Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  Light from tall, branched candlesticks danced over silver and Spode, glittered off the turbaned Arab, camel and palm tree of a splendid epergne (ornamental centrepiece). Four entrées (two ‘brown’ of beef, mutton or venison, two ‘white’ of chicken, brains or rabbit) followed soup and preceded a joint – carved by Mary, rather than Edward, which was thought daring and rather modern. Then came birds, game or duck and heavy puddings, Stilton and lighter desserts, before Mary caught the ladies’ eyes, fans snapped shut, and the women rose and like globules of quicksilver came together and flowed out to the drawing room, leaving the men to their male talk and port.

  ‘WILLIE WE HAVE MISSED YOU’

  Later, the gentlemen rejoined their wives, and ‘there was certain to be a lady present who sang very sweetly, or had a lovely “touch” on the piano. . . [who] was not sure if she had brought her music, but it always turned out that her husband had done so and had left the portfolio with his hat and coat in the hall’. Explaining that she was terribly out of practice, the lady would begin to play or sing, while the audience ‘assumed expressions of regretful melancholy if the music was sad, or pensive gaiety if it was lively, and fixed their eyes on various points of the ceiling’. Once, feeling the mood rather dull, Mary herself was bold enough to sing ‘Willie We Have Missed You’, ‘Wait for the Wagon’ and ‘Long Time Ago’. She was not quite certain whether she was wise to do this, but ‘I did not vex Edward, and I think that is as good a criterion as I need have’.

  Edward’s sister Ada came frequently to stay, as did Mrs Sidgwick. Mary’s brothers Henry and Arthur visited, too, and one winter’s night in 1864, when Edward was away, they held a séance. Mary was fascinated, and thought she might be a medium.

  Even before Darwin had published the book that set scholars debating and sent a shudder – of outrage or terror – down many a theologian’s spine, among the educated talk had turned to agnosticism. A swell of doubt gathered force throughout the decade. As certainties were borne away, many grasped at spiritualism for rescue. For most, attempts at contact with the afterlife were a palliative to religious insecurity, an assurance of an existence beyond the material world. Others were more sceptical, and, picking up on the language of science, referred to their ‘psychical research’.

  Henry Sidgwick, who had followed Edward to Cambridge and was now a fellow of Trinity, was a young man of merciless scepticism and rigorous intellect, yet he found that although ‘the scientific atmosphere’ had paralysed his ‘old theological trains of thought and sentiment’, he could not discard them completely. A few years earlier, he had abandoned all thought of a clerical career, but felt a deep sense of loss. ‘I still hunger and thirst after orthodoxy,’ he wrote, ‘but I am, I trust, firm not to barter my intellectual birthright for a mess of mystical pottage.’ Henry took a deep investigative interest in the occult. He had joined the Ghost Society that Edward had helped to establish as a student, and was in the process of developing it into the respected Society for Psychical Research. Henry felt an intense responsibility for the effect his scepticism might have on others, and he tried to raise such topics with Edward, whom as a boy at Rugby he had revered. Edward was adept at ‘avoiding points of fundamental controversy so that one never felt them to be avoided’, and that made Henry reluctant to ‘degrade the conversation consciously and deliberately into a debate’. Although Henry may also have held back in discussions with his clever and enquiring sister, he was – in the interests of psychical research – prepared to hold an after-dinner séance with her. Edward, when he returned home, was furious.

  Despite his student-day dalliance with the Ghost Society, Edward was ‘very vexed and spoke very strongly’ to Mary, denouncing spiritualism as ‘either a sin or a folly’. Later he would dismiss its manifestations as ‘phenomena of a class which appears mostly in uncivilised states of society, and. . . in persons of little elevation of intellect’, but for the present he forbad Mary further séances, speaking ‘harshly’ and telling her that if her behaviour were known, it would harm his reputation. ‘I can’t feel it is so wrong,’ Mary retaliated, ‘when undertaken in a reverent spirit.’ She resigned herself to the notion that – for the time being at least – further spiritualist investigations must cease, but she remained unconvinced by Edward’s reasoning, in particular by his appeal to his reputation. ‘I don’t know why it is,’ she noted in her diary, ‘but I always rebel against this argument.’ That winter’s-night séance at Wellington was by no means the last in which Mary took part.

