Edward Thomas was gloomy as Eeyore. In 1906 he complained to a friend that his writing ‘was suffering more & more from a silly but unavoidable nervous interest in the children’s movement in and out of the house’. The following year, he noted, I have no ‘interests’ at all, and marriage, he said, is ‘continually encrusting the soul’. To be fair, his life was a torment — depression, worrying about and writing for money, a miserable marriage — and perhaps most cruel of all he was denied the comfort we have, as later readers, of knowing that it will all turn out all right in the end. His was a messy life which found an elegant ending: with the writing of a handful of perfect poems, and then an abrupt death.
It is because of this end-stopped life that Matthew Hollis a few years ago decided to write a biography of Thomas’s last year, and specifically his linked decisions to start writing poetry and to enlist in the first world war: Now All Roads Lead to France (2011). Now, Jean Moorcroft Wilson gives the full cradle-to-grave life. The material is always interesting, but the inevitable result is that we spend a lot of time waiting.
His was a fairly standard middle-class Victorian childhood: educated at what he called a ‘clockwork school’, full of rote learning; a confident father who read Dickens to him and a mother he adored. It was full, too, of the odd repressions we associate with Victorian Britain. He never mentions his brothers in his autobiography because they didn’t fit his self-portrait as a solitary figure. He got engaged young, at 19; he went up to Oxford, where he experimented with opium and — more surprisingly— rowing.
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