A House of Air. Hermione Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ to rule, although he believed the choice was not in his hands—‘if calls exist,’ he wrote, ‘called I was, against my will’—and they think he was at the very height of his powers in Truro, working as a creative pioneer, with a new cathedral to build, and on the way to revealing his own personal conception of the episcopacy and of religion itself. As Primate ‘his acquaintance with the practical affairs of Church and State was slight, and he knew he would quickly have to master all the administrative problems that would surround him. Everything poetical and romantic, the very essence of his view of life, would be left behind in Cornwall.’ But Edward of course went courageously into new duties and controversies—temperance, patronage, disestablishment, the guidance of missionary societies, ‘the wretchedness of the poorest classes, their ignorance and wildness and false friends,’ reunion between the churches, ritual.

      His Lincoln judgement of 1890 was given after months of hard work and anxiety. The Bishop of Lincoln was on trial on charges of ‘irregular and unlawful ritual,’ and in particular of adopting the eastward position with his back to the congregation during the consecration, so that the people could not see what the priest was doing. Benson finally allowed the eastern position as optional, but insisted that the consecration of the elements itself must be before the people. ‘What he meant by this was illustrated at my consecration in St Paul’s Cathedral,’ wrote my grandfather (my other one, the Bishop of Manchester). ‘He thus deliberately differentiated the English Holy Communion from the Roman Mass. But this provision of his has been generally disregarded.’ Who cares? But in February 1889, crowds besieged Lambeth Palace on the first day of the trial, long before the doors opened at eleven o’clock, and the police had to be called in to keep order.

      This grandfather, by the way, although he worked himself almost to death, allowed himself not to answer letters from obvious lunatics. But Benson, apparently, told his chaplain that they must all be answered, since they might have been of importance to the men who wrote them. He never retired, but died (in October 1896) on a visit to the Gladstones, at early Communion in the church at Hawarden. ‘He died like a soldier,’ said Gladstone. And he had lived like one, too, constantly at his post. But Palmer and Lloyd might, perhaps, have said more about his interest in the supernatural. At Cambridge, in the late 1840s, he and his friends had founded a Ghost Club. He is usually said to have lost interest in such matters or even to have come to disapprove of them, but in his notebooks for 12 January 1895, Henry James writes:

      Note here the ghost story told me at Addington…by the Archbishop of Canterbury…the story of the young children (indefinite number and age) left to the care of servants in an old country house…The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children; the children are bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree. The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and their apparitions, figures, return to haunt the house and children, to whom they seem to beckon, whom they invite and solicit, from across dangerous places, the deep ditch of a sunk fence, etc so that the children may destroy themselves, lose themselves, by responding, by getting into their power. So long as the children are kept from them, they are not lost; but they try and try, these evil presences, to get hold of them. It is a question of the children ‘coming over to where they are.’

      Edward Benson told this story in the year before his death. There are two principles within each soul—we have to choose, we have to renew the struggle every hour. He had preached this so long and so earnestly, but here it is in the form of a powerful tale of haunting. How can it be said, then, that he left everything poetical and romantic behind him in Cornwall?

      London Review of Books, 1998

       The Need for Open Spaces

      Octavia Hill was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England, in 1838, the youngest but two of a family of eleven children, ten of them girls. She had no formal education, for her strong-minded mother believed in letting her children do what they were best at, and in letting them be outdoors as much as possible. When Octavia was fourteen, the family moved from the country into London: she never forgot the loss of green fields and fresh air.

      However, she needed to earn her living, so she became the manager of a toy-making workshop run for the benefit of girls from what was then called a ragged school. Hill went on to become a crusader for housing reform, managing small blocks of slum property and making sure the apartments were fit to live in. She grew into authority and sat on select committees and royal commissions, but without wavering an inch from her first principles.

      She didn’t believe in charity as such. What she asked for, for everyone, was access to education, employment at a fair wage, and, above all, space ‘for the sight of sky and of things growing.’ She felt strongly that people, and the poor in particular, needed open space, but she also set herself to see that they got it. This is the work for which she is now best remembered, as one of the founders of the National Trust. The campaign, based on the open spaces movement in the United States, began in the late 1880s with a protest against the closing of rights of way and footpaths. The first stretch of land to be presented to the trust was four and a half rocky acres on the coast of Wales. By the time Hill died, in 1912, the trust’s property had expanded beyond all calculations, and some American conservationists had taken to looking to Hill for inspiration.

      Evidently, to achieve so much, Hill had to be an impressive but also an infuriating woman. Tiny, stout, noticeably badly dressed, with a hat like a pen wiper (her lifetime friend John Ruskin couldn’t bear her dowdiness), she was obstinate—no, more than obstinate, absolutely inflexible. She has been called one of the noblest women ever sent upon earth, but it didn’t do to disagree with Octavia Hill.

      New York Times Magazine, 1999

       In the Golden Afternoon

      Lewis Carroll: A Biography, by Morton N. Cohen, and The Red King’s Dream, or Lewis Carroll in Wonderland, by Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone

      In a letter of 1874 the author of Alice described to a child friend how he had been seen off at the railway station by two affectionate friends, Lewis Carroll and Charles Dodgson. Here he is dividing himself not into two, but three. This was never a matter of conflicting selves. It was a game, though one he took seriously, as mathematicians do.

      Morton N. Cohen, after thirty years of faithful research and scholarship, has undertaken a complete biography of the whole man, and finds himself driven to call him ‘Charles.’ In a certain sense, there is little to relate. Dodgson was born in 1832, the eldest child of the parsonage at Dares-bury in Cheshire, where ‘even the passing of a cart was a matter of great interest.’ He was deaf in one ear and stammered. At Rugby, he suffered uncomplainingly for four years. At home, he edited nursery-table magazines, The Rectory Umbrella and others, for his brothers and sisters, and took responsibility for them when the parents died. In 1851, he went up to Christ Church, and spent the rest of his working life there. He was elected to a studentship in mathematics and became a rather contentious member of the very contentious governing body and Curator of the Common Room, laying down some good wine and, in 1884, instituting afternoon tea. He had rooms, first of all in the Library building, and then, when he had more money, in Tom Quad. His study was as full of devices and puzzles as a toyshop, and up and down his stairs came scores of little girl visitors and their mothers. (When speaking to children, he did not stammer.) As a Ruskinian in search of beauty and, at heart, a gadgeteer, he became a notable amateur photographer. His subjects were almost all celebrities—he stalked the Tennyson family, catching them at last in the Lake District—and children. In 1880, perhaps because the new dry-plates made the whole thing too easy, he put away his camera. In 1867, he had made an expedition to Russia with his old friend Henry Liddon; he never went abroad again, never married, and was ordained only as a deacon, never as priest. Meanwhile he worked relentlessly, though sedately, publishing three hundred titles, of one kind or another, in СКАЧАТЬ