The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

  It would appear that grief drove a wedge between them. In her blank verse drama Absalom, or In the Queen’s Garden, Edith appears to suggest that Hubert found consolation with another woman. When Maacah, one of three consorts of King David, learns that their son Absalom has been slaughtered in battle, she is desperate for the king to seek comfort with her, but he turns to one of the others instead.4

  Shortly before Fabian died, the Illustrated London News had commissioned ten new Bastable stories from Edith, which they planned to run between November 1900 and July 1901. An eleventh was requested for their Christmas issue. It was then that Laurence Housman suggested she write about a society for being good. When T. Fisher Unwin published these stories as The Wouldbegoods in September 1901, Edith dedicated it:

  TO

  MY DEAR SON

  FABIAN BLAND

  It was the first in a series that won her acclaim and secured her literary legacy. She paid tribute to Fabian in her Bastable stories. He had earned the nickname “Bloodthirsty Bill” at St. Dunstan’s College in Catford because he was frequently in trouble and showed little respect for authority. In “Bill’s Tombstone,” chapter three of The Wouldbegoods, a mother believes her son has been killed, but he turns up, very much alive: “She met him at the gate, running right into him, and caught hold of him, and she cried much more than when she thought he was dead.”5 Fabian’s most prominent role is as Robert in her Psammead series, and the illustrator H. R. Millar used his own son, who had also died young, as a model for this character. He also informed Richard in Harding’s Luck, Edith’s favorite of her novels. When Dickie, a boy from Deptford, travels back in time and becomes Richard, a kindly nurse declares:

  There are certain children born now and then—it does not often happen, but now and then it does—children who are not bound by time as other people are. And if the right bit of magic comes their way, those children have the power to go back and forth in time just as other children go back and forth in space—the space of a room, a playing-field, or a garden alley. Often children lose this power when they are quite young. Sometimes it comes to them gradually so that they hardly know when it begins, and leaves them as gradually, like a dream when you wake and stretch yourself. Sometimes it comes by the saying of a charm.6

  As Fabian had not been doing well at St. Dunstan’s, he was sent to Loretto, a strict boarding school just outside Edinburgh, but he returned home after six desperately unhappy months. He died shortly afterward. When the children in The Wouldbegoods dress up to play at foxhunting, H.O. wears “the old red football jersey that was Albert’s uncle’s when he was at Loretto.” When they misbehave, Oswald tells readers: “My father said, ‘Perhaps they had better go to boarding-school.’ And that was awful because we know father disapproves of boarding-schools.”7

  After Fabian died Edith buried herself in her work. She retreated into her little study at the top of the house, which she had furnished with “her desk, her chair and one large crock, kept always full of flowers.”8 Berta Ruck remembered seeing “great childish bunches of buttercups and bluebells.”9 She appears to have used her own study as a model for Mother’s workshop in The Railway Children:

  One day when Mother was working so hard that she could not leave off even for ten minutes, Bobbie carried up her tea to the big bare room that they called Mother’s workshop. It had hardly any furniture. Just a table and a chair and a rug. But always big pots of flowers on the window-sills and on the mantelpiece.10

  Hubert had a study on the ground floor, and Berta Ruck remembered hearing him hit a punch bag he had installed there over and over.11

  Edith would work feverishly when deadlines loomed. She filled page after page of the glossy, colored paper she favored before flinging each one to the floor until her desk became an island in a sea of unedited work. At the end of each session, she would gather these pages together to revise them. Such industriousness made 1901 the most lucrative year of her writing career. The three major books published that year were The Wouldbegoods, Thirteen Ways Home, and Nine Unlikely Tales, the stories from each of which had been published in magazines and periodicals earlier. The reviews she was receiving for her adult books make it clear that her talent lay in writing for children, as this damning review of Thirteen Ways Home, published in The Athenaeum, makes clear:

  Thirteen Ways Home, by E. Nesbit (Treherne & Co.), consists of some pretty little stories of the unexpected sort, which mostly end in a happy marriage after not too disquieting obstacles. There is really very little to say about them. We imagine most of them have already appeared in monthly magazines, and it is almost a pity they did not stay there, as they were hardly worth preserving in more permanent form.12

  She borrowed from other writers when writing her stories for children. When Five Children and It was serialized in The Strand Magazine, she paid tribute to F. Anstey, whose story The Brass Bottle, featuring a genie that grants wishes, had been serialized in the same publication two years earlier:

  “It’s like ‘The Brass Bottle,’” said Jane.

