1892 As Samantha Matthews notes in her study of Victorian literary funerals, Tennyson’s was the biggest of them all in a century that revered its authors as never before or since.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate for almost half a century, died at dawn on 6 October 1892 in Haslemere, Surrey, aged 83. He was suffering from gout and influenza. The news that the queen’s favourite poet had died was telegraphed to the newspapers. They already had reporters in place outside the poet’s residence, Aldworth House.
Victoria herself sent a telegram of condolence (how far the communication systems had advanced since 1837, when there was not even a penny post). It was, the nation agreed, an event of truly national – not merely literary – importance. Something important was passing away: a whole era.
Tennyson’s physician, Dr Dabbs, posted a bulletin recording the death to the gates of Aldworth House, vividly picturing the poet’s last hours:
Nothing could have been more striking than the scene during the last few hours. 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 had 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’.
All poets should have such a physician at their deathbed.
The actual marble statue would, of course, be raised in Poet’s Corner. The interment in the Abbey was arranged for 12 October. It was decided that he should lie for eternity (or until the final judgement) alongside Browning. The coffin (cased in lead, as regulations on intramural burial required) was closed on 8 October. A copy of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, with its funerary lines, was slipped into it by a well-meaning house servant:
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
The grave was dug in the Abbey at night, by gaslight. The coffin, draped in a Union Jack, was brought to London, also at night, by special train to Waterloo station, where a small crowd awaited. It was then taken by hearse to the Abbey, where it lay among a mass of floral tributes.
There were insufficient tickets available for those wishing to view the coffin, lying in poetic state, and crowds massed outside the Abbey. Tennyson’s son, Hallam, noted that many attending could be seen reading the poet’s ‘In Memoriam’ before the service.
The papers printed handy maps, indicating where the dignitaries would be sitting. The queen herself was not present but ‘represented’ during the short service, during which the coffin rested on a purple-clothed trestle. The service itself was dominated by the musical version of the poem that Tennyson had composed three years earlier for his own death, ‘Crossing the Bar’ (inspired, in fact, by a bout of seasickness on the trip to his holiday home in the Isle of Wight). Its last stanza forecasts what was currently happening in the Abbey:
For tho’ 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.
The national flag was removed, and the body was lowered into the earth, sacred to God and English literature, decked with a few ‘wreaths of honour’ – foremost that of Queen Victoria: laurels, with an inscription ‘in the monarch’s own hand’.