However, she was also a writer. At the beginning of the 1890s Elizabeth Goodman was still in charge of the household, since ‘no-one dared to speak to her of rest’, but she now no longer swept Charlotte’s manuscripts into her dustpan. Alone in her room Charlotte sat down, partly to justify her friends’ expectations – that always meant a great deal to her – partly to show herself what she could do, partly to earn money. Without money free will means very little. Though Charlotte never wanted to get rid of her responsibilities, she preferred not to be answerable to anyone. She needed, in fact, not independence but freedom.
There was a business-like side to Charlotte. She knew, at least, how to set out on a writer’s career. Her manuscripts went out to a lady typewriter – they were still called that – who, herself, was a distressed gentlewoman. They came back neatly bound in brown paper, were lightly corrected in pencil and sent off with the stamps for return postage stuck to the front cover. As to where they should go, there was a wide choice in the nineties, the golden age of the English periodical. A hopeful writer, a beginner poised on the verge, must have been bewildered simply by the number of new and older publications. Although Answers and Tit-Bits had been started, with enormous success, to provide something lighter in the way of weeklies, they existed side by side with the older heavies, The Athenaeum, The Sphere, The Academy, The Spectator, The Saturday Review and a host of others, always increasing, literary or political or both, and joined every month by the closely printed ranks of magazines, led by Blackwood’s, The Strand and the Pall Mall. These last specialized in fiction, and could count on the best-known names as contributors – Hardy, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Conan Doyle, Conrad, Henry James, all of them valued in those days largely as spinners of yarns. The best seller had not yet parted company with literature. The yarns, whether they came from hacks or writers of genius, were set among feature and travel articles and pages of ‘little-known facts’ which linked the magazines with the earlier self-educational journals. The readers were loyal and persevering, ready to learn what the writers insisted on telling them.
In 1891, for example, when The Strand first appeared, George Newnes ‘respectfully placed his first number in the hands of the public’, hoping, as he said, to justify its survival in spite of the ‘vast number of existing monthlies’. Newnes opened with an absurd romance by Grant Allen in which the heroine faints on a railway line and the hero (called Ughtred Carnegie) has to decide whether to save her and derail the oncoming express, or to leave her to her fate. Next there are ‘portraits of celebrities’ (Tennyson, Swinburne, Rider Haggard, Sir John Lubbock, representing three parts of literature to one of science), notes from a sermon by Cardinal Manning, and a feature on the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, which opens:
Fire! Fire! This startling cry aroused me one night as I was putting the finishing touches to some literary work. Rushing pen in hand to the window I could just perceive a dull red glare in the northern sky.
This leads to yet another rescue, when at the scene of the fire ‘a female form appears at an upper window’. If it had not been a female form, or failing that, a child, it would have not been interesting enough for The Strand.
Charlotte’s first venture, The Minnow Fishers, was in this ‘curious personal experience’ category, much in demand from editors and readers. It was based on a real incident during one of her walks along the canal towpath to Maida Vale, on the way to Kensal Green, where her grandfather Henry Kendall lay buried. The Minnow Fishers are small boys on this towpath, intent on their lines and hooks. They don’t apparently notice that an even smaller child is struggling in the water ‘or if they had it didn’t detract them from the business in hand’. For this detachment Charlotte feels a kind of admiration. The drowning child is dragged out by a passer-by, and one of the boys has to admit to being the elder brother of this ‘miserable object blinking palely out again at life, laboriously restored to the damp dusk, the cheerless outlook of the dingy stretches of the bank, the stagnant water and the impassive friends’. The brother is obliged to take the victim home, but gives him ‘a vindictive cuff, which met with no response. The two remaining minnow fishers sat serenely on.’
