Did H. G. Wells murder George Gissing? If not deliberately homicidal, he certainly hastened the older novelist’s death. During the winter of 1903, while living in the Pyrenean town of Saint Jean Pied-de-Port, Gissing fell ill with pneumonia. On Christmas Eve, his wife, Gabrielle, sent Wells a despairing telegram, “George dying, entreat you to come in greatest haste”. By the time Wells arrived the following evening, Gissing’s pulse was irregular and he had begun hallucinating, his delirium nurtured by the Latin texts and Gregorian chant recently studied for the background to his historical romance Veranilda. Wells, identifying malnutrition as the chief problem, took over Gabrielle’s nursing duties and dosed the patient on quantities of coffee, champagne, milk and beef tea before hurrying homewards. Gissing’s temperature promptly shot up, a prolonged death agony ensued, and when an overdose of morphia was prepared, he was heard to whisper, “It is useless, doctor, to continue the struggle”, and died two days later.

Another of his contemporaries, Thomas Hardy, had defined existence as “a general drama of pain”, and Gissing’s life had exemplified this almost from the outset. If not specifically looking to fail, then he felt at home with what Hardy calls “unsuccess”, remaining wary of comfort and compromise even when worn out by a determination to maintain his integrity in an overcrowded literary marketplace. Such consistency engendered loneliness, and it was this that had driven him, while a student at Owen’s College in Manchester, to befriend the prostitute Nell Harrison, then aged seventeen, a drunkard wracked by syphilis, epilepsy, and brain damage possibly caused by tapeworm cysts from eating tainted pork. Caught stealing from his classmates to supply her with money, Gissing was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment with hard labour. Far from correcting his bias in regard to reality, the whole experience tilted it still further, and two years later, after moving to London, he took the extreme step of marrying Nell.

What either of them hoped to achieve as husband and wife is a mystery. Nell, the classic Victorian “unfortunate”, was hardly able to reinvent herself as respectable, and Gissing soon abandoned his naive intention of making her more ladylike with the help of education. Even as material for fiction her potential was limited by what English readers were then prepared to tolerate in the field of social realism. The fledgling novelist, whatever his admiration for Zola, was unimpressed by the latter’s absorption with contemporary society as an affair of systems and mechanisms. Altogether less reductive, Gissing concentrated on the individual’s battle for survival amid alienation and indifference, whether in a limited social sphere or else against the background of a metropolitan London in which the writer himself, while doggedly tramping its mean streets, remained to some degree an outsider.

“For people who are not anxious about tomorrow’s dinner life in London is very fine”, he warned his sister Ellen, “otherwise it is a cruel sort of business.” Paul Delany’s painstaking account of Gissing’s literary career suggests, however, that despite the acrid, sombre wisdom dispensed by New Grub Street, the novelist earned critical respect from early on for his stubborn singularity. Gladstone had admired The Unclassed, Edmund Gosse praised its author’s “powerful and mournful studies of life”, while Henry James, in a remarkable astute notice of The Whirlpool, admired Gissing’s mingling of humanity and passionate realism with “the general grey grim comedy”.

Once he became established as a writer, ruthless in putting a distance between himself and the boozy, diseased Nell, he saw her death from syphilis in a Waterloo lodging house as a benign augury. Surveying the wretched contents of her room, including pawn tickets, heaps of dirty rags and a fragment of buttered bread, he noted that “she will help me more in her death than she balked me during her life”. No such bleak comfort was afforded by a second marriage. Edith Underwood, whom Gissing picked up in the Marylebone Road, proved hopeless both as a mother to their two sons and as the kind of helpmeet Gissing essentially required. Suffering from chronic depression, she was eventually committed to a lunatic asylum, while her husband turned for solace to his French translator Gabrielle Fleury.

Delany emphasizes Gissing’s own culpability in his inadequate relations with all three wives. The creator of the feminist Rhoda Nunn in The Odd Women, or of In the Year of Jubilee’s entrepreneurial Beatrice French, never quite forsook the lace-curtain proprieties of his lower-middle-class Yorkshire childhood, which demanded the continuing ministry of a domestic angel submissive to husbandly authority. “George”, observed Gabrielle wearily, “with regard to practical everyday life, is like a child.”

It is this infantine quality, perpetually at odds with Gissing’s desire, as a writer of fiction, to confront the bleakest actuality head on, which alternately exasperates and enthrals us as we read Delany’s biography. He has been more generous than many earlier writers on Gissing in amplifying such important episodes as the extended visit to Italy in 1897, which resulted in the travel book By the Ionian Sea, and his shrewd analysis of The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft helps us to understand why this, the writer’s least characteristic work, should have remained his only book in print for more than fifty years after his death. The gradual rehabilitation, during recent decades, of Gissing beyond Ryecroft, even beyond New Grub Street, whether as an artist or as a witness to the late-nineteenth-century urban scene, has made Paul Delany’s George Gissing possible. If we do not necessarily agree with George Orwell’s view of Gissing as “the best novelist that England produced”, we can share Delany's admiration for his subject’s enduring intensity of engagement and unassailable singleness of purpose.

Paul Delany
GEORGE GISSING
A Life
444pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £25.
978 0 297 85212 4

Jonathan Keates’s most recent book is The Siege of Venice, issued in paperback in 2006. He is the author of Handel: The man and his music, which is being reissued later this year.

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