Many of the adventures in The Story of the Treasure Seekers and The Wouldbegoods have their origins in that perfect summer in La Haye. The Bastable children populate their circus with farm animals; the English pig became the truculent black pig that reluctantly plays an elephant. Just like Edith and her brothers, they play shipwrecked mariners on the roof of the hen house. Alice Bastable describes how they follow a stream to its source, just as Edith, Alfred, and Harry had:
I cannot tell you about all the windings of the stream; it went through fields and woods and meadows, and at last the banks got steeper and higher, and the trees overhead darkly arched their mysterious branches, and we felt like the princes in a fairytale who go out to seek their fortunes.32
Those weeks at La Haye were a key period of stability and happiness in Edith’s turbulent childhood. “The happy memories of that golden time crowd thickly upon me,” she wrote.33 She rose early each morning to enjoy the day to the full, and many of her fictional characters do likewise. For the rest of her life she could conjure up at will the scents of dead leaves and wood smoke that marked the end of their stay.
Autumn arrived and the boys returned to England. Edith was sent to Mademoiselle Fauchet’s school in Dinan, but a misunderstanding saw her arrive five days early. She was “bored to extinction,” so she ran away. Rather than return her, Sarah enrolled her in the Ursuline Convent in Dinan, where she enjoyed fleeting happiness among kindly nuns whose patience she tried to the limit. Mère Marie Madeline instructed her to tell her mother that she was a “bon petit diable.” She translated this as “a proper little devil, a holy terror,” and signed her letter “your young Diable, Edie Nesbit, Little Daisy,” adding a perfect little drawing of a daisy at the bottom of the page.34
In Daphne in Fitzroy Street (1909), a largely forgotten novel for adults, Daphne is introduced as a mischievous, tree-climbing, poetry-writing girl who feels confined in her convent school. Edith described how “long, narrow horse-shoe tables, spread with coarse unbleached linen, were outlined by a vivid, varying fringe of girls, mostly eating thin soup and wide slabs of pain de ménage. The English girls ate eggs and drank chocolate.” Forbidden from talking, they would gossip “without moving one’s lips, in a voice too low to be heard above the clatter of plate and spoon and the setting down of the yellow mug after drinking.”35
Edith missed Sarah desperately. When Alfred, who was in school nearby by then, told her that their mother was away from home, information the nuns had kept from her, she pleaded: “Mama do come home.”36 Her letters home were playful and deeply affectionate. In 1869, she instructed Sarah to “buy a locket for Minnie on her birthday and give it her from me.” She enclosed a lock of hair with instructions that it be placed inside along with a photograph.37 Perhaps she hoped her thick, dark hair would act as a talisman. In Wet Magic (1913), a mermaid presents four young siblings with locks of her hair, which she instructs them to wear around their necks at all times in order to survive in the kingdom of the merpeople.
On November 3, 1869, Mère Marie Madeline wrote to Saretta, who had better French than Sarah, to inform her of the nuns’ disappointment at finding two empty wine bottles in eleven-year-old Edith’s room: “I regret that Daisy should have taken wine,” she explained. “I believe this has been the cause of her tempers. It was her brother who brought it to her and the little girl wished to drink some of it.” This kindly nun expressed concern for Edith, who had “been crying a lot.”38 “The nuns are all very kind to me,” she told Sarah, “though I have been very naughty, but I am very sorry and intend to be good now.” She asked if she might become a Catholic and if she might “learn singing,” since she wanted to “so very much indeed.” Her concern for a family pet provides an insight into her warmth and humor: “How is that queen of dogs that splendid lady that estimable that lovely loving lovable Trot,” she asked. “I hope Her Majesty is in bonne santé, that she has sufficinetay [sic] of daintys to please her royal palate, and a sprightly family of hippopotami to be a comfort in her old age.”39
In November 1869, Edith, Alfred, and Harry were sent to schools in Germany, she to a school run by Moravian Sisters near Düsseldorf and they to a boarding school nearby. She was so unhappy that she attempted to run away three times, but her poor German prevented her from reaching her brothers’ school, and hunger forced her back on each occasion. She was saved by geopolitics. When the Franco-Prussian war was declared in 1870, the English siblings sang “La Marseillaise” in the street. Edith harbored anti-German sentiments throughout her life.40 Although she was given permission to join her mother in France, hostilities obliged her to travel via Southampton, where her boat was held up in fog for three days. Not yet twelve years old, she was traveling alone once again, only this time she was the only female on board.
