Tennyson’s Gift

‘He is Lancelot!’ exclaimed Mrs Cameron to her husband, later. ‘I shall pose him with Mary Ann as the Lady of Shalott! Such human passion! Can’t you imagine him singing “Tirra Lirra” on the river?’

‘I believe I have found a model for Physical Energy, my dear,’ confided Watts to his wife. ‘Mr Fowler is a magnificent specimen. How do you think he would look with no clothes on?’

‘I can’t quite define it,’ said Ellen less elevatedly (and to herself). ‘But I would just like to get my hands on him, that’s all.’

Only Tennyson saw no practical application for the phrenologist in his own work. But then he never was a head-hunter; he was always the head hunted. Many years ago, his miserable brother Charles had written a derisive poem about phrenology, which began,

A curious sect’s in vogue, who deem the soul
Of man is legible upon his poll.
Give them a squint at yonder doctor’s pate,
And they’ll soon tell you why he dines on plate.

After such a strikingly bathetic start to the genre of the Phrenology Poem, most Victorian poets agreed the wisdom of conserving their candle for something else.

‘I meant it, come to tea with us, Fowler,’ he boomed. ‘Bring your charming daughter. I suppose she is charming? I mean to say, if she isn’t, don’t bring her. However, I will insist the boys are present, so that you may conduct your examinations in full view of everybody, as though in a spirit of – well, teatime fun!’

Teatime fun was not something Tennyson had ever experienced; in fact the word ‘fun’ was so new to his vocabulary that he paused for a moment to repeat it to himself, fun-fun-fun, weighing its poetic value (which was short).

Lorenzo bowed. ‘It will be a pleasure. And will we have the delight of meeting your wife?’

Tennyson frowned. ‘Emily? Why ever not?’ He paused. Here was a point, actually. How was he to break the news to Emily? She had been so nervy in the past few days. A few random memories suddenly converged in his mind. Count Cavour in the shrubbery. Her hand guiltily in the teapot. Eating bits of paper torn from Punch.

‘Well, as long as that’s clear to you, Mr Fowler. Emily is not mad, not mad, not mad. I can’t tell you how often I have to reassure her on the subject.’

Julia knew nothing of this fresh arrangement, otherwise she would have insisted on organizing it and providing some food. No, at the termination of Lorenzo’s informal lecture, she had wiped her eyes again and hurried to Farringford for the second time that day, possibly wishing (as she ran along, panting and sweating, with her shawls a-flap) that some clever engineer would soon get around to inventing the safety bicycle. A dozen copies of the perfect-gift periodical lay in a basket across her arm. There was also a hammer and some nails, and some paste made from flour and water. Myopic pompous ingrate though Alfred was, he would certainly find his review before the day was out. He would rejoice in the Westminster’s good opinion, if the effort killed her.

Arriving at the house, she first established that Alfred had not returned, and that Emily was lying down upstairs. Then she made twelve quick decisions, distributing the copies in cunning places and completing the task in as many minutes. She paused for breath on the lawn, adjusted her lace cap (which was always getting askew), and departed for Dimbola Lodge again. Today she would photograph Mary Ann in the pose of Friendship, which oddly she now knew to be a small organ of the brain positioned just back from the ear. Perhaps Mr Fowler could stimulate that organ in some of Julia’s acquaintance, she thought. ‘Then we might be getting somewhere.’ Dodgson meanwhile kept to his room at Dimbola, dreaming of the quiet life in Oxford. This morning he had seen Lorenzo Fowler enter the house, but no sign of the red-headed daughter, thank goodness. Dodgson was relieved. The last thing he needed was to be separated from his wits again by that demon in infant form.

Detached observers might assume that where Dodgson was concerned, the Fowlers owed an apology. After all, their antics had deranged a complete stranger – and while he was on his holidays, too. But the Fowlers saw it quite the other way about. Dodgson had many reasons to apologize to them. For one, he was a pervert. For another, he had ruined their show. Most important of all, however, he had interfered with their takings. Lorenzo was therefore not the ideal person to minister to Dodgson in his current fragile state.

