The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

  My book of memories lies open always at the page where are the pictures of Kentish cherry orchards, field and farm and gold-dim woodlands starred with primroses, light copses where the blue-bells and wind-flowers grow.43

  She was on the verge of leaving her childhood home, but she would never forget the happy days she spent there, and soon she would introduce her future husband to her old haunts.

  * Alfred had followed in his late father’s footsteps. Brilliantly inventive as a chemist, he would prove to be a poor businessman.

  * Philip Marston was uncharitable about Frances: “She never seemed to me to be a lovable old lady,” he wrote, “but I suppose she was, since she won the hearts of her children” (Charles Churchill Osborne, Philip Bourke Marston, Times Book Club, 1926, p. 27).

  * Edith’s brother Alfred sometimes went by his middle name, Anthony.

  * A large-valved horn or trumpet.

  † Caroline Man lived at Halstead Lodge in nearby Carshalton with her daughter Eleanor.

  * Juliana Horatia Ewing, British author of children’s stories and notable for her insight into the life and emotions of a child.

  † Violet was born Lucy Violet Oakley. As an adult, she lived with her aunt Janey de Brissac Phelps, who ran an orphanage in Camberwell. Violet acted as secretary to the orphanage. Neither she nor her aunt ever married.

  * Frank Page Oakley, who was four years younger than Edith, trained as an architect and set up his own practice in Manchester in 1887.

  CHAPTER 4

  “A PARTICULARLY AND PECULIARLY MASCULINE PERSON”

  Little trace can be found of Sarah and Edith at 6 Mount Pleasant, Barnsbury Square in Islington. What we do know is that shortly after she arrived in London, Edith, who was in her teens, agreed to marry a young bank clerk named Stuart Smith. It is always a challenge to identify someone with the most common surname in Britain. The census of 1881, however, includes an accounts clerk named Stuart Smith who lodged, with his older brother Frederick, an insurance clerk, at 70 Thornhill Road, also on Barnsbury Square in Islington. Their landlord was William Lambeth, a bookbinder from Oxford.

  Since this Stuart Smith was baptised on March 16, 1860, it would appear that he was younger than Edith, information that fits the account given to her biographer Doris Langley Moore by Ada Breakell, her “dearest and oldest friend.” Ada remembered that he was eighteen months younger than Edith and “a very young man” when they became engaged.1

  Ada also left an account of a visit she paid, with Edith, to the “money changer’s office, (or bank)” where Smith worked:*

  H[ubert]. Bland was also working there, and one day, on our going in to change a note, Stuart introduced Mr. Bland to us; and that was the first time E. Nesbit saw H.B. as far as I know . . . personally, I never thought seriously of her engagement to Stuart and the next time I went to London to stay with them (in 1878) she was engaged to Mr. Bland.2

  Edith’s letters to Ada suggest that she was besotted with this charismatic young man. “How different I was this time last year!” she exclaimed in one. “Now I see the world through ‘larger, other eyes.’”3 Bland, who was two-and-a-half years older than her, was born on January 3, 1855, to a well-established Woolwich family that had thrived as a result of hard work. His paternal grandfather, Cornelius Bland, was a plumber and glazier. His father, Henry Bland, had trained as a commercial clerk and became a successful businessman whose many interests included a directorship of the River Steam Packet Company and a position as clerk to the Woolwich Burial Board. A proud man, he described himself as a “Gentleman” on Hubert’s birth certificate. Hubert’s mother, Mary Anne, was a member of the Lacey family, an equally prominent Woolwich family. His maternal grandfather, John Lacey, kept the Red Lion Inn at Mulgrave Place. His wife, Elizabeth, took over when he died, and it trades to this day.

  Life was filled with promise for young Hubert, an intelligent boy with a compelling personality. Keen to expose him to the best education available, his parents enrolled him at Whiteley School on Woolwich Common and, later, Godwin’s School at Blackheath. He also attended several local crammers, institutions that prepare pupils for an examination intensively over a short period of time, with a view to passing the entrance exams for the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, where he would train as a commissioned officer of the Royal Artillery or Royal Engineers. These ambitions were dashed on September 5, 1866, when Henry Bland died, aged fifty-eight, after “a very brief but trying illness of spasmodic asthma.” The Kentish Independent reported:

  No man was better known, or more highly respected than Mr. Bland. The son of a leading Woolwich tradesman, he formerly took a very active part in all movements which were connected with the improvement of the town, and the development of its trade. He was for many years one of the Commissioners of the old Court of Requests; had served the office of Churchwarden, Local Commissioner, and indeed almost every other office of honour and credit, in connection with the parish. Latterly he withdrew himself from nearly all active local movements. At the time of his death, he held the offices of Chairman of the Woolwich Steam Package Company, and Clerk and Collector to the Woolwich Equitable Gas Company.4

  Due to the sudden and catastrophic nature of his illness, Henry had made little provision for his widow. Mary Anne was obliged to swap her well-appointed home at 29 Frances Street for a more modest house, 46 Samuel Street, also in Woolwich. When her daughter Helen married local man Louis Tasche later that year, Hubert, who was eleven years younger than his sister, became her last dependent child. His considerably older brothers, Henry and Percy, had left home years earlier, and another brother, William, the first child born to the Blands, had died in childhood.5 The census of 1871 recorded that Mary Anne Bland, an “annuitant” aged fifty-seven, lived at 46 Samuel Street with her sixteen-year-old son, Hubert, a scholar, and a general servant named Margaret, who was also sixteen.

  This adjustment in Hubert’s circumstances ended all prospect of military training. His education curtailed, he tried for the civil service but became a clerk instead. He retained a lifelong interest in the military, and he joined the Artists Rifles, a volunteer light infantry unit. Physically imposing and standing well over six feet tall, he was an athletic man who showed great prowess at swimming, boxing, running, and jumping. “Hubert Bland was a very big man,” his friend Cecil Chesterton wrote in an introduction to Essays by Hubert Bland (1914). “That was the first impression that anyone who met him received.”6 In a letter to Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw, who also knew him well, described him as:

  A man of fierce Norman exterior and huge physical strength . . . a strong Conservative and Imperialist by temperament. . . . [He] was never seen without an irreproachable frock coat, tall hat, and a single eyeglass which infuriated everybody. He was pugnacious, powerful, a skilled pugilist, and had a voice like the scream of an eagle. Nobody dared be uncivil to him.7

  Henderson noted that Hubert possessed “strong individuality and hard common sense.”8 Certainly he had a rebellious streak; he smoked heavily and was, by his own admission, “adventurous” with drugs; “I have taken opium in all its forms,” he claimed. “I have eaten haschish [sic], and soothed my sorrows with Indian hemp.”9 The monocle that Shaw took such exception to was a necessity rather than an affectation. He suffered from chronic shortsightedness that was markedly worse in his left eye and had adopted this eccentric but practical aid when he was seventeen. He attached it to a watered silk ribbon that was thoroughly in keeping with his flamboyant dress code: silk hat and frock coat by day and tail coat, worn with gleaming stiff collar and cuffs, gloves, and a silver-topped cane, in the evening.

  Hubert was popular with his peers and attractive to the point of irresistibility to women. As Cecil Chesterton observed:

  In regard to the sexes he knew that men were men and that woman were woman. His virility would have forbidden him to desire any alteration in this condition of things even if he had thought such an alteration practicable.10

 
; He regarded himself as “a particularly and peculiarly masculine person” and had essentialist notions of men and women being fundamentally different but complementary. An ardent womanizer, he claimed to have had his “first love-affair at the age of eight.” By twelve, he was “formally engaged to the most charming of her sex.”11

  Before meeting Edith, Hubert had entered an understanding with Yorkshire-born Maggie Doran, who lived with her family at 86 Powis Street, less than fifteen minutes’ walk from the home he shared with his mother.12 Maggie’s father, Thomas, a Londoner by birth and a dyer by trade, was proprietor of a family business and had trained her as a dyer’s assistant. She may also have acted as a paid companion to Hubert’s mother. Maggie believed that Hubert intended to marry her. By the time he was courting Edith, she was pregnant with his child.

  Family sources confirm that Maggie gave birth to a son shortly after Hubert met Edith, but no record of him can be found in birth records or census returns, and he may have been put up for adoption.13 Edith, who knew nothing of this, took to spending her days in the beautiful old library at Guildhall in London, reading, writing, or losing herself in her thoughts while she waited for Hubert to take his lunchtime break. Lengthy letters to Ada contain expressions of existential angst and concern for her future. “I’m worried with trying to understand things,” she admitted:

  What good is my life to me? What good can I do with it? Can I do anything? Is life a dream and death a reality?—Or is death the substance?—I think on—and on—I nearly get an answer and then—just as I think I am attaining to what I so desire, it slips—and I lose my chance and then—I have only to “dry my eyes and laugh at my fall” and humbly begin my train of thought all over again—I shall never be answered—I think still and from my thoughts gain nothing—attain nothing, see nothing of all that my soul longs to grasp.

  She realized how ridiculously self-absorbed she sounded and closed by writing:

  I better stop, I think. I shall only sink into a veritable miry slough, represented by my own ridiculous system of bad metaphysics—and, as I don’t want to drag you down with me I won’t go on—on paper—In my thoughts I sink or swim—done—14

  As 1878 reached its end, Edith presented Hubert with a little leather-bound notebook. She painted a pretty sheaf of daisies on the front and wrote: “To Hubert Bland from Daisy Nesbit, for Xmas 1878.” Inside, she had copied out Sonnets from the Portuguese, the intimate sequence of poems Elizabeth Barrett Browning had written for her husband, Robert. They both admired the Brownings and enjoyed reading their sonnets aloud to one another. In October 1881 they joined the newly established London Browning Society, although Robert Browning, who was very much alive at the time, observed wryly that “it was 300 years too early for a Browning Society.”15

  Early in their relationship, Edith took Hubert to her beloved Halstead. There, they wandered through the woods and had lunch in a “funny, old-fashioned Inn.” She appears to recapture that idyllic day in her short story “A Holiday.” A fictional couple who are strangers to each other spend several sublime hours strolling through lush green parkland in Halstead “where tall red sorrel and white daisies grew high among the grass that was up for hay.” They “talked of all things under the sun.” While they are there, “[the] gold sun shone, the blue sky arched over a world of green and glory.” “It seemed,” Edith wrote, “that the green country was enchanted land, and they under a spell that could never break.”

  Yet this is not a relationship between equals. The man is “eager to impress her with that splendid self of his.” The woman is “anxious to show herself not wholly unworthy.” She impresses on him that “she, too, had read her Keats and her Shelley and her Browning—and could cap and even overshadow his random quotations.”16 She takes him to a copse of beech trees that she used to visit with her brothers when she was a child. She believes they share a special bond:

  To the end of her days no one will know her soul as he knew it that day, and no one ever knew better than she that aspect of his soul which he chose that day to represent as its permanent form.17

  Yet there is a sting in this tale. The lovers agree to preserve in their memories this one perfect day. They part, vowing never to meet again. The woman is certain she will never meet a man to equal this stranger and rejects “an excellent solicitor who may have made her happy.” She never marries but grows “faded and harassed” as her life unfurls in an unsatisfactory manner. The man writes a poem inspired by the woman’s eyes. He sells it to the Athenaeum for two guineas and considers his day trip to have been extremely worthwhile.18

  Edith may have explored doubts in her fiction, but her description of the day she spent in Halstead with Hubert, which she included in an exuberant and curiously childish letter to Ada, contained no hint of foreboding: “The country was fresh young and jolly. So were we,” she exclaimed.19 As the summer of 1879 drew to a close, she was pregnant with Hubert’s child. The poems she wrote at this time indicate a deepening relationship, but she appears terrified of losing his regard. In “Après,” an unpublished poem she wrote in her personal journal in July 1879, she lamented:

  So now our bright, brief love is done

  How sweet its dreams, my dear—

  The joy you coveted is won,

  The end you chose is here.

