In “To a Lady,” Hubert declared, rather ominously: “I think women find it easier to ‘settle down’ in marriage with a partner they don’t love than men do.”31 The vast majority of women, he insisted, “do not marry for love.” Marriage, he reasoned, was a profession for women, and “one needs not to love a profession or anyone in it to adopt it.” Conversely, men must marry for love since they have nothing to gain from marriage “but the satisfaction of that instinct, that impulse.” He drew a clear distinction between love and “raw passion,” and insisted that the latter “can always be satisfied without anything so drastic and so irrevocable, and so generally bothersome as marriage.”32
Hubert insisted that women could only find sexual satisfaction in marriage. For women and men, he believed:
There have been, are, and always will be two standards of sex morality which the Law has been, is, and always will be impotent to reduce by one, for these two standards are established by Nature’s decree.33
In “The Love Interest,” he declared: “Love is the ever-present possibility, one is never safe from it.”34 Since he made little effort to resist temptation, it seems reasonable to suppose that Edith had him in mind when she wrote of one character in The Incredible Honeymoon: “The temperamental needle of Edward Basingstoke followed the magnet of romance.”35 Yet Hubert believed a marriage could be made to work. In “Hobson’s Choice” he declared: “It doesn’t follow because you didn’t freely choose your wife that therefore your marriage must turn out a failure, and your children rise up and call you cursed.”36 This seems at odds with his statement in “About Divorce” where he warned:
To-day we all know that to marry in haste is to do something more than to prepare for oneself a leisured repentance; it is in all probability to bring into the world offspring whose lives will be one long expiation of their parents’ ghastly error.37
Ghastly or not, Hubert and Edith had made their error. As her pregnancy advanced, she may have pushed him to legitimize their situation, since the consequences of a baby born outside the confines of marriage would be far worse for her than for him. In “Observations on the Art of Life,” Hubert described how, “at the age of twenty-five or thereabouts,” men “love women best, admire them most, find most pleasure in their society, clutch with most avidity at the faintest signs of their favour, write most letters to them, make most assignations with them, feel most keenly, most convincedly, that in them is the top of life.”38 He was twenty-five years old when he married Edith, who had just turned twenty-one.
Although civil wedding ceremonies were unusual at that time, Hubert Bland and Edith Nesbit were married at a London registry office on April 22, 1880. She was seven months pregnant at the time and still living at Oxford Terrace with the Knowles family. Hubert gave his address as 17 Devonshire Square, a building known as Commercial Chambers that was subdivided into “18 or 20 offices.”39 This address was associated with Clarke, Bland & Co., a brush manufacturing partnership he had entered with John Reade Clarke a short time beforehand. He had left the bank and invested what capital he had in this enterprise. Edith may have been nervous on her wedding day, since her father’s name is recorded as Henry rather than John. Their witnesses appear to have been strangers to them, and no members of either family were present. Ada Breakell, who insisted that Sarah Nesbit “did not like Hubert Bland,” also believed that Hubert did not tell his own mother that he was married “for quite a long time.”40
Edith rarely mentioned her wedding day, and it must be hoped that it did not resemble the dispiriting ritual that Katherine and Edward endure in The Incredible Honeymoon:
The dingy house with the grimy doorstep, and the area where dust and torn paper lay, the bare room, the few words that were a mockery of what a marriage service should be, the policeman who met them as they went in, the charwoman who followed them as they went out, the man at the end of the long, leather-covered table . . . who wished them joy with, as it were, his tongue in his cheek. And there was the signing of names and dabbing of them with a little oblong of pink blotting-paper crisscrossed with the ghosts of the names of other brides and bridegrooms . . . and then they were walking down the sordid street, she rather pale and looking straight before her, and in her white-gloved hand the prize of the expedition, the marriage certificate.41
It is to be hoped too that Hubert did not share Edward’s regret. He “wished the day’s work undone” and lamented: “Freedom was over, independence was over, and all his life lay at the mercy of a girl.”42
In her semi-autobiographical novel The Red House (1902), Edith has her protagonist Chloe, a newly married woman, suggest that men “feel injured at the mere idea a girl they like might marry someone else.” Len, her husband, replies: “It’s only that women believe in marriage and men don’t.”43 Chloe too disparages traditional weddings, as Len explains:
“What an ideal beginning to a honey-moon!” said my wife. “Fancy walking straight home to your own house. No broughams and slippers and things, no long railway journey and horrid hotels and lodgings, with the rice dropping out of you in showers every time you move an inch, and everybody grinning sympathetically after you.”44
Whether she desired it or not, an expensive ceremony would have been beyond Edith’s means and, in any case, it was considered improper for a heavily pregnant woman to participate in an elaborate celebration.
