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
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 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 contentious 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.
At this point, Cohen gives way to ungainly speculations. Perhaps, he thinks, in 1863, when the newly married Prince and Princess of Wales visited the Deanery, Alice might have impetuously piped up: ‘I’m going to marry Mr Dodgson.’ And if Charles were present, perhaps taking it as a teasing remark, or not, he might have picked up the thread and replied: ‘Well said, and why not!’ Ah, teasing. That might have much to do with the case. Young females can bat their eyes, shake their heads, toss their locks about, feign innocence, and make outrageous suggestions all with intent to shock and call attention to themselves. And the three clever Liddell sisters were probably expert in these arts.
The biographer’s task, however, isn’t to picture wild scenes at the Deanery, but, as Cohen tells us, ‘to look beyond the writings and into the artist.’ He has set himself to account for Dodgson’s shyness, reserve, and melancholy and the springs of his magical creative power. His conclusion is that Dodgson, as a rector’s eldest son, bore ‘scars of guilt’ because he was a childless bachelor and a mathematician who would never be a priest. The father must, it seems, have been oppressive, although there is very little evidence for this and Cohen has to end the section rather lamely: ‘Had Charles managed to forge a union with Alice or some other object of his desire he would have been a far happier man than he was.’ Alice in Wonderland, he claims, is, in fact, about Dodgson himself, and his adolescent trials and stresses (although Alice could in no circumstances be anything but a little girl, absolutely certain of the rules she has learned and able to put down any amount of nonsense). Through the Looking-Glass is about Alice Liddell, but the game is more advanced. She climbs the social ladder and ‘becomes a woman.’ This doesn’t account for the irresistibility of the stories, which Cohen, in orthodox style, puts down to emotional and sexual repression. He has made a checklist of the prayers entered in the diaries for purity and a new life. There are many more of these, he calculates, when Dodgson was meeting the Liddell children regularly. His diverted sexual energy ‘caused him unspeakable torments,’ but we can consider ourselves fortunate, since it was in all probability the source of his genius. Meanwhile, without ever compromising his conscience or his religious faith, he had to endure his existence as ‘the odd man out, an eccentric, the subject of whispers and wagging tongues.’
Although Cohen accepts Mavis Batey’s identification (published in 1991) of the stories with their Christ Church background, he seems never quite to realize how well Dodgson was suited to mid-Victorian Oxford. Oxford hostesses were good judges of eccentricity, and the college halls were used to nervous, stammering, opinionated, riddling and joking guests. My grandfather, a tutor at Corpus in 1870, notes, ‘Heard this evening the last new joke of the author of Alice in Wonderland: he (Dodgson) knows a man whose feet are so large that he has to put his trousers on over his head.’ There is a kind of friendly resignation about this, certainly not hostility.
As to Alice herself, she was a creature of the golden age of indulged small girls, when Ruskin piled up valuable books for them to jump over, when Oscar Wilde rowed little Katie Lewis on the Thames, delighted with her selfishness, when Flaubert wrote a letter to his niece from her doll and Gladstone buttered his granddaughter’s bread on both sides. And Alice becomes a queen, but her reign will be short. As the century turned, the little girls of fiction were replaced by boys (Peter Pan, Le Grand Meaulnes) who were either unwilling or unable to grow up, but that is not the world of Alice. ‘I had known dear Mr Dodgson for years,’ Ellen Terry said. ‘He was as fond of me as he could be of anybody over the age of ten.’ Dodgson believed that ‘anyone that ever loved one true child will have known the awe that falls on one in the presence of a spirit fresh from God’s hands on whom no shadow of sin has yet fallen,’ but between ten and fourteen the shadow did fall. On 11 May 1865, he met Alice (by now thirteen) with Miss Prickett, ‘the quintessence of governesses,’ in Tom Quad. ‘Alice seemed changed a good deal, and hardly for the better probably going through the usual awkward stage of transition.’ Like every other child friend (though none of them were so dear), she had withdrawn her true self into time past. In Chapter 23 of Sylvie and Bruno, he expresses his nostalgia as a melancholy joke when with the help of the Professor’s Reversal Watch he turns time backward, only to find himself cruelly cheated.
