1George Gissing’s expulsion from Owens College, Manchester in the summer of 1876, and his subsequent conviction and imprisonment for petty theft is a well known—perhaps the best known—fact of his biography and, seemingly, a spectacular act of self-destruction. In a life otherwise rather drably conservative, this was an episode of deviance from middle-class social conformity to rival any of the excesses of the late Victorian fin de siècle. The act was certainly a defining one. It condemned Gissing to the toils of new Grub Street instead of the cloistered life of classical scholarship for which he was clearly destined. Although much has been made of this episode as a class crime with clear social consequences, there seems to have been rather less speculation as to what inner compulsion might have driven an ambitious young scholar to exchange his hard-won middle-class advantages for a precarious life of literary endeavour in the murky world of the London underclass. There are too many gaps in the record to attempt any just assessment of Gissing’s relationship with Nell Harrison, the young girl that he sought to save from a life on the streets, stole for, and eventually married after a year in America. On his side, letters and diaries have been censored or destroyed, on hers, inevitably, silence.
- 1 Morley Roberts, The Private Life of Henry Maitland, 1912 (London: The Richards Press, 1958). See pp (...)
2This has not inhibited much myth-making of the episode from Morley Roberts’s account of the relationship in The Private Life of Henry Maitland onwards.1 The official version is that the young idealistic student wished to ‘save’ a young girl already drifting into a life of alcoholism and prostitution. The money he stole from fellow students was to fund her chance of a better life. Morley Roberts describes how he bought Nell a sewing machine to keep her off the streets, while John Middleton Murray is lyrical about the motives of this ‘Manchester Raskolnikov’ in his essay on Gissing published in 1959:
- 2 John Middleton Murray, Katherine Mansfield and Other Literary Studies (London: Constable, 1959) 5–6
By the time he was a young and solitary student in Manchester, he was hungry for female companionship. And he found it, at the age of seventeen, in a girl a year younger than himself who had taken to the streets. One pictures her as kind and sweet to him, and exalted beyond herself by the knowledge that she had inspired a sincere and unselfish love in a young man of education; and him as enraptured equally by his initiation into the mystery and delight of sex, and by his sense of chivalry in rescuing, in defiance of the prudent world, a victim of its social oppression. He was Perseus to her Andromeda. All his instinctive idealism, nourished by his memories of Dickens, went into the determination to keep Nellie Harrison from the streets.2
3We learn from Roberts’s fictional biography that ‘Maitland’, his pseudonym for Gissing, led a fraught double life in his early London years. After evenings spent dining with Frederic Harrison’s Positivist circle, he would return to a domestic life of squalor and constant disruption as Nell’s behaviour grew increasingly uncontrollable. Roberts tells of an evening he spent with ‘Maitland’ conversing in one room while an invisible female presence banged on the dividing wall demanding attention. Nell was often ill with a number of mysterious ailments, her absconding grew more frequent and by 1883 the ill-matched couple were leading separate lives although Gissing continued to pay her a regular weekly allowance.
4The Nether World was, of course, written in the immediate aftermath of Nell’s death in 1888. The account of his visit to her death-bed in his diary is memorable. It concludes:
- 3 Pierre Coustillas (ed.), London and the Life of Literature in late Victorian England: The Diary of (...)
Came home to a bad, wretched night. In nothing am I to blame; I did my utmost; again and again I had her back to me. Fate was too strong. But as I stood beside that bed, I felt that my life henceforth had a firmer purpose. Henceforth I never cease to bear testimony against the accursed social order that brings about things of this kind. I feel that she will help me more in her death than she balked me during her life. Poor, poor thing!3
5With Nell’s death and the subsequent writing of The Nether World, Gissing seems to have achieved some kind of catharsis that allowed him to move away from inner city squalor and deprivation into other areas of the city and onto other concerns. This novel is his most focussed and disciplined treatment of that most fashionable topic for the 1880s, ‘the residuum’. The Nether World plays its part in a general contemporary debate about poverty, unemployment and fears concerning the declining moral and physical condition of the urban masses in London and elsewhere. My interest is not so much in this public debate but in the language of abjection that Gissing uses to such powerful effect in this text and his fascination with the marginal, the transgressive and excluded.
