Tennyson And Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context (The Nineteenth Century Series)

TENNYSON AND VICTORIAN PERIODICALS

This page intentionally left blank

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals Commodities in Context

KATHRYN LEDBETTER Texas State University, USA

© Kathryn Ledbetter 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Kathryn Ledbetter has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Ledbetter, Kathryn Tennyson and Victorian periodicals : commodities in context.—(The nineteenth century) 1.Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809–1892—Criticism and interpretation 2.Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809–1892—Relations with periodical editors 3.Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809-1892—Appreciation—Great Britain 4.Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809–1892—Appreciation—United States 5.Popular literature—Great Britain—History and criticism 6.Popular literature—United States—History and criticism 7.Periodicals—Publishing—Great Britain—History—19th century 8.Periodicals—Publishing—United States—History—19th century I.Title 821.8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ledbetter, Kathryn. Tennyson and Victorian periodicals : commodities in context / Kathryn Ledbetter. p. cm. — (The nineteenth century series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7546-5719-1 (alk. paper) 1. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809-1892—Relations with publishers. 2. Periodicals—Publishing—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Literature publishing— Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. Poetry—Publishing—Great Britain—History—19th century. 5. Authors and publishers—Great Britain—History—19th century. 6. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809-1892—Political and social views. 7. Politics and literature— Great Britain—History—19th century. 8. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809–1892— Appreciation. I. Title. II. Series: Nineteenth century (Aldershot, England) PR5586.L43 2006 868’.6409—dc22 2006002364 ISBN–13: 978–0–7546–5719–4 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd. Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents List of Illustrations General Editors’ Preface Acknowledgements

vii ix xi

Introduction

1

1

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

7

2

Resistance and Commodification: Tennyson’s “Indecent Exposure” in the Periodicals

45

3

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers: Political Poetry

101

4

“God Save the Queen”: Laureatic Responses

143

5

Transatlantic Connections

169

Appendix A Appendix B Appendix C Bibliography Index

203 207 211 213 227

This page intentionally left blank

List of Illustrations (All illustrations owned by the author except as indicated) 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 3.1 5.1 5.2 5.3

“Cupid and the Nymph,” The Gem for 1831 Table of Contents, The Keepsake for 1837 Title Page, The Keepsake for 1851 “The New Timon, and the Poets,” Punch, 18 February 1846 “The Grandmother’s Apology,” Once a Week, 16 July 1859 “Colours of the Double Stars,” The Cornhill Magazine, December 1863 “The Victim,” Good Words, 1 January 1868 “1865–1866,” Good Words, 1 March 1868 “1865–1866,” Good Words, 1 March 1868 “Alcaics,” The Marlburian, 20 September 1871, Courtesy Marlborough College Archives “Helen’s Tower,” Good Words, 1 January 1884 “The Fleet,” The Pall Mall Gazette, 23 April 1885, Courtesy Mills Memorial Library, McMaster University “Child-Songs,” St. Nicholas, February 1880 “The City Child,” St. Nicholas, February 1880 “The Princes in the Tower,” St. Nicholas, February 1880

21 33 41 50 54 64 72 74 75 85 98 140 194 195 196

This page intentionally left blank

The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical literature, travel writing, book production, gender and non-canonical writing. We are dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories, while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep, and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape.

Vincent Newey Joanne Shattock University of Leicester

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgements Many individuals and institutions helped to make this project possible. I would like to extend my sincerest gratitude to Ann Donahue of Ashgate Publishing and its Nineteenth-Century Series Editor Joanne Shattock for their encouragement with this manuscript from proposal to production. I also thank the anonymous reader who wrote a highly detailed review that helped me reconsider many incomplete or uninformed conclusions and expand my discussion in interesting ways. I am also grateful to many who read parts of my manuscript, including colleagues at Texas State University-San Marcos: Kenneth Margerison; Teya Rosenberg; Marilynn Olson; Priscilla Leder; Luan Brunson; Victoria Smith; and Allan Chavkin. Former Texas State English Department Chair Lydia Blanchard, present Chair Michael Hennessy, and Dean of Liberal Arts Ann Marie Ellis have supported my project in many ways. Research in England was enabled by a Research Enhancement Grant approved by my colleagues on that committee. I am grateful to the brilliant scholarship produced by members of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, whose mission is to expand our knowledge and understanding of periodicals and their importance to the history and culture of Victorian Britain, Ireland, and the Empire. I thank conference attendees who have asked pertinent questions about my research at annual conferences of RSVP, as well as VISAWUS (Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies of the Western United States), SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing), and MLA (Modern Language Association). I also thank Nan Sweet; Richard Fulton; Patrick Scott; Ezra Greenspan; Christopher Ricks; Linda Hughes; Nancy Jo Nutt; Paula Cudworth; and Joy Ledbetter. I am grateful to librarians at Texas State University-San Marcos, the University of Texas, and the British Library for very efficient service with interlibrary loan and rare book materials. Grace Timmons was a most helpful and cheerful guide through the letters and manuscripts at the Tennyson Research Centre, and I am also extremely grateful to Linda Johnson, my patient UK travel companion on that research trip. Terry Rogers, Honorary Archivist in the Archives Room at Marlborough College, graciously provided me with historical background and photocopies of a little-known Marlborough College periodical that published a Tennyson poem. Finally, I thank my friend Richard for being a fan of my project. And I am most grateful to my banjo-playing hero, Alan Munde, who patiently listened to my reading of every draft and offered his perspective, not unlike Tennyson’s, of a commercial performance artist.

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction This book about Tennyson’s publications in Victorian periodicals assumes that the reader of a Tennyson poem printed in a periodical voluntarily or involuntarily creates meaning outside of the solitary poetic text as the mind interprets the visual rhetoric of social and historical codes available from the page on which it appears, or from impressions of the periodical gained from influences such as its editor, publisher, marketing plan, and other contributing factors. A Tennyson poem published in a Victorian periodical engages readers with meanings that are different from those embedded in the same poem published in a book volume, and each reproduction of the text in a new publishing format gathers its own set of meanings because of the material package unique to the particular format: a newspaper is not a monthly or weekly magazine, which is not a literary annual. Yet all are periodicals with publishers who market poems and sell them to readers in a format that is both inscribed by and demonstrative of ideology consumed by the purchasers. Just so, Tennyson’s name was marketed, purchased, and assimilated. Thus, both poem and poet become cultural commodities enmeshed in contexts that create meanings for their readers, which also include scholars such as myself, historically removed from the Victorian moment. My objective in this project is to explore such contexts and propose potential resultant meanings for Tennyson poems as they appeared on the periodical page. I use the only interpretative method that seems to make sense in the current era of critical historical awareness. This is not a traditional monograph about Tennyson or his poetry, nor is it biography, although I engage biographical contexts as they enter into my varied histories. I do not propose a history of each periodical that claims Tennyson as a contributor, but, as with biography, I often apply it as a context. I position myself as a reader of the visual rhetoric of Victorian periodicals, using the poetry of Tennyson as my focus. My method owes much to theoretical approaches of cultural materialists, Marxists, and new historicists, and to the academic shift these theorists inspired that have resulted in fresh perspectives about texts and opportunities to integrate literature with history, journalism, sociology, and other cultural evidence. We can also fully explore the import of Victorian periodicals in this process, which is, as Lyn Pykett notes, “inevitably interdisciplinary. It not only challenges the boundaries between hitherto separately constituted fields of knowledge, but also challenges the internal hierarchies and sub-division within discrete academic disciplines.”1 Literary texts are artifacts unlocked from their former lofty Romantic encoding as isolated textual art.

1 Lyn Pykett, “Reading the Periodical Press,” Investigating Victorian Journalism, eds. Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 4.

2

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

My questions about Tennyson’s experience with Victorian periodicals began when I happened upon his poem “The Victim” in a popular women’s newspaper, the Queen. I wondered about the poet’s relationship with this periodical, hoping to learn more about its editorial policy and his attitudes toward women’s publications. Not only did I find no mention of the poem’s presence there, I found very little scholarship on any Tennyson engagement with Victorian periodicals. I soon learned that Tennyson originally submitted this poem to Good Words, where it was published on 1 January 1868 with an engraved illustration, and the Queen editor swiftly borrowed the poem from Good Words for her own uses for publication on 11 January, but she was apparently unable to acquire the illustration. What did Tennyson think about editors passing his poems around from one periodical to another, adding or deleting illustrations that someone (probably not Tennyson) may have spent considerable time thinking about? What did the illustration contribute to the meanings of the poem as it appeared in Good Words that it could not do in Queen? What might “The Victim,” or any poem, mean to a reader who comes to her newspaper with expectations of news about women’s fashions, balls, court activities, and news of the colonies where loved ones may be living or fighting? How many Tennyson poems had been copied in this way? How would the poem’s meaning change if it were printed in a paper with a smaller, more intellectual and formally educated readership? Did Tennyson calculate these factors when submitting poems to periodicals? I found that copyright agreements with publishers did not extend to periodicals, even if owned by the publishers themselves. Why were periodicals editors allowed to bypass copyright restrictions, when other publishers were strictly held to the law? If Tennyson was ambivalent about publishing at all, why did he submit so many poems to periodicals? Many of my questions must remain unanswered. After finding a listing of these poems in the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature and doing a preliminary search of standard biographies and monographs, including June Steffensen Hagen’s Tennyson and His Publishers, I was shocked to learn that scholars of the world’s first media poet and the most popular Poet Laureate in history have overlooked such a wealth of opportunity for growth in Tennyson studies. The poems had been largely ignored or, in some cases, brushed off as inferior productions best kept hidden, demonstrating a preferential attitude toward aesthetics that Jerome McGann views as betraying “a fundamental misconception of the function of ideas and ideology in poetical works.”2 My study hopes to right this imbalance by exploring contexts that reveal ideas and ideology in this set of poems without aesthetic judgments of individual poems; as Pierre Bourdieu suggests, all such assessments are class-based and merely reflect the critic’s own social field. Once one begins to explore Tennyson’s presence in periodicals, it immediately becomes frustratingly obvious that a definitive selection of poems cannot be made, and difficult decisions about which poems to discuss become sometimes unstable negotiations. Tennyson authorized publication of at least 62 poems in 32 periodical 2 Jerome McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 187.

Introduction

3

titles, and I discuss each of these engagements; however, more poems appear in more periodicals than he authorized, and these are also important because of textual inscriptions that teach us more about Victorian society and the poet’s growth as a cultural icon. Cataloguing his publications in United States periodicals would be an overwhelming, perhaps impossible, task. Editors clipped, cut, and pasted stanzas, lines, and sections of whole poems as they pleased, according to the amount of space they decided poetry should have or would fill on a page. Other challenges remain. For instance, CBEL lists “To W. C. Macready” in the Tennyson section under “Contributions to periodicals etc.” as a publication in The Times on 3 March 1851; however, this poem appears in the Times as part of a speech delivered by John Forster at a farewell banquet for the actor’s retirement from the stage. The Times reprints the entire speech, with Forster reading the poem, which was then reprinted in the Household Narrative of Current Events in March, the Athenaeum on 8 March, the People’s and Howitts’ Journal in April, and in other daily and weekly papers. The poem was not a contribution to The Times or any other newspaper, regardless of its widespread distribution in that format. The Times writer records that “Mr. Forster stated that his friend the Poet Laureate, Alfred Tennyson, had intrusted [sic] him with a few lines of poetry addressed to their distinguished guest, which with the permission of the assembly he would read. (Loud cries of ‘Read, read.’) Mr. Forster proceeded to read the following lines, which were received with much applause. . . .”3 Tennyson undoubtedly knew that his poem would be copied by the other papers once The Times covered the event, and he surrendered it as a gift to Macready (and the public); Tennyson would view many poems in his career as gifts to “the people,” and he reportedly enjoyed being thought of as the “Poet of the People.” The CBEL bibliographer chooses to list the first periodical publication of this poem, but it does not meet conventional expectations of a contribution. Yet we must consider its appearance on the page as a testament to Tennyson’s fame, for his poem was an exciting event at the dinner, and The Times viewed the event important enough to allot almost three full columns of the day’s space for its reportage. A similar circumstance occurs with the CBEL item listed as “In Memoriam. W. G. Ward,” published in The Athenaeum on 11 May 1889. The poem appears in a column titled “Literary Gossip” as a preview of a biography of W. G. Ward to be published by Macmillan within a few days of the notice, featuring Tennyson’s dedicatory lines. The poet did not send these to the Athenaeum, but he would not protest to Macmillan the use of his lines as advertisement for the new book. Another example is “Epitaph on General Gordon,” printed first in The Times on 7 May 1885 as part of a letter that appears in a “News in Brief” column. Tennyson sent the lines in a letter to J. G. Whittier in response to the latter’s request for an epitaph to be inscribed on Gordon’s tomb in Westminster Abbey. The entire letter containing the epigraph is printed in the column as follows:

3

“Dinner to Mr. Macready,” The Times (3 March 1851), 5.

4

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals “Dear Mr. Whittier,—Your request has been forwarded to me, and I herein send you an epitaph for Gordon in our Westminster Abbey—i.e., for his cenotaph:— “‘Warrior of God, man’s friend, not here below, “‘But somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan; “‘Thou livest in all hearts, for all men know “‘This earth hath borne no simpler, nobler man.’ “With best wishes, yours very faithfully, “TENNYSON.”4

The multiple quotation marks indicate imported text, and the closing line of the letter appears as part of the epigraph, adding to the oddity of its presentation. The letter is the contribution, rather than the poem, and textual expectations for poetry are further disrupted by the original purpose of the lines as an engraved epitaph. Yet another textual oddity occurs with the unauthorized printing of “Compromise” in St. James’s Gazette on 29 October 1884. The epigram was sent to Gladstone in a letter to his daughter Mary Gladstone to promote Tennyson’s political position on the Franchise Bill. Tennyson later learned about the publication in St. James’s, but the poem was not meant for periodical publication; nevertheless, Tennyson’s lines inadvertently and publicly promoted a political position while enhancing the status of the periodical. A less complicated example appears in the New York newspaper, the Independent, which features Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” in its 1886 Christmas issue (23 December). Here the editor announces that the poem appears “By special cable to the Independent.”5 This urgency promotes the newspaper’s importance and demonstrates the influence of technology in transatlantic publishing; however, this is not the first publication of the poem. The volume Locksley Hall Sixty Years After had been published in mid-December in Britain, and the paper’s version owed its Christmas coup to the wonders of cable.6 While we may wish to examine the poem’s criticism of Britain in America or the associated commentary by an anonymous writer on the following page who defends Tennyson from harsh critics in England, the poem’s status as a reprint relegates the thematic opportunity to another study. Just as difficult to establish is a finite construction of contexts and a method of organization. The extent of reader imagination and interpretation of codes on a page is unknowable, but I would like to propose meanings from contexts that became critically clear in my own reading of each periodical’s rhetorical stance, its history, and Tennyson’s engagement with his readers. I organize Tennyson’s periodical publications in a loosely chronological fashion within each chapter, but the chapters do not then necessarily follow each other chronologically; instead, each starts from the beginning of thematic tendencies I observe in the periodical genres, the poet’s 4 “Gordon, Tennyson, and Whittier,” The Times (7 May 1885), 6 5 Alfred Tennyson, “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” The Independent (23 December 1886), 18. 6 The author of a brief review of the poem on the following page of the Independent writes: “We believe this is the longest poem ever cabled across the sea; we are sure it is the finest.” “Lord Tennyson’s Poem,” The Independent (23 December 1886), 20.

Introduction

5

attitudes, specific intentions for types of poems and periodicals, and publications submitted to the United States. Chapter One is a discussion of Tennyson’s early development through publication with the highly popular literary fashion of the 1820s and 1830s, the literary annuals. Tennyson joined other authors who criticized the annuals as trashy substitutes for poetry volumes while benefitting from much-needed financial support and the introduction of his name to middle-class women readers who would later become part of a huge loyal readership and important consumers of his poetry. The annuals inscribed his poems with feminine desires for romance, social climbing, and images of female beauty, while editors and publishers of the genre indoctrinated Tennyson into the aggressive, competitive world of periodicals. Chapter Two shows how the poet’s reluctance to publish because of insecurities and Romantic ideas of poetic exclusivity conflicted with his need to support himself and his desire to become a popular poet. He repeatedly claimed to hate periodicals, while seeking them out for financial support or surrendering to requests from friends for contributions. The fortunate result was that readers around the world knew of Tennyson, who became a cultural icon the likes of which our modern society cannot comprehend in terms of a literary figure. He was as much a commodity as were his poems and the publishing formats in which they appeared. Whether or not Tennyson was aware of such constructions, the poet and the periodical were cooperative partners, encoding iconography and ideology. Chapter Three concerns Tennyson’s political poetry, the publication of which was almost always a product of his desire to promote a political agenda. He chose specific periodicals for their ability to expose his views, often contributing anonymously in the early years to protect his reputation as Poet Laureate. My study reveals that Tennyson was often influenced in his emotive appeals by his own readings of newspaper accounts; thus, a journalist may be considered to be a co-author of a Tennyson poem such as “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” In Chapter Four, I discuss poems published in performance of Tennyson’s role as Poet Laureate, either as works that Queen Victoria requested for official functions or events or as personal tributes he wrote in honor of the royal family. Tennyson was more active in this role than any Poet Laureate before him, a suitable response to an era that required such earnestness. Yet the publications demonstrate a degree of respect from his public that surpasses mere recognition of his official role. They saw Tennyson as an extension of the monarchy and the Empire, and he fulfilled their expectations with numerous poems that appear in popular periodicals such as The Times so that he could be accessible for popular consumption. Chapter Five explores Tennyson’s reputation in the United States and his contributions to American periodicals. I propose that he was more loved in the United States than in Britain because the lack of copyright restrictions caused his work to be disseminated in a wider range of periodicals and publication formats. Editors cut and pasted portions of his longer poems to fit their periodical’s positioning with readers, who often never knew a poem was part of one of his longer works, such as The Princess or In Memoriam, because they did not buy poetry volumes. His work was largely out of his control in the United States, a frustrating situation for Tennyson and

6

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

other English authors, but good for his reputation. He authorized a select group of publications, from which he earned extraordinary fees in some cases, and I discuss all these submitted poems, but I also review his frequent bootlegged appearance in literary annuals of the United States in an exploration of his importance to middleclass women readers. This study is, then, an interrogation of contexts inscribing a large selection of Tennyson’s authorized and unauthorized publications in Victorian periodicals in Britain and the United States. It explores the notion that the poet and the periodical become commodities in a cooperative exchange with Victorian society. The author’s intent is negotiable and sometimes unimportant, as are his revisions for later volumes, for a reader interprets in the moment of interaction with the periodical, which is temporal and meant to be discarded. The meanings gathered during that moment evolve into sometimes vague personal memory, or they disappear forever, deconstructed by the next reconstitution of art that may appear in a later volume. Thus, Tennyson’s fear of losing control of his art by publication in periodicals was well-founded. Roland Barthes might say that Tennyson lost control of his art once he committed it to paper; the printer’s devils and ideology may have produced more meaning than even Tennyson could imagine.

Chapter 1

Those “Vapid” Gift Books Book historians record a remarkable change in reading audiences, book production, and publishing methods during the 1820s and 1830s as the market became dominated by economic forces inviting innovative and diverse publication formats.1 Perhaps the most maligned of these new outlets for publication was the highly profitable literary annual, anthologies of poetry, light essays, short fiction, and elegant engraved illustrations which appeared every autumn for the Christmas season, marketed as elaborate gifts much desired by middle-class readers. Courting potential buyers with sentimental titles such as the Amulet, the Forget-Me-Not, the Keepsake, the Literary Souvenir, and Friendship’s Offering, the annuals became ornamental drawing-room attractions, often covered with brilliant red watered-silk, tooled morocco leather, or velvet, featuring engravings by many well-known artists such as J. M. W. Turner, Edwin Landseer, Thomas Stothard, and Thomas Lawrence, and poetry and prose by almost every writer of importance during the second quarter of the nineteenth century.2 A sampling of writers who contributed to the annuals includes Felicia Hemans, L. E. L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer1 See James J. Barnes, “Depression and Innovation in the British and American Book Trade, 1819-1939,” Books and Society in History, ed. Kenneth E. Carpenter (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1983). Parts of this chapter were previously published in Victorian Poetry as “‘BeGemmed and BeAmuletted’: Tennyson and Those ‘Vapid’ Gift Books,” 34:2 (Summer 1996), 235-45. I am grateful for permission to reprint sections of the article in this chapter. 2 For more information on the annuals, see Bradford Allen Booth, ed., A Cabinet of Gems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938); Andrew Boyle, An Index to the Annuals 1820-1850 (Worcester: Andrew Boyle, 1967); Eleanor Jamieson, “The Binding Styles of the Gift Books and Annuals,” in Frederick W. Faxon, Literary Annuals and Gift Books: A Bibliography 1823-1903 (1912; rpt. Middlesex: Private Libraries Association, 1973); “The Annuals of Former Days,” The Bookseller 1 (29 November 1858): 493-99; A. Bose, “The Verse of the English ‘Annuals,’” The Review of English Studies 4 ns:13 (January 1953): 38-51; John Ford, Ackermann, 1783-1983: The Business of Art (London: Ackermann, 1983); John Heath, The Heath Family Engravers 1779-1878, 2 vols. (Hants, Eng.: Scolar Press, 1993); Alaric Alfred Watts, Alaric Watts, A Narrative of His Life, 2 vols. (London: Bentley, 1884); Kathryn Ledbetter, “Lucrative Requests: British Authors and Gift Book Editors,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 88:2 (June 1994): 207-16, and “White Vellum and Gilt Edges: Imaging The Keepsake,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 30:1 (Spring 1997): 35-4; Peter Manning, “Wordsworth in The Keepsake, 1829,” in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, eds. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and “L. E. L.’s ‘Verses’ and The Keepsake of 1829,” a Romantic Circles hypertext edition of three

8

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Lytton, Benjamin Disraeli, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, John Ruskin, William Makepeace Thackeray, Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, Edward Fitzgerald, Thomas Moore, Alfred Tennyson, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett, and Robert Browning. Despite the potentially prohibitive price of twelve shillings (the Keepsake was a guinea), S. C. Hall estimated the public spent 100,000 pounds each season for annuals during their peak in the 1830s.3 In 1824 the Literary Souvenir sold 6,000 copies in two weeks; the following year their totals exceeded 15,000. Walter Scott exclaimed to John Lockhart in 1828: “The world (bookselling world) seem mad about ‘Forget me nots’ and Christmas boxes.”4 Editors often paid high fees for contributions; Scott received £500 for his work in the 1829 volume of the Keepsake. Artists received 20 to 100 guineas for lending their pictures to be engraved, and engravers sometimes got as much as 150 guineas for the production of a single plate.5 Yet many writers who contributed to the annuals complained that they were gaudy, commercial, and empty of artistic merit, and business with literary annuals tended to irritate many authors because of the aggressive tactics required by editors to compete in the annuals market. Alfred Tennyson contributed to gift books and expressed his own vituperous opinions of them, as indicated in this letter to Richard Monckton Milnes on 21 December 1836: “Provokt by the incivility of Editors, I swore an oath, that I would never again have to do with their vapid books. . . . To write for people with prefixes to their names is to milk he-goats: there is neither honour nor profit.”6 Aristocratic editors “with prefixes to their names,” such as 1837 Keepsake editor Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley, often sought authors who would write without pay while saving their large budget for literary celebrities such as Scott.7 Bitten by resentment because of this and other aggressive, competitive, and irregular editorial practices, Tennyson Keepsake poems (and commentary) by Terence Hoagwood, Kathryn Ledbetter, and Martin Matthew Jacobsen (http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/lel/keepcov.htm). 3 S. C. Hall, Retrospect of a Long Life: 1815 to 1883 (New York, 1883), 176. 4 Sir Walter Scott, The Letters of Sir Walter Scott 1826-1828, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 12 vols. (London: Constable, 1936), 10:374. 5 For more information on fees for engravers and the book illustration business, see Anthony Dyson, Pictures to Print: The Nineteenth-Century Engraving Trade (Williamsburg: The Book Press, 1984). 6 Alfred Tennyson, The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 3 vols., ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1:144, 146. 7 On 15 December 1838 Thomas Moore records shock at how little L. E. L. was paid for writing an entire volume of the Drawing Room Scrapbook: “the payment to poor L. E. L. for her 60 pages of verse (for such was the quantum required) amounted at first, only to £100, though afterwards to £120 or 30—On hearing this, I could not help telling him laughingly that even if I could have agreed to write for him it was plain he knew nothing of the sort of scale by which my prices (however undeservedly) had been measured. Lalla Rookh for instance—3000 guineas.” Yet Rudolph Ackerman offered Moore £3000 to write 12 poems for 12 engravings to be included in an annual titled Flowers of Loveliness (24, 25, 26 November 1836). The Journal of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden, 6 vols. (Newark: U of Delaware Press, 1983), 5:2027, 1835.

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

9

belittled the books in his letters; yet, although his most active participation in the annuals came during the 1830s, he continued to submit poems to them as late as 1851. The hatred Tennyson professes is more closely related to his ambivalence about publishing in a popular genre and uncertainty about the direction of his career as a popular poet than to a decided opposition to the literary aesthetic found in the annuals, in spite of his claims that annuals were “vapid.” Tennyson needed to seek out popular forms of publication to reach a larger audience to support himself as a poet. Ironically, while defining an audience for his work and gaining favor with his public, Tennyson scoffed at the publications they read. Yet, his appearance in the books provided much needed exposure to a burgeoning new middle-class readership, which included a growing number of female readers, and prepared him for the role of Poet Laureate. The appearance of new titles each year unleashed volumes of creative commentaries by authors and observers of the period. Charles Greville described annuals as trashy, “gorgeous inanities” containing “the most distinguished artists and the best engravers” sacrificing their work to “poetical effusions of the smallest possible merit, but exciting interest and curiosity from the notoriety of their authors.”8 A reviewer in the Monthly Review of 1832 proclaims that “The general style of the ‘Annual’ verse and prose has been of that spurious elegance, which marked the decline of classic taste in the Roman Empire.”9 Thackeray, who published in the Juvenile Forget-Me-Not (1831), the Keepsake (1849, 1851, 1853, 1854), and the Drawing-Room Scrapbook (1847), portrayed the annuals in this often-quoted review printed in Fraser’s (December 1837): Miss Landon, Miss Mitford or my Lady Blessington writes a song upon the opposite page about water-lily, chilly, stilly, shivering beside a streamlet, plighted, blighted, lovebenighted, falsehood sharper than a gimlet; recollection, cut connexion, true-love token, spoken, broken, sighing, dying girl of Florence, and so on. The poetry is quite worthy of the picture, and a little sham sentiment is employed to illustrate a little sham art.10

Charles Lamb, who contributed to the Bijou (1828), the Gem (two poems in 1829), and the Christmas Box (1828), condemned the annuals for “ostentatious trumpery” and recorded the following sentiment to Bernard Barton on 11 October 1828: I hate the paper, the type, the gloss, the dandy plants, the names of contributors poked up into your eyes on the first page and whistled through all the covers of the magazines, the barefaced sort of emulation, the immodest candidateship brought into so little space. . . . In short I hate to appear in an Annual.11 8 Quoted in Amy Cruse, The Englishman and His Books in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: Harrap, 1930), 279. 9 “The Present State of Literature,” The Monthly Review 3:3 (1832), 381. 10 William Makepeace Thackeray, “A Word on the Annuals,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 16 (December 1837), 758. 11 Charles Lamb and Thomas Noon Talfourd, Letters of Charles Lamb, W. Carew Hazlitt, 2 vols. (London: Bell, 1886), II:292.

10

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

In a review of annuals for 1830, Christopher North (John Wilson) satirizes annuals and periodicals as part of a revolution of reading material that threatens to replace Milton and Pope (December 1829): Now, will any one presume to deny, that this has been a great change to the better, and that there is now something worth living for in the world? Look at our literature now, and it is all periodical together. A thousand daily, thrice-a-week, twice-a-week, weekly newspapers, a hundred monthlies, fifty quarterlies, and twenty-five annuals! No mouth looks up now and is not fed; on the contrary, we are in danger of being crammed; an empty head is as rare as an empty stomach; the whole day is one meal, one physical, moral, and intellectual feast; the Public goes to bed with a Periodical in her hand and falls asleep with it beneath her pillow.12

North genders periodicals and “the Public” as feminine and images them as seasonal productions of nature: “Suppose them all extinct, and life would be like a flowerless earth, a starless heaven. We should soon forget the seasons themselves—the days of the week—and the weeks of the month—and the months of the year—and the years of the century—and the centuries of all Time—and all Time itself flowing away on into eternity” (948). Such revulsion deserves a critical look, for it indicates the tendency among Tennyson’s contemporaries, as well as among our own, to label popular literature for mass publication as “bad,” while literature produced and conserved for appreciation of the educated few as “great.” The reaction also indicates a class-based and misogynistic fear of the impending democratization and feminization of literature. A. Bose contends that the annuals catered to a new reading public that included “manufacturers, tradesmen, and Britons overseas, and the expectations of poetry of these classes differed from the poetic standards of those who had had the benefit of the classical education of the universities and who regarded literary appreciation as more or less their close preserve.”13 As Robert Southey wrote to George Ticknor on 17 March 1829: With us no poetry now obtains circulation except what is in the Annuals; these are the only books which are purchased for presents, and the chief sale which poetry used to have was of this kind. . . .Booksellers and printsellers find it worth while now to publish for a grade of customers which they deemed ten years ago beneath their consideration.14

The new reading public also included women of all classes, and the effects of this phenomenon clearly dictate the following comments by James Froude in his history of Carlyle: “An experienced publisher once said to me: ‘Sir, if you wish to write a book which will sell, consider the ladies’-maids. Please the ladies’-maids, you 12 Christopher North (John Wilson), “Monologue, or Soliloquy on the Annuals,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 26 (December 1829), 950. 13 Bose, 49. 14 Robert Southey, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey, 6 vols. (London: Longman, 1850), VI: 39-40.

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

11

please the great reading world.’ Carlyle would not, could not, write for ladies’maids.”15 While annuals were too expensive for ladies’-maids, the tendency to write for younger women readers became evident in literature published throughout the period, and authors who aimed for success would and did write for them. Lee Erickson repeats Bose’s claim and credits the annuals for helping to create such an audience: The literary Annuals, in particular, revealed that the readership of poetry had become increasingly young and female and that this new market could be successfully segmented from the old with a new format and packaging. The Annuals effectively divided poetry into one kind for a limited audience made up largely of artistic gentlemen and scholars, and another for a much larger audience composed primarily of women and children.16

This tendency permanently damaged the sales of poetry, according to Erickson; thus, “with the end of the reign of poetry in the literary marketplace in 1825 also came the real end of Romanticism.” Erickson claims that poets thus felt alienated from their audience, as evidenced by the later use of the dramatic monologue as “symbolic of the lack of an audience for and the consequent alienation and self-doubt of the poets who were beginning their careers in the 1830s” (40). Undoubtedly, the annuals editors and publishers focused their attention on an audience of young women; indeed, Keepsake proprietor and engraver Charles Heath wrote to artist Kenny Meadows that he only wanted illustrations of beautiful young females in his books: “I don’t care about her maternity, or Shakespeare, or anything else. You must not make her more than twenty or nobody will buy! If you won’t, I must get Frank Stone to do her instead. All Frank Stone’s beauties are nineteen exactly, and that’s the age for me!”17 The young, future Queen Victoria confirms the desire for such reading, for she purchased the 1837 Keepsake and the Oriental Annual as Christmas gifts on the eve of her accession to the throne as Queen Victoria.18 Harold Nicolson notes that the importance of Tennyson’s contributions to the annuals lies in the fact that the Annuals are at the same time an indication and a cause of a change in the angle of public taste, more precisely a change of literary audience. And this change

15 James Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of His Life 1795-1835, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1882), II:374. 16 Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800-1850 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 33. 17 Quoted in Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, ed. W. Minto, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892), 1:114-115. 18 Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, The Girlhood of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty’s Diaries Between the Years 1832 and 1840, ed. Viscount Esher, 2 vols. (London: Murray, 1912), I:180.

12

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals is important; for the young poet between 1823 and 1850 found himself writing with the picture of a very definite audience before him, an audience of young ladies.19

As Nicolson states, the cultivation of this audience was critically important for Tennyson’s development at this stage in his career, and recent scholars discuss his integration with and influence of the traditionally gendered feminine aesthetics common in the annuals.20 Erickson contends that this shift, along with the influence of a pictorial aesthetic, created inferior poetry that permanently damaged the literary marketplace: “Annuals lowered poetic standards and provided an inadequate shelter for poetry against the ever-rising tide of the periodicals” (48). His approach demonizes the periodical format, as if poetry were being rapidly devoured by an unstoppable monster, while glorifying the traditional Romantic notion of the poet, notably male. Erickson’s observation that “long before poetry lost its cultural preeminence, the best poets realized that, given an expansion of the readership in England, poetry was condemned to move in advance of the popular taste and to become an avant-garde art in order to retain its formal and artistic integrity,” thus marginalizing itself from the mass readers attracted to periodicals (48). Indeed, it is Arthur Henry Hallam who writes to Leigh Hunt on 18 January 1831 about Alfred and Charles Tennyson:

I do not suppose that either of these poets is at all likely to become extensively or immediately popular: they write not to the world at large, which ‘lieth in wickedness’ & bad taste, but to the elect Church of Urania, which we know to be small, & in tribulation.21

Yet it was Hallam who aggressively and furtively submitted Tennyson’s poetry to magazines and annuals for publication. What he and his colleagues claimed, in a return to past Romantic ideals, conflicts with what they practiced, in a practical encounter with the material present.

19 Harold Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of His Life, Character and Poetry (London: Constable, 1923), 104. 20 For example, see Herbert F. Tucker, “House Arrest: The Domestication of English Poetry in the 1830s,” New Literary History 25 (1994): 521-548; Margaret Reynolds, “Fragments of an Elegy: Tennyson Reading Sappho,” The Tennyson Society (Lincoln, 2001); Richard Cronin, Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824-1840 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002); Donald S. Hair, Domestic and Heroic in Tennyson’s Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981); Linda H. Peterson, “Domestic and Idyllic,” A Companion to Victorian Poetry, eds. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman and Antony H. Harrison (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 42-58; Dino Franco Felluga, “Tennyson’s Idylls, Pure Poetry, and the Market,” SEL 37:4 (1997): 783-803; and Brian Goldberg, “‘A Sea Reflecting Love’: Tennyson, Shelley, and the Aesthetics of the Image in the Marketplace,” Modern Language Quarterly 59:1 (March 1998): 71-97. 21 Arthur Henry Hallam, The Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam, ed. Jack Kolb (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979), 396.

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

13

In a review of the 1837 Tribute, an annual featuring Tennyson’s sonnet (“O that ‘twere possible”), reviewer Macvey Napier approved of the change in popular taste, commending the “more rational, healthy, and natural tone of feeling, on the part of our writers, indicating a corresponding state of the public mind,” as a gauge of how far poetry had come from the German sturm und drang movement of irrational feeling and tempest. He writes in the Edinburgh Review: It indicates plainly enough a decided decline in the taste for the poetry of excitement and a return towards what we must always consider as the highest and truest vocation of the muse—the poetry of intellect, humanized and brought home to the heart by sentiment at once elevated and familiar—at once of individual and universal application.22

In their undergraduate days, Tennyson’s coterie of Cambridge Apostles promoted Wordsworthian ideals of writing for a select group of admirers, fueling Tennyson’s future anxieties about becoming a popular poet; but the “universal application” required by Napier’s description of the new reading public’s aesthetics invited Tennyson to separate himself from elitist attitudes and prepare himself for a serious career that would be intimately tied to popular acclaim. Erickson notes the popularity of L. E. L. as an indicator of a move to feminine aesthetics. However, Napier articulates a model for poetry readers that includes men in an aesthetic negatively typified by Erickson and others as feminine because it encompasses domestic themes of the heart and home in a massive shift to control the literary and revolutionary excesses of earlier decades. Such a shift may be viewed by some critics as inferior and harmful to poetry, but I suggest an alternative perspective of the annuals as cultural artifacts offering important textual placement for poetry that expanded its readership, preserved it during years of financial crisis, and, by Erickson’s admission, “radically changed the publishing marketplace for poetry and thus inevitably the place of the poet in early Victorian literary culture” (48). For Erickson, this shift is unfortunate; for Tennyson, it was a necessary negotiation that resulted in the eventual textual placement of Tennyson as a Victorian icon. Tennyson’s popularity would increase because of his appeal to such readerships, and this transition would depend on continued publication in aggressively commercial ventures. The annuals were a good opportunity for Tennyson at a time when poetry publication for authors of his age and status was risky.23 Authors sneered at annuals as literary toys, but the books benefitted the publishing world in many ways: they enhanced the status of engravers and their art;24 provided an outlet for the development of the short story genre; gave 22 Macvey Napier, Review of The Tribute, Edinburgh Review 66 (October 1837), 105. 23 James J. Barnes notes major panics in 1819, 1825–26, 1829–32, 1837–42, and 1847– 48 because of inflation accompanying the Napoleonic Wars and government policies that discouraged production and distribution of cheap printed matter by taxing manufactured paper. Barnes sees this as a challenge that inspired innovation in the literary marketplace. See pp. 231-248. 24 An 1858 article in the Bookseller argues that painters “were ever ready to acknowledge the services rendered to them by the circulation, not only in England, but in every part of the

14

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

women writers opportunities to enter the publishing business as writers and editors;25 cultivated new readers; bolstered a weakening economy in the publishing business; provided authors and publishers with much-needed cash and confidence during a depression in the marketplace;26 and created an environment for Tennyson to work his way through to the poet of the 1840s and beyond. Poets had to acknowledge the power of annuals, if they wanted to make their living in the trade. The guiding aesthetic in annuals was that literature gives voice to desires of the heart. Eloquently written verses and tales about love or lost love, death, nature, and children dominate the contents of gift books. Religion (Christianity), married life, mild social concerns, moral lessons, and medieval romance were acceptable and typical subjects, but annuals’ contributors also published imperialistic poems and stories of Eastern adventures and romantic fantasies.27 Readers expected the books to maintain strict notions of propriety in language, art, and the degree of emotion expressed, for they were read by the entire family. Although Tennyson published a Continent, of highly finished translations of their respective works; thus making their names familiar as “household words” to thousands of persons who had never heard of them before. Previous to the appearance of the Annuals, there were few, if any collectors of modern pictures in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, or Leeds . . . [but now] the prices of our English painters have gone on increasing with the demand until they have reached, in many instances, six times the amount they used to ask for their works.” “The Annuals of Former Days,” 495. For more information on engravers of literary annuals, see Kathryn Ledbetter, “‘The Copper and Steel Manufactory’ of Charles Heath.” Victorian Review 28:2 (2002), 21-30. 25 Because literary annuals bolstered a depressed literary market, they helped to create and later improve employment opportunities for scores of working-class women hired to work in the book manufacturing trade. “A Day at a Bookbinder’s,” published in the Penny Magazine XI (September Supplement 1842): 377-384, describes a room at Westley’s and Clark’s binding factory set aside especially for annuals. A wood engraved picture shows rows of women busily tacking, hammering, and sewing stacks of books on tables. Another image illustrates a woman elsewhere in the factory, sitting at a sewing press arranging stacks of quires (379). The author boasts: “It is a fortunate circumstance, considering the very limited number of employments for females in this country, that there are several departments of bookbinding within the scope of their ability. . . . This firm, for instance, in a busy season, give employment to about 200 females, whose weekly earnings average from 10 to 18 shillings; and where a supervision, at once kind and judicious, is observed by the principals, an honourable subsistence is thus afforded for those who might have no other resources to fly to” (380). 26 Coleridge wrote to Literary Souvenir editor Alaric Watts (14 September 1828) that Keepsake editor Frederic Mansel Reynolds had offered him £50, “more by the bye than all my literary labours, if I except my salary during the time I wrote for the Morning Post and the Courier had procured me, as a set off against a dead loss, a dead loss of about £300.” Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 2 vols. (London: Constable, 1932), II:416. For more details on the involvement and payment of Wordsworth, Coleridge and other authors in literary annuals such as the Keepsake, see Hoagwood, Ledbetter, Jacobsen. The site also includes publishing history of the Keepsake. 27 For a discussion of themes in stories and poems of literary annuals, see Kathryn Ledbetter, “Domesticity Betrayed: The Keepsake Literary Annual.” The Victorian Newsletter 99 (Spring 2001), 16-24.

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

15

fragment of Maud in a book sharing some characteristics of an annual (the Tribute, 1837), the later work (1855), with its snarling anger and hints at insanity, would be inappropriate in a gift book of the thirties. Taste, gentility, and high moral sentiments were the standard for contributors to literary annuals. Editors were charged with the responsibility of sanitizing their books through censorship, for, if the books did not sell, the publishers blamed the editors, often citing bad taste in contributions. Not acceptable were politics, current events, radical social opinions, hints at sexuality (although the engravings were sometimes overtly sensual), crude or hard language, and extreme negative emotions (elaborate, self-sacrificing grief and sorrow were the noble exceptions). Sonnets were popular as a poetic form to express the more attractive or romantic feelings, but authors also wrote short fiction and essays that touched these sentiments. Steel-plate engravings became the most expensive, most respected element of the book’s production, and authors were often asked to create a story or poetic situation around the engravings. Depending on the annual, images displayed fashionable aristocratic women finely dressed, travel scenes, and story pictures. Art was important to the aesthetics of the book; middle-class readers could view copies of fine paintings for the first time in history in the days before the National Gallery opened at Trafalgar Square in 1838. One of the early complaints from critics was that the engravings were too small; thus, the books began to get bigger yearly as they competed with one another. Editors chose pictures of women and children, animals, nature scenes, romantic embraces, or characters from famous novels and portraits of their authors. The engraved illustrations, poems, stories, essays, and beautiful bindings combined to appeal to the new bourgeois public, anxious to prove their cultivated tastes by appreciating art, literature, and manners. A small sampling of Tennyson’s offerings indicates the flavor of what Nicolson (borrowing a phrase from Bulwer-Lytton) called his “School-miss Alfred” or “Keepsake style.” In “No More” (the Gem, 1831), the speaker grieves with “gushing” tears over his dead love. The same volume features “A Fragment,” which appeals to new interests in distant exotic eastern civilizations. Here Tennyson looks back at a once magnificent race and ponders the mysteries of its fate; gift books frequently provided such mental escapes for their readers through travelogues and scenic engravings of foreign lands. In a sonnet for Friendship’s Offering of 1832, a friend’s or lover’s absence causes permanent melancholy that so darkens the speaker’s moody tempers that when they are together, “there’s never perfect light.”28 In the Yorkshire Literary Annual for 1832, a Tennyson sonnet pays homage to all women, with “Dimples, roselips, and eyes of any hue,” whom he loves, “black eyes and brown and blue.” Love is so rich it hurts the speaker, “dazzled to the heart

28 Alfred Tennyson, “Sonnet” (“Me my own Fate to lasting sorrow doometh”), Friendship’s Offering: A Literary Album, and Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1832 (1831), ed. Thomas Pringle (London: Smith, Elder, 1831), 367.

16

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

with glorious pain.”29 In another sonnet, “Check every outflash, every ruder sally,” published in Friendship’s Offering for 1833, Tennyson guides the reader to the place where he first confessed his love. Now “the haunted place is dark and holy,”30 and a nightingale’s plaintive call brings back the sensations of the summer night when the confession occurred. “St. Agnes” (The Keepsake, 1837) appeals to fantasies of escape for women who might feel trapped in domestic dreariness as the sanctified bride of Christ in the poem gets lifted “to the golden doors; / The flashes come and go; / . . . the gates / Roll back, and far within / For me the Heavenly bridegroom waits, / To make me pure of sin.”31 As an unavoidable presence of the 1820s and 1830s, annuals literature easily integrated Tennyson’s early style with that of women contributors to the annuals, and he often adapted their content; for example, A. Bose notes that “Tennyson’s ‘Dora,’ composed not later than 1835, owed its story to Miss [Mary Russell] Mitford’s prose tale ‘The Rustic Wreath. A Village Story,’ published first in Friendship’s Offering for 1828 and afterwards in the third volume of Our Village under a different title.”32 Initially, it was Hallam who pushed Tennyson into annuals publication, as he had with other decisions to print in these early years. June Steffensen Hagen describes the two men as having vastly different approaches to publication, “Alfred procrastinating, worrying, and Arthur acting.”33 Certainly Tennyson initially hoped to relieve his own financial situation by trying to corner the high fees reportedly paid to some authors, but editors were apparently not as willing to pay relatively unknown writers such as Tennyson. He needed either to support himself or take money from his mother, who was barely getting enough to support her other children. Hallam wrote to Charles Merivale on 14 August 1831: Alfred, not intending to go into the Church, as the grandfather who was ‘patria potestas’ over his wishes and not having yet brought himself to cobble shoes for his livelihood, is desirous of putting his wits to profit, & begins to think himself a fool for kindly complying with the daily requests of Annuals without getting anything in return.34

Tennyson “devolved his business” on Hallam, who asked Merivale to ask Edward Moxon how much he would pay for monthly contributions to his new periodical, the Englishman’s Magazine, and if he would be interested in publishing a volume of Tennyson’s poetry. Hallam’s request shows an early awareness of the close relationship 29 Alfred Tennyson, “Sonnet” (“There are three things which fill my heart with sighs”), Yorkshire Literary Annual for 1832 (1831), ed. C. F. Edgar (London: Longman, 1832), 127. 30 Alfred Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, 2nd edn, Christopher Ricks, ed., 3 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), I: 323. 31 Alfred Tennyson, “St. Agnes,” The Keepsake for 1837 (1836), ed. Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley (London: Longman; Paris: Delloy, 1836), 248. 32 Bose, 46. 33 June Steffensen Hagen, Tennyson and His Publishers (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979), 12. 34 Hallam, 460.

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

17

between periodicals and publishers of poetry volumes. He was volunteering Tennyson for a monthly commitment, showing his acute awareness that periodicals and their publishers were good for poetry, not just in their potential for future volumes, but for continued and regular exposure to reading audiences who purchased periodicals. Tennyson was serious about making his living as a writer, and Hallam went directly to the most prominent likely source for publication and exposure for the new poet. Tennyson continued to publish in the annuals despite the lack of payment because friends such as Hallam asked him to, but they were also attractive opportunities for a young literary man because they were very popular books which featured works from a respectably large portion of the literary community. His appearance in an annual could enhance his reputation, uniting him with contemporary authors in a publication that glorified literature in the finest, most beautiful material display then possible in the publishing world. Tennyson’s literary annual debut occurred in the Gem for 1831, published in October 1830 for the Christmas gift-giving season.35 He contributed three poems to the volume: “A Fragment,” “Anacreontics,” and “No More.” The Gem was a relative late-comer to the annuals scene, preceded by the Forget-Me-Not in 1823; Friendship’s Offering in 1824; and the Literary Souvenir and eight others in 1825. By 1832, the last year of the Gem’s publication, 63 annuals were on the market,36 including the most successful and longest running title, the Keepsake (1828–57). The Gem first appeared as the 1829 volume, published in 1828 by William Marshall and edited for its first two years by Thomas Hood (1799–1845), poet and former co-editor of the London Magazine earlier in the decade under Keats’s publisher, John Taylor. The son of a publisher and grandson of an engraver, Hood’s connections to the literary world were many. Among his friends were Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Thomas de Quincey, Athenaeum editor Charles Wentworth Dilke, Thomas Noon Talfourd, 35 Frederic Lees made an interesting case in 1900 for an earlier publication from Tennyson in an annual titled Death Doings (1826). Lees found two poems which were signed “Alfred”; in the same volume appeared a poem called “Spleen,” signed by “Edward.” Lees reasoned that the young brothers submitted poems to the annual just as they would later do for the Yorkshire Literary Annual. He attempted to show stylistic resemblances to prove the two poems belong to Tennyson, but Arthur Waugh challenged Lees in a later article, saying Tennyson could not have published these without some record among the family letters, and refutes the evidence of style. Lees persisted with his find in still another article, with his most convincing argument, which portrays a young Tennyson writing juvenilia, sending “many boyish lines to the Poets’ Corner of more than one local paper.” He continues: “May I ask—Is it likely that Tennyson, with prevision of future fame, preserved every scrap he wrote or every letter he received from editors? As to strength or weakness of evidence based on internal evidences of style, that is also a matter of opinion” (February 17, 155). But, as Lees says, only the manuscript and plates of Death Doings would settle the issue. Frederic Lees, “Tennyson and the Old Annuals,” Literature 6 (27 January 1900): 87-88; (3 February 1900): 113; (17 February 1900): 155. 36 Frederick W. Faxon, Literary Annuals and Gift Books: A Bibliography 1823-1903 (1912) (Pinner, Middlesex: Private Libraries Association, 1973), xi.

18

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

and other literary men, including Taylor and Keats’s friend John Hamilton Reynolds, both of whom encouraged Hood to enter the publishing profession. Most importantly for our discussion of Tennyson in the annuals, Hood’s circle also included Moxon, publisher of the Englishman’s Magazine that featured Hallam’s now-famous review of Tennyson’s 1830 volume, “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry” (August 1831, pp. 616-28).37 When the literary annuals came into vogue, Hood was a prolific contributor, with poems appearing in the Forget-Me-Not, Friendship’s Offering, Literary Souvenir, Amulet, Bijou, and Ackermann’s Juvenile Forget-MeNot, and he wrote much of the contents for his own successful annual, Hood’s Comic Annual. In later years, Hood was also a frequent contributor and editor of Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine from 1841–1843 and Hood’s Magazine from 1844 until his death a year later. Hood hoped to gather former contributors to the London Magazine for his first issue of the Gem in 1829. Once he got Walter Scott committed to a contribution (“The Death of Keeldar”), Hood used Scott’s name to lure others to his stable of authors for that year’s volume, which sold 7,500 copies in two editions. Each year Hood fell in line with dozens of editors, friends of editors, publishers, and others, pleading writers for contributions to annuals, while he was also busy writing and editing Hood’s Comic Annual (1830–39). The competitive, demanding flurry of requests from annualizers must have been bewildering to authors such as Scott and Wordsworth, who were aggressively pursued, as well as to a minor poet such as Tennyson, who was wary of commercial exposure of any kind, but wanted to advance his career. Publisher William Marshall exemplifies the unethical tactics that sometimes offended authors, resulting in their hatred for annuals; according to Peter F. Morgan, several of the authors of the 1829 Gem did not receive payment. John Hamilton Reynolds wrote to Hartley Coleridge in 1829 that Marshall was “a very mean, impracticable, disagreeable sort of personage” and Hood later said he was “an old Pirate - & hypocrite.”38 Marshall continued to speculate in the annuals market, producing Marshall’s Christmas Box in 1831 and 1832, The Midsummer Keepsake (1834), and The Midsummer Comic Annual (1836). Although Hood’s name appears as editor of the 1830 volume, he did not work for Marshall after 1829, presumably quitting after getting the 1830 volume ready for press. Nevertheless, because Hood used his professional connections to publicize and market the Gem during its first two years, his name continued to be associated with the Gem in absentia, although no editor appears on title pages for the annual’s remaining two years that include

37 Moxon also published Charles Lamb’s Album Verses (1830) and married Lamb’s stepdaughter, Isola. Tennyson’s contributions to the Gem perhaps came from Hallam to Moxon to Hood or Gem publisher Marshall; Moxon contributed poems to the 1829, 1830 and 1831 volumes. An alternate source may have been Edward Fitzgerald, who contributed three poems to the 1831 volume. 38 Quoted in The Letters of Thomas Hood, ed. Peter F. Morgan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 112n.

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

19

the 1831 volume featuring Tennyson’s poems. Marshall’s example is pertinent to Tennyson because it demonstrates the type of crude tactics that produced the rash of negative contemporary responses to annuals and their producers. One might wonder, if Tennyson and Moxon knew of Marshall’s reputation as the recalcitrant Gem publisher, why they would risk contributing after Hood left unpaid, unless they were eager to appear in the book he had promoted or had already consigned their works to Marshall for future publication before Hood left. At the same time the twenty-one-year-old Tennyson was negotiating his contribution with the Gem in June 1830,39 his first volume of poetry, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, was being advertised in the Athenaeum on 19 June and the Literary Gazette on 26 June, but booksellers were not adequately stocking the book. Frustrated, Tennyson wrote to the book’s publisher, Effingham Wilson, on 18 June 1830: I hear complaints from various quarters that persons are not able to procure my book of the booksellers: I am likewise informed that you told Ridgeway that I desired the publication not to take place till the conclusion of the present week. There must be some mistake in this report, though I am at a loss to account for the origin of it. At any rate the book has been delayed much too long and I must request you to disseminate it immediately, as everybody is leaving town. . . . P.S. Have you sent the book to Cambridge, Cheltenham, and Louth, as I requested you through Mr. Hallam?40

It promised to be an eventful summer, for the “everybody” leaving town included Tennyson, who would embark in July upon the unfortunate adventure to aid revolutionaries in Spain. Hallam writes to Tennyson on 4 October: “Effingham of course I shun as I would ‘whipping to death, pressing, and hanging.’”41 Their uneasy relationship with Wilson corresponds with Hood’s experience, both publishers making the literary profession a frustrating, financially insecure business. The ultimate irony of the Gem and other literary annuals was that their material production involved the latest technology in bookbinding, paper manufacturing, engraving, and aggressive marketing, while their producers advertised the book in terms of genteel elegance, grace, class, and feminine domesticity that contrasts with such competitive modern tactics. The anonymous prefatory poem of the 1831 Gem presents the annual as a permanent gift that will “keep its hues in every weather,” but the volume is a seasonal periodical, destined for mass consumption and doomed to an early death by competition from genre overproduction.42 Bound in crimson wateredsilk, the 1831 Gem featured 12 elegant engravings of paintings by Lawrence, Cooper, Collins, and others. The first of Tennyson’s poems to appear in the Gem volume is

39 The 1831 volume features a notice from the editor after the title page, establishing the end of July as the next volume’s deadline 40 Tennyson, Letters, I:44. 41 Hallam, 380. 42 Prefatory poem (“Roses are pretty things, no doubt”), The Gem, A Literary Annual for 1831 (1830) (London: Marshall, 1831), vi.

20

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

“No More,” written in 1826, according to Christopher Ricks. Thomas Lounsbury claims that the poem is unremarkable and writes that it leaves on the mind the impression that the author is trying to say something which it is beyond his power to express. The sense of inadequacy is made perhaps unduly apparent because both poem and subject inevitably suggest the unrhymed song in ‘The Princess,’ usually entitled, when separated from its context, ‘The Days that are not more.’43

Tennyson’s contributions to annuals often invite such discussion about how they reach, through revision, “the high-water mark of lyrical achievement in our tongue” in later volume publication and what changes made them into more pleasurable, readable, or famous poems (266); although “No More” was not reprinted as published in the Gem, it later evolved into “Tears, Idle Tears.” The Gem poem is interesting for its demonstration of Tennyson’s early reliance on sentiment, as the smell of a “wildweed-flower alone” produces the physical sensation of tears gushing and ears ringing as an expression of the speaker’s grief over a lost love.44 Its textual position on page 87 of the 1831 Gem places the poem after a poem by T. K. Hervey titled “Cupid and Nymph” that illustrates an engraving of “Cupid and the Nymph,” painted by Hilton and engraved by Engleheart (Figure 1.1). In the picture, a loosely robed beauty cradles a naked Cupid beneath her in a playful embrace, holding his quiver, empty of arrows, just out of reach above them. The classical context distances the viewer from the sexual implications of a partially naked nymph overpowering a cupidic baby boy. The poet describes the nymph waking the sleeping Cupid and urges the nymph to fly home while her “heart is a free and happy thing,” and “sport not with his flowery spell, / It is a flowery chain” (87). The poet questions Cupid’s mythical gift of immortality as a “boon to drag an aching heart / Through many an age of tears,— / To wear unfading poison-flowers,—/ And long to die, through deathless hours!” Thus an engraving portraying a sensuous, merry Dryad’s practical joke upon boy-god of love Cupid becomes a morose commentary on love as an eternal hell in life, similar to the one Tennyson describes in his poem that appears directly under “Cupid and Nymph,” almost as a postscript. The continuation of mourning from Hervey to Tennyson creates a suicide wish, for all pleasure has gone “Lowburied fathomdeep beneath with thee,” as Tennyson’s persona proclaims, and Cupid’s gift is a burden that makes suffering eternal. Such themes commonly appear in literary annuals, especially when the suffering has to do with lost love or abandonment, and the pictures within the Gem contain paratextual power that influences meaning of other poems within the container of literature. Six of its 12 engravings feature children, either in classical or contemporary context, three portray violent adventure scenes, two are travel pictures, and one portrays “Lady Russell, writing to her husband the evening before his execution.” Choice 43 Thomas R. Lounsbury, The Life and Times of Tennyson [From 1809 to 1850] (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 266. 44 Alfred Tennyson, “No More,” The Gem, A Literary Annual for 1831 (1830) (London: Marshall, 1830), 87.

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

Figure 1.1

“Cupid and the Nymph,” The Gem for 1831

21

22

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

and placement of these images was somewhat involuntary, as William Marshall undoubtedly used whatever engravings he could obtain or afford for each volume. However, the collection of visual themes and accompanying poems of the volume engage Tennyson’s poems with the women and children in the annual’s aesthetic expressed by the visual and written texts, as well as with the current attitudes and expectations about literary annuals. A good example is “Anacreontics,” a Tennyson contribution to the Gem which contains lines of simple, light wordplay about love, well suited for casual reading, in spite of their much heavier later revised state in The Lady of Shalott.45 The poem begins with images of flowers that the speaker has woven into a garland for his lover, Lenora. She accepts his gift with “a light and thrilling laughter,” and loves him “ever after.”46 Another poem in the volume, “A Fragment,” mourns the loss of a glorious Egyptian race. According to Ricks, Tennyson is describing the “sons of Cush who invaded Mizrain . . . they built temples, colossi, tombs and pyramids, and a branch of this race settled in Rhodes as children of the Sun.”47 Nothing but the pyramids survive, and “Old Memphis hath gone down: / The Pharaohs are no more: somewhere in death / They sleep with staring eyes and gilded lips. / Wrapped round with spiced cerements in old grots / Rockhewn and sealed for ever.”48 The poem expresses a noble sentiment for the past, and its sources were “quarried” from the earlier poem, “Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind.” However, placement in the Gem marks it as the leading poem in a series of travelogues, the next titled “Foreign Albums,” a series of four poems supposedly reprinted from album books about places the author has visited throughout Europe. These poems are meditations about people and events that have occurred in the variously named places. For instance, an album poem from St. Bernard about Napoleon imagines that “Upon these snows the Despot trod, / The less than man, the would-be God!” (246). A geographical essay then describes Bergues, a fortified town near Calais in northern France, accompanied by an engraving of “La Tour du Marché.” If Tennyson’s fragment poem is quarried from an earlier poem about doubt and a yearning for childhood, the quarried result printed in the Gem becomes a travelogue that comforts doubt with adventurous escapes and motherly attention of the feminine aesthetics in the annuals. It also places his poem next to amateur compositions drawn from an album book, a popular drawing-room fad. About Tennyson’s Gem contribution, “No More,” Hallam Tennyson remarks that “Although my father considered the poem crude, it is remarkable for a boy of seventeen.”49 Unfortunately, reviewers were not impressed with Tennyson’s youthful 45 See Ricks’s note in Tennyson Poems, I:313. 46 Alfred Tennyson, “Anacreontics,” The Gem, A Literary Annual for 1831 (1830) (London: Marshall, 1830), 131. 47 Tennyson, Poems, I:314. 48 Alfred Tennyson, “A Fragment,” The Gem, A Literary Annual for 1831 (1830) (London: Marshall, 1830), 243. 49 Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son (New York and London: Macmillan, 1911), I:80.

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

23

talent; the Literary Gazette, while generally approving of the volume, saying “There is some of as sweet poetry as we have met with in an Annual,” commented of Tennyson’s contributions: “To Mr. Tennyson’s poems we can only say, in the words of Shakespeare, ‘they are silly, sooth.’”50 However, demands of friends for something by Tennyson continued, and Tennyson reluctantly complied; when William Henry Brookfield asked for a contribution to the Yorkshire Literary Annual, Tennyson returned this typically clever, acerbic response from Somersby on 3 August 1831, as he gave in to Brookfield’s request: Have I not forsworn all annuals provincial or metropolitan. I have been so beGemmed and beAmuletted and be-forget-me-not-ted that I have given all these things up. In consequence of the urgent solicitation of S. C. Hall Esq. I had consented some time ago to make my appearance next year in The Amulet, but I vowed at the same time that this concession should be the last. . . . No—by St. Anne—No. I would not do it for Tennant—no—not for Hallam. Yet peradventure for thee, William Henry, I might be brought to do it.51

Tennyson evidently decided to ignore the “urgent solicitation” from S. C. Hall for the Amulet, for he did not appear in that annual; however, Tennyson’s brother Frederick profited from Hall’s solicitations, for his poem titled “Poetical Happiness” appears in the 1832 Amulet, and he contributed yet another poem for the 1833 volume. Alfred promised Brookfield he would try to get a sonnet from his brother Charles for the Yorkshire while reaffirming: “seriously, Brookfield, I have a very strong objection to appearing in annuals and it is only because you ask me that I have sent you the following sonnet (written for you), not very good I promise you, but take it for better, for worse at all risks” (I:63). Alfred’s hopes to acquire a sonnet from Charles proved futile, for none from Charles appears in the Yorkshire; however a sonnet from Edward Tennyson would be the troubled eighteen-year-old brother’s last poetic effort before being committed to an insane asylum, where he lived until his death in 1890. Thus, literary annuals provided an important creative outlet for more than one Tennyson poet.52

50 Review of The Gem, Literary Gazette (16 October 1830), 667-668. 51 Tennyson, Letters, 1:63 52 Although he is not listed in Boyle’s standard Index to the Annuals, Brookfield also contributed four poems to the Yorkshire. Tennyson delivers playful but hard criticism about Brookfield’s efforts in the 1831 letter, claiming that “’tis chiefly because in the aforesaid annual I expect thy pleasant company which alone is sufficient to compensate for the lack of novelty on thy way,” referring to Brookfield’s Yorkshire poem, “The Peak Storm,” unidentified by Lang and Shannon (I:63). Tennyson adds: “I like thy verses though I find fault with some expressions in them which I will not speak of here for fear of putting thee in ill humour. There are only two, I mean, which I will leave thee to find out and if thou cans’t not, I will confess myself in the wrong.” Other Brookfield contributions include “Ecce Quam Bonum,” “Sonnet to a Lady on Her Birth-day,” and “The Last Chord.” Other authors represented are John Clare, Felicia Hemans, Aubrey de Vere, and Robert Montgomery and William Lisle Bowles of the Yorkshire area

24

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Alfred’s own sonnet begins with the line “There are three things which fill my heart with sighs,” published in October 1831 for the 1832 Yorkshire Literary Annual in its only year of existence, its short life perhaps predetermined by the absence of engraved illustrations highly desired by readers. Tennyson’s contribution reflects characteristics of work influenced by his unfortunate 1830 journey to the Pyrenees with Hallam to supply money and secret messages for José Maria Torrijos and the Spanish revolutionaries.53 The sonnet locates the poet musing “At sunset, underneath a shadowy plane. / In old Bayona nigh the southern sea” while being watched by black eyes, presumably female, although the poet only sees the eyes, “confused / And dazzled to the heart with glorious pain.”54 “Eyes of any hue” inspire the poet’s sigh, but of the black eyes that look at him “From an half-open lattice,” the poet exclaims: “I live and die, and only die for you.” Margaret Reynolds brands this one of Tennyson’s “girlie” poems, “simpering illustrations for a soft-porn collection parading their vital statistics.”55 Reynolds contends that Tennyson adopts a Don Juan persona in his early poems, “And, like Don Juan, what Tennyson is doing here is using these girls to make himself. Don Juan is a Romantic hero who is a Narcissus, using women as mirrors to reflect himself to twice his size. Tennyson is a Romantic poet who is also a Narcissus, using women as mirrors to reflect himself into poetry” (21). Reynolds claims that he creates the women as textual pleasures. The women in Tennyson’s “girlie” poems thus become objectified as sex objects. One could adopt a similar position about male artists whose paintings objectified beautiful aristocratic women and became major commodity features as engravings in literary annuals such as the Keepsake; these women begin as objects of a male gaze, but they also become objects of the female reader. As modern advertisers and publishers of women’s magazines well know, women also gaze at other women as models for their own appropriation of self, and literary annuals provided many opportunities for such mirroring, often suggesting behavior and attitudes that confronted the domestic ideology they outwardly promoted. Further, women in these early poems also serve a larger role than objectification, according to Linda M. Shires: The appropriation of the female in Tennyson’s early poems serves as more than just an aspect or representation of the poet-figure. The female represents the undersense of poetry itself, melody and pure sound, and even unconsciousness. . . . Tennyson’s early handling of the nineteenth-century connection between lyricism, privacy, and the feminine consists

53 According to Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson and some of the Apostles had become intrigued by “the Spanish exiles in London who had fled their native country in 1823 when Ferdinand had been restored to the throne, revoked the constitution, and set about harsh reprisals. Tennyson’s imagination had been captured by the failure of the liberal revolution,” and he wrote about it in Poems by Two Brothers. The 1830 trip with Hallam inspired works such as “In the Valley of Cauteretz,” “Mariana in the South,” and “The Death of Œnone.” See Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (Oxford: Clarendon; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 116 54 Tennyson, “Sonnet,” Yorkshire Literary Annual, 127. 55 Reynolds, 21.

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

25

of linking the female to more than poetic imagination, for he also associates her with eternal, cosmic process.56

Tennyson’s sonnet portrays women as breathtaking beauties in the first lines, but the woman gazing at the speaker stuns him into a meditation about her as a romantic, tragic figure; her pain may have originally resulted from revolutionary unrest, but revolution is converted to romance in context with the Gem aesthetic, and the woman from Bayona becomes a mysterious, lovely, forbidden creature whose gaze overpowers the male, providing a model for sexual dominance and creativity for women readers. A poem directly preceding Tennyson’s contribution, “The First Leaf of a Young Lady’s Album,” confirms the notion that such readerly textual participation occurs. James Montgomery’s poem begins by questioning: “What thoughts, beyond the reach of thought / To guess what they may be, / Shall in succession here be brought, / From depths no eye can see!”57 “Many a willing hand” inscribe the pages of the book and remain “unfading stand. . . That she who owns the Book may find, / Reveal’d in every part, / The trace of some ingenuous mind, / The love of some warm heart” (125). While the annual is not the same in genre as the album book, where parlor visitors write poems and quotations upon visiting the lady’s home, a writer inscribes an annual with literature that invites the reader’s thoughts into the world of the poem, influenced by the textual conditions of her daily life and intellectual experience. Brookfield’s poem, “‘Ecce Quam Bonum!’” appears directly after Tennyson’s sonnet, contextualizing them both with Cambridge Apostles while Tennyson’s publication in an annual that prints a miscellany of poems and fiction by little-known hopefuls from the Yorkshire area places him in a potentially compromising position as a provincial poetaster. However, sharing the volume with Felicia Hemans, who contributed at least 94 poems to over 13 annuals from 1826 to 1835 places his work within a display of the feminine aesthetic that could only increase his female readership and ensure success in future publishing ventures. In addition, the Yorkshire Literary Annual was, with the exception of Tennyson, Hemans, Brookfield, and other notable authors, primarily a production of Leeds, widening the poet’s exposure outside London and Cambridge circles. Tennyson’s publication in the Yorkshire potentially created far more textual activity than he could anticipate. The Yorkshire poem was not Tennyson’s only concession that year; the 1832 Friendship’s Offering, edited by Thomas Pringle, contains another sonnet, “Me my own fate to lasting sorrow doometh.” Smith & Elder took over the annual in 1828 after five years of publication and reaped financial rewards for 14 years, according to publisher George Smith, who recalled that

56 Linda M. Shires, “Rereading Tennyson’s Gender Politics,” Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, ed. Thaïs E. Morgan (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 51. 57 James Montgomery, “The First Leaf of a Young Lady’s Album,” Yorkshire Literary Annual for 1832 (1831), ed. C. F. Edgar (London: Longman, 1831), 125.

