Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  In the autumn of 1871, just as the leaves were beginning to turn, the children noticed that a new crib had appeared in the night nursery. It contained ‘a small, pink creature called Hugh’, who had as yet no conversation.

  A short while later, their mother left Wellington for a very long time.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Charles Dickens’s wife Catherine bore ten children in sixteen years, as well as enduring a number of miscarriages. Queen Victoria set a firm example to the nation by producing nine offspring, at a comparable rate. The birth of Hugh brought Mary up to no more than the national average of six, but her youth, the stresses of life with Edward at Wellington College, of giving lessons to her elder children, which often left her ‘utterly done up’, and her struggles with disabling postnatal melancholy took a severe toll. Recovering from Martin she felt ‘wretched’. Arthur was born with ‘suffering’; after the third baby, Nellie, she wanted no more, yet was pregnant with Maggie within a year. Her illness after Fred’s birth had been serious enough, even though, Mary admitted, there ‘was at first a great pleasure in the importance of it’, in the attention and pampering. Illness was enticing, it brought interest from others and relief from obligations to duty. A week in Hastings with Emily Edwardes, and without the baby, had helped no end. But Mary’s collapse after Hugh was born was of a different order entirely.

  Mary began to experience headaches and have difficulty sleeping. She lost her appetite, felt pressure on the top and sides of her head. The ground seemed to rise and fall beneath her feet, and she became uncertain in walking. As time went on, she appeared to lose all sense of the present, and became extremely distressed, feeling ‘very depressed and ill and incapable’. Doctors diagnosed nervous prostration, or as it was becoming known in more advanced medical circles, neurasthenia, a label that carried a sense of social acceptability, even a touch of prestige. Neurasthenics, one doctor declared, were generally of a refined and unselfish nature, ‘just the kind of women one likes to meet with’. They were ‘sensible, not over sensitive or emotional, exhibiting a proper amount of illness’ and, what was more, if treated with care showed a ‘willingness to perform their share of work quietly and to the best of their ability’.

  Clearly, Mary required rest before she could be expected to resume her role at Wellington. She was sent to Scotland to recover, and when that had no real effect, to stay with close friends, the Wordsworths, at Riseholme Hall, a magnificent pile set in fields and forests and fronting a large lake, three miles out of Lincoln. Christopher Wordsworth (a nephew of the poet William) was Bishop of Lincoln and had first met Edward through his son John, who was briefly a master at Wellington. In the summer of 1869, shortly after Christopher had been consecrated, the two families took a momentous holiday together in Whitby.

  Edward and Mary were going through a time of ‘bickerings and unlovingness’, but Whitby with the Wordsworths turned into ‘a glorious month’. Edward was already firm friends with the Bishop, but it was the Wordsworth progeny who provided the greater delight. The women adored Edward, and he ‘revelled’ in the ‘love poured out on him’. In particular Elizabeth Wordsworth, an intelligent young woman of Mary’s age, was fired by his conversation, drawn by his unusual magnetism, and thought him supremely handsome, with the hands ‘of an enthusiast, every finger full of character and vigour’. After the holiday, the two kept up a close and affectionate correspondence. ‘I have often wished for you by the half hour together,’ he wrote to her, one lonely day at Wellington.

  TO MISS E. WORDSWORTH 14 July, 1871

  Dearest Elizabeth,

  Last Sunday I had a singular and interesting change, I went to Windsor to preach to the Queen and saw something of and much admired Mr Gladstone. His eyes alone afford sufficient reason for his being Prime Minister, and we talked of anything and everything (except Cathedrals), as if he had not another thought in his mind except to know all the knowable in literature. . .

  Your ever affectionate,

  EWBenson

  Mary felt the glimmerings of a Schwärmerei for Elizabeth, but realized ‘oh my vanity! how I fancied attracting her – how I thought she was thinking of and looking at me when far other nobler things occupied her. . .’ Elizabeth, for her part, was rather irritated by Mary, thought her ‘all over the place arguing with you at every turn and insinuating herself into everything like tooth-powder into the man’s dressing-case compartments in Somebody’s Luggage’. Instead, it was Elizabeth’s younger sister Susan with whom Mary fell in love, drinking ‘’arf pints’ late at night in Susan’s bedroom, and writing long, passionate letters to her in the months to come.

