By Geoff Sawers
Dorothy Edwards (1902-34) was a Welsh modernist writer of quiet, jewel-like short stories focussed on loneliness, often set among the rural middle classes; she was briefly taken up and then dropped by the Bloomsbury set.
The Christian Socialist J. Stitt Wilson (1868-1942) was a hugely charismatic speaker who drew crowds of thousands wherever he travelled; constantly on the move, tirelessly crossing North America and later the Atlantic. He addressed millions of people across his lifetime. A Methodist preacher (like Dorothy’s grandfather), he resigned his ministry after conflicts with church superiors over his political activism and rejection of capitalism.
A conservative paper described him in 1902 as a man ‘of striking appearance. His make-up is rather Byronic, clean-shaven, long locks parted on the side and the Byron collar and flowing tie. He was formerly a minister and his platform style is that of the evangelist. He is forceful and has the power to stir men. He gave vent to a number of blasphemies that had a bad effect on many auditors.’
Wilson described socialism as just ‘practical Christianity’; Karl Marx’s work was ‘a pale pink pamphlet’ beside the levelling force of the Bible. Gilbert Binyon later remarked that ‘for Christianity in the Labour movement, perhaps the most powerful figure that has ever appeared was the Rev. J. Stitt Wilson.’
I am writing a biography of Dorothy Edwards and I cannot help but note that the fact these two people should ever have met, let alone formed the bond that they did, defies logic. But Dorothy was a passionate, forthright child, born into a fiercely left-wing household, and when Wilson made his first British lecture visit in 1907-09, he stayed briefly with the Edwards family. He and Dorothy made firm friends at once (she would have been six or seven) and began a correspondence that lasted the rest of her life. She would be a published author by the time they actually met again.
Dorothy went to University College Cardiff, ‘in an almost total absence of men students’ after the First World War; an eerie social atmosphere, but one full of possibilities too. Whilst society at the beginning of the 1920s left women in no doubt that marriage should be their destiny, the National Census found 19.8 million women living in England and Wales, and only 18 million men. It was a daunting imbalance, concentrated on Dorothy’s generation, who naturally looked for other careers.
Ever temperate, the Daily Mail declared that ‘the superfluous women are a disaster to the human race.’ Even within education attitudes were stacked against their sex. Nancy Astor, the first woman in Parliament, remarked in 1921 that ‘there is no inherent reason why a girl who takes a first in Law at Cambridge should not make as good a barrister as a man who takes a third.’
Dorothy’s two books, Rhapsody (1927) and Winter Sonata (1928), were both well-received in the press, but the years that followed were awkward for her and she could not follow her early successes.
Stitt Wilson made a second British visit in late 1928; he was based up in Bradford but he and Dorothy managed to cross paths at a railway station and have an ecstatic reunion. His speaking tour was hugely successful and in the run-up to the General Election the following year the Labour Party invited him back once more, hoping that his passionate revivalist speaking would help to fire up the cause. Although she was 26 this was the first election at which Dorothy would have been eligible to vote herself, the franchise having been extended just the year before.
This time Wilson based himself in Cardiff; but soon after his arrival he found himself crippled with pain from sciatica, and Dorothy, who lived close by, dropped everything to look after him. A few weeks later he was free from pain again and striding around the platform giving two-hour speeches as he had always done before. On the eve of the election he was the warm-up speaker for Ramsay MacDonald before a crowd of 5000; the following day saw the Labour Party elected to power with MacDonald as Prime Minister.
Wilson’s public life is well documented, but his personal papers were later lost in a fire and the record of his private life is much patchier. I had begun to wonder whether Dorothy’s adoration of this man was even real or just a fan-crush, when by chance I turned up a six-page letter from him, recalling her care when he was ill. He told her he had:
…an unforgettable pleasure in the memory of the days when the only release from the racking pain of my body was the hours of your company. And I recall that when the few days came that you were sick & could scarcely dare to go out & so I was left without you – the hours were interminable – & I would not be comforted. For all this I have constantly blessed you […] We reached a place in the ‘Fellow-ship of Souls’ in those hours of my pain & your affectionate & devoted concern for my welfare, that is vouchsafed to few mortals – thanks, I always trust to your lofty intelligence & nobility of spirit…
He was, then, a famous man; this is a powerful testimonial and we can see why Dorothy felt some sense of ownership for him. It is curious that at exactly this moment, another handsome stranger should show up in her life.
The novelist David Garnett (1892-1981) befriended her out of blue, introducing her to a dazzling host of literary contacts. It was exciting, but socially she was out of her depth. If the Bloomsburies had any politics they were Liberals, but mostly they’d affect disdain for the subject. There might be a shadow of hawkishness too in the sophisticated Garnett’s patronage of this younger woman; we cannot ignore the fact that whilst Dorothy describes his ‘brotherliness’ she also mentions him ‘kissing me in taxis’.
At home, at a meeting of her local Labour Section Dorothy got distracted by petting a small cat that had wandered in and found herself elected vice-Chairman. She had absent-mindedly voted for herself. But the Labour government was in trouble; in a desperate attempt to balance the books they cut unemployment assistance – the Party fell to in-fighting over this issue. At the election defeat of 1931 Dorothy collapsed and remained in bed for several weeks. She had had depressive episodes before; now she found herself undergoing hallucinations and fits of anger. Her poorly mother was barely able to care for her. Her literary work stalled entirely.
In a late burst of energy she did manage to complete a small clutch of new stories, mostly during a stay in David Garnett’s attic in the first six months of 1933. But as soon as she left Garnett’s house and returned to Cardiff she began an intense private journal dedicated to Stitt Wilson, in which she poured out her love and adoration for him. In her deep distress she seemed to be bouncing between these two confident, older men, unable to fully strike out on her own. Stitt Wilson was a far more reliable father-figure than Garnett, but he lived on the other side of the world.
Only one of those new stories was published in Dorothy’s lifetime. ‘Mutiny’ appeared in ‘Life & Letters’ that September.
It tenderly portrays an elderly Christian Socialist and his teenage granddaughter Primrose, ‘Prim’, who he is trying to persuade not to marry the ‘wrong’ man, an English aristocrat. On the ship bringing them home from Africa a mutiny had broken out and this minister – expected to uphold the social order – had sensationally sided with the sailors.
This story, as published, has a confoundingly discordant ending since Prim does marry the Count; a second mutiny, in a way. But the original manuscript ends quite differently, detailing the positive outcome of the minister’s onboard actions and thus affirms his stance, rather than undermining him. It is not clear why this final page was left off the story; since Garnett was at this point relaying Dorothy’s stories to the press it could well have been his decision, and it hard not to see that as a subversion of her ideals.
Tragically, a few months later Dorothy took her own life; a surprise to no one who knew her and saw closely how difficult she found coping with the world to be.
Her friends then entrusted Garnett with all her manuscripts in the hope that he would get them published but only one appeared; the rest ‘mysteriously disappeared’, or so Garnett claimed – although they all survive today in his archive; mostly mis-labelled. One day, perhaps, they can be published.
All quotations from unpublished material appear courtesy of Special Collections, The University of Reading’ (MS5085) and The Charles Deering McCormick Library (Special Collections & Archives) at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois (MS164); my thanks to the archivists there for their help. Steve Barton, Wilson’s biographer, helped me to decipher some words in his handwriting and I would like to thank him too.
