Palgrave Literary Dictionaries General Editors: Brian G. Caraher and Estelle Sheehan
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Palgrave Literary Dictionaries General Editors: Brian G. Caraher and Estelle Sheehan
This series provides readers with concise and reliable guides to individual authors or groups of authors. Entries are arranged alphabetically and include topics and issues on literary works, fictional characters, place, historical, political and social contexts, intellectual influences, genre and critical traditions. Entries are cross-referenced as appropriate. Each Dictionary will include a practical introduction, bibliography of recommended further reading and a chronology of key events. Titles include: Malcolm Andrew THE PALGRAVE LITERARY DICTIONARY OF CHAUCER Martin Garrett THE PALGRAVE LITERARY DICTIONARY OF BYRON Valerie Purton and Norman Page THE PALGRAVE LITERARY DICTIONARY OF TENNYSON
Palgrave Literary Dictionaries Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–98779–7 (Hardback) 978–0–230–20035–7 (Paperback) (outside North America only)
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Founding Editor: Malcolm Andrew
You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
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POEMS BY TWO BROTHERS: The Poetry of George Clayton Tennyson and Charles Tennyson D’Eyncourt (with Christopher Sturman) A COLERIDGE CHRONOLOGY AN IRIS MURDOCH CHRONOLOGY CHARLES DICKENS: Dombey and Son (editor) GUSTAV DORÉ: Doré’s London (editor) ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON: Idylls of the King (editor)
Also by Norman Page A DICKENS COMPANION A. E. HOUSMAN: A Critical Biography AUDEN AND ISHERWOOD: The Berlin Years E. M. FORSTER THE LANGUAGE OF JANE AUSTEN TENNYSON: An Illustrated Life TENNYSON: Interviews and Recollections
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Also by Valerie Purton
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Palgrave Literary Dictionaries
Valerie Purton & Norman Page
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The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Tennyson
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© Valerie Purton & Norman Page 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of their work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–1–4039–4317–0 hardback ISBN: 1–4039–4317–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
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No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
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For Campbell, Dinah and Tom Purton and in memory of Jean Page
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Series Editors’ Foreword
ix
Preface
xi
Abbreviations
xiii
Chronology
xv
Entries A–Z
1–334
Bibliography
335
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Contents
vii
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The purpose of the Palgrave Literary Dictionaries is to provide the reader with immediate access to reliable information on some of the major authors of literature written in the English language. These books are intended for a readership including students, graduate students, teachers, scholars and advanced general readers. Each volume will be dedicated either to an individual author or to a group of authors. It will offer a concise reference guide, consisting mainly of entries presented under headwords arranged in alphabetical order. The entries will vary in length from about 10 to about 3,000 words, depending on the significance of the particular topic. The topics will include the literary works, individuals, fictional characters, genres, traditions, events, places, institutions, editors and scholars most relevant to a full and sophisticated understanding and appreciation of the author (or authors) in question. The more substantial entries will include suggestions for further reading, full particulars of which will be supplied in a selective bibliography. Access to information will be facilitated by extensive cross-referencing. We trust that volumes in this series will be judged by their effectiveness in providing quick, clear and convenient access to reliable and scholarly information. BRIAN G. CARAHER AND E STELLE SHEEHAN Series Editors Queen’s University Belfast
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Series Editors’ Foreword
ix
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Tennyson is now generally recognized as the most important English poet of the Victorian age and a key figure in the cultural and intellectual life of the period. His exceptionally long life covers most of the nineteenth century, and his unusually long career most of Victoria’s reign (beginning, indeed, before she came to the throne). His work touches on key issues in science, religion, philosophy, politics and other aspects of the age. Cast in a great variety of forms and genres, it also contains echoes of earlier texts ranging from the classics and the Bible to the English Romantics. His circle of friendships was remarkably wide and included many of the leading figures of his time. For all these reasons this volume will be valuable to students and readers of Tennyson as a user-friendly work of reference that provides succinct and accurate information on Tennyson’s poetry, its period and contexts. The volume’s primary emphasis is naturally on Tennyson’s works. These entries are, however, augmented by a wide range of entries on Tennyson’s life and friendships, on places of significance in his life and especially in relation to his poetry, on the connections between Tennyson’s writings and those of other authors, on the historical, social, cultural and ideological context of his work, and on his contemporary reception and reputation and subsequent critical fortunes. A brief chronology relates the poet and his works to the times in which he lived. Within each entry, asterisks are used to indicate the existence of another potentially relevant entry on a related topic. In the interests of readability these have been kept to a minimum, and they have not been used unnecessarily to indicate the existence of entries on obvious topics (Arthur Hallam, In Memoriam etc.). Abbreviations too have been kept to a minimum. Each entry begins with a short definition, followed by an account which varies in length from a few dozen to three thousand words. The length of any particular entry is intended to be appropriate to the relative significance and complexity of the topic. Wherever possible, we have also given direct quotations from the people involved, so that readers may be able to hear more clearly these voices from the past. The longer entries and those on the more significant topics end with suggestions for further reading. These refer to the brief selective bibliography with which this book concludes. Information on periodicals mentioned in the text may be found under ‘Periodicals’.
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Preface
xi
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Abbreviations
1830 1833 1842 1855 Idylls 1864 1869 1880 1885 1886 1889 1892
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical Poems (1833) Poems (1842) Maud and Other Poems The Idylls of the King Enoch Arden, etc. The Holy Grail and Other Poems (dated 1870) Ballads and Other Poems Tiresias and Other Poems Locksley Hall Sixty Years After Etc. Demeter and Other Poems The Death of Oenone, Akbar’s Dream, and Other Poems
Secondary sources Allingham
William Allingham, William Allingham’s Diary, introd. Geoffrey Grigson (Fontwell, Sussex: Centaur Press, 1967). Charles Tennyson Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1949). Chronology F. B. Pinion, A Tennyson Chronology (London: Macmillan, now Palgrave Macmillan, 1990). Jump John D. Jump (ed.), Tennyson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967). Letters Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Letters of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon Jr., 3 vols, 1821–50, 1851–70, 1871–92 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982–90). Martin Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980; rpt London: Faber, 1983). Memoir Hallam Tennyson, Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1897). Page Norman Page (ed.), Tennyson: Interviews and Recollections (London: Macmillan, 1983; 2nd edn, Basingstoke: Macmillan, now Palgrave Macmillan, 1985). Ricks Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, Green, 1969).
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Works of Tennyson
xiii
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xiv Abbreviations
Tennysons
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Thwaite
Charles Tennyson and Hope Dyson, The Tennysons: Background to Genius (London: Macmillan, 1974). Ann Thwaite, Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).
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1809
1816 1820 1823–24 1827 1829
1830
1831 1832
1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1840
1842 1843
(6 August) Birth of Alfred Tennyson at Somersby, Lincolnshire, fourth son of Rev. Dr George Clayton Tennyson, Rector of Somersby, and his wife Elizabeth (née Fytche). Alfred and his elder brothers attend Louth Grammar School. Charles and Alfred continue their education at home under their father’s supervision. Verse-drama, ‘The Devil and the Lady’ written by 14-year-old Alfred. In 1824 Dr Tennyson suffers a breakdown. (April) Poems by Two Brothers published (by Charles and Alfred). (November) Charles and Alfred go up to Trinity College, Cambridge. Alfred meets Arthur Hallam, joins the Apostles, select undergraduate debating society, and wins the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for his poem ‘Timbuctoo’. Poems, Chiefly Lyrical published. Hallam and Tennyson travel in the Spanish Pyrenees, visiting the Valley of Cauteretz. Charles Lyell publishes Vol. I of The Principles of Geology. (March) George Clayton Tennyson dies. Tennyson leaves Cambridge without taking a degree. Great Reform Bill. Social unrest. Hallam and Tennyson travel in Germany. (December) Poems (1833) published. (September) Hallam dies in Vienna. Tennyson in love with Rosa Baring. (July) George Tennyson, Tennyson’s grandfather, dies, leaving money to all his grandchildren. (May) Tennyson’s brother Charles marries Emily Sellwood’s sister Louisa. Coronation of Queen Victoria. The Tennysons leave Lincolnshire and settle in High Beech, Epping, in Essex. Tennyson unofficially engaged to Emily Sellwood. Engagement broken off. The Tennysons move to Tunbridge Wells in Kent. Tennyson suffers from recurrent nervous illness. Poems 1842 published in 2 vols. Tennyson loses most of his grandfather’s inheritance when Matthew Allen’s business venture collapses. Tennyson takes the ‘water cure’ with Dr Gully in Malvern.
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Chronology
xv
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xvi Chronology
Vestiges of Creation published anonymously. Tennyson is granted a Civil List pension of £200 a year. Tennyson and Edward Moxon travel in Switzerland. The Princess is published. Tennyson travels in Ireland and Cornwall. ‘Year of Revolutions’ in Europe. 1849 Tennyson resumes courtship of Emily Sellwood. 1850 (May) In Memoriam appears. (June) Tennyson marries Emily Sellwood. (November) Tennyson succeeds Wordsworth as Poet Laureate. 1851 (April) The Tennysons’ first child, a boy, is still-born. They travel in Italy. The Great Exhibition opens. 1852 (August) Hallam Tennyson born. Louis Napoleon becomes Napoleon III and threatens Britain. 1853 The Tennysons move to Farringford in Freshwater, Isle of Wight. 1853–56 Crimean War between Russia and an alliance of Britain and France. 1854 (March) Lionel Tennyson born. 1855 Maud and Other Poems published. 1857 Indian Mutiny breaks out. 1859 Four Idylls of the King appear. Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. 1861 Tennyson visits Cornwall. The Tennysons travel to the Pyrenees, visiting the Valley of Cauteretz. (December) Prince Albert dies. 1862 Tennyson’s first audience with Queen Victoria. 1864 Enoch Arden and Other Poems is published. 1867 Second Reform Act extends the franchise. 1868 Aldworth, the Tennysons’ second home, is built on Surrey/Sussex border. 1869 Tennyson becomes a founder-member of the Metaphysical Society. The Holy Grail and Other Poems is published. 1872 ‘Gareth and Lynette’ and ‘The Last Tournament’ appear. 1875 Tennyson’s first play, Queen Mary, is published. 1876 Queen Mary is produced. Harold is published. Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India. 1879 Charles Tennyson dies. The Falcon is produced. 1880 Tennyson travels in Italy. Ballads and Other Poems appears. 1881 Henry Irving produces and appears with Ellen Terry in The Cup. 1883 Tennyson accepts a barony. (The offer of a baronetcy had been refused in 1865, 1873, 1874 and 1880.)
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1844 1845 1846 1847 1848
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1884 Becket is published. Gladstone pushes through the Third Reform Act. 1885 Tiresias and Other Poems published. General Gordon killed at Khartoum. 1887 Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. 1886 Death of Lionel Tennyson. ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ appears. 1889 Demeter and Other Poems published. 1892 (6 October) Death of Tennyson. The Death of Oenone, Akbar’s Dream and Other Poems published posthumously.
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Chronology xvii
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Acton, John, 1st Baron (1834–1902) Historian; liberal Roman Catholic. Lord Acton, a close friend of *Gladstone, Whig MP and author of Lectures on Modern History (published posthumously in 1906), was noted for his great erudition. The Tennysons visited Lord Acton and his family in Tegernsee (on their way through Germany to Venice) in 1882: Acton disliked Tennyson’s ‘want of reality ... the indefiniteness of his knowledge’, but was won over by his charm. However, he wrote to Mary *Gladstone in 1884 of Tennyson’s ‘profound animosity against Gladstone’ which made him very uneasy about Tennyson’s peerage.
Albert, Prince Consort (1819–61) Husband of Queen *Victoria and great admirer of Tennyson’s poetry. After his marriage to Queen Victoria in 1840, Prince Albert worked indefatigably in the interests of British trade and culture, setting up the Great Exhibition in 1851 and taking a keen and educated interest in the arts. Though they met twice at most, he and Tennyson established a friendship based upon mutual admiration, and Albert’s patronage helped the poet enormously as he struggled to establish himself. Albert particularly admired In Memoriam and was instrumental in Tennyson being offered the *Poet Laureateship in 1850. In 1856, he visited *Farringford unannounced, as the Tennysons were unpacking, and thereafter encouraged their contact with the Queen. Tennyson dedicated the Idylls to his memory in 1862, presenting the Prince as his Arthurian ideal. *Swinburne cynically called the poems the ‘Morte d’Albert, or Idylls of the Prince Consort’ (Martin, 500). Albert’s early death ironically helped establish
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A
1
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Albert, Prince Consort
In Memoriam as the major Victorian poem, since the Queen declared it to be, next to the Bible, her greatest comfort.
Built 1868: Tennyson’s house on the Sussex Downs. Needing a second home more accessible than *Farringford, the Tennysons bought land on Blackdown, on the northern edge of Sussex, two miles from Haslemere in Surrey. James *Knowles built the house, for no fee, in an eclectic mixture of styles ironically not unlike Charles *Tennyson d’Eyncourt’s *Bayons Manor. It was named after the Berkshire village where Emily *Tennyson’s father, Henry Sellwood, had grown up; the foundation stone was laid on Shakespeare’s birthday, 23 April, and Sir John *Simeon gave a brief address. George *Eliot and George Henry Lewes lived nearby and became friends. Tennyson, unlike Emily, enjoyed the opportunity afforded for frequent visits to London. The family would move to *Aldworth for the summer to escape the tourists who haunted the *Isle of Wight, but would return to Farringford for Christmas. It was at Aldworth that Tennyson died on 6 October 1892.
Alice, Princess (1843–78) Third child and second daughter of Queen *Victoria and Prince *Albert. Princess Alice married Frederick of Hesse in 1862 and later founded the Women’s Union for Nursing Sick and Wounded in War. When Tennyson dedicated the Idylls to Prince Albert in 1862 he sent a copy of the dedication to Princess Alice for the Queen’s approval. Princess Alice wrote in reply that the poem had soothed her mother’s ‘aching, bleeding heart’. She herself died young, after catching diphtheria from her sick child; Tennyson dedicated Ballads and other Poems (1880) to her, in the poem ‘Dead Princess’. This mentions the ‘fatal kiss’ which she gave her child, and the fact that, though she was Grand Duchess of Hesse-Darmstadt, she had asked for an English flag to be draped on her coffin.
Allen, Matthew (c.1792–1845)
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Aldworth
Director of mental asylum; his bankruptcy caused the loss of Tennyson’s inheritance. Allen, a neighbour of the Tennysons at *High Beech, was advanced in his treatment of the insane, but unsound in his financial dealings. In his 1837 book, Essay on the Classification of the Insane, he advocated minimum restraint
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on the mentally ill. His most famous patient was John Clare who, despite the homesickness which made him eventually run away, always remained loyal to Allen himself. Tennyson’s brother *Septimus became a voluntary patient of Allen’s in the late 1830s and Tennyson’s visits there, where he was himself treated by Allen, taught him a great deal about madness, material he was later to use in *Maud. In 1840 Allen persuaded Tennyson to invest most of his inheritance, in return for a life insurance policy, in a wood-carving scheme; in 1843 this collapsed, with the loss of all of Tennyson’s investment as well as money invested by three of his sisters. Edmund *Lushington, Edward *FitzGerald and Charles *Tennyson d’Eyncourt all supported the family financially at this time. What saved Tennyson, not only from financial ruin but also from severe depression, was Allen’s sudden death from a heart attack early in 1845: Tennyson then gained back the money he had insured on Allen’s life, though this was by no means the whole of his original inheritance.
Allingham, William (1824–89) Poet, diarist and man of letters; friend of Tennyson. The Irish poet’s love of Tennyson’s verse moved him to write his own bestknown poem, ‘The Fairies’, in 1849. Tennyson admired his Poems (1850). Allingham visited Tennyson in 1851 and in 1863 moved to work in the Customs Office in Lymington, Hampshire, to be nearer his hero on the *Isle of Wight. His Diaries give detailed information about Tennyson’s life and opinions over four decades. He was completely subservient to his friend, coping cheerfully with being teased about his Irish accent and periodically snubbed – though Tennyson did write to *Gladstone about increasing Allingham’s Civil List pension, claiming that ‘the man has the true spirit of song in him’. In 1874 he married the illustrator, Helen Paterson. His last words, ‘I am seeing things that you know nothing of’, impressed Tennyson as encouraging his own belief in the immortality of the soul. See also: Ireland.
Amadis de Gaula (Amadis of Gaul) Sixteenth-century chivalric romance which influenced Tennyson’s early poems. The poem, a sixteenth-century Spanish or Portuguese romance, was translated in an abridged version by Robert Southey in 1803 and was in *Dr Tennyson’s library. It describes a lost prince, Amadis, cast away in a box on a river and reared in Scotland. He becomes the flower of chivalry, loving
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Amadis de Gaula (Amadis of Gaul) 3
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4
Amadis de Gaula (Amadis of Gaul)
and eventually, after many exploits, winning Oriana, daughter of the King of Great Britain. The poem provided Tennyson with the name ‘Oriana’ for his 1830 ballad, as well as reinforcing the chivalric themes he developed in the early poems and in the *Idylls of the King.
Ralph Waldo Emerson spread Tennyson’s reputation in the USA through his championing of the *Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), *Poems (1833) and *Poems (1842). Charles Stearns Wheeler of Harvard eventually persuaded Tennyson to allow the publication of the 1842 volume by William Ticknor and Company, which paid him £150 for the copyright – impressing the poet greatly, as there was not at that stage a copyright agreement between the two countries. His transatlantic reputation grew. In September 1871 the editor of the New York Ledger offered Tennyson £1,000 for any poem, even as short as 12 lines. He responded with ‘England and America in 1782’, written in the 1830s, in which he admiringly links the latter with the English radical tradition represented by John Hampden and suggests an early version of the ‘Special Relationship’. It was published in the New York Ledger on 6 January 1872. In ‘Hands All Round’, written in response to unrest in France and the rise of Louis Napoleon, he refers to America as ‘Gigantic daughter of the West’, and prophetically asks her to join the mother country in the fight against tyranny. Unlike Charles *Dickens, he could not be persuaded to visit the New World. In the 1870s he was offered, but refused, a 50-lecture tour at $1,000 a lecture. American admirers wrote frequently, including the young writer Bayard *Taylor, who on a visit to *Farringford almost cured Tennyson of his prejudice against the supposedly casual manners of Americans. American Men of Letters, from Longfellow to *Whitman, beat a path to his door. Nathaniel Hawthorne stalked him through the National Gallery. After a rush of proAmerican feeling, Tennyson’s prejudices returned when an apparent breach of privacy by Taylor resulted in an article about him in the American press. Tennyson’s popularity continued in the USA throughout his lifetime and well into the twentieth century: successful plays were made of *‘Dora’ and *‘Enoch Arden’ and in 1891 *The Foresters played to full houses in New York, before coming to London.
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America
Anacreon Sixth century BC Greek lyric poet; influence on Tennyson. The Odes of Anacreon were translated by Abraham Cowley in the seventeenth century and by Thomas Moore in 1800. Cowley’s poems were at *Somersby and Tennyson used this translation of Ode xxxiv in his poem, ‘The Grasshopper’
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‘Ancient Sage, The’
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Analecta Graeca, Majora et Minora Translated as The Greek Anthology by R. G. Macgregor in 1864; collection of about six thousand short elegiac poems by over three hundred early Greek writers. Originally by Meleager of Gadara in c.60 BC, this collection was printed as a whole for the first time in 1813 and was a popular schoolbook for Tennyson’s generation. It introduced him to *Sappho, *Theocritus and others, who became his favourites and strongly influenced his own work. Several copies of the anthology, including one from Arthur Hallam, were in Tennyson’s library, now in the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln. The importance of the Anthology in schools during the early decades of the nineteenth century is evidence of the centrality of Hellenism in the culture of the period.
‘Ancient Sage, The’ Published 1885 in *Tiresias And Other Poems. Benjamin *Jowett suggested the subject. Tennyson commented, ‘What the Ancient Sage says is not the philosophy of the Chinese philosopher Laot-ze, but it was written after reading his life and maxims’ (Ricks, 1349–50). The dialogue between the youthful pessimism of the follower and the serene optimism of the Ancient Sage can be seen as the older Tennyson seeking to enlighten his younger self, a reworking of *‘The Two Voices’ in which the second voice has gained immeasurably in maturity and wisdom. This is evident in the disparity between the light, song-like stanza form of the follower and the weighty blank verse of the Sage. The rationale for belief is very much Tennyson’s own: ‘Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son’ but ‘Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt/And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!’ There is also a moving elegy to *‘The Passion of the Past’ in which are faint echoes of such earlier poems as *‘Tears, Idle Tears’ and *‘Mariana’, and an account of the trance-like state which Tennyson had experienced from boyhood. This he linked to his poetic imagination, in which ‘the mortal limit of the Self was loosed,/And past into the Nameless’. The poem is an optimistic statement of faith, but perhaps rather effortfully serene.
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(Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, 1830). It refers to ‘Tithon’, the legend that Tennyson later developed into *‘Tithonus’. In October 1830 Tennyson published in The Gem a poem called ‘Anacreontics’, beginning ‘With roses muskybreathed’ and written in the seven-syllable lines used by the Greek poet. The imagery in this poem looks forward to *‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1833).
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Apostles, The
Exclusive *Cambridge University intellectual society of which Tennyson and Arthur Hallam were members. Officially the Cambridge Conversazione Society, ‘The Apostles’ was founded in 1820 and gained its nickname because its membership was originally restricted, like Jesus’ Apostles, to 12. ‘Apostles’ was, however, also a derogatory term in Cambridge, referring to the 12 lowest-achieving students on the Bachelor of Arts list. Frederick Denison *Maurice and John *Sterling raised the tone and the profile of the society in the academic generation before Tennyson. Their aim was to discuss subjects beyond the fixed boundaries of the academic disciplines. This made it the ideal forum for ideas in an age when knowledge was changing shape so rapidly. The Apostles espoused the Romanticism of *Coleridge and opposed the rationalism of the followers of Jeremy Bentham. They read Kant and *Shelley and, though Tennyson himself disclaimed any aptitude for philosophy (‘I have but a gleam of Kant and have hardly turned a page of Hegel’ [Benson (1905): 6]), their ideas fitted well with his own mysticism and with his deep and life-long belief in a reality beyond the material world. Many of the group had non-conformist backgrounds but religious doubt was common. Tennyson’s *‘Supposed Confessions of a Secondrate Sensitive Mind not in unity with itself’ is very much a product of his Apostles background. Though it began in St John’s College, the society was by Tennyson’s time almost exclusively based in Trinity College. There was huge prestige in being chosen: a new member had to be known and approved by all the other members. Eminent Trinity men who were not admitted included Tennyson’s friend William *Brookfield, Edward *FitzGerald (whom Tennyson only came to know after leaving Cambridge) and William Makepeace *Thackeray. The bonds made within the membership were enduring. Tennyson’s regard for Maurice is shown in his appointing him godfather to his son, *Hallam, in 1852. Arthur Hallam had been elected in May 1828 and, after Tennyson’s success in the Chancellor’s Poetry competition in 1829 with *‘Timbuctoo’, he was instrumental in having him proposed by Robert John *Tennant and elected on 31 October 1829. Close friendships within the society were quite usual and derived from early nineteenth-century Romantic idealism rather than necessarily from homoeroticism. Richard Monckton *Milnes was elected alongside Tennyson and for a time canvassed Hallam to be his closest friend. John Mitchell *Kemble and William Bodham Donne, Robert *Monteith and Francis *Garden, G. S. *Venables and Henry *Lushington, as well as Arthur Hallam and Alfred Tennyson, developed in each other’s company a lofty ideal of what friendship could be. Loyalties were expected to be for life and certainly continued after marriage. It is in the light of these accepted friendships that Robert Monteith wrote to Tennyson
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after Hallam’s death: ‘I assure you all with whom I have spoken have been full of sympathy with you and all wish, as I do, for stricter friendship with you, if it might be (which is all but impossible) that together we might help to fill up the gap’. (See In Memoriam Lyric vi ‘One writes, that “Other friends remain” ... ’). Henry Alford, Richard Chenevix *Trench, Stephen Spring Rice, Charles *Merivale, Edmund *Lushington, Douglas Denon Heath, Charles Buller, John *Heath, Joseph Williams *Blakesley, William Hepworth Thompson and James *Spedding were the other Apostles, the last-named Tennyson’s closest friend after Hallam, being regarded as the father of them all and nicknamed ‘The Pope’. The Apostles met secretly on Saturday evenings in each other’s rooms. Members would take turns to give a paper on a subject of their own choosing. Examples included ‘the Origin of Evil’, ‘the Derivation of Moral Sentiments’, ‘Have Shelley’s poems an immoral tendency?’ or Hallam’s ‘Whether the existence of an intelligent first cause is deducible from the phenomena of the Universe’. When Tennyson’s turn came he chose to speak on ‘Ghosts’, but panicked, burned his notes and in embarrassment felt obliged to resign from the society. A similar pattern is discernible in his membership of other societies, in particular the *Metaphysical Society, and seems to be attributable primarily to his shyness in large groups. He continued to keep in such close touch with the Apostles, however, that the resignation made little difference, and in 1855 he was invited to become an honorary member of the society. The Apostles in later life formed a ‘Cambridge network’, most of them gaining positions in the Church of England or in the academic world: Blakesley was Dean of Lincoln, Chenevix Trench Archbishop of Dublin while W. H. Thompson became Master of Trinity, and Monckton Milnes was created Lord Houghton. They gave Tennyson the love and loyalty he needed at the beginning of his career and largely continued to offer him friendship for the rest of his life. Further reading: Allen (1978); Brookfield (1906).
Arabian Nights, The Properly known as The Thousand and One Nights. Collection of ninth-century stories written in Arabic which captured the European imagination and which influenced Tennyson greatly. The tales have Indian, Persian and Arabic sources. Their framework is the succession of stories told by the wily princess Scheherazade to her husband, the king, beginning on their wedding night: her aim is to save her life, since her husband has killed every one of his former wives on the morning after their marriage.
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Tennyson, like *Dickens, adored these stories as a child. The 1805 edition of the translation by Antoine Galland (1646–1715) was in *Dr Tennyson’s library. ‘Recollections of the Arabian Nights’ is one of the strongest poems in the 1830 volume and is based on two of the stories, ‘Noureddin and the Fair Persian’ and the ‘History of Aboulhassen’. The former deals with a woman ill-used by her lover and links, according to John Killham, with *‘A Dream of Fair Women’ and *The Princess. Exotic Eastern imagery from this early reading frequently surfaces in Tennyson’s later poems, notably when the hero of *Maud imagines the English Hall garden to be a Persian garden, with Maud’s brother as the cruel sultan. But I am not invited, But, with the Sultan’s pardon, I am as well delighted, For I know her own rose garden And mean to linger in it. (824–8) *‘Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, Now the White’ has all the sensuous languor of Persian love poetry and is based on the Persian verse form, the ghazal.
Architecture Tennyson despised his Uncle *Charles’s grandiose *Bayons Manor, the ‘gewgaw castle’ in *Maud. However, he himself preferred Gothic to Classical – in *Somersby, *Farringford and *Aldworth. ‘It is like blank verse, it will suit the humblest cottage and the grandest cathedral. It has more mystery than the classic’ (Tennyson, Hallam [1911]: 218). He had Aldworth built, by James *Knowles in 1868, in French Gothic style, very reminiscent of Bayons Manor, though on a smaller scale, with parapets, corbels, heraldic creatures, emblazoned shields adorning the windows – and the arms of the Tennyson d’Eyncourts on the chimney-pieces.
Argyll, George Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke of (1823–1900) One of Tennyson’s closest correspondents and friends. Tennyson met the Duke after becoming Poet Laureate. He and Emily visited the Argylls in Inverary Castle in 1857, and the Argylls visited *Farringford for several years from 1859. Argyll proposed Tennyson for membership of ‘The Club’ in London in 1865, joined him in the *Metaphysical Society and in 1884 introduced him when he took his seat in the House of Lords. Despite his initial
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‘Armageddon’ Juvenilia: the basis for *‘Timbuctoo’. A fragment of 500 lines of Miltonic blank verse, probably written before Tennyson was 15, describing the night before the final battle between the forces of Good and Evil. The setting is like an apocalyptic landscape by John Martin (1789–1854), the English Romantic painter: the speaker looks down from a mountain height over a great plain. The glaring sunset, the frightened beasts and the presence of flitting dark forms suggest the imminence of a great event. A trumpet blast announces the arrival of a seraph who summons the speaker, ‘Open thine eyes and see!’ The speaker then feels himself to be ‘A scintillation of the Eternal Mind’ and is filled with a powerful sense of his own identity (the opposite of the boyhood trances Tennyson later spoke of, in which he would lapse out of identity): ‘Here in that hour I could have fallen down/Before my own strong soul and worshipped it.’ The self-confidence is typical of the very early poetry (cf. *‘The Devil and the Lady’); self-doubt and melancholia take over in the adolescent verse of *Poems by Two Brothers (1827). Two versions of ‘Armageddon’ exist: the text printed by Sir Charles Tennyson in 1931 contains fewer than fifty lines later incorporated into ‘Timbuctoo’; however, Trinity Notebook 18 (see Manuscripts) contains a version including 120 lines which later became the whole central vision of ‘Timbuctoo’.
Arnold, Matthew (1822–88) Poet and critic; author of Culture and Anarchy (1869). As a young man Arnold admired *‘Timbuctoo’, but his mature opinion of Tennyson’s poetry is summed up in his response to the Idylls: ‘Tennyson, with all his temperament and artistic skill, is deficient in intellectual power’ (Martin, 423). He thought Tennyson’s Wordsworthian *‘Dora’ far inferior to Wordsworth’s own pastorals and in his 1853 Preface attacked the violent, intense verse of the Spasmodic school of poets (P. J. Bailey, J. W. Marston, Sidney Dobell and Alexander Smith) in terms which suggest that he is implicitly attacking
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pride in the company of a duke, Tennyson famously once apologized to him for not changing for dinner by saying, ‘I can’t dress for you, for I never dress for any one, and if I made an exception and dressed for a duke, my butler would set me down as a snob’ (Page, 162). In 1881 Tennyson wrote ‘To the Duke of Argyll’ when his friend, the ‘Patriot Statesman’ resigned as Privy Seal because, like the poet, he objected to *Gladstone’s Irish Land Law Bill.This gave more rights to tenants and would, according to Argyll, interfere with the rights of landlords.
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Tennyson for preferring the unbalanced individual psyche to the permanence of the Classical values he himself espoused. This, of course, is to ignore the centrality of Classical Greece in Tennyson’s imagination, for example, in the balance and poise of *‘Ulysses’ and *‘Tithonus’. Tennyson in turn admired ‘The Forsaken Merman’ but not Arnold’s prose works. In 1865 Arnold believed Tennyson had stolen the subject of ‘Lucretius’ from him. The two met occasionally in London literary circles, but seem to have been mutually suspicious, Tennyson commenting (on the prospect of meeting Arnold at a dinner party) that he ‘didn’t much like dining with Gods!’ (Allingham, 288).
Art and artists Arthur Hallam and Tennyson frequented the new National Gallery in Trafalgar Square during their years at Cambridge. Tennyson’s particular favourite was The Raising of Lazarus by Sebastiano del Piombo – a huge work which meant even more to him after Hallam’s death. They had visited Samuel *Rogers’s art collection just before Hallam left London, in 1833, where Hallam had particularly noted a superb *Titian, probably Noli Me Tangere, and a Raphael Madonna. They both loved Titian, and one of Hallam’s last letters to Tennyson, from Vienna, is full of admiration for the paintings he had found there – ‘Oh, Alfred, such Titians! By Heaven, that man could paint! I wish you could see his Danae. Do you write just such a perfect Danae! And there are two fine rooms of Rubens, but I know you are exclusive and care little for Rubens, in which you are wrong: although no doubt Titian’s imagination and style are more analogous to your own ... ’ (Hallam [1981]: 785). Hallam had noticed how often Tennyson chose a visual or directly pictorial language to convey his abstract insights. In his 1831 Englishman’s Magazine review he wrote of Tennyson’s ‘picturesque delineation of objects ... fused ... in a medium of strong emotion’. Shortly after Hallam’s death, Tennyson depicted an artist hero in *‘The Gardener’s Daughter’ which perfectly suited his pictorial imagination, creating an image which is also part of a narrative. *‘Dora’ in the *English Idyls also suggests a perfect genre-painting. Early reviewers likened his work to the portraits of Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830) and to the landscapes of Richard Wilson (1714–82) and Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88). Later in his career, in *‘Enoch Arden’, he entered into the mood of the genre-painter, choosing scenes with a visual impact, and telescoping stretches of narrative with less visual power. Later in life, Tennyson took his sons regularly to the National Gallery to visit his favourite paintings. Art remained a vital part of his imaginative life. Victorian painters, especially the PreRaphaelites, found many subjects in Tennyson’s poetry. *‘The Lady of Shalott’ was a popular image and was transformed from demure maiden into a wild femme fatale in a late, 1890s, version of Holman *Hunt’s original 1860s
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sketch. However, Edward *Moxon’s Illustrated Edition of Tennyson’s Poems (1857), with illustrations by *Millais, *Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Arthur Hughes, was not a commercial success. Tennyson almost always objected to illustrations of his works, but his own eye for the telling, often domestic detail rendered the poems the ideal subject for Victorian genre-painting.
Arthurian literature The myths of King Arthur became popular during the nineteenth century, helped by Tennyson’s *Idylls. When the *‘Morte d’Arthur’ was published in 1842 the story was largely unfamiliar to readers. Tennyson had included a reference to Arthur’s death in a stanza of *‘The Palace of Art’ (1833) which he later abandoned as too obscure. Arthur Hallam had encouraged him to retain the verse, preferably without a footnote, but Tennyson decided against it. However, by 1873 when the first ten Idylls were published together, Arthurian literature had become enormously popular. Tennyson’s earliest sources were Sir Thomas *Malory and the twelfthcentury clerics and writers, Layamon and Geoffrey of Monmouth. Layamon gives an account of Arthur’s birth in his long narrative poem, Brut (c.1190) while Geoffrey of Monmouth covers similar material in his Historia Regum Britannicae (c.1136). In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century there had been some antiquarian interest in Arthur. Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799) had a 25-page appendix on Arthurian literature; George Ellis’s Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances (1805) contained Arthurian ballads. Two epics existed, by Richard Hole (1789) and Henry Hart Milman (1839); there was an unfinished Spenserian poem by Reginald Heber (1812: published 1830); and there were travesties by John Hookham Frere (1817–18) and John Moultrie (1824). Sir Walter *Scott was steeped in Arthurian legend, as evidenced in Sir Tristram (1802), The Bridal of Triermain (1813) and Marmion (1808). The last-named book Tennyson read as a child. It was probably here that he first encountered Malory, whose Tale of King Arthur had been republished, in two cheap reprints of a seventeenth-century text, in 1816, to be followed by a more accurate reprint of Caxton’s original edition in 1817. Tennyson owned both 1816 editions. During the gestation of the poem (after the ‘Morte d’Arthur’ of 1842) there were the Thornton Romances (1844), and new editions of the alliterative ‘Morte Arthure’ and Layamon’s Brut (1847), and the *Mabinogion translated by Lady Charlotte Guest from 1838 to 1848. In 1848 Tennyson discussed his plans with another Arthurian, R. S. *Hawker, in *Cornwall, and in that year too the first book of Edward *Bulwer-Lytton’s 12-book King Arthur was published.
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Further reading: Ormond (1989).
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By 1853 Charlotte M. Yonge was freely discussing Malory in The Heir of Redclyffe. In the same year William Morris and Edward *Burne-Jones met at Oxford and set up an ‘Order of Sir Galahad’ based on their reading of Tennyson’s 1842 poem. As late as 1878, undergraduates used Arthurian nicknames (A. E. Housman signed himself ‘Tristram’ in a university periodical). At least until the outbreak of the First World War, the age of chivalry represented by the Arthurian legends kept its hold on the British literary imagination. The definitive essay on this subject is Tillotson (1965).
Ashburton family Ashburton, Alexander Baring, 1st Lord (1774–1848) Ashburton, William Bingham Baring (1799–1864) The Ashburtons were relations of Rosa *Baring; their son, William Baring, was a friend of Tennyson and, like him, a member of the Sterling Club. It was at Lord Ashburton’s London house that Thomas *Carlyle introduced Tennyson to Sir John *Simeon. When William became second Lord Ashburton on his father’s death, he offered the tenancy of a house he was buying in Croydon to the Tennysons when they were homeless soon after their marriage, but was refused. William’s wife, Harriet, Lady Ashburton, was a great friend of Carlyle, who spent long evenings with her at Bath House, the Ashburtons’ home in London. Unlike her quiet husband, she was a great socializer. During the Farringford years, Tennyson was invited to Lady Ashburton’s gatherings at the Grange near Alresford: he refused all her Christmas invitations, but at New Year 1856 he did leave *Emily and the boys to join the Ashburton New Year Party, where he was surrounded by literary lions, read *Maud to the company, and enjoyed himself so much that he stayed for over a week. The New Year Party looked set to become a tradition, but the following year Lady Ashburton died and thereafter Tennyson stayed at home in *Farringford.
Astronomy One of Tennyson’s ‘terrible Muses’ which enthralled him all his life. Tennyson’s fascination with the stars and planets began in childhood: the words ‘Far, far away’ moved him deeply as a small child: he was preoccupied from early childhood to old age with the notion of never-ending space. His earliest poetry includes the lines: ‘The rays of many a rolling central star/ Aye flashing earthwards, have not reached us yet’ (Memoir, i.20). He knew Sir William Herschel’s theories; references to nebulae and the speed of light are in *‘The Devil and the Lady’ (written when he was 14). William *Whewell, under whom he studied at Cambridge, had written a Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840) which included a particularly full account of astronomy. That
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it haunted Tennyson’s imagination is evident from the recurrence of such imagery as that in *‘The Two Voices’ (1833) which considers the possibility of extra-terrestrial life:
In In Memoriam (1850) Tennyson indicates an awareness of the debate over the nebular hypothesis: ‘The stars’, she whispers, ‘blindly run; A web is wov’n across the sky; From out waste places comes a cry, And murmurs from the dying sun.’ (Lyric iii) Scientists in the 1830s held, as part of the ‘nebula hypothesis’, that the earth had broken off from the sun and that the cooling down experienced on this small planet was also happening, necessarily more slowly, within the sun itself. The stars run ‘blindly’ because they are operating according to an inexorable ‘celestial mechanics’. In 1843 Tennyson read Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830) by Sir William Herschel’s son, Sir John *Herschel, and later became this eminent astronomer’s friend, following closely his development of a catalogue of double stars. In *The Princess (1847) astronomy is a central part of the students’ curriculum and Lady Psyche’s cosmic lecture begins with a vision of creation straight out of Robert *Chambers’s Vestiges of Creation (1844): ‘ “This world was once a fluid haze of light ... ’ (The Princess, 101). There are astronomical references in the *‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ (1852) and in the ‘monstrous eft’ passage in *Maud as well as the less well-known section, Part I, 18: ‘Sad astrology ... /You tyrants in your iron skies’, in which Tennyson, like his age, makes little distinction between astronomy and astrology. In 1864 Tennyson became a friend of the astronomer J. Norman *Lockyer, who believed in the gradual decline of the earth into uninhabitability, and who helped Tennyson to see super-novae through his own six-inch telescope. When Tennyson visited Paris, encouraged by Lockyer, he eagerly went to see the eminent astronomer, Urbane Leverrier (1811–77), and the Observatory. In the 1870s he returned to astronomical ideas and imagery, in *‘Lucretius’ and in *‘The Higher Pantheism’, but in 1886 they emerge much more pessimistically, in *‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’. At *Farringford he would take favoured visitors such as Sir John *Simeon up to his study to look through his two-inch telescope at the stars. In *‘Vastness’ (1885) he returns to those earliest celestial
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‘Think you this mould of hopes and fears Could find no statelier than his peers In yonder hundred million spheres?’ (28–30)
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Aubade ‘Dawn song’ Most early literatures contain examples of this song of sadness as lovers part at daybreak. The earliest European example is the Provençal troubadour’s ‘alba’ dating back to the late twelfth century. Tennyson would have known particularly Troilus’ speech in Book 3 of *Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and *Shakespeare’s dialogue between Romeo and Juliet as dawn breaks following their wedding night. Tennyson uses the convention with a difference in *‘Tithonus’, where the Dawn, the goddess Aurora, is awaited by her human lover, ageing but immortal. In place of regret at parting comes trepidation before the arrival of an eternal loveliness which Tithonus can no longer bear. The originality of the approach was surely influential on twentieth-century poets who continued to develop a sense of the darker side of the dawn song, notably William Empson in ‘Aubade’ (1940) and Philip Larkin in his late poem, ‘Aubade’ (1977).
‘Audley Court’ 1842; one of the English Idyls. Written in 1838 at Torquay, the setting based on Abbey Park, a local country house, ‘Audley Court’ is modelled on the classical idyll and in particular *Theocritus’ 7th Idyll. Tennyson creates in blank verse a bucolic picture of contentment and friendship in a nineteenth-century setting; this is a poem of mood rather than narrative, though the context, a picnic in a grand park, and the interspersed songs, anticipate *The Princess (1847). Alongside this poem in the late 1830s, Tennyson produced *‘Walking to the Mail’, *‘Edwin Morris’ and the framing poem for *‘The Epic’: like the last-named, ‘Audley Court’ is self-reflexive. The speaker in the poem creates his own song from ‘a volume, all of songs ... I set the words, and added names I knew’. In exactly the same way, Tennyson, in writing the poem, self-consciously modernizes the literary past. The theme of fulfilled male friendship also links it closely to ‘The Epic’ (even to the repetition of the name ‘Francis’) and might suggest that the Classical model allows (as so often with Tennyson) for the transmuting and objectifying of painful personal material after Arthur Hallam’s death.
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images which have continued to enthral and terrify him: ‘Many a planet by many a sun may roll with the dust of a vanished race’. All the troubles of the world are ‘but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million suns’. In ‘Parnassus’ (1889) he labels what he most fears: ‘These are Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses!’ In both poems, he sets against these images what has always protected him from the full impact of his scientific imagination – a tenaciously held belief in human immortality.
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English novelist, favourite of Tennyson. Tennyson was a devoted admirer of Jane Austen’s novels. As early as 1833 he was reading Emma, perhaps at the recommendation of Arthur *Hallam, another avid novel-reader. Hallam *Tennyson reported him as praising her understanding of the smallness of life and for a Shakespearean realism in her character-drawing. Persuasion and Mansfield Park he declared to be his favourite Austen works. In 1867 he asked William *Allingham to join him on a trip from *Farringford to Lyme Regis, saying: ‘I have wanted to see the Cobb ever since I read Persuasion.’ (The Cobb at Lyme Regis is the scene of a dramatic incident in that novel.) Allingham reported, ‘T. is a great novel-reader, very fond of Scott, but perhaps Miss Austen is his prime favourite’ (Allingham, 156). When fulminating late in life against the horrors of biography, Tennyson ‘thanked God Almighty that he knew nothing of Jane Austen, and that there were no letters preserved either of Shakespeare’s or Jane Austen’s, that they had not been ripped open like pigs’ (Martin, 552). His bracketing of the two together shows clearly his sense of Austen’s canonical status and reveals his own deep respect for the novel as a form.
Austin, Alfred (1835–1913) Poet; became Poet Laureate 1896. Austin published 20 volumes of verses and 3 novels. Prompted by Tennyson’s ex-publisher, Bertrand Payne, he attacked Tennyson’s poetry anonymously in Temple Bar (May 1869), as third-rate: ‘our age ... the age of Tennyson? ... preposterous!’ (Jump, 294–311). He wrote a partial retraction in 1885, ‘A Vindication of Tennyson’ (Austin 1910), withdrawing his accusation that Tennyson as a poet was too ‘feminine’. He acquired, from *Virgil’s tomb, the laurel wreath placed on Tennyson’s brow at his funeral; Austin did gain the Laureateship in 1896, as he had hoped, but he was much ridiculed and his poetry is now little remembered.
‘Aylmer’s Field’
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Austen, Jane (1775–1817)
Dated 1864; narrative poem of love blighted by wealth. The artist Thomas *Woolner supplied the story (a Suffolk tale in which the influence of George *Crabbe is evident) of a rich man whose decision to break his daughter’s attachment to a rector’s son leads to the deaths of both young lovers and eventually to the deaths of the grieving parents. This piling of
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death upon death smacks of Victorian melodrama though the influence of the Victorian novel is also evident: less obviously, the shape of the narrative closely resembles Greek tragedy: Sophocles was a great favourite of Tennyson. In Sophocles’ Antigone, proud Creon is reduced, by a similar edict, to similar desolation. This uncomfortable blending of genres into a contemporary blank verse narrative proved troublesome to Tennyson; the theme itself, touching on his own passion for Rosa *Baring, always proved difficult to confront, though he succeeds in *‘Edwin Morris’ by using a wry humour completely absent here. Sir Charles Tennyson suggested that ‘the young Averill’ (presumably the poem’s hero, Leolin) exhibits ‘undoubted glimpses’ of Arthur Hallam. The overarching theme, as in the *Idylls and *‘Tithonus’, is the inevitable collapse of civilization: in the end, the rich Aylmer estate is destroyed so that once again ‘all is open field’ (853).
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Bag Enderby Lincolnshire village, part of Tennyson’s father’s living. Tennyson’s father, the Reverend Dr George Clayton *Tennyson, was inducted into the living of Bag Enderby and *Somersby in 1806, shortly after his marriage to Elizabeth *Fytche in August 1805. The livings together brought in £180 a year and, added to his father’s allowance, gave George Tennyson a good start to married life, although he was a very reluctant clergyman. The Tennyson children regularly attended at both churches. Bag Enderby church is reputedly where Tennyson met Rosa *Baring and, by extension, where the narrator of *Maud met the eponymous heroine: She came to the village church, And sat by a pillar alone; An angel watching an urn Wept over her, carved in stone. (ll. 301–4)
Bagehot, Walter (1826–77) Economist and man of letters: early critic of Tennyson. Bagehot edited the National Review and later The Economist and was the author of an important political work, The English Constitution. In 1869 he became, with Tennyson, one of the founder members of the *Metaphysical Society and gave an early paper, ‘On the Emotion of Conviction’ at a meeting attended by Tennyson. In ‘Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning, or Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry’ (National Review 1864), he had established the notion that Tennyson’s poetry was highly decorative but somehow inferior to the purity of *Wordsworth’s. Taking *‘Enoch Arden’ as an example, he describes
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Bagehot, Walter
the protagonist as ‘a dirty sailor’ and argues that Tennyson has to resort to ‘ornateness’ to make him acceptable and that, if the story had been told in Wordsworth’s ‘pure and simple ... unadorned and classical style’, it would have been less than three pages long. Ornate art, he says, aims to create ‘a mist of beauty’. The reputation of Victorian poetry was done a disservice by this influential review. On the reception of the *Idylls of the King in the 1870s, however, Bagehot perceptively observed that the general public was fonder of the work than ‘Mr Tennyson’s straiter disciples’ (Jump, 282–93).
‘Balin and Balan’ Published 1885: the last published of the Idylls of the King. Although it had been written in 1872–74, Tennyson did not feel ready to publish this Idyll until 1885, when he included it in his final volume of poems, *Tiresias and Other Poems. After 1872, the public thought the Idylls complete but Tennyson wanted to make up 12 (the epic number, as in *Virgil’s Aenead) and to move *‘Merlin and Vivien’ to later in the story. He uses *‘Balin and Balan’ both to introduce Vivien and to prefigure in the brothers’ final fight the climactic battle in *‘The Passing of Arthur’. Taking little from the second book of *Malory’s Morte d’Arthur apart from the final duel, the Idyll shows the evil effects of Guinevere and Lancelot’s adultery on the choleric Balin, who flees into the woods, where he unknowingly kills and is killed by his loving brother Balan. ‘Loyal natures are wrought to anger and madness against the world,’ said Tennyson. This was also his theme in *‘Pelleas and Ettarre’. King Pellam (‘asceticism and superstition’, says Hallam *Tennyson) and the blackfaced Sir Garlon suggest different perversions of Christianity and the knightly ideal. The tender, deeply private ending of the brothers’ dying reconciliation has lent itself to psychoanalytical readings of doppelgangers, particularly since Tennyson changes Malory’s brothers into twins. The brothers are also perhaps surrogates for the central lovers, whose spiritual relationship is about to become destructively physical. Futher reading: Purton (2007).
Ballads and Other Poems Published 1880. Among the 22 poems in the volume occur domestic tales (‘The First Quarrel’, *‘In the Children’s Hospital’, ‘The Sisters’ [They have left the doors ajar]) and laureate poems (‘To the Princess Frederica on her Marriage’, ‘Dedicatory Poem to Princess Alice’); there are also historical subjects (‘Columbus’ and ‘Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham’), celebrations of military valour (‘The Defence of Lucknow’, *‘The Revenge’), dialect ballads (‘The Northern Cobbler’, ‘The Village Wife’) and 4 of Tennyson’s very rare
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sonnets. *‘Rizpah’, an account of mother love, made a great impact, pleasing even *Swinburne, as did ‘The Revenge’. *‘De Profundis’ was begun at the birth of Hallam *Tennyson in 1852 (‘Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep’) but was now developed, like *‘The Higher Pantheism’ and *‘The Ancient Sage’, to expound Tennyson’s argument against materialism and determinism. It was of the second section of this poem that Tennyson wrote: ‘At times I have possessed the power of making my individuality as it were dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility and the loss of personality, if so it were, seemingly no alteration but the only true life’ (Memoir, i.320). ‘Prefatory Sonnet to the “Nineteenth Century” ’, *‘To the Rev. W.H. Brookfield’, *‘Montenegro’ and ‘To Victor Hugo’ were 4 sonnets all published in the early editions of the Nineteenth Century, the last-named being a rare favourable reference to *France, occasioned by Lionel *Tennyson’s visit to the great French writer in 1877. Two poems show Tennyson’ s interest in the construction of nationhood: *‘The Voyage of Maeldune’ was based on an Irish legend in which Maeldune and his men, having sworn to avenge the murder of Maeldune’s father, pursue the murderer from island to island, finding excess, rather as in *‘The Lotos-Eaters’, in each one: see also Ireland. *‘The Battle of Brunanburh’ is an attempt to emulate Old English alliterative verse, and gives an account of the battle between the English and an alliance of Scots and Danes, which appeared in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 937 and which was a formative battle in the creation of English identity. The poetic translation, based on a literal translation by Hallam Tennyson, was highly praised by Edward *FitzGerald. Another translation, of *Homer’s Iliad xviii, entitled ‘Achilles over the Trench’, renders Homer into blank verse, this being, as Tennyson had argued in the Cornhill Magazine in December 1863, the best metrical form for the purpose. ‘To Dante’ was a tribute commissioned by the people of Florence in 1865, to mark 600 years after Dante’s birth (see also ‘To Virgil’). ‘Sir John Franklin’ was one of Tennyson’s most successful epitaphs, designed for the cenotaph in Westminster Abbey in honour of the explorer, an uncle of Emily *Tennyson. The collection was more enthusiastically received than any of the four preceding volumes. Edward *FitzGerald praised the volume obliquely by saying that it was the best since Poems 1842, though still inferior to that earlier poetry.
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Baring family
Baring family Sir Francis Baring (1740–1810) established the financial house of Baring Brothers, became a director of the East India Company and an MP, and was
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Baring family
said to be worth several million pounds at his death. His fourth son, William, was drowned in a boating accident off Lulworth Cove in Dorset. Four years later, in 1832, William’s widow married another wealthy man, Admiral Arthur Eden, who was to become Assistant Comptroller of the Exchequer, and moved with him to Harrington Hall, two miles from *Somersby, an attractive Queen Anne manor-house which he had leased from the *Cracroft family. With them came Mrs Eden’s three unmarried daughters, Fanny, Georgina and CharlotteRose (*Rosa).
Baring, Rosa (later Shafto) (c.1813–98) Early love of Tennyson and possible inspiration behind *Maud. Rosa Baring, young, beautiful and rich, came to live at Harrington Hall, two miles from *Somersby, in 1832. The Baring and Tennyson families met at local events such as the Stuff Ball in *Louth, Rosa attracting much general admiration for her buxom beauty. For her birthday, 23 September 1834, Tennyson wrote ‘Thy rosy lips are soft and sweet’ – conventional and in line with his other poems of the time, such as ‘Lilian’ or ‘Adeline’, in praise of female beauty. It seems likely that he gradually became infatuated with her. Many of the poems contain rose imagery and some led to more important later poems. ‘Early Verses of Compliment to Miss Rosa Baring’ is a preparation for ‘Go not, happy day’ in Maud (I.xvii) – verses which had been intended for *The Princess. *‘The Gardener’s Daughter’ (1833) with its heroine who is ‘a Rose/in roses’, contains much emotionally autobiographical material. Twelve poems seem to have been written directly to or about Rosa between 1834 and 1836. The last shows Tennyson’s bitter disillusionment with the emptiness behind her beauty: ‘How thought you that this thing could captivate?’ Other similar 1830s poems are *‘Lady Clara Vere de Vere’, ‘Lady Clare’ and *‘Dora’. Rosa married Robert Shafto, a wealthy Yorkshire landowner, in 1838 but the emotional situation she came to represent for Tennyson continued to re-emerge in his poetry: *‘Edwin Morris’, *‘Locksley Hall’ and *‘Aylmer’s Field’, all recreate the situation of a sincere but poor lover whose passion for a rich girl is spurned, either by the girl herself or by her family. The debate over the provenance of *‘Roses on the Terrace’, whether a poem to Emily or to Rosa, continues, but is unresolvable: Tennyson himself would have said that it gives him no credit for imagination. It is a serene poem about memory, about the elision of past and present into a timeless recollection of young love. In old age, Rosa recalled Tennyson as ‘so quaint and so chivalrous, a real knight among men’ (Thwaite, 635) but gave no indication of any deep feeling for him.
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Tennyson refused a baronetcy four times before, in 1883, accepting a hereditary peerage, a barony. In the nineteenth-century English Honours system a Baronet gained the title of ‘Sir’ and held that title for life; however, a full Barony admitted the owner of the title to the hereditary peerage; he became a Lord or Baron and passed this title down to his descendants. Tennyson was first offered a baronetcy in 1865 and rejected it. He had made his preference for his ‘simple name’ clear many times in discussions with Thomas *Carlyle and others. After his visit to the *Queen in 1873, he was again offered an honour by the Prime Minister, William *Gladstone, and this time replied cautiously that ‘if it were hereditary it would be prized by him for his boys’. However, only a baronetcy was offered and this he again turned down, Tennyson writing that he and *Emily would prefer to remain ‘plain Mr and Mrs’, though they would like a title to be passed on instead to their son *Hallam. In 1874 Disraeli, having succeeded Gladstone, made a third offer, at the same time as he made an offer to Thomas *Carlyle. Both men refused him. When Gladstone became Prime Minister again in 1880, he made a fourth offer and was again refused. At this stage it seems possible that Tennyson was holding out for a peerage which would then descend to Hallam. Certainly, on the voyage of the Pembroke Castle in 1883 it was Tennyson who introduced the topic, implying that he would now accept an offer. Gladstone’s colleague Sir Arthur Gordon suggested to the Prime Minister that the offer might now be of a peerage and, after conducting enquiries into Tennyson’s financial position, Gladstone made the offer. Tennyson at this point demurred until Gladstone agreed to remit the fees involved in becoming a peer, and then finally accepted. Having had his initial requests for the title of ‘Lord d’Eyncourt’ or ‘Baron Tennyson d’Eyncourt’ rejected (it turned out that his uncle’s claim to the name could not be upheld by the College of Arms), he finally settled on ‘Baron Tennyson of *Aldworth and *Freshwater’. He continued to maintain that he would ‘regret my simple name all my life’ – but the evidence suggests that he rejoiced in the title as completely vindicating his father’s memory and reclaiming the ‘disinheritance’ he deeply believed his family had suffered under Old George *Tennyson so long ago.
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Barony
‘Battle of Brunanburh’ Published 1880; based on Old English poem of the making of England. This poem is included in the 1880 volume under ‘Translations’. Tennyson says that he based it closely on Hallam Tennyson’s prose translation published
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‘Battle of Brunanburh’
Baudelaire, Charles (1821–67) French symbolist poet, author of Les Fleurs du mal (1857). Baudelaire’s apparent love of ugliness and squalor (‘nostalgie de la boue’) disguises the way the poem shows through exquisite imagery and poetic craftsmanship the hidden beauty of ‘correspondences’ in the urban degradation of Parisian life. It also conveys with uncompromising vividness the poet’s sense of evil and sin. It shocked its original French audience and was generally regarded with suspicion and distaste by English readers too. Tennyson’s openmindedness and acuteness are evident in his remark, after reading the poems, that he found Baudelaire to be ‘a kind of moralist’. Unlike many of his English contemporaries, he was not put off by the dark material, though he admitted that the subject matter taken by itself was shocking. He hated what he took to be the decadence of French art and thought as exemplified in the writings of Emile *Zola and, in England, in the sensuality of A. C. *Swinburne – but in the case of the two poets he retained a clear admiration for what they were able to achieve as poets.
Bayons Home of the Tennyson d’Eyncourts; Victorian Gothic castle in *Lincolnshire. Beacons, a thatched seventeenth-century house on the hillside above *Tealby, was expanded by Tennyson’s grandfather, *George, in the 1790s and known as Tealby Lodge. Tennyson’s uncle *Charles, assuming that ‘Beacons’ derived from the French ‘Bayeux’, later changed its name to Bayons, as part of his project to link the family to the aristocratic d’Eyncourts. He undertook an extensive building programme, developing Bayons from a manor-house into a castle, complete with turrets, battlements, portcullis and barbican. Armour was bought from the Eglinton Tournament (held in 1839 in an attempt to revive medieval jousting), and the whole was motivated, not only by a desire for personal self-aggrandisement but also by the nineteenthcentury passion for medievalism, a desire to establish continuity with an idealized heroic past.
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in the Contemporary Review (November 1876). It appealed to him as he was writing *Harold (1876), one of his series of plays on the making of England, because it is an account of the English King, Athelstan, defeating the invading forces of Scots and Danes as part of the consolidation of his West-Saxon kingdom. The poem is written in unrhymed dactyls and trochees and shows Tennyson late in his career still experimenting with verse forms.
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Bayons represented to Tennyson everything he hated about the Tennyson d’Eyncourts: it becomes in his poems a symbol of pretentiousness and injustice. In *Maud, it provides the scene for the narrator’s jealousy, a ‘gewgaw castle’ owned by the ‘lordling’ whom he eventually kills. However, his own passion for chivalry and idealized medievalism was not unlike his uncle’s, as evinced in the conception of the *Idylls of the King; the house he built at *Aldworth in 1868 ironically revives the spirit of Bayons, though architecturally it is less successful in blending with the landscape. Bayons Manor was demolished in the 1960s, but many photographs survive. See also: Brancepeth Castle. Further reading: Leach and Pacey (1992).
Beaumont, Francis (1584–1616) and John Fletcher (1579–1625) Elizabethan dramatists; early influences on Tennyson. Copies of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays were in *Dr Tennyson’s library. *‘The Devil and the Lady’, written in Tennyson’s early teens, is strongly influenced by a range of Elizabeth and Jacobean comedies, including those by Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe (the comic scenes in Dr Faustus) and Beaumont and Fletcher. Tennyson held *Shakespeare to be ‘head and shoulders’ above the other Elizabethan dramatists; however, ‘The Devil and the Lady’ shows how the spirit of this generation of writers in general possessed his imagination. It is the language and poetry, rather than specifically dramatic moments, which seem to have influenced the 14-year-old Tennyson.
Becket Tennyson’s third and most successful play (published 1884). Begun in 1876, this is the last of the trilogy on ‘the Making of England’ and deals with the rivalry between King Henry II and his archbishop, which led to Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral. Though he had reverted to the chronicle style of *Queen Mary (1875), Tennyson did, as in *Harold (1876), attempt to appeal to popular taste by adding a love triangle: the play is based on a love-song he had written, but not published, to be sung by Henry II and his beloved, Rosamund de Clifford (‘Fair Rosamund’). The battle between Crown and Church for the governance of England is Tennyson’s real concern. His historical research was so extensive that the original play was longer than the uncut Queen Mary. Sir Henry *Irving called it a ‘remarkable play’ but argued that it would be too expensive to produce. Reluctantly, Tennyson shelved it until 1884; he still had to wait until the summer of 1892, before Irving announced that the time was right to start production. Bram Stoker
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Becket
(1847–1912), Irving’s secretary and touring manager (later to become the author of Dracula, 1897) came to *Aldworth in the late summer to discuss Irving’s plans. Sadly, Tennyson did not live to see Becket’s success in 1893, with the most celebrated actress of her day, Ellen *Terry (1847–1928), as Rosamund and Irving himself in the title role. The play has been consistently praised for the picture it gives of the times. T. S. Eliot, greatly influenced by Tennyson particularly in The Waste Land, produced his twentieth-century version of the story in Murder in the Cathedral (1935).
Bible Tennyson as a parson’s son was immersed in biblical language and imagery from childhood. While he was at *Cambridge, he became aware of a new tendency to treat this book like any other, analysing and testing it as a historical document, in line with the thinking of the new German theologians. (George *Eliot was to translate Das Leben Jesu, by D. F. Strauss, in 1846 as part of this trend.) This was one of the themes of debates among the *Apostles but it was not an issue which Tennyson himself found threatening. He approached the Bible rather as great poetry than as doctrine. The Song of Solomon was a favourite: Tennyson read extracts with Arthur Hallam at Cambridge and when he heard of the death in Paris of his beloved Henry *Lushington in 1855, he turned again to the Song of Solomon to read to *Emily that night. In the early years of their marriage, the Bible was one of many books he read aloud to her in the evenings; she records in her Journal readings from Kings, Chronicles, Zechariah and Ezra. When J. F. D. *Maurice came to stay at *Farringford, his reading of the Bible moved Emily and Alfred, the latter saying it was the most holy and earnest he had ever heard. Benjamin *Jowett was a great friend and in 1860 worked on the dangerously sceptical Essays and Reviews at Farringford – a volume which caused great controversy and encouraged that non-dogmatic interpretation of the Scriptures which was Tennyson’s own (though Emily’s faith was considerably more conventional). After his sons were finally sent away to school in 1864, Tennyson occupied himself with learning Hebrew. His purpose was to be able to read his favourite Old Testament books – Job, Isaiah and the Song of Songs – in the original and perhaps to use them in his poetry – though he succeeded in neither aim. It is noteworthy that the book he held on his deathbed in 1892 was not the Bible but the works of *Shakespeare.
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Biography Early adulatory biographies gave way to more recent darker studies. Tennyson’s intense desire for privacy and his dislike of publicity, even in the face of his great fame during the last four decades of his lifetime, were manifested
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in many ways: during a visit the historian William *Lecky, for example, noted the short-sighted poet’s alarm when he mistook a flock of sheep for a group of tourists. More significantly, these feelings led him to deplore the contemporary flourishing of literary biography and more especially to fear and detest the idea of himself becoming the posthumous object of biographical attention. His friend Henry *Taylor reported him as declaring on one occasion ‘that he thanked God Almighty with his whole heart and soul that he knew nothing of Jane *Austen, and that there were no letters preserved either of *Shakespeare’s or of Jane Austen’s, that they had not been ripped open like pigs’ (Martin, 552). (He was wrong about Austen’s letters, of course.) On another occasion he remarked more succinctly but in a similar spirit, ‘After death the ghouls!’ (Ricks, 1230). Tennyson never wrote an autobiography (though of course much of his poetry is deeply personal and sometimes directly autobiographical in nature), but his choice of his son *Hallam as authorized biographer was among other things a strategy to pre-empt the unwelcome intrusions of other biographers. Hallam had in effect served as his father’s secretary and literary factotum during the poet’s latter years, and his loyalty, devotion and tact were not in question. His Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son was first published in two volumes in 1897. This makes extensive use of letters, personal recollections by those who knew the poet, and other documents, all held together by a historical narrative of the subject’s life and career, so that the effect is polyphonic and to some extent impersonal. At the same time the work is unashamedly adulatory: Tennyson is consistently presented as a hero. Nowhere is this more evident than in the extraordinary account of his deathbed, rich in pictorial and symbolic detail, no reader of which can be in the slightest doubt that, at least as far as the biographer is concerned, Tennyson was not only a great poet but also a man of outstanding charisma. Given its authorship and the circumstances and period of its composition, it is not surprising that Hallam’s Life handles discreetly, or simply leaves untouched, matters explored much more thoroughly by later biographers – for example, the strain of mental instability in the Tennyson family and the poet’s own periods of deep depression (the strongest phrase used by Hallam in this connection is ‘terribly despondent’). Appearing in 1897, the year of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, Hallam’s biography is in many respects a fair specimen of the Victorian life-and-letters tradition, which *Carlyle memorably characterized as mealy mouthed. A generation later the reaction, in the years immediately following the Great War, was led by biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), who created a new style of biography, economical, candid and iconoclastic. Harold Nicolson’s Tennyson: Aspects of His Life, Character and Poetry (1923) is a product of this reaction. Less voluminous and also less pious and reverential than Hallam’s offering on the
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shrine of filial duty, it nevertheless pays Tennyson the compliment of taking him seriously in a world that had changed profoundly in the thirty years since his death, and in a period when his reputation, along with that of many other great Victorian writers, had suffered a decline. Nicolson’s book remains readable and suggestive even today. A generation later still, the poet’s grandson Sir Charles Tennyson published a detailed and informative life, Alfred Tennyson (1949). Two significant reappraisals were published in 1962: Valerie Pitt’s Tennyson Laureate and Joanna Richardson’s The Pre-Eminent Victorian. Of various biographies published in the later years of the twentieth century, the most important is Robert Bernard Martin’s substantial Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (1980). Comprehensive, factually reliable and critically judicious, this is an outstanding example of modern scholarly biography. It must be said, though, that Martin’s sympathies are more keenly aroused by the young Tennyson, neurotic and unstable, than by the Laureate laden with honours, and in the second half of the book there is a noticeable tendency to scepticism and even subversion. This can be plainly seen in, for instance, Martin’s account of the poet’s death, which in its antiheroic bias and anticlimactic treatment forms an instructive contrast with the version of the same event by Hallam Tennyson referred to above. Among more recent biographies are Peter Levi’s Tennyson (1993), Norman Page’s Tennyson: An Illustrated Life (1992), Leonée Ormond’s Alfred Tennyson: A Literary Life (1993), and Michael Thorn’s Tennyson (1993). Andrew Wheatcroft’s The Tennyson Album (1980) is a fascinating collection of contemporary photographs. Norman Page’s Tennyson: Interviews and Recollections (1983) contains selections from contemporary accounts of the poet. Ann Thwaite’s Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife (1996) gives many insights into Tennyson himself, from an instructively new angle. A final instance will suggest how biographers of different periods have accorded very different treatment to the same episode in Tennyson’s life. The modern view of Tennyson’s relationship with Arthur Hallam is that it was crucial and far-reaching in its effect on his life and poetry, and more specifically that their 1830 journey to Spain was one of the major phases of that relationship. Hallam Tennyson, however, attaches little importance to it, concluding blandly that ‘My father returned from the expedition in improved health’ (1897: i.54). Sir Charles Tennyson’s account marks a considerable advance in perceptiveness and candour: the time in Spain ‘proved one of the formative experiences of his life’ (1949: 95). But Martin goes much further: for him it was ‘the trip that meant most to Tennyson all his life’, and one of which ‘echoes reverberate through his work’ (1980: 120). Tennysonian biography has travelled a very long way in less than a hundred years.
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Bourne, Mary (née Tennyson)
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Author and statesman. A lawyer, Birrell also published literary reviews in Obiter Dicta (1884); later he became a Liberal MP and Chief Secretary for Ireland. He married Lionel *Tennyson’s widow Eleanor (née Locker-Lampson) in 1888, two years after Lionel’s death. The Tennysons were deeply disapproving. Alfred asked him, ‘Why do you want to force an entrance into my family?’ However, it proved a very successful marriage and the three Tennyson grandsons remained deeply attached both to their stepfather and to their paternal grandparents. Birrell succeeded in being a loving husband, a devoted father to his own children with Eleanor, and an equally devoted stepfather to Lionel’s children, Alfred, Charles and Michael.
Blakesley, Joseph Williams (1808–85) Cambridge *Apostle; later Dean of Lincoln. J. W. Blakesley was a student of Corpus Christi College and, as a member of the Apostles, was given the task of organizing their contribution to the university students’ defence of *Cambridge during the social unrest at the time of the Reform Bill. James *Spedding called him ‘Captain of the Corps of Poets and Metaphysicians’ (Martin, 125). Blakesley described Tennyson at Cambridge as ‘one of the mighty of the earth’, and urged him to settle to writing out his poetry rather than ‘flirting ... with all the Muses’ (Memoir, i.93, manuscript materials). He was one of the circle of friends visited by Tennyson during his lonely bachelor years at the end of the 1830s and commented on the poet’s heavy smoking of the cheapest tobacco, in a black clay pipe, for hours on end. Tennyson addressed a poem to him (‘To – [Clear-headed friend]’) and his letters, to Tennyson and to the other Apostles, show warmth and humour. On meeting Tennyson’s sister Mary he described her to R. C. *Trench as ‘a finelooking person, although of wild-looking countenance, something like what Alfred would be if he were a woman and washed’ (Martin, 176). Blakesley moved to Trinity College as a Fellow and tutor, before accepting a college living as an Anglican clergyman. He rose to high office in the Church, becoming a Canon of St Paul’s and Dean of Lincoln.
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Birrell, Augustine (1850–1933)
Bourne, Mary (née Tennyson) (1777–1864) Tennyson’s Calvinist aunt, younger daughter of George *Tennyson. Mary was the third child and younger daughter of George and Mary Tennyson of Market Rasen, Lincolnshire. She was sent away as a child to be
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brought up by her maternal grandmother in Caistor and was always a difficult personality, inheriting her father’s tendency to acerbity and adding to it a fervent Calvinist belief in the doctrine of the elect. She saw her nieces and nephews as already condemned, and observed memorably to the 14-year-old Alfred on one occasion, ‘Alfred, Alfred, when I look at you, I think of the words of Holy Scripture, “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire” ’ (Charles Tennyson, 49). Mary was responsible for Tennyson’s lifelong hatred of extreme Puritanism and ascetic gloom, which he could convey vividly in such poems as *‘St. Simeon Stylites’. She did, however, try to do her duty by her family, attended her brother *George’s wedding in August 1805, to Elizabeth Fytche, and was the only member of his family to visit him on his deathbed and to attend his funeral in 1831. She married in her forties, John Bourne of Dalby, near *Somersby, and, though the marriage was childless, the two were comfortable in their shared faith. Alfred went on visiting her well into adult life and seems to have remained fond of her, commenting at her death that he regretted not having visited her in her old age.
Bousfield, Dr William (c.1770–1836) Horncastle doctor. William Bousfield was a well-respected member of the Horncastle community. His sisters ran a school there, which was attended by the young Emily *Sellwood. As George Clayton *Tennyson’s doctor and friend, Bousfield probably prescribed the laudanum to which he became addicted. His loyalty to his friend blinded him to the misery in the household: in 1827, Bousfield refused to believe Elizabeth *Tennyson’s account of her husband’s violence, declaring that he showed ‘the same acuteness of mind and playfulness of manner as when I first met him more than thirteen years ago’ although he admitted that ‘he habitually indulges too much in strong liquor’. When Dr Tennyson died in March 1831, Bousfield attributed it to typhus, though the symptoms suggest the combined effect of alcoholism, epilepsy and drugs. Either to protect the family from realizing the true cause of death, or possibly because he really believed in his own typhus diagnosis, Bousfield had the doctor’s body hurriedly removed from the house to avoid further infection. That Alfred did not take the typhus theory seriously is shown by the fact that, the very night after the death, he slept in his father’s bed, hoping in vain to see his ghost.
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Boyne family Tennyson’s favourite aunt, Elizabeth *Russell, married the son of a self-made coal millionaire, Matthew Russell in 1798, and produced two children. Her
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son William died in 1850 in his thirties without an heir. Her daughter Emma, Tennyson’s first cousin, enjoyed a lively social life in London, and refused to go into mourning or even curtail her social life for her uncle, Tennyson’s father, when he died in 1831. She married Gustavus Frederick Hamilton, who on the death of his father became the 7th Viscount Boyne. When she was pregnant with a possible son and heir she was chased by a bull. Her mother’s letter shows surprising sympathy for the bull (‘poor things, one cannot help pitying them’). For a time Elizabeth lived with her daughter and son-in-law in the Champs Élysées. The couple visited the Tennysons when Alfred rented Gore Lodge, Lady Franklin’s house in Kensington, in 1867, and lived a pleasure-seeking existence in high London society. Eventually they inherited Brancepeth Castle from the Russells and this became part of the Boyne estate, so that there was much travelling between Lord Boyne’s seat in Shropshire and County Durham. Many Tennyson papers are held by the Boyne estate.
Brackenbury family Lincolnshire neighbours and friends of the Tennysons. The Brackenburys, *Cracrofts, *Heneages and *Massingberds were the main country families who mixed and intermarried with the *Franklins, *Rawnsleys, *Sellwoods and Tennysons. In 1813 Tennyson’s father cursed ‘the lousy race of Brackenburies through all its branches and from end to side’ for snapping up the seaside holiday accommodation in *Mablethorpe which he wanted for his family. The circle of *Lincolnshire families provided a secure and stable social base for the young Tennysons as they grew up and there was also a cycle of annual events which they all attended, notably the Lincoln ‘Stuff Ball’.
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth (1837–1915) ‘Sensation’ novelist; favourite writer of Tennyson. Miss Braddon found fame in the 1860s, alongside Wilkie Collins, Mrs Henry Wood and others, as a writer of ‘Novels of Sensation’, involving extreme and often implausible events and usually centring on a guilty secret. Tennyson was devoted to her novels: ‘I am simply steeped in Miss Braddon – I am reading every word she ever wrote’ (Charles Tennyson, 377). Always an enthusiastic novel reader he found in her work sensational plots and vivid scene-setting. Her most famous novel, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) centres on a pretty blond heroine who commits bigamy, abandons her child, kills her husband and plans to poison her second husband. Later equally lurid novels include Aurora Floyd (1863) and The Doctor’s Wife (1864). Tennyson was not alone in his admira-
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tion: *Thackeray, Stevenson and Thomas *Hardy all expressed pleasure in her work. She herself was obviously equally influenced by Tennyson. She often uses Tennysonian quotations and sets her tales in countryside reminiscent of *‘The Lady of Shalott’.
The original medieval castle was extensively rebuilt in the Gothic style by Matthew Russell and his wife, Tennyson’s favourite aunt *Elizabeth, when they inherited it in 1817. They were helped by Tennyson’s uncle, Charles *Tennyson d’Eyncourt, who was later to conduct similar rebuilding at *Bayons Manor. Tennyson visited his relatives in County Durham and the ‘gewgaw castle’ in *Maud (347), owned by the coal-millionaire, ‘Master of half a servile shire’ (339), could plausibly have been based on Brancepeth, as well as Bayons.
Brassey, Thomas, 1st Earl (1836–1918) Friend of Tennyson. In 1889, as Tennyson was recovering from a severe illness, Lord Brassey, parliamentary secretary to the Admiralty, lent him his three-masted luxury schooner, the Sunbeam, in which he and his wife had toured the world in 1876–77. Together with *Hallam and Nurse *Durham, Tennyson explored the coastline of Devon and Cornwall in a holiday which helped him make a full recovery.
‘Break, Break, Break’ Dated 1842; early poem on the death of Arthur Hallam. Written in *Lincolnshire, probably in spring 1834, the poem is a seemingly plain, simply worded expression of human mourning. However, it is more oblique than at first appears. This is a poem about absence which is itself characterized by absence and displacement: the implied premise of the first line is that it is the human heart, rather than the waves, which is about to break – but this is nowhere stated. The ‘topos of inexpressibility’ of *‘Tears, Idle Tears’ is anticipated in ‘I would that my tongue could utter’ – so that the first verse enacts the restless dissatisfaction, the hopeless searching, which constitutes its theme. The heavy stresses of the first line are replaced by the healthy rhythms of life going on in verses 2 and 3: ‘O well for the fisherman’s boy’; ‘And the stately ships go on’; but they return in the final verse to disrupt normal life again and in this last verse (again anticipating ‘Tears, Idle Tears’) the speaker comes as near as he can to articulating his pain. Again, however, there
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is displacement with a ‘day that is dead’ standing in (as in ‘Tears’ and ‘Dark House’ [In Memoriam, Lyric vii]), for the dead Hallam. It is a poem which conveys the pain of absence, of bereavement, in the impossibility of uttering the name of the dead man.
Published 1855; subtitled ‘An Idyl’; contains one of Tennyson’s best-known lyrics. This sentimental story of lost love is best known for its inset lyric about the brook, ‘I come from haunts of coot and hem’. Tennyson noted that this was ‘not the brook near *Somersby’, though the latter is described in ‘Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea’ (1842).
Brooke, Stopford (1832–1916) Author and divine. Tennyson respected Brooke as a critic. In Tennyson: His Art and Relation to Modern Life (1894), Brooke argued that Tennyson’s poetry stopped developing with the Laureateship.
Brookfield, William Henry (1809–74) College friend of Tennyson; chaplain-in-ordinary to Queen *Victoria. Brookfield became friendly with Tennyson and Arthur Hallam when they were fellow-students at Trinity College, *Cambridge, in the 1820s. He was a sociable man who was elected President of the Cambridge Union and retained many of his university friendships throughout his life. He had a successful career in the Church, eventually becoming a chaplain-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria. Brookfield’s wife Jane, née Elton (1821–96), whom he married in 1841, was a cousin of Arthur Hallam and later became a friend of Tennyson – though she never lionized him and could be on occasion unsparing in her comments. Her lively letters were published in 1905 as Mrs Brookfield and Her Circle and give a vivid and often wickedly funny picture of the Tennyson circle in the middle years of the century. After Brookfield’s death in 1874 Tennyson wrote a sonnet affectionately recalling their early days (*‘To the Rev. W.H. Brookfield’), published in 1875 and containing a reference to Hallam. In 1890 Mrs Brookfield recorded a visit to *Farringford during which Tennyson suddenly turned to her and said, ‘Jane, let us dance.’ When she protested that their dancing days were over, he solemnly pirouetted by himself across the room (Brookfield [1905]: 318).
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‘Brooke The’
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Neighbour of the Tennysons at *Freshwater; spiritualist. Mary Brotherton spent much time with Emily *Tennyson after Lionel’s death, and recorded that she found her not in despair but radiant with the thought of meeting him in heaven (Thwaite, 567). In 1878 she gave Tennyson the idea for *‘Rizpah’ from a penny magazine called Old Brighton, which she lent him. In 1884 Tennyson visited her on his return home after taking his seat in the House of Lords on the crossbenches. She was finishing tea, so he put the tea cosy on his head and re-enacted the whole ceremony for her.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1806–61) Poet; friend of Tennyson. Elizabeth Barrett admired and was influenced by Tennyson’s poetry before she met him, though she found his early work lacking in sensuality. Leigh Hunt described her to Tennyson in 1838 as ‘a fair and no unworthy imitator of yours’ (Martin, 241). When she read the 1842 Poems (published by Moxon and Co., who had just rejected her own volume!) she declared, ‘I think such a godship of Tennyson!’ (Martin, 266). Tennyson admired her in return, saying that she was the only woman poet whom he desired to meet. They did eventually meet by chance with their spouses in Paris in 1851, when the two women were particularly drawn to each other by the recent loss of their babies. At a famous London evening recorded by Dante Gabriel *Rossetti in September 1855, it was Elizabeth who asked Tennyson to read *Maud, after which her husband read ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’; she read nothing herself. She always remained loyal to Tennyson’s poetry, though she was doubtful of Emily’s influence; the Idylls, however, disappointed her, again because of what she felt was the absence of warmth and life. The two poets seem at several points in their careers to be in dialogue. Barrett Browning had been suspicious of *The Princess (1847) before publication, arguing that the world was ‘too old and fond of steam for blank verse poems ... on the fairies’ (Ricks, 741). Aurora Leigh (1857) is her response – a verse novel about a woman writer making her way in the modern world. Tennyson’s Laureate verse is in its own way his response to Barrett Browning – his genuine attempt to deal with the contemporary world without the aid of myth and legend. Barrett Browning’s expectations of his poetry tied in closely with his own doubts about his work, as he struggled in the 1840s and 1850s to respond to Chenevix Trench’s comment, ‘Tennyson, we cannot live in Art’ (Martin, 162).
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Poet; friend and rival of Tennyson. Browning and Tennyson acknowledged and respected each other as rivals. They first met in London in 1841 and always remained on friendly terms despite the fact that Tennyson found Browning’s poetry, especially ‘Sordello’, difficult and ‘unmusical’. Tennyson was always puzzled that he, who was unmusical, should produce such musical poetry, while Browning was exactly the opposite. Browning spoke warmly of Tennyson’s poetry, especially *Maud, and commented in the 1860s, ‘Nobody has more fully found out at the beginning what he was born to do – nor done it more perfectly’ (Martin, 430). By this time his own reputation was growing; in 1869 Tennyson published the second major collection of Idylls of the King while Browning published The Ring and the Book, the material for which he had earlier offered to Tennyson. Both poets flirted unsuccessfully with the theatre and in later life they dedicated books of poems to each other. (Tennyson’s *Tiresias and Other Poems of 1885; Browning’s Selections of 1886). When Browning died in Venice in 1889, Tennyson campaigned successfully to have him buried in Westminster Abbey. Charles Tennyson says, ‘There had never been a spark of jealousy on either side, and there have been few friendships between great writers so sincere, loyal and understanding’ (1949: 518). A description by Dante Gabriel *Rossetti of an evening with the two poets reading their work aloud suggests their different approaches: Browning dramatizes his characters, whereas Tennyson intones; Browning is more concerned with psychology, Tennyson with language and music.
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 1st Baron Lytton (1803–73) Novelist; enemy of Tennyson. The prolific author of many novels including Pelham (1828), The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and Rienzi (1835) and of successful plays, including The Lady of Lyons (1838) and Money (1840), Bulwer was a close friend of Charles *Tennyson d’Eyncourt whose reformist politics he shared, together with a love of a romanticized past. Like Tennyson, he had won the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for Poetry at *Cambridge. He viciously attacked Tennyson’s 1833 volume in the new Monthly Magazine for its ‘eunuch strain’ (Martin, 169). In 1845 Tennyson accepted a £200 p.a. pension from the Prime Minster, Robert Peel. Charles Tennyson d’Eyncourt discussed Tennyson’s finances critically with Bulwer who, while staying at *Bayons, wrote ‘The New Timon’, a scathing attack on Tennyson’s poetry and on the pension, which, he said, should have
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Browning, Robert (1812–89)
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gone to the impoverished playwright, James Sheridan Knowles (1784–1862). Tennyson, encouraged by John *Forster, replied with *‘The New Timon and The Poets’. Bulwer, sensing defeat, initially denied authorship of the anonymous ‘New Timon’. Charles Tennyson d’Eyncourt, Bulwer and Tennyson all attended *Macready’s Farewell Banquet in 1851 and the two writers also frequented *Little Holland House in the 1850s, but their enmity continued. The Idylls proved much more popular than Bulwer’s treatment of the Arthurian legends. In a gesture of reconciliation in 1876, after the deaths of Bulwer and Charles, Tennyson dedicated his play *Harold to Bulwer’s son, Robert Lytton: ‘Your father dedicated his “Harold” to my father’s brother; allow me to dedicate my “Harold” to yourself’, and confessed that he had used Bulwer’s historical novel in researching for his play. Bulwer is also significant in Tennyson family history for having rejected the affections of Charles Tennyson d’Eyncourt’s daughter, Julia, who in consequence retired to a Roman Catholic nunnery for the rest of her life.
Burne-Jones, Sir Edward (1833–98) Pre-Raphaelite painter. After Tennyson’s death, Burne-Jones, at *Emily and *Hallam’s request, repainted the famous Samuel *Laurence portrait of the poet as a young man (which Tennyson himself had thought ‘blubber-lipt’ [Memoir, ii.104]). He rendered it softer and more acceptable to the mourning family. Tennyson had known BurneJones from gatherings at *Little Holland House and it is Burne-Jones’s account of Tennyson’s funeral in Westminster Abbey that captures the inappropriateness of the occasion: ‘O but yesterday was so flat and flattening. I’ll never forgive the Queen for not coming up to it, and I wish Gladstone had. And there should have been street music, some soldiers and some trumpets, and bells muffled all over London, and rumbling drums ... I wish I hadn’t gone’ (Martin, 583).
Burns, Robert (1759–96) Scottish poet, much admired by Tennyson Tennyson said more than once that he would give all his own work to be able to produce Burns’s exquisitely simple songs or Richard *Lovelace’s ‘To Althea’. On a trip to Scotland in 1848 he made a pilgrimage to Burns’s monument at Kirk Alloway, ‘out of love for the great peasant’, as he wrote, adding, ‘there never was immortal poet if he be not one’ (Memoir, 143). He reported to Edward *FitzGerald that, walking alone by Doonside, he had fallen ‘into a passion of tears’. After his
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marriage, Burns was one of the poets he read with his wife. Tennyson’s attraction to Burns’s linguistic simplicity is worth noting, in the light of Walter *Bagehot’s contemporary assessment of Tennyson as an ‘ornate’ poet.
Academic and friend of Tennyson. After a period as Headmaster of Harrow School Butler became Master of Trinity College, *Cambridge, in 1886. He was friendly with the Tennyson family from 1861, and his ‘Recollections of Tennyson’, included in Hallam Tennyson’s Tennyson and His Friends, contains accounts of his visits to *Farringford and provides interesting glimpses of the poet’s daily life.
Byron, George Gordon, Lord (1788–1824) Romantic poet, hero of Tennyson’s boyhood. The great hero of the first generation of Romantics, author of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Corsair and Don Juan, Byron was wild and subversive both in his life and in his writing. His verse can be both richly sensuous and coldly satirical; in espousing the cause of Greek nationalism he seemed to embody that free spirit of Romanticism which continued to exert its influence on the next generation. When the news of Byron’s death from marsh fever at Missolonghi reached England in April 1824, for the 15-year-old Tennyson ‘the whole world seemed to be darkened’ (Memoir, i.4) and he carved the words ‘Byron is dead’ on a rock in Holywell glen. It was only later that *Keats and *Shelley came to supersede his first poetic hero. Byron was popular in *Cambridge when the Tennyson brothers went up, but by that time they were more enthusiastic about Shelley and eager to spread his reputation. In November 1829 Arthur Hallam led a debating team to Oxford to debate ‘Byron or Shelley: which is the greater Poet?’ The Cambridge team was supporting Shelley, an Oxford man, while Oxford was supporting Byron, from Hallam and Tennyson’s own Trinity College. Byron ‘won’ the debate. In the late 1830s Tennyson met Samuel *Rogers and Thomas *Moore, friends of Byron, and listened avidly to their talk of the great man. By now he felt that, however good the poetry, the man had been insincere and affected (two of the greatest indictments in Tennyson’s system of values). One of the stories told was of Byron’s response to the news of *Wellington’s victory at Waterloo – ‘I am damned sorry to hear it!!’ (Martin, 231). Wellington was an even greater hero of Tennyson’s, and Byron sank even lower in his esteem. He continued to admire the poetry,
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Butler, Henry Montague (1833–1918)
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and quoted from ‘The Isles of Greece’ in the late 1860s calling it ‘very fine’. Much of Byron’s poetry, however, he could no longer enjoy, except perhaps ‘The Vision of Judgement’ and parts of Childe Harold and of Don Juan. In old age he declared that ‘Byron is not an artist or a thinker, or a creator in the higher sense, but a strong personality: he is endlessly clever and is now unduly depreciated’ (Memoir, ii.287).
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Cambridge Tennyson went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, on 9 November 1827, as a ‘pensioner’ (an ordinary undergraduate rather than a scholar). He lodged with his older brothers *Frederick and *Charles, first in Rose Crescent near the college and later in Trumpington Street, in 57 Corpus Buildings. The Master of Trinity was Christopher Wordsworth, brother of the poet; Tennyson’s tutor, who also taught him moral philosophy and mathematics, was the eminent scientist William *Whewell. For the first year the young Tennyson seems to have felt detached from the place, attacking its senior members in ‘Lines on Cambridge of 1830’ because they ‘teach us nothing, feeding not the heart’. In the spring of 1829, however, he became friends with Arthur Hallam who gained him entry into the *Apostles, and in June 1829 he won the Chancellor’s Medal for Poetry with *‘Timbuctoo’. At the end of February 1831 he and Charles were called home to their dying father’s bedside. Tennyson, who had always struggled academically, particularly with mathematics, failed to complete his degree. Despite this, the Cambridge years were perhaps the most influential of his life, centred as they were on the friendship with Hallam.
Cameron, Julia Margaret, née Pattle (1815–79) Pioneering photographer; friend and neighbour of Tennyson on the *Isle of Wight. One of the seven Pattle sisters who included Maria, the future grandmother of Virginia Woolf, Julia Margaret compensated for her lack of beauty in a famously beautiful family by her warmth, generosity and eccentricity. Having been given a camera for her fortieth birthday, she developed her own style of portrait photography and set about photographing her eminent neighbours
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and friends, including Charles *Darwin, Thomas *Carlyle, Sir John *Herschel and Tennyson. She produced images of all of her sitters which have become iconic and her considerable contribution to the history of photography is increasingly being recognized. Of her many photographs of Tennyson, perhaps the best known is the one he himself dubbed ‘The Dirty Monk’. She also made photographs of her servants, posed to illustrate the *Idylls of the King. Unlike most of his circle, she treated Tennyson without deference. (She thought her friend Sir Henry *Taylor was the greater poet.) She was the only woman, apart from his wife and sisters, whom he addressed by her Christian name. Mrs Cameron retired with her husband, the eminent lawyer Charles Hay Cameron (1795–1880) to Ceylon in 1875 where she continued her vivid photography. She died while gazing at a sunset from her window and her last word was ‘Beautiful’. It is noteworthy that Tennyson did not write an elegy for this good friend, nor for his sisters Mary or Emily. This may suggest that his friendships with women were of a different quality from his friendships with men. The Tennysons’ life on the Isle of Wight has been treated in Virginia Woolf’s comedy Freshwater (1923; rewritten and performed 1935) and in Lynne Truss’s novel Tennyson’s Gift (1996).
Carlyle, Jane Welsh (1801–66) Wife of Thomas Carlyle, letter-writer and friend of Tennyson. Jane Carlyle, famous for her acerbic wit, never used it on Tennyson, of whom she was very fond, despite the fact that, meeting her at a party not long after having spent a long evening with her at Cheyne Walk, he completely failed to recognize her. She observed that any woman would fall in love with him. To her delight he overcame his habitual shyness with women and treated her like a male companion; he would fill her house with pipe smoke as he talked with her for hours. At a particularly uncomfortable weekend at the home of Lady *Ashburton (with whom Carlyle was fascinated: Harriet Baring, Lady Ashburton [d. 1857]) Jane was comforted by Tennyson’s ease and charm. Her sharp wit, however, bemused him and after her death he observed that she was ‘a most charming, witty converser, but often sarcastic’ (Carlyle, Thomas, and Jane Welsh Carlyle [1970]: 97).
