The grievous worries of Gissingites . . . ‘You have to promise me to suppress your redundant auxiliary verbs . . . ’ (To Have and Have Not, Part 2.)

I fear the following reflections rehash a Case of Unfinished Business inasmuch as a little while ago I challenged  those assumptions that accept there is a classical economy expressed by Lewis (Lutwidge) Carroll’s prose, a feature many would expect of an Oxford logician. I have no doubt that his near namesake, the Cambridge logician Ludwig Wittgenstein, would have had a view on it.  http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2012/04/to-have-and-have-not.html

I questioned the words of Alice, ‘Oh dear! I’d nearly forgotten that I’ve got to grow up again!’  I maintained that the sort of double-verbing Carroll employs with his irritating auxiliary+verb clusters lacks the crystal clarity one would have expected from an Euclidean geometrist and syllogistic rationalist. 

With these scruples – not to say overscrupulosity – in mind, I was prompted to ask Pierre Coustillas, the world’s foremost authority on George Gissing – a master of plain English prose perfected by the acutest discrimination – as to whether ‘a Frenchman of equal discernment had ever noted in Gissing the use of the redundant auxiliary verb of “got” (as in “I have got” instead of “I have”).’ I added: ‘In your estimation, having read and reread Gissing, do you regard Gissing as a purist in English usage?’

For a contemporary usage, I noted that Wilde, in his Ideal Husband of 1893, has the character, Mrs. Cheveley, say: ‘You have got to promise me to suppress your report.’

‘You have got to promise me . . ’

 

 

Linguistic oddities?

Professor Coustillas kindly replied: ‘As you seem to have guessed linguistic problems and Gissing’s use of English have been to me (and to my wife) a fascinating subject. Very rarely do we happen to notice oddities. An example which will not surprise you is his (in my opinion) faulty  use – off and on – of “like” for “as”. Clara Collet* once told him about this and (surprisingly!) he declared himself surprised. But this being said, he was, I think, an excellent stylist. He was a purist. His correspondence with Kitton about their respective editorial labours for the Rochester Edition of Dickens’s works (Methuen) is interesting in this respect.

 ‘He certainly never uses the form used by Mrs. Cheveley! Indeed he never uses “do” with “have”. I think that looking for “I do not have” in his works and correspondence would be a waste of time.

‘Although I do not wish either you or myself to spend too much time on such problems, I am tempted to ask you whether you have noticed that very few English people ever use the word “whom” these days. The mistake which consists in using “who” for “whom” is common even among English academics. As a foreigner, such things worry me grievously.’

* Noted statistician and confidante of George Gissing and Eleanor Marx.

 

Evanescent conjectures . . . alleged solecism.

In the event, since this correspondence was conducted in November 2009, we never returned to these rather evanescent conjectures and, nine years later, this venerated scholar sadly was taken from us (Pierre Coustillas, literary scholar, born 11 July 1930; died 11 August 2018).

Only lately have I reconsidered the alleged solecism of ‘like’ for ‘as’.

It did not take me long to find in Demos an example of how the ‘as = like’ misconception of Gissing’s ‘impure English’ might have arisen.

In Demos, the protagonist Richard Mutimer is lower-class.  On two occasions the alleged solecism can be read:

‘She never takes things like you do,’ Richard remarked.

‘You’re not going to say, like mother did, that it was the worst piece of news she’d ever heard?’

In my view, in each case the lower class colloquialisms are in character, so hardly the error Clara Collet supposedly identified.

So for loyal Gissingites the writings of our hero remain an unpolluted stream of both demotic and unadorned English in cadences regulated by a classicist, in exemplars of English prose at its neatest and nimblest because even when, without sentiment, it reaches down to explore below the Lower Depths it still issues from a source that flows faultlessly from the Heights of Parnassus.    

 

See also . . . Escape Chute: An Unexpected Loophole to Enfranchisement (re. Gissing’s feminism). http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/03/escape-chute-unexpected-loophole-to.html

See also . . . A Girl Alone: Scenario of a Screenplay in Homage to George Gissing. http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/04/a-girl-alone-scenario-of-screenplay-in.html

See also . . . Respectable Log-Rolling.                              https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2012/02/?m=0

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

 

Escape Chute: An Unexpected Loophole to Enfranchisement

The daughter of a maid, like the wife of a bachelor, is well taught. 

This old English saying about illegitimacy (and common law) could serve as a motto for A Stranger in Blood, my mid-Victorian period story from my Sister Morphine collection, which was inspired by the unconventional heroines found in the fictions of George Gissing, the nineteenth-century novelist and supporter of female emancipation. See...
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/respectable-log-rolling.html 

Its theme centres on an often disregarded loophole in English law – an escape chute, if you will – concerning the Age of Majority as it applies under the reformed 1872 Bastardy Laws.  Hitherto unexplored implications of this Law – certain exemptions from the legal age of majority, venia aetatis (an age indulged by agreement) in their effect — prompted, in addition, the writing of A Stranger in Blood. Nor did this legislation change significantly in the first half of the 20th Century, since the 1872 Law served as the basis of dealing with the financial management of illegitimate children for a further 85 years, until 1957.

