tennyson at 200: the bicentenary of the victorian laureate

Tennyson at 200: The Bicentenary of the VictorianLaureate

John Morton*University of Greenwich

Abstract

2009 saw the 200th anniversary of the birth of Alfred Tennyson, the most famous poet in theworld in the Victorian period and Victoria’s Laureate. This article will detail the publications,events and media response which commemorated this bicentenary. Considering writers as diverseas Christopher Ricks, Mick Imlah, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Adam Foulds and Angela Leighton,as well as popular culture, current affairs and journalism, it will also provide an assessment (by itsnature introductory) of Tennyson’s significance to the world ‘two hundred years after’.

Compared with his contemporaries such as Darwin, Tennyson’s anniversary is being largelyignored – a fact that would have astounded people a hundred years ago. [Commenter Rayprabaon Guardian website] (Redmond)

Alfred Tennyson was both attracted to, and repelled by, the business of literary commem-oration. On hearing news of the death of Byron, he ‘rushed out of doors, sat down bymyself, shouted aloud, and wrote on the sandstone: ‘Byron is dead!’(‘Hallam TennysonII.69). The importance of this event was such that the poet frequently recounted thestory to his family, and the impact of this tale was such that the poet’s son looked (‘invain’) for the inscription when he visited the poet’s childhood home shortly before hisfather’s death in 1892 (Hallam Tennyson I.4). Tennyson was not only interested in com-memorating literary milestones in his youth; in 1882, he wrote ‘To Virgil’ to commemo-rate the nineteenth centenary of that poet’s death, at the request of the VergilianAcademy of Mantua. With this in mind, one could idly speculate that he would havegreeted the events and publications which commemorated his own bicentenary in 2009with some enthusiasm, mixed with his characteristically gruff humour and phlegmaticapproach to literary fame.

Tennyson was not afforded the same fanfare in 2009 as his contemporary and acquain-tance, also born in 1809, Charles Darwin. Though a 1-day conference uniting the pair,‘Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers’, was held on the 17th October 2009, the meritsof Darwin were rather more widely celebrated last year than those of Tennyson. Part ofthis must be to do with philosophical relevance – ongoing debates about creationismdemonstrate the continuing importance of Darwin’s writings, while Tennyson, though auseful source for an illustrative quote in such debates (for example John Micklethwait andAdrian Wooldridge misidentify the phrase ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’ as a responseto Darwin in their recent book God is Back (Micklethwait 40)), can offer no such directimpact on these discussions. A more appropriate comparison might be made with otherVictorian literary figures; the ‘Dickens 2012’ celebration is already in the advanced stagesof planning and was recently launched by the Mayor of London; there is as yet no web-site for the bicentenary of Robert Browning, also in 2012 and very likely to be dwarfed

Literature Compass 7/9 (2010): 876–882, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00748.x

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by the novelist (not to mention the London Olympics). Allied with the unfortunatecoincidence with Darwin is the sense that Tennyson, as the longest-serving Poet Laureateof Queen Victoria’s reign, has long been associated with the pejorative associations of theword ‘Victorian’, and indeed ‘Laureate’. Nicholas Shrimpton asks in a recent Times Liter-ary Supplement review, had Tennyson as Laureate ‘perhaps dwindled, rather than risen,into his public role? Was it not inevitable that an official function so amply fulfilledwould crush the delicate Late Romantic sensibility which had made his early work excit-ing?’ (Shrimpton 22) This idea of ‘two Tennysons’ – the interesting, tortured, excitingpre-Laureateship late Romantic, and the Official Bard of Victorian England – has beencommon currency in literary debates for over a hundred years, beginning with the viewsof Gerard Manley Hopkins and Tennyson’s friend Edward FitzGerald, continuingthrough the caustic, Strachey-inspired dismissals of Tennyson’s later work in HaroldNicolson’s 1923 study of the poet, through T. S. Eliot’s nuanced 1936 reappraisal ofIn Memoriam; and these ideas linger in less well-established literary locations, as the recep-tion of Tennyson’s works on the Guardian Book Blog makes clear (one commenteropined, ‘I don’t know much about Tennyson. However, his being a favourite of QueenVictoria is hardly encouraging’ (Parini)). Equally clear is that this prejudice was cementedby Modernism; the epithet ‘Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet’ (which recurs to StephenDedalus throughout the day in Ulysses – though quite why readers of this novel adoptthe prejudice of a pretentious failure like Dedalus is open to question) has stuck, voicednot only by other Book Blog commenters but also by Andrew Motion in a 1992 TimesLiterary Supplement reappraisal (Joyce 42).

Despite the occasional online grumble, 2009 saw two major conferences on the subjectof Tennyson, as well as the aforementioned Tennyson ⁄Darwin day. Single-author confer-ences on the topic of Tennyson are something of a rarity, so to have two in a year pro-vided exciting opportunities for Tennyson scholars and enthusiasts to meet and discuss hisworks. The first of these in the year was ‘Tennyson’s Futures’ (27th–28th March), organ-ised by the emerging Victorian poetry scholars, Joseph Pizza and Gregory Tate. Despitethe bitterly cold weather, the event was well attended, including plenaries from RobertDouglas-Fairhurst, Seamus Perry, Eric Griffiths and Herbert F. Tucker. Panel sessionswere lively, thanks in no small part to the high level of expertise in the audience, andsome of the highlights included Christopher Ricks on adapting Tennyson to music, andSamantha Matthews on the history of quoting Tennyson in isolation. It was also cheeringto see so many high-quality papers from postgraduates, indicating a bright future forTennyson studies. Of particular interest at this conference was the presentation by JimCheshire, a lecturer in art and design at the University of Lincoln, on Tennyson’s treat-ment by James Betrand Payne in the Laureate’s final days at Moxon, in which Cheshiretrailed his upcoming exhibition in Lincoln, ‘Tennyson Transformed’ (a version of thispaper is set to be published in Victorian Poetry in 2012).

This exhibition, which ran at from June to August, was held at the brand-new Collec-tion Gallery in Lincoln, situated next to the old Usher Gallery. For those of us who areused to having to negotiate, sometimes unsuccessfully, with the curators of that gallery tosecure access to the invariably undisplayed Tennyson holdings, as well as those of usinterested in Tennyson’s reception and afterlife, this exhibition was a joy; it included anexcellent juxtaposition of differing representations of the Charge of the Light Brigade,photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, sketches by Edward Lear, and some extremelyinteresting artefacts, including an 1867 cabinet engraved with scenes from Tennyson’s‘The Day Dream’. Perhaps the highlight, though, was the focus on Pre-Raphaelite andother Victorian artists’ interpretations of Tennyson, including proofs from the illustrated

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ª 2010 The Author Literature Compass 7/9 (2010): 876–882, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00748.xLiterature Compass ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

‘Moxon Tennyson’, which the poet hated because the Pre-Raphaelite illustrations didnot mirror his poetry accurately enough. The most impressive work on show, in a yearof Waterhouse,1 was the second of that painter’s depictions of the Lady of Shalott, andyet most remarkable (at least for this writer, an obsessive about Tennyson’s afterlife), werethe several early twentieth-century artistic responses to the poet, which bore the influ-ence of Aubrey Beardsley, a figure not often associated with the Victorian Laureate.These included a 1909 sculpture of ‘Guinevere’s Redeeming’ by Sir William Reynolds-Stephens and a 1903 illustration from ‘Elaine’ by Jessie M. King.

