The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

Henry Ryecroft is a portrait of Gissing himself: a 60 year old writer who has been plagued by money problems and lack of real recognition during a long career devoted to literature. Towards the end of his life he comes into an inheritance allowing him, finally, to free himself from the demands of poverty. He rents a small house in Devon with a housekeeper and devotes his final years to walks in the Devonshire countryside and writing his memoirs.

This hardly sounds like a gripping read, and it's not. However, as a meditation on ageing, the intellectual life, the importance of books, the beauty of the natural world, the position of the intellectual in society, the effects on character of poverty (an overriding concern in all of Gissing's work), the book is unparalleled in its gentle wisdom and beauty. Who among us cannot respond to this:

Ah! the books that one will never read again! they gave delight, perchance something more; they left a perfume in the memory, but life has passed them by for ever. I have but to muse, and one after another they rise before me....

I read much less than I used to do; I think much more. Yet, what is the use of thought which can no longer serve to direct life? Better perhaps, to read and read incessantly, losing one's futile self in the activity of other minds....

To the end I shall be reading and - and forgetting. Ah! That's the worst of it! Had I at command all the knowledge I have at any time possessed, I might call myself a learned man... I cannot preserve more than a few fragments of what I read, yet read I shall, persistently, rejoicingly....

Wonderful stuff. A book to read again and again. ( )

http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/the-private-papers-of-henry-ryecrof... ( )

Fiction: A book I re-read every 10 years; there's something about this deceptively simple tale of books, reading, country life and the seasons - it reflects much of what we term 'civilisation' but it also has a very personal angle for me in it as well. ( )

George Gissing's late work, The private papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), is described in The Cambridge history of English literature as lying `in form, somewhere between the journal intime and the diary, reflection and observation being expanded to the length of brief essays', and in the Oxford Companion to English Literature as `a mock-autobiography'. As the purported autobiographer is a fictitious character, the eponymous Ryecroft, the book partakes also of the nature of fiction.

The 293 pages of text are provided, in the 1903 edition from Archibald Constable at least, with a four-page index. There had been few previous indexes to fictitious works.

In 1751 Samuel Richardson, at the request of Samuel Johnson, had compiled an Index Rerum to the 3rd edition of his novel, Clarissa, and in 1754 he provided for Sir Charles Grandison an `Index Historical and Characteristical of the Seven Volumes of this Work'. In 1805 Isaac d'Israeli added `An Illuminating Index' of 22 pages at the end of the third volume of his amazingly-titled novel, Flim-flams! Or, the life and errors of my uncle, and the amours of my aunt! With illustrations and obscurities, by messieurs tag, rag, and bobtail. With an illuminating index! In three volumes, with nine plates (published by John Murray) -- only for this novelty to be greeted in Critical Review (3rd ser. 4, Feb 1805) with: `These five prefaces, ... and illuminating index (as this new expedient to swell a novel is absurdly called), entirely supersede the use of any text; and indeed we could have spared it without a sigh.' In 1811 d'Israeli provided an `Index to the Notes which particularly relate to the Jesuits' at the end of his novel, Despotism: or the fall of the Jesuits. A political romance, illustrated by historical anecdotes (John Murray). The A. & C. Black editions of 1886-7 of Sir Walter Scott's The Waverley novels included short indexes, chiefly of proper names. In 1889 Lewis Carroll provided a whimsical index to Sylvie and Bruno (Macmillan), and in 1893 to Sylvie and Bruno concluded.

There seem to be two possible reasons for Gissing's taking the unusual course of including an index in his fictitious memoir. One must be to emphasize, draw further attention to, some of his favourite topics and opinions there treated of, such as: Agnosticism; Author, the unsuccessful; Books, love of; Civilization, prospects of; Conscription; Democracy in England; English virtues; Novel-writing; Prudery, English; Publisher and author; Quarrelling, universality of; Spring, thoughts of; and the joke he recounts, Steamboats, advertisement of. Then the 19-line entry for Ryecroft himself, which includes the subheading, `self-criticism', surely gave Gissing a splendid opportunity to devise subjective subheads for his presumable self-representative, such as, `no cosmopolite', `apology for his comfort', `anti-democratic temper', `delight in giving', `desire of knowledge', `hatred of science'.

Another reason to include an index in a spurious biography is to lend it an apparent authenticity. Virginia Woolf did this with her entirely fictitious Orlando (Hogarth Press, 1928) in which the protagonist, Orlando, lives for 400 years and turns from man to woman. Leon Edel, in Writing lives, principia biographica writes of Orlando: `In keeping with its nature the volume is endowed with an index. The pretence of scholarship and exactitude is maintained to the end.' Woolf's `playfulness about Orlando's category met difficulties; booksellers, confused by its apparent status as biography, as indicated on the title page, and supported by its possession of an index, refused to sell it as fiction. Nevertheless, overcoming at least that joke, Orlando sold well'. (Philip Bradley, 1989, The Indexer 16/4.246)

Similarly, Ranulph Fiennes included indexes (and maps and photographs) in his `factional novels', The Feather Men (1993) and The Sett (1996 -- Little Brown), to add to the impression of actual factuality. The original, hardback editions have `Fact or fiction?' on the covers. When The Feather Men was brought out in paperback a year later, the publishers presented it as fiction, removing the maps, photos and index accordingly.

So -- those are perhaps the reasons for the inclusion of the index in The private papers of Henry Ryecroft. There is another factor, besides its being an index to a fictional text, that makes it interesting to a professional indexer such as myself: it is an example of a late 19th-century index. To see how far this differs from biographical indexes of today, I scanned in the original index from my 1903 edition of the book, and worked through it, inserting entries, details and further references that seemed to me lacking -- by 21st-century, proper biographical standards.

I found the chief differences between the original index and my revision/expansion to be that Gissing used capital initials for all entries, whether common or proper nouns, inserted commas at the end of entries before page numbers, and usually gave only the first page number where the topic was mentioned, rarely extending the reference to the next or subsequent pages when the text continued to treat of the same topic. He usually gives only surnames in the index, when only these occur in the text; a modern indexer would insert forenames in the index entries. These are probably characteristics of the indexing of the period. I added many more entries: Gissing probably selected those topics he wanted emphasized, rather than attempting or intending a thorough analysis of the whole text into index form. There are a some slips in alphabetical order -- Comfort following Conscription, Paestum following Painting, and the final entry, Xenophon, following Youth.

A previous critic of this index, Robert Irwin, much disliked the book (`If the novel is not very good in the first place, even the best sort of index will not rescue the book from mediocrity or worse') but does at least allow that this index matches the tenor of the text -- one criterion for a good index, writing, `A glance at the index suffices to show the novel to be bookmanly, tweedy, insular, complacent stuff. ... The index of Gissing's novel is boring, but it is no more so than the text it is appended too'.