IN A FABIAN HOTHOUSE

H.G. Wells's attempts to take over the Fabian Society and E. Nesbit's step-daughter are de- scribed in the second of two extracts from A Woman of Pas- sion, The Life of E. Nesbit 1858-1924 by Julia Briggs AFTER a penurious early married life Edith Nesbit found prosperity at the turn of the century through the serialisation of her novels in the Strand Magazine and her husband Hubert Bland's celebrated column In the Sunday Chronicle. They lived and entertained in style at two houses in Kent (at Eltham and Dymchurch) with their own children, Paul and Iris, and Hubert's two children, Rosamund and John, born to Edith's best friend and companion Alice Hoatson, and adopted by Edith. The Blands' domestic life and their work for the Fabian Society were disrupted by the advent of the 'little bad wolf' H.G. Wells.

H.G. Wells and his second wife Catherine were first introduced into Fabian circles by their friend Graham Wallas in 1902. They were soon on good terms with the Webbs, the Shaws and the Blands, though Wells did not actually join the Society until February 1903. His reputation as a writer was by then well established and he had recently built Spade House for himself at Sandgate, along the coast from Dym- church, between Hythe and Folkestone. Though Wells found Spade House a con- genial place in which to work and play with his two young sons, he was easily bored and always glad to have friends close at hand. The Wellses' first recorded visit to the Blands took place at Dymchurch that autumn, and Mrs Wells wrote to Edith in November 1902, enclosing some photo- graphs taken that afternoon: I send these with a quaking heart, fearing indeed they may make an end to our friendly relations. But please don't be angry with us, and put them in the fire if you feel like it. The amateur photographer must be the best hated of all creatures. Well, we at any rate treasure them as being mementos of a most delightful afternoon. I suppose you have abandoned Dymchurch. Their friendship developed over the next year or two, while retaining a comparative formality, with both the Wellses addressing Edith as 'Mrs Bland'. A letter from H.G. written in the autumn of 1903 congratu- lates Edith on her collection of short stories, The Literary Sense, with a warmth that includes a degree of politeness, A less strained and more spontaneous enthusiasm is evinced in a letter written the following winter, December 1904:

Steamed Lady,

I never told you how we like the Phoenix and the Carpet and how extraordinarily more than the late Mrs Ewing who was once first we now esteem you. The Phoenix is a great creation; he is the best character you ever invented — or anybody ever invented in this line. It is the best larking I ever saw. Your destiny is plain. You go on every Xmas never missing a Xmas, with a book like this, and you will become a British Institution in six years from now. Nothing can stop it. Every self-respecting family will buy you automati- cally and you will be rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and I knock my forehead on the ground at your feet in the vigour of my admiration of your easy artistry.

This was one of Wells's prophecies that, exceptionally, came true. It sounds more heartfelt because Edith's comic fantasies appealed far more to Wells's taste than did her adult writing. He genuinely admired her children's books and many years later told Doris Langley Moore [Nesbit's first biographer] that he considered them underrated.

Edith and H.G. got on very well. They were both extravert and full of fun — both of them loved long walks and arguments, parties, games of all kinds and charades. Edith borrowed a number of ideas from Wells's books — at first openly and, after their estrangement, covertly, while he may have learned from her something of the art of party-giving. Both had marked childish streaks in them, characteristic of the pri- vileged youngest child who has not fully consented to grow up. Shaw recognised this trait in Wells, describing him more than once as a spoilt child, but it was also evident in Edith. During 1905 Wells pub- lished A Modern Utopia and Kipps, which was partly set at Dymchurch. Edith en- joyed Kipps unreservedly but her initial reaction to the Utopia was less enthusias- tic, though it was to have a substantial influence on the serial she was currently writing, The Amulet. That summer Wells made plans to join the Blands on the Medway; she wrote him a note telling him where to find them:

My dear Sir,

I can't remember whether you were told that our Inn at Yalding is 'The George' — It would be dreadful if you were to seek us vainly at the 'Bull' or the 'Anchor',

I've read your Utopia again. I don't disagree as much as I thought. And I think it is a splendid book. I wish I could write books like that, You must be very very glad of yourself when you think of that book.

One afternoon towards the end of July H.G. turned up at Well Hall entirely without warning, carrying his valise and announcing, 'Ernest, I've come to stay.' He called Edith 'Ernest' because he had first supposed that the bare initial stood for a man's name, and what, after all, was more important than being Ernest? (Co- incidentally, an early Bodleian cataloguer made the same assumption.) Edith was delighted with Wells's confident expecta- tion of her hospitality, and immediately set about organising entertainments in the form of tableaux and charades to celebrate his arrival and amuse him next day. These were based on the titles of his books and he had to guess what they were: for Love and Mr Lewisham, Paul sat at a table, studious- ly reading, while little John, got up as Eros with a bow and arrow, shot at him. Wells stayed about a week, on this occasion, and while he was there completed the draft of his novel In the Days of the Comet, writing in the garden as Edith herself did; it was not finally published until the following year. He and Edith sat up talking until two or three in the morning, but he also went out of his way to be pleasant to the rest of the family, telling John fairy-tales, talking politics with Hubert and flirting mildly with Rosamund.