She spent the months that followed in a series of boarding schools and the unfamiliar homes of relatives and friends. On census night, April 2, 1871, she was recorded as a pupil at Brunswick House School in Hammersmith; Alfred was there too. She recalled one “strange house” in Sutherland Gardens in East Sheen, “a house with large rooms and heavy hangings—with massive wardrobes and deep ottoman boxes.” During her first night, she lay “trembling in the chill linen of a strange bed,” gripped by a terror that “in the black silence something might be stealthily creeping—something which would presently lean over you, in the dark—whose touch you would feel, not knowing whether it were the old woman in the mask or some new terror.”41 She persuaded her hosts to leave the gas light burning, but they dimmed it while she slept and she woke “in a faint light” convinced she could see “a corpse laid out under white draperies, and at its foot a skeleton with luminous skull and outstretched bony arm.”42
She also stayed for a time at 15 Claremont Square in Islington, home to Sarah Bolton, née Nesbit, a distant relative of her late father. Peering out between the “brown wire blinds” that obscured each window, she grew increasingly despondent as she watched tradesmen’s carts rattle past. These may have inspired “the carts of butchers and bakers and candlestick makers” in The Railway Children. In Five Children and It, she wrote: “London is like a prison for children, especially if their relations are not rich.” In My School Days, she described the “sordid ugliness of Islington,” which outraged the feelings of a child who had always found her greatest pleasures and life’s greatest beauties in the “green country.”43
She described the Boltons as “the kindest hearted people in the world,” who would have done anything to please her had they understood what she desired, but she was desperately bored there. Sarah Bolton, who had “a heart full of kindness,” spoke of nothing but the court circular* while her daughters, Rose, Fanny, and Helen, all older than Edith, were merely kind “in their way.” As the house had few books, she reread the “few old bound volumes of Good Words† again and again.” Books were enormously important to her. “I can remember my fourth birthday,” she wrote, “but I cannot remember a time when I could not read.” In Wings and the Child, she advocated for children to be given access to books as early as possible:
For a child from ten onwards it is no bad thing to give the run of a good general library. When he has exhausted the storybooks he will read the ballads, the histories and the travels, and may even nibble at science, poetry, or philosophy.44
She had eclectic taste and liked to be challenged. “I myself, at the age of thirteen,” she remembered, “browsed contentedly in such a library—where Percy’s anecdotes in thirty-nine volumes or so divided my attention with Hume, Locke and Berkeley. I even read Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and was none the worse for it.”45
Edith took a keen interest in Dr. Robert Bolton’s infrequent observations on his patients and their ailments. One evening, filled with mischief, she crept into his office, uncorked the medicine bottles he had left ready for dispatch, mixed their contents in a large jug, then refilled each bottle with her concoction and replaced each cork. Later that night, she woke in an absolute panic, c
onvinced that some unsuspecting patient would die as a result of her naughtiness and that she would be hanged for murder.
By morning, she had resolved to let matters take their course. Should Dr. Bolton be put on trial for murder, she decided, she would step forward and admit her guilt. Warming to her theme, she pictured herself confessing “among the sympathetic tears of usher and jury, the Judge himself not remaining dry-eyed.”46 No longer bored, she wept over this notional murder and exalted in her future heroics. She revived this episode in The Story of the Treasure Seekers: The Bastable children mix a batch of medicine and test it on Noël before selling it to the general public. Albert-next-door’s uncle is not amused:
“Look here,” he said, “you’re old enough not to play the fool like this. Health is the best thing you’ve got; you ought to know better than to risk it. You might have killed your little brother with your precious medicines. You’ve had a lucky escape, certainly.”47
A week elapsed with no word of an unexplained death, and Edith’s anxiety gave way to “acute boredom.” She wrote “a frantic letter” to Sarah, who was staying in Penshurst, near Sevenoaks in Kent, begging to be removed from the Bolton household. Since she had no stamps, she asked Sarah Bolton to post it for her. An inveterate letter-opener herself, Edith would discover later in life that the punishment for opening a letter destined for someone else was often unhappiness with its contents. When Sarah Bolton read this exceptionally unflattering critique of her hospitality, she added a note urging Sarah Nesbit to remove her daughter without delay.
