Eleanor Fitzsimons - guest post - Socialism in the Stories of E Nesbit

Today I'm delighted to welcome Eleanor Fitzsimons, author of a new biography of  E Nesbit, to tell us more about a relatively unknown side the Nesbit's life - her strong Marxist beliefs and their influence on her stories



SOCIALISM IN THE STORIES OF E. NESBIT

Nowadays, we know E. Nesbit as the author of wonderful stories for children and a source of inspiration for writers from C.S. Lewis to J.K. Rowling. Yet poetry was her true passion. As she told one friend “only my socialist poems are real me”. Nesbit’s close friend and fellow Fabian Society member George Bernard Shaw described her as “a committed if distinctly eccentric socialist”. Her commitment to a fairer society was informed by her experience of genuine hardship when, as a newly married mother, she decorated greeting cards and sold simple illustrations to earn a living for her unorthodox family. She raised three children with her husband, Hubert Bland, and two more he fathered with her friend Alice Hoatson. Although she wrote what the market demanded, Nesbit promoted social reform in her stories for young readers who she regarded, with good reason, as far more open to reforming ideas than their parents.

Before she wrote the books we remember her for, including The Wouldbegoods, The Railway Children and Five Children and It, Nesbit and Bland co-authored The Prophet’s Mantle, a socialist novel inspired by the arrival in London of Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. The Russian exile in The Railway Children is also based on him. Nesbit was keen to fulfill the Fabian society mission, which she defined as “to improve the social system – or rather to spread its news as to the possible improvement of the said SS”. When the children in The Wouldbegoods form a society, Dora describes its aim as “nobleness and goodness, and great and unselfish deeds,” adding: “We wish to spread our wings and rise above the kind of interesting things that you ought not to do, but to do kindnesses to all, no matter how low and mean”.

Nesbit includes a particularly inflammatory public speech in The Story of the Amulet:
Comrades and fellow workers, how long are we to endure the tyranny of our masters, who live in idleness and luxury on the fruit of our toil? They only give us a bare subsistence wage, and they live on the fat of the land. We labour all our lives to keep them in wanton luxury. Let us make an end of it!
Here, her fictional children travel forward in time to a utopian London where school is delightful, mothers and fathers share the burden of childcare, and everyone dresses in comfortable clothing. When the Babylonian Queen time travels to Victorian London she assumes that the workers she encounters must be slaves on the verge of revolt since they are so poorly treated. The children explain that these workers are free and have the right to vote for their government yet they cannot justify why misery persists. Nesbit often exposes the flaws inherent in government policy by having children attempt to explain it.

Elsewhere in The Story of the Amulet, the Psammead points out: “You’ve got your country into such a mess that there’s no room for half your children – and no one to want them”. In The House of Arden, Richard refuses to return to Victorian London, declaring “they make people work fourteen hours a day for nine shillings a week, so that they never have enough to eat or wear, and no time to sleep or be happy in”. The children in The Wonderful Garden persuade an indifferent landlord who owns a castle and a mansion in Belgrave Square to protect one of his tenants, a vulnerable old woman. In The Magic World, when the enchanted crows that inhabit ‘Justnowland’ are changed back into men, they vow “in future we shall not be rich and poor, but fellow-workers, and each will do his best for his brothers”.

The most credible and socially aware of Nesbit’s books is The Railway Children, with its clear message of political criticism and social change. It seems likely that ‘Old Gentleman’ is included to reassure parents reading to their children that wealth and social position are not threatened by socially conscious behaviour. It is not necessary to cede your power, merely to make proper use of it. Victorian literature is not short of moralising tales but Nesbit was never hectoring or po-faced. She often poked fun at fellow socialists and utopian thinkers. The key characteristics of her stories for children are fantasy and humour. She spread her radical ideas on the benefits of a fairer society by embedding them in superbly crafted, gripping stories that continue to resonate with children to this day. 




Eleanor Fitzsimons is the author of The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit (Duckworth, 2019)

Take It Cool by Jonathan Pinnock

review by Maryom

 Author Jonathan Pinnock has always felt that his surname is about as far removed from cool as you can get; you may get Pinnocks who are strange, eccentric or even mad but at "two consonants away from disaster" being cool eludes them. Then, searching through a pile of second-hand records, he stumbled on something that would change his whole outlook - a reggae single "Take It Cool" by Dennis Pinnock. At last a Pinnock who was well and truly cool - but also, curiously, a Jamaican black Pinnock, as far removed from the author's white West Country background as it's surely possible to get. Could there really be any family ties between Dennis and Jonathan?

