Edith made little money from her poetry, and she needed to accept whatever paid work she was offered in order to meet her financial commitments. In 1892 her first full-length book for children, Discovery of America: The Voyage of Columbus, a lavishly illustrated narrative in verse, was brought out by Raphael Tuck and Sons in an expensive guinea edition to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of that event. The following year, A. D. Innes published two volumes of her Gothic horror stories, Something Wrong and Grim Tales. She also wrote The Marden Mystery, which was brought out in a very limited run by Chicago-based self-publishing specialist S. J. Clarke in 1894. No surviving copy can be found, but its theme seems to have been the early days of the Socialist movement, and it is thought to have had chapters in common with Something Wrong by Fabian Bland. In March 1896 it won seventh prize, a sum of $600 (approximately USD$17,000 today), in a competition for “stories of mystery” sponsored by the Chicago Record.
In 1894 the Bland family moved to Three Gables, a substantial house in Baring Road, off Grove Park in Lewisham, and May Bowley described a dance her sister attended there. The company was “very mixed.” When refreshments failed to turn up, Edith and Alice distracted guests with lively duets on the piano, and the housemaid danced with Hubert and several of their male guests. One “young lady from the East End” suggested to Miss Bowley “let’s sit here and have a nice talk about the fellers.”33 To cap it all, the cook was drunk:
Mrs Bland got her up to bed and then searched the room and found a bottle of whiskey—This she hid in my sister’s room—not altogether to her content as she thought the cook might come in search of it in the night; but Mrs Bland said it would never occur to the culprit to look in the room of a visitor.34
When deadlines loomed, Edith would hang a “keep out” notice on her door. Money was tight, and she often needed to write a story or poem to settle a particular debt. As often as not, she would divert this money to pay for some entertainment or donate to a charitable cause. In the title story from The Butler in Bohemia, a family throws an extravagant dinner party at which nothing on the table is paid for while tradesmen demand the settlement of long overdue debts.
She continued to write poetry. John Lane published several of her poems in The Yellow Book and brought out A Pomander of Verse in 1895. The following year, Lane published In Homespun, a collection of tales written in Kentish dialect, as part of his avant-garde Keynotes series.* That same year she was appointed to the panel of poetry critics at The Athenaeum. She reviewed The Wind Among the Reeds by a young poet named William Butler Yeats, and declared: “Mr Yeats’s sketches are full of charm; his poems are full of lyric sentiment; a slight voice sings, but it sings truly, sweetly and with a clean and fresh sincerity.” Her Songs of Love and Empire was published in 1897 to coincide with the jubilee of Queen Victoria. She dedicated it to Hubert:
To you the harvest of my toil has come
Because of all that lies its sheaves between;
You taught me first what Love and Empire mean,
And to your hands I bring my harvest home.
She was also invited to contribute to “The Wares of Autolycus,” an unsigned daily column in the Pall Mall Gazette. This was a great honor since only leading women writers were invited to contribute.
Given her output at this time, and her prominence as a poet, it seems extraordinary that The Spectator would declare, in 1906, “Nesbit always writes with a facile and graceful pen, but her real forte is not in short stories for grown-up people, but in stories for children.”35 Yet her celebrated stories for children were taking shape. The first story to feature the Bastable children, “The Play Times,” appeared anonymously in Nister’s Holiday Annual in 1894. She reworked it as “Being Editors” in The Story of the Treasure Seekers.
Another Bastable story, published in Father Christmas, a supplement to the Illustrated London News, in December 1897, was attributed to “Ethel Mortimer” since Edith had a story, “The White Messengers,” in the main paper. Although she believed that her stories had been “miserably mutilated” in Father Christmas, they did hint at wonderful things to come: “I can’t tell you about that now,” Oswald Bastable declares in one, “but it will all be printed in a book some day, and then you can get someone to buy it for you for Christmas.”36
It was not until 1898 that six episodes of The Story of the Treasure Seekers appeared, between the Pall Mall Magazine and the Windsor Magazine. Edith turned forty that summer, and she described her birthday party in a letter to her mother:
I had a very nice birthday. Fabian made a bonfire in the evening and decorated the garden with Chinese lanterns. I had some pretty presents—a moss agate brooch, a gold ring (fifteenth century), gloves, table centres, a silver watch chain, a book, a pair of little old flint-lock pistols and some beautiful flowers.
In The Red House she described: “A garden hung with soft-tinted Chinese lanterns glowing amid gleams of green leaf-lights and deeps of black-leaf-shadow, a company . . . placated by good drink.” She was a youthful, vivacious woman, and she commented, wryly, to her mother “I am forty, as you say: but I never feel forty. When I am ill I feel ninety—and when I am happy I feel nineteen!” When The Story of the Treasure Seekers appeared in book form in 1889, The Athenaeum gave it a muted welcome:
The Story of the Treasure Seekers (Fisher Unwin) describes the adventures of some children who endeavour to supplement their father’s limited means by various expedients. Falling on good luck generally in the shape of “tips,” they are left finally installed in the good graces and luxurious home of a regular fairy-tale uncle. It is evident that E. Nesbit knows children, their ways and habit of thought, thoroughly; and assisted by two clever illustrators like Mr Gordon Browne and Mr Lewis Baumer, she has made an attractive book of her young people. They seem very grown-up at times, but that is perhaps a distinctive charm of the modern child. Two little protests only as to this pleasing performance. One regrets to find the children paid five shillings by an editor for retailing personalities about an old man of their acquaintance, and also to find them using the word “beastly” so much.37
This reviewer identified as the key to Edith’s success a childlike quality that she retained throughout her life, which enabled her to empathize with children in a way few of her peers have managed, before or since.