Edith left in disgrace, but she could not conceal her delight at exchanging dreary Islington for “the splendour of a blaze of buttercups” in the Penshurst churchyard. She sat contentedly beneath the outstretched branches of a silver-white may tree, listening to the skylarks that sang overhead. Sarah offered only “gentle reproaches,” but one of her sisters, it’s not clear which, was “exceedingly angry.” “Try and be a good girl, and not make dear Mamma unhappy,” she urged. Edith was willing to comply as long as she was allowed to remain “among the golden buttercups and silver may-bushes.”48
Aged thirteen, she was on the verge of putting away childish things. The upheaval that characterized her early life continued when her play-box went missing during the crossing from France. She was desperately upset at the loss of a favorite toy, which she described in Wings and the Child:
I had a black-and-white china rabbit who was hard enough, in all conscience, but then he never pretended to be anything but a china rabbit, and I bought him with my own penny at Sandhurst Fair. He slept with me for seven or eight years, and when he was lost, with my play-box and the rest of its loved contents, on the journey from France to England, all the dignity of my thirteen years could not uphold me in that tragedy.49
This “crockery rabbit, white with black spots, crouched on a green crockery grass-plot” makes an appearance in Daphne in Fitzroy Street.50
Although Mary Nesbit’s short life had been blighted by tuberculosis, that beautiful, sweet-natured young woman had not withdrawn from society entirely: “How many balls has Minnie been to?” Edith had inquired of her mother in a letter she sent from the Ursuline Convent in 1869. Mary spent much of her adolescence convalescing in France, yet she attracted the attention of at least one young man back in England. In her late teens, she became engaged to Pre-Raphaelite poet Philip Bourke Marston.
* Tobacconist.
* “I see, children, that you have seen the spinning lady.”
* The official record of royal engagements.
† An improving periodical, i.e., one that instilled good behavior in the reader.
CHAPTER 3
“DIM LIGHT OF FUNERAL LAMPS”
Mary Nesbit’s involvement with Philip Bourke Marston brought Edith into contact with the Pre-Raphaelite circle that dominated literary London, a circumstance that had a profound impact on the trajectory of her life. Philip, who was born in London on August 13, 1850, was the third child and only son of Eleanor Jane Marston, née Potts, and John Westland Marston, an exceptionally well-connected dramatist, critic, and host of one of London’s most influential literary salons. John Marston’s close friend Charles Dickens wrote a prologue to his play The Patrician’s Daughter, and Henry Irving, manager and lead actor at the Lyceum Theatre, held a benefit performance of Byron’s Werner for him on June 1, 1887, played the lead, and presented him with a check for £928 (approximately £120,000, or USD$160,000, today). Philip was named after Philip James Bailey, author of Festus, who was also his godfather. His godmother was bestselling novelist Dinah Maria Craik, whose most popular short poem, “Philip, my King,” was addressed to him.
Regular visitors to the Marston home in Chalk Farm, regarded as “one of the chief literary resorts in London,” included William Makepeace Thackeray, Ford Madox Brown, brothers William and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne.1 Several of these luminaries recognized in Philip a precocious talent for poetry. It was said that he was “almost adopted by Swinburne from the age of fourteen.”2 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, spoke of him “ever in the highest terms, and regarded him as undoubtedly the most gifted of all the younger men.”3 Responding to a sonnet Philip wrote in praise of his verse, Rossetti composed “To Philip Bourke Marston, inciting me to poetic work.”
