A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Her subjects were the staples of Victorian women’s fiction—money, wills, marriages, church and chapel, disgraceful relatives, family power-struggles, quarrels, deathbeds, ghosts—though she fearlessly stepped outside this in her Little Pilgrim stories, which take place beyond the grave.

  ‘Is she worth reading?’ Elisabeth Jay has been asked time and again. The question is difficult to answer, since the books are so hard to find, and publishers who do reprint them always go back to the Chronicles of Carlingford, probably because the title suggests Trollope’s Barchester series (from which Mrs Oliphant borrowed a little when she felt like it). But although she wrote with marvellous fluency—writing, she said, felt to her much like reading—the length of the three-volume novel seems not to have suited her.

  She is at her very best in novellas and short stories. Two of them, which might well be reprinted together, are ‘The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow’ in which a conventional widow with a large estate falls in love with her coarse-mannered steward, and ‘Eleanor and Fair Rosamond’. Here the wife finds out that her husband has made a bigamous marriage. She has the other woman’s address, and resolutely sets out for the distant suburb, the street, the house. What follows is ‘tragifarce,’ as Mrs Oliphant calls it, ‘the most terrible of all,’ and she risks a conclusion that dies away into silence and echoes.

  This is a valuable study, strong on Mrs Oliphant’s religious experiences and on her professional life. As to her bewildering personality, perhaps no one understood her better than the thirty-years-younger James Barrie. In 1897, when she lay dying of cancer, he called to see her and ‘the most exquisite part of her, which the Scotswoman’s reserve had kept hidden, came to the surface.’ But he does not say what she told him.

  Observer, 1995

  * * *

  1The first story was ‘The Executor,’ which appeared in Blackwood’s, May 1861, but in the end was not part of the Carlingford series. These are The Rector and The Doctor’s Family, published together in three volumes by Blackwoods (1863), Salem Chapel (1863), The Perpetual Curate (1864), Miss Marjoribanks (1866), and Phoebe Junior: A Last Chronicle of Carlingford (1876). During this period she published twenty-one other full-length books.

  2If Carlingford is to be identified at all, I would suggest Aylesbury, where Francis Oliphant designed some windows for St Mary’s Church. Characteristically, when no donor came forward he offered to pay for them himself.

  3Frank’s stipend isn’t given, but in Trollope’s Framley Parsonage (1861) the Reverend Josiah Crawley, Perpetual Curate of Hogglestock, earns £130 a year.

  THE VICTORIANS

  Called Against His Will

  Father of the Bensons: The Life of Edward White Benson, Sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, by Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd

  It’s more of a difficulty than a help that so much has been written about the Bensons (Palmer and Lloyd have already done a biography of Fred Benson) and that the family should have written so much about themselves. The Archbishop kept diaries, and his wife Minnie wrote two—one a dutiful sightseer’s journal, kept at her husband’s suggestion on her honeymoon, another one, years later that told some, at least, of the story of her heart. (There is also a contemporary diary of Minnie’s for 1862—63.) Arthur Benson wrote four and a half million words of diaries, a book of family reminiscences, a family genealogy, lives of his father, his sister Maggie and his brother Hugh, and a memoir of his sister Nellie. Fred wrote Our Family Affairs, Mother, As We Were, and (almost on his deathbed) Final Edition. He also kept a diary. The Bensons, ‘a rather close little corporation,’ as Arthur called them, had a boundless talent for self-expression, self-justification and self-explanation. Yet they did not give themselves away.

  Edward White Benson took charge of his five brothers and sisters at the age of fourteen, after the death of his father in 1842. This father had been an unsuccessful research chemist who had invested what money he had in a process for manufacturing white lead, but Edward, fearing the taint of ‘business,’ refused to let his mother carry on with it. This was probably wise, since he already had a career in the Church in mind. ‘To a boy of tender home affections there is perhaps no pain more acute than can be caused by the discovery that his schoolfellows think slightingly, on the score of poverty or social distinctions, of those who are dearest to him in the world.’ This is from the biography of one of my grandfathers, later Bishop of Lincoln: it tactfully conceals the fact that in the 1860s his father kept a shop, and got hopelessly into debt. Edward Benson was spared this, but when his mother died in 1850 he was still working for his tripos at Cambridge, and since she had been living on an annuity the family faced the future on a little over a hundred pounds a year. He was rescued by the rich and childless bursar of his college, Francis Martin, who had heard of his troubles, and offered to support him until he could earn his own living. Martin lavished affection on the handsome, hard-pressed scholar, but, the authors say, ‘the younger man did not fall in love with the older although he was willing to accept both the devotion and all the advantages that went with it.’ This seems hard. Affection can’t be regulated, and by 1852 Edward had in any case determined to make eleven-year-old Minnie, daughter of his widowed cousin Mrs Sidgwick, his future wife. Neither of his relationships, with the doting Mr Martin or the bewildered Minnie, was considered in any way strange in the 1850s.

