Mrs Benson bore four sons and two daughters to E. W. Benson, and the three surviving sons became significant figures in turn-of-the-century culture. By the time the sons were going through Cambridge, after their years in public school, their father had become, first, Bishop of Truro, and then Archbishop of Canterbury moving in the highest political and intellectual circles. The three sons seem to be to epitomise the 'trivium' that faced the educated members of the English establishment during the run-up to the First World War. They could go in three directions. They could take the old imperial idea as their motto, even marry a lady of 'good breeding stock', and maybe pay with their life in the coming disaster, leading from the front with the fervour of doomed youth. Or they could join the flippant and cynical culture that was beginning to emerge around people like Lytton Strachey, Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, seeing it rather as a justified rebuke to the stiff de-sexed certainties of Victorian England. Or they could turn away, in search of another and more genuine form of spirituality than was offered by the Anglican Church (which was, for intellectuals of that generation, too much embroiled in the imperial project to be credible as doctrine, and too quaint in its manners to be of any more than theatrical appeal).
Oliver Evans
I'm waiting.
Angel Cox
Those three paths were separately taken by the Archbishop's three surviving sons. Thus the first of them, A. C. Benson, became a master at Eton, a Cambridge don, and a famous author of Christian essays and verse, imbued with a stiff patriotic melancholy. It is to him that we owe the words of our unofficial national anthem, 'Land of Hope and Glory', sung to the trio section of Elgar's 'Pomp and Circumstance March' no. 1. (Note, however, that Elgar was a Roman Catholic, whose feelings for England intensified as his faith declined.) Like his father, the Archbishop, and his unfortunate sister, A. C. Benson suffered from some kind of bipolar disorder, rendering him prone to fits of deep depression - fits that were in some way authenticated by his gentle and melancholic essays.
Anthony Brooks
The second surviving son, E. F. Benson, was a fashionable novelist, extremely successful in his day with the stories of Mapp and Lucia. He wrote fascinating memoirs of his life and times - 'As We Were' (1930) and 'As We Are' (1932), plotting the radical change in the English psyche as a result of the Great War. In 1914 he published the story of David Blaize, set in an imaginary English public school, in which the topic of sexual passion between older and younger boys is openly explored, though in ways that condemn any overt physical expression. 'David Blaize' had a sensational impact and E. F. Benson received letters from soldiers at the front thanking him for this book that consoled them with the idealised vision of their school days and the pure loves that they had then enjoyed. Its sickly sentimentality and shallow prose are more noticeable today than its erotic undercurrents; but it was followed at the time by more 'David Blaize' novels by Benson, and was not thought to be in the slightest corrupting - on the contrary its message was one of boy-scout purity. The lesson that we might draw from E. F. Benson is that the flippant culture to which Wilde belonged was entirely contagious with the dignified patriotic Anglicanism of Benson's father and older brother, and represented a clear option for members of the upper class who could not go along with the stuffy certainties that were about to be blown away by the First World War.
Hunter Murphy
Finally, there was the youngest brother, Hugh Benson, who entered the Anglican Church only to find himself longing for a more universal and more apostolic form of spirituality, and eventually turning his back on the whole Anglican settlement in which he had been bred, to embrace the Church of Rome. He lived much of his time in Rome, rising to the rank of monsignor, and was much fêted by the Roman Catholic establishment - after all, to have converted a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury represented a radical inroad into the Protestant citadel. He was also a noteworthy writer, with serious devotional works as well as children's books, science fiction and visionary plays to his credit.
It seems to me that this trivium continued to define the existential choice of the privileged class in England after the First World War. The Bensons brilliantly illustrate its reality, since they were all three offspring of the unified Anglican culture - the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. The war swept away the certainties, such as they were, of the Anglican settlement, but left this trivium in place. The question was still: do we go forward along the old Anglican path, the path of patriotic loyalty and dignified churchgoing; do we sink into the world of sensual gratification and facetiousness; or do we turn our backs on the whole thing, and seek repose in some other, more universal, more eternally rooted faith?
