Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 2.djvu/134

 Girouard was not only eminent as a lawyer and judge, but he was also an authority on the early history of the settlement of Montreal. In recognition of his historical researches he was presented by the governor-general with the Confederation medal in 1895. He began publishing the results of his studies in 1889, and in 1893 his papers, translated by his son, D. H. Girouard, were collected at Montreal under the title 'Lake St. Louis, Old and New, and Cavalier de la Salle.'

He was three times married: (1) in 1862 to Marie Mathilde, daughter of John Pratt of Montreal; she died in 1863; (2) in 1865 to Essie, daughter of Dr. Joseph Cranwill of Ballynamona, Ireland; she died in 1879; (3) on 6 Oct. 1881 to Edith Bertha, youngest daughter of Dr. John Beatty of Cobourg, Ontario. He left four daughters and six sons, one of his sons by his second wife being Sir Percy Girouard, at one time governor of the East Africa Protectorate.



GISSING, GEORGE ROBERT (1857–1903), novelist, born in the Market Place, Wakefield, on 22 Nov. 1857, was eldest child in a family of three sons and two daughters of Thomas Waller Gissing (1829-1870), a Suffolk man of literary and scientific attainments, who settled at Wakefield as a pharmaceutical chemist, was author of a 'Wakefield Flora,' and corresponded on botanical subjects with Hooker, Bentham, and other botanists. The novelist's mother (still living) was Margaret, daughter of George Bedford of Dodderhill, a well-known solicitor in Droitwich. A younger brother, Algernon, enjoys some reputation as a novelist. George, who was profoundly influenced by his father, passed from private day schools in Wakefield to Lindow Grove, a Quaker boarding-school at Alderley Edge, where his unsociability and intellectual arrogance asserted itself at times unpleasantly, but where he shone on speech-days (see Born in Exile, chap, i.). In 1872 he came out first in the kingdom in the Oxford local examination, and obtained an exhibition at Owens College, Manchester. At the end of his first session he won Dr. Ward's English poem prize; he also gained a special prize for classics and the Shakespeare scholarship, and took a high place with honours in the London intermediate arts (see Owens Coll. Union Mag. Jan. 1904, p. 80). Unhappily, at this critical period, as at other times of his life, amorous propensities led him into serious trouble. His career at Owens broke off in disgrace, and his pride cut him adrift and made a temporary pariah of him; his health, too, was temporarily impaired by 'insane' overwork at college.

For eight or nine years after his disappearance from Manchester his resources were extremely precarious, and he was dogged by many hardships. After a brief period of clerkship at Liverpool he crossed as a steerage passenger to America, and was for a short time a classical tutor and then a gas-fitter at Boston. At Niagara he contemplated suicide; in Chicago he came near to absolute starvation. His experiences as a penniless rover in American cities are described with little deviation in 'New Grub Street' and elsewhere. Although he was neither morose nor eccentric in motive or bearing, he showed a curious inability to do the sane, secure thing in the ordinary affairs of life. An ill-considered marriage increased his embarrassment. He lacked social nerve, and the everyday conflicts of social intercourse bewildered and confounded him. Early attempts to obtain remunerative employment in the American press failed. In 1877, however, he managed to return to Europe, and then in the quiet atmosphere of Jena studied Goethe, Haeckel, and Schopenhauer, to be followed by Comte and Shelley. He became an adept in religious and metaphysical discussion, and boxed the compass of opinion like his own Godfrey Peak (in Born in Exile). His correspondence at this time with a friend in Berlin, Herr Edward Bertz, author of 'Philosophie des Fahrrads' (1900) and other works, forms an autobiographical document of extraordinary impressiveness and candour.

On his return to England about the close of 1878 he illustrated his debt to Germany in a crude but powerful novel entitled 'Workers in the Dawn' (Athenæum, 12 June 1880), in which the Wertherian hero is, of course, the author, while Casti is his Teutonic confidante. Gissing, who risked the greater part of his ready money upon this book, confidently anticipated large profits. But the book was read by few save the critics, who denounced its 'dangerous' tendencies, and Gissing was once more faced by hunger and destitution. Copies, however, were sent to Mr. John Morley and to Mr. Frederic Harrison, both of whom recognised its power and interest. In 1882 the author became tutor to Mr. Harrison's sons; he