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brothers – teacher, socialite and priest – found themselves producing literary terrors. Horror for the Bensons really began at home.

      Arthur, Fred and Hugh were the surviving sons of Edward White Benson, one of Queen Victoria’s favourite Archbishops of Canterbury. Another son, Martin, died in his teens. The whole family was, to put it mildly, odd. To all appearances the epitome of an upper-class Victorian family, their history reads like a TV soap opera – a child bride, a ruthless patriarch, lesbianism, homosexuality, child death, religious mania and homicidal lunacy.

      Edward Benson married Mary Sidgwick when she was eighteen (he’d had his eye on her since she was eleven). They produced six children, two of whom died young. The surviving daughter, Maggie, was to become totally insane and attempt to murder her mother, who was embroiled in a lesbian affair with one of Maggie’s friends.

      The father became an ogre to his children, who spent much time in their copious autobiographical works trying to allay his ghost. None of them married and the Benson line died out with them.

      With this gloriously dotty background, it is amazing that the brothers managed to keep both feet on the ground, though Arthur and Hugh had some alarming one-legged patches.

      As Fred’s life is so well known, and his ghost stories very familiar and not included here, I do not propose to dwell on his career any more, but turn instead to his brothers, who are less familiar and still unjustly neglected.

      Arthur became a schoolmaster, teaching first at Eton in 1892 and moving to Cambridge in 1903, where he rose to become Master of Magdalene College. He seems to have attracted some curious circumstances in his life. His main literary fame was founded on a string of books consisting of somewhat scholarly homilies, full of sweetness and light, which brought him a huge audience. One of his admiring readers was an anonymous American woman, wealthy in her own right, who had married an equally rich man. Touched by Benson’s description of the penury of Magdalene College, in 1915 she offered him, out of the blue, a large sum of money to improve the college. Understandably taken aback, Arthur eventually agreed, provided he was a trustee only, and over the next few years the American lady’s largesse enabled him to turn Magdalene into one of Cambridge’s leading colleges. Strange as it may seem, Benson and the American lady never met.

      Arthur suffered from depression, often for years at a time, and this affliction was made doubly crippling for him as it was such depression that heralded his sister Maggie’s descent into madness (happily, not the case with Arthur). In one of his books, Fred recounts how Arthur, in the grip of depression, thought he had locked his servants into the house and that they would be starving to death. He urged Fred to investigate, but it was a baseless alarm: he had made provision for them and then forgotten all about it.

      On a happier note, Arthur Benson is unwittingly celebrated every year at the Last Night of the Proms, when a rapturous audience bellows out his words to Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, better known as Land of Hope and Glory.

      Known to the world at large as the serene author of his rather sickly essays, he was in real life very big, very jovial and a born mickey-taker. His lifelong friend was M.R. James, our finest ghost story writer, and like Benson, large and inclined to a good laugh.

      It is not unlikely that they both had a quiet snigger from time to time at the antics of Hugh Benson. He seemed to have found a good antidote to the Benson blues: religion. Despite being the son of the head of the Church of England, and being ordained by his father into that church, Hugh Benson turned to the Roman Catholic church and was ordained into that faith in 1904. He did well; he rose to become a private chamberlain to Pope Pius X in Rome, returning to England in 1914 when Pius died (and dying himself soon after).

      While Arthur was happy with his small Cambridge circle, Hugh Benson became famous as a public speaker and went on tours preaching the faith all around the world. He was a fiery convert indeed – as is shown in his ghost stories – and his passion for all things Catholic is perhaps the greatest flaw in his writing. He was not without human failings: he became involved with the unsavoury Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo). The fascination of this seedy character is hard to understand, yet he excites the interest of writers to this day. Rolfe latched on to Benson as Hugh was a Catholic priest and a famous author – the two things Rolfe most coveted – and a plan to write a book together was to turn sour in the extreme. For reasons not too clear at this late date, but more to do with Rolfe’s lack of balance than Benson’s lack of judgement, the project fell through. Rolfe saw this as one more stage in his imagined persecution by the Catholic church, and the result was a very long hate campaign against all the Bensons. Rolfe was quite prepared to include the odd brother or two in his war against Hugh, and both Fred and Arthur got vitriolic letters from him.

      Like Fred, Arthur and Hugh wrote extensively and sold well. They may not have matched their brother’s output, or achieved his more enduring fame, but he had more time on his hands than they did.

      Arthur churned out his books of essays and a few novels; he edited Queen Victoria’s letters for publication; and he produced books of Benson family autobiography and biography, including a book each on his father, Hugh Benson and Maggie Benson.

      Hugh wrote books on religious practice and thought; some novels, both historic and prophetic, with lots of religion included; and contributed to the Benson catalogue of family history. For a line which died out, the Bensons left behind a vast amount of personal history which makes interesting reading now. There is certainly much left unwritten which would make even more interesting reading; and it should never be forgotten that the Bensons were supreme self-publicists – we read what they wanted us to know and nothing more, true or not.

      And all three of them wrote ghost stories. Their individual aims in writing them, however, varied enormously. Fred wrote his for money and entertainment. Arthur wrote his, in the main, as allegorical tales for his pupils, and kept fairly private some darker stories that were only published after his death. Hugh wrote his as glorifications, often unctuous, of his new Catholic faith. That Arthur and Hugh managed to produce such good material despite all this speaks worlds for their talent.

      The family and its background provided much overt influence. For instance, all three brothers wrote of rooms in towers: Fred in the title story of his 1912 collection, Arthur in ‘The Closed Window’, and Hugh in ‘Father Maddox’s Tale’. The tower room was a feature of their home in Truro, Lis Escop, when Edward Benson was Bishop of Truro from 1877 to 1882.

      Fred Benson was by far and away the most successful ghost story writer of the three and was not interested in moral lessons or religious tracts. He wrote his stories to frighten, and said so. Yet Arthur’s and Hugh’s stories contain some pretty scary stuff, and if Arthur wrote his for his pupils, they must have had a few nasty moments when he read them aloud. Hugh seems to frighten us almost in spite of himself at times.

      Arthur had met M.R. James in 1873, when they were both pupils at Temple Grove School, East Sheen (the setting for MRJ’s ‘A School Story’), and they stayed close friends until Benson’s death. Arthur would sit in on James’s Christmas readings of his stories, with friends such as Herbert Tatham, E.G. Swain and Arthur Gray, all of whom also wrote ghost stories. James’s influence on this genre is quite remarkable; it is possible to trace his influence in the work of over sixty writers.

      While neither Benson nor James overtly copied each other, there are some interesting parallels. In ‘The Uttermost Farthing’, Benson introduces a phantom that could have stepped from the pages of James. ‘The Red Camp’ bears an interesting resemblance in tone to MRJ’s later work ‘A Warning to the Curious’, where archaeological treasure hunting brings a grim reward.

      Arthur’s published ghost stories were written to entertain his pupils, and collected into book form later. One of his Eton pupils, E.H. Ryle, has described a typical Benson reading:

      We used to assemble in his dark and deserted study … exactly at the appointed moment [Benson] would emerge from his writing room … He would turn up the light in a green-shaded reading lamp on a little table, bury himself in his great, deep armchair … and then, in a low, conversational tone of voice, he would narrate an absorbing tale. I loved those Sunday evenings. The darkened room,

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