The Children's Book

and teach them tolerance, kindness and self-reliance. This book, with the title Dark Doings at Blacktowers, was a huge success. Julian Cain read it in the Easter holidays of 1897 and said to himself that if he were Tom he would find the book unforgivable. By then Tom was apparently back to “normal,” running wild in the woods, and still doing Latin with Vasily Tartarinov and English with Toby Youlgreave. Olive had given him a copy of Blacktowers, inscribed “To my dear son, Tom,” but it was not clear to her, or to anyone, whether he had read it. He had developed a habit of simply not speaking about a great number of things. Olive did not write any more of Tom Underground until after the publication of Blacktowers. She rewrote the last section she had sent to Marlowe, with the company trapped in a shaft which was a dead end, and made them hear a silvery tapping on the other side of what had seemed impenetrable rock. Gathorn wielded his pick from one side, and the other pick echoed his blows, until the rock suddenly crumbled, and they were in a large chamber, lit by silver lamps, where a creature neither woman nor spider, but with features of both, was spinning long silvery threads …

18

Eighteen ninety-six was a gloomy year. William Morris died in October, as Tom was hiding in thickets and Olive was pacing her corridors. Prosper Cain, still grieving over the suicide of his Director in June, was harassed, both personally and professionally, by the sustained Press campaign against the military presence in the Museum. The military, accused of muddle and incompetence, hit back with statistics and oratory. A Parliamentary Select Committee was formed to go into it, which met twenty-seven times in 1897 and twenty-six times in 1898. It included Sir Mancherjee Bhownaggree, Conservative Member for Bethnal Green, where objects from the Museum were on display. It also included John Burns, the socialist MP for Battersea. The committee recommended that the whole Department of Science and Art be reorganised, and the duties of all the officials redefined.

All sorts of institutions were coming to life. The Tate Gallery opened on Millbank in 1896, the National Portrait Gallery moved from Bethnal Green to a site next to the National Gallery, in the same year. The Whitechapel Gallery, a solid and elegant Art Nouveau building by C. Harrison Townsend, and an offshoot of all the teaching, studying and social enthusiasm in Toynbee Hall, was built between 1897 and 1901. A Fabian Society member, incurably ill, committed suicide and left his fortune to the Fabians, to forward their ends. Sidney and Beatrice Webb decided that this could best be done by the founding of the London School of Economics, and in 1896 the rich Irishwoman Charlotte Payne-Townshend took the top floor of no. 10 Adelphi Terrace for the first students and lecturers—though this move was not wholly approved of by all the Fabians. The dissenting Fabians included John Burns, and Sir Sydney Olivier, who worked in the Colonial Office and had taught at Toynbee Hall.

There were other suicides: in 1897 Barney Barnato, the bankrupt Randlord, jumped overboard and drowned on his way back from the Cape to a monstrous party, in his newly built monstrous house in Park Lane, to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. In 1898 Eleanor Marx, socialist, new woman, trade unionist, Ibsen translator, poisoned herself on finding that her lover, Edward Aveling, had secretly married an actress, and needed her to sell her father’s papers to keep her. The Yellow Book produced its last issue in 1897, destroyed at least partly by Oscar Wilde. (Aubrey Beardsley had made a cover, which was not used, for the first edition of the Savoy, in 1896, which depicted a naked putto pissing on the discarded Yellow Book. The cover, when it appeared, was without Yellow Book, and showed a putto innocent of cock and balls.)

In 1899, in May, the little old Empress of India, having been celebrated in flaming summer weather by a swelter of loyal emotion in 1897, was driven up in a semi-state open landau to perform what turned out to be her last public duty, the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone of Aston Webb’s new buildings at what was now to be called the Victoria and Albert Museum. The stone was red Argyll granite, and the ornate trowel, with which, assisted by Aston Webb, she laid the stone, was kept by the Museum. She was too tremulous either to climb any steps or to speak, and handed her speech to the Lord President of the Council, the Duke of Devonshire, who had persuaded her to add her own name to her dead husband’s. “In compliance with your prayer, I gladly direct that in future this Institution shall be styled The Victoria and Albert Museum and I trust that it will remain for ages a Monument of discerning Liberality and a Source of Refinement and Progress.”

