Budge showed Edith the amulets in the museum’s collection, including one that was strikingly similar to the amulet “made of a red, smooth, softly shiny stone” that her children find. He also suggested that she use this “Tyet” amulet, the Isis knot, since it allowed the bearer to access regions of the underworld. He described it in his book Egyptian Magic (1901):
This amulet represents the buckle of the girdle of Isis, and is usually made of carnelian, red jasper, red glass, and of other substances of a red colour; it is sometimes made of gold, and of substances covered with gold.3
Budge told Edith that each amulet was associated with a Hekau, a word of power:
By pronouncing certain words or names of power in the proper manner and in the proper tone of voice he [a priest] could heal the sick, and cast out the evil spirits which caused pain and suffering in those who were diseased, and restore the dead to life, and bestow upon the dead man the power to transform the corruptible into an incorruptible body, wherein the soul might live to all eternity. His words enabled human beings to assume divers forms at will, and to project their souls into animals and other creatures; and in obedience to his commands, inanimate figures and pictures became living beings and things which hastened to perform his behests.4
He invented a word of power for her, which he wrote out in hieroglyphics: “Ur Hekau Setcheh” translates as “Great of magic is the Setcheh,” the Setcheh being a mythological serpent demon. He also suggested elements of her plot: the “arrival and conquest of the copper-users,” the inclusion of ancient Assyria as a location, and the name Rekh-mara for her Egyptian priest. It was Budge who drew her attention to the bas-relief of an eagle-headed god, which she cast as Nisroch. This god releases her children from a dungeon:
“UR HEKAU SETCHEH,” she [Anthea] cried in a fervent voice. “Oh, Nisroch, servant of the Great Ones, come and help us!” There was a waiting silence. Then a cold, blue light awoke in the corner where the straw was—and in the light they saw coming towards them a strange and terrible figure. I won’t try to describe it, because the drawing shows it, exactly as it was, and exactly as the old Babylonians carved it on their stones, so that you can see it in our own British Museum at this day. I will just say that it had eagle’s wings and an eagle’s head and the body of a man.
Playfully, she included her own name:
“What was the name the Queen said?” asked Cyril suddenly. “Nisbeth—Nesbit—something? You know, the slave of the great names?”
“Wait a sec,” said Robert, “though I don’t know why you want it. Nusroch—Nisrock—Nisroch—that’s it.”
Budge is in her book too. He shares some characteristics with her “learned gentleman” and both value the ability to speak ancient languages. She also pokes gentle fun at his proclivity for writing prolifically on topics that interested him:
He had not had many adventures with children in them, and he wondered whether all children were like these. He spent quite five minutes in wondering before he settled down to the fifty-second chapter of his great book on “The Secret Rites of the Priests of Amen Ra.”
Several of the learned gentleman’s pronouncements might have come directly from Budge’s mouth:
“It’s quite possible,” the learned gentleman replied. “Such charms have been found in very early Egyptian tombs, yet their origin has not been accurately determined as Egyptian. They may have been brought from Asia. Or, supposing the charm to have been fashioned in Egypt, it might very well have been carried to Babylon by some friendly embassy, or brought back by the Babylonish army from some Egyptian campaign as part of the spoils of war. The inscription may be much later than the charm. Oh yes! it is a pleasant fancy, that splendid specimen of yours was once used amid Babylonish surroundings.”
The real Budge appears briefly on the steps of the British Museum when the Babylonian Queen arrives to retrieve her jewelery: “‘But we don’t wish to use harsh measures,’ added the nice one, who was really very nice indeed, and seemed to be over all the others.”
