When I went up to Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1960, freshmen (we were all men) were presented with a potted history of the place written almost forty years earlier by its then master, Arthur Christopher Benson. The slim volume was remarkable for its smugness and snobbery, which confirmed the common opinion that Magdalene was a finishing school for Old Etonians. Benson celebrated the college’s sporting tradition, manifested in ‘a string of hunters waiting in the street for the close of a perfunctory lecture, the instructor being as anxious to get to the meet in time as his reluctant hearers’. And he prided himself that Magdalene had ‘never lacked a certain touch of social distinction’.

It was thus easy to assume that Benson was a conventional pillar of the establishment. A son of Edward White Benson, first headmaster of Wellington College and archbishop of Canterbury, he taught at Eton from 1885 until 1903, wrote ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, co-edited (with Lord Esher) Queen Victoria’s letters, and was elected a fellow of Magdalene, serving as master for ten years until his death exactly a century ago. He was also a prolific and popular belletrist, penning vacuous sentiments in mellifluous prose for what he called ‘a feminine tea-party kind of audience’. Typical of his books was From a College Window, in which he rhapsodised about the beauties of nature while, so an ancient don told me, facing away from the window. Benson aspired to produce a great work but acknowledged that he was ‘a feeble dabbler in literature’. As a dispenser of unctuous uplift, he likened himself to Dickens’s Mr Chadband and did indeed become something of a joke. Undergraduates quipped that he spent the morning doing nothing and the afternoon writing about what he had done in the morning. Max Beerbohm drew a cartoon of Benson ‘vowing eternal fidelity to the Obvious’.

Less obvious was the fact that Benson was a man in psychological toils, producing a diary that is mordant, sardonic, malicious and funny, a complete contrast to the bland effusions that won him wealth and fame. Like his idiosyncratic siblings, Benson was dominated, if not crushed, by his fearsome father. That able and ener­getic despot was notable for grooming a girl aged eleven to become his future wife, for turning white with rage as he flogged pupils at Wellington, and for being plagued by depression, which blighted his family’s life. Benson himself suffered from ‘neurasthenia’, which today would probably be diagnosed as bipolar disorder. He had a number of breakdowns, the longest taking place between 1917 and 1923, when he spent some time in a nursing home. Enduring horrific mental torture, terrifying suicidal impulses and fantastic paranoid delusions, he wrote, ‘The truth is that I am in hell.’ 

Fortunately, the bulk of his diary is more cheerful. Benson had a sharp eye for detail, a gift for pithy description and an irreverent attitude towards the eminent. Attending the coronation of Edward VII, he feared that it would be for the king not a consecration to a life of duty but ‘the Apotheosis of Buttons’. Benson characterised the monarch as affable, stupid, pompous, gross and philistine. When the preacher at Edward’s funeral said that he had gone to eternal rest, Benson commented: ‘He didn’t want to go there a bit; he wanted to go to Newmarket.’ As for George V, he was ‘every inch a cad’, while his eldest son was ‘a little rip’. Benson was more indulgent towards Queen Mary, characteristically agreeing to edit the official book about her much-feted doll’s house, even though he considered the project ‘ineradicably silly’.

Benson, who became more heterodox with age, did not spare the Church of England. He particularly disliked its Anglo-­Catholic wing, which was all ‘fringes & phylacteries … an upholstery movement, an aesthetic sham’. He deemed archbishop of Canterbury Frederick Temple a humbug and his successor, Randall Davidson, a Sadducee. A sermon by the bishop of London he compared to ‘the waving of a pocket-handkerchief from a sinking ship’. He disparaged dons, noting their petty squabbles and their table manners: one ate like a ‘wild-beast’ while another put food in his mouth ‘as if he were conveying valuable articles into a safe’. Oscar Browning of King’s College had a touch of genius, but, seeing his ‘evil face, as if loosely moulded out of dirty dough & smeared with train-oil, leering vilely at some detestable thought’, Benson pronounced him an ‘abominable old man’. Politicians also got short shrift. A self-­confessed High Tory, Benson damned Lloyd George as a ‘vile demagogue’ and said that Churchill resembled ‘some sort of a maggot’. Yet he condemned Kipling’s jingoism, recorded that General Kitchener was a devilish, squinting fellow and thought Admiral Fisher ‘nearly an orang-outang’.

Benson was acerbic and often hilarious about other authors. He describes Henry James’s talk as boring but ‘intricate, magniloquent, rhetorical, humorous’, and quotes him as saying that ‘the difference between being with [J M] Barrie & not being with him was infinitesimal’. Asked whether any of the actresses introduced to him by Ellen Terry were pretty, James replied, ‘I must not go so far as to deny that one poor wanton had some species of cadaverous charm.’ Immensely fat, G K Chesterton got so hot at a Magdalene dinner that the sweat ran down his cigar and ‘hissed at the point’. Hilaire Belloc was scintillating but frowsy and tipsy, living in something like a ‘gypsy encampment’, which, Benson thought, should be burned to the ground. Accompanied by Edmund Gosse, Benson visited Thomas Hardy, whose features were ‘curiously worn & blurred & ruinous’; they might have belonged to ‘a retired half-pay officer, from a not very smart regiment’. Although admiring H G Wells, Benson deprecated his ‘strong cockney accent’ and his ‘glorification of animalism’. 

As this suggests, Benson shared many of the social prejudices of his day. He extolled gentlemanliness and his favourite term of abuse was ‘ill-bred’. Admitting to a personal deficiency, he disliked most women, excluding them from his public lectures and regarding them as ‘an inferior race’. Brought up to be ashamed of sex, he was revolted by ‘slobbering osculations’ and ‘dog-like & promiscuous amours’. He engaged in romantic friendships with handsome young men, describing these affairs as ‘absolutely pure … above all other loves, noble, refining, true; passion at white heat without taint’. Benson recognised the erotic impulse behind his relationships but refused to write about it, preferring to dwell on idyllic bicycle rides or delicious tea parties with the likes of George Mallory, Rupert Brooke and Dadie Rylands. 

At over four million words, Benson’s diary is perhaps the longest in the English language. The contents of these two volumes represent roughly a twelfth of the whole. The editors, both distinguished Magdalene historians, have done a magnificent job. The introduction is brilliant, the selections are impeccable, the illustrations are apposite and the footnotes are entertaining as well as erudite. This distillation reveals that Benson’s diary is one of the best of the kind. To be sure, he is not in the same league as that other Magdalene diarist Samuel Pepys. But he is superior to James Lees-Milne, Harold Nicolson and Chips Channon, and on a par with Walter Scott and Virginia Woolf. Contrary to all expectations, the vapid sentimentalist produced a work of lasting interest and importance.