Censoring Queen Victoria (9 page)

In an elegant display of power and
savoir faire
, Esher then airily conducted Benson down to the King's private rooms ‘to see what pictures there were …' Benson soon forgot his discomfiture and was captivated:

There are some lovely things. There is a little
audience chamber
of QV's fitted up so by Prince Albert with pictures and miniatures – very Victorian but such treasures. A row of heads of George III's children by Gainsborough. So strange to see those fussy, absurd, big, voluble men as graceful boys with low collars. The Dukes of Cambridge and Sussex are simply charming. Then to the Queen's rooms – such exquisite things and to the King's room where there is a Winterhalter of Queen Victoria with an unbound tress of hair – such a touching,
intime
thing – and a ludicrous Landseer where Prince Albert sits in a drawing room in shooting clothes, with the ribbon of the Garter and a table covered with hares, ducks and kingfishers. It is high day, but the Queen stands beside him dressed for dinner.

Before this visit, Benson knew the Queen as a little old lady in her widow's weeds and deep black bonnet. He had probably seen very few, if any, pictures of her as a young woman.
The Winterhalter painting he described was a beguiling portrait of the young Queen with her hair down and her head tilted back, exposing her bare neck and shoulders. It was commissioned by Victoria as a surprise birthday present for Albert in 1843, in the fourth year of their marriage. It was significant that Benson saw these very intimate portraits so early on in the editing.

After this meeting with Esher, Benson lamented in his diary that he had managed to ‘fall foul' of the King ‘thrice times already'. Poor Benson! The King almost certainly knew nothing of his offences. Esher and Knollys, both experienced courtiers, artfully ensured that those around them were permanently anxious about Court protocol. That evening, in a bid to recover face, Benson concluded his diary with: ‘Wrote a snappish note to Cust …'

B
ENSON WAS ASTOUNDED AT
the rapidity with which Esher did his editorial work. One Friday afternoon about eight weeks into the editing, Esher came to collect ‘all of their work to date'. Benson's diary entry conveyed some resentment:

Went up to the Castle & got there very hot. Esher came in as if he had nothing in the world to do – cool, graceful, charming. I showed him our materials and he carried it all off in a tin box. What a luxury to have had none of the work of selecting &c but to read all this interesting stuff through merely excising and omitting. He is a very fortunate prince!

The following Monday, Benson returned to the Castle and found that Esher had already returned the box. Benson was flabbergasted! When he looked over Esher's corrections, he made the first of many gentle protests to his editor-inchief: ‘I quite agree with your suggestions except in one or two
very
minute points. There should be a little spice of triviality I think preserved to give a hint of humanity. This applies to about three harmless excisions …'

Esher seems to have responded that the excisions were far from ‘harmless', and to have suggested that they were based on the King's own objections. ‘Why has H.M. become alarmed?' Benson asked. ‘Has anyone been talking? There is plenty to omit, but I don't want it to become a colourless and official book. That would be losing a great opportunity.' Esher was much more cautious, and Benson already felt a certain vexation on this point. He recorded in his diary: ‘The King seems to have taken fright, according to Esher, [and] has been cautioning him that there is to be nothing private, nothing scandalous, nothing
intime
, nothing malicious.' If there had been a more formal set of guidelines, perhaps the King's anxieties could have been more easily assuaged. But his concerns about scandal and malice continued, as did those of Esher. The following weekend, Esher visited Benson:

[Esher] said that he must warn me once more, & I must warn Childers against any indiscretion – that we had better not say anything even about having seen private papers – speak of State Documents only. He thinks the King nervous and fussy about it all. I expect someone has been talking. He says he has not told the King how private some of the papers are. I was able to reassure E. on that point. I said, ‘They are
private
– but they are not
confidential
exactly as a rule – there is
nothing
of which, if I were an unscrupulous man I can [sic] make any use of to exploit blackmail.'

Only a few days earlier, Benson had assured Esher, ‘There is no difficulty about
scandal
. I can honestly say that that element has been rigidly excluded in my selections.' He added, most perceptively: ‘As
to ill-natured references, it is of course a more difficult matter because there are certain people who consider everything ill-natured that is not adulatory, when applied to deceased persons.'

Meanwhile the editing proceeded. Benson frequently employed agricultural metaphors to describe his work: ‘ploughing'; ‘hewing'; ‘slashing and hacking'; ‘bright sun, westerly wind worked at Castle … I worked savagely, cutting like a backwoodsman.'

The editors had no agreed plan for the book or the principles of selection when they began. The format was based on the traditional ‘Life and Letters' biographies that had become so popular in the nineteenth century, some of which had been published by John Murray. A compilation of letters and autobiographical fragments, intended to allow the subject to speak for him or herself, was deemed the purest form of biography. This was what Esher had in mind. Unfortunately, as a genre, it had come to consist of expansive, multivolume productions such as Queen Victoria commissioned to commemorate the life of the Prince Consort.
Although it was written by Theodore Martin
, the historian Walter Arnstein has suggested that Victoria contributed substantially to it. Benson criticised it as too long and almost unreadable, yet it set the standard for such biographies. The genre was later pilloried by Lytton Strachey, who lamented

those two fat volumes
with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead – Who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the
cortège
of the undertaker and wear the same air of slow, funereal
barbarism. One is tempted to suppose, of some of them, that they are composed by that functionary, as the final item of his job.