Although Budge had been married for years, it has been suggested that there was a romantic element to his friendship with Edith. She appears to have confided in him about her unhappiness at Hubert’s serial infidelities. He told Doris Langley Moore that she felt unfulfilled and disillusioned when they met and that she had “worries and domestic troubles.” He even hinted strongly that she asked him to take her away, as she had once asked Richard Le Gallienne. It seems she wept when he refused. “She was a great woman,” he declared, “and I valued her friendship highly.”5 Edith’s story “The Kiss” may reveal the true nature of their relationship. Neville Underwood sets eyes on a young woman writer for the first time:
Their first meeting was in the long gallery among the Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum. Enthusiast though he was, he was tired, as human souls are tired, with the cold reserve of carved stone—the imperturbable mystery of these old kings and gods who had kept for thousands of years, amid the shifting sands of the desert, their immemorial secrets. His eyes ached with the close scrutiny of minute and delicate detail. Then suddenly his eyes rested on her, fair and laughing and full of the joy of life, and his soul rejoiced because there was still youth in the world, and secrets that no kings and gods had power to keep from the sons of men who walk the earth to-day.6
Underwood helps this young woman with a book she is writing on ancient Egypt. They fall in love, and he discovers that she wears an amulet that is the counterpart of one he wears around his neck. Whatever the nature of the real relationship, it came to an end when Budge left on one of his long archaeological tours to Egypt.7
Magic fascinated them, but the extent to which they participated in the occult and paranormal practices that were popular at the time is unclear. Budge was certainly perfectly happy to have the public believe that artifacts in the British Museum were cursed. Both of them believed in ghosts, and several of Budge’s friends were members of the Ghost Club, a secretive organization that promoted belief in the spirit world and conducted paranormal investigations. He never joined this club, but he was welcome as a guest. One friend remembered what a “marvellous storyteller” he was:
Like Scheherazade, he could keep a company at dinner spellbound till dawn with tales of his experiences both East and West. They would range from adventures on Nile and Tigris to the most thrilling of ghost stories.8
Several members of the Fabian Society, Frank Podmore in particular, took a keen interest in the paranormal and participated regularly in séances or investigated hauntings. Others, including Edith, were more skeptical and took no part in these activities. But in a letter to Ada Breakell, dated March 1884, she mentioned that she had read “an intensely interesting book . . . called Esoteric Buddhism by Sinnett.” He was Alfred Percy (A. P.) Sinnett, a theosophist and disciple of the Russian mystic Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the occult Theosophical Society. In The Lark one of Edith’s characters lends his house “to a Theosophist Brotherhood.” The former Fabian Annie Besant was president of the Theosophical Society, and Edith submitted a poem, “Torch-bearers,” to Lucifer, a Theosophic magazine that Blavatsky and Besant edited.9 Yet she expressed skepticism about Besant’s conversion. Edgar Jepson explained:
Her [Edith’s] interest in the occult had brought her into close contact with Mrs Annie Besant, in the days when it had been made quite clear to that good woman that she was not going to become the supreme ruler of the Fabian Society, and she was turning her attention to Spiritualism, in which there seemed a possibility of undisputed sway. Mrs Bland told me that it was truly entertaining to observe the firmness with which Mrs Besant insisted that spiritualistic phenomena should come and saw to it that they did come, and then the ease with which she persuaded herself that they had come wholly of themselves. It is plain therefore that Mrs Besant was fortunate in presently discovering Theosophy, and that her decision to rule in Theosophy rather than serve in Socialism was sound.10
This skepticism cr
eeps into The Story of the Amulet too:
A journalist, who was just leaving the museum, spoke to Robert as he passed.
“Theosophy, I suppose?” he said. “Is she Mrs Besant?”
“Yes,” said Robert recklessly.
The journalist passed through the gates just before they were shut.
He rushed off to Fleet Street, and his paper got out a new edition within half an hour.
MRS BESANT AND THEOSOPHY: IMPERTINENT MIRACLE AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM.
Edith’s reputed membership in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the foremost occult organization of the day, is intriguing. The founding principles of the order were drawn from new interpretations of ancient texts, particularly those written by mystic and philosopher Hermes Trismegistus. By 1896 more than three hundred men and women, drawn predominantly from the middle classes, had joined this shadowy organization. Among them were Arthur Conan Doyle, Aleister Crowley, W. B. Yeats, Constance Wilde, Bram Stoker, Florence Farr, and Maud Gonne, who resigned on the grounds that her fellow members were inherently dull. “They looked so incongruous in their cloaks and badges at initiation ceremonies,” she complained.11 Most biographical accounts suggest that Edith was a member of the Golden Dawn, but evidence to support this is rarely cited. The organization was of course secretive by nature, but eyewitness accounts never mentioned her as they did others, and her name does not appear on the rolls.12 Budge too never joined the order, even though his translation of The Book of the Dead (1895) had particular significance for members.
