George Gissing and the Limehouse Golem

I started reading Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem by Peter Ackroyd a couple of days ago. It is set in Victorian London and it's all reminiscent of Jack the Ripper and East End squalor. I was interested in reading it because George Gissing was a character (as is Karl Marx). What I did not know was that someone had made a film of it, and it's release date is next month. So perhaps George Gissing is about to become famous, or at least a little better known.

The story is a bit of a linked list of literary references in places. SPOILER When you first meet George Gissing, he is reading an article he's written for the Pall Mall Gazette reviewing an essay that Thomas de Quincey had written about a horrific murder case earlier in the century (which put me in mind of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote). So you have a man of letters writing about a man of letters writing about a man of letters writing poetic prose on a true crime case. It's like something out of the Time Literary Supplement.

I watched the film, The Limehouse Golem, yesterday. George Gissing was in it, but he was given short shrift by Jane Goldman (the script writer). Peter Ackroyd was sympathetic to him, or at least interested in his life story. Jane Goldman had the detective scold him for pitying himself about his wife. It was not a bad film, but it was gory. It was like Jack the Ripper with literary allusions.