Virginia Woolf later complained that the subjects of such works appeared ‘
very much overworked
, very serious, very joyless'. Since such books relied chiefly on important – usually serious – documents, they could be rather colourless. The notion that they allowed the subject to speak for herself was also problematic. Not all the documents were in her voice – often they were letters to her by others, mostly men. But even when the ‘voice' belonged to the subject, in this case the Queen, her words were being selected and edited, and from an already restricted collection – that is, from the surviving written records.

Benson and Esher wanted to avoid the stigma associated with such stiff and bloated volumes. In keeping with the ideas of the time, however, they considered that the historical facts, set out chronologically, should dictate the shape and tone of their book. In following this convention, Queen Victoria's childhood and genealogy were compressed into seventy-one pages. The following twenty-four years, from her accession in 1837 until Albert's death in 1861, occupied the bulk of the remaining fifteen hundred pages.

The original idea, as discussed by Esher and Benson, was to publish two or perhaps three volumes. When John Murray was consulted, he agreed, adding that, ‘the materials should afford a general guide and be allowed to shape themselves … to the best advantage'. Two or three volumes would be readable by a general audience and hence marketable and, as Benson said frequently: ‘I so want the book to be read!'

Benson constantly agonised over the material being excluded
and whether the book should be expanded. When he made his first visit to the Round Tower and counted over four hundred volumes of bound material, two or three volumes immediately seemed too limiting; he knew that much interesting material would have to be rejected. The more he read, the more he despaired at the space constraints. After reading King Leopold's correspondence with the Queen for the first time, he described it as ‘a tremendous acquisition – I really think that if I had been
au fait
with the whole thing I should have
simply
advised the publication of [this] correspondence … It quite goes to my heart to dock it.' Esher wrote to Lord Knollys (but not to Benson) expressing the same anxiety, but he was still hopeful that the selection could be ‘compressed' into three volumes.

As he worked away at the Windsor coalface, Benson felt impelled to submit an argument for four volumes. Just two months after commencing work, he wrote to Esher:

My dear Esher,

… It will be a real disaster if the book is curtailed. I think it
could
be done in four volumes; but you will remember that [at the outset] I was very strong for two volumes. Since I have seen the collection I feel quite differently. I have no doubt that the interest aroused by the book will be very great indeed, and I think it can be averred that for each volume we produce, at least two could be produced without any diminution of interest.

It might be respectfully submitted to His Majesty

1. That the interest of the book to a great extent depends upon the additional and vivid detail which it gives the historical and social events and the sidelights which it throws. To truncate the letters too much or to omit letters will
be to deprive these episodes of much of their interest. One can't omit the important letters; but the events narrated by them are not always familiar, and it is by taking the letters all together that the interest of the book will be produced.

2. By producing the book volume by volume the grave objection to the 4-volume form is removed. People would find a 4 volume book, all of which appeared simultaneously, rather too solid, it is true – but not when the volumes came out one by one. I will answer for it that no reader of volume one, will be disappointed, or will not look forward with anything but intense interest to volume two.

3. It must be remembered that the letters are not like
literary
letters, where the style is the main attraction – the simplicity, the frankness, the good sense of many of these letters are a great charm – but the wide range of affairs and the inner knowledge of politics are the great points – & such characteristics can only be brought out by full reflections.

If the smaller number of volumes is
decided
upon, the only way will be to give up any idea of [the correspondence giving] a connected history of the years – if that were done in 2 volumes, the letters would merely be a few frigid extracts – & we must instead just choose a few episodes arbitrarily and give them in full.

It must be remembered that this is after all biographical
material
. If such a book as the
Life of Mr Gladstone
takes three volumes, what would an issue of illustrative letters have occupied.

One other point – as it stands the letters to a great extent form their own comment; but if the book is made a short one, long introduction & notes will be absolutely
necessary to explain the letters – & this in my opinion would be wholly a mistake. My idea is that we should efface ourselves as much as possible, only just giving enough explanation & comment for an ordinary reader to understand.

This letter needs no immediate answer. But please let me know as soon as possible what is decided … In fact I simply don't think it
can
be done more briefly, though I quite appreciate the advisability of brevity.

Ever yours,

A.C.B.

Benson was overwhelmed again and again by the size of the archive and what they were trying to achieve. His focus at this stage seems to have been the ‘historical and social events' in which Victoria had participated as a public figure. He does not seem to have been particularly interested in Victoria ‘the woman', or even Victoria ‘the person'. Esher began the project from a much more pragmatic and political standpoint – the need for a memorial, but not of monumental proportions. Initially he thought, or hoped, that two volumes would suffice, and was reluctant to consider more than one additional volume.

Benson, in his usual manner, continued to waver. In January 1905, when the material for Volume I sent to Murray amounted to about sixteen hundred pages and Benson calculated that at least a third of it would need to be cut, his initial solution was again to consider a fourth volume. He went on, however, ‘I am myself strongly against this. The book will then become a standard work, a work of reference not a book to be read …' Six months later, he mentioned the possibility again; a prodigious amount of cutting was still necessary, he lamented, ‘unless
we do run to four vols'. Every time a new stash of letters was found, Benson despaired of having to cut still further: ‘vol iii must be reduced – by throwing out whole episodes, not by simply starving episodes or omitting detail …' Again and again, he questioned the decision to opt for three volumes rather than four or even five!

Such vacillation may have been a source of annoyance and frustration to Esher. On 2 August 1905, and again on 5 August, Benson reiterated his view that it would be impossible to condense the remaining material into Volume III, and again suggested a fourth volume. When Esher did not reply, Benson wrote directly to the King on 9 August, asking for a fourth volume. Lord Knollys alerted Esher to Benson's request, writing: