The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

  Shaw wrote of Charlotte:

  She, being also Irish, does not succumb to my arts as the unsuspecting and literal Englishwoman does; but we get on together all the better, repairing bicycles, talking philosophy and religion . . . or, when we are in a mischievous or sentimental humour, philandering shamelessly and outrageously.

  When it came to sex, they reached a mutually satisfactory understanding:

  As man and wife we found a new relation in which sex had no part. It ended the old gallantries, flirtations, and philanderings for both of us. Even of those it was the ones that were never consummated that left the longest and kindliest memories.86

  * She was related to Thomas Courtney Townshend, Shaw’s old employer in Dublin.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE MOUSE MOVES IN

  Edith’s letter to Ada Breakell, in which she described George Bernard Shaw as “one of the most fascinating men I ever met,” also contained playful speculation about Alice Hoatson, who had, to an extent, replaced Ada in her affections: “Miss Hoatson pretends to hate him [Shaw],” she declared, “but my own impression is that she is over head and ears in love with him.”1 In another letter she told Ada that “Hamlin,” the “refined” man in “The Copper Beeches,” a story she had written with Hubert for the Weekly Dispatch, was based on Frank Podmore; “I think he is in love with Alice Hoatson,” she ventured. “I don’t fancy she will have him.”2

  Perhaps such speculation was motivated by her desire to see her new friend find happiness. Yet Shaw showed no interest in Alice, and Podmore, who later left an unhappy marriage, was almost certainly gay.3 It may have suited Edith to believe that Alice’s attentions were occupied elsewhere, since this would leave her less susceptible to Hubert’s charms. Ironically, if Alice’s account of their first meeting in January 1882 is to be believed, Edith had been particularly anxious for her to meet Hubert at the time. Although Alice had accepted her invitation to visit the following Sunday, Hubert was absent and they did not meet until May 1882.

  Whatever Alice thought about her new friend’s husband during those early months, her attachment to Edith was undeniable. They complemented each other in temperament; while Edith was impulsive and brimful of fun, Alice was passive and accommodating. So deep was Edith’s affection for Alice that she insisted they must be related. She pestered her friend Oswald Barron, who was a journalist and a scholar of heraldry, to search for some connection in their ancestry. Barron, like many young men, was susceptible to her considerable charm and agreed to do so, but he found no evidence of a blood tie. Over time, Alice developed a more ambivalent attitude toward Edith. Decades later, she described her to Doris Langley Moore as “without exception, the dearest, naughtiest, most cruel, most kindly, affectionate creature God ever sent into this world.”4

  Once Edith had written affectionate verse for Ada Breakell. Now she directed her pen toward Alice, who inspired one saccharine little ditty she included in her Gothic poem “The Moat House”:

  My sweet, my sweet,

  She is complete,

  From dainty head to darling feet;

  So warm and white,

  So brown and bright,

  So made for love and love’s delight.

  God could but spare

  One flower so fair,

  There is none like her anywhere;

  Beneath wide skies

  The whole earth lies,

  But not two other such brown eyes.5

  Oddly, this little confection is nested inside an otherwise cautionary tale that documents the fall of an innocent young novice who was cohabiting with her callous lover. She bears her lover’s child, but he abandons her to make an advantageous marriage. There are obvious parallels with Hubert’s abandonment of Maggie Doran.

  At the time he met Alice, Hubert was still in the habit of spending several nights a week at his mother’s home in Woolwich. He may have been meeting Maggie there. Alice would stay over on those nights, and Hubert’s departure at about half-past ten, while the children slumbered overhead, became the signal for Edith and her to resume their work on the various poems, stories, and illustrated cards for which Edith had secured commissions. When Alice tried her hand at illustrating cards, Edith would outline her drawings in order to improve them. Heads bent companionably over their task, they worked into the small hours, grinding out stories and verse in order to meet their deadlines.

