Charlotte Mew

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  By the end of the summer the main building was complete except for the boundary walls, and the Vestry, who had been ‘crouching’ in the half-finished rooms, emerged and passed a resolution that the money had been well spent. This, however, was in the face of public complaints about the delay, the small size of the hall, the bright red Bracknell brick which was ‘brought before the eye to a painful degree’ and which, without the stone dressings, would be ‘unbearable’ and make Hampstead’s residents dizzy. Most unfortunate of all was the fact that the builder had already had the date carved over the entrance, 1877, whereas the grand opening had to be delayed until November 1878. At the celebration dinner a number of healths were drunk ‘three times three’, but not Kendall and Mew’s.

  It seems clear that the Kendall women, who had always treated Fred as an uncouth interloper, blamed him for this and every other misfortune, and refused to admit his difficulties at the end of twenty loyal years of partnership. Although Fred was only an executor of H.E.K.’s will and not a beneficiary (unless he survived Anna Maria), there was a strong feeling that he was after the money. This appears from Maria Kendall’s will, made on 17 April 1883 to dispose of her legacy from her own family, the Cobhams. One-third was to go to Anna Maria ‘for her sole use and benefit separate and apart from and exclusive of her said husband Frederick Mew, and that she may hold and enjoy and dispose of such share in the same manner as if she were unmarried’. The legend that Fred was a monster of selfishness was now well established. Charlotte, sadly enough, the little girl for whom he had made the doll’s house with bow windows, grew up to believe the legend, and repeat it.

  In 1885 H.E.K. died, leaving a personal estate of £616 10s. His widow, with Mary Leonora, went to live permanently in Brighton, while Fred was confidently expected to keep the firm going, and maintain them all in comfort. Very likely the family did not know how things stood. Gissing’s Dr Madden in The Odd Women, who considers that ‘women, young and old, should never have to think about money’, and fails to take out any insurance, was a not unusual type of professional man. And probably Fred could not bring himself to tell them the truth, which was that for all his size and presence he was a follower, not a leader. After the death of his beloved old master, he lost direction. For years he had been doing virtually all the work, in the office and on the sites, but always as Kendall wanted it.

  During Kendall’s long illness Fred had designed or part-designed a few private houses, a bank at Aldershot (1882), and (his most important commission) the Capital and Counties Bank in Bristol (1885), ‘with details somewhat Greek in character’. In the same year the Hampstead Vestry, perhaps surprisingly, had asked the partners to undertake an extension to their Hall along the Belsize Park frontage. Fred in fact carried this out, but this is the last commission of his that I have been able to trace. The heart had gone out of him.

  He was, admittedly, cowardly in not telling his wife that the firm’s work had declined and that Elizabeth Goodman should be making do and patching even more, rather than less. After the commission for the Vestry Hall extension, he even agreed that the family should look for a larger house. Anna Maria no longer had Brunswick Square to fall back upon. She needed a ‘better address’. In 1888 the Mews moved to 9 Gordon Street, just where the street joins, or once joined, Gordon Square. It was a much taller house than Doughty Street, four storeys above the basement and its sunless area, and it had a piano nobile of spacious rooms, elegantly railed off with a wrought-iron balcony. The whole street had been built by Thomas Cubitt for the Bedford Estate before he moved on towards greater triumphs in London’s West End. This would have recommended the house to Anna Maria, since Mrs Lewis Cubitt was the most distinguished of her aunts. It kept up the connection, and this was precious to her. Fred bought the end of the lease, with another twenty-four years to run.

  Elizabeth Goodman settled them all in. The semi-invalid Anna Maria must of course be spared as much trouble as possible. Wek, her parrot, who had been with her since the days in Brunswick Square, was introduced, under protest, to his new home. Kendall’s picture of the Shining City was hung in the front drawing-room, next to the portrait of Anna Maria as a young girl. Fred’s office was on the ground floor. But Gordon Street was never either a happy or a lucky house. After the move, Fred pinned his hopes on Henry. The dashing, promising son must have been more than a help with the office routine, and a much-needed new life in the business. He was a refuge in a house full of women. But now, in his early twenties, Henry began to show unmistakable signs of mental breakdown. The illness was what was then known as dementia praecox, because it was thought to attack adolescents and young adults in particular. It would be called schizophrenia now. Fred was advised that there was no possibility of a cure, and for the rest of his life Henry was confined, with a private nurse, to Peckham Hospital.