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Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881) Historian, social critic and friend of Tennyson. Both Carlyle and his wife Jane Welsh *Carlyle were friends of Tennyson. Carlyle and Tennyson, who had probably met for the first time in 1838, saw each other often during the latter’s bachelor years in London and, according
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to Hallam *Tennyson’s Memoir, they would take long walks together at night. Despite their doubts about each other’s work (Tennyson found Carlyle’s diatribes often merely bad tempered while Carlyle felt that Tennyson was ‘a Guardsman spoilt by poetry’ [Martin, 303]) they got on remarkably well throughout their lives. An early description by Carlyle speaks of the poet as ‘a most restful, brotherly, solidhearted man’ (Martin, 242), while in a later letter written by Carlyle to Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1842 he gives a striking account of Tennyson’s confused and depressed state of mind during this period (‘He is often unwell, very chaotic – his way is thro’ Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless ...’). Carlyle’s vivid pen-portraits display a verbal felicity which Tennyson acknowledged when he observed wryly that his friend was ‘a poet to whom Nature has denied the faculty of verse’.
Carroll, Lewis Pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–98). Oxford mathematician, writer, photographer; author of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Carroll met Tennyson in 1857. He became particularly popular with Tennyson’s small sons and took photographs of them and of Tennyson in rather formal pose. Tennyson admired his photography, especially a portrait of Emily’s niece, Agnes *Weld. ‘The Mouse’s Tale’ in Alice in Wonderland is reputedly based on a dream Tennyson told Dodgson. However, probably in 1868, the friendship began to cool: Tennyson forced Carroll to destroy a manuscript copy of *‘The Lover’s Tale’ that the latter had uncovered (this being a work the poet had always been very unwilling to publish). Carroll wrote in 1870 asking if he might keep and show to friends a privately printed copy of ‘The Song of the Wrens’, another of his works about which Tennyson was deeply sensitive. He received an icy reply from *Emily, obviously at Tennyson’s request: ‘a gentleman should understand that when an author does not give his works to the public he has his own reasons for it’ (Hudson [1954]: 107–11). It is possible that the subsequent estrangement lay behind the parody of *Maud as ‘The Garden of Live Flowers’ in Through the Looking Glass (1873). In 1872 Carroll wrote to recommend a doctor to treat *Lionel’s stammer, but was again rebuffed. The episode illustrates Tennyson’s sense of betrayal when he felt his poetic reputation was being threatened by the ‘pirating’ of his work.
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Catullus, Gaius Valerius (c.84–c.54 BC) Roman poet; favourite of Tennyson. Catullus’ love poems and elegies appealed strongly to Tennyson; it is possible that the Roman poet’s brilliantly satirical epigrams inspired Tennyson’s less
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successful attempts at the genre. Tennyson’s library contained eight editions of Catullus and he read the poet’s works to *Emily in the early months of their marriage. He used Catullus’ metre in Attis for his ‘Boadicea’ (1859) – calling it an ‘echo’ of the Roman poet. In *‘Frater Ave atque Vale’ (written in June 1880 when he was recovering from the death of his brother *Charles), he described the peninsula of Sirmio as ‘sweet Catullus’s all-but island’, referring to a happy lyric Catullus wrote (xxxi) ‘Paene insularum, Sirmio, insularumque/ocelle’ – but he combined this with reference to a sad lyric (ci), an elegy for Catullus’ dead brother. This is a characteristically Tennysonian mixing of moods. He continued reading Catullus during 1880, sharing the beauty of the lines with his guests at *Farringford, and an 1822 edition of Catullus was one of the favourite books with which he surrounded himself on his deathbed.
Chambers, Robert (1802–71) Publisher and author. With his brother, Chambers set up the influential Edinburgh publishing firm of W. & R. Chambers. Always fascinated by science, in 1844 he published anonymously Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, in which he attempted to explain for a general audience the scientific theories of the time. The book caused a sensation when it came out, because of its acceptance of the principle of the evolution of lower species into higher. Chambers did, however, unlike *Lyell, maintain the notion of the progress of the world. Tennyson asked Edward *Moxon to send him a copy, commenting that he had seen it advertised in The Examiner and that ‘it seems to contain many speculations with which I have been familiar for years, and on which I have written more than one poem’ (15 November 1844, Letters, i.230). Tennyson was untroubled by the notion of the evolution of species and Chambers’s teleological theory of the universe possibly allowed him to reintroduce hope into the later sections of *In Memoriam. Chambers’s ideas are evident in the Epilogue, with its culminating vision of Hallam as the peak of creation.
Chapel House, Twickenham The Tennysons’ first proper home after their marriage. They moved there in 1851, after a disastrous mistake over their first house, The Hill, in Warninglid near Horsham, Surrey, where water poured onto their bed during the first night. On Easter Sunday 1851 their first child was born dead at Chapel House, but on 11 August the following year, Hallam *Tennyson was born. He was christened there on 5 October but by the end of the month the Tennysons had decided to escape the bad drains and damp climate of Twickenham. They
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eventually left on 24 November 1853 for *Farringford. Tennyson turned the lease of Chapel House over to his mother, who moved in with her four unmarried children.
Published 1854; topical Crimean War poem based on an article in The Times. The ill-advised and disastrous military action in the course of the *Crimea War campaign took place on 25 October 1854, when a small number of British cavalrymen was ordered to charge down a narrow valley towards a greatly superior Russian force. The Russian army mowed them down with guns positioned on the heights above the valley. There were few survivors. On 13 November Tennyson read an article in The Times criticizing the charge. He composed the poem ‘in a few minutes’, according to Hallam *Tennyson, on 2 December. Hallam adds that the phrase, ‘some hideous blunder’, used by the editorial writer and echoed and adapted in line 12, gave Tennyson the idea for the metre of the poem, in which the repeated dactyls suggest the thundering hooves of galloping horses. The poem also makes use of verbal repetitions – for example, ‘cannon’ in the penultimate stanza – as well as reiterated patterns of syntax. The combined effect of these is to produce an almost hypnotic sense of inevitability as the misguided military decision results in the fatal charge of men and horses towards the Russian guns. The poem appeared in The Examiner on 9 December 1854. Tennyson revised the text for republication in 1855, omitting lines 5–12, but quickly regretted this decision and reverted to the original text in the following year. He was worried by the discovery that the number of soldiers involved had been 700 rather than 600: in the end he decided, with *Emily’s encouragement, that metre was more important than numerical accuracy. Despite his reported self-deprecation (‘Not a poem on which I pique myself’ [Ricks, 1034]) and the disparagement of his friend Richard Monckon *Milnes, the poem was immediately popular and Tennyson sent 1,000 copies, at their chaplain’s request, to the British soldiers at the siege of Sevastopol. This is one of the best known of Tennyson’s poems, inseparably identified with the famous and tragic historical event upon which it is based. Tennyson’s own wax-cylinder recording of the poem was made in 1890 and, transferred to modern recording media, gives a memorable impression of the Victorian public reading style. A minor point of interest is the rhyming of ‘hundred’ with ‘blundered’ and ‘thundered’: the rhyme is imperfect in Received Pronunciation, but there is evidence that in the Lincolnshire dialect the first of these words is pronounced ‘hunderd’ and thus makes a full rhyme.
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See also: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: recordings.
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Chaucer, Geoffrey
English poet and author of The Canterbury Tales; influence on Tennyson. One of Tennyson’s favourite non-Classical poets, Chaucer was the inspiration behind his *‘A Dream of Fair Women’ (1832), in which the medieval poet is imagined, following Arthur Hallam’s description, as ‘the morning star of song ... Dan Chaucer, the first warbler’ (ll. 2, 5). Tennyson was careful to point out the difference between the two poems: ‘Chaucer, the first great English poet, wrote the “Legend of Good Women”. From among these Cleopatra alone appears in my poem’ (Ricks, 440). When James *Knowles designed *Aldworth in 1868 he included above the dining-room mantelpiece an emblem of Chaucer with those of Tennyson’s other favourites, *Dante, *Shakespeare, *Milton, *Goethe and *Wordsworth. Tennyson was reading Chaucer to *Emily in the 1870s while completing the later Idylls and there are Chaucerian echoes in the ways in which he develops *Malory’s plots. When he died in 1892, Tennyson was fittingly laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, next to Robert *Browning and near the monument to Chaucer.
Cheltenham Spa town in Gloucestershire: the Tennyson family went there for their health. Tennyson’s father, uncle, grandfather and Aunt Elizabeth *Russell all ‘took the waters’ at Cheltenham and found them to be very beneficial. The next generation followed suit, Emily *Tennyson meeting Arthur Hallam there illicitly, during his father’s interdiction, in 1831. Mrs *Tennyson moved there in the 1840s for her health, accompanied by several of her children, which meant that Alfred was forced, until his marriage in 1850, to spend more time there than he cared to, since he found it a ‘polka-parson-worshipping place’ full of ‘pumps and pumprooms, chalybeates, quadrilles’ (Martin, 296).
Clare, John (1793–1864) Peasant poet, influence on Tennyson. Tennyson could well have encountered Clare on his visits to Dr Matthew *Allen’s asylum at *High Beech in 1840. Clare had been confined there since 1837, but was to escape in 1841 and walk home to Helpstone in Northamptonshire. Tennyson went to visit his younger brother *Septimus, who was a voluntary patient; however, his own fascination with melancholia and madness and his burgeoning friendship with Allen made him stay longer than he intended and he mixed with some of Allen’s patients with great delight.
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Chaucer, Geoffrey (c.1343–1400)
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Clare and Tennyson share much more than an edge of madness, however; *landscape in each poet occupies a central place in their consciousness and in their poetry. Loss and the *‘passion of the past’ are central themes. The Tennyson who wrote ‘Unwatched the bough begins to sway’ on the eve of his departure from *Somersby could understand something of Clare’s passionate love of his home village. Both mention birds frequently in their poetry – Tennyson’s specificity of knowledge here rivalling Clare’s. Clare epitomized for Tennyson the purity and simplicity he admired so much too in Robert *Burns – suggesting the unofficial folksong dimension of his poetry, heavily disguised though it was by his classical education.
Clark, Sir Andrew (1826–93) Tennyson’s London physician. Sir Andrew Clark was consulted by Tennyson in London from the 1860s and at various points made vain efforts to improve the poet’s mode of living, particularly with respect to the unremitting pipe-smoking. In 1867, Clark persuaded Tennyson to walk before lunch and to rest afterwards; in 1880, he advised him to stop drinking port; in 1887, he wired *Emily, after Tennyson’s examination, to reassure her that there was ‘nothing whatever to cause the slightest anxiety’ (Martin, 563); in June 1890, Clark was equally optimistic about Tennyson’s health, but by the end of July 1892 it was obvious that his system was giving way. Sir Andrew was summoned to *Farringford and attended the deathbed alongside the local doctor, Dr *Dabbs. Clark and his wife and daughter were also part of the large group which accompanied Tennyson on the Pembroke Castle cruise in 1883. Their relationship was very much that of social equals, and shows the high status of the top ranks of the medical profession. Clark had progressed from apprenticeship in Dundee as a surgeon to joining the much more prestigious profession of physician. In 1858 he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and a physician to the London Hospital; he was created baronet in 1883 and in 1885 was made a Fellow of the *Royal Society (as Tennyson had been in 1865).
Classical literature
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Classical literature
Tennyson read the Greek and Roman authors at an early age; they influence his work deeply. Tennyson’s father, no mean classical scholar himself, tutored his sons in Greek and Latin when they were very young. Tennyson was steeped in the classical authors and became an even greater classicist than his father.
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Of the Greeks he adored *Sappho and *Theocritus, an edition of which, Analecta Delicta, by Andrew Dalzel, was at *Somersby. It included Theocritus’ first, second, third and eighth idyll. In Latin, equivalent to the romantic charm of Sappho was *Catullus, though Tennyson also loved *Ovid. He remembered all his life (though he actually misremembered) ‘sonus desilientis aquae’ – from Ovid’s Fasti, a book about Roman feast days. The line is actually ‘ex alto desilientis aquae’. Perhaps the most important way in which classical literature influenced Tennyson was not so much through its subject matter but through metre. The sound patterns of classical verse can be heard in many of his poems. Classical metre is based on quantitative values and the length of syllables. English metre by contrast is based on rhythm, on systems of stresses. It may be that Tennyson’s keen awareness of quantity in English as well as in Latin is responsible for the peculiar musicality of his verse. (He once said that he knew the value – that is, the quantity – of every English word except for ‘scissors’ [Memoir, ii.231].) Tennyson replicated classical metres in English verse in ‘Milton: Alcaics’ and in ‘Hendecasyllabics’, in *‘Frater Ave atque Vale’ and in ‘On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria’, where he imitates the classical glyconic. His series of essays in the Cornhill Magazine, December 1863, entitled ‘Attempts at Classic Metres in Quantity’, included an exercise in Hendecasyllabics, after Catullus, an attack on Sir John *Herschel’s attempt to translate the Iliad into English hexameters, which simply goes to ‘prove the impossibility of the task’ (Ricks, 1156), and an attempt at rendering the Iliad into blank verse. Tennyson often chose classical subjects to deal with issues close to him – as when, through the figure of the aging Ulysses, he confronted his own despair after Hallam’s death. ‘The Hesperides’, *‘Oenone’, *‘The Lotos-Eaters’, *‘Ulysses’, *‘Tithonus’, *‘Tiresias’, ‘Demeter and Persephone’ and *‘The Death of Oenone’ are all based on classical mythology, both Homeric and post-Homeric. *‘Lucretius’ deals with the legendary fate of the Roman philosopher while enabling Tennyson to approach indirectly what he saw as the sexual decadence of his own age. Both William *Gladstone the Prime Minister and Tennyson the Poet Laureate were classical scholars. Whenever they could, they talked at length about a topic close to both their hearts, the problems of translating Homer. Whereas Gladstone thought of classical literature teleologically, as anticipating, or implicitly acknowledging a need for the truths of Christianity, Tennyson had no such coherent vision. Even when he uses Homeric subjects – ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ or ‘Ulysses’ – his verse is musical and discursive rather than ‘masculine’ and direct – more Virgilian than Homeric. Douglas Bush (1937) suggests that Tennyson worked more like a Roman poet than a Greek – hence his preference for the Alexandrian *idyll rather than the more ancient Homeric *epic. Tennyson generally presents the classical deities as indifferent to humankind – only rarely, as in ‘Demeter and Persephone’, acknowledging that they might display any human sympathy.
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The negative approach to the question of ‘influence’ is embodied in John Churton *Collins’s pedantic collection of Tennyson’s ‘borrowings’ from the classical authors and his belief that Tennyson was, like Virgil, ‘a great imitative poet’. It would be truer to say that, in recasting classical material for his own age, he was enriching the present by enabling encounters with the past.
Clevedon Town in Somerset; burial place of Arthur Hallam. Arthur Hallam’s maternal family, the Eltons, owned Clevedon Court. Hallam’s uncle wrote from there in October 1833 to tell Alfred of his friend’s death. Hallam’s body was brought there from Vienna and buried on 3 January 1834 in the vault at St Andrew’s Church, overlooking the Bristol Channel; Tennyson was offered a place in the family’s funeral carriage, but declined to attend. A lengthy memorial tablet composed by Henry *Hallam is in the church. Tennyson and *Emily visited Clevedon Church for the first time on their honeymoon in 1850, at Emily’s instigation. ‘It seemed a kind of consecration to go there,’ she wrote (Martin, 338).
Clough, Arthur Hugh (1819–1861) Poet; author of ‘Amours de Voyage’. Clough’s poetry can be passionate or satirical but is always strangely ‘modern’ in its underlying scepticism. An early visitor to *Farringford in the 1850s, Clough described Tennyson as a ‘big simple child of a man’ but was less taken with the poetry, though both poets wrote about religious doubt and both admired *Homer. With Coventry *Patmore Clough helped Tennyson research Welsh folklore for the Idylls. The Cloughs spent six weeks in *Freshwater in March 1861 and the two poets met again in France in 1860, travelling, with Tennyson’s family, to Cauteretz about which Clough wrote, ‘he is very fond of this place evidently’. Clough himself was already ill: he died the following November in Florence.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834)
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Further reading: Bush (1937); Markley (2004).
Romantic poet and critic. Coleridge’s influence on Tennyson’s generation as wild poet of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ and perhaps even more as co-author of the Lyrical Ballads (1798) was considerable. *Hallam’s aesthetic is underpinned
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by Coleridgean Romanticism. Coleridge late in life knew of Tennyson’s work, but seems to have preferred Charles *Tennyson (Turner)’s poems. Coleridge’s recorded response to the 1833 Poems was that Tennyson had begun ‘to write verses without very well understanding what metre was’, though he confessed that he found ‘some things of a good deal of beauty’ (Martin, 173). Tennyson remarked wryly in later life, commenting on *‘Oenone’, that he had been used to omitting hyphens in his early days and printing compound words as ‘glenriver’, ‘tendriltwine’ and so on, and that ‘Coleridge thought because of those hyphenated words that I could not scan’ (Ricks, 385). Coleridge’s theory of Imagination was used by Tennyson’s generation as a rallying cry against Benthamism and Mechanism: he became, through the writings of John Stuart *Mill, a founding father in the Carlylean/Ruskinian struggle against the dehumanizing effects of industrialization.
Collins, John Churton (1848–1908) Critic and lecturer. Collins published ‘A New Study of Tennyson’ in Cornhill Magazine (January 1880). His approach to the poems infuriated Tennyson, who believed that Collins, in examining his debt to earlier great writers, was impugning his imagination. He is alleged to have described Collins as ‘a Louse on the Locks of Literature’ (Martin, 529). Collins’s lengthy campaign for the recognition of English literature as an academic subject parallel to the Classics succeeded in 1893 when Oxford set up a final honours school in English and in 1904 he himself became Professor of English Literature at Birmingham University. Further reading: Jump (1967).
‘Coming of Arthur, The’ First of the Idylls of the King; recounts the circumstances of Arthur’s birth. Originally entitled at the trial printing ‘The Birth of Arthur’, the poem was published in 1869 (dated 1870) with *‘The Holy Grail’, *‘Pelleas and Ettarre’ and *‘The Passing of Arthur’. Once Tennyson had solved the problem of how to tell the Holy Grail story, the rest followed quickly. ‘The Coming of Arthur’ was begun late in 1868 and completed by the end of February 1869. Its language, like that of ‘The Passing of Arthur’, is deliberately more archaic than that of the other Idylls. It is based on *Malory with significant differences: whereas Malory relates events chronologically, Tennyson jumps back and forward in time, beginning with Leodogran’s doubts about his daughter’s marriage to Arthur. Malory makes it clear that Arthur is King Uther’s son and therefore the rightful
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king; Tennyson obscures Arthur’s parentage, giving three differing versions of the king’s ‘coming’ without choosing between them. Bedivere first narrates the Malory story, only to have it undermined by Bellicent, Arthur’s half-sister. She tells of the mystic events at the crowning of Arthur, of Excalibur and the Lady of the Lake, and then is asked by Leodogran if she is truly Arthur’s sister. ‘What know I?’ she replies. She offers one tale of Arthur’s childhood, where ‘he found me first when but a little maid’ and then begins again: ‘But let me tell you now another tale’. This third story, of Arthur’s arrival from the sea, swept as a babe to Merlin’s feet, she has been told herself by Merlin’s master, Bleys. Thus this first of the Idylls suggests the unfixedness of myth rather than the certainty of history. There are many links between Arthur Hallam as presented in *In Memoriam and the figure of King Arthur in this poem. Both are pure, ‘selfless’, ‘stainless’; both show tenderness towards children; both are androgynous figures, the King being ‘Arthur the blameless, pure as any maid’ (*‘Balin and Balan’, 472); both are types of Christ, the androgynous Christ of Holman *Hunt’s Light of the World (1853). At the same time, the poem raises the larger philosophical question underlying the Idylls – is there a single fixed truth to be found or is everything relative? Merlin’s riddles reinforce the point: ‘And truth is this to me and that to thee’ (‘Coming of Arthur’, 406). It is an issue which had been raised by Tennyson as early as *Poems by Two Brothers, and it haunts recent deconstructionist readings of the poems. The poem’s publication date, 1869, coincides with optimism about the British Imperial project and with discussions about the status of Canada and Australia. Arthur’s refusal to pay tribute to Rome is part of the continuing process of colonial change: ‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new’ (‘Coming of Arthur’, 508). Although the theme had been in Tennyson’s mind since boyhood, the poem, as it emerged at the end of the 1860s, was very much of its own time. After the Romans’ departure, Britain was fought over by rival factions. Arthur, allegedly King Uther’s son, newly crowned and attempting to draw the kingdom together, asks Leodogran, one of the ‘petty kings’, for his only daughter, Guinevere. Leodogran demurs because of doubt over Arthur’s identity. Bedivere, ‘the first of all his knights’ tells the story of King Uther’s rape of Gorlois’s wife, Ygerne, and of Arthur’s subsequent birth and removal by the magician Merlin to be fostered. Then Bellicent, daughter of Gorlois and Ygerne, gives her account of Arthur’s coronation and of his taking of the sword Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake. Brought up as Arthur’s sister, Bellicent confesses her uncertainty, since her parents were dark, as was King Uther, but that
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‘Coming of Arthur, The’
. . . this king is fair Beyond the race of Britons and of men. (329–30)
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48 ‘Coming of Arthur, The’
She gives her third, magical version of Arthur’s arrival from the sea evading issues of parentage. Leodogran accedes to Arthur’s request; Lancelot, Arthur’s favourite knight, fetches Guinevere to Camelot. At the wedding, Arthur refuses tribute to ‘slowly-fading Rome’ and Britain stands as an independent, united country at last.
Southwestern-most county of England; mythical home of King Arthur. Cornwall was always linked with King Arthur for Tennyson because of its Celtic culture. In May 1848, while planning the Idylls, he travelled there alone to absorb the atmosphere of the Arthurian legends. While recovering from a fall which injured his leg, he visited the poet R. S. *Hawker at Morwenstow and then travelled to *Tintagel. He returned to Cornwall in 1860 while preparing the next batch of Idylls. Thomas *Woolner accompanied him and they travelled to Bideford, Clovelly, Bude and again to Tintagel, covering at least ten miles a day on foot and seabathing whenever they could. ‘The Welsh claim King Arthur, but the poet gives all the votes to us’, said Caroline *Fox (1882: 324), whom they met on their journey. Tennyson’s last visit was in old age when, with *Hallam and Nurse *Durham (who cared for him in his last years: see Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: death and funeral) he explored the coast from Lord Brassey’s yacht, the Sunbeam (see: Thomas, 1st Earl Brassey).
Crabb Robinson, Henry (1775–1867) Diarist, lawyer and man of letters; met Tennyson in London in the 1840s. Crabb Robinson indefatigably recorded his literary life in his diaries and is a useful source of information on Tennyson’s bachelor days in London: he witnessed the first meeting of Robert *Browning and Tennyson, in March 1841, at one of Richard Monckton *Milnes’s breakfasts in London, describing Tennyson on that occasion as ‘a bandit of genius’. Later they talked at length at a dinner party at Samuel *Rogers’s about *Goethe and Schiller, and Crabb Robinson was confirmed in his belief that the young man was ‘by far the most eminent of the young poets’. He recorded, however, Tennyson’s priggish distaste for the notorious Caroline *Norton, who was seated beside him at the dinner table and whom he tried to ignore.
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Cornwall
Crabbe, George (1754–1832) English poet; strong influence on Tennyson. Born in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, Crabbe rebelled against the stylized pastoral poetry of his day and recorded village life and rural poverty, describing
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the Suffolk landscape with a naturalist’s precision. He was a favourite with Tennyson throughout his life. He read Crabbe aloud to friends and reproached them when they were not moved to tears. Crabbe’s poetry was the subject of conversation at a unique dinner party given by Charles *Dickens for W. M. *Thackeray, Edward *FitzGerald and Tennyson on 27 April 1843: to the early Victorians he obviously held a central place in English literature. Crabbe’s influence is particularly evident in *‘Enoch Arden’ (1864) which was partly based on his verse tale, ‘The Parting Hour’ (Tales, 1812). In both stories, the rival is named Philip. When Tennyson and his son visited FitzGerald in Woodbridge, Suffolk, in 1876, part of their purpose was to see Crabbe country.
Cracroft family Neighbours of the Tennysons in *Lincolnshire. The Cracrofts were cousins to the *Sellwood family of Horncastle. Colonel Cracroft, a friend of George *Tennyson, witnessed *Frederick’s rudeness towards his grandfather in 1832 (see Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: Brothers and sisters: Frederick). Robert Cracroft (1783–1862) owned *Harrington Hall and in 1831 rented it to Arthur Eden, step-father of Rosa *Baring. His son, Colonel Weston Cracroft (1815–83) of Hackthorn Hall, Lincoln, kept a diary in which he poured scorn on the ‘pomp and circumstance’ of Charles *Tennyson d’Eyncourt’s *Bayons Manor and in 1849 criticized Tennyson’s ‘scrubby-looking’ appearance (Martin, 328).
Crimean War (1854–56) War against Russia by an alliance of Great Britain, France and Turkey to check Russian expansionism on the Black Sea coast. The first reference to the approaching war in Tennyson’s poetry is in *‘To the Rev. F.D. Maurice’, written in January 1854. The family had just moved to *Farringford. They could hear the boom of cannon as the Navy practised manoeuvres and see from their windows the warships setting off down the Solent on their journey to the Crimea. Tennyson comments sourly in this light conversation poem on the ‘selfish war’ as being the result of a ‘northern [i.e. Russian] sin’. The Tennysons followed news from the Crimea avidly. After landing on 17 September 1854, the British had a quick victory at the Battle of Alma, followed in November by a disastrous defeat at Balaclava, including a suicidal cavalry charge into the Russian guns. Tennyson read The Times editorial condemning this military blunder while he was sweeping up autumn leaves in the garden and immediately composed *‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, which appeared in The Examiner on 9 December and was an instant popular success. When an army chaplain at Sevastopol wrote to tell him
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Crimean War (1854–56)
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how much the men loved the poem, he arranged for a thousand copies to be sent out to them. Throughout the war he was working on *Maud, completing it during the bitter winter during which thousands of soldiers on both sides were dying of disease and cold in the Crimea. It was published at the end of July 1855, by which time the tide of the war was turning against the Russians. Tennyson’s description of the self-absorption of the speaker and of his eventual escape from private despair by setting off to fight in the Crimea provoked attacks on the poem from all sides: some readers thought Tennyson was advocating war as a cure for personal grief; others, that, by putting bellicose sentiments into the mouth of a madman, he was proving himself to be ‘of the Peace Party’. The critical debate continues – though today critics read the poem, as the poet intended, as a dramatic monologue rather than as a political polemic. Once the Allies, with Sardinia’s help, achieved the fall of Sevastopol, the Crimean War was quickly ended by Russian capitulation in March 1856 at the Treaty of Paris. As early as 22 June 1855 Tennyson recorded seeing the first ships returning up the Solent.
Croker, John Wilson (1780–1857) Tory reviewer; severe critic of Tennyson’s 1833 Poems. Croker had a fearsome reputation as the destroyer of John *Keats. He had savaged ‘Endymion’ in 1818, and *Shelley blamed him directly for Keats’s death, which took place three years later. John Lockhart, the editor of the Quarterly Review, was a friend of John Wilson (Christopher *North) and may have commissioned Croker to avenge Tennyson’s squib ‘To Christopher North’. Croker (in the Quarterly Review, April 1833) did not attempt any genuine analysis, as Wilson had done: he merely demolished both the weakest and the strongest poems by quotation, misquotation and sarcasm, having particular fun at the expense of *‘O Darling Room’ but equally savaging *‘Oenone’, *‘The Hesperides’ and *‘The Lady of Shalott’ (‘a spinster who had, under some unnamed penalty, a certain web to weave’) and ending with a casual demolition of ‘To Christopher North’, almost as if daring the young poet to retaliate. Crushed by this third venomous attack, following those of Christopher North and *Bulwer-Lytton, Tennyson did not publish another volume of poetry until 1842.
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‘Crossing the Bar’ Conceived in the spring of 1889 and written in October, this, perhaps the best-loved of Tennyson’s poems, also has the best-known provenance: after
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a dangerous illness, Tennyson heeded his nurse’s suggestion that he write a hymn of thanks for his recovery. While crossing the Solent from Lymington to Yarmouth, on his way home to *Farringford, he composed the poem, by his own account, ‘in twenty minutes’. The image of setting sail, central to *‘Ulysses’ and to the ending of *‘Merlin and the Gleam’ (in their different ways two of Tennyson’s other most personal poems), also recalls *‘Tears, Idle Tears’, in which embarking and returning are equally and mysteriously elided. The three-stress lines stretch to five stresses in the third line of each quatrain, as the tide pulls rhythmically out to sea; in the final stanza, a moment of poise is reached, with line 1 stretching out to match and balance line 3, at the point of crossing the bar: For, though from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crossed the bar. Tennyson’s explanation of this stanza (which had caused some puzzlement) was: ‘The pilot has been on board all the while, but in the dark I have not seen him’ (Ricks, 1459). ‘Mind you put my “Crossing the Bar” at the end of all editions of my poems,’ he said to his son – and the wish has almost always been respected (Ricks, 1458).
Cup, The Produced 1881; Tennyson’s fifth published play. Written in 1879, while Tennyson was writing *The Falcon, this two-act tragedy was based on a story in Plutarch’s De Mulierum Virtutibus, which the poet had found in W. E. H. *Lecky’s History of European Morals. Synorix, a Galatian nobleman, falls desperately in love with Camma, already married to the Galatian prince Sinnatus. Unable to overcome her loyalty to her husband, he has Sinnatus killed, is crowned his successor and renews his suit. Camma pretends to consent but, now a priestess of Diana, lures Synorix to the temple supposedly to make a sacrifice to the goddess, and poisons both her pursuer and herself with wine from the eponymous cup. The power of marital love was a truly Victorian theme and the play was a huge success, thanks to exotic staging and the performances of *Irving and Ellen *Terry. It ran for between 125 and 130 nights, preceded by The Corsican Brothers, by Frederick Fox Cooper (1886), and later by The Belle’s Strategem, by Hannah Cowley (1780). Tennyson disapproved of Irving’s performance as Synorix, however, saying that he had turned a subtle character into a simple villain. The play was not published until 1884, when it appeared with *The Falcon.
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Cymbeline (1609/10)
Play by *Shakespeare; favourite of Tennyson. This seems to have been Tennyson’s favourite of all Shakespeare’s plays. He was particularly moved by the final scene, in which, after many vicissitudes, the married hero and heroine, Posthumus and Imogen, are reunited. Posthumus’ words to Imogen, ‘Hang there like fruit, my soul,/Till the tree die!’ (Cymbeline V.v.263–4), were lines which Tennyson said, ‘always bring tears to my eyes from their simplicity’ (Memoir, ii.290). He insisted on having a copy of the Collected Works on his deathbed, tried to read from Cymbeline but failed, and finally laid the volume face down, cracking the spine, so that today the copy still opens at Posthumus’ speech. When he lay in an open coffin, the family put into his hands a bunch of roses from Emily and a copy of Cymbeline.
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Cymbeline (1609/10)
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Dabbs, Dr G. R. General practitioner at *Freshwater, *Isle of Wight, who tended Tennyson in his final illness. Dr Dabbs cared for *Emily after her collapse from overwork in 1874, looked after the family for over twenty years and attended Tennyson in his last illness in 1892. Tennyson’s London physician, Sir Andrew *Clark, was also called in. For a week the old man lay in bed, suffering, said the doctors, from influenza and gout. At 8 a.m. on 3 October he told Dr Dabbs that he was sure he was about to die. Dabbs’s account has become the standard one and reveals how he, like *Hallam, saw this as somehow larger than an individual death and more like a national event: ‘On the bed a figure of breathing marble, flooded and bathed in the light of the full moon streaming through the oriel window; his hand clasping the Shakespeare which he had asked for but recently, and which he kept by him to the end; the moonlight, the majestic figure as he lay there, “drawing thicker breath,” irresistibly brought to our minds his own “Passing of Arthur” ’ (Memoir, ii.428–9). Dr Dabbs soothed the final pangs with chloroform, and at 1.35 a.m., on 6 October 1892, Tennyson died peacefully.
‘Daisy, The’ Published 1855; epistolary poem to Emily *Tennyson. Tennyson adapted the metre for this poem from *Horace’s Alcaics and wrote it on a visit to Edinburgh at the end of summer 1853, while missing his wife. He recalls in detail their Italian tour of 1851 and ends with the discovery of the daisy in a book which his wife had lent him – a daisy he had picked for her in Italy. The small physical token of their love kindles his soul in ‘this dark city’ and ‘My fancy fled to the South again’. The Mediterranean landscape moves him, as in *‘Mariana in the South’: the tension between North
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54 ‘Daisy, The’
Dakyns, Henry Graham Tutor to Tennyson’s sons; housemaster at Clifton College. Educated at Rugby and *Cambridge, Dakyns was appointed tutor to Tennyson’s two sons in 1861. Though he stayed just over a year, he was a great success. Late in 1861 he accompanied the Tennyson family through France to the Pyrenees and tactfully dropped behind Tennyson as he walked in the *Valley of Cauteretz. He remained a friend of the family for the rest of Tennyson’s life, introduced his friend John Addington *Symonds to Tennyson, and was one of the last visitors to *Aldworth in 1892.
‘Dante’ Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), Italian poet; major influence on Tennyson. Dante’s masterpiece, La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) consists of the Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso and describes the human soul (the poet himself) journeying through Hell and Purgatory before finally reaching Paradise. Tennyson was given the classical education usual for boys of his generation and class, which included not only the classics but also the Italian poetry of Dante. In his first surviving letter (October 1821?), written at the age of 12, the young Tennyson quotes Dante: ‘Nessun maggior dolore, Che ricordarsi del tempo felice, Nella miseria’. He puts the same thought into *‘Locksley Hall’: ‘this is a truth the poet sings,/That a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things’ (75–6). *‘Ulysses’ (1833) is based much more on Dante’s version of the story in Inferno xxvi, in which Ulysses speaks, than on the original in *Homer’s Odyssey, in which the events are only hinted at. In the Inferno, Ulysses’ ship and his mariners are drowned; Tennyson predictably stops just before the disaster, holding the action in suspension. In *‘Tithonus’ (1833) too, there is a direct borrowing from Dante, this time from Paradiso xxv: ‘Earth in earth’ is exactly Dante’s ‘terra in terra’. Tennyson writes through the expectations raised by the references to Dante, showing, not a paradise, but a soul suspended in an eternal limbo. Though he praised Dante to his sons for his intensity, to *Gladstone in 1876 he declared: ‘as the English language is much finer than the Italian for variety of sound, so *Milton for sound is often finer than Dante ... What, for example, can be more monotonous than the first lines of the “Inferno” with their “a-s”?’
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and South, and between vastness and the tiny reality of the flower (as in *‘Flower in the Crannied Wall’) produces a relaxed epistolatory style which he was to develop further in *‘To the Rev. F.D. Maurice’ (the next poem in the 1855 volume *Maud, and other Poems), ‘To Professor Jebb’ and ‘To the Master of Balliol’.
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Darwin, Charles (1809–82) Scientist and evolutionary theorist. Tennyson bought On The Origin of Species as soon as it appeared, in November 1859, and read it ‘with intense interest’ (Chronology, 87). He was already familiar with evolutionary theories from his reading of Charles *Lyell and Robert *Chambers, and it is they who influenced *In Memoriam, completed almost a decade before Darwin’s work became well known. Specifically Darwinian ideas of natural selection and adaptation to environment underlie some of the later poems, especially *‘The Holy Grail’ and other Idylls and there is an Epigram ‘To an Evolutionist’. Darwin visited Tennyson at *Farringford on 13 August 1868. Emily’s Journal records that Tennyson said, ‘Your theory of evolution doesn’t make against Christianity’, and that Darwin replied, ‘Certainly not’ (Memoir, ii.57).
De Vere, Aubrey (1814–1902) Irish poet, dramatist, critic, essayist and friend of Tennyson. Tennyson and De Vere met in 1841 or 1842; thereafter they saw each other frequently in London, and in 1848 Tennyson visited his friend in Ireland. De Vere became a Roman Catholic in 1851. He acknowledged the influence of Tennyson on his own work. His account of their meetings quoted in Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir refers to Tennyson’s ‘entire simplicity and unconventionality’ (i.208). W. G. *Ward wrote that Tennyson’s friendship with De Vere was ‘almost lifelong, and showed Tennyson at his best in conversation’.
Death and immortality
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(Memoir, ii.215). He did not attend the Centenary celebrations in Florence but sent some short lines to be read to the Florentines, saying that they were ‘something like a Greek epigram’. Here he refers to Dante as ‘King that has reigned 600 years’, and contrasts the great poet with himself, ‘wearing but the garland of a day’ (‘To Dante: Written at the Request of the Florentines’ [ll. 1, 6]; Ricks, 1191).
The Immortality of the Soul was for Tennyson the central question of all. In *Poems 1830 occur the two balancing poems ‘Nothing Will Die’ and ‘All Things Will Die’. Their coexistence mirrors the permanent dynamic in Tennyson’s life and work between faith and doubt. In *‘Tithonus’ he exceptionally considers the possibility that immortality may itself be a horror, but
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Death and immortality
in the rest of his work it remains an obsessive desire, focused of course on his longing for the presence of Arthur Hallam. In the 1840s he asked everyone he met, he later told William *Allingham, to find an answer to that all-consuming question, reading widely in pursuit of some comfortingly definitive statement. Scientific developments and theories of evolution fascinated him. In 1844 he saw an advertisement for Robert *Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and asked his publisher and friend, Edward *Moxon, to get a copy for him, since it seemed, he said, to contain ‘many speculations with which I have been familiar for years, and on which I have written more than one poem’ (Letters, i.230 [15 November 1844]). When it arrived, he opened and read it eagerly – but found there, not the certainty he desired but further speculation. Reading Chambers did, however, reinstate for him the teleological world-view that *Lyell had destroyed, and the Chambers sections of *In Memoriam show a recovery of hope after the blank despair of the ‘Evolutionary Stanzas’ liv–lvi. In Memoriam, with its carefully positive Epilogue was, he said, ‘more hopeful than I am myself’ (Ricks, 859). All his life Tennyson longed to be convinced of eternity. James *Knowles, according to Sir Frederick Pollock, ‘invented the *Metaphysical Society (in 1868 ) for the purpose of convincing Tennyson of the immortality of the soul’ (Martin, 483). Like several of his siblings, he was interested in spiritualism and once or twice in his life attended séances, notably after his son *Lionel’s death, when he was so moved at the apparent arrival of a spirit that he cried out, ‘Are you my boy Lionel?’ He felt aware, he said, of the unseen world like ‘a great ocean pressing round us on every side, and only leaking in by a few chinks’ (Martin, 557). He was particularly interested in the experience of Alfred Russel *Wallace who, though a scientist, was a firm believer in spiritualism. In the 1885 volume he reaches for moments of absolute faith. *‘The Ancient Sage’ shows a serenity and confidence in the immortality of the human spirit which builds on the ending of In Memoriam. *‘Vastness’ turns from science and the advances of the world to the inner conviction of the transcendence of human love: ‘Peace, let it be! For I loved him and love him for ever:/the dead are not dead but alive’ (xxxvi). Yet in his life he was still plagued by doubt and in Westminster Abbey he said to his son *Hallam, ‘it is beautiful, but what empty and awful mockery if there is no God!’ (Martin, 555) – returning to that moment of absolute despair in In Memoriam Lyric lv, with the ‘fanes of fruitless prayer’. The death of his younger friend, William Allingham, in 1889 consoled him as Allingham’s last words had been ‘I am seeing things that you know nothing of’ (Allingham, 388). His own religious belief remained tenuous to the end. In his last few months he begged Benjamin *Jowett not to continue their running debate about religious doubt. As he died, he called, ‘Hallam! Hallam!’ for his
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Dedication to the Idylls 57
son, but also possibly for the friend whose memory had sustained him through the years and on whom he built his belief in immortality. See also: Dabbs, Dr G. R.
Published 1892; posthumous volume of poems. This volume, published on 28 October 1892, three weeks after Tennyson’s death, begins with a dedicatory poem to his old friend, Benjamin *Jowett, as an introduction to ‘The Death of Oenone’, a poem its author considered ‘even more strictly classical in form and language’ (Memoir, ii.386) than the original *‘Oenone’ (1832) and which shows how vividly the Pyrennean landscape had continued to haunt the old poet’s imagination, sixty years after his first journey there with Arthur Hallam in 1830. ‘Akbar’s Dream’, the second title poem, was inspired by books lent to Tennyson by Jowett, who loved to encourage his friend’s interest in Eastern religion and history. ‘Your father appreciates the East’, he said approvingly to Hallam (Ricks, 1441). The story is of the great Mogul Emperor, Akbar (1542–1605). Tennyson’s note to the poem says that Akbar’s ‘tolerance of religions and abhorrence of religious persecutions puts our Tudors to shame’. The poem ends, like the Idylls, with the collapse of the hero’s great civilization by corrupt later generations. Other poems include: ‘Kapiolani’, a great chieftainess who lived in the Sandwich Isles – inspired, presumably, by the stories told by Queen *Emma on her visit to *Farringford in 1865: ‘St Telemachus’ (a pendant to *‘St Simeon Stylites’); a Laureate poem ‘On the Death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale’; ‘The Churchwarden and the Curate’ (in Lincolnshire dialect); ‘Charity’ (‘based on a true story’ of murder and passion); and ‘The Bandit’s Death’ (dedicated to Sir Walter *Scott and taken from Scott’s last journal). There is finally a cluster of intense and worthy poems meditating on weighty matters of faith: ‘The Dawn’, ‘Doubt and Prayer’, ‘The Making of Man’, ‘Faith’, ‘The Silent Voices’, ‘God and the Universe’ and ‘The Dreamer’. Most of these poems have a biographical rather than a purely poetic interest; however, one, *‘June Bracken and Heather’, shows that, at the very end of his life, Tennyson’s lyric gift had not deserted him, and the whole volume, in its breadth and ambition, deserves serious reading.
Dedication to the Idylls
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‘The Death of Oenone’, ‘Akbar’s Dream’ and Other Poems
‘To the Prince Consort’ (1862). Tennyson wrote this dedication for the new edition of the 1859 Idylls over the Christmas of 1861, Prince *Albert having died on 14 December. He had originally written ‘And indeed he seems to me/Scarce other than my own ideal knight’ but changed it to ‘my king’s ideal knight’ to refute suggestions
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Dedication to the Idylls
by Leslie Stephen and others that Arthur himself was a portrait of the Prince Consort. *Swinburne continued to refer to the Idylls thereafter as the ‘Morte d’Albert’. Certainly the descriptions of the Prince’s ‘sublime repression of himself’ and of his ‘wearing the white flower of a blameless life’ recall the saintly Arthur of *‘Guinevere’. Tennyson includes in the Dedication several specific references to Albert’s achievements, for example, in planning the Great Exhibition of 1851. At *Emily’s suggestion, he sent the ‘Dedication’ to Queen *Victoria’s daughter, Princess *Alice, and received a reply from the Queen herself saying that it had soothed her ‘aching, bleeding heart’ (Martin, 442). Prince Albert had requested an inscription in his copy of the Idylls in 1860. His admiration for Tennyson’s poetry had been a strong factor in 1850 in deciding the Laureateship. Tennyson achieves in this Laureate verse something of the impressive rhythmic effect of the *‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’, in such lines as ‘I dedicate,/I dedicate, I consecrate with tears –/These Idylls’ (4).
Demeter and Other Poems Tennyson’s final, very successful volume of verse (1889). This, the last volume of Tennyson’s verse, sold 20,000 advance copies. It was dedicated to Lord Dufferin (Frederick Blackwood, 1st Marquis of Dufferin and Ava [1826–1902]), in a poem which at last expressed something of Tennyson’s emotions at *Lionel’s death in 1886 (*‘To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava’). The other significant poems are *‘Merlin and the Gleam’, *‘Vastness’ and *‘The Roses on the Terrace’, all three suggesting, as so often in these later volumes, the desire to sum up a lifetime. The dedication of ‘Demeter and Persephone’ is to Professor R. C. Jebb (1841–1905), the classical scholar, who had helped Tennyson explore his sources for this poem in the Homeric Hymn and the works of *Ovid. ‘Demeter and Persephone’ is an example of Tennyson’s use of classical mythology and the dramatic monologue to address by indirections some deeply personal issue or contemporary argument. Here, the central point (as in *‘Tiresias’) is that classical myth is a preparation for the revelation of Christianity. Tennyson, according to his elder son, considered Demeter ‘one of the most beautiful types of womanhood’ (Ricks, 1373). She gravely describes to her beloved daughter her sorrow at their brutal separation by Pluto, and the decree of Zeus that Persephone should be returned to her ‘For nine white moons’ of the year. (Ovid’s version in the Metamorphoses is six and six; the Homeric Hymn has eight and four; Tennyson here optimistically establishes a summer nine months long.) The whole poem, in its quiet gravity and its mourning for lost happiness, is reminiscent of *‘Tithonus’. Demeter feels pity for suffering humanity and thus becomes an anticipation of the Christian God. The poem ends with Persephone’s resurrection, but, typically, it is the final image of the
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... see no more The Stone, the Wheel, the dimly-glimmering lawns Of that Elysium, all the hateful fires Of torment, and the shadowy warrior glide Along the silent field of Asphodel. (147–51) As usual in these later volumes, there is a Lincolnshire poem, ‘Owd Roä’, based on a newspaper article about a dog rescuing a child from a burning house. Several poems deal with friendship: ‘To Mary Boyle’ introduces (a familiar practice in the later volumes) a rediscovered youthful poem (as if Tennyson is showing the coherence, the timelessness, of his own life and work). ‘To Ulysses’ generously recalls his earlier great monologue in a tribute to F. T. *Palgrave’s brother, the explorer W. G. Palgrave, whose own account of his travels was entitled Ulysses (1887). There is the inevitable epitaph, this time to Tennyson’s dear friend W. G. *Ward. The narrative poem, ‘The Ring’ (virtually an extract from a play in dramatic blank verse) is a supernatural tale of jealousy between two sisters. ‘Romney’s Remorse’ is a dramatic monologue, suggested by a letter from Edward *FitzGerald, about the last days of the painter George Romney. In many of these poems, Tennyson seems damagingly influenced by the contemporary Sensation Novelists he read so eagerly. (See: M. E.*Braddon) The macabre story, ‘Happy: The Leper’s Bride’, though morally impeccable (and deliberately contrasted with *Swinburne’s earlier necrophiliac treatment of the theme), is too close to melodrama. There is some Laureate verse, including ‘On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria’ (previously published in Macmillan’s Magazine), in which Tennyson copied the metre of *Catullus. The poem was set to music by C. V. Stanford. There are several epigrams (a form in which Tennyson never seems at home), including one on Paris. In ‘By an Evolutionist’, created from separate epigrams during bouts of severe illness, Tennyson suggests that pain has starved his wilder nature (possibly a reference to his father and the fear of epilepsy). ‘Parnassus’ continues Tennyson’s debate with science, here seen as a potential threat to the arts – with ‘Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses’. The impact of the volume was clinched by the huge success of *‘Crossing the Bar’, which instantly became a favourite for funeral services and which showed how close Tennyson still was to the deepest yet most common human experiences.
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approach of Pluto, the ‘shadowy warrior’, even though negated, which lingers in the memory. Persephone, says her mother poignantly, shall
Democracy Like many of his Cambridge compatriots, Tennyson was suspicious of the passing of the first Great *Reform Bill (1832). In 1884 he warned *Gladstone about
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the passing of the third great extension of the franchise, the 1884 Reform Bill, though he did reluctantly vote for the Bill. In his poetry there is pessimism about democracy in the first *‘Locksley Hall’ (1842): ‘Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion creeping nigher,/Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire’ (135–6). In *‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ (1886), which Gladstone regarded as a dangerously anti-progressive poem, there is indeed heavy irony in the rhetorical questions of the speaker at the expense of Democracy: ‘All the full-brain, halfbrain races, led by Justice, Love and Truth;/All the millions one at length with all the visions of my youth?’ (ll. 161–2). However, such hope as there is is linked to the ordinary people, while disillusionment is with their rulers, the politicians: ‘Nay, but these would feel and follow Truth if only you and you,/Rivals of realm-ruling party, when you speak were wholly true.’ There is also a version of the eighteenth-century belief in the ‘Noble Savage’: ‘Plowmen, Shepherds, have I found, and more than once, and still could find,/Sons of God, and kings of men in utter nobleness of mind.’ Belief in exceptional individuals does not constitute belief in democracy in twenty-first century terms, but it is enough to show at least that Tennyson was no automatic respecter of the English class system: ‘here and there a cotter’s babe is royal born by right divine;/Here and there my lord is lower than his oxen or his swine’ (117–26). Like Thomas *Carlyle and others of his generation (even Charles *Dickens on occasion), Tennyson could and often did identify ‘Democracy’ with rule by ‘the mob’; yet he always maintained a sentimental belief in and affection for the values of ‘the people’, imagined, perhaps, as the Lincolnshire folk among whom he had grown up.
‘Devil and the Lady, The’ Juvenilia: Tennyson’s first, unpublished, play. Tennyson’s first attempt at drama was an unfinished three-act blank verse pastiche of Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy, written (according to a note by Dr *Tennyson) when Alfred was only 14 (1823). Magus, the necromancer, before setting off on a journey, commissions the Devil to guard his wife, Amoret (‘Jessica’ in the earliest draft), and keep her chaste. The Devil sends Amoret to bed, dresses in her clothes and invites her six lovers, who appear one after the other, into the cottage where he plays tricks on them. The source is a story in Francis Palgrave’s ‘Popular Mythology in the Middle Ages’ (Quarterly Review xxii [1820]), in which the Magus character returns to find the weary Devil begging him to take his wife back and bemoaning, as the young Tennyson puts it, ‘that weighty task, to guard/A woman ’gainst her will’. The blank verse is confident and opulent, the language is astonishingly rich, with wide-ranging knowledge of the professional vocabularies of the lovers, a lawyer, a chemist,
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60 Democracy
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O suns and spheres and stars and belts and systems, Are ye or are ye not? Are ye realities or semblances Of that which men call real? (ll. 40–4)
Dialect poems Tennyson’s continued interest in the *Lincolnshire dialect of his boyhood is evident in the production of a series of poems in very accurate Lincolnshire dialect beginning in 1864 (thirty years after he had left Lincolnshire), when *‘The Northern Farmer’ appeared in *Enoch Arden and Other Poems. Its success spurred him to write *‘The Northern Farmer, New Style’ in 1870 and a series of poems including ‘The Spinster’s Sweet-Arts’ (1885), about an old woman talking to her cats, and ‘Owd Roä’ (1889) that develops a tale Tennyson had read in the newspaper about a black retriever rescuing a child from a burning house. ‘Dialect’ is associated in these poems with comedy and/or sentimentality. William *Wordsworth’s concern with the language of the common people, expressed in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1798), has no equivalent in Tennyson. What is evident, rather than any larger poetic theory, is a simple but deep nostalgia for the language of his youth. Tennyson’s own speech was noticeably ‘North Country’ all his life, as is evident on the 1890 *recording of his voice by the Thomas Edison Company.
Dickens, Charles (1812–70) Greatest Victorian novelist; friend of Tennyson. Tennyson and Dickens, the two most popular literary men of their age, respected each other throughout their lives, though they were never intimate friends. Dickens particularly admired the ‘Truth and Beauty’ of the 1842 *Poems; Tennyson seems to have been suspicious of Dickens’s ‘sentimentality’. Dickens put more into the friendship than Tennyson, making the poet godfather to his fourth son, Alfred Tennyson D’Orsay Dickens, in 1846, and inviting him to share the summer lodgings in Switzerland where he was writing Dombey and Son (an invitation Tennyson refused – though he did visit Dickens in Lausanne, accompanied by Edward *Moxon). Tennyson saw Dickens play Bobadil in Every Man in his Humour in 1845; they were together at *Macready’s
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a soldier, a mathematician, a sailor and a monk. Though its buoyancy and optimism were to vanish for ever, to be replaced by the adolescent melancholy of *Poems by Two Brothers (1827), there are early hints of Tennyson’s mature concerns, for example:
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Domesticity Tennyson had always looked after his younger brothers and sisters as a boy, and had given them some of the domestic security they lacked, but in his bachelor days, after Arthur Hallam’s death and during the separation from Emily *Sellwood, he spent his time travelling from one friend to another, sleeping on their floors and leaving clouds of tobacco smoke in his wake. After his marriage in 1850 he settled down to what some of Emily’s critics like Edward *FitzGerald felt was too cloying a domesticity. In fact, he travelled up to London from *Farringford several times a year, resuming his bachelor lifestyle for a time, while Emily seems to have been perfectly happy to stay at home on the *Isle of Wight. With this outlet, he proved an excellent husband and father, cherishing his two boys at home as long as was possible and writing fatherly letters when he or they were away from home. The small family unit, so unlike the family in which he had grown up, was strong and very unVictorian in its tenderness and indulgence of the two children. Tennyson enjoyed both entertaining and being entertained and a steady stream of visitors came to *Farringford, right up to the very end of his life, when Hallam *Tennyson had to prohibit them from coming to say goodbye.
‘Dora’ ‘English Idyl’, published 1842. ‘Dora’ was written by 1835 and was partly suggested by Mary Russell Mitford’s story, ‘Dora Cresswell’, which appeared in Our Village vol. iii, 1828. Tennyson had been reading *Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ to *FitzGerald and in ‘Dora’ he attempts to capture a Wordsworthian simplicity of expression. Wordsworth himself was pleased: ‘I have been attempting all my life to write a pastoral like your “Dora” and have not succeeded.’ The story is told with severe economy. The hard-hearted father, Farmer Allen, estranged from his son William because of his refusal to marry Dora, his niece, is immediately won over in Miss Mitford’s story, at the sight of his baby grandson (William having married a labourer’s daughter, Mary, and soon afterwards, having died). Tennyson avoids Mitford’s sentimentality at this point by having the old man brutally
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farewell banquet in 1851 and Tennyson heard Dickens reading A Christmas Carol in 1857. Their facial resemblance (despite Tennyson’s greater breadth and height) was remarkable. At Dickens’s funeral in Westminster Abbey in June 1870 Tennyson was mobbed by the crowd as he tried to leave, not because of his celebrity but because of his unsettling similarity to the dead man. When he saw *Millais’s sketch of Dickens’s dead face, he exclaimed, ‘It is exactly like myself!’ (Martin, 489).
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cast off Dora and take the child away to rear himself. It is only the pleading of the baby’s mother, William’s widow, Mary, that makes him finally break down, so that the ending, as in Mitford, is one of unity and familial peace. There is a sparseness of diction which occasionally reaches towards the biblical and the scene in which the child, wearing a wreath of flowers, is placed in the harvest field to await his cruel grandfather, reads as an anticipation of *Hardy – though Tennyson moves quickly away from the tragic potential towards the domestic and ‘idyllic’. For later readers, the effect is perhaps more that of a successful pastiche than of any new development in Tennyson’s own voice.
Dr Tennyson’s Library Alfred’s reading in his father’s library influenced his work throughout his career. Dr Tennyson had acquired books at the dispersal of the library of Dr Johnson’s friend, Bennet Langton, and his own library eventually contained about two and a half thousand books including classical and oriental works, history, philosophy and theology, and a small scientific collection. He educated his three eldest sons himself before they went to university and the influence of his library is strongly evident in Tennyson’s early work. The basic grounding the library provided was in Greek and Latin classics, in *Dante and in English literature – *Spenser, *Shakespeare, *Beaumont and *Fletcher, *Milton, *Pope, *Thomson, Collins, Gray, Campbell, Macpherson’s Ossian, *Byron and *Scott. There was a strong Eastern section, including the *Arabian Nights, translations of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian poetry and of the Qur’an. There was much Ancient History, Plutarch, an account of the life of Genghis Khan, a history of India and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There were books of travel, voyages to South America, journeys in the Middle East and in the Levant. There was a fine collection of romances, including the first modern (1816) reprint of Thomas *Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, the Decameron, Orlando Furioso, Don Quixote, Les Cent Nouvelles and a 12-volume collection of Ancient Romances, including the *Amadis de Gaula There was Mrs Barbauld’s 50-volume collection of British novelists (1810), individual copies of Fielding, Richardson and Smollett and Sir Walter Scott’s novels, which were being issued while Alfred was growing up. There was a rich collection of folklore including Francis Grose’s Antiquities of England and Wales and Jacob Bryant’s Analysis of Ancient Mythology. Among the examples of the literary influence of his father’s library on Tennyson, two books by G. S. Faber, writer on religion and myth, were in the library: Horae Mosaicae (1818 edition) and The Difficulties of Infidelity (2nd edition, 1833). Both helped form *‘The Lady of Shalott’. See: Paden (1942).
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Dr Tennyson’s Library
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Dr Tennyson’s Library, that of his son *Charles, and over two thousand volumes from Alfred’s own library, are all now at the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln. The ‘Inventory and Valuation of the Furniture, Plate, Linen, Books and other effects of the late Dr. Tennyson’ drawn up for probate on 8–9 June 1831 gives a list of George Clayton Tennyson’s books. Further reading: Campbell (1971–73 [1971]), pp. 1–23; Moore (1966).
Dramatic monologues Tennyson and Robert *Browning perfected this form in order to explore individual psychology and states of mind. After the battering he received from Christopher *North and J. W. *Croker for *Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and *Poems (1832), Tennyson developed during the 1830s a voice which protected him from personal attacks but which still enabled him to address deeply personal emotions. The dramatic monologue, as developed by Tennyson and by Robert Browning, became the most characteristic poetic form of the Victorian era, combining a dramatic situation with the delineation of complex and often extreme psychology. The dramatic monologue develops from the dramatic soliloquy (as in Hamlet’s ‘To Be, Or Not To Be’) but stands alone outside the confines of a play, although in some cases, as in Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, a detailed dramatic plot is constructed around it. Browning depends far more for his effects on dramatic irony; for Tennyson, the recreation of the speaker’s state of mind is the ultimate aim. There are three defining characteristics of the form, two essential and the third very usual: 1. A single speaker, obviously not the poet, speaks in a particular moment, often a critical moment, and that speech makes up the whole poem. 2. The point of the poem is the exact delineation of the speaker’s character and state of mind in such a way as to add complexity and interest: central to the effect are irony and/or paradox, based on the fact that the reader knows or deduces more about the situation than the speaker knows, or than the speaker intends to reveal. 3. Often the speaker addresses one person or a group of people, whose existence and reactions we know of only from the speaker’s own words.
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See: Tennyson, George Clayton.
Tennyson had used the dramatic lyric several times in the 1830 and the 1832 volumes: *‘Mariana’, *‘Oenone’ and *‘The Lotos-Eaters’ all convey states of mind rather than full character analysis and are not generally considered dramatic monologues. The first great dramatic monologue is *‘St Simeon Stylites’,
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probably written in 1833, before Arthur Hallam’s death. It is a full-length psychological portrait of the worst excesses of the sort of life-denying Puritanism that Tennyson knew, in milder form, in his aunt Mary *Bourne. The exploration of suicide/martyrdom is complex and the paradox at the heart of the poem is that, grotesque and monstrous though Simeon is, the possibility is left open that he may be speaking the truth. The title itself uncomfortably suggests that his arguments have been proved valid. Thus the dramatic monologue affords the expression of complex emotions without any need for the suggestion of a simple solution. Shortly after Hallam’s death in 1833, Tennyson turned to the dramatic monologue and to figures from classical myth in a double bid both to distance himself from his own grief and at the same time to be able to address it. Within the space of a few months he wrote *‘Ulysses’, *‘Tithonus’ and *‘Tiresias’. With the defining features of the dramatic monologue form in mind, it can be seen that, in ‘Ulysses’, Tennyson’s best-known example of the form, the power of the verse comes from the tension between the ‘official’ language of adventure used by Ulysses and the language and rhythms of weariness and longing for rest. Critics have suggested that, beneath several of the most strenuous lines, a line of opposite meaning can be heard, as ‘’Tis not too late to seek a newer world’ bears the impress of ‘’Tis far too late to seek a newer world’ (57). The last line, ‘To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield’ (70) is so constructed as to undercut its own surface meaning, since it ends with a heavy stress on ‘yield’. Tennyson’s comment that this poem, written less than three weeks after the news of Hallam’s death, ‘gave my feeling about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life’ (Memoir, i.196) better than anything in Idylls reveals both the strength of his longing at that time for oblivion and the power of this third person form to enable him to address deeply intimate emotions. Similarly in ‘Tithonus’, the burning question of what immortality actually is can be addressed in a way which allows Tennyson to entertain the possibility that it may after all be a nightmare. In ‘Tiresias’, the willing sacrifice of a young man, Menoeceus, who goes to his death to save the city of Thebes, is celebrated by the old blind prophet: ‘He will achieve his greatness’ (161). Tennyson addresses the question of how to find meaning in an early death while again identifying with the old left behind when the young heroes have gone. It is a particularly Victorian feeling of belatedness, which may well explain the power of these dramatic monologues in their own time. In *Maud the central question for both contemporary and later readers is to what extent the poem constitutes a dramatic monologue. The unnamed speaker’s escape to war has been read as a reflection of Tennyson’s own response to the *Crimean War, as a nationally and personally cleansing experience. It is impossible to fix the distance in this ‘monodrama’ between the narrative voice and the poet’s own, and this is even more true of the two *‘Locksley
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Dramatic monologues
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Hall’ poems. The attitudes towards race and class contained in them cannot be sensibly regarded as entirely divorced from Tennyson’s own and the shrillness of the second (‘Poor old Heraldry, poor old History, poor old Poetry’ [‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’, 249]) does sound similar to recorded comments of the old poet in his own person. (It must also be said that Tennyson himself averred of the later poem that ‘There is not one touch of biography in it from beginning to end’ [Memoir, ii.329–31].) Ultimately, the complexity of voice in the dramatic monologue can be either its strength when, as in *‘Ulysses’ it is controlled and the separate personality of the speaker carefully delineated, or, as in ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’, its weakness when there is a blurring of the personal and impersonal. Further reading: Langbaum (1985 [1957]); Ricks (1972).
‘Dream of Fair Women, A’ Dated 1832; revised for 1842 *Poems. Borrowing the device of the medieval dream poem from Geoffrey *Chaucer, Tennyson refers to him in the early verses as the ‘morning star of song’ (3) and retains the figure of Cleopatra, but otherwise takes little from his poem. Whereas Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Good Women’ celebrates women faithful in love, Tennyson’s poem tells of eight tragic women: Helen of Troy; Iphigenia, whose father Agamemnon sacrificed her before the Trojan War; Cleopatra Queen of Egypt; Jephthah’s daughter from the book of Judges in the Old Testament; Rosamund Clifford, mistress of Henry II (a story he returns to in his 1884 play *Becket); Margaret Roper, daughter of the martyr, Sir Thomas More; Joan of Arc; and Eleanor of Castile, wife of King Edward I, who, according to legend, saved his life after the battle of Acre by sucking poison from his wound. For the 1842 version Tennyson deleted the four ‘balloon stanzas’, which stand as a separate poem about a manned balloon flight and which were probably originally topical because of specific flights in Lincolnshire in the early 1830s. Arthur Hallam thought highly of the poem; despite its staginess, it deals boldly with female heroism, a subject Tennyson was to espouse again in *The Princess, and its accounts of dreaming and waking are predictably rich and strange.
Dufferin and Ava, 1st Marquis of (1826–1902)
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Blackwood, Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple Diplomat and administrator; friend of Tennyson. Lord Dufferin became a friend of Tennyson’s in the late 1850s, declaring that Tennyson’s was the only poetry he could understand. As governor-general of Canada (1872–78) he strengthened that country’s sense of federation and
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See: ‘To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava’.
Duff Gordon, Sir Alexander, and family Friends of Tennyson. When Tennyson became Poet Laureate in 1850, he began to mix with the politicians and other men of influence in English society. One of these was Sir Alexander Duff Gordon, whose wife, Lady Lucy Duff Gordon (1821–69), the author and translator, he had entertained with the *Brookfields in his bachelor days. She told the story of him lying full-length on the carpet and saying, ‘Will you please put your foot on me as a stool?’ (Martin, 318). The Duff Gordons’ daughter, Janet, was one of the few young women who proved impervious to Tennyson’s charm. When the family stayed at *Freshwater, the 16-year-old girl walked with him and at one point he asked her to tie his shoe. She refused, saying, ‘Papa says men should wait on ladies, not ladies on men’ (Martin, 448–9).
Durham, Nurse Nurse who attended Tennyson in old age. Nurse Durham came to care for Tennyson during his severe illness of September 1888, and in May 1889 accompanied him on his recuperative voyage on Lord *Brassey’s schooner, the Sunbeam. When he tried to tell her she was no longer needed, in July 1889, she refused to leave, telling him he should rather write a hymn of thanksgiving for his recovery than dismiss her. In October 1889 he did just that – showing her the poem, *‘Crossing the Bar’, before he showed it to anyone else. She helped him prepare his last collection of poems, *Demeter and Other Poems, published in December 1889.
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encouraged Tennyson’s interest in imperial matters. In October 1885, when he was governor-general of India (1884–88), he invited *Lionel and Eleanor *Tennyson on a visit, as part of Lionel’s preparation for a career in the India Office. While at Government House in Delhi, Lionel became ill with a fever, was eventually shipped home with a doctor in attendance, but died as the ship passed through the Red Sea, to which his body was, later that same day, committed.
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‘Edwin Morris’ Published 1851; one of the English Idyls. Composed in 1839 during Tennyson’s trip to the Welsh Llanberis lakes, the poem mixes idyll with Victorian melodrama. In the figure of the idealist Edwin Morris, Tennyson can deal lightheartedly with youthful passion. The narrator distances himself from Edwin’s excessively romantic vision of love, saying that he himself in contrast has a ‘wayward modern mind,/Dissecting passion’ (87–8); however, he then suffers a broken love affair very much anticipating the plot of *Maud, is chased from his beloved by an almost comic Victorian chorus of ‘Trustees and Aunts and Uncles’ and hears later of her hasty marriage to a wealthy landowner called, like Rosa *Baring’s husband, Robert. The poem seems to be a wry critique by Tennyson of his own early poetic style (lines are quarried from *‘The Gardener’s Daughter’, written in the 1830s), as well as of his own early passion for Rosa. It ends, unlike Maud written 16 years later, with forgiveness for the heroine, not so much for her own sake as because ‘she seems a part of those fresh days to me’ (142). The poem is significant for what seems like an anticipatory parody of Maud, though it is more knowing, witty and detached than the later poem. It must be read as a framed narrative rather than a lyrical outpouring and that may in itself be a useful pointer as to how Tennyson intended his readers to understand Maud. ‘Edwin Morris’ is one of the most successful of the English Idyls.
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E
‘Elaine’ Published 1859 then 1869 as *‘Lancelot and Elaine’; Idylls of the King. The fourth of the 1859 Idylls, ‘Elaine’ was written between July 1858 (at *Little Holland House) and February 1859 and was originally referred to by Tennyson’s family, and friends like Thomas *Woolner, as ‘The Maid of 68
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Astolat’. It is based on *Malory xviii 9–20, which talks of ‘the fair maid of Astolat ... Elaine le Blaunch’. It was intended to balance *‘Guinevere’ – an innocent set against a guilty love of Lancelot – and to complete the quartet started by the pairing of evil Vivien and good Enid. Tennyson said of his earlier version of the story, ‘The Lady of Shalott is evidently the Elaine of [Malory’s] Morte d’Arthur, but I do not think that I had ever heard of the latter when I wrote the former’ (Ricks, 354). In Tennyson’s later version of the story, written more than twenty years after *‘The Lady of Shalott’, Lancelot has lost his innocence and the stress is not on magical powers but on the pains of human love. The interest is as much psychological as mythical: ‘The tenderest of all natures sinks under the blight, that which is of the highest in her working her doom’, explained Tennyson (Ricks, 1621). This suggests, as do his comments on *‘The Holy Grail’, a grasping of the paradoxes of the human psyche; the diamonds in this poem, torn from their thread by the anguished queen, are both powerfully symbolic and psychologically suggestive. Tennyson’s character-drawing in the Idylls is not realistic but almost surrealist in its method.
Eliot, George Pseudonym of Mary Anne Evans (1819–80). Novelist; critic but also friend of Tennyson. George Eliot admired Tennyson’s earlier poetry but criticized *Maud in the Westminster Review, complaining that she could not share Tennyson’s belief in ‘War as the unique social regenerator’ (Chronology, 72). Poet and novelist were eventually introduced in 1871 by G. H. Lewes. Tennyson thought her ‘like the picture of Savonarola’ (Memoir, ii.107), but he called several times during the summer, reciting *‘Tears, Idle Tears’, *‘Guinevere’ (which moved her deeply) and of course, Maud. He gave a public reading at her home in 1877. Tennyson admired Eliot’s insight into character and thought Hetty Sorrel’s flight in Adam Bede one of ‘the two most pathetic things in modern prose fiction’ (Memoir, ii.225). They disagreed amicably about science and materialism, Tennyson saying, ‘Well, good luck to you and your molecules’ (ibid. ii.226). She attended the opening of *Queen Mary on 18 April 1876, and showed her affection for Tennyson by calling him ‘mi caro Poeta’ (Martin, 490).
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Emma, Queen of the Sandwich Islands 69
Emma, Queen of the Sandwich Islands Royal visitor to Tennyson on the *Isle of Wight. The dowager queen came to *Farringford in September 1865, while in England raising money for a new Anglican cathedral. Lady Franklin, Emily’s aunt, had met her on a visit to Hawaii and recommended that she come; Queen
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Emma, Queen of the Sandwich Islands
*Victoria sanctioned the visit. According to the custom of her country, Emma was actually the widow of her own half-brother, but Queen Victoria nevertheless found her ‘peculiarly civilised’ though ‘a savage’ by appearance (Thwaite, 411–12). Emily thought she was ‘calm and sweetly dignified’ and Alfred, despite his generalized comments about *race, was fascinated by her, taking her to walk on the downs, where she ran about like a child. Emma had lost her own son and *Lionel’s hazel eyes reminded her of him. Queen Emma loved Farringford and afterward observed ‘her own unworthiness to have been in intimate intercourse with the Poet Laureate’.
Empire Tennyson could be straightforwardly imperialist but the *Idylls give a more complex response to Empire. Tennyson’s vision of Empire is typical of his generation in being based upon his identification of Victorian Britain with Imperial Rome. An optimistic, expansionist vision of trade and world-wide influence is always accompanied and quietly undermined, therefore, by a knowledge of the ultimate fate of the Roman Empire – memorably recounted in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788). Once he became Poet Laureate in 1850 Tennyson consciously sought to express his sense of Britain’s place in the world. His early Laureate verse included popular attacks on Britain’s enemies, in particular the French. By the 1870s, like his countrymen, he had developed from this simple jingoism towards an idealistic vision of an imperial family of nations stretching across the globe. In 1876 Disraeli had Queen *Victoria declared ‘Empress of India’ and Imperialism became a conscious ideology. Tennyson was deeply moved, not so much by imperial power, as by the image of a ‘Family of Nations’. In *‘To the Queen’, the 1872 dedication of the Idylls of the King, he argues for the importance of Canada, in face of a recommendation that Canada should be encouraged to sever her connection with Great Britain, as she was ‘too costly’. The patriotic poems of 1852 against Louis Napoleon he recast in the 1880s as full-blown imperial odes. Thus ‘Hands All Round!’ was rewritten for Queen Victoria’s birthday on 15 March 1882, as ‘To all the loyal hearts who long/To keep our English Empire whole!’ ‘Britons Guard Your Own’ (1852) re-emerged, adapted to suit the times, as the refrain to the ‘Ode for the Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition’ in 1886:
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Britain’s myriad voices call, ‘Sons, be welded each and all, Into one imperial whole, One with Britain heart and soul!’
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Like most of his countrymen, Tennyson was very moved by the Indian Mutiny, the death of his friend and hero, General *Gordon at Khartoum, and the fates of other ‘imperial heroes’, like Sir Henry Havelock, martyrs, as he saw it, in the cause of civilization. However, another strand of his thinking is evident in the Idylls of the King, in which a much more sober analysis of Empire is given – a sense of the inevitability of change and decay: ‘the old order changeth, yielding place to new’ (‘Coming of Arthur’, 508; ‘Passing of Arthur’, 408). Even in *‘The Coming of Arthur’ there is proleptical reference to the passing of Arthur’s power: ‘And after these, King Arthur for a space ... made a realm and reigned’ (19). The end of *‘Aylmer’s Field’ (1864) anticipates Thomas *Hardy in its acknowledgement of the transience of all human projects, including the great British Empire: ‘Then the great Hall was wholly broken down ... and all is open field’ (‘Aylmer’s Field’, 846, 853). At the same time, Tennyson never seems to have lost his belief in the potentially unifying power of Empire. In 1886 he published *‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ which, while vehemently attacking all the corruptions of the age, never directly attacks the notion of Empire itself, implying only that good leadership is what is needed to hold ‘Those three hundred millions under one Imperial Sceptre now’ (117). In 1887 Tennyson published the very straightforwardly laudatory ‘On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria’, which proudly celebrates ‘Fifty years of ever-widening Empire!’ Further reading: Bevis (1999); Reynolds (2001); Rowlinson (1992).
English Idyls Published 1842 and later. Collection of pastoral poems set in contemporary England. Several of the poems in the 1842 volume form a coherent cluster, combining the pastoral mode with a contemporary setting in a way that may have been intended to answer Tennyson’s critics who felt that he did not address the nineteenth-century world. These poems are: *‘Dora’ – Tennyson himself said this was ‘modelled on Miss Mitford’s pastorals’. Mary Russell Mitford’s story ‘Dora Cresswell’ (Our Village iii, 1828) is the source. It is written simply in Wordsworthian style. *‘The Gardener’s Daughter’ or ‘The Pictures’. *‘Walking to the Mail’. The source is *Theocritus’ Fourth Idyll. *‘Audley Court’. *‘The Epic’.
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English Idyls 71
In addition, several poems published later have often been included in the category of ‘English Idyls’: *‘Edwin Morris’ or ‘The Lake’. Although not published until 1851, this poem was written in 1839, at the same time as the other ‘English Idyls’ (Memoir i.174).
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English Idyls
‘The Golden Year’ (1846) seems thematically to be a candidate for inclusion and Christopher Ricks (1969, 714) pushes its composition back to 1839. ‘The Talking Oak’.
The problem of identifying the ‘English Idyls’ is compounded by the fact that Tennyson himself never seems to have used the term directly; it emerges first in Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir, together with an explanation for the spelling of ‘idyl’: ‘my father used to spell Idyls then with one “l” for these shorter Idyls, and *Idylls with two “ls” for the epic *Idylls of the King’ (I.508). Christopher Ricks quotes Tennyson himself: ‘regarding the Greek derivation, I spelt my Idylls [of the King] with two l’s mainly to divide them from the ordinary pastoral idyls usually spelt with one l’ (1987, III, 263). There seems little doubt that Tennyson intended something identifiably different from his earlier verse to emerge from these domestic idylls. They have traditionally been read as appealing to a bourgeois public. Modelled on *Theocritus, they pay attention to the homely everyday details of life. Reinflected for the restless, rapidly changing 1830s, however, they present a vision of domestic happiness identified with Englishness, which involves, as several recent critics have observed, a deliberate exclusion of anything outside middle-class experience. They are poems of consolidation in the midst of unsettling change and, read closely, they can be found to bear subtle signs of the social tensions from which they emerged. See also: ‘The May Queen’; ‘The Miller’s Daughter’. Further reading: Ebbatson (2003); Padley (2007).
‘Enoch Arden’ Narrative poem first published in 1864. This blank verse poem stands first in the collection *Enoch Arden and Other Poems (see next entry, which also refers to the title-poem’s extraordinary contemporary popularity). The original title of the collection was ‘Idylls of the Hearth’. This may be taken as signalling a deliberate change of direction in Tennyson’s career as a poet and invoking a world as far removed as possible from that of the four recently published *Idylls of the King (1859), to which the rejected title at the same time clearly alludes. Tennyson’s concern is now with the lives of the humble and obscure. A reviewer in Chambers’ Journal thought that the poem was a ‘simple’ tale ‘nobly told’, revealing the tension between ‘simple’ and ‘nobly’. The poet is now finding in the lives and tragedies of ordinary folk an interest and even a moral grandeur that he had formerly found in Arthurian legend; and the same paradox appears in the closing lines of the poem itself, where the fisherman Enoch is described as a ‘heroic soul’.
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*‘Love and Duty’.
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The narrative runs to 911 lines but tells what is in essence a very simple story. In a small English seaport, location unspecified, ‘a hundred years ago’, three children – Annie Lee, Philip Ray and Enoch Arden – play together. The two boys are of disparate social origins, Philip being son and heir of a prosperous miller while Enoch is ‘a rough sailor’s lad’ (14). When they play at ‘keeping house’, Philip innocently suggests that they should take turns to be the ‘husband’ of Annie – and this turns out to be a foreshadowing of the central action of the poem. When they grow up, both find themselves in love with Annie, but it is Enoch, who has worked and saved hard and bought his own fishing boat, who is successful. Three children are born to them, but hard times fall on the little community, poverty strikes, and Enoch is driven to seek to retrieve his fortunes far afield by joining a vessel ‘China-bound’ (122). Nothing is heard of him for many years, during which time one of the children dies; Philip, however, still unmarried and still in love with Annie, proves a kind and generous friend to the fatherless family, and in the course of time comes to be looked upon by the surviving children as a second father. Meanwhile, after a shipwreck, Enoch is marooned on a tropical island – at first with two companions but, after their deaths, alone. After more than ten years Annie, reluctantly persuaded that he must be dead, marries Philip. Rescued at last, Enoch returns home but learns what has happened in his absence and takes a vow not to reveal that he is still living (‘Not to tell her, never to let her know’ [782]). He finds work in the village but falls ill after a year; on his deathbed he reveals his secret to his landlady and enjoins her to give his blessing to Annie, her children and Philip. In many respects the narrative is in a vein of realism that recalls the poems of George *Crabbe. At the same time, however, there is a strong element of patterning that distinguishes it from a short story in verse. Almost every significant moment in the narrative finds a parallel elsewhere in the poem, and nearly everything that happens in the latter part has been anticipated in the earlier. At the outset Annie guilelessly declares that ‘she would be little wife to both’ (36), and she spends the rest of the poem fulfilling this unconscious prophecy. As a young sailor Enoch three times rescues drowning men, anticipating the rescue of himself and his two companions after the shipwreck. In one early scene Philip is the unseen observer of the happiness of Enoch and Annie, a situation significantly varied in the much later scene where Enoch, returned but still presumed dead, observes his own place in the family now occupied by Philip. Annie’s three children, reduced to two by death soon after Enoch’s departure, become three again when she bears a child to Philip. The dying Enoch relives in his delirium the moment of his rescue from the island, his dying words (rich in irony and ambiguity) being ‘ “I am saved!” ’ (908). Having been presumed dead, he returns to life only to die a second time, now in earnest. The list could readily be extended.
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‘Enoch Arden’
Verbal repetitions, too, underline the parallels of situation. ‘So these were wed, and merrily rang the bells’: this line first occurs when the wedding of Enoch and Annie is described, then reappears when she and Philip go through a marriage ceremony that is, unknown to them, no marriage at all. (A further echo, perhaps, is Enoch’s auditory hallucination when, alone on his island, he seems to hear the bells of the village church.) Two scenes in the wood, involving first Enoch and Annie and then Philip and Annie, include the same descriptive details in exactly the same words: ‘Just where the prone edge of the wood began/To feather toward the hollow’ (67–8, 370–1). There is also some marked numerological patterning involving the number three: among other instances, three playmates at the outset, Enoch and Annie’s three children, Philip knocking fatefully three times on Annie’s door as he begins his wooing, three men marooned on the island, and Enoch declaring on his deathbed, ‘I think I have not three more days to live’ (847) (he duly dies on the third day). The theme of the sailor’s return after a long absence and often with ensuing matrimonial complications was not a new one but makes many appearances in the popular literature of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to Tennyson, the central situation of the poem was suggested to him by his friend Thomas *Woolner, was based on an actual case, and ‘came out of Suffolk’ (Memoir, ii.7), but he adds cautiously that ‘something like the same story is told in Brittany and elsewhere’. George *Crabbe’s ‘The Parting Hour’ contains many of the same ingredients as ‘Enoch Arden’; it first appeared in Crabbe’s Tales in Verse (1812), and Tennyson, who admired Crabbe greatly, is known to have been reading it in 1859 and again in 1862. Elizabeth Gaskell’s short story ‘The Manchester Marriage’, first published in the 1858 Christmas Number of *Dickens’s magazine Household Words, also contains some suggestive parallels and is another possible source. Also in 1858 a popular poet of the day, Adelaide Anne Procter, published a successful volume of poems, Legends and Lyrics, that includes a poem entitled ‘Homeward Bound’. This too is a plausible source. Literary sources aside, 1861 saw the passing of the Offences against the Person Act, which took up (along with much else) the question of what may be termed innocent or unwitting bigamy. The effect of the Act was to renew the provision in a statute from the time of James I that in certain circumstances bigamy was not culpable. The crucial point was that the missing spouse should not have been seen or heard of ‘for the space of seven years’, and in the poem this is, of course, Annie’s situation. There was wide public discussion of the Bill before its passage through Parliament, and Tennyson may very well have become aware of the issues at stake. The final three lines of the poem have often been attacked as bathetic and as undermining the solemnity of the antepenultimate line, while the emphasis
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on the cost of Enoch’s funeral has been a particular object of criticism and even derision.
The phrase should surely, however, be seen as ironic: poverty has driven Enoch to exile and loss of his family, and the money lavished on his obsequies comes too late to be of any use to him. This reading gains force from the knowledge that Tennyson is known to have deplored the lavish and ostentatious burial customs of the period. The immense popularity of ‘Enoch Arden’ led to its transfer to a variety of media. It must have appeared on the programme of countless penny readings, and there were at least twenty-eight translations, three stage versions and eventually four adaptations for the silent cinema, as well as a setting by Richard Strauss for reciter and piano (1897).
Enoch Arden and Other Poems Volume of poems published in 1864. The Enoch Arden volume, published in August 1864, exemplifies Tennyson’s versatility over a range of poetic forms and genres. It opens with two long narrative poems, the title-poem and *‘Aylmer’s Field’, and also includes the dramatic monologues *‘The Grandmother’ and *‘Northern Farmer, Old Style’ (the latter in the *Lincolnshire dialect). In the section titled ‘Miscellaneous’ the best known are another dramatic monologue, *‘Tithonus’, and the poignant lyric *‘In the Valley of Cauteretz’, a late memorial to Arthur Hallam. Less memorably, the same section also contains instances of Tennyson in his capacity as Laureate (‘A Welcome to Alexandra’, ‘Ode Sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition’ [1862]). The volume concludes with a group of ‘Experiments’ that testify to Tennyson’s unflagging interest in *classical literature and especially the adaptation of classical metres to English verse. These include ‘Boadicea’, ‘On Translations of Homer’ (hexameters and pentameters), ‘Milton’ (alcaics), the engaging hendecasyllabics beginning ‘O you chorus of indolent reviewers’ and incorporating references to *Catullus, and a ‘Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad into Blank Verse’. Although the volume does not, by prevailing modern judgements, contain a significant quantity of Tennyson’s best work, it sold extremely well. It has been described by John Jump as ‘an extraordinarily popular volume, perhaps more so than any other by its author’ (Jump, 13). Its success was largely thanks to the wide appeal of the title-poem, which Sir Charles Tennyson has gone so far as to
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So past the strong heroic soul away. And when they buried him the little port Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.
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nominate as his grandfather’s most popular poem. On the day of publication 17,000 copies were sold and 60,000 by the end of the year. Tennyson’s literary earnings for the second half of 1864 amounted to nearly seven thousand pounds, and ultimately the volume was to prove his most widely popular. Two very early responses to the volume, and especially the title-poem, are those of Walter *Bagehot and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The former’s essay ‘Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or: Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry’ appeared anonymously in the National Review for November 1864. This finds in Tennyson an example of artificial or contrived simplicity in contrast to the genuine simplicity of Wordsworth. Hopkins, still a student at Oxford, wrote at length about ‘Enoch Arden’ in a private letter dated 10 September 1864 where he developed the idea of Tennyson as an example of ‘Parnassian’ or highly wrought and highly self-conscious poetry (Jump, 278–81).
Epic Long narrative poem celebrating heroic achievement. The epic is the natural form for recording the exploits of legendary heroes and thereby reinforcing a sense of national identity. The 24-book epic of *Homer’s Iliad followed by the Odyssey both narrate events surrounding the Trojan War, as does *Virgil’s 12-book Aeneid, composed when Roman writers were striving to emulate their Greek predecessors and to produce a great national literature. *Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained (1671) are conscious attempts to celebrate the greatness of English language and culture by giving England her own epic. Tennyson looked, as Milton had done, for a subject for a great English epic, and very early in his youth lighted on the legends of King Arthur. His reason for calling them ‘Idylls’ is probably connected to the intended method of publication: he had the 12 books of his Arthurian epic in mind from the beginning, ‘But then I thought that a small vessel, built on fine lines, is likely to float further down the stream of Time than a big raft’ (Ricks, 1460). *Gladstone nevertheless wanted the 1859 Idylls to be called an ‘Epic’, since he felt that they would have a valuable place in the politics of the nation, as suggesting the sort of Englishness which he himself espoused. Despite his rejection of the term ‘epic’, Tennyson took pains to reorganize his 11 Idylls into 12, the Virgilian epic number, before publishing them as a finished work in 1885.
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‘Epic, The’ Dated 1842; original frame for the *‘Morte d’Arthur’. Tennyson added this 52-line prologue and 31-line epilogue to the original 1833 poem before its publication in 1842, perhaps as *FitzGerald said,
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to ‘give a reason for telling an old-world tale’ (Ricks, 582), since the story of the contemporary poet Everard Hall links the Victorian reader directly to the mythical past. Included among *‘English Idyls’ in the 1842 volume, the poem suggests but then undercuts pastoral idyl. Everard Hall, the poet, doubtful of the justification for his ‘epic, his King Arthur, some twelve books’, has burnt them: ‘Why take the style of those heroic times? ... these twelve books of mine/Were faint Homeric echoes, nothing worth’ (35, 38–9). His friend Francis Allen has, however, plucked the eleventh book from the flames: the ‘Morte d’Arthur’. This fascinatingly self-reflexive passage perhaps suggests Tennyson’s fear of committing himself, in the contemporary climate, to a larger plan. It is also part of a continuing debate between Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett *Browning, who, despite her admiration for her friend, felt, with most of her generation, that poetry should directly address its own age. (Tennyson said, ‘Mrs Browning wanted me to continue this: she has put my answer in Aurora Leigh’ [Ricks, 583]) The later modification of ‘Epic’ to ‘Idyll’ suggests a change of purpose. Tennyson later insisted that he had never intended to write an ‘Epic’: ‘I should be crazed to attempt such a thing in the heart of the 19th Century’ (Ricks 1972: 265). Another example of what Christopher Ricks calls Tennyson’s ‘art of the penultimate’ (Ricks, 506) is the implication, in 1842, that the finished Idylls would include a twelfth episode after the death of Arthur in the eleventh book. Perhaps Tennyson was at that stage intending to emulate *Malory, who followed his Morte d’Arthur with ‘The Dolorous Death and Departing out of this World of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere’. Psychologically, there is yet another example here of the elision of the identities of Tennyson and Hallam: Everard contains attributes of both, most obviously in a stanza later transferred to ‘The Antechamber’: For having lately met with Everard Hall, I marvelled what an arch the brain had built Above his ear and what a settled mind Tempered the peaceful light of hazel eyes Observing all things. (10–14) This, says Ricks, ‘almost certainly describes Arthur Hallam’. However, the description of Hall reading is, according to *FitzGerald, very like Tennyson himself:
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... and the poet little urged, But with some prelude of disparagement, Read, mouthing out his hollow oes and aes, Deep-chested music. (‘The Epic’, 48–51)
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Epilepsy
Tennyson’s grandfather, father, uncle and at least one of his cousins, all suffered from this disease, considered shameful in the nineteenth century because it was thought to be caused by masturbation and was linked to *madness. Tennyson’s identification with the mental and physical sufferings of his father was such that he thought he himself was going blind – significantly, another symptom linked in the popular mind with masturbation. It is probable that it was only after Dr James *Gully of Malvern had convinced him, by the end of the 1840s, that he had not inherited the disease and that he therefore could not transmit it to any descendants, that he felt able to marry. See also: Tennyson, Emily, Lady.
Eyre, Edward John (1815–1901) Eyre had been an indefatigable explorer in Australasia before becoming lieutenant-governor of New Zealand (1846–53), governor of St Vincent (1854–60) and finally governor of Jamaica (1864–66). In decisively suppressing a native rebellion and proclaiming martial law, he sentenced over six hundred people to death and was quickly denounced by some commentators in England for cruelty. Eyre’s actions divided British public opinion. A ‘Jamaica Committee’ made up of J. S. *Mill, Thomas *Huxley, Herbert Spencer and others condemned him and endeavoured to bring him to trial for murder. His supporters included Thomas *Carlyle, Charles *Kingsley and John *Ruskin, who set up a rival committee for his defence. Tennyson passionately defended Eyre against *Gladstone at a dinner at Thomas *Woolner’s, recorded by John Addington *Symonds: ‘We are too tender to savages ... Niggers are tigers, niggers are tigers’. When someone pointed out that Englishmen too can be cruel, he said, ‘Not like Oriental cruelty’ (significantly regarding ‘foreignness’ as a single condition, rather than a range of cultural differences). (See also: Race.) Coincidentally, Eyre, like Tennyson, had attended *Louth Grammar School in *Lincolnshire, though this link is unlikely to have been a factor in Tennyson’s unswerving support for his actions. In the event, Eyre was quickly recalled to England, commended for his decisiveness but blamed for his ‘unnecessary rigour’, and in 1874 retired to Shropshire to live out his days on a colonial governor’s pension.
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Epilepsy
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Falcon, The Produced 1879; Tennyson’s fourth published play. Based on a story by Boccaccio (the ninth novel of the fifth day of the Decameron, this one-act romantic comedy was begun by Tennyson while he waited hopefully for Sir Henry *Irving to agree to produce the much more ambitious *Becket. Irving had suggested that he write a short play more suited to contemporary taste. The Falcon was produced by the actor-managers, William and Madge Kendal (who also starred as the lovers, Federigo and Giovanna) at the St James’s Theatre in December 1879 and ran for 67 nights, even though it was preceded by a mediocre three-act comedy called The Queen’s Shilling. The Prince and Princess of Wales saw it and approved. Tennyson himself thought it ‘stately and tender’. Involving only four characters, the play centres upon the poverty of a noble count whose last treasured possession, the falcon, he chivalrously serves up to his lady as the only food in the house. *FitzGerald was scathing about ‘two people reconciled to love over a roasted Hawk’. The play was not published until 1884, when it appeared in a volume with *The Cup.
Farringford Tennyson’s *Isle of Wight home from 1853. The Tennysons leased and then bought Farringford near *Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, after over two years’ abortive searching for a suitable home, following their marriage in 1850. It was an extended Georgian house, built in 1806, with about fifteen rooms, reminiscent of Tennyson’s boyhood home, *Somersby Rectory, though considerably larger. There were views over the Solent and nearby walks on the high Downs. Farringford became a magnet for Tennyson’s visitors but also for tourists, who plagued them every summer. In 1868 the Tennysons built *Aldworth, to protect their privacy and to have
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80 Farringford
‘Fatima’ (1832; revised 1842) Called ‘O Love, Love, Love! Oh withering might!’ in 1832, the poem was given its new title and a second stanza in the 1842 volume. Tennyson models it on *Sappho’s Fragment 2. The name ‘Fatima’ is derived from the *Arabian Nights. The female speaker awaits her lover who dare not come for fear of the husband. The urgent eroticism is in stark contrast to the stagnant despair of *‘Mariana’, as the oriental setting contrasts with the *Lincolnshire ‘moated grange’, and seems to liberate the poet to be able to deal with female desire. The verse form is identical to that of *‘The Lady of Shalott’, without the refrain: one single rhyme continues through each verse, increasing the emotional intensity. ‘Eleanore’ is another adaptation of the same Sapphic fragment. The poem is noteworthy as the most blatantly erotic of Tennyson’s work.
