[In the following review, Bell praises Benson's diaries but questions the accuracy of them as presented in David Newsome's Edwardian Excursions.]

David Newsome's On the Edge of Paradise gave a full introduction to A. C. Benson's life through his manuscript diary preserved in the library of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He now turns to its earlier volumes for a series of long extracts covering some of Benson's vacation activities during his last years as an Eton master, before he settled in Cambridge as a don and man of letters, devoting his literary talents to the lucrative but undemanding lower-middle reading public and his romantic yearnings to the better-looking youth of the university. The earlier diaries seem oddly timeless (helped by some of Benson's expressions—“sate”, “skipt”, “manufactory”) and the selection has the air of a book for the country-house guest-room. It is appropriately insubstantial (and, especially when compared with the 400 larger pages of the Paradise book, alarmingly expensive), but it does succeed in giving us some representative passages of Benson at true length.

His quality as an observer is well brought out, particularly the peculiar social position that he occupied as an upper-middle-class academic, enabled by his Etonian and archiepiscopal connections to move freely in aristocratic and Court circles—and finding himself more attracted to them than he usually liked to admit, even when commenting on their stuffiness, philistinism and formality. His eye was sharp, and during this early period his pen was being sharpened by practice with telling (but sometimes rather too easy) similes that were to characterize his later journalizing at Cambridge. Eating an overlarge peach was “as if I were biting into a baby's skull”, Kempe's stained glass depicts “rabbit-faced people in carpets, and angels with ragged wings”; another don, met in Court circles, is “like a damaged Dickens”. He is able to give subliminal glimpses of his subjects, like the flash of the peeresses' mirrors checking the fit of their coronets at the coronation of Edward VII. It was there that he noticed their husbands:

It was now exactly like the garden-party in Alice in Wonderland—the business-like peers had gone, but the rest evidently yielded to the irresistible desire to prance and pace and mince and look magnificent, reading admiration in each other's eyes. The coronets were truly absurd—so big, like battered hats and so unreal looking. The peers who took them off looked well.

State occasions, such as the Coronation, Gladstone's funeral, or a visit to the Vice-Regal Lodge at Dublin (where Benson found himself at a disadvantage, having taken a Homburg and not a top hat) occupy about half the book; they are observed with a shade less disrespect than Benson perhaps wished to convey. A Christmas party at Claremont with his former pupil the Duke of Albany (newly of Coburg), and its tiresome Germanic horseplay (“the odd fondness that Royalty have for ‘ragging’ other people and laughing at their discomfiture, when they are sure they will never be made to look foolish themselves”) is recorded in detail, but he decides that the “atmosphere of false deference and elaborate ceremony” is not for him.

Better, perhaps, were the long, idyllic trips in summer vacations, to Cambridgeshire, Norfolk or Gloucestershire (where Broadway became the Upton of his Letters), redolent of Norfolk jacket, knickerbocker breeches and bicycle—or later of the motor-car, and the not unwelcome attention the hissing and snorting new carriage attracted in country towns. There was church-visiting, but never in a merely archaeological, M. R. James-ish way: places were to be appreciated for their human associations. “This barnacle-like incrustation of human interest is what gives such a place its catholicity of charm”, Benson noted at Ely, and “antiquity, combined with beauty—mellow mouldering age” was much desired, often producing a hyper-aesthetic rhapsody that is very much of its period. Charm in individuals had its special appeal for him, and A. J. Balfour is well portrayed in his domestic surroundings at Whittingehame.

Literary judgments are delivered with the smart briskness of a clever schoolmaster rather than the more considered finality of Benson's later critical manner. The exception here is the long account of a visit to Swinburne, interviewed while Benson was working on the English Men of Letters Rossetti; it is already known from Percy Lubbock's earlier and more circumspect selection from the Diary, but it well deserved republication. Every detail of the Putney ménage is recorded, and—as one might expect—it is Watts-Dunton who steals the show:

I can't understand this enigma—how this egotistical, ill-bred, little man can have established such relations with Rossetti and Swinburne. There must be something fine about him, and his extraordinary kindness is perhaps the reason. But his talk, his personal habits (dripping moustache etc) and his egotism would grate on me at every hour of the day. And yet “he is a hero of friendship” said Rossetti.

Domestic detail, quaint period charm, social snobbery and literary condescension all combine in the nine pages on “The Pines” in a way that show Benson at his best.

The text varies in places from that given in On the Edge of Paradise, and there are a number of misreadings and misprints throughout that make one mistrust the presentation of the Diary here as altogether accurate.