George Gissing

Voices of the Unclassed

Martin Ryle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351157469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Once seen as a relatively marginal figure, George Gissing (1857-1903) persists in sparking interest among new generations of radical critics who continue to be inspired by his work and to develop fresh approaches to it. This essay collection, bringing together British, European, and North American literary critics and cultural historians with diverse specialities and interests, demonstrates the range of contemporary perspectives through which his fiction can be viewed. Offering both closely contextualized historical readings and broader cultural and philosophical assessments, the contributions will engage not only the specialist but those interested in the diverse themes that absorbed Gissing: the cultural and social formation of class and gender, social mobility and its unsettling effects on individual and collective identities, the place of writing in emerging mass culture, and the possibilities and limits of fiction as critical intervention.

Chapter 1
Blatherwicks and Busybodies: Gissing on the Culture of Philanthropic Slumming

Diana Maltz

The mendicant wore his ordinary garments, for it would have been impossible to find worse, but over each eye he had tied a large green shade, the pair being not unlike the blinkers of horses, which signified that he had sustained the irreparable misfortune of loss of eyesight. He had, moreover, all at once become one-armed, the left being so skilfully disposed that nothing but a close examination could have shown that it was not in reality amputated. On his head was a chimney-pot hat, terribly battered, around which was wrapped a piece of white cardboard, bearing these words, half in written, half in printed, characters:

“CHRISTIEN FRENDS!

Pray concider a widood Father

The victim of a Explogion

And may God bless you.”

In his right hand he held a stick, and he directed Arthur to guide him by the empty sleeve on the other side. In this manner they issued out of Whitecross Street and proceeded westwards. (Workers in the Dawn, vol. 1, pp.70f.)

The drunken Bill Blatherwick of Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn (1880) feigns blindness and lameness in order to collect alms from the West End bourgeoisie. One of a shifty criminal underclass, he brings his innate coarseness and sadism to bear in his treatment of the shivering and cowering Arthur, whose blonde angelic looks earn them more pennies from passers-by. Through this scenario, Gissing would seem to affirm the need for institutional checks on almsgiving, and he might be interpreted as approving of the eleven-year-old Society for Organizing Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendacity, or Charity Organisation Society (C.O.S). Established following the bureaucratic disaster of the Mansion House Relief Fund of 1866-9, the C.O.S. acted as a clearinghouse to distinguish between deserving and undeserving recipients of charity.

The scene of Bill Blatherwick and Arthur Golding cadging pennies in the snow not only evokes a Dickensian pathos, but also expresses the doubt of a generation of philanthropists who questioned the effectiveness of almsgiving. Through the end of the century, social reformers and writers remained suspicious of those who appeared penniless but whom they suspected were profiting very well as beggars. In terms of institutional parish support, these reformers sought to track how much each applicant for help was gaining; they were wary that some were benefiting simultaneously from ‘overlapping’ agencies. Most of all, the middle classes feared pauperization, or the demoralization of the urban working classes. These ideas were articulated in essays and tracts by the founders of the C.O.S: the society’s secretary Charles Loch, Helen Dendy Bosanquet and her husband Bernard Bosanquet (whose brother Charles Bosanquet had served as the C.O.S.’s first secretary before Loch), and Octavia Hill.

A dauntless organizer, Octavia Hill systematized visitation into an efficient network that included female settlement house workers, sanitary inspectors, district nurses, and poor law guardians. She further devised the role of lady rent collector as a means of supervising and regulating poor families. In talks that she presented in parish halls, Hill outlined what she called ‘a more excellent way of charity’, persuading volunteers to eschew random doles in favour of research into each applicant’s history and practical aids to the applicant’s self-help (Hill, p.63). Hill claimed that small monetary gifts were not merely useless in the long run, but injurious, as they set the poor up to expect further gifts as a matter of habit. Such gifts, she argued, ‘eat out their energy and self-reliance’ and deprive the poor of self-respect (p.93).

