In the Dark: Tales of Terror by E. Nesbit. E. Nesbit

Though her mind was as active as ever, her body failed her. Letters written during this period show the strain and agony she suffered, drugged with morphia or racked with pain. Finally, on 4 May 1924, she died; it seems to have been a blessed release. She is buried in St Mary’s in the Marsh churchyard, near Dymchurch. Her gravestone (actually a wooden memorial made by Tucker himself) says simply, ‘Resting. E. Nesbit. Mrs Bland-Tucker. Poet and Author.’ I think she earned her rest.

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      Most writers have two or three styles but E. Nesbit experimented in about a dozen … horror stories, sentimental love stories, stories in dialect; she wrote poetry for public recitation, poetry for the nursery, Socialist propaganda poetry … work for children, birthday books, a volume on dogs, little plays …

      Doris Langley Moore Edith Nesbit, 1933

      Edith Nesbit as a writer of ghost and horror stories stands apart from her contemporaries. An obvious comparison would be with Mrs Molesworth, who wrote children’s books and ghost stories; but there the similarity ends. Mrs Molesworth would never have given ‘Man-Size in Marble’ its vicious ending; the hero’s wife would have been saved in the nick of time.

      ‘Man-Size in Marble’ is probably Edith Nesbit’s best known story, and its appeal to modern readers is not surprising. It is unremittingly savage; the hero’s wife does absolutely nothing to deserve her fate, except by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is instructive to imagine what her fellow female ghost story writers would have made of it; Edith Wharton, for instance, would have smothered it in language (Nesbit seems neither to have met Henry James or, if she did, take much notice of him – happily for her writing). The story’s success is all the more interesting as we see hardly anything at all other than an empty space where something should have been and a bit of a statue at the end. Mrs Molesworth would probably have given us the lot before her happy ending, shuffling marble feet and all.

      Edith Nesbit had a strong dread of being buried alive, caused, it seems, by the experience of a relative who had been actually placed in his coffin before it was discovered he was still alive. ‘The Five Senses’ can only be read as an attempt to work out her own fear in literary form.

      ‘The Power of Darkness’ was inspired by Edith’s visit in 1905 to the Musée Grévin in Paris, a macabre waxwork show which must have put the wind up her no end. There are traces of it in ‘The Head’ as well. That story also owes a lot to her more happy pastime of building miniature towns and cities, one of which she exhibited at the 1912 Children’s Welfare Exhibition, at London’s Olympia.

      We can only guess at what burrowed away in her mind to produce the strong streak of necrophilia discernible in ‘Hurst of Hurstcote’ and ‘From the Dead’. In the former, John Hurst breaks open his wife’s coffin and is found lying on the vault floor with her in his arms; while in the latter, the hero’s wife returns from the dead. Not unusual in this genre, admittedly; but consider Nesbit’s description: ‘The figure of my dead wife came in … it came straight towards the bed [note the ‘it’] … its wide eyes were open and looked at me with love unspeakable. I could have shrieked aloud.’ Hardly a happy family reunion.

      Husbands and wives are not seen in the best light in her stories. The husbands are either longing for dead wives or seeing the ones they’ve got die. There seem to be few Hubert Blands in the stories; perhaps not surprising – his thrusting type, with a penchant for the occasional punch-up, is not conducive to a creepy story.

      One romantic triangle, in ‘The Pavilion’, is very strangely resolved, by an unusual relic of the sixteenth century. First published late in her career, Edith Nesbit seems, in this tale, to be striking off in a new direction. It certainly stands out from the rest.

      Two stories – ‘The Five Senses’ and ‘The Three Drugs’ – bear the hallmarks of a rudimentary attempt at science fiction. The wonder potion story was in vogue in the 1890s, after Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In both cases, Nesbit brings in her own phobias, more so than other writers on the theme.

      There are traces in most of the stories of what seems to have been her dominant phobia – the dead returning to life. In 1896, Edith wrote about a childhood visit to see the mummified corpses in the church of Saint Michel, Bordeaux. They made a deep impression:

      A small vault, as my memory serves me, about 15 feet square … round three sides of the room ran a railing, and behind it – standing against the wall with a ghastly look of life in death – were about 200 skeletons, hung on wires … skeletons with the flesh hardened on their bones, with their long dry hair hanging on each side of their brown faces, where the skin in drying had drawn itself back from their gleaming teeth and empty eye-sockets. Skeletons draped in mouldering shreds of shrouds and grave-clothes, their lean figures still clothed with dry skin, seemed to reach out towards me … I was paralysed with horror … not daring to turn my head lest one of those charnel-house faces should peep out at me.

      These charming exhibits (who on earth thought them suitable for children’s entertainment?) were ‘the crowning horror of my childish life,’ she wrote. ‘It is to them, I think, more than to any other thing that I owe nights and nights of anguish and horror, long years of bitterest fear and dread … my children, I resolved, should never know such fear. And to guard them from it I must banish it from my own soul.’

      It is all too easy to see works of fiction as standing for something significant to the author’s life. Too often, I suspect, works written with an eye to making a few pounds quickly are invested by critics with a significance far beyond their author’s intentions. Edith Nesbit’s stories were written with money in mind, no doubt about it. But I think there may have been enough of the author in them to make them doubly interesting. You can see Edith Nesbit scribbling away, trying to push back the sight of the Bordeaux mummies creeping up behind her chair or standing in the corner, watching her with dried-up eyes. Or thrusting away the vision of being alive in her coffin, sensitive to all around her but unable to attract any attention to her plight. Or even trying to exorcise the demon of Hubert Bland rampant, impregnating anything he could get his hands on, even under their own roof.

      Edith Nesbit’s biographers give her ghost stories minimal treatment. Anthea Bell and Noel Streatfeild never mention them. Very unfairly, Doris Langley Moore brushes Nesbit’s stories aside, in her otherwise warm and affectionate book, as being ‘singularly ineffectual and now deservedly forgotten’. Julia Briggs, on the other hand, does not dismiss them, but merely mentions them, though she does go at length into ‘Man-Size in Marble’, which she sees as having sexual connotations. With the amount of sex in Edith’s life – her own and other people’s – that would not be surprising.

      I hope readers today will approach Edith Nesbit’s stories with a sympathetic eye. In a genre now heavily laden with massive novels and complex plots, the bald simplicity of her tales of terror comes as a pleasant and refreshing change. They certainly deserve a new audience after all this time.

       Hugh Lamb

      Sutton, Surrey

      May 2017

       MAN-SIZE IN MARBLE

      Although every word of this tale is true, I do not expect people to believe it. Nowadays a ‘rational explanation’ is required before belief is possible. Let me, at once, offer the ‘rational explanation’ which finds most favour among those who have heard the tale of my life’s tragedy. It is held that we were ‘under a delusion’, she and I, on that 31st of October; and that this supposition places the whole matter on a satisfactory and believable basis. The reader can judge, when he, too, has heard my story, how far this is an ‘explanation’, and in what sense it is ‘rational’. There were three who took part in this; Laura and I and another man. The other man lives still, and can speak to the truth of the least credible part of my story.

      I never knew in my life what it was to have as much money as would supply the most ordinary needs of life – good colours, canvasses, brushes, books, and cab-fares –