Tennyson and the Fabrication of Englishness

M. Sherwood

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137288899
• eBook ISBN: 9781137288905
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Through an examination of Tennyson's 'domestic poetry' - his portrayals of England and the English - in their changing nineteenth-century context, this book demonstrates that many of his representations were 'fabrications', more idealized than real, which played a vital part in the country's developing identity and sense of its place in the world.

1

‘A Poet in the Truest and Highest Sense’: The Early Poems and their Reception

Alfred Tennyson became a published poet at the age of seventeen, when Poems by Two Brothers was issued by the booksellers J. and J. Jackson, of Louth in Lincolnshire, in April 1827. From his first published volume Tennyson was reviewed in the periodical press and by January 1833 he was ‘admitted on all hands to be a true poet’.¹ Tennyson’s early poetry – Poems by Two Brothers (1827), Timbuctoo (1829), Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832) – appeared in turbulent times. Revolutions were taking place in many Continental countries and states; in England, transformed by industry, there were ‘Swing’ uprisings and agitation for electoral reform, concerns for the royal succession and for the future of poetry. In Chapters 1 and 2 I examine how critics of the early poems attempted to define and shape Tennyson as an English poet in the context of contemporary concerns, and consider the ways in which poems selected or rejected by reviewers reflect changing notions of nineteenth-century Englishness. Twentieth-century critics argue that Poems, Chiefly Lyrical ‘immediately raised nearly all the problems which were to preoccupy critics during the next four decades’.² However, contemporary critics’ concerns are foreshadowed in the earlier reviews of Poems by Two Brothers and Timbuctoo, which are also considered in this chapter. The reception of Poems (1832) is examined in Chapter 2.

Poems by Two Brothers

The 1827 volume was published anonymously, at the Tennyson brothers’ request.³ It was distributed by Simpkin and Marshall, a London wholesale distributing agent with Lincolnshire connections, and offered for sale at five shillings, with large paper copies seven shillings. It is not known how many copies were printed, or sold, but in 1870 ‘a considerable stock of remainders, both bound and unbound’ was discovered in the printer’s warehouse.⁴ Publication was therefore perhaps an act of friendship rather than practical business sense: Elizabeth Tennyson, the poet’s mother, was the daughter of a Louth vicar, and while a reluctant pupil at Louth Grammar School Tennyson ‘wrote an English poem . . . for one of the Jacksons’.⁵ Poems by Two Brothers – which despite its title contained poems by three brothers, with Frederick contributing three and Alfred and Charles about fifty each – was advertised in two local newspapers and a French literary journal.⁶ The volume brought the brothers twenty pounds in cash and books from J. and J. Jackson⁷ and two anonymous reviews in London periodicals.

The reception of Poems by Two Brothers is mentioned only in passing by twentieth-century critics and biographers,⁸ but the reviewers’ remarks anticipate aspects of later criticism of Tennyson’s work and are thus worthy of examination. The Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review published on 19 May 1827 (which gives the volume’s publication date as 1820) selects for ‘Review . . . All New Publications of Value and Interest’, perhaps not wholly impartially as one of the Chronicle’s London distributors was Simpkin and Marshall. In a brief notice the reviewer declares: ‘This little volume exhibits a pleasing union of kindred tastes, and contains several little pieces of considerable merit’. ‘Stanzas’ and ‘God’s Denunciations Against Pharaoh-Hophra, or Apries’, by Charles and Alfred respectively, are thought ‘deserving of extract’.⁹

A longer and more significant notice appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine for June 1827, among the ‘Review[s] of New Publications’. Like many publications which printed reviews of Tennyson’s poems, the Gentleman’s Magazine, founded in January 1731 by Edward Cave, a London printer and publisher, and published continuously until September 1907, was a literary miscellany or ‘monthly collection’, designed ‘to treasure up, as in a magazine’ – in the sense of an arsenal or storehouse – ‘the most remarkable pieces’.¹⁰ Edited by ‘Sylvanus Urban, Gent’, the pseudonym adopted by Cave and used by editors throughout the publication’s life,¹¹ the Magazine began by reprinting material collected from journals and newspapers throughout the country, but after 1739 increasingly commissioned its own essays, articles and reviews. Late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century periodicals were priced beyond the reach of most buyers (the Literary Chronicle cost one shilling and the Gentleman’s Magazine one shilling and sixpence) and the Gentleman’s Magazine – its title reflecting a socially divided, patriarchal society – was, as the editorial pseudonym suggests, ‘distinctly intended for the drawing-room in town and country’.¹² However, the Magazine, published in an unusual, pocket-sized format, was an instant success; in 1746, when the population of England was between six and seven million, it had a circulation of 3000 and by 1797 this had increased to 4550.¹³ A wider readership was reached through the periodical’s presence in eighteenth-century coffee houses – a masculine domain – and later in subscription reading rooms and libraries.

