The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

  Edith’s neighbors were a conventional bunch. Anne Robenson, an elderly widow in her seventies, lived with her daughter Mary, who was in her forties and also widowed, and Mary’s young daughter, Maud, at number three. William Venn, a notary in his twenties, lived with his wife, Mabel, at number six. John Stap, a shipowner’s clerk in his sixties, lived with his wife, Rebecca, and their four grown-up children at number four. Charles Kingsford, a financial agent in his forties, lived with his wife, Anne, and their six daughters at number seven. The only other unusual household was number five, where two young Canadian men lived, one a medical student and the other a physician.

  Ada Jane Moore, who was twenty-five, lived at 1 Birch Grove, directly across from the Blands. She shared her home with her husband, William, a cotton broker who was almost twice her age, her stepson, Arthur, aged fourteen, and her own children, James, aged five, and newborn Dorothy. Of her new neighbors, Ada declared:

  No rumour nor gossip was considered too bad to be believed about them. They rode bicycles in bloomers, they were absolutely unconventional and careless, they outraged “Mrs Grundy” in every way and were condemned and generally disliked by the very respectable neighbourhood of Lee.

  She described “little Fabian,” aged four, as “the most amazing child—odd and tiresome and a terror.” He would accost “City Gents” on their way to the train station and beg them for halfpennies. “Imagine the disgust of the neighbourhood,” Ada exclaimed.4 Rosamund, who was known affectionately as Rom, was “easily the most attractive” of the children. Ada considered her “a real darling with her soft dark eyes and pretty ways.” She could be precocious too, Ada reported: “Sitting on the knee of a man-visitor she said gravely, lifting her skirt, ‘Do you know I have real lace on my drawers.’”

  Edgar Jepson confirmed that the Bland children were “to an extent, the children of the House of Bastable.” He described how Fabian and Rosamund, whom he called “an amazingly pretty child,” had scandalized the neighborhood when they “made posies of flowers from their garden, took off their shoes and stockings, and in their shabbiest clothes sold the posies to native residents on their way to catch the business trains to London.”5 Edith allowed her children to go barefoot and dressed them in the loose-fitting, aesthetic clothing she favored. Her fictional children often struggle with garments they describe as “tight under the arms” or “prickly round the neck.” The incident with the posies, and others like it, provided her with inspiration for a series of stories that would ensure her literary legacy. The first of her Bastable books, The Story of the Treasure Seekers, appeared in 1899, when she was in her early forties, but early versions were published anonymously in Nister’s Holiday Annual between 1894 and 1896. In one episode, Oswald Bastable puts on his oldest clothes and heads to Greenwich Station, where he sells yellow chrysanthemums “in penny bunches.” A similar episode appears in Harding’s Luck (1909) when Dickie Harding sells posies to earn money.

  Ada Moore believed the Bland children “ran wild,” but she insisted that Edith was “a tender mother and devoted to the children who were considered neglected.” “I doubt if they were,” she added. Edith could certainly be exceptionally affectionate. Like Mother in The Railway Children, she “made up funny pieces of poetry for their birthdays and for other great occasions, such as the christening of the new kittens, or the refurnishing of the doll’s house, or the time when they were getting over the mumps.”6 She wrote a poem for Paul to celebrate his recovery from typhoid fever. When Iris recovered from measles, she recited a poem that described how their pets cheered her return downstairs. Another of the comic verses Edith wrote for Iris prompted the nickname “That.” When Iris was twelve or thirteen, she decided that she no longer wished to be called by the various pet names she had been given. Edith wrote:

  They often call me bunny

  Or sometimes kitten cat

  My proper name is Iris

  So please to call me that.7

  Ada Moore told Doris Langley Moore that Edith was “always the spirit of originality, freedom and difference . . . a smoker of cigars who just went her own way and was the centre of a group of people who did likewise.” She cared little for the good opinion of her straitlaced neighbors. “The Blands’ aloofness was the right attitude for people interested in ideas to assume when living in suburbs,” Edgar Jepson declared. “Though civil to their neighbours, they were never intimate with them; they believed that the native residents would bore them by a lack of understanding.” He regarded Edith as “an uncommonly clever and often amusing woman” and admired the “vivacity and intelligence” of Hubert’s conversation.8

