The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

  He dressed in the usual conventional get up of the London business man, frock coat, top hat, etc. He told me that he was considered much too eccentric in being a Socialist* and he could not afford further eccentricities such as Bernard Shaw’s mustard coloured loose fitting tweed suits and “Trilby” hat!29

  A letter Hubert wrote in his capacity as secretary was published in the Engineer on August 4, 1885, under the heading “Novel Method of Erecting Bridgework.” But he lacked any technical qualifications, and an engineer was hired in his place. Perhaps that explains Edith’s reference, in The Red House, to “the late deplorable action of the London Water Companies.”30 Once again it fell to her to earn the greater part of the household income.

  Many of the insights we have into Edith’s state of mind at this time come from a series of letters she exchanged with her close friend Ada Breakell, who had sailed for Australia in January 1884 to join her fiancé, Edith’s brother Harry. Certain she would never see her friend again, Edith confessed that she was “grieving after” her and exclaimed: “No one has loved you so long as I—(outside your own people I mean) and I don’t think anyone could love you more.” She felt no inclination to mix with others; “I hate strangers,” she declared. In an exceptionally intimate passage, she admitted:

  I think so often of those few minutes in the bedroom at Dulwich. It was then I first felt and realized what it meant for you to be going away. If I live to be a hundred I shall never forget that evening. My Ada—my dear—my friend.

  Edith appears to have been crying as she wrote these words, since she goes on: “I don’t want to mar the superlative neatness of this large blue sheet by blots or anything of that nature.” She asked Ada to imagine how she would feel if it were she who had been “left behind, longing and yearning and feeling your heart ache very very bitterly for my sake—as I now for yours my dear and for the loss of you.” She closed by assuring her: “I long for you and love you so my darling.” She signed this heart-wrenching letter “Dai.”

  Her letters are filled with news of her life with Hubert and “the bunnies,” her affectionate name for their two tiny children. So changed was her life that she declared: “I seem to have lived three or four lives right through since those old times.”31 On Easter Sunday 1884 she described a scene of perfect domesticity: “the kettle is singing on the fire and the kitten purring before it,” she wrote. “I have just got Iris to sleep, and laid her down and Paul is standing watching my scribbling pen.” She mused: “Iris ought certainly to have been the boy—and Paul the girl,” adding. “They are very good children, I think, as children go—and if only we don’t add to their number I am satisfied. But that is a big ‘if.’”32

  On April 11, 1884, she admitted to Ada: “I am not doing any painting just now, I am sorry to say—so I try to write as many stories as I can—but it is uphill work—writing when you don’t feel a bit inclined.”33 Poetry was her true passion: “I’m sure to quote poetry sooner or later if I’m not restrained,” she exclaimed, then complained:

  What seems to be the worst of my present life is that I have no time to do any good work—in the way of writing verse I mean. I want to write another longish poem or two and there don’t seem to be any blank sheets of time lying loose round to scribble it down on.34

  Released from the London Hydraulic Power Company, Hubert too turned to writing and discovered he had a talent for it. His greatest pleasure, by his own account, was to read his work aloud to an attentive crowd, made up primarily of young women dressed in “greenish and yellowish velvet and silk drapery, all curled up in sinuous poses, and looking . . . like a lot of dear little caterpillars.”35 He collaborated with Edith under the pseudonym “Fabian Bland,” and they received £10 (approximately £1,200, or USD$1,600 today), the equivalent of two months’ wages, for a story published in the Longman’s Magazine Christmas number for 1884; “Hubert wrote the first part and we finished it together,” Edith told Ada.36 They also received £3 (approximately £370, or USD$490 today) a week for “The Social Cobweb,” a series of twelve loosely themed stories that ran in the Weekly Dispatch until March 1884. “Did I tell you I am writing nothing now by myself except poems,” she told Ada. “In all stories Hubert and I ‘go shares.’ I am sure it is much better when we write together than when we write separately.” In The Red House, Chloe and Len write collaboratively; Len starts each story for Chloe to finish. She resents having to write through financial necessity too:

  I longed to write the stories because I wanted the money they would bring to me. The longing was keen enough to be painful, not strong enough to get itself satisfied. It was not a desire for the thing in itself—not a desire to achieve, to attain—but depended for its vitality on a secondary motive.37

  In The Story of the Treasure Seekers, Noël, who is a surrogate for Edith, tells the editor of the Daily Recorder that he does not write for money but because he wants to. “Art for art’s sake eh?” the editor responds.