6Gissing certainly declared a need to ‘bear testimony against the accursed social order’ but this noble public project seems to have been driven by something darker and more intractable. His fraught relationship with Nell seems to be the perfect demonstration of Freud’s theory of degradation in erotic life. In his paper, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’ (1912), Freud suggests that in over-civilised men there is a tendency for the love emotion to split between the sacred and profane: ‘Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love’. He continues:
- 4 S. Freud, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’, in A. Richards (ed.) On (...)
People in whom there has not been a proper confluence of the affectionate and sensual currents do not usually show much refinement in their modes of behaviour in love; they have retained perverse sexual aims whose non-fulfilment is felt as a serious loss of pleasure, and whose fulfilment on the other hand seems possible only with a debased and despised sexual object.4
- 5 Morley Roberts 116. Roberts continues: ‘If by any chance Maitland, instead of coming into the hands (...)
7Freud himself acknowledged that this ‘debasement’ was widely prevalent among nineteenth century gentlemen and perhaps, in varying degrees, the inevitable consequence of modern civilization, but in Gissing’s case it does seem to be particularly acute. Morley Roberts, who knew the young Gissing best of all his friends, writes tellingly that Maitland ‘did not seem to know what love was’ and that his ‘boyish passion was not of the kind that keeps boys innocent’. When seeking to dissuade his friend from another disastrous marriage with Edith Underwood, Roberts noted that: ‘his mind recognised (the) truth but his body meant to have its way.’5
- 6 See Paul Matheisen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas, (eds.), The Collected Letters of George (...)
8We know that Gissing’s second misalliance was followed by the quick completion of New Grub Street while it was his initial disgrace that seems to have led him into a life of fiction-writing in the first place. Even allowing for Morley Roberts’s undoubted gift for mythologizing, the apparent link between Gissing’s sexual interest in uneducated girls and creativity is intriguing. His own rationalisation for his actions, that no educated woman would marry a man who earned less than four hundred pounds a year, seems rather unconvincing.6 I would like to explore further some of the literary consequences of Gissing’s fall from social middle-class respectability into the margins of ‘outcast London’ using some of Julia Kristeva’s psychological notions of the ‘abject’ as she outlines them in Powers of Horror. In particular I should like to examine The Nether World, the last and finest of Gissing’s working-class novels, in the context of Kristeva’s theories of identity formation. In effect, I want to explore The Nether World in the context of Gissing’s own ‘nether world’.
- 7 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982 (...)
9Kristeva’s theory of abjection lays great emphasis on the precariousness of personal borders as the individual subject constantly struggles to maintain a cultural identity in the symbolic order. For Kristeva, the rejection of the mother and all the filth and refuse associated with the female body is necessary for the establishment of the individual ego, but the subject is never secure in its self-sufficiency and must endlessly enforce its borders, both fascinated and horrified by what lies beyond. Excrement, blood, bodily fluids and corpses are all examples of the abject, constant reminders of what must be expelled beyond the borders in order for the subject to maintain its ‘clean and proper body.’ Yet however much the encultured subject defends the symbolic law of the father, it remains drawn by desire to ‘what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.’ As Kristeva writes: ‘Not me, not that. But not nothing either.’7 According to this theory, the melancholy and desiring subject is always drawn towards what it most fears and abhors.
- 8 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986 (...)
10What is certain is that, for whatever motive, Gissing’s relationship with Nell Harrison was responsible for his expulsion from the ‘clean and proper body’ of Victorian middle class respectability and classical scholarship into a ‘low’ world of slums, urban detritus and working class poverty. The fictional world he chose to explore and make his own coincides very much with that described by Stallybrass and White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression.8 They describe the process whereby bourgeois fears and anxieties are transcoded onto what they term ‘the grotesque body’ of the modern city with all its threatening impurity and insecure borders: in particular, its filthy slums with their mad, sick, sexually transgressive and unruly occupants.
11Gissing knew his Dante, and in the opening chapter of the novel classical reference and abjection blend. We enter his nether world symbolically through the gateway of a madhouse or jail that is surmounted by a bust of a man ‘distraught with agony’:
- 9 George Gissing, The Nether World, 1889 (London: Dent, Everyman Library, 1973) 2. All subsequent ref (...)
The eyes stared wildly from their sockets, the hair struggled in maniac disorder, the forehead was wrung with torture, the cheeks sunken, the throat fearsomely wasted, and from the wide lips there seemed to be issuing a horrible cry.9
12The novel may be set in the inner city streets of nineteenth century Clerkenwell but ‘Mad Jack’, an obscurely literate vagrant, underlines the point near its end should we have missed it:
This life you are now leading is that of the damned; this place to which you are confined is Hell! There is no escape for you. From poor you shall become poorer; the older you grow the lower shall you sink in want and misery; at the end there is waiting for you, one and all, a death in abandonment and despair. This is Hell—Hell—Hell!10
13So the nether world is a place of despair, greed, depravity and death—the novel opens and closes in a graveyard—from which there is ultimately no escape.
14Gissing’s ‘proper body’ may be composed of bookishness, bourgeois constraint and classical learning, but he seems irresistibly drawn to scenes of dirt, disorder and violence. The justly famous set-piece chapter 12, ‘Io Saturnalia’, describes London workers at play on the August bank holiday, implicitly contrasting the demotic turmoil at the Crystal Palace with an idealised vision of the ancient world. It achieves its particular tone of enraptured disgust by describing the ‘low’ pleasures of the poor with the contempt of a man of culture, who surveys the proletarian crowd at play with fear and loathing:
Observe the middle-aged women; it would be small surprise that their good looks had vanished; but whence comes it they are animal, repulsive, absolutely vicious in ugliness? Mark the men in their turn: four in every six have visages so deformed by ill-health that they excite disgust; their hair is cut down to within half an inch of their scalp; their legs are twisted out of shape by evil conditions of life from birth upwards.11
15Yet the narrator’s contempt is complicated by ambivalent desire:
A fight, a scene of bestial drunkenness, a tender whispering between two lovers, proceed concurrently in a space of five yards. Above them glimmers the dawn of starlight.12
16He may view the ‘imbecile joviality’ in the Palace’s ‘Shilling Tea-room’ with a sardonic disdain for the pleasures of the poor, but food is still a significant preoccupation. The diet of the poor intrigues Gissing because the act of eating transgresses borders. Clem Peckover, whose name indicates voracious appetite as well as physical dominance, converts ‘bad’, crude proletarian food into dangerous sexual energy. In an early chapter the omniscient narrator lovingly describes her preparation of a meal with a relish akin to her own:
The sausages—five in number—she had emptied from the frying-pan directly on to her plate, and with them all the black rich juice that had exuded in the process of cooking—particularly rich, owing to its having several times caught fire and blazed triumphantly. On sitting down and squaring her comely frame to work, the first thing Clem did was to take a long draught out of the beer-jug; refreshed thus, she poured the remaining liquor into a glass. Ready at hand was mustard, made in a tea-cup; having taken a certain quantity of this condiment on her knife, she proceeded to spread each sausage with it from end to end, patting them in a friendly way as she finished the operation. Next she sprinkled them with pepper, and after that she constructed a little pile of salt on the side of her plate, using her fingers to convey it from the salt-cellar. It remained to cut a thick slice of bread—she held the loaf pressed to her bosom whilst doing this—and to crush it down well into the black grease beside the sausages; then Clem was ready to begin.13
17Nourished by such ‘oleaginous matter’, Clem is only superficially healthy; her growth is ‘rank’ and ‘evilly fostered’. However, although Gissing may seek to distance and so constrain his creation by such authorial judgements, they cannot disguise his obvious fascination with unconstrained female appetite.
