A LIFE LESS ORDINARY
E. Nesbit is famous for her children’s books. But as her latest biographer, Elisabeth Galvin, reveals, the author’s life was a far cry from straw boaters and buns for tea.
FOR many of us, a love of reading began when we were children. My mum tells the story that every time she sat down, I would jump on her lap with a book. One of the stories she read to me was The Railway Children by E. Nesbit. I must have been about eight years old, and it was the same time I decided I wanted to be an author when I grew up.
Some 32 years later, my dream came true when I published The Extraordinary Life of E. Nesbit, a biography of one of my favourite childhood authors. It came about quite by chance. I saw a notice posted by an agent for the publisher Pen & Sword. Known for its military history, the company was branching out into biographies and calling for ideas.
I thought back to the stories I liked reading as a child and remembered E. Nesbit. I began some preliminary research and was amazed to discover that the author had led a very different life from the stories of Edwardian straw boaters and buns for tea. Crucially, the last biography of her had been published some 30 years before. It took me a while to gather up the courage to submit my proposal, but eventually I took a deep breath and sent it to the agent.
I heard back almost immediately, and hearing the good news is something I will never forget. I threw both hands up into the air, thrilled. I was on cloud nine as I began to research more thoroughly this mysterious E. Nesbit.
I had assumed for all those years that one of my favourite authors was a man – but she was a woman, and her name was Edith. She was born in Kennington, London, and when she was just three years old something happened to Edith that affected her for
the rest of her life – her father died from a sudden heart attack. Not having a stable father figure was something Edith never got over, and it affected her in so many ways.
From then on, Edith’s childhood was peripatetic; she had attended five schools by the time she was ten, and lived in France, Germany and Spain with no permanent home between the ages of seven and twelve. She spent a lot of time with her brothers and grew up quite a tomboy.
She was just 15 years old when her name first appeared in print, after a poem she had written was printed in a popular Victorian magazine. From that magical moment, Edith was hooked on writing. She desperately wanted to be a poet, although it was prose that she sold commercially. It was a skill that would eventually save her life.
When Edith grew up, she moved to London and became engaged to a bank clerk called Hubert Bland. Extremely charming and handsome, he was tall and dark and devastatingly appealing to Victorian women. The couple had plenty in common. They were both followers of William Morris, and were amongst Britain’s first socialists. They helped found the Fabian Society in 1888, from which the Labour Party has its roots.
When Edith was 21, she married Hubert. But absolutely no one knew – not even her mother – and no friends or family attended her wedding in London at Easter in 1880. What was the reason for this? She was seven months pregnant. This was highly scandalous for the Victorian era, of course.
In fact, her mother had never trusted Hubert, and she was right not to do so. Although he seemed the perfect gentleman in top hat and tails, with a respectable job and plummy accent, it was actually all a show. Hubert Bland was really a Cockney from Woolwich! He was already engaged to another woman, who had borne him a son a few months earlier. Hubert kept up the affair for about 10 years.
Edith knew nothing of this, and was blissfully happy with her new husband. When Paul was born three months later, she was delighted with her life as a mother and wife. Yet bad luck was to come. Hubert caught smallpox twice and subsequently went bankrupt. It was up to Edith to keep the family afloat.
It was very unusual for a respectable middle-class married woman to work, especially so soon after having a baby, but Edith had no choice. She wasn’t trained in anything at all, but turned to the one thing she loved – and that was writing.
Every night after she put the baby to bed, she would scribble away. She wrote sentimental stories about love, children or animals for the plethora of Victorian periodicals on the market at that time. She would work late into the night, sometimes fuelled with a teaspoon of gin. Finally she’d go to bed, then get up early the next morning to gather up bundles of the stories, wrap them up with brown paper and string, and take the tram to Fleet Street.
Edith would spend the day trudging up and down, showing editors her work. At first she didn’t sell many stories, but she never gave up. She gained a reputation for hard work and never missing a deadline.
In the meantime, Edith had another baby, Iris, and a few years later a son, Fabian, yet still managed to keep writing. It was a struggle she kept up for 10 years, and it was during this time that she met a fellow journalist, Alice Hoatson. They instantly became great friends, and it wasn’t long before Edith introduced her to Hubert, her husband.
It was a fatal encounter as Alice and Hubert began conducting an affair, which resulted in a baby. When Edith found out her friend was expecting a child, she desperately wanted to help. She wasn’t aware who the father was, but knew that, as an unmarried mother, Alice would be turned out of polite Victorian society.
Edith begged Alice to come and live with them and promised to adopt the baby so she could look after it in public, and allow Alice to care for the child in private. Eventually Alice guiltily agreed.
After the birth of the baby, Rosamund, Edith found out the terrible truth. Yet the three of them kept up the pretence and hid the shocking secret; Alice lived with them as their housekeeper. Unbelievably, the same thing happened seven years later – Alice again fell pregnant by Hubert, and again Edith adopted the baby, a son called John this time.
It all sounds wilder than fiction. But at that time it suited Edith to have Alice live with them to look after hearth and home; she was still writing hard, waiting for her big break. And Edith and Hubert were no ordinary couple. They considered themselves bohemians, with all that entails.
Edith had a string of affairs with famous and not-so-famous men, including playwright George Bernard Shaw. Later, as a teenager, Edith’s daughter Iris ran off with H.G. Wells, and was saved from eloping to Paris in disguise when Hubert ran on to their train and smartly punched Wells on the nose, before hauling his daughter on to the platform.
It was in 1897 that Edith finally hit the big time with her writing, publishing The Story of the Treasure Seekers, about the six Bastable children from Lewisham. People had never read anything like it before; it was the reality television of its day. She wrote about real middle-class children and the real things they got up to – bickering, answering back to grown-ups, wearing torn clothes, dirty faces and messy hair. Before Edith, fiction for children was usually instructional, moralistic or religious, or so generic that everyone in the family would read it together, by the fire after dinner.
But just as she found fame through her writing, in 1900 Edith experienced a tragedy from which she never recovered. Her son, Fabian, had a routine operation to remove his tonsils, but died in his sleep. Edith blamed herself because she had fed him breakfast that morning, forgetting that he shouldn’t eat before being given general anaesthetic.
It was in her deep grief over the following seven years after Fabian’s death that she wrote nine of her bestselling novels, including The Railway Children in 1906 and Five Children and It in 1902. Before she died, she wrote more than 100 novels, plays and collections of short stories.
As Edith became one of the most famous authors in the country, she and Hubert threw lavish parties at their rented mansion called Well Hall, in Eltham. H.G. Wells once described it as “the place one rushed down to on a Friday night”.
Before a party, Edith would write little poems for her guests, leaving them in their rooms with flowers she picked from the garden. Once everything was perfect, she would appear on the stairs in her trademark
Liberty silk gown and Turkish slippers – she always refused to wear a corset, and had scandalously short hair. She smoked from a long cigarette holder, and even smoked cigars. Dinner would either be lavish or very simple beer and cheese, depending on Edith’s finances – she famously spent everything she earned and was hopeless with money.
After dinner, the evening would really get going. There would be socialist debates, games of badminton, dancing – Edith could apparently high-kick until she was 60 – and lots of singing and playing on the piano. The guests were an eclectic mix of famous writers, literary figures, flaming socialists and local people including Edith’s cook (who apparently had a particular penchant for Hubert’s special red wine and champagne punch).
But, in 1914, Hubert died suddenly of a heart attack, and all the parties stopped. Edith was devastated, and almost died herself shortly afterwards. By the time she recovered, the First World War had begun and to make ends meet, Edith turned Well Hall into a market garden, growing fruit, vegetables and flowers for the war effort. She kept chickens, and also took in paying guests.
Help came from an unlikely source – a cheerful, capable Cockney who worked on the Woolwich ferry. His name was Tommy Tucker, and he was the complete opposite of Hubert. Tommy kindly and competently helped Edith get back on her feet, organising her finances and mending the crumbling mansion as best he could.
The two had known each other all their lives as members of the Fabian Society, and gradually Edith fell in love with him. They married in 1917. Finally, Edith had found the stable man she had always sought.
“For the first time in my life, I know what it is to possess a man’s whole heart,” Edith wrote to a friend.
After the war, Edith and Tommy found two RAF huts by the sea in Kent on the Romney Marsh and converted them into a home. Typically eccentric, Edith called them the Long Boat and the Jolly Boat, after her sea captain husband. They nicknamed each other “Captain” and “First Mate”, and she spent the last years of her life very happily, despite her huge change in circumstances.
Edith maintained her gift for making friends – including one Noël Coward, who had moved in nearby. Even though he was only a young playwright, they got on famously and she used to critique his plays. Noël was a huge E. Nesbit fan, and was thrilled to meet her – he described her as “unspeakably underrated”.
It was in 1923 that Edith wrote her last novel, The Lark, a witty novel for adults, recently reissued by Penguin. The following year she died of lung cancer surrounded by her family, friends and husband and was buried at St Mary’s in the Marsh, where Tommy Tucker erected a traditional sailor’s wooden grave marker. It is ironic that the best-selling author of day, and one who remains so beloved by children more than 100 years later, died in relative obscurity.
I still have that red leather-bound copy of The Railway Children with the cover title written in gold letters that my mum would read to me all those years ago.
I hope I’ll keep it always.
Pan Macmillan have beautifully republished E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children and Five Children and It. We have a competition for five of our readers to win a copy of each of these books. Turn to The Bookshelf on page 78 to enter.