E. Nesbit (Edith Bland) 1858 – 1924
Married name: Edith Bland (also used pseudonym Fabian Bland)
Author
15 August 1858 – 4 May 1924
A Tribute by Eleanor Fitzsimons
Ever since The Story of the Treasure Seekers was serialised in an assortment of periodicals, before being published as a standalone volume in 1899, Edith Nesbit, who wrote as E. Nesbit, has been celebrated almost exclusively as a children’s author. Yet she wrote in every genre, and her abiding passion was for poetry with a socialist theme. Had she not married pompous philanderer Hubert Bland when she was twenty-one and seven months pregnant with their first child, we might not have her wonderful stories for children. Hubert’s abject failure as an entrepreneur obliged Edith to write for the money she needed to support their family. In time, this included the couple themselves, their three children, and two more that resulted from the decades-long affair Hubert had with Edith’s good friend Alice Hoatson. Edith’s stories for children brought her wealth and fame, but she resented the tight deadlines and lack of opportunity to compose rousing poetry. She worked feverishly, filling page after page before tossing them to the floor. Often, she was so late with copy that she begged her illustrators to go ahead without her, promising to bend her stories to fit their images.
Edith was a Londoner through and through. A high-spirited child with a vivid imagination, she loved to roam the streets that lay beyond her Kennington home. Her favourite place was the British Museum in Great Russell Street, where she spent hours among the Egyptian antiquities, enthralled by the mummies in particularly. Her idyllic childhood was shattered when her father, a brilliant analytical chemist and principal of an agricultural college in Kennington, succumbed to T.B. at forty-three. Edith was just four. When her sister Mary contracted the disease that had killed their father, Sarah Nesbit, twice widowed by then, took her daughters to France to find a cure. Edith spent the remainder of her childhood and early adolescence trailing around continental Europe, missing out on an education, and oscillating between boredom and terror at the unfamiliarity of it all. In My School Days, her poignant memoir of childhood, she describes how she missed the “plate-glass cases, camphor, boarded galleries, and kindly curators” of the British Museum.
In 1875, Edith returned to London, where she shared cramped lodgings with her mother in Islington, before living as a lodger with a family in Oxford Terrace near Hyde Park. After she married Hubert, they rented houses in and around Lewisham and Lee. Throughout this time, she sought sanctuary in the Reading Room of the British Museum. There, she discovered a flourishing community of literary and political women. She sat alongside, and befriended, radical women like Clementina Black, Dorothy Richardson, Amy Levy and Mona Caird. Naturally, she was drawn to women who shared her socialist views. Fellow Fabian Society member Annie Besant was there, as was South African born feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner, who lived for periods of time at 32 Fitzroy Street and 19 Charlotte Street. Schreiner told a friend “Mrs Bland (E. Nesbit) was so kind to me before I left London…Do you know, she’s one of the noblest women?”. Another close friend from the Reading Room was Eleanor Marx, who lived close by at 122 Great Coram Street, in the heart of Bloomsbury.
Fiery socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw was a regular visitor to Eleanor Marx’s home, and he met Edith there on several occasions. He knew her as a fellow member of the Fabian Society and they often continued their intense conversations at the British Museum Reading Room. It was from there that they conducted their rather chaste love affair. “With Mrs Bland at the museum,” Shaw noted in several diary entries of the time. During the early days of their relationship, he was living at 37 Fitzroy Street, in the Bloomsbury ward, with his mother, Bessie, a trained singer. Edith put his home into her semi-autobiographical novel Daphne in Fitzroy Street (1909), and cast him as Mr Henry, Daphne’s irascible love interest.
Edith wrote fondly about Bloomsbury in several of her novels for adults, which are largely forgotten today. To her, this vibrant district, populated by radical thinkers and artists, represented the possibility of freedom and a bohemian way of life. She knew many Bloomsbury writers. In later life, she befriended and acted as a mentor to E. M. Forster. In Daphne in Fitzroy Street, she locates her eponymous Daphne right in the heart of the district. When Aunt Emily warns Daphne that “Bloomsbury is where artists and disreputable people like that live,” the artistic young woman responds:
How lovely! And to think that in Bloomsbury hundreds of artists and nice people are living their own lives, like anything. And I am doing church embroidery for bazaars, and being found fault with for everything I say or do.
When Daphne, who has led a sheltered life, finally makes her way to Bloomsbury, she is unsettled at first. “Bloomsbury nests do not easily please one whose life-nest has been in the clean quiet of an old convent, whose only strange perch has been in the well-ordered cleanly comfort of a middle-class suburban house,” she declares. She searches for suitable lodgings, but she rejects the first few places she sees.
[T]hey were dark, they were stuffy, they were frowsy and fusty. They smelt as if the windows were never opened, and they looked as though the window curtains were never taken down and the carpets never taken up.
Once she has settled on a shared house in Fitzroy Street, she scours the “side streets and back streets and odd criss-cross streets in Bloomsbury where second-hand furniture may be bought”. On her first morning in her new home, she “awoke in the grim dawn and looked out on the blackened Bloomsbury roofs”.
Time after time, Edith wrote about Bloomsbury. In Dormant (1911), a Gothic romance, she wrote:
In Gower Street, Bloomsbury, stands, as you may or may not know, University College; and there, swarm students of all degrees; students of Art and Literature, and Law and Language, Medicine and Chemistry, and Engineering and Semitic Epigraphy, Physics and Mathematics; young men and women of all types and tastes. Some of them desire to learn and some desire to appear to have learnt, but all, or almost all, desire, deeply and with the whole heart, to enjoy themselves. This they do, each in his own way You have heard of the strawberry teas; perhaps you have passed along Gower Street, gazed curiously through the iron railings, and beheld young women in bright muslins adorning the steps and the greensward in front of the [Slade] Art School, and dispensing tea and chatter to lounging youths.
