Monsignor Hugh Benson’s birthday on 18 November 1871 prompts a reflection on his life. This year, that reflection is shaped especially by the June publication of the extraordinary diary of his eldest surviving and closest brother, Arthur Christopher (AC), released to mark the centenary of Arthur’s death.
First and briefly, the diary: The Benson Diary: Volume I: 1885–1906; Volume II: 1907–1925 (edited by Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam, Pallas Athene, 2025). Arthur, an eminent housemaster at Eton and, for a decade, Master of Magdalen, Cambridge, was celebrated as a prolific writer of poetry and belles-lettres and is better known as the author of the lyrics to “Land of Hope and Glory”. Selections from his diary (kept between 1885 and 1925) — 180 manuscript volumes (running to close to five million words) — had been edited by his friend Percy Lubbock in 1927, and by David Newsome in 1979. But this year venerable Professors Duffy and Hyam’s generously introduced and meticulously edited two volumes, “somewhat less than a twelfth of the whole, about 350,000 words”, have been almost universally hailed. The TLS proclaimed, “In the Pepys Class”; the Literary Review’s Piers Brendon considered “Benson's diary is one of the best of the kind”; and The Critic’s headline read: “A fascinating record of a vanished world.”
