The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

  It almost seemed like a miracle of mercy when he met Mary Nesbit and her sweet young voice lured him back to a fresh interest in this world. He loved her, as poets love,—suddenly, romantically and with an adoring and idealising devotion that at once expressed itself in the fifty-seven sonnets which form the first division of his earliest book.13

  Although it was written for his mother, the dedication in Song-Tide and Other Poems proved tragically prophetic:

  TO THE MEMORY OF ONE WHOSE LOVE WAS THE CHIEF JOY OF MY LIFE AND WHOSE LOSS IS ITS INCONSOLABLE AFFLICTION

  For many years Mary had faced her illness with great stoicism, but her symptoms were worsening. As William Sharp recalled:

  Miss Nesbit was far from robust, but only a few friends knew that she had developed symptoms of consumption. She bore her unseen crown of sorrow bravely, and only when it became certain that her life was no longer secure for any length of time did she endeavour to warn her lover of the inevitable. But love had blinded his inner vision, and he either did not realise or else refused to allow himself to believe what was with infinite gentleness hinted to him.14

  On November 30, 1871, while she was staying with friends at La Haute Motte, Châteauneuf-d’Ille-et-Vilaine, in Normandy, Mary lost her battle with the disease that had blighted her life. She was just twenty years old. Philip and Sarah were with her, and it was reported that Philip had found her lifeless body, although his father was adamant that this was not the case. Afterward he kept vigil by her lifeless body for hours. Christina Rossetti wrote to her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: “Poor Philip Marston, what a terrible sorrow for him in his blindness.”15 He in turn told poet and physician Thomas Gordon Hake that “poor Philip Marston” was “just back from Brittany where he went not to see—poor fellow—but to be with a beautiful girl his betrothed who has just died of consumption.”16 Swinburne wrote to his mother: “I have told you of Philip Bourke Marston, the blind youth who was engaged to be married at 21 to a very beautiful girl who died before the wedding day.”17

  Mary’s body was shipped to England in a stout French coffin made of pale wood bound with iron hasps and fleurs-de-lis. On December 1, 1871, her remains were placed on the top shelf of vault 81 in the public vaults of the Anglican catacombs at West Norwood Cemetery, close to the resting place of her father.18 Edith seemed haunted by this loss. In “A Strange Experience,” an unsettling Gothic tale she wrote for Longman’s Magazine in March 1884, Isabel, a beautiful but utterly demented young woman with “waves and ripples of . . . auburn hair,” a “red perfect mouth” and “wildrose-coloured cheeks,” insists on staying with the body of her murdered twin sister, “Edith.” To soothe Isabel’s mania, Edith’s body is buried and replaced with a wax effigy.19

  Philip was described as being “absolutely prostrate” with grief after Mary’s death, and Thomas Purnell believed that his friend’s “soul, as well as his body, was left in the dimness of anguish.”20 His second collection, All in All (1875), is filled with sonnets that lament his lost love. He inscribed a copy “presented to Anthony Nesbit from his friend Philip Bourke Marston.”* Sadly, this was merely the latest in a string of misfortunes that blighted his life, tragedies that, as his biographer Sir Leslie Stephen explained, “might well excuse the morbid element in his views of life and nature.”21 “If one were not too insignificant for the metaphor,” Philip complained to William Sharp, “I could with bitter truth assert that the stars in their courses have ever fought against me.”22

  In 1874, Philip’s close friend Oliver Madox Brown, son of Ford Madox Brown, died of blood poisoning. He was just nineteen. In 1878 he lost his sister Cicely, who had been a source of great comfort after Mary’s death. His other sister, Nellie, who was married to poet Arthur O’Shaughnessy, died in January 1879. O’Shaughnessy himself died two years later on the eve of contracting a second marriage. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Philip’s greatest poetic inspiration, died of Bright’s disease in April 1882. A short time later, poet James Thompson, having wandered the streets of London, lost to drink and despair, sought refuge in Philip’s lodgings before being taken to University College Hospital, where he died. Philip too found solace in alcohol. Although he grew increasingly moribund, Edith stayed loyal to him until he too died, aged just thirty-seven, on February 13, 1887.