My story was devised for publication in 2004, the year of the 160th and 170th Anniversaries of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act and its controversial ‘Bastardy Clause’ (that children up to 16 years old should be the sole responsibility of the mother), and of the Act’s further amendment in 1844.  The 1834 Act caused an outcry and in 1844 the Law was changed so that a mother could apply for maintenance from the father. In 1872 the Bastardy Laws were reformed to make the putative father equally liable for the support of the illegitimate child until the age of 16.  

2004 was also the 20th Anniversary of the Age of Majority Bill (Dáil Éireann of the Republic of Ireland 1984) which entitled the Act to reduce full voting age from 21 years to 18 years. The reduction of Age of Majority from 21 to 18 is codified in The Family Law Reform Act 1969, for England and Wales ; the Age of Majority (Scotland) Act 1969 ; and the Age of Majority Act (Northern Ireland) 1969; under this Act, earlier marriage (under 18) also defined the attainment of full age.

Women must have their wills while they live,
because they make none when they die.

This second English saying also served as an epigraph to a sub-plot in my story dealing with the future of a wife and her fortune before the Married Women’s Property Act was passed in 1882.

Feminist issues such as these were explored by George Gissing in his fictions, and my own text was a kind of homage to those short stories and novels of his that questioned the inequalities endured by all thinking women in Victorian society.

Gissing was also a keen-eyed observer of the niceties of class distinctions, and, should you ever read my A Stranger in Blood,  you’ll note that the two leading players in this story are intended as two sides of the same coin – a double-headed coin, as it were – an ego and an alter ego, whose contrasting highborn and lowborn social ranks reflect Gissing’s own preoccupations with class differences between feminist militants in their struggle for self-determination.

In this connexion, it’s appropriate that Gissing drew inspiration for some of his fictional feminists from the celebrated French anarcho-feminist firebrand, Louise Michel, who was herself illegitimate and the daughter of a serving maid.

Similarly, my narrative is dedicated to the memory of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, herself illegitimate, and a founder of Girton College, Cambridge, 1869, (authoress of Reasons for the Enfranchisement of Women, 1867, and Acting Mistress of Girton, 1872). She was a notable campaigner for Women’s Property rights and in 1854 she published her Brief Summary of the Laws of England concerning Women, which was an influential document for campaigners in their securing the Act of 1882.

Memo : A must-read for all George Gissing aficionados is Professor Pierre Coustillas’s magisterial The Heroic Life of George Gissing.

See also . . . A Girl Alone: Scenario of a Screenplay in Homage to George Gissing.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/a-girl-alone-scenario-of-screenplay-in.html

 

See also . . . The Grievous Worries of Gissingites. https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-grievous-worries-of-gissingites-you.html

Respectable Log-Rolling

At the beginning of January 2012, I wrote to the editor of Private Eye to comment on their traditional New Year log-rolling* feature, which contained in my opinion an unwarranted attack.

Dear Editor

I do take issue with your singling out of D.J. Taylor for pretentiousness in his review of Professor Coustillas's magisterial Life of George Gissing (Part 1) under your terms for inclusion within the 'obscurely highbrow' category of literary reviews for 2011 (PE no. 1304). Professor Coustillas is the chronicler most venerated by Gissingites and a plainer speaking critic of this 19th century master one could not find. Anyhow, the works of Gissing are anything but obscurely highbrow. It's because they are subtle dramas of social realism written in perfected plain English prose that they are so admired.
Etc.

My letter duly appeared in the January 25 2012 Issue 1306, and I felt I had staunchly defended Gissing's greatest champion against gross charges of high brow elitism, unwarranted in respect of both the biographer AND his subject.

I hasten to declare my interest.

I am a devoted disciple of Gissing, and admire his neutral prose style. And like Gissing, I don’t actively shun the passive voice or negative form of statements if they add variation to the texture of one’s prose.  I have no doubt that this attitude flouts today's convention, which holds that the active voice should dominate one’s writing style.

Funnily enough, shortly after shooting off my letter to PE, I found myself re-reading Morley Roberts on the idiosyncracies of his pal, Gissing.  Roberts writes: ‘On more than one occasion, as it was known that I was acquainted with Gissing, men asked me to write about him. I never did so without asking his permission. This happened once in 1895. He answered me: "What objection could I possibly have, unless it were that I should not like to hear you reviled for log-rolling? But it seems to me that you might well write an article which would incur no such charge; and indeed, by so doing, you would render me a very great service.” ’

So there it is. Log-rolling is quite respectable according to GG !

*Log-rolling = The exchanging of favours or praise, as among artists, critics, or academics.