Gissing Family

Algernon's parents were Thomas Waller Gissing (1829-1870) and Margaret Gissing (1832-1913), and he had two older brothers named William and George. His initial education was at Back Lane School in Wakefield, but from 1870 he started attending Lindow Grove School in Cheshire as a boarder, as a result of his father's death. He went on to study Law at London University, graduating with an LLB in 1882. He practised as a solicitor in Wakefield for a while, but failed to attract enough clients to sustain his practise.[2] Having been unsuccessful in his legal career, Gissing decided to pursue an interest in writing literature. During his life, he wrote and published 30 books, but earned a negligible income from them. He received a number of grants from the Royal Literary Fund.[2]

Gissing's 1924 Cotswold walking guide, The Footpath Way in Gloucestershire was one of the first for the district.[3]

While at Gresham's School, Alfred had been in the junior division of the Officers' Training Corps from January 1910 to August 1914, when, with war apparent, he volunteered to join the British Army. As a member of the British Red Cross Society & Order of St John, he first served in France as Orderly with the Friends Ambulance Unit, Dunkirk, from 2 October 1915 until early December 1915.[10]

On 10 December 1915, he filed an "application for appointment to a temporary commission in the regular army for the period of the war". As he was under 21 years of age, the application had to be signed by his guardian, Clara Collet, who took care of him after his father's death. Alfred was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery on 16 December 1915, and promoted to lieutenant on 7 July 1917.[9][11] He was in India when the news reached him of his brother Walter's death at Gommecourt during the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916.[9][12]

After the end of the war, Alfred Gissing remained in the army, serving in Iraq and then working for the Inter-Allied Press Censorship Committee in Constantinople[13] between May 1919 and February 1920. He was demobilised on 5 March 1919 and resigned his commission in the Special Reserve on 28 April 1920, leaving the service with the rank of lieutenant.[14]

In the 1939 Register he described himself as a writer & Air Raid Warden (A.R.P.), living with his wife in Croft Cottage, Barbon, South Westmorland R.D., Westmorland.[15] Despite his military experience and while he was still in his early forties at the beginning of the Second World War, Alfred Gissing did not seem to have joined the Army or the Home Guard and nothing is known of his activities during that time.[16]

At about the time he left the army, Alfred Gissing assumed his father's posthumous interests from Algernon Gissing, and he went to live at Fernleigh, St Mark's Avenue, Leeds, Yorkshire, which had been Margaret and Ellen Gissing's home. He began to develop a collected edition of his father's works and to correspond with publishers and collectors as literary executor.

From 1924 until 1927, he lived in Richmond, Surrey. He wrote a preface for A Victim of Circumstances by George Gissing (Constable and Dutton, 1927), a collection of his father's short stories, and he edited a compendium of his father's work, Selections Autobiographical and Imaginative from the Works of George Gissing (Jonathan Cape, 1929).

Alfred Gissing sold a number of his father's literary papers, often not using his own name in doing so.[17] The critic Bouwe Postmus speculates that he felt guilty about these sales.[17] In his own right, Alfred Gissing wrote biographies. He wrote a 600-page unpublished biography of his father and several other shorter accounts, also unpublished.[9]

On 26 July 1938, he married Frances Muriel Smith, a 32-year-old widow whose maiden name was Braham, in Broadway, Gloucestershire. They had three children, Michael, Charles William (who died in infancy), and Jane—who became a British Olympic skier. After the Second World War, Alfred settled at Salvan in the Swiss canton of Valais, an area well known to George Gissing, where Alfred founded and ran an English school for children displaced by the war, subsidised by UNESCO.[9] The Alfred Gissing family moved to Les Marécottes, near Salvan, where they purchased a hotel in 1951, and remained there for the rest of his life. Alfred died and was buried at Salvan in 1975.[9]

• Letters to members of his family by George Gissing, collected and arranged by Algernon and Ellen Gissing, with a preface by his son, Ellen Gissing, Alfred C. Gissing & Algernon Gissing
• A Victim of Circumstances and other stories by George Gissing, ed. Alfred C Gissing (Constable, London, 1927, and Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 1927)
• Selections autobiographical and imaginative from the works of George Gissing ed. Alfred C. Gissing, with an introduction by Virginia Woolf (Cape, London, 1929, and J. Cape & H. Smith, New York, 1929)
• William Holman Hunt, a biography by Alfred Charles Gissing (Duckworth, London, 1936)
• Stories and Sketches by George Gissing, with preface by Alfred C. Gissing (London, Michael Joseph, 1938)

Unpublished

• George Gissing, a biography, by Alfred C. Gissing[18]