Paul Cyril Bland was born on June 22, 1880, two months to the day after his parents’ wedding day. When Hubert’s brush manufacturing business failed a short time later, they were plunged into desperate financial uncertainty. Hubert always insisted that his business partner had absconded abroad with the funds, but records indicate that Clarke, Bland & Co. had been “dissolved by mutual consent” on July 9, 1880, less than three weeks after Paul was born.45 Whatever the truth, Edith was required to muster what resources, determination, and ingenuity she had to support her family. For years she earned a small, sporadic income from her poetry and her drawing. At that time there seemed little prospect of her writing some of the most popular and influential children’s books ever published.
* In Edgar Jepson’s Memories of an Edwardian and Neo-Georgian (1937), he writes that Edith told him she met Hubert at a picnic and they shared a plate of strawberries and cream. Yet Ada was adamant that her account was accurate.
CHAPTER 5
“MORE LIKE A LOVER THAN A HUSBAND”
George Bernard Shaw was an occasional visitor to the Bland marital home at 28 Elswick Road, off Loampit Vale in Lewisham, South-East London. He included a description of this modest terraced house in his An Unfinished Novel (1958). Noting the “cheap oilcloth on the hall floor & untrustworthy chairs,” he went on to describe how:
The furniture was not all of one set. The carpet was very old, the sofa was concealed by a cretonne cover that hid it to the very casters, and the rest of the moveables were clearly spare pieces from the stock of father or mother.1
In “The Force of Habit,” a Gothic tale she wrote for Ainslee’s Magazine, Edith has a young married woman move into “a little new red-brick Queen Anne villa” that was “damp as any cloud.”2 She described the difficulties of living in a “microscopic” little “bandbox” house, with a minuscule backyard in The Red House.
The census for 1881, taken on April 3, recorded Edith Bland, “Authoress,” aged twenty-two and married, as head of household at 28 Elswick Road. Also present was baby Paul Bland, aged ten months, and his grandmother Sarah Nesbit, who may have been visiting. There were two live-in domestic servants: Elizabeth Knight, aged thirty-four, and Elizabeth Rule, aged fourteen. Hubert was at his mother’s home in Woolwich that night. His occupation was recorded as “brush manufacturer” and, although he would celebrate his first wedding anniversary less than three weeks later, he was registered as “unmarried.” This deception may have been prompted by the presence that evening of Maggie Doran, who is registered as a visitor. There was no record of their child.
Hubert may have been quarantined
in his mother’s house at that time. A virulent outbreak of smallpox gripped London in 1881, and he fell victim to this life-threatening illness.* He bore the scars for the rest of his life. Family accounts suggest that it was baby Paul who had come into contact with an infectious patient when a maid took him to visit her family. He developed no symptoms but somehow infected his father. In fact Hubert contracted the disease twice, and he kept his distance from his wife and infant son while he fought it.
It was while he was ill that Hubert’s partner in the brush business defrauded him. On March 8, 1881, Hubert wrote an intriguing letter to the editor of the Sporting Times expressing fury at a man who had fled England some months earlier. “Dear Sir,” he inquired:
Can you, or any of your readers inform me whether the “Timothy Knapp” whose letter [posted in San Diego in America] you published in your yesterday’s issue is a certain clerk who left England rather hurriedly last autumn in order to avoid a horse-whipping? Do you happen to know if he is likely to come back, as he is anxiously “wanted”? Information on this subject will greatly oblige yours very truly,
Hubert Bland,
Bowater Crescent, Woolwich, S.E.3
A Minnie Williams responded several weeks later:
Dear Sir,—Mr. Bland is quite right in his surmises as to “Timothy Knapp.” This person was a clerk in the city up to the time when he found it convenient to leave England “hurriedly.” After threatening women and slandering men he ran away to escape the unpleasant alternative.4
A second letter, from an Emmeline de Vere, was published that June:
Sir,—I believe Timothy Knapp is the man wanted by Mr. H. Bland. His real name is J.H. Since he hurried away last autumn he has been adding to his list of dirty tricks and writing false and slandering letters. I think it’s not likely he’ll come back now when the account is so much heavier against him than when he was so prudent before to get the herring pond between those he has injured and himself.5
This absconder was most likely Irish-born John Reade Clarke, the man registered as Hubert’s partner. In 1908, an obituary in the Emmetsburg (Iowa) Democrat confirmed that Clarke and his wife had arrived in Iowa in 1881 “at the wish of his uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. T.R. Crawford.” This Clarke, it was reported, had “prospered and is quite contented with this country.”6
Ada Breakell confirmed that the brush business had ended disastrously. According to another friend named Alice Hoatson:
Every penny he [Hubert] had which he had put into a brush factory had been embezzled by his partner. Not a penny was left, that was how it came about they were in such ghastly poverty—all the money gone and much of the stock. Hubert retained a few brushes and gave them to friends as gifts.7
In The Story of the Treasure Seekers, Mr. Bastable is defrauded in a similar fashion: “Father was very ill,” Oswald Bastable explains, “and while he was ill his business-partner went to Spain—and there was never much money afterwards.”8 In The New Treasure Seekers (1904), father learns that his “wicked partner who ran away with his money was in France.”9 When the Bastable children see an advertisement in the Lewishment Recorder promising that “£100 secures partnership in lucrative business for sale of useful patent,” a “Generous Benefactor” cautions: “I don’t advise you to enter into that partnership. It’s a swindle.”10 In “Miss Eden’s Baby,” a story from The Literary Sense (1903), Miss Eden’s father dies of a heart attack brought on by the shock of his partner running off with all his money.
In The Story of the Treasure Seekers, Oswald Bastable describes the debt collectors who called to their door. They “got very angry and said they were calling for the last time before putting it in other hands.”11 Edith suffered similar humiliations when Hubert was ill, and it fell to her to generate income for rent and tradesmen’s bills. She told Ada Breakell that she was “fiendishly busy sometimes.”12 As if life wasn’t difficult enough, by the spring of 1881 she was pregnant for a second time. Like professional writer Laura in her chilling tale “Man-size in Marble,” Edith became the breadwinner in the family. It is revealing that Laura’s patronizing husband, Jack, who calls her “Pussy,” as Hubert did Edith, trivializes her work and refuses to take her seriously. His attitude contributes to the death of his wife.13
When Hubert advised Edith that no editor could resist a manuscript presented by a beautiful woman, she walked the length of Fleet Street, hawking her sketches and poems. It was reported in Current Literature that this was how she secured a commission for one of her best-regarded poems in 1883:
[Her] first hit was made with her poem “Absolution,” in the pages of Longman’s magazine; a perfect stranger, she called one day at the office and read the poem to the editor; it was accepted then and there, and for its appearance in the magazine she received $75.14
In Daphne in Fitzroy Street, the eponymous Daphne declares: “Someone had said last night that the only way to sell your stuff for magazines was to call on editors yourself.”15 She dons “her quietest hat and gown” and heads “down into the City to call on editors,” but she “returned heavy footed” when her “brown paper parcel of sketches, whose string had been untied so often and so wearily, had grown strangely heavy to carry.”16 She explains how demoralizing this is:
“I’ve been trying to sell my drawings,” said Daphne, suddenly. “Oh, editors are hateful—even when you see them—and when you don’t, and you generally don’t—they’re fiends, I believe.”17
In The Red House, Chloe too believes “to be on the spot is the thing,” since “work is given to the people who look after it.”18 She “went to town twice a week to wring remunerative orders for illustrations from the flinty hearts of editors.” In The Railway Children, Mother, whom Edith modeled on herself, earns a precarious living this way:
Mother, all the time, was very busy with her writing. She used to send off a good many long blue envelopes with stories in them—and large envelopes of different sizes and colours used to come to her. Sometimes she would sigh when she opened them and say: “Another story come home to roost. O dear, O dear!” and then the children would be very sorry. But sometimes she would wave the envelope in the air and say: “Hooray, hooray. Here’s a sensible Editor.” Whenever an Editor was sensible, there were buns for tea.19
Much of Edith’s modest income at this time came from decorating blank greeting cards with pretty illustrations, many of them drawn from nature. It helped enormously that she could compose verse for the inside too. Ada Breakell recalled the manager of one “Jewish firm of colour printers located in the City” refusing to accept a pack of decorated cards because she completed them two days later than agreed. He relented when she burst into tears. This firm was almost certainly Raphael Tuck and Sons, a leading manufacturer of greeting cards in London at that time. Perhaps Edith had entered the nationwide design competition they launched in October 1880, which helped establish the custom of sending Christmas cards.20 In time, she developed an excellent relationship with Gustave Tuck, chairman and managing director. He remembered her as a “high-spirited, charming, whimsical” woman, with a penchant for inventing verse on the spot and a playful habit of reading the palms of Tuck employees.21
Edith gave birth to a baby girl on December 2, 1881. They named her Mary but always called her by her middle name, Iris.
A short time later, Edith, who was in the habit of opening other people’s letters,* opened one Maggie Doran had written to Hubert. She learned that their relationship was ongoing and that Maggie had absolutely no idea Hubert was married with two children.22 Although she had every right to be furious, she realized that this woman had been duped just as much as she had. Living up to what Ada Breakell described as her “very loving and forgiving disposition,” she set about befriending her unwitting rival.23
Never one to waste a good plot, Edith drew on this incident when she wrote her cautionary tale “After Many Days” for Longman’s Magazine in November 1893. A woman named Margaret is abandoned by her fiancé. He quits his job
in the bank and sets off to seek his fortune, but his ventures fail and he descends into desperate poverty.24 In “From the Dead,” from Grim Tales, a woman opens a letter addressed to her brother and justifies her prying by explaining that she knows both sender and recipient. Matters end badly. In “Dick, Tom and Harry” Harriet reads a letter intended for her fiancé and discovers that she is at the center of a love triangle.
Although Ada Breakell was certain that Edith “could not help seeing what sort of a man H.B. was,” she could not recall her friend ever saying a word against him, nor complaining about the infidelities he took so little trouble to conceal.25 Hubert seemed unrepentant and could be playful when justifying his flirtations. In The Happy Moralist he declared: “the Don Juans of the world generally are good-tempered, genial, generous fellows.” The woman he is addressing responds: “It is comforting to feel that one’s husband never so much as smiles at another woman, of course; but it is rather cold comfort if he never smiles at you either.”26 She lists the disadvantages of not having a “Don Juan” for a husband:
It’s nice to know that no part of his income goes on jewels to other women, but one would like a few shillings of it to go in flowers for oneself. A man should spend his evenings at home, of course; but then it does rather depend upon how he spends them there doesn’t it? If he sits reading the evening papers or dozing in an arm-chair, he might almost as well be anywhere else mightn’t he?27
This woman points to Drelincourt, “the most charming and attentive of husbands.” He writes to his wife every day and she is “one of the merriest women in London.” She exclaims: “He makes love—I don’t believe he can help it—to every woman he knows and yet see how delightful he is.” She declares admiringly: “he is more like a lover than a husband.”28
For quite some time Hubert was in no position to buy jewels for other women. Happily the couple’s finances improved dramatically in 1883, when he was appointed as secretary to the newly established London Hydraulic Power Company. A business acquaintance described him at this time:
The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit Page 7
