The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit
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Edith had been raised in the Anglican faith, but she too converted to Catholicism shortly after Hubert. The faith was fashionable at that time, and neither observed it closely, nor instilled it in their children. They did welcome several Catholic clergymen into their circle, notably the charismatic Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, former Anglican priest and son of an Archbishop. He had converted in 1903 and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1904.
Benson, like Edith, wrote prolifically across several genres: historical, horror, science fiction, children’s stories, plays, apologetics, newspaper articles, and devotional works. His visits to Well Hall were so frequent that they converted a tiny room adjoining his usual bedroom into an oratory. It was he who introduced them to the extraordinary Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe. Rolfe, the eldest son of a piano manufacturer, left school at fourteen but managed to secure employment as a teacher in several London grammar schools. He too converted to Catholicism and thought of becoming a Catholic priest. Sometimes he abbreviated his name to Fr. Rolfe, although it seems he was dismissed from a seminary at Oscott, near Birmingham, and the Scots College in Rome. He returned to England where he made a poor living as, variously, an artist, a photographer, a historian, and a translator.
Rolfe was openly homosexual and enjoyed an intense but ostensibly chaste friendship with Benson. Before their friendship ended abruptly in 1906, they had exchanged letters several times a day. Afterward they satirized each other viciously. Rolfe wrote books as Baron Corvo, and sometimes Frank English, Frederick Austin, A. Crab Maid, and various other unlikely monikers. Critic J. Lewis May described him as a “strange, erratic creature, half-imposter, half-genius.” He wrote for The Yellow Book, and John Lane collected his stories as Stories Toto Told Me in 1898. Reports suggest that when he came to Lane’s office to discuss a further series, he infested a chair with fleas, a legacy of time spent in a Welsh workhouse. May confirmed this:
Corvo, I have heard it said, was not infrequently verminous, and after his departure it was found necessary to treat with abundant doses of insecticide the armchair on which he had reposed.39
Lane described Rolfe as “a gaunt figure shrouded in a tattered mackintosh which might hide anything or nothing.” Yet he spoke with “an arctic highness which strangely contrasted with his frightfully shabby garb.”40 Rolfe in turn described Lane as “a tubby little pot-bellied bantam, scrupulously attired and looking as though he had been suckled on bad beer.”41
Rolfe claimed to own original material relating to the Borgias. Grant Richards published his The Chronicles of the House of Borgia in 1901, and Rolfe invited Hubert to invest thousands of pounds in some related scheme. Hubert turned him down, but Edith and he did attempt to persuade Richards to publish Rolfe’s satirical novel Nicholas Crabbe, A Romance even though it contained a description of Richards as a “scorbutic hobbledehoy” and a “bumptious young thing [with] a silly noddle.” It was so inflammatory and its characters were so identifiable that it was not published until 1958, decades after he died.
During visits to Well Hall, Rolfe struck up an unlikely friendship with John Bland, who remembered him as “a man of charming manners to a child, who knew all about magic and charms, who wore strange rings and told fascinating histories.” Every year on his birthday John would receive a letter from Rolfe. He described these as “so unlike any others I ever received both in substance and in script.” He even modeled his handwriting on Rolfe’s beautiful script, which had been likened to that of a medieval manuscript.42
Rolfe moved abroad when John was still a child, and his final years were marked by extremes of poverty and affluence. He died in Venice in 1913.
