Tennyson Among the Novelists 9781474211529, 9781441102379

Citation preview

For Laura

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Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand, A hand that can be clasped no more – Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creep At earliest morning to the door. He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly through the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day.* [Y]ou should never put the name Tennyson in the title of a book and expect it to sell.**

* In Memoriam VII, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols, (Harlow: Longman, 1987), II pp. 325–6. All references to Tennyson’s poems are from this edition. For purposes of space I will refer to each subsequent poem quoted by its number in the edition, with line references thus: In Memoriam VII, Ricks no. 296. ** Lynne Truss, ‘Tennyson’s Gift’, accessed at http://www.lynnetruss.com/pages/content/ index.asp?PageID=71 on 8 September 2009.

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Acknowledgements

I first studied Tennyson as an undergraduate with Dr. Peter D. McDonald, and the introduction to his book British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880–1914 (Oxford: OUP, 1997) was an inspiration for this study. I am indebted to all those who have given me advice on drafts of this book, not least Philip Horne, Rosemary Ashton, Warwick Gould and RobertDouglas-Fairhurst. Anthony Cummins cast a careful eye over an earlier draft of the book, for which I am very grateful. I owe a debt of gratitude to many other colleagues and acquaintances for their input and advice, including Danny Karlin, Hugh Stevens, Charlotte Mitchell, Henry Woudhuysen, Helen Hackett, Peter Swaab, Rachel Bowlby, John Mullan, Jane Lewty, Oliver Herford, Miranda El-Rayess, Ruth Maxey, Leonée Ormond, Mark Turner, Barbara Hardy, Max Saunders, Jan Piggott, Samantha Matthews, Robin Brumby, Marion Shaw, Roger Ebbatson, Saverio Tomaiuolo, Kirstie Blair, Robert Hampson, Ruth Livesey, Lynne Truss, Keith Linley, John Williams, Jenny Bavidge and Justine Baillie. Many of the above are current or former colleagues, and I am grateful to all staff and students at the various institutions I have worked at while writing this book – University College London, Royal Holloway, and the University of Greenwich – for their support and inspiration. I would also like to thank the organizers of the many conferences at which I have presented material from this book, as well as the audiences at those events. The staff at the Tennyson Research Centre, especially Grace Timmins, have been of enormous help, as have the staff at the British Library, the Weston Education Centre, Senate House Library , UCL Library and the University of Greenwich Library; I would also like to thank the AHRC for granting me a doctoral award for this research. The research could not have been completed without Kirk H. Beetz’s Tennyson: A Bibliography (London: Scarecrow, 1984): I would like to thank everyone at Continuum for their enthusiasm, dedication and support, including Colleen Coalter,

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Anna Fleming, and Gurdeep Mattu; and my editors, not least Murali Muralidharan. I am grateful to all my friends and my family for their support; and to my parents and my sister for being there when I needed them most. Finally, and most importantly, I am grateful to Laura, for everything.

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Preface

In Henry James’s 1907 book of travel-reflections The American Scene, which details his return to the country of his birth, the author visits a Boston much changed since his youth, and finds vistas of bourgeois prosperity in the avenues of the ‘New Land’.1 It seems to James ‘a community leading its life in the social sun’.2 Why, accordingly, of December afternoons, did the restless analyst, pausing at eastward-looking corners, find on his lips the vague refrain of Tennyson’s ‘long unlovely street’? Why, if Harley Street, if Wimpole, is unlovely, should Marlborough Street, Boston, be so – beyond the mere platitude of its motiveless name?3 James can understand the ‘unloveliness’ of Wimpole Street, with its ‘monotony of black leasehold brick’, but is puzzled to find himself with the ‘vague refrain’ on his lips when in this new comfortable area of Boston.4 A meditation of several pages is stimulated for James by the insidious question of why it is that ‘Marlborough Street, for imperturbable reasons of its own, used periodically to break my heart’.5 This book sets out to ask why writers of fiction from the 1850s to the present day found on their lips refrains from Tennyson.

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Introduction

‘So word by word, and line by line, / The dead man touched me from the past’:1 Theories of Influence

In the only other survey of Tennyson’s presence in the English novel, Barbara Hardy’s Tennyson and the Novelists (1993), it is claimed that ‘Art’s most famous, perhaps most fruitful, cross-fertilizations occur within genre’.2 The majority of recent studies of allusion have focused on a single genre – poetry – and writers such as Walter Jackson Bate, Harold Bloom, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Christopher Ricks have brought out the ways in which poems resonate with allusions to earlier works, whether the references are conscious or, to use Angela Leighton’s terminology, ‘undersongs’.3 Despite all of the above being very sensitive readers of prose, they do not go into much detail about allusions to poetry in fiction (or, indeed, vice versa). This book aims to provide a case study of allusions to one poet, in myriad, very different works of fiction, in order to investigate both the changing literary reception of Tennyson, as well as to discover something about the relationship between poetry and prose. Though in 2009 prose is universally considered to be as worthy of study as verse, this was not always the case, and this book will chart the relationship between the two genres from the Victorian period to the present day. My focus on Tennyson is inspired by his being something of a unique case, as his work has been read more widely than any other poet writing since 1800, and he also serves as an archetypally ‘representative’ Victorian figure for both his admirers and his detractors. Walter Jackson Bate’s 1970 book The Burden of the Past and the English Poet remains one of the key texts in the study of influence. Bate identifies the ‘accumulating anxiety’ that writers (more specifically, for Bate, poets) face – ‘What is there left to do?’4 His focus is the eighteenth century, as a variety of writers who came to be known as ‘neoclassical’ found that ‘something still remained to be done’.5 Bate’s book is clearly inspired by his own experiences as a specialist in Romantic literature, writing in the twentieth century, and in what he calls early twentieth-century ‘formalism’, he observes: [T]he immense effort of the arts, including music, of the early and middle twentieth century to get the nineteenth century off their backs. So

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strenuous – at times single-minded – was the effort that, during the childhood and youth of those of us now middle-aged, many of us began to assume that the first requirement of the sophisticated poet, artist, or composer was to be as unlike his nineteenth-century predecessors as possible. We even had moments when we suspected that the principal influence on modern poetry, for example, was not so much the array of abstractions cited in the recondite search for aim or justification, but rather the poetry of Tennyson. What we are trying desperately to be unlike can tell a great deal about not only what we are doing but why, and a movement may often be better understood by what it concretely opposes than by its theoretical slogans.6 Tennyson is an aptly chosen example; and not just in the study of ‘modern poetry’, for which we can probably read ‘modernist poetry’, but also in fiction, both modernist and more recent. Bate’s description of the dilemma of ‘what is there left to do’ as an ‘anxiety’ leads one to think of the title of a book published two years after that of Bate – Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, whose title is perhaps the most famous phrase concerning the concept of influence, and remains widely quoted (usually without citing Bloom’s actual argument). Clearly influenced by Bate, Bloom wanted to move away from the dominant practice in the study of ‘Poetic Influence’ which, as he saw it, involved ‘the wearisome industry of source-hunting, of allusion-counting; an industry that will soon touch apocalypse anyway when it passes from scholars to computers’.7 The prediction, as this book (and countless others) confirm, was wide of the mark, and also rather belittling – there are very few studies which simply ‘count’ allusions, and it is difficult to imagine a critic attempting to justify such an all-encompassing theory as The Anxiety of Influence in the present day. Bloom claimed to be reacting against the ‘more absurd myths (or gossip grown old) of literary pseudo-history’, the ‘critical absurdity which salutes each new generation of bards as being somehow closer to the common language of ordinary men than the last was’.8 With fiction, particularly twentieth-century fiction, in mind, this is complicated further. There are few who would consider the work of either Joyce or Woolf as ‘close to the common language of ordinary men’. In his effort to establish a new way of discussing influence, Bloom’s elaborately Freudian theory is that ‘Poetic history [...] is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves’.9 The rebellion is, at root, a revolt against ‘the consciousness of death’s necessity’, a stronger rebellion than those enacted by ‘all other men and women’.10 This derives from Freud’s idea of the child desiring to become ‘the father of himself’, as Bloom believes that ‘All quest-romances of the post-Enlightenment […] are quests to re-beget one’s own self, to become one’s own Great Original’.11 The poet-child (which, in this overtly gendered account, could easily be ‘poet-son’) is forced to struggle with his own poetical ‘father’ in order to fight the anxiety of potential

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poetic death. Bloom believes that, this anxiety of influence is ‘a variety of the uncanny’, as both the fear of castration and the fear of ceasing to be a poet manifest themselves frequently as a visual problem.12 Either the poet ‘sees too clearly […] or else his vision becomes veiled, and he sees all things through an estranging mist.’13 One can see how much more psychoanalytical and polemical an approach this is than Bate’s idea of ‘the burden of the past’ – Bloom’s poet does not set out to negate the apparent influence of the recent past, but to overcome it through misreading. For Bloom only ‘strong poets, major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death’ manage to engage fully with the influence of these precursors.14 His list of such ‘strong poets’ is a select few – in the Victorian period, for example, only Tennyson and Browning qualify.15 The process is one of ‘misprision’:16 ‘Poetic Influence – when it involves two strong, authentic poets, – always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.’17 As such, ‘Every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem. A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety.’18 For Bloom, ‘the motto of English poetry since Milton was stated by Keats: “Life to him would be Death to me”.’19 Harold Bloom admitted in 1997 that the reception of his book ‘remains ambivalent’ and it is certainly the case that the central theory has been hotly disputed; but a coherent alternative has not been suggested until fairly recently.20 The Anxiety of Influence has helped call into question a central idea of allusive theory – prior to its publication, the relationship between a younger poet and an earlier writer was a clearly defined hierarchy, with the elder the sole agent – Bloom demonstrated that the work of a younger writer can influence how one views an elder. Despite his having opened up this new area of interest, Bloom’s theory is, as he has admitted, problematic. A major difficulty is his use of the word ‘strong’. While this functions, in terms of the theory, simply to denote a capability and willingness to engage in a misreading of a certain predecessor, it also calls into mind the idea of hierarchy. Bloom has never been afraid of thinking in hierarchical terms – his book The Western Canon, for instance, spelt out his own idea of the great works of Western literature. The ‘strong’ poets Bloom identifies are undoubtedly canonical – the least famous is Wallace Stevens – and yet his idea of ‘strength’ can easily be read out of context to indicate a ‘pecking order’ of poets, where in reality for Bloom the judgement that a poet like Tennyson is ‘stronger’ than, say, Gerard Manley Hopkins, is based purely on the differing ways in which they engage with Keats. From such a sensitive critic, however, the choice of words cannot have been an innocent one. This calls to mind another problem with Bloom’s theory – the fact that it comprehensively ignores historical and biographical details. For example, the influence of Keats is decided on as the most important to the young Tennyson. And yet the idea of poetical ‘inheritance’ presupposes that the younger poet is aware of the work of the elder. In reality Keats’s work was barely known in his own lifetime, and the adolescent Tennyson’s knowledge of the work of Keats is

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open to question. The poet whose work was revered, above all, by Tennyson’s friends at Cambridge (the ‘Apostles’) was Shelley, whose merits were debated at the Oxford Union by some of the ‘Apostles’ in 1829. But for Bloom, Shelley is the poetical forefather of Browning, as expressed in A Map of Misreading, with Shelley the ‘presence that [‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’] labors to void.’21 Browning’s poetical forebear is indeed usually cited as Shelley, thanks to his illuminating discussion of the poet’s work in the ‘Essay on Shelley’, but the frequent use of first-person narrators in Browning’s poetry calls into question the existence of so easily definable a relationship of father and son; it could be argued that the difficulty of his poetry, alongside his frequent use of the dramatic monologue, asks as many questions of the Wordsworthian idea of a poet as ‘man speaking to men’, and indeed of the poetry of Shakespeare’s dramatic soliloquies, as it does of Shelley’s poetics.22 The idea of there being one poetic father for a younger poet to ‘misrepresent’ is thus deeply questionable. And what Bloom’s argument also fails to take into account is the cultural context of both the earlier and the later poem. As the work of Jerome McGann has shown, poems are not disseminated through history without any contextual background – the context of a piece (e.g. where it has been previously published, whether it is associated by the reader with a particular person or group of people, whether it is on a particular school syllabus) is enormously important. Although, as Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has pointed out,23 the amount of work required by McGann of a critic is nearimpossible – they are asked to be aware of every single instance of a poem’s publication – it is nonetheless true that a number of poets and novelists are afforded prominent roles in the work of a younger poet because of what they are perceived to stand for – if, say, a poem by Tennyson is first encountered as the poem to be translated in a much-hated Latin class, or alternatively, if it is associated with recitals by a loved grandparent. This lack of attention to historical context differentiates Bloom from Bate, whose book is consistently more closely engaged with such details, and it is also this difficulty in Bloom’s argument that helps demonstrate the importance of looking at the idea of influence beyond a single genre. If the contextual background of a poem is, in fact, important, then the poem could well have an influence on people who are not necessarily writing poetry. Influence might be something more, or less, than the inspiration for Bloom’s ‘misprision’. Christopher Ricks’s conception of allusion is rather more accommodating than that of Bloom: [T]o allude to a predecessor is both to acknowledge, in piety, a previous achievement and also is a form of benign appropriation – what was so well said has now become part of my way of saying, and in advancing the claims of a predecessor (and rotating them so that they catch a new light) the poet is advancing his own claims, his own poetry, and even poetry. By an open recognition of the predicament of the poet as heir, and of the burden of the past,

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by embracing rather than merely failing to evade the predicament, the poet can be saved by allusion, by being an alert and independent dependent.24 Central to this is Ricks’s idea that ‘the alluder hopes that the reader will recognise something’, in contrast, as he sees it, with the plagiarist who hopes that the reader will not.25 The writer, as envisaged by Ricks, is rather more self-aware than he or she is in Bloom’s book (the lack of female writers in Bloom’s scheme is notable, though Ricks also uses the male pronoun), and the practice of allusion as presented by Ricks is not one of ‘creative misreading’, but something with the potential for many different interpretations, as opposed to Bloom’s narrative of wrestling with the past. Recently the work of Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has explored allusion and influence in the Victorian period in a manner closer to that of Ricks than Bloom. In a detailed engagement with the latter, Douglas-Fairhurst concludes that the argument of The Anxiety of Influence is too narrow, as a result of his ‘decision to adopt a theory of anxiety which is a curiously arrested version of Freud’s thinking on the subject.’26 Rather than poetical engagements with the ‘mighty dead’ being examples of ‘wrestling’, for Douglas-Fairhurst they are instances of poets ‘conversing’ with their forebears.27 Although, as noted, Douglas-Fairhurst is wary of the implications of Jerome McGann’s theory of readership, he believes that something of the original context of a quotation carries into the new work in which it figures: A quotation has hidden depths, but also hidden widths; it resonates in its new context, saved, but its outline is also pressed against, chastised, by what remains behind.28 My approach to allusion in this book, while not entirely discounting Bloom, will be primarily influenced by Ricks and Douglas-Fairhurst. Allusion is not always a generous act – it can just as easily be ‘contemptuous’ (as Ricks himself calls a particular example of T. S. Eliot citing Tennyson) as it can be appreciative.29 My focus on a single alludee was inspired, in part, by Stephen Gill’s 1998 book Wordsworth and the Victorians, in which Gill investigated the ‘cultural significance’ of Wordsworth in the Victorian period.30 Gill’s book addresses many very interesting aspects of Wordsworth’s reputation in the Victorian period, including both his influence on particular writers – Arnold, Tennyson, and George Eliot most notably – and a more general sense of his fame and status as a ‘spiritual power’.31 Wordsworth was a more explicitly philosophical poet than Tennyson, and while Gill is sensitive to allusion, his book dwells at greater length on the ideas in Wordsworth’s poetry as well as his influence on culture in more general terms – Wordsworth and the Victorians ends with an account of the development of the Wordsworth Society into the National Trust. The establishment of the Wordsworth Society took place in 1880, thirty years after the poet’s death;32 that of the Tennyson Society occurred over sixty years

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Tennyson Among the Novelists

after his death, in 1960. The discrepancy in the amount of time taken for a group of admirers to establish a society celebrating the poet’s work is testament to the much less easy transition of Tennyson to the position of a celebrated, established part of the English canon. There was a period in the twentieth century in which it seemed likely that Tennyson’s work would never become securely canonical, its continuing presence in anthologies at odds with its apparently dwindling relevance to twentieth-century readers, as evinced by the very small number of book-length studies of Tennyson published between 1923 and 1949. While Gill’s book does examine Wordsworth’s reputation when it was ‘at the ebb’ in the mid-1860s, when we compare the chronologies of reception history we can again see the difference between the afterlives of the two poets.33 The ‘tide’ turned in Wordsworth’s favour in the 1870s and 1880s, as Gill notes, just twenty years after his death.34 Twenty years after Tennyson’s death, in 1912, his status as one of the pre-eminent English poets was only beginning to be called into question, and the practice of Tennysonian allusion only just starting to display traits of being anything other than admiring. Gill, in his introduction, says that ‘a case could be made for pursuing [his] theme to the end of the Great War’, as ‘Wordsworth’s virtue as a specifically English poet was fervently promoted’, and indeed any study of a writer’s twentieth-century afterlife has to take the impact of both World Wars into account.35 The conflicts were of tremendous importance to the reputation of English poets in general, but in particular Tennyson. As I will show, it was the association of Tennyson’s work with the elderly, ruling classes in early twentieth-century Britain that was seen as so damaging in light of the Great War, and yet the outbreak of the Second World War was one of the main catalysts in his return to favour; allusions to his poetry in contemporary fiction still tend to appear, in the main, in books and stories concerned with the Victorian age and its aftermath. The studies I have outlined above range widely in their focus, but despite, for example, Harold Bloom’s frequent citation of Wallace Stevens, and Ricks’s interest in T. S. Eliot and Bob Dylan, they tend to focus on the practice of allusion by writers working before 1900. My book is allied to the 2009 OUP collection Tennyson Among the Poets, which contains essays discussing both Tennyson’s influence on poets and other poets’ influence on him, but Tennyson Among the Novelists will attempt to approach allusion from a new angle: the study of allusion to a single writer and of that writer’s influence on writers of fiction, from the Victorian period to the present day. Although critics and biographers of, say, Virginia Woolf often identify particular influences on the young novelist, there are very few studies of individual writers and their literary afterlives in the twentieth century. While Tennyson is one of the most interesting examples, given his eminence and fame in the Victorian period, this study will demonstrate the benefit of a consideration of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary afterlives. One only need think of the punishment of Tony Last in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust – re-reading the complete works of Dickens for an eternity – to see the potential interest of a study of Dickens’s influence on novelists (and perhaps poets) in the

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twentieth century – one is reminded of the original title of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which was a quotation from Our Mutual Friend, ‘He do the Police in Different Voices’.36 In letters written during the drafting of The Waste Land, an exchange between Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot show the two poets disagreeing about the relationship between poetry and fiction. Taking Pound’s advice, Eliot deleted another allusion to fiction written in the Victorian period – Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The epigraph of the poem was originally a passage in Conrad which ends with Kurtz’s ‘cry’ of ‘The horror! the horror!’37 The correspondence about it ran thus: Pound: ‘I doubt if Conrad is weighty enough to stand the citation.’ Eliot: ‘Do you mean not use the Conrad quote or simply not put Conrad’s name to it? It is much the most appropriate I can find, and somewhat elucidative.’ Pound: ‘[Do as you like about] Conrad; who am I to grudge him his laurel crown?’38 Valerie Eliot’s notes inform us that, once Pound had delivered this slight on Conrad, who was still alive, ‘The passage was omitted’.39 The implications of this exchange also illuminate the issue of allusion to poetry in novels. Conrad does not possess a ‘laurel crown’, but ever since 1850 (where this book will start), Tennyson did. No matter how elucidative Conrad’s work was, Pound did not believe it ‘weighty’ enough to consider as the epigraph to Eliot’s poem, and prior to the later Modernist period, the novel per se was generally considered as lacking in ‘weight’ in comparison to poetry. This book will, through a study of allusions to Tennyson’s work in the novel (primarily the English novel, though I will consider some Irish, American, Canadian and Australian fiction, as the treatment of Tennyson in novels from those countries is remarkably similar, at times, to that in British fiction), develop an understanding both of the changing reception of Tennyson’s work, as well as the changing relationship between poetry and fiction. The book will provide as comprehensive a survey as possible of the responses of novelists to Tennyson’s poetry. The debate about originality and ‘unconscious’ allusion was just as fierce in the Victorian period. Brander Matthews believed: Words are more abundant than situations, but they are wearing out with hard usage. Language is finite, and its combinations are not countless. It is scarcely possible for any one to say or write anything in this late time of the world to which, in the rest of the literature of the world, a parallel could not be found somewhere.40 As this book will show, novelists in the Victorian period often self-consciously turned to poetry to create their own ‘parallels’, perhaps in an attempt to ally

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their work with the more surely ‘literary’ poetry; it could be argued that Tennyson would not have disapproved, as his own theory of artistic influence was: People accused Virgil of plagiarizing, but if a man made it his own there was no harm in that (look at the great poets, Shakespeare included).41 With this in mind, we should turn to how Tennyson was ‘plagiarized’ – or, to put it in a more friendly way, alluded to – in works of fiction during his own lifetime.

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Chapter 1

‘This is what I call democratic art – the revelation of the poetry which lies in common things’:1 Tennyson in the Victorian Novel

Although Tennyson believed in the superiority of drama and poetry over fiction – thinking Shakespeare ‘a sun to which Jane Austen [. . .] is but an asteroid’,2 he was nonetheless a voracious reader of novels, and in a gesture of appreciation, sent a copy of his 1842 Poems to Dickens, which the novelist took as holiday reading on a trip to Thanet the same year.3 This act of respect, as well as an appreciation of the poet’s work, led to Dickens inviting Tennyson to the premiere of the production of Every Man in His Humour, in which Dickens was acting, in 1845;4 and the same year Dickens christened his son Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens.5 This inspired some scorn, not least from Robert Browning, but it does seem to be a genuine tribute to a poet whom Dickens admired to the extent that Alfred Tennyson was named godfather of the baby. On the merits of Dickens, Tennyson was slightly more equivocal – the ‘asteriod’ Austen was, all the same, his favourite novelist, and he turned down an invitation to join Dickens in Switzerland in the 1840s because ‘if I went, I should be entreating him to dismiss his sentimentality, and so we should quarrel and part, and never see one another any more. It was better to decline – and I have declined’.6 Based on the date, this seems a reaction to Dickens’s Christmas Books, but Tennyson does retain a small influence on the fiction of Dickens, despite the novelist being a notably un-allusive writer. As Anthony Kearney has noted, Dickens seems to have alluded to In Memoriam remarkably soon after its publication, in David Copperfield. Martha expresses immense regret at the corruption of Little Em’ly: I would have lived to be old, in the wretched streets – and to wander about, avoided, in the dark – and to see the day break on the ghastly lines of houses, and remember how the same sun used to shine into my room, and wake me once – I would have done even that, to save her!’ 7 There is a clear allusion here to In Memoriam VII (cited at the beginning of this book), which ends:

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He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day.8 The shared ‘ghastly’ unites the two passages, but the ‘line of houses’ seems to closely correspond to the ‘long unlovely street’. Kearney observes a ‘shared imagery of despair and guilt’, but the latter seems to be presented very differently – Martha’s guilt is literal, as she bears some responsibility for Emily’s descent into the world of prostitution; Tennyson creeps ‘like a guilty thing’, the power of the line residing in the lack of definition in the simile. The inclusion of this allusion to In Memoriam in David Copperfield underlines the idea of 1850 being Tennyson’s ‘annus mirabilis’, when he published the aforementioned elegy, his most celebrated long poem; was finally married to his fiancée, Emily; and was awarded the Laureateship. It is also the year of the first two major instances of allusion to his work in fiction – in David Copperfield and also Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke. It seems slightly incongruous now, with the word ‘Tennyson’ near inseparable from the word ‘Lord’, but the poet plays a fairly prominent role in Kingsley’s openly pro-Chartist novel. It is certainly true, as Barbara Hardy has noted, that the poet appears as ‘part of the presentation of popular culture’,9 and indeed in the Victorian novel as in the ‘neo-Victorian’ novel, Tennyson’s works often seem to have been invoked in order to evoke periodicity – be it in order to make the novel look up to date, as is the case with Kingsley, or in order to date it specifically, as is the case in ‘Morpho Eugenia’ by A. S. Byatt. 10 Alton Locke contains a much more sustained engagement with Tennyson’s poetry than David Copperfield. The eponymous hero of Kingsley’s novel is born into a devoutly religious household, where Old Testament heroes are venerated along with ‘Reformation-martyrs’ such as Cromwell and Hampden.11 He takes an apprenticeship as a tailor, but as well as learning his trade he also tries to educate himself, by reading a few pages of poetry a day in a bookshop. His favourite from the start is Byron (in an assumption of common interest with the reader, often referred to simply by the titles of his poems), and is also an early admirer of Shelley. Locke seems unaware of the fairly radical political background of the latter, and following his admiration of Cromwell, the poetry Locke prefers for its politics (as opposed to any other qualities) is that of Milton. In this he is influenced by MacKaye, the Scottish owner of the bookshop Locke frequents, who notes that ‘Shelley’s gran’; always gran’; but Fact is grander – God and Satan are grander.’ 12 It is Tennyson, however, whose undergraduate coterie of friends the ‘Cambridge Apostles’ had evangelized for Shelley, who makes the profoundest impact on Locke. Locke comes across Tennyson’s poems while trying to compose verse inspired by Lillian, a young lady he is attracted to:

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the unequalled sketches of women that I found there, while they had, with the rest of the book, a new and abiding influence on my mind, were quite enough to show me my own fatal incompetency in that line. I threw my verses away, never to resume them.13 The object of Locke’s affection, Lillian, has a Tennysonian name, albeit with amended spelling, and it is the discovery of Tennyson’s poems that truly inspires the tailor-poet. In Tennyson’s work Locke finds ‘the embodiment of thoughts about the earth around me which I had concealed, because I fancied them peculiar to myself.’ 14 As Locke self-identifies so clearly as ‘the working man’, he is most keen on ‘the altogether democratic tendency of [Tennyson’s] poems, [. . .] an element especially democratic, truly levelling; not his political opinions, about which I know nothing, and care less, but his handling of the trivial every-day sights and sounds of nature’.15 Locke credits Tennyson thus: he has learnt to see that in all nature, in the hedgerow and the sandbank, as well as in the alp peak and the ocean waste, is a world of true sublimity, – a minute infinite, – an ever-fertile garden of poetic images, the roots of which are in the unfathomable and the eternal, as truly as any phenomenon which astonishes and awes the eye. The descriptions of the desolate pools and creeks where the dying swans floated, the hint of the silvery marsh mosses by Mariana’s moat, came to me like revelations. I always knew there was something beautiful, wonderful, sublime in those flowery dykes of Battersea-fields; in the long gravelly sweeps of that lone tidal shore; and here was a man who had put them into words for me. This is what I call democratic art – the revelation of the poetry which lies in common things.16 The examples Locke cites seem unusual, given this description – dying swans and the moat of Mariana do not seem all that close to the resolutely urban environment he has grown up in – but it is the immediacy of the imagery in Tennyson’s poetry which so transfixes Locke, as Tennyson, ‘living amid the same hopes, the same temptations, the same sphere of observation as they, gives utterance and outward form to the very questions which, vague and wordless, have been exercising their hearts’.17 Locke’s enthusiasm for Tennyson builds, as he links the poet’s craft with that of Landseer and Fielding in the visual arts, and finds them united: in all authors who have really seized the nation’s mind, from Crabbe and Burns and Wordsworth to Hood and Dickens, the great tide sets ever onward, outward, towards that which is common to the many, not that which is exclusive to the few – towards the likeness of Him who causes His rain to fall on the just and on the unjust, and His sun to shine on the evil and the good; who knoweth the cattle upon a thousand hills, and all the beasts of the field are in His sight.18

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The phrase ‘the great tide sets ever onward’ carries a slight echo of ‘Locksley Hall’, where we read ‘Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change’, and the latter half of Locke’s sentence has the air of Tennyson’s ‘one far-off divine event, / To which the whole creation moves’.19 The work of Tennyson seems common currency among the young people Locke encounters on his travels over England – he recounts his conversations with Lilian: She talked about poetry, Tennyson and Wordsworth; asked me if I understood Browning’s Sordello; and then comforted me, after my stammering confession that I did not, by telling me she was delighted to hear that; for she did not understand it either, and it was so pleasant to have a companion in ignorance.20 Browning, even at this early stage, has been established as one of the most important contemporary poets but is also established as far more difficult than Tennyson – a difficulty over which young lovers can bond. And the words of Tennyson recur to Locke as he travels to spread his Chartist mission and experiences the countryside: Dark curdled clouds, ‘which had built up everywhere an under-roof of doleful grey’, swept on before the bitter northern wind, which whistled through the low leafless hedges and rotting wattles, and crisped the dark sodden leaves of the scattered hollies, almost the only trees in sight.21 The lines in quotations marks are taken from ‘The Dying Swan’, a poem to which Locke has already referred in the novel, reinforcing the genuineness of his admiration for Tennyson; and another of Tennyson’s early poems, ‘The Poet’s Song’, recurs to Locke in prison, where he describes the view out of his cell, ‘The dark sleeping fallows bloomed with emerald blades of corn, and then the corn grew deep and crisp, and blackened before the summer breeze, in “waves of shadow” as Mr. Tennyson says in one of his most exquisite lyrics’.22 Locke can also find much in Tennyson that is applicable to his political activities. After delivering the (ultimately failed) Chartist Petition of 1848 to parliament, Locke is reminded of ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, thanks to the ‘roars of laughter’ the petition inspired in the House of Commons – Locke chooses Tennyson’s phrase, ‘inextinguishable laughter’, and goes on to quote a large chunk of ‘The Choric Song of the Lotos-Eaters’, and the quotation ends thus: There they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands, Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands. But they smile, they find a music, centred in a doleful song, Steaming up, a lamentation, and an ancient tale of wrong, Like a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong;

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Chanted by an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil, Sow the seed and reap the harvest with enduring toil, Storing little yearly dues of wheat, and wine, and oil; Till they perish, and they suffer – some, ’tis whispered, down in hell Suffer endless anguish! –23 To which Locke adds ‘Truly – truly, great poets’ words are vaster than the singers themselves suppose!’ The British Parliament is compared with the idealized vision of Epicurean Gods which the Lotos-Eaters sing of, and aspire to. As Elizabeth A. Cripps has noted, ‘and praying hands’ is italicized since the correct form of a petition to the British House of Commons includes a ‘prayer’, and the image is doubly apt, at least in a literal reading, because factory workers were often referred to as ‘hands’ at the time.24 The prayer that the Lotos-Eaters envisage, however, is one of the supplication of the masses. Locke believes that the British Parliament, like the Lotos-Eaters, sees the anguish of the working man as only deserving of a ‘smile’, their ultimate response being the decision that ‘surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil’.25 The choice the British Government has – of looking away, and of slumbering on rather than addressing the pain of the toiling population – is destructive both for the workers and, in Tennyson’s poem, for the Lotos-Eaters themselves, and this is why Locke considers the poem so appropriate. This retrospective application of ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ to events which seem fairly remote to Tennyson’s poem might be inspired by an experience Locke has of the poem near the end of the book, when he is ill and being nursed by Lilian. She reads the beginning of the poem, and Locke is more inclined to the attitude of relaxation and rest, as ‘it was not reading – it was rather a soft dreamy chant, which rose and fell like the waves of sound on an Æolian harp’. Lilian adds three lines of Shelley after finishing the part of the Tennyson poem, and, as Locke looks up, he has a vision while looking at ‘a copy of Raffaele’s cartoon of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes’, which ‘seemed to blend into harmony with the feelings which the poem had stirred’.26 The ‘vista of the waters and mountains’ and the scene in front of it ‘confessed His power, who sat there in His calm godlike beauty’, and Lilian, on noticing what Locke is looking at, beings to talk to him ‘of [Jesus] as the great reformer’.27 Barbara Hardy has said of this vision that as a result of Locke (and Kingsley’s) political and religious commitment, at its climax ‘the book requires a Christian work of art’, and that the union of Tennyson’s poem, which asks ‘why should we toil alone?’ with the Raphael print, means that his work is ‘revised for Christian affirmation’ – which, as Hardy’s book shows, unites Kingsley with the later Charlotte Yonge in whose Pillars of the House (1873) we find a ‘christianizing revision’ of The Princess.28 Locke’s is a multifaceted response to Tennyson – on the one hand, the song of the Lotos-Eaters is recontextualized, with some sympathy, as part of his spiritual reawakening; while only a few pages earlier, part of the song’s idealization of

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laziness ends up standing for all that he most hates about the English political system. Tennyson, it would seem, remains the democratic poet even at the end of the poem – the modernized song of the Lotos-Eaters is modernized still further, leading the way to the union of Chartist politics and Christian faith which was the aim of both Locke and the novel’s author, Charles Kingsley. If Locke is the earliest (and, one could argue, to this day the most vociferous) Tennyson enthusiast to dominate a novel as a character, then it seems that Elizabeth Gaskell is the earliest Tennyson enthusiast to maintain her affection in the framework of more than one work of fiction. At the end of the same year in which Alton Locke was published, Gaskell wrote ‘The Moorland Cottage’, a Christmas story for Household Words. The story is designed to be just as convincingly ‘real’ as Alton Locke – it begins with a long and intricate set of directions (‘If you take the turn to the left, after you pass the lyke-gate at Combehurst Church’)29, and these instructions lead you to a house which ‘is, or rather it was, at the time of which I speak, the dwelling of Mrs Browne, the widow of the late Curate of Combehurst’.30 Despite this ostensible realism, the plot is sensational, concerning the dissolution of Edward Browne and his sister Maggie’s attempts to save him from his own profligacy. Often hailed as a narrative inspiration for George Eliot’s later The Mill on the Floss (as well as focusing on the relationship between siblings, on of whom is named Maggie, Gaskell’s novel also ends with a drowning),31 the story is also noteworthy for its very early engagement with Tennyson’s In Memoriam. This poem was published the same year, and as John Chapple has noted, having been lent a copy of In Memoriam in 1850, Gaskell exclaimed in a letter that it is ‘a book to brood over – oh how perfect some of them are’.32 Gaskell tried, the same year, to convince Charlotte Brontë of Tennyson’s merits, only to meet with at best, indifference – in a letter to Gaskell, Brontë called the poem a ‘rhymed and measured and printed monument of grief. What change the lapse of years may work – I do not know – but it seems to me that bitter sorrow, while recent, does not flow out in verse.’ 33 This predates the response of Paul Verlaine, who claimed that ‘When he should have been broken-hearted [. . .] he had many reminiscences’ – a criticism beloved of W. B. Yeats.34 Gaskell complained that Brontë ‘calls me a democrat, & can not bear Tennyson’ (at the time, the word ‘democrat’ was still used pejoratively by some thanks to its associations with the worst excesses of the French Revolution).35 However, despite Brontë’s scorn, In Memoriam had such an impact on Gaskell that she quoted it in fiction almost immediately, in ‘The Moorland Cottage’. In a story which, as established above, feels so realist in tone, Gaskell avoids the problem of alluding to the poem at a point of the story set before its publication by addressing the reader more or less directly as narrator, with an aside on the institution of marriage. We read: [I]f marriage were to be made by due measurement and balance of character, and if others, with their scales, were to be the judges, what would become of all the beautiful services rendered by the loyalty of true love? Where would be

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the raising up of the weak by the strong? or the patient endurance? or the gracious trust of her – Whose faith is fixt and cannot move; She darkly feels him great and wise, She dwells on him with faithful eyes, ‘I cannot understand: I love.’ 36 Gaskell here, in an act common to novelists who allude to Tennyson, alters the verse, as the first word in the stanza is actually ‘her’, not ‘whose’. Tennyson’s verse at this point discusses a marriage where the woman ‘knows but matters of the house, / And he, he knows a thousand things’.37 Gaskell quotes the poetry not for its ostensible perpetuation of gender norms, but rather for the depiction of a relationship where some things remain secret and unknown, but in which love is still very much present. This is of direct relevance to the story, in which Maggie supports her brother unquestioningly even when it is clear he has done considerable wrong; and, coming relatively early in the narrative, the quotation is apt because Maggie has pledged herself to Frank, about whom she is still to learn a great deal, but who will eventually come to rescue her from the shipwreck. By alluding to Tennyson here, Gaskell’s narrator is thus situated in the contemporary literary world of 1850, and can also help establish Tennyson as a contemporary poet whose work is as applicable to events of the past, as to the present. The characters of the story, too, seem to be keen readers of poetry – Frank explains why he ends up on a ship bound for America, having followed Maggie, by saying ‘I remember, I thought how happy you and I would be, striving together as poor people ‘ “in that new world which is the old” ’.38 Frank here makes casual reference to ‘The Day Dream’, Tennyson’s 1842 poetical retelling of the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ story. In an edition of Gaskell’s shorter fiction, Suzanne Lewis has written that the quotation is ‘particularly apt’ as Maggie earlier describes her childhood dwelling place as ‘like the place the Sleeping Beauty lived in’,39 and Frank does indeed rescue her; however Frank’s allusion, concerned as it is with a more literal ‘new world’, functions mainly as an indication of how widespread Gaskell believed the knowledge of Tennyson’s poems to be. Gaskell alluded to Tennyson in a more moving (and rather more intricate) manner in Cranford (1851), a Pickwick-esque series of stories concerning the fictional town, appeared, like ‘The Moorland Cottage’ before it, in Household Words (edited by Charles Dickens). The readers of the novel are united with some of its characters in a shared appreciation of Dickens; the effervescent Captain Brown raves about Pickwick, establishing himself as at one with the literary tastes of the readership of Household Words and thus, potentially, Cranford. Brown is eventually killed by a train because he has been so engrossed in his reading of Pickwick that he saw a small child in danger too late, saving her while

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losing his own life, an incident linked to an earlier comment in one of Gaskell’s letters. She had procured a copy of Tennyson’s poems for a former weaver of her acquaintance called Samuel Bamford, whom she tracked down to ‘a little old-fashioned public house’ in Manchester, leaving the man with a copy of the 1842 poems, which he immediately set about reading in a ‘crowded street’, in danger of being run over.40 A working-class Tennyson enthusiast also crops up in Cranford in the shape of Thomas Holbrook, a man so fiercely proud of his class that he ‘even sent back letters with this address [Esquire], telling the postmistress at Cranford that his name was Mr. Thomas Holbrook, Yeoman.’ 41 Soon after he appears in the novel, we discover that he had been romantically involved with one of the heroines of the novel, ‘Miss Matty’, but they never married because, according to Miss Pole, Holbrook ‘would not have been enough of a gentleman for [Miss Matty’s father] the Rector’.42 Although Holbrook is 70 years old, he is a strong advocate of Tennyson, and as he walks in the garden with the narrator of the story, he occasionally quotes poetry to himself: We came upon an old cedar-tree, which stood at one end of the house; ‘The cedar spreads his dark-green layers of shade.’ ‘Capital term – “layers!” Wonderful man!’ I did not know whether he was speaking to me or not; but I put in an assenting ‘wonderful’, although I knew nothing about it; just because I was tired of being forgotten, and of being consequently silent. He turned sharp round. ‘Aye! you may say “wonderful.” Why, when I saw the review of his poems in “Blackwood”, I set off within an hour, and walked seven miles to Misselton (for the horses were not in the way) and ordered them. Now, what colour are ash-buds in March?’ 43 The quotation comes from ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’, which makes Holbrook an admirer of Tennyson’s 1842 Poems, like Frank in ‘The Moorland Cottage’ before him. Holbrook’s seemingly odd question about ash-buds is a way into extolling the virtues of ‘The Gardner’s Daughter’, as Holbrook says that he did not know their colour ‘till this young man comes and tells me. Black as ash-buds in March. And I’ve lived all my life in the country’.44 As with Alton Locke before him, Holbrook draws attention to the minutiae of natural detail which Tennyson provides in his poems, which causes the reader to approach the world anew after contemplating the detail of the poems. In Modern Painters I (1843), John Ruskin highlighted the importance of paying as close attention to nature as possible: Pick up a common flint from the roadside, and count, if you can, its changes and hues of colour. Every bit of bare ground under your feet has a thousand

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such; the grey pebbles, the warm ochre, the green of incipient vegetation, the greys and blacks of its reflexes and shadows, might keep a painter at work for a month, if he were obliged to follow them touch for touch: how much more when the same infinity of change is carried out with vastness of object and space.45 This contemplation was linked, for Ruskin, to moral goodness, as The art, or general productive and formative energy, of any country, is an exact exponent of its ethical life. You can have noble art only from noble persons, associated under laws fitted to their time and circumstances.46 That Holbrook (along with Alton Locke) is a ‘noble’ character is clear, and it seems that both Kingsley and Gaskell were inspired by Ruskinian aesthetics in their appreciation of Tennyson, whose attention to natural detail is striking to this day. However, Tennyson is not only invoked in Cranford to establish ideas on aesthetics. Once Holbrook and the narrator return, he insists on reading Tennyson aloud, and the household assents. Whatever he proposed would have been alright to Miss Matty; although she did fall sound asleep within five minutes after he had begun a long poem, called ‘Locksley Hall’, and had a comfortable nap, unobserved, till he ended; when the cessation of his voice wakened her up, and she said, feeling that something was expected, and that Miss Pole was counting: ‘What a pretty book!’ ‘Pretty! madam! It’s beautiful! Pretty, indeed!’ ‘Oh yes! I meant beautiful!’ said she, fluttered at his disapproval of her word.47 ‘Locksley Hall’ was certainly one of the highlights of the 1842 Poems for contemporary readers, and its purposeful metre (returned to by Auden, among others) suits it to being read aloud. But Holbrook may have had an ulterior motive, which is rather undermined by Miss Matty falling asleep – the poem’s story is one of love conquered by social status, just as the romance between Miss Matty and Holbrook was undone by considerations of class. Soon after the reading, Holbrook dies, having gone on a trip to see Paris, and Miss Matty mourns him as a widow would – another Tennysonian motif.48 Once she began using epigraphs, Gaskell often recoursed to Tennyson, including ‘Loved and Lost’, the title of chapter twenty of Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), a quotation from In Memoriam XXVII. Marion Shaw has shown that this chapter also alludes to In Memoriam VI, where a woman is imagined putting a ‘riband or a rose’ in her hair, only for the man whom she hoped to impress to die ‘even when she turn’d’.49 Shaw demonstrated that in Sylvia’s Lovers, the story is amended; the ribbon in the hair is taken to mean that a lover has drowned, but in Gaskell’s historical novel

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(as in Tennyson’s ‘Enoch Arden’, published one year later), the lover is only presumed drowned, and returns to find his lover married to another. Tennyson provides a fitting chapter epigraph in one of Gaskell’s ‘industrial’ novels, set in the present day, North and South (1854–55). Margaret Hale, the heroine of the novel, has grown up in Hampshire, at the fictional village of Helstone. She has a firm attachment to the place, and when in London describes it to Henry Lennox as ‘like a village in a poem – in one of Tennyson’s poems’.50 The link between Tennyson and the rural idyll indicates that Hale has also been reading Tennyson primarily for his picturesque poems set in rural locations, such as ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’. The novel is full of poetry – each chapter carries an epigraph from a poem – and the approach is usually fairly literal. For example, chapter VII, ‘New Scenes and Faces’, begins with the following from Matthew Arnold: Mist clogs the sunshine, Smoky dwarf houses Have we round on every side.51 This comes from ‘Consolation’, a poem in which Arnold contrasts his own dejection with situations in other parts of the world, to conclude that ‘Time [. . .] Brings round to all men / Some undimm’d hours’.52 In a literal sense, the image is appropriate, as in this chapter Margaret gets her first impressions of the North, with its ‘long, straight, hopeless streets of regularly built houses, all small and of brick’, and the ‘deep lead-coloured cloud hanging over the horizon’ as they approached Milton.53 As editors including Patricia Ingham 54 have noticed, however, the lines are also appropriate because Gaskell had an enduring interest in the idea of personal desolation being contrasted with scenes elsewhere – and this is manifested fairly clearly in North and South, where, although Margaret’s initial unhappiness in Milton is presented sympathetically, once she has got more used to the town she is introduced to the suffering of industrial workers such as Bessy Higgins and her father, which calls her own pain into question. Margaret’s idealization of her Southern home is later called into some question by her education in the very different landscape and communities of the industrial North, but when her father decides to move his family to Milton, a Northern town which approximates to Manchester, her anguish is vivid and believable, if slightly over-the-top: ‘It seemed to her at the moment, as if the earth was utterly more desolate than if girt in by an iron dome, behind which there might be the ineffaceable peace and glory of the Almighty’.55 As the family leaves Helstone, we read: Railroad time inexorably wrenched them away from lovely, beloved Helstone, the next morning. They were gone; they had seen the last of the long low parsonage home, half-covered with China-roses and pyracanthus – more homelike than ever in the morning sun that glittered on its windows, each belonging to some well-loved room. 56

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The epigraph of this chapter, entitled ‘Farewell’, is taken from In Memoriam: Unwatch’d the garden bough shall sway, The tender blossom flutter down, Unloved that beech will gather brown, The maple burn itself away; Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair, Ray round with flames her disk of seed, And many a rose-carnation feed With summer spice the humming air; ****** Till from the garden and the wild A fresh association blow, And year by year, the landscape grow Familiar to the stranger’s child; As year by year the labourer tills His wonted glebe, or lops the glades; And year by year our memory fades From all the circle of the hills.57 The epigraph is used in a similarly thoughtful manner as the quotation from Arnold. The blossoms and flowers of Helstone landscape will indeed grow unfamiliar to Margaret, whose return, later in the novel, both comforts and also proves to her that she has irrevocably changed; her memory has faded, though she is still remembered. The wider source of the quotation, though unacknowledged (the poem is simply credited to ‘Tennyson’), is also appropriate, and hints at the darkness to come – it is taken from In Memoriam, and fairly soon after Margaret arrives in Milton, her mother will pass away, followed late in the novel by her father. As Tennyson’s fame and popularity grew in the years following the publication of In Memoriam, so he maintained a presence in some of the most well-regarded novels published in the period, including those of George Eliot. As Samantha Matthews has noted, the year after the publication of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), a compendium entitled The Tennyson Birthday Book was published, which Eliot thought ‘exceedingly ill-done’, a reaction possibly connected to a book of Sayings from her books being published in 1872 – Tennyson’s copy of this book is held at the Tennyson Research Centre.58 Despite her ostensible opposition to an author’s work being quoted out of context and boiled down to a collection of ‘common knowledge’, Eliot misquoted Tennyson in a chapter epigraph in the first edition of Daniel Deronda. The original heading runs: This is true the poet sings, That a sorrow’s crown of sorrow Is remembering happy things.

