The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

  It was pointed out to her that poor children could not build her magic city, so she built “a Poor Child’s City of cardboard, treacle-tins, jam-jars and clothes pegs, all painted and polished and cemented until people exclaimed at its beauty and marvelled at its ingenuity.”8 All this effort did little to improve sales of her book. She never worked with Macmillan again and wrote a letter of complaint:

  I am still not at all well; the failure of The Magic City has quite knocked me over. You know, really, I am a person who has never quite grown up, (that is why I am able to write for children!) and I feel this blow as though I were a disappointed child.9

  Unfortunately Dormant and Ballads and Verses of the Spiritual Life, both published in 1911, fared no better. Equally disappointing were sales of The Magic World, a collection of twelve stories published in 1912. Edith was frantic by the time the final installment of Wet Magic appeared in The Strand Magazine in August 1913. She confided in Harry:

  Things are pretty black for us—Hubert has practically lost his sight—he is undergoing a very expensive treatment which may do some good, but so far has done very little, if any. I am getting very tired of work, and the expenses of life don’t seem to get less. I wish everyone had a small pension at 50—enough to live on. I have had a novel [The Incredible Honeymoon] in hand for some time, but I have been too worried to get on with it. I am now going into the country for a few weeks, in the hope of getting some work done.10

  Edith retreated to Crowlink with her dogs. She also took her new secretary, who she described as “a quiet youth who types what I write and in the evenings plays chess with me.” She was “trying to get well and do a little work,” she told Lady Dunsany, but she resented the demands placed upon her:

  I am getting very tired of writing stories and wish I need only write verse, and set down the things I think. Any success my stories have had is due I think to a sort of light-hearted outlook on life—and now that Hubert’s eyes have failed him a steamroller seems to have gone over all ones hopes and ambitions, and it is difficult to remember how it felt to be light-hearted.11

  She returned to Well Hall with a plan, which was explained in the Pioneer newspaper:

  Passers-by, catching glimpses of the garden, often came to ask if flowers were sold. In the old days the flowers were given away. But these enquiries suggested a new industry.12

  Edith described her glorious flowers in her final novel, The Lark:

  The peonies were out now—great balls of splendid crimson—and the white balls of the guelder rose, sheaves of violet and purple flags, the wide graceful arches of Solomon’s seal, armfuls of lilac sweet as Spring herself, tall tulips rosy and white and gold, the yellow stars of the leopard’s bane—oxslips, cowslips, and always forget-me-nots.13

  Berta Ruck remarked of Edith, “if I know her generous heart the flowers would have been made up in enormous bunches and the fruit would be heavily overweight!” Sure enough, her prices were keen. She refused to accept any payment for a beautiful wreath of narcissi and white lilac that she made for a shabbily dressed woman who enquired about flowers for her daughter’s funeral; she even pinned original verses among the blooms. It was only when war came that her takings improved. At the height of hostilities she was making twenty-five shillings (approximately £108, or USD$143, today) a week.

  By spring 1914 Hubert had lost his sight entirely. Edith left him with Alice and Ada Breakell and traveled to Crowlink with her son John. With them went his friend Stephen Chant, and Cecil Gould, who was her friend and fellow poet Gerald’s younger brother.* On the afternoon of April 14, Hubert finished dictating several book reviews and a letter to the editor of The Chronicle to Alice, rose unsteadily to his feet, and announced “Mouse, I feel giddy.” She ran to support him and shouted for Ada to phone for the doctor. As Hubert fell to the floor, he reassured her that he was not hurt. He died almost immediately thereafter. Since Rosamund was convalescing in Dymchurch after a serious illness, Alice phoned Rosamund’s husband, Clifford Sharp, who arrived with Iris. It was he who organized for a death mask to be made. She then sent Edith a telegram urging: “Come at once Hubert very ill.” They were having supper when it arrived. Edith ordered a car from nearby Eastbourne, and they drove home in complete silence. They arrived at two in the morning and learned that Hubert had been dead for several hours. Unable to comprehend her loss, Edith attempted to warm Hubert back to life by covering him with down quilts and hot water bottles. It took a doctor opening a vein to convince her that he was gone.