  The history of mental weakness was not on the Mew side, but the Kendall. Never mentioned in public was the reason why Edward Herne Kendall, Anna Maria’s elder brother, had failed to join the partnership after his training, and why in fact he had no occupation of any kind. Edward was not a schizophrenic, simply a borderline case who might from time to time need looking after, and who could never be trusted with his own affairs. When he became completely irresponsible his money was saved up for him and invested until he ‘came back’. Mary Leonora, also, was not strong in the wits, or, at least, foolish, and it was the constant fear of her mother, Mrs Kendall, that she might be ‘got hold of’ in some way, and left penniless. In all probability, Henry Mew’s tragic illness had nothing to do with his Kendall uncle and aunt, and yet the suggestion remained that it had. Meanwhile the fact that there was no insanity to be traced in Fred’s family was likely to make him more, and not less, to blame.

  The family at 9 Gordon Street was reduced, after so many hopes, to three daughters. Elizabeth Goodman acted as the family’s consoler. ‘There was nothing conscious or masterful about this,’ Charlotte wrote, ‘it was simply the gentle, irresistible mastery of the strongest, clothed with an old-world deference.’ The son was as good as lost, but the youngest, Freda, was doted upon. Even her name had been a romantic flight, distinguishing her from all the rest. Fred and Anna Maria, whatever their discords, both combined to love and spoil this exceptional little girl, who grew into adolescence still beautiful and brilliant. This would be about the time when Henry Mew made his sad exit into separation and silence.

  Then, early in the 1890s, Freda followed him. She began to show recognizable symptoms of schizophrenia, then, like Henry, broke down beyond recall. Poor Fred asserted himself for almost the last time, and insisted that she must not be kept in London, but sent back to the Island, within reach of the Bugle Inn and the farm. Freda lived for another sixty-odd years as a paying patient at the Whitelands Hospital, Carisbrooke, without ever recovering her sanity.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘These I Shall See’

  CHARLOTTE MEW’S two asylum poems are On the Asylum Road and Ken. These, like the others from which I have quoted, were written at a distance of time from the first experience. Like Hardy and Housman, she was a poet of delayed shock.

  Both Ken and On the Asylum Road are impersonations, written through, but not in, the first person. Mad people are described by a sane onlooker, but ‘this I is not I’. In both poems the speaker, or spoken-through, is painfully indirect and breaks down at one point or another into a kind of dislocation, as though the subject of insanity could only be approached in that way. The guilt is obvious, but there is no solution for it, except refuge in the community’s opinion.

  Ken is not about a case of dementia praecox, but an amiable harmless local idiot. He lives and always has lived at a place which sounds very like Carisbrooke – ‘the town is old, and very steep’, leading up to the mental hospital, the castle and the convent (which in Carisbrooke would be St Dominic’s). Ken means well, but is simply not like the rest of us, believing that all the children and all the deer in the park belong to him, and that a pile of
broken feathers on the ground is really a living bird. He is hideous to look at, however,

  If in His image God made men

  Some other must have made poor Ken –

  In time he becomes too much, not of a danger, but of a nuisance. Sometimes he stays in church too long, or points to the crucified Christ and says ‘Take it away’; then everyone is embarrassed. The only thing to do is to pretend not to notice, ‘You did not look at him as he sat there’ and finally to lock him up – and the speaker doesn’t suggest that the authorities are wrong about this. What else could they have done? But the poem ends

  So, when they took

  Ken to that place, I did not look

  After he called and turned on me

  His eyes. These I shall see –

  Charlotte claimed that in this poem she had tried to ‘obscure the tragic side by tenderness of treatment’. Why she said this I cannot think. She must have known that she was emphasizing it.

  On the Asylum Road is not localized, and might be anywhere where mental patients, at the end of the nineteenth century, were institutionalized and taken out for regular exercise. The first verse opens:

  Theirs is the house whose windows – every pane –

  Are made of darkly stained or clouded glass:

  Sometimes you come upon them in the lane,

  The saddest crowd that you will ever pass.

  The horror of the darkly stained and clouded glass, the poem’s one insistent detail, works very strongly. Surgeries, Christian churches and mortuaries, as well as asylums, shut themselves off in this way, with glass which is a denial of what glass should be. Behind their dark glass, the mad own nothing. ‘Theirs is the house’ – but we know it isn’t, only it will be more convenient for us to pretend that it is. And ‘you’ (or in the next three verses ‘we’) have agreed that the best thing to do is smile encouragingly at them,

  And think no shame to stop and crack a joke

  With the incarnate wages of man’s sin.

  The reader or listener is bound to ask what is happening here and why the inmates, the ‘brother shadows in the lane’, should (unless they are all syphilitics) be all classed together as ‘the incarnate wages of man’s sin’. This returns us to the wretched situation of 9 Gordon Street.

  As ill-fortune would have it, the breakdown first of Henry, then of Freda, coincided with the years when the science or apparent science of eugenics first took the field, and became a favourite subject of newspaper articles. Francis Galton’s Natural Inheritance was published in 1889, and in 1894 he set up his research laboratory in University College. The belief of so many centuries that, given God’s grace and human patience, there was a hope that mad wits could be restored, was superseded, for the time being, by what looked like conclusive scientific evidence. Eugenics dealt in statistics, family studies and the tabulation of ‘morbid inheritance’, setting out to show that transmission of this inheritance led to the gradual degeneration of a whole society. The improvement of society, then, depended on genetic politics. If any member of your family was ‘different’, no matter in what way, you were morally bound not to reproduce. If you did so, you contributed to the nation’s decline and must expect ‘the incarnate wages of man’s sin’. In fact, the first editor to see Ken rejected it on the grounds that the magazine ‘believed in the segregation of the feeble-minded’. Charlotte and Anne, living within the orbit of London University, both of them great readers of weeklies and attenders of lectures, came to the conclusion that they must never have children, and so had no right to marry. This decision was not the same thing for the two of them. For Charlotte, whether or not she ever came to terms with her own sexuality, all passion was destructive. She had learned that already, and never had reason to change her mind. Anne, on the other hand, three years younger, was the most normal or even ‘the most human’ of the family. There was some self-imposed guilt in regard to the persuadable Anne, although they must have made the decision together.

  But both the Mew girls loved children, Charlotte in particular. Their great capacity for happiness and disappointment appealed to her, so did their detachment from adult affairs and their concentration on the far greater reality of a game. She was delighted when she saw a small girl and boy wait unconcernedly for a coffin to be carried down the stairs and out of the door, and then turn back at once to playing shops. Of walking on stilts she wrote: ‘If you could go on doing it for ever, you need envy no-one, neither the angels nor the millionaires’, and of playing with water, ‘The horse-trough is always there to sail your hat in and trail your arms in, until your elder sister sneaks up from behind, and cops you out of it by the neck’. She suffered, only half-unwillingly, from empty arms. If she did not want to bear children, she would have liked to want to. ‘If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the child who went or never came.’ Absorbed as she always was, from her Gower Street days, with the Brontës, she was haunted by the story of Charlotte Brontë’s dream as Mrs Gaskell tells it in her Life, a dream of holding a crying child, and knowing that nothing can save it.

  There were the two daughters, then, in 9 Gordon Street, vowed to sterility, which would also mean devotion to each other. Three years’ difference in age steadily came to be less and less important. Charlotte and Anne saw that they had been born to make head against their difficulties together, with this difference, that there were some things Charlotte would never tell, or feel it right to tell, the docile Anne. Their mother’s role was established: she was a chronic invalid with no definable illness, a precious responsibility because so much had to be done for her. As to Fred, there is nothing to show what he felt about the fates of his youngest and oldest child, except his loss of interest in life. He ceased to do very much at all. There are no more records of him at the R.I.B.A., and his subscription to the newer Architectural Association lapsed altogether. In 1895 he wrote a dignified but pathetic letter to The Builder, pointing out that even the design for his Capital and Counties Bank at Bristol was now being attributed to another architect.

