“So many odd women – no making a pair with them. The pessimists call them useless, lost, futile lives. I, naturally – being one of them myself – take another view. I look upon them as a great reserve. When one woman vanishes in matrimony, the reserve offers a substitute for the world’s work.”
George Gissing, The Odd Women (1893)
WELLS NEEDED TO MOVE AGAIN, for by 1909 his life had become unmanageable on all fronts. Spade House, with its distance from London but promise of the order he needed, no longer served its purpose. Perhaps it never had. It was a place he escaped to, leaving his emotional and public lives behind him, wherever he had just been. This was a building whose architect’s trademark was the integration of small hearts into door panels and windows, but Wells had vetoed this. He wanted the hearts inverted, so they became spades. From the beginning, it had been clear that there would be no needless sentimentality in this house.
With the publication of Love and Mr. Lewisham in 1900, and its attack on the suffocating nature of conventional morality, Wells had turned his back on the nineteenth century and looked towards the future. The following year he published Anticipations, a distillation of his view of what the world might look like in the year 2000. Old institutions must go, whether old-style liberalism, the ruling class, or conventional religion and social relations. Overcome by the inexorable weight of historical forces, these would be swept away and replaced by a world order where social engineering, not old-fashioned patriotism, prevailed.
The new state of Wells’s anticipation was to be a world-state, led by “beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds,” one in which “the procreation of base and servile types” would be held in check. It is as if he now sought a purgation of everything he detested about his early life and background: “For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little and less benevolence.”1
Anticipations met with decidedly mixed, and extreme, views. Some people, like the young G.K. Chesterton, thought it a detestable work; others, like Wells’s friend the novelist Arnold Bennett, were overwhelmed at its daring. Among those who approved of its emphasis on eugenics were the socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb. This, and Wells’s earlier sympathetic portrayal of the plight of the working-class Lewisham, convinced the Webbs to open the Fabian Society to him.
In this way, Wells was drawn increasingly away from Spade House, to London and the Fabian socialists. Some of them, like the political reformer Graham Wallas and the critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw, he had encountered earlier. But now he began to consort with the broader circle of socialist acquaintance. The group formally accepted him for membership in 1903, and before long he and the Fabians began to circle each other, each vying to make their own ideas prevail. It was an uneasy alliance from the outset. His first lecture, delivered poorly in his high-pitched voice, was an unmitigated disaster. He was desperate to be taken seriously, like Shaw. But he remained an outsider. Within a year he had threatened to resign, and he remained a member only after others convinced him of his importance to the Fabian cause. He continued, however, to criticize the society’s elitism and its methods of organization. There was much in this working-class man from Bromley that did not harmonize with these middle-class progressive reformers, and it nettled him. In 1906 his behind-the-scene criticisms became public ones when he read to the group a paper called “Faults of the Fabians.” It divided them, and alienated him from the Webbs – but he had become the centre of attention.
The controversy within the Fabians and his success as novelist and prophet kept him, however, a much-sought-after guest of some of them. Among these was the family of Hubert Bland and his wife, Edith, who under the name “E. Nesbit” was well known as a writer of the children’s books that provided much of the Bland family’s income. One of the “founding fathers” of the Fabians, Hubert Bland was the Victorian hypocrite in purest form. To outside observers, he appeared to be the Victorian gentleman, complete with high collar, frock coat, and monocle, accompanied with the platitudes of High Victorian morality; to those who knew him better, he was a philandering roué who had been engaged to a pregnant woman at the time of his marriage to Edith, herself seven months along. Edith, scarcely conventional herself, took the woman, Alice Hoatson, into her home; after she discovered that her husband was the father-to-be, she agreed to adopt the baby. The child was a girl, and they named her Rosamund. Later, Hubert and Alice had another child. Edith carried on as if nothing of consequence had happened.
Wells first frequented the Bland home to bathe in its bohemian goings-on when Rosamund was a young girl, but by 1905 she was in her teens and was a founding leader of the group of reformers’ children known variously as the Fabian “Nursery” or “Kindergarten.” He started visiting the Blands more often. Rosamund was precocious and available, open to his overtures and willing to meet his desires. These were satisfied when the two spent a few nights alone in Dymchurch, a short distance from Spade House.2 According to Wells, he was doing the girl a favour, rescuing her from the lecherous intentions of her father. “I conceived a great disapproval of incest,” he wrote, “and an urgent desire to put Rosamund beyond its reach in the most effective manner possible, by absorbing her myself.”3 Once again, his principles followed in the wake of his actions.
The Fabians, with their calculated flaunting of convention, were a rich sexual hunting ground for Wells. The aura of fame that surrounded him drew women of all ages, and memoirs of these Edwardians suggest that several of the Fabian wives, possibly Edith Bland herself, succumbed to his allure.4 He brought with him the promise of sexual freedom, and he practised what he preached. When his next book, In the Days of the Comet, appeared in 1906, it was evident that he was in earnest in his commitment to sexual licence. It articulated a doctrine of sexual freedom in the extreme, and met with savage denunciation from newspapers and pulpits. As the public campaign against Wells gained momentum, it also secured sympathetic support for the besieged author from his Fabian friends. The Webbs and the Shaws went out of their way to comfort him.
