The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

  From the start she was all for women’s Causes. Yet this was a story the every-sided woman told us, at Grez, about herself when young in a house-party of the (then) Ultra Emancipated. “They talked and they talked and they talked for hours of Woman’s Rights. You never”—Here E. Nesbit took out her cigarette, drew down her lips, and let that ineffable blank grimace widen her eyes—“you never heard so much about the Enfranchisement of Women. At last Miss——” a girlhood’s friend—“and I were able to stagger to our bedroom and take out our hair-pins and shake out our hair and I was just able to say faintly: “Now let’s have a nice long talk ALL ABOUT YOUNG MEN!’”25

  Edith held extraordinarily traditional views on gender, although she rarely fulfilled the role of a traditional woman herself. In “The Goodwife’s Occupation Gone,” she lamented the decline of the traditional household:

  Homes are ceasing to exist, and housewives, as our grandmothers understood the word, are no more. Well-to-do women keep servants to relieve them of the work of the house, and the mistress no longer finds it needful or desirable to practise the household arts in which her grandmother excelled. From the stores she can order the sheets ladies used to weave and hem, the clothing ladies used to cut out and make, the stockings ladies used to knit, and the kerchiefs they used to embroider. The kind of life she lives can be sustained on machine made things and the steamroller we call civilisation has gone over all the old occupations of women: occupations calling for patience, energy, imagination, and a host of little kindly virtues. It has crushed individuality out of the home, and it is crushing the home out of the house.26

  In “Miss Lorrimore’s Career,” published in Sylvia’s Journal in February 1894 alongside an article titled “Women in Journalism,” her Miss Lorrimore is in possession of “brave independence.” She makes her living as a journalist and is a better researcher than any of the male writers she meets in the British Museum Reading Room. When she turns down a proposal of marriage from a fellow journalist, she declares, “I have a paper on old maids to finish for the Globe.” But she abandons her research because it makes her fearful. A friend remarks that he rarely sees her name in print and that she has grown “a bit thin and seedy looking.” She agrees to marry her rejected admirer, declaring: “I don’t care about independence now . . . I don’t want independence, I want you.”27

  Edith could be very contradictory. In “The Slaves of the Spider” she decried those women who were willing to be tricked into buying the latest fashions:

  Wasting time, thought, money, brains, heart and energy, not on inventing or making, or causing to be made, beautiful garments, distinguished and individual, but in a passionate, delirious, all-absorbing effort to wear what other people are wearing.28

  She interpreted this as proof of women’s unfitness to wield power:

  It has been said that any claim which women may make to equal rights and political privileges can never be taken seriously so long as women follow the fashion. And the observation is just. The long, glittering line of Oxford Street alone, with its shop after shop devoted entirely to different kinds of clothes and ornaments for women, shouts a negative to the Woman’s Rights question. Our fashion papers, blossoming week by week with the exotic flower of some new absurdity; our daily Press, with its woman’s page, and its serious treatment of a thousand feminine fripperies; the very existence, the prosperous existence, of these things proves more convincingly than a whole library of anti-feminist tracts that the great mass of women are not as yet fitted for the use of power and responsibility; and, what is more, that they do not really desire these.29

  When war was declared in 1914, Edith castigated the frivolity of women who “could find no more engrossing thoughts than lace petticoats and new skirts six yards round.” She contrasted this with the “example men had set to the world by their magnificent valour and the splendour of their endurance,” and she warned of austere times to come when regret would bite hard.30

  Edith held young women, her own daughters included, to an impossible and undesirable standard. Yet she allowed her fictional girls far more latitude; they could be brave and resilient. In The Magic City (1910) her adult Pretenderette, a nasty, spiteful nursemaid, appears to lampoon the suffragette movement. Yet an edict decrees: “Girls are expected to be brave and the boys, kind.” In The House of Arden, Elfrida is consistently braver than her brother Edred. One passage is particularly insightful:

  Elfrida did not understand. How should she? It’s almost impossible for even the most grown up and clever of us to know how women used to be treated—and not so very long ago either—if they were once suspected of being witches. It generally began by the old woman’s being cleverer than her neighbours, having more wit to find out what was the matter with sick people, and more still to cure them . . . from “wise woman” to witch was a very short step indeed.

  She included this radical exchange in The Railway Children:

  “Can girls help to mend engines?” Peter asked doubtfully.

  “Of course they can. Girls are just as clever as boys, and don’t you forget it! How would you like to be an engine-driver, Phil?”

  “My face would be always dirty, wouldn’t it?” said Phyllis, in unenthusiastic tones, “and I expect I should break something.”

  “I should just love it,” said Roberta,—“do you think I could when I’m grown up, Daddy? Or even a stoker?”

  Her women protagonists do occasionally earn their living, but they generally follow conventional courtship plots and aspire to marry a suitable young man. In “The Girton Girl” her Laura Wentworth, who is “handsome and learned,” likens marriage to slavery but marries a young man she saves from drowning. The closest Edith came to writing an emancipated woman was Sandra in Salome and the Head. She flees a dysfunctional marriage and supports herself as an interpretive dancer. Edith based her on the scandalous Maud Allan, who was billed as “The Salomé Dancer” when she toured England in 1908.

