The Pioneering British Socialist Who Revolutionized Children’s Literature (Published 2019) (2024)

THE LIFE AND LOVES OF E. NESBIT

Victorian Iconoclast, Children’s Author, and Creator of “The Railway Children”
By Eleanor Fitzsimons

Let’s assume that you have never heard of the English author E. Nesbit. Let’s also assume that you didn’t know that “E.” stands for a woman’s name (Edith), or that she wrote dozens of children’s books in the Victorian and Edwardian eras that brought her instant fame. Many of these classics are still read today, and one, “Five Children and It” — the first book I ever borrowed from a library, upon getting a library card at the age of 5 — has been continually in print since 1902.

That novel is about a bad-tempered, goggle-eyed Psammead (Greek for sand fairy) whom five children dig up in a gravel pit. In her new biography, “The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit,” Eleanor Fitzsimons suggests that Nesbit may have “dreamed up her Psammead” as a 7-year-old in Brighton, where she was disappointed that the stony beach had “only sandiness,” not sand. The creature grants the children a wish a day, which expires at sunset. The wishes come out badly: having wings (they get stranded on top of a church tower at nightfall); being rich (nobody trusts their gold pieces and they’re nearly arrested); being gorgeous (nobody recognizes them, which they find distressing); having the house besieged by warriors (difficulties obvious). As the Psammead grumpily explains, “You hadn’t the sense to wish for what was good for you.”

Let’s further assume that you need to be told that Nesbit has influenced writers from J. K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman to George Bernard Shaw (whose flower girl Eliza Doolittle was inspired in part by Nesbit’s effusive personality). And that you could use a lesson on sundry other details about her, including, for example, that in the late 1880s, when Shaw and Nesbit were both in their 20s, she fell hard in love with him. They met through the socialist Fabian Society — a band of “very jolly” (Nesbit’s words) rabble-rousers from the “educated middle-class intelligentsia” (Shaw’s words) — which served as an important incubator of Britain’s future Labour Party. Nesbit co-founded the society in 1884, along with half a dozen other contrarian idealists, including her sexist, womanizing, monocle-sporting husband, Hubert Bland.

Shaw rebuffed Nesbit’s overtures, given that she was the wife of a friend and fellow Fabian, as well as the mother of three small children, with a fourth on the way (though that one, Rosamund, whom Nesbit would raise as her own, was borne by another woman, one of her husband’s many lovers). But Shaw and Nesbit remained friends. Nesbit had a lifelong habit of cultivating literary people. In her 60s, she met Noël Coward, then in his 20s, when he rented a cottage near her home in Kent. The area was thick with writers, among them Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and H. G. Wells, though Wells’s friendship with Nesbit and Bland ended in 1908, when he tried to run off with Rosamund. As a little boy, Coward told Nesbit, he had been so stirred by her stories about the Psammead that he stole a coral necklace and pawned it so he could buy a book in which the tales were collected.

Nesbit was “delighted” to hear of his youthful transgression. She was well known for her “contempt for conventionally ‘good’ children” and reserved her admiration for high-spirited children — and grown-ups — whose intensity and well-meaning inspirations landed them in fascinating scrapes and eventful brushes with history. This, after all, had been her own pattern. She was like a steampunk perpetual motion machine, popping out distinctive creative work and dynamic social plans on a conveyor belt that never stopped but sometimes had a hitch or two.