In this essay, I examine Gissing’s work in the context of the language of Hill’s essays, demonstrating that Gissing was aware of the C.O.S.’s rhetoric and fluctuated in his responses to it. I see this paper as a companion piece to Ruth Livesey’s ‘Reading for Character: Women Social Reformers and Narratives of the Urban Poor in Late Victorian and Edwardian London’ (Livesey, 2004). Livesey argues that lady visitors like Hill’s volunteers were taking their cues from realist fiction and gauging the quality of applicants for aid by the conditions of their clothes and homes and contents of their cupboards. In effect, charity volunteers drew a composite picture of each mother and her family by looking for specific physical indications of demoralization or independence. As Livesey writes, ‘Character was to be read in the smallest object choices – boots and hats or pawn tickets and rent books – the intimate spaces of the poorest working-class homes yielded up their contents to the reader of character and a moral aetiology was traced into these items’ (p.47). Persuaded by Livesey’s argument, I would like to augment it by adding that this relationship between caseworkers and novelists was indeed a two-way street. As much as the lady visitors learned from the realist novelists, the novelists also replicated the C.O.S.’s discourse on the able-bodied, undeserving poor. In some novels, Gissing seems to echo Hill’s analytic understanding of pauperization, while in others he satirizes her practical efforts. By the 1890s, Gissing joined his contemporaries by looking to simultaneous, parallel models of cross-class relations, models that were as paternalistic toward the poor as Hill’s but less emphatic about protecting charities from financial losses.

Gissing had two very real links to the world of Hill and discriminate philanthropy, both of them figures who embodied the active, public New Woman, and both connected to the core network of fifteen or so people at the heart of the C.O.S. Edith Sichel had at the age of 23 joined the Metropolitan Association for the Befriending of Young Servants founded by Janey Nassau Senior. A sister of the novelist Tom Hughes, Senior belonged to the Christian Socialist circle around F.D. Maurice’s Working Men’s College with whom Octavia Hill allied herself. Senior’s organization worked to save vulnerable women before they fell by assigning runaway girls menial jobs in middle-class homes. Clearly of a philanthropic bent, Sichel had tried in an 1888 article to claim Gissing as a fellow traveller, much to his chagrin (Sichel, 1888). Writing to Sichel, Gissing insisted that he was interested in such questions purely as themes for his fiction. He asserted ‘the philanthropic movements of the day are nothing to me save as artistic material’ and that ‘my books can never be practically useful’ (Coustillas, 1987, pp. 16f.). Ultimately, even she admitted that his novels were too pessimistic to advocate any programmes for change, for his working-class roughs seemed impervious to improvement.

The same year as Sichel and Gissing’s correspondence, the social worker Clara Collet took up residency in the East End and began her work assisting Charles Booth in his monumental survey, Life and Labour of the People of London. As an affiliate of the university settlement Toynbee Hall, a District Secretary of the C.O.S., and a participant in various reform-minded clubs, Collet was fully integrated into the philanthropic vanguard, and this familiarity would ground her later critiques of that community. One such critique is Collet’s essay, ‘The Philosophy of Thrift’, published in the Charity Organization Review in 1895. Gissing knew of this article as a work in progress, writing to Collet: ‘I wonder how you have got on with your uncongenial essay?’ (Mattheisen et. al., vol.5, p.282). This is a double-entendre, as the writing of the essay was a burden on Collet, but also ‘uncongenial’ to her colleagues in the C.O.S. As the editors of Gissing’s Collected Letters claim, ‘Although Clara Collet was connected with the C.O.S. for more than twenty years, she seems to have been uneasy with that institution’s emphasis on self-help’ (p.283). Gissing himself had no direct business with the C.O.S., and therefore his correspondence with Collet is an important source for our knowledge of how his views on the C.O.S. and its philanthropic project changed over time.