The air of scandal surrounding Wells heightened his appeal. Here was an author who did not write books suitable for display in polite company. If the conclusion of Comet was to be believed, it took a ménage à trois, or even à quatre, to build the new world order. Wells defended himself by saying that free love was sordid only because women remained a form of property, captive to convention: “To experiment you must be base; hence to experiment starts with being damned.”5 Free love became an issue in the 1907 election campaign in Bromley, and the ever-compliant Jane signed a letter sent out to defend her husband’s good name. But a further complication lay ahead, and its name was Amber Reeves.
The Reeveses were a Fabian couple of long standing. William Pember Reeves was director of the London School of Economics, a wealthy gentleman socialist for the likes of whom the phrase “stuffed shirt” seems to have been coined. His wife, Maude, shared his political sympathies, and she became smitten by H.G. Wells. So did her beautiful nineteen-year-old daughter, Amber, a child of the Fabian Kindergarten and easily as forward in her views and actions as Rosamund Bland. At the time she and Wells were introduced, she was a student at Cambridge, with the looks of a Pre-Raphaelite and a brilliant academic future ahead of her. By all accounts, she set out in pursuit of Wells, with the complicity of her mother, and he proved to be more than willing to be chased and cornered.
It was Wells, however, who made the first decisive move when he visited Amber’s Cambridge rooms in May 1908. The relationship soon became a public one, observed for example by the poet Rupert Brooke, and the mutual infatuation was all too evident. Beatrice Webb confided to her diary about Amber Reeves: “A somewhat dangerous friendship is springing up between her and H.G. Wells. I think they are both too soundly self-interested to do more than cause poor Jane Wells some fearful feelings – but if Amber were my child I should be anxious.”6
Meanwhile, Wells and Dorothy Richardson had renewed their friendship, for he had suggested earlier that they become lovers.7 She had decided it was time to take up the offer.8 In 1907, she miscarried with Wells’s child. The same year, Wells attempted to elope to the continent with Rosamund. Fabian rumour had it that the couple were stopped only at the train station by Rosamund’s furious father, who punched the forty-year-old Bromley Lothario in the nose and removed his daughter from the coach.9 “And damn the Blands!” Wells confided to Bernard Shaw. “All through it’s been … lies that has tainted this affair & put me off my game.”10
Matters were clearly out of control, even for Wells, for the ongoing affair with Amber was now a serious one. While Pember Reeves put up with his daughter’s too-public flirtation with Wells, her mother, a member of the Fabian executive and a leading advocate of women’s suffrage, clearly encouraged the liaison.11 Wells invited Amber to Spade House to meet his wife, who remained backstage while the little Edwardian drama unfolded in full light. Amber returned frequently, sometimes for weeks on end, for she and H.G. had fallen in love, coupling in London flats whenever the mood suited them.12 They went arm in arm to dinner parties and the theatre. Amber, proud of her catch, began to boast of the affair. Wells’s love life remained at the centre of Fabian gossip. But this time he seemed to have crossed a boundary that even Fabians could not accept.
Amber Reeves became pregnant in April 1909. This was no passade. For the first time Wells thought seriously about divorcing Jane, and he announced to his friends that he intended to do so and to sell Spade House. Amber was pressing him to marry her. Wells resisted at first, but before the spring was out he and Amber departed from Victoria Station for Le Tourquet and a furnished chateau in France. Wells began making arrangements to sell Spade House. It had become one more symbol of “domestic claustrophobia.” His intention was to experiment in polygamy.
A telling photograph, taken when H.G. and Jane lived in Spade House, sets the domestic scene – one not of convivial life with a partying smart set but of the husband and wife, alone with their young children in the nursery. Frank and George (nicknamed “Gip”) kneel, annoyed that the camera has interrupted their play with the train set that surrounds them. Gip looks unhappily into the camera lens, a hint of suspicion in his eyes. Jane, seated in a high-backed spindled chair, hands clasped on her lap, looks vacantly down towards the children. Wells stands uncomfortably, hands in pockets, also looking down. But his eyes seem directed towards the miniature railroad tracks, not his boys. He is the one nearest the door. A few years later, Gip would write to his mother: “When is Daddy coming to have a look at me?”13
During the summer of 1909, Wells abruptly took a house in Catherine’s name on Church Row in Hampstead. The entrance of the comfortable three-storey Georgian terrace was protected from the street by wrought-iron railing, its brickwork softened by a cover of ivy. Here was a place most people would covet, an easy stroll to the peacefulness of Hampstead Heath or the countryside, yet close enough to the heart of London that friends would not be inconvenienced when visiting for dinner or for parties. Wells made the move so he could be near the cottage he had rented for Amber at Woldingham in Surrey.
The relationship had deteriorated while they were on the Continent. Wells was torn between Jane and an orderly home, and Amber and adventure. Where provision of creature comforts was concerned, Amber was no Jane and she made it plain that she did not intend to become one. Wells returned to England and Jane, and then he played his ace in the hole. It took the form of Rivers Blanco-White, a barrister who had declared his desire to marry Amber in spite of her relationship and her condition. Wells now dared her to marry Blanco-White; shocked at the suggestion, she responded by saying that the next thing would be that he would recommend prostitution. But she knew now that she could not compete with Jane and win. She telegraphed Blanco-White and left for England. Wells wired his wife to join him for a family holiday in France.14
The affair was by no means over. At the end of July 1909, after she and Wells had discussed their predicament with Jane, Amber and Blanco-White married, and in Wells’s interpretation she refused to let her husband touch her until her child was born. The baby arrived on New Year’s Eve, 1909, a girl she named Anna Jane. Officially, Amber lived in her Woldingham cottage, but Wells continued to visit her regularly. Fury among the Fabians now knew no bounds. “The blackguardism of Wells is every day more apparent,” Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary near the end of September. “He seduced Amber within the very walls of Newnham, having been permitted as an old friend to go to her room … Anyway, the position now is that Amber is living in a cottage that has been taken by Wells, and is receiving frequent visits from him while her husband lives in his chambers in London. And poor Reeves is contributing £300 a year to keep up this extraordinary ménage!”15
Wells was trapped in “a web of affections and memories” that bound him to two women, and it was one he had spun himself.16 He was in love with a woman half his age, he admitted to his friend Violet Paget (known to readers of her essays and novels as Vernon Lee). But he was adamant now that he would not leave his wife. Paget was sympathetic but saw through the moral pretence. “What grieves me,” she wrote to him, “is not that those who have eaten the cake or drunk the wine should pay the price of it, but that the price should be paid by others who have not their share.” Had Wells given a whit of real thought to the emotional cost to Catherine of his misadventure? And what about the essential inequality of the relationship between Wells and Amber itself? “My experience as a woman and a friend of women,” Paget told Wells, is “that a girl, however much she may have read and thought and talked, however willing she may think herself to assume certain responsibilities, cannot know what she is about as a married or older woman would, and that the unwritten code is right when it considers, that an experienced man owes her protection from himself – from herself.”17
It is highly unlikely that Florence Deeks read the Toronto World on weekdays. She would instinctively have disliked the newspaper’s sensational style of journalism, its chatty prose, its irreverent outlook. Yet she liked its commitment to social reform, and each Sunday the self-proclaimed “people’s paper” carried Flora MacDonald Denison’s “Under the Pines” column, a wide-ranging discussion of women’s issues. Florence often bought the Sunday World. On December 14, 1909, she almost certainly did. That day, after she had finished reading Denison’s column, she clipped it out. She kept it for the rest of her life.18
Flora Denison was one of the great and most radical advocates of feminism in Canada, and Florence had come to see in her something of a kindred spirit. They were about the same age (Florence was three years older) and both had been born and raised in small towns in eastern Ontario – in Denison’s case, Belleville and later Picton. Like Florence, Denison had attended the local collegiate institute, followed by a move to Toronto. Flora had married, but the marriage had failed and she managed to support herself as journalist, businesswoman, and (since 1906) secretary of the Dominion Women’s Enfranchisement Association.19
Denison’s subject that Sunday was “What Women are Doing for the Advancement of Civilization.” In it, she brought her readers up to date on the women’s suffrage movement in Toronto. “Many encouraging happenings are piling up each day,” she wrote, “and the careful ones who thought it unwise to introduce a Militant Suffrage to a conservative Toronto audience, are finding out that Toronto has been doing a lot more thinking on the suffrage question than appeared on the surfaces.”
Of all Toronto suffragists, Flora Denison was among the most militant, especially, as she demonstrated this day, in arguing that only by direct political action would women be able to improve their condition. “In order to make homes safe,” she declared, “women must not only help to make the homes but they must help make the laws that govern the homes. They must evolve a social soul.” They must resist the argument that politics is degrading, or that by engaging in political activity women became “unwomanly.”20 More immediately, Denison suggested, Toronto’s women should go to Massey Hall the following Saturday night to judge for themselves whether radical suffragists had abandoned their womanhood. They should go there to see Mrs. Pankhurst.
For the past month, Emmeline Pankhurst of England, founder and leader of the Social and Political Union and the most militant suffragette in the world, had been on a North American tour, speaking to huge crowds in Boston, New York, and elsewhere. Toronto was one of her final stops before returning home, and the prospect of her visit had made quite a stir in the provincial capital. This was the woman at the centre of the gathering of thousands of women in London’s Hyde Park only a year earlier. Her supporters, intent on winning the suffrage, had paraded on Downing Street, heckled politicians, spent time in jail, starved themselves, disrupted the House of Commons, and made powerful cabinet ministers cower.21
In the “Saturday Magazine” section on November 20, 1909, the Globe announced Mrs. Pankhurst’s arrival in town. In an act of perhaps deliberate irony, on facing pages it juxtaposed her photograph with one of Goldwin Smith, formerly Regius professor of history at Oxford and Canada’s most prominent social critic and best-known anti-feminist. There was the wizened eighty-six-year-old Smith, sitting at his desk in his downtown mansion, the Grange, formally dressed in black tie and skullcap, gazing sombrely at his papers. He had just announced his retirement from journalism after a Canadian career of more than thirty years, and the watch and fob that hung from his waistcoat seemed to serve as a glum reminder that his day was past. Mrs. Pankhurst, on the next page, wearing middle age well, looked firmly beyond the camera lens, her hair parted in the middle and a scarf wrapped tightly around her neck. That very day she was to bring her “campaign of martyrdom” to the city.22
Massey Hall that night held an audience its founders had not anticipated. The Masseys had built their fortune on the production and sale of farm machinery, and by the 1890s the family mix of Methodism and money was helping turn them into Toronto’s most prominent philanthropists. The concert hall that bore their name had opened in 1894, and it was there that patrons of the arts listened to concerts performed by the Toronto Philharmonic Society and its symphony orchestra, the Toronto Choral Society, and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir. On the evening of November 20, 1909, its program was very different.
A few people began to mill around the entrance to the imposing but severe red-brick building on Shuter Street just off Yonge, in the middle of the retail district, very early in the evening. More soon arrived. Many came alone, others in small groups. Suddenly the hall was surrounded by an animated throng waiting for the front doors to open. Late arrivals stood in ragged lines for a block east down Shuter. Others, it seemed in the thousands, snaked out onto the Yonge Street sidewalk, blocking pedestrian traffic attempting to move north or south. The corner was a slow swirl of dark, ankle-length dresses protruding from overcoats protecting their wearers from the evening chill. Almost every person in this anxious yet polite crowd was a woman.
They arrived from all walks of life and in all manner of dress. Society matrons stepped from their private coaches in expensive hats and shawls; shopgirls and sales clerks, ill clad against the evening, scurried straight from their shifts at Eaton’s or Simpson’s. Teachers, struggling on meagre wages to present a respectable public face, walked from their rooming houses. Members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union arrived fresh from Willard Hall a short distance away, handing out pledge cards to anyone who would take one. Undergraduate students came in groups from their cramped rooms and boisterous university residences. Together they clustered in common cause against the wall of the concert hall, seeking shelter from the November wind.
Finally, the ushers unlocked the doors and the sea of women began slowly to be swallowed up by Massey Hall. Those fortunate enough to gain entrance waited quietly in the plush seats or spoke in hushed whispers to their neighbours. The auditorium was crammed to the rafters, and overcoats shrouded the balcony rails and backs of seats. Many more women stood impatiently outside in the cold. They would not get in that night, and an official’s announcement at the entrance that the keynote speaker would be prevailed upon to speak again the next day at the Princess Theatre failed to dissolve their disappointment. Slowly they disappeared into the night.
It is very likely that Florence Deeks was one of the lucky entrants that night, sitting patiently in her seat, waiting for a sign of movement towards the podium at centre stage. At last a stirring of the curtains, and Joseph Oliver, in his second year as mayor and wearing his chain of office, took the stage, along with several local dignitaries and the band of the Grenadiers. Oliver offered a few words of welcome to the assembled audience, then introduced the guests – the physicians Dr. Margaret Gordon and Dr. Augusta Stowe-Gullen and the educationalist James L. Hughes, champions of the cause of social reform and women’s rights. Then the Grenadier band took over. The acoustics of the hall were superb, and the brassy martial air of the Sousa marches seemed surprisingly appropriate.
Then Mayor Oliver took the podium, and with the first mention of Emmeline Pankhurst’s name, utter silence. The occasion was already remarkable. Here was the mayor of the city introducing a woman and a cause that (as the Globe was to put it the following Monday) only a few years earlier had been discussed “with cheap sneers and smoke-room jokes.”23
Suddenly there she was, peering over the lectern. How tiny this enemy of orthodoxy seemed! Every eye in the house was on Mrs. Pankhurst now. What a contrast between the ferocious reputation and the ladylike looks! She was beautiful. A historian would later write: “She resembled a virgin rather than a virago. With her svelte pre-Raphaelite figure borne majestically erect, with her clear, olive complexion and full, rosy cheeks, with her raven-black hair, with her delicately pencilled eye-brows and deep violet-blue eyes, above all with her entrancingly melodious voice, she was the very antithesis of the frustrated spinster and the soured old maid of popular mythology.”24
She spoke softly at first. “It seems like one of the great audiences we are in the habit of addressing at home,” she began. But as she warmed to her theme, her voice grew tense and her slender nostrils contracted. Her eyes flared whenever she sought to drive an important point home.25
A Globe reporter in the audience began to take notes. It was not the first time that day he had heard her speak, for she had addressed the local chapter of the Canadian Club, all men, at noon. “A slight, intellectual-looking woman,” he had scribbled, “of splendid voice, and possessing remarkable power as a speaker.” As she reached full voice, she again made clear how far she and her supporters would go, and had already gone, to secure votes for women. They had been to jail, and by refusing to take food in prison they had helped force their cause to the forefront of British politics.
For the next hour and a half she told the assemblage of women the story of the suffrage movement in England. As she had earlier in the day, she spoke about the earliest struggles for the male franchise. Men themselves, she pointed out repeatedly, had widened the range of voters only by committing acts of violence. Now they had won the vote and possessed the full powers of citizenship. Women had not, and their interests were different from those of men. It was time women took control of their destinies.
Pankhurst was in full flight now, her clear, strong voice easily reaching the balcony. Woman needed and wanted power in order to protect their interests. Politicians had finally been forced to listen and take heed. Pankhurst finished her speech with a flourish. “You haven’t got men big enough, strong enough or intelligent enough to continue the empire, and that is our business.” Women want to improve the conditions of life. Women are the future, she proclaimed, and the future is theirs to shape. It would be woman who made “healthy mothers of healthy men,” she “who would be the backbone of the empire.”
She was done. The house was silent. First a ripple, then a wave of applause rising in volume and intensity filled the auditorium. As a single body, the full house stood in tribute. It was in high spirits and it wanted more, but Pankhurst, exhausted, waved in reply, politely shook hands with Mayor Oliver and the podium guests, and disappeared beyond the curtains. Still the audience clapped, and only gradually did it allow Dr. Gordon, Dr. Stowe-Gullen, and Mr. Hughes to give the short addresses they had prepared.
It is just possible that on Farnham Avenue, later that night, the three Deeks sisters gave voice to the inherent zeal of their evangelical heritage. In the flush of enthusiasm for the evening’s message, they gather at the piano in the parlour, around Mabel, who now puts her studies at the Royal Conservatory of Music to good use. Florence’s clipping of Mrs. Denison’s “Under the Pines” column is propped against the piano’s music rest. It is the one that had announced the coming of Mrs. Pankhurst, and it contains the words to “The Woman’s Marseillaise.” One can almost hear the three sisters singing once again the French anthem with which the gathering at Massey Hall had ended, revised now for the purpose of their own liberation:
Arise, ye daughters of the land
That vaunts its liberty,
Make reckless rulers understand
That women must be free,
That women will be free,
Hark! hark! The trumpet’s calling,
Who’d be a laggard in the fight?
With victory even now in sight,
And stubborn foremen backward falling.
Mabel, improvising furiously at the piano, is in full voice as her fingers reach the chorus, and Annie lends vocal support. Even usually reserved Florence has caught the spirit as the trio issues its musical challenge, singing of “freedom’s call,” their voices rising with each stanza, until the final chorus: “March on, march on, / Face to the dawn / The dawn of liberty.”
The sisters have collapsed in a fit of half-embarrassed laughter. What had gotten into them? What if Mother had been roused by the noise? What giddiness has this been?
Not quite giddiness. Florence picks up her clipping and puts it into her handbag for safekeeping. Denison’s message, like Pankhurst’s, has become important to her. She will treasure this piece of paper. The sisters go quietly up the stairs to their rooms, but for Florence some disparate strands of thought seem to have come together.
Emmeline Pankhurst left Toronto for England at the end of November 1909, soon after her Massey Hall address, but not before she paid a polite visit to Professor Goldwin Smith at his home in the Grange.26 Back home, she and her supporters used increasingly militant and spectacular means to win victory for the suffragists’ cause. Over the next few years, Florence Deeks kept abreast of her activities, for they often appeared on the front page of the Globe, the Mail and Empire, and the World. In 1912 Pankhurst was arrested and imprisoned, winning release only after she went on a hunger strike. The next year she was again arrested, refused to eat, and was released – only to be confined again under the newly passed “Prisoners, Temporary Discharge for Health Act.” The cycle repeated itself a dozen times in as many months. But this kind of militant radicalism was foreign to Florence’s disposition, as it was to most Canadian women.
She much preferred the more cerebral and broader radicalism of Flora Denison, whose articles in the World continued to develop a brand of militant feminism more congruent with her own view of life. Denison consistently preached that economic independence was central to any true emancipation for women. “Women’s sphere,” she wrote, “should only be limited by her capabilities and I believe there is no sex in the human brain. Women are at last in the commercial arena and each day becoming more independent. Their final salvation will be achieved when they become the financial equals of men.”27 Everything in Florence’s life pointed to the truth of Denison’s assertion, and she knew it.
The Toronto feminist leader did not argue against home or marriage as such; she believed instead that, by romanticizing these institutions, social observers ignored the way the dependence they entailed transformed them into prisons of domesticity for women. “Now we all know there is a great deal of maudlin sentiment written about the home,” Denison wrote in 1909, “for we see on all sides, women whose lives are dull and monotonous if not tragic, just on account of this wonderful talk of the sacredness of the home.” This was a refrain Denison repeated constantly. When Florence picked up her copy of the World on the morning after Pankhurst’s speech at Massey Hall and turned to Denison’s column, the message was there: “The homemakers have been the workers with too often neither freedom, hours or wages.”28
What could Florence Deeks do to serve the cause of women? She did not know; she needed to learn much more, especially about the origins of the injustices under which women everywhere suffered.
“Nobody will ever know what Jane thought,” one of Wells’s many biographers once wrote.29 Perhaps, but an informed guess can be made at her state of mind during the chilly autumn of 1909. The past few years had been the most stressful ones of her marriage. She had done so much to make it work, taking Spade House from an empty shell and transforming it into a haven as comfortable and happy as her husband’s unpredictable moods would allow. Life there had been memorable: guests every weekend, spilling out from the house onto the grounds; servants offering tea and biscuits on the terrace; games of every sort; lively wine-coloured and wit-laced talk in the parlour every evening; Wells, as always, at centre stage, taking everything in even as he held forth.
It is doubtful that Catherine had ever enjoyed her husband’s little anecdote about how he had made the architect change the decoration for the front-door letter plate from a heart to a spade because he did not want “to wear his heart so conspicuously outside.”30 But as time passed, she no doubt came to appreciate just how symbolic the decision was. Every glance at it would have reminded her that the house near the sea had never been a place where the heart could find a true place, outside or inside, except with the children. From the first it had been somewhere to help hide emotions, at least of the kind she needed from her husband. And at the end, in the haste and confusion of the move to Hampstead in May, she was probably glad to leave it all behind. She had made her pact with her husband during the many talks over Lewisham, and had come to live with his petty deceits and larger betrayals – the flirtations with Dorothy Richardson years ago, the dalliances with the writer Violet Hunt in the tool shed, the trysts with Rosamund Bland in Dymchurch.
She could handle all this only by refraction, by letting each of these rebukes of Catherine deflect towards her persona as Jane. Catherine knew the common perception of her other self: “poor Jane,” “foolish Jane,” Jane, the woman who could satisfy her man in efficient domestic management but not in bed. But she knew this man her husband well enough to know that something in him, perhaps the disorder of his early life, required the order and stability that Jane alone could give him. And with each affair, while a little more of Catherine faded into the English mists, Jane grew in strength.
H.G.’s affair with Amber Reeves had thrown all this into doubt. For the first time the pact had been threatened, and divorce became a real possibility.31 Hampstead was the only possible means of salvaging the situation. Perhaps this, too, would pass. Once he gained his possessions and controlled them, he soon tired of them. He needed his work as much as his women, and for that Jane was his most precious asset wherever they lived. When the business with Amber was at its height and everyone else seemed in a panic, had it not been she, Jane, who had quietly gone out to buy the baby clothes?32
It could only have amazed Catherine that in spite of whatever chaotic directions his uncontrolled passions took him in, he never stopped writing. In the early autumn, and throughout his battles with the Fabians, he had been hard at work drafting another novel, and as she read it, chapter by chapter, she would have recognized that it had brought out the best in him. In its vast panorama of Victorian and Edwardian life, it was the work he hoped would give him the recognition as a serious novelist he so coveted. It was his Tristram Shandy, his “condition of England” novel, and it was worthy of a Sterne or a Dickens.
The book once more followed the trajectory of her husband’s own life. Its main character, George Ponderevo, is H.G. Wells in all but name. The portrait of Bladesover House and his mother in the first chapter are extraordinary, detailed, and poignant portraits of Up Park and Sarah Wells. Ponderevo, like Wells, is a divided man – divided by a commitment to dispassionate and skeptical science and research, yet given over also to the emotional demands of his romantic and sentimental side. Again, the autobiographical elements: the housekeeper mother, the ne’er-do-well father, the stately home’s great library, unhappy apprenticeship, attendance at a London college of science, association with Fabians. A quick love affair, marriage, divorce. But this novel was so much more than Lewisham. Far beyond anything else he had written, it revealed the complexity, the aspirations, the deep discontent of this man.
There was much Catherine would have admired in the book, not least its emotional honesty. But there was so much else. It was also his indictment of the ways the old England he idealized had come to be corrupted – by crass materialism, imperialist adventurers, and a venal capitalism. As George travels through life, from Victorian Bladesover to Edwardian London, England seems to collapse around him under the weight of its own corruption. In this England, there are no certainties or enduring values.33 Eventually Wells had settled on the title “Tono-Bungay” for the novel, the name of a patent medicine invented by George’s uncle. It is at once the source of the family’s wealth and a phony panacea for the ills of society.
Tono-Bungay appeared early in 1909 and met with a lukewarm reception. But his next book was taking a more troubling direction. True, Tono-Bungay had used many aspects of his past life to flesh out the bankruptcy and decline of a civilization. In it, he had written about his past. But now, in the new book, his daily private life threatened to become his art.
During the first half of 1908, while the scandal over his passade with Rosamund Bland had Fabian London gossiping, Wells had steadily worked on the new novel, Ann Veronica. As Catherine read, typed, and retyped the first chapters, the story of an intelligent and independent-minded young woman who chafes under the restraints of a suburban life and an authoritarian father, she no doubt recognized a good deal of herself from the days before her marriage. After leaving home against the will of her father, Ann becomes involved with a middle-aged married philanderer, Ramage. Helped by a loan from this man, she enters a Kensington college of science, where she meets and falls in love with her teacher, Capes. She continues to socialize with the benefactor, Ramage; but after she rebuffs his attempt to assault her sexually in the private room of a restaurant, she is enraged and resolves to throw herself into the cause of the movement for women’s liberation.
In May 1908 the real world of the suffrage movement had exploded in an assault by suffragettes on the House of Commons in Westminster, and Wells made Ann Veronica one of them. She is sent to prison a restless and discontented young woman, and she emerges hardened in her determination to let nothing get in the way of obtaining what she wants from life. Fully herself now, she is a model of the newly liberated woman; but in the writing the thinly disguised portrait of Catherine is transformed into a character who distinctly resembles Amber Reeves.
Catherine must easily have recognized the transmogrification of her earlier self into her husband’s new love as the novel advanced. Ann Veronica has become a woman with an active sexual appetite and a determination to have it satisfied. She spurns convention by breaking her half-hearted engagement with her suitor, Manning, in order to run off with Capes on an illicit “honeymoon” in the Alps. The Catherine of the first half of the novel had failed to be enough; for her creator, nothing less than Amber would do, and that is what Ann Veronica becomes. In the final chapter of the novel, which takes place four years after the affair in the Alps, Capes is a famous dramatist; Ann Veronica is pregnant and thoroughly domesticated. Wells the novelist had transformed her back into a variation of Jane.
In Ann Veronica, Wells acted as the voice of women liberated from the bonds of marriage and sexual custom, but only when this served his own purposes and those of his fictional self, Capes. Both had gone with their young women to the Continent for an illicit affair. But Wells showed himself to be no champion of actions taken by the suffragettes to achieve their end. In the novel he pilloried them unmercifully, making one, Miss Miniver, into a ridiculous caricature of neurotic and sex-fearing zealotry. Some among his readers may have taken Ann Veronica as their guide to a life without inhibition; but if so they would have to turn a blind eye to the fact that in the end she is fulfilled only after Capes has had his will and his way with her.
Publication of Ann Veronica in October 1909 renewed the scandal that surrounded Wells’s private life. His Fabian friends were embarrassed that he should have made so public his private affairs, and his enemies found a new reason to damn the immoral life he led. Even his usual publisher balked at the implications of his storyline. Wells had promised the book to Macmillan, which had published several of his previous books; but once he had read it, Sir Frederick Macmillan refused to publish the novel. Knighted just that year and in charge of the firm since 1903, he was no Victorian prude. The urbane, cigar-smoking publisher, whose bushy grey moustache rivalled his bow tie in size, was a master at his trade, and he knew well the likes and dislikes of Macmillan readers.