There is no doubt that Edith was drawn to darkness, and the magic in her stories often takes a dark turn. Quentin falls asleep at Stonehenge in “Accidental Magic.” When he wakes in “the great and immortal kingdom of Atlantis,” surrounded by blue-robed priests, he realizes he has been chosen for sacrifice. He is a curious boy and questions his mother:
“I say, mother, tell me some more about Atlantis.” Or, “Mother, tell me some more about ancient Egypt and the little toy-boats they made for their little boys.” Or, “Mother, tell me about the people who think Lord Bacon wrote Shakespeare.”13
This last question intrigued Edith for more than a decade and consumed vast quantities of her time, energy, and money. She had always loved Shakespeare’s plays, and her attempts to explain them to her children prompted her to adapt them into stories. In her introduction to The Children’s Shakespeare, she is huddled with Iris and Rosamund before a roaring fire at an inn in Stratford-upon-Avon. They are poring over a volume of Collected Works the innkeeper has lent them. Edith “with eyes fixed on the fire was wandering happily in the immortal dreamland peopled by Rosalind and Imogen, Lear and Hamlet.” She is roused by a “small sigh”:
“I can’t understand a word of it,” said Iris.
“And you said it was so beautiful,” Rosamund added, reproachfully. “What does it all mean?”
“Yes,” Iris went on, “you said it was a fairytale, and we’ve read three pages and there’s nothing about fairies, not even a dwarf, or a fairy god-mother.”
“And what does ‘misgraffed’ mean?”
“And ‘vantage,’ and ‘austerity,’ and ‘belike,’ and ‘edict,’ and—?”
“Stop, stop,” I cried, “I will tell you the story.”
In a moment they were nestling beside me, cooing with the pleasure that the promise of a story always brings them.
Iris asks her mother:
Why don’t you write the stories for us so that we can understand them, just as you told us that, and then, when we are grown up, we shall understand the plays so much better?14
It is not known at what point Edith became fascinated by a theory that suggested a group of writers and thinkers led by Sir Francis Bacon had written Shakespeare’s plays. She also subscribed to a belief that they had embedded an elaborate philosophic system in the texts.* Prominent figures who thought likewise included Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry James, and the German mathematician Georg Cantor. Mark Twain explored this in Is Shakespeare Dead?, while her old friend Andrew Lang wrote Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown.
Edith decided she would try to decipher, using mathematics, the coded information embedded in Shakespearean texts that confirmed Bacon as their author. Just as she had recruited Budge to explain ancient Egyptian magic, she approached mathematician Edward Neville da Costa Andrade, who would one day become a distinguished physicist.† Andrade had submitted several poems to The Neolith, which Edith had chosen not to publish, but they became friends anyway. When Berta Ruck met him at Well Hall, she described him as “rather bewildered-looking.”15
It must have frustrated a man as mathematically gifted as Andrade to have to explain complex logarithms to a woman he regarded as having “no mathematical capabilities at all.”16 He was certain that Shakespeare had written his plays and regarded her investigations as “dreary nonsense.” He believed that she had received encouragement from a “monstrous regiment of quacks.”17
Yet he was fond of her and he worried that this pursuit had “completely stopped her creative work.” He may have hoped to debunk her notions and persuade her to abandon this project by gently working through the mathematics with her.
In pursuit of her proof, Edith purchased numerous books on ciphers and secret codes. Several were rare and costly, including an original 1614 edition of Napier’s Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio. She even studied Latin to help her with her quest. Yet it was doomed by her innumeracy. In an attempt to explain complex logarithms, Andrade resorted to using matches and sand. He recalled:
She was by nature quite incapable of mastering the means of mathematical symbols and arguments and for a long time based theories on the supposition that the incommensurable number e was 2.7182, whereas these are but the first five figures of a number that can be worked out to as many as thirty decimal figures.18
When challenged on its validity, Edith would describe her work as a “mental narcotic—such as some people find playing patience.” In the grip of her obsession she would spend whole days working on ciphers, ignoring stories she was contracted to complete, or rushing through them to get them out of the way. In her eagerness to prove her theory she would pounce on random sequences of letters. She insisted that sections of Sonnet CV could be deciphered as “I am F.B.” or “I am Fras B.” or “I am Hog” or “F. Ba is W. Sha.” She also searched for significant dates—1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death, or 1623, the year Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, commonly referred to as the “First Folio,” was published. She also explored the theories of occult Baconians who credited Rosicrucian mysteries to him.