  Edith’s greatest challenge was coming up with plots. “If ever you think of any plots—mind you let me know,” she wrote to Ada. “They are our great difficulty. The writing is a much more simple matter than the construction.” She asks if Harry might suggest “even central ideas for stories,” since “they are so hard to hit upon.” She was astonished that she had received no news of her brother: “But you did not tell me anything about Harry,” she complained. “How is he? How does he look? Is he well? Is he much altered?” The truth was that Ada’s relationship with Harry had faltered by then, and she was making plans to return to England alone.* She had been supplanted somewhat by a new friend Edith had met when she visited Warwick House in Salisbury Square, the offices of Sylvia’s Home Journal, early in 1882, clutching a story she had written with Hubert.38

  In the account of their first meeting that she gave to Doris Langley Moore, Alice Hoatson, manuscript reader for Sylvia’s Home Journal, recalled that Edith was “pale as a ghost and shivering with cold” when she arrived.39 As the magazine was due to go to press that day, the office was bustling with activity. Edith was ushered in to see editor-in-chief Charlotte Elizabeth Graham, who was in her late twenties and had made her name as a prolific writer and editor of publications targeted at women. As “Madge” Charlotte dispensed advice on etiquette, which was also the theme of several books she had written, among them How to Be Pretty Though Plain (1899). She must have been heavily pregnant at that time, since her daughter Pearl was born in April 1882.

  Graham was sympathetic, but she insisted that she could not publish Edith’s story unless Alice Hoatson approved it. Decades later, Alice told Doris Langley Moore that she felt desperately sorry for this young woman, who had gone to such lengths to have her story accepted. She promised to read it as soon as she could and invited her to sit by the fire and drink a cup of cocoa. They chatted companionably for an hour or so. Alice’s account is somewhat unreliable. She recalled that she read Edith’s story that day and sent her a personal note to let her know she was recommending it for publication. She was therefore amazed to find her back at the offices of Sylvia’s Home Journal early the following morning in a state of extreme agitation. Hubert, it transpired, had submitted the same story to the Weekly Dispatch, and it was to be published the following Saturday. In response, Alice insisted that she agreed Edith could swap her story for one she had written alone. Yet no story by E. Nesbit appeared in Sylvia’s Home Journal during this period. Perhaps she used a pseudonym.

  * The smallpox epidemic placed great strain on available hospital beds in London. To ease the situation, the Metropolitan Asylums Board chartered two old wooden warships from the admiralty to be converted into hospital ships: the Atlas, a ninety-one-gun man-of war built in 1860, and the Endymion, a fifty-gun frigate built in 1865. George Bernard Shaw contracted the disease during the same outbreak.

  * Her son John confirmed this in an interview with Doris Langley Moore. George Bernard Shaw incorporated this trait into his pen portrait of Edith in An Unfinished Novel.r />
  * Hubert and Edith had developed an interest in Socialism by this time and Shaw, a fellow Socialist, dressed eccentrically in a Jaeger suit.

  * On September 6, 1893, Harry Nesbit married Jessie Emily Rosser Rogers in Queensland, and they had a son whom they named Collis Anthony Artis Nesbit. Harry died on February 14, 1925, aged sixty-eight. He is buried in Brisbane, Australia.

  CHAPTER 6

  “A COMMITTED IF ECCENTRIC SOCIALIST”

  Midway through 1884, Edith discovered she was pregnant once more; Fabian Bland was born on January 8, 1885. The name his parents chose, one they had used when collaborating on stories, honored a new political movement that was occupying increasing amounts of their time. Life with three tiny children, few resources, and a desperately uncertain future threw up challenges that Edith had to grapple with every day. She mustered every creative impulse to fund the necessities of family life. But she made time to indulge her intellect too. “We are going out a good bit just now,” she told Ada, “to all sorts of places and meeting all sorts and conditions of men.” It was not always fun. “Sometimes I enjoy myself,” she confessed, “and sometimes I don’t—which is the way of the world I suppose.” They joined the Browning Society, the Shelley Society, and the Lewisham Literary Society, which, she complained, “has three secretaries who between them can never get a notice out in time.”1

  In “The Faith I Hold,” a paper Hubert read before the Fabian Society in December 1907, he described himself at this time as:

  A young man with his heart in the right place and in search of ideas, hungry for ideas, ready to listen to anybody who had ideas to offer; particularly political ideas, ideas that might lead to action, that might set one doing something.

  He admitted that his “old friends the Tories were bankrupt of ideas,” and he felt “embittered and too prejudiced to listen to anything a Liberal had to say.” When he learned that “William Morris was calling himself a Socialist,” he decided, “If William Morris was a Socialist, whatever else Socialism might be it would not be ugly.” It was then that Hubert Bland “turned to the Socialists, who just then were beginning to make a clamour.”2 He might not have been so effusive had he overheard Morris tell trade unionist and Labour politician John Lincoln Mahon: “The debate at the Fabian last night was a very absurd affair only enlivened by a flare up between me & that offensive snob Bland.”3

  Edith too admired Morris, a leading light in the vibrant Pre-Raphaelite movement. She was drawn to what Hubert described as the “simple, beautiful ideals of mediaeval England” that Morris incorporated into his painting and poetry. These, she believed, provided an antidote to the “insistent sordidness and blatant ugliness” that had crept into society. They included a pen portrait of Morris in Something Wrong, the serial they wrote for the Weekly Dispatch. In The Story of the Amulet (1906), Edith’s fictional children travel forward in time to a verdant, utopian London where school is delightful, mothers and fathers share the burden of childcare, and everyone dresses in comfortable clothing. This episode owes a debt to Morris’s News from Nowhere (1900) in which he envisaged a utopian society founded on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production.

  Disillusioned with the creeping commercialism that had gripped society, Morris joined the radical Social Democratic Federation (SDF), which had been founded as the Democratic Federation by Henry Mayers Hyndman in 1881. Hyndman, a devotee of Karl Marx, realized that Morris could be relied upon to deliver a fiery sermon and welcomed him with enthusiasm. He left a wonderful description of him:

  His imposing forehead and clear grey eyes, with the powerful nose and slightly florid cheeks, impressed upon you the truth and importance of what he was saying, every hair on his head and in his rough shaggy beard appearing to enter into the subject as a living part of himself.4

  Morris addressed SDF meetings throughout the UK and insisted that beauty had a place in any workable model for a socialist future. However, by December 1884 he had decided that the SDF was not sufficiently revolutionary, and he left to help establish the Socialist League. He was coauthor of its manifesto. By then, Hubert had become captivated by what he described as Hyndman’s “air of cocksuredness, his breezy bonhomie, the exhilarating atmosphere of optimism which seemed to exhale from his very presence.” In “The Faith I Hold” he acknowledged that Hyndman was “the predominant factor in my own conversion to the Socialist Faith.”5

  Hyndman had impressed Edith too. After hearing him lecture on Socialism, she declared him “very good indeed.”6 Hubert outlined their motivation in embracing this new doctrine:

  We felt that we had had the misfortune to be born in a stupid, vulgar, grimy age, an age, too, that was getting stupider, grimier, more vulgar, every day, and so we turned away from it to a little world within a world, a world of poetry, of pictures, of music, of old romance, of strangely designed wall-papers, and of sad-coloured velveteen.7

  Although he acknowledged that Hyndman’s “prediction of the social revolution for the year 1889,” was absurd, Hubert admitted that he “more than half hoped that it might be true.” “Personally,” he declared, “I gave the capitalist regime at least another ten years of life.”8 They included Hyndman in Something Wrong (1893) as a thinly disguised “Gottheim,” the genial yet strident leader of the United Pioneers of Labour.

