Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B.A. of Trinity College

by A.C. Benson

Reproduction of the original: Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College by Arthur Christopher Benson

223 pages, Hardcover

First published March 28, 2010

About the author

Arthur Christopher Benson was an English essayist, poet, author and academic and the 28th Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Benson was born on 24 April 1862 at Wellington College, Berkshire. He was one of six children of Edward White Benson (1829-1896; Archbishop of Canterbury 1882–96; the first headmaster of the college) and his wife Mary Sidgwick Benson, sister of the philosopher Henry Sidgwick.

Benson was born into a literary family; his brothers included E.F. Benson, best remembered for his Mapp and Lucia novels, and Robert Hugh Benson, a priest of the Church of England before converting to Roman Catholicism, who wrote many popular novels. Their sister, Margaret Benson, was an artist, author, and amateur Egyptologist.

Reviews

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars rounded up (rounding up because anyone who wrote a self-insert fake biography and anonymously published it in the 1880s probably needs that extra half a star).

[ALEARDO ZANGHELLINI · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think it was in the preface of Despised and Rejected that I read that Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton was the first homosexual novel published in England. I think that’s a bit misleading. There is a suggestion of homoeroticism in the novel, but I would hardly call it a homosexual one. It is really a philosophical novel —an intelligent one —and interesting on that account. It’s what you may call edifying, but not in a cringeworthy way. Arthur Hamilton is an introspective character holding himself to high standards. He has boyhood crushes at Eton, which hardly counts as homosexual, for didn’t they all all? Indeed, when one of his loves later turns into a practicing homosexual, Arthur is very much disappointed and disgusted. At one point he falls just short of proposing to a woman, and there’s no suggestion that if the marriage had come to pass he would’ve somehow felt trapped or betrayed his nature. Later he adopts a teenage boy at the father’s request, and takes over his education. The book makes much of the boy’s beauty, and Arthur is conscious of it, but nothing untoward happens, and indeed Arthur’s high-mindedness — and apparently lack of a sexual drive — rules out even the possibility of that from the start. So, if anything the novel is pederastic rather than homosexual, and then it is so only at a very rarefied, Platonic level.