Gissing in Prison
by PAUL DELANY
Gissing's
arrest and imprisonment in 1876 was probably the most important event of his
life. I will not attempt to give a full account of it here, but only to bring
forward some newly discovered documentary evidence and to supplement Pierre Coustillas's 1963 article on the affair.1 The
evidence is the register entry for Gissing's commitment to Bellevue Prison,
Hyde Road, Manchester on 6 June 1876.2
Bellevue Prison
was opened in 1849 to expand prison capacity for the rapidly growing city of
Who were
Gissing's companions in the prison, and what were their crimes? The prison
register is a classic document of Victorian social control, exercised over the
mainly Irish slums west of Deansgate (earlier
described in Engels' Condition of the Working Class of
Gissing was the
second prisoner of forty-three (twenty-five male, eighteen female) who entered
Here is my
transcription of the register entry with added comments:
Register No.: 14797
Prisoner's Name: George Robert Gissing
When and by Whom
Committed: 6 June. T. Dale J.F. Furniss Esq. [These would be the magistrates, sitting
jointly]
By Summary Conviction: S. of A. [Session of Assizes]
For what offence or on what charge: Stealing 5/2 in money [About £10 to £15 at current value]
Sentence: One
c[alendar] /month Hard Labor
[This might mean the treadmill, the turning of a crank, or picking oakum]
Age last birthday: 18
Personal Description:
Height: 5-8
1/2 [Gissing would have been one of the tallest men in the prison]
Complexion: Light
Hair: L[ight]/brown
Eyes: Grey
Marks upon person and remarks: Freckled face, mole left side neck, mole right side
Professed trade or occupation: None
Place of birth: Yorkshire
Last or usual residence: Mother Margaret Victoria Place, Wakefield [Gissing had been
in lodgings on Grafton Street near Owens College when arrested, but perhaps
wanted to conceal his connection with the college]
Religious profession: C E [Church of England]
Extent of instruction: Well
Married or single: S[ingle]
Parents living: M[other]
Number of Previous Committals: --
Letters received: 22/6 & 27/6 [It was quite unusual for a prisoner at Bellevue to receive
or send letters. Probably only letters from next of kin were allowed, and not
until two weeks had passed]
Letters sent: 24/6 & 28/6
Date of Discharge: July 5
It must have
been a dreadful thing for a gentleman to be imprisoned in such a place. The
irony was that Gissing, in trying to save Nell from the slums of Deansgate, was himself plunged into the lowest circle
reserved for the Victorian underclass. When he made that class the subject of
his earlier novels, he treated them with a mixture of sympathy and dissociation
-- probably the same emotions with which he endured his month in Bellevue
Prison.
NOTES
1 "George Gissing a
2 The prison
register is held at Strangeways Prison,
3 John Halperin,
Gissing: A Life in Books (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982), p. 19.
This article first appeared in the Gissing Journal for October 1996 and
is posted here by kind permission of the author.
http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/english/Gissing/GissingInPrison.htm