At four million words he beats Pepys, but the daily jottings of a judgmental don fail to transcend his rather stuffy millieu
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C Benson is remembered today, if at all, for having edited three volumes of Queen Victoria’s letters and for writing Land of Hope and Glory to accompany Elgar’s first Pomp and Circumstance march – though, like Elgar, he came to dislike the vainglorious imperial sentiments that the words express – “vulgar stuff and not my manner at all”. Born in 1862, he began his working life as a school master at Eton, before moving on in 1904 to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was first a fellow and then master.
Notably, he left voluminous diaries – over four million words, filling 180 bound volumes – four times the length of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who had been an undergraduate at Magdalene. Benson was well connected and knew most of the political and literary elite of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, so one might have expected him to offer a similarly unrivalled portrait of the age. Many believe that he did: one review of these two edited volumes declares that because of them, he has entered “the diarists’ pantheon”.
But though he met plenty of writers and other figures of note, he has little of value to say about them. Indeed his literary judgments are crass when not philistine: Henry James’s “idea of art was to tell a tale that few could understand or to present figures so faint & vague as seldom to be more than hypothetical”; Arnold Bennett was “a cad”; of Housman: “I don’t think he is quite a gentleman”.
