The Expression of Social Values in the Writing of E. Nesbit

Edith Nesbit Bland would no doubt have been considered an unconventional personality regardless of the era into which she happened to be born. She reached adulthood during the late Victorian age, however, and in that age she appeared remarkably advanced in her personal behavior and values. The most comprehensive biography—by Doris Langley Moore—traces Nesbit's strong individualism from her childhood to her death. Moore spices her chapter about the Blands' involvement in the early Fabian Society with details about E. Nesbit's personal appearance and habits which might lead one to believe that she was indeed the prototype of today's liberated woman. E. Nesbit cut her hair short in the 1880's, wore "aesthetic" loose-fitting dresses, and smoked in public. Moore further promotes the image of the Blands' Bohemianism by stressing the radical nature of their socialist politics:

These views were then regarded as little less than seditious: one needed as much moral courage to confess to them as one might need today to confess to an out-and-out belief in the most extreme form of Communism. The outrageous young Blands were Socialists.¹

Socialism in the general sense was perhaps an "outrageous" idea in comparison with the more conservative and staid beliefs of Englishmen of the same social stratum as the Blands, yet the Fabian Society itself was by no means a group of political firebrands.

In The History of the Fabian Society by one of its original founders, Edward Pease, the types who were initially attracted to Fabian ideals are described as being comfortably middle-class intellectuals:

the seed sown by Henry George took root, not in the slums and alleys of our cities—no intellectual seed of any sort can germinate in the sickly, sunless atmosphere of slums—but in the minds of people who had sufficient leisure and education to think of other things than breadwinning.²

In the introduction to the 1963 reprinting of Pease's history, Margaret Cole points out the exclusiveness of the early Society membership, despite the fact that its primary goal was to "abolish poverty." And in the political spectrum of that period the Fabians were comparatively moderate in their radicalism.

The words "gradualist," "evolutionary," and "practical" attached to Fabian doctrines indicate the non-revolutionary methods of which the Society generally approved. There were, nevertheless, left-wing and right-wing factions within the society itself. In a letter to a friend E. Nesbitt explains these divisions:

There are two distinct elements in the F.S. . . . The practical and the visionary—the first being much the strongest—but a perpetual warfare goes on between the parties which gives to the Fabian an excitement which it might otherwise lack. We belong—needless to say—to the practical party, and so do most of our intimate friends . . .

(Moore, p. 107)

Hubert Bland was in fact one of the most conservative members of the Society and seemed to have had much influence on his wife's political commitments. H. G. Wells, who was at one time a member of the Society and a frequent visitor to the Bland household, makes a case for an innate difference in the couple's political natures. In his Experiment in Autobiography he writes:

It was, I am convinced, because she, in her general drift, was radical and anarchistic, that the pose of Bland's self-protection hardened into this form of gentlemanly conservatism. He presented himself as a Tory in grain.

She acquiesced in these posturings. If she had not, I suppose he would have argued with her until she did.

But a gay holiday spirit bubbled beneath her verbal orthodoxies and escaped into her work. The Bastables are an anarchistic lot. Her soul was against the government all the time.³

All of this must be remembered in considering the political and social views in E. Nesbit's works. As a member of the Fabian Society, she was by association more politically unorthodox than most people in her social and historical context. Yet the organization was itself middle-class and moderate, and her background was middle...