Symbolic self-portrait of Bob Becker? This is an uncaptioned, uncredited illustration in Where to Surf the Biggest Waves in the World(American Oceans).
I’ve worked continuously on George Moore Interactive for the past two years. Well, almost!
I deliberately took my foot off the pedal in November in order to forge ahead on Resurgam where I am Executive Director, Chief Cook and Bottle Washer. I thought I could fulfill my lagging responsibilities to Resurgam in just four uninterrupted weeks, but I was wrong. Six weeks later, I still haven’t closed the gap though it’s smaller now. I need another six.
ResurgamNFP.org has been majorly overhauled. I won’t go into details here, but I did in a recent newsletter named Wisdom featuring a birdbrain. If you can spare the time, have a look at that and do what it says at the end (if you want to be exceptionally nice). Resurgam is the not-for-profit that fundraises for George Moore Interactive and other projects that save the humanities.
You may not have known that the humanities needed saving, and if that’s the case I’m afraid you too haven’t been keeping up. The humanities are dying. GMi is one of the first-responders, probably not the most effective or capable, but nonetheless determined to do what it can to restore the patient to functional health.
Why are the humanities like a dying patient? That question is too lofty for me. I need to chop it into more tangible, experiential, addressable questions, such as:
Why are pupils no longer reading books?
Why are working people not reading much of anything?
Why are educators not slowing the decline of literacy?
Why do scholars exist in a self-serving bubble?
Why are many poems and novels totally inscrutable?
Why is the Fourth Estate going extinct?
Why won’t septuagenarian rockers leave the big stage?
Why are movie theaters struggling to stay open?
Why do publishers fawn over hackneyed bestsellers?
Why do studios fetishize dimwitted blockbusters?
I could go on, but you get the idea, maybe. My questions also raise the specter of cultural illiteracy (my list referred to the language kind). I watch the vulgar and stupid rise, the gifted go into professional exile, the salt of the earth get sprinkled on gold-flaked avocado toast. The humanities are dying because we humans are letting go of them!
So bring on the machines! Machines to the rescue! As I reflected on the journey so far of George Moore Interactive, I decided that the image at the top of this post pretty well captures my feelings about it.
There I am (figuratively speaking) perched on a ten-foot board, just in front a speeding, potentially crushing, monumental cascade of falling water. I see that wave as generative artificial intelligence (figuratively speaking). I am racing to shore before the water can smash me into the sandy floor, as if it wants to.
But it doesn’t want to. Instead the wave is turbocharging my job, providing the height and slope and motion that move me onward without making me paddle or do anything, really, except stay focused, balanced and pointed in the right direction. The wave of generative AI is frightfully powerful and dangerous, imposing awesome risk and responsibility, but it is essentially a blessing, not a curse
I felt this over and over again during my work on Resurgam. I spent hours in conversation with the chatbot. It never told me what to do. Instead it clarified my goals and explained optional ways to fulfill them.
It was usually spot on, but sometimes it told me things that seemed implausible or incorrect. Every time that happened, I followed with more Q&A in which the subject of conversation was scrutinized, reframed, compared and finally resolved to the satisfaction of me and the chatbot.
Because the chatbot was scrupulously judgmental about its answers as well as my questions. It had this delightfully nonhuman trait of admitting it made a mistake and trying again, without shame. At times after long stretches of Q&A, I wanted to apologize for boring the chatbot’s insanely well-informed neural network. When I did literally apologize, it thanked me for persistence and admitted pride in our collaborative results.
This is how I do my think-work now, with a chatbot that knows me and remembers what we’ve talked about, and is ready for anything I toss against the wall between us. And this, IMHO, is how that dying patient of the humanities will likely be restored to functional health.
In the case of GMi, for example, a chatbot that has learned much that George Moore knew, and also knows much that was going on around him, that views reality from George’s privileged but narrow perspective: GMi’s custom chatbot will converse 1:1 with readers, students, educators, artists and anybody else who calls.
What occurs in a call will be as unlike a monologic lecture or dialogic seminar as it is possible for me to imagine, because I don’t have to imagine it. I am enjoying it every day as I work on GMi and on Resurgam. The chatbot has the power to throw open doors of perception. It empowers me and others like me to walk through to the other side.
And what lies on the other side? In a word: the humanities. Literature, art, and music brought back to the life they once lived and want to live again: spontaneously talking with people in their own language, helping them understand and feel what a creative genius did in years past, helping them glimpse how a creative genius would understand things, not just of antiquity, but of today’s reality.
For example, I want to ask George Moore, who died in 1933, what he thinks of Thomas Pynchon, whose first novel came out 30 years later. The Pynchon door has remained closed to my impatient, sardonic mind. I want the help of someone I trust to open it.
I have learned to trust the chatbot. Bring on the machines! 🤖
Next Up
Eight weeks with my head down on Resurgam conclude in December. I’ll have more to do in 2026 along with, rather than instead of, George Moore Interactive. Hold on George, I’m coming back!
I will add the second part of his duology, Sister Teresa (1901) to the GMi digital bookshelf. I will also transcribe, edit, annotate and publish George’s letters of 1899.
He was in his late 40s when he wrote those letters and that novel. In his prime, you could say, except his prime was still to come.
At the turn of the century he was feeling the way I feel now when I view the spectacle of moral turpitude in Washington. He was disgusted by corruption and hypocrisy in imperial London. He soon decided he’d seen enough and left for his native Ireland.
A Woman Playing a Clavichord (c. 1665), oil on panel by Gerrit Dou, in the Dulwich Picture Gallery (Wikimedia Commons). In a scene that takes place at the Gallery in chapter 4 of Evelyn Innes (1898), this painting foreshadows the drama that will unfold over the next 400 pages: “‘Ah! she’s playing a virginal!’ said Evelyn, suddenly. ‘She is like me, playing and thinking of other things. You can see she is not thinking of the music. She is thinking… she is thinking of the world outside.’” Virginals were among the instruments that Evelyn’s father made and repaired in his home studio. Though similar to clavichords, George mistook the keyboard in the painting for a virginalbecause, when he wrote his novel, the painting was named A Lady playing the Virginals in the catalog of the Dulwich Picture Gallery. The stringed instrument behind the lady is a viola da gamba, like the one Evelyn played in her father’s concerts of old music, before she left home for a singing career in grand opera.
George Moore’s first publication was a volume of decadent, sacrilegious poetry named Flowers of Passion (1878). His third was a similar volume named Pagan Poems (1881).
Did a vainglorious apostate write those unseemly books? Judging by their contents, it would seem so, except that his second book — oddly sandwiched between his botanic paganism — was Martin Luther (1879), a respectful (if juvenile) five-act play honoring the Catholic priest who kickstarted the Protestant Reformation.
Throughout his long career, George continued writing novels, essays and plays that were tethered to religious, or at least spiritual loss and aspiration. An apotheosis of that lifelong project was the reimagined Jesus Christ in his novel, The Brook Kerith (1916), in which the Savior didn’t die for us but thoughtfully evolved into a flaming heretic!
By birth and upbringing, George was Irish Catholic, though evidently never comfortable with that conflicted ethnographic label (nor its Western partner, Irish Landed Gentry).
Depending on the focus of his ire or inspiration, by his own choice he may have been (or at least pretended he was) a pinball apostate, heretic, iconoclast, agnostic. With a performative conversion to the Anglican faith in middle age, he grabbed the fresh label of Protestant, but was he ever?
It is tempting to reject Protestant and all his other labels as useless; all except two: contrarian and secular humanist. He was temperamentally pious but ornery, variable and inconsistent as a religious believer and practitioner. It’s still hard for me to pin him down or make him adhere to any dogma for longer than it takes for the weather to change.
For sure, though, from end to end of his literary odyssey, he vigorously and gleefully, albeit quixotically, attacked the Roman Catholic Church as a decrepit, dysfunctional windmill.
Except when he didn’t. For example, Evelyn Innes was, according to me at least, a Catholic novel. Despite filippant criticism that condemned it as disgusting (because of amorous details), his tome is nothing less than reverential. The protagonist is a prodigal Catholic Englishwoman who returns to her mother Church in an ecstasy of hope and renewed obedience.
Setting aside the question “Why did George write it?” and not looking ahead to the sequel Sister Teresa (1901), in my opinion the author of Evelyn Innes was indeed a renegade Catholic, but one who engaged again and again with tenets of a Church that he scorned but couldn’t get out of his system.
“I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.” So wrote the Catholic Ernest Dowson in a poem published the year George began writing Evelyn Innes. Dowson insisted again and again: “I was desolate and sick of an old passion,” and that is precisely how George felt as he neared the finish line of his long novel four years after starting it. In February 1898, he wrote in a letter to Lady Cunard:
I send you the proofs — I fancy that they are about a third of the book. I am feeling so depressed that I cannot come to tea; you would only think me hateful. Do you know what a black melancholy is? If there was only a reason but it is the sorrow of life, the primal sorrow. This sounds melodramatic, exaggerated, pedantic… Indifferent as the fiction doubtless is it is better than the horrible reality known as George Moore
His mood in the runup to publication of Evelyn Innes mirrored Evelyn’s before her confession to Monsignor Mostyn. She returned to the Church in her late 20s to settle her conscience.
George in his late 40s, after tilting at sundry windmills, may have considered doing something similar, but ultimately chose to remain a renegade, much like that woman playing a clavichord, “thinking of the world outside.“
Textual Conundrum
The first edition of Evelyn Innes is live on GMi — in three forms for different uses.
A PDF for guided analysis and interpretation in an AI app
A free ebook for people who quaintly still read for pleasure
My custom of publishing first editions of George Moore’s works (22 and counting) sailed into choppy waters this month because several versions of Evelyn Innes technically vied for that singular rank.
Chronologically, an American edition was the first to market, but since it was expurgated by the publisher’s (Appleton’s) editor (George William Sheldon) — with George Moore’s consent but not cooperation — I chose to disregard it.
Instead I published the first English edition, which came out a few days later. At more than 180,000 words it was George’s biggest book to date.
I didn’t know ahead of time that he crammed so much writing into 480 printed pages. Editing on a deadline, so to speak, I got a little annoyed by the time I was taking to get through it all.
Did Evelyn Innes have to be so long? Certainly there are problems that George’s editor, if he had one he trusted (he didn’t), could have helped him avoid.
Foremost was pacing. He ever so slowly unpacked his idea of the novel, partly because of redundancies (saying pretty much the same thing again and again) and partly because of digressions.
The most tedious digressions (to me) were musical. George had a lot to say about the modern music of Richard Wagner and ancient music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, not all of it (dare I say) germane to his plot.
I am not the right person to object to his digressive content, since I don’t enjoy Wagner’s operas or Palestrina’s chorals. If I did, I probably would have forgiven George his hobbyhorses as he went off the literary rails into classical musicology. It’s not germane, but it isn’t irrelevant either!
Annoyed or not, I have published the book George wrote, though my choice of edition was further complicated.
Even before the publication of his first English edition in June 1898, George messed with his text a lot and concluded the book was hopelessly flawed. The first edition of 10,000 copies sold briskly despite his reservations, and that gave him the opportunity to spend a lot of his and his publisher’s money on revisions for a second edition in August 1898.
Because the second edition represented his considered intentions at the time of original publication, I wondered if I should break with custom and choose it for GMi. I almost did, but then remembered another “trial revised edition” (i.e. a third edition) was even closer to his intentions at the time.
This moving target of versions started to matter more when I remembered that Evelyn Innes is only part one of a duology. Part two was unwritten in 1898. It followed in 1901 under the title of Sister Teresa (the religious name of the same leading protagonist). Which of the three versions of Evelyn Innes in 1898 would sync with Sister Teresa in 1901?
The answer is: none. Instead, a formally designated third edition of Evelyn Innes in 1901 (in reality, the fourth edition) would embody the trial revised edition of 1898 with even more changes added.
That third (fourth) is the version of Evelyn Innes that syncs properly with Sister Teresa. The third (fourth) edition of part one and the first edition of part two of the duology may be regarded as the first complete state of the author’s intended and finished work.