  “Yes, I’m glad we read that or I should never have thought of it.”

  Unlike Anstey, she had the ability to write from the perspective of a child and was brilliant at weaving magic and fantasy into their everyday lives. She opened Five Children and It by explaining: “Grown-up people find it very difficult to believe really wonderful things, unless they have what they call proof. But children will believe almost anything, and grown-ups know this.”13

  She also took inspiration from her own life. “The Blue Mountain,” one of the stories from Nine Unlikely Tales, features her grandfather Anthony Nesbit and her nephew, also Anthony, son of her brother Alfred Anthony Nesbit, who had died young in terrible poverty in 1894. During his life, Alfred had made his name but not a fortune as an inventor and was lauded as “an analytical and consulting chemist of great attainments.”14 An ink he had developed to prevent the fraudulent alteration of checks and postage stamps was praised in Scientific American but was never put to commercial use.15 Similarly, his experiments on the action of colored light on carp were reported in the Journal of Science in June 1882.16 His most celebrated experiment, perhaps, was his system for dyeing flowers, which was featured in The Globe under the heading “Painting the Lily” in July 1882.17 It was his ingenuity that made it possible for Oscar Wilde and several of his young male friends to wear emblematic green carnations to the opening night of Lady Windermere’s Fan on February 20, 1892. In September 1913, almost two decades after his death, Edith wrote a letter to The Globe that was published under the heading “Chemicals and Flowers”:

  Sir,—In your issue of to-day, under the head “Chemicals and Experiments,” you state that Mr Leonard Bastin has been writing about methods of changing the colour of flowers. The discoveries treated of were made by my brother, Anthony Nesbit, in 1882, in which year flowers coloured by him were sent to Queen Victoria, and a bouquet of flowers coloured by him was presented to the then Princess of Wales, at the Savage Club. The discoveries were made in the course of experiments dealing with the veining of flowers and are chronicled, if my memory serves me, in the “Daily Telegraph,” January 1883, among the scientific discoveries of the year. My brother is dead, and so I venture to write to claim for him the little sprig of laurel which crowns the discovery of these pretty and interesting experiments.18

  On Christmas Eve 1879, Alfred had married Zara Ann Rogerson Tuxford, the daughter of George Parker Tuxford, in whose Barnes home his father had died. Their first child, John Caleb Anthony Nesbit, was born in 1881, making him almost exactly the same age as Iris. A daughter, Zara Antonia, born in 1884, was close in age to Fabian. On September 15, 1891, a notice in the Bankruptcy Gazette confirmed that “A.A. Nesbit, Analytical Chemist” had been declared bankrupt. Two years later, on September 7, 1893, he was admitted to Gray’s Inn Road Workhouse but discharged after just four days. Six months later, on March 19, 1894, he died of “pulmonary tuberculosis exhaustion.” He was just thirty-nine yea
rs old.

  Edith often included chemists and inventors in her stories. One of the characters in The Red House is an “experimental chemist.” A clever young chemist in Dormant inherits a title, a fortune, and a family mystery. John Rochester in The Lark (1922) “knows all about chemistry and dyes and engines and dynamite and all sorts.” He declares, “rather bitterly,” “I shall invent something some of these days, and then you can have all the social and financial advancement you want.”19 Her Mr. Bastable is an absentminded inventor whose business failure prompts his children to seek a family fortune. They visit a workhouse on Christmas Day in The Wouldbegoods. Rather than encountering hardship there, the matron invites them to tea and ushers them into “a very jolly room with velvet curtains and a big fire, and the gas lighted.” The food is excellent and entertainment is lively. In contrast, in The Incredible Honeymoon she wrote of “the great terror of the poor—the living tomb which the English call the Workhouse.”20

  Since Alfred’s family was left penniless, Edith did what she could for them. In May 1896 she wrote to the Reverend C. H. Grinling, secretary of the London (Woolwich) branch of the Charity Organisation Society, to explain that “all the money we can spare has to go to my sister-in-law and her children.”21 She also helped Zara find literary work. Anthony trained as an analytical chemist, and Zara Antonia was a teacher at a London County Council school, but after a time they all left for Australia, where Edith’s brother Harry and various other family members lived.

