Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends - Penelope Fitzgerald

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had been started, with enormous success, to provide something lighter in the way of weeklies, they existed side by side with the older heavies, The Athenaeum, The Sphere, The Academy, The Spectator, The Saturday Review and a host of others, always increasing, literary or political or both, and joined every month by the closely printed ranks of magazines, led by Blackwood’s, The Strand and the Pall Mall. These last specialized in fiction, and could count on the best-known names as contributors – Hardy, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Conan Doyle, Conrad, Henry James, all of them valued in those days largely as spinners of yarns. The best seller had not yet parted company with literature. The yarns, whether they came from hacks or writers of genius, were set among feature and travel articles and pages of ‘little-known facts’ which linked the magazines with the earlier self-educational journals. The readers were loyal and persevering, ready to learn what the writers insisted on telling them.

      In 1891, for example, when The Strand first appeared, George Newnes ‘respectfully placed his first number in the hands of the public’, hoping, as he said, to justify its survival in spite of the ‘vast number of existing monthlies’. Newnes opened with an absurd romance by Grant Allen in which the heroine faints on a railway line and the hero (called Ughtred Carnegie) has to decide whether to save her and derail the oncoming express, or to leave her to her fate. Next there are ‘portraits of celebrities’ (Tennyson, Swinburne, Rider Haggard, Sir John Lubbock, representing three parts of literature to one of science), notes from a sermon by Cardinal Manning, and a feature on the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, which opens:

      Fire! Fire! This startling cry aroused me one night as I was putting the finishing touches to some literary work. Rushing pen in hand to the window I could just perceive a dull red glare in the northern sky.

      This leads to yet another rescue, when at the scene of the fire ‘a female form appears at an upper window’. If it had not been a female form, or failing that, a child, it would have not been interesting enough for The Strand.

      Charlotte’s first venture, The Minnow Fishers, was in this ‘curious personal experience’ category, much in demand from editors and readers. It was based on a real incident during one of her walks along the canal towpath to Maida Vale, on the way to Kensal Green, where her grandfather Henry Kendall lay buried. The Minnow Fishers are small boys on this towpath, intent on their lines and hooks. They don’t apparently notice that an even smaller child is struggling in the water ‘or if they had it didn’t detract them from the business in hand’. For this detachment Charlotte feels a kind of admiration. The drowning child is dragged out by a passer-by, and one of the boys has to admit to being the elder brother of this ‘miserable object blinking palely out again at life, laboriously restored to the damp dusk, the cheerless outlook of the dingy stretches of the bank, the stagnant water and the impassive friends’. The brother is obliged to take the victim home, but gives him ‘a vindictive cuff, which met with no response. The two remaining minnow fishers sat serenely on.’

      In its sympathetic view of children hard, or hardened, as nails, this story makes a good introduction to Charlotte Mew’s London. One detail, the bloated face of the rescued infant, ‘a painful spectacle, suggestive of a crimson airball, a gruesome penny toy’, shows that she is describing something actually seen. What is surprising is how little, after all, she seems to have learned from Miss Harrison’s English lessons. Charlotte always had trouble with grammar and punctuation, but, apart from that, the presentation of the story is laborious in the extreme, opening with

      It was an after-dinner patter; someone had been generalizing on the elevating influence of sports, of angling in particular: ‘And thereby,’ interposed my friend, John Hilton, ‘hangs a tale; it was when we lived near Maida Vale of Melancholy Memory: I was walking home one horribly damp afternoon by way of the canal’ …

      and so on. This very short story hardly needs the ‘after-dinner patter’ or John Hilton either: he is simply a device, or rather a gallant attempt to adapt to the fiction market. And he was not of much use to Charlotte, who was unable to place The Minnow Fishers, although she put it by and sent it later to The Outlook. She would have to try a different tack.

      The epigraph to The Minnow Fishers is from Richard Jefferies, ‘to be calm without mental fear is the ideal of nature’. Charlotte, from her school days, kept lists of quotations from favourite authors, copying out sentences that seemed to her helpful and true. In 1889 she had been reading Jefferies’ Field and Hedgerow, his last essays, a book published after his death. ‘It set my own heart beating,’ she wrote, ‘for I felt I discovered in it an undreamed-of universe.’ Jefferies’ large claims to have learned ‘the spirit of earth and sea and the soul of the sun’ answered to her own intimations, feelings beyond words that had come to her as a child on the Island.

      They come at evening with the home-flying rooks and the scent of hay,

      Over the fields. They come in spring.

      Field and Hedgerow, like her own vision of nature’s peace, was a relief from what she called ‘pavement dreams – those thoughts that come sometimes in cities, of the weary length or terrible brevity of life’. The trouble was, and she knew this very well herself, that she was an incurable Londoner. The intimations would not hold. She wanted company, even when she was declaring she didn’t, she loved hurrying from one appointment to another, and feeling all round her the pressure of a million unknown lives. Jefferies himself, in Amaryllis at the Fair, has a sudden glimpse of the ‘terrible, beautiful thickness of people’ in the London streets, ‘so many, like the opulence of Nature itself’. How well she understood this Charlotte showed in one of her last poems, The Shade-Catchers.

      At about this time Anne brought a new friend home to Gordon Street, a student from the Female School of Art, Elsie Millard. Elsie’s father was elocution master at the City of London School; her elder sister, Evelyn, was on the stage. Evelyn had been rigorously trained in her father’s personal system, based on a selection of speeches from Shakespeare arranged alphabetically to illustrate the whole range of emotions from Ambition and Anger to Unimpassioned speech, Violence, Wistfulness and Zeal. In 1891 she was appearing at the Grand Theatre, Islington, in Joseph’s Sweetheart, but her speciality was in ‘perfect lady’ parts and her great successes were to be in Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray and as Princess Flavia in The Prisoner of Zenda. Elsie, who preferred landscape painting, occasionally made sketching trips to the West of Ireland. The Millards were eminently respectable – they lived in Kensington, and were strict Catholics – but they did bring Charlotte, for the first time, into the fringe of the theatrical and studio world.

      A break with the past came in 1893, with the death of Elizabeth Goodman. At the age of sixty-nine she contracted blood poisoning, as the result of running a needle into her hand. She had always wanted to die in harness, and she did. But after it was all over a strange group of Goodman relatives and in-laws, whom no-one had ever heard of before, turned up to take away her few belongings in a cab. They insisted on arranging the funeral, ‘not without some bitterness’. Charlotte felt they made the house smell. ‘Their moral and physical odour seemed to cling about it long after they had left it.’ An interesting point is her attitude to Elizabeth Goodman’s ‘plausible greasy sister-in-law, who was alleged to be an artist’s model and when not sitting to someone or other was said to be nursing an invalid gentleman at Boulogne or Worthing or Ostend.’ In short, she was a kept woman, ‘always taking expensive medicines and borrowing railway fares’, and this is what Charlotte felt about such women when she actually met them. In contrast, she went on romanticizing the Magdalens and pale harlots of the pavements and street lights, creatures of the abyss, seen only in passing. In this matter Charlotte Mew was truly a child of the 1890s.

      Nothing of Elizabeth Goodman’s was left at 9 Gordon Street – not even her workbox, or her Queen Victoria Jubilee tea-pot. How deeply and how confusedly Charlotte felt the loss can be seen from a curious fantasy which she wrote, A Wedding Day. The bride, in

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