The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit Read online

  Copyright © 2019 Eleanor Fitzsimons

  Jacket © 2019 Abrams

  Published in 2019 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958823

  ISBN: 978-1-4197-3897-5

  eISBN: 978-1-68335-687-5

  Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use.

  Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below.

  Abrams Press® is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

  ABRAMS The Art of Books

  195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007

  abramsbooks.com

  FOR DEREK, ALEX, AND EWAN

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1

  THE MUMMIES OF BORDEAUX

  CHAPTER 2

  “FAREWELL THE TRANQUIL MIND! FAREWELL CONTENT!”

  CHAPTER 3

  “DIM LIGHT OF FUNERAL LAMPS”

  CHAPTER 4

  “A PARTICULARLY AND PECULIARLY MASCULINE PERSON”

  CHAPTER 5

  “MORE LIKE A LOVER THAN A HUSBAND”

  CHAPTER 6

  “A COMMITTED IF ECCENTRIC SOCIALIST”

  CHAPTER 7

  THE SUMMER OF SHAW

  CHAPTER 8

  THE MOUSE MOVES IN

  CHAPTER 9

  “HOW WAS HER FANCY CAUGHT?”

  CHAPTER 10

  “A CHARMING LITTLE SOCIALIST AND LITERARY HOUSEHOLD”

  CHAPTER 11

  “DRAMATIC ENTERTAINMENT ATNEW-CROSS”

  CHAPTER 12

  “THE MEDWAY, WITH THE PSAMMEAD”

  CHAPTER 13

  “ISN’T IT A DEAR LITTLE PLACE?”

  CHAPTER 14

  “MY SON; MY LITTLE SON, THE HOUSE IS VERY QUIET”

  CHAPTER 15

  “ALWAYS SURROUNDED BY ADORING YOUNG MEN”

  CHAPTER 16

  “ERNEST, I’VE COME TO STAY”

  CHAPTER 17

  “I WANT THE PLAIN NAKED UNASHAMED TRUTH”

  CHAPTER 18

  “VOTES FOR WOMEN? VOTES FOR CHILDREN! VOTES FOR DOGS!”

  CHAPTER 19

  “A CURTAIN, THIN AS GOSSAMER”

  CHAPTER 20

  “I AM NOT HURT”

  CHAPTER 21

  “A HANDYMAN OF THE SEA”

  CHAPTER 22

  “TIME WITH HIS MAKE-UP BOX OF LINES AND WRINKLES”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS

  INTRODUCTION

  When I was a little girl who borrowed weekly adventures from my local library, my favorite stories were by E. Nesbit. Best of all were her tales of magic, and of these the book I loved most was The Story of the Amulet. I accompanied her fictional children to ancient Egypt, Babylon, and the lost city of Atlantis. I met Emperor Julius Caesar as he stood on the shores of Gaul looking across toward England. I was filled with hope on reading her account of a utopian London where everyone is happy and wise. In “Praise and Punishment,” chapter nine of Wings and the Child, her manual for a successful childhood, Nesbit herself explained:

  There is only one way of understanding children; they cannot be understood by imagination, by observation, nor even by love. They can only be understood by memory. Only by remembering how you felt and thought when you yourself were a child can you arrive at any understanding of the thoughts and feelings of children.1

  Confirming that the children in The Story of the Amulet were “second cousins once removed” of her beloved Bastables from earlier books, she confided:

  The reason why those children are like real children is that I was a child once myself, and by some fortunate magic I remembered exactly how I used to feel and think about things.2

  The key to her brilliance was that she was one of us, and her magical adventures felt as if they could easily happen to you or to me. Her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography explains this:

  Her characters were neither heroes nor moral dummies, but real young human beings behaving naturally. This gift of character drawing, aided by the ease and humour of her style, place her in the highest rank among writers of books for children.3

  A profile published in September 1905 in The Strand Magazine, where Nesbit’s most popular stories were serialized, praised her “astonishing versatility” and her “almost uncanny insight into the psychology of childhood.”4 A review in John O’London’s Weekly noted: “Take a book by E. Nesbit into any family of boys and girls and they fall upon it like wolves.” Of her own style, she wrote: “I make it a point of honour never to write down to a child.” In an interview with the Dundee Evening Telegraph, she insisted: “It’s quite natural that children should believe in fairies.”5

  In Treasure Seekers and Borrowers, Marcus Crouch suggested of E. Nesbit: “No writer for children today is free of debt to this remarkable woman.” He believed that she “managed to create the prototypes of many of the basic patterns in modern children’s fiction.”6 Nesbit came of age in the Victorian era, but she did not leave us more of the stiff, moralizing tales that characterized the nineteenth century. Instead, as Crouch explained, she “threw away their strong, sober, essentially literary style and replaced it with the miraculously colloquial, flexible and revealing prose which was her unique contribution to the children’s novel.” She wove her whimsy and magic into the everyday lives of children, and they would not easily let this go.

  It helped that Nesbit’s own life was just as extraordinary as anything found in the pages of her books. A nervous child with a vivid imagination capable of conjuring up phantoms at every turn, she experienced tragic loss and displacement as a child. In adulthood, she became, as Humphrey Carpenter puts it, “an energetic hack, keen to try anything to support her wayward husband and her odd household.”7 Her abiding passion was for poetry with a socialist theme, but she rarely had the time to indulge it, something for which generations of children have reason to be grateful.

  E. Nesbit lived through a time of extraordinary political upheaval, and she was instrumental in introducing socialist thinking into British intellectual life. A founding member of the Fabian Society, she counted George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells among her closest friends. She was tireless in campaigning for the alleviation of poverty in London, and she expended considerable time and energy in helping poor children living on her doorstep in Deptford. Yet she enjoyed the finer things in life and made no apology for doing so. She had a keen eye for nature and detested the creeping urbanization she saw all around her. Some of her finest writing celebrates the beauty of the British countryside.

  A strikingly attractive woman with a keen sense of fun, E. Nesbit attracted a circle of young admirers who left fascinating glimpses of her in their letters and memoirs. Some of her closest friendships were with her young fans. She included them in her stories, and the letters she sent them are exceptionally revealing. She put the best of herself into her books for children. E. Nesbit is one of the world’s most important writers. She has entertained and inspired generations of us. Yet just two full biographies have been devoted to her, and both have been out of print for years. I believe she deserves a third, and here it is.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE MUMMIES OF BORDEAUX

  One day in September 1867, little Daisy Ne
sbit, who had just turned nine and was wearing her “best blue silk frock,” waited impatiently at the entrance to the bell tower of the church of Saint Michel in the French city of Bordeaux.1 She was clutching the hand of her older sister—whether this was Minnie, aged fifteen, or Saretta, her half-sister, who was twenty-three, she does not make clear in the account she left—and “positively skipping with delicious anticipation” as an aged French guide fumbled with the keys to the fifteenth-century crypt that lay below the bell tower. At last, he unlocked the ancient door and led the young tourists through an archway and down a poorly lit, flagstone passage.

  Daisy was an exceptionally imaginative and high-spirited child. She was also intensely homesick and had grown “tired of churches and picture-galleries, of fairs and markets, of the strange babble of foreign tongues and the thin English of the guide-book.”2 When she learned that Bordeaux contained a crypt full of mummies, she imagined the “plate-glass cases, camphor, boarded galleries, and kindly curators” familiar from visits to the British Museum. She begged to be taken to see them: “As one Englishman travelling across a desert seeks to find another of whom he has heard in that far land, so I sought to meet these mummies who had cousins at home, in the British Museum, in dear, dear England,” she explained.3

  Any one of the many thousands of visitors who had traversed that dank passageway before her could have warned her that what lay beyond bore no resemblance to the “cousins” who lay in twin rows of angled cases in the center of the bright and airy room where Egyptian antiquities were displayed at the British Museum. In 1791, when alterations were being made to the church of Saint Michel, one of the oldest surviving medieval churches in Europe, it became necessary to exhume the bodies interred in the adjoining cemetery. Rather than unearthing the skeletal remains they expected, startled workmen were confronted with seventy human forms, weirdly intact and dressed in the rags and tatters of their burial clothing, their shriveled, gray-brown skin still cleaving to their bones. New Zealand newspaper the Otago Daily Times suggested “the earth around the church seems to have something peculiarly antiseptic in its nature.”4

  Rather than reburying these desiccated corpses, the church authorities arranged them upright against the crypt walls of the bell tower, which stood some distance from the church. Soon these eerie new inhabitants were attracting visitors in droves, among them celebrated French writers Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo. Flaubert appeared unmoved. “I can testify,” he wrote, “that all have skin as drum-tight, leathery, brown and reverberant as ass hides.”5 In contrast, the unsettling experience made Hugo gloomy and filled him with a foreboding of disaster.6

  The reporter from the Otago Daily Times described a rough-looking guide, likely the same man who led Daisy and her sisters, who clutched a flickering candle on a stick and thumped each body in turn with a stout club in order to demonstrate its soundness. In voluble French, he drew attention to the “excellent calves” of one desiccated man and the perfectly preserved lace chemise worn by a young woman who had died four centuries earlier.7 Here too was “The Family Poisoned by Mushrooms,” and over there “The General Killed in a Duel.” He became particularly animated when he reached one “poor miserable” who had been buried alive: “See how his head is turned to one side and the body half turned round in the frantic effort to get out of the coffin, with his mouth open and gasping,” he exclaimed. Little wonder the Otago Daily Times declared the whole thing “a disgusting and demoralising show.”8

  In 1837, three decades before Daisy arrived, a trio of eminent doctors took skin and muscle samples in order to determine what kept these corpses intact. Their detailed notes describe a descent of thirty or forty steps into a “circular space, the walls of which are tapestried by dead bodies all standing erect.”9 They left a particularly vivid description of one “miserable creature”:

  The mouth open and horribly contracted, the inferior members strongly drawn to the body—the arms, one twisted by convulsions is thrown over the head, the other folded beneath the trunk and fixed to the thigh by the nails, which are deeply implanted in the flesh; the forced inflexion of the whole body, gives the expression of ineffable pain, all announcing a violent death. Unfortunate wretch! had he died in this state, or rather, had he been buried alive, and assumed this position in the horrible agonies of awakening?10

  Little Daisy walked down that same passage with its tang of damp earth and negotiated that same flight of narrow stone steps, each one slippery with mold. Her French was poor, so she missed the guide’s warning of “natural mummies.” Instead, she anticipated “a long clean gallery, filled with the white light of a London noon, shed through high skylights on Egyptian treasures.”11 Yet the darkness made her wary and she tightened her grip on her sister’s hand.

  With a triumphant cry of “Les voilà!” their guide threw open a “heavy door barred with iron” and Daisy was confronted with a sight that horrified her for the rest of her life:

  A small vault, as my memory serves me, about fifteen feet square, with an arched roof, from the centre of which hung a lamp that burned with a faint blue light, and made the guide’s candle look red and lurid. The floor was flagged like the passages, and was as damp and chill. Round three sides of the room ran a railing, and behind it—standing against the wall, with a ghastly look of life in death—were about two hundred skeletons. Not white clean skeletons, hung on wires, like the one you see at the doctor’s, but skeletons with the flesh hardened on their bones, with their long dry hair hanging on each side of their brown faces, where the skin in drying had drawn itself back from their gleaming teeth and empty eye-sockets. Skeletons draped in mouldering shreds of shrouds and grave-clothes, their lean fingers still clothed with dry skin, seemed to reach out towards me. There they stood, men, women, and children, knee-deep in loose bones collected from the other vaults of the church, and heaped round them. On the wall near the door I saw the dried body of a little child hung up by its hair.12

  Paralyzed with horror, she scarcely remembered retracing her steps. She dared not turn her head “lest one of those charnel-house faces” peep out “from some niche in the damp wall.”13

  That evening, as she sat alone in her hotel bedroom while her mother and sisters dined below, she grew convinced that the mummies had followed her and were lurking in a curtained alcove set into the wall. The young French waiter who delivered her supper was confronted with a distraught child in desperate need of comfort. He spoke no English and she hardly any French, but he drew back the curtain to dispel her fears, helped her fetch more candles, and took her onto his knee, singing softly and feeding her bread and milk while she clung to his neck until the others returned.

  In My School Days, a series of articles published in the Girl’s Own Paper between October 1896 and September 1897, Daisy, who was thirty-eight by then and writing under her given name of Edith, or E. Nesbit, insisted:

  The mummies of Bordeaux were the crowning horror of my childish life; it is to them, I think, more than to any other thing, that I owe nights and nights of anguish and horror, long years of bitterest fear and dread. All the other fears could have been effaced but the shock of that sight branded it on my brain, and I never forgot it. For many years I could not bring myself to go about any house in the dark, and long after I was a grown woman I was tortured, in the dark watches, by imagination and memory, who rose strong and united, overpowering my will and my reason as utterly as in my baby days.14

  She admitted: “It was not till I had two little children of my own that I was able to conquer this mortal terror of darkness, and teach imagination her place, under the foot of reason and the will.” Years later, she kept a human skull and a small collection of bones in her house in order to familiarize her children with artifacts that had terrified her in childhood. “My children, I resolved, should never know such fear,” she explained. “And to guard them from it I must banish it from my own soul. It was not easy but it was done.”15

  This early scare instilled a lifelong fear
of the risen dead, which Edith explored in her fiction. In a story she wrote during her childhood, she has a young girl named Mina descend a secret flight of steps and walk toward a dim light before reaching “a round room with doors all around.” Behind one is “a corridor lined with dead bodies.”16 In “Man-size in Marble,” a horror story she wrote for Home Chimes magazine in December 1887, the effigies of two long-dead knights come alive and stride down the nave of a church. In “From the Dead,” which is included in her collection Grim Tales (1893), a widower wakes to find his shroud-clad wife standing at the foot of his bed. In “Hurst of Hurstcote,” published in Temple Bar magazine in June 1893, the body of a deceased bride does not decay. In “The Power of Darkness,” which she wrote for The Strand Magazine in April 1905, a man descends into the catacombs of the Musée Grévin in Paris and discovers that the wax effigies on display have come to life.

  Generations of children had their first encounter with terror in the pages of Edith’s best-loved books. Her braver characters scoff at such fanciful notions in a way she could not. In The Wouldbegoods (1901), her young narrator Oswald Bastable informs readers: “My uncle he always upheld that dead man was no deader than you and me, but was in a sort of fit, a transit, I think they call it, and looked for him to waken into life again some day [sic].”17 The Bastable children imagine that a body kept behind glass at the top of a tower will come alive and lock them in. In The Wouldbegoods, young Dora Bastable fears she may encounter “a skeleton that can walk about and catch at your legs when you’re going up-stairs to bed.”18 In The Enchanted Castle (1907), her child protagonists lure the terrifying Ugly-Wuglies, oddly animated collections of old clothing and bric-a-brac, “hollow, unbelievable things” that had no insides to their heads, into a dark passageway reminiscent of the one populated by the mummies of Bordeaux.19

  Edith had an exceptionally fertile imagination, and her anxieties were intensified by the upheaval she experienced in early life. She populated her stories with people and events from her past and wrote alternative outcomes to exorcise her fears and phobias. In My School Days, she described how she prayed “fervently, tearfully, that when I should be grown up I might never forget what I thought and felt and suffered then.” She was three years old when tragedy blighted her life. On Sunday morning, March 30, 1862, her father, John Collis Nesbit, aged just forty-three, died at Elm Bank House in Barnes, the home of his “intimate friend” and publisher, George Parker Tuxford.20