REMEMBERING TENNYSON

Mention Tennyson and perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is the poet’s tribute to the 278 individuals who died during the Crimean War’s Charge of the Light Brigade. But it was losses closer to his heart that defined Tennyson’s work during a 60-year career which would see him serve as Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert as well as a social commentator. This month Idylls of the King, at Lincoln Castle, illustrates one of Tennyson’s most famous poems...

ON MINSTER GREEN, next to Lincoln Cathedral stands a bronze statue, Grade II listed and dating back to 1905. The figure is Tennyson, born on 6th August 1809 and shown with his dog Karenina. The poet is depicted staring down at a flower in his hand, imagining him composing the verse of Flower in the Crannied Wall, written in 1863. It’s not the only place in the county that Lincolnshire’s famous son is remembered...

Dr Jim Cheshire is Associate Professor at the School of Humanities and Heritage at the University of Lincoln, and maintains an academic and personal interest in Victorian medievalism. In the same way that Pugin was an advocate of neo-gothic or gothic revivalist architecture, Tennyson was tantamount to a gothic revivalist poet, drawing on many medieval themes and giving them a contemporary relevance to the Victorian era.

Dr Jim is also involved with the Tennyson Society, serving as its Honorary Secretary alongside its chairperson Valerie Purton. The group and its Tennyson Archive is based at the Lincolnshire Archives which cares for 17,000 pages of proofs and manuscripts, 9,000 examples of Tennyson’s personal correspondence, diaries, illustrations and other material relating to the poet’s life and work during a career, which ran from the 1830s to the 1890s.

It’s unusual, Dr Jim says, for a local authority to hold such a comprehensive archive of a locally-born poet. But Lincolnshire has good reason to be proud of Tennyson, if not for his prolific body of work then for his role as Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert or the commercial success of his work during his own lifetime, an unusual success compared to, for instance, Keats and Shelley

School pupils are likely to quote Charge of the Light Brigade as an example of the poet’s work, but it’s another verse – Idylls of the King – which is celebrated at Lincoln Castle in February and March, with the display of two illustrations from the 12 epic poems which recount the rise and fall of King Arthur.

“There are many aspects of Tennyson which can fascinate anyone from the poetry enthusiast to the academic,” says Dr Jim. “For a start there’s a musicality and a beauty in the way he created verse; he was a technically very gifted poet.”

By the end of the 1820s Shelley, Byron, Keats and Blake had all died, though William Wordsworth lived until the 1850s. Tennyson’s early work therefore drew inspiration from the romantic poets, whilst his later work was more idiosyncratic in its style, not least for its use of narration.

“Tennyson invented or at least popularised the dramatic monologue in poetry, and in his work the reader is able to get to know a character – Ulysses, for example – which make us question who the narrator is in much of his work. And so, with this story-like approach, he reinvented poetry for a Victorian era.”

Idylls of the King is good example of Tennyson’s work as it fuses together a number of the notable features of his work, including this narrative approach.

Idylls reflects the way Tennyson draws parallels with medieval life, using it as an allegory of Victorian society. One of the final sections of Idylls is The Passing of Arthur – an expanded retelling of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. Published in 1485 its protagonist Bedivere carries the dying king to Avalon and stays with him as the sun rises on a new year.

Tennyson’s Idylls was published in 1859, nine years after he was appointed Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. By that time, Tennyson – living in London – had become one of the first popular celebrities to be mobbed by his fans. Tennyson had moved to the Isle of Wight seeking a quieter life, but with Queen and Prince Albert also living on the island – on the Osborne estate – and with Albert in particular holding Tennyson in such high regard, his celebrity status hardly diminished.

When Prince Albert died in December 1861, Queen Victoria found solace in Tennyson’s In Memoriam. In March 1862, Tennyson received a letter from the Queen requesting that he visit her at Osborne House. The meeting took place in April and in her diary the Queen recorded it:

“I went down to see Tennyson who is very peculiar looking, tall, dark, with a fine head, long black flowing hair and a beard — oddly dressed, but there is no affectation about him. I told him how much I admired his glorious lines to my precious Albert and how much comfort I found in his ‘In Memoriam.’”

Words: Rob Davis. Image: Alfred Tennyson with book, by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1865, Victoria & Albert Museum.

“He was full of unbounded appreciation of beloved Albert. When he spoke of my own loss, and of that to the nation, his eyes quite filled with tears.”

Tennyson’s empathy for the Queen’s grief was drawn from the loss of his most important friend, fellow writer and travel companion, Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833. A devastated Tennyson wrote In Memorium A.H.H for Arthur, which was published in 1850.

Upon Albert’s death, Tennyson was asked by Princess Alice to write something that would soothe her mother’s grief, and the poet subsequently wrote the prologue of Idylls dedicating it to Prince Albert, comparing him to Arthur and again drawing parallels between Medieval and Victorian society. Several further meetings took place between Tennyson and Queen Victoria, and having discussed the lack of availability of German poetry, the Queen arranged for a specially bound volume to be sent to Tennyson from Europe. The Queen also offered him a baronetcy four times – in 1865, 1873, 1874 and 1880. He finally accepted in 1883, this persistence indicating the Queen’s continuing fondness for the poet.

By this time Tennyson’s role as poet laureate made him a public voice, and today his work is considered high culture in nature. But during the mid-19th century, he also had an avid following among the working classes, and would be ambushed by admiring miners, for example, keen to praise the social commentary that featured in his work.

On one occasion, a radical working as a weaver was speaking with the author Elizabeth Gaskell and remarked how much she admired the poet’s work but couldn’t afford a volume of her own. Gaskell wrote to Tennyson who arranged for a copy of his 1842 volume to be sent to her. “Dickens is a good parallel,” says Dr Jim.