of existence that reconciles human and more-than-human worlds.

Conclusion Gissing, suggests John Halperin, “was an ecologist before anyone knew what ecology was”.31 “I for my part can spend an hour in marvelling over any green spray”, Gissing once wrote.32 Indeed, Gissing’s letters suggest 29

Morton, 13, 14. Garrard, 39. 31 Halperin, 3. 32 The Collected Letters of George Gissing, Volume Three 1886-1888, ed. by Paul F. Matthiessen, Arthur C. Young, Pierre Coustillas (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1992), 142. 30

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that, like Ryecroft, Gissing understood the meaning of “really dwelling at peace upon the suggestions which makes themselves heard in the whispering of leaves”.33 But whilst there is no doubt that much of Gissing finds its way into The Private Papers – Halperin argues that here, “[t]he pretence of fiction is dropped altogether” – Gissing sought to distance himself from his creation.34 “I hope too much will not be made of the few autobiographic pages in this book”, he wrote to Frederic Harrison on 11 February, 1903, the year in which he died. “The thing is much more an aspiration than a memory.”35 Ultimately, this is why Ryecroft’s papers are so important: rather than encoding the nostalgic backwards glance of a writer longing for his own release from “anxious toil”, they can and do embody a tentative (“proleptic”) look to the future. This is not simply to underline the significance of Ryecroft’s pastoral as a critical commentary on industrial modernity, or the importance of his outright rejection of the corrosive, life-denying power of capital: Ryecroft’s responsiveness to the more-than-human world takes the reader “beyond pastoral” to the politically contested (but also crucially important) terrain of what long-term, sustainable forms of dwelling might entail.36 Moreover, Ryecroft’s narrative quietly asserts the importance of the tropes (such as the pastoral, but also dwelling itself) that help to shape and structure our response to the environment. Indeed, Ryecroft’s thinking often goes further still, in ways that parallel the material turn. What we call reality depends on how we perceive it, view it, and represent it; like us, it is caught up in the intra-action between the material, and the discursive. “[T]he Poet is indeed a Maker”, Ryecroft wrote, invoking a thoroughly Shelleyan argument (82). But as Ryecroft later notes, adding a further layer of meaning to that process of coconstitution, “[l]et every land have joy of its poet; for the poet is the land itself, all its greatness and sweetness, all that incommunicable heritage” (96). For Ryecroft, the writer is inextricable from what we would now regard as his or her environment; in this sense, there is no such thing as (pastoral) retreat, only a deliberate withdrawal from a world that is incommensurable with human happiness, and the equally deliberate, if cautious first steps towards new material-discursive structures that might sustain both human and non-human forms of life.

33

The Collected Letters of George Gissing, Volume Three, 142. Halperin, 315. 35 The Collected Letters of George Gissing, Volume Nine 1902-1903, ed. by Paul F. Matthiessen, Arthur C. Young, Pierre Coustillas (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1997), 58. 36 Garrard, 145. 34

CHAPTER 6 THE QUARRIES ON THE HEATH: THE IMPRINT OF PLACE AND GISSING’S WAKEFIELD STORIES LUISA VILLA

The atmosphere of Wakefield would soon make the completest dullard of me. —George Gissing, Diary, 2 September 1888

This chapter’s title refers to the “quarry on the heath”, the eponymous fictional location of Gissing’s unpublished short story concerning a stern father (a parson), his daughter and her young lover, who turns out to be her brother and her father’s unacknowledged son.1 The fictional quarry is the place where the two young people meet in secret, where they are discovered by the father and into which the young man accidentally falls and dies on a dark stormy night when fleeing the object of his incestuous passion. Roughly the same tragic quarry is written into the more sophisticated oedipal plot of A Life’s Morning (1888), the one Gissing novel that most clearly bears the imprint of his native town. Both narratives feature the “sins of the fathers” theme, that is, the characteristic tendency of Gissing’s early fiction to shift the burden of guilt from child to parent. This aspect of Gissing’s early plots intrigued me in my previous critical work on the author,2 and would certainly deserve further elaboration. It is, however, left

1

“The Quarry on the Heath” was first published in George Gissing, Essays and Fiction, ed. Pierre Coustillas (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 1970), 203226. 2 I have tentatively addressed the “sins of the father” theme in my book Figure del risentimento. Aspetti della costruzione del soggetto nella narrative inglese ai margini della “decadenza” (Pisa: ETS, 1997) especially 106-114, and have picked it up again, relating to Workers in the Dawn, in “Writing in the Dawn,” 161-172, in

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at the margins of this chapter, which instead focuses on locating the latent images of Wakefield in Gissing’s writings. The corpus on which the analysis is based is made up of the novels and, more marginally, the short stories that, one way or another, have been associated with Wakefield. In these, one is struck by the thinness and evasiveness of Gissing’s fictional Wakefield. A novelist of Gissing’s calibre – with his outstanding grip on late nineteenth-century urban England, and special sensitivity to “circumstances” – could have made much more of it, had he been differently inclined. Gissing’s narrative take on Wakefield has hitherto failed to arouse the interest of the critics. It seems to have been taken for granted – that is, regarded as unproblematic – that a bright young man from the north should have detached himself from his provincial home, and shown much impatience and contempt for those who had failed likewise to emancipate themselves from the cultural narrowness and parochial preoccupations which characterise provincial life. This chapter, then, aims to denaturalise Gissing’s narrative stance, to conjure up, and make sense of, what is missing in his fictional representations of Wakefield. It will also provide a critical survey of what is actually there, including, of course, the mysterious quarries.

Thomas Waller’s Wakefield Gabrielle Fleury’s recollections offer insights into George Gissing’s literary projects at the time of his death. Besides “a 2nd book in the style of Rycroft” and two historical novels (“one of Rome in the time of Cicero, the other about Gregory VII & the Emperor at Canossa”) which he would write “if Veranilda proved to be a success,” there was a book of local history of a provincial town in England (Wakefield) between 1850 & 70, where he wld have used his knowledge and recollections of his father’s time & part in the municipal affairs. He liked that book very much; thought he cld do something really interesting, fix a time not so very far away, yet absolutely different from the present.3

Christine Huguet (ed.), Writing Otherness: The Pathways of George Gissing’s Imagination (Haren, NL: Equilibris, 2010). 3 “Appendix III: Gabrielle Fleury’s Recollections of George Gissing,” The Collected Letters of George Gissing, ed. Pierre Coustillas, Paul F. Matthiessen and Arthur C. Young, vol. 9 (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1997), 281-82.

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This suggests that Gissing was aware that his birth-place, and his father’s engagement in its public life, might have provided material and inspiration for a provincial novel such as he had never tried to write before. It is well known that, at the time, the forty-seven year old author was suffering from, roughly, the same sort of pulmonary affection that had caused his father’s untimely death in 1870. This was, no doubt, reason enough for him to revert to his early years, and to question whatever faint memories of his father he might have retained across the abyss of time. But we also know – from the same source – that residence abroad was fraught with the fear he might lose his grip on his English subject-matter: G. often spoke of his attachment to England, explaining that Engl. was so much more to him than to any other Englishman, on account of what he was intellectually. […] What made his strength & his value […] was precisely his direct and thorough knowledge, his picture of English life, his having so completely given himself to it. And if he ever began to write with less conscientiousness of observation & lose contact with English life, his value would immediately diminish (Fleury, “Recollections”, 276).

On the one hand, then, living on the Continent inclined him to the transnational dimension of the remote European past (with projects of further novels set in ancient Rome or in the Middle Ages, in the line of Veranilda). But on the other hand, it made him brood on the risks involved in déraciné cosmopolitanism – Henry James figuring as a notable example thereof – and hark back to the circumscribed precinct of English provincial life (Fleury, “Recollections”, p. 276). To Gissing, Rome was the “fatherland to every intellectual mind”, the site of Arnoldian culture over which an ideal Father presides (Fleury, “Recollections”, p. 280). Wakefield, conversely, had been the scene of his flesh-and-blood parent’s adult pursuits, and might well be construed as a fitting mooring for the novelist alarmingly drifting across cultures and frontiers. All too often, in his letters and diaries Gissing berates the Wakefield of his mother and sisters as a small town given to gossip, rife with bigotry and stultifying for any modern intellectual mind. Much as we may dislike the gender stereotyping involved, it is refreshing to ascertain that he was aware there was (and had been all along) another Wakefield, his father’s Wakefield, theoretically within reach, yet – narratively speaking – unexplored. At least some of the distinguishing features of Thomas Waller Gissing’s Wakefield can be teased out of his obituary in the Pharmaceutical Journal, where his untimely demise was promptly lamented on January 7th,

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1871.4 This biographical profile, confirmed and supplemented over the years by the painstaking archival research-work of Pierre Coustillas, Bouwe Postmus, and others,5 depicts an extremely energetic personality. It also conveys his multifarious engagement with the public life of his adoptive town. He had been a very active member of the Wakefield Mechanics Institution’s executive committee, of which he was made Honorary Librarian. He was also the Secretary of Wakefield Book Society, Treasurer of the Liberal Party, Town Councillor (from 1867), and was on the committees of the Wakefield Industrial and Fine Arts Exhibition (1865), the School of Art, Clayton Hospital, and the Chamber of Commerce, besides being Secretary of the local branch of the Pharmaceutical Society and publishing two books on the local flora. This seems to have been, by all standards, no mean achievement. He was an outsider in Wakefield, having moved there – as a newly certified Pharmaceutical Chemist – in 1856, aged 27, and would die in 1870, aged 41, the father of five children, the eldest being George, aged 13 at the time of his demise. The details of Thomas Waller Gissing’s engagement “in municipal affairs” conjure up Wakefield as a dynamic and prosperous Victorian town. It had an increasingly democratic local government system, cultural amenities and educational establishments, growing regional prestige, and impressive public buildings – many of which still testify to the wealth and civic pride of the South-Yorkshire entrepreneurial and professional classes.6 We know that Thomas did not profit much from Wakefield’s wealth, but no doubt he shared his fellow-townsmen’s civic pride in local achievement and agency. The Obituary recollects one example of Thomas’s militant care for local prerogatives. It was due to his prompt action that the provincial branches of the Pharmaceutical Society managed to avert the passing of a 4

Anon., “Obituary: Thomas Waller Gissing,” Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions (1871), 556-7. 5 Coustillas, The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part I: 1857-1888 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), pp. 9-51; Bouwe Postmus, “Thomas Waller Gissing Before His Move to Wakefield: Some Materials Towards His Biography,” The Gissing Journal 46:1 (2010), 1-18. Coustillas acknowledges a number of articles, especially by Wakefield-based scholars such as Clifford Brook and Anthony Petyt, which have helped trace the Gissing family’s history and map its entourage. 6 Such wealth and civic pride would erect a new grander Town Hall in 1880, and – in the 1890s – an even more imposing County Hall, as a consequence of Wakefield’s becoming the seat of the West Riding County Council and an episcopate in 1888. The latter implied the elevation of its grand, ancient, and recently restored parish church to Cathedral status. For a useful survey of the history of nineteenth century Wakefield, with plenty of information and illustrations, see Kate Taylor, The Making of Wakefield 1801-1900 (Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Wharncliffe Books, 2008).

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draft of the Pharmacy Act 1868 that heavily discriminated against them in favour of their London-based colleagues.7 Thomas’s life and deeds in Wakefield, with his huge investment in its political, social and cultural life, cannot be separated from the strong tradition of proud municipalism that pitted local identities and interests against the encroachments of the metropolis. George Gissing’s inability to buy into this positive sense of locality and difference may be regarded as decisive in preventing him from turning his father’s Wakefield to significant fictional use. We may try to account for this inability in a variety of ways. Leaving the purely psycho-biographical aside, we may consider, for example, Raymond Williams’s argument in The Country and the City. In his chapter “Cities of Darkness, Cities of Light” – a landmark in the history of the critical appreciation of Gissing’s urban fiction – Williams maintains that the inability to perceive positive aspects of urban centres, those of the industrial North as well as London, was a common feature of nineteenthcentury literature. Many works focused on denouncing the evils (the “darkness”) of urbanization and industrialization, and were therefore unable to perceive their “light”, their slow hatching of a more democratic society, “the city’s human reply to the long inhumanity of city and country alike.” The latter included much that could be connected with Thomas Gissing’s engagement in Wakefield’s public life: the struggle to create new forms of local government […] a struggle for the vote and for the reform of parliament, again centred in the cities. There was the fight for education, led from the cities […] the active growth of municipal as well as metropolitan culture: the struggle for new amenities – the libraries and the institutes – in the new needs of the towns. 8

According to Williams, Gissing’s specific take on urban life stems from his propensity to see the metropolis – beyond its mesmerizing complexity – as “an oppressive and utilitarian uniformity” determined by the capitalistindustrial modes of production, as a world of “employers” and “employed”, 7

“It is not generally known that when the Pharmacy Act of 1868 was passing through Parliament, Mr. Gissing discovered that in the Bill first presented, twothirds of the members of Council were to be drawn from London, only seven members being allotted to the rest of Great Britain. He energetically pointed this out in a quarter where his remonstrances received full sympathy, and an appeal being promptly made to the Local Secretaries throughout the kingdom, their opinions showed such unanimity that the Council removed the obnoxious clause”. Anon., “Obituary,” 557. 8 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 231.

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and not just as a pell-mell Dickensian variety of “rich” and “poor” (Williams, Country and City, 223, 220). Gissing’s very selective, simplistic, pejorative view of Wakefield might be considered as a necessary accompaniment to the bitter radicalism that informs his London novels. On the other hand, Robin Gilmour, in his still much quoted chapter on “Regional and Provincial in Victorian Literature” (1989), explains how the “loss or decline in regional customs and individuality” was, at the time, inherent in improved communication and transport. In the course of the Victorian age this would make for nation-wide standardisation, which in turn was bound to undermine local difference and its discursive articulation in positive terms.9 In this respect, George Gissing’s distance from his father’s Wakefield may be viewed, to some extent, as generational. It also connects with the Arnoldian conception of culture with its penchant for “the tone of the city, of the centre” and its intense bias against the “provincial spirit”.10 Arnold – Gilmour contends – offered aspiring young men a transcendent idea of culture theoretically “available to all classes and conditions of men” (Gilmour 1989, 57). This was perhaps especially the case with those he called “aliens” who, very much as Gissing’s “unclassed”, “are mainly led, not by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit, by the love of human perfection.”11 But this quest for perfection “seemed to require a severing of local links […] driv[ing] a wedge between regionalism and culture, stigmatising the one as an enfeebled provincialism, and raising the other above the claims of time and space” (Gilmour 1989, 57). This does not really explain why Gissing should imbibe Arnold’s doctrine with so little discrimination, while, say, Thomas Hardy should be able to subject its tenets to qualifications and criticism, and make his father’s declining Dorset the setting of his greatest novels. Still, this context of nation-wide transformations and contemporary intellectual debate helps make it more than just a personal eccentricity that Gissing should shun 9

Robin Gilmour, “Regional and Provincial in Victorian Literature”, The Literature of Region and Nation, ed. R. P. Draper (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 53. Following the same line of argument, Josephine McDonagh, “Rethinking Provincialism in Mid-Nineteenth Century Fiction: Our Village to Villette”, Victorian Studies, 55:3 (2013), 399-424, compares the decline of English province with that of provincial newspapers, which were a powerful lobby in the first half of the century and lively alternatives to the London press, yet gradually lost their prestige to the London based national newspapers which emerged in the later decades. 10 Here I follow Gilmour (and many others in similar contexts) in referring to Matthew Arnold, “The Literary Influence of Academies”, Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 249. 11 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 146.

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tapping into his father’s Wakefield. It helps explain why he should systematically fashion it in the guise of the stereotypical provincial/industrial town, snobbishly perceived/imagined from the metropolis by the traditional cultural elite, or by those members of the younger generation who, having migrated to London, regard with contempt their narrow-minded and less enterprising age-peers who have stayed behind. This is particularly characteristic of Gissing’s take on Wakefield in A Life’s Morning, as the narrator’s following digression on provincial young men amply testifies: They were not especially ignorant or vulgar, these budding townsmen, simply imbecile. One could not accuse them of positive faults, for they had no positive qualities, unless it were here and there a leaning to physical fatuity. Their interests were concerned with the pettiest of local occurrences; their favouritisms and animosities were those of overgrown infants. They played practical jokes on each other in the open streets; they read the local newspapers to extract the feeblest of gossip; they had a game which they called politics, and which consisted in badging themselves with blue or yellow, according to the choice of their fathers before them […]. If any Dunfield schoolboy exhibited faculties of a kind uncommon in the town, he was despatched to begin life on a more promising scene; those who remained, who became the new generation of businessmen, of town councillors, of independent electors, were such as could not by any possibility have made a living elsewhere.12

George Gissing’s Wakefield: “The Quarry on the Heath” and A Life’s Morning Though a good many of Gissing’s narrative works have, or partly have, a provincial setting, only a few have been associated with Wakefield: “The Quarry on the Heath” (1881), A Life’s Morning (1888), The Emancipated (1890), Born in Exile and Denzil Quarrier (1892), “The Invincible Curate” (1895) and “The Firebrand” (1896). In these narratives Wakefield recurs as a location under various fictional names (Dunfield, Twybridge, Polterham, Mapplebeck, Donniston). This was a common practice in the Victorian provincial novel, as exemplified by Gaskell’s Cranford, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Dickens’s Cloisterham, and Hardy’s countless Wessex towns and villages. There are, of course, differences from case to case, but generally speaking the use of fictional names suggests that the setting, though indisputably local and different from the metropolis, is also typical, and is meant to represent more than the mere features and concerns of a 12

George Gissing, A Life’s Morning (1888; Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), 102103.

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specific extant community. More negatively, this may imply that provincial towns can be known by (stereo)types, and within their special category they are – to all intents and purposes – very much the same. This is especially evident in industrial centres such as Gaskell’s Drumble and Milton Northern or Dickens’s Coketown, where the fictional names have a clear allegorical aspect, underscoring the prototypical character of the fictional town. It foreshadows – Ian Duncan suggests – the tendency of the conflicts portrayed in each novel to polarise into abstract juxtaposition (static rural burghs vs aggressively dynamic urban centres; North vs. South; Utilitarian Industrialism vs. a fully human conception of individual and social life).13 Gissing’s provincial place-names belong to this tradition, his Wakefield avatars being juxtaposed to the rural South, to London, and also to near-by larger towns. “The Quarry on the Heath”, most likely the first of Gissing’s Wakefield narratives, altogether avoids confronting the town proper. 14 The “Heath” which provides the overall setting of this unpublished short story has been associated without controversy with Heath Common, “one of a few tracts of open land near Wakefield,” where stone quarries could be found “until they were filled in and grassed over” in the 1950s or 60s (Brook 1980, 27). This location is represented as an emphatically “dreary” patch of flat countryside ravaged by intensive coal-mining. It is the site of an ugly village, aptly named Wastell Heath, which – according to Brook – Gissing based on New Sharlston, a coal-mining settlement roughly five miles from 13 Ian Duncan, “Provincial and Regional Novel”, 318-35 in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Patrick Brantlinger and William Thesing (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 331. 14 The dating of “The Quarry on the Heath” has been an object of debate. Pierre Coustillas’s designation of 1881 is based on the date which appears in pencil on the manuscript and is supported by the melodramatic plot and the quality of the writing, both of which suggest it is an early story in the line of others Gissing wrote around 1880, or even earlier. Coustillas surmises that the idea of the story “may have been suggested to Gissing by his stay in Wakefield late in August 1881”. See his editorial introduction to the story (Gissing, Essays and Fiction, 203); and, also, Coustillas, Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part I, 197. According to Clifford Brook, George Gissing and Wakefield (Wakefield: The Gissing Trust, 1980), p. 29, however, internal evidence – that is, reference in the text to a recently built church (which he identifies with St. Luke’s, erected in Sharlston, near Wakefield, in 1886-1887) – suggests that the story must have been conceived and written after 1886. This would make it an offshoot of his revision of A Life’s Morning, rather than Gissing’s first attempt at spinning a story around the Wakefield quarry. This seems unlikely, though not absolutely impossible, but nonetheless does not much affect my argument here.

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Wakefield’s town centre (Gissing, “Quarry on the Heath”, 204). In the fiction, the “nucleus” of the village is Pit Row, a “long hideous row of twostoried dwellings” built next to the colliery, which matches the still extant terrace named Long Row, built to house the Sharlston colliers in the 1860s (Brook 1980, 28-9). The foregrounding of the bleak industrial periphery at the expense of the town-centre is also part and parcel of Gissing’s evasive narrative take on Wakefield in A Life’s Morning. Here, Dunfield, the fictional Wakefield, is connected with a number of smaller places (like Banbrigg/Agbrigg and Sandal/Pendal) in its surroundings. The pervasive railway network linking the town centre to its “straggling colonies” and near-by Hebsworth (perhaps Leeds?), “the large manufacturing town which is a sort of metropolis to Dunfield and other smaller centres around it” (Gissing, A Life’s Morning, 116) plays a major narrative role. In the novel, Hebsworth stands for the “metropolis”, since it is in the course of a business trip there that, like many a naïve fictional provincial newly arrived in London (and like the teenage George Gissing in Manchester), Mr Hood temporarily but all too fatally loses his moral bearings. A Life’s Morning is emphatically Gissing’s Wakefield novel. It is also the novel where he focuses on the grown-up child/aging parent relationship most nakedly; very little of Thomas Waller’s Wakefield is, however, to be found therein. Of all the numerous local institutions Thomas was engaged in, only the Mechanics’ Institution is cited, retrospectively, as the place where the teenage Emily was able (very imperfectly) to quench her thirst for learning free of charge.15 Among the town’s amenities, only the Agricultural Show is mentioned: it is said to provide entertainment to the “pleasure-seeking Dunfieldian,” but does not attract the cultured heroine, let alone the ironical narrator (Gissing, A Life’s Morning, 104). As for Dunfield’s political life, a glimpse of it in the imminence of a national election is offered in Chapter 14 and 15 through the Baxendale family. The Baxendales are portrayed as members of a trans-regional elite. They have 15 Predictably, Emily could do so only in a disorderly, haphazard way, such as we would expect from self-instructed enthusiasts coming from lower-middle class backgrounds, lacking Arnoldian standards, and having to rely on the advice of provincial librarians: “The strange things she read, books which came down to her from the shelves with a thickness of dust upon them; histories of Greece and Rome (‘Not much asked for, these,’ said the librarian), translations of old classics, the Koran, Mosheim’s ‘Ecclesiastical History,’ works of Swedenborg, all the poetry she could lay hands on, novels not a few. One day she asked for a book on ‘Gymnoblastic Hydroids’; the amazing title in the catalogue had filled her with curiosity; she must know the meaning of everything. She was not idle, Emily.” Gissing, A Life’s Morning, 66.

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connections with other great industrial centres and the metropolis and serve as a trait-d’union between the provincial locality and the London/Surrey based upper-middle classes, into which the protagonist Emily will be eventually incorporated through marriage. The Baxendales’ is the only home in Dunfield where domestic “culture” (a wide range of books, intellectual conversation) is to be found; elsewhere, what the dismayed reader encounters is the pathetic objectification of thwarted aspirations that could only be realised elsewhere. Such is Dagworthy’s collection of “fine photographs of continental cathedrals and churches”, or Emily’s father’s “laboratory”, where – among a small range of science books, test tubes, retorts and other apparata – he stubbornly strives to keep up “the pretence of serious study” amidst the painful contingencies of his life (Gissing, A Life’s Morning, 81, 96). In the novel, despite the accurate topography, the town proper (that is, Thomas Waller’s Wakefield) is, narratively speaking, hardly there. There is an ironical reference to some fashionable residential areas (“St. Luke’s, the Belgravia of the town”, where the well-to-do Baxendales live; “North Parade being the equivalent of Mayfair”); the heroine goes to the post office once; the villain buys some gloves in a shop; and that’s about it (Gissing, A Life’s Morning, 98). The plot gravitates towards Dunfield’s dismal periphery, itself only slightly less dreary and desolate than Wastell Heath.16 Most of what has any importance, strong emotional content, or visual impact on the reader happens there: Emily and her father’s walk on Heath Common; Emily and Wilfrid’s meeting at Sandal Castle (an unimpressive ruin in the quasi-rural periphery of Dunfield); the sighting of the train from Mr Hood’s “laboratory”; Dagworthy’s aggressive love declaration in the unromantic Cartwrights’ garden “in the shadow of the railway viaduct” (Gissing, A Life’s Morning, 107); or his walk on the Heath in the early morning, with the discovery of Mr Hood’s corpse at the bottom of the quarry. Quarries were indeed to be found around Wakefield. They were a traditional feature of the countryside, in West Riding as elsewhere. Some were in use; some were abandoned and provided (as they do nowadays) naturalistic environments of some interest; others were only recently opened, with concomitant disruption of the eco-system. Thomas Waller Gissing, who was a keen botanist, haunted the area in search of plant specimens and involved his family in his botanical pursuits, is bound to have

16

It is summer, in fact, and the reader is duly spared “the dull splash of the walker’s footfall on the muddy ground”, “the thick snowdrift, the icy wind” and the other winter props of the 1881 short story. Gissing, “The Quarry on the Heath”, 205, 226.