FitzGerald, Edward (1809–83) Author, translator and lifelong friend of Tennyson. Tennyson and FitzGerald met when both were at Trinity College, *Cambridge, and, despite the difference in their social origins (FitzGerald came from a wealthy upper-class background), subsequently formed a close friendship. They met frequently during Tennyson’s bachelor years, and his friend’s letters contain many glimpses of him during this period. FitzGerald was a man of simple tastes and modest lifestyle, and after Tennyson’s marriage, as the Laureate’s fame grew and his lifestyle became grander, they saw much less of each other and the friendship cooled somewhat. Though FitzGerald continued to write to him, Tennyson, a notoriously bad correspondent, rarely replied. Their last meeting was in September 1876, when Tennyson, accompanied by his son *Hallam, called unexpectedly on FitzGerald at his home in Woodbridge, Suffolk. The occasion is touchingly described by FitzGerald in a letter to Fanny Kemble (21 September 1876) (Page, 126). No less touching is Tennyson’s poetic account of the meeting, written some seven years later: *‘To E. FitzGerald’ is a warmly affectionate and quietly humorous tribute to his friend, and one of the finest of his personal poems. Sadly, FitzGerald died before the poem was published and was never to know how much their friendship still meant to Tennyson.
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a home closer to London. They would spend every summer there but always return to Farringford in the autumn. Thus Farringford for Emily represented Christmas, family and home, while Aldworth epitomized the more public side of Tennyson’s life.
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In contrast to Tennyson’s intense dedication to the vocation of poet, there is something of the dilettante or gentleman-amateur of letters about FitzGerald. Among various minor literary enterprises now virtually forgotten, however, his free rendering of The Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám has achieved enduring fame.
Fletcher, John See: Beaumont, Francis (1584–1616) and John Fletcher (1579–1625).
‘Flower in the Crannied Wall’ Published 1869 volume (dated 1870), The Holy Grail and other poems. ‘The flower was plucked out of a wall at “Waggoners Wells” near Haslemere” ’, Tennyson revealed (Ricks, 1193). G. F. *Watts’s statue at Lincoln shows the poet holding the flower, with the words engraved on the plinth. Placed in the ‘Holy Grail’ volume directly after *‘The Higher Pantheism’, it shows Tennyson’s alternative approach to metaphysics – via the simplicities of nature. The thought that the mystery of life is contained as much in microcosm as in vastness is one Tennyson must have encountered in a poet with whom he is rarely compared, William Blake: To see a World in a grain of sand And a Heaven in a wild flower. To hold Infinity in the palm of a hand And Eternity in an hour. In expressing this whole idea in miniature, in six lines, Tennyson’s tiny poem, like Blake’s, embodies its own theme.
Foresters, The Written 1881; produced 1892: Tennyson’s seventh and last published play. After the success of *The Cup, Henry *Irving suggested the subject of Robin Hood and sent Tennyson historical material. Tennyson visited Sherwood Forest (as he had visited Canterbury Cathedral for *Becket and Battle Abbey for *Harold) and finished the writing in 1881, only to have the play rejected by Irving as lacking in dramatic excitement. Tennyson’s aim was to ‘sketch the state of the people in another great transition period of the making of England, when the barons sided with the people and eventually won for them the Magna Charta (sic)’ (Memoir, ii.173). He based the play on the old Robin
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See also: ‘To E. FitzGerald’.
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Hood ballads and included a song previously entitled ‘National Song’ and printed in the 1830 *Poems with an anti-French chorus, which was altered in the stage version. Tennyson’s play presents Robin and his Merry Men as an ideal community, like that of King Arthur and his Knights, and, like them, chivalrously respectful of womanhood. The play was successful in New York, opening on 17 March 1892, with Tyrone Power playing Much the Miller’s son, and with incidental music by Sir Arthur Sullivan. However, when the same producer, Augustin Daly, staged the play in London in 1893, it failed disastrously.
Forster, John (1812–76) Critic and biographer; friend of Tennyson. Forster knew most of the literary men of his day; he contributed to The Examiner, the Quarterly and the Edinburgh Review and wrote biographies of his friends Walter Savage Landor (1869) and Charles *Dickens (1872–74). As a friend of *Bulwer-Lytton he was involved in the quarrel over ‘The New Timon’, Bulwer’s poetic attack on Tennyson in 1845; Forster persuaded Tennyson to publish his angry reply, *‘The New Timon and the Poets’, in Punch in 1846. Forster was jealous of Dickens’s fondness for Tennyson; he was also offended by Tennyson’s dislike of letter-writing and his secrecy about his marriage in 1850, but received a very placatory and revealing letter beginning ‘Come, Forster, don’t be angry with me ... ’ (Letters, 1, 331 [10(?) July 1850]). Forster read out Tennyson’s sonnet to *Macready at the latter’s Farewell Dinner in 1851; and as editor of The Examiner he published *‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ on 9 December 1854. He was also the recipient of one of Tennyson’s most moving letters when *Emily gave birth to a still-born boy in April 1851. (Tennyson wrote many letters about the birth.)
Fox, Caroline (1819–71) Diarist and acquaintance of Tennyson. A member of a prominent Cornish Quaker family, Caroline Fox met Tennyson when he toured *Cornwall and the Scilly Isles with his friend F. T. *Palgrave in August–September 1860. Her Journal, first published in 1882 and re-published in a fuller version in 1972, contains impressions of the two friends. She found Palgrave ‘charmingly enthusiastic’ about Tennyson’s genius, and reported his view that ‘if (Tennyson) had never written a line of poetry, he should have felt him none the less a poet’ (Fox 1882: 324).
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The Tennysons travelled in France during several holidays and visiting the Louvre in Paris became an important and necessary experience for Tennyson. However, politically he shared his countrymen’s continuing prejudice against the French, following the Napoleonic wars. His generation still carried their parents’ memories of the French Revolution and there was a genuine fear, apparently confirmed in 1848, the Year of Revolutions, that England would be infected by the unrest which seemed to characterize the Continent of Europe, when opposition to Louis Philippe came to a head in an armed insurrection in Paris in February. Louis Philippe was forced to abdicate and, by December, Louis Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon I, had been elected President of France. He led an armed intervention which re-established the temporal power of Pope Pius IX, and, three years after his election, on 2 December 1852, proclaimed himself Emperor of France as Napoleon III. Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état, and the knowledge that he modelled himself upon his hated uncle, led to widespread fear in England of the possibility of a French invasion. Alfred and *Emily both contributed to a fund set up by Coventry *Patmore to raise a force of volunteer riflemen. Tennyson wrote a series of impassioned poems which he published anonymously in the press, to alert his countrymen: ‘The Penny-Wise’, ‘Rifle Clubs!!!’, ‘Britons, Guard Your Own’, ‘For the Penny-Wise’, ‘The Third of February, 1852’, ‘Hands All Round!’ and ‘Suggested by Reading an Article on a Newspaper’. He does say, in ‘Britons, Guard Your Own’: ‘We hate not France, but France has lost her voice’ (19). However, the identification of France, as well as of Wales, Ireland and Scotland, with Celtic emotionalism always made Tennyson uneasy. His prejudice emerges in *In Memoriam in ‘the schoolboy heat,/the blind hysterics of the Celt’ (Lyric cix, 15–16). Fear of the French dissipated when, in 1854, France and Great Britain formed an alliance to challenge Russian power in the Near East, which resulted in the *Crimean War. Tennyson’s references to France are generally uncomplimentary, a rare exception being the ‘Sonnet: To Victor Hugo’, commemorating his son *Lionel’s visit to the great playwright in 1877 which suggests a progressive internationalism: ‘I know not – England, France, all man to be/Will make one people ere man’s race be run’ (10–11). See also: Empire.
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Franklin, Sir John (1786–1847) Explorer; uncle of Emily *Sellwood. After two great expeditions through Northern Canada to the Arctic Sea, Franklin, knighted in 1829, governed Van Diemen’s Land from 1837 to 1843
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before embarking on what was to be his last voyage in search of the NorthWest Passage through Northern Canada. One of Franklin’s sisters, Sarah, was the mother of Emily, Anne and Louisa Sellwood. He attended Louisa’s marriage to Charles *Tennyson Turner in Horncastle in May 1836 and in June met Tennyson at supper at the Sellwoods’, where Tennyson’s casual behaviour and pipe-smoking apparently vexed him. Emily’s father, Henry Sellwood, was Franklin’s solicitor and ‘dearest friend’. Franklin’s 1845 Arctic expedition never returned. Lady Franklin sent out many relief expeditions and the three ships were eventually found trapped in the ice and deserted. Franklin had died in 1847; his crews had survived for many more months but they too had died in the end. In 1875 Tennyson’s epitaph for Franklin was placed on his memorial in Westminster Abbey. It is one of his most successful epitaphs, understated and suggesting, with the repeated negatives, the dreadful absence of its subject and the emptiness of his fate: Not here! the white North has thy bones; and thou, Heroic sailor-soul, Art passing on thine happier voyage now Toward no earthly pole.
‘Frater Ave Atque Vale’ Published 1885, in *Tiresias and Other Poems. The poem was written on a visit to Sirmio in Italy in June 1880. Tennyson’s brother *Charles had died in April 1879 and *Hallam, worried about his father’s health, had taken him travelling through Europe. Tennyson combines two poems by *Catullus, one praising the beauty of Sirmio, the other mourning his brother’s death. The effect is peculiarly poignant, as in *‘Tears, Idle Tears’. The trochaic octameters combine the rhythm of the rowing (‘Row us out from Desenzano’), the pulse of grief, and the throbbing ‘Passion of the Past’. This is one of three poems associated with Charles. The others are ‘Prefatory Poem to My Brother’s Sonnets’ (1880) and Lyric lxxix from *In Memoriam, in which Tennyson apologizes to his favourite brother for seeming to neglect him, in mourning Arthur Hallam: ‘ “More than my brothers are to me,” – /Let this not vex thee, noble heart!’ (1–2).
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Freshwater Small village on the west coast of the *Isle of Wight: Tennyson’s home from 1853. The little village provided Tennyson with a rich assortment of neighbours: Julia Margaret *Cameron moved there in 1860 and in her wake came a stream
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of visitors, including the sculptor G. F. *Watts and his young wife Ellen *Terry, still in her teens. *Thackeray’s daughters came to live there after his death and in 1864 there were constant balls at Mrs Cameron’s house, Dimbola, and parties at *Farringford. One of the guests observed to Anne Thackeray: ‘Everybody is either a genius, or a poet, or a painter or peculiar in some way; is there nobody commonplace?’ (Martin, 447). *Garibaldi visited in the spring of 1864 and planted a commemorative tree, which was soon stripped by souvenir-hunters. Ellen Terry ran from her marriage after less than a year, seeking comfort at Farringford. There were more ordinary friends like the *Simeons and later W. G. *Ward, but Mrs Cameron’s place, when she departed for Ceylon in 1876, was taken by the *Prinseps and their permanent lodger, the lonely Watts, and by Mrs Sabine *Greville, another well-connected lady who adored Tennyson. Julia Margaret *Cameron’s great-niece, Virgina Woolf, wrote a comedy, Freshwater, based on the eccentric Victorian community. More recently, Lynne Truss in Tennyson’s Gift (1996), again exploits the comic potential of the group surrounding Tennyson in the 1860s. See also: Ritchie, Anne, Lady.
Fytche, Elizabeth See Tennyson, Elizabeth (‘Eliza’ née Fytche).
Fytche family Tennyson’s mother, Elizabeth Fytche, was the daughter of a former vicar of *Louth in *Lincolnshire. His maternal family continued to live in Louth during his boyhood. His widowed grandmother was a severe old lady with whom he reluctantly stayed while a day boy at Louth School. His Aunt Mary Anne Fytche was kindly and comforted him when his school life proved difficult. She and her brother, John Lewis Fytche, who lived in Thorpe Hall, Louth, were involved in negotiations with Old George *Tennyson during the 1820s, when Tennyson’s father, George Clayton *Tennyson, was declining as a consequence of epilepsy and alcohol addiction. Dr Tennyson in his unbalanced state considered the Fytche family to be his enemies (he called his brother-in-law ‘a perfect Demon’), but both sides of the family struggled to cope with his excesses and took responsibility for the education and safety of the Tennyson children. Tennyson’s cousin, Lewis Fytche, was close to the *Somersby family and many family letters, including notably lively missives from Tennyson’s youngest sister, *Cecilia, are addressed to him.
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Garden, Francis (1810–84) Cambridge Apostle; theologian. Among the *Apostles Garden was closest to Robert *Monteith. Known as ‘the Scotch duo’, they travelled together in Europe during their Cambridge days and visited Tennyson at *Somersby (where Frederick *Tennyson found them ‘rather too magnificent for a little parsonage in a remote corner of *Lincolnshire’ [Martin, 148]) and Hallam in London. Garden reviewed the 1842 *Poems enthusiastically for the Christian Remembrancer (which he edited), though he implied that the poems were rather removed from ordinary life. In later life he married and settled in Edinburgh, where he published the Dictionary of English Philosophical Terms (1878) and other works.
‘Gardener’s Daughter, The’ Written 1833–34; one of the English Idyls (1842). More richly erotic than the earlier poetry, this blank verse tale of love and friendship, written at *Cambridge, is based on *Theocritus’ Seventh Idyll and celebrates Tennyson’s deep friendship with Arthur Hallam as well as Hallam’s love of Emily *Tennyson. Tennyson makes the narrator an artist and the subtitle, ‘The Pictures’, suggests his deliberate stress on the visual. It is close to *‘The Miller’s Daughter’ in its mixture of youth and age and to *‘Audley Court’ and *‘Walking to the Mail’ in its mood of youthful happiness. Tennyson’s friendship with Hallam is suggested in the narrator’s love for Eustace and Hallam’s love for Tennyson’s sister Emily in Eustace’s love for Juliet. However, in an unused preface, ‘The Antechamber’, Tennyson’s detailed portrait of Eustace is much more a self-portrait than a portrait of Hallam. This confusion of identities might simply suggest the danger of a straightforward biographical reading: it
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might more interestingly suggest that merging of identities which Tennyson often describes in his sonnets to his friend. The Gardener’s Daughter, Rose, herself is purely imaginary – though Tennyson’s emotions had been stirred by both Rosa *Baring and Emily *Sellwood while he was revising the poem. The intended series of ‘Daughter’ poems never materialized but this poem was finally printed in the 1842 volume. Tennyson refused to publish his other blank verse love story, *‘The Lover’s Tale’, because it was ‘full and rich ... full of faults’ (Ricks, 299), and he pruned this poem during the years before publication in an attempt to correct a similar excessiveness. The poem has one more biographical significance: in early August 1833 Tennyson read fragments of it to his friends in London, including Hallam, on the eve of Hallam’s departure to the Continent. This was to be their last meeting.
‘Gareth and Lynette’ Idyll (1872); second in the final order of the Idylls of the King. Begun in 1869, the Idyll caused Tennyson compositional problems and was temporarily set aside. It was published with ‘The Last Tournament’ as a springtime idyll of ‘the golden days of Camelot’, to balance, in the youthful Gareth, the ruined Pelleas in *‘Pelleas and Ettarre’. The narrative, uniquely, is straightforwardly linear, based on the story of Beaumains in *Malory vii, though the opening 430 lines are original, recounting Gareth’s efforts to escape from his loving mother and become Arthur’s knight. The four enemy knights he encounters – the Morning Star, Noonday Sun, Evening Star and Death – suggest the larger seasonal pattern of the Idylls. Illusion and reality are confused: Gareth, though royal, becomes a kitchen knave; Lynette rejects him despite his knightly prowess, until he faces the knight of Death, who is actually ‘a blooming boy’ in disguise. Camelot, as Gareth approaches it, seems an illusion; even Lynette is elusive, merely an emissary for her sister Lyonors, who never appears. Tennyson exaggerates the conventions of romance here in order to set off the tragic later idylls. Gareth’s frequent laughter suggests the self-conscious playfulness of this Idyll, which ends with a rare reference to the instability of narrative itself as Tennyson foregrounds his dialogue with Malory: And he that told the tale in older times Says that Sir Gareth wedded Lyonors, But he, that told it later, says Lynette. (1391–3)
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Garibaldi, Guisseppe (1807–82) Italian patriot: visitor to *Farringford in 1864.
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Garibaldi’s heroic military exploits in the cause of Italian reunification were much admired in England. In April 1864, having been granted the freedom of the City of London, he came to Farringford to greet the Poet Laureate. There were crowds at the gate and flags hanging from the windows. The two had trouble understanding each other until they quoted Italian poetry. Garibaldi, to Tennyson’s dismay, knew little of *Dante, whom he considered ‘Popish’. He planted a wellingtonia tree (later stripped by souvenir hunters). Tennyson afterwards commented that he had ‘the divine stupidity of the hero’ (Martin, 450). See also: Revolutions.
Geology Tennyson’s reading of geology moulded part of *In Memoriam. Tennyson read Sir Charles *Lyell’s Principles of Geology in spring 1837. It had been published in three volumes between 1830 and 1833. Tennyson’s interest in geology – which he was later to link, in ‘Parnassus’ (1889), with astrology as ‘terrible Muses’, predated Lyell and is evident in early poems such as *‘Armageddon’ with its enraptured descriptions of volcanic eruption, the changes in the movements of streams and the desolation of the surface of the earth. Processes of change fascinated him from the beginning and he was very ready, unlike many of his contemporaries, to accept Lyell’s vision of erosion and sedimentation as the moving principles behind the landscape. This also opened up for him the aeons of time which his imagination eagerly grasped as key to the terrible wonders of the universe. In one stanza of *In Memoriam he neatly sums up Lyell’s theory of ‘Uniformitarianism’ and gradual change: The moanings of the homeless sea, The sound of streams that swift or slow Draw down Aeonian hills, and sow The dust of continents to be. (Lyric xxxv, 9–12) He debates with Lyell later in the famous ‘Evolutionary Stanzas’: So careful of the type?’ but no. From scarpèd cliff and quarried stone She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go.’ (Lyric lvi)
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At the end of his career, in *‘Vastness’, he is still envisaging a geologically governed universe, bringing together here his two ‘Terrible Muses’: ‘Many a planet by many a sun may roll with the dust of a vanished race’ (2).
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The Geological Society of London was founded in 1807, only two years before Tennyson was born. The work of Georges Cuvier and others established the science of palaeontology during the 1820s from the study of fossils. This eventually led to the discovery and naming of ‘dinosaurs’. Geological strata were simultaneously being classified and, in Tennyson’s youth, the process of ‘mapping’ the universe was well underway. Tennyson’s early poems are full of cataclysm, though they are largely derived from literary sources. In the 1820s he regularly read the Quarterly Review, which contained some striking anonymous articles by the young Charles Lyell, and which captured Tennyson’s imagination. ‘All truth is change’, he wrote in Poems (1830). Adam Sedgwick and William *Whewell, who both taught the young Tennyson at *Cambridge, were believers in the catastrophism theory of creation, the belief that the world’s landscape has developed by a series of natural cataclysms (a theory compatible, in the minds of some religious thinkers, with a belief in Noah’s Flood). Tennyson, despite his love of catastrophist imagery – volcanoes, cataclysms – was already much more inclined to believe in slow change and in 1830 produced a genuinely ‘geological’ sonnet, ‘The constant spirit of the world exults’, which concludes: As in the oldest crusts of the Earth we find Enormous fossilbones and shapes imprest Of ancient races that have ceased to be. (12–14) This is advanced thinking for 1830. Even bolder is ‘This Earth is wondrous, change on change’, which conveys a wild optimism in the discoveries of geology. He responded calmly to William Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise on the power, wisdom and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation, and satirized the controversy in *‘The Epic’ in an annoying parson ‘hawking at Geology’ (16). His reading of Lyell in 1836 moved his imagination deeply, especially Lyell’s sense of the change of the Earth’s climate: in the cold spring of 1837 he wrote: The tenth of April! is it not? Yet Nature wears her frozen robe. How deep, Charles Lyell, are we got In that great winter of the globe? (‘The tenth of April is it not?’, 1–4)
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Early in In Memoriam he refers to the older, discredited theories of a ‘central fire’, but later his reading of Lyell produces the despairing ‘Evolutionary Stanzas’ as he recognizes Lyell’s underlying point: there is endless change, but NOT endless development or progress. Only towards the end of the poem, by which time he had read Robert *Chambers’s Vestiges of Creation (1844) and
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regained his belief in teleology, can he look at Lyell’s changes and assert that the laws of the spirit are different from the laws of geology:
In *The Princess, Tennyson makes his heroine an amateur geologist, and includes in the poem two fossil elephants, which he had found in current geological discoveries. ‘Nature brings not back the Mastodon’ (*‘The Epic’, 36) shows a brave acceptance of the end of species. Meanwhile he was himself becoming something of an amateur geologist, exploring the cliffs at Whitby and later at *Freshwater, composing metaphors based on what he saw and meditating on the fossils which he collected. Tennyson was much better prepared than many of his contemporaries for the ideas loosed on the world by *Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). In 1865 Professor Richard Owen, the eminent anatomist and enemy of Darwin, came to *Farringford and the two men examined large fossil bones dug out of a nearby cliff. Poems directly relating to Darwin’s ideas are few, but one, ‘Guess well’ (c.1876) contains the memorable lines, Courage, old Clio! We have read the rocks ... We are more than horse or dog Whose one dumb record is their limbs and brains. Towards the end of his life, Tennyson persisted in his geological researches and was moved to renewed pessimism by the speculations of Lord Kelvin that both earth and sun were cooling down. His imagery in *‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’, sadly, is of dying volcanoes, very different from the depiction of molten energy in ‘Armageddon’: his own favourite line in ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ was: ‘Cold upon the dead volcano sleeps the gleam of dying day’ (42).
‘Geraint and Enid’
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They melt like mists, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go. But in my spirit will I dwell, And dream my dream, and hold it true ... (Lyric cxxiii)
Second half of one of the 1859 Idylls; fourth Idyll in the final order. The lines which now make up ‘Geraint and Enid’ were privately printed in 1857 and published as the second half of ‘Enid’, one of the 1859 Idylls, with ‘Vivien’, ‘Guinevere’ and ‘Elaine’. Tennyson’s subtitle, ‘The False and the True’ stresses the contrast between the deceitfulness of Vivien and Guinevere and
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the loyalty of Elaine and Enid. (The first half of the poem is now the separate Idyll, *‘The Marriage of Geraint’.) The title was expanded to ‘Geraint and Enid’ in 1869. The poem was divided into two parts in 1873 and given its final title in 1886. This idyll is based on the *Mabinogion, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest (1849). It was begun on 16 April 1856. Hallam *Tennyson’s headnote opens as follows: ‘The sin of Lancelot and Guinevere begins to breed.’ Geraint, mistakenly convinced of his wife’s infidelity (because of the example of Guinevere), insists that she ride before him on their journey and that she does not speak. Enid therefore cannot warn him of the various perils that beset them. After Geraint has overcome three knights in battle, as well as Enid’s old admirer, Limours, he is wounded and collapses in the castle of the fierce Earl Doorm who, assuming her husband to be near death, makes advances upon Enid which she resists out of love for her husband. Geraint suddenly comes back to life and beheads the wicked lord. Convinced now of his wife’s loyalty and innocence, he puts her on his horse and they escape together, their marital happiness restored.
Gladstone, Mary (later Drew) (1847–1927) Daughter of W. E. *Gladstone; friend of Tennyson. Mary was her father’s favourite in a family of seven and often accompanied him on his political trips. Her diaries give valuable insights into personalities and events. She visited *Farringford with her father and was rumoured to have been loved unrequitedly by Hallam *Tennyson. She recorded Gladstone falling asleep during one of Tennyson’s readings of *Maud and, more importantly, she gives the fullest account of the 1883 voyage of the Pembroke Castle, during which Tennyson finally accepted a peerage from her father.
Gladstone, William Ewart (1809–98) British Prime Minister on four occasions between 1868 and 1894; friend and rival of Tennyson. Gladstone began his political career as a Tory, but shifted allegiance to become the century’s most prominent Liberal politician, responsible for many of the great developments of nineteenth-century social policy including the extension of the franchise, but failing in his last great ‘mission ... to pacify Ireland’ (Richards and Hunt 1965: 182). A deeply religious man, he saw his whole life in moral terms, keeping a diary of his own failings. He devoted much of his
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life outside politics to the study of *Homer, a subject he discussed many times with Tennyson. Gladstone was Arthur Hallam’s closest friend at Eton. His relationship with Tennyson, who superceded him in Hallam’s affections at *Cambridge, always involved an element of rivalry. Hallam had introduced Gladstone to Tennyson’s early poetry during their university days, but the two first met, to share memories of their lost friend, in 1837. After a long gap, they only began to see each other socially in the 1860s. Tennyson found Gladstone ‘a very noble fellow’ (Martin, 458), while Gladstone regarded Tennyson as a political innocent. Family visits were exchanged between Hawarden and *Farringford and various descriptions survive of shared dinner parties (see: F. T. *Palgrave; Thomas *Woolner). John Addington *Symonds recorded an encounter in 1865 with ‘Gladstone full of facts, Tennyson relying on impressions’ (Martin, 459). Gladstone’s proper discovery of Tennyson’s poetry did not come until 1859 with the publication of the first group of Idylls of the King. In a long essay in the Quarterly Review he discussed the early poems, criticized *Maud (implicitly for its militarism), praised *In Memoriam as ‘perhaps the richest oblation ever offered by the affection of friendship at the tomb of the departed’ (Jump, 244) and then went on to extol the Idylls as a volume which ‘raises the character and the hopes of the age and the country which have produced it’ (Jump, 266). He was especially moved by ‘Guinevere’ which he continued to read and reread throughout his life. Practically, Gladstone’s interventions were crucial in Tennyson’s career. As early as 1845 he had tried, with Henry *Hallam, to negotiate a Civil List pension for the struggling poet. In 1865 came the first offer of a baronetcy, which Tennyson declined. In 1873, 1874 and 1880 Tennyson again declined. In 1881, Emily *Tennyson wrote to suggest her son *Hallam as Gladstone’s secretary, but Gladstone quietly let the idea drop. During a shared cruise on the Pembroke Castle in 1883 the offer of a full *barony (a peerage) was accepted and thereafter Tennyson sat as an Independent (not, as Gladstone had hoped, as a Whig) in the House of Lords. An intervention in the opposite direction came in 1885, when Queen *Victoria asked her *Poet Laureate to persuade Gladstone to retire. With great reluctance Tennyson undertook the task but had to report to the Queen, ‘Mr Gladstone goes no further than to say he will not if he can help it’ (Martin, 548). The political differences between the two men increased with the years. In 1852 Tennyson wrote passionately about the possibility of a French invasion (‘Riflemen form!’) just as Gladstone was endeavouring to calm public fears. The two disagreed over Governor *Eyre’s suppression of the uprising in Jamaica in 1865, Tennyson siding, like *Dickens, *Carlyle and others, with the Governor, and Gladstone bemoaning the loss of innocent black lives. On the extension
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of the franchise, Tennyson was eventually persuaded to vote for Gladstone’s 1884 Bill, but later wrote to beg him to moderate his views: ‘Steersman, be not precipitate in thine act’. In *‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ (1886) Tennyson challenged Gladstone’s political optimism and was rewarded by a review in Nineteenth Century in which Gladstone attacked the poem’s premises and proudly set out the achievements of the age. The final break came over Home Rule for *Ireland. At what was to be their last meeting, in 1890, Tennyson had to be persuaded to come down from his room to talk to his old friend. During a long conversation Gladstone succeeded in dispelling his misgivings about Home Rule, but by the next morning the misgivings had returned and Tennyson condemned the persuasive powers of ‘that old rascal’ (Martin, 575). For years he had said, ‘I love Mr Gladstone but hate his politics’ (Charles Tennyson, 479). Gladstone’s move to the left during his long career took him far from Tennyson, who remained always a strong conservative in politics. It is worth noting, however, that in religious matters the position was reversed, with Tennyson’s openness and eclecticism contrasting strongly with Gladstone’s conservatism. That they retained to the end of their lives a sense of their early connectedness is shown in two late incidents. Two days before he died, Tennyson asked his son, ‘Have I not been walking with Gladstone in the garden and showing him my trees?’ (Memoir, ii.426). After the funeral, Gladstone, as if seeking to reinstate himself in the Hallam story, offered to lend Queen Victoria his own letters from Hallam, lovingly preserved over the years. His sense of the parallelism of their lives is shown in his wistful lines to Hallam Tennyson after Tennyson’s death: ‘He and I had both lived with great loneliness after beginning in the midst of large bands of friends’ (Martin, 575). See also: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: politics.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832) German poet and dramatist; favourite of Tennyson. It is to Goethe that Tennyson refers in the opening stanza of *In Memoriam: I held it truth with him who sings To one clear harp in divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things.
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He later commented: ‘I alluded to Goethe’s creed. Among his last words were ... “from changes to higher changes” ... Goethe is consummate in
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so many styles’ (Memoir, ii.391). Tennyson read Goethe to *Emily in the early years of their marriage. He took the family to see Goethe’s house in Weimar in 1865 and commented to *Allingham on his return that Weimar, where he touched Goethe’s coffin, is ‘the most interesting place in Europe’ (Allingham, 125). An emblem representing Goethe was placed above the dining-room mantelpiece at *Aldworth, alongside those of Tennyson’s other favourite non-classical poets – *Dante, *Chaucer, *Shakespeare, *Milton and *Wordsworth. He used the sayings of the earlier writer to bolster up his fear of *democracy, quoting him as observing that such a system sets ignorance into motion.
Gordon, Major-General Charles George (1833–85) Soldier, killed at Khartoum. General Gordon’s distinguished military career in China, the Crimea and South Africa culminated in a mission to the Sudan to rescue Egyptian garrisons from the Mahdi forces. The only Englishman remaining in Khartoum, he sustained a siege of 317 days by the enemy army. Reinforcements from England arrived too late to save his life. Gordon’s death in January 1885 moved Hallam *Tennyson to set up a committee (of which Tennyson was a member) to found the Gordon Cadet Corps for poor boys (as Gordon had wished) and also the Gordon Boys’ Home. At the request of the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier, Tennyson wrote an epitaph published in The Times and reprinted in *Tiresias and Other Poems (1885). Tennyson was still soliciting subscriptions for the Gordon Boys’ Home in his final months and representatives from the home attended his funeral in October 1892.
Gosse, Sir Edmund (1849–1928) Literary critic and man of letters. The son of the eminent zoologist Philip Henry Gosse, Edmund Gosse wrote many biographies as well as essays and reviews. His masterpiece is his autobiographical account of his relations with his father, Father and Son (1907). He knew most of the eminent men of his day and, in his Selected Essays: First Series (1928), he includes an account of his first meeting with Tennyson in 1871 at the British Museum, where the young Gosse was then working, recording that Tennyson had complimented him on his recently published poems. On the poet’s eightieth birthday in 1889 Gosse concluded a generally sceptical essay by admitting that Tennyson had written ‘with more constant, unwearied, and unwearying excellence than any of his contemporaries’ (Martin, 569). As part of the birthday celebrations, Gosse asked Tennyson to contribute a poem
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See also: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: reception.
Grahame, Elspeth, née Thompson Wife of author Kenneth Grahame; in her childhood, friend of Tennyson. Tennyson met Elspeth and her mother on a tour through Italy with Hallam *Tennyson, in 1873. Mrs Thompson helped him when there were problems with hotel accommodation in Pontresina and Elspeth became a firm favourite with the poet. He would take her for walks in London, she in her grey schoolgirl clothes, he in his conspicuous Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat. Disturbed, on one occasion, by attention from the crowds, he scolded her, ‘Child, your mother should dress you less conspicuously – people are staring at us’ (Charles Tennyson, 425). Often he took her to Westminster Abbey and observed that, one day perhaps, he himself would lie there.
‘Grandmother, The’ Written 1859; published in Enoch Arden and Other Poems (1864). First called ‘The Grandmother’s Apology’, ‘The Grandmother’ was first published in Once a Week, 1 July 1859, accompanied by an illustration by *Millais. It was then included in the ‘Enoch Arden’ volume of 1864. Benjamin * Jowett had suggested the subject, saying that poets had not dealt properly with old age. He quoted an old lady as saying that ‘The spirits of my children always seem to hover about me’ (Ricks, 1106). Tennyson’s account in the poem of a stillborn baby which ‘had fought for its life’ is based on his own experience of his first child being born dead in April 1851. The grandmother’s tribulations, outliving all her beloved children, appealed to Victorian taste and particularly moved Thomas *Carlyle. Tennyson read it during the Pembroke Castle cruise in 1883 to the Tsar and Tsarina of Russia. See also: Scott, Sir Walter.
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to his periodical, the New Review. Tennyson sent him ‘The Throstle’, but was annoyed when it appeared with misprints. Gosse’s quiet scepticism extended to his description of Tennyson’s funeral in 1892, which he described as beginning with a procession of ‘a stream of nonentities’ (Martin, 582). His enigmatic essay on Tennyson written the day after the funeral (published in the New Review 1892) declares that ‘this remarkable phenomenon of the popularity of Tennyson ... is but transitory and accidental’ (Mazzeno 2004: 32).
Greville, Mrs Sabine Tennyson’s neighbour in *Freshwater; flatterer and acolyte. Mrs Greville to an extent took Julia Margaret *Cameron’s place in Tennyson’s life at *Farringford in the 1870s. She was rich, loved the arts, and loved famous
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men even more. Henry *James described her as a ‘mixture of the ridiculous and the amiable in which the amiable predominates’ (Martin, 509). Unlike the sceptical Mrs Cameron, she was slavish in her attachment to Tennyson, and like *Palgrave and *Allingham would put up with any amount of rudeness from him. She behaved with self-conscious melodrama, falling on her knees to read out Tennyson’s *‘To the Rev. W.H. Brookfield’ to his widow, Jane (much to Jane’s sceptical amusement). Her encouragement influenced Tennyson in turning, ill-advisedly, to the stage in the 1870s.
‘Guinevere’ Idyll; eleventh in the final order of the Idylls of the King. The third of the 1859 Idylls, written between July 1857 and March 1858, has as its nucleus part of King Arthur’s farewell speech to his adulterous wife, which Tennyson rather tactlessly gave to his wife on her birthday, 9 July 1857: But hither shall I never come again, Never lie by thy side; see thee no more – Farewell! (575–7) ‘Guinevere’ is designed to balance ‘Elaine’ in the first volume of Idylls, with both women, one innocent, one guilty, in love with Lancelot. It is largely original, based on *Malory’s reference (xxi, 7) to Guinevere’s becoming a nun as an act of repentance after Arthur’s death. Tennyson changes and expands the story to allow for a powerful scene in which Arthur rebukes his wife for betraying, not only him but also the ideal of Camelot. ‘Guinevere’ was a favourite of *Gladstone, *Clough and George *Eliot. Tennyson originally intended to end the cycle here, just as Malory closes with Guinevere’s death followed by Lancelot’s. However, by 1870 he had decided to end with the revised *‘Morte d’Arthur’, thus moving from Malory’s stress on the guilty pair back to his own centre of interest, ‘the blameless king’ (‘Merlin and Vivien’, 162). Arthur tells his wife, ‘I was ever virgin save for thee’ (‘Guinevere’, 554) – thus dismissing the older legend of his incestuous fathering of Mordred (Tennyson’s ‘Modred’). However, though he is a potent poetic presence as numinous king, Arthur is less effective as angelically pure cuckold; Guinevere writhes in guilt, as Vivien does in sexuality, but her ultimate recognition that ‘we needs must love the highest when we see it’ (‘Guinevere’, 655) is less poetically successful. The attempt to humanize the king, in his grief at his wife’s adultery, was considered enormously successful in its own time but since then has been generally considered a failure. The shifts in taste between a sentimental age and a sceptical one make any balanced assessment of the poem difficult to achieve.
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Medical doctor; practitioner of *Hydropathy, ‘The Water Cure’ in Malvern. After Tennyson had lost money on Matthew *Allen’s wood-carving scheme he turned for comfort to the very popular ‘water cure’, first in 1843 at Prestbury, then in 1847 at Umberslade, and later that same year at the centre of the movement, in Malvern. Tennyson’s Cambridge friend, the Rev. John *Rashdall, now lived in the town and provided him with accommodation. Tennyson was attracted by Dr Gully’s extremely successful publication, The Water Cure in Chronic Disease (1846). The central idea (rather like colonic irrigation today) was to purify the body as completely as possible in order to allow natural forces to do their work of healing. One treatment involved wrapping the patient in wet sheets; Tennyson commented gloomily that he had been ‘half cured, half destroyed’ (Jenkins 1974: 9) by the ‘cure’ but he brought *Emily there in 1852, when she was pregnant, with an idea of moving to Malvern. Gully’s charismatic personality may have been a factor, as it certainly was in his success. He was very much involved too in mesmerism and in psychical research, both of which interested Tennyson, though he kept his distance from both, even when he discovered that he himself possessed strong mesmeric powers. Gully’s most important intervention in Tennyson’s life was in persuading him that his recurrent bouts of illness could not be attributed to inherited epilepsy and were much more likely to be caused by gout. This probably influenced Tennyson’s decision once more to consider marriage, and to end the long separation from Emily Sellwood.
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Haddelsey, Susan (b. 1822) Lincolnshire neighbour and friend of the Tennyson family; recipient of one of Tennyson’s last letters. Susan’s father was a Caistor solicitor, Charles Haddelsey, who collected rents for Tennyson from a small property which his grandfather had left him in Grasby. Susan was, with Tennyson’s *sisters Mary, Emily and Cecilia, one of *‘The Husks’, the group of blue-stockings who discussed Romantic poetry and wrote frequent letters to one another. These letters give many insights into Tennyson’s life in the 1840s and later. The families remained close even after the Tennysons’ move to *High Beech and Tennyson, remembering his early days as he neared the end of his life, exchanged friendly, nostalgic letters with Susan a few days before his death in 1892.
Hallam, Arthur Henry (1811–33) Close friend of Tennyson; subject of In Memoriam. As Tennyson’s dearest friend at *Cambridge, Hallam influenced and promoted the early poetry. His sudden death at 22 was a defining event in Tennyson’s life and led to the composition of the series of elegies which was to become In Memoriam. Tennyson’s continued grieving can be seen from the early *‘Morte d’Arthur’ (1833) through *‘In the Valley of Cauteretz’ (1861) to the closing lines of *‘Vastness’ (1885):
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H
Peace, let it be! For I loved him, and love him for ever: the dead are not dead but alive. (‘Vastness’, 36)
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To the end of his life Tennyson believed Hallam to have been ‘as near perfection as a mortal man can be’ (Martin, 73). Hallam was the eldest surviving son of the Whig historian Henry *Hallam and his wife Julia (Elton) of *Clevedon Court near Bristol. He had been a naturally precocious child, reading French by the age of seven and Latin by nine and he showed early literary talent, though his father tried to encourage him away from literature and towards politics. At Eton his closest friend was the young *Gladstone. He was nicknamed ‘Mother Hallam’, perhaps because of a certain over-earnestness, but his outstanding intellectual and personal promise was recognized by both fellow-pupils and masters. After Eton he travelled for a year in Italy, becoming proficient enough in the language to write Italian verse and developing further his passion for *Dante. He also fell in love with Anna Wintour, a beautiful Englishwoman ten years older than himself. He and his friend James Milnes Gaskell were rivals for her attentions and vied with each other in writing poetry about her. By the time Hallam came up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1829 she was engaged to be married and he began his Cambridge career mourning her loss. Henry Hallam’s own college was Christ Church, Oxford. He had sent his son to Trinity College, Cambridge, partly as a way of breaking what he saw as the confinement of the earlier Eton ties with Gaskell and Gladstone and partly because of Cambridge’s stronger reputation, at the time, in the ‘exact sciences’. Tennyson and Hallam met when both submitted poems for the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for English Verse in April 1829, during Tennyson’s second year, and within a month they were writing sonnets to each other. Their deep and exclusive friendship was part of the Romantic ethos of the time. Within their circle, everyone seems to have ‘paired off’ in this way, with none of the homosexual implications which might be attributed to such a relationship today. Hallam encouraged Tennyson to attend the Cambridge Union debates and, in the autumn of 1829, to join the debating society, the *Apostles, to which he himself had been elected in May. In December 1829 Hallam visited *Somersby for the first time and by the end of his next visit in April 1830 he had declared his love for Tennyson’s sister, *Emily. Plans for joint publication of the poems of the two friends were scotched at the last minute by Henry Hallam and Tennyson’s *Poems, Chiefly Lyrical appeared alone in June 1830. Hallam published an anonymous review of the volume in the Englishman’s Magazine in 1831, praising his friend’s work as ‘Poetry of Sensation’ rather than ‘Poetry of Reflection’ and insisting that ‘Whenever the mind of the poet suffers itself to be occupied, during its periods of creation, by any other predominant motive than the desire of beauty, the result is false in art’ (Jump, 35). This review has proved the most lasting
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of Hallam’s writings and was praised by *Yeats as anticipating the concerns of Symbolist poetry. The long vacation of 1830 saw Hallam and Tennyson travelling through France and making a daring journey into Spain to take money and coded messages to the revolutionaries who were trying to retake Spain from the repressive monarch, Ferdinand. At the foot of the Pyrenees they walked in the Valley of Cauteretz, a moment of such huge emotional significance to Tennyson that he returned several times in later life, recalling the event in a powerful later lyric 31 years later, ‘In the Valley of Cauteretz’. Hallam proposed to Emily Tennyson in December 1830 and was accepted. Henry Hallam, however, insisted that the young couple have a year of separation until Hallam reached his twenty-first birthday. Tennyson left Cambridge in February 1831 without completing his degree and thereafter Hallam acted as his unofficial publicist, setting up the connection with Edward *Moxon, who was to be Tennyson’s first regular publisher. Hallam completed his degree at Cambridge in January 1832, winning both the college English essay prize and the prize for declamation. After his twenty-first birthday on 1 February he returned to *Somersby to claim Emily’s hand, though marriage itself seemed a long way off as the two families wrangled about an appropriate financial settlement. In that summer Hallam and Tennyson travelled in the Low Countries and, after much effortful persuasion on his part, Hallam ‘felt a thrill of pleasure’ (Martin, 159) when, in December 1832, Tennyson finally produced his next volume of poems, *Poems, 1833. After Cambridge and with his betrothal to Emily finally accepted by his family, Hallam began a career in the law, and was admitted to the Inner Temple in London. To please his father, he accompanied him on a continental tour of Hungary and Austria. On the evening of 15 September 1833, Henry Hallam returned to his hotel to find his son dead in a chair. He had apparently suffered a cerebral haemorrhage; a post-mortem revealed a congenital malformation of the brain which would have been bound to cause an early death. The news did not reach Somersby until early October, when a letter from Hallam’s uncle, Henry Elton, reached Tennyson, who broke the news to Emily. Though her health collapsed for a year while Tennyson apparently continued with his life, the depth of his suffering is conveyed in the series of lyrics which he began to write, the first on 6 October, and which became In Memoriam. *‘Ulysses’, *‘Morte d’Arthur’ and *‘Oh, that ’twere possible’, the germ of *Maud, are among the poems written directly after the news of Hallam’s death. Hallam’s body was sent home by sea and he was buried in the family vault in Clevedon Church on 3 January 1834, the eighth child of the family of 11 to die young. A place was kept for Tennyson in the funeral coach, but he decided not to attend.
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Of Hallam’s published writings, one hundred copies of Remains in Verse and Prose of Arthur Henry Hallam were printed in 1834; Records of an Eton Schoolboy, containing letters from Hallam to James Milnes Gaskell, was privately printed in 1883; Hallam Tennyson’s Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son (1897) contains perhaps the fullest treatment of Hallam’s life and letters; T. H. Vail Motter edited The Writings of Arthur Hallam in 1943; an authoritative collection of the letters (a project originally advocated by Gladstone but refused by Henry Hallam) was finally produced by Jack Kolb in 1981. The homosocial nature of the friendship, with its implications for Queer Theory, has been much explored, notably by Chris Craft (1988; for a summary, see Kolb 2000), in the face of Tennyson’s own blunt disclaimer, ‘If anyone thinks I called him “Dearest” when he was alive, they are very much mistaken. Why, I never even called him “Dear” ’ (Ricks 1972: 217). It is impossible to gauge the truth behind the myth of Arthur Hallam’s promise. His exceptional talents are attested to by many besides the Tennyson family, including Gladstone, who preserved letters from Hallam all his life and, on Tennyson’s death in 1892, offered to lend the letters to Queen *Victoria. Though there are dissenting voices – Fanny *Kemble, John *Rashdall – it is striking that almost everyone who wrote of him praised his human qualities as being as remarkable as his intellectual ones. ‘We all looked forward to his society, & support through life in sorrow & in joy, with the fondest hopes’, said Alfred’s older brother Frederick *Tennyson (Martin, 184). This bereavement it could be argued formed Tennyson as poet and man more than any other event in his life. As John *Rashdall observed of Tennyson in his diary in January 1834, ‘Hallam seems to have left his heart a widowed one’ (Martin, 187).
Hallam, Henry (1777–1859) Historian; father of Arthur Henry Hallam. Henry Hallam, the eminent Whig historian, published works on the Middle Ages, on constitutional history and, in 1837–39, an Introduction to the Literature of Europe. He had ambitious plans for his elder son and oversaw his education, choosing to send him to Trinity College, *Cambridge, rather than to his own college, Christ Church, Oxford, probably because he wished to separate him from his Eton friends, including W. E. *Gladstone. He persuaded his son against joint publication of a book of poems with Tennyson, so that *Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) contained only Tennyson’s work. Suspicious of Arthur’s engagement to Emily *Tennyson in 1831, he extracted a promise from his son not to visit *Somersby again until February 1832, when he reached 21. Having reluctantly accepted the subsequent engagement, he
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travelled with Arthur on the Continent and it was he who found the young man dead in their hotel room in Vienna in September 1833. In his grief, possibly tinged with remorse, Henry Hallam regarded Emily ever after as ‘a sacred object’ (Martin, 185), supporting her with a £300 annuity even after her marriage to Richard Jesse in 1841. He grew closer to the Tennysons over the years, helped Tennyson gain a Civil List pension in 1845, became Hallam *Tennyson’s godfather in 1852, and in his will left £500 to Alfred and £1,000 to Emily Jesse.
Hallam family Henry *Hallam and Julia Elton, Arthur Henry Hallam’s parents, had 11 children, only 4 of whom survived infancy. Hallam belonged to the property owning Whig aristocracy, while his wife’s family owned *Clevedon Court near Bristol. They were cultured and well connected and spent great efforts on their children’s education. After Arthur’s death, his closest sister, Ellen, cultivated the friendship of Emily *Tennyson. Ellen’s diaries record her own grief. She survived her beloved brother by only four years, dying early in 1837 at the age of 21, after complications following an attack of measles. Their parents’ only solace was the success of their second surviving son, Henry Fitzmaurice (1824–50), known as Harry, who, like Tennyson, gained the Chancellor’s Medal while at Trinity College, Cambridge. His sudden death in Sienna at the age of 26 left his sister Julia the only survivor of the 11 children. At the time of Arthur’s death the family were living at 67 Wimpole Street in London, which became the ‘Dark house’ of Lyric vii of *In Memoriam.
Hardy, Thomas (1840–1928) Novelist and poet, influenced by Tennyson. As a poet, Hardy reacted against the fluidity and euphony of the Tennysonian style, but his novels often testify to his close knowledge of the Laureate’s work, and Tennyson for his part read Hardy’s fiction. The two met in London in March 1880, and Hardy’s autobiography offers a vivid account of the meeting. On arrival he found Emily *Tennyson lying down ‘as if in a coffin’, but she rose to greet him and his companion, Mrs Anne Proctor, and Tennyson himself was very sociable. He told Hardy that he liked A Pair of Blue Eyes the best of Hardy’s novels. Tennyson can hardly have been unaware that this early novel is particularly rich in quotations from and allusions to his own work (Hardy 1962: 136, 137).
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See also: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: reception: posthumus reputation.
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Tennyson’s second published play (1876; dated 1877). Dedicated to Lord Lytton (Robert Lytton), son of Tennyson’s old enemy *Bulwer-Lytton, the play draws on Bulwer’s own historical romance, Harold, Last of the Saxon Kings, as well as on Edward Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest (1867–69) and the original sources of the Bayeux Tapestry (which the Tennyson family had seen on their visit to Brittany in 1864) and also on the Roman du Rou, a history of the Dukes of Normandy. It is the second play in Tennyson’s trilogy about the making of England and enacts the struggle for mastery among Saxons, Danes and Normans, centring on William of Normandy’s successful invasion of England in 1066. The prefatory sonnet, ‘Show-Day at Battle Abbey, 1876’, reveals Tennyson’s sympathy for ‘our Norman-slandered king’, the Saxon, Harold, and presents the Norman Conquest as an unfortunate event where ‘might made right’. Harold is not a chronicle play like its predecessor and is more tightly organized. However, the failure of the previous play, *Queen Mary, frightened off potential producers and the play was not staged until 1928. Tennyson took two-and-a half hours to read it in its entirety on his visit to the *Gladstones in 1876; Mary Gladstone records (surely euphemistically) that her father ‘seemed sleepy’ (Martin, 516).
Harrington Hall Small manor house two miles from *Somersby; setting for sections of *Maud. Harrington Hall was owned and occupied by the *Cracroft family in the early part of Tennyson’s life. In 1832 it was leased to Arthur Eden, who brought his wife and pretty step-daughters to live there. The young Tennyson became infatuated with the beautiful 18-year-old Rosa *Baring and wrote many ‘Rose’ poems about her between 1834 and 1836. The gardens at Harrington Hall feature in Maud and the terrace may possibly recur in *‘The Roses on the Terrace’, written in 1889.
Hawker, Robert Stephen (1803–75) Poet, folklorist and rector of Morwenstow in *Cornwall. Tennyson met Hawker while travelling in Cornwall in May and June 1848. He thought Tennyson ‘a tall swarthy Spanish-looking man, with an eye like a sword’ (Martin, 320). They looked at *Tintagel and talked of writing Arthurian poems: Hawker wrote, ‘He is about to conceive a Poem – the Hero King Arthur – the scenery in part the vanished land of Lyonesse, between the Mainland and the
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Scilly Isles’ (Martin, 320). Hawker published his own version of ‘The Sangrael’ in 1864, and his best-known poem, ‘Song of the Western Men’, in 1869.
Cambridge friend of Tennyson; kept valuable Commonplace Book. John Heath and his brother Douglas were very much part of Tennyson’s circle, both at *Cambridge and afterwards in London. Arthur Hallam mentions Heath as involved in the earliest plans to publish Tennyson’s poetry and as ‘mad’ when he heard his decision NOT to publish *‘The Lover’s Tale’ in the 1833 volume. During the stay of Tennyson and his sister *Mary in London in the spring of 1833, the Heaths and Hallam took the Lincolnshire visitors boating on the Thames and it seemed likely that Heath was falling in love with Mary, as Hallam had with Emily. Heath was visiting Mary at *Somersby later that year when the news came of Hallam’s death. In 1835 the Heath family entertained Tennyson at their home at Kitlands, near Dorking, Surrey, and tried in vain to lift his gloomy spirits. By this time, John Heath and Mary Tennyson were in love and spent Christmas 1835 together at Somersby. In 1837, however, perhaps because of Mary’s increasing involvement in religion, Heath broke off the engagement, receiving the opprobrium of the whole Tennyson family. Heath’s importance to Tennyson studies is that, during 1832–34, he kept a Commonplace Book in which is recorded the gestation of many of the early poems. This is now available to be consulted at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and there is a full description by Sir Charles Tennyson (1936: ‘Tennyson papers, II: J. M. Heath’s “Commonplace Book” ’).
Heneage family The Heneages were a *Lincolnshire family who lived during George *Tennyson’s time at Hainton, and were his supporters early in his career. They witnessed Old George’s contempt for his elder son and, according to the *Somersby Tennysons’ family tradition, it was Squire Heneage who, on being told of George’s intention to disinherit his son, replied, ‘George, if you do this you will be damned, you will indeed!’ (Tennysons, 41). Heneage also held the living at South Willingham, which Old George negotiated for his son when it was decided that he should go into the Church.
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Heath, J. M.
Heraclitus of Ephesus (fl. c.500 BC) Greek philosopher who believed that everything is in a state of flux, ever coming into being and passing away again.
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Heraclitus was nicknamed ‘the weeping philosopher’ because of his belief that nothing is permanent. As a young man Tennyson was much attracted to this philosophy and his poem, ‘Oi neontes’ (‘All thoughts, all creeds, all dreams are true’) at the end of the 1830 volume sums up his belief in endless impermanence. He points out the paradox in this in an added comment beneath the poem: ‘Argal – this very opinion is only true relatively to the flowing philosophers’. This is a deconstructive moment anticipating the critical strategy of the twentieth-century philosopher Jacques Derrida, and it encourages a deconstructive reading of Tennyson. What Christopher Ricks calls his ‘art of the penultimate’ (Ricks 1972: 49) might similarly be thought of as a Heraclitian refusal of fixture or closure. The paired poems in the 1830 volume, ‘All Things Will Die’ and ‘Nothing Will Die’, suggest a continued debate. Heraclitian moments occur at every stage of Tennyson’s poetry – from *‘Ulysses’: ... whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. (20–1) to *‘Lucretius’: I saw the flaring atom-streams And torrents of her myriad universe ... Fly on to clash together again, and make Another and another frame of things For ever ... (lines 38–41) The Idylls too suggest, in the *‘Coming’ and the *‘Passing’ of Arthur an eternal flow rather than one fixed heroic lifetime.
Herschel, Sir John Frederick William (1792–1871) Astronomer; friend of Tennyson. The son of Sir William Herschel (1738–1822), a distinguished astronomer who discovered Uranus and many stars and nebulae, Herschel continued his father’s work and became one of the leading scientists of his day. On 11 February 1864 Tennyson and Herschel were fellow-guests at the London home of W. F. Pollock, James *Spedding and Sir John Tyndall also being present. There are some fine photographs of Herschel by Julia Margaret *Cameron, and Herschel himself has a place as one of the earliest pioneers of photography in England.
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Herschel, Sir John Frederick William
See also: Astronomy.
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‘Hesperides, The’
Published 1832; not reprinted. This poem was omitted from the 1842 volume probably because of its experimental rhythm and metre. It was mercilessly attacked on those grounds, and because of its arcane imagery, by J. W.*Croker in his infamous 1833 review. The experimentation with irregular stanza-form here follows that in ‘The SeaFairies’ (1830) and may well have been a necessary preliminary to the success of *‘The Lotos-Eaters’, the poem immediately following it in the 1833 volume. In later life Tennyson regretted not having included the poem among his *Juvenilia (see Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: Juvenilia). The classical myth of Hercules stealing the golden apples of the Hesperides, daughters of Hesperus, the god of the setting sun, is blended with the voyage of the Carthaginian explorer Hanno, off the west coast of Africa in the fifth century BC, and the resulting incantatory verse is open to many interpretations. The vision of a treasure guarded from the world has been read, like *‘The Lady of Shalott’, as a parable about the necessary isolation of the artist; it also has clear links to the Garden of Eden. The poem’s power comes from the rich confusion of its imagery and its enigmatic quality. Tennyson conceals his meaning as the Hesperides hide their golden apples.
High Beech Epping Forest, Essex. Home of the Tennyson family from 1837 until 1840. Tennyson organized his family’s move from *Somersby, which became essential once the new rector, Mr Burton, married and needed to establish a family in the rectory. High Beech was 12 miles from London but at that time was still in the country, so it seemed ideal for him to move between family and friends in Town. The house itself was called Beech Hill and was set on a hill overlooking Waltham Abbey. It was quite a grand residence employing four indoor servants and several gardeners, and Tennyson soon realized it was a ‘cockney residence’ (Martin, 232). The Tennysons never really settled in Epping Forest, but during his rambles there Tennyson fatefully made the acquaintance of Dr Matthew *Allen, who ran an asylum at High Beech and was (temporarily) to destroy his fortunes. Few of Tennyson’s friends ever stayed at Beech Hill, partly because he soon disliked the house and partly because he spent an increasing amount of time in London, but *Thackeray visited, as did Emily *Sellwood, as a friend of Tennyson’s sisters. She and Alfred stayed up one night to look at meteors. In 1840, having found Beech Hill too expensive to run, the family moved to Tunbridge Wells, which had a better climate but which Tennyson immediately hated. *Septimus had stayed behind as a voluntary patient of Dr Allen, and Alfred too returned many
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times to stay at Dr Allen’s, even entertaining his friends there as he never did at Tunbridge Wells.
This short poem of nine rhyming couplets, written for the first formal meeting of the *Metaphysical Society on 2 June 1869, was read in Tennyson’s absence by James *Knowles. Like *‘Lucretius’, written at the same time, it examines the link between the material and the spiritual worlds and expresses Tennyson’s passionate belief in the immanence of God: ‘Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet’ (12). It also neatly throws into doubt the evidence of the senses: ‘For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool’ (16). The title perhaps suggests Tennyson’s desire to link Wordsworthian natureworship with the Christian belief in a loving God.
History, Tennyson’s attitude to Tennyson’s idea of history was initially the Victorian schoolboy’s notion of great men and battles. His first poem on English history is ‘The Vision of Charles the First’. He was soaked in the Walter *Scott novels he had read as a boy and completely accepted Scott’s version of the building of the English nation. This can be seen, for example, in the notion of the different races which emerges in *In Memoriam: A love of freedom rarely felt, Of freedom in her regal seat Of England; not the schoolboy heat, The blind hysterics of the Celt. (Lyric cix) The same story lies behind the *‘A Welcome to Alexandra’ (1863): For Saxon or Dane or Norman we, Teuton or Celt, or whatever we be, We are each all Dane in our welcome of thee! (31–3) As with science, however, Tennyson kept up with developments in the study of history. He knew personally three of the best historians of his time, Thomas *Carlyle, J. R. Green and J. A. Froude. In the mid-century these writers were producing much more realistically human accounts of historical events and these were being taken up by the dramatists. In his sixties, Tennyson began writing plays, at least partly because he wanted to give the country a group
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‘Higher Pantheism, The’ (1869 [1870])
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of history plays which, like *Shakespeare’s, would help reinforce a sense of national identity. His concept of English history was formed by Scott, but also by traditional Protestantism, which taught that modern England had been forged in the sixteenth century, in Henry VIII’s opposition to the Pope and to what came to be known as the Roman Catholic Church. This tradition was encouraged during his lifetime by the threats presented in the rise of the Tractarian Movement and in what seemed like the recrudescence of *Roman Catholicism. Looking round for suitable subjects for a series of history plays, he therefore lit on the idea of the Reformation. This is the spirit behind *Queen Mary (1875). In researching for this play he read Foxe’s Booke of Martyrs, Hooker, Neale, Strype and the secular histories of Holinshed and Camden, as well as the ecclesiastical histories of Collier, Fuller and Burnett. Several of the other plays – *Becket (1876), *Harold (1877) and *The Foresters (1881; about Robin Hood ) – go back to earlier periods, but all present situations involving brave resistance to authority – a very broad definition of the spirit of ‘Protestantism’. The stories are often based on Froude’s History of England (12 vols, 1856–70), itself a very dramatic work. In 1873 Tennyson was so moved by reading Froude’s account of Sir Richard Grenville that he interviewed the secretary of the Hakluyt Society to find out more. He read Froude’s story aloud to *Emily on his return and several years later wrote *‘The Revenge: A Battle of the Fleet’. In poetry, he turned to England’s ancient past, in *‘The Battle of Brunanburh’ (1880), using his son’s translation of a tenth-century Old English poem again dealing with a decisive battle which helped establish England as a nation – the historical theme which moved him more than any other.
‘Holy Grail, The’ Idyll (1869); eighth in the final order of the Idylls of the King. Tennyson had published a short poem, *‘Sir Galahad’, in the 1842 volume. He confessed in 1859 that he had also composed a poem on Lancelot’s quest for the Holy Grail ‘in as good verse as ever I wrote – no, I did not write, I made it in my head, and it has altogether slipt out of memory’ (Memoir, i.457). Despite this he claimed to have been hindered from continuing the 1859 Idylls because he needed to begin with the story of the Grail and doubted ‘whether such a subject could be handled in these days, without incurring a charge of irreverence’ (Memoir, i.456). The scepticism of the mid-century was linked to debates about Charles *Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and to the new German biblical scholarship which treated the Bible as a historical document rather than as Holy Writ. Tennyson feared that to write of the Grail at such a time would be ‘too much like playing with sacred things. The old writers believed in the Sangraal’ (Memoir, i.457). Emily *Tennyson, however, was deeply committed to what she believed to be a truly noble subject. Once Tennyson finally hit upon
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a narrative solution, he completed the poem quickly, in September 1868: ‘It came as if by a breath of inspiration’ (Memoir, ii.126). His solution was to use multiple narrative, so that he as poet was not committed to belief or disbelief. Although it is based on *Malory xiii–xvii, the poem inevitably presents a much more subjective and sceptical account of the Grail than Malory’s. It begins with a minor character, Ambrosius (not in Malory), and contains five different visions of the Grail, by the Holy Nun, Sir Galahad, Sir Percivale, Sir Lancelot and Sir Bors. As in a nineteenth-century realist novel, each account depends upon and helps reveal the character of the teller. The poem also seems to reject Galahad’s asceticism as unsuitable for normal men. Tennyson summarized the argument: ‘Faith declines, religion in many turns from practical goodness to the quest after the supernatural and marvellous and selfish religious excitement. Few are those for whom the quest is a source of spiritual strength’ (Ricks, 1661). King Arthur, in Tennyson’s version, is horrified when his knights set out on what to him is a quest intended only for saintly ascetics like Galahad. It is only after doing his duty in this world that Arthur feels he can give himself up to visions, to ‘moments when he feels he cannot die’ (‘The Holy Grail’, 912). These lines Tennyson himself said were the key to the Idylls: they seem to refer to his mystical sense of the unreality of the material world and to his yearning for immortality; they recall too the trances into which he had fallen periodically from boyhood and may also be compared to the vision of Hallam in *In Memoriam Lyric xcii.
Homer Supposed author of two ancient Greek epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. As a boy of 12 Tennyson fell in love with Homer’s Iliad, in Alexander *Pope’s translation, and composed hundreds of lines using Pope’s metre. As Tennyson lay on the beach at *Mablethorpe, Homer’s version of the Trojan War haunted his imagination, something he recalled later in life: Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind, And here the Grecian ships did seem to be. (‘Mablethorpe’, 3–4) In adult life he still argued that the Odyssey was the most beautiful book of all. Wherever he travelled he listened for Homeric echoes, recording his disappointment in 1839 when Aberystwyth did not produce a ‘much-sounding’ Homeric sea (though Barmouth proved more ‘Mablethorpe-like’ [Letters, i.172]). Tennyson’s own library contained six editions of the Iliad in Greek and five English translations, and one edition of the Odyssey with three translations. He always carried Homer round with him on journeys, together
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with *Shakespeare, *Milton, *Virgil, *Horace, Pindar and *Theocritus. ‘The Sea Fairies’, *‘The Lotos-Eaters’ and *‘Ulysses’ are based on Homer, though their spirit is more akin to that of Virgil, not ‘epic’ but languorous and full of individual emotion. Tennyson uses the Roman ‘Ulysses’ rather than Homer’s ‘Odysseus’ and comments that his sources were Odyssey xi 100–37 but also Dante’s Inferno xxvi 90–141. Tennyson and *Gladstone frequently discussed Homeric verse and particularly the problem of translating it into English, Gladstone complaining that Tennyson seemed to prefer Latin to Greek vocabulary – Jove rather than Zeus and Greeks rather than Achaeans. In the Cornhill Magazine of 1863, Tennyson wrote in the Headnote to his ‘Attempts at Classical Metres of Quantity’ of the failure of English hexameter translations and instead provided a fragment of his own, using blank verse: ‘So Hector spake ... ’ (Iliad viii 542–61). Gladstone, however, continued to translate Homer into hexameters. In 1877, Tennyson returned to the iambic pentameters he knew from Pope, as in a fragment called ‘Achilles over the Trench’ (Iliad xviii 202). One of the greatest achievements of the later years, ‘Demeter and Persephone’ (1889), in *Demeter and Other Poems, is based on the Homeric ‘Hymn to Demeter’. Here Tennyson returns to blank verse and ends with a fine evocation of Odyssey xi 538–9, describing: ... the shadowy warrior glide Along the silent field of asphodel. (151) See also: Classical literature; Virgil. Further reading: Markley (2004).
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 BC) Roman poet: influence on Tennyson. Horace’s perceptive and ironic realism helped shape Tennyson’s attitude towards poetry at an early age. Tennyson was steeped in the classics as a child. Before he started *Louth Grammar School at the age of seven, his father made him repeat on successive mornings the four books of Horace’s Odes. This produced such an aversion that Tennyson said that he could not bear Horace’s poetry again until he was over forty – but its influence is evident nonetheless. Horace is the best-represented of all classical authors in the libraries of Tennyson and his father, Dr *Tennyson owning five editions of his works and Tennyson himself eight. The copy of the Ars Poetica in the *Somersby library is heavily annotated in Tennyson’s hand and there are often echoes in the subject matter, sound and rhythm of his own
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Houghton, Lord (Richard Monckton Milnes) see Milnes, Richard Monckton, 1st Baron Houghton.
Hunt, Leigh (1784–1859) Versatile author and journalist. A survivor from the Romantic period, Hunt had known *Shelley and *Keats and was therefore widely respected by Tennyson’s generation. In 1831, at the prompting of Arthur Hallam, Hunt published a favourable review of *Poems by Two Brothers, in The Tatler. He later reviewed the 1842 volumes, also favourably. In April 1833 Tennyson spent an evening in Hunt’s company at the home of the publisher Edward *Moxon. In 1837, after Tennyson had written in praise of Hunt’s own poems, Hunt invited him to contribute to the Monthly Repository, of which he was editor. In the following year Tennyson contributed to a fund established by John *Forster to give financial aid to Hunt who, like his fictional counterpart in *Dickens’s Bleak House, Harold Skimpole, was often in financial difficulties. After the death of *Wordsworth in 1850 The Spectator suggested that the rivals for *Poet Laureateship would be Tennyson and Hunt; Tennyson’s reaction was to tell John Forster that, if this were the case, he hoped the appointment would go to Hunt.
Hunt, William Holman (1827–1910) Painter, founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; illustrator of Tennyson’s poems. Tennyson met Hunt in the 1850s in the Cosmopolitan Club in London and they both also often visited *Little Holland House, home of the artistic *Prinseps family. Hunt stayed at *Farringford and witnessed Tennyson’s panic at the approach of what he took to be a group of admiring tourists. Hunt was one of the illustrators, with D. G. *Rossetti, *Millais and Arthur Hughes, of *Moxon’s Illustrated Edition of the Poems in 1857. He was roundly criticized by
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verses to Horace. In his youthful translations he usually uses iambics to suggest in English the impact of the Latin lines. In ‘Milton: Alcaics’ (1863) he for the first time used the Horatian Alcaic strophe in English verse. *‘The Daisy’, he declared, was written ‘in a metre I invented, representing in some measure the grandest of metres, the Horatian Alcaic’ (Ricks, 1019). A similar imitation occurs in ‘To the Rev. F.D. Maurice’. Once he had overcome his distaste, Tennyson used Horace’s early influence frequently and imaginatively.
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Tennyson for not following the poems closely enough. In particular the poet wanted to know why the Lady of Shalott in Hunt’s illustration had ‘her hair wildly tossed about as if by a tornado?’ (Martin, 414). Having had all of his illustrations demolished, Hunt observed wryly: ‘I am afraid I was not a suitable designer for the book’ (Martin, 415). At once Tennyson apologized and the two remained on good terms, Hunt saying that he was honoured by the poet’s candour. In 1860, Hunt and Val Prinsep joined Tennyson and *Palgrave on a holiday in *Cornwall and witnessed Tennyson having every step dogged by the younger man, who had strict instructions from *Emily never to let him out of his sight. Hunt was also present at the dinner at John Addington *Symonds’s house, at which the fate of Governor *Eyre was hotly debated and in which Tennyson pledged his support for the governor against his black victims. Hunt’s illustrations of Tennyson have a magic of their own, and his painting of The Lady of Shalott, to which he returned again and again until the end of his life, reveals a frustrated sexuality in the figure which neither he nor the poet ever openly recognized.
Husks, The Group of blue-stockings who discussed Tennyson’s poetry in the 1830s. After Arthur Hallam’s death, Tennyson’s sisters *Mary, *Emily and *Cecilia set up a discussion group, which conducted a great deal of its business by means of long letters. Their topics were the Romantic poets, *Byron, *Shelley and *Keats, but also Tennyson himself. Ellen *Hallam, Hallam’s sister, and the *Sellwood sisters were attached to the group, whose letters provide a vivid picture of the life in *Somersby in the 1830s, as well as giving unwitting testimony (as indeed does the name they chose for themselves) to the role and status of middle-class women at the time.
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825–95) Scientist, champion of Charles *Darwin, admirer of Tennyson. Thomas Huxley was a distinguished man of science when the profession of ‘scientist’ was only just establishing itself. He was Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons and at the Royal Institution; as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ he championed the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection; eventually he became President of the Royal Society. He is a significant figure in Victorian culture also because he recognized the importance of the poetic as well as the scientific imagination and was in particular a great admirer of Tennyson.
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Hydropathy ‘The Water Cure’, followed by Tennyson in his thirties. Hydropathy had been developed by Vincent Priessnitz in Grafenberg, Austria, and brought to England in the 1840s. It involved cleansing the blood by sitzbaths, water jets and the ‘great douche’, and then by tightly rolling the patient, naked, in a wet sheet, the aim being to encourage sweating, excretion, fever and boils and thereby to empty the whole system of impurities. Large quantities of water had to be drunk and long walks taken in all weathers. Tennyson’s physical and emotional collapse in 1843, induced partly by fear of epilepsy, led him to try the Water Cure at Prestbury near the family’s new home in Cheltenham. The process was said to cure mental as well as physical instability and did not involve the stigma of entering a mental hospital. Tennyson spent seven months on this first visit and in 1847 tried a similar but less extreme regime at Umberslade near Birmingham. At the end of the year he went to the Malvern establishment run by Dr James *Gully and it was here, on his second visit in autumn 1848, that he declared himself cured. Gully had persuaded him that his basic problem was not, as he had feared for years, epilepsy, but gout. *Water was always Tennyson’s favourite element: in this case it did effect a healing which was mental as well as physical and allowed him to move on in his life. In 1850 he felt able at last to marry Emily *Sellwood and his earlier depressive symptoms did not recur.
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On 17 March 1873, together with another distinguished scientist, Professor John Tyndall, Huxley visited Tennyson at *Farringford; the conversation touched on *In Memoriam as well as on scientific topics. Huxley said that Tennyson had the best understanding of science of all the poets. He was instrumental in Tennyson being invited in 1864 to join the Royal Society; Tennyson refused on this first occasion but, when asked again the following year, accepted.
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Idyll Short poem describing an episode from rural life. The idyll was originally closely linked to ‘pastoral’, particularly in the works of the Greek poet *Theocritus which are set in a serene and idealized landscape and convey tranquil emotions. The word comes from the Greek diminutive, eidillion, or ‘small picture’. In the 1842 *Poems is a group of poems which Hallam *Tennyson much later referred to, apparently on his father’s authority, as *‘English Idyls’: they include *‘The Gardener’s Daughter’, *‘Dora’, *‘Walking to the Mail’ and *‘Audley Court’. Here, Tennyson tries to apply the classical form to his own day, although in doing so he often adds a narrative element which was absent from the classical originals. Perhaps ‘Audley Court’, with its evocation of friendship and celebration in a bucolic setting is closest to the Theocritean model idyll. In using the same term, though with a double ‘l’, for *Idylls of the King, Tennyson is first establishing a link between British and classical mythology (he always pronounced the word in the Greek way as ‘idle’) and, second, suggesting the tragic irony of Camelot’s fall from its originally idyllic state. *Gladstone, among others, questioned the appropriateness of the term for these long narrative poems: no diminutive (eidillian) can be adequate to the breadth, vigour and majesty which belong to the subjects ... The poet used the name once before; but he then applied it to pieces generally small in the scale of their delineations, whereas these, even if broken away one from the other, are yet like the disjointed figures from the pediment of the Parthenon in their dignity and force. (Jump, 251)
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I
He suggested instead *‘Epic’, revealing his own reading of the poems as having a place in the politics of the nation. Tennyson’s own explanation was: ‘I 114
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Idylls of the King, The Arthurian epic in 12 books, published between 1842 and 1885. ‘When I was twenty-four I meant to write a whole great poem on it [the Arthurian legends] and began it in the Morte d’Arthur,’ Tennyson said to James *Knowles (Ricks, 1464). He later said that the key to the Idylls lies in Arthur’s speech at the end of *‘The Holy Grail’, where the king talks of: moments when he feels he cannot die, And knows himself no vision to himself, Nor the high God a vision, nor that One Who rose again. (912–15) The immortality of the soul is thus at the heart of the Idylls, as it is of *In Memoriam. Sources Sir Thomas *Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, the *Mabinogion (translated by Lady Charlotte Guest), Layamon’s Brut, old French Romance and Celtic folklore are the sources cited by Hallam *Tennyson. Tennyson draws particularly on Malory, despite his reservation that these fifteenth-century stories were ‘loosely strung together without art’ (Ricks, 1460). Tennyson’s adaptations of Malory suggest the differences between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Malory quickly establishes Arthur’s legitimate parentage and consequent right to the throne; Tennyson leaves the birth mysterious. Malory is more interested in Lancelot, Tennyson in Arthur, as ‘ideal manhood closed in real man’. (This line was his final emendation to the poem, added in 1891 [Ricks 1969, 1464].) However, in Malory it is Merlin who brings Guinevere home to Arthur for their wedding; in Tennyson it is Lancelot. Malory and other sources make Mordred Arthur’s son by an incestuous relationship with Bellicent. Tennyson spells his name ‘Modred’ and makes him Arthur’s nephew by Bellicent. Tennyson makes the guilt of Lancelot and Guinevere the source of the collapse of the Round Table, particularly stressing female guilt (with Vivien as an additional, more overt villainess). In the 1872 Idylls he constructed the figure of King Mark as the source of evil (with Vivien as
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spell my Idylls with two l’s mainly to divide them from the ordinary pastoral idyls usually spelt with one l. These idylls group themselves round one central figure’ (Ricks, 1467). This definition explains the naming of the Idylls of the King, each after one character – though the names were later often changed from one to two, so that, for example, ‘Elaine’ (1859) becomes in later editions *‘Lancelot and Elaine’.
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his emissary). The ruining of Pelleas and Balin through their disillusionment with Guinevere provides a more powerful emotional centre to the narrative than the military rivalry. Whereas Malory proceeds to describe the deaths of Lancelot and Guinevere, Tennyson ends with the death of King Arthur. He told his son that he had felt that he could not have improved upon Malory’s account of the deaths of the two lovers. The whole poem is structured on images of the decay and dissolution of Britain after the departure of the Romans, during which time Arthur ‘for a space’ ‘made a realm and reigned’ (‘The Coming of Arthur’, 19). Structure Each idyll is a self-contained story from the Arthurian cycle which Tennyson weaves together by means of repeated characters, motifs and imagery into a moral fable about the collapse of Arthur’s ideal court as a direct result of Queen Guinevere’s adultery with Sir Lancelot. The cycle begins with Arthur’s birth and the setting up of Camelot (*‘The Coming of Arthur’) and ends with the collapse of the Round Table and Arthur’s final defeat by Modred (*‘The Passing of Arthur’). The early Idylls show the golden days of the Round Table and the ultimately happy love affairs of *‘Gareth and Lynette’ and *‘Geraint and Enid’; *‘Balin and Balan’ ends tragically with the deaths of two brothers; *‘Merlin and Vivien’ leaves Merlin bewitched and trapped forever in a hollow tree; thereafter the stories are tragic, with lovers being destroyed by jealousy or unrequited love. *‘The Holy Grail’ shows the purest vision, attainable only by Galahad, not by the earthly king: indeed, the pursuit of a visionary ideal is presented as ruinous to the earthly court. *‘Pelleas and Ettarre’ begins hopefully like *‘Gareth and Lynette’, but ends in despair; Pelleas turns into the fearsome Red Knight of *‘The Last Tournament’; disorder spreads as the knights lose faith in the courtly ideal, because of the widespread knowledge (spread by the wily Vivien) of Guinevere’s infidelity. Vivien and Modred betray the lovers as they take their final farewell. Guinevere flees to a nunnery and Lancelot to his own lands. In a last great battle, Arthur faces Modred, who has joined forces with the heathen Saxons, and kills him, but is himself mortally wounded. He is borne away in a barge by three queens to be healed of his ‘grievous wound’ in the ‘island valley of Avilion’. Excalibur, the sword which seems to give meaning and purpose to life, was received by Arthur as a young king, but has to be returned to the lake before he can depart. Tennyson must have originally considered another book, as in *‘The Epic’ (1842) ‘Morte d’Arthur’ is referred to as the eleventh book of twelve. In the event, he reached the epic total of twelve by dividing ‘Geraint and Enid’ into two books. Tennyson pointed out the
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Composition Tennyson contemplated writing about Arthur, ‘the greatest of all poetic subjects’ (Ricks, 1462), when he read *Malory as a boy. He first used Arthurian material in *‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1832), an early working of the Lancelot and Elaine story. At the same time he was writing two comparable lyrics, *‘Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere’ and *‘Sir Galahad’, both of which he published in the 1842 volume. After Arthur Hallam’s death in 1833, he seems to have returned to the Arthurian material in a completely different mood, producing a blank verse ‘epic’ treatment, the *‘Morte d’Arthur’ (written in 1833–34) and thereafter the partial identification of the king with Hallam is sustained. The figure of the noble King has also been linked with Prince *Albert, who died in 1861, and even with Arthur Wellesley, Duke of *Wellington (d. 1852). When he came to publish the ‘Morte d’Arthur’ in the 1842 volume, Tennyson felt obliged to add a contemporary framing narrative – *‘The Epic’ – which Edward *FitzGerald thought was ‘to anticipate or excuse the “faint Homeric echoes” ’ and ‘to give a reason for telling an old-world [Fairy-]tale’ (Ricks, 1969, 582). In 1859 Tennyson produced four Idylls, ‘Enid’ , ‘Vivien’ (originally called ‘Nimue’), ‘Elaine’ and ‘Guinevere’. They are clearly patterned as the ‘True and the False’ and stress the female protagonist. When they were reworked into the complete cycle, the titles of the first three were changed to give precedence to the male protagonist – so becoming ‘Geraint and Enid’, ‘Merlin and Vivien’ and *‘Lancelot and Elaine’. In 1869 came the next four Idylls. The ‘Morte d’Arthur’ lost its contemporary framing narrative and was augmented to become ‘The Passing of Arthur’. ‘The Holy Grail’ proved difficult, but once Tennyson thought of the multi-narrator approach, it was written quickly. These are very much products of the 1860s in their handling of religious debates, though they are also evidence that, in Hallam Tennyson’s words, Tennyson ‘had carried a more or less perfected scheme ... in his head over thirty years’ (Ricks, 1462). In 1872 came ‘Gareth and Lynette’ and ‘The Last Tournament’ – balancing episodes (both, in Malory but not in Tennyson, involve Gareth) from the beginning and end of the cycle. ‘Balin and Balan’ was written by 1874 but not published until 1885.
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cyclical unity of this final version: ‘The Coming of Arthur’ is at New Year; Arthur’s marriage to Guinevere is in May; the vision of the Holy Grail in midsummer; the Last Tournament and Guinevere’s flight in autumn; and Arthur’s death on the last night of the year. Within the Idylls, the youthful idealism of Gareth, in the springtime of Camelot, is balanced by the destruction of youthful idealism in Pelleas, who comes to a waning Camelot in the autumn.
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Order of publication
‘Dedication’ ‘The Coming of Arthur’ ‘Gareth and Lynette’ ‘The Marriage of Geraint’ ‘Geraint and Enid’ ‘Balin and Balan’ ‘Merlin and Vivien’ ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ ‘The Holy Grail’ ‘Pelleas and Ettarre’ ‘The Last Tournament’ ‘Guinevere’ ‘The Passing of Arthur’ ‘To the Queen’
‘Morte d’Arthur’ ‘Enid’ ‘Vivien’ ‘Elaine’ ‘Guinevere’ ‘The Coming of Arthur’ ‘The Holy Grail’ ‘Pelleas and Ettarre’ ‘The Passing of Arthur’ ‘The Last Tournament’ ‘Gareth and Lynette’ ‘Balin and Balan’
(1842) (1859)
(1869)
(1872) (1885)
The *‘Dedication’ was published in 1862, after Prince Albert’s death. *‘To the Queen’ was published in 1872, to accompany the two Idylls.
Style Tennyson deliberately made the language of the opening and closing idylls more archaic than the rest, but throughout the Idylls there is a conscious and accomplished reworking of medieval literature. Tennyson replicates Malory’s frequent use of ‘and’ and ‘so’, such repeated simple conjunctions adding to the impression of an inexorable narrative drive through an epic chronicle of events. This sits uneasily alongside the influence of the realist novel, where action emerges from character. It is possibly the inevitably unsatisfied rival expectations of medieval romance and realist novel which have caused much of the negative criticism of the poem. *Chaucer’s influence is strong, both in character types, the shifts from comedy to tragedy and the use of dress to identify character. Songs are often introduced, suggesting both the influence of *Shakespeare and the importance of riddles in medieval Welsh poetry. The prevalence of dreams has been thought to be an effort at characterization; it is much more likely to be linked to medieval dream poems, especially Chaucer’s. The natural settings should not be read as merely indulgent nature descriptions: they are again a medieval device, perfected in Gawain and the Green Knight, to externalize a spiritual landscape.
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Final version
Genre The poem is not officially an *‘epic’ but a series of ‘eidillions’ – *idylls, or ‘small pictures’, perhaps suggesting the importance of visual imagery.
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Reception In 1842, *Arthurian literature was new; by 1872, the Idylls’s success had made it hugely popular and familiar. John *Sterling commented of ‘Morte d’Arthur’ that ‘the miraculous legend of “Excalibur” does not come very near to us, and as reproduced by any modern writer must be a mere ingenious exercise of fancy’ (Quarterly Review, 1842) (Ricks, 585). This comparatively mild comment discouraged Tennyson to such an extent that he wrote no more of the project for over a decade. The 1859 volume was hugely popular as a national epic, with ‘Guinevere’ generally found most moving. In 1869 reviewers, thinking the work complete, expended great energy on allegorical interpretations. After the 1872 volume, most readers were sure that the Idylls were concluded. R. H. Hutton threatened Tennyson if he altered or added a word. Readers such as *Gladstone, who wanted a public epic, greeted the 1859 Idylls as the ‘highest point which the poetry of our age has reached’ (Jump, 256), but were disappointed in the later Idylls, which seemed to slide into mysticism and private myth. At 80, Tennyson declared that he had meant the poem as allegory, the battle between Senses and Soul, but earlier he had warned his readers against over-interpretation, or looking too hard for history or allegory. He did, however, admit that ‘there is an allegorical or rather a parabolic drift in the poem’ (Memoir, ii.127). He argued for openness of interpretation: ‘Poetry is like shotsilk with many glancing colours. Every reader must find his own interpretation according to his ability, and according to his sympathy with the poet’ (Memoir, ii.127). *FitzGerald heartily disliked the Idylls, believing that Tennyson should have stopped after the ‘Morte d’Arthur’, that his King Arthur smacked too much of Prince *Albert and that, after all, the old Prose Romances could not be bettered. Critical approaches
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*Gladstone objected, of the 1859 Idylls, that the unassuming name obscured the grandeur of the conception. These are different, however, from the pastoral *English Idyls; spelt with two ‘lls’, as Tennyson pointed out, they are grouped round one central heroic figure (see Idylls). Tennyson’s determination to have 12 books also suggests epic ambitions: influenced by *Virgil, he wanted to emulate the 12 books of the Aenead, also centred on a single heroic figure.
The Idylls were highly regarded in Tennyson’s time, especially by *Dickens, *Thackeray, Macaulay and, of course, Prince Albert, men of his own generation; to the next generation of *Swinburne and *Meredith they appeared sanctimonious. After the First World War they reached a nadir of unpopularity. Revaluation began in the 1960s as the poem’s subtle underlying organization
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began to be recognized. Tillotson refers approvingly to Tennyson’s desire for a ‘compacted’ and ‘vertebrate’ poem, citing *Palgrave in Memoir, ii.506 (Tillotson 1965: 82). Allegorical and mythical readings became popular. However, there continued to be criticism of the poem’s alleged coldness, its ‘inadequate characterisation’ and its ‘narrative weaknesses’. B. C. Southam criticized Tennyson’s ‘failing in dramatic sense which is really an absence of human sympathy’. Valerie Pitt (1962) blames what she takes to be its overall failure on Tennyson being a lyric rather than an epic poet. More recent criticism has focused on the imperialist background, on the significance of weapons (Freudian readings abound), and on the very Victorian presentation of female sexuality and guilt. The brilliant images in the Idylls – especially the jewels which feature so prominently – have always been recognized, even by the poem’s detractors who found the language generally flat. Tennyson attempts to achieve in verse the cold brilliance of a medieval tapestry; the detached narrative voice is the voice of narrative itself rather than of an individualized teller. Beginning often in media res and looping back on themselves, the narratives appear inevitable, already foretold, like pages in a book already read. The framing narrative, ‘The Epic’, actually anticipates the other 11 books, decades before these were actually written. The whole poem is an exercise in the art of narrating, the hypnotic effect enhanced by the mesmeric blank verse, which unrolls almost too easily. Perhaps Tennyson’s attempt (even as late as 1890) to humanize Arthur is the real mistake: these mythical characters can never ask for sympathy like those in a realist novel. They are figures in a complex pattern, a verbal tapestry, a text. See under individual titles of each Idyll. See also: Epic; Idyll; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: Criticism, Tennyson’s sensitivity to.
In Memoriam (1850) Tennyson’s elegy to Arthur Hallam: the most celebrated poem of the Victorian age. Mode of composition Written as individual lyrics from shortly after Hallam’s death (September 1833) until its anonymous publication in May 1850, the poem was originally referred to by Tennyson as ‘The Way of the Soul’ or ‘Fragments of an Elegy’. Emily *Sellwood’s favoured title, ‘In Memoriam’, suggests a unified purpose, but this is belied by the fragmentary, diary-like mode of the poem’s composition over 17 years of mourning. A fragment, ‘Hark! The dogs howl!’, written in the weeks
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following the news of Hallam’s death, was, according to Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir, ‘the germ of In Memoriam’ (Ricks, 855). It describes a ghostly vision of Hallam:
Tennyson, asked by Henry *Hallam to contribute a prose appreciation to his son’s Remains (1834), replied that he had found it impossible but added, ‘I hope to be able at a future period to concentrate whatever powers I may possess on the construction of some tribute’ (Ricks, 855). Soon his friends were mentioning in letters an increasing number of ‘memorial verses’. In the Memoir, however, Tennyson is recorded as saying, ‘I did not write [the sections] with any view of weaving them into a whole or for publication, until I found that I had written so many’ (Memoir, i.304). The lyrics were collected in an old butcher’s account book which, according to popular legend, Tennyson left behind in one of his rented rooms in 1849, and which had to be retrieved from a cupboard by Coventry *Patmore. Nervous of publishing something so personal, Tennyson issued a trial edition in March 1850 which was circulated among his closest friends including, significantly, Emily Sellwood, whose comments prove that the poem had finally convinced her of the nature of Tennyson’s religious faith. Anonymity lasted less than a day, before the Publishers’ Circular announced the name of the author. Metre What came to be known as the ‘In Memoriam stanza’ – four tetrameters rhyming abba – had been used by Tennyson for earlier 1832 political poems such as ‘Hail Briton!’. He thought it was his own invention and only after publication discovered that it had already been used by Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Ben Jonson and Sir Philip Sidney. Structure There are 133 sections, including a Prologue and an Epilogue. Tennyson’s own later explanation of the structure is chronological: ‘the divisions of the poem are made by First Xmas Eve (Section xxviii), Second Xmas (lxxviii), Third Xmas Eve (civ and cv etc.)’. He later told James *Knowles that there were nine natural groups or divisions: i–viii; ix–xx; xxi–xxvii; xxviii–xlix; l–lviii; lix–lxxi; lxxii– xcviii; xcix–ciii; civ–cxxxi. Eight extra sections which occur in the Notebook were not published in 1850 but can be found as an Appendix in Ricks’s 1969 edition of the Poems.
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Larger than human passes by The shadow of the man I loved. (‘Hark! the dogs howl!’, 20–1)
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*Shakespeare’s Sonnet sequence is a possible analogy, particularly in the light of Arthur Hallam’s own love for these sonnets. His father, Henry *Hallam, writing just before the publication of In Memoriam, deplored their influence, declaring his wish that Shakespeare had not written them; Tennyson roundly declared him wrong: ‘they are noble’ (Ricks, 861). A modern critic, Paul Turner, has helpfully listed the following influences: *Theocritus, *Horace, *Catullus, *Ovid, Moschus, *Milton, *Shelley, Petrarch, Shakespeare, *Keats, *Lucretius, *Goethe, *Lyell, *Chambers, Paley and *Dante (Turner [1976], pp. 116–30). In addition, Lyric lxix (‘I dreamed there would be Spring no more’), where the poet becomes a Christ-like martyr, has unmistakeable echoes of William Blake. (See also: *‘Flower in the Crannied Wall’). Elements of the classical elegy abound and include epicedia, epithalamia, genethliaka and propemtika (see Markley [2004], 70–84). Themes and readings of the poem Tennyson himself remarked that it was ‘a poem, not a biography’, founded ‘on the engagement of Arthur Hallam to my sister, on his sudden death at Vienna, just before the time fixed for their marriage, and on his burial at *Clevedon Church. The poem concludes with the marriage of my youngest sister, *Cecilia’ (Memoir, i.304–5). It begins with a funeral and ends with a marriage – begins with death and ends with the promise of new life – ‘a sort of Divina Commedia, ending with happiness’ (Memoir, i.304). Tennyson is imposing upon his ‘fragments of an elegy’ (Ricks, 857) the linear narrative from despair to hope which Emily and his Victorian readers desired – the moods of grief put in order, from the early rawness of new bereavement to the gradual incorporation of irreplaceable loss into the rhythms of continuing life. There are many immediate personal details: of Hallam’s body being brought home from Vienna by sea (Lyric ix – the earliest section written), or memories of Hallam’s individual personality and appearance – the ‘bar of Michael Angelo’ on his forehead, which can still be seen on his portraits (Lyric lxxxvii), the charm which won over the Tennyson children on visits to *Somersby (cix), his debating days at Cambridge (cx), the Tennyson family’s departure from Somersby in 1837 (cii). These are interwoven into the larger debate about the possibility or otherwise of personal immortality. Tennyson uses Christian imagery, with the figure of Hallam often being subsumed into that of Christ, as in the Epilogue, but also imagery from Buddhism, with the loss of individuality at one point accepted and glorified as something close to nirvana (‘Farewell! We lose ourselves in light’: xlvii); there is a more straightforwardly Romantic Wordsworthian pantheism (‘Thy voice is on the rolling air’: cxxx) and, as mentioned, a Blakean section in which the poet himself becomes the sacrificial victim (lxix). The
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Literary influences
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poem is in fact culturally discursive and eclectic rather than dogmatic, ranging through moods and images as a diary of grief rather than as a prescription for curing pain. (See: Blair [2006]). In Memoriam also embodies many of the religious debates of the midVictorian age. The most significant sections for twenty-first century readers are perhaps the ‘Evolutionary Stanzas’, liv–lvi, where the speaker uses imagery from Charles *Lyell and Robert *Chambers to consider the irrelevance of the individual to the workings of evolution and in which *Nature is described (in possibly the best-known line in all of Tennyson) as ‘red in tooth and claw’. The slow erosion and sedimentation of landscape are imagined in brilliant lines which encouraged Thomas *Huxley to say that Tennyson could convey scientific ideas better than any other poet: The hills are shadows and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go. (cxxiii) There is certainly here an embracing of science and its implications, but there is also, in the later stanzas, a turning away from the evidence of the natural world to a more Coleridgean reliance on inner experience: I found Him not in world or sun, Or eagle’s wing, or insect’s eye; Nor through the questions men may try, The petty cobwebs we have spun ... A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason’s colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answered ‘I have felt’. (cxxiv) Other powerful and significant lyrics in the poem include: ‘Dark House’ (vii) an evocation of blank despair, outside the home of the dead friend; ‘This truth came borne’ (lxxxv) containing the lines, ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all’; ‘By night we lingered on the lawn’ (xcv), which, at the heart of the poem, describes a mystical experience of momentary reunion with the dead – ‘The living soul was flashed on mine’; ‘You say, but with no touch of scorn’ (xcvi), in which occur the often-quoted lines: ‘There lives more faith in honest doubt,/Believe me, than in half the creeds’; and ‘Ring out, wild bells’ ([cvi] with its optimistic evocation of the New Year).