In its sympathetic view of children hard, or hardened, as nails, this story makes a good introduction to Charlotte Mew’s London. One detail, the bloated face of the rescued infant, ‘a painful spectacle, suggestive of a crimson airball, a gruesome penny toy’, shows that she is describing something actually seen. What is surprising is how little, after all, she seems to have learned from Miss Harrison’s English lessons. Charlotte always had trouble with grammar and punctuation, but, apart from that, the presentation of the story is laborious in the extreme, opening with
It was an after-dinner patter; someone had been generalizing on the elevating influence of sports, of angling in particular: ‘And thereby,’ interposed my friend, John Hilton, ‘hangs a tale; it was when we lived near Maida Vale of Melancholy Memory: I was walking home one horribly damp afternoon by way of the canal’ …
and so on. This very short story hardly needs the ‘after-dinner patter’ or John Hilton either: he is simply a device, or rather a gallant attempt to adapt to the fiction market. And he was not of much use to Charlotte, who was unable to place The Minnow Fishers, although she put it by and sent it later to The Outlook. She would have to try a different tack.
The epigraph to The Minnow Fishers is from Richard Jefferies, ‘to be calm without mental fear is the ideal of nature’. Charlotte, from her school days, kept lists of quotations from favourite authors, copying out sentences that seemed to her helpful and true. In 1889 she had been reading Jefferies’ Field and Hedgerow, his last essays, a book published after his death. ‘It set my own heart beating,’ she wrote, ‘for I felt I discovered in it an undreamed-of universe.’ Jefferies’ large claims to have learned ‘the spirit of earth and sea and the soul of the sun’ answered to her own intimations, feelings beyond words that had come to her as a child on the Island.
They come at evening with the home-flying rooks and the scent of hay,
Over the fields. They come in spring.
Field and Hedgerow, like her own vision of nature’s peace, was a relief from what she called ‘pavement dreams – those thoughts that come sometimes in cities, of the weary length or terrible brevity of life’. The trouble was, and she knew this very well herself, that she was an incurable Londoner. The intimations would not hold. She wanted company, even when she was declaring she didn’t, she loved hurrying from one appointment to another, and feeling all round her the pressure of a million unknown lives. Jefferies himself, in Amaryllis at the Fair, has a sudden glimpse of the ‘terrible, beautiful thickness of people’ in the London streets, ‘so many, like the opulence of Nature itself’. How well she understood this Charlotte showed in one of her last poems, The Shade-Catchers.
At about this time Anne brought a new friend home to Gordon Street, a student from the Female School of Art, Elsie Millard. Elsie’s father was elocution master at the City of London School; her elder sister, Evelyn, was on the stage. Evelyn had been rigorously trained in her father’s personal system, based on a selection of speeches from Shakespeare arranged alphabetically to illustrate the whole range of emotions from Ambition and Anger to Unimpassioned speech, Violence, Wistfulness and Zeal. In 1891 she was appearing at the Grand Theatre, Islington, in Joseph’s Sweetheart, but her speciality was in ‘perfect lady’ parts and her great successes were to be in Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray and as Princess Flavia in The Prisoner of Zenda. Elsie, who preferred landscape painting, occasionally made sketching trips to the West of Ireland. The Millards were eminently respectable – they lived in Kensington, and were strict Catholics – but they did bring Charlotte, for the first time, into the fringe of the theatrical and studio world.
A break with the past came in 1893, with the death of Elizabeth Goodman. At the age of sixty-nine she contracted blood poisoning, as the result of running a needle into her hand. She had always wanted t
o die in harness, and she did. But after it was all over a strange group of Goodman relatives and in-laws, whom no-one had ever heard of before, turned up to take away her few belongings in a cab. They insisted on arranging the funeral, ‘not without some bitterness’. Charlotte felt they made the house smell. ‘Their moral and physical odour seemed to cling about it long after they had left it.’ An interesting point is her attitude to Elizabeth Goodman’s ‘plausible greasy sister-in-law, who was alleged to be an artist’s model and when not sitting to someone or other was said to be nursing an invalid gentleman at Boulogne or Worthing or Ostend.’ In short, she was a kept woman, ‘always taking expensive medicines and borrowing railway fares’, and this is what Charlotte felt about such women when she actually met them. In contrast, she went on romanticizing the Magdalens and pale harlots of the pavements and street lights, creatures of the abyss, seen only in passing. In this matter Charlotte Mew was truly a child of the 1890s.