  On April 19, 1914, The Chronicle carried a report headed “Sudden End to a Great Writer’s Career.” It was attributed to a young journalist named St. John Ervine, who was a member of the Fabian nursery and had been suggested by Clifford Sharp. Although Ervine admired Hubert enormously, he barely knew Edith, and he appears to have sourced much of his information from Marshall Steele’s daughter Enid, who disliked her intensely.* This odd eulogy made no mention of Hubert’s wife and promoted Alice instead. Describing his first sighting of Hubert, Ervine wrote:

  He was striding down Walbrook, talking loudly in his curious, thin, tinny voice to a lady whom I afterwards learned to know as his devoted friend and, when his eyes failed him, secretary, Miss Alice Hoatson.14

  In response, Alice described Ervine’s obituary as “the most insulting and impossible laudation—meant as praise no doubt, but dreadful to me, and to Edith too.”15

  Edith’s tribute to Hubert was to compile Essays by Hubert Bland: “Hubert” of the Sunday Chronicle, which she dedicated to “the readers who loved Hubert.” In a touching epilogue, she commended the qualities she admired most in her late husband:

  Hubert wrote as he spoke and he spoke as he thought. He never did for money or for fame sell himself. He had, in the highest degree, the quality of intellectual honesty. He would not deceive himself, nor would he suffer others to be deceived. His was the large tolerance of one who understands the weakness and the strength of the soul of man. He hated the Pharisees, the Prigs, the Puritans, and those who grind the faces of the poor. All men else he loved.

  She praised his bravery in facing blindness “like a man” and reconstructed his final moments: “Hubert worked to the last, he died working, and his last words when he felt the hand of death upon him were ‘I am not hurt.’”16 Whether she felt regret that these words were not directed at her, she did not disclose.

  In keeping with her rather macabre nature, Edith kept Hubert’s death mask wrapped in a silk handkerchief on a shelf beside the fireplace in her living room. She would show it to people of whom she was particularly fond.17 Although their marriage had been turbulent, she missed the man she described as her “close and constant companion and friend for thirty-seven years.”18 Berta Ruck insisted that “they were interested in each other to the end.” She suggested that Hubert had provided Edith with the drama she needed in her life.19 It is true that she sometimes seemed more amused than upset by his womanizing. She told May Bowley that she had once called on a “Mrs M.,” an attractive young married friend, only to find her “becomingly arrayed as an interesting invalid with a sprained ankle, lying on a sofa, while Mr Bland sat by her side reading poetry to her.” She observed that it was “his turn to look rather foolish.”20 Toleration for such behavior was higher at that time. As Edgar Jepson wrote of Hubert:

  During the ten years, or more, that we were on friendly terms I never knew him to have more than two, or perhaps three [mistresses] at a time, and no one can say that was excessive for the days of Edward the Peacemaker.21

  The Liverpool Echo reported on the terms of Hubert’s will:

  The testator left the balance of his property upon trust to his youngest son, John, stating: “This I do because my wife is happily able to earn a good income, and my other children are provided for.”22

  Further detail was provided in the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer:

  He bequeathed his household effects to his wife (“E. Nesbit”), expressing the hope that she will give any
of his books which she may not care to keep for herself to such libraries or persons as she may consider will make good use of them, and that she would make gifts of mementos of his personal effects to intimate friends. The balance of his property he left upon trust for J.B.23

  Shortly after Hubert’s death, Edith took John, aged thirteen, to Paris, where they spent time with her friend Alphonse Courlander, Paris correspondent for the Daily Express, his wife, Elsa, and their daughter, Rosemary. Edith fell desperately ill while they were there and crippling stomach pains confined her to her hotel room. When Alice arrived to take them home, she found Edith bedbound and surviving on a diet of bread and milk. In England she was diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer and admitted to Guy’s Hospital for an operation. Money was so scarce that she could not afford to hire a car to take her there. As Hubert had instructed Alice to go to George Bernard Shaw for help should she ever need it, she asked if she might borrow his car. He told her it was in for repair and gave her five pounds to hire one. Edith was exasperated when Alice returned change to him of more than three pounds.