  At times they must have felt like Albert-next-door’s uncle in The Story of the Treasure Seekers, “pegging away at one of the rotten novels he has to write to make a living.”6 In The Wouldbegoods, the fictional Alice declares: “People aren’t obliged to like everything they write about even, let alone read.”7 Like Len in The Red House, they “worked hard, hard, hard, and earned enough to keep body and soul and the two of us together in our microscopic house.”8 Sometimes they would fortify themselves by sipping weak gin. “One tablespoonful in water was our allowance,” Alice told Doris Langley Moore, “but sometimes Edith would say, ‘O mouse just one more and we can get this batch done. Mack wants it all at once.’”9

  The “Mack” Edith mentioned was illustrator and editor Robert Ellice Mack, who collaborated with her on a series of anthologies for children. She would write stories and verse to accompany the “sheaves of illustrations” he sent.* They worked on “Songs and Sketches,” a lavishly illustrated series brought out by high-end publisher Griffith, Farran & Co., which contained original verse by E. Nesbit and “Caris Brooke,” a pseudonym she shared with her half-sister Saretta, alongside poems by Swinburne, Keats, Byron, Matthew Arnold, and others, among them Philip Bourke Marston.10

  Alice was invited into the Blands’ inner circle. In 1884 she joined the Fabian Society, and in June 1885 she was appointed acting secretary. She always insisted that Edith had pestered her to move in with them. Yet there was no room for her in their tiny terraced home in Lewisham, which doubled as the “bandbox” starter house in The Red House, “squeezed in between two more portly brethren” in the “dusty avenue of little villas.”11 In any case, Alice was reluctant to leave her widowed mother. Like Edith, she had lost her father when she was a child.

  In March 1886, Edith and Hubert signed a six-month lease on 5 Cambridge Drive, a spacious semi-detached house with a garden located just off the Eltham Road in Lee Green. Edith may have been anxious to leave Elswick Road. In February she had been delivered of a stillborn child. More than four decades later, in the long, and rather self-serving account she gave Doris Langley Moore, Alice, who nursed her friend through this loss, recalled how “E. went nearly mad about this.”12 She expressed deep frustration at Edith’s unwillingness to relinquish the tiny corpse and took credit for having persuaded her friend to allow her to dress the “poor mite.” She placed the baby in a “long fish basket” and surrounded it with flowers. “Then I took it to E.,” she wrote:

  She had promised to let me take it away in a quarter of an hour. By that time I ought to have known the worth of her promises! Well I didn’t. For one hour and a half I struggled to get it from her while Hubert came to know what had happened to me. At last she let him take it; he looked so wretched, he could not hide his misery.13

  Alice’s instinct to align herself with Hubert in the face of Edith’s perfectly reasonable grief might appear odd were it not for the fact that they had embarked on a love affair by then. As Edith grieved the loss of her fourth child, Hubert’s fifth, Alice was carrying his sixth.

  In a bid, perhaps, to distract her friend from the sorrow that had engulfed her, Alice presented Edith with a green-bound notebook with “For Verses” embossed on its cover. She had little opportunity to fill it. Within weeks of losing her baby, she contracted measles from one of her children and fell dangerously ill. It was Annie Besant who took Paul, aged five, and Iris, aged four, into her home. Baby Fabian, who was just fifteen months old, stayed with his mother. Once she recovered, Edith was caught up in a whirl of intimate train journeys, liaisons in the vegetarian restaurants of London, and long suburban
walks with Shaw. She appeared oblivious to Alice’s burgeoning pregnancy. In any case, as an unattached woman from a respectable family, Alice would surely have concealed her condition.

  Late in September 1886 the Bland family moved around the corner to 8 Dorville Road. Local boy Eric Bellingham Smith, who was five at the time, left a vivid description of this house.*

  It was violently bedaubed with paint, round porch, front door, etc., and stood out between its brick coloured neighbours. Inside there was quite a nice bright little sitting room and round it as seats were square-covered boxes with colour cloth or cretonne on them. I lifted one of those covers and underneath was Tate Sugar.14

  In The Red House, Chloe admits: “The divan is only orange-boxes filled with straw, and covered with those old green curtains—you know—the ones that were so faded.”15

  Little Eric sat in on lessons Paul and Iris received from Alice and donned the miniature boxing gloves Hubert bought him so he could spar with Paul. He remembered seeing Edith just once, when he caught a glimpse of her wearing a full-length black cloak over a sunshine-yellow dress. She was exceptionally busy by then, churning out novelty books for children and short stories or verse for magazines. She was also collaborating with Hubert on novels and short stories. Yet poetry remained her passion. A profile in The Strand Magazine confirmed: “Her own emphatic view is that there is not better training for any kind of writing than the writing of verse.”16

  Her first collection of poetry, Lays and Legends, was published in November 1886 on the recommendation of Longmans, Green & Co.’s reader Andrew Lang, who was also literary editor of Longman’s Magazine. Lang was a Scottish poet, novelist, and critic who is best remembered for his enormously popular series of fairy tales for children. He believed Lays and Legends “might please a fairly large public” but suggested it should be “judiciously weeded” since “socialistic ideas” were repeated “pretty often.”17

  Edith’s poems mirrored preoccupations with the instability of her marriage and her passion for socialism. “A Last Appeal” features a rousing refrain:

  Food that we make for you,

  Money we earn:

  Give us our share of them—

  Give us our turn.

  The collection sold well and won critical acclaim, although the reviewer at Vanity Fair expressed surprise at one revelation:

  E. Nesbit has been a puzzle to us for some time. In reading the magazines we found from time to time verses of singular beauty, and the beauty was allied with a strength quite masculine. In this new volume we find evidence that the writer is a woman.18

  Reviewers often assumed E. Nesbit was a man. She was described in The Graphic as “a man of rare poetic gifts and of true honest purpose.” Like Lang, their critic took fright at her overtly left-leaning verse:

  We would fain ask him to reconsider the use he makes at times of his talents. He must know the hollowness of the Socialistic cry and that all this clamour for what some are pleased to call “Freedom”—that is unbounded licence—is simply pernicious nonsense.19

  Edith was fully aware of this confusion. She told her friend Berta Ruck:

  All the reviewers took me for a man, and I was Mr Nesbit in the mouth of all men until I was foolish enough to dedicate a book to my husband, and thus give away the secret.20

  The confusion persisted for years. Reviewing Five Children and It in 1905, at the height of her fame, one critic who described her as “one of the most delightful present-day writers for children,” added: “He has a wonderful understanding of child nature and his stories usually amuse grown-ups.”21

  An astute self-publicist, Edith sent a proof copy of Lays and Legends to Oscar Wilde, a published poet and an acknowledged leader of the Aesthetic movement. He replied with characteristic generosity:

  Any advice I can give you is of course at your disposal. With regard to your next volume—but you do not need to be taught how to tune your many-chorded lyre, and you have already caught the ear of all lovers of poetry.22

  He published several of her poems in The Woman’s World, which he edited at the time, and described “Mrs Nesbit [sic]” as “a very pure and perfect artist.”23 In “Poet’s Corner,” which he wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette in November 1888, he noted the socialist influences in her poetry: “Socialism, and the sympathy with those who are unfit seem, if we may judge from Miss Nesbit’s remarkable volume, to be the new theme of song, the fresh subject-matter for poetry.” He detected in her work “not merely the voice of sympathy but also the cry of revolution,” and he quoted from her “remarkably vigorous” “Two Voices”:

  This is our vengeance day. Our masters made fat with our fasting,

  Shall fall before us like corn when the sickle for harvest is strong.24

  Just as Wilde included Edith on the list of women he considered to have “done really good work in poetry,” pioneering publisher John Lane declared that he counted himself fortunate “to have published the works of five great women poets of the day—Mrs [Alice] Maynell, Mrs Marriott Watson, Miss E. Nesbit, Mrs Tynan Hinkson, and Mrs Dollie Radford.”25

  One of Edith’s staunchest supporters was Algernon Charles Swinburne, a man regarded as one of the most accomplished lyric poets of the time. In a letter to Mary Nesbit’s former fiancé Philip Bourke Marston dated November 15, 1886, Swinburne asked what his connection was to the author of Lays and Legends since these poems reminded him “in some of their finer characteristics rather of your own than of any other contemporary’s.” Her poem “Two Christmas Eves” struck him as “the sort of poem that Charlotte Brontë might have written if she had had more mastery of the instrument of verse.”26 Swinburne threw his considerable weight behind Lays and Legends. He arranged for Jerome K. Jerome to review it in Home Chimes under the heading “The Discovery of a new poet.”27

  Through his final years, when alcohol addiction had impaired his already fragile health, Philip Bourke Marston and Edith maintained a close friendship. In a final letter to critic Thomas Purnell, Philip asked that he take an interest in “the poems of E. Nesbit, the sister of her who had departed.”28 In December 1886, while confined to his death bed, he told William Sharp: “I think few lives have been so deeply sad as mine, though I do not forget those who have blessed it.”29 He died on February 13, 1887, and Swinburne eulogized him in the Fortnightly Review. Louise Chandler Moulton listed Edith, Iza Duffus Hardy, and South African novelist Olive Schreiner among “the group of literary friends who cheered with their sympathy and appreciation the last sad years of Marston’s darkened life.”30

  Edith felt “sick and sad” when she heard the news. She confided in Shaw:

  Philip’s death is the best thing that could have happened to him but it’s saddening to come to the end of a fifteen years’ friendship—and to feel that you can do nothing for your friend now, ever any more.31

  By then her personal life was in turmoil. Weeks before the publication of Lays and Legends, Alice Hoatson moved to 8 Dorville Road. She became “mouse” to Edith’s “pussycat” and played “auntie” to the Bland children.

  In the account she gave Doris Langley Moore, Alice claimed that she had been seriously ill and Edith had offered to nurse her in her home. In truth, she was in the final stages of pregnancy. When her daughter, Rosamund, was born in October 1886, she refused to disclose the identity of the father, and Edith agreed to raise the child as her own. On September 12, 1900, when she was almost four years old, the little girl was christened Rosamund Edith Nesbit Bland.

  Shaw recalled that Alice had attended a meeting of the Fabian Society on November 19, 1886, the date chosen as Rosamund’s birthday. Afterward she walked to Charing Cross station, accompanied by several others. In fact Rosamund had been born three weeks earlier. In The Prophet’s Mantle, which was published long before Rosamund arrived, “Alice Hatfield” is a single woman who takes refuge with a sympathetic family when her unplanned pregnancy can no longer be ignored. The real Alice was fortunate to have been given the opportunity
to keep her reputation intact while also having a hand in her daughter’s upbringing.

  Although accounts differ as to when Edith first learned that Hubert was Rosamund’s father, she was not kept in the dark for long. May Bowley, a family friend, told Doris Langley Moore: “I think privately, knowing them intimately as I did, that if Mr Bland was Rosamund’s father, she must have happened with Mrs Bland’s consent.” She cast Hubert in a heroic light and declared: “I have often heard him express the opinion that every woman had a natural right to a child whether she were married or not.” She acknowledged that Edith and Hubert had an “unusual” marriage, but she was adamant that they were “good companions” who remained “on excellent terms.” She remarked on the “absence of jealousy” between Edith and Alice and noted that Alice “made a useful ‘auntie’ who helped out in any way required of her and mended for all the children.”32

  This rather jolly description of domestic harmony clashes with alternative accounts. Rosamund believed that Edith had always had her suspicions and that she discovered the truth six months after her birth. In her version, Edith had pestered Alice for the truth until she broke down and confessed. This provoked “a hell of a scene” after which Edith had insisted on Alice and her child being “ejected then and there onto the street.” She only relented when Hubert threatened to join them. Lingering tensions erupted from then on.

  Rosamund insisted that Edith “could not have borne losing” Hubert since he had a “tremendous hold” over her. She believed that he was “absolutely irresistible to the women he paid court to, not only before the event of capture, but after.” He took “infinite trouble to please” and he “endowed every affair with the romance of his own imagination.” Since he was unwilling to relinquish either lover or wife, he used “every art of which he was capable to keep them both.” Yet hostilities were never far from the surface, and friends recalled a household bubbling over with tension. “Scenes as usual,” Shaw noted in his diary after one trying evening when only Edith and Alice were present.34