She broadened her investigations to include Elizabethan and early Jacobean texts such as Spencer’s Faerie Queene and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. She even scoured the authorized version of the Bible in the hope of uncovering clues concealed within the text. Andrade told Doris Langley Moore:
In the end it grew, as far as I could make out, into a theory that some mysterious collection wrote Shakespeare’s plays, Bacon’s essays, Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,” the Authorised Version, Spenser’s “Faerie Queene,” and many other books.19
Gripped by Baconian mania, she wrote to her brother Harry in Australia in 1912 to ask him if he was a Baconian or a Shakespearean. She explained:
I have been investigating the question of ciphers in the works of Shakespeare—and have found several—but I don’t know enough about figures to get very far. I wish you were here to help me!20
In a follow-up letter she expressed frustration with the logarithms she was using: “The Shakespeare Cipher I am after involves the use of Logs not Briggs but Napier’s,” she wrote. “I can get no book dealing with Napier’s Logs to the base E i.e. I/2.2121396—and so on. And I am quite incapable of learning such things from books even if there were one, which I don’t believe there is.”21
No one was safe from her quest. One young visitor to Well Hall remembered being handed a magnifying glass and asked to
find a pig in an old engraving or print of Shakespeare.22 In 1914 Edith turned to George Seaver, a young Classics tutor she had hired to coach thirteen-year-old John for his school entrance exam. He described his first sighting of her:
Presently the door was flung open and a tall lady in a trailing black silk gown and somewhat careless disarray stepped—or rather swept into the room. Her countenance was round and ruddy, her bird-like eyes and curly hair were brown, her freckled wrists jingled with silver bangles, other trinkets hung from necklaces about her dress; she carried a long cigarette-holder in one hand and under her arm a tobacco-tin and papers; with nimble fingers she rolled her own cigarettes and smoked incessantly. She might have been a gipsy queen.23
Seaver admired Edith enormously, and he hated to see her wasting her time, and what he recognized as a genuinely deep knowledge of Shakespeare’s work, on what he regarded as “naïve ingenuity in fitting facts to theories.” Other friends tried to dissuade her too. John Squire, a reviewer for literary magazine the New Age, spent hours attempting to convince her that she was wasting her time. On one occasion he sat up with her until two o’clock in the morning while she labored over some Baconian “proof” that was dependent on her erroneous calculation that 4 x 13 = 42. He pointed out her error and was dismayed when she seemed surprised rather than disillusioned.
George Bernard Shaw learned of her obsession when she asked to borrow his first folio facsimiles of Shakespeare. When she asked him for money to fund her investigation, he gave her a cheque for £100 (approximately £11,000, or USD$14,500, today). He did likewise the following year but warned her to sort out her finances and to accept the commissions she was missing out on. She wrote to assure him of her commitment, and he sent her a postcard with the perfect riposte:
Have you ever considered (this is a belated reply to yours of 8th May) how utterly impossible it is that Shaw of Dublin could have written his wonderful plays. Is it not clear that they were written by Sidney Webb L.L.B. Shaw was an utterly ignorant man. His father was an unsuccessful business man always on the verge of bankruptcy, just like old Shakespear [sic] or John Dickens. Shaw had a very narrow escape from the police for setting fire to a common [in Dalkey in Dublin at the age of twelve]. He was a disgrace to his school, where he acquired little Latin & less Greek. He got no secondary education & came to London an unknown & obscure provincial. And this is the man to whom people attribute the omniscience, the knowledge of public affairs, of law, of medicine, of navigation &c&c&c, which informs the plays and prefaces of G.B.S. Absurd! Webb, the L.L.B, the man who carried all before him in examinations in his boyhood, the upper division civil servant of the Foreign and Colonial Offices, the author of Industrial Democracy &c, was clearly the man. I could pile the case much higher if there was room.
The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit Page 29