Carson Sanchez
That was the question confronted by the new generation of public school boys, who were at school during the Great War, and young men shortly thereafter, and it was a question predicated upon leisure. Only members of a privileged class could have that king of existential choice. For other, more normally situated people, the questions of how to earn a living, how to make one's way in the world, how to achieve security, ensured that allegiances and ideals could not be chosen, but must be accepted as the common destiny of those whose first goal is survival. Such people, if Christian at all, would most likely have been Nonconformist. And they would have formed, in the eyes of the Bloomsbury Group, the despised foundation of society, the 'marrying classes', for whom patriotism is a sine qua non and a sign of submission to fate. Ordinary people would have reacted with abhorrence to E. M. Forster's expression of the Bloomsbury worldview: 'if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country'. But it was ordinary people whose national loyalty was to be called upon, when Britain was dragged into another war, and when many of the intellectuals chose to betray them, whether or not for the sake of a friend.
Jack Collins
Reminder that other boards exist. They welcome poetry discussion on /lit/, for example.
>Tortured. >When the bridegroom smoothed his hair >There was blood upon the bed. >Morning was already late. >Children singing in the orchard >(Io Hymen, Hymenaee) >Succuba eviscerate.
But it is undeniable that English literature since that time has been dominated by writers who defend a sacramental vision of England as part of our cultural legacy, and therefore as something that can go on flourishing, even if no longer rooted in faith. This is surely the view that comes across from the poems and the Wessex novels of Thomas Hardy, from Conrad's vision of the English Merchant Navy and its residue of imperial virtue, from the Anglican pilgrimage of T. S. Eliot, even from the agnostic sense of loss in Orwell and Larking. And in the criticisms of F. R. Leavis this desire for culture as a 'real presence' that will provide the Eucharistic moments in the life of our nation becomes all but explicit - and with a pronounced low church accent, identifying Bunyan and Blake as the leading figures in a tradition of creative dissent. It is only because of the Church of England that this view of English culture has been possible, and it is this very view of the English culture that drew me [Roger Scruton], aged fifteen, into the Anglican Church, not knowing how much I should have to believe in order to claim the Church's comforts.
Jordan Brooks
brit/pol/ subhumans, how does this make you feel?
How does it know that BNP, EDL, UKIP, Britain First and National Action all flopped?
How does it feel knowing that you're all useless deadbeats who've contributed nothing to British politics?
How does it feel knowing that Britain will become less wh*Te by the minute?
How does it feel knowing your powerless against the based Tories and Labour?
YOU'LL HAVE TO GET USED TO SEEING A BLACK BULL AND A WH*TE GIRL.
YOU'LL HAVE TO GET USED TO SEEING MORE MOSQUES BUILT.
ALL THE CITIES WILL BE LIKE LONDON.
BUT KEEP POSTING YOUR GAY HITCHENS MEMES AND CIRCLEJERKING ON YOUR CONTAINMENT GENERAL.
Noah Phillips
There's a tard in my church. Screaming whilst I pray. God's best joke yet?
Ethan Ward
*blocks your path*
Christian White
...
Blake Thomas
I was speaking to Lindy via email the other day.
Brandon White
...
Wyatt Walker
Local authorities where White British pupils are below 10%: Newham, Brent
20%: Tower Hamlets, Harrow, Westminster, Redbridge, Ealing, Hackney, Slough, Lambeth, Waltham Forest, Enfield, Kensington and Chelsea
30%: Hounslow, Haringey, Luton, Southwark, Barking and Dagenham, City of London, Camden, Lewisham, Hammersmith and Fulham, Croydon, Wandsworth, Leicester, Islington
40%: Greenwich, Merton, Hillingdon, Birmingham, Barnet, Manchester
50%: Sandwell, Bradford, Reading, Wolverhampton, Kingston upon Thames, Nottingham, Blackburn with Darwen, Bedford, Coventry, Peterborough
70%: Bolton, Rochdale, Bristol, City of, Windsor and Maidenhead, Southampton, Sheffield, Havering, Leeds, Newcastle upon Tyne, Trafford, Buckinghamshire, Wokingham, Hertfordshire, Stoke-on-Trent, Salford
Juan Ortiz
I see no evidence... bar London which can sink. Filthy kuffir
Jose Gray
LOL GET USED TO IT WH*TE SUBHUMANS KARMA FOR COLONIALISM :^)
Thomas Cruz
What?
Grayson Jenkins
You can't even speak English properly and you've a native Brit.
Am I, a black WARRIOR, supposed to fear you on your containment board?