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In Memoriam 123
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Several issues have been the focus of later exegesis and analysis of the poem. The first is the ‘Honest Doubt’ debate: is the poem ultimately optimistic or pessimistic? In Memoriam was read by most Victorians as a linear narrative moving from doubt to hope, though Tennyson himself observed, ‘It’s too hopeful, this poem, more than I am myself’ (Ricks, 859). The New Critics, in the mid-twentieth century, were also looking for unity of structure and meaning, though they preferred a less positive reading. Also, T. S. *Eliot famously observed of In Memoriam that ‘Its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience’ (1936: 336). More recent manuscript studies have shown Tennyson ordering and re-ordering the sections in ways which suggest no single overarching principle of development. The subject seems to be not so much hope or despair but rather the tension between them, suggested by the juxtaposition of opposing stanzas which effectively mime the traditional movement of mourning between clinging to the past and letting it go. The second issue is the level of autobiographical reference and the question of homosexuality. Tennyson says, ‘It is rather the cry of the whole human race than mine’, and adds, ‘It is a very impersonal poem as well as personal’ (Ricks, 859). The range of imagery used to describe the central relationship has attracted much attention. Every familial relationship is in fact used here to describe the central one. A typical stanza is: My Arthur, whom I shall not see Till all my widowed race be run; Dear as the mother to the son, More than my brothers are to me. (ix) Critics determined to prove a homosexual relationship have tended to ignore the wider frame of reference of ‘mother’ and ‘brothers’ and focus exclusively on the ‘widow’ image here and on phrases like ‘I shall be thy mate no more’ and, in Section xciii, ‘Descend, and touch, and enter’. ‘Dear’ and ‘Dearest’ are also used and there are references throughout to the sense of touch, particularly to ‘a hand that can be clasped no more’ (vii, 5), a frequent image. Tennyson himself gave a blunt rebuttal of any homoerotic subtext. Though there is no doubt of the intensity of the relationship, it has to be viewed in the context of the frequency of Romantic friendships between young men in the 1830s. See also: Hallam, Arthur Henry. More recent criticism has been concerned with the impossibility of extracting any fixed meaning from such disparate lyrics, the danger of over-
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Later criticism
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determination. ‘The different moods of sorrow as in a drama are dramatically given,’ said Tennyson (Ricks, 859). Modern criticism, for example that of John D. Rosenberg (2005b), has stressed the poem’s polymorphous qualities rather than its argument: it breaks down sexual, natural and life and death boundaries and circles back upon itself, as the abba verse form itself circles back. Sexuality is unfixed. There are even sections which have been said to anticipate the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, notably xlv: ‘The baby new to earth and sky ... Has never thought that “this is I” ’. Reception The poem was an instant success. It was much admired by Prince *Albert, whose own death in 1861 ironically served to renew the poem’s popularity. ‘Next to the Bible,’ said Queen *Victoria, ‘In Memoriam is my comfort’ (Memoir, i.485). For George *Eliot, it sanctified human love as a religion (Ricks 1972: 221). Edward *FitzGerald struck a minority note of scepticism: ‘Don’t you think the world wants other notes than elegiac now?’ (Rosenberg 2005b: 41). Paul Verlaine (quoted by W. B. *Yeats) stressed the poem’s particularly English escape from generalized emotion into practical detail: he found that he couldn’t translate it into French because ‘Mr Tennyson was too noble, too Anglais, and when he should have been broken-hearted had many reminiscences’ (Rosenberg 2005b: 43). Sixty thousand copies of the poem were sold in the first few months after publication, there were four editions by the end of 1850 and thirty editions during Tennyson’s lifetime. It is still regarded by many, despite or because of, its mixture of the lyrical and the commonplace, as the great Victorian poem and Tennyson’s greatest achievement. Criticism Blair (2006); Mattes (1951); Sinfield (1986); Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1982).
‘In the Children’s Hospital’ Dramatic and sentimental poem apparently based on an actual event. The poem, written in 1879–80 and published in 1880, was by Tennyson’s own account based on ‘a true story’, and in this respect, as well as in its sympathy for the sufferings of humble folk, it may be compared with *‘Rizpah’, another poem of similar date. Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir (ii.253) identifies Mary *Gladstone as the friend who passed on the story to Tennyson. The references to the New Testament (for example, in lines 26 and 50, and in the concluding line) provide a contrast with the distinctively modern aspects of the poem: the doctor ‘Fresh from the surgery-schools of France’ with his ‘ghastly tools’ is very much a contemporary figure.
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‘In the Children’s Hospital’
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126 ‘In the Garden at Swainston’
This *elegy, published 1874, was written on 31 May 1870 when Tennyson attended the funeral of his close friend Sir John *Simeon at his home, Swainston, on the *Isle of Wight. Sir John as ‘the Prince of courtesy’ is linked to Arthur Hallam and to Henry *Lushington, both of whom had also died suddenly abroad, to make up a trinity in the poet’s heart. Tennyson uses the image of the nightingale, resonating from classical mythology and from *Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, as a symbol of transient passion to contrast with the permanence of his love. His mastery of elegy is shown, as in *‘In the Valley of Cauteretz’, by the contrast between simplicity of language and complexity of rhythm and between the deeply personal and the universal. Further reading: Ebbatson (2005).
‘In the Valley of Cauteretz’ Elegiac lyric expressing memories of Arthur Hallam. The poem was written on 7 September 1861 at Cauteretz in Spain, in the course of a family holiday, and published in 1864. The spot was one that Tennyson had visited with Arthur Hallam during their time together in Spain in the summer of 1830: the earlier visit was therefore 31 years in the past, not ‘two and thirty years’, as he writes in line 6. Tennyson’s motives may have been mixed when he remarked in 1863 that ‘Altogether I like the little piece as well as anything I have written’ (Ricks, 1123), for as well as being a late memorial to his dead friend the lyric combines in its ten lines beauty and poignancy as well as verbal and metrical skill of a high order. The opening phrase, ‘All along the valley ... ’, appears five times in this brief lyric, in alternate lines, but with significant shifts of meaning: it is first the path of a stream; then the scene of a walk in the past; then the scene of a walk in the present; fourthly, the voice of the stream brings to mind the voice of a dead man; and, finally, it is once more a setting, this time for the illusion that the voice of the dead man is heard again. It can also be said that the poem begins in geography or topography, and there are throughout references to such features as the ‘rocky bed’ of the stream and to ‘rock and cave and tree’. Quickly, however, it becomes something different from a landscape poem as the experience of the remembered past becomes intensified by the associations of the poet’s surroundings, and the metaphorical ‘voice’ of the stream becomes a human voice. The situation, in which a scene visited after a long absence revives memories and emotions, is characteristically Wordsworthian, but the intricacy of the verbal patterning is Tennyson’s own. At the conclusion, the ‘living voice’ of the stream becomes identified with the long-silent voice of Hallam, which thereby itself becomes, at least subjectively, a ‘living voice’. The poem could well have borrowed the title of a much earlier poem that was part of Tennyson’s creative response to
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‘In the Garden at Swainston’
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Hallam’s death, *‘The Two Voices’, and it also anticipates the concluding words of a much later poem, *‘Vastness’: ‘the dead are not dead but alive’. For another short poem in which memories of the past blend with landscape and generate a subtle and intricate interplay of words, see: *‘The Roses on the Terrace’.
Tennyson and Arthur Hallam returned from their Spanish adventure via Dublin in 1830 – Tennyson’s first visit to Ireland. In 1842 he planned to visit Aubrey de Vere in western Ireland. Missing de Vere, he travelled alone for two weeks, from Limerick to Killarney down to Cork, visiting the Ballybunion caves en route. As was his usual practice, he kept images in his head from this journey which emerged much later in his poetry, in *‘Merlin and Vivien’ (1859): So dark a forethought roll’d about his brain, As on a dull day in an Ocean cave The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall In silence. (228–31) In 1848, on a second visit to Killarney, he wrote ‘The splendour falls on castle walls’, noting later that it was: ‘Written after hearing the echoes at Killarney in 1848. When I was there I heard a bugle blown beneath the “Eagle’s Nest” and eight distinct echoes’ (Ricks, 783). On this visit he spent five weeks at Curragh Chase with de Vere, in quest of the huge Atlantic waves off the island of Valencia on the western extremity of Ireland. In summer 1878 he went for a longer trip, with his son Hallam, staying at the houses of the Irish aristocracy, Lord Sligo at Westport and Lord Monteagle at Mount Trenchard, and visiting Killarney once more. Though he seemed to love the landscape, Tennyson shared the prejudice of his age and took delight in baiting his younger friend William *Allingham, himself Irish by birth, by talking of the ‘unreasonableness’ of the Irish and their ‘horrible island’; once challenged he backed down, admitting that the English had been brutal and that the Celts were a charming people. In 1878 he asked A. P. Graves to suggest a suitable subject for an Irish poem. Graves suggested ‘the *Voyage of Maeldune’ which Tennyson promptly wrote to illustrate, he said, the genius of the Celts; with Allingham’s help he later also attempted a poem in Irish dialect.
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Ireland
Irving, Sir Henry (1838–1905) Actor; famous as Becket in Tennyson’s play. Tennyson was a keen theatre-goer in the 1870s and 1880s, largely because the theatre itself had revived since his younger days, with spectacular productions,
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larger theatres and larger-than-life acting. The young Henry Irving led the way, managing the Lyceum Theatre with Ellen *Terry from 1878 to 1902 and reviving popular interest in *Shakespeare. He first triumphed in The Bells (1871–72), in Richelieu (1873) and, famously, in Hamlet (1875). Tennyson saw these last two plays and sent the script of *Becket to Irving in 1879 but Irving felt that it would be too expensive to stage and shelved it until just before the poet’s death. He did play the lead, Synorix, in *The Cup (1881) with Ellen Terry as his lover Camma who finally poisons him for making her betray her husband. Becket was finally staged just after Tennyson died and the role of Becket himself became one of Irving’s greatest triumphs, with Ellen Terry as Rosamund. Irving thought Tennyson’s play-writing mediocre but flattered him to his face and imitated his voice and intonation for his Shylock in The Merchant of Venice – a characterization Tennyson disliked (without realizing its link to himself) because it ‘made you pity Shylock too much’ (Martin, 524).
Isle of Wight Island off Southampton; Tennyson’s home from 1853. After their marriage in 1850 the Tennysons looked for a house by the sea and found *Farringford, near the village of *Freshwater at the west end of the Isle of Wight. *Emily loved the relative seclusion of the island, but Tennyson went frequently to London for companionship. It was on the Isle of Wight that his hatred of ‘literary tourists’ developed, though he delighted in walking on the downs and found congenial company in the society of Sir John *Simeon, Julia Margaret *Cameron and, later, W. G. *Ward. It was during the crossing from Lymington in Hampshire to Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight, in October 1889, that he composed *‘Crossing the Bar’.
Italy Tennyson as a young man several times considered going to Italy. His eldest brother, *Frederick, settled there in 1836 and stayed until 1859, enjoying a life of arts and music. Alfred considered joining him there but in the end stayed and looked after his family during the move to *High Beech in Essex. In 1846 he again talked of Italy and again he changed his mind. At last he and *Emily went through France to Italy on a long holiday in 1851, moving slowly south through Monaco and on to Genoa, going through La Spezia to Bagni di Lucca to stay with Tennyson’s old Cambridge friend, Francis *Garden. Emily distrusted *Roman Catholicism and Alfred disliked the fleas. Once they reached Florence things improved and they stayed ten days with Frederick and his Italian wife, coming home via Milan and Como and into Switzerland where Alfred picked a flower for Emily. Finding the pressed flower two years later, he wrote *‘The
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Daisy’, a tribute to the beauties of Italy. He returned once to Northern Italy with Hallam in 1873 and in 1880 Hallam took his father to Venice to help him recover from the death of his beloved brother *Charles. Venice itself disappointed him, but they then journeyed through Verona to Sirmio, the small peninsula jutting out into Lake Garda and there the remembrance of his favourite Roman poet, *Catullus, freed him to write his elegy, *‘Frater Ave Atque Vale’, with Catullus’ wistful voice of mourning for his brother and of joy at the beauty of the natural world both sounding through the poem. See also: Revolutions.
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James, Henry (1843–1916) American novelist. James had been brought up on Tennyson whom he called his ‘earliest known and best-loved’ poet. However, when he came to England at the beginning of his literary career, in 1875, one of his first tasks was to review Tennyson’s firstperformed play, *Queen Mary; he produced a very negative assessment, calling the play ‘simply a dramatised chronicle, without an internal structure’ (Martin, 512). When he finally met his hero in 1877, the poet talked only about ‘port and tobacco’ and, to James’s distress, ‘was not Tennysonian’ (Martin, 519). It may be that Tennyson was using his habitual ploy of being deliberately prosaic to keep inquisitive strangers and potential hero-worshippers at bay. Subsequent meetings (including a reading of *‘Locksley Hall’, which left him unmoved), finally reconciled James to the realization that a poet was simply a man after all.
Jebb, Professor Sir Richard Claverhouse (1841–1905) Greek scholar; friend of Tennyson. Jebb’s many classical publications include Primer of Greek Literature (1877) and Homer (1887). He visited *Aldworth several times, on one occasion in August 1887, watching an eclipse of the moon with Tennyson. His praise of the later poems and the plays greatly encouraged Tennyson. He published an enthusiastic review of *Harold in The Times in 1876 and in March 1892 attended Augustin Daly’s production of *The Foresters in New York, writing afterwards to Tennyson full of admiration for the play. Tennyson wrote ‘To Professor Jebb, the Following Poem’ as an introduction to ‘Demeter and Persephone’ (1889), which Jebb had helped him research.
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Sister of Tennyson and betrothed of Arthur Hallam. Known as Emily. Two years younger than Alfred, Emily was, with her older sister *Mary, one of the two acknowledged beauties of the Tennyson family, dark-haired and dark-eyed. She met Arthur Hallam when he visited *Somersby for the first time on 20 December 1829, a date Hallam kept thereafter as ‘a saint’s day’. A year later they acknowledged their love for each other. Arthur’s father, doubtful both of the permanence of his son’s affections and of the suitability of the Tennyson family as relations, insisted on a separation until Hallam became 21, on 1 February 1832. During this time the two lovers maintained a passionate but rather uneasy correspondence in which Hallam showed more concern over Emily’s health than she over his, and they even contrived to meet on at least one occasion, in Cheltenham. They renewed their vows as soon as the banishment was over: ‘I love her madly,’ he wrote: ‘I feel as though I had never known love till now’ (Charles Tennyson, 117–18). Though there were still problems between the families, the engagement seemed secure. Emily’s response to the sudden news of Arthur’s death, which reached Somersby at the beginning of October 1833, was to faint in her brother’s arms. Her physical collapse lasted for months. When she was strong enough she rejoined family life, wearing one white rose in her black hair. She began to visit the Hallam family, growing particularly close to Hallam’s younger sister Ellen, with whom, together with her own sisters Mary and *Cecilia, she formed *‘The Husks’, a group of intellectual women who studied Romantic poetry and wrote many letters to one another about literary topics. Henry *Hallam supported her with a £300 annuity, as he had intended to do on her marriage to his son. However, in September 1841 she became engaged to Captain Richard Jesse, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, whom she had probably met at the Hallams’. Tennyson gave his sister away at her wedding – but it is never mentioned in *In Memoriam, where the wedding of the youngest Tennyson sister Cecilia to Edmund *Lushington provides a more suitable ending to the poem. Henry Hallam generously continued the £300 annuity even after the marriage. The Jesses’ first child was christened Arthur Henry Hallam Jesse, but the memory of Arthur does not otherwise seem to have cast a great shadow over what was a happy marriage. The second son, Eustace, named after Emily’s Tennyson D’Eyncourt cousin who had also died young, became the father of the writer, Fryn Tennyson Jesse. Later in life Emily was drawn by her sister Mary into Swedenborg’s Church of the New Jerusalem and became interested in spiritualism but, on being told by one medium that Arthur Hallam was awaiting her after death, she objected strongly on the grounds that it was she and her husband who deserved to spend time in heaven together. It was the rest of the
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Tennyson family, as well as the Hallams, who kept alive the memory of her earlier love; when she died, her brother *Frederick wrote a poem imagining her meeting once again ‘the lover of thy youth’ (Tennysons, 167, line 19).
Hungarian violinist. In the late 1870s, Tennyson made friends with Joachim, the greatest violinist of his time, who would play for him at 14 Eaton Square, the house the Tennysons had taken for the winter season in London. They discussed music which Tennyson could only explain to himself in terms of poetry – the poetry of the bowing, the flashing images he saw as he listened. During ‘At Home’ evenings, Joachim would play sonatas with Emily Ritchie while Alfred and Emily listened. See also: Music.
Jowett, Benjamin (1817–93) Oxford don and classical scholar. Jowett became Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford in 1855 and Master of Balliol College in 1870. His editions and translations of Plato’s dialogues were once widely used. Tennyson met him in Oxford in 1855 and Jowett subsequently became a frequent visitor to *Farringford. On one visit he was photographed by Julia Margaret *Cameron. After a visit in 1861 he wrote of Tennyson: ‘The more I see of him the more I respect his character, notwithstanding a superficial irritability and uneasiness about all things ... No one is more honest, truthful, manly, or a warmer friend; but he is as open as the day, and, like a child, tells any chance comer what is passing in his mind’ (A Volume Supplementary to the Life and Letters, quoted in the New York Times [Wednesday 24 February 1900]: 1). Jowett was constantly trying to think up subjects for Tennyson’s poetry, believing, as he said, that ‘subjects were like blackberries ... and could be gathered off every hedge’ (Martin, 424). He contributed to *‘The Ancient Sage’, ‘Akbar’s Dream and *‘The Grandmother’. In 1861 Alfred and Emily supported Jowett throughout the storm caused by the publication of the collection of liberal theological essays, Essays and Reviews. However, when he visited Farringford church the vicar called him ‘Judas Iscariot’ from the pulpit. Jowett was intensely grateful for the support of the Tennysons, a support particularly difficult for Emily with her deep and narrow religious views.
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Joachim, Joseph (1831–1907)
See also: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: faith and doubt.
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Lyric poem published in the posthumous collection of 1892. Like *‘The Roses on the Terrace’, this exquisite lyric, simultaneously tender and firm in tone, is cast in a single sentence. It is a very personal poem addressed to the poet’s wife in their old age, though she is not specifically mentioned. It was written in June 1891 but not published in Tennyson’s lifetime; in the 1892 volume it stands first and, as the fourth line makes clear, constitutes a dedicatory poem. Also like ‘The Roses on the Terrace’, visual details of the external world are deftly transformed into the inner qualities of the addressee: bracken, heather and sky become expressive of qualities of Emily’s inner life and character.
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Keats, John (1795–1821) Romantic poet; influence on Tennyson. Tennyson admired Keats most of all the Romantic poets (despite his early fondness for *Byron). His early verse was often compared to Keats’s: there are echoes of the earlier poet, particularly in *‘Timbuctoo’ which, with its loose organization, gives a very Keatsian impression of random, luxuriant imagery. Tennyson here combines Keats’s visual exhuberance and colour with a grand Miltonic blank verse. When Arthur Hallam sent Tennyson’s early poems to Leigh *Hunt in 1831, he claimed that his friend was the legitimate heir of Keats, and it was a claim supported by many readers. An example is Tennyson’s early poem, based on the visit to Cauteretz with Hallam, ‘Check every outflash, every ruder sally’, which combines the Pyrenean experience and ‘mild-minded Melancholy’ with local Lincolnshire details – ‘the summer midges’ – in a very Keatsian way. There was, ironically, another link in the attack of J. W. *Croker, Keats’s nemesis, who certainly accepted Hallam’s definition – but, for that very reason, attacked Tennyson. Most of the reviewers in fact assumed that Tennyson belonged to the ‘Cockney School’ of Keats and *Shelley and in the April 1833 issue of the Quarterly Review. Croker launched into him with heavy sarcasm, describing him as ‘another and a brighter star of the galaxy or milky way of poetry of which the late lamented Keats was the harbinger’ (Martin 169). He seems to have still prided himself on his savage review of ‘Endymion’ in 1818 which Shelley blamed directly for Keats’s decline and death. The effect on Tennyson was less dramatic – but he published nothing more for a decade and for decades thereafter dreaded publication.
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Actress, member of famous acting family; sister of John *Kemble and friend of Tennyson. Fanny met Tennyson and Arthur *Hallam while visiting her brother at *Cambridge. Hallam was greatly attracted to her, but cheerfully accepted her adoration of Alfred, whom she later referred to as ‘our hero, the great hero of the day’ (Page [1985]: 4). In the Christmas vacation of 1829, Hallam went with Alfred and Charles Tennyson to see Fanny in her first theatrical role, as Juliet in her father Charles’s production of Romeo and Juliet at the Covent Garden Theatre in London. In 1832 they saw her in The Hunchback, again at Covent Garden, Hallam observing wryly that she ‘acted better than ever ... because she knew Alfred was there’ (Martin, 151). In a fit of adoration, she exclaimed of Tennyson, ‘I am glad! I am glad! ... Glad that there is yet a man in England capable of performing such glorious things. He is the greatest painter in poetry that I know’ (Martin, 152). Fanny believed herself to be the inspiration of Tennyson’s ‘Eleanore’ (1832) and admired the poem enormously. However, she greatly disliked the revisions to the 1832 volume in the 1842 Poems, saying that some of the works were irretrievably spoiled. Later she retired from the stage and settled in America, but she continued to give Shakespearean readings and published several autobiographical volumes. Tennyson remained on friendly terms with her and in July 1871 she was a lunch guest at *Farringford and read *Shakespeare to the assembled company.
Kemble, John Mitchell (1807–57) Editor and Anglo-Saxon scholar; Cambridge *Apostle and friend of Tennyson. Brother of Fanny *Kemble, Kemble took part with Tennyson and Arthur *Hallam in the 1830 expedition to Spain to help the revolutionaries. He initially planned to enter the Church but instead became an Anglo-Saxon scholar, working in Germany under Jacob Grimm before returning to lecture at Cambridge. In 1840 he succeeded his father, Charles, as Examiner of Plays. He edited several Anglo-Saxon texts, notably the first critical edition of Beowulf and became a pioneer of Anglo-Saxon studies. He was remembered among the Apostles for his dictum, ‘The world is one great thought, and I am thinking it’ (Martin, 116).
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Kemble, Fanny (Frances Anne) (1809–93)
Ker, Alan (d. 1885) Barrister; Tennyson’s brother-in-law, husband of Mary *Tennyson.
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Ker, Alan
Mary Tennyson’s attachment to John *Heath had ended in 1837 when he effectively jilted her, possibly as a result of her new-found interest in Swedenborgian spiritualism. On 7 July 1851 she married an impoverished barrister, Alan *Ker, only later telling her startled family. Shortly afterwards the Kers emigrated to Antigua, where Ker was to work for over thirty years in the Judicial Service of the West Indies. He had a distinguished career, acting successively as Attorney General of Antigua, Chief Justice of Nevis, Chief Justice of Dominica and finally puisne judge of the Supreme of Court of Jamaica. There were long separations from his wife and son, Walter, but the marriage remained a devoted one. After Mary’s death in England in April 1884, Ker wrote to their son describing her as a ‘good, pious, amiable and gentle woman, every way worthy to be her mother’s daughter’. He survived his wife by less than a year, dying on 20 March 1885. Their son, Walter, became an eminent scholar and barrister.
Kingsley, Charles (1819–75) Novelist; friend of Tennyson after his marriage. The author of Westward Ho! and The Water Babies was vicar of Eversley in Hampshire, close to Drummond *Rawnsley’s parish of Shiplake in Oxfordshire and met Emily *Sellwood there. After the publication of the trial edition of *In Memoriam in March 1850, Kingsley put pressure on Emily to quell her doubts about Tennyson’s religious faith: Hallam *Tennyson believed Kingsley’s intervention ‘did more than anything to encourage her’ (1911: i.350) to resume the relationship. The Tennysons deeply admired Alton Locke (1851) and Kingsley much admired Tennyson’s poetry, but in Two Years Ago (1857) he introduced an opium-addicted poet whom Tennyson initially took as a caricature of himself. Kingsley and F. D. *Maurice’s Christian Socialism influenced Tennyson’s vision of industrialized England in *Maud (1855).
Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936) Poet, influenced by Tennyson. As an old man, Tennyson took a keen interest in the work of the next generation of poets. He was particularly impressed by Kipling’s ‘The English Flag’ and wrote to congratulate him. Kipling’s military reply suggests the attitude of both to their public role as poets: ‘When the commander in chief notices a private of the line the man does not say “thank you”, but he never forgets the honour and it makes him fight better’ (Martin, 577). Kipling’s approach to the public function of poetry owes a great deal to his admiration of Tennyson’s Laureate poems.
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Architect of *Aldworth and founder and editor of the Nineteenth Century; friend of Tennyson. Always ambitious, Knowles asked Tennyson to be the dedicatee of his The Story of King Arthur and his Knights (1862) and thus started an acquaintance. Tennyson, meeting him casually on Haslemere railway station in 1867, suggested that, as a professional architect, he might consider designing the second home he and *Emily planned to build nearby. This was to become *Aldworth House. Knowles agreed to the proposition, but would accept no fee, arguing that Tennyson’s poetry was more than payment. In November 1868 Knowles founded the *Metaphysical Society, with 26 distinguished members, including Tennyson. In the same year Tennyson presented Knowles with his manuscript notes on the characters in his *Idylls of the King. In January 1870, Knowles contributed a long letter on the Idylls to The Spectator and returned to the same subject in an article in the Contemporary Review three years later. In 1877 he founded an important new journal, the Nineteenth Century, to the first number of which Tennyson contributed a sonnet. In 1883 Knowles wished to publish Arthur *Hallam’s letters to *Gladstone, but Tennyson vetoed the project. In 1890, while Tennyson and his son were staying with him in London, Knowles engineered the last meeting between the poet and Gladstone. Knowles was knighted in 1905.
‘Kraken, The’ Published 1830 but not reprinted until 1872. An early sonnet (though, unsettlingly, it has 15 not 14 lines), on a mythical sea monster which Tennyson had read about in his father’s library in books by Walter *Scott and T. C. Croker. He links the rousing of the subterranean beast with the final apocalypse, the ‘latter fire’, suggested by G. S. Faber’s books (also in *Dr Tennyson’s library) on religious mythology. Despite these welldocumented literary sources, the sonnet has established its place in anthologies probably because it invites political readings in its treatment of stasis and change: Tennyson presents change as inevitable, but frightening and possibly fatal. The poem thus links thematically to the stagnant state depicted in *‘Mariana’ (also 1830) and to the fate of *‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1832); though it was probably written earlier, at *Somersby, it has even been linked to Tennyson’s experience of turmoil at *Cambridge preceding the 1832 Reform Act. It has been interpreted both as a conservative poem (fearing change) and as a radical, Shelleyean one (desiring revolution) and as such has become a focus for discussions of Tennyson’s *politics.
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Knowles, Sir James (1831–1908)
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‘Lady Clara Vere De Vere’ Published 1842; written by 1833. This expression of egalitarian sentiment fitted the public mood after the passing of the 1832 *Reform Act. The theme of inequality of birth is a Tennysonian favourite, receiving fullest expression in *Maud, whose heroine shares Lady Clara’s disdain and, like her, breaks the heart of her humbler lover. The conclusion, in which Lady Clara is advised to ... teach the orphan-boy to read Or teach the orphan-girl to sew (69–70) as a cure for ennuie, anticipates the move from the individual to the social in Maud. Tennyson’s quotability is evident in the famous lines, Kind hearts are more than coronets And simple faith than Norman blood. (55–6)
‘Lady of Shalott, The’ 1832; revised 1842. Early Arthurian lyric. The story is ‘taken from an Italian novelette, Donna di Scalotta’, said Tennyson (Ricks, 354). However, the crucial elements, the mirror, weaving, curse, song and river, are his own. The poem uses a stanza form adapted from medieval Welsh ballads by Michael Drayton in the seventeenth century. Tennyson continued: ‘The Lady of Shalott is evidently the Elaine of the *“Morte d’Arthur” [see: “Lancelot and Elaine”] but I do not think that I had ever heard of the latter when I wrote the former’ (Ricks, 354). The poem was heavily revised for the 1842 volume, in the direction of a move from myth and magic to a greater awareness of
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the social world. ‘The charm is broken utterly’ is the Lady’s message at the end of the first version; the later version moves to another point of view:
Tennyson’s own move in the 1840s away from Hallam’s ‘Poetry of Sensation’ towards a more public poetry is suggested in one explanation the poet gave of his poem: ‘the new-born love of something, for some one in the wide world from which she has been excluded, takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities’ (Memoir, i.117). At other times, however, he talked of preferring ‘a parabolic drift’ (Ricks 1463) to one-to-one allegorical correspondences. The Lady is mysteriously cursed to a life of seclusion. She is trapped, not just by the tower, but by the literary tradition of the weaving lady, of Penelope and Arachne. Tennyson seems here to be breaking an old myth in order to create the possibility of a new one. Her rebellion, fatal though it is, seems both inevitable and inevitably fatal, and suggests, as in *‘The Kraken’ (1830), Tennyson’s ambivalence about change. She is impelled to break the spell only after the cumulative effect of the sight of Sir Lancelot and then of ‘two young lovers lately wed’. These presumably are the ‘realities’ of which Tennyson speaks, but recent criticism has made much of the complex perspectives established in the poem: looking at the mirror set behind her tapestry in order that she can view her weaving from the right side, the Lady observes in it reflections from the river of the figures on the bank. What she actually sees then is the reflection of a reflection – not ‘presence’ at all. Despite Tennyson’s disclaimer, there is no simple move from fantasy to reality – particularly when the symbol of ‘reality’ turns out to be the mythical Camelot. The use of one long rhyme in each stanza linking two five-line tetrameters, interlocked by the steady ‘Camelot’/’Shalott’ refrain, makes the weaving of the story emulate the weaving of the tapestry – another typically self-reflexive move. Rhythm and vocabulary are simple and hypnotic, relying on alliteration and repetition. The Lady moves from ‘a space of flowers’ towards a more public identity by inscribing her name on the boat. This is eventually read by the people of Camelot, but the mystery of her love for Lancelot remains: he never properly deciphers her message of love but sees only ‘a lovely face’ (169). This poem has been subjected to a wide variety of critical readings and the history of its reception provides a miniature history of Tennyson criticism. It was a favourite with its first readers – apart from J. W. *Croker, who
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But Lancelot mused a little space; He said, ‘She has a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace, The Lady of Shalott.’ (168–71)
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‘Lady of Shalott, The’
savaged it in the Quarterly Review for its vagueness. Others tried to find in it a simple allegory about the place of the artist in the world. (This reading would vindicate Arthur Hallam’s argument that for the artist involvement in the public realm of ideas brings fatal results to his art. It is not just the Lady but the tapestry which is destroyed.) In the 1950s, G. Robert Stange gave as its argument that ‘the artist must remain in aloof detachment, observing life only through the mirror of the imagination, not mixing with it directly. Once the artist attempts to lead the life of ordinary men, his poetic gift, it would seem, dies’ (1949: 16, in Joseph 1996: 26). The shift towards post-structuralism meant that critics found any simple binary opposition between the ‘imaginary’ and the ‘real’ problematical: they focused instead on the Lady as herself a ‘text’, in Geoffrey Hartman’s pun on Lévi-Strauss’s term, ‘a floating signifier’ (Stott 1996: 28), whose meaning is inevitably unstable and uncommunicable. She has shown, in fact, in her refusal to stay in the tower, a ‘desire for reality-mastery as aggressive and fatal as Freud’s death-instinct’. Christopher Ricks anticipated the ‘reflection of a reflection’ observation in 1972 and argued instead that this double negative cancels itself out and therefore actually reinforces presence: ‘Her mirror constitutes a protection against life for the Lady; it cracks after she sees somebody doubly mirrored – “From the bank and from the river” – within the mirror. It is as if the protection is cancelled out: re-re-flection = flection, the impact itself’ (1972, 75). Feminist and New Historicist critics have focused on the Lady as an emblem of the plight of the Victorian woman or even of the Victorian working class, trapped in an ideology which, by definition, they cannot see until some decisive intervention occurs. To Isobel Armstrong, ‘the Lady works just as the agrarian reapers work’, without questioning. Once she does question her position, she finds that she can in fact leave the tower: ‘it is the moment when myth is recognized as myth, or as ideology, which enables action, and the construction of a new myth’ (1993: 85). In this reading, ‘it is not clear whether her new song is a song of triumph or defeat’: it is certainly, according to Armstrong, a poem about the sexual politics of repression. Interestingly, nineteenth-century artists were quick to pick up the sexual politics of the poem. Paintings by John *Millais, by J. W. Waterhouse and by Holman *Hunt show the lady respectively as a virginal Ophelia, a mature and sensuous woman and a mysterious witch. Hunt’s painting grew over several decades until by its 1904 completion the Lady had become a monstrous Eve, embodying rebellion. Dante Gabriel *Rossetti typically focused instead on the ‘male gaze’ of Sir Lancelot on the dead Lady. Julia Saville’s article, ‘The Lady of Shalott: A Lacanian Romance’ (1992), examines some of these paintings in the light of Lacanian theory.
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See also: Art and artists; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: Critical approaches.
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North-western area of England of particular natural beauty. The Lake District provided Tennyson with his first Arthurian landscape. He used Bassenthwaite Lake as the setting for the *‘Morte d’Arthur’, following his visit to James *Spedding at Mirehouse in 1835. It was on this visit that he became friends with Edward *FitzGerald. Tennyson as always absorbed the landscape, and put the vapours and the soaking rain into his poem. This was after all the perfect setting for the Lady of the Lake. He had passed close to *Wordsworth’s house at Rydal, when he took the coach from Keswick but refused Spedding’s suggestion that they visit the older poet. After two or three weeks at Mirehouse, the three friends moved on to the Salutation Inn at Ambleside where they rowed on Lake Windermere and met S. T. *Coleridge’s son Hartley. In 1850 *Emily and Alfred returned to the Lake District on their honeymoon, staying in a hotel in Keswick and visiting Mirehouse. The landscape of the *Idylls is often *Tintagel and *Cornwall, but sometimes the earlier vision of the Lake District shines through.
‘Lancelot and Elaine’ Seventh idyll in the final order of the *Idylls of the King (1859). Published in 1859 as ‘Elaine’ and given its final title in 1869, the idyll was begun in July 1858 after some persuasion by Thomas *Woolner that Tennyson should tell the story of the Maid of Astolat. Tennyson’s later comment on the tale’s theme was: ‘The tenderest of all natures sinks under the blight, that which is of the highest in her working her doom’ (Ricks, 1621). The source of the story is Malory xviii 9–20. Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat, cherishes the shield of Sir Lancelot. The idyll then explains how she came to possess it. King Arthur on his adventures had found the skeleton of a king from whose crown he retrieved a set of diamonds; one of these he offered as the prize each year in a jousting competition. For each of the past eight years, Lancelot had won a diamond, planning to keep them until the set was complete and he could present it to Guinevere. Guinevere persuades him to enter the lists this year in disguise. Travelling there, Lancelot stays at the castle of the Lord of Astolat, with his two sons Sir Torre and Sir Lavaine and his daughter Elaine, who falls hopelessly in love with him. She persuades him to wear her favour in the lists. This convinces his own family that the anonymous knight in the jousts cannot be Lancelot and, after he has won the diamond, they attack and wound him as a rival knight. Badly injured, Lancelot is nursed back to health by Elaine, spurns her innocent advances and returns to Guinevere. By this time rumours of his attachment to Elaine have spread through Camelot and the Queen is distraught with jealousy. Elaine
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pines away for love, but before she dies writes a letter to explain her death. In accordance with her wishes her brothers place her body in a barge to be rowed down to Camelot. As the barge passes under the Queen’s window, Guinevere, convinced of Lancelot’s betrayal, furiously hurls Lancelot’s diamonds down into the river. Elaine’s letter, proclaiming her unrequited love for Lancelot, is read out by the King, Guinevere forgives her knight, but Lancelot leaves the castle to struggle with his remorse and guilt. The 1859 Idylls were subtitled ‘The False and the True’: in this idyll the figure of the jealous Guinevere, ‘false’ to her distant husband, is set against that of the innocent Elaine, ‘true’ to her fantasy of Lancelot. Twenty-first-century readers are likely to find Tennyson’s heavy-handed patterning simplistic.
Landscape Tennyson describes landscape both for its own sake and as the embodiment of states of mind. ‘Thy soul is like a landskip, Friend’, wrote Tennyson to a Cambridge *Apostle, in a poem praised by Arthur *Hallam. To Emily *Sellwood, as he was leaving *Somersby, he wrote of the link in the opposite direction: ‘A known landskip is to me like an old friend who speaks to me of the past and of half-forgotten things’ (Letters, i.166). Human lives and landscape are intimately interfused for Tennyson: I climb the hill: from end to end Of all the landscape underneath, I find no place that does not breathe Some gracious memory of my friend. (In Memoriam Lyric c) W. J. Fox perceptively wrote in an early review of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830): ‘He seems to obtain entrance into a mind as he would make his way into a landscape’ (Jump, 26). The best example of a landscape which is also a state of mind is *‘Mariana’, but landscape functions in a similar way in *‘Tithonus’, in *Maud and right through Tennyson’s career to *‘June Bracken and Heather’. However, Tennyson also loved landscape for its own sake – and journeyed to find appropriate landscapes simply as settings for his poems. *‘The Lady of Shalott’ may be in the realm of a medieval fairytale world but it is patently set in Lincolnshire – as are many of the earlier poems. Tennyson travelled to *Cornwall to find an authentic setting for the Idylls; he returned to the *Lushingtons’ home, *Park House, to be sure of the accuracy of *‘Audley Court’; the journey to the Pyrenees provided the setting for *‘Oenone’; Killarney inspired ‘The splendour falls on castle walls’.
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Tennyson praised Virgil as ‘Landscape-lover’ (‘To Virgil’, 3), acclaiming his Eclogues, with their descriptions of ‘wheat and woodlmd,/tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd’ (‘To Virgil’, 5). He too could paint domestic idylls; however, what had first sparked his own imagination was the Exotic and this is evident throughout his poetic career, from *‘The Lotos-Eaters’, to *‘Enoch Arden’, to the late poem, ‘To Ulysses’. The Pyrenees haunted him, but also the tropics (though he never travelled further south than Lisbon). From his earliest childhood, after all, he had been stirred by the words, ‘Far, far away’ (Memoir, i 11).
‘Last Tournament, The’ Tenth idyll in the final order of the *Idylls of the King (1872). Unusually, Tennyson published this idyll alone in the Contemporary Review in December 1871, before republishing it in book form with *‘Gareth and Lynette’ in 1872. Both idylls in *Malory focus on Gareth, since it is he who fights the Red Knight. Tennyson transfers this task to Arthur, as he needs to show Camelot collapsing during the king’s absence on the quest for the Red Knight. The ‘Tristram and Iseult’ half of the tale, based on Malory viii–x, had been planned since 1859, though the fool Dagonet, with whom the narrative begins and ends, is original. Parallelism and confusion of identity are central: Nestling is a surrogate for the child Arthur and Guinevere never had; the ‘Tournament of Dead Innocence’ parallels the ‘Tournament of Youth’ in *‘Pelleas and Ettarre’; King Mark sends Tristram to fetch the Irish Isolt, as Arthur sent Lancelot for Guinevere; there are two Isolts; the Red Knight is actually Gareth’s alter ego, the benighted Pelleas; Tristram’s brutal death prefigures the final tragedy. Tennyson consciously builds up King Mark as a villain, as in all the last three Idylls written; in Tristram, he challenges *Swinburne’s ‘religion of pleasure’ in Songs before Sunrise (1870). The distorted syntax, frequent compound words and contorted narrative act as an extreme contrast to the youthful straightforwardness of ‘Gareth and Lynette’.
Laurence, Samuel (1812–84) Portrait painter; painter of best-known oil painting of the younger Tennyson. Laurence painted Tennyson’s portrait at the behest of Edward *FitzGerald in 1838 and found the sitter extremely congenial company, the strongest-minded man he had ever met. It became the first and best-known oil painting of the poet, though Tennyson himself called it ‘blubber lipt’ (Martin, 240). Following Tennyson and Hallam’s visit to him in Woodbridge in 1876, FitzGerald presented the Laurence portrait to *Emily. After Tennyson’s death, Hallam and
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Emily employed Edward *Burne-Jones to repaint and soften the portrait and it is this later version which now hangs in the National Gallery.
Poet, artist, traveller and writer; friend of Tennyson. Tennyson and Lear met at the *Lushingtons’ home, *Park House, probably in 1849, when Lear was deeply and unrequitedly in love with Franklin Lushington. The friendship blossomed after Tennyson’s marriage, as Lear adored *Emily. He was a guest at both *Farringford and *Aldworth, and a regular correspondent of Emily’s. His Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania and Illyria (1851) prompted Tennyson’s praise in his poem *‘To E.L., on his travels in Greece’. In October 1855, during his stay at Farringford, he sang his own settings of *‘Mariana’, *‘The Lotos-Eaters’ and *‘Oh, that ’twere possible’ and even hoped that he might find somewhere to live nearby: ‘Do you think there is a Pharmouse or a Nin somewhere near you, where there would be a big room looking to the North? – so that I could paint in it quietly, & come & see you and Mrs Tennyson promiscuously?’ (Martin, 397). However, over the years Lear began to worry too much about Emily’s health to enjoy his visits to Farringford; he was besides terrified by Julia Margaret *Cameron. On his first visit to Aldworth, he and Tennyson quarrelled over the prices of Lear’s watercolours. Lear recorded: ‘one would fancy him a mere child & a foolish one too’ – except for his determination to drive a hard bargain. Lear concluded bitterly, ‘Verily O Poet! You are a wonder!’ (Martin, 486). Thanks to Emily, the quarrel was patched up, but shortly afterwards Lear went to live abroad and they rarely met again, though Lear named his house in San Remo Villa Tennyson. Lear’s watercolours and musical settings of Tennyson’s poems capture a delicate exoticism which appealed to the poet, despite his usual reluctance to have his work translated into any other medium. Lear’s many illustrations for Tennyson’s poems are collected in Poems by Tennyson Illustrated by Lear (1889).
Lecky, W. E. H. (1838–1903) Historian and essayist; friend of Tennyson. Lecky was a Liberal in politics and the author of a History of Rationalism (2 vols, 1865) and of a History of England in the Eighteenth Century (12 vols, 1878–92). He became a friend of Tennyson in the 1860s and in May 1879 memorably accompanied him to Wiltshire, visiting Stonehenge, Amesbury and Salisbury Cathedral. Lecky called Tennyson ‘the best critic of verse I have ever known’ (Memoir, ii.201). He was present at important family events, including
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*Hallam’s wedding in 1884. At a performance of *The Cup in 1881 he recorded his admiration of Tennyson’s shrewd comments to Ellen *Terry on her acting.
Popular singer. Tennyson invited Jenny Lind to *Farringford in May 1871, where she sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘Auld Robin Gray’ at his special request. She also sang Handel and Elijah and impressed *Emily not only with her sense of fun but also with her deep religious faith. Tennyson’s love of Jenny Lind is part of the ‘folk’ side of his nature, shown also in his love of Robert *Burns and of English and Scottish folk songs.
Lincolnshire and Lincolnshire society Large agricultural county on the east coast of England; Tennyson’s birthplace. The landscapes of Tennyson’s childhood are everywhere in the early poetry, from ‘The Brook’ to *‘The Lady of Shalott’, which opens with a typical scene: On either side the river lie Long fields of barley and of rye, That clothe the wold and meet the sky. The wolds are high and wooded, chalk hills lush in summer but bleak in winter, with narrow lanes and gentle slopes scattered with sheep – a very rich and varied landscape rather than the bleak, primitive environment envisaged by Tennyson’s *Apostle friends at Cambridge, who pretended to refuse to believe in the existence of such a provincial place. The social life of Lincoln and *Louth, with its ‘Stuff Balls’ and close community of county families – the *Cracrofts, the *Massingberds, the *Rawnsleys, the *Heneages, the *Brackenburys and others – satisfied Tennyson until well after Arthur *Hallam’s death. When it became necessary to leave *Somersby, however, he was quite ready to move on, though, as soon as the family was established in Essex, he characteristically began to pine for Lincolnshire once again. In later life there was little reason to return to Lincolnshire: the surviving family members came to stay at *Farringford, and Tennyson seems to have attached little sentiment to the place of his birth. However, although he travelled widely in search of appropriate settings for his poems, his imagination continued to feed on Lincolnshire scenes and they recur as homely yet magical moments even in the later poetry, for example, in *‘Gareth and Lynette’ (1872) with its glimpse of
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a field of charlock in the sudden sun Between two showers. (380–1)
London home of the *Prinsep family; favourite haunt of Tennyson. Julia Margaret *Cameron’s sister was married to Thoby Prinsep: the seven Pattle sisters formed a social circle (known as ‘Pattledom’) at the Prinseps’ house in West Kensington, to which artists and writers, including *Burne-Jones, Holman *Hunt, Dante Gabriel *Rossetti, G. F. *Watts and Robert *Browning, George *Eliot, *Thackeray and Tennyson, were drawn from the 1850s onward. Watts had his own studio in the house and completed his ‘moonlight’ portrait of Tennyson there.
Locker-Lampson, Frederick (1821–95) Minor poet, man of letters, and friend of Tennyson. Born Frederick Locker, he adopted the surname Locker-Lampson (adding the maiden name of his second wife) in 1885. His collection of light verse, London Lyrics (1857), was very popular in its day. He was an intimate friend of Tennyson, and the two families were united in 1878 when his daughter Eleanor married Tennyson’s younger son, *Lionel. In 1868 Locker-Lampson was the poet’s travelling-companion on a trip to Paris, and in the following year they toured France and Switzerland together.
‘Locksley Hall’ Published 1842; youthful romance, linked to Rosa *Baring. Written 1837–38, the poem has 8-stress trochaic lines which give a balladlike rhythm and urgency to the first-person tale of a young man’s despair at being jilted for a wealthier suitor. Tennyson weaves into the story many of his own hopes and fears for the future of the world, anticipating in the speaker’s more optimistic moments ‘the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world’ (128). There are poetically prophetic images of
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the heavens filled with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue. (123–4) The speaker possesses the emotional intensity and self-absorption of the hero of *Maud. The central plot, a love affair between cousins, recurs in ‘The Brook’
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Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion creeping nigher, Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire. (135–6) At this, the very beginning of the Victorian age, however, optimism wins through: Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns. (136–7) The speaker considers exchanging the modern world, with its ‘march of mind’ for some exotic tropical island where ‘I will take some savage women, she shall rear my dusky race’ (168), but baulks at this abandoning of the fruits of European civilization, and instead accepts his European identity: ‘Forward, forward let us range’ (181), leaving home but presumably not leaving Europe. The poem is permeated by 1830s imagery; Tennyson was one of the earliest to include in his poetry the steam ship and the railway. He later admitted that his line ‘let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change’ (182) was based on a misconception: when he first travelled on a train in the dark he had imagined that it ran down a groove. The detail suggests both the receptivity of his imagination and his concern for the factual accuracy of his images. This is one of the best-known and most frequently quoted of Tennyson’s poems and was popular and influential from its first appearance. Richard Monkton *Milnes sent a copy, with *‘Ulysses’, to Sir Robert Peel as part of the campaign to gain Tennyson a Civil List Pension (granted in 1845).
‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’
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and *‘Aylmer’s Field’, but the exploration of betrayal and rejection draws painfully, if indirectly, on Tennyson’s own rejection by Rosa Baring in the mid1830s. The turning to the political as an escape from personal tragedy is a resolution also adopted in Maud; in this earlier poem, there is simply a flight from home to an unspecified exotic clime. Tennyson’s critique is of a recognizably 1830s society, not yet sufficiently engaged in social reform and with an ever-growing underclass:
Published in 1886; pessimistic sequel to *‘Locksley Hall’ (1842). The original speaker now talks to his grandson, Leonard, on the eve of the funeral of the rich rival who stole his beloved cousin Amy from him in the original ‘Locksley Hall’. He recounts his own lifetime of experiences since the
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youthful jilting: Amy died early, in childbirth; the speaker’s wife, Edith, is dead too, as is their son Leonard (the poem was written shortly after the death of Tennyson’s younger son, Lionel, in April 1886); the grandson, his namesake, will now inherit Locksley Hall. The diatribe against the materialism and decadence of the late-Victorian world has all the febrile weakness of an old man. As a dramatic monologue which Tennyson did try in his revisions to tone down, it still cannot be entirely separated from his own sense of disgust with the age of *Zola and *Swinburne: Bring the old dark ages back without the faith, without the hope, Break the State, the Church, the Throne, and roll their ruins down the slope. Authors – essayist, atheist, novelist, realist, rhymester, play your part, Paint the mortal shame of nature with the living hues of Art. (137–40) The old man’s rantings in the middle section of the poem have obscured the forgiveness with which it ends. There is an unexpected encomium to the rival who, after Amy’s early death, lived childless and Strove for sixty widowed years to help his homelier brother men, Served the poor, and built the cottage, raised the school, and drained the fen. ... Earth would never touch her worst, were one in fifty such as he. (267–8, 270) There is even hopefulness in the concluding thoughts that ‘man can halfcontrol his doom’ and that ‘Love will conquer all at last’ (280); in the end young Leonard is left to take Locksley Hall into the future. It is tempting, despite Tennyson’s usual disclaimers, to see in this old man’s poem a belated reconciliation with the memories of the Tennyson d’Eyncourts – possibly even a guilty recognition of the disparity between his uncle’s fortunes and his own. Uncle *Charles had after all done a great deal both for his country (working for the Reform Bill) and for his community of *Tealby in *Lincolnshire, where he had indeed built a school – and, unlike his nephew who had been loaded with honours, he had received no recognition, not even the knighthood for which he had longed. In 1877, Tennyson had made his peace with the shade of his old enemy, *Bulwer-Lytton, through dedicating his play *Harold to Lytton’s son. Bulwer had been Uncle Charles’s closest friend. Reconciliation was in the air. *Gladstone responded angrily to the political pessimism in the poem, believing that it ignored the improvements which the Victorian age (and his four ministries) had effected. He wrote passionately in the Nineteenth Century (January
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Locksley Hall Sixty Years After Etc. Published 1886. Dedicated to Emily *Tennyson, the volume contained the title poem, ‘The Fleet’ (a patriotic poem urging Britain to build up her navy – occasioned by the prospect of a war with Russia over Afghanistan), a laureate piece on the ‘Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen’ and the play, *‘The Promise of May’. This was the only play published in a volume of poems. ‘The Fleet’ had been published on 23 April 1885 in The Times and, like most of Tennyson’s patriotic verse, it occasioned several parodies, though it was praised by Cardinal Manning. The ‘Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition’ with its refrain ‘Britons, Guard Your Own’ is a plea for unity in the Empire and was commissioned by the Prince of Wales in the spring of 1886. Given a musical setting by Sir Arthur Sullivan, it was performed at the Albert Hall on the exhibition’s opening on 4 May 1886. The volume was, however, completely overshadowed by the furore caused by its title poem.
Lockyer, Sir (Joseph) Norman (1836–1920) Astronomer and friend of Tennyson. Lockyer was an eminent astronomer who became Director of the Solar Physics Observatory and Professor of Astronomical Physics at the Royal College of Science. He also loved Tennyson’s poetry and, in Tennyson as a Student and Poet of Nature (1910), attempted to classify Tennyson’s *nature imagery scientifically and thus prove his ‘accuracy’ as a poet. Tennyson was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1865 (having declined the honour the previous year). Lockyer became a FRS in 1869. In August 1892 Lockyer was one of the stream of visitors who came to celebrate Tennyson’s eighty-third birthday. They talked at length about the ages of the earth, sun and stars; and their friendship kept alive the ‘conversation’ between Victorian literature and science.
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1887) in favour of progress and liberalism, arguing that the poem had no place in the approach to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. This poem has often been seen as a shrill failure, comparable to *Carlyle’s ‘Shooting Niagara’. Tennyson himself hoped that, set against the first ‘Locksley Hall’, it would provide a useful historical insight into the beginning and ending of the Victorian Age.
London From his days as a Cambridge student, Tennyson needed London for excitement and social life but then usually returned to the country to write poetry.
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He used the city as a base during the wandering years between his leaving Lincolnshire in 1837 and marrying Emily *Sellwood in 1850. He would visit friends and stay for long periods, smoking heavily. After the move to *Farringford, Tennyson found that he still needed the stimulus of the city and made long visits there several times a year, leaving Emily on the *Isle of Wight. The dynamic between the seclusion and safety of his home and the stimulus of the society in which he moved in the City seemed to satisfy a creative need. His haven in the city in the 1850s and 60s was *Little Holland House, the *Prinseps’s home in West Kensington. He also visited the *Carlyles in Cheyne Row, Chelsea. Later, when Tennyson’s fortune had increased, the family leased an expensive house in fashionable Eaton Square and in 1870 he took a small pied-à-terre in Albert Mansions, Victoria Street, so that he could be near the *Lockers, his son *Lionel’s in-laws. On his final visit in 1892, he went with *Hallam to the Natural History Museum before visiting Macmillan’s to discuss his royalties: London as always provided an essential focal point in his life.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807–82) American poet; friend of Tennyson. Longfellow stayed at *Farringford in 1868. According to *Lecky, Tennyson became deeply fond of him, describing him as one of the most enchanting of men. Tennyson was generally suspicious of American manners, but seems to have made an exception of ‘noble old Longfellow’ (Letters, iii.221). The two remained correspondents and in 1877 Longfellow wrote the poem, ‘Wapentake for Alfred Tennyson’. After Longfellow’s death in 1882, the Longfellow Literary Society invited Tennyson to become an Honorary Member, an invitation which he gladly accepted.
‘Lotos-Eaters, The’ Written in 1830, published in 1832, and revised for its reappearance in the 1842 volumes, the poem is based on a legend recounted in *Homer’s Odyssey (ix, 82–104). In the course of their long and arduous journey home after the Trojan War, Odysseus and his crew land on the island of the Lotos-eaters, where some of the sailors, wearied by years of toil and danger at sea, fall victims to the seductions of the drug. According to classical tradition, eating the lotos produces a state of extreme relaxation and inertia, so that the past, with all its ties and responsibilities, is forgotten. The first part of the poem describes the landing and the natural beauty of the island; the ‘choric song’ that follows is put in the mouths of some of the mariners who have succumbed to the effects
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of the lotos and will not return to the rigours of life at sea, but will remain in a land where it is ‘always afternoon’. This renders the opening of the poem retrospectively ironic: the first word is ‘Courage’, and Odysseus’ urging of his men to resolution and effort stands in contrast to everything that follows. The effect in the opening line of the pronoun ‘he’ in addition creates the illusion that this is a fragment of a longer text – that the reader is being admitted to a narrative already in progress. This is Tennyson’s favourite method of introducing ‘timeless’ mythical material. As in other poems of this period, then, including *‘The Palace of Art’ and *‘The Lady of Shalott’, Tennyson is here exploring the temptations of withdrawal from the world of work and effort. The other side of the debate can be found in *‘Ulysses’, another poem about the same Greek hero. The idea of withdrawal from the world is closely associated with rest, sleep and dreams – words that recur in the poem – and with the final oblivion of death. It is also associated with the beauty of *landscape, so that the island is presented as a kind of paradise. *Water was Tennyson’s favourite element, and there are numerous allusions to it: the island is a ‘land of streams’, and line 9 offers a description of a waterfall that in its verbal movement enacts the phenomenon described. Criticism of the poem has recently centred on its relevance to the social conditions of the time: the mariners’ weariness and desire for rest predates their addiction to the lotos flowers. They can be seen, especially in the light of Tennyson’s revisions, as surrogates for the weary industrial workers of the ‘Hungry Forties’. Tennyson also enacts through the mariners’ plight the desire for escape from the world which was one of his own main poetic concerns. Further reading: Armstrong (1993).
Louth Market town in North Lincolnshire, where Tennyson attended grammar school. It was in Louth that George Clayton *Tennyson took lodgings while waiting for the living of *Somersby and *Bag Enderby to become available. Here, between 1802 and 1804, he met and courted the beautiful Elizabeth *Fytche, daughter of a former vicar. The pair were married in 1805. Tennyson was sent to the King Edward Grammar School in Louth in 1816, to join his older brothers, *Frederick and *Charles. (Their uncle, *Charles, had also been a pupil there.) The school, under the headmastership of the sadistic Reverend John Waite, seems to have been a brutal place even for those times, and Alfred was deeply miserable. He later recalled that ‘the only good I ever got from it was the memory of the words “sonus desilientis aquae”, and of an old wall covered with wild weeds opposite the school windows’ (Martin, 30–1). He
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left at the end of 1820 and, whenever he returned to the town in later years, refused to go down the lane which led to the grammar school.
Written 1842; possibly autobiographical poem describing the breaking of an engagement. The poem was written at the time Tennyson broke off his engagement to Emily *Sellwood (whom he eventually married in 1850). It closely resembles Tennyson’s final letter to Emily, asking her to believe in him: ‘How should this dependence on thy state coexist with my flying from thee? Ask not. Believe that it does. ’Tis true, I fly thee for my good, perhaps for thine, at any rate for thine if mine is thine’ (Martin, 247). The tenderness in the poem could well have been directed towards Emily: ‘Live happy; tend thy flowers; be tended by/My blessing!’ (84–5). Many factors have been suggested for the separation. The official reason given was Tennyson’s financial position but this no longer seems plausible in light of his actual income. Fear of passing on inherited epilepsy is a possible reason. Others are: brother *Charles’s recent separation from Emily’s sister Louisa; Alfred’s belief that the Sellwood family therefore disapproved of his own match; his fear that he could not live up to Emily’s high religious standards; and possibly a fear of committing himself. Certainly all these factors had been resolved by 1850: Alfred had discovered that gout, not epilepsy, was the root of his physical ailments; Charles had recently returned to Louisa; Alfred’s success would make him a desirable match for the Sellwood family; *In Memoriam (a trial copy of which he sent to Emily) proved to her the depth of his religious feeling; and perhaps, at 39, he was at last ready for commitment. The nature of the ‘Duty’ in the poem’s title is never made explicit but Charles Tennyson Turner wrote of Alfred’s overstrained moral scrupulousness as to what was conceived to be duty’ (Martin, 249) – which reinforces the sense that there is a biographical dimension to the poem.
Lovelace, Richard (1618–58) Cavalier poet; influence on Tennyson. Lovelace is known today for a handful of lyrics. After reading aloud the most famous of these, ‘To Althea, from prison’ (which contain the lines ‘Stone walls do not a prison make/Nor iron bars a cage’), Tennyson remarked, ‘I would give all my poetry to have made one song like that!’ (Memoir, i.211). His love of the simplicity of this song and of the poetry of Robert *Burns must be set against Walter *Bagehot’s characterization of his own poetry as ‘Ornate’.
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Published 1879; developed from a juvenile poem. Begun in the poet’s late teens, the poem was withdrawn at the last minute from the 1833 volume, despite Arthur Hallam’s vigorous objections. Tennyson continued to believe it was ‘full of faults’ (Ricks, 299) but nevertheless wrote a sequel, ‘The Golden Supper’, for the *‘Holy Grail’ volume in 1870. Exasperated by endless pirated versions, he finally published the whole work in 1879. Based on Boccaccio and influenced by *Keats, the poem is, by the poet’s later account, ‘the breath of young Love’ (Ricks, 300). Parts I and II tell of the passion of the narrator, Julian, for his foster-sister, Camilla, and his grief when she is swept off by his friend, Lionel. Psychoanalytically minded critics have made biographical links with Arthur Hallam and Tennyson’s sister *Emily in order to explain Tennyson’s fierce reluctance to publish the tale. Part III is a powerful vision of the beloved returning to life and leaping from the funeral bier and ‘The Golden Supper’ (narrated by a friend) darkens Boccaccio’s happy ending as Julian, having united Camilla and Lionel, passes ‘for ever from his native land’ (Ricks, 348).
‘Lucretius’ Dramatic monologue based on the classical legend of the suicide of Lucretius, overcome by the horrors of lust: 1869 (1870). The poem is based on the Greek legend that the Epicurean philosopher, Lucretius, having been secretly given a love potion by his wife to win back his affection, was so disgusted by the ensuing visions of lust that he killed himself. Tennyson may well have read Lucretius’ De rerum natura as a boy in his father’s library. He returned to the work in the 1860s and studied it deeply. Tennyson first published the poem in Macmillan’s Magazine, May 1868, and then in The Holy Grail and Other Poems in 1869 (1870). At the publisher’s suggestion he edited out a risqué reference to ‘budded bosom peaks’ – though Emily had transcribed the whole work, and did not consider the phrase shocking. The poem embodies Tennyson’s attack on what he saw as the materialism behind Epicureanism and is a direct challenge to the rising poetic star, Algernon Charles *Swinburne. The controlled blank verse belies and largely negates the subject matter. It is a poem about eroticism rather than an erotic poem, and is notable for its blatant use of storm and fire to describe sexual arousal. At the same time, classical scholars have praised the clever integration of Lucretian philosophy into the monologue as well as the considerable skill involved in evoking Lucretius’ consciousness. Tennyson is concerned to show that ‘the Gods are careless’ (‘Lucretius’, 150) and that all that is left for
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the Epicurean, in a world without a loving God, is the tranquillity found in death.
Close friends of Tennyson, commemorated in *In Memoriam, *The Princess and *‘In the Garden at Swainston’. The three brothers, Edmund Law (1811–93), Henry (1812–55) and Franklin (1823–1901) Lushington lived at *Park House, near Maidstone in Kent. Edmund knew Tennyson at Trinity College, Cambridge, and his rooms in London were a haven in Tennyson’s bachelor days. In autumn 1842 he married the poet’s youngest sister, *Cecilia, the marriage described at the end of In Memoriam. A professor of Greek at Glasgow University, he took his family to Scotland for half of every year. The marriage was not a happy one, but Lushington remained devoted to Tennyson until the end of his life, publishing little himself but utterly absorbed in his brother-in-law’s poetic career. Henry was a Cambridge *Apostle; his closest friend, George *Venables, another Apostle, never married but devoted himself to Henry. After Arthur Hallam’s death Tennyson too became close to Henry, staying late and smoking in the rooms he shared with G. S. Venables in the Temple and relying on him, he said, for the most perceptive criticism of his work. Henry became chief secretary to the government of Malta in 1847. On his way home from Malta in 1855 he died suddenly in Paris. Emily *Tennyson’s Journal recorded Tennyson’s grief at the news: ‘A. reads Ecclesiastes to me, which he had once read to Henry Lushington. Also Solomon’s Song.’ The depth of his feeling is evident in *‘In the Garden at Swainston’ (1870), in which Henry joins Arthur Hallam and Sir John *Simeon as the triumvirate who possess Tennyson’s heart. Franklin was beloved unrequitedly by Edward *Lear and the two were involved in the social life of *Park House and *Aldworth. In 1860 they visited *Farringford, where Tennyson was ‘snubby and cross’ (Martin, 431). Franklin outlived the rest of his family and was eventually knighted for his service as London’s chief metropolitan magistrate. The definitive account of the family is Waller (1986).
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Lyell, Sir Charles (1797–1875) Geologist whose ideas influenced Tennyson. Lyell’s three-volume Principles of Geology was published from 1830 to 1833 and read by Charles *Darwin during his voyage on HMS Beagle. Tennyson read
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it in 1837 and it greatly influenced the earlier sections of *In Memoriam, notably the ‘Evolutionary Stanzas’, liv–lvi (Memoir, i.162) and Lyric cxxiii ‘The hills are shadows, and they flow/ From form to form, and nothing stands’. Lyell wrote eloquently and persuasively of the endless changing of the earth’s landscape through the two inexorable forces of erosion and sedimentation. The second volume has as its epigraph: ‘The inhabitants of the globe, like all other parts of it, are subject to change. It is not only the individual that perishes but whole species.’ He opened up the prospect of aeons of time, a direct challenge to the biblical account of a 4,000-year-old world. At this stage, Lyell preserved his belief in the unchangeability of species; later, however, like Darwin, he turned his attention directly to humanity and produced The Antiquity of Man (1863), which ran through three editions in one year and in which he finally gave his endorsement to Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species through natural selection. Lyell himself remained tormented, for religious reasons, by the notion that man might have ape-like ancestors, though this seems not to have concerned Tennyson, whose major question was about immortality. See also: Chambers, Robert; Death and immortality.
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Lyell, Sir Charles
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Mabinogion, The Collection of early Welsh tales, used by Tennyson in the writing of the *Idylls of the King. Lady Charlotte Guest (1812–95) published in 1840 ‘Geraint, son of Erbin’, 1 of the tales she had translated from the Welsh. She published the full collection of 11 tales in 1849. They consist of 4 mythical tales of the Mabinogi, 5 native tales and 3 ‘Romances’, including the Geraint story. Tennyson owned a copy of the 1849 collection and used it, together with the Chretien de Troyes version, ‘Erec and Enid’, in writing the idyll which was eventually to be split into two as *‘The Marriage of Geraint’ and *‘Geraint and Enid’.
Mablethorpe Seaside resort in *Lincolnshire, place of Tennyson’s earliest holidays. The meeting of sea and sand moved the young Tennyson’s imagination and he envisaged all his favourite scenes from the classics as taking place here. The lines beginning Here often, when a child, I lay reclined, I took delight in this locality. Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind, And here the Grecian ships did seem to be
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M
are referred to in the Memoir (Tennyson, Hallam [1892]) as ‘Mablethorpe’ and were probably written in 1833, though not published until 1850. It was to Mablethorpe that Tennyson and his brother *Charles drove to celebrate the publication of *Poems By Two Brothers in 1827, shouting their verses to the sea. 156
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Actor; subject of sonnet by Tennyson. Macready’s highly overblown performances as Hamlet, Lear and Macbeth were enormously popular in the 1830s and 1840s. Tennyson and Macready attended the amateur theatrical parties run by *Dickens and *Forster and Tennyson was asked to be 1 of the 50 stewards and 600 guests at the grand farewell banquet on Macready’s retirement, on 7 March 1851. John Forster read out, to cheers, the sonnet Tennyson had been asked to write for the occasion. It was later printed in The Times and in The Atheneum, the latter reflecting the general opinion by saying they had decided to publish it ‘in honour rather of the occasion than of any particular merit of its own’ (Ricks, 990). Tennyson’s admiration for Macready’s performances are important as possibly contributing to his decision to devote a large part of his later life to writing plays.
Madness The fear of epilepsy in Tennyson’s family was closely linked in his mind to the fear of mental instability. His younger brother *Edward was confined to York Lunatic Asylum from the age of 20; another brother, *Septimus, describing himself as ‘the most morbid of the Tennysons’ (Martin, 138), lived with what would now be called severe depression; all the other siblings were to suffer temporary mental breakdown at some stage in their lives. The behaviour of their father, the Revd George Clayton *Tennyson, mentally unstable, probably epileptic and eventually alcoholic, was a major influence upon Tennyson’s later life. Certainly a belief that he had inherited ‘the Black Blood of the Tennysons’ affected him deeply and may well have contributed to the breaking off of his engagement to Emily *Sellwood in 1840. During the next ten years, Tennyson’s mental and physical health were both precarious; even his son’s Memoir admits that he suffered badly during that time from ‘hypochondria’. He seems to have linked the trances into which, from a boy, he had been able to fall, to epilepsy and therefore to mental imbalance. The Water Cures (see: Hydropathy) he took at Dr James *Gully’s establishment were perhaps less effective than Gully’s argument that his real problem was gout. The sudden improvement in his financial affairs in 1845, after the death of Matthew *Allen, no doubt also aided his recovery; thereafter, he recognized the innocuous nature of his ‘weird seizures’ enough to be able to include them in *The Princess (1847). With a return to mental and physical health came reunion with Emily and marriage in 1850, which ended forever the fears of incipient insanity (though the tendency to worry about his physical health remained). Again, the fears could now be expressed in poetry: *Maud (1854), subtitled ‘The Madness’, deals with
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the hero’s collapse into insanity (inherited from his father, a suicide) and his ultimate recovery through love of Maud and the unselfish decision to go to war for his country. In ‘The Flight’ (1836), ‘The Wreck’ (1855) and *‘Aylmer’s Field’ (1862) Tennyson uses madness as a metaphor for the unhealthiness of a society given over to Mammon. Even in the late Idyll, *‘Balin and Balan’ (1885; written 1873), he presents Balin as troubled by uncontrollable ‘violences’. The answer, provided in the eulogy to Prince *Albert in the pendant to the *Idylls, *‘To the Queen’ is ‘sublime repression’ of oneself, as Ann Colley argues in Tennyson and Madness (1983). Perhaps Tennyson was after all right to be concerned about his psychological inheritance: though his two sons, *Hallam and *Lionel, escaped the Tennysonian ‘black blood’, Lionel’s third son, Michael, suffered from mental instability throughout his short life. Further reading: Colley (1983).
Malory, Sir Thomas (fl. 1470) Author of Le Morte d’Arthur, the main literary source of the *Idylls of the King. Identified usually as Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, Warwickshire, the author of Le Morte d’Arthur adapted a cycle of Arthurian legends ‘from the Frensshe’ while he was in prison. They were printed by William Caxton in 1485. Late in life, Tennyson said, ‘the vision of an ideal Arthur as I have drawn him had come upon me when, little more than a boy, I first lighted on Malory’ (Ricks, 1464). He had encountered the stories as a child, possibly initially through reading *Scott’s Marmion. As a boy he owned Wilks’s three-volume edition of 1816. (The Eugene Vinaver edition regarded as authoritative today is based on a different manuscript discovered in 1934.) Christopher Ricks’s edition of The Poems of Tennyson (1969) provides a detailed account of the alterations and additions which Tennyson made to Malory’s stories. Each version is very much of its respective time. Malory’s Arthur has a very clear parentage and is obviously the legitimate ruler; Tennyson’s Arthur has a much more doubtful lineage. Malory’s is a securely Christian work, whereas Tennyson’s is full of doubt – particularly about the truth of the Holy Grail. Malory’s Nimue becomes Tennyson’s Vivien, and Tennyson invents a new setting for the story of Merlin and Vivien. Where Malory stresses the figure of Lancelot, Tennyson concentrates more on Arthur; he ends with Arthur’s departure for Avilion, whereas Malory goes on to narrate the penitence and deaths of Lancelot and Guinevere. In general, whereas Malory’s stories were ‘loosely strung together without art’ (Ricks, 1460), Tennyson in adapting them, according to his son’s Memoir, ‘restored the idealism, and infused into them a spirit of modern thought and ethical significance’ (Memoir, ii.122). In doing so, he lost some
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of the energy and rawness of Malory, the business-like prose and control of pace changing into a complex, richly poetic vision of chivalry and the collapse of empire.
The Trinity Manuscripts. These were left to Trinity College, Cambridge, by Hallam *Tennyson in 1924. They Include many unpublished poems and fragments, drafts of the major poems and a manuscript of *In Memoriam presented by Lady Simeon in 1897. Houghton Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard. This contains Sir Charles Tennyson’s collection of his grandfather’s notebooks and loose papers, together with many stubs of notebooks. (Full description and index, E. F. Shannon and W. H. Bond, Harvard Library Bulletin x (1956): 254–74.) Tennyson Research Centre, Lincoln. This contains valuable manuscript material, including letters and a MS of In Memoriam. It holds the libraries of Tennyson, his father George Clayton *Tennyson and his brother, Charles *Tennyson Turner. Commonplace Book kept by Tennyson’s friend, J. M. Heath, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK. Compiled 1832–34. Contains many of Tennyson’s early poems. (Full description in ‘Tennyson papers, II: J. M. Heath’s Commonplace Book’, Cornhill cliii [1936]: 426–49). Allen Notebook, Trinity College, Cambridge, UK. Contains some early poems. There is also C. Ricks and A. Day (eds), The Tennyson Archive, 31 vols (New York and London, 1987–93), consisting of facsimiles of Notebooks and papers.
‘Mariana’ Dramatic lyric (1830). The epigraph is adapted from *Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (III, i), where the actual words used are ‘There, at the moated grange resides this dejected Mariana’. These haunting words, evoking a picture of a woman in a state of depression, abandoned by her lover and isolated in a remote and ancient house, seem to have been enough to set Tennyson’s imagination working. It was a situation he also made use of in *‘Mariana in the South’ and in *‘The Lady of Shalott’. The term ‘picture’ is used advisedly above, for this is a poem rich in visual detail, and its most remarkable attribute is the way in which external objects are used to express a state of mind. It has been described as a Pre-Raphaelite poem written years before the establishment of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and
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also as a Symbolist poem written decades before the Symbolist Movement; at the same time it shows the influence of *Keats both in its exploration of melancholy and in its sharply observed and precisely expressed descriptions. Keatsian, too, is the exploitation of sounds to reinforce sense: in the opening lines, the consonantal clusters in ‘blackest moss’ and ‘thickly crusted’ suggest not only an overgrown and neglected garden but also the lethargy and inaction of Mariana herself, who will turn out to be as ‘sad and strange’ as the ‘broken shed’. Garden and buildings are as desolate as her heart. There is notable subtlety and paradox in the line ‘Unlifted was the clinking latch’ (6): in normal circumstances a latch should clink as people pass through the door, but this is a world, like that of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, where nothing happens. Mariana’s own words, marked by a slight change of metrical form in the closing lines of each stanza, are repetitive and lead neither to thought nor to action – to nowhere, indeed, but the death that she yearns for. She inhabits a ‘dreamy house’, and again the emphasis on sleep and dreams brings Keats to mind. The theme of withdrawal from life, enforced or otherwise, is a recurring one in Tennyson’s early poetry, but whereas such poems as ‘*The Palace of Art’ and *‘Ulysses’ in effect conduct a kind of debate on this subject, ‘Mariana’ offers only one side of the debate by presenting a character whose actions are all in the past. See also: Millais, John Everett.
‘Mariana in the South’ Dramatic lyric (1832), a companion-piece to *‘Mariana’. The poem was first published in 1832 and extensively revised before its reappearance in the 1842 volumes. It seems to have been based on the *landscape of southern *France which Tennyson explored on his journey to the Pyrenees with Arthur Hallam in 1830. Like her namesake in the earlier poem, the central figure is a young woman confined alone in an isolated house after her rejection by a man who had sworn to love her. But here the setting is not an English ‘grange’, but a location close to a barren Mediterranean seashore, as is made clear by early references to the ‘brooding heat’, a ‘dusty vine’ and an ‘empty river’. Equally exotic are the references to the Roman Catholic faith in such terms as ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘Madonna’. This religious note affects the ending of the poem: whereas Mariana in the earlier poem can only escape from the circularity of her obsessive melancholy by wishing she were dead, the later Mariana positively looks forward to finding in heaven a peace that the earth has not given her. This state of release is perhaps anticipated by her dream of the scenes of her childhood in a region of mountains and streams – a dream that makes it clear that, in addition to her other sources of misery, she is an exile in her
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‘Marriage of Geraint, The’/’Geraint and Enid’ Third and fourth in the final *Idylls, originally a single story ‘Enid’. This, the second of the 1859 Idylls, began as a single idyll written between April and November 1856 and privately printed in 1857. It is based, not on *Malory, but on ‘Geraint, Son of Erbin’ in the *Mabinogion, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest (1838–49). Tennyson wrote the ending of ‘Geraint and Enid’ in *Wales. Discovering that the correct Welsh pronunciation was ‘Ennid’, he altered the poem where necessary to correct the metre. The story of the loyal wife is told at a leisurely pace but with the characteristic flashback technique of the Idylls. Geraint’s unfounded suspicion is meant to show the spreading of Lancelot and Guinevere’s sin through the court. The title ‘Geraint and Enid’ was supplied in 1869 (1870); the division into two parts was made in 1873; and the final titles did not appear until 1886. Geraint’s uxoriousness is presented as a loss of manhood – a move from the public realm proper to a man into the merely private: Enid shows the proper link between the two when she says, ‘I cannot love my lord and not his name’ (92). The story in its final positioning in the Idylls between *‘Gareth and Lynette’ and *‘Balin and Balan’, occurs at a transitional point, set in the high summer of Arthur’s reign, but suggesting, in Geraint’s suspicion and distrust, the seeds of its downfall. It reverses the gender roles of the earlier Idyll, Enid’s loss of status echoing Gareth’s, while Geraint tests his wife as Lynette implicitly tests her lover. There are debts to *Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale’ in Geraint’s decision to ‘prove [his wife] to the uttermost’ and, despite the optimistic ending, with Geraint eventually convinced of his wife’s fidelity, there is an elusive uncertainty about the landscape and language which suggests the tragedy ahead.
Massingberd family Neighbours of the Tennysons in *Lincolnshire. Eliza Massingberd objected in 1831 to the idea of living in the parish of ‘so strange a man as Dr Tennison [sic] and ... his strange family’ (Sturman 1999b: 127). After his death she was more charitable, recalling the disinheritance tradition: ‘His father has indeed much to answer for’ (Sturman 1999b: 127). Her son, Francis Charles Massingberd (1800–72), Rector of Ormsby-cum-Ketsby in Lincolnshire, experienced a university friendship as intense as Tennyson’s
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present situation. As in ‘Mariana’, there is a powerful congruity between the external scene and the protagonist’s state of mind, with much effective use of visual detail (for example, the ‘one sick willow, sere and small’ [53]). There is a well-known painting (1897) by J. W. Waterhouse based on this poem and now in Fulham Public Library.
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with Arthur Hallam, and produced his own ‘In Memoriam W.R.C.’ [William Ralph Churton], which he declared is ‘imitated from Tennyson’s In Memoriam’ (Sturman 1999b: 125), in 1860.
Extended dramatic monologue or ‘monodrama’ (1855). Maud appeared in Maud and Other Poems, published on 28 July 1855. It had been largely written in the previous year, but its origins go back two decades to the extraordinary creative period that followed the death of Arthur Hallam. At that time Tennyson had composed a lyric fragment that in a revised form appeared in The Tribute in 1837 as ‘Stanzas’. It begins: *Oh! that ’twere possible After long grief and pain, To find the arms of my true-love Round me once again! Christopher Ricks sees this poem in its original form as having been obviously prompted by the death of Hallam. Its much later appearance in Maud constitutes, therefore, a link between the poem and the one that had appeared five years earlier, *In Memoriam. There was a very marked contrast, however, in the nature and reception of these two poems. In Memoriam had been a resounding success and had helped to win Tennyson the *Poet Laureateship in 1850, but Maud was received, in the phrase of Sir Charles Tennyson, with ‘almost universal reprobation’ (Charles Tennyson, 286). Reviewers found it morbid and obscure, and some heaped scorn upon it: one said that the title had one vowel too many and it did not matter which vowel was dropped. W. E. *Gladstone found it ‘unintelligible’ (Jump, 248), and both he and George *Eliot deplored what they took to be the glorification of war in the last part of the poem, where the hero sets off to fight in the *Crimean War. Tennyson himself said that ‘This poem of Maud or the Madness is a little Hamlet, the history of a morbid, poetic soul, under the blighting influence of a recklessly speculative age.’ He adds: ‘The peculiarity of this poem is that different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters’ (Ricks, 1039). This explains his choice of a subtitle, ‘A Monodrama’: the poem is, as it were, Hamlet as a one-man show. As with the soliloquies of Shakespeare’s hero, there is considerable variety of language, tone and mood but uniformity of voice. Notwithstanding the strictures of contemporary critics, Maud is in fact a powerful psychodrama, experimental and innovative in ways that clearly baf-
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fled and disconcerted the reviewers of 1855. The instability of the unnamed hero-narrator, with his violent swings of mood and emotion, the sometimes lurid drama or melodrama of the narrative and the novelty of the poem’s structure were a bold departure from the kind of poetry for which Tennyson had become famous; and the richness and complexity of the language sometimes seems closer to *Shakespeare or the Modernists than to a Victorian Laureate. Consider, for instance, a line like ‘And the flying gold of the ruined woodlands drove through the air’ (12) – on one level a vivid evocation of a natural scene, with the pictorialism with which Tennyson had become associated, but also as rich in ambiguity as the ‘bare ruin’d choirs’ of Shakespeare’s sonnet, since ‘golden’ and ‘ruined’ allude also to the wealth and bankruptcy that are important elements in the story. It is significant that echoes of this poem can be quite clearly heard in the poems of T. S. Eliot. One might be forgiven for supposing that lines such as And I loathe the squares and the streets, And the faces that one meets ... And my heart is a handful of dust (IV: 232–3, 241) come from the Modernist poet rather than the Victorian. If it looks back to Hamlet and forward to The Waste Land, however, Maud is also very much a poem of its own day, touching on many contemporary social issues from wife-beating and child-murder to bad housing conditions and the adulteration of food. At its heart, though, is a powerful story of injustice, depression, passion, violence, mental disturbance and healing. This strong subjective narrative is varied by the use of a wide variety of metrical forms and contrasting tones ranging from the savage intensity of the opening lines (the first verb in the poem is ‘hate’, the first adjective ‘dreadful’) to the wondering contemplation of the seashell near the beginning of Part II: See what a lovely shell, Small and pure as a pearl, Lying close to my foot. (II: 49–50) The narrative is further varied by the insertion of lyrics such as the well-known ‘Come into the garden, Maud’. In his account of the biographical sources of the poem, R. W. Rader (1963) has argued that embedded within it can be found expressions of many of the key experiences and anxieties of Tennyson’s personal life to this date, from the mental instability of the Tennyson family to the unhappy love affair with Rosa *Baring. Whatever the reason, Maud seems to have had a deep personal signifi-
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cance for its author, and his repeated readings of it to friends over a very long period (see under Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: Readings) come close to qualifying as an addiction or even an obsession.
Maud and Other Poems Volume of poems (1855) which raised hostility from reviewers. Tennyson did not anticipate the negative reviews produced by this volume, most of which were centred on what was assumed to be his praise of war in the final section of the title poem. Both *Gladstone and George *Eliot were scandalized, Gladstone calling the tone one of ‘sound and fury’ (Jump, 246) while Eliot castigated Tennyson’s ‘faith in War as the unique social regenerator’ (Martin, 389). Tennyson’s defence was that the poem was a dramatic monologue and that he was after all showing a madman arguing for the benefits of war. His most extended defence was in the Epilogue to ‘The Charge of the Heavy Brigade’ (1885), which records his conversation with the young Laura *Tennant. Other poems in the volume raised little controversy. *‘The Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’, *‘The Daisy’, ‘The Brook’ and *‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ suggest the poet extending his range, from the conversation poem to his wife, ‘The Daisy’ to two of his most successful Laureate poems.
Maurice, (John) Frederick Denison (1805–72) Theologian and academic. In the 1820s Maurice and his close friend John *Sterling built up the *Apostles into an important Cambridge University society. The two men were much admired by the next generation of Cambridge undergraduates, including Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, to whom they communicated their own sense of Christian Socialism. Maurice supported Tennyson in his readmission to the Apostles after problems over delivering enough essays. He went on to become successively Professor of English Literature and Professor of Theology at King’s College, London, but was dismissed from the latter post on account of his unorthodox theological views. Later he became Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge. He was active in the Christian Socialist movement, and founded the Working Men’s College and the Queen’s College for Women. Maurice became godfather to Tennyson’s son *Hallam, and is greeted in that capac-
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See also: Tennant, Laura; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: Critical approaches; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: Readings; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: Reception; Tennyson, George Clayton.
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‘May Queen, The’ Written 1832; revised 1842. The original 11-stanza ballad of a young girl moving from delight at being Queen of the May to untimely death from consumption was augmented in the 1833 volume by a separate poem of 13 stanzas entitled ‘New Year’s Eve’. This, with an additional 15-stanza ‘Conclusion’, was subsumed under the title *‘The May Queen’ in the 1842 volume. An early *Lincolnshire poem, its deliberate simplicity (often misunderstood as genuine naivety) links it with *‘Lady Clara Vere de Vere’, ‘The Lord of Burghley’ and *‘Lady Clare’. The poem was praised by *Bulwer-Lytton in his otherwise condemnatory review of the 1833 volume – an indication of how perfectly it suited early nineteenth-century taste. Its huge success was, as letters to the poet attest, as ‘applied’ rather than ‘pure’ poetry: it described a common situation, in an age plagued by consumption, and the heroine’s Christian acceptance of death was deeply comforting to many readers. John Stuart *Mill seemed to align it with *Wordsworth in praising its ‘simple, genuine pathos, arising out of the situations and feelings common to mankind generally’ (Jump, 88). In all these poems Tennyson deliberately ventriloquizes the voice of the medieval balladeer, but it is not a voice that has found general acceptance since the Victorian age and parodies began in Tennyson’s own lifetime, notably in the 1884 Secular Review, when he became a Peer: You must wake and call me early, call me early, Vicky dear ... ... And I’m to be one of the Peers, Vicky, I’m to be one of the Peers. (Jordan 1979: 177)
Meredith, George (1828–1909)
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ity in Tennyson’s poem ‘To the Rev. F. D. Maurice’, written in 1854, in which Tennyson lends support to him in the religious controversy in which he was still immersed, calling him one of ‘that honest few’ (‘To the Rev. F.D. Maurice’, 5). In 1857 Maurice acted as peace-maker in a misunderstanding between Tennyson and Charles *Kingsley and in 1868 he became, with Tennyson, one of the founding members of the *Metaphysical Society.
Poet and novelist; critic of Tennyson. Tennyson admired Meredith’s poetry, especially ‘Love in a Valley’ which he said he wished he had written and upon which he draws in *‘In the Valley of Cauteretz’. However, he found reading his novels to be like ‘wading through glue’ (Martin, 364). For his part, the mercurial Meredith had begun as an
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Merivale, Charles (1808–93) Cambridge friend of Tennyson; cleric and translator; Dean of Ely. Charles Merivale was one of Tennyson’s earliest friends at *Cambridge, although he was at St John’s College rather than Trinity. He described Tennyson as ‘an immense poet’ (Martin, 60) and spoke of the delights of his conversation. Merivale won the Chancellor’s Medal for Poetry in 1828 and it was he who, at Tennyson’s request, read out his friend’s winning entry on the subject of *‘Timbuctoo’ the following year. In 1831, Merivale and Arthur *Hallam together negotiated with Edward *Moxon the payment due to Tennyson for the poetry he had contributed to the Englishman’s Magazine. Merivale remained part of Tennyson’s circle long after the Cambridge days; he was at the heart of Tennyson’s literary life in London during the long bachelor years of the 1840s.
‘Merlin and the Gleam’ Published 1889. The poem’s metre consists of two-stress lines, largely made up of dactyls and trochees, to suggest the rhythms of old Welsh or possibly Anglo-Saxon poetry. Tennyson’s own gloss is that the ‘Gleam’ (always a key word in his poetry) suggests ‘the higher poetic imagination’. The temptation (fostered by Hallam *Tennyson) to read it as straightforward allegory obscures its riddling quality; it is a deeply self-reflexive poem about poetry itself, with echoes of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ but also of Tennyson’s own *‘Ulysses’ – O young Mariner, Down to the haven, Call your companions, Launch your vessel (123–6)
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admirer of Tennyson but, after their first meeting, he found him to be vain, insisting on his status as a ‘great poet’ (Martin, 363–4). Thenceforth Meredith was the source of a series of unflattering anecdotes about Tennyson. He was assisted by his friend, Janet *Duff Gordon, who also disliked the poet and found him vain.
– and the *landscape encompasses Tennyson’s whole poetic career, abounding in themes and phrases suggestive of many other poems. Arthur Hallam is identified clearly with King Arthur (‘The king who loved me,/And cannot die’ [79–80]). Poetically, his departure is delayed well beyond its place in sim-
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‘Merlin and Vivien’ Published in 1859: originally published as ‘Nimue’ and then as ‘Vivien’; sixth in the final order of the Idylls of the King. Based on *Malory iv, I, but more on the *Mabinogion, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest (1838–49), this was the first of the Idylls attempted after the *‘Morte d’Arthur’ (1842), possibly as the result of the increased stability of Tennyson’s life after marriage and the Laureateship. Begun in February 1856 and finished by 31 March of that year, it shows Merlin’s bewitching by Vivien (at first called ‘Nimue’) and his imprisonment by her in the trunk of an oak tree. The trial volume, Enid and Nimue; the True and the False, was set up in 1857 and the two Idylls were finally published with *‘Guinevere’ and *‘Elaine’ in 1859. The contrast was to be between true Enid and false Nimue, but the Nimue poem is also concerned more overtly with sensuality than any of the other Idylls and the language is often openly erotic. It was *Burne-Jones who persuaded Tennyson not to use the beautiful name Nimue for the evil enchantress; he later produced perhaps the most haunting illustration of the poem, The Beguiling of Merlin. (See: ‘Geraint and Enid’.) Tennyson decided to continue after the 1869 Idylls because, as he said: ‘I must have two more Idylls at the least to make “Vivien” come later into the Poem, as it comes far too soon as it stands’ (Tillotson 1965: 103). In the final version, ‘Merlin and Vivien’ becomes the sixth Idyll, which allows for a longer period of optimism before the collapse of the Round Table and before the corruption of Arthur’s court becomes apparent.