26

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals it had a circulation of from eight to ten thousand copies. . . . The actual publishing of Friendship’s Offering was a notable event. For two or three days before the day of its appearance everybody remained after the shop had closed. Tables were set out, and we sealed up each copy in a wrapper. When the work was all over we were regaled with wine and cake, and sang songs.58

Friendship’s Offering is notable for its presence in the Yorkshire Haworth parsonage, where the juvenile Brontë children pinned its engravings on the walls to use as models for their fictional characters. Sixteen-year old John Ruskin would publish his first verses in the 1835 Friendship’s Offering when W. L. Harrison took over as editor. The 1832 volume features an inscription plate facing the frontispiece and containing the verse motto: “This is Affection’s Tribute - Friendship’s Offering, / Whose silent eloquence, more rich than words, / Tells of the Giver’s faith and truth in absence, / And says - Forget me not!”59 An elaborate floral ribbon design encircles three cameos topped by a lyre, the middle cameo blank upon purchase for the giver to write a token message to the receiver. My copy reads “To Miss Anna Brewer / Dieppe 1831 Dec the 25th / By her affectionate / friend / Matthew [last name undecipherable].” The giver writes below the verse motto the words: “This motto forever.” The inscription page connotes the gift-giving economy of the annuals and the degree to which literature became a cherished commodity to middle-class readers. Pringle announces in his Preface that the frontispiece engraving of elegantly dressed and bejeweled Lady Carrington is “the last female portrait executed by Sir Thomas Lawrence, who . . . considered it one of his most successful productions” (vi-vii). The elaborately embossed leather binding intricately designed and focused around a gold impression of a lyre articulates a marketing focus on old-world notions of poetic inspiration, class, and feminine delicacy. Yet the audience for Pringle’s Preface is “the public,” who will notice that the book aims at “the more quiet graces of a literature combining simplicity of style with elevation of sentiment, and possessing a salutary moral tendency in its general effect” (v). Such values are more related to bourgeois ideology, and middle-class readers could use the book as a palimpsest of upper-class fantasy. The introductory poem by Pringle establishes the book as a superior commodity in the gift economy and emphasizes the moral responsibility and modest, thus humble, means of the giver; gems, gold, and ruby rings may be pleasing, but the poet/giver must be content with sending a “simpler gift” in whose pages “no sentiment is traced / That Virtue, in her gravest mood, / Would wish to see effaced” (xii). Contributors notable to annual readers include then-popular authors Mary Russell Mitford, Barry Cornwall, James Montgomery, Richard Howitt, John Clare, Mary Howitt, Caroline Norton, and Allan Cunningham. Poems by Alfred and

58 Quoted in Jenifer Glynn, Prince of Publishers: A Biography of George Smith (London & New York: Alison & Busby, 1986), 27-28. 59 Friendship’s Offering: A Literary Album, and Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1832 (1831), ed. Thomas Pringle (London: Smith, Elder, 1831).

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

27

Frederick Tennyson appear on the same page close to the end of the book, sandwiched between verses by Caroline Norton and William Motherwell. Alfred’s sonnet has a similar sense of grief and doom apparent in the previous year’s Gem poem, “No More.” Tennyson’s speaker compares his emotional state to that of the person to whom he speaks. The object of the speaker’s affection is “so bright, / When we two meet there’s never perfect light.”60 He consigns his fate to “lasting sorrow” that is unconsolable and unchangeable. He is “Like a lone cypress, through the twilight hoary, / From an old garden where no flower bloometh, / One cypress on an inland promontory,” yet his spirit follows the second person, who comforts him: “But yet thy lights on my horizon shine / Into my night, when thou art far away.” If the speaker’s sorrows do not go away like those of his friend’s, whose “woes are birds of passage, transitory,” because his “hopeless melancholy gloometh,” creating his dark nature. Caroline Norton’s preceding six-stanza poem, “There is No Trace of Thee Around,” follows the speaker as she searches for her beloved in places they have been, and memories haunt her until she realizes that he “never more shalt rove / Through these sweet scenes again!”61 The two poems combine to create a morose sense of loss, but Norton’s is a lost romantic love. Norton’s stories and poems often portray women abused and disillusioned in marriage, with false hopes of romance. Forced by the lack of opportunities for self-fulfillment and financial independence, women choose undeserving men who compromise the woman’s position in society with selfish, insincere promises of fidelity. The double standard of nineteenth-century morality allows the man to move on to the next conquest while Norton’s women suffer the scorn of society as “unchaste” women, echoing Mary Wollstonecraft’s complaint. Perhaps Norton’s love is dead, perhaps Tennyson’s love is not, but both speakers are alone and lonely, unconsolable and searching for love. The poems pair their authors in a stereotypically feminine dependence on a pathological love that results in emptiness and despair, and Tennyson’s contribution to Friendship’s Offering and other annuals places him in a bourgeois book product that markets such emotions and the aesthetic of loss as proper and common with young women. The history of Tennyson’s publication the following year in the 1833 Friendship’s Offering shows how interdependent were the annuals, magazines, and other periodicals when it came to getting contributions. Publisher Edward Moxon had recently inaugurated the Englishman’s Magazine, and he asked Hallam to persuade Tennyson to give him a poem for a “flash number” for his issue, to include Wordsworth, Southey, and Lamb. Hallam excitedly wrote to Tennyson on 15 July 1831, advising him to send “The Sisters,” “Rosalind,” or the “Southern Mariana,” saying, “If you choose I have no doubt that you can become a permanent contributor

60 Tennyson, “Sonnet,” Friendship’s Offering, 367. 61 Caroline Norton, “There is No Trace of Thee Around,” Friendship’s Offering: A Literary Album, and Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1832 (1831), ed. Thomas Pringle (London: Smith, Elder, 1832), 366.

28

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

on terms.”62 Hallam confronted Tennyson’s resistance to publishing in the periodical, urging him not to “disdain a mode of publication which Schiller and Goethe chose for their best compositions. . . . You have no reason to be ashamed of your company and if a friendly name pleases you more than a famous one, I shall be along with you, at least if Moxon thinks me worthy of admission” (441). Without waiting for Tennyson’s response, Hallam wrote to Moxon on the same day: “I do not doubt he will contribute to your publication, although I know the periodical mode of writing is no favorite with him, and he has refused some of the old stages. Meantime I send you a Sonnet of his, which I have by me, and which pleases me much, both as a curious metrical experiment, and a piece of rich poetic feeling” (437). Hallam became too impatient to wait for an answer from Tennyson and sent “Check every outflash” to Moxon for publication in the August 1831 Englishman’s Magazine. Hallam’s busy letter-writing day included a guilty confession to Richard Monckton Milnes: “It is a sad breach of trust, for I don’t think he cares a straw for the Sonnet, and he is terribly fastidious about publication, as you know. Pray find some salve for my conscience in your convenient system of Ethics” (443). He begged for forgiveness in a letter to Tennyson two weeks later on 26 July 1831: “You perhaps will be angry when I tell you that I sent your sonnet about the ‘Sombre Valley’ to Moxon, who is charmed with it, and has printed it off. I confess this is a breach of trust on my part, but I hope for your forgiveness” (446). Such circumvention was evidently acceptable, and even crucial, if Tennyson’s reputation was to be advanced. Yet Hallam’s action resulted in unexpected and unsolicited publication in another annual, an outcome that became symptomatic of Tennyson’s frustration with periodical publication.63 Fellow contributor and Friendship’s Offering editor Thomas Pringle reprinted Tennyson’s poem for the 1833 volume. Tennyson wrote to Pringle: “With respect to my sonnet I had rather you had not republished it, it was not originally intended for publication but a friend of mine sent it without my permission to the Englishman’s Magazine, and for more reasons than one I could wish it had been suffered to moulder in the dead body of the experiodical; but the stars rule all things.”64 The last phrase concedes publication to Pringle, however much Tennyson might outwardly protest, and correspondence with him later in the year lacks the tone of disgust for annuals we see in letters to friends; on 11 November 1832, Tennyson wrote to Pringle: “I will receive your Friendship’s Offering with open arms,” and asked if he would be interested in looking at poetry from his brother Charles (82). Pringle admits in the 1833 Friendship’s Offering Preface that he has not “adhered strictly to [their] usual practice” in publishing Tennyson’s poem because of its previous appearance in the Englishman’s Magazine, “a clever periodical, which amidst the ‘chance and change’ of the times with ‘the trade,’ was consigned, after the 62 Hallam, 441. 63 Wordsworth and Southey declined Moxon’s request for contributions, but Tennyson’s sonnet appeared in the Englishman’s Magazine with poems by Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Hood, Caroline Norton, Mary Russell Mitford, John Clare. 64 Tennyson, Letters, I:85

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

29

publication of a few numbers, to premature extinction.”65 As Pringle was writing the Preface in 1832, the publishing community was desperately trying to recover from a depression in the marketplace and increasing numbers of literary annuals appeared every year, threatening to squeeze out one of the only remaining profitable outlets available for poetry in the 1830s. Pringle’s Preface boasts that The ‘ANNUAL’ Christmas Fleet (to adopt the commercial style) having sustained very considerable damage in the late heavy gales, from which ‘The Trade’ has suffered so severely, it is a matter of no slight satisfaction to the Owners of the ‘FRIENDSHIP’S OFFERING, of London,’ to be enabled to announce to their correspondents at home and abroad that their good seaworthy vessel (F.O.) has not only accomplished her last voyage in perfect safety, while so many others of superior tonnage or pretensions have either actually foundered at sea or sprung most perilous leaks, but that she now clears out for another trip under very auspicious circumstances. (vi)

The metaphor of the book as a sturdy, seaworthy vessel for poetry against troubled times accurately represents Friendship’s Offering, as well as other successful, longrunning titles such as the Keepsake, the Literary Souvenir, and the Amulet. The annuals rescued poetry from its elite position in volumes that a wider audience of new readers either could not or would not buy; indeed, annuals and other periodicals made poetry more accessible to more readers than ever before. Tennyson’s future in publishing depended upon his adaptability to these new readers, and his appearance in these early volumes were a stable investment. Pringle had reason to boast, for his annual would survive through the mid-1840s, when many annuals titles were lost in the dust of competition. Rudolph Ackermann’s Forget-Me-Not was the first English annual in the fall of 1822, but publishers soon recognized the commercial opportunities of a literary book joined with fine arts; an article in the Bookseller estimates sales of earlier volumes of annuals at fifteen to twenty thousand copies.66 Friendship’s Offering first appeared in the fall of 1823, along with Alaric Watts’s Literary Souvenir, and the race for literary gift buyers was on, with many new titles appearing by the time the 1833 Friendship’s Offering featured Tennyson’s poem in November, 1832. However reluctant Tennyson was in exposing what he thought was inferior work, Hallam loved the poem; “The sonnet is glorious,” he said. “That line about the nightingale is worth an estate in Golconda.”67 Tennyson’s sonnet describes a place of great natural beauty where love now lost was first proclaimed. The speaker remembers a nightingale who warbled “with long and low preamble” and other creatures in this lovely place that memory has made “dark and holy.” Tennyson evidently reconsidered his opinion of the poem and revised it, adapting lines from 65 Thomas Pringle, Preface, Friendship’s Offering: A Literary Album, and Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1833 (1832), ed. Thomas Pringle (London: Smith, Elder, 1832), vii. 66 “The Annuals of Former Days,” 23. 67 Hallam, 423.

30

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

the sonnet, “The nightingale, with long and low preamble, / Warbled from yonder knoll of solemn Larches,” to “The Palace of Art.” Ricks notes that Tennyson also adapted the second and third lines of the poem to “The Lotus-Eaters.” Hallam perceived an improvement in Tennyson’s attitude soon after these publications appeared in literary annuals and wrote to Brookfield on 4 March 1832 that “Alfred is, as I expected, not apparently ill; nor can I persuade myself anything real is the matter. His spirits are better; his habits more regular; his condition altogether healthier. He is fully wound up to publication, & having got £100 from Mrs. Russel talks of going abroad.”68 Yet Edward Fitzgerald testifies to Tennyson’s poetic health, while noting a darker mood toward such publication; he writes to W. B. Donne in 1833: Tennyson has been in town for some time: he has been making fresh poems, which are finer, they say, than any he has done. But I believe he is chiefly meditating on the purging and subliming of what he has already done: and repents that he has published at all yet. It is fine to see how in each succeeding poem the smaller ornaments and fancies drop away, and leave the grand ideas single.69

Regardless of Tennyson’s ambivalence or the conclusions of friends such as Fitz, poems such as “St. Agnes,” written in September 1833 and published in November 1836 in the Keepsake for 1837, edited by Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley, eventually became significant additions to the Tennyson oeuvre. The appearance of “St. Agnes” in the 1837 Keepsake was again due to the efforts of his friend William Henry Brookfield. Tennyson renews his familiar expressions of disgust for the annuals in his letter to Brookfield, tossing off a casual disclaimer for his contribution that avoids responsibility for the poem’s quality, in case of criticism. Tennyson also adds that he would have sent something longer (or better) if the annual’s editor, Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley, had used more feminine persuasion:70 I have sent you a little poem written some three years back: had there been any prospect of filthy lucre, or perhaps had the lady herself wooed me with her fair eyes, I might have sent something which would have filled a larger space in her annual. . . . I trust that she will 68 Hallam, 537. 69 Tennyson, Letters, I:95. 70 Keepsake editor Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley was a daughter of the Duke of Rutland, and a friend to Richard Monckton Milnes, Caroline Norton, Mary Shelley, and the Countess of Blessington. She published yearly volumes of verse for 11 years from 1833 and various early contributions to Blackwood’s Magazine. She edited and wrote many poems for the 1837 and 1840 Keepsake volumes. According to Janet E. Courtney, “Lady Emmeline was a Byron enthusiast; she carried a lock of his hair all over the world, together with one of Napoleon’s, another object of her fervent admiration and pity.” In her admiration for Byron, she had much in common with Brookfield’s poet friend. Janet E. Courtney, The Adventurous Thirties: A Chapter in the Women’s Movement (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 158.

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

31

not take it in earnest of any thing to be sent her next year, for I have a sort of instinctive hatred toward annuals each and all.71

Tennyson might pretend that “St. Agnes” was a “little” poem (therefore unimportant), thrown out casually to satisfy Brookfield, but he thought enough of it to revise it for the 1842 edition of Poems. George Darley told Milnes that he had seen “a pearly little keepsake song” of Tennyson’s there, saying, “I caught a glimpse of the lustrous little thing in the Annual dunghill which Lady Emily Somebody scrapes together—and crowed, being a better judge of jewels than corn.”72 Darley’s comment represents a typical sneer at the popular aesthetic found in the annuals, but he wasn’t the only one reading the Keepsake volume. Tennyson received some nebulous critical attention from the Keepsake volume of 1837; the Athenaeum, although asserting “no particular feature is recognizable,” reprinted “St. Agnes,” saying, “We must, however, find room for a poem, by Mr. Alfred Tennyson, which, though it has much of the right convent spirit about it, is withal so perversely fantastic, that we extract it as much for its curiosity as its beauty.”73 The poet was getting important attention from the press in whatever context he appeared, including the “Annual dunghill.” The “perversely fantastic” element of “St. Agnes” (later renamed “St. Agnes’ Eve”) is the suggestion that a nun waits for a heavenly bridegroom to release her from sin caused by her refusal to marry on earth. The theme ennobles female purity and sacrifice for young female readers of the Keepsake. Milnes, who was also a contributor to this volume (“On the Marriage of the Lady Gwendolin Talbot”), commented on the poem’s positioning in the Keepsake volume, writing to Tennyson in 1836: “Your ‘St. Agnes’ looks funny between Lord Londonderry and Lord W. Lennox, God her aid! I like Brookfield’s sonnet eminently. . . .”74 His specific reference to the placement of Tennyson’s poem is a mystery, for it does not appear between Londonderry and Lennox, but between a short story by Lord William Graham, “The Castle of Lawers,” and Ralph Bernal, Jr.’s poem, “Lines Addressed to a Lady Abroad.” Perhaps Milnes or Tennyson asked Stuart-Wortley before the Keepsake went to the printer to move “St. Agnes” so that it would not look “funny” between Londonderry’s “Stanzas to the Lady Emmeline Manners” and Lennox’s tale, “The Orphan of Palestine.” Londonderry’s poem that appears on page 140 of the Keepsake is a response to reading a poem by Lady Emmeline Manners in 1830, according to the extended title not printed in the Contents. The woman of Londonderry’s stanzas “loves in vain,” as “The worst of tortures fate can find, / Corrode her fair and spotless mind, / And force a life of pain. . . an anguish too severe, / For e’en a friend to soothe or cheer.”75 By the fourth stanza the poet reveals a brighter prospect ahead: “Genius, 71 Tennyson, Letters, I:144. 72 Quoted in James Pope-Hennessy, Monckton Milnes: The Years of Promise 1809-1851 (London: Constable, 1949), 94. 73 Review of the Annuals for 1837, The Athenaeum (November 5, 1836), 783. 74 Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, I:157. 75 The Marquess of Londonderry, “Stanzas to the Lady Emmeline Manners, upon Reading a Poem of Hers in 1830, Ending, ‘And Still I Ever Love in Vain!’” The Keepsake for

32

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

her child will fondly greet! / And, though delay’d, she still will meet / All that she dreams of joy!” (140). The poem portrays love as a hopeless agony for the woman, who is broken-hearted and abandoned by either her lover or husband and left with a child that will comfort her “through the various change of life” (141). Whether or not the child is illegitimate, the woman will also be scandalized by her lover’s abandonment, and her financial security will be permanently at risk. Milnes was appropriate in saying that Tennyson’s poem looked “funny” if he meant that his poem about the bride of Christ would be tainted in association with Londonderry’s poem, because its contextualization with the former threatens the legitimacy of Christ and the holy mother Mary, and cheapens the martyrdom of the virgin St. Agnes. The story that would follow Tennyson’s poem in that placement would be Lord William Lennox’s “The Orphan of Palestine.” After a seemingly unrelated history of William of Normandy, the tale recounts the adventures of a French prince who is fascinated by Jerusha, the Orphan of Palestine, a maid of honor in employ of the Countess of Perche. Although the maid has mysterious origins, she is betrothed to Prince William’s companion, Count Arnulf de Arnulf, who holds the secret of her birth. One night Jerusha dreams of a man watching her and awakes to find Arnulf chasing off an intruder who is actually watching her from her bedchamber. After much complicated plot detail, we find that Jerusha is actually the long-lost Catherine de Poictiers, the daughter of the Duke of Guienne. The story is typical of much sensational literature of the annuals, especially in its predictable recovery of the woman’s social status. However, the engraving provides another text. It shows a woman sensuously sleeping on a bed, her breasts nearly uncovered, and her arm casually draped over her head. A man looks at her from the end of the bed. The image of the man gazing at the sensuous sleeping woman and the potential rape indicated in the story by the soldier who invades her room makes the collection of texts a male sexual fantasy while satisfying the social yearnings of middle-class women readers who were repeatedly treated in literature throughout the period to the fantasy of suddenly finding themselves rich and titled. The dream sequence threatens Jerusha with rape in both story and picture. The story of the virgin St. Agnes involves an actual rape of a young girl who refuses to marry a Roman man and gets beheaded for her obstinance. Young girls honored the memory of St. Agnes by fasting and praying on the anniversary of her martyrdom in hopes of seeing their future husbands. If Tennyson’s poem had appeared before “The Orphan of Palestine,” a reader may have felt sanctified by her identification with the bride of Christ, followed by a collision of the legend of St. Agnes with a confusing mixture of sexual perversions, fantasies, and fears. Milnes may have also been commenting on Tennyson’s imprisonment between two titled names in a book where he was overwhelmed by aristocratic privilege. Of 55 contributions to this Keepsake volume, 25 are by titled authors, including 12 by Stuart-Wortley (Figure 1.2). Other notable contributors (besides Brookfield 1837 (1836), ed. Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley (London: Longman; Paris: Delloy, 1836), 140.

Figure 1.2

Table of Contents, The Keepsake for 1837

34

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

and Milnes) include L. E. L., Mary Shelley, and Edward Fitzgerald. Tennyson’s insecurities about class are well known, and Milnes could easily see the ironies of his Cambridge friend being in textual collusion with the aristocracy after endless family class conflicts with the Old Man of the Wolds, dead just one year when the Keepsake editor was compiling her book in 1836. Ultimately, the poem appeared after a Scottish tale by Lord William Graham about a Scottish chieftain’s beautiful cousin who runs away with an Irish harper, only to be caught by the arrogant chieftain, who cuts the harper into pieces. The cousin Lady Alice dies of a broken heart and Irish rebels tear up the chieftain’s castle, carrying out the moral justice against the arrogant Scot. Following Tennyson’s poem is another by Ralph Bernal, Jr., “Lines Addressed to a Lady Abroad,” in which the speaker decides that love is more desirable than being free of the intense feelings it brings. We might assume that Milnes felt Tennyson’s poem to be textually secure in this position. An advertisement for the 1837 Keepsake reveals additional context with literary annuals as beautiful picture books. The ad, featured in the Athenaeum on 3 December 1836, reprints puff reviews, including a boast from a reviewer in the Observer that “Among the contributors are titled names distinguished for their acquirements, and others of high eminence in the literary world. The ‘Keepsake,’ thus splendidly embellished and supported, cannot fail to command that general patronage to which its merits entitle it” (858). A full page ad on Christmas Eve (24 December 1836) promotes the 1837 Keepsake among Charles Heath’s other Longman publications, including Gems of Beauty, 12 engravings “with fanciful illustrations in verse” by the Countess of Blessington; Heath’s Picturesque Annual for 1837, bound in bright green velvet because of its visual focus on “A Tour in Ireland” by Leitch Ritchie; the Book of Beauty, bound in purple as “the empress of the Annuals;” and an added publication, the Countess of Blessington’s latest silver-fork novel, The Confessions of an Elderly Gentleman, with six plates “being portraits of his six loves.” The ad offers the books as an extravagant, last-minute Christmas gift that promises to be a feast for the eye, as well as an adventure for the imagination. The Bookseller writer comments on Heath’s stable of illustrated books: “These splendid books were published at a price which might fairly have been asked for any one of the twenty engravings of which each volume was composed. To publish them simultaneously was, in a mercantile point of view, perfectly suicidal.76 A poetry volume had stiff competition among such visual delicacies. A review in the Athenaeum (5 November 1836) notes that “The sight of so many ladies, ‘looking delightfully with all their might,’ and such an array of gorgeous millinery, is enough to make any man turn misogynist, and to drive him, in the impatience of satiety, to extol sackcloth as ‘the only wear.’”77 Keepsake portraits of women and literary heroines became a cliché in the art world for the rest of the century, according to Richard Altick:

76 “The Annuals of Former Days,” 499. 77 Review of the Annuals for 1837, 783.

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

35

Her cloyingly malign influence persisted from the late Regency almost to the end of the Victoria era; her person, as represented by countless paintings and drawings and the engravings that disseminated those images, was the quintessence of the age’s notorious sentimentality, in which the preceding century’s sensibilité, a prized affectation of the élite, was coarsened for, and by, the middle classes. It would not be too daring to suggest that pictures of her were icons secularized for Protestant homes, hung and reproduced in places where, in Roman Catholic societies, images of the Madonna and female saints could be found. They were the most familiar visual manifestation of the Victorian cult of woman worship.78

Altick repeats the common assault on literary annuals’ aesthetics while testifying to its persistent power throughout the Victorian era, but the competitive force of women was obviously formidable. A reading of Tennyson’s early “girlie” poems clearly shows the influence of such women and anchors him well within the aesthetic Altick describes. Tennyson’s friends remained a productive source for editors who wished to acquire a contribution from the young poet for the annuals. Milnes, along with Bernard Barton, was trying to fill a charity volume of poetry for Lord Northampton called The Tribute; once again, Tennyson was expected to respond to the call for help. Lord Northampton was organizing the collection for clergyman poet Rev. Edward Smedley (1788–1836), editor of Encyclopaedia Metropolitana from 1822, who had lost his hearing and was losing his eyes. Smedley died before he could benefit from the volume, but the project continued for the family’s sake. Milnes wrote to Tennyson in 1836: “I have half promised you will give him something pretty considerable, for the fault of the book will be that the contributions are not as great in dimension as in name.”79 Tennyson responded with his usual tone, saying he regretted sending “St. Agnes” to the Keepsake, and renewing his complaints of the annuals: That you had promised the Marquis I would write for him something exceeding the average length of annual-compositions—that you had promised him I would write at all—I took this for one of those elegant fictions with which you amuse your Aunts of evenings, before you get into the small hours, when dreams are true. . . . I have not even seen the Keepsake: not that I care to see it, but the want of civility decided me not to break mine oath again for man or woman. And how should such a modest man, as I, see my small name in collocation with the great ones of Southey, Wordsworth, R. M. M. etc. and not feel myself a barndoor fowl among peacocks?80

Tennyson’s feigned provincial and artistic humility notwithstanding, Milnes was furious. He wrote an angry letter, accusing Tennyson of “insulting irony” and “piscatory vanity,” threatening to give his copy of “Anacaona” to Lord Northampton

78 Richard D. Altick, Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760-1900 (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1985), 86-87. 79 Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, 1:157. 80 Tennyson, Letters, I:146.

36

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

if Tennyson refused to comply with his request. Alfred’s acquiescent response in January 1837 shows classic Tennysonian wit: Now is my nose out of joint, now is my tail not only curled so tight as to lift me off my hind legs like Alfred Crowquill’s poodle, but fairly between them. Many sticks are broken about me. I am the ass in Homer. I am blown. What has so jaundiced your goodnatured eyes as to make them mistake harmless banter for insolent irony harsh terms applicable only to—, who, big as he is, sits to all posterity astride upon the nipple of literary dandyism, and ‘takes her milk for gall.’ . . . You judge me rightly in supposing that I would not be backward in doing a really charitable deed. I will either bring or send you something for your Annual. (I:147-148).

Tennyson surrendered as he had done for friends in the past who had pressured him into publishing for the annuals, further promising to get something from Charles and Frederick. However, by March, Tennyson had not yet sent the poems, claiming they were too troublesome: These two poems have been causing me confounded bother to get them into shape. One I cannot send: it is too raw, but as I made the other double its <usual> former size, I hope it will do. I vow to Heaven I never will have to do with these books again. So never ask me. (I:149)

Here Tennyson misdirects his complaints toward the books themselves, when his anxiety stems from the pressure to publish exerted by insistent friends such as Milnes and his own fear of closure in the poem he was trying to submit. Ironically, the poet had much more to do with the poem, but not for publication in the Tribute. Seventeen years after the Tribute appeared, Tennyson’s neighbor on the Isle of Wight, Sir John Simeon, found a copy of the annual and asked Tennyson to create a story around the poem he wrote for it, thus the first twelve stanzas of Tennyson’s Tribute poem became the fourth section of the second part of Maud. Further, George Marshall, Jr. suggests that Tennyson decided on the name “Maud” from an anonymous ballad in the Tribute titled “The Wicked Nephew,” about a Lady Maud whose lover kills her uncle’s ghost. Marshall notes that, “Although the stories are different in obvious ways, there are several events common to both poems: murder for material gain, overseas flight after a murder, madness caused by having committed a murder, presence of a ghost, and death after a fall.”81 Marshall also suggests the influence of another poem from The Tribute titled “The Miner” on Tennyson’s 1885 ballad, “Tomorrow.” One can easily conclude that, regardless of Tennyson’s ambivalence toward the annuals, he integrated them with his own work, and the poems he published in them became fruitful productions for later readers. Although the Tribute was not exactly an annual since it appeared only one year and it contained no steel engravings, its basic format and audience was that of the gift books purchased for the holiday season. Tennyson was involved in a vehicle that 81 George O. Marshall, Jr., “Giftbooks, Tennyson, and The Tribute (1837),” The Georgia Review 16 (Winter 1962), 464.

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

37

reached the mass reading audience and he was in good company; as Marshall notes, “Of the 56 names in the table of contents (13 contributions were anonymous), 37 eventually found their way in the Dictionary of National Biography, though few of them are listed there as ‘poet’” (460). The contributors were known in professions such as geology, mathematics, or other such careers, according to Marshall. The 422-page volume featured 131 contributions by authors as widely diverse as William Wordsworth, James Montgomery, Walter Savage Landor, G. P. R. James, William Lisle Bowles, Joanna Baillie, Horace Smith, Richard Trench, Aubrey de Vere, Agnes Strickland, Lord John Russell, Thomas Moore, and Poet Laureate Robert Southey; the Queen was at the top of a four-page list of subscribers. Reviewers reacted favorably to the book, although Richard Trench thought that except for himself and Tennyson everyone had sent the “poorest or nearly the poorest, things they had by them.”82 The Literary Gazette reviewed it on their front page on 2 September 1837, giving the volume credit for “evidences of fine taste and high talent;”83 Macvey Napier in the Edinburgh Review (October 1837) reported that “A volume such as this, embodying contributions from thirty or forty individuals, of all ranks, professions, tastes, and predilections, may be regarded as a sort of literary barometer, indicating, with quite sufficient truth for practical purposes, the present state and variations of the poetical atmosphere.”84 If Tennyson wanted to grow with new literary trends and readerships, his appearance in the Tribute placed him in good company. About Tennyson’s contribution, the reviewer stated simply, “We do not profess perfectly to understand the somewhat mysterious contribution of Mr. Alfred Tennyson, entitled ‘Stanzas’; but amidst some quaintness, and some occasional absurdities of expression, it is not difficult to detect the hand of a true poet—such as the author of ‘Mariana,’ and the ‘Lines on the Arabian Nights’ undoubtedly is” (108). The poem was originally written in 1833–34 after the death of Hallam, but it clearly yearns for a lost female lover and expresses an anguished loneliness that calls into an empty world for female companionship. The speaker calls forth memories of former moments with other loved ones, just as he is pulled back into reality by city sounds of traffic and flashing lights of busy streets. He is distraught to the point of feeling a morose disconnectedness from reality. The early poem introduces a sense of insanity for later versions. Considering the mixed responses to Maud in the poem’s critical history, others who viewed the poem as “mysterious” would later join this reviewer in their recognition of Tennyson’s genius. Tennyson reappeared in literary annuals long after his fame had been established in the Poems of 1842 and The Princess (1847). He contributed eight lines, a “fragment of a poem about Mablethorpe,” to the Manchester Athenaeum Album in 1850, a fundraising project designed to rescue the Manchester Athenaeum from debt by paying off its mortgage. Tennyson’s charitable contribution was as one of the “literary well-wishers whose duty and high privilege it is to be the pioneers of 82 Quoted in Pope-Hennessy, 94. 83 Review of The Tribute, Literary Gazette (2 September 1837), 553. 84 Macvey Napier, Review of The Tribute, Edinburgh Review 66 (October 1837),104.

38

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

that advance of mind which this institution is designed to follow and promote.”85 Its visually attractive, embossed green cloth binding and quarto anthology format borrows from annuals of the later period (the Keepsake’s last volumes up to 1857 featured similar size and bindings), but the Manchester Athenaeum Album does not aspire to annual publication. Its editor states the purpose of the book as purely financial and promotes the institution as a “self-educational” agency that recognizes the necessity of literature as a companion to scientific pursuits: The volume would at last serve to indicate that amid the busy scenes incident to commerce and manufactures we are not solely absorbed in materialities: that, highly as we value our artistic ‘fabrics,’ we appreciate and still more highly those ‘vestments of thought’ which drape and embellish the Spirit-life; and that while science displays its power to poetise matter . . . we would seek to regard these as fresh suggestions of those subtle analogies between matter and mind which the latter is ever seeking to penetrate. (viii)

Disraeli and Dickens had been honorary speakers at recent fundraising banquets for the Manchester Athenaeum, which was established in 1836 “for the purpose of affording to ‘the youth of the middle classes,’ those intellectual advantages which can only be obtained by wealth or the combination of numbers.”86 The organization claimed over 1700 financially supportive members from the Manchester area. Lord John Manners proclaimed at an 1844 fundraising banquet for the Athenaeum that his support is possible because the organization “only proposes to supply the already educated with wholesome and agreeable reading—to mould, soften, and elevate the intellectual tastes of that middle class of which it is chiefly composed, and to foster and encourage rising talent.” The poem serves as a model for young talent by articulating intellectual dreams of Tennyson as a boy. Charles Tennyson and Christopher Ricks show that the poem is a fragment of a manuscript poem from Notebook 17 written during 1833 when Tennyson was visiting Mablethorpe in March.87 The lines recall Tennyson’s childhood memories of the beach at Mablethorpe: Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind, And here the Grecian ships all seem’d to be. And here again I come, and only find The drain-cut level of the marshy lea, Gray sand-banks, and pale sunsets, dreary wind, Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea.88 85 “Dedication,” Manchester Athenaeum Album (Manchester: Cave and Sever, 1850), vii-viii. 86 “Grand Soiree at Manchester,” The Times (5 October 1844), 5. I am grateful to Simon Poë who emailed this article to me in generous response to my plea for information about the Manchester Athenaeum on the Victoria discussion list. 87 Sir Charles Tennyson and Christopher Ricks, “Tennyson’s ‘Mablethorpe,’” Tennyson Research Bulletin 2:3 (November 1974),121. 88 Quoted in Tennyson and Ricks, 121.

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

39

Dreams from books filled the young poet’s imagination, just as the Athenaeum hopes will happen for their youth in a way that the adult can never recapture. The poem is also interesting because it shows Tennyson’s return to poems of 1833 for a contribution to another literary annual. On the eve of the publication of Tennyson’s great work In Memoriam A. H. H. and his accession to the Poet Laureateship, Tennyson returned to a publishing format he had criticized for years. Yet many other literary celebrities of this period also continued the tradition of investing their work in what remained of the literary annual fashion during the 1840s and 1850s, including: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Keepsake 1855, 1857; Finden’s Tableaux, 1840) Robert Browning (Keepsake 1856, 1857) Edward Bulwer-Lytton (Keepsake 1841, 1842, 1848, 1849, 1851, 1855; Book of Beauty 1840, 1841, 1843, 1844, 1845; Drawing-Room Scrapbook 1847) Thomas Carlyle (Keepsake 1852) Charles Dickens (Keepsake 1844, 1852) Benjamin Disraeli (Keepsake 1845, 1846; Book of Beauty 1840, 1841, 1842, 1843) Richard Monckton Milnes (Keepsake 1840, 1841, 1842, 1843, 1844, 1845, 1846, 1847, 1848, 1849, 1851, 1852, 1853; Drawing-Room Scrapbook 1847, 1848, 1849; Book of Beauty, 1840, 1841, 1844, 1845, 1847) John Ruskin (Friendship’s Offering 1840, 1841, 1842, 1843, 1844; Keepsake 1845, 1846; Book of Beauty 1845, 1846) William Makepeace Thackeray (Keepsake 1849, 1851, 1853, 1854; Drawing-Room Scrapbook, 1847). The list of annuals publication from these decades must be partly attributed to the charms and influence of editors such as the Countess of Blessington, who enlisted contributions for the Keepsake from 1841–1850 and the Book of Beauty from 1834– 1850 at her lavish dinner parties where many of London’s literary elite gathered. Marguerite Power, niece of Lady Blessington, took over the editorship of the Keepsake after her aunt’s financial failure forced her to conduct a scandalous and tragic sale of all her belongings and move to Paris, where she died in 1849. Power commissioned London publisher David Bogue to conduct the book’s production after former Keepsake proprietor Charles Heath’s bankruptcy and death. The volume containing Tennyson’s poems appeared in November 1850, the year after Blessington’s death. According to frequent annualist Mrs. Newton Crosland (Camilla Toulmin), Marguerite Power “was very good-looking, clever, attractive, well-bred, and endowed with considerable literary ability. . . [but] She always appeared as if some tragic doom were impending over her; and if she had lived at the time of the ‘reign of terror’ in France, her fate would certainly have brought her to the scaffold as an aristocrat.”89 Many people in the literary community still read and respected 89 Mrs. Newton Crosland (Camilla Toulmin), Rambles Round My Life: An Autobiography (1819-1896) (London: Allen, 1898), 181.

40

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

the Keepsake; journalist and novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) wrote to a friend on 24 November 1851: “you must read Carlyle’s denunciation of the opera pub[lish]d in—the Keepsake! The Examiner quotes it at length. . . . He is a naughty fellow to write in the Keepsake and not for us—after I wrote him the most insinuating letter, offering him three glorious subjects.”90 Although Eliot was not a fan of literary annuals, a number of well-known authors appeared in the Keepsake during Power’s editorship. However, some contributors participated only out of pity for Blessington’s niece; Thackeray describes the writing of his contribution for the 1853 Keepsake as “as gloomy as a funeral,” adding, “it was necessary to do something for poor Miss Power.”91 Barry Cornwall asked Robert Browning to appear in the Keepsake as a personal favor for Power, describing her as: a young woman who is very respectable—very hardworking—and wretchedly poor. It forms almost her whole subsistence. Last year she failed in getting her usual contributions. . . . It is not necessary to say that Miss Power has exchanged a luxurious life for poverty— that she has a few months ago had the small pox in its worst form--and that she is now working for bread. All this you may surmise, with its attendant miseries.92

Cornwall was responsible for Tennyson’s 1851 contributions, as well as Carlyle’s in 1852. In spite of the editor’s tragic circumstances and the annual’s worn reputation, the book continues to feature a beautiful leather binding and steel-plate engravings of artwork by a new generation of artists, such as Courbould. The 1851 Keepsake title page (Figure 1.3) demonstrates the annual’s stereotypically feminine emphasis on literature and romance, with a medieval courtier playing on a harp while a young woman in Victorian dress opens a quarto much like the Keepsake, as if to put one of the poems to song. Contributors whose poems might be engaged in this moment of medieval fantasy include Landor, Cornwall, Lytton, Thackeray, and Keepsake faithful, Milnes. Tennyson contributed two poems, “What time I wasted youthful hours” and “Come not, when I am dead,” reprinted in the seventh (1851) and subsequent editions of Tennyson’s Poems. As if to comment on the Keepsake’s fate, the speaker of the poem asks his readers not to visit him when he is dead, nor to “drop thy foolish tears upon my grave, / To trample round my fallen head, / And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst not save.”93 The poem’s bleak perspective mirrors the destitute situation of the volume’s editor as the speaker claims to care no more about

90 George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 376. 91 William Makepeace Thackeray, The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon N. Ray, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1945), III: 56. 92 Quoted in Richard Willard Armour, Barry Cornwall: A Biography of Bryan Waller Procter (Boston: Meador, 1935), 234. 93 Alfred Tennyson, “Stanzas” (“Come not, when I am dead”), The Keepsake for 1851 (1850), ed. Marguerite Power (London: David Bogue, 1850), 122.

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

Figure 1.3

Title Page, The Keepsake for 1851

41

42

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

life. All is forgiven, all is gone, and Tennyson marches forth into his new role as Poet Laureate, leaving the annuals far behind, in their unique moment in book history. The days of the annuals were finished by the 1850s in England; competition and high production costs had signaled their fate by the late 30s.94 Periodicals such as Cornhill Magazine and New Monthly Magazine offered original poetry and fiction at greatly reduced costs and the middle classes were seeking the three-decker novel at Mudie’s. The elegant drawing-room gift books were out of fashion, their reputation dwindling to a footnote in publishing history. Yet these books were a vibrant force in the nineteenth-century book world. They were profitable outlets for poetry publication, providing young authors such as Tennyson with a large appreciative 94 According to Bose: “The number of English Annuals, rising from nine in 1825 and 1826 to forty-three in 1830, fell to eleven in 1850, and after 1860 the species virtually died out” (38) The 1836 Athenaeum reviews 25 annuals for 1837 and late reviews for six from 1836. The diversity of titles suggests creative attempts to capture openings in the market for annuals: Book of Christmas English Bijou Almanac Almanac for the German Watering-places Sportsman’s Annual Scottish Annual Picturesque Annual Forget-Me-Not Friendship’s Offering Flowers of Loveliness Christian Keepsake Fisher’s Juvenile Scrap Book Drawing-room Scrap Book Oriental Annual Gems of Beauty The Gift The Landscape Annual Biblical Keepsake Finden’s Tableaux Book of Beauty Keepsake Token Juvenile Forget-Me-Not Hood’s Comic Annual Watts’s Cabinet of Modern Art Heath’s Drawing-room Portfolio The German Tourist Andalusian Pictorial Album The Hunter’s Annual The Bijou Almanac Yet this was only a portion of the annuals that appeared during the height of the annuals craze from 1823 to 1840.

Those “Vapid” Gift Books

43

audience of growing middle-class readers, and contemporary scholars with a record of the poet’s literary development during a decade that was once falsely regarded as Tennyson’s “silent” years.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 2

Resistance and Commodification: Tennyson’s “Indecent Exposure” in the Periodicals Laurel Brake observes that literature published in periodicals is “instantly and always contextualized, embedded in a matrix of other pieces which make up the issue in which it appears, and extend to the issues before and after. Periodical texts, by virtue of the format in which they appear, are self-confessedly historical, contingent, looking backward and forward, with a historical identity.”1 Poetry published in periodicals engages other texts, both on the page and in the cultural and social ethos of the periodical containing the material poem. When we read a Tennyson poem on a periodical page, meaning must be recognized in Bakhtinian dialogue with the specific periodical and its editor; its random or planned placement on the page; historical and cultural events (within the periodical or outside); literary ancestors of the poem; and our own readerly prejudices produced by criticism of the poet and his other work. These unpredictable forces could be somewhat foreboding to Tennyson, who wished to retain tight control over transmission of meaning. The threat of textual multiplicity, combined with the poet’s prejudicial attitudes against commercialistic marketing and display of his art created career-long tensions between Tennyson and Victorian periodicals. Yet he wanted to make his living as a poet, and he wanted the attractive financial rewards of periodical publication. Ironically, the machinery of commercial production that gave Tennyson the cash needed to support his standard of comfort forced him into a material code that offended what he believed to be the cultural aesthetic obvious within his own poetic, personal, and public persona. Tennyson’s reluctant decisions paid off; from his post-adolescent contribution of “Timbuctoo” to the Cambridge Chronicle and Journal (10 July 1829) and early poetry for literary annuals, to his last public utterances as Laureate and peer, periodicals brought Tennyson exposure to new readers, improved his financial status with increasingly higher fees, and, as Poet Laureate and literary celebrity, provided him with an outlet for trumpeting opinions on his latest political cause. Indeed, Tennyson’s entire 1 Laurel Brake, “Writing, Cultural Production, and the Periodical Press in the Nineteenth Century,” Writing and Victorianism, ed. J. B. Bullen (London and New York: Longman, 1997), 54. Parts of this essay were previously published as “Protesting Success: Tennyson’s Year of ‘Indecent Exposure’ in the Periodicals.” Victorian Poetry 43:1 (Spring 2005): 53-73. I am grateful for permission to republish parts of the article in this chapter.

46

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

career is inseparable from a dependence on the very format he supposedly hated, and generations of scholars have largely ignored or devalued important contexts provided by periodicals, misled by Tennyson’s protestations and prejudice against the genre. Critics examine Tennyson’s fear of being viewed as a “popular poet,” thus inferior; his disgust with aggressive commercial editorial tactics; a lingering attachment to the Romantic notion of poet as prophet/priest; and an old-world aversion to publication as ungentlemanly and distastefully middle class clarify Tennyson’s frequent, candid comments about periodicals and enlighten our understanding of his reluctance to publish. Nurtured in an aura of the isolated poet-priest engendered by Byron, Keats, and Shelley, Tennyson tried to maintain insularity from commercialization of both his poetry and his image, yet his desire for financial aggrandizement conflicted with notions of exclusivity and Romantic inspiration. Periodicals too greedily consumed literature, in Tennyson’s view, and editors squandered a writer’s talent by spreading his art among unappreciative newly literate masses and by incessantly pressuring him for more and more contributions. Thus, as with annuals, Tennyson typically returned a negative answer to a periodical editor’s request for contributions. Upon learning that Thackeray was to be editor of a new monthly magazine, the Cornhill, Tennyson wrote to him from the Isle of Wight on 6 November 1859: I am sorry that you have engaged for any quantity of money to let your brains be sucked periodically by Smith, Elder and co.: not that I don’t like Smith . . . but that so great an artist as you are should go to work after this fashion. Whenever you feel your brains as the ‘remainder biscuit’ or indeed whenever you will, come over to me and take a blow on these downs where the air as Keats said is ‘worth sixpence a pint.’2

The belief system at work here is that artists should not have to labor in the grueling mines of magazine work, writing for hire, getting paid per page, and rushing to deadlines with printers and other lowly worker types. Tennyson may have wanted to stop publishing after great disappointment from the 1833 Quarterly Review blasting of his first volume, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, but the urging of friends and contributions to literary annuals kept his name before readers, with poems appearing in volumes for 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833, and 1837. Appearance in Edward Moxon’s monthly Englishman’s Magazine in 1831 (with Arthur Henry Hallam’s famous review of Tennyson’s volume) helped to advance Tennyson’s unlikely reputation as a magazine contributor to Thackeray, who viewed Tennyson as a model for his own professional ambitions; Thackeray wrote in his diary on 2 June 1832 that Tennyson is a “clever fellow . . . & makes money by magazine writing, in wh. I shd. Much desire to follow his example.”3 Throughout the 2 Alfred Tennyson, The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 3 vols., eds. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982-1990), II:245. 3 William Makepeace Thackeray, The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon N. Ray, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1946), I:205. For an exploration of Thackeray’s role as a “commodity-author” engaged in periodicals, see

Resistance and Commodification

47

decade some critics called a silent period, Tennyson was getting requests to publish in periodicals. Leigh Hunt tried to interest Tennyson in contributing to the Monthly Repository on 31 July 1837: Do not hesitate to send me a Sibylline leaf if you can, and be sure I ask it for your honour and glory as well as my own advantage. I want my magazine to be such a magazine as was never seen before, every article worth something, though I say it that shouldn’t, and I believe you know my gallant wish to be a sort of Robin Hood of an editor, with not a man in my company that does not beat his leader. A sonnet—a fragment—anything will be welcome, most especially if you put your name to it; and therefore for the sake of poetry and my love of it, again I say, oblige me if you can; and also send instantly because time begins to press.4

Hunt’s request blends editorial vanity with a competitive edge that requires celebrity as a selling point for his magazine. He wants Tennyson’s name, and he cares not what poem is attached, as long as he can get it before deadline. Hunt’s letter provides an early indication of Tennyson’s current fame and future celebrity status, partly enabled by his appearances in periodicals. Tennyson’s involvement in a “literary squabble” in the pages of Punch in 1846 shows the poet engaging a periodical to defend himself against a public attack and benefitting by the exposure at a time when he would soon be needing such attention for the 1847 publication of The Princess. Tennyson wrote a satirical poem in response to an anonymously written attack in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s new volume titled The New Timon. Apparently Bulwer was angry that his friend, playwright James Sheridan Knowles, had been set aside for a £200 Civil List pension given to Tennyson by Sir Robert Peel in 1845, and loyalty to Tennyson’s jealous uncle Charles Tennyson d’Eyncourt, who supported his political ambitions, further stirred Bulwer’s antagonism. Bulwer had also been one of the negative reviewers of Tennyson’s 1830 volume of poems, and he repeated some of the terms of that review in his attack on Tennyson, a copy of which the poet found at a book club in Cheltenham. A section of The New Timon labels Tennyson’s poetry as a “jingling medley of purloin’d conceits, / Outbabying Wordsworth, and outglittering Keates, / Where all the airs of patchwork-pastoral chime / To drowsy ears in Tennysonian rhyme!”5 Bulwer chides “School-Miss Alfred” in terms that criticize his poetry as too domestic and feminine. Bulwer’s rantings indicate a paranoia about gender, an interesting motive for attack coming from Bulwer, for he was the very picture of dandyism, according to Martin:

Richard Pearson, W. M. Thackeray and the Mediated Text: Writing for Periodicals in the MidNineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 4 Quoted in Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, 2 vols. (New York and London: Macmillan, 1911), I:163. 5 Quoted in Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 296.

48

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals Bulwer touched up his face with make-up, dyed his hair and beard a bright red, and on at least one occasion came to Little Holland House leading twelve French poodles, with their hair and his own coiffed to match. He was a joke in society for his chamois-tipped pink boots with three-inch cork heels to give him height. . . . He was a very easy man to despise, but he was not a fool. (297)

Most insulting to Tennyson was the implication that he was rich and didn’t deserve the pension. Tennyson recalls: “Moreover, I remembered that he had said ‘If a man be attacked, let him attack.’”6 Tennyson may have been encouraged by an anonymous writer’s allusion to the fray in a 7 February 1846 Punch poem titled “‘The New Timon,’ and Alfred Tennyson’s Pension.” The poem satirizes Bulwer’s attack on Tennyson as being like a noisy pup impotently snarling at a giant mastiff: You’ve seen a lordly mastiff’s port, Bearing in calm, contemptuous sort The snarls of some o’erpetted pup, Who grudges him his “bit and sup:” So stands the bard of Locksley Hall, While puny darts around him fall, Tipp’d with what TIMON takes for venom; He is the mastiff, TIM the Blenheim.7

The poem gives Tennyson the moral advantage in the confrontation, and publicizes the squabble so that, when Tennyson’s response, signed “Alcibiades,” appeared in Punch three weeks later, readers may have had little doubt as to its authorship.8 Tennyson wrote a furious reply and allowed John Forster to submit it to Punch for publication on 28 February 1846. Forster’s role here is important, for he was substituting as a literary agent for Tennyson in a triangle between his friend, Punch editor Mark Lemon, against another friend, Bulwer-Lytton. Forster wrote to Tennyson on 18 February 1846, justifying his uncomfortable position: I think it an act of Justice—one of those solemn and terrible expiations with which personal likings or dislikings have really nothing to do. I should never have ceased to reproach myself, if I had attempted to obstruct its publication. I should have felt myself a

6 Quoted in Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, I:245. 7 Anonymous, “‘The New Timon,’ and Alfred Tennyson’s Pension,” Punch, or the London Charivari 10 (7 February 1846), 64. 8 A lively and interesting debate about Forster’s submission of Tennyson’s poem to Punch and Tennyson’s intentions with the transaction occurs in the following articles: John Bush Jones, “Tennyson, Forster, and the Punch Connection,” Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 11 (1978): 118-121; James A. Davies, “‘Tennyson, Forster, and the Punch Connection’: A Reply,” Victorian Periodicals Review 13 (1980): 64-65; John Bush Jones, “The Punch Connection II; or, et tu, Tennyson,” Victorian Periodicals Review 13 (1980): 66-69; James A. Davies, “‘Tennyson, Forster, and the Punch Connection’: AGAIN,” Victorian Periodicals Review 13 (1980): 103-105.

Resistance and Commodification

49

constant traitor to you—who have given me so much pleasure—who are indeed a part of the pleasure of my life (how little in all!) Which alone is constant and unfailing.9

Such loyalty would work in Tennyson’s favor throughout the next decade, for Forster continued to be a reliable source for reviews, and for publishing important political poetry of the early 1850s after Forster moved from literary editor to his new position as editor of the Examiner in 1847. In “The New Timon, and the Poets,” Tennyson ridicules Bulwer’s dandyism, calling him a “padded man— that wears the stays” and accusing him of jealously attacking poets greater than he: “You talk of tinsel! Why we see / The old mark of rouge upon your cheeks. / You prate of Nature! You are he / That spilt his life about the cliques. / A Timon you! Nay, nay, for shame . . . Off, and let him rest” (Figure 2.1).10 Regretting his angry display, Tennyson followed this with another poem titled “After-Thought,” published a week later in Punch. Here “Alcibiades” grieves the “petty fools of rhyme” who lose themselves in “pigmy wars” and “hate each other for a song.”11He admits his part: “And I too talk, and lose the touch / I talk of. / Surely, after all, / The noblest answer unto such / Is kindly silence when they brawl” (106). Tennyson indicates here that he knew readers would recognize the identity of “Alcibiades;” otherwise, an admission of pettiness and what amounts to an apology would not be necessary. Forster biographer James Davies states that “Forster, despite his friendship with Bulwer, sent the poem to Punch. He did so for a number of reasons. One, almost certainly, was because Tennyson asked him to place it.”12 Tennyson self-righteously surrendered responsibility for his poems appearing in Punch, claiming Forster was to blame. He insisted that “They were too bitter. I do not think that I should ever have published them.”13 However, Tennyson’s protests seem empty; arguably, he knew Forster would publish them, and that the most appropriate outlet for his satire would be a periodical such as Punch, its specialty being the translation of bitterness to print. Anonymity was not possible or desirable with such opportunities for celebrity. Regardless of Tennyson’s intent, as a result of the public confrontation in Punch, Tennyson won a battle of prestige against Bulwer with periodical writers, who discussed the squabble in other papers for weeks after the event, providing Tennyson with much needed support just as he was preparing The Princess for publication. A Times reviewer comments that The New Timon’s attack on Tennyson is “ill-natured and unjust.”14 An Athenaeum review claims that Bulwer’s attack on Tennyson is merely a desperate publicity ploy for the new book: 9 Tennyson, Letters, I:251. 10 Alfred Tennyson [Alcibiades], “The New Timon, and the Poets,” Punch, or the London Charivari 10 (28 February 1846), 103. 11 Alfred Tennyson [Alcibiades], “After-Thought,” Punch, or the London Charivari 10 (6 March 1846), 106. 12 James A. Davies, John Forster: A Literary Life (Leicester: Leicester UP, 1983), 88. 13 Quoted. in Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, I:245. 14 Review of The New Timon, The Times (5 June 1846), 7.

50

Figure 2.1

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

“The New Timon, and the Poets,” Punch, 18 February 1846

Resistance and Commodification

51

A few coteries may have been stirred into curiosity by the workings of the well-worn machinery of “private copies,” smart inscriptions, and industriously-circulated rumours . . . and Punch has been aroused to treat with a thwack of his “wife-compelling stick” the anonymous assailant of Alfred Tennyson; but this is all—scarcely enough, our readers will admit, to instal [sic] an author obviously in agonies to occupy a high pedestal among the poets of England.15

Because of exposure in the periodicals, Bulwer’s reputation suffered, but Tennyson’s reputation improved. Yet Bulwer continued to criticize Tennyson’s work in much the same terms as in The New Timon; he wrote in 1864 to a friend that Tennyson was “a poet adapted to a mixed audience of school-girls and Oxford dons,” and in 1871 that Tennyson “has in him less of the masculine quality than any English poet of repute. I can scarcely understand how any man could reconcile himself to dwarf such mythical characters as Arthur, Lancelot and Merlin, into a whimpering old gentleman, a frenchified household traitor and a drivelling dotard.”16 Although returning Tennyson’s homophobia, Bulwer’s comments appear as jealous attacks from a star whose light is fading. Tennyson’s future promised to far outreach Bulwer’s in every literary sense. Tennyson again turned to Forster in 1849 for a periodical forum to express disgust for the public’s fascination with private lives. He asked Forster, now the editor of the Examiner, to publish a poem titled “To——” (24 March 1849), an angry response to the publication of Keats’s love letters by Lord Houghton in 1848. Tennyson addresses an unnamed poet who “made the wiser choice; / A life that moves to gracious ends,” opting to live among “troops of unrecording friends, / A deedful life, a silent voice.”17 By choosing to avoid publication and live a private life, the unnamed poet will miss little, except the “irreverent doom” of scandals and the public examination of private feelings: For now the Poet cannot die, Nor leave his music as of old, But round him ere he scarce be cold Begins the scandal and the cry; “Give out the faults he would not show! “Break lock and seal! Betray the trust! “Keep nothing sacred: ‘tis but just “The many-headed beast should know.”

Another poet (Keats) then becomes the subject of Tennyson’s poem, one who “gave the people of his best: / His worst he kept, his best he gave. / My curse upon the clown and knave / Who will not let his ashes rest!” Tennyson says it is better for a 15 Review of The New Timon, The Athenaeum (14 March 1846), 263. 16 Quoted in Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton (London: Macmillan, 1913), 430-431. 17 Alfred Tennyson, “To ——,” The Examiner (24 March 1849), 180.

52

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

bird to sing in the wilderness and die “unheard within his tree,” than to sing “long and loud,” only to be torn apart by vultures at glory’s gate (180). Here Tennyson was expressing his well-documented horror of exposing his private life, just as he was deciding to renew his romance with Emily Sellwood. Ironically, he chose to grouse in a most public way, by publishing a poem signed “Alfred Tennyson” in a popular weekly paper well known for reviews of his works. Thus, the celebrity status given to Tennyson in the Examiner defeats the desire for obscurity promoted in the poem. By 1859, Tennyson was at the height of his popularity, and other writers worshipped him. Edmond Gosse records his first meeting with the poet: Tennyson was scarcely a human being to us, he was the God of the Golden Bow; I approached him now like a blank idiot about to be slain. . . . It is not merely that no person living now calls forth that kind of devotion, but the sentiment of mystery has disappeared. Not genius itself could survive the Kodak snapshots and the halfpenny newspapers.18

However, Tennyson was not only actively engaging the glare of publicity that afflicted later artists, he was becoming a commodity of the periodicals featuring such promotion. As exciting new titles began to appear on the marketplace, some editors felt that a poem from the Poet Laureate was absolutely necessary for the periodical’s success, and Tennyson began to feel the pressure; he writes on 20 March 1861 to Anna Maria Hall, whose new publication, the St. James’s Magazine was to appear in April: “I regret that I cannot have the pleasure of sending you a Poem for your Magazine as I have refused and been obliged to refuse similar requests even from personal friends, such requests having become too numerous to grant.”19 However, he was granting requests, and quite regularly. Martin contends that Tennyson feared that his creativity would somehow end: He was fifty years old and aware that his youth was gone: ‘A poet’s work should be finished by the time he is sixty. Anything I write must be in the next ten years!’ Publishers were constantly asking for more copy; friends urged causes, philosophical positions, religious doctrines, and more grandiose statements of mortality on him with the injunction that it was his duty to write about each; most demanding of all was Tennyson’s own dark fear that the sacred stream might be drying up at the source.20

No evidence of such an end was in sight for Tennyson, if we judge by demand for his work by periodicals editors. Three major Victorian periodicals of the 1860s used Tennyson as a competitive commodity by featuring his poetry in their first few issues: Once a Week (16 July 1859), Macmillan’s Magazine (January 1860), and Cornhill Magazine (February 1860). Clearly, Tennyson was an important element of success for the periodicals.

18 Quoted in Ann Thwaite, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape, 1849-1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 101. 19 Tennyson, Letters, II:272-273. 20 Martin, 425.

Resistance and Commodification

53

The first of these publications introduces Tennyson’s poetry to the expanding demand and influence of illustration. Once a Week was particularly important in the history of wood engraving because its artists began to draw their designs directly upon the wood block instead of that work being completed by engravers. Publishers Bradbury and Evans introduced their new periodical, Once A Week, on 2 July 1859, after a quarrel with their erstwhile partner Charles Dickens over the publication of Household Words. Dickens split from the team and started All the Year Round, while Bradbury and Evans competed with Dickens by initiating Once A Week, featuring a higher priced, better quality publication illustrated by artists from their Punch staff, such as John Millais, John Tenniel, and Hablot K. Browne, later joined by Holman Hunt and others. The marketing of quality included Tennyson and his poem, “The Grandmother’s Apology,” published in Once a Week on 16 July 1859. Publishers and owners of Punch, William Bradbury and Frederick Mullett Evans paid for rights to print the poem, allowing Tennyson to keep the copyright; Tennyson felt some obligation to them, as they were printers of Moxon’s (thus Tennyson’s) books. He wrote to Emily on 21 June 1859: “Evans has offered me £100 for the old woman to put in his new paper. I think I ought to take it.”21 She quickly agreed and wrote to Alfred Gatty on 9 July that “Alfred could not very well refuse his own printer.”22 Emily was not always so easily convinced that Tennyson should be exhibiting his work in periodicals, as we shall see with later publications. The idea for the poem came from Reverend Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College and Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford, who wrote to Emily Tennyson in December 1858: I suggested ‘old age’ to Mr. Tennyson, a sort of ‘In Memoriam’ over a lost child, wandering in soothing strains over all the thoughts and feelings of the aged. It always seems to me that ‘old age’ has been badly treated by poets. . . . An old lady once said to me quite simply, ‘The spirits of my children always seem to hover about me.’ Might not something of the kind be expressed in verse?23

A large illustration by Millais dominates the top half of the page containing Tennyson’s poem and depicts an old woman sitting comfortably in front of a window before a desk, where a large book is opened to a ribbon place marker (Figure 2.2). A younger woman sits on the floor at her feet, one hand gently clutching the old woman’s gnarly fingers and the other an open letter. A cat drinks from a bowl beside the chair, contributing to an aura of quiet contentment. In the poem, a grandmother learns of her eldest son’s death from a letter the girl has just read from the son’s wife, a woman the grandmother says was “Never the wife for Willy: he wouldn’t take 21 Tennyson, Letters, II:230. C. R. Weld indicates a fee at variance with this amount. He writes on an autographed manuscript copy of the poem: “I negotiated the right of printing this in ‘Once a Week’ when it appeared & for which Messrs Bradbury & Evans paid me for the Author one hundred guineas.” British Library, Ashley ms. 4520. 22 Ibid., II:230n. 23 Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, I:432.

54

Figure 2.2

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

“The Grandmother’s Apology,” Once a Week, 16 July 1859

Resistance and Commodification

55

my advice.”24 The grandmother relates confused memories about her children and her husband, also named Willy. She recalls an episode before marrying Willy when her cousin Jenny spread scandalous rumors about her to turn Willy’s head away: “I knew right well / That Jenny had tript in her time: I knew, but I would not tell. / And she to be coming and slandering me, the base little liar! / But the tongue is a fire as you know, my dear, the tongue is a fire” (42). The parson further embarrassed her by making a sermon out of the gossip, implicating her guilt by saying: “a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.” She confronted Willy about Jenny, but he eventually convinced her to marry; now a grandmother, the woman still remembers the painful encounter 70 years later. During that time, all her children have passed before her, including her first baby, dead at birth like Tennyson’s own firstborn. Now she sits in her chair remembering them all as if they were still alive, knowing that she will soon follow. Her apology is that she cannot cry for Willy: “But how can I weep for Willy, he has but gone for an hour, —/ Gone for a minute, my son, from this room into the next; / I, too, shall go in a minute. What time have I to be vext?” (43). The old woman has little left to cry for, and she must accept life’s inevitable end and an afterlife, where she can meet them all again. Tennyson’s poem is sweetly sentimental and well suited for a periodical designed for a traditional Victorian family periodical such as Once a Week. It was this type of poetry that endeared Tennyson to his middle-class readers, evoking responses similar to this 1871 comment by Hippolyte A. Taine: Does any poet suit such a society better than Tennyson? Without being a pedant, he is moral; he may be read in the family circle by night; he does not rebel against society and life; he speaks of God and the soul, nobly, tenderly, without ecclesiastical prejudice; there is no need to reproach him like Lord Byron; he has no violent and abrupt words, excessive and scandalous sentiments; he will pervert nobody.25

Certainly, Tennyson wrote from a deep well of domestic, patriotic, spiritual, and sentimental propriety, but his poetry appears to suit all readers, partly because it comes to them contextualized with ideological expectations for specific formats. According to Richard D. Altick, the most widely circulated of Victorian periodicals were illustrated family periodicals such as Once a Week.26 Its readers may not be able to afford a volume of Tennyson’s poetry, or see themselves as particularly literary, or know of his work in any format other than periodical. Thus, during years when Tennyson published two of his most popular volumes, Idylls of the King (1859) and Enoch Arden, and Other Poems (1864), the poems published in periodicals expanded his reputation, while the periodicals reaped profits from consumer demands for the Poet Laureate. 24 Alfred Tennyson, “The Grandmother’s Apology,” Once a Week (16 July 1859), 41. 25 Quoted in John Jump, ed., Tennyson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge: New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), 272. 26 Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1957), 360.

56

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Richard Altick also notes the presence of “a growing public which, until the sixties, had been inadequately cared for, largely because of the rush to accommodate the semiliterate millions. This was the middle-class audience of superior education but relatively little spending money: the people who disdained cheap weeklies. . . . To their rescue came the shilling monthly” (358-359). When Macmillan’s Magazine appeared as the first shilling monthly, followed soon after by Cornhill Magazine, Tennyson’s name became a main selling factor for both. Macmillan later used Tennyson as a brand product for publishing interests; Gerhard Joseph explains that Tennyson, “in the later stages of his life, this wealthiest of Victorian poets is indeed ‘become a name’ not like his Ulysses . . . , but rather a name upon which Macmillan can in turn inscribe itself.”27 Yet, such branding of Tennyson by Victorian periodicals was occurring much earlier than in these later Macmillan volumes of the 1880s and 1890s. From the beginning he was linked to a periodical’s success, but especially after his appointment as Poet Laureate. Macmillan’s Magazine (1859–1907), begun as the brainchild of Alexander Macmillan and frequenters (including Tennyson, Herbert Spencer, F. D. Maurice, T. H. Huxley, Francis Palgrave, William Allingham, and Coventry Patmore) of Thursday evening social events that came to be known as “tobacco parliaments” at Macmillan’s office. Influenced by the recent publication of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Macmillan called his group The Round Table and considered giving the magazine the same title. Macmillan hoped that Tennyson would contribute to his new periodical and began to prepare the field by sending a warm letter to Emily on 29 September 1859, expressing in lengthy, gracious terms what Tennyson’s poetry meant to his family and late brother Daniel: Ever since 1842, when the first 2 volume edition was published, there has been no book, but one, so often in our hands, or whose words have been so often on our lips. Each successive publication was hailed with a fresh joy and conned [sic] and discussed and read and re-read together till every sentence was familiar to us. Our most earnest aspirations after any nobleness in life or thought got its best expression oftenest I believe in the words of these books.28

Emily disapproved of publication in periodicals, and such praise undoubtedly moved her to favor Macmillan, although she confessed to a friend on 26 May 1860 that “I always disliked his sending poems to magazines. He sent the first away from home all unknown to me.”29 Evidently, Emily’s influence was important, but not critical. Yet Macmillan politely considered her influence, reassuring her that a publication in his magazine would not interfere with Tennyson’s relationship with his current publisher, Moxon, and that the poem would be available for later republication in 27 Gerhard Joseph, “Commodifying Tennyson: The Historical Transformation of ‘Brand Loyalty.’” Victorian Poetry 34:2 (Summer 1996), 141. 28 Tennyson, Letters, II:242. 29 Emily Tennyson, The Letters of Emily Lady Tennyson, ed. James O. Hoge (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1974), 136n.