Yet Philip’s childhood was far from charmed. In infancy, his eyesight was damaged when an excessive dose of belladonna was administered to prevent him contracting scarlet fever from his older sister Nellie. When he was three years old, a blow to his head during boisterous play caused inflammation in both eyes and an almost total loss of vision. An operation provided temporary respite, but his sight deteriorated over time. To his great credit, he bore his disability with good humor. He insisted that he could distinguish between “night and day, and even sunshine and cloud-gloom,” and could “discern the difference between men and women by their relative sizes and the shape of their garments.”4 He never let his blindness hold him back and even developed a passion for sea swimming.
Little was made of Philip’s disability, although popular novelist Lady Duffus Hardy did admit to being “perplexed by the way in which he was wont to run up against chairs and tables as if he had miscalculated their distances.”5 Her family was connected to the Marston family through a mutual friendship with painter Ford Madox Brown, a close confidant of both John Westland Marston and her husband, Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy, Deputy Keeper of the Public Record Office. Philip cultivated a lifelong friendship with Iza, the Duffus Hardys’ only child, a delicate, bookish girl who became a successful novelist like her mother. It was Lady Duffus Hardy who introduced Philip to Iza’s friend Mary Nesbit while she was staying in their home, a “pretty house, standing in the midst of a large and well-wooded garden in St John’s Wood.”6 In March 1887 drama critic Thomas Purnell, who regarded himself as “Philip’s first intimate,” noted that his friend was “passionately devoted” to the “sister of Mr A. A. Nesbit, the eminent analytical chemist.”* He declared her “one of the most beautiful girls I ever saw.”7 Purnell was not alone in remarking on Mary’s beauty. In the Pall Mall Gazette she was described as “a very beautiful girl with whom he [Philip] was madly in love.”8 Richard Garnett, in the Dictionary of National Biography, referred to her as “a young lady of great personal and other attractions.”9 Edith too described Mary in her sonnet “To My Sister’s Portrait,” which she wrote around the time of Mary’s engagement:
A SONNET
To My Sister’s Portrait
It is so lovely! Yet that portrait shews
But one half of her beauty, auburn hair
Falls o’er her shoulders and her throat, small fair
Soft hands, and a delicate Grecian nose!
Those eyes, those wells of truth and love and light
Speak volumes to a colder heart than mine
They are as tranquil those blue eyes of thine
As summer sea beneath a moonl
it night.
Thy cherry lips make happy slaves of those
Who hear thee speak through them their Christian name.
Some love thee sadly without hope of love
Some give thee love while hoping for the same.
Some love thee with a love that cannot die
And, Maris Stella, such a one am I.10
Philip too was physically striking. In her introduction to his Collected Poems, Louise Chandler Moulton, his friend and fellow poet, described him as “a slight, rather tall man . . . very young-looking even for his age,” with “a wonderfully fine brow”:
His brown eyes were still beautiful in shape and colour. His dark-brown hair and beard had glints of chestnut; and all his colouring was rich and warm. His was a singularly refined face, with a beautiful expression when in repose—keenly sensitive but with full, pleasure-loving lips, that made one understand how hard his limitations must be for him to whom beauty and pleasure were so dear.11
His nature was as sweet as his face. According to William Sharp, who claimed him as “my chief friend,” he was a sweet, gentle young man, “passionately fond of flowers” and “intensely happy” in Mary’s company.12 Mary took Edith to visit Philip’s friends. She remembered playing hide-and-seek with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and visiting his sister Christina Rossetti at the home she shared with her mother, Frances.* It was meeting Christina that inspired her to become a poet.
In 1871, Song-Tide and Other Poems, Philip’s debut collection, was published to wide acclaim. He presented the first copy to Mary, who had inspired many of its sonnets and love poems. Yet his joy was tainted with despair. A short time earlier, he had lost his beloved mother, who had been devoted to him and who had written out his poems as he composed them. He told Louise Chandler Moulton that “the whole world had gone to pieces.” She recognized the importance of his relationship with Mary during this difficult time:
The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit Page 4