It’s clear that Edith and Hubert had a habit of taking in odd waifs and strays. As Nina Griffith told Doris Langley Moore:
Invariably, in the midst of the most distinguished gathering, one would find some weak or wounded creature who was taking shelter at Well Hall—a baby rescued from poverty or illness (who surprisingly appeared at late dinner), a poor relation waiting for a job, a painter seeking recognition, a timid girl whom someone there believed in and encouraged to write stories. No one who knew the Blands could resist seeking their comfort and their counsels in distress.43
The census of 1901 recorded Edith’s old friend Ada Breakell living in the lodge at Well Hall with her younger sister Annie, a district nurse.* Ten years earlier, in 1891, Maggie Doran showed up in the census record for their home at 2 Birch Grove. In 1898 she had taken over her late father’s business and the Beckenham Directory lists “Doran, M. and Co., Dyers” operating out of his old premises, 31 High Street, Beckenham.44 A short time later she contracted pleurisy, and Edith took her in once more. She was nursed by Iris until she was transferred to the Cottage Hospital in Eltham, where she died on March 25, 1903. She was forty-seven years old and she had never married.
Edith’s mother, Sarah, had died the previous year at the age of eighty-four after a long and trying illness. In his letter of condolence, Laurence Housman paid tribute to the “quiet charm” of this “sweet and beautiful character.” Once again Edith sought refuge in Dymchurch. Edgar Jepson recalled:
In the summers we still went to Dymchurch, where we always found the Blands. In those days Dymchurch was just a village. No strangers came to it for weeks on end, and if you wished to go to any place from it, you had to walk, drive, or bicycle . . . In those summers there was very good lawn tennis and bridge at the house of the Squire.45
Berta Ruck described these holidays too: “We bathed, we tramped, we played rounders with her on the sands.”46 She dubbed the houses they rented “an annexe to Well Hall.” The little weather-boarded cottage on the High Street, which they shared with the village post office, became “Well Cottage.” From 1904 to 1911, Edith rented Sycamore House, a substantial Georgian dwelling that had once been the rectory. Since it was let unfurnished, she filled it with second-hand odds and ends sourced from a local dealer. It became “the Other Place.” If visitors were plentiful, she would rent “Well Cottage” too.
It was while she was in Dymchurch that Edith invented her terrifying Ugly-Wuglies, when a scene they were acting out required more characters than they had people. She painted paper faces and mounted them on coat hangers that were hung with clothes, just as her children did in The Enchanted Castle:
The seven members of the audience seated among the wilderness of chairs had, indeed, no insides to speak of. Their bodies were bolsters and rolled-up blankets, their spines were broom-handles, and their arm and leg bones were hockey sticks and umbrellas. Their shoulders were the wooden cross-pieces that Mademoiselle used for keeping her jackets in shape; their hands were gloves stuffed out with handkerchiefs; and their faces were the paper masks painted in the afternoon by the untutored brush of Gerald, tied on to the round heads made of the ends of stuffed bolster-cases. The faces were really rather dreadful. Gerald had done his best, but even after his best had been done you would hardly have known they were faces, some of them, if they hadn’t been in the positions which faces usually occupy, between the collar and the hat. Their eyebrows were furious with lamp-black frowns—their eyes the size, and almost the shape, of five-shilling pieces, and on their lips and cheeks had been spent much crimson lake and nearly the whole of a half-pan of vermilion.47
Edith must have made quite the spectacle as she cycled down to the seafront in her billowing Liberty frocks. She would perch on a rain barrel chatting to the vicar, her amber cigarette holder clenched between her teeth, or wander arm-in-arm with Mrs. Fisher, the woman who cleaned her house. She organized fundraising theatricals for local causes and petitioned for the first garbage cart for the village. This garbage cart was given a heroic role in The New Treasure Seekers:
We heard afterwards that poor, worthy Mr Sandal had climbed a scaffolding to give a workman a tract about drink, and he didn’t know the proper part of the scaffolding to stand on (the workman did, of course) so he fetched down half a dozen planks and the workman, and if a dust-ca
rt hadn’t happened to be passing just under so that they fell into it their lives would not have been spared.48
Kathleen Waters, a young visitor, left a description of Edith at this time:
[She] sat at breakfast . . . hung with beads and jingling silver bangles, and glowing in a flowery crimson dress like a poppy: and those young men about her all talking and arguing. We had our picnic at Hythe Canal and returned home in the evening—only to learn that there was no dinner! Our hostess had forgotten to order it. Quite unperturbed even by the appearance of several extra visitors, she disappeared while we went to dress, and when we came down, there was a perfect meal ready—an omelette about a yard long and some delicious strange drink with excellent coffee to follow. At about 10 o’clock we all bathed by moonlight.49
* Alfred Orage, editor of the New Age, to which Edith contributed regularly.
