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A Very Queer Family Indeed
Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain
By Simon Goldhill The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-39381-0
CHAPTER 1
Sensation!
We can begin with a kiss, though this will not turn out to be a love story, at least not a love story of anything like the usual kind.
One afternoon in 1853 in Cambridge, an intense, evangelical twenty-three-year-old student sat on the sofa with a plumpish, earnest twelve-year-old girl on his knee, as he had so often that year, and now carefully proposed marriage. She burst into tears, but, as he wrote later with un-self-aware pride, she said nothing girly or foolish. Instead, she tied the ends of his handkerchief together in a knot and gave it to him. He kissed her, and, to the unabating anxiety of her widowed mother, the engagement was official.
Six years later, as soon as she was eighteen, after a courtship that was as much a schooling as an affair, they married. He went on to become the Archbishop of Canterbury at the height of Victoria's reign. She went on to discover that her passion was directed toward women. She spent months in Germany, leaving her baby and five other children, in desperate longing for a Miss Hall. After the archbishop's early death, she spent her last twenty years sleeping in the same bed with the daughter of the previous Archbishop of Canterbury. This is not a trendy Bloomsbury Group story, where such affairs might be passed off in the name of love and art, but a tale from the heart of the British establishment. She was comforted after the archbishop's death by Queen Victoria herself, who knew a thing or two about public bereavement.
The archbishop and his wife had six children, none of whom ever had heterosexual intercourse, as far as we can tell; certainly none of them ever married.
The oldest boy, Martin, died as an adolescent from "brain disease" at school, almost certainly meningitis; Nellie, one of the sisters, died not long after, picking up an infection while working among the poor. Arthur, tall, luxuriantly mustachioed, taught at Eton, edited Queen Victoria's letters from Windsor Castle, became a celebrated writer and eventually Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge, holding the position till his death, despite long periods in hospital for severe, crippling depression. His writings, including a huge diary, offer a rich portrait of the male world of Victorian and Edwardian Cambridge college life — and he wrote the words for Edward Elgar's nationalist hymn, "Land of Hope and Glory." Fred — fair and slight, who loved ice-skating, golf, and a high social life — became a celebrated novelist, famous for writing flippant society fiction, which finally was made into a successful retro-chic comedy series, Mapp and Lucia, in the 1980s by Channel 4 in Britain, with a remake screened by the BBC in 2015. He ended up living with his collie dog and butler in Rye in Kent, a pillar of the bourgeois society he lampooned, in a house once owned by his and Arthur's good friend Henry James, more serious anatomist of bourgeois society. Maggie, educated at Oxford, was the first published female Egyptologist; she found a passionate relationship with the quiet and persistent Nettie Gourlay. When Maggie, the archbishop's daughter, and Nettie lived with Maggie's mother and her companion, the previous archbishop's daughter, there were stormy rows and an atmosphere the boys found it hard to come back home to. There are not many such households — then or now — of a mother and daughter, both with an intimate female friend, all living together. Maggie, however, also had a severe mental breakdown and was hospitalized for some years before her death in early middle age: one of the symptoms of her mental disease was a violent, suspicious hatred of her mother. Hugh, the baby of the family, found his own route to rebellion, by becoming — shockingly for the son of the archbishop — a Roman Catholic priest. He also became a widely successful novelist and distinguished preacher, before his early death from heart disease. He specified that his veins should be opened after his death, like a stake through the heart, because he was terrified of being buried alive.
This, then, was the Benson family: Archbishop Edward White Benson, his girl bride, Minnie Sidgwick, and their renowned children. It could make for a sensational story.
