The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

  Poor Dorothy is dead at Lugano after years of suffering. Seems hard that she should be taken from her three little children and I should be left a withered tree.35

  * According to Ruck, Edith referred to her eyes as green.

  * Watts lived overseas for long periods and lost touch with the Bland family. He was killed in July 1935 when a KLM flight from Milan to Amsterdam via Frankfurt crashed in the Italian Alps. He had been rushing home to be with his second wife, who had given birth to their third child days earlier.

  † Forman was among the 1,198 passengers who perished when the Lusitania was torpedoed on May 7, 1915. He was thirty-nine and had been traveling in the hope of selling his only play, The Hyphen. Before boarding he received an anonymous phone call warning him that the Lusitania would be blown up, but he disregarded it as a practical joke. His body was never identified.

  * Afterward Lamert worked for the London Financial News and edited the Money Market Review. He was appointed chairman and managing director of Thomas de la Rue & Company Limited, a specialist printing company. He developed an interest in politics and was unsuccessful in contesting the Buckrose (Yorkshire East Riding) constituency as a Liberal candidate in 1929. He married Elizabeth (née Sheepshanks), and they had a daughter, Margaret.

  * Dorothea and Richard’s youngest daughter, Pamela, a poet, died in mysterious circumstances when she apparently fell from a cliff on March 27, 1935. She was twenty years old. Diana, their eldest daughter, also died young. Richard married for a second time in November 1935, but his wife, Edith Harriet Weston, an American, died less than four months later. He left for America in 1940 but returned to Capri in 1947 and died there on December 22.

  CHAPTER 16

  “ERNEST, I’VE COME TO STAY”

  When Graham Wallas,* a fellow Fabian, introduced Edith to science fiction writer H. G. Wells in 1902, she was amused to discover that, although familiar with her work, he had always assumed she was a man. To perpetuate the joke, Wells took to calling her “Ernest” every time they met. On one memorable occasion, he turned up at Well Hall, suitcase in hand, and announced, “Ernest, I’ve come to stay.” Wells, the son of a lady’s maid and a gardener turned shopkeeper, had endured a miserable, impoverished youth blighted by depression and an overwhelming sense of doom. On reading Darwin’s theories, he became convinced that evolution would lead inevitably to extinction. He was exceptionally clever and was awarded a scholarship to the Normal School of Science (now Imperial College London) to train as a science teacher. When ill health cut his teaching career short, he turned to journalism instead.

  In 1891 Wells married his cousin Isabel, but the marriage ended when he left her for one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he nicknamed “Jane.” They lived together for a time and were married in 1895. Wells was plagued by ill health but in 1901, after he was treated by a doctor in Kent, he felt so much better that he moved to the coastal village of Sandgate with Jane and their two young sons. He was delighted to learn that Edith and Hubert could often be found in nearby Dymchurch, just a few miles along the coast. He knew them from the Fabian Society, which he joined in 1903, and he later described them in Experiment in Autobiography, although he had fallen out with them by then:

  E. Nesbit was a tall, whimsical, restless, able woman who had been very beautiful and was still very good-looking; and Bland was a thick-set, broad-faced aggressive man, a sort of Tom-cat man, with a tenoring voice and a black ribboned monocle and a general disposition to dress and live up to that.1

  Jane and he were invited to Well Hall and learned to play badminton there. Wells recalled:

  She [Edith] ran a great easy-going hospitable Bohemian household at Well Hall, Eltham, an old moated house with a walled garden. Those who loved her and those who wished to please her called her royally “Madame” or “Duchess,” and she had a touch of aloof authority which justified that.2

  Edith thought highly of Wells as a writer and valued his opinion on her work. He wrote to congratulate her on The Literary Sense, which he liked “immensely,” but he was less impressed with Thirteen Ways Home, since he found it too sentimental. She hated to be criticized and chided in response:

  Love is not always the detestable disintegration that you pretend to think it. Sometimes, and much oftener than you admit, it is “nice straight cricket.” Anyhow one wishes it to be that—you do, too.