  THE DOUBT: ‘CAN THESE DRY BONES LIVE?’ BY HENRY BOWLER, 1855

  From time to time, Mary would make a note or two in her diary. Her resolutions to make regular entries in the journal were frequently broken. Her apathy and sense of failure as a wife were persistent themes, as well as her aversion to bills, and a constant determination to do her duty, to please Edward, not to fail or disappoint him – as she pared away at her own personality, effacing herself completely in his favour. ‘This ought to be (and to all appearance will be) a time of great trouble and sorrow for me,’ she wrote on Ash Wednesday shortly before she turned twenty-three:

  I have most woefully neglected my bills, having, in spite of Edward’s constant requests and my own most wretched sense of duties undone, gone on from day to day, always deceiving myself and imagining that this day had its own peculiar duties, and that tomorrow I would do them. The truth is, I believe, that I dreaded them. It is cowardly I know, and now that I have done them and am going to give them to Edward this afternoon, I find they amount to over £200. What he will say I scarcely dare think, and to crown it all Mamma is here, and it will grieve her terribly. If we were alone, I could bear these hours better, but to have Mamma as witness and make her so unhappy is almost intolerable. I know she takes my part, and that makes it worse still. . . I never again will let my accounts get the least crooked. This I trust is final. And now I am going to keep a regular diary all through Lent, hoping that I may be able to have some true Easter joy and Easter happiness.

  Neither resolution – for the diary nor the accounts – held for long. Mary put off the confession for a few days, and with it current entries in the diary end abruptly.

  Edward, on his part, had also broken promises. The third pledge of the written vow he had given Mary before they were married – never to be angry with her – had not survived their wedding journey. Now his spells of temper became more frequent, and the second pledge – to keep domestic affairs private – also appeared to be forgotten. Not only was Mrs Sidgwick witness to Edward’s displeasure with his wife, but his sister Ada, too, and even a visiting Mr Martin if he happened to be in the room when Edward lashed out. Edward complained of Mary’s ‘want of tenderness’, of her inability to ‘pick him up’ when he was downhearted, and in particular found fault with her housekeeping. The upsets that Mary called ‘jarrings’ could seethe on for days, the silent simmering erupting at intervals to the boil.

  One morning, as Mary was copying out a letter to Lord Derby (in addition to her domestic tasks, she was Edward’s de facto secretary), Edward came storming into the room and ‘made some very strong remarks on the subject of the Antimacassars’. Mary had to admit to herself that ‘they certainly did want changing very much’, but the scale of Edward’s reaction to something so trivial was derailing. ‘It destroys one’s whole peace of mind to be spoken to in that way, if one thinks about it, and if one does not I suppose it does one no good.’ What made matters worse was that ‘Ada was in the room too – I don’t think he knows what effect his words produce.’

  The ice set in for nearly a week. ‘This morning was as bad as the two preceding ones,’ Mary wrote two days after the first explosion. When Edward again rebuked her for her carelessness, she and Ada simply, silently, left the room. Later Edward and Mary read German to each other, ‘but there was another contretemps before going to bed’. The following morning after breakfast he tackled her on the matter of an overcharged bill. Ada was still in the room.

 
‘It is a duty to notice things of that kind even though they give one trouble,’ said Edward. ‘But some people shrink from things of an unpleasant nature. Especially if they have fat chins.’

  Riled, Mary rose from the table. ‘I knew you would say something of that kind,’ she said, hurt. ‘I won’t stay.’

  ‘If you leave the room, you will not see me again today,’ replied Edward in a perfectly even tone. At this, Ada rose and left. Edward continued, with resolute calm.

  ‘It is a duty of the mistress of a household to correct everything going awry in it,’ he said. ‘One is bound to notice mistakes, and to order a household as perfectly as possible. It is a law of God that cleanliness and order lead to godliness.’

  Mary listened silently.

  ‘And now,’ Edward concluded, ‘I think you need not be pettish with me.’

  The next day was Sunday. In his sermon in the school chapel, Edward preached that people were divided into three sorts, the followers of Pleasure, of Comfort and of Duty – and it was clear with whom Good lay.

