In that most rarefied haunt of civilisation – Edwardian Mayfair – there parades a strange and glorious collection of social climbers, snobs, bright young things, poor but charming young men and flattering pastors. These delightful ‘freaks’ are captured in a series of devastatingly incisive and irresistibly funny character sketches by the master humorist E. F. Benson. Fans of Benson’s inimitable Mapp and Lucia novels may recognise some early prototypes in such characters as Mrs Weston, with her enthusiasm for yogic postures, or Aunt Georgie, who is passionate about embroidery and calls his chauffeur ‘naughty boy’. Others are still recognisable today, from a ‘horizontal climber’ who finds that no amount of money will make up for a boring party, to the ‘grizzly kittens’ who seek to prolong their youth with a ‘miserable display of mature skittishness’.

Reminiscent of Saki, another genius of Edwardian comic fiction, Benson’s exquisitely concise dissection of each personality creates a sparkling and perceptive social satire. With original illustrations by George Plank, this is the perfect guide to the inhabitants of Grosvenor Square, Brook Street and Park Lane – all that makes up ‘the big S in Society’.

The Freaks of Mayfair: A Work in Progress - TOM HOLT

Tom Holt, novelist and E. F. Benson enthusiast, explores how the character studies in The Freaks of Mayfair refined his later writing.

E. F. Benson was entirely possessed by life. His characters crackle and hum with vitality, a quality that makes them irresistibly attractive even when they’re the sorts of people whom, were they flesh and blood, you’d cross the road to avoid. What prevents us from identifying Benson’s Miss Mapp as an amoral Machiavellian character is a thin veneer of civilisation and a general reluctance to use poison (though I’m sure the thought crossed her mind more than once). But what makes Benson’s characters thrilling to read about in spite of their illimitable reserves of malice and folly is vitality.

Benson wrote 105 books and seven plays, a body of work that included ghost stories; books on skating, cricket and golf; biographies of Alcibiades, Ferdinand Magellan and Charlotte Brontë; First World War history; The Social Value of Temperance; and From Abraham to Christ. If you’d asked him in 1920 (the year Queen Lucia was published, when he was fifty-three) what he’d be remembered for, he’d probably have replied, ‘Dodo’, his first successful novel to which he wrote three sequels. Sixty-nine years after his death, his six Lucia books are established classics. The other 99...?

Benson was born in 1867 and died in 1940. He worked at a time when there was a good living to be made from writing intelligent, gently satirical social comedy. A lot of other writers did just that; they worked, earned money, died and were forgotten, as Benson probably would have been if he’d died in, say, 1918. That was the year he moved to Rye and started looking out of the window of the garden room of Lamb House.

Writing all those books, about so many different things, Benson was, above all else, a professional. That term has many connotations. It doesn’t preclude a divine fire, passion or inspiration; it does imply craftsmanship, staying power and the ability to write books that people want to read, rather than feel they have to.

A professional knows that the three ingredients of a novel are style, plot and character, that these elements must blend and complement each other, and that each ingredient should be subordinated to the aims of the whole. At the height of his powers, Benson was a master of co-ordination. His plots are slight and episodic, because the characters who act them out lead that sort of life – picaresque rather than epic. To create the comic effect, however, his style encompasses every voice from mere naturalism to the Homeric. The Lucia books are full of the language of war because the characters see their lives in terms of battles and truces, heroic conflicts interspersed with expedient diplomacy. If he caricatures the mannerisms of his speakers, the exaggeration is minimal; he sharpens and compresses the things he has heard real people say. The key to his art is keen observation heightened by that slight, judicious exaggeration that transforms mere reporting into fiction.

The Freaks of Mayfair is a collection of character studies rather than a novel. The characters are described, their histories recorded, their quirks and foibles catalogued, but there is no story and no action per se. Benson, who was steeped in classical literature, may well have had in mind the Characters of Theophrastus, a botanist and disciple of Aristotle who sought (fortunately with his tongue lodged firmly in his cheek) to classify human beings as he’d earlier classified plants, with each little fault of temper and social defect representing a different subspecies. The Aristotelian method called for the collection and correlation of raw data with a view to refining it into generally applicable laws and theories, and Benson’s book has about it the feel of a zoologist’s field notes. He cultivates the illusion of objectivity; the satire is always subtle, often lurking in the nuances of a single word – the widow in the chapter ‘The Sea-Green Incorruptible’ is pleased that her late husband didn’t die of some ‘vulgar disease’ – or a wickedly innocent juxtaposition – giving us the history of Aunt Georgie, the narrator reports, ‘By this time his step-mother was dead (Georgie did a lovely crayon of her after death).’

Mostly, The Freaks of Mayfair is a torrent of telling detail, the sort of thing Benson would have noticed and carefully, scientifically recorded in a notebook – minutiae of actions, reactions, possessions and manners that, when set down without comment, tell you more about a character than two pages of analysis from the narrator ever could. It’s a series of studies in the sense that a painter might use the term: self-sufficient as a work of art in its own right, but all the more interesting when viewed as source material and practice for Benson’s later novels. Sir Louis and Lady Mary Marigold in ‘The Compleat Snobs’ remind us immediately of Lucia and Pepino in Brompton Square, Mrs Weston in ‘Quack Quack’ is Daisy Quantock, with her Christian Science and her guru, while Aunt Georgie is fascinating as a first draft of a character Benson changed, refined and reduced to essentials before we meet him for the first time as Georgie Pillson in his garden at Riseholme. There’s more than a soupçon of acid in Benson’s sketch of Aunt Georgie. He and Georgie Pillson share a great many mannerisms and props – embroidery, hair dye, plain unmarried sisters, a pretty parlourmaid, a dislike for those who ‘have shown themselves “tarsome” ’, and all the rest of it. Aunt Georgie is definitely meant to be viewed as one of the ‘Freaks’ the title promises us, so much so that Benson feels compelled to defend him; he may have done nothing good with his life but he’s done nobody any harm. The same may be true of Georgie Pillson, but there’s never any need for the narrator to say so.

The Freaks of Mayfair is an exceptional opportunity to watch a craftsman – a professional – at work. It’s a chance to get to know our friends as they were years before we first met them, when they were young and callow. The world Benson observes and records so minutely may be gone for ever, but the vitality of his characters and the life he gives them makes them immediately recognisable and timelessly enjoyable.