The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

It was clear that Charlotte Wilson’s nihilist views were more radical than those of her fellow Fabians. Shaw believed that, after she joined, “a sort of influenza of Anarchism soon spread through the society.” In 1885, aided by Edward Pease and Annie Besant, she organized the Society of Friends of Russia. She also wrote an account of anarchism in What Socialism Is, which became Fabian Tract No. 4 and was published in June 1886. The following year she resigned from the Executive and joined forces with Russian Anarchist Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, who had informed a character in Edith and Hubert’s novel The Prophet’s Mantle. Together they established the Freedom Press and financed, edited, and published Freedom, an anarchist newspaper to which Edith contributed.

  Like Charlotte Wilson, Edith too caused a stir at Fabian meetings. She cut her hair short, in a style she described as “deliciously comfortable,” and she adopted simple aesthetic clothing made from natural fibers; these new costumes were “deliciously pleasant to wear.”48 She also took up smoking, a habit long considered the preserve of men, rolling her own cigarettes and inserting them into an elegant amber holder. On occasion she even smoked theatrical black cheroots.49 In Something Wrong, a collection of eight gothic stories that were likened in style to those of Edgar Allan Poe, her character Nora takes up smoking as a protest against gender prejudice. In “The Pavilion,” published in The Strand Magazine in November 1915, she scorned “ladies who had not yet learnt that a cigarette is not exclusively a male accessory like a beard or a bass voice.” Here too she praised “the freedom of modern dress and coiffure, and the increasing confidence in herself which the modern girl experiences.”50 In The Story of the Treasure Seekers, Alice Bastable, her fictional alter ego, insists that the hairdresser cut her hair short and “always will play boys’ parts.”

  Edward Pease described Edith as “the most attractive and vivacious woman of our circle.”51 When Havelock Ellis sat behind her at a meeting, he described:

  A woman, young and beautiful it seemed to me, and certainly full of radiant vitality; she turned around and looked into one’s face with a frank and direct gaze of warm sympathy which in a stranger I found singularly attractive so that I asked afterwards who she was. I never spoke to her and never saw her again.52

  With Hubert beside her in his velvet evening coats, yellow neckties, and ever-present monocle, they must have made an arresting pair. A report on the Fabian delegation to the International Socialist and Trade Union Congress at the Queens Hall in 1896 noted “Mr Hubert Bland, looking like a stray bank director, imparted a soothing air of respectability to his vicinity.”53

  Of course, Edith performed far more than a decorative role at Fabian meetings. She was elected to the pamphlet committee in March 1884; “Now can you fancy me on a committee?” she asked Ada, “I really surprise myself sometimes.”54 That year she helped produce the first Fabian pamphlet, Why Are the Many Poor?, written by W. L. Phillips, a house painter who helped runaway slaves in America, then scrutinized line by line by members of the committee before it was signed off on. Edith seemed unimpressed: “Personally I don’t think much of it,” she told Ada, “but you can’t expect working men’s style to be much and his facts are all right.” She softened the blow by writing of Phillips, “I like him so much.”55

  In February 1886 Edith was elected onto the Fabian Society Conference Committee. The minutes of a meeting held on May 6, 1887, recorded: “Mrs Bland recommended the holding of classes in political economy as a development of the society’s work.” A fortnight later she was elected to a “committee to make suggestions for amending the printed statement of the Basis, Aims, etc. of the society.”56 She also contributed to the Fabian Society journal To-Day, which she helped Hubert edit for a time.

  Yet she could be disruptive too. Several members recalled how she would demand glasses of water or faint during meetings, particularly if she had been crossed in an argument. It was Shaw as usual who provided the most entertaining account. After attending a meeting on January 1, 1886, at which Edward Carpenter read a paper on private property, he wrote:

  Awfully dull meeting. Wilson yawning like anything—no wonder! Infernal draft from the window, Coffin fidgeting—putting coals on the fire, distributing ipecacuanha lozenges, & so on. Miss Coffin sitting on the landing, evidently bored. . . . Something making a frightful noise like the winding of a rusty clock. Mrs Bland suspected of doing it with the handle of her fan. Wish she wouldn’t. Two or three meetings like this could finish up any society.57

  He refused to sit beside her unless she promised not to interrupt him by asking for a glass of water or “staging a faint.”58 Uncommonly tall and fiery-haired, Shaw was in his late twenties by then and was described by one friend as looking like a “fairly respectable plasterer, his cuffs trimmed with scissors, his boots shabby and cracked, and his tall hat worn back to front because the brim was broken.”59 Yet he had a compelling personality, and Edith was one of dozens of women who fell madly in love with him.

  * “But one thing is needed,” Christ to Martha, Luke 10:42.

  * Money or material wealth.

  * The actor Laurence Olivier was his nephew.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE SUMMER OF SHAW

  In a diary entry dated February 21, 1920, poet and writer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote of George Bernard Shaw: “He is an ugly fellow, too, his face pasty white, with a red nose and a rusty red beard, and little slatey-blue eyes.”1 Above these eyes, Irish editor and writer Frank Harris noted, were “straight eyebrows tending a little upwards at the outside and thus adding a touch of the familiar Mephistophelian sarcasm to the alert keen expression.”2 Fellow Fabian Sydney Olivier wrote about Shaw’s “dead white complexion and orange patches of whisker about his cheek and his chin,” and recalled Henry Hyde Champion likening him to “an unskillfully poached egg.”3 Poor Shaw had only grown his “straggly beard” to conceal scars left by smallpox, which he, like Hubert, had contracted in 1881.

  Hubert, who was a careful and flashy dresser, remarked on Shaw’s shabbiness: “When I first knew Bernard Shaw,” said Hubert Bland, the journalist, author, and Fabian,

  his costume was unmistakably, arrantly Bohemian. . . . Shaw wore a pair of tawny trousers, distinguished for their baggy appearance, a long cutaway coat which had once been black, but was then a dingy green, cuffs which he was now and then compelled, cruel though it was, to trim to the quick, and a tall silk hat, which had been battered down so often that it had a thousand creases in it from top to crown. Ah, that was a wonderful hat! . . . Shaw had to turn it around when he put it on, because it was broken in the middle, and if he wore it in the usual way it would fall limply together when removed from his head.4

  Poverty dictated Shaw’s careless appearance. When he received a life assurance payment upon the death of his father, he bought a suit from the newly opened Dr. Jaeger’s Sanitary Woollen System shop on Fore Street in London. He insisted that this getup, made from undyed wool stockinette, allowed his body to breathe, but Frank Harris remarked that he looked like “a forked radish in a worsted bifurcated stocking.”5 Shaw had plenty to say about Hubert’s appearance too. He dubbed him “the eyeglassed and indomitable Bland,” and counted him among a group of Fabian men of “exceptional character and attainments.”6 His comments on Hubert were reported in an article for the Evening Dispatch:

  He was always a very striking figure. He was an enormously powerful man physically; he had such immense shoulders that none of us would sit next to him in a room, because his shoulders occupied the space of three chairs. He had to leave room between the Hubert and the Bland and a chair space on either side of him to allow his shoulders to work.7

  Most people understood that Shaw’s attractions lay beneath the superficial. As Harris noted, he was “above all a charming talker with enough brogue to make women appraise him with an eye to capture.”8 Blunt declared:

  Shaw’s appearance, however, matters little when he begins to talk, if he can ever be said to begin, for he talks always in his fine Irish bro
gue. His talk is like his plays, a string of paradoxes, and he is ready to be switched on to any subject one pleases and to talk brilliantly on all.9

  It was a fellow Fabian who provided the best encapsulation: “Mr Shaw’s position, as I understand it, is one of pure, unadulterated individualism.”10 He could be infuriatingly enigmatic. Asked what he thought of “G.B.S.,” Shaw replied that G.B.S. was “one of the most successful of my fictions” and “about as real as a pantomime ostrich.”11 In fact he was excruciatingly shy and described himself as “nervous and self-conscious to a heartbreaking degree.” Since he spilled over with opinions on every topic, he cultivated a deceptive “air of impudence.”12

  George Bernard Shaw, nicknamed “Sonny” in boyhood, was born on July 26, 1856, at 3 Upper Synge Street in the lower-middle-class Portobello district of Dublin city. He was the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw, an ineffectual, alcoholic civil servant turned corn merchant, and his wife, Lucinda Elizabeth “Bessie” Shaw, an accomplished amateur singer. His two older sisters were Lucinda, always called Lucy, and Elinor Agnes, whom they called “Yuppy.” He told the actress Ellen Terry that his was “a devil of a childhood . . . rich only in dreams, frightful and loveless in realities.”13

  Shaw’s mother, whom he regarded as “a Bohemian anarchist with ladylike habits,” introduced music into his life but remained distant otherwise.14 In adulthood he dreamed she was also his wife, a fantasy that would have intrigued Freud. Interestingly, it was said that Freud remarked: “Shaw does not understand sex. He has not the remotest conception of love. There is no real love affair in his plays.”15 The young Shaw was strongly influenced by Bessie Shaw’s singing teacher, George John Vandeleur Lee, a man he considered “mesmeric” and “daringly original.” It was Lee who prompted Shaw’s lifelong habits of eating brown bread and sleeping with the windows open. Although Lee lived with the family for a time, Shaw insisted that his relationship with Bessie was purely professional. He told Frank Harris:

  I was brought up in a ménage à trois (we kept joint household with a musician who was a bit of a genius as a teacher of singing and conductor, with my mother as his prima donna and lieutenant).16

  When Lee moved to London in May 1873, Bessie followed with Yuppy and Lucy in tow. Lucy became a successful music hall singer, but poor Yuppy died of pulmonary tuberculosis in a sanatorium on the Isle of Wight in March 1876. Shaw remained in Dublin with his father, a man he regarded as “humane and likable” although he was utterly undone by drink.17 He accepted a junior clerkship with a firm of estate managers. For £18 (approximately £2,000, or USD$2,600 today) a year he sat in “a stuffy little den counting another man’s money.” He did well there and was promoted, but he regarded the whole enterprise as a “damnable waste of human life.” In March 1876 he too left for London.

  In London Shaw tried unsuccessfully for the civil service. He drifted for three years before accepting a job as Wayleave Manager with the Edison Telephone Company, where he was responsible for securing permission for the running of telephone lines through private property. He resigned in June 1880. That December he moved with his mother to an unfurnished apartment at 37 Fitzroy Street, close to the newly electrified reading room at the British Museum. By then he had written Immaturity, a semiautobiographical novel that was rejected time and time again. By the time it was published by Constable in 1931, its author was fêted as a celebrated playwright and intellectual.

  Shaw spent his evenings at lectures and society meetings, where he mixed with the most radical thinkers in London. Soon he was contributing from the floor during every debate. He styled himself an “independent radical” in search of a political home. He was on the verge of joining the SDF when he met Hubert in the offices of the Christian Socialist in May 1884. Sensing a potential convert, Hubert invited Shaw to attend the next meeting of the Fabian Society and sent him a copy of Fabian Tract No. 1—Why Are the Many Poor?

  It seemed clear to Shaw that the Fabians represented “a body of educated middle-class intelligentsia, my own class in fact.”18 He attended a meeting on May 16, 1884, and wrote in the minutes, “this meeting was made memorable by the first appearance of Bernard Shaw.”19 In September he was accepted as a member and he was elected to the Executive the following May. That same month, in a stirring address, he outlined seventeen propositions that were adopted as the first Fabian Society manifesto. Edward Pease described them as “unqualified Shaw.”20

  According to Ada Chesterton, Cecil’s wife, Bernard Shaw and Hubert Bland were the “star turns” of the Fabian Society:

  Some of the committee members suggested a diet of nuts and undiluted vitamins but their drabness faded at the sight of G.B.S.s flaming red head and general flamboyance. Hubert Bland, refulgent in eyeglass, smartly cut clothes, stiff shirt and collar and exotic tie, looked like a dashing company promoter at a Convocation of Rural Deans, or a sinister international spy at a meeting of the Junior Navy league.21

  Another Fabian, Jerome K. Jerome, attributed the theatrical atmosphere of their meetings to the presence of Shaw. In autumn 1886 Shaw delivered a lecture on “Socialism and the Family.” Afterward, referring to himself, Shaw penciled in the minute book: “This was one of Shaw’s most outrageous performances.” He could be deadly serious too. Edith regarded him as “the most interesting” of the Fabians. She painted a perfect little pen portrait for Ada Breakell:

  G.B.S. has a fund of dry Irish humour that is simply irresistible. He is a very clever writer and speaker—is the grossest flatterer (of men, women and children impartially) I ever met, is horribly untrustworthy as he repeats everything he hears, and does not always stick to the truth, and is very plain like a long corpse with a dead white face—sandy sleek hair, and a loathsome small straggly beard, and yet is one of the most fascinating men I ever met.22

  In Daphne in Fitzroy Street, Edith cast Shaw as Mr. Henry, Daphne’s love interest, and has her declare: “I wish he would fall in love with me. I’d soon put him in his place. It would be a real pleasure to do it. But he’s not likely to. I believe he hates me, really.”23 Edith would have benefited from the advice offered by fellow Fabian Beatrice Webb, who declared: “You cannot fall in love with a sprite and Shaw is a sprite in such matters, not a real person.”24 Peevish at times and inclined to hypochondria, Shaw seemed an unlikely object of romantic desire. He could be infuriatingly self-absorbed and exceptionally set in his ways. Once, when Lady Randolph Churchill invited him to lunch, he telegraphed “Certainly not! What have I done to provoke such an attack on my well-known habits?” To her credit, she replied “Know nothing of your habits. Hope they are not as bad as your manners.”25 Lunch rarely figured in Shaw’s daily routine, which he outlined in a letter to E. D. Girdlestone:

  I do not smoke, though I am not intolerant of that deplorable habit in others [he later admitted that he hated to see women smoke]. I do not eat meat nor drink alcohol. Tea I also bar, and coffee. My three meals are Breakfast—cocoa and porridge; Dinner—the usual fare with a penn’orth of stewed Indian corn, haricot beans or whatnot in the place of the cow; and “Tea”—cocoa and brown bread, or eggs. [Sunday dinner was] brown bread and cheese, with a glass of milk and an apple.26

  Yet, for all his eccentricity, Shaw had survived several romantic entanglements by the time Edith was extolling his virtues. He portrayed himself as hapless prey and told Frank Harris: “I did not need to pursue women; I was pursued by them.”27 This appeared to irk him. “Whenever I have been left alone in a room with a susceptible female,” he told Hesketh Pearson, “she has invariably thrown her arms round me and declared that she adored me.”28 In Shaw’s novel Love Among the Artists (1881) young women are drawn inexplicably to taciturn musical composer Owen Jack. “He was not conventionally handsome,” admits one admirer, “but there was something about him that I cannot very well describe. It was a sort of latent power.”29

  Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary: “Adored by many women, he [Shaw] is a born philanderer.”30 Hubert, who was a s
erial and unapologetic womanizer, declared that Shaw seemed “obsessed by Woman . . . terrified by Woman, dominated by Woman.”31 While convalescing from scarlet fever at the home of a maternal uncle in 1882, he had become embroiled in a desultory romance with trainee nurse Alice Lockett. To keep up their connection after he left, she took music lessons from his mother. This relationship appears to have been comparatively chaste; Shaw’s biographer Stanley Weintraub described it as more epistolary than physical.32 It was over by 1885, but they corresponded for years, and he lent her money when her husband was called up during the First World War.33 She inspired the spirited character Gertrude Lindsay in his novel An Unsocial Socialist (1887).

  Shaw’s relationship with Jenny Patterson, a friend and pupil of his mother’s, was far more significant. She informed hot-tempered Blanche Sartorius in Widowers’ Houses (1892) and stormy Julia Craven in The Philanderer (1893). In a diary entry dated July 26, 1885, his twenty-ninth birthday, he noted that he lost his virginity to Patterson, an event he described as “a new experience.”34 Insisting this was his “first connection of the kind,” he wrote: “I was an absolute novice. I did not take the initiative in the matter.”35 Yet he was being coy, since he had recorded on July 18 that he had purchased “some fl,” an abbreviation of French letters, or condoms.36

  Shaw’s attitude to sex was distinctly odd. When Cecil Chesterton asked him if he was “puritan in practice,” he was reported to have replied that “the sexual act was to him monstrous and indecent and that he could not understand how any self-respecting couple could face each other in the daylight after spending the night together.”37 Hesketh Pearson insisted that Shaw believed the most satisfactory way of procreating “would be for a crowd of healthy men and women to meet in the dark, to couple, and then to separate without having seen one another’s faces.”38 Shaw himself wrote: “I was not impotent; I was not sterile; I was not homosexual; and I was extremely susceptible, though not promiscuously.”39