The King and His Reign I: Prince George's Education

Non-fiction ~ essay
Published in The Spectator, 22nd February 1935
1,295 words
(First read 02/12/2014)

"What do you mean 'Four's too young for the Navy'?"

In this the first of twelve articles published to commemorate the silver jubilee of King George V (1865-1936), EFB contrasts the prince's rearing with that of his father Edward VII (1841-1910).  The latter had a miserable, lonely childhood thanks to his parents¹ and so, to ensure that his son didn't suffer the same fate, packed young George off to the Navy at the earliest possible opportunity, along with the ill-fated heir to the throne Prince Albert Victor (1864-92)².
That's pretty much it, actually.  It's available to read online here.


¹ See King Edward VII: An Appreciation (1933) and The Baron (1937), etc.
² I daresay Edward found kids a bit style-cramping as well.

The Education of a King

Non-fiction ~ article
Published in The Spectator, 17th March 1933
1,070 words
(First read 07/07/2014)

No doubt EFB published this condensed version of the education of the long-serving Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, to get the public warmed up for the release of his full-length book King Edward VII: An Appreciation, which was released in June of the same year.  Despite all the best efforts of Prince Albert (guided in part by his own ex-tutor Baron Stockmar), the prince's education was a signal failure ... or rather he never really learnt anything that his dad and the Baron wanted him to learn.
You can read the article online here.

Queen Victoria

Non-fiction
Published 1935
(First read 22/02/2014)

A clever and witty biography in which Benson deals mainly with Victoria as woman and wife rather than queen and empress.  The tone is light, anecdotal, even a bit gossipy; there's humour, some of it ever-so-gently in mock of Her Royal Shortness and killer consort; EFB doesn't bore the pants off us with endless politics and politicians, instead sketching them in with a few skilled strokes; in short, the reader's left feeling that he probably knows enough about Queen Victoria now.  (The edition I have ~ Chatto & Windus, 1987 ~ also has the advantage of being 'lavishly illustrated', which always helps ...)  Not available online.

STOP PRESS

I just came across this in Mother (1925):

Once only had I seen [the Queen] close and quietly.  For one year, towards the end of the eighties, my father had taken a house on Deeside for August, and we were all invited to Balmoral.  And the diminutive old lady with the prominent blue eyes that looked very fixedly at you and the really beautiful voice, who was so small and so significant, was the head of everything, the incarnation of stability and security, something cosmic. ...  There was, too, something vividly individual about her, and if, never having seen her before, I had observed her walking into some very unexpected place, like a small restaurant in Soho, I verily believe I should have known her for Queen Victoria: nobody else could possibly be quite like that, nor could she possibly have been anyhow different.

Other critics

As a biographer, Mr. Benson has several outstanding qualities, all of which were won, perhaps, from his long apprenticeship to the novel. He has a remarkable ease of narrative, which makes event follow event with precision and grace; he has the collector's fancy for knowing all the facts, no matter how trivial; he has a quiet humor, quite free from any bitterness of wit, that enjoys gossip for its own sake and savors it as a kind of art in itself; and, most important of all, he has the suavity and gentleness of the born spectator, whom nothing can move very deeply but who understands even themost extraordinary aberrations of conduct without feeling contempt for their authors. These are very great gifts for a biographer, since they lead almost inevitably to the production of books which are rich in entertainment and full of information, books that have charm and vivacity and the polish that marks the elegant drawing-room. If they lack power and compelling prophetic insight, it is because they have the defects of their virtues.

~Charles David Abbott in The Saturday Review, 20/04/1935

  

There is no end to books on Queen Victoria, as, stunned, we contemplate the decay of her world. It is much as if admirers of the full-rigged ship devoted their talents to minute descriptions of the figurehead at the bow. Benson cannot possibly lend her life the acid contrast necessary to such a work, for he is the chief dispenser of Victorian memorabilia, and his volume, As We Were, successfully concealed, with innate charm, just what the Victorians were.

