The Whirlpool
George Gissing
THE WHIRLPOOL
Introduction by D. J Taylor
Notes by Patrick Parrinder
Contents
Introduction
THE WHIRLPOOL
Further Reading
Notes
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THE WHIRLPOOL
GEORGE GISSING was born in Wakefield in 1857. His academic career at Owens College, Manchester, was abruptly terminated in 1876 after a ruinous involvement with a young prostitute, Nell Harrison, imprisonment for theft, and expulsion. He married Nell in 1879 and after her death in 1888, he married another working-class woman, Edith Underwood, in 1891. This marriage too was unhappy, and in 1898 Gissing met the French translator, Gabrielle Fleury, with whom he spent the rest of his life. Writing to stave off desperate poverty, and influenced by Dickens and Zola, he produced powerfully realistic novels that illuminated the bleak life of the English underclass, the injustice of society and the plight of women. His writings were voluminous, and included such novels as The Nether World (1889), New Grub Street (1891), Born in Exile (1892) and The Odd Women (1893), In the Year of Jubilee (1894) and The Whirlpool (1897). He also wrote a critical study, Charles Dickens (1898), a travel book, By the Ionian Sea (1901), and a book of thinly disguised autobiographical fiction, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903). Only in his last years did Gissing win some measure of financial security and personal happiness. His literary reputation was slowly established during the 1890s, and in 1896 he met H. G. Wells, who became a close friend. He died in 1903 at St Jean Pied de Port in the Pyrenees.
D. J. TAYLOR was born in 1960. He is the author of eleven novels including English Settlement (1996), which won a Grinzane Cavour Prize, Derby Day (2011), long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and The Windsor Faction (2013). His non-fiction includes Thackeray (1999) and Orwell: The Life, which won the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Biography. He lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore, and their three children.
PATRICK PARRINDER is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Reading.
Introduction
‘… quite particularly marked out for what is called in his and my profession an unhappy ending’
– Henry James
In the early summer of 1896, hard at work on the manuscript of what was to become The Whirlpool, George Gissing struck up a connection with the Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill. A natural solitary, wary of unburdening himself even to the friendliest male associate, Gissing seems to have decided that Zangwill, author of the best-selling Children of the Ghetto, was a suitable repository for his confidence. The fascinated account that Zangwill gave to his friend Montagu Elder of the evening on which Gissing ‘poured out his sad soul’ offers a horribly accurate precis of some of the personal demons that threatened to drag him down.
He is a handsome youthful chap but seems to have bungled his life in every possible way, and after a terrible uphill fight to be still burdened with some woman who, I suspect, breaks out in drink. He hates woman and is not in love with life. From another source I hear that the cloud on his career had its origin in imprisonment for stealing money from overcoats &c when he was the pride of Owen’s College, Manchester …
Above the miseries that Gissing brought upon himself in a career that stretched back to the early 1880s there rises the unmistakable scent of fatalism. His first wife, a prostitute whom he imagined he could redeem, and for whose benefit he was reduced to thieving from his fellow-students, was already dead in conditions of unimaginable squalor; her replacement – a working-class girl named Edith Underwood, more or less picked up in the street – had spent the four years of their marriage making his existence hell. In fact the domestic background against which The Whirlpool was written, mostly between May and December 1896, is a pattern demonstration of this shy and hyper-sensitive man’s habit of strewing his path through life with the kind of self-made obstacles calculated to impede his progress. By early 1896 the family Gissing – father, mother and four year-old son Walter – had been quartered at Epsom for nearly two years. The arrival of a second child, Alfred, soured Edith’s temperament to the point where Gissing resolved to transfer Walter to the care of his aunts in Wakefield. The separation produced a letter from mother to son signed off ‘with much love and kisses’. This Walter silently decorated with a drawing of a woman holding a stick.
Naturally all these afflictions wrought a physical effect. A photograph taken in the spring of 1896 shows a ravaged, unhappy-looking man – ‘shockingly haggard and aged beyond his thirty-nine years’ as one of his biographers puts it. He took a short holiday in a picturesque part of North Wales – much of the scenery reappears in The Whirlpool’s central section – and in the intervals of canvassing sympathetic friends on Walter’s plight (‘I am responsible for his future, and I know I am doing the right – the only right – thing’), his dealings with Edith kept to a bare minimum and the study door firmly shut, settled down to write.
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