Merriman, Revd Dr Joseph Rector of *Freshwater, *Isle of Wight, in the 1880s and 1890s. Dr Merriman came to administer communion to the Tennyson family before their annual removal from *Farringford to *Aldwych, on 29 June 1892. This was to be Tennyson’s final departure from the Isle of Wight and the communion signalled the end of an era. Tennyson was determined to avoid anything that smacked of Catholicism and quoted the lines he had given to Thomas Cranmer in *Queen Mary, before he took the sacrament. This was intended to stress that
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ple chronology, to become the poem’s climax and turning point. Tennyson’s identification of Merlin with himself as poet perhaps affords extra interest to the *‘Merlin and Vivien’ Idyll. There is resonant metaphor in the final stanza which unites life and art, as the Mariner is told to ‘Launch your vessel/And crowd your canvas’. The whole poem is a crowded canvas of the poet’s achievement, ending, as in ‘Ulysses’, with the shifting ‘margin’ ‘ere it vanishes/Over the margin,/After it, follow it,/Follow the Gleam’ (128–31).
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he did not believe in the *Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, that the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ at the moment of communion: ‘It is but a communion, not a mass,/No sacrifice, but a life-giving feast.’
Established by Sir James *Knowles; Tennyson was a founder member. The society arose from a discussion of the afterlife between Tennyson and the astronomer Charles Pritchard in Sir James Knowles’s house in November 1868 and was established to encourage rational debate about the relationship between religion and science. There were 26 original members including *Bagehot, Froude, *Gladstone, *Huxley, Archbishop Manning, Henry Sedgwick and the Dean of Canterbury. By 1870 the Duke of *Argyll, F. D. *Maurice, John *Ruskin and the Archbishop of York had joined. Eventually there were 60 distinguished members and the Society met once a month from November to July. Tennyson’s enthusiasm soon lapsed, as it had with other societies including the *Apostles, probably because of his diffidence in large gatherings: he attended the preliminary meeting but sent a poem, *‘The Higher Pantheism’ (written two years earlier), to be read at the first formal session on 2 June 1869. He attended only 11 meetings over the decade of the Society’s existence and finally resigned in 1879, a few months before the Society itself collapsed.
Metrics Tennyson experimented with metrics all his life: his greatest strength was variety – from Greek quantitative metre to blank verse to traditional ballad form. Tennyson as a boy began by imitating the poets of the previous century: he wrote, he told his son, ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of iambic pentameters in imitation of Alexander *Pope’s Iliad. He and his two elder brothers could improvise such lines. Their father was a poet and, said Tennyson, ‘could write regular metre very skilfully’ (Memoir, i.11). He swiftly moved on to dignified iambic blank verse. His first preserved poem, written when he was 14, was the dramatic blank verse fragment, *‘The Devil and the Lady’, which metrically shows signs of his early reading of Paradise Lost (though its major debt is to Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy). *‘Armageddon’ (to be reinvented for the Chancellor’s Medal at Cambridge as *‘Timbuctoo’) is also in blank verse and Tennyson returned to this form for his great dramatic monologues. However, the 1830 volume contains only one blank verse poem, ‘The Mystic’, and is noteworthy for the extensive experimentation with a range of often over-complex metres. The poems to stylized ladies – Claribel, Lilian, Isabel, Madeline, Juliet – have
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been much criticized and were never reprinted by Tennyson, but they have in common elaborate rhyme schemes and stanza forms which suggests that they were deliberate experiments to extend the young poet’s range. *‘Ode to Memory’, with its five-stress and three-stress iambics, recalls *Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ while there is much classical influence in works reminiscent of *Theocritus and *Anacreon. Classical metre exerted a strong influence upon the young Tennyson: he declared once that he ‘knew the quantity of every English word except “Scissors” ’. Whereas English verse is structured on stress (accent), Greek and Latin verse is structured on the fixed length of the syllables (quantity), decided not only by the individual vowel sound but by the consonants which follow it. In Greek and Latin verse quantity never changes. In English verse, accent, the length or stress on a word, is much more individual, affected by pronunciation or individual stress patterns. Heated debates on prosody were conducted in print by such writers as John Foster in An Essay on the Different Nature of Accent and Quantity, with their Use and Application in the English, Latin and Greek Languages (1762/63; 3rd edn 1830), and Edwin Guest in A History of English Rhymes (1838). The first of these was in *Dr Tennyson’s library, the second, in Tennyson’s own. Later, E. S. Dallas in Poetics: An Essay on Poetry (1852) continued the argument. Foster had argued that English has many two-syllabic words, is dominated by iambs and trochees, has few dactyls and no spondees and that it is consequently deprived of the grandeur of Longinus and Aristotle. Like his predecessor, S. T. *Coleridge, Tennyson took up the challenge to attempt to use classical metre in his English verse and, in particular, to attempt the great rolling hexameter. Pope’s Iliad, which had so influenced him as a boy, was itself Pope’s translation of classical hexameters into heroic couplets. Now Tennyson was ready to move back to the original. Coleridge had responded condescendingly to Poems 1830: ‘The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is ... What I would, with many wishes for success, prescribe to Tennyson ... is to write for the next two or three years in none but one or two well-known and clearly defined metres ... as Eton boys get to write such good Latin verses by conning Ovid and Tibullus. As it is I can scarcely scan his verses’ (Martin, 173). Tennyson in turn was scornful of Coleridge’s attempts at ‘English hexameters’ and argued that Coleridge had misunderstood his work. Tennyson’s own struggle to adapt English verse to the hexameter begins in the 1830 volume in ‘Leonine Elegiacs’. ‘Leonine: a kind of verse which rhymes at every hemistich, the middle always chiming with the end’, says the English Encylopaedia of 1802, a copy of which was at *Somersby. This is adapted to the classical elegiac couplet, a dactylic hexameter followed by a line of dactylic pentameter. Tennyson’s youthful exploration of metre and stanza form matured into more subtle concentration on extending the boundaries of genre – as in
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*The Princess: A Medley, where dramatic blank verse alternates with lyrics, and later, *Maud: A Monodrama, in which a variety of verse forms is used to carry the action. However, his fascination with metrical experimentation returns in 1863 in poems published in *Thackeray’s Cornhill Magazine as ‘Attempts at Classical Metres in Quantity’: ‘Milton: Alcaics’ and ‘Hendecasyllabics’. The Alcaic metre consists of a quatrain of two 11-syllable ‘hendecasyllabics’ then a 9-syllable line and a 10-syllable line, all in dactyls and trochees. ‘Milton: Alcaics’ praises a great predecessor; the ‘Hendecasyllabics’ attacks ‘you chorus of indolent reviewers’, following the metre used by *Catullus for satirical assaults. Tennyson felt that his achievements in classical metre were not sufficiently noticed by the critics. Interest in classical metres had revived in the 1860s, and Tennyson and Matthew *Arnold were involved in a fierce dispute over the best way to translate *Homer: Arnold insisted that it should not be Tennyson’s blank verse – to which Tennyson replied by publishing 22 lines of a ‘Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad in Blank Verse’. The strongest effects perhaps are produced when Tennyson conveys the sound and rhythm of classical verse without exactly following a specific classical metre. This is evident in *‘To Virgil’ and the great dramatic monologues *‘Ulysses’, *‘Tithonus’ and *‘Tiresias’. He evokes *Virgil, *Horace and Catullus by this means. Horace is recalled in the stanza form of ‘The Daisy’ and Catullus’ elegiac stanza form in *‘Frater Ave Atque Vale’, his galliambic in ‘Boadicea’ and his glyconic form in ‘On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria’. Though his international public hailed him for the emotions with which they could identify in his verse, Tennyson’s seriousness as a poet is nowhere better shown than in his constant development of his metrical skills. As a poet, it was his technical achievement that mattered most to him: ‘I have been reading in the Spectator that *Wordsworth, *Keats & myself were the three masters of blank verse who are also great in rhyme. Keats was not a master of blank verse. It might be true of Wordsworth at his best. He ought only to have published a sixth of what he did, either in blank verse or rhyme’ (Martin, 564). Tennyson expresses justifiable pride here in his competence and variety as a master of metrical form. Further reading: Markley (2004); Tennyson, Charles (1954).
Mill, John Stuart (1806–73)
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Philosopher; author of a significant review of Tennyson’s 1833 volume. As a Utilitarian, Mill might have been expected to react unfavourably to the more fanciful poems in the 1833 volume. In fact, his review in the July 1835 edition of the London and Westminster Review began with a fierce attack
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on Tennyson’s critics, J. W. *Croker and John Wilson (Christopher *North). Mill called the former flippant and the latter disgracefully cynical. He went on to identify perceptively, as Arthur Hallam had done in his 1831 review, Tennyson’s ‘power of creating scenery, in keeping with some state of human feeling; so fitted to it as to be the embodied symbol of it, and to summon up the state of feeling itself, with a force not to be surpassed by anything but reality’ (Jump, 86). He criticized some of the more ‘political’ poems as the least mature – a useful corrective to some of the *Apostles, who felt that Tennyson simply needed to change his subject matter to become a deeper poet. He felt that Tennyson should discipline his imagination and place his ‘thoughts in a strong light before the intellect’ (Jump, 92) to give form to his feelings. With great prescience he chose to reprint *‘Mariana’ and *‘The Lady of Shalott’. Mill’s approach to poetry is in fact remarkably close to Hallam’s: in his article ‘What is Poetry?’ (2006), in The Examiner in 1833, he imagines it much in Hallam’s terms, as something deeply private, to be kept pure and away from the public world.
Millais, John Everett (1829–96) Painter, member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; illustrator of Tennyson. A friend of Tennyson from the 1840s, Millais was one of the earliest visitors to *Farringford in 1854, where he sketched the infant Hallam for an illustration for *‘Dora’. In 1857 Millais was one of the artists chosen by Edward *Moxon to contribute to his grand Illustrated Edition of the Poems. Tennyson was uncooperative, distrusting the whole idea of illustration for poetry. Some of Millais’s images, however, notably *Mariana, have established themselves as memorable evocations of the poems. Millais remained on friendly terms with Tennyson, and attended the opening night of *Queen Mary on 18 April 1876.
‘Miller’s Daughter, The’ (1833) Written by April 1832 (revised 1842), the poem was influenced by Mary Russell Mitford’s prose idyll The Queen of the Meadow (1827) reprinted in Our Village (1832), which also contained material used in ‘The Brook’ and *‘Dora’. It was part of a projected series of ‘Daughter’ poems, including *‘The Gardener’s Daughter’ and ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’. Arthur Hallam also mentions a proposed ‘Inkeeper’s Daughter’. J. W. *Croker’s vicious review contained an extended attack on the poem, which may have prompted the extensive revisions. Certainly Tennyson altered the ‘water-rat’ ridiculed by Croker into a
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more poetically conventional ‘trout’. Written before the poet was 23, it is an early example of youthful nostalgia, Tennyson using the trope of age looking back on youth that he was to employ to such effect in *‘Ulysses’. The poem deserves to be examined for strengths beyond the apparently sentimental material. There is a lyrical evocation of married love in old age (which biographically-minded readers have seen as anticipating Tennyson’s own future); there is a meeting of the young lovers via a reflection in water, as in *‘The Lady of Shalott’; and there are inset songs, a device Tennyson was to use again in *The Princess and the *Idylls. As a dramatic monologue, it achieves an intentional simplicity, while the regular rhyme and rhythm successfully convey the achieved serenity of old age, which is its theme.
Milnes, Richard Monckton, 1st Baron Houghton (1809–85) Poet, biographer of *Keats and MP. Richard Monckton Milnes (who became Lord Houghton in 1865) was elected to the Cambridge *Apostles on the same day as Tennyson in 1829. Tennyson thought that he looked remarkably good-tempered and he was indeed noted for his charm. He attempted to enlist Arthur Hallam as his closest friend, but was summarily rejected. The experience of deep friendship, Hallam wrote, ‘thrills within me now – but not – pardon me, my dear Milnes for speaking frankly – not for you’ (Martin, 96). Milnes supported Tennyson’s early poetry and tried to publish with Hallam and Tennyson, but was again rejected. Tennyson and Milnes almost quarrelled in 1837 when Milnes asked Tennyson for a contribution to The Tribute, edited by the Marquis of Northampton. Tennyson refused, saying he hated the incivility of editors. Milnes responded by threatening to give Northampton his copy of Tennyson’s ‘Anacaona’ (an experimental poem about which Tennyson was very diffident) to publish. Tennyson backed down with good grace and humour and eventually produced *‘Oh, that ’twere possible’, expanding it from the brief lines written after Hallam’s death and thus preparing it for use in *Maud in 1854. Milnes is a constant presence in Tennyson’s correspondence during the bachelor years. Having become MP for Pontefract, he set up a series of ‘breakfasts’ to rival those of the old poet, Samuel *Rogers. Tennyson was invited by both Milnes and Rogers, and at Milnes’s he met *Gladstone, *Carlyle and his old Apostles friend James *Spedding, but he refused out of modesty Milnes’s invitation to meet the Duke of Wellington, his great hero. Milnes constantly encouraged Tennyson to publish, and reviewed the 1842 volume enthusiastically in the Westminster Review. He schemed with Carlyle and others to get Tennyson a Civil List Pension, after the financial disaster with Matthew *Allen in 1844 (though it was Henry *Hallam who finally persuaded Gladstone); he offered Tennyson and *Emily a wing of his house at
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Fryston for their honeymoon – but was refused. In middle age, the two moved further apart, Milnes becoming clearly dissipated and offending Tennyson’s puritanical instincts by showing visitors his collection of pornography. He also threatened to publish the early copies he had of Tennyson’s unpublished poems – to which Tennyson replied, ‘You beast!’ (Martin, 96). A mutual friend, Henry Reeve, told Hallam, when both men were dead, ‘Never were two men more unalike. It seemed to cost your Father as much to dine in mixed company, as it cost Houghton to dine without it’ (Martin, 461).
Milton, John (1608–74) English poet: influence on Tennyson. Milton’s poetic influence on Tennyson’s early verse is considerable. In addition, Milton’s sense of absolute vocation, as a national poet with a mission to write a great national epic, encouraged Tennyson in his resolute pursuit of a poetic career in his refusal to be distracted by taking other employment, and in his grand project of writing an Arthurian epic. Samson Agonistes moved the young Tennyson to write a long letter to his Aunt Elizabeth *Russell at the age of 12, and may in part lie behind his lifelong intense fear of blindness. The dignity and apocalyptic imagery of Paradise Lost are behind the early play, *‘The Devil and the Lady’ as well as the Cambridge prize-winning poem, *‘Timbuctoo’. The early sonnet ‘Poland’ (1833) derives its calm and control from Milton’s ‘On the late massacre in Piedmont’. Milton remained a constant presence in Tennyson’s imagination and a yardstick for poetry in general. ‘Lycidas’, Tennyson used to say, was the clearest test of any reader’s poetic instinct. When his play, *The Promise of May, was barracked on its opening night, he wrote to a supporter that he had been sustained by one of Milton’s sonnets, ‘I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs’, in which the poet declares that, in attempting to defend civilized behaviour, he has been ‘casting pearls to hogs’. In old age Tennyson would quote aloud from Paradise Lost, bemoaning what he saw as the descent of his own age into decadence.
Mitford, Mary Russell (1787–1855) Popular writer: author of Our Village (1832), a source for Tennyson’s *English Idyls. Tennyson was probably introduced to ‘Miss Mitford’s’ works by Arthur Hallam, another avid reader of fiction. The sketches and stories which make up Our Village (1832) provided him with much material for *English Idyls. Mitford’s Dora Cresswell lies behind *‘Dora’; *‘The Miller’s Daughter’ and ‘The
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See also: Idyll; Wordsworth, William.
Monteith, Robert Cambridge Apostle. With Francis *Garden, Robert Monteith made up ‘the Scotch duo’ among the *Apostles. When the pair visited *Somersby during the *Cambridge days, Frederick *Tennyson found them ‘rather too magnificent’ for the Rectory. Tennyson in turn much later visited Monteith in his opulent home in Carstairs. Monteith actively championed Tennyson’s early poetry, wrote sympathetically when Hallam died and was the recipient of one of Tennyson’s most moving letters about the stillbirth of his first son in 1851. See also: Idyll; Forster, John.
Montenegro In 1876 the Montenegrins and Serbians, backed by Russia, rose against their Turkish oppressors. Fearing once more the increase of Russian power in the Near East, only 23 years after the Crimean War, the Tory government threatened to back the Turks, much to the horror of *Gladstone, whose forceful intervention helped persuade the Russian tsar to declare war on Turkey in April 1877. In March, Tennyson had talked to Gladstone about the brave resistance of the Montenegrins to the Turks, and wrote a sonnet in honour of the ‘warriors beating back the swarm/Of Turkish Islam’ (‘Montenegro’ 10–11). Gladstone and Tennyson were united in their sympathy for small nations standing up to larger ones and Tennyson in addition saw Islam as an exotic but savage force. See also: Revolutions.
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Brook’ draw on The Queen of the Meadow. Mitford seemed to Tennyson to be attempting exactly that mode of ‘modern pastoral’ to which he himself was drawn and to which, with his classical education, he brought his own love of *Theocritus’ Idylls and *Virgil’s Eclogues. However, the simple sentimentality of Our Village lacks the sharper social awareness of Tennyson’s classical sources and the blending of two such different sources, in the English Idyls, is often an awkward one.
‘Montenegro’ Tennyson’s favourite among his own sonnets. First published in the Nineteenth Century in May 1877, immediately before an article by *Gladstone on the Montenegrins, the sonnet was prompted by a
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discussion with Gladstone about the bravery of the Montenegrins’ resistance to the Turks in a war which had broken out in 1876. ‘Tsernogora’ or ‘black mountain’ is the Slavonic name for this small state in south-eastern Europe. The sonnet is a rare example of Tennyson’s awareness of the wider politics of his day; he interprets the battle, as a Victorian Englishman would, as Christianity versus Islam: ‘warriors beating back the swarm/Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years’. Like two similar sonnets on *Poland, the poem reveals Tennyson’s strong response to the heroism of the underdog. He himself felt that it was his best sonnet.
Moore, Thomas (1779–1852) Irish poet; friend of *Byron and influence on Tennyson. After Byron’s death, Moore destroyed his friend’s scandalous memoirs and wrote his own life of Byron (1830). Tennyson met him on visits to Samuel *Rogers’s house in the 1830s and agreed with Moore that it had been right to suppress the memoirs, in the interests of the poet’s privacy. Moore edited Byron’s works and in 1835 received a literary pension, to which a Civil List pension was added in 1850. (Tennyson, much younger and probably better off financially than Moore, had received a Civil List pension in 1845, thanks largely to the efforts of Henry *Hallam.) Tennyson preferred Moore’s poetry to that of Rogers and particularly admired Moore’s ‘Oft in the stilly night’. See also: Poems by Two Brothers; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: fame and privacy.
‘Morte d’Arthur’ Written 1833, published 1842, first major *Idyll, written soon after Arthur Hallam’s death. Rewritten as *‘The Passing of Arthur’ (1869). ‘When I was twenty-four I meant to write a whole great poem on it [the Arthurian legends] and began it in the Morte d’Arthur’, Tennyson in later life told his son (Ricks, 1464). The poem follows closely *Malory xxi 4–5, narrating the aftermath of the last battle between Arthur and Modred, the wounded king’s order to his sole surviving knight, Bedivere, to throw the sword Excalibur into the lake, the knight’s initial disobedience, the coming of the barge with the three queens and the bearing of the king to Avilion, ‘where I will heal me of my grievous wound’ (264). Three earlier lyrics, *‘Sir Galahad’, *‘Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere’ and *‘The Lady of Shalott’ also deal with Arthurian characters and Tennyson had already referred to Arthur’s death in one verse of *‘The Palace of Art’ (1832). The contemporary
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framing narrative, *‘The Epic’ was added later, before eventual publication in the 1842 volume. Though part, then, of a larger scheme, ‘Morte d’Arthur’ was undoubtedly prompted by Hallam’s death in September 1833. Bedivere’s lament is deeply personal: Tennyson too was facing the prospect of ‘going forth companionless’. Arthur’s ‘wide blue eyes’ also recall Hallam. Tennyson gives Arthur a long life of achievement and a prolonged deathbed scene, both of which had been denied Arthur Hallam. Yet the poem begins with an adverb, ‘So all day long the noise of battle roll’d’, as if this is not a single event but the continual reworking, the eternal present, of myth. The combination of personal urgency and mythical strangeness was unappreciated by such contemporary critics as Leigh *Hunt, who thought the poem old-fashioned: ‘It treats the modes and feelings of one generation in the style of another’ (Ricks, 585). Tennyson explained late in life that the ‘form of the “Coming of Arthur” and of the “Passing” is purposely more archaic than that of the other Idylls’ (Ricks, 1470). The best-known section of ‘Morte d’Arthur’, does, however, address a very Victorian issue – how to confront the inevitability of change: The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. (240–3) This is an extraordinarily brave and bleak poem. In the original version there is no closing attempt at consolation: ‘And on the mere the wailing died away.’ In *‘The Passing of Arthur’ (1869) significant alterations are made. John *Sterling wrote a very favourable review of Poems 1842, but, like Hunt, singled out ‘Morte d’Arthur’ for criticism as unrelated to the modern world: ‘The miraculous legend of “Excalibur” does not come very near to us, and as reproduced by any modern writer must be a mere ingenious exercise of fancy’ (Ricks, 585). Tennyson was later to say that it was this criticism which stopped him from going on with a project that he had already worked out in his head: ‘I had it all in my mind, could have done it without any trouble ... but the Reviews stopped me’ (Ricks, 1460, 1464).
Moxon, Edward (1801–58)
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Long-time publisher, poet and friend of Tennyson. Moxon’s publishing list included *Shelley, *Clare, *Coleridge, Lamb, Leigh *Hunt, *Keats and Southey and *Wordsworth, and, in the next generation, Robert *Browning, *Patmore and *Longfellow as well as Tennyson, who had been introduced to him by Arthur Hallam. He published *Poems, Chiefly Lyrical
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(1830), *Poems (1833), *Poems (1842), *The Princess (1847), *In Memoriam (1850), *Maud (1855) and the Illustrated Edition of the Poems (1857). In 1831, having decided to give up his attempt to earn a living by his own poetry, the ambitious young Cambridge graduate Edward Moxon turned to publishing and launched the Englishman’s Magazine, the first number of which contained Arthur Hallam’s important review of Tennyson’s 1830 volume. The magazine continued to champion Tennyson against attacks from Blackwood’s, the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, but it went out of business in 1833, possibly damaged by Christopher *North’s devastating attack on Hallam’s 1831 article and on Tennyson’s poetical powers generally. Moxon ignored the Christopher North review and the subsequent *Croker review of the 1833 volume and continued to publish Tennyson, despite the reduced sales of the 1833 volume. His own poetic leanings helped make him a friend as well as publisher and he became very much part of Tennyson and Hallam’s social circle. After Hallam’s death he urged Tennyson to publish again, and the eventual appearance of the 1842 volume owes a great deal to his steadiness and persistence. Times were unconducive to the publication of poetry and Moxon had already turned down Elizabeth Barrett *Browning, so his confidence in Tennyson is all the more remarkable. It was at Moxon’s house that Tennyson eventually met *Wordsworth, in 1845; Robert *Browning, seeing poet and publisher together at a later dinner party in 1846, wrote that the way in which Moxon took care of his friend was ‘the charmingest thing imaginable, and he seems to need it all’ (Martin, 301). In 1846, Moxon accompanied Tennyson to Switzerland, where they met *Dickens. In 1849 he made another crucial intervention in Tennyson’s career, when he discovered the existence of the ‘Elegies’ to Hallam and begged to be allowed to read them. He then offered Tennyson a cheque on the spot and *In Memoriam was published a year later, deservedly confirming Moxon’s reputation as well as that of Tennyson (Martin, 324). The relationship was always based on business as well as friendship and Tennyson still drove a hard bargain when he sold the *‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ to Moxon in 1852, forcing him up to £200 before he accepted. Moxon planned the 1857 Illustrated Edition of Tennyson’s Poems which was a commercial failure, though, despite this, he paid Tennyson the full £2,000 he had promised. The following year, he suddenly died; his brother William, taking over the firm, blamed Tennyson for the failure of the Illustrated Edition, and relations between Tennyson and his first and most important publishers fatally soured.
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Music 177
See also: Publishers.
Music Tennyson’s verse often possesses the quality of music, though he himself was not conventionally musical.
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Tennyson received music lessons as a small boy but they stopped when he returned from school in *Louth in his early teens, though he went on with his singing lessons for several years. He sang ballads at *Somersby parties and throughout his life loved the popular songs and dances which he remembered at *Lincolnshire balls as a young man. He enjoyed romantic ballads and some Beethoven, especially An die ferne Geliebte. In comparing himself with Robert *Browning he would say that he himself had no training in, nor real appreciation of, music, while Browning was genuinely musical – and yet Browning’s poetry, he said, was not musical whereas his own overflowed with music. He had little sense of the complexities of classical music: in 1874 he suggested excerpts from Beethoven to accompany *Queen Mary, his first performed play. The composer Charles Villiers Stanford had to explain to him that one could not ‘excerpt’ Beethoven as background accompaniment. Joseph *Joachim, the great violinist, became a friend at this time. He would play at *Farringford with Emily Ritchie, much to Tennyson’s delight, though he understood little of what was going on in musical terms. He would listen earnestly and comment on the poetry of the bowing and the effect in his head of rushing water and flashing lights. Once he read *‘The Revenge’ to Joachim and asked if he could reproduce on his violin a certain effect, of the peace of nature after the thunder of battle. Tennyson’s poetry is full of rhythms of every sort, from the splashing waters of ‘The Brook’ to the thundering hooves of *‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’: he was a particularly aural poet and ‘heard’ his verse, usually by declaiming it alone or to an audience. His work suggests the complexities in defining the different art forms, the flowing of sound and sense into the distinct but linked channels of poetry and music.
Myths and legends Tennyson used classical, Arthurian and Celtic myths to address contemporary issues. From his earliest days, Tennyson responded to the power of classical myth. The first extant poem, written when he was in his early teens, is his translation of Claudian’s ‘Rape of Proserpine’ and one of his last great poems is the optimistic pendant to this story, ‘Demeter and Persephone’. Many of his greatest poems, including *‘Ulysses’, *‘The Lotos-Eaters’, *‘Oenone’ and of course the *Idylls of the King show him imaginatively entering into and transforming myth and legend to his own purposes. Occasionally he somehow contrived to create his own more potent myth out of scattered raw materials, as in *‘The Lady of Shalott’. When R. C. *Trench warned him, ‘Tennyson, we cannot live in Art’ (Martin, 147), his response was once more to create his own myth, of the mysteriously captive Soul, in *‘The Palace of Art’. In
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*The Princess, the address to the present day which he feels obliged to make, frames another strangely re-imagined myth of, as it were, a tribe of intellectual Amazons running a women’s university. He was very conscious of the need to address his own time and he did this, as he had done in *‘The Epic’, by using the device of the frame to give a second perspective on a story. He commented on ‘Demeter and Persephone’ (1889): ‘When I write an antique like this I must put it into a frame – something modern about it. It is no use giving a mere réchauffé of old legends’ (Ricks, 1373). The ‘frame’ is often the sense that all other myths are leading towards the final Christian revelation – the ‘teleological’ approach to myth so popular with the Victorians. Thus, even in *In Memoriam, he struggles to ‘place’ Hallam in some great overarching myth, and finally makes him, like King Arthur, a type of Christ, the wounded saviour who will one day return. See also: Demeter and Other Poems.
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Nature Tennyson’s Romantic empathy with the natural world is always tempered by a clear-sighted interest in scientific truth. Tennyson prided himself on the simple accuracy of his descriptions of the natural world. The pink tips on the underside of daisy petals described in *Maud – ‘For her feet have touched the meadows and left the daisies rosy’ – were the simple truth, he said, not nature embodying human feelings. He objected to John *Ruskin’s ‘pathetic fallacy’ as leading to vagueness in description. Natural descriptions appear for their own sake, even in poems concerned with larger philosophical issues, as in *In Memoriam lxxxiii: The little speedwell’s darling blue, Deep tulips dashed with fiery dew, Laburnums, dropping-wells of fire. (10–12) *‘Vastness’ reveals a key characteristic of Tennyson’s visual imagination: a keen-sighted attention to minute detail combined with the ability to evoke huge vistas of space and time: ‘What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million suns?’ (4). It is tempting to trace this characteristic back to his extreme myopia: he sees nearby objects with extreme clarity, but everything else is vague and undifferentiated. It is ironical that perhaps the most frequently quoted line of Tennyson, also from In Memoriam, is ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’ (Lyric lvi, 15). Though science had forced him to re-evaluate ‘Nature’ as an abstract force, his own strong delight in the natural world persisted. It is entirely fitting that one of the best of the late poems is both a love poem and, in the simplest sense, a ‘Nature poem’: *‘June Bracken and Heather’ (1891).
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Published 1846. Tennyson’s old enemy, Sir Edward *Bulwer-Lytton, had attacked his Civil List pension (1845) by dubbing him ‘School-Miss Alfred’, and savaging his poetry in a long satirical poem, ‘The New Timon’. This included much of Lytton’s original attack on the 1833 volume, published in the New Monthly Magazine (January 1833), but went further, condemning Tennyson’s ‘jingling melody of purloined conceits,/Out-babying Wordsworth and out-glittering Keats’ (Martin, 296). Bulwer-Lytton’s venom was prompted by the passing over of his own nominee, the elderly playwright, James Sheridan Knowles, and the attack was couched as a pitiful plea on behalf of the poor older poet. Tennyson, Lytton pointed out (anonymously), though ‘in the prime of life, belonging to a wealthy family, without, I believe, wife or children’, was now ‘quartered on the public purse’ (Ricks, 736). Though the New Monthly’s 1833 attack too had been anonymous, Tennyson rightly suspected Lytton of the authorship of both pieces; he was also well aware that Lytton had become his hated uncle Charles *Tennyson d’Eyncourt’s closest friend. He scribbled out an 11-stanza response, signed ‘Alcibiades’ (the character who pronounced Timon’s epitaph in *Shakespeare’s play), and showed it to John *Forster. Forster persuaded him that it should be published and submitted it to Punch, where it appeared on 28 February 1846. The poem cruelly attacks Lytton as a vainglorious dandy: The padded man – that wears the stays – Who killed the girls and thrilled the boys, With dandy pathos. (8–10) Tennyson very soon regretted publication and in the next edition of Punch published a retraction, ‘After-thought’, which ended: Surely after all, The noblest answer unto such Is perfect stillness when they brawl. (18–20) This was published in the Collected Works, as ‘Afterthoughts’. He never reprinted his original attack.
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‘New Timon and the Poets, The’
North, Christopher Pseudonym of John Wilson (1785–1854), severe critic of Tennyson’s early poetry. Professor John Wilson was professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University. His first reference to *Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) in the March 1832 edition of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine had been thoughtful and generally
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North, Christopher
complimentary, but in the full review in the May 1832 edition he takes a tougher line, ridiculing the more ‘metaphysical’ poems, and reserving particular venom for W. J. Fox’s eulogy in the Westminster Review and for Arthur Hallam’s laudatory review in the Englishman’s Magazine (August 1831) which, he says, ‘awoke a general guffaw’ (Jump, 51). In the second half of the essay, Wilson actually praises Tennyson for revealing ‘feeling, fancy, imagination, genius’ in *‘Ode to Memory’, ‘The Deserted House’, ‘Dirge’, *‘Mariana’, ‘Claribel’ (and all the poems about young ladies), ‘The Daydream,’ ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ (Jump, 58–63); ‘most beautiful of all’ is ‘The Ballad of Oriana’ and ‘highest of all [his] achievement’ is ‘Recollections of the Arabian Nights’ (Jump, 62). Tennyson ignored the praise and was painfully stung by the criticism. His poetic retort, *‘To Christopher North’, attacked ‘crusty Christopher’. He soon regretted the poem and wrote an appeasing letter, but this did not stop the aggrieved Wilson from publishing further negative comments in the following years. Wilson’s review, together with that of J. W. *Croker’s of the 1833 Poems, contributed to Tennyson’s ten-year delay in publishing his next volume – though all the time he was writing the lyrics which were to become *In Memoriam, as well as painstakingly revising the earlier poems. Wilson’s and Croker’s criticisms may well have contributed to the quality and maturity of the 1842 volume, emerging as it did after a long delay.
‘Northern Farmer (New Style), The’ Published 1869 (1870); pendant to ‘The Northern Farmer (Old Style)’. Tennyson wrote the poem after the success of the first ‘Northern Farmer’, basing it upon a single sentence he had heard uttered by a *Lincolnshire neighbour: ‘When I canters my ‘erse along the ramper [highway] I ‘ears “proputty, proputty, proputty” ’ (Ricks, 1189). As in the case of *‘Mariana’ and the earlier ‘Farmer’, a single phrase sparks the creation of a whole character. The rich farmer advises his son to marry for property rather than for love; in contrast, the earlier farmer had cared only about doing his duty to the land he had tended all his life. Contemporary cartoons picked up the materialism of the ‘nouveau riche’, and this became the most popular of the dialect poems, one which Tennyson himself read with gusto. He included it in the *recording made in May 1890 for the Thomas Edison company. The theme of Materialism hindering Marriage, treated in *Maud with tragic seriousness, is here presented comically, showing that earthy side of the poet which Henry *James among others found so ‘unTennysonian’, but evincing the immense variety of his talents.
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See also: Dialect poems; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: composition, methods of.
‘Northern Farmer (Old Style), The’ Published 1864; without subtitle): first dialect poem.
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Written between February and October 1861, this poem, the first and perhaps the strongest of all the dialect poems, constitutes a complete break from Tennyson’s earlier work. Its grim humour, Tennyson said, was ‘founded on the dying words of a farm-bailiff, as reported ... by my old great-uncle ... “God A’Mighty little knows what He’s about a-taking me. An’ Squire will be so mad an’ all” ’ (Ricks, 1124). The stoical but utterly secular character of the old man who cares only about the land he has tended all his life, as well as the use of dialect, were so great a departure from his earlier verse, so unspiritual, that Tennyson hesitated about publishing the poem in the *‘Enoch Arden’ volume (1864), but he was persuaded by *Spedding and *Jowett that it would not cause offence. He set it, significantly, next to *‘Tithonus’: both poems deal with the point at which life ceases to be sweet and should be left behind. The success of the poem prompted him to write *‘The Northern Farmer (New Style)’ in 1870 – about a more respectable but much less admirable character. The Northern Farmer in his stoicism in the face of death and absolute refusal to be sentimental could be said to have stronger links with the classical world than with the Victorian. It reduced Edward *FitzGerald to tears.
Norton, Caroline (1808–77) Novelist, daughter of R. B. Sheridan; disliked by Tennyson. Mrs Norton’s unhappy marriage and her efforts to retain custody of her children, as well as her very independent behaviour in society, had led to her reputation being compromised. She was the only woman among seven men at a dinner given by Samuel *Rogers on 26 January 1845. The other guests were Tennyson, Henry *Lushington, James Kenny the dramatist, Edward *Moxon, Henry Crabb Robinson and James *Spedding. Mrs Norton arrived late and was escorted by Rogers to a place next to Tennyson, who disliked her immediately. He afterwards said that ‘he felt as if a serpent had just dropped off’ and that he had ‘shuddered sitting by her side’ (Martin, 284). For her own part, Mrs Norton declared that he had been so offensive to her that she would like to see ‘all the Tennysons hung up in a row’ (Martin 284). Only much later, after his marriage, and when he discovered that Mrs Norton was on good terms with respectable members of society like the Duchess of Argyll did Tennyson revise his opinion of her and she was invited to *Farringford with her son Brinsley in 1859. Such deeply conservative views of marriage are important in understanding the presentation of Vivien and of Guinevere in the *Idylls of the King.
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Novel-reading 183
Novel-reading Tennyson was an eager novel-reader all his life, possibly to the detriment of his narrative poetry.
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As an adolescent Tennyson began to read and and to love the works of Walter *Scott and of Jane *Austen, both of whom remained favourites for the rest of his life. (He had always been eager, he said, to see the Cob at Lyme Regis, ever since reading Persuasion.) As a young man he responded to the Gothic novels of Anne Radcliffe, particularly The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), a quotation from which he used to preface his early poem, ‘The Passions’ (1827): ‘You have passions in your heart – scorpions; they sleep now – beware how you awaken them! they will sting you even to death.’ As students, he and Hallam also read a wide range of popular fiction that today has been forgotten. In July 1831, Arthur Hallam was reading Susan Ferrier’s The Inheritance. Tennyson’s poem ‘Lady Clare’ (1842 but written c.1835) is based on this novel, in which a substituted baby becomes an heiress. The ‘English Idyl’, *‘Dora’ is based on Mary Russell *Mitford’s story ‘Dora Cresswell’. A great favourite in Tennyson’s middle life was Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), Aurora Floyd (1863), The Doctor’s Wife (1864) and other ‘Sensation’ novels. ‘I am simply steeped in Miss Braddon’, he confessed (Charles Tennyson, 377). Though he was strongly attracted to her populist ‘sensation’ plots, he also read *Thackeray and *Dickens and, in later life, *Hardy, Henry *James, Hall Caine, George *Meredith and R. L. Stevenson. A more insidious influence of the novel-form was on the structure of the *Idylls of the King. The prosaic and moralistic Victorian scenes, particularly in *‘Geraint and Enid’ and in *‘Guinevere’, seem to undermine the verbal and rhythmic power of the poetry itself. It is important to recognize, however, that Tennyson is evolving here a complex mixed genre of novel and romance: behind ‘Geraint and Enid’ is not only the Victorian novel but the medieval tale of Patient Griselda. The novel itself, after all, has a complex and often distinguished ancestry. Further reading: Tucker (1993).
‘Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, Now the White’ Lyric from *The Princess (1847). This, the most sensuous of Tennyson’s lyrics, is supposedly read aloud by Princess Ida herself from ‘a volume of the Poets of her land’ (Part 7, 159) while she nurses the wounded Prince. This ambiguity of gender is part of its power, lending extra intensity to the infolding of one lover into the other in the last few lines. Its form reveals Tennyson’s knowledge of Persian poetry, possibly gained from the works of Sir William Jones, in his father’s library at *Somersby. It is a ‘ghazal’: ‘the requisite number of couplets, the repetition of a single final word at short intervals to produce what is tantamount to rhyme, and ... the standard images and ornaments of the Persian love poem, roses, lilies, peacocks, the stars, the cypress’. The classic reading is by John Kilham (1958: 214–15), from which the quotation above is taken.
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‘O Darling Room’ (1832) Light-hearted squib, savaged by critics. The poem was written after Tennyson toured the Rhine with Arthur Hallam in July 1832 and its playfulness was drastically misunderstood by John Wilson *Croker in his ruthless dissection of the 1833 *Poems. Since then, more sympathetic but perhaps no-less-misguided critics have sought and found in this ephemeral light verse indications of latent homosexuality in the stress on ‘two couches soft and white’ and more evidence of Tennyson’s feminine nature in the ‘little room so warm and bright/Wherein to read, wherein to write’ (5–6). Tennyson’s mistake was not in composing the poem, but in publishing it with more serious verse: his humorous tone (which surfaces in other poems such as *‘Edwin Morris’, equally overwhelmed by over-solemn scrutiny) is still often missed or misread. Here, the comically exaggerated joy at returning to the comforts of home after a long continental journey and the equally comical parody of earnest English travellers’ sightseeing (‘For I the Nonnenwerth have seen’ [7]) have been misconstrued as unintentionally bathetic. The significance of the poem is biographical rather than literary: Croker’s attack, particularly on this poem, sent Tennyson into a long silence during which he reworked many of the 1832 poems for what was to become the 1842 volume. The poem, unfortunately, was long remembered by Tennyson’s enemies: *Bulwer-Lytton reprinted part of it as the work of ‘School-Miss Alfred’, in his attack in ‘The New Timon’ (1846). Tennyson responded quickly with *‘The New Timon and the Poets’.
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‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ (1852) Tennyson’s first major poem as Poet Laureate.
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‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’
The Duke of Wellington died on 14 September 1852. Despite his reluctance to flatter the great, Tennyson held Wellington in high esteem and wrote the ‘Ode’ even though it was not strictly a Laureate commission. It was hastily published on 14 November and sold to the crowds at the funeral on 18 November. Tennyson revised it considerably for the second printing in 1853. The poem veers towards the jingoism of Tennyson’s earlier 1852 antiFrench verses but its rhythms give it a genuine stature and gravity, particularly in the opening stanzas, which suggest a funeral march. There are some fine lines – ‘the last great Englishman is low’ (18); ‘Render thanks to the Giver,/England, for thy son’ (47–8); ‘Not once or twice in our fair islandstory/The path of duty was the way to glory’ (209–10) – as well as lines which unwittingly suggest the poet himself: ‘And, as the greatest only are,/In his simplicity sublime’ (33–4). In his account of Wellington’s military exploits Tennyson reveals his own political position: his conservative conviction that England is an island nation beleaguered on every side by enemies, but against all the odds preserving ‘the one true seed of freedom’ (162). Proper names are powerfully absent from the poem, giving it a symbolic quality. The conclusion successfully uses the Anglican hymn-writing tradition Tennyson knew so well: ‘And in the vast cathedral leave him./God accept him, Christ receive him’ (280–1). The definitive essay on the composition of the poem is by Edgar Shannon and Christopher Ricks (1979), available as an appendix to Christopher Ricks’s Tennyson, 2nd edition (1989).
‘Ode to Memory’ Juvenilia developed further after *Hallam’s death; published 1830. Tennyson felt this to be one of his best early *Nature poems. There is a juxtaposition, characteristic of the Juvenilia, of very literary Miltonic pastoral (‘What time the amber morn/Forth gushes from beneath a low-hung cloud’ [70–1]) and detailed observation of the *Lincolnshire landscape (‘Or even a lowly cottage whence we see/Stretched wide and wild the waste enormous marsh’ [100–1]). There is even a specific reference to the garden at *Somersby: ‘The seven elms, the poplars four/That stand beside my father’s door’ (lines 56–7). After Hallam’s death Tennyson added lines 119–21, addressed to him but remaining firmly in the elegiac tradition:
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My friend, with you to live alone, Were how much better than to own A crown, a sceptre, and a throne! (119–21)
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The refrain suggests that *‘Passion of the Past’ which was always to remain at the heart of Tennyson’s work:
There is already a depiction of vastness in time and space (‘the million stars ... the illimitable years’ [35, 42]) and the final vision is the comforting one of the beautiful goddess preparing an inner landscape for the mind, ‘in after life retired’ (111), to wander in.
‘Oenone’ Written 1832; heavily revised for 1842; story from classical myth. The story of the nymph Oenone, heart-broken after Paris abandons her for Helen, is from sources in *Ovid and is written as an epyllion, a little epic, in the manner of *Theocritus, upon whom Tennyson modelled the refrains. The setting is modelled upon the south of France, where Tennyson had travelled with Hallam in 1830. Oenone’s husband, Paris, shows her the golden apple he had been given for judging the respective beauty of the three goddesses and invites her to eavesdrop upon his judgement. Oenone’s innocence and weakness are contrasted with the might of the goddesses whom she watches, in particular Pallas Athene who coldly tells Paris, ‘Self-reverence, self-knowledge, selfcontrol,/These three alone lead life to sovereign power’ (142–3). Oenone begs Paris in vain to give the vote to Pallas but he is easily seduced by Aphrodite who promises him ‘The fairest and most loving wife in Greece’ (183). Choosing Helen, he casts off Oenone. The theme of the rejected maiden links the poem to *‘The Lady of Shalott’ and to *‘Mariana’; an extra poignancy comes from the dignity of the classical metre and classical allusions contrasted with the human weakness of the speaker. The poem has always retained its popularity, though it is rarely recognized (because of the 21-line descriptive introduction) as, in effect, a dramatic monologue to be considered alongside *‘Ulysses’ and *‘Tithonus’. Further reading: Turner (1976).
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O strengthen me, enlighten me! I faint in this obscurity, Thou dewy dawn of memory. (122–4)
‘Of old sat Freedom on the heights’ Published 1842; written c.1833; patriotic poem. This is the second of three consecutive political poems in the 1842 volume, all written in the aftermath of the passing of the *Reform Act in 1832. The others are ‘You ask me why, though ill at ease’ and ‘Love thou thy land, with love
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far-brought’. All are known only by their first lines, and the others are written in the iambic tetrameter later to be used in *In Memoriam (this poem, however, rhymes abab and has a shorter fourth line in each stanza, which gives it a more epigrammatic quality than the others). Tennyson denied that all three were based on a speech made in the Cambridge Union by James *Spedding, explaining that he and Spedding thoroughly agreed on politics. The conservatism of these political poems is embodied in the regular verse form and rhythm which eschew ‘the falsehood of extremes’ (‘Of old sat Freedom on the heights’, 24). Tennyson’s political position, on the evidence of these early poems, did not substantially change between the beginning and ending of his career. He was always a moderate conservative, much moved by the heroism of small countries and underdogs. Freedom is also associated with mountains in Tennyson’s much later political sonnet, *‘Montenegro’ (1880). See also: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: politics.
‘Oh, that ’twere possible’ Tennyson wrote an original version of 70 lines in 1833–34, after the death of Arthur Hallam. He added another four stanzas in 1837. These 110 lines were published in The Tribute in September 1837 as ‘Stanzas’ and in 1855 became the nucleus of *Maud. Tennyson published them at the request of Richard Monkton *Milnes, who had been angered by his earlier refusal to contribute to the journal, but he obviously still considered the lyric incomplete and did not reprint it until it eventually reappeared in Maud, in the dramatic context of the hero’s despairing dream, during exile in France, of his lost beloved. The imaginative shift from the loss of Hallam to the more conventional loss of a sweetheart suggests that, as throughout *In Memoriam, Tennyson is struggling for different types of language in which to convey his sense of loss.
Osborne House Queen *Victoria and Prince *Albert’s home on the *Isle of Wight. Osborne House was built to Prince Albert’s specifications by Thomas Cubitt and is an Italianate villa, intended as a home and not a palace, and reflecting Albert’s cultured taste. Tennyson was summoned there to meet Queen Victoria four months after Prince Albert’s death, on 14 April 1862. He was deeply nervous, but his desire to comfort the widowed queen overcame his shyness. She told him that, in her deep grief, *In Memoriam was her comfort. The house itself, designed by Prince Albert, is a glorification of domesticity rather than a grand palace and this suggests the comfortable ‘bourgeois’ values shared by the Royal Family and the Tennysons. The whole Tennyson family was invited to spend a day at Osborne in May 1863 and the visit was a great success: *Emily
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recorded that ‘Ally talked very eloquently with the Queen & we all laughed and talked ... I never felt it so easy to talk with any stranger before’ (Martin, 444). On 15 February 1867 Tennyson visited the Queen alone at Osborne, Emily being too ill to go, and found again that he was completely at ease with her. He complained about the tourists who haunted *Farringford. The Queen replied that at Osborne she was not troubled by them, to which he responded: ‘Perhaps I should not be either, Your Majesty, if I could stick a sentry at my gates’ (Charles Tennyson, 367). The two met for the last time at Osborne on 7 August 1883, when she charmed him by quoting back at him some of his own lines from In Memoriam.
Ovid (43 BC– AD 18) (Publius Ovidius Naso) Roman poet; influence on Tennyson. Both Tennyson and his father, Dr George *Clayton Tennyson, owned copies of Ovid’s works and many of Tennyson’s classical poems, notably *‘Oenone’, *‘Tiresias’ and ‘Demeter and Persephone’, show the influence of the Roman poet. *In Memoriam owes a great deal to the Roman love elegy as developed by Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus and *Catullus. Ovid’s Amores describes the anguished separation of the speaker from his beloved by a long journey: Tennyson adapts this for the early stanzas of In Memoriam describing the ship bearing Hallam’s body home (ix–xvii). The Amores also recounts the agony of the lover excluded from his mistress’s house, standing outside the bolted door: this paraclausithyron tradition is used by Tennyson in the ‘Doors, where my heart was wont to beat’ sections of his poem (vii and cxix). Lyric xviii, describing Hallam’s funeral, draws resonance from Ovid’s Tristia, or ‘Poems of Sadness’. See also: Demeter and Other Poems; Markley (2004).
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Paget, Sir James (1814–99) Surgeon, Tennyson’s friend and one of his doctors. James Paget was the Queen’s surgeon-general and was one of the many medical men Tennyson consulted in London in 1863 for an inflamed leg, probably caused by gout (itself the result of drinking large quantities of port). Tennyson selected Paget from many others, and they became good friends, Paget never charging for his consultations. Tennyson consulted him again in 1866 and in 1870, when he was suffering from a bad attack of eczema. Paget published a series of lectures in The Lancet in the 1870s about ‘nervous mimicries’ – disorders which we would now call psychosomatic and which include a self-induced paralysis strangely reminiscent of Emily *Tennyson’s disorder. The Tennysons entertained Sir James, with Robert *Browning, Matthew *Arnold, the Duke of *Argyll and others, at their winter lodgings at 14 Eaton Square, where on Saturday 30 March 1878 Joseph *Joachim the Hungarian violinist played for them. Paget became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1851, and was knighted in 1871, when he also became vice-chancellor of London University.
Paintings, photographs and sculptures of Tennyson 1. Selected paintings and sketches of Tennyson Youthful sketches, by Charles *Tennyson, Agnes *Weld and James *Spedding. These are of Tennyson as an adolescent and are informal and amateurish, but revealing.
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Samuel Laurence, Tennyson as a young man (c.1839). This was commissioned by Edward *FitzGerald, who regarded it as his one of his most treasured possessions. Tennyson himself said it made him look ‘blubber lipt’. In 1876, after 190
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the visit of Tennyson and *Hallam, FitzGerald gave the portrait to *Emily. After Tennyson’s death, she asked G. F. *Watts to retouch it. He refused, but Edward *Burne-Jones complied, making it blander than the original, in line with Emily and Hallam’s wishes. D. G. *Rossetti, sketch of Tennyson reading *Maud (1855). Carlo Pellegrini (‘Ape’), cartoon published in Vanity Fair (1871). Frederick Sandys, lithograph (1884). Helen Allingham, portrait of Tennyson reading (1890). G. F. Watts, chalk sketch (1890). Lowes Dickinson, sketch in profile (c.1890?). 2. Selected sculptures of Tennyson Thomas *Woolner, medallion – profile (1856). Thomas Woolner, bust of Tennyson (1856) (purchased by Trinity College, *Cambridge). G. F. Watts, statue with Karenina the wolfhound (*Lionel’s dog), outside Lincoln Cathedral. 3. Selected photographs of Tennyson James Mudd, Tennyson with broad-brimmed hat (1857). O. G. Rejlander, Tennyson with his wife and sons (1863). Julia Margaret *Cameron, ‘The Dirty Monk’ (1869). William Barraud, Tennyson in broad-brimmed hat (1888).
‘Palace of Art, The’ Allegorical poem exploring the attractions and limitations of a life devoted to art. The poem was published in 1833 and revised for republication in 1842. It seems to have originated in a remark made by Tennyson’s Cambridge contemporary R. C. *Trench: ‘Tennyson, we cannot live in art’ (Ricks, 400) – a reproof worthy of one who later became an archbishop, and prompted by his friend’s preoccupation with poetry and apparent indifference to the larger world of human affairs, responsibility and action. Another Cambridge contemporary, James *Spedding, later wrote in the Edinburgh Review (April 1843) that the poem ‘represents allegorically the condition of a mind which, in the love of beauty and the triumphant consciousness of knowledge and intellectual supremacy, in the intense enjoyment of its own power and glory, has lost
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G. F. *Watts, portrait in oils (1859).
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sight of its relation to man and to God’ (Jump, 147). The opening line, ‘I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house’, perhaps echoes the ‘stately pleasure-dome’ referred to in the opening of *Coleridge’s ‘Kublai Khan’, though Coleridge’s historical distancing has been replaced by an unmistakable note of hedonistic egotism. The stages and styles of construction described thereafter exemplify the ‘life in art’ or commitment to aesthetic values deplored by Trench. The ending makes it clear, however, that such a life is ultimately unsatisfying: after four years the palace is abandoned, and ‘ “Make me a cottage in the vale,” she said,/“Where I may mourn and pray” ’ (lines 191–2). The simplicity of the language in these lines suggests a rejection of the Keatsian cult of beauty in favour of Wordsworthian plain living and high thinking, but as so often with Tennyson’s endings the conclusiveness is compromised by a partial retraction: the palace is not to be pulled down, for ‘Perchance I may return with others there,/When I have purged my guilt’ (295–6). The final word points unmistakably to the recognition of moral error, but the life of art is not wholly rejected. Of great significance, however, is the phrase ‘with others’: the egotism of the opening has given way to identification with the human community and a commitment to social endeavour (‘cottage’ surely hinting at the life of the poor). The poem has much in common with *‘The Lady of Shalott’, though the conclusions of the two poems seem to be opposite: in the latter, abandonment of the solitary life devoted to art leads to disaster, whereas in ‘The Palace of Art’ it represents a mature act of renunciation and atonement, a step forward into a fuller, more responsible life.
Palgrave, Francis Turner (1824–97) Civil servant, man of letters and close friend of Tennyson. Palgrave is now best remembered as the editor of the Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics (1861 and later editions), for several generations an immensely popular anthology. In his choice of the selections he sought and received advice from Tennyson. The two had met in 1849 and became lifelong friends, spending many holidays together, including a visit to Portugal in 1859. Palgrave’s letters and journals, published in 1899, contain many references to his meetings with Tennyson, and much evidence of the warmth and intimacy of their relationship. In April 1849, for instance, Tennyson read him parts of the as-yet-unpublished *In Memoriam. After one holiday Palgrave wrote that they had ‘enjoyed ourselves like schoolboys’ (August 1867), and on 25 August 1883, after a Sunday morning walk at *Aldworth, he wrote that Tennyson was ‘as interesting, as rich in mind, almost as ready for humour and liveliness as when he showed his poems to me in MS in his dingy lodgings by Mornington Crescent in 1849’ (Page, 18).
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Tennyson was also acquainted with Palgrave’s younger brother, William Gifford Palgrave (1826–88), who became a Jesuit missionary; he wrote ‘To Ulysses’ in W. G. Gifford’s honour. See: Demeter and Other Poems.
Home of the *Lushington family; favourite haunt of Tennyson in his bachelor days. Park House, near Maidstone in Kent, was a haven for Tennyson from about 1839. His friendships with Edmund and Henry *Lushington helped him after the death of Arthur Hallam. Hallam’s younger brother, Harry, wrote (probably facetiously) that ‘the Tennyson habit of coming unwashed and staying unbidden was, is and will be the great burthen and calamity of the Lushington existence’ (Brookfield and Brookfield 1905: i.213). Tennyson accidentally met Emily *Sellwood there in 1848, after eight years of estrangement; partly as a result, in 1849, the engagement was renewed.
‘Passing of Arthur, The’ Idyll (1869), based on ‘Morte d’Arthur’ (1842); last in the final order of the *Idylls of the King. Originally called at the trial printing ‘The Death of Arthur’, ‘The Passing of Arthur’, incorporating the central section of the earlier ‘Morte d’Arthur’, was written and published in 1869, together with *‘The Coming of Arthur’ (originally called ‘The Birth of Arthur’), *‘The Holy Grail’ and *‘Pelleas and Ettarre’. Tennyson removed the framing story of ‘Morte d’Arthur’ (ironically, the only part of the Idylls called *‘Epic’) and added 169 lines at the beginning and 29 at the end. The poem deals, he said, with ‘the temporary triumph of evil, the confusion of the moral order, closing in the great Battle of the West’ (Ricks, 1742). The more indefinite ‘Coming’ and ‘Passing’in the titles add to the uncertainty about Arthur’s origins and fate and align Arthur to the ‘eternal present’ of *myth rather than to the definiteness of history. The ontological uncertainty underscoring all the Idylls turns this last battle into a dream where ‘friend slew friend not knowing whom they slew’ (101) (a reference back to *‘Balin and Balan’). The new introduction is strongly Shakespearean, with Arthur in his tent before the battle being visited by the ghost of Gawain. ‘Hollow, hollow, hollow all delight’ (33) is an image from the earliest prose account, probably written in 1833, of the sacred mount of Camelot where ‘all underneath it was hollow’ (Ricks, 1461). Arthur also refers to Guinevere – ‘One lying in the dust at Almesbury’ (77). Tennyson thus increases the unity of the whole poem, but loses the mystery and immediacy of the original beginning, ‘So all day long the noise of battle rolled’, by spelling out all that was simply implied in that
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original ‘So’. Just as *‘The Last Tournament’ was built on pagan imagery, so this idyll’s language is specifically Christian, with Arthur, like Christ on the Cross, despairing before a death which includes the promise of an ultimate return. Tennyson cleverly reverses the perspective of Arthur’s departure so as to suggest that, somewhere else, he is ‘returning from his wars’ (461; italics added). Whereas ‘Morte d’Arthur’ ended bleakly with ‘And on the mere the wailing died away’, the new 29-line conclusion imposes optimism in the final line: ‘And the new sun rose bringing the new year’ (a line which Tennyson had originally placed earlier in this final section). The wasteland imagery and symbolism of this poem greatly influenced T. S. Eliot and its language has generally been better received by later critics than that of the earlier Idylls.
‘Passion of the Past, The’ Arthur Hallam referred in a letter to Tennyson on 26 July 1831 to his friend’s ‘passion for the past’ which seemed to him to be ‘universal and all-powerful, absorbing your whole existence’. Tennyson said to James *Knowles of *‘Tears, Idle Tears’ (itself linked to Hallam’s death), ‘In my boy-phrase, “The Passion of the Past”. The first gray streak of earliest summer-dawn, The last long stripe of waning crimson gloom ... ‘ (Ricks, 785). ‘The ‘Past’ for Tennyson is, as he implies, a geographical as well as a temporal distance, as illustrated in *‘The Roses on the Terrace’. It is embodied late in his life in *‘The Ancient Sage’ (1885): Today? But what of yesterday? For oft On me, when boy, there came what then I called, Who knew no books and no philosophies, In my boy-phrase, ‘The Passion of the Past’. The first gray streak of earliest summer-dawn. The last long stripe of waning crimson gloom, As if the late and early were but one – (216–22) This is more than mere nostalgia: it is from his earliest days, at the heart of Tennyson’s poetic vision.
Patmore, Coventry (1823–96)
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Poet and critic; retrieved lost manuscript of *In Memoriam. Patmore had a wide circle of literary and artistic friends, including Robert *Browning, *Woolner, *Ruskin, *Millais and Holman *Hunt, and was a contributor to the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ. Tennyson met him in about 1846, and a close friendship ensued. After Patmore published his best-known poem,
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‘Pelleas and Ettarre’ (1869) Ninth in the final order of the *Idylls – ‘Almost the saddest of the Idylls’ (Tennyson). ‘Pelleas and Ettarre’ was published with *‘The Coming of Arthur’, *‘The Holy Grail’ and *‘The Passing of Arthur’ and with them is obviously crucial to the thematic development of the poem. Based on Malory iv 21–4, the story of the young and idealistic Pelleas’s love for the worthless Ettarre marks, in the finished work, a turning point in the narrative – ‘the breaking of the storm’, said Tennyson (Ricks, 1687). Pelleas’s cruel treatment by Ettarre and subsequent betrayal by Gawain show how quickly the high standards of Arthur’s court collapsed after the Grail quest. In the structure which Tennyson slowly established in the Idylls, this poem balances *‘Gareth and Lynette’: in each, a beautiful lady holds power over the young knight – though Lynette learns and is reclaimed whereas Ettare is condemned. The opposite situation is set up in the two ‘Enid’ Idylls and in *‘Elaine’, in each of which the woman is presented as the victim. R. W. Rader has linked this Idyll with Rosa *Baring, particularly in the rose song (lines 391–400). Certainly the theme of the callously dismissed young lover is recognizable from *Maud, where the biographical links are undisputed. Tennyson makes Pelleas’s fate much bleaker and crueller than that of Malory’s ‘Pelles’: in Malory, ‘Ettarde’ eventually does fall in love with Pelles and is spurned in her turn: ‘So the lady Ettarde died for sorrow, and the damsel of the lake rejoiced Sir Pelles, and loved together during their lives’ (Ricks, 1702). Tennyson ruthlessly shows the permanent damage of betrayal in Pelleas’s horrific transformation into the Red Knight of *‘The Last Tournament’. The ending suggests the biblical implications of the story by turning Modred into a Judas figure: ‘And Modred thought, “the time is near at hand” ’.
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The Angel in the House, Tennyson wrote to him (30 October 1854): ‘you have written a poem which has a fair chance of immortality’. Patmore reviewed *Maud favourably in the Edinburgh Review. Following Patmore’s conversion to *Roman Catholicism and after the death of his wife, his remarriage and retirement to Sussex, the friendship cooled somewhat. However, a letter from Patmore on 5 June 1881, expressing his regret at the lapse of their friendship received a reassuring reply from Tennyson.
Periodicals Tennyson frequently used the expanding periodical press, especially when answering requests from editors who, like James *Knowles, W. M. *Thackeray and Edmund *Gosse, were his friends, or, like Alexander Macmillan, his publisher. He also used the newspapers and periodicals for political poems
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needing quick and wide circulation, as in the 1852 French invasion scare or *‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ in 1854, and for experimental poems. *Swinburne in particular was critical of what seemed to be Tennyson’s overuse of popular periodicals from the 1860s onwards and Tennyson himself felt uncomfortable about the practice: ‘My feeling is against writing in Magazines. “Why then did you?” – I know the argument is against me. But what I put into the Cornhill were things sui generis, experiments which I wished to try with the public’ (Letter to the Duchess of Argyll, 26 December 1863). He often picked up stories from the press as the subjects for his poems. ‘Happy: The Leper’s Bride’ was from an article in the Isle of Wight County Press, 1888; ‘Owd Roä’ was, he said, from ‘one of the daily papers’ (Ricks, 1379) – the story of a child rescued from a burning house by a black retriever – Old Rover. Popular newspapers and periodicals may well have encouraged the more anecdotal later poems, but it is worth remembering that some of Tennyson’s greatest poems, including *‘Tithonus’ and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, first appeared in the newspapers or periodicals. See also: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: Reception. Athenaeum, The (1828–1921) J. S. Buckingham’s literary review was set up to be ‘a true Athenaeum’, for writers of every sort. Buckingham attacked the *Quarterly Review for its Tory political bias, even in its literary reviews. Tennyson’s poems published: ‘To W.C. Macready’ (8 March 1851, quoted from Macready’s Farewell Banquet on 7 March. The editor stated he was printing it ‘in honour rather of the occasion than of any particular merit of its own’). ‘In Memoriam W.G. Ward’ (11 May 1889). Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1817–1980) Set up by Scottish publisher, William Blackwood, as a Tory rival to the Whiggish Edinburgh Review, it shared the politics of the Quarterly Review, but prided itself on its greater acerbity. Certainly, under the editorships of John Lockhart and John Wilson from 1817, it blisteringly attacked the ‘Cockney School of Poetry’, attempting to destroy the reputations of John *Keats, Leigh *Hunt and William Hazlitt. In contrast, it championed the work of William *Wordsworth and Sir Walter *Scott. Christopher *North (John Wilson) was still active when the next generation of poets appeared and wrote in the February 1832 edition that he had good hopes of Tennyson but the cockneys
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were doing all they could to spoil him; in the May 1832 edition he developed his attack, adding scorn for those who over-praised Tennyson, including A. H. Hallam.
Church of England Quarterly Review In an 1842 edition, Leigh Hunt describes the ‘literary dandyism’ of Tennyson’s ‘Godiva’. Contemporary Review Founded in 1866, it was edited from 1870 to 1877 by James *Knowles, Tennyson’s friend and advisor. *‘The Last Tournament’ was published in December 1871. Tennyson received £150. Cornhill Magazine (1860–1975) Launched in January 1860 by W. M. *Thackeray, who begged Tennyson for a poem. He ‘ferreted among [his] old books’ and found *‘Tithonus’, originally written in 1833 as ‘Tithon’. The Cornhill was published by George Smith of Smith & Elder who briefly became Tennyson’s publisher. Tennyson’s poems published: ‘Tithonus’ (February 1860 – written in 1833) ‘Attempts at Classic Metres of Quantity’ (December 1863): ‘On Translations of Homer: hexameters and pentameters’; ‘Milton: alcaics’; ‘Hendecasyllabics’; ‘Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad in Blank Verse’. Court Journal The royal journal. ‘Long as the heart beats life within her breast’ (19 March 1864) (lines in memory of Queen *Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, who had died in 1861)
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Cambridge Chronicle and Journal During Tennyson’s university days, it published *‘Timbuctoo’ (10 July 1829), the prize poem which had won the Chancellor’s Medal.
Daily News (1845–1960) Became the News Chronicle in 1930; founded by Charles *Dickens as a Liberal rival to the Morning Chronicle. ‘Because she bore the iron name’ (1890).
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Edinburgh Review, The (1802–1929)
Englishman’s Magazine (1831–33) Founded by Edward *Moxon as a literary monthly, publishing poems, essays and criticism and also notes on music, art and drama. It defended the ‘Cockney School’ vigorously against Blackwood’s and the Quarterly. Its reviews were, unusually, often signed. Arthur Hallam’s important review of Tennyson’s 1830 volume was published in the August 1831 edition; vicious attacks on that review (as well as on Tennyson’s poetry) by Christopher *North in Blackwood’s probably contributed to its early collapse in 1833. Sonnet: ‘Check every outflash, every ruder sally’ (August 1831) Every Saturday ‘Lucretius’ (2 May 1868 – also published, May 1868, in Macmillan’s Magazine) Examiner, The (1808–81) Radical weekly founded by John and Leigh *Hunt; edited 1847–55 by John *Forster. Tennyson’s poems published: ‘To ______, After Reading a Life and Letters’ (24 March 1849) ‘Britons, Guard Your Own’ (31 January 1852 – unsigned) ‘The Third of February, 1852’ (7 February 1852 – signed ‘Merlin’) ‘Hands All Round!’ (7 February 1852 – signed ‘Merlin’) ‘Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper’ (14 February 1852 – signed ‘Taliessin’ and praising the earlier two poems as if from a different hand) *‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (9 December 1854 – signed ‘A.T.’) Fraser’s Magazine (1830–82)
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Whiggish and weighty. Published James *Spedding’s favourable review of Poems (1842).
A highly respected Tory journal competing with Blackwood’s and the Quarterly Review. It was proud of the non-partisan approach of its reviews. ‘For the Penny-Wise’ (February 1852 – unsigned) ‘Ode Sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition’ (June 1862; this had already been published in The Times)
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Gem, The (1829–32)
Good Words ‘1865–66’ (March 1868 – ‘ruined by the absurd illustrations’, said Tennyson [Ricks, 1192]) ‘The Victim’ (1 January 1868) ‘Helen’s Tower’ (January 1884) (previously privately printed for Lord *Dufferin in 1861) Keepsake, The ‘St Agnes’ (1837); later called ‘St Agnes Eve’ (1855) ‘Stanzas: What time I wasted youthful hours’ (1851) ‘Stanzas: Come not when I am dead’ (1851) Macmillan’s Magazine (1859–1907) Founded by David Masson, it only used signed articles and published a wide range of material, including poetry, politics, fiction, travel writing. Tennyson’s poems published: ‘Sea Dreams: An Idyll’ (January 1860 – Alexander Macmillan gave £300 for the rights to the poem) ‘Wages’ (February 1868) ‘A Voice Spake out of the Skies’ (February 1868) *‘Lucretius’ (May 1868) *‘The Charge of the Heavy Brigade’ (March 1882) ‘Freedom’ (December 1884 – Tennyson’s ‘First political utterance as a peer’, said Hallam *Tennyson) (Memoir, ii.305) *‘Vastness’ (November 1885) ‘On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria’ (April 1887: printed as ‘Carmen Saeculare: an Ode in Honour of the Jubilee’) Manchester Athenaeum Album ‘Lines: Here often, when a child, I lay reclined’ (1850: called ‘Mablethorpe’ in Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir)
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Literary annual edited by Thomas Hood. ‘Anacraeontics’; ‘A Fragment: ‘ “Where is the Giant of the Sun” ’ (October 1830)
Morning Chronicle (1769–1862): a Whig journal for which Dickens worked in the 1830s as a reporter and Thackeray later as an art critic.
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‘The Penny-Wise’ (24 January 1852 – unsigned; reprinted in The Leader, 24 January, and the Evening Journal, 24–6 January 1852)
New Review (1889–97) ‘The Throstle’ (October 1889); the editor, Edmund *Gosse, had commissioned the poem – but was also responsible for errors in the printing) New York Ledger ‘England and America in 1782’ (6 January 1872: Tennyson was offered £1,000 for any poem of three stanzas and adapted a poem originally written in 1832–34) Nineteenth Century Monthly review founded 1877 by James *Knowles, who moved from editing the Contemporary Review. It brought together eminent contributors with conflicting views, such as W. E. *Gladstone and T. H. *Huxley on biblical miracles. ‘Prefatory Sonnet to the “Nineteenth Century” ’ (March 1877 – requested by James Knowles for the first number; published without a title) *‘Montenegro’ (May 1877) ‘To Victor Hugo’ (June 1877) ‘Achilles over the Trench’ (August 1877) *‘The Revenge: A Ballad of the Fleet’ (March 1878) ‘Dedicatory Poem to the Princess Alice’ (April 1879 – dedicating to her memory the subsequent poem, ‘Lucknow’) ‘Lucknow’ (April 1879) ‘De Profundis’ (May 1880 – begun at Hallam *Tennyson’s birth in 1852) ‘Despair’ (November 1881; Tennyson wanted this published with a pendant poem, to be called ‘Hope’ or ‘Faith’ – but Knowles, to his annoyance, published it alone) *‘To Virgil’ (September 1882) *‘Frater Ave Atque Vale’ (March 1883) ‘The Death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale’ (February 1892)
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New and Old Tennyson must have read the 1875 edition for the details of ‘In the Children’s Hospital’ (1880).
In November 1883 Gladstone suggested publishing some of his own letters from Arthur Hallam in the Nineteenth Century. Tennyson was scandalized: ‘Knowles is a very clever man & kindly, but he is ... Knowles of the 19th Century & would set the fame of his Review above the fame of your old friend & mine, at least I fear so’ (Martin, 548).
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Periodicals 201
Once a Week ‘The Grandmother’s Apology’ (16 July 1859). Tennyson said that the editor, Evans, had offered him ‘£100 for the Old Woman to put in his new paper’ (Ricks, 1106; later published as ‘The Grandmother’), allowing him to keep the copyright. ‘The Spiteful Letter’ (4 January 1868) Pall Mall Gazette Tennyson read an article in this magazine on 8 December 1881 and wrote ‘The Wreck’ (1885); in April 1885 he read articles here about the weakness of the navy and wrote ‘The Fleet’ – published in The Times. Punch (1841–1992) Illustrated humorous weekly; strongly Radical during the nineteenth century. *‘The New Timon and the Poets’ (28 February 1846; sent in by John *Forster on Tennyson’s behalf and signed ‘Alcibiades’) ‘Literary Squabbles’ (7 March 1846, published with the title, ‘Afterthought’) Quarterly Review (1809–1967) Founded by John Murray as a Tory rival to the Whig Edinburgh Review. Like its fellow-Tory Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, it allowed political bias to govern its literary reviews. Although it supported *Wordsworth and the ‘Lake School’, it fiercely attacked *Keats, *Hunt, Hazlitt, *Shelley and later Tennyson, *Dickens, Macaulay and Charlotte Brontë. In the April 1833 edition, J. W. *Croker published a harsh, unsigned review of the 1833 Poems. Tennyson knew the periodical well and a passage in the 1816 edition about Sir Walter *Scott’s The Antiquary may have, much later, inspired *‘The Grandmother’. John Sterling reviewed Poems (1842) in September 1842. Spectator, The (1828)
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In January 1887, Gladstone published in the Nineteenth Century a long article attacking *‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ for its pessimism in the face of progress.
Weekly periodical founded by R. S. Rintoul to purvey ‘educated radicalism’. Reviewed the 1830 Poems and stated that two of the poems were like Abraham Cowley’s work. Later reviewers in the 1860s were extremely respectful of Tennyson.
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St Nicholas (New York) ‘Child-Songs’ (February 1880) ‘Minnie and Winnie’ (February 1880) Tatler, The Leigh *Hunt reviewed the 1830 volume critically, saying that poems like ‘The Tears of Heaven’ weren’t poetically truthful. Times, The (1785–present day) As the great Establishment newspaper, The Times received most of Tennyson’s Laureate verse, in particular poems addressed to the Royal Family. ‘To W.C. Macready’ (3 March 1851; also in The Athenaeum and several newspapers, all quoting it from Macready’s Farewell Banquet on 7 March 1851) ‘Riflemen Form!’ (9 May 1850 – signed ‘T.’) ‘Ode Sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition’ (24 April 1862) *‘A Welcome to Alexandra’ (7 March 1863 – to mark the arrival from Denmark of the Prince of Wales’s bride) ‘A Welcome to Her Royal Highness Marie Alexandrovna, Duchess of Edinburgh’ (7 March 1874 – she had married Alfred Duke of Edinburgh on 23 January in St Petersburg) ‘Sir John Franklin’ (31 July 1875; printed to mark the unveiling of the monument in Westminster Abbey) ‘The Fleet’ (23 April 1885; inspired by articles in the Pall Mall Gazette on the insufficiency of the navy) ‘Epitaph on General Gordon’ (7 May 1885) ‘To HRH Princess Beatrice’ (23 July 1885; on her marriage to Prince Henry of Battenburg) ‘Take, Lady, what your loyal nurses give’ (27 June 1891; inscribed by Tennyson in a copy of his works to be given by the Royal Guild of Nurses to Princess Louise Augusta of Schleswig-Holstein on her marriage).
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St James’s Gazette ‘Compromise: “Steersman, be not precipitate in thine act” ’ (29 October 1884; addressed to W. E. *Gladstone, the poem was published without Tennyson’s permission)
Tribute, The Editor, Lord Northampton. ‘Stanzas: *Oh! That ’twere possible’ (September 1837: the longer version. Tennyson had annoyed Richard Monckton *Milnes by refusing to contribute
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Westminster Review, The (1824–1914) Established by the Benthamite John Stuart *Mill as a rival to the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review. W. J. Fox reviewed Poems (1830) favourably (January 1831), and the Review continued to support Tennyson’s poetry.
Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–49) American poet and Gothic writer. The author of The Raven and Other Poems and of such Gothic tales as ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. Poe saw Tennyson as ‘most ethereal’, saying that ‘no poet is so little of the earth’. On the strength of the 1842 volume he called Tennyson ‘the greatest of poets’ (Mazzeno 2004: 15). The admiration was mutual, Tennyson referring to Poe as ‘the most original American genius’ (Memoir, ii.292–3). Late in life Tennyson said that the only thing he would ever have wanted to see in America was Poe’s grave.
Poems 1833 Tennyson’s second volume of poems. Published by Edward *Moxon in December 1832, but dated 1833, the volume was seen through the press by Arthur Hallam. The 30 poems showed a distinct advance on the 1830 volume and included, most importantly, *‘The Lady of Shalott’, *‘Mariana in the South’, *‘Oenone’, *‘The Palace of Art’, *‘The Lotos-Eaters’, *‘A Dream of Fair Women’, ‘To J.S.’ and *‘The Hesperides’. These mature treatments of classical themes, as well as the new Arthurian ballad, were accompanied by a further group of poems to beautiful women – Margaret, Kate, Eleanore, Rosalind – and by three political sonnets, ‘Buonaparte’, and two on the Russian invasion of Poland. There are several poems that might be classified as *English Idyls, including *‘The Miller’s Daughter’ and *‘The May Queen’, both of which came to be seen in the twentieth century as peculiarly ‘Victorian’ (though they are, of course, pre-Victorian), and six sonnets, at least two of which are presumed to be addressed to Arthur Hallam. *‘A Dream of Fair Women’ suggests the influence of *Chaucer. *‘The Sisters’ is influenced by Walter *Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Weaker poems include two to the New Year and the light-hearted *‘O Darling Room’. Tennyson had originally intended to include *‘The Lover’s Tale’, but withdrew it at the last minute, despite Hallam’s vigorous protests. In contrast he insisted, against
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to The Tribute earlier; he seems to have struggled to produce an ending for the original lyric, simply to pacify Milnes.)
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Hallam’s advice, on printing the squib *‘To Christopher North’, an angry and ill- considered riposte to the critic of the 1830 volume. There is a great increase in power and control in Poems 1833, though this was not generally recognized by the critics. *Landscape poetry is enriched by the southern scenery of France and the Pyrenees (following the 1830 journey with Hallam), in such poems as ‘Oenone’ and ‘Mariana in the South’, while the *Lincolnshire landscape still infuses the English poems. The New Year poems may well be linked to the death in 1831 of Tennyson’s father whose spirit, in an 1830 poem, ‘haunts the year’s last hours’ (Ricks, 215). (Dr *Tennyson had died in March 1831.) The first powerful elegy, ‘To J.S.’, mourning James *Spedding’s brother, also speaks of a son’s grief. The morbid introspection of the 1830 volume, however, seems to have vanished, perhaps as a result of his death. The central issue in this volume, focused most clearly in ‘The Palace of Art’, is that between abstract beauty and the demands of the real world. The tension between the ‘poetry of sensation’ and the ‘poetry of reflection’ was from now on to be central to Tennyson’s thinking about his art. Though most of the 1830 reviews had been encouraging, reviews for this volume were largely negative. Perhaps the reviewers themselves had been chastened by Christopher *North’s indictment of those who had, in his opinion, over-praised the young poet. Many of the negative comments seem to apply retrospectively to the 1830 volume rather than to this much more accomplished one. Only W. J. Fox (who had praised the 1830 volume) in the small-circulation Monthly Repository, and John Stuart *Mill in the London Review, recognized the merits of the new book. *Bulwer-Lytton (close friend now of Tennyson’s hated uncle *Charles) attacked its ‘prattle of childhood’ (Charles Tennyson, 135). Worst of all was an anonymous review in the large-circulation Quarterly Review of April 1833. There was no review in Blackwood’s or from Christopher North, but North’s old colleague John Lockhart, now editor of the Quarterly, who had been brought up to detest the ‘Cockney School’, set J. W. *Croker, the destroyer of John *Keats’s reputation in 1818, to attack Tennyson. Unlike North’s 1830 review, which did identify the poems’ merits, this review simply quoted out of context (having particularly malicious fun with ‘The Lady of Shalott’) in order to hold the young poet up to ridicule. Sales of the volume were reduced, Tennyson’s precarious confidence was shattered, and he plunged into a decade of silence. See also: Poetry and society; Publishers.
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Poems 1842 Tennyson’s third volume of poems. After a ten-year silence caused by Arthur *Hallam’s death in 1833, the savaging of the 1833 volume by J. W. *Croker, and a genuine recognition of the need to revise earlier work, Tennyson eventually published two volumes of
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poems in May 1842, prompted by pressure from American admirers. The most notable poems are: *‘Ulysses’, *‘Morte d’Arthur’, *‘Locksley Hall’, *‘The Two Voices’, *‘The Vision of Sin’ and *‘Break, Break, Break’. Volume I contained 46 poems, the majority being revised versions of earlier works: 23 of the 56 poems in *Poems Chiefly Lyrical (1830) were reprinted, as well as 16 of the 30 poems in *Poems 1833. Only 7 poems, therefore, were completely new: *‘Lady Clara Vere de Vere’, ‘Conclusion’, ‘The Blackbird’, ‘You ask me why, though ill at ease’, *‘Of old sat Freedom on the heights’, ‘Love thou thy land’ and ‘The Goose’. Volume II contained 29 more new poems (although of these, ‘St Agnes’ had already been printed in The Keepsake for 1837, while the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ section of ‘The Daydream’ had appeared in the 1830 volume). Surprising omissions from the 1842 volume are *‘The Hesperides’ and ‘Hero and Leander’; *‘The Lady of Shalott’, *‘The Miller’s Daughter’, *‘The Palace of Art’ and *‘The LotosEaters’ had all been heavily revised (some readers felt, in line with Christopher *North’s strictures). There was an increasing fascination with the Arthurian legends, manifested in *‘The Epic’ and *‘Morte d’Arthur’, *‘Sir Galahad’ and *‘Launcelot and Guinevere’. There were poems prompted by individual experience, notably ‘The Two Voices’, ‘Locksley Hall’, ‘Ulysses’ (written shortly after the death of Hallam) and *‘Love and Duty’ (written after the break with Emily *Sellwood); *‘St Simon Stylites’ and ‘The Vision of Sin’ depicted opposite sorts of excess, religious and sensual, and reveal Tennyson’s horror of ‘the falsehood of extremes’. There were more modern *‘English Idyls’ – *‘The Gardener’s Daughter’, *‘Dora’, *‘Walking to the Mail’ and *‘Audley Court’, as well as the revised versions of *‘The May Queen’ and *‘The Miller’s Daughter’. In these idylls, Tennyson adapts the classical eclogue for his own times, attempting, though in a very circumscribed way, to address the modern age. Reviews were generally friendly rather than enthusiastic, even the former *Apostles like Francis *Garden and Richard Monkton *Milnes controlling their enthusiasm, perhaps with an eye on Croker and North. John *Sterling’s review in the Quarterly Review compensated for Croker’s in the same journal ten years earlier, but did include the reservation that such a miraculous legend as the ‘Morte d’Arthur’, even within the modern frame of ‘The Epic’, ‘does not come near us’. This, said Tennyson in later life, was enough to deter him for more than a decade from pursing the Arthurian project. The critics still seemed overawed by North and Croker and determined not to be lured into overpraise. Eventually, in the Edinburgh Review of April 1843, James *Spedding produced a balanced assessment, praising the revisions and claiming greater emotional depth for the new poetry. Francis Garden in the Christian Remembrancer (July 1842) specifically recommended that Tennyson distance himself from Hallam’s theory about ‘pure poetry’ and address the world around him. However, the general tenor of the poems is already far removed from Hallam’s ‘poetry of sensation’, and Tennyson seems already
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to be struggling towards greater involvement with the world: this is evident from the acclaim of Elizabeth Barrett, herself in the vanguard of the ‘socially engaged’ poets. The volume confirmed Tennyson’s reputation with a whole band of influential admirers, including Barrett herself, Thomas *Carlyle and Edgar Allan *Poe, who observed, ‘I am not sure Tennyson is not the greatest of poets’: all were to remain loyal ever afterwards. This was, however, the last of Tennyson’s volumes that Edward *FitzGerald was to enjoy. His comments on all the subsequent poetry refer nostalgically to this volume as a watershed. Sales were steady, and the army of Tennyson’s admirers slowly grew, seduced by the combination of beauty and moral seriousness in the poet’s vision. See also: Browning, Elizabeth Barrett.
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) Tennyson’s first volume of poetry, published while he was still at *Cambridge, this volume contained 56 poems of which 23 were reprinted, often heavily revised, in the 1842 volume. (Poems NOT reprinted in the 1842 volume are printed in bold type.) The original plan had been for Arthur *Hallam to share the authorship, but Henry *Hallam forbade this. The most notable poems are *‘Mariana’, *‘The Kraken’, *‘Supposed Confessions of a Secondrate Sensitive Mind Not in Unity with Itself’ and *‘Ode to Memory’. Written largely in the poet’s late teens, some of these poems are little more than Juvenilia, and, like *Poems by Two Brothers, are often introspective and melancholic. Many of the weakest and the strongest poems deal with the pull between stasis and change. ‘Nothing Will Die’ and ‘All Things Must Die’ (though not reprinted until 1872) are important for their role in establishing the dialectic that runs through Tennyson’s work. Though Christopher *North called the pair ‘feeble and fantastic’ (Jump, 56), their silent commentary upon each other, without judgement, is a technique used in the major works, especially *‘The Holy Grail’, where rival truths are silently juxtaposed. Similarly, the even more significant final poem, ‘hoi neontes’ (in Greek letters) (‘The Flowing Ones’) shows already, in this adaptation of *Heraclitus and the ‘flowing philosophers’ (Ricks, 258), Tennyson’s struggle between a conscious desire for fixed meaning and a poetic recognition that ‘All truth is change’. At the opposite extreme, there is a collection of poems to and about young ladies, comprising ‘Claribel’, ‘Lilian’ (to Sophy *Rawnsley), ‘Madeline’ and ‘Adeline’. ‘Isabel’ is an idealized portrait of Tennyson’s mother and poignantly suggests her relationship with her difficult husband: ‘a clear stream flowing with a muddy one’ (30). Tennyson’s father is also suggested in ‘A spirit haunts the year’s last hours’. ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ is simple fairytale, ‘The Merman’ and ‘The Mermaid’ are derived from Tennyson’s
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reading in folklore, in Walter *Scott and in T. C. Croker. The *Lincolnshire landscape and the natural world are described in many of the poems, notably ‘The Dying Swan’ (the swan as a symbol of mortality is used again at the beginning of *‘Tithonus’), ‘The Grasshopper’ (containing an early reference to Tithonus), and most of all, the ‘Ode to Memory’. In contrast, ‘Recollections of the Arabian Nights’ shows the intense attraction of the exotic. Two patriotic songs, ‘English Warsong’ and ‘National Song’, anticipate the laureate verse. There are several successful portraits, including ‘To J.M.K.’ (John Kemble), ‘To—[Clearheaded Friend]’ (J. W. Blakesley) and ‘A Character’, modelled on Theophrastus and describing a fellow-undergraduate, Thomas Sunderland, described by *FitzGerald as a ‘ very plausible, parliament-like, and self-satisfied speaker at the Union’ (Ricks, 218). A rare example of Tennysonian invective, it was termed by Leigh *Hunt ‘a faultless composition’ (Ricks, 218). There are two Romantic accounts of the Poet’s Role, ‘The Poet’ and ‘The Poet’s Mind’, and several poems on death, notably ‘The Deserted House’, ‘Love and Death’ and ‘A Dirge’, which recapitulate the morbidity evident in *Poems by Two Brothers and may suggest the imaginative hold Tennyson’s ‘black-blooded’ father still had over his imagination. Classical subjects include ‘Hero and Leander’ and ‘The Ballad of Oriana’. ‘The Mystic’, the only blank-verse poem, describes one of his boyhood trances. There was much metrical experimentation in the volume, a feature criticized by *Coleridge. Tennyson later attributed this criticism to a misunderstanding resulting from his own youthful aversion to hyphens – which were added in later editions. The more experimental metrical exercises tended not to be reprinted in 1842. The varying quality of the poems suggests a willingness to experiment but also, perhaps, a youthful overconfidence encouraged by the unqualified enthusiasm of the *Apostles (See also: Metrics). Arthur *Hallam sent the book with Charles Tennyson’s Sonnets and Fugitive Pieces, to Leigh *Hunt, who wrote a favourable review, as did W. J. Fox in the Westminster Review. Hallam himself wrote what was to be his most enduring essay in the Englishman’s Magazine (August 1831). These were all spoilt, for Tennyson, by the severe comments of Professor John Wilson (Christopher *North) in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in May 1832. Wilson’s initial comments in the February edition had been generally favourable (‘He has – Genius’ [Charles Tennyson, 119]); however, in the full May review, disturbed by Fox and Hallam’s eulogies, he lambasted the ‘Cockneydom’ of Tennyson’s supporters and dismissed the weaker poems as ‘drivel’ or ‘distinguished silliness’, before extracting the best, like ‘Mariana’, as evidence that, after all, ‘Alfred Tennyson is a poet’ (Jump, 63). Tennyson’s hurt response, the squib *‘To Christopher North’, was ill judged, but the review did send him back to analyse and rewrite the verse that eventually appeared in the much stronger 1842 volume. It also delayed the planned publication of what was eventually the 1833 volume.
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Poems, Chiefly Lyrical
See also: Publishers.
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Tennyson’s first published volume of poetry (1827), co-authored with his brother *Charles. Jacksons of *Louth published this small volume on 20 April 1827, giving the youthful authors ten pounds in cash and ten-pounds-worth of books. Old George *Tennyson said gloomily to Alfred, ‘There, that is the first money you have ever earned by your poetry, and, take my word for it, it will be the last.’ The volume contains 102 poems and an advertisement which boldly declares in Latin, ‘we have passed the Rubicon and we leave the rest to fate’. Forty-two poems have been identified as being by Alfred, 4 by a third brother, *Frederick, and most of the rest by Charles, though several are difficult to attribute. There is no proof as to who was behind the publication, which could not have been a financial proposition for a provincial bookseller; Tennyson’s father, grandfather or even his generous Aunt Elizabeth *Russell have all been suggested as the secret benefactor. On the publication day the two boys drove to *Mablethorpe in a hired carriage and recited their poems against the roar of the waves. There were two casual references to the volume in reviews but very few sales. W. D. Paden in Tennyson in Egypt (1942) identifies the influences of authors in *Dr Tennyson’s library, including Addison, Burke, *Byron, Cicero, Claudian, Cowper, Gray, *Horace, Hume, Sir William Jones, Juvenal, *Lucretius, *Milton, Moore, *Ovid, Racine, Mrs Radcliffe, Sallust, *Scott, *Shakespeare, Spenser, Tacitus, Terence, *Virgil and Edward *Young. The poem ‘Written during the Convulsions in Spain’ anticipates Tennyson’s involvement as an undergraduate in the Spanish revolutionary cause. (This was not published until 1893 – see below.) Other poems by Alfred tend to be metrical exercises in the styles of Gray, Byron, Moore and Scott, drawn from the *Somersby library rather than from life. The lure of the exotic (for a boy whose favourite words were ‘Far, far away’) is evident from some of the titles: ‘Antony to Cleopatra’, ‘The Exile of Bassorah’ (based on *The Arabian Nights), ‘The Expedition of Nadir Shah into Hindustan’, ‘Mithridates and Berenice’, ‘Alexander and the High Priest’, ‘The Druid’s Prophecies’, ‘The Vision of King Charles the Eleventh in Sweden’, as well as ‘Exhortation to the Greeks’, ‘Babylon’, ‘Lamentation of the Peruvians’, ‘The Fall of Jerusalem’. These last 4 poems with their images of death and destruction, of cataclysmic collapse, perhaps suggest the precarious emotional state of the Somersby household as it daily expected the collapse of Dr Tennyson, but similar images continued to preoccupy the mature poet. The same voice can be heard in the collapse of the Round Table or of *Aylmer’s Field. An even more (implicitly) personal poem is ‘I wander in darkness and sorrow’. The image of the friendless, exiled soul recalls George Clayton *Tennyson’s poem, ‘The Wandering Jew’, as does ‘Unhappy man, why wander there?’ (not
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printed until 1893). The theme of ‘Friendship’, in a poem using Dr Tennyson’s favourite Spenserian stanza, anticipates *In Memoriam. The epigraph shows how prepared the young Tennyson was to ‘fall into friendship’ at university. It is a quotation from Cicero’s De Amicitia: ‘I am not now speaking of the ordinary and commonplace friendship – delightful and profitable as it is – but of that pure and faultless kind, such as was that of the few whose friendships are known to fame’ (Ricks, 113). There is a preoccupation with old age and with isolation in poems like ‘The Old Sword’ and ‘The Old Chieftain’, which, anticipating *‘Ulysses’, use the mask of age to cover youthful pain. Though many of the poems contain direct echoes of Byron, there are also reminiscences of George Clayton Tennyson’s own poetry as well as a complex of filial emotions about his plight – his frustration and sense of failure. A complex set of such emotions lies behind ‘Remorse’, ‘The Grave of a Suicide’ and ‘The Dead Enemy’, which were to emerge in *Maud, where they are directly linked to a failed and suicidal father figure. The image of the hapless victim haunts these poems, a figure which Dr Tennyson, in his poetry and his life, had made his own. ‘Memory’ shows a significant swing from introspective gloom to transports of delight, though other poems such as the ode ‘Perdidi Diem’ show the speaker trapped in ‘fruitless discontent’. The poetic moods are those of the adolescent, the aspiring Romantic poet and, vicariously, of the frustrated father at Somersby Rectory. A revised edition of the volume was completed in 1893 with the help of the aged Frederick, who managed to establish the authorship of most of the poems, and to add several which had been omitted from the 1827 volume ‘for some forgotten reason’ (Ricks, 155). (Tennyson observed later in life that better poems had been kept back from publication as being ‘too much out of the common for the public taste’ [Memoir, i.23].) Generally, Poems by Two Brothers is not an experimental volume, but follows the popular poets of the time, particularly Byron, *Crabbe, *Rogers and Thomas *Moore. The book owes most, perhaps, to the haunting presence, both poetic and personal, of Dr George Clayton Tennyson. See also: Publishers.
