The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit Read online

  An obituary in the Illustrated London News confirmed that John Nesbit had died from “consumption” after a “long wearing illness.” He was eulogized as “one of the most celebrated analytical chemists” in England, a “pioneering educationalist, and principal of a highly regarded agricultural college in Kennington.”21 His remains were interred in the public vaults of the Anglican catacombs at West Norwood Cemetery in London, a place not dissimilar to the crypt in Bordeaux, since its entrance lies at the base of ancient steps and the ground is desperately uneven.

  Edith’s fiction is replete with missing parents. The Bastable children often recall the trauma of losing their mother. The children in the Psammead Series are separated from their father without warning. In The Railway Children (1906), young Bobbie clings to her father as tightly as she can and cries “Oh! My Daddy, my Daddy!” The magnitude of Edith’s own loss is suggested by the inclusion of a nearly identical scene on the final page of The House of Arden (1908): “and in one flash she was across the room and in her father’s arms, sobbing and laughing and saying again and again—‘Oh, my daddy! Oh, my daddy, my daddy!’” She was in the habit of recycling plots and scenes.

  Edith had few memories of her father, but she did recall being terrified when he turned his fur-lined traveling coat inside out in order to dress up as a bear when playing with her older brothers, Alfred and Harry. “The first thing I remember that frightened me was running into my father’s dressing-room and finding him playing at wild beasts with my brothers,” she revealed, “his roars were completely convincing.”22 In The Wouldbegoods, timid Daisy is confronted by the sight of the Bastable boys, Dicky and Noël, dressed in tiger-skin rugs. She “stopped short and, uttering a shriek like a railway whistle, she fell flat on the ground.”23 Edith must have felt guilty for remembering her father, a kindhearted man by all accounts, as a frightening figure. She has her narrator, Oswald Bastable, ridicule Daisy’s response by scoffing that it was just a game. She also makes her surrogate, Alice Bastable, dress up as a bear to frighten timid Denny.

  Edith Nesbit, the fifth child of Sarah and John Nesbit, was born on August 15, 1858. Sarah also had a daughter, Saretta, from her first marriage to a grocer named Charles Green. Widowed in her twenties, she raised Saretta alone for three years before she married John Nesbit in 1851. Saretta and she moved into the Nesbit College of Agriculture and Chemistry at 38 and 39 Kennington Lane, a middle-class residential street just around the corner from the Oval Cricket Ground. Both houses were demolished during Edith’s lifetime to make way for more modest terraced dwellings, and the district was absorbed into Greater London. Back in 1851, John, Sarah, and Saretta shared their lively home with assorted members of the Nesbit family, boarders at the college who ranged in age from thirteen to twenty-three, and three domestic servants.

  Edith’s grandfather, Anthony Nesbit, who had established the college in 1841, was still living there when she was born. The son of a Northumberland farmer, he had taught himself mathematics while working as a farm laborer from four in the morning until four in the afternoon. An account of his early life, written by his grandson Paris Nesbit, described how he “maintained himself” from the age of eight, when he left his family home.24 His extraordinary aptitude for math and science gave him access to the teaching profession, and he earned recognition as a committed educationalist and an excellent if somewhat severe teacher. He also wrote extensively on the natural sciences and became a noted adversary of Charles Darwin.25

  A profile of Edith published in The Strand Magazine in September 1905 included the information that “her English blood is modified by a trace of Irish, to which those who are strong on racial influences may attribute something of the humour which can be found in her work.”26 This would appear to be a reference to her “Irish grandmother,” Mary Collis, who married Anthony Nesbit on February 9, 1817. A notice of their marriage appeared in the New Monthly Magazine:

  At Leeds, Mr Anthony Nesbit, master of the Commercial and Mathematical School, Bradford, to Mary, daughter of the late Rev. David Collis, of Fairfield, near Manchester.

