Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends. Penelope Fitzgerald

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СКАЧАТЬ stouter. She grew out of early childhood still small-boned and tiny, with her face a perfect oval, the ‘moonfaced darling of all’, but given to sudden withdrawals. She had become a reading and writing child, retreating under the nursery table and producing ‘sheets of pathetically laboured MSS’. These Elizabeth Goodman swept into her dustpan. Much of the faithful servant’s time was spent in planning small treats and great careers for the four children, but she didn’t hold with this writing rubbish. Poetry, in fact, she maintained, was ‘injurious to the brain’. Lotti turned to imagination’s refuge. Evidently, she deduced, she was misplaced and alien, her father and mother were not her real parents. ‘Never, I know, but half your child’ she wrote in The Changeling:

       Times I pleased you, dear Father, dear Mother,

       Learned all my lessons and liked to play,

       And dearly I loved the little pale brother

       Whom some other bird must have called away.

       Why did They bring me here to make me

       Not quite bad and not quite good,

       Why, unless They’re wicked, do They want, in spite to take me

       Back to Their wet, wild wood?

      These are verses for children, written in 1912. Charlotte used to read them aloud, when the time came, to children of her acquaintance, giving no explanation, because she believed (quite rightly) that none would be needed. They understood her at once.

      Anne was taller and prettier, but in spite of her brilliant violet-blue eyes, more usual-looking. She hadn’t Lotti’s strangely arched eyebrows, or her disconcerting look of astonishment, which might be sarcasm. Anne never wrote anything, but drew, or painted; she was the little sister, quicker to make friends than Lotti, but quite contentedly under her influence. Freda, the youngest, was the most striking of all. She was ‘like a flame’. Anna Maria took pride in this youngest, and, determined to live through her daughter, liked to take little Freda about herself, particularly to dancing classes. For these Anna Maria dressed elaborately, appearing, for example, in a pale blue boa, an awkward thing for a very short woman to wear.

      Henry, four years older than Charlotte, at a time of life when four years make the most difference, was the looked-up-to elder brother. In the room reserved as an office, he worked away at his drawing-board, but with an eye, quite naturally, to his own amusements. At the age of sixteen or so he began to go out dancing, and now, apparently, Elizabeth Goodman, ‘when she was called upon to deliver the secret note or the unhallowed bouquet, would stand stiff-backed and sorrowful-eyed, holding it in her strong, beautifully-shaped rough hand to “receive instructions”, with an impressive “Very well, sir”, which was not convincing.’ Why poor Henry shouldn’t send a bouquet, which seems harmless enough, or why it should be unhallowed, is not explained. Possibly Goodman was doubtful of any form of communication between the sexes, as leading, in the end, to trouble.

      In 1879 Lotti made her first venture beyond the family in Doughty Street and the cousins in the Isle of Wight. She was entered as a pupil in the Gower Street School. The school was not more than twenty minutes’ walk away up Guildford Street and past the British Museum, so that she was able to come home for her mid-day dinner, but the headmistress, Miss Lucy Harrison, made a profound impression on her, which might be described as a revelation of a kind.

      Lucy Harrison left a strong mark, in fact, on several thousands of young girls who passed through her hands. It couldn’t be said of her – as it was of Miss Buss, at the North London Collegiate – that she was ‘a great educator who should never have been allowed to come into contact with children’. There are very many tributes to her good influence, intellectual and moral – she would never have distinguished between the two – but there was, in Octavia Hill’s words, ‘something Royal’ about her which perhaps exempted her from criticism. She may not always have known what she was doing.

      She had been born in 1844, in Yorkshire, of Quaker parents, the youngest of eight, and grew up into a top-whipping, boat-building tomboy, such as many large mid-Victorian families produced. A good shot with a stone, she felt, when she killed her first robin, ‘after the first start of joy in the success of the action, a revulsion like the horrors of Cain’ when she held the warm body in her hands. When she threw her favourite pocketknife into the water (apparently by mistake) ‘I felt’ – she wrote – ‘as if I had thrown my heart in.’ Hers was the excess of guilt attributed to Maggie in The Mill on the Floss, or Cathy Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, or Jo in Little Women, when their behaviour was not only passionate, but masculine. Lucy Harrison had to come to terms with it in order to control her own life and those of others.

      She was educated in France and Germany and at the liberal and unsectarian Bedford College. Languages came easily to her, history and poetry were her passion. Coming as she did from a broadminded Ruskinian background, she prayed to be serviceable. This meant the Octavia Hill Settlement, temperance clubs, the Suffragists, prisoners, exiles. Mazzini, when she visited him in his wretched rooms, gave her a cigar which she kept as a souvenir till it fell to pieces. There was still a wealth of undirected energy which had to be worked off in heavy carpentry and amateur dramatics. Then, when she was twenty-two, she was asked to help out at the Bedford School, then attached to the college. In 1868 the college gave up the school, and it moved to Gower Street, with Lucy Harrison as assistant.

      Children adored Miss Harrison. She kept them in order because she never expected to be disobeyed. All, apparently, felt when she stood in her favourite attitude, looking upwards with her hands clasped behind her, that what she said was ‘given from above’. For these youngers ones she evolved an effective question-and-answer method, which she later published as Social Geography for Teachers and Infants.

      Here is a picture of a church. Where is it standing? – ‘In the middle of a churchyard’ – Sometimes there is grass round the church, with trees and plants. How is the church separated from the street or road? – ‘By iron railings’ – When you walk up the steps or along the path, how do you get into the church? ‘Through the door’ – Sometimes when people die they are taken into the church which they attended while they were alive. How does the bell ring then? – ‘Very slowly. It is said to toll.’

      In 1875 the headmistress, Miss Bolton, retired, and Lucy Harrison took over. Worshipped by all the visiting staff, men as well as women, she had no problems of organization: concentrating now on the senior girls, she made them feel what education had meant to her – an uplifting emotional experience. ‘You need not call anything a luxury that you can share.’ They were to love music and poetry. A book, even a book’s title, is a door into another mind, letting in light and fresh air, and in the pain and joy of poetry the soul has the chance to meet itself. As to what they read – and she read aloud to them untiringly – it must be what went deepest and lifted highest – Shakespeare, Dante in Cary’s translation, Blake, Wordsworth, and her own favourites, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, the Brownings, Coventry Patmore, Alice Meynell. Carlyle, describing the hero as poet, insists that we ourselves have Dante’s imagination, though with a weaker faculty, when we shudder at the Inferno. This kind of thing gives endless scope to the teacher, and can end up as something like sentimentality. There was in fact a certain confusion in Miss Harrison’s interpretations between the windswept heights which Dante and Shakespeare were then thought to share with the Authorised Version, and the indulgence of hot tears in the dark. A reading which all her pupils heard often, and never forgot, was from Alice Meynell’s Preludes of 1875 – the sonnet To a Daisy, which ends

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