Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  A week later, Edward took leave of the family in Bristol and returned to Cambridge.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Edward White Benson had been fourteen when, in 1843, his father died, leaving a widow and seven children with a very modest income and a patent for the processing of cobalt.

  Edward White Senior had studied privately with the chemist and astrologer Dr Sollitt of York back in the 1830s, then experimented in his home laboratory and come up with, amongst other discoveries (and not without the odd window-shattering explosion), a method of making carbonate of soda, and a new process for producing white lead and cobalt for colouring paint. In 1838 he established the British White-Lead Company, with a large factory amidst the flowers and open countryside of Birmingham Heath, but after an initial spurt of success the business ran dry of capital. The company failed in 1842, and Edward White died a few months later, reportedly of an internal canker but quite possibly, given the toxic substances with which he had surrounded himself for much of his adult life, from poisoning. His business partners offered his widow lifetime use of the family home (which was attached to the deserted factory) and a small annuity. Young Edward – or ‘White’ as he was more often called then – was able, just, to continue as a day boy at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, where he had been a scholar since the age of eleven, and where he developed a respect that amounted almost to worship for his headmaster James Prince Lee.

  THE CURIOUS CASE OF DR SOLLITT OF YORK

  A true tale of the black arts

  The great Dr Sollitt of York cast nativities with some success. He was a scholar and magician, and much else besides. Witness what happened in Woodstock some years before Victoria was Queen, at the house of the family of the doctor’s acolyte, Edward White Benson, a chemist of Birmingham. Dr Sollitt had long studied the ways of the Evil One, and perusal of his books had led him to believe he could himself summon the Prince of Darkness. In his chambers at Woodstock he drew a circle and went so far in the requisite incantations as to have recited the Lord’s Prayer backwards. At this moment he was most violently called in the house, and in dread of detection if any one should come to look for him and find himself either excluded or admitted, the dark doctor rushed instantly out of the room. Scarcely had he reached the lowest stair, when a wonderful crash was heard in the room he had just quitted. The whole household ran thither, and it was found that not a single article of furniture, literally, was in place. They all lay overturned on the floor. So perturbed by this event was Dr Sollitt that he forswore his art and made a solemn bonfire of his books. And indeed his acolyte Edward White Benson, too, whenever then or later convinced that he had by Astrology acquired such information of future events as he believed improper for a man to attain, he desisted and burned his books also. This tale is true, as told by said Benson to his son, who became Archbishop of Canterbury.

  ‘White’ had been a Benson family name for three generations. Young Edward’s grandfather, Captain White Benson, was named after Francis White, the unmarried whist partner of his father, one Edward Benson of Ripon. Francis White had bequeathed his entire estate to his card-playing friend, and Edward Benson of Ripon named his son White in gratitude. This young man (later to be Captain White Benson) married his first cousin, Eleanor Sarah Benson. Eleanor was the sister of Ann Sidgwick (née Benson), little Minnie Sidgwick’s ancestor at Skipton Castle. The son of White and Eleanor, Edward White, the patent holder of cobalt processing, married Harriet Baker, of a staunch Unitarian family. He had a well-developed sense of humour – he once opened a commonplace book with a Pindaric Ode on a Gooseberry Pie – but he was also the author of a book entitled Essays on the Works of God and a fervent Evangelical. Harriet reluctantly joined the Church of England in deference to her new husband.

  SILHOUETTES OF EDWARD WHITE BENSON (SENIOR) AND HARRIET BENSON

  Young Edward White was their first son – pale and sickly, averse to games, and supremely sensitive. A picture of Bottom wearing an ass’s head in a copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream struck him dumb with terror and gave him nightmares for weeks; the cry of a wounded hare during a shooting party made him immediately sick, and he swore an oath never to take up a gun in sport. But he was a talkative child, chattering away to strangers and conjuring the most ‘monstrous figments’ – for which untruths he was frequently beaten. He remained ‘White’ until a long summer holiday with his Sidgwick cousins in Yorkshire so improved his health and gave him such a tan that the family joked that his name no longer matched his appearance, and that he should be called Edward instead. He was then interchangeably ‘White’ and ‘Edward’ until his twenties, when the latter stuck.

