Charles Elkin Mathews

Summary

Introduction

In 2015, Gerri Kimber uncovered a collection of poems at the Newberry Library in Chicago, titled The Earth Child, which KM had sent to the London publisher Elkin Mathews in the second half of 1910 at the age of twenty-two, representing her second serious attempt at publishing poetry. All knowledge of The Earth Child manuscript’s existence had been forgotten until 1999, when it was bequeathed by the estate of Jane Warner Dick (1906–97) to the Newberry Library, where its importance remained unnoticed by scholars until the 2015 discovery. Of the thirty-six poems in the collection, only nine had previously been published. Thus, the period 1909–10 is now considered as perhaps the most fruitful of KM’s poetic writing career, in terms of both quality and quantity.

KM’s choice of publisher is revealing. Charles Elkin Mathews was a British publisher and bookseller who played an important role in the literary life of London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, having strong contacts with the Irish Literary Society, the Rhymers Club and the Arts and Crafts movement. His catalogue included names such as Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons, and later on volumes of poetry by W. B. Yeats, Lionel Johnson, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Robert Bridges, among others. From 1892 to 1894 he worked in partnership with the publisher John Lane, culminating in the publication of The Yellow Book in 1894, which had exerted a deep fascination for KM during her late teenage years. Death, love, decay, extreme emotion: all were expressions of KM’s late-teenage mindset, resulting in the first of her stories written in dialogue form, ‘The Yellow Chrysanthemum’, at the height of her fascination with Wilde and the Decadents.

This important manuscript discovery revealed how, at the very moment when KM, now back in Europe, was starting to have stories accepted for commercial publication, she was also taking herself seriously as a poet. Indeed, had the collection been published, perhaps she might now be celebrated as much for her poetry as for her short stories. Some of the poems in the collection had been referred to by JMM in the introductory note from his first posthumous edition of her poems in 1923, where he comments: ‘I remember her telling me when first we met, that the beautiful pieces now gathered together [… in the section] “Poems, 1911–1913” had been refused, because they were unrhymed, by the only editor who used to accept her work’ (these poems having been erroneously dated by himself).