Growing reputation and The Princess, 1845–1850
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
Between 1839 and 1845, Tennyson was subject to several periods of debilitating depression as he cast about for a decent source of income. Obviously the disastrous investment in Matthew Allen’s wood-carving scheme had been an expression of his desperation in these years.
By 1845 his fame was spreading and his circumstances were clearly improving. The reviews of the 1842 volumes had established him as a major literary figure, whether he himself was willing to believe this or not. Lushington’s policy on Matthew Allen’s life paid out £2,000 to Tennyson; in addition he had now earned £746/8/1 from sales of Poems (four editions). In the same year he began to receive a pension from Robert Peel’s administration.1 Thomas Carlyle had been instrumental here; he had kept in close touch with Tennyson during the whole miserable affair of being cheated by Allen, and in 1840 suggested to Fitzgerald that Tennyson ought to be a strong candidate for a Civil List pension. Henry Hallam, Arthur’s father, committed himself to the cause and wrote to Robert Peel, strongly backing Tennyson’s claim by praising him ‘as the very first among the younger class of living poets’. Peel read some of Tennyson’s poems, was duly impressed, and the offer of a pension of £200 a year followed in September 1845.2
Tennyson was squeamish about accepting patronage, and as a consequence he slightly delayed his reply to Peel’s offer. On 29 September when he wrote to Peel accepting the pension he said simply, ‘I was from home and my family not aware of my direction’, but his clear reluctance to be seen as the object of charity can be inferred from a reassuring letter from Henry Hallam himself a few days later:
Your scruples about the pension need not molest you much […]. Peel, as I told him, will be applauded on all sides for such a distribution of patronage. It is not the habit of any one to find fault with the disposal of public money in regard of literary merit.
Hallam went on to tell Tennyson that he was ‘a great favourite with the young ladies – however like Orpheus you may be in other respects you will never be torn to pieces with sharp female claws’.3 Henry Hallam was seldom other than serious; this cumbersome joke is very much out of character. Tennyson was restless and uncomfortable in Cheltenham, where his mother had now decided to live – the society ‘en masse’ in the town was decidedly undistinguished, as he wrote to Aunt Russell in October – and his continuing ‘scruples about the pension’ were part of the restlessness.
The pension was the occasion of a spat which Tennyson would later regret. Edward Bulwer Lytton bitterly attacked the fourth edition of Tennyson’s Poems, published in 1846, with a squib called ‘The New Timon’ printed in Punch:
Let School-Miss Alfred vent her chaste delight
On ‘darling little rooms so warm and bright!’
Chaunt, ‘I’m aweary,’ in infectious strain,
And catch her ‘blue fly singing i’ the pane.’
Lytton added a note to the effect that Tennyson was ‘in the prime of life, belonging to a wealthy family, without, I believe, wife or children’, yet was now because of the Peel pension ‘quartered on the public purse’. Tennyson’s response, ‘The New Timon and the Poets’, also published in Punch, was itself personal, arrogant and offensive (Lytton was both a literary ‘subaltern’ and a superficial dandy who wore a corset):
I thought we knew him: What, it’s you,
The padded man – that wears the stays –
Who killed the girls and thrilled the boys,
With dandy pathos when you wrote,
A Lion, you, that made a noise,
And shook a mane en papillotes.
And once you tried the Muses too;
You failed, Sir: therefore now you turn,
You fall on those who are to you,
As Captain is to Subaltern.4
Lytton had been a Trinity undergraduate a few years earlier than Tennyson. As a literary man and a political careerist he made a large number of enemies, but he also had good friends, including Dickens and Disraeli. As member of Parliament for Lincoln, he supported Alfred’s cousin, Tennyson d’Eyncourt, in the House of Commons. Lytton was a prolific novelist: his long list of successful historical romances included Harold, the last of the Saxons (1848; this novel would have a bearing, years later, on Tennyson’s own work). His first publication was a novel, Falkland (1827), which Tennyson had read as an undergraduate: interestingly it had provided hints for some of Tennyson’s Cambridge poems, notably ‘The Kraken’, ‘The Palace of Art’, ‘Mariana’ and ‘Mariana in the South’.5
Tennyson disliked Lytton’s friendship with the d’Eyncourt cousins, and he already saw him as a literary enemy: he suspected (almost certainly rightly) that Lytton had been the author of an anonymous hostile review of his 1832 volume (in The New Monthly). This review had dismissed Tennyson’s lyricism as borrowed and imitative, ‘the worst conceits of the poets of the time of Charles II, and the most coxcombical euphuisms of the contemporaries of Elizabeth.’6 The fires were already stoked, then, for an outbreak of bad temper.
The fact that Bulwer Lytton had talked hypocritically about Tennyson to the d’Eyncourt cousins added to Tennyson’s fury. Lytton was staying with the d’Eyncourts at Bayons (and working on his historical romance, Harold, which he would dedicate to Charles d’Eyncourt) at the time that ‘The New Timon’ appeared. Tennyson wrote a brief reminiscence of this quarrel which his son Hallam published in the Memoir:
I never wrote a line against anyone but Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer. His lines did not move me to do so. But at the very time he was writing or had written these he was visiting my cousins, the d’Eyncourts, and said to them, ‘How much I should like to know your cousin Alfred.’
The canard about his circumstances had stung as much as Lytton’s verses: ‘he stated in a note that I belonged to a very rich family. The younger son, his friend, who had inherited was rich enough, but the elder branch was shut out in the cold, and at that time I had scarce anything’.7
Tennyson’s squib had been sent to Punch by his friend John Forster, and he began regretting its appearance immediately. He followed it with a second contribution to Punch, a balanced little rhyme about literary quarrels in which he acknowledged that he would have done better to keep quiet: ‘Surely, after all, / The noblest answer unto such / Is perfect stillness when they brawl.’8 Still, his display of anger countered the charge that he was a ‘school-miss’ who was only interested in dimity interiors like his ‘darling room’. It did his reputation no harm to show that he could defend himself robustly.
Had Tennyson and Bulwer Lytton managed to become friends instead of enemies, they might well have found that they had a good deal in common. They were both tall, impressive, very good-looking and attractive to women; they were both intensely proud and sensitive to adverse criticism; they both saw themselves as of high descent but unfairly disinherited; and they both made very substantial fortunes from the success of their writings.
Many years after the initial quarrel, Tennyson and Lytton came to respect each other. Lytton died in 1873, and in 1876 Tennyson managed a graceful gesture to his memory: he dedicated his historical drama, Harold, to Lytton’s son (the second Lord Lytton, who was at that date Viceroy of India). In this dedication he acknowledged Bulwer Lytton’s novel as one of his sources, and added: ‘Your father dedicated his “Harold” to my father’s brother; allow me to dedicate my “Harold” to yourself.’9
The Rawnsley family would always exert a very strong pull on Tennyson. The clergyman Thomas Rawnsley had been an important and very necessary stabilising force during his childhood. He had been the only person locally who could help Dr Tennyson to forget his grievances and enjoy a normal sociable life. Thomas Rawnsley’s son, Drummond Rawnsley, another clergyman and stable family man, was Tennyson’s closest Lincolnshire friend. In a long letter written in October 1845 to Thomas Rawnsley, Tennyson protested that ‘however appearances are against me I have a love for old Lincolnshire faces and things which will stick by me as long as I live’.10 He was restless in Cheltenham, and would have preferred to spend some of the winter months with his Lincolnshire circle rather than with Henry Hallam, to whom he had pledged himself. He knew that he could not in decency decline the hospitality of the man who had engineered his pension and was also Arthur Hallam’s father, but he would have been more comfortable with the Rawnsleys.
He did not enjoy feeling beholden, and he was worried about the way some of Lincolnshire would take the news of his good fortune over the pension. ‘I doubt not that I shall meet with all manner of livor [malignity], scandal, and heart-burning, small literary men whose letters perhaps I have never answered, bustling up and indignant that they are past by – they!’11 He encouraged Rawnsley to visit Cheltenham, but in decidedly mixed terms (it was ‘a handsome town’ in ‘one of the prettiest counties’ but ‘a Polka-parson-worshipping place’).12 Tennyson was careful not to disparage Lincolnshire by an implied comparison with the liveliness of Cheltenham. In reality, though, he was ambivalent about Lincolnshire. The Somersby Tennysons had suffered slights from, Lincolnshire society, and there was a certain consolation now in being able to look on that society as provincial and restricted. Notwithstanding his Lincolnshire accent and his untidy appearance and ‘coarseness’, Tennyson was by this time a London poet and a national figure.
Tennyson visited Henry Hallam and his family in November. Hallam was markedly kind to him, and wrote afterwards praising his character, genius and fame, and reminding him of the ‘sacred recollections’ of his dead son.13 But Tennyson was in a distressed and unstable state, and in January he was said by Elizabeth Barrett Browning to be ‘seriously ill with an internal complaint and confined to bed’ (the news came from the Lushingtons, and she had heard it from her brother who was a friend of George Stovin Venables). It was in this same letter that she famously expressed her astonishment over the proposed theme of what would become The Princess. ‘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?’14
All Tennyson’s friends knew that ‘The University for Women’ (that is, The Princess: A Medley) was brewing. His writing had suffered severe setbacks while he struggled with his emotional problems and financial crises, but throughout these The Princess was never out of his mind. When it was published in 1847, he made it clear to its readers – from its subtitle – that it did not wish to take itself seriously. It was not attempting to be an epic. Nor was Clough’s Bothie of 1848, which is in a sense a similar work, an undergraduate plaything. Clough’s poem had a particularising title followed by a disavowing subtitle: The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich: A Long-Vacation Pastoral. Clough had inadvertently used a dialect obscenity in the title (suggested to him by ‘some very unscrupulous Gaelic wit’).* This boyish mishap is part of the undergraduate feel of the poem, which is reinforced further by its dedication. ‘My long vacation pupils will I hope allow me to inscribe this trifle to them, and will not, I trust, be displeased if in a fiction, purely fiction, they are here and there reminded of times we enjoyed together.’15 As the ‘long-vacation pastoral’ firmly indicates, what these works have in common with Tennyson’s ‘The Epic’ (which prefaced his ‘Morte d’Arthur’ of 1842) is that they are grounded in undergraduate experience.
In both The Princess and The Bothie, the narrative leads a young man from the world of friendship to fulfilment with the perfect woman. The Prince marries his Princess Ida, and Philip, the Oxford undergraduate, marries his Scottish peasant girl, Elspie. The Prince and Ida will live royal lives in a place and time which feel vaguely medieval (though the frame of the poem, with its references to modern science and engineering – and powered flight – gestures firmly towards the future) while the destination of the lovers in the Clough poem is, in nineteenth-century terms, modern but equally remote. They emigrate to New Zealand:*
There he hewed, and dug; subdued the earth and his spirit;
There he built him a home; there Elspie bare him his children,
David and Bella; perhaps ere this too an Elspie or Adam;
There hath he farmstead and land, and fields of corn and flax fields;
And the Antipodes too have a Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich.16
The Princess belonged to the world of the Lushingtons. Henry Lushington heard Tennyson read some of the poem in April 1845, and commented in detail on what had been written so far. His brother Edmund, the most attentive of the family, remembered hearing parts of it read while Tennyson was visiting Park House in the years 1845, 1846 and 1847.17 There was a summer house in the grounds where Tennyson could find privacy when he wanted it, and the family tradition has it that much of The Princess was written there in these three consecutive summers. The poem was first published late in 1847 without a dedication, but the second edition, published early in 1848, was dedicated to Henry Lushington as a kind of belated acknowledgement of the help that he had given.
The Princess was a comic and oblique treatment of a serious subject: much of it sounded like a joke, but it contained passages of major poetry which in effect compelled the audience to take the work seriously. Tennyson substantially reworked and revised, as though he himself was baffled by it: he knew that it was important but did not quite know how to shape it. The Princess is a milestone in his quest for the significant long poem, a quest which he had pursued through previous long works in sharply contrasting verse forms (his schoolboy drama The Devil and the Lady as well as ‘The Palace of Art’). The rights and education of women were serious topics on which he had been brooding for some years. He had brilliant sisters at home and he was aware of young women in Cambridge who could not enrol as undergraduates, but would perhaps like to play a role in the institution. A little jeu d’esprit called ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’ dresses one of these irresistible girls as a ‘Proctor’, in other words a (mature, and male) university law enforcer. This was written in 1830 when he was twenty-one, and was a Cambridge joke:
Sweet Kitty Sandilands,
The daughter of the doctor,
We drest her in the Proctor’s bands,
And past her for the Proctor.
All the men ran from her
That would have hastened to her,
All the men ran from her
That would have come to woo her.
Up the street we took her
As far as to the Castle,
Jauntily sat the Proctor’s cap
And from it hung the tassel.18
Did this actually happen? It is unlikely, but it is fun to think of Alfred Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, Richard Monckton Milnes and other wags persuading a lively girl to impersonate one of the grumpy old terrors of the place. Several of the cartoons that Tennyson drew in his undergraduate notebooks show proctors rebuking the young men – the proctors are always fat, with squat, commonplace features, prodigious sideburns, tasselled caps and long gowns, and in one case an ominous and conspicuous genital bulge. Kitty Sandilands would have been hard pressed to manage all that, even with Monckton Milnes’s help. But the geography is specific – she would have walked with her gang of male friends, giggling, all the way down Trinity Street, past St John’s, past the medieval shops and public houses until she crossed the Cam at Magdalene Bridge and then up the hill to the old Castle Mound, at the top of which she would have been ceremoniously enthroned.
And the joke contained a serious point. Why was Kitty Sandilands barred from aspiring to the dignity of a proctor? Within the imaginative world of The Princess, Tennyson made such a thing possible.
Lilia, the strong-minded sister in the poem, could well be based on Louy, Edmund Lushington’s vivacious and independent sister. Sir Walter Vivian, though, the bluff elderly family man and squire who hosted the feast for the Mechanics’ Institute19 in the poem, was the opposite of Edmund, who at that date was very young, not yet married, and much happier with one or two intelligent friends than with a large gathering. At Glasgow he was far too scholarly to be an inspiring teacher; his students liked him as a personality but got little out of his lectures.
The setting of The Princess is imagined as a female Cambridge, and therefore vaguely medieval, but the young women in it are not only modern but belong to the future. One of the Prince’s young friends points this up:
‘Pretty were the sight
If our old halls could change their sex, and flaunt
With prudes for proctors [though Kitty Sandilands was no prude], dowagers for deans,
And sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair.’20
At an early stage of the poem’s composition there was more preoccupation with the future than there is in the final published text. Harvard Notebook 22 has this intriguing section of futuristic romance (composed in the late 1830s):
We crost into a land where mile-high towers
Pufft out a night of smoke that drowsed the sun;
Huge pistons rose and fell, and everywhere
We heard the clank of chains, the creak of cranes,
Ringing of blocks and throb of hammers mixt
With water split and spilt on groaning wheels
Until we reacht the court.21
This is a future for industrial Britain as imagined by the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, or perhaps William Armstrong, the formidable Tyneside weapons manufacturer, or even – at a level which is in all senses more fundamental – Sir John Bazalgette, the cloacal genius who created Victorian London’s sewage system.
It is hard to get a ‘handle’ on The Princess. Its subtitle, a ‘medley’, is one of those teasing words like ‘idyll’ which leaves one at a loss – what kind of work of art are we looking at? After the elaborate and ornate experiment – the beauty of all these young women playing at men’s roles in a building designed for men – the fierce old King, the Prince’s father, roughly articulates the traditional viewpoint with which mature males feel comfortable. This is how the young Prince needs to treat his Princess:
Man for the field and woman for the hearth:
Man for the sword and for the needle she:
Man with the head and woman with the heart:
Man to command and woman to obey;
All else confusion. Look you! the gray mare
Is ill to live with, when her whinny shrills
From tile to scullery, and her small goodman
Shrinks in his arm-chair while the fires of Hell
Mix with his hearth: but you – she’s yet a colt –
Take, break her: strongly groomed and straitly curbed
She might not rank with those detestable
That let the bantling scald at home, and brawl
Their rights or wrongs like potherbs in the street.
They say she’s comely; there’s the fairer chance:
I like her none the less for ranting at her!
Besides, the woman wed is not as we,
But suffers change of frame. A lusty brace
Of twins may weed her of her folly. Boy,
The bearing and the raising of a child
Is woman’s wisdom.22
At a literal level the poem’s narrative seems to endorse this. At the same time the distanced, comic, ornate manner of the whole invites us to think that none of the opinions or attitudes expressed are to be taken seriously. It is as though Tennyson built an elaborate defence strategy designed to distance himself from whatever doubts or scruples about his treatment of the theme may be lurking beneath the poem’s highly polished surface. The several ‘weird seizures’ from which the Prince suffers – all introduced into the poem in 1851 – are a further distancing device. None of this is real:
[…] like a flash the weird affection came:
King, camp and college turned to hollow shows;
I seemed to move in old memorial tilts,
And doing battle with forgotten ghosts,
To dream myself the shadow of a dream.23
The notion that life is a dream is a Shakespearean one, embedded in much of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet and The Tempest.
Dreamlike lyrical delight characterises the verses in The Princess that are loved and quoted:
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
This song was written near Tintern Abbey, ‘full for me of its bygone memories’, as Tennyson said of it. ‘It is the sense of abiding in the transient.’ Tintern Abbey is not very far from Clevedon, where Arthur Hallam was interred in the church. Of the immediate trigger for the tears, Frederick Locker Lampson quoted Tennyson as saying that it was not ‘real woe’ but ‘the yearning that young people occasionally experience for that which seems to have passed away from them for ever’.24
‘Tears, idle tears’ was part of the original 1847 text, but some of the songs were added later. These are not imagined as literally sung within the text; they are rather lyrics which stand at a tangent to the main narrative. A beautiful sunset in the main narrative prompted this song (added in 1850):
The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.*
The songs were ‘the best interpreters of the poem’, and were designed to enable the reader to see that ‘the child [Lady Psyche’s child] is the link through the parts’. One of them is a lullaby for this child:
Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea,
Wind of the western sea!
Over the rolling waters go,
Come from the dying moon, and blow,
Blow him again to me;
While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.25
As a part-song set in 1863 by Joseph Barnby this soon joined the standard repertoire of Victorian choral societies.
The Princess closed by commenting on its own strategies. It has many styles – the young men have been using ‘mock-heroic gigantesque’ while the women have used a quite different register. The poem’s narrator refers to it as a ‘strange diagonal’,26 a compromise between satire and realism. But behind these distancing devices, and the teasing and bantering tone, there is a serious argument at work, one which was continuous with the daring and generosity of spirit of the Cambridge poems. As an undergraduate Tennyson had written a celebration of great women throughout history in ‘A Dream of Fair Women’, in which he had been explicit about the need to change the power relationship between the sexes:
In every land I thought that, more or less,
The strongest sterner nature overbore
The softer, uncontrolled by gentleness
And selfish evermore:
And whether there were any means whereby,
In some far aftertime, the gentler mind
Might reassume its just and full degree
Of rule among mankind.27
The twin ideals – of equality and of the right of women to a university education – are expressed so eloquently and at such length in The Princess that the poem’s equivocating close does not erase them.
Despite the fact that she herself will later benefit from a man’s brute strength (she is saved from drowning by Cyril, the Prince who loves her), Princess Ida’s first speech to the three young men (disguised as women) is compelling in itself, and is not invalidated by subsequent events:
O lift your natures up:
Embrace our aims: work out your freedom. Girls,
Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed:*
Drink deep, until the habits of the slave,
The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite
And slander, die.28
The Prince, Cyril, is the last of the ‘medley’s’ several narrators. His name is an anagram of ‘lyric’, as though he is in fact the authoritative voice of poetry itself. His argument is that marriage between them will complete the identity of both:
For woman is not undevelopt man,
But diverse: could we make her as the man,
Sweet Love were slain: his dearest bond is this,
Not like to like but like in difference.
Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;
Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words.
Cyril – ‘Lyric’ – finds the perfect music to accompany him in Ida’s mind and in her beauty, and as the two become ‘liker’ so they will become ‘The single pure and perfect animal, / The two-celled heart beating, with one full stroke, / Life.’29
In both The Princess and ‘Morte d’Arthur’, the frame shows high-spirited young men engaged in learned fooling – itself a strong tradition in English writing (Tristram Shandy is a major example). And there is a love story in each poem.30 ‘Morte d’Arthur’ and ‘The Lady of Shalott’ are among the poems in which Tennyson can clearly be seen to be responding to the same influences and preferences that stirred the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Inspired by prophetic phrases from Modern Painters, the first volume of which had been published by the twenty-four-year-old John Ruskin in 1843, this group, of whom the most conspicuous were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Thomas Woolner, set themselves to challenge the Royal Academy and the academy schools, and to claim the authority of nature itself as the basis of their art.
Unlike Rossetti and Millais, the sculptor Thomas Woolner was a rough provincial (from Hadleigh in Suffolk), the son of a minor post office official. He was outspoken, courageous, capable of being bearish and brusque in manner, and violently ambitious. In 1849, when he was twenty-five, a reward for his ambition came in the form of an introduction to Tennyson. This was fortuitous timing – Tennyson was forty-one, a well-established poet on the way to the immense recognition which would come his way in 1850. But he liked rough-hewn and ready young men, and agreed to sit for a medallion in December 1849. It was hard for Woolner to establish continuity, however, because so many changes were taking place in Tennyson’s life in the spring and summer of 1850.
When he was not on one of his extended visits to Park House, Tennyson’s home was now the house that his mother rented in Cheltenham. He had a sustained period of work there early in 1845, in ‘a little room at the top of the house in St James’ Square’ remembered by Dr Buchanan Ker, brother of Mary Tennyson’s husband, as ‘not kept in very orderly fashion’, with books and papers ‘quite as much on the floor and the chairs as upon the table’, where Tennyson, ‘pipe in mouth, discoursed to his friends more unconstrainedly than anywhere else on men and things and what death means’. George Stovin Venables visited him there in March 1845. Venables recalled that he ‘went up to A.T.’s room, & sat a good while, he reading out passages from Pericles & Love’s Labours Lost. He is a very fine critic.’31 Tennyson was clearly reading Shakespeare’s late romance, Pericles, and the comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost, while brooding upon his own comedy-romance. In Love’s Labour’s Lost a group of scholarly young men renounced the company of women; in Tennyson’s ‘medley’ that position was reversed, the scholarly young women renouncing men.
Tennyson’s social life was increasingly active. He had met Wordsworth some years earlier, but it was during this year that he got to know the great poet; several of his friends recorded Tennyson’s delighted account of a supper party, where Wordsworth had said ‘come brother bard, to dinner’. Tennyson had been tongue-tied and awkward, but at last he had summoned the will to pour out his admiration to the old man, who took his hand ‘and replied with some expressions equally kind and complimentary. Tennyson was evidently much pleased with the old man, and glad of having learned to know him.’32
Part of the social circle was ‘the Sterling Club’. This society, named after the controversial Apostle John Sterling, who had died young, was in effect a London continuation of the Cambridge Apostles, and a dinner on 29 April 1845 was correspondingly a matter of grand young men who had known each other at Cambridge: ‘Two Spring Rices, Lord Ebrington, Spedding, Law, Alfred Tennyson, Venables, Merivale, T. F. Ellis, Trench’.33
Tennyson also needed calmer companionship than this, and one of his restful friends was Aubrey de Vere (1814–1902), the charming, gentle and aristocratic Irish poet, who had come up to Cambridge some ten years after Tennyson. Stephen Spring Rice, de Vere’s cousin, was an Apostle and acquaintance of Tennyson’s; through Spring Rice, de Vere became friendly with Monckton Milnes and James Spedding. He had first met Tennyson, again through Spring Rice, in 1842. De Vere himself was a mystical and solitary soul, a man who would find his spiritual home in the Roman Catholic Church. Like those other loyal friends, Spedding and Henry Lushington, de Vere was an excellent and supportive critic of Tennyson’s work in progress. On 17 April he called on Tennyson ‘and found him much out of spirits. He cheered up soon, and read me some beautiful elegies’ (drafts of In Memoriam), and on the 18th he heard Tennyson read his ‘University of Women’ (The Princess).34
In August of 1846, Tennyson took a holiday in Switzerland with his now indispensable publisher, Moxon. In the course of his holiday he wrote the lyric ‘Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height’, which would find its place as one of the most memorable and resonant passages in The Princess. He and Moxon travelled down the Rhine – Tennyson was stirred by memories of his visit to the area with Arthur Hallam in 1832 (‘Nonnenwerth and Drachenfels, sad recollections’ – Nonnenwerth had been particularly recalled in Tennyson’s ill-starred poem about his ‘darling room’).