In 1899, in October, the High Commissioner in Cape Colony prepared to go to war with the Boers for the gold mines of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The Boers immediately invaded Natal and Cape Province, taking Ladysmith, Mafeking, and Kimberley. Prosper Cain did not think it would all be over by Christmas. He went to Purchase House, to talk to Benedict Fludd, having visited those sappers who were to embark for the battlefield, where they were training as bombardiers and explosives experts in the barracks at Lydd. They had invented an explosive, Lyddite, which was to be used in South Africa to blow bridges and destroy farmhouses.

Cain did not like the war. He was not sure it was a just war, and he was not sure it could be prosecuted successfully. He quoted Rudyard Kipling, with a sardonic smile, to Benedict Fludd.

Walk wide o’ the Widow at Windsor

For ’alf o’ Creation she owns:

We ’ave bought ’er the same with the sword an’ the flame

An’ we’ve salted it down with our bones.

(Poor beggars!—it’s blue with our bones!)

Fludd said “A Black Widow indeed.” He was paying little attention to the war, which he denounced as another evil in a Fallen World. Cain, with and without his children, visited Purchase House frequently between 1896 and 1899. There had been a time when, as a very young man, Cain had drunk with the pre-Raphaelite Bohemia to which Fludd briefly belonged, and had watched him disappear into the night—“in search of dissolution,” he always said, holding up a pale hand to prevent anyone accompanying him. There had been rumours that he took pleasure in danger. Often he disappeared, in black moods, for weeks together, and his friends and companions canvassed the possibility that he was dead in an alley, or flotsam in the black Thames. He came back from one of these absences accompanied by his own Stunner, Sarah-Jane, whom he named Seraphita, and married. Prosper, by then a young lieutenant, was at the wedding, and could still, with increasing difficulty, remember the radiant, blithely innocent face of the young bride, her hair full of flowers, her garments spattered with them, like Botticelli’s Flora. She had looked at Fludd with a slightly silly, but touching adoration, the lieutenant thought, not himself finding her desirable, for she lacked spice. He himself was twenty-three, then, in 1878, and he thought Seraphita was younger. He was in love, and married his elegant and secretive Italian Giulia later the same year, taking her briefly to Lucknow, which she hated, and back to London for Julian’s birth in 1880. When he next saw the Fludds, which was not until after Florence’s birth, and Giulia’s death, in 1883, Imogen was four, Geraint two and Pomona one year old. By then, Seraphita had taken on the blank, listless look she still had. The children were prettily dressed and slightly grubby. Fludd, he discovered, was absent for days and weeks together. He had been making pots in Whitechapel, and had set a house on fire with a kiln disaster, after which he simply walked into the night, and disappeared. It was not Seraphita who told this to Prosper Cain. She offered him tea made without boiling water, and with insufficient tealeaves, and stared slightly to the side of his head. Prosper Cain found some connoisseurs to buy some pots and commission some more, and when Fludd returned, employed him as a ceramics consultant at South Kensington.

He had been doubtful about the recent renewal of Fludd’s artistic energy, on the arrival of Philip. He had noted that the daughters—Imogen certainly, Pomona in an odder, jerkier, more effusive way—had taken on Seraphita’s vacant look. He went back from time to time to encourage the firings and was surprised how long both the work and the marginal profit-making had gone on. He thought this was to be attributed to Philip Warren, whose own throwing and, later, glazes increasingly impressed him. He thought Philip was stolid—he saw to the flues and the packing of the kiln—and was surprised by the intricacy and delicacy of his designs for tiles and bowls. Fludd was bold and breath-taking. Philip was fine. Prosper Cain was both amused and encouraged by the unconventional commercial support the pottery had. Geraint, still in a rage to escape poverty, suborned traders and charmed great