[In the following introduction to Edwardian Excursions, Newsome provides an overview of the major themes in Benson's diary excerpts.]

Praised be thou, O my Lord, of our brother the Bicycle,
Who holdeth his breath when he runneth,
And is very swift and cheerful and unwearied, and silent.
He beareth us hither and thither very patiently,
And when he is sick he doth not complain.

So, in the summer of 1902, Arthur Benson paid his tribute to the bicycle, by his own individual addition to St Francis' Hymn to the Sun. ‘Hither and Thither’ his bicycle certainly took him in the years of his travels, the seven years between 1898 and 1904, when he was a housemaster at Eton in his late thirties. He had given up Alpine climbing, following an accident in 1896. He was only once thereafter, before his death in 1925, to take a holiday abroad again, and then only in reluctant response to the advice of his doctor. His passion now became the discovery of his own country, going off when he could in each of his vacations, sometimes with a close friend as companion, to explore Wales, Fenland, the Norfolk Broads, the Cotswolds—on the whole places that offered not the overpowering dramatic effects of mighty mountains and awesome crags, but the more delicate treasures, hidden because subdued, off the beaten track in rural England, relatively unvisited and therefore unspoiled.

This book tells not only of the excursions which he liked best, to holiday haunts and distant, lonely retreats. During these same years Arthur Benson made some memorable visits to interesting people or to important events; all of them recorded with extraordinary fidelity in the massive diary which he began to compile during the summer of 1897: to Westminster Abbey for the funeral of Mr Gladstone and for the coronation of Edward VII (he took his bicycle to the latter, but had a servant to collect it at Waterloo and take charge of it until he needed it); to Dublin to stay with the Viceroy of Ireland, the Earl of Cadogan (no bicycle there; he travelled everywhere in state); to visit Algernon Swinburne at Putney, when he cycled all the way from Eton; on a holiday in Scotland with his friends, the Donaldsons, to lunch with the Prime Minister at Whittingehame, the Balfour family home. They all cycled in a party together.

Time was when Arthur abandoned his bicycle for a motor-car (his first long ride in one is described in the account of his holidays on the Norfolk Broads). This was in the days when he had become a relatively rich man, after the publication of The Upton Letters and From a College Window and, as Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, he sought for further independence by taking a house at Haddenham in the Fens. This period of his life lies outside the limits of this book and was in itself productive of dozens of volumes of diary which supplied their own collection of fresh vignettes and descriptions of the late Edwardian period. Even so, in his heart, Arthur always looked back wistfully to the days of his cycling feats—the joyous independence of two wheels, going fast enough to cover thirty or forty miles a day, but slowly enough to notice the little things—the churches, the houses, the tiny dramas of life in a cottage garden or in a village street—as you passed.

The whole of this book is a series of period pieces—self-contained narratives or descriptions taken from the most remarkable diary that has ever been preserved; remarkable partly for its unique length (180 volumes in all, covering the years 1897 to 1925), and also for the richness of its detail, written by an acknowledged master of the diarist's art. Only recently has this intriguing source, in the possession of Magdalene College, Cambridge, become available for use, because Arthur Benson—as Master of Magdalene—forbad (excepting only his close friend, Percy Lubbock, who was allowed to publish a highly-diluted selection) any inspection of its contents for fifty years after his death. Before returning to the evocations of Edwardian England, as illustrated by the selection of writings here, it may be helpful to supply a brief word about the diarist and his life.

.....

Even when Arthur Benson had compiled only a hundred pages of his record, one discerning critic, who was allowed to see what he had written, made a judgement on its quality. Henry James was the favoured recipient of Arthur's tentative efforts, and he firmly approved. What he actually said had the characteristic note of Jamesian sententiousness. He congratulated Arthur on producing ‘a series of data on the life of a young Englishman of great endowments, character and position at the end of the nineteenth century’.

Arthur conceded that this was a little extravagant, but typical of Henry James' generosity. He recognised that as the eldest surviving son of Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury (who had died in 1896), he occupied a dignified position in society, which in some ways he rather more resented than respected because of the expectations which that eminent start in life imposed upon him; and although an Eton housemaster mingled frequently with the great and occupied a position and status which might well open up more glorious posts in the future, he was more conscious, at this stage of his life, of the drudgery of the responsibility which denied him the opportunity to indulge his real passion and ambition—to become a prominent literary figure. Nor would he accept Henry James' estimate of his endowments and character. His diary abounds in passages of genuinely harsh self-analysis, accusing himself of timidity and ineffectiveness; and—as for his endowments—he felt that these he had largely squandered, so that he was highly dubious about his prospects for the future. ‘I am very busy’, he wrote in the same month that Henry James saw fit to compliment him, ‘… God knows I am not complacent. I have plenty of unqualified faults; and I am nobody in this busy place except a pleasant, sociable person, rather reclusive but amiable when extracted. I have no influence or weight. My business capacities are mistrusted; my accuracy doubted; my originative powers discredited; my auctoritas non-existent. I do not mind this and it keeps me humble, I hope.’