Now, the author had guessed before he started out on his quest that any, even the shallowest, search into Jamaica's past was going to lead him to the slave trade and plantation owners - so he was rather hoping there wouldn't be a connection! Even so he tracks down the early Pinnock colonists of the seventeenth century and their descendants, including one who quickly earns the name "Dog-face Phil". Alongside this story, he tries to track down Dennis himself via record label back-catalogues and that miracle of research tools, the internet, in the hope that one day the cool and un-cool branches of the Pinnocks may meet.
If you've watched the BBC's Who Do you Think You Are? you'll know that researching family history is a lot of pot-luck - sometimes it's full of surprises and stories, while sometimes it's of little interest to anyone beyond relatives. Having read Jonathan Pinnock's fiction, I expected him to turn what could be a plodding piece of research into something interesting and fun - and he did!  The different threads are easily-followed, and build an amusingly-told story that held the attention of a non-Pinnock with no interest in reggae (I didn't even recognise the names of it's stars!)

And for anyone interested in researching their own family history, there are a few pointers at websites and organisations that may prove useful

Maryom's review - 4 stars

Publisher -   Two Ravens Press
Genre - non-fiction, family history

The Beatles by Mick Manning and Brita Granstrom

Review by The Mole

Beatlemania started in 1963 and lasted just 7 short years but the legacy lives on today. At a recent pantomime there was an audio soundtrack running of just Beatle tracks and our 16 year old was surprised that what she was listening to and enjoying was the Beatles. One wonders how many more generations will go on to enjoy music from that short era.

This picture book, because it's difficult to ignore the fact that that is what it is, tells a very complete - if somewhat abbreviated - story of the origins of the Fab Four and their meteoric rise to fame. There are no photographs in this book - it is all original artwork - and the layout and presentation will appeal greatly to younger readers but the content and concise factual presentation will also appeal to fans of the group from their 1963 origins.

The format makes it a book to either 'dip into' for 20 minutes or just to sit down and read  - getting lost in nostalgia and being drawn down memory lane, forgetting the book a while.

A really beautiful book covering the lives of these seemingly 'normal' youngsters - although I never changed my trousers at the bus stop!

Publisher - Frances Lincoln
Genre - Picture Story Book, Non-fiction, biography

Buy The Beatles from Amazon

Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted by Andrew Wilson

review by Maryom

Normally when I'm writing a review I start with either the blurb from the book or my own synopsis. In this case that's a bit redundant as the title really says it all; Life Before Ted - the story of Sylvia Plath's childhood, adolescence and college years up to her fateful meeting with Ted Hughes.
Now The Mole suggested that at this point I add a short bio of Plath , saying " the wife of Ted Hughes the poet laureate - and a writer herself" which made me wonder if this is how she's generally seen; firstly as the wife of someone famous with an afterthought about her own work and a sly inference that she only wrote because her husband did. If so, then a lot of people will find this book an eye-opener as it concentrates not only on her early life but on the hundreds of poems that she wrote before meeting Hughes. I must admit that although I 'discovered' Plath as a poet before Hughes, I still only had the most basic outline idea of her life - and a lot of that was based on her largely autobiographical novel The Bell Jar.

This account starts rather slowly with family history and the lives of Sylvia's parents Otto and Aurelia. Although her childhood circumstances undoubtedly influenced Plath, the narration at this point just seems like a stringing together of facts. It isn't till she leaves home for Smith College, that Plath really seems to take shape as a person - and what a contradictory person she was; a fun-loving high achiever, obsessed with her work but constantly out dating a string of boyfriends; mixing with wealthy friends but having to rely on scholarships and her own writing to fund her way through college. All these aspects fuelled and shaped her.

Wilson has encouraged never previously interviewed  friends and lovers from these early years to speak out about the Sylvia they knew but I sometimes felt there were questions, possibly less discrete ones, that I'd have loved to have asked. He also draws on unpublished letters and poems (the title comes from one of them) to shed light on Plath's emotional and artistic development and it's rather a shame that at least some of them couldn't have been quoted. Despite these quibbles, Mad Girl's Love Song is a most fascinating book whether you just want to know more about Plath's life or are looking for influences in the development of her work.
I'm generally inclined to think that the writing matters more than the personal details of an author's life but as I read this book it became apparent that for Plath the two were intricately and inextricably mixed.

Maryom's review - 4.5 stars

Publisher - Simon & Schuster

Genre - non-fiction, biography,

Buy Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted from Amazon