No one who has written about the Bensons has been able to help making Minnie the heroine of the story. They married in 1859, when she was eighteen and Edward thirty. ‘An utter child,’ she wrote, ‘with no stay on God. Twelve years older, much stronger, much more passionate, and whom I didn’t really love. How evidently disappointed he was—trying to be rapturous—feeling so inexpressibly lonely and young, but how hard for him.’ Edward went on to be a master at Rugby, the first Master of Wellington College, Chancellor of Lincoln, the first Bishop of Truro, and in 1883, Archbishop of Canterbury. Minnie bore him six children, all of whom loved her dearly, and from her early days as a muddled extravagant housekeeper she grew into the doyenne of vast households. She liked meeting distinguished people and was certainly a great gainer from her marriage. Gladstone called her ‘the cleverest woman in Europe.’ She was not clever, but she was generously responsive, and had a genius for following her instincts even when she hardly admitted them. She was, as became clear early on, a woman who loved women, and had agonizingly keen relationships, emotional and spiritual, with a series of female friends, some of them quite dull. It says a great deal for the Bensons that they made a go of an ill-assorted marriage, a brilliant, bizarre, self-centred family, and a career that reached the very summit.
Edward’s present biographers take a calm and judicious tone, but they call him a ‘natural bully’ and say that his children all emerged ‘scarred,’ except his eldest son Martin, who died at seventeen, and Nellie, his eldest daughter, who was not afraid of her father. But all of them, even the amiable Fred, inherited his neurasthenia and spells of black depression, and Maggie, the younger daughter, became suicidally insane, recovering only for the last few days of her life. Hugh, the treasured last-born, looks in his childhood photographs like a changeling, palely staring. The three sons grew up homosexual and each of them, in their distinctive way, avoided taking responsible posts. Arthur, when the point came, did not want to be headmaster of Eton. Fred became a popular novelist and a resolutely genial bachelor. Hugh, having converted to Catholicism, lived as a priest without a parish.
Their father was integrity itself, a mighty force always heading the same way, excluding other opinions with an absolute certainty of their wrongness. His system was total: music, literature, travel, social behaviour, the careful folding of an umbrella, the management of gravy and potatoes on the plate, were all judged not from the aesthetic but the moral viewpoint. We know that he was a flogging headmaster, that to Ethel Smyth (a friend of Nellie’s) ‘the sight of his majestic form approaching the tea-table scattered my wits as an advancing elephant might scatter a flock of sheep,’ that conversation with him was not to be undertaken lightly and that Hugh—for example—felt like ‘a small china mug being filled at a waterfall.’ He dearly liked his children to be near him and anxiously waited for their love. But circumstances were against him, because as schoolmaster, bishop and archbishop his family were always on show and must be urged and interrogated into perfection. Meanwhile the children themselves were longing, perhaps praying, for him to go away.
‘No one,’ Betty Askwith wrote in Two Victorian Families, ‘who has not experienced some taste of Victorian family life (for it survived in places well into the twentieth century) can quite understand the extraordinary sense of living under the domination of one of those vital, strong-willed tyrants. If the tyranny be accompanied, as it frequently was, with vivid personality and wide-ranging intellectual interests there was an excitement about it which was incommunicable.’
Edward Benson was a great man, and Palmer and Lloyd give a sympathetic account of a formidable career. He loved to rule, although he believed the choice was not in his hands—‘if calls exist,’ he wrote, ‘called I was, against my will’—and they think he was at the very height of his powers in Truro, working as a creative pioneer, with a new cathedral to build, and on the way to revealing his own personal conception of the episcopacy and of religion itself. As Primate ‘his acquaintance with the practical affairs of Church and State was slight, and he knew he would quickly have to master all the administrative problems that would surround him. Everything poetical and romantic, the very essence of his view of life, would be left behind in Cornwall.’ But Edward of course went courageously into new duties and controversies—temperance, patronage, disestablishment, the guidance of missionary societies, ‘the wretchedness of the poorest classes, their ignorance and wildness and false friends,’ reunion between the churches, ritual.
His Lincoln judgement of 1890 was given after months of hard work and anxiety. The Bishop of Lincoln was on trial on charges of ‘irregular and unlawful ritual,’ and in particular of adopting the eastward position with his back to the congregation during the consecration, so that the people could not see what the priest was doing. Benson finally allowed the eastern position as optional, but insisted that the consecration of the elements itself must be before the people. ‘What he meant by this was illustrated at my consecration in St Paul’s Cathedral,’ wrote my grandfather (my other one, the Bishop of Manchester). ‘He thus deliberately differentiated the English Holy Communion from the Roman Mass. But this provision of his has been generally disregarded.’ Who cares? But in February 1889, crowds besieged Lambeth Palace on the first day of the trial, long before the doors opened at eleven o’clock, and the police had to be called in to keep order.
This grandfather, by the way, although he worked himself almost to death, allowed himself not to answer letters from obvious lunatics. But Benson, apparently, told his chaplain that they must all be answered, since they might have been of importance to the men who wrote them. He never retired, but died (in October 1896) on a visit to the Gladstones, at early Communion in the church at Hawarden. ‘He died like a soldier,’ said Gladstone. And he had lived like one, too, constantly at his post. But Palmer and Lloyd might, perhaps, have said more about his interest in the supernatural. At Cambridge, in the late 1840s, he and his friends had founded a Ghost Club. He is usually said to have lost interest in such matters or even to have come to disapprove of them, but in his notebooks for 12 January 1895, Henry James writes:
Note here the ghost story told me at Addington…by the Archbishop of Canterbury…the story of the young children (indefinite number and age) left to the care of servants in an old country house…The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children; the children are bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree. The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and their apparitions, figures, return to haunt the house and children, to whom they seem to beckon, whom they invite and solicit, from across dangerous places, the deep ditch of a sunk fence, etc so that the children may destroy themselves, lose themselves, by responding, by getting into their power. So long as the children are kept from them, they are not lost; but they try and try, these evil presences, to get hold of them. It is a question of the children ‘coming over to where they are.’
Edward Benson told this story in the year before his death. There are two principles within each soul—we have to choose, we have to renew the struggle every hour. He had preached this so long and so earnestly, but here it is in the form of a powerful tale of haunting. How can it be said, then, that he left everything poetical and romantic behind him in Cornwall?
London Review of Books, 1998
The Need for Open Spaces
Octavia Hill was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England, in 1838, the youngest but two of a family of eleven children, ten of them girls. She had no formal education, for her strong-minded mother believed in letting her children do what they were best at, and in letting them be outdoors as much as possible. When Octavia was fourteen, the family moved from the country into London: she never forgot the loss of green fields and fresh air.
However, she needed to earn her living, so she became the manager of a toy-making workshop run for the benefit of girls from what was then called a ragged school. Hill went on to become a crusader for housing reform, managing small blocks of slum property and making sure the apartments were fit