Certainly the narrative pieces are all in place for a sensational picture of Victorian family life. The archbishop was, as a young man, flamboyantly handsome. His father, a somewhat feckless inventor, had died young, leaving the family impoverished. Edward, with a fierce sense of duty, struggled to succeed against his poverty and to make his way to Cambridge, with the help of his scattered relatives; but his mother died while he was still a student, leaving the immediate family penniless. He was sufficiently pious, sufficiently stubborn, and sufficiently authoritative not to allow his young brother and sister to be brought up by a wealthy uncle, because of strongly held religious scruples — the uncle was a Unitarian, unacceptable to the Anglican Edward. Consequently, he arranged for his two siblings to live with his cousin, Mary Sidgwick, who, in the way of such narratives, would turn out to be his future mother-in-law. He made it through Cambridge (and beyond) thanks to the help of a Mr. Martin, the bursar of Trinity College, an elderly fellow, rich, evangelical, unmarried, who in best Dickensian tradition offered the handsome young man all the financial and moral support he needed and "treated him with a half lover-like, half paternal adoration." They read together, and Mr. Martin stroked Edward's hair. Edward's firstborn was duly called Martin. Edward won a fellowship at Trinity, became a schoolmaster, rising to be the first, pioneering headmaster of Prince Albert's new school, Wellington College, where he first lived with his new wife, who was the same age as his sixth-formers. He ruled the school and his family in the manner of Thomas Arnold: terrifying, religious, strict, violent, fair ... From Wellington, like so many schoolmasters, he turned to the church, and from his first position at Lincoln, became the founding Bishop of Truro, a new see and the first new cathedral in England since the Middle Ages. From Truro to Lambeth Palace and the leadership of the Anglican communion, all with the same spirit of hard work and total commitment to a mission: "I mean to rule," he declared privately on his appointment — "a supreme piece of self-revelation," as his son sardonically commented. ... This is a classic Victorian success story: a passionately driven man, charismatic, full of energy and ambition and desire to make the world a better place, working up from misfortune through the great institutions of university, the public schools, and the church, rising to a position at the heart of the empire's power. He died from a heart attack while praying in Prime Minister Gladstone's private chapel. His portrait, symbolically enough, is set next to Queen Victoria's in the stained glass at Canterbury Cathedral.
Yet Benson was tormented by depression, the "black dog" that haunted the family's whole life. He was, in the manner of a Victorian patriarch, fearsome, angry, and constantly critical of his children — in a way that his fits of depression exacerbated. He needed to educate, to direct, to correct. As an undergraduate, when a black student, one Crummel of Queen's College, was graduating, someone in the gallery tauntingly yelled out, "Three groans for the Queen's Nigger"; Benson, then a pale undergraduate, immediately shouted back, "Shame! Shame! Three groans for you sir!" and led the whole audience in an impromptu three cheers for Mr. Crummel, to the total humiliation of the racist bully. Yet he constantly bullied his own children about not wasting time, about being serious, about doing their duty, as he chastised his wife for smoking, for not keeping proper household accounts, not reading the right books. Desperate for affection, he had no idea how it might be fostered. His children remembered long walks, when he would read aloud to them improving books, awkward and anxious mealtimes, judgments of morbid solemnity, and how in comparison to their father's little head shake of disapproval, "no gesture in the world has ever seemed so formidable." Typically, when he and Minnie had not conceived a child in the first year of marriage, he wondered to her what sin they might have committed to be barred from the joy of parenthood. It would be easy to tell Edward White Benson's story as a deeply upsetting tension between remarkable public success and constant private torments and familial psychological violence.
Minnie Sidgwick's story, too, seems destined for an overexcited narrative arc. Wooed from the age of eleven, married at eighteen, her diaries reveal a brittle desperation to appear happy through making her husband happy. Her brothers became educational and intellectual luminaries, and the Cambridge University humanities campus, the Sidgwick Site, is named for her brother Henry Sidgwick, the great moral philosopher. As the wife first of a headmaster and then a bishop, and finally of an archbishop, she was required to be a hostess in an equivalently glittering milieu. William Gladstone wondered if she was the cleverest woman in England or in Europe, a pleasantry that has been taken far too seriously by her admirers — her education was spotty at best. But she was renowned for the fascination and attractiveness of her conversation, not as a wit firing off glittering bon mots, but as an attentive, engagingly personal fabricator of a tent of intimacy through talk.
Yet her private anxieties, too, were in stark contrast with her public life. She fell in love with women and indulged her passion, leaving her young family for months and months. She whiled away long hours with her female friends — "we spent the month in the most complete fusing," she wrote of her time with Emily Edwardes. "She did not often walk with us or play with us," remembered Arthur, with characteristic melancholy: "The truth is she had a life of her own, apart from my father's life, apart from ours" — an idea that goes against all the expected stereotyping of a Victorian wife and mother. At some point in her mid-thirties, however, she also became deeply religious — not with the fierce evangelical and institutional commitment of her husband, but with an intense, personal faith. It allowed her to treat the death of her oldest child with an equanimity her husband could not match. Martin had truly and simply, for her, gone to heaven, and she quietly rejoiced at the journey, while Edward, the bishop, was crushed with "a nightmare of grief and dismay." Her religion never left her, even and especially after Edward's death, even as four of her children died before her. "Her married life, though she would not have purchased her freedom at any price, had been a constant and urgent strain," throughout which she struggled with the physicality of her desire, the powerful feelings of her intimate relations with women, and the spirituality and restraint her Christianity demanded. Love, she knew, was a gift from God, but the extreme pleasures and pains — along with insistent carnal longings — were hard for her to regulate within her powerful Christian conviction, a turmoil her children barely recognized as she lived out her life quietly, sharing her bed with Lucy Tait, as a Victorian matriarch, in a grand house, supported financially by her successful sons. So Minnie Sidgwick's life is twisted between selfishness and duty — between duty to others and care for herself — and between religious propriety and fleshly feelings, doubly tormenting, doubly transgressive, both as desire itself and as desire for women, not her husband. Could she have a life apart? And at what cost? There is a psychodrama waiting to be written — of the Christian lover of women, trapped in a psychologically violent marriage at the center of the empire's church and state apparatus, struggling with her conflicting and all but overwhelming feelings.
All six children disappointed their father. Martin, the eldest, was a paragon: brilliant at school, quiet, pious — his father's dream. He stuttered, which may reflect the strain of such perfection under such parents. His death at age seventeen tore a hole in his father that never healed. Nellie tried to be the perfect daughter — working with the poor, caring for her parents, gentle, but always willing to go for a hard gallop with her father for morning exercise. Her death at a young age, unmarried, was for the whole family an afterthought to the awfulness of Martin's loss. Arthur, Fred, and Hugh all found the Anglican religion of their father impossible. Arthur went to church, appreciated the music, the ceremony and its role in social order, but struggled with belief, even when he called out to God in the despair of his blackest depression. Fred was flippant and disengaged, and his first novel, Dodo, the hit of the season in 1893, outraged his father's sense of seriousness. Fred represented Britain at figure skating — a hobby that was as far as he could get from his father's ideals of social and religious commitment, the epitome of a "waste of time." Hugh's turn to the Roman Catholic Church was after his father's death — but like all the children, the fight with paternal authority never ceased. While his father was alive, Hugh muffed exams, wanted to go into the Indian Civil Service against his father's wishes — he failed those exams too — and argued with everyone in the family petulantly. Maggie, too, was "difficult": "her friendships were seldom leisurely or refreshing things," commented Arthur; Nellie, more acerbic, added, "If Maggie would only have an intimate relationship even with a cat, it would be a relief." Her Oxford tutors found her "remorseless." At age twenty-five, still single, she did not know the facts of life. Over the years, her jealousy of her mother's companion Lucy Tait became more and more pronounced, as did her adoption of her father's expressions of strict disapproval. Her depressions turned to madness and violence, leading to her eventual hospitalization.
There is another dramatic narrative, then, of the six children, all differently and profoundly scarred by their home life, which they wrote about and thought about repeatedly. Cross-currents of competition between the children, marked by a desperate need for intimacy, in tension with a restraint born of fear of violent emotion and a profound distrust (at best) of sexual feeling, produced a fervid and damaging family dynamic. There is a story here of what it is like to grow up with a hugely successful, domineering, morally certain father, a mother who embodied the joys of intimacy but with other women — and of what the costs of public success from such a complex background are.
This looks like a family ripe for sensational biographical exploration. The interwoven tapestry of life histories, rich with sexual innuendo, madness, creativity, and power, together with the backdrop of beautiful houses, famous friends, and the corridors of imperial and ecclesiastical authority, make for a heady and worryingly voyeuristic brew. Add an unparalleled richness of sources — diaries, letters, reminiscences, biographies, novels, essays — and it will come as no surprise that indeed Minnie Sidgwick has found a small but significant place in modern studies of lesbian life and been treated to a recent, somewhat luridly told biography. Arthur Benson, too, has his modern biography, based on his voluminous diaries, which, in the modern way, dwells at length on his troubled sexuality. There are also less insightful and rather dully hagiographic versions of E. F. Benson, born out of a love for his comic novels and their untroubled world; and even the occasional attempt to tell the history of the whole family, though without the necessary research in the family papers or understanding of the Victorian cultural context. The movie or TV series would be a blockbuster.
But this book will not be a biography, nor even a family history, even though it started with a kiss and will traverse in detail some extraordinary scenes of a family that does offer a remarkable window on to Victorian and Edwardian society.
This book is not a biography partly because, like Adam Philips — who ventriloquizes Freud while writing a Freudian biography of Freud — I find biography a ludicrous genre. There are, for sure, more and less sophisticated biographies, and there will be plenty of biographical moments in this book, but the attempt to summon up a life in neatly chronological prose is bound to be an expression of its own failure. From what perspective is such a life to be constructed? From the self-deceptions of autobiography? From a fantasy of the omniscient narrator, from the dutiful child looking upwards and backwards to a parent, from a competitive or loving brother, a partner, locked in a self-defining embrace? What events, what feelings, what external or internal dynamics are to make up a life story? No life can be lived without narrating itself, but how can a biographical narrative not distort, change, or restructure the experiences of the passage of time, hourly, monthly, yearly?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Very Queer Family Indeed by Simon Goldhill. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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