page_title: A. C. Benson
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: A. C. Benson / Career
caption_attribution_description: Men of the Day No.881: Caricature of Mr A. C. Benson MA. Caption reads: "Fasti Etonenses"
context_page_description: Arthur Christopher Benson, FRSL was an English essayist, poet, author and academic and the 28th Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is noted for having written the words of the song "Land of Hope and Glory".
context_section_description: From 1885 to 1903 he taught at Eton, but returned to Cambridge in 1904 as a Fellow of Magdalene College to lecture in English Literature. He became president of the college (the Master's deputy) in 1912, and he was Master of Magdalene (head of the college) from December 1915 until his death in 1925. From 1906, he was a governor of Gresham's School.
  The modern development of Magdalene was shaped by Benson. He was a generous benefactor to the college, with a significant impact on the modern appearance of the college grounds; at least twenty inscriptions around the college refer to him. In 1930, Benson Court was constructed and named after him.
  He collaborated with Lord Esher in editing the correspondence of Queen Victoria (1907). His poems and volumes of essays, such as From a College Window and The Upton Letters (essays in the form of letters) were famous in his time; and he left one of the longest diaries ever written: some four million words. Extracts from the diaries are printed in Edwardian Excursions. From the Diaries of A. C. Benson, 1898–1904, ed. David Newsome, London: John Murray, 1981. His literary criticisms of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward FitzGerald, Walter Pater and John Ruskin rank among his best work.
  He wrote the lyrics of the Coronation Ode set to music by Edward Elgar for the 1902 coronation of King Edward VII, which has as its finale one of Britain's best-known patriotic songs, "Land of Hope and Glory".
  Like his brothers Edward Frederic (E. F.) and Robert Hugh (R. H.), A. C. Benson was noted as an author of ghost stories. The bulk of his published ghost stories in the two volumes The Hill of Trouble and Other Stories (1903) and The Isles of Sunset (1904) were written for his pupils as moral allegories. After Arthur's death, Fred Benson found a collection of unpublished ghost stories. He included two of them in a book, Basil Netherby (1927); the title story was renamed "House at Treheale" and the volume was completed by the long "The Uttermost Farthing"; the fate of the rest of the stories is unknown. Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories (1911; reprint 1977) collects the contents of The Hill of Trouble and Other Stories and The Isles of Sunset. Nine of Arthur's ghost stories are included in David Stuart Davies (ed), The Temple of Death: The Ghost Stories of A. C. & R. H. Benson (Wordsworth, 2007), together with seven by his brother R. H. Benson, while nine of Arthur's and ten of Robert's are included in Ghosts in the House (Ash-Tree, 1996); the contents of the joint collections are similar but not identical.
caption: "Fasti Etonenses", Benson caricatured by Spy for Vanity Fair, 1903.
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