18If ‘bad’ food goes into the mouths of the poor, ‘tainted’ language is one kind of filth that can come out. This ranges from the biblical rantings of ‘Mad Jack’, the crude language or comically illiterate letters that feature generally in the novel, to the perverse creativity of Mr Hope, an inhabitant of Shooter’s Gardens which is the worst slum of the nether world:
On the slightest excuse he would threaten to brain one of his children, to disembowel another, to gouge out the eyes of a third. He showed much ingenuity in varying the forms of menaced punishment [. . .] Mr Hope was a man of individuality; he could make his family tremble; he could bring lodgers about the door to listen and admire his resources.14
19The embittered and distraught John Hewett exchanges the release of excessive drinking for the fury of radical political rhetoric on Clerkenwell Green:
It was terrible to look at him when at length he made his way out of the crowd; his face was livid, his eyes bloodshot, a red slaver covered his lips and beard; you might have taken him for a drunken man, so feebly did his limbs support him, so shattered was he by the fit through which he had passed.15
- 16 The Nether World 94.
- 17 The Nether World 74.
20Significantly, the Hewetts are introduced in a chapter entitled ‘A superfluous family’ (chapter 3); John is superfluous in the sense that he is unemployed, but the family is also superfluous in the sense that they exceed and refuse to be contained by the social stratifications of the nether world. John’s daughter, Clara, has a similar ‘persistent sense of intolerable wrong’ and a ‘fierce desire to plunge herself into ruin’.16 She defies her father’s wishes and falls into a disreputable liaison with the manipulative lawyer’s clerk, Scawthorne, in order to escape her life of drudgery for a career on the stage. Some of the novel’s finest passages deal with her mutiny and inevitable punishment. Disfigured by the acid throwing of a vindictive rival, Clara returns to the grim penitential Farringdon Road Buildings after her failed attempt of upward mobility. The innermost circle of Gissing’s nether world is ‘The Court’ of Shooter’s Gardens: ‘filth, rottenness, evil odours, possessed these dens of superfluous mankind and made them gruesome to the peering imagination.’17 But even this hellhole is preferable to the grim barracks in which Clara is now incarcerated. Monotonous, over-regularised and built like a prison, these new ‘model’ dwellings are the upper world’s attempt to institutionalise and contain the spawning poverty-stricken masses and so neutralise their threat. Clara’s liminal energy is constrained in deadening respectability here, and, by the end of the novel, maimed and defeated, it has turned inward to produce self-destructive neurosis.
21If Clara has aspirations to upward mobility, her brother Bob’s career moves downward into crime. Apprenticed to the die-sinker’s craft, a skilled occupation that entitles him to wear a collar, Bob prefers to associate with the ‘collarless’ like Eli Snappe ‘who dealt surreptitiously in dogs and rats, and the mere odour of him was intolerable to ordinary nostrils.’18 Bob’s sexual preferences are similarly for those of lower rank or inferior intelligence. Initially attracted to the hapless slum waif ‘Pennyloaf’ Candy, he becomes more and more corrupted by the rapacious Clem Peckover. Unsurprisingly his relationship with Pennyloaf ends in violence:
Pennyloaf had the ill-luck to drop a saucer, and it broke on the floor. In the same instant he leapt up and sprung on her, seized her brutally by the shoulders and flung her with all his force against the nearest wall. At her scream the child set up a shrill cry, and this increased his rage. With his clenched fist he dealt blow after blow at the half-prostrate woman, speaking no word, but uttering a strange sound, such as might come from some infuriate animal.19
- 20 See London and the Life of Literature, p. 36. ‘Frid. July 13. Fine warm day, thank heaven! Wrote on (...)