  Members of the Blands’ unorthodox circle were perfectly willing to travel to 2 Birch Grove for regular “at homes” at which they would discuss politics into the small hours or play hide-and-seek, charades, and other lively games. Sometimes Edith would play the piano so they could dance. Many of these visitors were enthusiastic members of “It,” a monthly debating society that Edith had a hand in establishing; “we had nearly every literary man and woman we knew meeting here once a month,” Alice bragged. Occasionally a discussion paper would be circulated in advance, but more often than not, as Alice confirmed, they would “just talk on any subject under the sun.”9 On January 18, 1896, Shaw noted in his diary that he had addressed “‘It’ on ‘Great Men: Are They Real?’” “It” was a great success for a time, but it was disbanded after Harold Cox, future Liberal MP for Preston, caused a scandal by reading a paper on “Nudity in Art & Life.” Noel Griffith claimed that Edith was outraged, but Shaw insisted Cox meant no harm. This incident was reported in The Sphere: “Mr Cox once astonished an audience by advocating, with apparent seriousness, a dispensation from clothes.”10

  Jepson believed that Edith “rather queened it over the young writers and painters she gathered round her and directed their lives with a ruthless precision.”11 Prominent among her protégés was Oswald Barron, who was almost a decade younger than her and wrote a daily column for the London Evening News as “The Londoner.” According to Jepson:

  The Londoner, one of the earliest and the most intelligent of Mrs Bland’s young men, was an uncommonly witty and amusing talker and helpful to her in the matter of the stories of the House of Bastable—indeed the hero of them was drawn from him.12

  Edith paid Barron the highest tribute by naming Oswald Bastable after him and dedicating the first of her novels for children:

  TO OSWALD BARRON

  Without whom this book could

  never have been written

  The Treasure Seekers is

  dedicated in memory of

  childhoods

  identical but for the accidents

  of time and space.

  Barron was living in rooms at Temple, a legal district in the vicinity of Temple Church in central London, when they met, but he moved to Grove Park in 1896, where he shared a house with Jepson and Italian journalist Olindo Malagodi.* Jepson admitted that they moved there “in order to be near the Blands.”13 All three were in their mid-twenties and were members of the Fabian Society.

  For a time Barron behaved like a member of the Bland household. When he was collaborating on ballads and short stories with Edith, she would confine him to her study until they came up with something worthwhile. She was keen to promote his career and asked John Lane if she might visit some Saturday afternoon to introduce “my friend Mr Oswald Barron, who collaborates with me in prose and verse.” Barron, she explained, was “learned in archaeology and things like that.” “I think you will like him,” she assured Lane, “and I am sure he will like you.”14 They dedicated their short story collection, The Butler in Bohemia (1894), to Rudyard Kipling and their one-act farce, A Family Novelette, was performed in New Cross Public Hall in February 1894.

  Barron had a vivid imagination, and plots came easily to him. Hubert paid him half a crown each for ideas for his weekly Stock Exchange Journal stories. Edith protested that he was “robbing the poor boy.”15
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br />   It is thought that Barron suggested the plot for The Railway Children. He certainly inspired Edith’s mystery The Secret of Kyriels (1889) when he suggested, during a day trip to Scotney Castle in Kent, that “Old Cyrals,” a knot of houses to the southwest of Brenchley, might be a corruption of the Breton name Kyriels. The novel features Christopher Surtees, a scholarly man with a deep love for history and genealogy. Fellow Fabian Adeline Sergeant, a prolific poet and novelist, gave her opinion on an early manuscript titled Kyriel’s Bridge and assured Edith that it was “certain to achieve success.” She predicted: “Your name is so well known as a writer of lovely verse and striking short stories, that you will indeed be made welcome in the ranks of novelists!”16 The Literary World described The Secret of Kyriels as “an old-fashioned sensational novel of the Jane Eyre school” and informed readers that Edith showed “unusual literary ability.”17 A review in Book News lauded “a superabundance of ingenuity not only in the construction of the plot but in the conception of the characters.”18 Yet sales were disappointing, and it did not endure.

