Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends. Penelope Fitzgerald

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      Or they might even earn their own livings. Anne, since she left the Gower Street School, had been enrolled at the Royal Female School of Art at 43 Queen Square, within easy walking distance of Gordon Street. The course offered two five-month terms at fifteen guineas a year, three times as much as the South Kensington Schools, which concentrated on design training for industry. The Female School, on the other hand, had in mind, from its first beginnings in the 1840s, the daughters of professional men ‘unexpectedly compelled to earn a living’, and at first the students had only been accepted at discretion, if they could show (preferably with a certificate from a clergyman) that they were genuine ‘needy gentlewomen’ who would be obliged to maintain themselves. Anne specialized in bird and flower painting. She was happy to do only that, hoping one day for an exhibition of her own, but if need arose she would be qualified to teach or to execute paid commissions, without ever ceasing to be a lady. Anna Maria need have no alarm on that score. Her younger daughter would still have the prestige of an amateur.

      What about Charlotte, who had learned only what she chose to, but always did it well? She was, for instance, very good at embroidery, and she could have got an excellent training at the Royal School of Art Needlework, established with its workrooms in Kensington, or, if that was too far to go, there was a School of Mediaeval Embroidery, run by the sisterhood of St Katherine in Queen Square to supply church furnishings. She could then have worked at home, and sold discreetly, perhaps through the Association for the Sale of Work of Ladies of Limited Means. She could, though this would have been more difficult to conceal from the neighbours, have given piano lessons. From Miss Harrison she had heard time and again a reading of Carlyle’s ‘Everlasting No’ from Sartor Resartus. The ‘No’ is the certainty of death and the loss of faith which make life meaningless, followed by the answering Everlasting Yea, that in spite of this, man must work at what he is fit for. ‘Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fragment of a product, produce it, in God’s name!’ But the truth was that Charlotte, in spite of Carlyle, hated steady work. It has to be admitted that she never applied herself systematically to anything.

      It might be thought, however, that as a changeling and enfant terrible, only just grown up, she would have wanted independence at all costs. Here we come to the irreconcilables in Charlotte Mew. One side of her treated the other cruelly. She was secretly, and sometimes openly, impelled to let rip, to shock the shockable, and to turn her back on the lot of them.

       Please you, excuse me, good five o’clock people,

       I’ve lost my last hatful of words

      and yet she clung as desperately as Anna Maria herself to dear respectability. She never left home for long, never became – for example – a suffragette or even a suffragist, never made any attempt to claim political or sexual freedom or defend herself either against society or her own nature. On the contrary, with fierce self-suppression she inherited the fate of the world’s minorities and suffered as an outsider, an outsider, that is, even to herself. She was determined to remain Miss Lotti – a lady, even if she made rather an odd one. There is pathos in this clinging to gentility by a free spirit, who seemed born to have nothing to do with it. But her home promised normality – its very dullness did that – and normality implies peace. As a five o’clock person, out of the shadow of the madhouse, a good daughter, devoted to her mother, she could treat the savage who threatened her from within as a stranger. To use her own image, she could stay as ‘a blade of grass which dare not grow too high lest the world should snap it’.

      However, she was also a writer. At the beginning of the 1890s Elizabeth Goodman was still in charge of the household, since ‘no-one dared to speak to her of rest’, but she now no longer swept Charlotte’s manuscripts into her dustpan. Alone in her room Charlotte sat down, partly to justify her friends’ expectations – that always meant a great deal to her – partly to show herself what she could do, partly to earn money. Without money free will means very little. Though Charlotte never wanted to get rid of her responsibilities, she preferred not to be answerable to anyone. She needed, in fact, not independence but freedom.

      There was a business-like side to Charlotte. She knew, at least, how to set out on a writer’s career. Her manuscripts went out to a lady typewriter – they were still called that – who, herself, was a distressed gentlewoman. They came back neatly bound in brown paper, were lightly corrected in pencil and sent off with the stamps for return postage stuck to the front cover. As to where they should go, there was a wide choice in the nineties, the golden age of the English periodical. A hopeful writer, a beginner poised on the verge, must have been bewildered simply by the number of new and older publications. Although Answers and Tit-Bits 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, СКАЧАТЬ