Resistance and Commodification

57

a Moxon volume. Macmillan wrote this gleeful note to James MacLehose on 6 October 1859: Don’t whisper it to a soul, as it may after all come to nothing, but I am in hopes of a poem from Tennyson. . . . He said several times he wished we were his publishers, but he was so tied that he could not move at present. . . . My hope for Tennyson’s poem is a half promise he made when he was in Cambridge, which I mean to try and clinch—if I can do it without obtrusiveness—when I am with him.30

After a visit to Tennyson’s home at Farringford, Macmillan received a promise for a “Seaside Idyll” from Tennyson, and he was willing to pay well for such commercial advantage. The young Matthew Arnold received £25 for a poem published in Macmillan’s and the Atlantic Monthly in April, 1866, commenting that it was “the best pay I have yet had, and I have no doubt, as the curiosity about my things increases, they will bring me a little money,” but Alfred Tennyson in 1859 received £250 (Martin records £300) for 304 lines, about a pound a line for a poem that spanned eight pages of a very important issue.31 Macmillan held over Tennyson’s poem, “Sea Dreams. An Idyll,” until his third issue to compete with the Cornhill Magazine debut in January, 1860, but he maximizes the promotional benefit of Tennyson’s name by advertising the upcoming appearance of his contribution and keeping Tennyson’s name before the readers in reviews of his work, featured in the two issues before “Sea Idylls” was published. J. M. Ludlow’s review of Idylls of the King, published in November, 1859, pairs the poet with Wordsworth as “one of the powers for good of the present age,” but he raises Tennyson above Wordsworth as a poet who is more in tune with his readers’ feelings: “We feel in dealing with him that he has fought with the same foes, wrestled with the same doubts, as ourselves, and won his blessing from the conflict; and one grows thus to perceive that . . . he is essentially a great Christian poet.”32 Such a claim should set Tennyson’s success, but, in spite of the review’s general note of praise, Ludlow remarks that readers will not get attached to the volume: “To the great mass of readers in the working, and what may be called the quasi-working classes (clerks, assistants, and such like), King Arthur and his Court are personages very far removed from all subjects of ordinary interest” (71). To readers able to purchase the Idylls volume and Macmillan’s Magazine, the review serves to promote the poet’s volume and separate such readers from the classes beneath them by including them in a select, educated group who would indeed be interested in King Arthur and his Court. Less financially flush readers could afford Tennyson only in a periodical.

30 Quoted in Charles L. Graves, Life and Letters of Alexander Macmillan (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1910), 133-34. 31 Quoted in Nicholas Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 220-221. 32 J. M. Ludlow, “Moral Aspects of Mr. Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King,’’’ Macmillan’s Magazine 1 (November 1859), 68.

58

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

The December, 1859 Macmillan’s prints a commentary, pseudonymously written by J. M. Ludlow, on a review of Maud featured in the Quarterly Review. The author claims that the reviewer misunderstands Tennyson’s purpose in Maud when he warns the poet “of the evil results that may ensure from confusing the public mind with doubtful and exaggerated utterances on important and vital public questions.”33 The article chides the reviewer for not recognizing that Tennyson “was not speaking in his own person, but was, in fact, writing a long and sustained dramatic poem in a style striking and novel. The experiment, certainly, on the same scale was, so far as I know, novel to literature” (115). He asks: Why should not the poet exhibit what he may legitimately conceive to be the effects on such a man of a solitary life spent among books and an occasional newspaper, which may possibly contain accounts of baby poisoning, food adulteration, frauds not unlike the one he has suffered by, all tending to give him exaggerated and bitter views of “a world in which he has hardly mixed?” (115).

This comment testifies to the power of reading periodicals while it excuses Tennyson from any subversive content in the poem. The review, combined with the previous month’s article on the Idylls, refreshes reader awareness of Tennyson’s last two poetry volumes and soothes any doubts about his suitability for readers of Macmillan’s, thus collectively working toward the reception (and purchase) of “Sea Dreams” and the magazine. The idyll connects with Ludlow’s “quasi-working class” in its first line, as it begins the tale of a “city clerk, but gently born and bred,” who is angry because of losing money in a fraudulent investment scheme in a Peruvian mine. A violent sermon adds fuel to his anger, as he broods on his resentments. The clerk, his wife, and their daughter Margaret take a vacation at the sea, where the man has a dream in which a strong woman who has worked in the mines shows him a ship wrecked on a reef of gold. The man sees the folly of his anger: “‘My dream was Life; the woman honest Work; / And my poor venture but a fleet of glass / Wreck’d on a reef of visionary gold.’”34 The wife tries to soothe the clerk with a Christian approach to dealing with scoundrels: “His gain is loss; for he that wrongs his friend / Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about / A silent court of justice in his breast” (195). But the clerk continues to call the man an evil hypocrite. The wife then recounts a dream she had, where a wall containing statues of saints and kings fell into the sea until all the icons were washed away. The couple learns that the man who cheated the clerk has died of heart disease, thus the evil man gets his due, and the man forgives so that Christian morality can be revived. Patricia Elizabeth Davis offers the compelling argument that “some provocative anomalies disturb the placid surface of traditional morality” in the poem, and that 33 J. M. Ludlow [A. Y.], “The ‘Quarterly Review’ on Mr. Tennyson’s ‘Maud,’” Macmillan’s Magazine 1 (December 1859), 114. 34 Alfred Tennyson, “Sea Dreams. An Idyll,” Macmillan’s Magazine 1 (January 1860), 194.

Resistance and Commodification

59

Its discordant voices magnify the moral and spiritual confusion of a class for whom self-help had become an obsession, and profit a utilitarian idol. Its discordant structure and awkward prosody reflect the fragmentation of values responsible for that confusion. Tennyson’s sentimental Idyll questions the bourgeois ethic in which ambition masquerades as honest labor and naivete as simple faith, compelling Tennyson’s readers to discover their own relation to “truth” in a rapidly changing society.35

She cites the publication in 1859 of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty,” F. D. Maurice’s What is Revelation?, and Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help to the poem’s context, which also includes Tennyson’s involvement in a failed wood-carving investment scheme contrived by Dr. Matthew Allen in which Tennyson lost a fortune of £3,000. Author of “On the Temper and Spirit of the Christian Religion,” Allen provided a good model for the city clerk of “Sea Dreams,” and, like the clerk’s betrayer, he died of heart disease. The poem clearly reveals the anomalies Davis explores, just as the promotion of Tennyson’s poetry offered by Macmillan’s confirms the worship of idols and ambition that the poem critiques. Perhaps because of these messages that conflict with Macmillan’s readership, Tennyson’s contribution of “Sea Dreams” to the January 1860 issue “did not have the dramatic effect on the fortunes of the Magazine that Macmillan had hoped for,” according to George Worth. Not until much later would Macmillan reap rewards for his labors when Tennyson signed a contract in 1884, making the Macmillan firm his final publisher.36 At the same time Tennyson was being courted by Alexander Macmillan and Emily was receiving gracious letters from him, Thackeray was writing his own charming, persuasive letters to Tennyson for a contribution to the debut issue of his new Cornhill Magazine. The first letter arrived in September to notify Tennyson that he was thinking of publishing a review of In Memoriam written for Fraser’s in 1850 as part of a collection. He tells Tennyson: “I felt bound to tell all whom I could make listen, what a gentleman and a Christian ought to think of you and your work.”37 The next piece of flattery came in October, addressed “My Dear Old Alfred.” Here Thackeray overflows with praise about The Princess and the Idylls: “I have had out of that dear book the greatest delight that has ever come to me since I was a young man; to write and think about it makes me almost young. . . . P.S. I thought the ‘Grandmother’ quite as fine. How can you at 50 be doing things as well as at 35?” (445). In an addendum attached to this letter, Thackeray writes: The rhapsody of gratitude was never sent, and for a peculiar reason; just about the time of writing I came to an arrangement with Smith and Elder to edit their new magazine, and to

35 Patricia Elizabeth Davis, “Challenging Complacency: The ‘Discords Dear to the Musician’ in Tennyson’s ‘Sea Dreams: An Idyll,’” Victorians Institute Journal 14 (1986), 8586. 36 George J. Worth, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1859-1907: “No Flippancy or Abuse Allowed” (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 21. 37 Quoted in Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, I:443

60

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals have a contribution from T. was the publishers’ and editor’s highest ambition. But to ask a man for a favour, and to praise and bow down before him in the same page seemed to be so like hypocrisy, that I held my hand, and left this note in my desk. (445)

But Thackeray doesn’t mind the hypocrisy now, for Tennyson had already turned down Smith and Elder’s request for a contribution, and Thackeray was pulling out all the persuasive tools of friendship and vanity, sending both the letter of praise and a request for a contribution in the same package. He continues his plea: “If you can’t write for us you can’t. If you can by chance some day, and help an old friend, how pleased and happy I shall be! . . . I see one, two, three quarterlies advertized to-day, as all bringing laurels to laureatus. He will not refuse the private tribute of an old friend, will he?” (446). It is hard to imagine Tennyson turning down such an appeal to friendship, especially after Thackeray’s extended praise in the previous letters and his status as a loyal reviewer. Indeed, Tennyson answers: “your very generosity and boundlessness of approval made me in a measure shamefaced. . . . But I may tell you that your little note gave me more pleasure than all the journals and monthlies and quarterlies which have come across me” (446). Thackeray’s flattery was effective. Tennyson writes to Thackeray that he gave Macmillan the only thing he had available: “I don’t think he would have got it (for I dislike publishing in magazines) except that he had come to visit me in my Island, and was sitting and blowing his weed vis-àvis” (447). Such lively correspondence reveals much about Tennyson’s professed dislike for publishing in magazines, as well as his reasons for contributing. He wanted to be pampered and persuaded to publish in periodicals, seemingly against his will. Contributions such as Tennyson’s political poems, sent to newspapers for special causes, didn’t count, as Emily makes clear in this letter to Alfred Gatty on 10 May 1859: “Pray make Alfred’s apologies to the editor of ‘The Constitutional Press.’. . . Alfred never did contribute to any periodical, has indeed refused many urgent requests to do so as you may imagine. Unless you consider ‘contribution’ sending such a poem as ‘The Riflemen’ on a special occasion.”38 As of this letter, 24 Tennyson poems had appeared in periodicals, including those published in literary annuals. All but “Timbuctoo,” published in the Cambridge Chronicle and Journal (10 July 1829), were submitted for Tennyson by friends, or by Tennyson himself. Both Macmillan’s and Cornhill publications were partly a result of his friendships with publishers and editors. Although Alexander Macmillan hoped to compete with the Cornhill’s debut by featuring a Tennyson poem in the same month, the Cornhill’s first issue sold 120,000 copies, “easily a record for an English literary periodical,” according to Victor Bonham Carter.39 Tennyson’s Cornhill contribution, “Tithonus,” did not appear until a month later, in February, 1860. Thackeray apparently decided to hold over some of his star authors to the next issue, counting on the fanfare of the debut to create sales. Featuring a Tennyson poem in the next issue would continue the excitement 38 Emily Tennyson, Letters, 136. 39 Victor Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession (London: The Society of Authors, 1978), 63.

Resistance and Commodification

61

into a new month. Thackeray wrote to Emily on 15 December: “Hip Hip Hurray. Our number is gone to press but the poem will be still more welcome for February, for a reason wh. I wonder whether Alfred will guess when he buys (as I trust he will do) No 1 of the Cornhill Magazine.”40 Emily was proud of Alfred’s contribution, writing to Margaret Gatty on 23 January: “I hope there will be one thing at all events in the Cornhill Magazine this month which you will like— Ally’s ‘Tithonus,’ a companion poem to ‘Ulysses.’ 75,000 Mr. Smith said have been published for this month and were nearly sold when he wrote some days ago.”41 Tennyson wrote “Tithonus” in 1833 as “Tithon,” and later meant it to be part of “Ulysses.” A. A. Markley notes that Tennyson preferred to display his metrical experiments first in periodicals; he was “eager to put his accomplishments before a wide popular audience” before publishing them in volumes.42 Tennyson asked Smith to include as an addition to his Cornhill contribution a letter to Thackeray reading “My dear Mr. Ed. / or / My dear Thackeray / Or / whatever you think best / You ask me for a poem. Will you accept one which was written about a quarter of a century ago? It is a pendant to my ‘Ulysses’?”43 Smith felt that such an admission would devalue the poem, and it would also make Tennyson’s contribution seem less of a scoop for the Cornhill; editors liked to present his poems as if they were composed specifically for their periodical. Tennyson also requested that he preview an illustration of the poem before publication, but, regrettably, no illustration of “Tithonus” appears in the Cornhill. With such concerns, Tennyson shows insight about public perceptions of his work, as well as its contexts in the periodical, for he remarks to the Duke of Argyll on 27 January 1860 that his old poem will be positioned “queerly enough at the tail of a flashy modern novel,” Trollope’s serialized Framley Parsonage (252). Tennyson’s poem depicts the tragic story of Tithonus, who was granted immortality by Zeus at the urging of Eos, who forgot to also ask for his eternal youth. Thus Tithonus ages and becomes little more than a voice. In the poem, Tithonus mourns his “cruel immortality” as he pleads to be released: Let me go: take back thy gift: Why should a man desire in any way To vary from the kindly race of men, Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?44

While Eos remains lovely, Tithonus is doomed to age forever. Men are happy “that have the power to die” (176). As Tennyson anticipated, such classical eloquence in a poem sorely clashes with the “flashy modern novel” that precedes it in the periodical; 40 Thackeray, IV:168. 41 Emily Tennyson, Letters, 145. 42 A. A. Markley, Stateliest Measures: Tennyson and the Literature of Greece and Rome (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 117. 43 Tennyson, Letters, II:248-49. 44 Alfred Tennyson, “Tithonus,” Cornhill Magazine 1 (February 1860), 175.

62

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

yet the poem lifts up common mortals who read the Cornhill as far superior to Tithonus, who now wants to give his immortality back to the gods. The poem seems to tell its readers to be content with their (middle-class) humanity and avoid reaching for the outer limits of existence. By publishing in the Cornhill, Tennyson was an integral part of an excitingly modern Victorian phenomenon: the shilling monthly magazine, and there was more opportunity to be had if he was willing; after paying him £50 for “Tithonus,” a poem written decades before, Smith offered Tennyson a record 5,000 guineas to publish in the Cornhill (and later in book form) as many lines as were in the Idylls, but this offer Tennyson could not take seriously. He must have felt that digging out “Tithonus” for an appearance in a Victorian publishing extravaganza was enough for a day’s work. In December, 1863, Tennyson appeared for the last time in the Cornhill, with a series of four experimental poems titled “Attempts at Classical Metres in Quantity.” The poems included “Translations of Homer. Hexameters and Pentameters”; “Milton. Alcaics”; “Hendecasyllabics”; and a translation of the Iliad in blank verse. Markley notes that these poems were written in response to an attack from Matthew Arnold in his lectures “On Translating Homer,” where Arnold admonishes translators for using blank verse with Homeric epics and, in particular, Tennyson’s blank verse.45 Tennyson issued extensive editing orders for these poems to ensure that their experimental form would not be disturbed; he asked Smith’s publishing partner Henry Samuel King in late November 1863 to “not let the Devils have their own way” with the final printed copy.46 As Markley points out, these lines were “an important reminder of the degree to which Tennyson prided himself on his expertise in both employing and approximating classical verse forms in his own poetry,” and he didn’t want them to be disturbed by printing errors.47 Tennyson was confident of his “mastery of classical metres,” and the ironic tone in the poems suggest a degree of backhanded boastfulness. The “lame hexameters” he offers up are “a most burlesque barbarous experiment.”48 He compares them to croaking frogs that are “no worse than daring Germany gave us,” but still “barbarous hexameters.” His “Hendecasyllabics” attacks the “chorus of indolent reviewers” who criticized his abilities as he ventures forth with his metres “Like the skater on ice that hardly bears him” (708). Tennyson urges the reviewers to consider the difficulties of the “dainty metre” and give him credit for his attempts: O blatant Magazines, regard me rather— Since I blush to belaud myself a moment— As some exquisite rose, a piece of inmost Horticultural art, or half coquette-like Maiden, not to be greeted unbenignly. 45 Markley, 99. 46 Tennyson, Letters, II:344. 47 Markley, 99. 48 Alfred Tennyson, “Attempts at Classical Metres in Quantity,” Cornhill Magazine 8 (December 1863), 707.

Resistance and Commodification

63

As Markley notes, Tennyson’s hexameters are metrically successful, but Tennyson continues his pose of humility here in a plea that places him in a familiar reference with the feminine as an irresistible, delicate rose or a flirtatious maiden courting their attention. The pose shows the poet confident of his talent and up to the challenge. The poem’s publication in the Cornhill is an opportunity for Tennyson to publicly lobby his art to reviewers and critics and to demonstrate a competency with the difficult metres. Once again, the periodical provides Tennyson with a forum in which to fight back. Thackeray had resigned from the Cornhill the year before and, just after Tennyson’s poems appeared in the December issue, Thackeray died on 24 December. Although Cornhill historians contend that the magazine thrived long after Thackeray left as editor, Tennyson confessed in late June 1864: “I think I must give up the Cornhill; though I have no doubt of the liberality of the proprietors” (376). The comment suggests that Tennyson eventually lost confidence in the periodical after Frederick Greenwood took Thackeray’s position in June 1862, or that Smith and his new publishing partner Henry Samuel King were not coddling him for contributions in Thackeray’s way, although King would become Tennyson’s book publisher after Strahan & Company’s business failed in 1873. A section from “The Palace of Art” also appears in this issue, interesting because of its placement above an article on star-watching (Figure 2.3). The pair provide an example of how poetry was cut and pasted into textual collusions that do not depend upon the reader’s knowledge of the fragment’s original context. Tennyson’s lines are here titled “Colours of the Double Stars,” and they appear on page 679 of the December 1863 Cornhill. Ricks states that these lines appeared in the 1832 Poems with a note: “If the Poem were not already too long, I should have inserted in the text the following stanzas, expressive of the joy wherewith the soul contemplated the results of astronomical experiment.”49 The poem’s position, Tennyson’s quatrain format removed, directly above the essay about star-watching makes it appear as if it belongs to the essay as an epigraph. Tennyson signed his full name, “Alfred Tennyson,” in every instance of publication for the Cornhill, but here the poem is signed simply “Tennyson.” An article beneath the poem instructs star gazers about colors of various stars and gives the positions of stars that may be viewable from telescopes. The writer summarizes Doppler’s theory of colors in double stars and sound-producing aerial waves. As a fragment the poem is about a woman who sees into “the mystic dome” with her inner vision “as with optic glasses,” her naked vision replacing the telescope required by readers of the article. However, when Tennyson poem is placed above the article, the image of a female cosmic visionary is dimmed by the dominance of an instruction manual for star-gazers, and, ironically, perhaps this comes closer to the intent Tennyson implies in his note to the 1832 volume. Five poems in seven periodicals comprised Tennyson’s entire list of publications for the year 1868: “The Victim” in Good Words (1 January); “The Spiteful Letter” 49 Alfred Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, 2nd edn, ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), I:450n.

64

Figure 2.3

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

“Colours of the Double Stars,” The Cornhill Magazine, December 1863

Resistance and Commodification

65

in Once a Week (4 January); “Wages” in Macmillan’s Magazine (February); “18651866” in Every Saturday (U. S., 22 February) and Good Words (March); and “Lucretius” in Macmillan’s Magazine (May) and Every Saturday (U. S., 2 May). The output worried Swinburne, who pleaded to Richard Monckton Milnes: “Cannot you, as a friend of Mr. Tennyson prevent his making such a hideous exhibition of himself as he has been doing for the last three months? I thought there was a law against ‘indecent exposure’?”50 Such attitudes suggest that periodicals generally published inferior literature, and that writers whose works appeared in them devalued both literary quality and reputation through unsophisticated exposure in the mass media. Tennyson outwardly concurred, repeatedly claiming to hate publishing in periodicals. Tennyson scholars speculate about the poet’s occasion for comparatively prolific periodical publications in 1868. Charles Tennyson suggests that “feeling uneasy at his long lack of contact with the public, and not yet ready with enough work for a new volume, he published a series of poems (the fruits of his increased activity) in periodicals.”51 Alternately, Martin cites the fear of financial distress caused by the recent purchase of Aldworth and plans for a new house. June Steffensen Hagen, whose study of Tennyson’s publishing history curiously omits significant discussion of Tennyson’s appearance in periodicals, notes that Tennyson’s troubled relationship with Moxon’s manager J. Bertrand Payne was aggravated in 1867 by the discovery that the firm had been collecting copyright infringement fees from the Religious Tract Society and others without his approval or benefit; Tennyson complained: “I could not accept anything from God.”52 Payne’s highly commercial style was reminiscent of that of literary annuals editors whom Tennyson found offensive early in his career.53 In 1864, when Tennyson suggested a working-class edition of Enoch Arden, Payne had expanded Tennyson’s idea of a cheap series of sixpenny parts by producing a somewhat elaborate five-shilling anthology. Although the volume brought Tennyson well over £5700, Tennyson felt that he had been “persuaded, against his will, to issue the volume in a more ornamental style than his severe taste generally admitted.”54 As with periodical publication, Tennyson’s elitist, Romantic notions of poetry conflicted with his publishers’ ideas of market fashion. Frustrations with Payne and fear of the company’s financial collapse caused him to seek a new publisher in Alexander Strahan, owner of Good Words between 1860 and 1911, as well as Sunday Magazine (1864); Argosy (1865); Contemporary Review (1866); and Good Words for Young People (1869). Martin notes Tennyson’s temporary solution: “To sell his poems to periodicals was to ensure their publication

50 Quoted in Martin, 476. 51 Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 374. 52 Quoted in June Steffensen Hagen, Tennyson and His Publishers (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979), 115. 53 See Kathryn Ledbetter, “‘BeGemmed and BeAmuletted’: Tennyson and Those ‘Vapid’ Gift Books,” Victorian Poetry 34:2 (Summer 1996), 235-45. 54 Charles Tennyson, 354.

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

66

without having to deal with Payne,” thus solving the financial problems as well as the disagreements with Payne.55 For some time Strahan had been courting Tennyson, who wrote to Emily Tennyson on 14 November 1868, “Strahan dined here yesterday and has not the least doubt that he can make the £4000 per annum (which he promised me) . . . Strahan asserts that he makes a clear profit of £7000 a year by Good Words alone, and that my business would bring no end of grist to his mill.”56 Publication in Strahan’s periodical proved to be a good business move, and Tennyson’s future book publisher Strahan paved a clear path by offering Tennyson the extraordinary fee of £700 for a single poem, “The Victim.” Such practical concerns do not seem evident, however, in Tennyson’s early correspondence about Good Words with the Duchess of Argyll, who wrote to Tennyson on 21 December 1863: I should make Norman Macleod extremely grateful if I could persuade you to send him something for ‘Good Words’—and I should like to please him, as I think him an excellent Man. He has not asked me to do this. You know it is the best of all the Cheap periodicals, and you should be glad to help it. They are printing 1,500,000—for next year! 57

The invitation mixes personal loyalty to the Duchess, sentiment for Good Words editor Macleod, and the inevitability of commercial success. Yet Tennyson characteristically refused, writing to the Duchess on 26 December 1863, “I dare say ‘Good Words’ is a very meritorious and very popular publication but, you see my feeling is against writing in Magazines. ‘Why then did you’–I know the argument against me, but what I put in the Cornhill were things sui generis, experiments which I wished to try with the public.”58 Tennyson’s excuse seems valid, for his December 1863 Cornhill poems were indeed experimental, but Thackeray’s recruitment efforts for this first volume of the Cornhill also included an appeal to friendship, and Thackeray’s publisher George Smith surpassed any desire for experiment or friendly relations by offering Tennyson 5,000 guineas to publish his poetry in the Cornhill for three years. Here, as in Good Words, money would become the subtext to friendship, ultimately convincing Tennyson to publish in the periodical in spite of his proclaimed hatred for the commercial product. The Duchess further promotes Good Words to Tennyson on 3 October 1867, saying that her husband the Duke had “written a good deal” for Good Words, which had paid him “very well” and “is read by thousands.”59 Personal appeal, promises of mass readership, a calculated business move with a new publisher, and high fees combined to make Good Words an irresistible proposition for the reluctant poet, who writes to the Duchess of Argyll on 4 November 1867:

55 56 57 58 59

Martin, 477. Tennyson, Letters, II:506. Ibid., 346n. Ibid., 346 Ibid., 346n.

Resistance and Commodification

67

You need not have thanked me for you know I was ungracious enough to refuse you—and as to Dr. MacLeod—(though there was such a pathos in his letter enclosed to me by Strahan that it bore me down) I gave in to his wish against the grain: perhaps indeed for that I ought to be thanked more not less—but as far as you are concerned—I can’t see that you owe me anything but objurgation. Now I am. . . Afraid to think what I have done. . . for my one answer to all applicants is no longer usable.60

Of course his one answer was that he hated to publish in magazines and periodicals, but it rarely worked, not just because other friends would make pitiful appeals, but also because he could not refuse good money and exposure to the reading audiences that could be reached through periodicals. Emily Tennyson expressed excitement about her husband’s contribution of “Tithonus” to the Cornhill in 1860, but she did not approve of Tennyson’s dealings with Good Words in 1868 when it appeared that Tennyson would suffer from the year’s over-exposure in the periodicals, as she explains to Gatty on 7 October 1868: In an evil hour if we look only to the consequences to himself, he yielded to the entreaties of friends that he would do what he could to relieve Mr. Norman Macleod’s mind of anxiety during his Indian Mission [‘The Victim’], then his friend Mr. Grove would be hurt if refused [‘Lucretius’ and ‘Wages’], then his printers must have something and so he heaped up abuse to himself by giving such little things as he had by him [‘The Spiteful Letter’], and then another friend for charity [Christopher Ricks suggests ‘1865–1866’] but you will quite understand that this is very different from writing something at their request. This, to save his life he could not do worthily unless the fit were upon him.61

Money was Emily’s immediate concern about Tennyson’s Good Words commitment; she preferred volume publication to the periodical. Emily writes to Tennyson about future publications (20 November 1868): “Pray do not let the poems go into ‘Good Words’ . . . when it is taken into consideration that Enoch Arden in one year brought in about £6000 it is perfectly absurd to think of £700. . . I do entirely object not only on these grounds but on the ground of the unpleasant position it puts thee in with regard to other magazines.”62 Here Tennyson’s publications in the periodicals become contextualized in a mire of sympathy for editors and publishers, a practical need for commercial appeal, and elitist professions of exclusivity, coloring perceptions of quality and meaning. Emily’s narrow vision did not perceive the importance of Tennyson’s contributions to such periodicals as Good Words beyond the bottom line; however, as with literary annuals, these publications also frequently demonstrate a thorough integration with the aesthetic and literary community of women readers and writers. The aesthetic considered traditionally feminine, and therefore distastefully sentimental to critics such as Bulwer-Lytton, involved themes and expressions of 60 Ibid., 470-71. 61 Tennyson, Letters, II:504-505. 62 Emily Tennyson, Letters, 227

68

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

the heart, usually involving women characters or domestic situations. “The Victim” clearly encodes the domestic ideology that ennobled women for sacrificial display. Such martyrdom excited Tennyson, according to Christopher Ricks: “Above all, the poem has at its core that complex of doubts which never ceased to excite Tennyson: the moral ambiguity of self-sacrifice, of saving one’s soul and one’s self, and—at the heart of it—the intricate evasions by which suicide could rationalize itself as martyrdom”63 The poem, as contextualized in Good Words, a periodical designed for Sunday reading, also provides evidence that woman’s role in such incidents of martyrdom serves to counter, rather than confirm, religious aims by questioning the authority and benevolence of the church, and the fact that women readers sometimes disapproved of Scottish preacher and Good Words editor Norman Macleod’s secular approach merely adds ironic context. Macleod was publisher Alexander Strahan’s choice for the magazine’s first editor when it began as an eight-page weekly in 1860. Sally Mitchell notes that “contributors to more intellectual magazines tended to sneer at Good Words,” but the publication “records the literature of respectable bourgeois England” and, “during its best years in the 1870s, regularly sold between 80,000 and 130,000 copies per issue, which was more than any other monthly of that time.”64 According to Mitchell, “Their intention was to produce a periodical that would have as much variety as secular magazines and yet retain a distinctively Christian spirit, so that it could provide Sunday reading without insulting intelligent adults.”65 Within a year, the publication’s format had changed to a monthly, and its religious focus relaxed through the ensuing years to include more secular articles and fiction than religious readings. Macleod monitored his magazine and its contributors carefully for high standards of Christian morality. Nevertheless, readers often complained. To one such woman critic, he wrote: It must surely be acknowledged that the periodical, so far as its mere ‘secular’ element is concerned, may be admitted as a respectable and a worthy visitor of a Christian family on at least six days in the week? And if so, why not take the visitor by the throat, say at 11.55 on Saturday night, just at the moment when he is being transformed into a dangerous intruder, and incarcerate him till he becomes once more respectable at 12.5 [sic] on Monday morning?66

Macleod’s liberal approach often rankled readers: as Mitchell notes, Good Words printed “the fiction accepted for family reading by the broad mass of respectable, churchgoing people in the Victorian middle class.”67 The “distinctively Christian 63 Christopher Ricks, Tennyson (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 108. 64 Sally Mitchell, “Good Words,” British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837-1913, ed. Alvin Sullivan (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1984), 145. 65 Ibid., 145. 66 Quoted in Alexander Strahan, “Norman Macleod,” The Contemporary Review 20 (1872), 294. 67 Mitchell, 145.

Resistance and Commodification

69

spirit” prevailed until its later years, in spite of Macleod’s somewhat liberal attitudes. “The Victim” concerns a legend from Charlotte Yonge’s Golden Deeds that intrigued Tennyson.68 It tells of a “heathen monarch who was bidden by his priests to appease the supposed wrath of his gods by the sacrifice of the being dearest to him,” his son.69 The monarch’s wife dies in the son’s place “with a last look of exceeding joy at her husband’s love and her son’s safety.” Yonge writes that “Human sacrifices are of course accursed, and even the better sort of heathens viewed them with horror; but the voluntary confronting of death, even at the call of a distorted presage of future atonement, required qualities that were perhaps the highest that could be exercised among those who were devoid of the light of truth” (63-64). In Tennyson’s poem, a priest prays to the gods Thor and Odin for relief from famine and plague afflicting his people, promising the life of the country’s dearest soul. His prayers bring no relief while “the Priesthood moan’d.”70 Eventually “it seemed that an answer came:” to sacrifice the life dearest to the king. The priest goes to find the king but first comes upon the queen and their eight-year-old son. Assuming that this boy who “seem’d a victim due to the priest” must be dearest to the king, thus the sacrifice needed to placate the gods, the priest takes him away. When the boy’s grief-stricken mother later asks the king who is dearest, the king avoids the challenge, saying, “what use to answer now? For now the Priest has judged for me” (18). Meanwhile, “the Priest was happy, / His victim won.” In the last moments, just as the knife comes down to kill the boy, the mother intervenes at the altar stone and receives the knife into her breast, “shrieking ‘I am his dearest, I– / I am his dearest!’” (18). The priest is just as happy with this sacrifice as with the other; apparently any sacrifice will satisfy him, and whoever dies proves that the gods have answered any question about which one should be martyred. Tennyson uses the word “seemed” in stanzas II and III to indicate the priest’s justification for any apparent answer to his prayer, suggesting that he is simply reaching for signs without believing that the gods are listening. The priest’s fearful, ambivalent attitude toward the fate of whomever should be chosen for the sacrifice appears irresponsible and cruel. He has no more concern for 68 Emily Tennyson received a copy of Yonge’s Golden Deeds from Macmillan, writing to him on 30 December 1864: “My best thanks for Golden Deeds which I feel sure I shall like. The teaching by Great Examples is so much pleasanter if not better than the warning by bad.” Tennyson Research Centre #203. Yonge wrote to Macmillan on 1 July 1865: “I hear Tennyson is thinking of founding a poem on the story of Odin’s Sacrifice in the Golden Deeds” (Quoted in Jenny Stratford, “Tennyson’s ‘The Victim’ and Charlotte Yonge’s A Book of Golden Deeds of All Times and All Lands, 1864,” The Library 5th ser. 31:2 [June 1976]: 140-42). However, there is no tale about Odin in Yonge’s book. The tale Tennyson adapts appears in context with classical Greece as part of “The Devotion of the Decii, B.C. 339” from A Book of Golden Deeds of All Times and All Lands, (Cambridge: Sever and Francis, 1865), 62-63. Tennyson revised the tale as Scandinavian. See also Christopher Ricks, ed. The Poems of Tennyson, 2nd edn., 3 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 2:694. 69 Yonge, 63. 70 Alfred Tennyson, “The Victim,” Good Words (1 January 1868), 17.

70

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

the suffering of the king’s family than he has clarity about any guidance from the gods. The anger of the gods created the famine, according to the people’s belief, but they do not respond to pleas for mercy. The priest’s exultation at murdering the child seems eerily sadistic, even in light of the country’s desperate situation. In a poem about a pagan society, these details may serve to affirm the righteousness of Christianity to Victorian readers; yet the woman’s victimization by a misogynistic religious official indicates that there is no place for woman in God’s scheme on earth. Tennyson’s priest, perhaps forgiven for his para-Christian Scandinavian culture, gives us little confidence in church leaders or in knowing God’s will, as He leaves people adrift to depend only upon their own action and values. A similar ideological conflict caused Macleod to reject Anthony Trollope’s novel Rachel Ray in 1863 because of “Trollope’s often caustic attacks on the clergy’s role as society’s moral guardians,” according to Mark W. Turner:71 Rachel Ray demonstrates Trollope’s own ethical system in which the need for individuals, and women particularly, to become their own moral guardians is more important than following the strict advice of the pastoral adviser who is probably somewhat hypocritical anyway. Unless he was prepared to promote a value system which undermined the eminence and influence of the clergy, MacLeod had to reject Rachel Ray. (57)

Meaning in Tennyson’s poem is more ambivalent than in Trollope’s novel and Tennyson was the greater literary celebrity, thus no controversy ensued as with Trollope. Tennyson’s characterization of the queen fits with evangelical notions of woman’s sacrificial domestic role as wife and mother, but other ambiguities and questions remain. Had the king privately confessed his preference to his wife for the son over the mother, causing her to choose a suicidal sacrifice that would soothe her pride by placing her in the position of “saving” her country, as well as her son? The possibility suggests that the woman’s love (and domestic ideology) has been betrayed. Without such speculation, the woman remains the poem’s heroic figure; she singly serves everyone in the poem by martyring herself for love of her country, husband, and child. As in many other poems, Tennyson sets up a textual dialogue aimed at pleasing the middle-class woman reader. He also confirms Yonge’s dedication to female sacrifice, reluctantly condoning suicide as a righteous martyrdom.72 71 Mark W. Turner, Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 51. 72 One reader of my manuscript questioned the likelihood that Victorian readers of this poem and its illustration would interpret the pagan priest’s insistence on sacrifice as an attack on leaders of the Anglican Church. To test my reading, I distributed copies of the poem and its engraving to graduate students enrolled in my course titled “Visual Rhetoric,” asking them to interpret the poem’s visual and written text. All seven students said they first thought of the Biblical story about the trial sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham. They also thought that the mother was ennobled by preventing the death of her child from murder by the religious entities, and that the image portrayed the sanctity of motherhood in a world where women were victimized by religion gendered male. Students thought of other female religious

Resistance and Commodification

71

The accompanying illustration by A. Boyd Houghton and engraved by Thomas Dalziel provides yet another interpretation of Tennyson’s poem (Figure 2.4). J. Hillis Miller theorizes that “A picture and a text juxtaposed will always have different meanings or logoi. They will conflict irreconcilably with one another, since they are different signs, just as would two different sentences side by side, or two different pictures. Only the same can mean the same;”73 however, poem and image do conspire to create new meanings when combined. The full-page Good Words illustration of “The Victim” depicts a dark scene at the altar-stone with a grizzled priest’s knife raised over a bound and naked boy who clings to his mother. She looks to the heavens as she opens the bodice of her dress to expose a well-shaped breast to the knife. The husband/father/king looks away as if hiding his eyes, while he holds onto the wife’s hand. In Tennyson’s poem the wife “sprang alone,” away from her husband who, with better reflexes, might have tried to pull her back from the knife. But Houghton’s illustration portrays him looking away, as if he is allowing his wife’s sacrifice to occur. In this context, the woman stands between the boy and his father, both literally and symbolically, for the patriarchy and kingly line must survive long after the woman has served her purpose in childbearing. This martyrdom is far less optimistic than if the wife had chosen the powerful role as savior to the people. A testament to the poem’s potential for popularity with women readers is its appearance in the women’s periodical The Queen: The Lady’s Newspaper (11 January 1868). The Queen publication also once again clearly demonstrates the instability of the periodical text. Launched by Samuel Beeton in 1861 and merged with The Lady’s Newspaper in 1863, the Queen was a quarto sixpenny weekly packed with illustrated fashions, embroidery patterns, travel essays, and articles about social events, music, books, flowers, and domestic hints. According to Margaret Beetham: The ladies’ newspaper above all produced femininity as a text available for reading. The masculine reader might engage with this femininity only as an object of his gaze. The feminine reader, however, not only read but used her reading to reproduce herself as another feminine text, available in turn to other knowledgeable readers.74

As with literary annuals earlier in the century, Tennyson’s poetry becomes contextualized with femininity through his appearance in a woman’s periodical. Queen editor Helen Lowe most certainly pirated “The Victim” from Good Words a week after its original publication. Here it appears in ironic display (without the martyrs such as Joan of Arc and St. Theresa. It never occurred to them to view the scene as a pagan event, even though I had given them that background. While Victorian England was certainly imperialistic in its Christian emphasis, I maintain that readers of any era may relate any religious mythology to their own, as my students clearly demonstrated. I thank students of the Visual Rhetoric class for their input: Dawson Cadenhead; Christie Carr; Jennifer Johnson; Sarah McNeely; Jae Kyong Park; John Roesler; and Ashley Smith. 73 J. Hillis Miller, Illustration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 95. 74 Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800-1914 (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 91.

72

Figure 2.4

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

“The Victim,” Good Words, 1 January 1868

Resistance and Commodification

73

illustration) as the sole offering under the lighthearted column title “The Wise, the Witty, and the Beautiful.” The poem’s theme is anything but witty or beautiful, but its position above a book review feature titled “Gleanings from New Books” places Tennyson in the Queen’s literary offerings as something new and significant for a proper lady’s cultural awareness, while the poem thematically ennobles the publication’s domestic focus. The page features article reprints, such as “Platonic Women,” from the Saturday Review, about how attitudes toward women could fulfill “the dreams of her favourite philosopher,” Plato.75 The author describes with amused tone the challenges confronting a professor teaching women students at a “Ladies’ College” and concludes that woman does have equality in warfare, but the battle is fought at home: Woman alone keeps up the private family warfare which in the earlier stages of society required all the energies of man. It is a field from which man has completely retired, and which would be left wholly vacant were it not occupied by woman. . . . The Platonic woman of to-day may not march to the field or storm the breach, but she is unequalled in out-manoeuvring a rival, in forcing an entrance into society, in massacring an enemy’s reputation, in carrying off matrimonial spoil. (37)

This description thematically relates to the wife in Tennyson’s poem. Although the ironic tone de-sentimentalizes the poetic situation and characterizes women as somewhat shallow, the ideology of woman as savior in “Platonic Woman” also uplifts the woman in Tennyson’s poem as a heroic warrior against a dysfunctional priesthood, an ineffective patriarchy, and a society desperately needing her martyrdom. Tennyson thus becomes a poet for all people, not just men. Two months after “The Victim” appeared, Tennyson published another poem in Good Words, “1865–1866,” and, as with “The Victim” and its image, the illustration accompanying the poem guides the reader into multiple meanings beyond the Tennyson text (Figures 2.5 and 2.6). The poem reflects a particularly windy season in 1865 when Tennyson complained to Francis Turner Palgrave, “What a season! The wind is roaring here like thunder, and all my ilexes rolling and whitening. Indeed we have had whole weeks of wind.”76 As he is being tossed about by the “roaring and blowing of the winds” brought by the old and new years, a fisherman who narrates the poem expresses doubt about the future, asking a personified New Year whether the years ahead offer “aught that is worth the knowing? / Science enough and exploring, / Wanderers coming and going, / Matter enough for deploring, / But aught that is worth the knowing?’”77 A full-page illustration drawn by Lord Frederic Leighton and engraved by the Dalziel brothers frames the poem’s text on page 144 of the March issue and faces an additional illustration (unlisted in the Good Words index) on the next page, engraved and probably drawn by Thomas Dalziel, 75 Anonymous, “Platonic Women (From the Saturday Review),” The Queen, the Lady’s Newspaper (11 January 1868), 37. 76 Tennyson, Letters, II:427. 77 Alfred Tennyson, “1865-1866,” Good Words (1 March 1868), 144.

74

Figure 2.5

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

“1865-1866,” Good Words, 1 March 1868

Resistance and Commodification

Figure 2.6

“1865-1866,” Good Words, 1 March 1868

75

76

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

meant to correspond with the other image and the poem.78 Leighton’s frame depicts a fisherman standing at his post in front of a tower wall, blown about by winds coming from the two bodiless heads of the old and new years, demonstrating the roaring winds described in the poem. Seasonal bells strung upon wires at the top of the tower ring out the old year and ring in the new, while the fisherman holds a sprig of holly next to a fire that blows violently out of its grate. In sharp contrast, the fisherman in the darker engraving on the opposite page calmly smokes his pipe as he looks out toward a troubled ocean and foreboding skies from the guard post at the top of a castle tower, as if to represent the future in Tennyson’s poetic philosophy. Although the poem provides no answers to the poet’s questioning, if the fisherman of the first page is blown about by the anxieties of scientific theories and strange new explorations in the past, the fisherman of the second regards the turmoil from his post behind England’s powerful protective fortress, a symbol of the empire’s longstanding history of strength and security, ensuring a safe future, but not answering the question of what is worth knowing. Tennyson’s poem is well-placed in Good Words, a popular Victorian periodical, illustrated by the best artists and craftsmen available; however, the poet continued to express troubled feelings about publishing his work in tandem with illustrations and periodicals. The Dalziel brothers had a longstanding relationship with Alexander Strahan from the 1860s through the 1880s, engraving many of his books and other publications, and Strahan appointed them to control the illustrations for Good Words in 1862. George Somes Layard credits the publication with having inaugurated the era of wood-engraved book illustration, and the Dalziel brothers engraved a large proportion of these fine illustrations in its most successful years.79 Writing in 1901, the brothers Dalziel asserted that Good Words, “considering the period of its advent, was equal to anything that has yet been done at that price, and, if measured by the distinguished artists and brilliant writers of whose work it was composed, it is a question whether any of the more recent magazines would equal it in actual merit” (158). Nevertheless, Leighton’s artwork displeased Hallam Tennyson, who wrote that the poem was “ruined by the absurd illustrations.”80 The Poet Laureate’s experience with Moxon’s Illustrated Edition of 1857 had been less than satisfying, and he seldom approved of visual representations of his poems. According to Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson “disliked having artists distort his words” and took the artists “sternly to task if any of their illustrations contained a single detail that could not be plainly justified by the words of the poems.”81 Lorraine Janzen Kooistra further explains Tennyson’s problem with illustrations in Moxon’s edition: 78 I am grateful for the insight of the anonymous reader of this manuscript, who noted that the “cloaked figure wearing a large (perhaps wide-awake?) hat and smoking a pipe in illustration 9” could suggest Tennyson himself, “whose picturesque dress was widely reported.” 79 The Brothers Dalziel, The Brothers Dalziel: A Record of Work 1840-1890, 1901 (Frome, Wiltshire: Butler & Tanner, Limited, repr. 1978), 23. 80 Quoted in Tennyson, Poems, II: 691n. 81 Martin, 414.

Resistance and Commodification

77

What the poet was really protesting against was the right of the reader to interpret and envision a train of associations sparked by the images and situations in his text. It is for this reason that illustrated poetry in the latter part of the nineteenth century becomes so important for understanding poetic (con)texts. Illustration offers the student of Victorian literature a material trace of contemporary readers’ responses to a poem, not only in the pictures themselves, but also in the critical reviews assessing the pictures in relation to their poems.82

Kooistra notes that Tennyson, as “(after Longfellow) . . . the period’s most illustrated poet,” was a “reluctant collaborator at best, and a subversive one at worst” (394). He knew the importance of images to his readers and eventually accepted the unstable visual rhetoric of his work as a necessary evil, especially when he began to reap the financial rewards from reissues illustrated by Arthur Hughes and Gustave Doré in this same period. By 1875 Tennyson was accepting enough to approach Julia Margaret Cameron with the idea of creating photographic illustrations for the twovolume 1875 edition of Idylls of the King. Marylu Hill shows that Tennyson “took an active interest in the choice of appropriate models for the Arthurian characters, going so far as to debate with Cameron in a public space over a young and visibly embarrassed bishop as to whether or not he would be a good Lancelot.”83 In spite of Tennyson’s criticism of the illustrations for “1865–1866,” the two image texts inform the poem with a surprisingly Tennysonian interpretation, confirming his conservative notions of a powerful England. Although “1865–1866” was not reprinted in a volume of Tennyson’s poems in book form until Ricks’s complete edition, Tennyson sent it to his American publisher James Fields, who published it in Every Saturday (22 February 1868). Fields would eventually pay Tennyson £500 to get copies of poems before their publication in England. “1865–1866” appears in Every Saturday without illustrations at the end of the issue below a longer poem by Robert Buchanan, with significantly less fanfare than it received in Good Words. Tennyson’s inconsistency about whether to refuse to publish in periodicals invited yet more requests from friends and literary professionals for contributions, but he was more strongly committed when such requests were made by representatives of his own printers and publishers. E. S. Dallas made such an appeal in December 1867, calling in Tennyson’s obligations to his printers Bradbury & Evans. The request is complicated by a sense of hurried desperation to meet deadlines for their new periodical project to be titled Once A Week. Dallas writes to Tennyson in December 1867:

82 Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, “Poetry and Illustration,” A Companion to Victorian Poetry, eds. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 401. 83 Marylu Hill, “‘Shadowing Sense at War with Soul’: Julia Margaret Cameron’s Photographic Illustrations of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King,” Victorian Poetry 40:4 (Winter 2002), 446.

78

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals I venture to make a request to you in my own behalf and also in behalf of Messrs Bradbury & Evans who have had the honour of printing all your works. They have projected a new series of Once a Week and they have asked me to undertake the Editorship of it. In that capacity I take the liberty of addressing you to beg the favor of your giving me any short poem which you think may be suitable to the pages of such a periodical. To receive a contribution from you would be an honour at any time. But at present it would be a real act of favour if you could help us soon. The fact is that I have accepted this Editorship at a very short notice, that I have to be ready with the materials of my first number on Saturday next, and that I shall therefore be peculiarly obliged if you will allow me to lead off with something from your pen. . . . As for terms—you know that you can command your own.84

At the most, Tennyson is given a few days to respond with a suitable poem for the new periodical. By 1868 he had undoubtedly written scores of refusals for contributions that would be much less troublesome, possibly receiving scores of irate responses that we shall never read because of Hallam Tennyson’s careful assignment of much Tennyson correspondence to the fire after his death. Tennyson hints at such letters when he writes to William Bradbury upon returning the proofs for “On A Spiteful Letter” for publication in the January 4 issue of Once a Week, “It is quite correctly printed and I expect will bring upon me more spiteful letters. It is no particular letter to which I allude: I have had dozens of them from one quarter or another” (473). As a demonstration of Tennyson’s frustration with such troubles, the poet in “On A Spiteful Letter” has received one from an anonymous writer saying that the author’s “fame in song has done him much wrong, / For himself has done much better.”85 The speaker is frustrated with fame and the uninvited criticism it brings as he answers to the letter-writer: “Greater than I—isn’t that your cry? / And I shall live to see it. / Well, if it be so, so it is, you know; / And if it be so—so be it!” The repetition of “so” implies “So what?” in an effective sarcasm that puts the letter writer in his place. The poem evokes a weary tone, a soul worn out with complaints and public attacks: “O faded leaf, isn’t fame as brief? / What room is here for a hater? Yet the yellow leaf hates the greener leaf, / For it hangs one moment later” (13). As a feature in an issue inaugurating the new year and placed above a hopeful article about “New Year’s Day Vows,” Tennyson’s poem seems bitter. Ironically, 1868 would be an eventful year for his career: increasing fame would bring more conflicts between Tennyson, his public, and his publishers, but more profits than he could imagine. The year 1868 marked Tennyson’s reappearance in Macmillan’s, with two poems, “Wages” in February and “Lucretius” in May. Macmillan’s new editor George Grove sought out Tennyson for the magazine in 1867, and “was piqued that Alexander Strahan and the Reverend Norman Macleod. . . had successfully anticipated him,” according to Edgar F. Shannon, Jr.86 Grove writes to Macmillan on 23 December 1867: 84 E. S. Dallas to Alfred Tennyson, December 1867, Tennyson Research Centre #6379. 85 Alfred Tennyson, “On A Spiteful Letter,” Once A Week (4 January 1868), 13. 86 Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., “The Publication of Tennyson’s ‘Lucretius,’” Studies in Bibliography 34 (1981), 148-49.

Resistance and Commodification

79

I have got a little poem from A. T.—at last Mrs. Tennyson sent it today for the January No. with an injunction that if too late I was to send it back and I should have it again—This of course I have done. 2 verses very pretty and strong. a sort of pendant to the Will [sic]. (‘O well for him’) [‘Wages’] It came very nicely and gratefully on my disappointment about Good Words.87

After seeing an advertisement of Good Words featuring Tennyson’s contribution, Grove writes to Macmillan a few days later (28 December 1867) that “A. T. is making himself very common: I notice a poem announced by him for Good Words” (149). Thus Grove set out for Farringford to expand his request and received a commitment for an additional poem, “Lucretius,” at £300. Grove’s persistence demonstrates once again the aggressive business tactics of Victorian periodicals editors that Tennyson hated, but he gave in to a friendly appeal and a generous monetary arrangement. “Wages” met with enthusiastic approval by Macmillan, who praised the poem as a “very noble and true idea fitly expressed,” while Grove said, “There is enough in these 10 lines for a whole No.” (150). Thematically, the poem reflects Tennyson’s concern about immortality. According to Martin, Tennyson became increasingly troubled about morality in England, and the whole problem was intimately connected with his growing preoccupation with religion and the old duality of spirit and matter that had perplexed him for so long. . . it was essential for him to believe in an afterlife in order to believe in morality in this world. Repeatedly he told his friends that if there were no afterlife he would jump into the Seine or the Thames, put his head in the oven, take poison, or fire a pistol at his own temple.88

The same intensity evident in this anecdote appears in the Macmillan’s poem, as the poet hopes for the “glory of going on” after death, making earthly glories and virtue worthwhile: Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song, Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an endless sea— Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong— Nay, but she aim’d not at glory, no lover of glory she: Give her the glory of going on, and still to be. The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust, Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly? She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just, To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky: Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.89

The poem is interesting as a cultural document that expresses a characteristic sense of doubt in the Victorian era, but its presence in Macmillan’s served a more 87 Quoted in Shannon, 149. 88 Martin, 482. 89 Alfred Tennyson, “Wages,” Macmillan’s Magazine 17:100 (February 1868), 271.

80

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

practical purpose of ensuring future publishing agreements between Tennyson and Macmillan. The text of “Lucretius” is far more complex, and its publication history has become an example of how publishers prudishly protected their readers. Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. expertly summarizes the contexts, critical reception, and textual variations of this poem in his 1981 study titled “The Publication of Tennyson’s ‘Lucretius’”; here Shannon demonstrates how comprehensive studies such as his “supply significant insights into the poet’s personality and method of composition and into the human relationships among author, publisher, editor, and wife.”90 Previously unpublished letters reproduced in Shannon’s article provide evidence of Tennyson’s attitudes about his periodical publications in 1868 and help to focus my discussion of the poem here. Tennyson’s experience with publishers of Macmillan’s and Every Saturday typify the continuing contentious relationship between creators of literature and their material product discussed in this book; authors who wished to reap the financial rewards of new markets could not avoid their commercially aggressive business partners and the uncontrollable texts that became public domain in Victorian periodicals, in spite of payments, copyrights, lawyers, contracts, manuscripts, and authorial wishes. Immediately after Tennyson committed “Wages” and “Lucretius” to George Grove in January 1868, he began to have doubts about publishing “Lucretius” in the magazine. Tennyson sent Macmillan the poem with the understanding that it was to go thenceforth to Boston for dual publication in the Atlantic Monthly, a periodical owned by Ticknor & Fields, the first American firm to pay English poets. Tennyson hoped to cash in on extravagant profits extended to Dickens (a generous £2,000) for “some slight essays” published in the firm’s periodical;91 yet Tennyson remained concerned that “Lucretius” would be pirated, and he sent an alternate poem, “God spake out of the skies”: “With respect to the Lucretius I am staggered by what I hear from good authority. That if I publish in a serial I virtually give up my copyright & any one has a right to republish me. Really if this be so I must decline giving it to your Magazine however unwillingly” (477). Macmillan sought legal counsel about his parameters with copyright violations and wrote to Grove on 14 January 1868: “[There is] no doubt that we have a perfect right to prevent the Journals from copying the poem entire, and I will do it. . . . It is only a bad custom, in no sense a right that has led to this sort of elaborate plundery.”92 With this assurance and after an additional concession to the Tennysons for the right to republish “Lucretius” in volume format within twelve months, breaking their contractual agreement on this detail, Grove and Macmillan thought they would receive Tennyson’s manuscript on deadline. However, additional problems arose when Francis Turner Palgrave and Edmund Lushington disapproved of the poem’s publication in a magazine; Macmillan evidently pleaded to Palgrave not to interfere. Yet Tennyson remained reluctant. Grove wrote 90 Shannon, 147. 91 Tennyson, Letters, II:479. 92 Quoted in Shannon, 151.

Resistance and Commodification

81

to Macmillan: “He WILL not let us have the Lucretius—Strahan’s plaeds [pleadings] and Dallas’s advertizments, added to Payne’s and E. Lushingtons dissuasions have frightened him [sic] . . . I confess to being VERY MUCH VEXT, but I fear he is immoveable.”93 Tennyson decided at the last moment against letting Macmillan publish “Lucretius,” evidently because of pressures from Strahan, who had just outbid Macmillan for Tennyson’s signature on a publishing contract. Moxon’s Payne continued to be troublesome, and an advertising campaign promoting Tennyson’s January contribution to Once a Week, conducted by the magazine’s editor E. S. Dallas, was far too commercial for Tennyson’s taste. Emily Tennyson indicates their hatred of such publicity in her Journal on 10 March 1868: “Very much annoyed by Mr. Payne who cannot understand our love of absolute simplicity in advertisement & business arrangements so that we may be free to take thankfully what comes in this way. Be it much or little. What grieves me is that his love of excitement may mislead the public as to A. who has nothing to do with these matters.”94 Emily wanted Tennyson to appear simple before his public and free from the crass implications of commercialization; she writes to Thomas Woolner on 10 March 1868: “What I do really care for is that my Ally should stand before the world in his own childlike simplicity.”95 Advertising should be conservatively tasteful and plain, so that Alfred would not “appear a mere low, cunning tradesman” (218). Any noble protection of Tennyson’s image by Emily is informed by her consistently aggressive attempts to get maximum fees for his poetry, whether it appeared in periodicals or volume format; his image was partly her product. By early February, 1868, future and former publishers, editors, critics, and loyal supporters were literally tearing Tennyson to pieces, causing him to freeze all commitments. Macmillan wrote this last-minute, desperate personal appeal to Lushington on 3 February: [Tennyson] has given us a short poem and promised a longer one—Lucretius. Indeed we actually have it in type. He now wishes to recal it; two motives chiefly operate with him as I understand: one, that other magazine publishers have dragged his name into vulgar publicity, the other that you disapprove of it. Now whatever other publishers have done, we have not been guilty in this respect, our advertisements have been unostentatious, not sensational. . . . Now I promise that there will be no vulgar advertisements, and remind you that our Magazine is in no sense a sensational magazine & never has been . . . the appearance of this poem in a Scholarly magazine like ours would I am sure in no way do him injury.96

The letter is a shrewd appeal to Lushington’s sense of scholarly sophistication, while settling Emily’s fear of vulgar commerciality. 93 Quoted in Shannon, 154. 94 Emily Tennyson, Lady Tennyson’s Journal, ed. James O. Hoge (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 272. 95 Emily Tennyson, Letters, 218. 96 Quoted in Shannon, 154-55.

82

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Tennyson’s poem appeared in the May issue after much textual adjustment. Tennyson was enmeshed in a specific moment of publishing history; it may have seemed for Tennyson a somewhat frantic three-month period in 1868, but the 1860s were an excitingly innovative decade when Victorian periodicals reached a point of popularity never before achieved. Publication in fine intellectual magazines such as the long-running Macmillan’s, the literary Cornhill (whose first issue sold 120,000 in 1859), and less expensive publications such as Good Words and Once a Week, featuring illustrations by notable artists and engravers, were not the poor business choices for Tennyson that his friends and wife often claimed. These were commercial products of the unavoidable new readerships. The financial business intimidated and confused Tennyson as much as his well-meaning friends. According to Herbert F. Tucker, “Lucretius” and other Tennyson poems articulate the “doom of Romanticism:” “Tennyson’s theme and imagery gravitate toward some inevitable ground in the power of God, the drift of nature, or a psychic fixation upon the days that are no more;”97 I would further add that Tennyson himself was caught in such a divide. Yet, to aggressively engage the marketplace meant that he must publish in Victorian periodicals. His romantic fixation caused him to seek solace in genres and themes of the past. Markley proposes that “the import of Tennyson’s critique of Lucretian rationalism should be read in light of his view that an old tale should not be retold unless given a modern frame and context. The publishing history of ‘Lucretius’ offers clues to the poem’s modern implications as Tennyson saw them . . . [thus] Tennyson first presented ‘Lucretius’ to the public in the venue of a widely read periodical.”98 The irony of publishing “Lucretius” in Macmillan’s is that the poem, according to Christopher Ricks, “compacts three of Tennyson’s horrors: at erotic madness, at a Godless world, and at a juggernaut universe;”99 all three seem valid responses to the confusing swirl of competitive business tactics and aggressive marketing of Victorian periodicals that caused Tennyson to recoil, along with an uncontrollable growth in mass readerships that threatened tradition and social control, and a commodity culture that devalued the need for moral value in favor of materialism. As Daniel Albright states: Tennyson intended the poem as an indictment of an age that found no true sacredness in things, an age that saw the gods only as figments of philosophers or pornographers. . . . ‘Lucretius,’ like ‘Balin and Balan,’ investigates the decay of mythology: as myths lose their efficacy they become fairy tales to amuse children, or, Vico-fashion, the halting attempts of primitive man, incapable of abstraction, to explain natural phenomena with his impoverished vocabulary.100 97 Herbert F. Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 13. 98 Markley, 147. 99 Ricks, 290-91. 100 Daniel Albright, Tennyson: The Muses’ Tug-of-War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 144.

Resistance and Commodification

83

Yet the poem invites the very conflict that its author feared. “Lucretius” is a dramatic monologue about the loss of control over erotic desires and represents Tennyson’s critique of materialism and agnosticism; the subject of the monologue is Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, author of De Rerum Natura, a book that structures Tennyson’s poem, explaining the material philosophy of Epicurus. The poem explicitly describes the loss of sexual control by Lucretius, whose wife has poisoned his drink with an aphrodisiac. The description challenged Macmillan to remove passages he feared too seductive for his readers; most famous of the many changes Tennyson made for Macmillan is the following description of an Oread quoted from Every Saturday, reinserted by Tennyson for the American edition because “They are not so squeamish as we are;”101 “how the sun delights / To glance and shift about her slippery sides / And rosy knees, and supple roundedness, / And budded bosom-peaks.”102 The description is mild by today’s standards, but it does evoke a visual image of ripe sexuality, and the poem provides an intense character study of a man overcome by the sensual and whirling toward suicide. George Worth offers an additional explanation of Macmillan’s concern, claiming that the poem’s history “indicates that more was involved in this curtailment than mere prudery, for example Macmillan’s acceptance of Tennyson’s request that the poem be set up in larger-than-usual type, a change that appeared to Macmillan to call for some condensation.”103 Worth further states that we must not “dismiss Macmillan as a spokesman for Mrs. Grundy; on the contrary, he deplored Grundyism as a serious obstacle to the appreciation of Tennyson’s poetry” (42). Worth’s assessment reminds us that unscholarly attachments to traditional interpretations of nineteenth-century literary history overlook more valuable perspectives that place poetry in its proper context as a material product with commodity status, in conflict and cooperation with market, publisher, and author demands. As if to make an example of the uncontrollable forces of the marketplace, Tennyson’s poem was not delivered to James Fields in America until 17 March, too late for the Atlantic Monthly. Fields writes: “We printed it in our “every Saturday”, and it was immediately cribbed all over the country and printed in magazines and newspapers. It was a great disappointment to us not to have it for the Atlantic, but we did the next best thing left us and put it into the weekly.”104Regardless of their attempts to avoid piracy, “Lucretius” thus became a regular feature in periodicals throughout the United States in 1868. By March Tennyson was receiving warnings from friends such as Benjamin Jowett, who wrote on 8 March 1868: “Don’t write any more in Magazines if you can help: indeed, it is a goodnatured mistake and will do you harm. The Magazinewriters say, ‘Art thou become as one of us?’ etc.”105 Tennyson did not publish again in periodicals until 1871, but the exposure he received through periodical 101 Tennyson, Letters, II:483. 102 Alfred Tennyson, “Lucretius,” Every Saturday (2 May 1868), 576. 103 Worth, 41. 104 Quoted in Shannon, 168. 105 Tennyson, Letters, II:484.

84

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

publications in 1868 would produce more than generous fees. Tennyson managed to restore his creative confidence, arrange profitable publication agreements in England and America, participate in the initiation and growth of illustrated periodicals of the Victorian era, and continue to cultivate women readers. In spite of elitist concerns for preferred genres of publication, the quality of Tennyson’s poetry did not deteriorate because of periodical publication, nor did he send inferior poems to periodicals. Rather, Tennyson’s reputation merely increased as readers who might never purchase a volume of poetry read his work in the context of Good Words and many other such publications throughout the Victorian era, and we should avoid the critical misjudgment of casually viewing periodical publications as occasional lines cast off as favors. Tennyson’s next periodical publication in the 20 September 1871 issue of The Marlburian probably occurred as an act of loyalty to friends at Marlborough College in Wiltshire, where Hallam attended school from April 1866 until March 1872, according to Marlborough archivist, T. E. Rogers.106 Granville Bradley, Marlborough headmaster from 1858 to 1871, became good friends with the family, and bought a house near Farringford on the Isle of Wight. Upon sending Hallam to Marlborough, Tennyson said: “I am not sending my son to Marlborough—I am sending him to Bradley.”107 The Headmaster assisted Emily in finding their favorite tutor for the boys, Graham Dakyns, who accompanied the family on a European tour in 1861 and remained a friend until Tennyson’s death. According to Rogers, Tennyson wrote poetry at Bradley’s home while visiting Hallam, and Bradley’s daughter, Margaret L. Woods, records that Tennyson wrote “The Victim” during one of these visits. Tennyson either left his “Alcaics” with Bradley specifically to publish in the student paper, or he gave the poem to Bradley, who took the liberty of publishing it without Tennyson’s approval. An alternate version of the poem comes from T. J. Wise, who claims that Tennyson wrote only the last two lines of “Alcaics,” signed “T” (Figure 2.7). If Wise is accurate, we might also speculate that the young Hallam Tennyson, who was becoming interested in poetry, may have tried his hand at writing the preceding six lines. The poem appears in a student paper that features an interesting mix of briefs, notes, correspondence, and reports on sporting events. Its placement after an essay titled “The Battle of Marlborough” and signed by “Three Goblins” provides a satirical intertextual comment on Tennyson’s own flag-waving political poetry and the local rifle corps he actively supported. Rogers comments that the essay, prompted by the Franco-Prussian War, “was poking fun at flag-waving in general and of the Marlborough College Cadet Corps in particular.”108 The possibility that Tennyson wrote only the last two lines may explain why the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature mysteriously lists the poem’s first 106 I am very grateful to Mr. Rogers for sending me copies of the Marlburian, and for providing background information on Tennyson’s history with Marlborough College. 107 Quoted in Margaret L. Woods, “Tennyson and Bradley (Dean of Westminster),” Tennyson and His Friends, ed. Hallam Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1911), 181. 108 Email from T. E. Rogers on 2 May 2003.

Resistance and Commodification

Figure 2.7

85

“Alcaics,” The Marlburian, 20 September 1871, Courtesy Marlborough College Archives

86

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

line as “Thine early rising well repaid thee,” instead of the first two appearing in the Marlburian. Ricks does not mention the poem in either form. Regardless of its ambiguous history, Tennyson’s friendly connections with Bradley seem to confirm his authorship of the poem, and its context entices us to examine a new Tennyson poem in yet another obscure Victorian periodical. Not in the least obscure were Tennyson’s publications with friend and editor James Knowles in two very successful intellectual monthly journals, the Contemporary Review and the Nineteenth Century. Knowles was the architect who designed Tennyson’s new home at Aldworth, but he was also the founder of the Metaphysical Society, of which Tennyson was a charter member. Contributors to the Contemporary Review and Knowles’s later periodical, the Nineteenth Century, were sometimes members of the Metaphysical Society, whose contributions were papers that had been delivered to members at Society meetings. The organization came together as a result of Tennyson’s discussions with Knowles and Oxford astronomer Charles Pritchard about topics such as King Arthur, Darwin, science, agnosticism, and expanding materialism of the period. One Knowles account records a visit to Tennyson’s home on the Isle of Wight in November, 1868, where the idea came about: While King Arthur was being so much and so frequently discussed between us the mystical meanings of the Poem led to almost endless talk on speculative metaphysical subjects—God—the Soul—free will—Necessity—Matter & spirit—& all the circle of Metaphysical enquiry. . . . Tennyson said how good it would be if such subjects could be argued & debated by capable men in the manner & with the machinery of the learned Societies. ‘Modern Science’ he said ‘ought surely to have taught us how to separate light from heat—& men ought to be able now-a-days to keep their tempers—even while they discuss theology.’ I said that if he & Mr. Pritchard would join such a society—I would endeavour to get it up in London.109

The Metaphysical Society scheduled its first meeting on 21 April 1869, with about 20 original members.110 Knowles also served Tennyson as an energetic influence who encouraged him to continue working on the Idylls when he tired of the theme and urged him to publish with Alexander Strahan after Moxon’s collapsed. Strahan published the Contemporary Review, and he appointed Knowles as its editor after Tennyson urged Strahan to “find some literary occupation” for Knowles. The opportunity came when Henry Alford resigned in March 1870. Knowles proved to be good for the periodical; although he featured serious, intelligent articles about social reform,

109 Quoted from Tennyson Research Centre manuscript reprinted in Priscilla Metcalf, James Knowles: Victorian Editor and Architect (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 213. 110 Alan Willard Brown’s meticulous history lists all Society members during its existence, the year they joined, the meetings they attended, and the papers they read. See Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis, 1869-1880 (New York: Columbia UP, 1947).

Resistance and Commodification

87

rather than literary works, critics view one of his greatest editorial achievements as being the acquisition of Tennyson’s “The Last Tournament” in December, 1871, the only Idyll to appear in a periodical. Tennyson wrote to Emily on 2 November 1871: “I do not well see what better mode I have of publishing than in the Contemporary,” but options for publishing the poem clouded decisions about its proper placement.111 Tennyson was apparently considering sending the poem to Ticknor & Fields in the United States for publication in their Atlantic Monthly, according to a letter from Knowles on 4 November 1871 reminding Tennyson that “The fact of sending it to Osgood [of Ticknor & Fields] only commits you to a publication of some sort in this country.”112 Tennyson would also have to publish the poem in England to protect his copyright from English publishers who might pirate it from the Atlantic. Options he considered included printing “The Last Tournament” in booklet form, or publishing it in Knowles’s Contemporary Review. Of course, Knowles urged Tennyson to publish in the Contemporary, but he did so with tenacious consideration of the poet’s wishes: If you become finally convinced that the “booklet” plan is the best it is by no means too late to adapt it. . . . You know how much better I personally consider publication in the Review—but just because I am Editor of it. I have a most distinct personal unwillingness to print it there—unless you yourself are quite clear about the desirability of it. . . . However it is published there will be some objections to any additions at all being made to the Idylls.