  She closed this letter by scolding: “But it is a dreadful thing, and one of the curses of middle age to forget how to be sentimental.”3

  In December 1904, in a letter he addressed to “’Steamed Lady,” Wells expressed huge admiration for The Phoenix and the Carpet and assured Edith that the Phoenix was the greatest of her characters. “Your destiny is plain,” he wrote:

  You go on every Xmas never missing a Xmas, with a book like this, and you will become a British Institution in six years from now. Nothing can stop it. Every self-respecting family will buy you automatically and you will be rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and I knock my forehead on the ground at your feet in the vigour of my admiration of your easy artistry.4

  In 1905 Wells gave Edith a presentation copy of The Time Machine inscribed “To E. Nesbit from H.G. Wells and thank God for her.” After his A Modern Utopia was serialized in the Fortnightly Review, she assured him: “I’ve read your Utopia again. I don’t disagree as much as I thought.”5 She mentioned his The Time Machine in her story “The Dwellers,” which she wrote in April 1909 after they had fallen out:

  Why not cave dwellers, who had gone on unsuspected by the busy world—like in Mr Wells’ “Time Machine”–lurking underground. I did wish then that I hadn’t read the “Time Machine.”6

  In happier times she put him into The Story of the Amulet:

  “Why do you call him ‘Wells’?” asked Robert, as the boy ran off. “It’s after the great reformer—surely you’ve heard of HIM? He lived in the dark ages, and he saw that what you ought to do is to find out what you want and then try to get it. Up to then people had always tried to tinker up what they’d got. We’ve got a great many of the things he thought of. Then ‘Wells’ means springs of clear water. It’s a nice name, don’t you think?”

  Just as she had asked Kipling, Edith asked Wells, an accomplished cartoonist, if he would contribute an illustrated piece to the children’s magazine she was planning. They were exchanging playful letters at the time. In one she confessed to her dislike of housework:

  Directly I got home the horrors of housekeeping clawed me, and I’ve lived in a wild whirl of misery ever since. . . . It is most horribly hard on women who work; that they should have, as well, to constantly fight with beasts at Ephesus—I mean in the kitchen.7

  On one occasion she asked Wells if she might bring Berta Ruck and Richard Reynolds to meet him. Berta was particularly keen since she admired him hugely and regarded him as “the determined fighting champion for better things on earth.” She remembered: “I knew him when his zenith was approaching. He was beginning to be acclaimed as a prophet who would leave his imprint on the generations.”8

  When Wells turned up unannounced during the summer of 1905, Edith was delighted. He stayed for a week and sat in her lovely garden working on a first draft of his novel In the Days of the Comet; it was published the following year. Once his day’s writing was done, he joined energetic games of badminton. This was a habit of Edith’s too. Berta Ruck confirmed that she would write a chapter of three to five thousand words, send it to be typed, then head outdoors to do “some quite hefty gardening” or play “a hard game of badminton.”9

  While Wells was with them, Edith organized evening tableaux and charades themed on the titles of his books. He read fairy tales to John, aged six, flirted with nineteen-year-old Rosamund, and stayed up until two or three in the morning chatting with his hosts and fellow guests. Richard Reynolds was there, as was Marshall Steele’s daughter Enid, and a young man named Horace Horsnell, who was known affectionately as “Jimmy.” Horsnell was working as Edith’s secretary
at the time, a role he occupied on and off for eight years.* They knew each other because he had shared rooms with Arthur Watts, “Oswald in Paris.” Edith dedicated Daphne in Fitzroy Street to him.

  Wells invited Edith to visit Spade House on her way to Dymchurch later that year; “Miss Ruck and Enid and Reynolds count as Blands,” he assured her. Since Jane and he could not accommodate the full party, he suggested they come in “ones and twos and threes” like a “circulating library.” He set aside, for the full month of September, a bedroom with two beds, which he christened “the Well Hall room.” He even planned to “erect a sort of badminton.”

