Charlotte Mew Read online

  Henry Mew, however, was determined not to put his sons into the licensed trade, but to send them to London to make their fortunes. George and James went first, and were set up in a small business. Fred was to be an architect, or rather something between an architect and a speculative builder. Evidently there was money in that. In the Island itself, Seaview Villas were going up all round the coast in response to the new holiday trade, and new Gothic churches were ready for them, including St Paul’s, Barton, where the Mew family worshipped on Sundays. Royal Osborne, five miles north of Newport, was begun in 1845 (when Fred was thirteen), and went forward in the charge of the great builder Thomas Cubitt (Queen Victoria’s ‘our Mr Cubitt’) over the next three years. It might have been thought, then, that a bright boy could be apprenticed and have good prospects without leaving the Island. But one of Fred’s uncles was already a partner in a London architect’s firm, Manning and Mew, at 2 Great James Street, Bedford Row. The firm seems not to have been particularly successful, but it had the great virtue of being ‘in the family’. Fred was despatched, and arrived at the age of fourteen straight from the sea breezes and cow pastures and the old-fashioned Bugle Inn to London’s East End. His elder brothers had a house off the Old Kent Road, and he was to be lodged there.

  To begin with they sent him for a little further education to Mr Walton’s Albany House Academy, also in the Old Kent Road. Walton’s place was not quite as grand as it sounded, being a commercial school which gave a grounding in business correspondence, practical arithmetic and some Latin. After a year Fred’s father took him and paid the premium for his articles with Manning and Mew, where he was to learn architectural drawing, ‘improving’, and surveying, and to make himself useful on the sites.

  The only building by which (if at all) Manning and Mew is remembered is the New School of Design at Sheffield (commissioned in 1856). The drawing for it, the only one which the firm ever exhibited at the Royal Academy, is by Fred. But in the following year he found himself a more hopeful position, transferring as architectural assistant to H. E. Kendall, Junior, of Spring Gardens, Trafalgar Square. Henry Edward Kendall called himself Junior, or H.E.K., out of respect for and to distinguish himself from his grand old father. This father, the son of a Yorkshire banker, had been a pupil of Thomas Leverton and a friend of Pugin. In the Gothic manner he had designed churches, prisons, workhouses and castles, helped to develop the fashionable Kemp Town district of Brighton, and later designed Mr Kemp’s own mansion in Belgrave Square. He was responsible, ‘wholly or in part’, to quote his obituary in The Builder, ‘for the houses of the Earls of Bristol, Egremont and Hardwicke’. Everything was done with spirit. Kendall was tall, distinguished and generous, loved dogs and guns, and continued to shoot even after he had blasted off his left hand in an accident. At a time when Thomas Hardy, it seems, had to sit through a sermon in Stinsford church against ‘the presumption shown by one of Hardy’s class in seeking to rise, through architecture, to the ranks of professional men’, and these professional men themselves weren’t always clearly distinguished from jobbing builders, Kendall was, without question, ‘gentlemanly’. One example was his conduct in the affair of Kensal Green Cemetery; in an open competition for the chapel he was awarded first prize for his Gothic design, and second for his ‘Italianate’. There seemed not much room for manoeuvre here, but the chairman, Sir John Paul, ignored the decision and ruled that his own design, which had won no prize of any kind, must be accepted and that Kendall should carry it out, which, with what was thought ‘very proper spirit’, he refused to do. By the 1850s he already had thirteen grandchildren and several great-grandchildren, and in his grey-haired dignity was known as ‘the Nestor of architects’.

  The Bugle Inn, Newport High Street, where Charlotte Mew’s father was born in 1832.

  Henry Mew’s trade card.

  H. E. Kendall, articled to his father, loved him. He had more imagination than the old man, but was less confident, and partly suppressed it. They worked well together, and were both active in the ‘formation of an institute to uphold the character and improve the attainment of Architects’ which met, at first, at the Thatched House Tavern and Evans’ Cave of Harmony. These were the very early days of the R.I.B.A.

  H.E.K. specialized in private houses, from a villa to a mansion, Board Schools, and lunatic asylums. In 1857, when he took Fred Mew, the country boy, into his office, he was also district surveyor for Hampstead, and a very busy man. The pages of his publication Kendall’s Modern Architecture, with its handsome illustrations, showed the clients exactly what to expect. Gothic was always in stock, but as tastes changed you could have Greek, Italian Renaissance, Early English (or Tudor), Jacobean, Queen Anne, or a combination of two or more. Several of the office’s pupils had distinguished themselves – for example, J. T. Wood, who discovered the remains of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus – but what was needed, with the 1860s in sight, was a hard-working young man who for a salary of fifteen shillings a week would make the working drawings and collect the details and ‘appropriate ornament’ which were the hackwork of the conscientious Victorian architect. Professional examinations were not compulsory until 1863, and Fred Mew never took any. He settled down to the assistant’s work in Spring Gardens. Although he was not without temperament – in fact he was given to occasional black depressions – he dedicated himself whole-heartedly to Kendall’s service. He left his lodging in his brother’s house, and took a room in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. This gave him only three miles to walk to work in the morning, a great improvement. Then, in 1859, Kendall nominated him as associate of the R.I.B.A.; old Kendall, in very shaky handwriting, supported the nomination. In 1860 Fred was made a junior partner.

