The Babe, B.A. : being the uneventful history of a young gentleman at Cambridge University — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Babe's Serious Side

The Babe is introduced as habitually flippant and foolish, but the excerpts show a sharp contrast when he acts. During a rehearsal of what appears to be a Greek play—Clytemnestra and Ægisthus are mentioned—the Babe, costumed in a 'deerstalker cap and long, loud ulster,' stops mid-performance when a stage manager drops a metope. He threatens to quit unless the noise ceases, then resumes 'thirty-four lines back.' The narrator comments that 'all the Babe's flippancy and foolishness left him when he was acting, and only then, for acting was the one thing he took quite seriously.' This is the most sustained character detail in the excerpts, suggesting that the novel's comedy may rest on the gap between the Babe's usual demeanor and his occasional intensity.

Domestic Comedy at King's

A chapter titled 'A College Sunday' describes the rooms shared by Reggie and Ealing in Fellows' Buildings, King's. The set includes two pianos 'tuned about a quarter of a tone apart from each other,' two grandfather clocks, and a 'most deficient supply of chairs.' Reggie's solution—'one can always sit on the piano'—typifies the tone. Ealing's piano skills are limited to hymn-tunes and 'Father O'Flynn'; Reggie has mastered the Cavalleria Rusticana Intermezzo 'from force of repetition.' The humor is gentle and circumstantial, built from the mismatch between possessions and practicality, and from the characters' musical limitations. The passage exemplifies the 'homely ingredients' promised in the dedication.

Catalog Mismatch: Science Fiction?

The Project Gutenberg record assigns The Babe, B.A. to 'Science Fiction & Utopias,' a category that finds no support in the excerpts. The text contains no speculative elements, future settings, or utopian schemes. Instead, it offers a realistic, if lightly comic, portrait of undergraduate life in late-Victorian Cambridge: college matches, amateur theatricals, shared rooms, and the social dynamics of dons and students. The dedication explicitly rejects 'heroes, century-making captains of eleven, chess blues, and higher aspirations' in favor of the normal plane. Readers seeking science fiction will be disappointed; the book is better understood as a campus novel in the tradition of comedic academic fiction.

Benson's novel rewards attention to its small set pieces—the rehearsal interrupted by a falling metope, the pianos a quarter-tone apart—rather than to plot. The excerpts suggest a book that values tone over incident, and the Babe himself remains an intriguing figure precisely because his seriousness is so narrowly confined to acting. Readers should approach it as a period comedy of manners, not as a utopian or science fiction work, despite the catalog listing.

Reading about the Babe’s uneventful Cambridge days, I recalled long afternoons in a dusty library, the comforting weight of routine. There’s a strange peace in small dramas, cricket and tea. That same quiet ache surfaced in Bull-dog Drummond: The Adventures of a Demobilised Officer Who Found Peace Dull — Key Ideas to Explore, where peace itself feels like a character—shadowed, waiting, almost tender in its stillness.