A House of Air

This was a sturdy professional attitude, but I think she had another reason for the sensational elements in Salem Chapel. Arthur Vincent cannot come to terms with himself, or with his gift of words, until he has encountered what Mrs Oliphant (who knew something about it) called ‘the dark ocean of life.’ Poor though he is, he has been sheltered from the sight of absolute want and misery, and at Homerton he has never been led to think about such things. The shock of Mrs Hilyard’s mysterious poverty drives him out to visit the slums in Carlingford, even though he has no idea how to go about it. He believes everything he is told, gives money to everyone who asks, and returns penniless and exhausted. This is a beginning. But the wild scenes of flight and pursuit in which he is soon caught up distance him from Carlingford altogether. This, I think, is the effect Mrs Oliphant wanted. When at long last he admits to Salem that his old certainties are gone and that now he only faintly guesses ‘how God, being pitiful, has the heart to make man and leave him on this sad earth,’ he is talking about things which he could only have learned outside Carlingford, and beyond it.

When John Blackwood, however, said that the novel came very near greatness, but just missed it, he was probably regretting the disappearance of Salem for so many chapters. And if some of the readers thought that the book must be by George Eliot (this caused Mrs Oliphant an indescribable mixture of pleasure and annoyance), they, too, were thinking of Salem: Mrs Oliphant inherited the Victorian novelist’s birthright, the effortless creation of character. In Salem she is totally at her ease. She lets her readers know the people of Grove Street better than poor Arthur Vincent ever does. This is true even of those who only make two or three appearances. Mr Tufton, for example, Arthur’s predecessor, is a homely old minister who has fortunately been ‘visited’ by paralysis—‘a disease not tragical, but drivelling’—giving the congregation an excuse to retire him with a suitable present. A bland self-deceiver, he has never admitted his own failure, and the congregation (this is a convincing touch) has forgotten it. They assume that it will do the new minister all the good in the world to visit the old one and draw on his wisdom. Arthur suffers agonies of impatience in the Tuftons’ stuffy front parlour, dominated by its vast potted plant. But this place of amiable self-deception is, unexpectedly, also the source of truth. The crippled daughter, Adelaide, strikes the sour note of absolute frankness and absolute unpleasantness. Her eyes have ‘something of the shrill shining of a rainy sky in their glistening whites.’ She explains that she has no share in life ‘and so instead of comforting myself that it’s all for the best, as Papa says, I interfere with my fellow creatures. I get on as well as most people.’ She takes no pleasure in it; it is an ‘intense loveless eagerness of curiosity’ that the complacent old Tuftons scarcely notice. At the end o f the book Adelaide plays a curious small part in deciding Arthur’s future. This kind of detail, a novelist’s second sight, is characteristic of Mrs Oliphant.

Mr Tozer, the senior deacon of Salem, seems at first to represent the Victorian idea of the good tradesman. Never quite free of the greasiness of the best bacon and butter, he is proud of being ‘serviceable’ to the gentry and is all that is meant or implied by ‘honest’ and ‘worthy.’ He makes the familiar equation between morality and trade. All accounts, financial and spiritual, must be squared, and the new pastor’s sermons must ‘keep the steam up.’ His household, where the apprentices eat with the family, is patriarchal, and, it is suggested, belongs to times past. So, perhaps, does his unaffected kindness. Often, Salem knows, ‘he’s been called up at twelve o’ clock, when we was all abed, to see someone as was dying.’ All this is predictable, but Mrs Oliphant refuses to simplify it. Tozer is Arthur’s champion, but partly, at least, because he backed him from the first and can’t endure to be put in the wrong. When Arthur touches despair, Tozer shows him Christian kindness, but doesn’t conceal his pride in managing the minister’s affairs. Arthur finds it hard to bear Tozer’s perfect satisfaction over his own generosity. He feels, and so do we, that it would be ‘a balm’ to cut Tozer’s remarks short, and to ‘annihilate’ him. At this point he is goodness in its most exasperating form. Yet we can’t miss the weight of his reproach when the wretched young man ‘breaks out’ (his sister is suspected of murder): ‘Mr Vincent, sir, you mustn’t swear. I’m as sorry for you as a man can be; but you’re a minister, and you mustn’t give way.’

