The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

  G.B.S.24

  It would seem those few who supported her had questionable motives. Prominent among them was Edmund Vivian Tanner, brother of the celebrated actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who was born Beatrice Stella Tanner. Tanner used the alias Max, and Edith named one of her dachshunds after him. He claimed to have collaborated with Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence on The Problem of the Shakespeare Plays (1910), which experts dismissed. Andrade considered him a charlatan and described him as “a long-haired man whom she [Edith] maintained at her expense in Dean Street.”25 When she took a lease on a flat at 42 Rathbone Place in 1912, she allowed him to stay there too. She even paid him a small allowance. Tanner, who suffered from tuberculosis, is thought to have inspired Great Uncle Charles in The Wonderful Garden (1911):

  He was more shadowy than you would think anybody could be. He was more like a lightly printed photograph from an insufficiently exposed and imperfectly developed negative than anything else I can think of. He was as thin and pale as Mrs Wilmington [his housekeeper], but there was nothing hard or bony about him. He was soft as a shadow—his voice, his hand, his eyes.

  It may have been Tanner who encouraged Edith to believe she had made a breakthrough. She told A. P. Watt, her new agent:

  I know it sounds mad, but I have found the Shakespeare cipher. I have told no one but you. The discovery ought to be worth thousands of pounds. I can’t leave my work. Do trust my word. I have imagination but I am not a fool or a liar. Come and see. You will be very glad if you do come. It is wonderful yet simple and you can work it yourself. I am willing to trust you with the secret, and I think you will come at once and receive it. . . . It comes out as definitely as the result of an addition sum. You will see. You will see . . . Try not to think about history or literature or the improbability of cipher being there. It is there.26

  She offered to write a series of articles on her discoveries. Like several others, she had become convinced that Elizabeth I had been married in secret to the Earl of Leicester and had two sons by him—Francis Bacon and the Earl of Essex.

  Although she was sincere in her pursuit, she could send herself up too. She included playful references to her obsession in several of her books. William Bats from Dormant is a Baconian. In The Magic City her jailer, Mr. Bacon-Shakespeare, “has written no less than twenty-seven volumes, all in cypher” on the subject of a crochet mat that no one can unravel since he has forgotten the cypher. One exchange between Katherine and Edward from The Incredible Honeymoon goes as follows:

  “You aren’t a Baconian, are you?” she asked, looking at him rather timidly across the teacups. “But you can’t be, because I know they’re all mad.” “A good many of them are very, very silly,” he owned, “but don’t be afraid—I’m not a Baconian, for Baconians are convinced that Bacon wrote the whole of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature off his own bat. I only think there’s a mystery. You remember Dickens said the life of Shakespeare was a fine mystery and he trembled daily least something should turn up.” “And nothing has.” “Nothing. That’s just it. There’s hardly anything known about the man.”

  Edward insists he is not a Baconian, but he tells Katherine: “I’m pretty sure that whoever wrote ‘Hamlet,’ that frowsy, money-grubbing provincial never did.”27 One character in The Incredible Honeymoon, “a tall, gaunt man in loose, ill-fitting clothing with a dispatch case in one hand and three or four note-books in the other,” has given up his job as an accountant and spent eighteen years decrypting ciphers. He tells Edward and Katherine that Shakespeare’s grave contains no body, and he cites “the evidence of facts as well as of ciphers.”28

  As to what Hubert made of all this, he wrote in The Happy Moralist:

  The well-meaning and industrious pedants who spend time and temper in wrangling as to whether Shakespeare was Bacon and Bacon was the son of Queen Elizabeth . . . doubtless have a place to fill in the universal scheme of things; but their place, we may be sure, is not among the artists. And yet in saying so much I am falling perhaps into the very error I set out to condemn; for if more pleasure is to be got from combing a folio through a magnifying glass in order to discover a possible cypher than with Romeo wooing Juliet on her balcony, who am I that I should scoff?29

  Edith was very vocal in stating her position. When an exchange of letters was published in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph during 1911 and 1912, she took the side of the Baconians. Writing of Shakespeare’s grave, she wondered:

  Whether the person occupying the grave (or enjoying the fame) is the person entitled to occupy the grave (or enjoy that fame). The problem is to find out who is in that grave (enjoying that fame), to find out whether the grave (or fame) is occupied by a great and noble man, or whether, as some of us fear, a very costly and beautiful monument has been erected—by regretta-ble error—over the body of a dead donkey.30

  In “An Iconoclast in Stratford,” which she wrote in 1921, she declared: “I cannot find the slightest shadow of evidence that Shakespeare was born in this house.” She insisted that Stratford “lives on the open-mouthed credulity of its visitors.” Yet she seemed cured of her Baconian obsession, since she declared:

  Is there not Shakespeare’s true shrine, his glorious works, which, as he himself foresaw, “marble and the gilded monument of princes” shall not outlive? About the authenticity of such relics as Hamlet and Lear there is no doubt; they bear in them the signet-stamp of immortal genius. Can we not honour the man who wrote them, without wasting enthusiasm on rings that he never wore and snuff boxes that he never touched? And if we must have some material object for our devotion there is always the gravestone in the chancel of Stratford church under which lies Shakespeare’s last secret. We can at least lay our garlands there with clean hands and with honest hearts.31

  * This theory gained currency midway through the eighteenth century after the publication in 1857 of The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded by Delia Bacon. It was perpetuated by William Henry Smith, author of Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakespeare’s Plays? in 1856.

  † Andrade was Professor of Physics at University College London from 1928 to 1950 and Director of the Royal Institution Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory from 1950 to 1952. In 1958 he was awarded the Royal Society Hughes Medal. Edith dedicated Wet Magic to him.

  CHAPTER 20

  “I AM NOT HURT”

  Hubert Bland, although powerful and imposing, was plagued with chronic heart trouble for much of his adult life, a condition no doubt aggravated by his enthusiasm for cigarettes. Sometime around 1910, when he was in his mid-fifties, he turned down an invitation to lecture on the grounds that he never knew when “one of these brief heart attacks is coming on.”1 A major attack in November 1910 brought him so low that he was obliged to rest completely over Christmas. By January he was well enough to travel with Edith to the Headland House Hotel in the busy fishing port of Looe in Cornwall, where they took the sea air for a month.

  He seemed much recovered when they returned home, but his eyesight, never dependable, had begun to fail badly. He was diagnosed with retinal disease in both eyes. When a heavy fall detached the retina in his relatively good eye, doctors warned him that he would almost certainly go blind. As he was desperate to avoid this, he agreed to undergo an expensive course of treatment, but it had little effect. Lecturing became impossible, and he resigned his position as honorary treasurer of the Fabian Society, a post he had held since its formation in 1884. He did continue with his weekly column in the Sunday Chronicle, and he reviewed novels for his son-in-law Clifford Sharp at the New Statesman, but he depended on Alice to read and take dictation for him.

  By the spring Edith was desperate for a holiday, but she seemed reluctant to return to the “Other House” in Dymchurch. Perhaps it seemed haunted by memories of the time she had spent there with Richard Reynolds, who was married to her niece by then. Instead she rented Crowlink Farmhouse, which she described to Harry as “an old farm house near the sea—very lovely.”2 Large enough to accommodate a dozen
guests at a time, it was perched high above the Seven Sisters on the cliffs of the West Sussex coast and had once been a smugglers’ retreat. She wrote it into The Incredible Honeymoon as “Crow’s Nest Farm”:

  Then over the crest of the hill, in a hollow of the downs there was the dark-spread blot of house and farm buildings. . . . The path that led to the door had its bricks outlined with green grass, a house-leek spread its rosettes on the sloping lichened tiles of the roof, and in the corner of the window the toad-flax flaunted its little helmets of orange and sulphur colour.3

  Edith decided that Crowlink was haunted and nailed charms over the lintels to ward off malevolent spirits. She loved the early spring solitude of her new surroundings, which she described in a letter to Lady Dunsany:

  It is a lonely little house on the downs, not a sound all day but the wind and the sea, and on sunny days, the skylarks. The quiet is like a cool kind hand on one’s forehead. There are no flowers now, except the furze which as you know only goes out of flower when kisses go out of season.4

  During the six years that followed she fled to Crowlink as often as possible. When she could not get there, she sublet it to friends. One was historical novelist Maurice Hewlett, who needed a retreat after he separated from his wife, Hilda, in 1914. This breach was caused in part by her obsession with aviation; in 1911 she had become the first woman in England to gain a pilot’s license.

  During the summer of 1911 Edith stayed in Birmingham with Dorothea and Richard. He drove her to Edgbaston so she could take three young fans out for the day. They were Mavis and Cecily Carter, cousins in their mid-teens, and Kathleen, or Kay, Mavis’s ten-year-old sister. They went to the Lord Leycester Hospital, a historic group of medieval timber-framed buildings on Warwick High Street dating mainly from the late fourteenth century. Then on to Warwick Castle, Guy’s Cliffe, and Stratford-upon-Avon, where Edith complained about having to pay sixpence to visit Shakespeare’s church.

  Mavis had been the first to discover Edith, when she received a copy of Five Children and It for her ninth birthday. She was captivated by the book and shared her enthusiasm with Cecily and Kay. They decided to write to Edith to thank her for writing it. Mavis explained:

  The first letter went astray and daring greatly we wrote again. This time we received a prompt reply written in her own broad, generous but difficult-to-read handwriting that I was soon to know so well. “My dears,” she wrote, “I did reply to your first letters. I wonder what happened to mine? Perhaps it got put in a drawer and slipped over the edge and was lost forever, or perhaps bad boys put lighted fuses in the pillar box in which it was posted . . . its fate would remain a mystery like that of the Man in the Iron mask, or what became of the little Dauphin?”5

  In her letter Cecily, with the impudence of youth, had included a list of authors whose work she preferred. Edith commended her choices and advised her to add acclaimed children’s author Mrs. Ewing to her list. From then on the girls sent Edith a letter on her birthday every year. Her responses were unfailingly warm. She dedicated The Wonderful Garden “to Cecily, Kathleen and Mavis Carter.” She told Kay that she wished for a magic carpet so she could bring them all to her. When she put Mavis and Kay into Wet Magic, her last serial for The Strand Magazine, she had them reading Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, one of the books they preferred to hers.

  In the autumn of 1910, Mavis, aged fourteen, was sent to boarding school in Folkestone. Her mother sent Edith a photograph accompanied by a note telling her how happy she was to be in a school near Dymchurch, where they knew Edith spent her holidays. A telegraph arrived the following day, inviting them to lunch at “the Other House.” Mavis recorded her memories of this day:

  I remember well driving from Folkestone along the coast, punctuated by the old Martello towers erected in the days when Napoleon was expected to invade our shores. The old horse clip-clopped along and my heart was beating in anticipation. We (my mother and I) arrived at a shabby lovable house near the sea, and she stood at the door to welcome us. I can see her still so vividly—of medium height and fullish figure, her brown untidy curly hair piled up and held with tortoise shell combs. Her kind and beautiful brown eyes looked at one, over spectacles tilted to the very tip of her well-shaped nose—they looked with such penetration I remember. She wore flowing frocks of “Liberty” browns and flames, hanging from a yoke with flowing sleeves, and I rather think amber beads; and a longish cigarette holder completed the picture, for she was always smoking.

  To put the young girl at ease, Edith had organized for a basket of kittens to be brought to the house. For lunch she served roast chicken with bread sauce, followed by chocolate pudding. The day was a great success, and they resolved to meet any time Edith was in the Midlands, but they mostly communicated by letter. Edith became a trusted adult friend who was always ready with encouragement or advice. When Mavis confessed that she had difficulty controlling her temper, Edith replied with eight pages of reassurance that began: “My dear, I know what it is to have a temper, I’ve had a long and hard struggle with mine.” When Edith undertook to write a column describing her childhood for the Daily Chronicle, she consulted Mavis on what she thought readers might enjoy. When she asked her to let her know if she ever skipped or disliked any parts of her books so she could write better stories in the future, Mavis assured her that she loved every word.

  Edith had a reputation for not taking criticism well, but she was in the habit of asking trusted friends for their opinion on her work. She sent a proof copy of her supernatural novel Dormant, which she had completed at Crowlink, to Lady Dunsany and asked her to check if she had “made footmen or butlers do anything foreign to their beautiful natures.” She also asked for permission to dedicate it:

  To Lady Dunsany

  From

  E. Nesbit

  They had grown close. When Edith charted the moat at Well Hall, she included a “Lady Beatrice’s Haven.” She also chose the name “Dunsania” for “a great tract of country” within her boundary walls.

  Edith’s books were selling poorly by then, and sales of Dormant were disappointing. When she declined Harry’s invitation to invest in a newspaper he hoped to establish in Brisbane, she explained that they were “awfully hard up at present.” She sent him an unpublished poem and asked him to return it if he did not use it. “I am frightfully busy,” she told him, “Rehearsals of my play every day.”6 The play she was referring to was Unexceptional References, a forgettable one-act comedy licensed to the Royalty Theatre in Dean Street. Since it was performed just once, as a matinee, on December 10, 1912, she certainly wasn’t going to make her fortune from it.

  That same month, the first instalment of Wet Magic appeared in The Strand Magazine, along with her story the “The Sleuth Worm,” the first of her work to appear in the magazine that year. Edith attributed her absence to “the muddleheadedness of an agent” but it seems more likely that she had nothing ready. She was still spending far too much time on her Baconian investigations, and she had been in such a hurry to finish her previous serial, The Wonderful Garden, that her illustrator H. R. Millar needed to work from chapter summaries and drawings she had dashed off. She did promise to alter any aspect that was at odds with his illustrations.

  This decline in sales had been of concern in 1910 when Macmillan published The Magic City. Desperate to promote it, Edith suggested mounting a small exhibition in Selfridges. H. R. Millar helped her with this project and remembered that the store manager had been horrified to discover how many bricks she had taken from the toy department. When he refused to allow her to take any more, she took umbrage and left. She took her project elsewhere. In a letter to Harry, she explained that she was building “a ‘Magic City’ of bricks and dominoes and odds and ends, at Olympia for the Children’s Welfare Exhibition.” In preparation, she erected a section measuring ten by six feet in her Rathbone Place flat. This time Sir Frederick Macmillan offered to pay for the bricks.

  The Children’s Welfare Exhibition was he
ld at London’s Olympia exhibition center from December 31, 1912, to January 11, 1913. Thousands of visitors, including politicians and several members of the Royal family, attended debates, discussions, and lectures on children’s literature, health, and psychology. Edith’s booth was open on one side, and the three enclosing walls were painted sky blue. On a raised surface she had constructed a city with elaborate palaces and towers, delicate bridges, and lush gardens, all fashioned from common household items: cotton reels, biscuit tins, saucepan lids, and chessmen. She hung illustrations from The Magic City on the walls and offered copies for sale.

  While she was there, Edith chatted with fans and read fairy tales in a session chaired by G. K. Chesterton. Afterward she responded to numerous letters requesting instructions for building a city like hers by writing Wings and the Child. She included an account of the Children’s Welfare Exhibition:

  Let me remember how many good friends I found among the keepers of the stalls, how a great personage of the Daily News came with his wife at the last despairing moment, and lent me the golden and ruby lamps from their dining-table, how the Boy Scouts “put themselves in four” to get me some cocoa-nuts for roofs of cottages, how their Scout Master gave me fourteen beautiful little ivory fishes with black eyes, to put in my silver paper ponds, how the basket-makers on the one side and the home hobbies on the other were to me as brothers, how the Cherry Blossom Boot Polish lady gave me hairpins and the wardens of Messrs W.H. Smith’s bookstall gave me friendship, how the gifted boy-sculptor for the Plasticine stall, moved by sheer loving-kindness, rushed over one day and dumped a gorgeous prehistoric beast, modelled by his own hands, in the sands about my Siberian tomb, how the Queen of Portugal came and talked to me for half an hour in the most flattering French, while the Deity from the Daily News looked on benign.7