Tennyson's Name

Identity and Responsibility in the Poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson

Anna Barton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351895699
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Seeking to understand Tennyson's poetry as the work of a man concerned with making and then living up to one of the most famous names in Victorian literature, Anna Barton offers close readings of Tennyson's major works. From his obscure beginning as 'A.T.', one of two anonymous brothers, to the height of his success, when he held the impressive title 'Alfred Lord Tennyson, DCL, Poet Laureate', the development of Tennyson's career took place in a period increasingly aware that a name could command considerable cultural capital. In the marketplace goods were sold on the strength of their brand name; in the press the battle for signed articles was fought and won; and in Victorian drawing rooms young ladies collected the autographs of family and friends and pasted them into scrap books. From his early lyrics to his Arthurian Idylls, Barton argues, the laureate's keen sense of professional identity forced him to grapple with modern concerns about the ethics of print in order to establish his own responsible poetic.

Chapter 1

‘General Names’ and ‘Small Names’: Tennyson’s Two Juvenilia

The Special Collections department of Glasgow University library holds a copy of the second edition of Poems by Two Brothers. The book is eighty-eighth of the three hundred copies printed in 1893 and comes from the collection of the Scottish artist D.Y. Cameron who had it rebound in vellum in 1901 and decorated the new cover with his own painted design, formed out of the initials ‘A’, ‘C’ and ‘T.’ Slipped inside the front cover are three newspaper clippings and an old post card. The post card is a picture of Farringford, the Tennyson house at Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight, the newspaper clippings bear the headlines: ‘TENNYSON’S VOICE ON RECORD Presented to the British Museum’; ‘SHE NURSED TENNYSON: Sister Durham Dies At 88’; and ‘GRANDNIECE OF TENNYSON. Would Like to Write Poetry. DRAWBACK OF NAME.’ This small Tennyson miscellany provides a glimpse of the poet’s posthumous existence in the early 1900s. Each scrap of print claims a material link to the former Laureate: his house, his voice, his nurse or his name. We are shown what Tennyson’s house looked like, informed that there is a gramophone recording of Tennyson reading ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ in the British Museum and told that it was at the suggestion of Tennyson’s nurse that he composed ‘Crossing the Bar.’ It is all the kind of anecdotal ephemera that might be of interest to collectors and enthusiasts and the article about Tennyson’s grandniece, published in The Citizen in 1927 is the most ephemeral of the lot. It begins:

At the present moment staying with friends in Wales there is a pretty 22-year-old English girl who would like to write poetry except for one thing. That drawback is her name.

She is very fair, blue-eyed, humorous and wistful, but her name embarrasses her poetical ambitions.

The reason is that her name is Audrey Margaret Tennyson, and she is the grand-niece of the former Poet Laureate.

The article then prints extracts from a memorial poem written by Miss Tennyson on the occasion of the death of Sarah Bernhardt. Under the subheading ‘Not Copying’ the young poet insists: ‘‘‘Of course, that was not my first, […] I began to write when I was twelve. Everybody said that I was copying the style of my grand-uncle, but I was not. I had never read any of his poems.’’’ After printing another poem, the article concludes: ‘The young poetess is at present assisting a relative in gardening experiments in Wales. The open-air life surrounded by flowers and animals realizes her ideal existence, while she has an outlet for her patriotism and character study in her leadership of a company of Girl Guides.’¹ The article implies that Audrey Margaret has all the qualities necessary for her to succeed as a poetess (she is ‘very fair, blue-eyed, humorous and wistful’) were it not for her embarrassing name. But it protests too much and draws attention to the fact that neither the young lady nor her verse would have been considered worthy of the few column inches they are given were it not for this ‘drawback.’ Miss Tennyson claims to be frustrated by being compared with her great uncle and expresses an eagerness to dissociate her poetry from his, while at the same time inviting such a comparison by telling the journalist that her first attempts at composition were so like Tennyson’s in style that she was accused of copying.