* Malagodi trained as a journalist in England and became a prominent Italian liberal journalist and writer, and eventually editor of La Tribuna in Rome.
* Her decision to visit this relatively unexplored resort may have been influenced by Grant Allen’s article “Cap d’Antibes” (Longman’s Magazine, March 1890). Hubert indicates as much in his essay “In the South” while suggesting that Allen had not visited the town when he wrote it.
* The Bowley sisters worked as illustrators for Raphael Tuck and Sons and supported their family. May was involved in Conan Doyle’s fairy investigations. She also illustrated E. Nesbit’s Royal Children of History (1896) and Children’s Shakespeare (1897). They were inseparable and neither ever married.
* The series included nineteen volumes of short stories and fourteen novels. The first of these, and the work that gave its name to the series, was George Egerton’s extraordinary Keynotes, a collection of her short stories.
CHAPTER 11
“DRAMATIC ENTERTAINMENT AT NEW-CROSS”
In Memories of an Edwardian and Neo-Georgian, Edgar Jepson described Edith as “as generous a creature as I ever came across,” adding:
Not only was her purse always at the service of her hard-up friends and all the distressed who crossed her path, but there was no end to the pains she would take to get them work and straighten out their affairs and keep them on their feet.1
As her finances improved, she stayed true to her socialist credentials and was determined to do something for people who lived in heartbreaking destitution right on her doorstep. In 1889, social scientist Charles Booth, aided by a team of researchers, among them his cousin Beatrice Webb, a leading
Fabian, compiled Life and Labour of the People in London. Booth revealed that the closure of the docks in 1869 had created a poverty rate of 65 percent in the district that lay adjacent to the riverside at Greenwich, an area that included Deptford in the borough of Lewisham, where Edith lived.
In Harding’s Luck, Edith described the Lewisham district of New Cross, home to her protagonist Dickie Harding, in stark terms: “its dirty streets, its sordid shifts, its crowds of anxious, unhappy people, who never had quite enough of anything.” Deptford also provided the backdrop for “After Many Days,” a story for Longman’s Magazine in which she described the desperate state of the tenements that were populated by “groups of dirty-faced children who played on the stairs and on the landings.”2 She wrote a letter to the Daily Mail that was described as a “powerful plea for the underfed children in our elementary schools.”3 Not content with merely highlighting this crisis, Edith donated generously, even when she could ill afford to do so. When tradesmen presented their bills, she would cry: “How can I let the Deptford children starve to pay butchers, bakers, etc.!”4
In January 1895 an article in the Kentish Mercury titled “Humanitarian Work in Deptford” brought one area that was experiencing unspeakable destitution to the attention of readers:
Hughes Fields have long since ceased to be fields in anything but name. Dingy-looking houses of a terrible sameness, peopled for the most part with riverside labourers, cattle market men, and costermongers who eke out a precarious livelihood, and generally “do the best they can.”5
Yet the children who lived in this district had not been abandoned entirely:
It is the school which serves this poverty-stricken spot that has been chosen by Mr and Mrs Hubert Bland for a number of years now as the object of their benevolence. Though the people are the poorest of the poor they are not lacking in those little graces which go to sweeten even the roughest of lives.6
The London School Board had designated Hughes Field primary school a “specially difficult school.” Pupils were withdrawn as soon as they were capable of earning a wage, and the attendance rate was just 65 percent. It was reported that one kindly school inspector purchased food for the children out of his own pocket. The dire poverty they endured was highlighted in an appeal carried in the Blackheath Gazette:
In this very poor school a large proportion of the children are either shoeless or very badly shod and clad, even during this inclement weather, and the teachers would gladly welcome any gifts of old boots and clothing—no matter how old they may be.7
Edith opened Harding’s Luck with a lament for the urban sprawl that had replaced “once green fields”:
Dickie lived at New Cross. At least the address was New Cross, but really the house where he lived was one of a row of horrid little houses built on the slope where once green fields ran down the hill to the river, and the old houses of the Deptford merchants stood stately in their pleasant gardens and fruitful orchards. All those good fields and happy gardens are built over now. It is as though some wicked giant had taken a big brush full of yellow ochre paint, and another full of mud colour, and had painted out the green in streaks of dull yellow and filthy brown; and the brown is the roads and the yellow is the houses. Miles and miles and miles of them, and not a green thing to be seen except the cabbages in the greengrocers’ shops, and here and there some poor trails of creeping-jenny drooping from a dirty window-sill.8
She had strong views on education and held the teachers who worked in deprived schools in high regard. In Wings and the Child, she explained:
There are no words to express half what I feel about the teachers in our Council Schools, their enthusiasm, their patience, their energy, their devotion . . . The hard thing to do is to live for your country—to live for its children. And it is this that the teachers in the Council Schools do, year in and year out, with the most unselfish nobility and perseverance. And nobody applauds or makes as much fuss as is made over a boy who saves a drowning kitten. In the face of enormous difficulties and obstacles, exposed to the constant pin-pricks of little worries, kept short of space, short of materials and short of money, yet these teachers go on bravely, not just doing what they are paid to do, but a thousand times more, devoting heart, mind, and soul to their splendid ambition and counting themselves well paid if they can make the world a better and a brighter place for the children they serve. If these children when they grow up shall prove better citizens, kinder fathers, and better, wiser, and nobler than their fathers were, we shall owe all the change and progress to the teachers who are spending their lives to this end.9
She understood the constraints these teachers faced when dealing with overwhelming inequality:
When we think of what the lives of poor children are, of the little they have of the good things of this world, the little chance they have of growing up to any better fate than that of their fathers and mothers, who do the hardest work of all and get the least pay of all those who work for money—when we think how rich people have money to throw away, how their dogs have velvet coats and silver collars, and eat chicken off china, while the little children of the poor live on bread and tea, and wear what they can get—often enough, too little—when we think of all these things, if we can bear to think of them at all, there is not one of us, I suppose, who would not willingly die if by our death we could secure for these children a fairer share of the wealth of England, the richest country in the world.10
Edith’s ideas were exceptionally progressive, and she advocated radical change to the school curriculum. “The teaching in our schools is almost wholly materialistic,” she claimed. “We teach children about the wonders of gases and ethers, but we do not explain to them that furnaces ought to consume their own smoke, nor why.”11 She regarded education as “the unfolding of a flower, not the distorting of it.”12 “If I had my way,” she insisted, “children should be taught no facts unless they asked for them. Heaven knows they ask questions enough. They should just be taught the old wonder-stories, and learn their facts through these.”13
She believed that every child, regardless of their circumstances, deserved at an absolute minimum “good food, warm clothes, fresh country air, playthings and books, and pictures.”14 Rather than rely on the state to provide these basic necessities, she undertook to distribute them herself. She organized her first Christmas party for the pupils of Hughes Field primary school in 1888 and maintained this tradition for ten years. Just twenty children attended the first party, which was held at 8 Dorville Road. When Edith discovered they had earned their invitations through good behavior, she insisted on including every child. Attendance rose to five hundred, then one thousand, necessitating a change of venue to the school building itself. The Kentish Mercury reported on the party she hosted in January 1896:
Following her usual custom, Mrs Hubert Bland, of Lee, assisted by several friends gave a tea and entertainment on Saturday afternoon to between 300 and 400 of the poorest and wretchedest of the little ones who attend the Hughes’ Fields Board Schools, Deptford. The whole of the children were first mustered in the infants’ class-room, and eventually divided into batches and served with tea—which included a plentiful supply of bread and butter and cake—in the four classrooms . . . each child was made the recipient of a warm garment and a toy.15
She raised funds and hosted working parties every Saturday for three months leading up to each party, at which family, friends, and neighbors made warm, practical clothing; they knitted hats and comforters, and, on one occasion, made trousers for the boys from blue corduroy that had been supplied by Saretta’s husband, John Deakin. Edith’s neighbor Ada Moore described these gatherings:
I shall never forget our Saturdays during the winter of 1890–1 (I think). We worked at all kinds of things for the very poor of Deptford for some hours, then a supper of, probably, herrings, cheese and bottled stout, followed by a dance.16
It was “very hard but glorious fun,” Alice confirmed, “and we enjoyed every minute of it.”17
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Edith shared her views on how children should be treated at Christmas with readers of the Yorkshire Evening Post:
If . . . a committee of persons who dislike children and wished them ill were to meet for the purpose of discussing how best to treat children worst, that committee could hardly have devised any more pernicious scheme than the orgy of excitement and food which we offer to our children on and about the Feast of Christmas.18
Several of Edith’s stories draw on this charitable work. In “The Town in the Library in the Library in the Town” from Nine Unlikely Tales, “Mother” helps the elderly poor by organizing “Christmas presents, tea and snuff, and flannel petticoats and warm capes, and boxes of needles and cottons and things like that.” Like their real-life counterparts, “Rosamund” and “Fabian” are required to help, but an outbreak of measles has confined them to the library at home. There, they find Christmas treats and toys that have been hidden away, and they get up to all sorts of mischief.19
One year, Fabian stole sweets intended for pupils of the Hughes Fields school. He denied it, but he was found out and punished severely. In her story “The Criminal,” Edith described how wretched and remorseful he was. She evoked the Christmas spirit:
It was Christmas time. The house was alive with children, and filled with a rosy mist of open secrets . . . In the drawing-room, too, were the presents that were not secrets—the gifts of sweets and toys and clothes for the poor little children, who had no nice homes and kind mothers, the children who, on Christ’s birthday, at least, were remembered.
The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit Page 16
