Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  Minnie had always hated causing others pain, had always wanted ‘to make people happy at once’. Now her entire energy, her mirth, charm and vivacity were focused on the desire ‘to be worthy of [Edward], to please him, not to disappoint him’ – and to please her mother, too, Mama who had ever tried to instil in her a sense of duty. Minnie understood what she should be doing, and set about doing it. She would be ‘a good and useful woman, a true woman’. She would shape herself to Edward. Like the fair love in The Princess, she would set herself to him, ‘Like perfect music unto noble words’. As Minnie approached womanhood, the foundations for her married life were being firmly laid.

  By the time she was sixteen or seventeen, Minnie was already providing emotional support for the man twelve years her senior. Towards the end of his first year at Rugby, Edward had begun to experience periods when he felt bilious and cross, ‘with a decidedly low opinion of the world, and a melancholy view of human life’. As time went on, he would sink for days on end into crippling depressions. The doctors diagnosed neuralgia, for which the prescribed cure was a heavy, meat-filled diet, large doses of quinine, and generous quantities of port – which one imagines might not have ensured him much in the way of bright mornings, cheerful clarity of mind or a settled stomach. Edward relied increasingly on Minnie to brighten the mood of her ‘affectionate grumbler’.

  In Minnie’s enclosed world, where Nurse Beth’s love and that ‘first friendship’ with an unnamed girl were solitary beacons of warmth and affection, Edward’s volcanic energy, his ardour, beauty and intelligence, drew out a devotion in her. Dry, critical, humourless and didactic he may have been, but he did love her. When, in March 1859, their long-secret engagement was eventually made public, Minnie revelled in the attention this brought her, expressing ‘elation’ at a ‘sense of being interesting’. A few months previously, at the remarkably young age of twenty-nine, Edward had been offered the headmastership of Wellington College, a new public school established by Prince Albert as a memorial to the Duke of Wellington. This gave him the financial stability to summon his ideal wife, and to set a wedding date for 23 June. Minnie was eighteen.

  As their wedding day approached, Edward relaxed a little. He wrote a poem on the transformation of his ‘Ladylove’ to ‘Wife’. Some of the stuffiness of his letters to Minnie disappeared. At times they took on a tone reminiscent of the crazy light-heartedness he had recorded many years before, on holiday in the Lake District. ‘I find I have no will of my own now, you witch!’ he wrote to Minnie a month before the wedding, adding with some prescience: ‘But I can only console myself by a magnificent threat – “You won’t find it so always” – There now!’ At Minnie’s suggestion that they take a long walk together after collecting their banns certificate prior to the wedding, he exclaimed, ‘your picture of the walk down the Newbold Road drives me almost wild’, warning in a later letter that Minnie had ‘better order a strait waistcoat [straitjacket] in case the possession of it [the ‘precious certificate’] should involve any extravagances’. He concludes one letter:

  Ever with fervent

  lover-love and

  enduring husband-love

  Your own

  Edward

  In another letter, mentioning the gift of a cameo bracelet to Minnie from Mr Martin, he enthuses in a flurry of underlining: ‘you must wear it on the day – the 23rd you know – the 23rd the 23rd the 23rd’, a few days later surrounding that magical ‘23rd’ with a bursting halo of lines, so that it appears on the page like an explosion, or a holy star.

  Edward wrote of his delight at receiving the passport for their wedding journey, as it described him as the Revd E. W. Benson, ‘a British Subject travelling on the Continent with his wife’. Just five days before the wedding, he sent Minnie a series of solemn promises, written in German, and ‘set to my hand, dear love, that I will do my part faithfully and lovingly in keeping them, and if I ever transgress show me this letter and I will beg your forgiveness on my knees. . . ’ He asked Minnie to copy out the promises and sign a similar undertaking, adding a cautionary ‘I know that I never shall have to show them to you again’.

  A SOLEMN AND PERSONAL CONTRACT

  1. From this day forth you will live for me and I shall live for you; we shall never keep the slightest secret from each other, and even if we do go astray in this, we will confess at once.

  2. We shall never reveal anything of our domestic affairs to anyone.

  3. Finally, we shall never be angry with each other, and not even act badly towards one another in jest.

  The eighteen-year-old Minnie was rather plain, with full cheeks and a snub nose. Her thick hair, parted in the centre, hung in two large loops over her ears, and was gathered at the nape of her neck. Her hands were chubby, her figure dumpy, but there was a mischievous glint in her eyes, and her lips toyed tantalizingly with smiles. She was quite capable of teasing her husband-to-be, telling him she had gone without him to a ball, though had not ‘danced with a single gentleman except in a Sir Roger de Coverley, and that one was Earnest [sic] Coleridge of the age of 11’. Edward was sometimes startled at the change in his little Minnie. ‘Wherever learned you that sweet charm (so dear to a bridegroom) to be at once so maidenly and so wifely,’ he wrote to her after a visit to Rugby from Wellington College, where he had already begun preparations for the opening of the school. ‘Wherever learned you to be so maiden-modest yet so wifely-frank, and so womanly-free and so unprudish-pure?’ He marvelled at the emergence of the woman he had both moulded and yearned for for seven long years. ‘When you loved me with the child love you speak of now – oh how sadly sometimes I used to wonder when it would ripen, and be all like the little flashes of woman-love that used to flash out sometimes in the midst.’ He looked forward to the night when ‘we shall sleep in Paris, married life with all its untried bliss will be a reality and no dream or imagination any more’.

  MARY BENSON, AGED NINETEEN

  Minnie was sent off to sit for a pre-wedding photo-portrait, with an appointment at noon ‘because from 12 to 3 is the best time for the sun’. Mrs Sidgwick treated her to a shopping spree in London. Minnie was as excited as a child with her silks and laces, her little light-brown jacket, her wide hat trimmed with white ribbon, her trinkets and fineries. She delighted in the moment. She bathed in the sense of making Edward so happy, and she ‘put away the future’.

  ON BOOKSHELVES IN THE YEAR OF THE BENSONS’ MARRIAGE

  Edward Benson and Mary Sidgwick were married on 23 June 1859, at St Andrew’s Church in Rugby. Dr Frederick Temple, the new headmaster of Rugby School, conducted the ceremony. The couple set off immediately for Folkestone and the Continent.

  A FINAL BACKWARD GLANCE FROM MRS BENSON’S RETROSPECTIVE DIARY

  So childishly, confidently, without stay or guide, though trusting in God. . . only childish in understanding I married that June morning. . .

  . . . danced and sang into matrimony, with a loving, but exacting, a believing and therefore expecting spirit 12 years older, much stronger, more passionate, and whom I didn’t really love – I wonder I didn’t go more wrong. . .

  PART II

  MRS BENSON

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Revd E. W. Benson, ‘travelling on the Continent with his wife’, headed first to Paris. Mary bought a diary from the Papeterie Maquet on the Rue de la Paix, most likely at Edward’s instigation, as it is Edward’s voice that echoes from the pages. While Edward had no sympathy at all for music (his rendition of hymns in church produced ‘a buzzing noise that bore no relation to any known melody’) or for secular painting, he was absolutely indefatigable when it came to ecclesiastical art and churches. Dutifully, Mary records in her diary opinions on architecture, as the couple march through church after church. She mouths phrases as hollow as those of a child repeating what it has overheard its parents say, passing off their wisdom as its own. ‘The west front, which we come upon first, is exceedingly various in detail, though not at all over-ornamented,’ she inton
es. ‘There is none of that ugly matching which is so often seen in Churches of the present day,’ she continues, preaching against ‘everything weak and modern’.

  To the diary, Mary confides not a word on love or marriage. She barely mentions Edward. Only in a much later journal does she recall her feelings of those first few days of married life:

  Wedding night – Folkstone [sic] – crossing – oh how my heart sank – I daren’t let it. . . misery – knowing that I felt nothing of what I knew people ought to feel – knowing how disappointing this must be to Ed., how evidently disappointed he was – trying to be rapturous – not succeeding, feeling so inexpressibly lonely and young. . .

  REVD E. W. BENSON AND HIS WIFE

  Edward’s passionate nature can hardly have come as a surprise to Mary, but she had lived for the moment, had ‘put away the future’. It caught up with her in Paris: ‘How I cried at Paris! poor lonely child, having lived in the present only. . . The nights! I can’t think how I lived.’ In retrospect she wondered ‘how hard it was for Edward. He restrained his passionate nature for 7 years, and then got me!’

  Duty to her mother had been supplanted by duty to her husband, and Mary did her best to fulfil that duty. It did not take Edward long to break the third of the promises he had made her before their wedding – ‘the first hard word’ came as early as Paris, over laundry arrangements. It is hard to imagine that Mary produced Edward’s letter in response to his anger, or required him – as he had vowed he would – to apologize on his knees.

  THREE VICTORIAN HONEYMOONS

  Amelia Sedley, newly Mrs George Osborne, contemplates her childhood bed

  She looked at the little white bed, which had been hers a few days before, and thought she would like to sleep in it that night, and wake, as formerly, with her mother smiling over her in the morning. Then she thought with terror of the great funereal damask pavilion in the vast and dingy state bedroom, which awaited her at the grand hotel in Cavendish Square. Dear little white bed! How many a long night she had wept on its pillow! How she had despaired and hoped to die there. . . Kind mother! How patiently and tenderly she had watched round that bed! She went and knelt down by the bedside; and there this wounded and timorous, but gentle and loving soul, sought for consolation, where as yet, it must be owned, our little girl had but seldom looked for it.

  From Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847–8

  Dorothea Casaubon is found sobbing while on her wedding journey in Rome

  Dorothea had no distinctly shapen grievance that she could state even to herself; and in the midst of her confused thought and passion, the mental act that was struggling forth into clearness was a self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault of her own spiritual poverty. She had married the man of her choice, and with the advantage over most girls that she had contemplated her marriage chiefly as the beginning of new duties. . . that new real future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material from the endless minutiae by which her view of Mr Casaubon and her wifely relation, now that she was married to him, was gradually changing with the secret motion of a watch-hand from what it had been in her maiden dream. It was too early yet for her fully to recognize or at least admit the change, still more for her to have readjusted that devotedness which was so necessary a part of her mental life that she was almost sure sooner or later to recover it. Permanent rebellion, the disorder of a life without some loving reverent resolve, was not possible to her; but she was now in an interval when the very force of her nature heightened its confusion.

  From Middlemarch by George Eliot, 1871-2

  Married off by her guardian to the first man to express an interest in her, young Janey discovers the nature of married life

  Janey, being young, and shy, and strange, was a good deal frightened, horrified, and even revolted, by her first discoveries of what it meant to be in love. She had made tremendous discoveries in the course of a week. She had found out that Mr Rosendale, her husband, was in love with her beauty, but as indifferent to herself as any of the persons she had quitted to give herself to him. He did not care at all what she thought, how she felt, what she liked or disliked. He did not care even for her comfort, or that she should be pleased and happy. . . He took it for granted that, being his wife, she would naturally be pleased with what pleased him, and his mind went no further than this. Therefore, as far as Janey liked the things he liked, all went well enough. She had these and no other. Her wishes were not consulted further, nor did he know that he failed in any way towards her. . . he played billiards in the evening in the hotels to which he took her on their wedding journey; or he overwhelmed her with caresses from which she shrank in disgust, almost terror. That was all that being in love meant, she found; and to say that she was disappointed cruelly was to express in the very mildest way the dreadful downfall of all her expectations and hopes. . .

  From A Story of a Wedding Tour by Margaret Oliphant, written during the 1870s

  The Bensons hurtled onwards to Switzerland. Edward travelled at a relentless tempo. ‘There are some interesting places in the neighbourhood,’ noted Mary, somewhat wistfully, at Rheims, ‘which we had not time to go and see.’ Phrases such as ‘we intended to go’ and ‘we determined to try and reach it’ pepper her narrative as the sights flash by on a marathon twelve-hour journey to Strasbourg. Even there, the Bensons did not stop: ‘There we had such a fine bustle! Edward rushed off to get the tickets, while I bolted into the refreshment room, for the train started for Basle almost immediately.’

  At Basle, they stopped for a night at the grand Hotel des Trois Rois, where from their bedroom window the young bride could admire ‘the mighty Rhine’, which ‘rolled along as it seemed beneath our very feet, with a murmuring deep music, glittering in the moonlight’. Next day, sitting in the garden of the equally luxurious Hotel Baur au Lac in Zurich, she stared out across the lake, the first (she notes in her travel diary) she had ever seen, until late in the evening, ‘watching the red light of the sun. . . fade away into pale moonlight’. Mary Benson had never been abroad before, and she marvelled at what she saw. As she and Edward travelled into the Alps, her diary finally finds her own voice. She inhales pine forests ‘fragrant with the rich smell of rain’, glories in wild roses and tufts of Alpine gentians; she is transfixed by ‘a roaring river. . . rushing down, foaming and turbid from some far-off glacier’. An Alpine horn blows a ‘scale of notes, wild and sweet, up and down – and wilder and sweeter and more faint, the mountains give back the notes, multiplied over and over again’. Pretty Swiss girls catch her eye, decked out for festivity in silver chains and trinkets; a ‘charming, motherly woman in a blue gown and spectacles’, who waits on her at an inn, pleases her immensely; with chambermaids she collapses in giggles at her own clumsy attempts to speak German.

  After Edward’s stifling lectures on architecture all the way through France, the Alps rekindled Mary’s verve and sense of adventure. Off she set along mountain trails, ‘armed with a magnificent Alpenstock’ (Edward ‘scorning such aid’), and earning the ‘wondrous compliment’ from the guide that she was a veritable Gamsenjäger (mountain-goat hunter). She crossed a glacier, admiring the ‘glorious blue-green colour of the ice in the crevasses’, tried her hand at rowing on Lake Lucerne, took a dip in its ‘clear blue waters’ (the most enjoyable bathe she had ever had), and, despite the ‘fearful prophecies on Edward’s part concerning the damage that was likely to accrue’, went sledging on a patch of snow. She found chamois delicious to eat, and improvised with a handkerchief when she needed a veil against the sun. On one walk the young couple had to take shelter from a storm in a country cottage, with three ‘nice-looking, intelligent lads and a little demure maiden’; on another she persuaded Edward to buy her ‘a noble little St Bernard’s puppy’, which in fact turned out not to be of that breed at all.

  Edward and Mary joined two other newly-weds, the Stephens from Reading, for mule rides and Alpine walks; on one such, they left the other couple b
ehind, ‘leaping and running down the steep descent’ to the edge of a glacier, where they sat among rhododendrons to gaze down on the ice, as they waited for their companions and guide to catch up. Edward’s school and college friend Joseph Lightfoot arrived for a while, with a large party. They went on carriage rides with some Americans (a nation Mrs Sidgwick held in intense disdain), and encountered swarms of insects which caused the ladies to point and scream, and the gentlemen to come to their rescue, walloping with maps and guidebooks.

  At night they sat around the log fires of inns, talked with other guests, dozed, and danced the occasional polka (something else of which Mrs Sidgwick deeply disapproved). Mary finished and enjoyed Charles Kingsley’s rather bloodthirsty Westward Ho!, which she had brought with her to read, and acquired a copy of Thackeray’s recently published The Virginians, which depressed her ‘by the dreadful picture of human nature that it gave’.

  Towards the end of July, the Reverend and Mrs Benson packed what they needed into a small carpet-bag, sent their heavier luggage on ahead, and began the journey back to England, settled married life, and Wellington College.

  CHAPTER SIX

  After a brief stay with Mrs Sidgwick in Rugby, Edward and Mary left for Wokingham, in Berkshire. Wellington College was four miles out of town, set in a desolate part of Bagshot Heath. Mary sat in her bonnet and shawl, amidst the undulating sea of her skirts, as their carriage trundled them across scrubland and heather, over a sandy hill covered in Scotch fir and sword-grass. Her new home rose before her, a startling rendition of a French château, gaunt and imposing with its unweathered red brick and pale Bath stone. Flanking towers with leaden tops gave the unpleasant sensation of ‘following one everywhere, it seemed, with hollow melancholy eyes’. Beside the school lay a marsh that Edward intended to turn into bathing pools, beyond that the raised plateau of The Ridges. To the east, the chimney of a stoneworks belched black fumes, surrounded by a garden of broken carvings; to the west was a wild forest known as Bearwood. From the school gates sandy paths ran through groves of pine and across untamed heathland, where, in the distance, stood a cluster of brick kilns with smoky tops. Just over a mile away, the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum was being built. Sandhurst Military College lay a little farther off. The carriage rode up a recently planted avenue of Wellingtonia trees, into grounds where heather bound in bundles stood ready for removal, and the rhododendrons Edward had ordered were just beginning to flourish.