The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

  Edith borrowed a pony from the Woodcocks and rode along local tracks, up over hills, and through fields crisscrossed with drystone walls. She put the people and places of Derbyshire into her stories. A house called Three Chimneys became home to The Railway Children. Some people believe that the trains that steamed along the Sett Valley can be found on its pages too. References to “Old Mills” and “Aspenshaw Farm” scattered throughout her early stories must relate to the nearby industrial town of New Mills and to Aspenshaw Hall.

  In 1891 John and Saretta moved to the tiny village of Booths-town in Worsley, seven miles west of Manchester. Edith stayed with them in 1893, arriving in the middle of a miners’ strike. The local economy was utterly dependent on deep mining, which had come to the region with the sinking of Mosley Common Colliery during the 1860s. When coal prices dropped, colliery owners attempted to maintain their profits by reducing the miners’ wages. The Miners Federation responded by calling for a living wage and organizing a lock-out, which lasted for much of that summer. Edith volunteered at the local soup kitchen.

  That was also the year she chanced upon her favorite holiday destination, the coastal village of Dymchurch in Kent.35 She was there when she dedicated The Phoenix and the Carpet:

  To

  My Dear Godson

  HUBERT GRIFFITH

  and his sister

  MARGARET

  This Hubert, who was born in October 1896, was the son of Noel Griffith and his wife, Georgina “Nina” Freeling.* Edith wrote a charming poem under her dedication:

  TO HUBERT

  Dear Hubert, if I ever found

  A wishing-carpet lying round,

  I’d stand upon it, and I’d say:

  “Take me to Hubert, right away!”

  And then we’d travel very far

  To where the magic countries are

  That you and I will never see,

  And choose the loveliest gifts for you, from me.

  But oh! alack! and well-a-day!

  No wishing-carpets come my way.

  I never found a Phoenix yet,

  And Psammeads are so hard to get!

  So I give you nothing fine—

  Only this book your book and mine,

  And hers, whose name by yours is set;

  Your book, my book, the book of Margaret!

  E. NESBIT

  DYMCHURCH

  September, 1904

  * People in charge of or working on a barge.

  * That book is now in my possession.

  * In adulthood Hubert Freeling Griffith (1896–1953) became a journalist, playwright, and drama critic. He also joined the RAF. Margaret and he also had a brother, Owen, who was born in 1907.

  CHAPTER 13

  “ISN’T IT A DEAR LITTLE PLACE?”

  The summer of 1893 was unusually hot, and England was gripped by drought from April to August. Edith was keen to escape the oppressive suburbs, so she took Paul, aged thirteen, and Iris, aged eleven, to the coastal town of Hythe on the edge of Romney Marsh. She loved the spectacular Kent coastline, and it is celebrated in her beautifully illustrated seafaring tale, The Pilot, which was published that year. Hythe had been one of the original Cinque Ports granted limited autonomy in exchange for defending the country against invasion. By 1893 it was a bustling seaside resort with shingle beaches, an esplanade, bathing machines, and donkey rides. It was packed with holidaymakers, so they escaped the hordes by taking an excursion to Dymchurch, a tiny fishing village five miles down the coast.

  Dymchurch was built on reclaimed land, and a sea barrier originally constructed by Roman invaders has been maintained there ever since.*

  Edith fell in love with this unspoiled village. Her first impressions can be gauged from Katherine’s reaction in The Incredible Honeymoon:

  They sped on; through Dymchurch, where the great sea-wall is, and where the houses are built lower than the sea, so that the high tide laps against the sea-wall level with the bedroom windows that nestle behind its strong shelter.

  It was she who spoke then “Isn’t it a dear little place?” she said.

  In Dymchurch a staunch Martello tower stands sentinel behind the seawall, one of seventy-four built along the south coast between 1805 and 1812 to repel a French invasion. Katherine describes it in The Incredible Honeymoon:

  Wouldn’t you like to live in a Martello tower? They have one beautiful big room with a Norman-looking pillar in the middle, and a down-stairs part for kitchens, and an up-stairs, where the big gun is, that you could roof in for bedrooms. I should like a Martello! Don’t you want to buy one? You know they built them to keep out Napoleon—and the canal as well—but no one uses them now. They just keep fishing-nets in them and wheelbarrows and eel-spears.