Comic characters on this scale generate their own energy, and grow beyond themselves. Tozer escapes from the confines of his ‘worthiness.’ In his own way—although Arthur feels he must be ‘altogether unable to comprehend the feelings of a cultivated mind’—he is a connoisseur, and even an aesthete. This appears in his description of a tea meeting, ‘with pleasant looks and the urns a-smoking and a bit of greenery on the wall,’ and, more surprisingly, in his tribute to Lady Western’s beauty: ‘She’s always spending her life in company, as I don’t approve of; but to look in her face, you couldn’t say a word against her.’ Again, Tozer’s reverence for education goes deep, although he is too shrewd to expect others to share it. It would, he thinks, be unwise to charge an entrance fee to Arthur’s lectures. ‘If we was amusin’ the people, we might charge sixpence a head; but, mark my words, there aren’t twenty men in Carlingford, nor in no other place, as would give sixpence to have their minds enlightened. No, sir, we’re conferring of a boon, and let’s do it handsomely.’ He, too, has his battle to fight, with his second deacon, Pigeon, who cannot believe that Salem needs a highly educated minister. And, in practical terms, Pigeon turns out to be right, but we can never doubt Tozer’s claim to authority. The last sight we have of him is his red handkerchief; he has drawn it out to wipe away a tear or so, and to Arthur, preaching for the last time in Salem Chapel, ‘the gleam seemed to redden over the entire throng.’ This is Tozer heroic. Mrs Oliphant herself, although she always refused to make any high claims for her own work, admitted that Tozer had amused her.

Salem can settle back to its own level, and find its own peace. ‘Unpeace’—this is Mrs Tozer’s word—is at all costs to be avoided. But there is no easy solution for Arthur Vincent, who has been called upon for something less than he can give, but has given, all the same, less than he might have done. Like The Rector and The Doctor’s Family, Salem Chapel points forward to the future without exactly defining it. As the story ends, Arthur knows what it is to mistake one’s calling, and to be misunderstood, and to suffer. He still has to learn what it is to be happy.

VI. The Perpetual Curate

Frank Wentworth, the Perpetual Curate, was one of Mrs Oliphant’s favourites. ‘I mean to bestow the very greatest care on him,’ she told her publisher, William Blackwood, as she set to work, with her usual rush of energy, to expand Frank’s story from the glimpses we get of him in The Rector and Salem Chapel. In this fourth Chronicle, Carlingford is as respectable, slow moving, and opinionated as ever. Frank, on the other hand, is ‘throbbing…with wild life and trouble to the very finger-points.’ He is a dedicated priest, he is in love, and he is still (as he was in The Rector) too poor to marry, certainly too poor to marry Lucy Wodehouse, the young woman he loves.

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To be a perpetual curate, in the 1860s, meant exactly that. He was in charge of a church built, in the first place, to take the pressure of work off a large parish. To a great extent he was independent. But to rise higher he had (like any other curate) either to be preferred to a family living, or to be recommended by the Rector to his Bishop. If, however, he was ‘viewy’—meaning if he had views that his superiors didn’t accept—the result was bound to be a high-spirited clash with the Rector, with which the chance of recommendation was likely to disappear.

Frank Wentworth is ‘viewy.’ He is a Ritualist. At his little church, St Roque’s, built in hard stony Gothic, there are candles, flowers, bells and a choir in white surplices. The worship there represents the later phase of the Tractarian movement whose effect was so disturbing that the Established Church had begun to take legal action against it. (One of the first of these cases, in fact, was brought against the Perpetual Curate of St James’s, Brighton, who refused to give up hearing confessions.) Frank remains a good Anglican, and Mrs Oliphant never makes it very clear how extreme his opinions are, only that he holds them sincerely. And his Ritualism, of course, is not a matter of outward show, but of symbolizing the truth to all comers. But the candles and flowers of St Roque’s are a scandal to three-quarters of Carlingford.

Frank, however—and here he is in deeper trouble—doesn’t confine himself to St Roque’s. By the 1860s the Tractarian movement had spread out from Oxford into missions to England’s industrial slums. Frank’s first Rector, old Mr Bury, had asked the energetic young man to help him, for the time being, in Wharfside, Carlingford’s brickworking district down by the canals. Here his daily contact with extreme hardship, and the difficult lives and deaths of the poor, has brought out Frank’s true vocation. In Wharfside he is respected and loved. His plain-spoken sermons fill the little tin chapel. But Wharfside is not in Frank’s district. He has only come to think of it as his own. It is this that the new Rector, Mr Morgan, finds intolerable. Unquestionably the success of his ministry has gone to Frank’s head, Morgan challenges him directly. He proposes to sweep away the tin chapel and build a new church in Wharfside. This is not power politics, it is a dispute over a ‘cure of souls,’ but still a dispute. And ‘next to happiness,’ as Mrs Oliphant puts it, ‘perhaps enmity is the most healthful stimulant of the human mind.’