They reached Lucerne and took a steamer over the lake to Weggis, where he found that he was expected to share a room (‘fleabitten’) with Moxon. The hotel was noisy with other guests (‘infernal chatter of innumerous apes’). They saw essential sights such as the Rhigi, the ‘far off Jungfrau looking as if delicately pencilled’, and visited Küssnacht, Flüelen, and William Tell’s chapel. The minor vexations of travel continued unabated: ‘bad beer – sour ill looking maid – go into church – two rouged harridans in flounce and furbelows for Virgins’. A night in Lungern, charming place though it is, was spoilt by ‘infamous beds swarming with fleas’.35
Towards the end of this holiday the two men visited Charles Dickens in Lausanne. Dickens was puzzled by the fact that Tennyson had brought Moxon with him, noting that Moxon was ‘an odd companion for a man of genius’, and ‘snobbish’ but good-natured. It soon became clear to him that Moxon was in effect looking after Tennyson, and that without Moxon’s help the practicalities of the holiday would have been hard for Tennyson to manage.36
Tennyson reported to his friend Fitzgerald that the Swiss were ‘greedy, goitred, miserable-looking poor devils’.37 For most of his long life he would behave as though the refreshment and stimulus of travel were rewarding for him, while at the same time his actual expeditions were all too often accompanied by a steady litany of complaints.
Henry Lushington had become an indispensable friend to Tennyson and a sharply intelligent reader of his poetry. There was an unwelcome separation from him early in the following year, when Henry had ‘received a letter from Lord Grey, colonial secretary in the new Whig government of Lord John Russell, offering him the chief secretaryship of the British government on the island of Malta. […] The position ranked second only to the governor’s in the civilian administration of the island, and under Lord Grey’s plans to liberalize the Maltese government, gave promise of acquiring additional importance.’38 This was a great loss. Tennyson determined to make the most of Henry Lushington’s sensitivity and insight before he left.
The Tennysons as a family continued to treat Edmund and Cecilia’s home as their own, particularly when the owners themselves were away in Glasgow. George Stovin Venables, who regarded himself as Henry Lushington’s closest friend, was by 1847 increasingly irritated by this. Venables had the generosity of spirit, though, to help Tennyson with poems, proofs and publicity. Henry was plunged into depression by the prospect of going to Malta, despite the fact that he had no other career, and Venables was anxious to have some time with his dear friend, on his own. He arrived at Park House by invitation on 11 February 1847, but the place was already full of unwelcome Tennysons: ‘Mary Tennyson and Miss Hamilton, a Scotch old maid […] also of course Horatio & Matilda Tennyson, which is a great nuisance.’ The next day Venables ‘found no opportunity of speaking to H[enry], all day from the crowd in the house’. Later Venables again visited Park House to find his beloved Henry taken up by Tennyson: Henry was reading the newly completed Princess. Despite himself Venables took an interest, borrowed the MS of the poem, and on a railway journey to Hereford ‘read the greater part of the New University with pleasure and admiration’. By 16 February Tennyson had returned, intending, as he wrote to T. H. Rawnsley, to ‘see the last’ of his ‘brother-in-law’s brother’, who would soon be off to Malta and, ‘being a man of feeble stamina’, was ‘afraid of the climate and altogether down in the mouth about it’. Tennyson would ‘do my best to set him up, though I am very unwell myself’. Tennyson again found himself apologising to Lincolnshire friends: because of Henry Lushington’s imminent departure and his own illness, ‘a journey into Lincolnshire so as to catch all your “clan” in full conclave is quite impossible’. ‘My old friendships are as dear as ever,’ he declared, and he asked Rawnsley to ‘not be hard of faith but believing’.39
Tennyson’s illness led him to take a water cure at Umberslade Hall near Birmingham, where he read proofs of The Princess and remained for a month or more. It is not clear what his illness was, but it was certainly a nervous disorder of some kind. Anxiety about whether to resume contact with Emily may have contributed to it, and there is also a sense in which he was in conflict with himself over his own emerging success. He was increasingly lauded and feted: his friends now included Carlyle, Wordsworth and Browning, and he had become the leading author of the best poetry publisher in London. The obscure, vagrant identity that he had cherished since his 1830 volume no longer fitted the reality of his situation.
Thomas Carlyle, now settled in Chelsea, was captivated by Tennyson’s physical magnificence and the sense of being in the presence of a kind of wild creature or noble savage, and the two men became good friends in the course of the 1840s. Carlyle recalled his first meeting with Tennyson in 1840: ‘A fine large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-coloured, shaggy-headed man inwardly, with great composure in an inarticulate element as of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke; great now and then when he does emerge: a most restful, brotherly, solidhearted man.’40 ‘Restful’ at that date Tennyson certainly was not; his inner life was one of anxiety and anguish. As he got to know him Carlyle saw him more accurately, and in a letter of 1844 he wrote of Tennyson’s physical beauty, his ‘rough dusty-dark hair; bright-laughing hazel eyes; massive acquiline face, most massive yet most delicate’, and of the marks of suffering on him: ‘a man solitary and sad, as certain men are, dwelling in an element of gloom, – carrying a bit of Chaos about him, in short, which he is manufacturing into Cosmos!’ He noted that Tennyson smoked ‘infinite tobacco’ and was often unwell.41
Once Tennyson called at Chelsea, looking for Thomas, and found his wife instead. He was acutely awkward with a woman on her own, and Jane’s solution was to entertain him as Carlyle would have done, with pipes, tobacco, brandy and water. Relaxing somewhat, he smoked for three hours on end, and talked to her ‘exactly as if he were talking with a clever man’.42 James Spedding’s rooms in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Edward Fitzgerald’s rooms in Charlotte Street and the top-floor rooms in 1 Mitre Court Buildings shared by Henry Lushington and George Venables, were always open to him. If he saw lights he would go up and find a group, usually of former Cambridge men, who would enable him to renew the old easy sense of companionship.
Early in the 1840s Carlyle introduced him to a new friend, Sir John Simeon. It was on this occasion that Carlyle memorably described Tennyson as ‘sitting on a dung-heap among innumerable dead dogs’ (by which he meant simply that Tennyson was preoccupied by the past – this was certainly true).43 The meeting was at Bath House, the London residence of Lord and Lady Ashburton. The Ashburtons were related to Rosa Baring (and their son, William Baring, had become another of Tennyson’s friends). Lady Ashburton, intelligent, vulgar, lion-hunting and famously ugly, enjoyed surrounding herself with geniuses, and Tennyson regularly found himself invited to Bath House as his reputation grew.
Meanwhile, nervous distress and irritability caused him to seek out further water cures, at Cheltenham in 1846, at Birmingham with a well-regarded practitioner, Dr Edward Johnson in 1847, and then later in 1847 for a longer and more fruitful period – during which he was writing some of the songs for the revised and expanded Princess – at Dr Gully’s water-cure establishment in Malvern. One of the attractions was that the vicar of Malvern was the Rev. John Rashdall, whom Tennyson had known at Cambridge and in Lincolnshire, and who had married Rosa Baring’s sister. (This was the same Rashdall who had been disconcertingly sharp in his diary about Arthur Hallam’s death in 1833.) Tennyson stayed in Rashdall’s vicarage rather than in one of the attractive properties that Dr Gully had acquired to accommodate his patients. Gully had treated Henry Hallam, which must have given Tennyson confidence in him.
Dr Gully and Dr Wilson, his partner in the practice, held that ‘all chronic disease was caused by a faulty supply of blood to the viscera; either the blood was poor in quality or owing to defective circulation it was not carried off and the viscera became engorged with it. The application of cold water to the skin by various methods: compresses, or packing in sheets wrung out of cold water, or sitz baths or jets or douches was used to animate the circulation and get it working normally.’44
Tennyson’s friends were puzzled by his need for these water cures. Fitzgerald saw it as a discouraging sign:
Tennyson is emerged half-cured, or half-destroyed, from a water establishment: has gone to a new Doctor who gives him iron pills; and altogether this really great man thinks more about his bowels and nerves than about the Laureate wreath* he was born to inherit. Not but he meditates new poems; and now the Princess is done, he turns to King Arthur – a worthy subject indeed – and has consulted some histories of him, and spent some time in visiting his traditionary haunts in Cornwall. But I believe the trumpet can wake Tennyson no longer to do great deeds; I may mistake and prove myself an owl; which I hope may be the case. But how are we to expect heroic poems from a valetudinary? I have told him he should fly from England and go among savages.45
Like his father (and his brother Charles), Tennyson had a self-indulgent and addictive personality, and he needed periods in which the stimulants – alcohol, especially, but also tobacco, late nights and urban excitement – were replaced by what were in effect spiritual retreats.
After the publication of the first version of The Princess late in 1847, Tennyson’s friends were struck by his restlessness. This had to do with the need to take further the big Arthurian project which had begun with the ‘Morte d’Arthur’ published in 1842. He projected a visit to Arthurian sites in Cornwall but was persuaded by Aubrey de Vere to be his guest in Ireland first (de Vere argued that the waves and the cliffs were even more romantic in Ireland than they were in Cornwall). He accompanied de Vere to his family seat, Curragh Chase in County Limerick, where he was entertained handsomely but struck his host as restive and ill at ease. De Vere was anxious about him:
I hope we shall make this visit pleasant to him. I wonder why he came, and whether he is fond of me, I fear not much so. Yesterday, when I looked up at dinner and saw him sitting between my sister-in-law and her sister, in this remote land, strange to him, I felt all at once such an affection for him as made his noble face look very dim and misty. He has indeed a most noble countenance, so full of power, passion and intellect – so strong, dark and impressive.
Tennyson was an awkward guest: he read aloud a good deal to his hosts, his regular strategy for coping with sticky situations, but he was reluctant to join in other entertainments. He was supercilious and resistant when a dance was held at the house, but here the Irish were a match for him. The mother of one of the young unmarried girls who were guests at the dance turned on him and rebuked him: ‘How would the world get on if others went around growling at its amusements in a voice as deep as a lion’s? I request that you will go upstairs, put on an evening coat and ask my daughter to dance.’46 Since Tennyson was an excellent dancer, he was then able to enjoy the evening, and he began to engage rather better with the characteristic Irish enjoyment of revelries of this kind. From Curragh he went to Killarney, where the light on its celebrated castle prompted one of the songs for The Princess, ‘The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls’.*
Edward Fitzgerald, hitherto one of Tennyson’s most devoted disciples, was feeling disillusioned. He was unable to see the point of The Princess and he confessed this to Tennyson’s brother, Frederick (whom he always addressed as ‘Frederic’) in May 1848:
I had a note from Alfred three months ago. He was then in London: but is now in Ireland, I think, adding to his new poem, the Princess. Have you seen it? I am considered a great heretic for abusing it; it seems to me a wretched waste of power at a time of life when a man ought to be doing his best; and I almost feel hopeless about Alfred now. I mean, about his doing what he was born to do.
In the same letter, Fitzgerald wrote that he had heard Jenny Lind. Frederick was passionate about music – indeed it was a major part of his life – and in his generous way Fitzgerald liked to keep him informed about current performances in London. Fitzgerald also loved gossip about their mutual Cambridge friends. James Spedding, for example, was respected by all of them but they also liked to laugh gently at his solemnity, self-sufficiency and austere celibacy. Fitzgerald had decided that Spedding was in love with Jenny Lind: ‘Night after night is that bald head seen in one particular position in the Opera house, in a stall; the miserable man has forgot Bacon and philosophy, and goes after strange women.’47
In May 1848, Tennyson finally went to Cornwall in search of Arthurian legends. His arrival at the inn in Bude was marked by a mishap. ‘Arrived at Bude in dark, askt girl way to sea, she opens the back door … I go out and in a moment go sheer down, upward of six feet, over wall on fanged cobbles.’ He gashed his leg so badly that it did not heal for six weeks.
He stayed in simple places, with grocers and shopkeepers as well as in small inns, and found to his surprise that many of the Cornish people whom he met (including a miner who hid behind a wall to have a close view of him) knew his poetry well.48
He made friends with Robert Stephen Hawker (1803–75), the learned, celebrated and highly eccentric vicar of Morwenstow. Hawker was himself a poet, as well as an antiquarian and a genuine scholar of all matters Cornish. He was a generous-minded and compassionate pastor; he suffered agonies of grief over the casualties caused by shipwreck along the particularly dangerous section of coast which was part of his parish. Tennyson and Hawker were alike in some ways: they were both big men; they enjoyed wild landscapes and the company of simple people; they both cultivated a distinctive personal appearance. Tennyson’s Spanish cloak and hat had already become part of his personality, and Hawker was a flamboyant dandy. He refused to wear black clothes or a clerical collar; his preferred outfit was an expensive but dirty velvet-trimmed brown cassock, worn at all times (even when scrambling over rocks on the coast, with all his skirts tucked up and a pair of sturdy grey trousers beneath them). This was set off by a soft black velvet cap or a kind of pink fez without a tassel. On occasions he liked to dress as a mermaid and sit out on a rock in the bay near his vicarage. Later in life he became addicted to opium and his personality began to disintegrate (among other things he became a compulsive fantasist), but, at the time Tennyson met him, he was scholarly, interested and helpful. At first he was disconcertingly cold, but as he came to understand the nature of Tennyson’s quest he became voluble and friendly. He talked to him at length about his Arthurian project and lent him a great many books and manuscripts to read while he visited the places associated by legend with King Arthur’s Camelot: Tintagel, Camelford, Kynance, St Ives, Land’s End and the Lizard.49
The stories of King Arthur had preoccupied Tennyson since his adolescence. ‘Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere’ was completed in his twenty-first year in 1830, though not published until 1842. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ was written by 1831 (he corresponded with Arthur Hallam about it in October of that year) and published in 1832 (revised in 1842). ‘Morte d’Arthur’ was written in reaction to the shock of Arthur Hallam’s death (thus in 1833–4) and published in 1842, and ‘Sir Galahad’ also was written by 1834 (and published in 1842).
In 1848 Tennyson’s foe Bulwer Lytton pre-empted him with a twelve-book narrative poem, King Arthur, the story of a Welsh king willing to die rather than surrender his kingdom. Bulwer’s poem nodded acknowledgement to Malory but strayed a good distance from the sources and was essentially a colourful episodic invention with some degree of energy and talent about it. His prose preface to his epic reads as though written in conscious rivalry with Tennyson.
Whatever the defects of this Poem, it has not been hastily conceived or lightly undertaken. From my earliest youth, the subject I have selected has haunted my ambition – for twenty years it has rested steadily on my mind, in spite of other undertakings, for the most part not wholly ungenial [preparing for a poem which …] seeks to construct from the elements of national romance, something approaching to the completeness of epic narrative.
Bulwer Lytton’s poem venerated male friendship and valour, and his Arthur was physically magnificent, and enjoyed an ideal friendship with his Lancelot:
O’er the light limb, and o’er the shoulders broad,
The steel flowed pliant as a silken vest;
Strength was so supple that like grace it showed,
And force was only by its ease confest […]
And if the friendship scarce in each the same,
The soul has rivals where the heart has not;
So Lancelot loved his Arthur more than fame,
And Arthur more than life his Lancelot.
