'The Whirlpool' by George Gissing

  

This is a very complex and closely plotted novel but all that doesn’t matter much because the real events are inward and moral. Again and again Harvey Rolfe the central figure, a gentleman of independent means who passes his days in scholarly pursuits mounts the heights of moral assessment; high ground which he has gained after a rackety start in life.  The exact details of that are given quite late in the novel but initially as we meet him dining at the Metropolitan Club we find that he is decent sort of chap who at age 35 is rolling towards middle age down the gentle slope of esoteric study in his rooms which are in a filthy condition arising from a charity job he has given to an indigent lady that lives by grace and favour of the landlord in a room at the top of the house. As ever in the novels of Gissing incompetent and mutinous servant pullulate. 

The smash of Bennet Frothingham’s Britannia Loan, Assurance, Investment and Banking Company is the novel’s big bang as it were. All of the characters in it are affected by the loss of their money and readjustments are required by all except for Harvey who has his money in solid and safe instruments which allow him £900 a year, a quite respectable income in 1897.   The moral core of the novel is suffering and growth. Mrs. Abbott is one of those people visited by great sorrow who  comes out on the right side of that equation.  

"In truth, Harvey did not quite like Mrs. Abbott. Her age was about seven and twenty. She came of poor folk, and had been a high-school teacher; very clever and successful, it was said, and Harvey could believe it. Her features were regular, and did not lack sweetness; yet, unless an observer were mistaken, the last year or two had emphasised a certain air of conscious superiority, perchance originating in the schoolroom. She had had one child; it struggled through a few months of sickly life, and died of convulsions during its mother's absence at a garden-party."

The children of a cousin of hers have been abandoned by their father and she takes them on and rears them with the Rolfe’s financial help.   Her husband died due to an overdose of laudanum that he was taking for his neuralgia whether that was deliberate or not is left unclear. 

Alma the daughter of Bennett Frothingham is a talented musician who marries Harvey.  She is rather spoilt and lacks the character to stick at anything and being over reliant on praise falls into a torpid state when they move into Wales and there is no one to admire her.  

The Carnabys, Hugh and Sibyl are friends of Rolfe affected by the financial smash of Britannia and have to begin to think of trade to restore their fortune.  Sibyl is a queenly figure, an aristocratic type, in contrast to Hugh who is a classic Arnoldian barbarian who ought to be putting down uprisings in a far flung corner of the Empire.

" Her opinions were uttered with calm assurance, whatever the subject. An infinite self-esteem, so placid that it never suggested the vulgarity of conceit, shone in her large eyes and dwelt upon the beautiful curve of her lips. No face could be of purer outline, of less sensual suggestiveness; it wore at times an air of cold abstraction which was all but austerity."

Part of the mystery and interest of this novel is that we never really plumb the depths of what Sibyl really is.  What is her relation to Cyrus Redgrave who attempted to seduce Alma before her marriage.  Is there an alliance between them of some sort.  Alma thinks there is.

I see now that it is impossible to even suggest the winding and threading of the plot of this novel which was written at great speed by Gissing. The overwhelming fact of social class and the genteel ignorance of ladies of where the money was coming from is realised in the minor figure of Mr. Leach:

"At the age of fifty, prematurely worn by excessive labour, he was alarmed to find his income steadily diminishing, with no corresponding diminution—but rather the opposite—in the demands made upon him by wife and daughters. In a moment of courage, prompted by desperation, he obtained the consent of Dora and Gerda to this unwelcome change of abode. It caused so much unpleasantness between himself and Mrs. Leach, that he was glad to fit up a sleeping-room at his office and go home only once a week; whereby he saved time, and had the opportunity of starving himself as well as of working himself to death."

A brilliant novel, a picture of late Victorian life amongst the rentier classes.