  Rosamund was showing an interest in writing at the time, and Wells threatened playfully to “go thoroughly into the sorrows of an incipient literary career” while she was there. Turning to Iris, he admitted, “I never have talked to Iris.”10 Although Iris was artistic, she was far less flamboyant than her half-sister. Ada Chesterton commented on this:

  With such magnetic personalities in the family Paul Bland and his sister Iris were overshadowed, but Rosamond [sic], the other sister, was too dominant to be obscured. Dark and comely, with a full figure and lovely eyes, she was very attractive, and many of the older men completely lost their heads over her.11

  Ironically, it was Rosamund, or “Rom,” who was most like Edith. In “To a Child (Rosamund),” a poem from The Rainbow and the Rose, Edith called her “my little lovely maid.” Everyone assumed they were close, and several people remembered Rosamund singing sweetly to Edith’s accompaniment, their lovely melody floating out through the balconied window of the upstairs drawing room and across the rose garden. When Berta Ruck learned the truth, she exclaimed: “You’re so like her! . . . How could one have thought—! I should have said the most like of all her children,” to which Rosamund responded serenely: “I know. Convenient . . . that we’ve all got these brown eyes.”12

  Edith was horrified by Wells’s threat. “Don’t, please don’t discourage Rosamund,” she begged:

  She must earn her living. If Hubert and I were to die she’d have to earn it at once: I want her to be able to earn it by writing—and not to have to go into a shop or be a humble companion.13

  Opportunities for young women were limited at the time, and she encouraged Rosamund’s precocious talent. In 1908 a profile in The Writer informed readers: “Miss Bland began to write at an early age, and there are in existence verses of hers accompanied by her own illustrations executed at the age of five.”14 When she was fifteen she collaborated with Edith on Cat Tales (1902), a slight picture book published by Nister in London and Dutton in New York. Although it is attributed to “E. Nesbit and Rosamund E. Bland,” Edith’s name is considerably more prominent on the cover. Rosamund also wrote stories as “Rosamund Edith Nesbit Bland,” but she never came close to emulating Edith’s success.

  In October 1905 Wells returned to Well Hall accompanied by Jane. Edith was completing the final chapters of The Railway Children at the time. She was halfway through The Story of the Amulet, which was being serialized in The Strand Magazine, and she was working on The Magician’s Heart too. Shortly afterward, she wrote to tell them: “I have finished The Railway Children which has sat on my bent and aged shoulders for nearly a year!!!!!!!” Perhaps that’s why “Jimmy” Horsnell could accept Jane Wells’s invitation to come to Spade House and help her type up her husband’s work. He worked for them on and off for years.

  Edith, Iris, and Rosamund planned to visit the Wellses in December 1905, but they postponed when Iris fell ill with suspected appendicitis. Once she was well, she asked if she might visit her fiancé John Austen Philips, and Edith went with her. When they finally got to Spade House in January, Edith was out of sorts. She apologized for having been a “dull guest” in her thank-you letter. When the Wellses came to Well Hall in early spring, Rosamund was staying with the Steele family. She wrote to tell them “the only thing I have to look forward to is my visit in April.” Iris wrote too, asking Jane in an intriguing postscript not to reply, since she, Iris, was “so much disliked at head quarters now-a-days” that she would “surely answer back” if she was asked awkward questions.15

  There was always some drama playing out. As Wells wrote of Edith and Hubert:

  The two of them dramatized life and I had as yet met few people who did that. They loved scenes and “situations.” They really enjoyed strong emotion.

  He observed that, when the Blands were around, “rumour moved darkly and anonymous letters flitted about like bats at twilight.”16 Recalling “an atmosphere of talk, charades, mystifications and disputes,” he remarked:

  All this E. Nesbit not only detested and mitigated and tolerated, but presided over and I think found exceedingly interesting. Everywhere fantastic concealments and conventions had been arranged to adjust these irregularities to Hubert’s pose of ripe old gentility. You found after a time that Well Hall was not so much an atmosphere as a web.17

  Wells was an unapologetic and open advocate for free love and, like Hubert, had numerous affairs, some more significant than others. Apparently Hubert spoke often to him of his illicit romances. Wells wrote:

  He would give hints of his exceptional prowess. He would boast. . . . He was, he claimed to me at least, not so much Don Juan as Professor Juan. “I am a student, an experimentalist,” he announced, “in illicit love.”

  He believed Hubert enjoyed the deception:

  It had to be “illicit” and that was the very gist of it for him. It had to be the centre of a system of jealousies, concealments, hidings, exposures, confrontations, sacrifices, incredible generosities—in a word, drama. What he seemed most to value was the glory of a passionate triumph over openness, reason and loyalty—and getting the better of the other fellow. The more complex the situation was, the better it was fitted for Bland’s atmosphere.18

  Tensions came to a head after Wells became involved with Rosamund, a liaison he attempted to justify in H.G. Wells In Love:

  In that hothouse atmosphere of the Bland household at Dymchurch and Well Hall I found myself almost assigned as the peculiar interest of Rosamund, the dark-eyed sturdy daughter of Bland and the governess Miss Hoatson. Rosamund talked of love and how her father’s attentions to her were becoming unfatherly. I conceived a great disapproval of incest, and an urgent desire to put Rosamund beyond its reach in the most effective manner possible, by absorbing her myself.19

  This accusation was highly damaging, and Wells cited no evidence to support it. But Hubert did have an oddly intimate relationship with his daughter; he dedicated Letters to a Daughter to her, writing “we have been as intimate as most fathers and daughters; more intimate I fondly think.”20 He was clear about the nature of this intimacy, and explained:

  His daughter is the only woman in all the world for whom a man five-and-twenty years her senior can feel no stir of passion, no trace of that complex emotion that modern novelists and people of that sort are so pleased to call sex-love; the only woman from whom he cannot possibly evoke passion in return.21

  Exactly what happened between Rosamund and Wells remains unclear. Accounts suggest that, sometime during the summer of 1908, Hubert, accompanied by Clifford Dyce Sharp, a young Fabian, intercepted them at Paddington station. They may have been eloping or simply heading to Paris for the weekend. There is some suggestion that Rosamund may have been disguised as a boy, which would indicate it was all a bit of a lark. Various reports suggest that Hubert hauled Wells off a train and punched him. Certainly, in Letters to a Daughter, he had promised to “punch a man who tried to take you away from me.”22 Wells played the whole thing down and denied any genuine interest in Rosamund, but he confided in Violet Hunt, another of his lovers: “I have a pure flame for Rosamund who is the Most—Quite!”23

  According to Alice, Edith was incandescent with rage and sent an abusive letter to Jane Wells. Wells commented on this too:

  Miss Hoatson, whose experiences of life had made her very broad-minded, and who had a queer sort of liking for me, d
id not seem to think this would be altogether disastrous for her daughter; but presently Mrs Bland, perceiving Hubert’s gathering excitement in the tense atmosphere about us, precipitated accusations and confrontations. Bland stirred up her strain of anti-sexual feeling. She wrote insulting letters to Jane, denouncing her tolerance of my misbehaviour which came rather oddly from her.24

  He gave his version of what had transpired:

  Rosamund was hastily snatched out of my reach and, in the resulting confusion, married to an ambitious follower of my party in the Fabian Society, Clifford Sharp—and so snatched also out of the range of Hubert’s heavy craving for illicit relations. It was a steamy jungle episode, a phase of coveting and imitative desire, for I never found any great charm in Rosamund . . . in that damned atmosphere that hung about the Blands, everyone seemed impelled towards such complications; it was contagious . . . 25

  This episode provoked a breach between Wells and the Blands, and he labeled them “the strangest of couples.”26 Dismissing Hubert as “a tawdry brain in the Fabian constellation,” he observed:

  The incongruity of Bland’s costume with his Bohemian setting, the costume of a city swell, top-hat, tail-coat, greys and blacks, white slips, spatterdashes and that black-ribboned monocle, might have told me, had I had the ability then to read such signs, of the general imagination at work in his persona, the myth of a great Man of the World, a Business Man (he had no gleam of business ability) invading for his own sage strong purposes this assembly of long-haired intellectuals. This myth had, I think, been developed and sustained in him, by the struggle of his egoism against the manifest fact that his wife had a brighter and fresher mind than himself, and had subtler and livelier friends.27