  In contrast, Edith used her horror stories to critique traditional marriages and allowed women to occupy more fluid gender roles. In “Man-size in Marble” a young husband courts disaster by dismissing his sensible wife’s legitimate concerns. In “Hurst of Hurstcote” a controlling husband commands the soul of his deceased wife to remain in her body until he too is dead. In “From the Dead” another husband, who is overtaken by masculine instincts, chastises his wife too harshly. She haunts him after she dies.

  Edith may have been inconsistent on the woman question, but her support for socialism never wavered. She shared Hubert’s concern for exploited working-class women whom they wished to restore to what they regarded as their rightful place in the home. In his essay “To the Emperor of Japan” Hubert railed:

  In spite of the deep-rooted conviction of ours as to woman’s sphere (we always call it woman’s sphere) being purely domestic, many hundreds of thousands of women in England are working outside of that sphere, working in factories and fields for their living, working in garrets and cellars for a pittance that will not provide a living or anything like a living, that pregnant women within a few days of their childbearing are compelled to daily labour, the severity of which inflicts upon them and their offspring lifelong injury, that in the streets of all our great cities thousands of women are nightly offering their bodies for sale.31

  When writing for children, Edith seemed keen to deliver a strong message of social justice. With good reason, she regarded her young readers as far more open to reform than their parents. One clear message in The Story of the Treasure Seekers is that: “Poverty is no disgrace. We should honour honest poverty.” In The New Treasure Seekers she encouraged children to recognize the inequities in English society and to empathize with those less well off. When her children attempt to explain government policy, they generally expose its inherent flaws.

  In The House of Arden, Richard condemns a social system that obliges mothers to work while leaving their children in inadequate care. In The Story of the Amulet, the Babylonian
Queen warns that the “slaves” she encounters in Victorian London appear to have been so badly treated that they must be on the verge of revolt. The children counter this by arguing that democracy and voting rights render these workers free. Yet they cannot explain why misery persists in a system that is touted as fair. When they attempt to house an orphan child who is destined for the workhouse, the Psammead points out: “You’ve got your country into such a mess that there’s no room for half your children—and no one to want them.”

  The past offers no solutions, since tyranny is endemic to human nature; she makes this clear in her descriptions of the harsh, hierarchical Egyptian regime. Solutions can only be found in a reformed future that is built on socialist ideals. In The Story of the Amulet the children travel forward in time to a verdant, utopian London where school is delightful, mothers and fathers share the burden of childcare, and everyone dresses in comfortable clothing. In The Magic World, when the enchanted crows that inhabit “Justnowland” are changed back into men, they vow “in future we shall not be rich and poor, but fellow-workers, and each will do his best for his brothers.”

  In The Railway Children, which was published in the year that the Labour Party entered government as an independent political force, Edith promoted a sense of individual responsibility and community. Her children are far more visionary and ambitious than her adults, and they reflect the Fabian belief that socialism transcends class since it benefits everyone. Since they lack awareness of rigid class boundaries, they teach the adults to let go of their notions of charity and hierarchical inequality in order to concentrate resources where they are needed.

  In The Magic City an old woman is being put out of her rented home:

  “Gentlefolks,” said the woman bitterly; “got a grand ’ouse of their own up in London. But they gone and took a fancy to my little bit, ’cause it looks so pretty with the flowers I planted, and the arbour my father made, and the roses as come from mother’s brother in Cambridgeshire . . . ‘Such a sweet pretty cottage to stay in for week-ends,’ they says; an’ I may go to the Union and stay there, week in, week out, and much they care. There’s something like it in the Bible, only there ain’t no prophets now like there was of old to go and rebuke the folks that takes away poor folks’ vineyards and lambs and things to make week-end cottages of.”

  She expects little sympathy from her landlord: “He’s all right,” she points out, “he’s got the castle and he’s got his mansion in Belgrave Square; I can’t expect him to bother about me and my little house.” The children are horrified. They petition the landlord and persuade him to change his mind. Edith included utopian thinking in this book too. When Mr. Noah takes Philip to see their factories, he expects ugliness but finds instead:

  Pleasant, long, low houses, with tall French windows opening into gardens of roses, where people of all nations made beautiful and useful things, and loved making them. And all the people who were making them looked clean and happy.

  Philip wonders why real-life factories are so unpleasant:

  “That’s because all your factories are money factories,” said Mr Noah, “though they’re called by all sorts of different names. Every one here has to make something that isn’t just money or for money—something useful and beautiful.”

  Although Edith delivered her socialist message very effectively, she never hectored and she was not above poking fun at socialists and utopian thinkers. In The New Treasure Seekers, Eustace Sandal, an amalgam of Fabian Society members Edward Carpenter and Henry Salt, is:

  A vegetarian and a Primitive Socialist Something, and an all-wooler, and things like that, and he is really as good as he can stick only awfully dull. . . . Well he has great magnificent dreams about all the things he can do for other people, and he wants to distil cultivatedness into the sort of people who live in Model Workmen’s Dwellings, and teach them to live up to better things.