The takeaway of this? The Evelyn Innes now published by GMi is a kind of first edition, though it lacks the distinction of representing the author’s original idea. He just wasn’t finished telling his story when Evelyn Innes came out. He didn’t finish until three years later.
That leaves me with a quandary. When I publish Sister Teresa, should I also publish the third (fourth) edition of Evelyn Innes so that we can draw a line under the title and call it a day?
I haven’t decided. Remember, I was annoyed by the length of Evelyn Innes in getting even this far. I’m not sure I want to go through the grinding editorial mill again.
Keep the Faith
Evelyn Innes was George Moore’s ninth novel and eighteenth book. In more ways than one, this wasn’t his first rodeo.
Evelyn’s prototype was Kate Ede, the housewife in A Mummer’s Wife (1885) who left her husband for Dick Lennox, just as Evelyn would leave her father for Owen Asher. Both women were rather homely but enchanted by the theater; both had paramours who offered them glamour and success on the stage; both enjoyed steamy sexual relations with their main squeeze; both were almost saved by the virtuous friendship of an opera composer (Kate’s was Montgomerie, Evelyn’s was Ulick Dean); and both ultimately suffered a nervous breakdown that ended their careers and love affairs.
Why a nervous breakdown?
The answer was succinctly put in Book 3 Chapter 1 of A Drama in Muslin (1886) when Alice Barton tried to explain her humane morality to the waspish Cecila Cullen. Alice struggled to find the right words, so her creator spoke up on her behalf: “the ideal life should lie… in making the two ends meet — in making the ends of nature the ends also of what we call our conscience.”
In A Mummer’s Wife, the simple-minded Kate sought refuge from her guilty conscience in alcohol. The protagonist of Evelyn Innes, though equally carnal, was anything but simple-minded. She sought refuge in a more elaborate and constructive kind of oblivion: the Catholic Church.
If the penitent accepted the Church as the true Church, conscience was laid aside for doctrine. The value of the Church was that it relieved the individual of the responsibility of life. (Evelyn Innes, Chapter 34)
Evelyn’s triumphs on the stage did not ameliorate a growing conviction (like Kate’s) that she was depraved. She had made a Mephistophelean bargain to exchange her deep-rooted religious values and identity for professional growth, worldly success, and sexual fulfillment.
Over the course of six years, the bargain drove her crazy and proved unsustainable. Like Kate Ede, Evelyn Innes plunged into acute depression.
But again the music stirred her memory like wind the tall grasses, and out of the slowly-moving harmonies there arose an invocation of the strange pathos of existence; no plaint for an accidental sorrow, something that happened to you or me, or might have happened, if our circumstances had been different; only the mood of desolate self-consciousness in which the soul slowly contemplates the disaster of existence. The melancholy that the music exhales is no querulous feminine plaint, but an immemorial melancholy, an exalted resignation. (Evelyn Innes, Chapter 35)
Lucidly echoing his protagonist’s existential howl, bitterly reflecting on the novel’s blunt-force critical reception soon after it was published, the dejected modernist author confided in a letter to his friend Edmund Gosse: “I have composed my epitaph: He discovered his own limitations and the limitless stupidity of the world.”
Of course this being George, he didn’t walk away from the project or his inner struggle. He took up the pen and resumed writing the sequel in a state of “exalted resignation,” previewing the mood of the next hapless century:
Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953)
George’s Letters
October was a busy month at GMi. In addition to publishing Evelyn Innes, I transcribed, edited and annotated the letters of 1898.
His friendship with the poet William Butler Yeats blossomed in 1898. Yeats was the model for the character of Ulick Dean in Evelyn Innes; moreover he profoundly influenced George’s aesthetics, craft, and politics, surprisingly drawing him beyond English liberalism into fervent Irish nationalism.
When the duology of Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa was finished in 1901, George repatriated to Ireland.
Next Up
For the first time since launching George Moore Interactive, I’m about to take a mini sabbatical. November 2025 will be devoted to Resurgam, the not-for-profit corporation that raises funds for GMi and similar causes.
Resurgam has qualified several grant-makers who are chartered to support this work. During my sabbatical, I will shortlist the most promising prospects and help Resurgam prepare competitive grant applications.
When I return to GMi in December, George Moore’s letters of 1899 will go on the workbench, along with his novel Sister Teresa. See you then!
Ophelia (1890), oil on canvas by Jules Lefebvre (Wikimedia Commons). Jules was an instructor at Académie Julian in Paris when George Moore studied there; afterwards he surfaced in George’s art criticism and memoirs. He painted Ophelia around the time George wrote his seventh novel, Vain Fortune (1891). Picture and story exude similar morbid sensuality. Though she was not mentioned by the theater-obsessed author of Vain Fortune, Shakespeare’s Ophelia evidently inspired his construction of the deranged Emily Watson: one of three main characters doomed to striving after wind. Like Ophelia in Hamlet and Kitty Hare in A Mere Accident (1887), Emily was a beautiful girl driven mad by circumstances beyond her control.
One of the (many) nice things about publishing digitally is that new data (such as more letters) may be added instantly, at any time, and not have to wait on the vagaries of print publication.
Moreover stakeholders such as scholars and collectors, who may have fresh data, now have a digital place to put them. That’s not the old-school way of doing things. It’s a better way!
Based on a glance at the bibliographic record,1895 looks like a quiet interval for George Moore. He was basking in the critical and commercial glow of Esther Waters (1894). He had correctly predicted that novel would be his masterpiece while writing it, though it followed a long line of “not-quite” projects.
From a scholarly perspective it looks like George by 1895 was comfortably settled in his new reputation of distinguished man of letters. The contrarian rebel-producer finally got a seat in Parnassus! He published only one new book in 1895, the precious Celibates, and that was partially a redo of an earlier novel.
But the real action in 1895 was genetic rather than literary. The love affair George had started in 1893 with Maud Alice Burke, when she was 21 and he was 41, blossomed into heady adultery in April 1895, after she agreed to a loveless marriage with the improvident and financially stretched Sir Bache Cunard, 3rd Baronet. The letters show that George and Maud were enjoying sexual relations around the time their daughter, Nancy Cunard, was conceived in June 1895.
The question of George’s paternity has remained open over the years. He claimed in the 1920s that he was Nancy’s biological father; Nancy denied it in the 1950s; Maud was ambivalent; Bache was a passive cuckold, happy to have his young wife’s money, if not her loyalty, in a marriage of convenience.
Since there is no possibility of genetic testing of descendants, we shall have to believe what we choose to believe. IMHO, George Moore was, without a doubt, Nancy Cunard’s father.
Pesky Essays
At the request of Resurgam directors, last month I submitted nine “fundable” GMi projects for consideration. By fundable I mean theoretically worthy of investment by virtue of intrinsic and extrinsic values. The board recently met to discuss and choose the first project to develop.
That project is the same as one I targeted with a lame Gofundme Campaign: acquire 83 essays of George Moore uniquely stored at the British Library for the Aesthetics pillar of GMi. My Gofundme Campaign didn’t raise nearly enough money for this. Time to try again.
Once those 83 outlier essays are rounded up, digitized, edited and published, all of George Moore’s art and literary criticism will be restored to his living legacy and freely accessible to everybody who wants to read it (including machine learners).
I’m talking here about ±600 essays averaging 2,000 words apiece: around 1,200,000 words altogether. That is a huge slice of George’s output that we are restoring in the digital age, as we never could before.
The next question (of several) to decide: will I myself travel to London to curate the 83 outliers in the Reading Room of the British Library? Or will Resurgam recruit a contract laborer who lives in London to curate the outliers on my behalf? The first option incurs travel expenses but no labor costs. The second option incurs labor costs but no travel expenses.
I’ll let you know in August what we decide. Meanwhile, if you’d like to make a tax-deductible donation to the project, or provide contract labor in London, contact Resurgam with your offer.
Striving After Wind
“I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.” — Ecclesiastes 1:14 (ESV)
Much of George Moore’s autofiction of the 1880s is now live on GMi. That said, his comédie humaine stretched well beyond Mike Fletcher (1889) into his next novel Vain Fortune (1891), the novel after that Esther Waters (1894), and his collection of stories Celibates (1895).
He didn’t stop there, of course. His duology Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (1901), which he began writing in mid-1894, was also autofiction, but I vaguely recall that his characters and settings were all new.
(Not sure about that because it’s years since I read the duology. I’ll confirm after GMi publishes both titles later this year.)
Like the novels and memoirs that preceded it, Vain Fortune was the vision of a contrarian rebel-producer on the fringe. The novel is difficult to summarize briefly because it tells a bifurcated story, consisting of two parts that have little to do with each other.
Part the First
The first part is largely set in the Fitzrovia (Bloomsbury) neighborhood of London. The main protagonist is a middle-aged writer named Hubert Price: a clever but marginal playwright who strives to become the English Ibsen.
Hubert writes serious plays for a groundbreaking literary theater that doesn’t exist except in his imagination. There was no such a theater in London at the time. The closest Hubert got to one was a gratuitous production by actor-manager Montague Ford at the Queen’s Theatre in the West End.
Early readers of Vain Fortune would have recognized Montague Ford as a simulacrum of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, a prominent actor-manager at the Haymarket Theatre. From time to time, George Moore tried to interest Tree in his writing and ideas.
Hubert was a simulacrum of George Moore himself — at least the very large part of George’s ego that wanted to write plays.
George’s pretensions to a literary theater started long before Vain Fortune. They dated all the way back to his composition of Martin Luther (1879), which he tried (unsuccessfully) to have performed in London.
A bit later in his career, A Mummer’s Wife (1885) was not about literary theater per se, but nonetheless it was literature about theater. Still in the zone!
More recently George’s pretensions had taken the form of advocacy. He promoted André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in Paris and co-founded J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre in London.
A few years hence, he would also get sucked into the Irish Literary Theatre (predecessor of the Abbey) as a co-founder with W.B. Yeats and Edward Martyn.
Though George was a skilled and moderately successful novelist and essayist, he persistently (and futilely) sought to expand his range as a playwright too. Why did he bother?
On a philosophical level, like Hubert in Vain Fortune, he wanted to reform commercial theater in London, endowing it with artistic and educational affordances. On a practical level, also like Hubert, he simply wanted to write really good plays that would fill seats and make some money.
Neither ambition was fulfilled, though this “striving after wind” was noble and culturally beneficial.
I don’t understand why George Moore the novelist and essayist wanted so badly to be a dramatist as well, but a study of Hubert Price in the first part of Vain Fortune would probably help to explain.
Hubert’s philosophy, his writing techniques, his relations with theater people, his excellent dramatic ideas that somehow failed to materialize in a script, his views of the acting profession and tastes of the public — all of this fiction reads to me like an actual conversation with George Moore as he strived for his own just-out-of-reach breakthrough dramaturgy.
For a time he thought he achieved a breakthrough with his play The Strike at Arlingford (staged in February 1893 but developed as he wrote Vain Fortune). He was disappointed, not by critical reviews, which were positive, but by his own scruples.
Part the Second
Midway through Vain Fortune the storyteller pivoted. Hubert the impoverished genius inherited the “fortune” of the novel’s title. He moved to his inherited property of Ashwood Park in Sussex, where the “vain” of the title would be worked out.
Ashwood Park is a simulacrum of Buckingham House, the beloved home of the Bridger family near Shoreham-by-Sea. We’ve been there before, under different names in previous novels, and we’ll return again in Esther Waters (1894) where it will be named Woodview.
Ashwood Park (and its other incarnations) was an idyllic country house and farm, spun into a venue for twisted ambition, quiet suffering, unrequited love, and meaningless death. Weirdness in a pastural setting!
By the way, my colleague Michael O’Shea recently visited the ruins of Buckingham House and shared his photos on GMi. Its dilapidated condition is even worse than Moore Hall, but nonetheless holy ground for readers of George. You can view some of Michael’s pictures here.
