Things are never as they seem

One of my favorite Victorian poets is Henry Newbolt. He is much out of fashion but I enjoy him none-the-less.

From Robert Fulford's column about Henry Newbolt

What makes Henry Newbolt (1862-1938) especially notable in this context is that he was famously, gloriously, even flagrantly Victorian--more Victorian, certainly, than the queen. A totally respectable figure, Newbolt was a lawyer, a novelist, a playwright, and a magazine editor. Above all, he was a poet who sang the virtues of chivalry and sportsmanship combined in the service of the British Empire.

In 1897 his reputation took form around a poem about a schoolboy cricketer who grows up to fight in Africa. There, in the panic of battle ("The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead"), he's stirred to heroic action by a school days memory: "his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote - / Play up! play up! and play the game!" Those last eight words became famous as the expression of Newbolt's belief that war should be fought in the spirit taught by games masters in good English schools. One critic said Newbolt could lift hearts like Tennyson. Another called his work "eminently virile" (which, at the time, was praise).

[snip]

As a 25-year-old lawyer, Henry fell in love with Margaret Duckworth, a woman of great charm who had many qualities associated with young men. She rode to hounds at a furious clip (much faster than Henry) and she was as interested in science as in music; she defied her hyper-religious mother by studying Darwinian biology. Henry liked her mannish side (and would begin letters to her with "Dear Lad") but when he started to court her an impediment emerged. Margaret was already in love with someone else, her cousin, a beautiful young woman named Ella Coltman. They were both members of the Grecians, a club of women who studied Greek poetry, disdained the company of men, and privately gave each other male names drawn from the classics. Margaret announced she would marry Henry only if Ella became part of their intimate life together, and Henry agreed.

For years, Henry went to the law courts every day while Margaret went over to visit Ella at her family's mansion. All three spent evenings together, and Newbolt's friends understood that when they invited Henry and Margaret for the weekend, they invited Ella as well. Even so, Ella began complaining to Henry that she felt left out, an unwanted third party.

Chitty explains that Newbolt solved that problem by making Ella his mistress. Margaret understood. The women were not precisely equal (Margaret had the children, Ella played aunt), but they appear not to have been jealous of each other. Newbolt scrupulously divided his sexual attention. He left among his papers a ledger page showing columns of figures which, Chitty tells us, "represent the number of times he slept with each of his women each month between 1904 and 1917, averaging as much as 12 per head per month."

In middle age they reached a new arrangement, with Ella in a London house (now marked with a plaque in Newbolt's honour) and Margaret in the country. But there were complications. Henry fell in love with a third woman whom neither Margaret nor Ella liked; since she complained a lot, they named her Lydia Languish. And Margaret found another man, the sculptor Henry Furse, in whose house Margaret and Newbolt lived for a time. So Newbolt at that point had two wives and a girlfriend, Margaret two husbands. Nevertheless, the original triangle was still in place at Newbolt's death.