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commented upon them.17 In The Ferns and Fern Allies of Wakefield and Its Neighbourhood, privately published in 1862 with lavish illustration and a long list of subscribers, he relates having originally sighted one type of fern at Heath Common, and adds that “it has been destroyed by the opening of the stone quarry.”18 As for the young George, we have his comment on the ravages wreaked by large scale quarrying on the beautiful Glenridding landscape, in the Lake District,19 and we may also assume that he shared Hubert Eldon’s antipathy for excavating and mining, which figures so conspicuously from the very first chapter of Demos where the commencement of an industrial excavation at Wanley is indicted as part of a scheme that “would produce money at the cost of the merely beautiful”.20 The contemplation of the “merely beautiful”, however, is not the stuff Gissing’s novels are made of. It is, therefore, no surprise that quarries and mines should also have different connotations for Gissing in the 1880s. This is evident in The Unclassed, where he used the idea of “dig[ging] deeper, to get to untouched social strata”, and “look[ing] beneath the surface” to articulate – via Waymark – his naturalist poetics.21 Besides, given that in local Yorkshire dialect quarries are called “quarrels”, Gissing’s deadly fictional quarry may arguably have some connection with his well-known réssentiment – as in his famous letter to Harrison: “I have a quarrel with society […] the quarrel is life-long: even since I can remember I have known this passionate tendency of revolt.”22 It might even be the very word “quarry”, then, that 17

That the whole Gissing family was involved in Thomas’s haunt for specimens is shown by the boy George’s very early letters to his father. Collected Letters of George Gissing, vol. 1, 1, 8, 9. 18 Thomas Waller Gissing, The Ferns and Fern Allies of Wakefield and Its Neighbourhood (Wakefield: R. Micklethwaite for the Author, 1862), p. 4 19 George Gissing, Letter to Algernon, dated August 12th, 1884: “Horribile dictum […] the mountain sides, to a height of hard upon a thousand feet, are converted into mere quarries, & a great stream which rushes down with splendid leaps into a lake is made the colour of dirty milk by the mill-refuse. Ruskin should lift up his voice, methinks” (Collected Letters of George Gissing, vol. 2, 238-39). 20 Gissing, Demos: A Story of English Socialism (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 4. 21 “The fact is, the novel of every-day life is getting worn out. We must dig deeper, get to untouched social strata. Dickens felt this, but he had not the courage to face his subjects; his monthly numbers had to lie on the family tea-table. Not virginibus puerisque will be my book, I assure you, but for men and women who like to look beneath the surface, and who understand that only as artistic material has human life any significance.” George Gissing, The Unclassed, 2 vols (London: Chapman & Hall, 1884) II, 33-34. 22 George Gissing, Letter to Frederic Harrison, dated June 24th, 1884 (Collected Letters of George Gissing, vol. 2, 231).

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caused, or at least added to, Gissing’s ambivalent attraction to the “quarry on the heath.” Be that as it may, Gissing does not seem to have commented on Wakefield’s quarries, which were – one gathers – smallish affairs, carved into the ground or on the side of unprepossessing slopes, with water often stagnating in their bottom. “The Quarry on the Heath” features a small abandoned quarry, “the hollow at the foot of the rugged wall of rock now converted into a species of dismal swamp” (Gissing, “Quarry on the Heath”, 206). The quarry where Mr Hood poisons himself in A Life’s Morning is very much the same: it is still in use, though, and consequently the swamp is somewhat downscaled. Here the harassed heroine is shown to rest on her way to Dagworthy, and we get a snippet of description: On reaching the quarry, she stayed her feet. The speed at which she had come, and an agitation which was increasing, made breathing so difficult that she turned a few paces aside, and sat down upon a rough block of stone, long since quarried and left unused. Just before her was a small patch of marshy ground, long grass growing about a little pool. A rook had alighted on the margin, and was pecking about. Presently it rose on its heavy wings; she watched it athwart the dun sky. Then her eye fell on a little yellow flower near her feet, a flower she did not know. She plucked and examined it, and then let it drop carelessly from her hand (Gissing, A Life’s Morning, 176).

Admittedly, quarries are ugly sites at the best of times. As such, they can hardly be the subject of lyrical paeans, and it was only enthusiastic and pious geologists of the early-Victorian generation, like Hugh Miller, who might attempt to represent the grim work in a quarry as an invaluable opportunity for adventure as well as for self-improvement.23 As traditional working-places linked to pre-industrial urban settlements, however, quarries might well have inspired different lines of discourse. Suffice it to recall what Hardy’s narrator famously manages to spin out of rooks pecking and a lonely harrowed field in the middle of nowhere. The boy Jude perceives them as just “ugly”, but, the narrator suggests, “to every clod and stone there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy deeds.”24 This is not meant to imply that Gissing’s passage may not have its 23 The Scottish geologist Hugh Miller (1802-1856) recalls his youthful manual work in a quarry as a crucial step in his intellectual and moral development in the first chapter of his popular Old Red Sandstone; or, New Walks in an Old Field (1841; Edinburgh: Johnstone & Hunter, 1852) 33-48. 24 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 9.

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attractions, but they lie in individual psychology rather than in cultured reflection on the local past, or on natural history – such as we may perhaps expect of a passionate botanist’s devoted son. Indeed, unaware of Thomas Waller’s interest in flora, one would be forgiven for missing the full emotional intensity underlying the heroine’s curiosity in the “flower she did not know”, or potentially the guilt (the heartlessness towards the father) implied in letting it drop “carelessly” from her hand. Last but not least, stone quarries were also, in truth, dangerous places. Victorian provincial newspapers occasionally relate accidents occurring to people passing by,25 which is what happens to the young Harold in Gissing’s short story, and – more frequently – to workers crushed by falling rocks or cranes and other machinery.26 No such accidents are recorded in Gissing’s imaginary quarries, though something along this line is to be found in “Mutimer’s Choice” – the unpublished short story (conjecturally dated 1884) which, though set in London, includes what may easily pass for a typical quarry accident: “the chain gave way on a crane just when they were lifting a big block, and it fell on [James Mutimer]”).27 In this context, it is remarkable that a stone (though of a smaller size) should kill the character called Richard Mutimer in Demos, very much as a stone might have smashed the skull of his Chartist grandfather. Thus, a tiny but intriguing stone trail can be traced in the Gissing narratives of the 1880s, issuing, so to speak, from the Wakefield quarry and achieving full visibility in Born in Exile, where the geological-mineralogical theme gets the upper hand.

25 See, for instance, “Sad Fatality to an Octagenarian”, The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent (13 December 1873), 10, where the accident is reported of an elderly local farmer who, on going to his patch of land “before daybreak”, “fell down a stone quarry, a depth of many feet, and received such injuries about his head, that death resulted.” 26 See, for example, “Dreadful Accident at Brinfield Quarry”, The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent (2 May 1874), 10, which tells of two quarry workers, “engaged in hoisting a block of stone, weighing nearly three tons, by means of a crane, […] when the crane chain slipped, and displaced the working apparatus of the machine. The ponderous weight on the upright shaft of the crane caused it to overturn, and it fell with a crash on the two quarry men.” 27 “Mutimer’s Choice” was first published in Gissing, Essays and Fiction, 242-253. I am quoting from this edition, p. 250. In his editorial presentation of the text (241), Pierre Coustillas underscores the greater stylistic maturity of this short story as compared with “The Quarry on the Heath” and suggests that it might have been written in June-July 1884.

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Revisionary narrations In moving from A Life’s Morning to the later Wakefield novels, it is preliminarily useful to note that, apart from Dunfield, the other presumptive fictional Wakefields are, geographically speaking, less clearly associated with Gissing’s birth-place. In The Emancipated, for instance, Gissing deliberately investigates the impact of a lower-middle-class upbringing on a number of characters coming from the north of England. The thematic link with Wakefield is so strong that Ellen, his younger sister, especially resented the novel, believing that the neurotically pious, pathologically jealous and ostensibly Mancunian female protagonist might be an unflattering portrait of herself.28 The geographical association with Wakefield is, however, very tenuous, since most of the novel is set in London and abroad, and the only episode actually taking place in the industrial North is Miriam Baske’s journey and overnight stay in Bartles, a fictional suburb of Manchester. Arguably, in The Emancipated Wakefield is also displaced onto Sowerby Bridge, evoked in the novel as the birth-place of the professional painter Mallard and his ward Cecily Doran. Sowerby Bridge is a market town in Yorkshire, and, like Wakefield, was certainly a town with a long history and identity – not at all an urban settlement sprung up as a consequence of recent industrialization and carrying the curse of provincialindustrial inter-changeability. Nonetheless, in the novel it is summarily recalled as “a manufacturing town which, like many others in the same part of England, makes a blot of ugliness on country in itself sternly beautiful.”29 In Born in Exile Wakefield fares decidedly better. Its narrative avatar, Twybridge, is located in the Midlands. Twybridge is said to be close to the larger industrial town named Kingsmill, whose Whitelaw College is described as “a noteworthy instance of what Englishmen can do for themselves, unaided by bureaucratic machinery”, a statement that sounds unusually appreciative of provincial energy and cultural achievement. 30 No details of Twybridge’s topography or physical description are given, but it is a relief to be informed that there resides more than one “intelligent man” 28

That Ellen was upset by the reading of The Emancipated emerges from Gissing’s letter to her dated April 3, 1890 (Collected Letters of George Gissing, vol. 4, 211). In the same letter, Gissing rejected this assumption, but we may forgive Ellen for her naïve reading of her brother’s fiction if we recall that Miriam’s family appears to be made up of a radical, agnostic and untimely deceased father, a bigot mother and a brother who challenges traditional morality, lives accordingly and meets a bad end. 29 George Gissing, The Emancipated, 2 vols (London: Bentley, 1890), vol. 1, 155. 30 George Gissing, Born in Exile (London: Dent, 1993), 5.

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(Gissing, Born in Exile, 25). The typographer named Rawmarsh, the exrailway employee with a passion for geology, Mr Gunnery, and a manufacturing chemist named Moxey all befriend the young and by no means endearing protagonist. A network of basically sympathetic female relatives and acquaintances – inevitably pious, and much despised by Godwin Peak – manage to secure for him the patronage of the local magnate in the form of a three-year scholarship. Such an exceptionally lenient take on provincial life seems to be the result of the cool unsentimental treatment of the protagonist, whose psychology the narrator implacably dissects and whose réssentiment at his family background and lower-middle class provincial upbringing is certainly kept at arm’s length. A consequence of this narrative stance is arguably that the quarry that Peak encounters on his way back home from Kingsmill in chapter 3 (and reminisces about towards the end of the novel) hosts no mournful accident, and retains only metaphorical associations with death. It is, in fact, above all geologically interesting, and even gives Peak the chance – a very rare boon for a Gissing character – briefly to escape from the narrow confines of his fretful self: He knew enough of the geology of the county to recognise the rocks and reflect with understanding upon their position; a fragment in his hand, he sat down to rest for a moment. Then a strange fit of brooding came over him. Escaping from the influences of personality, his imagination wrought back through eras of geologic time, held him in a vision of the infinitely remote, shrivelled into insignificance all but the one fact of inconceivable duration. Often as he had lost himself in such reveries, never yet had he passed so wholly under the dominion of that awe which attends a sudden triumph of the pure intellect. When at length he rose, it was with wide, blank eyes, and limbs partly numbed. These needed half-an-hour's walking before he could recover his mood of practical self-search (Gissing, Born in Exile, 47).

This instance of geological sublime (Kantian sublime, as predicated on the triumph of pure intellect),31 as trite as it might have been by the early 31 Possibly suggested by the re-reading of Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes, which he bought in November 1890 while he was still in London, working on geology at the British Museum, see London and the Life of Literature in Victorian England: The Diary of George Gissing, ed. Pierre Coustillas (Lewisburgh: Bucknell University Press, 1978), 230. On Gissing, Hardy (and others) and geology, see Dennis R. Dean, “‘Through Science to Despair’: Geology and the Victorians,” Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives, ed. James Paradis and Thomas Postlewait (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 111136, and J. M. I. Klaver, Geology and Religious Sentiment: The Effect of Geological

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Nineties, is a far cry from the unrelieved factualness of Gissing’s previous quarries. It is part and parcel of the novel’s rich cultural density, and the psychological complexity of its protagonist. We learn from Gissing’s diary and letters that his interest in geology preceded his residence in Devon. Indeed, it might have been among his reasons for moving there, given that the county boasts many geological attractions and one Victorian geological celebrity, William Buckland (b. Axminster, 1784), whose much-read Bridgewater Treatise on “geology and mineralogy” (1837) is mentioned in the novel and after whom Peak’s college-friend Buckland Warricombe is christened. It might be surmised, however, that residence in Exeter may have helped Gissing recover some of the narrative and intellectual potentialities of “his father’s Wakefield” – the passionate interest in science, the activities of provincial scientific societies, and their appeal to new urban professionals (such as Thomas Waller) whose ambitions and rising status were based on knowledge and education.32 The father-science nexus is indeed featured in A Life’s Morning but it is shown – as we have noted in passing – in a pathetic-dysphoric light, and is made relevant to the plot only in regards to Mr Hood’s selfdestructive choice of cyanide. In Born in Exile, Godwin’s untimely deceased father (retrospectively recalled in chapter 2) belongs to the same depressing brood. A chemist, dispensary by profession, he unhappily turned farmer and died, a failure, at forty-three. But the connection of science, business, political radicalism, professional self-realization and social innovation is underscored more open-mindedly throughout the novel, and father figures who dabble in geology are more impartially portrayed. There was, originally at least, a touch of rebellion to dogma and stultifying tradition in the gentlemanly Mr Warricombe, and there certainly is in Mr Gunnery. The author of a little handbook on petrology, Gunnery teaches the young Godwin all he knows, and bequeaths him two cabinets of stones and fossils, together with his scientific instruments, which Godwin takes first to London and then to Exeter. He is a dignified rather than pathetic figure; and he dies at the riper age of seventy-three as a consequence of a stupid domestic accident: blood poisoning as a consequence of walking barefoot on the point of a large nail. Meeting Godwin for the last time he lucidly predicts his end and regrets not having broken his neck “among honest

Discoveries on English Society and Literature Between 1829 and 1859 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 188-95. 32 Paul Elliot, “The Origins of the ‘Creative Class’: Provincial Urban Society, Scientific Culture, and Socio-Political Marginality in Britain in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Social History 28:3 (2003), 361-87.

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lumps of old red sandstone” – an ironical textual nod, perhaps, to the previous fictional quarry fatalities (Gissing, Born in Exile, 58). One might be tempted to expect that, after Born in Exile, a new narrative vein would open, for Gissing, marked by a more balanced evaluation of cultural and social life in English provincial towns. Denzil Quarrier was to be the last of the Gissing novels associated with Wakefield. Written in Exeter just after Born in Exile, it only partly fulfils such expectations, and overall seems to have worked the other way around, sealing off for good the access to that novelistic subject-matter. The novel – whose eponymous protagonist bears the imprint of the quarry in his very name – deals with emancipated émigré provincials going back to their native town, with a view to carving for themselves a political career as liberal MPs. This is a situation that Gissing would redeploy on a diminutive scale, and in the comic mode, in “The Firebrand” (1896). The provincial location of Denzil Quarrier is an imaginary town called Polterham. It is situated, vaguely, in the Midlands, and seems but little connected with Wakefield, since it features only a few recent factories and comparatively pleasant surroundings. Also, it is shown as the scene of a lively political and cultural life which the novel especially foregrounds in the run-up to the momentous 1880 election, a time when even draper shops host political debate. Polterham’s name and its topography, in fact, have been persuasively associated with Exeter, where the 1880 election had ended with the surprising defeat of the Tory candidate (son of Sir Stafford Henry Northcote, then Chancellor of the Exchequer and a local grandee) and an ensuing riot.33 Gissing’s letters written at the time he lived in Exeter also show that he was favourably impressed by the cultural facilities – especially the “Devon & Exeter Institution”, founded in 1813 “to promote the general diffusion of Science, Literature and the Arts; and for illustrating the Natural and Civil History of the County of Devon, and the History of the City of Exeter.”34 It was financed by public subscription and provided an eloquent example of the civic pride of English provincial communities, their care for local history and heritage, and their active interest in culture and learning. Gissing praised it as an “admirable establishment, much like the London library” with its “25,000 volumes of sterling universal literature, and reading room with all current ephemerides” and hoped he would be able to 33 W. G. West, George Gissing in Exeter (Exeter: Exeter Rare Books, 1979), 8. According to West, local politics at the time also provided at least one recent scandal similar to that which might force Denzil Quarrier to resign, were Lilian’s marital status divulged. 34 http://devonandexeterinstitution.org

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fork out the 3 guineas’ yearly subscription.35 A later letter to his brother shows that he eventually joined the cheaper Exeter Literary Society (established in 1841), with its “reasonably good library”, “excellent reading room” and “a large lecture-hall” under construction. In that context, he remarked that the Exeter Literary Society resembled the Wakefield Church Institution – though it was “by no means directed by clerical prejudices, for “The Nether World” is on the shelves”. 36 He might as well have recalled Wakefield Mechanics’ Institution, and its Library, which had been prominent among Thomas Wallers’s public engagements. They were certainly conspicuous in the adult son’s reminiscences of his dying father, who had made him “write from his dictation a list of newspapers and periodicals, which it had just been decided should be taken at the Mechanics' Institute.”37 Neither Gissing’s admiration for Exeter’s cultural facilities, however, nor any fond personal recollections of the Wakefield Mechanics’ Institution and his father’s engagement in its library that may be weaved into Denzil Quarrier,38 seem to modify Gissing’s pejorative take on provincial life and culture. “Polterham is paltry”, as one character in the novel states.39 Thus, the Literary Institute, of liberal-radical sympathies, and the rival Constitutional Literary Society, which is Tory, are heavily satirised as backward and parochial, while local libraries are seen as unable to cater for the needs of emancipated intellectuals. Private and public life is infested by Evangelical piety and revivalist meetings (registered, especially, in a passage that recalls A Life’s Morning)40. Although Polterham is represented as a sizable urban centre, with its pavements, street lamps, policemen, Magistrates Court, conference halls, etc., the town periphery, as with 35 George Gissing, Letter to Algernon, dated January 24, 1891, Collected Letters of George Gissing, vol. 4, 266. 36 George Gissing, Letter to Algernon, June 15, 1891, Collected Letters of George Gissing, vol. 4, 300. 37 George Gissing, “Reminiscences of My Father,” published in Pierre Coustillas, “Gissing’s Reminiscences of His Father: An Unpublished Manuscript,” English Literature in Transition, 32:4 (1989), 419-439, (425). 38 According to Brook, “Wakefield Mechanics institution is central to Denzil Quarrier as well as to ‘The Invincible Curate’”, 1980, 13. 39 George Gissing, Denzil Quarrier (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1892), 181. 40 In chapter 5 of Denzil Quarrier the anecdote is told of “Poor Tompkins”: his wife was so taken up by the revivalist frenzy that neglected her “domestic duties” and “one morning he locked her into her bedroom, and there he kept her on very plain diet for three days.” Gissing, Denzil Quarrier, p. 54. Roughly the same anecdote – of a husband who had been “driven to such a pass” by his frenzied wife as to “turn the key on her in her bedroom” and there he had kept her till she “remembered her domestic duties” – is told in Gissing, A Life’s Morning, 213-4.

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Dunfield, acquires a decisive role. It provides the setting for Mrs Wade’s cottage and Lilian’s encounter with Northway. Moreover, it is the site of Lilian’s death in the aptly named Bale Water pond, with its subdued but unmistakable connection with the imaginary Wakefield’s tragic quarry: The origin of this pond or lakelet had caused discussion among local antiquaries; for tradition said that it occupied the site of a meadow which many years ago mysteriously sank, owing perhaps to the unsuspected existence of an ancient mine. It connected with a little tributary of the River Bale, and was believed to be very deep, especially at one point, where the tree-shadowed bank overhung the water at a height of some ten feet (Gissing, Denzil Quarrier, 142-3).

Bale Pond figures as a skating ground in the early part of the novel, and its implied coldness is, of course, an element of realism. Lakes which originate from sunken mines, or from streams filling long-abandoned quarries, are indeed prone to be deeper, colder and more dangerous than most natural lakes of comparable size. Thus, though Lilian dies on an April night, her death in Bale Pond also resonates with a handful of earlier Gissing stories, featuring frozen waters and unnatural death. In the snowstorm of “The Quarry on the Heath”, for instance, a young man dies by accidental falling into the quarry, and his corpse is later found by his beloved in the frozen swamp. Comparable episodes occur in “The Sins of the Fathers” (1877), at the ending of Workers in the Dawn (1880), and – of special interest here – in “All for Love” (1880), an unpublished provincial novella set in “the quiet little town of Market Leyton, a prosperous but drowsy place, generally redolent of hay and clover.”41 In the course of the narration, this Cranfordlike gossipy rural burgh becomes truly nasty, and the story – one of bigamy, jealousy and blackmail, very similar to Denzil Quarrier – ends in the dead of winter, with a corpse dumped into a frozen river, and the murderer’s subsequent suicide in the same stream. It is interesting to notice that, while A Life’s Morning includes the death in the quarry but sidesteps the winter setting, Denzil Quarrier – a 1892 re-writing of “All for Love” – picks up again that obsessive dormant motive. This registers the resilient metaphorical cluster that links death and cold water in Gissing imagination, and connects it again with the archetypal Wakefield quarry. 41 George Gissing, “All for Love,” Essays and Fiction, p. 106. In this context it is interesting to notice that death and frozen water are also linked, though not causally, in Thyrza, where the heroine’s natural death is made to occur during an exceptional spell of clear and cold weather, and it is preceded by a skating scene set in Regent’s Park.

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Conclusion Very much, then, as Godwin Peak does with Mr Gunnery’s collection of rocks and fossils, Gissing seems to have carried his “quarry” with him from Yorkshire to London. It is starkly confronted through the incestuous triangular father-daughter-lover plot in “The Quarry on the Heath”, then more extensively and skilfully, in A Life’s Morning, and eventually rewritten (and perhaps exorcised) in his Exeter novels. Why the “quarry” should provide the most distinctive trait of Gissing’s imaginary Wakefield is, it seems, impossible to ascertain. It is a reasonable hypothesis that it carries the imprint of ancient oedipal conflicts reactivated and exacerbated by Thomas Waller’s untimely death, petrified by the Manchester traumatic events, and slowly worked through by successive narrative attempts. In terms of investment in local political and intellectual life, Denzil Quarrier is the closest Gissing ever got to his father’s Wakefield, but it is also a novel where fathers are conspicuously absent or marginalised, the scene being largely occupied by the grown-up members of the young generation. Their fatherless condition may be seen reflected in the tottering Tory authority in Polterham, in their attitudes towards conventional morality, and in the moral disorder that ensues. There are no sins of the fathers in Denzil Quarrier; much rather sins of their sons and daughters, which makes for a narrative (and psychical) constellation significantly at variance with the one that pivoted on the original Wakefield quarry. The mysterious “petrological” imprint of the imaginary Wakefield lingers on, however faintly, in this novel. There is, to start with, a stone, hidden in a snowball, “which had stunned [the child Denzil] in one of the fights between town and Grammar School” – a mere snippet of text, a random childhood memory recalled light-heartedly by the protagonist, but foreboding the deadlier rivalries and treacheries which infest adult provincial life (Gissing, Denzil Quarrier, 137). A further intrusive stone appears in another fight among children that takes place in the effervescent political climate that precedes the election (Gissing, Denzil Quarrier, 293). This stresses that friends may injure more than enemies. And there is the retrospective and very marginal glimpse of Lilian’s father’s death. He was a “builder in a small way”, lived in Bristol, and died prematurely because of a brick that fell accidentally on his head (Gissing, Denzil Quarrier, 106). A brick, of course, is not a stone, but – as evidence of a persistent obsessive motive – it may be considered acceptable enough.

CHAPTER 7 THE IMAGINATIVE DELIGHT: A GEOGRAPHY OF THE DREAM IN THOMAS HARDY AND GEORGE GISSING MARCO OLIVIERI

In the comparative analysis of geographical space as a place of memory for George Gissing and Thomas Hardy, both writers look to the ancient world not only as an intellectual desire but as a unique “dream” moment of history: Gissing retraces the cultural signs of Magna Graecia in a memorable journey to southern Italy told in By the Ionian Sea; Hardy conceives Wessex and the vestiges left by the Romans as a magical and ritual mindset in which the natural cycles of time blend with old legends and superstitions. Hardy’s Wessex and Gissing’s Magna Graecia (as he faithfully follows François Lenormant’s path)1 become archetypal scenarios, acting as a symbolic remedy against the threatening background of new technological inventions that undermine the traditional values of the past. The constantly changing geography of human agency is connected to the heterotopia of imagination: a place that unravels myths, reinvents them, and finally avoids the catastrophe of history that forgets itself harnessed by the new demands of modernity. In 1902 Hardy wrote a letter to his friend Henry Rider Haggard. He bitterly commented on the ominous signs of a world in detrimental transition, outraged as it was by the loss of its historical identity and above all of the cultural memory of the past. “For one thing”, Hardy stated, “village tradition —a vast mass of unwritten folk-lore, local chronicle, local topography and nomenclature— is absolutely sinking, has nearly sunk, into 1

François Lenormant was a French archeologist. His journeys to southern Italy are described in his travel writing: À Travers l'Apulie et la Lucanie (1883) and La Grande Grèce (1881). This last work inspired both Gissing and, later, Norman Douglas’s Old Calabria (1915). Both Gissing and Douglas retraced Lenormant’s itinerary, in search of the places and characters described by the French scholar.

