Sacred Mysteries: The connection between E Nesbit and St Sebastian

The author of The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Railway Children, E Nesbit, married an impossible man. Edith fell for Hubert Bland, left home and was married in a register office. He gave a false address and didn’t tell his mother, for he had  already had a son by her paid companion, Maggie.

When Edith discovered, she forgave him. She forgave him again when her best friend Alice came to care for her in an illness and became the mother of a daughter by Hubert. She passed off the girl as her own (as again with a son). 

His fellow-socialist Bernard Shaw said Bland was “never seen without an irreproachable frock coat, tall hat, and a single eyeglass which infuriated everybody”. Bland said of himself: “All who knew him liked him except those who hated him.”

Edith wrote a couple of novels with Hubert under the pen name Fabian Bland, for in 1884 he had helped found the Fabian Society. It favoured socialism achieved by permeating existing structures, instead of by revolution This became the philosophy of the Labour Party.

Edith called a son born in 1885 Fabian, but he died suddenly in 1900, a loss she felt greatly.  Then Hubert Bland died in 1914, having become a Catholic.

Edith then married a Cockney who never wore a collar, to the disapproval of her family. He was a Catholic too, though she never formally converted. They lived in two army huts on Romney Marsh. What a life she had! 

I think few now appreciate that the Fabian Society, which is still going as a think-tank, was named after the Roman General, Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus. He was called Verrucosus after the wart on his lip but he was also called Cunctator because of his delaying tactics in fighting Hannibal. The Fabian Society has been keeping its powder dry for 140 years.

Today is the feast of St Fabian, Bishop of Rome, martyred in 250. He was of the same family as the general 500 years before. 

People complain about popes now – that they are too loose doctrinally or too hidebound. But things were a shambles in Fabian’s day. He was credited with reconciling rival factions in Rome that had followed either Pope Pontian or Hippolytus, an anti-Pope as far as can be made out. Both were martyred, perhaps together in exile, and martyrdom does a lot to make up for schismatic tendencies. The two share a feast day, August 13.

But during Pope Fabian’s reign a new imperial persecution broke out. Fabian was recorded as dividing Rome into seven deaneries, with notaries to collect information about the martyrs. He became a martyr himself on January 20 250 and was buried in the catacomb of Callixtus. The carved inscription on this tomb survives, cut in Greek characters.

In the early 18th century, his remains were transferred to the church of St Sebastian without the Walls, a basilica rebuilt in the early 17th century above ancient catacombs. The facade is a modest Baroque structure that would hardly be noticed in Venice. It stands in a stone-walled nook like a farmyard on the old Via Appia.

Pope St Fabian’s altar is in the Albani chapel in the basilica. The sculpture nearby of the recumbent St Sebastian (whose feast also falls today) at his own altar owes something to Michelangelo’s Dying Slave and adumbrates the memorial to Shelley at University College, Oxford, with the addition of two or three arrows. St Fabian stands fully vested and triply tiara’d in high Renaissance style, assisted by three marble angels.