Lost here Art’s mean distinctions! knightly troth,
Frank youth, high thoughts, crown’d Nature’s kings in both.50
A mark of Tennyson’s capacity for what Carlyle called his ‘chaos’ was his ability to lose his own manuscripts. One of the most startling of his letters (now in the Beinecke Library, Yale) shows that a manuscript book containing the most complete state of what would become In Memoriam was almost lost and destroyed in 1849, the year before it was published. In February Tennyson was staying with friends at Bonchurch, on the Isle of Wight, and had left the book in London. From there he wrote to Coventry Patmore:*
I went up to my room yesterday to get my book of elegies – you know what I mean – a long butcher-ledger-like book. I was going to read one or two to an artist here. I could not find it? I have some obscure remembrance of having lent it to you. If so, all is well. If not will you go to my old chambers and institute a rigorous inquiry. I was coming up to-day on purpose to look after it, but the weather is so ferocious I have yielded to the wishes of my friends here to stop till tomorrow. I shall be, I expect in town tomorrow at 25 M.P. [25 Mornington Place, the rooms in which Tennyson was staying in London] where I shall be glad to see you: at 9.10 P.M. the train in which I come gets into London. I suppose I shall be in Mornington Place about 10 o’clock. Perhaps you would in your walk Museum-ward call on Mrs Lloyd and tell her to prepare for me. With best remembrances to Mrs Patmore, believe me Ever yours A
A ‘rigorous inquiry’ is a comic usage echoing newspaper reports of police investigations of the day. (Tennyson’s published Letters have ‘vigorous’, which is a misreading.51) Patmore liked to tell the story of how he had rescued the elegies. Somewhat hugging himself with self-importance, he later said to William Allingham (who recorded it in his diary):
I have in this room perhaps the greatest literary treasure in England – the manuscript of Tennyson’s next poem. It is written in a thing like a butcher’s account-book. He left it behind him in his lodging when he was up in London and wrote to me to go and look for it. He had no other copy, and he never remembers his verses. I found it by chance in a drawer; if I had been a little later it would probably have been sold to a butter-shop [for wrapping butter – the editors of Tennyson’s Letters quote this in a footnote but give ‘butcher-shop’ (by association, presumably, with the ‘butcher-ledger-like’ book) instead of ‘butter-shop’].52
Patmore heightened the effect here in three different ways: in fact Tennyson had an excellent memory for his own poetry; there were many drafts of individual elegies in his multiple notebooks; and there were two ‘butcher’s book’ manuscripts of the elegies in existence by this date.53 But it is still a good tale.
Recalling Tennyson for a memoir published in 1900, Willingham Franklin Rawnsley wrote:
My earliest remembrance of him is of his visiting my parents at Shiplake, before 1850, when I was turned out of my little room in order that he might have a place of his own to smoke in. He was then still working on ‘In Memoriam,’ and it was in this little room of mine that he wrote the ‘Hesper Phosphor’ canto (no. CXX). It was on 7th of February, in or about 1850, that Tennyson and my father drove to Reading, and on their return they were quoting some verses to one another with much amusement. Tennyson said to me, ‘And oh, far worse than all beside, he whipped his Mary till she cried.’ ‘What is that?’ I asked. ‘Oh, you’ll know tomorrow,’ was all the answer I could get; and it puzzled me greatly.
The mystery was cleared up the following day, Willingham Rawnsley’s birthday, when he was given a copy of Struwel-Peter (in which the verse about Mary being whipped appeared).
These memories are indispensable, because they are so sharp:
It was at Shiplake that he said to my mother, after reading Matthew Arnold’s ‘Merman,’ ‘I should like to have written that.’* And it was then too that on his casting about as he often did, for a new subject to write on, my mother, as she herself told me, suggested his enlarging his lovely little fragment, published some years before in ‘The Tribute,’ than which she told him he had never written anything better, and which, for he acted on the suggestion, is now imbedded in ‘Maud.’ The lines were:
Oh that ‘twere possible
After long grief and pain
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again.
I have the whole canto as it then stood, written out at the time for my mother.54
The 1842 volumes and The Princess enhanced Tennyson’s reputation so that by the late 1840s this brilliant, drifting man, who in 1845 had seemed almost a vagrant, was becoming more established and more secure. Socially, though, he was still regarded as something of an outsider. It puts Tennyson’s attitudes to Lincolnshire into perspective to be reminded of the way in which the wealthy and the grand of the county continued to regard him. Harrington Hall, for example, the scene of Tennyson’s doomed attachment to Rosa Baring, had been leased by the Barings from its owner, one Weston Cracroft (1815–83). Cracroft was a friend of Thomas Rawnsley, whom he visited late in 1849, writing in his diary some reflections which displayed the fixed attitudes of this typical Lincolnshire gentleman. In his tone there is innocent surprise over the fact that Rawnsley, ‘a poor country parson’, had seriously grand contacts among the gentry (‘Sir Gilbert Heathcote, Lord Willoughby d’Eresby and heaps of other “nobiles” its very remarkable’). At the Rawnsleys’ dinner party on 18 November the misfit among the guests, in Cracroft’s view, was ‘Alfred Tennyson the poet’. Cracroft took some interest in Tennyson (he was becoming indisputably famous), but his appearance and bad manners were marked against him: ‘When he lights up his face is almost fine, but his expression coarse when unexcited. On the whole his features coarse, and complexion dirty and sallow – he wears spectacles – conversation agreeable.’ When Tennyson put his feet up on the sofa, his hostess ‘all of a sudden quietly warned him off’.55 (Sofia Rawnsley, wife of Thomas Rawnsley since 1815, had known Tennyson as a little boy and as a dreamy and unkempt young man.) The following day, lunching with Edward Rawnsley (one of Thomas’s sons) at Raithby, Cracroft encountered Tennyson again: ‘a scrubby looking fellow by daylight – dress no way neat – in short a poet’.56
The Lushingtons had facilitated the writing and publishing of The Princess, and, later, they played a key role in Tennyson’s rapprochement with Emily Sellwood. Arriving at Park House from Wales on a Friday in September 1847, Venables found among several visitors ‘Miss Sellwood and A.T.’. On the following Monday, having given very little notice, Tennyson went off to London in the afternoon, and Venables noted that Emily Sellwood left Park House the following Saturday. A few days later Venables reported that ‘A.T. appeared, to me most unexpectedly’, and he and Venables left Park House on Monday, 4 October. When Venables was next at Park House, 10 October, Emily was there but Tennyson was not – Emily left two days later, on the 12th. The possibility of ‘accidentally’ meeting at Park House, however briefly, must have been tantalizing for them both, but Alfred and Emily were doing what they could to avoid awkwardness – and, in particular, any discussion of their relationship amongst their friends – by taking care not to be under the same roof for any length of time.57
Early in 1849, Emily saw the manuscripts of the memorial poems for Arthur Hallam which would become In Memoriam. They had been lent to her by her cousin, Catherine Franklin, who in 1842 had married Drummond Rawnsley. It was as a consequence of reading these verses that Emily wrote a remarkable letter (known only because it was quoted in full by Willingham Franklin Rawnsley in Memories of the Tennysons; the original seems not to have survived). The letter is often dated 1 April 1850, but it seems likely, as Ann Thwaite suggests, that it was actually written a year earlier, in April 1849.58
Emily was encouraged by Catherine to send a message about the elegies to Tennyson. She found in In Memoriam comforting assurance that Tennyson was a man of deep feeling and, crucially, that he was fundamentally a Christian believer. To communicate with him directly was a momentous step, given the breaking-off of their engagement back in 1840, and, here in her letter to Catherine, Emily was understandably very cautious about it:
My dearest Katie … Do you really think I should write a line with the Elegies, that is in a separate note, to say I have returned them? I am almost afraid, but since you say I am to do so I will, only I cannot say what I feel … You and Drummond are among the best and kindest friends I have in the world, and let me not be ungrateful, I have some very good and very kind. The longer I live the more I feel how blessed I am in this way. Now I must say good bye – Thy loving sister. Emily.
I thought I would write my note before the others came. Here it is, no beginning nor end, not a note at all, a sort of label only. ‘Katie told me the poems might be kept until Saturday. I hope I shall not have occasioned any inconvenience by keeping them to the limit of time; and if I have I must be forgiven, for I cannot willingly part from what is so precious. The thanks I would say for them and for the faith in me which has trusted them to me must be thought for me, I cannot write them.’
Within this letter to Catherine Rawnsley Emily quoted an enthusiastic letter about the memorial poems that she had herself received from Charles Kingsley (1819–75), the clergyman, writer and Christian socialist who was a close friend of Drummond Rawnsley and a warm admirer of Tennyson’s work. Kingsley had written:
I have read the poems through and through and through and to me they were and they are ever more and more a spirit monument grand and beautiful, in whose presence I feel admiration and delight, not unmixed with awe. The happiest possible end to this labour of love! But think not its fruits shall so soon perish, for they are life in life, and they shall live, and as years go on be only the more fully known and loved and reverenced for what they are.