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eternal oblivion”.2 The novelist was deeply interested in the unavoidable transformations of England’s countryside. He had, as Williams points out, “the educated consciousness of the facts of change”.3 According to Hardy, these changes were determined by the overcoming of the most unbridled capitalist dehumanisation, which would inevitably clash with the historical presence of all archaic social values defining the rural proletarian identity. With the spread of modern technical means of production, peasants ran the risk of crushing their own manpower peculiar to the working class. Day labourers drifted due to market pressures with no basic certainties about their future. They were also projected towards a daunting fate characterized by two alternatives: the “workhouse and the grave”.4 The Wessex region, a fictional space roughly corresponding to Dorset in Hardy’s literary works, was being condemned to a destiny without memory. Anyway, Wessex cannot be conceived as a topographical invention. As a “partly real, partly dream”5 setting, the ancient region belonged to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom. Thus, Hardy’s Wessex is at the same time the emblematic trigger of a mythopoeia and the metafictional dimension of a literary dream. Actually, as a symbolic geography of the historical imagination, Hardy's mode of textualization finds a more intense degree in the dramatic configuration of dreams. Drama is cognate with dream, a relation similar to one also present in other Germanic languages such as the Old Norse draumar and the German Traum.6 The phonological and semantic correspondence between dream and drama can probably explain Tess's dark tragic nature as she sleeps on the Sun-Stone in the druidic cromlech of Stonehenge. Angel warns the officers not to touch his wife, who in the meantime has assumed the pose of a sacrificial victim: “Let her finish her sleep!”.7 Angel yells at them, as if the dreaming ritual was the last dramatic act to be performed in a liturgical scheme. For this reason, the dream strategy would be functional to a dramatic isotopy that seems to raise the tragic sense of the human up to the level of symbolism. During the wedding night, in the altered state of 2 Michael Millgate, ed., The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1984), 336. 3 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (St Albans: Paladin, 1975), 239. 4 Thomas Hardy, “The Dorsetshire Labourer”, in Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, ed. Harold Orel (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1966), 169. 5 Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3. 6 Significantly, “every dream bears a remarkable resemblance to drama”. Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (New York: Random House, 1977), 178. 7 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 418. All further references will be to this edition and given in text as Tess.

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consciousness induced by somnambulism, Angel enters the room where Tess sleeps and shouts: “Dead! Dead! Dead! […] My wife — dead, dead!” (Tess, 266-67). Later he would lay down his wife in the empty crypt of a church, dreamily prefiguring the pantomime of Tess's “liturgical” death in the sacred shrine of Stonehenge (Tess, 268-69). These enunciative moments are full of symbolic significance structured as they are on the degree of the mythical discourse, since “in the archetypal phase the work of literary art is a myth, and unites the ritual and the dream”.8 The oneiric scenario is anthropologically clear because, following this argument, dreaming can be understood as a personal stratagem in which the individual tries to escape the primary fear of death and its disturbing effects. As a consequence, the act of dreaming appears to become the symbolic form related to the fear of a real experience of sacrifice. Supposedly, for Hardy, the sacrifice of a figurative death relates rêverie to an ancestral expression of submission to the blind natural will. His dreamlike agency restores the archetypal memory circumscribed by vegetation myths. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Bathsheba places the flowers on Troy's tomb after the wind has scattered them: “Bathsheba collected the flowers, and began planting them with that sympathetic manipulation of roots and leaves which is so conspicuous in a woman's gardening, and which flowers seem to understand and thrive upon.”9 Completely involved in the sympathetic order of Nature, Bathsheba can revive the buds on a grave. Indeed, Hardy seems to convey the ecological idea of a tactile and prolific relationship with Nature only if human beings devote themselves to her with entrenched, ritual mindset. Hardy and Gissing go beyond the concept of contextual criticism aiming to situate a text in a cultural or cultural-historical context. Their works tend to be, so to speak, meta-contextual, “opening on issues that may involve perspectives or questions for which given cultural conceptions seem limited”.10 In fictional production, Gissing follows in the footsteps of François Lenormant, whereas Hardy takes James Frazer as his cultural model.11 All things considered, Hardy’s literary spaces are imbued with a vision of Nature as a fatalistic entity that acts on human relations. James Frazer and Thomas Hardy knew each other and met sporadically. Their 8

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 118. 9 Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, 312. 10 Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 4. 11 Hardy and Gissing were close friends of Edward Clodd, chairperson of the London Folk-lore Society. Both Clodd and Frazer, deeply Darwinian scholars, influenced Hardy's literary activity from an anthropological standpoint.

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sullen and grumpy personalities were in a mutual dialectic relationship.12 Both were scholars of magic and superstition: paganism was alive and well in Wessex and it was not only the farmers who were affected. As a matter of fact, every account of natural landscape must represent an implicit reengagement with what nature means or could mean for the people acting in. For instance, the nonhuman environment functions as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history. Moreover, the nonhuman implies the environmental doublethink: awareness of the potential gravity of environmental degradation far surpasses the degree to which people effectively care about it.13 With ecological intelligence, Hardy excludes every dysphoric element from the sacred space of the agricultural world, even purposed to social benefits. The combine harvester is perceived as “a red tyrant that the women had come to serve”; the operator entrusted with the steam machine for seasonal harvesting, works “in the agricultural world, but not of it. He served fire and smoke; these denizens of the fields served vegetation, weather, frost, and sun” (Tess, 345). The fertile countryside is thus symbolically conceived as a mythical lucus, the ecological ideal which takes its primeval food of survival. As a space for the sacred telluric ritual of fertility, the edenic Nature of Wessex is therefore associated with all the positive symbolism of rebirth based on the primitive rites of vegetation and the concerning functions of dietary sustenance. Nevertheless, the countryside evokes a more diffuse sentimental feeling and environmental value requires its antithesis.14 Moorlands, glades, woods, and forests are spaces of complex life forms and ecological destruction; of nightmare and wonderment; of growth and decay; of fantasy and ritual; of secrets and control; of hiding and the hidden. Thus, on the mythical level of pagan topography, Hardy’s Wessex also appears as the fictional revelation of a crisis. In the broad context of Western philosophical discourse on the concept of place, Bachelard’s “coefficient of adversity”15 insinuates the idea that the ambivalent space where Hardy’s characters operate is thought as epistemic disorder, an annihilating chaos of the individual. It gives vent to that evocative feeling that Durand conceived as 12

See Robert Fraser, ed., Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1990), 4. 13 See Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge [Mass.] and London: The Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 4-8. 14 See Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 102 ff. 15 Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: an Essay on the Imagination of Matter (Dallas: The Pegasus Foundation, 1983), 157.

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the “Nocturnal Order of the Image”.16 Here a euphemistic utterance expresses the transformation of brutal and mortal terrors into deep-rooted fears of intimacy, mainly in relation to sexuality. In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the forest called The Chase (known as the oldest in England) encompasses all the topological dysphoria associated with wilderness. The Chase symbolizes the archaic nemeton, the place of the bloody sacrifice and ritual, in which the heroine suffers the rape by Alec under the intoxicating action of a kind of mystical narcosis. Here Tess’ trance seems to be induced by the autumn fog, which at the time becomes the metaphorical spectrum of Alec's phallic rule. The surrealistic mist that silently rises over the forest like a soporific haze would act as a powerful narcotic magically evoked by Alec’s aggressive masculinity (Alec’s essence mainly appears as that of a satyr, the mythological nature spirit). This symbolic association of fog ļ dream is testified by a passage in the novel during the first meeting with Tess in Trantridge. The bluish smoke produced by Alec’s cigar acquires the figurative projection of a hypnotic haze temporarily repressing her perceptions: He watched her pretty and unconscious munching through the skeins of smoke that pervaded the tent, and Tess Durbeyfield did not divine, as she innocently looked down at the roses in her bosom, that there behind the blue narcotic haze was potentially the “tragic mischief” of her drama – one who stood fair to be blood-red ray in the spectrum of her young life (Tess, 47-48).

Actually, Hardy describes the profane space of The Chase as belonging to an unnatural elsewhere, far from human interests and concealed for centuries in the gloomy legends of Wessex: A truly venerable tract of forest land; one of the few remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primæval date, wherein Druidical mistletoe was still found on aged oaks, and where enormous yew-trees, not planted by the hand of man, grew as they had grown when they were pollarded for bows (Tess, 43-44).

Undoubtedly, the act of dreaming is the function of a symbolic experience related to the fear of a real experience of sacrifice. The sacrifice is the memory of a founding murder that shows its symbolic efficacy because it needs the cultural designation of an “emissary victim” which replaces the mythical remembrance of the original victim. The violence 16 See Gilbert Durand, The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary (Brisbane: Boombana Publications, 1999), 187 ff.

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concerning sacrifices always moves from a stimulus of yearning: as Girard pointed out, “la violence est à la fois l’instrument, l’objet et le sujet de tous les désirs”.17 In particular, there is no overstatement in the comparison between the drama experienced by Tess in The Chase and the enigmatic sacrifice executed in ancient times around the sacred grove and sanctuary of Nemi, which begins Frazer’s monumental study of magic and religion.18 At Nemi once stood the dedicated nemeton and the shrine of Diana Nemorensis, or the Diana of the Wood. The surrounding forest was mostly characterized by oaks, traditionally considered as sacred trees. After all, according to ancient mythographs, the mysterious golden bough that Aeneas, at the Sibyl’s bidding, plucked before he essayed the perilous journey to the world of the dead, was the mistletoe oak. Inside the sanctuary of Nemi grew a tree of which no branch might be broken. Only a fugitive slave was given the opportunity to seize one of its branches. Had he succeeded in doing so, he would have acquired the right to establish a cruel custom: to fight with the priest-guardian of the temple of Diana and, once he killed him, hold the priesthood in his stead as Rex Nemorensis. In the sexual drama depicted in the sylvan nemeton of The Chase, Hardy evokes the elementary ritual structure underlying the rule of this bloody priesthood, although all the mythical afflatus is reshaped through a fundamental semantic diversification. There is a transposition of meaning in ritual since the novelist overturns its actantial relevance. Such an inversion seems to be due to the archaic and patriarchal myths of the nighttime 'sexual hunt' (neither the name of the place nor the rite performed here therefore seem to be fortuitous), since it is not the earthly embodiment of Virbius that violently dies by ritual institution. It is not a man —or Alec in the novel— but Artemis-Diana of the Wood: Tess. There are clues pertaining to this fictional mythopoesis. Alec and Tess have a sort of sexual (perhaps ritualistic) intercourse among the ancient oaks of the wood, similarly to the priest of Diana Nemorensis, namely Virbius, who, before being replaced by the candidate for the priesthood, Hippolytus, annually instituted a mystical marriage with the divine female counterpart, the latter under the symbolic guise of the oak tree, Egeria. Moreover, Tess, as a lunar divinity, such as Artemis, will be exposed to the ritual sacrifice in the sun sanctuary of Stonehenge, before being hanged. Practically as a lunar priestess she will be sacrificed to the Sun god, who compared to the pale matriarchal energy of the moon symbolizes the dominion of the virile fire, the patriarchal spirit, or phallic-masculine. Furthermore, Tess will be 17

René Girard, La violence et le sacré (Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1972), 215. See James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Ware: Wordsworth Edition, 1993), 1-7. 18

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replaced by a substitute, paradoxically chosen by the heroine herself: her sister Liza-Lu. Indeed, in the Temple of the Winds, before falling asleep, Tess says: Angel, if anything happens to me, will you watch over Liza-Lu for my sake?”, she asked, when they had listened a long time to the wind among the pillars. “I will”. “She is so good, and simple, and pure... O Angel – I wish you would marry her, if you lose me, as you will do shortly. O if you would!” (Tess, 416).

The desire of the emissary victim will finally be fulfilled by Angel, who (although Hardy does not explicitly admit it) will marry Liza-Lu, becoming the mirror image of Tess, the new queen of the forest, her mythical double: “A tall budding creature, half girl, half woman — a spiritualized image of Tess” (Tess, 419). Hardy’s writing belongs to the enunciative paradigm of a written “confession”, taken in the etymological sense of a “declaratory act” around a “different” world. The different world is Wessex, meaning a rural heterotopia in decline that stubbornly persists on the deep feelings of a Mythical Time. By the use of the cultural code of magic, for the dramatis personae operating in Wessex the post-liminality phase of social reintegration seems unravel a cultural acceptance of collective symbols (at least from Van Gennep’s ethnological perspective).19 Anyway, before being a functional space for the plot, Wessex is an anthropological text. Hardy narrates it by conceiving Wessex as hanging between the cult of the dream and the sacrifice of hunger, “a starve-acre place” (Tess, 305), acting on characters up to the limits that make tragic their existence. The natives seem to live in a fit of segregate marginality. Their dreams and desires are incompatible with the uncertainty of illusions and disenchantments. Liminal spaces imply transformation and change, but Hardy’s liminal personae confirm an inoperative and submissive opposition to change. The drama of their lives is articulated via “in-betweenness”, a neutral condition in which the individual is trapped between two opposing chronotopes. On the one hand, Eustacia Vye, the protagonist of The Return of the Native (1878), represents a state of individual inactivity by observing the world through a telescope in romantic expectation of a different social standing. On the other hand, in Jude Fawley’s eyes, the “Brown House” becomes the voyeuristic limen of desire because it triggers the imagination of a better future.20 The young man observes the flickering brightness of Christminster surrounded by the 19 20

See Arnold Van Gennep, Les rites de passage (Paris: Editions A&J Picard, 2011). See Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (London: Penguin, 1998), 19-20.

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calm darkness of the moorland. His gaze turns into a symbolic dream moving from obscurity to light, without finding favourable confirmation in his real life. According to Hardy, the art of storytelling requires a narrative distance that moves as far away as possible from the objectivity of reality understood as verisimilitude. The novelist aims to communicate impressions and not arguments, focalizing the narrative discourse on his idiosyncrasy. Every minimal daily experience is literally intrigued by ‘faithful imagination’ in its antirealist purposes, since “realism is not Art.”21 Put in other words, Hardy and his symbolic writing compose an ideal safeconduct that intervenes either to stop the chaos or to redeem the Wessex community from its existential failure. It is a process of transcoding that arranges eccentric and apparently irrational cultural systems of ancestral knowledge into a literary model, restoring for the reader the historical memory of a mythical world being lost. Hardy can be considered as an anthropologist who deploys imaginative paradigms as a metafictional escape from the ruin caused by the loss of traditional values, and his novels as narrative documents of a disappearing mythical memory. By following this approach, one could speak of Hardy’s politics of nostalgia, but not in a simplistic or opportunistic manner.22 Rather, Hardy tries to conceive of nostalgia as a sort of ecojustice that seeks an anthropological language to speculate upon the environmental lifestyle of a hypothetical future. The novelist transposes the folklore of his rural community into literary discourse. So, by looking back to history, he activates a cultural code that, beyond the static nature of aesthetic preservation, performs the key function of reconstructing the mythical systems dying in the ancient rural tradition of Wessex. For George Gissing, conversely, narrative becomes the space of the imagination in which to find refuge from the evils of late-Victorian epistemology. If any landscape is a condition of the spirit, in what Blythe defines “local landscape consciousness”,23 Gissing returns to his imaginary source from scientific and learned forays. He has a picture, so to speak, of an ideal consciousness. Unable to get involved in the social triumphalism of his time, Gissing was characterized by “his apparently exaggerated sensitivity and painful incapacity to sustain the ordinary frictions of

21 Thomas Hardy, “The Profitable Reading of Fiction”, in Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, ed. Harold Orel, 116; Millgate, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, 192. 22 See Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Environment, 96 ff. 23 Ronald Blythe, Characters and their Landscapes (Orlando: Harvest/HBJ, 1982), 3.

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everyday life”.24 His narrative is escapist. Concerned with the psychodynamics of the literary image, Gissing’s experience in the abstract mindscapes of memory is not an inert excursion into the domain of locational imagination, because “inhabited space transcends geometrical space”.25 Rather than spatial imaginary, his travelogue shows the topoanalysis of his intimate being, the space he actually loves. Gissing is considered as a man of the two worlds (the world of human misery and the world of classical literature to find refuge in), and By the Ionian Sea is a sort of metaphorical journey into his youthful recollections. The book narrates southern Italy, but at the same time Gissing’s writing can be read as a cultural map towards the founding myth of his knowledge. Undoubtedly By the Ionian Sea displays a verbal itinerary along the creative rêverie of the artistic imagination: Every man has his intellectual desire; mine is to escape life as I know it and dream myself into that old world which was the imaginative delight of my boyhood. The names of Greece and Italy draw me as no others; they make me young again, and restore the keen impressions of that time when every new page of Greek or Latin was a new perception of things beautiful. The world of the Greeks and Romans is my land of romance. 26

During the Victorian age, one notion of moral progress was deeply connected to the idea of “otherness” on the basis of an ascending cultural order which conceived of the Italians as the apex of civilizations and Britain’s tropical colonies as the savage nadir. One of the striking things about sociocultural evolutionary assumption was its metaphorical extendibility clearly related to its ideological adaptiveness. Biological and cultural assumptions such as “degeneration” and “arrested development” facilitated analogizing up and down the developmental scale.27 With travel writing, typically, the “others” were seen on a scale of binary opposition of more or less relative to the observer’s own culture: more or less savage/civilized, reasonable/emotional, natural/artificial and so on, according to a dominant Western European mindset which is still deeply embedded in colonial and postcolonial social dimensions.28 What has been

24

Adrian Poole, Gissing in Context (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975), 6. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 47. 26 George Gissing, By the Ionian Sea (Oxford: Signal Books, 2004), 5. All further references will be to this edition and given in text as Ionian Sea. 27 See George W. Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 162; 228. 28 See Rob Pope, The English Studies Book (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 148; 180. 25

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called Gissing's “impertinent ego”,29 in By the Ionian Sea seems resized. The author certainly follows in the footsteps of Lenormant and other predecessors who visited the deep south of Italy. Yet the text is a kind of personal testament. His commemorative impulse is inseparable from a cult of the narrative voice that defines the creative phonocentrism of his discourse. Gissing follows an antithetical structure, contrasting intense light with darkness, sound with silence, life with death, the pagan world with Christianity, ancient and modern. As the writer claims at the end of his journey: Alone and quiet, I heard the washing of the waves; I saw the evening fall on cloud-wreathed Etna, the twinkling lights come forth on Scylla and Charybdis; and, as I looked my last towards the Ionian Sea, I wished it were mine to wander endlessly amid the silence of the ancient world, today and all its sounds forgotten (Ionian Sea, 131).

Gissing’s fiction is broadly naturalistic and anti-romantic in flavour and predominantly urban in setting. The best of his work deals with social issues (gender, class, money). Yet By the Ionian Sea seems to summarize a constellation of genres and states of mind going beyond the pure ideological schematization of tout-court realism. By the Ionian Sea is a commemorative non-fiction work, and a commemorative culture will inevitably rationalize its ideologies of a metaphysics of signs.30 Gissing does not describe landscape. He rather makes an axial transformation from Hardy’s natural world to the scenery of his own dreams. Landscape, in its original sense, presumes real world. On the contrary, scenery has been associated with the world of illusion, a world of art and make-believe. Gissing stands ‘behind the scene’ of mere realism and depicts a land of romance. The “land of romance” determined in his travel book represents an eidetic doctrine of signs, which mixes nostalgia for primitivism with a pure and emotional description of places, trades, peasants, sometimes with irony. Of course, he does his environmental analysis with empathetic delicacy. However, it cannot be overlooked that, in Gissing's eyes, southern Italy is still a legacy of an unsophisticated archaic, wild backwardness. “Life in a country called civilized cannot easily be more primitive than under these crazy roofs,” he argues in the chapter named after “Miseria” (Ionian Sea, 108). But he keeps on: “[The] domestic was the most primitive of the household”; “It gave me pleasure to find the place so small and primitive”, 29

Pierre Coustillas, “Introduction”, in Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, xviii. See Eugene Vance, “Roland and the Poetics of Memory”, in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (London: Methuen, 1980), 375.

30

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and “a shaky deal table and primitive chair completed the furniture” (Ionian Sea, 7; 105). The Italian workers of the late nineteenth century are individuals who have come directly out of the Paleolithic toils of their ancestors: “Never I have seen man so utterly patient, so primaevally deliberate”; “These fishermen are the primitives of Taranto; who shall say for how many centuries they have hauled their nets upon the rock? […] Their slow, patient effort speaks of immemorial usage, and is in harmony with time itself” (Ionian Sea, 26; 27). Gissing motivates a cultural experience by bringing it back to its historical domain and he seemingly lives that. The Ionian, an elongated bay of the Mediterranean Sea, gives the congenial ecologic niche in which Gissing’s escapist purpose becomes cross cultural life-writing. Supposedly, most people experience a gap between the kind of world they live and the kind they want. On Gissing’s personal level, oneiric conscience is what bridges the gap; By the Ionian Sea lingers on varied inner landscapes of his dreamlike feelings. The travelogue acts as an escape from Gissing’s own time, and it turns into an itinerary towards the immortality of classical history. During his stay in Italy, Gissing makes traveling an ethnobiographical metaphor through the dynamic use of public transport. Ships, trains, coaches, define the remapping of the mindscape Gissing crosses and narrates in southern Italy, inasmuch “one of the first acts of any explorer, conqueror or coloniser […] is to name the places he […] ‘discovers’”.31 Mainly the train – that great technological icon of speed in Victorian England – takes on an opposing value for Hardy and Gissing.32 The former textualizes railway as a technological artefact which epitomizes the idea of changing. Hardy’s character by name of George Barnet, after a voluntary exile that lasted twenty-one and a half years, returns to his hometown of Port-Bredy and finds it totally innovated. Before being abandoned that ancient village was “an old-fashioned town”, the contrast being that “of inorganic differences the greatest was that a railway had invaded the town”.33 The use of the adjective “inorganic” seems to widen the critical gap of an unresolved dichotomy, emphasizing the oppositional dialectic 31

Pope, The English Studies Book, 146. Unlike in England, the political divisions and wars that affected Italy before the Unity in 1861 meant that the peninsula was a remarkably slow starter with railways. See Michael Robbins, The Railway Age (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 128. Gissing complains about the chronic delay of Italian trains, which the English traveller is not able to get used to: “I found that a sudden change in the time-table, without any regard for persons relying upon the official guide, was taken as a matter of course,” Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, 39. 33 Thomas Hardy, “Fellow–Townsmen”, in Wessex Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 126. 32

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between Nature and Science. On the other hand, the term “invaded” infers a double meaning: for instance, it can both entail the idea of a city invaded by hordes of travellers and also the conquest of the traditional space by a nonhuman agency. Furthermore, to Hardy, the train is an artificial object threatening the holy pact between the human and the ancestral time of Nature. There is a revealing passage in Tess: The cans of new milk were unladen in the rain, Tess getting a little shelter from a neighbouring holly–tree. Then there was the hissing of a train which drew up almost silently upon the wet rails, and the milk was rapidly swung can by can into the truck” (Tess, 205).

Hardy’s excerpt is meaningful. Due to the magical and apotropaic power attributed since ancient times to the holly-tree, Tess’s gesture is an impulsive self-defence rite in order to preserve her from the pestilent poison of modernity. Conversely, to Gissing, the train appears as a naturalistic element of the Italian landscape that emphasizes the solitary amplitude of his journey. Gissing feared and abhorred the mob. His ecological “silence of the ancient world” (Ionian Sea, 131) is an emblematic rejection of the austere Victorian human environment which disallows bonds among individuals. Undoubtedly in Italy the train cannot be conceived as Hardy’s Wessex technological contaminator, but its presence expresses the erudite mythopoesis of a literary journey into the glorious memory of the past: “Wherever the train stopped, that sea-music was in my ears —now seeming to echo a verse of Homer, now the softer rhythm of Theocritus” (Ionian Sea, 123).34 The Italian train is the mechanical dimension of the territory and, paradoxically, it becomes a privileged point of view along the countryside. With a new ecology of the eye, in a world irreparably out of the geographical control of the environment, Gissing’s spaces in the anthropocene pretend to be told again: “For half an hour the train slowly ascends. The carriages are of special construction, light and many-windowed, so that one has good views of the landscape” (Ionian Sea, 82). Gissing’s youthful flirtation with the Positivists and with contemporary middle-class hopes of cultural transformation was quickly to give way to a defensive dream of passivity and inner withdrawal from a hostile and refusing world. Certainly, a world whose only law was the “survival of the fittest”: “Keep apart, keep apart, and preserve one’s soul 34

The novelist also dramatizes the Italians’ superstitious conviction about the story of the Capuchin friar, who, without a ticket, did not allow the train to depart. See Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, 33-35.

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alive: that is the teaching of the day. It is ill to have been born in these times, but one must make a world within a world”.35 For Gissing, a man of two worlds, the escapism is an idealistic journey. The third chapter of his travel book, “The Grave of Alaric”, epitomizes the dreamy epic of a whole troubled existence that empathizes with the humble poverty of the Italians. The social experience of Gissing’s alienated, disaffected man of letters has remarkable affinities with the backward isolation of Calabria: “Here still lingers a trace of the old civilization,” states Gissing, “there must be great good in a people which has preserved this need of beauty through ages of servitude and suffering” (Ionian Sea, 20). Alaric, the first king of the Visigoths, stimulates the imaginative delight of Gissing offered by the liberation of a dreamy epic: I had come here to think about Alaric, and with my own eyes to behold the place of his burial. Ever since the first boyish reading of Gibbon, my imagination has loved to play upon that scene of Alaric's death. Thinking to conquer Sicily, the Visigoth marched as far as to the capital of the Bruttii, those mountain tribes which Rome herself never really subdued; at Consentia he fell sick and died. How often had I longed to see this river Busento, which the “labour of a captive multitude” turned aside, that its flood might cover and conceal for all time the tomb of the Conqueror! (Ionian Sea, 17).

In Gissing, the anachronistic glory of Alaric represents the discrepancy between the dream of transcendence that underpins the déclassé motif of the ancient world in which, from childhood onwards, his imagination sought refuge, and the reality of frustration that is the experience of life in the increasingly specialized world of late-Victorian capitalism. This sort of intellectual frustration with Victorian triumphalist technocracy brings Gissing closer to Hardy. Both writers condemn, and reject, the human atomization caused by modernity. The social deviations of the industrial epistemology become the object of a repudiation in the forms of the sterile relations created by a commodified community. Hardy frowns upon the mechanical principles of the Victorian society. Fatalism pervades the landscape of his narrative spaces. In Hardy’s Wessex, 1851 and its celebratory Great Exhibition, entails a temporal disjuncture from ancient and modern, “an extraordinary

35

Quoted in John Sloan, George Gissing: the Cultural Challenge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 8. Gissing wrote the lines on hearing of William Morris's arrest during a political meeting in the East End.

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chronological frontier”, “a precipice in Time”.36 Inversely, Gissing criticizes the puritanical coldness of human relations, and one should not forget his expulsion from Owens College in Manchester was because of a beloved prostitute for whom he had been accused of stealing money. All things considered, both the writers convey a sceptical view of bourgeois values. Hardy recounts Wessex and its rustics in order to preserve “a fairly true record of a vanishing life” for his own satisfaction.37 Among all the discursive forms, the novel is quite a narrative device that makes myth its deepest semantics, a mythical object capable of expressing a meaning of value in the form of artistic artifice.38 If Hardy's tragic novels serve to record a jeopardized folkloric knowledge, the novelist becomes the ethnographer who delves into his rural community. Hardy’s densely symbolic writing turns out to be a ritual practice transposed into the patterns of narrative plots. By rewriting the individual text, Hardy refocuses it as a parole of a vaster system langue: “The individual text retains its formal structure as a symbolic act: yet the value and character of such symbolic action are now significantly modified and enlarged”.39 From a different perspective, the unclassed Gissing approaches history with an escapist purpose. “The English Zola” plunges into a foreign yet familiar land with the goal of distancing himself from the modern world and its problems. “For him who cannot shape his life as he will” (Ionian Sea, 131), Gissing’s travel book is undoubtedly documentary in its attachment to the refined culture of the past. That very adherence is also the basis of a Utopianism40 that points beyond the inadequacies of both the past and the present, allowing their reconciliation. His cultural and intellectual escapism indicates an idealised path towards a world that has yet to come into being, a world of the imagination at its most hidden and challenging depths.

36

Thomas Hardy, “The Fiddlers of the Reels”, in Id., Life’s Little Ironies (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2002), 113. 37 Thomas Hardy, “General Preface to the Novels and Poems”, in Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, ed. Harold Orel, 46. 38 See Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l'écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 30. 39 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1983), 85. 40 Travel writing entails just about any act of writing and representation, and the sense of travelling in space and time extends the perspective to the mindscapes of Utopian narrative.

CHAPTER 8 “A DISTURBING PRESENCE”: UNHOMELINESS AND ESTRANGEMENT IN THE ODD WOMEN REBECCA HUTCHEON

There are half a million more women than men in this happy country of ours [...] so many odd women – no making a pair with them. The pessimists call them useless, lost, futile lives. I naturally – being one of them myself – take another view. I look upon them as a great reserve.1

This is Rhoda Nunn’s account, in The Odd Women (1893), of the dilemma facing women in the late nineteenth-century. Gently contemptuous of marriage, her wording in the passage is also indicative of the novel’s diverse and myriad rhetoric. Through Rhoda’s designation of a “great reserve” Gissing alludes to both feminist New Woman novels and, with “pessimists [...] useless, lost, futile”, ironically invokes the conservatism of smeg’s contentious essay “Why are Women Redundant?” (1862). Elsewhere in the novel, the contemporary patriarchal discourses on femininity and gender roles by writers such as Coventry Patmore and John Ruskin are variously expounded by the book’s characters. In a typically Gissing-like fashion, opposing views are variously championed and undermined, pitted against each other and vie for ascendency. So far, so predictable. But what I want to suggest is that, in Gissing’s post-1890 novels, after he had suppressed his “impertinent Ego”, this tropological, ideological, formal and structural fragmentation equates to uncanny vestiges that haunt the language, characterisation and spaces of the texts.2 1 George Gissing, The Odd Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 44 (italics in original). 2 George Gissing, “Preface” to the Second Edition of The Unclassed, in George Gissing: Critical Heritage eds. Pierre Coustillas and Colin Partridge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 74.

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Before dwelling on the haunting nature of Gissing’s allusions and irony, let us return briefly to novel’s ostensible focus – the incongruity of women. The oddness of Gissing’s Odd Women is well-documented in both contemporaneous and modern criticism. An early review, for example, defines the novel as a story about women […] quite unfitted to realise for themselves that to be successful, to burst the bonds which encapsulates their narrow, sordid lives, they must be ‘odd’”.3

More recently, critics such as John Sloan, Emma Liggins, Sally Ledger and Josephine McQuail, have also focused on the female characters.4 These readings are variously apt. Gissing himself, writing to Edward Bertz during the novel’s composition, explained: “the title means ‘Les Femmes Superflues’ – the women who are odd in the sense that they do not make a match; as we say ‘an odd glove’”.5 To define someone as odd, especially when consigned to the chremamorphic analogy of a glove, is to imply a missing part of a necessary double, an unnatural incompleteness. Others, namely Mark Gibson, Tara MacDonald and Simon J James and Christine Huguet, have registered how Gissing’s writings (and The Odd Women in particular) also explore the predicaments and failures of masculinity.6 Accordingly, this chapter will demonstrate how in many respects The Odd Women is concerned with a broader crisis of identity, that the charge of “oddness” can equally be laid at the feet of the male protagonists (Edmund Widdowson in particular), and that this oddness leaves uncanny markers in the novel’s structures. The novel exposes the 3

Critical Heritage, 215. John Sloan, George Gissing: The Cultural Challenge (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989); Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Emma Liggins, George Gissing, the Working Woman, and Urban Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Josephine McQuail, “‘Woman as an Invader’: Travel and Travail in George Gissing’s The Odd Women” 139-51 in Gissing and the City, ed. John Spiers (Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2006). 5 The Letters of George Gissing to Eduard Bertz 1887-1903, ed. Arthur C. Young (London: Constable, 1961), 171. 6 Mark Gibson, “Odd Women and Male Vision: Men’s Views of Women in The Odd Women”, The Gissing Journal 26:2 (1990), 2-20; Christine Huguet and Simon J James, “Gissing’s Failed New Men: Masculinity in The Odd Women” in George Gissing and the Woman Question: Convention and Dissent, ed. Christine Huguet and Simon J. James (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Tara MacDonald, The New Man, Masculinity and Marriage in the Victorian Novel (London and New York: Routledge, 2015). 4

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pressure to conform to, or fit into, societal roles and identities. This, in turn, creates an essential preoccupation with doubleness and oddness, with symmetries and asymmetries that, in the conflict between society and unconscious, creates a rupture which is the perfect breeding-ground for the uncanny. Such latent uncanniness can be traced in the novel’s language, in its narrative and spatial patterning, and in what Julian Wolfreys has elsewhere described as the “disturbing interaction between people and place”.7

Language, narrative and the urban uncanny Monica Madden’s oddness is derived from her divergence from the traditional middle-class female trajectory – her movement from the family home to her husband’s house is disrupted by a period of work and independent living. Monica’s interaction with the outside, Emma Liggins tells us, displays her “urban knowledge” which, to Sally Ledger, affords Monica attributes of the flâneuse.8 All this equates to oddness in the sense of being separated from a usual pairing, of being mis- or out-of-place. It is on an outing to Richmond Park when, having been stood up by her colleague Miss Eade, Monica “start[s] alone” and meets another lone figure, Edmund Widdowson (Gissing 1993, 37). Loneliness, or singularity, is bound up in his name, a compound of foretelling and foreboding nouns (widow-son). But rather than through direct representation, the initial meeting is reported via Monica’s “reverie” in church. Lost in a dream, Monica: “was probably the one who went through the service most mechanically. Not a word reached her understanding”; throughout she “wore the same preoccupied look, with ever and again a slight smile or a movement of the lips, as if she were recalling some conversation of special interest” (Gissing 1993, 37). At first it as though, in some strange pre-echo of Widdowson’s shadowy surveillance of Monica as he stalks her through the city and watches her house, the narrator (and therefore the reader) is a partial and external witness. This externality is emphasised in “mechanically” with its halfgesture towards uncanny automatism. But through the ensuing daydream narrative (also reminiscent of automatism9), the boundary between internal and external begins to merge. The narrator enters Monica’s thoughts as they drift back to the previous Sunday and blur into a stream of consciousness 7

Julian Wolfreys, Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture, 1800–Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018), 36. 8 Liggins, Working Woman, 119; Ledger, New Woman, 162-69. 9 Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 38.

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that is half prompted by, yet constantly wandering from, the surroundings. As Monica thinks of couples and her loneliness, of her sisters and their poverty, of her prospects and employment, she enters a dream-within-adream. The oscillation between focalisation and narratorial perspective lends the passage a strange sense of distance. The earlier description of Monica in the church comes from the point of view of a provisional narrator who holds certain information back thus unsettling the boundaries between memory, reflection and fancy: her preoccupation is undefined, her face displays a “smile or a movement, as if she were recalling” – the description is in free indirect style. As Samuel Weber makes clear, “the role of the narrator”, although “totally neglected by Freud,” “provides the context for that movement of repetition and splitting which is constitutive for the uncanny”10 Widdowson’s oddness is of an altogether different type. The first account of him is focalised through Monica as she weighs up his attributes as a possible suitor. Her mediations – “[h]is utterance fell short of perfect refinement, but seemed that of an educated man. And certainly his clothes were such as a gentleman wears. [...] Was it a bad sign that he carried neither gloves nor walking-stick?” – communicate uncertainty (Gissing 1993, 38). He is defined in terms of negation – “fell short”, appearance – “seemed”, and incompletion. This estranges Widdowson; any initial sense of his character is gained through Monica’s cataloguing of external signifiers, itself checked by narrative reticence. Held up in the seeming identity of the doubly singular Widdowson, then, is the prevailing sense of the opposite, a hint of an Other, a double. What’s more, this instability prefigures his volatile and changeable temperament. Next comes Widdowson’s disembodied voice: he mentioned that he had had a long drive, alone; his horse was baiting in preparation for the journey back to London. He often took such drives in the summer. [...] He lived at Herne Hill (Gissing 1993, 38-9).

The continued use of the third person diminishes Widdowson, his presence is effaced, and this impression is furthered by the past tense of the retrospective account. In the transposed speech, loneliness, or oddness, comes at the centre of Widdowson’s presentation of himself, and therefore is intimated as something integral to his identity. This sense is reinforced structurally: “alone” is formally isolated, singled out in its own clause at the

10 Samuel Weber, “The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment,” Modern Language Notes, 88 (1973), 1102-33, 1123

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sentence’s centre. Despite her misgivings, Monica agrees to meet Widdowson again: And why had she consented? The man could never be anything to her; he was too old, too hard-featured, too grave. Well, on that very account there would be no harm in meeting him. In truth, she had not felt the courage to refuse; in a manner he had overawed her. And perhaps she would not keep the engagement. Nothing compelled her. She had not told him her name, nor the house where she was employed. There was a week to think it over. All days and times were the same to him—he said (Gissing 1993, 39-40).

Again, the narrative, deftly and almost unnoticeably, switches between focalisation and interpretation. Since she’s not attracted to Widdowson, Monica reasons, it wouldn’t be improper to meet. But the narrator gives access to Monica’s unconscious realisation that she felt unable to refuse, that she’s been subdued by him. As though in retort to the implied narrative voice Monica reflects that, due to the freedom of anonymity, she can still cancel. Nonetheless, the words describing her decision – not having “the courage to refuse”, “overawed”, “compelled” – give a residual sense of coercion. And the closing impression of Widdowson, to whom all days and all times are identical, adds to the overall disquiet it its iterative monotony. In the end Monica is compelled to meet Widdowson. At the start of the chapter leading into their meeting comes a curious paragraph: At that corner of Battersea Park which is near Albert Bridge there has lain for more than twenty years a curious collection of architectural fragments, chiefly dismembered columns, spread in order upon the ground, and looking like portions of a razed temple. It is the colonnade of old Burlington House, conveyed hither from Piccadilly who knows why, and likely to rest here, the sporting ground for adventurous infants, until its origin is lost in the abyss of time (Gissing 1993, 46).

The set piece registers the site as somewhere where the present is haunted by the past. But it is a past that, “conveyed hither from Piccadilly” and soon to be “lost in the abyss of time”, is bifurcated from its temporal and spatial narrative. Much like the passage itself, the ruins are out-of-place in their context and, with “who knows why”, their meaning is obscured. As such, the seemingly digressive description can be read as an anticipatory chremamorphic doubling of Widdowson. Like the segment of Burlington House “laid out in order” and appearing like a temple, Widdowson’s

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apparent command – his stony features and gravitas – hides deep-set disintegration and purposelessness; “I never”, Widdowson later admits to Monica, “found what my way was to be” (Gissing 1993, 52). The fragments of dismembered columns initiate a pattern of loneliness that is repeated in Widdowson: “I live a rather lonely life”; “I keep so much to myself” (Gissing 1993, 52), and a detachment so profound that, at times, “[Monica’s] companion was scarcely more than a voice” (Gissing 1993, 48). When read this way, what emerges is a rupture between the painstakingly described details of outward realism and the odd and repetitive preoccupations and anxieties that figure underneath. And it is at moments as seemingly irrelevant and objective as the portrayal of the Burlington House ruins that the uncanniness of Gissing’s textuality comes through: the external mirrors or exposes a more troubling inward truth, and emotional incoherence is displaced and is a given a furtive voice in the inanimate. The depiction of the ruins, then, leave the reader with a sense of foreboding at the start of Monica and Widdowson’s union. The trip through the park and along the river is full of such unease, awkwardness, unnaturalness, the unfamiliar – “coldness”, “silence”, “threatened”, “perturbed”, “anxiety” (Gissing 1993, 48, 50, 55). And this is bolstered, too, by the persistence reticence of the narrative voice. Focalised through Monica, we witness only Widdowson’s outward features that, despite signalling inner turmoil, nonetheless remain apart from the narrative explanation: “when silent he had the look of one who inwardly debates a grave question”; “[he] looked desperately grave, and drove the boat on. Monica was disturbed”. Grave, here used as an adjective (later echoed in Widdowson’s smile “that graved wrinkles about his eyes” (Gissing, 54)) and carrying the noun entombed within it, becomes something of Widdowson’s leitmotif. And the more we hear of him, the more we are aware of his troubled sense of self. He is, for instance, profoundly alert to his rootlessness. He is insecure in his religious faith. He is haunted by memories of life as a clerk and his inferiority subordinated to a huge institution. The inheritance of his brother’s wealth allows him to become a “man of means,” but he is ill-equipped in the role of a gentleman (Gissing 1993, 40). Where Burlington House, and the early encounters of Widdowson, evoke a man disembodied, his description of Herne Hill is one of uncanny embodiment. And if Freud is certain of anything concerning the uncanny, it is that it begins at home. According to Freud, the haunted house is “perhaps the most potent” instance of the uncanny, as it carries the symbolic associations so often connected with the concept, namely “death, dead

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bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts” (Freud, 148). Anthony Vidler, making the case for the architectural uncanny, argues that in the nineteenth century the house provided an especially favoured site for uncanny disturbances: its apparent domesticity, its residue of family history and nostalgia, its role as the last and most intimate shelter of private comfort sharpened by contrast the terror of invasion by alien spirits.11

However, this alone is not enough, for “here the uncanny is too much mixed up with the gruesome and partly overlaid by it” (Freud, 148). The haunted house, then, is not by default uncanny since the uncanny is reliant on an experiencing conscious, or what Vidler describes as the relationship between “the psyche and the dwelling, the body and the house”.12 Rather it is Widdowson’s description of his interaction with his house that endorses its uncanniness. ‘“All my life”’, he explains to Monica, I have wished to have a house of my own, but I didn’t dare to hope that I ever should. Men in general don’t seem to care so long as they have lodgings that suit them, – I mean unmarried men. But I always wanted to live alone – without strangers, that is to say. I told you that I am not very sociable. – When I got my house, I was like a child with a toy; I couldn’t sleep for satisfaction. I used to walk over it, day after day, before it was furnished. There was something that delighted me in the sound of my footsteps on the staircases and bare floors. Here I shall live and die, I kept saying to myself. (Gissing 1993, 84)

The new home is a realisation of a dream of solitude, a representation of a mental state. Widdowson’s dreams of privacy, of insular living, and his delight in permanence might appear to correlate with the epitome of the suburban ideal. His childlike “delight” in the solitude of the empty house, his sleeplessness, is given a ritualistic quality through repetition (“day after day”). This sensuous interaction with embodied place finds a parallel in the return to the site of childhood described in Henry James’s short story “The Jolly Corner” (1909). Spencer Brydon, alarmed by the rapid change he sees in New York, retreats into and increasingly relishes the materiality of his family home. Brydon speaks of all the value he read into it, into the mere sight of the wall, mere shapes of the rooms, mere sounds of the floors, mere feel, in his hand, of the old

11

Anthony Vidler, Essays on the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 17. 12 Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, x.

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silver-plated knobs of the several mahogany doors, which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead.13

Like the house at Herne Hill, Brydon’s “jolly corner” is loaded with the resonant psycho-dynamics of place. Yet in The Odd Women, the pleasure Widdowson derives from hearing his “footsteps on the staircases and bare floors” ironically exposes the vacancy and narcissism of his domestic fantasy. In lieu of a ghost, Widdowson haunts his own house, his echoing footsteps a synecdoche of the fragmented self. His neurotically repetitive movement, full of mechanical redolence, is iterated on a local level with the report of his repeated interior dialogue – “here I shall live and die, I kept saying”. This results in a doubled image of home; the realisation of stability is met by a lonely, barren finality. To both Widdowson and Brydon, the empty house has an embodied presence that, through phenomenological engagement, is rife with associations with childhood and death. But where Brydon, the returning native, connects death with a continued line of personal history in the family home, for Widdowson, a stranger in a new house, death is the future and his own. What both instances make clear is that the uncanny is not an external presence but rather something which arises from inside the self. The uncanniness of Widdowson’s house is brought about through his ritual of familiarity which, in its hypnotic iteration, pre-empts his obsessive cycles both before the marriage (perambulating the streets near where Monica lives) and after (picking the same arguments).

The suburban house The suburbs of Gissing’s post-1890 novels are characterised by, on the one hand, their iterability and monotony and, on the other, their frailty and ambivalence. In both cases, the visual – row upon row of terraced houses – is symptomatic of an ideologically inflected inward aesthetic. So, for instance, in In the Year of Jubilee (1894) the duplicated villas of Grove Lane both cause and reflect the protagonist Nancy’s ennui. And elsewhere in the novel, the new jerry-built environs of Merton Avenue register how dangerously close the suburbs are to merging into their ideological opposite: the slums.14 The Odd Women is unusual in Gissing’s suburban oeuvre in that although Monica’s claustrophobia neatly prefigures Nancy’s in creating 13 Henry James, “The Jolly Corner,” in The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, vol. 12 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964), 201. 14 See Rebecca Hutcheon, Writing Place: Mimesis, Subjectivity and imagination in the Work of George Gissing (London: Routledge, 2018).

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a narrative of female suburban entrapment, it also provides an unsettling counterpart to Widdowson’s suburban topophilia and agoraphobia. The uncanniness of Widdowson’s house is brought about through his ritual of familiarity which, in its almost hypnotic obsessiveness, carries darker undertones. To Vidler the uncanniness of the suburbs arises when their profound ordinariness and uniformity is matched with the “fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners [...] to suddenly become defamiliar, and seem derealised, as if in dreams”.15 The outward appearance of Widdowson’s house at Herne Hill, one of “two little villas, built together, with stone facings, porches at the doors, and ornamental gables”, with, as Widdowson remarks, “nothing pretty or noticeable about it [...] it isn’t grandly furnished” offers an impression of just this kind of bland and banal show of familiarity (Gissing 1993, 84). The semi-detached house, itself always a double, is described by Widdowson via a series of negations, just as, earlier, he describes himself (“I don’t easily make friends”, “I can’t talk to strangers” (Gissing 1993, 52)). These negations are simultaneously suggestive of the suburbs’ strange liminality or indefinability (occupying the threshold between the city and the country which, along with the city’s boundaries, is subject to shifts), and of a seeming homogeneity which emerges as a site of blankness or inexpression. As a result, the house is at once deeply personal – an articulation of the finally realised self – and deeply pedestrian – indistinguishable from its neighbour. The suburban, then, is a slippery term that is hard to pin down. It is an architecture and a location, a discourse and an ideology, simultaneously geographical and tangible yet shifting and nebulous. The contradictions at the heart of suburbia, as escape and prison, protected and threatened, urban and non-urban, imply both an instability of meaning and a lack of clear-cut distinction. And at the heart of the uncanny, too, lies a structural uncertainty in the relationship between familiar and unfamiliar. In his examination of the terms in German and across other languages, Freud’s definition relays the ambiguity caused when unheimlich snakes around to incorporate its opposite heimlich: 16 “[w]hat interests us most [...] is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word ‘heimlich’ exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, ‘unheimlich’” (Freud 2003, 129). In Freud’s reading, then, the uncanny concerns the destabilising of a dialectic, a textual and linguistic instability, a crossing of thresholds and the porousness of boundaries. This transgression of borders and merging of seeming opposites is also true of suburbia. Supposedly or ideologically speaking, the suburb 15

Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, 10. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” (1919) in The Uncanny, trans. David McClintock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 195-201.

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capitulated domesticity, privacy, and isolation; it provided a space away from, but in close reach of, the city. Suburban space, then, is grounded in the maintenance of distinction and distance in which cultural and social distinction is imaginatively realised in physical distance. Already it’s clear that the suburb is defined as much by what it isn’t – the city, the commercial, the slum – as by what it is. What this leads to is the suburbs being constantly undermined by boundary anxieties and an unstable identity, and herein lies their uncanny potential. In Gissing’s earlier novels, of the 1880s, people could be easily identified by their place and locations – Clerkenwell, Lambeth, Holborn – had characters of their own that could be mapped out and, to a certain extent, grasped by the narrative. This is what makes the suburban locations of The Odd Women so odd. Herne Hill is remarkably abstract compared to the much more demarcated areas of the City elsewhere in the text. In the suburb, what is foregrounded is ideological and psychological mapping: the effect of place and its connotations on mental space in which the place itself is impressionistic. On one of his early meetings with Monica, Widdowson wants to shape the city and to reinforce the notion of suburban separation: The sky threatened till sundown, but Widdowson was able to keep declaring that rain would not come. He took a south-westward course, crossed Waterloo Bridge, and thence by the highways made for Herne Hill. Monica observed that he made a short detour to avoid Walworth Road. She asked his reason. [...] 'Because you slaved and suffered there. If I had the power, I would destroy it—every house. Many a time,' he added, in a lower voice, 'when you were lying asleep, I walked up and down there in horrible misery.' (Gissing 1993, 83)

Widdowson’s route, avoiding the site of Monica’s employment on Walworth Road, spatialises his escapist attitude, his longing to distance the suburban home from labour (both Monica’s but also, by extension, his own). Yet his use of the conditional past perfect exposes the hopelessness of complete separation and his wilful ignorance of the connection, physical and psychical, between the two. The heavy-handed symbolism of pathetic fallacy – “the sky threatened” – makes the psychic significance unavoidably clear: the threat of the storm bleeds into the threat of Widdowson’s suppressed pugnacity (“If I had the power, I would destroy it”) and stalkerish tendencies. Where the route connecting city to suburb is mapped out – south-westward, Waterloo Bridge, highways avoiding Walworth Road – the suburbs remain indistinct, unmapped, and charged, instead, with affective significance: “[t]he tired horse clattered upon the hard highway and clouds gathered for a night of storm” (Gissing 1993, 86). The return of

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pathetic fallacy gives the landscape agency where Widdowson, in his automaton-like circling, has none, and creates an impression of displacement in which “tired”, “hard”, and “storm” inflect the suburbs with foreboding. Physical indistinctiveness, then, demands that meaning in the suburbs be sought out via other modes. Herne Hill’s lack of tangible characteristics forces its allusive association with John Ruskin, who spent his early life there, to the fore. In his suburban villa, Widdowson yearns for the traditional Ruskinian middleclass home. But by 1873, the once semirural isolated suburbs had become, to Ruskin, an endless land of rotten brick repeated ad infinitum. All houses have a drawing-room and dining, room, transparent from back to front, so that from the road one sees the people’s heads inside, clear against the light. [...] They are fastened in a Siamese-twin manner together by their sides, and each couple has a Greek or Gothic portico shared between them, with magnificent steps, and highly ornamented capitals.17

According to Ruskin, the sprawling suburbs subvert their original qualities of seclusion and exclusivity, the houses are open, visible, multiplied and cramped. The focus on duality, and on the porches and gables, connects to the description of the villa at Herne Hill. As a result, Widdowson’s ideal is shown to be unachievable since, in the words of the very figure he identifies with, the sought-for mid-Victorian suburban ideal is obsolete. The suburbs become, instead, a site of repression in which something hidden – the city – comes to light. The circuitous route enacts this repression spatially in an attempt to emulate a distance no longer viable in the modern city of connection.