† Allan Ostler M.C., R.A.F., was a Yorkshire-born war correspondent with the Daily Express and The Standard. On October 16, 1918, he was killed in action, aged thirty-three, while serving as an observer. He had accompanied the Turkish Army to cover the Balkan War in 1912 and 1913. Edith was very friendly with his younger sister Margaret. She sent her inscribed books and dedicated The Enchanted Castle (1907) to her when she was sixteen:
TO MARGARET OSTLER WITH LOVE FROM E. NESBIT
Peggy, you came from the heath and moor,
And you brought their airs through my open door;
You brought the blossom of youth to blow
In the Latin Quarter of Soho
For the sake of that magic I send you here
A tale of enchantments, Peggy dear,
—A bit of my work, and a bit of my heart . . .
The bit that you left when we had to part.
* Ada Breakell died in Wimbledon on November 14, 1943. She had never married and she left her estate of £788 (approximately £35,600, or USD$47,000, today) to her unmarried sister, Maria.
CHAPTER 15
“ALWAYS SURROUNDED BY ADORING YOUNG MEN”
According to Ada Chesterton, Edith was “always surrounded by adoring young men, dazzled by her vitality, amazing talent and the sheer magnificence of her appearance.”1 These would-be disciples vied eagerly for her attention, since they realized that her patronage could benefit their literary careers. She spurned those she thought insincere. Edgar Jepson observed of Alfred Sutro, a partner in a firm of wholesale merchants who had ambitions to be a writer:
It even seemed to him that to round off his Literariness he ought to become one of Mrs Bland’s young men, and he set about becoming one. But she did not see eye to eye with him in the matter. Indeed she spoke to me of his effort with indignation; I gather that she thought it monstrous pretentiousness.2
Sutro succeeded as a playwright and was elected, with Edith, to the dramatic subcommittee of the Society of Authors.
Edith showed no such reticence in befriending Richard Reynolds. This Liverpool-born son of a brigadier general was nine years her junior and a brilliant scholar with a first-class honors degree (the highest undergraduate degree) in Classics from Balliol College, Oxford. A committed socialist, he joined the Fabian Society in 1890 and was appointed secretary. He worked as a barrister and a journalist before taking a job as a schoolmaster. Friends believed that he was passionately in love with Edith for more than a decade. It is possible that she named Richard Bastable, father of the Bastable children, as a tribute to him, since they attended the same college. She put a Richard into Harding’s Luck too.
It was Reynolds who had come to Edith’s aid when Paul contracted typhoid in October 1898 and needed to be kept in isolation. She had agreed to his suggestion that Iris and Rosamund stay in his rooms at Temple, even though they were obliged to sleep on his floor. Reynolds lived at Well Hall for several months. He was there for the census of 1901 but left for Birmingham a short time later to take up a position as schoolmaster at King Edward’s School. During the long school holidays he spent time with Edith in Dymchurch. He accompanied her on boating holidays too, and she mentioned him in a poem she sent to Iris’s friend Douglas Kennedy in June 1902:
Dorothy, dearest of my nieces—
Her dearness breaks one’s heart to pieces;
Iris, most aged of two dear daughters,
Shall dream beside the Medway waters;
And there with Esmond gay will be
Reynolds and Kennedy and me!
Although Kennedy was confined to a wheelchair, he loved boating and accepted her invitation to join them. She appears to have taken an almost motherly interest in him, and he told Doris Langley Moore that she sent him “hundreds of letters.”3 He may have informed her lame boy, Dickie Harding, in Harding’s Luck (1909). Her decision to allow Dickie to escape his disability by traveling back in time to live as able-bodied Richard indicates a troubling sympathy with ideas underpinning eugenics and seems horrifically patronizing now. It seems certain that Kennedy informed Denny in Salome and the Head, since he relies on a wheelchair and lives in a house on the banks of the Medway.
The “Dorothy” Edith mentioned in the first line of her poem was Saretta’s daughter Dorothea Deakin, of whom she was exceptionally fond. She dedicated The Literary Sense to “Dorothea Deakin with the author’s love.” At the time they went boating, Dorothea was twenty-five years old, slim, raven-haired, and strikingly attractive. She had aspirations to be a writer and collaborated with Edith on two one-act plays, The King’s Highway and The Philandrist, or The London Fortune-teller, which were performed in the Woolwich Freemason’s Hall on May 13, 1905. In 1906 Edith asked her agent, James Brand Pinker, to place Dorothea’s novel Georgie, and it was picked up by the Century Company in New York.
When Dorothea’s novel The Wolves of Shiloh was serialized in the London Daily News, an accompanying profile informed readers that she “began writing when she was only sixteen,” adding “the young authoress says that she owed much to ‘E. Nesbit’ in mastering the art of story-writing.”4 Her story “Candle-light,” published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in May 1914, was prefaced by a short poem by Edith.5 She made little impact. The Gloucester Journal described her as “a magazine writer with a pretty style and some originality.”6 She was included in The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction but was merely credited with having “published some fairly tedious comedies of village or country house life.”7
Edith treated Dorothea like a third daughter. In March 1904 she took her to Paris with Iris and Rosamund. Iris was a talented artist and planned to enroll in the life classes offered by the Académie Colarossi. When she showed her work at an Arts and Crafts Exhibition in Hampstead in 1906, the Hampstead and Highgate Express commended: “Miss Iris Bland, daughter of the novelist E. Nesbit, whose exhibit consists of exquisite stenciling on Chiffon.”8 Rosamund too had reason to be in Paris. A tantalizing snippet in The Writer informed readers: “In 1904 a bust of her [Rosamund] appeared in the Paris Salon. It shows a noble, thoughtful face marked by both intellect and beauty.”9 Although the catalog for 1904 includes several busts of young girls, it does not indicate which one is Rosamund.10
Rather than book a hotel, Edith took a furnished flat in Montparnasse where, according to Berta Ruck, a succession of visitors enjoyed “wolf-sized tea out of those two-handled Breton pottery cups with brioches, and cherry jam spread over holey French bread, and many slabs of patisserie.”11 Berta, who was just a little older than Iris, was studying at the Académie Colarossi. They became friends, and she described Iris as “a dark-eyed, witty slip of a girl in a green gown.”12 She must have been thrilled when she discovered Edith was her mother, since she and her siblings were “enraged E. Nesbit fans” who bought The Strand Magazine for her stories alone.13 When they met, she christened Edith “Duchess” after the character in Alice in Wonderland, and described her as “A woman of great vitality and super-abundant energy. Tall, fresh-faced, brown-haired, with brown eyes that both saw and spoke.”*
Berta left a description of Edith at that time:
Edith offered this young woman some liberating advice: “If you aren’t a lady, don’t try to be one,” she said. “Much better stay a free and happy bounder.”15 Berta witnessed her shifting moods, her “dramatic storm-and-brilliance quality,” and recalled:
She could be morose as a gathering thunder-cloud. She could flash into a prima donna’s rage. Having spread panic, blight and depression over the entire household of which one member had displeased her, she would withdraw behind an emphatically-closed door, and there stay, leaving those who loved her to the darkness that can be felt. When she emerged—a sunburst! The entire landscape and population would bask in that genial all-pervading warmth, charm and sympathy that streamed from her—for one half-hour of which I would exchange the life-long friendship of any of your even-tempered, well-balanced, impersonal, tepid, logical Laodiceans.16