  In his teens, and particularly after his father died, Edward grew increasingly fervent in his faith, gathering around him like-minded friends for whom discussion of the Council of Trent and the validity of lay baptism was as natural and eager as that of racquets or cricket. With one of them Edward formed a secret, doctrinally conservative Society for Holy Living, ‘to bring the kingdom of God to the poor, to promote the spiritual unity of the Church and to practise the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount’. His emanations of sanctity once provoked a less pious schoolfellow to ask him, ‘And how is the Bensonian Ethereality?’ and earn in response a forgiving smile. ‘I don’t care for the book, nor for the people who write such things,’ remarked his mother on finding him engrossed in Tract 90 of John Henry Newman’s Tracts for the Times, suggesting the possibility of a leaning towards Catholicism that rocked her Unitarian soul, ‘but I don’t want to stop you reading what you wish: only you ought to think, would your father have approved of it?’

  ‘Yes, mother, I have thought of that and I think he would wish me to be acquainted with what is going on in the Church,’ was the young man’s crushing reply.

  Edward had a clear fondness for ceremony and ritual. He converted an office in his father’s deserted lead factory into a private oratory, with brass rubbings from nearby churches, a cloth-draped table for an altar, stools to kneel on, and a cross made for him by an old carpenter (who earned rebuke for his pains, as he had rounded off the edges instead of leaving them square). Here he went every day to say the Canonical Hours. Suspecting that while he was at school his sisters were disobeying his injunction on their entering the room, Edward booby-trapped the door, bringing a battering shower of books down on the head of his little sister Emmeline when she peeked in one morning. She did not merit the forgiving smile. It was, after all, his oratory.

  Though straitened in circumstances Edward Benson was not bereft of achievement. Cambridge beckoned. In 1848 he proceeded from King Edward’s School to Trinity College as a subsizar (partially financially supported by the college), then followed a steadily rising path, becoming a full sizar the following year, and finally a scholar (an honour that brought more substantial support). His sister Eleanor wrote to congratulate him: ‘What a fine, clever fellow you are, you will soon be Archbishop of Canterbury, and would deserve to be, should you not?’, a question Edward surely deemed rhetorical.

  Edward lived with ferocious frugality, surviving his first year at university on expenditure of just over £90, less than the earnings of a lowly clerk. (Mr Guppy, in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, published in monthly parts from 1852, is comically proud of an annual income of £104, set to rise to £117.) Edward took in pupils to support his finances, one summer acting as tutor to two boys at Abergeldie Castle, on the River Dee near Aberdeen, and catching sight at the Invercauld Highland Games of a young Queen Victoria (the most plainly dressed woman there, he thought) and Prince Albert (‘horribly padded and belted’). His mother let go her domestic staff, and did all the cooking, scrubbing, ironing and cleaning herself, with the help of Edward’s sisters, but when she wrote to him suggesting that she make use of her late husband’s cobalt patent, and set up in business, Edward was horrified. A mother in ‘trade’ was utterly unacceptable. The rigid strata of society might be beginning to bend, ever so slightly, as all manner of people rubbed should
ers (and made fortunes) in newly industrialized cities and every example of humanity piled into railway trains to speed around the countryside, but the direction of any social mobility should be upwards, not down. A mother who scrubbed her own floors was bad enough, but concealable; one in trade – especially for someone in such an environment as the University of Cambridge, and particularly when it came to career or marriage prospects – was too dreadful to contemplate. Edward would not admit such a stumbling block to his progress. ‘I do hope and trust you will keep out of it,’ he instructed her. ‘It will do me so much harm here, and my sisters so much harm for ever! I trust that the scheme be abandoned once and for all.’ Mother complied. She always did.

  Instead, Harriet Benson scraped together what she could of her capital and invested it in the railways. The ‘roaring and rattling railroad days’ had begun, with (as Charles Dickens put it) ‘wheezin’, creakin’, gaspin’, puffin’, bustin’ monsters’ shooting around the country at up to 36 miles per hour. (‘Not quite so fast next time, Mr Conductor, if you please,’ said Prince Albert as he alighted after his first train journey in 1842.) Between December 1844 and January 1849 the network grew from 2,240 to 5,447 miles. In 1849, 60 million journeys were taken by train. Shares in railway companies promised unimaginable riches, and thousands of people joined in a frenzy of speculation that became known as railway mania. Harriet Benson can hardly be blamed for secretly becoming one of them. Just months after she did so, the market crashed, with an estimated loss to investors of some £800,000,000. Mrs Benson was ruined.

  A few months later, all her offspring in Birmingham fell ill with typhus fever. Not only did Harriet Benson have single-handedly to nurse six children who were tossing and sweating in delirium, but she had to keep the household running without their help. For a while she withheld the seriousness of the situation from Edward, as she did not want to interrupt his work at Cambridge or upset him, but eventually she had anxiously to write for help. ‘Do you think,’ came the reply, ‘it could be managed that instead of my coming down to you, you yourself should come up here for a week and bring one of those who are under ten years old – (that would be half fare by the Railway). This place is so beautiful and fresh now, that I think it would restore the health of the most confirmed invalids.’ The house in Birmingham must have been seething with infection. Edward’s own health and well-being, all (not least the Good Lord himself) would surely agree, eclipsed that of the rest of the family. In case this part of the letter was too complicated, he trusted his mother would ‘not grudge the trouble of reading it over again’, and he went on: ‘prayers for your restoration in my heart, mingled with prayers that He will not suffer me so to abuse the health and happiness and prosperity that He gives me here (for in all these, my dear Mother, I know that you rejoice). . . ’

  Two days later Edward wrote again, wishing he could say something to comfort the invalids, but assuring them that they would comfort each other best – and reminding them that the ‘true comfort is of the Comforter’. He was halfway through a third letter when news arrived that his sister, Harriet, had died. She was eighteen. Edward’s letter changed course to become a paean to her grace, truthfulness, obedience and saintliness. Finally, he set off for Birmingham.

  Mrs Benson herself laid out the wasted body of her eldest daughter and namesake, then retired to bed. At midnight, she got up, lit a lamp and went in for one last look at the body. Back in her own bedroom, exhausted, she lay down with her head on her hand to sleep. She died in the night of heart failure. By the time Edward Benson arrived, he had two funerals to arrange.

  Edward’s mother’s annuity and the right of the family to occupy the house in Birmingham terminated with her death. Her railway shares were worthless. Once expenses had been paid, Edward calculated that the entire family fortune amounted to just over £100. Aunts and uncles rallied round. A Benson half-uncle sent Edward money to meet immediate needs; seventeen-year-old Eleanor and ten-year-old Ada were taken to Bristol to be looked after by Mrs Sidgwick, the widow of their father’s cousin, and the rest went – temporarily – to stay with Uncle Thomas Baker, their mother’s Unitarian brother.

  A rich and generous businessman, Uncle Thomas wrote to Edward offering to take the baby of the family – little Charlie, who was eight – and maybe one of the sisters, and bring them up as his own. He undertook not to ‘instil into the child any Unitarian principle’, to bring him up according to Edward’s religious convictions and to allow Edward ‘freely [to] exercise [his] influence by visit or by letter, and hereafter decide on the boy’s school’. Edward rejected the offer. He would not permit even the faintest whiff of Unitarianism to taint the air his brother breathed. Better that Charlie live in penury and be poorly educated than imperilled by comforts and ministrations offered by such inappropriate substitute parents as Aunt and Uncle Baker.

  AN INCIDENT IN WHICH EDWARD BENSON, UNDERGRADUATE OF TRINITY, STANDS BY HIS HIGH PRINCIPLES

  A story told of the African American pastor and abolitionist Alexander Crummel, by the Revd J. Bowman of New Southgate, who was present

  On a certain Degree day in 1850 or thereabouts the undergraduate Crummel of Queens’ appeared in the Senate House to take his degree. A boisterous individual in the gallery called out: ‘Three Groans for the Queens’ nigger.’ A pale, slim undergraduate in the front of the gallery, very youthful-looking, became scarlet with indignation and shouted in a voice that re-echoed through the building: ‘Shame, shame! Three groans for you sir!’ And then: ‘Three cheers for Mr Crummel!’ This hurrah was taken up in all directions, and the original offender had to stoop to hide himself from the storm of groans and hisses that broke out all round him. That pale undergraduate was one Benson, later Archbishop of Canterbury.

  Thomas Baker knew how to deal with his objectionable young nephew. He wrote that he had hoped Edward’s ‘own good sense’ would have preserved him from ‘such narrow and debasing sentiments’. He withdrew all support, adding: ‘I do not see how you can expect from us any sympathy in pursuing an education which has so far taught you not to regard us as friends, but as a class whose influence, beyond a very small range, is to be avoided.’ If that was the way Edward felt, he would ‘hereafter be bound to provide for [Charlie’s] future as he would have been provided for had he been with me’.

  Edward flinched a little. His beliefs were, after all, deeply and sincerely held. He noted his uncle’s ‘uncommon candour’, thanked him for his kindness, and asked his pardon. Then he went on to lecture the older man on Christian doctrine and practice, holding up his own religious principle as ‘not a thing of tender feelings, warm comforting notions, unpruned prejudices, and lightly considered opinions’ but one that ‘consists of full and perfect convictions, absolute belief, rules which regulate my life. . . and tests by which I believe myself bound to try every question, the greatest and the least.’ He rounded off his sally with: ‘This is a very serious matter; and I hope you will not think bitterly either of the young man’s presumption, or the young Churchman’s bigotry. Bigot (so-called) thus far, a conscientious Catholic [here meaning orthodox Anglican] must ever be.’

  Buffeted between beliefs about which he probably had no inkling, little Charlie Benson was blown on to the cold hard land of brother Edward’s ‘full and perfect conviction’. This might have spelt disaster for the boy, had it not been for the intervention of the kindly Mr Martin.

  Francis Martin, the Bursar of Trinity College, was well into middle age, gruff, grey-haired, solitary, unmarried and rich. He was also a fervent Evangelical. Soon after Edward returned to Cambridge from Birmingham, Mr Martin noticed the beautiful, troubled young man making his desultory way across the Great Court. He knew of the family bereavements, offered his condolences, and invited Edward up to his rooms. The visit marked the beginning of an intense and passionate protectorship.

  A fierce figure, with high collars that scraped and rasped at his cheeks, pale grey eyes, parchment-like skin, a rough manner and a resonant voice, Mr
Martin commanded Edward’s deference, but treated him with a parental tenderness that grew into adoration. The crusty old don softened, and began to make his affection tangible. He offered to pay all Edward’s expenses at Cambridge and to continue as long as the money was needed; he furnished Edward’s rooms, supplied him with cheques to cover other needs, marked his own birthday by making over £100 as a gift to Charlie and the young ones, rescuing Charlie from the poverty into which his brother’s strong conviction would have cast him. Mr Martin even set aside £500 for the Benson girls’ dowries.

  Edward’s sister Eleanor observed that her brother had a disposition to ‘make idols’, particularly of older men. At school he had formed an ‘almost romantic attachment’ to his headmaster, James Prince Lee, and at his first sight of the Tutor of Trinity, William Collings Mathison, in chapel, he had been awestruck, thinking he should never be able to approach such a quietly elegant, attractive man, with his ‘small intelligent forehead and blue eyes and placid brow’. Yet the intensity of Mr Martin’s feeling was confusing. ‘I do not worthily return his affection,’ Edward wrote. ‘I find myself hardly able to understand it.’ Nevertheless, he blossomed under the older man’s care. The prig who could write such an uncompromising letter to his uncle could also be high-spirited and fancy free; he could be mad with the joy of a summer’s morning, and take his mind off on crazy new adventures. Swept along by a fervour for the supernatural that spread countrywide in the 1850s, and echoing his father’s and Dr Sollitt’s interest in the occult, Edward helped found a Ghost Society, to collect and investigate ghostly tales. He wrote poems, took pleasure tours with Mr Martin and enjoyed silly jokes. In the 1851 long vacation he joined a reading party led by William Collings Mathison in the Lake District and went on long walks, enthusing in his diary that he ‘shrieked and shrieked with delight’ as he plunged into the Mirror Pool at Rydal Head, climbed up Scardale Fell then scampered down to Windermere, ‘jumpy, jerky, wally-shally, boggy-joggy, splashy rushy, thumpy, zany, coky boasty, bathy, warmy, coolly, freshy’.