The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

  He declared that Edith possessed “a certain essential physical coldness” and sneered that “most of her activity went into the writing of verse, rather insincere verse, rather sentimental stories for adults and quite admirable tales for children.” But his excruciating analysis of her marriage does include a degree of sympathy:

  In the end she became rather a long-suffering lady, but her restless needle of a mind, her quick response, kept her always an exacting and elusive lady. It was I am convinced because she, in her general drift, was radical and anarchistic, that the pose of Bland’s self-protection hardened into this form of gentlemanly conservatism.28

  Although Wells could see that Edith accommodated Hubert’s behavior, he insisted that cracks lay close to the surface of their relationship:

  She acquiesced in these posturings. If she had not, I suppose he would have argued with her until she did, and he was a man of unfaltering voice and great determination. But a gay holiday spirit bubbled beneath her verbal orthodoxies and escaped into her work. The Bastables are an anarchistic lot. Her soul was against the government all the time.

  This discordance of form and spirit lay on the surface of their lives. Most of us who went to them were from the first on the side of the quicksilver wife against the more commonplace, argumentative, cast-iron husband. Then gradually something else came into the ensemble. It came first to the visitor at Well Hall as chance whisperings, as flashes of conflict and fierce resentment, as raised voices in another room, a rush of feet down a passage and the banging of a door.29

  I found these two people and their atmosphere and their household of children and those who were entangled with them, baffling to an extreme degree. At the first encounter it had seemed so extraordinarily open and jolly. Then suddenly you encountered fierce resentment, you found Mrs Bland inexplicably malignant; doors became walls so to speak and floors pitfalls. In that atmosphere you surprised yourself. It was like Alice through the Looking Glass; not only were there Mock Turtles and White Queens and Mad Hatters about, but you discovered with amazement that you were changing your own shape and stature.30

  When George Bernard Shaw attempted to mediate, Wells dismissed him as “an unmitigated middle Victorian ass.” In an excoriating letter, he railed:

  You play about with ideas like a daring garrulous maiden aunt, but when it comes to an affair like the Bland affair you show the instincts of conscious gentility and the judgement of a hen. You write of Bland in a strain of sentimental exaltation, you explain his beautiful, romantic character to me—as though I don’t know the man to his bones. You might be dear Mrs Bland herself in a paroxysm of romantic invention. And all this twaddle about “the innocent little person” [Rosamund]. If she is innocent it isn’t her parents’ fault anyhow.31

  Naturally Shaw had the perfect riposte. He described Wells as “the most completely spoilt child I have ever known.”32

  The debacle with Rosamund damaged the relationship between Wells and Shaw, but the campaign Wells launched to reform the Fabian Society cracked it wide open. Although Wells appeared sincere, Ford Madox Ford claimed he had boasted: “Fordie, I’m going to turn the Fabian Society inside out and then throw it into the dustbin.” Ford was aghast at such disingenuousness and wrote:

  Never would he think of becoming anything so detrimental as a politician. He was just going to upset the society for a lark because it was so dull and pompous and because he wanted to introduce some imagination into its methods . . . and because he wanted to study the methods of politicians. Then he would pull out and write political romances with all the local colour correct.33

  If it was a lark, Wells certainly went to great lengths to pull it off. If he was to be successful, he needed to displace the Fabian Executive, the “Old Gang,” and Hubert was its longest standing member. Wells, who was so compelling on the page, was also a notoriously poor public speaker. In The History of the Fabian Society, Edward Pease noted that he deployed a “low monotonous voice, addressed to a corner of the hall.” This left him “severely handicapped in his contest with the skilled debaters of the ‘Old Gang.’” Undaunted, he launched his campaign by delivering two key lectures early in 1906. His delivery may have been poor, but his content was provocative. The first, “The Misery of Boots,” contained overt criticisms of Sidney and Beatrice Webb but was hailed as a brilliant critique. The second, “Faults of the Fabians,” which fired up an increasingly heated debate, was summarized by Pease:

  On February 9th the great controversy began by the paper entitled “Faults of the Fabians,” read by Mr Wells to a members’ meeting and subsequently issued as a private document to all the members of the society. It was couched altogether in a friendly tone, expressed cordial appreciation of the record of the Society, but criticised it for lack of imaginative megalomania. It was “still half a drawing-room society,” lodged in “an underground apartment,” or “cellar,” with one secretary and one assistant.34

  A special committee was established in response. During 1906 and 1907, debates were conducted at members-only meetings. Since Shaw led for the Fabian Society governing body, the Executive, the controversy narrowed to Wells versus Shaw.

  Many Fabians welcomed this push for reform. The special committee agreed that the Society’s Basis should be rewritten, its name should be changed, its Executive should be enlarged, new members should be recruited, and candidates should be put up for Parliament. Flushed with success, Wells argued that this amounted to a vote of no confidence in the existing Executive. He hoped to win Hubert’s support, but Shaw warned Hubert to tread carefully, so he merely pointed out that, rather than initiating grassroots reform among young Fabians, Wells was representing middle-aged members of the special committee. Although Wells was appointed to the Executive and his ideas were given a fair hearing, he felt he was making no real impact. He broke with the Fabian movement two years later. Shaw summed up the whole affair:

  To Fabian socialist doctrine he [Wells] could add little; for he was born ten years too late to be in at its birth pangs. Finding himself only a fifth wheel in the Fabian coach he cleared out; but not before he had exposed very effectively the obsolescence and absurdity of our old parish and county divisions as boundaries of local government areas.35

  One legacy of all this upheaval was the establishment, at Wells’s suggestion, of an educational and social group that was dubbed the Fabian Nursery. It was open to members aged twenty-eight and under, who were encouraged to attend parties, dances, country rambles, musical entertainments, and lectures. Rosamund was appointed secretary, and Clifford Dyce Sharp was treasurer. When they married in September 1909, Ada Chesterton declared “Clifford Sharp carried off the prize.” Although she acknowledged that he was a “good-looking boy, with shining fair hair and very good nose . . . almost a Georgian type, with an inborn chivalry for women,” she confessed to finding him “painfully priggish and pompous.” She observed that he “gave little promise at that time of his future brilliance, though he was very controversial even then.”36

  Beatrice Webb thought Rosamund “a charming little person . . . with literary tastes and housewifely talents,” but she regarded Sharp as “not a sympathetic or attractive personality,” and added “he has little imagination, he is quite oddly ungracious in his manner.” Sharp had been born into a strict Nonconformist family from Surrey. He abandoned an engineering degree at University College London and worked as a journalist instead. When the Webbs founded the New Statesman in 1913, they appointed him editor.

  By the time Rosamund was married, Wells had embarked on a tempestuous affair with Amber Reeves, another member of the Fabian Nursery. She had been a brilliant undergraduate student and had cofounded the Cambridge University Fabian Society (CUFS), the first to enlist women from its founding. She had a daughter with Wells before she too was married off to a suitable man, a young lawyer named Rivers Blanco White. “I did not arrange to marry Rivers,” she insisted, “he arranged it with H.G., but I have always thought it the best that could
possibly have happened.”37

  Beatrice Webb condemned this “sordid intrigue with poor little Amber Reeves” and insisted that, had her parents known of his attempted seduction of Rosamund, they never would have allowed her relationship with Wells to develop.38 She had good reason to feel ill disposed toward Wells. As Shaw explained, he had “caricatured, abused, vilified and lampooned her again and again.”39 In The New Machiavelli (1910), Wells’s alter ego Dick Remington has an affair with Isabel Rivers, who is a blending of Amber and Rosamund. Beatrice is caricatured as aggressive, domineering Altiora Bailey, a character Beatrice herself described as “really very clever in a malicious way.”40 In early editions Wells lampooned the Blands as the spiteful and intrusive Booles, “queer rivals and allies and under-studies of the Baileys,” but he wrote them out later, or melded them with the Baileys. At one point Remington declares of Mr. Boole:

  I particularly recall a large, active, buoyant, lady-killing individual with an eyeglass borne upon a large black ribbon, who swam about us one evening. He might have been a slightly frayed actor in his large frock-coat, his white waistcoat, and the sort of black-and-white check trousers that twinkle. He had a high-pitched voice with aristocratic intonations and he seemed to be in a perpetual state of interrogation. “What are we all he-a for?” He would ask only too audibly. “What are we doing he-a? What’s the connection?”41

  He characterized Mrs. Boole as “a person of literary ambitions” and “a vulgar careerist aiming only at prominence.” Remington declares that she “writes a poor and slovenly prose and handles an argument badly.” He describes how the Booles “set themselves industriously with all the loyalty of parasites to disseminate a highly coloured scandal”:

  Boole, I found was warning fathers of girls against me as a “reckless libertine,” and his wife, flushed, roguish, and dishevelled, was sitting on her fender curb after dinner, and pledging to little parties of five or six women at a time with infinite gusto not to let the matter go further.42

  Wells includes “a youngster named Curmain” in The New Machiavelli. This man acts as supplementary typist and secretary to both Remington and Mrs. Boole. He is described as a “tall, drooping, sidelong youth with sandy hair, a little forward head and a long thin neck,” and he is almost certainly Jimmy Horsnell. When Remington learns that Curmain has passed letters he received from his young lover Isabel to Mrs. Boole, he remarks that she “wasn’t ashamed to use this information in the service of the bitterness that had sprung up in her since my political breach with the people to whom she had attached herself.”43

  Clifford Sharp edited the New Statesman for many years but was dismissed in 1930 on account of his chronic alcoholism. Afterward he would turn up and sit behind his old desk, drinking whisky and drafting copy. He was a morose drunk. Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf’s husband, described him as “a curiously chilly and saturnine man.”44

  After Sharp lost his job, Rosamund and he were deeply in debt. Desperate for work, she took on some copywriting for an advertising agency. In this capacity she asked Wells to recommend a brand of cigarettes. In her letter, she recalled:

  I remember I gave you promise on the seashore at Dymchurch twenty-two years ago that I would tell you if ever I was stranded. You told me then that Clifford Sharp would be no good to me. How terribly, terribly right you were.45

  She wrote in a letter dated September 3, 1930: “Dear H.G. Clifford came home the other night & thrust a page of ‘The Tatler’ under my nose, saying ‘There’s H.G. for you.’ And it really was.”46

  Rosamund separated from Sharp in 1932, but she took him back a few months later and they lived off her tiny income. Poor Sharp made strenuous attempts to give up alcohol but died of complications related to his alcoholism in 1935. In September 1933 Rosamund had written to Wells:

  By degrees I got used to the idea that I didn’t exist except simply as a thread on which all sorts of odds and ends are stuck together. . . . Yet I am glad so many of your bits stuck.47

  She dedicated The Man in the Stone House (1934), her semi-autobiographical novel, “to my first love and to my last love.” This odd, unsettling book, set on Romney Marsh, documents a love affair between a teenage girl named Monday Wallace and a much older man who resembles Wells. He is “the hero and fascinated villain of all her daydreams.”48 This man tells her: “I’m by way of being an author and I came here to write a book, a book which requires a good deal of thinking about.”49 He wonders if he is “guilty of forcing a bud into too early a blooming.” Rosamund wrote “Her love for him was only a child’s love, he believed but there was sex in it, for all that. Sex flowing in the right channel, to mature later, when the right time came.”50

  * Wallas, a social psychologist and educator, who would cofound the London School of Economics, makes an appearance in Wings and the Child when Edith describes encountering “the Discobolus whom we all love and who is exactly like Mr Graham Wallas in youth.”

  * Horace Horsnell became a playwright, drama critic, and author in his own right, and wrote as “H.H. of the Observer” for a time. He wrote supernatural fiction and is profiled in Shadows in the Attic: A Guide to Supernatural Fiction, 1820–1950.

  CHAPTER 17

  “I WANT THE PLAIN NAKED UNASHAMED TRUTH”

  In April 1905 Edith had written a disconsolate letter to her agent, James Brand Pinker:

  I wish you could get me an order for a serial for grown-up people, something like the Red House. I don’t think it is good for my style to write nothing but children’s books.1

  In 1907, as she was approaching her fiftieth birthday, she took charge of a project she ran with a group of talented, imaginative young men who were in their mid-twenties. One was Francis Ernest Jackson, a poster designer and lecturer in lithography at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Jackson was keen to produce a college magazine, and he discussed this possibility with a colleague, Graily Hewitt, who was a calligrapher. They recruited a mutual acquaintance, Welsh artist Gerald Spencer Pryse, to help them. Pryse, a recent recruit to the Fabian Society and a friend of Arthur Watts, suggested they consult Edith on editorial content.

  Edith had an interest in calligraphy and illumination. She invited the men to Well Hall and undertook to find contributors for this new magazine, which they named The Neolith. Pryse was appointed art editor, Jackson agreed to oversee technical production, and Hewitt took responsibility for calligraphy. They agreed to run the business as a cooperative and to take an equal share of any profit, and they each put up capital of ten pounds to pay for advertising and other expenses. Since they needed a London base, Edith agreed to rent a flat in Royalty Chambers, adjacent to the Royalty Theatre on Dean Street. She described it in her novel Dormant:

  If you mount the steps of the Falstaffe Theatre under the glass roof here the pink geraniums and white daisies make a light that you can see from the end of the street, you will find between the box office and the pit entrance a door, and beside it the legendary “Falstaffe Chambers.” When the theatre is closed, as it quite often is, the ragged children of Soho play about the entrance, and on the lower steps of that staircase elderly little girls sit nursing heavy babies and scolding their little brothers, and the door of Royalty Chambers serves them as shelter, ambush, and hiding place. It is an untidy doorway, through whose door, mostly open, the wind blows dust and straws and scraps of paper. If, picking your way through the clusters of infants, you go up a flight of stone steps, you pass, on your right, the fine rooms where the Management does its business, when it has any. Still ascending, you pass another plate on the door of Mr Ben Burt, where to his name are added the significant words “Correspondence only.” On the floor above you find a brown door on which is whitely painted the word Monolith, and below it “William Bats, Editor.” If you knock on the door and ask for a copy of Monolith, Mr Bats, if he be at home, will tell you that the paper has ceased to appear.2

  Edith and Pryse collaborated on several projects. He illustrated her books These Little Ones, Salo
me and the Head, and The Magic World, and she persuaded the editor of The Strand Magazine to allow him to illustrate The Magic City, although H. R. Millar illustrated the book version (1910). Pryse was also responsible for the arresting images of poverty that accompanied her socialist poem “Jesus in London.”* He adored her sense of fun. With Arthur Watts, he would cycle through the night from London to Dymchurch, arriving there without even a change of clothes. Edith never seemed to mind. She may have been pleased with the distraction, since Watts believed she never enjoyed writing and grew ever more stressed as deadlines approached.

  During one visit the young men built a raft out of old fencing and invited Edith to sit in a wicker chair they had perched on board. When the raft capsized, she ruined her new Liberty dress, but she found the whole episode very funny. She hired a car on another occasion and they set out for London, accompanied by their five dogs: Edith’s dachshunds, Max and Brenda; two greyhounds belonging to Pryse; and a bull terrier owned by Watts. It took them twelve hours to travel seventy miles because the engine kept cutting out and they had several punctures. Edith never lost her cool, even though the dogs fought continuously, and she remained in good spirits throughout.

  Edith adored her dachshunds and often put them into her books. For some reason, when he illustrated The Magic City, Pryse drew them as Dalmatians even though she described them as “dachshunds, very long and low.” Millar did the same in the book version. These dogs were not universally loved. One friend described them as snappy, and Rosamund admitted that they were terribly spoiled. At mealtimes they would rush around the table, then jump onto Edith’s lap. If she had attached their leashes to her chair, she would trip over them when she got up.