She talked late: the old fire was still there, the old loving curiosity for Life, and, in spite of her frail health, more than the old enjoyment of the moment. She told me—She, who had known of Love and Friendship as much as any woman in this world ever had,—“For the first time in my life I know what it is to have a man’s whole heart.”21
Since she had moved to Romney Marsh, Edith had written “occasional joyful letters” to her young friend Mavis Carter, describing how the Long Boat was taking shape, though it was “full of shavings and carpenters.”22 Now she reassured her:
I have everything to make me happy except health, kindest and most loving nursing and care . . . a four-post bed like a golden shrine and a view of about eight miles of marsh bounded by the little lovely hills of Kent.23
Finding herself in Folkestone, Mavis decided to take the bus to visit Edith. The “grave-faced little friend” who answered her knock warned her that Edith was desperately ill. Although she noted that her “face was like ivory, the dark eyes full of pain,” she detected traces of the old, exacting Edith:
Young, awkward, gawky and broken-hearted, I sat on a stiff chair and twisted my legs in desperation around its rungs, while I sought vainly for the right words. Suddenly in the old characteristic manner she scolded me violently, telling me to sit up and take Queen Mary for my model who “always crosses her right foot over her left.” Crestfallen, I pulled myself into a more becoming posture, when with her old sweet smile she said “Forgive me, my dear, I’m cross and fretful because I really am so very ill.”24
Edith talked “with her old brilliance.” When Mavis stood to leave, she insisted that Tommy help her to the gate so she could see her off. Mavis looked back and observed “a frail and indomitable figure, blowing me kisses, waving me ‘farewell.’”25
Edith suffered a crisis in December 1923. She told Berta she had almost died and, in response, her friend arrived with arms filled with flowers so Edith could enjoy them in life rather than have them adorn her grave. All this time, Olive and Tommy nursed her with unfailing devotion, writing her letters for her and reading her favorite books aloud: Jane Eyre, and Kipps by her old friend H. G. Wells. Her grown-up children would visit on weekends, and she was as welcoming and sociable as ever. When young Angus MacPhail, who would later work as a screenwriter for Alfred Hitchcock, wrote to ask if there would be more Bastable stories, she replied: “Alas, my dear Angus, your poor E. Nesbit lies dying and it is a long business and very tiresome. I fear the last of the Oswald saga has been sung.” She invited him to visit her in her “government hut in the middle of Romney Marsh.”26
Edith was in great pain but she seemed tranquil, buoyant even, toward the end. “What things there are still to see and to do, and to think and to be and to grow into and to grow out of!” she told Berta Ruck in March 1924.27 Agnes Thorndike presented her with a contraption that allowed her to sit up and admire “the marsh and the hills behind those superb sunsets that all us marsh people love so,” as Sybil put it.28 Edith wrote a poem of thanks:
On bed of state long since a Queen
Would wake to morning’s starry beams
Silvering the arras blue and green
That hung her walls with cloth-of dreams;
And, where the fluted valance drooped
Above the curtains ’broidered posies,
The pretty caravan cupids trooped
Festooning all her bed with roses.
Mother of Stars! Enthroned I lie
On the high bed your kindness sent,
And see between the marsh and sky
The little lovely hills of Kent;
And, ’mid the memories old and new
That bless me as the curtain closes,
Come troops of pretty thoughts of you . . .
And mine, too, is a bed of roses.29
Death held little fear for her, and she shared a lovely image with Berta:
When you were at Well Hall I used often on summer evenings to skip away from the table and go and look through the window at the rest of you finishing your desserts and your flirtations and your arguments amongst the flowers and fruits and bright glasses and think “This is how I shall see it all some day when I am not alive any more.” Well it won’t be Well Hall I shall go back to now when the time comes for it died before I died and it is quite dead whereas I am only half.30
“Good-bye, my dear,” she wrote. “I really think the door will open soon now, and I may be able to scurry through at last, but I shall remember you wherever I wake.” Generous to the end, she assured Berta: “Whenever you think of me do not forget to think how much happiness your loving kindness has given me, and how you have helped my last, long months.” She signed herself “Your loving Duchess.”31
On May 4, 1924, Edith Nesbit died of “bronchiectasis and cardiac dilatation” at the age of sixty-five. The nature of her illness suggests she may have had lung cancer too. Tommy, Olive, Iris, and Paul kept vigil by her bedside, and she died in Iris’s arms. In accordance with her wishes, she was buried in a plain oak coffin in the peaceful country churchyard of St. Mary in the Marsh, under the protective shade of a majestic elm that stood close to the road. At Tommy’s request, a short funeral service concluded with a reading of the final section from Dormant:
“It seems such waste, such stupid senseless waste,” said Bats. “His great thoughts, his fine body that loved life, all the friendship, the aspiration, the love . . . all thrown away, gone, wasted for ever.” “Who says that it is wasted?” said the Jew. “It is his body that has served its turn and is cast away. The great thoughts, the friendship, the aspiration, the love; can we say that these die? Nay, rather, these shall not die. These shall live in the Courts of the Lord, forever.”32
The Nottingham Evening Post reported: “E. Nesbit (Mrs Hubert Bland), the famous writer of children’s and other stories, directed that a wooden tablet bearing her name should be the only memorial over her grave.” Tommy carved the simple wooden monument that marks her grave.
Resting, E. Nesbit, Mrs Bland-Tucker,
Poet and Author died 4th May 1924 Aged 65
In Dymchurch a committee was formed to organize the establishment of a reading room and village club to her memory.33 There was talk of an “E. Nesbit Institute,” and the muddy track leading to her home for the final two years of her life, the only home she ever owned, was renamed Nesbit Road. A correspondent to the Derby Daily Telegraph who had never met her wrote: “I felt that one of my oldest and dearest friends had passed away . . . in her death I can but mourn one who was to me, although I never met her, a guide, philosopher, and friend in my childhood, ever ready and willing to transport me to ethereal realms.”34
Save for a few small bequests, the less than seven hundred pounds that Edith left went to Tommy. She instructed him to sell the copyright in her works, and he used some of the proceeds to purchase an annuity of sixty pounds for Olive Hill. Mavis Carter gave him a scrapbook of Edith’s uncollected stories, articles, and poems that she had compiled for him as a birthday present at Edith’s request. In 1931 Tommy helped Doris Langley Moore with her biography, but he complained that there was too much of him in it and not enough of Hubert. When Rosamund’s marriage failed in 1932, she moved in with Tommy. She was holding his hand when he passed away peacefully, after suffering a stroke, on May 17, 1935. He was seventy-nine.
No memorial was erected in the churchyard where he is buried. Under the terms of his will, he left the Jolly Boat to Iris and the Long Boat to Paul. What money he had went to his nephews. Sadly, Edith’s children did not fare well. On October 9, 1940, after years of depression, Paul, aged sixty, ingested poison and died. Iris reached her hundredth birthday, but her life was blighted by tragedy when her daughter Pandora died in a road accident in France in 1950. A professional dancer, she had danced in Madame Pavlova’s company. Iris raised Pandora’s adopted children, Max and Fern. John became a brilliant bacteriologist, and his research into trachoma and blindness improved many lives. They were n
ot blood relatives, but he, like Edith, was prone to chest complaints. He died at the age of forty-six and was praised for his “kindness and gentleness.”35 His birth mother, Alice Hoatson, ended her life in poverty and always spoke of her “niece and nephew” Rosamund and John.36
Edward Jepson summarized Edith’s literary legacy:
Mrs Bland presented and still presents to hundreds of thousands of impressionable children a sane and courageous, cheerful and kindly approach to life, which has probably been more valuable to the English than all the speeches of their politicians of the seventy odd years since she was born.37
In 1956 Noël Coward wrote from Jamaica:
I am reading again through all the dear E. Nesbits and they seem to me to be more charming and evocative than ever. It is strange that after half a century I still get so much pleasure from them. Her writing is so light and unforced, her humour is so sure and her narrative quality so strong that the stories, which I know backwards, rivet me as much now as they did when I was a little boy. Even more so in one way, because I can now enjoy her actual talent and her extraordinary power of describing hot summer days in England in the beginning years of the century. All the pleasant memories of my own childhood jump at me from the pages.38
A copy of The Enchanted Castle was found beside his bed when he died on March 26, 1973.
Many writers took inspiration from Edith’s books. In 1947 American writer Edward Eager was delighted to discover a secondhand copy of Wet Magic while searching for books to read to his son. “I have not got over the effects of that discovery yet, nor, I hope, will I ever,” he recalled, adding:
Probably the sincerest compliment I could pay her is already paid in the fact that my own books for children could not even have existed if it were not for her influence. And I am always careful to acknowledge this indebtedness in each of my stories; so that any child who likes my books and doesn’t know hers may be led back to the master of us all.
He recognized the source of her talent: “It was when the child in her spoke out directly to other children that she achieved greatness,” he wrote, and he elaborated:
But there are lucky people who never lose the gift of seeing the world as a child sees it, a magic place where anything can happen next minute and delightful and unexpected things constantly do. Of such, among those of us who try to write for children, is the kingdom of Heaven. And in that kingdom E. Nesbit stands with the archangels.39
C. S. Lewis borrowed Edith’s wardrobe from her story “The Aunt and Amabel,” written in 1912, in which a little girl enters a magic world through a wardrobe. Of The Story of the Amulet, he wrote: “It first opened my eyes to antiquity, the ‘dark backward and abysm of time.’ I can still re-read it with delight.”40 In 1925 he presented several of her books to J. R. R. Tolkien’s sons, John, Michael, and Christopher. By coincidence, Tolkien had been a pupil of Richard Reynolds, the husband of Edith’s niece Dorothea, at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and it was Reynolds who drove him to Oxford University when he was due to start his first term in 1911.
Although Tolkien never admitted to reading Edith’s books, in childhood, aged seven, he wrote a story about a “green great dragon” at the same time as her Book of Beasts was being serialized in The Strand Magazine. In a letter to his publisher, written two years after The Hobbit was published, he described her as “an author I delight in.”41 He was invited to deliver the Andrew Lang Lecture in 1939, and early versions of his speech praise the “triumphant formula that E. Nesbit found in the Amulet and the Phoenix and the Carpet.”42 He removed this from later versions. Elements of Tolkien’s stories appear to draw on Edith’s work, and a story he told his children features a cantankerous sand-sorcerer he called a Psammead.
Fantasy writer Donald Douglas had as his bookplate:
Mr Douglas is an abject admirer of E. Nesbit, and once introduced a reference to the Ugly-Wuglies (those bloodcurdling creations in “The Enchanted Castle”) into his first novel “The Grand Inquisitor.”43
Lady Antonia Fraser described The Enchanted Castle as “surely the best horror story ever written.” She explained: “The moment when the Ugly-Wuglies begin to clap stays with me and still chills as it did then. I like all Nesbit but this is the best.”44 Her admiration was shared by the late Queen Mother, who wrote to thank Noël Coward for his gift of four of Edith’s books and told him:
I am quite sure that I shall once again be terrified of the Uglie Wugglies—oh the horror of the kid gloves clapping! Do you know, that I often take off my gloves to clap at theatres or ballet or opera, and I know that this is purely because the sound of the dull thudding of languid hands in gloves brings back vividly the dreadful Uglie-Wuglies!45
When she delivered a lecture, “In Celebration of Edith Nesbit,” at the Inaugural General Meeting of the Edith Nesbit Society on October 29, 1996, celebrated children’s author Joan Aiken took the opportunity to acknowledge her own debt:
She has had a powerful influence on my own writing, as can readily be seen. Her strongest point is her marvellous capacity for combining magical and fantastic ingredients with comic realistic situations.46
Screenwriter and novelist Frank Cottrell Boyce described her importance to him in an interview with the Irish Times: “I came to her late, but it unlocked something in my head. It’s way beyond an influence,” he says. “She’s massively underrated. I love comic writing—I love Damon Runyon and PG Wodehouse and David Sedaris. But none of them are in the same planet as E Nesbit.”47 Michael Moorcock has Oswald Bastable narrate his trilogy A Nomad of the Time Streams (1971–81). Helen Cresswell adapted Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet for television, and wrote The Return of the Psammead in 1992. Booker Prize–winning novelist A. S. Byatt drew on Edith’s life when writing her magnificent The Children’s Book. Jacqueline Wilson brought the first instalment of Edith’s Psammead series up to date with Four Children and It (2012). Kate Saunders wrote Five Children on the Western Front as a sequel to Five Children and It. Emma Donoghue, acclaimed author of Room, was influenced by Edith’s Bastable children when writing The Lotterys Plus One. The extraordinarily popular and prolific English writer Neil Gaiman, who loves all her books, particularly the Psammead series, included her story “The Cockatoucan; or, Great-Aunt Willoughby,” from Nine Unlikely Tales, in Unnatural Creatures, a collection of short stories about fantastical things that he edited in 2013.
When asked to name her favorite books, J. K. Rowling, hailed as the queen of modern-day writing for children, replied:
The first of my chosen books is the famous story of the six Bastable children, who set out to restore the “fallen fortunes” of their house: The Story of the Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit. I think I identify with E. Nesbit more than any other writer. She said that, by some lucky chance, she remembered exactly how she felt and thought as a child, and I think you could make a good case, with this book as Exhibit A, for prohibition of all children’s literature by anyone who can not remember exactly how it felt to be a child. Nesbit churned out slight, conventional children’s stories for 20 years to support her family before producing The Treasure Seekers at the age of 40.
It is the voice of Oswald, the narrator, that makes the novel such a tour de force. I love his valiant attempts at humility while bursting with pride at his own ingenuity and integrity, his mixture of pomposity and naivete, his earnestness and his advice on writing a book. According to Oswald, a good way to finish a chapter is to say: “But that is another story.” He says he stole the trick from a writer called Kipling.48
Rowling identifies Edith’s ability to empathize with children as the key to her popularity. Edith described herself as one of those people who “feel to the end that they are children in a grown-up world.” In Wings and the Child she explained:
You cannot hope to understand children by common-sense, by reason, by logic, nor by any science whatsoever. You cannot understand them by imagination—not even by love itself. There is only one way: to remember what you
thought and felt and liked and hated when you yourself were a child. Not what you know now—or think you know—you ought to have thought and liked, but what you did then, in stark fact, like and think. There is no other way.49
She described these adult children:
They just mingle with the other people, looking as grown-up as any one—but in their hearts they are only pretending to be grown-up: it is like acting in a charade. Time with his make-up box of lines and wrinkles, his skilful brush that paints out the tints and the contours of youth, his supply of grey wigs and rounded shoulders and pillows for the waist, disguises the actors well enough, and they go through life altogether unsuspected. The tired eyes close on a world which to them has always been the child’s world, the tired hands loose the earthly possessions which have, to them, been ever the toys of the child. And deep in their hearts is the faith and the hope that in the life to come it may not be necessary to pretend to be grown-up.
Such people as these are never pessimists, though they may be sinners; and they will be trusting, to the verge of what a real grown-up would call imbecility. To them the world will be, from first to last, a beautiful place, and every unbeautiful thing will be a surprise, hurting them like a sudden blow. They will never learn prudence, or parsimony, nor know, with the unerring instinct of the really grown-up, the things that are or are not done by the best people. All their lives they will love, and expect love—and be sad, wondering helplessly when they do not get it. They will expect beautiful quixotic impulsive generosities and splendours from a grown-up world which has forgotten what impulse was: and to the very end they will not leave off expecting. They will be easily pleased and easily hurt, and the grown-ups in grain will contemplate their pains and their pleasures with an uncomprehending irritation.
If these children, disguised by grown-up bodies, are ever recognised for what they are, it is when they happen to have the use of their pens—when they write for and about children. Then grown-up people will call them intelligent and observant, and children will write to them and ask the heart-warm, heart-warming question, “How did you know?” For if they can become articulate they will speak the language that children understand, and children will love, not them, for their identity is cloaked with grey grown-up-ness, but what they say. There are some of these in whom the fire of genius burns up and licks away the trappings under which Time seeks to disguise them—Andersen, Stevenson, Juliana Ewing were such as these—and the world knows them for what they were, and adores in them what in the uninspired it would decry and despise.50
The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit Page 34