Like all the clippings held between the pages of Cameron’s edition of Poems by Two Brothers, the article trades on the name of the former Laureate, but it also inadvertently reveals something of the posthumous life of that name. Reduced to its essentials, the story here is that there is a girl called Tennyson. The reason that the article finds it worth noting that anyone at all (let alone a woman and a woman poet at that) should be called Tennyson is because by 1927 Alfred Lord Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laureate had made that name wholly his own. This chapter will return to the beginning of Tennyson’s career to examine the beginnings of his name. It will discuss the different manifestations of Tennyson’s juvenile identity, considering his poetic and professional development from the publication of the first edition of Poems by Two Brothers in 1827 to the publication of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in 1830 and exploring the significant absence of the 1827 volume from accounts of the poet’s career.

Audrey Tennyson was not the first to imagine that the name ‘Tennyson’ might prove an embarrassment to poetical ambition. Exactly a century before this article appeared in The Citizen, two of Audrey Tennyson’s great uncles, embarking on their first publishing venture, also felt that their name would afford them no advantage. Poems by Two Brothers, published by J. and J. Jackson in 1827 was anonymous. Although the anonymous publication of poetry was on the decline in the early nineteenth century an unsigned collection of poems would not have been unusual,² but two letters from Charles and Alfred to their publisher reveals the strength of their feelings in the matter. One letter concludes: ‘The C. and A.T. did not form part of our agreement. You, of course, added it inadvertently.’³ This instruction seems to have been ignored by Messers Jackson, because it is repeated in stronger terms in a second letter:

Dear Sir

The signature of C.& A.T. at the conclusion of the preface was not in the contract – we have therefore erased it – nor do we think it would assist the sale of the book, since you are at liberty to say who are the authors & C.A.T. in London would not be taken any more notice of than no signature at all. You will see the Errata on the reverse.

Yours Truly C. and A.T.⁴

Charles and Alfred got their way. The preface goes unsigned, as do the poems, so the reader knows neither the identity of the two brothers nor which brother wrote which poem. When Hallam Tennyson produced the second edition in 1893, he added the author’s initials at the base of each poem (nowhere in the second edition is it stated what the initials C. and A.T. stand for: by 1893 it is the reader’s knowledge rather than their ignorance of the names of the two poets that is taken for granted). Hallam also wrote a second preface in which he requests that:

[…] none of the poems in this volume said to be by my father and consequently signed A.T., be included in any future edition of his Works, as my uncle, Frederick Tennyson, cannot be certain of the authorship of every poem, and as the handwriting of the poem is known not to be a sure guide.⁵

As work by W.D. Paden and Christopher Ricks has shown, Hallam’s attributions are largely in agreement with two initialled first editions of Poems by Two Brothers.⁶ Hallam was an extremely careful chronicler of his father’s life and work and is unlikely to have made any claims about Tennyson’s authorship about which he was not very confident, so the reason he gives for his request to the reader seems disingenuous. It is much more likely that Hallam’s preface is an attempt to be faithful to his father’s original desire for anonymity. Either way, the letter written by Tennyson and his brother at the very beginning of his career and the preface written by Hallam on his father’s behalf sixty years later serve to illustrate the poet’s lifelong carefulness where his name was concerned.

Further evidence of Tennyson’s developing preoccupation with what he should be called can be found in the letters. Of the 1832 collection, Tennyson writes to Edward Moxon:

P.S. The title page may be simply

Poems

By Alfred Tennyson

(don’t let them squire me)⁷

And in a letter to Richard Monkton Milnes written in 1836, he responds to an invitation to write for The Keepsake by complaining that:

To write to people with prefaces to their names is to milk he-goats: there is neither honour nor profit: up to this moment I have never even seen the Keepsake: not that I care to see it, but the want of civility decided me not to break mine oath again for man or woman. And how should such a modest man as I, see my small name in a collection with the great ones of Southey, Wordsworth, R. M. M. etc. and not feel myself a barndoor fowl among peacocks?⁸

In both these letters the young Tennyson is keen to maintain control over where and in what form his name appears. The bracketed instruction to Moxon not to let the printers ‘squire’ him and his comment to Milnes about composing poetry for ‘people with prefaces to their names’ indicates a self-consciousness about rank and title that is equally evident in the following remark about his own ‘small name.’ The smallness of Tennyson’s name is figurative as well as literal: its size, without prefaces or appendices, has a meaningful correlation to his public worth and identity. Tennyson made no secret of his dislike of annuals and gift books and the letter is really just a flimsy excuse for failing to contribute a poem to The Keepsake. He jokes that he is a ‘modest man’ whose name does not deserve the company of former and present Laureates, but we sense that the joke masks a real concern that his name, which within a couple of decades would be bigger than that of Wordsworth or Southey, should not over-reach itself.