Sir Frederick recognized that the reading public would take offence at this latest offering by Wells, and he informed the author of this fact. Everything about the novel, he said, was fine until the episode of the suffragettes. “When, however, Ann Veronica begins her pursuit of the Professor at the International College, offers herself to him as a mistress and almost forces herself into his arms, the story ceases to be amusing and is certainly not edifying.”34 Negotiations between publisher and novelist went nowhere. Wells pleaded with him, to no avail, and when the book appeared, it was under the imprint of the less seasoned publisher Fisher Unwin.
Sir Frederick Macmillan’s estimation proved correct. Press and pulpit vilified the book and its author. The private scandal that had once been more or less confined to literary London became a very public affair. The earlier campaign against Wells gained new force, and a life of its own, energized by the way Wells seemed to have written against the grain of the entire contemporary movement for moral reform. On November 20, an anonymous reviewer for the Spectator described Ann Veronica as a “poisonous book” with “pernicious teaching.” “The Wellsian world,” he declared, “consists of this and nothing more: If an animal yearning or lust is only sufficiently absorbing it is to be obeyed. Self-sacrifice is a dream and self-restraint a delusion. Such things have no place in the muddy world of Mr. Wells’s imagining. His is a community of scuffling stoats and ferrets, unenlightened by a view of duty or abnegation.”35
Leaders of the YWCA and the Girls’ Friendly Society declared their outrage. Lending libraries refused to stock the book. Throughout London, “Clubland” was abuzz at Wells’s latest outrage. It was one thing to sneak away with some young thing not one’s wife, but quite another to parade the affair on the printed page. In the men’s clubs of the city, whether the Athenaeum or White’s or Wells’s own Reform, eyebrows were raised and brows furrowed. If the man was so willing to reveal the grossest details of his own love life, what would prevent him from turning his savage pen on the politicians, statesmen, clerics, and men of letters he had also come to know?
From the street everything looked normal at 17 Church Row, Hampstead. Servants left in the morning for the market or the stores, the postman delivered mail several times each day, and the occasional guest arrived in the early evening. H.G. and Jane seldom went out, and their parties were fewer, often confined to lunchtime – pale affairs compared with the times at Spade House. Their social circle had noticeably shrunk in the face of the campaign against the immoral author. Wells avoided his clubs. Some of his friends believed he had undertaken not to see Amber for a year or two. When he left Church Row, however, he was often headed in the direction of Woldingham and Amber, sometimes for weeks at a time – but just until the baby was born, he promised Jane. Only whispered confidences with Arnold Bennett over lunch and letters from the ever-faithful Richard Gregory, the favourite family “uncle,” seemed to cheer Wells. “The worst of reading a book like this,” Gregory wrote to his old friend after finishing Ann Veronica, “is the desire to experience a woman like V. It was the same with Beatrice in Tono-Bungay and others back to Weena in The Time Machine. In spirit I am a polygamist with the lot.”36
During the bitter winter months of 1909–10, Catherine Wells had come so very close to losing her husband. He had been willing to throw up everything for Amber Reeves, and had been stopped in the end not by anything Jane represented but by Amber’s own decisions and by her pregnancy. She had seen the signs in his attitude towards their sons. H.G. was pleasant enough around them, but he seemed curiously disengaged, without the parental will to connect. From his point of view, for example, the child he had fathered with Amber was “an extraordinary irrelevance.”37
As the November winds swept up and over Church Row, only to descend and gather dust in swirling eddies from the graveyard across the street, Catherine may well have taken comfort in the thought that the furor caused by Ann Veronica might at last end her husband’s adulteries. Perhaps he would settle down to prove the greatness as a novelist that Tono-Bungay had promised. But she never knew what was really on his mind until, as Jane, she carried away his rough drafts to type.
On March 20, 1910, Beatrice Webb recorded in her diary that H.G. Wells seemed to have been “frightened into better behaviour” by the way in which one friend after another was sheering off and by the damning review of his book in the Spectator.38 His first novel of that year seemed to bear this judgment out. The History of Mr. Polly was a funny book, his Alfred Polly a fully realized Dickensian character with an eccentric but amusing vocabulary and a hapless life. The characteristic thefts from the author’s own life were there – the indifferent education, the apprentice draper, the marriage to a cousin, the walking out of the marriage – but Polly was a figure of fun and the book offered pleasant resolutions. None of the opprobrium levelled against Ann Veronica could be repeated with Mr. Polly.
For Wells, such a consoling thought was little more than a bucket of water thrown in the direction of encroaching flames. The harmless nature of the book encouraged him to renew his adventurous social life and hold forth once again at the Reform Club. Many among his social circle greeted Mr. Polly with relief, although some, like Shaw and the Webbs, were aware that he continued to see Amber Reeves and seemed heedless of the wreckage the relationship had left in its wake.
Wells was already at work on a very different kind of book, The New Machiavelli. Whatever contrition he harboured had turned to anger at the charge that his books were immoral. He continued to resent Sir Frederick Macmillan’s rejection of Ann Veronica. In February 1910, when he got Jane to send The New Machiavelli to Sir Frederick for publication, it was as much as anything an act of defiance. The book, he told the publisher, would be a political one.