It is distressing that Morton Cohen seems to care so little for Sylvie and Bruno, Dodgson’s parable of love and forgiveness. It is here that he is closest to his friend George MacDonald, whose Phantastes was written as a ‘fairy-tale for adults.’ When (in the introduction to Sylvie and Bruno Concluded) he says that he has imagined a possible psychical state in which a human being ‘might sometimes become conscious of what goes on in the fairy world, by actual transference of their immaterial essence,’ he is talking about something of the greatest importance to him. It is not enough to say, as Cohen does, that ‘Charles retreated inward when he should have travelled outward.’
Cohen, however, may well think that after thirty years’ patient study of the material he has earned the right to his own interpretations. Certainly he has avoided ‘the eccentric readings [that], while they may amuse, do not really bring us any closer to understanding the work,’ although, judging from his true grit as a biographer, he has probably read them all. The Red King’s Dream is yet another one. Here the authors, Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone, set out with the apparent advantage of living at Hawarden Castle, a few hundred yards from the Gladstone Library at St Deiniol’s. Their quest seems to have started there, with a strange conviction that, in Tenniel’s Wonderland illustration, the Lion is Disraeli and the Unicorn (in spite of his unmistakable goatee beard) is Gladstone. Tenniel was a political cartoonist, therefore the whole book must be a contemporary satire. (Dodgson, in fact, chose Tenniel not because of his work for Punch, but because the animals were so good in his Aesop’s Fables.) The White Knight must be Tennyson, and Tennyson’s two sons (not twins) must be Tweedledum and Tweedledee. In default of other evidence, an anagram will do. For instance, it is decided that the Mad Hatter is Charles Kingsley, so that the Hare must be his brother Henry: the Hare’s reply, ‘It was the best butter,’ is an anagram (though unfortunately it isn’t quite) of The Water Babies. But ‘we still did not know who the Dormouse could be…we could not fit him into the Kingsley coterie.’ It is anybody’s guess, but fit in he must, and he turns out to be F. D. Maurice, while Dean Stanley is the Cheshire cat, and Millais, because of his commercial success, is the Lobster who is baked too brown. And so on, faster and faster.
The only compensation is that the authors seem to be enjoying themselves so much. In this way at least their research is part of what Dodgson called ‘those stores of healthy and innocent amusement that are laid up in books for the children that I love so well.’
Times Literary Supplement, 1995
Edward Lear (1812—1888) made his reputation as a water-colourist after almost no training, and invented himself as an Old Man with a Beard. He is a very attractive example of Victorian self-help. It was not an easy life, of course. English humorists are all depressive, and Lear suffered to the very end from ‘fits of the morbids.’
Vivien Noakes’s Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (1968), her book on his painting, and her catalogue for the 1985 Exhibition are classics. Peter Levi acknowledges her work without reserve. It has left him free to write an eccentric, affectionate biography, and to indulge himself as well as his subject. Lear was born in Holloway in 1812, the youngest of twenty-one children. When he was four, his father, a stockbroker, was declared bankrupt. Edward had perhaps five years at school and scarcely knew some of his family. He was lucky that his much older sister Anne looked after him tenderly, and he never had to go out to work as a clerk. He was unlucky in having poor sight until he was given spectacles, everything he saw was ‘formed into a horror’, in being epileptic and asthmatic, and in having (at the age of ten) been put through an experience by a brother and a cousin that he remembered as ‘the greatest evil done to me in life excepting that done by C.’ Who was ‘C’? Lear kept diaries, but later destroyed all of them up to the year 1858.