Nothing of Elizabeth Goodman’s was left at 9 Gordon Street – not even her workbox, or her Queen Victoria Jubilee tea-pot. How deeply and how confusedly Charlotte felt the loss can be seen from a curious fantasy which she wrote, A Wedding Day. The bride, in the excitement of her marriage, forgets the old woman who has looked after her since she was a child. The old woman, tired out by a lifetime’s work, sits in her spotless cap and apron, with her Bible and workbox on her knee, waiting in vain for the expected visit. During the bridal night itself, when for the lovers ‘the present is eternity’, the old woman dies. As a corpse she is still sitting stiffly the next morning in her chair, ‘alone and smiling’. She has remained on duty.
Charlotte was twenty-five. The Minnow Fishers had not been accepted so far, nor had A Wedding Day. In 1894, in common with most of London’s hopeful writers, she saw the preliminary announcement of yet another magazine, this time a new quarterly. ‘In many ways its contributors will employ a freer hand than the limitations of the old-fashioned periodical can permit. It will publish no serials; but its complete stories will sometimes run to a considerable length in themselves.’ The notice was printed on bright yellow paper, with a bizarre illustration by Aubrey Beardsley. ‘And while The Yellow Book will seek always to preserve a delicate, decorous and reticent mien and conduct, it will at the same time have the courage of its modernness, and not tremble at the frown of Mrs Grundy.’ Although John Lane, the publisher, was every bit as commercially-minded as Newnes, the élitist tone of all this contrasted boldly with The Strand, which had been ‘respectfully placed’ in the hands of the public. The Yellow Book also promised to be important, charming, daring and distinguished, and the editor was prepared to consider contributions.
CHAPTER FIVE
A Yellow Book Woman
JOHN LANE, who launched The Yellow Book with his partner, Elkin Mathews, was (in Arthur Waugh’s phrase) ‘a sly new-comer’, or, to put it another way, a publisher with a fine instinct for the right moment. In 1893–4 he sensed that the Aesthetes had still a little distance to go, and could contribute to the beautiful book-making which he loved. On the other hand, he could cautiously scent the new movements, women’s independence in particular. He was projecting his Eve’s Library (the title itself is a Lane-like compromise) which was to include a translation of Hansson’s Das Buch der Frauen and studies called The Ascent of Woman and Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction. Meanwhile, when Aubrey Beardsley and Henry Harland came to him with their idea for the new quarterly, distinguished in contents and make-up, but bound in lemon-yellow, the colour of dubious French paperbacks, Lane realized that there was something in it for him. With the attention-catching Yellow Book he could trap new authors on to his list and publicize those he had already. ‘Modernness’, yes – no stirring yarns, no serials, no rescue from the railway-line – but Lane wanted Harland, while looking around for new talent and creating an agreeable stir, to keep his head. The down-and-out element on Lane’s list, unfortunates like Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson, who was drinking himself to death on eau-de-cologne, all the pale infusion of French symbolism and post-Pre-Raphaelitism, even Aubrey Beardsley himself, could all be got rid of if necessary, and so indeed, before long, they were. Lane was the coming publisher, poised between the old century and the new, and making a profit from both.
Henry Harland, his editor, was a very different kind of literary man, a garrulous flamboyant New Yorker, unpredictable except in his kindness. Although he wrote a great deal himself, favouring at this particular time a style half way between Maupassant and George du Maurier, his real talent lay in encouraging others. He was a champion of the short story, even a martyr to it, since underneath his party-giving geniality he was already mortally sick with tuberculosis.
Harland loved his contributors, whenever that was possible, and was loved. He was ‘the Chief’, with a rare editorial temperament, putting all his knowledge of the business at their disposal, and working passionately over their copy. Yet he allowed himself to be laughed at. He could in fact be quite childish, buttoning up his waistcoat over two cushions to appear unnaturally stout, or telling his guests – though always with great charm – that there was nothing to eat in the place and he could only conclude that he must have been drunk when he invited them. But the next step would be to some little French restaurant, where everyone could talk till the stars grew pale. When Aline, his wife, arrived from America, there might be arguments on a heroic scale, and a crockery-throwing element was added to the Harlands’ true commitment to music and literature. The editorial desk was disorderly, and the Chief relied on his assistant, Ella D’Arcy (not really anything as grand as an assistant, she said, all she did was to tidy up the drawers and put the typescripts at the bottom to the top), to meet the printer’s deadline. Before Ella volunteered for the job, however, and while there was still clear space on the desk, Harland and Beardsley brought out the first number of The Yellow Book.
All who paid their five shillings expected something extraordinary; most were outraged by Arthur Symons’s Stella Maris, written a long way after Rossetti’s Jenny, and glorifying the ‘delicious shame’ of some long past night with a prostitute, or, as he calls her, a ‘Juliet of the Streets’. Symons’s piece yearns back to the faint end-time of the last Romantics, and Beardsley’s Night Piece, which does duty as an illustration, is precisely of the nineties. Ella D’Arcy’s short story Irremediable, however, looks forward to the coming psychological novel. Understated, economical and subtle, the story is one of what she called her ‘monochromes’. The husband no longer loves his intensely irritating wife who can’t even shut the door properly, or ‘do one mortal thing efficiently or well’. But in the end he accepts that she will always be the centre of his life, because hate is stronger than love.
Charlotte Mew seems not to have written her next story, Passed, until she had read The Yellow Book’s opening number. By this I don’t mean that she was waiting to see what sort of thing would suit, rather that reading it set her imagination free. Passed bears every sign of being written at top speed, projected with not much conscious control from the level which her life as Miss Lotti suppressed. The narrator, who appears to be a well-off young woman, given, however, to ranging the London streets at the mercy of her own ‘warring nature’, suddenly rushes out of her comfortable home on a cold December evening. She enters a Roman Catholic church (which seems to be St James’s, Spanish Place), and in the lamp-lit darkness sees a girl kneeling in ‘unquestionable despair’, a ‘wildly tossed spirit’ who appeals silently for help. ‘Did she reach me, or was our advance mutual? It cannot be told. I suppose we neither know. [sic]’ They hurry together through mean crowded streets to a wretched tenement, where the girl’s sister lies dying; their last possessions, a chair and an inlaid workbox, have been put on the fire. We are to understand that they have come down in the world and the sister has been seduced by a lord, or at least by a clubman, as fragments of a letter on crested paper are lying on the quilt. The fragrance of a bunch of ‘dearly-bought’ violets, in a tea-cup at th
e bedside, strays through the room.
Indisputably, I determined, something must be done for the half-frantic wanderer who was pressing a tiring weight against me. And there should be some kind hand to cover the cold limbs and close the wide eyes of the sleeper.… The dark eyes unwillingly open reached mine in an insistent stare. One hand lying out upon the coverlid, I could never again mistake for that of temporarily suspended life. My watch ticked loudly, but I dare not examine it, nor could I wrench my sight from the figure on the bed.…
My gaze was chained: it could not get free. As the shapes of monsters of every varying and increasing dreadfulness flit through one’s dreams, the images of those I loved crept round me, with stark yet well-known features, their limbs borrowing death’s rigid outline, as they mocked my recognition with soundless semblances of mirth.… The horribly familiar company began to dance at intervals in and out of a ring of white gigantic bedsteads, set on end like tombstones, each of which framed a huge and fearful travesty of the sad set face that was all the while seeking vainly a pitiless stranger’s care.
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