As Deborah McDonald’s recent biography of Clara Collet attests, Collet’s friendship was extremely significant to Gissing (McDonald, 2004). Their relationship centred on his domestic difficulties and her efforts to relieve them, and Gissing showed little interest in Collet’s social investigations. Yet Collet was a conduit through which Gissing could observe clashes in philanthropic theory and practice. She occasionally sent Gissing her published work (Mattheisen et al., vol. 5, pp.118, 140-141; vol.6, pp.4, 60; vol.7, pp.16, 409). Alternately Gissing wrote to Collet for information on social reform groups he wanted to document in his novels such as the anti-smoking lobby and women’s journalism schools (vol.8, p.107; vol.5, p.188). It is true that Gissing’s questions about Collet’s economic writings are brief and most often occur at the end of his letters as a polite gesture. Their correspondence contains little if any developed dialogue about her charitable or sociological work. At the same time, it is worthwhile to recall that many of Gissing’s letters were destroyed by Collet.

Like many of his Victorian contemporaries, Gissing found an easy target in the figure of the philanthropic do-gooder. He identified wealthy women for whom charity was a mere star in a constellation of social climbing activities, like Lady Ogram in Our Friend the Charlatan (1901) who subsidizes a hospital to thwart her philanthropic rivals, or Sybil Carnaby in The Whirlpool (1897) who lectures on the suffering of working girls after demonstrating her maliciousness elsewhere. As John Goode noted in his 1967 analysis of The Nether World (1889), Gissing implicitly critiqued the C.O.S and its inherent paternalism through his representation of the arrogant Miss Lant, who doles out judgment more freely than she dispenses cheap soup (The Nether World, p.216). A central image of Will Warburton (1905) is Norbert Franks’ painting, ‘The Shimmer’. Franks hesitates in determining how he will represent the face of the female district visitor, leaving it for last. In keeping with Franks’ (and Gissing’s) realist credo, the protagonist advises Franks to depict the girl as ‘“sharp-nosed, thin-lipped, rather anaemic, with a universe of self-conceit in the eye”’ (p.62). I mention these instances rather than, say, Mr. Gresham’s short-term charity to Arthur Golding in Workers in the Dawn or Mr. Tollady’s more lasting generosity to him, because in this essay, I am less interested in the upper-class independent philanthropist, or the working person who shows neighbourly kindness to a sufferer in his own class. This essay is more focused on the formation of philanthropic institutions with their own C.O.S.-like principles, and Gissing’s representation of their proponents as they toe the party line.

The rhetoric of discriminate almsgiving

Octavia Hill’s essays, published in two collections, Homes of the London Poor (1875) and Our Common Land (1877), clearly capture the spirit and intention of the Charity Organisation Society. They are not dull reading, in part because Hill frequently dramatizes her points through case histories.

You or I go into a wretched room; we see children dirty and without shoes, a forlorn woman tells us a story of extreme poverty, how her husband can find no work. We think it can do no harm to give the children boots to go to school; we give them and hear no more. Perhaps we go to Scotland the following week, and flatter ourselves if we remember the children that *** gift of boots at least was usefiil. Yet just think what harm that may have d*** Perhaps the woman was a drunkard, and pawned the boots at once and drank the money; or perhaps the man was a drunkard neglecting his home, and the needs of it, which should have been the means of recalling him to his duties, he finds partially met by you and me and others; or perhaps the clergy have seen that the poor woman cannot support the children and her husband, who is much too ill to find work, and have felt that if she and they are not to die of starvation they must go into the workhouse, for it is the only means of getting enough for them; charity not being organized in the district, cannot undertake to do all that is wanted for them, and so had better do nothing. For gifts so given may raise false hopes which you and I, now pleasantly enjoying ourselves, never think of. Because we went in and gave those boots, because others like us gave coal-tickets and soup-tickets last winter, what may not turn up? the poor woman asks herself. That gambling, desperate spirit enters into her heart, the stake being freedom and home. She plays high; she wins, or loses…. (Hill, pp.51f.).

Hill argues that instead of saving for a period in which trade is slack, poor families who are accustomed to doles act irresponsibly, failing to send their daughters out for domestic service or to invest in having their sons apprenticed, so that each might be self-reliant. In place of money, Hill and her colleagues try to provide the poor with contacts for jobs, short-term stays outside the city so that the ill may regain their health (to pursue work later on), and savings clubs to encourage habits of thrift. Hill and her fellow-workers also advocated a variety of cultural and aesthetic provisions for the poor’s spiritual elevation, such as public libraries, art galleries, open spaces and beautified public thoroughfares (Maltz, 1998).

Hill frequently chastened parishes for the lack of communication between their charitable workers, particularly singling out the species of uneducated but well-meaning lady visitor who has gained no guidance from those with greater knowledge of the parish’s poor constituents. The C.O.S. itself existed to close these gaps – for instance, to put ministers and sanitary authorities in contact with voluntary visitors to the poor. Hill critiques the innocent and inadvertently harmful lady visitor who goes out slumming only intermittently and hands out doles to a needy family, no questions asked. She advises that through proper networks of communication, the visitor will be not merely empathetic but informed and farsighted. Hill advocates knowing the poor not merely as ‘poor people’, but as individuals through more regular and intimate contact with them (Hill, p.49). The gift that one gives instead of mere money is one’s self (p.62).

In Workers in the Dawn, Gissing is invested in representing his heroine as a model female philanthropist. Despite her religious scepticism, Helen Norman is in many ways a voice for the C.O.S. She tells her guardian that she will not merely leave it to established charities to do her work, emphasizing the place of personal relations:

“The efforts of bodies are commendable and excellent – in their proper places. But for the work I see before me, individual effort is alone fitted; of that I am convinced…..” (Gissing, Workers in the Dawn, vol. 1, p.257)

Helen Norman does contribute money, but assisted by a parish minister who knows each case (later, she will associate with the working-class bookseller Mr. Tollady for his knowledge of his neighbours) Helen exists in a fictional universe far simpler than that of 1880s philanthropy, and her dependence on the individuals Tollady and Heatherley obfuscates the complex system of professional bodies (district visitors, health inspectors, social workers) whose tasks Hill negotiated. Helen is a creature of the late 1870s, the period when Gissing was formulating his novel: had he written Workers in the Dawn in the late 1880s or early 1890s, he probably would have situated her in the centre of a women’s institutional network, like that of Rhoda Nunn and Mary Barfoot. Helen would have been represented as belonging to a movement of female public intellectuals, as has been described by Martha Vicinus, Judith Walkowitz, and Deborah Epstein Nord in their critical work on late-Victorian, middle-class female urban communities (see Nord; Vicinus; Walkowitz).

Quite early in the novel, Helen’s mentor, the slum minister Mr. Heatherley, cautions her after she has paid money out of her purse to a young indigent mother: ‘“I must warn you, Miss Norman… against being too easily caught by affecting stories”’ (Workers in the Dawn, vol. 1, p.274). This warning subsequently proves justified. Some chapters later, Helen is deceived by a family who spend her alms on alcohol; she returns to their room to find the furniture she has purchased for them pawned and the whole family, children included, sprawled out drunk (vol.2, pp.23f.). It is a scene reminiscent of Hill’s own accounts of the shiftless poor. Once Helen has confessed her mistake to Mr. Heatherley, he replies:

“I should advise you to be very careful not to waste your money where there appears but slight hope of its doing good. After all, we have but very little power, except whe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• General Editors’ Preface
• Introduction: Gissing’s Critical Contexts
• 1 Blatherwicks and Busybodies: Gissing on the Culture of Philanthropic Slumming
• 2 Her Appearance in Public: Sexual Danger, Urban Space and the Working Woman
• 3 ‘Just a morsel to stay your appetite’: Gissing and the Cultural Politics of Food
• 4 The Strange Case of Godwin Peak: Double Consciousness in Born in Exile
• 5 Sex and the City: Gissing, Helmholtz, Freud
• 6 The Discontents of Everyday Life: Civilization and the Pathology of Masculinity in The Whirlpool
• 7 Whirlpools of Modernity: European Naturalism and the Urban Phantasmagoria
• 8 ‘To show a man of letters’: Gissing, Cultural Authority and Literary Modernism
• 9 New Grub Street’s Self-Consciousness
• 10 The Voice of the Unclassed: Gissing and Twentieth-Century English Fiction
• Index