- 21 Paul Matheisen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas (eds.), The Collected Letters of George Giss (...)
22Bob’s skills are also perverted. He becomes a counterfeiter and his final pursuit and capture, reminiscent of the chase after Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist, form the climax of the novel. A diary entry reveals that Gissing was so excited by the writing of this episode that he felt ill and driven to get up and walk the streets.20 Bob is finally cornered in ‘The Court’ of Shooter’s Gardens. For his description of the dismal room where the drunken Mrs Candy lives with her simpleton son, it can be seen from his diary that Gissing drew upon the details of his wife’s last resting-place noted there. As he wrote to his brother at the time, ‘I always feel very much at home amid those surroundings of squalor.’21
23The boundaries and borders containing the nether world can sometimes seem breachable but ultimately prove to be unyielding. Once on the stage, Clara is taunted by the nearness yet remoteness of the upper world across the footlights that she can parody in feeble plays but never enter. However, in her brother’s case, the retributive forces of ‘polite’ society can enter the nether world dramatically and decisively in the form of a police raid:
Ten seconds, and there came a tremendous crash; the crazy door, the whole wall, quivered and cracked and groaned. The crash was repeated, and effectually; with a sound of ripping wood the door flew open and a light streamed into the room.22
24On the title page of The Nether World, Gissing inscribed a quotation from Ernest Renan’s speech delivered at the Académie Francaise in 1889:
- 23 ‘A painting of a dung-heap might be justified if a beautiful flower grew out of it; otherwise the d (...)
‘La peinture d’un fumier peut être justifiée pourvu qu’il y pousse une belle fleur; sans cela, le fumier n’est que repoussant.’23
25Morley Roberts took the ‘beautiful flower’ to be a reference to Nell:
His disaster with his first wife was due to early and unhappily awakened sex feeling, but I think he believed that his marrying her was due to his desire to save somebody, whom he considered to be naturally a beautiful character, from the dunghill on which he found her. The poor girl was his first ‘belle fleur’.24
- 25 The Nether World 392. See also Rod Edmonds, ‘The Conservatism of Gissing’s Early Novels’, Literatur (...)
26It seems more likely that Gissing is referring to the noble self-sacrificial lives of Sydney Kirkwood and Jane Snowdon who alone in the dung-heap of the nether world remain pure and uncontaminated by greed, rage or reckless desire. With Schopenhaurian pessimistic resignation they live selfless lives that serve to provide a limited comfort to those who live near them and depend on them for solace and support. They carry Gissing’s moral message of the need for heroic fortitude ‘against those brute forces of society that would fill with wreck the abysses of the nether world.’25 But the real creative energy in the text seems to lie elsewhere, in particular in the portrayal of the monstrous Clem and the rebellious Hewett siblings.
- 26 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, 1921 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) 193.
- 27 The Nether World 127.
- 28 The Nether World 7–8 and 120.
27‘A dry soul is best’ Birkin tells Ursula in Women in Love; ‘some people are pure flowers of dark corruption’.26 Gissing is one of those transitional late Victorian writers who anticipate the modernist challenge to conventional morality. The authorial persona strives to present us with a noble heroine in The Nether World. In a scene reminiscent of the school-room in Hard Times Jane Snowdon is presented to us in a ray of sunshine as a girl of ‘clean and proper body’ with her ‘smooth grey dress’, ‘white linen collar’, ‘closely plaited’ brown hair and ‘well shaped’ head.27 But she is no match for Clem, an altogether more exotic bloom of ‘ancestral exuberance’ and ‘splendid savagery’ that carries a ‘red Indian scent’. ‘The putrid soil of the nether world’, we are told, ‘yields other forms besides the obviously blighted and sapless’. ‘In laughing, she [Clem] became a model for an artist, an embodiment of a fierce life independent of morality.’28 It would seem that the dung-heap of the nether world is never ‘merely repulsive’ and produces more than one kind of beautiful flower.
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