  Her companion, Edward, suggests that it is haunted:

  A soldier’s ghost walks there; the village people say “it’s one of them there Roman soldiers that lived here when them towers was built in old ancient Roman times.”1

  During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Dymchurch was a haven for smugglers. In The New Treasure Seekers, an old man relates this dark history to the Bastable children:

  “There used to be lots of smuggling on these here coasts when my father was a boy,” he said; “my own father’s cousin, his father took to the smuggling, and he was a doin’ so well at it, that what does he do, but goes and gets married, and the Preventives they goes and nabs him on his wedding-day, and walks him straight off from the church door, and claps him in Dover Jail.”2

  When Edith first arrived the village had a windmill, but it had stopped working in 1882 and it was demolished in 1905. During one of her early visits she rented Mill House on Mill Street. She used it in The New Treasure Seekers as the home of Miss Sandal, and Oswald Bastable describes it to readers:

  It is before you come to the village, and it is a little square white house. There is a big old windmill at the back of it. It is not used any more for grinding corn, but fishermen keep their nets in it.3

  That first summer Edith took rooms in a house on Marine Terrace. Once she had settled in, she sent for the rest of her family. Hubert’s beloved mother, Mary Ann Bland, had died on August 7, at the age of seventy-four, and it would seem that he welcomed the opportunity of a seaside holiday. In late October he sent a note to Edward Pease asking if he might be excused from the next Fabian meeting: “We are having a very good time down here, shrimping, eeling, swimming, etc.,” he wrote.

  Edith enjoyed the seclusion she found in Dymchurch. But two years after she chose it as her favorite holiday destination, in 1895, the wealthy Stoakes-Jones family commissioned a development that included the Arcade Gift Shop and a cluster of holiday houses, the first to be built in the village. She explored the surrounding countryside by bicycle and dogcart, and took inspiration from that secluded landscape. Several of the stories she included in Grim Tales are set in and around Romney Marsh. The exceptionally chilling “Man-size in Marble” unfolds in St. Eanswith’s Church in the village of Brenzett, which lies just eight miles inland. Her eerie, animated marble knights were suggested by the tomb chest of John Fagge and his son, which dominates the North Chapel. One of these figures rests on his elbow as if he is about to rise.

  The horror genre was popular with magazine editors, and Edith sold dozens of stories that she later collected in book form. She had a talent for the Gothic. A review in The Spectator likened her style in Something Wrong to that of Poe, “whose influence, indeed, seems, with or without the author’s consciousness, to have affected the whole book.”4 She also used the genre to help explore her deep-seated fears and phobias that had endured since childhood. Since she was determined not to pass these on to her children, she kept a human skull on the top of the piano and scattered several human bones about the house.

  Edith put Dymchurch into several of her stories, and she usually renamed it “Lymchurch.” “Tomorrow,” says a wise woman in The House of Arden, “the French shall land in Lymchurch Bay.”5 In Oswald Bastable and
Others, Lymchurch is home to Miss Sandal:

  It was the seaside so, of course, there was a beach, and besides that the marsh—big green fields with sheep all about, and wet dykes with sedge growing, and mud, and eels in the mud, and winding white roads that all look the same, and all very interesting, as though they might lead to almost anything that you didn’t expect. Really, of course, they lead to Ashford and Romney and Ivy Church, and real live places like that. But they don’t look it.6

  It also features in her collection Man and Maid and in one story, “The Millionairess,” she included a description of the beach:

  The tide was low, the long lines of the sandbanks shone yellow in the sun—yellower for the pools of blue water left between them. Far off, where the low white streak marked the edge of the still retreating sea, little figures moved slowly along, pushing the shrimping nets through the shallow water.

  In “The Millionairess,” Rosamund “watched the seagulls and shrimpers from under the sea-wall of Lymchurch” while Andrew Dornington, a young poet seated beside her, celebrated the landscape in verse:

  Now the vexed clouds, wind-driven, spread wings of white,

  Long leaning wings across the sea and land;

  The waves creep back, bequeathing to our sight

  The treasure-house of their deserted sand;

  And where the nearer waves curl white and low,

  Knee-deep in swirling brine the slow-foot shrimpers go.

  Pale breadth of sand where clamorous gulls confer

  Marked with broad arrows by their planted feet,

  White rippled pools where late deep waters were,

  And ever the white waves marshalled in retreat,

  And the grey wind in sole supremacy

  O’er opal and amber cold of darkening sky and sea.

  This fictional Rosamund is staying in “a little house behind the sea-wall.” Its door “opened straight from the street into the sitting-room, after the primitive fashion of Lymchurch.” Andrew Dornington is at the Ship, a genuine Dymchurch inn. He observes: “The trees, still gold in calmer homes, stood almost leafless in wild, windy Lymchurch.”7

  In “Rack and Thumbscrew” from Man and Maid, Milly describes Lymchurch as “a glorious place to work,” adding: “Father did reams down there.”8 Edith too found she could work well in Dymchurch. She was not alone. Romney Marsh was a magnet for writers: Henry James, whose writing she emulated in The Literary Sense, lived just sixteen miles away in Lamb House in Rye. Joseph Conrad lived all over Kent. Edgar Jepson remembered meeting him in Dymchurch “one hot summer when he came from his home in the hills above the marsh, bringing his family, to spend the day with [author and journalist] Perceval Gibbon.”9 In 1901 Ford Madox Ford, grandson of painter Ford Madox Brown, moved to Winchelsea, just a twenty-mile cycle along the narrow lanes leading from Dymchurch. It was also in 1901 that H. G. Wells moved his family into Spade House, a house built to his specifications in Sandgate near Folkestone. He celebrated the area in his novel Kipps:

  There were glorious days of “mucking about” along the beach, the siege of unresisting Martello towers, the incessant interest of the mystery and motion of windmills, the windy excursions with boarded feet over the yielding shingle to Dungeness lighthouse . . . wandering in the hedgeless, reedy marsh.10

  Edith returned to Dymchurch every summer for more than a decade, and her improved finances allowed her to rent ever better holiday homes. In 1899 she received her first commission from The Strand Magazine when she was invited to write “The Book of Beasts,” a series of seven stories about dragons. An eighth dragon story was published in their Christmas number. A very generous thirty pounds per story was added to when she collected and published them as The Book of Dragons in 1901. She dedicated it:

  To Rosamund

  chief among those for whom these tales are told

  The Book of Dragons is dedicated in the confident hope

  that she, one of these days, will dedicate a book

  of her very own making

  to the one who now bids

  Eight dreadful dragons

  Crouch in all humbleness

  at those little brown feet.

  It was also in 1899 that T. Fisher Unwin published The Story of the Treasure Seekers on the recommendation of their reader Edward Garnett. He was a mentor to Joseph Conrad and a key influence on the work of D. H. Lawrence, but he had foolishly turned down James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on behalf of the publisher Duckworth in 1915. Although The Story of the Treasure Seekers would become a classic of children’s literature, it did not have an easy start. While individual chapters appeared in Pall Mall Magazine and Windsor Magazine, it was rejected by several publishers, among them Edith’s old collaborator Robert Ellice Mack, who was working for Edinburgh-based publisher Thomas Nelson & Sons by then.

  Perhaps she frightened them off with her terms. She told her agent, William Morris Colles, the first of several to represent her, that she wanted fifty pounds plus a royalty of 16.5 percent. A former solicitor and leader writer for the Standard, Colles was described by publisher William Heinemann as “a big, burly, bearded lawyer with a wheezy infectious laugh—a sort of well-spoken, decent-minded, entirely reputable nineteenth-century Falstaff.” He had founded the Authors’ Syndicate, which he operated under the auspices of the Society of Authors.11 His impressive client list included William Somerset Maugham and George Gissing and, briefly, H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett. Yet he was generally regarded as ineffective. Edith soon replaced him with James Brand Pinker.