Knowles reasoned that if the poem appeared in the Contemporary, objections might be tempered by the acknowledgement of Strahan’s connections with the periodical and reminded Tennyson that Strahan would “object to being passed over unless Macmillan or the Cornhill would give more money which I doubt.”113 Tennyson and Strahan were getting rich on profits from Tennyson’s books; Hagen estimates the figures for Strahan’s publication of The Holy Grail and Other Poems (1870): On a sale of 40,000, at seven shillings a copy, Strahan would have received £1400 in commission on gross sales. Tennyson would have received about three shillings a copy after paying all costs of publication and Strahan’s commission, giving him a total of £6000. (And, in fact, in Tennyson’s receipts record appear three entries for the Holy Grail in 1870: £5000, £837 and £367— total £6204.)114

However, Tennyson received £150 for his contribution, according to his letter to Emily on 2 November (Charles Tennyson claims £500). This is a relatively small amount, considering he had just earned £1,000 for a three-stanza poem in the New York Ledger and £700 from Strahan for his contribution to Good Words three years 111 Tennyson, Letters, III:17-18. 112 James T. Knowles to Alfred Tennyson, 4 November 1871, Tennyson Research Centre #8148. 113 Ibid. 114 Hagen, 119.

88

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

before, but Tennyson wisely perceived the importance of serving his publisher’s interests in the Contemporary Review. He announced to Knowles on 9 November: “I have settled that the ‘Last Tournament’ should appear in The Contemporary, and this, after due consideration of all pros and cons.”115 “The Last Tournament” would not appear in an American periodical, and it would not be published separately for copyright reasons. Book men were owners and editors of periodicals, and publishers saw the two as interdependent products, as we see in this comment by Charles Morgan about Macmillan’s: There are those nowadays who have it as an ideal that a publisher should own and control all the tributaries of his trade. . . . There is an opposite school of thought, to which the Macmillans have adhered, which holds that . . . publishing has a duty to authorship, should not confront writers with the inhumanity of a department store . . . [although Daniel Macmillan’s opinions] did not exclude a periodical, for a periodical, as then understood, was not a diversion from the proper business of publishing, but an integral part of it, an opening for authors, a response to their work swifter and warmer than the publication of a book, and a field for their experiment.116

Tennyson considered publishing more of his Idylls in the Contemporary Review, as we see in this letter to Knowles on 5 April 1872: “Gareth is not finished yet. . . . I have made out the plan, however, and perhaps some day it will be completed; and it will be then to consider whether or no it should go into the Contemporary or elsewhere.”117 He eventually decided to publish Gareth and Lynette, Etc. in a volume with “The Last Tournament” in December, 1872, his last venture with Strahan, whose business failed presumably because of overexpansion and “a certain fecklessness towards the less lofty details of business.”118 Tennyson was so deeply integrated in the web of commercial production that involved publishers and periodicals by then, that he considered buying the Contemporary Review as a wise business decision, as we see in this letter from Knowles in 1877: “Do you remember how you suggested years ago when the Con. Rev. was offered to me that you & I should buy it together? How I wish now that I had acted on your suggestion—You were wise & I a fool—for I found it a failure & have made it now worth £2500 per ann— & for whom? Strahan & his creditors & friends!”119 The publication of Tennyson’s Idyll in the Contemporary Review was an exchange of commodities between Tennyson, his publisher, and the Metaphysical Society, which completes the textual triangle because its membership bonded these men and integrated Victorian ideologies that attracted the magazine to its readers; thus, all participants were cooperative agents in the promotion of the ideology expressed 115 Tennyson, Letters, III: 17-18. 116 Charles Morgan, The House of Macmillan (1843-1943) (London: Macmillan, 1943), 56-57. 117 Tennyson, Letters III:28. 118 Hagen, 123. 119 Quoted in Metcalf, 277.

Resistance and Commodification

89

in “The Last Tournament” and capitalistic endeavors of the publishing community. Tennyson’s poem foreshadows the fall of King Arthur’s Round Table, reflecting the sense of doubt and doom, as well as traditional perspectives of sin, expressed by many members of the Metaphysical Society. As Tennyson said about the Idylls: “The whole . . . is the dream of man coming into practical life and ruined by one sin. Birth is a mystery and death is a mystery, and in the midst lies the tableland of life, and its struggles and performances. It is not the history of one man or of one generation but of a whole cycle of generations.”120 Metaphysical Society member, Dean of Canterbury, and founding editor of the Contemporary Review, Henry Alford, further explains: In Arthur’s coming—his foundation of the Round Table—his struggles and disappointments, and departure—we see the conflict continually maintained between the spirit and the flesh; and in the pragmatical issue, we recognize the bearing down in history and in individual man of pure and lofty Christian purpose by the lusts of the flesh, by the corruptions of superstition, by human passions and selfishness. (127-128)

We might parallel “The Last Tournament” with the fall of Alexander Strahan, one of many nineteenth-century publishers whose business failed because of corruptions such as greed and overweening ambition. James Knowles would go on, in a plan “to draw off with my Company of Knights from all quarters of the compass to some quite unrestricted ground,” to another successful Victorian periodical, the Nineteenth Century.121 Upon departing from the Contemporary, Knowles became further aggravated by comments Strahan made about his former editorship of the periodical. In a letter to The Times on 16 January 1877, Strahan acknowledged announcements about Knowles becoming the editor of the new Nineteenth Century, and he deemphasized Knowles’s former role as editor of the Contemporary Review; Strahan claiming that he was nothing more than a “consulting editor with light duties.” Knowles wrote to Tennyson on 20 January that Strahan was a “pick-pocket” and a “little creature” who, “with his falsehood has done me all the good in this world—for he has advertized the XIX Cy for me in a way which £ would not have done. How wonderful it is—that with all his practice he doesn’t lie better.”122 According to Philip Wilfrid Ward, Knowles created his periodical because “A platform was needed from which distinguished men of all ways of thinking could address the whole reading public on all great topics of the hour. The idea was that of public debating, in which the name and antecedents of each speaker, as well as his arguments, should have their weight, as they have in the House of Commons.”123 Thus the Nineteenth Century was, from the outset, a periodical that marketed celebrity and intellectual debate. Ward claims that signed articles in the Nineteenth 120 Hallam Tennyson, Memoir II:127. 121 Quoted in Metcalf, 272. 122 James T. Knowles to Alfred Tennyson, 20 January 1877, Tennyson Research Centre #3852. 123 Philip Wilfrid Ward, Ten Personal Studies (London: Longmans, 1908), 68.

90

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Century replaced pamphlets, which were expensive, and the periodical was a big improvement because it was “read by everyone” (69), but the periodical format also transforms the debate of a pamphlet into a material product from which Knowles and his publisher could reap mighty profits. Knowles writes to Tennyson on 6 January 1877 that he will feature “such a list of promised supporters as I should think few men can have had before. . . . They say one & all that the new Review will be an assured & great success & encourage me in every way to take it up.”124 However, Knowles was largely interested in the money such a platform would produce, as he excitedly reported that King “expects to sell 20,000! Of it—if not 30,000!” (279). Such riches, all in the name of perfectly arranged, marketable ideology; Metcalf states that “balance was beautifully struck in the March Nineteenth between poetry and morals, the Church of England and the Vatican, literature and science, Russian and Turkish home life and British imperial policy, [and] the old power of preaching and the new power of psychology—however daunting to us its unadorned pages” (280). Knowles immediately began pleading with Tennyson for a contribution to launch the first issue of the Nineteenth Century, explaining that Tennyson must lead the pack of intellectual celebrities if the new periodical was to be successful: So far as in me lies—we will have a more illustrious band round the new Review than has been round any other in our time—but of course it lies with you to do more towards helping me to realize my purpose than with any other one man—I mean—my purpose of collecting all of the very best & highest—for you know quite well that it is no flattery to say your name will draw others which no other name would do in literature.125

Knowles wrote another flattering letter to Tennyson on 20 January 1877, pleading with him with the words: “If you will—you may now make my fortune.”126Knowles tells Tennyson that the secret to the new periodical’s success lies on Tennyson’s shoulders, and he doesn’t mind begging: Everybody tells me one and the same thing about ‘the XIX Century’—get Mr. Tennyson to give you something—however small—& whatever it may be for your first number & your success is certain—. It will make it known everywhere in a way which nothing else whatever can do—& give it a stamp which will make it . . . I overcome my repugnance to acting like a beggar—and beg of you to help me at my need—if you anyhow can do so & as I would help you.

The appeal indicates the intensity of power that came with Tennyson’s name on a new periodical. He is the secret to its success, and “everybody” knows it. Tennyson had already given the periodical its name, and he complied with Knowles’s request for fortune making by contributing the first issue’s prefatory poem. Knowles 124 Quoted in Metcalf, 276. 125 Quoted in Metcalf, 278. 126 James T. Knowles to Alfred Tennyson, 20 January 1877, Tennyson Research Centre #3852.

Resistance and Commodification

91

wrote to Tennyson on 23 January 1877: “I really don’t know how to thank you enough!”127 In addition to Tennyson’s loyalty to his old friend Knowles and their Metaphysical Society, he was also once again publishing for a periodical owned by his publisher, Henry S. King (transferred in August 1877 to Kegan Paul), his publishing arrangement again coordinated by its editor, James Knowles, according to Hagen.128 Thus, although Tennyson did not again contribute to the Contemporary Review, he repeated the triangular, interdependent type of commodity relationship created there. Yet Knowles worried about offending King by the separate acquisition of the poem for his new periodical, and he suggested that, if it came to the worst & he did object—you still might set me on my feet if you would—by simply writing me a page of prose—with which he could not interfere—a letter containing your blessing as it were on my enterprize. I would write to you formally in some sufficient way if I might—so as to have a reason for it.129

However, King did not object, and the first page of the first issue of the Nineteenth Century features Tennyson’s prefatory poem, which unifies both of Knowles’s editorial projects and articulates central pursuits of the Metaphysical Society. The poem announces that “Those that of late had fleeted far and fast / To touch all shores, now leaving to the skill / Of others their old craft seaworthy still, / Have charter’d this.”130 The implication here is that the periodical is an old, but seaworthy vessel chartered by explorers of the outer limits of thought. Traditional faith will guide its oars as, “mindful of the past, / Our true co-mates regather round the mast, / Of diverse tongue, but with a common will.” Tennyson’s descriptions of daffodil and crocus reflect the season of the periodical’s birth, but also signify a spiritual rebirth, “to put forth and brave the blast”: For some, descending from the sacred peak Of hoar high-templed Faith, have leagued again Their lot with ours to rove the world about; And some are wilder comrades, sworn to seek If any golden harbour be for men In seas of Death and sunless gulfs of Doubt.

The poem articulates the Metaphysical Society’s focus on free thought and the investigation of new ideas in religion and science without losing touch with spiritual aims. It was a heady proclamation, but a successful one.

127 James T. Knowles to Alfred Tennyson, 23 January 1877, Tennyson Research Centre #3853. 128 Hagen, 133. 129 James T. Knowles to Alfred Tennyson, 20 January 1877, Tennyson Research Centre #3852. 130 Alfred Tennyson, Prefatory Poem, The Nineteenth Century 1 (March 1877), 1.

92

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

The Nineteenth Century became “essential reading for educated and selfeducated alike,” according to one observer.131 Tennyson contributed more poems to the Nineteenth Century than to any other periodical, and all appeared on their issue’s first page. Twelve Tennyson poems were published in the Nineteenth Century during the next decade, four in 1877, followed by one poem each year from 1878 to 1883, and his last in February 1892. Such longevity and consistency with one periodical firmly connects Tennyson’s reputation to the Nineteenth Century’s ideology and establishes a perspective of the poet as a giant of Victorian thought, although the poems he wrote for the periodical are not remarkably different from similar poems published in some other periodicals. Tennyson’s poetry, placed on the issue’s first page as an introduction to the heavy earnestness of Victorian scientists and religious men, extends to the poet a high-minded intellectual calling that far outreaches alternate perspectives of him as domestic, sentimental, reluctant, or feminized. Tennyson’s Nineteenth Century poem titled “To Victor Hugo” (June 1877) expands the intellectual focus across the channel. At this moment in his political history, Tennyson was pro-Turkish and anti-French, but the poem shows Tennyson tentatively celebrating the French novelist. While Hugo is a “Cloud-weaver of phantasmal hopes and fears,” he remains the “Stormy voice of France!”132 The poem admits a calming hope for a peaceful future between the two countries, where all people will be united: “England, France, all man to be / Will make one people ere man’s race be run: / And I, desiring that diviner day, / Yield thee full thanks for thy full courtesy / To younger England in the boy my son.” Tennyson is thanking Hugo for kindnesses offered to Hallam Tennyson during a recent visit to France. Yet the peace for their two countries is not yet arrived for Tennyson, and his prediction that it will arrive before the end of man’s time on earth does not seem to be a time in the near future. Nevertheless, Tennyson’s poem extends to Hugo an acceptance of his intellectual status to Nineteenth Century readers. “Achilles Over the Trench” (August 1877) shows Tennyson turning to periodicals again for publication of his classical experiments as with the Cornhill in 1863. Another blank verse translation of Homer, “Achilles Over the Trench” was written in the 1860s with the earlier poems, according to Ricks.133 A line printed after the title indicates the original of the translation, “Iliad xviii 202,” which chronicles the return of Achilles to battle after his boycott of Agamemnon’s war kept him aloof and away from the front lines until the death of Patroclus. In Tennyson’s poem Achilles is buoyed by Iris, who has just told him that his mere presence will cause the Trojans to run with fear. Indeed, Achilles needs only to shout out to the Trojans to cause havoc: Thrice from the dyke he sent his mighty shout, 131 David Tribe, “In the Beginning . . .,” Twentieth Century 175:1034 (1967), 4. 132 Alfred Tennyson, “To Victor Hugo,” The Nineteenth Century 1:4 (June 1877), 547. 133 In his record of variants and corrections to the proofs of this poem, Patrick Scott demonstrates that Tennyson took great care with periodical proofs. See P. G. Scott, “The Proof of Tennyson’s ‘Achilles Over the Trench,” Tennyson Research Bulletin 2:1 (1972): 38-39.

Resistance and Commodification

93

Thrice backward reel’d the Trojans and allies; And there and then twelve of their noblest died Among their spears and chariots.134

The story would have been very familiar to readers of the Nineteenth Century, but this particular rendition of Achilles also implies that reputation evokes as much power as brute strength, and that men can conquer with aural proclamations. The philosophers, historians, politicians, scientists, and statesmen, and other writers and readers of the Nineteenth Century would surely welcome such positioning of the intellectual tradition on the first page of this powerful periodical. Perhaps Tennyson too closely tied himself to the Nineteenth Century in later years, for its ideals went out of fashion at the same time as Tennyson, “to a new generation of cosmopolitan aesthetes and literati who were making intellectual headway in the reviewing columns, and on whom the insular therapies of In Memoriam no longer cast their old charm,” according to Herbert F. Tucker.135 Tennyson’s growing concern with the nature of spirit and matter, the decline of Christianity, and his spiritual quest drive much of the later poetry published in the Nineteenth Century. However, “De Profundis,” which appeared in the May 1880 issue of the Nineteenth Century in two sections titled “Two Greetings” and “The Human Cry,” shows Tennyson as a poet of sentiment, rather than of intellect, as he affirms spiritual truth in the mere existence of life. The newborn infant comes into the world as a spirit from “Out of the deep,” the primeval past, into a “finite-infinite space / In finite-infinite time,” and the poet wishes for his child a full and rich life “Nearer and ever nearer Him who wrought / Not Matter, nor the finite-infinite, / But this main miracle, that thou art thou, / With power on thine own act and on the world” (740). Fear of the mysterious infinite is cut short by the miracle of life, the ultimate spiritual truth. The sentiment is out of step with skeptical aesthetes of the period. Always in the shadow of Tennyson’s success, yet critical of his commercial exposure in periodicals, Matthew Arnold also complained, sneering to Thomas Humphry Ward that “Tennyson ought to be placed in confinement to prevent any more such exhibitions as his poem in this last XIX Century.”136 Indeed, the poem is an exhibition of personal joy over the mysteries of childbirth and faith in God the Creator. After elegantly commemorating the birth of his son Hallam in this poem, written on 11 August 1852, Tennyson records “The Human Cry” in chants of “Hallowed be Thy name—Halleluiah!—/ Infinite Ideality! / Immeasurable Reality! / Infinite Personality! / Hallowed be Thy name—Halleluiah!”137 The outburst of unqualified emotion, so repellant to Arnold and other critics in these last decades of the nineteenth century, exemplifies the contradictory nature of Tennyson’s oeuvre, making it difficult to categorize him as 134 Alfred Tennyson, “Achilles Over the Trench,” The Nineteenth Century 2:6 (August 1877), 2. 135 Herbert F. Tucker, Introduction, Critical Essays on Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. Herbert F. Tucker (New York: G. K. Hall, 1993), 4. 136 Quoted in Murray, 298. 137 Alfred Tennyson, “De Profundis,” The Nineteenth Century 7:39 (May 1880), 741.

94

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

one type of poet and contributing to a textual conflict with the Nineteenth Century’s purpose. The periodical’s mood is somber, lofty, and intellectual, while Tennyson’s poem is celebratory, emotive, and full of wonder. “De Profundis” is, as Arnold noticed, uncritical and almost anti-intellectual in its childlike acceptance of God and the miracle of birth. Thus, in his high-minded intellectual calling, Tennyson’s contribution to the Nineteenth Century appears as a jarring contradiction and an intrusion on the periodical’s ethos. It might have been better placed in a family weekly, but for the sense that the poet/narrator is overcoming spiritual doubt with blind surrender to the inexplicable evidence of God in human regeneration. In any case, the poet is increasingly out of step with intellectual trends at some moments, while indulging in the dark cynicism of impending modernism at others. If “De Profundis” struck a chord of hope, “Despair: A Dramatic Monologue” (November 1881) criticized a society Tennyson viewed as materialistic and dogmatic. According to the head note for the poem: “A man and his wife having lost faith in a God, and hope of a life to come, and being utterly miserable in this, resolve to end themselves by drowning. The woman is drowned, but the man is rescued by a minister of the sect he had abandoned.”138 Suggested by Mary Gladstone from a newspaper clipping about an actual event, Tennyson turned the suicide pact into a personal attack on what he perceived as the spiritual malaise in his culture. In “Despair,” the world the narrator survives in causes him to be “‘frighted at life / not death’” (630). The discouraging message that drove the couple to suicide was “of a Hell / without help, without end” (631), where a man is like a worm “in the dust and the shadow of / its desire—/ Of a worm as it writhes in a world of the weak trodden down by the strong, / Of a dying worm in a world, all massacre, murder, and wrong” (632). The man recalls his troubled life, plagued by the death, crimes, and dishonesty of his children and proclaims that “these are the new dark ages, you see, of the popular press,” where “Doubt is the lord of this dunghill” and “Hope will have broken her heart, running after / a shadow of good; / For their knowing and know-nothing books are / scatter’d from hand to hand—/ We have knelt in your know-all chapel too looking over the sand” (638). Here the popular press is the organ of Godless doom-sayers, while the speaker grieves his loss of belief in a God that “would have power over Hell till it utterly vanish’d away” (639). The God of Love and the God of Hell cannot live in the same world, thus blasphemy, despair, and suicide are the only sane options for the living. Because of its depressive theme, the poem stirred much controversy and misunderstanding among reviewers and the public who, according to Hallam Tennyson, failed to recognize the poem as a dramatic monologue. Swinburne read the poem as an expression of Tennyson’s overserious moral and political conservatism, and he quickly took advantage of the moment by publishing an anonymous parody of Tennyson’s poem in the December 1881 Fortnightly Review titled “Disgust: A Dramatic Monologue.” Like Tennyson, Swinburne includes a head note, but his parody reveals that “A woman and her husband, having been converted from free 138 Alfred Tennyson, “Despair,” The Nineteenth Century 10:57 (November 1881), 629.

Resistance and Commodification

95

thought to Calvinism, and being utterly miserable in consequence, resolve to end themselves by poison. The man dies, but the woman is rescued by application of the stomach-pump.”139 Swinburne’s intertextual poem reverses the cause for suicide, as well as the gender of the surviving mate, a woman who has “taken precautions” to ensure that she does not die with her husband. According to her story, the narrator and her husband “were brought up Agnostics” and “got some idea of selection and evolution, you know—/ Professor Huxley’s doing.” Compared to the troubles of Tennyson’s narrator, the woman and her husband chronicle a comical array of problems, beginning with a puppy dying of mange, a parrot choking on its perch, and a cousin’s forged check, all blamed on their regular attendance at church. They decide to poison themselves in the face of an unacceptable world “where worms breed worms to be eaten of worms that have eaten / their betters—/ And reviewers are barely civil—and people get spiteful letters– / And a famous man is forgot ere the minute hand can tick nine.” Swinburne makes fun of the language and attitudes of Tennyson and earnest metaphysicians of the Nineteenth Century, his narrator claiming that life is not worth living, And the infinitesmal sources of Infinite Unideality Curve in to the central abyss of a sort of a queer Personality Whose refraction is felt in the nebulae strewn in the pathway of Mars Like the parings of nails Aeonian—clippings and snippings of stars— Shavings of suns that revolve and evolve and involved—and at times Give a sweet astronomical twang to remarkably hobbling rhymes. (716)

Realizing that humans cannot exist without creeds, the couple decide to buy strychnine pills to end their lives when they learn the ultimate message of life is vocation and duty. Swinburne’s commentary reflects on Tennyson’s seriousness and, in its relation to the periodical containing the poem, the conservative, serious context of the Nineteenth Century. Swinburne was a frequent contributor to the Fortnightly Review, whose editor John Morley’s progressive policy contrasted with that of the Nineteenth Century, and “Tennyson was attacked as being opposed to democracy, rational inquiry, reform, and freedom for women,” according to Dickie A. Spurgeon.140 The occasion of Swinburne’s anonymity is paradoxical, for his ambivalence toward Tennyson was no secret, and the Fortnightly Review’s attitudes were well known to its readers. Tennyson intended for “Despair” to be accompanied “by a pendant poem of ‘Hope’ or ‘Faith,’”141 but Knowles rejected them, along with the “Charge of the Heavy Brigade,” which was eventually published in Macmillan’s Magazine 139 Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Disgust: A Dramatic Monologue,” The Fortnightly Review 30 n.s.:180 (1 December 1881), 715. 140 Dickie A. Spurgeon, “The Fortnightly Review,” British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837-1913, ed. Alvin Sullivan (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), 132. 141 Tennyson, Letters III:220.

96

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

(March 1882). As a result, his poem appears alone and unmoderated by “Hope” or “Faith” in the textual or spiritual sense. Significantly, the poem’s provenance (Mary Gladstone’s newspaper clipping), its publication in the Nineteenth Century, reception of it by reviewers in various periodicals, and Swinburne’s intertextual development of “Despair” in the Fortnightly Review occurred entirely and exclusively as an engagement with Victorian periodicals, demonstrating that, by the 1880s, poetry in periodicals had long surpassed its primary purpose for publishers as filler or advertising for poetry volumes, and had now evolved into independent forums for poetic and philosophical dialog with Victorian culture for poets such as Swinburne and Tennyson. A parody such as “Disgust” increased public awareness of Tennyson’s claims about society, while embellishing the status of both periodicals through controversy fired by the immediacy available in periodical publication. The last two Tennyson poems published in the Nineteenth Century express the poet’s sense of personal loss and fear of degeneration and decay in English society. In both poems, Tennyson demonstrates his love of antiquity and becomes a metaphor for Roman poets Virgil and Catullus speaking in the context of an empire famous for its tragic decline to Nineteenth Century readers about what Tennyson viewed as a state of decline for their own British Empire. The poems also eerily foreshadow Tennyson’s death on 6 October 1892, along with the radical shift in temperament and perspective that accompanied the twentieth century. It would also signify the death of the Nineteenth Century, its name soon outdated and necessarily adjusted to the Twentieth Century. As with previous Tennyson poems published by the periodical, “To Virgil” (September 1882) and “‘Frater Ave Atque Vale’” (March 1883) introduce their issues, setting the tone of doubt and conservative reaction for the entire month’s readings. Although Tennyson wrote “To Virgil” in answer to a request “of the Mantuans for the Nineteenth Centenary of Virgil’s Death,” the poem becomes an elegy to its own century’s (and the poet’s) imminent death.142 Luigi Carnevali, representative from the Vergilian Academy of Mantua, wrote to Tennyson (23 June 1882): “What better honour will the singer of Eneas be able to receive than that which would be tributed to him by the venerable poet of free England?”143 Tennyson later became an Honorary Associate of the Academy, appropriate because of the poet’s parallels to the Roman poet.144 Tennyson commemorates Virgil as the “Chanter of the Pollio, glorying / in the blissful years again to be, / Summers of the snakeless meadow, / unlaborious earth and oarless sea” (322). Yet no hope for regeneration in “blissful years again to be” is evident, for the next stanza portrays Virgil as “Thou that seëst Universal / Nature moved by Universal Mind; / Thou majestic in thy sadness / at the doubtful doom of human kind.” All that remains is the poet Virgil, whose work shines 142 Alfred Tennyson, “To Virgil,” The Nineteenth Century 12:67 (September 1882): 321. 143 Tennyson, Letters III:231n. 144 Markley charts the poem’s rhythms and allusions as they recall Virgil’s works, including the Aeneid, Eclogues, and Georgics (p. 104).

Resistance and Commodification

97

from the past to “gildest yet this phantom shore; / Golden branch amid the shadows, / kings and realms that pass to rise no more.” Virgil is the teller of tales about kings and glories of the Roman Empire that will be no more, his poetic role similar to that of Tennyson, whose idylls of kings and gallant deeds chronicle an empire once great but now decayed with materialism and greed. Tennyson salutes Virgil from “the Rome of freemen,” the “Northern Island / sunder’d once from all the human race” and, by implication of his role as Poet Laureate, he proclaims himself the Victorian Virgil who will shine into future generations from the past with stories of lost glory after the empire’s destruction. In “‘Frater Ave Atque Vale’” Tennyson salutes Roman lyric poet Catullus, whose elegiac poem for his dead brother expresses the poet’s “hopeless woe . . . nineteen-hundred years ago” and parallels the feelings of loss Tennyson must have felt from the recent death of his own brother, Charles Tennyson Turner.145 Barbara R. Pavlock suggests that Tennyson’s poem “embraces several moments and events concurrently,” including the experience by both poets of losing brothers, Tennyson’s observing the landscape of Sirmione on a recent trip to Italy, and his “own attempts to reproduce and conjoin the two Catullan poetic modes.”146 Pavlock adds that poetic time is not real time: it is “not merely recorded or reproduced; it is completely transcended,” thus Tennyson’s poem brings the Catullus moment into the Victorian present. Tennyson was using the periodical for an intertextual display of Catullus’s rhythms. Perhaps he experimented thus in periodicals because he viewed them as less permanent or their readers as more tolerant of experimentation. In any case, the artifacts survive long after the death of the Victorian moment as a testament to the creative process made available by the periodical. A different type of chronological displacement occurs with a poem privately printed in 1861, but appearing in Good Words in January 1884, “Helen’s Tower” (Figure 2.8). Here the poem is layered between a visual illustration above and a narrative description below that relates to the poem’s geographical reference. These additional layers overpower the creative work in the middle. Tennyson’s poem about Helen’s Tower describes the structure as “Dominant over sea and land,” as in the image, but the poem is a memorial to a son’s love for his mother, as Lord Dufferin intended when he built it: “Son’s love built me, and I hold / Mother’s love engraved in gold / Love is in and out of time, / I am mortal stone and lime.”147 The tower will fall with time, and the mother and son will die, but love and the poem will remain. The emotion evoked in the poem is undercut by a dry travel narrative by Charles Blatherwick about Helen’s Tower that follows, and an illustration of the tower with stormy clouds embracing its pointed rooftop dominates the center of a cameo image placed at the top of Tennyson’s poem. Because the image is dark and difficult to 145 Alfred Tennyson, “‘Frater Ave atque Vale,’” The Nineteenth Century 13:73 (March 1883), 357. 146 Barbara R. Pavlock, “‘Frater Ave atque Vale:’” Tennyson and Catullus,” Victorian Poetry 17:4 (Winter 1979), 376. 147 Alfred Tennyson, “Helen’s Tower,” Good Words (January 1884), 25.

98

Figure 2.8

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

“Helen’s Tower,” Good Words, 1 January 1884

Resistance and Commodification

99

see, the eyes focus more readily on the mysterious scene than on the poem. Yet, Tennyson’s poem remains, imprisoned between the image and Blatherwick’s narrative, on the 1884 page of Good Words, long after its 1861 occasion. Although Tennyson did not return to antiquities for a theme during the last years of his life, he did continue to contribute poems to periodicals and allow himself to be marketed by the New Review (1889–1897), a periodical with dubious aspirations of competing with the Nineteenth Century. Ann Murtagh describes the New Review as a “third group in the literary world, midway between the conventional morality and respectability of the Victorians, and the intense, self-conscious, refined artistry of the aesthetes and decadents.”148 The “new conservatives” at the helm of the New Review included editor Archibald Grove from 1889 to 1894. Here Tennyson was one of the grand old men of English literature, lending authority to the neo-conservative flavor of the periodical. Its insistence on a serious format (without illustrations) and debates about serious issues liken it to the Nineteenth Century, but seriousness was out of style by the 1890s, and the prospect of a long-running success was bleak, in spite of changes made to improve sales. Nevertheless, Tennyson’s poems blend with the seriousness articulated by the articles, format, and editorial policies of the New Review, although his poems appear quaintly cheerful upon first glance. “The Throstle” (October 1889) and “A Song” (“To sleep! to sleep! The long bright day is done,” March 1891) are poems about the seasons of life written in the rhythms and language of children’s poetry, with a haunting sense of loss and temporality familiar in these late Tennyson poems. “‘Summer is coming, Summer is coming. / I know it, I know it, I know it. / Light again, leaf again, life again, love again,’” cries the throstle, while the cynical speaker calls the bird a “wild little poet.”149 Light rhythms of the bird’s proclamations announce the new seasons, but the speaker responds that there is nothing new, with no summer daisy yet apparent, and he insists that the bird is silly: “Never a prophet so crazy!,” says he. Childish belief in new seasons cannot be entertained by the speaker, nor can they be promoted in the world vision of the New Review, regardless of its place in an era when everything appeared in the light of progress and industrial invention. The last stanza of the poem lends a clue to Tennyson’s dark mood, as the throstle warbles “‘Here again, here, here, happy year!’” The speaker admits that “Summer is coming, is coming, my dear, / And all the winters are hidden,” but the winters—and death—are waiting. Tennyson’s second contribution to the New Review, and his last for Victorian periodicals, appeared a few seasons before his death. In “A Song,” Tennyson articulates the permanent sleep of death with a sense of simplicity that belies its meaning. Daylight departs with the “fallen sun,” joys “vanish with the day,” and griefs “fade away” with sleep.150 Griefs may subside, but joys and the bright spirit 148 Ann Murtagh, “The New Review: A Glimpse at the Nineties,” Victorian Periodicals Review 14 (1981), 11. 149 Alfred Tennyson, “The Throstle,” The New Review 1:5 (October 1889), 409. 150 Alfred Tennyson, “A Song” (“To sleep! To sleep!”), The New Review 4:22 (March 1891), 193.

100

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

of the sun also depart. Eventually, “all life will sleep at last,” as will Tennyson. Tennyson made inquiries with other periodicals, including Scribner’s magazine The Century, before settling on its publication in the New Review; Macmillan’s offered to publish it, but Hallam responded that their proposed publication date of April would be too late. He asked George Craik: “could you see what the ‘Century’ would give for it in March? . . . The New Review offered £200 or more for anything in March did it not?151 The New Review publication of “The Throstle” corresponded with the poem’s simultaneous appearance in the Scotsman, as well as in several American newspapers, including the New York World (29 September 1889). Ironically, Tennyson suffered in this late era of his publishing career some of the same frustrations with publication that he experienced as a much younger man: mistakes and omissions proliferated in the printing. He writes to Review editor Archibald Grove in early October 1889: “I find that my little song to the Throstle is mutilated in your Review. . . . The fault does not lie with you, but is attribu[ta]ble to a friend of mine who asked me to let him have a poem for a New Review. I wrote it out for him and it seems he has sent you an imperfect copy.”152 Tennyson repeats the phrase in writing on the final proof copy as if to add sting: “Thus mutilated!”153 The friend was Edmund Gosse, and Tennyson moans: “I think there never was so short a poem so abominably misused. Whose fault it is I don’t know possibly Mr. Gosse’s. He is a very inaccurate man. I am sorry I ever sent it.” To make matters worse, Gosse had written an article commemorating Tennyson’s 80th birthday for the St. James’s Gazette on 3 August 1889, and Tennyson accused Gosse of making inaccurate claims: “He has made three statements in his notice of me in the St. James’s Gazette all more or less false.”154 Grove assured Tennyson that the printing mistakes were from Gosse’s copying errors, sending him the original copy. Tennyson wrote to Walter Theodore Watts (8 October 1889): “My poor little lilt of the Throstle has been abominably misused” (405). The flavor of complaint appears repeatedly in Tennyson’s correspondence; from his earliest contributions to literary annuals and other periodicals, to his last periodical publication in the New Review, Tennyson worried over misunderstandings, misprintings, and miscommunication involving friends who persuaded him to publish and the editors who provided the publication opportunities. Well-meaning friends and associates led the reluctant poet into arrangements he did not like, deadlines he resisted, and media attention he deplored. Yet he was an active participant as a cultural commodity and an influential force in the media explosion of the nineteenth century. Just as Queen Victoria was the first media monarch, so was Tennyson the first media Poet Laureate, and he never retired.

151 Hallam Tennyson to George Lillie Craik at Macmillan’s, 7 February 1891, British Library, Add. 54981, Macmillan correspondence with Hallam Tennyson, 1891–1893. 152 Tennyson, Letters III:405. 153 Proof of “The Throstle,” British Library cat. No. 4284, 33. 154 Tennyson, Letters III:406.

Chapter 3

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers: Political Poetry Gérard Genette writes that every literary work extends beyond the author’s original statement through embedded materials he calls “paratext;” a book’s binding, format, typesetting, title page, title, dedication, publishing notices, prefaces, notes, and other textual interactions are codes that create a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that—whether well or poorly understood and achieved—is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it (more pertinent, of course, in the eyes of the author and his allies).1

In a periodical, paratext may include such elements as editorial opinion, letters to the editor, advertising, adjacent feature articles, other authors and their previous contributions, and reportage of news events. When an author publishes a poem in a periodical, its pertinence relates less to the “author and his allies” than to the author’s integration with the periodical as cooperative cultural commodities. Thus traditional discussions of aesthetics in Tennyson’s poetry inadequately inform our understanding of his role in Victorian literature and society without considerations of the poems that appeared in periodicals and the historical contexts within which they work. One can reach for almost any critical study and find prejudices against Tennyson’s political poems, especially the earlier works published in 1852. For example, Tricia Lootens recognizes that our modern, post World War I sensibilities may abhor earnest Victorian patriotism and admits its importance to our understanding of the period: “At present, Victorian patriotic fervor in its diverse forms deserves closer scrutiny, not least because—even in its most reactionary moments—it strives so openly to unite developing conceptions of subjective identity, at its most intimate, private, and inescapable, with shifting definitions of the powers and duties of public political subjects.”2 Yet Lootens brands the 1852 series of political poems published in the Examiner, the Morning Chronicle, and Fraser’s as “a spate of vehement— 1 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Tr. Jane E. Lewin. 1987. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 2. 2 Tricia Lootens, “Victorian Poetry and Patriotism,” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 276.

102

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

not to say frenzied” exclamations of patriotic fervor (256). Her rhetoric is not too distantly related to Robert Bernard Martin’s excoriation of these poems as shameful productions that any admirer would wish had never seen light. . . . In them Tennyson slips across the narrow line dividing ardent patriotism from hysteria. . . and succeeding only in manifesting the hollow belligerence of the unmartial man caught up in blind chauvinism. . . . The best that can be said of them is that they contributed to the writing of Maud three years later.3

Tennyson evidently agreed, for many of his political poems published in periodicals do not appear in later collections. However, ghettoization of this corpus is a disservice that limits our ability to understand the author in new ways that permit his evolution into future canons. Jerome McGann noticed this unscholarly tendency in Tennyson studies over twenty years ago, noting that critics who find Tennyson’s political poetry distasteful are practicing “ahistorical structures of interpretation that have dominated criticism for the past fifty years,” and this approach is just as much “a judgment upon our own ideas and their limitations as it is upon Tennyson’s:”4 Ideology functions in poetry not as generalized idea, abstract thought, reified concept, but as a specific and historically concrete manifestation of such things. . . . Like the particular referential elements in poems—the so-called historical facts which critics and editors will gloss for later readers—ideology in poems is a matrix of historical particularities: in this case, the particularities of belief and commitment, ideas written in a grammar of needs, feelings, and attitudes.” (230-231)

Poetry embedded in Victorian periodicals provides enticing examples of ideology and historicity that cannot be found in any other sample. I will avoid the forms of criticism McGann deplores and examine ways in which Tennyson’s poetry works within the periodical, often as an advertisement for middle-class editorial opinion, whatever the specific periodical’s general political tendencies, or as an addendum to the ideology expressed in its paratextual elements. Tennyson’s poetry also mirrors and elevates political views embedded in the periodical and extends the issues to a wider readership. A poem printed in a newspaper is short, densely focused, and noticeably surrounded by brief white space that demands attention; it is not several pages of close newsprint reportage that may appear daunting to many readers who are hurried or uninterested in further information. If the same poem appears in a monthly known for its intellectual focus or in a family weekly, its meanings will change in response to the interpretive forces placed upon it by readerships of varying class, gender, or economic capacities. Its visual presentation on the page may be influenced by the proliferation (or absence) of illustrations, and factors as seemingly innocent 3 Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 365. 4 Jerome J. McGann, “Tennyson and the Histories of Criticism,” Review 4 (1982), 231, 235.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

103

as cheap paper may place a poem within an ideological context different from other periodicals. The frequency of a title’s publication may also affect a reader’s interpretation of meaning: an intellectual monthly such as the Nineteenth Century calls for a more studied reading than a sensational newspaper such as the Pall Mall Gazette or the Examiner; a newspaper provides fragmented text that is published frequently and often cast aside after one reading, while weeklies or monthlies are retained for further perusal and perhaps a deeper interrogation by the reader. Poetry has the potential to attract more readers (and buyers) to the periodical, while Tennyson attains the role of popular poet by appearing in varied formats with poetry that communicates a thought or emotion in a moment’s browse. Art also dramatizes an event in ways that often dominate its interpretation for later generations beyond its moment. Picasso’s painting of Guernica is what we remember of a tragedy that would otherwise be lost to memory other than a historian’s. Tennyson’s poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” encoded the unfortunate 1854 death charge, making it required reading for school-aged children for much of the twentieth century, and it now often represents the token piece of information many people retain about the Crimean War. Without the poem, the charge might have become a footnote in the long history of military blunders. A study of Tennyson’s political poetry as published in periodicals gives us a clear perspective of the poet deeply integrated in a creative, interdependent relationship with the Victorian media and its mass readership. These poems will be explored as products of specific moments in British history; thus the poems of the 1850s have a distinctively different flavor from those of the 1880s. Like others in his era, Tennyson was an avid newspaper reader all his life; according to Elizabeth A. Francis, “In a contemporary note to his wife preserved at Lincoln, Tennyson suggests in strong terms that she read The Examiner rather than The Times. Despite his preference for Leigh Hunt’s Examiner it is clear from other evidence that Tennyson perused The Times with care.”5 However, his letters clearly document a disdain for the more commercial, sensational aspects of periodicals; he complains to Edward Moxon on 25 May 1847 that “an Edinburgh paper mentions that I have a poem in the press. Confound the publicities and gabblements of the 19th century!”6 After becoming Poet Laureate in 1850, his personal life became subject to increasing gossip and public inspection, about which he commented to Sophia (Rawnsley) Elmhirst on 8 March 1851: “Gossip is my total abhorrence. I wish it were some living crawling thing that I might tread it out for ever” (II:9). Edward Lushington reported that Tennyson was afraid his wedding to Emily would be publicized: “Alfred will gladly give 7/6 out of his limited income (for a married man) to every penny-a-liner who will keep it out of the papers” (I:328). Nevertheless, after

5 Elizabeth A. Francis, “Tennyson’s Political Poetry, 1852-1855,” Victorian Poetry 14:2 (Summer 1976), 117n. 6 Alfred Tennyson, The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, eds. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), I:274.

104

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

consulting James Spedding about some “National Songs for Englishmen,”7 Tennyson aggressively sought out periodicals for these pseudonymous poems through his brother-in-law Alan Ker and Charles Weld soon after becoming Poet Laureate. He first submitted them to The Times, who ignored them (ostensibly because their policy did not allow anonymous publications), and then to John Forster at the Examiner (“Britons Guard Your Own,” 31 January 1852; “Hands All Round,” February 1852; “Third of February, 1852,” February 1852; and “Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper,” 14 February 1852). Tennyson presumably worried that his political involvement might be offensive to his new position as Poet Laureate, and chose to submit these poems anonymously or with pseudonyms such as “Merlin,” “A.T.,” and “Taliessen.”8 Tennyson worried about being discovered, but not much, as indicated in this note to Emily on 23 January 1852: “Did I say Forster would peach? NO I am not sure, indeed if you had his word that he would not, he would not. My poem is public property. I wish every paper to have it. Though readers of the Examiner would no doubt guess the authorship from knowing his friendship for me. Never mind. The Times is a fool.”9 The note indicates that Tennyson never really intended for the poems to be anonymous, and thought The Times foolish for thinking they could be. Weld and Ker also submitted Tennyson poems to the Morning Chronicle (“The Penny-Wise,” 24 January 1852) and “For the Penny-Wise” to Fraser’s, who managed a turnaround on his submission rapid enough to include the poem in the February, 1852 issue. These publications provided immediate, highly visual, influential responses to the invasion panic felt by most of the country after Louis Napoleon’s December, 1851 coup d’état. Tennyson expresses concern that they appear immediately, so that he can be in conversation with current events; he writes to Emily Tennyson on 22 January 1852 that Charles Weld is sending his poems around, but Tennyson is reluctant to send anything to Fraser’s because “it is so long before Fraser comes out that my poem will be half superannuated like the music. I see that here and there people are really beginning to be awake to their danger” (II:23). Memories of the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s subsequent domination of Europe and threat to England stimulated British distrust of Louis Napoleon, the great general’s nephew. Elements of the British popular press often worried that defense capabilities were undervalued in Parliament. According to Peter Burroughs: Both navy and army were constrained by public and parliamentary insistence on retrenchment, which affected all aspects of government spending and the policies of all ministries after 1815. . . . Expenditure on the armed forces was both highly visible as

7 Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1911), I:342. 8 Richard Fulton wisely observes that the choice of these pseudonyms is a good indication that Tennyson was writing for a well-educated readership. Letter, June 2005. 9 Tennyson Letters, II:23.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

105

the largest component of public spending, and highly vulnerable in the absence of major crises abroad.10

However, in spite of controls over military expenditures, the British were still buoyed by their defeat of the French at Waterloo; commemoration of military heroism at the battle continued to be popular through the mid-century, and the Duke of Wellington’s 1852 funeral was an event of massive proportions. Repeated concerns in the press about military defense against the French had developed while Louis-Philippe was still the French monarch in the 1840s and continued after Bonaparte acquired power. An “imbalance in the deployment of troops and ships aroused grave public and ministerial concern in 1846-47, and again in 1852-53, when scares of invasion were sparked by construction of the French naval base at Cherbourg and alarmist pronouncements that ‘steam had bridged the Channel’” (325). Ian F. W. Beckett adds that “the publication in May 1844 of a pamphlet by the Prince du Joinville, son of King Louis Philippe, which forcibly argued the possibilities of the application of steam power to naval warfare and the announcement in 1846 of a naval building programme of 93 million francs seemed indications of likely French intentions.”11 Journalistic opinion clearly viewed the French as dangerously unpredictable and threatening to British national security; moreover, the French were, as everyone knew, simply immoral. Such assessments were confirmed by a Times report on 15 December 1851 which reproduces a missive from Mallet-Dupan, laying blame for the success of Bonaparte’s coup on the degenerate nature of his own countrymen: The cause of this revolution . . . must be sought in the character of the age. Luxury, epicurean habits, and the pursuit of wealth, have washed out the energy of the higher classes. There is neither blood, nor feeling, nor dignity, nor reason, nor capacity among them. The love of repose is the only instinct they retain. They are Hindoos found slumbering on their palm-leaves by the Moguls, who came to pillage and exterminate them. Everything is reduced to this calculation,—‘How much will you leave me if I surrender my country, my altars, my honour, and my laws?’12

The article follows with a quotation from M. Royer Collard: “‘the greatest school of immorality in the world is the history of France for the last fifty years’” (4). The prejudicial reference to “Hindoos” implicates another textual layer that encodes the French with British subalterns in India, considered by the racist majority as lazy and lacking true Christian earnestness. Victorian journalists felt no need for objectivity in their reportage, and Tennyson typically got caught up in such emotional appeals for moral purification and righteous military defense. Lawrence James describes the historical moment that inspired Tennyson to this emotional call-to-arms. According 10 Peter Burroughs, “Imperial Institutions and the Government of Empire,” Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume III: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 324. 11 Ian F. W. Beckett, Riflemen Form: A Study of the Rifle Volunteer Movement 18591908 (Aldershot: The Ogilby Trusts, 1982), 8. 12 “London, Monday, December 15, 1851,” The Times (15 December 1851), 4.

106

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

to James, “Waterloo had been the key that had opened the door to a golden age” of progress and expansion throughout the world:13 Britain’s recent spectacular advances had only been made possible by success in the French and Napoleonic Wars. They had amply vindicated the older notion of the British as a protestant people specially favoured by God. It was resuscitated during the gloomier phases of the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny, which were marked by days of national prayer in which clergy of all denominations and their congregations begged forgiveness for the country’s sins and asked God for victory. If Britain ever faltered in war it was because of domestic moral waywardness. (372)

The chivalric code taken up by Tennyson and others ennobled the warrior’s task to defend God’s chosen people in what became the “pleasure culture of war,” as described by Michael Paris: In the pleasure culture of war, battles were fought far away; they were ever unjust, but fought for high moral purpose by chivalrous volunteers who performed their killing function according to the well-defined rules of war, and, of course, the majority of casualties were to be found among the Other—the uncivilized and outlandish foreigner.14

Such nationalist, militaristic codes inscribe Tennyson’s publications in periodicals throughout the decades, and these early poems are a response to the specific threat of French invasion enhanced by a distrust born in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. From its first reports of Louis Napoleon’s 2 December 1851 coup d’état, The Times begins with a wary, watchful attitude that proliferates into preparations for a war of self-defense by the time of Tennyson’s publications in January and February. On Thursday 4 December 1851, the leading story claims that We believe that it is the fixed resolution of every Government in Europe, including our own, to view with perfect impartiality and absolute forbearance every possible change that may occur in the Constitution and Government of France. It rests with the French nation to resist or to submit, to establish or to overthrow, to live as freemen or to crouch before the iron or the leaden idols of despotic power.15

Impartiality is ignored in this and succeeding issues of The Times, as writers scourge events in France for evidence of despotism, violence, oppression, and plans for aggression against the British homeland. French lawlessness is confirmed with columns upon columns of detailed second-hand reportage proudly acquired “by electric telegraph” from the streets of Paris. An “Express from Paris” on 4 December from a Paris correspondent “dated yesterday, 5 p.m.” reads: “‘The tranquillity that 13 Lawrence James, Warrior Race: The British Experience of War from Roman Times to the Present (London: Little, Brown, 2001), 371. 14 Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850-2000 (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 26. 15 “London, Thursday, December 4, 1851,” The Times (4 December 1851), 4.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

107

Paris enjoyed last night and early this morning has been interrupted for a short time, and blood has already flowed’” (4). The immediacy of the news, reported by The Times’s own correspondent, lends a sensational sense of readerly participation that all forms of news media have since relied upon for maintaining high readerships (and viewers in this television age), thus insuring financial success. A report on Monday 15 December 1851 about the expenses of the Caffre War in South Africa cites that the clash is costing “exactly 112,000£ a month. . . . We are thus expending every day of our lives upon a squabble with savages . . . about four times the total sum devoted to the purposes of art, science, and public education in the United Kingdom” (4). That was also money that many felt could be better spent developing military defenses against the potential French invasion. Defeats in the Caffre War showed that the British army regiments were far below standards in military technology and supplies, according to a later report on 6 January: “Encumbered with a musket of no practical use beyond arm’s length, with a knapsack much heavier than is necessary, and clothes of the most entangling fashion, his efficiency is soon destroyed, and regained only at a cost of time and patience which his enemy turns to just as much profit as he does.”16 Such complaints continued throughout Victoria’s reign as arms technology and colonial fiscal demands rapidly outpaced Parliament’s willingness to fund military expenditures. Ironically, this reluctance was partly due to a distrust of the army, according to James: It was an enduring paradox in the nation’s public life that while the British never shrank from boasting of their soldiers’ prowess, they remained deeply suspicious of the army as an institution. The evolution of its administration reflected this apprehension. Authority was decentralised and divided among a multiplicity of separate boards. . . . The result was a complex, often bewildering machine which easily became snagged in red tape and moved ponderously. . . . (379)

Thus, Tennyson joins with many patriotic British concerned about the readiness of the army, as well as the navy. On 17 January 1852, a report reads: “It seems to be generally admitted that the present state of our defences is more likely to provoke the attack than to inspire the respect of our warlike and unscrupulous neighbours.”17 Defeats in the Caffre War provided a distant example of what could happen with the French. “What is our fleet doing in the South when it should do us service in the North?” asks The Times editorial. “Why are we leaving the British Channel comparatively defenceless, in order to exhibit our flag at the mouth of the Tagus or on the coasts of the Mediterranean? . . . What policy can be conceived more absurd than to fill the Atlantic and Pacific with our fleets and leave our own coast thinly guarded and poorly defended?” (4). Tennyson undoubtedly read and internalized this passionate appeal, for its rhetoric begins to sound like his own political poetry that would appear in the Examiner within the next two weeks. He wanted to take advantage of the wave of feeling generated by events in France by seizing opportunities for 16 “There is a certain proverb,” The Times (6 January 1852), 4. 17 “It seems generally admitted,” The Times (17 January 1852), 4.

108

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

persuasion in periodicals, and these poems were meant to belong to his public; about “The Penny-Wise,” published in February 1852 Fraser’s Tennyson writes: “I might have made some £5 of it but I give it to the people. Let it be published and spread as widely as may be. If the Times won’t put it in, send it to the Morning Chronicle, the Athenaeum, anywhere. It is too long a time to wait for Fraser” (II:22). One creates a vision of Tennyson vigorously and generously casting out poems as if they were propaganda flyers to be tacked up at every corner of the empire; here there is no evidence of Tennyson’s characteristic ambivalence about publishing in periodicals or fears about the influence of the press. On 31 January 1852, Tennyson’s “Britons, Guard Your Own” questions readers of the Examiner as The Times editorial had done on 17 January: “Who can trust a liar?” He urges Britons to “Call home your ships across Biscayan tides, / To blow the battle from their oaken sides. / Why waste they yonder / Their idle thunder? / Why stay they there to guard a foreign throne?” The French people have surrendered their rights by choosing a tyrant, “By tricks and spying, / And craft and lying, / And murder, was her freedom overthrown. Britons, guard your own.”18 Tennyson calls on his countrymen’s anti-papal prejudices, claiming that “The Pope has bless’d him; / The Church caress’d him” and “His ruthless host is bought with plunder’d gold, / By lying priests the peasant’s vote controll’d” (67). The only free country left able to fight against such a foe is, of course, Britain, who stands alone against an apocalyptic foe. As Paris notes, religion and militarism were partners in the Christian mission: “The armed forces were the means by which the nation’s unique relationship with the Almighty would be protected from Popery and other evils, while also ensuring that missionary activity could safely take place in dangerous heathen lands.”19 Tennyson calls upon his neighbors throughout England to join soldiers of the past who “won old battles with our strength, the bow. / Now practise, yeomen, / Like those bowmen, / Till your balls fly as their true shafts have flown” (67). Many readers, including Coventry Patmore, thought England should divert money from the Caffre War to homeland defenses for a potential war with France, and they were ready to take up arms to do their part in the Volunteer Rifle Club movement that was spreading throughout England. Patmore writes to The Times on 22 January 1852: “I am one of a large number of gentlemen employed in a public establishment of an eminently pacific character. I proposed that some of us and of our friends should combine for the purpose of learning, in the cheapest and quickest way, how to handle a rifle.”20 Talk about the Volunteer Rifle Movement began as a result of the first war panic of the decade in 1846-47 and continued throughout the 1851-52 panic, finally reaping results during the third in 1858-59 when the War Office authorized the Volunteer Rifle Corps. Tennyson supported the movement and sent £5 to Patmore 18 Alfred Tennyson, “Britons, Guard Your Own,” The Examiner (31 January 1852), 67. 19 Paris, 15. 20 C. K. P. [Coventry Patmore], “A Rifle Corps: To the Editor of the Times,” The Times (22 January 1852), 3.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

109

in 1852 to start a group at the British Museum, but Emily writes to Patmore on 28 January to ask that he “not speak of him [Tennyson] as an ‘agitator’ for any cause whatsoever. . . . The word has come to have so evil a meaning, a sort of hysterical lady meaning if nothing worse.”21 Spedding comments that he is “thinking that the more noise we make in that way the better, and the more we practise the less likely are we to be called upon to perform . . . I think I could hit a Frenchman at 100 yards, if he did not frighten me” (II:25). Understandably, soldiers and politicians sometimes disapproved of the movement; the Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief from 1855 to 1895, referred to them as a “very dangerous rabble” and “unmanageable bodies that would ruin our Army.”22 Nevertheless, Tennyson and Martin Farquhar Tupper became associated as promoters of the Volunteer Rifle Corps movement, and the group adopted Tupper’s poem title “Defence not Defiance” for its motto. The fact that men of all ages and experience were ready to arm themselves against demon Frenchmen in skirmishes with local amateur militia gives us a sense of the terror felt by the country during this period. The reality of a French invasion may not have been logical, but no one can doubt the reality of England’s fears about such a threat. Michael C. C. Adams claims that anyone who criticizes Tennyson’s politics is taking a presentist view of the past, imposing today’s values on yesterday’s peoples. Themselves morally averse to war, they will not allow that the nineteenth century, and Tennyson in particular, legitimately might have viewed war in more positive terms. . . . We may question the wisdom of the policy but we should not disparage the sense of high purpose which it evoked—at least not if we wish to appreciate the Poet Laureate. The history of literature cannot conform to later political or moral systems.23

A focus on Tennyson’s politics rather than the context of presentation also blinds us to enlightening awarenesses about Tennyson as a Victorian commodity. Tennyson’s poem appears in the 31 January Examiner as an outline of paratextual elements concerning the French threat. A front-page article warns that “Every day adds to the apprehension of danger in the public mind, and anxiety for defence against invasion. There is prevalent one of those instincts of alarm which are more unerring than the calculations of reason. The proposal of volunteer rifle corps is everywhere well received.”24 Later the Examiner asks: But after all, what chance is there of a French army of 40,000 men ever reaching the shores of England and landing safely in a state of efficiency? Three hundred steamers of the first class would hardly convey such a force with its provision of artillery, horses,

21 Tennyson, Letters, II:25. 22 Quoted in Beckett, 11. 23 Michael C. C. Adams, “Tennyson’s Crimean War Poetry: A Cross-Cultural Approach,” Journal of the History of Ideas 40:3 (July-September 1979), 406. 24 “Capabilities of Defence,” The Examiner (31 January 1852), 65.

110

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals stores, and commissariat. France has not got them; and if she had, she could not assemble them without our having abundant notice.25

But the front page article concedes that “We never have been, and are not of the class of alarmists, but we firmly believe that an invasion will be attempted if we encourage it by the absence of all preparation. If we remain like a flock of sheep the butcher will come amongst us to a certainty, and slaughter and fleece us.”26 While the Examiner wishes to present the side of reason, a letter to the editor printed adjacent to Tennyson’s poem relates that he vaguely remembers seeing a statement in The Times or the Examiner from French Assembly member Thiers to the effect that “when M. Louis Bonaparte first went to Paris, and as President consulted him upon public affairs, he spoke of a foreign war as expedient.”27 Confusion about the statement’s source and the paper’s desire for the maintenance of reason gets lost in the possibility that Louis Napoleon has all along been planning a foreign war. The letter directly below suggests that country villages donate their Fire Brigade personnel toward defense and that “The horses used for the fire-engines ought also to be trained artillery horses. In case of alarm, every man and horse would instantly proceed to the central district to await orders, and some officer should be there to take command.”28 The prospect of troops and horses being called up from every village in Britain suggests the degree of panic that excuses Tennyson from any unique characteristics of nationalistic fanaticism. A later section on “The Army and Navy” dutifully reprints a report from the Limerick Chronicle that “10,000 young men could be raised in Ireland in one month for the army,”29 and a “Devonian” writes that if armed in Devon, “twice 5,000 would start up, as at the whistle of Roderick Dhu. Let one county set the example, and the rest would burst to follow it” (73). Further evidence of national interest in grassroots defense appears in a classified ad promoting an upcoming lecture in London on “National defences—an explanatory description of Wilkinson’s stadia, the Prussian musket, the Lancaster and Minie rifles, the improved conical bullet, and fire-arms of the earlier periods” (77). A reader can open the Examiner at any page and see that potential war with France was its hottest commodity. Book publishers were also cashing in on the public mood; the National Illustrated Library announces in a classified ad that in a few days readers can buy The Political Works of Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, “with an Original Memoir of his Life, brought down to the present date, drawn from Authentic Sources, Critical Notes, &c” (79), and one of Bentley’s featured new publications is The Cape and the Kaffirs; or, Notes of a Five Years’ Residence in South Africa, by Alfred W. Cole. 25 Editorial, The Examiner (31 January 1852), 70. 26 “Capabilities,” 66. 27 “M. Bonaparte’s Foreign Policy—To the Editor of the ‘Examiner,’” The Examiner (31 January 1852), 67. 28 “Hints for our Defences—To the Editor of the ‘Examiner,’” The Examiner (31 January 1852), 67. 29 Quoted in “The Army and the Navy. Military Preparations in Ireland,” The Examiner (31 January 1852), 71.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

111

In the next issue, published a week later (7 February 1852), the Examiner features two Tennyson poems, “The Third of February, 1852” and “Hands All Round.” The poems appear as part of the newspaper’s inflamed response to a 3 February House of Lords session, during which Lord Derby scolded the press for helping to create the crisis about France. In his address, reprinted in The Times on 4 February, Derby realistically claims that obsessive focus in the English press on France’s potential for war could cause Napoleon to change his peaceful attitude toward England. He cautions the press that they are not statesmen and warns that “it is incumbent on them, as a sacred duty, to maintain that tone of moderation and respect even in expressing frankly their opinions on foreign affairs.”30 Fired by cheers from his peers, Derby continues: “I say that it is more than imprudent, that it is more than injudicious, that it is more than folly—that it is perfect madness at one and the same time to profess a belief in the hostile intentions of a foreign country, and to parade before them the supposed inability of this country to defend itself (cheers); to magnify the resources of your supposed assailant, and to point out how easy would be the invasion, if not the subjugation of this country (though, thank God, the most violent have not yet spoken of subjugation); but to speak of that invasion, accompanying it with details of the fearful amount of horror and bloodshed which, under any circumstances, must attend it, and then, in the same breath, to assail with every term of obloquy, of vituperation, and abuse, the public and private character of the man who wields that force which you say is irresistible.” (2)

Derby’s comments were viable, but the newspapers, shaped partly by public mood, were not interested in reality. Predictably, the press unleashed its corps of critics in response to Derby’s speech, and the 7 February 1852 edition of the Examiner contained several articles and two of Tennyson’s poems which were carefully constructed to undercut Derby’s position. The page immediately preceding Tennyson’s poem, “The Third of February, 1852,” features an article titled “Parliament and the Press.” While it is not the leading article of the issue, it continues a critique of politics begun there, and its sarcasm sets the tone for Tennyson’s poem: We have read the lessons taught to the press the other night in Parliament upon the subject of prudence. . . . We have been very rude indeed towards M. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. . . . We ought to have seen humbly that he is now a formidable potentate. . . . The end, personal aggrandizement—justified the means, perjury, murder, and pillage. We use these words, be it understood, in a sense strictly courteous and parliamentary; and with extreme respect for the exalted criminal, who by such means may have only meant to appeal to the affections of a sympathising people.31

The writer claims a penitent mood and ironically raises up other papers as “sacred from all official or personal interferences,” naming them as sacred models of virtue. 30 Quoted in “Opening of Parliament. House of Lords, Tuesday, Feb. 3,” The Times (4 February 1852), 2. 31 “Parliament and the Press,” The Examiner (7 February 1852), 83.

112

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

His ironic point, of course, is that all newspapers will interfere if they are worth their print, that the press is not a collection of scandal mongers, and that it will not bow to a scolding from a hypocritical Parliament. Its articles are not meant to be “prudent” or please members of Parliament or Louis Napoleon, but to sell newspapers and represent popular opinion: “We should have thought that the press, conducted as a trade, would trade by supplying articles of the kind most satisfactory to its customers. But it is clear that we are very stupid, or we should more clearly understanding the meaning of the honourable gentleman [Napoleon]” (84). To support its attack on Parliament members, the Examiner reprints articles from other papers, such as this quotation from The Times the day after the debate: Are we to bow to the same censure as that which has destroyed the press of Paris, or are we merely to print these things and abstain from the comment which they invite? Is every action of our own statesmen to remain the subject of the freest and most unfettered criticism, and are we to abstain from offering an opinion on the rulers of foreign countries? Or are we to venture remarks on the conduct of Powers weak or remote, but to be awed into silence when dealing with those nearer or more powerful? (84)

The cry for constitutional liberties continues on the next page with Tennyson’s poem, “The Third of February, 1852,” and the poem sounds much like the editorial banter of previous pages. Tennyson begins with an address to “My Lords,” and recalls the debate. As the poem continues, Tennyson establishes himself with a free press as the “we” of the nation, asserting that “We love not this French God, the child of Hell, / Wild War, who breaks the converse of the wise.”32 The message is that “there is a higher law” than Parliament: freedom of speech for the populace, thus the press. He praises Englishmen of the past who have fought against tyrannical rulers (namely Charles I and James II) and accuses Parliament of weakness: “And you, my Lords, you make the people muse / In doubt if you be of our Barons’ breed—/ Were those your sires who fought at Lewes? / Is this the manly strain of Runnymede? / O fall’n nobility, that, overawed, / Would lisp in honey’d whispers of this monstrous fraud!” (85). Tennyson’s charge implies the moral instability and decline of the nobility as expressed by Mallet-Dupan in the description of French weaknesses printed in the December 1851 Times. Complacency and silence are sins, and Tennyson, with his corps of pressmen, must speak out, in spite of commercial interests claimed by the Manchester industrialists who wish for free trade with France: “We are not cottonspinners all, / But some love England and her honour yet” (85). The poem claims independence from Parliament and industrialist capitalists, reassuring them that the English people will fire up war fever against the French if they please, in spite of being scorned by the Government, for the people must speak, if only to leave a record of freedom should England be snuffed out in a moment. Tennyson plays prophet, calling on England’s noble courageous history and its strong sense of Protestant democratic ideals, while codifying the Examiner’s role as voice for the culture’s 32 Alfred Tennyson, “The Third of February, 1852,” The Examiner (7 February 1852), 85.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

113

cherished values. As Michael C. C. Adams writes, “this is not mere jingoism but the articulation of sincere anxiety about the unhealthy influence of trade on morals, an anxiety shared by many serious men in the capitalist countries.”33 Tennyson fears the moral deterioration within described by Mallet-Dupan, and looks to war as the only alternative to losing Constitutional freedoms threatened by the French, as well as Parliament. Adams further explains: “We have, then, a nation corrupted by selfinterest among businessmen, with an aristocracy which has either been co-opted by the new order or, in peaceful neglect, has allowed its traditional virtues to wither, clinging to a peace which is no peace at all. By contrast the vision of a society purged and rejuvenated by war would be a refreshing one” (415). Publishing a poem in the Examiner or any periodical would be, for Tennyson, an appeal to the middle class in a rejection of the elite, and marketing of such ideology produces purchasing power, exactly what periodicals need to survive. An article adjacent to Tennyson’s poem on page 85 uses a review of The Life and Letters of Barthold George Niebuhr to remind readers of the Volunteer Rifle Movement by affirming that Niebuhr is a “bright example to our friends who fear to look ridiculous in rifle clubs.”34 The reviewer recounts a tale of the German philosopher volunteering his services to the Landwehr to help fight the French in 1813: “Niebuhr’s friends in Holstein could hardly trust their eyes when he wrote them word that he was drilling for the army, and that his wife entered with equal enthusiasm into his feelings . . . she was willing and ready to bring even her most precious treasure as a sacrifice” (85). The review works as propaganda for regular citizens who might be considering the rifle movement and middle-class women, who may be reluctant to support a loss of their men to military action. It also supports both Tennyson’s theme in “The Third of February, 1852” and the Examiner’s editorial position against the French, and Britain’s Parliament. The next page features another Tennyson poem, “Hands All Round,” which appears at the center fold as an addendum to the Niebuhr review continued on that page and another review of The Men of the Time in 1852; or Sketches of Living Notables, an encyclopedic listing of intellectual men of all nationalities and careers. The review quotes the book: “‘We have peerages to tell us about the aristocracy of birth, but none devoted to the aristocracy ‘of talent.’”35 The focus of such a collection in the context of the Examiner and “Hands All Round” elevates Tennyson and a democratic grouping of talented men who nobly retain an earned position in society, rather than an inherited one. The poem is a spirited nationalist anthem that later became a popular drinking song for pub regulars, cited by Walter Savage Landor

33 Adams, 414. 34 Review of The Life and Letters of Barthold George Niebuhr, The Examiner (7 February 1852) 85. 35 Review of The Men of the Time in 1852; or Sketches of Living Notables, The Examiner (7 February 1852), 86.