Many Tennysonians were introduced to this exhibition personally by Dr Cheshire atthe other major Tennyson conference of the year, ‘The Young Tennyson’, which ranfrom the 16th–20th July. The conference was held at the University of Lincoln, by thewaterside of the city. This conference comprised scholarly papers as well as other activi-ties such as trips to significant locations from the poet’s Lincolnshire childhood (as well asthe exhibition), a dramatic presentation and dinners. The speakers were of a very highcalibre, including Linda K. Hughes, Angela Leighton, Seamus Perry and Robert Doug-las-Fairhurst; Christopher Ricks, still the most important Tennyson scholar, spoke after adinner. Material culture and influence were two of the most commonly discussed topics,with Leighton discussing ‘Tennyson’s Hum’, which reverberates, among other places, inthe work of Woolf; Linda K. Hughes gave a very well-received lecture on Tennyson andSwinburne, while Douglas-Fairhurst and Perry provided richly comic and far-rangingaccounts of the poet’s life and afterlife.

Events in Lincolnshire were not limited to this conference; the Tennyson Society, inconjunction with Lincolnshire County Council, organised almost forty events for the‘Tennyson 2009’ celebrations. Other locations associated with Tennyson also commemo-rated the anniversary; the hotel at Farringford in the Isle of Wight, previously the poet’shome, held an exhibition of artefacts including manuscripts and furniture from July toSeptember. The poet’s final home, Aldworth in Sussex, remains off limits, a continuingdisappointment; one hopes that a Tennysonian might take an interest the next time itgoes on the market (it was put up for sale in 2008).

Lynne Truss notes on her website that ‘you should never put the name Tennyson inthe title of a book and expect it to sell’ (Truss), and it is certainly the case that academicmonographs about Tennyson are never likely to trouble the bestseller lists. Bicentenariesand the like usually spur a glut of publications, and yet 2009 passed with relatively fewnew studies of the poet, in contrast with 1992 which saw three separate biographies pub-lished, before we take other books and articles into account. Perhaps the main reason forthis relative lack of publications is the fact that many Tennysonians were busy writingchapters for Tennyson Among the Poets, a collection of essays detailing the Laureate’s rela-tionship with his poetical predecessors as well as his influence on others. The preface tothis expansive collection was written by Christopher Ricks, who still has a strong influ-ence on Tennyson criticism, and a number of the essays place a Ricksian emphasis onclose reading and tracing allusions. There was no biography of the poet published in2009, though John Batchelor has been working on one as can be seen from his 2006article ‘Alfred Tennyson: Problems of Biography’. Recent monographs of interest toTennysonians include Sally Bushell’s Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth,Tennyson and Dickinson (2009), Jason Rudy’s Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics(2009), Cornelia Pearsall’s Tennyson’s Rapture (2008), Anna Barton’s Tennyson’s Name(2008), Herbert Tucker’s Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (2008), KathrynLedbetter’s Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals (2007), Matthew Bevis’s The Art of Eloquence(2007), Angela Leighton’s On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (2007),

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and Kirstie Blair’s Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (2006); the nature ofacademic reviewing is such that many of these books are still being appraised in journalsin 2010. These various titles demonstrate both the wide range of recent approaches tothe poet, and their very high quality demonstrates that working on Tennyson perhapsencourages a general (though not uniform) focus on detail, along with precise and per-ceptive phrasing.

Despite the relatively few book-length studies published in 2009, the year did see anenormous amount of attention given to Tennyson’s work in journals. Herbert F. Tuckerguest edited an issue of Victorian Poetry (Spring 2009) which was entirely concerned withthe work of the Laureate, collecting articles of exceptionally high quality, not least thoseby Erik Gray (‘Getting it Wrong in ‘The Lady of Shalott’’) and Gregory Tate (‘Tennysonand the Embodied Mind’); several other 2009 issues of Victorian Poetry contained impres-sive articles on Tennyson. Tate also contributed an outstanding article, ‘‘‘A fit person tobe Poet Laureate’’: Tennyson, In Memoriam, and the Laureateship’ to the 2009 TennysonResearch Bulletin which appeared at the very end of the year. That journal continues toserve as the most important resource for Tennysonians under the editorship of RobertDouglas-Fairhurst; combined with Linda K. Hughes’s annual review of the year’s workon Tennyson in Victorian Poetry, Tennysonians have no excuse for not keeping up to datewith criticism.