  Edith dedicated Oswald Bastable and Others to “my dear niece Anthonia [sic] Nesbit.” By then, her fortunes were improving, and much of her income came from The Strand Magazine. Yet her relationship with this publication developed slowly. Although her dragon stories, serialized in 1899, had been popular with readers, the magazine commissioned just three stories from her in 1900 and none at all in 1901. This all changed in 1902, when she submitted nine interlinked stories that featured a magical sand fairy and five children who bore an uncanny resemblance to her own.

  Harold Robert (H. R.) Millar, a young Scottish graphic artist who had trained as a civil engineer, was asked to illustrate Five Children and It. His ability to render her characters so perfectly, her Psammead in particular, astounded Edith. She suggested they must be connected through some form of telepathy, but he assured her that his precision owed much to her detailed, evocative descriptions. Millar was the perfect collaborator since he could accommodate her chronic tardiness and complete half a dozen elaborate drawings in just a couple of days. She always apologized profusely and promised to alter her story to fit his drawings. They had worked together for several years before they met for the first time, at a party she hosted to introduce him to their young fans.

  Fabian’s death cast a pall over the Blands’ home, but after a time they opened it to their friends once more. After all, as Edgar Jepson put it, Edith and Hubert were “the most hospitable creatures in the County of London.”22 H. G. Wells described Well Hall as “a place to which one rushed down from town at the week-end to snatch one’s bed before anyone else got it.”23 Berta Ruck regarded it as “a place of infinite hospitality, a house of call for an infinite variety.” She insisted that she “could turn up at any time without invitation.”24 One evening each week was devoted to political speeches, and thirty to forty invited guests would be seated in rows in the grand hall as if they were at a public event. Berta Ruck remembered meeting Laurence Housman, Noel and Nina Griffith, and Cecil Chesterton, who she described as “cherubic and argumentative.”25 In The Chestertons (1941), Cecil’s wife, Ada, described their visits to what she described as “the headquarters of enthusiastic youth, artists, writers, flaming socialists and decorous Fabians”:

  Every Saturday evening Well Hall, a huge old house, rambling and romantic, was thrown open. We used to crowd into the long, low drawing-room and listen to a challenging speech on some vexed topic. H.G. Wells, Orage,* and some of the Fabian Executive would turn up fairly regularly and contribute to the discussion. Names that later became notable in Fleet Street were familiar, Ivor Heald, the white-headed boy of the [Daily] Express, and Allan Ostler,† both of them brilliant and both killed in the Great War. Oliver Onions was another habitué, with his wife Bertha Ruck.

  Ada thought very highly of Edith and wrote of her:

  She was a wonderful woman, large hearted, amazingly unconventional but with sudden strange reversions to ultra-respectable standards. Her children’s stories had an immense vogue, and she could write unconcernedly in the midst of a crowd, smoking like a chimney all the while.26

  If guests arrived at the front of the house they would find a placard informing them: “The Front Door Is at the Back!” This was because the front door opened directly into the long hall where dinner was served, and drafts were not welcome. Those who arrived early would often find Hubert and Edith hard at work. Mary Milton, the doctor’s daughter, remembered Hubert striding out of his den, immaculate in evening dress, his indispensable monocle pressed firmly in place. Edith would then appear at the top of the stairs, “radiant” in a vibrant, flowing silk dress paired with Turkish slippers. Along her arms jangled dozens of silver bangles, each one presented to her by Hubert to celebrate her finishing a book. She wore them always, even when bathing.