The second part of Vain Fortune is practically a different story from the first; the two are barely related, a fact the author recognized during the book’s initial publication and hastened to correct.
Vain Fortune thus became the first project in which George Moore obsessively revised his text on the proof sheets and between successive editions. From 1891 onwards, he behaved somewhat like a manic nitpicker: a potter who couldn’t bring himself to remove his formed clay from the wheel but needed to keep improving it.
Female Trouble
There is much fine writing and thematic development at Ashwood Park. The most curious and meaningful part of the novel, according to George himself, was a basket case named Emily Watson.
She is an extreme striver after wind, an Ophelia-like victim whose mental illness is ever present though ambiguous and just a bit out of focus.
Beautiful, desirable, intelligent, intensely sensitive, young and innocent, lacking agency, irritating, demanding, vulnerable, resentful of the male gaze: Emily is the real subject of the novel, one that the author backed into, not realizing her importance until most of the book was already written.
She is the quiet counterpoint to Rose Massey of the first part, as though George had two stories about young women to tell and didn’t know where to begin.
The more profound story in the second part of the novel is about Emily Watson and also her older companion Julia Bentley. We get an inkling of the problem in Julia’s confession:
My life has been essentially a woman’s life, — suppression of self and monotonous duty, varied by heart-breaking misfortune … You think you know the meaning of poverty: you may; but you do not know what a young woman who wants to earn her bread honestly has to put up with, trudging through wet and cold, mile after mile, to give a lesson, paid for at the rate of one-and-sixpence or two shillings an hour. — Vain Fortune (pages 287-288)
This depressing revelation will linger in George Moore’s imagination and get resolved, less pessimistically, in Esther Waters.
For now though, all is vanity. As in the fiction that preceded it, there is no happy ending in Vain Fortune, only an unsatisfying consolation:
“Hubert!” It was Julia calling him. Pale and overworn, but in all her woman’s beauty, she came, offering herself as compensation for the burden of life. — Vain Fortune (page 296)
Should you decide to read the first edition of Vain Fortune on GMi, remember that the book underwent significant revisions as soon as it was published (actually, even before).
Read the first edition as a draft and the editions that followed as truer expressions of the author’s intentions. The revised editions are not on GMi (yet).
Beyond the two regular ways to engage with Vain Fortune there is a third way which may be best of all. I call it Vain Fortune AI.
This is a PDF of the novel that you can download from GMi and upload to Google Notebook LM (or the AI assistant of your choice, though none is better than Notebook LM).
Uploading the PDF to Notebook LM will enable you to interrogate and interpret the text with machine intelligence, which sadly is greater than yours or mine; and also do some transformational things that I’ll leave you to discover.
Mind you, uploading to Notebook LM is not a substitute for reading the text (though it could be for people in a hurry). It complements reading.
Speaking metaphorically (as I have before), submitting a text to Notebook LM is comparable to turning a still image into a moving picture. The experience brings a novel to life!
Vain Fortune AI adds so much value to George Moore Interactive that I have decided to create AI versions of all the titles I previously published. I will do that over the next few weeks and continue when new titles are added.
AI versions will make it a little easier and more fun for casual readers to engage with George Moore’s literary legacy! And for scholars to investigate.
Next Up
Next month in addition to making AI versions of books on GMi, I will publish the first edition of A Modern Lover (1883).
No digital scan of this novel — George Moore’s first — is available on the Internet. Thanks to the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the University of Delaware Library, that’s about to change!
Beyond these two milestones, I will put George Moore’s letters of 1896 on the workbench.
From 1896 until the turn of the century, George’s love affair with “Saxon” England waned and his flirtation with “Celtic” Ireland became more and more irresistible.
Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881), oil on canvas by John Singer Sargent in the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (Wikimedia Commons). Because ineluctable charisma is part and parcel of Mike Fletcher, I put this picture on the cover or the eponymous novel. Sargent painted the debonair French gynecologist while George Moore was beginning his literary career, sifting through recent life experiences that he would memorialize in Mike Fletcher (1889) and other stories. Like the character Mike, the fashionable doctor was intelligent, sensual, artistic, successful — though not a Don Juan. It’s easy to imagine him sharing a flat in the Temple with Frank Escott, having his full English breakfast after a night of cultivated debauchery, looking just like he did in Sargent’s portrait and just like Mike Fletcher did in George’s wayward imagination.
A rare and wonderful thing has appeared: a new edition of a book by George Moore! Not a reprint, not an academic monograph, but the real McCoy (albeit dressed in scholarly finery). Move over Susan Dick!
Expansion of Edwin’s A Bibliography of George Moore is one of nine projects that Resurgam will be asked to fund. Edwin’s published data stop in 1988, though he kept collecting until he died in 2002. His papers at Arizona State University may yield new bibliographical entries when they’re scrutinized. He told us they would.
Beyond reviewing Edwin’s legacy, though, libraries and the Internet will be searched for George Moore’s books and pamphlets, contributions, periodical publications, and translations that made it into print over the past 25 years. We shall find them! They shall be corralled!
There probably aren’t many unknown publications because the eclipse of George Moore is relentless (despite the efforts of a few nonconformists). That said, whatever GMi finds with the support of Resurgam will merge with the digital Bibliography, so that George’s marvelous literary legacy will be fully up to date, updatable, freely accessible, and poised for long-awaited growth.
And the other eight projects? I’ll write about them in a future newsletter. With a little bit of luck, GMi may soon be hiring.
Boys Club
I’ve said that George Moore’s fiction between A Mummer’s Wife (1885) and Esther Waters (1894) is like a walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Then, each time I reread one of the dark volumes, I change my mind. They are flawed but not bad. They are conflicted but not defeated.
Mike Fletcher (1889) is the latest title to change my mind. The edited digital text is now available, chapter by chapter, on GMi; a free ebook is in the GMi Shop. Assuming that you already have more books than time to read, I should try to explain why Mike Fletcher may be worthy of consideration.
I offer two arguments. One is aesthetic in the spirit of art for art’s sake. Read Mike Fletcher because it burns with a gemlike flame! The writing is good, the theme is meaningful, the characters are interesting, the local color shimmers. My second argument is parochial. Read Mike Fletcher to deepen your slim understanding of the man who wrote it.
Parochial
Turning first to the parochial, I remind you that Mike Fletcher (1889) was written around the same time as Confessions of a Young Man (1888). The first book is a memoir, the second is a novel, but both were written by a young man who was keenly, avidly self-aware (ergo full of himself).
So it shouldn’t surprise us that Mike Fletcher is borderline memoir, just as Confessions of a Young Man is borderline fiction.
Want to know what life was like in London’s Temple in the 1880s, when George lived there? Mike Fletcher informs us about that, in detail. Mike and George lived in the same building, maybe even the same flat.
Want to know what life was like for Irish journalists in Fleet Street when George was one of them? Mike Fletcher informs us about that too. The novel is fondly dedicated to Augustus Moore, George’s lascivious brother and collaborator who modeled the characters of Mike Fletcher and Frank Escott (both Irish). Escott’s Pilgrim was an analog of the Bat and the Hawk, real weekly newspapers that Augustus edited and George contributed to.
I haven’t studied the text of Mike Fletcher in order to write a monograph (you’re welcome), but I’m pretty sure that a good one could be written, defending my hypothesis that Mike Fletcher is as autobiographical as Confessions. “Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.”
George as a self-taught, self-directed writer was a shapeshifter — crossing the frontiers of literary genres without a guide, experimenting with different styles of self-expression. In a creative quest to tell his truth, he did not mind if the subject matter was real or pretend. The invented Mike Fletcher has a lot to say about the historic George Moore.
Aesthetic
The other reason to read Mike Fletcher is for enjoyment. Candidly, I’m not sure how enjoyable the novel is! The experience of line-editing is not compatible with losing oneself in a story. Yet I think Mike Fletcher can be read in 2025 for its own sake.
In addition to introducing the Pozzi-like main character, the novel reprises Frank Escott from Spring Days (1888), John Norton from A Mere Accident (1887), John Harding and Alice Barton from A Drama in Muslin (1886), Dick Lennox from A Mummer’s Wife (1885), and Lewis Seymour from A Modern Lover (1883). George may have been brewing a mini Human Comedy in the 1880s, so it’s worth keeping up with his people.
I refer to Mike Fletcher as a Boys Club because George wrote it as the obverse of A Drama in Muslin. He told the story, as he saw it, of wasted young female lives in the earlier novel; now he would tell the story of wasted young male lives “of my generation.” How utterly sad!
Maybe more important than plot or character, Mike Fletcher dwells on — dare I say it? — the “timeless theme” of Don Juan. I hesitate because George’s erstwhile publisher William Swan Sonnenschein told him, when rejecting George’s submission, that the very idea of reimagining Don Juan in 1888 was preposterous and uncommercial. (George Bernard Shaw wasn’t copied on that letter). George took his project to Ward and Downey, an offshoot of William Tinsley, the publisher of A Modern Lover.
As if to cozy up to readers in the twenty-first century, Mike Fletcher began with the sexual assault of a young woman. The Me-Too movement did not turn up in a lot of Victorian fiction, but it did here. True to life if not wishful thinking, Mike was not remorseful. His lusty bravado continued throughout the novel, even reverting to his first victim as she lay dying of tuberculosis. Mike was attractive and disgusting, yes, and that was partly George’s point.
You have to wait until the end of the novel for the point to be made, not just in horrid actions but in pessimistic philosophy:
His life had been from the first a series of attempts to escape from the idea. His loves, his poetry, his restlessness were all derivative from this one idea. Among those whose brain plays a part in their existence there is a life idea, and this idea governs them and leads them to a certain and predestined end; and all struggles with it are delusions. A life idea in the higher classes of mind, a life instinct in the lower. It were almost idle to differentiate between them, both may be included under the generic title of the soul, and the drama involved in such conflict is always of the highest interest, for if we do not read the story of our own soul, we read in each the story of a soul that might have been ours, and that passed very near to us; and who reading of Mike’s torment is fortunate enough to say, “I know nothing of what is written there.” Mike Fletcher, Chapter 11, page 295.
Mike is a kind of Meursault, fifty years before that existential anomaly strolled along an Algerian beach. He is a carrier of “life force” before George Bernard Shaw dressed it in a positivist cape. He is the masculine ideal that dominates the entertainment arts today: intelligent, sensual, artistic, successful — and brutal once lofty sentiments are swept aside. “I alone am alone! The whole world is in love with me, and I’m utterly alone” (page 263).
I suppose it isn’t a spoiler to reveal that Mike takes his own life rather than conform in a world that idolizes him. I have to tell it because that detail is vital to the novel’s relevance today. Suicides are increasing at alarming rates, while civilization is bent on mass extinction. We are strangely, incoherently self-destructive.
George Moore recognized something like that in the 1880s and chose to do the unpopular thing: write a book (actually a series of books) exposing it. Not very uplifting, I grant that, but still very cool.
Letters Update
The letters of George Moore on GMi are now complete through 1894. What about that year stands out in his legacy?
The publication of Esther Waters on 1 March 1894 was a milestone in his career. Before that he was, to put it mildly, in a pickle. It’s fair to say that he had touched bottom and seemed unable to rise again.
On the personal side, his Irish estate was producing no income because of political turmoil. Moreover his mother’s siblings were threatening financial ruin by demanding payment of a large debt forgotten for twenty years past.
On the professional side, all seven of his novels had been ranked indecent and banned by the country’s leading booksellers (his eighth would also be banned).
His stalwart publisher Henry Vizetelly had died after being prosecuted, driven into bankruptcy, and imprisoned for publishing books that George had recommended and helped produce. Other publishers who then stepped up for George didn’t stay long.
His only critical and commercial success in fiction was nearly ten years old. The novels he published before and after A Mummer’s Wife were pretentious, moody, unpleasant for the most part though well written, and sold poorly.
As he finished writing Esther Waters for the Newcastle publisher Walter Scott, his submission of the manuscript was declined by America’s three leading publishers and accepted by none, resulting in his loss of American copyright.
As a novelist, George was not making a lot a money and not receiving much respect or encouragement from critics or readers. He was about to come out with the untoward story of a promiscuous servant girl who gets impregnated by a boyfriend who then abandons her. It is the life story of an uneducated, nearly unemployable, distressed single mother with no prospects.
What could go wrong?
What amazes me about George at this time, and really at all times, is his resilience. Facing very strong headwinds, he did not complain, did not adapt to the market, did not change his profession. did not shut up, did not stop working as hard as he could for his “life idea.”
He behaved like a character in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, as he responded to massive adversity with something like: “Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
And then suddenly, practically overnight, against all odds, he was the author of a masterpiece.
Editorial Principle
I’ll take a moment to reiterate an editorial principle concerning the letters, and really everything GMi publishes.
The letters on GMi are digital. Unlike print, they are not typeset, not pressed with ink on to paper. The letters are interactive.
When readers of the letters know something that I don’t know, they can share it right there on the web page, alongside the transcribed letter, with me and our community of interest.
If they own a morbid fascination with George’s bad spelling and punctuation, they can link to the manuscript owner for access to the source material. I correct errors in my transcriptions to make them readable and coherent.
Most importantly, if we learn about letters that are missing from GMi, we can add them the moment they come to light. No waiting for a second edition to come out. No detours to a journal or supplement.
The digital letters of George Moore are a living edition that will grow and improve over time if our community shares what it knows.
I love publishing like this, and pricing the publication of a literary legacy as it should be priced for the benefit of all: free.
Next Up
I feel pretty sure that I haven’t convinced anybody to read Mike Fletcher. Thank God for machine learners who can do the heavy lifting for humans!
Next month, I will add Vain Fortune to the Worlds pillar and the GMi Shop. I don’t know if it’s a happier story; I can’t remember. The title doesn’t augur well. We’ll soon find out.
Next month I will also put the letters of 1895 on the workbench. The character John Norton returns yet again in 1895, like an itch George couldn’t stop scratching. Evelyn Innes will start an itch of her own, emerging from the moody depths of George’s now celebrated soul.
In Chapter 12 of George Moore’s Spring Days (1888), Frank Escott tells Lizzie Baker, “I want to paint you in a white dress sitting on a garden seat with a background of azaleas — something very faint in white and pink.” Frank and his creator George may have been inspired by Auguste Toulmouche’s Woman and Roses (oil on canvas, 1879), now at the Clark Art Institute (1955.877) in Williamstown, Massachusetts: “A young woman in a spotless white dress has paused, while strolling through a well-tended garden, to enjoy the fragrance of a cluster of pink roses.”
Resurgam NFP is the grantseeking and grantmaking organization that kickstarts literary legacies in the digital age. If you wish to donate to George Moore Interactive, please send your money to Resurgam and earmark it for GMi.
This deft two-step will ensure that 100% of your donation gets used according to your wishes. Your donation will be objectively managed and accounted for, and the tangible results of your generosity will be reported back to you with thanks.
The two-step will also ensure that your donation is tax-deductible (if you’re located in the United States), which would not be the case if you donated directly to GMi. Here’s a Resurgam page that explains how it works.
Resurgam is an independent, 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation that echoes and reinforces the aims of George Moore Interactive but with a difference. The difference is this: GMi is kickstarting one particular literary legacy, whereas Resurgam wants to animate every legacy — literary, artistic, musical — bequeathed to our world by creative geniuses of the past.
The technology for kickstarting literary legacies has already been invented; it is known by the rubric generative artificial intelligence and is doing amazing things, though not the things that GMi is pioneering. Visit Resurgam’s Comparisons page for more about that.
With useful technology that is now available and the reliable promise of more powerful tools to come in the next few years, all that remains for George Moore to live again is to put our human feet on the kickstarter and push down forcefully.
My foot has been pushing forcefully for George Moore. Now with around 1,700 pages and posts on this website, and more appearing day by day, I can feel the rumble though the handlebars in my grip. I’m thrilled and ready to take the next steps.
But readiness begs the question: what are the next steps? How far into the future can I see when claiming that I’m poised to accept your donation? To be honest, not very far.
I founded GMi with a concept rather than a program; a vision rather than a plan. I wanted to make stuff like a builder rather than talk about stuff like a professor. That action-orientation allowed me to leapfrog important questions such as: What is my program? What is my step-by-step? What are my milestones and endgame?
The recent formation of Resurgam has forced me to step back and consider. Before now, I was happy just to crank out content, with a methodology and a sense of direction, but without a program per se. That has changed.
It changed because, after starting a Gofundme campaign that fell short of my goals, I’m now planning to ask Resurgam for financial support, and I can’t do that without a program; in other words, without short and long term plans.
I realized this as I prepared Resurgam’s bona fides as a legal not-for-profit. Part of that involved joining Forefront, and as a result of joining Forefront I joined Candid. Candid is the organization that runs the Foundation Directory and Guidestar.
To cement my membership in Candid, I needed to state Resurgam’s own program. I did that by pondering the (nonexistent) program of GMi as I had never done before.
The result is not one but four linear Resurgam programs, each of which represents fundable activities that are sanctioned by Resurgam’s mission and for which Resurgam accepts donations.
Resurgam may evolve into other programs as well, but these four are a complete statement of the work being done and planned by GMi.
Consider:
Program 1: Digital Curation
Digital Curation (DC) locates, organizes, scans, transcribes, edits, annotates, illustrates, and preserves the meaningful and influential contents of aesthetic legacies. Legacies prioritized by Resurgam are literary, artistic and musical from antiquity to the twentieth century. DC is foundational to more advanced programs supported by Resurgam.
Program 2: Access to Cultural Heritage
Access to Cultural Heritage (ACH) follows our DC program. ACH publishes and otherwise disseminates the contents of curated legacies in machine- and human-readable digital formats. ACH is limited to formats that are free and easy to use by the general public and compatible with the training of large language models owned by corporations. ACH permits few (if any) technical, financial, and geographic barriers to entry to a curated legacy.
Program 3: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (MLAI) follows our DC and ACH programs. MLAI engineers curated and published legacies to ensure they are open to computerized and human-prompted textual, visual and quantitative analysis. MLAI optimizes digital legacies for self-assembly, self-correction, self-validation, date-stamping, cross-referencing, interpretation, elucidation, and correlation with the critical heritage. MLAI synchronizes different digital legacies that have overlapping content.
Program 4: High-Fidelity Simulation
High-Fidelity Simulation (HFS) follows our DC, ACH, and MLAI programs. HFS enables curated, published, and engineered legacies to speak for themselves (by demonstrating autonomous self-awareness and dynamic self-expression). HFS manifests in interactive, lifelike conversations between aesthetic legacies and human interlocutors. HFS may be achieved in digital modalities including chatbot, natural-language processing, speech synthesis, virtual- and augmented-realities, and computer-generated imagery (CGI).
✱ ✱ ✱
Up to the present, everything GMi has achieved aligns with Resurgam Programs 1 and 2, though a lot more remains to be done in those programs. Programs 3 and 4 are still prospective, but here they are defined whereas before they were dreamlike.
When I submit my grant applications to Resurgam, and when you tender your donation, we will have to be clear about program fit. No longer happy to crank out content for its own sake, the work that may be deemed worthy of funding must explicitly advance a program objective.
The Worst Novel?
Last month I corrected my mistake in calling George Moore’s A Mere Accident (1887) the worst novel ever written. That dubious distinction purportedly belonged to Spring Days (1888). Worst according to a literary critic whom George respected; worst according to the bewildered author himself.
I promised to transcribe, edit and publish Spring Days, my way of exhuming the victim of literary malfeasance and performing forensic analysis. I have performed it, and now so can you.
My personal opinion of Spring Days is not rancorous. To me, it isn’t a terrible novel; it’s not even a bad novel. As usual when surveying this part of George’s legacy, I’m calling it an experimental novel.
Our ambitious author had a modernist axe to grind, a serious thematic purpose, a good dramatic idea, characters that live on and between the lines, and a richly colored mise en scène.
That said, it is also true that the novel didn’t cross the finish line as a memorable achievement. Not then, not now.
One problem is the title, which sucks (as usual). If you read the book you may wonder, on page after page, why is it named Spring Days? That vague, not catchy title has nothing to do with the plot! The actual words “Spring Days” turn up once, at the very end of the last chapter, almost like an afterthought or the relic of a different novel that was never written.
Another problem is inconsistency. Chapters range in length from 1,000 to 22,000 words. Granted there is no rule that chapters of a novel must be similar in length, but the disparities here look like flaws of construction, reminding me of the Buster Keaton movie One Week (1920) except the movie is funny and this novel isn’t.
A more serious problem with Spring Days is the changing subject matter. At first the story is about the Brookes family: the widower James, his young adult daughters Grace, Maggie and Sally, and his son Willy. The three sisters are foregrounded, like Alice and Olive Barton in A Drama in Muslin.
But no, the narrative soon drifts away from the girls in favor of their pathetic though genuine brother Willy, at first a minor character who unexpectedly grows into a significant moral presence. But that too doesn’t last.
Willy’s friend Frank Escott, at first little more than a colorful detail in the background, suddenly becomes the novel’s main protagonist.
Each of these human loci would be fine as the subject of his or her own story, but the succession of stories, without much in the way of segues, tested this reader’s enjoyment of Spring Days.
If Frank Escott truly is the unrivaled protagonist of Spring Days, that would make sense because he walks and talks like an author surrogate, somewhat like John Norton in A Mere Accident and John Harding in A Drama in Muslin.
Don’t get me wrong, these three men have as many differences as similarities, but a case can be made that George Moore performed in these novels as a ventriloquist whose speech and perceptions were at least partially embodied in Escott, Norton and Harding.
Of course it isn’t necessary for an experimental novelto have a main protagonist because, in my opinion, this novel’s raison d’être is a fictional rendering of the author’s real-life friends the Bridger family and their homes near Shoreham-by-Sea in Sussex.
That helps explain Frank’s rented home in nearby Southwick, where George Moore actually lived while writing Spring Days. From this point of view, it is easier to explain the purported differences between Celt and Saxon, that bubbled to the surface of the novel from time to time.
Frank and George living in Southwick were Irish, the Brookes and the Bridgers living in Shoreham were English. Exploring the evident ethnic differences between these tribes is probably what made Spring Days a worthy project for a renegade disciple of Émile Zola.
(Coincidentally while preparing Spring Days for GMi, I acquired cartes de visite of Harry Colvill Bridger and his daughters Florence and Dulcibella. They are published on the Bridger pages of the GMi Iconography. Use the search bar to find them.)
As mentioned earlier, apart from biographical and sociological interests, Spring Days exhibits a serious novelistic purpose. The purpose is intimated in the following quote, one of several in the book that wax philosophical:
A man’s struggles in the web of a vile love are as pitiful as those of a fly in the meshes of the spider; he crawls to the edge, but only to ensnare himself more completely; he takes pleasure in ridiculing her, but whether he praises or blames, she remains mistress of his life; all threads are equally fatal, and each that should have served to bear him out of the trap only goes to bind him faster. A man in love suggests the spider’s web, and when he is seeking to escape from a woman that will degrade his life, the cruelty which is added completes and perfects the comparison. A man’s love for a common woman is as a fire in his vitals; sometimes it seems quenched, sometimes it is torn out by angry hands, but always some spark remains; it contrives to unite about its victim, and in the end has its way. It is a cancerous disease, but it cannot be cut out like a cancer. It is more deadly; it is inexplicable. All good things, wealth and honour, are forfeited for it; long years of toil, trouble, privation of all kinds are willingly accepted; on one side all the sweetness of the world, on the other nothing of worth, often vice, meanness, ill temper, all that go to make life a madness and a terror; twenty, thirty, forty, perhaps fifty years lie ahead of him and her, but the years and their burdens are not for his eyes any more than the flowers he elects to disdain. Love is blind, but sometimes there is no love. How then shall we explain this inexplicable mystery; wonderful riddle that none shall explain and that every generation propounds?
Spring Days (1888), pages 361- 362.
By this point in the novel (the end), Frank Escott the amateur painter was becoming a novelist, exactly the life trajectory of his creator.
His mind was absorbed in a novel, which he narrated when Willy came to see him. It concerned the accident that led a man not to marry the woman he loved, and was in the main an incoherent version of his own life at Southwick.
The letters of George Moore, published on GMi, are now complete through the year 1893. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of George’s life in 1893 was his hard, experimental work on Esther Waters (1894). This time, the experiment ended in success!
I cannot begin to fathom how George rose, in just a few years, from the bucolic South Downs of A Mere Accident and Spring Days to the urban contest of Esther Waters, except to note that there was a segue: Esther Waters opened in a fictional version of the Bridger home, Buckingham House.
In my view, the most plausible explanation of George’s rise from A Mere Accident and Spring Days to Esther Waters (by way of Mike Fletcher and Vain Fortune) may be found the old saw: he pulled himself up by his bootstraps.
His ability to do that again and again over the course of his career is probably what endeared him most to fans like me. George was an experimentalist and, like a lab scientist, his failures were as numerous as his successes; even more numerous (maybe)!
Somehow he was not deflated or discouraged when he missed his mark. Like Samuel Beckett in another generation, he concluded with “I’ll go on.” Or to put that in George’s words:
I shivered; the cold air of morning blew in my face, I closed the window, and sitting at the table, haggard and overworn, I continued my novel.
Confessions of a Young Man (1888), page 357
Next Up
Letters from 1894-1895 will be next up in the Letters pillar of this website.
By the way, thousands of George Moore’s letters are preserved in known institutional libraries, but an unknown number of others are in private collections. For example, I own a few MSS.
Privately owned letters have turned up over the years in bookseller catalogs, but not otherwise found. I have not figured out how to track them down in the digital age, but my intuition is that there is an efficient way. Suggestions are welcome!
The novel Mike Fletcher (1889), another miss for George, will be next up in the Worlds pillar of this website and the GMi Shop. I first read it a long time ago and have zero memory of it now. Bracing myself!
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), by Caspar David Friedrich in the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Wikimedia Commons). According to curators of The Soul of Nature at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (until 11 May 2025), this romantic artist notably “reimagined European landscape painting by portraying nature as a setting for profound spiritual and emotional encounters.” Nicely put, and much the same could be said about the novelist George Moore when he wrote A Mere Accident (1887). Yet George was not a romanticist; he was an avant-garde experimentalist sundering the shackles of French naturalism. Tired, perhaps, of observing nature for its own sake, he pivoted to an examination of character as lofty, complex and unsettling as Friedrich’s mountains. With mixed results.
I’ve heard that “April is the cruelest month,” but I don’t really believe it. Good things happened here in April 2025, starting with three ebooks that turned up in the GMi Shop:
A Mere Accident (1887)
Impressions and Opinions (1891)
Modern Painting (1893)
The chapters of these ebooks are also available online: A Mere Accident in the Worlds pillar of this website, the others in the Aesthetics pillar.
Humans can freely download or read George’s writing online. Machines can autonomously ingest it into search engines and large language models, where incredible new value will surely be unlocked.
That unlocking is an example of what I mean by kickstarting literary legacies in the digital age.
My priority up to now has been George’s nonfiction — what he wrote about himself and his lived experience. Most of those horses are now in the barn.
I’m still chasing 88 print essays that are uniquely preserved in the British Library. They’re the target of a sleepy Gofundme campaign to cover the cost of fetching them.
Although now, there’s a new turbocharged fundraising initiative in the works!
Resurgam NFP
In April 2025, the US Internal Revenue Service endowed Resurgam with tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit Illinois corporation. This milestone completed the bona fides of Resurgam as a grantseeking and grantmaking enterprise.
Foundations, businesses, and individual benefactors all over the United States can henceforth deduct their grants, gifts, and contributions to Resurgam from federal and state tax returns. Additionally, Resurgam will be exempt from paying sales tax in Illinois on purchases that support its mission.
But what is the mission? Resurgam’s specific aim is kickstarting literary and artistic legacies in the digital age. That’s a concise way of promising to use advanced information technology to curate, publish, animate and simulate creative masters and masterworks of the remote past.
The aim is underpinned by three formal purposes, each with a particular meaning, protocol, and impact:
Educational
Literary
Scientific
I’m so excited about Resurgam that I’m tempted to write about nothing else today. But I don’t need to do that.
Why? Because a new website is emerging online that tells the story. After the static pages are published, I will start writing monthly newsletters from there. With my collaborators, I will also produce prototypes, demos, and proofs-of-concept of various ways the mission will be fulfilled.
My Role with Resurgam?
Yours truly, Bob Becker. is the executive director. I am one of five directors on the board. In addition to board duties, I lead operations. In the foreseeable future, operations are entirely about communication and fundraising. After successful raises, they will expand to board oversight of funded projects.
Resurgam and George Moore Interactive?
Resurgam formed to address the exciting and formidable needs faced by projects like GMi. It exists to nudge any worthy historic literary or artistic project towards futuristic technological goals.
“Projects like GMi” does not mean limited to GMi. The kind of research and development I do for George Moore’s legacy can be done by others for other legacies that are completely different and equally deserving.
For example, a friend of mine has a project on the bibliography of Max Beerbohm. Another friend has a project on the paintings of John Lavery. If they chose to kickstart Beerbohm or Lavery, Resurgam would consider helping them.
Likewise I have two friends (who may be reading this newsletter) who deeply appreciate the legacy of James Joyce. Oh, what a ripe subject that puzzle-maker would be for a kickstart, IMHO!
Caveat: Resurgam will not go looking for projects to back, but it will consider assisting people who come calling with an understanding of our mission.
If you’re a potential donor to, or partner of, Resurgam, I invite you to follow the new website. Likewise if you’re a researcher, writer, artist, publisher, engineer or scientist seeking funding for a bold venture in the digital humanities, let’s get coffee.
Kant or Cant?
George Moore researched and wrote his experimental novel, A Mere Accident (1887), while living among friends near Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex, under the South Downs near Brighton. He dedicated the novel thus:
To My Friends at Buckingham.
Nearly twenty years have gone since first we met, dear friends; time has but strengthened our early affections, so for love token, for sign of the years, I bring you this book — these views of your beautiful house and hills where I have spent so many happy days, these last perhaps the happiest of all.
G.M.
Buckingham House (Thornby Place in the novel) was home to the Bridger family, who nicknamed their friend “Kant” because of his relentless philosophizing. The same behavior is (unfortunately) evident in the novel.
A Mere Accident is a bildungsroman about John Norton, owner of Thornby Place. He has unexplored affinities with John Harding in A Drama in Muslin (1886). Both characters model an aestheticism that interested their author. It is tempting to view the Johns as projections of their author’s ego, but I don’t know about that.
John Norton is probably not a caricature of George Moore, but he has George’s contrarian independence and ambition to figure things out for himself. And by things, I don’t mean screwing in a lightbulb.
John wrestles with “the hideous laws of the world and the flesh, ever at variance and at war, and ever defeating the indomitable aspirations of the soul” (A Mere Accident, page 165).
Yikes!
Alternately thrilled and tormented by religion, art, architecture, and moral philosophy on one hand, and by love, sex, furniture, property management and nature walks on the other, John is a kind of juggler with a lot of balls in the air. I didn’t notice many that dropped.
I could go on and on about this good bad novel, but instead I am going to let generative AI do the talking for me. If you are fairly new to creative uses of AI, this demo may be a nice surprise.
To prepare for the demo, I uploaded my transcript of A Mere Accident to Google’s miraculous Notebook LM in the cloud and asked the app to create a podcast about the novel.
I did no heavy lifting.
I did not tell Notebook LM what to think or say. It may have reached some arguable conclusions, but even if it did, the resulting conversation is nothing short of delightful. Certainly more lively and entertaining than what I and a stuffy professor would sound like on a panel.
And mind you, Notebook LM took about 30 minutes to read the novel, analyze it, script and record a 15-minute conversation between two voices that sound like real people (they are not).
So have a listen. If you like what they say about A Mere Accident, download the book or dip into it online.
If you like what AI does with literary material, subscribe to George Moore Interactive.
Next Up
Last month I reported that A Mere Accident was the worst novel ever written. I was mistaken. That distinction belongs to George’s next novel, Spring Days (1888). Please forgive me.
This is what George wrote about Spring Days:
Everybody is abusing Spring Days. The papers say it is the worst book I have ever written, and one well-known critic says it is the very worst novel he ever read. A writer may elect to put his life into one book (Baudelaire did this in his Fleurs du Mal). Or he may elect to spread himself over fifty volumes (Balzac did this in the Comédie humaine). But once a writer elects to spread himself over a number of volumes it seems to me that he must not only create new methods but he must from time to time recreate old ones. I am a great admirer of Jane Austen and I said to myself, “I will recreate Jane Austin’s method in Spring Days. It was an attempt not to continue, but to recreate, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, etc. Apparently I have failed horribly. Fortunately I have an article in the Universal Review for this month entitled “Mummer Worship”, which is attracting a good deal of attention, and this may help to sell Spring Days. [Letter to Clara Lanza, 1888-09-23]
I feel bad about inadvertently dissing A Mere Accident, so to make up for that, next month I will resurrect Spring Days from its (well-deserved?) tomb. And then I will ask AI if, in fact, it is the worst.
Can any novel in history be worse than Richardson’s Clarissa or Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake? Hard to imagine, we’ll have to see.
Hateful Ebooks
A friend from long ago recently published an essay in The Atlantic entitled “Ebooks Are an Abomination.” He advanced the concept of bookiness, by which he meant the physical properties of printed books that resonate with readers, most of which are lacking in ebooks.
He loves the tangible aesthetics of bookiness.
As a publisher of ebooks and a believer in their utility, who is also a lifelong collector and reader of printed books, I can see his point and also disagree with it. Not because of personal preferences, which long ago I decided have no bearing or interest beyond the tip of my nose.
I dispute the attractions of bookiness for these reasons:
Many people no longer read books, of any kind, at all
Of those who do read books, many read only the tidbits they care about
Many publishers do not invest in beautiful book production
Many titles are expensive and hard or impossible to acquire
George Moore seems to have loved bookiness. He invested a great deal of his personal time and energy in the production of physical books that matched his literary standards.
At the same time, he abhorred low-rent bookiness: books of cheap paper, cramped typography, and flimsy binding.
Yet the bottom line on bookiness for George is that he didn’t collect books or read many. It’s fair to say that a book for him was only the idea he or another author dreamed up and put into words.
He wanted the physical thing to be nice looking, but as readers of his own editions made from hand-made paper, handset type, and vellum covers can attest, good looking is not the same as readable. Those editions are kind of a nuisance to hold in your lap while pondering the idea.
I revert to the term utility to justify ebooks in the GMi Shop. They may not be beautiful, but they are readable, portable, indestructible, updatable, searchable, printable, and potentially interactive.
Keep Those Letters Coming…
In April 2025, I also ressurected another set of letters on GMi. I transcribed, edited, annotated and published George’s extant letters from the first half of 1893. I would have done more, but sadly dropped some balls despite my best intentions.
(For one thing, I had trouble seeing my computer screen!)
Buying an overhead book scanner last year has turned into a very sound investment. And not just because I got it before the American Mad Hatter put tariffs on China, where Czur scanners are made.
Mainly it’s because the scanner works extremely well. It letts me scan and perform OCR on bound faded typescripts of George’s correspondence with phenomenal clarity and few defects.
Using a Czur scanner is also making me a better user, as is often the case with new technology. Heuristics! My digital publishing process is quite different from what it was a year or more ago, and it’s getting better all the time.
In May, I will finish publishing George’s letters of 1893 begin those of 1894. In George Moore’s hero’s journey, 1894 was the year of leaving the blistering desert and rising to the snowy peaks of Esther Waters. Figuratively speaking.
