A pacifist in Budleigh: George Gissing (1857-1903)

Not too many Budleigh people know that a great Victorian literary figure, considered in the 1880s as one of the three greatest novelists in England, stayed in the town. Even fewer know of him as a pacifist, for Budleigh Salterton was renowned in the past as a favourite retirement place for military types as well as a health resort. 

And yet, at around the time he was writing his novel The Crown of Life, a desire for peace was in the news. On 29 August, 1898, Czar Nicholas II of Russia issued an invitation to all nations to confer over the limitation of armaments, observing that ‘the intellectual and physical strength of nations; labour and capital alike, have been unproductively consumed in building terrible engines of destruction’. In a letter that Gissing wrote the following year to his German friend and writer Eduard Bertz, he described the novel as containing ‘a rather vigorous attack on militarism’.

According to Gissing’s biographer Jacob Korg, these radical ideas were derived from the author’s reading of Russian writers such as Leo Tolstoy, whose sympathy with the dissident Spiritual Christian group of militant pacifists known as Doukhobors is well known.  Gissing felt that Russian spirituality could serve as an antidote to British Imperialism. 

Gissing and his sister Margaret had spent the spring of 1897 staying at 4 West End Villas – now 14 West Hill – in Budleigh, a town which he had discovered in February 1891 when living in Exeter. They would be joined there by the author, journalist and fellow-pacifist H.G. Wells and his wife. No doubt Czar Nicholas’s invitation would have been one of their subjects of conversation, perhaps contributing to Gissing’s thoughts as he composed The Crown of Life, which was published in 1899.

The novel attacks the role of the press as a fomenter of war. It is notable for its character Lee Hannaford, an inventor of destructive munitions, described by one expert on Gissing as ‘a grotesque, a ludicrous demon’ with ‘near mad Strangelovian inclinations’. Hannaford is used by the author to fix attention upon ‘a sinister aspect of industrialisation at the end of the nineteenth century’.

Here is Gissing’s depiction of the sanctum in which Hannaford works: ‘hung about with lethal weapons of many kinds and many epochs, including a memento of every important war waged in Europe since the date of Waterloo. A smoke-grimed rifle from some battlefield was in Hannaford’s view a thing greatly precious; still more, a bayonet with stain of blood; these relics appealed to his emotions. Under glass were ranged minutiae such as bullets, fragments of shells, bits of gore-drenched cloth or linen, a splinter of human bone – all ticketed with neat inscription. 

'A bookcase contained volumes of military history, works on firearms, treatises on (chiefly explosive) chemistry; several great portfolios were packed with maps and diagrams of warfare. Upstairs, a long garret served as laboratory, and here were ranged less valuable possessions; weapons to which some doubt attached, unbloody scraps of accoutrements, also a few models of cannon and the like.’

By contrast, the novel’s character John Jacks yearns for the day when a new world statesman appears: ‘I want someone to talk about Peace – and not from the commercial point of view,’ he tells us. ‘The slaughterers shan’t have it all their own way… civilization will be too strong for them, and if old England doesn’t lead in that direction, it will be her shame to the end of history.’

Sadly for the idealistic Gissing, it was a time of growing militarism and eventually a bloody war which consumed one of his two sons. Rifleman Walter Gissing died in a hail of shellfire on the first day of the Battle of the Somme at Gommecourt, aged 24; his body was never identified or buried in a marked grave in the ensuing chaos.

Photo of Gissing c.1880, from Wikipedia

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at 

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