  On September 22, 1914, the Hull Daily Mail reported that “E. Nesbit (Mrs Hubert Bland), the well-known writer for children, has undergone a serious operation at Guy’s Hospital, London and is still very ill.”24 Her temperature had dropped so dramatically that doctors warned Iris there was little hope of her surviving. Ignoring their advice, Edith insisted that Iris feed her half a teaspoon of Brand’s Essence of Beef every hour. She was discharged shortly afterward.

  Her long convalescence was not helped by tragic news that reached her on October 23. When war was declared on July 28, 1914, shortly after she left Paris, her friend Alphonse Courlander spoke of traveling to the front, though he had been traumatized by his experiences covering the Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913. Hamilton Fyfe, a journalist friend, described his state of mind: “A delightful fellow he was, amusing, quick-witted, but not well-equipped to withstand the panic which seized the city as the Germans came nearer every day.” Courlander’s response was catastrophic:

  One morning he made up his mind to leave for London [where his wife and daughter were by then]. Then, as he sat in the train, the shame of abandoning his post came vividly before him and he jumped out. But the next morning he went to the station again and this time he stayed in the train. In London he was badly received. He killed himself.25

  Courlander was just thirty-three years old when he took his own life. Elsa, his widow, stayed in London, where she helped Alice nurse Edith back to health.

  The Bland family was caught up in hostilities too. Paul joined the special constabulary, and Iris was appointed as an overseer at the Woolwich munitions factory, where she was joined by several members of the Well Hall staff, who found jobs filling shells. Clifford Sharp was recruited by the Foreign Office and took Rosamund to Sweden on a covert diplomatic mission. Although Edith detested war, she was unwavering in her patriotism. She composed war poetry and compiled Battle Songs, Chosen by E. Nesbit. True to her kind and contradictory nature, she also sheltered an elderly German friend to save him from internment. She chastized Alice for applauding the shooting down of a zeppelin, reminding her that people were being burned alive before their eyes. When her friend Edward Andrade, who had helped her with her Shakespeare texts, was sent to the front, she wrote to express her hope that war would be over by summer:

  But with this war going on the world seems so unreal that doing any writing seems futile. It feels like beginning an epic on the morning of the Last Day, with the last trumps sounding in your ears.26

  She lit a candle for Andrade on Easter Sunday and placed his badge in front of a statue of Saint Anthony. He visited her at Well Hall whenever he had leave. She told Mavis Carter that she was struggling to finish The Incredible Honeymoon because the “horrible war” had added to “the desolation and the feeling that nothing is worthwhile.” She described it as “a nightmare of horror, the whole thing.”27 In a gloomy letter to Harry, in which she accepted that she would probably never see him again, she wrote: “If I could live without writing I should like never to write another line.”28 Yet all was not bleak. She welcomed cheery visits from Enid Bagnold, future author of National Velvet, who came to tea on her motorcycle several times when she was working as a Voluntary Aid Detachment at the Royal Herbert Hospital. As a teenager Bagnold had lived on nearby Shooters Hill. She had been so keen to meet a writer that she had taken walks in the hope of bumping into Edith or Hubert.