Catherine could see the telltale signs – the restlessness, the irritability, the need for constant movement that in the past had meant another affair, either in progress or just over the horizon. As she had prepared the new book for presentation to a publisher she could tell from it, too, that nothing had really changed since the scandal with Amber Reeves. In fact, The New Machiavelli enlarged on the central themes of Ann Veronica. Once again, her husband ransacked the stuff of his own past. The central character, Richard Remington, writes from exile in Italy, where he is with his young mistress, Isabel Rivers. He has tried to write his own version of The Prince, but has failed. In frustration, he decides to tell the story of his own life, and of the way his private passions have defeated his hopes for a life in public service.
From his early life in Bromstead, a suburb of London, Remington manages to get to Cambridge, where he flirts with socialism and studies political economy. Later he moves to London and manages to forge a successful career as a journalist. While there, he becomes acquainted with Oscar and Altiora Bailey, two leading Fabians whose home is a gathering place for political reformers. He also renews his friendship with Margaret Seddon, a former Cambridge science student of progressive political views whom he had met several years earlier through relatives. Torn between his aspiration to public service and his sexual longings, he sees in Margaret a means of satisfying both needs.
They marry, but it is a marriage without passion from the outset, a life of “generous-spirited insincerities.” Richard wins a seat as a Liberal MP. But while campaigning he meets Isabel Rivers, the young daughter of a constituent. Remington is restless but now feels energized even as he is “beset” by sex. Embracing the suffragette cause, he renews his friendship with Isabel, visiting her in Oxford, and they become lovers. They try to avoid scandal and talk about the moral implications of their illicit affair and the possibility of having an illegitimate child. He discusses his problems with Margaret, who proves to be an understanding soul. Remington is touched by her compassion. He is torn between his commitment to Margaret and his longing for Isabel. Disenchanted with politics, he meets with Isabel in St. James’s Park, and they decide to leave everything behind. The novel ends where it had begun, with Remington and Isabel alone in Italy, where he will write his memoirs and help raise their child.
As Catherine read through the novel, she must have noted the irony. In real life, as Jane, hers was a life lived in the background, always at the periphery of the action, apart from the centre of attention. But in her husband’s novels, she often played a leading role. For here she was again, easily recognizable as Margaret, the ever-understanding, loyal wife. Even her private thoughts were now on display, as when Margaret sends her husband a letter as he is about to leave England: “I’ve always hidden my tears from you – and what was in my heart. It’s my nature to hide – and you, you want things brought to you to see.”39 These were her thoughts, all right, but filtered through his needs. For Catherine, reading this passage, one thing must have been clear: they would soon be moving again.
Assured by Wells’s promise that The New Machiavelli would be a “large and outspoken” political book, and would not revisit the themes of Ann Veronica, Sir Frederick Macmillan had purchased the rights to it sight unseen. Despite his rejection of Ann Veronica, he was nothing if not a good businessman, and he wanted this successful author back. For his part, Wells wanted their relationship to continue. The book was to be published in monthly parts in the English Review, beginning in May. Macmillan could publish it any time after September.40
The publisher was shocked at what he now read. Politics there may have been in the novel, but at its heart was the story of Wells’s relationship with Amber Reeves, now fully fleshed out. Defiant and obviously unrepentant, Wells was, in effect, daring society to tell him that what he had done was truly wrong. But there was also much more than this. Some of the leading lights of London were subject to his acid pen. Not only the Webbs, as the Baileys – “two active self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public service”41 – but, more alarming to Sir Frederick, a good number of its most important politicians in thin disguise.
Edwardian London was a very large city, but in some ways its circles of social influence and association were decidedly circumscribed. Important men gathered information, formed alliances, and made decisions in the private dining rooms and lounges of its men’s clubs. The centre of influence and Empire was a cloud of cigar smoke, dinner jackets, and decanters of fine wine. In the new novel, much of this was placed on open display for public scrutiny. The situation was intolerable. How could Wells’s publisher hold his head up at the Athenaeum if he published this book? As one of Wells’s biographers puts it: “The scene was crowded with living portraits, and Sir Frederick would have none of it.”42
On June 21, 1910, Sir Frederick sent Wells a letter of rejection. The finished book, he said, was not of the sort they had agreed to. “It is unnecessary for me to particularise,” he went on, “but I feel sure you will agree that the kind of thing we objected to in Ann Veronica is here intensified, and that if we had good reason for rejecting Ann Veronica, there is twice as much reason why we should not publish The New Machiavelli.”43 Their contract had been broken. Wells responded with an angry letter, but Sir Frederick remained adamant, even after seeing revised proofs. He would not publish a book that made adultery some sort of perverted moral virtue.
The nominal theme of The New Machiavelli was the way one must capitulate to convention or take flight in the trains of passion. But behind it lay an attitude of defiance and a motive for revenge. At Sir Frederick’s initiative, the book went the rounds of several of London’s leading publishing houses, but none would touch it. Finally it appeared in 1911 under the imprint of John Lane, who was someone for whom Wells had acquired an intense dislike. As with Ann Veronica, the circulating libraries refused to carry The New Machiavelli. The Spectator declined to advertise it; Edinburgh booksellers sought to return their copies; the Birmingham city council banned it. Wells even held a press conference to deny that it offended against decency. The book sold well, but those whose good opinion, like Henry James, Wells so coveted denied it the acclaim he thought it deserved. “There is, to my vision, no authentic, and no really interesting and no beautiful report of things” in the book, James wrote to him.44
From this point on in his career, H.G. would no longer attempt to be the “man of letters” he was not. His was the voice of prophecy, he realized, not of literary illumination. His private battle was against a world without vision, one that lacked his moral courage. He would continue to go his own way. And he would sell the place on Church Row.