Poet Laureateship Tennyson held this post from 1850 until his death in 1892. The death of William *Wordsworth on 23 April 1850 launched a protracted campaign to influence the choice of his successor. Numerous names were put forward, and Tennyson was on the list but was at first regarded as an outsider; however, the publication of *In Memoriam five weeks after Wordsworth’s death proved uncannily timely, and its enthusiastic reception turned Tennyson into a strong contender. He was offered the post early in November and after some hesitation accepted.
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Poet Laureateship
From the dedicatory poem *‘To the Queen’ in 1851, and for some forty years thereafter, he discharged the duties of the post conscientiously, producing commemorative verses on such varied royal occasions and personalities as the ‘Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen, Written at the Request of the Prince of Wales’ (1886), ‘To H.R.H. Princess Beatrice’ (1885) and ‘The Death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale’ (1892). Of considerably greater significance are poems prompted by more momentous public themes such as the *‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ (1852) and *‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1854). With Queen *Victoria, a keen admirer of In Memoriam, he developed a personal friendship. Tennyson’s public recognition as demonstrated by the award of the Laureateship, combined with his marriage and the publication of his most celebrated long poem, helped to make 1850 a major turning point in his life and career. See also: Tiresias and Other Poems.
Poetry and society Tennyson was caught between theories of ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ poetry. The early reviews of the 1830 volume are polarized between W. J. Fox’s declaration that the young poet has an important social role to fill and Arthur Hallam’s equally fervent assertion that the Poet should keep the outside world well away from his poetry and concentrate entirely on Beauty. R. C. *Trench’s criticism of the volume – ‘Tennyson, we cannot live in Art’ (Ricks, 400) – inspired *‘The Palace of Art’ in the 1833 volume. Trench was voicing the opinions of many of the *Apostles, who wanted to see ‘their’ poet gaining influence by addressing the problems of the day. The tension is there throughout this volume, notably in poems like *‘The Lady of Shalott’. After Hallam’s death the pressure to set aside his views and to re-enter society resulted in a tension which was sometimes fruitful (in *‘Ulysses’ and in *Maud) and sometimes inhibiting (as in most of the *‘English Idyls’ and in *‘Enoch Arden’, where the evocation of contemporary society seems to twenty-first century readers to reduce the power of the poetry). The rival theories go back to the pre-Victorian period, reconfigured in the 1820s by John Stuart *Mill in his essays on Bentham and *Coleridge, which set up the debate for the rest of the century and beyond. W. J. Fox, the first enthusiastic reviewer of the 1830 volume and, like Mill, a committed Benthamite, stressed Tennyson’s social role – beginning by arguing that poetry, like machinery, can and must be endlessly improved. Against him stood, not only Arthur Hallam but also Samuel Taylor *Coleridge, an admirer of Tennyson’s early poetry and of that of his brother *Charles, and a great, if subliminal, influence on Tennyson’s ideas, particularly in *In Memoriam: the line, ‘the heart/Stood up and answered “I have felt” ’ (Lyric cxxiv, 15–16) is
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pure Coleridge. Coleridge died in 1835 but his ideas continued to be influential throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. By the end of Tennyson’s life, the Bentham/Coleridge debate was still being argued, but now in terms of the rise of Socialism set against the rise of Aestheticism. The dynamic in Tennyson’s poetry between the love of Beauty and the need to be Useful can be felt throughout the poet’s works. Tennyson observed that he had written *The Princess (1847) partly as a response to his debates with Mrs *Browning. She was to argue in Aurora Leigh (1857) that if there’s room for poets in this world ... Their sole work is to represent the age, Their age, not Charlemagne’s. (Book 5, 202–3) In The Princess Tennyson finds an uneasy compromise, addressing a burning issue of the time, the education of women, in a medieval/fairytale setting. The urge to be part of public life is also sharply evident in the Laureate verse, where the interventions into politics usually (but not always) produce execrable jingoistic verse. They can result, however, in genuinely great public poetry like the *‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ and *‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. Even in the last volumes of verse, the late lyrics with their ‘pure’ emotion are written against the heavy historical moralizing of the plays in which Tennyson seems to be struggling to justify the comparisons frequently made between his own work and that of *Shakespeare. The lyric gift survives supremely in *‘The Roses on the Terrace’ and *‘June Bracken and Heather’, poems which return the poet poignantly to Hallam and the purity of the poetry of sensation. See also: Hallam, Arthur Henry; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: poetic development.
‘Poets and their Bibliographies’ (1885: ‘Old poets fostered under friendlier skies’; title added in 1888) This sonnet encapsulates Tennyson’s approach to his poetry, and to art in general: in it, he imagines ‘Old *Virgil’, ‘old popular *Horace’ and *Catullus looking down on their works, cherished in libraries today, and adjures them to ‘be jubilant’ that they were lucky enough to live ‘Before the Love of Letters, overdone,/ Had swamped the sacred poets with themselves’. Tennyson always hated the bibliophile’s approach to literature, involving poring over earlier drafts rather than the poet’s definitive version. An earlier title of this poem was: ‘On publishing every discarded scrap of a Poet’. Ironically, Tennyson found it hard to
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settle on a definitive version of his own work: he constantly reworked poems, even adding a new line to the Idylls in the last year of his life.
(1833; not reprinted until 1872) Originally entitled ‘Sonnet: On the result of the late Russian invasion of Poland’, this and the sonnet preceding it in the 1833 volume, ‘Sonnet: Written on hearing of the outbreak of the Polish Insurrection’, show Tennyson’s interest in political freedom in the years leading up to the passing of the 1832 *Reform Act. The Poles rose against their Russian rulers in November 1830 and the resulting war lasted until September 1831, after which Poland, apart from the small republic of Cracow, was completely absorbed into Russia. For Tennyson, Poland was obviously a symbol of national heroism. He told William *Allingham: ‘When I was 22 I wrote a beautiful poem on Poland, hundreds of lines long, and the housemaid lit the fire with it’ (Ricks, 458). The sonnet has a literary as well as a political provenance, being influenced by *Milton’s ‘On the Late Massacre in Piedmont’, which also lies behind a similar sonnet, on a similar situation, much later in Tennyson’s career, *‘Montenegro’. ‘Poland’ is a regular Italian sonnet, unlike the previous Polish sonnet in which, more typically, Tennyson mixes the English and Italian forms. Russia is envisaged here as the ‘overgrown Barbarian in the East’ (7). See also: Revolutions.
Pope, Alexander (1688–1744) Poet, translator of the Iliad; influence on Tennyson. Pope’s translation of the Iliad (1715), though much more Augustan in spirit than Homeric, was greatly admired in its own time and well into Tennyson’s. As a boy of 11 or 12 Tennyson read it enthusiastically and imitated it, writing ‘hundreds and hundreds of lines in the regular Popeian metre’ (Memoir, i.11). His first extant poem, a translation of Claudian’s ‘Rape of Proserpine’ effortlessly reproduces Pope’s metre, iambic pentameters in rhyming couplets. It begins: The gloomy chariot of the God of night, And the wan stars that sickened at the sight, And the dark nuptials of the infernal King, With sense rapt in holy thought, I sing.
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‘Poland’
Tennyson never included Pope among his favourite poets in adult life, once the Romantics had undermined the authority of the eighteenth century; when he
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returned to the myth of Demeter and Persephone in the 1880s, he eschewed Pope’s Alexandrians in favour of his own blank verse.
(1847; narrative poem about women’s education) The poem is in blank verse in seven books, with a Prologue and a Conclusion which frame the fairytale narrative with a contemporary account of the opening to the public of Sir Walter Vivian’s stately home. This is based on the home of the *Lushington family, *Park House, near Maidstone in Kent, and the second edition of the poem in 1848 was dedicated to Henry Lushington. The story Seven student friends including the narrator explore the house, with its links back through English history, and then the grounds, full of the paraphernalia of modernity – telescopes, clockwork steamers, ‘a petty railway’ – before settling down to tell a tale prompted by the demands of the young daughter of the house, Lilia, for women to be taken seriously: ... I wish I were Some mighty poetess, I would shame you then, That love to keep us children! ... I would build Far off from men a college like a man’s, And I would teach them all that men are taught. (131–3, 134–6) The young men in response embark on a ‘tale from mouth to mouth’ (188), supposedly based on an old story. The fairytale is told by a Prince, who had been betrothed since childhood to the daughter of the neighbouring King Gama, Princess Ida. Having been rejected by her in favour of a life of learning and the founding of a women’s university, the Prince with two friends, Cyril and Florian, sets out to win her back. Disguised as women, they trick their way into the university. Florian recognizes his sister, Psyche, a widow, as one of the university professors. Her baby, Aglaia, sleeps beside her as she lectures on women’s evolution. They enlist the Lady Psyche’s support in their deception and the support too of Melissa, daughter of the much more formidable professor Lady Blanche, also a widow. On a geological expedition the three disguised young men are obviously falling in love, Cyril with Psyche, Florian with Melissa, and the Prince with Princess Ida. The deception is eventually discovered: war is threatened between Ida’s father and the prince’s father, Psyche flees leaving her baby for the Princess
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to bring up and in a fifty-against-fifty combat, Ida’s brother Arac overcomes Florian, Cyril and the Prince, leaving the last-named unconscious. The Princess’s army has won the battle. She forgives Psyche and returns to her the baby Aglaia, but is defeated, despite the military victory, by the overriding imperative to tend the many wounded; she reluctantly turns her university into a hospital and, returning to woman’s traditional role, nurses the Prince until, on his return to consciousness, he begs her to kiss him before he dies. Romance overcomes rebellion, the Prince lives and the two are united in marriage, with the Prince becoming an ardent supporter of the female cause: ‘my hopes and thine are one’ (343). In the return to the framing narrative, the student narrator speaks of ‘social wrong’ and the possibility that ‘wildest dreams /Are but the needful preludes of the truth’ (Conclusion, 73–4). He joins the chorus of working people: ... Why should not these great Sirs Give up their parks some dozen times a year To let the people breathe? So thrice they cried, I likewise, and in groups they streamed away. (Conclusion, 102–5) The six songs were placed by Tennyson in the third edition (1850) between the sections of the poem. According to Tennyson, ‘The child is the link through the parts, as shown in the Songs (inserted 1850) which are the best interpreters of the poem’ (Ricks, 711). The songs are: ‘As through the land at eve we went’ (about the death of a child reuniting its parents); ‘Sweet and low’ (a lullaby); ‘The splendour falls on castle walls’ (about the echoes of the past increasing rather than decreasing); ‘Thy voice is heard through rolling drums’ (showing a warrior inspired to defend his children); ‘Home they brought her warrior dead’ (a widow determines to live for her child); and ‘Ask me no more’ ( a lover giving way to her beloved). Within the narrative itself are two blank verse lyrics, *‘Tears, Idle Tears’, sung to Ida and the Prince by a maid with a harp, and ‘Swallow, Swallow flying, flying South’, sung in an effortful treble by the disguised Prince. These lyrics are discussed by Ida in the narrative, the first being dismissed as weakly nostalgic, the second laughed at because of the falsetto quality of the singer’s voice. The poem’s concerns are prefigured in Tennyson’s earlier poetry, for example, in *‘A Dream of Fair Women’ (1832 text), and the influence of *The Arabian Nights is also strong. However, Tennyson always felt, as have most later readers, that the poem was not entirely successful: ‘though truly original, it is, after all, only a medley’ (Ricks, 743). What is interesting today is the dispersal of the narrative among the seven male students – a disclaiming of authorial authority which perhaps suggests a reluctance to take responsibility for what is truly reformist in the poem; the gendered mix of blank verse (male) and
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Critical issues Tennyson stressed that the baby is central to the meaning of the story and he seems to make motherhood or the maternal instinct trump every other desire, however powerful: ‘could a child’s security survive the fulfilment of a mother’s ambitions?’ seems to be the underlying social riddle raised by the extravagant plot. The baroque embellishments and sillinesses of the plot are perhaps a way of approaching by indirections this serious and socially threatening theme. There is much discussion in the frame-narrative of the processes and problem of narrative, which has reclaimed the poem for more theoretically minded recent readers. The frame-narrator talks of his problems with his own narration: ‘Betwixt the mockers and the realists’ he ‘moved as in a strange diagonal,/And maybe neither pleased myself nor them’ (Conclusion, 24, 27–8). There has been much discussion, for example, by Gerhard Joseph (1992), of the ‘strange diagonal’ as intrinsic to Tennyson’s oblique narrative methods and to what Christopher Ricks has called his ‘art of the penultimate’ (Ricks 1972: 49). Another point of interest are the Prince’s ‘weird seizures’ (Part 1, 14), usually seen as a version of Tennyson’s own experience of lapsing into trances as a boy, for example, after repeating his own name. These trances recur in various forms in the *Idylls of the King (‘The Holy Grail’) and notably in *In Memoriam (xcv). A major issue too has been the presentation of gender ambiguity. The Prince is ‘blue-eyed and fair of face’ as opposed to the warrior-like ‘magnificence’ of the Princess. Kate Millett in a seminal 1969 essay attacked ‘the poet’s own problems with sexual identity’ in the poem (Millett 1970), but later critics have been more inclined to see a rich complexity in the rival discourses of sexual radicalism and conservatism presented in the story. Gilbert and Sullivan’s *Princess Ida (1884) exploits to the full the comic potential of the plot. Elizabeth Barrett *Browning wrote Aurora Leigh (1857) partly in response to Tennyson’s The Princess, also treating of women’s education, but setting the poem pointedly in the present day. Her response to The Princess in 1847 had been: ‘Now isn’t the world too old and fond of steam, for blank verse poems, in ever so many books, to be written on the fairies?’ (Ricks, 741). The definitive study of the poem is John Killham’s (1958), though there have been many later studies, usually underpinned by gender theories.
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lyrics (female); the evolutionary imagery throughout, prompted presumably by Tennyson’s reading of Charles *Lyell and Robert *Chambers; and the return to conservatism at the end, where the Princess’s intellectual rebellion is trumped by the Prince’s need for nursing, which drives her back to her conventional role. There is a passing moment of ambiguity in the ending as Lilia, the modern incarnation of the Princess, retrieves the scarf she had flung round the stone statue of a male ancestor and walks thoughtfully home.
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Comic opera (1884) by Gilbert and Sullivan, based on *The Princess (1847). The farcical elements of The Princess fit well into the libretto of W. S. Gilbert, and the whole opera maintains a consistency of tone which is not present in the original. The topicality of Tennyson’s poem from nearly forty years earlier is impressive: the controversy over ‘The New Woman’ and women’s right to university education made The Princess seem a prophetic work. Newnham College, Cambridge, and Somerville College, Oxford, had opened in the 1870s, rendering Tennyson’s vision of university education for women a reality at last – although female students were not allowed to take degrees until much later.
Prinsep family Owners of *Little Holland House; friends of Tennyson. In the 1850s and 1860s Mr and Mrs Thoby Prinsep held court in West Kensington, inviting literary and artistic guests, including Tennyson, to gather under their roof. He was a retired Indian civil servant, his wife Sarah (‘The Principessa’) one of the seven half-French Pattle sisters, a sister of Julia Margaret *Cameron (who was the only plain face in a family of beauties). Another sister, Maria, was to become, in 1882, the grandmother of Virginia Woolf. With the Prinseps Tennyson was indulged and lionized, though Mrs Cameron added a refreshing scepticism, believing as she did that Henry *Taylor was the better poet. Her friendship with Tennyson, begun here, was to flourish even more when they became neighbours on the *Isle of Wight in 1860. In 1875, however, the Camerons moved back to Ceylon and the Prinseps in turn moved to the Isle of Wight, to the Briary near *Farringford, though they never filled the gap left by Mrs Cameron. The Prinseps’s son Valentine was an artist and friend of William Holman *Hunt. In 1860 he and Hunt shared part of Tennyson’s Cornish holiday and witnessed the poet’s attempts to escape the over-solicitous attentions of Francis *Palgrave, who had been instructed by *Emily to look after her husband. In the end, Tennyson apologized to Hunt and Prinsep and bolted.
Promise of May, The Performed 1882, published 1886; Tennyson’s sixth published play: ‘a modern village tragedy’ in prose. Written in a phonetic *Lincolnshire dialect, this three-act melodrama was the only one of Tennyson’s plays to be set in the present day. A Lincolnshire farmer has two daughters, Dora and Eva. A gentleman, Philip Edgar, finds his way to the remote farm. ‘A surface man of many theories’ (Tennyson’s description)
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(Charles Tennyson, 465), he seduces and then abandons Eva. She runs away from home and is given up for dead. The father and his farm decline into ruin. At last, when her father is old and blind, Eva returns, injured, and is hidden and nursed by Dora. Edgar reappears, almost persuades Dora (who has never met him) to marry him, but is confronted by Eva, who then collapses and dies of shock. Dora is left alone with her now-demented father. Having been refused by Sir Henry *Irving and the Kendals, the play, produced by Mrs Bernard Beere, opened at the Globe Theatre on 11 November 1882 but was deemed a dramatic failure and closed on 15 December. Tennyson withdrew it from the press but published it in the *‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ volume four years later – his only publication of a play in a volume of poems. Mary *Gladstone records the embarrassment of attending the opening night with *Hallam and *Lionel, noting the jeering and hissing that greeted the ‘special points of pathos, morality and tragedy’ (Letters, iii.236). On 14 November the Marquis of Queensbury (soon to accuse Oscar Wilde of sodomy) protested from the audience over what he took to be Tennyson’s attack upon freedom of thought. The relentless accumulation of tragedy, a piling of Pelian on Ossa, is reminiscent of ‘Aylmer’s Field’ and suggests, not so much Victorian melodrama, as the Greek tragedies which Tennyson read constantly. It proves, however, impossible to transfer the uninterrupted intensity of ancient Greek drama to the ‘mixed economy’ of the English stage: Tennyson follows *Shakespeare in interspersing tragedy with comic scenes of farmers and yokels. He had hoped to ‘bring the true drama of character and life back again’ (Charles Tennyson, 465), but was merely dismissed as old fashioned.
Publishers Edward *Moxon was Tennyson’s main publisher, followed by Alexander Macmillan. In April 1827, Jacksons, the booksellers in *Louth, published Tennyson’s first volume co-authored with his brother *Charles, *Poems by Two Brothers. Dr *Tennyson thought Jackson ‘an infernal Rogue’ (Martin, 45) but he offered the young authors £20 in books and cash, despite the fact that they insisted on their work being published anonymously. It is possible that a richer member of the family, most probably Elizabeth *Russell, may have paid for part of the publication. In June 1830, Effingham Wilson published *Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in an edition of 600 copies at five shillings each. It is possible again that, since Tennyson was still quite unknown, the publisher was being subsidized, this time by Arthur Hallam who had arranged the agreement. In 1831, Edward Moxon, who had known Hallam at Cambridge, launched the Englishman’s Magazine. The August 1831 edition contained work by Charles
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Lamb, Thomas *Hood, Mary Russell Mitford and Leigh *Hunt, as well as Hallam’s important essay on Tennyson’s poetry. Thanks to Hallam, it also contained Tennyson’s sonnet, ‘Check every outflash’. Hallam eventually persuaded Moxon to publish Tennyson’s new volume of poems. *Poems (1833) appeared in December 1832 (dated 1833) and sold 100 copies in two days. This edition, however, consisted of only 450 copies published at five shillings each – fewer and cheaper than the previous volume, which suggests that the earlier volume had not been a financial success. The crushing review by J. W. *Croker in the Quarterly Review (April 1833) undoubtedly damaged sales and in two years only 300 copies were sold – though Moxon insisted that he had every intention of continuing to publish Tennyson’s work. On 14 May 1842 he duly published the two-volume edition of *Poems at 12 shillings for the set. Eight hundred copies were printed and by September 500 copies had been sold – at a time when Moxon turned down even Elizabeth Barrett *Browning because, as he told her, poetry generally did not sell. This was Tennyson’s first real financial success, and 24 editions of this important volume appeared during his lifetime. *The Princess was published on Christmas Day 1847, missing the Christmas sales period only because Tennyson had insisted on further revisions. A second edition appeared by February the following year. During the winter of 1848/49, Moxon discovered the existence of Tennyson’s ‘memorial verses’ to Arthur Hallam. He immediately offered to publish them and offered Tennyson a cheque for £300 on the spot. The poems appeared anonymously in late May 1850 as *In Memoriam. Tennyson’s authorship was soon discovered and Moxon’s faith rewarded: four editions of the poem appeared during that year and, by January 1851, 8,000 copies had been sold. Tennyson was an unexpectedly good businessman: though he wrote the *‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ purely out of love for the man, he came to London in 1852 to sell the poem to a publisher. John Parker offered him £150 for an edition of 10,000 copies at a shilling each. Edward Moxon trumped this with the offer of £200 for 10,000 copies to be sold at two shillings each. Tennyson’s loyalty to Moxon did not get in the way of his canny business sense. On 28 July 1855, *Maud and Other Poems was published and in 1857 Moxon produced an Illustrated Edition of Tennyson, with paintings by a range of artists including Dante Gabriel *Rossetti, John *Millais and William Holman *Hunt. Moxon published 10,000 copies, but only sold 2,000. Generously, he still paid Tennyson the £2,000 he had promised, even though the remaining copies had had to be sold to Routledge. Edward Moxon died on 3 June 1858 and shortly afterwards relations between Tennyson and Moxon and Co. were permanently strained by the publishers demanding money back from Tennyson to cover the failure of the Illustrated
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Edition. The dispute was soon settled, with the publishers withdrawing their claim, and in June 1859, when the first batch of the *Idylls appeared, Moxon and Co. could risk printing 40,000 copies, of which more than 10,000 sold during the first month after publication. In 1860, Moxon and Co. paid Tennyson £4,542 in royalties, and his success soon encouraged magazine publishers to bid huge amounts to publish his poetry. Once a Week offered him £100 for *‘The Grandmother’, saying that he could keep the copyright; Alexander Macmillan paid £300 to publish ‘Sea Dreams’ in Macmillan’s Magazine; *Thackeray, however, paid only £50 in 1860 for *‘Tithonus’, which appeared in the new Cornhill Magazine. *Enoch Arden and Other Poems was published by Moxon and Co. in August 1864 and proved to be the greatest financial success of all, making Tennyson £8,000 in the first year alone. Of the whole of the first impression, 60,000 copies had been sold by the end of the year and the volume continued to sell better than any other of the poet’s works during his lifetime. By 1868, relations with Moxon and Co. had changed. Tennyson had been publishing individual poems in magazines, including ‘The Victim’, for which Good Words paid him £700. He had reason to believe that Moxon’s, under the new management of Bertrand Payne, was no longer financially secure. As ‘the main pillar’ of their publishing list, he demanded to know the full details, was denied and therefore decided to sever his long connection with the firm. From the many publishers who sought his attention he chose Alexander Strahan, who gave him an enormously generous deal of £5,000 per annum for five years for the right to publish everything already in print and thereafter to publish new volumes with 90 per cent of the profit being kept by the poet. However, by 1873, this contract was putting Strahan in financial difficulties and he could not renew it. Tennyson turned to Henry S. King, who guaranteed him £25,000 for the next five years. *Emily hoped that this arrangement would last for the rest of their lives, but by 1883 King’s firm had been taken over by Charles Kegan Paul, who proposed to reduce Tennyson’s annual payment from £5,000 to £2,000, and Tennyson accordingly decided to move elsewhere. At last, Alexander Macmillan, who had been awaiting his opportunity for years, stepped in, and on 15 January 1884 Tennyson signed the contract that was to last his lifetime and to give him peace of mind. It was for ten years, gave him a third of the advertised price of all books sold, guaranteeing £1,500 per annum minimum even if royalties did not reach that amount. This arrangement, though not generous on either side, worked well and Macmillan remained on close terms with Tennyson for the rest of the poet’s life.
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Publication in the United States of America In America, Tennyson had early been asked to let his 1830 and 1833 poems be reprinted by C. C. Little & Co. of Boston (who had been encouraged by Ralph
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Waldo Emerson, an early admirer). He refused, being painfully conscious of weaknesses in the early volumes. However, further requests from the United States at last prompted him to revise the poems for what was to become the 1842 double volume, and to allow this to be published in America. His correspondent Charles Stearns Wheeler arranged for publication by William D. Ticknor & Co., who honourably paid $150 for the copyright, though no copyright agreement yet existed between the two countries. Ticknor and their successors, Ticknor & Fields, remained Tennyson’s American publishers to the end of his life and James T. Fields and his wife became personal friends. In 1872 he settled with Fields for an annual payment of £5,000 for advance copies of his poems before their publication in England.
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Queen Mary (1875; Tennyson’s first published play.) Tennyson was determined to produce a trilogy on ‘the making of England’ (Memoir, ii.173). In 1874 he read Holinshed and Froude’s Mary and researched contemporary sources. As always when using historical material, he was determined to achieve historical accuracy (see ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, ‘The Revenge’ – and even the agonizing over the number of years in ‘In the Valley of Cauteretz’). The play deals with the five years from Mary’s accession to the throne in 1553 to her death in 1558 and presents her (in what Tennyson felt was his strongest piece of dramatic character-drawing) more as a sad and lonely woman than as a public figure. The overt aim, however, was to show ‘the final downfall of Catholicism in England’. The stage play (shorter than the published version) was produced at the Lyceum Theatre in London from 18 April to 13 May 1876, with Henry *Irving playing Philip of Spain. It ran much longer in two Australian theatres and was also successful in America. Two editions of Queen Mary were published during 1875, though sales were poor. The music, by Charles Villiers Stanford, was also published. Though well received by his admirers, Queen Mary is little more than a chronicle play, with little real dramatic tension.
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Race Tennyson’s views were very much those of his time. In *‘Locksley Hall’ (1833) he gives a clear picture of contemporary ‘Orientalism’, imagining his hero escaping to the tropics where ‘I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race’ (168). A fascination with the exotic runs through the early poems, including *‘The Lotos-Eaters’ (1842), though by the end of his career this has modulated, in *‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’, into a crude misappropriation of Darwinism in the description of ‘all the full-brain, half-brain races’ (161). In 1864 Tennyson’s response to General *Eyre’s prosecution for the brutal suppression of the riots in Jamaica, that the government was ‘too tender to savages’ (Martin, 459), much as it appals a later readership, was in line with contemporary comment. In fact, Tennyson refused to join the committee set up to defend Eyre, simply sending a donation instead and adding that he could not honestly say he supported all of Eyre’s methods. He certainly seems not to have extended prejudice to individuals. In the year of the Eyre controversy he entertained *Emma, Queen of the Sandwich Isles, at *Farringford, making a throne for her from the wood of a felled ilex tree and listening enthralled to her songs and stories of her own culture.
Railways Spread throughout Britain in the ‘Railway Boom’ of the 1840s. Tennyson’s fascination with technological developments did not prevent him from initially misunderstanding how trains worked. In the prophetic section of *‘Locksley Hall’ (1842) he writes: ‘Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change’ (182). He commented years later: ‘When I went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester (1830) I thought that the wheels ran in a groove. It was a black night, and there was such a vast
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R
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Rawnsley family 223
Rashdall, Rev. John (1809–69) Lincolnshire friend of the Tennysons Rashdall knew the older Tennyson brothers, first at *Louth Grammar School and then at *Cambridge. His 1833–34 diary, written while he was curate at Orby in Lincolnshire, gives useful insights into Tennyson’s life. Rashdall found Rosa *Baring ‘the prettiest & most elegant girl I ever was intimate with’ (Martin, 217). He comments in October 1833, ‘the accomplished-vain philosophic Hallam, dead, suddenly, at 23’ (Martin, 74). According to Rashdall’s account, Tennyson was much in society during the months following Hallam’s death, though Rashdall does note that ‘Hallam seems to have left his heart a widowed one’ (Martin, 187).
Rawnsley family Particular friends of the Tennysons in *Lincolnshire. The Reverend Thomas Hardwick Rawnsley (1789–1861), incumbent of Halton Holgate, ten miles from *Somersby, was a close friend of George Clayton *Tennyson, took his side in the family troubles and officiated at his funeral in 1831. As one of the guardians of the Somersby children he tried in vain to persuade them to take up suitable professions. His daughter Sophy (later Elmhirst) (1818–89) had a teasing brother/sister relationship with Tennyson, who in Poems 1830 addressed her as ‘Lilian’. He wrote to her the morning after his marriage in 1850, ‘We seem to get on very well together. I have not beaten her yet’ (Martin, 334). Catherine Rawnsley, née Franklin (1818–92), a cousin of Emily *Sellwood, married Sophy’s brother, the Reverend Drummond Rawnsley (1817–82) in 1842. The object of Tennyson’s flirtation in 1836, she was instrumental in reuniting Emily and Alfred: the Rawnsleys received one of the trial copies of *In Memoriam, to be shown to Emily in an attempt to persuade her of Tennyson’s religious beliefs. The marriage took place from the Rawnsleys’ house in *Shiplake in June 1850, with Drummond officiating. The Rawnsleys’ sons, Willingham Franklin (b. 1845) and Hardwick Drummond (b. 1851: Canon Rawnsley, one of the founders of the National Trust) both
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crowd round the train that we could not see the wheels. Then I made this line’ (Ricks, 699). It is likely that Tennyson and Arthur *Hallam, on their way home from travelling in the Pyrenees, caught, not the first, but one of the first Liverpool to Manchester trains; the very first ran on 15 September 1830, fatally injuring the politician William Huskisson who had come to see it set off.
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224 Rawnsley family
wrote on Tennyson, Willingham (1909) and in ‘Tennyson Centenary’ (1912: 243–313) and Hardwick in Memories of the Tennysons (1900).
The Reform Bill, first introduced in 1830, proposed the redistribution of parliamentary seats and a near tripling of the electorate, reducing the power of the land-owning aristocracy and giving more power to the rising middle class. The passing of the Bill was attended by great popular unrest. Tennyson and Hallam, like many of their *Cambridge contemporaries, became embroiled in the demonstrations by local agricultural labourers. In Michaelmas Term 1830, there were riots in nearby Huntingdon and the undergraduates formed themselves into groups of a dozen or so, armed with heavy sticks, to protect the town and the threatened university library, in the event of a rumoured assault. James *Spedding recorded how moved Tennyson was by the plight of the agricultural workers – but this was not enough for him to support their political activities. The attack never took place and the Bill began its journey through the House of Commons at the time of Dr *Tennyson’s death in *Somersby in March 1831. Dr Tennyson died on 16 and was buried on 24 March. Charles *Tennyson d’Eyncourt, then Liberal MP for Grimsby, was much hated by the Somersby Tennysons for not visiting his dying brother, nor attending the funeral. He argued that he had been needed to help the passage of the Reform Bill through the House of Commons, and he did indeed, despite an attack of gout, attend the Bill’s Second Reading on 22 March 1831, at which the Bill was passed by only one vote. The Reform Bill finally became the Great Reform Act on 7 June 1832.
Reminiscences In addition to the formal lives of Tennyson published over the last hundred years (see: biography), there are many informal records of his daily life and conversation written by those who had personal knowledge of him. Some were published as books and articles, while others were private documents such as letters and diaries that came into the public domain at a later date. Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir of his father incorporates a considerable amount of material written by others, and Hallam also published additional material of the same kind in his Tennyson and His Friends (1911). Three friends who knew Tennyson over a very long period call for specific mention. Edward *FitzGerald was close to Tennyson in his early years and, much later, was the addressee of one of Tennyson’s finest short poems. He was a brilliant letter-writer and the four volumes of his correspondence (FitzGerald 1980) include much of interest, especially some vivid glimpses of the bachelor
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Reform Act 1832
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years in London. William *Allingham, the Irish poet, met Tennyson in 1851 and his diary contains a very full record of meetings between them (Allingham 1907). F. T. *Palgrave met Tennyson in the 1840s and his journal records many meetings over the years (Palgrave 1899). Two friends who produced more formal accounts of their memories of Tennyson are Agnes Weld (1903) and H. D. Rawnsley (1900). A short but interesting account of a first meeting with the older Tennyson is included in Edmund Gosse (1928). Probably the most formal conversations with Tennyson of which some record survives were those with Queen *Victoria, and interesting material on their relationship, including the Queen’s records of meetings with her Laureate, will be found in Dear and Honoured Lady (Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, and Queen Victoria 1969). The last reminiscences of Tennyson to appear – 77 years after his death – are those of his grandson Sir Charles Tennyson: originally broadcast as a radio talk in 1969, they were reprinted in The Listener as ‘Memories of my Grandfather’. Further reading: Page (1985).
‘Revenge: a Ballad of the Fleet, The’ Patriotic poem of English heroism against the Spanish Armada (1880). First published in 1878 in the Nineteenth Century as ‘Sir Richard Grenville: A Ballad of the Fleet’, the poem earned Tennyson £30. He had read the story of Sir Richard Grenville’s battle against 53 Spanish ships in an article by J. A. Froude, called ‘England’s Forgotten Worthies’, in the Westminster Review of July 1852. The first line, ‘At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay’, was written on 9 March 1873, after Tennyson had talked to the secretary of the Hakluyt Society, but it was four years later that he read Edward Arber’s reprint of all the available facts surrounding the event and could at last finish the poem. He was possibly influenced by Robert *Browning’s ‘Herve Riel’ (published 1871) but there is an energy and a narrative aplomb in the enterprising free-syllabled metre and irregular rhyme which is very much his own and belies the Modernists’ judgement that he had no gift for narrative. Sir Richard’s derringdo is reminiscent of the still-remembered heroics of Admiral Lord Nelson, while the situation recalls *‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. Sir Richard with his single ship takes on the entire Spanish fleet for 15 hours and finally yields only when he is mortally wounded. He wants to scupper the ship so that it will ‘Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain’ (90), but his men prefer to surrender and live and the ship is handed over to ‘a swarthier alien crew’ (110) before finally being overwhelmed by a storm and sinking, ‘To be lost evermore in the main’ (119).
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226 ‘Revenge: a Ballad of the Fleet, The’
See also: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: Narrative poems.
Revolutions The shadow of the French Revolution hung over the generations which followed it, well into the middle of the nineteenth century. Tennyson shared with his age a suspicion of the very idea of revolution and a fear of its occurring in England. During his childhood and youth, the political unrest after the Napoleonic Wars and the social unrest consequent upon industrialization made this seem very likely. Tennyson’s response to the political turmoils he witnessed in Europe during his long life varied, however, with his age and with his opinion of the countries involved. The 1848 ‘Year of Revolutions’ unsettled him as it did most of his countrymen, and reinforced his suspicion of anything other than gradual change, which began to be seen as the identifying feature of English constitutional government. The story of Italy, recounted below, has parallels with contemporary events in France, Germany and Austria. In January 1848, the people of Palermo rose against King Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies. A similar revolution in Vienna drove Prince Kliemens von Metternich from power, and the autocratic leaders of Parma and Modena were also forced to flee. In 1849, an insurrection by Mazzini forced Pope Pius IX to flee from Rome, and Rome was proclaimed a republic. However, Louis Napoleon dispatched the French army to occupy Rome and reinstate the Pope. The French formed an alliance with an Italian coalition to expel the Austrians from Italy, but at the last minute deserted the small Italian republics and conducted their own treaty with the Austrians. Guiseppe *Garibaldi, the Italian patriot, rallied the various Italian republics and eventually forced the defeat of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Rome, thereby establishing the beginnings of Italian unification. Louis Napoleon’s treachery to the small Italian republics had made him very unpopular in Britain and Garibaldi’s attacks on the Papacy were extremely popular. Tennyson was delighted to welcome Garibaldi to *Farringford on his visit to England in 1864.
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Mary *Gladstone recorded that, on 12 April 1878, Tennyson read ‘The Revenge’, increasing the speed as the poem progressed and ending by shouting out the climax. The immediate and lasting popularity of the poem made it a favourite for children’s anthologies well into the twentieth century. It moved even Thomas *Carlyle, while R. L. Stevenson thought it one of the noblest of English poems.
See also: France; History, Tennyson’s attitude to; Italy; Montenegro; Poland; Spain; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: politics.
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Rogers, Samuel 227
Novelist and memoirist; friend of Tennyson. Elder daughter of W. M. *Thackeray, Anne too became a novelist, writing impressionist works, including Old Kensington (1873) and Mrs Dymond (1885). When her father died in 1863, she and her sister came to the *Isle of Wight to stay in a cottage owned by Tennyson’s friend and neighbour, Julia Margaret *Cameron. Tennyson showed his deep sympathy by standing outside their window, silently sharing their grief and later joined in Mrs Cameron’s plans for organizing a whirl of social activities for them. Anne regarded him as a second father and became his constant companion on walks along the cliffs. She wrote to him in 1886 that she thought of the old days on Freshwater Downs as ‘the nearest thing to Heaven I could imagine’. The friendship continued after her marriage to senior civil servant Richmond Ritchie (knighted in 1907) and on Tennyson’s death she published Records of Tennyson, Ruskin and Browning (Macmillan, 1892).
‘Rizpah’ Dramatic monologue based on a real-life incident. The poem was written in 1878 and published in 1880 in *Ballads and Other Poems. Before publication Tennyson read it (5 June 1879) to a group of friends, at which time it had the title ‘Bones’. The final title is taken from the Old Testament: see I Samuel 21, where it is mentioned as the name of a mother who guarded the corpses of her two sons. However, the poem is based on an incident much closer to Tennyson’s own lifetime, mentioned in a popular magazine, Leisure Hour, and drawn to his attention by a friend, Mary *Brotherton. The incident dated from 1793 and concerned a Brighton woman whose son had been hanged and who subsequently collected and buried his bones. In the poem the woman on her deathbed recalls how her son was hanged and his body left to rot; as the bones fell to the ground she gathered them up, took them home, ‘numbere’d’ them, and hid them away. A woman of a higher social class sits beside her deathbed and is a silent listener to her confession. The poem seeks to win sympathy for the sufferings and feelings of the poor and in this respect can be associated with *‘Enoch Arden’ and other poems about the humblest levels of society.
Rogers, Samuel (1763–1855)
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Ritchie, Anne, Lady (née Thackeray) (1837–1919)
Poet, banker and literary host; early supporter of Tennyson. Rogers belonged to the generation of *Coleridge and *Wordsworth, but was still a significant figure in literary London in the early Victorian Age, holding
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literary breakfasts as well as opening his gallery of paintings and his library to literary London. Tennyson met him in August 1833 when he and a group of friends, including Arthur Hallam, went to see Rogers’s Italian paintings, including a Titian. It was the eve of Hallam’s departure for the Continent. Tennyson was distressed that Rogers’s library contained his brother *Charles’s poems but not his own. However, they struck up a friendship at their second meeting in 1837, James *Spedding noting that the two men seemed to have taken a great fancy to each other. After the attack on the 1833 poems by J. W. *Croker, Rogers had defended the young Tennyson as ‘the most promising genius of the time’ (Charles Tennyson, 141) and he declared himself ‘thrilled’ by the 1842 volume. When the *Laureateship was being discussed in 1850 he decided that he was ‘a shadow so soon to depart’, therefore too old to be considered (Martin, 351), thus leaving the field open for Tennyson; he also lent Tennyson his own court dress (borrowed for an identical occasion by William Wordsworth) for his presentation to the Queen as Poet Laureate in February 1851.
Roman Catholicism Though he was no regular churchgoer himself, Tennyson’s temperament and background meant that he was bound to be suspicious of Roman Catholicism. Brought up fiercely Protestant and with Calvinism in the family in the person of his Aunt Mary *Bourne, he was, like most people of his age and class, nervous at the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Britain in 1850 and concerned at the declaration of Papal Infallibility in 1870. His plays, especially *Queen Mary, suggest that his vision of nationhood is of a nation establishing itself in terms of its opposition to Papal authority. His close friendship in later life with two *Isle of Wight neighbours who were both Roman Catholics, first Sir John *Simeon and, after his death, with W. G. *Ward, suggests, as so often with Tennyson, a gap between his political generalizations and his personal responses. He even attended Sir John Simeon’s funeral, though he objected to the emotional outpourings of the family’s grief. On what was to be his last day at *Farringford, on 29 June 1892, before the annual departure for *Aldworth, Tennyson took communion in his study with the Rector of Freshwater, Dr Merriman. Determined to avoid High Church practices, let alone any suspicion of belief in transubstantiation, he recited his own lines from Queen Mary, spoken by Archbishop Cranmer: ‘It is but a communion, not a mass,/No sacrifice, but a life-giving feast.’
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228 Rogers, Samuel
See also: History, Tennyson’s attitude to; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: religion.
Romanticism Tennyson was very much influenced by the Romantics in his youth, but became more obviously ‘Victorian’ later in his career.
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The influence of *Byron and *Shelley was strong in the early poems, with their richness and sensuousness of language and imagery. As his career progressed, however, Tennyson increasingly separated the form and content of his poetry. He would ask friends for ideas for poems, with none of that sense of the organic union of form and content which characterized the Romantic poets. The determination to relate his work to his own time, exemplified most clearly in *‘Enoch Arden’, led him away from Romanticism and towards a Victorianism which can be at best genuinely public poetry and at worst sentimental. See also: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Keats, John; Wordsworth, William.
‘Roses on the Terrace, The’ Lyric poem published in 1889. This lyric of Tennyson’s old age looks back more than fifty years to his early love for Rosa *Baring, whose forename, hinted at in its first word, is kept punningly in mind from the title onwards. In a single eight-line sentence the poem moves from the present to the past and back again to the present, suggesting the workings of memory and the power of associations and of visual details of the external world. It is a poem of masterly economy and incomparable subtlety, one of its most remarkable features being the way in which, almost cinematically, one image dissolves into another under the pressure of feelings still intense after half a century: the terrace at *Aldworth in Surrey becomes the distant terrace of *Harrington Hall in Lincolnshire, home of the Baring family; the rose before his eyes becomes the remembered blush on the young girl’s cheek when he speaks the word that is both the name of the flower and her own name; quickly, though, the blush of the past becomes once again the rose of the present, and the distant terrace becomes the one on which he stands. A final felicitous touch is the ‘fifty miles’ echoing the ‘fifty years’ of the first line, concluding a poem in which time and space have both been annihilated by memory. It must be added that some critics, including Harold Nicolson (1923) and Ann Thwaite (1996), have argued that the poem is in fact addressed to Emily *Tennyson: they insist that Tennyson would not have offered bait to future biographers by addressing Rosa Baring directly. It is certainly true that in the only surviving holograph version (at Harvard) the first line reads simply: ‘Here on this terrace fifty years ago’. Most Tennyson scholars, however, including Christopher Ricks (1972; 1989; 1992), Jack Kolb (1981) and R. W. Rader (1963), follow the reading above.
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Rossetti brothers 229
Rossetti brothers Tennyson met Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82), artist and poet, and his brother William Michael Rossetti (1829–1910), art critic and man of letters,
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230
Rossetti brothers
See also: Art and artists.
Royal Society, The Organization set up in 1660s to discuss scientific developments. The Royal Society’s founders included Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren, and literary figures like Abraham Cowley and John Dryden were made members. This sixteenth-century tradition was continued in the nineteenth century, when Tennyson was invited to become a Fellow of the Society in 1864, on the strength of what was seen as his ability to make science a subject for poetry. He declined, but was invited again the following year and accepted. As with the other societies to which he belonged, he rarely attended the meetings. T. H. *Huxley, a doyen of the society, declared, ‘We scientific men claim him as having quite the mind of a man of science’ (Martin, 462).
Royalty Tennyson admired the Royal Family but was never a sycophantic Royalist. There is evidence that Queen *Victoria and Prince *Albert made some informal recognition of Tennyson as early as 1847 and certainly it was Prince Albert’s deep admiration for *In Memoriam which led to Tennyson being offered the *Poet Laureateship after *Wordsworth’s death in 1850. Prince Albert’s informal visit to *Farringford in 1856, as the family were unpacking, suggests that a genuine friendship might well have been established had it not been for the Prince’s early death in 1861. Tennyson’s decision (prompted by *Emily) to dedicate the *Idylls to the Prince seems no more than an appropriate recognition of the bond between them – though *Swinburne wrote cynically about the ‘Morte D’Albert’, implying a sycophancy that was not in Tennyson’s nature. Ten years later, *‘To the Queen’ concluded the Idylls and was forwarded to Princess Alice to give to her mother. A certain sort of friendship grew between the Queen and her Poet Laureate in the years following Albert’s death. He walked around Albert’s mausoleum at Frogmore with her in 1873 and produced appropriate poems on royal occasions, including a poem of welcome to Princess Alexandra (1863), to the Duchess of Edinburgh (1874) and of mourning for Princess Alice herself (1878). He also wrote personal letters of sympathy when she injured herself in a fall and when her favourite, John Brown, died. In 1883 the two old people met and
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at the home of the *Brownings on 27 September 1855, and in the course of conversation complained bitterly about the attacks by critics on *Maud. D. G. Rossetti sketched him as he read Maud. On 30 August 1858, W. M. Rossetti, who was staying on the *Isle of Wight, called on Tennyson. There was another meeting between the two, once more in the company of Browning, on 1 July 1863. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was one of the illustrators of *Moxon’s commercially unsuccessful Illustrated Edition of the Poems in 1857.
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the Queen proved to be able to quote In Memoriam back to the poet, which impressed him greatly: ‘I thought that very pretty to quote my own words in answer to me’ (Martin, 539). Although he seems genuinely to have admired Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Tennyson’s discomfort with royal protocol was evident throughout his life and particularly in the Pembroke Castle cruise in 1883. The Prince and Princess of Wales, the Tsar and Tsarina of Russia and the King and Queen of Greece were among the guests at a luncheon on board. Asked by the Princess of Wales to read aloud to the company afterwards, he absentmindedly beat time for ‘The Bugle Song’ and *‘The Grandmother’ on the Tsarina, who was wedged beside him. His distaste for the ceremony and show associated with royalty and the aristocracy is evident in his apology to the Duke of Argyll for not dressing for dinner: ‘I can’t dress for you, for I never dress for any one, and if I made an exception and dressed for a duke, my butler would set me down as a snob’ (Martin, 428).
Ruskin, John (1819–1900) Art critic, writer and aesthetician. Tennyson followed Ruskin’s precepts on the power of Gothic architecture, describing it in very Ruskinian terms as ‘like blank verse’ with ‘more mystery than the classic’ (Martin, 373). Ruskin in turn was very moved by the 1859 *Idylls of the King but wrote to Tennyson that such great powers ‘ought not to be spent on visions of things past but on the living present’ (Charles Tennyson, 322). He was in absolute agreement over the ending of *Maud (1855) and wrote several kind letters to *Farringford, though he never accepted the open invitation to visit the Tennysons. He and Tennyson debated the notion that the natural world reflected human moods – which Ruskin rejected and therefore dubbed the ‘pathetic fallacy’, arguing that Tennyson’s line from Maud, ‘For her feet have touched the meadows/And left the daisies rosy’ (Part I, 434–5), was a prime example of imposing human emotions onto natural objects, while Tennyson retorted that he was simply and accurately describing the pink underside of daisy petals, visible when trodden upon. Ruskin continued to meet Tennyson at the *Metaphysical Society in the late 1860s and he, Tennyson and Robert *Browning were observed in deep conversation at one of Browning’s exhibitions of his son Pen’s paintings, in London in 1878.
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Russell, Elizabeth, née Tennyson 231
Russell, Elizabeth, née Tennyson (1776–1865) Tennyson’s aunt. Elizabeth was the first child of *George and Mary Tennyson and was kept at home while her younger brother and sister, George and Mary, were sent away to
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be brought up by their grandparents. She was charming and affectionate, popular with all her relatives, especially her two brothers George and Charles, who both addressed poems to her and regarded her as their Muse. ‘Lines to a Lady on her Departure’ was their wistful farewell ode when she married Major Matthew Russell in 1798 and left *Lincolnshire to live from 1817 in renovated Brancepeth Castle in County Durham. This architectural project gave her brother Charles his first experience of helping redesign a castle in the medieval manner, experience he later put to good use in rebuilding *Bayons. Elizabeth worked hard throughout her life, with varying success, to remain on good terms with her exceptionally over-sensitive family, initially refusing to allow her brother Charles to dedicate his elegy ‘Eustace’ to her in 1851, lest it offend her sister Mary. Aunt Elizabeth was the first in the family to recognize Alfred’s talent. It is possible that she subsidized the publication of *Poems By Two Brothers in 1827; she certainly gave him £100 a year from the age of 18 until well after his marriage. Her husband was the son of a self-made coal millionaire, which meant that Elizabeth was not only willing but also able to help her nephew financially. Alfred called her ‘Asile’, and his frequent letters to her from *Cambridge show him experimenting in styles and trying out rhetorical flourishes, confident of her understanding and sympathy. He always remained close to her, though she was hurt by *Maud (1855) in which the bitter attack on a mine-owning landowner – ... for whom Grimy nakedness dragging his trucks And laying his trams in a poisoned gloom Wrought, till he crept from a gutted mine Master of half a servile shire (I.x.336–9) – seemed like a slight on her husband’s family. Elizabeth Russell’s letters (on green paper) are lively, witty and quotable: she recommends ‘activity and travelling’ for the family’s tendency to depression; other people, she says, are ‘armadilloes while my coat of mail ... is as pervious as a cullender’ (Tennysons, 180); she wishes she had been created male not female, ‘clustered, not cloven’ (Martin, 4). She had a son, William, who died without issue in 1850 and a daughter Emma, who married Viscount Boyne, thus joining lands in Shropshire with those in Durham. Many of the Tennyson family letters are now in the possession of the Boyne family.
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232 Russell, Elizabeth, née Tennyson
Russia Tennyson’s father, George Clayton *Tennyson, had travelled through Russia on a memorable journey in 1801, about which he told fantastical tales.
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Because of Russian expansionism during the middle years of the nineteenth century, the ‘Russian Bear’ was much feared and distrusted in England and Tennyson, as so often, shared the popular feeling. He and *Emily became caught up in anti-Russian fervour during the *Crimean War (1854–56), and *‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ is set against the background of the Russian guns. Tennyson also wrote poems in favour of any small country or state which stood up to the great power of Russia. In *‘Poland’ (1833) he writes of the ‘icy-hearted Muscovite’ (10). Talking with John Bright in 1877, in the middle of the Russo-Turkish War, he expressed his hostility to the Tsar but his fear too of continued Turkish rule in Europe – adding, however, that he admired the Turkish religion. At a dinner in 1878, when Russia had just defeated the Turks, he remarked of the Russians that ‘I hate them like the devil’ (Tennyson, Charles 1949: 442) – and worried that his recent publishing of *‘The Revenge’ might inflame public feeling. Throughout his life, Tennyson’s hatred of powerful and oppressive nations was unwavering and this seems to have had little to do with Russia as a culture. In 1871 he entertained *Turgenev, who told him vivid stories of Russian life to which he responded with enthusiasm. He had also as a boy his father’s vividly fantastic stories of escapades in Russia to whet his imagination. In 1883 he met the Tsar and Tsarina on the Pembroke Castle cruise and, as a later letter confirms, found the Tsar ‘a kind and good-natured man’ (Memoir, ii.391). He was thus particularly horrified to hear, in 1891, of the terrible persecution of the Russian Jews and, a year before his death despite his hatred of letter-writing, was moved to write to the Secretary of the RussoJewish Committee that, if the stories were true, then ‘Russia has disgraced her Church and her nationality’ (Memoir, ii.391). See also: Revolutions; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: politics.
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Sappho Greek lyric poetess (mid-seventh century BC) Born in Lesbos, Sappho wrote love poetry, generally believed to have been addressed to women, which has been preserved in fragmentary form. From *Catullus onwards, male poets have imitated her work, making her also a model for heterosexual love poetry. Arthur Hallam and Tennyson wrote versions of her Fragment 31 at *Cambridge in 1831 and Hallam linked Tennyson’s *‘Mariana in the South’ with Sappho. Other early poetry of that time, notably ‘Fatima’ and the *‘Ode to Memory’ also show Sapphic influence. See: Reynolds (2001).
Science Tennyson’s poetic imagination embraced radical nineteenth-century developments in science. Tennyson’s chief scientific interests were in geology and astronomy, though he called them the ‘terrible Muses’ (‘Parnassus’, 16), and his early poetry is full of geological imagery, of earthquakes and cataclysms, initially derived from *Milton and *Shelley, but soon embracing genuinely new scientific insights as when in *‘Armageddon’ he describes the eruption of Cotopaxi. At *Cambridge he was involved with the *Apostles in confronting William Paley’s entrenched principles of ‘Natural Theology’ (1802) which expounded the ‘Argument from Design’: that God could be deduced from the evidence of the natural world. Tennyson voted ‘No’ to the question, ‘Is a First Cause deducible from the phenomena of the universe?’ Reading the Quarterly Review in the 1820s, he shared the scientists’ vision of an endlessly changing universe worth studying for its own sake. His tutor at Trinity College was William *Whewell,
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who invented the terms ‘Uniformitarianism’ and ‘Catastrophism’ and who helped change the static picture of Natural Theology to one of development and change. This was much more in tune with Tennyson’s own earliest imaginative insights and with his interest in *Heraclitus and ‘the flowing philosophers’. In *‘The Palace of Art’ (1833) he envisages foetal development as part of a shift towards theories of evolution. In 1837 he read *Lyell’s Principles of Geology (three vols, 1830–33) and its influence is strong in the despairing ‘Evolutionary stanzas’ of *In Memoriam (liv–lvi). In 1844 he asked Edward *Moxon to send him a new work, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (published anonymously by Robert *Chambers) and found that this populist book better enabled him to integrate scientific theories of Creation with continued belief in individual immortality. *The Princess (1847) is underpinned by theories of evolution and suggests that these can produce healthy change, both in society and in relations between the sexes. He read On The Origin of Species (1859) as soon as it appeared. When the two men met in 1868, *Darwin reassured Tennyson that his theory of Evolution was compatible with Christianity. The visit may have influenced Tennyson in immediately afterwards writing the long-delayed ‘Holy Grail’ (1869). Astronomy, the other ‘terrible Muse’, infuses the poems from the beginning. Tennyson owned a telescope through which, with selected friends, he would watch the night sky at *Farringford. He was fascinated by the Orion nebulae, discovered by his friend, Sir John *Herschel, which Merlin observes in ‘Merlin and Vivien’ (1859): it suggests the limits even of astronomy – a cluster of stars so far away that they cannot be distinguished by a telescope, yet can be seen by the naked eye – and appealed to his sense of paradox. T. H. *Huxley said of Tennyson, ‘He is the only poet since Lucretius who truly understood scientific thought’ (1900: ii.338). In 1864 Tennyson was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society in recognition of his dissemination of scientific ideas through his poetry. He declined, but the following year accepted. Hugh Monro’s new edition of ‘Lucretius’ appeared in 1864 and in 1868 Tennyson published *‘Lucretius’, exploring the Roman philosopher’s atomistic materialism in De Rerum Natura. Towards the end of his life, in *‘Vastness’ (1885) Tennyson reaffirmed his sense of the immensity of the universe and the majesty of scientific discoveries of space and time – though, while not rejecting any of these truths, he sets against them, as always, the evidence of the heart, arguing for human immortality: ‘Peace, let it be, for I loved him, and love him for ever:/The dead are not dead but alive’ (36–7). In July 1892, a few months before his death, he made the last of his many trips to the Natural History Museum in Kensington, where he insisted on visiting his favourite dinosaur exhibits. He later questioned his friend, the scientist Norman *Lockyer,
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closely on the relative ages of the sun and earth. To the end of his life, while imaginatively embracing the truths of science, he set against the demands of scientific rationalism what he saw as the equally insistent truths of the human heart.
Scotland As an enthusiastic reader of Robert *Burns and Sir Walter *Scott, Tennyson was eager to visit Scotland as a Cambridge student in 1833. He was, however, disappointed by the weather and the bleached countryside; on a second solitary trip in 1849 he saw Edinburgh and the Highlands, enjoyed a wonderful voyage from Oban to Skye, and loved Inverary, though the high point of his visit was the pilgrimage to the Burns Memorial at Kirk Alloway. It was at Edinburgh in 1853, on a tour with *Palgrave, that he wrote *‘The Daisy’ for *Emily, recalling their honeymoon trip to Italy. Tennyson took Emily to Inverary in October 1857 to stay at the Duke of *Argyll’s castle, where they were entertained in splendour for a week. Tennyson’s last trip to Scotland was on the voyage of the Pembroke Castle, up the west coast and on to Norway, in 1883.
Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832) Scottish novelist and poet, much admired by Tennyson. Tennyson’s earliest poetry is modelled on *Pope and on Scott: ‘The Bridal’ was written after reading Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor and in his early teens he composed a 6,000-line epic modelled on Scott, ‘full of battles, dealing too with sea and mountain scenery’ (Memoir, i.12). He said afterwards that he had never felt himself more inspired, running about the fields with a sword, imagining himself a conqueror advancing on enemy country. He then came across *Malory, and the notion of an Arthurian epic began – but it was Scott who gave him his first experience of a narrative adventure poem, in Marmion, and of the handling of the Arthurian legends in ‘The Lady of the Lake’. In 1840 Tennyson visited Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire to see the ruins described in Scott’s novel, Kenilworth, but was disappointed; in 1863 he had the opposite experience, being so impressed by Castleton in Derbyshire and the Peak that he could not believe that Scott, who slighted the mountain in Peveril of the Peak, could ever have been there. Many of the places Tennyson visited he saw through their literary incarnations, and Scott’s imaginative world in particular remained part of his own to the very end of his life. In the 1880s he wrote a
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See also: Astronomy; Geology.
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dedication to Scott which was published with ‘The Bandit’s Death’ (based on a Scott story) in the posthumous edition of Poems of 1892:
Sellwood, Emily See Tennyson, Emily, Lady (née Sellwood)
Sellwood family Henry Sellwood was a Horncastle solicitor, son of a well-to-do Berkshire family who had lost their money and land in the previous generation. He was a widower with three daughters, Emily, Anne and Louisa, his wife, one of seven sisters of the explorer, Sir John *Franklin, having died when her daughters were small. The two families knew each other well when Alfred and *Emily were in their teens and, on 24 May 1836, Louisa, generally regarded as the prettiest of the sisters, married Alfred’s favourite brother *Charles. Emily was her sister’s bridesmaid and in ‘The Bridesmaid’, written at the time, Tennyson seems to suggest his own attraction to her: ‘my life is sick of single sleep:/O happy bridesmaid, make a happy bride!’ (‘The Bridesmaid’, 13–14). By 1838 his engagement to Emily was officially recognized, but at about the same time Louisa and Charles parted, which may have been a contributory factor in the subsequent breaking of relations between Alfred and Emily in 1840. Louisa was religious and dutiful and the couple were deeply attached to each other, but the marriage was blighted for years by Charles’s opium addiction, which in turn fed Louisa’s mental instability. They lived apart for 12 years but remained closely in touch and were finally reunited in 1849, a year before Tennyson and Emily too came together again. Louisa was inclined towards religious mania, but her devotion to her husband in a childless marriage was absolute and within a month of his death in 1879 she too was dead. Anne Sellwood sketched both Tennyson and Arthur *Hallam in 1830, and it is her small pencil sketch of his friend which Tennyson kept with him, hanging it above the fireplace of wherever he was living, for the rest of his life. In 1842 she married lawyer Charles Weld, who acted as Tennyson’s agent in a dispute with *Moxon and Co. Publishers in 1858. Weld was dismissed from his job for some unspecified reason in 1861 and died in 1869, having
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O great and gallant Scott, True gentleman, heart, blood and bone, I would it had been my lot To have seen thee, and heard thee, and known.
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never really recovered from the shock of the disgrace. Their daughter Agnes *Weld became a friend and confidante of her aunt Emily and spent much time with her widowed mother on the *Isle of Wight, in order to be near the Tennysons. Emily, as the last unmarried daughter, looked after her father devotedly during the 1840s, reading history with him, walking with him and singing to him. Believing that the *Lincolnshire climate was giving her consumption, she and her father moved in 1847 to Hale Place near Farnham in Surrey. The break with Lincolnshire signalled the end of her hopes with Alfred. They made a temporary home for Louisa in her own break from Charles. When Alfred finally married Emily in 1850, they stayed in close touch with Henry Sellwood; in 1864 he and the Welds moved to Keyhaven, on the mainland opposite the west coast of the *Isle of Wight, to be close to Emily and her family, and Henry died there, on 19 September 1867.
Shakespeare, William (1564–1616) English dramatist and poet, the greatest literary influence on Tennyson. Tennyson absorbed Shakespeare’s works from childhood, and his own works are steeped in references, both direct and oblique, to the plays and poems. *‘The Devil and the Lady’ contains echoes of Hamlet, Lear and The Tempest, as the 14-year-old Tennyson makes Shakespeare’s language his own. Shakespeare remained a constant presence in his life, the ultimate measure by which he judged his own poetry. At *Cambridge he joined in play readings of Shakespeare, proving particularly effective as Malvolio in Twelfth Night. He and *Hallam both loved the Sonnets and after Hallam’s death Tennyson’s thoughts frequently turned to them. Henry *Hallam’s article attacking the effeminacy of the Sonnets provoked Tennyson to comment on their ‘nobility’, saying to *FitzGerald: ‘Sometimes I think that Shakespeare’s Sonnets are finer than his Plays – which is of course absurd. For it is the knowledge of the Plays that makes the Sonnets so fine’ (Martin, 201–2). In the spat with *Bulwer-Lytton he signed himself ‘Alcibiades’ (from Timon of Athens), suggesting his awareness of the lack of dignity in this public quarrel. *‘Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Mind Not in Unity with Itself’ is full of echoes of Hamlet, and *Maud is built even more obviously on that play and on the central character, with the second part of the poem – the feud, dance, duel and flight – also evoking the plot of Romeo and Juliet. It is, he said to his son, ‘A little Hamlet, the history of a morbid poetic soul under the blighting influence of a recklessly speculative age’ (Memoir, i.396).
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In 1840 Tennyson visited Stratford-on-Avon and, overcome by being in Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, scribbled his name on the wall, as thousands of tourists have done – though he confessed to feeling embarrassed afterwards. The epitaph to *‘Mariana’, ‘Mariana in the moated Grange’, is a quotation from Measure for Measure III.i.212 and refers to the neglected betrothed of Count Angelo, abandoned and forgotten as Angelo pursues Isabella. In ‘Mariana’ and *‘Mariana in the South’, Tennyson produces two poems in which the external world embodies the inner world of the central character. *The Princess has been likened to Shakespearean comedy, with echoes of Love’s Labour’s Lost and As You Like It, particularly in the inserted songs – though it is noticeable that Tennyson’s songs, unlike Shakespeare’s, all evoke loss and longing. In 1868, Tennyson chose to lay the foundation stone for his second home, *Aldworth, on 23 April, Shakespeare’s birthday. By the 1870s he was himself being compared with Shakespeare, and it was at this point, as if aligning himself more closely with his predecessor, that he turned his attention to drama. In 1875 he saw Henry *Irving’s famous Hamlet. Inspired by this, he produced a series of plays – *Harold, *Becket and *Queen Mary – which seem to have been intended as a continuation of Shakespeare’s History Plays. Their relative lack of success may have been partly due to the fact that Tennyson unlike Shakespeare, was no man of the theatre: his whole life had been devoted to the very private activity of writing poetry. In fact, Tennyson used the example of Shakespeare in support of his claim for the privacy of the writer: he declared to Henry *Taylor that ‘ he thanked God Almighty with his whole heart that he knew nothing of Shakespeare but his writings ... and that there were no letters preserved’ (Martin, 552). On his deathbed, it was to Shakespeare, not to the Bible, that Tennyson turned, demanding his copy of *Cymbeline (‘Where is my Shakespeare, I must have my Shakespeare’ [Memoir, ii.426]). When he died, it was open at one of his favourite quotations, from the moment at which Posthumus is reunited with Imogen: ‘Hang there like fruit, my soul,/Till the tree die’ (V.v.263–4). This he had always called among the tenderest lines of Shakespeare.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822) English Romantic poet, influence on Tennyson. The three oldest Tennyson brothers all loved Shelley’s poetry and brought their enthusiasm with them to *Cambridge, where his reputation was not yet established. In November 1829 Arthur *Hallam led a debating team to Oxford to debate whether *Byron or Shelley was the greater poet. Later, Tennyson was
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Shiplake Village in Oxfordshire: place of Tennyson’s marriage. Tennyson’s old Linconshire friend, Drummond *Rawnsley, was vicar of Shiplake in the late 1840s and it was there that Tennyson and Emily *Sellwood were at last fully reconciled after their long estrangement, in May 1850. Tennyson immediately took out a special licence so that they could be married where and when he wanted, rather than returning, as would have been normal procedure, to Emily’s parish church. The wedding took place on 13 June 1850 in Shiplake Church, the service conducted by the Rev. Drummond Rawnsley. Charles *Kingsley’s parish of Eversley was close by and his influence with Emily, as someone with a very happy marriage of his own, may well have emboldened her to accept Tennyson’s returned affections. The couple stayed at Shiplake after their honeymoon, house-hunting in vain in the area, and it was a place that remained dear to them.
Simeon, Sir John (1815–70) Landowner and politician. Simeon was a Roman Catholic whose home at Swainston Hall, near Newport on the *Isle of Wight, was only a few miles from Tennyson’s home at *Farringford. He represented the Isle of Wight for two periods in Parliament. He and Tennyson were close friends from about 1854. Sir Charles Tennyson, in his biography of his grandfather, characterizes Simeon as ‘a fine type of country gentleman: a good scholar, an excellent landlord, and Master of the Isle of Wight foxhounds’ (Charles Tennyson, 280). When Simeon died suddenly in Switzerland, Tennyson was so affected by shock and grief that he postponed the move to his new home, *Aldworth House; Simeon had been present at the laying of the foundation stone two years earlier. *‘In the Garden at Swainston’, which hails Simeon as ‘Prince of courtesy’, was written on the day of his funeral and also commemorates Arthur *Hallam and Henry *Lushington. All three men, Tennyson’s closest friends, died suddenly abroad. Tennyson wrote to Lady Simeon: ‘He was the only man on earth ... to whom I could and have more than once opened my whole heart’ (Charles Tennyson, 389).
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branded by early reviewers as belonging to the ‘Cockney school’ of *Keats and Shelley. He shared his love of Shelley with Robert *Browning and impressed Browning on their first meeting by discussing Shelley’s poetry. Early poems like *‘Armageddon’ owe a great deal to Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion’ as well as to Keats’s ‘Endymion’.
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‘Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere: A Fragment’
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‘Sir Galahad’
Sometimes on lonely mountain meres I find a magic bark; I leap on board: no helmsman steers: I float till all is dark. (39–40) The poem was written in the same period as the *‘Morte d’Arthur’ and reveals Tennyson’s early interest in the Arthurian legends, as well as his ability, even in this simple poem, to produce a memorable line: My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure. (3–4) Although this is a first-person narrative, there is no attempt to explore Galahad’s feelings, the aim being to produce a ballad rather than a true dramatic monologue.
‘Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere: A Fragment’ Published 1842; written largely in 1830. Written at the same time and in virtually the same metre, as *‘The Lady of Shalott’ and in almost the same stanza form, the poem reveals Tennyson’s early experimentation with Arthurian material. He produced *‘Sir Galahad’ and *‘Morte d’Arthur’ in the same period and *‘The Palace of Art’ (1832) includes a later deleted stanza about the ‘deep-wounded child of Pendragon’. The poem refers to events dealt with more complexly in *‘The Coming of Arthur’ (1869), when Lancelot is sent by King Arthur to fetch Guinevere to their wedding. It is based on Malory xix and, like Malory, makes no moral comment on the events described. It seems likely that at some stage Tennyson recognized that the medieval ballad form was not appropriate in the nineteenth century for sustaining a ‘national epic’ and instead developed the blank verse used in the ‘Morte D’Arthur’. He was, however, deterred for many years from pursuing the Arthurian project, partly by John *Sterling’s adverse comments on ‘Morte d’Arthur’, which Sterling felt did not speak to contemporary concerns.
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Published 1842; written by September 1834. This early treatment of the Grail Quest is written in regular quatrains with alternate lines rhyming, grouped together in threes. Separated, they reveal a simple ballad form reminiscent of Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ :
See also: Arthurian literature; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: reception.
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‘Sisters, The’
Published 1832; early ballad by Tennyson, inspired by Sir Walter *Scott. The poem was written by 15 July 1831. Tennyson knew much of Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border by heart. This ballad, in which the speaker is a girl who avenges her sister by seducing and then stabbing to death the sister’s murderous lover, owes a great deal to Scott’s ‘The Cruel Sister’, as well as to the Bluebeard story. It is one of the few poems Tennyson was prepared to make humorous: on one of Arthur *Hallam’s visits to *Somersby, Tennyson recited his new poem with relish, exaggerating the line ‘Three times I stabbed him through and through’ (29) (which he pronounced ‘thruff and thruff’) to amuse his audience.
Society for Psychical Research, The Organization founded in 1882 to explore the supernatural. Alfred Russel *Wallace, William Barrett, William Crookes and several other physicists set up the society as an alternative to the more conventional British Association for the Advancement of Science: they used highly scientific methods to examine spiritualist practices, in particular ‘inexplicable’ phenomena such as apparitions and telepathy, and were scrupulous in exposing frauds like Mme Blavatsky. John *Ruskin and William *Gladstone as well as Tennyson were members or associates. In the 1860s Tennyson had attended at least one séance at *Aldworth and in the late 1870s, after his brother *Charles’s death, he showed a renewed interest in spiritualism. See also: Spiritualism.
Somersby Village on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds; birthplace of Tennyson. ‘Somersby’, wrote Tennyson in old age, ‘is secluded under a chalk-hill, called in the dialect of this county, a wold – a village shadowed by tall elm trees, with here & there a sand-rock jutting out of the soil’ (Martin, 19). The Rectory stood across a narrow lane opposite the small thatched grey church, with its large garden hidden from view behind the house. The ‘seven elms, the poplars four’ (‘Ode to Memory’, 56–7), Tennyson recorded, were augmented by sycamores, a Scotch fir, a kitchen garden with gooseberry bushes and, at the bottom of the glebe field, the brook, which Tennyson commemorated in ‘Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea’, when the family left Somersby in 1837. Holywell Wood, where Arthur Hallam fell in love with Emily *Tennyson and Emily *Sellwood fell in love with Alfred lay behind the Rectory. George Clayton *Tennyson redecorated the Rectory in the Gothic style, which remained a favourite of his son’s. The villagers tolerated the eccentric family, admiring the Rector’s
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‘Sisters, The’ [We were two daughters of one race]
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beautiful voice when he preached his sermons, and noticing Alfred in particular forever walking around with his nose in a book. See also: Architecture; Lincolnshire.
The cruel king, Ferdinand VII of Spain, who in 1814 had abrogated the constitution and reinstated the Inquisition, faced a liberal revolt which built up by 1820 into a revolution. The young Tennyson wrote a poem, later omitted ‘for some forgotten reason’ (Ricks, 155) from *Poems by Two Brothers (1827), ‘Written During the Convulsions in Spain’, in which he praised the rebels and exhorted Pampeluna, Saragossa and Vallilodad to fight ‘for the broad flag of liberty’ (‘Written During the Convulsions in Spain’ 24). In 1823 the intervention of the Duke of Angoulême, against which the British government vehemently protested, restored Ferdinand to his throne and he at once set about revoking the constitution and committing brutal reprisals against his countrymen. Many Spanish exiles found their way to London, notably the charismatic José María Torrijos y Uriarte who, through John *Sterling, was introduced to the *Apostles. Several of the group offered help to the Revolutionary cause, including *Hallam and Tennyson who set off to take money and secret messages to the revolutionaries in the Pyrenees. They were quite quickly disillusioned with the cause, once they realized that the ‘fighters for liberty’ were intending to kill the priesthood as well as the king – but the expedition led to Tennyson’s acquisition of a whole new realm of exotic scenery, which emerges in *‘Mariana in the South’, *‘Oenone’ and *‘In the Valley of Cauteretz.’ The Spanish Pyrenees became a sacred place to Tennyson after his visit to Cauteretz with Arthur Hallam. They had completed their *‘Spanish Adventure’ and were able to relax in mountainous scenery which gave Tennyson imagery for ‘Oenone’, but also seemed to mark a glorious climax to their friendship. In 1861 he walked in the valley again, this time with the poet Arthur Hugh *Clough, whom he and his travelling companion Graham *Dakyns had met by chance earlier on their journey. Tennyson told Clough of the place’s significance to him and later began to compose the first version of ‘In the Valley of Cauteretz’. He must have felt the poetic significance of Clough’s own early death occurring only a few weeks later in Florence. In September 1874, Tennyson took his son *Hallam to Cauteretz and they returned once more the following summer. See also: Revolutions.
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Spain
‘Spanish Adventure, The’ Trip by Tennyson and Arthur Hallam in 1830. Members of the *Cambridge *Apostles had been recruited to what they saw as the liberation cause of General José María Torrijos y Uriarte, leader of the
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‘Spanish Adventure, The’
Spanish Constitutionalist exiles in London, who had fled their country on the restoration of the oppressive King Ferdinand to the throne in 1823. John *Sterling and John *Kemble inspired their fellow-Apostles to help and Hallam and Tennyson volunteered to take money and coded dispatches in invisible ink to the revolutionaries who were massing in the Pyrenees. They set out on 2 July 1830, Tennyson’s mother covering his tracks for him by telling his uncle *Charles that he was ‘very ill’ and had had to go to London. (His father was due home from his own Continental adventures any day.) They travelled via Paris, Poitiers and the Mediterranean coast, Tennyson collecting landscape for *‘Mariana in the South’, and finally made contact with the leader of the insurrectionists, Ojeda, at Pont d’Espagne, a border village where the swiftly flowing rivers, the Gaube and the Marcedou join. They were horrified to realize that the insurrectionists intended to use the money to attack and kill not only their brutal political enemies but also the priesthood: Ojeda casually revealed that his aim was ‘couper la gorge à tous les curés’. Released from their mission, they recuperated from the journey in the Valley of Cauteretz. This became a key moment in Tennyson’s life, one to which he always returned in memory and in the poem *‘In the Valley of Cauteretz’. His subsequent adoption, for the rest of his life, of the Spanish cloak and broad-brimmed sombrero hat may have originated in his sympathy with the exiles, but it continued as a permanent reminder of the person he had been when he shared the journey with Hallam. They returned home via Bordeaux and the steamer Leeds, bound for Dublin, and were sketched by one of the other passengers, Mr Harden, whose three daughters sang and played games with them on deck. This is probably the only image showing the two young men together. On 20 September they were in time to take one of the first trains to run between Liverpool and Manchester (though not the very first, on 15 September, which killed the MP William Huskisson). See also: Railways; Revolutions; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: appearance; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: politics.
Spedding, James (1808–81) Scholar, editor of Francis Bacon; *Cambridge *Apostle; lifelong friend of Tennyson. Spedding was one of the most beloved of the Apostles, their father-figure (Tennyson called him ‘the Pope’); he looked older than his years and his bald head was a constant source of amusement. At *Cambridge he was Tennyson’s closest friend after Arthur *Hallam. When Spedding’s younger brother Edward, also a friend of Tennyson, died on 24 August 1832, Tennyson wrote the first of
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what were to become his great elegies, *‘To J.S.’. This was praised by Hallam and its quiet gravity prefigures the elegies that, a little over a year later, Tennyson was to begin to write for his own friend and ‘more than brother’ (In Memoriam Lyric ix, 20). It was on his first visit in April 1835 to Spedding’s family home, Mirehouse, on Bassenthwaite Lake in what is now Cumbria, that Tennyson began his friendship with Edward *FitzGerald. This was a momentous visit for all three young men. Spedding sketched Tennyson as he read his poems aloud. Tennyson worked on the *‘Morte d’Arthur’, absorbing the landscape of Bassenthwaite into the poem. Fitz made shrewd and perceptive comments on the poetry. Spedding remained a wise friend and adviser to Tennyson, who was revising *In Memoriam before publication in 1850. After Tennyson’s marriage, however, relations grew more difficult. *Emily distrusted Spedding’s ‘free-thinking’ ways and his influence on Alfred in London, calling him a ‘naughty infidel’ (Martin, 367). Despite many invitations, he was reluctant to go to *Farringford. The two saw little of each other after 1864 when Spedding moved out of the centre of London to make a home for his nieces. Tennyson wrote to him affectionately that he was no longer the ‘comeatable, runuptoable, smokeablewith J.S. of old, but ... a family man, far in the west, sitting cigarless among many nieces, clean and forlorn’ (Martin, 536). In 1881 Spedding was run over by a London cab and badly injured. In hospital, he expended much energy in making sure that the cab driver was not blamed. Tennyson, having been turned away by the hospital on one occasion, never saw his old friend again, for a few days later Spedding died.
Spenser, Edmund (c.1552–99) Poet, influence on Tennyson. Tennyson read Spenser in his father’s library and at *Cambridge and his use of mythical landscape, particularly in *‘The Lady of Shalott’ owes something to the earlier poet. In The Fairie Queen III ii , Spenser describes the love between Britomart and Artegall and ‘The wondrous myrrhour, by which she in love with him did fall.’ Spenser had followed *Virgil’s pattern of moving from eclogues to epic, from the Shepheardes Calender (1579) to The Faerie Queene (1590–96) and this pattern seems to have become part of Tennyson’s plan for his own development, as he moved from ‘English Idyls’ to the *Idylls of the King. He makes use of the Spenserian stanza in *‘The Lotos-Eaters’ and there are echoes of Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’ (1595) in the final section of *In Memoriam.
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See also: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: poetic development. Further reading: Markley (2004).
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Spiritualism
Tennyson’s longing to believe in the immortality of the soul led him throughout his life to attempt communication with the dead. His first, abortive, speech for the *Apostles in 1830 was to have been on Ghosts. In 1831 he slept in his dead father’s bed soon after his death, hoping to have a belief in the immortality of the soul confirmed. Tennyson’s sister *Mary was a convinced spiritualist, as were his brother *Frederick and Arthur Hallam’s beloved *Emily, who longed to get in touch with her dead fiancé. Tennyson, equally eager for contact with Hallam, talked of the ‘great Realm of the unknown’ and occasionally consulted mediums, including Mary *Brotherton in *Freshwater and a Mrs Acworth, who was invited to *Aldworth in 1869, much to his wife *Emily’s displeasure. As a devout member of the Church of England, Emily disapproved of the wilder reaches of spiritual exploration, though many mid-Victorians, including Elizabeth Barrett *Browning and George *Eliot, attended séances. Tennyson invited Alfred Russel *Wallace, the scientist/spiritualist, to *Aldworth in 1884. Tennyson listened open-mindedly to his account of séances, but was disturbed that none of the spirits who had been summoned mentioned God or Christ. (Wallace’s scientific credibility was soon to be seriously damaged by his naive belief in the fraudulent medium satirized in Robert *Browning’s ‘Mr Sludge the Medium’.) In 1879 Tennyson’s brother *Charles died and Tennyson asked his friends about reliable mediums and declared that he heard ghostly voices whispering in his ear. A particularly desperate visit to a séance was after the death of Lionel *Tennyson in 1886 when, the table having moved to indicate the presence of a spirit, Tennyson cried out, ‘Are you my boy Lionel?’ (Martin, 558). In 1887, however, visiting his oldest brother Frederick in Jersey, he reacted sceptically to Frederick’s absolute belief in the spirit world: ‘I grant you that spiritualism must not be judged by its quacks, but I am convinced that God and the ghosts of men would choose something other than mere table-legs through which to speak to the heart of man’ (Martin, 563). Though he was never convinced of the validity of séances, he remained aware of what he felt to be the spiritual world surrounding the physical one, like ‘a great ocean pressing round us on every side, and only leaking in by a few chinks’ (Martin, 557). Mysticism, as distinguished from spiritualism, fascinated the poet from childhood. An early attempt to describe his youthful trances is in ‘The Mystic’ in *Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830). Hallam *Tennyson says that this poem states his father’s ‘early intimations, or indistinct visions, of the mind’s powers to pass beyond the shadows of the world – to pierce beyond the enveloping clouds of ignorance and illusion, and to reach some region of pure light and untroubled calm, where perfect knowledge should have extinguished doubt’ (Memoir, i.304).
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Spiritualism
See also: Society for Psychical Research.
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Published 1842; dramatic monologue written in 1833. In his first major dramatic monologue, Tennyson uses the suffering figure of the saint on his pillar to ridicule the excesses of asceticism. The dignified blank verse form gives a bathetic effect to Simeon’s account of his suffering: ‘In hungers and in thirsts, fevers and cold,/In coughs, aches, stitches, ulcerous throes and cramps’ (12–13), he mortifies his flesh in order to rid himself of sin. By the end of the poem he believes that he has achieved sainthood and asks for the last communion before he dies. Tennyson relished reading this poem comically aloud to emphasize its grotesqueness. His deep abhorrence of asceticism is also evident in King Arthur’s condemnation in *‘The Holy Grail’ (1869) – and yet in this earlier poem the strongest poetic moments are when the saint is expounding his theories. A genuine debate is at work, within the poetry, as to whether or not this grotesque figure may not after all be right. The poem ends with an example of Tennyson’s characteristic use of ambiguity, in the moments before the saint’s death. Tennyson presents a divided figure, hugely ambitious, yet insecure about his place in the world: to that extent, Simeon’s divided nature is one with which the young poet can identify. The story of the saint who spent 36 years on various pillars, praying for forgiveness for his sins, is in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788), but the subject may have been suggested to Tennyson by the behaviour of his Calvinist aunt, Mary *Bourne, who gave him a lifelong distaste for the excesses of Puritanism. Robert *Browning admired this poem and used a similar approach in ‘Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister’, another *dramatic monologue in which the speaker condemns himself unwittingly out of his own mouth.
Sterling, John (1806–44) *Cambridge *Apostle; writer; subject of biography by Thomas *Carlyle. Sterling, with his close friend F. D. *Maurice, reinvigorated the Cambridge Apostles in the early 1820s, just before the arrival of Tennyson and Arthur *Hallam. He encouraged them to support the Spanish revolutionaries in 1828 and it was largely his influence that set the two young men off to *Spain in 1830. However, in autumn 1830 he married, then fell ill, and set off for the West Indies, abandoning the Spanish cause. The Sterling Club, named in his honour, survived into the 1830s and was probably the scene of Tennyson’s meeting with Thomas Carlyle in the late 1830s. His greatest influence on Tennyson’s career, however, was as the reviewer of the 1842 volume in the Quarterly. The editor, J. G. Lockhart, possibly to make up for the lascerating J. W. *Croker review ten years earlier, had allowed Sterling free choice of
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‘St Simeon Stylites’
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review topic, knowing that he would choose his friend Tennyson’s volume. The review was very favourable, though Sterling confided to J. S. *Mill that he doubted whether Tennyson could ‘conceive a serious character, but as a lyrical and specially a descriptive poet & writer of eclogues he is quite in the front rank of our countrymen’ (Martin, 265). His one published reservation (in the middle of the favourable review) was about the *‘Morte d’Arthur’: ‘The miraculous legend of “Excalibur” does not come very near to us, and as reproduced by any modern writer must be a mere ingenious exercise of fancy.’ This was enough to deter Tennyson for years from pursuing his Arthurian epic. He said later that before he read the Sterling review, ‘I had it all in my mind, could have done it without any trouble’ (Ricks, 1464). In the event, he waited until 1859 before publishing the first full batch of Idylls.
Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind Not in Unity with Itself’ (1830; not reprinted until 1884) The poem was prompted by the intellectual debates Tennyson encountered at *Cambridge as he moved from his mother’s simple faith to his own more complex beliefs; however, it is technically in the form of a *dramatic monologue conveying a state of mind not necessarily to be identified with the poet’s. Tennyson described the speaker as a fictional character who would have coped better with life if someone had said to him, ‘Come work’ (Ricks, 197). The hysterical voice, in fact, anticipates that of *St Simeon Stylites in the first major dramatic monologue of 1833: no-one has ever suggested that he should be confused with the poet. The ideas raised relate interestingly to Tennyson’s later development, anticipating poems written after Arthur Hallam’s death, in particular *‘The Two Voices’ and *In Memoriam, in the speaker’s declaration that ‘It is man’s privilege to doubt’ (142) and to ... analyse Our double nature, and compare All creeds till we have found the one, If one there be. (174–7) There are links with other melancholy poems of the Juvenilia, especially in the last three Hamlet-like lines (‘O weary life! O weary death!’) Through dramatic monologue, however, Tennyson is beginning in this poem to find the formal means of detaching himself from and shaping emotional states which he was to use in mature poems like *‘Ulysses’. In his review of the 1830 volume in the Englishman’s Magazine, Arthur Hallam suggested that the title is misleading, as the poem shows ‘rather the clouded season of a strong mind, than the habitual condition of one feeble and “second-rate” ’ (Jump, 46).
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Poet; critic of Tennyson. Swinburne visited *Farringford in 1858 and initially made a good impression. Tennyson later praised ‘Atalanta in Calydon’ as capturing ‘the true spirit of the old Greek poets’ (Martin, 461). Swinburne, however, soon lost respect for Tennyson, ridiculing his many magazine publications in the 1860s, calling the completed *Idylls (after Prince Albert’s death in 1861) the ‘Morte D’Albert’ (1872) and attacking *Queen Mary (1876). Robert *Browning thought that sales of Tennyson’s poetry were falling off in the late 1860s because of the increased popularity of Swinburne. Following Swinburne’s scandalous Poems and Ballads (1866), Tennyson, in *‘Lucretius’ (1869) treated eroticism in a way acceptable to the Victorian readership: ‘What a mess little Swinburne would have made of this!’ he observed (Martin, 479). Much later, however, Swinburne’s ‘The Leper’ (1866) seems to have prompted one of Tennyson’s least successful narrative poems, ‘Happy: The Leper’s Bride’ (1889). Tennyson identified Swinburne increasingly with the sexual licence he saw everywhere towards the end of his life, but remained generous about his talents, in 1891 writing to him, ‘I am and have always been your admirer’ (1982–90: iii.428 [1891]). On Tennyson’s death in 1892 Swinburne too showed maganimity: Far above us and all our love, beyond all reach of its voiceless praise, Shines forever the name that never shall feel the shade of the changeful days. (‘Threnody: October 6 1892’, 10–11)
Switzerland Tennyson’s father had travelled through Switzerland on one of his manic European journeys, and it was also the honeymoon destination of Charles and Louisa *Tennyson Turner. In April 1846 Tennyson was invited by *Dickens to accompany him to Switzerland, but declined, explaining afterwards: ‘If I went, I should be entreating him to dismiss his sentimentality, & so we should quarrel & part’ (Martin, 302). In the end he did go, later that summer, with Edward *Moxon as his travelling companion. Travelling to Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen, Tennyson wrote most of the lyric, ‘Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height’, which he put into *The Princess (1847). They reached Geneva in mid-August and on 23 August visited Dickens in Lausanne, where he was writing Dombey and Son. Dickens gave them ‘some fine Rhine wine and cigars innumerable’ which immediately made Tennyson feel at home, but later recorded that he found Moxon snobbish and ‘an odd companion for a man of genius’ (Martin, 308). Tennyson’s second trip to Switzerland was in June 1869,
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Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837–1909)
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when his travelling companions were Frederick *Locker-Lampton and the Revd Stenton Eardley of Emmanuel Church, Streatham. They travelled to Basle and Zurich and on to Interlaken. Thence they moved on to Lauterbrunnen and walked up to Mürren. The higher Alps moved Tennyson to talk of all visible phenomena as distorted shadows of the Almighty, which we can perceive only dimly because of the limits of our human senses. They walked down to Grindelwald from their Wengen Alp Hotel and stayed for several days enjoying the glaciers, streams and avalanches and then returned to Paris via Lucerne and Mount Pilatus. In late August 1872, Tennyson at last took his whole family to Switzerland, mountaineering with *Lionel, gaining a view of Mont Blanc (which he thought looked like a cathedral with three naves) and then spending time in Geneva. His last visit was with *Hallam in September 1873, just after the latter’s twenty-first birthday, on a tour of Alpine Italy which included trips into Switzerland.
Symonds, John Addington (1840–93) Writer and translator. Invited in December 1865 to Thomas *Woolner’s to meet Tennyson and *Gladstone, Symonds left a detailed account of the evening, centred on a fierce disagreement over Governor *Eyre’s suppression of a Jamaican uprising, in which Tennyson defended Eyre against Gladstone’s attacks. Symonds visited *Aldworth in late summer 1892 with his friend Graham *Dakyns, who had tutored Tennyson’s sons. Symonds was, for his time, unusually explicit about his homosexuality; it is unlikely that Tennyson knew much about this side of his life.
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Taylor, Bayard (1825–78) American writer, accepted by Tennyson as an admirer. Taylor was a noted poet, literary critic, translator and travel writer. He visited *Farringford in summer 1857, introduced by *Thackeray, and made a good impression on Tennyson, whom he described as ‘a delapidated Jove’ (Martin, 411). Taylor returned with his wife in February 1867 and they both wept as Tennyson read *‘Guinevere’ to them. The friendship ended abruptly later that year, when Taylor’s account of the visit, in a private letter to a friend, was somehow obtained and printed by an American newspaper. Tennyson’s coldness to American visitors never thawed thereafter. See also: America.
Taylor, Sir Henry (1800–86) Civil servant, poet and dramatist. Taylor had a long career in the Colonial Office and also published poems and had several verse-tragedies staged. Tennyson and Taylor were acquainted by 1851, and a friendship developed. He was also a friend and photographic subject of Julia Margaret *Cameron, who thought he was a greater poet than Tennyson.
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Tealby *Lincolnshire Wolds village, home of Tennyson’s grandfather. George *Tennyson, known to his grandchildren as ‘the Old Man of the Wolds’, bought land in this little village near Market Rasen in 1784 and there built up the family estate, *Bayons Manor. Tealby Church contains the family’s 251
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memorial tablets, but there is no mention of Tennyson’s troubled father, George Clayton *Tennyson, who was buried instead at his own parish church of *Somersby, at George Tennyson’s insistence. Alfred’s brother *Charles was curate of Tealby for a time in the 1830s, but generally the two branches of the family grew increasingly apart; Tealby was always identified in the minds of the Somersby Tennysons with unpleasant visits, usually on financial matters, to ‘the Old Man of the Wolds’. From 1833 it was the home of the younger, favoured son, Charles *Tennyson d’Eyncourt and his family, while Old George lived out the last 18 months of his life nearby in Usselby. The memorial tablets in Tealby Church are referred to briefly in *‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ (1886).