  * Alice Hoatson contributed toward a banner for the Women’s Suffrage Movement, and it may have been this one, or another that read “Equal opportunities for Men and Women.”

  * There were exceptions. In February 1896, Beatrice Webb had written Women and the Factory Acts, which was published as Fabian Tract No. 67. In March 1900 Shaw wrote Women as Councillors, which was published as Fabian Tract No. 93. In 1927 Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism was published. Penguin Books reissued it in 1937 as the first book under the Pelican imprint, at which time Shaw amended the title to The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, and Fascism. In The Socialist Woman’s Guide to Intelligence: a reply to Mr Shaw, Lilian Le Mesurier objected to his self-satisfied and condescending tone.

  CHAPTER 19

  “A CURTAIN, THIN AS GOSSAMER”

  In a passage in The Enchanted Castle, Edith explained how magic gives rise to endless possibilities:

  There is a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs forever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real. And when once people have found one of the little weak spots in the curtain which are marked by magic rings, and amulets, and the like, almost anything may happen.1

  The Bastable stories and The Railway Children were rooted in reality, but many of her most celebrated stories enmesh the magical with the mundane. When conjuring up fantastic creatures, like her Psammead, she relied on her extraordinarily vivid imagination or accepted ideas from friends. When writing The Story of the Amulet, the third book in her Psammead trilogy, serialized in The Strand Magazine between May 1905 and April 1906, she drew heavily on the magic of Ancient Egypt.

  This story opens with her fictional children finding the Psammead in a pet shop near the British Museum. With his help they acquire one half of a magic amulet that allows them to travel through time. She dedicated this brilliant book:

  TO

  DR WALLIS BUDGE

  OF

  THE BRITISH MUSEUM

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

  AS A SMALL TOKEN OF GRATITUDE FOR HIS

  UNFAILING KINDNESS AND HELP IN

  THE MAKING OF IT

  Seeking inspiration for her time-traveling story, she had visited the British Museum, where she spotted a notice informing visitors that Budge, Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, was available to answer queries. She knocked on his door and explained that she was a children’s writer in search of inspiration. Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge, a portly, ruddy-cheeked man from Bodmin in Cornwall, who was one year older than Edith, recalled her visit as “a very pleasant break in the day because she was ‘quick on the uptake,’ and had a delightful sense of humour.”2 When he learned of her interest in magic, he suggested she set her book in Ancient Egypt, where pharaohs and kings kept storytellers as members of their households; he told her that their best-loved tales concerned sexual intrigue spiced with magic. He recommended she mull over his advice and to return if she wished to know more. She was back within the week.

  Budge was an extraordinary man. His mother was the daughter of a waiter in a Bodmin hotel and his father was never identified. As a child he was sent to live with relatives in London. Although he was exceptionally bright, he was obliged to leave school at the age of twelve to work as a clerk with W. H. Smith. His thirst for knowledge undimmed, he studied Hebrew and Syriac, a form of Aramaic, with a volunteer tutor who introduced him to the pioneering Egyptologist Samuel Birch, Keeper of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum. Birch’s patronage was invaluable. He gave Budge access to rare books and precious stone tablets, and he asked his assistant, the Assyriologist George Smith, to help him with the ancient Assyrian language, which he studied for almost a decade. During his lunch break, Budge would sneak into St. Paul’s Cathedral to study in solitude. Such dedication attracted the attention of the organist John Stainer, who raised funds so Budge could study the Semitic languages—Hebrew, Syriac, Ethiopic, an ancient biblical language, and Arabic—at Cambridge University.

  Budge published dozens of
works on the ancient Near East during his tenure at the British Museum, and he traveled to Egypt and the Sudan to acquire antiquities, often by controversial means. Edith was delighted when he agreed to help her. He translated aloud from Babylonian and Egyptian texts that she incorporated into her story, and he read early drafts of The Story of the Amulet. His input is evident throughout. It was Budge who informed Edith’s description of an Assyrian banquet:

  They did enjoy the banquet. They had a beautiful bath, which was delicious, were heavily oiled all over, including their hair, and that was most unpleasant. Then, they dressed again and were presented to the King, who was most affable. The banquet was long; there were all sorts of nice things to eat, and everybody seemed to eat and drink a good deal. Everyone lay on cushions and couches, ladies on one side and gentlemen on the other; and after the eating was done each lady went and sat by some gentleman, who seemed to be her sweetheart or her husband, for they were very affectionate to each other. The Court dresses had gold threads woven in them, very bright and beautiful. The middle of the room was left clear, and different people came and did amusing things. There were conjurers and jugglers and snake-charmers, which last Anthea did not like at all. When it got dark torches were lighted. Cedar splinters dipped in oil blazed in copper dishes set high on poles.

  Then there was a dancer, who hardly danced at all, only just struck attitudes. She had hardly any clothes, and was not at all pretty. The children were rather bored by her, but everyone else was delighted, including the King. “By the beard of Nimrod!” he cried, “ask what you like girl, and you shall have it!” “I want nothing,” said the dancer; “the honour of having pleased the King may-he-live-for-ever is reward enough for me.”

  And the King was so pleased with this modest and sensible reply that he gave her the gold collar off his own neck.