  After Mary’s death, Sarah decided to settle in England with her surviving children, who were as mischievous as ever. Years later, Edith confessed that during a trip to see the illuminations organized in February 1872 to celebrate the recovery of the Prince of Wales from typhoid fever, they had tossed firecrackers into the mouths of the trombone and cornopean* “to the amazement and terror of the band.”23 Sarah settled on the picturesque village of Halstead in her native Kent. Perhaps she was attracted by its name, which is derived from the Anglian hald, meaning “refuge” or “shelter,” and the Old English stede, meaning “place,” hence “safe place, or place of refuge.”

  When falling sugar prices stimulated the jam industry, Halstead became a haven of fruit farms. Local woodland was grubbed up to make way for strawberries, while damson trees, known locally as “skegs,” lined the hedgerows. Smallholders’ huts were erected hurriedly, then replaced with stone cottages. Boisterous groups of itinerant pickers were often spotted emerging from one or other of the village pubs, the Rose and Crown and the Cock. Sarah leased Halstead Hall, a substantial detached house, from Caroline Man, whose late husband, Harry Stoe Man, had purchased it using a legacy of six hundred pounds her mother had left her.† The Man family was notorious in the village. Harry had made himself extremely unpopular in the late 1820s when he annexed the pond adjacent to Halstead Hall, the main source of water for the village. He was eventually prosecuted for nuisance and imprisoned for failing to pay a fine of £100 (approximately £11,000, or USD$15,000, today) imposed by the court. Although use of the pond reverted to the villagers, Man stoked further enmity by opposing an application by the parish vestry to exempt Halstead’s poorest cottagers from the payment of rates.24

  It was said that Halstead Hall was haunted. Long before the Nesbits arrived, the local rector had carried out a ceremony of exorcism on the stairway. This event may have informed Edith’s horror story “The Portent of the Shadow,” in which she wrote: “On the staircase, the feeling used to be so awful that I have had to bite my lips till they bled to keep myself from running upstairs at full speed.”25 But she described her “Kentish home” as “dearer to me than all.” In My School Days she wrote:

  After many wanderings my mother took a house at Halstead, “The Hall” it was called but the house itself did not lend itself to the pretensions of its name. A long, low, red-brick house, that might have been common-place but for the roses and ivy which clung to the front of it, and the rich, heavy jasmine which covered the side. There was a smooth lawn with chestnut-trees round it and a big garden, where flowers and fruit and vegetables grew together, as they should, without jealousy or class-distinction. There never were such peonies as grew among our currant-bushes, nor such apricots as hung among the leaves on the sunny south wall. From a laburnum-tree in a corner of the lawn we children slung an improvised hammock, and there I used to read and dream, and watch the swaying green gold of leaf and blossom.26

  The Man family had long vacated Halstead Hall, but Septimus Man, Caroline’s youngest son, lived in a cottage in the village. A tragic figure, he was believed to have suffered heat stroke while practicing as a barrister in India. On returning to England, he developed “brain fever” and fell into a coma so deep that he was declared dead. He was laid out “with a penny on each eye and a plate of salt on his chest,” but he woke in the dead of night and attempted to strangle his brother.27 Afterward he grew increasingly eccentric. In his confused state, he would squat in Halstead Hall whenever it was empty of tenants, and it was his shadowy presence that fueled rumors suggesting the house was haunted. Edith remembered him well:

  The only really exciting thing was the presence, within a stone’s throw of our house, of
our landlady’s son, who lived all alone in a little cottage standing in the fields. He was reported mad by the world, eccentric by his friends; but, as we found him, perfectly harmless. His one delusion, as far as I know, was that he was the rightful owner, nay, more, the rightful tenant of our house, and about once in six months he used to terrify the whole household by appearing with a carpet bag at the front door and announcing that he had come to take possession. This used to alarm all of us very much, because if a gentleman is eccentric enough to wish to “take possession” of another person’s house there is no knowing what he may be eccentric enough to do next. But he was always persuaded to go away peaceably, and I don’t think we need have been so frightened. Once while he was in the drawing-room being persuaded by my mother, I peeped into the carpet bag he had left in the hall: It contained three empty bottles that had held mixed pickles, a loaf of bread and a barrister’s wig and gown. Poor gentleman, I am afraid he was very eccentric indeed.28

  Although Alfred and Harry were sent to school, Edith, to her great relief, was excused. She missed her brothers desperately and longed for school holidays when their adventures could resume. Then they would sail across the once-contested pond on a raft the boys had built or roam through the “gold-dim woodlands,” which were “starred with primroses,” and “light copses where the blue-bells and wind-flowers grow.” In My School Days, she described these glorious days in vivid prose:

  Oh, those dewy mornings—the resurrection of light and life in the woods and fields! Would that it were possible for all children to live in the country where they may drink in, consciously or unconsciously, the dear delights of green meadow and dappled woodland! The delight in green things growing, in the tender beauty of the evening light on grey pastures, the glorious splendour of the noonday sun on meadows golden with buttercups, the browns and purples of winter woodlands.29

  When Alfred shot a fox, mistaking it for a rabbit, he hid the corpse in his bedroom. He scoffed at Edith’s suggestion that they give it a funeral and persuaded her to help him stuff it instead. They bought a shilling book on taxidermy and the chemicals they needed, skinned the poor creature, and buried its innards before nailing its pelt to the inside of a cupboard door, but their efforts were a failure, and they soon abandoned the project. Next day they rose early, before the maids had stirred, and reunited the pelt with its contents. In My School Days, Edith recalled that “the dew was grey on the grass, and the scent of the wet earth was sweet and fresh.”30 In The Wouldbegoods, when the Bastable children shoot a fox in error, they give it the elaborate funeral Edith had desired. “The fox was cold,” she wrote, “but its fur was so pretty, and its tail and its little feet.” She even composed a eulogy for it.

  Edith loved the bright little bedroom she had been allocated, with its window facing westward over a garden filled with roses, shrubs, and fruit trees. She arranged bright potted plants along her window ledge, so they might be “encouraged by the western sun.” To her delight, they blossomed profusely. In her short story “The Brute,” a large-eyed, dark-haired girl with a passion for poetry leans out of a “jasmine-muffled lattice window” overlooking “the dewy stillness of the garden.” The “cloudy shadows that had clung in the earliest dawn about the lilac bushes and rhododendrons had faded like grey ghosts, and slowly on lawn and bed and path new black shadows were deepening and intensifying.” The girl gazes out over the “green garden, the awakened birds, the roses that still looked asleep, the scented jasmine stars! She saw and loved it all.” She is “full of the anxious, trembling longing that is youth’s unnecessary joy.”31

  A hatch built into Edith’s bedroom ceiling provided an entrance to a secret place, “by turn a treasure and a charm.” By treading carefully on the crossbeams in the attic, she could traverse the narrow passage that ran underneath the eaves until she reached a narrow wooden door that opened out onto a flat space at the center of the roof with tiled ridges sloping up on each side. Alfred and Harry had access to a trapdoor in the linen closet next to their bedroom. They reveled in those “happy, vanished days, when to be on the roof and to eat tinned pineapple in secret constituted happiness!”32 Edith included this refuge in The Wouldbegoods and its sequel, The New Treasure Seekers (1904). Oswald Bastable, equipped with “a book and a few apples,” enters “a square trapdoor in the ceiling of the linen room” to reach “the wonderful, mysterious place between the ceiling and the roof of the house”:

  The roof is beams and tiles. Slits of light show through the tiles here and there. The ceiling, on its other and top side, is made of rough plaster and beams. If you walk on the beams it is all right—if you walk on the plaster you go through with your feet . . . it was splendid . . . He walked along a dark, narrow passage. Every now and then cross-beams barred his way, and he had to creep under them. At last a small door loomed before him with cracks of light under and over. He drew back the rusty bolts and opened it. It opened straight on to the leads, a flat place between two steep red roofs, with a parapet two feet high back and front, so that no one could see you. It was a place no one could have invented better than, if they had tried, for hiding in.33

  Of her own secret roof space, Edith wrote: “This until the higher powers discovered it was a safer haven (for privacy) than even the shrubbery.” The shrubbery in question was a tangle of lilacs and laburnums that grew thickly around the pond at Halstead Hall. When she needed a refuge “secure from the insistent and irritating demands so often made on one’s time by one’s elders,” she would crawl deep inside, equipped with a volume of Mrs Ewing’s* tales.34