Emily then added her own comments to this: ‘So said a true seer. Can anyone guess the name of this seer?’ She expected Catherine to guess that the ‘seer’ who had written this was Kingsley. She followed this with a brief paraphrase of a letter that she had herself written to Tennyson, in which she had said ‘that I am the happier for having seen these poems and that I hope I shall be the better too’.59
Since 1844, Kingsley, ‘the true seer’, had been rector of Eversley, which was close to Shiplake, Rawnsley’s own parish. Kingsley was to review In Memoriam in Fraser’s Magazine in September 1850. This in many ways remarkable review responded with great warmth to the central relationship in the poem. Kingsley was celebrated for his ‘muscular Christianity’, and his review gave full measure both to muscles and to Christian enthusiasm. He commended equally the ‘spiritual experiences’ and the mutual bond between the poet and his dead friend:
Blessed, thrice blessed, to find that hero-worship is not yet passed away; that the heart of man still beats young and fresh; that the old tales of David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias, Socrates and Alcibiades, Shakespeare and his nameless friend, of ‘love passing the love of woman,’ ennobled by his own humility, deeper than death, and mightier than the grave, can still blossom out if it be but in one heart here and there to show men still how sooner or later ‘he that loveth knoweth God, for God is Love!’.60
In Memoriam was crucial in bringing the lovers together after their long estrangement and detachment. It was not the only factor; Tennyson felt confident, more prosperous, more socially secure, and had put the depressions and crises of the 1840s behind him. The sequence of events following Emily’s reading of the poem makes it clear that she saw in it enough elements endorsing Tennyson’s basic piety for her to relax her strictly orthodox Christian scruples. By Christmas of 1849 it seems clear, as Ann Thwaite has argued, that they had agreed to marry, but they had decided to keep this secret. Tennyson wrote to Catherine Rawnsley on Christmas Day 1849: ‘I have made up my mind to marry in a month. I have much to do and settle in the mean time. Pray keep this thing secret. I do not mean even my own family to know.’61 The marriage did not take place ‘in a month’, of course, and it is not known whether Tennyson panicked and backtracked or whether further difficulties developed between the lovers. Ann Thwaite suggests that an outside event may have caused them both to agree to postpone their plans. Emily’s aunt Elizabeth (the ‘Aunt Betsy’ whom Tennyson had found tiresome in the past) died in January 1850, which meant that Emily went into a period of mourning.62
Because so few people were invited to this marriage, it is especially interesting to have the young Willingham Franklin Rawnsley’s eyewitness account of it:
It was at Shiplake that the poet, described in the Marriage License as ‘Alfred Tennyson of Lincoln Inn Fields,’ and his bride, who was put down as ‘Emily Sarah Sellwood of East Bourne in the county of Sussex,’ in reality two Lincolnshire people, were married by another Lincolnshire person, my father, Drummond Rawnsley, very quietly on June 13th 1850.63
H. D. Rawnsley recorded his mother’s patience with the wayward poet: ‘At the time of the wedding, over which he had given a great deal of trouble to my mother [i.e. Emily Sellwood’s cousin Catherine Rawnsley] by his inability to make up his mind, so that the marriage license was dated May 15, though the wedding did not take place til June 13, she had endless trouble to get not only the cake and the bride’s wedding dress ready, but also his own essential wedding garments.’ About these garments he wrote Catherine Rawnsley a strikingly brief and abrupt note (in early June 1850): ‘It is settled for the 13th, so the shirts may be got on with.’
Tennyson’s sister Mary identified closely with the diffidence, indecisiveness and fear of commitment that he was displaying, although she did also protest at his thoughtless and hurtful behaviour towards his siblings: ‘Alfred maintains silence [as late as May 1850] about the engagement, which I think is not fair towards his family, especially as the Rawnsleys know it. […] Poor thing, I daresay he is miserable enough at times, thinking of what he is about to do.’ Of the wedding itself – although in fact she was relying on inaccurate hearsay for both the day and the weather – Mary wrote: ‘Well, all is over. Alfred was married to Emily Sellwood last Friday – Friday, and raining [neither was true], about which I feel very superstitious. I hope they will be happy, but I feel very doubtful about it.’64 Tennyson’s brother Charles Tennyson Turner, whose wife Louisa was one of the bride’s sisters, wrote a quirky letter of congratulation:
Oh, what a queer world it is! I hope however it has done a brace of amiable and remarkable people some genuine good, whirligig as it is. This time at least – well! The thing is to come off on the 13th, daddy [Mr Sellwood, Louisa and Emily’s father] says. Good wishes in crowds from me. I despatch a dove’s wing to you. I am going to keep pigeons, would they were carrier pigeons! then would I trouble their wings with missives of congratulation to arrive more swiftly than the railroad. coo! coo! coo! Your affectionate brother Charles65
The guests included old Mr Sellwood (Emily’s father), Cecilia (Tennyson’s sister) and her husband Edmund Lushington, Charles Weld (who was married to Anne, another of Emily’s sisters) and two Rawnsley children. Emily remembered the scrambled preparations for her great day: ‘Neither the cake nor the dresses arrived in time, and the white gloves were lost, but the wedding notwithstanding took place.’66 Tennyson was laconic and comical about the whole affair. To Sophy – now Mrs Elmhirst, but still in his own mind one of his sweethearts – he wrote about his new wife, ‘We seem to get on very well together. I have not beaten her yet’. In poetry, though, he gave his real feelings. ‘To the Vicar of Shiplake’ acknowledged the blessing of his marriage:
Good she is, and pure and just.
Being conquered by her sweetness
I shall come through her, I trust,
Into fuller-orbed completeness;
Though but made of erring dust.67
Only loving intimates would have put up with Tennyson’s behaviour over Emily Sellwood. There were mitigating circumstances – his fame was burgeoning, the very long engagement had been deliberately kept secret from most of his friends so that the general astonishment which would now greet the news was something he was temperamentally unable to deal with, and he was clearly intensely apprehensive, indeed panicked, once the prospect of losing his liberty and uniting himself for life to another person became a reality. He was, after all, over forty and in recent years had lived a life of complete freedom (if not complete independence) and – it is fair to say – wholehearted self-indulgence. Still, his behaviour is puzzling. He was a Lincolnshire man, marrying a Lincolnshire girl, from the home of Lincolnshire friends, albeit friends who had moved to Oxfordshire. Why did the marriage have to be kept away from his native county, and why were none of his own immediate family told that it was taking place? Why were none of them invited? He doted on his mother – all the Tennysons did – so how could he bring himself to keep her in the dark about the most important personal event of his life?
Perhaps the explanation is simply that he did not know how to cope with the fact that he was now well known, and felt in danger of being torn in pieces by the mindless curiosity of a mob. Some of the boon companions of his bachelor years were indignant about the secrecy. ‘Come Forster, don’t be angry with me,’ he wrote to the well-known journalist and man-about-town John Forster, who was later to be Dickens’s first biographer. ‘If I had told others and left you alone in the dark, I grant you might with justice feel some indignation. I told nobody, not even her who had most right to be told, my own mother. She was not angry, why should you be? It is nothing but the shyness of my nature in everything that regards myself. I never kept my birthday yet, nor mentioned it, till it was over.’ All of his friends must have felt that they had equal right to such explanation. Perhaps in retrospect Tennyson was feeling that his secretiveness had not been such a good idea, but he had to make the best of it now that the thing was done. ‘Doubt not my regard for you,’ he begged Forster, ‘and make allowance for my idiosyncracies however strange they may seem.’
Robert Monteith, the Apostle and Trinity man, sent a much more conventional and acceptable letter of congratulation. The tone of Tennyson’s response to him is one of relief; here was at least one friend who showed no sign of feeling offended:
I thank you and Mrs Monteith very heartily for your kind messages. There is even some chance that soon I may thank you in person; for I have left the whole eastern coast of Scotland unvisited and last year when I left you it was my intention to return and complete my tour. […] I have married a lady only four years younger than myself who has loved me and prayed for my earthly and spiritual welfare for fourteen years. God grant that we may get on well together. I am sure if we do not the fault will be mine.
This is not false humility – he was genuinely worried about the married state: ‘I have lived so long unmarried that I may have crystallized into batchelorhood [sic] beyond redemption: then I hope that I have yet some plasticity left.’68
Edmund Peel, a poet and a cousin of Robert Peel, had been a friend of Tennyson’s since the mid 1840s, and a warm supporter of the pension awarded by his cousin to Tennyson in 1845. From June 1846 there survives a remarkable ‘Extempore Sonnet’ written jointly by Tennyson, Edmund Peel and a play-writing clergyman called White, following a visit that Tennyson made to the Isle of Wight. Tennyson’s opening lines to this confection refer to the three of them as ‘Two poets and a mighty dramatist’ who ‘threaded the Needles on a day in June’; in other words they took a rowing boat round the somewhat perilous west point of the island. Tennyson’s health had been poor (‘ricketty’, in Fitzgerald’s phrase) and Moxon had arranged for him to take this holiday. It was a kind of post-Apostolic holiday, three men behaving like undergraduates taking a break.69 This same Edmund Peel saw Tennyson immediately before his marriage, but was told nothing about the impending event. When the news reached him, he sent a slightly malicious letter about it to a friend:
Alfred is married!!! The lady, who is described to me as a very nice person, not handsome nor the reverse – and not with money nor absolutely without, is the Sister of his brother Charles’ wife, her name Silwood. Charles Weld, the Secretary of the Royal Society, married another Sister. Alfred’s wife has had indifferent health, and indeed (like the lady Browning married) has passed half her life hitherto on the sofa – but marriage is often a restorer.
Peel went on to quote Edmund Lushington, who as a guest at the wedding obviously knew the situation better than he did: ‘The only anecdote told, in connection with any public announcement of the affair, was mentioned to me on Sunday by Lushington, who says that Alfred will gladly give 7/6 out of his limited income (for a married man) to every penny-a-liner who will keep it out of the papers.’70
Tennyson had clearly understood the appeal of his earlier image – long-haired, Spanish-looking, Cambridge-educated penniless romantic vagrant. Leaving Lincolnshire would never be a complete process: during the period in the 1830s when he and Emily were still exchanging love letters, he wrote an extraordinarily evocative letter to her about his feelings for the county. The letter probably dates from 1838:
I have dim mystic sympathies with tree and hill reaching far back into childhood. A known landskip is to me an old friend, that continually talks to me of my own youth and half-forgotten things, and does more for me than many an old friend that I know. An old park is my delight and I could tumble about in it for ever.71
The Lincolnshire self was now put behind him, despite the fact that central relationships that lasted the whole of his life – with Emily and with the Rawnsleys – had begun there. Lincolnshire was provincial, and Tennyson in the 1850s was now embarked on an upward trajectory through the Victorian social system, which meant in practice that his ambitions would be centred in London (though he never made his main home there). From 1850 onwards he was clearly a ‘gentleman’, and he reinforced and entrenched this status for the next thirty years.
* * *
The masterpiece of 1850, In Memoriam, was a Lincolnshire poem which said goodbye to Lincolnshire. It put Tennyson’s provincial self into a national and historical perspective. Section XI – a poem of prodigious technical skill, comprising a single sentence extending over five stanzas in which the word ‘calm’ expressed both the peace of the natural world and the stillness of death – displayed the familiar landscape:
Calm and deep peace on this high wold,
And on these dews that drench the furze,
And all the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold:
Calm and still light on yon great plain
That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
And crowded farms and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main.72
The three Christmases that provided the chronological frame for the elegy for Hallam also marked the retreat from Lincolnshire. The first two, XXVII and LXXVIII, were set in the Somersby rectory, where Tennyson’s sister Emily grieved for her lost lover and Tennyson himself grieved for his lost friend. The third, CIV and CV, is set in High Beech, Epping, the home to which the Tennysons had moved when they had to leave Somersby in 1837. This was ‘new unhallowed ground’; unhallowed both because there were no memories of Arthur in this setting, and also, poignantly, because Dr Tennyson lay in his grave in Somersby outside the church where he had served, and immediately opposite his former rectory. While they still lived there, his wife and children could see his simple memorial every day. Now, in Epping:
We live within the stranger’s land,
And strangely falls our Christmas-eve.
Our father’s dust is left alone
And silent under other snows:
There in due time the woodbine blows,
The violet comes, but we are gone.73
Poems C to CIII of In Memoriam recorded the deep sadness that was stirred in Tennyson when the day came to leave Somersby in 1837. The whole landscape recalled Arthur Hallam to him:
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.
Leaving this physical landscape brought back with sharp immediacy the fact of Hallam’s death (‘I think once more he seems to die’). On the last night that they slept in the old home, Tennyson had a dream, a very vivid one, which he recorded in CIII. The figure of Arthur Hallam appeared to him as a giant figure on a ceremonial ship, surrounded by female mourners. (The whole scene seemed to anticipate the elaborate visual accounts of King Arthur’s funeral ship in ‘Morte d’Arthur’ and Idylls of the King.) Tennyson embraced Arthur, ‘fell in silence on his neck’, and the ship with its mourners and its reunited friends set slowly out to sea. Since poem IX, the agonising fact of Arthur’s death had been associated with ships, so that it was appropriate that a kind of resolution of the physical grief for him should take this form. The grief is for Somersby as well, for the leaving of Somersby and for the loss of the old Lincolnshire family life. Now that the Tennysons had to leave, the garden, the brook, the surrounding woods and the whole landscape would be ‘unloved’ and ‘uncared for’. This group of poems marked Tennyson’s reconciliation with change. The familiar garden would become ‘Familiar to the stranger’s child’, and the whole landscape would continue to renew itself as the natural world inevitably must. In these poems there was pleasure and relief, as well as pain, in the recollection of the day that he left Lincolnshire.74
The middle year of Tennyson’s life, 1850, was also the midpoint of a two-part story. Part one could be called ‘local boy makes good’; the lad from Lincolnshire published In Memoriam in May, he was married in June, he was appointed Laureate at the end of the year. In short, he had arrived. Part two could be called ‘consolidation and decline’; in the big ambitious Laureate enterprises, Idylls of the King and his Shakespeare-like history plays, he bought into the identity of the ‘national poet’ and tailored his works to fit that identity and the market that came with it. Still, there can be no doubt that in these works he also remained substantially true to himself. As a child and adolescent he had established a body of literary interests, rooted in his reading of Shakespeare and Malory, to which he would constantly return to nourish his later writing. This imaginative reservoir never failed him. It helped him to use his prodigious fluency as a bulwark against the undoubted fact that from 1870 onwards the tide of opinion would turn against him. Younger minds, in league with figures in literary London who had become enemies for commercial reasons, worked to demolish the monument that Tennyson had become. They would fail because his central core was unassailable.
* Hence the change to the title by which it is now known, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich.
* Many of the early European settlers in New Zealand were Scots, like Clough’s Elspie, and the oldest European building in New Zealand dates from the 1830s.
* Magnificently set for Peter Pears in Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings.
* ‘Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed’ became an inspiration for nineteenth-century women educators, and is the motto of the Girls’ Public Day School Trust.
* Fitzgerald’s observation about the Laureate wreath was apposite; early in 1847 Tennyson had been asked by William Whewell, now Master of Trinity, to write an ode for the installation of the Prince Consort as Chancellor of Cambridge later in the year. Tennyson was pleased by the invitation but found that he could not write anything that satisfied him (‘the work does not seem to prosper in my hands’, Lang and Shannon, I, pp. 272–3) so he declined, and the request was passed on to the incumbent Laureate, Wordsworth.
* There is an alternative tradition that this famous song was in fact either composed or revised during Tennyson’s visit to Malvern in September 1848. He gave a copy to Dr Gully’s sister, Anne, who wrote at the bottom, ‘Given to me by the poet in the drawing room of the Priory House, Great Malvern’ (Dr Gully’s private residence). (Lang and Shannon, I, p.280n.) The text of this copy has now disappeared, but it had a variation from the published state. The colouring of a Malvern sunset contributed ‘the red light shakes across the lakes’ in place of ‘the long light shakes across the lakes’ in the printed text. (Jenkins, Tennyson and Dr Gully, p. 8.)
* ‘Coventry Patmore (1823–96) was at this time in his twenties and working in the printed books department of the British Museum. He was ambitious, wrote poetry, and consciously modelled himself on Tennyson, whose acquaintance he sought out; Tennyson warmed to him and saw a good deal of him during 1846–7 while they were both bachelors about town. The friendship changed somewhat after Patmore’s marriage in 1847, which became the basis of Patmore’s later commercial success; his long verse sequence in praise of marriage, The Angel of the House, brought him a reputation and strong sales which freed him from his work at the British Museum.
* In general Tennyson and Arnold were seldom cordial about one another’s work, but they regarded each other with a good deal of respect. In November 1856 Arnold would be surprised and pleased to learn that Tennyson had said that if something should happen to him, Matthew Arnold ought to be his successor as Laureate. (Lang, Letters of Matthew Arnold, I, p. 347.)