The letters to Messers Jackson concerning the anonymity of Poems by Two Brothers are written out of these same concerns. Charles and Alfred write that the inclusion of the authors’ initials would contribute nothing to the volume because they would mean nothing to its readers, but their insistence that the initials be removed suggests a greater anxiety for anonymity than they at first expressed. As in Alfred’s later letter to Milnes, the brothers’ wish to keep their names out of print is disguised as modesty, but is something closer to careerism: these were not the poems by which they wished to make their name. This assumes an unusual degree of professional forethought for two teenaged boys, but Alfred Tennyson was precocious in this respect. Charles Tennyson’s biography of his grandfather records that, aged ten, Alfred labelled his compositions: ‘The Poetry of Tennyson’ and ‘The Prose Writings of Tennyson’, evidence that ‘Alfred was already thinking of himself as “Tennyson”, an established poet with a row of publications to his credit.’⁹ Poems by Two Brothers then, is not ‘The Poetry of Tennyson’ and the poems within the volume that Alfred composed are, in a sense, not by Tennyson, but by someone who was to become Tennyson in three years’ time.

None of the poems from the Two Brothers volume was republished during Tennyson’s lifetime. Macmillan’s Complete Poems of 1894, which was put together in collaboration with Tennyson before he died does not include the 1827 poems and begins with an incomplete and re-ordered selection from Poems, Chiefly Lyrical along with some ‘Early Sonnets’ that may have been composed as late as 1842, all of which come under the heading ‘Juvenilia.’ This editorial decision, made late in life, is further evidence that Tennyson consistently identified the beginning of his career with the first publication that bore his name. The Macmillan edition effectively retells the story of Tennyson’s poetic and professional development, instructing us to read Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, which was published when Tennyson was twenty-one, as an immature work. These poems describe an immaturity that Tennyson was willing to own, unlike the immaturity of Poems by Two Brothers, which Tennyson dismissed as ‘early rot’.¹⁰ But the gap between the anonymous and the signed juvenilia is a matter of more than quality. It marks out the beginning and end of a conscious process of self-fashioning that continues throughout Tennyson’s career.

Tennyson’s first juvenile publication has long been recognized as imitative of Byron. W.D. Paden’s exhaustive account of the sources and influences of the volume has identified throughout instances of Byronic ideas, style and language. Less attention has been paid, however, to the ways that Poems by Two Brothers models itself on Byron’s own juvenilia.¹¹ Hours of Idleness was published in 1807, when Byron was eighteen. Famously the target of a scathing attack by Henry Brougham in the Edinburgh Review because of the way the young lord announced himself to his public, Byron’s letter of introduction to his readership, which dominates his slim volume, is worth quoting at some length:

In submitting to the public eye the following collection, I have not only to combat the difficulties that writers of verse generally encounter, but, may incur the charge of presumption for obtruding myself on the world, when, without doubt, I might be, at my age, more usefully employed. These productions are the fruits of the lighter hours of a young man who has lately completed his nineteenth year. As they bear the internal evidence of a boyish mind, this is, perhaps, unnecessary information. Some few were written during the disadvantage of illness, and depression of spirits; under the former influence, ‘CHILDISH RECOLLECTIONS’, in particular were composed. This consideration, though it cannot excite the voice of Praise, may at least arrest the arm of censure. A considerable portion of these poems has been privately printed, at the request, and for the perusal of my friends. I am se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction ‘Of Names’
• 1 ‘General Names’ and ‘ Small Names’: Tennyson’s Two Juvenilia
• 2 Inherited Names
• 3 Naming the Dead
• 4 Anonymity and the Responsible Name
• 5 The Commodified Name
• 6 The Names of Old Friends
• Bibliography
• Index