Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends. Penelope Fitzgerald

never be shifted, not by an inch. ‘She herself’, according to Charlotte, ‘came of very humble stock’, and had no book-learning, but somewhere she had learned perfect manners, ‘and, in speaking, an unusual purity of accent’ – ‘purer’, very likely, than Fred’s. Proud of her skill, proud even of her servant’s caps and aprons, which she made herself, she knew absolutely her moral and social role at 30 Doughty Street. She was to make life tolerable for her young mistress, who had married beneath her. Doughty Street was a comedown, but there are ways of managing everything. This did not, of course, mean any insubordination towards the master, quite the contrary; only there was a constant ‘making do’ and contrivancing of the boot-patching, collar-turning and left-over cold meat variety, which had never been necessary in Brunswick Square, and of which Fred cannot have been left unaware. When her wages were paid it was Elizabeth Goodman’s habit to buy a small present for everyone in the house ‘except the too exalted head’, that is to say, Fred, in his drawing-office on the second floor. No one in the house could in fact be too exalted for Elizabeth, who was in charge of everything, but in treating Fred as beyond the range of her little presents we may be sure that she kept him in his place. Through a ceaseless round of cooking, nursing and laundrywork she remained a stern ally of Anna Maria, and, by implication, a silent reproach to the man she had chosen to marry.

      And Fred continued to work perseveringly, but without ‘rising’. His idea of an evening out was a smoking concert, or Jolly, at the R.I.B.A. All his friends were architects – in fact, nearly all the houses in Doughty Street were occupied by architects, except for Solomon Fisher and Samuel Lazarus, who were solicitors. Sometimes he crossed the street to the Foundlings’ Home in Coram’s Fields to talk to the orphans, and see them eat their dinners. Either Fred did not know how to better himself, or he would not.

      Over the years seven children were born to the Mews, and in the matter of the christenings battle was joined between Fred and Anna Maria. She was determined that all her sons should be named as Kendalls. Fred – though he knew his obligations – couldn’t see anything wrong with his own family. Henry Herne (b. 1865) was named for Anna Maria’s father, and for one of her aunts, Mrs Caroline Herne. Frederick George Webb (b. 1867) had the Mew Christian names, with an added compliment to Mrs Webb, of the Fountain Inn. Charlotte Mary (b. 1869) was the first daughter, followed by Richard Cobham (b. 1871) – a kind of truce, this, Richard Mew being the farming uncle at Newfairlee, while the Cobhams were the well-to-do family of Anna Maria’s mother. Caroline Frances Anne was born in 1872, and then came Daniel Kendall (b. 1875) who was actually renamed, a few months later, as Christopher Barnes; the Barnes were relations of Fred’s by marriage. The last child, who was born in 1879, and who would then have been called ‘an afterthought’, was a third girl. She was christened Freda Kendall.

      In the background of these sad disagreements was death, the remorselessly punctual infant mortality of the Victorian nursery. Frederick George Webb died on an outing to Broad-stairs, aged two months. In one terrible year, 1876, the Mews lost two more of their children. Christopher Barnes, shortly after receiving his new name, died in March of convulsions, which were then thought to be the result of ‘anger and grief’ in the nursing mother. Richard Cobham, five years old, died of scarlet fever.

       Oh! King who hast the key

       Of that dark room,

       The last which prisons us but held not Thee,

       Thou know’st its gloom.

       Dost Thou a little love this one

       Shut in to-night,

       Young and so piteously alone,

       Cold – out of sight?

       Thou know’st how hard and bare

       The pillow of that new-made narrow bed,

       Then leave not there

       So dear a head!

      This verse, Exspecto Resurrectionem, is Charlotte Mew’s, written thirty years later. So, too, was To A Child in Death, with its wretched question from the suddenly left alone – ‘What shall we do with this strange summer, meant for you?’ Charlotte, at seven years old, was certainly brought in, as elder sisters were in the 1870s, to see her little brother ‘in death’. Richard had been the nearest to her in age, the one she loved to order about. Neither of her poems describes the stupor, or the acute ulcerated throat, of scarlet fever. They are not exact recollections so much as the first experience of grief, locked unchanged in her memory. She never suggested that writing the poems made the grief any less.

      What would be surprising, if we didn’t know that the life of children is conducted on a totally different system from that of adults, is that Charlotte Mew always spoke of her childhood as a time of intense, but lost, happiness. She was known then as Lotti, and her nursery, high up in London’s clouds, contained among its heap of solid toys one which was most particularly hers and her sisters’, a doll’s house, designed and made by Fred Mew himself. Evidently it was a pleasure for him to have daughters. The doll’s house had fashionable Queen Anne bow windows, although the straight up-and-down Doughty Street had none. This was their mansion, but the attic rooms themselves were a self-contained kingdom, where Elizabeth Goodman reigned, even if the tiny Lotti, curly, brilliant, irresistible and defiant, proved to be a difficult subject. ‘To us as children she was as fixed a part of the universe as the bath (cruelly cold in winter) into which she plunged us every morning, and the stars to which she pointed through the high window, naming some of them, in the evening sky.’ Under authority they were all safe, even when they had to be whipped for wildness.

      Everything that pleased children in the 1870s pleased Lotti extravagantly. She was carried away by the ‘sheer excitement’ of colour in a box of chalks or the maddening sound of her penny trumpet, or the strange transformation of sugar which, heated in a saucepan over the nursery fire, turned to dark crimson ‘pig’s blood’. At Christmas she was ‘half-mad’. She declared, in later life, that she ‘never outgrew the snow-flakes’. Elizabeth Goodman, who in the ordinary way read only the Bible and a popular comic, Ally Sloper’s Weekly, at Christmas time ‘flung into the festooned disorder of the nursery a pile of Christmas numbers, and thence forward walked with us, for a week or two, in a world of pure romance. Red lights gleamed from Manor House windows: ostlers bandied jests in the courtyards of lonely inns: the crack of whips and the hoofs of post-horses drowned the wheels of the crawling cab and the bell of the Muffin-man ting-tinging down our long, dull street; while we glided down broad oak staircases and swore in the halls of holly-decked mansions, where above, ghosts stalked through the corridors, and below there was always dancing, or lost ourselves on the great white road outside where the snow was always falling, in a whirl of highwaymen and elopements.’

      Henry, as the eldest by four years, and a boy, a Victorian boy, was admired, but separate from the others. He was quick at drawing, and would be apprenticed to his father at Kendall and Mew as soon as he turned sixteen. A kind word from an elder brother of this sort goes a long way. The three girls, when they were taken out to the square or to music lessons, had to remember that they were ladies. They must not be flushed, their hair must not be tossed, they must go out looking neat and return in the same condition, with clean handkerchiefs.

      Few visitors ascended the creaking top flight of stairs to the nursery. For this reason the queer little sewing-woman, who came twice a week, made a disproportionate impression. In an essay of 1901 Charlotte calls her ‘Miss Bolt’, recalling her minutely as she sat mending, making and darning in the nursery chair, biting off the thread with her two protruding front teeth, because it saved the expense of grinding scissors. To her ready listeners Miss Bolt droned on about her own relatives in Lambeth. In speaking of the dead her voice assumed ‘a dirge-like tone’; out of the living she made her own mythology. Scraping and denying herself for the sake of her no-good brother’s family, she tottered away with Fred Mew’s cast-off suits and anything else she could scrounge, even the candle-ends and scraps, all to be sold on her relatives’ behalf. ‘Ain’t there something to be