  ‘I always feel even when he speaks severely, that he really does it for my sake,’ Mary wrote miserably in her diary. She blamed herself for ‘having behaved badly’ and assured herself that she ‘went away much happier’ for the reprimand. Edward often spoke to her in this manner, saying (she noted in her diary) ‘among many other things of the same kind, a paraphrase of:

  “Oh but she will love him truly

  He shall have a cheerful home

  She will order all things duly

  When beneath his roof they come.”’

  Mary still knew her Tennyson. She had most likely also read Coventry Patmore’s paean to the perfect woman, The Angel in the House, which had been appearing in instalments throughout her engagement and the early years of her marriage, achieving immense popularity as a statement of the Victorian ideals of wives and daughters. Yet Mary had to struggle against her desire to recline on the sofa reading Shelley, rather than doing the accounts or saying her prayers, and against her impulse to answer Edward back. ‘A great difficulty is I cannot obey as I should,’ she noted. ‘Please God to help me.’ A nugget of rebellion remained.

  IDEAL WIVES

  A woman’s ‘highest duty is so often to suffer and be still’.

  Mrs Sarah Stickney Ellis in

  The Daughters of England, Their Position in

  Society, Character and Responsibilities, 1845

  How important a work is mine. To be a cheerful, loving wife, and forbearing, fond, wise, thoughtful mother, striving ever against self-indulgence and irritability, which often sorely beset me. As a mistress to be kind, gentle, thoughtful both for the bodies and souls of my servants. As a visitor to the poor to spare myself no trouble so as to relieve wisely and well.

  Marion Jane Bradley, wife of Edward

  Benson’s colleague at Rugby School, George

  Granville Bradley, in her diary c. 1854

  The Wife’s Tragedy

  Man must be pleased; but him to please

  Is woman’s pleasure; down the gulf

  Of his condoled necessities

  She casts her best, she flings herself,

  How often flings for nought, and yokes

  Her heart to an icicle or whim,

  Whose each impatient word provokes

  Another, not from her, but him;

  While she, too gentle even to force

  His penitence by kind replies,

  Waits by expecting his remorse,

  With pardon in her pitying eyes;

  And if he once, by shame oppress’d,

  A comfortable word confers,

  She leans and weeps against his breast,

  And seems to think the sin was hers. . .

  From Canto IX of Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House, published in instalments between 1854 and 1863

  A Husband’s Predicament

  I married her, thinking her so young and affectionate that I might influence her as I chose, and make of her just such a wife as I wanted. It appeared that she married me thinking she could make of me just the sort of husband she wanted. I was grieved and disappointed in finding I could not change her, and she was humiliated and irritated at finding she could not change me. . . I soon began to observe characteristics which gave me so much grief and anxiety that I wrote to her father saying that there was slight nervous affection of the brain. [The principal cause of which] was her always thinking that I ought to attend her, instead of herself attending me.

  John Ruskin’s ‘Statement to his Proctor’

  prepared for the suit brought against him

  by his wife to annul their marriage, 1854

  The voice of a dissenter

  Man, on the other hand. . . seeks to find in his wife, a sort of upper servant, or female valet, who is to wait upon him, attend to his wants, instinctively anticipate his wishes, and study his comfort, and who is to live for the sole purpose of seeing him well-fed, well-lodged, and well-pleased!

  Ann Richelieu in Can Women Regenerate Society?, 1844

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The first child came a little over a year after the Bensons were married, when Mary was still nineteen. Martin was born in August 1860, followed by Arthur in 1862, Nellie in 1863, then Maggie in 1865 and Fred in 1867. After Fred, Mary suffered something of a nervous collapse. In 1871 Hugh was born. After that, Mary broke down completely. Throughout the years at Wellington, as Mary learned to run the household, hide her shyness, and assume the roles of hostess and Edward’s secretary; as she struggled with the temptation to put off doing the accounts, repressed any feelings of rebellion and moulded herself to Edward’s will, she was almost continuously pregnant or recovering from childbirth.

  Mary’s old nurse Beth was summoned to Wellington when Martin was born. Elizabeth Cooper was just sixteen in 1834, when she had walked from her village to be interviewed by a young Mrs Sidgwick for the position of nursemaid to her first child. She was forty-two when, having looked after each of the Sidgwick children in turn, she arrived at the Master’s Lodge. Once again, Beth remained as the family grew.

  Ada visited frequently and offered companionship and support, but much of Mary’s listlessness and sapped will in the face of household duties was the product of sheer exhaustion. Arthur was a pale, sickly child, and although Beth bore most of the burden of looking after him, worry added to Mary’s ill-being. And the Lodge itself played a role: by the time Nellie arrived, thirteen months after Arthur, the family’s accommodation had simply become too crowded.

  ELIZABETH COOPER, ‘BETH’, WITH ONE OF HER BENSON CHARGES

  Soon after Maggie’s birth, the family moved to a new, more commodious Master’s Lodge, built to Edward’s design and satisfaction in the workaday Gothic style made fashionable by Ruskin. Commanding gables and tall chimneys signalled a fitting residence for the headmaster. A separate outdoor entrance to Edward’s study, main rooms grouped around a large hall with a gallery running round, and a grand drawing room complete with alabaster chimney-piece all added to its authority, but windows clotted by stone mullions meant the interior was dark. Sombre pitch-pine panelling, wallpaper of sullen green or grey, with shadowy vegetation and the odd spray of gold, and a chill lilac distemper (soon dappled with the sticky fingerprints of climbing children) did little to alleviate the gloom. Upstairs, the nursery was brighter and more airy. Fred, its fifth young inhabitant, joined the others a month after little Maggie’s second birthday.

  Just before Fred’s birth, Mary fell in love. This new love was not the timorous, dutiful commitment she felt for Edward. The flood of entirely another force engulfed her, something wilder, more reckless, more akin to her passionate ‘first friendship’ at the Blue House. Edward was like a god, evoking awe, demanding fealty, creating obligations, requiring abnegation of self. Mary’s new love tempted her to shrug off duty and delight in pleasure. The object of her passion was Emily Edwardes, a tall, gentle girl who lived with her widowed mother at Yately Hall, some tw
o miles distant from the school.

  Emily was not the first person to awaken Mary’s fervour after she married. Five years earlier, just after Arthur was born, George Ridding, the Tutor of Exeter College at Oxford, came down to examine at Wellington. Like Edward, Dr Ridding was an ardent upholder of the Muscular Christian educational ideals of Doctors Arnold and Temple, but he was a mild, tactful man. ‘How I liked him,’ Mary wrote, ‘was even too excited – head easily upset – Strange to remember the feelings he stirred – it was chaff, I think – on his part, certainly.’ But mostly, Mary lost her heart to women. There was a neighbour, Mrs Powell, ‘a fascinating little thing. . . I know I shall get very fond of her if I see much of her’ (which she did), and a Mrs Price, who came to luncheon one summer’s day at the old Lodge. ‘I do take to Mrs Price,’ Mary noted in her diary, ‘there is no denying it. I wonder if I am wrong in thinking that she also takes to me.’ She was not. There were others, too often referred to only by their Christian names: ‘Annie – she loved me – I led her into some beauty, some good but what might I have done!’, and Katie Meyer (the daughter of the Superintendent at Broadmoor) who did not love her so well, but ‘Phillie came with her, and did’. Mary experienced the greater intensity of feeling for Annie, ‘such love, such delight in each other’. She visited for a month, and they took a trip to Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast. ‘Annie and I drew together,’ wrote Mary. ‘The ways she sat and kissed my hand – our walks – our sittings – and finally the beach – and all the while in an undercurrent I was knowing what love was growing in our hearts for each other. . . and so we spent the month, Annie and I, in most complete fusing.’ Mary often fell back on metaphor to express her passion, on images of fusing, of buds, flowing, restlessness and stirrings, of truth in her ‘inward parts’. She grew to recognize the first kindling of one of her infatuations, calling these early sensations the ‘My God, what a woman!’ stage. When Ada was not visiting, Mary wrote to her about her crushes, her ‘Schwärmereien’ (enthusiasms), numbering them in succession. Emily Edwardes was number 39.