The opening sentence of Herbert Hensley Henson’s autobiography is a misdirection: ‘I belong to the middle class, and to the soundest part of it, namely, that which from time immemorial has lived and worked in the country.’ Although Henson’s father was Devon-born, he spent his working-life in a London drapery warehouse before retiring to a villa in the seaside resort of Broadstairs. The family were not the sturdy bourgeoisie of a country town, but London overspill. After the early death of Henson’s mother when he was six, his childhood was chaotic, insecure, and distressful. His father was a morose, quarrelsome, and penny-pinching member of the Plymouth Brethren. Schools were sinks of corruption, according to the old puritan, who insisted that his boy must self-educate at home until, at the age of 14, he was allowed to attend a mediocre school in Broadstairs. A few years later his father, who deplored undergraduate colleges as dens of vice, allowed his enrolment as a non-collegiate student of Oxford University. Young Henson lived with supreme self-sufficiency in cheap digs at Cowley: ‘Oxford is a wonderful place for making friends’, he later said, ‘but many of them are not worth making.’

Henson read little as a boy except histories and his father’s tomes on the Last Judgment. His disjointed education in Broadstairs and years of isolation in Cowley precluded him from being one of those youths, described by Lord Acton in 1885, who felt proud of their school and college colours, fell into the easy habit of conformity, read books with which they expected to agree, and took holy orders in the Church of England while pledging themselves privately to some secular sage, such as Coleridge or Carlyle. Walter Bagehot similarly sensed that an Oxford education disheartened young men. Most of those who were ordained in the Church of England spent their careers in, he wrote, ‘a kind of sacred torpidity.’ They had no higher hope than to live out their days in rural parsonages, ‘sedulous in their routine duties’, at best quiet and useful, compliant with conventional teaching, and self-confined in safe, worn channels of thinking. Henson’s outlandish upbringing, by contrast, kept him from torpidity or quietude.