By the time he was sixteen, he was ‘drawing for bread and cheese,’ then made a serious start as a bird painter, and was summoned to Knowsley by the old twelfth Earl of Derby to draw the menagerie. Another benefactor, Lord Egremont, asked him: ‘But where is all this going to lead to, Mr Lear?’ It led to the life of a wanderer, or rather of a voluntary exile. In 1837, Lord Derby (and others) paid his passage to Rome. Lear got himself an attic in the via del Babuino, and began to learn Italian. What was to be drawn was beyond anything he could have imagined, not the antiquities, but the views. At that time, as Levi points out, you could still see the tip of Mount Soracte from the middle of Rome, glittering white in winter, and then there was the Campagna.
Levi believes that Lear ‘became happy from the time he decided to become a landscape painter.’ After nine years in Rome, and the publication of two volumes of Excursions in Italy, there was an unexpected interlude when the Queen, pleased with the Excursions, sent for him to improve her drawing. This was a new opening, perhaps, but it came to nothing. From Rome he went on, travelling in discomfort inconceivable, to Calabria, Sicily, Corfu, Greece, Turkey, Albania, Egypt, Palestine, Athens, Crete. It was his ambition to paint the whole Mediterranean coast, with one last expedition to India. In the 1870s he eventually settled down in a villa at San Remo. As a young man, he had walked almost the whole distance from Milan to Florence. As an old one, he had to be lifted in and out of railway carriages ‘like a bundle of hay.’ But he continued to work. In recording the lands of summer, he made something like ten thousand watercolours.
Levi writes finely about images he loves of countries which he himself knows well. Temperamentally, I think he is drawn to sketches more than to finished pictures, to ‘dew-freshness and variety,’ ‘the heavenly-fresh sketch of the bridge at Scutari,’ yet, on consideration, he believes that the chromolithographs of the Ionian islands are Lear’s masterpiece, and out of these he selects for his one permitted colour illustration the view of Zante, which had worried Lear because he didn’t see how it could be made picturesque. ‘In fact it was that failure which lay at the root of his success…He drew a picture of perfect provincial peace and quiet, enlivened, if at all, only by a few normal-looking goats, but in doing so he expresses the true genius of place…The image has stood still in his eye.’
Lear was deeply interested in technical processes that might create a larger market for him, photography in particular; he didn’t seem to see how threatening it might become to a painter of views. Meanwhile, he continued to make a living in the only way he knew, and as his hero, Turner, had done he either got commissions, or showed his finished works to people who might be likely to buy them. Apart from these, there were his travel albums and the Nonsense books, both of which sold moderately.
Apparently he thought seriously of marriage and proposed twice to the same girl, but since she was forty-six years younger, he must have been certain of a ‘No.’ Friends, the visits of friends, their unaccountable behaviour, their many-paged and always-answered letters, were the defence against ‘cruel loneliness’ and the support of his life, partly because he lived a good deal through theirs. Frank Lushington, the dearest of all, he followed to Corfu. When he heard that another close friend, Chichester Fortescue, had been made Secretary for Ireland, he threw a fried whiting, in his joy, across the hotel dining room. There were tears, also, and ‘angries.’ Not a hint of homosexuality here, Levi insists, but this ignores the many lights and shades of that golden age of male friendship. Undoubtedly, however, the real married couple of the household were Lear and his grumbling old Suliot servant, Giorgis, an unsatisfactory cook (‘Fried oranges again!’) but faithful to the death. Giorgis did not think a poor man should want to live more than sixty years, and in fact died before Old Foss, Lear’s favourite cat, the other presiding genius of the villa at San Remo.
Lear had escaped the fate of a mid-Victorian jester to the gentry, established his own life and planted his own garden. Now, accepting his stoutness, his beard, his strange nose, he mythologized himself, delightfully, though more wistfully, perhaps, than the circumstances warranted, as the desolate Yonghy Bonghy Bo and finally as Uncle Arly, who wandered the world in shoes too tight for him. There was a mythical version, too, of Old Foss.