The chief interest to be found in a biography of Victoria is the attitude of the biographer. Granted that Lytton Strachey presented her unfairly, it must be admitted in the concession that he made a brilliant job of it. Benson treads in fearfully, being of angelic disposition, and sets about gracefully admitting the basis of Strachey’s libel, mitigating it with an amused tolerance which never swerves from printing, when pressed, the approximate truth. Where the author of Eminent Victorians once toyed wittily with a vast machine of politics, Benson is more concerned with giving a domestic background to Victoria’s life, though the facets of her career which must delight all amateur psychologists glitter occasionally by reflection in Benson’s amused eyes. Just why such a lush field is permitted to lie fallow, when the psychologists are so thorough in digging into the past, must be only a matter of diminishing royalties if such liberties are ever taken with a Royalty considerably diminished herself.

I read the book with interest chiefly in perusing an estimate of England’s queen by a gentleman antithetical to Lytton Strachey’s attitudes. Though it may be true that the latter lost considerable esteem in the obituaries the English critics paid him, Benson’s work, with its access to official archives, at least absolves Strachey of mendacity and rehabilitates much that the wittier man belittled. Benson’s book is the last word in gentleness. Until another Strachey - preferably John, or any other good Marxian - cares to survey the past of this remarkable queen, Benson’s biography will remain a standard work.

~Laurence Stallings in The American Mercury, 06/1935

The Princess Sophia

Fiction ~ novel

Published April 1900

Approx. 75,000 words 

(First read 18/11/2013) 

Sophia is firmly in the Ruritanian romance category.  Benson's madey-uppy Eastern European principality is called Rhodopé and is situated in a coastal part of [wait for it]

Albania.  Luckily for EFB, no-one in Rhodopé speaks Albanian, or even seems to know it exists: everyone uses impeccable English.  After a brief tour of Sophia's childhood, we see her ascend her dad's throne at the age of something like 20 [as ever, I forget the detail].  She marries a neighbouring prince and settles down to a life of ... well, nothing much, really.The 'catch' or, to use a more technical term, the 'thing' about this princess is that she is, from an early age, addicted to gambling: she loves roulette far more than she ever does her husband, her son, her father, her country, or anything else.  Gambling is pretty much all there is to her: she can't be arsed with running her country, which bores her; her sole child (Prince Leonard) has to sit in the nursery twiddling his thumbs till he gets a look-in; she soon

realizes her husband (Petros) isn't up to much, but nonetheless appoints him regent while she's off in Monte Carlo for x months of every year indulging her ruling passion; the only idea she ever has is to save herself some travel by opening a casino in Rhodopé itself.

The plot: Petros and the evil prime minister [yah! boo!] decide to oust Sophia while she's out of the country tossing her civil list down the toilet.  In one of the weirdest conspiracies I've ever read, they plot together to pull off separate dethronements ... it's kinda complicated.  Inevitably all their efforts come to nought in the end.  The PM is jailed for life, the prince consort merely exiled and divorced.  This takes us to about three-quarters of the way through.  The remaining dollop is devoted to her life post-non-event, and to her 'relationship' with her son-and-heir, who eventually ~ at the age of 20 or so [yawn] ~ wins the principality off her in a bet.  Yes, you read that right.

As so often seems to be the case with these reviews, I've ended up giving the impression that I didn't enjoy The Princess Sophia.  In fact I did quite enjoy it ~ but that's a  long way from being the same as thinking it was 'good'.  It wasn't: it was tripe.  But, despite having too many shortcomings to list, it was quite enjoyable tripe.  Lovers of Benson humour beware, though: 'light-hearted' though the general tone is, the novel is a zone almost entirely free of laughs, intentional or otherwise.  
It's available online here.

