But both the Mew girls loved children, Charlotte in particular. Their great capacity for happiness and disappointment appealed to her, so did their detachment from adult affairs and their concentration on the far greater reality of a game. She was delighted when she saw a small girl and boy wait unconcernedly for a coffin to be carried down the stairs and out of the door, and then turn back at once to playing shops. Of walking on stilts she wrote: ‘If you could go on doing it for ever, you need envy no-one, neither the angels nor the millionaires’, and of playing with water, ‘The horse-trough is always there to sail your hat in and trail your arms in, until your elder sister sneaks up from behind, and cops you out of it by the neck’. She suffered, only half-unwillingly, from empty arms. If she did not want to bear children, she would have liked to want to. ‘If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the child who went or never came.’ Absorbed as she always was, from her Gower Street days, with the Brontës, she was haunted by the story of Charlotte Brontë’s dream as Mrs Gaskell tells it in her Life, a dream of holding a crying child, and knowing that nothing can save it.
There were the two daughters, then, in 9 Gordon Street, vowed to sterility, which would also mean devotion to each other. Three years’ difference in age steadily came to be less and less important. Charlotte and Anne saw that they had been born to make head against their difficulties together, with this difference, that there were some things Charlotte would never tell, or feel it right to tell, the docile Anne. Their mother’s role was established: she was a chronic invalid with no definable illness, a precious responsibility because so much had to be done for her. As to Fred, there is nothing to show what he felt about the fates of his youngest and oldest child, except his loss of interest in life. He ceased to do very much at all. There are no more records of him at the R.I.B.A., and his subscription to the newer Architectural Association lapsed altogether. In 1895 he wrote a dignified but pathetic letter to The Builder, pointing out that even the design for his Capital and Counties Bank at Bristol was now being attributed to another architect.
How did the Mews manage? In 1892 Anna Maria inherited a third of the estate from her grandfather, Thomas Cobham; this came to £2266 12s. 3d. Her mother died in this same year, again leaving her the correct third share, £1717. 2s. 10d., and an annuity of £50. Anna Maria had also come into two legacies, a little earlier, from an uncle and aunt. All these sums of money were administered for her by Walter Barnes Mew, the son of Fred’s sister Fanny, who was a solicitor with an office at 4 Harcourt Buildings, in the Temple. Fred evidently relied a good deal on Walter, and, writing to him as ‘your affectionate uncle’, was glad to leave matters in his capable hands. ‘Anything that appears foggy to me will doubtless be clear enough to your legal eye,’ he added, sounding a good deal older than his sixty years. Walter, with the approval of the trustees, invested the total sum in an annuity for Anna Maria, which would bring her in £300. It was a reasonable sum at a time when you could cling to respectability, even gentility, on £80 a year. The annuity, of course, would die with her, but Walter must have calculated that Charlotte and Anne, his two pretty cousins, would find husbands soon enough.
Or they might even earn their own livings. Anne, since she left the Gower Street School, had been enrolled at the Royal Female School of Art at 43 Queen Square, within easy walking distance of Gordon Street. The course offered two five-month terms at fifteen guineas a year, three times as much as the South Kensington Schools, which concentrated on design training for industry. The Female School, on the other hand, had in mind, from its first beginnings in the 1840s, the daughters of professional men ‘unexpectedly compelled to earn a living’, and at first the students had only been accepted at discretion, if they could show (preferably with a certificate from a clergyman) that they were genuine ‘needy gentlewomen’ who would be obliged to maintain themselves. Anne specialized in bird and flower painting. She was happy to do only that, hoping one day for an exhibition of her own, but if need arose she would be qualified to teach or to execute paid commissions, without ever ceasing to be a lady. Anna Maria need have no alarm on that score. Her younger daughter would still have the prestige of an amateur.
What about Charlotte, who had learned only what she chose to, but always did it well? She was, for instance, very good at embroidery, and she could have got an excellent training at the Royal School of Art Needlework, established with its workrooms in Kensington, or, if that was too far to go, there was a School of Mediaeval Embroidery, run by the sisterhood of St Katherine in Queen Square to supply church furnishings. She could then have worked at home, and sold discreetly, perhaps through the Association for the Sale of Work of Ladies of Limited Means. She could, though this would have been more difficult to conceal from the neighbours, have given piano lessons. From Miss Harrison she had heard time and again a reading of Carlyle’s ‘Everlasting No’ from Sartor Resartus. The ‘No’ is the certainty of death and the loss of faith which make life meaningless, followed by the answering Everlasting Yea, that in spite of this, man must work at what he is fit for. ‘Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fragment of a product, produce it, in God’s name!’ But the truth was that Charlotte, in spite of Carlyle, hated steady work. It has to be admitted that she never applied herself systematically to anything.
It might be thought, however, that as a changeling and enfant terrible, only just grown up, she would have wanted independence at all costs. Here we come to the irreconcilables in Charlotte Mew. One side of her treated the other cruelly. She was secretly, and sometimes openly, impelled to let rip, to shock the shockable, and to turn her back on the lot of them.
Please you, excuse me, good five o’clock people,
I’ve lost my last hatful of words
and yet she clung as desperately as Anna Maria herself to dear respectability. She never left home for long, never became – for example – a suffragette or even a suffragist, never made any attempt to claim political or sexual freedom or defend herself either against society or her own nature. On the contrary, with fierce self-suppression she inherited the fate of the world’s minorities and suffered as an outsider, an outsider, that is, even to herself. She was determined to remain Miss Lotti – a lady, even if she made rather an odd one. There is pathos in this clinging to gentility by a free spirit, who seemed born to have nothing to do with it. But her home promised normality – its very dullness did that – and normality implies peace. As a five o’clock person, out of the shadow of the madhouse, a good daughter, devoted to her mother, she could treat the savage who threatened her from within as a stranger. To use her own image, she could stay as ‘a blade of grass which dare not grow too high lest the world should snap it’.
However, she was also a writer. At the beginning of the 1890s Elizabeth Goodman was still in charge of the household, since ‘no-one dared to speak to her of rest’, but she now no longer swept Charlotte’s manuscripts into her dustpan. Alone in her room Charlotte sat down, partly to justify her friends’ expectations – that always meant a great deal to her – partly to show herself what she could do, partly to earn money. Without money free will means very little. Though Charlotte never wanted to get rid of her responsibilities, she preferred not to be answerable to anyone. She needed, in fact, not independence but freedom.
There was a business-like side to Charlotte. She knew, at least, how to set out on a writer’s career. Her manuscripts went out to a lady typewriter – they were still called that – who, herself, was a distressed gentlewoman. They came back neatly bound in brown paper, were lightly corrected in pencil and sent off with the stamps for return postage stuck to the front cover. As to where they should go, there was a wide choice in the nineties, the golden age of the English periodical. A hopeful writer,