Levi wanders amiably and sometimes confusingly in and out of the diaries and letters, and up and down the years. But the book arose, he tells us, ‘from an attempt to put together a lecture on Lear as a poet,’ and it seems a pity that in the end he has left himself so little room for this. Lear was a skilled metrist, partial to dactyls (‘Calico,’ ‘Pelican,’ ‘runcible’), and a magic songwriter, with something like a reverence for the absurd. Levi says something about this, and, as a poet, he defends the limericks from anyone who may have found them disappointing because of the repeated last rhymes. But he goes over the edge, surely (as he does several times in this book), when he says that in the 1880s Lear was writing poetry which ‘no one but Tennyson (until Hardy) could rival for its lively and startling originality.’ What’s become of Browning?
Times Literary Supplement, 1995
I think of Tennyson as one of the greatest of the English-rectory-bred wild creatures. In matters of theology, love, doubt, grief, and loss he is usually felt to have said what most people wanted to hear, but when he was in the grip of his daemon, as he surely was in ‘Break, Break, Break,’ or ‘Tears, Idle Tears,’ with its strange series of comparisons, or ‘In the Valley of Cauterez,’ or the last five verses of ‘To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava,’ he is not definable and not resistible. He was a superb metrist, who scarcely needed to care for the opinions of Indolent Reviewers, but did care, and he was someone who could hear the authentic voice of the English language. By this I don’t mean onomatopoeia (in any case many of his subjects for this—immemorial elms, church bells, steam trains—have unfortunately almost disappeared), but the sound of the language talking to itself. Take his round ‘o’s, which can be heard as he pronounced them himself in his recorded reading of ‘The Ballad of Oriana’: ‘When the long dun wolds are ribbed with snow…’ When my grandfather, as Bishop of Lincoln, preached the centenary sermon at Somersby, he quoted ‘Who loves not knowledge?’ and was told afterwards ‘You should have said know-ledge. Lord Tennyson always pronounced it so.’ Every round ‘o’ had its weight and its considered position. ‘Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row!’—‘Naay, noä mander o’ use to be callin’ him Roä, Roä, Roä [Rover]/For the dog’s stoän deaf, and ’e’s blind, ’e can neither stan’ nor goä.’ That is the Spilsby variation, of course. At times Tennyson seems to me to be listening, rather as Pavarotti does, in apparent amazement simply to the beauty of the sound s that he is inexplicably able, as a great professional, to produce.
Times Literary Supplement, 1992
In 1984, Ann Thwaite wrote, most successfully, the biography of Edmund Gosse, the Man of Letters. Now she has made a close study of another almost extinct profession, the Great Man’s Wife. It was a role that could end tragically, as it did for the second Mrs Watts, who had to live on in the painter’s house and studio for more than thirty years after his death, while his reputation faded to almost nothing. Emily Tennyson only survived her husband by four years, giving her time to work, with her son Hallam, on the two volumes of Memoirs.
They first met each other as Lincolnshire children. She was the daughter of Henry Sellwood, a Horncastle solicitor; he came from the disastrous Rectory family at Somerton. She did not marry her Ally until she was thirty-six years old. By this time the worst of his financial troubles were over (although he had formed a chronic habit of grumbling about money), and a few months later he was appointed Poet Laureate. But for the past seven years the two of them had been eating their hearts out, while her well-meaning father forbade them to correspond. Sellwood was thinking of the drinking and smoking, the restlessness, the black moods and indeed the ‘black blood’ of the Tennyson family, the father an epileptic drunkard, one brother in an asylum, another one violent, a third addicted to opium from Lincolnshire’s homegrown poppies. Beyond this, Emily was a steadfast believer, while Tennyson was tormented and unresolved, particularly over God’s reason for creating sin and suffering. Another gulf to cross was the ‘deeper anguish’ of Arthur Hallam’s death, which had left Tennyson, as he said, ‘widowed,’ so that he ‘desired to die rather than to live’. But this, at least, was not a drawback to Emily. As a strengthening influence, she thought of herself as Hallam’s appointed successor. It seems a difficult concept, but it illustrates the depth, the purity, and the strange nature of Victorian emotional relationships.
Even Ann Thwaite, the most thoroughgoing of researchers, can’t tell exactly how it was that the crisis was resolved. They were married on 13 June 1850, at Shiplake-on-Thames. Tennyson said, in apparent surprise, that it was the nicest wedding he had ever been at.
