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despite having been orphaned at sixteen, the son of a bank-rupt chemical manufacturer. He had a short career teaching at Rugby with Dr Arnold before being selected as the first headmaster of Wellington College , a new school being created under royal charter. He worked closely with the Prince Consort to establish the new school, and Queen Victoria maintained a keen interest in the college after Albert’s death.
    Edward married his cousin Mary Sidgwick. They were a well-connected family: Mary’s three brothers all went on to become Oxbridge dons, and one married the sister of a future Prime Minister. As Edward’s career progressed, both Mary and Edward developed networks of influential friends and colleagues. Thus Arthur grew up within the most eminent circles of Victorian and Edwardian England. He later recorded a conversation with Sir Philip Burne-Jones, the son ofthe artist Edward Burne-Jones, about ‘the difficulty of being sons of famous men, and how it overshadowed one with inevitable comparisons’.
    Born in 1862, Arthur was the second son of Edward and Mary’s six children. After attending Eton and then King’s College in Cambridge, he returned to Eton as a housemaster for twenty years. He became a fellow and, later, the Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was a published writer of poetry, biography and memoir, and a member of the Athenaeum Club and of the Royal Society of Literature and the Academy of Letters. He was a friend of the Master of the Queen’s Music, Sir Walter Parratt, and wrote verses and hymns for Queen Victoria and other royals. In 1904, when he began work on Victoria’s letters, he was unmarried and forty-two years of age. Despite his many achievements, Benson sadly described himself as ‘a good case of an essentially second-rate person who has had every opportunity to be first rate, except the power to do so’.
    Benson’s own personality and achievements were inextricably linked with those of his family, especially his father. In his biography of Arthur, David Newsome described the father, Edward, as having a ‘prodigious physical energy and intellect, [with a] self-righteous and domineering personality’; he was a ‘constant and imposing presence’ in the lives of his children. In his diary Arthur wrote, ‘Papa was, of course, strict, severe and moody, and believed in anger as the best way of influencing people – and he never knew how terrible his anger was.’ He expected his children (and his wife) to be perfect; they must be examples of their father’s principles in action and models to the boys in his care. They must spend all of their time in useful and improving occupation. Arthur recalled the books he was given to read: no novels, as writingfiction equated to telling lies, but ‘books like
Philosophy in Sport
, where the boy cannot even throw a stone without having the principles of the parabola explained to him with odious diagrams’. The children never knew which innocent remark or act of childish impetuosity might be taken seriously amiss. The eldest son, Martin, came close to achieving perfection in his father’s eyes but died when he was seventeen. As the biographer Brian Masters puts it, the remaining children were ‘constantly reminding themselves what a disappointment they must be to their revered, faultless, fierce and dominating father’.
    Arthur’s mother, Mary (or ‘Minnie’), was the only surviving daughter of the Reverend William Sidgwick, a second cousin to Edward. Reverend Sidgwick had been the headmaster of the Skipton Grammar School in Yorkshire but died of consumption in 1841, just two months after Mary’s birth. In a state of prolonged bereavement, her mother eventually settled her family in Rugby, so that her sons could attend school there. Edward Benson joined the Sidgwick household in 1853 upon his appointment as a master at Rugby, and in 1859 he and