A Journey with Two Maps by Eavan Boland

Author:Eavan Boland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-02-09T16:00:00+00:00

Charlotte Mew: An Introduction

I

Charlotte Mew was born in London in 1869. Her family—middle-class, respectable, afflicted— lived at number 30 Doughty Street in the borough of Camden. I lived near there as a child in the 1950s, when the airy squares with their chestnut and plane trees, their white wedding-cake houses, were still almost intact.

By that time, however, London was pitted and humbled by two wars. To find Charlotte Mew’s city we have to peel back the erosion, the doubt, the fog-scars of a hundred years until we come to a place that glows with empire. Pepys’s London. The London of the novelists. A few houses down, nearer to Russell Square, Charles Dickens had written his early novels in number 48. What more could a child like Charlotte Mew want, you might ask, than to be born in the environs of a luminous gossip and a great novelist?

The census of April 4, 1881, suggests a normal Victorian family with their children: Henry H. Mew, aged fifteen, “Scholar,” Charlotte M. Mew, aged eleven, “Scholar,” Caroline F. A. Mew, aged seven, and Freda K. Mew, aged two, together with the live-in servants: Elizabeth Goodman, aged fifty-six, “Nurse Domestic,” and Lucy Best, aged eighteen, “Cook Domestic.”

But appearances, here as elsewhere, can be deceptive. A more vulnerable and struggling family would be hard to find. The terrible story begins early. One child died. Two more died when Charlotte was seven, one of fever, the other of convulsions. Her only brother, Henry, became schizophrenic early in life. And her youngest sister, Freda, notable in that homely family for being “beautiful as a flame,” became schizophrenic at sixteen.

It must all have bewildered Frederick Mew, Charlotte’s father. He was an architect, but not a particularly enterprising one. His wife, the daughter of a more eminent architect, had social and financial expectations he failed to fulfill. Fred Mew’s income did not increase. But his family did. By 1879 there were seven children. The shadows were growing longer.

Death. Insanity. Class. Suddenly, in that apparent decorum of imperial England, a window opens into a savage time. The Mew family are the dark side of empire. Charlotte Mew lived the pain and contradiction: the shame of a genteel life endured without the money gentility requires; the pain of a sexuality gentility would reject.

II

In 1888 the family moved to Gordon Street. A larger, more expensive and far more unlucky house. Charlotte Mew attended the Gower School. There, within the space of four years, two of the children drifted into insanity. Henry, Charlotte’s only brother, was confined to hospital in his early twenties and never re-emerged. His death certificate of March 1901 lists the place of dying as Peckham House Lunatic Asylum. He is said to be buried in Nunhead Cemetery. Freda, the beautiful youngest girl, followed him in her late teens. Alida Monro, a later friend of Mew, opened a small window into the events when she commented: “Their sad condition was a constant torment to Charlotte.”

The startling, off-kilter poems published when

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