  No one who has written about the Bensons has been able to help making Minnie the heroine of the story. They married in 1859, when she was eighteen and Edward thirty. ‘An utter child,’ she wrote, ‘with no stay on God. Twelve years older, much stronger, much more passionate, and whom I didn’t really love. How evidently disappointed he was—trying to be rapturous—feeling so inexpressibly lonely and young, but how hard for him.’ Edward went on to be a master at Rugby, the first Master of Wellington College, Chancellor of Lincoln, the first Bishop of Truro, and in 1883, Archbishop of Canterbury. Minnie bore him six children, all of whom loved her dearly, and from her early days as a muddled extravagant housekeeper she grew into the doyenne of vast households. She liked meeting distinguished people and was certainly a great gainer from her marriage. Gladstone called her ‘the cleverest woman in Europe.’ She was not clever, but she was generously responsive, and had a genius for following her instincts even when she hardly admitted them. She was, as became clear early on, a woman who loved women, and had agonizingly keen relationships, emotional and spiritual, with a series of female friends, some of them quite dull. It says a great deal for the Bensons that they made a go of an ill-assorted marriage, a brilliant, bizarre, self-centred family, and a career that reached the very summit.

  Edward’s present biographers take a calm and judicious tone, but they call him a ‘natural bully’ and say that his children all emerged ‘scarred,’ except his eldest son Martin, who died at seventeen, and Nellie, his eldest daughter, who was not afraid of her father. But all of them, even the amiable Fred, inherited his neurasthenia and spells of black depression, and Maggie, the younger daughter, became suicidally insane, recovering only for the last few days of her life. Hugh, the treasured last-born, looks in his childhood photographs like a changeling, palely staring. The three sons grew up homosexual and each of them, in their distinctive way, avoided taking responsible posts. Arthur, when the point came, did not want to be headmaster of Eton. Fred became a popular novelist and a resolutely genial bachelor. Hugh, having converted to Catholicism, lived as a priest without a parish.

  Their father was integrity itself, a mighty force always heading the same way, excluding other opinions with an absolute certainty of their wrongness. His system was total: music, literature, travel, social behaviour, the careful folding of an umbrella, the management of gravy and potatoes on the plate, were all judged not from the aesthetic but the moral viewpoint. We know that he was a flogging headmaster, that to Ethel Smyth (a friend of Nellie’s) ‘the sight of his majestic form approaching the tea-table scattered my wits as an advancing elephant might scatter a flock of sheep,�
�� that conversation with him was not to be undertaken lightly and that Hugh—for example—felt like ‘a small china mug being filled at a waterfall.’ He dearly liked his children to be near him and anxiously waited for their love. But circumstances were against him, because as schoolmaster, bishop and archbishop his family were always on show and must be urged and interrogated into perfection. Meanwhile the children themselves were longing, perhaps praying, for him to go away.

  ‘No one,’ Betty Askwith wrote in Two Victorian Families, ‘who has not experienced some taste of Victorian family life (for it survived in places well into the twentieth century) can quite understand the extraordinary sense of living under the domination of one of those vital, strong-willed tyrants. If the tyranny be accompanied, as it frequently was, with vivid personality and wide-ranging intellectual interests there was an excitement about it which was incommunicable.’

  Edward Benson was a great man, and Palmer and Lloyd give a sympathetic account of a formidable career. He loved to rule, although he believed the choice was not in his hands—‘if calls exist,’ he wrote, ‘called I was, against my will’—and they think he was at the very height of his powers in Truro, working as a creative pioneer, with a new cathedral to build, and on the way to revealing his own personal conception of the episcopacy and of religion itself. As Primate ‘his acquaintance with the practical affairs of Church and State was slight, and he knew he would quickly have to master all the administrative problems that would surround him. Everything poetical and romantic, the very essence of his view of life, would be left behind in Cornwall.’ But Edward of course went courageously into new duties and controversies—temperance, patronage, disestablishment, the guidance of missionary societies, ‘the wretchedness of the poorest classes, their ignorance and wildness and false friends,’ reunion between the churches, ritual.

  His Lincoln judgement of 1890 was given after months of hard work and anxiety. The Bishop of Lincoln was on trial on charges of ‘irregular and unlawful ritual,’ and in particular of adopting the eastward position with his back to the congregation during the consecration, so that the people could not see what the priest was doing. Benson finally allowed the eastern position as optional, but insisted that the consecration of the elements itself must be before the people. ‘What he meant by this was illustrated at my consecration in St Paul’s Cathedral,’ wrote my grandfather (my other one, the Bishop of Manchester). ‘He thus deliberately differentiated the English Holy Communion from the Roman Mass. But this provision of his has been generally disregarded.’ Who cares? But in February 1889, crowds besieged Lambeth Palace on the first day of the trial, long before the doors opened at eleven o’clock, and the police had to be called in to keep order.

  This grandfather, by the way, although he worked himself almost to death, allowed himself not to answer letters from obvious lunatics. But Benson, apparently, told his chaplain that they must all be answered, since they might have been of importance to the men who wrote them. He never retired, but died (in October 1896) on a visit to the Gladstones, at early Communion in the church at Hawarden. ‘He died like a soldier,’ said Gladstone. And he had lived like one, too, constantly at his post. But Palmer and Lloyd might, perhaps, have said more about his interest in the supernatural. At Cambridge, in the late 1840s, he and his friends had founded a Ghost Club. He is usually said to have lost interest in such matters or even to have come to disapprove of them, but in his notebooks for 12 January 1895, Henry James writes:

  Note here the ghost story told me at Addington…by the Archbishop of Canterbury…the story of the young children (indefinite number and age) left to the care of servants in an old country house…The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children; the children are bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree. The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and their apparitions, figures, return to haunt the house and children, to whom they seem to beckon, whom they invite and solicit, from across dangerous places, the deep ditch of a sunk fence, etc so that the children may destroy themselves, lose themselves, by responding, by getting into their power. So long as the children are kept from them, they are not lost; but they try and try, these evil presences, to get hold of them. It is a question of the children ‘coming over to where they are.’

  Edward Benson told this story in the year before his death. There are two principles within each soul—we have to choose, we have to renew the struggle every hour. He had preached this so long and so earnestly, but here it is in the form of a powerful tale of haunting. How can it be said, then, that he left everything poetical and romantic behind him in Cornwall?

  London Review of Books, 1998

  The Need for Open Spaces

  Octavia Hill was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England, in 1838, the youngest but two of a family of eleven children, ten of them girls. She had no formal education, for her strong-minded mother believed in letting her children do what they were best at, and in letting them be outdoors as much as possible. When Octavia was fourteen, the family moved from the country into London: she never forgot the loss of green fields and fresh air.

  However, she needed to earn her living, so she became the manager of a toy-making workshop run for the benefit of girls from what was then called a ragged school. Hill went on to become a crusader for housing reform, managing small blocks of slum property and making sure the apartments were fit to live in. She grew into authority and sat on select committees and royal commissions, but without wavering an inch from her first principles.

  She didn’t believe in charity as such. What she asked for, for everyone, was access to education, employment at a fair wage, and, above all, space ‘for the sight of sky and of things growing.’ She felt strongly that people, and the poor in particular, needed open space, but she also set herself to see that they got it. This is the work for which she is now best remembered, as one of the founders of the National Trust. The campaign, based on the open spaces movement in the United States, began in the late 1880s with a protest against the closing of rights of way and footpaths. The first stretch of land to be presented to the trust was four and a half rocky acres on the coast of Wales. By the time Hill died, in 1912, the trust’s property had expanded beyond all calculations, and some American conservationists had taken to looking to Hill for inspiration.

  Evidently, to achieve so much, Hill had to be an impressive but also an infuriating woman. Tiny, stout, noticeably badly dressed, with a hat like a pen wiper (her lifetime friend John Ruskin couldn’t bear her dowdiness), she was obstinate—no, more than obstinate, absolutely inflexible. She has been called one of the noblest women ever sent upon earth, but it didn’t do to disagree with Octavia Hill.

  New York Times Magazine, 1999

  In the Golden Afternoon

  Lewis Carroll: A Biography, by Morton N. Cohen, and The Red King’s Dream, or Lewis Carroll in Wonderland, by Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone

  In a letter of 1874 the author of Alice described to a child friend how he had been seen off at the railway station by two affectionate friends, Lewis Carroll and Charles Dodgson. Here he is dividing himself not into two, but three. This was never a matter of conflicting selves. It was a game, though one he took seriously, as mathematicians do.

  Morton N. Cohen, after thirty years of faithful research and scholarship, has undertaken a complete biography of the whole man, and finds himself driven to call him ‘Charles.’ In a certain sense, there is little to relate. Dodgson was born in 1832, the eldest child of the parsonage at Dares-bury in Cheshire, where ‘even the passing of a cart was a matter of great interest.’ He was deaf in one ear and stammered. At Rugby, he suffered uncomplainingly for four years. At home, he edited nursery-table magazines, The Rectory Umbrella and others, for his brothers and sisters, and took responsibility for them when the parents died. In 1851, he went up to Christ Church, and spent the rest of his working life there. He was elected to a studentship in mathematics and became a rather contentious member of the very co
ntentious governing body and Curator of the Common Room, laying down some good wine and, in 1884, instituting afternoon tea. He had rooms, first of all in the Library building, and then, when he had more money, in Tom Quad. His study was as full of devices and puzzles as a toyshop, and up and down his stairs came scores of little girl visitors and their mothers. (When speaking to children, he did not stammer.) As a Ruskinian in search of beauty and, at heart, a gadgeteer, he became a notable amateur photographer. His subjects were almost all celebrities—he stalked the Tennyson family, catching them at last in the Lake District—and children. In 1880, perhaps because the new dry-plates made the whole thing too easy, he put away his camera. In 1867, he had made an expedition to Russia with his old friend Henry Liddon; he never went abroad again, never married, and was ordained only as a deacon, never as priest. Meanwhile he worked relentlessly, though sedately, publishing three hundred titles, of one kind or another, in thirty-five years. He also, of course, became famous, and yet perha ps the most dramatic incident of his life was the river expedition to Nuneham when his whole party, including his aunt, two of his sisters, and Alice herself, got wet through and had to be taken to a friend’s house to dry off. In 1898, almost as an afterthought, Dodgson died of a cold and cough.

  Morton Cohen is as heroic as a biographer, in his way, as Dodgson was with his camera. This means going painstakingly into university and college politics, and making a serious attempt to sum up Dodgson’s professional career. ‘A modest, none too successful lecturer of mathematics,’ in Roger Lancelyn Green’s judgement, ‘whose writings on the subject are hardly remembered to-day.’ This, naturally, is not enough for Cohen, who calls in expert opinion, mostly in favour but sometimes against, on every syllabus, textbook and pamphlet. Then there are the puzzles and ciphers, and the almost unplayable games. Even Cohen, perhaps, hasn’t tried ‘Croquet Castles.’ The book is arranged chronologically, but pauses from time to time to consider a subject at greater length. It is a disadvantage, certainly, that the four years from 1858 to 1862 are missing from Dodgson’s diaries. These volumes would cover the beginning of his acquaintance with Liddell, the Dean of Christ Church, the strong-minded Mrs Liddell and their young family. By 1862, Alice was nearly ten. The fourth of July was the ‘golden afternoon’ (although Cohen anxiously points out that the meteorological records show that it was raining) when Alice and her two sisters listened to the earliest version of her adventures underground. Two years later, Dodgson had apparently fallen quite out of favour at the Deanery. He had applied in vain for leave to take the girls out on the river, ‘but Mrs Liddell will not let any come in future: rather superfluous caution…Help me O God, for Christ’s sake, to live more to Thee. Amen!’ What precisely, or even imprecisely, had gone wrong? Dodgson had disagreed with Liddell over college business, but scholars and Heads of Houses were used to arguments on a much grander scale than this, and the Dean would never have let such things interfere with personal mat ters. Perhaps the worst case of all for a biographer, nothing definable happened at all.