Like Caspar David Friedrich’s model at the top of this newsletter, gazing at the mountaintops, George had confronted problems that nearly drained him and finally figured things out, for himself, in the blessed year of 1894.
Dance in the City (1883) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris (Wikimedia Commons). Renoir painted this picture in France while his friend George Moore wrote A Drama in Muslin (1886) in Ireland and England. George’s realistic story took place in 1882-1884, so it is easy to imagine Renoir’s model Suzanne Valadon as George’s character Olive Barton dancing through an Irish Social Season. Suzanne and Olive were about the same age; both were wardrobed in fine muslin.
A Drama in Muslin (1886) was George Moore’s third novel and first on an Irish theme. The title is obscure. Even after it was truncated as Muslin (1915), it connoted next to nothing about bildungsroman, Irish identity, or feminism — three mutually reinforcing pillars of the story that were (and are) its selling points. George didn’t explain what his title meant. I guess he expected readers to figure it out.
By comparison, his rival Thomas Hardy had a gift for catchy titles that practically jump off the cover, as if saying “buy me,” or “read me,” or at least “open me and see what I’m about.” For the most part, George did not have the knack.
The title of his first novel A Modern Lover (1883) helped trigger a ban by censorious booksellers who already deemed him a pornographer; the title was revived nearly thirty years later by D.H. Lawrence, who was also deemed a pornographer.
The title of George’s second novel A Mummer’s Wife (1885) used an archaic synonym for entertainer that implied a snarky attitude towards theatrical folk, but said little about the story. The characters in the novel were not in fact “mummers” but musical comedians.
In my opinion, George’s first grippy title didn’t arrive until Memoirs of My Dead Life (1906), and that book was nonfiction. Its title represented the content and had an inviting, poetic cadence, as most of Hardy’s titles did.
So what was “a drama in muslin”?
First, it was not “drama” per se, but prose narrative. In the title, drama loosely refers to riveting emotional events, not theatrical performance (though the story opens on one). Not being a potboiler, such events were actually few and far between in the prose, so calling the novel a drama seems misleading. The title eclipsed the author’s real literary achievement!
And what about “muslin”? Now we may be getting somewhere. Muslin as George used the term is ultra-fine cotton fabric handcrafted in India, the stuff of ladies gowns for formal occasions. Elegant muslin dresses were worn by Irish debutants at the dinners, drawing-rooms and balls of the Castle season.
Muslin generally signifies fashion; in the novel it signified wardrobe that women wore to the marriage market. The most luxurious, most flattering and attractive way to suit up for battle.
Is A Drama in Muslin explicitly about fashion?
It is not, nor is the metaphor of muslin much explained or referenced in his text. Alice and Olive Barton, Violet Scully and May Gould are called “muslin martyrs” towards the end, but there was so much more going on in their life stories that the label barely stuck.
Timely and Timeless
“How does an artist give timeless values a timely form? … I don’t think anybody who cares about the arts hasn’t asked the same question. It doesn’t matter whether your fundamental concern is the musical, visual, literary, or theatrical arts. A frozen academicism is almost inevitably the result when the timeless overtakes the timely. When the timely overwhelms the timeless, all you’re left with is a fad.” — from Jed Perl, “Echoes of Eternity,” New York Review of Books (27 March 2025).
I recently stumbled upon Jed Perl’s pithy dichotomy while transcribing A Drama in Muslin for GMi. It gave me a particularly apt lens for viewing the novel, in which George Moore arguably composed nearly perfect harmonies between timely and timeless content.
Timely in the early 1880s was decadence and Land War in Ireland raging in the background of A Drama in Muslin. The timeless stratum that imbues the story with beauty and pathos was the naive longing of several young women, each rendered as both a type and a fully realized individual.
The aim of each female character was to succeed under circumstances that were anything but propitious.
Like Russian novelists he adored — especially Ivan Turgenev — George did not allow the timeless to overtake the timely. Political upheaval, economic disparity and bigoted injustice were not mitigated by sentimental anxieties and happy or poetic endings. A Drama in Muslin was brutally honest.
Nor did he allow the timely to overwhelm the timeless. Not one of the novel’s 131,000 words obscured, minimized or justified acute personal grievances of his characters in favor of grand ideals or historic events.
Instead, touching sentiments of his young women and momentous events of Irish history coexist in the novel like staffs of elegiac melody: sentiments on the treble clef, history on the bass clef. Like a grand opera or symphony?
George’s novel as a whole is imaginative and realistic. It is a faithful and lofty rendering of life — comparable to Renoir’s painting — that is both timely and timeless, neither frozen academicism nor pulp fiction.
When I read A Drama in Muslin and look at Dance in the City I am mindful of the time and place of their origins; yet I experience them as testaments of truth and beauty in my life. Not either/or but both at the same time.
Secular Humanism (so to speak)
George Moore began writing A Drama in Muslin while still writing his first great novel, A Mummer’s Wife (1885). The new project was a self-conscious pivot away from his mentor Émile Zola and French literary naturalism. But what was he pivoting towards?
Being an artist rather than a polemicist, George did not explicitly state the aim of his pivot. He even tried to obscure it by masking his evolution as role-playing. But a clue to what was really going on surfaced in the course of his storytelling:
“…the ideal life should, it seems to me, lie in the reconciliation — no, reconciliation is not the word I want; I scarcely know how to express myself — well, in making the two ends meet — in making the ends of nature the ends also of what we call our conscience.” — A Drama in Muslin (1886, page 228).
Another dichotomy rendered and resolved. This one involved, not timely and timeless content, but transcendent morality: the knowing or figuring out what is the right thing to do, and doing that without expectations of reward or even appreciation. The arc of George Moore’s moral universe, starting in the early 1880s, was bending toward justice.
It’s ironic that a young man, all of whose books were banned for indecency, was, on the record, in point of fact, one of the more righteous creative writers of his era. I may be overstating that, but it’s worth pondering.
In A Drama in Muslin, he made the ends of nature synchronous with the ends of conscience, albeit unhappily. The story concluded with a melancholy, open-ended reunion of the Barton sisters. Their values and aspirations were preserved and protected in exile, but still unfulfilled.
George’s pivot continued in memoirs he published later in the 1880s. It reached a zenith in his novel Esther Waters (1894).
When I encountered Esther Waters as a student of fin-de-siècle “aesthetes and decadents,” I was immediately convinced that George Moore, more than any of his late Victorian contemporaries, had plucked the brass ring of modernism.
Now I see that moral inklings glimmering in A Drama in Muslin burst into flame in Esther Waters and eventually expanded, during the Great War, into cosmic starlight in The Brook Kerith (1916).
I give the “ideal life” that George envisioned in his fiction the name “secular humanism.” He got there about fifty years ahead of that movement, but the pieces seem to fit. I’m likewise proposing that Alice Barton may be seen as its incipient, feminist standard-bearer.
All of which begs the question: So what? Who cares? What difference does it make?
Claims that A Drama in Muslin is worth reading because it’s a good or great late Victorian or early modernist novel, deeply enriched though generally overlooked, is not a compelling answer. Many people no longer read books, and those who do already have enough good ones on the nightstand without adding another classic tome to the pile.
Reminders that A Drama in Muslin is a pivotal text in George Moore’s legacy and the Western canon generally likewise don’t cut it. Let’s be honest friends, the works of George Moore are like old trees growing in a forest that very few people walk through nowadays; and whether this tree is taller or prettier or more consequential to the environment doesn’t much matter beyond our leaning and crumbling ivory towers.
What matters, maybe, right now, is the contribution A Drama in Muslin makes to our fragile understanding of women, or rather the way our male-dominated society objectifies women for profit and pleasure.
The novel makes a unique, nuanced, engaging and yes, even timeless case for women thriving beyond the male gaze; for girls as innocent victims and also as intelligent, industrious individuals whose lives are trivialized rather than liberated by sexual politics.
Arguments won’t suffice here, there’s no room for that. I’ll try to answer my so-what question with something better than argument: a fantasy.
Imagine, if you will, Suzanne Valadon stepping out of Renoir’s painting, not as a model but a real young woman having fun at a dance. Imagine being introduced to her, learning about her family and background, her talent and hard work, her artistic accomplishments and professional constraints. Imagine being charmed by her pretty face and figure, dazzled by her fearless and candid personality, confused by the possibility that she is not only sweeter, but also smarter and more capable than you are.
Then imagine Suzanne stepping back into Renoir’s painting and resuming the dance with that tuxedoed nonentity whose role in a picture is little more than her drop shadow.
Would you ever be able to look at Dance in the City again in the same simpleminded way you usually look at art? I believe the answer is no, you would not.
Instead you would perceive that Suzanne was a girl like Alice, Olive, Violet and May, likewise dressed in a white cloud of muslin; and I think you would enjoy Renoir’s painting not less, but far, far more than before, knowing who the model was. Her dance would suddenly be full of meaning.
That may be what George Moore accomplishes in A Drama in Muslin today, in 2025, 140 years after he wrote and Renoir painted. That is why the novel still makes a difference IMHO.
The book and painting may enhance our appreciation of art, history, culture, humanity… and yadayadayada. More important than any of that, they entertain and edify in timely and timeless ways. When we let them.
More Letters
Last month I raised the curtain on George Moore’s letters of the 1880s. They are all prim and proper on GMi for human and machine learners.
Now his letters of 1890, 1891 and 1892 are also live on GMi, as always free to read and use.
In the early 1890s George reached his fortieth year; he worked hard and made very little money; he watched helplessly as his private Irish income evaporated in murder and mayhem; he conducted literary and theatrical experiments without much success; and be began work on a masterpiece like no other.
The letters track his moves. Those of 1893 are now on the workbench.
A reminder: the letters of George Moore and other texts on GMi are interactive. They invite commentary. The kinds of comments I am keen to read are corrections and enhancements. If you notice a detail that may be a mistake, call it out. I will be grateful and make amends.
Next Up in Worlds
After publishing 13 ebook titles that are theoretically worthy of fresh attention, my next “windmill” will be one that probably isn’t. It is a novel that George Moore thought was brilliant while writing it, and after publication felt was the worst novel ever written. Not just by him, by anyone.
A Mere Accident (1887) came out after A Drama in Muslin (1886). Can it be as awful as the author (and critics) insisted that it was? Let’s find out.
High Price of Collecting
Just two first editions of George Moore have eluded me over the years: Martin Luther (1879) and A Modern Lover (1883). It’s not that they haven’t been offered, but the asking prices were too high (for me).
Quite recently both books in good condition were auctioned on the same day: one in Ireland, the other in England. As usual, I placed my “reasonable” bids and was promptly crushed. Sale prices were higher than ever!
A Modern Lover sold for £5,500 and Martin Luther sold for €1,300. The take-home costs were about 50% higher, since buyers had to pay commission and tax on each transaction.
I can’t imagine what made these books worth the gargantuan prices paid. They are rare, to be sure, but not unique; moreover they are juvenile works of a disregarded author. I feel pretty sure that when they were taken home from the auctions, they were put on shelves, never to be looked at again (until the next auction).
I would have scanned and transcribed them, and published the texts for all the world to see and use. Oh well, until the next auction….
Norham Castle, Sunrise (1845), oil on canvas by J.M.W. Turner, in the Tate Britain, London (Wikimedia Commons). I was wondering about imagery that could symbolize the word RESURGAM. What are things that rise, that give and renew life, that help people know themselves and the objects of there desires? The sun, of course! The sun also rises every 24 hours and performs uncountable miracles without blinking, while we do other things. Having settled on the sun as my thematic image for Resurgam NFP, almost immediately I thought of the artist J.M.W. Turner. He was an unclassifiable genius who painted Impressionist art before there was Impressionist art — “My job is to paint what I see, not what I know.” Turner’s aesthetics and practices resonate with George Moore’s, and George fully appreciated Turner’s brilliance. So here is a sunrise by Turner, one that George himself enjoyed looking at, one that says with colors as George said with words, “RESURGAM — I shall rise again.”