Since Frank cannot compromise on a matter of principle, he faces a future without advancement. This means the long-drawn-out waste of his love and Lucy’s. Here is the central concern of the novel, and there are two minor episodes, comic and pathetic by turns, which stand as a kind of commentary on it. In the first place, the Morgans themselves have waited prudently through many years of genteel poverty. The appointment to Carlingford has been their first chance to marry. But by now Mrs Morgan is faded, her nose reddened by indigestion, while Morgan has the short temper of middle age. With a touching determination they brace themselves, after so many delays, to make the best of things. The railway, for example, runs close behind the Rectory, the first house they have ever lived in together. The old gardener suggests that it won’t show so much when the lime trees have ‘growed a bit,’ but poor Mrs Morgan is ‘reluctant to await the slow processes of nature’; the processes, that is, which have tormented her for the past ten years. Then there is the terribly ugly, but perfectly good carpet left behind by the last Rector. Mrs Morgan detests this carpet. But she tells herself, with hard-won self-control, ‘It would not look like Christ’s work…if we had it all our own way.’ She cannot afford to complain. Time has robbed her of the luxury of ingratitude. And in her heart she is afraid that it has narrowed her husband’s mind, although this makes her more loyal to him than ever. ‘If only we had been less prudent!’ Mrs Oliphant shows that, in spite of everything, the love between the Morgans goes deep, but Frank, passing them in Grange Lane, sees them as grotesque, and feels his own frustration as demon thoughts.

Secondly, there is the story of the elder Miss Wodehouse, the gentle, ‘dove-coloured,’ forty-year-old spinster who appears in The Rector. To all appearances she is resigned to a life without self, devoted to her pretty and much younger sister. But the Reverend Morley Proctor returns to Carlingford and offers her her ‘chance.’ True, he proposes disconcertingly with the words ‘You see we are neither of us young.’ But he allows Miss Wodehouse, for the first time, to set a value on herself, ‘a timid middle-aged confidence.’ She even has it in her power, for a while at least, to patronize Lucy. She will have a home of her own. When Lucy’s happiness makes this unimportant, Miss Wodehouse has ‘a half-ludicrous, half-humiliating sense of being cast into the shade.’ A truly good-hearted woman, she cannot understand these new feelings. We have to recognize them for her.

Love, money, duty, passing time, the powerful interactions of the mid-Victorian novel, all bear down on the Perpetual Curate. But there is a possible way out. The Wentworths are a landed family and they have a living, with a good income, in their gift. The living is expected to fall vacant and Frank is the natural successor, unless—and the Wentworths have heard disturbing rumours of this—he has ‘gone over’ to Ritualism. To investigate this, Frank’s unmarried aunts, all firm Evangelicals, arrive in Carlingford. They are there to take stock of the flowers and candles, to hear whether their nephew preaches ‘the plain gospel,’ and to deliver their verdict accordingly. Although Mrs Oliphant objected to the fairy-tale element in Dickens, surely she is allowing herself to use it here. Three aunts—one gracious, one sentimental, whose hair ‘wavered in weak-minded ringlets’; one stern and practical—install themselves in Grange Lane. From there they circulate through the town, at once menacing and ridiculous.

It is no surprise, however, in a novel by Mrs Oliphant, to find enterprise in the hands of the women. Frank’s father, the Squire, is an attractive figure, but a bewildered one, with only ‘that glimmering of sense which keeps many a stupid man straight’. He is shown, in fact, as acting largely on instinct. Outside his broad acres (where he is shrewd enough) he seems at a loss. From his three marriages there are numerous children with conflicting interests, and he hardly seems to know what to do with them either. And the family not only descends remorselessly on Frank but summons him home to deal with the problem of his stepbrother Gerald.

Gerald is the Rector of the parish of Wentworth itself. But he has been struggling with doubts and has now been converted—‘perverted,’ the aunts call it—to the Roman Catholic Church. The wound to his family and their sense of betrayal leaves them almost helpless. ‘Rome, it’s Antichrist,’ says the old Squire. ‘Every child in the village school could tell you that.’ More monstrous still, Gerald hopes to become a Catholic priest. And then there is a very real obstacle: he is married. His wife, Louisa, is a fool. While Gerald struggles to be ‘content to be nothing, as the saints were,’ Louisa complains, through ready tears, ‘We have always been used to the very best society!’ But she has the power of weak, silly women, a power that fascinated Mrs Oliphant, herself an intelligent woman who had to struggle to survive. Gerald, obsessed with his wife’s troubles and his own ordeal, is ‘like a man whom sickness had reduced to the last stage of life.’

Frank’s generous heart aches for his brother. The whole family relies on him to bring Gerald to his senses, and the debate between the two of them is extended through the central part of the novel. It begins at Wentworth Rectory, where the solid green cedar tree on the lawn outside the windows seems to stand for ancient certainties, and it echoes the painful divisions in so many English families after the turning point of Newman’s conversion in 1845. Frank is aware that if Gerald resigns the Wentworth living it will be there for himself and Lucy, but he hates himself for remembering this. Indeed, all he has time for is the distress of his brother’s sacrifice.

Mrs Oliphant herself was no sectarian. The ‘warm Free Churchism’ of her early days was behind her, or rather it had expanded, in the course of a hard life, into tolerance. Forms of worship interested her very little. She knew only, as she told one of her friends, that she was not afraid of the loneliness of death because of ‘a silent companion, God walking in the cool of the garden.’ Time and again she relates religion to instinct and nature. This doesn’t mean that she treats Gerald and Frank’s debate as unimportant, only that it follows its own lines. There is, for instance, nothing like Charlotte Brontë’s romantic approach to the question in Villette (1853). The real point at issue is reached in Chapter 40 when Gerald explains himself in terms of authority. He needs a Church that is ‘not a human institution,’ one that gives absolute certainty on all points. Although the steps by which he has reached this decision aren’t given, there is a hint here of Charles Reding, the hero of Newman’s Loss and Gain (1848). Frank’s answer is unexpected. He bases it, not upon freedom of conscience, but on the sufferings and inequalities of this life. How can the Catholic Church, which can no more explain these things than anyone else, claim that its authority is sufficient when it comes to doctrine? If trust in God is the only answer left to us for the pain of life, then, says Frank, ‘I am content to take my doctrines on the same terms.’

Frank is to be seen here as the true priest, because he puts himself at the service of human suffering without pretending to be able to explain it. He understands, too, the relief from anxiety, which Mrs Oliphant herself thought was ‘our highest sensation—higher than any positive enjoyment in this world. It used to sweep over me like a wave, sometimes when I opened a door, sometimes in a letter—in all simple ways.’ The complement of this is the sympathy for others which relief brings, ‘the compassion of happiness,’ and this, too, Frank feels at the last. But this is the same Frank Wentworth who has to restrain himself from whacking his aunt’s horrible dog, and who lies awake maddened by the sound of the drainpipe—his landlady has ‘a passion for rain-water.’ Mrs Oliphant is determined to keep him human. Indeed, it is only on those terms that he can truly be a priest.

After the success of Salem Chapel, Mrs Oliphant had asked for, and got, £1,500 for the The Perpetual Curate. It was the highest payment she ever had from a publisher. John Blackwood’s old clerk (she was told) turned pale at the idea of such a sum, and remonstrated with his master. The story began to run in Blackwood’s in June 1863, and was produced under even greater difficulties than usual. Mrs Oliphant wrote it only one or two instalments in advance—this at her own request, as the monthly deadline, she said, ‘kept her up.’ In the autumn she travelled, with her usual large party of friends and children, to Rome. There, in January 1864, her only daughter fell sick, and died within a few weeks. Maggie was ten, ‘the beloved companion,’ as Mrs Oliphant had been as a little girl, to her own mother. ‘It is hard to go out in the streets,’ she wrote, ‘to look out of the window and see the other women with their daughters. God knows it is an unworthy feeling, but it makes me shrink from going out.’

In spite of this, ‘the roughest edge of grief,’ as she found it, she missed only one instalment for Blackwood’s, for May 1864. Stress, perhaps, was responsible for a few mistakes (the church architect is called first Folgate, then Finial), and for the weakness of the sub-plot, involving Frank, as it does, in unlikely misunderstandings. Fourteen years earlier Mrs Oliphant had sent her first novel, Margaret Maitland, to the stout old critic Francis Jeffrey; he told her it was true and touching but ‘sensibly injured by the indifferent matter which has been admitted to bring it up to the standard of three volumes.’ The difficulty remained, the standard length was still demanded in the 1860s by publishers and booksellers, and she set herself to meet it. Certainly the story, with its comings and goings from house to house, moves slowly at times. But Mrs Oliphant, I think, is able to persuade the reader to her own pace, so that we can truly say at the close that we know what it is like to have lived in Carlingford.

Whatever we may think of the turns of the plot, she is at her shrewdest in this book, and at the same time at her most human. Her refusal to moralize is striking, even disconcerting. It is here in particular that she stands comparison with Trollope, whose titles Can You Forgive Her? and He Knew He Was Right challenge readers not so much to judge as to refer to their own conscience. In The Perpetual Curate the worthless do not repent. Jack Wentworth, the bon viveur, seems on the point of sacrificing his inheritance but the old Squire tells him sharply to do his duty. Everyone is fallible. Young Rosa, who causes so many complications, looks as though she is going to be a helpless victim of society. She turns out to be nothing of the sort. Miss Wodehouse becomes not gentler, but tougher. In Chapter 43 she is treasuring up an incident that might be useful to her in arguments with her future husband. Lucy, because she had made up her mind to sacrifice herself and marry Frank, even though it means being a poor man’s wife, can’t rejoice whole-heartedly at his success; it lessens her, she feels ‘a certain sense of pain.’ And when Frank speaks of poetic justice, Miss Leonora says, ‘I don’t approve of a man ending off neatly like a novel in this sort of ridiculous way.’

Frank Wentworth’s story returns to the problem of The Rector and Salem Chapel—What does it mean for a man to call himself a priest? and, closely related to this—What can he do without the partnership of a woman? ‘Partnership’ is the right word here. In The Perpetual Curate, the lesson Frank learns is this: ‘Even in Eden itself, though the dew had not yet dried on the leaves, it would be highly incautious for any man to conclude that he was sure of having his own way.’

Adapted from the introductions to the Virago editions

of The Rector (1986), The Country Doctor (1986), Salem Chapel (1986) and The Perpetual Curate (1987)

The Mystery of Mrs Oliphant

Mrs Oliphant, ‘A Fiction to Herself’: A Literary Life, by Elisabeth Jay

‘I don’t think I have ever had two hours uninterrupted (except at night, with everybody in bed) during the whole of my literary life,’ said Mrs Oliphant. At night, therefore, she wrote—nearly one hundred novels, more than fifty short stories, history, biography, travel, articles ‘too numerous to list’ in the index even of this meticulous book.

She was born in 1828 in Wallyford, near Edinburgh, and brought up in Liverpool. Her father, a clerk, seems never to have counted for much. The mother kept everything going, and this pattern—the helpless man, the strong woman—persisted through her life and in her fiction. Of her two brothers, one became a drunkard, the other a bankrupt invalid. She married her cousin, an unpractical stained-glass designer. He died (for which she found it hard to forgive him), leaving her to drift about Europe for cheapness’ sake, with £1,000 in debts and three young children to feed.

Before long, her brothers, nieces, and nephews would also look to her for support. Words had to be spun into money, even when her only daughter died at the age of ten, leaving her to ‘the roughest edge of grief.’ She never expected help from her two idle, graceless sons; indeed she indulged them absurdly. Part of her rejoiced in taking charge and preferred her dependants to be weak. She knew this tendency of hers, and described it unsparingly in The Doctor’s Family. In her new biography of Mrs Oliphant, Elisabeth Jay calls her ‘completely self-aware,’ able to see herself in both comic and tragic lights, or as ‘a fat little commonplace woman, rather tongue-tied.’ This phrase comes from her Autobiography, still unpublished when she died in 1897. It reads as a spontaneous outpouring of love and grief, with sharp passages, too, when other women authors come into her mind. (‘Should I have done better if I had been kept, like George Eliot, in a mental greenhouse and taken care of?’) Jay, who edited the Autobiography in 1990, makes it her starting-point here. But she didn’t want, she says, to go through the life and the work, comparing them blow by blow: a career is linear, but a woman’s life is cyclical. Her part-headings speak for themselves: ‘Women and Men,’ ‘A Woman of Ideas,’ ‘The Professional Woman.’ Her only firm ground, she tells us, has been Mrs Oliphant’s attempt to ‘evaluate her gender role,’ but her book, after eight hard years of original research, is much more comprehensive than this.

Mrs Oliphant, in any case, wasn’t evaluating so much as surviving. The necessities of the long battle made her unpredictable. More than once she described her visit, in 1860, to Blackwood’s offices—‘myself all blackness and whiteness in my widow’s dress,’ a humble supplicant who understood little about money—but when that didn’t work she negotiated advances with the best. She believed that women should be given the vote, but not that she herself would ever want to use it. She could be ‘almost fearsomely correct and in the middle of it become audacious.’ Often, too, her stories don’t give her readers the satisfaction of closure—a conventionally happy or even a well-defined ending. She doesn’t want us to expect too much of life, certainly not consistency.

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

1 (#ulink_33a8e7d2-46f3-5d7b-a683-c16f5fa3aab6)The 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.

2 (#ulink_d6f616cb-2878-5760-bede-69fab71ee975)If 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.

3 (#ulink_f66b8e9a-bee5-5bf8-9e49-97e160b21848)Frank’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 (#ulink_bdde4232-f426-5516-be14-f3afc74cd5d2)

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: