Censoring Queen Victoria by Yvonne M. Ward Read Free Book Online

was afraid of Papa (I don’t wonder),’ wrote Arthur, ‘and it must have been terrible to be so near him and his constant displeasure … In fact this little record changes my whole view of their relations … probably they should never have married.’ He did not ponder what effect his parents’ relationship had had on him. He knew himself well enough: ‘My own real failing is that I have never been in vital touch with anyone – never either fought with anyone or kissed anyone! … not out of principle, but out of a timid and rather fastidious solitariness.’ He did not know or care to explore the cause.
    During the ten years after 1892, Arthur published on average one book a year and during the following decade this rate more than doubled. These included gentle little prose collections, containing gentle reflections on nature and philosophical themes, which sold well, particularly amongst female readers. But he also wrote about individual men’s lives, their characters and achievements. The men he chose were exceptional, mostly unmarried, or men for whom marriage was ‘a closet’ in Brenda Maddox’s sense. He became something of a champion of homosexual and ambivalent men. In 1923, the year before his death, Arthur recorded a conversation with his brother Fred:
    We discussed the homo sexual [sic] question. It does seem to me out of joint that marriage should be a sort of virtuous duty, honourable, beautiful and praiseworthy – but that all irregular sexual expression should be bestial and unmentionable. The concurrence of the soul should be the test surely?
    The novelty of the term ‘homosexual’ is evident in Arthur’s writing of it as two separate words. He believed that men should be judged according to their depth of feeling, not social conventions or legalities. This was especially apparent in his biographical writings and in his celebration of the lives of men, many of whom he knew to be of ‘irregular sexual expression’.
    These books were published with neither fanfare nor secrecy, but sympathisers would have identified the encoded messages. Benson’s first book, published under the pseudonym Christopher Carr, was
Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B.A. of Trinity College, Cambridge, extracted from his letters and diaries, withreminiscences of his conversation by his friend Christopher Carr of the same College
. It was published after Benson’s return to Eton as master and he was soon identified as the author. The memoir described a love affair between two Eton boys. Such friendships, Benson wrote,
    are truly chivalrous and absolutely pure, are above all other loves, noble, refining, true; passion at white heat without taint, confidence of so intimate a kind as cannot even exist between husband and wife, trust as cannot be shadowed, are its characteristics.
    But the affair painfully disintegrated when the boys were reunited at Cambridge, thwarted by guilt and a crisis of faith.
    Benson’s second book was a collection of biographical sketches called
Men of Might: Studies of Great Characters
, written in collaboration with his lifelong friend and fellow Eton master, Herbert Tatham. Published in 1892, this volume was written as a teaching aid, aiming to supply schoolmasters with ‘lectures on men of various eras and denominations for boys 15 to 18 years old’. The subjects chosen were ‘Socrates, Mahomet, St Bernard, Savonarola, Michael Angelo, Carlo Borromeo, Fenelon, John Wesley, George Washington, Henry Martyn, Dr Arnold, David Livingstone, General Gordon, and Father Damien, the leper priest of Molokai’. Benson and Tatham’s mission was to instil in boys (and any other readers) a sense of glory in manhood, of the faith men could have in each other, and of the love and moral strength they could give to one another. Their collaboration itself grew out of a quintessentially homosocial friendship that began in