  Ultimately, Edith prevailed, and The Story of the Treasure Seekers was published by Christmas 1899. There should have been a second cause for celebration as that year came to a close. In the spring of 1889, Edith, who was forty-one, had discovered she was pregnant. She decided to look for a home in the countryside where she could raise what was to be her last child. In My School Days, she had written longingly of a country childhood:

  Oh, those dewy mornings—the resurrection of light and life in the woods and fields! Would that it were possible for all children to live in the country where they may drink in, consciously or unconsciously, the dear delights of green meadow and dappled woodland! The delight in green things growing, in the tender beauty of the evening light on grey pastures, the glorious splendour of the noonday sun on meadows golden with buttercups, the browns and purples of winter woodlands—this is a delight that grows with ones growth, a delight that “age cannot wither nor custom stale,” a delight that the years who take from us so much can never take away—can but intensify and make more keen and precious.12

  On a lovely spring day she was wandering along a country lane in the Well Hall district north of Eltham in the Royal Borough of Greenwich, verdant with chestnut, hawthorn, lilac blossom, and Queen Anne’s lace. There she stumbled upon a dilapidated eighteenth-century house that stood half a mile from the rural village of Eltham and three miles from Woolwich. It had thirty paneled rooms, a great hall, and vaulted cellars.*

  Edith adored it. She bought out the five-year lease that had been due to run until September 1899 and moved in that May. As soon as she arrived, she began working on The Red House, a celebration of her new home that was published in 1902. Len and his wife, Chloe, travel “through green lanes where hawthorns were budding in pink and pearl” to reach a dilapidated mansion he has inherited:

  The house was hidden almost—at any rate transformed, transfigured—by a network of green leaves and red buds; creepers covered it, all but. And at the side there was jasmine, that in July nights would be starry and scented, and wisteria, purple-flowered and yellow-leaved over its thick gnarled boughs, and ivy. And at the back where the shaky green veranda is over-hung by the perilous charm of the white balcony, Virginia creepers and climbing roses grew in a thorny maze. The moat was there, girdling the old lawns with a belt of silver and on it a sad swan and a leaky boat kept each other company. Yellow laburnums trailed their long hair in the water, and sweet lilac bushes swayed
to look at their pretty plumes reflected in it. To right and left stretched the green tangled mysteries of the overgrown gardens.13

  Just after they moved in, Sidney Webb told his wife, Beatrice:

  The Blands are living in a queer and ramshackle old house, somewhat baronial in 18th-century style, right out in the country, with a moat, swans, wild ducks & rabbits on their own 4½ acres of ground. It is an odd but attractive rough place, which they have on 5-year lease.14

  One American visitor who remarked on the age of the house was surprised by Edith’s response: “It is not really old,” she said. “This part of the house was built in 1740, and the original walls are only five-hundred years old.” Her visitor felt “impossibly youthful.”15

  In “Mr Alden’s Views,” a column for the New York Times, American journalist W. L. Alden confirmed:

  I suppose there is no objection to mentioning what every one in London knows, that “E. Nesbit” is Mrs Bland, and that the story of the “Red House” is in many respects a truthful narrative. I have seen the “Red House” in question and a very attractive place it is, although I have the suspicion that the young people found it rather damp.16

  Berta Ruck, who was a frequent visitor, also confirmed that Edith’s “lovely shabby old house with three ghosts and a moat” was exactly as she had described it in The Red House.17

  The house was in poor repair, and significant renovations were required to make it habitable. The oak staircase collapsed while they were moving in, confining them to the ground floor. Blocked gutters led to flooding in the parlor; precious books and ornate Turkish carpets were destroyed. Edith filled the house with heavy oak furniture, a decision Edgar Jepson attributed to the influence of Oswald Barron, who “collected old oak, a horrible practice, in which she aided him.”18 Her favorite feature was a moat spanned by a fifteenth-century bridge leading to an island lawn, the original site of a Norman manor house occupied by Margaret Roper, eldest daughter of Sir Thomas More.* In the summer the moat was used for swimming and boating. In the winter it made a wonderful skating rink. A red-brick Tudor barn with high chimneys and gables stood on the north side of the moat. There were sheds and stables too, and two Tudor cottages, North Lodge and South Lodge, which they rented to their friends.