The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

Victorian Iconoclast, Children's Author, and Creator of The Railway Children

Abrams Books

Contents

THE MUMMIES OF BORDEAUX

One day in September 1867, little Daisy Nesbit, who had just turned nine and was wearing her "best blue silk frock," waited impatiently at the entrance to the bell tower of the church of Saint Michel in the French city of Bordeaux. She was clutching the hand of her older sister — whether this was Minnie, aged fifteen, or Saretta, her half-sister, who was twenty-three, she does not make clear in the account she left — and "positively skipping with delicious anticipation" as an aged French guide fumbled with the keys to the fifteenth century crypt that lay below the bell tower. At last, he unlocked the ancient door and led the young tourists through an archway and down a low-lit, flagstone passage.

Daisy was an exceptionally imaginative and high-spirited child. She was also intensely homesick and had grown "tired of churches and picture-galleries, of fairs and markets, of the strange babble of foreign tongues and the thin English of the guide-book." When she learned that Bordeaux contained a crypt full of mummies, she imagined the "plate-glass cases, camphor, boarded galleries, and kindly curators" familiar from visits to the British Museum. She begged to be taken to see them: "As one Englishman travelling across a desert seeks to find another of whom he has heard in that far land, so I sought to meet these mummies who had cousins at home, in the British Museum, in dear, dear England," she explained.

Any one of the many thousands of visitors who had traversed that dank passageway before her could have warned her that what lay beyond bore no resemblance to the "cousins" who lay in twin rows of angled cases in the center of the bright and airy room where Egyptian antiquities were displayed at the British Museum. In 1791, when alterations were being made to the church of Saint Michel, one of the oldest surviving medieval churches in Europe, it became necessary to exhume the bodies interred in the adjoining cemetery. Rather than unearthing the skeletal remains they expected, startled workmen were confronted with seventy human forms, weirdly intact and dressed in the rags and tatters of their burial clothing, their shriveled, gray-brown skin still cleaving to their bones. New Zealand newspaper the Otago Daily Times suggested "the earth around the church seems to have something peculiarly antiseptic in its nature."

Rather than reburying these desiccated corpses, the church authorities arranged them upright against the crypt walls of the bell tower, which stood some distance from the church. Soon these eerie new inhabitants were attracting visitors in droves, among them celebrated French writers Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo. Flaubert appeared unmoved. "I can testify," he wrote, "that all have skin as drum-tight, leathery, brown and reverberant as ass hides." In contrast, the unsettling experience made Hugo gloomy and filled him with a foreboding of disaster.

The reporter from the Otago Daily Times described a rough-looking guide, likely the same man who led Daisy and her sisters, who clutched a flickering candle on a stick and thumped each body in turn with a stout club in order to demonstrate its soundness. In voluble French, he drew attention to the "excellent calves" of one desiccated man and the perfectly preserved lace chemise worn by a young woman who had died four centuries earlier. Here too was "The Family Poisoned by Mushrooms," and over there "The General Killed in a Duel." He became particularly animated when he reached one "poor miserable" who had been buried alive: "See how his head is turned to one side and the body half turned round in the frantic effort to get out of the coffin, with his mouth open and gasping," he exclaimed. Little wonder the Otago Daily Times declared the whole thing "a disgusting and demoralising show."

In 1837, three decades before Daisy arrived, a trio of eminent doctors took skin and muscle samples in order to determine what kept these corpses intact. Their detailed notes describe a descent of thirty or forty steps into a "circular space, the walls of which are tapestried by dead bodies all standing erect." They left a particularly vivid description of one "miserable creature":

The mouth open and horribly contracted, the inferior members strongly drawn to the body — the arms, one twisted by convulsions is thrown over the head, the other folded beneath the trunk and fixed to the thigh by the nails, which are deeply implanted in the flesh; the forced inflexion of the whole body, gives the expression of ineffable pain, all announcing a violent death. Unfortunate wretch! had he died in this state, or rather, had he been buried alive, and assumed this position in the horrible agonies of awakening?

Little Daisy walked down that same passage with its tang of damp earth and negotiated that same flight of narrow stone steps, each one slippery with mold. Her French was poor, so she missed the guide's warning of "natural mummies." Instead, she anticipated "a long clean gallery, filled with the white light of a London noon, shed through high skylights on Egyptian treasures."11 Yet the darkness made her wary and she tightened her grip on her sister's hand.