Now Emily embarked on her profession, which was primarily a defensive campaign on many fronts. Tennyson had to be protected against distress of body and mind—against noise and disturbance, against the servant situation (which Georgie Burne-Jones, herself an expert campaigner, described as ‘a bloody feud or a hellish compact’), against visitors, sightseers, vexatious relatives, against a monstrous daily post (every amateur poet in the country sent their verses for his opinion), against contemptible hostile criticism and a writer’s own self-doubt and self-reproach. He seems to have managed up till then without her, largely by moving about. Indeed, even after his marriage, the Tennysons moved often, and for years Emily had two houses to run, Farringford at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight and Aldworth, near Haslemere, where they went in summer to avoid the holiday-makers. Ann Thwaite’s book is long, but her painstaking method is the only way to give an idea of Emily’s immensely troublesome, immensely rewarding daily life. Almost everything that could go wrong with the two houses did, including that traditional enemy, the drains. In 1856, for example, Emily was weeding potatoes, binding Alfred’s manuscripts, and planning a new dairy: she paid the bills and subscriptions, kept the accounts…found tenants…organized and supervised builders. She became deeply involved with the Farringford farm when they took it over in 1861. Emily would often consult Alfred—about the rent they should ask for the chalkpit, for instance—but he would say, ‘I must leave it in thy hands to manage.’
In 1865, Queen Emma of the Sandwich Islands arrives with her Hawaiian entourage. The children’s rooms are needed for the royal party, and they are crammed into the lodge, while Emily’s cousin and aunt, who are staying ‘indefinitely,’ are stowed away elsewhere. Later, Dr James Acworth arrives; his wife is a spiritualist medium and ‘in A’s study,’ Emily’s diary records, ‘a table heaves like the sea.’ In 1871, there is a full house at Aldworth, but Mrs Gladstone is told to come and bring as many of the family as possible. ‘We have room, both in house and heart.’ Some guests have to be encouraged, some consoled. Tennyson, although a generous host, is unpredictable. In 1859, Edward Lear, a favourite guest, is so rudely treated that he goes upstairs to pack; Emily soothes him and buys one of his drawings. Meantime, her two sons, Hallam and Lionel, are brought up from golden-haired darlings, encouraged to walk on the dinner table, to become unrebellious, affectionate, quite dull young men.
Thwaite gives them almost as much importance in her biography as they must have had in their own family. She is following, she says, Christopher Ricks’s advice to her—‘Parents are formed by their children as well as children formed by their parents.’ But did Emily ever change? Some personal difficulties she solved simply by letting them be—the poet’s dirty shirts, for example, his dark muttering or bellows of complaint after dinner, his skirmishes with pretty women visitors and his compulsion to wander. ‘I trust Saturday will indeed bring thee back, but do not come if there is anything for which thou wouldst wish to stay,’ she writes in 1859.
These indulgences irritated friends of long standing who saw Emily as a kind of saint, certainly much better than Alfred deserved. ‘Do not throw away your life,’ Jowett wrote to her. He thought ‘there was hardly enough of self in her to keep herself alive.’ Lear (half envious of the closeness of marriage, half repelled by it) wrote in his diary that ‘no other woman in all this world could live with [A. T.] for more than a month.’ They were mistaken, however, if they thought Tennyson was ungrateful. He knew very well that he was blessed, and would, he said, have worked as a stonebreaker to be allowed to marry her earlier. ‘If she were not one of the sweetest, justest natures in the world, I should be almost at my wits’ end.’ And the two of them faced together the death of two children—their first son, who was stillborn, and Lionel, who died at sea in 1885 on the passage home from India.
