Jane Austens Aunt Behind Bars by Stephen Wade

Author:Stephen Wade [Wade, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, British
ISBN: 9780857282149
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: 2013-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

9

George Gissing’s Dangerous Love

In 1850 the Belle Vue Prison opened for business in Manchester. Building begun in 1847 at a time when the prison system in England was moving slowly from old house correction facilities to large local prisons and penitentiaries. It was destined to be what today is called a dispersal prison: used for short-term prisoners mostly but also for those awaiting longer sentences, or at that time, waiting for transportation. The finished prison was like a castle, with buttressed walls and an iron-lined portcullis. It had four sections, one being for women and three for men. Each section had three tiers of cells and these were around an arched thoroughfare. In 1855 it was expanded, and the female section was then to house 250 women.

There were problems, as there were in all prisons – mainly of overcrowding and disease. In 1865 the surgeon wrote a report, and he referred to the death of a female inmate and added,

I have for some time felt the want of a Dead House to which bodies could be removed from their cells, and in a case like this, fatal from a very contagious disease, it is very important that some provision be made.

Eleven years after that report, George Gissing, aged 18, was admitted as a prisoner, sentenced to one calendar month of hard labour. He was, in modern terms, a university student, and a very bright one at that. He had won numerous awards for his scholarship and had done very well financially. Everything pointed towards his move to Oxbridge and very probably to an academic life, perhaps with fellowships. But George, future novelist of the lower middle class strugglers in the competitive and class-ridden society of Victorian Britain, had fallen from grace, to the level of a common thief who had stolen from his fellow students. A fellow could not sink much lower than that; it defined him as a cad as well as a low criminal. Instead of wearing a mortar board and gown, he now wore the coarse, arrowed livery of Her Majesty’s prison creatures, those who had dropped out of society into the limbo of incarceration.

In 1948, George Orwell described the kind of writer Gissing became:

Gissing was not a writer of picaresque tales, or burlesques, or comedies, or political tracts: he was interested in individual human beings, and the fact that he can deal sympathetically with several different sets of motives, and makes a credible story out of the collision between them, makes him exceptional among English writers.

He adds that Gissing had seen and been among the working class, and had regarded them as ‘savages’ but comments that he was only being ‘intellectually honest.’ As a prisoner in a local gaol, observing rules of silence and working hard each day, he would have been among the workers and those described at the time as the ‘underclass.’ And yes, all that experience would have been ‘material’ for the future writer, but he did not really use it, preferring instead to file the experience away in darkness.

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