The fascination of reading a great diary is that not only does one not know what is going to happen next, but the writer himself does not know either. When Henry James made his judgement on Arthur's promise as a diarist, neither he nor Arthur could have had the faintest conception of what the experiment would lead to, let alone what Arthur's life held in store. All that he saw was an early fragment of a huge collection which, by the time of Arthur's death, had grown into a chronicle of nearly five million words. As a record of a man's private thoughts and hopes, agonies, frustrations and aspirations it is unique; but, more than that, its ‘data’ (to use Henry James' word) of the life, conventions and mores of English society between the years 1897 and 1925, admittedly as viewed by one particularly perceptive pair of eyes, constituted an exceptionally informative and detailed back-cloth to the social, political and cultural history of these times.

In this respect, Henry James judged correctly. Even in the short extract that he read, he could discern that Arthur Benson had the endowments of the natural diarist. He combined the instincts of the voyeur with the talent of the artist in words. He was fascinated by other people, their quirks and idiosyncrasies, the little things that made them different, the gestures and expressions which gave them vitality, the personal absurdities that made them both laughable and lovable. He had a photographic eye which could recall minutiae of natural effects and the tiniest details of buildings and a craftsman's designs. All through his life he had been blessed (or cursed, as he sometimes felt) with an essentially spectatorial disposition. Even as a little boy his chief delight had been simply looking at things, and reflecting upon them and trying to find the words to describe them. When he became a figure of consequence—as Head of a Cambridge House, or as a recognised literary personality among the giants of his day—his chief occupation, while attending Committee meetings or supposedly important discussions or ceremonies, was to examine his colleagues carefully, to cherish secret mirth at their self-importance, and to savour in anticipation the description of the scene that would be chronicled later in the diary. For much as he wrote—and he published over sixty books in the course of his career—the literary exercise that gave him most satisfaction was the private record he was keeping in his journals, which his contemporaries would never see but which his posterity would—one day—savour and enjoy.

It helped, of course, to occupy a suitable vantage-point from which to observe the doings and posturings of interesting people. Here, again, Henry James was correct in recognising the advantage of Arthur Benson's position. If it was true in 1897, it remained so throughout his life. Already Arthur had established himself as a prominent figure within various different, but equally intriguing, circles. He was thoroughly at home within the world of the Anglican Church, being the son of an Archbishop and linked by ties of close friendship to the families of the Taits and the Davidsons. He was given an entrée at Court, through his ability to produce odes and lyrics for royal occasions almost to order (‘Land of Hope and Glory’ was just one of these, thrown off in the course of an idle hour). He had been a King's Scholar at Eton and served as a master there for twenty years. As Housemaster to the young Duke of Albany and the sons of the Earl of Cadogan, Lord St Germans, Lord Northampton and the Duke of Westminster, he was brought quite naturally, if a little self-consciously, into the circle of the late Victorian and Edwardian aristocracy. When he left Eton for Cambridge, as Fellow of Magdalene, in 1904, he found himself again in the Eton circle at King's, and through these friendships he was admitted, before long, to the inner circle of Cambridge worthies. Even as a young man he had come to the notice of Henry James and Edmund Gosse, and although he was never really part of the London literary world, he enjoyed his position on the periphery, meeting at one time or another all the great luminaries of that circle, from Browning and Swinburne to the later generation of Hardy, Belloc, Chesterton and Wells.

Given this vantage-point, he indulged unashamedly his temperamental disposition and natural skills—to observe, to describe, to caricature, to mock; without exception to cast over all a naturally disrespectful eye and to translate the image without delay into graphic description and pungent, caustic prose.

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So vast is this collection of diaries that to publish them in extenso would be an impossible undertaking. They certainly afford material for a biography, if proper allowance is made for the subjectivity of the source. It was actually in no spirit of self-inflation or unpleasing self-esteem that Arthur himself wanted his diary to be used in this way. He believed in all sincerity that the most interesting biographies of all were those of really rather ordinary people, who aspired to no particular eminence in their own achievements, but who left behind them a sufficient body of honest reflections to cast light, from their individual standpoint, upon some particular corner of the history of their times. Such a biography has been recently attempted in my book, On the Edge of Paradise: A. C. Benson the Diarist.

