Born in Exile by George Gissing (pub.1892)

George Gissing’s rate of production worked against the development of a good style. He wrote eight hours a day producing a novel every year. When he showed a publisher two volumes of Demos that had as a theme contemporary worker agitation he was told that if he could produce a third volume they would publish it immediately. In those days novels came in 3 volumes. He set to and wrote it in two weeks. No, one doesn’t read Gissing for the exquisite bouquet of a fine style. You are liable to find periphrasis and bathos and unconscious humour on every page but even so there is a documentary fever in his work as he strives to leave nothing out. My gude and I have been having fun with Godwin Peak’s first meeting with the nicely bred Sidwell Warricomb.

A slight languor in her movements and her voice, together with the beautiful coldness of her complexion, made it probable that she did not share the exuberant health manifest in her two brothers. She conversed with mature self-possession, yet showed a slight tendency to abstractedness. On being addressed, she regarded the speaker steadily for an instant before shaping her answer, which always, however trifling the subject, seemed carefully worded. In these few moments of dialogue, Godwin reached the conclusion that Sidwell had not much sense of humour, but that the delicacy of her mind was unsurpassable.

‘The delicacy of your mind, me dear, is unsurpassable, I forbear animadversion to your sense of humour’.

Godwin Peak has a plan to woo and win a lady of the upper class but the problem is that he himself is a scion of the working class. ‘There is much of me in Godwin Peak’ Gissing admitted to his friend Morley Roberts who wrote a memoir called The Private Life of Henry Maitland rather transparently based on the authors life. George Gissing was a brilliant scholarship student probably the most learned of any writer in the 19th. century. He knew the classics thoroughly and his favourite topic of conversation with Roberts was obscure points of Greek prosody. Plato he read for the beauty of his writing rather than the philosophy. He spoke French, German, Italian and could read Spanish. He was destined to be a don until he was caught stealing money from his fellow students at Owens College, the forerunner of Manchester University. He was sentenced to one month in prison. It’s all there in his biography but don’t read it in Wikipedia which goes against all known evidence about his relationship with Nell a prostitute.

She is often described as a prostitute, but there is no evidence for this. It is reported that he gave her money in an attempt to keep her off the streets, but, again, there is no evidence.

The classic Wikipedia demand for citation is missing. Very odd.

Gissing being denied any relationship with a woman of the refined upper classes because of his disgrace decided that a ‘work girl’ might be brought to evince delicacy of mind by training. He quite possibly helped to drive his second wife mad.

This extreme snobbery and detestation of the vile working class that he was doomed to live amongst feeds into the character of Godwin, named after William ‘Political Justice’ Godwin. How might one sanitise lowly origins and become a gentleman with access to the unsurpassable? Why; take orders in the Church established by law. A slight moral hurdle is that Peak is an agnostic who thinks that religion is for women and the weak minded who have not understood the Origin of the Species and the ongoing work in biblical criticism and the age of the earth. We are now in the ‘80‘s and there are some, even those of a scientific temper, who resist the evidence . Martin Warricomb, Sidwell’s father, a retired lecturer in Geology is one of those.

The bent of his mind was anything but polemical; he cared not to spend time even over those authors whose attacks on the outposts of science, or whose elaborate reconcilements of old and new, might have afforded him some support. On the other hand, he altogether lacked that breadth of intellect which seeks to comprehend all the results of speculation, to discern their tendency, to derive from them a consistent theory of the nature of things. Though a man be well versed in a science such as palaeontology it does not follow that he will view it in its philosophical relations. Martin had kept himself informed of all the facts appertaining to his study which the age brought forth, but without developing the new modes of mental life requisite for the recognition of all that such facts involved. The theories of evolution he did not venture openly to resist, but his acceptance of them was so half-hearted that practically he made no use of their teaching. He was no man of science, but an idler among the wonders which science uses for her own purposes.

By pretending to be able to reconcile religion and the new science Peak comes very close to Warricomb senior which brings Sidwell to trust him. Buckland Warricomb the son is a different matter. He suspects that Peak is duplicitous. How could a man of such obvious intelligence swallow such trifling rationalisations. He sets out to trace the origins of this unctuous paragon.

There is a great deal in this novel for those who wish to get a feeling for the class system, intellectual currents, blue stockings, intelligentsia, the spiritual turmoil and the rampant hypocrisy of the Victorian age. It’s quite readable, despite the lumps in the porridge. The portrait of the modernising parson Bruno Chivers is amusing. His lineaments are still to be discerned amongst the higher and the lower clergy. (That diction is catching) I recommend it. To be found on Gutenberg in all formats.
born in exile