“The joys of home”18 The connection to Ruskin, implied through Herne Hill, becomes a fully realised subtext of domestic interiority. Widdowson, anxious about modernity and outside influences, covertly wishes to repress Monica’s past: “his wife’s former pursuits were an abomination to him; he could not bear to hear them referred it” (Gissing 1993, 171). The violence of his repugnance, and desire to banish all thought of the past, places Widdowson in a state of denial. As a result, his following proclamations that “[w]oman’s sphere is the home”, that women’s work is “unnatural”, and that “every word 17

John Ruskin, Fors Clavigiera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (New York: John B Alden, 1885), 413. 18 Gissing, The Odd Women, 167-181.

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[Ruskin] says about women is good and precious” immediately appears as antedated fanaticism (Gissing 1993, 171). Such ideals, in line with the earlier Victorian doctrine of separate and gendered spheres, are laid out in Ruskin’s 1865 lecture “Of Queen’s Gardens”. The woman, Ruskin writes, is designed for “sweet ordering, arrangement and decision”, she “sees the qualities of things, their claims, and their places”.19 Like Ruskin, Widdowson conflates the customary and natural, the mental and the material. The marital home, Ruskin continues, should be the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home.20

The home as the centre of tranquillity, security and stability, as a haven from the outside world, is coloured with a nostalgia that anticipates similar masculine constructions of the domestic by later theorists like Heidegger and Bachelard. But, with “terror, doubt and division”, Ruskin ushers us straight into the world of the uncanny which lurks at the borders of the house and can creep in through its walls, admitted by its inhabitants and carrying the constant threat of reversing home and “not home”. Analogously, Henri Lefebvre points out that the “special, still sacred, quasi-religious and in fact almost absolute space” that Bachelard links with the concept of the house reflects “the terrible urban reality that the twentieth century has instituted.”21 The dream of a stable and isolated home is, as Vidler has suggested, a reaction symptomatic of the experience of an unheimlich modernity.22 This links with Bachelard’s own questioning of stable boundaries in one of his few acknowledgements of deleterious potential in the architecture of domesticity: “[o]utside and inside form a dialectic of division, the obvious geometry of which blinds us [...] Outside and inside are both intimate – they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility”.23 To Bachelard, this “dizzying” meeting point of open and confined spaces carries within it extreme states of spatial fear: claustrophobia and agoraphobia. 19

John Ruskin, Sesames and Lilies (London: Dent, 1907), 59. Ruskin, Sesames and Lilies, 60. 21 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 120–121. 22 Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, 63–66 23 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (1958; New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 211. 20

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What all these constructions of home do, then, is envisage in absolutes and, by so doing, define it not just in its own terms but also in terms of its opposite. Absolutes and opposites also, by definition, create boundaries that in themselves always carry transgressive potential. They also recognise, as with Ruskin’s penetrating “anxieties of outer life” and Bachelard’s dialectic, the proximity of hostility to the domestic core. From this emplaced, outward-looking perspective, which positions home uncomplicatedly at the centre of desire, it is Monica’s subversive domestic deficiencies which introduce division into the home and render it hostile and unheimlich. She, as Ledger puts it, “wreaks havoc on conventional marriage”, and disrupts “gender codes by occupying public spaces”.24 But is it not in fact Widdowson who, in constructing opposites, also creates an involuntary spatial fear and thus crosses the threshold of Ruskin’s inadvertent uncanny? Domestic life, to Widdowson, is one of repetition and complete acquiesce to habit: He had a passion for routine. Every night, before going upstairs, he did a number of little things in unvarying sequence – changed the calendar for next day, made perfect order on his writing-table, wound up his watch, and so on. That Monica could not direct her habits with like exactitude was frequently a distress to him; if she chanced to forget any most trivial detail of daily custom he looked very solemn, and begged her to be more vigilant. (Gissing 1993, 174)

This attentiveness to the minutia of space goes beyond the middle-class Victorian preoccupation with material objects as a way of expressing and identifying the self. Widdowson’s worship of the domestic is of a kind traditionally assigned to women. Obsessed with “perfect order” and the “little things”, he neurotically performs tasks of “sweet ordering, arrangement and decision”, seeing “the qualities of things, their claims, and their places” in a manner akin to how Ruskin defines a wife show perform her duties.25 Where Monica yearns for “more freedom of movement”, one comparable to that of her pre-marital life, Widdowson is most happy when they remain cloistered and undisturbed at home: “[t]he week was in all respects what Widdowson desired. Not a soul came to the house; Monica went to see no one” and “his contentment overflowed in tenderness”. But in all things concerning the outside, Widdowson’s paranoia goes into overdrive, “tormented” by “suspicion” of subterfuge when a doctor recommends Monica leave the house more. Widdowson’s desire to stay at home, when it begins to merge into fanaticism, appears as a phobia of the 24 25

Ledger, The New Woman, 162. Ruskin, Sesames and Lilies, 60.

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outside, one that Vidler defines as the “metropolitan” uncanny: “identified with all the phobias associated with spatial fear [...] including agoraphobia [...] a distancing forced from reality by reality”.26 Widdowson spasmodically oscillates between a desperate desire to please Monica and “sheer frenzy” mixed with “ceaseless torment” (Gissing 1993, 219). Jenny Bourne Taylor has suggested that, in Born in Exile, Gissing “starts to anticipate the modern narrative” by dissecting “Godwin's self-absorbed and divided psyche”: “the critique of modern culture”, she argues, “is refracted through the personality of its central protagonist”, whom she describes as at once “fragile and controlling”.27 The same could be said of Widdowson and The Odd Women. The cultural critique of the novel, its exploration of marriage and gender roles, is played out in Widdowson’s battle between “tradition and reason” (Gissing 1993, 220). He rapidly alternates between wild mistrust and grovelling tolerance and, when Monica leaves the house, he follows her in spite of himself, as though stuck in a pattern of haunting observation: Insufferable misery possessed him. [...] Resolve as he might, he found it impossible to repress the impulses of jealousy which, as soon as peace had been declared between them, brought about a new misunderstanding. Terrible thoughts smouldered in his mind; he felt himself to be one of those men who are driven by passion into crime. Deliberately he had brooded over a tragic close to the wretchedness of his existence; he would kill himself, and Monica should perish with him (Gissing 1993, 219).

Widdowson, “possessed”, unable to “repress” his jealousy, is split, resolving to be level-headed yet always reverting back to morbidly dwelling on selfdestructive tendencies. Impulse wins over will every time. It is Widdowson who is “inconsistently-minded”, and who introduces “doubt, division and terror” into the home, thus making the domestic space in which he desires Monica to remain a site of the uncanny. The uncanny, after all, is not a property of space itself, but rather a projection of a mental state that elides boundaries between opposites. Widdowson’s agoraphobia registers just how easily that suburban aspiration for solitude and privacy slips, when pervaded with his adversity to strangers, into estrangement – a state Vidler defines as peculiarly modern and urban.28 Widdowson’s estrangement is manifold: ideological, cultural. spatial. But what makes his estrangement uncanny is his distance from the narrator and, therefore, the reader. Rarely does the narrative enter into Widdowson’s 26

Vidler, Uncanny Architecture, 6. Jenny Bourne Taylor, “The Strange Case of Godwin Peak: Double Consciousness in Born in Exile,” 61-76 in 63. 28 Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, 9. 27

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consciousness with the same effortless ease as it does other characters (Monica, Everard Barfoot, Rhoda Nunn). And when his thoughts are communicated, they remain at arm’s length: Widdowson began to perceive that he must exert authority in a way he had imagined would never be necessary. All his fears, after all, were not groundless. Monica's undomestic life, and perhaps the association with those Chelsea people, had left results upon her mind. By way of mild discipline, he first of all suggested a closer attention to the affairs of the house. Would it not be well if she spent an hour a day in sewing or fancy work? Monica so far obeyed as to provide herself with some plain needlework, but Widdowson, watching with keen eye, soon remarked that her use of the needle was only a feint. He lay awake o' nights, pondering darkly (Gissing 1993, 172).

Although the narrative details Widdowson’s reflections and fears, the perspective is projected outwards to “those Chelsea people” and Monica rather than inwards. The rhetorical question, which elsewhere might signal entrance into an interior monologue, here just mimics the lack of actual communication between husband and wife and again emphasises Widdowson’s deflection tactics, implying an absent subjective centre. The internal viewpoint shifts and becomes actual viewing as Widdowson – always the passive observer – suspiciously watches Monica. The poetic register of “o’ nights” depersonalises and further distances Widdowson, giving a sense of his self-dramatisation. Rather than thinking with Widdowson, the narrative simply reports his act of thinking. By contrast, via free indirect speech, the reader experiences with Monica how Widdowson’s agoraphobia creates the opposing spatial fear of claustrophobia: “[s]he wished so to be alone” and have the “liberty to lie awake, to think without a disturbing presence” (Gissing 1993, 224). Privacy – that stalwart of middle-class Victorian ideology – is denied to Monica, and the home is a prison of Widdowson’s insistent and inexhaustible presence. In the early depictions of her “free wanderings” as Monica moves from place to place, and even the early meetings with Widdowson in parks and drives around the city, London appears expansive and connected. After her marriage Monica’s spatial existence becomes cumulatively narrower in focus consisting, instead, of various detached interiors. As with Herne Hill, and the exterior of Widdowson’s house, the interior is remarkably indistinct; there is very little detail given of the furnishings, the objects within. This all contributes to an overall sense of unhomeliness at home but also to its horrendous intensity in that the narrative denies the relief of coded displacement. The action is almost solely confined to the library, the site of miscommunication in which Widdowson’s abstract theory abuts Monica’s

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need for lived experience. The spatial contraction is reinforced formally as the novel becomes gradually more episodic in structure. This atmosphere of confinement is furthered by Widdowson’s surveillance – first in person, then via a hired detective – that makes Monica the cynosure of multiple vantage points. The uncanniness of this sinister surveillance surfaces in the gap between known and the unknown. At times, Monica is aware of being watched, as when Widdowson haunts the streets outside her house: “he gazed in that direction”, “his eye was upon her”, to the point that “whenever she went out in the evening, it was with expectation of seeing him somewhere in the neighbourhood”; “more likely than not his eyes had several times been upon her” (Gissing 1993, 73; 82). This continues after their marriage: “you want to get me away into a quiet country place where I shall be under your eyes every moment” (Gissing 1993, 221). Unsettling enough. But worse is when Monica is unconscious of the watching eye: “his eyes devoured the front of the building” (Gissing 1993, 76). Feeling eyes upon you is one thing, but the hidden, unsensed eye takes on properties of the monstrous made all the worse since, as readers, we feel complicit in the observation and invasion.

Repetition and return Only by staying at home, under Widdowson’s watchful gaze, can Monica avoid confrontation. The home becomes the site of endless reiteration as the couple fluctuate between loaded silence and stagnant, revolving arguments. They remain trapped in the same dispute due to Widdowson’s compulsion to repeat: “[h]e plunged on into the ancient quagmire. ‘A man may know with impunity what is injurious if it enters a woman's mind’” (Gissing 1993, 223). The couple endlessly circle around the same topics of freedom and independence, of duty and convention and, later, of accusation and denial. Widdowson’s solution to their marital problems, which he sees caused by the city and its troubling modernity, is to move to Clevedon, the place of Monica’s childhood. And so the novel ends where it begins, retreating back, like Monica and Widdowson’s arguments, rather than progressing forwards. To revisit the lost home, Bachelard suggests, is to cross a threshold into unreality.29 And, in Vidler’s reading, to return is to be confronted with the architectural uncanny, the familiar homeliness now “oozing dread”.30 In the end, Monica perishes at the hands of external forces. The heavy cogs of the realist tradition – with its propensity for bowdlerisation – begin turning, generating narrative circularity by ending the novel as it 29 30

Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 77-79. Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, 8.

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starts, with a death in Clevedon. The diminution of Monica’s agency is signalled by a shift in naming and narrative focus. In London, where her “will is stronger” than Widdowson’s and her thoughts are focalised, Monica is intimately and knowingly referred to by her first name (Gissing 1993, 279). In Clevedon, she is increasingly spoken about rather than through, an object not a subject, and is therefore defined as “Mrs Widdowson”. Of course, the division of character and narrative has been there throughout and nowhere is that clearer than in the novel’s chapter headings. “The Joys of Home” depicts marital discord and “Health from the Sea”, blazing rows in painfully symbolic stormy weather. Such titles, then, are loaded with caustic satire, and irony itself is a linguistic doubling which reverses meaning and yet depends upon its opposite. Likewise, the omniscient and telepathic narrator – that uncanniest of agencies – has been there all along, hinting and haunting. The narrative possesses and portrays “uncanny knowledge” – a feature of narrative fiction alone.31 And more than the ghost story, more than the Gothic novel, realist fiction bears uncanny potential since it hides or represses its “disturbing presence[s]” under an obsessional preoccupation with materialities (houses, appearances) and structures (of narrative tradition, meaning, society, culture, gender). And yet, as a result, all these compulsions and attempts to reinforce boundaries (inside/outside, public/private, home/away) simply increase and encourage the possibility and magnitude of their infringement.

31

Royle, The Uncanny, 256.

CHAPTER 9 “THE WAY TO LITERATURE”: GISSING, DICKENS AND THE PLACE OF INFLUENCE FRANCESCA MACKENNEY

To many George Gissing seemed an unlikely choice for a critical study of Charles Dickens. The journalist C. K. Shorter commented on the “curious irony” of giving “Mr Gissing the task of appreciating Dickens”: “the one writer makes poverty so much more depressing than it really is, the other so much more joyous”.1 In many ways, Gissing defined himself in direct opposition to his literary forebear. Following the publication of his first novel, Workers in the Dawn (1880), the young novelist wrote to his brother, Algernon Gissing: I have struck out a path for myself in fiction, for one cannot of course compare my method & aims with those of Dickens. I mean to bring home to people the ghastly condition (material, mental, & moral,) of our poor classes, to show the hideous injustice of our whole system of society.2

Gissing sets out the key differences between himself and Dickens in terms of both their literary methods and aims: his intention is to reveal the “ghastly condition” of the poorer classes with little of the “joyousness” which Shorter and others associated (rightly or wrongly) with Dickens. As critics have discerned, however, the fact that Gissing finds it necessary to point out these differences hints at an underlying anxiety regarding the extent of his literary inheritance. The two novelists can and must be

1

C. K. Shorter, ‘Literary Letter’ Illustrated London News, 26th February 1898, 296. Pierre Coustillas, Paul F. Matthiessen and Arthur C. Young, eds., Collected Letters of George Gissing, 10 vols (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1990-7), II, 320 2

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compared, for Gissing defines himself, as Simon J. James observes, “always by the contrast”.3 In Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898), Gissing presented his predecessor as very much “a man of his times”; by placing Dickens firmly in context, he also implicitly distanced himself from the man and the times in which he wrote.4 Later, however, Gissing retraced his steps and retrospectively acknowledged how certain street-names and topographical aspects of London would immediately call to mind a character or expression from Dickens. In “Dickens in Memory” (Literature, 1901), Gissing recalls eagerly hunting out the places made famous by Dickens’s fiction on his first visit to the metropolis: The very atmosphere declared him; if I gasped in a fog, was it not Mr. Guppy’s “London particular”?—if the wind pierced me under a black sky, did I not see Scrooge’s clerk trotting off to his Christmas Eve in Somers Town? In time I came to see London with my own eyes, but how much better when I saw it with those of Dickens!5

Literary maturity does not so much involve striking out on a new path as a kind of banishment—an irrevocable “fall” from a Dickensian foggy Eden. In this respect Gissing expresses a similar ambivalence as that which Sarah Winter has discerned in Henry James, F. R. Leavis and other critics of Dickens in the early to mid-twentieth century. Following stark criticism of Dickens’s “lifeless, forced, mechanical” characterisation in an 1865 review of Our Mutual Friend, in an autobiographical fragment of 1913, James expressed a reluctance to allow the “draught of intellect” to come whistling through the “dusty” treasure-chambers of youth.6 Childhood memories are preserved, like Miss Havisham’s wedding dress, even as the mature critic acknowledges that these “dusty” treasures are no longer accessible to a developed adult consciousness (James 1983, 92; 315-7). Ironically, Gissing recalls Dickens’s account of his childhood reading in his fictional autobiography, David Copperfield (1849-50). 3

Simon J. James, Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing (London: Anthem Press, 2003), 39. See also John Goode, Ideology and Fiction (London: Barnes & Noble, 1979), 15. 4 Pierre Coustillas, Simon J. James and Christine de Vine, eds., Collected Works of George Gissing on Charles Dickens, 3 vols, vol. 2, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (Surrey: Grayswater Press, 2004), 17. 5 Pierre Coustillas, ed., vol. 1, Essays, Introductions and Reviews (Surrey: Grayswater Press, 2004), 50. 6 Henry James, Autobiographies, ed. Frederick W. Dupree (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 254, 92.

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Gissing was certainly familiar with the passage, which he quoted in a later article on “The Homes and Haunts of Dickens” (Nottinghamshire Guardian, 1902): Every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone in the church, and every foot of the churchyard, had some association of its own, in my mind, connected with these books, and stood for some locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the church steeple; I have watched Strap, with the knapsack on his back, stopping to rest himself upon the wicket-gate; and I know that Commodore Trunnion held that club with Mr. Pickle, in the parlour of our little village alehouse.7

Both writers movingly attest to the importance of literature in forming the associations which shape the child’s perception of their reality. Gissing pays tribute to an influence which dates back, in his own phrase, “to the very beginning of things” (Gissing 2004, I, 47). There are no things before art, there is no London before Dickens, and Gissing cannot remember those early years without lapsing back into the style of the author he knew and loved so well. In recalling Dickens’s account of his childhood reading in his account of reading Dickens as a child, Gissing not only acknowledges his own personal indebtedness; he also implies the cyclical, ineluctable nature of literary association and artistic influence. Like “Dickens in Memory”, “The Homes and Haunts of Dickens” describes the places made famous by Dickens’s fiction and “ever after to be associated with his memory”. In this later article, however, Gissing observes that the author’s home at Gad’s Hill had “borne a famous name” long before Dickens (Gissing 2004, I, 55). He quotes the lines from Shakespeare’s Falstaff which had endeared the name to the novelist as a young child: “But, my lads, my lads, tomorrow morning, by four o’clock, early at Gadshill!” (Shakespeare, qtd. in Gissing 2004, I, 55). Places, names, quotations from Dickens and quotations from Dickens’s literary forebears are interwoven throughout these sketches of the author’s homes and haunts. Gissing describes the scenes at Chatham which the young Dickens had peopled with Commodore Trunnion and other favourite characters from his childhood reading, as well as the house in Lant street which Dickens’s young readers had in turn come to associate with that “remarkable student of medicine, Mr Bob Sawyer” of The Pickwick Papers (1836; Gissing 2004, I, 56). Gissing is no longer striving to set out on a new path for himself in literature. He is plotting and mapping the complex interrelationships between places, names, 7

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, qtd. in Gissing, Collected Works on Dickens, I, 56.

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personal memories and memories of reading. He is tracing the journey which both he and Dickens had travelled, the journey which he calls “the way to literature” (Gissing 2004, I, 57). This chapter will explore how Gissing’s invocations of his literary forebear in his descriptions of place reflect this deepening interest in the processes of memory, association and literary influence. Focusing especially on New Grub Street (1891) and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), it argues that Gissing’s engagement with Dickens in his fiction led him to question both the meaning and value of artistic “originality”.

Under the Great Dome Critics have often emphasised the newness of New Grub Street (1891). The novel is concerned with the new literary market of the late nineteenth century and is widely seen as marking an irreversible break with the past— with Dickens, Dickens’s London and an earlier generation of writers. Adrian Poole, for example, has observed the “historicising” perspective of Gissing’s critical study of Dickens: while Gissing had presented Dickens as very much a “man of his times”, Poole argues that Jasper Milvain, in Gissing’s novel, represents “the “man of the time” now”.8 Simon J. James reads Gissing’s narrative technique as a “parodic” inversion of Dickensian plots (James 2003, 44); similarly Jacob Korg notes the “reverse justice” by which virtue, and artistic integrity, are rarely rewarded in Gissing’s novels.9 Although New Grub Street appears to signal a “new” approach to the “new” London of the 1890s, Gissing’s novel may also be read as a deeply ironic satire of what Richard D. Altick has identified as a late Victorian “obsession with the new”.10 In the opening chapter, Milvain describes the differences between himself and novelists such as Edward Reardon: But just understand the difference between a man like Reardon and a man like me. He is the old type of unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won't make concessions, or rather, he can't make them; he can't supply the market. I—well, you may say that at present I do nothing; but that’s a great mistake, I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks 8

Adrian Poole, Gissing in Context (London: Macmillan, 1975), 109-10. Jacob Korg, ‘The Paradox of Success and Failure in the Novels of George Gissing’, Gissing Newsletter. vol. 19, no. 3 (1983), 16-23 (17). 10 Richard D. Altick, The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 10. 9

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first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising.11

Jasper draws the distinction which many have perceived as central to Gissing’s novel, between the “old” type of artist and the “new” literary man of 1882. Yet Milvain’s description of this “new” figure draws to a close with an ironic interrogation of that word “new”: “when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly”, we are told, the literary man of 1882 is “ready with something new and appetising”. Milvain produces “new” literature with mechanical regularity: “study them”, he tells his sister, “discover the essential points of such composition; hit upon new attractions; then go to work methodically” (Gissing 1993 13). He is ever-ready with a “new tack” for the “new season” and the “new monthly” (Gissing 1993, 72, 54., 73). The “new” periodical is fittingly entitled The Current, seemingly forgetful of the past, yet also implicitly unable to look to the future: it looks only to the “now” of day-to-day market-led consumption (Gissing 1993, 74). The words “new” and “original” are throughout the novel associated with the jargon of the “new philosophy”, panegyric praise for “the new work which is at once powerful and original”, and eulogistic flattery of the “new” writer for modern English girls (Gissing 1993, 25; 445; 458). New Grub Street, for all its newness, casts a wry look at this seemingly insatiable demand for the “new and appetising”. In the new London of New Grub Street, Dickens is yet a pervasive, haunting presence. Time and again, Gissing invokes his predecessor in his representations of the city and its literary culture. Perhaps the most sustained engagement occurs, appropriately, “under the great dome” of the British Museum (Gissing 1993, 20). The heroine, Marian Yule, suffers a “profound discouragement” as a “taste” of the London “fog” grows “perceptible in the warm, headachy air” (Gissing 1993, 106). Gissing’s repetition of “fog” throughout this passage recalls Dickens’s repetition of the same word in the opening chapter of Bleak House. In “Dickens in Memory”, Gissing had noted how the “atmosphere” reminded him of his predecessor (Gissing 2004, I, p. 50). In his Introduction to the Rochester edition of Bleak House (1900), he recognised the “fog” in the novel’s opening as an example of Dickens’s singular achievement in making “the common and the unclean most forcibly picturesque”: “the gruesome, the vile, and the ludicrous”, he observed, “combine [in] the richest suggestiveness” (Gissing 2004, I, 179). The Dickensian fog invades Marian’s senses; the “taste” of it distorts the way that she responds to and experiences the world that surrounds her. As 11

George Gissing, New Grub Street, ed. John Goode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 8.

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the fog grows thicker, Dickens’s influence also becomes more pronounced. Marian is carried into a kind of “grotesque humour” in which she, in a characteristically Dickensian way, begins to picture “common” and familiar objects as phantoms—library officials as lost souls “doomed to wander in an eternity of vain research along endless shelves” (Gissing 1993, 107). Dickens looms large throughout this passage, as Marian expresses the concern which, as Robert MacFarlane observes in Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature, preoccupied many late Victorian and Modernist writers. In the opening passage of George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), for example, the protagonist is said to have lost all “pretension to novelty”; “our new thoughts”, as Feverel recognises, “have thrilled dead bosoms”.12 Whatever the material circumstances of the new literary man in 1882, Gissing’s heroine expresses a deeper, more fundamental concern that nothing “new” can, or even necessarily should, be written. At the beginning of the passage, she defines “originality” as the “joy” and “privilege” of the writer who has “an urgent message for the world”. She recognises that her “father”, Alfred Yule, has “no such message” and despairs at the readers around her, whose sole aim appears to be to “make new books out of those already existing, that yet newer books might in turn be made out of theirs”. Not only has Marian’s father abandoned “all thought of original production”, but the critique also turns to the writer of the present volume, Gissing himself, who might be charged with the allegations waged at Mr Yule: Gissing too is “only writing about writing”. His reworking of Dickens appears to perform a similar function as the “Literary Machine” which Marian envisages being created in the mechanistic age: “throw in a given number of old books, and have them reduced, blended, modernised into a single one for to-day's consumption”. Newness is associated with a literary market which, as the “new” literary man Jasper Milvain had earlier suggested, is driven by dayto-day consumption. Old literature, on the other hand, has led to superfluity; there is, the heroine observes, already “more good literature in the world than any mortal could cope with in his lifetime” (Gissing 1993, 107). As the fog grows thicker and the “featureless” shelves appear to threaten Marian’s individual identity, modernity is abruptly announced in the figure of the “electric light”—the “new” technology, the “new source of headache”. The light brings Marian back to a kind of self-consciousness: she is reminded of how little she has done that day. If the light brings Marian back to herself, in one sense, it also, in another, appears to threaten her identity, even her humanity. She is made to feel like a literary “machine” 12 George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Penguin, 1998), 9-10.

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which “had no business refusing its duty”. The light brings her out of her Dickensian humour, but the intolerable “uncertainty” of that light also prevents her from working. Earlier she may have seen the world through a Dickensian fog, but, without those old associations, her senses are distorted to the point that the world appears to have no fixed meaning. There is no point of reference. The pages flash “blue and green and yellow” before Marian’s eyes (Gissing 1993, 108).

Dear Old Horrors In The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), Gissing returns to the old: old memories, old books and old England. Writing in seclusion in Devon, Ryecroft is free from the inexhaustible demand for newness, and above all newspapers, that had so oppressed Marian Yule: I have not yet looked at the newspaper. Generally I leave it till I come back tired from my walk; it amuses me then to see what the noisy world is doing, what new self-torments men have discovered, what new forms of vain toil, what new occasions of peril and of strife. I grudge to give the first freshness of the morning mind to things so sad and foolish.13

The repetition is reminiscent of Dickens’s repetition of the same word in his description of the “bran-new” family in the “bran-new” house in the “bran-new” quarter of London, the Veneerings in Our Mutual Friend (1865): All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French polished to the crown of his head.14

In both Our Mutual Friend and Henry Ryecroft, the repetition undermines the sense of the word: “newness” is nothing new; it is not a sign of “originality”, but of superficial conformity. The notion of “originality” denies the more evolutionary, Darwinian sense of the word: the “origins” 13 George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, ed. Mark Storey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5. 14 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Adrian Poole (London: Penguin 1997), 18.

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which the Veneerings fail to acknowledge in their “bran-new baby” and which Gissing evokes through the seasonal, cyclical structure of Henry Ryecroft. Dickens allied his own artistic practices with those who recycle existing materials and waste—dustmen, mudlarks, dredgermen, the taxidermist, Mr Venus, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the doll’s dressmaker, Jenny Wren. In Henry Ryecroft, direct repetition is superseded by modulation, by alliteration—the “first freshness” of the “morning mind”. Ryecroft is able to distinguish between newness and the “freshness” of the morning. The passage concludes by recalling Wordsworth’s “still sad music of humanity”).15 Ryecroft turns to the old to find a “fresh” appreciation for the returning spring. Gissing’s narrator reflects on his boyhood impressions and the authors which shaped them. He dwells particularly on the question of originality. Immediately following his definition of art as “an expression, satisfying and abiding, of the zest of life”, Ryecroft observes that this theory is not itself anything new: Some one, no doubt, hit upon this definition of mine long ago. It doesn’t matter; is it the less original with me? Not long since I should have fretted over the possibility, for my living depended on an avoidance of even seeming plagiarism. Now I am at one with Lord Foppington, and much disposed to take pleasure in the natural sprouts of my own wit—without troubling whether the same idea has occurred to others. Suppose me, in total ignorance of Euclid, to have discovered even the simplest of his geometrical demonstrations, shall I be crestfallen when some one draws attention to the book? These natural sprouts are, after all, the best products of our life; it is a mere accident that they may have no value in the world’s market (Gissing 1987, 55-6).

Ryecroft’s anxious avoidance of “even seeming plagiarism” recalls Marian’s concerns in New Grub Street—as well as, perhaps, some of the anxiety discernible in the young Gissing’s desire to strike out a new path for himself in fiction. But the difference here is that originality “doesn’t matter”. Ryecroft is untroubled by what he perceives as an over-emphasis on artistic “originality” in a literary market whose rulings are arbitrary, “accidental”; they are market-driven and have no authority in nature. The passage moves from a concern with “my living” to “our life”—from commercial to emotional value, and also from the individual to the shared. While a younger Ryecroft had anxiously avoided any charge of plagiarism, the older writer 15

William Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’, in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2005), l. 91.

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finds value in the “common” and the “familiar”. It is their familiarity, their commonness, their unoriginality which makes these “natural sprouts” the “best products of our life”.

A Thing of Uncertain Boundaries This is not to say that Ryecroft’s views on originality straightforwardly reflect Gissing’s own. The relationship between author and narrator has been the subject of persistent critical dispute. The publication of Gissing’s Commonplace Book in the 1960s confirmed that much of the material for Henry Ryecroft was directly drawn from the author’s own past experiences, reminiscences and reflections on art and politics.16 Others, however, have emphasised an ironic distance between author and narrator, particularly regarding the nostalgia into which Ryecroft intermittently relapses.17 Mary Hammond helpfully describes Ryecroft as “a version of Gissing”: she emphasises the distance between author and narrator, but further argues that this distance in some ways enabled Gissing to be “more honest” about his views on London, England and writing “than ever before”.18 Neither author nor fictional character are themselves entirely fixed, stable entities, and the process of distinguishing between them is therefore doubly problematic. There are many “versions” of Gissing. And as Gissing suggests in both New Grub Street and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, no version is entirely original. The narrative persona of Henry Ryecroft has literary forebears, and among the most pronounced is the persona which Dickens adopted in his series of semi-autobiographical essays, The Uncommercial Traveller (18609)—it is a persona that is at once personal and distanced, nostalgic and ironically aware of its own nostalgic tendencies. As Dickens’s biographer John Forster commented in his Life of Dickens (1872-4), which Gissing revised for an abridged edition in 1903, this selection of essays was made “specially attractive” by their “personal 16 See Jacob Korg, ‘Division of Purpose in George Gissing’, pp. 64-79 in Pierre Coustillas, ed., Collected Articles on George Gissing (London: Frank Cass, 1968), 168-178; also see John Halperin, Gissing: A Life in Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 315 17 See Cope, ‘Definition as Structure in “The Ryecroft Papers”’, 152-67 in Coustillas, ed., Collected Articles; also see Lowell T. Frye, ‘“An Author at Grass”: Ironic Intent in Gissing’s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft’, English Literature in Translation, 1880-1920, 24: 1 (1981), 41-51. 18 Mary Hammond, “‘Amid the Dear Old Horrors’: Memory, London, and Literary Labour in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft”, 171-9 in John Spiers, ed., Gissing and the City: Cultural Crisis and the Making of Books in Late Victorian England (London: Palgrave, 2006), 175.

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tone”, the inclusion of “personal reminiscences” and even “individual confessions”—which range from Dickens’s notorious sleeping habits to more oblique references to his childhood and private life. Forster admired the “plan and drift” of the essays, and this slight contradiction in terms reflects the freedom which Dickens was able to discover in this looser structure (Forster, in Gissing 2004, III, 180-1). Gissing ranked Dickens’s achievement in The Uncommercial Traveller with that of the “eighteenthcentury essayists” whom he believed his predecessor had himself “had in mind” (Gissing 2004, II, 155-6). He praised the “refreshing candour” with which Dickens described the scenes of London; the essays provided an “interesting exception” to what Gissing perceived as misleading representations of poverty in Dickens’s novels (Gissing 2004, II, 169-70). He returned to this subject in the Preface which he wrote for the 1901 Rochester Edition of The Old Curiosity Shop. Here Gissing reflected that Dickens had been experimenting with these “more or less ingenious methods of giving coherence to a literary miscellany” when preparing Master Humphrey's Clock, the weekly periodical in which The Old Curiosity Shop was first serialised in 1840-41; Master Humphrey, Gissing believed, was initially intended “to deliver himself meditatively on all manner of subjects” and provide “picturesque glimpses of old English life” (Gissing 2004, I, 111-12). Gissing considered Master Humphrey’s Clock an early attempt at what Dickens would “at a much later time, do so very much better” in The Uncommercial Traveller. He praised especially the “idiomatic” quality of Dickens’s prose (Gissing 2004, I, 112). While Gissing recognised the Uncommercial Traveller as a literary persona, paradoxically he believed that this persona enabled Dickens to find a more “complete expression” for “his views of life” (Gissing 2004, II, 156). The Uncommercial Traveller is idiomatic and in it Dickens revisits many of the scenes of his childhood: Rochester, Chatham, London, as well as “the places I have never been”—the fictional worlds of Crusoe’s island, Gil Blas’s cave and Don Quixote’s study.19 In “Travelling Abroad” (7th April 1860), the narrator meets “a queer small boy” who reads “many books” and aspires to own the house at Gad’s Hill that the young novelist associated, as Gissing would later observe, with the scene of Falstaff’s famous robbery in Shakespeare’s Henry IV (Dickens 2000, 86). Personal memories and associations are vividly, at times threateningly real in these writings. They shape, but also haunt and distort the traveller's memory and imagination: in a remarkably grotesque twist on the figure of Banquo at the banquet, “the large dark figure” which he observes at the Paris morgue 19

Charles Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveller and Other Papers (1859-70), ed. Michael Slater and John Drew (London: J.M. Dent, 2000), p. 171.

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appears in the traveller’s dinner, floats directly towards him in the baths and becomes inexplicably “associated” with “rather sickly smell” of his hotel apartment (Dickens, Uncommercial Traveller, 90). The traveller also revisits the more pleasing scenes associated with the beginning of fancy and imagination: Chatham. He confides that he can still remember the smell of “wet straw” in the carriage in which he was taken from those scenes and “forwarded, carriage paid, to the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London” (Dickens 2000, 139). Yet if Dickens appears to set up a familiar contrast between country and city, childhood innocence and rude urban awakening, his narrator, after revisiting the scenes of his childhood, renames that lost eden Dullborough—a name which satirises the misleading, nostalgic tendency to both idealise and generalise the scenes of childhood. The traveller experiences disillusionment and yet also recognises the complexity of that feeling: “in my heart I had loved it all day too” (Dickens 2000, 148). In The Uncommercial Traveller Dickens explores the subtle relationships between real and fictional worlds, personal memories and memories of reading, past and present selves. The presiding metaphor of travel evokes the nomadic aspects of an identity irreducible to any fixed category. The literary persona is as nomadic, as changeful, as Dickens himself. The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft may be read as Gissing’s attempt at a highly idiomatic, yet fanciful mode of writing which enables the writer to revisit the scenes of the past and to “deliver himself meditatively on all manner of subjects”. Like Dickens in The Uncommercial Traveller, Gissing in Henry Ryecroft imaginatively revisits the scenes of his past—from idyllic childhood scenes to “the places where I housed in the time of my greatest poverty”: Not long ago, had anyone asked me how I felt about these memories, I should have said that there were certain street names, certain mental images of obscure London, which made me wretched as often as they came before me; but, in truth, it is a very long time since I was moved to any sort of bitterness by that retrospect of things hard and squalid. Now, owning all the misery of it in comparison with what should have been, I find that part of life interesting and pleasant to look back upon—greatly more so than many subsequent times, when I lived amid decencies and had enough to eat. Some day I will go to London, and spend a day or two amid the dear old horrors (Gissing 1986, 24).

Like Dickens’s Uncommercial Traveller, Ryecroft vividly recalls the “street-names” and “mental images” of life in London: the “winding way” by which he travelled from Oxford Street to Leicester square”, his “raving hunger” as he stared yearningly at the “hot steam rising” from the pies and

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puddings in the shop window. Like the Uncommercial Traveller also, Ryecroft betrays an intense ambivalence regarding these memories or “dear old horrors”. Frequently he contradicts himself: Ryecroft begins by saying that “not long ago” he would have been made “wretched” by such memories but concludes the sentence by saying that it is “a very long time since” he had been “moved to bitterness” by “that retrospect of things hard and squalid”. These inconsistencies suggest that Gissing is distanced from and ironically commenting on the irregular movements of his narrator’s mind, but it may further be argued that Gissing, like Dickens, was aware of such inconsistencies in himself—those nostalgic impulses and contradictions which the author can recognise in his narrator precisely because he can recognise them in himself. In an unsigned review in Pilot magazine (7th March 1903), the reviewer echoed Gissing’s praise for The Uncommercial Traveller: he recognised the narrative device employed in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft as “an eminently convenient and graceful form in which to speak his mind on many matters”. Although the reviewer implies that Gissing is speaking his own mind through a narratorial guise, he also recognises the multiplicity, and implied instability, of the author’s opinions “on many matters”. He perceives these stray “papers” as enabling “discursiveness” to have “free play”: the fragmented narrative allows for changes of mood, selfcontradiction and incompleteness; it resists the regular argument of a single, fixed point of view. “An arrow”, observes the reviewer, “may be aimed in a certain direction with no undertaking to empty the quiver in a determined effort to hit the gold”.20 Like Gissing’s essay on “The Homes and Haunts of Dickens”, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is composed of a series of places, names, literary quotations, direct and indirect allusions, and personal memories which subtly interplay with fictional memories or memories of reading. They are composed of many voices, sometimes jarring, sometimes modulated, but always essentially and irrevocably joined. They evoke a more complex sense of literary originality and development, a less linear journey than that which the young Gissing had hoped for when he dreamed of setting out on a new “path” for himself in literature. As the perceptive reviewer in Pilot observed, and as Dickens and Gissing both came to realise, “the artist’s own personality is a thing of uncertain boundaries” (Anon., in Coustillas and Partridge 1972, 422).

20 Pierre Coustillas and Colin Partridge, eds., George Gissing: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge: 1972), 422.

CHAPTER 10 ART FOR ART’S SAKE AND THE WORLD AS AN AESTHETIC PHENOMENON: GISSING AND RUSKIN JEREMY TAMBLING

I shall get to Gissing and place towards the end of this chapter when discussing Gissing’s relationship with modernisms, but I will start firmly in the nineteenth-century. Gissing’s judgments are always generous and fresh. While Pierre Coustillas’ biography indicates that Gissing was reading Ruskin in the early 1870s,1 the main sections of his letters which indicate enthusiasm for Ruskin appear when he was living in London: for example, on 12 May 1883, he is reading Unto this Last, and saying: His worship of beauty I look upon as essentially valuable. In that he differentiates himself from Carlyle, whom else he closely follows. It matters little that his immediate schemes are impracticable; to keep before the eyes of men the ideal is the great thing; it does its work in the course of time.2

It is generous praise, which catches a way in which Ruskin’s insights can be held onto despite his quirks and reactionariness, such as his dislike of Balzac in “Fiction, Fair and Foul” (Ruskin 1881, 34.267-283).3 The letter questions whether if Ruskin had been born poor, making an implied comparison with himself, his “socialistic fervour” would have shown itself in “furious revolutionism” instead of “calm grave oratory”. And he then poses the problem:

1

Pierre Coustillas, Heroic Life 1857-1888 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), 64. Paul F. Matthiessen, Arthur C. Young and Pierre Coustillas, eds., The Collected Letters of George Gissing (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1990-1996), 2, 135. 3 Note Gissing: “I don’t altogether agree with it” – (Matthiessen et al, Letters, 1.280). 2

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Ruskin is marginalised, in comparison to the work of art, but of course, it might be said that Ruskin’s poetic prose may often be seen as art itself. Gissing acknowledges that: on 7 February 1884, he writes, apropos of Modern Painters, “His idealism is not at all offensive to me & his prose is of course delightful” (Matthiessen et al 1991, 196). On 14 February, 1884, he writes more generally about Ruskin, on the basis of having attended the delivery of “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century”, two lectures which Ruskin had given at the London Institution in Finsbury Circus on February 4 and 11, where Ruskin records his sense of newly noticing in 1871, clouds covering the sky, brought by plague-winds, of which he wrote in Fors Clavigera, and thinks of as poisonous smoke and dead men’s souls, and which he concludes by saying would make impossible now the writing of Modern Painters (1843), whose first volume is so much in praise of Turner.5 Here Gissing considers: the necessary union between beauty in life and social reform. Ruskin despairs of the latter & so can only look on by-gone times. Younger men (like W. Morris) are turning from artistic work to social agitation, just because they fear that art will be crushed out of the world as things are. In his lecture the other night on a new kind of storm-cloud he believes only to have appeared of late years, Ruskin more than once hints that the degradation of the heavens is due to man’s iniquity. Strange sight, the old fellow standing up in the London Institution & rebuking his hearers like a Hebrew prophet. (Matthiessen et al 1991, 2:197).

The dilemma Gissing sees in Ruskin between art and social reform is one he shares himself, though he hardly agrees with Morris’ solution.6 That October, he writes that he is “just engaged upon Modern Painters”, where, of course, Ruskin made an essential case for Turner. He calls it: – a marvellous book, very technical in parts, but abounding in true Ruskinisms of thought & diction. It is all rather spoilt for me by its 4

Matthiessen et al, Letters, Vol. 2, 135 Ruskin, Library Edition ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903-1912), 34:78. 6 John Goode, “Gissing, Morris, and English Socialism,” VS 12 (1968): 201-226. 5

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theological mode of regarding aesthetic questions but one must concede the man his stand-point. Certainly I shall go to the Nat. Gallery & look at the Turners in a wholly new light; so much at all events one gets of direct instruction. (Matthiessen et al 1991, 2:264)

And a few pages later (8 December 1884), there appears this judgment on Ruskin, relative to one of the lectures Ruskin gave as The Pleasures of England “Birds, and how to Paint them”, a summary of which was reprinted in The Pall Mall Gazette.7 It attacks the middle-classes; then the loss of the country; then the scientific objectifying attitude to birds which must kill them before studying them. Here Gissing comments: “He is right in all he says about our civilization. I see that more & more clearly” (Matthiessen et al 1991, 2:274). In Ruskin, and expressed most clearly in “The Nature of Gothic” in The Stones of Venice, art, which never loses religious significance, becomes the measure of a civilization, and Ruskin’s hatred of the nineteenth-century finds its failure in art (about which Ruskin is very contentious, as with his dislike of iron) as symptomatic of its placing money (“illth”) above everything else. The thesis Ruskin defends is that “beautiful things are useful to men because they are beautiful, and for the sake of their beauty only; and not to sell, or pawn – or in any other way turn into money”. He calls this his “political economy.” 8 Similarly, he holds that “ideas of beauty … are the subjects of moral, but not of intellectual perception”.9 So that although he says in 1865 “I am no Puritan, and have never praised or advocated Puritanical art”10 and holds in the last volume of Modern Painters (1860), that no asceticism is “a healthy or central state of man”,11 Ruskin is ambiguous about aestheticism, and art for art’s sake, even though he is perfectly capable of praising it, and of being classifiable as an aesthete; and his anti-aestheticism will be most remembered from his attack on Whistler’s “Nocturne in Blue and Gold: The Falling Rocket” exhibited in Sir Coutt Lindsay’s Grosvenor Gallery, in Fors Clavigera no. 79, on the “Cockney impudence” that characterised a “coxcomb ask[ing] two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”.12 Ruskin’s hostility went far 7 “Mr Ruskin on Birds and How to Paint Them”, The Pall Mall Gazette 60 (1884): 3-4. 8 Ruskin, Library Edition, 4, 4. 9 Ruskin, Library Edition, 3, 111 10 Ruskin, Library Edition, 19, 29 11 Ruskin, Library Edition, 7, 424 12 Ruskin, Library Edition, 29, 160. See Nicholas Shrimpton, “Ruskin and the Aesthetes” in Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 131-152. Shrimpton is equally clarificatory in “Italy” in The

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beyond Carlyle, slighting art and literature (and in doing so not insignificantly giving his first name to that of Mr Gradgrind) while making equally violently angry statements about “the mechanical age” and the “cash nexus”, is remembered in Demos chapter 29, in: thus far I am with the Socialists, in that I denounce the commercial class, the bourgeois, the capitalists – call them what you will – as the supremely maleficent. They hold us at their mercy, and their mercy is nought. Monstrously hypocritical, they cry for progress when they mean increased opportunities of swelling their own purses … 13

But Ruskin cannot act as a final mentor to Gissing, however much Gissing admired him, and however much Ruskin’s reputation increased in the 1890s; his sense of the problems of Ruskin shows in his dismissal of Tolstoy’s What is Art?: “it is conceivable that a great artist should work in a spirit of antagonism to the prevailing religion: to say nothing of the certainty that some forms of art are not concerned with the ethical spirit at all”.14 That might not make the work of art unethical, of course; it might mean that art anticipates an ethical relation yet to come. Despite Gissing’s discomfort, it is not easy to see that some of the tensions Ruskin pointed to have gone away. Ruskin was intent on art as a means of education, and however patrician he might have been, yet in wanting equal wages, he could be regarded as a Socialist, and this Gissing was not because he could not endorse a sense that the working-class could emerge out of their condition, partly because of their nature, and partly because their state was to be a “quarter-educated”, which he felt was produced by the 1870 Education Act, meant that not just this class but all were prey to the devaluation of literature which was symbolised in advertising.15 A divide opens up in Workers in the Dawn (published in 1880, the same year as Nana), when Arthur Golding, the working-class self-taught artist, rejects painting in the mode of Hogarth, fundamentally important both for Dickens, and for Ruskin, for its moral sense, and for its depiction of poverty, as in “Gin Lane”: Beauty was the goddess that he worshipped at the inmost shrine of his being, and to the bodying forth of visible shapes of beauty his life must be Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin, edited by Francis O’Gorman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 49-65. 13 Gissing, Demos: A Story of English Socialism (London: Smith and Elder 1888), 385. 14 Ruskin, Library Edition, 7, 164. 15 George Gissing, New Grub Street, ed. Bernard Bergonzi (1891; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 496.

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devoted or he must cast aside the pencil for ever. …how should he go for his models to the slums and the hovels amidst which his wretched childhood had been passed? 16

Gissing, as opposed to Arthur, is not opposed to Hogarth, of course: Workers in the Dawn describes Maud Gresham’s marriage to Mr Waghorn in a chapter called “Marriage à la mode” (Gissing 2010, 220), and it similarly comes to grief, partly through the rake Augustus Whiffle; while equally Gissing writes a harlot’s progress through Carrie Mitchell.17 The novel has something eighteenth-century in how it parodies society through “Sir Horace Good-for-Nothing and Miss Lydia Rake-at-Heart” (Gissing 2010, 231), and it does not shun from treatment of gin-palaces. But however lightly parodied Arthur’s sentiments are in the inflation of the Shakespearian language of “bodying forth”, Workers in the Dawn endorses Arthur’s aestheticism over against something more Hogarthian, as with the response that Helen Graham, in a chapter called “The Triumph of Art”, gives to Arthur Golding about his art, and the ultimate social effect it will have. Helen is part George Eliot (but more conventional when it comes to marriage) in her German-acquired adherence to Strauss, Comte, and the Germans, and part Ruskinian social worker, with a dangerous tendency to idealise (Gissing 2010, 209: “her own nature was richly poetical – esteeming poetry the perfection of the noble faculty of speech, as the highest outward expression of that law of perpetual striving which alone she worshipped” – and note the ambiguity of that “alone”, and the loaded “noble”). She says: Without the works of a Raphael our civilization could not have been what it now is. You say that a beautiful picture only pleases its painter and a few rich dilettanti. In appearance, it may do no more, but in reality its spirit permeates every level of society … nothing in this world is more useful than the beautiful, nothing works so powerfully for the ultimate benefit of mankind. (Gissing 2010, 475-486).

This critical position exceeds Ruskin, becoming Paterian; when Gissing was reading “The Art of the Renaissance”, he was commenting with distaste on William Morris allowing himself to be arrested on a demonstration in Whitechapel (21 September 1885): a following letter quotes Marius the Epicurean (1885) approvingly, and the “tree of knowledge” growing in 16

George Gissing, Workers in the Dawn, ed. Debbie Harrison (Brighton: Victorian Secrets 2010), 127. 17 Coustillas, Heroic Life, 1, 37-38

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Marius which aims, so primly, to make aestheticism produce the more perfectly formed life: He was acquiring what is ever the true function of all higher education to teach – a system, or art, namely, of so relieving the ideal or poetic traits, the elements of distinction, in our every-day life – of so exclusively living in them – that the unadorned remainder of it, the mere drift & debris of life, becomes as though it were not.18

However impossible without Ruskin this desire for art in Pater, Gissing, and Arthur Golding, it expresses a divide between art as political or useful, and art as for itself. It cannot be aligned with Adorno’s sense of modernist art being autonomous, and necessarily so; first because Adorno does not start with a sense of what art is, and is committed to newness, whereas, because Ruskin’s relies more upon a sense of art as known, even though Ruskin had taken a risk with Turner: it is like Arnold’s “the best that is thought and known in the world” as a definition of culture, assuming standards which are already given, and which it cannot question, given in the sense of Arthur copying work (Gissing 2010, 241-248), and retreating from life to illustrate “The Palace of Art” (Gissing 2010, 498ff). It does not seek the new. And aestheticism opens up a crisis in Arthur Golding, giving him “a double Life” – the title of chapter 11, one which, as for Ruskin, makes the aesthetic the source of an inward conflict: As he grew older he felt within himself the stirrings of a double life, the one, due to his natural gifts, comprehending all the instincts, the hopes, the ambitions of the artist; the other, originating in the outward circumstances of his childhood … bent solely on the one object of making the world less wretched, even though he died in the effort (Gissing 2010, 118-119)

This separation between art and its social uses, as if these can never be reconciled, makes Gissing articulate a division in the self – a double life – whose splitting power affects everything, and frustrates all destinies, producing a death-drive which is most clearly articulated in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I would like to interrogate this division in three ways. The place that Ruskin gives to beauty cannot finally be sustained, because Gissing finds beauty double in a way Ruskin could not, in an

18 Matthiessen et al, Letters, 2, 352. See Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas, ed. Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1985), 31-32.

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opposition between beauty and sexuality.19 These two cut across classrelationships, so that the very moment when Arthur is nearest to Helen Graham’s middle-class world, he is most pulled towards Carrie, and wants to improve her. Though Ruskin must have been aware of it, his sense of beauty negates the sexual: as he writes in Modern Painters II (1846): “I wholly deny that that the impressions of beauty are in any way sensual; they are neither sensual not intellectual, but moral”.20 He was to separate from Rossetti’s sensualism, despite having spoken for the Pre-Raphaelites: Rossetti was to become leader of the “Fleshly School” of poetry by 1871.21 Ruskin was thought of and attacked as feminine himself, called for example a “mad governess” by the Saturday Review which was rejecting Unto this Last, so that the gender-attack was used to weaken Ruskin’s political attack.22 Yet his own essay on women, “Of Queens’ Gardens” from Sesame and Lilies (1865) while speaking for women’s education, desexualises the woman: in The Odd Women, Mr Widdowson, who even lives at Herne Hill, where Ruskin had lived, to complete the resemblance to him, wants his new wife Monica to read Ruskin, since “every word he says about women is good and precious”.23 Any analysis of Ruskin must confront this blockedoff quality in his work if it hopes to make Ruskin tell as a critic and not lock him into his aestheticism; but the unblocked state, in Britain, could not produce a better alternative, and points to something inhibiting within the national ideology. In Demos, Richard Mutimer is characterised as having no imagination; and an education which was profitless, which is reflected in his bookshelves, where the reign of fact of political economy means that “the chosen directors of his prejudice taught him to regard every fact, every discovery, as for or against something” (Gissing 2011, 136). As Benjamin shows, the bourgeois interior is the place of private subjectivity in the nineteenth-century, but there is no art in the room to give a sense of the self expressing itself in interesting or revelatory traces. In light of that, it is interesting to note the comments on Turner by Henry Ryecroft, Gissing’s nearest approach to a Ruskin in his withdrawal from modern life. If Ruskin felt he got nowhere in terms of making Turner acceptable, by his continual 19 The division is in Michael Collie, The Alien Art: A Critical Study of George Gissing’s Novels (Folkestone: Archon Books ,1979), 38. 20 Ruskin, Library Edition, 4, 42. 21 Schrimpton, “Ruskin and the Aesthetes,” 146. 22 Dinah Birch, “Ruskin’s Womanly Mind” in Ruskin and Gender, ed. Dinah Birch and Francis O’Gorman (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2002), 111. For Ruskin as feminine, see Fors Clavigera, 28.81. 23 George Gissing, The Odd Women, ed. Elaine Showalter (1893; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 173.

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writing about him, the explanation comes here. Ryecroft notes a strangeness in Turner, which would differentiate him for instance, from Constable, or the standard landscape painters whom Ruskin criticised: One obvious reason for the long neglect of Turner lies in the fact that his genius does not seem to be truly English. Turner’s landscape, even when it presents familiar scenes, does not show them in the familiar light. Neither the artist nor the intelligent layman is satisfied. He gives us glorious visions; we admit the glory – but we miss something which we deem essential. I doubt whether Turner tasted rural England; I doubt whether the spirit of English poetry was in him; I doubt whether the essential significance of the common things which we call beautiful was revealed to his soul. Such doubt does not affect his greatness as a poet in colour and in form, but I suspect that it has always been the cause why England could not love him.24

Ryecroft is perhaps not free from a criticism of Turner himself in this passage, but the passage is also a shrewd critique of Englishness. There is a defamiliarising quality within Turner, as though it demands to be seen double, first recognising what it is not, as, incidentally, in Ruskin’s case, he could not do with Whistler: it risks everything by taking away from the ideological sense that this landscape is known and is English, and the English country, and that the task of painting is to render what is already known. Turner’s art cannot quite satisfy nationalist expectations; it is not usable in that way, and so becomes art for art’s sake because it lacks usevalue. Nor is the painting a translation of something known in another medium, such as poetry; Turner’s poetry exists instead in “colour and form”. It is presented here as a challenge to Ryecroft, and to Gissing as well, indicating the desire within him to say something new; in the same way that his Italy in By the Ionian Sea is not that of the tour-guide, and certainly not that of the Englishman abroad.25 If the divide between beauty and the sexual distinguishes Gissing from Ruskin; it implies one reason why the split between ideal beauty and the demands of society cannot be reconciled, since what complicates it and, save in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, makes Gissing more modern than Ruskin, is the sexual. Hence Arthur feels divided between two women, Carrie Mitchell, and Helen (the coincidence of the name with Nelly making Nelly as it were, the unconscious of what Arthur desires in Helen, certainly aligning the two women). It returns with Osmond Waymark in The 24

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, ed. Mark Storey (1903; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 102-103. For other references to Turner, Matthiessen et al, Letters, 2, 319; 349-50.0.

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Unclassed (1884) divided between Maud Enderby and Ida Starr: “Each answered to an ideal which he cherished, and the two ideals were so diverse, so mutually exclusive”.26 Maud’s being is conventional and spiritual though she is also an artist; Ida is heterogeneous to him and he cannot know her. Such a double state of being runs throughout Gissing, and reveals too that each separate state contains its own other within it, so that it is not simply a question of a divided state, but of infinite splittings within a subject which is made to imagine itself as single. Hence, since the desire for beauty contains something repressed within itself, Workers in the Dawn reveals that the project to carry art into working-class life cannot be undertaken without some unawareness of self; even the cleric Mr Hetherley, who works in the East End, surprises everyone by marrying the working-class co-worker Lucy Venning. The older artist, Mr Graham, who will have nothing to do with the East End, is, correspondingly, a fraud, producing art for the middle-class market. Overshadowing an unwillingness in Gissing to engage with social existence and social problems is the pessimism which comes from a Schopenhauerian sense of “the will”, Schopenhauer’s version of the Kantian “thing in itself”, interest in which replaced Gissing’s relationship to Frederick Harrison’s Positivism, as in Gissing’s essay “The Hope of Pessimism”, about which he writes to Algernon on 6 October 1882.27 Helen Graham acquires knowledge of Schopenhauer in Germany, and reads the two volumes of Parerga and Paralipomena, which comment on The World as Will and Representation: she derives from Schopenhauer that the sense that “the desire for life is the root of all evil” (Gissing 2010, 159-160). Yet Schopenhauer was much more specific than this generalisation. Beyond that general statement taken from Parerga and Paralipomena, there is the point that Schopenhauer repeatedly makes, that the sexual in men and women for ever divides them and casts them as opposed to each other, as in chapter 27, “On Women”, which casts the woman as more anarchic than the male, while in the case of the man, Schopenhauer argues, noting the saying that “directly after copulation the devil’s laughter is heard”, that “sexual desire is the quintessence of the whole fraud of this noble world, for it promises so unspeakably, infinitely, and excessively much, and then performs so contemptibly little”. And the act of procreation is the man’s expression of a will-to-live which uses the man.28 In section 60 of the first 26

George Gissing, The Unclassed, ed. Jacob Korg (1884; Brighton: Harvester Press, 1976), 92. 27 Matthiessen et al, Letters, 2, 103. 28 Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena 2 vols, trans., E.J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1974), 2.316.

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volume of The World as Will and Representation, affirmation of the will is said to be the same as affirmation of the body.29 The genitals are for Schopenhauer, “the real focus of the will”, “the opposite pole to the brain, the representative of knowledge, i.e. to the other side of the world, the world as representation”.30 Earlier, he has called them “objectified sexual impulse”.31 There are only two choices: abstention from the sexual; this, like Proserpina not eating pomegranates in the underworld, could ensure survival, but she has eaten six, and Schopenhauer quotes from Goethe’s Triumph der Empfindsamkeit to make the point that the sexes are, therefore, already lost.32 The discovery that the will picks up the individual and drops them after it has secured the survival of the species rather than the individual - adherence to the principium individuationis being what the person in love feels is being exalted -, turns the will against itself and destroys it. Sexuality contains, therefore, its own death-drive; this is basic to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud being also influenced here by Otto Weininger (1880-1903) writing in Geschlecht und Charakter on bisexuality with Schopenhauer behind him, Weininger also influencing Wittgenstein. In Weininger, who killed himself on 4 October 1903, just before Gissing’s death, in an interesting parallel to Gissing, the sexes each contain the other, and the woman is more destructive, in that her aim, for which she uses the man, is to be the mother, in which she will serve the interests of the species, whereas the prostitute stands outside that coerciveness, in the name of individuality.33 Schopenhauer considers the disparity between the sexes in chapter 54 of The World as Will and Idea: “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love”, which concludes, before an appendix which finds male homosexuality an essential part of the will, that the will: cannot attain to a better state or condition than its present one; consequently with life, this constant suffering and dying of individuals are certain to it. To free it from this is reserved for the denial of the will-tolive; through the denial, the individual will tears itself away from the stem of the species and gives up that existence in it. We lack concepts for what the will now is; indeed, we lack all date for such concepts. We can only describe it as that which is free to be or not to be the will to live. … It is

29

Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 1.327. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 1.329. 31 Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 1.108. 32 Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 1.329. 33 David Luft, Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 45-88. 30

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the point that remains for ever inaccessible to all human knowledge precisely as such.34

To free the self from suffering and dying, the self needs to deny the will to live, yet that cannot be by a passive act, but by an exercise of the will, which radically splits the will so that there can be no neat binary opposition between “will and representation”. Nor, indeed, can there be any knowledge of what the will is: in that, Positivism is dismissed. And without the will, there can be no creativity, which means that creativity contains its own death-drive: Reardon in New Grub Street suffers from inability to write, and that is because “my will seems to be fatally weakened”.35 This passivity of being, which Gissing notes to be the “nature and the merit” of Reardon, and Harold Biffen to possess is the reason for Reardon’s defeat as an author.36 That applies as much as the argument that literature has been turned into a trade, cheapened because it has become consumer-fare for the “quarter-educated”. That is the market, created by the 1870 Education Act, which Whelpdale aims for, and he knows that the ranks of the “quartereducated” will expand, since most people will be satisfied to be included in that grouping, once the newspaper Chit-Chat, Gissing’s version of Titbits (1891) is floated.37 Such a decline, which makes taste no more than a function of the market, may be accounted for in terms of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, but Reardon and Biffen’s refusal of the will goes further and Schopenhauer’s explanations need developing psychoanalytically. Gissing, whatever Helen Graham might or have noticed, could only have registered that the will is, for Schopenhauer, the sexual, and its presence is the initial cause of Arthur’s pursuit of Carrie. Helen returns from Germany with an intellectual split between, on one side, rationalism and Positivism, which are implicit in her endorsing of both David Strauss, whose Life of Jesus took her to Tubingen in the first place, and Comtean Positivism; and the opposite, a deep non-rationalism which comes from Schopenhauer. The split cannot be resolved by Helen’s enthusiasm for Shelley (Gissing 2010, 164), and the rejection of Positivism, of the scientific mode of knowing, with its assurance about definition, is not only central to Schopenhauer, but also means that, although many critics have wished that Gissing could have used Zola more, he actually could have got nothing from him, since Zola’s naturalism is the application of Positivist thought, realism which, the antithesis of Balzac, has gained its strength, and its irrevocability 34

Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 2.560. Gissing, New Grub Street, 79. 36 Gissing, New Grub Street, 460. 37 Gissing, New Grub Street, 496; 516. 35

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from the standpoint of a scientific method, which, therefore, leaves no space for the non-rational. A Zola-based realism could never take account of the divisions within the will which make it not only not a unitary concept, but one which places a central undecidability at the heart of fiction. Just as Engels could praise Balzac as a realist above Zola, because he could see that Balzac’s realism demands confronting a divided state and divided loyalties – his own sympathies for Throne and Altar, and his sense of the necessity of that noble class to be overthrown, so Zola was less essential to Gissing than Balzac, and Dickens.38 Helen’s attempts at social reform through teaching literacy in the East End are defeated by the sickness which kills her, but Waymark, the novelist in The Unclassed, acknowledges to Julian Casti that his interest in social problems was insincere, as a failure to see the other in “the poor and ignorant”: “I did not make their cause my own, but my own cause theirs” (Gissing 1976, 211). To say that “art is now all I care for” (Gissing 1976, 211), and that he has no “declared social subject” declares his own pessimism, which is Schopenhauerian; but Julian, the Keatsian (Gissing 1976, 288) who has made a disastrous marriage to Harriet Smales, another prostitute, and very different from Ida, replies that though Waymark’s novel is “pure art”, yet an old direction toward the social still shows in his choice of subjects, and “it is a kind of art in which the social question is predominant” (Gissing 1976, 212).39 To this Waymark replies that “every strong individuality is more or less the expression of its age” (Gissing 1976, 212), which implies that the art he might be capable of, however distant it seems to be from class-poverty, nonetheless is symptomatic of it, formed by it, and the work of the artist cannot be other than the expression of classdivision, however unconscious. But we would have to add that in Gissing, the sexual question seems to inhere in the class-issue, even affecting the novel’s title, The Unclassed. According to Waymark, talking to Maud, Schopenhauer is the pessimist, for whom “the will to live is the root of sin”; significantly, he thinks such a sense of sin is an anachronism (Gissing 1976, 224). Yet that intellectual perception does not mean that Waymark is any less a Schopenhauerian: he says that “the doctrine of philosophical necessity, the idea of Fate, is with me an instinct” (Gissing 1976, 225). We approach Freud’s analysis in Civilization and its Discontents of guilt being the “most 38 Frederico, Letter to Margaret Harkness, April 1888, in Marxists on Literature: An Anthology, ed. David Craig (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 269-271. 39 See David Grylls, “Gissing and Prostitution” in George Gissing and the Woman Question: Convention and Dissent, ed. Christine Huguet and Simon J. James, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 12-28. There are many good essays in this collection.

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important problem in the development of civilization”, the price paid for advance in civilization being a “heightening of the sense of guilt”.40 And here we move from Schopenhauer to the much more complex Nietzsche. The conscious rejection of sin is a Nietzschean strain in the text: in his study of Gissing and the Germans, Patrick Bridgewater suggests that Gissing could have been aware of Nietzsche by the time of The Unclassed, as he certainly showed acquaintance with him later.41 Bridgewater quotes Waymark’s statement to Julian earlier on, after he has said that the novel of every-day life is “getting worn out”, that his writing will be “for men and women who like to look beneath the surface”, that “only as artistic material has human life any significance” (Gissing 1976, 117). This recalls several statements in The Birth of Tragedy, which, of course, engages with Schopenhauer’s pessimism, recasting it as a “strong pessimism”, which is defined as a “a penchant of the mind for what is hard, terrible, evil, dubious in existence”– the opposite of Reardon and Biffen.42 The division in Schopenhauer between the world as the anarchic and destructive “will” which takes no account of the individual, and the “idea”, or “representation”, as the attempt to fashion individuality and find, or create some pattern of meaning, becomes in The Birth of Tragedy the Dionysian – Apollonian distinction, where the first abolishes being the principle that welcomes dissolution; the second is the principium individuationis, the desire for rational, and non-divided, individuality. Tragedy shows the Apollonian yielding to the Dionysian, which allows itself to go under, and it acknowledges that “whatever exists is both just and unjust and equally justified in both” (Nietzche 1956, 65); a proposition which, denying the sufficiency of any moral schema, leads Nietzsche to argue that “existence could be justified only in aesthetic terms” (Nietzche 1956, 9); or again, that “only as an aesthetic product can the world be justified to all eternity” (Nietzche 1956, 42). No projection of morality, least of all one that invokes guilt and a sense of sin, can justify, or square, what happens in existence; any such attempt is “other-worldly”, as Nietzsche puts it; the view contrasts wholly with Ruskin, who wishes to hold and morality together. Only by making a form of poetry out of what happens, or only by finding a new poetry, can there be any justification for living at all. Nietzsche’s viewpoint 40 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1964), vol 21, 134. 41 Patrick Bridgewater, Gissing and Germany (London: Enitharmon Press 1981), 5884. 42 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals trans. by Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday Anchor 1956), 4; 143.

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does not aestheticise existence in an objectifying spirit, though that is one take on the meaning of the phrase “art for art’s sake”; rather, it sees that there can be no way of justifying the terrible things that happen, save by a creation which responds to the ungrounded nature of existence. D H Lawrence, then, a significant reader of Gissing, and of The Birth of Tragedy writes in a letter of 1912, “tragedy really ought to be a great kick at misery”.43 To return to The Unclassed: Waymark aware of Schopenhauer and of Nietzsche’s response to Schopenhauer, finally escapes from tragedy, as Maud, retreating into her pessimism does not. She has not been able to resolve a contradiction: “her soul in reality was that of an artist, and whereas the artist should be free of everything like moral prepossession, Maud’s aesthetic sensibilities were in perpetual conflict with her moral convictions” (Gissing 1976, 150). She has never, Gissing writes, obtained an idea of the artistic character: This irrepressible delight and interest in the active life of the world, what could it be but the tendency to evil, most strongly developed? These heartburnings whenever she witnessed men and women rejoicing in the exercise of their natural affections, what could that be but the proneness to evil in its grossest form? (Gissing 1976, 150)

It is as if Gissing is trying out a Nietzschean language in the way he characterises the sexual as omnipresent, and the artist’s reaction to that; hence the perhaps overly-Utopian writing; but Maud’s reaction to the sexual remains partly Schopenhauerian, and partly held by the Christianity in which she grew up, influenced by her aunt, Miss Bygrave (Gissing 1976, 32-35: there are echoes here of the childhood of Esther Summerson in Bleak House). Her language is caught within a set morality which Gissing’s achievement was to have questioned increasingly in his novels: as, in the letter to Edmund Bertz of 2 June 1893 he writes: “I am convinced that there will be no social peace until women are intellectually trained very much as men are […] I am driven frantic by the crass imbecility of the typical woman. That type must disappear […] And I believe that the only way of effecting this is to go through a period of what many people will call sexual anarchy”.44 The anarchy is a Dionysian expression at work in society, and Gissing seems more able to contemplate it than crowd frenzy and consumer hysteria, as in The Nether World (1889) and In the Year of Jubilee (1894), 43

James T. Boulton, ed., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), I, 459. 44 Matthiessen et al, Letters, 5.113.

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as The Odd Women , where the new and wholly non-Ruskinian “new woman”, Rhoda Nunn, the new woman, speaks about the “sexual instinct” as something that novelists dare not talk about, and which she thinks must be repressed in men (Gissing 1993, 64, 67). Rhoda believes that men will have to practise the asceticism which made Christianity triumph; in that sense her feminism is non-Nietzschean, and conveyed as such in her surname. If the language of Ruskin goes out of date so that it must be replaced by a new awareness of the sexual, that implies also the point that for Gissing, the realism that beckons on was defined by Zola, as Biffen in New Grub Street discusses that.45 As if wanting to exceed Zola’s positivism, Biffen wants to go further in an “absolute realism in the sphere of the ignobly decent”, treating “ordinary vulgar-life with fidelity and seriousness”, which contrasts in his own estimate with both Zola, who writes “deliberate tragedies; his vilest figures become heroic from the place they fill in a strongly imagined drama” (in that way, Zola compromises his own scientific position), and with Dickens, who spoils his own tendencies to such realism by his softening adherence to melodrama and humour. In contrast to both these, Biffen wants to set down dialogue in the streets “verbatim, without a single impertinent suggestion of any point of view save that of honest reporting”. Such passivity, he knows, will be “unutterably tedious”, but he wants to try it (Gissing 1968, 173-174), and the reason for doing so is because the tediousness is a guarantee of its truth: this being not a Keatsian position: not “beauty is truth”. When Biffen tells this outline of his work in progress Mr Bailey: Grocer to Reardon, the pessimist, whose novel The Optimist presumably attacks Comtism, he says that both of them are “rabid idealists” (Gissing 1968, 174). That compromises such realism from the start, because it contradicts it, the idealist being someone with ideals, which is the opposite of the passive realist. It suggests that Biffen is also the divided subject, which is what emerges when he falls in love with the widowed Amy Reardon, and it becomes apparent that on a previous occasion when he fell in love, he had repressed all such emotion. Now, “after that hour of intimate speech with Amy, he never again knew rest of mind or heart” (Gissing 1968, 523), which means that he is challenged again by the sexuality of the will. His writing of a pure realism looks, then, like an attempt to negate the force of the will, which is incarnated in the presence of Amy; it will also drive him to suicide. His passivity is a masochistic strategy, in which case, it still has a sexual component; it suggests that the will remains dominant in him, even when he is in retreat from it. 45 For Gissing on realism see Aaron Matz, “Gissing’s Ambivalent Realism,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 59 (2004): 212-248.

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Biffen’s statement of his intention to Reardon, refusing the possibility of finding any beauty in everyday life, is far from simple; if it points to a divided subject who writes, it also points to several ambiguities about what art does, or can ever do in the conditions of capitalism. One meaning of nineteenth-century aestheticism as Diana Maltz indicates, is that it attempts to transform everyday life, hence the political force of those aesthetes, men and women, who, contemporary with Gissing but unlike him, engaged in social issues.46 This is exactly what Biffen’s project refuses to do. But nor is he acknowledging the force of Schopenhauer: he will not follow Waymark, in The Unclassed: The novel of every-day life is getting worn out. We must dig deeper, get to untouched social strata. Dickens felt this, but he had not the courage to face his subjects’ his monthly numbers had to lie on the family tea-table. Not virginibus puerisque will be my book, I assure you, but for men and women who like to look beneath the surface, and who understand that only as artistic material has human life any significance. (Gissing 1968, 116-117)

If these subjects, which Dickens wanted to touch on, and which I would argue he does, in indirect and allusive and allegorical modes, are 46 Diana Maltz, “Practical Aesthetics and Decadent Rationale in George Gissing,” Victorian Literature and Culture 28 (2000), 55–71. See also Diana Maltz, British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870-1900: Beauty for the People (London: Palgrave 2006). This excellent study discusses Henrietta (1851-1936) and Samuel Barnett (1844-1913) at St Jude’s, Whitechapel (Commercial Street) (1848); founders of Toynbee Hall; Whitechapel Gallery, founded in 1898; G.F. Watts; the Charity Organisation Society after 1869, which included Hill, Charles and Helen Dendy Bosanquet, Charles Loch, and Clara Collet, a friend of Gissing. With these women philanthropists, compare Miss Lant in The Nether World, as well as Helen Graham. Octavia Hill (1838-1912), granddaughter of Southwood Smith (1788-186) came from the world of reform of Chadwick and Shaftesbury; she was associated with F.D. Maurice, whose Working Men’s College, founded 1854, included. F.J. Furnivall, Tom Hughes, FM Brown, Ruskin, and George Macdonald. Among topics relevant for aesthetes she discusses the Kyrle Society for the Diffusion of Beauty Among the People (1876), the Early Closing Movement, and Bank Holidays Act 1871. She discusses the Sabbatarian Soc (LDOS – 1831), and the Sunday Society (1875) founded by Mark Judge (1847-1927: architect, Metropolitan Board of Works, and an hygienist); and the Sunday Opening Act (1896). Other figures Maltz discusses are Stewart Headlam (1847-1924), curate at S Michael, Shoreditch; Anglo-Catholic and Ruskinian: “All that is beautiful in this world brings to us a message from God” (qtd. Maltz, 138). Kept out of the church after 1878, he founded the Church and Stage Guild (1879). See Jose Harris, “Ruskin and Social Reform,” in Ruskin and the Moderns, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999), 7-34.