  Many people believe Edith and Oswald were lovers, but their relationship cooled after 1899 when he married the aristocratic Hilda Leonora Florence Sanders. They may have named their daughter Yolande, who was born in 1906, after a character in The Red House (1901). Afterward, Barron devoted increasing time and energy to the study of heraldry. In 1901 he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He founded and edited a scholarly periodical, The Ancestor, the following year. Although Barron always refused to discuss his relationship with Edith, it seems he inspired a sequence of poems she wrote early in 1898 under the title “Via Amoris.” She told her agent, William Morris Colles, that she was particularly fond of three: “After Death,” which is a lament for a lost love, and “Via Amoris” and “The Poor Man’s Guest,” both narrated by someone who did not seek love but was overwhelmed by it.

  Although Edith’s first two poetry collections were critically and commercially successful, she struggled to interest any publisher in a third. She was enormously grateful when D’Arcy Wentworth Reeve, a wealthy member of the Fabian Society, paid for Lays and Legends to be reissued and funded a second series under the same title. She presented him with a first edition of The Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which she inscribed “D’Arcy Reeve from E. Nesbit. Je suis ici en bien d’amie.” In 1892 a notice in Current Literature confirmed “E. Nesbit (Edith Bland), after a long illness is working on her new book, Lays and Legends, Second Series, the first series having run through three editions.”19

  Reeve called to see Edith in January 1892 and was shocked to find her struggling with bronchitis, a condition that plagued her throughout her life. In The Red House, H.O. says of Noël, Edith’s fictional alter ego: “Wait till you see his poetry! It comes of his having bronchitis so often, I think.”20 When Reeve offered to fund a holiday, she traveled with Alice to Antibes in the south of France.*

  Their trip started disastrously when they boarded the wrong train in Paris. On reaching Dijon at ten o’clock that night, they were ordered to disembark without warning. They had retired for the night, and they struggled to gather their belongings. Edith spoke excellent French but she had lost her voice. When she begged for light to pack by, the conductor simply repeated: “Depechez vous tout de suite, le train parti.” They stood on a platform in Dijon Station, half-dressed and clutching armfuls of whatever they could “gropingly find” in the minutes available. Most of their money and several items of value remained on the departing train.21

  Never one to waste a plot, Edith included this incident in her novel Dormant (1911). Anthony Drelincourt laments: “I have lost my watch and my purse, and I feel that I have caught the cold of my life.” He explains:

  At Lyons the train stopped—stopped going for good, I mean. It was “All Change.” A very wet night. I got into my clothes as well as I could. But before I was dressed, the officials turned the lights out, and dragged me and my odds and ends onto a swimming black platform. Then the train went away. And I found I had lost my watch and my purse.22

  Edith and Alice reached Marseilles at seven o’clock the following morning, shivering with cold and desperately hungry. As it was too early to call on the British Consul, they found a café and ordered coffee and buttered rolls, which Edith was too ill to eat. When the unsympathetic Consul advised them to take the matter up with his counterpart in Toulon, they caught a train to that city. They stayed for four days in “a dilapidated hotel . . . with a general air of poverty and neglect,” then headed for Antibes. Edith was so desperately ill that she struggled to walk unaided.

  Days later, Hubert joined them, accompanied by sisters Ada and May Bowley, whom he had bumped into in Paris.* On learning that they had been ill with influenza, he had persuaded them to travel south. May left an account of their time in Antibes, a “quaint little Mediterranean town—all white walls, red roofs, soldiers and smells.” Locals, unused to such exotic visitors, turned out to stare at Edith and Alice in their loose Aesthetic dresses. They mixed well with fellow tourists, described by May Bowley as a “party of painters, romancists, rhymers, journalists—all happy, all idle, all rejoicing in the fair jewels of sea and sun and sky.” Since Alice and Hubert took early morning swims together, the proprietors of their hotel decided they must be brother and sister.23

  There was a group of French army officers stationed in the town, and Hubert appeared to have no objection to Edith strolling about “with the arm of a French army officer round her waist.”24 They were invited to a local dance, and one officer provided a room where the women could change. Edith found it unbearably stuffy and joked that there must be a corpse under the floorboards. She forced open a window that had been painted shut and was leaning out as far as she could when the room’s startled occupant returned. She inadvertently started a trend when she told a dance partner who trod on her toes repeatedly that it was customary in England to dance side by side.