The usual image of Emily Tennyson is that of one more sickly Victorian woman, ruling from her sofa. (That, certainly, was how Virginia Woolf represented her in her play Freshwater.) From early childhood she had been considered a weak creature and as a married woman she was often in too much pain to walk, and yet, as Thwaite points out, when her sons were little she writes of climbing ladders, scrambling over rocks, and getting down the Alum Bay cliffs with her feet in eel-baskets. It was not until Hallam and Lionel were students that she had some kind of serious collapse. But nineteenth-century ailments defeat twentieth-century biographers. Reducing sufferers to a wreck, pain was accepted as a lifetime companion. Patience was prayed for, a cure was hardly expected. It’s a relief to know that Emily was a great believer in champagne, and brandy in her bedtime arrowroot.
After five years of research, Thwaite asks herself and the reader: was Emily Sellwood’s life (as Jowett put it) ‘effaced’? After she left school to become an angel in the house, she educated herself, like so many spirited Victorian daughters, by reading. (My own step-grandmother entered in her diary on her wedding-day: ‘Finished Antigone; Married Bishop.’)
Emily read Dante, Goethe, Schiller, science, and theology, as Thwaite says, ‘as though in preparation for eternity.’ When she was introduced to Queen Victoria, they talked ‘of Huxley, of the stars, of the millennium, of Jowett.’ Did she squander her intelligence, or worse still, did she wear herself out for nothing? Mrs Gilchrist (the widow of Blake’s first biographer) told William Rossetti that she believed that Emily did positive harm, when ‘watching him with anxious, affectionate solicitude, she surrounds him ever closer and closer with the sultry, perfumed atmosphere of luxury and homage in which his great soul—as indeed any soul would—droops and sickens’. Edward Fitzgerald, the sardonic friend, considered, in the 1870s, that Alfred would have done better with ‘an old Housekeeper like Molière’s’, or perhaps ‘a jolly woman who would have laughed and cried without any reason why’; Tennyson’s best things, he thought, had gone to press in 1842. What, then, is the value of a woman, and what is poetry worth, even one poem, say Maud, or ‘To the Rev. F. D. Maurice’? Thwaite, although she gently reproves Fitzgerald, doesn’t discuss these things. She has set her own limits, and she is not writing a book about Tennyson, but about Emily.
In fact, Tennyson understood, or at least comprehended his wife very well. He knew that she was motivated by love in its highest form of compassion, not only for himself but for every other human being. Motherless herself, she was conscious every hour of the day of ‘the forlorn ones.’ It wasn’t only that she dreamed on a large scale of old-age pensions for the poor, justice in Schleswig-Holstein, furnished rooms for single working women. Her instinct to rescue and console extended to the future and the past. Admiring Turner’s paintings, she added ‘How one wishes one might have done something to make his life happy.’ Simply to be unfortunate was a good enough claim on Emily.
Her faith, Tennyson wrote in the dedication to his last poems, was ‘clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven.’ Easy enough to treat this ironically or even satirically, but Ann Thwaite has done neither—she has gone right in among these people like a good, if inquisitive, neighbour who becomes a lifelong friend. She persuades us, or almost persuades us, that Emily mustn’t be thought of as a victim, since she believed her work was as important as it was possible to be. This doesn’t mean that she was satisfied with it. ‘I could have done more,’ she said on her deathbed.
Times Literary Supplement, 1996
Christina Rossetti (1830—1894) wrote ‘If I had words’ and ‘I took my heart in my hand’ and ‘If he would come today, today’ and ‘What would I give for a heart of flesh to warm me through’ and:
I bent by my own burden must
Enter my heart of dust.
Her poetry she described as ‘a genuine “lyric cry,” and such I will back against all skilled labour.’ Biographers, though not Christina herself, feel themselves obliged to explain where the passion came from, how it was restrained, and what ought to have been done with it. Then they have to face her preoccupation not only with death but with the grave, and the sensation of lying, remembered or forgotten, under the turf. There was, too, a sardonic Christina, whose comment on art and life was this:
The mangled frog abides incog,
The uninteresting actual frog:
The hypothetic frog alone
Is the one frog we dwell upon.
But she was also, and this was central to her whole existence, twice-born. At the age of about thirteen she became, in company with her mother and sister, a fervent High Anglican. The keynote, which Pusey and Keble had set, was self-sacrifice. To find enough to sacrifice and to suffer for, ‘not to keep back or count or leave’—the same impulse as Eliot’s ‘Teach us to care and not to care’—became her prayer, in extremity. She saw herself as a stranger and a pilgrim in this world, waiting for release.
She was born the youngest of a family of happily settled Anglo-Italian exiles: a pedantic, sentimental, slightly cracked father, an imperturbable mother, Italian visitors and refugees in and out at all hours. The children had their grandfather’s fruit garden near Amersham for a paradise, poverty to keep them from contact with the outside world, admiring relatives to pet them and their mother to educate them. Dante Gabriel and Christina were the ‘storms’ of the family, and, when in a rage, Christina could be a ripper and a smasher. The elder sister, Maria, and loyal William Michael were the ‘calms.’ On ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ William’s editorial comment was: ‘I have more than once been asked whether I could account for the outburst of exuberant joy evidenced in this celebrated lyric; I am unable to do so.’ Christina needed both the saintly narrow-minded sister and the ‘brothers brotherly,’ and there they were: ‘wherever one was, the other was, and that was almost always at home.’
Like Emily Brontë, Charlotte Mew, and Eleanor Farjeon, she knew the greatest happiness of her hushed life-drama very early on. No wonder that the most radiant of her lyrics are the children’s verses of ‘Sing-Song,’ or others that children readily understand (‘In the Bleak Midwinter,’ ‘Does the Road Wind Uphill?’) or half-understand and can’t get out of their minds, like ‘Goblin Market.’ It is easy to remember this luscious and suggestive temptation poem not quite as it is—or perhaps one remembers it wrong on purpose. ‘The central point,’ as William insisted, is that ‘Laura having tasted the fruits once, and being at death’s door through inability to get a second taste, her sister Lizzie determines to save her at all hazards; so she goes to the goblins, refuses to eat their fruits, and beguiles them into forcing their fruits upon her with so much insistency that her face is all smeared and steeped with the juices; she gets Laura to kiss and suck these juices off her face, and Laura, having thus obtained the otherwise impossible second taste, rapidly recovers.’ It is a story of salvation, which Christina, for what reason we can’t tell, dedicated to her sister Maria.
As it turned out, she never left the family’s shelter. She became a fountain sealed, a Victorian daughter ageing in the company of her aunts and her beloved mother. Dante Gabriel described her ‘legitimate exercise of anguish under an almost stereotyped smile.’ She broke off two engagements to be married on religious grounds—not, surely, as Maurice Bowra thought, because she was afraid of ‘the claims of the flesh,’ but because she had twice found a sacrifice that was worth the offering.
Of the dozen or so biographies of Christina, the latest, by Georgina Battiscombe, is the most readable and certainly the most judicious. As an Anglican who has written lives of both Keble and Charlotte M. Yonge, Mrs Battiscombe understands the wellspring of Christina’s religious experience, and she explains it admirably. She is very good, too, on the dutiful day-to-dayishness of the outer life. With calmness and accuracy she counters earlier interpretations that seem to her out of proportion—by Lona Mosk Packer (obsessed with the idea that William Bell Scott was Christina’s lover), Maureen Duffy (engrossed in the phallic symbolism of ‘Goblin Market’), Maurice Bowra, Virginia Woolf. She has, of course, her own explanation. She sees Christina as a warm-blooded Italian conforming through strength of will to a strict Anglicanism—an awkward fit. ‘The poetry’s tension arises when her thwarted experience of eros spilled over into her expression of agape; but to explain her intense love of God simply in terms of repressed sex is too cheap and easy an answer. Love is none the less genuine because it is “sublimated.”’ The subtitle of the book is A Divided Life. On the technique of the poetry, as apart from its subject matter, she has less to say, and she doesn’t do much about relating it to the Tractarian mode, as Professor G. B. Trevelyan has done in his recent Victorian Devotional Poetry. But the story itself could not be more clearly told.
London Review of Books, 1982