THE CRITICS

Mr Benson's novel is not void of entertainment, but it seems to have been written in an overwhelming hurry. Often enough in reading some volume of memoirs one says, “there is a novel here,” and would go on to write it, were it not for the fact that one realises that the story has got to be extracted from the material, the essential kept ~ some of it invented ~ and the inessential rejected. Mr Benson seems to have started with the intention of writing a novel, and to have succeeded only in producing a sketch history of an entirely fictitious character, on which a good story might be founded by anyone who had the time required for such achievements.  [...] There are several stories hidden away in the mass of material Mr Benson has got together. It is a pity he had not time to make up his mind as to which of them he desired to tell.

~The Morning Post, 26/06/1900

We are inclined to think that Mr. Benson's new book is the best thing he has yet done. It is a very clever study of gambling and a very clever study of human nature. In all the book there is not a character which is not natural, and there is also an absence of the superficiality which has sometimes been noticeable in Mr. Benson's work. He seems to be thoroughly at home with his characters, and describes them with truth and with originality.

~The Guardian, quoted in endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

 A gay and spirited performance, and the Princess herself a clever picture. It is lively reading, and the characters bubble along in true Bensonian fashion.

 

~The Westminster Gazette, quoted in endpapers of The Book of Months

As brilliant in execution as it is happy in conception.

 

~The Birmingham Daily Post, quoted in endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

Told with verve and wit. If the novel is to amuse we cannot recommend a more agreeable companion than Mr. Benson's brilliant friend The Princess Sophia.

~Literature, quoted in endpapers of The Book of Months

The best of the book is undoubtedly the admirably-conceived and skilfully-drawn character of Sophia herself ~ princess, gambler, and very woman. Mr. Benson has written nothing fresher or more graceful than the chapter which tells the story of her courtship. The art with which he preserves his picture of the card-playing, betting, hard-riding girl from any taint of vulgarity or sordidness is not easily over-praised.

 

~The World, quoted in endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

A rather long-drawn-out and not very creditable story of an imaginary principality lying between Greece and Turkey. Its Princess is a confirmed gambler, and in the end she stakes her kingdom in a game of roulette with her son, who is disguised, and whom she does not know. The book is decidedly inferior to Mr. Benson's historical stories of Greece, The Vintage and The Capsina. The last-named book seems to us to be the high-water mark of the literary achievement of the author of Dodo.

 

~The Outlook (US), 28/04/1900

The characterization is excellent, the humour pleasing, the satire true.

 

~The Daily Telegraph, quoted in endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

There is brilliance, lightness of touch. The dialogue is neat and brisk, and the miniature Court and its courtiers are amusingly treated.

 

~The Athenaeum, quoted in endpapers of The Book of Months and Sheaves

The Disappearance of Jacob Conifer

Fiction ~ short story
Published in The Windsor Magazine, October 1927
Collected in Desirable Residences and Other Stories (1991)
Approx. 2,700 words
(First read 06/05/1992) 

This one's a bit of an oddball, difficult to categorize ... let's call it 'allegorical satirical speculative fiction'¹ with a bit of a detective mystery thrown in for good measure ... try to imagine a Conan Doyle story rewritten by H. G. Wells then rewritten again by E. F. Benson. (!)
Well anyway, it tells the story of Mr Jacob Conifer, an American millionaire, "one of that amiable company of Transatlantic cousins whose mission in life appears to be to make the English folk of London acquainted with each other and with them."  Conifer sets out to conquer Society ("forcible feeding was his method"); his rise to the top of the crème is a total success.  Why then did he suddenly disappear one day? and what has become of him?²  This is what our narrator and his pal set out to discover; after comparing notes about their impressions of him, the narrator realizes a curious fact about Conifer's appearance:

I saw him once bowing to a Princess, and he looked immense.  I scorn to argue that it was a small Princess.  Let's agree that both you and I thought he looked small on some occasions and big on others.

And the 'joke' turns out to be that Conifer was such a terrific snob that merely being in the presence of aristocrats and the like caused him to increase in size ... and vice versa.
The big mystery for me, though, was this: "Why did EFB choose to make him an American?"


¹ The Satyr's Sandals (1920) is another piece that falls into this weird category.
² Apologies for the weird shift of tenses here.