‘Tears, Idle Tears’ Lyric from The Princess (1847). Written at Tintern Abbey, so recalling *Wordsworth’s poem, but probably connected to Arthur *Hallam, buried 15 miles away in *Clevedon: Tennyson said, ‘This song came to me on the yellowing autumn-tide at Tintern Abbey, full for me of its bygone memories. It is the sense of the abiding in the transient’ (Ricks, 784). He denied a directly personal element, saying that the emotion was not real woe: ‘it was rather the yearning that young people occasionally experience for that which seems to have passed away from them for ever’ (Ricks, 785). This wonderfully ambiguous poem both expresses and analyses an emotion which is itself deeply ambiguous: the ‘passion for the past’. Spring and autumn, height and depth, dawn and dusk, life and death are reversed by cleverly oxymoronic phrasing – ‘happy Autumn-fields’, ‘So sad, so fresh’, ‘dying’ and ‘grows’ – and ambiguity hovers over crucial words – ‘the underworld’, ‘dark summer dawns’. Nostalgia is allowed to exert its allure but is also analysed as pleasurable pain: ‘Deep as first love, and wild with all regret.’ The poem’s strong movement suggests a rhyme scheme which, like the past, does not actually exist. An essay on this poem by the American New Critic, Cleanth Brooks, ‘The Motivation of Tennyson’s Weeper’ (1947a), proved a turning point in Tennyson’s critical reputation. See also: Critical approaches; ‘Passion of the Past, The’.
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Tennant, Laura (later Mrs Alfred Lyttleton) A favourite of Tennyson in old age, Laura Tennant was his ‘little witch’, his ‘passionate little friend’, whom he met on the Pembroke Castle during the 1883
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You wrong me, passionate little friend, I would that wars should cease ... (9–10)
Tennant, Robert John (1809–42) One of Tennyson’s circle of friends at *Cambridge. Tennant was a member of Trinity College and of the *Apostles and it was he who proposed Tennyson for membership. With W. H. *Brookfield, he was one of the least wealthy of the group and after leaving Cambridge became a schoolmaster and later a clergyman. His friendship with Tennyson continued beyond their Cambridge years: in August 1833, for instance, he was present, along with the writer Leigh *Hunt and the publisher Edward *Moxon, at a supper at which Tennyson recited parts of *‘The Gardener’s Daughter’. He also corresponded with Tennyson and visited the Tennyson family home at *Somersby. In 1834 he fell in love with Tennyson’s sister *Cecilia: a letter written to Tennyson at the end of July informs his friend that he is aware that he has no chance of success, and assures him that if he is permitted to continue his visits to Somersby he will not cause difficulties by renewing his suit.
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord The article is divided into the following sections: Appearance; Brothers and sisters; Childhood; Collected editions; Composition, methods of; Conversation; Critical approaches; Criticism, Tennyson’s sensitivity to; Death and funeral; Education; Faith and doubt; Fame and privacy; Friendship; Health; Homes; Humour; Juvenilia; Letters; Memoirs; Money; Narrative poems; Poetic development; Politics; Readings; Reception; Recordings; Religion; Sea voyages and love of the sea. (See also: Domesticity.) Appearance
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voyage. He flirted innocently with her, as with many young girls, one day asking her to kiss him, which she did. She confided in her diary, that she would any day, as she loved him. In the Epilogue to ‘The Charge of the Heavy Brigade’ (1885) he re-enacts a conversation with Laura (‘Irene’), and gives his most vehement riposte to charges that he used his poetry (as in *Maud) to advocate war:
From birth, Alfred seems to have been of heroic proportions. Family tradition quotes the doctor who cared for Mrs Tennyson as saying, ‘Here’s a leg for a babe of a week!’ He grew up tall, over six feet, with thick, dark, wavy hair, an aquiline nose, deep-set eyes and sensuous mouth – all captured in the Samuel Laurence portrait completed when he was about thirty. His strength too was
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heroic: there are family stories of him carrying a small pony across the lawn at *Somersby. After the *Spanish adventure with Hallam in 1830, he took to wearing a long Spanish cloak and broad-brimmed hat, which suited his romantically swarthy, indeed Spanish, appearance. Tennyson did not, however, take much care of his impressive physique, being by nature physically inactive and having early become addicted to pipe-smoking. He was also notoriously careless about the state of his clothes. There are many anecdotes about the dubious cleanliness of his shirt collars. He himself dubbed one of Julia Margaret *Cameron’s photographs of him, ‘The Dirty Monk’. When he was presented to the Queen as Poet Laureate at a levee in 1850, he squeezed himself into the Court dress worn by the previous Poet Laureate, William *Wordsworth, a man slightly shorter and significantly thinner than Tennyson, writing in relief to *Emily afterwards that it had not been unbearably tight. Despite his striking appearance and a certain vanity about his hair (he always insisted that it was not thinning with age and that it contained no trace of white), he was generally unaware of the impact he created, complaining in his later years that one small girl he had taken for a walk should have been dressed less conspicuously since everyone had stared at them. See also: Grahame, Elspeth. Brothers and sisters George (1806) (died in infancy) Frederick (1807–98) The first surviving child of George *Clayton and Elizabeth *Tennyson was fair, unlike his younger siblings, hot-tempered and a poet. He was sent to Eton and then to Trinity College, *Cambridge, but was rusticated for three terms in 1828 for non-attendance at chapel and for being impertinent when the Master of College asked for an explanation. He contributed four poems to *Poems by Two Brothers (1827) but seems to have had no objection to being excluded from the title of the volume. His affection for his rich and beautiful cousin Julia Tennyson d’Eyncourt led to rejection and may have contributed to Alfred’s recurring theme (most fully explored in *Maud) of lovers separated by inequality of fortune. Frederick shared his father’s emotional instability and it was their quarrel in 1829, with threats of violence on both sides, that prompted the hardpressed Eliza to leave *Somersby, taking her children for refuge to her family in *Louth. At his grandfather George *Tennyson’s death in 1835, Frederick was left the largest portion of a considerable estate, including an annual £200 maintenance for his mother and a capital sum of £3,000 for the support of his brother Edward. Having spent some years in Italy where he became a favourite of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett *Browning, Frederick finally married and settled, in 1859, at St Helier in the Channel Islands, where he had a son, Julius, and became
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fascinated by spiritualism. During a lifetime of considerable ease he produced various volumes of poetry including Poems (1853) (privately printed), Days and Hours (1854) and two volumes for his brother Alfred’s publisher, Macmillan: The Isles of Greece (1890) and Daphne and Other Poems (1891). Charles (1808–1879)
Mary (1810–84) The closest to Alfred of all his sisters, Mary was remarkably beautiful, despite a limp which was the result of a childhood accident. As an adult she was critical of men generally (though she made an exception for her gentle brother Charles). It was rumoured that she attempted to escape from the rectory in 1828, when her father was at his worst. She played the harp during parties in the Rectory garden and was the acknowledged beauty of an extremely beautiful family. Tennyson’s friend *Blakesley described her memorably, when Alfred took her to London in 1833, as ‘really a very fine-looking person, although of a wild sort of countenance, something like what Alfred would be if he were a woman and washed’. Mary became a favourite of the *Hallams and her charm helped win the family over to Hallam’s proposed marriage to her younger sister Emily. With Emily, Cecilia and Ellen Hallam she founded *‘The Husks’, a bluestocking group who read and discussed the Romantic poets and Tennyson’s own early work. She fell in love with John *Heath later in 1833 and they were engaged in 1835. Catherine Franklin thought her the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. However, Heath broke the engagement in 1837, possibly as the consequence of Mary’s increasing religiosity, and shortly afterwards she was attacked and disfigured by the family mastiff at *High Beech. Disillusioned with men, she settled down to spinsterhood with Emily and plunged further into Swedenborgianism, *spiritualism and mesmerism. She adopted a jaundiced view of Alfred and Emily *Sellwood’s wedding in 1850, but late in 1851 announced to her astonished family that she had married a penniless Cheltenham barrister, Alan *Ker. Ker took his new bride out to Antigua and thence to Dominica and Jamaica. Altogether, he worked for 30 years in the Judicial Service of the West Indies. They had a son, Walter, who became a barrister and a scholar, and who also, like so many of the male members of the family, wrote poetry. Though the Kers did visit *Farringford on at least one occasion, in 1871, they were always suspicious of Emily’s ambitions for Alfred. Mary drifted away from her brother after their respective marriages. Her husband described her after her death as a ‘good, pious, amiable and gentle woman, every way worthy to be her mother’s daughter’. Like her brothers, she wrote verse, mostly sonnets, but never published them: there are more than sixty of her poems in the Tennyson Research Centre.
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See: Turner, Charles Tennyson
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Emilia (Emily) (1811–87) see: Jesse, Emilia Edward, like Frederick, quarrelled frequently with his father and probably inherited from him the mental instability that was to haunt his long, sad life. In his childhood his grandfather had favoured him, but after the death of Dr Tennyson in 1831, when Edward was 18, it soon became obvious that he was unfitted for any profession. He would weep for long hours, deploring his miserable life. Alfred warned his grandfather and uncle that Edward’s mind might ‘so prey on itself’ that he would become a danger to himself. At the end of 1832 he was sent away to a home for the insane in York, where he was provided for all his life by money from his grandfather. Alfred is known to have visited him there several times but there is little evidence that the family as a whole kept in touch with their benighted brother. There are some early poems which suggest poetic promise. Three sonnets were transcribed by Alfred’s Cambridge contemporary and his sister Mary’s suitor, John *Heath, into his Commonplace Book, and Mary Tennyson added seven of Edward’s poems into a collection of ‘Sonnets and Fugitive Pieces’ which she dedicated to Frederick. Perhaps the most impressive is ‘Sonnet upon Holbeck’. See: Sturman (1999b). Arthur (1814–99) Despite sharing to the full the family’s good looks, Arthur was regarded as lacking in any particular talent, and behaved so oddly on a visit to his grandfather at the age of 16 that the old man complained desperately, ‘he is as idle as a foal ... he would be the subject of ridicule anywhere’ (Tennysons, 79). He did not enter any profession, became addicted to alcohol, and spent some time in a mental hospital. He then lived with his brother Frederick in Italy for over a decade, returned to *Lincolnshire, and in 1860 married Harriet West. He underwent some sort of religious conversion and devoted much of his time to the sick and poor of the parish of Wrawby. It was to Arthur as a child that Alfred had confided his own ambition, ‘Well, Arthur, I mean to be famous’ (Memoir, i.17). Septimus (1815–66) Beloved by his older brothers as a lively and handsome child and regarded even by his d’Eyncourt relatives as one of the most capable of the younger brothers, Septimus on his father’s death in 1831 was apprenticed to a land agent. However, his tendency to depression (‘the black blood of the Tennysons’ [Tennysons, 120]) led Alfred to intervene and arrange for him to move away from home and establish a career. This did not occur: Old George Tennyson’s death left Septimus with a legacy which enabled him to leave work and live at home with his mother. He went with Arthur to live with Frederick in Florence
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but returned after a few years, was overcome by the inertia that dogged him, spent his inheritance and died at 51. Dante Gabriel *Rossetti remembered meeting him in Henry *Hallam’s house in Wimpole Street: a large, shaggy figure lying on the hearth rug rose to greet him with the words, ‘I am Septimus, the most morbid of the Tennysons’ (Tennysons, 120).
In October 1833, it was Matilda who, returning from a dancing lesson, delivered to Alfred the post containing the terrible news of Arthur Hallam’s death. In the period between the death in Vienna on 15 September and the news reaching *Somersby, she and Mary had thought they had seen his ghost. Matilda did not marry but remained with her mother. Family tradition had it that, after falling headfirst into a coal scuttle as a child, she was never quite normal. She was fond of her sister-in-law, Emily, and frequently visited *Farringford, staying with Emily while Alfred was away from home, during the latter part of her second pregnancy, with Hallam. After Mrs Tennyson’s death in 1865 she spent the greater part of every year at Farringford; her eccentricities were quite hard for her brother and sister-in-law to bear, though her affectionate, kind-hearted nature compensated for them. Cecilia (1817–1909) With Mary and Emily she was at the centre of a group of intellectual young women who called themselves *‘The Husks’, and studied the Romantic poets as well as the works of Tennyson himself. Tennyson’s youngest sister’s marriage is immortalized at the end of *In Memoriam. She had earlier been pursued by one of Alfred’s Cambridge friends, R. J. *Tennant, but in autumn 1842 she married another of his friends, Edmund *Lushington, and took over the running of *Park House, the Lushington home, which was a haven for Alfred and the other Tennysons during the 1840s. During the separation between Alfred and Emily Sellwood, Cecilia grew closer to Emily and she and Edmund were the only close family members to attend Alfred and Emily’s hastily arranged wedding in 1850. Edmund was Professor of Greek at Glasgow University. Cecilia (Cissy), despite her lively sense of humour, suffered badly from nervous troubles and depression throughout the marriage, which was not helped by having to spend the winters with her husband in Glasgow. The couple had four children. Their only son died at the age of 13, two daughters died young and the last, who survived her parents, never married.
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Matilda (1816–1913)
Horatio (1819–99) With Arthur, Horatio attended *Louth School, as Alfred had done. On his father’s death in 1831 there was talk of sending him into the Navy but he was two years too young. As the youngest in the family, he lived with his mother
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at *High Beech, but then set out to farm in Tasmania, where he discovered that he was not suited to farming and lost most of his inheritance from his grandfather. He returned home in 1843 to his mother’s house in Cheltenham. Like his brother Alfred, he took the water cure, describing it vividly in letters. He married Charlotte Elwes in 1857 and they had four children. Like Arthur, he experienced some sort of religious conversion in middle life and devoted much time to helping the poor. When his wife died, he stayed at *Farringford to be comforted. See also: Hydropathy. Childhood Tennyson’s early years were imaginatively rich, though darkened by his father’s violence. Brought up in *Somersby Rectory in *Lincolnshire, the son of a violently melancholic father and a gentle mother, with two older surviving brothers, four younger sisters and four younger brothers, Alfred Tennyson had a childhood which was imaginatively rich and stimulating, despite the deepening shadow of his father’s alienation and depression. As a small child, before he could read, Alfred was entranced by the words ‘far, far away’. His poetic career began properly at the age of eight, when his beloved elder brother *Charles set him the task of covering a slate with poetry on ‘Flowers’. He did so, copying the style of James *Thomson, ‘then being the only poet I knew’ (Memoir, i.11). The lives of the three eldest Tennyson brothers were from the beginning steeped in poetry, with their father sharing his own poetic efforts as he educated them for a time at home, and their mother too reading poetry to them. Though they had to share a cramped bedroom, *Frederick, Charles and Alfred also had the run of their father’s 2,500-book library. The three boys later wrote Popeian heroic verses (see: Alexander *Pope); Charles and Alfred would practise making verses as they walked in the fields, shouting their best efforts across the hedge to each other. At 12 Alfred completed ‘an epic of six thousand lines à la Walter *Scott’ (Memoir, i.11). As the third child in a large family, Tennyson also learned early the responsibilities of looking after younger brothers and sisters. He would gather them round him and regale them with tales of knights and ladies; they would act plays and Alfred was so accomplished a thespian that he was generally regarded as a potential professional actor. The villagers also remembered him ‘dawdlin’ about wi’ a book’ (Robert Roberts, quoted in Page, 3). The *Tennyson d’Eyncourt cousins and the grandfather, Old *George, were held in suspicion by the Somersby family, who all believed implicitly in ‘the Disinheritance Tradition’ and that their father had been badly treated by his own father and younger brother. Alfred, however, got on reasonably well
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with his relations and particularly with his Aunt Elizabeth *Russell, who later supported him financially. His cousin, George Hildyard, recalled enacting battles in the fields round Somersby. Alfred and Charles also remembered defending a bridge, like the Horatii brothers, against the village boys. Discipline was a confusing mixture of maternal indulgence and quixotic paternal tyranny – a combination which gave all the children problems when they tried to adapt to the larger world. There were also parties, many pet animals and occasional holidays at *Mablethorpe, the place where Alfred first saw the sea. The irregular, creative unconventionality of life at Somersby appealed strongly to Arthur *Hallam when, in 1829, he first visited the scenes of Alfred’s childhood. It was in many ways, as he realized, despite its practical disadvantages, the ideal seedbed for a poet. The increasing mental instability of George Clayton *Tennyson darkened family life, however, as the older boys entered their teens. Alfred’s physical similarity to his father led to a close identification, and he was very affected by the Rector’s terrible depressions, so that as a small boy he would fling himself on the graves in the churchyard and wish he were dead. *Cambridge in 1827 certainly presented itself to him as an escape from a deeply troubled home. Collected Editions Poems (1857) (London: Edward Moxon). The Illustrated Edition including work by Holman *Hunt, Maclise, *Millais and *Rossetti. The Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate (1884). Seven volumes, New Collected Edition (London: Macmillan). Carefully revised by Tennyson. One-volume Works (1894, Macmillan) includes Tennyson’s late revisions. Hallam Tennyson (ed.) (1907–08), The Works of Tennyson Annotated, nine volumes (London: Macmillan). This is the Eversley Edition, prepared by Hallam Tennyson and including Tennyson’s own comments on his works. Christopher Ricks (ed.) (1969), The Poems of Tennyson, Longman Annotated English Poets (Harlow, Essex: Longman). The text is based on the Eversley edition but includes later poems, manuscript poems, some textual variants, full annotations based on Tennyson’s own comments and those of his editors, and literary allusions.
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Christopher Ricks (ed.) (1987), The Poems of Tennyson, Longman Annotated English Poets, 3 vols (Harlow, Essex: Longman, revd edn). This uses the Trinity College Cambridge manuscripts, which had previously been interdicted, and thus becomes the fullest edition available.
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Tennyson’s habit from boyhood was to build up from a single line, declaiming his verse rather than feeling the need to write it down. Arthur Hallam on one occasion hid behind a chair and scribbled down the verse as it was declaimed, thus preserving *‘The Lotos-Eaters’. Tennyson’s was the prodigality of genius: he talked of having made up and forgotten hundreds of lines of verse, because of a preference for rolling the lines round in his head rather than painstakingly recording them on paper. He would ‘recycle’ poems and lines. For the Chancellor’s Medal at *Cambridge he turned an early poem, *‘Armageddon’, into *‘Timbuctoo’ to meet the requirements of the competition. Perhaps because of his method of composition, he was notoriously careless with the physical records of the poems. Returning home one night in the dark, he dropped the whole manuscript of the 1830 volume out of his greatcoat pocket, and it was never recovered. Luckily, the poems were all still swirling round in his head and he was able to piece them together again from memory: ‘the invisible ink was made to reappear, all the thoughts and fancies in their orderly series’. Sometimes, as in the case of *‘Mariana’, *‘The Northern Farmer: New Style’ and *‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, a single rhythmic line from an outside source was enough to produce a whole poem. *Landscape too always mattered to him enormously, and he would travel to the places he needed for the natural background for certain poems, such as *‘Oenone’ or the *Idylls. The composition of the poems seems to have been reward enough for him and publishing was always an extra dreaded dimension. Once published, the poems continued to be worked upon, *The Princess in particular being changed quite radically over three or four years after its initial publication in order to bring out its themes more clearly. With all his long poems Tennyson wrote separate sections which he then fitted together. This produced quite a different effect from the organic concentration of the shorter poems which were usually built up from a phrase or line. The composition of *In Memoriam exemplifies the problem: 131 individual lyrics composed over a period of 17 years were crafted into a larger whole. After struggling with the order of the lyrics, Tennyson finally produced a linear narrative of despair leading to hope which did not capture the original spirit of the lyrics. In later life, though the verse itself still flowed richly, Tennyson was quite prepared to borrow ideas for content from the newspapers or from friends. Thus ‘Owd Roä’ came from a newspaper story; *‘In the Children’s Hospital’ from an anecdote told him by Mary *Gladstone; and *‘The Grandmother’ from an idea offered by Benjamin *Jowett. Perhaps the poem which shows Tennyson’s method of composition at its most typical and striking is *‘Crossing the Bar’ (1889): a central idea meditated upon, an experience which crystallized that idea – and the whole poem composed in the poet’s head during the 20-minute crossing of the Solent.
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Composition, methods of
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Tennyson loved all-male company and conversation. Fellow students recalled him in the *Cambridge days holding his friends in paroxysms of laughter with his stories and mimicry. His shyness often prevented him from contributing in more formal situations and his membership of such clubs as the *Apostles and much later the *Metaphysical Society caused him considerable nervousness. This may have been due in part to his extreme myopia, which meant that he could not take verbal cues from the facial expressions of others; in later life this sometimes led to him holding forth rather than interacting with a group. He was generally shyer with women, with the notable exceptions of Jane Welsh *Carlyle and Julia Margaret *Cameron, both of whom treated him on equal terms, respectively teasing and bullying him. Horror-struck at the prospect of being lionized, of ‘having the heart plucked out of his mystery’, he coped with potential hero-worshippers of either sex by sticking to superficial topics such as the price of coal, much to their bemusement and distress. His readings of his own poetry took over from conversation on some occasions, whole evenings being taken up with sometimes repeated readings of *Maud. He enjoyed the company of admiring but not effusive younger writers like William *Allingham, who recorded much of their wide-ranging conversations, though he found himself occasionally the butt of Tennyson’s bear-like grumpiness. *Hallam edited out the earthier side of his father’s conversation: the rough Lincolnshire humour and the liberation afforded by the drinking of port made him an excellent and amusing companion when he was in the mood. Edmund *Gosse recorded in the late 1870s both Tennyson’s considerable drinking and his subsequent telling of bawdy stories (Martin, 517). Critical approaches Modern fame is nothing. I’d rather have an acre of land. I shall go down, down! I’m up now. Action and reaction. (Tennyson, recorded in William *Allingham’s Diary xx) Criticism of Tennyson during his lifetime is dealt with in ‘Reception’. An invaluable resource for the history of Tennyson criticism is Mazzeno (2004). Overview
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Conversation, Tennyson’s
From the publication of *‘Enoch Arden’ in 1864, Tennyson was increasingly accused, by the generation of *Swinburne and later of *Yeats, of sentimentality and moralizing. This ‘Reaction against Tennyson’, which the poet himself had predicted, peaked before the beginning of the First World War. He was regarded as earnestly didactic in a way which to some Edwardians seemed typically Victorian. After a war for which such Victorian highmindedness
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seemed partly responsible, it became the critical fashion to condescend to him. ‘Poor old Tennyson!’ said a critic in 1930 (Harstock 1930). Even at the nadir of his critical fortunes, however, the ‘pure’ lyrical poetry never lost favour and was always well represented in the selections which continued to be published even after complete editions declined. The year 1923 was a key one. Harold Nicolson’s Tennyson: Aspects of His Life, Character and Poetry, underpinned by Sigmund Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1917), presented ‘the Divided Tennyson’ – half morbid mystic, half prosperous Laureate – and advocated the rejection of the later Tennyson in favour of the former. The debate Nicholson set up was between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ poetry, the latter regarded as the province of the Victorians, the former, of the Moderns. This debate mirrored that in Tennyson’s own lifetime between the Poetry of Sensation and the Poetry of Reflection (see also: Hallam, Arthur Henry; Poetry and society). With the work of I. A. Richards (1929) and later of F. R. Leavis (1936), the more objective, non-biographical approach of ‘close reading’ at first seemed further to encourage the rejection of Tennyson, and Victorian poetry in general, from serious consideration because of what was seen to be its vagueness and lack of intelligibility. Leavis omitted Tennyson from Revaluation (1936) as not offering ‘any very interesting local life for inspection’. T. S. *Eliot’s 1936 essay on *In Memoriam reinforced the rejection of the narrative and Laureate verse, though it praised the poet’s lyrical skill. However, the new objectivity in criticism did ultimately lead to a reconsideration, by the American New Critics. Cleanth Brooks in The Well-Wrought Urn (1947b) reread *‘Tears, Idle Tears’ and, to his self-confessed surprise, found it full of verbal subtlety, ambiguity and paradox. He concluded (having absorbed Nicolson’s remark that ‘Tennyson should be read very carelessly or not at all’ [1923]) that the poet must have ‘blundered’ into the success of this particular poem. The 1940s also saw W. H. Auden’s judgement, informed by Freud, that Tennyson was ‘the stupidest’ of English poets, notable only for his knowledge of melancholia (Auden 1944: x). This summary dismissal was countered by the poet’s grandson, Sir Charles Tennyson, who, in his balanced 1949 biography, for the first time championed the longer poems. In the 1950s Jerome H. Buckley’s The Victorian Temper (1951) and E. D. H. Johnson’s The Alien Vision in Victorian Poetry (1952) ushered in a reconsideration of the Victorians, and raised the possibility that Tennyson’s work (if not the poet himself) was reacting against, rather than reinforcing, Victorian cultural values. In 1962 two critical biographies, by Valerie Pitt and Joanna Richardson, reclaimed Tennyson’s public poetry, showing it to be informed by, and in turn informing, the private lyrics. There was still stress, as in the 1940s, on ‘unity’ – reinforced by Jerome H. Buckley’s monograph on Tennyson (1960) in which he argued, against Nicolson, for the coherence both of the poet’s personality and of the poems themselves. In 1960 Sir Charles Tennyson helped set up the
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Tennyson Society, which itself attempted to unify loyal readers and academics. In 1969 came the magisterial edition of the Complete Poems by Christopher Ricks, laying the foundation, at last, for detailed textual study. The rise of critical theory took some time to overtake Tennyson studies, an indication of his tardy return to academic respectability. Ricks’s Tennyson (1972), usually regarded as a bastion of liberal humanist criticism, in fact argued against the unity of the major poems as well as positing an ‘art of the penultimate’ (Ricks, 49), an open-endedness, as characteristic of the poet. In 1977, Terry Eagleton, in ‘Tennyson: Politics and Sexuality in The Princess and In Memoriam’, became the first major critic to apply both Marxist and Lacanian theories to the poems. The issue of whether Tennyson’s poetry ultimately supports or undermines the bourgeois values to which he officially subscribed has subsequently been well debated; Alan Sinfield (1971) argued against Eagleton that Tennyson uses dissident strategies such as the blurring of gender roles to subvert conservative ideology. In general, the liberal humanist critics are characterized by their desire to find wholeness and unity in the poems, while the critical theorists of whatever persuasion look for dissonances, contradictions, gaps and silences. At the beginning of the 1980s, Jerome McGann in ‘Tennyson and the Histories of Criticism’ (1982) warned against the ahistorical reading of the New Critics but also against a politicized reading which dismisses what is alien to current beliefs and values. There have been indeed many ideologically based readings, Phenomenological, Freudian, Feminist, Marxist, New Historicist, Lacanian, Post-colonial, Deconstructive and, later, Queer Theorist, most of which, despite their theoretical stances, have found much in Tennyson to admire. By 1986, Tennyson had been included in the Rereading Literature series, which signalled his acceptance by critical theorists. Alan Sinfield (1986) finally lays to rest the ‘unity’ debate, stressing contradictions and deviance in the poems, uncomfortable features which, he argues, have always been glossed over in the interests of reading the poet as a coherent embodiment of Victorian values. Theoretical assaults on the ‘unified human subject’ by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida led to a particularly fruitful approach to Tennyson through the notion of the ‘construction of the self’. Roger Ebbatson (1988), trying to reconcile what he called ‘the widely divergent approaches of Christopher Ricks and Alan Sinfield’, argued that in Tennyson’s poetry there is ‘the desire to escape from the self and the equally strong desire to hold on to it’. The shift in the Tennyson canon is shown in a comparison of John Killham’s edition of Critical Essays, published in 1960, with the Herbert Tucker collection (1993) published for the centenary of Tennyson’s death, in 1992, and even more with the commemorative edition of Victorian Poetry, edited by Gerhard Joseph (1992). Killham’s collection has seven sections consisting of 16 essays. The first section (essays by G. M. Young [1939] and Arthur J. Carr [1950])
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discusses ‘The Victorian and the Modern’ with essays that seek to situate Tennyson in the twentieth century and to justify studying him. Four sections (11 essays) deal with shorter poems, the classical background, *‘Ulysses’ and ‘Tears, Idle Tears’. All the great major works are represented by only 3 essays, 1 on *In Memoriam (T. S. Eliot, 1936), 1 on *Maud and 1 on the Idylls. This suggests the truth of Eliot’s remark (1936) that ‘The reading of long poems is not nowadays much practised’ (Killham 1960: 209). In striking contrast, in Victorian Poetry (1992), the Tennyson canon has been largely restored. Of 15 essays, 6 deal with the earlier shorter poems, there is still only 1 on In Memoriam, but there is at last 1 on *‘Enoch Arden’ (the first of Tennyson’s major poems to be heavily criticized during his lifetime and the last to be critically ‘reclaimed’), and an astonishing 7 on the Idylls of the King. From Nicolson’s dismissal of the Idylls in the 1920s as one of the major barriers to reading Tennyson (a dismissal repeated by Ricks in 1972), the poems have become the centre of attention, fascinating fin-de-siècle critics by their apocalyptic pessimism, epistemological explorations, critique of imperialism and construction of national identity. Gerhard Joseph’s Introduction embodies the characteristically ludic approach of critical theory: he brings back the shade of the Bard, who complains hilariously about his sufferings at the hands of modern critics. Joseph introduces a Derridean essay by James Kincaid (1992) which collapses the distinction between forgetting and remembering, a phenomenological piece by James R. Reed (1992) on Tennyson’s notion of ‘framed’ perception, an essay by J. Hillis Miller (1992) which employs the strategies of Paul de Man in examining the rhetoric of ‘Tears, Idle Tears’, 2 essays on cultural ideology, 6 on gender construction, and 2, by Herbert F. Tucker (1992) and Timothy Peltason (1992), which largely avoid fashionable critical vocabulary. The separation of the various theoretical approaches of the second half of the twentieth century seems irrelevant at the beginning of the twenty-first century as a new eclecticism emerges in which most critics employ a mixture of, for example, Marxist, Feminist and Lacanian methodology. At the beginning of their impact on Tennyson studies in the 1960s, however, the approaches had been conceived as distinctive; it therefore seemed sensible in the present article to attempt to identify the characteristic emphases of each, with the rider that there is always and inevitably overlap among them, even within such individual critics as Sinfield as they grow and change. Structuralist approaches
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Leo Spitzer was perhaps the first to apply structuralist principles to Tennyson’s work in 1952. He does so conscious of his own temerity, apologizing at one point for daring to paraphrase the poem in order to make its structure clearer. His reading of ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ (1952) is a response to Graham Hough’s archetypal reading (1951), which itself was a response to Cleanth Brooks (1947b).
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Spitzer chides Hough for vagueness, and posits instead a horizontal and vertical dualism in the poem’s structure.
Alan Sinfield in his Tennyson volume for the Rereading Literature Series (1986) shows how the dominant ideology works through texts to make convincing its own version of the world and how Tennyson uses dissident strategies to struggle against such ideology. In a later essay, ‘Tennyson and the Cultural Politics of Prophesy’ (1990), Sinfield suggests that Tennyson’s ‘dissidence’ does not in fact escape the confines of capitalism but is contained within it. Cultural materialism, new historicism Terry Eagleton (1977) focused on whether the poems were conservative or subversive – a debate that raged into the twenty-first century. Isobel Armstrong (1993: 41–67) applies a ‘post-Hegelian’ reading, avoiding the temptations of, on the one hand, deconstruction and, on the other, Marxism, to find ‘double poems’, with Tennyson responding in his revisions of earlier poems like *‘The Lady of Shalott’ and *‘The Lotos-Eaters’, to the social conditions of the 1840s and producing, if the poems are read as ‘double poems’, a critique of industrial exploitation. Psychoanalytical approaches Matthew Rowlinson in Tennyson’s Fixations: Psychoanalyis and the Topics of the Early Poetry (1994) examines fragments and poems from 1824 to 1833 and combines psychoanalysis with deconstructive theory to identify ‘a distinctively Tennysonian articulation of desire’. His Lacanian textual modulation of psychoanalytic readings is far removed from Nicolson’s ‘morbid mystic’ of the 1920s: attentive close reading strategies have followed the earlier broad-brush application of Freudian psychology. Feminist approaches, gender studies First-wave feminists such as Kate Millett (1970) launched an assault on *The Princess but later more subtle exponents such as Marion Shaw (1988) dealt more broadly and sympathetically with the way in which Tennyson uses female protagonists to address complex questions. Carol Christ’s influential essay, ‘The Feminine Subject in Victorian Poetry’ (1987) stimulated much work on Tennyson’s constructions of femininity and (of more recent interest) masculinity. Interdisciplinary work has been undertaken on evolutionary theory and the discourses of gender, especially in relation to *In Memoriam and The Princess. Linda Shires (1990) addresses the construction of patriarchy in the Idylls, and shows Tennyson’s move in revisions to an increasingly radical questioning of the dominant ideology. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985) examines homosocial
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desire in The Princess, and there have been various gay readings of In Memoriam, notably by Christopher Craft (1988) and Jeff Nunokawa (1991).
*‘The Lady of Shalott’ has attracted a variety of post-structuralist readings, from Herbert Tucker, Timothy Peltason, Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman, all of whom have read the poem as an allegory of the reading process itself, with the Lady as a ‘floating signifier’ drifting out of the control of any authorial presence. Gerhard Joseph’s reading in ‘My Lady(‘s) Shuttle: The Alienation of Work into Text’ in his Tennyson and the Text (1992) goes further, suggesting that the poem is a paradigm of the evolution of critical theory from New Criticism to post-structuralism. His book itself enacts the nostalgia for ‘presence’ of the critic who desires to re-engage with a biographical Tennyson while entrapped within the all-encompassing textuality of post-structuralism. Hillis Miller, in ‘Temporal Topographies: Tennyson’s Tears’ (1992) takes Joseph’s reading of ‘Tears’ a step further, that of deconstruction, arguing that the final line about ‘Death in Life’ signals the ‘undermining of all presence’, and is part of Tennyson’s rhetoric of ‘perpetual loss and absence’. ‘Traditional’ criticism Alongside theoretical readings and to a large extent inured from them, ‘traditional’ criticism has continued in the work of Norman Page (in Collins 1992), Christopher Ricks (1992), Eric Griffiths (1989, using a semiotic approach) and, more recently, Matthew Campbell, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry. See also: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: criticism, Tennyson’s sensitivity to; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: reception. Criticism, Tennyson’s sensitivity to The scorn of critics silenced Tennyson for nearly ten years, between the 1833 and the 1842 volumes and delayed work on the Idylls for even longer, until the 1850s. In the epigraph to *‘The Devil and the Lady’, begun when he was 14, Tennyson wrote: ‘Spes alit juventutem at poesin, vituperatio permit at laedit’ (Hope nourishes youth and poesy, abuse represses and injures it). This extreme sensitivity to criticism dogged him even at the height of his fame. The comments of Christopher *North about the 1830 volume and of J. W. *Croker and *Bulwer-Lytton about the 1833 Poems silenced him for nearly a decade – though during that time he was working on the *In Memoriam lyrics and very profitably revising many of the earlier poems. In consequence, the 1842 volume, when it did emerge, showed a much greater maturity partly as a result of the criticisms received.
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The 1842 volume was generally received very favourably, but even the comments of friendly critics such as John *Sterling were taken to heart and brooded upon. Sterling, in a generally laudatory review in The Quarterly in September 1842, declares of the *‘Morte d’Arthur’: ‘The miraculous legend of “Excalibur” does not come very near to us, and as reproduced by a modern writer must be a mere ingenious piece of fancy’ (Ricks, 585). As a result, according to Tennyson himself, the Arthurian project was shelved for many years. Instead, *The Princess (1847) constituted an answer to Sterling and other friends who had begged him to address the issues of the day. Perhaps his most effective poetic assault on his critics was the 1864 hendecasyllabic ‘O you chorus of indolent reviewers’, aimed at those who had misunderstood his metrical experiments. Later in life Tennyson still recalled Edward *FitzGerald’s pungent comments on his work, referring to them wryly and affectionately at the end of *‘To E. FitzGerald’ (1885). See also: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: reception. Death and funeral (October 1892) Tennyson had recovered from a serious illness in 1888 and in October 1889 wrote *‘Crossing the Bar’, at his nurse’s suggestion, in thanksgiving for that recovery. He remained in good health and spirits until mid-1892. On the annual departure from *Farringford, he, unusually, had the local rector come to the house to give communion to the whole family. Tennyson, who was not a regular churchgoer, made sure that this was clearly seen to be a Protestant communion by quoting Cranmer’s assertion in *Queen Mary, against the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation: ‘it is but a communion, not a mass,/No sacrifice, but a life-giving feast’ (Martin, 578). Once settled at *Aldworth, Tennyson made what was to be his last trip to London, visiting his new publishers, Macmillan, and one of his favourite destinations, the Natural History Museum. At the end of July his health began to fail and it became obvious that he would not recover. He was determined to keep the news from the public as long as possible. Even so, visitors streamed to Aldworth to say goodbye. In the last week, *Hallam sent for both Sir Andrew *Clark from London and Dr G. R. *Dabbs from Freshwater. Tennyson surrounded himself with his favourite books and for a week lay dying. When the *Queen sent a telegram, he muttered, ‘O, that Press will get hold of me now!’ His last words, according to his son, were, calling out, ‘Hallam, Hallam’, and, to Emily, ‘God bless you, my joy.’ Dr *Dabbs’s description of the deathbed shows how iconic this death was: ‘On the bed a figure of breathing marble, flooded and bathed in the light of the full moon streaming through the oriel window; his hand clasping the *Shakespeare which he had asked for but recently, and which he kept by him to the end; the moonlight, the majestic figure as he lay there, “drawing thicker
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breath,” irresistibly brought to our minds his own “Passing of Arthur”.’ At 1.35 a.m. on 6 October, Tennyson died. The coffin lay open until 10 October, Tennyson’s brows crowned with laurel from *Virgil’s tomb, gathered by Alfred *Austin, and in his hands a copy of *Cymbeline. On 12 October 1892, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, next to Geoffrey *Chaucer. The Abbey and the streets outside were packed; the nave was lined by the Balaclava Light Brigade and boys of the *Gordon Boys’ Home, but *Emily was too ill to attend and neither the *Queen nor *Gladstone was there. Edward *Burne-Jones found the day ‘flat and flattening’, but cheered himself by imagining the conversations Tennyson could now have with Chaucer, adding, ‘I suppose he’ll be hurrying off to Virgil soon.’ See also: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: fame and privacy; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: religion. Education As a small boy Alfred had classes at *Somersby village school and at the age of 7 he followed his two older brothers to *Louth Grammar School. He was a day scholar, staying with his grandmother, Mrs *Fytche, and her daughter, Mary Anne. The next four years were miserable for him: the headmaster, the Reverend J. Waite, beat the boys unmercifully, the teachers and some of the other boys were cruel too and Alfred so hated the school that, whenever he was in Louth thereafter, he avoided going down the lane leading to it. He said that the only good he ever got from it was the memory of the words ‘sonus desilientis aquae’ (a misquotation from *Horace) and of an old wall covered with wild weeds opposite the school windows (see: Water). At home at the age of 11, Alfred was often responsible for the care of his younger siblings. His two elder brothers were away, his father was sinking under a mixture of epilepsy and drink and his loving but gentle mother needed him to support her. In the intervals between his bouts of illness Dr *Tennyson took on Alfred’s education, teaching him the classics and having him tutored, badly and ineffectively, in maths. Most importantly, Alfred had the run of his father’s considerable library (see: Dr Tennyson’s Library) and was already absorbed in writing an epic in the style of Sir Walter *Scott and a play, *‘The Devil and the Lady’, into which he poured his self-acquired erudition. In 1827, again following his older brothers, he was admitted to Trinity College, *Cambridge, where his tutor, William *Whewell, tolerated his eccentricity, his complete absorption in poetry and his complete inability to cope with mathematics, which made a degree extremely unlikely. In the event, Tennyson left the university without a degree in March 1831 when his father was dying, and never returned. When he came to educate his own two sons, Tennyson and his wife kept them at home longer than was usual, never exposing them to the brutal treatment to which Alfred had been subjected at school. Their inevitable departure
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in 1865, at the ages of 13 and 11, to a preparatory school in Dorset made their parents desolate. *Hallam thereafter was sent to Marlborough and *Lionel (considered not strong enough for Marlborough) to Eton. In his poetry Tennyson takes up the cause of women’s education in *The Princess (1847).
In its own day, *In Memoriam was regarded, by Queen *Victoria and many of her subjects, as a poem of consolation, reinforcing faith. In the twentieth century, however, Tennyson was rediscovered as the ‘Poet of Doubt’, a title confirmed by T. S. Eliot’s judgement of In Memoriam, ‘Its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience’ (Eliot 1936: 336). Tennyson himself had sanctioned the view, in In Memoriam itself: ‘There lives more faith in honest Doubt,/Believe me, than in half the creeds’ (Lyric xcvi, ll. 11–12). What seems more interesting today is the dynamic between faith and doubt, which gives energy to so much of his poetry. Dualism is everywhere, from ‘Nothing Will Die’ and ‘All Things Will Die’ in the 1830 volume to *‘The Two Voices’, to the *‘Northern Farmer, Old Style’ and ‘New Style’, to the careful pairing of opposed characters crucial to the structure of the *Idylls of the King. When he developed his source material in *‘The Voyage of Maeldune’, it was to provide antithetical islands to the ones named in the original – an ‘Isle of Fire’ to match the ‘Isle of Water’, an ‘Isle of Silence’ to match an ‘Isle of Shouting’ and so on. It may be that the binary thinking of ancient Greek, embedded in language as well as in culture, enhanced what was already a tendency in his own thinking. He disliked formal debate and avoided it whenever he could. The crux of the argument in In Memoriam is in fact an abandonment of argument, a turning from one form of thinking to its opposite: A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason’s colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answered ‘I have felt’. (cxxiv, 13–16) Tennyson grew up in a culture which J. S. *Mill characterized as one divided between the value systems of Bentham and *Coleridge. Mill himself sought a synthesis. Tennyson as a poet throve on the movement between systems – even if as a man he searched desperately for conviction, for a fixed position of belief in human immortality. In his poetry, conviction is always undermined by verbal or semantic uncertainty, by endless deferral of meaning: ‘The dead are not dead but alive’ (*‘Vastness’, 36); ‘To strive, to seek to find and not to yield’ (*‘Ulysses’, 70) (the stress on the very term he wants to avoid); In Memoriam itself, working towards stasis and certainty, actually ends on a word which
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undermines the possibility of fixity: ‘To which the whole creation moves’ (Epilogue, 144). See also: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: religion. Further reading: Ricks (1972), p. 55.
As a boy, Tennyson told his younger brother Arthur, ‘I mean to be famous’ (Memoir, i.17). Though he single-mindedly fulfilled his aim, and valued his reputation for the light it shone on poetry, he found the trappings of celebrity hard to bear. Obsessively shy in public events, he had his friend Charles *Merivale read his prize-winning poem on his behalf at *Cambridge and he avoided official engagements as far as possible. The tourists haunting him from the 1850s at *Farringford on the *Isle of Wight, even pressing their noses against the window as he ate breakfast, he regarded with fear and loathing, once short-sightedly fleeing from a flock of sheep when he mistook them for the despised ‘Cockneys’. He hid his home behind a great wall of trees, but still felt under threat. Thus *Aldworth was built, initially as a summer retreat rather than a second home: from 1869 the family fled there from their beloved Farringford at the beginning of every tourist season. Tennyson was also protective about his poetry – with good reason for it was often copied without his consent – and once read the then-unpublished ‘Boadicea’ to the Duke of *Argyll in the middle of a stubble field in order to avoid being overheard. When travelling he was desperately eager for his identity not to be discovered, delaying signing his name in the visitors’ book until just before leaving a hotel for fear of being mobbed. Even in *France, where he was certainly safe from discovery, he believed that people were hostile to him and that children were singing songs against him in the street. Because of his desire for privacy he never employed a secretary, which was only possible because first *Emily and then, when she collapsed from overwork, *Hallam, was prepared to devote a lifetime to his service. When intrusive visitors attempted, as he felt, to ‘pluck out the heart of my mystery’, he developed a very successful technique of confounding them by talking only about trivialities – leading Henry *James to say in disappointment that he was ‘not Tennysonian’ (Martin, 519). When watching his own plays, he drew attention to himself while trying desperately to avoid being noticed, by applauding in the wrong places. The invasion of privacy Tennyson feared most, however, was the invasion of the *biographers. He heartily approved the suppression of Lord *Byron’s most revealing letters. He saw what had happened to his old friend Thomas *Carlyle whose Life by J. A. Froude (1882) seemed to Tennyson inexcusably intrusive. He was desperate to keep his final illness from becoming public knowledge. One
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of the last things he said on his deathbed was: ‘O, that Press will get hold of me now!’ (Martin, 581). His vanity at his own fame annoyed some, amused others but was accepted by most of those around him. As Thomas Hughes perceptively put it: he felt ‘as fond of the dear old man as anyone in spite of his vanity, which is so open and superficial as to be quite inoffensive’ (Martin, 563). It was as ‘a Great Poet’ that he felt vain, and it was any impugning of his poetic fame that caused him, at every stage of his life, the deepest distress. See also: Conversation, Tennyson’s; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: criticism, Tennyson’s sensitivity to. Friendship Tennyson’s life was rich in friendship, despite his eccentricities; his early bond with Arthur *Hallam was the deepest friendship of all. Tennyson’s lifelong devotion to Arthur Hallam after a friendship of only five years was in the tradition of deep, exclusive male friendship current in the universities in the 1820s and 1830s. *Thackeray, speaking of his university days, said, ‘What passions our friendships were!’ (Martin, 95). Almost all the Cambridge *Apostles were in similar relationships – Robert *Monteith with Francis *Garden, George *Venables with Henry *Lushington, John *Kemble with W. B. Donne. Tennyson’s poem, ‘Friendship’ was published in *Poems by Two Brothers in 1827, two years before he met Hallam and has an epigraph from Cicero’s De Amicitia (On Friendship): ‘I am not now speaking of the ordinary and commonplace friendship – delightful and profitable though it is – but of that pure and faultless kind, such as was that of the few whose friendships are known to fame – “de vera et perfecta loquor”.’ Tennyson therefore was prepared by literature and contemporary culture for the intensity of his friendship with Hallam. What they offered each other was a mutual devotion to literature and temperamental complementarity: ... he was rich where I was poor, And he supplied my want the more As his unlikeness fitted mine. (In Memoriam, Lyric lxxix, 18–19) Two people after Hallam attained this ‘Holy Friendship’ status. Henry *Lushington, brother of *Edmund who had married Tennyson’s youngest sister, *Cecilia (the marriage recorded at the end of *In Memoriam) knew Tennyson well in his lonely bachelor days in the 1840s, and his rooms in London, as well as the family home, *Park House, were havens for the lonely poet. When Henry died on his way home from his government post in Malta, Tennyson described the death as ‘an unspeakable loss’. Like Hallam, Henry had known how to comment constructively on Tennyson’s poetry. Tennyson read Ecclesiastes and the
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Song of Songs with *Emily on the night the news came of Henry’s death – a sign of the depth of his emotion. Sir John *Simeon, the Tennysons’ Roman Catholic neighbour in *Freshwater, is the third person to reach the heights of ‘Holy Friendship’. He too died abroad, in Fribourg, at the age of 55. Tennyson wrote to his widow that Sir John was ‘the only man on earth, I believe, to whom I could, and have more than once opened my whole heart’ (Memoir, ii.98). He travelled at great inconvenience to Sir John’s funeral on the *Isle of Wight (he had attended neither Hallam’s nor Henry Lushington’s) and, in the garden there, wrote an elegy to all three men: *‘In the Garden at Swainston’, in which he elevates them into a Holy Trinity of Friendship. Tennyson’s many other friendships, notably with Edward *FitzGerald, James *Spedding, Benjamin *Jowett, Thomas *Carlyle, Edmund Lushington and with a group of younger admirers including William *Allington and Francis *Palgrave, were characterized by great conviviality when the friends were together and benign neglect when they were apart. His aversion to writing letters was legendary. Even Arthur Hallam mentions it. At best, he might apologize for not replying to a letter, as here to John *Forster: ‘I love you all the same, tho’ I should not write for 100 years’; at worst, after his marriage there might simply be a reply from *Emily and silence from Tennyson himself – often lasting for years. The unexpected visit to FitzGerald in Woodbridge in 1876, however, showed that for Tennyson at least, friendship continued unbroken, not needing the sustenance of letters. Tennyson’s range of friendships was wide. Though some relationships ended in misunderstanding and resentment, as in the case of Lewis *Carroll, the great majority lasted a lifetime. There were early friendships with women, like the young Sophie *Rawnsley, and later ones with Julia Margaret *Cameron and Jane *Carlyle – though, interestingly, there are no elegies to women in his works. It is his celebration of male friendship which produced his best epistolary and elegiac poetry. This includes not only In Memoriam, but ‘To J.S.’ (James Spedding), ‘To J.M.K.’, ‘To the Rev. F.D. Maurice’, ‘To the Rev. W.H. Brookfield’, ‘To E.L. [Edward Lear] on His Travels in Greece’, ‘To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava’ and, perhaps pre-eminently, ‘To E. FitzGerald’, in which Tennyson conveyed movingly in verse what he had not been able to convey directly to Fitz in the last months of his life – the unchanging warmth of a lifetime’s friendship.
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Health, Tennyson’s Despite a strain of hypochondria, including fear of inherited epilepsy, Tennyson’s remained robust until late in life. The strong constitution of the Tennyson family was a source of family pride. Emily *Tennyson, in her despair over Hallam’s death, talked of the possibility
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of dying and mourned, in her grief, the proverbial longevity of the Tennysons. There was, however, a family fear of *epilepsy which had emerged in George Clayton *Tennyson and in Tennyson’s cousin, George Hildyard Tennyson, and which may, in Tennyson’s fear that he too had inherited it, have contributed to the separation from Emily *Sellwood. The trances he experienced from boyhood he linked to the symptoms of epilepsy. There was also a strong tendency to hypochondria, evident in all the family letters and present in Tennyson himself. He was extremely myopic and worried from an early age about losing his sight. He worried too about his sanity, the ‘black blood of the Tennysons’ (Tennysons, 120), and spent several short periods as a voluntary patient in the mental asylum of Matthew *Allen, close to *High Beech. In 1843, having abused his system with heavy smoking and drinking, he suffered so badly from depression and physical debilitation that he began the *‘Water Cure’ at the village of Prestbury near Cheltenham. In 1847 he tried a similar regime at Umberslade, south of Birmingham, and thereafter he went several times to Malvern. In 1848, on his second visit, he was under the care of Dr James *Gully, who specialized in the cure of gout, and who seems to have persuaded Tennyson that this inherited disease rather than the more alarming one of epilepsy was the source of his problems. Tennyson felt himself to be cured and shortly afterwards, in 1850, came marriage to Emily Sellwood and the success of *In Memoriam. Thereafter, Tennyson’s health was still a source of grumbling but he remained relatively robust until old age. He could now regard his trances as rich experiences, ‘not a confused state but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words’ (Martin, 280). The ability to pass into trances faded with age but age also brought a more common-sense approach to his health: he told Hallam *Tennyson: ‘I used from having early read in my father’s library a great number of medical books to fancy that I had all the diseases in the world, like a medical student’ (Martin, 280). See also: Hydropathy. Homes See under individual names: Aldworth; Chapel House, Twickenham; Farringford; High Beech; Somersby. Humour Tennyson’s poetry is not noted for its humour. The *dialect poems seem to stand alone. By all accounts, however, he frequently possessed an earthy sense of fun and could be extremely amusing company, especially when encouraged to mimicry and playing party games. Interestingly, his humour seems to have been as much visual as verbal: he would mimic the sun coming out from behind a cloud, fluff up his hair and turn into George IV, put a pipe-stopper in his mouth and turn into a great bird on a branch, and even
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(in the right company) imitate a man on a close stool. At *High Beech *Cecilia wrote (without punctuation) to her friend Susan *Haddelsey: ‘We had some wild fun we sat up till one o-clock Alfred amusing us all the time by taking different characters, he made us laugh so much you should have heard him’ (Martin, 235). He could even occasionally send up himself and his poetry, reading *‘The Sisters’ with mock gusto, and embarrassing a dinner party gathering, just after *The Princess was published in 1847 by remarking: ‘I don’t think that since *Shakespeare there has been such a master of the English language as I’ – but then adding, disarmingly: ‘To be sure, I’ve got nothing to say’ (Martin, 317). There is a certain grim *Lincolnshire wit about even the most serious poems like *‘St Simeon Stylites’, but Tennyson’s humour derives from a much more simple folk tradition than his poetry: it is quite separate from his genius for words. His friend Frederick Locker-Lampson summed up the opinion of many of those who knew him best: ‘Did anybody ever make one laugh more heartily than Alfred Tennyson?’ (Martin, 479). Juvenilia Tennyson showed exceptionally early promise. Left at home with a cold as a child of eight when his family went to church, he was told by his nine-yearold brother *Charles to cover a slate with a poem about flowers. When Charles returned, Alfred had covered both sides of the slate with metrical Thomsonian verse. Tennyson himself said that, after reading Alexander *Pope’s translation of the Iliad, he wrote ‘hundreds and hundreds of lines in the regular Popeian metre’ at the age of 11 (Memoir, i.11). At the same age, he composed an epic of six thousand lines modelled on Walter *Scott’s Marmion, producing up to seventy lines at a time and shouting them aloud in the fields at night. ‘Though the performance was very likely worth nothing I never felt myself more truly inspired’ (Memoir, i.12). The feat moved his father to predict that Alfred ‘would yet be one of the great in English Literature’ (Paden 1942: 117n. 34). ‘A Translation of Claudian’s “Rape of Proserpine” ’ is the earliest extant poem, written between his eleventh and fourteenth year. Schoolboy translations of *Horace’s Odes are held at the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln. *‘The Devil and the Lady’ was written, according to Dr *Tennyson, when Alfred was only 14. ‘The Coach of Death’, a fragment of 192 lines in quatrains, is a Gothic fantasy, written at about the same age. It describes the dark coach being filled with the souls to be taken to the underworld. On its grim journey it meets a bright silver coach on its way to paradise. Most important is *‘Armageddon’, written at about 15, from which Tennyson derived the prize-winning poem *‘Timbuctoo’. The early verse is characterized by a huge confidence, which is replaced in the adolescent *Poems by Two Brothers (1827) by a brooding melancholy.
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The collected three-volume edition of Tennyson’s letters is Lang and Shannon (Tennyson 1982–90). Tennyson hated letter-writing. He is quoted as saying, ‘I would as soon stick a pig as write a letter’ (Letters, i.xxix). The three volumes compiled by Lang and Shannon, therefore, though they are an invaluable scholarly resource, do not suggest the personality of the writer as, for example, *Dickens’s letters (in twelve volumes over a much shorter life-span) do. Many letters were also destroyed by Hallam *Tennyson and his mother after Tennyson’s death: fewer than 2,000 remain and these are revealing largely for their information on events in the poet’s life rather than on his emotional, intellectual or literary development. Other collections of letters by people with whom Tennyson was associated are: ●
●
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Tennyson, Alfred Lord (1969): this draws on previously unpublished material in the Royal Archives, Windsor, and the Tennyson Research Centre. Tennyson, Emily (1974): a selection of 382 letters by Tennyson’s wife, dating from before her marriage until a week before her death in 1896. There are no surviving letters from the time of the early engagement or the long estrangement in the 1840s. Hallam, Arthur Henry (1981): an annotated collection of all known surviving letters and fragments both by Hallam and to him, dating from August 1824 to 11 September 1833 (four days before his death). The collection includes letters from his fiancée, Emily, but none from Tennyson.
Further reading: Millgate (1992). Memoirs Tennyson’s iconic status in his later years made it inevitable that he would be memorialized, particularly by the many eminent and not-so-eminent visitors who came to *Farringford and to a lesser extent to *Aldworth in the last decades of his life. Hallam *Tennyson’s two-volume biography is entitled Alfred Tennyson: A Memoir (1892), and includes much vivid personal detail derived from family tradition, which gives it a spontaneity impossible in a conventional biography. Other sources include: Allingham (1907); Knowles (1893); Page (1983); Rawnsley (1900); Ritchie (1892); Symonds (1923); Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, and Queen Victoria (1969); Tennyson, Charles (1969); Tennyson, Hallam (1911); Ward (1903).
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Further reading: Tennyson, Hallam (1911). Money After an insecure childhood and a disastrous financial speculation, Tennyson always felt himself to be poor, even at the height of his success.
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From a financially uncertain background as the third surviving son of a struggling parson with a large family, Tennyson was always conscious of the value of money. As an adolescent in 1827, he showed his sharpness in bargaining over the publication of *Poems by Two Brothers, when Jackson’s of *Louth agreed to pay a £20 advance for the volume. When he arrived at *Cambridge University later that year he had only £100 p.a. secure income, an annuity from his aunt, Elizabeth *Russell (which continued until well after his marriage in 1850). He had to ask for any extra funds from his father and grandfather; Arthur *Hallam, in contrast, coming from a secure professional family, had a guaranteed £300 a year. By the time he left Cambridge, Tennyson was £180 in debt. (This compares favourably, however, with his two elder brothers, who each owed about £235.) Somehow he resisted the pressure from his grandfather and uncle to enter the Church, and continued to live on his Aunt Elizabeth’s annual allowance, though for two decades he was continually short of money, and his travels in Europe with Hallam were completed on a shoestring budget. In July 1835 he visited James *Spedding in the Lake District, by dint of selling his Chancellor’s Medal for Poetry for £15. On that important visit he made friends with Edward *FitzGerald, who, with an income of £800 p.a., offered Tennyson £300 p.a. That summer, however, the ‘Old Man of the Wolds’, Tennyson’s grandfather, George *Tennyson, died, and Tennyson’s financial worries were soon at an end, at least for the moment. In his grandfather’s will he had been left the manor at Grasby and an estate there. The total value of his inheritance was more than £6,000 and the gross income roughly £500. In 1839 he could afford to turn down the offer of £60 from Edward *Moxon to write a preface to a life of *Beaumont and *Fletcher. In 1840, the year of the complete break with Emily *Sellwood, his income was close to the ideal he had mentioned to friends – the life of a country squire, ‘who lived on about £800 a year with his wife and family’ (Martin, 247). At about this time too, Arthur Hallam’s aunt Elizabeth died and left £500 to Tennyson. Two years later came financial disaster. In 1840 Tennyson had been persuaded by his friend, Matthew *Allen, to invest heavily in a wood-carving business. In all, he was to pour £3,000 into the project, plus the £500 from Miss Hallam, receiving in return an insurance policy of £2,000 on Allen’s life and great expectations of making his fortune. In 1843, just as the volume of Poems 1842 was selling rapidly, the wood-working scheme collapsed completely within a few months and Tennyson’s inheritance was gone. He had accepted the offer of £300 a year from *FitzGerald (Tennyson told *Carlyle that FitzGerald was ‘a man from whom one could accept money’ [Martin, 204]), and this continued for some years. Although he still had his Aunt Russell’s annuity and his poetry was at last beginning to earn over £150 a year, he felt himself to be destitute and complained bitterly to his friends about his ‘poverty’. Early in 1845, Matthew Allen died suddenly of a
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heart attack and Tennyson regained £2,000 of his investment. He refused the Prime Minister Robert Peel’s offer of £200 relief, but at the end of September accepted his revised offer (after the intervention of Henry *Hallam) of an annual pension of £200, which he was to keep until his death. In 1850 he finally married Emily *Sellwood, published *In Memoriam and became *Poet Laureate (a post which brought with it great honour but only £100 a year). Thereafter, his fortune grew with his fame. He drove hard bargains for his poetry, even with his faithful publisher Edward *Moxon, who had to pay him £200 for the *‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ in 1852. In 1853, when the income from his work was £1,658, he felt able to take out a lease on *Farringford on the *Isle of Wight. Though he had little capital, his total annual income was now that of a rich man, more than £2,500, though, in the tradition of his grandfather and father, he constantly pleaded poverty, and hung on to his Civil List Pension, his annual £100 from his Aunt Russell and money from FitzGerald. There is little doubt that psychologically he still believed himself to be poor – even after he had bought Farringford outright in 1856. With the success of the 1859 *Idylls, he was flooded with offers of large sums of money for his poetry and in 1861 he admitted to making about £2,000 a year. In 1864 he had hoped to make £2,000 from *Enoch Arden and Other Poems; in fact it brought in £8,000 in its first year alone. By 1867 the Tennysons were affluent enough to have a second home, *Aldworth, built for them near Haslemere, though the architect, Tennyson’s friend James *Knowles, refused to take any money for designing the house. With the second volume of Idylls in 1869/70, Tennyson was earning more than £10,000 a year from his poetry. In September 1871 a New York editor offered him £1,000 for any poem, ‘even if not more then twelve lines in length’ (Martin, 492). The offer of a peerage in 1883 was only made once *Gladstone had satisfied himself that Tennyson had enough income to keep up the financial commitments involved in bearing a title. He was offered $1,000 for each lecture of a proposed 50-lecture tour of the United States but declined, pleading infirmity. After a long lifetime of obsessive concern about financial insecurity, Tennyson left an estate of more than £57,000 at his death. Narrative poems Contrary to Modernist criticism, Tennyson was a considerable narrative poet. Narrative poems were popular in Victorian times, but today Tennyson’s lyrics appeal more. His own love of novels suggests, however, the importance he attached to narrative. One favourite plot in his narrative poems is the lover who is separated from his richer beloved by differences of class and wealth – a plot suggested by his own bitter experience with Rosa *Baring. Sometimes the idyll merges into narrative, as in *‘Edwin Morris’. In Tennyson, even the most violent
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narratives can also be poems of mood. T. S. Eliot observed that ‘for narrative Tennyson had no gift at all. Tennyson could not tell a story at all’ (1936: 181; Mazzeno 2004: 80). To Eliot, the greatest poems were those like *‘Ulysses’ or *‘Mariana’, where the outcome is not the point of the poem: instead, a mood or situation is brilliantly evoked. There is also, though, a range of genuinely narrative poems. The plots of *‘Enoch Arden’, of *‘Geraint and Enid’ and of *‘Guinevere’, for example, are close to those of the popular Victorian novels that Tennyson read so avidly. However, though the themes are, to modern readers, limitingly Victorian, the pace and shape of the stories reveal considerable narrative skill. Battles are described in *‘The Passing of Arthur’, headlong flight in *‘Balin and Balan’, brutal murder at the end of *‘The Last Tournament’, in ways which show immense power particularly in the use of rhythm to convey violent action – as in the murder of Tristram (‘ “Mark’s way” said Mark, and clove him through the brain’ [748]) Then there are the ripping yarns, *‘The Revenge’ and *‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, each driving towards tragic death and each carried by irresistible rhythms. Tennyson critiques the narrative mode itself in *The Princess by setting against it the lyric mode in the inserted songs. He was well aware of the need, the drive towards action: it is one of his central themes, as in the contrast between *‘The Lotos-Eaters’ and ‘Ulysses’. Conveying the pull towards action is thus both theme and mode in many of the narrative poems: central to the Idylls too is the narrative tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces – the building and the collapsing of order. Running beneath the official actions of Arthur is Lancelot’s passion for Guinevere, which undercuts, in plot and in the verse itself, the onward rush of the narrative. Tennyson’s greatness is not only in the lyric mode: the importance of narrative in his work has not yet received the critical attention it deserves. Poetic development Tennyson moved from private lyricism to public Laureate verse, but retained his central strengths. No-one has known better than Tennyson what he wanted to do nor done it with such persistence. (Robert *Browning, quoted in Martin, 430) Tennyson’s early poetry is ambitious, luscious, dramatic, from *‘The Devil and the Lady’ to *‘Armageddon’ (later to become *‘Timbuctoo’). His stylistic scope and subject matter are based on his inheritance from the Romantics. The early poems are intrinsically ‘literary’. Only occasionally in the 1830 volume is there a sign of something more – the mysterious charm of *‘The Lady of Shalott’ or the allegorical power of *‘The Kraken’. By the 1842 volume greater strength is evident, in ‘mood poems’ such as *‘The Lotos-Eaters’ and the great dramatic
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monologues, *‘Ulysses’ and *‘Tithonus’. It is certainly true that there was an increasing tension between what Tennyson wanted instinctively to write and what he felt he ought to be writing. While *Hallam’s memory pulled him back to ‘pure’ poetry, the more insistent and present voices of such friends as Thomas *Carlyle and Elizabeth Barrett *Browning were demanding that he address a contemporary audience with contemporary issues. The ‘Condition of England’ question was being addressed by the novelists: the poets too were expected to contribute to the debate. Tennyson tried in 1847, with *The Princess, but still seemed obliged to disguise the contemporary beneath the mythical-medieval. The *‘English Idyls’ scattered through each of the 1830s and 1840s volumes constitute a further attempt. Ironically, however, it seems that the more immediately Tennyson strove to address the concerns of his age, the more trapped in that age, and therefore time-constrained, the poetry became. His attempt to portray humble peasant life in *Enoch Arden emerges in a way which is inescapably Victorian; the turning towards the Crimean War at the end of *Maud traps those sections in time, while the sections depicting the narrator’s inner collapse into madness speak as freshly today as when they were written. The experimental nature of Tennyson’s *metrics in particular is evident in the series of poems he published in the Cornhill Magazine in 1863. He and *Gladstone argued fiercely and well into old age over Greek metres and the possibility of ‘quantitative’ poetry in English. Tennyson’s experiments with genre too are impressive, from the ‘Medley’ form of The Princess to the ‘Monodrama’ of *Maud, which was experimental and original enough to confuse many of its first readers. The *Idylls may suffer from the influence of the mid-Victorian novel, but they also embody an ambitious attempt to replicate medieval visual patterns. The urge to revise, to improve, the creative restlessness of the consummate craftsman is present in the revisions Tennyson was making on the Idylls into the last week of his life. It used to be thought a truism that Tennyson’s poetry fell away when he became *Poet Laureate in 1850. The Laureate Verse was regarded with disdain, particularly by the Modernists. Its strengths are, however, increasingly being recognized – and in addition it is now clear that there was never a final rejection of the Private for the Public, but that Tennyson’s lyric gift continued to the end of his life, as in *‘The Roses on the Terrace’ and *‘June Bracken and Heather’. Christopher Ricks describes Tennyson’s characteristic poetic movement as being ‘a progress outward which is yet a circling home’ (Ricks, 1972: 314). This is epitomized in the stanza form of *In Memoriam, but it also lies behind much of his best verse and it is particularly evident in *‘Crossing the Bar’. His own development as a poet never stopped and he followed it with a dedication that never wavered.
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Tennyson was never a liberal but moved from moderate conservatism to greater conservatism in old age. In his student days, Tennyson wrote poems about ‘the convulsions in *Spain’ (Ricks, 155), about Napoleon, tyranny and the *Reform Bill; he went to *France with *Hallam in 1830 and the two young men became involved in the Spanish republican cause. However, they also defended *Cambridge against the agricultural workers at the time of the Reform Bill in 1832 and were never properly ‘liberals’: despite the great influence of *Shelley’s poetry, the Romantic poet’s radical politics never appealed to the 1830s generation of *Apostles. Three untitled political poems in the 1842 volume – *‘Of Old Sat Freedom in the Heights’, ‘Love Thou Thy Land’ and ‘You Ask Me Why, Tho’ Ill at Ease’ – suggest that Tennyson’s conservatism was always part of his personality and that his trajectory was not the more usual one (followed, for example, by *Wordsworth) from young radical to elderly Tory. Tennyson always tended towards jingoism. He was consistently anti-French and greatly feared Louis Napoleon’s intentions towards England after his coup d’etat in 1852; he wrote seven shrill anti-French poems, including ‘Rifle Clubs!!!’, ‘Britons, Guard Your Own’ and ‘Hands All Round’. In 1865 he defended Governor *Eyre’s killing of 600 black Jamaicans, muttering, ‘Niggers are tigers, niggers are tigers’ (Martin, 459). He also objected strongly to *Gladstone’s policy on *Ireland. Politics and patriotism became identified in his mind, as in the minds of so many of his contemporaries, particularly during the *Crimean War – though that war also produced his best political poem, the subtly subversive *‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ with its disconcerting line, ‘Someone had blundered’. This admiration for heroism is evident in another strand of his politics which was unchanged throughout his life: his response to the bravery of small countries standing against larger oppressive regimes. This was consistent from the 1830s in his support for the Spanish revolutionaries standing against the monarchy, and for *Poland in its struggle against Russia, to his championing, later in life, of *Montenegro against the Turks. In fact, Tennyson was never a party-political animal. When he at last agreed to become a peer in 1884, he sat in the House of Lords on the cross-benches, declaring his independence from Gladstone by saying that he loved the man but hated his policies. He did reluctantly vote for the 1884 Reform Bill which continued the extension of the franchise, but did not scruple to advise Gladstone to beware of direct conflict with the Tories, in ‘Steersman, be not precipitate in thine act’. He broke from Gladstone completely over Home Rule for *Ireland, and his views became much more recognizably ‘Tory’, culminating in the despairing excesses of *‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ (1886) which was vigorously attacked by Gladstone in The Nineteenth Century (January 1887) for what the statesman took to be its narrow-minded pessimism.
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Politics was in the end never a defining issue with Tennyson and he would short-circuit any query with the ‘common-sense’ approach, declaring, ‘I am of the same politics as Plato, *Shakespeare, Bacon, & any sane man’ (Lyall 1902: 7). See also: Race; Revolutions; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: poetry and society.
Tennyson had a lifelong enthusiasm for reading his work aloud. It is hardly an exaggeration, indeed, to describe these authentic transformations of the written text into speech as an addiction and even an obsession. However, unlike such contemporaries as *Dickens, he never did so in public or for profit: such self-exposure would have been deeply repugnant to him. In 1862 he was offered, and declined, the huge sum of £20,000 for a reading tour of America. By this time the readings rarely took place outside his own home, and throughout his life his audiences were limited to small groups of friends and sometimes a single individual. There can be no doubt, however, that these private performances afforded him deep psychological gratification, and many accounts of, and references to, such occasions survive. The long series of private and informal readings began early. In 1835, for instance, he read ‘Morte d’Arthur’ and other poems to his Cambridge friends *FitzGerald and *Spedding, and three years later FitzGerald described other occasions on which ‘we would get Alfred to give us some of his magic music’ (Page, 6). This emphasis on the musicality of Tennyson’s delivery is recurrent: his readings (which were perhaps sometimes recitations) tended towards the incantatory and the chant-like. H. M. Butler referred to his ‘peculiar manner of reading, with its deep and often monotonous tones, varied with a sudden lift of the voice ... ’ (Page, 43). His vocal style could at times be dramatic, and Emily Ritchie described ‘the roll of his great voice’ as being like ‘an incantation’ (Memoir, ii.87). In his prime Tennyson’s voice was obviously an instrument of great power: FitzGerald speaks of his ‘deep-chested music’, and Bram Stoker writes: ‘His voice was powerful and vibrant ... In his reading there was a wonderful sense of time. The lines seemed to swing with an elastic step—like a regiment marching’. Similarly, James *Knowles describes his ‘grand, deep, measured voice’, adding that it was ‘not reading as usually understood, but intoning on a note, almost chanting’ (Page, 93). His choice of material was eclectic, including poems of melodrama and sentiment as well as humorous, anecdotal and dialect verse. Among his favourites seem to have been *‘Locksley Hall’, *‘Rizpah’, *‘Guinevere’, the *‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’, ‘The Spinster’s Sweet-Arts’ and *‘The Northern Farmer (Old Style)’. As this list suggests, longer as well as shorter poems were given, and some of the performances were on a heroic scale: in
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1876 *Gladstone and his family were given the whole of the verse-drama *Harold in a reading that took two and a half hours. But the poem that seems to have meant more than any other to Tennyson as a text for performance was *Maud, and there can be little doubt that performing this ‘monodrama’ satisfied some deep personal need within him. The last reading of Maud, described by Hallam *Tennyson, took place some six weeks before the poet’s death. Hallam’s account of this occasion suggests that even so late in life Tennyson’s vocal powers retained some of their force: ‘His voice, low and calm in everyday life, capable of delicate and manifold inflexion, but with “organ-tones” of great power and range, thoroughly brought out the drama of the poem’ (Memoir, i.395–6). Hallam’s contrasting of his father’s conversational and reading voices makes it clear that occasions of this kind were very consciously performances, and for Tennyson poetry was clearly a performance art. A poem was primarily something heard, and many of his revisions move in the direction of euphony as opposed to radically modifying the meaning. His sense of the emotive power of the human voice, and perhaps especially his own voice, began early: in his old age he recollected that ‘Before I could read I was in the habit on a stormy day of spreading out my arms to the wind, and crying out, “I hear a voice that’s speaking in the wind” ’ (Memoir, i.11). In this striking statement the ‘voice’ of nature finds utterance through not only the words but also the physical voice of the nascent poet. Nearly eighty years elapsed between that childhood experience and the final reading of Maud, and throughout this remarkably long period the connection between creative utterance and the spoken word, between ‘text’ as visible marks on a page and as sound-waves reaching the ear, was evidently crucial in Tennyson’s mind and sensibility. That connection surely has implications for the way we should read his poetry. See also: ‘Charge of the Light Brigade, The’; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: recordings. Reception Tennyson’s extreme sensitivity to criticism meant that critics’ opinions actively affected his poetry. 1830, 1833 The publication of *Poems by Two Brothers (1827) attracted no critical attention, but *Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) slowly elicited favourable reviews. The Spectator reviewer in August 1830 found similarities between the young poet and Abraham Cowley; in early 1831 the Westminster and the New Monthly both reviewed the volume favourably, the anonymous Westminster reviewer (W. J. Fox) perceptively noting that the strength of the poems lies in ‘the analysis of particular states of mind’ and prophetically commenting that ‘a genuine poet
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has deep responsibilities to his country and the world’ and that the young Tennyson has already shown himself to have ‘his own just conception of the grandeur of a poet’s destiny’ (Jump, 32–3). Arthur *Hallam, to draw more attention to the volume, wrote an anonymous review for the new Englishman’s Magazine in 1831, in which he adumbrates the ‘Poetry of Sensation’ (Tennyson’s forte) as being quite different from the ‘Poetry of Reflection’. The review has had great influence in anticipating the Symbolist Movement of the later years of the century and much later was praised by W. B. *Yeats. For Tennyson himself, taken in contrast with Fox’s Utilitarian viewpoint, it sets up the tension in his work between ‘Pure’ and ‘Applied’ Poetry, between poetry for its own sake and poetry for the public good – a tension which was to trouble him for the rest of his poetic career. The 21-year-old Hallam declared, uncompromisingly, ‘Whenever the mind of the artist suffers itself to be occupied, during its periods of creation, by any other motive than the desire for beauty, the result is false in art’ (Jump, 35). This was too much for one of the leading critics of the day, Professor John Wilson (Christopher *North). In February 1832, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, he praised Tennyson’s poems briefly but, in a full-length article in the May edition of Blackwood’s, he attacked first the young critics who had praised Tennyson and then some of the weaker poems in the collection. Angered by the attack on Hallam as much as the attack on his own work, Tennyson unwisely penned an epigram, *‘To Christopher North’, which he almost at once regretted. The publicity of Wilson’s attack, however, probably helped rather than hindered the fledgling poet’s reputation. The 1833 volume faces the tension between ‘pure’ creativity and the public duty of the poet. It was generally less well-received than the earlier volume, critics identifying instances of preciousness and affectation, as well as some richly imaginative works. Edward Bulwer (later *Bulwer-Lytton) launched into a brutal attack in the New Monthly Magazine (January 1833), holding up ‘To Christopher North’ and *‘O Darling Room’ for particular ridicule and accusing Tennyson of effeminacy and ‘an eunuch strain’. J. W. *Croker, the destroyer of John *Keats, had identified the young Tennyson (wrongly) as another member of the hated ‘Cockney School’, a radical in the Keats/*Shelley mould, and attempted a demolition of his poetic pretensions in a sarcastic review in the Quarterly which for the time utterly destroyed Tennyson’s precarious confidence. James *Spedding encouraged John Stuart *Mill to produce a strong defence in the radical London Review (July 1835), showing the development from the 1830 to the 1833 volumes – but by then Tennyson was mourning Hallam and had moved into a decade of silence.
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1842 After Croker, Tennyson’s reputation stagnated in England, though Emerson’s and Margaret Fuller’s enthusiasm gave him a keen following in *America. An 1842 British Anthology, Modern Poets of the Nineteenth Century, included 43 writers,
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but no room was found for Tennyson, though S. T. *Coleridge referred to him favourably in his Table Talk (1835). When the new double volume eventually appeared, it was obvious that Tennyson had worked hard at revising and developing his poetry. He was no longer mis-identified with radical politics, and all the reviewers seemed bent on reminding him of the need to relate to modern life. Francis *Garden (an *Apostle and friend) in the Christian Remembrancer (July 1842) declared that he held the foremost place among the young generation of poets but that he should move away from Hallam’s ‘Pure Poetry’ to write about his time. John *Sterling brought the Quarterly back into Tennyson’s camp with a similar exhortation (September 1842). Leigh *Hunt (Church of England Quarterly Review, October 1842), Richard Monkton *Milnes (Westminster Review, October 1842) and James Spedding (Edinburgh Review, April 1843) all united in praise, and encouraged Tennyson to produce a more ambitious work. During the 1840s Tennyson’s reputation quietly grew. In 1844 R. H. Horne called him ‘a true poet of the highest class of genius’ (Jump, 153). In 1846, after Tennyson was granted a pension from the Civil List, Bulwer attacked him in ‘The New Timon’; Tennyson’s angry response, in *‘The New Timon and the Poets’ elicited much sympathy, with newspapers and magazines rallying to his support. He was being recognized as ‘the coming man’; a few years later, this recognition had grown into something close to idolatry. The Princess (1847) There was a largely positive reception to this poem in which the escapism of the medieval fairytale is justified by its application to the contemporary issue of women’s education. Charles *Kingsley (Fraser’s Magazine, September 1850) declared that it was a fine mirror of the nineteenth century. Even those who demurred paid Tennyson the compliment of expecting greater things from him. Tennyson revised the poem rigorously in the light of the criticisms and it sold well, going into four editions by 1851. In Memoriam (1850) Tennyson suddenly reached the pinnacle of his reputation with this poem. Critics compared it to *Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ and to *Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It was generally accepted that Tennyson had fulfilled his promise. Though some readers worried about the depth of his religious faith, most regarded it almost as a book of devotion. There were few changes in subsequent editions.
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Maud (1855) The Spectator praised the poem but was almost alone: critics complained of its ‘morbidity’. *Gladstone and others objected to the apparent glorification of
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Idylls of the King, The (1859) This was generally welcomed with relief as a return to Tennyson’s former ‘noble’ manner. Gladstone was overwhelmed, especially by *‘Guinevere’. *Longfellow, Macaulay, *Jowett, A. H. *Clough, *Thackeray and *Ruskin all found something to delight them in the poems, though Ruskin added that his own preference was still for Tennyson’s contemporary poems like In Memoriam, Maud and *The Miller’s Daughter. Enoch Arden and Other Poems (1864) This was by far the most popular volume in Tennyson’s lifetime. More than 40,000 copies were sold within a short time of publication. The sentimental ‘Victorian’ poems made this volume overwhelmingly popular in its day but, by the same token, less accessible to later readers. Tennyson was even afraid that he might become the ‘Poet of the People’ in a way that would vitiate his higher ambitions for his poetry. Idylls of the King, The (1869) By now, the fashion for contemporary poems had run its course and critics recognized that these poems, despite their medieval setting, did contain lessons for their own age. Tennyson had confessed that John *Sterling’s criticism of the first Idyll published, the *‘Morte d’Arthur’ (in his review of the 1842 volume, Quarterly, September 1842), had put him off continuing the Arthurian poems for over a decade. There was much debate about the central meaning, particularly of *‘The Holy Grail’: James *Knowles’s letter in The Spectator was praised by Tennyson as the closest to explaining what he had intended. 1870s From the late 1860s, Tennyson’s reputation was unassailable. He was felt to embody the age, to be the only great living poet, comparable with Shakespeare. These expectations encouraged Tennyson to begin writing plays. Various critics still sniped at him, ineffectually, for being third-rate (Alfred *Austin), too polished (Ruskin and *Arnold) and too derivative, even plagiaristic (John Churton *Collins). This last criticism was the only one to infuriate the poet in the way in which the early criticism had done.
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war in the conclusion. Many readers found it ‘obscure’, and Tennyson accordingly revised it carefully in later editions to make the plot clearer. When critics returned to the poem later in Tennyson’s career, they tended to understand and admire it much more, in the light of the poet’s later work which, as it were, had taught them how to read it.
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Tennyson’s ‘imperial position in Poetry’ (*Palgrave) remained unchallenged, despite the snipers, until well after his death. Even *Swinburne, a sceptic of long standing (who had talked of the ‘Morte D’Albert’) declared that no-one was to make fun of Tennyson except himself. His challenge was, however, the most telling: the sensuousness of his own verse brought into English poetry a new frankness, much influenced by French writers like *Baudelaire, which Tennyson distrusted and could not or would not emulate. This became the ‘rift in the lute’ of his reputation in the early years of the twentieth century. 1880s Walt *Whitman thanked Tennyson on behalf of all his American readers. Other American writers acknowledged their debt to him. His fame was now transatlantic rather than European. Tiresias and Other Poems (1885) The reviews were adulatory: at 76, Tennyson was now a ‘Grand Old Man’ of letters, and the eagerly awaited volume, with its range and variety, did not disappoint. *‘The Ancient Sage’ in particular attracted admiration, especially from Jowett, for its radiant serenity. There was some surprise at the addition of yet another Idyll, the last of the 12, *‘Balin and Balan’, written in the previous decade, but this too satisfied readers, who felt that the old poet was bringing his work to completion. Demeter and Other Poems (1889) Another adulatory response greeted this, the final volume to be published in Tennyson’s lifetime. In the first week, 20,000 copies were sold. The strength of the lyric poems was particularly remarkable in the 80-year-old poet. Posthumous reputation Tennyson’s pre-eminence continued for about thirty years after his death, and much longer with the general reader. However, what came to be seen as his moralizing and the ‘applied’ quality of his poetry was soon judged inadequate to the needs of the Symbolists like *Yeats and the Modernists like *Hardy. In 1922 Hardy could write (deliberately using Tennyson’s own imagery from *‘Mariana’),
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The bower we enshrin’d to Tennyson, Gentlemen, Is roof-wrecked; damps there drip upon
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Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust, The spider is sole denizen; Even she who voiced those rhymes is dust, Gentlemen! (Hardy, ‘An Ancient to Ancients’, 36–42).
Key reviews Fox 1831; Hallam 1831; North 1832; Croker 1833. Recordings Representatives from the Thomas Edison Company came over from the USA in May 1890 to record Tennyson reading his own poetry. They stayed for several days, during which time he read into a phonograph ‘The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls’, *‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, ‘Come into the Garden, Maud’, ‘Ask me No More’ and other brief extracts from his work. Tennyson reads hypnotically, chanting his verse with no attempt at intonation. It is as if he were reading from the Greek or Roman classics: as Edmund *Gosse remarked: ‘He hangs sleepily over the syllables, in a rough monotonous murmur, sacrificing everything to quantity’ (Martin, 574). The original wax cylinders were left for years resting against the radiators at *Farringford and were as a consequence in poor condition, but they have recently been digitally remastered and put on CD by the British Library. See also: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: readings. Religion Tennyson was brought up in the Church of England but developed a nondogmatic, eclectic Christianity, founded on a passionate need to believe in personal immortality. Tennyson’s mother had a simple Christian piety which made her a much more attractive model of faith than his troubled father, the Rector. This simple faith, evident in his mother and, later, in his wife, appealed strongly to Tennyson, though he did not share it. His hatred of the doctrine of eternal damnation was sharpened by his contact with his Aunt Mary *Bourne who believed in predestination and was sure her nephew was doomed to hellfire. He always made a pointed contrast between, on the one hand, religious enthusiasm based on judgement and, on the other, the simple faith of his mother and his wife, based on compassion. After his father’s death, Tennyson, like his brothers, seemed destined by his grandfather and uncle for the Church. Where his more compliant brother *Charles gave way, Alfred persistently refused, confident of his vocation as a poet. During his lonely bachelor years, however, he explained to *FitzGerald
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See also: Critical approaches; Periodicals.
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the strength of his belief in a Divine Artificer, declaring that ‘I would rather know I was to be damned eternally than not to know that I was to live eternally’ (Martin, 262). His lack of a conventional Christian belief troubled Emily *Sellwood and was one of the reasons for the long breakdown in their engagement. Tennyson was not a regular churchgoer, though he said of Christianity (echoing Arthur *Hallam), ‘It is rugging at my heart’ (Martin, 331). He teased his mother when she became part of the apocalyptic school of Dr John Cumming. It was *In Memoriam which apparently finally convinced Emily of the quality of Tennyson’s spirituality – she called it ‘a spirit monument grand and true’ (Martin, 331) – and they were reconciled and married in 1850. ‘The peace of God came into my life before the altar when I wedded her’, he said (Martin, 334). On their honeymoon they met Aubrey *de Vere, who felt that Tennyson was becoming more of an orthodox Christian; however, he still refused, much to Emily’s disappointment, to go to church, though he would instead read prayers, lessons and sermons by F. D. *Maurice. Emily did persuade him to attend afternoon church for a time at *Farringford, though the *Isle of Wight neighbours continued to note how rarely he was seen in church. As he grew older, Tennyson’s beliefs became more eclectic. In 1865 he told *Allingham, ‘I believe in pantheism, of a sort’ (Allingham, 54). ‘Time is nothing. Are we not all part of the Deity?’ (Allingham, 54). His reading in *Lyell, *Chambers and later *Darwin had certainly changed the way in which he thought about personal immortality and produced the agonized ‘Evolutionary Stanzas’ in In Memoriam, with their memorable evocation of ‘fanes of fruitless prayer’ (In Memoriam Lyric lvi, 12) and their bitter account of the deception of Christianity. His search in later life led him in 1868 to become a founder member of the *Metaphysical Society. He rarely attended, though he did send *‘The Higher Pantheism’ to be read at one meeting. Sir Frederick Pollock memorably observed that ‘*Knowles set up the Metaphysical Society for the purpose of convincing Tennyson of the immortality of the soul’ (Martin, 483). Through his contact with the society, Tennyson came to respect agnosticism, though he continued to see pure materialism as irrational. He also had a deep-seated prejudice against *Roman Catholicism. When travelling in Europe with Emily, he had been scornful of Roman Catholicism’s belief in saints and holy relics, though he was, in later years, much more tolerant than Emily of the Roman Catholic faith of the *Simeon family, their neighbours on the Isle of Wight. Sir John Simeon became a close friend. In *Queen Mary Tennyson described the founding of England through rebellion against Roman Catholicism. (Papal Infallibility had been pronounced five years before the play [in 1870], seeming to make loyalty to the Crown impossible for British Roman Catholics.) On what turned out to be his last day at
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Farringford, Tennyson had the Rector of Freshwater, Dr *Merriman, administer communion to the family in his study. He was careful, even now, to distance himself from High Church practices by beginning with Cranmer’s protestant statement of faith in Queen Mary: ‘It is but a communion, not a mass,/No sacrifice, but a life-giving feast’ (Martin, 578). Later in life Tennyson would frequently ask casual acquaintances for reassurances about the afterlife, on one occasion making the request of a local shepherd. In conversations with such Church leaders as the Bishop of Ripon, he declared his belief that original sin would not be punished; he also confessed to the Bishop that he didn’t believe in hell. Exploring Westminster Abbey with his son, *Hallam, he declared, ‘It is beautiful, but what empty and awful mockery if there were no God!’ (Martin, 555). In 1885 came *‘The Ancient Sage’, loved by the liberally minded *Jowett. Here Tennyson reaffirms his optimism about the divinity of the world and the immortality of the human spirit. The optimistic old seer has learned that faith need not depend on reason; the younger listener is gloomy and pessimistic. The older has learned to lose himself in the Nameless. After his son *Lionel’s death in 1886, Tennyson felt constantly aware of the spirit world around him: ‘a great ocean pressing round us on every side, and only leaking in by a few chinks’ (Martin, 557). He went to a séance and, on being told that a spirit was present, cried out, ‘Are you my boy Lionel?’ It was Emily, with her unshakeable faith, who helped him through the bereavement. *‘Crossing the Bar’, written in 1889, a year after Tennyson had been very ill, displays a child-like faith and serenity which is reminiscent of that of Emily. There was, however, no indisputable conquering of religious Doubt in the final days – although in the last few weeks Tennyson refused any longer to discuss the subject with Jowett. Hints about his thinking can be perhaps gleaned from the poems which, according to Hallam Tennyson, his father wrote ‘at the end of his life’ (Ricks, 1456). There is the continuing power of the beloved dead in ‘The Silent Voices’ – ‘Call me not so often back,/Silent Voices of the dead’ (3–4); there is the long-delayed pendant to the melodramatic monologue, ‘Despair’, called ‘Faith’ (‘Doubt no longer that the Highest is the wisest and the best’ [1]). However, none of these poems matches in poetic force the earlier greater poems of Doubt. Tennyson had admitted to Wilfred *Ward several years earlier that when he prayed he felt as if God did not hear him. It is surely significant that when, as he lay dying, Tennyson collected his favourite books about him, he chose, not the Bible, but the classical poets he had loved as a boy and, most of all, his beloved *Shakespeare. These are books chosen for comfort by a man whose deepest religious feeling seems after all to have been not so much for Christianity as for Poetry.
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See also: Roman Catholicism; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: faith and doubt.
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Tennyson’s love of the sea began in childhood with his trips to *Mablethorpe, where the family holidayed. He would go to Mablethorpe in times of stress, to gaze on the waves. The place was linked in his mind with the Aegean Sea and with classical myth, and his lines ‘Oft, when a child, I lay reclined’ show the link clearly: ‘Here stood the infant Ilion of my mind/And here the Grecian ships did seem to be’ (‘Mablethorpe’, 3–4). The verse seems to have been written in 1833, after Arthur *Hallam’s death, but was only published, as two stanzas, in 1850. The *Idylls of the King was always linked in his mind with the coastline of *Cornwall, Wales, *Ireland and Brittany with its recurrent sea imagery, and he made repeated visits to these rocky coasts during the long years when he was writing the poems. After his marriage and the move from Twickenham, Alfred and *Emily took a furnished house between Eastbourne and Brighton, with views over the sea and the Downs. Thereafter they looked for a permanent home by the sea and in 1853 found *Farringford on the *Isle of Wight. Tennyson also loved sea voyages, beginning with his trip to the Continent with Hallam in 1830. On their return journey they took passage on the Leeds, bound from Bordeaux to Dublin and for four days enjoyed the romance of shipboard with the young ladies who were fellow-passengers. In 1858 Tennyson travelled alone to Norway, when Emily could not accompany him as planned to the Styrian Alps. A great storm in the North Sea broke the ship’s mast, but it was otherwise not a thrilling expedition for Tennyson, who mixed with the English at the Consul’s house in Christiana (now Oslo) and on his return said that he thought Norway was indistinguishable from *Scotland. In 1859 he travelled with *Palgrave to Portugal, another long sea voyage during which he garnered background scenery for *‘Enoch Arden’. The most eventful sea voyage of all was that on Sir Donald Currie’s 4,000 tons ship, the Pembroke Castle, in 1883, when Tennyson and his son *Hallam, accompanied by the Gladstone family, went for a fortnight’s trial cruise of the ship up the west coast of Scotland and on to Norway. Thousands cheered the Prime Minister and Poet Laureate as they embarked. *Gladstone and Tennyson talked of Arthur Hallam. After Christiansand in Norway the cruise was extended, at Tennyson’s request, to Denmark, so that he could visit Elsinore and Copenhagen. The ship’s party was invited to dinner by the King of Denmark, but Tennyson declined. The following day all the royalty staying with the King, which included the Princess of Wales, the Tsar and Tsarina of Russia and the King and Queen of Greece came on board the Pembroke Castle for a luncheon at which Tennyson mistook the Tsarina for a fellow passenger and called her ‘my dear girl’. It was during this voyage that Tennyson himself initiated discussion of the question of honours and finally agreed to
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accept the peerage that Gladstone had already offered him on four occasions in the past, insisting that he was accepting only for the greater honour of literature (See also: Barony). Tennyson’s final voyage was in 1889, when, accompanied by Hallam and by Nurse *Durham, who had cared for him in his illness earlier that year, he took a fortnight’s cruise on the Sunbeam, a luxurious three-masted schooner lent to him by Lord *Brassey. They had intended to go to *Ireland, but bad weather made them opt instead for exploring once more the coast of Devon and *Cornwall that he loved so well. The cold distressed him, but he talked of the past, often forgetting who was still alive and who dead, and reading *‘Guinevere’ with tears streaming down his face. When, unexpectedly, he made a full recovery from that illness, Nurse Durham suggested that he should write a hymn of thanksgiving. This led to the most famous of all of Tennyson’s sea trips, the last of his annual returns to *Farringford from *Aldworth in October 1889. Accompanied again by Nurse Durham, Tennyson watched the waves of the Solent and in the 20-minute voyage composed *‘Crossing the Bar’ which he scribbled down on their arrival at Yarmouth and, that evening, gave to Nurse Durham: ‘Will this do for you, old woman?’ he said (Martin, 570). See also: Water.
Tennyson, Arthur See: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: brothers and sisters.
Tennyson, Cecilia See: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: brothers and sisters.
Tennyson, Charles See: Turner, Charles Tennyson.
Tennyson, Edward See: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: brothers and sisters.
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Tennyson, Elizabeth (‘Eliza’ née Fytche)
Tennyson, Elizabeth (‘Eliza’ née Fytche) (1781–1865) Tennyson’s mother.
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Elizabeth Fytche was the daughter of a former rector of *Louth, Lincolnshire, and a niece of the Bishop of Lincoln. She met George Clayton *Tennyson while the latter was in lodgings in the town, waiting to take over the united parishes of *Somersby and Bag Enderby. Beautiful, dark-haired, rosy-complexioned and sweet-natured, she was the subject of 25 proposals of marriage before she finally accepted the handsome young priest. Their marriage was marred by the incompatibility of his intense, unstable character and her placid, easy-going temperament, and by the gradual destruction of his personality by drink. Marital happiness seems to have been replaced over the years by his violent rages and her fears for her children. In February 1829, Eliza wrote to her fatherin-law, George *Tennyson, announcing her intention of living separately from her husband. He gave her little support and she eventually took the children to lodgings with her own family in Louth. Dr Tennyson’s expeditions abroad gave the family some breathing spaces when they returned to Somersby, and his death in 1831 brought a sort of peace, spoilt by the mental problems of *Edward and *Septimus and by constant money worries. There is a clear portrait of Elizabeth in ‘Isabel’ (*Poems 1830), where she is imagined as a vine supporting her wayward husband. In 1837 the family moved to High Beech in Essex and later in her life her children rented a flat for her in Hampstead where she lived with her eccentric unmarried daughter *Matilda. Eliza read poetry to her children to such good effect that they all wrote verse as easily as prose. She created an atmosphere at Somersby attractive enough to win the heart of Arthur *Hallam, as well as other members of the *Apostles, including R. J. *Tennant, and her supposed ineffectuality must be set against her successfully raising 11 children who went on adoring her into adult life. It would be difficult, in fact, to prescribe a more fertile childhood for a poet than the one Eliza provided. Edward *FitzGerald, notoriously difficult to please, and a severe critic of Tennyson’s wife, found his mother ‘one of the most innocent and tender-hearted ladies I ever saw’, and Tennyson’s own spontaneous tribute, to the vicar at her funeral, could not be bettered: ‘She was the beautifullest thing God Almighty ever did make’ (Charles Tennyson, 14, 355).
Tennyson, Emily (Emilia) See: Jesse, Emilia; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: brothers and sisters
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Tennyson, Emily, Lady (née Sellwood) (1813–96) Tennyson’s wife. Emily Sellwood, the quiet, semi-invalid daughter of a Horncastle solicitor, probably met Alfred Tennyson when she was 16 and he 20. Her mother had
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died when she was 3 and the Sellwood sisters, Emily, Anne and Louisa, often stayed with their cousins, the *Cracrofts, at *Harrington Hall near *Somersby. In April 1830 there was a more significant meeting during a Somersby party to entertain Arthur *Hallam. Emily, accompanied by Arthur Hallam, came upon Tennyson unexpectedly in Holywell Wood. Seeing Emily in her pale blue dress he asked, ‘Are you a Dryad or a Naiad, or what are you?’ (Martin, 104). To Emily he seemed ‘a mysterious being, lifted high above other mortals’ (Martin, 104). She was in love from that moment. It may be significant that Hallam’s own love for Tennyson’s sister *Emily dated from a similar encounter in the same wood a few days earlier. Much of the emotion of this time is transferred to *‘The Lover’s Tale’, where Rosa *Baring may also be a silent presence. Tennyson did not reciprocate Emily’s obvious feeling for him until much later, at the marriage of Louisa *Sellwood to his beloved brother *Charles in 1836. His poem *‘The Bridesmaid’ marks the moment: I loved thee for the tear thou couldst not hide ... And thought, ‘My life is sick of single sleep: O happy bridesmaid, make a happy bride!’ (11, 13–14) The Tennysons soon after moved to *High Beech in Essex but Emily and Alfred continued to meet and kept up a correspondence and by 1839 Emily’s family at least considered them engaged. However, there followed a painful separation of 10 long years. There are many theories as to the reason for the long delay but all are largely speculative, Hallam *Tennyson, at his parents’ instigation, having destroyed almost all the letters between the two after his father’s death. The first contributory factor was the split between the Tennyson and Sellwood families in 1839, when Charles’s opium addiction led to his separation from Louisa. Tennyson’s trip to *Wales alone that summer alarmed Emily. In January 1840 he wrote to her: ‘If thou knewest why I fly thee there is nothing thou would’st more wish for than that I should fly thee’ (Martin, 427). Several biographers have glossed this as a revelation of Tennyson’s fear of hereditary madness and epilepsy, which they take to be the underlying reason for the split. The official reason given, however, one favoured by Hallam Tennyson in his Memoir of his father, was Tennyson’s lack of money. Whatever the truth of the matter, by May 1840 the engagement had been broken and Henry Sellwood had forbidden all correspondence between the two. During the 1840s none of Tennyson’s London friends heard him mention Emily, though the poem *‘Love and Duty’ in the 1842 volume may well have been inspired by their parting. Left in Horncastle with her father, Emily clung to her friendship with the youngest Tennyson sister, *Cecilia, but in 1847 the Sellwoods left Lincolnshire and moved to Farnham in Surrey. During that year too Dr J. M. *Gully, administering the ‘water cure’ in Cheltenham, succeeded
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in convincing Tennyson that he was not suffering from inherited epilepsy but gout, and shortly afterwards Emily and Alfred met accidentally at *Park House, where both were visiting Cecilia. In December 1847 Tennyson sent Emily a copy of his newly published book *The Princess. By November 1849, when he sent her versions of ‘Sweet and Low’ to choose between for a new edition of that book, the courtship had effectively been renewed. This time it was Emily who was reluctant, on the grounds of Alfred’s unconventional religious views. The publication of *In Memoriam, which he had shown her in manuscript, finally quieted her fears and the marriage took place with little preparation, on 13 June 1850, in *Shiplake Church in Oxfordshire. The union was undoubtedly a successful one on a personal level. Emily gave Tennyson the domestic stability he needed as well as supplying free and dedicated secretarial help as he became an increasingly public figure. At *Farringford she presided over a stream of visitors, most of whom, from *Carlyle to *De Vere, adored her. Edward *Lear’s tribute, though excessive, is not unique: ‘I should think ... that fifteen angels, several hundreds of ordinary women, many philosophers, a heap of truly wise and kind mothers, three or four minor prophets, and a lot of doctors and school-mistresses, might all be boiled down, and yet their combined essence fall short of what Emily Tennyson really is’ (Martin, 427). Edward *FitzGerald, however, felt that Emily stifled Alfred and contributed to a decline in his poetry: ‘An old Housekeeper like Molière’s would have been far better for him, I think’ (Martin, 500). Elizabeth Barrett *Browning said, ‘His wife is too much his second self; she does not criticize enough’ (Martin, 426). Certainly Emily went out of her way to encourage her husband’s poetry. It was Emily who persuaded Tennyson to retain In Memoriam as the title of his ‘Fragments of an Elegy’. She sent him for holidays alone in the Lake District and elsewhere to encourage composition; she constantly searched and encouraged others to search for subjects for poetry, as if she believed that a good moral subject was all that was needed. She was behind the writing of the epilogue *‘To the Queen’ at the end of the *Idylls; she insisted on the title of the *Enoch Arden and Other Poems volume; and she encouraged the writing of *‘The Holy Grail’, doubting afterwards if the poem would have been written ‘but for my endeavour, and the Queen’s wish and the Crown Princess’ (Ricks, 1660). Tennyson acknowledged his wife’s contribution to Enoch Arden and Other Poems by dedicating the volume to her in a painstakingly crafted verse, ‘Dear, near and true’. After a breakdown caused by overwork on her husband’s behalf, she and her elder son Hallam took shared responsibility for Tennyson’s daily life and for the publication of his work. Emily’s influence on Tennyson’s later poetry has often been criticized. Many later critics have argued that, having found contentment, he lapsed into mawkishness or patriotic excesses. The revaluation of the many fine lyrics of the later period has signally changed that assessment. In particular, *‘June Bracken and
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Heather’, the lyric he presented to Emily on her seventieth birthday, has suggested that her effect on his poetry was not entirely negative. There is some debate as to the addressee of *‘Roses on the Terrace’, Harold Nicolson (1923) and Ann Thwaite (1996) arguing that this poem too is for Emily, while most commentators assume it is addressed to Rosa *Baring. Christopher Ricks (1992) seems to combine the two views: while assuming that it is prompted by the death of Rosa Baring’s husband, he points out that ‘fifty years ago’ was exactly when Tennyson fell in love with Emily. After her husband’s death, Emily set about with Hallam organizing material for the Memoir. Her dedication never flagged. On her deathbed four years later she said, ‘I have tried to be a good wife’ (Thwaite 1996: 604). There seems little doubt that, by most reasonable measurements, she succeeded. The authoritative biography is Thwaite (1996). See also: Sellwood family.
Tennyson, Frederick See: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: brothers and sisters.
Tennyson, George (1750–1835) Tennyson’s grandfather: a powerful figure in his childhood and youth. ‘The Old Man of the Wolds’, a formidable presence in the lives of his children and grandchildren, was the only child of Michael Tennyson (1721–96) and his wife Elizabeth (née Clayton). His mother was an heiress, who brought into the family the delicate mental health which characterized the next generation. She died when George was only 5, and he developed into a shrewd, self-sufficient, reputedly hard character, though something of a hypochondriac and always liable to attacks of self-pity at alleged neglect by his relatives. In 1773, he completed his apprenticeship to a solicitor near Hull and set up practice in Market Rasen in North Lincolnshire. In 1775 he married Mary Turner (1753–1825), the raven-haired daughter of a rich land-owning family in Caistor, whose sweet, ineffectual nature was thereafter devoted entirely to pleasing her demanding husband and not vexing him. Her letters are full of apologies to him for her own or their four children’s illnesses, though there is also a strain of humour and light-heartedness. George built up his business successfully and became a man of considerable property, his most significant purchase being a small seventeenth-century manor house called Beacons near *Tealby, which had belonged to his Clayton ancestors and which he expanded to become Tealby Lodge, before moving his family into residence at the turn of the century. In the next few years, his son
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*Charles, having invented a Norman-French ancestry for the house and the family, had renamed it *Bayons Manor. Of his four children, two, *Elizabeth and *Charles were kept at home, while *George Clayton (the poet’s father) and *Mary were sent for several years to be brought up by, respectively, George’s father in Holderness and Mary’s mother in Caistor. It is possible that this was a recognition of the lonely state of the widower and widow rather than a rejection of the two children – though young George particularly always felt an outsider in his father’s affections compared to his favoured younger brother. George and Mary’s marriage was unexpectedly successful and when Mary died in 1825 her husband’s terse account in a letter to his elder daughter expresses Stoicism rather than lack of feeling: ‘I saw her dying, I saw her dead, & I am alive’ (Martin, 44). His misery made even the Tealby house gloomy and he began to rely on his favoured son and family for company, complaining bitterly at every slight or sign of neglect. The family letters are full of complaints about the behaviour of other family members as well as detailed discussion of health, in particular the condition of the bowels. George decided early that his younger son would make a better builder of the family fortunes than the wilder and more emotional George Clayton. He educated the two at the same school in York and both went on to St John’s College, *Cambridge. However, George was then found a place in the Church (traditionally the profession of a younger son) while Charles went on to study Law. The ‘Disinheritance Tradition’, in which young George ‘s family vehemently believed, sprang from this (and was reinforced in 1835 by the provisions of Old George’s will). It remains likely, however, that Old George was right in thinking that other professions would not have suited his difficult elder son. The Church was regarded by the middle classes at the time not so much as a vocation as a refuge for the more unworldly members of a family, and the result was several generations of scholarly clerics who paid a varying degree of attention to their pastoral duties. Alfred Tennyson’s branch of the family doggedly held to their belief in their grandfather’s wickedness in casting off their father, citing a family tradition that a neighbouring squire, *Heneage of Hainton, when told by Old George of his intention to disinherit, had replied, ‘George, if you do this you will be damned, you will indeed’ (Memoir, i.13). That Alfred told this story in old age to his own son, *Hallam, is an indication of the tenacity of the ‘Disinheritance Tradition’. George Tennyson, having given up Bayons to his son, died nearby at Usselby at the age of 85, clutching his son Charles’s hand and fighting to the last. His last words were, ‘Charles, I am dying, help me’ (Martin, 204). None of the Somersby family came to the very grand funeral. No-one from Usselby or Tealby had come to George Clayton Tennyson’s funeral four years earlier and the family rift now ran deep. George Tennyson’s Will made careful provision for
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the Somersby branch, leaving them all that he had gained through entail and inheritance (as befitted the senior branch of the family) while younger brother Charles and his family were left everything that George had earned through purchase or speculation, a reasonable recognition of Charles’s assistance to Old George in business matters. The story of the ‘Disinheritance Tradition’ so implacably believed in by the Somersby family was, however, reinforced by the provisions of the will since, in practice, Charles’s family’s inheritance was substantially larger than that of the Somersby family, while their need was demonstrably the greater. (Charles had 7 children as against the widowed Eliza’s 11 and was himself making a good career in the law and politics.)
Tennyson, George (1806) (died in infancy) See: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: brothers and sisters.
Tennyson, Dr George Clayton (1778–1831) Tennyson’s father. The third child and elder son of *George and Mary Tennyson, George was sent away to be brought up at Michael Tennyson’s (his paternal grandfather) home in Holderness, while his sister Mary was sent to live with her maternal grandmother. This sharing of children through the family was common at the time but, when his younger brother Charles was born in 1784 and kept at home, the pattern of rejection in George’s emotional life began to be established. George was sent to school in York and then for a year to Huntingdon to be prepared for *Cambridge University. He matriculated at St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1796 and took a pass degree in 1804. His father intended him for the Church and arranged for him to have the living first of Benniworth and later of the joint parishes of *Somersby and *Bag Enderby in *Lincolnshire. Meanwhile his younger brother Charles, a much more confident and personable young man, became effectively his father’s heir. This ‘Disinheritance Tradition’ has been questioned but it is certainly the version of events believed by the Somersby Tennysons. Despite the sibling rivalry thus established, George remained close to his brother, but was both terrified and resentful of his father, ‘Old George’. When he married the beautiful Elizabeth *Fytche, George soon found himself head of a large family and tried to shoulder his responsibilities. However, as he fought with an uncongenial profession, alcoholism and epilepsy, he became a figure of fear in his own home, though in the parish he was well respected for his beautiful voice and impressive sermons. On one occasion Elizabeth,
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anicipating violence to her children, took the family to her own relatives in *Louth. George’s escapes to the Continent resulted in wild stories, almost certainly fantastic, including a desperate escape from *Russia which, much later in life, his son Alfred would recount with relish. Despite his problems, he educated his eldest three sons at home and was himself a not inconsiderable poet. He died probably of a combination of alcohol and laudanum abuse, in 1831, and Alfred slept in his father’s bed the night after the death. The death certificate cited ‘typhoid’ as the cause of death, but Alfred’s action suggests that the infectious disease was used as a tactful concealment of the actual cause. None of the Tealby family, apart from his sister, Mary *Bourne, came to the funeral, another cause of resentment to the Somersby Tennysons. George’s unhappy life did have one good fruit in the education he succeeded in giving his sons: ‘I have known some satisfaction in thinking that my boys will turn out to be clever men. Phoenix-like, I trust (though I don’t think myself a Phoenix) they will spring from my ashes, in consequence of the exertions I have bestowed upon them’ (Martin, 40). It is a satisfying epitaph. See also: Bousfield, Dr William. Further reading: Sturman and Purton (1993).
Tennyson, Hallam, 2nd Lord Tennyson (1852–1928) Oldest surviving son and biographer of Tennyson; later governor of Australia. Hallam Tennyson was born on 11 August 1852, when his mother was 39 and his father 43. An older brother had been stillborn the previous year. His godfathers were Henry *Hallam and F. D. *Maurice. Tennyson was so moved by the birth that he wrote a loving ode to him, ‘De Profundis’ (‘Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep’). Hallam and his younger brother *Lionel were brought up protectively, largely on the *Isle of Wight, with private tutors, until they were eventually and reluctantly sent to a preparatory school when Hallam was 13 and Lionel 11. Hallam went on to Marlborough and thence to *Cambridge. His unselfish loyalty to his parents was tested in 1874 when he was forced by his mother’s breakdown to return home permanently: ‘I was summoned home from Cambridge and became my father’s secretary,’ he records calmly in his Memoir (cited in Martin, 505–6). He became indispensable to both his parents and supplanted the bevy of younger friends like *Allingham and *Palgrave who had previously surrounded Tennyson, though he remained uneasy at the continuing influence of James *Knowles. Hallam seems to have fallen vainly in love with Mary *Gladstone, but in 1884 he married a beautiful but poor Irish girl, Audrey Boyle. It was perhaps because of guilt at having deprived his son of a career that Tennyson eventually accepted a peerage, to be passed on to him. In later life, Hallam did gain a career
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of his own, being appointed Governor-General of Australia. His Memoir of his father has proved invaluable to Tennyson scholars, though it is carefully edited, by Hallam and his mother, to sanitize the poet’s character.
Tennyson, Horatio
Tennyson, Lionel (1854–86) Second surviving son of Tennyson; father of Sir Charles Tennyson. Lionel was born on 16 March 1854 and given his name because his father ‘saw Mars in the Lion culminating’ (cited from Emily *Tennyson’s ‘Journal’ in Martin, 377). He was a handsome, temperamental, charming child, fond of amateur dramatics and much photographed in his teens by Julia Margaret *Cameron (unlike his elder, plainer brother). After being tutored at home he was sent because of his stammer, not to Marlborough like his brother, but to Eton. At 21 he became engaged to Eleanor Locker, daughter of Tennyson’s friend, Frederick Locker-Lampson, and they were married in 1878 at Westminster Abbey. The three grandsons born, Alfred (‘golden-haired Ally’), Charles and Michael were a joy to Tennyson and Emily, though the youngest suffered from some unspecified mental trouble which would later blight his short life. In 1885 Lionel and his wife were invited to India by Lord *Dufferin, to further Lionel’s career in the India Office. In 1886 he caught a chill there which affected his lungs and heart. He died on the ship home as it went through the Red Sea and his body was buried at sea. Tennyson, broken-hearted, wrote *‘To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava’. Lionel’s son Charles later wrote of him: ‘though much more akin to his father in temperament than Hallam – perhaps because of this – he had never been so close to the poet as his elder brother’ (Charles Tennyson, 488). Tennyson, Mary See: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: brothers and sisters.
Tennyson, Matilda
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See: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: brothers and sisters.
See: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: brothers and sisters.
Tennyson, Septimus See: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: brothers and sisters.
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Tennyson d’Eyncourt, Charles
Tennyson’s uncle. Tennyson’s dislike of his father’s younger brother coloured many of his own later actions. It was based on the *Somersby Tennysons’ perhaps simplistic belief that their grandfather, George *Tennyson, had disinherited their father, George Clayton *Tennyson, and put him into the Church, simply in order to make Charles his heir. There were, however, complicated reasons behind the decision and Charles remained on good terms with his brother. Charles was handsome and able; he attended St John’s College, *Cambridge, became a barrister in the Inner Temple in 1806, Clerk of the Ordnance in 1831 and was Whig MP successively for Great Grimsby, Bletchingley and Stamford, before gaining a safe seat in Lambeth which he held for 20 years. In 1831 he was involved in a duel with his electoral rival, Lord Thomas Cecil. His marriage to Frances Hutton of Gainsborough was unhappy, partly because of Charles’s affair with Mary Thornhill but also because of sexual incompatibility, and from the mid1820s they lived apart. Charles poured his energies into the family history. In the 1830s he instigated the building of *Bayons Manor and in 1835 changed the family name to Tennyson d’Eyncourt, asserting a link through his mother’s family to an ancient aristocratic lineage. In 1851 he published Eustace, an elegy to his dead son, which inevitably provoked unfavourable comparison with *In Memoriam, published the previous year. He longed for a peerage, which never came, and legend has it that in old age, driving away from his grand Gothic mansion, he looked back and commented ruefully, ‘I must have been mad.’ Tennyson scholars have been unkind to Uncle Charles. As a Whig of genuinely reformist tendencies he was responsible for outlawing mantraps; he advocated the repeal of the corn and navigation laws – and his overt reason for not attending his brother’s funeral on the eve of the passing of the 1832 *Reform Bill was that his party badly needed him to bolster its small majority. He afterwards wrote to his father, ‘If I had not gone, the Speaker’s casting vote would have thrown out the Bill’ (Sturman and Purton 1993: 36). His influence on his nephew, despite their mutual dislike, is evident in the architectural style of *Aldworth and grew stronger after his death: in 1883, when Tennyson at last accepted a peerage, he first asked in vain for the title, ‘Lord d’Eyncourt’ and later ‘Lord Tennyson d’Eyncourt’, before finally deciding on ‘Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and Freshwater’.
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Tennyson d’Eyncourt, Charles (1784–1861)
See also: Barony.
Tennyson d’Eyncourt family Tennyson’s aunt and seven cousins.
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Charles *Tennyson married in 1808 an heiress from Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, Frances (Fanny) Hutton (1787–1878), after being called to the Bar in November 1806. They had seven children, to most of whom Charles gave family nicknames. George Hildeyard (‘the Sot’), born in 1809, was closest to his cousins *Charles and Alfred as a boy. They grew up before family tensions worsened and, unlike his younger brothers and sisters, he did pay regular visits to *Somersby. He went up to *Cambridge in 1828 where, on his father’s instructions, he tried not to mix with the Somersby Tennysons. He fell in love with *Bulwer-Lytton’s daughter Emily whose early death, possibly from neglect, prompted his turning to drink, hence his father’s unsympathetic nickname. Until he succumbed to alcoholism he had been on the staff of Lord Nugent in Corfu. A sufferer from the family disease of epilepsy, he never married. Edwin (‘the Snob’) married a sister of the Duke of Northumberland and became an admiral. Louis (‘the Stone’) became a judge. He was thought by his father to be lacking in filial affection. Ellen (‘the Shrew’) had a violent temper. Julia (‘the Saint’) was her father’s favourite daughter and beloved of all. She tended her grandfather, Old *George, in his last illness. She fell in love with the much older Edward Bulwer-Lytton, her father’s close friend and, when he politely rejected her, converted to *Roman Catholicism, became a postulant in 1848 and spent the rest of her life in a closed order, dying as a secluded nun in Coventry. Clara was good natured, the family peace-maker, and through her efforts the two branches of the family were slowly reconciled after her father’s death. Eustace, Charles’s favourite son, died after joining his regiment in the West Indies in 1842. His father wrote an elegy to him, in three cantos and heroic couplets, Eustace, which he was encouraged to publish in 1851, after the instant success of *In Memoriam. It achieved only a limited circulation. Old George died on 4 July 1835 and on 31 July a Royal Licence was issued to change the family name to ‘Tennyson d’Eyncourt’ after an earlier branch of baronial ancestors. One motive, apparent in family letters at the time, was to distinguish themselves from the Somersby branch of the family whom they referred to as ‘hogs’. Relations were strained further by the absence of the Somersby family from Old George’s funeral and by what was seen as their ingratitude over the provision made for them in their grandfather’s will. There was a further complication when Frederick *Tennyson declared his love for his cousin Julia. She rejected him and he left for Italy. A grandson, Sir Eustace Henry William Tennyson d’Eyncourt, a naval architect, went some way towards finally achieving the family ambition when he was made a baronet in 1930.
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Terry, Ellen
Actress, friend of Tennyson. Ellen Terry married the painter, G. F. *Watts, when she was only 16. For a time in the early 1860s they lived near *Freshwater on the *Isle of Wight and were part of Tennyson’s circle of friends there. As the short-lived marriage broke down, Ellen sought refuge with the Tennysons, playing like a child with *Hallam and *Lionel and going for walks with Tennyson himself. She never forgot his kindness to her and was delighted to take leading roles in his plays, produced by Sir Henry *Irving at the Lyceum Theatre in the 1880s. In 1893 she gave Tennyson his greatest (though posthumous) dramatic success, playing Rosamund to Irving’s Becket. See also: Theatre. Further reading: Slater (2000).
Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811–63) Novelist; friend of Tennyson. Thackeray and Tennyson met at Trinity College, *Cambridge, and became better acquainted in the 1840s when Thackeray and his wife settled in Coram Street, opposite the home of Tennyson’s friend John Allen and his wife, where Tennyson was a frequent visitor. Though suspicious of Thackeray’s apparent cynicism, Tennyson recognized his inner kindliness and Thackeray in return considered him the wisest man he knew: ‘He reads all sorts of things, swallows them and digests them like a great poetical boa-constrictor, as he is’ (Martin, 240). Tennyson invited him to *High Beech, a rare honour, and later he was also a regular visitor to *Farringford. *Dickens memorably invited Thackeray, *FitzGerald and Tennyson for supper in April 1843. Thackeray and Tennyson met regularly in the 1850s at the new Cosmopolitan Club in London and at *Little Holland House. Thackeray was at *Hallam’s christening in 1852 and in 1860 Tennyson contributed *‘Tithonus’ to Thackeray’s new magazine, the Cornhill and was paid £50. When Thackeray died, his two daughters came to live at *Freshwater, under the care of Julia Margaret *Cameron, and Tennyson took them under his wing. Anne particularly became part of the family, regarding Tennyson as her second father. In later life Tennyson always maintained that Thackeray was a greater artist than Dickens, though Dickens was more ‘affluent’.
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Terry, Ellen (1847–1928)
See also: Ritchie, Anne; ‘Tithonus’.
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Tennyson wrote seven plays in later life but never achieved real dramatic success. Tennyson was an early enthusiast for the theatre, writing *‘The Devil and the Lady’ at the age of 14. As a Cambridge student he saw Fanny *Kemble on the London stage and he saw her again in 1832 at Covent Garden in The Hunchback (Martin, 151). However, he read *Shakespeare and classical drama for its poetic rather than for its dramatic qualities and, though he was a constant playgoer, the plays available on the contemporary stage were more often melodrama or farce than serious theatre and possibly did not give him the dramatic understanding he needed. In 1851 he wrote a sonnet to W. C. *Macready on his retirement, which was read at the farewell banquet by John *Forster. In 1873 he saw Henry *Irving in *Bulwer-Lytton’s Richelieu. Moved perhaps by comparisons of his own work with *Shakespeare and by the possible patriotic value of history plays, he embarked, at the age of 65, on his new career as a dramatist. Three of his seven dramas, *Harold, *Becket and *Queen Mary, show ‘the making of England’ (Memoir, ii.173) and were intended to focus on key periods absent from Shakespeare’s English History Plays. *Hallam’s *Memoir suggests several reasons for his dramatic ambition: he enjoyed analysing historical events; he strongly desired to give fair play to characters he saw as having been wronged by history; and he was fascinated by human motivation. His first play, Queen Mary (1875), was inspired by reading J. A. Froude’s History of England (1856–70) and was topical in its tackling of *Roman Catholicism, since the 1870 doctrine of Papal Infallibility had brought to the fore the divided loyalties of English Roman Catholics. It was ambitious, with 23 scenes and 44 characters, but dramatically weak, a chronicle with little dramatic tension. It was written for the Lyceum Theatre in London, but Mrs Bateman, the manageress, demanded heavy cuts which Tennyson reluctantly supplied. The first-night audience in 1876 was enthusiastic and Henry *Irving stole the show with his performance as the coldhearted Philip of Spain. However, it ran for only 23 performances. Harold (1876), Tennyson’s second play, was influenced by his reading of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and was intended to show the melding of Danes, Saxons and Normans into one English race. There was no suitable part for Irving, which may explain the lack of interest in producing the play, which did not reach the stage for over fifty years. Tennyson’s third play, Becket, was presented to Irving in 1879, having taken three years to write. Irving declared it at the time to be too long and expensive to produce. (He was to change his mind 13 years later.) After the three five-act historical plays, Tennyson turned to the Decameron for his next, *The Falcon, a one-act drama based on Boccaccio’s ninth novel of the fifth day. The Kendals, who ran St James’s Theatre, presented it in 1879 as
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an afterpiece to a three-act comedy; it ran for 67 performances and costumes and staging were central to its success. Irving, having rejected three of his plays, nonetheless asked Tennyson for another: emboldened by the relative success of The Falcon, Tennyson stayed with romantic legend for *The Cup, set in Roman times and once again ambitiously staged, with a Temple of Artemis designed by James *Knowles. With Irving and *Terry as stars, the play ran for at least 127 performances in 1881. For his next play, Tennyson, turning his back on exotic spectacle, wrote a ‘modern village tragedy in prose’ at the urging of his enthusiastic admirer, Mrs Sabine *Greville. *The Promise of May was staged at the Globe Theatre in London in 1882, but was not well received and closed a month later. At the very end of his life, Tennyson was revising Becket for Irving, writing him a high-flown ‘anthem speech’ for Act 1. Four months after his death, the play opened to great acclaim, with Irving as Becket and Terry as Rosamund, and ran for 112 nights, in addition to a Royal Command Performance in Windsor Castle. The success of Becket led to the first English production of *The Foresters (written by Tennyson in 1881). Augustin Daly had had great success with this play of Robin Hood, in New York in March 1892, but when he staged it in London in 1893 it was not well received. Tennyson’s plays shared the fondness of their age for extravagant spectacle and elaborate costume. Many of the favourable reviews compare individual scenes with painting, a contemporary reviewer describing The Promise of May as providing ‘resplendent pictures of Medieval England’ (Slater 2000: 17). Dramatic language on the English popular stage was similarly bombastic, although it is worth remembering that Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was produced in Norway in 1879, to be followed a decade later by Wilde and Shaw. The conventions could have been changed, had Tennyson been the man to change them. As it was, the language of popular contemporary drama seems to have encouraged his weakest writing – as it did, in different ways, in the cases of Robert *Browning and Henry *James. When Harold was finally produced in 1928, St John Ervine wrote in the Sunday Times that ‘the English theatre lost in Tennyson an author who might, had the times been more propitious, have been one of its glories’ (Slater 2000: 20). This seems an unlikely proposition. As in the case of S. T. *Coleridge and Aids to Reflection (1825) and Church and State (1830), a great writer can be seen in retrospect to have spent inordinate energy in his final years working in a genre ill-suited to his genius.
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Theocritus (c.308–c.240 BC) Greek bucolic poet; influence on Tennyson.
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Theocritus established the conventions of pastoral poetry, describing the lives of the shepherds on his native isle of Sicily in a careful balance between idealization and realism. He was an enormous influence upon *Virgil and, often through him, upon nineteenth-century English poets. Tennyson owned three editions of the works of Theocritus and modelled his *English Idyls (1842) on Theocritus’ Idylls; having translated three of these aloud to F. T. *Palgrave in 1857, he observed, ‘ I should be content to die if I had written anything equal to this’ (Memoir, ii.495). Theocritus’ influence is everywhere in the English Idyls, notably in *‘The Gardener’s Daughter’ (1833–34) and *‘Audley Court’ (1842), where the adaptation of classical idyll to English conversation poem is most effective. Idyll 2 lies behind *‘Oenone’; Idyll 7 is an obvious model for Section ix of *In Memoriam (‘Fair ship, that from the Italian shore ... ’): in it the shepherd Lycidas prays that his loved one has a safe sea-voyage. Idyll 18 contains an ‘epithalamion’, the marriage hymn, a tradition Tennyson drew upon for the ending of In Memoriam. ‘Sea Dreams: An Idyll’ (1860) is based on Idyll 21. In *‘The Lotos-Eaters’ (1833), however, Tennyson presents a version of pastoral which misses Theocritus’ careful balance and stresses only sensuousness and escapism. Further reading: Markley (2004).
Thomson, James (1700–48) Poet, author of The Seasons; early influence on Tennyson. When Tennyson was 8, his elder brother *Charles gave him the task of filling a slate with poetry about flowers. This he did, producing blank verse in the style of Thomson, the poet he knew best at the time. Thomson’s detailed descriptions of nature in The Seasons (1749) appealed to him and helped develop his own keenness of observation of the natural world, although later in life he criticized the earlier poet’s artificial diction.
‘Timbuctoo’ Cambridge poem which won the Chancellor’s Medal (1829). The early poem, *‘Armageddon’ supplied the central great vision and half the eventual length of ‘Timbuctoo’, to which Tennyson gave a new beginning and ending. The exotic theme of Timbuctoo prescribed by the judges perfectly suited Tennyson, who was enabled here to develop the volcanic imagery which came so naturally to him as a young poet. Arthur *Hallam also entered the competition, and Tennyson’s entry, which he greatly admired, was the occasion of the beginning of their friendship. ‘Timbuctoo’ was recited on 5 July 1829 at the Senate House in *Cambridge by Tennyson’s friend Charles *Merivale, who
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Tintagel Village on the Cornish coast, supposed site of King Arthur’s court, Camelot. Tennyson visited *Cornwall while working on Arthurian legends, in 1848, and was taken to Tintagel by R. S. *Hawker. He returned in 1860 with *Palgrave and *Woolner, to gain more background for the *Idylls, and again in 1887, landing from Sir Allen Young’s yacht, the Stella. Tennyson never seems to have considered other candidates for Camelot, though several exist, particularly in *Wales. See also: Arthurian literature.
Tintern Abbey Ruined abbey in the Wye Valley on the Welsh border, setting for *Wordsworth’s poem and Tennyson’s *‘Tears, Idle Tears’. In October 1834 Tennyson visited the Wye valley alone and, in the ‘yellowing autumn-tide at Tintern Abbey’ (Ricks, 784), composed *In Memoriam xix (‘The Danube to the Severn gave ... ’) and *‘Tears, Idle Tears’, which he later included in *The Princess (1847). Arthur *Hallam had been buried at *Clevedon in Somerset, just across the Severn estuary, in January that year. Tennyson returned once more to Tintern, this time with *Emily, in July 1868.
‘Tiresias’ Published 1885; probably largely written in 1833. ‘Tiresias’ was originally a companion poem to *‘Ulysses’ and *‘Tithon’ (later developed into *‘Tithonus’): all three meditate on immortality, the issue which haunted the young Tennyson, particularly after Arthur *Hallam’s death. Here, he attempts to rethink a brutally curtailed life as a noble sacrifice. Tiresias, the blind prophet, knows that the only way in which Thebes can be saved is through the self-sacrifice of the youthful Menoeceus, whose ancestor, Cadmus, had offended Aries, God of War. Menoeceus goes to his death in order to save his country. Tiresias compares their respective fates: ‘Fairer thy fate than mine,
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had been the prize winner the previous year, the young poet himself having been overcome by shyness. It is a cluster of loosely organized images, suggesting the subjectivity of *myth and beginning with an epigram supposedly from the poet George Chapman: ‘Deep in that lion-haunted inland lies/A mystick city, goal of high emprise.’ There is no trace of the lines in Chapman, however, which suggests that Tennyson may have been wryly poking fun at the whole enterprise by suggesting that all myths are simply fiction.
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if life’s best end/Be to end well!’ (126–7). Tiresias shares Tithonus’ weariness with life: ‘I would that I were gathered to my rest,/And mingled with the famous kings of old’ (162–3). A life of achievement (‘Ulysses’) is contrasted with a life cruelly cut short. There are echoes of *In Memoriam in the imagery of the hand: ‘their examples reach a hand/Far through all years’ (122–3) and of the hero’s ‘maiden life’ (159). Originally, then, the poem held private meaning for Tennyson. However, when he revisited it for the 1885 volume it was, according to *Emily, for the public good, because he ‘has come to think that the world will receive lessons thus [in classical myth] when it discards them in modern garb’ (Ricks, 568). The lesson is presumably that of political pessimism (‘My warning that the tyranny of one/Was prelude to the tyranny of all’ [‘Tiresias’, 72–3]), evident here long before *‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’.
Tiresias and Other Poems Published by Macmillan in November 1885, the volume was dedicated to Robert *Browning. It is notable for the title poem, *‘Frater Ave Atque Vale’, *‘To Virgil’, *‘The Ancient Sage’ and the last of the *Idylls, *‘Balin and Balan’. Many of the poems had already appeared in periodicals. Reviews were enthusiastic, some critics even highlighting an improvement on the earlier work. There is great strength and variety in the choice, the elegiac tone of the Italian lyrics being offset by the Lincolnshire dialect comedy of ‘The Spinster’s Sweet-Arts’, of an old woman talking to her cats, all named after her old admirers. There is a cluster of commissioned Laureate verses, of royal events and epitaphs, and another of dramatically plotted ballads, all with affinities to *Maud and all suggesting the influence of Tennyson’s insatiable novel-reading. There are also poems reflecting his thoughts on old age, death and his own poetic achievement. Ironically, the poems prompted by contemporary affairs seem much more dated than those on more literary themes. The first poem in the trial edition was a sonnet, ‘Old poets fostered under friendlier skies’ (in 1888 given the title ‘Poets and their Bibliographies’),which bemoaned the modern mania for ‘publishing every discarded scrap of a Poet’ (Ricks, 1321). On a similarly personal theme is ‘The Dead Prophet’, a lurid and angry account of the tearing to pieces (made literal here, rather than merely metaphorical) of a great writer on his death. It was probably prompted by Froude’s revealing biography of Thomas *Carlyle (died 1881) which disturbed Tennyson, who felt that it exaggerated the Carlyles’ marital difficulties. *‘Tiresias’ is largely a revisiting of a much earlier work, but it allowed Tennyson to acknowledge his friendship with Edward *FitzGerald in the dedication and the epilogue. ‘Freedom’ was, according to Hallam *Tennyson, the poet’s ‘first political utterance as a peer’ (Memoir, ii.305). It emerged from
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Tiresias and Other Poems
reworkings of material in the 1830s poems, ‘Hail Briton’ (1831–33), ‘Love thou thy land’(1833–34) and ‘Of old sat Freedom’ (1833). This revisiting of youthful ideas characterizes the volume but there is much engagement too with contemporary issues. ‘To the Duke of *Argyll’ is a tribute to Tennyson’s old friend who resigned as Privy Seal in 1881 because (like Tennyson) he opposed *Gladstone’s Irish Bill. There was also the much-delayed ‘Balin and Balan’, of which *Jowett said, ‘I trust we have really heard the last of the Arthurian legend’ (Martin, 554). There were several highly coloured ballads. ‘The Flight’ is a melodramatic tale of arranged marriage (a perennial theme) and a mother’s guilt at abandoning her child. It contains faint echoes of *Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and is notable for having a ‘dwarf-like’ hero with a noble mind – possibly another echo of George Eliot, this time Philip Wakem in The Mill on the Floss. ‘Tomorrow’ is a lurid ballad in Irish brogue about an old woman who encounters the perfectly preserved body of her young lover, dug from a peat bog. William *Allingham helped Tennyson with the dialect. ‘Despair’, a 21-stanza narrative of a failed suicide, strongly recalls *Maud and in its pessimism anticipates *‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’. The pendent poem, ‘Faith’, in which Tennyson redresses the balance in favour of optimism, was not published until 1892. Of the Laureate verse, ‘Hands All Round’, with music by Emily *Tennyson, was reprinted here after its initial appearance for Queen *Victoria’s birthday, 15 March 1882. There are epitaphs for General *Gordon of Khartoum and for Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, English Ambassador at Constantinople. Of the latter, Tennyson commented to H. D. *Rawnsley, ‘I hate doing this kind of thing ... but they bother one out of one’s life if one refuses’ (Ricks, 1331). There is also a poem in honour of the marriage of Princess Beatrice to Prince Henry of Battenburg and a popular military ode, ‘The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava’, written as a complement to *‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, at the request of Kinglake, author of The Invasion of the Crimea (1863) and based, like the earlier poem, on a Times report. This had originally been published in 1882, but now had a Prologue to General Sir Edward Hamley, a visitor to *Aldworth in 1883, whose brilliant military career Tennyson wanted to defend from recent attack. There was also a new Epilogue, based on a conversation with Laura *Tennant, on the subject of the necessity of war and the need to believe in immortality. This last is the issue that burns through the best of the 1885 Poems, *‘The Ancient Sage’ and that other famous poem, written in 1885 too late for the 1885 volume, *‘Vastness’; in complex ways it haunts all these late poems.
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See also: Poet Laureateship.
‘Tithon’ Written 1833 (earlier shorter version of *‘Tithonus’ [1864]), soon after Arthur *Hallam’s death, as a companion poem to *‘Ulysses’, the poem considers
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immortality as possibly a curse rather than a blessing. Tennyson turns, as so often, to classical myth in order to address pressing emotional concerns. The goddess of dawn, Aurora, has granted her human lover, Tithonus, immortality, but not eternal youth. As a result he ‘wither[s] slowly in thine arms’ (6). Ricks (566) suggests that the subject may have been influenced by the grief of Tennyson’s sister *Emily, Hallam’s betrothed, who wrote to her brother: ‘What is life to me! If I die {which the Tennysons never do} ... ’ (Memoir, i.135). The quiet dignity of the blank verse is disturbed by the opening cry, ‘Ay me! Ay me!’, which was removed from the later version. It is a paradoxically sensuous poem about the decline of the senses, full of visual and tactile imagery, but with very little sound apart from ‘that strange song I heard Apollo sing’ (‘Tithon’, 52) when Troy was built. Tennyson suggests Emily’s plight, and his own, in Tithonus who cannot ‘know/Enjoyment save through memory’ (15–16, in the earlier version of ‘Tithon’: see Ricks, 1114n.). This direct reference to bereavement was removed from the later version, which is a more oblique treatment of ‘death in life’ (‘Tears, Idle Tears’, 20).
‘Tithonus’ Adapted in 1859 from *‘Tithon’ (1835), published 1864, as a pendant to *‘Ulysses’. Pressed by W. M. *Thackeray to provide a poem for the new Cornhill Magazine (January 1860), Tennyson found ‘Tithon’, written soon after Hallam’s death. He revised it and lengthened the poem by 12 lines. Tennyson subverts the traditional *aubade and uses classical myth to address the danger of desiring immortality. The concern is raised too in *In Memoriam, where the speaker wonders if the immortal Hallam will still be interested in his friend left so far behind on earth (xli). Here, the frustrating gulf between the ageing lover and the immortally young goddess suggests (as rarely in Tennyson) the danger of trying to preserve the dead by deifying them. The absolute separation between the living and those beyond the grave is finally accepted – ‘How can my nature longer mix with thine?’ (‘Tithonus’, 65). Just as Ulysses talks of the desire to go on, so this poem declares the need to make an end, not to try to hold on to the past and to youth. The quietness at its heart (as in ‘Demeter and Persephone’) is a trope for the distance and indifference of the classical gods to human suffering. They are ‘ever-silent’ to men (‘Tithonus’, 9). The warmth and colour of young love are contrasted with the cold and greyness of old age and immortality. There is a typical Tennysonian blurring of beginnings and endings, of death and life – ‘Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me’ (66); ‘happy men that have the power to die’ (70). The silvering of everything recalls Robert *Browning’s ‘Andrea del Sarto’, where it is linked with the deadness of Art at the expense of life: here too there is the implication that Tithonus’ plight is linked to that of the artist, who works to immortalize those whom he loves at the price of giving
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up the comfort of death and the relief of letting go of the past. As the poem of a much older man, this is much more assured and balanced than ‘Tithon’, and its verbal beauty belies its message that one should embrace transience. Ricks (1112–13) suggests that Tennyson was reminded of the earlier poem by Benjamin *Jowett’s visit in 1859 to Hallam’s grave. Afterwards Jowett wrote, ‘It is a strange feeling about those who are taken young that while we are getting old and dusty they are as they were’ (Ricks, 1113). The experience of bereavement is thus linked, in disguised mythical form, to the struggle of Art to overcome loss.
Titian (c.1487–1576) Venetian painter, favourite of both Tennyson and Arthur *Hallam. Titian’s brilliance in handling oil paint, and the vast range of his paintings in history, mythology, religion and allegory caused him to be much admired by the Romantic poets. Tennyson’s generation inherited this admiration and were able to examine such works as Bacchus and Ariadne at the new National Gallery in London. Hallam and Tennyson visited Samuel *Rogers’s art collection just before Hallam set off for his continental trip and were overwhelmed once more by Titian’s paintings. One of Hallam’s last letters, from Vienna, makes explicit the link he finds between his friend’s poetry and the artist: ‘Oh Alfred, such Titians! Do you write just such a perfect Danae! ... Titian’s imagination and style are more analogous to your own’ (Kolb 1981: 785). In *‘Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, Now the White’, perhaps his most sensuous poem, Tennyson does indeed return to the Danae, possibly linking the image to Hallam.
‘To Christopher North’ Published 1833 and never reprinted, this squib was written by the young Tennyson in response to a severe review by Christopher *North (Professor John Wilson) of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in May 1832. Wilson’s first reference to Tennyson’s work, in the February/March edition of the review concluded positively: ‘I admire Alfred – and hope – nay trust – that one day he will prove himself a poet. If he do not – then I am no prophet’ (Ricks, 460–1). However, by May 1832, Wilson had been increasingly disgusted by the eulogies given the volume by Tennyson’s *Apostle friends, especially Arthur *Hallam in the Englishman’s Magazine of August 1831. He felt Tennyson was in danger of being spoilt by too much praise. Tennyson may well have been as hurt by Wilson’s attack on Hallam as by attacks on himself. The nine-line verse is simple invective rather than satire. Tennyson moderated it, at his sister’s suggestion, changing ‘Tipsy Kit’ to ‘Crusty Christopher’, before
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insisting that it be published in the 1833 volume. Hallam wrote to advise his friend against publishing: ‘I have scruples whether you should publish it. Perhaps he may like the lines and you the better for them; but ... ’ (Ricks, 461). Tennyson soon regretted what he later called, in a letter to Wilson in April 1834, his ‘silly squib’, but the damage had been done. Hallam was proved right: it is likely that it was this attack on North which indirectly prompted the much more vicious attack on the 1833 Poems by J. W. *Croker, contributing to Tennyson’s decade-long retreat from further publication.
‘To E. FitzGerald’ Verse-epistle first published in 1885. The poem was written in 1883 and, by Tennyson’s own account, very shortly before Edward *FitzGerald’s death on 14 June of that year. In the 1885 volume *Tiresias and Other Poems the poem stands as an introduction to *‘Tiresias’. The tone of the poem is relaxed, tender, affectionate and sometimes humorous, and it possesses both the dignity of the old age that both men share (they were born in the same year) and the gentleness that was a characteristic of FitzGerald’s nature. In their later years the two friends had not been close and had seen each other only rarely, but the poem revives the feelings of the distant past and the ‘Old Fitz’ of the opening line is later significantly modified to ‘my Fitz’ (51). The subject-matter ranges widely over their long lives and includes, for instance, references to their bachelor days in London, to Tennyson’s experiment with adopting the vegetarian diet of the other, to FitzGerald’s rendering of Omar Khayyám, and to Tennyson’s last visit to his friend in September 1876. Remarkably, the poem is cast in a single long sentence of 56 lines, the unwinding of the syntax suggesting something of the workings of memory as more and more of the past returns to the reflecting mind. Ironically, FitzGerald died just before the poem was published and never knew of his old friend’s continuing affection for him.
‘To Mary Boyle’ Published 1889 in Demeter and Other Poems. Written in the spring of 1888, in Demeter and Other Poems the poem is subtitled ‘with the Following Poem’ and serves to introduce ‘The Progress of Spring’, an early poem from the 1830s. Mary Boyle, an artist, poet and novelist, met Tennyson at *Freshwater in 1883 and later visited *Farringford with her beautiful niece, Audrey, who later became Hallam *Tennyson’s wife. ‘To Mary Boyle’ is one of a group of fine poems addressed to close friends, living or dead, and like, for instance, *‘To E. FitzGerald’ it is in the form of a verse-epistle. The 17 quatrains consist of alternate rhyming lines of 5 and 2 metres, most linked by
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‘To Mary Boyle’
a comma or a dash to the next in the chain, giving a youthful joyousness to a poem actually written from one old person to another. The scenery is the garden at Farringford in which Tennyson unaffectedly delights. In common with many of the poems of Tennyson’s later years it moves freely between the present and the distant past, the old poem he is offering to Mary Boyle along with the new one providing the occasion for revisiting the period when the former was written. In lines 27–37, for example, he recalls his undergraduate days when, in the period immediately preceding the passing of the 1832 Reform Bill, there had been much unrest and specifically acts of arson in the rural districts around *Cambridge.
‘To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava’ Published 1889 in *Demeter and Other Poems as an introduction to the volume. Tennyson’s old friend Lord Dufferin (1826–1902), the Governor-General of India, had cared for Lionel *Tennyson in Calcutta during his final illness in 1886; Lionel had died of fever on the voyage home. Tennyson uses the *In Memoriam stanza, thus linking this great personal loss with the loss of Arthur *Hallam. The first stanza, however, begins very much in the public world, being borrowed from the 1830s poem, ‘Hail Briton’. Tennyson’s great achievement here is to use the political (‘At times our Britain cannot rest’ [1]) to move seamlessly to the deeply personal; the praise of Empire and of Lord Dufferin’s career become ‘a golden portal to my rhyme’ (16) and a way of confronting at last the ‘dreams that scarce will let me be’ (41) – the image of Lionel’s burial at sea. As with Hallam, the coffin at sea replaces the deathbed scene in the poet’s imagination and thus allows the potential for transformation – the key word ‘flash’ (44) is there, as in other transformative moments in the poetry. Tennyson modulates *Coleridge’s Conversation poem into a form which can encompass large and small events and, by linking them, can perhaps suggest a larger frame, a greater significance, for the individual tragedy.
‘To the Queen’ Published 1851, as dedication to Poems, 7th edition; Tennyson’s first publication as Poet Laureate. Tennyson’s genuine respect for Queen *Victoria (‘Revered, beloved’) did not make this first Laureate poem any easier to write, and there are many early drafts. He used the *In Memoriam stanza, as for other patriotic poems, but here produces a poignant combination of the public and the private, especially evident in stanza 4 (‘Where all about your palace-walls/The sun-lit almondblossom shakes’) which somewhat mitigates its official pieties.
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‘To the Rev. W.H. Brookfield’
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Published 1873; Epilogue to the Imperial Library edition of the Idylls. Composed at Emily *Tennyson’s insistence to balance the ‘Dedication’ to Prince *Albert, the poem makes clear the relevance of the Idylls to Victorian Britain. It refers to the recent thanksgiving service for the Prince of Wales’s recovery from illness, and links the Arthurian story to the Imperial Project of an ‘ever-broadening England’ (30). Tennyson is decisively not in favour of recent proposals to sever ties with Canada, and asks, ‘is this the tone of *empire?’ (18). Criticism of his presentation of King Arthur leads him to further explication here: the ‘new/old’ tale he has told, he argues, is not about mere myth, a ‘gray king ... a ghost’ (38), but about ‘Ideal manhood closed in real man’ (37). This line was his final emendation to the Idylls, added in 1891. He argues for political optimism, but ends with a gloomy warning of ‘The darkness of that battle in the West,/Where all of high and holy dies away’ (65–6). Thus this dedicatory poem embodies in miniature the shape of the Idylls as a whole: beginning in optimism and expansiveness, they end in a convoluted denial of despair in which (as in *‘The Passing of Arthur’) the image rejected nevertheless colours the whole. See also: Empire; Royalty.
‘To the Rev. W.H. Brookfield’ Published 1875; then 1880 in *Ballads and Other Poems. Published initially in a collection of *Brookfield’s Sermons which was issued after his death on 12 July 1874, the sonnet anticipates the warm tone of *‘To E. FitzGerald’ (1883). Both poems show the unchanging intensity of Tennyson’s feelings of friendship, often doubted by the friends themselves as they waited in vain for replies to their letters; neither poem, sadly, was ever read by its subject. Tennyson captures in the 14 lines of the sonnet ‘Old Brooks’s’ ‘humorous-melancholy’ (9) moods and the bonhomie of the *Cambridge days. Arthur *Hallam figures, much as in the Cambridge stanzas of *In Memoriam, nameless but numinous: How oft with him we paced that walk of limes, Him the lost light of those dawn-golden times, Who loved you well! (6–8)
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‘To the Queen’ [Idylls of the King]
The sestet changes into an inner dialogue as Tennyson tries to reconcile himself to the death, but ends in a moment of acceptance. The last line includes Brookfield’s own last words, ‘God bless you!’ and suggests, in ‘I shall join you in a day’, Tennyson’s strong feelings, in his sixties, of the transience of life.
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‘To Virgil’
Published 1882; then 1885 in *Tiresias and Other Poems. The poem was commissioned by the people of Mantua to mark the nineteenthhundredth centenary of the Roman poet’s death. It was published in Nineteenth Century in September 1882. Tennyson knew *Virgil’s poetry intimately and frequently quoted from the Aeneid in particular; here he uses trochees to emulate the hexameters of the original. Much of his description of Virgil’s achievement could apply to his own, particularly when he contrasts the poet with his predecessor, Hesiod, who, like Tennyson’s predecessor *Wordsworth, wrote about rural life: Landscape-lover, lord of language more than he that sang the Works and Days, All the chosen coin of fancy flashing out from many a golden phrase. (3–4) The poem enacts the rise and fall of civilizations (‘Ilion falling, Rome arising’ [2]) much as they are enacted in the *Idylls of the King. The world has changed: ‘the Rome of slaves hath perished’ (17) and Tennyson sees himself as Virgil’s descendent on this ‘Northern Island’ (18). ‘To Virgil’ is a triumph of tone: it combines dignity and tenderness, the public and the personal, in a way characteristic of Tennyson’s strongest elegies.
Trench, Richard Chevenix (1807–86) Cambridge *Apostle, later Archbishop of Dublin. Alone among the Apostles, Trench took a negative view of *Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830). Like *Hallam and Tennyson, he was caught up in the Spanish war: with John *Kemble he spied for the Revolutionaries, who hoped to regain power, but after the adventure he became disillusioned with politics. His reproof, ‘Tennyson, we cannot live in Art’ (Ricks, 400), prompted the writing of *‘The Palace of Art’ (1833), the introductory poem to which (‘I send you here a sort of allegory’) is addressed to him and proclaims the official Apostles’ view of poetry, that it should not be mere aestheticism (Ricks, 399–400). The poem itself, however, is much more ambiguous, and Arthur Hallam’s 1831 review in the Englishman’s Magazine seems a direct challenge to Trench in its advocacy of ‘pure’ poetry. See also: Poetry and society; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: poetic development.
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‘To Virgil’
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich (1818–83) Russian novelist.
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Turner, Charles Tennyson
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Turner, Charles Tennyson (1808–79) Lyric poet, particularly well known for his sonnets. The second surviving son of George Clayton *Tennyson and his wife, *Elizabeth, Charles changed his name to Turner in March 1835, when he became the heir of his great-uncle, Samuel Turner. Alfred’s favourite brother, kind, gentle and affectionate, Charles, according to family legend, started his younger brother on his poetic career by setting him the task of covering a slate with a poem about flowers. He attended *Louth School before being educated with Alfred at home by their father. He followed *Frederick to Trinity College, *Cambridge, in 1826 and in 1829 was awarded a Bell Scholarship for his English translation of the classics. In 1827 he and Alfred published *Poems by Two Brothers, to which he contributed just under half of the poems. As the most amenable of the three eldest boys, he was persuaded by his grandfather to stay on at Cambridge (after his father died in 1831) long enough to take his degree, so that he could then go into holy orders. He became curate at *Tealby and later vicar of Grasby, but his addiction to laudanum probably taken originally for his childhood asthma and prompted by his father’s use of the drug, nearly cost him his career in the Church and later his marriage. In 1836 he married Louisa *Sellwood, younger sister of Emily. The marriage was difficult both because of Charles’s opium habit and because of Louisa’s extreme religiosity. There was a separation of 12 years, from 1837 to 1849, after which Charles overcame his opium addiction, and they lived together lovingly for the rest of their lives, dying within a month of each other in 1879. Charles was much beloved by his parishioners and, despite the constant struggle with addiction, lived a quiet, useful life. His death at 71 deeply shook Alfred, whose own health suffered for a time. (See: *‘Frater Ave Atque Vale’ and ‘Prefatory Poem on My Brother’s Sonnets’. See also: Lyric lxxix of *In Memoriam, ‘ “More than my brothers are to me,”–/Let this not vex thee, noble heart!’) Charles’s poetry is lyrical and wistful and his reputation as a sonneteer is well established. In 1830 he published Sonnets and Fugitive Pieces, which *Coleridge compared to *Wordsworth and Southey. Thereafter he published nothing until 1864, when a book of sonnets appeared, dedicated to Alfred. In 1880, Hallam
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The author of A Month in the Country (1850) and Fathers and Sons (1862) was eager to visit Tennyson when he came to England. On 27 June 1871, Turgenev stayed overnight with the Tennysons at *Aldworth. He played chess with Hallam *Tennyson and their friend W. G. Clark, and backgammon with Tennyson, and regaled the company with stories of Russian life and folktales. His visit suggests the range of Tennyson’s influence across European as well as English literature.
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‘Two Voices, The’ Published 1842; dated 1833. A meditation on suicide, supposed to have been begun immediately after Arthur *Hallam’s death, in winter 1833, and to embody Tennyson’s longing for oblivion after the loss of his beloved friend; however, there are references to an earlier version, ‘Thoughts of a Suicide’, in the correspondence of the *Apostles before Hallam’s death, during summer 1833. The last five stanzas can be definitively dated after 1833: according to Edward *FitzGerald, they were composed in Dulwich meadows in 1835. Anticipated by *‘Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind ... ’(1830), this poem is much more tightly written, using iambic tetrameters in rhyming triplets and finely balancing the arguments for and against suicide, in 154 stanzas. The pervasive guilt of the earlier poem has vanished to be replaced by, what was to remain a lifelong obsession, the question of personal immortality. Influences have been suggested from the book of Job, from *Lucretius and most obviously from Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy. Several sections echo *In Memoriam, which was being written at the same time, especially its sections xliii–xlvii which debate the meaninglessness of random evolution. Tennyson later said, ‘When I wrote “The Two Voices” I was so utterly miserable, a burden to myself and my family, that I said, “Is life worth anything?” ’ (Memoir, i.193n.). The dialogue is disorientating from the beginning: the ‘still, small voice’ (‘Two Voices’, 1), a phrase usually used of the admirable Christian conscience, is here applied to the negative point of view. The negative points are almost always more pithily expressed, as if for Tennyson ‘the Devil has all the best tunes’. The poem is in the end less about argument than about a state of mind: I wept, ‘Though I should die, I know That all about the thorn will blow In tufts of rosy-tinted snow.’ (58–60)
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*Tennyson produced Charles’s Collected Sonnets Old and New, quoting Alfred as ranking some of them ‘among the noblest in our language’ (Turner, Charles Tennyson 1880: xi). Charles’s reputation has been strong and consistent and his sonnets, including ‘Letty’s Globe’ and ‘On the Eclipse of the Moon of 1865’ have appeared in many anthologies.
The speaker is fighting back with a declaration of his love of life: ’Tis life whereof our nerves are scant, Oh life, not death, for which we pant, More life and fuller, that I want. (397–99)
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Then comes the turning point of the poem, a transformative awakening such as *Dickens was to use in A Christmas Carol (1846):
The speaker opens a casement and sees, in a typical Tennysonian ‘framing’, a picture of Victorian domesticity which for later readers is perhaps the most dated part of the poem – father, mother and child walking soberly to church, making a ‘unity so sweet’ (421). It is at this point that, rather like *Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Tennyson’s speaker finds salvation in blessing others: I blest them, and they wandered on: I spoke, but answer came there none: The dull and bitter voice was gone. (424–6) At first it seems that this image of ‘unity’ has healed the divided self – but in fact a second voice has simply replaced the first: A second voice was at my ear, A little whisper silver-clear, A murmur, ‘Be of better cheer.’ (427–9) The grammatical implication is clearly that this is simply another mood, as unintegrated as the first into the identity of the speaker, and the hasty conclusion reinforces the sense of the poem having reached a merely provisional resolution. The speaker has not won the argument; his mood has simply changed. The last five stanzas, finally affirming life, are emulated in the Epilogue to *In Memoriam and recall T. S. Eliot’s comment that Tennyson’s poetic strength lies not in the quality of his faith but in the quality of his doubt. There is certainly a willed quality about them. Edmund Blunden pointed out that ‘Rejoice!’ is also the final word of Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’ Ode. The ‘hidden hope’ anticipates Thomas *Hardy’s ‘Darkling Thrush’. The final sense is one of endless recession into uncertainty, rather than of the stillness of genuine resolution. The evidence for the positive argument (as opposed to the emotional prompting of the sight of the little family group) is that:
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Then said the voice, in quiet scorn, ‘Behold, it is the Sabbath morn.’ (401–2)
Moreover, something is or seems, That touches me with mystic gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams. (379–81)
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‘Two Voices, The’
However, that triplet is replete with positives being turned into negatives – from ‘is or seems’, through the shift from the physical ‘touches’ to the metaphysical ‘mystic’ to the (by definition non-real) ‘dreams’ which are doubly unreal in having been ‘forgotten’ and in any case have no concrete existence since they are only a simile (‘Like’) after all. The presence of two voices remains a key characteristic of Tennyson’s poetry, and of his thinking, from the early pairing of ‘Nothing Will Die’ with ‘All Things Will Die’ (1830) to the dialogic structures of such mature poems as *‘The Ancient Sage’ and *‘Vastness’. Harold Nicolson called this ‘one of the finest and least appreciated of all Tennyson’s poems’ (1923: xxx).
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‘Ulysses’ (1842) *Dramatic monologue written soon after the death of Arthur Hallam. This dramatic monologue, first published in the 1842 collection, had been written many years earlier, and is one of the remarkable group of poems that originated in Tennyson’s reception of the news of the death of Arthur *Hallam. Tennyson himself stated that it had been composed ‘soon after Arthur Hallam’s death’ (Ricks, 560); more precisely, the manuscript is dated 20 October 1833, less than three weeks after he received news of this event. He also said that the poem expresses ‘the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life’ (Ricks, 560). This deeply personal message is encoded in a blank verse speech put into the mouth of the Homeric hero Ulysses (Odysseus). This is not, however, the Ulysses depicted in the Iliad and the Odyssey, but the hero at a later stage of his life after he has returned from his wanderings and settled down again in his island kingdom of Ithaca; and the immediate source of the poem is not *Homer but *Dante, who provides the basis for this part of the story in his Divine Comedy, which Tennyson had read in an English translation. At first glance this may seem a curious strategy as a creative response to a deep personal tragedy: a young Englishman living in *Lincolnshire expresses his deepest emotions through an old man supposedly living in Ancient Greece. What the borrowed episode does is to enable Tennyson to distance himself (or at least to appear to do so) from the experiences he has undergone and the turmoil of ideas they engendered: such experiences and ideas are too painful and too recent to be handled directly. This strategy enables him to create the illusion of impersonality while at the same time working out ideas that have a direct bearing upon his own life and situation. Although Ulysses’ audience in the poem is silent, we have a definite sense of their presence: they are the sailors who have served and travelled and fought
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with their leader over many years and who are now, like him, grown old, and Ulysses is not merely thinking aloud but addressing them and indeed persuading them to join him in one last voyage. Through a series of hints Tennyson skilfully creates both this sense of an audience and an awareness of the tableau-like scene: ‘This is my son, mine own Telemachus’ (line 33), as he hands over the rule of the island to the younger generation, and a few lines later, ‘There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail’ (44), as he points to the waiting ship ready to take advantage of a favourable wind. The main thrust of Ulysses’ argument is that it is inglorious simply to wait for death, and that those who have lived heroic lives should accept the challenge of one last act of heroism: they will sail west, symbolically towards the sunset but also towards an unexplored and unknown world, not expecting ever to return. Paradoxically death will only be accepted through an assertion of the demands of life. ‘The need of going forward’ (Ricks, 560) is in different terms as strong for the young Tennyson as for the Greek hero, the alternative being depression, withdrawal from the world, and perhaps even suicide – real possibilities for the young poet in the closing months of 1833. Recent criticism has concentrated on the ideological implications of the poem and, in particular, its relation to ideologies of empire. (See in particular Rowlinson [1992]) See also: Classical literature; Dramatic monologue.
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320 ‘Ulysses’
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‘Vastness’ Published 1885 in *Tiresias and Other Poems. Also published in Macmillan’s Magazine, November 1885, at the same time as Tiresias and Other Poems, ‘Vastness’ shows (until the last line) the deep pessimism expressed in the 1885 volume in ‘Despair’ but suppressed in *‘The Ancient Sage’. The pattern is similar to that of the Epilogue to ‘The Charge of the Heavy Brigade’, in the 1885 volume in which ‘Whole heavens within themselves, amaze/Our brief humanities’ (55–6) and in which ‘The falling drop will make his name/As mortal as my own’ (59–60; recalling the inscription on the grave of John *Keats in the English cemetery in Rome, composed by the dying poet himself : ‘Here lies one/Whose name was writ on water’), but in which the poet eventually concludes that, after all, ‘the man remains’. Similarly, in this poem, the politics, science, philosophy of the external world build up, anticipating *‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’, into a tidal wave of despair, powerfully reinforced by the insistent anapaests, until the final lines stop all movement completely: ‘Peace, let it be! For I loved him, and love him for ever: The dead are not dead but alive’ (36). The reference seems certainly to be to Arthur Hallam. Wilfred *Ward reported that when Tennyson read the poem aloud it had ‘two distinct voices – the last line being placed in the mouth of a separate speaker who answers the rest of the poem’. This poem is, in a way, the final version of *‘The Two Voices’ and brings to an end Tennyson’s many dialogic poems of Doubt. See also: Astronomy; Faith and doubt.
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Venables, George (1810–88) Barrister and journalist. 321
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Venables, who had been at school with *Thackeray, was a *Cambridge contemporary of Tennyson and a member of the *Apostles and the Sterling Club. His closest friendship was with Henry *Lushington and there were even rumours that he was jealous of Lushington’s bond with Tennyson. Certainly he, like Tennyson, was devastated by Lushington’s early death in Paris, on the way home from Malta, in 1855. Venables was a fellow and tutor of Jesus College before turning to a legal career and becoming a successful barrister. He was also a prolific journalist, contributing regularly to The Times and, from its inception, to the influential Saturday Review. He and Tennyson remained lifelong friends. See also: Lushington family.
Victoria, Queen (1819–1901); reigned from 1837. Tennyson and the Queen grew close after the death in 1861 of Prince *Albert, the Prince Consort, who had much admired the poet’s work. The Queen found *In Memoriam a tremendous comfort in her grief, copying out extracts, changing ‘widower’ to ‘widow’, and altering the gender of the pronouns to fit her own state. She even found consolation in the fact that both Hallam and the Prince had vivid blue eyes. In 1862 Tennyson published a Dedication for the *Idylls to the Prince, adjuring the Queen, ‘Break not, O woman’s-heart, but still endure’ (43). This led to invitations from the Queen to visit her at Osborne House on the *Isle of Wight, and later at Windsor. On the first occasion, Tennyson was impressed and moved by Victoria’s ability to quote his own poetry back to him. There is a famous satirical sketch by Max Beerbohm of one of their meetings, showing Tennyson reading his poetry to the unimpressed monarch. In 1872 Tennyson, at *Emily’s instigation, added *‘To the Queen’ to the new edition of the Idylls. Shortly afterwards came the offer of a baronetcy, which he refused, though in 1883 he accepted a peerage. In 1885 the Queen involved Tennyson in a vain attempt to persuade *Gladstone to retire. Despite their continued closeness, Queen Victoria did not attend the poet’s funeral in Westminster Abbey – though she did send two wreaths – and no member of the Royal Family was present. Edward *Burne-Jones said, ‘I’ll never forgive the Queen for not coming up’ (Martin, 583).
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322 Venables, George
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) (70–19 BC) Roman poet; major influence on Tennyson. Tennyson read Virgil, the greatest of the Roman poets, as a boy in his father’s library at *Somersby. He continued to read him avidly at *Cambridge, even unof-
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ficially during his mathematics classes with William *Whewell. Tennyson seems from an early age to have modelled his literary development on that of Virgil, who himself strove to emulate in Latin the literature of the Greeks. Virgil moved from the pastoral idylls, the Eclogues, to the more didactic Georgics and finally produced his 12-book national epic on the Fall of Troy and the founding of Rome, the Aeneid; Tennyson perhaps envisaged a similar trajectory from the *‘English Idyls’ to the Laureate verse and finally to the *Idylls of the King. In the 1880s he reorganized the last-named into 12 books, to fit the Virgilean model of what an epic should be. Like Virgil, Tennyson copied the pastorals of *Theocritus; like him, he added to the Greek poet’s idealization of country life references to the contemporary world. Like Virgil, Tennyson attempted a national epic, with ‘blameless’ Arthur, like ‘pius’ Aeneas, watching the rise and fall of a civilization. The frame narrative of the *‘Morte d’Arthur’, *‘The Epic’ (1842) contains the story of a poet’s attempting to destroy his work – as, famously, Virgil had demanded on his deathbed that the unfinished Aeneid should be burned. There are Virgilian cadences in poems such as the ‘Morte d’Arthur’, *‘Oenone’ and ‘Come down, O maid’. In 1882 the Mantuans asked Tennyson for a poem to mark the nineteenth centenary of Virgil’s death. The resulting poem, *‘To Virgil’ (1882), is made up of ten trochaic couplets (probably intended to be printed as long lines rather than, as they often are, as ten quatrains), in which Tennyson declared his life-long debt, calling himself one ‘that loved thee since my day began’ (19). They give the effect, as near as is possible in English, of Greek hexameters. After his death, Tennyson lay in an open coffin, his head encircled by a wreath of laurel from Virgil’s tomb which had been collected over a decade before by the poet Alfred *Austin. To his contemporaries Tennyson was England’s Virgil – a poet combining national glory with intimacy and tenderness. See also: Classical literature. Further reading: Markley (2004).
‘Vision of Sin, The’ (1842) Allegory in heroic couplets on the decline of a soul devoted to a life of pleasure. ‘The Vision of Sin’ was one of Tennyson’s favourites among his works. The use of heroic couplets is rare. Critics have found in it echoes of Johnson’s ‘Long-expected one-and-twenty’, *Burns’s ‘The Jolly Beggars’, *Keats’s ‘Lamia’ and *Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’. Tennyson’s own account is:
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‘Vision of Sin, The’
This describes the soul of a youth who has given himself up to pleasure and Epicureanism. He at length is worn out and wrapt in the mists of satiety. Afterwards he grows into a cynical old man afflicted with the ‘curse of
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‘Vision of Sin, The’
nature’, and joining in the Feast of Death. Then we see the landscape which symbolises God, Law and the future life. (Ricks, 718) The ‘Vision’s’ stark, ballad-like simplicity adds to the horror:
The final line turns Tennyson’s gift for the ‘art of the penultimate’ (Ricks, 49) – his reluctance to clinch an ending – into a brilliantly ominous moment: And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn God made himself an awful rose of dawn. (‘Vision of Sin’, 223–4) The horror of decadence here anticipates that in *‘Lucretius’ (1868) and is one of Tennyson’s deepest antipathies, producing some of his most powerful poetry.
‘Voyage of Maeldune, The’ Published 1880; poem on an Irish legend, intended to show the spirit of the Celts. In 1878 Tennyson asked A. P. Graves to suggest a suitable subject for an Irish poem; Graves sent him P. W. Joyce’s Old Celtic Romances, which gave him the outline of the legend of Maeldune. Most of the details are his own. Maeldune and his followers, having sworn to avenge the murder of his father, pursue the murderer from island to island, the Silent Isle, the Isle of Shouting, the Isle of Flowers, the Isle of Fruits and so on. Each has an excess of whatever is named and the travellers hate each place; they fight the inhabitants and sail on in anger, until at last they return to their own land, the Isle of Finn, where they find the murderer. ‘I saw him and let him be./O weary was I of the travel, the trouble, the strife and the sin’ (128–9), says Maeldune. Tennyson shows the proverbial pugnacity of the Irish in the fighting that ensues on each island, but he ends with his hero following the advice of Saint Brendan to ‘Remember the words of the Lord when he told us, “Vengeance is mine!” ’ (119). Tennyson added to the legend the increasing disillusionment of the travellers and the perpetual killing: originally he had intended Maeldune to return alone. Hallam commented, ‘By this story my father intended to represent, in his own original way, the Celtic genius’ (Ricks, 1276).
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I had a vision when the night was late: A youth came riding toward a palace-gate. (‘Vision of Sin’, 1–2)
See also: Ireland.
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Wales Tennyson was drawn back to Wales all his life, having initially been attracted by its links with King Arthur. In July 1839 Tennyson travelled to Wales for the first time, intent on learning more about the Arthurian legends. He walked from Aberystwyth to Barmouth, which he liked best because of its *‘Mablethorpe-like’ waves and steep cliffs. *In Memoriam Lyric lxxxvi, ‘Sweet after showers, ambrosial air’, was composed here. He went on to the Llanberis Lakes, which provided the inspiration and scenery for *‘Edwin Morris’, and which he described as the ‘most beautiful thing’ seen on this visit. He was back in Aberystwyth in June 1844, again walking to Barmouth and on to Caernarvon. During July he climbed Snowdon three times, declaring that he found the ascent easier than walking on level ground. Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of ‘Geraint, son of Erbin’ from the *Mabinogion appeared in 1840, and her Collected Tales from the Mabinogion in 1849. Having read the Geraint story in English, in 1856 Tennyson took his family for a long holiday in Wales, letting *Farringford, to find scenery for the *Idylls and in particular for ‘Enid’ (later *‘The Marriage of Geraint’ and *‘Geraint and Enid’). Wherever they stayed, he and *Emily employed schoolmasters to teach them Welsh and resorted to dictionaries to read the Mabinogion. They travelled from Llangollen to Dolgelly to Barmouth again, to Harlech and on to Caerleon. At Bala he completed the tournament scene in ‘Enid’ and talked at length to Emily about God and Infinity. The family dipped into Wales again in July 1868, going from Ross-on-Wye to Goodrich Castle, to Tintern Abbey, Chepstow and Caerphilly Castle. In August 1871, Tennyson and Hallam climbed Snowdon together and in 1887 they chartered Sir Allen Young’s yacht, the Stella, for a cruise off Wales and the West Country, this time accompanied by Hallam’s wife, Audrey.
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326 ‘Walking to the Mail’
Published 1842; written 1837–38: an *‘English Idyl’. Modelled in form on *Theocritus’ Fourth Idyll, this dialogue in blank verse is a conversation between John and James on their way to catch the mail coach, beginning and ending in media res, very much in the manner of Robert *Browning’s dramatic monologues. It is a slice of contemporary life, with information about Chartism, a poltergeist and youthful escapades involving stealing a pig. Chartism is simplified as another stage in the eternal battle between ‘those that want and those that have’ (‘Walking to the Mail’, 70), and the ‘pig’ story shows comically how the rich can be cheated out of their possessions. John is ‘A Tory to the quick’ (73); James is more tolerant of the unpleasant miser Jocky Dawes, saying, What know we of the secrets of a man? His nerves were wrong. What ails us, who are sound, That we should mimic this raw fool, the world ... (94–6) Tennyson touches dramatically on the important debates of the 1830s, cleverly finding a context (a walk to catch a coach) in which they do not have to be seriously debated. The poem has atmosphere and lightness but perhaps introduces subject-matter too disturbing for the *idyll form. See also: ‘English Idyls’.
Wallace, Alfred Russel (1823–1913) Naturalist and evolutionary theorist. The self-taught Wallace had reached a similar conclusion to Charles *Darwin about the process of natural selection, but the two men came to an amicable agreement that Darwin should publish his much-delayed On The Origin of Species first, in 1859. Tennyson was fascinated by Wallace’s mixture of scientific rigour and belief in spiritualism. Wallace visited Tennyson at *Aldworth in 1884 and tried to persuade him of the truths of spiritualism but Tennyson declared himself more interested in his accounts of ‘tropical nature’ (Page, 149). They agreed on the mysteriousness of Matter, which Tennyson said he found more mysterious than ‘Spirit’. See also: Society for Psychical Research; Spiritualism.
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‘Walking to the Mail’
Ward, Wilfred G. (1812–82) Catholic theologian and friend of Tennyson.
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Ward spent his last years at Freshwater, *Isle of Wight, where he was a neighbour and close friend of Tennyson, the friendship developing after the death of Sir John *Simeon, who, like Ward, was a Roman Catholic. The six-line poem ‘In Memoriam W.G. Ward’, included in *Demeter and Other Poems (1889), testifies to Tennyson’s very high admiration for Ward’s character and intellect. His son Wilfrid Ward (1856–1916), also a Roman Catholic, wrote biographies of Cardinal Newman and Cardinal Wiseman and also published interesting recollections of Tennyson in his Problems and Persons (1903), excerpted in Page (1983; 1985: 97–110). See also: Roman Catholicism.
Water Tennyson once declared that water was his favourite element, and from an early age he found pleasure not only in water’s different manifestations in the natural environment but also in its embodiment in poetic language: recalling his days at *Louth Grammar School, he said (perhaps with some exaggeration and even a deliberate attempt to shock) that Ovid’s phrase ‘sonus desilientis aquae’ (‘the sound of falling water’) was one of the very few things of value given him by his schooldays. In his own poetry water trickles, flows gently or majestically, tumbles from a height, and sometimes simply remains still. ‘The Brook’, in which the course of the water is traced in precise and loving detail, is one of the most widely familiar of all his poems; two mightier waterways, the Severn and the Danube, linked by their association with *Hallam, flow in *In Memoriam, and the Severn Bore becomes a metaphor for grief; the waterfall in the early *‘Ode to Memory’ (‘A pillar of white light upon the wall/Of purple cliffs’ [‘Ode to Memory’, 53–4]) is the first of many that cascade through the poems; the *Lady of Shalott’s lonely tower is surrounded by water, and the first thing she sees when she looks out is a water-lily; and in *‘Morte d’Arthur’ Excalibur is restored to the ‘level lake’ (191). These random examples might be multiplied many times over. As the example of the Severn Bore suggests, water is often invoked allusively and symbolically as well as descriptively: Tennyson was familiar, for instance, with biblical and liturgical texts and Anglican hymnody in which water represents life and restoration. But for the boy brought up near the bleak *Lincolnshire coast, the waters that cover the earth could be hostile and heartless rather than aesthetically delightful: in *‘Enoch Arden’, for instance, the isolation and separation of the protagonist from family and country by the watery element is achingly rendered.
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See also: Hydropathy; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: sea voyages and love of the sea.
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328 Watts, George Frederic
Painter and sculptor; friend of Tennyson. Watts and Tennyson met in London in the 1850s at the Cosmopolitan Club in Berkeley Square, in a room which had been Watts’s studio. They were both also part of the *Little Holland House set, where Tennyson was adulated and where Watts painted an idealized ‘moonlight’ portrait of him for Lady Somers. They met again on the *Isle of Wight in 1863, when Watts brought his 16-year-old bride, Ellen *Terry, in search of a house during the one year of their disastrous marriage. After their separation he settled with the *Prinseps in the Briary near *Farringford and the friendship continued. As an old man, Tennyson tried his hand at water-colours, with Watts advising him to ‘add a daub every day and you will soon have a picture’ (Martin, 574). Watts produced six portraits of Tennyson during his long lifetime, two in the 1850s, two in the 1860s and two in 1890. After the poet’s death, in 1892, Watts was commissioned to produce the massive statue which now stands outside Lincoln Cathedral, showing Tennyson with a flowering plant in his hand and accompanied by his wolfhound, Karenina. On the plaque is inscribed the whole of *‘Flower in the Crannied Wall’. Two fictional accounts of life at *Farringford, including Watts and Ellen Terry as well as Julia Margaret *Cameron, are Virginia Woolf’s comedy Freshwater (1923) and Lynne Truss’s comic novel, Tennyson’s Gift (1996). See also: Paintings, photographs and sculptures of Tennyson.
‘Welcome to Alexandra, A’ Published 1864; written 1863: commissioned Laureate verse. Written to mark the arrival in England, on 7 March 1863, of Princess Alexandra of Denmark to marry Albert Edward Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), the poem was printed in The Times on the wedding day, 10 March 1863. The trochaic tetrameters give it a vigour and buoyancy which matched the public mood of rejoicing and the Queen was delighted with what Tennyson himself called ‘a little lyrical flash, an impromptu’ (Ricks, 1152). The racial composition of the British Isles is described, as *Scott’s historical novel Ivanhoe, and many since, had imagined it as ‘Saxon and Norman and Dane’ (‘Welcome to Alexandra’, 2), though ‘Teuton [and] Celt’ (32) are added in the penultimate line. Tennyson’s narrative of nationhood is picked up again in his late play, *The Foresters (1881) that, like Ivanhoe, deals with the days of Robin Hood. It was already in place in *‘Lady Clara Vere de Vere’, written in the 1830s, though that poem questions the aristocracy of Norman blood (‘Welcome to Alexandra’, 56). Tennyson’s concept of nationhood was of the crafting of disparate peoples into
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one – ‘We are each all Dane in our welcome of thee’ (33), the image being reminiscent of the first British nation-builder, King Arthur, who ‘made a realm,/ And reigned’ (*Coming of Arthur’, 19). The ‘sea king’s daughter from over the sea’ integrates easily into this vision (‘Tennyson’ itself is after all a Danish name). The poet had more trouble with the royal bride who followed, in 1874, The Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna of Russia; memories of the *Crimean War were still strong and this poem resorts to ‘Love by right divine’ as the only method of resolving the historical differences between Great Britain and Russia. The poems themselves craft nationhood, as the Victorian empire-builders were doing across the world, through willpower and energy rather than passively in a racially ‘pure’ nation state. See also: Empire; Revolutions; Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: politics.
Weld, Agnes Grace (1849–1915) Emily Tennyson’s niece and confidante. The daughter of Emily *Sellwood’s sister Anne, Agnes suffered from mental problems and anorexia in her early twenties, but recovered and on her father’s death in 1869 came to *Freshwater in 1871. She became one of Tennyson’s constant companions during his walks on the Freshwater Downs and was, according to her aunt, a merry companion. She never married and, after a breakdown, dedicated her life to good works. In 1903 she published Glimpses of Tennyson, a work which Hallam *Tennyson described as extremely unreliable.
Wellington, Duke of (1769–1852) Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke; soldier and statesman. Tennyson always regarded him as his hero; when offered by Richard Monckton *Milnes in the 1830s the chance of a personal introduction, he refused, exclaiming, ‘What the devil do you suppose the Duke wants to see me for?’ (Martin, 243). He once saw the Duke riding out of Horse Guards Parade in Whitehall and took off his hat; the Duke made a military salute, which Tennyson later commemorated in his ‘Ode’. He was in the huge crowd watching the funeral procession on 18 November 1852 and his *‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ (1852) is one of his earliest and most successful Laureate pieces.
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Whewell, William (1794–1866) Fellow, later Master, of Trinity College, *Cambridge.
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Whewell, William
In 1830 Whewell delivered the first of the Bridgewater Treatises, on ‘Astronomy and Geology considered with reference to Natural Theology’; in 1837, he published History of the Inductive Sciences, and, in 1840, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, works which were very relevant to Tennyson’s own concerns. As Tennyson’s tutor in maths and moral philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1827 to 1831, Whewell had to cope both with his student’s weakness at maths (a compulsory subject for completion of a degree) and his inattentiveness in lectures. Tennyson called him ‘the lion-like man’ (Memoir, i.39) and there seems to have been mutual respect and even empathy between them. *Crabb Robinson much later described Tennyson as ‘a fine fellow in his physique, almost as powerful and rough as Whewell’ (Martin, 283). Despite this, Whewell was unable to compensate for his student’s academic deficiencies and Tennyson left Cambridge without taking a degree, in 1831, when his father was dying.
Whitman, Walt (1819–92) American poet. After Whitman had published a laudatory article ‘A Word about Tennyson’ in The Critic, Tennyson sent him (15 January 1887) a cordial letter of thanks. Whitman observed in the article that ‘His [Tennyson’s] very faults, doubts, swervings, doublings upon himself, have been typical of our age’ (Jump, 350). Later in the same year Whitman sent his photograph, and Tennyson again wrote expressing his thanks, adding that England could learn much from the American Constitution. In his Memoir Hallam *Tennyson refers to his father as saying, near the end of his life, that Whitman ‘neglects form altogether, but there is a fine spirit breathing through his writings. Some of them are quite unreadable from nakedness of expression’ (Memoirs, ii.424).
Women, Tennyson’s attitude towards As a young man, Tennyson had many women friends, whom he treated as he treated his sisters, notably Sophie *Rawnsley, to whom he wrote ‘Lilian’ in *Poems 1830. Later in life his striking appearance and reticence attracted women, though he was often shy and happier in male company. His female friends included Jane *Carlyle and Julia Margaret *Cameron. He much preferred women who teased him and was terrified of being lionized. He reacted badly to women who attempted to adore him, frequently resorting to brusquerie or downright rudeness to keep them at bay. It is noticeable that he never wrote an elegy to a woman, though he lost both Jane Carlyle and Julia Margaret Cameron. Male friendship ultimately mattered much more to him and possibly Victorian society offered him no model for deep friendship with a woman.
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The only woman about whom he wrote, apart from the love poems, was his mother whom, like his siblings, he adored throughout her life. After a brief but painful love affair with Rosa *Baring, Tennyson remained celibate until his marriage to Emily *Sellwood in 1850. The image of male virginity presented in *‘Guinevere’ (which so moved *Gladstone) was almost certainly Tennyson’s own experience and that of many men of his era. He makes a point of explaining in *In Memoriam that Hallam too ‘had tasted love with half his mind’ (Lyric xc, 1). Chastity until marriage for both sexes was very much his ideal, as is evident in *‘The Holy Grail’, with the image of Galahad and the holy nun united in their sexual purity and rendered more powerful because of it. At the same time, Tennyson’s humour in male company could be risqué, in a broad *Lincolnshire way. His letters were sanitized by Hallam *Tennyson to make him appear more innocent than, by other accounts, he really was. In old age he enjoyed the admiration of women in a more relaxed way and valued the companionship of Annie Thackeray *Ritchie and Mary *Gladstone. The late lyric, *‘June Bracken and Heather’ touchingly shows that his love for his wife endured into old age. Tennyson’s fear of uncontrolled sexuality is apparent throughout his career: in his reinflecting the Arthurian legends to make Guinevere carry the blame for the collapse of Camelot; in *‘Lucretius’ (1868); and in his dislike of A. C. *Swinburne (as a man, though he respected the poetry). In *‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ the speaker rails against the licentiousness of the age. Tennyson’s attitude to women is very much that of the average man of his background and time: as so often, it is his very typicality which proves most revealing and which can produce both his best and his worst poetry.
Woolner, Thomas (1825–92) Sculptor and poet. Woolner, one of the original members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was a close friend of Tennyson and, with other companions, accompanied him on a tour of *Cornwall in 1860. The two had first met in 1848, and as a sculptor Woolner had been immediately impressed by the fineness of Tennyson’s head. He subsequently executed a number of busts of him, including one of 1857 that was placed, and still remains, in the Library of Trinity College, *Cambridge. Woolner also offered Tennyson a number of suggestions for poems, including *‘Enoch Arden’.
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Wordsworth, William (1770–1850) Romantic poet; Tennyson’s predecessor as Poet Laureate.
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Wordsworth, William
Wordsworth and the Romantic poets were in vogue during Tennyson’s time at *Cambridge. Tennyson was particularly fond of ‘Michael’ and attempted to emulate the pastoral in his *‘Dora’ (1835). Wordsworth praised him: ‘I have been endeavouring all my life to write a pastoral like your “Dora” and have not succeeded’ (Martin, 291). The two may have met at Rydal Mount in 1835; they definitely met in London in May 1845, when Tennyson tried emotionally to express his debt to the older poet and Wordsworth described Tennyson as ‘decidedly the first of our living poets’ (Martin, 290). Tennyson’s estimation of Wordsworth was always high, although he told *Allingham in 1881 that *Keats was greater than Wordsworth; in 1889 he told *Palgrave of ‘his constant estimate of Wordsworth as the greatest of our poets in this century, although in some of his lesser verse he seemed “thick-ankled” ’ (Martin, 291). When the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, died in 1843, Tennyson was prematurely suggested but Wordsworth took the post. When Wordsworth himself died in 1850, Tennyson finally gained the *Poet Laureateship. See also: Poet Laureateship; Romanticism.
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Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939) Irish poet; helped to establish Tennyson’s posthumous reputation. Yeats praised Arthur *Hallam’s 1831 essay ‘On some characteristics of modern poetry, and on the lyrical poems of Alfred Tennyson’, calling it ‘criticism of the best and rarest sort. If one set aside Shelley’s essay on poetry and Browning’s essay on Shelley, one does not know where to turn in modern English criticism for anything so philosophic – so fundamental and radical – as the first half of Arthur Hallam’s essay’ (2004: ix.304). He warned, however, against what had ‘so often extinguished the central flame of Tennyson’, in ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’ (1961: 163).
Young, Edward (1683–1765) Poet, author of Night Thoughts (nine volumes, 1742–45). Night Thoughts, a popular example of the ‘graveyard school’ of poetry was extremely popular in England and Europe. Tennyson in his early teens copied out a long passage from Volume I, in the same notebook in which he was copying out *‘The Devil and the Lady’, and there are echoes of Young in that play, for example, an adaptation of Young’s ‘Procrastination is the Thief of Time’. Night Thoughts itself is thought to commemorate Young’s wife, and thus suggests Tennyson’s early interest in the Elegy as a poetic form.
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Zola, Émile (1840–1902) French naturalistic novelist, disliked by Tennyson. Zola’s naturalistic novels, notably Thérèse Raquin (1867) and Germinal (1885), caused a considerable stir when they were translated into English. Tennyson’s horror of sexual promiscuity, which emerges in the underlying themes of the *Idylls, was increased by his reading of these works. He linked *Swinburne and Zola as corrupting influences on society because of their stress on the power of bodily appetites – and this became his way of understanding and reworking the Arthurian myths. As an old man, he was still reading and puzzling over Zola, whose work he discussed with *Allingham in 1888, asking him, ‘How can a book corrupt?’ (Allingham 1967: 381).
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