Logan Hill
Proves that white people will do literally anything to not be near wogs
Christopher Johnson
There once was an user on brit/pol/ For whom discussion of poetry did not sit well While one day his father was giving him his medication He noticed his heart was barely beating and pupils in dilation He jumped his bedside and called his wife He exclaimed with great joy "The poison is working we'll soon start a new life"
Eli Murphy
Is he /ourguy/? There was a poster here a while back saying he was in a relationship with Lindy.
BNP = FAILURE EDL = FAILURE UKIP = FAILURE BRITAIN FIRST = FAILURE NATIONAL ACTION = FAILURE
/BRIT/POL...? THAT'S RIGHT - FAILURES!
John Watson
A COMMUNITY STRUGGLES TO COME TO TERMS
Jayden Thomas
Edwardian Pill
Ian Sanchez
>mirpuri,urdu and spanish how the fuck does that happen?
Nathaniel James
>replacing sick anti-white bastard with based mosley HERESY!
Blake Murphy
Good lad.
Christopher Campbell
Have you got the stats for how many of them are white european?
Jonathan Nguyen
Listen here wogboy or pretend wogboy
I actually can't wait for the day the nigs and pakis totally destroy the UK The state is staggering on with its pathetic (((multiracial))) polices. When it dies all that lovely multi billion pound court and police protection for coons and wogs will suddenly be gone and the streets and rivers on the UK will run red with the blood of our enemies.
>The NSDAP could only take power when the shitty liberal Wiemar regime had been destroyed
William Diaz
The pube is immunized against all dangers: one may call him a scoundrel, fat drunk Scotsman, at girl, faggot, it all runs off him like water off a raincoat. But call him a pube and you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back: "I've been found out."
Jordan Thomas
>brits >taking power over anything
You can't even control Brexit properly.
Jonathan Reyes
I'm not fat
Nathan Evans
>inbred brits think there'll be a day of the rope Feels good being a German.
Grayson Wilson
...
Dominic James
Funny the coons and nigs run to the police to accuse white people of racism if they call them coons and pakis
BTW where is your paki' trip?
Christian Price
>Scotsman he's polish-somali never seen his somalian dad though and his mum died of overdose when he was two
>'I have a job, a wife and children' >posts on here all day What did he mean by this?
Isaac Green
has parcelman tweeted about it yet?
Henry Rogers
I don't spend all day on here FOR FUCKS SAKE.
Xavier Price
He's on holiday today (Glasgow)
Josiah Bennett
So are we still going to get keked by our girl Amber Rudd or has that meme died like all the others?
Anthony Martin
>quick browse of Brit/pol/ at 9am; he's posting >go on Brit/pol/ at 3pm; he's still posting >check Brit/pol/ at 11pm; he will be posting
Matthew Wilson
>doubt.jpg
Luis Jones
>Churches bombed in egypt >deafening silence from may >mosque bombed >ABLOO BLOO THIS IS SO EVIL MUH POOR MUSLIMS
fucking hate tories tbqh lads
Joseph Roberts
Lawrence Konadu and Jeremy Opoku at Uniqlo on Black Friday
Landon Long
Are these football players or something?
William Baker
Fart in my mouth pisscandles
Hudson Russell
Unique I'D filter the paki.
Jaxon Hill
I DON'T SPEND EVERY MOMENT BETWEEN MY POSTS BROWSING Sup Forums YOU CUNTS, I CHECK IN EVERY NOW AND AGAIN AND MAKE A POST AND MIGHT STAY IF I'M HAVING A CONVERSATION OR ARGUMENT. NOT A DIFFICULT CONCEPT TO UNDERSTAND.
I'm up in Scotland so I can be at the boatyard tomorrow.
You seem upset. Was it because of earlier threads?
Gavin Wilson
Saw some grafitti telling pikeys to get the fuck out
Caleb Moore
Just got back from PCworld Crowded as fuck Brain-dead deanos, pakis syzmon and Ghanains trying to sell stuff to me and taking forever
Grayson Gomez
>graffiti Was it a bill?
Nathan Watson
???
Christian Fisher
What did you buy? I looked online and their deals were poor.
William Wright
Why PC world user? What are you retarded at?
Michael Allen
so whos this Mogg chap and what does he do?
Jaxon Adams
You tried to join in but became an Eddie
Cameron Peterson
i needed a new laptop and the laptop was cheapest there
Daniel Johnson
What?
Kayden Myers
>Merkel gets a lifeline: Martin Schulz says he WILL enter coalition talks in dramatic U-turn that brings hope of an end to crippling political deadlock