‘Sir!’ shouted Lorenzo, catching the invalid logician weakly buffing his lens with a cloth. Dodgson dropped the lens on his bedroom carpet, and gaped. Such violence of manner in a gentleman’s bedroom went well beyond decent practice. But worse was to come. With a flourish, Lorenzo shut the door behind him, and locked it.

Dodgson looked round in panic. The room seemed a lot smaller with Lorenzo in it.

‘Apologize? No, I have come to tell you that I know exactly what you’re up to.’

Dodgson thought quickly. What was he up to? Only failing to get Tennyson’s blessing for his book, as far as he could see. At worst, he was pilfering a few bits of bric-à-brac. There was nothing deserving this kind of beastliness.

‘It’s the business of any decent man,’ said Lorenzo. ‘Every American has a God-given duty to defend the weak!’

Dodgson was completely baffled. He sat down and pushed a lock of hair behind his ear. Not for the first time, he wished he had a big bushy Moses beard like every other Victorian man of consequence. He was sure it was his smooth chops that did for him.

Lorenzo read the inscription and his jaw dropped to his chest. It appeared to concern a proposed elopement between Dodgson and little Daisy Bradley.

‘You are a fiend, sir!’ said Lorenzo. ‘I can tell you at once that you will go nowhere with this child!’

And Dodgson blinked in amazement as the phrenologist left the room and locked the door behind him.

‘Why won’t you pose for Mrs Cameron?’ she asked. ‘It would make her so happy.’

‘Happy? But, my dear, Mrs Cameron’s happiness in this matter is neither here nor there.’

‘Consider what she does when she has a person’s photograph. She exhibits it, she gives copies to anybody who calls. She gives away albums.’

‘And I have a desire for seclusion. Why do you think I live on the Isle of Wight?’

‘Because the Queen likes it? And she once said she might visit you? And then you might get a knighthood?’

Alfred conceded the point. ‘Yes, but aside from that. I simply will not accept that, just because I am a poet, people should know what I look like –’

‘Take this point, my dear,’ interrupted Alfred. ‘On a walking holiday last year, my companion shouted “Tennyson!” in the hotel, and the price of our simple lodging was doubled at once. Already visitors come to our house, pushing their noses at the windows, frightening Emily, disturbing the boys. People send me their poetry to read. They want to intrude on my private life in a most unseemly manner. I fear for this development, my dear, especially if the railway comes to Freshwater. Even in death I will not be safe. For there is a fashion for writing lives of poets, publishing their diaries and letters.’

‘Yes, but that’s to show how important they are,’ urged Ellen. ‘Poets are dreadfully important.’

But Tennyson would not be cajoled. ‘But such scoundrels might tell the world that a man was mad, or dirty, or worse! And he has no defence! You may have seen my poem on the subject, entitled “To—, After Reading a Life and Letters”?’

‘No, it’s called “To—”. A blank, you know. It’s a poetic tradition, protecting people from exactly the presumptuous intrusion to which I respond.’

‘I shall quote to you what I wrote. Stand back, my dear.’ She did so. She folded her hands.

Tennyson ahem-ed, closed his eyes, and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. He opened his eyes again. ‘I’m starting in the middle,’ he explained. She nodded. He closed his eyes, and from deep within him his poetry-reading voice erupted with such force that around Ellen where she stood, lilies shivered on their stalks. Tennyson had a mournful, barking recital manner reminiscent of an expiring moose.

‘For now the Poet cannot die,

Nor leave his music as of old,

But round him ere he scarce be cold

Begins the scandal and the cry:

“Proclaim the faults he would not show:

Break lock and seal: betray the trust:

Keep nothing sacred: ‘tis but just

The many-headed beast should know.”’

Ellen put her hands together to clap, but Tennyson pressed on. Maids pegging washing in the kitchen garden beyond had popped their heads over the wall, to see the cause of the commotion. The laureate did seem very passionate about all this.

‘Ah shameless! For he did but sing

A song that pleased us from its worth;

No public life was his on earth,

No blazon’d statesman he, nor king.’

Ellen clapped now, and Tennyson let out a long breath. ‘You won’t hear anything better than that on the subject,’ he said.

‘I am sure I won’t. But don’t you agree that fame has its price, Mr Tennyson?’

‘It has a price,’ he agreed, ‘but I firmly believe that no one can make you pay it.’

Watts stood back from his canvas, after explaining its emblems and symbols to an impressed phrenologist. Watts hoped soon to broach the subject of Lorenzo modelling for him. For his own part, Lorenzo was definitely warming to the old goat, but he still couldn’t quite see the attraction for Ellen. The man had a head so flat at the back it suggested he’d been struck with a frying pan.

‘It is a very beautiful picture,’ Lorenzo agreed. ‘The brash camellia, the humble violets, a lovely conceit.’

‘If you could just show me the humble violets again. I can’t quite –’ ‘There.’

Lorenzo clapped him on the back, slightly too hard so that Watts dropped his palette.

‘It’s no fun down here without Mr Dodgson,’ pouted Daisy, her shrimp net limp in her hand.

Jessie looked at her pityingly. They were paddling in rock pools, as usual, under the eye of their respective maids.

‘Daisy, tell me you’re not serious,’ she said. ‘That man gives me cholera.’

‘You don’t understand about Mr Dodgson and me,’ she said. ‘It’s very special. I think he really loves me. We’re planning to run away. I’ve already packed a little bag.’

At two o’clock Emily Tennyson rose from her nap, and read the note sent by Alfred in the care of Julia’s gardener’s boy. Some Americans were coming to tea, apparently – an odd proposition from Alfred, since Americans were precisely the sort of people she was usually expected to shield him from.

In fact, if Americans turned up at the house, the Tennysons had a well-oiled routine for dealing with them. Emily would greet them hurriedly, leave them in the hall, and disappear to the dining room, immediately below Alfred’s library. There she would take a long-handled broom and bang the ceiling with it three times. Re-emerging in the hall with telltale ceiling plaster on her hair and shoulders, she would point the way upstairs to Alfred’s study, and then listen for Alfred’s scuffle as he ran down his secret staircase, threw open the garden door and hared across the lawn to the cliffs.

People sometimes objected that they had travelled six thousand miles to see the Poet Laureate, to which Emily would always riposte (though only mentally) that oddly enough, Alfred would not have crossed Lombard Street to meet them.

So she made the arrangements for tea (with food, this time), and got surprisingly busy. She was one of those invalids who has to lie down a lot, and sometimes can’t lift a bread knife, but can shift a mahogany wardrobe if the fancy is upon her to see it in a different place. To Alfred, she always tried to show her more feeble side, because it reminded him of his mother. To his friends, she emphasized the sacrifices she willingly made for her lord, so that they agreed in secret she was too good for him. To her children, she played the rewarding role of domestic saint.

This daily checking for madness, for example, she conducted in the following fashion: ‘What day is it, Hallam?’ ‘Tuesday, Mother?’ he lisped.

Her boys were very beautiful, she thought, and she would keep their hair curly against all objections for as long as she could – possibly until the day they left her house to be married. Other boys were sent off to school, but Emily employed a succession of governesses to teach her boys at home. As she often argued to Alfred, this only sounds like an expensive option, but in fact it was completely free. Each governess would stay about a year before realizing she was never going to be paid. And then she would leave, and another would replace her.

As she reached the bottom of the stairs, Emily decided that she felt very well. She might even take a turn in the garden. So vigorous were her spirits, in fact, that when she first discovered a copy of the Westminster Quarterly perched on the umbrella stand next to the peg where Alfred’s best hat was hanging, she simply removed it and tore it up. Only when she found another copy suspended from the door-knocker, and another attached to the collar of Alfred’s favourite wolf hound, did she start to suspect that things were dangerously out of the ordinary. Three copies of the Westminster? How? Why? Was this another bad dream like the wallpaper? She sat down and fanned herself. It suddenly seemed very hot. How could she bear it if things ran this much out of control?

Lorenzo looked down at his little girl, determinedly marching beside him in her little purple bonnet and lace-up boots, and he felt a surge of pride. He paused and kissed her hand.

‘If I could bottle this moment,’ he said, taking a deep breath, ‘I could become a millionaire.’

‘Between ourselves, Jessie, I have made an agreement with Mr Tennyson that I will check his sons for signs of madness.’

‘Yes, the Tennysons are all mad, you see,’ said Lorenzo. ‘Tennyson’s father used to spend an hour and a half each day choosing which peg to hang his hat on. So naturally, the present Mr Tennyson worries now that Hallam and Lionel are chips off the old block.’

Jessie had never heard you could inherit madness. She thought madness was something that just happened to people in Shakespeare when the wind got up.

‘Lionel’s not mad,’ she said flatly. ‘But I can’t speak for Hallam. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him.’

‘What about their mother? Does she have to be mad, too, for the boys to have caught it?’

‘She doesn’t have to be. Mr Tennyson says she has nothing to do with the black blood of the Tennysons. He was suspiciously emphatic on the point.’

‘My, I am really looking forward to this. If that old lady isn’t a tile or two short of the full dome, I promise you, Jessie: I’ll eat the hat shop on Ludgate Hill.’

To her increasing disbelief and concern, Emily found three more copies of the Westminster before the Fowlers arrived. One was peeking from under the hall carpet; another was on the seventh step of Alfred’s special stairs; and the third was in the fireplace. It was the wallpaper dream, only worse. Where could these things be coming from? Who could be doing this to her? She wanted to scream. Help! Help!

Yet she must appear normal, at all costs. Waiting therefore in a relaxed family tableau before the fireplace – boys at her skirt – for Alfred to deliver his new friends into her presence, she gripped her sons’ necks so tightly they started to see stars.

‘Look what I found inside one of Father’s shoes,’ he said, producing copy seven of the Westminster. She gasped, snatched it from him, and just as Alfred entered with his Americans, hurled it with considerable force across the room so that it landed behind a sofa. The Fowlers saw it fly. They looked at each other. Alfred, of course, saw nothing but a blur. ‘But it had a review of father’s new book,’ Lionel started to say, but he managed only ‘But it had –’ before Emily, in desperation, stamped smartly on his foot.

‘Good afternoon,’ she said, moving forward with as much grace as she could, while Lionel yelled with pain and fell over backwards holding his leg.

‘I think you’ve met Lionel,’ she indicated the squawking child rolling on the hearth rug. ‘Such a madcap!’

Emily laughed nervously. ‘A bird?’ she repeated. ‘No, no.’ She looked at Jessie Fowler, who stared back. ‘Although very possibly a bat,’ she added. ‘You know how it is.’

Alfred merely grimaced and led the way to the garden, while Lionel regained his composure and hopped along behind. He stuck his tongue out at Jessie, who stuck her tongue out in return.

Lorenzo gripped Jessie’s hand tightly, and gave it an excited squeeze. Already secrets and violence! Here was definitely something to tell the folks at home.

Things went relatively well for the rosy picture of mental health at Farringford until, seated in the garden, Lorenzo asked about the Wellingtonia.

‘Garibaldi planted it,’ said Tennyson, airily. ‘He just turned up in April, and we didn’t know why, so we put him to work with a shovel.’

Everyone laughed politely, as though it was a joke, although actually this version of events was pretty close to the truth.

‘But I have been meaning to ask about Count Cavour, my dear,’ Tennyson added. ‘You saw him the other day from the window, but he never came in.’

Lorenzo butted in, assuming this was a joke as well. ‘Did he come to mow the grass, Mrs Tennyson? Should we check that the man in the wide-awake tending the roses is not King Victor Emmanuel?’

‘But you pointed out of the window, and I got up to look.’ Emily smiled at her guests. ‘It must have been a joke,’ she explained. Alfred spluttered. ‘Well, if it was, it’s the first one you ever made!’

‘Perhaps you would like to see the tree itself, it is very fine,’ said Emily. Alfred agreed that this was a good way to change the subject and led the way.

‘Tell Mrs Tennyson about your fascinating experiences in phrenology, Mr Fowler,’ Alfred urged, but strangely Lorenzo could not be drawn. For once in his life, a Phrenological Fowler preferred not to have an audience. On this occasion it was far more interesting to have a spectacle. Never before had he seen a woman more tightly wound up than Emily Tennyson. Not only was she hallucinating about North Italian politicians, but she was craning her head in all directions, as though anticipating an ambush in her own garden.

‘Hello, what’s this?’ said Alfred. They had reached the Wellingtonia, and Alfred now leaned forward to pluck a small pamphlet from the trunk (where it was nailed).

Emily yelped in alarm. The Westminster! They all looked at her. What could she do?

‘Alfred. You’re right!’ she blurted, desperately. ‘I did see Count Cavour! I remember now! He came by gig!’ The others said nothing. Alfred turned back to the pamphlet and reached out his hand.

At which Alfred turned away from the tree, to say ‘I knew you saw him really!’ – thereby leaving Westminster copy eight safe for the meantime from discovery.

Copy number nine was an easier one. While the men went for a little game of croquet and the women drank tea, Emily asked little Jessie about herself, and noticed that the child was flicking through yet another manifestation of the Westminster. ‘It was attached to the seat of my chair,’ Jessie explained, as Emily took it gently from her.

‘Well, here’s one anyway. See if you can bury this periodical in that flower bed using only a teaspoon.’

Unsurprisingly, the child was not excited by the suggestion. ‘Why?’ she said.

‘Very well, I’ll do it myself!’ snapped Emily. And to Jessie’s astonishment, that’s precisely what she did.

It was only four o’clock and already Emily felt she could drop from exhaustion. Her head swam. Her whole body was so tensed for action that she tasted acid in her mouth. Besides which, the atmospheric pressure seemed to be rising, as if there would soon be a storm. Copy number ten was stuck to the tray on which the maid brought the tea; Emily upset the milk with a karate chop to the jug, and sent back for more. ‘Bring a different tray, I never liked that one!’ she added, twitching. It was clear by now that Alfred need have taken no pains to hide his phrenological intentions from her. Lorenzo could have put the boys in straitjackets this afternoon, shaved their girly hair, and ordered a black maria for their removal to Carisbrooke, and she would have noticed nothing.

As it was, however, Lorenzo was just examining Hallam’s head and proclaiming a massive healthy intellect when Alfred, suddenly aware of a discomfort in his hat, took it off and looked inside it. It was copy number eleven.

‘Look, Emily,’ he said. ‘What’s this?’ And Emily, pulling out all the stops of her ingenuity, snatched the hat, turned her back on the company, and promptly vomited inside it. She gave it back to him.

‘I do apologize to your guests, Alfred,’ she said, almost in tears. ‘Please do help yourself to some food, but I think I must lie down indoors. This heat, you know.’

‘You have all our sympathy,’ said Lorenzo, standing up to bow. She made a last desperate scan of the tea-table – no sign of another copy! she even checked in the teapot! – and took a few feeble steps towards the house. But she had gone only a few yards when the words ‘What’s this?’ assailed her ears for the very last time that day.

‘What’s this?’ said Lorenzo. For he was just cutting a piece of apple pie for Jessie (Alfred’s favourite) when his knife made contact with a papery thing. Copy number twelve of the Westminster Quarterly had been baked inside an apple pie. Lorenzo broke open the crust, and pulled out the magazine, which emerged in a shower of crumbs.

‘It’s the new Westminster Quarterly, my dear,’ called Alfred, delightedly, cleaning it against his waistcoat. ‘Emily, however did it get here? Do you think there may be a notice of Enoch Arden?’

But as he turned to see what his dear wife had to say on the matter, her skinny body fell to the grass, twitched once and lay still.