A. C. Benson (Arthur Christopher Benson) Biography

British writer, brother of E. F. and R. H. Benson, born at Wellington College, Berkshire, of which his father, E. W. Benson (1829–96), who later became Archbishop of Canterbury, was the first headmaster; he was educated at King's College, Cambridge. In 1904 he was elected a fellow of Magdalene College, of which he became Master in 1915. Among his early works in a prolific career are his Life of his father (1899); Fasti Etonenses (1899), a history of Eton; and the stories collected in The Hill of Trouble (1903) and The Isles of Sunset (1905). He produced numerous critical biographies, including those of Rosetti (1904), Fitzgerald (1905), and Ruskin (1911), and a succession of collections of essays, among which are From a College Window (1906) and Escape (1915). With the Second Viscount Esher, he edited three volumes of Selections from the Correspondence of Queen Victoria (1907), with whom he had been acquainted. He also enjoyed a considerable reputation as a poet and remains best known for ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, originally published with Elgar's music in 1902 as Coronation Ode for the coronation of King Edward VII; The Poems of A. C. Benson appeared in 1909. Between 1897 and 1925 he compiled a diary covering some 180 manuscript volumes, selections from which were published under Percy Lubbock's editorship in 1926. Due to the acutely personal nature of the material, the diaries were not available for inspection until 1975, when David Newsome gained access to them for his biographical study entitled On the Edge of Paradise (1980); Newsome also edited Edwardian Excursions (1981), which contains further selections from the diaries.