le Gallienne and the famous Egyptologist Dr Wallis Budge. Perhaps the balancing of Edith’s fun on the side with Bland’s adventures gave the marriage some needed stability.
Edith’s first solo book, a volume of poetry called Lays and Legends, appeared in 1886. This was moderately successful and she became more established as an author. She published her first children’s book, The Voyage of Columbus, in 1890. Her career reached a peak in 1901 and started a gradual decline thereafter (though not seriously until about 1910 onwards).
The turn of the century also brought real tragedy. The Blands’ eldest son, fifteen-year-old Fabian, died in 1900 after an operation to remove his tonsils. Edith was stricken. Darker days lay ahead. In 1910, Hubert fell ill with heart trouble and failing eyesight. He finally went blind when his one good eye failed, and in April 1914 he died of what seems to have been another, final heart attack.
Edith found herself in straitened circumstances. The war years obliged her to take paying guests at her home, Well Hall in Eltham, and she ran a poultry farm and market garden. This did not help much and, despite being awarded a Civil List pension of £60 a year for her services to literature, these must have been black times.
She never regained her literary feet, but gained some return of happiness when she married an old friend and fellow socialist, Thomas Tucker, in 1917. He persuaded her to move out of Well Hall, and they set up home at Jesson St Mary on Romney Marsh in Kent in 1922. She even published one or two more books. Life must have been hard, but Tucker was not Bland, and the marriage seems to have been a fairly happy one, despite her move to Kent coinciding with the onset of bronchial disease, which was in the end to kill her.
The last two years at Jesson St Mary were increasingly burdened by her growing incapacity. Though her mind was as active as ever, her body failed her. Letters written during this period show the strain and agony she suffered, drugged with morphia or racked with pain. Finally, on 4 May 1924, she died; it seems to have been a blessed release. She is buried in St Mary’s in the Marsh churchyard, near Dymchurch. Her gravestone (actually a wooden memorial made by Tucker himself) says simply, ‘Resting. E. Nesbit. Mrs Bland-Tucker. Poet and Author.’ I think she earned her rest.
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Most writers have two or three styles but E. Nesbit experimented in about a dozen … horror stories, sentimental love stories, stories in dialect; she wrote poetry for public recitation, poetry for the nursery, Socialist propaganda poetry … work for children, birthday books, a volume on dogs, little plays …
Doris Langley Moore Edith Nesbit, 1933
Edith Nesbit as a writer of ghost and horror stories stands apart from her contemporaries. An obvious comparison would be with Mrs Molesworth, who wrote children’s books and ghost stories; but there the similarity ends. Mrs Molesworth would never have given ‘Man-Size in Marble’ its vicious ending; the hero’s wife would have been saved in the nick of time.
‘Man-Size in Marble’ is probably Edith Nesbit’s best known story, and its appeal to modern readers is not surprising. It is unremittingly savage; the hero’s wife does absolutely nothing to deserve her fate, except by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is instructive to imagine what her fellow female ghost story writers would have made of it; Edith Wharton, for instance, would have smothered it in language (Nesbit seems neither to have met Henry James or, if she did, take much notice of him – happily for her writing). The story’s success is all the more interesting as we see hardly anything at all other than an empty space where something should have been and a bit of a statue at the end. Mrs Molesworth would probably have given us the lot before her happy ending, shuffling marble feet and all.
Edith Nesbit had a strong dread of being buried alive, caused, it seems, by the experience of a relative who had been actually placed in his coffin before it was discovered he was still alive. ‘The Five Senses’ can only be read as an attempt to work out her own fear in literary form.
‘The Power of Darkness’ was inspired by Edith’s visit in 1905 to the Musée Grévin in Paris, a macabre waxwork show which must have put the wind up her no end. There are traces of it in ‘The Head’ as well. That story also owes a lot to her more happy pastime of building miniature towns and cities, one of which she exhibited at the 1912 Children’s Welfare Exhibition, at London’s Olympia.
We can only guess at what burrowed away in her mind to produce the strong streak of necrophilia discernible in ‘Hurst of Hurstcote’ and ‘From the Dead’. In the former, John Hurst breaks open his wife’s coffin and is found lying on the vault floor with her in his arms; while in the latter, the hero’s wife returns from the dead. Not unusual in this genre, admittedly; but consider Nesbit’s description: ‘The figure of my dead wife came in … it came straight towards the bed [note the ‘it’] … its wide eyes were open and looked at me with love unspeakable. I could have shrieked aloud.’ Hardly a happy family reunion.
Husbands and wives are not seen in the best light in her stories. The husbands are either longing for dead wives or seeing the ones they’ve got die. There seem to be few Hubert Blands in the stories; perhaps not surprising – his thrusting type, with a penchant for the occasional punch-up, is not conducive to a creepy story.
One romantic triangle, in ‘The Pavilion’, is very strangely resolved, by an unusual relic of the sixteenth century. First published late in her career, Edith Nesbit seems, in this tale, to be striking off in a new direction. It certainly stands out from the rest.
Two stories – ‘The Five Senses’ and ‘The Three Drugs’ – bear the hallmarks of a rudimentary attempt at science fiction. The wonder potion story was in vogue in the 1890s, after Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In both cases, Nesbit brings in her own phobias, more so than other writers on the theme.
There are traces in most of the stories of what seems to have been her dominant phobia – the dead returning to life. In 1896, Edith wrote about a childhood visit to see the mummified corpses in the church of Saint Michel, Bordeaux. They made a deep impression:
A small vault, as my memory serves me, about 15 feet square … 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 200 skeletons, hung on wires … 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 figures still clothed with dry skin, seemed to reach out towards me … I was paralysed with horror … not daring to turn my head lest one of those charnel-house faces should peep out at me.
These charming exhibits (who on earth thought them suitable for children’s entertainment?) were ‘the crowning horror of my childish life,’ she wrote. ‘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 … my children, I resolved, should never know such fear. And to guard them from it I must banish it from my own soul.’
It is all too easy to see works of fiction as standing for something significant to the author’s life. Too often, I suspect, works written with an eye to making a few pounds quickly are invested by critics with a significance far beyond their author’s intentions. Edith Nesbit’s stories were written with money in mind, no doubt about it. But I think there may have been enough of the author in them to make them doubly interesting. You can see Edith Nesbit scribbling away, trying to push back the sight of the Bordeaux mummies creeping up behind her chair or standing in the corner, watching her with dried-up eyes. Or thrusting away the vision of being alive in her coffin, sensitive to all around her but unable to attract any attention to her plight. Or even trying to exorcise the demon of Hubert Bland