It must also be noted that Tennysonians could find much in fiction and poetry pub-lished around 2009 of interest. Mick Imlah’s 2008 collection The Lost Leader contains apassage entitled ‘Afterlives of the Poets’, the first of which is a poem entitled ‘In Memo-riam Alfred Lord Tennyson’, which, in typically playful fashion, follows the In Memoriamstanzaic form while not entirely following its style. Imlah’s poem begins:

No one remembers you at all.Even that shower of Cockney shrimpsWhose father hoisted them to glimpse

Your corpse’s progress down Whitehall

Have soiled the till and lain beneathWhile the last maid you kissed with feelingIs staring at the eternal ceiling

And has no tongue between her teeth. (Imlah 111)

The tone does not remain consistent throughout – jocular at the beginning, the poemshifts into half-memories of ill-fated trips to Aldworth and then strange, near-uncannyvisions of a Victorian literary ‘afterlife’. This is no case of angry irreverence in the mannerof Ezra Pound’s wilfully clunking ‘Alf Venison’ parodies of the early 1930s; Imlah editeda selection of Tennyson for Faber and Faber in 2004, and his poem is both a meditationon the status of Tennyson at the beginning of the twenty-first century and also a contem-plation of the figure of the poet more generally, which unites it with Adam Foulds’snovel The Quickening Maze (2009). Foulds, a published poet, focuses primarily on JohnClare in this novel, but it is set during Clare’s time in an asylum where another inmate isSeptimus Tennyson, thus a young Alfred is one of the main characters. Reviewers werequick to describe the novel as an account of Clare and Tennyson’s meeting, but in facttheir paths barely cross. Probably the most biographically sensitive fictional portrayal ofTennyson yet written, Foulds’s novel, like Imlah’s poem, is as much about the status ofthe poet in 2009 as it is about the Victorian age. It is not altogether clear why Tennysonshould remain an important figure in these considerations, given his seeming decline ingeneral popularity since 1892. Part of this might be to do with his dying just before the



advent of mass broadcasting – we only have a few garbled recordings of his readings,which conceal as much as they reveal, as opposed to the copious recorded output ofpoets such as Auden and Betjeman. Linked to this might be Tennyson’s financial status –the last poet to make a living chiefly by writing verse, as opposed to surviving via mediawork (as did Betjeman and to an extent Auden), having a ‘day job’ (as did Eliot andLarkin), or teaching. This might help make him an appropriate example with whom tocompare today’s multi-tasking versifiers – Imlah, after all, was a literary journalist, andFoulds’s novels sell more than his poetry collections.

Perhaps because it is written by a poet, Foulds’s portrait of Tennyson rings very true,even more so than that written by A. S. Byatt in Angels and Insects in the 1990s. Fouldspictures the poet’s thoughts during composition:

[T]he heavy, low waves and hardened undulations of the sand after the tide had withdrawn.Words began. Waves. Rocks. Lashed. Or felt. Waters that feel the scraping rocks, scourging rocks.Waters that feel the scourging rocks as they rush. That feel the sharp rocks as they rush. (Foulds 57)

The Quickening Maze was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize; The Lost Leader wonthe 2008 Forward Prize for best collection; the phrases from In Memoriam which begin ‘Benear me when my light is low’ contribute the title and epigraph to Andrew O’Hagan’s2006 novel Be Near Me, longlisted for the Booker (Tennyson 296).2 If not as solidly in thepublic eye as a writer such as Dickens, Tennyson has certainly not been forgotten by con-temporary writers – not, indeed, by contemporary producers of television.