A talented artist, Edith might have been among them had life gone differently for her. Iris Bland, her daughter, was a student at the Slade a decade before Dormant was published. Perhaps she was one of those “young women in bright muslins adorning the steps and the greensward in front of the Art School”.
In Edith’s gentle romance, The Incredible Honeymoon (1921), Edward Basingstoke declares, “there is a corner of me that would like to live in Bloomsbury and grub among books all day at the British Mu. And half the night in my booky little den”. In another novel, The Incomplete Amorist (1906), Cecil “went up to town and found Madame Gautier, the widow of a French pastor, established in a Bloomsbury boarding-house”. On occasion, the privilege enjoyed by Bloomsbury residents jarred with Edith’s socialist sensibilities. In “How Jake Went Home,” from her story collection These Little Ones (1909), she wrote:
‘And then he finished the buns to the very last crumbs in the paper bag, and went to look in at the garden in Bloomsbury Square, and he looked through at the green grass and graveled walks, and wished that he could find a garden where all the children could play, not just the ones whose mothers had keys of the cold iron gates.’
As Edith’s family grew, she began to long for countryside, and hedgerows, and freedom from London’s choking air. One lovely spring day in 1899, she happened upon a dilapidated eighteenth-century house standing in a country lane half a mile from the village of Eltham, near Woolwich. It had thirty panelled rooms, a great hall, and vaunted cellars, and she adored it. She lived there as a tenant for the next twenty years. Yet, she often returned to Bloomsbury, and her beloved British Museum. In The Story of the Amulet (1906), the third book in her Psammead series, the five children, who are inspired by her own children, are left in the care of old Nurse who lives in Fitzroy Street. They wander the streets of Bloomsbury and find the psammead in a pet shop near the British Museum. When Edith decided to incorporate the magic of Ancient Egypt into her book, she had knocked on the door of Ernest Wallis Budge, Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities. In gratitude for his friendship and his help, she dedicated this wonderful, beloved book:
TO
Dr Wallis Budge
of the British Museum as a
small token of gratitude for his
unfailing kindness and help
in the making of it
Eleanor Fitzsimons is the author of The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit (Duckworth, 2019). Her previous book is Wilde’s Women: how Oscar Wilde was shaped by the women he knew (Duckworth, 2015). She is an Honorary Patron of the Oscar Wilde Society and is on the editorial board of The Wildean. https://eafitzsimons.wordpress.com
Poems:
Silence
read here by Julia Pascal:
So silent is the world to-night
The lamp gives silence out like light,
The latticed windows open wide
Show silence, like the night, outside:
The nightingale’s faint song draws near
Like musical silence to mine ear.
The empty house calls not to me,
‘Here, but for fate, were thou and she–‘
Its gibe for once is checked. To-night
Silence is queen in grief’s despite,
And even the longing of my soul
Is silent ‘neath this hour’s control.
Like Amy Levy and Charlotte Mew, Nesbit celebrated the plane tree and its importance for the streets of London:
CHILD’S SONG IN SPRING
The silver birch is a dainty lady,
She wears a satin gown;
The elm tree makes the old churchyard shady,
She will not live in town.
The English oak is a sturdy fellow,
He gets his green coat late;
The willow is smart in a suit of yellow,
While brown the beech trees wait.
Such a gay green gown God gives the larches –
As green as He is good!
The hazels hold up their arms for arches,
When Spring rides through the wood.
The chestnut’s proud and the lilac’s pretty,
The poplar’s gentle and tall,
But the plane tree’s kind to the poor dull city –
I love him best of all!
MINI BIOGRAPHY
Education
Nesbit’s family travelled throughout Europe during her childhood as one of her sisters was ill. Her education was erratic, although she spent time at boarding schools in Brighton and France.
Some Key Achievements and Interests
1884 Co-founder of the Fabian society, a socialist organisation which believes that radical long-term goals are best achieved through gradual reform.
Is often referred to as the first modern writer for children and the inventor of modern children’s fantasy.
Five Children and It and The Story of the Amulet now considered children’s classics.
Lectured at the London School of Economics.
Issues
7 months pregnant when married Hubert Bland at a registry office – marriage unconventional and he spent a lot of time away from the home.
2 of Hubert’s children were from his relationship with Alice Hoaston who went to live with Nesbit helping her look after their 5 children (who all thought Edith was their mother).
She felt the need to publish political pamphlets and essays under the male pseudonym Fabian Bland.
Published novels under the gender-neutral name E Nesbit (but not using her married name Bland).
Opposed women’s suffrage because of the possibility that women would vote for the conservatives. She also maintained that women were mainly fit to be wives and mothers.
Connection to Bloomsbury
Part of a network of women who researched, worked, and came together at the British Museum.
The British Museum and surrounding area inspired The Story of the Amulet (1906).
Female networks include:
Members of the Fabian Society including Amy Levy, Annie Besant, Beatrice Webb, Clementina Black, Eleanor Marx, Olive Schreiner .
Fellow contributors to The Yellow Book , a quarterly literary periodical published at The Bodley Head Publishing House by Elkin Mathews and John Lane from 1894 to 1897.
Fellow contributors to The Woman’s World edited by Oscar Wilde from 1887 to1889.
British Museum circle including Amy Levy, Olive Schreiner etc.
Writing/Publications include
The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899)
The Railway Children (1906)
Five Children and It (1902)
The Story of the Amulet (1906)
“Women and Socialism: from the Middle-Class Point of View“. Justice, 4 and 11 April 1885
Further reading
http://www.edithnesbit.co.uk/index.php
A Review of Eleanor Fitzsimons’ “The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit” (victorianweb.org)