  Although Edith missed Alfred and Harry, she did make friends locally. She grew particularly close to Violet Oakley,† daughter of the Very Reverend John Oakley and his wife, Clara, who were regular visitors to Halstead. Violet was almost seven years her junior, but they remained friends into adulthood. It is thought she was referring to the Oakley family when she told a friend:

  When I was sixteen I stood at a window with a girl-friend of mine and her brother [Frank]* whom I did not particularly care for; and she said, looking out at the stars, “Let us three promise always to think of each other when we see The Great Bear” and I have done so ever since!35

  Edith was also friendly with the Sikes family, who lived at the rectory on Church Lane, a short distance from Halstead Hall. The Sikes children, Arthur, Francis, and Edward, were too young for her to play with, so she invented stories for them instead. Frances Sikes, their mother, lent her books. Before long, she had finished the complete novels of Walter Scott. With Alfred and Harry, she played tennis on an improvised court marked out on the rectory lawn. Sometimes they would run down Cadlocks Hill to the railway track that ran along a deep cutting at its base before it disappeared into distant tunnels in either direction. The fictional railway line running along the field at the end of the garden in The Railway Children, her most celebrated novel for children, appears to draw on memories of Halstead and how she would walk the railway line with her brothers.36 The “great bridge with tall arches running across one end of the valley” may be the imposing brick viaduct that spanned the next valley along, to the east of Chelsfield.37

  According to a profile of Edith included in The Poets and the Poetry of the Century (1897), she started writing poetry when she was just eleven years old, three years before she arrived in Halstead.38 An old mahogany bookcase with a deep top drawer that let down to form a writing table stood underneath the window of her bright new bedroom. There, she would scribble in secret, locking her work away if her brothers were around, since she knew they would pour scorn on it. The few poems she shared with them were humorous ditties designed to make them laugh. Years later, she would write similar verses for her own children. She had unassailable confidence in her literary talent and believed she would become “a great poet, like Shakespeare, or Christina Rossetti.” In “When I was a Girl,” an article she wrote for John O’London’s Weekly, she described the adolescent style of her early poems:

  I don’t know wheth
er it was the influence of the poetry I read or merely a tendency natural to my age, but from fourteen to seventeen all my poems were about love and the grave. I had no sweetheart in real life, but in my poems I buried dozens of them and wept on their graves quite broken-heartedly.39

  Edith signed her early poems “D. Nesbit.” Sarah sent several of them to Alexander Hay Japp, literary adviser to publishers Alexander Strahan and a member of the editing team on Good Words and the Sunday Magazine, and he agreed to publish them. Edith described her joy at seeing her work in print:

  The first poem I ever had published was a non-committal set of verses about dawn, with a moral tag. It was printed in the Sunday Magazine. When I got the proof I ran round the garden shouting “Hooray!” at the top of my voice, to the scandal of the village and the vexation of my family.40

  During the autumn of 1875, Sarah Nesbit gave up the lease on Halstead Hall. The impetus may have been Saretta’s marriage, on September 1, 1875, to John Deakin, a general merchant from Liverpool and a former pupil of the Nesbit agricultural college.

  It is also possible that a shortage of funds obliged her to leave her lovely home. It was suggested that her sons, Alfred in particular, had drained her of her remaining resources.41 Aged twenty-one, he was earning a reputation as an excellent agricultural chemist by then. Harry, who was nineteen, planned to leave for Australia.

  Before they moved to cheaper lodgings at 6 Mount Pleasant, Barnsbury Square in Islington, Edith and Sarah stayed for a time with Saretta in Manchester. While they were there, Edith, who was seventeen, befriended Ada Breakell. She would become a significant figure in her life. The warm letters they exchanged are filled with gossip and fascinating insights into Edith’s often-capricious state of mind.

  Many of Edith’s stories feature people who are obliged to leave their homes but come into riches in the nick of time. In “Thor and the Hammer,” from These Little Ones (1909), a little girl finds a will containing terms that allow her to stay in her lovely home. In “The White Cat,” from The Magic World (1912), she wrote: “the wicked lawyer’s taken nearly all mother’s money and we’ve got to leave our lovely big white house, and go and live in a horrid little house with another house glued on its side.” An ornamental cat is found to contain the key to a safe filled with money and jewels.42 In My School Days, Edith wrote: