Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  The Prince Consort, Prince Albert, had enthusiastically appropriated the plan by the Duke of Wellington Memorial Fund to establish a new public school as an enduring monument to the Iron Duke, who had died in 1852. Prince Albert wanted to found a school to rival Eton and Marlborough, based on the classical curriculum and functioning along sound German educational lines. Preference for admission would be given to the sons of deceased army officers, who would be offered a first-rate education at affordable fees. By 1858, the school building was already well under way but Albert had rejected all the candidates from a list of over thirty men submitted to him for the post of headmaster. Then he received a letter from Dr Frederick Temple, headmaster of Rugby School, wholeheartedly recommending one of his young masters as ‘intellectually a very superior man, a first-rate scholar’ and ‘one of the best teachers I have ever met with’. Edward White Benson’s name was already on the lips of the important and influential. He had been proposed as chaplain to the Bishop of London, commended as having ‘very pleasing manners’, being the best of his Cambridge contemporaries, ‘a very good scholar and divine’ and a ‘thoroughly religious man’.

  After several interviews, and having requested a long letter outlining Edward’s vision of the new school, the Prince offered him the position. The new Council of Wellington College confirmed the appointment (though Edward arrived late to meet them, wandering lost through the corridors of the House of Lords) at the handsome salary of £800 a year. When the meeting was over, Edward wrote immediately to Mary to boast that the governors had accepted all his proposals bar the construction of swimming pools, for which there were insufficient funds, with ‘the Prince, like a trump as he is, arguing well for every one of them. . . and, when any discussion arose, desiring the Secretary to read my letter aloud’.

  Just before Edward and Mary were married, Prince Albert had sent the young headmaster-to-be on a journey to Prussia and the German states to see how schools should be run. Edward was not impressed. The tour, he wrote to his friend Lightfoot, ‘was dullish work, though not uninteresting when contemplated from a sufficient distance, nor uninstructive from the same standpoint’, but he was convinced of the ‘vast superiority’ of English over German schools, and thought ‘our run of scholars vastly superior, in sense, feeling and extent of reading to theirs’. Edward had his own ideas about education. He was inspired by the methods of Dr Arnold and of his old headmaster James Prince Lee, and he was not going to countenance rule by committee.

  SOME VICTORIAN VIEWS ON THE GERMANS

  The land of our Saxon and Teutonic forefathers. . . [was] the birthplace of the most moral races of men that the world has yet seen – of the soundest laws – the least violent passions, and the fairest domestic and civil virtues. . . the regenerating element in modern Europe. . .

  Dr Thomas Arnold, on arriving at Cologne in 1828, appearing to disagree with his disciple

  The great evil of Oxford is the narrowness and isolation of one study from another, of one part of a study from the other. We are so far below the level of the German Ocean that I fear one day we shall be utterly deluged.

  Benjamin Jowett, later Master of Balliol, in a letter to Roundell Palmer MP, 1847

  The Germans have taken the lead in historical enquiries, and they laugh at results which are got by groping about in woods with a pocket-compass while they have made good roads.

  Will Ladislaw criticizes Mr Casaubon’s outmoded methods, in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, 1871–2

  The headmaster and Mrs Benson settled into the Master’s Lodge, beside the Great Gate. Comely and kind, Mary soon became known among the boys as ‘Mother Benjy’, even though, at eighteen, she was barely older than the Sixth-Formers. The boys adored Mother Benjy. They hated and feared their headmaster, and had good cause to. Edward’s reputation for violence and for ferocious beatings preceded him from Rugby. Headmaster Benson dominated his realm. As he walked the grounds, porters clipped to attention, boys saluted, gossip ceased. His masters were ‘dragooned as diligently as his pupils’. The headmaster fervently held that education was not merely a matter of honing the intellect, but of moral perfection – and he had ‘a microscopic eye for the smallest particulars’, as well as an unrestrained temper. He instituted Dr Arnold’s system of prefects, giving them wide disciplinary powers. Every morning he invited two senior boys to breakfast, to report to him any misdemeanours that might have escaped his attention. He expected them to prowl and to monitor. Any evasion of their duty exacted the severest penalties.

  E. W. BENSON, MASTER OF WELLINGTON COLLEGE IN 1867

  Drawn firmly into Edward’s orbit, Mary set about married life, feeling ‘still no real love, but influence’, and displaying for her mother (who came on frequent visits), to her husband and the world, her characteristic sunniness. ‘I would have died rather than anyone should have thought for a moment I wasn’t happy,’ she confessed. Before they were married, Edward had written to her from the school, where he had held back on any decoration for the Master’s Lodge, saying that if there was one thing he had set his heart on, it was ‘that you should settle in your own house all for yourself and according to your own ideas, I want no-one to interfere with you.’ But straightforward generosity of spirit was not Edward’s style, and he went on more characteristically, ‘if you love me you will manage it so’.

  In his Manual of Domestic Economy, published three years before the Bensons moved into the Lodge, J. H. Walsh suggested that a well-to-do family, with two servants, furnishing a three-bedroom house would need a sum of £585. Taste and decoration were not personal concerns, but defined according to status and position. The more prosperous a couple, the greater the percentage of their income would go on the writing desks and sewing tables, the sofas, ottomans and armchairs, the antimacassars, tablecloths and napkins required to make up a respectable home of appropriate appearance. A family with £100 a year might expect to spend £83 on furnishings, while 88 per cent of a £250 income would be swallowed up, and 117 per cent of £500. Edward’s handsome £800 salary put him near the top of J. H. Walsh’s scale – £1,000 a year, which required £1,391 to establish a home. It was important that the Lodge should be furnished in a manner appropriate to Edward’s position. Aristocracy, even royalty, might be received in its drawing room, and correct style amounted almost to a moral duty. Mr Martin would surely have helped out financially, Mrs Sidgwick, too, and surplus from the Blue House eased the situation, but in the early days of their marriage Edward and Mary most likely shared the lot of two other Victorian newly-weds, a young couple named the Berkeleys; their meals (wrote Maud Berkeley, on moving to London with her new husband) ‘became meetings of Council, where we debated the virtues of mahogany against teak, planned attacks on furniture warehouses, and worried, worried, worried’. Edward and Mary’s first major marital disputes were about money. That, and the way that Mary managed the household.

  Mary’s chief role was to keep the home neat and clean – society considered this both a virtue and an occupation in itself. She had servants, but she was supposed to advise and instruct them, to check and reprove, to order supplies correctly, to govern what was spent, and to pay bills on time. Mrs Beeton, whose Book of Household Management was published the year after Mary moved in to the Lodge, likened the mistress of a house to the commander of an army, asserting: ‘A woman must rule her household or be ruled by it.’ But Mary’s duties as daughter in the Blue House had not prepared her for those as wife in the Master’s Lodge. Little more than a girl, she was timid and uncertain. Mrs Sidgwick was rich, and Mary had a taste for good things, was extravagant, and loathed doing the accounts. ‘I put them off, let them accumulate, then daren’t bring them [to Edward],’ she admitted. ‘I knew it was the one thing he dreaded and disliked – but I disliked the doing them and dreaded the gloom they always brought – and so, cowardly and improvident, I put them off and lived in the present.’

  Mary bought a small notebook with a brown marbled cover, and began – in fits and starts
– to keep a diary, rather like the travel journal she had so valiantly struggled to keep up on her honeymoon. After her ‘usual morning duties’ she would sit down to the bills with an ‘I wish I could get them finished!’, easily to be distracted by a visitor before lunch, a crisis among the servants, or some confusion over what was owing to a tradesman, which would upset her calculations and her temper. On a number of occasions during the first years of her marriage, she secretly borrowed money from her brothers or from Mrs Sidgwick, to cover up a shortfall in the hope that Edward would not notice. At least once, Edward sat her down until way past midnight, forcing her to go through her books until totals balanced, so that tradesmen could be paid in the morning.