I recently introduced my first-year undergraduates to Tennyson via Virginia Woolf’sTo the Lighthouse, in which Mr Ramsay clatters round the garden of his holiday homebarking ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ at various guests and family members. One ofthe students immediately recognised the lines from an episode of the often-repeated1990s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, in which an English butler poses as a contempo-rary American poet. Having run out of material, he immediately begins to recite ‘TheCharge of the Light Brigade’ in Queen’s English, revealing his true identity. Another sit-com character with aspirations of intellectuality, Frasier Crane, also recourses to Tennysonin the final episode of Frasier. The radio psychiatrist, who has quit his job and will soonleave his old life behind, begins to recite ‘Ulysses’ as part of his farewell to his family, andthe scene cuts halfway through to reveal him again reciting the poem, this time to his lis-teners and colleagues, in his farewell broadcast; the end of ‘Ulysses’ was also recited by asomewhat less dignified real-life figure, the disgraced Governor of Illinois, at a January2009 press conference.3 ‘Locksley Hall’ has also featured prominently on American televi-sion; the lines ‘When I dipt in to the future far as human eye could see; Saw the Visionof the world, and all the wonder that would be’ (‘Locksley Hall’, ll.15–16, Tennyson271) appear on the dedication plaque of the ship in Star Trek: Voyager, which ran from1995 to 2001.4

Despite the presence of the poet in such diverse television programmes, there was anoticeable lack of televisual material concerning Tennyson in 2009. The BBC did run aseries entitled My Life in Verse, with various celebrities discussing how poetry has influ-enced their lives; Sheila Hancock chose ‘Tears, idle tears’, among others, as it offeredconsolation following the death of her husband, the actor John Thaw. The Lincolnshiregroup WAG Screen’s short film of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ offers a more sustained visualengagement with the poet, inspired in its style by the Waterhouse paintings, which pre-miered in Lincoln in April 2009 (accompanying it was a short film depicting Tennysonreading the poem at a dinner in 1856). In other media, a musical response could be heardon BBC Radio 3’s programme ‘The Verb’ on July 10th, where William Orbit premiered



a contemporary classical adaptation of In Memoriam, parts of which were read by the actorDavid Thewlis. There were very few other new musical responses – the majority of auralcommemoration came via the medium of spoken word. Linked to the Lincoln confer-ence was a double CD produced by the Tennyson Society, Tennyson Today, which con-sists of readings of Tennyson’s poetry by eminent figures connected with him, fromLynne Truss to Andrew Motion to Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, and the CD also containsthe same figures elaborating on the poems they have read. There were several BBCRadio 4 programmes concerning Tennyson broadcast in 2009, ranging from poets outlin-ing their personal responses to his work, to in-depth studies of particular poems. Listenersto the Today Progamme experienced a very Tennysonian end to 2009, as the guest edi-tor, P. D. James, read the ‘Ring out, wild bells’ passages of In Memoriam to end the finalbroadcast of the year.

It is clear from all the above activity that 2009 was a busy year for Tennysonians, andthat the bicentenary was commemorated in a fitting manner – the conferences will livelong in the memory, and the books and journals published in 2009 offer rich newresources for Tennysonians. It also gives us the opportunity to consider Tennyson’s placein English letters at the beginning of a new century. Tennyson did not feature in the topten of the BBC’s poll of ‘The Nation’s Favourite Poet’ (won by the fairly unlikely figureof T. S. Eliot; no Victorian poets were present in the list); when the Guardian Book Blogpublished a piece by Jay Parini entitled ‘Tennyson Remains Essential Reading’, com-ments were generally ambivalent, with one shrewd (if not syntactically adept) commenternoting that ‘a lot of people’s problem with Tennyson is with his age, not his poetry’ (Pa-rini); sadly, this has been the case ever since the initial reaction against the Victorians inthe early twentieth century. Tennyson remains in the public consciousness; however,imagined renderings of his poems by unlikely figures, such as Harold Pinter, are a main-stay of Craig Brown’s column in Private Eye, and the poet’s transatlantic appeal can clearlybe seen in both the amount of high-quality American Tennyson scholarship (as evincedat both major conferences, as well as in journals and books) and also the frequency withwhich Tennyson’s work is cited in US television and film (verses from In Memoriam areused as a plot device in the recent blockbuster Hellboy II). The prejudices outlined in thebeginning of this article still, to an extent, ring true; it may well be the case that part ofthe reason for Tennyson’s enduring popularity and relevance is through the reactions heprovoked in his own lifetime and after his death.

Short Biography

John Morton is Lecturer in English at the University of Greenwich. His monograph‘Tennyson Among the Novelists’ was published in June 2010 by Continuum. His essayon ‘T. S. Eliot and Tennyson’ was recently published in ‘Tennyson Among the Poets:Bicentenary Essays’ (Oxford: OUP, 2009), and he has published articles and reviews onVictorian literature and contemporary fiction.

Notes

* Correspondence: School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Greenwich, King William Building,London SE10 9LS, UK. Email: [email protected]

1 An exhibition entitled ‘J. W. Waterhouse: the Modern Pre-Raphaelite’ was held at the Royal Academy inLondon from April to September 2009.



2 I discuss the relevance of these lines to the novel in Tennyson Among the Novelists (London: Continuum, 2010), inwhich I also go into more detail on Foulds’s novel (Morton 2010, pp. 149–50).3 See <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/09/AR2009010900567.html>. I amgrateful to my anonymous Reviewer at Literature Compass for bringing this to my attention.4 I am grateful to Laura Morton, Robyne Hill and Neil Sabharwal for these references.

Works Cited

Barton, Anna. Tennyson’s Name. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.Batchelor, John. ‘Alfred Tennyson: Problems of Biography’. Yearbook of English Studies 36.2 (2006), 78–95.Bevis, Matthew. The Art of Eloquence. Oxford: OUP, 2007.Blair, Kirstie. Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart. Oxford: OUP, 2006.Bushell, Sally. Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson. Charlottesville: University

of Virginia Press, 2009.Cheshire, Jim (Ed.) Tennyson Transformed. Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2009.Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert, and Seamus Perry (eds.) Tennyson Among the Poets. Oxford: OUP, 2009.Foulds, Adam. The Quickening Maze. London: Jonathan Cape, 2009.Imlah, Mick. The Lost Leader. London: Faber & Faber, 2008.Joyce, James. Ulysses, Eds. Hans Walter Gabler, Walter Steppe and Hans Melchior. London: Bodley Head, 2001.Ledbetter, Kathryn. Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals. Aldershot:Ashgate, 2007.Leighton, Angela. On Form. Oxford: OUP, 2007.Micklethwait, John, and Adrian Woolridge. God is Back. New York: The Penguin Press, 2009.Morton, John. Tennyson Among the Novelists. London: Continuum, 2010.O’Hagan, Andrew. Be Near Me. London: Faber & Faber, 2006.Parini, Jay. ‘Tennyson Remains Essential Reading’.Guardian Book Blog, 13 August 2009. 10 March 2010. <http://

www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/aug/13/tennyson-essential-reading>.Pearsall, Cornelia. Tennyson’s Rapture. New York: OUP, 2008.Redmond, Camilla. ‘Radio Review: Great Lives.’ Guardian, 5 August 2009. 10 March 2010. <http://www.

guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/aug/05/tennyson-great-live-review>.Rudy, Jason. Electric Meters. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009.Shrimpton, Nicholas. ‘The Stupidest.’ Times Literary Supplement 5574 (29 Jan. 2010), 22.Tate, Gregory. ‘A fit person to be Poet Laureate: Tennyson, In Memoriam, and the Laureateship.’ Tennyson

Research Bulletin 9.3 (2009): 233–47.Tennyson, Alfred. The Poems of Tennyson. Ed. Christopher Ricks. Harlow: Longman, 1987. All references to this

work are to poem number rather than page.Tennyson, Hallam. Alfred Tennyson: A Memoir. London: Macmillan, 1897.Tucker, Herbert F. Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910. Oxford: OUP, 2008.——. (ed.) ‘Tennyson at Two Hundred.’ Victorian Poetry 47.1 (Spring 2009). 1–6.



tennyson at 200: the bicentenary of the victorian laureate

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