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sexual in nature, below the surface, Biffen is not probing there: his writing of the everyday is repressed. He is not transformative, nor is his writing, quite the reverse. The absolute opposite of him would be Rilke, the Nietzschean poet, in the Duino Elegies. If the Keatsian statement that “beauty is truth”, which was quoted in Workers in the Dawn (Gissing 2010, 210) is taken to mean that the creation of beauty is the creation of truth, then that may be compared with Nietzsche’s sense in The Birth of Tragedy that only as an aesthetic phenomenon can the world be justified, that statement which hovers inside Waymark’s account of the novel he wants to write. It makes it the more interesting to remember that Keats’ Ode and Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1819) were strictly contemporary. Keats’s Ode may be saying that the aesthetic has to be created, while “that is all / Ye know on earth and all ye need to know” may be an expression of the idea that there is only ever the world of surface appearance, of Schein: the world as Idea, the world as Apollonian. In contrast to Keats, if truth is beauty, then Biffen’s refusal to create, or transform, may also be a refusal to “justify” in Nietzschean terms. His passivity, which is also a will, has two features: it accords with a letter of Gissing to his brother Algernon stating that “the world is for me a collection of phenomena which are to be studied & reproduced artistically. In the midst of the most serious complications of life, I find myself suddenly possessed with a great calm, withdrawn as it were, from the immediate interests of the moment, & able to regard everything as a picture”.47 The language of detachment is strikingly reminiscent of a passage of Schopenhauer, which Nietzsche quotes: Even as on an immense, raging sea, assailed by huge wave-crests, a man sits in a little rowboat trusting his frail craft, so amidst the furious torments of this world, the individual sits tranquilly, supported by the principium individuationis and relying on it.48

Nietzsche comments that “the unshakeable confidence in that principle has received its most magnificent expression in Apollo, and that Apollo himself may be regarded as the marvellous divine image of the princpium individuationis”.49 Gissing, then, is acting as the figure of Apollo; it is revealing that he says he is “able to regard everything as a picture”. In the same way, Biffen can record life passively.

47

Matthiessen et al, Letters, 2.146. Schopenhauer, quoted by Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 22. 49 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 22. 48

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The sense of everything as a picture is also ambiguous. In one way, it evokes the Nietzschean sense of Apollonian life as appearance only, as Schein, as illusion, the delusory veil of Maya. For, as The Birth of Tragedy says, “the original Oneness, the ground of being, ever-suffering and ever contradictory, has need of rapt vision and delightful illusion to redeem itself”.50 But, in another mode, seeing everything as a picture anticipates Heidegger’s objection in his essay “The Age of the World Picture”, given as a lecture in 1938 but published in 1952, that the modern condition of knowing enframes everything, and produces it as a picture, in a way which implies the viewer’s detachment, and belief in the ability to represent everything, to put it inside the frame, which for Heidegger also means the “conquest” of everything.51 Man produces his own image of himself, which enables the ability to represent, and to colonise. It is relevant to recall here Gissing’s objection to science, as voiced through Henry Ryecroft, with the ambiguous example of Carlyle for support, and Ruskin, as already discussed.52 Science is the agency with most to gain from the age of the world as picture. If the danger of the aesthetic is, as already noted, that it permits disengagement with the world, the extreme of this appears in Walter Benjamin’s warning in 1936, that Marinetti’s Futurism was the consummation of l’art pour l’art, so that humanity’s “self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure”.53 Gissing approaches Benjamin’s prescient apocalypticism in Demos, when Eldon, himself an aesthete, says that talking with the capitalist Richard Mutimer is said to be like holding a dialogue with the twentieth century, and then asks “do you imagine the twentieth century will leave one green spot on the earth’s surface?” (Gissing 1888, 77) The danger in aestheticism, which Gissing knows, is that it may be a secret passivity, with the potential of being alienated from people and social issues, with the objectifying that entails. If the dominant readership is the quarter-educated, prey now to the market and advertising, the readership beyond that may take refuge in aestheticism, proposition, happens in New Grub Street, but such disengagement is doubly self-defeating, for the public and for the reader beyond, including Biffen, because it denies to that reader, or artist, a relationship to the public who are treated so cynically. His art is only in a very qualified sense that of an aesthete, but Biffen’s refusal to be a Zola, or 50

Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 52 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. by William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row 1977), 134. 52 Gissing, Henry Ryecroft, 162-164. 53 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 3: 1935-1938 edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 122. 51

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Dickens, by intervening in what he records, or by pointing up situations, or characters, is too easy, as is the criticism of these writers, and as is the refusal to go beyond the surface, which was what Waymark wanted to do. It risks accepting that the only reality is the recognisable everyday; but that, because that is recognisable, belongs to the past, to what has been seen; like Naturalism, which looks at the periphery of the city from the centre, rather than being of the periphery itself, and so schematises, it does not look for anything new. In the same way, Heidegger describes a way of seeing the world which has enframed it scientifically, and which makes a fetish out of the completeness and objectivity of what it sees. Gissing seems a more interesting novelist on account of his refusal to schematise, and in the way that he was marginal, and keeps himself as such, in such texts as Henry Ryecroft and By the Ionian Sea, but criticism of him will always have to pay attention to Joyce’s negativity, on reading Demos: “why are English novelists so terribly boring?”54 It is a critique of English colonialism and above all of English ideology which Gissing notes, as when he criticises Thackeray in Pendennis for “knowingly writing below the demands of his art” in the realm of the sexual,55 or saying that the writers who help him most are “French & Russian”, and adding “I have not much sympathy with English points of view”.56 It recalls the praise which Henry Ryecroft gives of Turner, that he does not seem English; it echoes the argument from Henri Murger that “Bohemia neither exists nor can exist anywhere but in Paris, that being London’s limitation”.57 To say that is not to forget Marx’s negativity about Bohemianism, but points to a dullness in London which Gissing notes: “London has no pays latin, but hungry beginners in literature have generally their suitable comrades, garreteers in the Tottenham Court Road district” (Gissing 1987, 21); but Ryecroft, speaking here, says that “more than once I was driven by necessity to beg from strangers the meanings of earning bread, and this of all my experiences was the bitterest” (Gissing 1987, 21). Ryecroft speaks of the “struggle against starvation” (Gissing 1987, 22). It suggests that there is no springboard for modernism in Gissing, if modernism is defined in terms of the potential for something new. Gissing describes being in the city in a condition of want: Henry Ryecroft buys a book when his “stomach 54 Pierre Coustillas and Colin Partridge, ed., George Gissing: Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 518. 55 Matthiessen et al, Letters, 2.276. 56 Matthiessen et al, Letters, 3.47. 57 Gissing, qtd. John Sloan, “Gissing, Literary Bohemia and the Metropolitan Circle,” in Gissing and the City: Cultural Crisis and the Making of Books in Late Victorian England, ed. John Spiers (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 75.

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clamoured for food” (Gissing 1987, 29), and the “Spring: chapter 10” section, with many echoes of Forster’s Life of Dickens, and David Copperfield, discusses the labyrinths of London where hunger kept him unable to purchase even one pennyworth of food, and the cellar where he lived off Tottenham Court Road, where Reardon first lives, in a garret (Gissing 1968, 88), or in Islington, not far from the City Road, looking out onto the Regent’s Canal (the site appears in Demos, chapter 3): As often as I think of it, I recall what was perhaps the worst London fog I ever knew, for three successive days at east, my lamp had to be kept burning; when I looked through the window, I saw, at moments, a few blurred lights in the street beyond the Canal, but for the most part nothing but a yellowish darkness, which caused the glass to reflect the firelight and my own face. (Gissing 1987, 26)

But, “had a goal before me, and not the goal of the average man. Even when pinched with hunger, I did not abandon my purposes, which were of the mind” (Gissing 1987, 28). The fog becomes part of the British Museum Reading Room, and of course, recalls Bleak House. The very ordinariness of this writing, and its literariness, in recalling Dickens’ London while describing his own, asks to be compared with the opening of the novel by Knut Hamsun (1859-1952), Hunger (Sult), which is where I belatedly say something about place. Hamsun’s novel is an account inflected by Georges Brand and Nietzsche, of a journalist living in deepest poverty and hunger, partly self-willed, in Oslo, then Christiana: “All of this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiana – that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him …”.58 The novel, appearing in 1890, predates, slightly, New Grub Street, but is modernist in a way Gissing is not, starting with that sentence, which is as strange as the Oslo it evokes; the city imposes itself on the person but not in any way that Zola’s naturalism could relate to. Three points may be noted: nothing really happens, but there is a sense of the everyday become strange, a contrast with Biffen; second, there is the sense of the city as alien, in a way which Gissing hardly achieves; his city may be alienating, but it does not strike him as different, or as containing its difference, so that the accounts Gissing offers of its locales are insights into the familiar, not into what resists knowing. And third, in the sense of Oslo, itself a small town, with a population of 135,000 in contrast to London’s then 4 million, holding the self – but how? And why? – it certainly suggests that the city does not permit autonomy - until it leaves its mark, there is a 58

Knut Hamsun, Hunger, trans. by Robert Bly (London: Picador, 1974), 24.

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commitment to the urban as different which Gissing’s literalism about places never achieves. To summarise what may be said of Hamsun’s sentence, there is in it the sense of something happening which cannot be precisely stated, which may add up to nothing at all objectively, but which nonetheless, in leaving its mark, requires a new writing to articulate it. The “I” of Hunger, a starving and out-of-work Raskolnikov, with no name apart from the ones he makes up, who has to get out of his room without his landlady seeing him, is a figure of heterogeneity who fantasises the articles he might write (one, “Crimes of the Future” is soon dismissed as a too-easy project [Hamsun 1974, 30]), and fantasises names (“Happolati, a businessman” [Hamsun 1974, 41]), while arguing with himself, doing things that are counter-intuitive as when he gives a beggar money, fearing going mad, and suddenly finding he has invented a word – Kuboaa – so that he says “I had arrived at the joyful insanity hunger was: I was empty and free of pain, and my thoughts no longer had any check” (Hamsun 1974, 77). He wants, too, to find a new word “black enough to suit” the darkness around him, “a word so hideously black that it would blacken my mouth when I said it” (Hamsun 1974, 78). There is no acceptance of reality as it is. The woman he pursues he calls Ylayali (Hamsun 1974, 31,32, 145), again a coinage, “a wonderful flowing sound”, though earlier, it had, contradictorily, “a smooth, nervous sound”. The new word, the desire to make life into a work of art, is the will not to be confined by a given reality, and it drives the “I” towards a complete heterogeneity, a splitting within the subject, which must somehow be related to something else in Hamsun: his fascism. Does Gissing work towards heterogeneity? Does Gissing find hunger strange, even a source of a different kind of knowledge, or something wholly predefined, which it is Hamsun’s quality not to find? Does he question given terms of reference? Yet every term that Hamsun’s novel finds strange, Gissing seems not to find so; his heterogeneity comes in his retreat from modern life, however heroically achieved in the travels of By the Ionian Sea, which, nonetheless aspires towards the past. He does so much: he is open to so much; he is held, too, by something in English ideology which resists finding the new. Perhaps he could have got more from the strangeness of Ruskin’s Turner.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Professor Richard Dennis is Emeritus Professor of Geography, University College London (UCL). He is the author of Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and co–editor of Architectures of Hurry — Mobilities, Cities and Modernity (Routledge, 2018). He contributed chapters to Gissing and the City (Palgrave, 2006) and Writing Otherness: The Pathways of George Gissing’s Imagination (Equilibris, 2010), and an essay on “Thyrza’s Geography” to the Victorian Secrets edition of Thyrza (2013. Beyond Gissing studies, his interests focus on housing and public transport in Victorian and Edwardian London and on Canadian cities in the early twentieth century. He is a trustee of The London Journal and was formerly Associate Editor of Journal of Urban History. Dr. Jason Finch is Associate Professor, English Language and Literature, at Åbo Akademi University. A co-founder and currently President of the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS), he works on modern urban literatures, including representations of housing and transport mobilities. He is the author of Deep Locational Criticism: Imaginative Place in Literary Research and Teaching (Benjamins 2016) and co-editor of seven books, most recently Literatures of Urban Possibility (Palgrave 2021). Dr Rebecca Hutcheon is a Digital Scholarship Researcher at the National Archives, Kew, London. Her research interests are in Romantic, Victorian and Modernist literature – mainly focused on the novel and travel writing – spatial theory, narratology and the digital humanities. Her monograph, Writing Place, was published by Routledge in 2018. Elsewhere, she has published extensively on George Gissing, literary geography and narratology. She is also the co-creator of a smart-phone app, Romantic Bristol: Writing the City. Dr José María Díaz Lage took his BA (English Philology) at the University of Santiago de Compostela and his MA (Literature, Culture and Modernity) at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London (now Queen Mary University of London). He subsequently took his PhD (English Philology) from the University of Santiago de Compostela. He has

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taught at the universities of Santiago de Compostela and Vigo. Since 2013 he has been a lecturer at the International University of La Rioja. Much of his research has focused on the relation of Anglo-American modernism to the avant-garde, as seen in the work of Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis and Mina Loy. He has also published research on Gissing’s fiction, specifically New Grub Street and Demos. He is a member of the editorial board of The Gissing Journal since January 2021. Dr Francesca Mackenney completed her PhD in English Literature at the University of Bristol. She has taught at Bristol, Edinburgh Napier University and Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research explores how we think and write about the natural world, with a particular focus on literary representations of birds, peatlands and place more generally. She has written on birds in the writings of Charles Dickens (The Dickensian, 2015), John Clare (Romanticism, 2020) and William Wordsworth (Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature, 2020). She is currently developing her doctoral thesis into a monograph, Birdsong, Speech and Poetry: The Art of Composition in the Long Nineteenth Century. Marco Olivieri is a postdoctoral research fellow at Pescara University. He has written essays on Thomas Hardy, Martin Amis, and ecolinguistics. He is currently translating the original 1871 edition of Leslie Stephen’s The Playground of Europe. Dr Michele Russo holds a PhD in English and Anglo-American Studies from the “G. d’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy, and teaches English in the Department of Economics, University of Foggia. He has published articles on J. Brodsky, V. Nabokov, L. M. Alcott, P. S. Allfrey, C. L. Hentz, W. Burroughs, G. Gissing, G. Moore, N. G. Prince, M. D. Shrayer and is the author of three monographs: John Lawson. Nuovo viaggio in Carolina (Perugia: Morlacchi, 2012), Iosif Brodskij: saggi di letture intertestuali (Milano: LED, 2015), and A Plurilingual Analysis of Four Russian-American Autobiographies. Cournos, Nabokov, Berberova, Shteyngart (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage, 2020). Dr Adrian Tait is an independent scholar and environmental critic with a particular interest in literature from the nineteenth-century and early modern periods. A long-standing member of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE-UKI), he has regularly published in its journal, Green Letters. He has also contributed to a number of other scholarly journals, and to essay collections such as Thomas Hardy, Poet:

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New Perspectives (2015), Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Literary Ecologies (2017), Victorian Ecocriticism (2017), and Enchanted, Stereotyped, Civilized: Garden Narratives in Literature, Art and Film (2018). Professor Jeremy Tambling is a writer and critic working on English and European literature and critical theory. He is formerly Professor of Literature at Manchester University, UK and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Jeremy is author of over twenty books on literary and cultural theory, many engaged with cities and urban theory. Professor Luisa Villa professor of English literature at the University of Genova, Italy. Her field of research is nineteenth-century and earlymodernist literature. She has published books in Italian on Henry James (1989), George Eliot (1994), ressentiment in late nineteenth-century fiction (1997), and the representation of the British military campaigns in the Sudan (“For Honour, not Honours”, 2009). She has edited or co-edited several collections of essays, among which The Victorians and Italy: Literature, Travel, Politics and Art (2009, with A. Vescovi and P. Vita), The Politics and Poetics of Displacement: Modernism off the Beaten Track (2011, with M. Bacigalupo), Modernism and the Mediterranean: Literature and Politics 1900-1937 (2014), and The British Aristocracy in Popular Culture: 200 Years of Representations (2020, with S. Michelucci and I. Duncan).

INDEX

A Adorno, Theodor W., 162 America, 8, 10, 70-81 anthropocene, 136 Arnold, Matthew, 99, 102, n. 162 art, 12, 76-80, 88, 152, 158-165, 168 automaton, 130, 138, 150 B Bachelard, Gaston, 117, 122, 13940, 143 Balzac, Honoré, 2, 157, 167-8 Barthes, Roland, 127 Benjamin, Walter, 163, 174 Bennett, Arnold, 3-4, 6, 17 Bertz, 31, 58-9, 67, 129, 170 Besant, Walter, 41, 47 Bohemianism, 175 Booth, Charles, 2, 14-15, 27, 48 botany, 10, 14, 31, 80, 88, 97, 103-6 Brand, Georges, 176 C Caird, Mona, 56 Carlyle, Thomas, 157, 160, 174 Channel Islands, 34 city, the, 36-54, 83, 85-87, 89, 9899, 125, 136-38, 142-43, 149, 155, 175-76 class, 39, 43-44, 46-47, 53, 58, 6365, 69, 81-83 middle-class, 2, 36, 39, 41, 45, 48-49, 53, 103, 107-8, 125, 127, 130, 138-40, 142, 15960, 163, 165 working-class, 5-6, 39, 45, 5154, 64, 76-77 Comte, Auguste, 80, 161, 167 Conrad, Joseph, 40

Constable, 12, 164 D de Certeau, Michel, 9, 34 Devon, 19, 28, 81, 85-88, 109-10, 151 Dickens, Charles 6, 11-12, 16, 22, 28, 39, 47, 52, 99-101, 145-156, 160, 168, 171-73, 175-76 Bleak House, 47, 149, 170, 176 David Copperfield, 146-7, 176 Dombey and Son, 47 Hard Times, 160 Master Humphrey's Clock, 154 Oliver Twist, 39, 52 Our Mutual Friend, 146, 151 The Old Curiosity Shop, 154 The Pickwick Papers, 147 The Uncommercial Traveller, 153-56 E ecocriticism, 10, 82-93, 116-17, 124-25 education, 55, 64, 97-98, 109, 160, 162-63, 168 Eliot, George, 32, 100, 161, Eliot, T S, 44 Ellis, Havelock, 61 Engels, Friedrich, 42-3, 168 Exeter, 16, 22-23, 31-33, 109-11, 113 exile, 5, 10, 70-81 F flânerie, 130 Fleury, Gabrielle, 95-96 focalisation, 121, 131-3, 144 Forster, E. M., 39

182 Forster, John, 153-4, 176 Frazer, James, 116-17, 119 Freud, Sigmund, 131, 133-34, 136, 162-3, 167, 169 G Gaskell, Elizabeth, 100-101 geography, 9, 15, 17-21, 29-31, 34, 36-37, geology, 14, 29-31, 105-6, 108-10, Gissing, Algernon, 7, 21-22, 29, 31, 145, 165, 173 Gissing, Ellen, 18, 29, 36, 107 Gissing, George works Short stories and essays “A Daughter of the Lodge”, 56, 62, 67-69 “Quarry on the Heath”, 100, 101-2, 105-106, 112-113s “The Artist’s Child”, 76-79 “The Firebrand”, 100, 110 “The Hope of Pessimism”, 16, 71, 165 “The Mysterious Portrait”, 80 “The Sins of the Fathers”, 112 “All for Love”, 112 “A Test of Honour”, 72-74, 79, 81 “An English Coast-Picture”, 7576, 81 “Dickens in Memory”, 146-47, 149 “Mutimer’s Choice”, 106 “The Homes and Haunts of Charles Dickens”, 147, 156 “The Schoolmaster’s Vision”, 61-63 “The Place of Realism in Fiction, 1, 6, 16 Novels A Life’s Morning, 10, 27, 32, 94, 100, 101n, 102-3, 105, 107, 109, 111, 112-13 Born in Exile, 16, 28, 33, 35, 36, 46, 109, 116, 117, 118, 119, 152

Index By the Ionian Sea, 8, 11, 12, 75, 122-27, 177 The Crown of Life, 27 Demos, 2, 39-40, 48, 53, 104, 106, 160, 162, 174-6 Denzil Quarrier, 17, 32-34, 11013 The Emancipated, 14, 30, 100, 107 In the Year of Jubilee, 136, 170 Isabel Clarendon, 22, 30 The Nether World, 2, 34, 39, 40, 48, 51, 53, 111, 170 New Grub Street, 5, 8, 10, 12, 16, 40, 41, 148-51, 152, 153, 167, 171, 174, 176 The Odd Women, 41, 128-144, 163, 171 Our Friend the Charlatan, 8, 10, 63-67 The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, 10, 12-13, 15-16, 82-93, 151-153, 155-56, 163-64, 174-75 Thyrza, 9, 16, 18, 23-24, 25-26, 39, 40, 48-49, 51-52 The Unclassed, 9, 12, 16, 26, 48, 49-50, 104, 127, 164-65, 168-69, 170, 172 Veranilda, 95, 96 The Whirlpool, 24-27, 57 Will Warburton, 27 Workers in the Dawn, 9, 12, 16, 19, 29, 37, 39-40, 43-54, 112, 145, 160-61, 165, 173 Gissing, Thomas, 21, 31, 95-98, 102-104, 106, 109, 111, 113 The Ferns and Fern Allies of Wakefield and Its Neighbourhood, 104 Grand, Sarah, 56 Greece, 29, 102n, 122 Greg, W. R., 128 H Hamsun, Knut, 176-77

George Gissing and the Place of Realism Hardy, Thomas, 11, 17, 32, 34, 99, 100, 105, 108n, 114-121, 123, 124-25, 126-27 A Pair of Blue Eyes 105 “The Profitable Reading of Fiction” 121 Far from the Madding Crowd, 115-16 Jude the Obscure, 120-21 Life's Little Ironies, 127 Tess of the d'Urbervilles, 115120, 125 The Return of the Native, 120 Wessex Tales, 124 Harkness, Margaret, 39, 47, 168n Heidegger, Martin 139, 174-75 history 2-3, 11, 24, 34 Hogarth, William, 21, 160-61 Humboldt, Alexander von 30-31 I idealism 4-6, 16, 19 Industrialisation 32, 73-74, 83-84, 86, 87, 93, 98-99, 101-105, 107, 126 irony, 12-13, 102, 103, 110, 123, 18-29, 135, 144, 148-48, 153, 156 Italy, 22, 26, 27n, 29, 114, 122-26, 164 Amalfi, 30 Calabria, 126 Capri, 30 Naples, 22, 31 J James, 10 James, Henry, 1n, 5, 6, 7, 76, 96, 134-35, 146 “The Jolly Corner”, 134-35 Joyce, James, 176 K Kant, Immanuel, 108, 165 Keats, John, 168, 171, 173

183

L Lawrence, D. H., 17, 170 Lefebvre, Henri, 8, 15, 139 Lenormant, François, 11, 114, 116, 123 London Bloomsbury, 21, 49, 52 British Museum, 108n, 149-150 Brixton, 26 Chelsea, 22, 25, 142 Clerkenwell, 2, 31, 137 Crouch End, 34 East End, 38, 40-42, 45-46, 5051, 126n, 165, 168 Hampstead, 30 Herne Hill, 131, 133, 135-36, 137-38, 142, 163 Lambeth, 16, 28, 31, 48-49, 52, 137 Seven Dials, 49, 50, 51, 52 Tottenham, 31-32, West End, 31, 32, 35, 45, 46, 48, 50-52, 53 Westminster, 16 Whitechapel, 27, 161, 172n M Marx, Karl, 90, 175 Marxism, 85, 90-91 Maupassant, Guy, 40 Mayhew, Henry, 47-48 Meredith, George, 37, 44, 54, 150 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel 150 mobility, 15, 77 Modernism, 4, 150, 162, 175-77 Morris, William, 32, 126n, 158, 161 Morrison, Arthur, 32, 49n, N Naturalism, 104, 123, 167, 175-176 New Woman, 9-10, 55-69, 128, 171 Nietzsche, 169-70, 173-74, 176 O Orwell, George, 3, 39,

184 Ouida, 56 P pastoral, 50, 83-89, 91-93 Pater, Walter, 161-62 Marius the Epicurean, 162 Patmore, Coventry, 128 Positivism, 79n, 125, 165, 167, 171 poverty, 14, 27, 38-45, 86, 89-91, 126, 154, 160, 168, 176 Pre-Raphaelites, 163 provincialism, 8, 10-11, 71, 95-103, 106, 107-113 Puritanism, 14, 74, 127, 159 R realism, 1-9, 13, 14-17, 32, 33, 171 Romaticism 1, 4, 87, 95, 110, 114, 117, 121-22, 124, 127 Rome, 11, 95, 96, 102n, 114, 122, 126 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 163 Ruskin, 12, 128, 138-40, 157-164, 169, 171, 172n, 174, 177 S satire, 16, 144, 148 Schopenhauer, 12, 165-70, 172-73 Schreiner, Olive, 56 science 103, 109, 174 Seascale, 23, 29 Shakespeare, William, 147, 154, 161 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 93, 167 Shorter, C. K., 145 slum, 2, 8, 9, 14-17, 36-54, 135, 137, 161 slumming, 27, 41, 48 Socialism, 157, 160

Index Soja, edward, 3, 17 space 3, 8-9, 15, 32, 36, 75-76, 114, 117, 122, 139-41 Spencer, Herbert, 60 suburbs, 2, 31, 33-34, 47, 53, 134, 135-38 T Tennyson, Alfred Lord 162 Tolstoy, Leo, 160 travel 19, 21, 29, 75-76, 80-81, 12227, 154-56 Trollope, 32, 38, 49n Turner, J. M. W., 12, 158-59, 162, 163-64, 175, 176 U uncanny, 128-31, 133-35, 136-37, 139, 140, 141, 143-44 utopia, 89, 91, 127, 170 W Wakefield, 21, 32, 94-113 walking, 9, 17, 22-23, 27, 28, 30, 31-32, 33, 49-51, 53, 57, 88, 103 Ward, Mary Augusta, 37 Webb, Beatrice, 48 Wells, H G, 3, 6, 57-58 Wessex, 11, 32, 100, 114-17, 12021, 125, 126-27 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 159, 164 Woolf, Virginia, 4-5, 6 Wordsworth, William, 152 Z Zola, Emile, 41, 167-68, 171, 174, 176