With a triumphant cry of "Les voilà!" their guide threw open a "heavy door barred with iron" and Daisy was confronted with a sight that horrified her for the rest of her life:

A small vault, as my memory serves me, about fifteen feet square, with an arched roof, from the centre of which hung a lamp that burned with a faint blue light, and made the guide's candle look red and lurid. The floor was flagged like the passages, and was as damp and chill. 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 two hundred skeletons. Not white clean skeletons, hung on wires, like the one you see at the doctor's, but 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 fingers still clothed with dry skin, seemed to reach out towards me. There they stood, men, women, and children, knee-deep in loose bones collected from the other vaults of the church, and heaped round them. On the wall near the door I saw the dried body of a little child hung up by its hair.

Paralyzed with horror, she scarcely remembered retracing her steps. She dared not turn her head "lest one of those charnel-house faces" peep out "from some niche in the damp wall."

That evening, as she sat alone in her hotel bedroom while her mother and sisters dined below, she grew convinced that the mummies had followed her and were lurking in a curtained alcove set into the wall. The young French waiter who delivered her supper was confronted with a distraught child in desperate need of comfort. He spoke no English and she hardly any French, but he drew back the curtain to dispel her fears, helped her fetch more candles, and took her onto his knee, singing softly and feeding her bread and milk while she clung to his neck until the others returned.

In My School Days, a series of articles published in the Girl's Own Paper between October 1896 and September 1897, Daisy, who was thirty-eight by then and writing under her given name of Edith, or E. Nesbit, insisted:

The mummies of Bordeaux were the crowning horror of my childish life; 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. All the other fears could have been effaced but the shock of that sight branded it on my brain, and I never forgot it. For many years I could not bring myself to go about any house in the dark, and long after I was a grown woman I was tortured, in the dark watches, by imagination and memory, who rose strong and united, overpowering my will and my reason as utterly as in my baby days.

She admitted: "It was not till I had two little children of my own that I was able to conquer this mortal terror of darkness, and teach imagination her place, under the foot of reason and the will." Years later, she kept a human skull and a small collection of bones in her house in order to familiarise her children with artifacts that had terrified her in childhood. "My children, I resolved, should never know such fear," she explained. "And to guard them from it I must banish it from my own soul. It was not easy but it was done."

This early scare instilled a lifelong fear of the risen dead, which Edith explored in her fiction. In a story she wrote during her childhood, she has a young girl named Mina descend a secret fight of steps and walk toward a dim light before reaching "a round room with doors all around." Behind one is "a corridor lined with dead bodies." In "Man-size in Marble," a horror story she wrote for Home Chimes magazine in December 1887, the effigies of two long-dead knights come alive and stride down the nave of a church. In "From the Dead," which is included in her collection Grim Tales (1893), a widower wakes to find his shroud-clad wife standing at the foot of his bed. In "Hurst of Hurstcote," published in Temple Bar magazine in June 1893, the body of a deceased bride does not decay. In "The Power of Darkness," which she wrote for The Strand Magazine in April 1905, a man descends into the catacombs of the Musée Grévin in Paris and discovers that the wax effigies on display have come to life.

Generations of children had their first encounter with terror in the pages of Edith's best-loved books. Her braver characters scoff at such fanciful notions in a way she could not. In The Wouldbegoods (1901), her young narrator Oswald Bastable informs readers: "My uncle he always upheld that that dead man was no deader than you and me, but was in a sort of fit, a transit, I think they call it, and looked for him to waken into life again some day [sic]." The Bastable children imagine that a body kept behind glass at the top of a tower will come alive and lock them in. In The Wouldbegoods, young Dora Bastable fears she may encounter "a skeleton that can walk about and catch at your legs when you're going up-stairs to bed." In The Enchanted Castle (1907), her child protagonists lure the terrifying Ugly-Wuglies, oddly animated collections of old clothing and bric-a-brac, "hollow, unbelievable things" that had no insides to their heads, into a dark passageway reminiscent of the one populated by the mummies of Bordeaux. Edith had an exceptionally fertile imagination, and her anxieties were intensified by the upheaval she experienced in early life. She populated her stories with people and events from her past and wrote alternative outcomes to exorcise her fears and phobias. In My School Days, she described how she prayed "fervently, tearfully, that when I should be grown up I might never forget what I thought and felt and suffered then." She was three years old when tragedy blighted her life. On Sunday morning, March 30, 1862, her father, John Collis Nesbit, aged just forty-three, died at Elm Bank House in Barnes, the home of his "intimate friend" and publisher, George Parker Tuxford.

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." 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." 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." 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. 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.

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." 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.