  The end of all you cared to give—

  A love too weak to live!20

  She is more explicit in Aimer, which she wrote on June 7, 1879, and subtitled “C’est être voue a la douleur, sans retour” [to be devoted to pain without return]:

  This is the end that has always grown

  From a woman’s love, and a man’s desire!21

  She signed herself “Daisy Bland, Aug. 27, 1879” in the cheap, black linen–covered notebook that contained her poems. Later, she added “deeply regretted,” which she underlined. That month, she left the Islington home she shared with her mother and, with Hubert’s help, secured lodgings with the Knowles family at 8 Oxford Terrace, just off Blackheath Hill in Greenwich, within walking distance of Woolwich. She shared this busy home with watchmaker Alfred Knowles, his wife, Sarah, and their four young children. They knew her as “Edith Bland.”

  Edith took to telling people that she had married Hubert in 1879, most likely in an attempt to legitimize their firstborn child. She included this information in a letter to anthropologist Francis Galton.22 Certainly Ada believed Edith was married by the time she visited her in London during the winter of 1879. Edith, who would have entered the middle trimester of pregnancy by then, took her friend skating.

  As her pregnancy advanced, she remained single, and Hubert continued to live with his mother. Perhaps he didn’t believe in the institution of marriage. In The Prophet’s Mantle, a novel he wrote with Edith as “Fabian Bland” in 1885, a socialist man explains to his pregnant lover that he cannot betray his principles and marry her since he doesn’t believe in the convention of marriage:

  The true marriage, he had maintained, was fidelity, and mutual love was more binding than could be a ceremony in which one of the performers did not believe. He loved her, he had said, far too dearly to wish to deceive her in the smallest degree about his sentiments, and so he felt bound to tell her that to him a legal marriage would be for ever impossible. In spite of that, would she not be noble enough to trust her life entirely to him, and be his wife?23

  When the woman rejects this arrangement, she is obliged to rely on the kindness of strangers.

  Hubert often expressed hostile views on marriage and was quoted as follows in the Lichfield Mercury:

  Marriage, as we know it, is the inevitable slayer of romance. Before the intimacy of marriage, says Mr. Hubert Bland, romance disappears like a mist wreath in the blazing sun.24

  In his essay “Some Ways of Love,” he declared: “The worst of friendship is that it may end in matrimony; the best of matrimony is that it may end in friendship.”25 In “Hobson’s Choice” he asked readers to consider “the feeble passive way in which men
fall into the one and drift into the other. . . . How many men who marry under thirty have the slightest intention of speaking the fatal word until it is spoken in spite of themselves?” He inquired:

  How many begin their courting with any end in view at all but that of a more or less harmless flirtation—the delightful pasttime or an idle hour? And then, before they know where they are, a hint from a candid friend that people are talking, that the girl is being compromised, or the tacit claims of honour decide the point.26

  Men, he insisted, “may face the altar” only because they lack the courage to “take so irretrievable a step as to face the grave.”27

  It may have been Edith who was skeptical. Twenty-one-year-old Katherine, protagonist of her novel The Incredible Honeymoon (1916), insists: “When I marry . . . it won’t be just because I want to get myself out of a scrape.”28 Katherine declares:

  I’ve always thought that even if I cared very much for some one I should be almost afraid to marry him unless I knew him very, very well. Girls do make such frightful mistakes. You ought to see a man every day for a year, and then perhaps, you’d know if you could really bear to live with him all your life.29

  Yet Katherine is desperate to quit her stifling home, and she tells a man she barely knows: “I wish I could come with you without being married.” He urges her to “Come then, come on any terms. I’ll take you as a sister if I’m not to take you as a wife.” Elsewhere, she worries: “What if he were to regret the adventure? What if he were to like her less and less . . . while she grew to like him more and more?”30