The Wellses and the Blands had been on terms of close friendship, paying each

other regular visits and keeping in touch through frequent notes. Over the next three years that friendship was to be dissipated by ideological disagreements, suspicion concerning H.G.'s intentions to- wards Rosamund, and finally by a major but well-concealed row, followed by mutual recriminations and denunciations; their long shadow falls across Wells's account of the Blands in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934). The first steps in their estrangement came about through Wells's efforts to reform the Fabian, to turn it 'inside out and then throw it into the dustbin', in his own phrase. Such a process meant unseating the 'Old Gang', the ex- 6 Wells conceived a passionate desire to emancipate Rosamund from her voluntary servitude

ecutive of 14, which still included Edward Pease (its permanent paid secretary), Shaw, Webb and Bland (as honorary treasurer); they had run the Society since its earliest days and, 20 years later, showed no signs of stepping down.

Clifford Sharp, who had first introduced Gerald Gould to Edith, was one of a group of young socialists who founded the 'Fa- bian Nursery' in 1906 — he acted as treasurer, Rosamund as secretary; Cecil Chesterton, G. K.'s younger brother, was also a member. The Nursery was divided between an almost excessive respect for their elders (Clifford Sharp and Cecil Chesterton were both ardent disciples of Hubert) and a sense that the Society was due for some kind of change. The Webbs had encouraged Wells to join the Fabian in 1903, and though he had threatened to resign with Graham Wallas in 1904, he finally settled down to a determination that the Fabian — piddling little middle-class club that it was — must have something made of it: its membership must be opened up, its finance put on to a practical and businesslike basis; it would have to give up its easy toleration of a wide range of ideas and abandon its policy of permeation in favour of putting up candidates for Parlia- ment and generally becoming more politi- cally effective.

Wells saw his campaign as particularly addressed to the intelligent and indepen- dent women in the Society whom he rightly identified as a restless and active group. His campaign for its reform began in 1906 with two lectures delivered in January and February, 'This Misery of Boots' and 'The Faults of the Fabian'. The latter criticised the Society for its failure of nerve, its lack of ambition or larger aims, and particular members of the Old Gang were mocked for their narrow outlook (the Webbs) or their innappropriate levity (Shaw). Though Wells was a notoriously poor public speak-

er (always addressing the floor or the ceiling and frequently inaudible), his speechei were pointed, and hard-hitting, and they went down well with an audience eager for change, though unable to formu- late exactly what changes they wanted.

Wells's committee (as he saw it) pre- sented its report for discussion to the Fabian on 7 December to a packed Essex Hall — a third of the entire membership had turned out; Wells's activities had in any case attracted many new members. The special committee proposed that the Society's Basis should be rewritten, its name changed, its executive enlarged, more recruits made and candidates put up for Parliament — in other words, it must drop its drawing-room exclusivity and be- come a popular socialist party. Wells might still have pushed his proposals through had he not insisted that their acceptance would constitute a vote of no confidence in the executive; his ambitious and large-minded schemes were thus yoked with what began to look like a petty personal vendetta. Wells spoke at great length and very poorly; he seemed bent on losing his cause single-handed. The meeting lasted so long that a vote was postponed until the follow- ing week.

Shaw wound up this next meeting with a cunning tactical device: he teased Wells into agreeing that he did not intend to resign if defeated, and then pitched into him with characteristic comic malice: 'Wells was squelched by a joke', it was said. No vote had taken place and very little discussion of the committee's report. Many people, among them Beatrice Webb, thought that, if Wells had not pressed for the overthrow of the Old Gang, he would have succeeded in getting his policies accepted.

A week later Shaw wrote to Wells assuring him that all was not lost: 'You can easily retrieve the situation if you will study your game carefully, or else do exactly what I tell you.' Wells never did anything he was told; he could hardly resign im- mediately, having just agreed not to, but he had been publicly defeated, and his hopes of using the Fabian as an organ for implementing his dreams of world reform began to fade; he was no longer interested in its proceedings and grew lazy about attending committee meetings. But he was still angry with what he regarded as the hypocrisy and the rigidly patriarchal atti- tudes of the executive, and still anxious to help its discontented womenfolk find free- dom, though he now pursued his goal on a more personal basis.