  At Riseholme, Mary was assured of comfort and close attention, but by June of 1872, some seven months after Hugh had been born, she was still not well. Edward wanted her to return to Wellington for Speech Day on 18 June, to perform her wifely duties at his side. The doctor advised strongly against her travelling, and Elizabeth Wordsworth did everything she could to make Edward change his mind. Susan wrote imploring him to remember that Mary required care, and to be sensitive to her needs, but he was resolute. Mary must return. A few days before Speech Day, she set off, travelling alone. She could not even break her journey in London, as she had hoped to do. By the time she arrived at Wellington she was so weak she had almost to be carried into the Lodge. She found the spirit to write for the Wordsworths a mock-heroic account of her journey entitled ‘Adventures of a Timid Englishwoman’, complete with sarcastic asides from Edward, but was soon once again seriously ill. Shortly after Speech Day, Mary’s brother Arthur intervened and persuaded Edward to allow Mary time to make a complete recovery, staying for a while with Christopher Benson, Edward’s youngest brother, at Wiesbaden, in a newly unified Germany.

  Mary travelled to Wiesbaden in September, most likely with Arthur, by boat to Ostend and then southwards via Cologne. It could not have been absent from her mind that her neurasthenia might be a long-lasting condition. Her present state was indeed wretched, and even Edward could not deny that a woman’s nerves and sensitiveness might detach her from domestic obligations, might award her time to herself without in any way detracting from her position as angel in the house.

  ON BEING ILL. . .

  The art of being ill is no easy one to learn, but is practised to perfection by many of the greatest sufferers.

  Julia Duckworth Stephen, in Notes from Sickrooms, 1883

  A married woman was heard to wish that she could break a limb that she might have a little time to herself. Many take advantage of the fear of ‘infection’ to do the same.

  Florence Nightingale, in Cassandra, a fragment unpublished in her lifetime

  Wiesbaden was a smart spa town, surrounded by meadows and winelands. Christopher Benson and his English wife Agnes had lived there for some time, taking in boarders and pupils at their house on Elisabether Straße. Barrel-chested and with powerful arms, Christopher had a handsome head much like Edward’s, but with an exuberant moustache. A childhood illness had arrested development in his legs, and he moved about in a wheeled chair, or was carried by his valet. At first, Mary found Agnes ‘somewhat stiff’, but as the weeks went by she warmed to her kindness and intelligence, and grew ‘so fond of her that it makes the life very pleasant’.

  Mary loved her room, and settled in quickly. Her first morning revealed Wiesbaden crisp and beautiful, ‘a most lovely morning to begin this new bit of life on’. Immediately her headaches disappeared and she began to eat well. Within a few days, she was taking exercise in the Walking Room at the Kurhaus, disapproving as she passed ‘the fearful low greed on all the faces’ of those in the gaming rooms. (Her distress was short-lived, as the new Prussian-led imperial government closed the casino in October.)

  The headaches later returned, but did not last as long, nor were they so violent as before. A strict daily routine beginning with prayers at a quarter past eight in the morning through to punctual retirement each night at ten, gave life a structure and rhythm, and Mary began to feel st
ronger. By October she was well enough to pay a visit to the local synagogue during Rosh Hashanah (where she was shocked by men wearing hats inside and talking during pauses in the ritual), and to go to the opera (where she giggled quietly at the appalling acting). She took German lessons with a Fräulein Bunsen, went for carriage rides in the country, and even on an excursion to Hamburg, nearly three hundred miles away.

  During her first days at Elisabether Straße, Mary had noticed ‘Miss Hall, a lady boarder. . . a very pleasant person – clever and bright and merry’. It was one of her ‘My God, what a woman!’ moments. In early October, Agnes Benson had ‘a very particular friend’ to visit, a Miss Abbott, who was ‘to be regarded slightly in the light of a nuisance, as she is one of those monopolising friends who wishes to be left alone with the beloved object always and is apt to take offence besides’. Miss Abbott liked nothing better than to sit at the ‘Beloved Object’s’ feet, or with her arms draped around her neck, for hours on end. Agnes was thus much occupied. Mary imagined that she might be seeing more of Miss Hall as a consequence. And indeed she did.