  In The Record of an Adventurous Life (1911), Hyndman wrote:

  About this time too, men and women of great ability joined our body. It is indeed sad to look back and see the number of really capable people who joined us in this year, and then to note that, instead of remaining with us and constituting a great party, so many of them drifted away and formed cliques. In addition to [William] Morris there were with us at this time, [Edward] Carpenter, Bernard Shaw, Bland and Mrs Bland, [Henry “Harry”] Quelch, [Andreas] Scheu, [Sydney] Olivier, Graham Wallas and others.9

  Hyndman was appointed editor of Justice, a weekly Socialist newspaper subtitled “Organ of the Social Democracy,” which appeared on January 19, 1884, and was sold on the streets of London by members of the SDF for one penny. “We started well,” he recalled:

  Morris, Shaw, Hubert Bland and Mrs Bland, Joynes, Salt, Champion, Helen Taylor and others made up a good staff; the paper itself was well printed, and the whole effect of it was good. But the trouble was with the circulation.10

  As was the case for Morris, the SDF failed to provide the radicalism Edith and Hubert sought, and they turned elsewhere. There was much political turmoil at the time. Edward R. Pease, a disillusioned young stockbroker, the sixth of fifteen children born to a devout Quaker couple, noted that London was “full of half-digested ideas.” He attributed this, in part at least, to the recent death of Charles Darwin while his unsettling theories were still being hotly debated.11 He summarized the ethos of the assortment of self-interested aristocrats and industrialists who governed Britain at that time and were utterly disengaged from the overwhelming social problems that blighted the lives of citizens:

  Pauperism was still to be stamped out by ruthless deterrence: education had been only recently and reluctantly taken in hand: factory inspection alone was an accepted State function.12

  Edith was similarly disillusioned. In “Porro Unum Est Necessarium,”* she wrote: “The Devil’s gospel of laissez-faire still inspires the calloused heart of man. Every man for himself, and Mammon* for the foremost.” She was dismayed by the lack of empathy that pervaded society and declared:

  But so dulled and stupefied is our sense of beauty, our sense of brotherhood, that our brother’s wounds do not hurt us. We have not imagination enough to know how it feels to be wounded. Just as we have not imagination enough to see the green fields that lie crushed where Manchester sprawls in the smoke—the fair hills and streams on which has grown the loathsome fungus of Stockport.13

  During the summer of 1883, Pease attended a meeting of the SDF and encountered “the oddest little gathering.” It consisted of “twenty characteristically democratic men with dirty han
ds and small heads, some of them obviously with very limited wits, and most with some sort of foreign accent.” He joined them when he realized that their manifesto, “Socialism Made Plain,” sought nothing less than the overthrow of capitalism.

  Pease was drawn to the teachings of Thomas Davidson, a mesmeric “wandering scholar,” the illegitimate son of a Scottish shepherd who had devoted his life to the betterment of society. In 1883, Davidson traveled to England from his adopted American home in order to whip up support for a “secular brotherhood” dedicated to the promotion of ethical perfection. He described this as “a Vita Nuova, a Fellowship of the New Life.” Fired with enthusiasm, Pease discussed these radical ideas with Frank Podmore, a post office clerk and fellow member of the Society for Psychical Research, which had been established to examine the bona fides of the many mediums, clairvoyants, hypnotists, and spiritualists operating in London. Pease was secretary of the haunted-house committee of this organization, and Podmore and he discussed their shared interest in socialist politics when they spent a night in a house in Notting Hill that was reputed to be haunted.

  On October 23, 1883, Pease invited Podmore, social reformer Henry Havelock Ellis, and Percival Chubb, a young civil servant with an interest in establishing a utopian community, to a meeting in his rooms at 17 Osnaburgh Street, near Regent’s Park. Havelock Ellis described Davidson as “the most remarkable man, the most intensely alive man, I had ever met.”14 Also present on that occasion were “a couple of junior clerks in the civil service, a medical student, an architect, some aspiring journalists, and half a dozen ladies of advanced opinions.”15 That evening the Fellowship of the New Life was established.