  How did the Mews manage? In 1892 Anna Maria inherited a third of the estate from her grandfather, Thomas Cobham; this came to £2266 12s. 3d. Her mother died in this same year, again leaving her the correct third share, £1717. 2s. 10d., and an annuity of £50. Anna Maria had also come into two legacies, a little earlier, from an uncle and aunt. All these sums of money were administered for her by Walter Barnes Mew, the son of Fred’s sister Fanny, who was a solicitor with an office at 4 Harcourt Buildings, in the Temple. Fred evidently relied a good deal on Walter, and, writing to him as ‘your affectionate uncle’, was glad to leave matters in his capable hands. ‘Anything that appears foggy to me will doubtless be clear enough to your legal eye,’ he added, sounding a good deal older than his sixty years. Walter, with the approval of the trustees, invested the total sum in an annuity for Anna Maria, which would bring her in £300. It was a reasonable sum at a time when you could cling to respectability, even gentility, on £80 a year. The annuity, of course, would die with her, but Walter must have calculated that Charlotte and Anne, his two pretty cousins, would find husbands soon enough.

  Or they might even earn their own livings. Anne, since she left the Gower Street School, had been enrolled at the Royal Female School of Art at 43 Queen Square, within easy walking distance of Gordon Street. The course offered two five-month terms at fifteen guineas a year, three times as much as the South Kensington Schools, which concentrated on design training for industry. The Female School, on the other hand, had in mind, from its first beginnings in the 1840s, the daughters of professional men ‘unexpectedly compelled to earn a living’, and at first the students had only been accepted at discretion, if they could show (preferably with a certificate from a clergyman) that they were genuine ‘needy gentlewomen’ who would be obliged to maintain themselves. Anne specialized in bird and flower painting. She was happy to do only that, hoping one day for an exhibition of her own, but if need arose she would be qualified to teach or to ex
ecute paid commissions, without ever ceasing to be a lady. Anna Maria need have no alarm on that score. Her younger daughter would still have the prestige of an amateur.

  What about Charlotte, who had learned only what she chose to, but always did it well? She was, for instance, very good at embroidery, and she could have got an excellent training at the Royal School of Art Needlework, established with its workrooms in Kensington, or, if that was too far to go, there was a School of Mediaeval Embroidery, run by the sisterhood of St Katherine in Queen Square to supply church furnishings. She could then have worked at home, and sold discreetly, perhaps through the Association for the Sale of Work of Ladies of Limited Means. She could, though this would have been more difficult to conceal from the neighbours, have given piano lessons. From Miss Harrison she had heard time and again a reading of Carlyle’s ‘Everlasting No’ from Sartor Resartus. The ‘No’ is the certainty of death and the loss of faith which make life meaningless, followed by the answering Everlasting Yea, that in spite of this, man must work at what he is fit for. ‘Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fragment of a product, produce it, in God’s name!’ But the truth was that Charlotte, in spite of Carlyle, hated steady work. It has to be admitted that she never applied herself systematically to anything.

  It might be thought, however, that as a changeling and enfant terrible, only just grown up, she would have wanted independence at all costs. Here we come to the irreconcilables in Charlotte Mew. One side of her treated the other cruelly. She was secretly, and sometimes openly, impelled to let rip, to shock the shockable, and to turn her back on the lot of them.

  Please you, excuse me, good five o’clock people,

  I’ve lost my last hatful of words

  and yet she clung as desperately as Anna Maria herself to dear respectability. She never left home for long, never became – for example – a suffragette or even a suffragist, never made any attempt to claim political or sexual freedom or defend herself either against society or her own nature. On the contrary, with fierce self-suppression she inherited the fate of the world’s minorities and suffered as an outsider, an outsider, that is, even to herself. She was determined to remain Miss Lotti – a lady, even if she made rather an odd one. There is pathos in this clinging to gentility by a free spirit, who seemed born to have nothing to do with it. But her home promised normality – its very dullness did that – and normality implies peace. As a five o’clock person, out of the shadow of the madhouse, a good daughter, devoted to her mother, she could treat the savage who threatened her from within as a stranger. To use her own image, she could stay as ‘a blade of grass which dare not grow too high lest the world should snap it’.