  Fred, in the old phrase, ‘filled a place’. H.E.K. had a son of his own, Edward Herne, who had been articled to him in the accepted family manner but, for reasons which were not talked about, had never finished his training. A nephew, Thomas Marden, had also been articled, but never practised. After these two failures, Fred became what he could never have expected to be, a confidant. When Kendall drew up his will he made Fred not a beneficiary, but a joint executor. In 1860 he offered him a junior partnership. Fred, on the strength of it, took the lease of a house, No. 30 Doughty Street, which was close to (though much less expensive than) Brunswick Square, where the Kendall family lived. The house, though modest, was too large for a single man, and it can hardly have surprised anyone when, early in 1862, he asked Kendall for the hand of his daughter.

  Anna Maria Marden Kendall may perhaps have been in love with her father’s tall, countrified assistant, or she may have felt that, at twenty-six, she oughtn’t to let this chance slip. What is certain is that she was a tiny, pretty, silly young woman who grew, in time, to be a very silly old one. But she had the great strength of silliness, smallness and prettiness in combination, in that it never occurred to her that she would not be protected and looked after, and she always was.

  The wedding took place at St George’s, Bloomsbury on December 19th 1863, and the witnesses were Henry Kendall, his sister Mrs Lewis Cubitt, and Sophia Webb, wife of the proprietor of the Fountain Inn, West Cowes. But Fred was not allowed to put down his own father’s profession as ‘innkeeper’. It was given as ‘Esquire’.

  The intention is clear enough. As Anna Maria’s husband, Fred was of course bound to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed, and to do this he had, in the first place, to set about making himself into a gentleman. The architect’s profession, even though since the 1830s it had been organizing itself as something distinct from the building trade, was not, as has been said, able to do this quite on its own. Fred, it was recognized, was not likely to be anything up to his father-in-law. H.E.K. was on easy terms with his titled clients and with Bishop Wilberforce, to whom he had dedicated his Designs for Schools and Schoolhouses, Parochial and National. Mrs Lewis Cubitt, Anna Maria’s aunt, was married to the youngest brother in the famous firm, and though the Cubitts had been the sons of a Norfolk carpent
er, look at what, through hard work and royal patronage, they had become! But Fred could at least see to it that he did not fall too far short. This pressure on him, as might be expected, came from the women. To Henry Kendall he was simply a young friend and assistant whom he liked, and could trust completely.

  Mecklenburgh Square and Doughty Street, w.c.1. No. 30, where Charlotte Mew was born, is on the extreme right.

  Fred took his bride to 30 Doughty Street, which he also used as a drawing-office. The house was narrow and steep between the basement kitchen and the attic nursery, but well placed at the end of the street, overlooking the airy plane trees of Mecklenburgh Square. Brunswick Square, with its far superior society and a mother always ready to listen to Anna Maria’s complaints, was only just round the corner, and Mrs Kendall took steps from the beginning to make sure that her daughter would hold the balance of power. From her own household she selected Elizabeth Goodman, a tall upstanding north-country-woman, a ‘treasure’, with all the value and inconvenience of treasures, an old-fashioned servant who asked for nothing beyond service and due reward, but whose prejudices could 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 turn
ed 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 done to your ma’s mackintosh?’ she would enquire irrelevantly. ‘I fancy she mentioned it. What serviceable articles they are!’ She got the mackintosh at last, but never wore it. It was pawned at once. The little Mews collected their own possessions into a parcel to give to her, but this was absolutely forbidden. Miss Bolt, disappointed, repeated the ambiguous rhyme:

  Give a thing, and take a thing

  Is a dirty man’s plaything.

  What truly impressed Lotti in her child’s-eye scrutiny was the recklessness of this dowdy woman in her endless self-sacrifice, and her pride. Pride was as important as survival. Miss Bolt would use low shifts, but would never condescend to be found out. Asked to come for an extra day’s work, she would sometimes pretend to be ‘previously engaged’. It was a crushed but unrepentant courage, the product of the London streets. Lotti saw through it immediately, and respected it.