  Some mornings Mary found it hard to get up, cast down by the dull routine of it all. ‘Another blank day. Mist, mist, mist on the world and in my heart and life. . . The evening was a little better than this morning, but it is based on no solid foundation – Oh dear, O dear! My heart feels like a stone.’ She tried to stir up her mind to prevent stagnation, reading German with Edward (which made the task easier) and, on her own, tackling Plato, books on mathematics and theology. In a world just beginning to be challenged by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and in which rationalism was leading many people to rethink aspects of the Bible rather than abandon it altogether, Mary occasionally dipped into works which Edward thought heretical, but which for her ‘seemed to open my brain. . . and show me a long vista of intellectual delights’.

  Once Mary’s household duties were seen to, days passed ‘as days generally do here. A walk after lunch, and a quiet read in the evening.’ The walks were not gentle strolls. Edward would set off at a tremendous pace (with the heavily skirted Mary doing the best she could to keep up) and he continued at a gallop until he had burned off the fret of the morning’s work, only then reducing tempo. The marches – through woods, across heathland, up The Ridge and down again, would last at least two hours. Yet days all too easily sank into a round of ordering dinner menus, sponging bonnet ribbons, pointless embroidery – or simple dispirited idleness. ‘I think my thinking and reasoning powers are deteriorating with disuse,’ Mary complained. As the years crept by, she drew up timetables to impose discipline on her daily routine in the hope of preventing time from draining away unused, but the dullness of everyday tasks seemed to engulf her and produce stasis. ‘Ah, my life is wasted,’ she noted in her diary as early as 1860, a few weeks after she had turned nineteen. ‘I scarcely know whether I can change now or not.’ The rest of the page is blank.

  Edward was also frequently downcast. His work at Wellington caused him great anxiety. He found these sons of soldiers coarse, unintelligent and difficult to mould. Parents (with some justification) protested at the poor quality of the boys’ food. At every turn, Edward clashed with the Board of Governors. He became convinced that they were hostile to him and on the lookout for the first sign of failure. Confiding this to his favourite master, and admitting that he found the Sixth (whom he had to teach himself) heavy and dim, a dead weight he could not budge, Edward burst into tears. ‘I wish I were more fit for my work. It is too great a work for me,’ he confessed to Mary. ‘I feel I am making a sad muddle of everything.’ The neuralgia and dark depressions that had afflicted him at Rugby intensified. His moods and furious silences affected all around him, and it fell to Mary to raise him from his low moments.

  Diversions did occur. Mary travelled to London – on one occasion to see the great tightrope walker Blondin at the Crystal Palace. Together with Mr Martin, the couple went on holiday in another whirl through France. Mary’s travel diary again became an inventory of church architecture. By the time they reached Nantes, she was exhausted. After a ‘cursory view’ of the cathedral with Edward before breakfast, supplemented by a ‘closer survey’ immediately afterwards, Mary had had enough: ‘I was so tired and knocked up that I could not look at anything, and what I did see I could scarcely remember, so rested all day till nearly evening, when I went to see a new church with Edward (transition between Norman and early French).’ Directly afterwards, the party set off for Angers and more churches, cloisters, chapels, hospices and the museum (where the Fine Arts section was closed, so they viewed Natural History instead). Further on, at Ponts-de-Cé, Mary noted, with a touch of relief, that ‘there was nothing to see but the bridge’. She records with barely suppressed glee how Edward himself fell asleep sitting on a wall in the middle of sightseeing, with gusto how French fisherwomen dig for eels, and adds a wry note that they listened to a ‘long quaint sermon on Patience, which was very appropriate’. But on the whole her journal is a chronicle of how she obliterates her own desires and throws all her energy into pleasing Edward, recording what she ought to be interested in to make herself more worthy, to advance ‘the improvement of her life’.

  Back at Wellington, Mary watched school football matches, approving that ‘all the screaming and shouting that used to be heard has given place to a severe silence, and the immense energy and spirit expressed in the boys faces, if you look at them close, shows that a good deal of the Rugby element has been introduced to the game’. Visitors to the Lodge offered Mary further diversion, and often intellectual stimulus. The Wellington schoolmasters came in twos and threes, after Edward’s Sunday-morning sermon or in the evenings for dinner. Mary particularly delighted in the company of the aptly named Mr Master, because he ‘supplied the very thing in which I have often thought the masters rather lacking – namely argumentativeness’. Indeed, Mr Master seemed very fond of it, ‘just for the sake of a sport’, and that made masters’ visits much livelier when he was there. Mary enjoyed a good argument, or rather she enjoyed ‘listening to an argument. It seems to stir my thinking powers up.’ It would not do for the headmaster’s wife to express too strong an opinion.

  Other visitors came in their scores – over fifty all told one summer. ‘What walks, what talks, what mirth!’ exalted Mary. Old friends came from afar, and the better class of neighbour, parents, people on school business, dignitaries and occasionally, before his death in 1861, the Prince Consort himself. Mary found courtiers, ‘whose talk consisted chiefly of little polite sentences, and pleasant stories of the Queen, Prince and Royal Family and mixed with a little mild politics’, rather dull, but was excited by the surprise arrival of Lord Derby, the former Tory Prime Minister, soon after the collapse of his second administration. Derby came with his erstwhile Home Secretary, Spencer Walpole, and his First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir John Pakington, who was considering sending his son to Wellington College. Swept into this grand company for mid-morning tea, Mary was attracted by Lord Derby’s ‘wonderfully bright blue eyes, that seemed to take in everything almost before it was spoken’, by his expansive forehead and a mouth that bespoke sharp wit and ‘an enormous amount of energy’. Most of all she was impressed by ‘the way he took anyone up if they made a mistake, or came down upon them if they could not understand a thing’. Sir John Pakington was ‘not half so sharp at taking things in at once as Lord Derby’, but all in all it was a meeting that ‘seemed to inspirit one, and make one think’.

  Lady Blanche Balfour (mother of a future Prime Minister, and of Mary’s brother Henry’s wife-to-be) blew in with Lady Salisbury during high winds and torrential rain one February morning, and was ‘as hearty and as merry as you would wish to see’. She had read a great deal and thought about what she had read, and could talk of all the news of the day ‘in a spirited and interested’ way. The stammering, tobacco-addicted, wickedly witty Charles Kingsley, whose Westward Ho! Mary had so enjoyed on honeymoon, was rector of Eversley, a brisk walk away. He and his wife Frances, who had black shining eyes and a roguish smile, became particularly close friends. The Bensons and Kingsleys made sure to dine at least once a month together, alone – ‘on the heights’ Mrs Kingsley called it, for all the mirth and good conversation. Soon she was ‘Fanny’ and Mary was ‘Minnie’ (Edward and intimate friends often still used her childhood name). At Wellington, Charles and Edward had lively
, laughter-filled discussions, pacing energetically outdoors, or tucked away someplace where Kingsley could enjoy his pipe ‘without deb-deb-debauching the boys’ – a daring occupation, because Edward loathed smoking.

  Gradually, the shy Mrs Benson assumed the mantle of local hostess a little more comfortably. On hot summer evenings a table might be laid for dinner guests out on the lawn, the white tablecloth glimmering and dappled under the beech trees, the chink of fork on plate playing lightly over a warm continuo of conversation. On winter’s nights, on high occasions, gentlemen shed coats and hats to warm themselves by the hall fire as they arrived, and the ladies, cocooned in plaid and shawls, disappeared into Mary’s sitting room, to re-emerge as silk butterflies in pink and green and purple. Then, arm in arm, couples processed into the dining room, with its round-backed mahogany chairs, tapestry curtains, engraving of The Last Supper (alongside one of the Prince Consort) and heavy oak sideboard made from two fine sixteenth-century altar panels.