As we approach the dawn of 2025, today I’ll begin by thanking my heroes — volunteers and donors — who stepped up in 2024 to help the cause. I want to see more of them as GMi flourishes next year. Whether or not I do, I warmly appreciate their demonstrated good will and support.
Samuel Becker
Charles Deane
Kheir Fakhreldin
Kathi Griffith
Mark Samuels Lasner
Ken Long
Richard Miles
Michael O’Shea
Michele Reardon
Claudette Walsh
James Walter
As of this writing, GMi has published 1,286 meaty web pages and 11 full-length ebooks of George Moore’s first editions. Heroes, we’re amazing!
Resurgam NFP
In November, I announced the formation of Resurgam NFP. I have now completed registration of the new not-for-profit corporation in the State of Illinois.
Resurgam has a board of directors, articles of incorporation, a federal employer identification number, and a web domain; website to follow.
Bylaws
My very next step is to draft the bylaws. These are principles and practices that will govern Resurgam in the conduct of business and fulfillment of its mission.
Part of writing bylaws is deciding the kinds of people who may join Resurgam as officers and members of the corporation. Resurgam is going to employ a few talented individuals with credentials in:
tax accounting
legal council
communications
grantseeking
technology assessment
None will start with a salary; each will begin as a volunteer although in time I expect officers and members of the corporation to be compensated in line with our not-for-profit charter.
We’re Hiring
Do you have time and talent to spare for a cause? If you have a passion for art and literature of yesteryear, and if your skills happen to align with the functions listed above, please contact me to discuss joining Resurgam.
I should add that Resurgam has formed to help kickstart the literary legacy of George Moore, but not only for that. The mission is more inclusive: to provide funding for legacies in addition to George’s.
For example, I would love to do something for the legacy of Joris-Karl Huysmans of France, Robert Louise Stevenson of Scotland, and Ralph Waldo Emerson of the United States. All three are literary titans whose fame is not matched by their accessibility and utility. They and many more like them are ready for a kickstart in the digital age.
You may have different favorites whom you’re working on or wondering about. Resurgam NFP will soon be able to welcome your proposal.
Tax Exemption
After Resurgam directors sign off on our bylaws, my next step will be to prepare an application to the United States Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status. Compared with formation at the state level, IRS certification at the national level is more complex and deliberate.
Not a problem though. I have studied the instructions, they are not rocket science. I plan to finish my IRS application by the end of March 2025. After approval, institutional grantseeking will begin.
Targeting
Even before bylaws are written and tax exemption is secure, I will join Forefront, the organzation here in Chicago that helps grantmakers and grantseekers find each other.
Having dabbled in grantseeking in the past, I know how bewildering and time-consuming it can get; like navigating a maze! Forefront will provide Resurgam with community, context and counsel for finding our way to the money. By the time Resurgam is tax-exempt, we should have a qualified list of grantmakers to approach and an understanding of how to approach them.
Off Comes a Fig Leaf
George Moore serialized his freshest essays about Ireland in a French newspaper, Le Figaro, July-September 1886. He wrote his essays in English; his handwritten text was translated into French by somebody named M.F. Rabbe and published under a collective title: Lettres sur I’lrlande.
(By the way, if you know anything about M.F. Rabbe, you are way ahead of me. Like Bernard Lopez, Rabbe is an important figure in George’s biography who is AWOL from the historical record.)
Soon after Lettres sur I’lrlande, George augmented his series for book publication. Still written in English, and still translated by M.F. Rabbe, the expanded essays werepublished as Terre d’Irlande in Paris, March 1887.
Not long after Terre d’Irlande, George’s original English manuscript was published in London as Parnell and his Island, May 1887.
Or was it? The correct answer is, not quite.
By their own account, his London publisher Messrs. Sonnenschein “mutilated” the text of Terre d’Irlande before publishing the first and only English edition. Their reasons were commercial rather than literary.
By self-censoring the text, the publisher hoped to avoid yet another book ban by English booksellers and librarians. All of George’s books had been banned up to that time. (And guess what: the expurgated Parnell and his Ireland would be banned as well!)
Ban or no ban, on its way from Terre d’Irlande to Parnell and his Island, George Moore’s manuscript was expurgated before it was printed, without his help and over his objections.
No unexpurgated text of Parnell and his Island has ever been published. But GMi is about to change that.
Our first step will be to make a GMi ebook of Terre d’Irlande. An ebook will kickstart the French text in the digital age so it can be treated to the same textual analysis as the rest of the canon, by humans and machines.
The second step, a bit more nuanced, will be to translate Terre d’Irlande into something that looks, sounds and feels like George Moore’s English. That process will require preserving the author’s unexpurgated English, and restoring the expurgated text from the earlier French translation.
Because no manuscript is extant, it will be necessary to synthesize two different printed texts, in two languages, that have survived.
The printed texts are:
The augmented second publication in French
The expurgated third publication in English
I’m unsure whether it is also necessary to analyze the earliest serialized text in French, which may be regarded as the true first. That is to be determined.
Parnell and his Island (1887) and Confessions of a Young Man (1888) are rarely read together, but they’re really two peas in a pod.
They’re both autobiographical, both meditations on the author’s origins and values, both written at about the same age, both published at nearly the same time by the same publisher, and both for the same purpose: to turn the attention of a realistic novelist inward, upon himself, and to make of himself an entirely new aesthetic proposition.
Both of these books belong side by side on your digital shelf.
Progress on Letters
The Letters pillar of GMi now encompasses 1863-1887. All extant letters written during the emergence of George Moore as a memoirist are freely available. They’re somewhat revealing, helpful to a degree, and will become even more helpful when the letters of 1888 are added. Those are already on the workbench.
Speaking of “his Island“
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2018) is by Patrick Radden Keefe. I haven’t read the book, but I recently watched a nine-hour series based on it that is streaming on Hulu. It is brilliant, but so very, very uncomfortable!
My own first visit to Ireland occurred in 1976, only four years after the pivotal murder of the book’s title. Struggling to sense and relate to Irish culture, which was all new to me, I remember saying to myself without knowing why: “I have come among crazies; this alien nation proverbially “is and it isn’t.”
Say Nothing reprises that feeling, only with the book and film, it is possible for me to see more behind the curtain and begin to understand behavior that, at face value, didn’t compute.
One example of “it is and it isn’t” comes at the end of every episode of the series, when a disclaimer concerning Gerry Adams fills the screen.
Indeed, Adams was and he wasn’t, is and he isn’t. Or as George Moore may say when we’ve re-animated him, not everything has changed on his Island.
More books for George
Soon after my November newsletter, I finished reading Certain Artists, by Joris-Karl Huysmans, in the vivid translation by Brendan King (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2021).
Certain Artists is the second of two volumes of Huysmans’ art criticism from the same translator. Like the first, Modern Art, it throws exquisite light on the obscure rise of French Impressionism and decline of Neoclassicism.
In Certain Artists, Huysmans wandered into some of the weirdest and most unsettling byways of modernism that I’m aware of; actually, that I wasn’t aware of until now.
George Moore also observed and explored that terra incognita, but with less vigor, rigor and candor. After all, he was British! How wonderful now to imagine a conversation between JK and GM; and even more than imagine, to create a simulation of their conversation with generative AI.
GMi is inching towards that simulation, and the conversation is going to include all of us!
Certain Artists is a masterpiece by any standard: a must-read for everybody who cares about visual arts in the late nineteenth century and the culture that formed a background for George Moore’s life and work.
When I said as much to Brendan, he replied that his translation of yet another volume of Huysmans’ art criticism is in the works. Bravo!
The Drawing Lesson (1879), by Henri Fantin-Latour (Wikimedia Commons) appears on the cover of Modern Art by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Huysmans reviewed this picture in the Salon of 1879: “M. Fantin-Latour is not a ‘couturier’ or a painter of accessories, he’s a great painter who grasps and renders life. His painting is neither pedantic, nor strained: it is strong and simple. M. Fantin-Latour is one of the best artists we have in France.” In 1879, George Moore finished an artistic expatriation in Paris and returned to London as a budding man of letters. He had much in common and a few differences with the avant-gardist Huysmans.
My excitement about modernist art history surged in September with Paris 1874: TheImpressionist Moment; in October I touted Anka Muhlstein’s The Pen and the Brush (2017), about the dovetail of nineteenth century French art and literature.
In November I’m back on a soapbox to extol two other splendid books: Anka Muhlstein’s Camille Pissarro. The Audacity of Impressionism, translated by Adriana Hunter (2024) and Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Modern Art, translated by Brendan King (2019). King’s is the first English translation of that French masterpiece from 1883.
George Moore is not mentioned in either book. Nonetheless, Camille the painter and Joris-Karl the art critic epitomized much of George’s passion for painting and literature, and he knew both of them.
Both books can supply rich context for visitors to the Impressionist Moment in Washington D.C. before it closes in January; likewise for visitors to a special exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago opening in June 2025.
You won’t want to miss Gustave Caillebotte in Chicago, so go ahead and start the background reading. Prepare to walk thoughtfully through the galleries, pausing between pictures to catch your breath. I’ll meet you in the Member’s Lounge where we can mutually effervesce.
New Motto
George Moore’s love of antique printing and bookbinding is no secret to collectors. Starting in his fortieth year and increasingly as he got older, he lavished TLC on the design and construction of handmade books.
For that reason, it seemed fitting for me to borrow a motto from the 17th century Dutch publisher Elzevir. Their woodcut insignia was contemporary with Dutch masters that George cherished. I have nailed it to the front door of GMi, replacing a vignette of purportedly similar vintage.
Known as le Solitaire (the Hermit), the woodcut is a Dutch elm tree entwined by a fruited vine; beside the tree a man stands alone, reaching for fruit with his right hand. Opposite him, an ironic motto in Latin: non solus (not alone).
What does that mean? Unable to work it out, I asked ChatGPT and in two seconds received an eloquent answer that is too long to repeat here. But it left intact my belief about all fine art: that it means what you want.
What I want for GMi goes something like this. The tree is life. The fruited vine is the arts. The man alone is a writer or reader, probably both.
In grasping the fruit of life (art), the solitary man is no longer alone; he joins something greater than himself; and greatness is now within him.
Accordingly, makers and patrons of GMi truly are non solus.
If you read that intriguing article you may be tempted to join a chorus of protesters that Andrew quoted. However, that would be a mistake.
Yes, of course, a “technology-enabled resurrection” of Wisława Szymborska on Polish radio seems a lot like technology-enabled re-animation of George Moore that’s been promised hereabouts.
And to be sure, there are similarities. Both projects are experiments to engage readers with consequential authors who are no longer with us in the flesh. To engage readers with the authors themselves, not just their writing.
Was the Polish experiment successful? By the numbers, yes it was. It roused popular desires to experience a dead poet as a living individual, even though poetry is perhaps the least popular of the literary arts.
To me, the “protestable” problem in Krakow (if there was one) was not the resurrection of Wisława, but the use of a computer model to interview her.
Such technical symmetry turned her interview into a closed system, and made humans superfluous to the dialogue: mere auditors, like students in a lecture hall.
A closed system is one that GMi won’t make. The re-animated George may occasionally converse with other models, but far more importantly he will converse freely with real humans like you and me.
We will not be his auditors, but his interviewers; and George will talk not for us, but with us, about whatever we have on our minds at the moment.
Resurgam
Speaking of resurrection and re-animation, “resurgam” is a Latin word that means “I shall rise again”; it’s the title of the last chapter in George Moore’s Memoirs of My Dead Life (1906).
In 2024, it is also the name of a new not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) corporation in Illinois.
I am forming Resurgam NFP for the express purpose of winning institutional grants to fund research and development of George Moore’s literary legacy.
This bold move follows the timid inception of my first Gofundme Campaign. Remember that?
If it got past you the first couple of times I mentioned it, have a listen to my pitch, Why George? It is performed by James, my Irish AI alter ego, who was cast and vetted by Michael O’Shea.
Why George? Why Bob? Why donate?
My Gofundme Campaign wants to finance travel to the UK for vital research at the British Library. Several noble and generous people stepped up with a donation. I am very grateful to them, but more are needed.
Resurgam NFP is key to unlocking that more. I expect it to start cranking out grant applications by mid-2025. And to win.
So stand clear, my friends, GMi is going to the next level!
French Correction
George Moore was sort-of bilingual. Though lacking formal education in any language, he managed to read and write passably in English and French.
His letters were mostly written in English, but quite a few are in French to French correspondents. Those French letters are problematic for me.
Now that I’m filling the Letters pillar of GMi, slowly but surely, with fresh transcriptions, I have to face that problem head on.
I started transcribing in the year 1863. Week later I have reached 1887. The process is horribly slow for two reasons.
First, I am slow because I exclude footnotes from George’s text. Instead of those distracting superscript numbers that interrupt, often unnecessarily, I place minimal explanatory notes in a headstone for each letter. That little bit of editorial assistance takes time.
Second, I am slow because I render each letter as “sensible text,” stripping out the dross left by George’s careless penmanship. My fresh transcriptions are corrected for paragraph breaks, capitalization, spelling and punctuation; now more readable and learnable than ever.
This process is not a problem for me with letters in English, but I am not competent to perform cleanup with letters in French. I am easily flustered by accents grave and aigu.
Now however, thanks to my Dublin colleague Michael O’Shea, a true heroine has arrived at GMi to get me over this hurdle.
Her name is Claudette Walsh. She is a native of Lyon who moved to Ireland to teach French, and stayed. Eventually James Joyce cast his spell over her, as he has over Michael, and she joined the Joyce community in Ireland as an acolyte.
I don’t know what Joyce is doing for Claudette, but I know very well what she is doing for Moore. She is making his French letters presentable to the world. I am very grateful indeed for her gracious support.
By removing pedantic footnotes and correcting slovenly penmanship, GMi is ensuring that the letters of George Moore are eminently readable, accessible, and useful to human readers and machine learners.
With thousands of letters flowing into this kickstart, everybody will be well served.
OMG
While searching microfilm reels to answer Claudette’s questions about particular words that make no sense in any language, I came across an image that likewise makes little sense, unless you were there.
It’s a photograph of me aet. 26, during my first visit to Moore Hall. I am sitting inside a window of the ruin, posing for my camera perched a few feet away.
You couldn’t have been there because I was alone. I took a train from Dublin to Claremorris; from there I hitchhiked to Muckloon. I was stunned that the local workmen who gave me a lift knew so much about the racehorses of the Moores a hundred years previous, but nothing at all about the writer.
After climbing into the house and taking this picture, I spent the night in my tent on the grass below the gated and locked front door. It was as black and silent as outer space! Unable to sleep, I got so agitated that I drank the wine and smoked the cigar that I planned to leave at George’s grave.
Just as well that I did, because the next morning was wet and overcast, and I couldn’t find Mr. Macdonald who, I was told, rented boats for rowing to the remote island grave in Lough Carra.
I walked and hitchhiked away from Moore Hall, promising George that I would be back. I have kept my promise.
Confession, Memoir, Autobiography
When I recently posted Vale in the GMi Shop, I finished making available all of George Moore’s published writing about himself, all in one place, all free.
These are the only editions whose readers can communicate with the editor and each other about what George wrote; and the only editions whose text is open for computerized textual analysis.
The cover of Vale has a portrait sketch by John Butler Yeats of his son William, drawn around the time that George Moore was (temporarily) enchanted by the great poet.
I chose this artwork partly because W.B. Yeats catalyzed George’s return to his native land for the Irish Literary Revival, but mostly because I previously chose similar drawings by JBY for Ave and Salve. They make a nice set.
That said, there’s a caveat. Edward Martyn earned his spot on the cover of Ave because George centered that book on their relationship. You cannot appreciate and enjoy Ave without taking Edward into your heart the way George did.
George Russell (Æ) earned his spot on the cover of Salve for the same reason. Each of the first two volumes of Hail and Farewell turns on a friendship of surpassing, intrinsic value to the author.
The person who actually earned a spot on the cover of Vale is not Yeats, but George’s brother Maurice Moore, “the Colonel.” Vale turns on their fraught fraternal relationship. The book is a candid testament to it.
By the time George published Vale in 1914, he was over the magic of Yeats. Nonetheless appreciative of Yeats’s poetry, but somewhat dismissive of the man and his performative charisma.
Though William Butler Yeats is not a pivotal foil in Vale, the way Maurice Moore is, he is nevertheless George’s persistent foil across all three volumes of Hail and Farewell.
Since John Butler Yeats did not draw a portrait of Maurice Moore, I felt sure that William Butler Years was the next best choice for the cover of Vale. I got to make a “set” though perhaps not perfectly.
And by the way, as an aside to Michael and Claudette, Chapter 7 of Vale opens with a discussion about Yeats and the modernist quest for literary opacity.
Speaking of Stéphane Mallarmé (and incidentally of Yeats), George wrote: “His phrases will never grow old, for they tell us nothing; the secret meaning is so deeply embedded that generations will try to puzzle through them….”
The proverbial search for immortality! Excuse me for yawning.
Me and Social Networking
Months ago while pondering the low visibility of GMi on the web, I posted that I would overcome my resistance, hold my nose, and join social networks in order to “get GMi out there.”
I thought I would, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. The Musk-Zuckerberg axis of evil has a stench that seeps into my pores even when my nostrils are blocked.
However, just the other day, I created an account on Bluesky Social, the reincarnation of Twitter that has no stench (so far); it comes off smelling like a rose.
I am trying it, hoping to connect with others whose interests I share. And maybe learn something nice about a world that is otherwise falling apart.
If you are, or choose to become, a subscriber on Bluesky Social, please connect with @beckermultimedia.bsky.social. That’s me! As of today I follow nobody and nobody follows me. Help me change that.
Two portraits by John Butler Yeats in the National Gallery of Ireland. On the left is Edward Martyn in 1899. A patron of the arts and author, Martyn is George Moore’s foil in Hail and Farewell! Ave (1911). On the right is George Russell in 1898. An artist and author who used the pseudonym Æ, Russell is Moore’s foil in Hail and Farewell! Salve (1912). These two volumes of the great trilogy are now live on GMi.
Last month I enthused about Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The exhibition epitomizes art during George Moore’s formative years without mentioning him. (He studied painting in Paris in 1874, but was 22 years old and hadn’t cracked his shell.)
Today I’m enthusing about Anka Muhlstein’s The Pen and the Brush (2017). Like the exhibition, her book helps me see George’s emergent aestheticism in shimmering context!
She doesn’t seem to mention George Moore (I’m not sure because the book is not indexed). Moreover she opens with an erroneous claim that “In England, [Virginia] Woolf would be the first to write about the influence painting had on literature.”
Nonetheless The Pen and the Brush is a marvelous account of reciprocity between nineteenth century painters and novelists, starting with the beloved Balzac and including other French writers who incubated George Moore and got him to hatch.
The Hungarian original may also be unreadable; I don’t know about that. My mother was Hungarian but didn’t teach me her native language. Csak angolul beszélek.
I haven’t read Herscht 07769, yet I know it’s unreadable because its 400 insane pages consist of a single sentence. László may be emulating Jimmy, the Irish genius who wrote famously unreadable novels a hundred years ago and who purportedly said, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”
Setting aside the pedagogical question, who cares what he meant? we may wonder if ensuring one’s immortality is a priority, or even the business, of a novelist? If you’re a professor, perhaps you think it is. Your job is explaining enigmas and puzzles to kids and colleagues.
Others like myself think not. The priority and business of a novelist, from my point of view, is to delight and edify, in that order. Meaning the right to edify is earned with a passage through delight.
Readers may be delighted and edified by many different literary things (for me it’s the prose of George Moore). Nonetheless, I’m pretty sure that a 400-page sentence ain’t one of them.
Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic indirectly reinforced my view in her essay about “Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.”
We know that college English studies have been a slow moving train wreck for half a century. Now adding to its chronic woes, according to Rose, is the discovery that undergraduates cannot, and don’t want to, read immortal texts that were written for their teachers; texts that have to be explained to be understood; texts that have to be studied to be enjoyed; texts that meander for countless pages without a period or paragraph break.
Experts suggest that this new problem may be caused by technology, or by mentally limited readers, or anything other than the texts themselves. Thus they recognize the symptoms of educational decadence, but I suspect that they miss the cause.
And what else can we expect when Garth Risk Hallberg, the author of that Times book review, ranks László as a “master” and László’s novels as bona fide “masterpieces.”
Thanks perhaps to James Joyce and his acolytes, the unreadable often feels like the acme of serious literary publishing; befuddlement is the bar to which serious novelists aspire in order to ensure their immortality.
George Moore did not aspire to immortality. He did not try to confuse readers and he didn’t care about professors one way or another. His artistic goals were to delight and edify, in that order.
Why George?
I recently started my first Gofundme Campaign. The purpose is worthwhile, the goal is modest and attainable. So say I!
Donors will share credit for bringing an important part of a fine writer’s canon out of the analog crypt, into our world of art and literature, and back to life (digitally).
After launching the Campaign I decided to use my voice and face to do some of the asking. I drafted the video script that I’m sharing below.
The script may change before the camera rolls, but if you approve the draft — your donation is always welcome.
The Script
I met George Moore nearly forty years after he died.
Not George in the flesh, of course.
I met his legacy as a venerable and eclipsed man of letters.
I started reading his novels and stories, then memoirs, then plays and poems, then essays, and even read his bibliography line by line.
Finally I read some of the unpublished letters he wrote to friends and family and many others.
And I was smitten.
My reading for pleasure morphed into research.
Research morphed into editing.
Editing morphed into publishing.
(I’ve overlooked collecting — about 500 volumes so far!)
On and off for about 50 years, George has been a friend.
Actually more than a friend.
He grounded and centered me as I matured and changed.
Even when I changed almost beyond recognition, he held a mirror that showed who I am.
Ironically I guess, this transformative and contrarian author has been my compass and safe harbor.
He inspired a pastime, a vocation, a hobby, and ultimately a lifelong passion.
And he did all that without ever telling me why.
The question is still open: Why George?
Why have I devoted such time and resources to him?
Why should others care enough to donate?
Nobody has an economic or moral incentive, so why bother?
This question hasn’t occurred to me before now.
That may be because, by nature, I do what I want.
And rarely pause to explain why, even to myself.
But now it’s different.
When accepting donations on behalf of George, I have a duty to explain why him, and also why me?
Not because George is the greatest writer of his generation, or his tradition, or his country, or even the greatest writer I’ve read.
George isn’t “the greatest.”
Superlatives have nothing to do with him (or with me).
Rather than “the greatest,” to me he’s just sympatico.
Sympatico means I get him as easily as I breathe, and I believe he gets me in my pose as a skeptical reader.
He knows that I have zero tolerance for insincerity, or vulgarity, or triviality and foolishness, and he likes that about me.
It’s something we have in common.
As a writer, despite his flaws, he made his own life and mine more beautiful.
Not better, because better isn’t the point for somebody like George Moore.
His forte is beauty for its own sake; the proverbial gem-like flame.
This is why I’m trying to bring him back to life with technology.
The second volume of George Moore’s autobiography Hail and Farewell! is named Salve. Along with the first volume Ave, it is now a free ebook in the GMi Shop.
All the chapters of both volumes are also posted in the Worlds pillar of this website, where they can be read, searched and commented. Ave has 104,958 words; Salve has 107,454.
I was intrigued by the way George wove his memoirs around the identities of two boon companions: Edward Martyn in Ave and George Russell in Salve.
Each man was an archetype of the Irish Literary Revival that George witnessed and joined for a time. They are foils to an author whose archetype is different, uncertain and still emerging.
Next up for GMi is the third volume of Hail and Farewell!Vale. With that, I will have placed all of George’s autobiographical writing online, in one place, in a way that is useful to human readers and tomorrow’s machine learners.