Rosamund had been a great focus of admiration in the Fabian Nursery, and had many suitors, including two particular admirers of her father, Cecil Chesterton, quick, clever but physically repellent, and the handsome fair-haired Clifford Sharp. He had read engineering at University College, London, but had not bothered to work and had gone down without his degree, determined to become a journalist. Beatrice Webb, who thought highly of his abilities, observed that he was not a sympathetic or attractive personality, he has little imagination, he is quite oddly ungracious in his manner'. Hubert also considered Clifford a serious and indeed a gifted young man and Rosamund, who enjoyed a very close relationship with her father, was also willing to be impressed, and even to contemplate becoming en- gaged to him. For Wells, meanwhile, Bland had come to stand for all that he found most intolerable in the attitudes of the executive — he was the personification of male complacency and sexual hypocrisy; and Rosamund as Bland's favourite posses- sion was also his chief victim. Wells con- ceived a passionate desire to emancipate her from her voluntary servitude and her blind admiration for her clay-footed father. A quarter of a century later he wrote of his affair with her as a steamy jungle episode, a phase of coveting and imitative desire, for I never found any great charm in Rosamund. I would rather I had not to tell of it. But in that damned atmosphere that hung about the Blands, everyone seemed impelled towards such complications; it was contagious. . . .

Yet in March 1907 he wrote to Violet Hunt: 'I have a pure flame for Rosamund who is the Most — Quite!' At some point that year Wells elicited a promise from Rosamund that she recalled many years later: I remember I gave you a promise on the

seashore at Dymchurch twenty two years ago

that I would tell you if ever I was stranded.

You told me that Clifford would be no good to me. How horribly, terribly right you were!

The details and dates of Rosamund's love affair with Wells remain mysterious. Rosamund herself told Doris Langley Moore that their friendship had been interrupted and never resumed when her parents went through her correspondence and discovered that Wells had 'amorous designs' upon her; she put this at 1906, but she did not always remember dates accur- ately, nor does she seem to have been entirely frank about the events and feelings involved. A letter from Rosamund to Jane Wells written on 4 March 1908 implies that, although relationships between the families were strained, they were still superficially amicable. However it came about, within a month or two of writing this letter, Rosamund and H.G. were caught at a London railway station in the act of running away together. The whole episode is obscure since all the protagonists felt compromised in one way or another and would not talk about it — though everyone else did.

According to Fabian gossip Hubert and Clifford had caught up with Rosamund and Wells at Paddington Station where they found the lovers already on the train. Hubert took hold of Rosamund and threatened Wells with a public scandal. According to the more highly-coloured family version, Rosamund had agreed to go to Paris with Wells for the weekend as 'a lark', and was dressed up as a boy (a not implausible detail given her passion for dressing up and Wells's celebrity); Hubert hauled Wells off the train and did not pause to waste words on him. He simply did 'what any gentleman would have done'. and thumped him, there being no horse whips to hand.

The row that followed Rosamund's un- successful elopement was, predictably, of epic proportions. According to Wells, Edith 'wrote insulting letters to Jane de- nouncing her tolerance of my misbe- haviour — which came rather oddly from her.' Shaw, who enjoyed being a busy- body and undertaking the role of peace- maker, tried to reconcile the injured par- ties and was savaged by Wells for his pains:

I think you do me an injustice — I don't mean in your general estimate of my charac- ter — but in the Bland business. However you take your line. It's possible you don't know the whole situation.

Well, I had some handsome ambitions last twelve-months and they've come to nothing — nothing measured by what I wanted and your friendship and the Webbs among other assets have gone for my gross of green spectacles.

And damn the Blands! All through it's been that infernal household of lies that has tainted the affair and put me off my game.

Both Edith and Rosamund had been deeply fond of Wells and both attempted unsuccessfully to renew contact with him after Hubert's death; but he was as great a man as ever while they had become no more than unimportant moments in his past. Edith, always a great believer in 'kiss and make up', wrote late in 1915 to ask, `Don't you think there ought to be a time-limit for quarrels?' Wells must have replied, for a second letter begins 'My dear Sir', the mode of address she had regularly used to him in the heyday of their friendship. Rosamund wrote him a love- letter, occasioned by seeing a reproduction of his portrait by William Orpen; it is a love-letter eloquent of her unrequited love for him and the emptiness of her later life: Clifford came home the other night and thrust a page of The Tatter under my nose, saying, 'There's H.G. for you,' And it really was! You cannot imagine how glad I was to see him again. Orpen is awfully clever. He has put down all that is essentially you, and nobody ever did that before. They put the unessential and obvious. But this is the real H.G, the H.G. who writes unforgettable, and darling things, the H.G. one loves, and always loved and couldn't misunderstand. This was once my H.G. and I think in some deep place in me is still my H.G.

A Woman of Passion, The Life of E. Nesbit 1858-1924 by Julia Briggs. (Century Hutchinson, £16.95) is published on 22 October. C) 1987 Julia Briggs.