  In an article she wrote for the Daily Chronicle, Edith described how they would sit “on Myrtle bushes” reading “pleasant books” and gazing out toward the island of Corsica, a “little shadow on the skyline”:

  And when we were hungry and thirsty, we ate and drank, French bread which is long, and French butter which is perfect, and little French oranges which they call Mandarins, and French galantine which is a mystery.25

  She hired a guitar and carried it “slung round her shoulders,” a habit that may have inspired her story “The Girl with the Guitar.”26 She also fell in love with a “very artistic green tea service,” but she packed it carelessly at the bottom of her suitcase and it reached England in pieces.27

  In an essay titled “In the South,” Hubert left an account of the people they met during their stay:

  Chatting to them [the locals] on the ramparts, when the setting sun is tinting with rose colour the snow-capped peaks of the Maritime Alps and turning the little bay into one wondrous gleaming opal, you shall hear more good things in twenty minutes’ talk than in a week of Kensington drawing-rooms, even when Oscar Wilde and his followers are of the guests.28

  He criticized local Frenchmen for staring at the women, but could not resist pointing out:

  And yet here there is some excuse for male staring, for the companion of most of my walks is worth more than a passing eye-blink. She is pretty, dainty, piquant, and altogether pleasant to look upon. She dresses in a blue skirt and blue jacket with a bright yellow blouse, and she wears a little round scarlet cap set jauntily on her head at a provoking angle. As she herself says, she looks like a paroquet—but then, as I tell her, a paroquet is a nice, decorative little bird.29

  They paid just five francs a day to stay at the “white-walled” Hotel du Commerce, which stood “on the summit of a hilly promontory.” Hubert was certain that the six-course breakfasts there were far superior to those provided at the nearby and considerably more expensive Grand Hotel du Cap, where Grant Allen was staying, although he did admire the waitresses ther
e:

  At the Grand Hotel the waitresses are things of beauty in Swiss costumes—blue silk aprons, muslin sleeves, velvet bodices, silver chains and neat ankles. What matter then, if the wine they pour out be thinner than that served by the single fat waiter here?30

  When Allen dined with them one evening, May Bowley reported that he was “very afraid of typhoid in consequence of the very conspicuous wells of Antibes.” She also reported that he “held forth, with rather bad taste, on the inferiority of women.”31

  While they were there, Hubert christened Edith “our poet,” and she celebrated their stay in a rondeau she sent to her young friend and fellow Fabian Bower Marsh.

  RONDEAU DE L’HOTEL DU COMMERCE

  For five francs a day, five francs a day,

  For diner and for déjeuner,

  For little rooms whose windows high

  Shew us blue hills, blue sea, blue sky,

  And snowy mountains far away,

  In Toulon and Marsailles our stay

  Was bleak with bills—and life was grey.

  But now we pay—the Mouse and I—

  Five francs a day.

  Here life flowers daily, glad and gay

  With citron, rose and oranger;

  We watch the bright blue days go by,

  And think of you at home—Ah, why

  Are you not also here, to pay

  Five francs a day?32

  She also presented Marsh with a watercolor sketch she made of a stone archway in Antibes. They had been friendly for a couple of years by then, and she had a habit of presenting him with inscribed editions of her books on his birthday. She also invited him to join her on several holidays, one to Whitstable and another boating on the Medway. Noel Griffith remembered him joining them for a day in Rottingdean when he spent most of his time chasing Edith’s runaway dog. Most significant was the trip they took to Halstead, where she brought him to her childhood home. Whatever the nature of their relationship, it ended when he married Gertrude Holroyd on August 20, 1901.