But to leave the matter at that would be a gross disservice to Arthur Benson, whose diary contains many more treasures than revelations about himself, his friendships, his everyday doings and concerns. The record embraces not only the reflections of a journal intime; it is also something of a literary portfolio—a sort of verbal sketchbook, with long descriptive passages recalling walks and expeditions, notable visits and memorable occasions, compiled sometimes with a view to possible publication at some later date; little essays composed round vignettes of contemporary life, as much an exercise in the art of writing as aide-memoires to evoke scenes and conversations which had caused pleasure or amusement.

In a biography, many of these episodes—especially the holiday chronicles—are too static to warrant more than a passing comment. To do justice to the wealth of material that Arthur recorded, then, it has seemed desirable to produce a selection of some of the most interesting and attractive of these self-contained pieces, choosing not only those of specific historical or literary significance, but also those which are purely period-pieces, evocative of an age—although not all that long past—sufficiently far back in memory to exude the quaintness and the charm of a family-album of sepia-tinted photographs found in some forgotten corner of attic, cubby-hole or loft.

No one consciously composes a period piece, because the writer has no means of knowing what will appear quaint or odd to a later generation. Arthur described his walks and expeditions in the hope that some future reader would follow in his footsteps and share something of the same joys and pleasures he himself had felt. Our first thought will surely be—how little of what he describes has survived. The people seen and memorialised in some charming vignette are now long dead; the country-inns, serving ginger-beer to thirsty cyclists, and the tea-parlours for hikers and the luncheon-hampers for travellers by train, even the steam-trains themselves, are all relics of the past or have changed their custom and their clientele. The eau-de-Cologne machine at Weighton station is no more—indeed, very few of the stations themselves have survived; and there is no longer a Viceroy in Dublin.

Most of the natural features, however, are timeless. Cader Idris still stands, and the view is much the same as ever it was. Ranworth Church, with its painted screen, is still to be visited, and the sedge still blows in a high wind to delight the ear. The absurd ecclesiastical monuments and stained-glass windows which caused Arthur and Herbert Tatham such merriment are still (for the most part) untouched. I have little doubt that with the help of an ordnance-survey map the farm called Fairholme, on the way to Swine (where Arthur and Lionel Ford lost themselves on a hot and drowsy afternoon) could still be found, with the paths and tracks not much Changed. Certainly the Lygon Arms at Broadway, where Arthur wrote the first of the Upton Letters, looks very much the same as it did in 1904.

To retrace these walks would be sentimental journeys, no doubt. The descriptions, however, are refreshingly free from the sentimental and the mawkish. Arthur himself admitted that when he came to write for publication, he could not somehow refrain from assuming his ‘company manners’. The prose became affected and strained. So frequently did he write in the vein of serene and leisurely avuncularity that he came in his later books time and time again to parody himself. In his diary, however, he wrote rapidly and unselfconsciously. On occasions he would try out a purple patch, when endeavouring to recall some particularly sublime or rhapsodic moment; but, on the whole, the diary reads as Arthur talked, not as he composed for his avid and somewhat undiscriminating reading-public.

The self-contained extracts given here have been subjected to a minimum of editing. A few spellings have been corrected; there has been some repunctuation (Arthur tended to use dashes for sentence-breaks). Some very local and irrelevant comments have been omitted. Since Arthur himself never revised his diaries or corrected anything he had written, the fluency of the original text is quite remarkable. Each extract has been annotated, firstly, by the inclusion of brief introductions, in order to set the piece in context, and secondly by notes identifying some of the characters mentioned and some of the more enigmatic and obscure allusions. On the whole, passages have been selected which do not appear in Percy Lubbock's earlier book, conceived on an entirely different principle. The notable exception is the account of Arthur's visit to Algernon Swinburne in 1903, which is so remarkable that it ought to be printed in an unexpurgated form.

One final word about the designation ‘Edwardian’ in the title. A few of the earlier pieces fall within the period 1898-1900 before Edward VII actually became King (in February 1901). This is rather more than mere editorial licence. The last decade of Queen Victoria's reign up to the gathering of the storm clouds which heralded the outbreak of European war were quintessentially the Edwardian years. As the nineteenth century drew to its close, a new age was being born, marked by the advent of the new aristocracy of wealth, the creed of secularism and the widespread mood of emancipation. Arthur was too much the son of his archiepiscopal father to be able to accept all these changes with equanimity. He felt a deep loyalty to the Queen which he could never transfer to her pleasure-loving son. Temperamentally a Victorian, however, he did not embark upon his continuous chronicle until the twilight of the old Queen's reign. All these pieces are set against a background of Edwardianism; and the journeys, scenes and visits here described are therefore, without exception, the record or logbook of Edwardian excursions.