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This was attributed to In Memoriam, but it actually comes from ‘Locksley Hall’, and Eliot corrected it in 1878, as well as amending ‘true’ to the correct’ truth’. This is truth the poet sings, That a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things. – tennyson: Locksley Hall 59 Although in an 1855 review of Maud, Eliot claimed that ‘Locksley Hall’ was ‘so familiar that we dare not quote it’,60 it would appear that In Memoriam – or, at least, what she thought was In Memoriam – was acceptable material for an epigraph. Her lapse in memory could be to do with the use to which she puts the quotation, two pages on, as she quotes the song Deronda is singing as he rows, which comes from Dante: Nessun maggior dolore Che ricordarsi del tempo felice Nella miseria: Eliot added a footnote to this, which says ‘Dante’s words are best rendered by our own poet in the lines at the head of the chapter’.61 The earlier version of the epigraph is rendered in roughly the same verse form as the Dante, which looks close to the In Memoriam stanza (although Eliot ignores the indentation of the poem, as well as its metre, in her misattribution). Barbara Hardy has observed that the link between Tennyson and Italian poetry is ‘characteristic of her internationalism’,62 and it is also surely characteristic of a writer who put a lot of time into thinking about epigraphs, even if they are misattributed. In this scene, Deronda sings lines from Dante, adapted for music by Rossini in Otello; an Englishman, who will later learn he is of Jewish descent, sings poetry adapted to music in Italian and in the same scene saves a Jewish woman from killing herself. The application of Tennyson to this chapter is certainly testament to Eliot’s internationalism, as she demonstrates her awareness that Tennyson’s lines are a translation from Dante; this is an epigraph which is very aware of its sources and its status in literary history, in a novel about which the same can certainly be said. In 1855, Eliot had named Tennyson as the contemporary author most likely to ‘live in the next century’, and she was fulsome in her praise for the poems she considered his best – ‘Ulysses’ as a ‘pure little ingot of the same gold that runs through the ore of the Odyssey’, for instance.63 But she also thought that in ‘Maud’, ‘with [a few] slight exceptions, he is everywhere saying, if not something that would be better left unsaid, something that he had already said better; and the finest sentiments that animate his other poems are entirely absent’.64 Eliot focused on the ‘morbid’ nature of not only the verse, but the mind being presented in the verse, and the ‘morbid conception of human relations’ presented as a ‘cure’ for the speaker’s morbidity.65 Part of this review’s uncharitability must lie in political opposition, as Eliot concludes:

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the ground-notes of the poem are nothing more than hatred of peace and the Peace Society, hatred of commerce and coal-mines, hatred of young gentlemen with flourishing whiskers and padded coats, adoration of a clear-cut face, and faith in War as the unique social regenerator.66 These sentiments would doubtless provoke some ire at the progressive, and often iconoclastic, Westminster Review, and yet Eliot’s general dislike of ‘Maud’ was shared by many of her contemporaries. The review also forms an early example of a reaction against Tennyson, based primarily on comparing the poet’s new works with his past output and finding the more recent poems lacking. A general doubt of Tennyson seems to have been fairly widespread, if usually voiced in private, in the 1860s. Matthew Arnold wrote in an 1861 letter that ‘I care for [Tennyson’s] productions less and less’ and in 1864 wrote that Tennyson was unlikely to ‘finally stand high’.67 However, in an act which might demonstrate how much he censored his opinion even among family members, in a short poem entitled ‘Tennyson’ which he inscribed in a copy of the Laureate’s poems given to his niece Mary, Arnold praised Tennyson as a poet ‘Whom wrinkled Seventy still owns, / And blooming Seventeen adores’.68 Another poet, who never published in his own lifetime, was more resolute in opposition. In an 1864 letter, Gerard Manley Hopkins remarked to A. W. M. Baillie that ‘I have begun to doubt Tennyson’.69 He believed that ‘Enoch Arden’, despite its popularity with the public at large, was ‘Parnassian’ – ‘one could conceive oneself writing it if one were the poet’.70 And for Hopkins, ‘a great deal of Parnassian lowers a poet’s average’, and more than anything else lowers his fame I fear’.71 This came shortly after the young Alfred Austin had derided the role of Laureate, in 1861: Degraded Genius! stooping to the yoke Of annual pence and some pert Premier’s joke, Once and for all these shameful links discard! Let verse, like Virtue, be its own reward! Dismiss, with scornfully impartial frown, Snarls from the gutter, guerdons from the Crown.72 Nine years after publishing this, Austin attacked Tennyson specifically – in an 1870 essay he wrote that Tennyson’s work was ‘the poetry of the drawing-room, rather than the music of the Spheres’, and described Idylls of the King as ‘exquisite cabinet pictures; but that is all’.73 Austin would go on to accept the laureateship, having written a long verse tribute to Tennyson shortly after the former Laureate’s death; Hopkins does not seem to have recovered from his doubt of Tennyson, but remains an ‘outlier’ in Victorian poetry, as he never published a poem in his lifetime. A similar outlier is Thomas Hardy, whose verse might look traditional, but who published all of his poems after the death of Victoria. Reading his poem ‘An Ancient

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to Ancients’ on its first publication in 1922, one could be forgiven for thinking that he would not have considered Tennyson a potential source for epigraphs. The bower we shrined to Tennyson, Gentlemen, Is roof-wrecked; damps there drip upon Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust, The spider is sole denizen; Even she who read those rhymes is dust, Gentlemen!74 Helen Small has said of this: If it lays Tennyson poetically in the grave, so to speak, declaring this kind of poetic luxuriance ‘roof-wrecked’, rusted quite away, it also places the speaker and his implied audience as one of Tennyson’s fond followers in the past (an ‘ancient’ speaking to ‘ancients’), and by performing to excess early Tennysonian style it keeps that style alive, recast as its own elegy.75 Small points out the similarity between the atmosphere of Hardy’s poem and that of Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’, and it is clear that, although affection for Tennyson might be the dominant preserve of ‘ancients’ (as indeed it seemed, to some at least, in 1922), there is still charm in these Tennysonian lines. There is, however, an irony in the list of great names we find late in Hardy’s poem, including ‘Sophocles, Plato, Socrates,’ who all burned ‘brightlier towards their settingday’.76 The precise date on which Hardy wrote ‘An Ancient to Ancients’ is unclear, but Hardy would have been aware of the critical groundswell towards the ‘young Tennyson’, which seems to have been active even in the Victorian period, and the Laureate is, to an extent, damned by the comparison. There was, however, a mutual respect between the two men – Tennyson enjoyed A Pair of Blue Eyes,77 a novel in whose epigraphs his poetry features a great deal. In Hardy’s Use of Allusion, Marlene Springer suggests that many of Hardy’s epigraphs in the novel are ‘simply decorative, supporting the judgment that Hardy had not yet completely decided to eschew quotation merely for its own sake’; for Springer, they are indicative of the work of a man ‘blindly infatuated with his own method, and [who] loads his “romance” with such a welter of allusions that he almost destroys the stylistic rewards of such an approach.’ 78 The approach was decided on, according to Springer, in order for Hardy to surmount ‘the common weaknesses of language itself: vagueness, ambiguity, deceptive morphological and etymological structures and misleading figures of speech’.79 This is undoubtedly the reason why many writers use quotations from poetry as their chapter epigraphs, and yet there is an ‘ambiguity’ in the reason behind Hardy’s literalist approach to epigraphs in this novel. Where Gaskell used poems which had relevance, both literally and emotionally, to situations in the novel,

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Hardy’s seem purely prosaic, and they even, at times, seem to rather underwhelmingly pre-empt events in the novels. Springer has noted: In the part of the manuscript excised from the Wessex Edition, Hardy justifies his allusive chapter titles by having the suspense of Elfride’s novel-reading ruined by titles which blatantly reveal the conclusion.80 Elfride’s taste in fiction, and her attempts at it, are given a fairly rough ride in the novel, but the relationship between allusion and her taste in fiction seems less clear than Springer suggests. If we only consider the Tennysonian epigraphs, we can see why so many critics have called them ‘weakly and distractingly snatched from context’.81 Thus chapter III of volume II carries the epigraph ‘Then fancy shapes – as fancy can’, from In Memoriam LXXX. The poem had been published over twenty years before the novel, and was well established as a source of epigraphs, but it is rare for a novelist with such literary aspirations to use the poem in so prosaic a manner as Hardy does here. The chapter concerns Elfride’s ‘fancy’, which is shaping her interest in the intellectual Henry Knight as her regard for her former lover, Stephen Smith, reduces. Her mind is kept ‘upon the stretch concerning Knight’, blushing ‘at some fancied mortification’ as a result of her behaviour towards him, though the two have never actually met – her novel was reviewed rather unfavourably by his magazine, and she has written to him to protest.82 There is a surface association between the quotation from Tennyson and the chapter, as in the verses from In Memoriam the poet imagines what would have happened to Arthur Hallam had it been Tennyson who died, but the association is all too literal – Tennyson’s dark daydreams of his potential death seem incompatible with Elfride’s nervous fretting over Knight’s review of her book. A similarly literal epigraph from Tennyson can be found in chapter XIII of book II, ‘To that last Nothing under Earth.’ This comes from the negative voice in Tennyson’s ‘The Two Voices’ (1842), and envisages the futility of life, a view which Tennyson’s narrator ultimately rejects. Hardy uses it to preface a chapter concerned with death, which is set in the family crypt of the Luxellians, but there is little else to connect the two. As Barbara Hardy has said, ‘as a keen Tennyson reader Hardy must have known what he was ignoring, but there are times when he seems neither to remember context nor to imagine a reader’s response, as in the routine quotations of some stories. The shallow-rootedness seems puzzling in a novel where there is so much Tennyson and so much In Memoriam.’ 83 Hardy has identified the most important quotation of Tennyson in a chapter epigraph – chapter VIII of book II, which is prefaced, ‘On thy cold gray Stones, O Sea’ (from Tennyson’s ‘Break, Break, Break’).84 This is located at the start of probably the most famous passage in the novel, where Knight and Elfride go out walking by the cliffs; in a rainstorm he becomes stuck on a ledge, and she manages to rescue him only by stripping off her clothes and using them as a makeshift rope. In recent years, however, the novel has become celebrated

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less for its raciness and more for Knight’s contemplation, as he hangs precariously off the cliff, of ‘an imbedded fossil’ in the rock.85 There is a clear link between his contemplation of the implications of Darwinian theory on time, which ‘closed up like a fan before him’,86 and Tennyson’s Lyell-inspired contemplations in In Memoriam of ‘There rolls the deep where grew the tree’.87 The landscape, too, as Barbara Hardy has noted, is faintly reminiscent of parts of In Memoriam, but the central link between the epigraph and the scene is, again, oddly literal – there are indeed ‘cold gray stones’ which Knight is in danger of ‘breaking’ himself on. At a push, and thinking as glibly as Hardy’s epigraphs encourage the reader to, one could argue that not only is the ‘touch of a vanished hand’ also important to Hardy’s novel – a hand which has vanished over a cliff, and is clinging on for dear life – but the ‘stately ships’ in Tennyson’s poem also have a referent in A Pair of Blue Eyes, as Elfride’s other lover is almost visible from the cliff, on his return from abroad. This apparently overtly literal approach is not, however, the exclusive domain of the narrator (or novelist). Late in the novel, Knight has resolved that Elfride’s passion, and her failure to tell him that she was originally betrothed to two men prior to meeting him, mean that ‘proprieties must be a dead letter with her; that the unreserve [. . .] meant indifference to decorum’.88 His self-styled intellectualism leads him back to his books, ‘few of which had been opened since Elfride first took possession of his heart’.89 Chiding himself for his own ‘unreserve’, he quotes a snatch of In Memoriam, which is presumably one of the neglected volumes, ‘O last regret, regret can die!’ 90 His ‘robust intellect, which could escape outside the atmosphere of heart’, is temporarily moved by these lines, which continue (in the poem, though unquoted in the novel), No – Mixt with all this mystic frame, Her deep relations are the same, But with long use her tears are dry.91 These unquoted lines are discarded, as ‘being convinced that the death of this regret was the best thing for him, he did not long shrink from attempting it’, and on this Knight leaves London to travel in Europe, with the single aim of ‘encouraging obliviousness of Elfride’.92 Knight is, as well as a lawyer, a literary journalist, and must have been aware that he was more or less misquoting Tennyson by citing him in this manner. A knowledge of the lines – which are hardly obscure – demonstrates the relative shallowness of Knight’s feelings for Elfride, and his (arguably) surface interpretation of poetry, snatching phrases out of contact to serve his own purpose, with little thought. A similar surface recollection of Tennyson by a character in a Hardy novel can be found in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, where we read of Angel: He himself knew that, in reality, the confused beliefs which she held, apparently imbibed in childhood, were, if anything, Tractarian as to phraseology,

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and Pantheistic as to essence. Confused or otherwise, to disturb them was his last desire: Leave thou thy sister, when she prays, Her early Heaven, her happy views; Nor thou with shadow’d hint confuse A life that leads melodious days. He had occasionally thought the counsel less honest than musical; but he gladly conformed to it now.93 Helen Small has noted that this ‘mixed tribute to Tennyson, at once critical and willing to let the critical impulse go, is imagined as the thought of a young man in love and disinclined, right now, to be rigorous either with the object of his love or with Tennyson.’ 94 And one notes that the lack of rigour is in common with that of Knight. As we will see, in the years that followed the publication of Tess, both George Gissing and E. M. Forster were to use a lack of thought about Tennyson to underline a male character’s similarly unthinking approach to courtship: laziness in consideration of Tennyson thus becomes a recognizable trope to identify a lazy, perhaps inappropriate, male lover. With Tess in mind, if we return to A Pair of Blue Eyes, such a questionable application of a snatch of Tennyson cannot help but remind the reader of the general approach to chapter epigraphs. As the instance of Knight using Tennyson is designed to demonstrate his firmness of resolution as well as his apparently shallow love for Elfride, just as the invocation of Tennyson is designed to say as much about Angel as anything else, how should we view the approach to epigraphs, which are handled in much the same way? Other late nineteenth-century novelists such as the American William Dean Howells gently mocked the use of Tennysonian quotations as titles to novels – in Howells’s 1885 The Rise of Silas Lapham a book entitled Tears, Idle Tears is ‘making such a sensation’ thanks to its ‘old-fashioned’ ability to ‘go for our heart-strings’.95 Far from the Madding Crowd, the novel Hardy published after A Pair of Blue Eyes, took for its title a phrase from Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard’, but the book’s chapters are appended with perfunctory summaries of the action; and by the time The Mayor of Casterbridge was published, in 1886, Hardy was simply numbering his chapters. With this in mind, one could perhaps conclude that the approach to epigraphs in A Pair of Blue Eyes is making the same sort of comment about the art of using poetical epigraphs in general, as the individual instance of Knight’s quotation is making about him.

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Chapter 2

‘The heat of life in the handful of dust’:1 The Turn of the Century

Tennyson’s work helps to colour the early courtship of Jasper Milvain and Marian Yule in George Gissing’s 1891 novel New Grub Street. Milvain, who believes himself to be ‘the literary man of 1882’,2 is cynical to the point of amorality about writing, advising others to ‘supply a simpleton with the reading he craves, if it will put money in your pocket’,3 railing against the three-volume novel, ‘a triple-headed monster, sucking the blood of English novelists’,4 and he eventually incurs the narrator’s wrath, as he is dubbed ‘Jasper of the facile pen’.5 From the beginning of the novel, he is romantically interested in Marian Yule. As they walk in the country, Jasper says, ‘When I was here late in the spring [. . .] this ash was only just budding, though everything else seemed in full leaf’. Marian responds: ‘An ash, is it?’ murmured Marian. ‘I didn’t know. I think an oak is the only tree I can distinguish’. ‘Yet’, she added quickly, ‘I knew that the ash was late; some lines of Tennyson come to my memory.’ ‘Which are those?’ ‘Delaying, as the tender ash delays To clothe herself, when all the woods are green, Somewhere in the “Idylls.” ’ ‘I don’t remember; so I won’t pretend to – though I should do so as a rule.’ She looked at him oddly, and seemed about to laugh, yet did not.6 As many critics have noted, including Bernard Bergonzi,7 the lines here are not, in fact, from the Idylls, but The Princess. Milvain’s lack of recognition could simply be the result of Marian’s misattribution, and her near-laughter would seem scornful and ill judged in that light. However, her amusement must surely arise more from the ‘as a rule’ which Milvain adds, and this is part of the central question addressed in the book – does being a ‘literary man’ entail success, in terms of commissions, sales of books, and reputation; or is it to do with artistic merit and poetical understanding? Both Marian (treated very sympathetically

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elsewhere in the novel) and Jasper should know their Tennyson fairly well, given their background – Jasper’s sisters both have Tennysonian names (Dora and Maud), and even Marian’s name could derive from ‘Mariana’, especially given her literary father. John Goode has also noted interestingly that the choice of a song from The Princess is telling, as Marian has achieved the ‘emancipation that the Princess seeks’ through education, and yet is thoroughly ‘disillusioned’ with it.8 One thing is certain – the poetry helps endear Marian to Jasper, as he recounts the meeting to his sister: There’s something very attractive about her. She quoted a line or two of Tennyson; the first time I ever heard a woman speak blank verse with any kind of decency.9 Although New Grub Street was published in 1891, and despite Milvain’s earlier lack of awareness of Tennyson, there is no doubt that if he were around in 1892 he would have penned an obituary or an article on the death of the Laureate. Writing such articles was considered to be one of the ‘sorts of things authors do’, in the words of Max Saunders; Ford Madox Ford, an aspiring writer at the time, tried and failed to write such an obituary in 1892 for precisely this reason.10 When writers reporting the Laureate’s death were not framing their text with his own work, they followed the tone of the earliest account of the poet’s deathbed scene, as dictated by his family physician Sir Andrew Clark, who described Tennyson’s passing as a ‘gloriously beautiful death’, and went on: In all my experience I have never witnessed anything more glorious. There were no artificial lights in the chamber, and all was in darkness save for the silvery light of the moon at its full. The soft beams fell upon the bed, and played upon the features of the dying poet like a halo.11 This account set the tone for reporting on his death. The Pall Mall Budget described the deathbed scene thus: Slowly the sun went down, the blue died out of the sky, and upon the valley below there fell a perfectly white mist. The hills, as our representative was told, put on their purple garments to watch this strange white stillness. [. . .] The bed on which Lord Tennyson lay, now very near to the gate of death, and with his left hand still resting on his Shakespeare, was in deep darkness; the rest of the room lit up with the glory of the night, which poured in through the uncurtained windows.12 One can perhaps discern an echo here in the landscape’s ‘purple garments’ of the ‘purple glens’ which appear in Tennyson’s lyric ‘The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls’, from The Princess.13 Eulogists were not unforthcoming in their assessments of the poet’s merits. In The Dial we read that ‘in the whole of English literature there are but the

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names of Shakespeare and Milton and Shelley worthy to be mentioned with his, and the literature of the world can add but few others to the list of such immortals’,14 and in The Graphic he was called ‘the greatest poet of the century’.15 This placing of Tennyson alongside the most clearly ‘immortal’ names in English poetry, and claiming that his relevance was not likely to diminish, continued after his death, for example in William Boyd Carpenter’s sermon preached in Westminster Abbey in April 1893. Carpenter claimed: [T]here came moments when bard-like he descended amongst us with his harp in hand, and whenever he came we gathered round him to hear the songs which he sung, for we knew that he had brooded over his song, and weighed well his words, and therefore, when he sang, men listened.16 The generally high regard for the poet seems to have been mirrored by the wider reading public: in 1897 Clement Shorter wrote of the ‘very wide hold upon the public which was his for at least thirty years prior to his death, and which is his to-day’.17 Evidence of a popular taste for the poet can be found in his play Becket, written in 1879, finally being put on the stage in 1893 by Henry Irving to enthusiastic reviews.18 This popular appeal underlines the approval given to the poet in 1891 by Edmund Gosse, who believed Tennyson’s widespread popularity to be ‘one of the most singular, as it is one of the most encouraging features of our recent literary history’.19 But Tennyson’s funeral radically changed Gosse’s mind. He witnessed the hordes of people outside the abbey, the presence of whom left him wondering ‘what if this vast and sounding funeral should prove to have really been the entombment of English poetry? What if it should be the prestige of verse that we left behind us in the Abbey?’ 20 Gosse’s fear was that if a poet, inspired by Tennyson’s popularity, could pander to popular taste, they could rise to fame without the approval of the small coterie of genuine poetry lovers whom the author of the article called ‘the cultivated’ as opposed to the ‘half-educated’. To Gosse, this was unthinkable. He went on to ask, ‘Is Tennyson, great as he is, a thousand times greater than Wordsworth? [. . .] The democracy, I fear, doth protest too much, and there is danger in this hollow reverence’.21 For Gosse, as Peter McDonald has put it, ‘cultural democratisation necessarily entailed devaluation’; he therefore could not view the near-universal acclaim for Tennyson as intrinsically positive for English literature.22 And yet Gosse’s attitude to Tennyson changed again, less than a year later. He reprinted the essay containing these comments in his 1893 collection, Questions at Issue, under the title ‘Tennyson and After’, but in an appendix also included a letter from George Gissing, entitled ‘Tennyson – and After?’ Gissing wrote that ‘the popular mind is my study, and I know that Tennyson’s song no more reached it than it reached the young-eyed cherubim’.23 He took great pains to point out that poetry was not popular – he cited the ‘custodian of a Free Library’ who claimed to issue around one volume of poetry a month – and reported

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Tennyson Among the Novelists

a conversation between two retired shopkeepers, reading the newspapers, one of whom remarked ‘A great deal here about Lord Tennyson’; the other replied ‘Ah – yes.’ 24 The conversation immediately moved on to a discussion of horse racing. For Gissing, ‘the mere price of [Tennyson’s] works is prohibitive to people who think a shilling a very large outlay for printed paper’.25 This statement is all the more revelatory if we think back to New Grub Street – the scene featuring Tennyson in that novel is clearly at some remove from the ‘popular mind’ of the two shopkeepers, and Milvain, in posing as someone who should know Tennyson even though he does not, might represent something more general about the literary world on Tennyson’s death – more reverent than truly understanding of the poet’s merits. If Tennyson’s works were not as widely loved as was claimed in obituaries, it is nonetheless true that he remained a dominant presence in literary periodicals, like that which Milvain writes for, long into the final decade of the nineteenth century. This is clear from The Athenaeum review of Hallam Tennyson’s officially sanctioned Memoir of his father in 1897; the reviewer believed that ‘the eagerness with which these volumes have been awaited shows that Tennyson’s hold upon the British public is as strong at this moment as it was on the day of his death’.26 The biography is still indispensable; it is the only source for many of Tennyson’s letters, and contains myriad biographical details that were unknown to readers of the poet; for example, the fact that on his father’s death Tennyson ‘slept in the dead man’s bed, earnestly desiring to see his ghost’.27 Hallam’s biography was the only major life of the poet published between 1892 and 1949;28 it would appear that Tennyson had succeeded, at least partially, in securing control over his posthumous reception. There was no shortage of potential successors to Tennyson as Laureate; indeed, in his memoirs, the satirist William Hurrell Mallock describes his stay at a country house in 1892. On the morning that Tennyson’s death is announced, two poets who are also guests strangely fail to appear for breakfast, and stay in their rooms until noon, finally appearing ‘like men who had got rid of a burden’. 29 The fruits of their labour appear the next day in newspapers, and are poems about the nation’s irreparable loss. Mallock notes that both of the poems they produced do, however, imply ‘that a poet existed who was not unfit to repair’ this loss.30 And yet the position remained unoccupied from 1892 to 1896. The previous three Laureates, Southey, Wordsworth and Tennyson, had all been gifted poets, and with Tennyson’s popularity, the question of who would inherit the laureateship was a matter of national debate in the 1890s. Wordsworth wrote almost no official verse as Laureate, and was well past his poetic prime when he was appointed in 1843. However, having a true ‘great’ as Laureate enhanced the reputation of the position, which had been largely neglected in the eighteenth century, and which was only really resurrected with the appointment of Southey, appointed in 1813. Following Wordsworth’s death in 1850, Tennyson was the natural choice,31 both of the poetry-reading public and, apparently, of royalty as well – according to his son, Tennyson was appointed as

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Laureate following Wordsworth’s death in 1850 ‘owing chiefly to Prince Albert’s admiration for In Memoriam’.32 Despite the prominent status of the position of Laureate, a successor was not appointed until New Year’s Day, 1896. In the interim there was a great deal of conjecture in the press about the post. In an 1895 Idler article, many important names in English literature were canvassed on who they thought should be Laureate. The dominant name was Swinburne – he secured the vote of, among others, Coulson Kernahan, Gissing, E. Nesbit and Oscar Wilde, the last of whom said that Swinburne ‘is already the Poet Laureate of England’, as ‘he whom all poets love is the Laureate Poet always’.33 Despite publishing one of the better elegies for Tennyson,34 Swinburne was unlikely to be chosen either by the Queen or Lord Salisbury, the Tory Prime Minister, given his republican views and the lingering association of his work with indecency after the scandal generated by the publication of Poems and Ballads in 1866. The other outstanding candidate was William Morris, who according to his biographer J. W. Mackail was privately sounded out by a cabinet minister about the possibility of succeeding Tennyson, to which Morris responded that ‘his principles and tastes alike made it impossible for him to accept’.35 Rudyard Kipling, who was certainly nationalistic enough to fulfil the task, was too young and scarcely lived up to Tennyson’s bardic image, even if he was already popular; other names were the relatively obscure Lewis Morris and William Watson. The idea which gained most support was not, however, the appointment of Swinburne, but the abolition of the position. This was most strikingly voiced by Grant Allen, who claimed that ‘I don’t think we ought to have a Laureate at all.’ 36 The calls for the position to be abolished were not successful, and the privilege was eventually granted to Alfred Austin, on New Year’s Day, 1896. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt noted that ‘Austin himself used to say that his appointment was a very simple matter, the recognition of his being at the head of English literature’, but the appointment was really inspired by Austin’s political views.37 In The Critic of the month of his appointment we read that ‘Tennyson has occasionally been called Alfred the Great. He will be called so oftener hereafter’.38 By 1892 Austin’s opinion of Tennyson had altered; his enthusiasm had sufficiently increased to write a fairly long elegy to the poet, ‘inspired’ by one of Tennyson’s Arthurian poems, the quasi-autobiographical ‘Merlin and the Gleam’. That Austin is one of the poets who stay in their rooms fervently expressing their grief in Mallock’s story is fairly clear, not least from the fact that Mallock mentions Austin immediately after his story. ‘The Passing of Merlin’ was ready in time for The Times to run it on the 7th October, and it was widely reprinted, for example in The Illustrated London News and The Graphic. Austin focuses on Tennyson’s Arthurian poems – ‘To-day is dole in Astolat’ – before going on to address what, for him, made Tennyson great: 39 In English gardens fringed with English foam, Or girt with English woods, he loved to dwell,

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Singing of English lives in thorp or dell, Orchard or croft; so that when now we roam Through them, and find Him not, it scarcely feels like home.40 It is clear what Austin values most about Tennyson from the poem – the Idylls are now viewed as a sort of national epic, with Tennyson the pre-eminent ‘national bard’, as is clear from the lines quoted above; he is elevated to semidivine status, with the ‘H’ of ‘him’ capitalized at places in the poem. Austin’s poetic output often focused on nationalistic matters, and his appointment as Laureate is therefore not entirely surprising; what is surprising is the speed with which he took to writing ‘official’ verse. The first poem he published as Laureate was ‘Jameson’s Ride’, perhaps an attempt to write in the manner of Kipling, which was published in The Times on 11 January 1896. The poem is far from a classic – it begins: Wrong! Is it wrong? Well, may be But I’m going, boys, all the same. Do they think me a Burgher’s baby, To be scared by a scolding name? They may argue, and prate, and order; Go, tell them to save their breath: Then, over the Transvaal border, And gallop for life or death!41 Critics were not impressed by the literary merits of this piece, but it was less the poetic form which was found to be so offensive, and more the content. It is not hard to see what attracted Austin to the topic – Tennyson’s most famous piece of official verse is still ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, and if Austin could quickly publish a poem praising a British military raid, also made up of around 600 men, it could help strengthen the case of the younger Alfred in his attempt to establish himself as an acceptable successor to the elder. The problem, for Austin, was that the raid had never been officially sanctioned. Starr Jameson had grown impatient with the lack of official British intervention in the Transvaal republic, where the ruling party had put in measures to restrict the enfranchisement of the Utlanders, British expatriate workers. Jameson decided to march towards Johannesburg over New Year in 1895–96, with the aim of supporting the Utlanders in an uprising. However, the support Jameson anticipated never materialized; the impetus of the raid quickly petered out, and Jameson surrendered.42 It is understandable why a loyal Tory like Austin would want to glorify such an endeavour; however, as a close friend of the Prime Minister, he should have been aware that Jameson’s actions were opposed by the Colonial Office, and as Poet Laureate he should,

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strictly speaking, have condemned the attack rather than have praised it. Austin’s reputation never fully recovered from this episode, and the poem, coupled with his consistently outspoken patriotism, left him open to ridicule throughout his Laureate career. The frequently poor quality of his verse, coupled with Austin’s selfimportance (he signed poems ‘A. A.’ in the national press assuming that all literate people would recognize his work immediately), were very easy to ridicule, and writers in Punch, among other publications, seized on the opportunity as soon as ‘Jameson’s Ride’ was published. The Punch parody begins: ‘Say, is it song? Well – blow it! But I’ll sing it, boys, all the same Because I’m the Laureate Poet, That’s the worst of having a name! I must be inspired to order, “Go, tell ‘em, to save their breath:” I can rhyme to “order” with “border,” And jingle to “breath” with “death”.’ 43 With such an inferior – and unpopular – poet as laureate, it is not hard to see why Tennyson still remained ‘the Laureate’ in much criticism of the period. Despite the widespread enthusiasm for Tennyson continuing after his death, one could be forgiven for thinking that this did not extend to the avant garde. The poets who made up the ‘Rhymers’ Club’ barely ever allude to his work in their poetry, or indeed in their correspondence;44 Leslie Stephen, despite being the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography, expressed his doubts in his 1898 Studies of a Biographer, echoing George Eliot in believing the hero of ‘Maud’ to be ‘not only morbid, but silly’.45 Joseph Conrad, who was just beginning his writing career, also had his doubts – he believed that ‘[t]here’s more poesy on one page of [Robert Bridges’s] Shorter Poems than in the whole volume of Tennyson’.46 Conrad disparaged novelists who were ‘popularites’ expressing the ‘common thought’,47 and refused to give Pearson’s Magazine his short story ‘The Return’ as it was ‘much too good to be thrown away where the right people won’t see it.’ 48 It is clear from his correspondence at the time that he understood that he would not necessarily find a great audience for his work – he wrote of Wagner and Rodin as kindred spirits, who ‘both had to starve a little in their day’, and believed that his admirers would doubtless be ‘limited’ in size.49 This idea of appealing to the few, as opposed to the many, and a seeming disregard for Tennyson, makes it all the more surprising that he should allude to the same passage of ‘Maud’ twice in four years, in ‘The Return’ (1898) and ‘Youth’ (1902). In the former, the marriage of a middle-class London couple disintegrates over the course of

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one evening. The husband, Alvan Hervey, discovers in a letter that his wife is leaving him, and as his emotions spiral out of control, he becomes ‘afraid with that penetrating faltering fear that seems, in the very middle of a beat, to turn one’s heart into a handful of dust’.50 The allusion could be to a passage from John Donne’s 1624 Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, or indeed the Bible, but the most recent, and famous, use of the phrase was undoubtedly the following from ‘Maud’: Dead, long dead, Long dead! And my heart is a handful of dust, And the wheels go over my head, And my bones are shaken with pain, For into a shallow grave they are thrust, Only a yard beneath the street, And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat, The hoofs of the horses beat, Beat into my scalp and my brain [. . .].51 The narrator of the poem is by this stage caught up in a frenzy as he has lost his betrothed, and envisages himself as buried alive. It is not hard to see the similarities between the two positions – Hervey has been spurned by his wife for reasons he cannot fathom, and the narrator of ‘Maud’ cannot comprehend the loss of his lover either. Behind both passages there is also a focus on the upper-middle class (be they rural, as in ‘Maud’, or urban as in ‘The Return’), whose outward prosperity is at odds with the tortured emotional state of the characters. The second citation of the phrase comes in ‘Youth’, where Conrad’s famous narrator Marlow is first introduced. He has been accepted on a ship, the Judea, to make his first journey to the East, at 20 years of age (Marlow recounts the story at the age of 42). After a tortuous journey from London to Newcastle, the ship crashes on the Tyne and finally sets off for Bangkok. Marlow’s account is peppered with exclamations about the excitement he felt at this adventure, such as ‘O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it!’ and reinforced by his belief that the ship represents ‘the endeavour, the test, the trial of life.52 As the journey progresses, the ship undergoes many hardships which Marlow meets with unflinching optimism to the end. One such incident is a massive explosion which takes place when ‘Java head’ was ‘190 miles off’.53 Marlow is thrown through the air by the explosion and describes the immediate aftermath: The coal-dust suspended in the air of the hold had glowed dull-red at the moment of the explosion. In the twinkling of an eye, in an infinitesimal fraction of a second since the first tilt of the bench, I was sprawling full length on the cargo.54

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He survives both the blast and its aftermath, affording him the chance to see the ‘jagged wall of purple at sunset’ of the East.55 And ultimately his relief is as much concerned with having had the fortune of experiencing such an incident as it is with his survival: I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more – the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort – to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires – and expires, too soon, too soon – before life itself.56 Marlow has elsewhere in ‘Youth’ claimed to have read Sartor Resartus on the voyage,57 and it is likely that he would have read ‘Maud’ at some point before narrating the story. Both Marlow and Hervey appear to be aware of the intricacies of the passage from ‘Maud’; the narrator in Tennyson’s poem at once envisages himself as dead and yet the urgency with which he feels his life is manifested through the repetition of ‘beat’ and the commas at the end of the lines. It would also seem that the passage has been in Marlow’s mind ever since he spoke of ‘the coal-dust suspended in the air’, a potent symbol of the energy of life and one which energises Alvan Hervey’s idea of the handful of dust as representative of death. Although citations such as this demonstrate that Tennyson’s verse could still have relevance to an avant-garde writer such as Conrad, one of the main reasons for his lingering presence in the general literary consciousness must have been a result of his very much inferior successor as Laureate, and the poets who became known as ‘Georgian’ were still writing verse that seemed, at least in terms of versification, to bear his influence. As we will see, another central factor in his appearance in novels both of this period and later is the prominence of his work in education. In 1903 P. G. Wodehouse, who was just starting out in his career, voiced a note of caution about ‘guidebooks’ to works of literature. In the ‘Notes’ to Tales of St. Austin’s, he wrote: How often have we been forced to take down from dictation the miserable maunderings of some commentator on the subject of Maud. A person reads Maud, and either likes or dislikes it. In any case his opinion is not likely to be influenced by writing down at express speed the opinions of somebody else concerning the methods or objectivity and subjectivity of the author when he produced the work.58 Wodehouse is being facetious here, and yet his comments, which appear in a book of school stories designed to appeal, in the main, to schoolchildren, are clearly intended to chime with real classroom experiences. By the 1900s, it

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seems, Tennyson was an integral part of a private school education – and not just in Britain. The Canadian writer L. M. Montgomery’s 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables contains an instance of Tennysonian influence that has lived long in the memory, as a result of the book’s enduring popularity. Anne is well suited to be an appreciator of Tennyson – an orphan, she rails against her ‘red’ hair and her lack of dimples,59 giving the reader an image of a young Pre-Raphaelite model, and her imagination is imbued with Victorian fairytales, as she retitles the scenery near her adopted home with names such as ‘the Lake of Shining Waters’.60 Once she gets to school, she is introduced to Tennyson’s ‘Elaine’, as ‘the Superintendent of Education [had] prescribed it in the English course for the Prince Edward Island Schools’. The very un-poetic manner in which this is introduced is maintained by the manner in which they studied the poem: They had analysed and parsed it and torn it to pieces in general until it was a wonder there was any meaning at all left in it for them, but at least the fair lily maid and Lancelot and Guinevere and King Arthur had become very real people to them, and Anne was devoured by secret regret that she had not been born in Camelot.61 Television and film adaptations of Montgomery’s book usually have Anne reciting ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and the less widely known ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ is a long poem to give to primary schoolchildren, but the comments of the girls as they prepare to launch Anne off down a river in their ‘dramatizing’ of the poem seem to indicate that the latter was indeed studied at Anne’s school, as they repeat ‘Sister, farewell for ever’, ‘Farewell, sweet sister’, and Anne is chided to ‘smile a little’ as Elaine ‘lay as though she smiled’.62 As she is launched, the raft hits a stake and springs a leak; Anne only narrowly escapes sinking along with the boat. One of several instances in which Anne is meant to learn to curb her imagination, the chapter, however, ends with her foster father urging her to ‘keep a little’ of her romance.63 Maybe thanks to his being taught so often in schools, and featured so often in children’s literature, phrases from Tennyson had become part of a general national vocabulary by the early 1900s, as shown by two novels concerning the political upheavals of the day. Richard Whiteing was primarily a journalist, but wrote several novels in his lifetime, including Ring in the New, published in 1906. Although Whiteing never considered himself a novelist, Ring in the New is an attempt to chronicle both the lives of a new class of young, independent, women making a living in London, and the ‘new democracy of London town’.64 The idea of a conflict between ‘the old and the new’ is introduced immediately; Prudence Meryon, the heroine, is upbraided by her rich aunt for using the word ‘ripping’ as an adjective to describe Girton College, Cambridge.65 She decides against working for her aunt and strikes out on her own, living a handto-mouth existence in Holborn and learning to type. Among her fellow students she meets one, Sarah, who is involved with the distribution of a new periodical

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entitled The Branding Iron. This is ‘a new journal of society – in the back streets’, which is broadly socialist in its agenda and becomes a talking point among both its target demographic and politicians over the course of the book.66 In one of its editorials, the journal splits the population into three parts – the 1.25 million people who earn over £700 a year, the 3.75 million who earn between £700 and £160 a year, and then spells out the last part: Incomes of less than £160 down to the vanishing point – thirty-eight millions of persons, earners and families all told. Diffuse or perish. Ring in the New!67 The exhortation to ‘Ring in the New’ derives from In Memoriam,68 and while the link to Tennyson is not followed up, the citation of his work in a fictional radical journal shows how the famous ‘ring out, wild bells’ passages of Tennyson’s poem had become common currency by the 1900s, so much so that they were deployed in pieces of writing which had little in common with the poet’s sentiments in writing the poem. Other lines of Tennyson are quoted in a later copy of The Branding Iron: The rich were never more indifferent about the poor than they are at this moment, when they have got them off their minds by liberal doses of the opiate of charitable and religious ministration. Tears, idle tears; why the wringing of the hands? All has happened just as might have been expected, just as it has happened before, as it will certainly happen again.69 Although it could simply be the repetition of a well-known phrase, the reference to ‘Tears, idle tears’ here could be seen as a coded criticism of Tennyson, and by extension his fellow Victorians, who were content to treat the poor with ‘charitable and religious ministration’. As later in Tennyson’s poem we find nostalgia for ‘the days that are no more’, the citation of the poem looks ironic – what The Branding Iron stands for is progress rather than nostalgia. As a result, the ending of the passage seems strange, as ‘Ring out the old!’ is quoted 70 – the desire for progress, for change from the Victorian past, is expressed through the words of the same poet whose work was ironized earlier in the same passage. Ultimately ‘the new’ is indeed rung in, and The Branding Iron is a success, instrumental in achieving the fictional victory of the Labour party, ‘the first day of the great upheaval which was to change the face of English history in our time’.71 At this point, the novel becomes openly didactic, as the reader is urged to side with the socialist hero, George Leonard, who is united with Prudence. The sentiment of Ring in the New – that writing can effect social change – was proved to be correct, at least to an extent, by Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists which was published (posthumously, and in abridged form) in 1914 and whose influence increased over the years, until 1945 when it was

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claimed that the novel was the chief reason for the Labour Party’s election win.72 Although it was published in the 1910s, it is set in the 1900s and Tressell tried (and failed) to get it published in his lifetime, which was undoubtedly a source of pain for the former painter, as it is clearly designed to be relevant to the first decade of the twentieth century. As the author states in his introduction, he wanted ‘to present, in the form of an interesting story, a faithful picture of working-class life – more especially of those engaged in the Building trades – in a small town in the south of England’.73 The book is a fictionalized autobiography of the lean times Tressell endured as a decorator in Hastings in the early 1900s, living a hand-to-mouth existence (despite his skill as a sign-painter) thanks to the depression. It is a novel designed to expose the terrible conditions in which the working classes live in the 1900s, and the politics of the novel are never in question – as Tressell states in his preface, I designed to show the conditions resulting from poverty and unemployment: to expose the futility of the measures taken to deal with them and to indicate what I believe to be the only real remedy, namely – Socialism. I intended to explain what Socialists understand by the word ‘Poverty’: to define the Socialist theory of the causes of poverty, and to explain how Socialists propose to abolish poverty.74 The novel shares a sense of political purpose with Alton Locke. Tressell’s book comprises a great many characters, most of them painters and decorators, all of whom (barring the corrupt foreman and his employers) live in poverty, under constant fear for their jobs. All are in debt of some form or another, not least Easton, who is forced to pawn most of his clothes and furniture in order to support his wife and baby, and Frank Owen, the ‘Tressell’ character, who although committed to Socialist politics is deeply aware of the need for money and is driven at times to contemplate suicide and killing his wife and son to end their misery. Owen is nicknamed ‘The Professor’ by his workmates, as he reluctantly gives lectures at lunch-time on Socialist politics, and although the majority disagree with his views, they nonetheless think him ‘a clever sort of chap’ because of the way he speaks.75 What prompts this conclusion is Owen’s discussion of the progress of civilization, where he says that every child who is born is ‘one of the heirs of all the ages that have gone before’.76 The phrase ‘heirs of all the ages’ is adapted from the end of ‘Locksley Hall’, and it recurs to Owen later in the novel. As he thinks about the possibilities for the advancement of the individual, he concludes that being an ‘efficient money-producing machine’ and ‘the servile subject of his masters’ is ‘the status of the majority of the “Heirs of all the ages” under the present system’.77 As the next example will show, this is not a simple matter of a phrase being sufficiently well known to form part of a standard vocabulary, as the passages from Tennyson in The Branding-Iron might have been. Tressell, the model for Owen, was not an average decorator – he too was nicknamed ‘The Professor’ and was a voracious reader of novels and poetry (Dickens,

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Swift, Shelley and Byron were all favourites – the latter two uniting him in taste with the young Alfred Tennyson).78 The influence of Dickens is by far the most noticeable on his work – his disreputable characters have idiosyncratic names such as Slyme and Graball D’Enclosedland – and as with Dickens, there is comparatively little allusion to poetry in the novel. It is no surprise that when it does appear, it is usually in chapters concerning Owen. As he thinks about ‘the unfathomable infinity of space’, Owen, an atheist, muses on the origins of the universe.79 He dismisses Christianity as it is ‘too absurd’, but also cannot fully trust in evolutionary theory as ‘although it was undoubtedly true as far as it went, it only went part of the way’, and did not answer the question of the beginning of the universe.80 For Owen, ‘the question remained unanswered because it was unanswerable,’ and he believes that ‘regarding the problem man was but – An infant crying in the night, An infant crying for the light, And with no language but a cry.’ 81 Owen cannot fully believe in either Christianity or evolution, the two systems of belief most commonly associated with Tennyson’s poem, yet these lines from Tennyson’s great elegy still resonate with him. What Owen is left with is the ‘longing for something to believe’, something to hope for.82 This ‘crying for the light’ is expressed in lines from Tennyson. In a much less overtly political work, Florence L. Barclay’s novel The Rosary, published in 1909, Tennyson’s work appears to have maintained its centrality to polite society. The novel is set among the English landed gentry, and its heroine is Jane Champion, ‘a perfectly beautiful woman in an absolutely plain shell’ 83, who is thirty years old and still single. She falls for an artist, Garth Dalmain, but decides against marriage as he is too young, although the real reason is that she is afraid of her own feelings for him. The world in which they live is clearly the very recent past (there is a discussion over forgetting to replace ‘Queen’ with ‘King’ in the national anthem), and Tennyson seems to still be popular in this upper-middle-class environment.84 At the beginning of the novel, Dalmain bemoans the trend for giving ‘silly up-to-date’ titles to paintings, where ‘just now one nondescript word is the fashion’, unless you want to attract attention ‘by calling your picture twenty lines of Tennyson’.85 But despite his status as an emerging artist, Dalmain is still keen on the Victorians, even using Tennyson for an anecdote of ‘the funniest thing we remember at a concert’.86 His was a nervous youth reciting ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, who in his fluster changed the words of the poem to: Theirs not to make reply; Theirs not to do or die; Theirs but to reason why.

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Dalmain claims that ‘The tone and action were all right, and I doubt whether many of the audience noticed anything wrong with the words.’ 87 This anecdote indicates a continuing presence of Tennyson’s work at concerts in the 1900s; Dalmain clearly expects some of his contemporaries (if not the audience in the theatre) to know the poem well enough to notice the mistake. The other main characters in the novel, Jane Champion and Doctor Brand, are also happy to quote Tennyson to each other. On the lie which she tells Garth as she rejects his advances, Jane says that ‘It was one of those dreadful lies which are “part a truth,” of which Tennyson says that they are “a harder matter to fight”.’ Doctor Brand replies by quoting the lines from ‘The Grandmother’ to which Jane is alluding, which are treated as a truism voiced in a well-known quotation, and they are of some relevance to the plot of the novel; both concern marriage and the unhappy romantic consequences of lies.88 The atmosphere of the initial scenes of the novel is faintly Tennysonian, and even resembles poetry in its structure of one-line paragraphs: The shadows silently lengthened on the lawn. The home-coming rooks circled and cawed around the tall elm trees. The sundial pointed to six o’clock.89 The use of the word ‘caw’ is evocative of the ‘Birds in the high Hall-garden’ in ‘Maud’, as there is an echo of the sound of ‘caw’ in ‘Maud’.90 The first sentence also feels inspired by Tennyson – ‘The long light shakes across the lakes’ from The Princess is suggested, through the similarity of the images and the alliteration of both ‘l’ and ‘s’ sounds, as is the line ‘By night we lingered on the lawn’ from In Memoriam, thanks to the correspondence of the phrases at the end of each line.91 If the approach to the earlier generations, and to the Victorian age in general, is more or less reverential in The Rosary (which has a curiously faded air throughout), a very different attitude towards ‘the early Victorians’ can be found in the 1908 novel A Room with a View by E. M. Forster, who has been seen by some critics as a proto-Modernist novelist.92 Forster’s novel also concerns the upper classes, and the initial setting for the novel – a guest-house in Florence – is clearly a remnant of the Victorian era. As Lucy Honeychurch sits to dinner, she looks at ‘the portraits of the late Queen and the late Poet Laureate that hung behind the English people, heavily framed’.93 The two portraits link Tennyson and Victoria as symbols of the older characters in the book, who represent a world order that is fading away. There are several incidents in the novel which highlight the distance between the two generations. Early in the story, Lucy’s aunt, Charlotte Bartlett, reports a conversation at dinner in the guesthouse, where the novelist Miss Lavish spends much of the meal trying to ‘prove that England, our great and beloved country, rests on nothing but commerce’.94 Such a suggestion enrages a fellow diner, Teresa, so much that she leaves the meal ‘before the cheese’, and on the way points to ‘that beautiful picture of

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Lord Tennyson’, saying that the poet ‘can confute’ Miss Lavish’s ideas ‘better than I’.95 Miss Lavish responds, ‘Tut! The early Victorians.’ 96 This provokes Charlotte enough to respond, ‘Miss Lavish, I am an early Victorian; at least, that is to say, I will hear no breath of censure against our dear Queen.’ 97 Although she finds that it is ‘horrible speaking’, she is able to remind Miss Lavish ‘how the Queen had been to Ireland when she did not want to go’, a defence of the Queen which apparently leaves Miss Lavish ‘dumbfoundered’.98 However, the indignity perceived in this conversation is not as shocking, in the world of the novel, as the earlier encounter between Charlotte, Lucy and Mr. Emerson, who is also staying in the pension and offers to exchange rooms with them, as his has a view. Although this appears a chivalrous thing to do, it is in fact considered forward and improper. That the effect of this offer has lingered is clear from the description of the end of the dinner argument, where Mr. Emerson ‘unluckily’ overhears Charlotte’s praise of Victoria’s decision to go to Ireland and agrees, saying ‘Quite so, quite so! I honour the woman for her Irish visit.’ 99 It is not the sentiment which offends, but the phrase ‘the woman’, which is repeated and emphasized by Charlotte. That the ideals of the world of the older generation are being replaced is clear from Lucy’s eventual choice of husband – she chooses the lower-class but passionate George Emerson over Cecil Vyse, who although the social superior of Emerson, is cold, pretentious and unappealing. This is clear from the contrasting courtship techniques of the two young men. While Emerson kisses Lucy after only knowing her for a few days, Cecil quotes Tennyson to her: Lucy had not attended either. Her brow was wrinkled, and she still looked furiously cross – the result, he concluded, of too much moral gymnastics. It was sad to see her thus blind to the beauties of an August wood. ‘Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height,’ he quoted, and touched her knee with his own. She flushed again and said: ‘What height?’ ‘Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height: What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang), In height and in the splendour of the hills?’ 100 Although there is physical contact in this scene, it is not as clearly eroticized as the earlier kiss, and the quotation of poetry appears outdated as a method of courtship, at least in its effect on Lucy. Tennyson is clearly less well known than Cecil thinks, as she either does not recognize the lines or chooses not to. In either case, his courtship has failed to move her. Instead of, as in New Grub Street, being embarrassed by a lack of awareness of Tennyson, Lucy is unimpressed even by the attempt and does not care that she does not recognize the lines, far more famous than those quoted by Gissing’s heroine.

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This is not a simple case of the poet no longer having any merits, as an extended passage earlier in the novel on the ideal ‘medieval lady’ shows: There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in our midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and was queen of much early Victorian song. It is sweet to protect her in the intervals of business, sweet to pay her honour when she has cooked our dinner well. But alas! the creature grows degenerate. In her heart also there are springing up strange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of the sea.101 While the image of a passive Arthurian heroine whom Forster associates with ‘early Victorian song’ still has resonance – indeed ‘there is much that is immortal’ in the image – it is clear from Lucy’s reactions to Vyse and Emerson that she cannot live up to the pure image represented in this novel by Tennyson, who stands for all the ‘early Victorians’.102 Lucy ‘does not stand for the medieval lady, who was rather an ideal to which she was bidden to lift her eyes when feeling serious’.103 Forster does not specify by whom ‘she was bidden’ to look to this ideal of womanhood, but it is apparent that the idea is ludicrous, and that Lucy, the modern young woman, will never live up to this stereotype of female virtue in the twentieth century. If not all of Tennyson’s output is specifically criticized here, it seems that this ‘ideal’ – a Victorian rather than truly medieval one – can be usefully associated with his Idylls. Although Tennyson had been considered to have lived a ‘saintly’ life in a 1902 book by Robert F. Horton,104 and despite a rather more serious, and influential, appraisal of In Memoriam by the eminent Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley appearing in 1901,105 the iconoclasm of Forster’s image – the idealized woman of pre-Raphaelite painting and Tennysonian poetry ‘growing degenerate’ – is echoed in the manner in which the poetry of Tennyson was discussed in some literary journals, particularly as the decade wore on. Events that would have been described in hushed, polite tones years earlier were now material for at least sardonic, if not sarcastic, comment. The clearest example of this was the unveiling of the statue of Tennyson at Lincoln Cathedral in 1905. This was designed by G. F. Watts, who died before he could see it erected, and depicts Tennyson examining a small plant which he holds in the palm of his hand, as described in the short poem ‘Flower in the Crannied Wall’ which is reprinted on an iron plaque at the statue’s base. The statue is rough in texture, the chiselling almost impressionistic, but it is undoubtedly a good likeness, the poet accompanied by his favourite dog. The unveiling was widely reported in the press, the most interesting report appearing in The Athenaeum. While the reporter notes that ‘The prevailing sense among those present was of veneration and reverence, a sense which the environment, the age of the sculptor, and that of the subject to the monument were alike calculated to foster’, he writes, ‘It savours, perhaps, somewhat of irreverence to say that from a distance the effect is rather that of one consulting a watch.’ 106

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This might seem like a flippant comment, and yet not only is it a fairly accurate description of the statue, it also registers a shift in the way in which Tennyson could be described – reporters and critics could write about the great Victorian poet in non-satirical publications and include jokes. This reverent mockery also appears in the writing of G. K. Chesterton. In a 1904 book on G. F. Watts, Chesterton had noted of the statue that ‘There is something very characteristic of Watts in the contrast between the colossal plan of the figure and the smallness of the central object’.107 In the same volume he also described Watts’s portraits of the two poets thus: ‘the head of Browning is the head of a strong, splendid, joyful and anxious man who could write magnificent poetry. The head of Tennyson is the head of a poet’.108 However, this essential difference (which Henry James would later note in his autobiography, The Middle Years) is countered by the similarity Chesterton identifies between the two poets, who were brought together: it must be supposed, by the one thing that they had really in common, a profound belief in the solemnity, the ceremoniousness, the responsibility and what most men would now, in all probability, call the pomposity of the great arts.109 Chesterton was unsure about the Idylls. In a 1903 essay on the poet, he claimed that: He felt that the time called him to be an interpreter. Perhaps he might even have been something more of a poet if he had not sought to be something more than a poet. He might have written a more perfect Arthurian epic if his heart had been as much buried in pre-historic sepulchres as the heart of Mr. W. B. Yeats.110 As Chesterton was generally very accepting of the leading figures of the Victorian age, it is interesting to see him specifically view a living poet as superior to Tennyson. And the opinions (first voiced in the 1870s) of another perceptive critic of Tennyson, Henry James, were reprinted in 1908, in which he voiced reservations. In an essay on ‘Queen Mary’, first published in 1875, James gives an account of the negative aspects of Idylls of the King: That King Arthur [. . .] is rather a prig, and that he couldn’t have been all the poet represents him without being a good deal of a hypocrite; that the poet himself is too monotonously unctuous, and that in relating the misdeeds of Launcelot and Guinevere he seems, like the lady in the play in ‘Hamlet’, to ‘protest too much’ for wholesomeness – all this has been often said, and said with abundant force.111 This did not stop James from repeating these complaints, and indeed reservations over the Idylls were becoming increasingly common in criticism of Tennyson. Arthur Quiller-Couch, in the introduction to a 1904 edition of

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Tennyson, wrote that ‘one may pretty safely prophesy that, as time goes on, even thick-and-thin Tennysonians will remove their stress of admiration from the Idylls to lay it more and more upon In Memoriam as Tennyson’s masterpiece’.112 This is possibly influenced by the writings of A. C. Bradley, whose 1901 study of In Memoriam cast a shadow over Tennyson studies in the decade, and who finished the 1900s by claiming that ‘in spite of countless beauties, the total result of the Idylls was disappointing, not merely from the defects of this or that poem, but because the old unity of spirit and story was broken up, and the new was neither equal to the old nor complete in itself’.113 This was part of a sustained effort to show that the long poem as a genre is close to ‘doomed’, and Bradley takes great pains in a footnote to distance himself from other detractors of Tennyson.114 James himself identifies a way around these problems, albeit in a judgement that is itself limiting, suggesting that if the reader does not think about the moralizing aspects of the work, but surrenders all senses to ‘their perfect picturesqueness, it is the most charming poetry in the world’.115 Perhaps the most powerful and important article (thanks to its place of publication) published about the poet in 1909 can be found in the Times Literary Supplement of August 5, where Walter de la Mare had a long lead essay about the poet printed (anonymously) on the front page. In this article he speaks of his ‘incredulity’ at its being Tennyson’s centenary, as his ‘poetry and presence’ are ‘so clear and fresh and contemporary in the minds of even the younger generation’.116 He notes that the poet ‘is the master of the magic word’, and calls the third stanza of ‘Crossing the Bar’ ‘perhaps, the most gravely beautiful in English poetry’.117 Ultimately, de la Mare believes that Tennyson was in touch with the modern world, which helped secure him a place ‘as one of the great traditions of Victorian England’.118 However, the article is not without humour or criticism. De la Mare sides with Edward FitzGerald in believing the 1842 volumes to be ‘the most enduring fraction of his work’, and asks of Tennyson’s characters whether ‘they ever evoke in us that hidden self which seldom stirs but never sleeps beneath life’s restless consciousness’.119 His description of the poet is less than reverent: Peculiarly impressive, rough-hewn, downright manliness was the outstanding feature of this humorous ‘grumpy’ poet, who left his hair to the chance barbering of his candle; who answered a flattering and formidable invitation to breakfast with contemporary demigods with a brusque, ‘I should hate it, Duchess’; who, eager to shine his brightest, could think of nothing but beer to talk about to Robertson of Brighton; who chanted his ‘hollow oes and aes’ with a ‘voice like the sound of a far sea or of a pinewood’ out of a cloud of tobacco smoke to any old crony that would listen to the poems scribbled down in that historical butcher’s book.120 This portrait of Tennyson, while unfair (and influenced by accounts of his American equivalent, in terms of national significance, Walt Whitman), has

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clearly built up as a result of the flood of autobiographies and biographies containing anecdotes of meetings with Tennyson which proliferated in the period between 1890 and 1909. The picture presented by de la Mare endured until the late 1940s with the appearance of genuinely insightful biographical material from the pen of Charles Tennyson, the poet’s grandson. As de la Mare says, English poetry (and, we can add, literature in general) ‘has floated out beyond the Tennysonian tradition’, and ‘is little influenced by, if not actually antagonistic to, the ideals of the Victorian age’.121 One could assume that as the age grew more remote, Tennyson’s importance in English literature would decrease further, in a relatively peaceful manner. But events of the 1910s, as well as the literature of that period, prove such a conclusion shortsighted.

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Chapter 3

‘I hate great men’:1 Tennyson in the Modernist Novel

The inspiration for ‘stately, plump Buck Mulligan’, whose shaving ritual opens James Joyce’s Ulysses, was Oliver St John Gogarty, who said in an interview about the novelist that his early poems were ‘Tennysonian, exquisite things’: Gogarty quotes this example from Chamber Music, Joyce’s 1907 collection: My love is in a light attire Among the apple trees Where the young winds do most desire To run in companies.2 These lines are reminiscent of Tennyson’s early love poems like ‘The May Queen’, in terms of their focus on rural scenes of young love affairs, and also because of the immediately noticeable metre. This early debt to Tennyson is admitted in an autobiographical passage in Joyce’s last novel, Finnegans Wake, where the novelist (under the name ‘Osti-Fosti’) says that his poetic career ‘began Tuonisonian’.3 The altered spelling with its rolling repetition of heavy ‘o’ sounds highlights the musicality of Joyce’s work, as well as that of Tennyson, uniting two very different writers. Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began life as an essay entitled ‘A Portrait of the Artist’, and developed into a long novel called Stephen Hero. He was dissatisfied with the latter, and decided in September 1907 to rewrite it completely.4 In the rewritten novel, now titled A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, near the end of his second year at boarding school at Belvedere, Stephen Dedalus, the fictional version of Joyce, is interrogated by his friend Heron about a female visitor. Heron urges him to ‘Admit!’ before ‘striking him again with his cane across the calf of the leg’.5 ‘Admit’, the ‘familiar word of admonition’, prompts Stephen to remember two incidents which took place ‘towards the close of his first term in the college’. The first is a ‘public chiding’ over a statement in an essay which his English teacher, Mr Tate, considers ‘heresy’.6 This leads him to recall an incident ‘a few nights after’ the caning when he met his classmates Heron, Boland and Nash in the road.7 The three

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begin to boast about ‘what books they were reading and how many books there were in their fathers’ bookcases at home’ (Joyce’s miming of the child’s thoughts and speech can be seen in the repetition of ‘books’ in this sentence).8 Boland then asks Heron ‘who is the best poet’: – Lord Tennyson, of course, answered Heron. – O, yes, Lord Tennyson, said Nash. We have all his poetry at home in a book. At this point Stephen forgot the silent vows he had been making and burst out: – Tennyson a poet! Why, he’s only a rhymester! – O, get out! said Heron. Everyone knows that Tennyson is the greatest poet. – And who do you think is the greatest poet? asked Boland, nudging his neighbour. – Byron, of course, answered Stephen.9 Heron replies, ‘Byron the greatest poet! He’s only a poet for uneducated people. [. . .] In any case Byron was a heretic and immoral too’. And the scene ends with Stephen being beaten with a cane and a cabbage stump until he ‘admits’ that ‘Byron was no good’.10 If we can assume that Stephen is roughly the same age as Joyce, then this incident would have taken place in 1893, a year after Tennyson’s death. It would seem that Stephen represents an early version of the iconoclastic readers and writers of The Egoist, who are ready to deny Tennyson the reverence afforded him by the likes of Edwin Watts Chubb, who considered Tennyson the final ‘Master of English Literature’; for Chubb, the passing of the poet was ‘the death of a prophet of old’.11 It should also be noted that two months prior to the publication of this passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in The Egoist, the journal had carried an appreciative article on Byron by Leonard A. Compton-Rickett.12 Despite the undoubted irony with which the precocious Stephen is presented here, what this episode in A Portrait suggests is that resentment towards Tennyson had, in fact, been building at least since 1892, and possibly even during Tennyson’s lifetime, and that writers like the emergent James Joyce, the real-life equivalent of Stephen Dedalus – who by the end of the novel has vowed to ‘encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’ – were set finally to contest the dominance of the Victorians.13 A similar desire to break free from the influence of the nineteenth century can be found in Virginia Woolf’s 1919 novel Night and Day. The heroine, Katharine Hilbery, is engaged in writing a biography of her grandfather, Richard Alardyce. He was a Victorian poet considered of sufficient importance to be buried in Westminster Abbey – a picture of his ‘tomb in Poets’ Corner’ hung above Katharine’s ‘nursery fireplace’.14 His burial in Westminster Abbey unites him with Tennyson and Browning as a pre-eminent Victorian poet, and his

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work appears Keatsian – one of his most famous poems is an ‘Ode to Winter’.15 However, the reasons cited for his pre-eminence unite him with Tennyson. ‘In one of those moments of grown-up confidence which are so tremendously impressive to the child’s mind’, the young Katherine was told that ‘he was buried [in the Abbey] because he was a “good and great man” ’.16 This closely corresponds to the reasons given for Tennyson’s fame by obituaries and elegies written on his death in 1892, which concentrated on the man as much as his work: his life was seen as a ‘perfect song’.17 One of Katherine Hilbery’s main occupations is to show guests around her grandfather’s studio, guiding them around the relics there assembled; his writing-table, original manuscripts and personal effects. When a group of Americans visit her house, we find her displaying her grandfather’s pen, pausing like a museum guide ‘for the right number of seconds’ before showing them his manuscripts.18 One of the guests, holding the manuscript of Alardyce’s ‘Ode to Winter’ in her hands, is suddenly overcome by something she notices in the corner of her eye: ‘What! His very own slippers!’ 19 She promptly abandons the manuscript, and ‘hastily grasped the old shoes, and remained for a moment dumb in contemplation of them’.20 The guest’s preference for such relics fits in with Woolf’s ideas about biography – the slippers show Alardyce as a ‘living man’ in a way that a manuscript draft of a poem never could, and indeed the process of writing Night and Day can be seen as an attempt to create such a living portrait (albeit a ‘merging of elements of herself and of her adored sister Vanessa’, as Julia Briggs observes).21 If Night and Day is widely regarded as an imperfect novel, it is nonetheless an attempt to portray ‘a real human being’, something Woolf saw as lacking in late Victorian biography.22 The criticism implicit in Woolf’s treatment of Alardyce’s legacy lies in the idea that it is precisely the veneration afforded ‘eminent’ poets and great men that leads biographers away from painting accurate portraits of the ‘real’ man, slippers and all, and towards exhaustively inclusive Lives and Letters. The bitterness felt towards this system can be discerned in the novel, where Ralph Denham remarks, ‘I hate great men. The worship of greatness in the nineteenth century seems to me to explain the worthlessness of that generation.’ 23 A change in the way ‘great men’ are treated can also be seen in works of criticism on Tennyson. In his 1923 study Tennyson: A Modern Portrait, Hugh I’Anson Fausset claims that early in their careers, faced with an apparently changed world of industry and commerce, Tennyson’s generation (which seems to be comprised, for Fausset, of the Cambridge Apostles of the early 1830s) decided that ‘Poetry should no longer seek to free men, but to entertain and sanctify their leisure; science and commercialism were to occupy their business hours’.24 The Tennyson poems which Fausset endorses are those published in Poems (1842), because ‘they show the whole range of Tennyson’s powers, and the first stage of that conflict between genius and the commonplace, which was to end in so overwhelming victory for the latter’.25 He is most scathing when he comes to the ‘public’ verse Tennyson wrote after his 1850 appointment to the laureateship.

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With ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, ‘he had won the heart of those mild and respectable masses who nourish in secret dreams of violence and gallantry, and look to a poet to rattle the sabre for them, and to relieve drab days by flaunting in perfect security the banners of war’.26 Poems like ‘Riflemen Form!’ appealed to ‘nervous Victorians’ who ‘slept easier [. . .] in their beds, happily ignorant of the nightmares they were preparing for their posterity’.27 Despite the claims of some critics in the 1920s that there was a widespread ‘undiscriminating aversion’ to Tennyson in the early twentieth century, the very posterity of his poetry – the end result of the values expressed therein, and their enduring appeal – is at the centre of Fausset’s condemnation of the poet.28 He ends his book: The result of [Tennyson’s] idle high-mindedness was the catastrophe of savagery and folly which we have known, and the decimating of a generation, young in hope and generosity, which had of itself willed no such things. Once, listening to the choristers in the Abbey, whither he was brought at last to rest, Tennyson said, ‘It is beautiful, but what empty and awful mockery if there were no God.’ On the fields of Flanders there was no God, and the mockery and squalor of it all was relieved by no white-robed Choristers, voicing a consolatory strain.29 Fausset’s sentiments were echoed by C. Colleer Abbott, who observed in a review that ‘When we read the patriotic poems in the light that has come to us from the late war, we understand that a man of such extreme limitations, such music-hall sentiments, so essentially a member of the governing classes, could not but lack the wider sympathies which were essential to some of the poems he was to attempt’.30 Several contemporary reviews contrarily grouped Nicolson and Fausset together in a common concern ‘with redeeming the fame of the poet of In Memoriam from the worst excesses of modern depreciation’, but Fausset’s slim volume was less influential than Harold Nicolson’s book Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry.31 It is hard to believe that Gilbert Thomas (the critic who believed the two to be united in rescuing Tennyson from ‘depreciation’) had even read Fausset’s book, where the author is, as Laurence W. Mazzeno has noted, ‘sometimes vicious and almost always derogatory’.32 Nicolson is not as ostentatiously hostile to Tennyson’s work and character as Hugh I’Anson Fausset; however his book is a critical reappraisal of the poet’s worth in the style of Lytton Strachey. In his introduction we read: For over fifty years his votaries prostrated themselves before the shrine which they had built for him, and he, moving a little clumsily at times within his sacerdotal vestments, became inevitably less and less the lyric poet, and more and more the civic prophet – the communal bard.33

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Nicolson views it as his duty to differentiate between ‘Tennyson the poet’ and ‘Tennyson the bard’ in order to ‘let in the sun’ on the poet’s laurels, which have grown into ‘vast thickets, dusty, cumbersome, and unvisited’.34 To do so, he writes a short biography of the poet, in which he is very critical of the influence of Emily, the poet’s wife. By virtue of their 1850 marriage, the wistful lady who became his wife was able, with little worsted strands, to bind what was most wild in him and most original, and by the persistent creation around him of an atmosphere of reverent admiration to build up, even for the Laureate himself, the legend of an infallible and prophetic thinker, the legend of a great ethical force – the legend, in fact, of all that Tennyson most emphatically was not, of all that he should never have attempted to be.35 In 1892 Emily Tennyson was described in a poem by Theodore Martin (himself quoting from Tennyson’s ‘Isobel’) as ‘The queen of marriage, a most perfect wife’.36 The difference between this, and the extremely critical tone of Nicolson’s account of the marriage, could not be greater, demonstrating an apparent change in English biographical practice, and in the general image of the poet, between 1892 and 1923. Nicolson permits himself to state as fact outright untruths (as Ann Thwaite has recently shown, Emily Tennyson was ‘passionate’, and far from conventional),37 as well as inherently criticize another age for its failings, which are judged in comparison to Nicolson’s rather less conventional 1920s world.38 The entirely fictional account of Tennyson at his home in Farringford in Nicolson’s book is memorable, with Tennyson’s day beginning badly ‘because the housemaid had removed a can of hot water which he had put out for his own shaving after breakfast’, his irritation enduring throughout the day so that he frequently returns, ‘nagging about that can’, disturbing his wife’s ‘day’s work’.39 The similarly fictional account of the poet’s readings is no more forgiving, as Nicolson renders his lengthened vowels in a reading of ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ as ‘Bury the greaaat Duke with an empire’s lamentaaation’, and ‘To the nooise of the moourning of a mighty naaation’.40 These readings are dwelt on at length, with the obvious intention of presenting the poet as self-obsessed and boring – ‘All that was expected of the audience during the recitation was their rapt attention, and if, at the end, any comment was exacted, it was easy to evade the point by becoming “broken down” ’.41 The influence of Henry James is keenly felt here. In 1917, the year after he died, an incomplete volume of memoirs from James’s early time in England, The Middle Years, was published, containing an account of a reading by Tennyson: ‘Oh dear, oh dear [. . .] I heard him, in cool surprise, take even more out of his verse than he had put in.’42 The poet ‘struck me [. . .] as neither knowing nor communicating knowledge’; in a memorably ironic turn of phrase, James decides that ‘Tennyson was not Tennysonian’.43 The Laureate, for James, did not live up to the ideal of the ‘Bard’ (James uses a capital letter for the term, by implication comparing the poet with Shakespeare) as suggested by his poems – and this

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could easily be a source for Nicolson’s inverted distinction. However, the impression James took away from the encounter was not negative: ‘My critical reaction hadn’t in the least invalidated our great man’s being a Bard – it had in fact made him and left him more a Bard than ever’, by virtue of Tennyson remaining undefinable and aloof from the day-to-day world and its expectations of him.44 Nicolson was selective in his citation of this eyewitness account. He backed up his description of Tennyson’s readings with James’s description of the audience being under ‘the heaviest pressure’, without including James’s conclusion that this underlined Tennyson’s Bardic status.45 Even if the phrase inspired Nicolson’s terminology, James’s praise seems at odds with the young critic’s differentiation between ‘poet’ and ‘bard’, the latter taking on a firmly negative association in his book. According to Nicolson, Tennyson’s frequent lapses into the mundane bardic incarnation are a result of ‘circumstances’, which turn out to be the fact that he is ‘great’, but not ‘supremely great’, and thus unable to overcome ‘the taste of his contemporaries’.46 This leaves his poetry with an ‘unnatural objectivity’, which ‘subordinated the lyric to the instructional’.47 Nicolson believes this to be especially concentrated in Tennyson’s ‘mid-Victorian’ period, which consists of ‘the group of poems which cluster round the Idylls and Enoch Arden’.48 Indeed, the Idylls are scarcely mentioned, and when Nicolson does consider them, pausing for a few sentences on the ‘magnificent poetry’ contained therein, he labels them ‘intellectually insincere’.49 The Tennyson worth reading, Nicolson concludes, can be found in the earlier poems: ‘one could emerge triumphantly in 1837 having proved that all the most durable of Tennyson’s work was either published or composed before the accession of Queen Victoria’.50 Ultimately for Nicolson, concluding his first chapter, He will be appreciated because he wrote ‘Ulysses’ and ‘The Lotos-Eaters’; because he wrote ‘Tithonus’; because he wrote ‘The Two Voices’; because he wrote ‘Maud’; because he wrote:‘Now lies the Earth all Danäe to the stars,’ And ‘Crossing the Bar’. And, after all, In Memoriam.51 This focus on In Memoriam, perhaps undermining Nicolson’s earlier statement about Tennyson’s pre-1837 work, can be seen as a continuation of the earlier champion of Tennyson, A. C. Bradley. And yet if we choose to take Nicolson’s word as gospel, Tennyson is only worth reading as far as 1855, with just a few poems published after that date requiring the reader’s attention. This idea of what is good in Tennyson is almost certainly influenced by the criticism of avant-garde poets writing in the 1910s. In 1916, Ezra Pound wrote to Elkin Matthews that a ‘serious writer’ cannot be ‘expected to abandon the tongue of Shakespeare for the meouing [sic] of Wordsworth and Al. Tennyson and Mr. Gosse’.52 In the same year, he observed in a letter to Iris Barry that

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‘Virgil is a second-rater, a Tennysonianized version of Homer’.53 The idea of the Tennysonian as ‘second-rate’ fits in with Pound’s idea of literature having possessed a ‘sense of life’ prior to the ‘stultifying period of the counter-reformation, or in English in Wordsworth and Tennyson’.54 In a 1917 essay he claimed that ‘the afflatus which has driven great artists to blurt out the facts of life with directness or with cold irony [. . .] leads Tennyson into pretty embroideries’,55 and in The Future in November 1917, he wrote: The Victorian cult of the innocuous so distressingly interposed itself. One is tired of hearing depreciation of Tennyson, but he is a very convenient example. The ‘Spectatorial’ mind, whether in press or in schoolroom, has recommended ‘safe’ poets.56 If Pound were truly tired of hearing such depreciations, Tennyson would not have been chosen as a ‘convenient example’; it would appear that Tennyson had become a whipping boy for writers in avant-garde periodicals like The Future. T. S. Eliot, in The Egoist the following year, demonstrated this, referring to the latter’s ‘large dull brain like a farmhouse clock’ (though even at this early stage in his career Eliot was equivocal, asserting that this brain ‘saved him from triviality’).57 Critics reviewing Nicolson and Fausset’s books noted a certain ‘dislike of the Victorian age’, and this ‘dislike’ is evident in other works of criticism published in the 1920s.58 Robert Graves and Laura Riding, in their 1927 Survey of Modernist Poetry, used Tennyson as an example of what was wrong with Victorian poetry – its perfection of sound was dangerous as it led to ‘the effect of allowing the thought of the poem to be controlled by its ability to please musically’.59 Graves and Riding went further in their criticism than Nicolson, and singled out In Memoriam for comparison with The Waste Land. Eliot would later write an appreciative essay about Tennyson’s poem, though Riding and Graves’s criticism privileged the Modernist work far above the Victorian. For them The Waste Land consisted of ‘delicate transitions from one atmosphere to another, where the separate parts are joined into a single continuous poem’.60 This elevated it above In Memoriam, as Graves and Riding found ‘no such transitions’ therein; ‘length in such poems means bulk’.61 In her novel Jacob’s Room, often cited as the third key work published in the annus mirabilis of 1922 (along with Ulysses and The Waste Land), Virginia Woolf creates a portrait of Jacob Flanders, a young man just entering adulthood, whose own fate is prophesied by his surname – the novels ends with him dead on the battlefields of the Western front. Jacob leaves Cambridge in 1909 and we witness his life in London, including his frequent conversations about music and art. One such conversation, which is reported as though it were overheard in public and is occasionally drowned out by background noise, appears to concern composers and poets from the past. Jacob asks his friend Bonamy ‘What about Beethoven?’ and later we see another snatch of Jacob’s side of the

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conversation, an admission that ‘Bonamy knows practically everything – not more about English literature than I do’, and then the retort, ‘I rather suspect you’re talking rot, Bonamy. In spite of what you say, poor old Tennyson. . .’.62. Jacob’s epithet for Tennyson – ‘poor old’ – expresses both a light-hearted admiration of the poet and an implicit acceptance that he is ‘old’ and has been subjected to enough abuse to be pitied. Much of Woolf’s 1920s output deals, as did Jacob’s Room, with the impact of the Great War, not least her 1929 essay A Room Of One’s Own. ‘Certainly it was a shock (to women in particular with their illusions about education, and so on) to see the faces of our rulers in the light of shell-fire. So ugly they looked – German, English, French – so stupid’.63 This echoes a later diary entry where she notes ‘how simple, how clear, how untroubled’ her parents were.64 The apparent breakdown in the old order echoes the difference discerned in the atmosphere of genteel ‘Oxbridge’ luncheon parties (such as the one at which this particular episode in her essay is set) before and after the war. Woolf observes that Before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things but they would have sounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves. 65 She goes on to ask, ‘Could one set that humming noise to words?’ She decides that one could do so ‘with the help of the poets’ and so takes up a book which ‘lay beside me’, from which she reads part of Tennyson’s ‘Maud’: There has fallen a splendid tear From the passion-flower at the gate. She is coming, my dove, my dear; She is coming, my life, my fate; The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near;’ And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late;’ The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear;’ And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’ If this is ‘what men hummed at luncheon parties before the war’, Woolf goes on to suggest that women hummed the first verse of Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘A Birthday’.66 She says of the two, What poets [. . .], what poets they were! [. . .] The very reason why that poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now.67

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Victorian verse is read for escapism, and Woolf’s narrator prefers such verse to ‘the living poets’ because it is firmly couched in the past, as opposed to the work of contemporaries who ‘express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment’.68 The phrase ‘torn out of us’ is important here. If Victorian verse can be summed up by these two metrically tight extracts, its power has to pale in comparison with modern poetry, which has the capacity to ‘tear’ feelings out of the reader, rather than ‘celebrate’ an earlier feeling. Woolf continues: lay the blame where one will, on whom one will, the illusion which inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to sing so passionately about the coming of their loves is far rarer now than then. One has only to read, to look, to listen, to remember. But why say ‘blame’? Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place? For truth. . . those dots mark the spots where, in search of truth, I missed the turning up to Fernham.69 Woolf uses humour here to mask the true impact of her ideas. As a committed pacifist, she cannot be praising the war itself – witness the elegiac tone of novels such as Jacob’s Room, and the deep sense of loss they evoke for the young men who died in Flanders. And yet the shattering of the ‘illusions’ both expressed in, and created by nineteenth-century poetry – which, for Woolf, had at least a symbolic role in the culture which led to the disaster of the Great War – becomes a positive step towards her generation emerging as capable of producing true works of art. On reading A Room of One’s Own (or hearing it delivered as a lecture) in 1929, the up-to-date Woolf enthusiast could not have helped being struck by the focus on Tennyson which this work shares with To the Lighthouse, published two years earlier. In the first part of the novel, ‘The Window’, we find Mr Ramsay, a fictionalized version of Woolf’s father, and head of the extended holidaying household, pacing around the garden of his summer-house reciting Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. The recital is heated, and frequently intrudes on the peace of other characters, not least his wife. She overhears him saying ‘Someone had blundered’, and dwells on the phrase: [S]he gave meaning to words which she had held meaningless in her mind for a long stretch of time. ‘Someone had blundered’ – Fixing her shortsighted eyes upon her husband, who was now bearing down upon her, she gazed steadily until his closeness revealed to her (the jingle mated itself in her head) that something had happened, someone had blundered. But she could not for the life of her think what. He shivered; he quivered. All his vanity, all his satisfaction in his own splendour, riding fell as a thunderbolt, fierce as a hawk at the head of his men

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through the valley of death, had been shattered, destroyed. Stormed at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well, flashed through the valley of death, volleyed and thundered – straight into Lily Briscoe and William Bankes. He quivered; he shivered.70 Mr. Ramsay’s reveries of heroism, manifested in poetic ‘splendour’, are a mere ‘jingle’ in his wife’s ears. ‘Mated itself in her head’ is testament to her ambivalence towards Tennyson’s work, as the line repeats over and over, negating the progress undoubtedly intended in the poem’s distinctive rhythm. Shuli Barzilai says of this: The distinguished professor of philosophy and pater familias is diminished by the humorously deflating contrast between his domestic situation and the content of the poem; the elevated, histrionic tone of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and its galloping dactylic rhythms are ridiculed, or, to a great extent, held in check by the context.71 Once Mr. Ramsay has left the scene, we are left certain that Barzilai’s interpretation is in tune with Woolf’s own intentions. Mrs. Ramsay thinks, ‘how extraordinarily his note had changed! [. . .] It sounded ridiculous – “Someone had blundered” – said like that, almost as a question, without any conviction, melodiously’; she ‘could not help smiling’ at hearing it.72 Few readers could avoid joining her. She understands her husband’s serious attachment to the verse, but cannot agree with him on its merits, or indeed on its seriousness. This is a moderately happy balance between two contrasting views of art, and yet not everyone in the novel is as tolerant of Mr Ramsay. Lily Briscoe, who is painting outside the house, encounters him: [H]e almost knocked her easel over, coming down upon her with his hands waving, shouting out ‘Boldly we rode and well’, but, mercifully, he turned sharp, and rode off, to die gloriously she supposed upon the heights of Balaclava. Never was anybody at once so ridiculous and so alarming.73 The only positive for Lily of Mr Ramsay’s poetic reverie is that it means he will not ‘stand still and look at her picture’, which she ‘could not have endured’.74 His view of art is anchored in the Victorian past – the poem was almost fifty years old when To the Lighthouse is set, and almost seventy-five when the novel was published – and yet, as we saw in A Room of One’s Own, the new generation of artists, represented by Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse, was only finding the confidence in the 1920s to emerge fully from the previous generation’s shadow, thanks to the lingering presence of writers such as James Main Dixon, who still adhered to Carlyle’s principle that ‘Universal History [. . .] is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here’.75 And To the Lighthouse itself is testament to the capacity for art of Woolf’s generation, which truly emerged as an artistic

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force in the 1920s. The image of Mr Ramsay loudly, seriously, reciting Tennyson as he stumbles into his houseguests and even his wife is undoubtedly funny, but it is also very serious. The full significance of the recitals only really comes to light in the ‘Time Passes’ section of the novel, where we read that, some years after the events described in the first part of the book, ‘twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay’.76 With the atrocities of Great War in the background, Mr Ramsay’s recitals suddenly appear a lot less humorous. Witness the second verse of the poem. ‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’ Was there a man dismayed? Not though the soldier knew Some one had blundered: Their’s not to make reply, Their’s not to reason why, Their’s but to do and die: Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.77 In the context of the unprecedented losses suffered by Woolf’s generation in the Great War, this leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. There were many similar ‘blunders’ in Flanders, not least Field Marshal Haig’s decision to try and take the crest of the Ypres ridges in 1917, leading to the loss of at least 70,000 men.78 The lines ‘Their’s not to make reply, / Their’s not to reason why, / Their’s but to do and die’ are easily applicable to the grim subjection of ordinary soldiers to the whims of their superiors in the first world war, and yet the overall tone of the poem does not sit easily ‘in the light of shellfire’ – Tennyson’s rhythm extols the appeal of combat, and his conclusion is undoubtedly positive: When can their glory fade? O the wild charge they made! All the world wondered. Honour the charge they made! Honour the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred!79 The image of Mr Ramsay reciting the poem over and over again, indulging in reveries of tragic martial heroism while pacing around his summer garden, can thus be seen as an attack on the assumptions about combat of the late Victorian generation. Reading the poem out of its original context (about which Jerome McGann wrote his admirable essay ‘Tennyson and the Histories of Criticism’ in 1982),80 Mr. Ramsay and his peers interpreted it as a positive depiction of

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resignation to orders from above, and the glory of dying for one’s country in a manner that can easily be avoided. In her writing in the 1920s, Woolf depicted Tennyson’s poetry as frivolous and almost ridiculous because she thought that its being taken seriously was deadly for her own generation. In 1935 Woolf finally finished her play Freshwater,81 about the poet and his coterie in the Isle of Wight, in order for it to be performed at the 17th birthday party of her niece, Angelica Garnett. The action takes place on one day in 1864, in which the recently married 17-year-old actress Ellen Terry and her husband (almost thirty years older than her), the painter G. F. Watts, visit the Camerons at Dimbola Lodge on the Isle of Wight. At the start of the play, Julia Margaret Cameron is washing her husband’s beard in preparation for their proposed move to India (in reality they left England for Ceylon in 1875). Tennyson, who lived very close by at Farringford, clatters into the scene complaining of intrusion from tourists at his house – ‘the Ladies Poetry Circle from Ohio’ currently occupy his bathroom.82 On hearing that the Camerons are to move, Tennyson is instantly worried, asking ‘how am I going to read Maud to you when you’re in India? Still – what’s the time? Twelve fifteen? I’ve read it in less.’ 83 The reading goes on, in and out of the audience’s earshot, for most of the first scene of the play. His ridiculous self-absorption can be seen even more clearly in the 1923 draft of the play, where he complains that if the Camerons leave, ‘whatever else may happen, they can never by any possible chance hear me read Maud again’.84 Such extended recitals were commonplace at Farringford, as is clear from accounts in late Victorian and early twentieth century life writing such as Henry James’s Middle Years. Woolf also mocks Tennyson’s hostility to his critics in the 1935 text: There was a damned ass praising Browning the other day. Browning, I tell you. But I ask you, could Browning have written: The moan of doves in immemorial elms, The murmuring of innumerable bees. Or this, perhaps the loveliest line in the language – The mellow ouzel fluting on the lawn? [The donkey brays.] Donkeys at Dimbola! Geese at Farringford! The son of man has nowhere to lay his head!85 The poet’s lack of modesty is underlined by his telling Ellen Terry, sitting on his lap, that ‘I am sensible to beauty in all its forms. That is my function as Poet Laureate’.86 Later on in the play, after meeting John Craig, a young sailor, the 17-year-old actress gives a summary of the Victorian intellectuals who congregated on the south coast of the island, at the town of the play’s title: Mrs. Cameron is the photographer; and Mr. Cameron is the philosopher; and Mr. Tennyson is the poet; and Signor is the artist. And beauty is truth; truth beauty; that is all we know and all we ought to ask.87

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Given Tennyson’s treatment in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one could easily imagine that similar levels of mockery awaited the poet in the novel which followed it, Ulysses. Barbara Hardy has noted of the book that ‘one of the most interesting Tennysonian titles may not be universally acknowledged as Tennysonian’ – despite the widespread fame of both Joyce’s novel and Tennyson’s poem, hardly any critics have connected them.88 Joyce appears an unlikely novelist to be influenced by Tennyson, based on the disdain shown towards him by Stephen Dedalus, and indeed Ulysses contains several examples of outright hostility to the poet, mainly in the episodes focusing on Stephen Dedalus’s journey around Dùn Laoghaire and Dublin. At the end of ‘Proteus’, the end of the first part of the novel as a whole, Dedalus remembers that ‘next when it is Tuesday will be the longest day’, which reminds him of Tennyson’s ‘May Queen’: ‘Of all the glad new year, mother, the rum tum tiddledy tum. Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet. Già. For the old hag with the yellow teeth’.89 The reduction of Tennyson’s poetry to ‘rum tum tiddledy tum’ fits in with the young Stephen’s description of Tennyson as a ‘rhymester’ (in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) as opposed to a true poet, and the extract also includes ‘Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet’, a favourite pun of Stephen’s, which occurs several times in the novel (The pun is not as original as Stephen’s gleeful repetition suggests – it first appeared on the 15th of December 1883 in the Illustrated London News.)90 Stephen repeats it while debating the sex life of Shakespeare with his friends in the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode, speculating that the playwright slept with ‘Harry of six wives’ daughter. And other lady friends from neighbour seats as Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet, sings.’ 91 We also find the character ‘Lord Tennyson’ in the hallucinatory ‘Circe’ episode, where he is described in brackets as ‘(gentleman poet in Union Jack blazer and cricket flannels, bareheaded, flowingbearded)’.92 As Vincent J. Cheng notes, the image combines ‘two emblems of the genteel English establishment, lawn tennis and the Poet Laureate’.93 In Dublin in the 1900s, lawn tennis (and ‘English’ sport in general) was a pressing political issue, as can be seen in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses, which takes the form of a pub discussion involving, among others, Leopold Bloom (the ‘hero’ of the novel) and a character called ‘the Citizen’, who is based on Michael Cusack.94 Cusack was one of the founder members of the Gaelic Athletic Association, which sought to promote Irish sports, primarily hurling, Gaelic football, and track and field athletics, at the expense of ‘English’ pursuits, for example cricket, lawn tennis and rugby.95 As Patrick J. Ledden has noted, ‘It is in the discussion of sport that Bloom finally offends the citizen beyond recovery’ – specifically, in his repeated praise for lawn tennis, which he believes is good for ‘agility and training the eye’, while the other men in the pub are talking about the Keogh-Bennett boxing match.96 With the context of tennis (and cricket) in 1900s Ireland in mind, the implied association between Tennyson and ‘English’ sport takes on a deeper significance, only strengthened by the fact that the poet’s grandson, Lionel, was a test cricketer for England between 1913 and 1921.

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Tennyson is thus an intrinsic part of what Tom Paulin has labelled ‘The British Presence in Ulysses’.97 The Victorian is associated with the British in Ireland not just through word association and biographical facts, but also by virtue of the occasional anti-Celtic sentiments of his verse. The clearest example of this comes in In Memoriam, where he claims that Arthur Henry Hallam possessed A love of freedom rarely felt, Of freedom in her regal seat Of England; not the schoolboy heat, The blind hysterics of the Celt [. . .].98 This would have been interpreted by Stephen as a further example of Tennyson’s status as the poetic representative of the oppressive British state, hence his idea of the Laureate writing ‘For the old hag with the yellow teeth’ – Queen Victoria.99 The appearance in ‘Circe’ also comes as Stephen is edging towards a fight with two drunken English soldiers who are increasingly angered by Dedalus’s apparent anti-Englishness, and Dedalus’s vision of Tennyson says, ‘Theirs not to reason why’, which in this context looks like an endorsement of the unreasonable nature of the average English soldier. Left with only these examples, one could conclude that Joyce is as set against the poet as Ezra Pound, albeit for different reasons. However, the Tennysonian presence in the Stephen Dedalus-dominated passages of Ulysses is countered by the references to the poet we find in the episodes of the novel concerning Leopold Bloom. We have already witnessed his enthusiasm for tennis, and this is backed up by an appreciation of cricket: he remembers that ‘Captain Buller broke a window in the Kildare Street Club with a slog to square leg’.100 He knows the fielding positions, and this even-handed appreciation of English culture is continued in his opinion of Tennyson. He thinks about the laureate’s poems in the Concert Room of the Ormond Hotel, in the ‘Sirens’ episode, where he listens to Richie Goulding sing ‘All is Lost Now’, and the singer later tells Bloom ‘of the night he [. . .] heard him, Si Dedalus, sing’ in Ned Lambert’s house.101 This causes Bloom to think, ‘Brothers-in-law: relations. We never speak as we pass by. Rift in the lute I think’.102 The reference is to Tennyson’s poem ‘The Rift in the Lute’, a song in the ‘Merlin and Vivien’ story in Idylls of the King. Bloom puns on the title – as the Gouldings are a musical family, there is a literal ‘rift’ in the ‘lute’, their musical tradition (the title is also frequently punned on in the novels of P. G. Wodehouse and in Saki’s short story ‘The Jesting of Arlington Stringham’). However, at the same time as Bloom listens to the singer, his wife Molly is committing adultery with Blazes Boylan – and Tennyson’s song is one of deception, the devious Vivien attempting to prove to Merlin that she is trustworthy. The ‘rift in the lute’ idea may be a pun which Bloom finds amusing with regard to

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Richie Goulding – he later calls him ‘Ritchie rift in the lute’ – but it masks a deeper concern about Molly’s infidelity.103 Another Tennyson poem which occurs to Bloom, this time in the ‘Eumaeus’ episode, is ‘Locksley Hall’. He thinks about the Hill of Howth: while Howth with its historic associations and otherwise, Silken Thomas, Grace O’Malley, George IV, rhododendrons several hundred feet above sealevel was a favourite haunt with all sorts and conditions of men especially in the spring when young men’s fancy, though it had its own toll of deaths by falling off the cliffs by design or accidentally [. . .].104 Line 20 of ‘Locksley Hall’ reads ‘In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love’, and the strong rhyme scheme of the poem is echoed in the half-rhyme of ‘fancy’ and ‘accidentally’ in the above passage.105 At first this seems a throwaway word association, but even the word ‘throwaway’ is resonant in Ulysses, as Bloom, talking about his newspaper, repeatedly tells Bantam Lyons he was going to ‘throw it away’, which Lyons interprets as a betting tip; later the men in the pub grow jealous, as a horse, ‘Throwaway’, wins its race.106 The Hill of Howth is memorably the scene of ‘the day we were lying among the rhododendrons’ in Molly Bloom’s reverie, where she decided ‘as well him [Bloom] as another’ and as she remembers their kiss we read the final ‘Yes’ of the novel.107 The fancy of both Molly and Leopold Bloom lightly turns to thoughts of love when they consider the Hill of Howth; Tennyson is saved from the inward-looking, bitter opinions of Stephen Dedalus by the more balanced, if perhaps unconscious, associations we find in the episodes involving Leopold Bloom. A less radical novelist of the 1920s, at least in terms of form, was Henry Williamson. His semi-autobiographical novel, The Dream of Fair Women, published in 1924, is one of the first novels to deal explicitly with the trauma suffered by soldiers after they experienced the trenches. The plot concerns a former soldier, William Maddison, who moves to a dilapidated cottage in the West of England on his return from the front. The war has not finished, but he has been discharged, and plans to write a book inspired by The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies. While staying in the run-down cottage he comes into contact with a woman, Evelyn Fairfax, with whom he has a short affair while her husband is away in the Army. Anne Williamson has claimed that Evelyn is based on a woman Henry Williamson called ‘Mabs B’, with whom he was infatuated in 1919, who had a reputation for ‘ “fast” behaviour’ and appeared to be a ‘devourer of men’.108 The moral character of the real woman is open to question, but there is no doubt that Williamson paints a fairly unsympathetic portrait of Evelyn Fairfax, who leads Maddison on before spurning him. He follows her to her home in ‘Findleston’ (a thinly disguised Folkestone), where he befriends her husband and looks after her daughter, all the while clinging to the hope of a romantic reunion with Evelyn. The novel does not end in a

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positive way, but rather with alcohol-soaked dances to celebrate Peace Day, Evelyn incapable of fidelity to any one man, and Maddison ultimately left alone. The title of the book is a clear reference to Tennyson (and Chaucer), but Maddison’s bookshelves conspicuously lack any copies of the Victorian poet’s work (he reads Blake, Shelley, Keats, Hardy, de la Mare and Sassoon). The title of the novel seems ironic, the ‘dream of fair women’ being a singular dream which is completely undone by the reality of the skittish and unfaithful Evelyn. If this is not a specific criticism of Tennyson, it is clear that the world, as perceived even in relatively traditional novels like that of Williamson, appears to have moved on from the more stable one in which Tennyson was writing. And Maddison is like other heroes of fiction dealing with the Great War in his literary tastes. Christopher Tietjens, in Ford Madox Ford’s series of novels Parade’s End, claims only ever to read Byron and is uninterested in Victorian poetry.109 Ford believed that despite the general abuse of Joyce’s Ulysses, British literature would soon ‘steal the Ulyssean complexion’ and claimed that though this might sound ludicrous, ‘there was once a time when the works of Alfred Tennyson were hailed as incomprehensible’.110 And though Ford claimed that his intention was ‘not to attack Tennyson’, he nonetheless welcomed the arrival of Joyce’s novel because ‘one more figure such as [Tennyson] must push English literature a thousand – or is it twenty thousand? – years back’.111But Joyce did write ‘Tuonisonian’ verse in youth, as he confesses (albeit in a garbled manner) in Finnegans Wake.112 The main ‘story’ of this novel – if it can be described as such – concerns a man named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, who owns a pub in the Dublin suburb of Chapelizod. The book dwells on his relationship with his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle, and the effect on their marriage of a shameful act committed by Earwicker in Phoenix Park, where it appears he watched two women urinate and possibly exposed himself to them; this is also linked to an incestuous desire for his daughter. Despite these apparent ‘themes’, the real ‘narrative’ of Finnegans Wake is elusive. Characters regularly change appearance and name, and appear and reappear in the flow of the novel’s language. For example, the character ‘Butt’, a comedian whom we see on television, claims that he was in the Reilly Oirish Krzerszonese Milesia asundurst Sirdarthar Woolwichleagues, good tomkeys years somewhile in Crimealian wall samewhere in Ayerland, during me weeping stillstumms over the freshprosts of Eastchept and the dangling garters of Marrowbone and daring my wapping stiltstunts on Bostion Moss, old stile and new style and heave a lep onwards.113 ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ recurs throughout this passage – in the references to ‘leagues’, ‘Crimealian Wall’ and the end of the sentence. It is worth dwelling on why, exactly, ‘Butt’ says that he has been ‘somewhile in Crimealian wall samewhere in Ayerland’. The passage is full of stereotypical literalisations

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of ‘Irish’ pronunciation, and yet it also draws together the Irish with soldiers ‘samewhere’ else – both the Crimea and London (‘Wapping’ appears, ‘Eastchept’ suggests City names like Whitechapel and East Cheap, and ‘Marrowbone’ suggests Marylebone). Military aggression – intrinsically linked to Tennyson – is seen as common to Irish, Russian and English. Maintaining the link between Tennyson and war in Finnegans Wake, the historical figure most closely associated with the poet in the book (and, thanks to Tennyson’s 1852 ode on his death, in English literature) is the Duke of Wellington. Late in the novel, four characters are lost in Phoenix Park in Dublin, where a signpost begins to talk: ‘To the dunleary obelisk via the rock vhat myles knox furlongs; to the general’s postoffice howsands of patience; to the Wellington memorial half a league wrongwards.’ 114 Wellington is a prominent figure in Finnegans Wake, and is frequently subjected to bawdy mockery – as Vincent J. Cheng has noted, despite his favourite horse, Copenhagen, being black, there are many references to ‘His same white harse’ near the beginning of the book.115 If we look at the later description of the Duke as a ‘bornstable ghentleman’, we come to understand this apparent hostility.116 Wellington was born in Ireland, but fought for the British at Waterloo, going on to become Prime Minister. Despite for many years being called a ‘sepoy general’ owing to his Irish parentage, he was far from complimentary about his fellow Irishmen, remarking of his roots, ‘because a man is born in a stable that does not make him a horse’.117 So far, we could conclude that the association drawn between Tennyson and Wellington is firmly anti-English (and anti-adopted English). However, to do this would be to ignore the other figures associated with Wellington in the book – not least Humphry Chimpden Earwicker himself. The passage which begins ‘To the dunleary obelisk’ makes clear reference to the Wellington Memorial in Phoenix Park – ‘the Wellington memorial half a league wrongwards.’ 118 The Memorial, which sits in Phoenix Park close to the Liffey, is a squat, phallic obelisk. Wellington is undoubtedly associated with a phallus in the book – phrases like ‘the Willingdone git the band up’, and ‘Sexcaliber hrosspower’ near the beginning of Finnegans Wake make this overt, and the echo of ‘Excalibur’ recalls, at least to some degree, Tennyson’s Arthurian poetry.119 And just as Wellington is a ‘bornstable ghentleman’, so Tennyson was Stephen’s ‘gentleman poet’ in Ulysses. The focus on the Memorial also recalls the central event in Finnegans Wake, which motivates all the various episodes therein – Earwicker’s shameful encounter in the Park. The many references to the phallic Memorial, so close to Earwicker’s pub in Chapelizod, refer not only to the physical obelisk but also serve as metaphors for Earwicker’s penis, and to reinforce this he is linked to Wellington the person as well as his memorial obelisk. Finnegans Wake contains many three-letter phrases which correspond to the initials ‘HCE’ (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker) or ‘ALP’ (Anna Livia Plurabelle) and one of these is ‘How Copenhagen ended’ – Earwicker is thus linked to Wellington, and both

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serve as symbols of the masculine.120 This can be extended to include Tennyson through the focus on the very masculine idea of war in most of the passages which engage with his work, as well as the association of Tennyson and Wellington. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce recognizes his ‘Tuonisonian’ roots, distancing himself from the hostility towards the poet expressed by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, and assimilates Tennyson into the narrative as an unquestionably masculine voice.

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Chapter 4

‘An infant crying in the night’:1 D. H. Lawrence and Tennyson

Soon after the publication of his first novel, The White Peacock, in 1910, D. H. Lawrence confessed to Frederick Atkinson that he was ‘no good’ at titles. He continued: That ‘White Peacock’ must be shot: it is a bird from the pen of Wilkie Collins or of Ibsen. Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost. Nay, I would not for worlds capture that poor creature and haul it round in a ‘one-object show’.2 The list of writers Lawrence did not want to emulate is wide-ranging; he set himself up as the inheritor of neither the mid-Victorian sensation novelist nor the more modern-seeming playwright, who in the early twentieth century still exerted a strong influence over young writers, not least Joyce, who reviewed ‘Ibsen’s New Drama’ When We Dead Awaken in 1900 and whose own 1915 play Exiles is strongly influenced by the Norwegian playwright.3 Lawrence’s turn away from both the high Victorian Collins and the less conventional and still very fashionable Ibsen shows just how keenly he felt the ‘burden of the past’. This antipathy to the Victorian past can be identified in a scene in Lawrence’s novel. Cyril, the narrator, visits a fairground where he ‘watched for Lord Tennyson’s bald head to come spinning round on the painted rim of the roundabouts, followed by a red-faced Lord Roberts, and a villainous looking Disraeli’.4 The great Victorian figures are rendered ludicrous, their legacies ultimately amounting to their portraits being rendered in varnished paint on the side of fairground roundabouts. This seems entirely in keeping with the 1900s approach to Tennyson, where statues were mocked as having the effect ‘of one consulting a watch’,5 and where G. K. Chesterton talked of the poet’s ‘pomposity’.6 The sardonic attitude to the poet seems to be maintained in Lawrence’s second novel, The Trespasser, published in 1912, where Siegmund, a musician, and his mistress Helena, who is one of his students, are taking an illicit holiday on the Isle

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of Wight and visit Tennyson Down, near Freshwater. The large stone cross erected in the poet’s memory had been standing since 1897 and the pair visit it: On the highest point of land stood a tall cross, railed in by a red iron fence. They read the inscription. ‘That’s all right – but a vilely ugly railing!’ exclaimed Siegmund. ‘Oh, they’d have to fence-in Lord Tennyson’s white marble,’ said Helena, rather indefinitely. He interpreted her according to his own idea. ‘Yes – he did belittle great things, didn’t he?’ said Siegmund. ‘Tennyson!’ she exclaimed. ‘Not peacocks and princesses – but the bigger things – ‘ ‘I shouldn’t say so,’ she declared. ‘Ha-a!’ He sounded indeterminate, but was not really so.7 Siegmund is a progressive thinker (his holiday reading is Nietzsche), and could be seen to represent the ‘modern’ frame of mind which can see only the negative in Tennyson, viewing him as a man who was able to deal with the ‘smaller things’ admirably – including peacocks, the mention of which leads one to assume that Lawrence had the title of his earlier novel in mind. It is interesting that Helena’s shock at hearing ‘Tennyson!’ described in these ways leads Siegmund to stereotype Tennyson’s art as other-worldly and ‘fairytale’ – ‘peacocks and princesses’ are the type of subject he did not belittle. The alliteration fosters the idea of a disdain even for the subjects which Siegmund feels Tennyson is equipped to address, and the apparent indeterminacy of his ‘Ha-a!’ does not in any way alter our idea of his low opinion of the poet. The identity of the ‘trespasser’ of the title is open to question – it could be Helena trespassing against Siegmund’s family, but it is more likely Siegmund himself, and one could conclude that the protagonist shares the distaste of the novelist who wanted his ‘White Peacock’ to be ‘shot’. Lawrence’s wartime experiences are likely to have prejudiced him further still against his Victorian forebears, as the 1914–18 period was one of immense upheaval in his life. The Rainbow was published in 1915, to far from universal acclaim – according to James Douglas, an often-outspoken reviewer for The Star, ‘there is no doubt that a book of this kind has no right to exist’ 8 – and it was prosecuted almost immediately in an obscenity trial thanks mainly to the explicit descriptions of sexual desire, and the lesbian relationship between Ursula Brangwen and her teacher Winifred Inger. Every copy of the book was destroyed, a traumatic experience which saw Lawrence move to the extremity of England, Zennor in Cornwall. The experience of witnessing this treatment of his work was compounded by news from Flanders of the Great War, and the immense casualties suffered by both sides. Lawrence had eloped to Germany with Frieda Weekley in 1912 – the pair would later marry – and she had family

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members in the German Army, as her father was an officer, and her cousin was the ‘Red Baron’, Captain Manfred Von Richthofen. Lawrence and Frieda suffered continual harassment in Cornwall, being accused, among other things, of sending signals to German submarines. Lawrence’s response to the war was vehement, if typically individual – thinking it ‘dreadful’ although believing that ‘the will to war’ could be found in the heart of every Englishman and every German.9 But his attitude towards Tennyson remained consistent – and in no senses uniquely negative – throughout the 1910s and beyond. Frieda’s explanation for agreeing to marry her first husband, Ernest Weekley, was that ‘I had been reading Tennyson, and I thought Ernest was Lancelot!’ 10 This misplaced, if affectionate, inspiration by Tennyson’s Arthurian poetry is replicated in the young Ursula Brangwen in Lawrence’s 1915 novel The Rainbow. The first four lines of ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ are quoted in an interior monologue and then we read: How she loved it! How she leaned in her bedroom window with her black, rough hair on her shoulders, and her warm face all rapt, and gazed across at the churchyard and the little church, which was a turretted castell, whence Launcelot would ride just now, would wave to her as he rode by, his scarlet cloak passing behind the dark yew-trees and between the open space: whilst she, Ah she, would remain the lonely maid high up and isolated in the tower, polishing the terrible shield, weaving it a covering with a true device, and waiting, waiting, always remote and high.11 The yearning which, as we are told at the beginning of the novel, characterizes the Brangwen women, is evident here, not least through the copious use of commas at the end of the passage. The repetition of ‘waiting, waiting’ also brings to mind Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’ alone and remote, repeating the word ‘aweary’, looking out of her window for the lover who is yet to return. Lawrence’s short novel The Virgin and the Gipsy, written in 1926, was published posthumously in 1930, and the same ‘Tennysonian’ yearning voiced in The Rainbow recurs in the later work. The story concerns the rites of passage of a young upper-middle class woman, Yvette Saywell, who, following her mother’s elopement, lives with her father and his imposing mother and sister. Life in the house is stifling, dominated by what Yvette sees as ‘the stony, implacable willto-power in the old and motherly-seeming Granny’.12 Yvette becomes aware of the possibilities in the world for passion and desire through a chance encounter with the gipsy of the title, who tells her fortune and then reappears at the house selling brooms and candlestick holders, and gives her ‘that naked suggestion of desire which acted on her like a spell, and robbed her of her will.’ 13 The gipsy allows her to envisage a world away from the stifling atmosphere at home with her grandmother, whose insidious insults and demanding nature reach a crescendo one night as Yvette and her sister Lucille are making a dress for the former out of blue silk velour:

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Then she went between the mirrors, to look at herself once more. As she did so, she sent the second mirror, that she had perched carelessly on the piano, sliding with a rattle to the floor. Luckily it did not break. But everybody started badly. ‘She’s smashed the mirror!’ cried Aunt Cissie.14 The mirror remains unbroken, but as it had belonged to the girls’ absent mother there ensues a major argument during which the elderly grandmother accuses Yvette and Lucille of coming from ‘half-depraved stock’.15 As Yvette heads upstairs, having lost the argument: At the first landing, she stood as she nearly always did, to gaze through the window that looked to the road and the bridge. Like the Lady of Shalott, she seemed always to imagine that someone would come along singing Tirra-lirra! – or something equally intelligent, by the river.16 The reference to ‘The Lady of Shalott’, as hinted at by the non-breaking of the mirror, is made explicit and continues in the following chapter, where we find her in the garden of the house: She always expected something to come down the slant of the road from Papplewick, and she always lingered at the landing window. Often a cart came, or a motor-car, or a lorry with stone, or a laborer, or one of the servants. But never anybody who sang Tirra-lirra! by the river. The tirra-lirraing days seem to have gone by.17 Yvette recognizes the inherent absurdity in thinking of herself as a modern Lady of Shalott, and the use of the word ‘tirra-lirraing’ is designed to mock the seriousness of Tennyson’s verse in the same way that his statue was mocked some twenty years earlier. The situations of the two female protagonists differ significantly; in Tennyson’s poem, ‘The mirror cracked from side to side’,18 but in the modern version of the story the mirror stays intact, and Yvette does not die. The novel ends differently from the poem, as the gipsy sends her a note in which he tells her his name, Joe Boswell; the people of Camelot only learn the Lady of Shalott’s name after her death, whereas Boswell and Yvette go on living after the flood, although it is almost certain that they are destined not to be united in love. However, the desire for contact with the outside world, initiated by a chance encounter with a stranger, is maintained in Yvette’s modern encounter with the gipsy, and it leads not to her death, but the death of the Granny (the book ends with the gipsy rescuing Yvette from a flood which claims the elderly woman’s life) - if anything a more optimistic ending than that of the poem.19 However qualified the yearning of the characters in Lawrence’s novels may be, it is still frequently expressed in Tennyson’s words.

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This Tennysonian yearning is not limited to female characters in Lawrence’s novels. Tom Brangwen, Ursula’s step-grandfather, the subject of the early chapters of The Rainbow, at school ‘sat betrayed with emotion when the teacher of literature read, in a moving fashion, Tennyson’s “Ulysses” or Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”. His lips parted, his eyes filled with a strained, almost suffering light’.20 As the teacher read on, he ‘was moved by this experience beyond all calculation, he almost dreaded it, it was so deep’.21 Tennyson is consistently associated with visionary power in the novel. In one of the most striking passages, Will Brangwen, part of the next generation, visits Lincoln Cathedral: Here the satisfaction he had yearned after came near, towards this, the porch of the great Unknown, all reality gathered, and there, the altar was the mystic door, through which all and everything must move on to eternity.22 Evelyn J. Hinz and John J. Teunissen have argued that this passage combines phrases from two of Tennyson’s poems, in what amounts to a rethinking of progress and faith.23 The very end of In Memoriam runs ‘And one far-off divine event, / To which the whole creation moves’.24 The revelation which Will is experiencing at Lincoln Cathedral – situated, of course, in Tennyson’s own Lincolnshire and outside which stands G. F. Watts’s statue of the poet – is voiced in a half-echo of the epilogue from In Memoriam, an expression of renewed faith as a result of the honest doubt described in the main body of the poem. This is linked to another of Tennyson’s poetical responses to the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, ‘Ulysses’, where we read: Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move.25 The idea of there being a higher world, a higher plane of existence, which is unreachable in the small English towns and villages in which the majority of Lawrence’s novels are set, recurs throughout his oeuvre, and it is in the midst of such crises of faith that Tennyson appears elsewhere in Lawrence’s novels. Barbara Hardy has noted that in a scene in The Trespasser, ‘Lawrence momentarily makes Siegmund contradict his own judgment that Tennyson belittled the big things’,26 during a crisis of faith. While on his holiday, embracing Helena, he feels ‘quite alone’ while looking at the night sky: But this night he did not want comfort. If he were ‘an infant crying in the night’, it was crying that a woman could not still. He was abroad seeking courage and faith for his own soul. He, in loneliness, must search the night for faith.27 Siegmund has looked for a higher love with Helena and this crisis is leading to the ultimate conclusion, where he finds the union deficient, their holiday affair

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almost too passionate, and beset with stilted conversations like the one about the Tennyson memorial. His crisis of selfhood and purpose is articulated in the language of In Memoriam, and Siegfried’s dilemma closely mirrors the emphasis on the unconscious and, indeed, un-knowing parts of the brain in Tennyson’s poem. The entire section runs: Oh yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt, and taints of blood; That nothing walks with aimless feet; That not one life shall be destroyed, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete; That not a worm is cloven in vain; That not a moth with vain desire Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire, Or but subserves another’s gain. Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last – far off – at last, to all, And every winter change to spring. So runs my dream: but what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.28 The same phrase from the last stanza recurs to Ursula Brangwen in The Rainbow. She desires a higher plane of feeling from her relationships, and has embarked on a doomed love affair with her friend Winifred Inger. Her desire for something higher in life is clear from her response to a proposal from Anthony, the brother of her friend Maggie: Her heart flamed with sensation of him, of the fascinating thing he offered her, and with sorrow, and with an inconsolable sense of loneliness. Her soul was an infant crying in the night. He had no soul. Oh, and why had she? He was the cleaner.29 The repeated citation of Tennyson’s phrase at moments of spiritual crisis cannot be a coincidence. At each of these points in the narrative the characters,

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who can all be said to be seeking a higher plane of understanding and feeling, are ultimately rendered bereft of any such enlightenment, stuck in the paradox of Tennyson’s verse, where the poet voices his lack of ability to manifest his feelings in some of the most moving lines in the language. The association of Tennyson with ‘childishness’ was not always so sensitive in the early twentieth century. Although T. S. Eliot published a series of children’s poems, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, in 1939, in his early years as a poet he was more disparaging of the potential quality of children’s verse. In a 1917 essay in The Egoist, Eliot says that the Idylls of the King sound to him ‘like Tennyson talking to Queen Victoria in Heaven’, and elsewhere wrote that they are ‘hardly more important than a parody, or a “Chaucer retold for Children” ’.30 At this point Tennyson’s poetry was a staple of children’s poetry anthologies, and at least one book of prose retellings of his poems for children had been published. The young Modernist Eliot evidently associated Tennyson’s work with poetry for children, as opposed to the ‘adult’ poetry which he and Ezra Pound, among others, were writing. Although the verse of Wilfred Owen, who was writing poetry in the trenches in 1917, is rather more traditional in form than that of Eliot, nonetheless on the basis of a letter he wrote to his mother one could conclude that he too viewed Tennyson’s work as ‘childish’ in a similarly derogatory manner. In his early life Owen’s admiration for the Victorian poet ran deep. In 1911, he bought some volumes of the Quarterly Review, which included the infamous review of Tennyson’s 1832 Poems, which Owen viewed as ‘the best pennyworth of humour I ever bought, albeit I would not let everybody enjoy it, lest Tennyson should come to shame’. He claimed to have spent a morning reading the volume ‘in naughty levity’, ‘with all the guilty consciousness of infidelity to a professed hero’.31 In April 1912 he wrote of the garden at Dunsden Vicarage, ‘O magnificent environment wherein to read Tennyson!’ and later in the same year he quoted the first verse of Tennyson’s lyric ‘Tears, idle tears’ from The Princess in a letter because ‘these lines might have been written for me so true to my state are they – tho’ I did not think of them at the time’.32 However, once Owen had arrived in Flanders and experienced the true horrors of war, his opinion changed. In a letter of 1917 he wrote: The other day I read a Biography of Tennyson, which says he was unhappy, even in the midst of his fame, wealth, and domestic serenity. Divine discontent! I can quite believe he never knew happiness for one moment such as I have – for one or two moments. But as for misery, was he ever frozen alive, with dead men for comforters. Did he hear the moaning at the bar, not at twilight and the evening bell only, but at dawn, noon, and night, eating and sleeping, walking and working, always the close moaning of the Bar; the thunder, the hissing and the whining of the Bar? – Tennyson, it seems, was always a great child. So should I have been, but for Beaumont Hamel.33

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Owen’s phrase ‘great child’, read in conjunction with Eliot’s disparaging remarks, could be read as a criticism. But it actually betrays the difference between the pre-and post-war worlds, as Owen sees a version of his adult self, unimpeded by the horrors of war, in the figure of the Victorian Laureate. And the absolute difference made by the war has led Owen to knowingly misquote the Victorian. The allusion to ‘Crossing the Bar’ is not simply an appreciative citation of a memorable phrase, but a fundamental misreading of the poem, where the speaker asks that there be ‘no moaning of the bar [. . .] But such a tide as moving seems asleep’.34 It was not the ‘moaning of the bar’ the speaker of ‘Crossing the Bar’ heard at ‘twilight and evening bell only’, but rather the ‘clear call’ of his mortality. Owen clearly knew this poem well enough to quote extensively from it, and the poem was still included at the end of most editions of Tennyson in 1917; for Owen the war veteran, there is only the moaning of the bar, and no hope of the tranquillity Tennyson desires for his death. Although Clifford Chatterley in D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not killed in the trenches like Owen, he returns in a wheelchair, impotent. His wife, Connie, leaves him for his groundskeeper, who reveals to her ultimately ‘what liars poets and everybody were! They made one think one wanted sentiment. When what one supremely wanted was this piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality’.35 When she leaves her husband, and he discovers who her lover is, he becomes nearly hysterical and is comforted by his housekeeper, Mrs Bolton, who sees hysteria as ‘insanity’: [H]ysteria is dangerous: and she was a nurse, it was her duty to pull him out. Any attempt to rouse his manhood and his pride would only make him worse: for his manhood was dead, temporarily if not finally. He would only squirm softer and softer, like a worm, and become more dislocated. The only thing was to release his self-pity. Like the lady in Tennyson, he must weep or he must die.36 This is a reference to Tennyson’s lyric ‘Home they brought her warrior dead’ from The Princess. It runs: Home they brought her warrior dead: She nor swooned, nor uttered cry: All her maidens, watching, said, ‘She must weep or she will die.’ Then they praised him, soft and low, Called him worthy to be loved, Truest friend and noblest foe; Yet she neither spoke nor moved. Stole a maiden from her place, Lightly to the warrior stept,

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Took the face-cloth from the face; Yet she neither moved nor wept. Rose a nurse of ninety years, Set his child upon her knee – Like summer tempest came her tears – ‘Sweet my child, I live for thee.’ 37 It could be the case that Mrs. Bolton does not know the context of the lines she is quoting, but nonetheless this is a painful poem to cite at this point; Connie is pregnant by Mellors the groundskeeper, and Clifford is impotent. Ultimately this is a reversal of gender – Clifford should be the warrior, and indeed went to war, but he has returned maimed rather than dead (in any case, according to Mrs. Bolton, he is the lady of the poem); he has no child to live for, and has gone so far as to suggest that any affair is acceptable if he can keep the offspring as his heir. The passage continues with Clifford likened to the ‘infant crying in the night’: The curious thing was that when this child-man which Clifford now was – and which he had been becoming for years – emerged into the world, it was much sharper and keener than the real man he used to be.38 We can understand the importance of the concept of the ‘infant crying in the night’ in Lawrence’s work more fully if we turn to Women in Love, which was published in 1920. By this point, Lawrence was well acquainted with the work of the emerging avant-garde novelists, such as Joyce, Proust and Dorothy Richardson, and described their work in contemptuous tones, writing that the art of fiction as they practised it was ‘dying in a very long-drawn-out fourteen-volume deathagony, and absorbedly, childishly interested in the phenomenon’.39 He was always at odds with these ‘Modernists’, despite the modernity of his prose; as Hugh Stevens has recently noted, ‘before one attempts to locate Lawrence’s modernism, one needs to acknowledge how Victorian he is.’ 40 According to Stevens, his fiction continues a project begun by George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, and continued by Thomas Hardy: an analysis of the impact of modern technologies on provincial communities, in which the ‘shock of the new’ was caused by the industrial revolution rather than by aesthetic revolutions.41 This is manifested in ‘The Lemon Gardens’, part of Twilight in Italy (1916), in which we read that ‘this great mechanised society, being selfless, is pitiless. It works on mechanically and destroys us, it is our master and our God.’ 42 The division between rural and mechanised is made explicit in Women in Love. The novel concerns Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen and their affairs with, respectively, Rupert Birkin (a school inspector) and Gerald Crich (who owns a mining firm). At the end of the novel, Gerald and Gudrun ultimately part, she

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for the arms of Loerke, an artist, and Gerald kills himself. The scene of their parting is as intense as the relationship that has preceded it: What then! Was she his mother? Had she asked for a child, whom she must nurse through the nights, for her lover. She despised him, she despised him, she hardened her heart. An infant crying in the night, this Don Juan. Yes, but how she hated the infant crying in the night. She would murder it gladly. She would stifle it and bury it, like Hetty Sorrell did. No doubt Hetty Sorrell’s infant cried in the night – no doubt Arthur Donnithorne’s infant would. Ha – the Arthur Donnithornes, the Geralds of this world. So manly by day, yet all the while, such a crying of infants in the night. Let them turn into mechanisms, let them. Let them become instruments, pure machines, pure wills that work like clock-work, in perpetual repetition. Let them be this, let them be taken up entirely in their work, let them be perfect parts of a great machine, having a slumber of constant repetition. Let Gerald manage his firm. There he would be satisfied, as satisfied as a wheel-barrow that goes backwards and forwards along a plank all day – she had seen it.43 Gerald’s mining firm stands for an industrial apparatus at odds with the natural landscape and which Lawrence believed would reduce people to the mechanical, making them essentially ‘wheel-barrows’ as Gudrun puts it. Lawrence’s work has often been labelled misogynist, and it is true that he was clearly more interested in his male characters, especially in his later work, and with establishing a new conception of sexuality (which he managed most completely in Lady Chatterley’s Lover). But it is worth noting that early reviewers of The Trespasser were unsure whether its author was a man or a woman, and it is also dangerous to say that he fully identifies with characters like Crich, Birkin or Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers: for all the passion and persuasiveness of their arguments they are always slightly ironized and the narrative remains detached from them. Looking at Lawrence’s letters from the period in which he was writing Women in Love, we find him echoing Ursula’s complaint. In a letter to E. M. Forster from 1915, Lawrence writes: We are tired of contemplating this one phase of the history of creation, which we call humanity. We are tired of measuring everything by the human standard: whether man is the standard or criterion, or whether he is but a factor in the Whole whose issue and whose return we have called God. I am tired of class, and humanity, and personal salvation. What care I whether my neighbour feels he is saved or not – saved, competed, fulfilled, consummated? I am tired to death of the infant crying in the night. I am sick of protesting Job, cursing his birth and his begetting. Is he so important, or his sufferings of such moment? Let him have done.44 In this, Lawrence is distanced from Gerald Crich and moves closer to Rupert Birkin, who ‘wanted sex to revert to the level of the other appetites, to be

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regarded as a functional process, not as a fulfilment. He believed in sex marriage. But beyond this, he wanted a further conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like two poles of one force, like two angels, or two demons.’ 45 This mirrors the lack of satisfaction Ursula and Siegmund find in most of their relationships in The Rainbow and The Trespasser, respectively. Lawrence was in agreement with the notion of a ‘primitive’ relationship with the body, and in particular with sexual desire. When it seems as if Birkin has finally achieved this, there is a slight qualification: ‘Not this, not this,’ he whimpered to himself, as the first perfect mood of softness and sleep-loveliness ebbed back away from the rushing of passion that came up his limbs and over his face as she drew him. And soon he was a perfect hard flame of passionate desire for her. Yet in the small core of the flame was an unyielding anguish of another thing. But this also was lost; he only wanted her, with an extreme desire that seemed inevitable as death, beyond question. Then, satisfied and shattered, fulfilled and destroyed, he went home away from her, drifting vaguely through the darkness, lapsed into the old fire of burning passion. Far away, far away, there seemed to be a small lament in the darkness. But what did it matter? What did it matter, what did anything matter save this ultimate and triumphant experience of physical passion, that had blazed up anew like a new spell of life. ‘I was becoming quite dead-alive, nothing but a word-bag,’ he said in triumph, scorning his other self. Yet somewhere far off and small, the other hovered.46 The ‘small lament in the darkness’ is close to the ‘infant crying in the night’, and this seems at first simply to be another manifestation of the crisis of the ‘higher love’ as expressed earlier. And yet the ending of the novel – which lingers on Birkin’s reaction to the death of his close friend Gerald – offers an insight into what this ‘unyielding anguish of another thing’ may be. As Birkin stands by his friend’s corpse, he says ‘He should have loved me’.47 The ‘infant crying in the night’ may well be, in Lawrence’s opinion, crying for a different kind of desire. The novel ends with Ursula telling Birkin ‘I don’t want anybody else but you. Why isn’t it the same with you?’ 48 Birkin replies, ‘Having you, I can live all my life without anybody else, any other sheer intimacy. But to make it complete, really happy, I wanted eternal union with a man too: another kind of love.’ 49 And the ultimate yearning endures, as the novel ends: ‘You can’t have two kinds of love. Why should you!’ ‘It seems as if I can’t,’ he said. ‘Yet I wanted it.’ ‘You can’t have it, because it’s false, impossible,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe that,’ he answered.50

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This is put into context by a passage from his 1916 book of travel writing (cited earlier), Twilight in Italy. Lawrence believes that ‘the secret for Italy’s attraction for us’ is ‘phallic worship. To the Italian the phallus is the symbol of individual creative immortality, to each man his own Godhead. The child is but the evidence of the Godhead.’ 51 And yet this worship ultimately leaves the Italian male alone. As Lawrence watches a performance of Ghosts by Ibsen, one of the writers he claimed to oppose, he sees a 38-year-old Italian who ‘could not be the blighted son’ 52 of the play. Instead this ‘robust, vigorous man’ had ‘a secret sickness which oppressed him. [. . .] [I]t was [. . .] a kind of debility in the soul. That which he wanted and would have, the sensual excitement, in his soul he did not want it, no, not at all. And yet he must act from his physical desires, his physical will.’ 53 Despite this, His true being, his real self, was impotent. In his soul, he was dependent, forlorn. He was childish and dependent on the mother. To hear him say, ‘Grazia, mamma!’ would have tormented the mother-soul in any woman living. Such a child crying in the night! And for what?54 A direct answer never comes, and yet soon after this we read that ‘His divinity was the phallic divinity. The other male divinity, which is the spirit that fulfils in the world the new germ of an idea, this was denied and obscured in him, unused.’ 55 This is a reference to Plato’s Symposium, in which Diotima says that ‘All human beings are pregnant in body and in mind, and when we read a degree of adulthood we naturally desire to give birth. We cannot give birth in what is ugly, only in what it beautiful. Yes, sexual intercourse between men and women is a kind of a birth.’ 56 This is the equivalent of the ‘phallic divinity’ which Lawrence describes. But for Diotima there is another kind of reproduction – the idea of artistic creation. She claims that ‘Wisdom and other kinds of virtue’ are ‘brought to birth by all the poets and by those craftsmen who are said to be innovative’. And the process is described thus: Take [. . .] the case of someone who’s been pregnant in mind with these virtues [of moderation and justice] from a young age. When he’s still without a partner and reaches adulthood, he feels the desire to give birth and reproduce [. . .] he will never do so in ugliness. Because he’s pregnant, he’s attracted to beautiful bodies rather than ugly ones; and if he’s also lucky enough to find a mind that is beautiful, noble and naturally gifted, he is strongly drawn to this combination. With someone like this, he immediately finds he has the resources to talk about virtue and about what a good man should be like and should do, and tries to educate him. It is, I think, when someone has made contact and formed a relationship with beauty of this sort that he gives birth to, and reproduces, the child with which he has long been pregnant. He thinks about the other’s beauty, whether

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they are in each other’s company or not, and together with him he shares in bringing up the child reproduced in this way.57 This is what the infant crying in the night is actually desirous of, at least according to Lawrence – the ‘other kind of love’ alluded to in Women in Love. And for most of the men in Lawrence’s novels, the infant remains crying in the night – this urge, even if acknowledged, is not acted on. At this point one should remember the source of the quotation, In Memoriam, an elegy to a dead male friend and the fullest expression of close male companionship in the English canon. Lawrence here expands on the Victorian, Tennysonian original, emphasizing the physical and (homo)sexual. That he feels able to address, albeit tentatively, what critics of Tennyson took almost sixty years more to fully acknowledge, is evidence both of Lawrence’s often underestimated kinship with the Victorian poet as well as the very different world in which his novels are set, and in which they were published.

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Chapter 5

‘Here at the quiet limit of the world’:1 The 1930s and 1940s

In the early 1930s, one could be forgiven for thinking that the dominant importance of Tennyson to contemporary literature was the potential for parody provided by his poetry and character. In 1930, Tennyson’s work featured prominently in The Stuffed Owl, Charles Lee and D. B. Wyndham Lewis’s ‘Anthology of Bad Verse’, and John Collier wrote in 1932 that Tennyson reflected the ‘fancies and sentiments’ of his age, deliberately using lightweight terms to distance the poet from the age of the Great Depression in the United States and 2.5 million unemployed in the United Kingdom.2 In 1930, W. H. Auden, however, drew the poet and contemporary world together, albeit in an act of parody. Auden referred to his ‘Get there if you can’ as ‘the Locksley Hall poem’ in a letter to Christopher Isherwood.3 It begins: Get there if you can and see the land you once were proud to own Though the roads have almost vanished and the expresses never run: Smokeless chimneys, damaged bridges, rotting wharves and choked canals, Tramlines buckled, smashed trucks lying on their side across the rails [. . .].4 This follows exactly the same metre and two-line stanza form as Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’, which was first published in the 1842 Poems. While this appears at first an intensely personal poem – it has long been claimed that it was inspired by Tennyson’s ultimate rejection by Rosa Baring, coupled with his grandfather’s decision to disinherit Tennyson’s father – it is also a state of the nation poem.5 In 1855 George Eliot thought the poem ‘so familiar that we dare not quote it’; in 1896 George W. Alger cited it as evidence of Tennyson’s status as ‘poet of the English people’, and J. W. Mackail in 1926 recalled that the poem was ‘for a time to many ardent souls something like a new gospel’.6 Auden’s poem is also a state-of-the-nation address in which things are ‘out of joint’. The danger for the narrator is if things carry on in the way they have been, ‘the mob’ will realize ‘something’s up, and start to smash’ – which leads him to conclude:7

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Drop those priggish ways for ever, stop behaving like a stone: Throw the bath-chairs right away, and learn to leave ourselves alone. If we really want to live, we’d better start at once to try; If we don’t it doesn’t matter, but we’d better start to die.8 Edward Mendelson claims that this ‘breathtakingly implausible’ conclusion implies that readers must ‘cure ourselves’ in order for ‘something outside politics [. . .] to cure the world’s disorder’.9 But he believes that such a resolution is near impossible, as if Auden ‘had no cure for himself, what could he offer others?’ 10 And yet as Mendelson notes elsewhere, in ‘Get there if you can’, ‘the audience is not really being addressed at all’.11 What Auden is actually addressing is the English poetic tradition, in which his poem – like The Waste Land – is an important intervention.12 ‘Locksley Hall’ was, by 1930, clearly outdated both in terms of its form and the ideas expressed in the poem. Tennyson had written a ‘sequel’ to his poem, ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’, in 1886, in which the narrator, now eighty, reiterates his belief in progress even though ‘the course of Time will swerve, / Crook and turn upon itself in many a backward streaming curve’.13 Auden’s poem can easily be seen as a ‘Locksley Hall Eighty-Eight Years After’, voiced by the grandson of Tennyson’s narrator, and yet is far from a respectful continuation of Tennyson’s work: his adoption of Tennyson’s metre and stanzaic form, in a poem of frenzy and hyperbole is gleefully disrespectful. While many of the 1930 Poems have a clear rhyme scheme and metre, ‘Get there if you can’ is far and away the least subtle, its closed two-line couplets affording the verse momentum at the expense of sense. The vision of the future is as unlikely as the ‘Federation of the World’ Tennyson envisaged: Engine-drivers with their oil-cans, factory girls in overalls Blowing sky-high monster stores, destroying intellectuals?14 The rhyme here is deliberately provocative, the ‘overalls’ and ‘intellectuals’ drawn together in a vision that cannot be taken entirely seriously. Indeed, the young Gavin Ewart adopted the same rhyme scheme three years later in his poem ‘Audenesque for an Initiation’, which claims that the younger poetic generation has ‘given up the Georgian poets, teaching dance bands how to croon, / Bicycling in coloured goggles underneath a pallid moon’.15 Despite this fairly jocular act of parody, other poets and critics writing in the 1930s were deadly serious in their opposition to Tennyson. F. R. Leavis, an emerging critic who taught at Downing College, Cambridge, championed T. S. Eliot as the most important of the new generation of poets. In Leavis’s eyes, Tennyson was near-irrelevant; in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) he remarked that the poet’s ‘intellectual interests [. . .] have little to do with his successful poetry’, and went on to claim that Gerard Manley Hopkins ‘is likely to prove, for

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our time and the future, the only influential poet of the Victorian age, and he seems to me the greatest’.16 Leavis’s agenda in writing his book was to establish a new tradition, at odds with the ‘dead’ work of Robert Bridges and the later Victorians, with Eliot and Hopkins at its centre.17 In this Leavis was united with another poet he had championed in New Bearings, W. B. Yeats, in the opinion that whatever new poetry should be like, it should be unlike Tennyson. In the introduction to his 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Yeats noted the general trend towards anti-Victorianism in verse written between 1892 and 1935: The revolt against Victorianism meant to the young poet a revolt against irrelevant descriptions of nature, the scientific and moral discursiveness of In Memoriam – ‘When he should have been broken-hearted,’ said Verlaine, ‘he had many reminiscences’ – the political eloquence of Swinburne, the psychological curiosity of Browning, and the poetical diction of everybody.18 Yeats’s book is deeply unconventional from the beginning – the first poem is a verse rendition of a sentence from an essay by Walter Pater – and claims to include ‘all good poets who have lived or died from three years before the death of Tennyson to the present moment, except some two or three who belong through the character of their work to an earlier period’.19 This did not stop Yeats from including Gerard Manley Hopkins in the collection, but it does mean that in his introduction he dwelt on the negative aspects of Victorian poetry – not least Idylls of the King. There are only two long poems in Victorian literature that caught public attention; The Ring and The Book where great intellect analyses the suffering of one passive soul, weighs the persecutor’s guilt, and The Idylls of the King where a poetry in itself an exquisite passivity is built about an allegory where a characterless king represents the soul.20 Yeats is being deliberately forgetful here – ‘Enoch Arden’ and In Memoriam also ‘caught public attention’, among others, and the latter is significant in terms of this passage and Yeats’s repetition of the word ‘soul’. In both poems Yeats identifies, the Victorian ‘soul’ is seen as inadequate – either ‘passive’ or represented by a ‘characterless king’. According to Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson sometimes called In Memoriam ‘The Way of the Soul’, and Yeats could have had this in mind when discussing The Ring and the Book and the Idylls.21 By implication, he is arguing that the Victorian soul, as manifested in the poetry of the period, is not presented in a satisfactory, or true, way. This is a fundamental difference between ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modern’ for Yeats and he implies that the work of Tennyson is irrelevant to the ‘soul’ of the 1930s, not least by comparison with the poetry of Hopkins, who died in 1889, three years before Tennyson, but who is included in Yeats’s anthology.

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One of the new 1930s poets, not dwelt on by Yeats or Leavis, had a rather different approach to Tennyson, as manifested in her fiction. Stevie Smith’s fictionalized autobiography, Novel on Yellow Paper, was published in 1936, and takes the form of a skittish, whimsical monologue by a secretary called Pompey Casmilus. Early in the novel, Pompey thinks back to the Victorian period: How richly compostly loamishly sad were those Victorian days, with a sadness not nerve-irritating like we have to-day. How I love those damp Victorian troubles. The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan. Yes, always someone dies, someone weeps, in tune with the laurels dripping, and the tap dripping, and the spout dripping into the water-butt, and the dim gas flickering greenly in the damp conservatory. [. . .] Then I think of the wild wet days of the wild wet Lincolnshire of the younger Tennyson. How, were there two? Yes, but I mean younger than the pet of the Old Queen. Younger and sadder. Oh the sad sweet over-sweet Alfred, so haughty, so proud and so disagreeable. And thinking of all this I have a great nostalgie for an open drain, like the flooded dykes they have there between the sodden fields.22 Here we can see a rephrasing of Nicolson’s idea of there being ‘two Tennysons’ – in this case, Nicolson’s ‘Bard’ is described as ‘the pet of the Old Queen’, which links Pompey to Stephen Dedalus, as well. Smith also seems here to be allied to another Modernist, Virginia Woolf, who claimed to read Tennyson precisely because the contemporary poets ‘express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment’, where Smith says that Tennyson provides ‘a sadness not nerve-irritating like we have to-day.23 Typically for this novel, however, the opinion does not linger, and soon after Pompey writes: Reader, do you ever feel sea-sad, loamishly-sad, like Tennyson, with that sadness too deep for words? Though of course nothing is too deep for words for a poet like him and me. I mean the deeper the better as they say je grösser der Schmerz desto besser das Kind. I think of my poems as my kiddo, and no doubt but Tennyson felt that way too, ‘Deep as first love and wild with all regret, Oh death in Life the days that are no more.’ And another one I’m set on is that one about that sick lady: ‘And like a dying lady lean and pale.’ 24 Soon after this passage, Pompey realizes that the ‘dying lady’ lines are in fact Shelley. The poetical sadness here is separated from the image of the poet, and elsewhere ‘loamishly’ functions as a term of approval: ‘[O]h how beautifully and loamishly sad are [Shakespeare’s] sad and tearing sonnets, where everything is so unsuitable, and not on the ground at all.’ 25

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The idea of reading Tennyson for escapism was widespread in fiction of the period. In William Faulkner’s 1932 novel Light in August, the failed preacher Gail Hightower reminisces about his training as a priest where he was initially afraid of the dark but grew simply to hate it. This leads him to conclude that ‘I should never have let myself get out of the habit of prayer’.26 At this he turns to the wall of his study, seeking a particular volume: It is Tennyson. It is dogeared. He has had it ever since the seminary. He sits beneath the lamp and opens it. It does not take long. Soon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand.27 On 27 April 1957, Faulkner was asked at the University of Virginia whether he agreed that reading Tennyson was ‘like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch’; he replied ‘No sir, that was Hightower’s opinion, and I’m not responsible for his opinion. I have a different opinion of Tennyson myself, that when I was younger, I read Tennyson with a great deal of pleasure. I can’t read him at all now.’ 28 Faulkner does not specify how much ‘younger’ he was when he enjoyed Tennyson, but the poet has enough of a presence in the novel to suggest that Faulkner was still able to read him in 1933, and the passages involving Tennyson are highly elucidatory. As Hugh M. Ruppersburg has noted, the image of the eunuch in the above quotation is a good ‘analogue’ for Hightower,29 who is similarly sterile and ultimately meaningless – and the calm tone in which Hightower thinks about the eunuch, with its soft alliteration of ch sounds, is in direct contrast to the brutal racist castration which takes place in his house later in the novel. What Hightower takes from the verse is, in fact, removal from life itself – Tennyson’s lust is ‘dehydrated’, the swooning ‘gutless’ and the trees ‘sapless’, bereft of life – one is reminded, in fact, of In Memoriam V, where lines of verse are described ‘like dull narcotics, numbing pain’.30 Hightower is ultimately lazy – he is happy with the effect of the eunuch’s song as he does not have to ‘bother to think aloud’; it provides an easier comfort than prayer. This is in keeping with his earlier preaching – Byron Bunch is told that the preacher was famous for ‘using religion as though it were a dream [. . .] a sort of cyclone that did not even need to touch the actual earth.’ 31 Hightower’s inertia ultimately results in the death of the central character of the novel, the mixed race outcast Joe Christmas, who kills his white lover Joanna Burden after she repeatedly urges him to get an education at the onset of her menopause. Hightower’s confidant Byron Bunch asks the preacher to give Christmas an alibi, but he will not make a commitment and, once Christmas has escaped from custody and fled to Hightower’s house, it is too late and the racist policeman Percy Grimm shoots and castrates Christmas. The earlier

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unthinking turn to Tennyson can be said to represent Hightower’s turn away from the world and his responsibilities as a Christian; and yet Tennyson has made an impression on him. Just after the murder, Hightower looks out of his window: Now the final copper light of afternoon fades; now the street beyond the low maples and the low signboard is prepared and empty, framed by the study window like a stage.32 The first part of this sentence is reminiscent of Section CXV of In Memoriam: Now fades the last long streak of snow, Now burgeons every maze of quick About the flowering squares, and thick By ashen roots the violets blow.33 The passage from Faulkner quoted above is similarly melancholic, and even contains a half-rhyme, of ‘fades’ and ‘stage’, enough to suggest that Hightower’s own ‘regret’ at the death of Joe Christmas is budding and blossoming like the ‘April violet’ of Tennyson’s poem.34 However, while the passage from In Memoriam appears near the end of the poem and is a melancholic counterpoint to a dominant tone of increasing optimism, there is a lot less hope in Hightower’s vision, which comes at evening, in August, at the end of summer. Even at the very end of the novel, where Hightower feels as though he is dying, his reveries are still marked by Tennyson. One of the complaints against his preaching was that he frequently mixed up religion with his grandfather’s Civil War past. His final vision in the novel is of another charge, which travels past him: Yet, leaning forward in the window, his bandaged head huge and without depth upon the twin blobs of his hands upon the ledge, it seems to him that he still hears them: the wild bugles and the clashing sabres and the dying thunder of hooves.35 Even if this vision of speed and clamour is remote in tone from Tennyson’s ‘The splendour falls on castle walls’, the way in which Hightower’s vision is phrased suggests that the Tennyson he reads for unthinking comfort has remained with him. The first verse of Tennyson’s song ends: Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.36 Faulkner’s ‘wild bugles’ and ‘dying thunder’ may be at odds with Tennyson’s words in terms of what they are describing, but the associations between the words remain for Hightower. Although Tennyson is only ever associated with

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this lazy, ponderous character in Light in August, his work resonates in Hightower’s mind, in spite of his inertia. One would expect Faulkner, the experimental American novelist, to have less sympathy for Tennyson than the Catholic British conservative Evelyn Waugh. In Waugh’s 1934 novel A Handful of Dust, an entire congregation mirrors Hightower’s lack of effort and thought in religious rituals: the churchgoers attend every week despite the fact that ‘few of the things said in church seemed to have any particular reference to themselves’.37 This is not an attack on the parishioners specifically, but on the world of 1930s England, so far removed from its Catholic past which, for Waugh, represents true salvation. The epigraph to Waugh’s novel leaves the reader in little doubt where its title is derived from: ‘… I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’ The Waste Land 38 That Waugh expected his readers to know the poem is clear from the omission of Eliot’s name from the quotation. Critics have long assumed that the title is drawn from this poem: ‘The title is, of course, taken from The Waste Land’ (David Lodge, 1971); ‘the title of the novel, derived from The Waste Land’’ (Shelley Walia, 1998); ‘the imprint of Eliot is there throughout the text and signalled unmistakably in the title’ (Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, 2002).39 But both Eliot and Waugh (whose father wrote the most important biography of Tennyson published prior to Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir and who edited a seven-volume set of Tennyson in 1905) knew that, as we have seen, the phrase could also be found in ‘Maud’: Dead, long dead, Long dead! And my heart is a handful of dust, And the wheels go over my head, And my bones are shaken with pain [. . .]40 The word ‘handful’ unquestionably links Tennyson and Eliot (as well as Conrad and Donne), but the source of this dust is Biblical – in Genesis 3.19 God tells Adam ‘dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’. The contrast between the modern world and its Victorian past, which are both rejected as inadequate in comparison with true Catholic belief, is the central theme of the novel. This title – at once Modernist and Victorian, but ultimately Biblical – is therefore a neat representation of the book as a whole. However, the dominant Tennyson poem referred to in the book is not ‘Maud’, but Idylls of the King. At the beginning of the novel, Tony Last and his wife Brenda dine in the large hall of his country house, Hetton Abbey, ‘at a small, round table’; the rooms of their house are

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named after Arthurian characters, ‘each with a frieze of Gothic text, each named from Malory, Yseult, Elaine, Mordred and Merlin, Gawaine and Bedivere, Lancelot, Perceval, Tristram, Galahad, his own dressing-room, Morgan le Fay, and Brenda’s Guinevere.’ 41 In the most comprehensive assessment of Tennyson’s presence in A Handful of Dust, Richard Wasson has called the novel a ‘critique of Victorianism’, in which the Victorians are the ‘chief cultural villains’.42 While this is to overstate matters – as Wasson himself notes, the point is that the world-views of both the Victorian age and the 1930s are fundamentally flawed – it is nonetheless clear that, despite Tony Last being a sympathetic character, he is ultimately as wrong-headed as his uncaring wife. That Tony’s view of the world is coloured by the Victorian age is made clear in the scene when he finds out, over the telephone, that Brenda has decided to sue him for alimony, after she has left him and he has complied with her request to make it look as if he was cuckolding her: He hung up the receiver and went back to the smoking room. His mind had suddenly become clearer on many points that had puzzled him. A whole Gothic world had come to grief . . . there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled.43 This passage highlights the central opposition in the novel: Tony’s aristocratic, chivalrous, predominantly rural world view is confronted by amoral modern urban society. Even after this image (whose alliterations suggest Tony believes it a poetic vision) has fled him, and the world ‘come to grief’, he remains committed to the Arthurian ideal. In the fifth part of the book – entitled ‘In Search of a City’ - Tony bumps into Dr. Messinger at his club and the pair set off on an expedition on the trail of a mythical, unnamed city. This expedition is often overlooked in synopses of the novel, perhaps because critics are aware that Waugh had written an alternative ending – however, in a letter to Henry Yorke he spelt out the reason for keeping the section: [T]he Amazon stuff had to be there. The scheme was a Gothic man in the hands of savages – first Mrs Beaver etc. then the real ones, finally the silver foxes at Hetton. All that quest for the city seems to me justifiable symbolism.44 But Tony is almost as much of a ‘savage’ as the others listed above. He ‘can conceive only of a romantic quest, not a truly religious one’, and ‘ “The City” he seeks is not the Holy City, the City of God, but rather a transfigured Hetton. His journey is to Camelot, not Rome.’ 45 Wasson equates Tony’s idealization of Hetton (‘a coral citadel crowning a green hill top sewn with daisies, among groves and streams’)46 with Tennyson’s ‘The Holy Grail’: [T]he sacred mount of Camelot, And all the dim rich city, roof by roof,

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Tower after tower, spire beyond spire, By grove, and garden-lawn, and rushing brook[. . .].47 The idealized (if impossible) quest represented in Idylls of the King is totally out of place in the 1930s and, for Waugh, even in the nineteenth century, as it is not concerned with real (for Waugh, this can be read as ‘Roman Catholic’) salvation, but a false image based in the material world. The only true ‘Holy City’ is Rome. Tony Last’s view of the world is definitely material – and specifically architectural. As he finally succumbs to a fever, in the company of a strange resident of the jungle named Todd who has employed Tony to read Dickens to him until his death, he has a vision of Brenda and says: I will tell you what I have learned in the forest, where time is different. There is no City. Mrs Beaver has covered it with chromium plating and converted it into flats. Three guineas a week, each with a separate bathroom. Very suitable for base love. And Polly will be there. She and Mrs Beaver under the fallen battlements…48 The ‘chromium plating’ represents the modern world, and for Tony, it is this world that has destroyed his vision of Hetton as the City. However, if we look back to the earlier descriptions of Hetton, we find that his ancestral home is itself just as false as the chromium. According to a fictional guidebook, Hetton, ‘formerly one of the notable houses of the county, was entirely rebuilt in 1864 in the Gothic style and is now devoid of interest.’ 49 For Tony, Hetton and its contents are ‘things of tender memory and proud possession’, but They were not in the fashion, he fully realized. Twenty years ago people had liked half timber and old pewter; now it was urns and colonnades; but the time would come, perhaps in John Andrew’s day, when opinion would reinstate Hetton in its proper place. Already it was referred to as ‘amusing’, and a very civil young man had asked permission to photograph it for an architectural review.50 Hetton, rebuilt in a quasi-medieval fashion in 1864, is in effect a bogus attempt at continuing the national heritage, by an aristocracy who are the most visible living presence of such a heritage. The analogy one can draw with Idylls of the King – an updated version of a national myth by a poet who was soon to accept a peerage – is clear. Waugh was aware of the virtues of Tennyson’s work, but in A Handful of Dust he launches a sustained attack on ‘English Gothic’, so beloved of the Victorians, and its poetic equivalent, Tennyson. Another Catholic writer who was coming to prominence in the 1930s was Graham Greene. Although he categorized several of his novels as ‘entertainments’, as opposed to the more serious term ‘novel’, the thrillers he wrote in the

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1930s are worthy of study in their own right, and in many ways an ‘entertainment’ like A Gun for Sale (1936) is as sophisticated as the more ‘literary’ The Power and the Glory (1940). Both contain references to Tennyson’s work, which serve less to criticize the poetry itself than to draw connections between the world Tennyson is describing in ‘The Brook’ and ‘Maud’ and that of Greene’s grimly realistic fiction. The Power and the Glory is, according to John Updike, ‘generally agreed to be Graham Greene’s masterpiece’, and is certainly the author’s least English work, in terms of its setting, which is in Mexico during the anti-Catholic persecutions of the mid-1920s.51 It is also un-English in terms of its focus on Catholicism, with the hero of the story a ‘whiskey priest’ who continues to fulfil his religious duties even in the face of potential arrest and murder. The narrative follows him around a province of Mexico as he tries to evade arrest, and he comes across a house which belongs to an English family. He has not eaten for days and fights with a dog over a bone, before coming across a book, which to him is ‘almost like a promise, mildewing there under the piles, of better things to come’.52 The book is an anthology of verse, Jewels Five Words Long, and the priest opens it on a page with Tennyson’s ‘The Brook’: ‘I come,’ he read, ‘from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally, And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley.’ 53 The priest, whose knowledge of English comes from time spent at a seminary in America, believes the vocabulary of the poem ‘very obscure’, but he can understand the conclusion: These verses ended on a philosophical note – “For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever.” The triteness and untruth of “for ever” shocked him a little: a poem like this ought not to be in a child’s hands.54 As the priest sees vultures in the yard, the apparent immortality of nature as described in the poem offers him little comfort in his situation, and directly contradicts his Catholic beliefs. He finds the desperation of the next poem he reads, Thomas Campbell’s ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter’, much more amenable to his state of mind. However, as history (and the novel) shows, the sentiment of the poem the priest reads is more pertinent than he thinks. The novel ends with his death, but with a vision of the Catholic religion continuing in Mexico, despite the ban, and the existence of more roaming priests who can perform the sacred rites. In the earlier ‘entertainment’ (the distinctions have stopped appearing in more recent editions of his work) A Gun for Sale, Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ appears at several important stages in the narrative, which again features a hero with compromised morals on the run. Raven, a hitman, has killed the Czech Minister of

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war, but on his return he is paid in stolen notes and goes after Davis, the man who hired him. The murder triggers an international crisis akin to the start of the First World War, and Raven flees to Nottwich, a midlands town very similar to Nottingham, where his employer has also travelled. Raven is a wanted man, and as he shelters between two semi-detached houses, he hears their residents flicking between radio stations: On the National Programme from the other house an elderly critic was reading verse. Raven couldn’t help but hear, standing in the cold garage by the baby’s pram, staring out at the black hail: ‘A shadow flits before me, Not thou, but like to thee; Ah Christ, that it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us What and where they be.’ He dug his nails into his hands, remembering his father who had been hanged and his mother who had killed herself in the basement kitchen, all the long parade of those who had done him down.55 The lyric from ‘Maud’ moves him, as the memory of his dead parents recurs to him, and the following lines upset him even more: ‘And I loathe the squares and streets, and the faces that one meets, Hearts with no love for me. . .’ He thought: give her time and she too will go to the police. That’s what always happens in the end with a skirt, – ‘My whole soul out to thee’ – trying to freeze again, as hard and safe as ever, the icy fragment.56 The phrase ‘hearts with no love for me’ reminds him of Anne, a chorus girl whom he met on the train to Nottwich and who he mistakenly fears will expose him as the fugitive gunman. This is where the two works begin to inform each other in a telling way. Raven is disfigured, the result of a botched operation to repair his hare lip, and truly believes himself to be unloved in the world, spurned by his family, employer and friends, much as the protagonist of ‘Maud’ is an outsider who loses his intended as a result of social pressures. ‘Maud’ is a poem whose frenzied narrator is the end product of a social system which is deeply corrupt, and who is elevated to the status of an unreliable anti-hero in the work. The relevance of this to Raven is shown in his occasionally inappropriate recollections of Tennyson’s work. His desire for companionship with Anne, and

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the hope for her trust, brings ‘Maud’ back to Raven as he searches for her body (she has been suffocated and is near death) in a lodging-house: ‘Because he was an outlaw she had to be an outlaw too. Ah, Christ! that it were possible’.57 In the final moments of his life he again remembers the poem. He finds himself cornered after killing both Davis and the man above him, a steel tycoon whose profits will rise with the advent of a war. ‘The climate of his mind’ at this point is formed by many quotations, including the same part of ‘Maud’: ‘the cultivated unlived voice of the elderly critic reading Maud: Oh, that ‘twere possible after long grief, while he stood in the garage and felt the ice melt at his heart with a sense of pain and strangeness. It was as if he were passing the customs of a land he had never entered before and would never be able to leave.’ 58 The poem recurs to Raven as a symbol of his longing for a normal life, as part of the social fabric rather than a deformed outcast, much as the protagonist of ‘Maud’ yearns for society, manifested by Maud’s brother, to accept his love as true. That such a tortured account of lost love and madness should be seen as a symbol of hope is testament to the depravity of society as much as to the ignorance of Raven. It is interesting that Raven remembers the poetry as spoken by a ‘cultivated unlived voice’. In the 1920s the BBC frequently broadcast readings from Tennyson,59 yet Greene’s mention of the elderly critic’s tone of voice indicates his awareness of how inappropriate such a violent, deranged poem is for the audience of the ‘National Programme’, and how the prolonged acquaintance with Tennyson has led to his being presented in a manner that is easy to listen to, but which masks the true power of his verse. Greene’s even-handed approach fits in with a shift in how T. S. Eliot viewed the Victorians, and in particular Tennyson. In 1931, in the preface to Harry Crosby’s collection of poetry Transit of Venus, Eliot wrote disparagingly of the public affection for the poetry of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, which gave its readership ‘the pleasure of which it is capable without the comparatively immense mental effort needed to enjoy the work of her masters, Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne’.60 One could argue that this seemingly new-found respect for the Victorians was motivated by the public response to The Waste Land. We have already witnessed the perceived dominance of the poem as identified by Brian Howard in 1930. Eliot was cautious of any such cult, and indeed of being seen as the voice of a generation, and one of the most often-cited statements he made negating this idea runs: It happens now and then that a poet by some strange accident expresses the mood of his generation, at the same time that he is expressing a mood of his own which is quite remote from that of his generation.61 The tone of this – ‘a poet’, ‘he’ – looks similar to the Eliot who wrote ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in 1919, an essay often interpreted as autobiographical despite its sentiments. But while Eliot’s opinions in the above passage can be (and often are) interpreted as a comment on the fate of The Waste Land, the

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poet to whom he is referring here is not himself – it is, in fact, Tennyson. The statement first appeared in an essay which formed the introduction to a 480-page selection of Tennyson’s verse, published by Nelson in 1936, accompanied by a stand-alone edition of the Idylls of the King as well as another volume of Tennyson’s later poetry. In the introduction, we read that Tennyson ‘had the finest sense of verbal music of any English poet since Milton’, and Eliot praises his ‘innovation in metric’ as well as his classical learning.62 Although Tennyson had ‘no gift at all’ for narrative,63 Eliot saw in his work ‘plenty of evidence of emotional intensity and violence’ 64 in a remarkably prescient piece of criticism – Tennyson’s childhood was immensely traumatic, as his father was disinherited and became an abusive alcoholic, treating his family very badly, but this was only just beginning to come to the attention of the public, with Charles Tennyson’s article ‘Tennyson Papers I: Alfred’s Father’, published in the Cornhill Magazine in March 1936. In this article the poet’s grandson outlined the ‘intense and violent’ moods of Tennyson’s father, which caused the young poet ‘often to run out into the night in utter misery and cast himself weeping down amongst the tombstones’.65 Charles Tennyson also revealed that Alfred’s father would not let him attend school ‘till he had shown himself able to recite by heart all the four books of Horace’s Odes on successive mornings’.66 In Eliot’s Essays Ancient and Modern, published in 1936, the Tennyson piece bore the simple title In Memoriam, and the long elegy stands out for Eliot as the work in which ‘Tennyson finds full expression’; he believed it to be ‘a diary of which we have to read every word’.67 The passage concerning the voice of a generation is made in a longer section detailing the poem’s initial reception as an assertion of Christian faith. While Eliot notes that Tennyson ‘consistently asserted a convinced, if somewhat sketchy, Christian belief’, he identifies another ‘Tennyson’ in the poem – ‘a very much more interesting and tragic Tennyson’.68 This Tennyson antedates Darwin in his evolutionary ideas (although Eliot curiously omits any mention of Lyell, whom Tennyson had read), and In Memoriam is religious ‘because of the quality of its doubt’ – Tennyson is ‘the great master of metric as well as of melancholia’.69 Although Eliot felt that Tennyson had been fundamentally misunderstood by the majority of his Victorian readers, in another piece he praised In Memoriam for its confirmation of Tennyson’s status as ‘the voice of his time’. This was in an Indian Service broadcast made in 1942, where, as well as praising Tennyson’s dialect poems and his classical scholarship, Eliot dwelt on him as ‘the poet of melancholia, passion and despair’.70 This seems an odd topic for a propaganda broadcast, but its title is in keeping with other critics writing around the same time, such as B. Ifor Evans, who believed it was ‘the poem of the poet himself, and, since it is so genuinely his, it becomes at the same time the great poem of his age’.71 For Eliot, In Memoriam is a ‘complex and comprehensive expression of an historic phase of thought and feeling, of the grandeur and the tragedy of the Victorian age’.72 In the elegy, Eliot believes that Tennyson ‘foreshadows, not only the Victorian compromise between science and reasonable religion, not

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only the optimism of the later nineteenth century about the inevitability of a world in which everybody will gradually be better and happier, but also the insecurity of this optimism’.73 Elsewhere, British propaganda was less nuanced, but rather more stirring – in a broadcast made on the BBC in 1943, John Betjeman cited Tennyson as a quintessentially English figure: For me, at any rate, England stands for the Church of England, eccentric incumbents, oil-lit churches, Women’s Institutes, modest village inns, arguments about cow parsley on the altar, the noise of mowing machines on Saturday afternoons, local newspapers, local auctions, the poetry of Tennyson, Crabbe, Hardy and Matthew Arnold [. . .].74 If Eliot’s ideas on Tennyson are not quite in keeping with the upbeat tone of Betjeman’s war broadcast, both poets are concerned with the establishment of the importance of the Victorian age, and the maintenance of the English tradition, be it poetic or more general. The association of Tennyson and ‘Englishness’ was continued in propaganda broadcasts on the other side of the conflict. A debate is ongoing about the wartime activities of P. G. Wodehouse, who consistently denied that he had any interest in politics, but it is nonetheless true that he made several broadcasts while in an internment camp in Germany and was heavily criticized for doing so in the English press.75 The first broadcast he made only contains passing reference to the political situation, dwelling on what he decided to do (and what to pack) when he was arrested at his home in France. His first decision was ‘to buckle down and read the Complete Works of William Shakespeare’, but he did acknowledge that after getting through a few plays, ‘something of Agatha Christie’s catches your eye and you weaken’.76 This did not stop him from packing the Works in his suitcase: Tobacco, pencils, scribbling pads, pipes, a pair of shoes, a razor, some soap, some drawers, a sweater, a couple of cardigans, six pairs of socks, Tennyson’s poems, half a pound of tea, and, of course, the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. My wife donated a cold mutton chop and a slab of chocolate.77 Wodehouse, as is clear from his novels, was from the beginning to the end of his career a strong admirer of Tennyson, and it is telling that he decides to include his poems as one of the home comforts which he will still be allowed by the Germans – the tea, mutton chop, socks and Shakespeare being the most obviously ‘English’ items on the list. On the same side of the conflict, but in Italy, Eliot’s ‘miglior fabbro’ Ezra Pound was also keen to promote Tennyson as a quintessentially ‘English’ figure but for more explicitly political ends. In his radio broadcasts Pound decried the decision of Great Britain and the United States to side with Russia, which he attributed, in part, to the influence of ‘The British Broadcasting Company, the Bloody Boobs Corporation’.78 He went on:

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Someone had apparently blundered, as Lord Tennyson wrote of the charge at Balaclava. And blundered, we think, considerably worse.79 This ‘blunder’ was to lose touch with ‘continental opinion’,80 and to rely on journals like Time Magazine and The Times. In a broadcast made in April 1942, Pound said: [W]hen you are sad and downhearted, git out your back issues of the Times Newspaper of London, if they haven’t been confiscated by the dog-catcher to make biscuit for miner’s children, and lull yourself with Tennysonian legends, such as ‘Dutch leadership in the Indies,’ rivalling that of Luzon, resistance, all merry and bright.81 Pound mocks the attempts by the Allied media to claim victories and strong resistance in the Dutch East Indies, which were occupied by Japan from 1942–45, linking Allied leadership to the resistance at Luzon during the Philippine– American War in the early twentieth century, during which a sixth of the population of the island were killed. Such denials of Allied strength were inevitable in Nazi propaganda, but it is interesting that Pound calls them ‘Tennysonian legends’. Based on Pound’s earlier claims that the poet’s ‘lady-like attitude towards the printed page [. . .] kept Tennyson out of his works,’ 82 and that ‘Virgil is a second-rater, a Tennysonianized version of Homer’,83 one could conclude that Pound views Tennyson as a sanitizer, and therefore a falsifier, of Arthurian legends, his versions of which ‘lull’ the reader, just as what Pound views as untrue stories in The Times lull Allied readers in the 1940s. In The Times in 1940 alone, quotations from Tennyson’s poetry with a word missing were used as crossword clues 24 times. This is a marked increase from the 1930s,84 and his work was clearly felt to be sufficiently well known for readers to be able to remember – or at least look up – the answers. The idea of Tennyson occupying a prominent place in the national consciousness in wartime was backed up in the Times Literary Supplement of 10 October 1942, where the fiftieth anniversary of Tennyson’s death was commemorated over several pages. In an article entitled ‘Fifty Years After’ (taking its inspiration from ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’), Harold Hannyngton Child wrote that although ‘Tennyson’s reputation sank lower than Browning’s’, ‘fifty years pass, and it swings up higher than it ever was.’ 85 This is because: Time and history have shown that (not to trouble about the prettiness) all the richest of the sensuous and emotional beauty of Tennyson’s verse might have passed out of mind, but for his constant truth to his very un-French, very English self, which insisted upon singing of morals, of evolution, of government and other such English or Philistine matters.86 It is true that Tennyson occasionally exhibited anti-French sentiments in his work – in In Memoriam we read of ‘the red fool-fury of the Seine’, and several of

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the poems he wrote in opposition to Louis Napoleon in the early 1850s could be construed as xenophobic even if the poet takes pains to explain that his criticisms are only of those French who support Napoleon in his establishment of the Second Empire.87 At this point in the Second World War, France had been occupied for over two years and yet even this does not excuse the tone of the article – by implication, it is ‘un-French’ to sing of morals and to acknowledge scientific discoveries. The Times Literary Supplement coverage of the anniversary of his death was almost entirely coloured by the war. Hannygnton Child claims that ‘During the half-century since his death three wars have occurred, to open men’s eyes to the true quality of this lately despised poet.’ 88 This is strange if one remembers the reaction to the Great War of Nicolson and Fausset, but the title of an earlier article by G. Wilson Knight in the Times Literary Supplement makes clear the new, more positive association with the war effort: ‘A Great National Poet: England at War: Tennyson’s Mystic Imperialism’.89 This article does not concur that part of Tennyson’s appeal lies in his ‘un-French’ nature, and describes his ‘adulatory and military excursions’ as ‘unimportant’, no more than ‘competent laureate hack-work’, preferring his ‘early sonnets on Napoleon and the partition of Poland with their smouldering Miltonic anger.’ 90 The editorial of the issue, by Philip Tomlinson, leaves the reader in no doubt of Tennyson’s relevance to the wartime situation: The years of disparagement have ended now we are plunged into affairs so perplexing and fearful; and the most capricious criticism never fell into the folly of denying mastery of verbal music to the poet of so many lines that vibrate in the memory. To-day we acknowledge more than that: our eyes are open to the visionary prophet in the poet.91 An earlier article by Tomlinson in the Times Literary Supplement of 2 March 1940 shows that this was not a rashly considered about-turn: We have lived through a time when Tennyson was pointed to as the typical figure of Victorian smugness and the unending composer of sounds with little sense worth the attention of an adult. To-day, when we have something more immediate in our minds than the dialectics of aesthetic movements, it is significant that we are becoming aware again of the deeper meanings and sweeping effects of some of the Victorian figures – Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold chiefly.92 The ‘more immediate’ concern, the war, meant that for some critics like Humbert Wolfe, the Victorian world had been rendered ‘impossibly remote’ from that of the early 1940s, as it had ‘died once, risen from the dead, and is again in the death-throes’.93 This allowed readers to consider Tennyson ‘as calmly as though he were an Elizabethan’,94 and that Tennyson was felt to have something historical to offer the British at wartime is clear from the frequency with

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which quotations from his work were included in the ‘Old and True’ column in The Times which contained pertinent quotations from history.95 Tennyson appears to have become assimilated into the English canon as a direct result of the conflict between the Allies and the Nazis, much as Woolf criticized his centrality to the canon as a result of what she perceived as his role in an earlier conflict, the Great War. The most high-profile intervention in the debate over Tennyson’s merits in the 1940s came in 1944, when W. H. Auden published an introduction to a Phoenix House selection of the poet. At the time, Auden was one of the most famous poets in the English-speaking world, and the selection was reviewed almost as widely as Charles Tennyson’s 1949 biography of the poet. From the outset, Auden’s essay is deeply unconventional. He makes several biographical errors, mistaking the date of Tennyson’s death as the 8 October 1892 (it was the 6th), and that of Tennyson’s journey with Hallam to Spain as 1831 (it was 1830), as well as misidentifying John Wilson Croker’s savage review of the poet in the Quarterly Review as the work of Lockhart, going on to make the unsubstantiated claim that as a result of this review, ‘for some years people were ashamed to be caught reading Tennyson’.96 The biographical introduction ends with the following infamous passage: He had a large, loose-limbed body, a swarthy complexion, a high, narrow forehead, and huge bricklayer’s hands; in youth he looked like a gypsy; in age like a dirty old monk; he had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia that he didn’t know; there was little else that he did.97 Auden is not merely being outspoken for the sake of it in this passage. He combines Tennyson’s own words with echoes of the later version of T. S. Eliot’s essay on In Memoriam in order to criticize both.98 Tennyson referred to one of Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs of him, taken in 1869, as ‘the dirty monk’,99 a name which has stuck ever since; Auden’s repetition of the description makes it appear that the poet always looked as he does in the portrait, but also hints at Tennyson’s later quasi-prophetic status, voiced frequently in the 1890s and 1900s.100 Auden widens T. S. Eliot’s claim (amended to the following in his 1936 Essays Ancient and Modern) that Tennyson ‘had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton’ 101 by omitting Milton’s name, but goes on to qualify this by immediately attributing a lack of intelligence to Tennyson in a stronger manner than any other critic, claiming that he ‘was also undoubtedly the stupidest’ of all the English poets. This is a recontextualizing of Eliot’s essay, an act which is almost as iconoclastic as what Auden is doing to Tennyson; he appears to be ridiculing Eliot’s assertion of Tennyson’s real emotional depth as well as highlighting what he believes Eliot has left out of his essay on the poet. Reviewers of the edition were quick to leap to Tennyson’s defence, a reaction which is in itself an interesting counterpoint to the essay. F. O. Matthiessen, in the New York Times Book Review, commented on the ‘haphazard’ nature of

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the introduction,102 but other critics were less forgiving; Sir Desmond MacCarthy mocked Auden’s portrait of ‘a poor, congenitally morbid, emptyheaded arrivist who sold his early poetic gift for riches and success!’ 103 He continued, ‘How different from some poets and authors today, leaders of the young, champions of the oppressed, beacons of the future, thinkers, who, when civilisation and their fellow-countrymen were in danger, promptly left for Hollywood!’ 104 Auden was not entirely unhappy with the amount of debate his selection aroused. In 1947 he wrote to Eric R. Dodds that ‘I became Public Cultural Enemy No 1 over the Tennyson preface [. . .] I’m delighted that the English can get excited over poetry though it is a little comic seeing that T is one of my favourite poets.’ 105 Given the ostensibly hostile nature of his introduction, this seems a strange thing to say, but Tennyson had been a presence in Auden’s poetry since his very first collection, and indeed if we look again at the essay on Tennyson, we can see that the poetic relationship between the two is acknowledged in a much more sustained way than the critics quoted above noted. Having claimed that ‘If Wordsworth is the great English poet of Nature, then Tennyson is the great English poet of the Nursery’, Auden continues that in his ‘basic anxiety about his existence Tennyson is the brother of another and greater nineteenth-century poet, Baudelaire’.106 Ultimately, despite Auden’s distaste for the poems of Tennyson which ‘would teach the Ideal’, he believes that he is in some respects preferable to the far more fashionable French poet, as even [I]f Tennyson embarrasses us by picturing Paradise as an exact replica of Somersby Rectory or Torquay, he has at least a conception, however naïve, of a good place, and does not, like Baudelaire, insist that its goodness and badness are unimportant, for all that matters is its novelty, to be attained at whatever cost by a cultivation of hysteria with delight and terror.107 Along with the ongoing desire of poets and critics alike to bicker over the merits of Tennyson, one of the clearest signals that Tennyson had secured a stable position in the English literary canon is the manner in which novelists in the late 1930s and 1940s referred to his work. In Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Elders and Betters (1944), Anna, a manipulative young woman engineering her inheritance from an elderly aunt, cites the poet in an argument about the passing of time, noting, ‘Nature is known to be red in tooth and claw [. . .] She snatches things from us all the time. I have found it even at my age.’ 108 In earlier works, for instance Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, Tennyson was the preserve of the elders and betters; in Compton-Burnett’s book we can see the younger generation appropriating (admittedly well known) phrases from Tennyson to justify behaviour which is at odds with the elder generation. The most prominent poem by Tennyson which featured in novels in the period was, however, ‘Tithonus’. In 1939, Aldous Huxley published a novel

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entitled After Many a Summer. It carried as its epigraph the following lines from Tennyson’s poem: The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan.109 His novel is set in California in the 1930s, and concerns an American tycoon, Jo Stoyte, who is loosely modelled on W. Randolph Hearst, the original of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Stoyte lives in a vast mansion with his young lover, Virginia Maunciple. His doctor, Dr. Obispo, is investigating a way of using fish guts to preserve the ageing tycoon’s life, aided by his assistant, Spanish Civil War veteran Pete Boone. Into this strange environment enters Jeremy Pordage, a middleaged English academic, who has been contracted to sort through the papers of the English aristocratic Hauberk family which Stoyte has recently bought. While the story begins with a grotesquely commercialized Californian landscape seen through the eyes of Pordage, Stoyte is the most important character of the novel, at least in terms of its title and the thrust of the plot. At the end of the novel, rightly believing his younger lover to be having an affair with Dr. Obispo, he goes into a murderous rage, and ends up killing Pete, the doctor’s assistant, rather than the doctor himself. Forced to flee, Stoyte ends up in London and goes to the ancestral home of the Hauberk family. In the basement, he discovers the other ‘Tithonus’ figure of the novel, the Fifth Earl of Gonister, aged 201, who has survived (along with his housekeeper) thanks to a diet of fish guts which he detailed in the Hauberk papers. The Earl is, however far from the eloquent, contemplative state of mind presented in Tennyson’s poem. As Obispo says, he is ‘A foetal ape that’s had time to grow up’.110 Stoyte, in a state of shock, can only mutter that ‘they look like they were having a pretty good time. I mean in their own way, of course’.111 The Californian attitude to death is the dominant theme of Huxley’s novel. One of Stoyte’s proudest possessions is the ‘Beverley Pantheon’, its grounds loosely modelled on the real-life Forest Lawn cemetery in California. Through the eyes of Pordage, we see ‘The sloping lawns, like a green oasis in the mountain desolation’, which features ‘the tiny Church of the Poet – a miniature reproduction of Holy Trinity at Stratford-on-Avon complete with Shakespeare’s tomb and a twenty-four-hour service of organ music played automatically by the Perpetual Wurlitzer.’ 112 We read that the Pantheon itself ‘lacked all verisimilitude’, and inside it Pordage finds, among other items, a replica of Rodin’s ‘Le Baiser’, ‘illuminated by concealed pink floodlights’, and at the entrance to every room there is a marble scroll inscribed with the motto ‘Oh, Death, where is thy sting?’ 113 This is not too far from the truth of Forest Lawn; as Jessica Mitford observed in 1963, the burial areas at the cemetery have been given

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names like ‘Whispering Pines’, ‘Everlasting Love’ and ‘Babyland’, which has an ‘encircling heart-shaped motor road’.114 Evelyn Waugh visited Forest Lawn several times in early 1947, and reported on the ‘entirely unique’ cemetery in his essay ‘Half in Love with Easeful Death’ which was published in Life and The Tablet. His comments chime with Huxley’s earlier parody: ‘Forest Lawn has consciously turned its back on the “old customs of death”, the grim traditional alternatives of Heaven and Hell, and promises immediate eternal happiness for all its inmates’; this is very close to the motto ‘Oh, Death, where is thy sting?’, inscribed on the marble scrolls in Huxley’s Beverley Pantheon.115 Waugh noted that at the real Forest Lawn, ‘There is no room for the Negro or the Chinaman, however devout; avowed atheists are welcome, but notorious ill-doers are not’,116 which led him to foresee ‘the huge joke of what the professors of anthropology will make of it all’ in the future.117 The novelist evidently relished the opportunity of visiting, and boasted in a letter that he was ‘on easy terms with the chief embalmer & next week am to lunch with Dr. Hubert Eaton himself.’ 118 And in his essay Waugh describes one of the three non-sectarian churches, ‘The Little Church of the Flowers’, which is a replica of Stoke Poges Church in Buckinghamshire, where Gray wrote his ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’. This recalls Huxley’s earlier satirical rendering of the cemetery in After Many a Summer, where he describes ‘the tiny Church of the Poet’.119 The association between Forest Lawn – the American way of death – and poetry has its roots in real life, and Huxley and Waugh took it as the inspiration for their two novels, both of which are directly concerned with one particular poem – ‘Tithonus’. James J. Lynch has argued that the two novels take the poem as narrative inspiration – for Lynch, Jo Stotye is simply an updated Tithonus with a lack of wisdom, whose life story mimics that of Tennyson’s version of Tithonus to the extent that he ‘immures himself in a castle on the western limit of the American continent’.120 That Tennyson’s poem and its juxtaposition with Forest Lawn are the inspiration for the story is undoubted, and yet the poem is not alluded to in the rest of the novel. Waugh believed the juxtaposition of the Californian death industry and ‘Tithonus’ sufficiently important, however, for him to return to both in The Loved One, a short novel published in 1948. He was aware of Huxley’s earlier novel – in a letter he wrote that ‘Aldous flirted with [Forest Lawn] in After Many a Summer but only with the superficialities. I am at the heart of it.’ 121 And being at the heart of it also led to a more sustained engagement with poetry. Waugh’s version of the cemetery, ‘Whispering Glades’, includes a burial plot, only accessible by boat, called ‘the Lake Island of Innisfree’, which is, according to the boatman, ‘named after a very fancy poem’.122 The ‘bee-loud glade’ which Yeats described in his poem is replicated by beehives at Whispering Glades, although since ‘folks was always getting stung’ by the bees, the natural sound of the insects was replaced by ‘mechanical and scientific’ effects.123

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The island is visited by Dennis Barlow, an Englishman who has shown some poetic talents prior to the Second World War (his one volume was reviewed in two columns of the Sunday Times).124 Barlow travels to Hollywood after the war to write the script for a film of Shelley’s life but ends up with a job at ‘The Happier Hunting Ground’, a pet mortuary and cemetery. This is a job that his fellow Englishmen in Hollywood believe ‘an Englishman just doesn’t take’, but Barlow is happy.125 When he returns to his workplace after dinner, he sits down to read poetry. Life in the Air Force had converted him from an amateur to a mere addict. There were certain trite passages of poetry which from a diverse multitude of associations never failed to yield the sensations he craved; he never experimented; these were the branded drug, the sure specific, big magic. He opened the anthology as a woman opens her familiar pack of cigarettes. Outside the windows the cars swept past continuously, out of town, into town, lights ablaze, radios at full throttle.126 The poem he turns to is ‘Tithonus’: ‘I wither slowly in thine arms,’ he read. ‘Here at the quiet limit of the world,’ and repeated to himself: ‘Here at the quiet limit of the world. Here at the quiet limit of the world’. . . as a monk will repeat a single pregnant text, over and over again in prayer. Presently the telephone rang.127 The Tennysonian phrase recurs to him later as he reflects on his ‘worthy trade’: Mr. Schultz raised his wages. The scars of adolescence healed. There at the quiet limit of the world he experienced a tranquil joy such as he had known only once before, one glorious early Eastertide when, honourably lamed in a house-match, he had lain in bed and heard below the sanatorium windows the school marching out for a field-day.128 Barlow equates Tennyson’s poem with solitude and rest. While it is clearly concerned with the former, the only idea of rest that can be found therein is as an idealized, unattainable death to which the immortal, yet ageing speaker aspires. Barlow’s dwelling on the phrase and his belief in its relevance to his own situation are both part of a wilful misreading. His position at the limit of the Western world is unquestioned, but it is far from ‘quiet’, with the rushing of the cars and the blaring of their radios, and his reverie is broken by more noise, the telephone ringing. The actual sensation he derives from the poem is an indulgent schoolboy laziness – which he is exhibiting in opening the anthology ‘as a woman opens her familiar pack of cigarettes’.129

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This approach to poetry is maintained in his love affair with the corpse beautician, Aimée Thanatagenos, whom he meets while at the Lake Island of Innisfree. He tells her he is writing a poem, and quotes part of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ to her (these lines include ‘half in love with easeful death’, which Waugh used as the title from his article on Forest Lawn).130 He never admits that it is not his own work, and on discovering that she prefers the ‘earlier masters’ to his own modern verse, he begins to copy out poems from ‘the bran-tub of the anthologies’ and claim them as his own.131 Once he came near to exposure when she remarked that Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day reminded her of something she had learned at school [. . .]. Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white, had struck bang in the centre of the bull, but he knew few poems so high and rich and voluptuous.132 ‘Bang in the centre of the bull’ is at odds with the tone of Tennyson’s poem, and highlights Barlow’s instrumental approach to poetry, which he uses as a seduction device to win the heart – or perhaps the body – of Aimée (one is reminded of earlier accounts of faux-Tennysonian courtship, in the work of Hardy, Gissing and Forster, as well as Hardy’s over-literal use of the poet in A Pair of Blue Eyes). When he is eventually found out, and their engagement is broken off, he reasons with her that ‘in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse’.133 This reference to the poetic theories which T. S. Eliot had expounded in the late 1910s and early 1920s is evidence not only of Eliot’s influence over English poetry in the 1930s and 1940s, but also of Barlow’s deceitfulness. The manner in which he apparently puts Eliot’s theories into practice shows that he is being selective about attitudes to poetry in the ‘dying world I come from’. What he is doing is not ‘allusion’ in the manner of Eliot, but outright plagiarism.134 Even his attempts at writing a poetic tribute to his friend Sir Francis Hinsley, who hangs himself after being fired by Megalo Studios, are sarcastic rewritings of anthology pieces. Witness his adaptation of Tennyson’s ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’: Bury the great Knight With the studio’s valediction Let us bury the great Knight Who was once the arbiter of popular fiction.135 The cruelty of Barlow’s version of Tennyson’s ode lies not just in his decision to write a lazy parody in honour of his dead housemate, but also in the disparity between the two deaths – Wellington’s funeral happened ‘to the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation’, but Sir Francis has killed himself in part as a result of the isolation he felt as an unemployed Englishman in Hollywood, where he is largely unlamented, even by the man he lived with.136

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His acquaintances at the cricket club believe that the suicide was a ‘ghastly business’, which happened mainly as a result of the shame of cohabiting with the failed poet and proud pet mortician, Barlow. Both Wellington and Hinsley had been given titles by the English crown, but while the death of the former was treated with all the pomp and ceremony the British Empire could muster (as indeed was that of Tennyson), the latter died friendless and alone in California, which Barlow envisages as a place of tranquillity, ‘the quiet limit of the world’. Although he is a young Englishman who has tried to adapt to the Californian way of life (and death), Barlow is very much an anti-hero. His approach to seducing the naïve Aimée is brutally free from ideals: Dennis required salesmanship; he sought to present Aimée with an irresistible picture not so much of her own merits or even of his, as of the enormous gratification he was offering. The films did it; the crooners did it; but not, it seemed, the English poets.137 The English poets can only offer him poetry replete with qualifications, thanks to the sophistication of their verse. Ultimately he is undone in his quest for Aimée as a result of his deceitful approach to quotation, as well as the difference between American and British conceptions of courtship. She complains in a letter to a newspaper agony aunt that Barlow is ‘not at all cultured. At first I thought he must be being a poet and he has been to Europe and seen the Art there but many of our greatest authors seem to mean nothing to him’.138 There appears to be a disjunction between American and British ideas of art – Aimée may have studied ‘Art’ at college, but it was a subsidiary subject to ‘Beauticraft’, and Waugh’s use of a capital ‘A’ here is interesting – one is reminded of Jeremy Pordage’s distaste for an American professor in After Many a Summer, as he talks ‘in phrases full of the audible equivalents of Capital Letters’.139 Such an education means that Aimée is unable to identify the poems Dennis is sending her as the fruits of many different poetic imaginations, and his ‘fraud’ is only uncovered when he adapts ‘Helena’, which is by an American poet, Edgar Allen Poe, and which is identified by his rival for Aimée’s affections, Mr. Joyboy. The attitude to art, and poetry in particular, of the Californian Aimée is a mixture of naïveté and materialism. As previously mentioned, when Dennis first meets her, she claims that at the Lake Island she thinks about ‘Death and Art’, and this inspires him to recite lines from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: . . . For many a time I have been half in love with easeful death, Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain . . .

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Aimée appreciates these lines: Why it’s beautiful. It’s just what I’ve thought so often and haven’t been able to express. ‘To make it rich to die’ and ‘to cease upon the midnight with no pain.’ That’s exactly what Whispering Glades exists for, isn’t it? I think it’s wonderful to be able to write like that.140 Her interpretation is overly literal and exhibits no sense of the history of the language, the reading of ‘rich’ having more to do with material riches than emotions, and she also fails to see the poem as an expression of longing, reading it almost as an advertisement for Whispering Glades. But despite this, she is genuinely moved by the poetry Barlow passes off as his own, and takes death seriously – as shown by her final act, which is to kill herself. Despite this bleak ending, there is some hope for poetry, the two nations, and indeed mankind, in the implications of the novel. T. S. Eliot, the man whose ideas Barlow cites to justify his lies to Aimée, was American by birth, and she enjoys the poetry Barlow copies for her despite her overly literal interpretation of many of the verses – and the most successful poem he claims as his own is by Tennyson. Poetry also breaks down the distinction between California and England in After Many a Summer. Dr. Obispo says that Pete’s infatuation with Virginia is based on the fact that he ‘Thinks she’s like something in the Works of Tennyson. You know, chemically pure’.141 While there is no doubt that the hypocritical Virginia is far from pure (she draws a curtain over her Virgin Mary when sleeping with Obispo), her name, and general demeanour, do imply purity. The fact that the doctor characterizes this as ‘Tennysonian’ shows that the poet’s work bridges any Anglo-American divide, in two novels which are ultimately concerned with the failure of both American optimism and English cynicism in their conception of mortality. Further demonstrating Tennyson’s transatlantic appeal, the third book of Lara Ingalls Wilder’s ‘Little House’ series, Little Town on the Prairie (1941), like Anne of Green Gables before her, Laura Ingalls (written about in the third person, in books which have always been described as novels) discovers ‘a secret’ while helping her parents prepare for the winter. In her mother’s underwear drawer, she finds: [A] perfectly new book, beautifully bound in green cloth with a gilded pattern pressed into it. The smooth, straight, gilt edges of the pages looked like solid gold. On the cover two curling scrolls of lovely, fancy letters made the words [. . .]142 The novel presents the title, Tennyson’s Poems, in its ‘original’ Gothic font, with the text curved to make an eye-shape. Laura begins to read ‘The Lotos-eaters’, before realizing that the book has been hidden for a reason, and so puts it back, despite her eagerness to read on. The lines recur to her over and over, and

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eventually she is given the book as a Christmas present, but finds the poem disappointing, as ‘in the land that seemed always afternoon the sailors turned out to be no good’.143 Her dissatisfaction, in reality, stems from the absence of her sister Mary, and despite her eventually coming to enjoy the poems (especially ‘Come into the garden, Maud’), they tend to be associated with moments of unhappiness, her overall enthusiasm notwithstanding. Tennyson’s words also recur in a bittersweet manner in Evelyn Waugh’s most famous book of the 1940s, Brideshead Revisited (1945). The first part of the novel concerns the arrival at Oxford of Charles Ryder, who is warned by his cousin Jasper not to fall in with the ‘undesirables of the college’.144 Ryder, narrating with hindsight, is scornful of the ‘commonplace’ books he brought up to college with him, for example ‘Roger Fry’s Vision and Design, the Medici Press edition of A Shropshire Lad, Eminent Victorians’.145 Despite his cousin’s warnings, Ryder falls in with Sebastian Flyte, one of a group of upper-class students seen by his cousin Jasper as ‘the very worst set in the University’.146 One of these is Anthony Blanche, who after eating lunch with Flyte, Ryder and several others, in Flyte’s rooms, proceeds to the balcony and recites parts of The Waste Land out to ‘the sweatered and muffled throng’ walking to the Summer Eights regatta through Christ Church Meadow.147 This is in keeping with the mid-1920s setting of the novel, but more surprising is that immediately after this recital, another of the lunch party sings ‘Home they brought her warrior dead’, ‘to his own accompaniment on the harmonium’.148 The juxtaposition of Victorian and Modernist carries on from the earlier A Handful of Dust, but there is a difference – while the 1934 novel was set in the present day, the beginning of Brideshead Revisited takes place in the past. The students’ seeing no problem in singing Tennyson after a recital of Eliot could be interpreted as a signal that the radical break in tradition identified by Pound and Eliot in their early criticism is not quite as revolutionary in hindsight, with young (albeit fictional) readers in the 1920s equally capable of appreciating the work of Victorians and Modernists. As the title suggests, Brideshead Revisited is about revisiting and the act of memory. The youthful enthusiasm of Ryder’s time at Oxford is presented with nostalgia and regret, and this only increases when he recalls the beginning of his second year: Everywhere, on cobble and gravel and lawn, the leaves were falling and in the college gardens the smoke of the bonfires joined the wet river mist, drifting across the grey walls; the flags were oily underfoot and as, one by one, the lamps were lit in the windows round the quad, the golden lights were diffuse and remote, like those of a foreign village seen from the slopes outside; new figures in new gowns wandered through the twilight under the arches and the familiar bells now spoke of a year’s memories.149 Even in the description of the beginning of a year which he and Sebastian were to spend mainly in the company of one another, Ryder’s presentation of the

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scene is melancholic and calls to mind in several of its phrases the following from In Memoriam: By night we lingered on the lawn, For underfoot the herb was dry; And genial warmth; and o’er the sky The silvery haze of summer drawn; And calm that let the tapers burn Unwavering: not a cricket chirred: The brook alone far-off was heard, And on the board the fluttering urn [. . .].150 Waugh’s passage transports Tennyson’s scene of a summer evening to Oxford in the autumn night, and the poetic inspiration is clear if we think of later lines from the same part of In Memoriam, where ‘in the house light after light / Went out, and I was left alone.’ 151 Both In Memoriam and Brideshead Revisited are elegies for a lost youthful friendship, formed in a British university town, with both narrators ultimately ‘left alone’ and removed from the close bonds of young companionship. On leaving Oxford, Charles Ryder eventually becomes an architectural artist, selling books of ‘portraits of houses that were soon to be deserted or debased’.152 National heritage in the face of potential permanent destruction is of great importance in the book, and Tennyson is part of this heritage – Waugh explicitly links his elegiac account of youthful companionship to the earlier In Memoriam.

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Chapter 6

‘Har fleag har fleag har fleag onward’ 1: Popular fiction post-1950

Many of the most famous literary friendships in history started at one of the British university towns – whether in fiction, like that of Flyte and Ryder, or in real life, like that of, say, Tennyson and Hallam. The young Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis met at St John’s College, Oxford, in 1941; both were reading English. Although the war saw Amis leave university to serve in the army (Larkin was spared from service because of his poor eyesight), the two remained close after the end of the conflict and kept up a steady correspondence which has since become an integral part of their literary fame. Although Amis later, editing a selection of Tennyson’s verse, discerned a ‘massive prejudice’ against Tennyson in the first half of the twentieth century,2 nonetheless he parodied Tennyson in a 1947 letter to Larkin: Send me your reactions to the enclosed a.s.a.p. Larkin, The red rose cries, ‘Helluh-er, helluh-er;’ And the white rose weeps, ‘Chwist nuh-er;’ The larkspur listens, ‘Good shuh-er, good shuh-er;’ And the lily whispers, ‘Feark yah-er,’ 3 Such foul-mouthed comic doggerel is a regular occurrence in Amis’s letters to Larkin. However, he parodied Tennyson in 1952 with an at least partly serious aim, when discussing John Wain’s terza-rima poetry: I think the metre makes for long-windedness or chattiness or something. I mean to say, they just go on and on, what? He doesn’t say anything you couldn’t say in half the time, does he? I can imagine some Dryden of 1980 writing that the sweetness of English verse was never understood or practised by his forefathers, and that Mr. Empson and Mr. Wain were the first reformers of English numbers. It is the English lecturer, And he is grown so poor, so poor. The lectures and tutorials have lost their meaning; And this is what breaks the heart.4 Lines 169–170 of ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ by Tennyson run ‘It is the Miller’s daughter, / And she is grown so dear, so dear.’ 5 The reference to Tennyson

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highlights the ignorance of any potential future ‘Dryden’ who might claim Wain’s interest in rhyme as a new phenomenon.6 The ‘poorness’ of the poetry – and indeed the teaching – of the English lecturers John Wain and William Empson is also suggested. If Tennyson is still the subject of mockery here, he is at least not the principal subject. Larkin would, however, go on to write a poem about the Victorian Laureate’s domestic situation, under the title ‘The Literary World’, which is not included in his Collected Poems: Mrs Alfred Tennyson Answered begging letters admiring letters insulting letters inquiring letters business letters and publishers’ letters. She also looked after his clothes saw to his food and drink entertained visitors protected him from gossip and criticism And finally (apart from running the household) Brought up and educated the children. While all this was going on Mister Alfred Tennyson sat like a baby Doing his poetic business.7 Christopher Ricks considers the poem ‘Just a smack at Tennyson, since it too much smacks of the infantile itself’.8 But just as Ricks notes that there is some truth in the idea of Tennyson ruling like a baby, so the approach to the poet’s wife would be expanded on, in rather less cartoonish fashion, in Ann Thwaite’s 1997 biography of Emily Tennyson. Elizabeth Bishop actually published her response to Tennyson, ‘the Gentleman of Shalott’, in her first collection, 1946’s North and South. This inverts the Tennyson poem, so the gaze is on the male body, which contemplated through the eyes of the Gentleman himself, inspiring the first line of the poem, ‘Which eye’s his eye?’ 9 The strangely identical nature of all his pairs of body parts – eyes, arms, legs – causes him to believe this is ‘the indication / of a mirrored reflection / somewhere along the line / we call the spine’.10 The mirror does

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not crack in the poem, though the gentleman does worry about what might happen if it were to move; but ‘The uncertainty / he says he / finds exhilarating’.11 This is because ‘He loves / that sense of constant re-adjustment’.12 Bishop’s Gentleman, then, is markedly different from Tennyson’s Lady – instead of being forced to watch the outside world through a mirror, the Gentleman is selfabsorbed, and is happy to think of himself as half a person, half-reflection, as ‘Half is enough’, the final line of the poem.13 The poem is not an attack on Tennyson, but rather an attack on the perpetuation of gender norms and of masculine self-absorption. Even as poets seemed equivocal, there was definitely a post-war movement away from outright hostility towards Tennyson and the Victorians in general in the academic world. In the 1940s, the study of the Victorian novel was becoming a serious academic discipline. The Trollopian, a journal founded in 1945, was designed originally to study Trollope’s novels as ‘the readiest materials for the reconstruction of certain phases of Victorian life’, viewing the mid-nineteenth century as ‘a chapter in the textbook of English history’.14 The editor, Bradford A. Booth, believed that ‘time silences disputes and wears away prejudices’.15 Such was the popularity of the journal that its initial issue was reprinted the following year, along with the second issue in which Booth acknowledged that ‘The Trollopian has always been conceived as a journal of the history of Victorian fiction.’16 This was formally acknowledged in the changing of the journal’s title in 1949, to Nineteenth-Century Fiction.17 This increase in scholarship of the Victorian period can be discerned in Tennyson criticism. After the publication of Charles Tennyson’s biography of his grandfather, articles and books about the poet became less concerned with debating whether he warranted a place in the English canon, and focused more on academic scholarship and study of his poetry. Allusions to Tennyson’s work endure in the work of novelists after 1950, not least in that of Agatha Christie. Her most Tennysonian book is The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962), a Miss Marple novel whose title is a direct quotation from ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and whose epigraph contains four lines from the poem: Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack’d from side to side; “The curse is come upon me,” cried The Lady of Shalott.18 In the novel, a young woman, Heather Badcock, is poisoned after talking to her idol, the film star Marina Gregg. At the meeting Gregg’s face is a picture of horror, which is described haltingly by Mrs. Bantry, a witness, thus: [A]s though she’s seen something that – oh dear me, how hard is it to describe things. Do you remember the Lady of Shalott? The mirror crack’d from side to side:

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‘The doom has come upon me,’ cried the Lady of Shalott. Well, that’s what she looked like. People laugh at Tennyson nowadays, but the Lady of Shalott always thrilled me when I was young and it still does.19 The words ‘doom ‘ and ‘curse’ remain interchangeable in the phrase, which is quoted repeatedly by Mrs. Bantry and by the other characters in the book (in an effort to work out exactly what would cause such a look to come over Gregg’s face). The resolution is a human one – it is the second time the actress and her admirer had met, the first being when Badcock was ill with German measles and disguised it so as to be able to meet Gregg. At this point Gregg was in the early stages of pregnancy and contracted the illness, with the result that her baby was born mentally disabled. She had no idea that the disease was contracted from Badcock until their second meeting, after which she poisoned her admirer in an act of revenge. The ending is a sad one as Gregg also dies of poisoning, making it apparent who Badcock’s killer actually was, and on the final pages ‘Marina Gregg lay in the great white shell of the bed – her eyes closed, her hands folded.’20 At the image Marple thinks ‘So [. . .] might the Lady of Shalott have lain in the boat that carried her down from Camelot’.21 And as Gregg’s husband falteringly says ‘She was – so lovely – and she had suffered so much’, Marple ‘quoted softly the last lines of the poem: He said: “She has a lovely face; God in His mercy lend her grace, The Lady of Shalott.” 22 Christie was not the only popular novelist writing in the post-war period whose work evinces an admiration of Tennyson. John Wyndham’s 1953 novel The Kraken Wakes contains a discussion about the merits of using lines from Tennyson for the title of a novel – and, indeed, the title is derived from Tennyson. The novel concerns ‘sea-tanks’, which crash into the oceans from outer space and proceed to occasionally travel onto land. A sea-tank looks like ‘an elongated egg which has been halved down its length and set flat side to the ground, with the pointed end foremost [. . .] between thirty and thirty-five feet long, of a drab, lustreless leaden colour’.23 Once on land, the sea-tanks shoot white cilia into their surroundings, dragging any humans they come into contact with to their death, and they very nearly capture Phyllis, the wife of the protagonist of the novel, Mike Watson. Sea-tank attacks cripple the shipping trade, and once the human race learns to shrink back from the coastline, the immediate threat of the sea-tanks dissipates, leading them to begin melting the polar ice-caps. The sight of the British capital submerged up to the North end of Trafalgar Square inspires Mike to ask ‘Didn’t somebody or other once say: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper?” ’ Phyllis is shocked and exclaims, ‘ “Somebody or other!” [. . .] That was Mr Eliot!” ’ Mike is underwhelmed, saying, ‘It might [. . .] be that it is the job of poets to have enough ideas to provide a quotation for any given set of circumstances’.24

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The pair also bicker early in the novel about quotation. The book opens with the pair discussing Mike’s writing an account of what happened, and the novel takes the form of this first-person account. Phyllis suggests that Mike starts the book with ‘that night on board the Guinevere’,25 and having decided to do so (following the introduction), they quarrel over a suitable epigraph. Phyllis suggests lines from Emily Pettifell, which she found in The Pink Nursery Book: But, Mother, please tell me, what can those things be That crawl up so stealthily out of the sea?26 Despite her protest that ‘You won’t get anything more apposite’, Mike refuses, and says instead that ‘I had in mind a thing of Tennyson’s’, causing Phyllis to exclaim ‘painedly’, but he wins out, since ‘after all, it is supposed to be my book’, and on the following page, ‘The Kraken’ is reproduced in full.27 It is not only in ‘adult’, popular fiction that Tennyson retained a presence in the 1950s and 1960s. In Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle’s How to be Topp (1954), one of the Molesworth series of books supposedly written by a naughty schoolboy and replete with spelling and grammatical errors, there is a guide on ‘How to be Topp in English’, designed for other prep-school boys. Apparently it is ‘farely easy to be topp in english’: i have said there only one peom in the English language e.g. The Brook which chater chater as it flo my dear it is obviously a girlie just like fotherington-tomas. However there are other peoms which creep in from time to time there is one which go Har fleag har fleag har fleag onward Into the er rode the 600.28 The ‘er’ could simply be a mistranscription of ‘air’, but it seems more likely that it is a baffled monosyllable expressing a temporary loss of memory, Molesworth having forgotten the phrase ‘valley of death’. The continuing centrality of Tennyson to the teaching of English in post-war public schools can also be seen in the contemporaneous Jennings and Darbishire (1952) by Anthony Buckeridge. Jennings, a schoolboy, is given a printing set and founds a publication, the Form Three Times. He and his friend Darbishire run a poetry competition (as well as a handwriting competition), but only get a few entries, mostly doggerel concerning pirates or cricket. Identifying the final poem as being written in the hand of ‘Venables’, Jennings is deeply impressed – the poem is, in fact, Tennyson’s ‘Break, break, break’. Having read it aloud, Jennings observes that ‘I don’t suppose Wordsworth and Tennyson and all that lot would think much of it, but it’s not bad for a chap of twelve’.29 Jennings and Darbishire struggle desperately to find ‘serious criticisms’, and the most Jennings can must is ‘the way he keeps on repeating “O well”? He says “O well for the fisherman’s boy” and “O well for the sailor lad.” People wouldn’t really say that, would they?’ Darbishire responds,

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‘Perhaps he couldn’t think of anything else to put, so he just thought, “O well,” and let it go at that’.30 The two boys, however, do not have the promised prize for the competition (a sponge cake), and so travel into town to try to get some funds by selling two of the oldest Latin grammars they can find, as they believe them to be valuable first editions. At the shop they find a copy of the Works of Tennyson, and discover that they have been ‘swizzled’.31 Darbishire lingers, all the same, on the ‘lovely poem’, reciting the final two lines to himself, ‘And I would that my tongue could utter / The thoughts that arise in me’, but this is not entirely welcome: Jennings snorted angrily. It was clear that his tongue would have no difficulty in uttering the thoughts that arose in him the next time he met Venables.32 The eventual confrontation is rather a let-down for Jennings, however, as it transpires that Venables had, in fact, entered the poem for the ‘best handwriting’ competition, not as an original poem. We have seen how P. G. Wodehouse thought that Tennyson was being taught in an incorrect manner as early as 1903, and that the poet provided him with reading material while he was incarcerated in Germany. Wodehouse frequently alludes in a jokey manner to this admired poet, not least in Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (1954). It is usually Jeeves who brings up lines of Tennyson, including passages from ‘Sir Galahad’ and ‘Maud’, and humour is usually generated by Bertie Wooster’s apparent lack of interest in poetry. But despite this, he brings up Tennyson himself in this novel, where a chapter begins: I don’t know if you happen to be familiar with a poem called ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ by the bird Tennyson whom Jeeves had mentioned when speaking of the fellow whose strength was the strength of ten.33 Bertie claims that he was forced to recite it to visitors ‘at the age of seven or thereabouts’, and despite many years having passed, I still recall its punch line. The thing goes, as you probably know, Tum tiddle umpty-pum Tum tiddle umpty-pum Tum tiddle umpty-pum and this brought you to the snapperoo or pay-off, which was Someone had blundered. I always remember that bit, and the reason I bring it up now is that, as I stood blinking at this pink-boudoir-capped girl, I was feeling just as those Light Brigade fellows must have felt.34 Wodehouse here uses an ironically inappropriate reference to ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ to highlight both the lack of thought in Bertie’s alluding to

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it, and also, potentially, the generally commonplace citation of a poem which is about the needless deaths of several hundred soldiers. The same poem is also used as a punch-line in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1938), where a newspaper editor finally realizes just how many mistakes he has made in securing the ‘scoop’ of the title and the line ‘Someone had blundered’ appears as a paragraph on its own.35 The assumption of shared familiarity which these examples imply indicates a relatively high level of interest in the poet’s work in the 1960s, backed up by an exhibition held at the Usher Gallery in Lincoln in 1963 of what it had recently acquired from the Tennyson Estate – its ‘Tennyson Collection’, which remains there to this day, though most of it is near-permanently held in storage. A great deal of material from the collection was on display in the 1963 exhibition including personal artefacts, such as the clinical thermometer used during the last days of his life, several family portraits, and some manuscript material, including ‘a tall narrow ledger’ containing part of the manuscript of In Memoriam.36 Following the popularity of this exhibition, just as the Trollopian emerged in the 1940s, almost twenty years later Tennyson criticism had a journal, as the first issue of the Tennyson Research Bulletin was published in 1967.37 But the most major intervention in Tennyson studies of the decade came at the very end, when Christopher Ricks published his masterly critical edition of The Poems of Tennyson, which is still reliable and has only been surpassed by his own revised three-volume edition, published in 1987. This edition was indispensable to scholars of the poet, and it was followed in 1972 by another important book by the same author, entitled Tennyson. In this study, Ricks claims that he is trying to ‘create a sense of what Tennyson in his private life underwent and became; to make an independent exploration of his poetry, seeking to comprehend its special distinction and to establish distinctions; and to suggest some of the relationships between the life and work.’ 38 The book is not a straightforward biography, and yet the links drawn by Ricks between the life and the work are some of the most sensitive and nuanced pieces of Tennyson criticism ever written, not least thanks to Ricks’s willingness to examine the poet’s troubled childhood in greater depth than any critic before him. Ricks, by this point one of the world authorities on the poet thanks to his 1969 edition, does not withhold criticism when he believes it is due. He writes that the Idylls are ‘strikingly uneven’, and that ‘the staple of the verse is insensitive and awkward.’ 39 Even this is part of the book’s central argument, similar to that of T. S. Eliot’s 1936 essay; that Tennyson is a poet of doubt. Another (rather more general) reappraisal of the Victorian period, which includes a fairly detailed discussion of Tennyson, focusing again on religion and the position of art in society, can be found in John Fowles’s 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman. A significant intervention in the appreciation of the Victorian period, the novel is set in the 1860s but through the use of asides and comparisons, its narrator consistently highlights the fact that it is being around a hundred years later. Sam, a servant who is explicitly compared to Sam Weller

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of The Pickwick Papers, is described as wearing clothes ‘quite as sharp as a “mod” of the 1960s’, and in the first chapter of the book the landscape around Lyme Regis on the South coast of Britain is described as ‘Primitive yet complex, elephantine but delicate; as full of subtle curves and volumes as a Henry Moore or a Michelangelo; and pure, clean, salt, a paragon of mass’.40 The narrator of Fowles’s novel both revels in the omniscient style of Victorian fiction and consistently exposes it as an artificial construction. The narrator often mentions Victorian novelists by name, singling out Hardy for particular attention: [T]he tension [. . .] between lust and renunciation, undying recollection and undying repression, lyrical surrender and tragic duty, between the sordid facts and their noble use – energizes and explains one of the age’s greatest writers [Hardy]; and beyond him, structures the whole age itself.41 The narrator elsewhere pathologizes this as ‘schizophrenia’: ‘the fact that every Victorian had two minds [. . .] is the one piece of equipment we must always take with us on our travels back to the nineteenth century. It is a schizophrenia seen at its clearest, its most notorious, in the poets I have quoted from so often – in Tennyson, Clough, Arnold, Hardy [. . .]’.42 The epigraphs are indeed one of the most immediately noticeable quirks of the novel’s style. Each chapter comes replete with at least one quotation from a Victorian text, and more often than not, from a poetic text. In an article on Fowles’s use of epigraphs, Deborah Bowen has claimed that the epigraph was ‘fairly common as the site of authoritative commentary in the nineteenth century romantic novel’.43 At times, the epigraphs in The French Lieutenant’s Woman seem to be fairly straightforward mirrors of action in the novel, in much the same way as Elizabeth Gaskell used them in North and South. For example, chapter 8 begins with the first two stanzas of In Memoriam CXXIII (‘There rolls the deep where grew the tree’).44 These lines introduce a chapter concerned with the protagonist, Charles Smithson, and his enthusiasm for geology, and it is clear that Fowles chose them for their anticipation of Darwin, whose influence bears strong on Smithson. In Memoriam was published before Darwin had written The Origin of Species, and the geologist whose influence is most keenly felt in Tennyson’s poem is Lyell – a scientist who is discussed directly by the narrator in Fowles’s novel (‘Lyell, let me interpose, was the father of modern geology’).45 Other epigraphs are similarly reflected in the action of the chapter, for instance chapter 49 which is introduced by ‘I keep but a man and a maid, ever ready to slander and steal’. This is taken from ‘Maud’, and it seems to echo the action of the chapter, where Sam, who up to this point has followed his master Charles’ orders, has finally decided to leave his employ. A less straightforward instance of the epigraph prefiguring the action of the chapter (and indeed the novel) can be found in chapter 6, which is introduced with the lone epigraph ‘Ah Maud, you milkwhite fawn, you are all unmeet for a wife’.46 Although Ernestina, Charles’ fiancée, is repeatedly described as adhering to the norms of female beauty of the 1860s,

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nonetheless the narrator is frequently caustic about her looks, and as the novel goes on, no matter which ending we decide on as the ‘real’ one (Fowles gives several alternatives), Charles does find her ‘unmeet for a wife’, as he falls dangerously for the ‘French Lieutenant’s Woman’ of the title, Sarah Woodruff, and even in the most ‘conservative’ of the novel’s potential endings, Charles is still infatuated with Woodruff even as he marries his fiancée. Ernestina’s beauty is also un-Tennysonian: Her face was admirably suited to the latter sentiment [disapproval]; it had eyes that were not Tennyson’s ‘homes of silent prayer’ at all, and lower cheeks, almost dewlaps, that pinched the lips together in condign recognition of all that threatened her two life-principles: the one being [. . .] that ‘Civilisation is Soap’ and the other, ‘Respectability is what does not give me offence’.47 The passages concerning Ernestina often form part of the narrator’s attempt to investigate the status of the body in the Victorian period, and Tennyson is caught up in this, in the epigraph from chapter 5. This runs: O me, what profits it to put An idle case? If Death were seen At first as Death, Love had not been, Or been in narrowest working shut, More fellowship of sluggish moods, Or in his coarsest Satyr-shape Had bruised the herb and crushed the grape, And bask’d and batten’d in the woods.48 A footnote several pages later explains the importance of these lines: The stanzas from In Memoriam I have quoted at the beginning of this chapter are very relevant here. Surely the oddest of all the odd arguments in that celebrated anthology of after-life anxiety is stated in this poem (XXXV). To claim that love can be Satyr-shaped if there is no immortality of the soul is clearly a panic flight from Freud. Heaven for the Victorians was largely heaven because the body was left behind – along with the Id.49 Fowles’s Tennysonian epigraphs are taken exclusively from In Memoriam and ‘Maud’. Fowles makes it clear that this would be unlikely to have been the case at the time, in a description of Charles’ travels: He read much, kept a journal of his travels; but it was an exterior thing, about places and incidents, not about his own mind – a mere way of filling time in the long evenings in deserted khans and alberghi. His only attempt to express

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his deeper self was in the way of verse, for he discovered in Tennyson a greatness comparable with that of Darwin in his field. The greatness he found was, to be sure, not the greatness the age saw in the Poet Laureate. Maud, a poem then almost universally despised – considered quite unworthy of the master – became Charles’s favourite; he must have read it a dozen times, and parts of it a hundred. It was the one book he carried constantly with him. His own verse was feeble in comparison; he would rather have died than show it to anyone else.50 We do see a few examples of this stilted, but very definitely Tennysonian, verse in the novel; and the idea of Charles as someone modern before his time is emphasized by his admiration for ‘Maud’, which was not universally popular in the Victorian period. By the 1960s, it still enjoyed a mixed reception, but it was sufficiently popular for Lord David Cecil to include the entire poem in his 1971 Faber selection of Tennyson, taking up 53 of 144 pages (by contrast, In Memoriam covers 13 pages).51 The enthusiasm for ‘Maud’ seems shared between Charles and the narrator of the novel, as the monodrama accounts for twelve of the novel’s Tennysonian epigraphs, compared with In Memoriam’s seven. The ending of the novel makes the union between the sensibilities of 1960s narrator and Victorian protagonist clear. We are told that ‘he has at last found an atom of faith in himself, a true uniqueness, on which to build’, and the novel end ‘And out again, upon the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea’.52 The second half of the sentence is a direct quotation from Matthew Arnold’s ‘To Marguerite’, a poem which just 40 pages earlier the narrator had called ‘perhaps the noblest short poem of the whole Victorian era’. Though the final sentence of the novel is still delivered by the omniscient narrator, the voice belongs equally to Arnold, Fowles, Charles and the narrator – and they are unified by poetry.

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Chapter 7

‘She has a lovely face’:1 Ladies of Shalott 1970–90

Laurence Mazzeno, in his 2004 book Alfred Tennyson: the Critical Legacy, has identified the period 1970–80 as that in which Tennyson was at ‘the height of critical acclaim’.2 If this is something of an overstatement, it is nonetheless true that interest in Tennyson was steadily increasing from the 1960s, culminating, perhaps, in the 1980 publication of Robert Bernard Martin’s Tennyson: the Unquiet Heart, still unsurpassed as a biography of Tennyson. Martin noted that, in contrast to the life of the poet written by Charles Tennyson, there was now no ‘need to justify a study’ of Tennyson, and his biography is sufficiently well-researched and written to be convincing in its speculation on, for example, the Tennysons suffering from hereditary epilepsy.3 Tennyson being central to literary studies in universities and schools in the 1970s is echoed by his prominence in a cluster of novels published in the late 1970s and 1980s – Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood (1976), Tirra Lirra by the River by Jessica Anderson (1978), The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner (1984), Floating Down to Camelot by David Benedictus (1985), as well as Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988) by David Lodge. Almost all the novels considered in this chapter deal with what might be termed a ‘Victorian inheritance’. They are all set in the contemporary world (although Tirra Lirra and Lady Oracle do include lengthy reminiscences about the 1950s and 1960s), and they are all concerned with the status of women in the present day, comparing it with the Victorian past. In some, this is through the juxtaposition of Victorian literature with contemporary ideas about gender and society; but in The Children’s Bach, this is through a contemplation of photographs of the Victorians. The sole reference to Tennyson in The Children’s Bach comes at the very beginning. At first this introductory paragraph appears to be little more than a piece of domestic detail, dwelt on at some length, but there are few parts of the house in which the majority of the book is set which are dwelt on for as long. Dexter found, in a magazine, a photograph of the poet Tennyson, his wife and their two sons walking in the garden of their house on the Isle of Wight. To the modern eye it is a shocking picture: they are all, with the exception of the great man himself, bundled up in such enormous, incapacitating garments.

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Eye-lines: Tennyson looks into the middle distance. His wife, holding his arm and standing very close to his side, gazes up into his face. One boy holds his father’s hand and looks up at him. The other boy holds his mother’s, and looks into the camera with a weak, rueful expression. Behind them, out of focus, twinkles the windy foliage of a great garden. Their shadows fall across the lawn; they have just taken a step. Tennyson’s hands are large square paws, held up awkwardly at stomach level. His wife’s face is gaunt and her eyes are set in deep sockets. It is a photo of a family. The wind puffs out the huge stiff curved sleeve of the woman’s dress, and brushes back off his forehead the long hair of the father’s boy who is turned towards the drama of his parents’ faces; though he is holding his father’s hand, he is separate from the group, and light shows between his tightly buttoned torso and his father’s leg. Dexter stuck this picture up on the kitchen wall, between the stove and the bathroom door. It is torn and stained, and coated with a sheen of splattered cooking grease. It has been there a long time. It is always peeling off, swinging sideways, dangling by one corner. But always, before it quite falls off the wall, someone saves it, someone sticks it back.4 This appears to be a photograph by Oscar Gustav Rejlander, which was perhaps most famously reproduced on the cover of Ann Thwaite’s 1997 biography Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife, where Emily’s coat is reproduced in red, with the rest of the photograph in black and white. The photograph in and of itself is perhaps slightly less than ‘shocking’, and the reason behind its prominence in the novel is unclear, at least at first. There is no doubt that Dexter, the pater familias, is a domineering presence in the household – when his wife is playing the piano, he will approach by stealth and hit the keys with his feet to put her off.5 The story of the novel is that of his wife, Athena, leaving him briefly to have an affair, only to return to find the house in a state of abject squalor, setting about the housework as she had done before. This would paint Dexter as a domineering, brooding presence, and as Nicholas Mansfield has argued, Tennyson’s ‘family, with the father at its centre, admired by a faithful wife and son, and supporting a more or less absent second son, replicates Dexter’s family.’ 6 Dexter is thus presented as a presence which Athena has to try to escape, albeit temporarily. The head of the family is certainly brought to a better awareness of the household as a unit, yet while Athena is away, he eventually sleeps with Vicki, the daughter of one of his friends, who is staying at his house and helping to look after his children. She is drunk when they sleep together, but does not seem to mind, and the next morning she showers: He sat at the ravaged table and watched the girl dry herself with efficient strokes, sawing between her toes and twisting her shoulders to reach the backs of her thighs. This was modern life, then, this seamless logic, this common sense, this silent tit-for-tat. This was what people did. He did not like it. He hated it. But he was in its moral universe now, and he could never go back.7

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What the initial description of the Tennyson photograph shows is that, contrary to what Dexter might think, he has always been in this moral universe, though previously faithful to Athena. His decision to stick the picture up is not, apparently, borne out of any regard for Tennyson’s poetry – his is a musical household, as the title of the book shows, and there is little literary allusion elsewhere in the book. Instead, it seems that, as the continual ‘saving’ of the photograph shows, he decided to stick the photograph up as a semi-ironic comment on his own status as domineering head of the family, but without realizing just how accurate a portrait it might actually be – and Dexter is ultimately lost when Athena ‘escapes’, an exit not available to Emily Tennyson even if she should have desired it. Dexter, as his casual selection of the photograph of Tennyson shows, is implicated in an age-old ‘silent tit-for-tat’ even before Athena leaves the house, and it is only when he appears to be losing that Dexter realizes he is part of this ‘modern life’ – a life which has a fairly precise referent in an eminent Victorian. There is another aspect to the dominance of the photograph, however. It is not necessarily Dexter who ‘saves it, [. . .] sticks it back’, but the less distinct ‘someone’. The traditional, Victorian family structure is thus not necessarily perpetuated by Dexter alone; and at the end of the novel, on Athena’s return, she begins to clean the house before her presence is really acknowledged. It is not certain whether this decision is borne out of a desire to repent, to return to adhering to ‘gender norms’, or simply to clean a house which she is still attached to as part of the family unit. This is why Nicholas Mansfield is right to suggest that the novel ‘dramatizes the contrast between [a] sort of heroic universalising aesthetic, and one that is more specific, contingent and personal.’ 8 The significance of personal experience is at the forefront of another Australian novel (published six years prior to Garner’s book), Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River. One of several novels from this period to concern itself with ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (and indeed to quote the poem in the title of the book), it demonstrates even more clearly its interest in the status of women in post-war society than The Children’s Bach. Although the setting must play its part in the decision to use Tennyson in the title (Tennyson is a suburb of Brisbane, where the majority of the novel is set), just like Alton Locke and Gabriel Hightower before her, Nora Porteous, the narrator of Tirra Lirra, was a Tennyson enthusiast in her youth. Her father’s copy of Tennyson ‘used to open at the right page because I had marked the place with a twist of silk-worm flops, a limp and elongated figure-of-eight’.9 The young Nora is ‘mad about poetry’,10 especially ‘The Idylls of the King and “The Lady of Shalott” ’ – the former separating her from the majority of post-1900 Tennyson enthusiasts. Although she later claims to have read ‘hundreds of novels’,11 Nora does not appear to have read Lawrence – indeed later on she seems to deny herself as a sexual being – nonetheless her youthful acquaintance with Tennyson’s poetry seems to ally her with Yvette Saywell, the heroine of The Virgin and the Gipsy, albeit her enthusiasm for Tennyson is somewhat more internalized. She ‘already had my Camelot’,

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a ‘region of my mind, where infinite expansion was possible’, where ‘no obtrusion’ could ‘prevent the emergence of Sir Lancelot’. The link between Nora and the earlier Anne of Green Gables seems clear here, as the uninspiring landscapes of both characters are transformed through a Tennysonian influence. The impression these lines made on Nora is underlined by her insistence on herself as ‘a person of undisciplined mind’, with ‘couplets, fragments, bits of bright alliteration, and some dark assonance’ in her head, which ‘like Sir Lancelot’s helmet and his helmet feather, burned like one burning flame together’.12 Tennyson is important to Nora because in this novel she writes her life as a quest, of sorts, ‘to outrun oppression’ – her youth is spent ‘waiting’, for something as yet undefined, and she walks at night, often with no particular purpose.13 On a walk, ‘one moonlit night’, she experiences a type of sexual awakening where she unbuttons her bodice and ‘let myself roll into one of these clefts [in a paddock]’.14 She lies with her breasts bared to the moon, in a ‘prolonged trance’, which is only broken by ‘the sound of trampling and tearing, [. . .] from a long way off. I was astonished when I saw the horse moving along the edge of the cleft’.15 The waiting here, in common with that of Yvette Saywell, does seem to be in some way sexual, then, but at a much less conscious level than in Lawrence’s novel; and the desire to outrun oppression does not seem to be purely concerned with sexual oppression – Nora decides, after a while, to let Sydney act as a ‘proxy for Camelot’, a substitution forced upon me by what little common sense I had left’.16 Sydney, however, does not represent the fulfilment of her quest, as she is shackled in an unloving and abusive marriage, and still seems desirous of escape while working (like the Lady of Shalott, she works as a seamstress): In my plans for escape I included no lover, but in my hours of lonely sewing and musing, when my head was bent over my work, and the crow of the backyard rooster rose above the distant hubbub of the primary school, I would become conscious of a heart-swelling hope, a vibrant space at my left side, a yearning in the nerves of my skin.17 Her escape is made to the country of Tennyson’s birth, and a job making theatrical costumes in London, where she enjoys some success and finds contentment. But in old age, she returns to Brisbane (the novel is, in fact, narrated with hindsight, in old age, as Nora recovers from illness in her childhood home), and comes to an epiphany: I believe I have found the river – the real river I disregarded on my first walks and failed to find on my last – because never before have I seen its scoured-out creeks nor known that the shadows of its brown water are lavender at evening. And one day, rising on stairs, fourteen broad planks, I see from above the two discs of a straw boater, a man’s shoulders, trousered legs. Coming closer,

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knees rising, left–right, left–right. At arm’s length now, hat tilts back, face is raised, arms fly out, gather me in. And out of that flurry, a child’s shriek, rising.18 This final epiphany, and the ‘plumes’ she previously spoke of, are finally exposed as ‘the step of a horse, the nod of a plume’, which she remembers seeing ‘at my father’s funeral’.19 The desire to outrun oppression looks rather different in this light, as the desires both to escape, and to return, are indelibly linked to her relationship with her father. The oppression of the father-figure is inseparable in this novel from the desire for reunification with him – which, as with Garner’s novel, leaves the ending open to interpretation – is the narrator ultimately desirous of escape or return? The answer, perhaps, lies in not in the similarities between the Lady of Shalott and Nora, but rather in their differences. Nora’s boorish husband might be a poor substitute for Lancelot, and her Camelot might be substituted by a number of inadequate places and states of mind, but she does not suffer the same fate as the Lady. At the end of the novel, Nora is still alive, if ailing, whereas the ‘curse’ causes the Lady’s undoing; by the time she reaches ‘the first house by the water-side’, she is dead.20 The only explanation the bystanders who discover her barge at Camelot have (at least in the 1842 version of the poem) is her name, written round the prow – the dead body causes concern, and Lancelot is the only person who ‘mused a little space’, saying ‘She has a lovely face; / God in his mercy lend her grace.’ 21 Although he displays less fear than the other inhabitants of Camelot, this is still a fairly trite observation, based on surface appreciation of her beauty as opposed to a genuine understanding. Anderson’s novel, as Dominique Hecq has noted, ‘metaphorically restores the potency of the Lady’s pen in providing her with a literary persona endowed with not one, but several, voices and selves’.22 This modernized Lady of Shalott cannot be summarized with a throwaway comment like ‘She has a lovely face’ – she now has control over the work of art, and can fully express herself – she will never be just a name on a prow, even if, like the Lady, she will be similarly deprived of a full union with her Lancelot. Another protagonist in a novel of roughly the same generation, Joan Foster in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, was similarly transfixed by Tennyson in her youth, though this (like much of Foster’s painful childhood) is presented in a rather more light-hearted manner. Foster moves to London: I wanted castles and princesses, the Lady of Shalott floating down a winding river in a boat, as in Narrative Poems for Juniors, which I studied in Grade Nine. I’d looked up shalott, fatally, in the dictionary: shallot, kind of small onion. The spelling was different but not different enough. I am half-sick of shadows, said The Lady of Small Onion.23

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The question of ‘Shalott’ and ‘Shallot’ confuses students and critics to this day (Professor Eric Griffiths recently confessed to initially making the mistake while writing his paper for the ‘Tennyson’s Futures’ conference in Oxford, March 2009). And the schoolchild’s approach to literature can clearly be seen in the next line which Joan recalls hearing as a schoolgirl: Then there was that other line, which caused much tittering among the boys and embarrassment among the girls: The curse is come upon me, cried The Lady of Shalott. Why did boys think that blood running down a girl’s leg was funny? Or was it terror that made them laugh? But none of it put me off, I was a romantic despite myself, and I really wanted, then, to have someone, anyone, say that I have a lovely face, even if I had to turn into a corpse in a barge-bottom first. Instead of the castles and ladies, though, there was only a lot of traffic and a large number of squat people with bad teeth.24 As we will see, the colloquial phrase ‘curse’, meaning menstruation, can also be found as a semi-joke in David Benedictus’s Floating Down to Camelot. Although primarily used in Atwood’s book as an example of juvenile, corporeal humour getting in the way of the appreciation of poetry, the book is very concerned with women’s bodies in general, and there is a definite sense of a Victorian influence in the presentation of these bodies – and especially the body of Joan Foster. She is an author, one of whose readings is covered by a newspaper thus: ‘Joan Foster, celebrated author of Lady Oracle, looking like a lush Rossetti portrait, radiating intensity, hypnotised the audience with her unearthly. . .’ 25 Foster marries someone named Arthur, and as he comforts her, late in the novel, we find another reference to ‘small onion’: ‘I began to cry. He put his arms around me, I put my arms around him, oozing tears like an orphan, like an onion, like a slug sprinkled with salt.’ 26 The reference to ‘onion’ casts the mind back to her early sympathy with the Lady of ‘Shallot’, and like an Arthurian hero, late in the novel, having been forced to flee to Italy, she writes anonymous postcards to Arthur saying, only half-jokingly, ‘Please rescue’.27 In Lady Oracle we again see a figure who corresponds to the Lady of Shalott given a voice, able to tell more of her story than Tennyson’s Lady or indeed Lancelot, while still adhering to some of the original poem’s narrative. The affinity between Foster and the Lady is underlined in her attempt at automatic writing, which she conducts sitting ‘in front of a mirror, with a paper and pencil and a lighted candle, and then . . . Well, these words would sort of be given to me’.28 These are originally undertaken in an attempt to find out more about Penelope, a character in one of her books (the name seems to have been decided on breezily by Foster, but significantly by Atwood, who would go on to

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retell the Ulysses myth from the perspective of his wife in 2005’s The Penelopeiad). But this offers Foster little, so she starts to ‘automatically write’ from her own standpoint, resulting in the following poem: Who is the one standing in the prow Who is the one voyaging under the sky’s arch, under the earth’s arch under the arch of arrows in the death bed, why does she sing She kneels, she is bent down under the power her tears are dark her tears are jagged her tears are the death you fear Under the water, under the water sky her tears fall, they are dark flowers 29 Although Foster admits that ‘I wasn’t at all sure what this meant’,30 she perseveres, and is provided with the plot of her novel Lady Oracle, whose title derives from another snatch of verse: He sits on the iron throne She is one and three The dark lady the redgold lady the blank lady oracle of blood, she who must be obeyed forever Her glass wings are gone She floats down the river singing her last song 31 The title is suggested by her publisher, who thinks it suggestive of ‘The women’s movement, the occult, all of that’.32 She had written formulaic ‘costume Gothic’ romances prior to this under a pseudonym, but worries immensely about the new book – about what its sexual politics might mean for her relationship with Arthur, and also what her newfound and unwanted fame might mean for her (semi-unwitting) activities as a radical left-wing activist embroiled in amateurish terrorism. The culmination of this is a decision to fake her own suicide – by pretending to drown off a small boat, in keeping with the Lady of Shalott theme – and then to flee to Italy.

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The increase in interest in Victorian spiritualism at the tail end of the twentieth century often led novelists writing ‘neo-Victorian’ – The increase fiction to contemplate Tennyson, whose In Memoriam is, after all, something close to an attempt to converse with the dead. Atwood’s novel is far from neo-Victorian, and the automatic writing in her novel is concerned with exploring the self as opposed to communicating with others, but from the lines above it is clear just how important ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is to the novel as a whole. These poems provide the serious, alarming counterbalance to the generally tongue-in-cheek method of narration in the novel, and they demonstrate that the ‘Lady of Small Onion’ is symptomatic of the novel in general – both light-hearted and yet concerned with a very serious and in-depth consideration of issues relating to gender in the post-war period. Atwood’s approach is not quite satirical, and yet several satires published in the early to mid-1980s also concern Tennyson – and, specifically, ‘The Lady of Shalott’, in the case of David Benedictus’s novel Floating Down to Camelot. A campus comedy set in Cambridge, which Benedictus began during a stay as a visiting fellow at Churchill College, the book offers a panoramic view of university life, with characters including undergraduates, postgraduates, academics, their spouses, and their parents. Near the beginning of a poem, Helen, an undergraduate, attends a lecture on ‘Tennyson and the Romantic Idyll’, which focuses on ‘The Lady of Shalott’.33 The atmosphere of the book already seem concerned with images of Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite femininity, as Gillian Gee, an artist who is married to a philosopher, asks, Why do artists always portray Ophelia so peaceful in the river, floating, her silver belly to the ochre sky, gaping at the clouds? Don’t they know that death brings no releases? [. . .] It’s a choice of torments. This one [. . .] or the worse one. 34 The theme of female death by water (if not in the water) is also found in ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and Hilda Leeks, an academic in the novel, lectures on Victorian poetry, claiming that ‘With the Victorian poets you could safely assume that drowned girls were either crazed or pregnant; occasionally both.’ 35 As we read her first lecture on Tennyson, which is, at times, presented in one column, with various audience responses in another, it becomes clear that the novel is concerned with the position of the literature of the past, in the present. After an American student, who is at the lecture by accident, leaves the hall ‘like Sir Lancelot setting out on a quest’,36 the lecturer begins by saying that, although Tennyson ‘had fallen out of fashion’, and was a poet who ‘[w]hen he tried to write Great Truths he wrote Twaddle’, nonetheless, ‘his romantic medievalism’ had never gone out of fashion.37 Hilda Leeks has little time for ‘The Lady of Shalott’, but still devotes a lecture to the poem, which according to her had ‘been traditionally handed out to adolescent girls much as iron pills and contraceptive advice had been handed out to them – whether they needed them or not’.38 This offhand

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comment might explain why it features so prominently in accounts of female adolescence in the work of writers as diverse as Lawrence, Atwood, Wilder and Anderson. The approach Leeks takes is informed by both Modernism and feminism – thus she offers ‘a short digression comparing Tennyson with Swinburne and Hopkins from a technical point of view (Tennyson was inferior)’, and goes on to ask why Tennyson’s heroines are ‘so passive’; it also predates Marion Shaw’s rather more nuanced assessment of Tennyson’s work from a feminist perspective, which was published in 1988.39 The humour of the situation the baffled students find themselves in is mined in the two-column part of the lecture scene, where she ponderously remarks on ‘the curse is come upon me’, ‘Did Tennyson know that poltergeists usually attack adolescent girls with problems of suppressed sexuality? Was this the problem, one wonders, with ‘Maud’?’, which is juxtaposed with the immediate response of ‘almost everyone’: ‘Who the hell was Maud?’ 40 Benedictus here accurately skewers the tendency of some academics to presuppose a very high level of knowledge, even in introductory lectures. Benedictus revels in the presentation of the lecture, and makes it clear that Helen, probably the most sympathetic character in the novel, is not entirely won over, as she ‘prefer[s] the eighteenth century anyway’ – which does not stop Tennyson’s poem from recurring in her thoughts over and over again throughout the week in which the novel is set.41 When she first sees John Gee, who ‘even without his gown [. . .] was an impressive figure’, she is reminded of the first glimpse of Lancelot in the poem, five lines of which are quoted; and in rather more prosaic fashion, and following Atwood, she excuses herself from having sexual intercourse with Bill, a postgraduate, as ‘the curse is come upon me’.42 The book’s Arthurian hero is the American from the initial lecture scene, however, and his name is, fittingly, Lance (an abbreviated form of ‘Lancelot’ that is also used by Meg Cabot in her 2006 novel Avalon High). He swans into lectures and is treated with ironic reverence in the novel – once he has left a lecture hall, it is described ‘like Shalott the day after the Lady floated away’.43 As Lance increasingly resembles the novel’s Arthurian hero, so Helen sees herself more and more as the Lady of Shalott. Sitting in her room in ‘Victorian Gothic’ halls,44 she experiments with her mirror: The swallows were on their way, the skates of their wings cutting figurations in the frozen sky from which the stars had been bleached. Helen framed the sky in the gilt of her mirror. It was finer, her mirror, than the finest Goya, for within its mercury was contained an infinity of pictures. It showed her whatever she chose to see and, by the tiniest adjustment, it showed her herself. ‘But in her web she still delights To weave the mirror’s magic sights For often through the silent nights A funeral, with plumes and lights And music, went to Camelot . . .’ 45

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Her halls of residence are referred to simply as ‘Shalott’ soon afterwards, and she tells a policeman that ‘There have been plenty of women put love before life’ – we are informed that here she is ‘thinking of Elaine and the Lady of Shalott’.46 It is not clear if she is putting love before life, but as she writes an essay she contemplates death in some detail, begining, ‘That the Victorians were halfway in love with death is a . . .’ only to berate herself because this ‘seemed like nonsense’.47 She has unthinkingly assimilated Keats’s line ‘Many a time / I have been half in love with easeful death’ into a discussion of the Victorians,48 and concludes her efforts, writing on the ‘last piece of paper she could find’ the following: ‘I neither know nor care about the Victorians, their poets, or those who read their poems [. . .] All I do know is that I find the idea of death appealing and I suppose that there have been, and still are, others who feel the same’.49 Atwood’s examination of the implications of ‘The Lady of Shalott’, as well as Anne of Green Gables’s near-drowning, hinted at the dangers for women of becoming overly besotted by the poem, but Benedictus goes much further. Helen’s idea of the appeal of death combines with Lance’s research interests, and she agrees to have herself frozen for ten years. Lance calls her ‘Sleeping Beauty’, but it is clear she resembles another Tennysonian heroine: ‘Flute music was plying. She was lying supine in the tank, her hair, spread about her face, giving the appearance of a waterlily. She was naked.’ 50 This final vision of Helen is contrasted with the painting which Hilda Leeks – who had previously only painted picturesque watercolours of east Anglia and Cambridgeshire – is working on at the end of the novel. A family of ducks is walking along the bank of the Cam, as people punt: Hilda Leeks was painting the scene, but how strangely she transformed it! The river was blood and the banks were thighs. The beaks of the ducks were scissors and the punt was empty. Razor blades of barley grew on either side of the river, and in the distance a gigantic horse, awash with foam and with saliva dripping from yellow teeth neighed at the sky. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ was the picture’s title, and, though its value in the salerooms of the world was to be considerable, there are few of my acquaintances who would care to have it hanging on their walls.51 Again we see the association between the colloquial ‘curse’ of menstruation and the curse of the poem; a horse inspires fear, as it did for Nora in Tirra-Lirra by the River. This is a rather different female interpretation of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ than the one offered by, say, Elizabeth Bishop; it anticipates other feminist interpretations of Tennyson in the 1980s, such as Marion Shaw’s 1988 monograph. Benedictus, as is clear from his treatment of Tennyson’s poem throughout the novel, is at once jocular and deadly serious, and even if the novel itself struggles under the amount of ideas crammed into it, the engagement with Tennyson is fruitful and apposite, sympathetic to contemporary ideas about the Victorian while remaining sceptical of their long-term potential, and appreciative of the poet’s undoubted merits.

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Another novel which (briefly) deals with Tennyson’s place in university education is David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988). Although the dominant works of Victorian literature with which the novel is concerned are the Victorian social problem novels of writers such as Gaskell and Dickens, nonetheless Tennyson is discussed in some detail near the end of the novel. Robyn Penrose, a lecturer on a temporary contract at the University of Rummidge, has been on a work shadowing programme with Vic Marks, who runs a local factory. They eventually travel to Germany together, where her knowledge of German helps him secure a favourable deal on tractors, and they sleep together. A period of separation follows, but Vic arrives at Robyn’s office the next term, to restart the shadowing placement – this time, he is to attend her tutorials and lectures. The first tutorial is on Tennyson, who Vic has not read in preparation, and a student called Marion reads her paper on ‘The struggle between optimism and pessimism in Tennyson’s verse’.52 Vic raises his hand when Marion suggests that the lines from ‘Locksley Hall’, ‘Let the great work spin for ever, down the ringing grooves of change’,53 ‘reflected the confidence of the Victorian Railway age’.54 Vic correctly observes that ‘He must have been thinking of trams, not trains’, and there ensues a long discussion about the difference, and whether it is in fact important. Typically in a Lodge novel, the trivial is in fact important – Vic’s literal, but ultimately accurate, reading, squares up against Robyn’s faltering description of the lines as first a ‘metaphor’, then a ‘metonymy inside a metaphor’, a ‘synechdoche: part for a whole’, and finally a ‘kind of accidental aporia’.55 ‘Evidently encouraged by the success of his intervention’, Vic chimes in again, and claims that the lover in ‘Maud’ singing ‘Come into the garden, Maud’ is singing ‘a well-known song to his girl’, as Vic had heard his own ‘grandad’ singing it – only to be sternly corrected by Robyn that the poem predates the song, leaving Vic to languish in a ‘hurt silence’.56 At the end of the tutorial, Vic cites some of ‘Locksley Hall’ of which he approves, which Robyn curtly observes she ‘might have guessed you would lap up’.57 But, as the novel mirrors a Victorian social problem novel, and as this is near the end of the book, the late disagreements are paving the way for a rapprochement. Vic sits in as Robyn is effectively told she will not be kept on, and stands up for her, also doing a great deal of reading for the shadowing, including Brontë, George Eliot, Arnold and Tennyson, who he likes best – ‘I never thought I’d like reading poetry, but I do. I like to learn bits off by heart and recite them to myself in the car.’ The lines he picks are ‘In my life there was a picture, she that clasped my neck had flown; / I was left within the shadow, sitting on the wreck alone’ (Ricks no. 417: ll. 15–16) Robyn calls it ‘rather beautiful’, and Vic calls it ‘rather appropriate’, which annoys her – but she does not know where it comes from – ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’, a poem she has never read – and Vic, hearing this, is ‘childishly pleased’.58 The novel ends, again, in keeping with Victorian conventions – Robyn inherits a great deal of money and invests in Vic’s new business, and she is able to keep her job at Rummidge. Although Lodge is a theoretically inclined critic, his novels always evince an awareness of alternative modes of interpretation, with a sense that literature

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ultimately transcends theoretical pigeonholes. Tennyson serves as the best example of this in Nice Work – taught by Robyn mainly to demonstrate certain aspects of the Victorian age, and with only a passing acknowledgment of literary beauty, the most un-literary eyes of a factory owner help her to see aspects of this she had not before realized, as well as focusing her own, at times, overly jargonistic approach to literary interpretation. One of the central ideas in Lodge’s fiction is that there is no one definitive ‘answer’ to what constitutes the ‘right way’ to analyse a text, as can be seen in Small World (1984). The novel deals with the impact of structuralism on academia, and ends with a showdown at an MLA conference in New York about the future of criticism, with traditionalists like Philip Swallow up against converts to literary theory like Morris Zapp, who wears a pin badge which reads ‘Every Decoding Is Another Encoding’.59 The novel’s hero, Persse McGarrigle, finds himself on his feet, asking the final question of the session, which is ‘What do you do if everybody agrees with you?’.60 There is no time for answers, but the question informs Lodge’s entire approach to writing fiction that discusses differing approaches to literary criticism at such length – the juxtapositions are what give Lodge’s novel, and by extension literary studies in general, life. This is also linked to Lodge’s other major concern in the novel – the idea of grail quests. As with conclusions in literary studies ultimately being endlessly deferred, so a central concern in the novel is demonstrating – through Persse’s search for an American postgraduate he is in love with – that grail narrative offers an equally endlessly deferred meaning. Texts which recur in the novel include The Waste Land and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (so ostensibly important to the former), but a minor character, Miss Maiden, who pops up to discuss grail quests, also thinks of Tennyson, and quotes ten lines of his ‘The Holy Grail’ to illustrate her reference to the Siege Perilous.61 Philip Swallow, somewhat unwillingly hailed as the leader of the ‘English school’ of traditional criticism, identifies it, to her joy. Lodge’s typically even-handed approach, then, does not intrinsically prefer the Modernist Eliot to the Victorian Tennyson.

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Chapter 8

‘A Hundred Years After’:1 Tennyson at Another Turn of the Century

The centenary of Tennyson’s death, in 1992, saw the poet’s work resonate in odd as well as familiar places. The rapper Method Man recites part of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ in the introduction to his 1993 song ‘What the Blood Clot’, seemingly for no reason other than the song and the poem both being concerned with violence. A year before this, to commemorate the centenary of Tennyson’s death, the Times Literary Supplement occasioned a series of (mostly male) figures from the world of literature to ‘reflect on Tennyson’s achievement and influence’ in a piece entitled ‘A Hundred Years After’.2 Many of the contributors wrote of their early years in which a prejudice against the poet was a prerequisite – Andrew Motion describing his first encounter with the poet’s work at university, where ‘All I could hear were the taunts of Joyce and Auden: Lord Tennyson was Lawn Tennyson; he had a nearly perfect ear but he was stupid’, and Kingsley Amis writing that when he was first exposed to the poet’s work in the 1930s, he was at ‘the nadir of his reputation among those starting to read poetry’, not least because ‘he was popular with antiquated persons like Mr. Oakley, who taught me Latin’.3 The lingering influence of Modernism here is clear, as writers who were born some thirty years apart describe a similar antipathy. Most of the writers in the survey go on to describe a particular moment of revelation where the poet’s gifts are made clear – for Amis, it was the discovery of Tennyson’s poem ‘Milton’, and for Motion a rare evening of reading poetry aloud, when a friend read ‘Audley Court’ and ‘the scales fell from my eyes’.4 Twentieth-century criticism and biographical discoveries meant that Terry Eagleton felt able to claim in the same feature that ‘if Queen Victoria had appreciated the well-nigh psychotic disturbance which inhabits some of these poems, it is unlikely that they would have remained among her favourite bedside reading’.5 This is an often-held view in the twentyfirst century – that Eliot’s ‘very much more interesting and tragic Tennyson’ was incapable of being fully understood by his Victorian peers (to an extent, this idea had already been undermined by John Fowles). The idea is founded, no doubt, in part on Eliot’s very sensitive and influential study of the poet, but it is also based on the anti-Victorian, pro-Modernist prejudice which emerged in the 1920s, epitomized by Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s 1927 A Survey of

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Modernist Poetry where unlike in The Waste Land, ‘length in such poems [as the Idylls] means bulk.’ 6 Hugh Kenner wrote in 1960 that Tennyson’s lyric ‘O Swallow, Swallow’ from The Princess is the work of ‘an earthbound poet, grounded in an iron time’; the Victorian poem is a ‘solo, not a folk ritual’ like The Waste Land.7 This reveals a hierarchy, like that outlined by Graves and Riding, in which the Modernist poet can transcend the ‘iron time’ of Victorian poetry, with all the industrial, mundane and historically specific (in the suggestion of ‘iron age’) implications of such a phrase, and achieve something apparently universal in his work – an ambition that the Victorians were by implication incapable of realizing. The same sort of hierarchy was maintained by Craig Raine in his 2006 book on Eliot, which claimed that Tennyson ‘doesn’t have Eliot’s mischievous, modernist cynicism’: the Victorian is by contrast a poet of ‘the obvious emotions, those standard, strong emotions that every one will admit to’.8 In 1992 some critics were even less measured than Raine, most notably Tom Paulin, who saw Tennyson as ‘the original National Heritage Poet’, whose work epitomizes ‘all that is bogus, self-parodic, dishonest, false and dead-as-doornails in the culture’.9 Tennyson reminds Paulin of ‘a solemn Victorian statue of King Alfred which I once saw in a dreary market town somewhere in the South of England’, thanks to his ‘simple-minded patriotism, the deep racism, the professional Angst and gravid sonorous chill of the verse.’ 10 Though Paulin maintains the association between the medieval king and the Victorian laureate, this is some distance from the ‘lordly line’ of ‘Alfred to Alfred’ which Francis Turner Palgrave described in 1892.11 Paulin thinks that Christina Rossetti, Clough, Browning and Hopkins are ‘much more gifted poets,’ 12 but admits that this stems from an ‘early exposure to sprung rhythm’, manifested in the work of Hopkins of which he remains a vociferous champion.13 In this, he is clearly following in the footsteps of Hopkins himself, as Paulin detailed in slightly greater length in 1995’s ‘The Critic at the Breakfast Table’. In a short entry on ‘Doubt’, Paulin presents Hopkins’s doubt of Tennyson as the catalyst for his entire poetic enterprise – it was ‘the key which enabled him to escape the prison of that fake classical style, to mash his way out of what Matthew Arnold called the tradition of the “full vowel” ’.14 Paulin, like Leavis before him, sees this as the beginning of Modernism, citing Eliot and Joyce as fellow Tennyson-doubters, ‘because they want to find and define their own styles against his. They want to resist his encroachment, his imperial rhetoric, his lack of any excitement’.15 There is, however, a problem with this united Hopkins–Eliot–Joyce–Paulin front of shared opposition – Paulin quotes very selectively (for instance, attributing ‘Alfred Lawn Tennyson’ to Joyce, as opposed to Stephen Dedalus), and coming to questionable conclusions – so ‘gentleman poet’ is read as a description of ‘a gifted amateur who belongs at a tennis match in the home counties – Tennyson is Wimbledon, the summery status quo’.16 This ‘modern unity’ in opposition to Tennyson is also located – though in a somewhat more ironized form – in J. M. Coetzee’s semi-autobiographical novel of 2007, Diary of a Bad Year. The book is split into three parts on each page – at

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the top is a series of short, ethical essays by a novelist known as ‘J. C.’; in the middle we find his account of the process of writing this, and his dealings with a new cleaner-cum-typist; and the bottom is the typist’s account. The passage concerning Tennyson comes in a part entitled ‘On Boredom’, where ‘J. C.’ discusses his schooldays, when he was: convinced that the boredom endemic among my contemporaries was a sign of their higher nature, that it expressed a tacit judgment on whatever it was that bored them, and therefore that whatever bored them should be looked down on for failing to meet their legitimate human needs.17 This leads him to the odd conclusion that ‘when my schoolfellows were bored by poetry, for instance, I concluded that poetry itself was at fault, that my own absorption in poetry was deviant, culpable, and above all immature’.18 He is led to this conclusion partly by ‘modern’ poetry criticism: ‘To the truly modern poet nothing could be more retrograde and contemptible than a liking for Tennyson’, and: The fact that my classmates were bored by Tennyson proved to me, if proof were needed, that they were the authentic if unconscious bearers of the new, modern sensibility. Through them the Zeitgeist pronounced its stern judgment on the Victorian age, and on Tennyson in particular. As for the troublesome fact that my classmates were equally bored (to say nothing of being baffled) by T. S. Eliot, this was to be explained by a lingering effeteness in Eliot, a failure on his part to measure up to their brusque masculine standards. It did not occur to me that my classmates found poetry boring – as they found all their school subjects boring – because they could not concentrate.19 The young ‘J. C.’, then, allies himself with Eliot in opposition to Tennyson, as a kindred ‘modern’. Though it might not appear so at first, there is a similar engagement with colonial matters here as in the Northern Irish Paulin’s response. ‘J. C.’ grew up in South Africa, like Coetzee himself, leaving to write an MA thesis on Ford Madox Ford. A shared interest in Modernism, and a sense of a ‘modern sensibility’, demonstrate that the young Coetzee (and ‘J. C.’) willingly bought into the idea of a universal, modern sensibility, at a time when T. S. Eliot had finished writing poetry (Coetzee was born in 1940, which means that this schoolroom episode is likely to have taken place in the mid-1950s). The mimicry of a Modernist construction of self which is itself retrospective and deliberate is gently mocked by the older Coetzee here, especially in the reference to ‘brusque masculine standards’, where all poetry, and by extension all art generally, is found wanting. This at once supports, albeit in a negative sense, the idea of a universal modern sensibility, as well as undermining it. Postcolonial approaches to nineteenth-century Britain are often found in fictional reappraisals of the Victorian age, as part of a wider movement which

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attempts to reinvigorate the Victorian period by focusing not only on what is left out of Victorian fiction (which I will go into in more detail later on), but also on historical figures. Tennyson has featured as a character in several of these fictional re-engagements with history (indeed the tradition of creating a ‘Tennyson’ character in a fictional work stretches as far back as Woolf’s Freshwater, and perhaps even to Ulysses), not least Lynne Truss’s 1996 novel Tennyson’s Gift. Although Tennyson’s Gift shares much of its humour with Freshwater, the novel is a lot more developed in terms of plot, and theories of photography, than Woolf’s play. The cast of characters, too, is more expansive – in addition to the Freshwater set (which includes, again in common with Woolf’s play, the ‘longbearded’ G. F. Watts and Ellen Terry),20 we meet a fictional American showman phrenologist on tour, and also in the small Isle of Wight town is Lewis Carroll, hoping to add the Laureate to the list of famous writers of his acquaintance. The manner in which Truss presents Carroll’s attempts to befriend such literary giants is indicative of the tone of the novel in general – Christina Rossetti’s demand ‘Be off with you! What are you doing in my drawing room?’ 21 is the kind of reaction Carroll is used to getting – and the presentation of Carroll to the reader again demonstrates the tone of the novel: It is a very warm day, but Dodgson’s only thoughtful concession to holiday garb is a pale boater added to his clerical black. Perspiration gathers at his collar and in his armpits, but since this is just the sort of discomfort a midVictorian gentleman is obliged to put up with, he refuses to take notice.22 The Tennyson we are presented with is the subject of equally affectionate mockery, with his ‘mournful, barking recital manner reminiscent of an expiring moose’; his sensitivity to reviews is revealed as largely make-believe, but it is spectacularly overindulged by his family, with Emily Tennyson reduced to burying reviews which arrive by post around the garden and tearing out and swallowing any references to the poet which appear in Punch.23 Elsewhere Truss demonstrates a keen understanding both of Tennyson’s general character and also of Victorian scientific development: If the sea defences were knocked down at Freshwater Bay, the waters would merge, and the West Wight become a tiny island of its own, as perhaps it once was. But in 1864 a small isthmus keeps the Isle of Wight in one piece, and that highly insular poet Tennyson is obliged to put up with it, here at the quiet limit of the world. From his windows at Farringford, he can survey the Afton Down, which he says dates back four hundred million years. From the top of his cliff, he can look to the Needles, stately in their lucid mist. He appreciates grand views. It has been shrewdly observed by modern critics that in Tennyson’s poetry, there is no middle distance – things are either big and far, or small and near. Had Victorian opthalmology been more advanced, the history of English poetry might have been quite other.24

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This gently parodic approach, at once alive to the quality of Tennyson’s verse and the potential of its being adapted to mundane ends (as in the snatch of ‘Tithonus’ alluded to above), stems from Truss’s desire to juxtapose the seriousness of Victorian ‘Great Men’ such as Tennyson with their rather less grandiose domestic (and corporeal) situations, and with the other side of Victorian literature and culture as manifested in the novel by Carroll – the humour and absurdity of the Alice books. This is also a reflection of Truss’s keen interest in the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron (Truss has written a short book on the Tennyson circle for the National Portrait Gallery in London), and her particular focus on the unreality of Cameron’s photographs – in the novel we find the photographer instructing the children in her household to paint red roses so they are actually white, to fully reflect the wording of the ‘flower garden scene’ in ‘Maud’.25 Truss writes on her website, retrospectively, of the novel’s fate: Tennyson’s Gift got great reviews when it came out, but it sold around 2000 copies and I was heart-broken. It suffered, partly because Penguin Books was in upheaval, editorially – but also, I think, because you should never put the name Tennyson in the title of a book and expect it to sell.26 The novel has enjoyed something of a renaissance with Truss’s rise to fame as the author of the grammar book Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, but the claim of Tennyson’s name being an impediment to success is significant, not least because novels with Tennysonian titles, as we have seen, have enjoyed not inconsiderable acclaim and sales since the early twentieth century. Perhaps the seriousness which Truss punctures so acutely is still too readily associated with the poet’s name, while the quality of his verse is less of an impediment to the average British book-buyer. A reimagination of an earlier period in Tennyson’s life, his friendship with Arthur Hallam, provided the plot for an episode of the BBC series Bonekickers in 2008. A programme inspired by the ‘alternative histories’ of Dan Brown, the final episode dealt with the discovery of the true Excalibur. The clues for the location of this sword were found via the discovery of Tennyson’s love-letters to Hallam, not in fact destroyed, which proved that they had enjoyed a homosexual affair, and also showed that the Apostles were a secret society devoted to the protection of the sword, who conspired to assassinate Hallam, who was threatening to divulge their secret. The programme was universally panned for being laughably farfetched (the Tennyson episode required a team of archaeologists to all have In Memoriam by heart), and a much more thoughtful fictional engagement with the young Tennyson and Hallam can be found in A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Conjugal Angel’, one of two novellas which make up Angels and Insects (1992). Byatt has said that her decision to write novels which deal with the Victorian period were ‘to do with rescuing the complicated Victorian thinkers from modern diminishing parodies like those of Fowles and Lytton Strachey, and from the disparaging mockery (especially of the poets) of Leavis and T. S. Eliot’.27 Her most famous novel which deals with the Victorian poets is Possession (1990),

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set, in the main, in the academic world of the 1980s but dealing with the discovery of a relationship between two Victorian poets. There is very little Tennyson in the novel – Byatt invented the two poets in question and modelled ‘their’ poetry on that of Browning and Dickinson.28 However, references to Tennyson abound in Byatt’s other novels – Julian in The Children’s Book (2009) wonders [. . .] how different his life would have been ‘If Gerald could have loved Florence, as Arthur Henry Hallam [. . .] had apparently come to love Tennyson’s sister Emily’,29 and Tom in the same novel ‘had had a habit since childhood of inserting his imagination into Sir Gareth, in Tennyson’s “Gareth and Lynette” ’.30 After Possession, Byatt’s next most sustained discussion of Victorian poetry, and more specifically Tennyson, can be found in Angels and Insects, a 1992 book composed of two novellas, ‘Morpho Eugenia’ and ‘The Conjugal Angel’; both contain references to Tennyson, who even appears as a character in the latter. ‘Morpho Eugenia’ is a story about the impact of Darwin, the Victorian study of natural history, and, perhaps most significantly, the relationship between science and literature. The main investigation of this relationship comes through the decision of the main scientist, William Adamson, to turn his study of patterns of ant behaviour into anthropomorphic short stories which will appeal to adults and children alike, but throughout the discussions of Darwin and faith, Tennyson recurs as a touchstone of reference. Adamson reads poetry – Browning’s ‘Home-Thoughts, from Abroad’ are quoted when he recalls his homesickness in his days in the Amazon – and when discussing the existence of God, he says, ‘[T]he Creation we so admire does not appear to have a Creator who cares for his creatures. Nature is red in tooth and claw, as Mr Tennyson put it’.31 On the other side of the debate over Darwin and religion is his father-inlaw, the Reverend Harald Alabaster, who also invokes Tennyson as an authority, and in one of his tracts on the subject he quotes In Memoriam LIV (‘An infant crying in the night’) and interprets it: ‘Was it not a true leading that enabled Mr Tennyson to become again as a little child, and feel the Fatherhood of the Lord of Hosts?’.32 Harald is not fully aware of the balance of faith and doubt which is struck in these lines, and his convictions are undermined by the self-importance which allows him to pose as an authority in this manner; and as we will see, one of the central facets of neo-Victorian engagements with Tennyson is the way in which they present his work as common knowledge in many walks of life, used for many different purposes. The cynical would claim, like Christian Gutleben, that ‘the quotation is not used to further the argument but to embellish the textual appearance, to enhance the formal presentation’,33 but Adamson and Alabaster’s quotations are not only window-dressing; they are intended to demonstrate how Tennyson was cited as an authority by very different intellectual movements in the Victorian period. Neo-Victorian writing does, however, often contain quotations from Tennyson which serve little purpose other than to ‘set the scene’, and it is the other story in Angels and Insects, ‘The Conjugal Angel’, which deals more intimately (in several senses of the word) with Tennyson.

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Byatt’s novella does not rely on the reader knowing Tennyson to function as a piece of writing, but it would be greatly diminished without at least some awareness of his work, and indeed of his personal history. The first part discusses the guests at a late Victorian séance in Margate, including characters named Captain and Mrs Jesse. Mrs Papagay, who runs the séances, seems to hear from her dead husband, Arturo, whose messages include the phrase ‘Naughty-lus tangle-shells sand sand break break breaker c.f.f.c. naughty Lilas’.34 Those who know a fair amount about the Tennyson family would already know that Mrs Jesse is Alfred Tennyson’s sister, and the result of Mrs Papagay’s ‘automatic writing’ is certainly a reference to Tennyson – it conflates ‘Break, break, break’ with In Memoriam X (‘Should toss with tangle and with shells’)35 – the words probably come from Mrs Papagay’s memory, since, as we go on to learn, the séances are dominated by Emily Jesse’s desire to hear from Arthur Henry Hallam (‘With whom, for some reason, they were none of them, not even Sophy Sheeky, able to establish communication’).36 The reader who is unacquainted with the history of Alfred Tennyson’s sister would not necessarily miss the allusion in the automatic writing, but the full significance of it – the reflection of how the séances are dominated by Hallam – only becomes clear later, where another spiritualist, Sophie Skeeky, is described: Sophy Sheeky knew large runs of In Memoriam by heart. She liked poems, it appeared, though she could never get interested in novels, a curious quirk of taste.37 Later, Sophy will recite parts of ‘Mariana’ to herself. This general knowledge of Tennyson’s poems might explain just how often his words come up in the séances. When the automatic writing draws up ‘Thy dark freight a vanished life’, from In Memoriam X, Captain Jesse identifies it and his wife snaps: Richard, stop talking [. . .] everyone knows that line is from my brother’s poem. The spirits often speak to us through that poem, it seems to be a particular favourite with them, and not only in this house, where it has its natural central place in our thoughts, but in many others, many others.38 We do not, however, witness ‘many others’, and it is clear that the atmosphere is particularly Tennysonian at these séances. It should be noted that in several other novels which deal with Victorian spiritualism, Tennyson’s work makes an appearance – in John Harwood’s The Séance (2008), where one of the principal characters, John Montagu, remembers his deceased wife’s distaste for the sound of the sea, which was ‘melancholy and oppressive: I would more than once catch her murmuring, half-unconsciously, “Break, break, break, on thy cold grey stones, O sea. . .” ’.39 She dies shortly after they are married, and for a while he has a dread of hearing ‘waves upon shingle’, but over time, the words he hears as he listens to the sea are ‘not “Break, break, break” but “the sword outwears its

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sheath, and the soul wears out the breast” ’.40 Tennyson’s words also recur to Mr Hither, a spiritualist, in Sarah Waters’s 1999 novel Affinity. Margaret Prior, a lonely, rich young woman, has become increasingly interested in spiritualism, and asks him if he is ‘aware of spirits, all about you?’ He replies, ‘I catch glimpses, only – “a little flash, a mystic hint”, as Mr Tennyson has it’.41 The choice is apt – in In Memoriam XLIV, Tennyson asks ‘How fares it with the happy dead?’ 42 The climax of ‘The Conjugal Angel’ comes in the juxtaposition of Alfred Tennyson and Emily Jesse. Elsewhere, Byatt has claimed to have little time for overtly feminist reappraisals of the Victorian age, and in particular appraisals of Victorian literature: Literary scholarship has treated women unfairly for many generations. But some of the attempts by feminist critics to put this right have caused two things to happen that I don’t like: one is that a lot of women students read nothing but writing by women – and I think one should always read writing by both sexes – and another is that they are discovering not very good writers and saying these are our forebears, we must say they were very good writers. It is no good, I think, trying to claim that Elizabeth Barrett Browning is anywhere near as good a poet as Robert. It distorts our literary judgment to be driven into a corner and to have to do that.43 Notwithstanding this approach to feminist literary criticism of the 1980s and early 1990s (by implication, and the choice of Barrett Browning, one assumes that Byatt is referring to critics such as Angela Leighton), it seems clear that ‘The Conjugal Angel’ is a feminist enterprise, like much neo-Victorian fiction, and this is clearest in the juxtaposition of Tennyson and his sister. If she was wholly truthful with herself, she remembered the sight of those two male backs, those two pairs of eagerly climbing legs, going up to the attic with the white beds, with the sensations of one excluded from Paradise.44 The discussions the young Tennyson and Hallam have are intensely poetic, and as Emily listens in to their recitals of Keats, ‘she knew the words, she could add the rest, as the rhythm hummed’.45 As we will see when we come to discuss Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, the idea of women in the Victorian age being denied all the pleasures afforded men, especially literary pleasures, is often highlighted in neo-Victorian fiction. Byatt’s novella is all the more forceful for its investigation of this issue being so personal. Emily Tennyson/ Jesse’s mourning for Hallam is approached via In Memoriam, which ‘had reawakened much that had lain quiet. Alfred’s mourning had been long and steadfast. It put hers, however fierce, however passionate, ultimately to shame’.46 Byatt might well have been aware of her inversion of Verlaine’s criticism, that ‘when [Tennyson] should have been broken-hearted [. . .] he had many reminiscences’.47

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The issue of gender is again brought up when Emily muses on the implications of In Memoriam, which ‘in some curious way, which could be poetic tact, the poem had made Alfred into Arthur’s widow’ – ‘Alfred had been faithful, as she had not’.48 Sally Shuttleworth has described the novella as an attempt ‘to reclaim Hallam from Alfred Tennyson, and to tell the story of Hallam’s true “widow”, not Alfred, but Emily Tennyson’.49 There is clearly a comparison of the pair’s experiences of loss in the novella, as Byatt introduces Tennyson as a character: He sat down on his bed and began again to fumble at his mismatched buttons. His legs were cold and goosefleshed; he shivered inside his nightshirt. He was aware of his own body, with an appalled pity he might have felt for some dumb ox doomed to be slaughtered, or heavy, cunning-eyed porker, whose vast throat was appointed to be slit in the fullness of its grunting and chuckling. When he was younger, when Arthur was only dead as it were yesterday, he had felt the unnaturalness of that vanishing in every ending of his own live nerves.50 Tennyson believed that biography was the equivalent of being ‘ripped open like a pig’ 51 – Byatt here has Tennyson alluding to his own words, as he often did in poetry, but also to the future image of himself – the first time this opinion was made public was in Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir of his father. The accuracy of the portrait highlights its audacity – Tennyson would almost certainly have disapproved of this very private intrusion into his bedchamber. The story’s interest in the image of Tennyson, as well as spiritualism, is underlined by what follows. The poet looks in the mirror: This decaying, handsome face peers at me. He touched its cheek. Icy. The body of this death. He said to it, ‘Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson.’ Neither of them, the looker inside his warm motion, the ghostly cold starer, were what everyone thought of as Alfred Tennyson. ‘Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson,’ he said, and then faster, more nervously, ‘Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson,’ unmasking both of them with every naming of this nothing, this incoherent and terribly brief concatenation of nerves and mind. Pitying his white throat, the skin as innocent as a baby’s below the shirtline, he finally did up the button, with peg-fingers that no longer belonged to him. The whole room, all space, was turning vertiginously round him.52 The Memoir also tells us how fond Tennyson was of repeating his own name to create a ‘waking trance’,53 and the reference to ‘what everyone thought of as Alfred Tennyson’ underlines Byatt’s interest in expanding on his official biography, and her attempt to re-present the act of mourning for Hallam from a different, and just as important, perspective. As Tennyson repeats his own name, becoming more and more self-absorbed, he undergoes a similar experience to the spiritualists in Margate, and the loss of self-control could refer, obliquely, to the comparison between Tennyson and his sister’s different

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approaches to mourning – he whose mourning was ‘long and steadfast’ falls into an alarming trance, worryingly ‘fierce’ and ‘passionate’, ‘not losing consciousness but [. . .] himself’.54 The novella is not, however, necessarily a repudiation of Tennyson, either as a man or as a poet. Byatt, as can be seen above, seems strongly committed to his work, and indeed has elsewhere claimed that ‘Morte D’Arthur’ and ‘The Lady of Shalott’ were among the first poems she ever read, thanks to their being adapted into ‘children’s paint books’; ‘I used to chant these poems to myself in bed’.55 At the conclusion of ‘The Conjugal Angel’, as Sophy Sheeky looks at the mourning Mrs Papagay, she thinks of ‘all the people in the world whose arms were aching and empty to hold the dead’, and concludes that this is ‘a life in death’.56 The end of a novella which has done so much to complicate the image of Tennyson as pre-eminent Victorian mourner nonetheless ends with an allusion to one of his poems, so beloved of Sophy Sheeky: Dear as remember’d kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; O Death in Life, the days that are no more.57 As several recent conferences and many journal articles (and indeed an entire online academic journal) show, literature that has variously been termed ‘neoVictorian’, ‘Victoriana’, or ‘retro-Victorian’ has enjoyed a renaissance over the last twenty or so years, and it is in works set in the Victorian age but written in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that the majority of recent allusions to Tennyson in fiction appear. Grace Moore has termed this trend ‘re-imagining the Victorians’,58 and indeed what these novels (the work of, among other, Byatt, Waters, Peter Carey and Michel Faber) share with Fowles is an attempt to present a different version of the Victorian age from that found in the work of Dickens, Eliot and Hardy – the Nineteenth Century presented in these novels more often than not comes replete with graphic sex scenes, homosexuality, an interest in spiritualism, an approach to religion which is sceptical at best and a celebration of aspects of society often overlooked by novelists in the Victorian period. This is part of a general reappraisal of the Victorian age epitomized by Matthew Sweet’s controversial 2001 book Inventing the Victorians which begins: ‘Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorian age is wrong’.59 Even ‘The Conjugal Angel’, which is in the main concerned with the relationship between living and dead, and the mourning process, deals with the supposed sexual repression in the Victorian period. The last piece of ‘automatic writing’ which Mrs Papagay undertakes in the novel is a poem, which ends: Sweet Rosamund, adult’rous Rose May lie inside her urn and stink

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While Alfred’s tears turn into ink And drop into her quelque-chose The Angel spreads his golden wings And raises high his golden cock And man and wife together lock Into one corpse that moans and sings 60 The other guests stop her from writing any more as it is ‘obscene’. As we will see, this return to the ‘obscene body’ is an aspect of neo-Victorian fiction that recurs in novels which deal with Tennyson. ‘The Conjugal Angel’ indicates that if Tennyson’s name was, as Lynne Truss claims, anathema to the reading public if located in the title of a novel, nonetheless there was still an interest in his work on the part of a fairly large section of the British literary public in the 1990s. Although no biographies of the poet have been published since the spate which coincided with the centenary of his death (by Michael Thorn, Peter Levi and Leonée Ormond), a major recent intervention in Victorian life writing did concern the Tennyson family – Ann Thwaite’s Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife, published the same year as Lynne Truss’s comic novel. This monumental work (735 pages) takes issue with the standard image of Emily Tennyson – the neurotic, negative influence on the poet who near-silenced his poetic excellence – as put forward first by Harold Nicolson and to an extent perpetuated first by Philip Larkin and even maintained, in however self-aware a fashion, by Lynne Truss. Thwaite re-presents Emily Tennyson as vivacious, passionate and unconventional, and the devotion of so many pages to a hitherto overlooked Victorian female intellectual was a major statement; its scope means that it is unlikely to be surpassed by another life of Emily Tennyson for some decades. The very act of writing such a long life of a Victorian woman who had hitherto attracted little attention from biographers can be seen as part of a wider attempt to visit the conventions of the Victorian age back on itself. Perhaps the clearest way in which this can be seen is in the sheer length of some neo-Victorian novels, not least The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber. This is the size of one of Dickens’s longer novels, running to around 900 pages, and its plot evinces a deep knowledge, and love, of Victorian fiction – the plot contains elements drawn from Dickens (in the focus on London’s slums and the figure of the orphan), from George Eliot (in the female protagonist who has literary aspirations), from Wilde (the treatment of said protagonist by the upper-class male protagonist mirrors, to an extent, Dorian Gray’s treatment of Sibyl Vane), and Brontë (parts of the novel read like a reconfigured version of Jane Eyre, replete with ‘madwoman’ in attic who actually suffers from anorexia and later cancer). Faber’s novel is an attempt to work outwards from these conventions and to display some of the aspects of life which are often glossed over in works written

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in the Victorian period. The choice of a prostitute as his central character is at part an attempt to make Victorian London, which can seem so remote from that of today in some novels published in the Victorian period, anything but. To this extent he makes Sugar, the female protagonist, into, among other things, a proto-flâneur, moving through the city in order to observe William’s day-to-day affairs and his life. Faber also makes the reader very aware of the aspects of life that Victorian novelists were not able to address – chiefly, sex and violence. Faber has said that ‘the poem has no direct significance to The Crimson Petal, I just liked the symbolism of crimson and white petals – blood, sexual immorality, purity, snow, the perfume business, and so on.’ 61 This approach to using Tennyson in the title of a contemporary work of fiction can be found in T. C. Boyle’s 2005 short story collection Tooth and Claw (where the phrase from In Memoriam describes a cougar taking over a lonely man’s house), Gordon Ferris’s 2008 crime novel The Unquiet Heart, whose title again comes from In Memoriam, and Colum McCann’s 2009 novel Let the Great World Spin, from ‘Locksley Hall’. There is more to Faber’s choice than the neatness of the phrase; there may be very few references to poetry in The Crimson Petal and the White, but there are a lot of references to crimson – chiefly, the crimson of human blood. On our introduction to the St Giles area of London (just North of Covent Garden and the hub of London’s prostitution) there is a coach accident, in which the vehicle is ransacked but the coachman is spared: To the people of Church Lane, he is a lucky man, a survivor who ought to be grateful. For, as the dray rattles off, it exposes a pattern of dark blood nestled between the cobbles, like a crimson weed.62 The novel is full of the vivid colours of bodily fluids – ‘scalding yellow vomit’, for example,63 and Faber lingers on almost every bodily function in the novel, as if to compensate for how rarely these are ever dealt with in fiction written in the Victorian period. Crimson and white are oppositions in the novel – Faber has elsewhere described Sugar as a ‘scarlet woman’,64 but she is mistaken for an angel by the mentally disturbed Agnes Rackham, who herself is ostensibly an ‘angel of the house’ but suffers in a recognizably contemporary way with her own body. There is no reason to doubt Faber’s sincerity in his claim that the poem is not especially significant in the grand scheme of the novel, but there are other nods towards Tennyson that are clearly designed to make the book feel authentically Victorian – and which underline it, at the same time, as a neo-Victorian novel. Agnes Rackham, the perfumer’s wife, is ‘well-bred’ and clearly knows her Tennyson – the valedictory poem of her school feels very Tennysonian, with talk of ‘none can thwart the Future onward rushing’ and a ‘little race of Learning’.65 We read that ‘in this insomniac hours before sleep she lies marooned in her queen-size bed, like the Lady of Shalott launched upon a dark lake in a vessel twice the size it need be’.66 And Sugar, who for a prostitute is remarkably well read (she is working on a deeply angry novel in which the heroine, also called

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Sugar, enacts bloody revenge on the men who pay her for sex),67 also seems to echo a Tennysonian heroine. Once William has moved her out of the brothel and into a private apartment, she longs for him to come to visit her: For days, Sugar waits for William to come. He doesn’t come. Why doesn’t he come? How many of a man’s waking hours can possibly be swallowed up by an already established, successful concern? Surely it’s a simple matter of writing the occasional letter? Surely William doesn’t have to oversee every tiny flower and approve its rate of growth?68 The first three sentences of this quotation are reminiscent of ‘Mariana’: With blackest moss the flower-plots Were thickly crusted, one and all: The rusted nails fell from the knots That held the pear to the gable-wall. The broken sheds looked sad and strange: Unlifted was the clinking latch; Weeded and worn the ancient thatch Upon the lonely moated grange. She only said, ‘My life is dreary, He cometh not,’ she said; She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!’ 69 Later in the novel, again we find Sugar sitting in her room (the nurse’s room in his family home), and again ‘William doesn’t come’.70 This phrase triggers a memory of ‘the frantic way he grips her when he’s fucking her from behind’.71 These references may be simple coincidences – the phrases after all are not outside the domain of ordinary English usage – but all the same, the style of Faber’s novel means that he will inevitably highlight the sexual undertones of ostensibly ‘pure’ phrases such as ‘he will not come’. Sugar in this scene still wishes to please the man who is ‘keeping’ her, and to appear to be pleased by him (this was the ‘trick’ which made her such a popular prostitute in her earlier days), but at the same time she has clearly developed strong feelings for William. As such, the comparison with Mariana is not out of keeping. Later in the novel, Sugar again could have Tennyson’s work in mind when thinking of William – as he finally arrives home, we read that ‘she can tell that her returning Ulysses is not in a lustful mood’.72 That Sugar is more or less entirely self-educated indicates that the Tennyson alluded to in the title of the novel might be even more elucidatory. ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal’ is a lyric which is often divorced from its context as part of The Princess. Among other things, the long ‘Medley’ is a consideration of

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women’s education, and despite its medieval setting, it is most definitely designed to have some relevance to the Victorian period; Faber is similarly interested in women’s education. The first conversation between Sugar and Rackham concerns Shakespeare, and it is not going too far to think that the allusions to Tennyson in the passages concerning Sugar which were detailed above are further evidence of her self-education, somewhat at odds with Tennyson’s slightly fudged attempt to approach the issue of female education in The Princess. Despite this self-education and a formidable intellect, Sugar is trapped throughout the novel, first as prostitute and then as nurse to the Rackham child, Sophie, and the artistic fruit of her labour is a book full of grisly sex and murder, which could never have been published in the Victorian period. The feminist inspiration for this book is clear – although Sugar has managed, to an extent, to secure a room of her own, she is doomed to only be able to truly leave it through being made destitute, and the novel she works on in that room is nothing like what Virginia Woolf envisaged as women’s writing. Writing in 2002 rather than 1872, Faber is able to approach the subject of religion – or lack of it – face-on. He takes issue with the idea of the Victorian period as one in which the average Briton was a regular churchgoer, and presents his protagonist as self-consciously non-religious, juxtaposing the perfume magnate with his wife, an Anglican convert through marriage but who still has reveries of the Catholic angels of her youth. In a paragraph entirely contained within brackets, we read: (A truly modern man, William Rackham is what might be called a superstitious atheist Christian; that is, he believes in a God who, while He may no longer be responsible for the sun rising, the saving of the Queen or the provision of daily bread, is still the prime suspect when anything goes wrong.)73 This ‘truly modern man’ does not appear to have experienced the crisis of faith which Tennyson documents at length in In Memoriam, and his wife’s version of Catholicism owes as much to superstition as to theology or indeed literature. Faber has said that ‘In Memoriam is one of my favourite poems. Queen Victoria’s too. It would’ve been nice to snuggle up next to her and share our favourite bits, so to speak.’ 74 The link between Queen Victoria and Tennyson is stressed in much of the recent writing about the poet. Just as Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses envisages Tennyson writing ‘for the old hag with the yellow teeth’, so characters in recent novels who are opposed to the general reverence afforded the Queen at the turn of the century are similarly indisposed to Tennyson. In Tracy Chevalier’s 2001 novel Falling Angels, which is set in the Edwardian period, the main character Kitty Coleman confesses in her narration that she was ‘terribly excited to hear the Queen is dead’, and wears ‘an unusual shade of blue’ instead of black to a commemorative service at Highgate Cemetery.75 The blue is remarked

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on dismissively by a neighbour, Gertude Waterhouse, who Kitty is happy to learn is ‘no relation to the painter’, as Waterhouse’s ‘Lady of Shalott in her boat looks as if she has just taken opium’.76 The women clearly differ on their opinion of the Queen – Waterhouse believes that ‘The monarchy is above criticism’, whereas Kitty Coleman blames the passion both her daughter and Gertrude’s have for the cemetery on the Queen for ‘elevating mourning to such ridiculous heights that girls with romantic notions grow drunk from it’.77 Tennyson was Victoria’s poet of choice during her protracted mourning period for Albert, and it appears clear from this example of fiction set in the aftermath of the Victorian period that progressive, proto-suffragettes (such as Kitty) are defined politically, to a certain extent, by their opposition to both Queen Victoria and Tennyson.

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Chapter 9

‘Sweet ’N Low’: Tennyson Today

Today, Tennyson’s words remain present in the most unlikely of places – on the tables of cafés and restaurants as well as in homes across the world. In a recently published history of his family’s business, Rich Cohen discusses how a globally successful American sugar substitute came to be named after a Tennyson poem. Marvin Eisenstadt, son of the inventor, Ben, claims that the name of the product patented in 1957, ‘Sweet ’N Low’, was ‘a phrase from [Ben’s] favourite Tennyson poem.’ 1 Rich Cohen reveals, in typically blunt fashion, that this is ‘not exactly true’, and is an effort ‘to class up the joint’.2 In reality the product was named after one of Ben’s favourite songs, ‘written with the words of the poem [. . .] that had been a hit in the early 1900s, when Ben was a kid’.3 The arrangement Cohen specifies is composed by Sir Joseph Barnby; it apparently played on the telephone when one was put on hold at Marvin Eisenstadt’s home. The product remains an international brand; in 2003 Sweet ’N Low was still the market leader, at least in terms of volume, of all the sugar substitutes in the United States.4 In a review of Cohen’s book, J. Robert Lennon noted that the product is now used by the ‘same people who still wear fedoras, or drive Buicks, or voted for Ross Perot’ – it ‘is forever associated with the past’.5 If Tennyson’s lyrics aren’t being quoted on sugar-substitute packets, or being reproduced on the floor of a new extension to the British Museum, we might overhear them in cinematic comic book adaptations. Guillermo del Toro’s 2008 film Hellboy II involves monsters from folklore who live in a semi-parallel world to contemporary America, and features an unlikely love story between Abe Sapien, a merman (one remembers the Tennyson poem) and Princess Nuala, an elf. She is on the run from her brother, and Abe, along with Hellboy, manages to take her to an apparently safe location. We then see her in the library, reading from In Memoriam L (‘Be near me when my light is low’). Abe overhears and immediately identifies it as Tennyson, and the book itself becomes a plot device, as a piece of the elf crown, the key to control of the Golden Army, is hidden therein. The same part of In Memoriam can be found as the epigraph to Andrew O’Hagan’s 2006 novel Be Near Me.

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Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick And tingle; and the heart is sick, And all the wheels of Being slow. Be near me when the sensuous frame Is racked with pangs that conquer trust; And Time, a maniac scattering dust, And Life, a Fury slinging flame. Be near me when my faith is dry, And men the flies of latter spring, That lay their eggs, and sting and sing And weave their petty cells and die. Be near me when I fade away, To point the term of human strife, And on the low dark verge of life The twilight of eternal day.6 As far as I am aware, this is the first real novelistic engagement with these lines. John Mullan, in a piece on O’Hagan’s novel for the Guardian book club, has said that ‘it is a risk, to hook your story to a literary source’, and yet as the novels studied in this book show, the risk is nearly always a calculated one, which does as Mullan says give a ‘heavy authorial nudge [. . .] as to the significance of what follows’.7 Reviewers of Be Near Me were generally quick to look for this significance, with the lines afforded such a prominent position in the text.8 Mullan noted that the title ‘lets us know that we are reading a story about mourning’;9 David Jays observed that O’Hagan’s protagonist and Tennyson share a ‘similar experience’, a ‘death that hollows out the life behind’; and Hillary Mantel noted that with these lines ‘the stage is set for a modern tragedy, an account of unslaked grief and society’s sick silliness’.10 In the ‘Reading Guide’ to O’Hagan’s novel on his publisher’s website, the final question asked about the book is: Go back and read the epigraph by Alfred, Lord Tennyson on the first page. Why might the author have chosen this poem? How is its meaning significant to Father Anderton’s story?11 O’Hagan’s novel is about someone in a vaguely similar situation to the Tennyson of 1850 – both have suffered the loss of a university friend of the same gender and then spent many years dealing with this by assuming a profession in which isolation and contemplation are inherent: Tennyson the poet, and O’Hagan’s Father David Anderton, a Catholic priest. Tennyson spent around eighteen years working on In Memoriam (as well as other poems) and finally published it

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in 1850, the same year he really began ‘living’, being appointed Poet Laureate and also getting married. The loss of a university friend which Anderton suffers is that of his lover, Conor, a student radical in the 1960s who was killed in a car crash while still at university. Just as the true source of Tennyson’s grief is kept at arm’s length from the reader (the poem is entitled In Memoriam AHH obiit MDCCCXXXIII but Hallam is never mentioned by name, and indeed the poem was always kept anonymous in stand-alone editions until the poet’s death), so O’Hagan’s novel begins in 2003, but initially contains very few references to the subject of the narrator’s grief – to the reason why the lines from Tennyson are reproduced on the first page of the novel. We learn very quickly that David is a Catholic priest, but the reason for his decision to follow this path is not made clear until much later in the book, in the most affecting part, the description of his time at university and love for Conor. It has long been speculated that Tennyson’s affection for Hallam spilled over into homosexual love, and it is clear that Anderton’s background at Oxford is an updated version of Tennyson’s undergraduate days at Cambridge. Tennyson and Hallam were relatively early members of the Apostles, and their generation of the secret society were enthused by the poetry of Shelley, at that time a relatively unknown poet, and to a lesser extent Keats. This fervour for an ostensibly unpopular writer is mirrored in O’Hagan’s novel by Anderton and his university friends’ immense regard for what they call ‘the big book’ 12 – A la recherché du temps perdu by Proust. Anderton is at university in the late 1960s, some forty years after the publication of the last part of Proust’s novel, and the French novelist was much more widely known at that point in time than, say, Shelley was in 1830. Anderton is aware that his student way of life was ‘fifty years out of date’, and he calls his group ‘actors’.13 Conor is part of a group known by others as ‘the Bombastics’, the ‘radicals and associated worshippers of Mao and haters of Lyndon Johnson’.14 The link between Conor and Victorian poetry is made explicit in the last passage of the book in which he features, the morning of the march on the American Embassy in 1968, when David sits waiting for his lover in Russell Square: with a flask of tea, the buses coming from Euston and sandwich bags heaped in the litter bins. I spread a book of Victorian poetry on top of my duffel bag and read while absorbing the morning – the terrific shine on the square’s black railings, a ladybird’s journey across the page – until it was time to make my way to meet Conor in Holborn.15 Just before the revelation that Conor has died, we read: I hear his sacred heart and see his eyes closing as he falls asleep. And I say: be near me. The world is rowdy and nothing is certain. Do not stray. None of us was meant to face the day and the night alone, though that is what we do and

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memory now is a place of fading togetherness. Be near me. True love is what God intends.16 Both Be Near Me and In Memoriam are works of literature concerned with the memory of the loss of a loved one and its effect on faith. While the identity of the addressee of Tennyson’s verse is open to question – it could be Hallam, or it could be God – the urge voiced in Anderton’s repetition of ‘be near me’ is clearly the desire for personal intimacy, near-sacrilegious in his carnal appropriation of the idea of the ‘sacred heart’. Although the priest is apparently a lover of poetry, the true impact of Tennyson’s words – which relies on the identity of the addressee being uncertain – eludes him. There is a dilemma in the novel, never fully resolved; how can a celibate Catholic priest possibly consider Tennyson’s poem, which so obviously blends the personal and the religious, to be appropriate to his own situation? Despite being a Catholic priest, Anderton’s faith in Be Near Me is not all that convincing. As O’Hagan says, In terms of religious faith, he’s a bit of an opportunist. I don’t know that I first saw him that way, but he sees in the Catholic faith a place where he can be exalted and removed and grieving and have it be called commitment rather than be perceived as just another lonely, isolated, sad man.17 David elsewhere admits that ‘I think I used the Church. It was a beautiful hiding place.’ 18 O’Hagan has claimed that in writing the novel he wanted to portray: ‘A crisis of faith and of self-belief, and a person’s realization that he’s been performing his whole life and hadn’t been actually living’.19 In an interview carried out in Australia, O’Hagan read part of the novel aloud, and his interviewer observed, ‘You’re a fantastic actor’, to which O’Hagan replied, ‘Show-off, you mean.’ 20 Acting is a central concern in the book. Anderton was educated at Ampleforth (an exclusive Catholic fee-paying school in the north of England), and while spending time with Brother Joseph, a cinema-obsessed friar, notes that ‘there was something fine and wasted’ about him.21 Anderton asks him why he is not ‘out in the world making films or being an actor?’, and the priest (who has a stammer) replies, ‘I am an actor. [. . .] Being a person of faith [. . .] is just like being a m-m-movie actor. Friend of the dark.’ 22 Early in the novel, Anderton admits that despite he and his housekeeper, Mrs Poole, being friends, ‘something in her and something in me made actors of us both when we were together’,23 and she brings up this aspect of his character later, saying ‘you’re such an actor when you don’t have to be’.24 Bishop Gerard, who studied in Rome at the same time as Anderton, brings up Anderton’s actions there, when he visited Galileo’s room: I remember your actions. You were playing the part of Galileo. One of the old friars was telling us about the Dominicans’ suspicion of Galileo and their

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interrogation of him, and you were transfixed, mouthing the words along with him. You’ve always been an actor, David. An actor will always want to play the part.25 The truth is that there is little that is genuine about Anderton. His love for poetry is akin to his thirst for alcohol – he might insist that his dinner guests all drink the wine ‘in the prescribed order. No mixing the wines in your glasses, either’,26 but he is equally happy to swig straight from a bottle of cider that Mark, a teenager whom he befriends, finds at the roadside, and to drink cheap, neat vodka in an abandoned pub with the same teenager.27 His true affection for poetry, like wine, is as a narcotic (thinking back to The Loved One and Light in August, it is clear that Tennyson’s verse has often been seen as somewhat ‘narcotic’). The only scene in which we see Anderton reading poetry is the aforementioned scene in Russell Square, in which a ladybird is allowed to make its slow way across a page. There are relatively few allusions to poetry (or fiction) in the novel, despite it being written in the first person, ostensibly by a lover of literature. One of the few is the passage in which Anderton repeats ‘be near me’, which also includes a reference to Conor’s ‘sacred heart’. Even in this scene he is playing a part – the part of the poetry lover. His profession should preclude him from allying the two identities of Catholic priest and homosexual lover in the way that Tennyson was able to play the part of private mourner and public poet; while in the latter case the relationship between the two is complex and nuanced, the former two roles are simply incompatible. Anderton willingly overlooks the true meaning of Tennyson’s words, using them as part of his supposed resolution between his religion and his love, where the whole dynamic of In Memoriam relies on there being no such resolution. That this misreading provides the title of the novel is fitting, because while the desire for union with Conor is clear, the desire for comfort from God is less so. Ultimately, Be Near Me is, as the reviewers have stated, ‘a story about mourning’, but it is a novel which is above all interested in exploring the insecurity and weakness of its central character. For all the catty and apparently ‘knowing’ remarks of David Anderton, and for all the times he is warned of it, he is blind to the clearest fact of all about himself – he has been playing a part from the beginning to the end of his life. A more authentic performance of ‘poetry lover’ can be found in Nicholson Baker’s 2009 novel The Anthologist. The book is a first-person account of a miserable summer which a minor American poet, Paul Chowder, spends failing to write an introduction to an anthology of verse (his partner has left him because he has repeatedly lied to her about the progress he has made); at the same time, it also takes the form of that introduction, with Chowder’s mind skipping between the minutiae of his domestic loneliness and his sincere, if idiosyncratic, belief in rhyme and metre as the two most important aspects of all poetry. Tennyson is frequently used as an example to substantiate Chowder’s claims, and in a characteristically playful moment the ‘Lawn Tennyson’ joke is

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revisited, while the narrator pontificates on the question ‘What’s the meter of badminton?,28 coming up with ‘Break, break, break’ as a potential answer – ‘Poink, poink, poink’.29 The phonetic transcription is continued when Chowder transcribes the recording Thomas Edison made of Tennyson reading ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’: pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! Hobble leg, hobble leg, hobble leg owhmmm! Into the bottle of fluff, rubbed the stuff under! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff!30 The phonetic spelling reminds one of the similar treatment of the same ‘pome’ in How to Be Topp. The light-hearted approach masks something of a serious intent – Chowder uses the lines as a springboard into a discussion of the use of triplets in the ‘regular four-beat line’.31 Throughout the book, it becomes clear the Chowder is coming to terms with what making an anthology might mean, in terms of the career of both the anthologist and the poets who are anthologized. He dwells obsessively on the submissions process for poetry at The New Yorker, and thinks that being a minor poet is still worth it, because ‘That’s what you have to think’.32 This leads him, somewhat inexplicably, to imagine the history of poetry as a well-attended restaurant, where: Tennyson’s at the salad bar, making his way around, holding the chilled plastic plate, fumbling in his beard. Poet laureate of the British empire. Staring for a long time at the tub of bean salad. Corn salad or bean salad, which will it be today? ‘Into the valley of death, rode the six hundred!’ Plop – beans. Pope’s there. [. . .] Malevolently ladling the blue cheese at eye level.33 This jokiness masks the deep unease Chowder feels about poetry in general. He claims that ‘Tennyson was liberated’ on the death of his father, and ‘began writing stupendous poems. Were they stupendous? Or were they only good? Or were they in fact not good at all? I’m not sure’.34 Later, though, it seems clear that Chowder has come to a conclusion on Tennyson’s merits, and that he subscribes to the Harold Nicolson’s conception of the poet (shared with, among others, Edward FitzGerald and Auden) that Tennyson was dulled by the Laureateship: Tennyson was morbid and strange, but Queen Victoria had been able to straighten his collar. And Tennyson had obliged by flipping on all the spigots and filling tankards with blank verse about King Arthur and the Round Table.35

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Chowder is elsewhere equivocal about blank verse, and Tennyson gets off lightly in comparison with Ginsberg – with the verse form of ‘Howl’, ‘You can’t get anywhere [. . .]. Nobody can.’ 36 If these references to Tennyson seem like asides, this is because the entire book is a series of asides, symptomatic of the writer’s block Chowder is experiencing and his seemingly skittish nature, which masks a more general anxiety – he breaks down into tears during a poetry workshop he is giving at a conference in Switzerland, and left his teaching job because the stress seemed to be too much for him. In many ways, he is the opposite of Anderton – the former, one of several characters discussed in this book who use Tennyson unthinkingly as something of a ‘beautiful hiding place’; Chowder’s engagement with Tennyson is both more intense, in its focus on metre, and at the same time less absorbed, in keeping with his apparent inability to focus on mental tasks for long periods (by the end of the novel he is, to all intents and purposes, just as much a professional handyman as a poet). As well as being a literary representation of writer’s block, The Anthologist is also a meditation on the role of the poet in the modern world, which allies it with another 2009 novel, The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. An account of a period in the 1840s when John Clare and Alfred Tennyson lived very close to each other in Epping Forest, it is primarily about the Victorian treatment of madness (Clare at this point is incarcerated in a lunatic asylum along with Tennyson’s brother Septimus), but Foulds is also interested in the general perception of the figure of poet in the 1840s, as well as the differences and similarities between the sensibilities of the ‘mad’ John Clare and ‘sane’ Alfred Tennyson. Foulds’s research is impressive – his Tennyson is the most believable yet to be featured in a novel (it is the least caricatured fictional representation of the poet). In his acknowledgments, Foulds singles out Robert Bernard Martin’s biography for acclaim, and biographical truths are incorporated into the novel in a sensitive manner. Foulds’s Tennyson repeats the phrase ‘what sort of creature are you – nymph or dryad’, used by both Arthur Hallam and Alfred Tennyson to woo their respective Emilies, when he meets the attractive Annabella Simpson in the novel.37 Foulds’s Tennyson also recounts some of the famous stories later featured in the Memoir – the trances when repeating his name,38 and his youthful, slightly histrionic grief at Byron’s death. And like Byatt’s Tennyson in ‘The Conjugal Angel’, Tennyson in The Quickening Maze obsesses over Arthur Hallam, and (in contrast to Byatt’s Tennyson) over In Memoriam, which he is still writing. Foulds also demonstrates a highly sensitive idea of Tennyson’s art, in passages seen through the future Laureate’s eyes, written in the third person: Alfred Tennyson walked to loosen his blood. He had spent the day sunk in a low mood. The word ‘sunk’ was the right one, the mood soft, dark, silted, sluggish; it smelt of riverbed, of himself.39 We also see a snapshot of composition, as Tennyson thinks of his childhood days spent at the beach at Mablethorpe:

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[T]he heavy, low waves and hardened undulations of the sand after the tide had withdrawn. Words began. Waves. Rocks. Lashed. Or felt. Waters that feel the scraping rocks, scourging rocks. Waters that feel the scourging rocks as they rush. That feel the sharp rocks as they rush.40 Along with the sympathetically presented delusions of John Clare, this demonstration of deliberation is part of an attempt in the novel to investigate the public perception of poetry in the 1840s and, more broadly, the general perception of a ‘poetic temperament’. One of the topics which Hannah Allen, daughter of the asylum-owner who is hoping to win Tennyson’s heart writes down as a possible conversation topic with Tennyson (along with ‘India’ and ‘The best society being of like-minded people, regardless of rank’) is ‘The waning public taste for poetry’ – and yet as Foulds shows, the figure of the poet was as much an object of fascination in the 1840s as it is today.41 Hannah’s reverie of Tennyson’s nature is somewhat idealized – ‘pensive, brooding you might say. Tall. [. . .] Dark. Strong shoulders’.42 She decides that music might be the way to his heart, and he compliments her piano playing as ‘very eloquent’, a compliment which ‘hotly pierced her. Eloquent! And from a poet. She must have touched his soul!’ 43 The idealized image of the desirable life of the poet is undermined soon afterwards, where, in a passage seen through Tennyson’s eyes, we read that the family life of the Allens is ‘life as it ought to be lived, unlike his private, stagnant whatever you may call it’.44 That Foulds’s novel has been well-received and shortlisted for the Booker Prize shows that despite the relatively small readership of contemporary poetry, the figure of the poet remains of great interest to a fairly wide section of the reading public (this might also be seen in the continuing popularity of A. S. Byatt’s Possession). The titles of some of the recent novels considered in this book also show that novelists continue to be keen on drawing associations between their work and poetry, which could suggest a vague perpetuation of the superiority of verse over prose which Tennyson himself believed in. This can be seen even in contemporary writing for teenagers, such as the American author Meg Cabot’s 2006 novel, Avalon High. Cabot is most famous for the Princess Diaries series of books, and Avalon High is similarly designed for a readership of girls in their early teens. Each chapter begins with an epigraph of four lines from ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and the book’s twenty-nine chapters roughly follow the poem from beginning to end (though not all of it is used). The epigraphs are not always entirely relevant to the part of the story they introduce, but it is clear why Cabot chose them. The heroine-narrator of the novel is named Elaine, and is the daughter of two medieval historians. She has moved school for a year as her father is on sabbatical, writing a book about a sword, and Elaine complains that were it not for this they could have stayed in Minneapolis, as her mother ‘could have written her own book – on my namesake, Elaine of Astolat, the Lady of Shalott – back home in St Paul’.45 Elaine lists being named after historical and literary figures (her Brother is Geoff, after Chaucer) as one of the many

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downsides to being the child of two academics, underlined by how often she hears ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (‘It’s not as if I hadn’t heard it seventy times this week alone’).46 Having been forced into reciting it to A. William Wagner, a boy she likes, she immediately dissociates herself from it, saying, ‘it’s a very lame poem. She dies at the end, floating in a boat’.47 The similarities with Elaine are immediately apparent, as she claims to have spent the summer ‘floating on top of the water, on one of those inflatable rafts’.48 Throughout the novel, there are many parallels drawn with the grail myth. Like Floating Down to Camelot before it, Avalon High also uses the abbreviated and more modern ‘Lance’ to stand for Lancelot, and has characters named Marco (to correspond to Mordred) and Jennifer (which, Cabot’s narrator helpfully informs us, is originally derived from Guinevere); the abbreviated ‘A’ in Wagner’s name also turns out to stand for Arthur. With so much of the grail myth being re-enacted in the setting of an American high school, the situation does not look good for Elaine (whose mythical precursor died, of course), especially when Wagner finds out that his girlfriend, Jennifer, has been cheating on him with his best friend Lance – and in a coincidence which stretches credulity, it transpires that the English teacher at the school is also a member of the ‘Order of the Bear’, a fictional cult dedicated to the coming again of Arthur. As the tension in the story builds, a terrific storm erupts: As I watched, my favourite raft was actually lifted up out of the water and thrown into the bushes by a powerful blast of wind. The water churned, even though the filter wasn’t working, thanks to the power being out. It looked like a giant witch’s cauldron, set to boil.49 With so many instances of the pathetic fallacy occurring, the destruction of the raft looks like a portent of Elaine’s fate. Her response is to carry the antique sword her father is working on down to a place where William enjoys sitting alone, and at this point, those who are aware of the grail myth realize that Elaine is not ‘Elaine’ in this version, but rather the Lady of the Lake, who will deliver a sword to Arthur, and her giving him this sword does indeed save him from being shot by Marco. Something of a decline in Tennyson’s fortunes could be perceived in the fact that an earlier children’s book, Anne of Green Gables, pointedly alluded to ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ and not ‘The Lady of Shalott’ in its own raft-floating scene; and though the grail myth is, to an extent, used as a plot device in the manner that Emma was used by the 1995 film Clueless, nonetheless, the presence of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ in Avalon High helps to perpetuate Tennyson’s fame, as well as (in a slightly less clear-cut manner) also maintaining the association between the Tennyson poem and girls coming of age, a feature of so many novels considered in this book. That Tennyson can crop up in such very different novels published so long after his death is testament not only to the continued uneasy relationship between fiction and poetry, but also to the staying power of a poet who seemed destined for relative oblivion in the 1930s.

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Notes

Preface 1

2 3 4 5 6

Henry James, The American Scene ed. W. H. Auden (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946), p. 248. James, The American Scene, p. 247. James, The American Scene, p. 247. James, The American Scene, p. 247. James, The American Scene, p. 248. James, The American Scene, p. 248.

Introduction 1 2 3

4

5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21

Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam XCV ll. 33–4, Ricks no. 296. Barbara Hardy, Tennyson and the Novelists (Lincoln: Tennyson Society, 1993), p. 2. A phrase used in her lecture ‘Tennyson’s Hum’ at ‘The Young Tennyson’ conference in Lincoln, 18 July 2009. Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), p. 3. Bate, The Burden of the Past, p. 20. Bate, The Burden of the Past, p. 21. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, (New York: OUP, 1973), p. 31. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 69. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 5. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 10. Freud quoted by Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence, p. 64. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. 77–8. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 78. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 5. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 12. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 19. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 30. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 94. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 32. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. Second Edition. (New York: OUP, 1997), p. xi. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: OUP, 1975), p. 116.

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154 22

23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38

39 40

41

Notes

William Wordsworth, ‘Preface’, 1802 text, Lyrical Ballads ed. R. L. Brett & A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 255. See John Woolford and Daniel Karlin, ‘Genre and Style’, Robert Browning (London: Longman, 1996), 38–73. See Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2002), pp. 66–7. Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: OUP, 2002), p. 33. Ricks, Allusion to the Poets, p. 1. Douglas-Fairhurst, Victorian Afterlives, p. 32. Douglas-Fairhurst, Victorian Afterlives, p. 51. Douglas-Fairhurst, Victorian Afterlives, p. 37. Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 258. Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 3. Chapter heading from Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians. Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians, p. 235. John Campbell Shairp, quoted in Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians, p. 211. Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians, p. 211. Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians, p. 8. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1971), p. 5. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript p. 3. Letter from Ezra Pound to T. S. Eliot, 24 December 1921, The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941 ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber and Faber 1951), p. 234; Letter from T. S. Eliot to Pound, ?January 1922, The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, p. 236; Letter from Ezra Pound to T. S. Eliot, ?January 1922, The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, p. 237. The actual phrase is ‘Ditto re:’ with ‘do as you like’ used earlier in the letter. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, p. 125 Brander Matthews, ‘The Ethics of Plagiarism’ [1886], quoted in Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2006), p. 64. Hallam Tennyson, Tennyson: A Memoir, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1897), II p. 385. All subsequent references to this book will appear in the following format: Memoir II p. 385.

Chapter 1 1 2 3

4

5

Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke ed. Elizabeth A. Cripps (Oxford: OUP, 1983), pp. 97–8. Memoir II p. 372. Letter from Charles Dickens to John Forster, 7 August 1842, The Letters of Charles Dickens Volume III (1842–43) ed. Madline House, Graham Story and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 306–7. Letter from Charles Dickens to Madame la Rue, 27 September 1845, The Letters of Charles Dickens Volume IV (1844–1846) ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 389. See The Letters of Charles Dickens Volume IV (1844–1846) ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 532–3.

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Notes 6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32

33

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Quoted in a letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Robert Browning, 1 May 1846, The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson Vol. I: 1821–1850 ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 253. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield ed. Nina Burgis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 582–3. In Memoriam VII, ll. 9–12, Ricks no. 296. Hardy, Tennyson and the Novelists, p. 9. I will discuss ‘Morpho Eugenia’ in Chapter 8 of this book. Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke ed. Elizabeth A. Cripps (Oxford: OUP, 1983), p. 13. Kingsley, Alton Locke, p. 94. Kingsley, Alton Locke, p. 84. Kingsley, Alton Locke, p. 97. Kingsley, Alton Locke, p. 97. Kingsley, Alton Locke, pp. 97–8. Kingsley, Alton Locke, p. 97. Kingsley, Alton Locke, p. 98. ‘Locksley Hall’ l. 182, Ricks no. 271; In Memoriam, ‘Epilogue’, ll. 143–4, Ricks no. 298. Kingsley, Alton Locke, p. 161. Kingsley, Alton Locke, p. 256. Kingsley, Alton Locke, pp. 291–2. Kingsley, Alton Locke, pp. 324–5. See, for instance, the argument between Margaret Hale and John Thornton about the word in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South ed. Elisabeth Jay (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), p. 113. ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ ll. 169–173, Ricks no. 170. Kingsley, Alton Locke, p. 354. Kingsley, Alton Locke, pp. 355–6. Hardy, Tennyson and the Novelists, p. 12; Hardy, Tennyson and the Novelists, p. 17. Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘The Moorland Cottage’, in The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell Volume 2: Novellas and Shorter Fiction ed. Alan Shelston (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), p. 5. Gaskell, ‘The Moorland Cottage’, p. 5. See Alan Shelston’s ‘Introduction’ to The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell Volume 2, p. ix. See John Chapple, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell and Tennyson’, Tennyson Research Bulletin 7.4 (2000), 194–5. Letter from Charlotte Brontë to Elizabeth Gaskell, 27 August 1850, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë Volume 2: 1848–1851 ed. Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 457. W. B. Yeats, introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 (Oxford: OUP, 1936), p. ix. Letter from Elizabeth Gaskell to Charlotte Froude, c.25 August 1850, The Letters of Mrs Gaskell ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Mandolin, 1997), p. 129. Gaskell, ‘The Moorland Cottage’, p. 48. In Memoriam XCVII ll. 31–2, Ricks no. 296. Gaskell, ‘The Moorland Cottage’, p. 85. Gaskell, ‘The Moorland Cottage’, p. 18.

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156 40

41

42 43 44

45 46

47 48

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Letter from Elizabeth Gaskell to John Forster, 7 December 1849, The Letters of Mrs Gaskell ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Mandolin, 1997), p. 95. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford, The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell Volume II: Novellas and Shorter Fiction ed. Alan Shelston (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005), p. 188. Gaskell, Cranford, p. 189. Gaskell, Cranford, p. 194. Gaskell, Cranford, p, 194. The actual phrase is ‘More black than ashbuds in the front of March’, ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’ l.28, Ricks no. 208. John Ruskin, Modern Painters I (Sunnyside: George Allen, 1888), p. 165. John Ruskin, ‘Inaugural’ (1870), Selected Writings ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford: OUP, 2004), p. 201. Gaskell, Cranford, pp. 194–5. In the 2007 BBC adaptation of the novel, the episode dealing with this incident ended with Miss Matty, played by Judi Dench, reciting part of ‘Locksley Hall’. Marion Shaw, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell, Tennyson, and the Fatal Return: Sylvia’s Lovers and “Enoch Arden” ’, Gaskell Society Journal 9 (1995): pp. 43–54; In Memoriam VI ll. 32–7, Ricks no. 296. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South ed. Elisabeth Jay (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005), p. 17. Gaskell, North and South, p. 57. ‘Consolation’ ll. 71–5, The Poems of Matthew Arnold ed. Kenneth and Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1979), p. 120. Gaskell, North and South, p. 58. See North and South ed. Patricia Ingham (London: Penguin, 1995), 430 Gaskell, North and South, p. 43. Gaskell, North and South, p. 55. Gaskell, North and South, p. 52. Samantha Matthews, ‘Tennyson in Pieces: A Short History of Quotation’, conference paper delivered at ‘Tennyson’s Futures’, Oxford, 28 March 2009. Letter from George Eliot to Alexander Main, 4 December 1877, The George Eliot Letters ed. Gordon S. Haight (London: OUP, 1956), p. 431. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda ed. Graham Handley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 169. George Eliot, ‘Tennyson’s Maud’, Selected Critical Writings ed. Rosemary Ashton (Oxford: OUP, 1992), p. 171. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 171. Hardy, Tennyson and the Novelists, p. 27. Eliot, ‘Tennyson’s Maud’, p. 171. Eliot, ‘Tennyson’s Maud’, p. 173. Eliot, ‘Tennyson’s Maud’, p. 173. Eliot, ‘Tennyson’s Maud’, p. 178. Letter from Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, 9 March 1861, The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. H. F. Lowry (London: OUP, 1932), p. 154; Letter from Matthew Arnold to J. Dykes Campbell, 22 September 1864, The Letters of Matthew Arnold 1848–1888 ed. George W. E. Russell (London: Macmillan, 1968), Vol. I p. 278.

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Notes 68

69

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72 73

74

75

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79 80 81

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84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

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Matthew Arnold, ‘Tennyson’ ll. 19–20, The Poems of Matthew Arnold ed. Kenneth and Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1979), 578. Letter from Gerard Manley Hopkins to A. W. M. Baillie, 10 September 1864, Selected Letters ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 23. Letter from Gerard Manley Hopkins to A. W. M. Baillie, 10 September 1864, Selected Letters, pp. 23–4. Letter from Gerard Manley Hopkins to A. W. M. Baillie, 10 September 1864, Selected Letters, p. 28. Alfred Austin, My Satire and its Censors (London: George Manwaring, 1861), p. 23. Alfred Austin, ‘Tennyson’, The Poetry of the Period (London: Richard Bentley, 1870), p. 25; Austin, ‘Tennyson’, p. 6. Thomas Hardy, ‘An Ancient to Ancients’ ll. 36–42, The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy Volume II ed. Samuel Hynes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 483. Helen Small, ‘Hardy’s Tennyson’, Tennyson Among the Poets ed. Robert DouglasFairhurst and Seamus Perry (Oxford: OUP, 2009), p. 368. Thomas Hardy, ‘An Ancient to Ancients’ ll.57–62, The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy Volume II p. 483. See The Letters of Alfred Tennyson Vol. III: 1871–1892 ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 185. Marlene Springer, Hardy’s Use of Allusion (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 41; p. 15 Springer, Hardy’s Use of Allusion, p. 4. Springer, Hardy’s Use of Allusion, p. 40. Barbara Hardy, ‘Literary Allusion: Hardy and Other Poets’, Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate ed. Keith Wilson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 65. Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes ed. Pamela Dalziel (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 154. Barbara Hardy, ‘Literary Allusion: Hardy and Other Poets’, Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate ed. Keith Wilson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 66. Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, p. 203. Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, p. 213. Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, p. 214. In Memoriam CXXIII l. 1, Ricks no. 296. Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, p. 340. Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, p. 341. In Memoriam LXXVIII l. 17, Ricks no. 296. In Memoriam LXXVIII ll. 18–20, Ricks no. 296. Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, p. 342. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles ed. Scott Elledge (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 135. Helen Small, ‘Hardy’s Tennyson’, Tennyson Among the Poets ed. Robert DouglasFairhurst and Seamus Perry (Oxford: OUP, 2009), pp. 356-7. William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 197.

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158

Notes

Chapter 2 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

17 18

19

20

21 22

23

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29

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Joseph Conrad, ‘The Return’, Youth: A Narrative, Heart of Darkness, and The End of the Tether (London: Dent, 1967), pp. 36–7. George Gissing, New Grub Street ed. John Goode (Oxford: OUP, 1999), p. 8. Gissing, New Grub Street, p. 460. Gissing, New Grub Street, p. 203. Gissing, New Grub Street, p. 455. Gissing, New Grub Street, pp. 27–8. In the notes to New Grub Street ed. Bernard Bergonzi (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 553. Gissing, New Grub Street, p. 524. Gissing, New Grub Street, p. 36. Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life Volume I (Oxford: OUP, 1996), p. 53. ‘Tennyson Dead’, The Star 1453 (6 October 1892), p. 2. ‘The Death of Lord Tennyson’, in ‘Tennyson Supplement’ to Pall Mall Budget 1255 (13 October 1892), p.1517. The Princess III^IV l. 11, Ricks no. 286. ‘Alfred Tennyson’, The Dial 13.152 (16 October 1892), p. 232. ‘Lord Tennyson’, The Graphic 46.1193 (8 October 1892), p. 422. William Boyd Carpenter, The Message of Tennyson: A Sermon in Westminster Abbey, April 30, 1893 (London: Macmillan & Co., 1893), pp. 15–16. Clement Shorter, Victorian Literature (London: James Bowden, 1897), p. 10. See, for example, Frederick Wedmore’s article ‘The Stage: Tennyson’s Becket’, The Academy 43 (18 February 1893), pp. 158–9. Edmund Gosse, ‘The Influence of Democracy on Literature’, Contemporary Review LIX (April 1891), p. 525. Edmund Gosse, ‘Tennyson’, The New Review VII.42 (November 1892), p. 514. The essay was reprinted the following year in Gosse’s collection of essays Questions at Issue (London: William Heinemann, 1893), with the title ‘Tennyson – and After’. Edmund Gosse, ‘Tennyson’, The New Review VII.42 (November 1892), p. 515. Peter D. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 6. Letter from George Gissing to Edmund Gosse, 20 November, 1892, reprinted as ‘Tennyson – and After?’ in Edmund Gosse’s Questions at Issue (London: William Heinemann, 1893), p. 325. Gosse, Questions at Issue, p. 328; Gosse, Questions at Issue, p. 330. Gosse, Questions at Issue, p. 329. Review of Memoir in Athenaeum 3650 (9 October 1897), p. 481. Memoir I, pp. 72–3. Thomas Lounsbury’s The Life and Times of Tennyson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915) is incomplete as it only details the poet’s life to 1850; Harold Nicolson’s 1923 study of the poet is more a work of criticism than a biography. William Hurrell Mallock, Memoirs of Life and Literature (London: Chapman & Hall, 1920), p. 90. Mallock, Memoirs of Life and Literature, p. 90.

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Notes 31

32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58

159

Samuel Rogers was offered the post before Tennyson, but turned it down on the grounds of his age. Memoir I, p. 334. ‘Who Should Be Laureate?’, The Idler 7 (Feb–July 1895), p. 403. A. C. Swinburne, ‘Threnody’, The Nineteenth Century 33 (January 1893), pp. 1–3. J. W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris, 2 Vols. (1899. New York: Dover Publications, 1995), Vol. II, p. 288. ‘Who Should Be Laureate?’, The Idler 7 (Feb–July 1895), p. 409. Quoted in Norton B. Crowell, Alfred Austin: Victorian (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1953), p. 20. Crowell, Alfred Austin: Victorian, p. 156. Alfred Austin, ‘The Passing of Merlin’ l. 16, Times 33763 (7 October 1892), p. 10. Alfred Austin, ‘The Passing of Merlin’ ll. 51–5, Times 33763 (7 October 1892), p. 10. Quoted in Crowell, Alfred Austin: Victorian, p. 21. See Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (London: Abacus, 1992), pp. 1–5. Quoted in Crowell, Alfred Austin: Victorian, p. 23. W. B. Yeats wrote of his days in the Rhymers’ Club that ‘Swinburne in one way, Browning in another, and Tennyson in a third, had filled their work with what I called “impurities”, curiosities about politics, about science, about history, about religion; and [Yeats believed] that we must create once more the pure work.’ Autobiographies (London: Macmillan & Co., 1955), p. 167. Leslie Stephen, ‘Life of Tennyson’, Studies of a Biographer (London: Duckworth & Co., 1898), Vol. II, p. 237. Letter from Joseph Conrad to Edward Garnett, 26 November 1897, Collected Letters Volume I: 1861–1897, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 413. Letter from Joseph Conrad to Aniela Zagórska, Christmas 1898, Collected Letters Volume II: 1898–1902, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) p. 137. Letter from Joseph Conrad to T. Fisher Unwin, 5 November 1897, Conrad Letters I, p. 405. Letter from Joseph Conrad to William Blackwood, 31 May 1902, Conrad Letters II, p. 418; Letter from Joseph Conrad to Baroness Jania de Brunnow, 2 October 1897, Conrad Letters I, p. 390. Joseph Conrad, ‘The Return’, in Almayer’s Folly and Tales of Unrest (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1947), p. 135. ‘Maud’ II.V.i ll. 239–48, Ricks no. 316. Joseph Conrad, ‘Youth: A Narrative’, in Youth: A Narrative, Heart of Darkness, and The End of the Tether (London: Dent, 1967), p. 12; Conrad, ‘Youth: A Narrative’, p. 12. Conrad, ‘Youth: A Narrative’, p. 22. Conrad, ‘Youth: A Narrative’, p. 23. Conrad, ‘Youth: A Narrative’, p. 37. Conrad, ‘Youth: A Narrative’, pp. 36–7. Conrad, ‘Youth: A Narrative’, p. 7. P. G. Wodehouse, ‘Notes’, Tales of St. Austin’s (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1903), p. 260.

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160 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71 72

73 74 75

76 77 78

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

93

94 95 96 97

Notes

L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (London: Puffin, 1987) p. 20; Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, p. 221. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, p. 37. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, p. 184. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, p. 185. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, p. 190. Richard Whiteing, Ring in the New (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1906), p. 195. Whiteing, Ring in the New, p. 12; Whiteing, Ring in the New, pp. 10–11. Whiteing, Ring in the New, pp. 42–3. Whiteing, Ring in the New, p. 116. H. N. Fairchild (‘ “Wild Bells” in Bailey’s Festus?’, Modern Language Notes 64.4 (1949), pp. 256–8) notes the similarity of the sentiment of the ‘Ring out, wild bells’ lines and passages from P. J. Bailey’s Festus (1839) which Tennyson had read in 1846, but the phrase repeated in Ring in the New is surely from In Memoriam. Whiteing, Ring in the New, p. 241. Whiteing, Ring in the New, p. 242. Whiteing, Ring in the New, p. 297. See Tristram Hunt’s ‘Introduction’ to The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (London: Penguin, 2004), p. xxviii. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists p. 1. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, p. 1. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, p. 253; Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, p. 22. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, p. 22. ‘Locksley Hall’ l. 178, Ricks no. 271; The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, p. 280. F. C. Ball, One of the Damned: The Life and Times of Robert Tressell (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), p.119; Ball, One of the Damned, p. 62. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, p. 280. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, p. 281. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, p. 281. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, p. 281. Florence L. Barclay, The Rosary (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909), p. 9. Barclay, The Rosary, p. 90. Barclay, The Rosary, p. 24. Barclay, The Rosary, p. 89. Barclay, The Rosary, p. 89. Barclay, The Rosary, pp. 169–70. Barclay, The Rosary, p. 35. ‘Maud’ I.XII.i, Ricks no. 316 l. 412. The Princess III^IV l. 3, Ricks no. 286; In Memoriam XCV l. 1, Ricks no. 296. See, for example, E. M. Forster’s Modernism by David Medalie (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). E. M. Forster, A Room with a View ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), p. 2. Forster, A Room with a View, p. 35. The sentiment is one hinted at in ‘Maud’. Forster, A Room with a View, p. 35. Forster, A Room with a View, p. 35. Forster, A Room with a View, p. 35.

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Notes 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

105

106

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108 109 110

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115 116 117 118 119 120 121

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Forster, A Room with a View, pp. 35–6. Forster, A Room with a View, p. 36. Forster, A Room with a View, p. 100. Forster, A Room with a View, p. 39. Forster, A Room with a View, p. 35. Forster, A Room with a View, p. 40. Robert F. Horton, Alfred Tennyson: A Saintly Life (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1900), p. 7. A. C. Bradley, A Commentary on Tennyson’s In Memoriam (London: Macmillan & Co., 1901), p. 36. ‘The Lincoln Monument to Tennyson’, The Athenaeum 4057 (29 July 1905), p. 145. G. K. Chesterton, G. F. Watts (London: Duckworth & Co., 1920; first published 1904), p. 74. Chesterton, G. F. Watts, p. 77. Chesterton, G. F. Watts, p. 77. G .K. Chesterton, ‘Tennyson’, in Richard Garnett and G. K. Chesterton, Tennyson (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1903), p. 8. Henry James, ‘Queen Mary’, Views and Reviews (Boston: The Ball Publishing Company, 1908), p. 177. Arthur Quiller-Couch, Introduction to Tennyson’s Poems: A Selection (London: Cassell and Company, 1904), p. 9. A .C. Bradley, ‘The Long Poem in the Age of Wordsworth’, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Macmillan & Co., 1909), p. 193. One should note that the loss of the ‘old unity of spirit and story’ is also the fate of the Round Table in the Idylls. Bradley, ‘The Long Poem in the Age of Wordsworth’, p. 204; Bradley, ‘The Long Poem in the Age of Wordsworth’, p. 193. James, Views and Reviews, p. 178. Walter de la Mare, ‘Tennyson’, Times Literary Supplement 395 (5 August 1909), p. 1. Walter de la Mare, ‘Tennyson’, p. 1. Walter de la Mare, ‘Tennyson’, p. 2. Walter de la Mare, ‘Tennyson’, p. 1. Walter de la Mare, ‘Tennyson’, p. 1. Walter de la Mare, ‘Tennyson’, p. 1.

Chapter 3 1 2

3 4 5

6 7

Virginia Woolf, Night and Day ed. Julia Briggs (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 12. Oliver St John Gogarty, ‘James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist’, in James Joyce: Interviews and Recollections ed. E. H. Mikhail (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 22. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 48. ichard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: OUP, 1982), p.264. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Walter Hettche (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), p. 100. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pp. 101–2. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. 102.

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162 8 9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25 26 27 28

29 30

31

32

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34 35 36

37 38

39 40 41 42

Notes

Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. 102. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pp. 102–3. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. 104. Edwin Watts Chubb, Masters of English Literature (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press 1967), p. 403. Leonard A. Compton-Rickett, ‘The Poetry of Byron’, The Egoist 1.8 (April 1914), pp. 141–3. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. 282. Virginia Woolf, Night and Day ed. Julia Briggs (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 27. Woolf, Night and Day, p. 8. Woolf, Night and Day, pp. 27–8. William Watson, ‘Lachrymae Musarum’, The Collected Poems of William Watson (London: John Lane, 1898), 20. Woolf, Night and Day, p. 269. Woolf, Night and Day, p. 269. Woolf, Night and Day, p. 269. Julia Briggs, ‘Introduction’ to Night and Day, p. xiv. Virginia Woolf, ‘A Character Sketch’, The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume 3: 1919– 1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), p. 255. Woolf, Night and Day, p. 12. Hugh I’Anson Fausset, Tennyson: A Modern Portrait (London: Selwyn & Blount, 1923) p. 69. Fausset, Tennyson: A Modern Portrait p. 99. Fausset, Tennyson: A Modern Portrait p. 186. Fausset, Tennyson: A Modern Portrait p. 219. See the ‘Foreword’ to C. H. O. Scaife’s The Poetry of Alfred Tennyson: An Essay in Appreciation (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1930). Fausset, Tennyson: A Modern Portrait p. 302. C. Colleer Abbott, ‘A Short View of the Case Against Tennyson’, Humberside 2.1 (October 1923), p. 8. Gilbert Thomas, ‘Tennyson and the Georgians’, London Quarterly Review 140 (July 1923), p. 46. Laurence W. Mazzeno, Alfred Tennyson: the Critical Legacy (Rochester and Suffolk: Camden House, 2004), p. 70. Harold Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry (London: Constable & Company, 1923) p. 5. Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry, p. 6. Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry, p. 156. Theodore Martin, ‘Tennyson and “Cymbeline” ’ line 13, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 72 (November 1892), p. 767. Ann Thwaite, Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife (London: Faber & Faber, 1996) p. xvii. Nicolson was married to Vita Sackville-West who conducted various same-sex affairs throughout her life. Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry, p. 158. Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry, p. 172. Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry, p. 173. Henry James, The Middle Years, in Autobiography ed. Frederick W. Dupee (London: W. H. Allen, 1956), p. 593.

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Notes 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52

53

54 55

56

57 58

59

60 61 62 63

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James, The Middle Years, p. 591; James, The Middle Years, p. 587. James, The Middle Years, p. 549. James, The Middle Years, p. 593. Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry, p.10; Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry, p. 19. Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry, p. 10. Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry, p. 231. Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry, p. 231. Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry, p. 7. Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry, p. 29. Letter from Ezra Pound to Elkin Mathews, c.29 May 1916, in Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, ed. Forrest Read (New York: New Directions, 1967), p. 278. Letter from Ezra Pound to Iris Barry, 20 July 1916, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907– 1941 ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), p.138. Letter from Ezra Pound to Elkin Mathews, 30 May 1916, Pound/Joyce, p. 285. Ezra Pound, ‘The Rev. G. Crabbe, LL.B.’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), pp. 276–7. Ezra Pound, ‘Landor’, Selected Prose 1909–1965 ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), p. 354. T. S. Eliot, ‘Verse Pleasant and Unpleasant’, The Egoist 5 (March 1918), p. 43. John Cann Bailey, ‘For and Against Tennyson’, Times Literary Supplement 1,108 (12 April 1923), p. 237. Laura Riding and Robert Graves. A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: William Heinemann, 1927), p. 31. Riding and Graves. A Survey of Modernist Poetry, p. 50. Riding and Graves. A Survey of Modernist Poetry, p. 50. Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room ed. Sue Roe (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 60. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas ed. Michèle Barrett (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 11. Entry for 22 December 1940 in The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume V: 1936–1941, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), p. 345. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 11. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 11. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 12–13. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 13. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, pp. 13–14. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. Stella McNichol (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 35–6. Shuli Barzilai, ‘The Politics of Quotation in To the Lighthouse: Mrs. Woolf Resites Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Cowper’, Literature and Psychology 41.3 (1995), p. 25. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 38. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 22. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 22. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History ed. Archibald MacMechan (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1901), p. 1. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 145.

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‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ ll. 9–17, Ricks no. 315. See John Keegan, The First World War (London: Hutchinson, 1998), pp. 381–395. ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ ll. 50–55, Ricks no. 315. See Jerome McGann, ‘Tennyson and the Histories of Criticism’, The Beauty of Inflections (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 173–203. Woolf proposed the idea in 1919 and a draft from 1923 exists. See Lucio P. Ruotolo’s ‘Preface’, Freshwater (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), pp. x–xi. Woolf, Freshwater, p. 8. Woolf, Freshwater, p. 9. Woolf, Freshwater, p.58. Woolf, Freshwater, p.16. Woolf, Freshwater, p. 12. Woolf, Freshwater, pp. 24–25. Hardy, Tennyson and the Novelists, p. 4. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (London: Bodley Head, 2001), p. 42. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. 103; See Lives of Victorian Literary Figures I: Eliot, Dickens and Tennyson by their Contemporaries Vol. 3: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ed. Matthew Bevis (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), p. 432. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 166. A reference to The Princess, Prologue ll. 97–8, Ricks no. 286. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 480. Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 205. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 241 See Patrick J. Ledden, ‘Bloom, Lawn Tennis, and the Gaelic Athletic Association’, James Joyce Quarterly 36.3 (Spring 1999), p. 631. Ledden, ‘Bloom, Lawn Tennis, and the Gaelic Athletic Association’, p. 630; Joyce, Ulysses, p. 261. Tom Paulin, ‘The British Presence in Ulysses’, Writing to the Moment (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), pp. 18–27. In Memoriam CIX ll. 13–16, Ricks no. 296. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 42. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 71. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 227. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 227. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 236. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 513. ‘Locksley Hall’ l. 20, Ricks no. 271. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 70. Joyce, Ulysses, pp. 643–4. Anne Williamson, Henry Williamson: Tarka and the Last Romantic (Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1995), pp. 66–7. Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End ed. Max Saunders (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 16. Ford Madox Ford, ‘Ulysses and the Handling of Indecencies’, Critical Essays ed. Max Saunders and Richard Stang (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 220.

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Ford Madox Ford, ‘Ulysses and the Handling of Indecencies’, 220. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 48. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 347. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pp. 566–7. Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.266; Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 8. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 10. Quoted in Elizabeth Longford, Wellington: The Years of the Sword (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 129. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 567. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 8. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 10.

Chapter 4 1

In Memoriam LIV, l. 18 , Ricks no. 296. Letter from D. H. Lawrence to Frederick Atkinson, 24 June 1910, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Volume I: September 1901 – May 1913, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 166. 3 James Joyce, ‘Ibsen’s New Drama’, reprinted in Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: OUP, 2000) pp. 30–49. 4 D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 35. 5 The Lincoln Monument to Tennyson’, The Athenaeum 4057 (29 July 1905), p. 45. 6 G. K. Chesterton, G. F. Watts (London: Duckworth & Co., 1920; first published 1904), 77. 7 D. H. Lawrence, The Trespasser, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 77. The inscription runs ‘In memory of Alfred Lord Tennyson this cross is raised as a beacon to sailors by the people of Freshwater and other friends in England and America’. 8 Review of The Rainbow in The Star, 22 October 1915, reprinted in D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. P. Draper (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 93. 9 Letter to Harriet Monroe, 17 November 1914, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Volume II: June 1913 – October 1916, ed. George J. Zyaturk and James Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 233. 10 Quoted in David Garnett, Great Friends (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 78. 11 D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 247. 12 D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’, The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 16. 13 Lawrence, ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’, p. 37. 14 Lawrence, ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’, p. 32. 15 Lawrence, ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’, p. 33. 16 Lawrence, ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’, p. 35. 17 Lawrence, ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’, p. 36. 2

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‘The Lady of Shalott’ l. 115, Ricks no. 159. The flood can also be read as a reference to George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860). Lawrence, The Rainbow, p.17. Lawrence, The Rainbow, p.17. Lawrence, The Rainbow, p.191. Evelyn J. Hinz and John J. Teunissen, ‘Odysseus, Ulysses, and Ursula: The Context of Lawrence’s Rainbow’, in The Modernists: Studies in a Literary Phenomenon, ed. Lawrence B. Gamache and Ian S. MacNiven (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses 1987), pp. 171–91. In Memoriam, Epilogue ll. 143–4, Ricks no. 296. ‘Ulysses’ ll. 19–21, Ricks no. 217. Hardy, Tennyson and the Novelists, p. 22. Lawrence, The Trespasser, p. 128. In Memoriam LIV, Ricks no. 296. Lawrence, The Rainbow, p. 386. T. S. Eliot, ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’, The Egoist IV.10 (November 1917), p.151; T. S. Eliot, ‘Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry’, Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 149. Letter from Wilfred Owen to Susan Owen, 21 November 1911, Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters ed. Harold Owen and John Bell (London: OUP, 1967), p. 96. Letter from Wilfred Owen to Susan Owen, 3 April 1912, Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters, p.127; to Susan Owen, August 1912, Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters, p.152. Letter from Wilfred Owen to Susan Owen, 8 August 1917, Wilfred Owen, Collected Letters, p. 482. Beaumont Hamel was one of the battlefields on which the onslaught of the Somme in 1916 was launched; Owen fought there in 1917. ‘Crossing the Bar’ ll. 3–5, Ricks no. 462. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 247. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover p. 290. The Princess V^VI, Ricks no. 286. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, p. 291. D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Future of the Novel’, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 151. Hugh Stevens, ‘D. H. Lawrence, Organicism, and the Modern Novel’, The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, ed. Morag Shiach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 142. Stevens, ‘D. H. Lawrence, Organicism, and the Modernist Novel’, p. 142. D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy, in D. H. Lawrence and Italy ed. Simonetta de Filippis, Paul Eggert and Mara Kalnins (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 39. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 466. Letter to E. M. Forster, 28 January 1915, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Volume II, p. 266. Lawrence, Women in Love, p. 199. Lawrence, Women in Love, pp. 187–8. Lawrence, Women in Love, p. 480. Lawrence, Women in Love, p. 481. Lawrence, Women in Love, p. 481.

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Notes 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57

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Lawrence, Women in Love, p. 481. D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy, in D. H. Lawrence and Italy ed. Simonetta de Filippis, Paul Eggert and Mara Kalnins (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 38. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy, p. 50. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy, p. 51. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy, p. 51. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy, p. 51. Plato, The Symposium, trans. Christopher Gill (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 43. Plato, The Symposium, pp. 46–7.

Chapter 5 1 2

3 4

5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15

16

17 18

‘Tithonus’ l. 7, Ricks no. 324. Charles Lee and D. B. Wyndham Lewis (eds), The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1930); John Collier, ‘Lord Tennyson’, in The Great Victorians, ed. H. J. and Hugh Massingham (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1932), p. 508. John Fuller, W. H. Auden: A Commentary (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 69. W. H. Auden, ‘Get there if you can’, lines 1–4, The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 48. See Christopher Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson, Vol. II pp. 118–19. George Eliot, ‘Tennyson’s Maud’, Selected Critical Writings ed. Rosemary Ashton (Oxford: OUP, 1992), p. 171; George W. Alger, ‘Tennyson as Poet of the English People’, Poet-Lore VIII (1896), p. 327; J. W. Mackail, Studies of English Poets (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1926), p. 241. Auden, ‘Get there if you can’, line 45. Auden, ‘Get there if you can’, lines 51–4. Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), pp. 90–1. Mendelson, Early Auden, p. 91. Mendelson, Early Auden, pp. 12–13. Throughout his career, Auden believed steadfastly in an idea (undoubtedly inspired by T. S. Eliot) of the poet’s relation to the ‘English Tradition’, telling his brother John in 1927, ‘The only thing which can hold you up in expression is just a lack of the tradition’. Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden (London: Heinemann, 1995), p. 64. In 1940 he repeated the idea in ‘New Year Letter’, writing of the ‘Great masters who have shown mankind / An order it has yet to find’ [W. H. Auden, ‘New Year Letter’ lines 99–100, Collected Poems ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), p. 201.] ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ ll. 235–6, Ricks no. 417. W. H. Auden, ‘Get there if you can’, ll. 47–8, The English Auden, p. 49. Gavin Ewart, ‘Audenesque for an Initiation’ lines 15–16, New Verse 6 (December 1933), p. 12. F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (1932. London: Chatto & Windus, 1950), p. 15; Leavis, New Bearings, p. 193. Leavis, New Bearings, p. 74. W. B. Yeats, introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 (Oxford: OUP, 1936), p. ix.

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Yeats, introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, p. v. Yeats, introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, p. xxvii. Memoir I, p. 393. Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), 13–14. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 13. Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper, 28. Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper, 236. William Faulkner, Light in August (New York: Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, 1932), p. 301. Faulkner, Light in August, p. 301. William Faulkner, Faulkner in the University ed. Frederick Landis Gwynn and Joseph Leo Blotner (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), p. 93. Hugh M. Ruppersburg, Reading Faulkner: Light in August (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), p. 187. In Memoriam V l. 8, Ricks no. 296. Faulkner, Light in August, p. 56. Faulkner, Light in August, p. 441. In Memoriam CXV ll. 1–4, Ricks no. 296. In Memoriam CXV l. 19, Ricks no. 296. Faulkner, Light in August, p. 467. The Princess III^IV ll. 5–6, Ricks no. 286. Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust ed. Robert Murray Davis (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 34. Frontispiece to Waugh, A Handful of Dust. David Lodge, Evelyn Waugh (London: Columbia University Press, 1971), p.27; Shelley Walia, Evelyn Waugh: Witness to Decline (New Delhi: Sterling, 1998), p.90; Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, ‘Unreal cities and undead legacies: T. S. Eliot and Gothic hauntings in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Barnes’s Nightwood’, in Special Relationships: Anglo-American Affinities and Antagonisms 1854–1936 ed. Janet Beer & Bridget Bennett (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p.226. ‘Maud’ II.V.i ll.239–43, Ricks no. 316. Waugh, A Handful of Dust, p.26; Waugh, A Handful of Dust, pp. 17–18. Richard Wasson, ‘A Handful of Dust: Critique of Victorianism’, Modern Fiction Studies 7 (Winter 1961) p. 327. Waugh, A Handful of Dust, p. 153. Letter to Henry Yorke, September 1934, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), p. 88. Wasson, ‘A Handful of Dust: Critique of Victorianism’, p. 331. Waugh, A Handful of Dust, p. 164. ‘The Holy Grail’ ll. 227–30, Ricks no. 471. Waugh, A Handful of Dust, pp. 212–13. Waugh, A Handful of Dust, p. 17. Waugh, A Handful of Dust, p. 18. John Updike, ‘Introduction’ to Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (London: Vintage, 2005), p. v. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (London: William Heinemann, 1940), p. 182. Greene, The Power and the Glory, p. 183.

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Notes 54 55 56 57 58 59

60

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62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74

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Greene, The Power and the Glory, p. 184. Graham Greene, A Gun for Sale (London: Vintage, 2005), pp. 62–3. Greene, A Gun For Sale, p. 63. Greene, A Gun For Sale, p. 93. Greene, A Gun For Sale, p. 164. In the Times radio listings in the 1920s, there are 39 separate instances of Tennyson poems either recited, or set to music. T. S. Eliot, ‘Preface’ to Harry Crosby, Transit of Venus (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1931), pp. ii–iii. T. S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’ to Poems of Tennyson (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1936), p. xv. T. S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, p. ix. T. S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, p. xii. T. S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii. Charles Tennyson, ‘Tennyson Papers: I. Alfred’s Father’, Cornhill Magazine 153 (March 1936), p. 290. Charles Tennyson, ‘Tennyson Papers: I. Alfred’s Father’, p. 300. T. S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, p. xiv; T. S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, p. xv. T. S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, pp. xv–xvi. T. S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, p. xviii. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Voice of His Time’, The Listener 27.683 (12 February 1942), p. 211. B. Ifor Evans, A Short History of English Literature (London: Penguin Books, 1940), p. 60. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Voice of his Time’, p. 212. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Voice of his Time’, p. 212. John Betjeman, ‘Coming Home’, Coming Home, ed. Candida Lycett-Green (London: Methuen, 1997), p. 141. See Robert McCrum, Wodehouse: A Life (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 314–24. Quoted in Frances Donaldson, P. G. Wodehouse: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), p. 380. Donaldson, P. G. Wodehouse: A Biography, p. 380. Ezra Pound, “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Leonard W. Doob (London: Greenwood Press, 1978), p. 26. Pound, “Ezra Pound Speaking”, p. 26. Pound, “Ezra Pound Speaking”, p. 26. Pound, “Ezra Pound Speaking”, p. 90. ‘The Rev. G. Crabbe, L.L.B.’, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), p. 276. Letter to Iris Barry, 20 July 1916, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), p. 138. For example, there were 5 similar clues in 1932. Harold Hannyngton Child, ‘Fifty Years After’, Times Literary Supplement 2123 (10 October 1942), p. 499. Hannyngton Child, ‘Fifty Years After’, p. 499. In Memoriam CXXVII l. 7, Ricks no. 296. Times Literary Supplement 2123 (10 October 1942), p. 499. G. Wilson Knight, ‘A Great National Poet’, Times Literary Supplement 2123 (10 October 1942), p. 498.

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106 107 108 109

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Wilson Knight, ‘A Great National Poet’, p. 498. Philip Tomlinson, ‘News & Notes’, Times Literary Supplement 2123 (10 October 1942), p. 493. Philip Tomlinson, ‘Return To Tennyson’, Times Literary Supplement 1987 (2 March 1940), p. 111. Humbert Wolfe, ‘Introduction’ to Tennyson, in Selections from Tennyson, Browning, Arnold (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 385. Wolfe, ‘Introduction’ to Tennyson, p. 385. Tennyson appeared in ‘Old and True’ twice in June 1940 alone, in The Times 48645 (18 June 1940), p. 9, and ibid, 48651 (25 June 1940), p. 9. W. H. Auden, ‘Introduction’ to A Selection from the Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (London: Phoenix house, 1946), p. x. W. H. Auden, ‘Introduction’, p. x. In a footnote, Auden included some suggested wider reading – Nicolson’s book and Eliot’s essay – but this is the only time Eliot is mentioned. W. H. Auden, ‘Introduction’, p. xi. See Ann Thwaite, Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p. 331. For example, the Duke of Argyll’s poem ‘At the Laureate’s Funeral’, National Review 119 (January 1893), p. 581. T. S. Eliot, ‘In Memoriam’, Essays Ancient and Modern (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), p. 175. F. O. Matthiessen, ‘Tennyson’, New York Times Book Review 50.4 (28 January 1945), p. 4. Desmond MacCarthy, ‘Tennyson’, Memories (London: MacGibbon & Lee, 1953), p. 154. MacCarthy, ‘Tennyson’, p. 154. Letter to Eric R. Dodds, 3 May 1947, quoted in Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden (London: Heinemann, 1995), p. 231. W. H. Auden, ‘Introduction’, pp. xv–xvii. W. H. Auden, ‘Introduction’, p. xix. Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elders and Betters (London: Victor Gollancz, 1944), p. 52. ‘Tithonus’ ll. 1–4, Ricks no. 324. Epigraph to Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer (London: Chatto & Windus, 1939). Huxley, After Many a Summer, p. 312. Huxley, After Many a Summer, p. 314. Huxley, After Many a Summer, p. 12. Huxley, After Many a Summer, p. 13. Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (London: Hutchinson, 1963), p. 128. Evelyn Waugh, ‘Half in Love with Easeful Death: an Examination of Californian Burial Customs’, The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 336. Waugh, ‘Half in Love with Easeful Death’, p. 336. Waugh, ‘Half in Love with Easeful Death’, p. 337. Letter from Evelyn Waugh to Augustus Peters, 6 March 1947, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), p. 247. Eaton was the founder of Forest Lawn. Huxley, After Many A Summer, p. 12.

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Notes 120

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123

124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152

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James L. Lynch, ‘Tennyson’s “Tithonus”, Huxley’s After Many a Summer and Waugh’s The Loved One’, South Atlantic Review 51.4 (November 1986), p. 33. Letter from Evelyn Waugh to Augustus Peters, 6 March 1947, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, p. 247. Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One (London: Chapman and Hall, 1948), p. 70. Yeats’s title is ‘Lake Isle’, a deliberate alteration by Waugh to highlight the Californian lack of poetic appreciation. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, line 4, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats ed. Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 39; Waugh, The Loved One, p. 70. Waugh, The Loved One, p. 18. Waugh, The Loved One, p. 8. Waugh, The Loved One, p. 12. Waugh, The Loved One, p. 12. Waugh, The Loved One, p. 19. Waugh, The Loved One, p. 12. Waugh, The Loved One, p. 82. Waugh, The Loved One, p. 90. Waugh, The Loved One, p. 90. Waugh, The Loved One, p. 121. One is reminded of the distinction made by Christopher Ricks in Allusion to the Poets. Waugh, The Loved One, p. 73. ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ l. 4, Ricks no. 309. Waugh, The Loved One, p. 91. Waugh, The Loved One, p. 88. Waugh, The Loved One, p. 78; Huxley, After Many a Summer, p. 69. Waugh, The Loved One, p. 82. Huxley, After Many a Summer, pp. 60–1. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie (London: Puffin, 1973), p. 105. Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, p. 172. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (London: Chapman & Hall, 1945), p. 25. Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, p. 26. Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, p. 38. Italics Waugh’s own. Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, p. 30. Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, p. 31. Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, p. 93. In Memoriam XCV ll. 1–8, Ricks no. 296. In Memoriam XCV ll. 19–20, Ricks no. 296. Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, p. 199.

Chapter 6 1

2

Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle, How to be Topp (1954. London: Puffin, 1962), p. 58. Kingsley Amis, ‘Introduction’ to Tennyson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 7.

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172 3

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34 35 36

Notes

Letter from Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 17 September 1947, The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed. Zachary Leader (London: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 141. In a letter of the 15 July 1946, Amis told Larkin ‘It is a lovely day and I have been sitting in he garden reading other men’s words’, including those of Tennyson (The Letters of Kingsley Amis, p. 78). The sentiment is reminiscent of Wilfred Owen’s account of reading Tennyson in the garden of Dunsden Vicarage. Letter from Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 18 June 1952, The Letters of Kingsley Amis, p. 286. ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ ll. 169–70, Ricks no. 162. Dryden’s idea of his predecessors overlooking rhyme is a chief concern in Walter Jackson Bate’s The Burden of the Past. Philip Larkin, ‘The Literary World’, repr. In Christopher Ricks, Essays in Appreciation (Oxford: OUP, 1998), pp. 203–4. Ricks, Essays in Appreciation, p. 204. Elizabeth Bishop, ‘The Gentleman of Shalott’ l.9, Complete Poems (London: Chatto and Windus, 2004), p. 9. Bishop, ‘The Gentleman of Shalott’ ll. 12–15. Bishop, ‘The Gentleman of Shalott’ ll. 39–41, Complete Poems, p. 10. Bishop, ‘The Gentleman of Shalott’ ll. 41–2, Complete Poems, p. 10. Bishop, ‘The Gentleman of Shalott’ l. 44, Complete Poems, p. 10. Bradford A. Booth, ‘Preface’, The Trollopian 1 (Summer 1945), p. 1. Booth, ‘Preface’, p. 1. Bradford A. Booth, ‘Editorial Note’, The Trollopian 2 (March 1946), p. 1. Since 1986 this journal has been called Nineteenth-Century Literature. Epigraph to Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962. London: HarperCollins, 2002). Christie, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, pp. 92–3. Christie, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, p. 351. Christie, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, p. 351. Christie, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, p. 351. John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes (London: Penguin, 1970), p. 138. Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes, p. 222. Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes, p. 8. Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes, p. 9. Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes, pp. 9–10. Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle, How to be Topp (1954. London: Puffin, 1962), p. 58. Anthony Buckeridge, Jennings and Darbishire (1952. Thirsk: House of Stratus, 2003), p. 82. Buckeridge, Jennings and Darbishire, p. 82. Buckeridge, Jennings and Darbishire, p. 100. Buckeridge, Jennings and Darbishire, p. 100. P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1954), p. 120. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, pp. 120–21. Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (London: Chapman and Hall, 1938), p. 302. Tennyson Collection: The Usher Gallery Lincoln (Lincoln: Lincoln Libraries, Museum and Art Gallery Committee, 1963), p. 8.

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Notes 37

38 39 40

41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52

173

1972 saw the founding of an esoteric, coterie journal entitled The Enchanted Moan, devoted to ‘Maud’, of whose issues only six copies were ever printed, with anonymously-written articles; copies of the journal remain in the British Library. Christopher Ricks, Tennyson (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. vii. Ricks, Tennyson, p. 264; Ricks, Tennyson, p. 269. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969. London: Vintage, 2004), p. 10. Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 264. Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 354. Deborah Bowen, ‘The Riddler Riddled: Reading the Epigraphs in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman’, Journal of Narrative Technique 25.1 (1995), p. 69. Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 49 Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 156. Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 36. Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 36. In Memoriam XXXV ll.17–24, Ricks no. 296. Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 35. Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 408. See A Choice of Tennyson’s Verse ed. Lord David Cecil (London: Faber & Faber, 1971). Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 445.

Chapter 7 1 2

3

4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

‘The Lady of Shalott’ l.169, Ricks no. 159. Laurence Mazzeno, Alfred Tennyson: The Critical Legacy (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), p. 127. Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (London: Faber & Faber, 1980), p. vii; Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart, p. 10. Helen Garner, The Children’s Bach (1984. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989), p. 1. Garner, The Children’s Bach, p. 63. Nicholas Mansfield, ‘A Pleasant, Meaningless Discord: Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach’, Westerly 36.2 (June 1991), p. 17. Garner, The Children’s Bach, 93. Mansfield, ‘A Pleasant, Meaningless Discord’, p. 22. Jessica Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River (1978. London: Penguin, 1984), p. 9 Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 9 Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 15. Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 9. Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 11; Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 9. Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 10. Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 10. Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 18. Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 59. Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, 140. Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, 141. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ l. 151, Ricks no. 159.

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174 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46

47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61

Notes

‘The Lady of Shalott’ ll. 169–70, Ricks no. 159. Dominique Hecq, ‘Tirra Lirra! Tales of Purloined Letters and Edited Destinies’, The Contact and the Culmination ed. Marc Delrez and Bénédicte Ledent (Liège: Liège Language and Literature, 1997), p, 172. Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (1976. London: Virago, 1982), p. 143. Atwood, Lady Oracle, p. 143. Atwood, Lady Oracle, p. 14. Atwood, Lady Oracle, p. 268. Atwood, Lady Oracle, p. 310. Atwood, Lady Oracle, p. 237. Atwood, Lady Oracle, pp. 221–2. Atwood, Lady Oracle, p. 222. Atwood, Lady Oracle, p. 226. Atwood, Lady Oracle, p. 226. David Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot (London: Macdonald, 1985), p. 30. Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, p. 15. Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, p. 84. Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, p. 22. Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, p. 31. Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, p. 31. Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, pp. 33–5. Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, p. 38. Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, p. 37. Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, p. 58; Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, p. 90. Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, p. 141. Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, p. 225. Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, p. 182. Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, p. 104 – Elaine and the Lady of Shalott are the same person. Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, p. 211 John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ l. 52, Complete Poems ed. Jack Stillinger (London: Belknap Press, 1982), p. 287. Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, p. 213. Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, p. 254. Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot, p. 252. David Lodge, Nice Work (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 335. ‘Locksley Hall’ l. 182, Ricks no. 271. Lodge, Nice Work p. 336. Lodge, Nice Work p. 337. Lodge, Nice Work pp. 338–9. Lodge, Nice Work p. 340. The two lines he singles out are ‘Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, matched with mine, / Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine’. ‘Locksley Hall’ ll. 151–2, Ricks no. 271. Lodge, Nice Work p. 356. David Lodge, Small World (London: Penguin, 1985) p. 194. Lodge, Small World, p. 319. Lodge, Small World, p. 245.

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Notes

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Chapter 8 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27

28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

‘A Hundred Years After’, Times Literary Supplement 4670, (2 October 1992), p. 8. A Hundred Years After’, pp. 8–9. ‘A Hundred Years After’, pp. 8–9. ‘A Hundred Years After’, p. 8. ‘A Hundred Years After’, p. 9. Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: William Heinemann, 1927), p. 50. Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (London: W. H. Allen, 1960), p. 153. Craig Raine, T. S. Eliot (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 57. ‘A Hundred Years After’, p. 8. ‘A Hundred Years After’, p. 8. Francis Turner Palgrave, ‘In Pace’ ll. 20–21, The Nineteenth Century 32 (November 1892), pp. 837–8. ‘A Hundred Years After’, p. 8. ‘A Hundred Years After’, p. 8. Tom Paulin, ‘The Critic at the Breakfast Table’, Writing to the Moment (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 284. Paulin, ‘The Critic at the Breakfast Table’, p. 284. Paulin, ‘The Critic at the Breakfast Table’, p. 284. J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (London: Harvill Secker, 2007), p. 217. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, p. 217. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, p. 218. Lynne Truss, Tennyson’s Gift (London: Profile, 2004), p. 25. Truss, Tennyson’s Gift, p. 5. Truss, Tennyson’s Gift, p. 4 Truss, Tennyson’s Gift, p. 157. Truss, Tennyson’s Gift, pp. 101–02. Truss, Tennyson’s Gift, p. 37. Lynne Truss, ‘Tennyson’s Gift’, at http://www.lynnetruss.com/pages/content/ index.asp?PageID=71, accessed on 18 September 2009. A. S. Byatt, ‘Ancestors’, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000), p. 79. See ‘A. S. Byatt’, interview in Writers and Company ed. Eleanor Wachtel (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 80. A. S. Byatt, The Children’s Book (London: Chatto and Windus, 2009), p. 404. Byatt, The Children’s Book, p. 255. A. S. Byatt, ‘Morpho Eugenia’, Angels and Insects (London: 1992), p.59. Byatt, ‘Morpho Eugenia’, p. 89. Christian Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), p. 20. A. S. Byatt, ‘The Conjugal Angel’, Angels and Insects (London: 1992), p. 169. ‘Break, break, break’ l. 1, Ricks no. 228; In Memoriam X l. 20, Ricks no. 296. Byatt, ‘The Conjugal Angel’, p. 190. Byatt, ‘The Conjugal Angel’, p. 175. Byatt, ‘The Conjugal Angel’, p. 204. John Harwood, The Seance (London: Vintage, 2009), p. 48. Harwood, The Seance, p. 51.

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176 41 42 43 44 45

46 47

48 49

50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61

62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77

Notes

Sarah Waters, Affinity (London: Virago, 2003), p. 225. In Memoriam XLIV l. 1, Ricks no. 296. Wachtel, Writers and Company, p. 85. Byatt, ‘The Conjugal Angel’, pp. 226–7. Although Hallam and Tennyson would have known some of Keats’s work at this time, the choice is problematic, as Byatt later has Hallam reciting ‘This Living Hand’, which remained unpublished until 1898. Byatt, ‘The Conjugal Angel’, pp. 222–3. W. B. Yeats, introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 (Oxford: OUP, 1936), p. ix. Byatt, ‘The Conjugal Angel’, p. 233–4. Sally Shuttleworth, ‘The Retro-Victorian Novel’, The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor S. Shaffer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), p. 256. Byatt, ‘The Conjugal Angel’, p. 261. In a letter quoted by Sir Henry Taylor, Autobiography (London: Longmans, Green, 1885), Vol. II, p. 193. Byatt, ‘The Conjugal Angel’, p. 272. Memoir I p. 320. Byatt, ‘The Conjugal Angel’, p. 272. Wachtel, Writers and Company, p. 82. Byatt, ‘The Conjugal Angel’, p. 290. ‘Tears, idle tears’ ll. 36–40, Ricks no. 286. Grace Moore, ‘Twentieth century re-workings of the Victorian novel’, Literature Compass 5.1 (2008), p. 136. Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. ix. Byatt, ‘The Conjugal Angel’, p. 286. Peter Wild, ‘Snuggling up to Queen Victoria’, 3am Magazine 2002, http:// www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/2002_sep/interview_michel_faber.html (site accessed 19 September 2009). Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003), p. 11. Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White, p. 444. ‘Interview with Michel Faber’, http://www.harcourtbooks.com/authorinterviews/bookinterview_Faber.asp (site accessed 19 September 2009). Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White, p. 767. Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White, p. 219. Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White, p. 725. Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White, p. 286. ‘Mariana’ ll. 1–12, Ricks no. 73. Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White, p. 534. Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White, p. 534. Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White, p. 414. Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White, p. 88. Peter Wild, ‘Snuggling up to Queen Victoria’, 3am Magazine 2002, http:// www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/2002_sep/interview_michel_faber.html (site accessed 19 September 2009). Tracy Chevalier, Falling Angels (London: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 16–19. Chevalier, Falling Angels, p. 18. Chevalier, Falling Angels, p. 114.

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Chapter 9 1 2 3 4 5

6 7

8

9 10

11

12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Rich Cohen, Sweet and Low: A Family Story (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 101. Cohen, Sweet and Low, pp. 101–02. Cohen, Sweet and Low, p. 102. Figures from Cohen, Sweet and Low, p. 226. J. Robert Lennon, ‘Tastes like Cancer’, London Review of Books 29.5 (8 March 2007), p. 41. In Memoriam L, Ricks no. 296. John Mullan, ‘Title Deeds’, Guardian, 30 June 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ books/2007/jun/30/featuresreviews.guardianreview5 (site accessed 19 September 2009). In Ian McDiarmid’s 2009 theatrical adaptation, the lines were recited by the actor playing Anderton before the action of the play got underway. Mullan, ‘Title Deeds’. Mullan, ‘Title Deeds’; David Jays, ‘Have Chandelier, Will Travel’, Observer, 13 August 2006, accessed at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/aug/13/ fiction.features3; Hillary Mantel, ‘The Heart is Sick’, Guardian, 19 August 2006, accessed at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/aug/19/fiction.shopping (sites accessed 19 September 2009). ‘Reader’s Guide’, accessed at http://www.mcclelland.com/catalog/display.pperl ?isbn=9780771068379&view=rg (site accessed 19 September 2009). Andrew O’Hagan, Be Near Me (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p. 165. O’Hagan, Be Near Me, p. 167; O’Hagan, Be Near Me, p. 183. O’Hagan, Be Near Me, p. 168. O’Hagan, Be Near Me, p. 189 O’Hagan, Be Near Me, p. 191. Kera Bolonik, ‘A Foolish Priest and Existential Baloney’, Bookforum June/July/ Aug 2007, http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/014_02/296 (site accessed 19 September 2009). O’Hagan, Be Near Me, p. 208 Kera Bolonik, ‘A Foolish Priest and Existential Baloney’. Ramona Koval, Interview with Andrew O’Hagan, ‘The Book Show’, 26 October 2006, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2006/1773820.htm (site accessed 19 September 2009). O’Hagan, Be Near Me, p. 110. O’Hagan, Be Near Me, p. 110. O’Hagan, Be Near Me, p. 18. O’Hagan, Be Near Me, p. 119. O’Hagan, Be Near Me, p. 209. O’Hagan, Be Near Me, p. 144. O’Hagan, Be Near Me, pp. 124–7. Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist (London: Simon & Schuster, 2009), p.60. Baker, The Anthologist, p. 60. Baker, The Anthologist, pp. 151–2. Baker, The Anthologist, p. 152. Baker, The Anthologist, p. 102. Baker, The Anthologist, p. 102.

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178 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

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Baker, The Anthologist, p. 76. Baker, The Anthologist, p. 182. Baker, The Anthologist, p. 162. Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), p. 162. Foulds, The Quickening Maze, p. 26; Foulds, The Quickening Maze, p. 102. Foulds, The Quickening Maze, p. 144. Foulds, The Quickening Maze, p. 57. Foulds, The Quickening Maze, p. 194. Foulds, The Quickening Maze, p. 31. Foulds, The Quickening Maze, p. 147. Foulds, The Quickening Maze, p. 147. Meg Cabot, Avalon High (London: Macmillan Children’s, 2007), p. 7. Cabot, Avalon High, p. 36. Cabot, Avalon High, p. 36. Cabot, Avalon High, pp. 5–6. Cabot, Avalon High, p. 233.

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Index

Abbott, C. Colleer 50 Albert, Prince 31 Alfred, King 128 Alger, George W. 79 Allen, Grant 31 Amis, Kingsley 105, 127 Anderson, Jessica Tirra Lirra by the River 115, 117–19, 123, 124 Arnold, Matthew 92, 94, 112, 125 ‘Consolation’ 18 ‘Tennyson’ 21 ‘To Marguerite’ 114 Arthur, King 148 The Athenaeum 30, 42 Atkinson, Frederick 65 Atwood, Margaret Lady Oracle 115, 119–21, 123 The Penelopiad 121 Auden, W. H. 79–80, 95–6, 127, 148 Austen, Jane 9 Emma, 151 Austin, Alfred 21, 31–3 Baillie, A. W. M. 21 Baker, Nicholson The Anthologist 147–9 Barclay, Florence L. The Rosary 39–40 Baring, Rosa 79 Barzilai, Shuli 56 Bate, Water Jackson 1–3 Baudelaire, Charles 96 Beethoven, Ludvig Van 53 Benedictus, David Floating Down to Camelot 115, 120, 122–4, 151

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Bergonzi, Bernard 27 Betjeman, John 92 Bishop, Elizabeth 106–7 Blake, William 62 Bloom, Harold 1–5 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen 31 Booth, Bradford A. 107 Bowen, Deborah 112 Boyle, T. C. Tooth and Claw 138 Bradley, A. C. 42, 44, 52, 54 Bridges, Robert 81 Briggs, Julia 49 British Broadcasting Corporation 89–90, 91, 92, 131 Brontë, Charlotte 14, 125 Jane Eyre 137 Brown, Dan 131 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 134 Browning, Robert 3, 4, 9, 43, 48, 81, 90, 93, 94, 128, 132, 134 Buckeridge, Anthony Jennings and Darbyshire 109–10 Burns, Robert 11 Byatt, A. S. Angels and Insects 10, 131, 132–7, 149 The Children’s Book 132 Possession 132, 150 Byron, George Gordon 10, 39, 48, 62 Cabot, Meg 123 Avalon High 150–1 The Princess Diaries 150 Cameron, Julia Margaret 58, 95, 131 Campbell, Thomas 88 Carey, Peter 136

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190

Carlyle, Thomas 56 Sartor Resartus 35 Carpenter, William Boyd 29 Cecil, Lord David 114 Chaucer, Geoffrey 71, 150 Cheng, Vincent J. 59 Chesterton, G. K. 43, 65 Chevalier, Tracy Falling Angels 140–1 Child, Harold Hannyngton 93–4 Christie, Agatha 92 The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side 107–8 Chubb, Edwin Watts 48 Clare, John 149–50 Clark, Sir Andrew 28 Clough, Arthur Hugh 112, 128 Clueless 151 Coetzee, J. M. Diary of a Bad Year 128–9 Cohen, Rich 143 Collier, John 79 Collins, Wilkie 65 Compton-Burnett, Ivy Elders and Betters 96 Compton-Rickett, Leonard A. 48 Conrad, Joseph 33, 85 Heart of Darkness 7 ‘The Return’ 33–4 ‘Youth’ 33–5 Cornhill Magazine 91 Crabbe, George 11, 92 Cripps, Elizabeth A. 13 The Critic 31 Croker, John Wilson 95 Crosby, Harry 90 Cusack, Michael 59 Dante 20 Darwin, Charles 91, 112, 132 de la Mare, Walter 44–5, 62 del Toro, Guillermo 143 The Dial 28–9 Dickens, Alfred 9 Dickens, Charles 9, 38, 136 David Copperfield 9–10 The Pickwick Papers 15, 112

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Index Dickinson, Emily 132 Disraeli, Benjamin 65 Dixon, James Main 56 Dodds, Eric R. 96 Dodgson, Charles (Lewis Carroll) 130–1 Donne, John 34, 85 Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert 1, 4–5 Dryden, John 105 Dylan, Bob 6 Eagleton, Terry 127 Eaton, Hubert 98 The Egoist 48, 53, 71 Eisenstadt, Ben 143 Eisenstadt, Marvin 143 Eliot, George 33, 73, 79, 125, 136 Daniel Deronda, 19–20 The Mill on the Floss 14 Sayings 19 Eliot, T. S. 5, 7, 53, 71, 81, 90–2, 95–6, 100, 102, 103, 108, 111, 127, 129, 131 Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats 71 The Waste Land 7, 53, 80, 85, 90, 126, 128 Empson, William 105–6 Evans, B. Ifor 91 Ewart, Gavin 80 Faber, Michel 136 The Crimson Petal and the White 134, 137–40 Faulkner, William Light in August 83–5, 117, 147 Fausset, Hugh I’Anson 49–50, 94 Ferris, Gordon The Unquiet Heart 138 Fielding, Copley 11 FitzGerald, Edward 44, 148 Ford, Ford Madox 28, 129 Parade’s End 62 Forster, E. M. 25, 74, 100 A Room with a View 40–2 Foulds, Adam The Quickening Maze 149–50

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Index Fowles, John The French Lieutenant’s Woman 111–14, 127, 131 Freud, Sigmund 2, 113 Fry, Roger 103 The Future 53 Galileo 146 Garner, Helen The Children’s Bach 115–17 Garnett, Angelica 58 Gaskell, Elizabeth 14, 73 Cranford 15–17 ‘The Moorland Cottage’ 14–15 Sylvia’s Lovers 17 North and South 18–19, 112 Gill, Stephen 5–6 Ginsberg, Allen 149 Gissing, George 25, 29, 31, 100 New Grub Street 27–8, 30, 41 Goode, John 28 Gosse, Edmund 29, 52 The Graphic 29, 31 Graves, Robert 53, 127–8 Gray,Thomas 25, 98 Greene, Graham 87 A Gun for Sale 88–90 The Power and the Glory 88 Griffiths, Eric 120 The Guardian 144 Gutleben, Christian 132 Haig, Douglas 57 Hallam, Arthur Henry 133, 149 Hardy, Barbara 1, 10, 13, 20, 23, 24, 59 Hardy, Thomas 62, 73, 92, 100, 112, 136 ‘An Ancient to Ancients’ 21–2 Far From the Madding Crowd 25 The Mayor of Casterbridge 25 A Pair of Blue Eyes 22–4, 25, 100 Tess of the D’Urbervilles 24–5 Harwood, John The Séance 133–4 Hearst, W. Randolph 97 Hecq, Dominique 119 Hinz, Evelyn J. 69

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191

Homer 53 Hood, Thomas 11 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 21, 80–1, 123, 128 Horace 91 Horner, Avril 85 Horton, Robert F. 42 Household Words 14–15 Housman, A. E. 103 Howells, William Dean The Rise of Silas Lapham 25 Huxley, Aldous After Many a Summer 96–8, 101, 102 Ibsen, Henrik 65, 76 Illustrated London News 31, 59 Ingham, Patricia 18 Isherwood, Christopher 79 James, Henry 43–4 The Middle Years 43, 51–2, 58 Jameson, Starr 32–3 Jays, David 144 Jefferies, Richard 61 Jesse, Emily 134–5 Johnson, Lyndon 145 Joyce, James 2, 73, 127, 128 Finnegans Wake 47, 62–4 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 47–8, 59, 64 Ulysses 47, 53, 59–61, 62, 63, 64, 82, 130, 140 Kearney, Anthony 9–10 Keats, John 3, 49, 62, 100, 101, 124, 134, 145 Kernahan, Coulson 31 Kingsley, Charles Alton Locke 10–14, 17, 38, 117 Kipling, Rudyard 31–2 Knight, G. Wilson 94 Landseer, Edwin 11 Larkin, Philip 105–6, 137 Lawrence, D. H. 123 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 72–3, 74 The Rainbow 66–7, 69, 70, 75

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192

Index

Sons and Lovers 74 The Trespasser 65–6, 69–70, 74, 75 Twilight in Italy 73, 76 ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’ 67–8, 117 The White Peacock 65–6 Women in Love 73–5, 77 Leavis, F. R. 80–1, 128, 131 Ledden, Patrick J. 59 Lee, Charles 79 Leighton, Angela 134 Lennon, J. Robert 143 Levi, Peter 137 Lewis, D. B. Wyndham 79 Lewis, Suzanne 15 Lockhart, John Gibson 95 Lodge, David 85 Nice Work 115, 125–6 Small World 115, 126 Lyell, Charles 91, 112 MacCarthy, Sir Desmond 96 Mackail, J. W. 79 Mallock, William Hurrell 30 Malory, Sir Thomas 86 Man Booker Prize 149–50 Mansfield, Nicholas 116–17 Mantel, Hillary 144 Mao, Chairman 145 Martin, Robert Bernard 115, 149 Martin, Theodore 51 Matthews, Brander 7 Matthews, Elkin 52 Matthiessen, F. O. 95–6 Mazzeno, Laurence W. 50, 115 McCann, Colum Let the Great World Spin 138 McDonald, Peter D. 29 McGann, Jerome 3, 5, 57–8 Mendelson, Edward 80 Method Man 127 Michelangelo 112 Milton, John 3, 29, 95 Mitford, Jessica 97–8 Montgomery, E. M. Anne of Green Gables 36, 118, 124, 15 Moore, Grace 136 Moore, Henry 112

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Morris, Lewis 31 Morris, William 31 Motion, Andrew 127 Mullan, John 144 Nesbit, E. 31 New York Times Book Review 95 The New Yorker 148 Nicolson, Harold 50–2, 82, 94, 137 Nineteenth-Century Fiction 107 O’Hagan, Andrew Be Near Me 143–7 Ormond, Leonée 137 Owen, Wilfred 71–2 Palgrave, Francis Turner 128 Paulin, Tom 60, 128, 129 Perot, Ross 143 Plato, Symposium 76–7 Poe, Edgar Allen 101 Pound, Ezra 7, 52–3, 60, 71, 92–3, 103 Proust, Marcel 73, 145 Punch 33, 130 Quarterly Review 71, 95 Quiller-Couch, Arthur 43 Raine, Craig 128 Rejlander, Oscar Gustav 116 Richardson, Dorothy 73 Ricks, Christopher 1, 4–5, 106, 111 Riding, Laura 53, 127–8 Roberts, Frederick 65 Rodin, Auguste 33, 97 Rossetti, Christina 54, 55, 128, 130 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 120 Rossini, Gioachino 20 Ruppersburg, Hugh M. 83 Ruskin, John, Modern Painters I 16–17 Saki 60 Sassoon, Siegfried 62 Saunders, Max 28 Searle, Ronald How to be Topp 109, 148

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Index Shakespeare, William 8, 9, 29, 51, 52, 59, 92, 97, 100 Shaw, Marion 17, 123 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 4, 10, 13, 29, 39, 62, 82, 145 Shorter, Clement 29 Shuttleworth, Sally 135 Small, Helen 22, 25 Smith, Stevie Novel on Yellow Paper 82–3 Southey, Robert 30 Springer, Marlene 22–3 Stephen, Leslie 33 Stevens, Wallace 3 Strachey, Lytton 50, 103, 131 The Sunday Times 99 Sweet, Matthew 136 Swift, Jonathan 39 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 31, 90, 123 Tennyson, Alfred ‘Audley Court’ 127 Becket 29 ‘Break, break, break’ 23, 109–10, 133 ‘The Brook’ 88 ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ 32, 39, 50, 55–6, 62, 110–11, 127, 148 ‘Come down, O maid’ 42 ‘Crossing the Bar’ 44, 52, 71–2 ‘The Day Dream’ 15 ‘A Dream of Fair Women’ 61 ‘The Dying Swan’ 11–12 ‘Enoch Arden’ 21, 52, 81 ‘The Gardner’s Daughter’ 16 ‘The Grandmother’ 40 ‘The Holy Grail’ 86–7 ‘Home they brought her warrior dead’ 72 Idylls of the King 21, 27, 42, 43, 44, 52, 60, 71, 81, 85, 87, 117, 128 In Memoriam 9–10, 14–15, 17, 19, 23, 24, 37, 39, 42, 44, 52, 53, 69, 70–1, 74, 77, 81, 82–3, 93, 104, 111–14, 122, 131–5, 138, 140, 143–7, 149

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193

‘The Kraken’ 109 ‘The Lady of Shalott’ 36, 67–8, 107–8, 118–24, 136, 138, 141, 150–1 ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ 36, 67 ‘Locksley Hall’ 12, 17, 20, 61, 79–80, 125 ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ 80, 93, 125 ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ 12–14, 52, 102 ‘Mariana’ 11, 22, 67, 133, 139 ‘Maud’ 20, 33, 34–5, 40, 52, 54, 58, 85, 88–90, 103, 112–14, 123, 125, 131 ‘The May Queen’ 59 ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ 105 ‘Milton’ 127 ‘Morte D’Arthur’ 136 ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal’ 52, 100, 138–9 ‘O Swallow, Swallow’ 128 ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ 51, 63, 100 Poems (1832) 71 Poems (1842) 16, 49 The Poems of Tennyson (ed. Ricks, 1969) 111 ‘The Poet’s Song’ 12 The Princess 13, 27–8, 37, 40, 42, 52, 71, 72, 84, 100, 128, 138–49 ‘The splendour falls on castle walls’ 84 ‘Tears, idle tears’ 37, 71, 136 The Tennyson Birthday Book 19 ‘Tithonus’ 52, 82, 96–100, 131 ‘The Two Voices’ 23, 52 ‘Ulysses’ 20, 52, 69 Tennyson, Charles 45, 91, 95, 115 Tennyson, Emily 51, 106, 116–17, 130 Tennyson, Hallam 30, 81, 85, 135, 149 Tennyson, Lionel (cricketer) 59 Tennyson Research Bulletin 111 Tennyson Research Centre 19 Tennyson Society 6 Terry, Ellen 58–9, 130 Teunissen, John J. 69 Thomas, Gilbert 50

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194

Thorn, Michael 137 Thwaite, Ann 51, 116, 137 Time Magazine 93 The Times 93, 95 Times Literary Supplement 93–4, 127–8 Tomlinson, Philip 94 Tressell, Robert The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists 37–9 The Trollopian 107 Truss, Lynne Eats, Shoots, and Leaves 131 Tennyson’s Gift 130–1, 137 Usher Gallery, Lincoln 111 Verlaine, Paul 14, 81, 134 Victoria, Queen 52, 60, 71, 127, 140–1, 148 Virgil 8, 53, 93 Von Richthofen, Manfred 67 Wagner, Richard 33 Wain, John 105–6 Walia, Shelley 85 Wasson, Richard 86 Waterhouse, John William 141 Waters, Sarah 136 Affinity 134 Watts, G. F. 42, 43, 58, 130 Watson, William 31, 49 Waugh, Evelyn Brideshead Revisited 103–4 A Handful of Dust 85–87, 103 The Loved One 98–102, 147 Scoop 111 Welles, Orson 97

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Index Wellington, Duke of 63–4, 100–1 Westminster Review 21 Weston, Jessie 126 Whiteing, Richard Ring in the New 36–7, 38 Whitman, Walt 44 Wilde, Oscar 31 The Picture of Dorian Gray 137 Wilder, Laura Ingalls Little Town on the Prairie 102–3, 123 Willans, Geoffrey How to be Topp 109, 148 Williamson, Anne 61 Williamson, Henry The Dream of Fair Women 61–2 Wodehouse, P. G. 60, 92 Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit 110–11 Tales of St. Austin’s 35–6 Wolfe, Humbert 94 Woolf, Virginia 2, 6, 82 A Room of One’s Own 54–5, 56 Freshwater 58–9, 130 Jacob’s Room 53–4, 55 Night and Day 48–9 To the Lighthouse 55–8, 96 Wordsworth Society 6 Wordsworth, William 5, 11, 30 Wyndham, John The Kraken Wakes 108–9 Yeats, W. B. 14, 43, 81, 98 Yonge, Charlotte Pillars of the House 13 Yorke, Henry (Henry Green) 86 Zlosnik, Sue 85

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