114

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

as “incomparably the best (convivial) lyric in the language.”36 It rallies the public to drink a toast to freedom, to a strong England, to moral wisdom and courage over greed and commercialism, to “Europe’s honest men” in their fight against tyranny, and to England’s “Gigantic daughter of the West,” the United States, urging her to be true to her British blood and join the fight for England’s freedom: “When war against our freedom springs! / O speak to Europe thro’ your guns! / They can be understood by kings.”37 The Examiner thus weaves a curious web of cultural texts with Tennyson’s poem: page 86 articulates a specifically democratic but conservative ideology commodified for a distinctly middle-class reader through a periodical created for mass distribution, while ironically promoting disdain for capitalistic greed that paradoxically fuels the social ambitions of his middle-class readers. The poem was so popular later in the century that Emily Tennyson set it to music and “the poem was sung all over Great Britain and the Colonies on the Queen’s birthday,” confirming Tennyson’s talent for reading the pulse of national mood and fulfilling his desire that his poems belong to the public.38 Indeed, Tennyson was so pleased with his success with these first three poems that he began a textual conversation with them in the fourth, published in the 14 February 1852 Examiner. “Britons, Guard Your Own” was unsigned, but Tennyson chose the name “Merlin” for “Hands All Round” and “The Third of February, 1852” after Forster suggested adding a name. James Spedding writes to Tennyson that he thinks a name “very desirable; and no great matter what name is chosen so it be short and pronounceable, Alfred, Arthur, Merlin, Tyrtaeus, Edward Ball, Britannicus, Honved, Hylax, anything. Amyntor would sound well, is not hackneyed, and is good Greek for defender or protector.”39 Clearly, Tennyson and his group are enjoying the publicity game, anchoring themselves to middle-class readers who have a grammar or public school education.40 The names intertextualize a heroic past with a call to heroic attitudes in the present crisis and make Tennyson an Everyman prophet. However, Tennyson evidently felt by this time he could also proceed as the “king of bards” and used Taliessin as his pseudonym for the 14 February poem, “Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper.” Taliessin’s address to the editor distances Tennyson another step from the previous issue’s two poems by creating a reader expressing “much interest” in Merlin’s poems: “The enclosed is longer than either of those, and certainly not so good; yet as I flatter myself that it has a smack of Merlin’s style in it, and as I feel that it expresses forcibly enough some of the feelings of our time, perhaps you may be induced to admit it.”41 Here Tennyson is indirectly praising his own poems and style: we have a fictive author commenting on the 36 Quoted in Sir Charles Tennyson, “Tennyson as Poet Laureate,” Writers and their Background: Tennyson, ed. D. J. Palmer (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1973), 215. 37 Alfred Tennyson, “Hands All Round,” The Examiner (7 February 1852), 86. 38 Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, II:265 39 Tennyson, Letters, II:25. 40 Richard Fulton, letter, June 2005. 41 Alfred Tennyson, “Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper,” The Examiner (14 February 1852), 99.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

115

works of another fictive author and publishing a poem about an unnamed article in a newspaper not necessarily the Examiner. Tennyson is building considerable defenses against being known to his public while drawing attention to himself with layers of pseudonyms. The artifice creates a mystifying pretense of yet another public prophet, the king of bards, Taliessen, exercising his paternal role to protect the public from the powers of Merlin and the press. In spite of his tradition of protesting periodical publication, Tennyson has clearly learned how to use their power to proselytize. One can only conclude, once again, that Tennyson’s desire for fame and an outlet for touting his political positions was greater than his revulsion about gaining notoriety by publishing in periodicals. The poem begins by praising the “manly style” of Merlin, inscribing the Examiner with the “public conscience of our noble isle, / Severe and quick to feel a civic sin, / To raise the people and chastise the times / With such a heat as lives in great creative rhymes” (99). This poem seems to be in paradoxical collusion with Parliament in its scolding of the press, here named the “dark Senate of the public pen.” Tennyson cautions them to “Take heed of your wide privileges! we, / The thinking men of England, loathe a tyranny.” He urges the press to “Be loyal, if you wish for wholesome rule” and promote England’s church, her sense of moral right, and her “Godlike Greatness,” rather than “The British Goddess, sleek Respectability.” Controversy within the church threatens its followers to “seel the burthen of their wills / To that half-pagan harlot kept by France,” as they “bicker less for truth than forms. . . . What unheroic pertness! what unchristian spite,” the poet complains. Complacency and greed endanger England’s moral fiber and weakens its youth. “Better wild Mahmoud’s war-cry once again! / O fools, we want a manlike God and Godlike men,” the poet proclaims, as he calls on Merlin and the press “To make opinion warlike, lest we learn / A sharper lesson than we ever knew” and returns to a medieval Crusade for comfort in the unmanly, un-English time of weakness against its foes. He ends the poem with the simple note of warning to “Prepare” (99). Although Tennyson’s admonishment recalls Lord Derby’s speech to Parliament about the irresponsibility of press opinions about France, his message establishes the press as the power that reigns over public opinion, thus over legislation and might of Parliament. By allying itself with a responsible free press, the public can assume its “manly” imperial role. Curiously, an unsigned poem appears later in this issue that also rouses the press to action, “Press and Statesmen— 1852,” addressed to the “Glory of Britain! Truthcompelling Press!”42 This unnamed poet urges the press, “strong in Truth and Right,” to be fearless against the threats of despots [like Napoleon] and not worry about “wringing Statesmen to such sore distress” (102). The poem appears to comment upon Tennyson’s “Hands All Round” from the previous Examiner as it urges the press to take its message “in full trust—athwart the Atlantic wave—/ Of welcome from our Saxon Brethren brave” so that it can accept the challenges of “Heaven’s bolt of rightful war.” Although the poem is unsigned, its poetic patterns and rousing 42 “Press and Statesmen—1852,” The Examiner (14 February 1852), 102.

116

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

spirit sound much like the poetry of Volunteer co-supporter Tupper, a contender for the laureateship only two years before publication of these poems. Just as he was submitting his poems to the Examiner, Tennyson wrote to Tupper on 19 February 1852: “Your verses have a good hearty smack of the right feeling in them and I doubt not have done much good—for my part I have not been wanting to the good cause. . . . Hoping sometime to know you better (tho’ I know much of you thro’ your books).”43 Critics and the public later confused the two when Tennyson’s poem called “The War” (signed “T”) appeared in The Times on 9 May 1859; Derek Hudson notes that “despite Tennyson’s general superiority, there were patriotic occasions on which his lines were scarcely distinguishable from Tupper’s” (192). The suggestion of Tupper’s authorship in the 14 February Examiner connected with Tennyson’s pseudonymous/anonymous poetry multiplies the laureatic role into generic imitation prophets that belong more to the Examiner and its ideology than to the Queen. The remarkable proliferation of war poems during January and February also included “For the Penny-Wise” (Fraser’s Magazine, February 1852) and “The Penny-Wise” (Morning Chronicle, 24 January 1852). The Fraser’s poem provides a now-familiar critique of inadequate military expenditure and preparedness, as Tennyson uses the recently reported Caffre War defeats to suggest that savages are better armed than the British Army troops: “Poor little people, we, / And in the world belated! / Our musket, as it seems, / Is superannuated.”44 His reference to muskets recalls the 15 December Times report on the expense of the Caffre War at the Cape in Africa. Charles Shaw responded to the report in a letter to The Times editor on 3 January 1852, recommending that the Government spend money to equip troops with the newer, better rifles used by the French so that they can end an expensive war. According to Shaw, Frenchmen equipped with these new rifles can hit targets more accurately from greater distances: At the late election of the President of France, on the Boulevards of Paris, one of these new balls entered the forehead of a Socialist Representative the moment he appeared on the barricade with his red flag—in short, disguise it as one may, 500 men so armed are more than a match for any 3,000 men armed with the present British musket. . . . If our 40,000 sportsmen were armed with this weapon, what country would ever dare even to think of invading the British Isles?45

Shaw’s letter translates a colonial defeat into an authoritative call for more military spending at home, and Tennyson’s political poems cooperate with Shaw’s recommendation by shaming Parliament’s penny-pinchers who would deny the soldier his full protection against the true enemy, the French. Shaw’s reference 43 Quoted in Derek Hudson, Martin Tupper: His Rise and Fall (London: Constable, 1949), 911. 44 Alfred Tennyson, “For the Penny-Wise,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 45 (January-June 1852), 224. 45 Charles Shaw, “The Caffre War and Les Tirailleurs de Vincennes. To the Editor of the Times,” The Times (3 January 1852), 7.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

117

to “sportsmen” speaks to men such as Patmore and Tennyson, promoters of the Volunteer Rifle Movement, and validates their need to arm. In support of all these texts, Fraser’s features an unsigned article adjacent to Tennyson’s poem titled “The State and Prospects of England.” After claiming to believe that France represents no present threat to England and asserting that Louis Napoleon’s “hands are too full of constitutions and the still more congenial details of social and political espionage to suffer him to meddle at present with his neighbours,” the author concedes that England should nevertheless be prepared:46 It is possible that the present uneasiness of the population of this country—for it is not the uneasiness of a party, it represents the impression of all parties—may be considerably in advance of impending calamities, in which England cannot be implicated without involving the rest of Europe; but it is not the less ominous and urgent on that account . . . we would rather be right too soon than too late. (226)

After relating recent numbers of England’s military force, “130,000 men, besides 140 regiments of militia . . . some fifty regiments of yeomanry cavalry, and a reserve of 40 or 50,000 out-pensioners and battalions” (229), the author elaborates on the inefficiency of troop training and arms, restating the claims of Shaw and other writers in recent Times reports: “The British army, once the flower of the chivalry of Europe, are beaten at their own weapons by the half-disciplined tribes of Asia and Africa. . . . We have of late years paid great attention to caps and hats, but have left our muskets to shift for themselves” (231). As if this discouraging news does not adequately explain the problem, the author elaborately details possible attack routes for the French and disagrees with an Examiner report that an enemy could not use England’s railways in its attack. He concludes that a landing would be catastrophic and undefendable: “Our reliance is in the patriotism and union of the people; and if war be inevitable, our last word is—not to stand still till it comes, but to anticipate and terminate it in the harbours of the enemy” (244). This 21-page, two-columned article possibly contributed to Lord Derby’s frustrated complaint about the press at the upcoming Parliament session on February 3, just days after Fraser’s appeared for purchase. Tennyson’s poem, “The Penny-Wise,” published in the Morning Chronicle on 24 January 1852, fulfilled Tennyson’s wish that his poetry be made public property; evidence of concurrent publication in the Evening Journal on 24–26 January 1852 and The Leader on 24 January under a different title, “Arm, Arm, Arm!” suggests the popularity of his topic with periodicals who were undoubtedly happy to have free copy. This poem expresses urgent concerns about military spending and readiness contained in other works published during this period, with a note to the editor that performs a function alternate to Taliessen’s distanced commentary on Merlin in “Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper;” here the poet lends authority to the poem by hinting that he is “known well enough in the literary world,” but 46 “The State and Prospects of England,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 45 (January-June 1852), 226.

118

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

chooses to sign himself “A Scorner of the Penny-Wise,” making his dedication to the cause seem more authentic while begging for attention to the writer’s identity. Once again Tennyson is making full use of the promotional value of feigned anonymity. This was the first of the 1852 series of political poems to appear in newspapers, its publication occurring in less than a week after Weld and Ker distributed them. The rhythmical “Arm, arm, arm” suggests the feet of soldiers marching to battle as drums keep the columns in time. The “sleepy Lords of Admiralty” and penny-pinching “brawlers” keep Britons from being prepared to meet the “bloody portent” across the channel: “Through you the land is cheated, / Till by barbarians better-armed / Our greatness is defeated. / The cheapest things are not the best, / The best things are the cheapest,” chants the poet as he calls on volunteers to ignore the anti-war “babbling Peace Societies” who preach demilitarization and decolonization, such as John Bright and Richard Cobden.47 The threat calls upon “big-limbed yeomen” to leave their prosperous land to fight a bigger fight, to save Christianity itself in the “battle of the world.” The French people are “Four hundred thousand slaves in arms” who could bring Britain down at any moment. Martin Farquhar Tupper took credit for originating the Volunteer Rifle Movement; in his autobiographical My Life as an Author, Tupper states: “I may justly claim to have originated that cheap defence of England, at Albury, more than a dozen years before it was thought of anywhere by any one else.”48 In 1852 he published in the Morning Star and Daily News many rifle poems similar to those of Tennyson, including “Arm,” mirroring the rhythmical chant featured in “The Penny-Wise” and under its revised title in the Leader, “Arm, Arm, Arm!” of 24 January.49 The press association of Tupper with Tennyson and the Volunteer Rifle Corps belongs in the 1852 context, but it also reaches forward into 1859, along with another poem written by Tennyson during the earlier period, “The War,” originally titled “Rifle-Clubs!!!” or “Riflemen Form!” A letter to Patmore in mid-January 1852 shows Tennyson caught up in war excitement as he announces the poem, titled at that stage “Rifle-Clubs!!!”: “Very wild but I think too savage! Written in about 2 minutes! The authorship a most deep secret! Mind, Mr. P. Really I think on writing it out it’s enough to make a war of itself. My wife thinks it too insulting to the F. and too inflaming to the English. Better not make a broadsheet of it, say I.”50 The original version was indeed offensive, as the poet implies that the French are “Bearded monkeys of lust and blood / Coming to violate woman and child!”51 However, Tennyson reworked this poem and published a much milder version in The Times on 9 May 1859 in the context of France’s war with Austria which opened 47 Alfred Tennyson, “The Penny-Wise,” The Poems of Tennyson, 2nd edn, ed. Christopher Ricks (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 2:468. 48 Martin Farquhar Tupper, My Life as an Author (London: Sampson Low, 1886), 296. 49 Tennyson was jealous of Tupper’s earnings, confessing to Henry Taylor that, although he was making £2,000 annually, Longfellow “receives three thousand, and he has no doubt that Martin Tupper receives five thousand.” Quoted in Martin, 436. 50 Tennyson, Letters, II:21. 51 Alfred Tennyson, “Rifle-Clubs!!!” Poems, 3:601.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

119

the door for the unification of Italy. Even though French attention was focused on the Italian front, Tennyson saw only danger for England. This poem cautions readers about the “Storm in the South that darkens the day” and tells Parliament: “Let your Reforms for a moment go,” so to “Look to your butts and take good aims. / Better a rotten borough or so, / Than a rotten fleet or a city in flames!”52 Tennyson is exaggerating the solution to meet the inequality he sees with expenditures that focus more on politics than on what he sees as more vital security issues. He is not promoting rotten boroughs, but his inflamed rhetoric points to a larger problem that will subsume any discussion of political reform if the military is neglected and England is invaded. The pulsing rhythms in the refrain “Riflemen, riflemen, riflemen form!” and repeated imperative punctuation evokes a sense of emergency about a threat, but the poem’s title, “The War,” suggests within the context of France’s present war with Austria that it will be about that conflict, rather than about the threat of French invasion of England. Britain was again intimidated by military buildups of Louis Napoleon, who had narrowly escaped Italian refugee Orsini’s bomb plot on 14 January 1858; Parliament had finally agreed in January 1859 to supply the Navy with battle ships, including two ironclads, to compete with the French, who never had naval superiority to the British, but they may have had more iron-clad ships. Tennyson writes to the Duke of Argyll on 18 July 1859: “Will no one put that second sight-seen bullet into Louis Napoleon’s forehead before he gets to London?”53 Tennyson appealed to Americans for help, as we see in Mrs. James T. Fields’s travel diary on 14 July: “Napoleon haunts his thoughts. He believes him about to attack England. Will America help us? He cries—we are but 50,000 against 600,000.”54 Again the press appears to have been partly responsible for public fears, based on England’s refusal to keep a large standing army. According to Ian F. W. Beckett: “A survey of ‘war-scare’ articles in the Saturday Review reveals that there was a total of 15 such articles in 1858, 47 in 1859, 44 in 1860, 33 in 1861 and still as many as 25 in 1862. Napoleon III still appeared the embodiment of militarism.”55 As a response to public opinion, Parliament authorized the official organization of the Volunteer Rifle Corps on 12 May 1859, just three days after Tennyson’s poem appeared in The Times, as well as in many other papers, according to Charles Weld.56 By 1860, Alexander Macmillan was writing to A. A. Vansittart (14 April): The Volunteer movement is the thing that occupies most space in the public mind here. Drilling and parade constantly going on. We had a grand display of the whole force— numbering over 500 men—in King’s the other day. It appeared to me that they were as likely to stand bullet or bayonet as any 500 men that could be found anywhere. This rifle

52 53 54 55 56

Alfred Tennyson, “The War,” The Times (9 May 1859), 10. Tennyson, Letters, II:236. Quoted in Tennyson, Letters, II:236n. Beckett, 32. Tennyson, Letters, II:223n.

120

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals Volunteer movement is a piece of serious earnest in the country whether it be ever needed or not. I hope it never will—for I am one myself!57

The Government was finally catching up with Tennyson and his public in their advocacy of the Volunteer Rifle Corps. Yet the poem that encapsulated its mission appears at the end of a spate of war coverage interspersed with stock exchange rates, Parliament member counts, and weather reports. Tennyson’s war poem is visually embraced by market news from Australia, a letter to the editor recounting heroic deeds of General Walpole during the recent mutiny in India, and listings of notables recently presented to the Queen. The placement suggests that this war poem is less interesting to the Times as a sensational item, demonstrating a difference between the Times and the Examiner. As a weekly paper, the Examiner could more purposefully explore current events as political issues and feature articles, whereas the daily Times placed news as received, in bulletin-style. The confusion of textual codes relating to the poem title and its suggested meaning, the placement of the Times page, the revised milder version of the original poem, and the time distance of seven years (that included such significant watershed events as the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny) creates a sense that this poem stands outside its sensational moment, stranded in a future with the Volunteer Rifle Corps in 1859, by then a movement so much in demand that Parliament officially enabled provincial corps to begin practicing with their brigades. Beckett asserts that “It is clear that Peel and his colleagues did not fear invasion and indeed he later claimed that the acceptance of the Volunteers was solely in response to popular opinion;”58 nevertheless, Tennyson and his followers did feel threatened, and his poem, however textually marginalized in the Times, touched a nervous strain in his readers that remained volatile in 1859. Whether or not Parliament officials concurred, the British public had much reason to feel threatened at any time during the Victorian era. According to Byron Falwell: There was not a single year in Queen Victoria’s long reign in which somewhere in the world her soldiers were not fighting for her and for her empire. From 1837 until 1901, in Asia, Africa, Arabia and elsewhere, British troops were engaging in almost constant combat. It was the price of empire, of world leadership, and of national pride—and it was paid, usually without qualms or regrets or very much thought. . . . It was in the Victorian era that continual warfare became an accepted way of life—and in the process the size of the British Empire quadrupled.59

The newspapers were guilty of whipping up war fever about France, but the presence of military conflict everywhere in their columns was sure to produce anxiety about national security, making Tennyson’s political poems seem appropriate expressions

57 Quoted in Charles L. Graves, Life and Letters of Alexander Macmillan (London: Macmillan, 1910), 152. 58 Beckett, 20. 59 There were over 200 conflicts during this period. See Byron Falwell, Queen Victoria’s Little Wars (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 1.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

121

of public opinion, rather than an individual’s jingoistic ranting as some critics might wish to portray it. In 1854, the enemy was Russia, and Tennyson could hear the cannons practicing for the Crimean War at their house. Emily “vowed that the first songs she would teach her sons would be patriotic ones, and the mood of the house may be judged by little Hallam’s war games in which he would roll on the floor and say, ‘This is the way the Russians fall when they are killed.’”60 On 27 March 1854, Britain declared war on Russia in an attempt to halt Russian designs on perennially weakening Turkey. France, with its own interests in the Ottoman Empire, served in an unlikely position as Britain’s ally, with Turkey and Sardinia. The brief, but bloody Crimean War is largely the history of a siege at the Russian fortress of Sebastopol on the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea. After initial battles at Alma, Balaclava and Inkerman in 1854, troops on both sides settled into a miserable winter in the Crimea. According to Falwell, “The siege itself followed the pattern of all sieges: there were trenches, redoubts, masked batteries, attacks, counterattacks, and a considerable amount of boredom, sickness and uncomfortable living. Before the winter was over, a great many soldiers froze to death or died of neglect, being given neither sufficient food nor adequate clothing.”61 The cavalry had strikingly beautiful uniforms, but they were ill-trained and ill-equipped for war. A bureaucratic tangle separated all services to the war; food, medical needs, fortifications, equipment, and administration were all under separate departments of the government. But the worst element of mismanagement came from the officers themselves, who were not professionally oriented, according to Falwell: “The few officers who took a professional interest in the arts and sciences of war were regarded as slightly eccentric. Only a few had any conception of, or interest in, logistics or administration of any kind. Most did not even know how to give a clear order or to execute any order not in the drill books” (71). Cecil Woodham-Smith further explains: The cavalry have always regarded themselves as socially superior to the remainder of the British Army. They have been the most expensive arm of the service, the most aristocratic, and the most magnificent. Exempted from the more irksome duties of war, marches, gradual encirclements, retreats fought painfully inch by inch, and reserved for brilliant feats of arms, they have preserved the primitive pride of the horseman riding while other men trudge in the dust.62

Officers mismanaged the war at every stage, and no one on either side could claim a successful outcome by the end of the war in September, 1855, except Florence Nightingale, who revolutionized notions of hospitals, health care, and nursing, and Alfred Tennyson, whose poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” poignantly memorialized the soldier’s martyrdom to arrogant, aristocratic blundering. 60 Martin, 381. 61 Falwell, 68. 62 Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Reason Why, 1953. (Alexandria VA: Time-Life Books, 1977), 147.

122

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Historians chronicle the complicated series of events leading up to what Falwell calls the “brave, stupid charge” of the Light Cavalry Brigade on that day, and my purpose here is not to set forth another historical account, nor to re-evaluate the poem’s complicated revisions and publication history, but to extend our understanding of Tennyson’s original poem as printed in the Examiner and contextualized with other periodicals. As Jerome McGann shows, the poem was a response to a question in the Times on 14 November 1854: “What is the meaning of a spectacle so strange, so terrific, so disastrous, and yet so grand?”63 McGann states that “The press reports themselves were to work out their explanations, and these had a profound influence on Tennyson’s poem. . . . But the press influence reached Tennyson, first, in the request for an explanation, the demand for a meaning” (240). However, Tennyson’s poem does not necessarily signify as a “patently aristocratic poem,” as McGann suggests. When read in context with middle-class Victorian periodicals, it becomes a commentary on the inadequacy of such ideological frames (245). While McGann’s reading of Tennyson shows the poem with an “ideological focus” that only seems to cross class lines, another reading of the poem as it appears in the Examiner maintains another ideological focus: that of the mass readership that controls the periodical’s livelihood, a distinctly middle-class text. The central point of fact is the order from Lord Raglan64 carried by Captain Nolan to Lord Lucan: “Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front—follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns. Troop horse Artillery may accompany. French cavalry is on your left. Immediate. (Sgd.) R.Airey.”65 However, the man responsible for clarifying the meaning of the order died soon after delivery, aide-de-camp Captain Nolan, who was a hotheaded, impatient cavalry expert frustrated at Lord Lucan for a blunder he felt kept the cavalry from attaining an important advantage over the Russians earlier in the day. According to Cecil Woodham-Smith, when Nolan first read the order, he “was almost off his head with excitement and impatience, and he misread it. He leapt to the joyful conclusion that at last vengeance was to be taken on those Russians who had been suffered to escape” (252-253). To complicate the situation, Lord Lucan was resentful at Lord Raglan: “The orders he had received during the battle had been, in his opinion, not only idiotic and ambiguous, but insulting. He had been treated, he wrote later, like a subaltern. . . . Throughout the campaign he had had bitter experience of orders from Lord Raglan” (253). Now Lucan was receiving more ambiguous orders, and he did not understand that he was being ordered to attack the Causeway Heights toward the south and recover guns that had been captured there by the enemy. He could see neither guns nor enemy but felt certain that Lord Raglan could not mean that Russian artillery located about a mile and a quarter down, at the end of the North Valley, 63 Quoted in McGann, 240. 64 I thank my colleague Kenneth Margerison for reminding me of the small, but not unimportant, fact that Lord Raglan is credited with inventing the raglan sleeve used on sweaters. 65 Quoted in Woodham-Smith, 248.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

123

should be attacked by British cavalry, for that would be certain death. Angry and impatient with Nolan’s insubordinate attitude, Lucan turned and asked, “Attack, sir? Attack what? What guns, sir?”66 Woodham-Smith describes the moment: Nolan threw back his head, and, ‘in a most disrespectful and significant manner,’ flung out his arm and, with a furious gesture, pointed, not to the Causeway Heights and the redoubts with the captured British guns, but to the end of the North Valley, where the Russian cavalry routed by the Heavy Brigade were now established with their guns in front of them. ‘There, my lord, is your enemy, there are your guns,’ he said, and with those words and that gesture the doom of the Light Brigade was sealed. . . . What did Nolan mean? It has been maintained that his gesture was merely a taunt, that he had no intention of indicating any direction, and that Lord Lucan, carried away by rage, read a meaning into his outflung arm which was never there. (252)

Unfortunately, Lord Lucan obeyed the order, and half the cavalry troops assigned to the Crimea charged the wrong way, directly into the face of Russian artillery. The result: “Some 700 horsemen had charged down the valley, and 195 had returned. The 17th Lancers were reduced to thirty-seven troopers, the 13th Light Dragoon could muster only two officers and eight mounted men; 500 horses had been killed” (272). As with all historical accounts, the preceding description of events from Cecil Woodham-Smith’s 1953 history of the Crimean War, comes to us under the influence of her moment in history, contemporary newspaper reports, and seemingly reliable official dispatches from actual participants in the military action published in 1854, and the reader’s assorted twentieth-century memories of politics and war. History and fiction often mingle, however diligent we are about documenting facts. Art can be far less earnest in its documentation, yet be more truthful because it represents imaginative interpretations of contexts that are “time and place specific.”67 Thus we must consider Tennyson’s poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” in context with newspaper reports from William Howard Russell in his role as Times war correspondent in the world’s first modern media war, as well as our own bitter memory of military blunders, and sensational reports rapidly transmitted on media outlets such as CNN. With the invention of the telegraph, Russell could dispatch news from the battlefront for publication in the next day’s paper. Tom Standage refers to the telegraph as the “Victorian Internet,” a crucial factor in heightened public awarenesses about the Crimean War: “The telegraph had annihilated the distance between the soldiers at the front and the readers back home, and between the government and its generals. . . . Suddenly the world had shrunk.”68 Standage adds that it was Russell’s reports that “highlighted the lack of proper medical support (which led to a public appeal that funded Florence Nightingale’s mercy mission)” (157). It was Russell’s reports 66 Ibid., 252. 67 McGann, 250. 68 Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers. 1998. (New York: Berkley Books, 1999), 157.

124

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

that shaped public opinion about the poor management of the troops, and it was Russell’s reports that inspired Tennyson’s poem with a phrase in his 13 November 1854 Times article about the tragic charge of the Light Brigade: “Causeless and fruitless, it stands by itself, as a grand heroic deed, surpassing even that spectacle of a shipwrecked regiment, settling down into the waves, each man still in his rank. The British soldier will do his duty, even to certain death, and is not paralyzed by feeling that he is the victim of some hideous blunder.”69 Even the courageous charge at the Battle of Alma can’t compare with “the progress of the cavalry through and through that valley of death, with a murderous fire, not only in front, but on both sides, above, and even in the rear. It would seem as if the lesson had already been read by the foe” (6). Russell’s emotional reportage sympathizes with the common soldier in this tragic mistake: Had there been the smallest use in the movement that has cost us so much,—had it been the necessity of a retreat or part of any plan whatever, we should endeavour to bear this sad loss as we do the heaps of human life lavished in an assault. Even accident would have made it more tolerable. But it was a mere mistake—evidently a mistake, and perceived to be such when it was too late to correct it. The affair then assumed the terrible form of a splendid self-sacrifice. (6)

Russell places the reader at his observation post above the valley, along with “Two great armies, composed of four nations,” that “saw from the slopes of a vast amphitheatre seven hundred British cavalry proceed at a rapid pace, and in perfect order, to certain destruction. Such a spectacle was never seen before, and we trust will never be repeated” (6). The description begins to sound like historical fiction, a serial the newspaper is carrying, or a romanticized historical account from the past: The whole brigade advanced at a trot for more than a mile, down a valley, with a murderous flank fire of Minié muskets and shells from hills on both sides. It charged batteries, took guns, sabred the gunners, and charged the Russian cavalry beyond; but, not being supported,—and, under the circumstances, perhaps it is fortunate it was not,—and being attacked by cavalry in front and rear, it had to cut its way through them, and return through the same cavalry and the same fire. The brigade was simply pounded by the shot, shell, and Minié bullets from the hills. (6).

In this day’s report, Russell does not assign blame for the charge but patriotically hopes that, no matter how events may suggest otherwise, the war will be won soon. The second edition of 13 November’s Times, reprinted on 14 November gives Russell all six columns and part of the next page to extend his dramatic account, available to Tennyson’s creative imagination. Again he takes the reader to the battle as a spectator and describes the scene from the bird’s-eye view of Balaklava, “with its scanty shipping, its narrow strip of water, and its old forts.”70 He describes 69 “London, Monday, November 13, 1854,” The Times (13 November 1854), 6. 70 “The War in the Crimea. The Operations of the Siege,” The Times (14 November 1854), 7.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

125

the cavalry tents, the French trenches, the mountain range “of most irregular and picturesque formation, covered with scanty brushwood here and there, or rising into barren pinnacles and plateaux of rock.” After setting the scene, he relates the entire day’s events in fictional style: “Never did the painter’s eye rest on a more beautiful scene than I beheld from the ridge. The fleecy vapour still hung around the mountain tops, and mingled with the ascending volumes of smoke; the patch of sea sparkled freshly in the rays of the morning sun, but its light was eclipsed by the flashes which gleamed from the masses of armed men below” (7). Such accounting shows Russell’s eloquent journalistic style, but it also captivated the British public imagination as it did Tennyson’s; a 14 November editorial exclaims that Russell’s descriptions of the “bloody tournament” leave visual pictures “that we are confident will never leave the memory of the least retentive reader,”71 and the writer begins to replicate Russell’s fictional mythology: “There is something in the pomp and solemnity of this fatal exploit which takes it out of ordinary war, and makes it a grand national sacrifice. The Roman citizen hardly rode more gallantly, more deliberately, into the fabled gulf in the Forum than those devoted six hundred rushed to the place of their glorious doom” (6). The brigade becomes an entity with a role outside that of soldiers following orders, noting that “they went with their eyes open, as if under a spell” (6). The sensibility evoked in these Times articles, printed in the same issue as Russell’s romantic reportage, is that of a mystical, supernatural intervention elevating the cavalry troops to heroic status. Such reports influenced readers who were far less fortunate than Tennyson in their artistic ability to articulate responses to emotive media appeals. In this context, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” becomes an artistic outgrowth of a media blitz. Yet Tennyson was consuming more than the Times reports for his poem. A reporter in the Examiner on 18 November surely lent more phrases; “The Political Examiner” is caught up as one of Russell’s observers on the hill overlooking the valley and writes: “The division was marshalled for its fate in two lines, led by Lord Cardigan, and they went to their work to do and die. Well may be imagined the feelings with which this extraordinary movement was witnessed by the two hosts.”72 Similar phrases occur in the lines “Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die,” appearing in the third stanza of Tennyson’s poem, just after the Russell-influenced observation that “Some one had blunder’d.”73 In the Times version of Tennyson’s charge, the only concern for the present purpose, this is the second appearance of the word “blunder’d,” its first occasion attached to Captain Nolan in implication of blame. The second stanza reads, “Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred, / For up came an order which / Some one had blunder’d. / ‘Forward the Light Brigade! / ‘Take the guns,’ Nolan said: / Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred” (780). Nolan is giving the command, rather than the officer in 71 “Small consolation it is,” The Times (14 November 1854), 6. 72 “The Affair of the Twenty-Fifth,” The Examiner (18 November 1854), 729. 73 Alfred Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” The Examiner (9 December 1854), 780.

126

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

charge, Lord Lucan. He is not reading the written order from Lord Raglan. Someone had blundered the order, and it was Nolan. The Times prints dispatches from Lords Lucan and Raglan on 13 November, and their official accounts of the charge present the day in general terms of heroism and loss that minimize the “blunder.” Lord Raglan’s report reads: “From some misconception of the instruction to advance, the Lieutenant-General considered that he was bound to attack at all hazards, and he accordingly ordered Major-General the Earl of Cardigan to move forward with the Light Brigade.”74 Lord Lucan reports that his cavalry brigade “made a most triumphant charge against a very superior number of the enemy’s cavalry, and an attack upon batteries which, for daring and gallantry, could not be exceeded. The loss, however, in officers, men and horses, has been most severe” (7). Russell’s 13 November second edition article stops short of assigning blame. A letter printed by the Examiner (18 November), written to the father of a survivor of the charge, attempts to set the record straight: ‘What baffles the understanding is, in what respect Captain Nolan, whose position was merely that of aide-de-camp, should thus have proved the unwitting instrument of the light brigade’s destruction. Before entering into so fearful a contest, the Earl of Lucan would have naturally awaited written instructions from the Commander-in-Chief. Either he received these from Lord Raglan (in which case his lordship would risk losing his wellearned reputation for prudence and caution) or he undertook the responsibility of the act himself. If, as it is said, the noble earl was influenced either by the petulance or the eager spirit of Captain Nolan, he was to blame, for a commanding officer is supposed to possess sufficient self-command and certain discretionary powers.’75

The charge is clearly being interpreted in these press reports as a critical loss of control within the Army ranks, and the average soldier, even if he is a member of the exclusive British cavalry, is a victim to the petty personal politics of those in charge. Undoubtedly, this is why soldiers were chanting Tennyson’s ballad in Sebastopol and why Tennyson ordered copies to be distributed there. They recognized that this is not a jingoistic call to war, but a desperate, tragic call to examine military organization and procedure, a subject the soldiers knew firsthand. Tennyson’s poem appears as natural addendum to war news in the 9 December issue of the Examiner. Edgar F. Shannon and Christopher Ricks provide an excellent, important record of revisions for this poem, and they are important to this study in that they confirm Tennyson’s initial emotional inspiration; after making changes to tone down the poem, Tennyson reverted to the Examiner version for 2000 quarto pamphlets of the poem later printed for distribution to soldiers at Sebastopol in August, 1855, after the revised version appeared in volume format with Maud.76 John Forster wrote to Tennyson upon publication of “The Charge of the Light 74 “The Attack on Balaklava,” The Times (13 November 1854), 7. 75 Quoted in “The Missing Dispatch,” The Examiner (18 November 1854), 736. 76 See Edgar Shannon and Christopher Ricks, “‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’: The Creation of a Poem,” Studies in Bibliography 38 (1985): 1-44.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

127

Brigade” in the Examiner: “. . . never, with a throbbing heart, have [I] read of those fights of heroes at Alma, Balaklava, and Inkermann, that I have not been eager for you to celebrate them—the only man that can do it up to their own pitch—the only ‘must of fire’ now left to us that can of right ascend to the level of such deeds.”77 The phrase “their own pitch” indicates more than the pitch of battle; it also connotes the pitch of media coverage that engulfs readerly imagination in these reports. Tennyson picks up on the emotional appeals, the language, the phrasing, and the energy of the news reports, even the implication of Nolan’s role. When his poem appears in the periodical, Tennyson then also becomes a cooperative part of the message, encapsulating the moment for his mass public with a very personal, immediate response. Nevertheless, the poem created controversy, according to June Steffensen Hagen, with “some readers complaining of the poem’s statement and others ridiculing its rhymes and meter. Such a reaction depressed Alfred, who was already upset over the course of the war.”78 An American critic writing in Graham’s Magazine (March 1855) wrote: “It is to be remarked that the British poet Laureate can find nothing to celebrate so much as a bloody blunder—an insane and ghastly charge proving the disgraceful generalship of the British leaders! British poetry can find no genuine inspiration in the war movement itself, a movement in which England is governed by imbecile councils and leagued with despots.”79 As Richard Fulton notes, such critics “are getting past the abstract glamour and heroism in Tennyson’s account and focusing on the reality of death and destruction. These two opposites (reality vs. glory) provide constant tension in the accounts of battle, in the 19th century and in virtually all other times.”80 Tennyson was concerned about the lack of military training, supplies, and support from a country whose overweening imperialistic ideology extends beyond its resources to protect its own citizens and soldiers at home and abroad. When they cry for more protection, the government fails to provide it and men die. This self-sacrifice is the mysterious cause for celebration in “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” not the blunder itself. Unfortunately, the Crimean War did little to stabilize the Balkans or enhance French and British interests in the Ottoman Empire, and Parliamentary debates continued to focus on military concerns abroad. During the 1870s, Tennyson’s sole outlet for political poems was The Nineteenth Century, a monthly review begun by Tennyson’s friend and the architect of his new estate at Aldworth, James Knowles. The Nineteenth Century was an intellectual forum for discussion of theological and political issues concerning Society members. Tennyson named the periodical, whose title Punch quickly satirized on 3 March 1877: “When we read in the Athenaeum that it was the Poet Laureate who gave Mr. Knowles the title of his new periodical . . . one can’t help remembering how the 77 Quoted in Shannon and Ricks, 5. 78 June Steffensen Hagen, Tennyson and His Publishers (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1979), 92. 79 “Editor’s Table,” Graham’s Magazine 46 (March 1855), 276. 80 Richard Fulton, letter, June 2005.

128

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Poet Laureate has characterised that century, in Maud, as ‘the wretchedest age since the world began.’”81 Tennyson wrote a special prefatory sonnet for the first issue in March, 1877 and contributed twelve poems during the 1870s and 1880s. This first issue was stocked with articles from Metaphysical Society members; Alan Willard Brown notes that non-members wrote only three of 11 articles in this first issue and less than half for the first six months of the periodical’s history.82 Tennyson and Knowles were charter members of the Society, founded by Knowles on 21 April 1869 with the purpose of exploring religious and philosophical questions that engaged the implications of positivism and agnosticism. A list of its members provides an artifact of mid-Victorian culture that demonstrates the powerful male intellectual community controlling Britain during the nineteenth century, and for whom Tennyson served as poetical spokesman. Celebrity members included members of Parliament, university deans, historians, theologians, physicians, scientists, political thinkers, bankers, scholars, philosophers, educators, essayists, and mathematicians. Many of its members were journalists, such as W. B. Ward, editor of the Catholic quarterly, the Dublin Review; Fraser’s editor James Froude; Spectator co-editor Richard Hutton; Macmillan’s editor George Grove; Walter Bagehot, literary critic and editor of the Economist; and Fortnightly Review editor John Morley. Other members included Thomas Henry Huxley; William E. Gladstone; Cardinal Manning; the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol; John Ruskin; the Duke of Argyll; essayist W. R. Greg; Leslie Stephen; and many others, until the organization disbanded in 1880. Such a bonding of representative Victorian thinkers encodes our understanding of Tennyson’s political poetry as it appeared in the pages of the Nineteenth Century. In this sense, Tennyson becomes less a poet with political opinions and more a poetic mouthpiece for upper middle-class ideology. Tennyson’s poem, “Montenegro,” published in the May, 1877 issue of the Nineteenth Century, was inspired by William Gladstone’s campaign to alert the public about Turkish atrocities committed against Bulgaria, first reported in the Daily News in June, 1876. With Serbia, Montenegro supported insurgents in the Ottoman Bosnia-Herzegovina and declared war on Turkey in 1876, with Russia as its main backup. Gladstone published a pamphlet in 1876 titled Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, detailing atrocities as reported in the Daily News article, and used “the platform of the Nineteenth Century on the Eastern Question seven times in the next two years,” according to Priscilla Metcalf.83 Knowles was proud of his role in influencing readers toward Gladstone’s views, and for “having to some extent been instrumental in causing it to be written. . . . At any rate, now people will not be able to say that the Liberals have no clear chart to sail by in Foreign

81 Quoted in Priscilla Metcalf, James Knowles: Victorian Editor and Architect (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 276. 82 Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis, 18691880 (New York: Columbia UP, 1947), 187. 83 Metcalf, 282.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

129

Policy.”84 The conflict translates into a familiar battle of ideologies reaching back to the Crusades and before, in the continuing war between Christian and Muslim in the Balkans. Tennyson, predictably, supported the Orthodox Christian Montenegro, a tiny mountainous country of about 196,000 people, extending to about 70 miles wide at its farthest points, 20 miles of this positioned along a border with Turkey. Vesna Goldsworthy writes that Tennyson’s poem is a response to W. E. Gladstone’s “call to assume the role of Montenegro’s Byron” in an attempt to win sympathy for the uprisings in this part of the Ottoman Empire: This was perhaps the first foreign policy issue of a type which was to become much more prevalent in the twentieth century, provoking public debate in a way which presaged later generations’ arguments about, say, the Spanish Civil War, Vietnam, or, indeed, Bosnia. With no vital British interests at stake (at least until the Russian army approached Constantinople in 1878), public attitudes were shaped by pressure groups, foreign correspondents and newspaper columnists. Individual positions were conditioned by attitudes towards the Great Powers involved—the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary and Russia—along with the concerns about the rights of the Christian population of the Balkans.85

Tennyson participated in provoking public debate about the Balkans by responding to Gladstone’s appeal and publishing “Montenegro,” which appeared to readers in the May issue of the Nineteenth Century just as Gladstone delivered a rousing speech to Parliament promoting action in the Balkans. The unique pairing of Gladstone the Liberal with traditionally Conservative Tennyson shows the poet choosing a political position largely through the influence of a friend and becoming a unit of organized political propaganda in the periodical. “Montenegro” appears in the Nineteenth Century as a pre-text to Gladstone’s historical sketch published on the next page, but Gladstone claims in his article that his sketch is meant to serve as a “commentary” to Tennyson’s text, and hopes “that an interpreter between Montenegro and the world has at length been found in the person of my friend Mr. Tennyson.”86 Yet the impetus for political concern and the inspirational portrayal of the Montenegrins comes from Gladstone; as Patrick Waddington notes, “The poet was in effect now following Gladstone’s lead, since to support Montenegro was to support Bulgaria and—by implication—Panslavism as well. The fact that Panslavism meant in practice Russian domination was, however, of little immediate consequence to Tennyson.”87 Here Tennyson is merely the artistic expression of a campaign by Gladstone, whose sketch portrays the people 84 Quoted in Metcalf, 282. 85 Vesna Goldsworthy, “Tennyson and Montenegro,” Tennyson Research Bulletin 7:1 (1997), 8. 86 William E. Gladstone, “Montenegro: A Sketch,” The Nineteenth Century (May 1877), 360. 87 Patrick Waddington, From The Russian Fugitive to The Ballad of Bulgarie: Episodes in English Literary Attitudes to Russia from Wordsworth to Swinburne (Oxford/Providence: Berg, 1994), 105.

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

130

of Montenegro as courageous, civilized mountain folk with a long history of martial heroism that parallels a long history of Turkish aggression recently demonstrated in violent oppression in Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Albania. Yet the Montenegrins courageously held out against the Turks and refused to let go of their Christian freedom: “To the Koran or to slavery they preferred a life of cold, want, hardship, and perpetual peril. Such is their Magna Charta; and, without reproach to others, it is, as far as I know, the noblest in the world.”88 Gladstone shows the Montenegrins intellectually comparable to other western nations, because their leaders carried the printing press into the mountains and used it to print laws: Again, it was only seven years after the earliest volume had been printed by Caxton in the rich and populous metropolis of England; and when there was no printing-press in Oxford, or in Cambridge, or in Edinburgh. It was only sixteen years after the first printingpress had been established (1468) in Rome, the capital of Christendom: only twenty-eight years after the appearance (1456) of the earliest printing book, the first-born of the great discovery. (362)

Montenegro is thus a Renaissance miracle, hidden in the treacherous Black Mountain region north of Turkey, fighting for ancient freedoms and Christianity. Yet “history proves it to have been the general rule not to attack Montenegro except with armies equalling or exceeding, sometimes doubling, or more, in numbers, all the men, women, and children that it contained” (367). Gladstone provides several anecdotes of courage in Montenegro’s history and pleads to his readers through these details to sympathize with this noble country, whose women are as courageous as its men. Tennyson’s sonnet artistically summarizes Gladstone’s portrayal of Christian freedom in Montenegro. According to Goldsworthy, “Tennyson offered what is basically a Romantic vision of the Balkan world . . . depicted as an impassable mountain kingdom populated by invincible heroes. Byron used similar images in his descriptions of the mountain people of neighboring Albania in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.”89 Her comment reminds us of Gladstone’s call for “Montenegro’s Byron,” a call Tennyson eagerly answered with this sonnet. The Montenegrins “kept their faith, their freedom, on the height, / Chaste, frugal, savage, arm’d by day and night / Against the Turk.”90 They are the “smallest among peoples,” whose warriors have been “beating back the swarm / Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years,” in defense of Montenegrin (and British) values. Goldsworthy calls Tennyson’s sonnet and Gladstone’s sketch “the crowning point of Gladstone’s Montenegrin campaign.”91 Such a campaign promotes Christian ideals and calls for the British rescue of starving, oppressed Montenegrins, isolated and alone in a battle for western values against the Infidel. While not the traditional intellectual investigation of agnosticism and science usually confronted by Metaphysical Society members, 88 89 90 91

Gladstone, 362. Goldsworthy, 10. Alfred Tennyson, “Montenegro,” The Nineteenth Century (May 1877), 359. Goldsworthy, 9.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

131

the sketch and the sonnet about Montenegro revives a familiar medieval conflict that calls for traditional heroic values, a Tennyson specialty. The March 1878 publication of “‘The Revenge,’ A Ballad of the Fleet” in the Nineteenth Century provides another example of Tennyson using textual representations of an event reported in a periodical as inspiration for his own text, while the resulting poem’s meaning then gets reconstituted upon publication in another periodical. The texts are interdependent and freely multiply meaning that is out of Tennyson’s awareness or control. The germ of the poem began after a reading of J. A. Froude’s article, “England’s Forgotten Worthies,” published in the Westminster Review of July, 1852. Froude’s article and Tennyson’s poem demonstrate Walter Houghton’s observation about Victorian hero worship: “In the fifties the national heroes came out of the Crimea; and presently—for this Protestant, commercial, and naval country—became the great Elizabethans.”92 However, Tennyson did not begin writing until 9 March 1873 and did not complete the poem until 1877 when he received more information about the historical event. Marshall places “The Revenge” in context with Tennyson’s 1850s political poems, but the March 1878 issue of the Nineteenth Century juxtaposes Tennyson’s poem with General Sir Garnet Wolseley’s 24-page article, “England as a Military Power in 1854 and in 1878,” creating a curious time warp between Tennyson’s 1850s political ideology and discussions of military power in the late 1870s. In terms similar to Tennyson’s in the 1850s poems, Wolseley demonstrates an urgent call for support of the British Army and Navy: “We never tire in advertising ourselves as an eminently practical people; as individuals or as commercial companies we insure our lives, our ships, our houses, &c., against various risks, but as a nation we take no trouble to insure our empire against disasters of the most serious nature.”93 Wolseley assures his readers that the homeland is safe compared to former years: When I compare the military strength of England now with what it was in 1854, I am as amazed at the condition of military weakness and helplessness in which we were when we began the Russian war of that year, as I am at the ignorance of those who are now to be heard croaking over our supposed want of strength and our alleged consequent inability to fight. (455)

Yet Wolseley’s article warns that Britain must build up the Navy to protect imperial interests abroad and relates examples of military weakness from the last twenty years. He asks, “Why is it that England is never ready for war, nor possesses the machinery by means of which she can expand her military peace establishments into a condition for active service? It is a proverbial saying that we are never fit for anything in the first campaign” (437). The Crimean War provides a central example of inefficiency and unpreparedness in Wolseley’s account. While England is strong enough to 92 Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1957), 324. 93 G. I. Wolseley, “England as a Military Power in 1854 and in 1878,” The Nineteenth Century (March 1878), 433.

132

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

defend itself at home, it needs substantial military growth to be able to initiate a war, something that “if the warlike spirit of the people be aroused in earnest we all know that Her Majesty will never want soldiers to fight for the honour and welfare of her kingdom” (456). In other words, England has many men who will fight a war if they feel warlike, comforting words to a nervous public needing heroes. Wolseley calls on Shakespeare for his closing, with a comparison of Victorian England to the England of Henry V: “A great empire has been built up for us by the military achievements of our forefathers. I for my part trust we may be able now and always to address them after the manner of Prince Hal: ‘You won it, ruled it, kept it, gave it us, Then plain and right must our possession be: Which we with more than with a common pain ‘Gainst all the world will rightfully maintain.’” (456)

If readers remembered Tennyson’s political warnings in poems of the 1850s, they may have felt comforted in concluding that he was justified, after reading Wolseley’s article. Peter Burroughs confirms that mid-Victorian naval policy involved “redistribution haphazardly driven by economy at home and circumstances abroad. . . . The full impact of retrenchment and the reappraisal of commitments were delayed until the 1860s,” but Gladstone worked to slash defense spending after about 1862. Burroughs records that “In the decade after 1865 the number of ships serving on non-European stations fell by 40 percent and manpower was halved to 11,000. Naval estimates decreased by a quarter to under £10m, the largest savings under all heads of public expenditure, and the total establishment was cut from 47,000 to 34,000 men. Broadly speaking, this pattern of naval policy prevailed until the mid-1880s.”94 The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 increased British anxieties and the resultant demand for military defense. An indication of anti-Russian fever during this crisis was the wild popularity, at least with the middle classes, of a London music hall song that first popularized the term “Jingo.” G. H. Macdermott’s song “We Don’t Want to Fight” chanted the following lines: We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do, We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, We’ve got the money too. We’ve fought the Bear before, and While Britons still are true The Russians shall not have Constantinople.95

According to H. G. Hibbert, the song “was translated into every language employing the printing press. It was mentioned in Parliament. It was quoted in a Times leader. It provided Punch with cartoon after cartoon. Learned men engaged in controversy as 94 Burroughs, 333. 95 Quoted in H. G. Hibbert, Fifty Years of a Londoner’s Life (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1916), 100.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

133

to the origin and meaning of the word, ‘Jingo,’ which, anyway, acquired and still has an exact significance as describing politicians of a certain temperament and method” (100). As usual, Tennyson felt the pulse of national anxiety and published “The Revenge” as another military poem in a periodical to advertise patriotism and heroism just as Russia was surrounding Constantinople, threatening to interfere with British imperial interests in the Balkans, the same issue that sparked the Crimean War. Ironically, Tennyson’s poem served as a bookend to another feature in this issue of the Nineteenth Century, an article by Gladstone denouncing the Turks just as Disraeli was sending the British fleet into the Dardanelles to aid the Turks against the Russians. A mob threw stones at Gladstone’s Harley Street home the day before his article appeared, indicating the status of his unpopular opinions about the crisis. However, Tennyson’s poem does not work in tandem with Gladstone’s article as with their publications on “Montenegro.” Its placement on the first page of the March 1878 issue, just before Wolseley’s article on military readiness, suggests that the poem is a marketable feature, while Gladstone’s contribution, “The Paths of Honour and of Shame,” appears at the end. Yet Knowles profited from such a combination of celebrated writers; Priscilla Metcalf comments: “With Tennyson at one end and Gladstone at the other, the March 1878 issue sold 20,000 or more copies—reaching, as such things are estimated, perhaps five times that number of readers.”96 The physical distancing suggests the wide space between their political views. Tennyson’s poem provides a hero from the past in Sir Richard Grenville, commander of the Elizabethan ship, The Revenge. Like Wolseley, Tennyson recalls past heroism to justify present military ambitions as he retells the poignant story of a damaged ship full of sick men that bravely fought and destroyed nearly the entire Spanish navy until seamen reluctantly decide to surrender for the sake of their families; Tennyson describes the event to Emily: “Sir Richard Grenville in one ship, ‘the Revenge,’ fought fifty-three Spanish ships of the line for fifteen hours: a tremendous story, out-rivalling Agincourt.”97 Grenville dies after the surrender, and the Revenge fulfills her name by going down only after nature cooperates by bringing down the rest of the Spanish Navy into the sea with her in a huge wave. The message here is that God and nature favor the British Navy because of its relentlessly courageous seamen, and ships such as the Revenge embody spiritual forces eternally loyal to the empire. Tennyson’s poem is a private, poetic representation of public mood, and his well-timed publication in the Nineteenth Century shows the poet continuing to exploit the medium, as the poem and the poet are textually exploited. Still riding the ideological pulse of Nineteenth Century readers, Tennyson once again returns to the past to mythologize British courage and moral superiority in “The Defence of Lucknow” (April 1879). This time he recalls the painful memory of a group of English men, women, and children who suffered at Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the turning point for British imperialism. Paris notes that 96 Metcalf, 281. 97 Hallam Tennyson, Memoir II:142.

134

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals Since the 1830s, India had been the main area for missionary activity and the most challenging. Thus it was common to think of the sub-continent as a battleground in which soldiers of Christ struggled against the forces of darkness. It was an easy transition, then, to see the army’s campaign to restore order as an extension of this missionary activity, and the British soldier as the new crusader fighting for the opportunity to renew the struggle for conversion.98

With “The Defence of Lucknow” and “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava. October 25th, 1854” (Macmillan’s Magazine, March 1882), Tennyson resurrects great moments of British heroism from previous generations in an artistic response to a dark, late-century public mood increasingly in need of heroes. As John MacKenzie notes, the Mutiny “helped transform the army’s reputation, already enhanced by the Crimean War; troops became heroic saviours of the besieged avengers of British honour. . . . The Mutiny also helped generate the atmosphere of hero-worship so characteristic of late nineteenth-century imperialism. The military leaders . . . became evangelical knights, defenders of the faith as well as the empire” (281). If the leaders were not mentioned in Tennyson’s poems, everybody knew them and could join in solidarity to the British myth of Christian greatness. “The Defence of Lucknow” follows “Dedicatory Poem to the Princess Alice,” a ballad commemorating the recent death of Princess Alice, who died on 14 December 1878 from kissing her child who was ill with diphtheria, and the commemorative poem appears as a “ballad of the deeds / Of England, and her banner in the East,” and a dedication to Englishness.99 “The Defence of Lucknow” picks up on the dedicatory poem’s phrase in its first line: “Banner of England, not for a season, O banner of Britain, has thou / Floated in conquering battle or flapt to the battle-cry! / Never with mightier glory than when we had rear’d thee on high / Flying at top of the roofs in the ghastly siege of Lucknow.”100 Thus two poems about tragic death introduce the April, 1879 issue of the Nineteenth Century, and Tennyson celebrates British valor while calling the Indians traitors as he retells the story of those who suffered the famous siege at Lucknow. Poetic rhythms reminiscent of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” push the lines forward: Death from their rifle-bullets, and death from their cannon-balls, Death in our innermost chamber, and death at our slight barricade, Death while we stood with the musket, and death while we stoopt to the spade, Death to the dying, and wounds to the wounded, for often there fell Striking the hospital wall, crashing thro’ it, their shot and their shell, Death. (577)

98 Paris, 38. 99 Alfred Tennyson, “Dedicatory Poem to the Princess Alice,” The Nineteenth Century (April 1879), 575. 100 Alfred Tennyson, “The Defence of Lucknow,” The Nineteenth Century (April 1879), 576.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

135

Still, the banner of England flew over the garrison at Lucknow. The banner image dominates the poem, a realistic detail that was important to Tennyson. He had written to Lucknow’s civil surgeon Joseph Fayrer to confirm the location of the banner and to authenticate his portrayal of the event; on 17 March Fayrer sent a pencil drawing of the structure and later told Tennyson about a reunion of soldiers who survived the siege: “You would have been pleased I think had you heard the remarks by some of these old soldiers about your ‘Siege.’ They said it was so true. It was as tho’ you had been there!”101 Tennyson replicates the heartbeat that accompanies intense fear in the rhythm of the poem and asks rapid-fire questions as if in a continuous panic, such as “What have they done? Where is it? Out yonder. Guard the Redan!” (578), as “ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England blew” (580). The horrors of sickness, decay, starvation, and death afflict the prisoners as the poem marches on for the first seven pages of the issue. Finally, Havelock’s Highlanders fight their way into the compound to rescue them, the English banner still flying over India. Without a break in imperialistic focus, the Nineteenth Century moves directly into an essay titled “Past and Future Policy in South Africa,” a discussion of the recent Zulu War. Ann Thwaite records that Emily Tennyson received a letter from Tennyson’s friend, Mary Brotherton, at the time he was writing “The Defence of Lucknow,” criticizing his “unChristian” views as she wrote: “I cannot approve his warlike spirit, and tendency of his poetry. It seems to me so far below the divine mission of a Great Poet to foster the sanguinary passions of men and to fall into the commonplace of dignifying patriotism as a first-class virtue—instead of part of the vanity and weakness of human nature.”102 According to Thwaite, Emily toiled over the necessity of war and an alternate response to conflict. She tried “to imagine what Christ would have us do in any given situation,” and was therefore happy when Tennyson wrote the following words intended as an epilogue to “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava” for its re-publication in 1885: And who loves War for War’s own sake Is fool, or crazed, or worse; But let the patriot-soldier take His meed of fame in verse.103

But these lines did not appear in the original version of the poem, published in Macmillan’s Magazine in March, 1882. In their absence, the poem revives the old military fervor in recounting the Crimean War tale of the “gallant three hundred” who rode into an outnumbering force of Russians at Sebastopol in 1854. The Heavy Brigade “rode like Victors and Lords” into the “heart of the Russian Hordes” until they completed the victorious, brave charge. A note at the end of the poem explains that the three hundred were the Scots Greys and the 2nd squadron of Inniskillings, 101 Tennyson, Letters, III:173. 102 Ann Thwaite, Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 524. 103 Quoted in Thwaite, 524.

136

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

and identifies three men following the commander as “Elliot, Scarlett’s aide-decamp, who had been riding by his side, and the trumpeter and Shegog the orderly, who had been close behind him.”104 Christopher Ricks mentions that Tennyson probably drafted the poem after the same Times report of 14 November 1854 that he used for “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” However, Emily records that Tennyson wrote this poem in February, 1882. The difference in Tennyson’s attitude toward war seems striking when we consider that the Heavy Brigade is not composed of Lords; they are “like Victors and Lords,” and the men with Scarlett have names. Men of the Light Brigade are common, but noble soldiers. The men of the Heavy Brigade earned praises of “Glory to each and to all, and the charge that they made! / Glory to all the three hundred, the Heavy Brigade!” (339). Patrick Waddington further comments: To compensate for the perhaps excessively romantic colouring of the earlier poem, he brought to his Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava a corresponding starkness of tone, the black and white of legend and of his own medieval romances. Whereas in The Charge of the Light Brigade all is nameless, leaderless, foredoomed (in the definitive version at least), in the later work Scarlett emerges as a hero-knight. The enemy, meanwhile, had to suffer in the process: whereas in the first poem they are treated rather neutrally, here they become ‘Russian hordes’ and a ‘dark-muffled Russian crowd.’105

Thus, in the historical moment when political ambition involves the century’s most intense imperialistic focus, Tennyson’s own famous earlier poem about the Light Brigade becomes a subtext juxtaposing the elite, but nameless Light Brigade soldier with the common man who serves courageously in the Heavy Brigade as a “patriotsoldier.” The true patriotic hero can now come from common lineage and serve as a trumpeter or an orderly, reflecting a democratization in Tennyson’s perspective. Waddington contends that “If it was never so popular as the earlier piece, this was perhaps because the times—and poetry—had changed. Whereas in the 1854–55 the accusation of warmongering was drowned by a chorus of patriotic praise, in 1882 the Crimean campaign in general seemed more blameworthy and Tennyson’s new defence of it anachronistic” (110). However, we see Tennyson adding the Epilogue lines that Emily welcomed, in an attempt to prove that he was not a war lover but a champion of the century’s glorious military past, and his attitude reflected a majority of readers who were patriotic, rather than cynical. Paris further explains: Popular militarism appealed as much to Liberals as to Tories . . . it was embraced by the established Church and Non-Conformists alike, and became a major theme in a rapidly developing popular culture which would guarantee that successive generations of young Britons, the guardians of the future, would be indoctrinated with such ideas and thus ensure the survival of the British Empire.106 104 Alfred Tennyson, “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava. October 25th, 1854,” Macmillan’s Magazine 45 (March 1882), 339. 105 Waddington, 108. 106 Paris, 48.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

137

In spite of Tennyson’s political grandstanding in periodicals through the years, he was not committed to a specific party and had little time for the official duties of Parliament after Gladstone recommended him for a literary peerage, although he took a seat in the House of Lords on 11 March 1884 at the age of 75. Charles Tennyson reports that “He took his seat on the cross-benches to show that he owed allegiance to neither party,”107 and Robert Bernard Martin adds that Tennyson “‘could not pledge himself to party thinking,’ wanting to be ‘free to vote for that which to himself seemed best for the Empire.’”108 Tennyson articulates his impatience with political ranting in “Freedom,” a poem published in the December Macmillan’s Magazine (1884), his “first political utterance as a peer” after taking his seat in Parliament in March, according to Hallam Tennyson.109 The poet expresses his respect for freedom and wonders how long it will last when “changes all too fierce and fast” threaten to mar “This heritage of the past.” Freedom is challenged by the “party cry / That wanders from the public good,” nations with idols “smear’d with blood,” and the “lawless crowd.”110 The poet is impatient with “Men loud against all forms of power— / Unfurnish’d brows, tempestuous tongues—/ Expecting all things in an hour– / Brass mouths and iron lungs!” (83). Martin claims that “Tennyson was too old to undertake any real political activity in the House of Lords, even if he had been so inclined. He attended only a few times and never spoke.”111 But Tennyson had never participated in group debates, and the political maneuverings of Parliament would be a waste of his time, for Tennyson’s political talent did not lie in the discussion of issues, but in the reconstitution of issues offered up by print media. A similar sense of impatience with late century politics occurs in his poem titled “Vastness,” published the following year in Macmillan’s (November 1885). The now-familiar moody, dark perspective about the world appears, as Tennyson rants about “Raving politics, never at rest—as this poor earth’s pale history runs,– / What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?”112 In the current mood of political cynicism, glory has no meaning, doubt plagues the age, and wealth, avarice, poverty, and hatred rule society. The valorous deeds and ambitions that excited Tennyson are no longer anchored in honor: “Stately purposes, valour in battle, glorious annals of army and fleet, / Death for the right cause, death for the wrong cause, trumpets of victory, groans of defeat” seem defused. All that remains is faith, for politicians are all liars: “Lies upon this side, lies upon that side, truthless violence mourn’d by the Wise, / Thousands of voices drowning his own in a popular torrent of lies upon lies.” Yet, Tennyson was careful to clarify on an autographed copy of a proof of “Vastness,” given to the Gladstones “With our love,” that Gladstone 107 Charles Tennyson, Six Tennyson Essays. 1952 (East Ardsley, Wakefield: S. R. Publishers, 1972), 64. 108 Quoted in Martin, 546. 109 Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, II:305. The poem was given to Macmillan’s Magazine for £50. 110 Alfred Tennyson, “Freedom,” Macmillan’s Magazine (December 1884), 82. 111 Martin, 546. 112 Alfred Tennyson, “Vastness,” Macmillan’s Magazine (November 1885), 1.

138

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

was not the intent of this stanza; beside these lines he wrote: “(*This of course does not refer to the same statesmen—only to the unscrupulous politicians).”113 In spite of all his protests about the political babble of his day, Tennyson’s role, intended or not, was to give public opinion a poetic voice. His doubt, frustration, and uncertainty were symptomatic of his times, even when he was seen by some as an old-fashioned man out of step with them. Tennyson had one more battle to wage in the media. Like so many of his political poems in periodicals, “The Fleet (On its Reported Insufficiency),” published concurrently in The Times and the Pall Mall Gazette on 23 April 1885, is a response to a newspaper article that caught his interest, published in the Pall Mall Gazette, a weekly newspaper and review established in 1865 and edited since 1883 by William Thomas Stead. The theme is a different verse of the same song: a warning about inadequate naval defenses precipitated by a war scare, this time with Russia. Historians and critics note the sensational nature of the press in its approach to national events by the 1880s, citing Stead as an example of a passionate journalist whose powerful activism resulted in social and political change. However, as this chapter clearly indicates, Tennyson’s political poetry had long been a tool for editorial propaganda and political influence. Stead played an integral part in creating public awareness of the problem, according to Peter Burroughs: In 1884 revelations in the Pall Mall Gazette by its editor, W. T. Stead, concerning British naval weaknesses and the rapidly expanding fleet of French battleships excited considerable public alarm. Although the strength of foreign navies and the threat they posed were exaggerated, the popular outcry stung the government into action. In 1885-86 expenditure on shipbuilding almost doubled to £3.6m. . . . Naval estimates of £11m in 1883 climbed to £18.7m in 1896, and £34.5m in 1903. Even so, the Royal Navy’s relative numerical superiority declined: in 1883 Britain had thirty-eight battleships to the forty of other countries; in 1897 the ratio was sixty-two to ninety-six.114

In August 1884, Stead became impassioned about British Navy readiness when H. O. Arnold-Forster informed him that European powers posed a threat to British naval supremacy. Raymond L. Schults explains that “The Liberal tradition of economy in government and of anti-imperialism did not jibe with a program of increased expenditures to discharge England’s growing imperial commitments.”115 Stead interviewed naval officers and others who confirmed the weakness of the Navy, and he published a long article in his September 15 issue titled “What is the Truth about the Navy?” On September 18, Stead dedicated the issues’s first six pages to the controversy, beginning with “The Truth about the Navy,” signed “By One Who Knows the Facts.” The article announces that the scramble for the world has begun, and contends that England will not be able to prevent its possessions from being 113 Autographed proof copy of “Vastness,” British Library 44493 f.1. 114 Burroughs, 338. 115 Raymond L. Schults, Crusader in Babylon: W. T. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 90.

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

139

taken by its neighbors, even though millions of people around the world depend on her. For the next three months, Stead continued to feature articles about naval unpreparedness by officers and officials, whipping up public emotions and fear of attack from Russia, France, Germany, or Turkey. Shults comments that, “Although other newspapers and magazines joined Stead in the campaign, the British press was neither as unanimous in its support, nor as quick to climb on the bandwagon” (94). Some believed Stead exaggerated military threats for sensational press coverage and resultant sales, but Shults defends Stead’s motives: “Stead sincerely believed that the navy needed to be strengthened, and as usual, his sensationalism was a means, not an end. Nor is there any tangible evidence of a politico-military-industrial cabal organizing a panic to promote profits” (104). By the time Tennyson’s poem appeared in The Times and the Pall Mall Gazette, the issue had been brewing for months, and Stead’s campaign had become a national concern. In March, 1885 Stead revived his campaign when Parliament began debating appropriations, just as war seemed imminent with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. On 13 March, Stead appealed to Tennyson with a letter explaining the naval crisis and sent copies of “The Truth about the Navy Once More” and “Is Our Navy Ready for War? By One Who Knows the Facts,” published in that day’s issue of the Pall Mall Gazette. Hallam thanked Stead for his father in a response letter, assuring him that Tennyson “has no doubt the Navy is much below its proper strength.”116 Stead’s appeal to Tennyson was a wise political decision, for Tennyson was well known for his views about appropriations, and he was still a “poet of the people” who could reach the public as no other spokesman could. When a Tennyson poem appears in a newspaper, cultural memory draws upon all political poems of the past to reinforce its authority. Stead’s 13 March article raises the possibility of a European war against Russia in alliance with the Turks and asks the question “How far is our navy ready for war?” The writer claims that England should spend at least £10 million to increase the navy, to defend its harbors, and to protect coaling stations abroad, but Parliament has cut expenditure requests in half, just as troubles in Afghanistan have begun again. A war scare coupled with low naval expenditures equals devastation, in his view. While the Germans are prepared, England’s ships are obsolete and unprotected against torpedoes. Red tape complicates the Admiralty, and outdated technology will create havoc if an emergency occurs. It would take weeks to mobilize, according to the Gazette writer. Such familiar rhetoric energized Tennyson. Although the title of his response was “The Fleet. (On its reported Insufficiency),” Stead tacked on an introduction for the Pall Mall Gazette titled “‘THE TRUTH ABOUT THE NAVY.’ A WARNING BY LORD TENNYSON” (Figure 3.1). The introduction and its title advertise the poem as a commentary on the original Pall Mall Gazette article and promote the newspaper’s ownership of Tennyson’s poem by reprinting Hallam’s letter of thanks. The introduction then records that “Since then the revelation of England’s naval weakness appears to have oppressed the mind of the Poet Laureate, as it has weighed down the mind of every other patriotic 116 Tennyson, Letters, III:311.