  Ellen Hall taught for most of the morning in town, but afterwards she and Mary would read to each other, go for walks in the woods and jaunts around Wiesbaden, then sit up late into the night together. Mary began ‘to like her exceedingly’. Soon she was in the hold of a full-blown Schwärmerei. ‘I began to love Miss Hall,’ she later recalled, ‘it was a complete fascination. . . our exquisite walks. . . gradually the bonds drew round – fascination possessed me. . . utter fascination. . . the other fault – thou knowest – I will not even write it – but O God, forgive – how near we were to that!’

  Back at Wellington, Beth looked after the younger children, and those who could write sent Mary letters about life at home. Martin, who was just eleven but very clever, told her that ‘our theatricals went off with a great deal of éclat’, and that his reading had put him into ‘a fever of excitement about the Peruvian Indians’. Five-year-old Freddie produced a letter that neither he nor anyone else could read, but later managed sweet and loving replies to his mother’s accounts of Wiesbaden. Maggie was often quite bossy, and eager to pass on news of her siblings’ shortcomings. Evidence of little Hugh is limited to such lines as ‘Baby has got two teeth [and] is not that nice’. Martin and Arthur were away at prep school much of the time. The others formed a tight nursery nest with Beth, who took them on outings and bought them little gifts with her own meagre funds. Their father was busy, and often distracted. ‘We and papa (for papa is not we) went out yesterday,’ wrote Maggie, before going on to relate how much better she was at pony riding than Nellie.

  Mary wrote that she missed them all, and separately to Edward saying how letters from him gave her ‘a pang when I get them, knowing how your minutes are overflowing with such work of all sorts’. Edward had said he did not want letters too frequently. Mary understood that, but could he perhaps get ‘Mama, anyone, to write if you have no time, to tell me how you are’. She had left her household finances at the Lodge in a dismal state, and secret loans from her family had not papered over her debts. Edward’s sympathy was thin. He was struggling with his own neuralgic attacks and depression, and soon Mary’s expenditure in Wiesbaden became a sore topic. She countered his queries with profusely apologetic explanations of just how she had to buy certain gifts, and pay her share of expeditions.

  The need for economies became even more of an issue in December, when Bishop Wordsworth offered Edward the Chancellorship of Lincoln Cathedral. This would involve an exact halving of his Wellington salary, which now stood at a handsome £2,000 a year, just at the time when he was having to meet the expenses of the older boys’ education – but it would remove Edward from the stress and overwork of a headmaster’s role, and take him closer to what he felt was his true calling, among like-minded men in ‘the cloistered existence I have always wished for’. He wrote to colleagues, spoke to friends, consulted his absent wife, posting her the Bishop’s letter and appending drawings of the Chancery and a plan of the house.

  EXPENSES TO NOVEMBER

  As December wore on, and Mary’s friendship with Ellen Hall bloomed, Mary, rather than returning to Wellington, began to ask for warm clothes to be sent her. Agnes, she wrote, had advised a sealskin coat, because it was so warm and light, though Mary made a show of objecting to the expense. Mama could pick out underwear. By mid-December, the people Mary met in Wiesbaden were admiring her ‘most delicious’ sealskin. Edward made his decision alone, and accepted the position in Lincoln. Servants who had previously addressed Mary as Frau Direktor, now called her Frau Dom Kanzler.

  As Christmas approached, Mary lamented the fact that she would not be with her family for ‘this last Christmas at the dear old home’. The thought brought on a rush of warmth for her husband.

  Ah what a dear home it has been, and how impossible it seems that one will ever be able to look at any other place as home – no other place can be to us what that has been. Our first home – where we first really knew each other, and where our love, deep enough always, has grown old and deepened and strengthened year by year, though each year it has seemed impossible to love you more – you have been very patient with me dearest – I was such a child when we married that I am afraid you must have had many sad moments – for it seems to me that I have only grown up of late years, and learnt the fullness and strength of married love, and what unity means and only of late years that I have been really a woman.

  On Christmas Day, Edward wrote ‘but a few lines because it is Christ’s birthday’, with the wish for Mary that the Lord would ‘take away at once the sickness in your head, and the sickness of my heart, which is a much worse evil, though alas! easier to bear’. He reminded her that they had now chosen ‘holy poverty for our portion and we must not live as if we were in holy riches, or indulge in all the amiabilities of expenditure’. He also apologized for an earlier, strong, letter that he hoped she would take in good part. Relations were taut. It was ‘a bad time’, Edward confessed to a friend. ‘My dear wife mends so slowly.’ ‘I cannot blame myself,’ wrote Mary to her husband, saying there was nothing she could do except try her best to get well, but ‘I am afraid you don’t think this’.

  Whenever talk of Mary’s return became definite and a date was set for her departure, she seemed to suffer a relapse – the return of headaches, a debilitating cold. Agnes wrote to Edward suggesting that Mary stay on until Easter, adding that she thought Mary gave ‘somewhat too good accounts’ of her health in the hope of reassuring him, and that uncertainty about returning ‘made her restless, and restlessness of course retards her purposes’. Dr Malcolm, who had originally sanctioned her departure, changed his opinion, saying that he thought when he spoke to her at first that she had to go home before Christmas, and that ‘it was a question of how well he could make her in the time’. Mary herself sent off volleys of doubleedged letters, on the one hand bewailing their separation, while on the other summoning pity for her condition, subtly alluding to another relapse, yet with a great display of bravery promising to overcome it. Clever, yet powerless, Mary had long learned the skills of prodding and tugging at other people’s emotions as one of the few means she had to gain some control over her world. She suggested that the continuance of her illness was due to ‘the excitement of this great change in our lives’, to Edward’s accepting the Chancellorship, and hinted that too early a return would lead to an even sorrier situation: ‘Sometimes I do feel very low – as if all this time and absence and money were going to be wasted, and I to be a poor incapable creature unfit for life and for you.’ She stayed on into the new year.

  When, in January, there was again talk of a homeward journey (Edward had not been swayed by the argument for a stay prolonged until Easter), Mary put forward Miss Hall as a travelling companion, even though that would involve paying expenses for her return to Wiesbaden. Her suggestion met with no success. In the end, she made the journey back to Wellington with a Mrs Mackenzie, ‘Kenzie’, who
had also spent some time at Elisabether Straße and had become a firm friend. Kenzie came to stay for a while at the Lodge in Wellington, from where she and Mary sent a teasing letter decorated with drawings to Ellen Hall, asking if she were not filled with envy and hatred at not being with them, and inviting her to be a ‘Bad Third’, or rather a second, for ‘WE are but ONE’. They reminisced about Wiesbaden, made snide remarks about Agnes’s dreadful Miss Abbott, and drew a tantalizing picture of how they were constantly entwined in embrace, how they took carriage rides, simply because the carriage was so small that they had to ‘sit VERY close to each other’. They ended with a sketch of themselves in each other’s arms in Mary’s sitting room at the Lodge, with the comment: ‘you can well imagine how the winged hours go by’.

  Ellen Hall came to Wellington. Without Ellen, Mary had been miserable; passionate letters were exchanged. When she was there, Mary neglected her household duties, she wronged her dear ones, was ‘unsympathetic to my boys – how they felt it – Arthur crying’. Mary’s love for her children, when it emerged through the heavy mist of the melancholy that descended on her after a birth, was warm and bright. Something of the Minnie of the Blue House in Rugby remained in Mary at the Lodge: the spiritedness, the ‘volatility’ her mother so despaired of. It helped her to peek through society’s curtain of nannies and nurseries, and to join children on the other side. Their tears – and her husband’s distress – pained her, yet she seemed unable to check her unsympathetic behaviour. ‘I lost my head,’ Mary admitted. ‘I came to grief.’ Ellen’s visit was a time of ‘tossings, doubts, indecisions, jealousies’ that ‘grieved E[dward] to the heart’. Edward was moved to speak to Mary about Ellen Hall. Unlike the earlier occasion, when Emily Edwardes had been the focus of discussion, this talk did not proceed mildly with a blessing and a prayer.