  Ada Chesterton left a vivid description of Edith:

  She was a very tall woman, built on the grand scale, and on festive occasions wore a trailing gown of peacock blue satin with strings of beads and Indian bangles from wrist to elbow. Madame, as she was always called, smoked incessantly, and her long cigarette holder became an indissoluble part of the picture she suggested—a raffish Rossetti, with a long full throat and dark luxuriant hair, smoothly parted.27

  Edith would serve her guests a late dinner at their long table in the great hall, which she had covered with dozens of roses from her garden and adorned with elaborate silver candelabra. When her bank balance was healthy, she would hire foreign chefs who kept the kitchen maids on their toes by creating a “ballroom atmosphere in the kitchen.”28 Nina Griffith described these dinners as “chancy” and recalled two Swiss chefs who conjured up exquisite dishes, among them a dessert of tiny white sugar chalets, each with a real light inside. When money was scarce, guests were served simpler fare—a gigantic soup-tureen of haricot beans followed by a block of cheese and apples from the orchard. There was always plenty of wine, red and white, served in exquisite Venetian bottles.29

  Afterward everyone retired to the drawing room, which had been cleared for dancing. Edith would accompany her guests on the piano, playing Sir Roger de Coverley, an English country dance, or perhaps the Lancers, which was a variant of the quadrille. She would finish with an energetic Gallop. Berta Ruck described how “cigarette in mouth, coloured Liberty draperies streaming over the piano stool, [she] would sit at the piano playing for Rosamund to sing.” Sometimes they would exaggerate some “sloppy English drawing room ballad, such as ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song.’”30

  There were games too. Edith was particularly fond of charades. Another favorite of hers was “Subjects and Adjectives,” where players would choose a noun from one hat and two adjectives from another before writing a verse using all three. They also played whist, piquet, patience, and chess. Boisterous games included hide-and-seek and devil in the dark, which was abandoned because it caused too much damage to their furniture. Of course, there was always talk, lots of it, and it continued late into the night. Then trains would be missed and guests would be obliged to stay the night. Next morning they would eat breakfast with Paul before he left for his job in the City, the financial district in London.

  The children were encouraged to invite their friends. As Nina Griffith reported, “the children were never shut away, and gave their opinions as definitely and dogmatically as the rest of us.”31 She remembered that Hubert in particular was perfectly happy to defer to youth. Berta Ruck remembered how Edith would “cuddle [John] on her lap, smile, and join animatedly in the general conversation.”32 “It is as wel
l to live with three generations at once,”she declared, “your own, your elders and the younger ones.”33 One young guest recalled “very lively” gatherings during which they acted out plays Edith had written and wore elaborate costumes she had made for them. Another young woman found these gatherings excruciating, particularly when everyone was asked to “give a song”: “I hated them,” she insisted. “I also hated Mrs Bland. She snubbed the girls and flattered the boys.”34

  Invitations were reciprocated, and Arthur Ransome remembered one gathering at G. K. Chesterton’s flat near Battersea Park in 1904:

  Here I met E. Nesbit and her husband, the rather florid Hubert Bland, with his monocle dangling from a broad silk ribbon, a confident, blustering creature for whose work both Chestertons had an exaggerated respect and I had none, though I had a great deal for the works of his wife.35

  Toward the end of 1900, shortly after Fabian died, Hubert was received into the Catholic Church. He insisted that he was a lapsed Catholic who had returned to the fold, but it seems he was brought up Nonconformist, possibly Plymouth Brethren. In any case, he demonstrated little interest in organized religion. In 1888, when he stood as a school board candidate for Finsbury division, he had advocated “the entire omission of religious teaching of every kind from the curriculum of rate aided schools.”36 Cecil Chesterton, who was also a Catholic convert, believed Hubert “was Catholic because he felt that if one were to have a religion it must be a religion at once traditional and dogmatic.”37 They both joined the Church Socialist League when it was established in 1906. Hubert wrote “Socialism and the Catholic Faith” for the Catholic Socialist Society, and this pamphlet was mentioned by Sean O’Casey in his play Drums Under the Window (1945):

  Socialism Made Easy, a penny a copy, only a penny the copy; tuppence each, Can a Catholic be a Socialist? only tuppence each, the truth for tuppence; Hubert Bland’s great work, Can a Catholic be a Socialist?38