Figure 3.1

“The Fleet,” The Pall Mall Gazette, 23 April 1885, Courtesy Mills Memorial Library, McMaster University

War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers

141

Englishman, and this morning the Times publishes the following spirited warning from the pen of the Laureate.”117 The pretext creates the sense of importance for the Gazette’s concerns about the Navy, portraying a grieving, godly, patriotic Poet Laureate suffering over the future state of the empire. Its mention of The Times makes the issue seem greater than Stead and his Gazette, a national concern about which all should be mindful. Stead undoubtedly took Tennyson’s poem from the morning’s Times at the last minute for his evening edition, in a rushed moment of opportunistic scooping for his paper. The poem is well placed on the front page, directly beneath an article about a contested piece of frontier in Afghanistan, but the introduction and poem encode recent articles about armaments and war. However, The Times version of Tennyson’s poem appears nearly at the end of the news section of the morning edition, just before last-minute dispatches and classified ads, perhaps suggesting that Tennyson submitted the poem for publication at the last minute. One questions why he would not have sent it to Stead as a response to the article. Nevertheless, the distancing from other news in the Times detracts from the potential for volatility within the poem that would be available on the Pall Mall Gazette’s front page as a response to former inflammatory articles in that paper. The preceding page features a story about a political visit to Welshpool from Lord Salisbury, and this story bleeds onto the page where Tennyson’s poem occurs at the top of the second column, buffered by Lord Salisbury’s visit on the left, classified ads on the right, and “Naval and Military Intelligence” placed below. The latter column provides little textual commentary on the poem, other than to announce Admiralty appointments, Yeomanry Cavalry training, and the dispatch of additional troops to support ailing troops in the Sudan. After the fiery buildup provided by Stead and an emotional response by Tennyson that aggressively addresses Parliament members as “You—you—if you have fail’d to understand,” the appearance on the Times page is anti-climactic.118 The steam of Tennyson’s attack seems misguided, as he complains that “Poor England, what would all these votes be worth . . . / You—you—who had the ordering of her Fleet, / If you have only compass’d her disgrace, / When all men starve, the wild mob’s million feet / Will kick you from your place—But then—too late, too late” (8). Justice will be served when starving millions vote Parliament members out of office for neglecting to provide military support, but then it will be too late, rendering all those votes worthless. Yet, the articles that follow Tennyson’s poem suggest that England is proceeding with “business as usual,” and Tennyson’s poem contains little collective textual power on the Times page. In spite of a lifetime of supporting the periodical press, Tennyson was abused by critics in his later years, and Hallam frequently expressed anger and frustration at criticism of his father in their columns. After publication of “The Fleet,” criticism was especially negative; a writer in the Spectator complained that 117 “The Truth about the Navy. A Warning by Lord Tennyson,” The Pall Mall Gazette, (23 April 1885), 1. 118 Alfred Tennyson, “The Fleet. (On its Reported Insufficiency),” The Times (23 April 1885), 8.

142

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals These hypothetical denunciations are not poetical; and unless Lord Tennyson was sufficiently sure of the neglect to assume it as true, he should not have attempted a poetical invective at all. As it is, his verses make a very lame invective, reminding us rather of Mr. Silas Wegg than of Lord Tennyson. As we read its inarticulate wrath, and its limping prediction of the ‘kicks’ of the mob, we cannot but say of Lord Tennyson, as Dickens said of his unpoetical hero, ‘he declines and he falls.’119

Hallam reacted to the article in a letter to Macmillan on 25 April 1885: “What an ungentlemanly attack on my Father in the Spectator! I have a good mind to write to Hutton & tell him that we do not want his paper to be sent to us any longer. But it is painful especially to us his family that a man like Hutton should say of my Father that ‘he declines, he falls’—Thank God he does not yet: & his later poems are as fine as any thing that he has done.”120 Angry at The Times for a later indiscretion, Hallam wrote on 15 December 1886 that “The Editor ought to be ashamed to allow an old hero like my Father to be so shamefully attacked in his columns . . . the Editor will not get any new poems like ‘The Fleet’ if I can help it in the future.”121 At the beginning of the Age of Periodicals, Richard Henry Horne wrote in 1833: Nearly all the periodicals are strictly commercial in their origin and foundation, which commonly influences, directly or indirectly, all the writers which they engage. . . . Few of the very few who know and wish to say what is right, can afford to do so; neither can they afford to be silent. Hence the periodicals in general, while they seem to lead, only follow public opinion, which is a far more profitable proceeding.122

Tennyson could afford to say what he thought was right, and he used his role as the first media poet to create influential art from cultural texts provided by a prolific supply of periodical reading material. He was also a consumer, sensitive to media influence, with his opinions about war, the military, and current events being constantly conditioned by a barrage of print, just as we are today with visual media. We may judge his poems as jingoistic saber rattling, but this says more about our own political moment than that of Tennyson and his readers. Tennyson clearly felt confidently connected in purpose with his readers, as exemplified by his comments about giving some of these poems to the public through newspaper publication. He considered his efforts heroic and patriotic, two qualities that most endeared him to Victorian readers.

119 Quoted from an article in the Spectator attached to a letter from Hallam Tennyson to Alexander Macmillan on 25 April 1885, Tennyson Research Centre #65. 120 Hallam Tennyson to Alexander Macmillan, 25 April 1885, Tennyson Research Centre #64. 121 Hallam Tennyson to Alexander Macmillan, 15 December 1886, Tennyson Research Centre #106. 122 Quoted in Oscar Maurer, “‘My Squeamish Public’: Some Problems of Victorian Magazine Publishers and Editors,” Studies in Bibliography 12 (1959), 22.

Chapter 4

“God Save the Queen”: Laureatic Responses Queen Victoria wrote to Tennyson late in their respective careers as monarch and Poet Laureate on 9 October 1883 and expressed her opinions about periodicals: “How I wish you could suggest means of crushing those horrible publications whose object is to promulgate scandal and calumny which they invent themselves!”1 Like the poet, the Queen hated the aggressive production of texts and resultant loss of control. Pressured by the rush of deadlines and the incessant, competitive acquisition of copy for daily, weekly, and monthly issues of periodicals, Tennyson complained that “All the magazines and daily newspapers, which pounce upon everything they can get hold of, demoralize literature. This age gives an author no time to mature his works”—no time, that is, if an author wanted to embrace the financial and promotional opportunities provided by periodical publication, in which Tennyson repeatedly showed acute interest (423). In spite of their complaints, the Poet Laureate and his Queen were public figures whose agency throughout the span of their tenure depended upon imaging available mainly through periodical print. Yet the material form of the periodical created its own text of both Tennyson and Victoria, simultaneously making them cultural icons while providing an outlet for poet and Queen to promote their own ideological agendas. Recent feminist and cultural scholarship concerning Queen Victoria’s role as a media monarch enlightens my discussion of Tennyson’s official laureate poetry and its meaning within Victorian periodicals. Robin Inboden observes that Tennyson and Victoria both held “ambiguous” public roles: “Tennyson, as the poetic voice of the State, must write important, uplifting poems while refraining from expressing any very clear political idea except jingoism, and Victoria must be the leader of the world’s greatest military and economic power while remaining a modest wife, mother, and widow,” and these conflicting roles contributed to Tennyson’s laureatic poems, “informed by exactly this complex intersection of personal and political values, and exactly Tennyson’s desire to propose a respectful, familial structure

1 Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1911), II:437. Her comment probably refers to recent criticism of Tennyson from the press about a peerage offered to him by the Queen that fall and gossip about his family lineage.

144

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

for political relations.”2 Adrienne Munich’s insightful study defines the secrets of Victoria’s success as monarch: “To consider Queen Victoria as the quintessential Victorian requires a recognition that she had a hand in defining that category and in fitting herself to it. The reign’s extraordinary success in representing itself as if it were simply what it represented itself as being is one of its secrets.”3 Margaret Homans observes that “The nineteenth century was an era of rapidly diversifying technologies for the dissemination of the self, and she [Queen Victoria] performed the action of creating the nineteenth-century monarchy largely through representations. She could manipulate her image, to the extent that her culture made it possible for her to do so; yet many of her representations were made by others.”4 I would like to position my comments in this chapter within these critical perspectives of the Queen’s role in representing her agency, adding that Tennyson and Victorian periodicals worked in tandem with her, contributing to the representation of Victoria’s image, while also becoming an extension of that image. Both figures were arguably the most popular of all media objects during the age of periodicals. John Plunkett describes Victoria as the “first media monarch,” noting that some of the first photographs ever registered for copyright were portraits of the monarchy: “Out of the first 2,000 photographs registered, up to 11 September 1863, 317 contained one or more members of the British royal family, a proportion of just over 15 per cent.”5 However, the first two portraits registered for copyright were of Tennyson (15 August 1862), clear evidence that public fascination with both Tennyson and the monarchy fueled commercial competition for images that would help sell printed product, whether it be books, periodicals, or individual prints. Further, the verse that Tennyson created for the Queen in his official role as Poet Laureate was often published in periodicals, with or without his permission. In this context, his laureatic verse colludes with the periodical in which it appears, to advertise Queen and Empire as icons of Victorian commodity culture, as well as to suggest other meanings that may conflict with popular beliefs. The traditional role of Poet Laureate was to celebrate national events; Valere Pitt explains: “The good Laureate is a ritualist. His poetry is part of the ceremony of public life; in a sense he can help to create it by imposing on domestic occasions, like the marriage of royalty, a certain dignity and solemnity. His business is to generalise and formalise in such a way that the particular occasion is stripped of individual eccentricities and set in the perspective of a common order.”6 Tennyson was an 2 Robin L. Inboden, “The ‘Valour of Delicate Women’: The Domestication of Political Relations in Tennyson’s Laureate Poetry,” Victorian Poetry 36:2 (Summer 1998), 207. 3 Adrienne Munich, Queen Victoria’s Secrets (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 4. See also the excellent collection of essays edited by Munich with Margaret Homans, Remaking Queen Victoria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 4 Margaret Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837– 1876 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), xxi. 5 John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 159. 6 Valerie Pitt, Tennyson Laureate (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 194.

“God Save the Queen”: Laureatic Responses

145

unlikely candidate for the job because of his seeming tendency to avoid anything at all that attracted notoriety and publicity. Before Robert Southey’s tenure (1813 to 1843), some viewed the position as an overtasking, demoralizing weight on one’s art; for example, the Duke of Buccleuch advised Sir Walter Scott not to take the position in 1813: I shall frankly say that I should be mortified to see you hold a situation, which by the general concurrence of the world, is stamped ridiculous. There is no good reason why this should be so; but so it is. . . . Any future poem of yours would not come forward with the same probability of a successful reception. The poet laureate would stick to you and your productions like a piece of court-plaster. . . . Only think of being chaunted and recitatived [sic] by a parcel of hoarse and squeaking choristers on a birthday, for the edification of the bishops, pages, maids of honour, and gentlemen-pensioners! Oh, horrible, thrice horrible!’7

Southey refused to write certain odes for certain occasions, except the annual New Year’s Day odes, and withheld publication of his poems in certain periodicals, such as the Gentlemen’s Magazine, the traditional source for printing official odes since 1731. Southey also refused to live at court or participate in many court functions, thus allowing himself more creative control over his time and mode of publication. When Wordsworth was Poet Laureate from 1843-1850, the expectations for annual odes were removed and the office became “not so much an office as an honour, not so much an obligation as a decoration” (182). Indeed, Wordsworth did not write a single official poem during his seven years as Laureate. Tennyson was little known to the public when Wordsworth died in 1850 and periodicals began discussing possibilities for the laureateship. Leigh Hunt, Sheridan Knowles, Henry Taylor, Bryan Waller Procter (“Barry Cornwall”), Charles Mackay, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were all seriously considered. Samuel Rogers refused the position because of his old age. Athenaeum columnist Henry F. Chorley opposed Tennyson because he already had a civil pension: “to confer on him the laureateship is at once to prostitute the office, and to do great wrong to yet unpensioned genius which may need the profit that is legitimately its due.”8 Charles Tennyson insists that the poet did not know about his candidacy for the position, in spite of much discussion in periodicals for months before Prince Albert’s November, 1850 letter offered him the laureateship: “Living in happy seclusion with Emily at Tent Lodge, he had heard little of the controversy, which had been going on since Rogers’ refusal in the spring, and, in spite of the considerable extent to which his claims had been canvassed, he had absolutely no idea that he was likely to be selected.”9 However, Tennyson’s letter to John Forster in April, 1850, shows 7 Quoted in Edmund Kemper Broadus, The Laureateship: A Study of the Office of Poet Laureate in England with Some Account of the Poets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), 164165. 8 Henry F. Chorley, “Our Weekly Gossip,” The Athenaeum (22 June 1850), 662. 9 Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 254.

146

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

that he was very interested in the discussion: “I see that the Spectator mentions two candidates for the Laureateship basking in the sunshine of royal favour. Does he mean already enjoying pensions? If so, does he mean L. Hunt and myself [sic]. I sincerely hope Hunt will get it rather than myself.”10 Comments from both Tennysons support the myth of the poet as a reluctant artist, shy of public acclaim and attention, but he clearly indicates an interest in the debate and an awareness of the issues well before being offered the position. After accepting in November 1850, Tennyson quipped that his friend Venables convinced him by promising that he would always “be offered the liver-wing of a fowl,”11 but he was still unsure of the decision: “I wish more and more that somebody else had it. I have no passion for courts but a great love of privacy: nor do I count having the office as any particular feather in my cap. It is I believe scarce £200 a year and my friend R. M. Milnes tells me that the price of the patent and court dress will swallow up all the first year’s income.”12 However, Tennyson took his new job as Poet Laureate very seriously and became surprisingly well suited for the position. Pitt describes the laureateship as being, like his marriage, an element in his new psychological stability—a link which bound him to the world of affairs. To be the ceremonial voice of the State, the servant of its Servant, was to have status in the community, and what is more, a status, not merely as a person, but as a poet: there was no need to deny the inner voice or the solitary vision. As the Laureate, the Bard, the Licensed Prophet, he could be, and often was, as eccentric as he liked without severing himself from the body of society.13

Tennyson did not necessarily want aristocratic status, however; when offered a baronetcy on 25 March 1873, Tennyson initially refused, writing to Gladstone that he would “rather we should remain plain Mr. and Mrs.”14 He later accepted the title in 1883. Pitt claims that the “sense of a public, prophet’s duty, became, for good or ill, a major element in Tennyson’s poetic life. After he became Laureate he rarely wrote private poetry.”15 However, all poetry is public upon being transferred to print, perhaps upon its being written in any format, and Tennyson was a poet who was always conscious of his public and his marketability. Thus his fame and wealth grew to phenomenal proportions, especially when compared to laureates before and since. First-hand observers of Tennyson indicate that he had ambitions for fame, but the fulfillment of these ambitions caused him to retreat from public attention, according to this account from Frederick Locker-Lampson: Tennyson says that as a boy he had a great thirst to be a poet, and to be a popular poet. He would rove through the fields composing hundreds of couplets, and shouting them to the 10 Alfred Tennyson, The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 3 vols. Eds. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), I:324. 11 Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, I:336. 12 Tennyson, Letters, I:344. 13 Pitt, 148. 14 Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, II:145. 15 Pitt, 149.

“God Save the Queen”: Laureatic Responses

147

skies; but that now he is inclined to think popularity is a bastard fame, which sometimes goes with the more real thing, but is independent of and somewhat antagonistic to it. He appears to shrink from his own popularity. He maintains that the artist should spare no pains, that he should do his very best for the sake of his art, and for that only.16

Yet, what Tennyson says about his artistic work ethic does not always correspond with what his publication history shows; such observations merely reveal the colorful dynamics of his conflicted personality. Soon Tennyson was complaining about public attention garnered by his position. He writes to his aunt, Elizabeth Russell, on 28 September 1852: “I am full of trouble and shall be for a long time and by way of helping me out of it the 200,000,000 poets of Great Britain deluge me daily with volumes of poems—truly the Laureateship is no sinecure. If any good soul would just by way of a diversion send me a tome of prose. O the shoals of trash!”17 His collected letters are replete with responses to aspiring authors, thanking them for books sent and giving writerly advice, such as this to A. Plackett on 31 December 1856: “You might, if you chose, offer these lines to some magazine, but you must not be surprised if they are refused, for the poetic gift is so common in these days that hundreds must have to endure this disappointment, and I should not be an honest friend if I did not prepare you for that.”18 Tennyson’s comments hint at the heavy load of correspondence as well as his awareness of the literary profession’s dependence upon periodical publication, whether for the fledgling or celebrated poet. Such earnest attention to duty helped him to become known as the representative poet of his time, much more than just the holder of an official title. As Martin states, “In time he became as much an emblem of the age as the Queen for whom it was named.”19 Publication in Victorian periodicals helped to encode Tennyson and his Queen with emblematic nodes familiar to their readers. Only three of ten official laureate poems published in periodicals appear to have been formally submitted by Tennyson. Periodicals editors evidently felt that these poems should be available for public consumption. The unapproved copying of his poems in Britain and the United States was a concern for Tennyson throughout his career, but he seems to have surrendered to the inevitability of his work being cast about for the sake of national ceremony. Such accommodations for the press are obvious to us in our promotion-obsessed society, but it was not until Victoria’s time that the court instituted a systematic procedure for informing the press about royal occasions. The monarchy maintained a casual relationship with the press, but now its future depended upon a more formal alliance, according to John Plunkett: The growth of professional journalism went hand in hand with the evolution of a doubleedged dynamic between the monarchy and the press. There was a reciprocal yet unequal 16 Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, II:80. 17 Tennyson, Letters, II:45. 18 Tennyson, Letters, II:169 19 Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 352.

148

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals dependency between these two institutions. Reporters and the royal family were locked within a pattern of mutual benefit and antagonism. This double-edged relationship is evident both in the public perception for royal reportage and in the interaction between newspapers and court functionaries.20

Royal events sold newspapers, while the reportage of such events “simultaneously helped to promote a philanthropic and industrious royal family” (200). Yet royals resented the intrusion of privacy and the distortion of facts. The type of media attention that began with Victoria’s reign during the wedding of the Prince of Wales bordered on sensationalism; the reportage of highly personal detail was a “significant departure from the standard style of dryly factual news description” and “prefigures the New Journalism of the 1870s and 1880s,” according to Plunkett (205). Bourgeois expansion made class differences seem more navigable than ever, and masses of reading public could steal a look into the private lives of royals and fantasize a different lifestyle for themselves. The Queen’s own creation of herself as a domestic monarchy made the royal lives seem more accessible, as Plunkett notes: “The attention of the newspaper and periodical press compromised the boundary between public and private space, while at the same time attempting to uphold it” (213). Tennyson’s laureate poems of this period appear on the newspaper page as inseparable partners with royal celebrity and promote Tennyson’s reputation as a privileged insider. For the marriage of the Princess Royal to Prussia’s Prince Frederic William on January 25, 1858, Victoria requested that Tennyson compose an additional verse for “God Save the Queen” to be sung at a concert at Buckingham Palace the evening of her wedding. Tennyson wrote two verses on command, and the Queen chose both. Her secretary, C. B. Phipps, explains to Tennyson on 29 December: “Her Majesty thinks that it will be better to have sung both the verses which you have sent to me— the first both as bearing upon the international view of the subject and introducing the name of the Prince—the Bridegroom, and the second as more in allusion, and complimentary to the Princess Royal.”21 However, Tennyson confesses displeasure with the verses in a letter to the Duchess of Argyll on 30 December 1857: I cannot say that my own workmanship pleases me, but the metre is so lumpish and dragging the Phoebus Apollo would tear his hair over it. Since sending these stanzas I have a sort of horror that in some modern version the line ‘Clothe them etc.’ must occur. I have only the oldest form in Chappell’s Book of Songs. Can you tell me whether my fears have any foundation.22

20 Plunkett, 199-200. 21 Quoted in “Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, Dear and Honoured Lady: The Correspondence Between Queen Victoria and Alfred Tennyson,” eds. Hope Dyson and Charles Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1969), 44. 22 Tennyson, Letters, II:191-192.

“God Save the Queen”: Laureatic Responses

149

His concern for precision is understandable, but use of the word “clothe” in his stanzas came to signify other interesting meanings when read in periodical publication, as we see below. Tennyson’s additional stanzas for “God Save the Queen” appeared in the next day’s Times report of the wedding events.23 Coverage spans two full six-column pages, beginning with the processional at St. James’s Palace. The Times reporter comments that, on this day “even more generally kept as a holyday by all classes in the metropolis than had been expected,” in spite of raw January weather and only a “transient glimpse of the Royal party and foreign guests,” the wedding event “excited interest enough to keep . . . thousands together for many hours.”24 The collection of guests at the wedding signifies solidarity with English tradition and national spirit, as the reporter notes “representatives of an eventful past, and those in whom repose the hopes of the future.” Leopold of Belgium is a historical figure who sends the writers thoughts “back 40 years, to another scene, with what changes and chances since?” Lord Palmerston “can recur to political and official memories of nearly two generations. These are the veterans who connect the present with the past,” and England’s future seems safe on traditions such as those confirmed by this event. As the reporter describes the Colonnade, where ticketed spectators, mainly female, rush to get the best seats, the wedding appears to be a ceremony being held for all of England’s women: “The prevailing style of dress was befitting a bridal; there were so many white bonnets and gauzy veils that it might have been supposed a large number of brides had been dispersed among the spectators. There were singularly few gentlemen.” The author then describes previous alterations to the Chapel Royal’s pews and the allowance of two feet for each lady’s seating, “a most feeble and inadequate concession to the fashions of the day, and great was the struggling and grievous the injury to robes of State before the ladies could reduce themselves to the required standards.” The reporter complains that, for most in the chapel area, “angels’ visits are frequent compared with the number of glimpses which they could have had of what was passing.” Basement seating for journalists, “representatives of the public,” were ample: “According to a popular Court fiction, however, no reporters were supposed to be present.” The Times was one of 11 newspapers attending the event, but their presence “established a protocol of journalistic invisibility. It marked a semi-official understanding between reporters and royal functionaries, if not quite an entente cordiale,” according to Plunkett.25 An attempt to identify guests as they arrive is qualified by a reminder that vision is limited. Yet, as the bride enters the chapel, “all can see distinctly the mild, amiable expression of her face, so replete with kindness and deep feeling. . . . Her bright bloom of colour has completely deserted her, and even when compared with her snowy dress her cheeks seem pale, and her whole appearance denotes tremulousness and agitation.”26 With this 23 24 25 26

Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, I:422. “The Marriage of the Princess Royal,” The Times (26 January 1858), 7. Plunkett, 220. “The Marriage of the Princess Royal,” 7.

150

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

description, the reporter ascribes to the Princess traditional feminine stereotypes of modesty and sensitivity, while noting the proper amount of anxiety expected of such ceremony. The Times article describes with intimate detail each participant, each item of decorative symbolism arrayed in the facilities, and, moment-to-moment, the entire wedding ceremony, including a reprint of the wedding program. “God Save the Queen” appears on the next page, within a report of the Buckingham Palace reception where new verses, “written for the occasion by Mr. Tennyson, poet laureate, were sung by all the principal performers and chorus” (p. 8). Tennyson’s ceremonial verse is predictably sing-song in its prayer for blessings on the royal couple: God bless our Prince and Bride! God keep their lands allied, God save the Queen! Clothe them with righteousness, Crown them with happiness, Them with all blessings bless, God save the Queen! Fair fall this hallow’d hour, Farewell our England’s flower, God save the Queen. Farewell, fair rose of May! Let both the peoples say, God bless thy marriage day, God bless the Queen!

The first stanza asking God to “keep their lands allied” nods to the traditional implication of royal marriage as a political union. The stanza asks that He “Clothe them with righteousness, / Crown them with happiness,” and, without further description of specific events immediately below the stanzas, the reporter records how the bride and groom are clothed: “The Princess of Prussia wore a dress of cloth of gold, trimmed with gold lace and flowers of bright colour, with diamonds; a wreath of flowers and diamonds to match the dress; a necklace of emeralds and diamonds. The Prince of Prussia appeared in a very handsome uniform of the Prussian Hussars.” This description, placed after the preceding stanzas, suggests that righteousness and happiness come clothed in riches and military might, not only for the bridal couple, but for the Queen and her dominion. The conflation of military power with such ostentatious feminine display implicates women as biological containers of aristocratic hegemony, but the wedding scene as reported in The Times also domesticizes monarchical power. At their simplest level, Tennyson’s official stanzas commemorate the celebrated union in terms of Christian righteousness, in natural combination with a consolidated empire allied with Prussia. However, in context with bourgeois consumer obsession for intimacy with the royals as indicated by the extensive Times narrative, “God Save the Queen” also works to place

“God Save the Queen”: Laureatic Responses

151

Tennyson in rank with the Queen as cultural icons promoting domestic ideology to readers from all classes. In spite of claims to the contrary, “God Save the Queen” was never officially designated as Britain’s royal anthem, and its provenance is dubious; some historians credit Henry Carey as its writer, some Thomas Arne, some an anonymous composer, and Tennyson was not the first to place a textual echo on the song. Its first performance purportedly occurred in the 1740s during the Jacobite Rebellion, and someone added an additional, anti-Scottish verse that encourages English army officer Marshall Wade to crush the rebellious Scots. From the other end of the empire’s historical chronology, the Sex Pistols wrote and recorded an anarchistic, anti-royalist version for Queen Elizabeth’s 1977 Silver Jubilee party, and British police arrested the group for trying to perform it from a boat floating on the Thames across from Westminster. Tennyson’s stanzas appear to be the only additions to the song that are not reactionary and confirm the dominant hegemony, although, as Alan Sinfield argues, “The appearance of homogeneity is an effect of ideology—it obscures the divergence of interests of different classes and class fractions. This ideological effect was relatively successful at the time when Tennyson became laureate.”27 The Times account of an elaborate, expensive display of royal hierarchy provides opportunities for powerful, but potentially unsettling, social-climbing fantasies for the middle and lower-class reader’s imagination, while Tennyson’s stanzas market Victoria and her brood in values relative to commoners (love and marriage, righteousness, and happiness). Class fantasies frustrated by didactic Christian temperance and repression of desire created a culture that first embraced, then later rejected Tennyson as its iconic hero in one century and produced the Sex Pistols in the next. How Tennyson’s laureatic poems came from Court to newspaper print is not always clear, but one can easily assume that journalists developed ways of stealing them from programs or official printed materials, although H. R. Fox Bourne notes that The Times “profited much by the special information it obtained from official sources.”28 In the case of Tennyson’s ode for the opening ceremonies of the 1862 London Exhibition, The Times stole his work from sheet music prepared for the event, and caused much frustration for Tennyson by misprinting his work and omitting verses. Tennyson wrote his Exhibition ode at the request of its organizing committee secretary, Francis Richard Sandford. Composer William Sterndale Bennett wrote music for the words, to be sung by an enormous choir of 4,000 voices at the opening ceremonies. The poem was published in London as an eight-page octavo pamphlet on 1 May 1862, and 1,000 copies were sold at the exhibition building for 1s. It was also included in the program for the opening ceremony. Tennyson found the job of writing for a massive vocal ensemble daunting, writing to Emily on 2 November 1861: “I must contrive to see Sandford and give up on the inauguration ode—I can’t

27 Alan Sinfield, Alfred Tennyson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 157. 28 H. R. Fox Bourne, English Newspapers: Chapters in the History of Journalism, 2 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1887), II:244.

152

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

accomplish it satisfactorily to myself.”29 Nevertheless, he presented the completed ode to Bennett on 6 November, complaining to the Duke of Argyll on 10 November: “I have half consented to write a little ode on the opening of the International Exhibition. The commissioners prest me: I should never have volunteered; for I hate a subject given me, and still more if that subject be a public one” (II:283). Curiously, Tennyson poses himself to the Duke as a reluctant servant, as if he has not yet decided to write the ode, yet he had already sent the completed ode to Bennett to compose its music. Bennett had his own doubts about putting Tennyson’s ode with a choir of unaccompanied voices: Indeed, with regard to one section of the Ode, he felt doubtful how it would yield to his musical treatment at all. When, in the course of composition, he found it manageable, then he was relieved, and would afterwards playfully say that he had set ‘The Exhibition Catalogue’ to music; for the nineteen lines in question contained the poet’s enumeration of the ‘marvels’ gathered within ‘the long laborious miles of Palace.’30

Bennett requested that the commissioners give him an orchestra, which they granted. The Times stole Tennyson’s poem from Bennett’s sheet music when it was published on 12 April and printed it with two significant errors on 24 April 1862. Tennyson requested corrections from The Times editor, the most egregious one being the misprint of “part divine” for “Art divine”; because The Times took its copy from sheet music, the copy editor picked up a large “P” signifying “Piano” and attached it to a word in the poem. Fraser’s Magazine editors took on the noble task of righting the error in an article about the Exhibition, complaining that “By some great breach of faith this Ode fell into the all-devouring jaws of The Times, where it was printed so incorrectly that we think our readers will be glad to see it as it was originally written, including three lines which have been omitted.”31 The 24 April Times version left out six lines, including the three noted by Fraser’s. A later Times version, published on 14 July 1862 with a Greek translation, corrects the former word problems and adds three of the missing lines, but omits the remaining three. It is unclear how Fraser’s acquired the three lines, deleted from the original manuscript by Tennyson, according to Christopher Ricks, who does not include them in the ode printed in his standard Tennyson edition.32 Thus, while Fraser’s proudly claims to have the authorized edition, it simply moves farther away from Tennyson’s intent, producing more errors and complicating an already messy textual history. No record exists of Tennyson’s frustration with these added abuses of his poem, but we could certainly justify a measure of resentment in him against the printer’s devils. The incident 29 Tennyson, Letters, II:281. 30 Quoted in Tennyson, Letters, II:282n. 31 “The International Exhibition,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country (June 1862), 803. 32 Alfred Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, 2nd edn, ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), II:624.

“God Save the Queen”: Laureatic Responses

153

demonstrates good reasons for Tennyson’s disgust with publishing in periodicals. His text was out of control, and The Times’ errors appeared in many unauthorized versions that appeared in Britain and America, as we see in Tennyson’s letter to James Fields on 11 February 1867: “you have printed the International ode with two mistakes: you copied it from the Times and did not see my letter to the Times about it.”33 Misprinted versions of the ode were rapidly being reproduced in American anthologies of Tennyson’s poems, but Tennyson could do nothing about it, and the ode could not be completely subdued until it appeared in the Cabinet Edition in 1874. The Fraser’s article preceding Tennyson’s poem reports on the Exhibition’s success a month after its grand opening ceremony. The article begins, not with praises of the ornamental beauty, scientific inventions, or stunning display of trades exhibited at the event, but with an accounting of receipts; the International Exhibition was turning a massive profit for its organizers. The 14 July 1862 Times article reprinting Tennyson’s ode compares the week’s attendance at this exhibition with the same week in the 1851 event: “a total of 228,427 for the week in 1851, and 307,612 for 1862, giving to the latter an excess of some 20,000 visitors. If, however, the returns had been carefully taken on Friday at least 30,000 more would have been added to this majority.”34 Clearly, the 1862 Exhibition was a much larger endeavor than that of 1851, but the spiritual presence of the late Prince Consort undoubtedly enhanced attendance receipts, for his tireless efforts enabled the 1851 Exhibition, and his death on 14 December framed the 1862 Exhibition in eulogistic terms, providing yet another context to Tennyson’s ode. As Tennyson was negotiating and worrying over Bennett’s composition and how his lines would sound being disseminated by 4,000 voices, Prince Albert died. During the winter months, Tennyson was busy composing memorials to Prince Albert. Two weeks after the Prince’s death, Tennyson composed dedicatory lines to be reproduced in a new edition of Idylls of the King (originally published in 1859), which was already at the printers, and on January 9, Tennyson added lines on the Prince’s death to his Exhibition ode. Thus the ode becomes an extension of the Dedication and promotes the added memorial context that might inspire buyers to purchase the new Idylls edition or pay to attend the Exhibition in memory of the Prince. As Margaret Homans shows, “Even poems written before Albert’s death became, after 1861, poems in Albert’s memory.”35 All these texts become embedded in the chain of commodities being sold in the world’s largest commodity exhibit. Yet the Fraser’s printing of the ode suggests that Albert’s golden years are finished, and the notion of peace that he envisioned was only a dream. The first stanza of the ode celebrates the occasion that peacefully gathers nations to share innovative ideas from science and art, but the second stanza abruptly changes the tone as it recalls Prince Albert: 33 Tennyson, Letters, II:452. 34 “International Exhibition,” The Times (14 July 1862), 7. 35 Homans, 180.

154

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals O silent father of our Kings to be, Mourn’d in this golden hour of jubilee For this, for all, we weep our thanks to thee! The world-compelling plan was thine, And, lo! The long laborious miles Of Palace.36

The poem lists Exhibition items on display, including tools, engines, fabrics, inventions, “shapes and hues of Art Divine,” ending with all items “mixt, as life is mixt with pain, / The works of peace with works of war.” The next three lines, deleted in the manuscript version at Lincoln, seamlessly continue the war theme in the Fraser’s version: “War himself must make alliance / With rough Labour and fine Science, / Else he would but strike in vain;” perhaps Tennyson felt these lines contradict the plea for peace contained elsewhere, as in the closing lines in which the poet hopes to see “all men work in noble brotherhood, / Breaking their mailed fleets and armed towers, / And ruling by obeying nature’s powers, / And gathering all the fruits of Peace and crown’d with all her flowers.” Yet the author of the Fraser’s article that includes the poem comments that The most striking fact connected with the present assemblage of objects, particularly if a comparison be instituted between the Exhibition of 1862 and that of 1851, is the great space occupied by engines of war. Then the flush of a new industrial idea and the lulling security of a long peace, filled many minds with the belief that there would be no more war. . . . Alas! The dream faded with the passing away of the brilliant glass house in Hydepark; and no sooner were the doors of the Exhibition of 1851 closed than the nations of the earth rose up to wage war.37

The writer commends the 1862 Exhibition for presenting “Armstrong and Whitworth guns” next to new scientific innovations, and quotes the last stanza in Tennyson’s ode: “for if we can make war so destructive as to be almost impossible, we shall arrive at last at that blessed period when the ‘fair white-winged peacemakers’ will fly into every haven unharmed by man, and all men will ‘work in noble brotherhood.’” Without the added lines extracted by Tennyson in his original version, such conclusions would seem overstated, for war is only mentioned in one other line of the ode, quoted above. The Fraser’s writer continues the theme by noting that countries “shaken by war occupy, in proportion to their territorial rank among nations, the smallest space”: the beleaguered United States, suffering from its Civil War, “is now dwarfed to a narrow corner in which her eagle cowers with collapsed wings. . . . Austria demanded only 50,000 feet; Russia, with her vast territories, but 15,000; while tiny Belgium occupies not less than 48,000” (804-805). Fraser’s reinstitutes lines deleted by Tennyson to weave an argument about England’s national strength and potential threats to security, while establishing her superiority over 36 Alfred Tennyson, “Ode Sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition,” quoted in “International Exhibition,” 803. 37 “International Exhibition,” 804.

“God Save the Queen”: Laureatic Responses

155

other nations, such as the United States, who are weakened by war. The Fraser’s writer criticizes the “all-devouring jaws of the Times” for printing errors, while he is enacting comparably unfaithful distortions of Tennyson’s work. The Times was a suitable publishing home for laureatic poetry because it was the dominant newspaper of Britain. Papers throughout the country and abroad were likely to disseminate errors from freely borrowed Times’ reportage of royal events, but Tennyson was a national possession. He was Britain’s Poet Laureate, just as Victoria was Britain’s Queen, and he sacrificed privacy and a degree of creative autonomy in his acceptance of the position. He was a paid poet, a translator of the royal message, or, as he signed his letters to the Queen, a “faithful and obedient servant.” Tennyson’s poem, “A Welcome to Alexandra,” honored the arrival of Denmark’s Princess Alexandra for her wedding to the Prince of Wales in March, 1863, and buoyed the hopes of Victoria; according to Hope Dyson and Charles Tennyson, the Queen had suffered much from what she considered the Prince’s instability, which she felt had contributed to Prince Albert’s collapse, and she had real hopes that Princess Alexandra’s beauty, charm and common sense would help her eldest son to settle down and accept his responsibilities. Tennyson shared this hopefulness of the Queen and the Nation.38

The wedding was the first royal event recorded by photo-journalists. Detailed newspaper reportage records Alexandra’s arrival in an elaborate procession through London on 7 March and the wedding on 10 March in the Chapel Royal. The poem arrived at Windsor just after the procession and appeared in the Times on the wedding day, although Tennyson sent it to Frederick Evans of Bradbury and Evans for official printing, rather than The Times. Tennyson wrote to the Duchess of Argyll about the poem, calling it “a little lyrical flash, an impromptu,” and noting that William Sterndale Bennett would again write music that would convert his poem into a popular song.39 Unfortunately, another composer did not bother to ask Tennyson’s permission and beat Bennett into the marketplace with his own Alexandra welcome song. The incident exemplifies the competitive and highly profitable potential of adopting Tennyson’s official poetry for public occasions. The composer, the newspaper, and publishers Bradbury and Evans all profited from Tennyson’s “impromptu.” Again, we have no record of his reaction to these commercial integrations; one must imagine him at Farringford, growling to Emily about the composer and a host of unethical, thieving newspaper editors. Publicly, the poet seems to have accepted the nature of his official contributions, allowing his product to become part of the cultural stream. Yet Tennyson benefitted from the reconstitution of his work in ways far beyond financial gain, favor from the Queen, and self-satisfaction for dutifully fulfilling his public role. He became the most highly visible poet in history. The Times publication of his poem served as a gift to readers of all classes, advertising the union of domestic love and national fervor. 38 Victoria, Dear and Honoured Lady, 73. 39 Tennyson, Letters, II:323.

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

156

The Alexandra poem echoes the celebration and applause offered to the Princess in the London procession, with its “thundering cheer of the street” and “thunders of fort and of fleet.”40 Spring flowers and music of birds “in the new-budded bowers” bring blessings and welcome to the Princess from coast to coast. Fireworks reach to the stars, flags fly high, and trumpets blare to welcome the new bride, the “Sea-kings’ daughter from over the sea.” Tennyson unites Saxon, Norman, and Danes in the marriage, a detail interesting to Robin Inboden because it indicates “a foreshadowing in small of the panoramic view of the empire’s inhabitants that will come in later poems. Here, the difference in Tennyson’s eyes between Saxon and Celt seems as significant as that between British and Indian, but more significant still is that all are united to welcome the gentle Danish princess.”41 The poem mirrors the nationalistic spirit of a Times report of the London procession from the previous day’s paper: The same feeling which led the poor labourers in the Kentish meadows to put flags on their haystacks drew the elite of the aristocracy to the windows of Pall-mall and Piccadilly, and from the moment of her first landing at Gravesend till the Princess drove beneath the towers of the oldest and stateliest of all the kingly seats of Europe the feeling was the same throughout—one honest hearty welcome, tendered with a blessing and goodwill.42

Countries and classes unite for this historic welcome: “For Saxon or Dane or Norman we, / Teuton or Celt, or whatever we be, / We are each all Dane in our welcome of thee, / Alexandra,” exclaims the poem in a cheerful rebirth of hope. Yet newspapers relentlessly remind us that all is not well on any day, regardless of glorious celebrations, for Tennyson’s poem shares the page with dispatches from American newspapers about bloody Civil War battles and a letter to the editor complaining about abuses received from clergymen of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, who mishandled crowds purchasing tickets to view the Princess from their churchyard. Victoria requested from Tennyson four lines to be engraved on a statue of the Queen’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, who died on 16 March 1861. The statue, sculpted by William Theed, stood in a Mausoleum that also contained Prince Albert’s remains (and later Victoria’s). Katherine Mary Bruce reported to Tennyson that the Queen was not satisfied with his lines: “Beautiful as they are, your tried kindness induces the Queen to let you know honestly that they do not quite express Her idea.”43 She wanted Tennyson to write lines that better described her view of the Duchess, and she thought one of his lines “too presuming.” Tennyson dutifully wrote new lines to satisfy the Queen, but his impatience with these tasks is reflected in a comment to Emily on 6 March 1873 in response to a request from the Queen through Lady Augusta Bruce (now Stanley) that he come to visit the Mausoleum in Windsor: “How I wanted to shirk it, so I said deuce take all Kings and Empresses

40 41 42 43

Alfred Tennyson, “A Welcome,” The Times (10 March 1863), 10. Inboden, 210-11. “The Reception of the Princess Alexandra,” The Times (9 March 1863) 9. Tennyson, Letters, II:350.

“God Save the Queen”: Laureatic Responses

157

and deuce take the Bruce, but I suppose I shall have to go and stop here till I go.”44 Yet Tennyson yielded once again to his Queen, by writing to order and attending on request, and the lines appeared as part of court news in The Court Journal and Fashionable Gazette on 19 March 1864, among brief stories about the Queen’s daily activities for the week in a column titled “The Court at Windsor.” According to the report, the Royal Family were at Frogmore for the anniversary of the Duchess of Kent’s death, commemorated by the unveiling of the statue containing Tennyson’s lines: The statue . . . represents the Duchess standing. It is on a pedestal of imperial red Portugese marble, and is placed in a temple over the chamber containing the sarcophagus. Over the statue is inscribed the following inscription: —‘her children rise up and call her blessed.’ The following lines by Mr. Tennyson are also inscribed: — Long as the heart beats life within her breast, Thy child will bless thee, guardian, mother mild, And far away thy memory will be blest, By children of the children of thy child.45

The report became the source for wide distribution of the inscription among the popular press. As Margaret Homans explains, the verses and the statue memorialize Victoria, rather than her mother: “The verse celebrates Victoria’s fertility and durability as well as the value of her blessing, even while it ostensibly celebrates the Duchess, and thus Victoria gets her laureate to praise her in just the manner she likes best, in a kneeling pose that nonetheless amply displays her virtues.”46 The Court Journal participates in such representations of Victoria, both through Tennyson’s lines and in its purpose as a periodical, to publicize gossip about the aristocracy. “The Court at Windsor” portrays a busy monarch, receiving foreign monarchs, socializing with political celebrities, and attending to official state business. In 1874, another royal wedding required Tennyson’s creative skills, but this request and the union it celebrated evoked a far less hopeful response than the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Denmark’s Princess Alexandra in 1863. Victoria’s second son Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, became engaged to marry the Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, who was the only daughter of Czar Alexander II of Russia, with whom Britain had a tense history of competition for power in the Balkans. According to Dyson and Tennyson, Prince Alfred’s mother did not at all welcome this match. She disliked and distrusted the Romanovs, saw no political advantage in the marriage and doubted whether the Duke would make a good husband. The engagement, which was announced in July 1873, was the prelude to much

44 Quoted in Victoria, 91. 45 Quoted in “The Court at Windsor,” The Court Journal (19 March 1864), 280. 46 Homans, 181.

158

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals diplomatic and domestic irritation and it was not until late in the year that the Queen became reconciled to it by the warmth and spontaneity of the young Grand Duchess.47

Lady Augusta asked Tennyson to compose a poem for the occasion, according to her letter to the Queen on 4 March 1874: “Tennyson did not feel, when we saw him before Xmas, that he could put his thoughts into a harmonious shape—and Your Majesty knows how impatient of all considerations but the breathing of the Gods his muse is, at least how very little at his own command or under his control.”48 Tennyson was probably struggling with his own anti-Russian sentiments, trying to arrange a balance between a limited tolerance for Russia and a demonstration of British superiority. The wedding took place in St. Petersburg on 23 January 1874, and the couple returned to London on 7 March. Tennyson’s poem, “A Welcome” appeared in the Times on the day of their arrival. Although the welcome poem belongs in Tennyson’s official celebratory genre, it comes layered with the poet’s political prejudices against Russia and recalls recent tensions in the first line, naming Alexander II as “The Son of him with whom we strove for power—/ Whose will is lord thro’ all his world-domain—Who made the serf a man, and burst his chain.”49 Like the wedding of the Prince of Wales and his Danish princess, this event comes at spring, a time of rebirth for Britain, “when her flowers begin to blow!” The next stanza hints at the broad expanse of empire belonging to Russia and Britain, from the “Tartar tents” and “all the Caucasus” to the “sultry palms of India,” the “voices of our universal sea / On capes of Afric as on cliffs of Kent, / The Maoris and that Isle of Continent, / And loyal pines of Canada murmur thee, / Marie Alexandrovna!” Patrick Waddington notes that Tennyson’s suggestion of Russian power abroad is hopeful: The route is somewhat circuitous, but no matter; while no one would suspect Tennyson of wishing Russia to have sway in India, there is a tacit acceptance that its power was on the land, while Britain ruled the seas. Provided that the Russian empire fell no more into barbarian hands, the poet now (despite his former scepticism) could see no reason why it should not complement Victoria’s own and build a firm base for future peace and harmony throughout the world. The young couple’s love figured universal love between peoples.50

However, the princess is coming to a “stranger land / Where men are bold and strongly say their say.” Alexander is credited for freeing the surfs, but the notion of English freedom is foreign to her Russian countrymen, thus peace is tentative: “Shall fears and jealous hatreds flame again? / Or at thy coming, Princess, everywhere, / The blue heaven break, and some diviner air / Breathe thro’ the world and change the hearts of men . . . howsoever this wild world may roll, / Between your peoples truth 47 Victoria, 92. 48 Quoted in Victoria, 92. 49 Alfred Tennyson, “A Welcome,” The Times (7 March 1874), 5. 50 Patrick Waddington, From The Russian Fugitive to The Ballad of Bulgarie: Episodes in English Literary Attitudes to Russia from Wordsworth to Swinburne (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 102.

“God Save the Queen”: Laureatic Responses

159

and manful peace, / Alfred—Alexandrovna!” The line suggests that such hatreds will indeed arise again, because miracles do not occur that change the hearts of men, and nothing will change the Russian truth, which is in opposition to “manful peace.”51 In spite of the union of the two countries represented in their names at the end, Britain and Russia would fight again, and Tennyson would not lose his distrust, as we see in his remark to William Allingham in 1878, at the end of the Russo-Turkish War: “I’ve hated Russia ever since I as born, and I’ll hate her till I die!”52 With his welcome poem, Tennyson converts a royal wedding into a political statement that expresses both his and his Queen’s distrust of Russian imperial designs and the poem becomes a textual element of the “Eastern Question” debated throughout the latter part of the century. The Times description of ensuing events reflects a similar attitude. The page containing Tennyson’s welcome poem on Saturday 7 March expresses no sense of national pride and celebration. The article simply begins by reporting that “The men-of-war ordered on duty at Gravesend to receive the Royal yacht having on board the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh have arrived and are now moored off the town.”53 However, the celebration began the following week, as the couple arrived at Windsor, and a Times journalist discusses historical tendencies to arrange royal marriages for political convenience: The sons and daughters of the Royal House are not sacrificed for fancied advantages never to be secured; they are joined in happy wedlock because affection has gone before; and, if a kindly international feeling afterwards arises, as may well happen, it is strong and enduring, because it is the fruit of natural causes and has sprung up without design and without forethought. . . . Arguments of State are lost in the sentiment of domesticity.54

Nevertheless, the writer exclaims that “We must all rejoice if England and Russia shall remain henceforth welded together in peace,” and another article on the same page reports on the “national satisfaction at a domestic alliance between England and Russia.” Domestic love reigns over political expediency in the Times report and in Tennyson’s poem; as Inboden writes, “The somewhat routine request to celebrate a royal marriage becomes an opportunity to heal the past, educate the present, and face the future with fearful hope.”55 Tennyson attended the wedding procession through London on 12 March and commented in a letter to Emily that “The people were very enthusiastic,” and that for miles the Queen and the Princess shook their heads “incessantly right and left, as if they had necks of india-rubber.”56 He remarked that “The Princess looked large and imperial,” but he was mainly worried that the rhythm

51 52 53 54 55 56

Tennyson, “A Welcome,” 5. Quoted in Waddington, 103. “The Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh,” The Times (7 March 1874), 5. “London, Monday, March 9, 1874,” The Times (9 March 1874), 9. Inboden, 212. Tennyson, Letters, III:74.

160

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

of his poem was wrong: “People say that the accent is on the antepenultimate, Alexándrovna. If so, it rather spoils my chorus.” Tennyson’s “Dedicatory Poem to Princess Alice” commemorates the death of Queen Victoria’s second daughter, Princess Alice, the Grand Duchess of HesseDarmstadt. Its placement in the Nineteenth Century, as a dedicatory poem to “The Defence of Lucknow” provides interesting opportunities to observe a convergence of domestic, religious, and political voices. Princess Alice was a favorite of Tennyson’s; upon first meeting her, Tennyson writes: “I was charmed with Princess Alice. She seemed to me what Goethe calls eine Natur. Did he not say that was the highest compliment that could be paid to a woman?”57 Alice was with her mother at Windsor Castle when Prince Albert died on 14 December 1861, and she initiated Tennyson’s first correspondences with the Queen after Albert’s death. In November 1878, Princess Alice’s fifteen-year-old daughter Victoria became ill with diphtheria and infected the rest of her children, including daughter May, who died on 15 November. As Alice’s son Ernie begged his mother to know May’s fate, Alice kissed her son, who was also infected with the disease, causing Alice’s death almost a month later on 14 December 1878, the 17th anniversary of Prince Albert’s death. The poem appears in conjunction with “The Defence of Lucknow” in the April, 1879 issue of the Nineteenth Century and represents a departure in the regular mode of periodical publication for his laureatic offerings; Tennyson’s official poems were usually distributed through elusive sources to The Times and freely copied by the popular press, but in this case Tennyson sent the dedicatory poem to Nineteenth Century editor James Knowles, who placed it like other Tennyson poems published in his periodical, prominently on the first page of the issue. Whether or not Tennyson actively contributed a poem to a periodical is not necessarily related to the meaning the periodical produces independently, except as it informs our perspective of the poet’s intent. The Nineteenth Century was the outgrowth of the Metaphysical Society formed by Knowles, Tennyson and others, to open-mindedly explore intellectual issues of faith and science, thus my reading focuses on the periodical’s ideological bent and its readership. Chapter Three discusses “The Defence of Lucknow” as an attempt to mythologize British courage from the past for a later generation of disillusioned seekers, such as the Metaphysical Society members. Robin Inboden places “The Defence of Lucknow” and its dedication to a dead princess together in a “feminizing context” and notes that, in both poems, “women, through their nurturing role in giving and preserving life, are cast in their own roles of heroism and selfsacrifice, not just victimization.”58 Inboden justifies the juxtaposition of poems as a parallel to the relationship of Britain and India: The Mother Queen treats India as the pride of her imperial family, offering political education, military protection, and scientific modernization to her newly adopted but no less treasured children. Yet the sick child, without meaning to, threatens to destroy the

57 Tennyson, Letters, II:304. 58 Inboden, 213.

“God Save the Queen”: Laureatic Responses

161

mother. It is surely suggestive that Princess Alice is identified so closely and insistently with England in the dedicatory poem. (214)

This rationale works well to connect the dedicatory poem with its companion. However, considering the poem as a unit in the material container of the Nineteenth Century creates yet another understanding of Tennyson’s work. The “Dedicatory Poem to Princess Alice” also demonstrates for Metaphysical Society readers the spiritual doubts that encode Tennyson with the later Victorians. “Dead Princess”: the first words of Tennyson’s poem starkly introduce readers to his central concern with death and the possibility of immortality. If there is a “living Power” and if that, “which lived / True life, live on,” and if there is eternity, and “if what we call / The spirit flash not all at once from out / This shadow into Substance,” perhaps Alice is listening and will accept Tennyson’s poem of praise.59 The poet names Alice “England’s England-loving daughter,” who, “Dying so English,” will have a flag on her coffin like the flag flown above the compound during the deadly siege of Lucknow. The poem recalls Tennyson’s familiar role as memorializer, first of Arthur Henry Hallam, and later of Prince Albert, who now shares an anniversary of death with his own daughter. From the beginning, Tennyson would be embedded with texts about death; as Margaret Homans observes, “For her laureate, Victoria presciently chose a professional mourner, for Tennyson shared with his Queen and Isle of Wight neighbor a near lifelong and highly public preoccupation with the death of the beloved.”60 Here Tennyson’s poem, “The Defence of Lucknow,” serves as a token of grief, an artifact presented in memory of Princess Alice for her grieving mother. A poem about the death of many women and children at Lucknow is the gift to commemorate death, past and present, and Tennyson does not hope or promise that much remains but glory and memory. One must cling to a lingering “if” to justify the incomprehensible loss of women and children during the imperial defense of Lucknow, and only the love of a woman for her child glorifies the fate of Alice. As material products of the spiritual questioning conducted by Metaphysical Society members, the poems answer all doubts. Tennyson’s work and his dead subjects are immortal as periodical print and further hypertextualization, but temporal as contexts of their revolving generations of readers. The collective effect of death in Tennyson’s laureatic work extends into another celebratory wedding poem for the Princess Beatrice, first printed as private copies for the Queen on 20 July 1885, and published in The Times on her wedding day, 23 July. Victoria requested “3 or 4 lines” to commemorate the wedding of her youngest daughter to Prince Henry of Battenburg at Whippingham Church on the Isle of Wight near the Queen’s home at Osborne. For the Queen, her youngest daughter’s marriage was a kind of funeral, according to Dyson and Tennyson: “The Queen, in spite of her liking for the Battenbergs, opposed it vigorously, not from any objection to Prince

59 Alfred Tennyson, “Dedicatory Poem to the Princess Alice,” The Nineteenth Century (April 1879), 575. 60 Homans, 179.

162

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Henry, but simply because she always disliked the marriage of her daughters, and, in this case, could not bear to be parted from her youngest, whose society and support had meant so much to her in recent years and who could have no successor.”61 Only the promise of habitation with Victoria after the wedding would settle the issue. The Queen writes to Tennyson on 5 July: “The young Prince, a soldier and excellent officer, though too young to have been in the German War, is very handsome, universally and deservedly beloved” (116). Tennyson returned a poem of 22 lines, happy that Beatrice was marrying a soldier: England, whose heart has rarely, if ever, beaten more warmly for her soldiers, nor with better cause than now, will rejoice that the Princess, whom she has loved as the devoted daughter, has every prospect of being the happy wife of a soldier Prince, and of bringing a new solace to the life which year by year becomes more precious to the whole Empire. (116)

In a letter to Tennyson on 8 July, Queen Victoria extends her discussion of Prince Henry as a German soldier to her suffering of the past months over “the fatal mistakes made by the late Government in Egypt and the Sudan—when they interfered and checked and stopped what was necessary and were always too late—thereby being the cause of the death of that noble Hero Gordon (whose abandonment is an eternal blot on our crown, though not on the Nation!).62 Thus Tennyson’s comment about Beatrice’s soldier-Prince relates to General George Gordon, in whose memory he was working to organize the Gordon Boys’ Home and in whom Queen Victoria joins Tennyson in hero worship, calling him “our simple soldier” (120). The Times had published Tennyson’s “Epitaph on General Gordon” only six weeks before publishing his poem for Princess Beatrice’s wedding. Although Victoria wrote that Beatrice was delighted with Tennyson’s wedding poem, hearsay that she was distressed about the occasion being described as a “white funeral of the single life” is understandable. However, the line refers to Victoria’s perspective about the loss of her virginal daughter’s companionship, and the poem works more as comforting note to a grieving Queen than as a celebration for Beatrice’s wedding. Tennyson describes two loves of a human life: one “the Sun of Dawn / That brightens thro’ the Mother’s tender eyes,” and another, the “Sun of spousal Love / Which from her household orbit draws the child / To move in other spheres.”63 While the “Mother weeps / At that white funeral of the single life, / Her maiden daughter’s marriage,” the child rejoices in leaving. But the poet asserts that Beatrice is a “True daughter, whose all-faithful, filial eyes / Have seen the loneliness of earthly thrones,” and she will “neither quit the widow’s Crown, nor let / This later light of love have risen in vain, / But moving thro’ the Mother’s home,” between both mother and spouse. A later Times report on the royal wedding commiserates with the Queen as an extended text of Tennyson’s poem: “Prince and Princess Henry 61 Victoria, 115. 62 Quoted in Tennyson, Letters, III:321n. 63 Alfred Tennyson, “To H.R.H. Princess Beatrice,” The Times (23 July 1885), 7.

“God Save the Queen”: Laureatic Responses

163

of Battenberg have started on their honeymoon amid the good wishes of the whole nation, and the Queen’s sorrow at parting with her daughter cannot but be soothed by the universal sympathy it has elicited.”64 Adrienne Munich views Victoria’s position on Beatrice’s wedding as an exploitation of her authority as mother: “her representations of herself as a mother depended in part in having at least on child at her beck and call. . . . The older Victoria, beyond childbearing years, becomes more of a national maternal figure than she did when she was bearing children.”65 Munich claims an active, conscious role for Victoria’s manipulation, and her efforts inspired representations of her as a maternal monarchy, and she “was known for suffering with her subjects, particularly the soldiers maimed in distant battlefields,” such as the suffering demonstrated in her letter to Tennyson about Gordon in the Sudan. The Times readers continued to suffer with Tennyson and his Queen, for the pages containing news of the royal wedding also feature news articles about the Sudan, Egypt, and the “Afghan Question,” reminding readers that all was not well with the empire. Nevertheless, Jubilee Day (21 June 1887) celebrated Victoria’s fifty years as monarch and confirmed her role as the symbolic heart of England. Tennyson inaugurated the season of celebration by writing “Carmen Saeculare. An Ode in Honour of the Jubilee of Queen Victoria,” published as the first page in the April, 1887 issue of Macmillan’s Magazine, owned by Tennyson’s own publisher since 1884, Macmillan and Company. Mowbray Morris was beginning a 22-year stint as editor of Macmillan’s, and he was responsible for serializing Thomas Hardy’s novel The Woodlanders, which flanks Tennyson’s poem in the volume; however, George J. Worth observes that publications by better known poets such as Tennyson and George Meredith “certainly owed less to Morris’s exertions than to the Macmillan’s wish to have two of their major house poets represented in the Magazine.”66 The exciting glory days of the 1860s were over for Macmillan’s, and Worth notes: “the fact that Macmillan was withdrawing from the direction of the Magazine during the dozen years before his death in 1896 helps to account for its decline under those last two editors”(19). Although publishing Tennyson’s Jubilee poem was still an important event, Tennyson’s contribution creates a backward look into the past for the periodical, as well as for the Poet Laureate and the Queen; all were aging cultural artifacts of a dying generation. As Worth describes it: One does often get the feeling in perusing Mowbray Morris’s Magazine that his contributors tended to look back rather than forward: not only centuries back . . . but also decades back . . . it is impossible for any knowledgeable person looking over those volumes today to escape the inference that something irrecoverable is perceived to be drawing to its close—not so much the century as something intimately connected with the history of the Magazine itself. (169) 64 News item, The Times (24 July 1885), 9. 65 Munich, 193. 66 George J. Worth, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1859–1907: ‘No Flippancy or Abuse Allowed’ (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003), 165.

164

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Tennyson would be dead on 6 October 1892, Victoria on 29 January 1901, and Macmillan’s after its October 1907 issue.67 As usual, the popular press rapidly reproduced parts of the ode without Macmillan’s permission, although Morris did demand and receive an apology from the Daily News for reprinting the entire poem. C. Villiers Stanton wrote music for a full orchestra performance at Buckingham Palace on 11 May 1887. Tennyson’s glory days were also waning, and ghosts of the past transcribe the celebratory purpose of his ode. He wrote to Victoria on 12 March 1887: I do indeed feel how the sense of loneliness may oppress Y.M. in the midst of these loud rejoicings. . . . The multitude are loud, but They are silent. Yet if the dead, as I have often felt, tho’ silent, be more living than the living—and linger for a while about the planet in which their earth life was passed—then they, while we are lamenting that they are not at our side, may still be with us, and the husband the daughter and the son lost by Yr. M. may rejoice when the people shout the name of their Queen.68

His comment reveals the theme set forth in his dedicatory poem for Princess Alice in 1879. According to George Marshall, “Tennyson had resolved not to mar the Queen’s jubilee by any such criticism of the age as he had voiced in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” and contends that the poem’s “dominant note is that of a paean celebrating the fifty years of Victoria’s reign,” but ghosts of dead people live in the text Tennyson produced for Macmillan’s, whose pages echo ghostly voices such as Alexander Macmillan’s.69 With the first line comes the acceptance that all must die, and “Fifty times the rose has flower’d and faded, / Fifty times the golden harvest fallen,” making the Queen a perpetually dying monarch. Recalling English kings of the past who celebrated 50 years on the throne, the poet portrays their years as “in shadow” and “half forgotten.”70 Victoria’s moment in history will be immortalized with a “stately memorial . . . regally gorgeous, / Some Imperial Institute, / Rich in symbol, in ornament, / Which may speak to the centuries, / All the centuries after us, / Of this year of her Jubilee” (404). The poem domesticizes Victoria as “gracious, gentle, great and Queenly . . . as true to womanhood as Queenhood, / Glorying in the glories of her people, / Sorrowing with the sorrows of the lowest!” (402-403). The image of womanhood as suffering is traditional feminine stereotyping that Queen Victoria cultivated and manipulated, according to Homans. Elizabeth Langland further notes that “These poetic images resonate with the portrayals of the Queen in portraiture 67 A special issue of Victorian Poetry prints a selection of parodies of Tennyson’s ode, indicating the widespread criticism he received about this poem, as well as many others in the later period of his life. See Victorian Poetry 25:3-4 (Autumn-Winter 1987). 68 Victoria, 130. 69 George O. Marshall, Jr., A Tennyson Handbook (New York: Twayne, 1963), 226227. 70 Alfred Tennyson, “Carmen Saeculare. An Ode in Honour of the Jubilee of Queen Victoria,” Macmillan’s Magazine (April 1887), 401.

“God Save the Queen”: Laureatic Responses

165

of the early and middle Victorian period” and “tended to deploy conventional feminized images.”71 The echo of previous feminized portrayals of the Queen encode Tennyson’s ode describing her as “Nothing of the vulgar, or vainglorious,” and a woman who is “beloved for a kindliness / Rare in Fable or History” (401402). While charging England’s lords and industrial kings of Commerce, Science, and Empire to express a spirit of harmony and charity during the celebration days, Tennyson also includes countries of the empire in his challenge: “Patient children of Albion, / You, Canadian, Indian, / Australasian, African, / All your hearts be in harmony, / All your voices in unison, / Singing ‘Hail to the glorious / Golden year of her Jubilee!’” Indeed, countries of the empire staged their own jubilant celebrations of the Queen’s reign, but troubles brewing at home and abroad could not be silenced by a song, and Tennyson notes the potential threats and rumbling of wars: “Are there thunders moaning in the distance? / Are there spectres moving in the darkness? / Trust the Lord of Light to guide her people, / Till the thunders pass, the spectres vanish, / And the Light is Victor, and the darkness / Dawns into the Jubilee of the Ages.” Spiritual doubts, the rattling of foreign guns, ghosts of the past, and a tooslender thread of belief in religion create a sense that Tennyson is whistling in the dark, attempting to reassure his readers about a visionary future in which he does not believe. As with his poem on Princess Alice, Tennyson’s comfort is in cold memorial and in the momentary happiness provided by the Jubilee Day. William Fredeman describes the Jubilee as an event that Provided a grand opportunity for sublimating national unrest, rekindled popular interest in the Queen, and entrenched her position with her subjects, but the grandeur of the celebration also prompted considerable criticism of conditions at home and abroad, even of the Queen herself. It also occasioned a general reassessment of all aspects of British life, including the role of the monarchy. The Empire had not yet begun that advance into desuetude that would eventually overtake it, but the signs of change were visible, and this year of the Queen’s greatest triumph may be seen as [a] turning point in British history.72

The century, too, was aging, and this sense of loss overwhelms any positive intent of the Tennyson text in Macmillan’s. One of the many parodies of Tennyson’s Jubilee ode reflects the guiding spirit of the new era that quickly tired of Tennyson’s now old-fashioned sensibility: You that once in affluence Of diction, caught the ear of time, Call we now no longer ours The people’s friend. Spoiled child With diadem, and much belorded. 71 Elizabeth Langland, “Nation and Nationality: Queen Victoria in the Developing Narrative of Englishness,” Remaking Queen Victoria, eds. Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 20. 72 William E. Fredeman, “Introduction: ‘England Our Home, Victoria Our Queen,’” Victorian Poetry 25:3-4 (Autumn-Winter 1987), 3.

166

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals We cannot now be comforted, Our maiméd heart for yours doth bleed, At this, your twaddle talk of Jubilee.73

Yet the power of periodicals was most decidedly thriving. In spite of its critics, Tennyson’s ode was influential with its readers, who began internalizing the text through newspaper reprints and Macmillan’s well before the celebration in June. A skimming of pages from The Times during the weeks before the Jubilee shows that Tennyson’s ode was being retextualized and commodified by his public. On 4 April 1887, just a few days after the ode appeared in Macmillan’s, the London Hospital uses the Poet Laureate’s ode as a fund-raising tool, quoting its lines in bold: “GIVE YOUR GOLD to the HOSPITAL—Lord Tennyson’s Jubilee Ode— LONDON HOSPITAL.”74 The hospital is cashing in on Tennyson’s challenge, urging those who are “wanton in affluence” to “Spare not now to be bountiful, / Call your poor to regale with you, / Make their neighborhood healthfuller, / Give your gold to the Hospital.”75 The ad lists names of recent donors and the amount given, including two Anonymous donors who gave £1, a wise tactic that enables less financially flush givers to become philanthropic, while perhaps feeling somewhat proud of being “wanton in affluence.” A later ad lists small contributions from groups of the type that middle-class readers might join: “The Skinners’ Company, £21; Readers of Rare Bits, 12s.”76 By 26 May, the line appeared at the top of the ad in quotation marks, serving as a now-familiar motto for the hospital’s fund-raising campaign, and that day’s paper also featured a report on the first meeting of the council of the Gordon Boys’ Home foundation, providing further connections to Tennyson, the Queen, and their shared commodification of suffering. The Times journalist reporting on the Jubilee Day celebration events on 22 June 1887 records that “The Sovereign, in spite of her burden of half a century of power, has assumed her part in the imposing ceremony by which her fifty years of glory and prosperity have been celebrated. . . . She has put aside her own sorrows and griefs, in order to join in the song of jubilant exultation which the nation is singing with one accord.”77 Nearly five years later, Tennyson continued to confirm his image as memorializer by dedicating his poem, titled “The Death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale,” to mourners, and the Nineteenth Century page on which it appears collaborates with the grieving text by printing “To the Mourners” in bold Gothic type. The eldest son of the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Clarence, died tragically on 14 January 1892 within six weeks of announcing his engagement to Princess Mary of Teck. The poet juxtaposes paradoxical images of bridal garland and funeral bier in his first line, suggesting the loss of hope and renewal represented in the upcoming union. 73 “Carmen Expostulatory,” in “A Selection of Parodies of Tennyson’s Jubilee Ode,” Victorian Poetry 25:3-4 (Autumn-Winter 1987), 23. 74 Classified ad, The Times (4 April 1887), 13. 75 Tennyson, “Carmen Saeculare,” 403. 76 Classified ad, The Times (5 May 1887), 1. 77 “Her Majesty’s Jubilee. The Celebration in London,” The Times (22 June 1887), 5.

“God Save the Queen”: Laureatic Responses

167

Possibilities of kingship are now “vanish’d in the shadow cast by Death.”78 Yet his search for comfort seems more confidently focused on Christian salvation, for “The toll of funeral in an Angel ear / Sounds happier than the merriest marriage-bell,” and there is “no discordance in the roll / And march of that Eternal Harmony / Whereto the worlds beat time, tho’ faintly heard / Until the great Hereafter” (182). If his hope for a happy future in the Jubilee poem rang shallow, his hope for a life after death reads authentic in this final official poem of his long life as Poet Laureate. Yet its presence in James Knowles’s Nineteenth Century continues to retain a liberal spirit of religious inquiry and, like the poem for Princess Alice, Tennyson’s elegy for the Duke lacks certainty that God exists, for his words of comfort to mourners turn on the conditional word “if,” “If this earth be ruled by Perfect Love,” there will be a heaven for the Duke of Clarence, for Victoria, for Albert, for Tennyson’s son Lionel and brother Charles, and for Tennyson himself. For now, Tennyson can only “mourn in hope.” When Tennyson died, periodicals around the world immediately began producing their own memorials, this time in honor of a poet whose death, according to Alfred Ainger, “dispirits and discourages us, because we feel that the last of a long line has departed, and we are anxious and uneasy as to the possibilities of the future.”79 The Times announced a day after Tennyson’s death that Macmillan’s would be publishing Hallam’s memoir of his father, which would become the version of Tennyson that would dominate Tennyson studies for a century.

78 Alfred Tennyson, “The Death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale,” The Nineteenth Century (February 1892), 181. 79 Quoted in Worth, 169.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 5

Transatlantic Connections Publication in the United States was a potential goldmine largely untapped for British authors for much of the nineteenth century because they could not demand legal payment from publishers who pirated their works. The absence of international copyright legislation ensured a rich return for the American publishers, who had long taken advantage of free copy provided by British periodicals and books arriving in the United States from abroad. Such opportunism irritated Tennyson, who jealously guarded his publishing arrangements in England, but was powerless over income and product in America. Yet the situation worked in his favor, at least tangentially, because prolific and diverse publication in the United States made him a legendary figure that outreached his reputation in Britain: Tennyson became an American icon, as confirmed by Hamilton T. Mabie in a special memorial article reprinted in the Review of Reviews after Tennyson’s death in 1892: Tennyson has been more widely read in this country than in England, and the knowledge of his work is more widely diffused. It has percolated through all classes of society, and much of it has been for many years a possession of the common memory. The poet more than once recognized the fact that he had more admirers in America than in England, and he had more admirers because he had more readers. He was earlier recognized here, as were Carlyle and Browning. . . . His lyrics and shorter idyls have been a part of our school literature for several decades, and ‘The May Queen’ and other pieces of its class have been heard in every schoolhouse on the continent.1

Determining readership figures is, of course, impossible, but Mabie reveals a belief in American hero worship that depends on superlatives, and the notion that Tennyson’s popularity can be gauged by the economic accessibility of his work to the masses appeals to American mythologies of democratic equality. Scholars often overlook the availability of his poetry in these formats and misjudge the implications of reprint culture. As Meredith McGill states, “Reprinted texts are a rich source of speculation about what kinds of literature were demanded by a democratic public, what counted as literature in this culture, and how high art might be reconfigured for middle-class and working-class audiences.”2 The sheer volume of reprints freely produced in newspapers, literary annuals, monthlies, weeklies, cheap papers, and other formats, 1 Hamilton W. Mabie, “The Influence of Tennyson in America. Its Sources and Extent,” Review of Reviews 6 (December 1892), 556. 2 Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 20.

170

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

represents an avalanche of Tennyson poetry, marketed to mass readerships of all economic levels, and the poet had very little control over how or where his works were published. Discussion about international copyright law in the United States indicated “a profound distrust of any measure that would consolidate the private ownership of texts,”3 but McGill views the resistance to copyright law as an act of national purpose: Reprint publishers frequently acknowledged nationalist aims, using foreign texts to refract an image of the nation as a whole that was seemingly impossible to produce by domestic means alone. Likewise, the culture of reprinting does not dispense with authors, but places authorship in complex and heightened forms of suspension. (20-21)

Editors of countless American periodicals marketed Tennyson’s famous name and persona, making him more popular than their native American authors, whose volumes often cost more than Tennyson’s.4 Many American authors were editors (Poe, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Fuller, Lowell, and Emerson all qualified as what Poe called “magazinists”); however, editors of periodicals also often became surrogate authors, as they reinvented Tennyson as an American possession by de-structuring and reassembling his poetry as fragments with new meanings subject to textual inscription by the periodical’s contents, and then capitalizing on the iconic status they created in marketing tactics that increased the periodical’s reputation and earnings. The poet was one of several nineteenth-century British authors lionized by Americans, but Tennyson was so popular that American authors “could not withstand the despotic power that Tennyson especially exercised over all who wrote in English,” according to Van Wyck Brooks.5 The periodicals helped to create Tennyson’s public persona by shaping his work to suit individual readerships, and reviewers created a romantic image of the poet as a reclusive, brilliant, and rough-spoken man hewn by a provincial English wilderness. Americans wanted to see Tennyson as a Romantic hero, who embraced a tormented solitude. While Tennyson was notoriously guarded about his privacy, he was not antisocial, and when at home at Farringford, he entertained a constant stream of guests. Nevertheless, the mythology became embedded with other codes of Tennyson iconography, as editorial manipulation and prolific publication of his texts made Tennyson a family treasure; as Susan Belasco Smith and Kenneth M. Price note, “The practice of reading for informal gatherings of family and friends—made books and especially periodicals a central source of entertainment in the home. The works of British and American fiction and poetry in the periodicals—those of Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Stowe, Longfellow, Helen Hunt Jackson, and E. D. E. N. Southworth, to name only a few—were a staple of 3 Ibid., 93. 4 An ad for new books published by G. P. Putnam’s in Bayard Taylor’s Poems of Home and Travel shows that Longfellow’s Poetical Works in two volumes cost $2, while Tennyson’s Poetical Works in two volumes cost $1.50. 5 Van Wyck Brooks, The Times of Melville and Whitman (New York: Dutton, 1947), 316.

Transatlantic Connections

171

such evenings.”6 Clearly, Tennyson was in the mainstream of American social life, and book publishers who owned the periodicals depended upon the commodification of such celebrity in their periodicals to sell poetry volumes, as well as other books on their list, further popularizing the poet as an American icon. A major difference between American and British periodicals of the Victorian period was the extent to which Americans of all economic levels adopted periodicals as their main reading source. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt emphasized the importance of periodicals in American cultural development, when he wrote in 1952: In America, the newspaper and the magazine were more important, from almost every point of view, than the book. . . . Here, the book seems to live in a sort of dependence— not quite on its own, a somewhat patronized appendix to its more powerful brother, the periodical press. . . . In Europe printing from the very beginning meant ‘books,’ in America almost from the start, ‘newspapers.’7

According to Clarence Gohdes, British travelers often commented on American superiority in “the diffusion of the reading habit among the less cultivated classes. The quantity of newspapers and magazines consumed in the United States was, like Niagara Falls, a wonder of the New World.”8 Americans were obsessed with reading and the desire for knowledge, or at least the appearance of knowledge, as an avenue for upward social mobility. Periodicals also became essential for encoding ideology of a bustling capitalistic nation. Thus, American periodicals became a nexus of culture and capitalism, where the United States citizen developed a sense of identity, with Tennyson a part of the process. Frank Luther Mott estimates that 2,500 American periodicals appeared from 1850–1865, encouraged by the passage of a new Post Office Act that reduced rates and transferred postage charges to the publisher. A magazine mania began in the years after the Civil War, resulting in much larger figures: A scant 700 periodicals for 1865, somewhat over 1,200 for 1870, twice that many for 1880, and some 3,300 for 1885. This means that in the two decades the number of periodicals multiplied more than four and a half times—increases of somewhat over 100 each year, speeded up toward the end of the period to 150 more each year. Allowance for an average life, within the period, of four years (a liberal estimate), gives some eight or nine thousand periodical publications not newspapers issued in the years 1865–85.9 6 Susan Belasco Smith and Kenneth M. Price, “Introduction: Periodical Literature in Social and Historical Context,” Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, eds. Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 7. 7 Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States, 2d edn. (New York: Bowker, 1952), 143-44. 8 Clarence Gohdes, American Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 47. 9 Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines 1850-1865, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 3:5.

172

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Nevertheless, book publishers were more interested in promoting the more profitable sales of book volumes through ads or excerpts in periodicals they owned largely for this purpose. Ideally, a Tennyson poem published in an American periodical would enhance his reputation with book buyers, creating appetite and desire for poetry volumes that cost little to produce, thus reaping a large revenue. John Olin Eidson notes that American interest in Tennyson began soon after Ralph Waldo Emerson publicly praised selections from the 1830 and 1832 volumes that had appeared in S. C. Hall’s Book of Gems (1836). According to Charles Tennyson, Emerson got Hall’s two volumes and “was soon talking and writing of them and lending them to his friends.”10 Emerson joined with Margaret Fuller, James Russell Lowell, and John S. Dwight, who praised Tennyson’s poems in a review published in the Christian Examiner, with the objective of promoting publication of an American edition of the Tennyson volumes to publishers C. C. Little and Company of Boston. Tennyson heard of the plan from his friend Charles Stearns Wheeler, who had been encouraged by James Russell Lowell to arrange the details with Tennyson. When approached by Wheeler about publication of an American edition, Tennyson responded in 1840 with cautious, but polite formality: I am rejoiced that I have made myself friends on the other side of the Atlantic and feel what a high privilege it is for a writer to be born into a language common to two great peoples; and so believe me not insensible—or if that seem to savour too much of the coldness of mere courtesy—believe me deeply sensible to the honour my American friends have done me even in making a request to which I feel it impossible to accede as they, perhaps might wish.11

Tennyson was anxious about losing control of his publishing rights and proceeds with an American edition, but he was typically nervous about all publication in these early years. He was insecure about his talent and reluctant to release his poems to the unpredictable evaluations of critics and readers. When poems were once released, Tennyson did not want an editor or publisher disturbing the text from his intended shape and order. He yielded only after being pressured by friends or other significant forces, such as financial need. A possible source of influence with Tennyson in this case may have been Cambridge Apostle Richard Monckton Milnes, who was friendly with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Milnes had asked Hawthorne to write to American publisher William Ticknor for books by American authors. He was also getting pressure to publish from Edward Fitzgerald, as suggested by his comments written to Fitzgerald during February, 1841: “You bore me about my book: so does a letter just received from America, threatening, though in the civilest terms that if I will not publish in England they will do it for me in that land of freemen—Damn!—I may curse knowing what they will bring forth, but I don’t care” (188). The only way

10 Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 179. 11 Alfred Tennyson, The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), I:187.

Transatlantic Connections

173

to head off the inevitable reprinting of the 1830–32 poems was to entice Wheeler with the prospect of a new volume. Tennyson told Wheeler that the poems on hand were “exceedingly crude,” but he promised that he would publish again in a few months (the 1842 Poems) and “transmit copies to Little and Brown and also to yourself (if you will accept one) and you can then of course do as you choose with them” (187). Privately, he complained to William Allingham: “I hate publishing! The Americans forced me into it again. I had my things nice and right, but when I found they were going to publish the old forms I said, By Jove, that won’t do!—My whole living is from the sale of my books” (188n). An American edition could be pirated back into England and compete with the original volume’s sales; publishers in the United States could and did do as they wished with his poems. Tennyson’s only option was to sign an agreement with a reputable publisher who would give him some amount of money for his labors, while allowing him to maintain minimal control over format. As Michael Winship states, British authors had to “depend on bargaining, goodwill, and trade custom in their attempts to benefit financially from the American editions of their works.”12 Ticknor editions would be first American editions; although other publishers would soon copy it, Tennyson would have had some initial approval over the copied text. In choosing William Ticknor and Company (later Ticknor and Fields) as the publisher of his authorized American editions, Tennyson was repeating his pattern of doing business within a close circle of admirers: Ticknor also published works by many of the authors responsible for introducing Tennyson to American readers. The two-volume 1842 American collection appeared on 7 July 1842, one month after Moxon’s English edition. Ticknor paid Tennyson $150, “equivalent to a royalty of 10 percent of the retail price for the copies in the first printing,” according to Winship, who adds that this publication resulted in the first payment to any British author before 1852.13 Tennyson thereafter earned £500 annually for advance copies of poems before they were published in England, and he was undoubtedly happy to get whatever he could out of his American representatives; he wrote to Ticknor and Fields on 18 March 1856: “From you alone among all American publishers have I ever received any remuneration for my books and I would wish therefore that with you alone should rest the right of publishing them in future [sic].”14 As a result of his loyalty he was one of only a handful of British authors after 1852 to receive payment by an American publisher until later in the century. Compared to his other earnings, his fee for providing advance proof sheets of his poems was nominal, but it continued for many years, and the firm often gave Tennyson additional payments through the 1850s as a bonus for the author’s success: “For example, Tennyson was sent £20 in June 1855 and again in May and November 1856, £30 in June 1857, and a further

12 Michael Winship, American Literary Publishing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Business of Ticknor and Fields (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 133. 13 Ibid., 136. 14 Tennyson, Letters, II:146.

174

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

£20 in November 1858—making a total of £110.”15 Their relationship did not protect him from the liberal piracy of British texts practiced by all American publishers. The agreement simply ensured that Ticknor could publish Tennyson’s American editions before the others; pirated British editions were beyond everyone’s control, in spite of unwritten voluntary trade agreements between American publishers which supposedly guarded their individual agreements with British publishers to acquire advance copies of English authors. Winship explains the trade courtesy practice: The firm that first publicly announced by advertisement its intention to publish a foreign work, established thereby a prior claim over any other American publisher to that work and, unless other arrangements were made, to later works by the same foreign author. These rights were further strengthened if the firm could state that it had made a payment to the author or original publisher of the foreign work. (138).

However, the market eventually dominated the manners, and trade courtesies gave way to cash and opportunity. The 1842 Boston edition of Poems officially marks the beginning of America’s love affair with Tennyson, who would no longer be the obscure genius praised by Emerson and his New England coterie. It was this collection that initiated the republication of his works in American periodicals. According to Eidson, Tennyson poems rarely appeared in American magazines and newspapers before 1842; he records 41 poems as quotations in reviews or separate selections during these early years. After the 1842 volume, Tennyson’s appearance in American literary annuals provides, as Eidson suggests, “one of the most reliable means for measuring Tennyson’s influence in America.”16 New England publishers were the biggest producers of annuals; thus annuals editors were most familiar with his work, and they freely copied poems from the 1842 volume, in part and in whole. As in English literary annuals, the poetry published by American annuals assimilates Tennyson with the sentimental, popular literature preferred by middleclass readers, many of whom were women. Ralph Thompson describes the literary fashion popular with such readers: Here were books ideally suited to an aspiring middle class. They appealed to the eye and the heart rather than to the mind; they were handsome and costly; they were ‘artistic’ and ‘refined.’ They met a demand for ‘culture’ and showed the purchaser that his country could produce—and would support—its own painters, engravers, and authors . . . It was only logical that cultural ambition should be symbolized by ‘ladies’ books.’17

Tennyson’s poetry seemed to satisfy their demands for foreign romance, medieval fantasy, and ennobling feminine domestic power, particularly with his “lady poems,” 15 Winship, 137. 16 John Olin Eidson, Tennyson in America: His Reputation and Influence from 1827 to 1858 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1943), 123. 17 Ralph Thompson, American Literary Annuals and Gift Books 1825-1865 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1936), 4.

Transatlantic Connections

175

as suggested by Eidson. Thompson describes the aesthetic: “Tender and genteel verse satisfied emotional longings, unrealistic engravings the visual” (5). A reviewer in the Democratic Review complained about trends such as those exhibited in literary annuals (1853): “The poets all used to chime in with ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel. . . . they caroled nothing but love ditties like Moore, then imitated Byron; and now they whimper like Tennyson.”18 His major competition in literary annuals was prolific British annuals’ contributor and poet, Felicia Hemans, even after her death in 1835. According to Mott, the Philadelphia Album offered Hemans $1,500 and house rent if she would edit its 1827 volume, and her influential aesthetic continued throughout the mid-nineteenth century in America. (1:400). American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and many women writers published their first works in literary annuals, and the books provided a format for the development of American style. Carey and Lea distributed the first literary annual in the United States, the Atlantic Souvenir for 1826, ready for the 1825 gift-giving season. The annual “increased in circulation in a few years from 2,000 copies to over 10,000.” Although somewhat pricey for the middle-class reader, it sold for an average of $2.50 for a plain binding and $3.75 and $4.50 for more elaborate ones. Thompson reports that over a thousand different gift book volume titles were issued in the United States from the beginning of its vogue in 1826 through the 1860s, “ranging in format from muslin-bound volumes at 37 ½ cents to magnificent folios at $20.”19 Fred Lewis Pattee notes that from 1846 to 1852 an average of 60 annuals appeared each year, with titles such as the Token, the Gift, the Violet, and the Snowdrop. The annuals became ornamental literary fashion for the formal drawing room, bound with elaborate stamped or tooled designs in morocco leather, paper, or fabrics, and illustrated by popular American and European engravers and artists. Most publishers got prose and verse from a variety of sources, and some thought nothing of reprinting entire British volumes. Tennyson’s appearance in American literary annuals, although pirated from British periodicals and sources such as his 1842 volume, places him in a literary commodity that markets a written and visual aesthetic traditionally viewed as feminine. He shares the format and readership with American women writers and editors such as Lydia Sigourney and Emily Percival. Many contributors were obscure hack writers who shared their pretensions with other perhaps well known, but not particularly original, contributors to annuals and periodicals. Although Tennyson was not well known before his 1842 volume, Americans purchased nearly as many copies of the 1842 American edition of his poems as were sold in England. Barbara Clark claims that “Americans enjoyed the poems for what they were—lyrics, idyls, and short narratives of extraordinary beauty,” the type of poetry found in literary annuals, while “The British were disappointed; they wanted something grander—an epic, a great moral or philosophical work. The English reviewers. . . sought to instruct

18 Quoted in Mott, 2:174. 19 Thompson, 7.

176

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Tennyson in his proper role as poet-priest-prophet.”20 However, American readers adopted the poet as their middle-class cultural priest without searching for a grander purpose, perhaps because of a habitual deference toward British authors, that later paralleled with a nationalistic pride of everything American after cultivating their own literary style during the mid-nineteenth century. American writer and editor Lydia Sigourney demonstrates the attitude as she writes to Keepsake editor Lady Blessington on 31 October 1842: I have seen with great admiration your Keepsake and Book of Beauty for the present year, which are embellishing the centre tables of some of our aristocracy; for we are not so pure a republic as to have no shadow of aristocracy, and we give too much prominence, perhaps, to that which is based solely on wealth.21

Sigourney edited her own annual, the Religious Souvenir in 1839 and 1840, and her name appeared on the title page of Godey’s Lady’s Book from 1840–1842. Some called her “The American Hemans” after British writer Felicia Hemans. She writes to Blessington on 12 August 1843: We are, as you doubtless know, emphatically a reading people. Our magazines, and many of the works that they announce, go into the humble dwelling of the manufacturer, into the brown hand of the farmer, and into the log-hut of the emigrant, who sees around him the dark forms of the remnant of our aboriginal tribes, & hears the murmurs of the turbid Missouri, perhaps the breaking billows of the Pacific.

Sigourney’s romantic, “humble” characterization of democratized American readers invites us to imagine the elaborately bound annuals at home in the “backwoods” of America, educating ignorant primitives with stories of London society pirated from British annuals. Her stance reflects ambivalent American attitudes about their aristocratic European friends; self-conscious, yet stubbornly resistant to suggestions of inferiority, Americans often thumbed their noses at English snobbery. The aristocratic model demonstrated in British literary annuals became hard to swallow for Americans, and they soon adapted their own version of these adventures according to Ola Elizabeth Winslow: “American publishers were forced to compete with tales of Austrian assassins, warriors who strode on stone ledges clad in Highland plaids, castle goblins, nocturnal separations and nights in the catacombs. The Americanized versions of these Old World marvels are the brightest gems in native caskets.”22 Americans did not need to accommodate for Tennyson, however; many of his

20 Barbara R. Clark, “Tennyson Across the Atlantic,” The Tennyson Research Bulletin 5:1 (November 1987), 3. 21 Quoted in Marguerite Blessington, The Blessington Papers, Formed by Alfred Morrison (Printed for Private Circulation, 1895), 208. 22 Ola Elizabeth Winslow, “Books for the Lady Reader, 1820-1860,” Romanticism in America (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), 100.

Transatlantic Connections

177

poems easily fit into the romantic imagination required for appreciation of literary annuals.23 By the time Tennyson became popular in the United States, the high point of popularity for annuals had passed, yet editorial scissoring, pasting, and placing of Tennyson’s poetry in later American literary annuals continued to demonstrate desire for Tennyson, regardless of the resulting fragmentation that often appeared. An early example is the pocket-sized (3” x 4 ½”) annual published in Boston by Elias Howe, the Album of Love. The volume prints three Tennyson selections, including one stanza (lines 215-222) from “The Miller’s Daughter,” originally published in America in the 1842 Tennyson volume of poems; stanza four from “To J. S.,” published in the English 1832 volume; and a sonnet, its first line printed as “Oh! were I loved as I desire to be” (unidentified). The Album “Contents” presents a dizzying display of male English literary celebrity, including Shakespeare, Spenser, Clare, Moore, Bulwer, Hogg, Montgomery, Southey, Cowper, Cowley, Byron, Scott, Rogers, Wordsworth, Milton, Jonson, Herrick, Lovelace, Thomson, Dryden, and Johnson. The list also includes nearly as many women, suggesting a canon of British women writers familiar to annuals readers from both countries: L. E. L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), Isabella Bird, Felicia Hemans, Caroline Norton, Elizabeth Barrett, Mary Russell Mitford, Charlotte Dacre, and others. N. P. Willis is the only recognizable American writer featured. A collection of 156 “poems” in 128 tiny pages guarantees that most or all of these will be fragmented by the editor, who dedicates the volume “To those who have already learned to love, and to those who have yet to love,” and expresses the hope that readers will “find an echo to their own thoughts within this little volume.”24 All of the titles listed in the Contents page have love as their theme. Without collating each poem, one suspects that the editor chose one or two stanzas from each of the authors listed, reproducing it in the Album of Love for a meaning that may or may not be isolated from its parent poem. The editor’s concern is not with respecting authorial intent or with faithfully replicating the poem’s physical integrity, but with creating meditations on romantic love. Thus, the editor becomes author, and all the selections become love poems, potentially quite divorced from their original meanings. The intense concentration on British authors and rarity of Americans designates the book as a cheap anthology with little financial outlay on copyright, but it also establishes the British poets as authorities on romantic love.25 The Album of Love for 1846 duplicates as its prefatory module Percy Bysshe Shelley’s fragmentary philosophical essay, “On Love,” reinventing its purpose with a new title, “What is Love?” The title reduces the essay into a recitation of romantic mediocrities and sets the theme for the book. Because of this use of Shelley’s essay, 23 See Appendix for a selection of American literary annuals featuring Tennyson’s poetry. 24 Dedication. The Album of Love. Boston: Elias Howe, 1846. 25 For examples of ways in which repackaging and reprinting authors influences public perceptions about their works, see Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel from Richardson to Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

178

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

one suspects that the producers of the Album of Love copied the fragment from British literary annuals, rather than a Shelley volume, for it also appeared in the 1829 London Keepsake adjacent to William Wordsworth’s poem, “The Country Girl” and L. E. L.’s “Verses.” Terence Hoagwood and I discuss the power of such positioning in our Romantic Circles hypertext edition of the 1829 Keepsake annual, concluding that Shelley’s fragmentary essay takes on new meanings when placed in a volume encoded by “partially disrobed female figures (as on the engraved title-page)” and the “amorous and flippant rhetoric of the other pieces in the volume.”26 The Keepsake “transforms the meaning of its contents” with elegant physical presentation of the material book itself, as well as a marketing rhetoric clearly focused on middle-class women readers and feminized, romantic literary themes. Hoagwood demonstrates that, in this cocoon of textual influences, Shelley’s essay ‘On Love’ functions as a valentine rather than the philosophical essay that it obviously is when it is encountered in a collection of Shelley’s other essays. Encountered here, in The Keepsake for 1829, like L. E. L.’s ‘Verses,’ Thomas Moore’s ‘Extempore,’ and Wordsworth’s ‘The Country Girl,’ it furnishes an instructive example of the power of material form—a book’s form, this particular vellum, under these silk covers, in that particular market—to manufacture the meanings of a literary work as it actually exists and as (a matter of fact) it enters the world.

Unlike Shelley’s essay, extraction of the stanza from Tennyson’s 1832 publication of “The Miller’s Daughter” does not distort its original meaning, and the untitled lines fit well within the arrangement of romantic meditations, for the poem and the individual stanza are about the constancy of love between the narrator and his wife, the miller’s daughter. Readers may not have remembered the complete poem from the 1832 volume, but it was reprinted many times in periodicals of all types; thus, the stanza echoes and advertises previous textual moments, expanding it into the visual, sensual, and rhythmic interpretation by incomplete memory that produces more fragmentation, yet further beyond the poet’s control. Various reconstitutions of “The Miller’s Daughter” appeared in American periodicals, indicating the poem’s popularity with American readers. Yet, as demonstrated in his relationships with the British annual editors, Tennyson understandably detested the liberties taken by such bold editors; his own obsessive removal and rewriting of stanzas for “The Miller’s Daughter” and other works is well known to Tennyson scholars, and one imagines what Tennyson would say about any particular stanza of his being isolated and titled as a separate unit by a disinterested editor for a foreign anthology. Nevertheless, the inclusion of his name in the canon of love poets places Tennyson in the hearts of young American women readers and increases the marketability of the 1842 and succeeding American volumes of his poetry.

26 Terence Hoagwood, Kathryn Ledbetter, and Martin Matthew Jacobsen, “L.E.L.’s ‘Verses’ and The Keepsake of 1829,” Romantic Circles, http://www.rc.umd.edu/ editions/lel/ keepcov.htm.

Transatlantic Connections

179

Of course, we cannot know how many Americans who purchased literary annuals actually read them, especially in these later years when the contents of many annuals were repackaged with new titles for purchase by people who were not likely to be interested in literary excellence or to be aware that their new volume was the same as a previous one. Friendship’s Gift, published by John P. Hill of Boston and edited by Walter Percival, is identical in all but binding and title page to the Lady’s Gift; A Souvenir for All Seasons, published by Charles T. Gill of Nashua, NH in 1849. Another example is Gems of Beauty for 1852, edited by Emily Percival. She copied Tennyson’s poem, “Come not, when I am dead,” from the 1851 London Keepsake for her 1852 volume and the next year reprinted almost the entire Keepsake volume for her Gift Book of Gems: A Literary Offering for All Seasons for 1853. Yet this practice was not uncommon. Unethical publishers often took advantage of the convenient purchase and repackaging of entire books, both American and British. According to Ralph Thompson, these “spurious gift books” allowed publishers to “present a ‘new’ volume at comparatively little expense and unwary purchasers would acquire the same assortment of articles year after year. About 35 American firms indulged in this questionable business, producing nearly 150 titles of the kind.”27 Buyers purchased literary annuals, especially in these later years, because they were visually attractive books that marketed literature as culture, evidently not noticing the repetition of material. In the Friendship’s Gift Preface, Walter Percival indicates the lack of excitement in his volume when he fails to express an appropriate recommendation for the book, other than it will not “offend the most scrupulous delicacy.”28 Other than propriety, Percival can only promise “no lack of entertainment” in the contents of his book. Fortunately, the Lady’s Gift does not bother with copying from its mother volume the Preface from Percival. One might think that the Irving Offering for 1852 (New York: Leavitt and Company) would be an annual featuring the works of American author Washington Irving, or that the authors published would be American, or that the annual would focus on American themes. However, the annual’s Preface states that the selection “consists of pieces which might be submitted to the inspection of the accomplished author of the Sketch Book himself, with full confidence of his approval.”29 Most of the contributors remain uncredited, including Tennyson, whose poem, “O Darling Room!” is reprinted from his 1832 volume of poems. The annual pirates five articles from the 1836 London Keepsake, including a tale from its editor, Caroline Norton (“Count Rodolph’s Heir”). The Irving Offering proves to be one of the “spurious” annuals described by Thompson, reissued as The Wintergreen, Always Remembered, A Token for 1853. Thompson cites its publisher, Leavitt and Company, as one of the firms most persistently unethical with this type of publication. Yet, however we may 27 Thompson, 13. 28 Walter Percival, “Preface,” Friendship’s Gift; A Souvenir for 1848, ed. Walter Percival (Boston: John P. Hill, 1848), n.p. 29 “Preface,” The Irving Offering. A Token of Affection, for 1852 (New York: Leavitt, 1852), 1.

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

180

judge such opportunism, we cannot place our own values about the books upon the readers who bought them; my copy of the Irving Offering is well worn, suggesting the book was indeed read. Its binding is stamped with a name, assumably that of its owner, Ann Eliza Swanton, who was proud enough of her purchase to place her name permanently on the book, thus Tennyson’s poem potentially became one of her personal treasures, even if unattributed and unrecognized as Tennyson’s until its reappearance in another periodical. Another poem from the earlier Tennyson volumes appears in the Young Lady’s Cabinet of Gems: A Choice Collection of Pieces in Poetry and Prose for 1854, edited by Virginia De Forrest (Boston: Kelley and Brother). The volume merges British poetry and fiction pirated from literary annuals with contributions reprinted from English periodicals, the periodical title replacing an author’s name in that column. Thus Tennyson joins the Quarterly Review, Household Words, and Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, along with Longfellow and Hemans as authors in this eclectic mix of reading material packaged as an annual with its familiar title format and illustrated frontispieces, but lacking the remaining engravings. Tennyson’s “contributions” include: “Circumstance” (1830), “The Garden” and “The Trio,” from “The Gardener’s Daughter” (1842). As changing literary fashion and too many annuals flooding the marketplace caused them to lose profitability, the New York Mirror was proclaiming the era as the “golden age of periodicals.” Tennyson’s poetry became a common feature in publications as diverse as the United States Democratic Review; Boys and Girls’ Magazine; Harper’s New Monthly Magazine; the International Magazine of Literature, Art, and Science; the Ladies’ Repository; International Weekly Miscellany; the Western Messenger; and Appleton’s Journal. The periodicals’ editors illustrated, scissored, reviewed, and adapted Tennyson’s poems as needed for space or thematic purposes for readers, many of whom were acquainted with Tennyson’s work only in its sometimes incomplete periodical format; as John Olid Eidson notes, “Scores of newspapers and magazines printed the passage [“Ring Out, Wild Bells”] as an individual poem, many not knowing that it was a part of In Memoriam.”30 As with literary annuals, we may never know how many of Tennyson’s poems were printed in American periodicals, but we can assume that his name and work became a standard of status and quality, providing publishers with uncalculable prestige and financial profit; as McGill notes, “reprint publishers made complex calculations about their reading publics, perpetually estimating, projecting, and seeking to meet the desires of readers who could be persuaded to buy cheap books and periodicals.”31 Until his appearance in Ticknor and Fields’s New England magazine, the Atlantic Monthly (February 1868), Tennyson sanctioned none of these periodical publications in the United States. For book publishers, owning a periodical was essential for marketing their book product; Frank Luther Mott claims that “There was hardly a leading firm which could get along without magazines. In the memoirs of the great 30 Eidson, 85. 31 McGill, 20.

Transatlantic Connections

181

publishers of those days one finds it explicitly stated as a sound business rule, that books alone do not pay.”32 Having a periodical was “an absolute requirement for publication of popular English authors in the United States. Only through periodical publication could one beat the pirates by securing, at a price, advance sheets so that the novels could appear almost simultaneously in both England and America.”33 In 1866 Fields offered Dickens royalty and publication in any of three magazines owned by the company: the Atlantic Monthly, Our Young Folks, or Every Saturday.34 The firm also arranged and profited from Dickens’s 1867 tour, receiving £1000 commission and 5 percent of the Boston receipts, according to Ballou (86). Another benefit for Ticknor and Fields was that they could promote their special relationships with the authors and advertise how they extended special treatment; as a result of the reputation that grew from such practices, on 15 April 1867 Charles Dickens joined Robert Browning, Charles Kingsley, Charles Reade, William Thackeray, Matthew Arnold. Coventry Patmore, Leigh Hunt, Thomas DeQuincey, Thomas Hughes, Owen Meredith, and Alfred Tennyson in claiming Ticknor and Fields as their only authorized American representatives. For Tennyson’s loyalty to the publishing house, Fields published favorable reviews of Tennyson’s work through the years, as demonstrated in 1863 when Atlantic’s co-editor Charles Eliot Norton was preparing to print a bad review of Enoch Arden: Fields gave Norton an alternate, more positive review, suggesting that the former “might drive new readers away who were unfamiliar with the merits of Tennyson.”35 Yet, in spite of their publishing agreement for American editions of his poetry, Ticknor and Fields had no special arrangement with Tennyson about publishing poems in the Atlantic, regardless of the loyalty and friendship that developed. When James Ripley Osgood, a clerk at Ticknor and Fields since 1854, wrote to Tennyson to request a poem for one of the firm’s three periodicals (Atlantic Monthly, North American Review, Every Saturday), Tennyson responded on 4 April 1867: “I am not in the habit of inserting poems in the English Magazines, and why should I in the American?—particularly as in this unhappy condition of international Copyright law the English Magazines would immediately pirate any thing of mine in yours.”36 Tennyson’s excuse is empty, considering that all the earnings and publications for the following year would be in periodicals in England and America. The average pay for Atlantic contributors was $6 a page or $50 a poem, but Tennyson undoubtedly earned much more than this, although no record is found in the Ticknor Log Books; Fields paid George Eliot $2100 for a poem that was eight and a half pages long, and Dickens received $1000 for “George Silverman’s Explanation,” a three-part work of 32 Mott, 2:214. 33 Ellen B. Ballou, The Building of the House: Houghton Mifflin’s Formative Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 80. 34 For a detailed account of Dickens’s publishing arrangements, see Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). 35 W. S. Tryon, Parnassus Corner: A Life of James T. Fields, Publisher to the Victorians (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 288. 36 Tennyson, Letters, II:456.

182

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

fiction appearing in the same volume as Tennyson’s poem.37 Tennyson was amazed at Ticknor’s fees; he writes to Macmillan’s editor George Grove on 17 January 1868: “The firm has been immensely liberal to Dickens giving him £2000 for some slight essays in their publications and I suppose would also give me something.”38 Fields was trying to raise circulation rates for the Atlantic; an original publication from Tennyson would boost its prestige, and fees such as those paid Dickens would considerably contribute to Tennyson’s purse. Since its first editor, James Russell Lowell (1857-1861), the Atlantic Monthly joined with writers of the American Renaissance from the Boston area to introduce the rest of the nation to high culture. Its original focus was to “promote good literature and speak out against slavery.”39 Its first issue on 1 November 1857 sold 20,000 copies at 25 cents an issue ($3 for a year’s subscription). The Atlantic’s contributors and readers appear to be much like Tennyson’s familiar Cambridge Apostles; according to Ellery Sedgwick, the Atlantic appealed to “the cultural ‘gentry,’ those who were interested in the life of the mind, who were generally well-educated themselves, and who saw themselves as educators of a larger public,”40 although many of the readers were also “midwesterners who found the Atlantic a reassuring link with New England culture.”41 Yet, by 1860, Lowell was being pressured to popularize the magazine and reduce the intellectual focus; it was losing the battle for readers being waged by other periodicals such as Harper’s Monthly, its 200,000 circulation dwarfing the Atlantic’s 30,000. Harper’s was heavily illustrated and featured casual, entertaining articles suitable for family reading. Reacting to the challenge of printing fewer heavy articles, Lowell wrote Fields: “If we make our Magazine merely entertaining how are we better than those Scribes and Pharisees the Harpers?”42 The following year, Fields took over as editor (1861–1871) and immediately began changing the magazine to reach more subscribers and listing contributors’ names in an annual index to increase the publication’s status. Circulation grew to 50,000 by 1866, but as long as the Atlantic refused to compete with Harper’s and Scribner’s with illustrations and more general reading, the magazine would remain far behind other monthlies, in spite of Fields’s collection of celebrity authors. In 1868, Tennyson published three poems in two American periodicals, the Atlantic Monthly and Every Saturday, both titles owned by Ticknor and Fields. According to James C. Austin,

37 Ballou, 169. 38 Tennyson, Letters, II:479. 39 Ellery Sedgwick, “The Atlantic Monthly,” American Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Edward E. Chielens (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 50. 40 Ellery Sedgwick, III, “The Early Years of the Atlantic Monthly,” American Transcendental Quarterly 58 (December 1985), 12. 41 Sedgwick, “The Atlantic Monthly,” 52. 42 Quoted in Ballou, 47.

Transatlantic Connections

183

Fields looked upon Tennyson with reverence as the sublimest of the living poets. Tennyson contributed only once to the Atlantic during the sixties, but the effect of his popularity upon the tone of the magazine was immeasurable. At the height of his fame he represented Victorian respectability and craving for culture, and these ideals his genteel American contemporaries were disposed to emulate.43

Royalties and book publishing arrangements were one aspect of Tennyson’s contributions to Fields’s periodicals, but Fields was also purchasing Tennyson’s allure, to sell magazines. Poetry volumes were not generally money-making ventures in the United States, even for Tennyson’s publisher. Former Atlantic editor William Dean Howells offered this advice to Benjamin S. Parker on 24 May 1866: It is well to consider a little about printing a book of poetry—it hardly ever pays. You will do better to try to make a magazine reputation first. And my own experience in regard to the reception which the mss. of unknown authors receive from editors is that they are fairly and attentively considered everywhere. I know this to be the case in the Atlantic office, and the office of The Nation, N.Y.44

William Charvat explains that “The periodical became the primary outlet for poets. As the competition of British literature made American books less and less profitable in the thirties and forties, our writers resorted more and more to the magazines.”45 Publishing poetry in the periodicals was not financially risky, for it took little space, acted as a visual break in the text, and worked to advertise the volumes being issued by the publisher for the poet. Thus Tennyson’s 1868 publication in the Atlantic Monthly was less about the poetry than the scoop of featuring a Tennyson poem immediately after its January publication in the English periodical Good Words. His publication also brought into the Atlantic’s pages the collective effect of heavy exposure of his name and poetry in many other magazine titles on the market. His poem “The Victim” is flanked by a travel journal by Edward Everett Hale titled “A Week in Sybaris,” and an article about Elizabethan dramatists entitled “Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, and Ford” by E. P. Whipple, and the poem’s placement on a printed page of text with no extraordinary format features or illustrations evokes a seriousness that minimalizes the sentimental tone present on the pages of Good Words. Unlike its appearance in the January Good Words, Tennyson’s poem appears without illustration in accordance with Atlantic tradition, lending a sophistication that the Good Words publication lacks, with its feminized family context. The woman’s sacrifice of her son to the gods becomes more a detail of mythology in the Atlantic, while the family context of Good Words makes the mother as moral mentor for women readers imbued with domestic sentiment.

43 James C. Austin, Fields of the Atlantic Monthly: Letters to an Editor 1861-1870 (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1953), 395. 44 W. D. Howells, Selected Letters, Volume I: 1852-1872 (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 252. 45 William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America 1800-1870, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 102.

184

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Also included in this issue are three serialized works of fiction: Flotsam and Jetsam by prolific American periodicals contributor Harriet Prescott Spofford, Doctor Molke’s Friends by Dr. I. I. Hayes, and “George Silverman’s Explanation,” by Charles Dickens. Introducing the 128-page issue is a long essay about the evils of tobacco by James Parton titled “Does It Pay to Smoke? By An Old Smoker,” and “Characteristics of Genius,” by F. H. Hedge. Other essays include “Four Months on the Stage. By a Painter,” about an artist who decides to make a living in the theater, “The Destructive Democracy,” an anonymous treatise on American politics and the upcoming 21st presidential election, and “The Encyclopedists” by John Rosengarten, a history of encyclopedia writers. The issue also features Henry James’s Gothic tale, “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes.” Other contributions of poetry include “Orion” (Anonymous), and a four-page poem titled “The Meeting,” by John Greenleaf Whittier. Literary reviews complete the issue. Of the entire volume for 1868, Tennyson and Dickens appear to be the only non-American contributors, nestled among other nineteenth-century American literary celebrities such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bayard Taylor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Harriet Beecher Stowe, James Russell Lowell, William Cullen Bryant, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Significantly, Tennyson is the only author in the issue whose name is listed on both the index and the poem. Tennyson’s name among such a group affiliates him with the canon of American tradition-makers, while it lifts up the Atlantic’s prestige with a sense of traditional English culture. Excellence in the Atlantic was a priority for Fields, in spite of its waning circulation, but Every Saturday was the publication that won Tennyson’s remaining two contributions. On 17 January 1868, Tennyson sent Fields “1865–1866,” a poem written two years before, and its appearance in Every Saturday on 22 February 1868 trumped James Strahan’s March London publication of the poem in Good Words. The poem’s length allowed Fields to wedge it in at last minute for the late February printing, and it appears boxed as if a postscript on the last page of the issue. Tennyson also sent “Wages” to Fields, which had also been submitted to Macmillan’s for publication in February. However, Tennyson knew that it would probably be too late for the February Atlantic and, as the poem would be published in the February Macmillan’s, its belated appearance in a later issue of either the Atlantic or Every Saturday evidently rendered it useless to Fields, except as “an autograph for Mrs. Fields,” to whom Tennyson graciously gave the poem, which never appeared in any Ticknor and Fields publications. The second poem published in Every Saturday was “Lucretius,” published concurrently on 2 May 1868 with Macmillan’s in England, but again disappointingly too late for publication in the Atlantic; thus it was destined for the weekly periodical, Every Saturday.46 The inaugural issue of Every Saturday appeared on 6 January 1866 and continued as a weekly until its last issue on 31 October 1874. By this time Ticknor and Fields were periodicals entrepreneurs; Annie Fields noted: “Jamie is deep in affairs. He is about to start a weekly journal called ‘Every Saturday.’ He will then have a quarterly, 46 Tennyson, Letters, II:484n.

Transatlantic Connections

185

a monthly, a weekly, and a juvenile. If there is no crisis from a too sudden contraction of the currency, he will weather the squally season well.”47 Every Saturday was to be edited by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who moved to Boston from New York in 1865 for the job. A reviewer in the New Englander and Yale Review proclaimed in January 1866 that This new magazine is intended for Town and Country, for the Fireside, the Seaside, the Railway, and the Steamboat. Its plan embraces Incidents of Travel and Adventure, Essays Critical and Description, Serial Tales, Short Stories, Poems, Biographies, Literary intelligence, etc., in connection with judicious selections from the admirable popular papers on Science which are constantly appearing in foreign periodicals.48

Readers purchased issues for 10 cents a week or $5 per year; the annual price was $4 if the reader subscribed to any other Ticknor and Fields periodicals. Every Saturday would be like many other American publications, its main reading material farmed from foreign magazines. According to W. S. Tryon, Every Saturday “was clearly imitative of Littell’s Living Age but the tone was more popular. Yet, as it turned out, not popular enough.”49 Unfortunately, its first two years financially disappointed Fields, in spite of a 25,000 circulation. A letter from Robert Collyer examines the problem: I have said to a great many people how do you like ‘Every Saturday.’ Their answer has been almost always in the same words. I do not quite like it . . . I am with the million. I do not know who is your editor but he is too scholarly, does not feel along the lines of our liking so much as his own, selects what will naturally please a many above the average in taste, put[s] their [sic] what will please a thousand rather than fifty thousand. . . . E. S. ought to be the most popular paper in the country . . . but take my word for it this cannot be until it strikes nearer the level of the popular idea.50

In America, as well as Britain, popular meant sentimental poetry and fiction suitable for family reading, illustrations, and light essays, but popular was not the focus of Every Saturday in its early years. Tennyson’s two publications in February and May were not enough to buoy its weak foundation. Shortly after Tennyson’s “Lucretius” appeared in the May 2 issue, Fields formed another company with partner James Osgood and tried to adjust the periodical’s focus with a larger format and wood engravings, but this shifted the publication to compete with the immensely popular Harper’s Weekly, whose circulation figures of about 200,000 far outnumbered the Every Saturday figures of 42,000 (in 1870). Soon, after Fields abandoned his publishing interests in 1871, Osgood took over until he suffered financial setbacks, and sold the publication to H. 47 Quoted in Tryon, 290. 48 Review of Every Saturday, New Englander and Yale Review 25:94 (January 1866), 177-78. 49 Tryon, 291. 50 Quoted in Tryon, 291.

186

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

O. Houghton during its final year. By the 1870s, a periodical in America could not hope to profit unless it could compete with the new illustrated popular magazines, and Every Saturday never quite reached their level. In the 22 February 1868 issue of Every Saturday, Tennyson’s poem (with the abbreviated title “1865–66”) appears unimpressive, especially when compared to its presentation in Good Words, with elaborate duplicate engraved illustrations surrounding “1865–1866” in its March issue. One immediately understands how the visual appeal provided by images could outdo a periodical with plain text. Tennyson was reluctant to send “Lucretius” for publication in any journal, fearing piracy of the poem. He eventually agreed to publish only after being placated by George Grove and Alexander Macmillan, and after agreement by all that both the Atlantic and Macmillan’s would publish “Lucretius” at the same time so that the poem would not appear first in the United States. Macmillan offered to arrange publication with Ticknor and Fields, and he was responsible for the poem’s arriving too late for publication in the Atlantic; Tennyson had released his last proof corrections long before they got sent from Macmillan’s hands to America. As a result, the appearance of “Lucretius” in the United States came with far less fanfare and critical response than it would have, had it appeared in the respected literary journal, the Atlantic. Edgar F. Shannon records an intricate, interesting history of revisions and corrections on multiple proofs of the poem in correspondence between Tennyson, Macmillan, and Macmillan’s editor George Grove.51 The most notable amendment was a nod to decorousness made by Tennyson when he removed lines that Macmillan felt would be too suggestive, an offense to propriety: And here an Oread. How the sun delights To glance and shift about her slippery sides And rose knees, and supple roundedness, And budded bosom peaks. Who this way runs.52

The line to replace these four in the Macmillan’s publication was “And here an Oread, and this way she runs.” Yet, Every Saturday printed the original lines as follows, adding the parentheses: And here an Oread (how the sun delights To glance and shift about her slippery sides And rosy knees, and supple roundedness, And budded bosom-peaks) who this way runs.53

Tennyson preferred the expanded version, writing to George Grove on 2 March 1868: “For the public perhaps the new Oread is the best—though I confess I love the old

51 See Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., “The Publication of Tennyson’s ‘Lucretius,’” Studies in Bibliography 34 (1981), 146-186. 52 Quoted in Shannon, 158. 53 Alfred Tennyson, “Lucretius,” Every Saturday (2 May 1868), 576.

Transatlantic Connections

187

one.”54 He asked Grove to send this passage to America: “They are not so squeamish as we are” (483). Macmillan sent Fields both versions of the poem, giving Fields the option to choose between them. Shannon comments that It is odd that in spite of Tennyson’s injunction to Grove about sending the full Oread to America, Macmillan included the alternative version, without any indication as to the poet’s preference, and that he professed himself still undecided as to which lines to use in Macmillan’s after what both he and the editor had previously written to Farringford. At any rate, Tennyson turned out to have judged the Americans correctly.55

Low circulation and poor textual presence may partly explain the lack of controversy created by Tennyson’s poem “Lucretius,” or, as Tennyson guessed, Americans just weren’t that concerned about propriety. Macmillan had agreed to enlarge the font in his periodical publication in England, further expanding the textual presence of the poem on the pages, while Every Saturday minimalizes its presence by removing all but two stanza divisions printed in Macmillan’s, a detail that reduces the poem from nine full pages with ample white space to two double-column, fine print pages, with not a white space to spare at the end. The borders that enclose Every Saturday’s text further boxes in the poem, creating daunting poetic density for a poem that may be already somewhat difficult for readers accustomed to light fiction and miscellaneous articles. As with “1865–66,” Tennyson’s poem is placed on the last page of the American periodical, presumably because of its late arrival, while the Macmillan’s version boldly and importantly introduces the May issue. Thus, “Lucretius” appears in the United States, without bowdlerization, to a relatively small and declining readership of a periodical that was losing money, and tacked onto the end of the issue as an afterthought. By 6 January 1872, the date of Tennyson’s publication of “England and America in 1782” in the New York Ledger (1855–1898), over one third of the population of the United States subscribed to periodicals. According to Smith and Price, “the inexpensive weekly magazines, an estimated 4,295 of them, had a combined circulation of 10.5 million, a staggering figure given the fact that the population of the United States was only 30 million in 1870.”56 The Ledger’s publisher, Robert Bonner, claimed a substantial portion of these readers as subscribers. According to Frank Luther Mott: “The Ledger’s success was one of the wonders of the times. In days when circulations of not ten periodicals in the country reached 100,000, the Ledger leaped far beyond its closest competitor with 400,000.”57 Bonner achieved these numbers through aggressive, sensational advertising campaigns and by paying extraordinarily high fees to literary celebrities while maintaining a consistent staff of well-paid popular writers such as Lydia Sigourney, Sylvanus Cobb, Jr., the first American woman newspaper columnist Fanny Fern, who earned $100 a column, 54 55 56 57

Tennyson, Letters, II:482. Shannon, 166. Smith and Price, 5. Mott, 2:359.

188

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

and E. D. E. N. Southworth, whose generous salary was $10,000 a year. Bonner also featured contributions from senators, college presidents, and scholars. The Ledger was a small folio, eight-page paper with fiction, poetry, miscellaneous light articles, and columns such as Fanny Fern’s “Fern Leaves.” Bonner marketed his paper for family reading; upon retirement, he said: When I first bought the Ledger . . . I pictured to myself an old lady in Westchester with three daughters, aged about twenty, sixteen and twelve, respectively, Of an evening they come home from a prayer meeting, and not being sleepy, the mother takes up the Ledger and reads aloud to the girls. From the first day I got the Ledger to the present time there has never appeared one line which the old lady in Westchester County would not like to read to her daughters.58

The implication here is that female readers have a low tolerance and little time for scandal, immorality, and complex intellectual thought. Tennyson’s frequent appearance in diverse American periodicals and literary annuals had prepared him for an audience of mothers and daughters who would be well pleased to read his work in the Ledger. Bonner is known for publishing the largest advertising that had ever appeared in a newspaper on 6 May 1858, when he promoted the Ledger on seven pages of the New York Herald. One report claims that Bonner paid $27,000 for one week of advertising, often using his profits to buy racehorses. Mott claims that “He is said to have spent $1,000,000 with the advertising agency of S. M. Pettengill & Company to spread the gospel of the Ledger” (2:16). Not surprisingly, Bonner’s reputation for a heavy advertising budget compared only with P. T. Barnam. His is the prototypical “rags to riches” story: Alger could never have dreamed of a hero like Bonner. . . . Here was his contemporary, a youth who owned his own paper at 26 and who was rich and famous at 31; at the same time a bold audacious fellow, ruthless with those in his way and tender with those he liked. The paper which cost him $500, by 1880 was worth two millions. Like other young hopefuls he was practically friendless and alone when he came to New York from Hartford but in his thirties he was on the best of terms with the leading social and business lights of the day.59

His recipe for success was to print no advertising in his own periodical, to make the price low enough for everyone to afford it, to focus on family reading, and to print only original contributions, for which he offered handsome fees. Celebrity authors included Dickens, who received $5,000 for a three-part work of short fiction, “Hunted Down,” Longfellow, who garnered $3000 for “The Hanging of the Crane,” and Henry Ward Beecher, who earned $30,000 in advance for his serialized novel, Norwood.

58 Quoted in Mott, 2:359. 59 Ralph Admari, “Bonner and ‘The Ledger,’” American Book Collector 6 (1935), 190.

Transatlantic Connections

189

The request came to Tennyson in a letter dated 16 September 1871, with Bonner stating self-importantly: “I should be very much pleased to have a poem by you for the number of the Ledger for January 1st, 1872, and I will gladly pay you One Thousand Pounds for it, even if not more than twelve lines in length. The gentleman who will hand you this is authorized to pay you that amount on your signifying to him your compliance with my request.”60 Clearly, when Tennyson agreed to submit a poem to the New York Ledger, he was entering a world of sensational commercialism as he had never before experienced, and such exposure earned him this hefty sum for a poem written forty years before, in the 1832–34 era. This was a substantial increase over the £150 he had received from publishing “The Last Tournament” in the Contemporary Review in December, 1871. The fee embarrassed Tennyson, who told Bonner’s emissary Francis Bartlett on 9 October 1872: “Yesterday I had all but made up my mind, out of consideration for Mr. Bonner and even myself, to reject the offer he made me through you; but this morning, remembering your assurance that the proposal was advisedly made, I have resolved to accept it.”61 Indeed, Bonner assured Tennyson on 22 December 1871 that he was very pleased with their arrangement: By the mail which takes this, I forward an advance copy of the Ledger containing your poem, with which I am well pleased. The lines are not only beautiful in themselves, but they will exert a salutary influence in promoting the good feeling between the two countries. . . . In reply to your remark about the compensation, I have only to say that, as it was quite satisfactory to me, I do not see why you should deem it extravagant.62

Nevertheless, Tennyson felt guilty enough about taking the sum that he twice approached the United States Ambassador Robert Cumming Schenck in London about creating an American scholarship in English literature, but Schenck was not interested in his proposal. Considering the expenditure, one would expect “England and America in 1782” to be featured on the front page of the newspaper, but it appears at the top of the second column of page four, just under the smaller New York Ledger banner. The column header reads: We have the pleasure of laying before our readers to-day an original poem by ALFRED TENNYSON, the great poet of England. Its stirring words are supposed to have been the utterance of a far-seeing and enlightened lover of liberty, at the date of the recognition of American Independence by the English government. This is the only poem ever written by Mr. TENNYSON for an American publication. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, the

60 Robert H. Bonner to Alfred Tennyson, 16 September 1871, Tennyson Research Centre #2699A. 61 Tennyson, Letters, III:17. 62 Robert H. Bonner to Alfred Tennyson, 22 December 1871, Tennyson Research Centre #2699B.

190

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals first of American poets, has long been among the writers for the Ledger; and we now hail with pleasure and with pride the advent in our columns of the first of English poets.63

Bonner’s claim of printing Tennyson’s only American periodical publication is fabricated for promotion, of course. Tennyson did not write the poem specifically for the Ledger, and he sent three poems to the Atlantic Monthly and Every Saturday only four years before. Connecting Tennyson to William Cullen Bryant lends importance to the latter by association and advertises future issues, for a notice at the bottom of the page announces that Bryant will be writing “a number of original poems . . . expressly for the Ledger during the new year.” The poem calls on England to be proud of America, “those strong songs of thine / Who wrench’d their rights from thee!” (4). If “Those men thine arms withstood, / Retaught the lesson thou hadst taught, / And in thy spirit with thee fought—Who sprang from English blood,” their victory is only because England taught her sons well. England should “rejoice with liberal joy,” confident that whatever America does, it will be because England taught her: “Thy work is thine—The single note / From that deep chord which Hampden smote / Will vibrate to the doom.” The poem praises the United States, while reminding readers of their firm roots in English culture. A companion poem by Rev. John Hall, D. D. appears two columns to the right, titled “America to Great Britain,” dated “New York, Dec. 15, 1871.” Perhaps written by request from Bonner to answer Tennyson, Hall reaffirms America’s allegiance to England, the “Old ocean queen! To whom we owe our birth,” and calls for solidarity between the two countries: “There have been strifes—In woe, they are forgot; / And feuds, they are as though they had been not.” The United States was once “a callow bird, pushed from the parent nest” but now she is strong “and glad her eagle wing to fold.” Because “God meant it well for truth and liberty,” Hall asks that the two great nations now “let these clasping hands / Be ever clasped—for blessing to the lands.” Relations between England and the United States were poor in 1872, because Americans felt the British had aided the South during the Civil War. According to Barbara Clark, “So intense was the political animosity that the mayor of Chicago insulted Queen Victoria by refusing a gift of books for a library newly constructed after the great Chicago fire of 1871.”64 The resentment may explain why Ambassador Schenck refused Tennyson’s scholarship proposal, but it also suggests why Tennyson may have sent this particular poem: he hoped for better relations between the two countries, and the best format available for expressing that hope to the largest readership was the popular New York Ledger. Tennyson’s poem shares the issue with an article against college hazing by James McCosh placed directly below “England and America in 1782;” an essay about snow sledding by Henry Ward Beecher; a serialized novel by E. D. E. N. Southworth, Between Two Fires; poems by Louise S. Upham and John O. Saxe; and an essay from Horace Greeley discouraging ambitious young men from going into debt for a classical education. Instead, Greeley promotes getting special training for a place in 63 “An Original Poem by Tennyson,” The New York Ledger (6 January 1872), 4. 64 Clark, 4.

Transatlantic Connections

191

life, with the idea of being self-taught. Greeley’s self-made man corresponds with the example of the New York Ledger’s proprietor, Robert Bonner, and such notions of freedom and self-definition thus become the reflection of England’s tutelage in light of Tennyson’s poem. One of the most important new publishing genres during the latter nineteenthcentury was the children’s periodical, and Tennyson published in two of the best juvenile publications in the history of American periodicals. St. Nicholas, from its first issue by Scribner and Company in November 1873, “beyond any doubt the best magazine for children ever published in America,” according to John Tebbel.65 The mastermind behind the magazine’s success was Mary Mapes Dodge (1830–1905), author of Hans Brinker; or The Silver Skates (1865). Her keen editorship from 1873 to 1905 kept circulation steady at 70,000 for many years, at a difficult time for such publications; Ballou reports that “Of the fourteen juvenile periodicals originated in the 1860s, three ceased publication in 1870, eight in the following years of the decade.”66 St. Nicholas was a well-illustrated, large octavo created and published by Roswell Smith, one of the founders of Scribner’s Monthly in 1870. Dodge wisely included articles and advertising of interest to parents, as well as children, claiming that In England, especially, the so called juvenile periodicals are precisely what they ought not to be. . . . We edit for the approval of fathers and mothers, and endeavor to make the child’s monthly a milk-and-water variety of the adult’s periodical. But, in fact, the child’s magazine needs to be stronger, truer, bolder, more uncompromising than the others. Its cheer must be the cheer of the bird-song not of condescending editorial babble.67

Stronger, truer, and bolder meant being more faithful to children’s moral and intellectual needs. Dodge wanted her juvenile production to provide clean entertainment, to give examples of good behavior in boys and girls, to demonstrate patriotism and a love of nature, home, beauty, and sincerity, to show life as it really is, and to provide good literature by the best authors. She featured such literary celebrities as Louisa May Alcott, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Robert Louis Stevenson, G. A. Henty, and Rudyard Kipling. Famous contributions include Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, illustrated by R. B. Birch; The Hoosier School Boy by Edward Eggleston; Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad; Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book stories; Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins and Jack and Jill, a portion of which shares an issue with Tennyson; and Hero Tales from American History, by Theodore Roosevelt.

65 John Tebbel, The American Magazine: A Compact History (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969), 148. 66 Ballou, 125. 67 Quoted in Catharine Morris Wright, Lady of the Silver Skates: The Life and Correspondence of Mary Mapes Dodge 1830–1905 (Jamestown, RI: Clingstone Press, 1979), 69-70.

192

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Hallam Tennyson responded to Dodge’s request for a contribution from his father on 30 September 1879, sending two poems for the February 1880 issue of St. Nicholas “because an able editor had scored a bull’s eye,” according to Catharine Morris Wright.68 The letter from Dodge to Tennyson requesting a contribution is a testament to Dodge’s talent for good author relations. She appeals to Tennyson reverentially, respectfully, and with a clear intent of begging gracefully in a letter dated 2 September 1879. Dodge names a few of the magazine’s respected contributors, “our own Bryant, Whittier and Longfellow, and many fine English as well as American writers,” whose work helps her to make the magazine better, and she appeals to Tennyson’s sense of moral earnestness with the hope that he will feel that the magazine is earnestly and faithfully conducted—that it is a power working for the good of the new world of men and women growing up around us. Its young readers, by careful estimation, number over one-hundred-and-fifty thousand in this country alone, and it has also a large British and Continental circulation.69

Dodge promises “substantial appreciation” from her publishers (£200), while appealing to his reputation as an American icon: My plea is the children themselves. They know you better than you can imagine. All over this continent, bright-eyed boys and girls read ‘The May Queen,’ the Song of ‘The Brooke,’ ‘Lady Clare Vere de Vere,’ ‘Charge of the Light Brigade,’ even the ‘Princess,’ and scores of your poems almost as soon as they can be said to read at all. They know the ‘Cradle-Song’ and ‘Lullaby’ by heart. Will you not give them something written ‘on purpose’—something for their very own, as they would say?

Dodge asks for an original poem for her Christmas number of St. Nicholas, but any poem copied in his own hand would also be acceptable (she suggests the Cradle Song, “What does Little Birdie Say?”), as long as it arrives in early October, in time for the Christmas number. When Dodge is at her most intense begging, she plays a gender card: “Oh please do (you know now that the editor of St. Nicholas is a woman!) Please give them a song, a fancy, a story—any-thing from two verses to a score, or what you will, and crown ‘St. Nicholas’ indeed. I want this good thing so much that I think I almost would sail to England for it, if that would help my cause.” Dodge perceives that pleading is more appropriate and recognizable if it comes from a woman. Dodge would not have to fetch the poem; Hallam’s letter with his father’s contributions arrived well before early October, her deadline for the Christmas number, but her plan seems confused, as she writes on 12 December 1879 that “They arrived too late for our January number, though we held it back as long as

68 Wright, 108. 69 Mary Mapes Dodge to Alfred Tennyson, 2 September 1879, Tennyson Research Centre #3645.

Transatlantic Connections

193

the publishers would allow.”70 Originally written for The Princess, his contributions were two short songs collectively titled “Child-Songs” (Figure 5.1). Dodge decided to publish them in the February issue, because Tennyson also offered to send music to accompany “The City Child.” Dodge sends profuse thanks to Hallam for the poems on 12 December 1879: “Pray convey to your father my earnest thanks for the two Child-Songs kindly forwarded by you. They are lovely, and we shall print them both in the February issue of ‘St. Nicholas.’ . . . With sincere appreciation of your courtesy, and true gratitude toward your noble father.” She adds a request for his autograph to accompany the poems and the composer of the music for “The City Child.” Both requests went unanswered, for Tennyson’s autograph does not appear in the issue, and the music is anonymously designated with the line “Music and Words written for St. Nicholas” (Figure 5.2). However, a sense of ownership is evident in the tactic devised to make up for the lack of a composer’s name, but the style of anonymous attribution also indicates a special relationship between Tennyson and St. Nicholas that lends authority and status to the publication: the music was especially written for the magazine. The songs appear on the first page of the February issue, facing a full-page engraved illustration by Samuel Cousins of a painting by John Millais, “The Princes in the Tower,” depicting the famous imprisonment of the two princes by Richard III (Figure 5.3). The boys in the illustration cling to each other as they stand at the bottom of the tower steps, looking out into the darkness as if waiting for death. Nobly dressed and handsome, the boys look in opposite directions, as if danger could come from any corner of the dangerous space. Such hard truths were commonly expressed in St. Nicholas. Dodge was an editor who believed that a magazine should be entertaining, but didactic, with a clear sense of morality: Doubtless a great deal of instruction and good moral teaching may be inculcated in the pages of a magazine; but it must be by hints dropped incidentally here and there; by a few brisk, hearty statements of the difference between right and wrong; a sharp, clean thrust at falsehood, a sunny recognition of truth, a gracious application of politeness, an unwilling glimpse of the odious doings of the uncharitable and base. In a word, pleasant, breezy things may linger and turn themselves this way and that. Harsh, cruel facts— if they must come, and sometimes it is important that they should—must march forward boldly, say what they have to say, and go.71

Dodge further achieves this goal in her comments upon the illustration in her column, “The Letter-Box.” She recounts the history of the princes and refers to another rendition of the boys by the French painter Delaroche, reprinted in “The Letter-Box” from a previous volume. The alternate image portrays the boys framed by a massive bed, in a similar clinging position and gaze, as their dog looking off 70 Mary Mapes Dodge to Alfred Tennyson, 12 December 1879, Tennyson Research Centre #3646. 71 Fred Erisman, “St. Nicholas,” Children’s Periodicals of the United States, ed. R. Gordon Kelly (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), 379-80.

194

Figure 5.1

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

“Child-Songs,” St. Nicholas, February 1880

Transatlantic Connections

Figure 5.2

“The City Child,” St. Nicholas, February 1880

195

196

Figure 5.3

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

“The Princes in the Tower,” St Nicholas, February 1880

Transatlantic Connections

197

to the back of the room at a door, as if hearing the steps of death coming for its masters. She tells a tale of the boys traveling from their home in Ludlow Castle to London, while children watched with envy as they passed: “Yes, many a boy and girl looked almost with envy that day upon the two royal children, and wondered how it felt to be the son of a king and lord of a nation.” However, looks deceive; the boys would be subjected to Richard, Duke of Gloucester, “the wickedest, cruelest and most powerful nobleman in all England. But for these boys, in all their pride of youth, his grace of Gloucester might be king himself!”72 Dodge further narrates their fate, describing what is happening in the two pictures provided: “It seems to us that Mr. Millais has painted them as they stood at this moment,— erect, heroic, but with suspense and terror in their beautiful faces. It is dreadful to look at them, dreadful to think of what is so soon to happen” (357). As with Tennyson’s poem, Dodge teaches children that nothing is as it seems, and all children can be victims of avaricious adults who can abuse them. Dodge tempers her warnings about life outside the home by trying to cultivate an interest in the commercial aspects of art production and the art of engraving, as she gives details of her business arrangements with participants of the illustration process: In the first place, the picture itself was painted by Mr. Millais especially for the society [the London Fine Art Society], for £3,000 or $15,000; then, at Mr. Millais’ request, Mr. Samuel Cousins of London undertook to engrave it in pure mezzotint (any of the unabridged dictionaries will tell you what mezzotint engraving is), and for doing so the Society paid him £1,627, or $18,135,—more than half the cost of the original painting, you see. (357)

According to Dodge, the Prince of Wales wrote the Society a letter of appreciation for Cousins’s engraving, having been reminded by it of his childhood with Queen Victoria. “Artist’s Proofs” were sold out “almost before the engraving was published, and then came sales so large that they surprised even the Society.” Its value was further enhanced by the fact that Cousins was old and losing his eyesight, thus new engravings from him would no longer be created, putting all present product at a premium. In the collection of texts represented by the two paintings, the two engravings, Tennyson’s two poems, and Dodge’s essay, the editor achieves her stated goal of establishing a value system in her magazine. She criticizes the childmurdering political power struggles of England’s heritage, while teaching children the intricacies of art and literature as a commodity. However, there is little to harm the children in Tennyson’s two poems, “The City Child” and “Minnie and Winnie,” that is, if the children stay close to home. Indeed, one observer calls the poems “harmless little bits.”73 “The City Child,” also featured on page 349 with music and words on “Our Music Page,” describes a “dainty little maiden” who wanders far from home, away from her mother and city home, to be 72 Mary Mapes Dodge, “The Letter-Box,” St. Nicholas 7:4 (February 1880), 356. 73 Wright, 36.

198

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

in meadows and gardens of flowers. The narrator chants a simple line to the maiden, asking “whither would you wander? / Whither from this pretty home, the home where mother dwells?”74 A wandering child invites dangers that innocence cannot anticipate, and the speaker gently scolds the maiden, who prefers to be “‘Far and far away. . . All among the meadows, the clover and the clematis, / Daisies and kingcups and honeysuckle-flowers.’” As with fairy tales, the poem’s simplicity often belies the sense of possible dangers. The city child wants to be a nature child and live simply, away from the city-house of her mother. A second song features two ladies, Minnie and Winnie, who “Slept in a shell.” The pair are safe in their shell, safe from the crashing seas without, and they sleep as “Echo on echo / Dies to the moon.” The stars wonder what Minnie and Winnie are dreaming about, but the ladies sleep on. Here the dreamy world in miniature ensures that Minnie and Winnie will be safely cocooned in nature until they are wakened by the sun and the linnet to venture forth into another day. The visual threat portrayed in the image of the princes in the adjacent illustration seems to clash with the simple lessons of the songs, yet the young reader is reminded on both pages that it is dangerous to stray, but danger may also exist at home, as demonstrated by the princes. In spite of the quality of St. Nicholas, the magazine was no commercial competition to the weekly Youth’s Companion (1827–1929), with its circulation numbers reaching about 400,000 by the time of Tennyson’s publication in the 13 December 1883 issue. A map of the United States and part of Canada printed in a circular of a Youth’s Companion of 1890 shows that only New Mexico, Arizona, and the Indian Territory had less than 500 subscribers that year; most other states display numbers into the thousands: California shows 16,743 subscribers; Kansas, 19,344; Pennsylvania, 23,773; and Iowa, 27,460.75 The map features a cameo image of a train speeding across the southwestern United States and a ship cruising in the ocean east of North Carolina, indicating coast-to-coast coverage and domination of the country’s 65 million citizen readers. In the earlier nineteenth century, the Companion went through several configurations of size and thematic focus as it articulated the Puritan didacticism of its founder, Nathaniel Willis (1780–1870). However, When Daniel Sharp Ford bought the periodical in 1857, he began editing and managing a weekly juvenile magazine that became quite different from its religious predecessor, making him a millionaire well before his death on Christmas Eve, 1899. Following Robert Bonner’s formula, Ford solicited original material from notable authors, such as Longfellow, Whittier, and Whitman, and popular women authors such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Kate Chopin. He also published articles by Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, and Booker T. Washington. He proudly listed past and present contributors in the Companion. Ford’s motto was “None but the best.” 74 Alfred Tennyson, “The City Child,” St. Nicholas 7:4 (February 1880), 281. 75 Louise Harris, “None but the Best” or The Story of Three Pioneers, The Youth’s Companion, Daniel Sharp Ford, C. A. Stephens (Providence, R.I.: C. A. Stephens Collection, Brown University, 1966), 35.

