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George Gissing: A Life

The downfall of a pessimist

Paul Delaney
Weidenfeld, 472pp, £25,

Ferdinand Mount

Wednesday, 5th March 2008

Ferdinand Mount reviews Paul Delany's biography of George Gessing

simply a lump of wealthy London put back to back with a lump of Whitechapel and stuck down on a most uninteresting piece of coast, a more hideous and vulgar sea-side town the mind of man has not conceived.

Anyway, far from giving up Nell, he poured more money down her throat, and since they could not share lodgings while unmarried, and despite his hatred of the Church, he married her in St James’s Hampstead Road.

Through all this process — a decidedly gruelling one, to put it mildly — Professor Delany has been tut-tutting and pursing his lips and shaking his head. ‘Many Owens students made an occasional visit to a brothel, with no harm to their future careers,’ he sighs in his broadminded way. Gissing, though, ‘brought doom on himself by deciding to save Nell from her way of life’, for ‘if she was just an ordinary girl of the streets, Gissing had been a great fool.’ Even writing to her from the States ‘showed that he had learnt nothing from being sent to prison’. Nothing like the treadmill to prevent prostitutes from finding husbands.

Why on earth could he not settle down with a nice middle-class girl and write nice middle-class novels for the circulating libraries? ‘He might have suffered much less from loneliness and sexual deprivation if he had chosen women whose status was closer to his own’, Delany tells us in his worldly-wise way. ‘All Gissing needed to do,’ he explains, sounding more and more like one of those ads on the back page which promise you the infallible recipe for turning out bestsellers, ‘was study his market and then meet the demand for material.’

Nell and Gissing eventually separate and she dies in ghastly poverty at the age of 30, although he never stops sending her what little money he has (at one point he is supporting no less than 15 members of his family from his scant earnings — Delany calls him ‘a soft touch’). The cause of death was probably the syphilis for which she had been receiving treatment, although the death certificate used the frequent euphemism of ‘acute laryngitis’.

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jeffrey manley

March 6th, 2008 6:48pm

When mentioning prominent South London authors, I'm surprised Mr. Mount does not name Henry Williamson. The fisrt volumes of his Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight describe his early life in and around Lewisham. And Mr. Mount is surely familiar with his work since he calls his own series of novels Chronicle of Modern Twilight. These latter by the way should have received more attention than they have.

Markus Neacey

March 11th, 2008 10:13pm

Gissing was not the self-defeating, self-pitying, or hopelessly pessimistic individual so many generally misinformed reviewers imagine him to be. Had he been so he would have hanged himself in his prison cell. Yet, having sacrificed his career and reputation to save a common prostitute, he did not wallow in despair. Instead, by sheer determination and imcomparable industriousness, not to mention courage, he resurrected his life and made of it beauty from ashes. For, during twenty-five years of literary activity, he produced a body of work, whose power and humanity resounds to this day. As Orwell in his day and his many admirers today recognise, that is hardly the legacy of a defeated pessimist.

Tom Luke

March 28th, 2008 4:57pm

I'm left gessing as to the quality of spelling.

The power of the evasive word

Michael Howard

The Economist Book of Obituaries, by Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe

Deadlier than the male

Andrew Taylor

When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so.