  Edith’s financial woes were alleviated somewhat in 1916 when Maurice Hewlett, her tenant at Crowlink, organized for her to receive a Civil Pension of sixty pounds (approximately £5,000, or USD$6,600, today) “in consideration of the merits of her writings in prose and poetry, and of her straitened circumstances.”29 This was supplemented with tiny subventions she received from the Royal Literary Fund, although these did little to help her meet her commitments. Her seaside holidays were put on hold and her dinner parties curtailed. Even so, Elsa Courlander insisted that she looked “as much a chatelaine as ever, and there was still a baronial air hanging over the frugal feasts.”30

  When G. K. Chesterton asked Edith to assist his friend Reginald Brimley Johnson* with the production of a children’s newspaper, he explained, “I thought of you not only as the ablest children’s novelist I know, but also more generally as one who understands the heroic simplicity of all revolutions of the right sort.”31 She found Johnson to be a “gracious, generous, and vivid personality” and agreed for her name to be included in his prospectus, but the scheme fell through due to lack of funding.

  Since it was her habit to write late into the night, she was usually first downstairs during air raids. She would organize card games to keep family and guests occupied. One favorite was racing demon, a fast and furious form of solitaire that they played by the light of a flickering candle. As trams on the line from Woolwich to Eltham were obliged to stop outside Well Hall during these air raids, she would take coffee to those on board. She was standing on the top of the tram, surrounded by family, passengers, and guests, when she witnessed the zeppelin being brought down. She was reduced to tears.

  War seemed interminable, and she missed Hubert desperately. Berta Ruck confirmed this:

  E. Nesbit often told me of her loneliness after her husband’s death; her children were grown up and John, who later became a doctor, seemed to be the only one at home and her devoted slave.32

  She confided in Edward Andrade. “Nothing seems worthwhile, somehow,” she told him. “It is like doing work on the sea shore when you know the tide is coming in that will wash away you and your work together.”33 A prayer she composed expresses her longing for companionship:

  God give me a garden of roses,

  And, someone to walk with there.34

  It was during these bleak days that she grew close to the man who would bring her great happiness during the years that remained to her.

  * She dedicated The Magic City to Barbara, Maurice, and Stephen Chant. Cecil Gould was killed in action in 1916.

  * It seems this animosity was mutual, since Edith used her name for the nasty aunt in Wet Magic.

  * A biographer, critic, and editor who specialized in writing about nineteenth-century English literature and literary figures.

  CHAPTER 21

  “A HANDYMAN OF THE SEA”

  Edith had chosen Well Hall for its seclusion, but the tramline had run past her gate since 1905, and a branch of the Woolwich Co-operative stores had opened across the road from her in 1906. Now war accelerated development. The Royal Arsenal at Woolwich lay four miles due north and extended over 1,300 acres. At the height of production, eighty thousand people were employed there, and local housing for munitions workers was supplemented with wooden detached hutments as war rumbled on. In June 1917 an article published in the Woolwich Pioneer and Labour Journal, a weekly newspaper produced by the Woolwich Labour Party from 1904 to 1922, documented the impact of war on Well Hall:

  The first change came with the
cultivation of all available land: the old orchard, long left to run wild in tangled beauty, was let out in allotments to working men. Gone are the pretty weeds and wild roses and lace-flowered elder trees; the old orchard now looks like a patch of French ground, intensively tilled.1

  When the government began requisitioning unused land in 1916, Edith, in a panic, organized for her gardener to rent out their paddock in allotments. In “The Voyage of the Hut,” which she wrote for The Graphic, she admitted that she saw opportunity in adversity:

  In the first year of the war a garden suburb and a sprawling Alpine-looking village of huts for munition-workers sprang up about us. And workmen passing saw our good green garden, and came in, by ones and twos and half-dozens, to ask whether we sold flowers.2

  She described to Edward Andrade how she would “stand all Friday and Saturday making up bundles of flowers to sell to working men” and admitted: “It’s a queer life, but I think it’s the best that could befall me just now.”3 The Pioneer newspaper confirmed:

  The doors of Well Hall were besieged on Friday and Saturday by crowds of working men ready to spend shillings and half crowns on big bunches of sweet old-fashioned flowers, to take home to their mothers and wives. . . . From this to the sale of vegetables and plants was an easy step.4