Transatlantic Connections

199

Ford tried to reduce the didactic focus, although he continued to insist on high moral standards. As with Dodge, one of the keys for his success was finding fiction and poetry broadly marketed toward family reading, rather than to a strictly juvenile readership. Preferring not to use his own name as the publisher, Ford invented one: Perry Mason & Co., a name later used as the character in Erle Stanley Gardner’s lawyer-detective stories. However, the Mason of the Companion was a more grizzled character than Gardner’s California detective; Mott notes that “the thousands of children who imagined Mr. Mason as a benevolent old gentleman with mutton-chop whiskers were not far from wrong after all, for that was what Ford looked like in his later years.”76 By 1883, the Companion was a major competitor in periodicals because of Ford’s shrewd marketing sense. He issued premiums for subscriptions, and children could receive toys, dolls, books, magic lanterns, and the “Magic Scroll Saw,” which Mott credits for adding 40,000 subscribers: The premium lists began in 1867; the circulation was quoted at 50,000 the next year, and it gained an average of about 10,000 annually for the next ten years. After that, its annual gain was more like 25,000, until it reached about 400,000 in 1887. It hovered around the half-million mark in the nineties, passing it in 1898.77

These numbers represent the highest magazine circulation in the United States during the 1880s, including that of popular magazines such as Harper’s, Scribner’s, and the Atlantic Monthly. William H. Rideing helped to increase Ford’s relationship with English authors after coming to the Companion in 1881, and he was probably Ford’s representative to Tennyson when he contributed his poem, “Early Spring,” for the December 13 1883 issue. Tennyson may have been feeling unusually tender toward American children during a time when he was also trying to raise money for the Gordon Boys’ Home; Charles Tennyson records that “The pupils of a large school in Brooklyn, U.S.A., sent an album of his poems which they had copied out with their own hands.”78 One immediately becomes interested in the anachronistic appearance of a poem about spring, printed on a page that features an article titled “Christmas and the Saturnalia,” an exploration of the various days or months assigned, through the centuries and in various cultures, as Christ’s birthday. The writer tells the story of how Christmas came to be on December 25, as a result of the pagan holiday practiced by the Romans, the Saturnalia, and an illustration adjacent to Tennyson’s poem depicts “Burning the Yule-Log” by Roman soldiers during the festival. The Puritans objected to commemorating Christmas because of its similarities to Roman traditions: “Our Pilgrim ancestors thought they were doing God’s service in trying to kill Christmas. Being learned in Roman antiquities, they stigmatized the festival as the survival of a

76 Mott, 2:266. 77 Mott, 2:268. 78 Charles Tennyson, 480.

200

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

pagan holiday,” according to the writer. Eventually, the Puritan preference for a day in November became Thanksgiving, and the old date for Christmas won out. If “Early Spring” does not fit the season, the poem fits the religious nature of articles on the page, as it assures readers that “Once more the Heavenly Power / Makes all things new, / And thaws the cold and fills / The flower with dew; / The blackbirds have their wills, / The poets too”; we might add: “and periodicals too,” for they had more will over the text than poets. Directly beneath “Early Spring” is “The Christmas Sentiment,” a Christian sermonette on the meaning of Christmas: He was born under an empire where the din of class clashing against class, and the wail of the oppressed, drowned the shouts of the victorious few. Yet He founded a Commonwealth wherein the caste-spirit should not pulsate, and whose citizens would view no man as a labor-saving machine, or as a stepping-stone.. . . While Easter asserts that if a man die he shall live again, Christmas affirms that in the new Commonwealth there is to be no difference of nation, no distinction as to privilege, nor classifying by extraction or position, nothing but humanity, for all are brethren.79

The description parallels the idealized vision of American democracy, but it is particularly ironic, considering the fight against slavery was still being fought in the United States a mere 20 years before, and all the western empires of the world were in an imperialistic race to colonize and subdue the weaker nations. Nevertheless, the writer confidently tells how the disciples sold and shared their possessions, and “Their love for their Master begat an enthusiasm of humanity which forbade one of them from living in luxury while a brother lived in poverty” (532). Six pages of advertising follow Tennyson’s poem and “The Christmas Sentiment,” illustrating in column after column the language of acquisition. Pianos; furniture; stereopticons; music schools; books; chocolates from Caracas; shoes; corsets; knitting silk; hairpieces; furs; Irish linen table cloths; manure spreaders; printing presses; shaving soap; magic lanterns; microscopes; guns; saw mills; silverware; homes in Minnesota, Dakota, Montana, Washington and Oregon; rubber roofing; toothache drops; bicycles; canaries; dictionaries; Christmas cards; the Noyes adjustable book holder, with book rack; Vick’s Illustrated Floral Guide; Forest and Stream; Garden and Farm Topics; cough drops; agitator threshers; Paganini violins; “20 million acres of railroad land for $2.60 to $4 per acre, on five years’ time if desired;” cement; scales; writing fluid; lifetime business college scholarships; hair crimpers; roller and ice skates; “Ladd’s Solace Chair;” and the Illustrated London News all in the enthusiasm of humanity and the spirit of Christmas for the Youth’s Companion readers and into their millionaire publisher’s account. Perhaps the Puritans were right about December 25 being a pagan ritual, but the Companion encourages a prosperous season, in spite of Puritan efforts to kill Christmas. Although the Youth’s Companion and the New York Ledger could boast huge subscription numbers and claim a broad national or international readership, the 79 “The Christmas Sentiment,” The Youth’s Companion 50:56 (13 December 1883), 532.

Transatlantic Connections

201

Atlantic Monthly, Every Saturday, and St. Nicholas, were generally marketed toward a smaller, New England readership. If not for aggressive editors who took advantage of the freedom from copyright, Tennyson may have remained an English Poet Laureate relatively unknown in the United States, except to a literate few who read the periodicals he chose for publishing his poems. However, the scissoring, pasting, and adapting of Tennyson’s oeuvre for American periodicals created a reputation that reached the hearts of the masses. Hamilton T. Mabie writes that “Tennyson has been contemporaneous with what is often called popular culture in this country. . . . Tennyson spoke out of an older civilization . . . he fed the imagination and nourished the aspirations of a people in who, despite their apparent devotion to material ends, there is a very deep vein of idealism.”80 The expansion of periodicals reading in the United States paralleled the proliferation of Tennyson’s reputation and the development of poetry in America because of the expanded readerships provided by periodicals. William Kingsley wrote that “There are very few small towns in the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific, where there is not at least one newspaper. In the whole country, there must be many thousands, and in every one of them there is a column as regularly devoted to ‘poetry’ as there are columns devoted to advertisements.”81 In American periodicals, poetry and advertisement were related in that they both sold cultural commodities and guaranteed a return investment of the periodical’s time and space, and Tennyson became a regular feature of this American exchange.

80 Mabie, 556. 81 William L. Kingsley, “Why We Have No Brownings or Tennysons in the United States,” New Englander and Yale Review 53:248 (November 1890), 495.

This page intentionally left blank

Appendix A

A Selection of Publications by Periodical Name Athenaeum 11 May 1889: “In Memoriam” Cambridge Chronicle and Journal 10 July 1829: “Timbuctoo” Contemporary Review December 1871: “The Last Tournament” Cornhill Magazine February 1860: “Tithonus” December 1863: “Hendecasyllabics” “Milton: Alcaics” “On Translations of Homer” “Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad in Blank Verse” Court Journal 19 March 1864: “Long as the heart beats life within her breast” Daily News 27 January 1890: “Because she bore the iron name” Englishman’s Magazine 13 August 1831, No. 5: Sonnet, “Check every outflash” Every Saturday (U.S.) 22 February 1868: “1865–1866” (see Good Words) 2 May 1868 (see Macmillan’s): “Lucretius” The Examiner 24 March 1849: “To—, After Reading a Life and Letters” 31 January 1852: “Britons, Guard Your Own” 7 February 1852: “Hands All Round” “The Third of February, 1852” 14 February 1852: “Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper” 9 December 1854: “The Charge of the Light Brigade” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country February 1852: “For the Penny-wise” June 1862: “Ode sung at the opening of the international exhibition” (see The Times)

204

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Good Words 1 January 1868 (reprinted in Queen): “The Victim”; also Atlantic Monthly (U.S.), February 1868 March 1868 (see Every Saturday): “1865–1866” January 1884: “Helen’s Tower” Macmillan’s Magazine January 1860: “Sea Dreams” February 1868: “Wages” May 1868 (see Every Saturday): “Lucretius” March 1882: “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava” December 1884: “Freedom” November 1885: “Vastness” April 1887: “Carmen Saeculare” The Marlburian 20 September 1871: “Thine early rising well repaid thee” Morning Chronicle 24 January 1852: “The Penny-Wise” The New Review October 1889: “The Throstle”; simultaneously published in The Scotsman & American newspapers March 1891: “To Sleep! To Sleep! The Long Bright Day is Done” New York Ledger 6 January 1872: “England and America in 1782” The Nineteenth Century March 1877: Prefatory Sonnet to the Nineteenth Century May 1877: “Montenegro” June 1877: “To Victor Hugo” August 1877: “Achilles Over the Trench” March 1878: “The Revenge” April 1879: “Dedicatory Poem to the Princess Alice” “The Defence of Lucknow” May 1880: “De Profundis” November 1881: “Despair” September 1882: “To Virgil” March 1883: “Frater Ave Atque Vale” February 1892: “The Death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale” Once a Week 16 July 1859: “The Grandmother’s Apology” 4 January 1868: “The Spiteful Letter” Pall Mall Gazette 15 November 1884: “Compromise” Punch 28 February 1846: “The New Timon, and the Poets” 7 March 1846: Literary squabbles, “Ah God! The Petty Fools of Rhyme”

Appendix A

205

St. James’s Gazette 29 October 1884: “Compromise” St. Nicholas (U.S.) February 1880: “Child-Songs” The Times 3 March 1851: “To W. C. Macready” 26 January 1858: “Stanzas for the Queen” 9 May 1859: “Riflemen Form!” 24 April, 14 July 1862: “Ode sung at the opening of the international exhibition” 10 March 1863: “A Welcome to Alexandra” 7 March 1874: “A Welcome to Her Royal Highness Marie Alexandrovna, Duchess of Edinburgh” 15 March 1884: “Sonnet on Cambridge” 23 April 1885: “The Fleet” 7 May 1885: “Epitaph on General Gordon” 23 July 1885: “To H. R. H. Princess Beatrice” 27 June 1891: “Take, Lady, What Your Loyal Nurses Give” Youth’s Companion (U.S.) 13 December 1883: “Early Spring” British Literary Annuals: Friendship’s Offering for 1832 (Oct 1831) Sonnet, “Me my own fate to lasting sorrow doometh” Friendship’s Offering for 1833 (Oct 1832) (reprinted from Englishman’s Magazine, Aug 1831) Sonnet, “Check every outflash, every ruder sally” The Gem for 1831 (Oct 1830): “Anacreontics” “A Fragment” (“Where is the giant of the sun”) “No More” The Keepsake for 1837 (Nov 1836) “St. Agnes” The Keepsake for 1851 (Dec 1850) “Come not, when I am dead” Stanzas, “What time I wasted youthful hours” Manchester Athenaeum Album 1850 Lines, “Here often, when a child, I lay reclined” The Tribute (1837) “Oh! That ‘twere possible” Yorkshire Literary Annual for 1832 (Oct 1831) Sonnet, “There are three things which fill my heart with sighs”

This page intentionally left blank

Appendix B

A List of Poems Featured by Chapters Introduction “To W. C. Macready,” The Times 3 March 1851 “In Memoriam—William George Ward,” The Athenaeum 11 May 1889 “Compromise,” St. James’s Gazette 29 October 1884 “Epitaph on General Gordon,” The Times 7 May 1885 Chapter 1 Those “Vapid” Gift Books “No More,” The Gem, 1831 “Anacreontics,” The Gem, 1831 “Fragment,” The Gem, 1831 “Check every outflash,” Englishman’s Magazine, 1831 & Friendship’s Offering, 1833 “Me my own fate,” Friendship’s Offering, 1832 “There are three things,” Yorkshire Literary Annual, 1832 “St. Agnes,” The Keepsake, 1837 “Oh! That ‘twere possible,” The Tribute, 1837 “Here often when a child,” Manchester Athenaeum Album, 1850 “Come not, when I am dead,” The Keepsake, 1851 “What time I wasted,” The Keepsake, 1851 Chapter 2 Resistance and Commodification: Tennyson’s “Indecent Exposure” in the Periodicals “Timbuctoo,” Cambridge Chronicle and Journal 10 July 1829 “The New Timon and the Poets,” Punch 18 February 1846 “Literary Squabbles,” Punch 7 March 1846 “To— , After Reading a Life and Letters,” The Examiner 24 March 1849 “The Grandmother’s Apology,” Once a Week 16 July 1859 “Sea Dreams,” Macmillan’s Magazine, January 1860 “Tithonus,” The Cornhill Magazine, February 1860 “Hendecasyllabics,” The Cornhill Magazine, December 1863 “Milton: Alcaics” “On Translations of Homer” “Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad in blank verse”

208

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

“The Victim,” Good Words 1 January 1868 “The Spiteful Letter,” Once a Week 4 January 1868 “Wages,” Macmillan’s Magazine, February 1868 “1865–1866,” Every Saturday (U.S.) 22 February 1868; Good Words, March 1868 “Lucretius,” Macmillan’s Magazine, May 1868; Every Saturday (U.S.) 2 May 1868 “Alcaics,” The Marlburian 20 September 1871 “The Last Tournament,” Contemporary Review, December 1871 Prefatory Sonnet to the Nineteenth Century, The Nineteenth Century, March 1877 “To Victor Hugo,” The Nineteenth Century, June 1877 “Achilles Over the Trench,” The Nineteenth Century, August 1877 “De Profundis,” The Nineteenth Century, May 1880 “Despair,” The Nineteenth Century, November 1881 “To Virgil,” The Nineteenth Century, September 1882 “Frater Ave Atque Vale,” The Nineteenth Century, March 1883 “Helen’s Tower,” Good Words, January 1884 “The Throstle,” The New Review, October 1889 “To sleep! To sleep!,” The New Review, March 1891 Chapter 3 War Scares and Patriot Soldiers: Political Poetry “The Penny-Wise,” Morning Chronicle 24 January 1852 “For the Penny-Wise,” Fraser’s Town & Country, February 1852 “Britons Guard Your Own,” The Examiner 31 January 1852 “Hands All Round,” The Examiner, February 1852 “Third of February, 1852,” The Examiner, February 1852 “Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper,” The Examiner 14 February 1852 “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” The Examiner 9 December 1854 “Riflemen Form!” The Times 9 May 1859 “Montenegro,” The Nineteenth Century, May 1877 “The Revenge,” The Nineteenth Century, March 1878 “The Defence of Lucknow,” The Nineteenth Century, April 1879 “Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava,” Macmillan’s Magazine, March 1882 “Freedom,” Macmillan’s Magazine, December 1884 “The Fleet,” The Times 23 April 1885, concurrently in Pall Mall Gazette on same day “Vastness,” Macmillan’s Magazine, November 1885 Chapter 4 “God Save the Queen:” Laureatic Responses “God Save the Queen, The Times 26 January 1858 “Ode Sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition,” Fraser’s Town & Country, June 1862; The Times 24 April and 14 July 1862 “A Welcome to Alexandra,” The Times 10 March 1863 “Long the heart beats life within her breast,” Court Journal 19 March 1864

Appendix B

209

“A Welcome to Her Royal Highness Marie Alexandrovna, Duchess of Edinburgh,” The Times 7 March 1874 “Dedicatory Poems to the Princess Alice,” The Nineteenth Century, April 1879 “To H. R. H. Princess Beatrice,” The Times 23 July 1885 “Carmen Saeculare,” Macmillan’s Magazine, April 1887 “Take, lady, what your loyal nurses give,” The Times 27 June 1891 “The Death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale,” The Nineteenth Century, February 1892 Chapter 5 Transatlantic Connections “The Victim,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1868 “1865–1866,” Every Saturday 22 February 1868 “Lucretius,” Every Saturday 2 May 1868 “England and America in 1782,” New York Ledger 6 January 1872 “Child-Songs,” St. Nicholas, February 1880 “Early Spring,” Youth’s Companion 13 December 1883

This page intentionally left blank

Appendix C

A Select Listing of Tennyson Poems in American Literary Annuals Because of the overwhelming number of reprinted Tennyson poems appearing in an inadequately catalogued genre, I cannot determine how many annuals published Tennyson poems. The following list of American literary annuals where Tennyson poems may be found is composed from information provided by the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Ralph Thompson’s American Literary Annuals and Gift Books, and John Olin Eidson’s Tennyson in America: His Reputation and Influence from 1827 to 1858. I add publishing and editorial information when confirmed: The Album of Love for 1846: Stanza from “The Miller’s Daughter,” p. 65; Sonnet (“But were I loved as I desire to be”), p. 89; Stanza from “To J. S.,” p. 56. Boston: E. Howe. The Album of Love for 1850: Exact reprint of Album of Love for 1846. The Forget Me Not for 1851: “The Poet’s Song,” p. 203 (poem not found upon my examination of the volume). Friendship’s Gift for 1848: “Love Thou Thy Land, with Love Far-brought,” p. 21013 (“Freedom”). Edited by Walter Percival, Boston: John P. Hill. Reissued as The Lady’s Gift, a Souvenir for All Seasons, ed. Walter Percival, Nashua, NH: Charles T. Gill, 1849. Friendship’s Offering for 1842: A Fragment (“Where is the Giant of the Sun, which stood”), p. 218-19, and “No More,” p. 307, both first published in the English Gem for 1831. Boston: E. Littlefield. Gems of Beauty for 1852: “Come not, when I am dead,” p. 79. Ed. Emily Percival, Boston: Phillips, Sampson. Poem reprinted from the 1851 London Keepsake. The Gift of Affection for 1852: “Love and Death,” p. 91; “Mariana,” p. 91. The Gift Book of Gems for 1853: “Come not, when I am dead,” p. 79. Ed. Emily Percival, Boston: Phillips, Sampson. See Gems of Beauty for 1852. Heart-Songs: A Book for the Gift-Season for 1856: The Princess IV: 21-40, p. 9091. The Hyacinth for 1854: “Mariana,” p. 147. Philadelphia: Henry F. Anners. Annual for children. The Irving Offering for 1852: “O Darling Room,” p. 154. New York: Leavitt. Contains five articles from the 1836 London Keepsake. Reissued as The Wintergreen, Always Remembered, A Token for 1853.

212

Appendix C

The Keepsake for 1852: “Come not, when I am dead,” p. 212, reprinted from the 1851 London Keepsake. New York: John C. Riker. Nineteen articles republished from various issues of the London Keepsake. Series presented as a continuation of The Opal, published by Riker, 1844–49. The Ladies’ Diadem: A Token of Friendship for 1853: “The Poet’s Mind,” p. 195; “The Sleeping Beauty,” p. 260. The Lady’s Gift for 1849: “Freedom,” p. 210-13. See Friendship’s Gift for 1848. The Ladies’ Wreath for 1851: The Princess VII: 243-71, p. 249. The Marriage Offering for 1848: The Princess VII: 243-71 ( “Woman”), p. 200. Memory and Hope for 1851: In Memoriam, V:1-12, p. 244. The Oriental Annual (cop. 1857): “Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” p. 70-75. Poetry of the Affections for 1853: “Love and Death,” p. 72; “Mariana,” p. 91. The Present for 1850: “Lilian,” p. 150-51. The Talisman, An Offering of Friendship for 1852: In Memoriam XCIV:1-16 (“How pure at heart and sound in head”), p. 60. Ed. Henry D. Moore. Philadelphia: Hogan and Thompson. The Woodbine: “Remembrance” (“Break, Break, Break”), p. 201. Ed. Caroline May. Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston. The Young Lady’s Cabinet of Gems for 1854: “Circumstance,” p. 129; “The Garden” from “The Gardener’s Daughter” (“Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite,” lines 33-47), p. 136; “The Trio” from “The Gardener’s Daughter” (“There sat we down,” lines 209-20), p. 136.

Bibliography Adams, Michael C. C. “Tennyson’s Crimean War Poetry: A Cross-Cultural Approach.” Journal of the History of Ideas 40:3 (July-September 1979): 405-22. Admari, Ralph. “Bonner and ‘The Ledger.’” American Book Collector 6 (1935): 176-93. “The Affair of the Twenty-Fifth.” The Examiner (18 November 1854): 729-730. Albright, Daniel. Tennyson: The Muses’ Tug-of-War. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986. Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Publish 1800-1900. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1957. — . Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760–1900. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1985. “The Annuals of Former Days.” The Bookseller 1 (29 November 1858): 493-99. Anonymous. Dedication. The Album of Love. Boston: Elias Howe, 1846. — . “‘The New Timon,’ and Alfred Tennyson’s Pension.” Punch, or the London Charivari 10 (7 February 1846): 64. — . “Platonic Women (From the Saturday Review).” The Queen, the Lady’s Newspaper (11 January 1868): 37. — . “Preface.” The Irving Offering. A Token of Affection for 1852. New York: Leavitt, 1852. — . “Prefatory Poem.” The Gem, A Literary Annual for 1831 (1830). London: Marshall, 1831. Armour, Richard Willard. Barry Cornwall: A Biography of Bryan Waller Procter. Boston: Meador, 1935. “The Army and the Navy. Military Preparations in Ireland.” The Examiner (31 January 1852): 71. “The Attack on Balaklava.” The Times (13 November 1854): 7. Austin, James C. Fields of the Atlantic Monthly: Letters to an Editor 1861–1870. San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1953. Ballou, Ellen B. The Building of the House: Houghton Mifflin’s Formative Years. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. Barnes, James J. “Depression and Innovation in the British and American Book Trade, 1819-1939.” In Books and Society in History, edited by Kenneth E. Carpenter, 231-48. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1983. Beckett, Ian F. W. Riflemen Form: A Study of the Rifle Volunteer Movement 1859– 1908. Aldershot: The Ogilby Trusts, 1982. Beetham, Margaret. A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800-1914. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

214

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Blessington, Marguerite. The Blessington Papers. Formed by Alfred Morrison. Printed for Private Circulation, 1895. Bonham-Carter, Victor. Authors by Profession. London: The Society of Authors, 1978. Booth, Bradford Allen, ed. A Cabinet of Gems. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938. Bose, A. “The Verse of the English ‘Annuals.’” The Review of English Studies 4 ns:13 (January 1953): 38-51. Boyle, Andrew. An Index to the Annuals 1820–1850. Worcester: Andrew Boyle, 1967. Brake, Laurel. “Writing, Cultural Production, and the Periodical Press in the Nineteenth Century.” In Writing and Victorianism, edited by J. B. Bullen, 54-72. London and New York: Longman, 1997. Broadus, Edmund Kemper. The Laureateship: A Study of the Office of Poet Laureate in England with Some Account of the Poets. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921. Brooks, Van Wyck. The Times of Melville and Whitman. New York: Dutton, 1947. Brown, Alan Willard. The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis, 1869– 1880. New York: Columbia University Press, 1947. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton. London: Macmillan, 1913. Burroughs, Peter. “Imperial Institutions and the Government of Empire.” In Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume III: The Nineteenth Century, edited by Andrew Porter, 320-45. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. “Capabilities of Defence.” The Examiner (31 January 1852): 65. Charvat, William. The Profession of Authorship in America 1800–1870. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Chorley, Henry F. “Our Weekly Gossip.” The Athenaeum (22 June 1850): 661-63. “The Christmas Sentiment.” The Youth’s Companion 50:56 (13 December 1883): 531-32. Clark, Barbara R. “Tennyson Across the Atlantic.” The Tennyson Research Bulletin 5:1 (November 1987): 1-8. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. 2 vols. London: Constable, 1932. “The Court at Windsor.” The Court Journal (19 March 1864): 280. Courtney, Janet E. The Adventurous Thirties: A Chapter in the Women’s Movement. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Cronin, Richard. Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002. Crosland, Mrs. Newton (Camilla Toulmin). Rambles Round My Life: An Autobiography (1819–1896). London: Allen, 1898. Cruse, Amy. The Englishman and His Books in the Early Nineteenth Century. London: Harrap, 1930. Dalziel, The Brothers. The Brothers Dalziel: A Record of Work 1840-1890. 1901. Frome, Wiltshire: Butler & Tanner, Limited, repr. 1978.

Bibliography

215

“A Day at The Bookbinder’s.” Penny Magazine XI (September Supplement 1842): 377-84. Davies, James A. John Forster: A Literary Life. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983. — . “‘Tennyson, Forster, and the Punch Connection’: A Reply.” Victorian Periodicals Review 13 (1980): 64-65. — . “‘Tennyson, Forster, and the Punch Connection’: AGAIN.” Victorian Periodicals Review 13 (1980): 103-105. Davis, Patricia Elizabeth. “Challenging Complacency: The ‘discords dear to the musician.’ In Tennyson’s ‘Sea Dreams: An Idyll.’” Victorians Institute Journal 14 (1986): 85-97. “Dedication.” Manchester Athenaeum Album. Manchester: Cave and Sever, 1850. vii-viii. “Dinner to Mr. Macready.” The Times (3 March 1851): 5. Dodge, Mary Mapes. “The Letter-Box.” St. Nicholas 7:4 (February 1880): 356-58. “The Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh.” The Times (7 March 1874): 5. Dyson, Anthony. Pictures to Print: The Nineteenth-Century Engraving Trade. Williamsburg: The Book Press, 1984. “Editor’s Table.” Graham’s Magazine 46 (March 1855): 276. Editorial. The Examiner (31 January 1852): 70. Eidson, John Olin. Tennyson in America: His Reputation and Influence from 1827 to 1858. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1943. Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans). The George Eliot Letters. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. 9 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954. Erickson, Lee. The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800-1850. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Erisman, Fred. “St. Nicholas.” In Children’s Periodicals of the United States, edited by R. Gordon Kelly, 377-88. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. Falwell, Byron. Queen Victoria’s Little Wars. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Faxon, Frederick W. Literary Annuals and Gift Books: A Bibliography 1823-1903 (1912). Pinner, Middlesex: Private Libraries Association, 1973. Felluga, Dino Franco. “Tennyson’s Idylls, Pure Poetry, and the Market.” SEL 37:4 (1997): 783-803. Ford, John. Ackermann, 1783-1983: The Business of Art. London: Ackermann, 1983. Fox Bourne, H. R. English Newspapers: Chapters in the History of Journalism. 2 vols. London: Chatto & Windus, 1887. Francis, Elizabeth A. “Tennyson’s Political Poetry, 1852-1855.” Victorian Poetry 14:2 (Summer 1976): 113-23. Fredeman, William E. “Introduction: ‘England Our Home, Victoria Our Queen.’” Victorian Poetry 25:3-4 (Autumn-Winter 1987): 1-8. Froude, James Anthony. Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of His Life 1795–1835. 2 vols. London: Longmans, 1882.

216

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Tr. Jane E. Lewin. 1987. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Gladstone, William. “Montenegro: A Sketch.” The Nineteenth Century (May 1877): 360-79. Glynn, Jenifer. Prince of Publishers: A Biography of George Smith. London & New York: Alison & Busby, 1986. Gohdes, Clarence. American Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. New York: Columbia University Press, 1944. Goldberg, Brian. “‘A Sea Reflecting Love’: Tennyson, Shelley, and the Aesthetics of the Image in the Marketplace.” Modern Language Quarterly 59:1 (March 1998): 71-97. Goldsworthy, Vesna. “Tennyson and Montenegro.” Tennyson Research Bulletin 7:1 (1997): 7-17. “Gordon, Tennyson, and Whittier.” The Times (7 May 1885): 6. “Grand Soiree at Manchester.” The Times (5 October 1844): 5. Graves, Charles L. Life and Letters of Alexander Macmillan. London: Macmillan, 1910. Hagen, June Steffensen. Tennyson and His Publishers. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979. Hair, Donald S. Domestic and Heroic in Tennyson’s Poetry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. Hall, S. C. Retrospect of a Long Life: 1815 to 1883. New York: Appleton, 1883. Hallam, Arthur Henry. The Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam. Ed. Jack Kolb. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979. Harris, Louise. “None but the Best” or The Story of Three Pioneers, The Youth’s Companion, Daniel Sharp Ford, C. A. Stephens. Providence, RI: C. A. Stephens Collection, Brown University, 1966. Heath, John. The Heath Family Engravers 1779-1878. 2 vols. Hants, Eng.: Scolar Press, 1993. “Her Majesty’s Jubilee. The Celebration in London.” The Times (22 June 1887): 5-6. Hibbert, H.G. Fifty Years of a Londoner’s Life. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1916. Hill, Marylu. “‘Shadowing Sense at War with Soul’: Julia Margaret Cameron’s Photographic Illustrations of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.” Victorian Poetry (Winter 2002): 445-62. “Hints for our Defences—To the Editor of the ‘Examiner.’” The Examiner (31 January 1852): 67. Hoagwood, Terence, Kathryn Ledbetter, and Martin Matthew Jacobsen. “L. E. L.’s ‘Verses’ and The Keepsake of 1829.” Romantic Circles scholarly Web site (Fall 1998). Http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/lel/keepcov.htm Homans, Margaret. Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837–1876. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Bibliography

217

Homans, Margaret, and Adrienne Munich, eds. Remaking Queen Victoria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Hood, Thomas. The Letters of Thomas Hood. Ed. Peter F. Morgan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973. Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830–1870. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1957. Howells, William Dean. Selected Letters, Volume I: 1852–1872. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Hudson, Derek. Martin Tupper: His Rise and Fall. London: Constable, 1949. Inboden, Robin L. “The ‘Valour of Delicate Women’: The Domestication of Political Relations in Tennyson’s Laureate Poetry.” Victorian Poetry 36:2 (Summer 1998): 205-21. “International Exhibition.” The Times (14 July 1862): 7. “The International Exhibition.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 65 (June 1862): 793-806. “It seems generally admitted.” The Times (17 January 1852): 4. James, Lawrence. Warrior Race: The British Experience of War from Roman Times to the Present. London: Little, Brown, 2001. Jamieson, Eleanor, “The Binding Styles of the Gift Books and Annuals.” In Frederick W. Faxon, Literary Annuals and Gift Books: A Bibliography 1823–1903, 7-17. 1912; rept. Middlesex: Private Libraries Association, 1973. Jones, John Bush. “Tennyson, Forster, and the Punch Connection.” Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 11 (1978): 118-21. — . “The Punch Connection II; or, et tu, Tennyson.” Victorian Periodicals Review 13 (1980): 66-69. Joseph, Gerhard. “Commodifying Tennyson: The Historical Transformation of ‘Brand Loyalty.’” Victorian Poetry 34:2 (Summer 1996): 133-47. Jump, John, ed. Tennyson: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967. Kingsley, William L. “Why We Have No Brownings or Tennysons in the United States.” New Englander and Yale Review 53:248 (November 1890): 495-504. Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. “Poetry and Illustration.” In A Companion to Victorian Poetry, edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison, 392-418. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Lamb, Charles, and Thomas Noon Talfourd. Letters of Charles Lamb. Ed. W. Carew Hazlitt. 2 vols. London: Bell, 1886. Langland, Elizabeth. “Nation and Nationality: Queen Victoria in the Developing Narrative of Englishness.” In Remaking Queen Victoria, edited by Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich, 13-32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Ledbetter, Kathryn. “‘Be-Gemmed and BeAmuletted’: Tennyson and Those ‘Vapid’ Gift Books.” Victorian Poetry 34:2 (Summer 1996): 235-45. — . “‘The Copper and Steel Manufactory’ of Charles Heath. Victorian Review 28:2 (2002): 21-30.

218

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

— . “Domesticity Betrayed: The Keepsake Literary Annual.” The Victorian Newsletter 99 (Spring 2001): 16-24. — . “Lucrative Requests: British Authors and Gift Book Editors.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 88:2 (June 1994): 207-16. — . “White Vellum and Gilt Edges: Imaging The Keepsake. Studies in the Literary Imagination 30:1 (Spring 1997): 35-4. Lees, Frederic. “Tennyson and the Old Annuals.” Literature 6 (27 January 1900): 87-88; 3 February 1900: 113; 17 February 1900: 155. Lehmann-Haupt, Hellmut. The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States. 2nd edn. New York: Bowker, 1952. “London, Monday, December 4, 1851.” The Times (4 December 1851): 4. “London, Monday, December 15, 1851.” The Times (15 December 1851): 4. “London, Monday, November 13, 1854.” The Times (13 November 1854): 6. “London, Monday, March 9, 1874.” The Times (9 March 1874): 9. Londonderry, The Marquess of. “Stanzas to the Lady Emmeline Manners, upon Reading a Poem of Hers in 1830, Ending, ‘And Still I Ever Love in Vain!’” The Keepsake for 1837 (1836). Ed. Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley. London: Longman; Paris: Delloy, 1836. 140. Lootens, Tricia. “Victorian Poetry and Patriotism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, edited by Joseph Bristow, 255-79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. “Lord Tennyson’s Poem.” The Independent (23 December 1886): 20. Lounsbury, Thomas R. The Life and Times of Tennyson [From 1809 to 1850]. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962. Ludlow, J. M. “Moral Aspects of Mr. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.” Macmillan’s Magazine 1 (November 1859): 63-72. Ludlow, J. M. (A. Y.) “The ‘Quarterly Review’ on Mr. Tennyson’s ‘Maud.’” Macmillan’s Magazine (1 December 1859): 114-115. “M. Bonaparte’s Foreign Policy—To the Editor of the ‘Examiner.’” The Examiner (31 January 1852): 67. Mabie, Hamilton W. “The Influence of Tennyson in America. Its Sources and Extent.” Review of Reviews 6 (December 1892): 553-56. MacKenzie, John M. “Empire and Metropolitan Cultures.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume III: The Nineteenth Century, edited by Andrew Porter, 270-93. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Manning, Peter. “Wordsworth in The Keepsake, 1829.” In Literature and the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, edited by John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten, 44-73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Markley, A. A. Stateliest Measures: Tennyson and the Literature of Greece and Rome. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. “Marriage of the Princess Royal.” The Times (26 January 1858): 7-8. Marshall, George O., Jr. “Giftbooks, Tennyson, and The Tribute (1837).” The Georgia Review 16 (Winter 1962): 459-64.

Bibliography

219

— . A Tennyson Handbook. New York: Twayne, 1963. Martin, Robert Bernard. Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Maurer, Oscar. “‘My Squeamish Public’: Some Problems of Victorian Magazine Publishers and Editors.” Studies in Bibliography 12 (1959): 21-40. McGann, Jerome. The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. — . “Tennyson and the Histories of Criticism.” Review 4 (1982): 219-53. McGill, Meredith L. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Metcalf, Priscilla. James Knowles: Victorian Editor and Architect. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Miller, J. Hillis. Illustration. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. “The Missing Dispatch.” The Examiner (18 November 1854): 736-37. Mitchell, Sally. “Good Words.” In British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913, edited by Alvin Sullivan, 145-49. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1984. Montgomery, James. “The First Leaf of Young Lady’s Album.” Yorkshire Literary Annual for 1832. Ed. C. F. Edgar. London: Longman, 1832. 125. Moore, Thomas. The Journal of Thomas Moore. Ed. Wilfred S. Dowden. 6 vols. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983. Morgan, Charles. The House of Macmillan (1843–1943). London: Macmillan, 1943. Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines 1850–1865. 5 vols. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1957. Munich, Adrienne. Queen Victoria’s Secrets. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Murray, Nicholas. A Life of Matthew Arnold. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Murtagh, Ann. “The New Review: A Glimpse at the Nineties.” Victorian Periodicals Review 14 (1981): 11-21. Napier, Macvey. Review of The Tribute. Edinburgh Review 66 (October 1837): 103110. News Item. The Times (24 July 1885): 9. Nicolson, Harold. Tennyson: Aspects of His Life, Character and Poetry. London: Constable, 1923. North, Christopher (John Wilson). “Monologue, or Soliloquy on the Annuals.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 26 (December 1829): 948-76. Norton, Caroline. “There is No Trace of Thee Around.” Friendship’s Offering: A Literary Album, and Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1832 (1831). Ed. Thomas Pringle. London: Smith, Elder, 1831. 366. “Opening of Parliament. House of Lords, Tuesday, Feb. 3.” The Times (4 February 1852): 2. “An Original Poem by Tennyson.” The New York Ledger (6 January 1872): 4.

220

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Paris, Michael. Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850– 2000. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. “Parliament and the Press.” The Examiner (7 February 1852): 83-84. Patmore, Coventry. “A Rifle Corps: To the Editor of the Times.” The Times (22 January 1852): 3. Patten, Robert L. Charles Dickens and His Publishers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Pavlock, Barbara R. “‘Frater Ave atque Vale’: Tennyson and Catullus.” Victorian Poetry 17:4 (Winter 1979): 365-76. Pearson, Richard. W. M. Thackeray and the Mediated Text: Writing for Periodicals in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Percival, Walter. “Preface.” In Friendship’s Gift: A Souvenir for 1848, edited by Walter Percival, n.p.. Boston: John P. Hill, 1848. Peterson, Linda H. “Domestic and Idyllic,” In A Companion to Victorian Poetry, edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman and Antony H. Harrison, 42-58. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. Pitt, Valerie. Tennyson Laureate. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. Plunkett, John. Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pope-Hennessy, James. Monckton Milnes: The Years of Promise 1809–1851. London: Constable, 1949. “The Present State of Literature.” The Monthly Review 3:3 (1832): 372-84. “Press and Statesmen—1852.” The Examiner (14 February 1852): 102. Price, Leah. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pringle, Thomas. Preface. Friendship’s Offering: A Literary Album, and Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1833 (1832). Ed. Thomas Pringle. London: Smith, Elder, 1832. vii. Pykett, Lyn. “Reading the Periodical Press.” In Investigating Victorian Journalism, edited by Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden, 3-18. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. “The Reception of the Princess Alexandra.” The Times (9 March 1863): 9-10. Review of the Annuals for 1837. The Athenaeum (5 November 1836): 783. Review of Every Saturday. New Englander and Yale Review 25:94 (January 1866): 177-78. Review of The Gem for 1831. Literary Gazette (16 October 1830): 667-668. Review of The Life and Letters of Barthold George Niebuhr. The Examiner (7 February 1852): 85-86. Review of The Men of the Time in 1852; or Sketches of Living Notables. The Examiner (7 February 1852): 86. Review of The New Timon. The Athenaeum (14 March 1846): 263. Review of The New Timon. The Times (5 June 1846): 7. Review of The Tribute. Literary Gazette (2 September 1837): 553-54.

Bibliography

221

Reynolds, Margaret. “Fragments of an Elegy: Tennyson Reading Sappho.” Lincoln: The Tennyson Society, 2001. Ricks, Christopher. Tennyson. New York: Macmillan, 1972. Russell, William Howard. “The War in the Crimea. The Operations of the Siege.” The Times (14 November 1854): 7. Schults, Raymond L. Crusader in Babylon: W. T. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. Scott, P. G. “The Proof of Tennyson’s ‘Achilles Over the Trench.’” Tennyson Research Bulletin 2:1 (1972): 38-39. Scott, Sir Walter. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott 1826–1828. Ed. H. J. C. Grierson. 12 vols. Vol. 10. London: Constable, 1936. Scott, William Bell. Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott. Ed. W. Minto. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892. Sedgwick, Ellery. “The Atlantic Monthly.” In American Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, edited by Edward E. Chielens, 50-57. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Sedgwick, Ellery, III. “The Early Years of the Atlantic Monthly.” American Transcendental Quarterly 58 (December 1985): 3-30. Shannon, Edgar F., Jr. “The Publication of Tennyson’s ‘Lucretius.’” Studies in Bibliography 34 (1981): 146-86. Shannon, Edgar F., Jr., and Christopher Ricks. “‘The Charge of the Light Brigade:’ The Creation of a Poem.” Studies in Bibliography 38 (1985): 1-44. Shaw, Charles. “The Caffre War and Les Tirailleurs de Vincennes. To the Editor of the Times.” The Times (3 January 1852): 7. Shires, Linda M. “Rereading Tennyson’s Gender Politics.” Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power. Ed. Thaïs E. Morgan. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990. 46-65. Sinfield, Alan. Alfred Tennyson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. “Small consolation it is.” The Times (14 November 1854): 6. Smith, Susan Belasco, and Kenneth M. Price. “Introduction: Periodical Literature in Social and Historical Context.” In Periodical Literature in NineteenthCentury America, edited by Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith, 3-16. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Southey, Robert. The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey. Ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey. 6 vols. London: Longman, 1850. Spurgeon, Dickie A. “The Fortnightly Review.” In British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837-1913, edited by Alvin Sullivan, 131-35. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. Standage, Tom. The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers. 1998. New York: Berkley Books, 1999. “The State and Prospects of England.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 45 (January–June 1852): 225-44.

222

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Strahan, Alexander. “Norman Macleod.” The Contemporary Review 20 (1872): 291306. Stratford, Jenny. “Tennyson’s ‘The Victim’ and Charlotte Yonge’s A Book of Golden Deeds of All Times and All Lands, 1864.” The Library, 5th ser. 31:2 (June 1976): 140-42. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. “Disgust: A Dramatic Monologue.” The Fortnightly Review 30 n.s.: 180 (1 December 1881): 715-17. Taine, Hippolyte A. “Tennyson.” In Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, edited by John Davies Jump, 270-77. London: Routledge; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967. Tebbel, John. The American Magazine: A Compact History. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969. Tennyson, Alfred. “Achilles Over the Trench,” The Nineteenth Century 2:6 (August 1877): 1-2. — . “Anacreontics.” The Gem, A Literary Annual for 1831 (1830). London: Marshall, 1830. 131. — . “Attempts at Classical Metres in Quantity.” Cornhill Magazine 8 (December 1863): 707-709. — . “Britons, Guard Your Own.” The Examiner (31 January 1852): 67. — . “Carmen Saeculare. An Ode in Honour of the Jubilee of Queen Victoria.” Macmillan’s Magazine (April 1887): 401-06. — . “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava. October 25th, 1854.” Macmillan’s Magazine 45 (March 1882): 337-39. — . “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” The Examiner (9 December 1854): 780. — . “The City Child.” St. Nicholas 7:4 (February 1880): 281. — . “Colours of the Double Stars.” The Cornhill Magazine 8 (December 1863): 679. — . “De Profundis.” The Nineteenth Century 7:39 (May 1880): 737-41. — . “The Death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale.” The Nineteenth Century (February 1892): 181-82. — . “Dedicatory Poem to the Princess Alice.” The Nineteenth Century 26 (April 1879): 575-76. — . “The Defence of Lucknow.” The Nineteenth Century 26 (April 1879): 576-82. — . “Despair.” The Nineteenth Century 10:57 (November 1881): 629-40. — . “The Fleet. (On its Reported Insufficiency).” The Times (23 April 1885): 8. — . “For the Penny-Wise.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 45 (JanuaryJune 1852): 224. — . “A Fragment.” (“Where is the giant of the sun”). The Gem, A Literary Annual for 1831 (1830). London: Marshall, 1830. 242-43. — . “Frater Ave Atque Vale.” The Nineteenth Century 13:73 (March 1883): 357-58. — . “Freedom.” Macmillan’s Magazine (December 1884): 81-83. — . “The Grandmother’s Apology.” Once a Week (16 July 1859): 41. — . “Hands All Round.” The Examiner (7 February 1852): 86. — . “Helen’s Tower.” Good Words (January 1884): 25.

Bibliography

223

— . “Here often when a child.” Manchester Athenaeum Album. In Sir Charles Tennyson and Christopher Ricks, “Tennyson’s ‘Mablethorpe,’” Tennyson Research Bulletin 2:3 (November 1974):121. — . The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, edited by Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. 3 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. — . “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After.” The Independent (23 December 1886): 1819. — . “Lucretius.” Every Saturday (2 May 1868): 575-76. — . “Montenegro.” The Nineteenth Century (May 1877): 359. — . “No More.” The Gem, A Literary Annual for 1831 (1830). London: Marshall, 1830. 87. — . “Ode Sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition.” The Times (14 July 1862): 7. — . “On A Spiteful Letter.” Once A Week (4 January 1868): 13. — . “The Penny-Wise.” In The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 994996. — . The Poems of Tennyson. 2nd edn. Ed. Christopher Ricks. 3 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. — . Prefatory Poem. The Nineteenth Century 1 (March 1877): 1. — . “Rifle-Clubs!!!” In The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks. 3:600. — . “St. Agnes.” The Keepsake for 1837 (1836). Ed. Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley. London: Longman; Paris: Delloy, 1836. 248. — . “Sea Dreams. An Idyll.” Macmillan’s Magazine (January 1860): 191-98 — . “A Song” (“To sleep, to sleep”). The New Review 1:5 (October 1889): 193. — . “Sonnet” (“Me my own Fate to lasting sorrow Doometh”). Friendship’s Offering: A Literary Album, and Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1832 (1831). Ed. Thomas Pringle. London: Smith, Elder, 1831. 367. — . “Sonnet.” (“There are three things which fill my heart with sighs”). Yorkshire Literary Annual for 1832. Ed. C. F. Edgar. London: Longman, 1831. 127. — . “Stanzas.” (“Come not, when I am dead”). The Keepsake for 1851 (1850). Ed. Marguerite Power. London: David Bogue, 1850. 122. — . “Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper.” The Examiner (14 February 1852): 99. — . “The Third of February, 1852.” The Examiner (7 February 1852): 85. — . “The Throstle.” The New Review 1:5 (October 1889): 409. — . “Tithonus.” Cornhill Magazine 1 (February 1860): 175-76. — . “To——.” The Examiner (24 March 1849): 180. — . “To H. R. H. Princess Beatrice.” The Times (23 July 1885): 7. — . “To Victor Hugo.” The Nineteenth Century 1:4 (June 1877): 547. — . “To Virgil.” The Nineteenth Century 12:67 (September 1882): 321-23. — . “Vastness.” Macmillan’s Magazine (November 1885): 1-4. — . “The Victim.” Good Words (1 January 1868): 17-18. — . “Wages.” Macmillan’s Magazine 17:100 (February 1868): 271. — . “The War.” The Times (9 May 1859): 10.

224

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

— . “A Welcome.” The Times (10 March 1863): 10. — . “A Welcome.” The Times (7 March 1874): 5. — . The Works of Tennyson. Ed. Hallam Tennyson. 9 vols. London: Macmillan, 1908. — . “1865–1866.” Good Words (1 March 1868): 144. Tennyson, Alfred (Alcibiades). “After-Thought.” Punch, or the London Charivari 10 (6 March 1846): 106. — . “The New Timon, and the Poets.” Punch, or the London Charivari 10 (28 February 1846): 103. Tennyson, Alfred (“T”). “Alcaics.” The Marlburian 6:101 (20 September 1871): 126. Tennyson, Charles. Alfred Tennyson. New York: Macmillan, 1949. — . “Tennyson as Poet Laureate.” In Writers and their Background: Tennyson, edited by D. J. Palmer, 203-25. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1973. — . Six Tennyson Essays. 1954. East Ardsley, Wakefield, Yorkshire: S. R. Publishers, 1972. Tennyson, Sir Charles, and Christopher Ricks. “Tennyson’s ‘Mablethorpe.’” Tennyson Research Bulletin 2:3 (November 1974): 121-23. Tennyson, Emily. Lady Tennyson’s Journal. Ed. James O. Hoge. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981. — . The Letters of Emily Lady Tennyson. Ed. James O. Hoge. University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974. Tennyson, Hallam. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son. 2 vols. New York and London: Macmillan, 1911. Thackeray, William Makepeace. The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray. Ed. Gordon N. Ray. 4 vols. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1945. — . “A Word on the Annuals.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 16 (December 1837): 757-63. “There is a certain proverb.” The Times (6 January 1852): 4. Thompson, Ralph. American Literary Annuals and Gift Books 1825–1865. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1936. Thwaite, Ann. Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape, 1849–1928. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. — . Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. Tribe, David. “In the Beginning . . .” Twentieth Century 175:1034 (1967): 4-8. “The Truth about the Navy: A Warning by Lord Tennyson.” The Pall Mall Gazette (23 April 1885): 1. Tryon, W. S. Parnassus Corner: A Life of James T. Fields, Publisher to the Victorians. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963. Tucker, Herbert F. “House Arrest: The Domestication of English Poetry in the 1830s.” New Literary History 25 (1994): 521-48. — . Introduction. In Critical Essays on Alfred Lord Tennyson, edited by Herbert F. Tucker, 1-8. New York: G. K. Hall, 1993.

Bibliography

225

— . Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1988. Tupper, Martin Farquhar. My Life as an Author. London: Sampson Low, 1886. Turner, Mark W. Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Victoria, Queen of Great Britain. Dear and Honoured Lady: The Correspondence between Queen Victoria and Alfred Tennyson. Eds. Hope Dyson and Charles Tennyson. London: Macmillan, 1969. — . The Girlhood of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty’s Diaries Between the Years 1832 and 1840. Ed. Viscount Esher. 2 vols. London: Murray, 1912. Yonge, Charlotte. A Book of Golden Deeds of All Times and All Lands. Cambridge: Sever and Francis, 1865. Waddington, Patrick. From The Russian Fugitive to The Ballad of Bulgarie: Episodes in English Literary Attitudes to Russia from Wordsworth to Swinburne. Oxford/ Providence: Berg, 1994. “The War in the Crimea. The Operations of the Siege.” The Times (14 November 1854): 7. Ward, Philip Wilfrid. Ten Personal Studies. London: Longman, 1908. Watts, Alaric Alfred. Alaric Alfred Watts, A Narrative of His Life. 2 vols. London: Bentley, 1884. Winship, Michael. American Literary Publishing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Business of Ticknor and Fields. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Winslow, Ola Elizabeth. “Books for the Lady Reader, 1820–1860.” In Romanticism in America, edited by George Boas, 87-109. New York: Russell & Russell, 1961. Wolseley, G. I. “England as a Military Power in 1854 and in 1878.” The Nineteenth Century (March 1878): 433-56. Woodham-Smith, Cecil. The Reason Why. 1953. Alexandria VA: Time-Life Books, 1977. Woods, Margaret L. “Tennyson and Bradley (Dean of Westminster).” In Tennyson and His Friends, edited by Hallam Tennyson, 181. London: Macmillan, 1911. Worth, George J. Macmillan’s Magazine, 1859–1907: “No Flippancy or Abuse Allowed.” Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Wright, Catharine Morris. Lady of the Silver Skates: The Life and Correspondence of Mary Mapes Dodge 1830-1905. Jamestown, RI: Clingstone Press, 1979.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Adams, Michael C. C. 109, 112, 113 Admari, Ralph 188 Albert, Prince 153, 160, 161, 167 Albright, Daniel 82 Alford, Henry 86, 89 Allingham, William 56, 159, 173 Altick, Richard 34, 35, 55, 56 Annuals, American 168, 174-80, 188 Album of Love 177-78 Atlantic Souvenir 175 Friendship’s Gift 179 Gems of Beauty 179 Gift Book of Gems 179 Irving Offering 179-80 Lady’s Gift 179 Wintergreen, Always Remembered 179 Young Lady’s Cabinet of Gems 180 Annuals, British 5-6, 7-43, 44, 46, 60, 65, 67, 71, 100 Amulet 7, 18, 23, 29 Bijou 9, 18, 42 Christmas Box 9, 18 Drawing-Room Scrapbook 9, 39 Forget-Me-Not 7, 17, 18, 23, 29, 42 Friendship’s Offering 7, 15-18, 25-29, 39, 42 Gem 9, 15, 17-27 Juvenile Forget-Me-Not 9, 18, 42 Keepsake 7-8, 14, 15, 16, 17, 24, 29, 30-42, 176, 178-79 Literary Souvenir 7, 8, 14, 17, 18, 29 Manchester Athenaeum Album 37, 38 Oriental Annual 11, 42 Tribute 13, 15, 35, 36-37 Yorkshire Literary Annual 15, 17, 23-25 Argyll, Duchess of 148, 155 Argyll, Duke of 61, 66, 119, 128, 152 Arnold, Matthew 57, 62, 93, 94, 181 Athenaeum 3, 18, 19, 31, 34, 42, 49, 51, 108, 127, 145 Atlantic Monthly 57, 80, 83, 87, 180-83, 190, 199, 201

Austin, James C. 182 Baillie, Joanna 37 Ballou, Ellen B. 181, 182, 191 Barnes, James J. 13 Barton, Bernard 9, 35 Beckett, Ian F. W. 105, 119, 120 Beetham, Margaret 71 Bennett, William Sterndale 151-52, 155 Blessington, Countess of 9, 30, 34, 39, 176 Bonaparte, Prince Louis Napoleon 104, 110, 111, 112, 119 Bonham-Carter, Victor 60 Bonner, Robert 187-91 Bose, A. 10, 16, 42 Bowles, William Lisle 23, 37 Bradbury, William 53, 78 Bradbury and Evans 53, 155 Brake, Laurel 45 Brookfield, William Henry 23, 25, 30, 31, 32 Brooks, Van Wyck 170 Brown, Alan Willard 86, 128 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 8, 39, 145, 177 Browning, Robert 8, 39, 40, 145, 170, 181 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 15, 38, 47-51, 177 Burroughs, Peter 104, 105, 132, 138 Byron, George Gordon 55, 46, 55, 129, 130, 175, 177 Cambridge Chronicle and Journal 45, 60 Carlyle, Thomas 11, 39, 170 Charvat, William 183 Chorley, Henry F. 145 Clare, John 23, 26, 28, 177 Clark, Barbara 175, 190 Coleridge, Hartley 18 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 8, 14 Contemporary Review 65, 86-89, 91, 189 Cornhill Magazine 42, 46, 52, 56-64, 66, 67, 82, 87, 92 Cornwall, Barry (Bryan Waller Procter) 26,

228

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

40, 145 Court Journal and Fashionable Gazette 157 Courtney, Janet E. 30 Crimean War 103, 106, 120-35 Crosland, Mrs. Newton (Camilla Toulmin) 39 Cunningham, Allan 26 Dallas, E. S. 77-78, 81 Dalziel, Thomas 71, 73 Dalziel Brothers 73, 76 Davies, James A. 48, 49 Davis, Patricia Elizabeth 58, 59 De Vere, Aubrey 23, 37 Dickens, Charles 7, 38, 39, 53, 80, 142, 170, 181, 182, 184, 188 Dilke, Charles Wentworth 18 Disraeli, Benjamin 8, 38, 39, 133 Dodge, Mary Mapes 191-99 Eidson, John Olin 172, 174, 175, 180 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) 40, 181 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 170, 172, 174, 184 Englishman’s Magazine 16, 18, 27, 28, 46 Erickson, Lee 11, 12, 13 Evans, Frederick 53, 155 Every Saturday 65, 77, 80, 83, 181, 182, 184-86, 190, 201 Examiner, The 40, 49, 51, 52, 101, 103-22, 125-26 Falwell, Byron 120, 121 Fern, Fanny 187-88 Fields, James 77, 83, 153, 181-87 Fitzgerald, Edward 8, 18, 30, 34, 172 Ford, Daniel Sharp 198-99 Forster, John 3, 48-51, 104, 114, 126, 145 Fox Bourne, H. R. 151 Francis, Elizabeth A. 103 Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 9, 59, 101, 104, 108, 116-17, 128, 152-55 Fredeman, William E. 165 Froude, James Anthony 11, 128 Gatty, Alfred 53, 60, 67 Genette, Gérard 101 Gladstone, Mary 4, 94 Gladstone, William 4, 128-30, 132-33, 137,

146 Gohdes, Clarence 171 Goldsworthy, Vesna 129, 130 Good Words 2, 63, 65-79, 82, 87, 97-99, 183-86 Gordon, General George 3, 4, 162-63, 166 Gosse, Edmund 52, 100 Greenwood, Frederick 63 Grove, Archibald 99-100 Grove, George 67, 78-80, 128, 182, 186-87 Hagen, June Steffensen 16, 65, 91, 127 Hall, Anna Maria 52 Hall, S. C. 8, 23 Hallam, Arthur Henry 161 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 180, 182 Harper’s Weekly 185 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 170, 172, 175, 184 Hazlitt, William 17 Heath, Charles 11 Hemans, Felicia 7, 23, 25, 175, 176, 177, 180 Hill, Marylu 77 Hoagwood, Terence 178 Homans, Margaret 144, 153, 157, 161, 164 Hood, Thomas 17-19, 28 Horne, Richard Henry 142 Houghton, Walter E. 131 Household Narrative of Current Events 3 Household Words 53, 180 Howells, William Dean 183, 184 Howitt, Mary 26 Howitt, Richard 26 Hudson, Derek 116 Hunt, Leigh 12, 28, 47, 145, 181 Huxley, Thomas Henry 56, 128 Inboden, Robin 143, 156, 159, 160 Indian Mutiny of 1857 106, 120, 133 James, G. P. R. 37 James, Lawrence 106, 107 Jones, John Bush 48 Joseph, Gerhard 56 Jowett, Benjamin 53, 83 Keats, John 46, 51 King, Henry Samuel 62, 63, 90, 91 Knowles, James 86, 89, 91, 127, 160

Index Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen 76, 77 L. E. L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon) 7, 8, 9, 13, 177 Lamb, Charles 8, 9, 17, 27, 28 Landor, Walter Savage 37, 40, 113 Landseer, Edwin 7 Langland, Elizabeth 174 Lawrence, Sir Thomas 7, 19, 26 Lehmann-Haupt, Hellmut 171 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 170, 118, 170, 180, 188, 192, 198 Lootens, Tricia 101 Lounsbury, Thomas 20 Lowell, James Russell 172, 172, 182, 184 Lushington, Edmund 80, 81, 103 McGann, Jerome 2, 102, 122 McGill, Meredith L. 165, 170, 180 Macleod, Norman 66-67, 68, 70 MacKenzie, John 134 Macmillan, Alexander 56, 59, 60, 119, 142, 186 Macmillan’s Magazine 52, 56-65, 78-83, 88, 95, 100, 128, 134-37, 163-67, 182, 184, 186-87 Markley, A. A. 61, 62, 63, 82, 96 Marlburian 84-86 Marshall, George O. Jr. 36, 37, 131, 151, 164 Marshall, William 17-19, 22 Martin, Robert Bernard 24, 47, 52, 57, 65, 76, 79, 103, 137, 147 Merivale, Charles 16 Metaphysical Society, The 86-91, 128, 130, 160-61 Metcalf, Priscilla 90, 128, 133 Millais, John 53, 193, 197 Miller, J. Hillis 71 Milnes, Richard Monckton 8, 28, 30-36, 39, 40, 65, 146, 172, 172 Mitchell, Sally 68 Mitford, Mary Russell 9, 26, 28, 177 Montgomery, James 25, 26, 37, 177 Moore, Thomas 8, 37, 175, 177 Morgan, Charles 88 Morning Chronicle 101, 104, 108, 116, 117 Mott, Frank Luther 171, 175, 180, 187, 188, 199

229

Moxon, Edward 16, 18, 19, 27-28, 56, 103 Munich, Adrienne 163 Murtagh, Ann 99 Napier, Macvey 13, 37 New Review 99-100 New York Ledger 87, 187-90, 200 Nicolson, Harold 11, 12, 15 Nineteenth Century 86, 89-99, 103, 127, 128-33, 134-35, 160, 166-67 Norton, Caroline 26, 27, 28, 30, 177, 179 Once A Week 52-55, 65, 77-78, 81, 82 Osgood, James Ripley 87, 181, 185 Palgrave, Francis Turner 56, 73, 80 Pall Mall Gazette 103, 138-41 Paris, Michael 106, 108, 133, 136 Patmore, Coventry 56, 108, 116, 118, 181 Pavlock, Barbara R. 97 Payne, J. Bertrand 65-66, 81 Peel, Sir Robert 47, 120 People’s and Howitts’ Journal 3 Percival, Emily 175, 179 Pitt, Valerie 144, 146 Plunkett, John 144, 147, 148, 149 Poe, Edgar Allan 170, 175 Power, Marguerite 39, 40 Price, Kenneth M. 170, 187 Prince of Wales 148, 155, 157, 158, 166, 197 Princess Royal 148 Pringle, Thomas 25, 26-29 Punch 47-50, 53, 127, 132 Pykett, Lyn 1 Quarterly Review 46, 58, 180 Queen 2, 71 Reynolds, John Hamilton 18 Reynolds, Margaret 24 Ricks, Christopher 20, 22, 30, 38, 63, 67, 68, 82, 86, 92, 126, 136, 152 Rogers, Samuel 145, 177 Ruskin, John 8, 26, 39, 128 Russell, William Howard 123-25 St. James’s Gazette 4, 100 St. Nicholas 191-98

230

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals

Schults, Raymond L. 138 Scott, Patrick 92 Scott, Sir Walter 8, 18, 145, 177 Scribner’s Magazine 100, 182, 191 Sedgwick, Ellery 182 Shannon, Edgar F., Jr. 78, 80, 126, 186, 187 Shelley, Mary 8, 30, 34 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 46, 178 Shires, Linda M. 24 Sigourney, Lydia 175, 176, 187 Sinfield, Alan 151 Smith, George 46, 59, 60-66 Smith, Horace 37 Smith, Susan Belasco 170, 187 Southey, Robert 8, 10, 27, 28, 35, 37, 145, 177 Southworth, E.D.E.N. 170, 188, 190 Spedding, James 104, 109, 114 Spurgeon, Dickie A. 95 Standage, Tom 123 Stead, William Thomas 138-41 Stothard, Thomas 7 Strahan, Alexander 63, 65-67, 68, 76, 78, 81, 86-89 Stuart-Wortley, Lady Emmeline 8, 30, 31, 32 Swinburne, Algernon 65, 94-96 Tebbel, John 191 Tennyson, Alfred “Achilles Over the Trench” 92 “After-Thought” (“Literary Squabbles”) 49 “Alcaics” 84 “Anacreontics” 17, 22 “Britons Guard Your Own” 104, 108, 114 “Carmen Saeculare. An Ode in Honour of the Jubilee of Queen Victoria” 163-67 “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava” 95, 134-36 “The Charge of the Light Brigade” 5, 103, 121-27, 134, 136, 192 “Child-Songs” 193-99 “Colours of the Double Stars” 63-64 “Come not, when I am dead” 40, 179 “Compromise” 4 “De Profundis” 93-94

“The Death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale” 166-67 “Dedicatory Poem to the Princess Alice” 160-61 “The Defence of Lucknow” 133-35, 160-61 “Despair” 94-96 “Early Spring” 199-200 “1865-1866” 65, 67, 73-77, 184, 186 “England and America in 1782” 187-90 Enoch Arden 55, 65, 67, 181 “Epitaph on General Gordon” 3, 162 “The Fleet (On Its Reported Insufficiency)” 138-42 “For the Penny-Wise” 104, 116 “A Fragment” (“Where is the giant of the sun”) 15, 22 “‘Frater Ave Atque Vale’” 96-97 “Freedom” 137 “The Gardener’s Daughter” 180 “God Save the Queen” 148-51 “The Grandmother’s Apology” 53-55, 59 “Hands All Round” 104, 110-114 “Helen’s Tower” 97-99 “Hendecasyllabics” 62 “Here often, when a child, I lay reclined” 38 The Holy Grail and Other Poems 87 Idylls of the King 55, 56, 57, 77, 153 In Memoriam 5, 39, 53, 59, 93, 180 “In Memoriam. William George Ward” 3 “The Last Tournament” 87-89, 189 “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” 4 Locksley Hall Sixty Years After 4, 164 “The Lotus-Eaters” 30 “Lucretius” 65, 67, 78-83, 184-87 Maud 15, 36, 37, 58, 102, 126, 127 “The Miller’s Daughter” 177, 178 “Milton. Alcaics” 62 “Montenegro” 128-30, 133 “No More” 15, 17, 20, 22, 27 “The New Timon, and the Poets” 47-51 “Ode Sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition” 151-55 “The Palace of Art” 30, 63 “The Penny-Wise” 104, 108, 116, 117-18

Index Poems, Chiefly Lyrical 19, 46 Poems of 1842 37 Prefatory Sonnet to the Nineteenth Century 127 The Princess 5, 20, 37, 47, 49, 59, 192, 193 “The Revenge: A Ballad of the Fleet” 130-33 “Riflemen Form!” 118-19 “St. Agnes” 16, 30-32, 35 “Sea Dreams: An Idyll” 57-59 Sonnet (“Check every outflash, every ruder sally”) 16, 28 Sonnet (“Me my own fate to lasting sorrow doometh”) 15, 25 Sonnet (“O that ‘twere possible”) 13 Sonnet (“There are three things which fill my heart with sighs”) 16, 24 “Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad in Blank Verse” 62 “The Spiteful Letter” 63, 67, 78 “Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper” 104, 114, 117 “Thine early rising well repaid thee” 86 “Third of February, 1852” 104, 110-14 “The Throstle” 99-100 “Timbuctoo” 45, 60 “Tithonus” 60-62, 67 “To—, After Reading a Life and Letters” 51 “To H.R.H. Princess Beatrice” 161-62 “To sleep! to sleep! The long bright day is done” 99-100 “To Victor Hugo” 92 “To Virgil” 96 “To W. C. Macready” 3 “Translations of Homer. Hexameters and Pentameters” 62 “Ulysses” 56, 61 “Vastness” 137, 138 “The Victim” 2, 63-71, 84, 183 “Wages” 65, 67, 78-80, 184 “A Welcome” 158 “A Welcome to Alexandra” 155 “What time I wasted youthful hours” 40 Tennyson, Charles 12, 38, 65, 87, 137, 145, 155, 172, 199

231

Tennyson, Edward 23 Tennyson, Emily 52, 53, 56, 59, 60, 61, 66, 81, 84, 87, 103, 104, 108, 114, 120, 133, 135, 136, 145, 151, 155, 156, 159 Tennyson, Frederick 23, 27, 36 Tennyson, Hallam 76, 78, 84, 92, 93, 94, 100, 137, 139, 141, 142, 192, 193 Thackeray, William Makepeace 8, 9, 39, 40, 46, 59-63, 170, 181 Thompson, Ralph 174, 175, 179 Thwaite, Ann 135 Ticknor, George 10 Ticknor, William 172, 173 Ticknor and Fields 80, 87, 173, 174, 180-86 Times 3-5, 38, 49, 89, 103-105, 107-26, 132, 138-42, 149-53, 155-60, 162-63, 166 Trollope, Anthony 70 Tryon, W. S. 185 Tucker, Herbert F. 82, 93 Tupper, Martin Farquhar 109, 116, 118 Turner, J. M. W. 7 Turner, Mark W. 70 Victoria, Queen 5, 23, 37, 100, 116, 120, 143-167, 190, 197 Volunteer Rifle Movement 84, 105, 108-09, 113, 116, 118-20 Waddington, Patrick 129, 136, 158 Weld, C. R. 53, 104, 118, 119 Wheeler, Charles Stearns 172-73 Whittier, John Greenleaf 3, 4, 184, 192, 198 Wilson, Effingham 18 Winship, Michael 173, 174 Winslow, Ola Elizabeth 176 Woodham-Smith, Cecil 121, 122 Woods, Margaret L. 84 Wordsworth, William 8, 14, 18, 27, 28, 35, 37, 47, 57, 145, 177 Worth, George J. 59, 83, 163 Wright, Catharine Morris 192 Yonge, Charlotte 69 Youth’s Companion 198-200