  Anthony Nesbit established a series of general schools during his lifetime. He educated his children at home and required them to assist him in the running of his schools from an early age. It was Edith’s father, John Nesbit, Anthony’s eldest son, who took over the running of the college in Kennington on his retirement and renamed it the College of Agriculture and Chemistry, and of Practical and General Science to reflect his own area of expertise. A talented chemist with a practical bent, he was admitted as a Fellow to both the Geological Society of London and the Chemical Society of London in 1845, when he was twenty-seven years old. He pioneered the teaching of natural science, lecturing extensively in “a most familiar and easy manner.” He also built up an extensive practice as a consulting analytical chemist and was an early advocate for the use of superphosphate fertilizers in agriculture. Somehow, he found time to write several highly regarded books on agricultural science, his central theme being the fertilizing properties of Peruvian guano, a far cry from his youngest daughter’s future output.27

  Father and son were passionate and progressive educationalists who set out their enlightened ethos in An Essay on Education (1841):

  THE FIRST AND GRAND CONSIDERATION in bringing up and educating Youth, is to endeavour to preserve and promote their Health and the Buoyancy of their Spirits, by making them comfortable, cheerful and happy; for without Health and Spirits, little progress will ever be made in the Acquisition of Knowledge.28

  “The Happiness of Parents and also that of their children are inseparably bound up together,” they insisted.29

  Anthony Nesbit died at home on March 15, 1859, five months short of Edith’s first birthday. He was lauded as a man “known for half a century in all our principal colleges and schools in connection with his many valuable mathematical works.”30 One can scarcely imagine what he would have made of his youngest granddaughter’s febrile imagination and her struggles with long division. “Beware of reading tales and novels,” he warned in An Introduction to English Parsing, “for they generally exhibit pictures that never had any existence, except in the airy imaginations of the brain.”31

  On June 8, 1857, fourteen months before Edith was born, John and Sarah lost their firstborn son, John Collis Nesbit, when he was just four years old. The cause of his death was recorded as “bilious remittent fever combined with hydrocephalus,” a redundant and largely descriptive medical term that covered a wide range of childhood conditions and infections.32 When Edith was born, on August 15, 1858, Saretta was fourteen; Mary, known affectionately as Minnie, was six; Alfred was three; and Henry, always called Harry, was just two. When the three youngest children were christened on June 25, 1859, family legend had it that precocious little Edith, affectionately known as Daisy, removed her tiny kid shoes in order to float them in the font as boats.33

  The Nesbit home stood on three acres of land, a portion of which was given over “for experimental purposes and the recreation of the students.”34 In Wings and the Child (1913), an instruction manual for parents keen to give their children a good start in life, Edith described this wonderland for urban children:

  It was in Kennington, that house—and it had a big garden and a meadow and a cottage and a laundry, stables and cow-house and pig-styes [sic], elm-trees and vines, tiger lilies and flags in the garden, and chrysanthemums that smelt like earth and hyacinths that smelt like heaven.35

  She described her childhood playroom:

  Our nursery was at the top of the house, a big room with a pillar in the middle to support the roof. “The post,” we called it: it was excellent for playing mulberry bush, or for being martyrs at. The skipping rope did to bind the martyrs to the stake.36

  In her late thirties she recast her siblings and herself as the Bastable children. In The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), she has Oswald and Dicky bury wimpish Albert-next-door in the garden while twins Alice and Noël, surrogates for Edith he
rself, watch on approvingly. She drew on an incident from her own childhood when her mischievous brothers buried her so firmly in their garden that she had to be rescued by adults. In “The Twopenny Spell,” from Oswald Bastable and Others (1905), young Lucy is affronted at being buried up to her waist by her brother Harry. She gets her revenge by casting a spell that swaps their personalities, with disastrous consequences. After Saretta covered her face with a hideous mask to play an old gypsy woman bent on abducting Edith, who played a “highborn orphan,” her dreams were haunted for decades. This episode informed her eerie Ugly-Wuglies from The Enchanted Castle.

  The boarders at the agricultural college often stepped in to soothe little Edith’s fears. She was terrified of a two-headed calf, a “terrible object” her father had purchased during a three-week tour of the north of England taken with a dozen pupils from the college. Her brothers used to chase her with this hideous article, but she lost her fear after a kindly student tucked her under one arm and the “two-headed horror” under the other to chase Alfred and Harry around the college.37 More terrifying was the empty skin of an emu, which had been nailed to a wall “with its wiry black feathers that fluttered dismally in the draught.” Edith regarded this as “no mere bird’s skin” but a malevolent creature that wished her ill. Every time she walked past it, she would cover her eyes. “It was always lurking for me in the dark, ready to rush out at me,” she remembered. “It was waiting for me at the top of the flight, while the old woman with the mask stretched skinny hands out to grasp my little legs as I went up the nursery stairs.”38 A kindly student cured her fear by convincing her to stroke it.

  Edith’s early childhood was overshadowed by her father’s protracted illness. In April 1861, almost a year before he died, he traveled with her mother to the Castle Hotel in Hastings, leaving the children behind with their nurse. This term-time trip was most likely prompted by a Victorian faith in the restorative properties of sea air for consumptive patients. An exceptionally loving letter Sarah wrote to her “Pretty little Daisy” almost certainly dates to this holiday. “I shall be so glad to have you down in my bed and hug and kiss you,” she wrote, assuring her, “I shall be home soon now.” She promised to bring “darling little Daisy” a “baby doll.” Edith treasured this letter throughout her life, and it closes with the words: “Papa and Mama send you lots of love and kisses.”39 Perhaps this doll is the one she described in Wings and the Child:

  I had a “rag doll,” but she was stuffed with hair, and was washed once a fortnight, after which nurse put in her features again with a quill pen, and consoled me for any change in her expression by explaining that she was “growing up.”40

  After John died, Sarah, who was now twice widowed and only in her mid-forties, attempted to step into her husband’s shoes. The Illustrated London News reported: “Mrs. Nesbit, and the large staff of assistants, will continue the business to which for a long time past her late husband has been totally unable to attend.”41 Since John’s reputation as an analytical chemist had attracted students from across the British Isles, Sarah faced an overwhelming task, but she did her best and entrusted the care of her younger children to a “nurse” named Mary Ann Moore, who was aided by an “under-nurse.”42 In My School Days, Edith portrays Moore as a warm and sympathetic young woman who soothed her fears. Decades later, she could recall perfectly her enduring fear of the dark:

  For to a child who is frightened, the darkness and the silence of its lonely room are only a shade less terrible than the wild horrors of dreamland. One used to lie awake in the silence, listening, listening to the pad-pad of one’s heart, straining one’s ears to make sure that it was not the pad-pad of something else, something unspeakable creeping towards one out of the horrible dense dark. One used to lie quite, quite still, I remember, listening, listening.43

  While she was tucking little Edith into bed one night, Moore noticed that her pillow was wet with “the dews of agony and terror.” Although she had completed her duties and her time was her own, this kindly young woman sat in the day nursery with the door ajar so her young charge would see a reassuring sliver of light as she drifted off to sleep.44 The little girls in The Story of the Treasure Seekers also sleep with the door ajar, and Denny in The Wouldbegoods cannot sleep without “the gas being left a little bit on.”45

  Yet timid little Daisy, who was so nervous of the dark, had an adventurous streak too and loved to explore the vast city that lay beyond her idyllic urban farm. Her dichotomous nature may explain why she wrote herself as the Bastable twins: intrepid, courageous Alice and fragile, sensitive Noël, who wrote poetry, as she did. Accompanied by Alfred and Harry, she would visit her beloved British Museum, or head to Madame Tussaud’s to marvel at relics from the French Revolution, “the waxen heads of kings and democrats, the very guillotine itself.”46

  Her favorite destination was the Crystal Palace, which had been moved to Penge Common by then, five miles south of Kennington Lane. There, she would marvel at elegant water temples surrounded by pools filled with water lilies. She loved the Egyptian Court, with its sphinxes and elaborately decorated pillars, and the Spanish Court, with its mosaic of gold, blue, and red, its tinkling fountain, and beautiful marble arches. In the Grecian Court, she came face-to-face with a reproduction of the Venus de Milo. It was on Penge Common that she encountered Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’s magnificent dinosaur park, complete with thirty-three life-sized beasts. She described them in Wings and the Child:

  They set up, amid the rocks and reeds and trees of the island in that lake, life-sized images of the wonders of a dead world. On a great stone crouched a Pterodactyl, his vast wings spread for flight. A mammoth sloth embraced a tree, and I give you my word that when you came on him from behind, you, in your six years, could hardly believe that he was not real, that he would not presently leave the tree and turn his attention to your bloused and belted self.

  Edith needed to touch them in order to be sure they were not real:

  Convinced, at last, by the cold feel of his flank to your fat little hand, that he was but stone, you kept, none the less, a memory of him that would last your life, and make his name, when you met it in a book, as thrilling as the name of a friend in the list of birthday honours.47

  Paleontologist Sir Richard Owen had hosted a dinner party inside the hollow iguanodon on New Year’s Eve 1853. Edith remembered one of her brothers giving her a “leg-up” so she could “explore the roomy interior of the Dinosaur with feelings hardly to be surpassed by those of bandits in a cave.”48 She put these stone beasts into The Enchanted Castle: “Their stone flanks, their wide ungainly wings, their lozenge crocodile-like backs show grey through the trees a long way off.” When the children wonder what to do with their dressing-up clothes, Mabel suggests the iguanodon: “We’ll hide them inside the great stone dinosaur,” she says. “He’s hollow.” Kathleen insists: “He comes alive in his stone.” “Not in the sunshine he doesn’t,” Mabel replies.49 After dark, Edith’s stone creatures come alive:

  There was a crunching of the little stones in the gravel of the drive. Something enormously long and darkly grey came crawling towards him, slowly, heavily. The moon came out just in time to show its shape. It was one of those great lizards that you see at the Crystal Palace, made in stone, of the same awful size which they were millions of years ago when they were masters of the world, before Man was.50

  Edith had a portal to the past on her very English doorstep, a point of access to the wonders of the ancient world. Little wonder her fictional children in The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) ride an enchanted carpet that “swirled their senses away and restored them on the outskirts of a gleaming white Indian town.” In The Story of the Amulet (1906), a charmed artifact allows them to swap Regent’s Park for the banks of the Nile River. Those joyous days came to an end before Edith reached her tenth birthday. By then she was far from home and longing for the familiar landmarks of early childhood.

  CHAPTER 2

  “FAREWELL THE TRANQUIL
MIND! FAREWELL CONTENT!”

  Early in 1866, when Edith was seven years old, the happy, stable life Sarah Nesbit had created was thrown into utter disarray. In her teens, Mary developed symptoms of tuberculosis, the disease that had taken her father. Determined not to lose another child, Sarah sold the college in Kennington, placed their possessions in storage, and moved to Brighton, where Mary might benefit from healthy sea air. Their lodgings on Western Road were a significant come-down from the three-acre paradise at Kennington Lane. In Wings and the Child, Edith recalled the “hard and hot” pavement of Western Road with its “long rows of dazzling houses” and their “small gritty garden where nothing grew but geraniums and calceolarias.”1

  Edith mourned the loss of the nursery where she and her brothers had played with “a large rocking horse, a large doll’s house (with a wooden box as annexe), a Noah’s Ark, dinner and tea things, a great chest of oak bricks, and a pestle and mortar.”2 The bricks, which she recalled with “fond affection,” had disappeared in the move. She assumed they must have been too heavy, or could not be accommodated in their cramped new home. Sarah bought “a small box of deal bricks made in Germany,” but these soft wooden building blocks proved hopelessly inadequate, and Edith’s disappointment lasted a lifetime. In Wings and the Child, which she wrote in her early fifties, she described her lost building blocks in precise detail:

  Our bricks were well and truly cut: they were of seasoned oak, smooth and pleasant to touch—none of the rough-sawn edges which vex the hand and render the building unstable; they were heavy—a very important quality in bricks. They “stayed put.”3