The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope

Lizzie is a liar, no three ways about it, confabulating like a good‘un from morning till night and coming to see in the end there might be some truth in her story. Money, rank, and beauty give her licence to paint a poetry over the prose of this world. She is a widow whose sickly husband died within a short time and being a baronet left her a lady with a £4000 pa. income for her life and a son who is the heir to the title. Lady Eustace had a diamond necklace valued at £10000 put on her neck by her husband and she intends to make her own of it and not let it sink back into the estate as her bete noir the family solicitor Camperdown insists. It is an heirloom and therefore cannot be taken as personal property. Was it in London that she first received it or in Scotland at the home castle of Portray? If at home then it might be counted amongst the paraphernalia of the home and therefore property of her own. The law is uncertain on these fine points. Best let it be in Scotland. Yes it was in Scotland. 

 

 Lively as a goat amongst the crags she leaps from fable to fib to buttress her stratagems getting increasingly confused as stern truth advances towards her. I read the Palliser series out of turn so I have foreknowledge of certain events and as I read I wondered how was this wrought. Simple when you know Lady Eustace and her mutability and invention all centred around the pole star of her own aims. Is it wrong to attempt to draw her first cousin Frank away from his true love Lucy. Not at all, in her computation it would suit them both,with her money his career as an M.P. and rising barrister would be enhanced. At that time MPs were not paid a salary and besides Frank Greystock is not a very good manager of his money. He’s in debt but still lives the life of a wealthy young man about town. His £2000 p.a. and her £4000 would be a fine basis for easy living. All his relations think so, a ‘poor’ man marrying the very plain governess for love, what is the sense of doing that. As ever the marriage mart is a theme of Trollope’s.

 

 It’s a very long novel but the narrative tension never slackens. As I wrote having read the books out of turn I wondered about certain outcomes but the author makes it all character centred and credible. The meddling Lady Glencora and Palliser’s quint farthing is a continuing theme from earlier books. An insinuating satire on the mores and manners of Victorian society twenty years before the Queen’s jubilee (1860‘s). George Gissing wrote ‘In the Time of Jubilee’ from the perspective of the lower middle classes if you want a more astringent version of of high Empire when the map was pink. Absolutely superb controlled writing but do read the Palliser novels in sequence.

The Unclassed by George Gissing

 Let me first of all deal with the problem of coincidence in novels, Victorian novels in particular.. The Unclassed by George Gissing is full of them. Does not that flagrant breach of likelihood ruin verisimilitude?  Yes if you view the novel as a tranche of life, a piece of social history using the characters as lay figures.  Of course its not that, it is a story, a world enclosed in a narrative, pure fabulism. It is a restricted world and the relationships of the characters must be worked out within it.  Therefore they must all meet in whatever likely or unlikely way they do. Its a small world..

A good way to bring disparate characters together is school. Right away the enmity which is a central element is established by Ida Starr skulling Harriet Smales with a writing slate knocking her out.  The row has come about through Harriet declaring Ida’s mother to be no better than a street woman which is actually true.  Though Ida who is about 10 or so does not know what this means having been sheltered from this life by a mother who wants to rear her gently being herself from a well off background but a little wayward, seduced at age 18 and by refusing to give up the child, Ida,  is cast out by her father, Abraham Woodstock.  Maud Enderby is a friend of Ida’s and she is being reared by her Aunt who is a strict ascetic non conformist. Maud believes that her parents are dead . Harriet’s father is a compounding chemist, sickly of course as per usual in the novels of Gissing a good percentage of the characters will be ailing.  Harriet is the only child but there is a nephew Julian Casti a few years older than her.  Mother is dead.

That is one assemblage of characters. The other element is the lone figure of Osmond Waymark.who brings them all together by writing an ad in the newspaper looking for a friend of literary bent to meet for conversation and company.  This is some years later than the opening scene. . 

Now this sort of review through dramatis personae is not my usual way of dealing with a novel.  I’m doing it to remind myself that this was the work of a 26 year old man and  his second novel.  It was an extremely complex narrative retaining interest in the characters as they developed over several years.  In some ways the novel is like a therapeutic journal plotting his own internal drama.  Waymark represents the authori himself as the strong writer able by the force of his personality to turn the prostitute Ida to purity and love unsullied by lust.  At the same time he is attracted to the religious Maud Enderby.  Casti represents the side of Gissing easily imposed on by a scheming woman dragged down and neglecting his talent.  At the time of the writing of the novel he had broken with Nell the alcoholic prostitute that he had married.  The intensity of the energies released in the writing creates a like absorption in the reader.  We want the fantasy to correct the sordid aspects of his life and the visualisation to achieve reality.  The speed with which it was written and its journal aspect mitigated the usual writerly orotundity which can make the prose the analogue of lumpy porridge.

Do all the characters meet? Yes they do, of course. There are many well drawn evil characters.  Harriet is a monster of passive aggression, and vengeance, Slimey a Caliban clown, and Mrs. Sprowl an instigator of vile plot.  As in many of Gissing’s novels there are slums noisome, crooked, rotten and with defective plumbing causing night soil to be cast into the yard.  This is a good novel. 

 

'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.

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

Gissing and The Nether World

George Orwell might have written the biography of George Gissing. He was asked to do so by a publisher in 1946 but he was on his way to the island of Jura and so had to decline the offer. Instead he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four which is a decent swap. Orwell was born in 1903 the same year that Gissing died and they both lived to the age of 46 each succumbing finally to lung disease. I am relying here on the biography George Gissing: A Life by Paul Delany. Therein the point is made that whereas Orwell took to tramping to research his books on poverty, Gissing merely walked the streets and visited the workshops of Clerkenwell to do research for his novel The Nether World but it could also be maintained that Gissing had no need of sentimental immersion as he had just buried his first wife Nell two weeks before starting that novel. He had first met and fallen in love with her when he was a brilliant young student and she a young prostitute. Though he, through the multiple scholarships which he had won, was well off, for a student, still that was not enough to keep her off the streets and he began to steal from his fellows at Owens College (later Manchester University). The month in goal that he received for his crime was the beginning of his real research into the nether world. Expelled from college in disgrace he went to America that place of dubious sanctuary but when he came back after a year took up with Nell again. His plan was to turn her into a ladylike companion but she kept up with her trade and her drinking throughout their marriage. Delany suggests that she infected him with syphilis, the disease that finally killed her and may have exacerbated the weakness of his lungs.

There are many of us who have been scorched by the fire of a fatal relationship but have come out the other side with a here be dragons map engramatically engraved on our brains . Gissing continued to explore that territory. What he needed was a nice intelligent work-girl that he could mould to a suitable companion. His second wife went mad and fought with the servants.

By being expelled from Owens College he had lost his chance to rise in the world. He later wrote in a letter:

The life of a Fellow at Oxford or Cambridge is, I should think, almost ideal. He has his man-servant, his meals either in private or at the public table, an atmosphere of culture and peace.

The way that the clever student can con his lessons well and deliver them back in the same diction as the professor, that sincere flattery that brings academic honour, could be the very mimesis that hobbles his style. It’s not there all the time, that constraint that makes him seem like a foreigner that was attempting the speech of a class always beyond him and that he could never be sure he was getting right. There is a concept of what is ‘writerly’ that stifles the life of his prose sometimes but I do not deny that this may be a function of his hurry. He began the novel on 19th.of March and finished it on the 18th. of July. In our more leisurely days that would probably be the time allotted for a first very rough draft .

In the Year of Jubilee

In The Forsyte Saga John Galsworthy chronicled the upper middle classes for the lower middle brow reader. The opening of the novel is set in 1886 which is one year before the jubilee of Queen Victoria. In the Year of Jubilee George Gissing writes about the lower middle classes. His audience is perhaps upper middle brow. There is no chance whatever that his work will be turned into a superior soap to beguile the winter schedule with a Christmas episode.

The close attention to class and the minute division in those classes that are opaque to the outsider is a theme of Gissing’s. In general his people are ill fed, ill housed and ministered to by mutinous servants. When introduced in the novel they are sketched in like types from a Lombroso catalogue.

A younger girl of much slighter build with a frisky gait, a jaunty pose of the head, pretty, but thin-featured and shallow-eyed; a long neck, no chin to speak of , a low forehead with the hair of washed-out flaxen fluffed all over it.

Due to the new universal education they, the 3 French sisters, are able to read but to what end.

But on tables and chairs lay scattered a multitude of papers, illustrated weeklies, journals of society, cheap miscellaneous penny novelettes and the like.

The 3 are living in De Crespigny Park, more genteel than their previous residence on the Camberwell Road. The husband of the eldest Ada is Arthur Peachey who is a leading light in a manufactory dedicated to disinfectant. Their deceased builder father left them some money.

Beatrice and Fanny had learnt to support themselves, Beatrice in the postal service, and Fanny, sweet blossom! by mingling her fragrance with that of a florist’s shop in Brixton; but on their fathers death both forsook their employment and came to live with Mrs. Peachey.

The other family in the novel are the Lords, Stephen the father, Nancy and Horace the children. Fanny French has designs on Horace whom she reckon will come in for half of the plunder when the old boy dies. He is a dealer in pianos, a lucrative trade when every parlour that fancied itself had to have one.

One thing about Gissing; if you want to know how people lived when the Empire straddled the globe and the Old Queen reigned he’s your man. Interiors, food, hairstyles, dress both male and female he covers everything with special attention to the shoddy and the tawdry. He’s much the better writer than Galsworthy in the rendering of texture. His depiction of the squalid and evil conditions of Victorian England distorting the lives of the masses is excellent. His women are fell creatures, his men mostly hapless. All his works are on Gutenberg. Recommended: New Grub Street, The Odd Women. I am at present reading The Nether World about life in the tenements. Not many jokes.