The Gentleman’s Magazine review of Poems by Two Brothers anticipates the language, methods and concerns of Tennyson’s later critics. Nineteenth-century reviewers were well-educated and well-read men, but not exclusively literary critics. Poetry was discussed in its social and cultural context and discussion could be wide-ranging. As Isobel Armstrong observes, reviewers’ vocabulary, whether approving or condemnatory, was evaluative rather than specialized, emphasizing poetry’s ‘effect on the reader’.¹⁴ The Magazine reviewer begins by rejecting Dr Johnson’s remark that ‘no book was ever spared in tenderness to its Author’.¹⁵ He believes ‘occasion and circumstances’ have often mitigated or reversed ‘the censure of criticism’, and praises the poems for their ‘amiable feelings’ – a frequently used term of critical approval – ‘expressed for the most part with elegance and correctness’. Comparison was a popular nineteenth-century critical approach and the Tennyson brothers are associated by comparison with Byron, Crabbe and Moore, regarded as ‘the only true poets among the moderns’.¹⁶ The brothers are also seen by the reviewer as set apart from ‘the larger class of mankind’, who ‘have barely reached the elements of thought’, a view which anticipates Arthur Henry Hallam’s belief in the immovably strong barrier between poets and ‘the large majority of readers’ unable to understand the poet’s mind.¹⁷ Rather than complain that the poems lack Byron’s ‘deep feelings’, Moore’s ‘polished grace’, or ‘the perfect mastery of human passions which distinguishes Crabbe’, the Magazine critic prefers to express surprise and admiration that, despite their youth, the Tennyson brothers share ‘so much of good feeling’, so poetically expressed.

The reviewer’s benign conclusion – that ‘the volume is a graceful addition to our domestic poetry, and does credit to the juvenile Adelphi’ – suggests that Poems by Two Brothers, like the Gentleman’s Magazine, is destined for the urban and rural drawing-room. However, if the term domestic is considered in its broader dictionary definition – ‘pertaining to one’s home country or nation’ – the comment appears remarkably prescient. As the later chapters of this study demonstrate, Tennyson became increasingly preoccupied with the contemporary condition of England, its people and landscape, the monarchy and ‘our English Empire’ (‘Hands All Round’, 1882, 14).

Despite a lifelong hypersensitivity to hostile criticism, already apparent in poems and letters,¹⁸ Tennyson’s first submission ‘to the microscopic eye of periodical criticism’ (‘Advertisement’ or Preface) was well received, with the Gentleman’s Magazine fortuitously suggesting, rather than shaping, his future role. However, nothing from Poems by Two Brothers was ever reprinted by Tennyson, who in later years ‘could hardly tolerate what he called his “early rot”’.¹⁹ His contributions to the published volume, later described as ‘almost all exercises in the fashionable styles of the day’,²⁰ are certainly less original than much of his early work. ‘I dare not write an Ode’, for example, a mock ode written in 1827 but not printed until 1965,²¹ explores with wry – and rare – humour the lack of originality he believed inevitable because ‘all the big things had been done’.²² The ‘Ode’ and other early poems were deliberately omitted from the volume, probably by the Jacksons, as ‘being too much out of the common for the public taste’.²³

Poems by Two Brothers nevertheless remains, with the early reviews, ‘of Value and Interest’ as the Literary Chronicle suggests. The volume reflects the Englishness of class and gender suggested by the title Gentleman’s Magazine, while Tennyson’s contributions to the volume introduce themes which become lifelong concerns and reveal his youthful admiration for English poets, particularly Byron. At Louth and Somersby Tennyson received the classical education which ‘in England . . . was the sign of a gentleman’²⁴ and the influence of Dr Tennyson’s teaching, and the Rectory’s extensive library, is immediately apparent from the volume. The Englishness of the nineteenth-century gentleman is exemplified by the practice of classical allusion – and embodied by the pseudonymous editor, ‘Sylvanus Urban’. A Latin epigram on the title page states, with classically conventional poetic humility, ‘we know these works of ours are worthless’²⁵ and, following the fashion of the day, literary epigraphs from classical and ‘domestic’ poetry and prose preface many poems. An apologetic ‘Advertisement’, or Preface, acknowledges the poets’ youth and the lack of originality intimated by the Byronic declaration, ‘we have passed the Rubicon’.²⁶ The ‘Advertisement’ warns that ‘investigation’ of the poems would reveal ‘a long list of . . . imitations’, and epigraphs and imagery reveal the influence of poets from Virgil to Byron. Later prose inspirations include contemporary fiction, of which all the Tennysons were avid readers, and eighteenth-century aesthetics. The speaker of ‘On Sublimity’ yearns for ‘the wild cascade, the rugged scene, | The loud surge bursting o’er the purple sea’, rejecting the ‘vales in tenderest green,| The poplar’s shade’ (1–4) reminiscent of Tennyson’s native Lincolnshire landscape, whose images recur throughout his later work. Ancient and eighteenth-century histories and travel narratives provide exotic, Other locations for ‘Persia’, ‘Hindostan’, and the Peruvians’ ‘Lamentation’ for the destruction of their ‘state’ and ‘strength’ (2), which reveals a hostility to the depredations of Catholic Spanish imperial ‘conquest’ (7) still apparent in ‘Columbus’ published in 1880.

Tennyson draws constantly on the English literary past. Despite earlier denials, his published ‘effusions’ contain a great deal of what he described as ‘Miltonic, Byronic . . ., Moorish, Crabbick, Coleridgick etc. fire’.²⁷ A Byronic sense of physical and emotional desolation pervades the poems, although this may reflect Tennyson’s own emotional state at the time. (The domestic situation at Somersby Rectory was far from tranquil.²⁸) Destroying hordes descend, like Byron’s Assyrians, ‘with wheels like a whirlwind, and chariots of fire!’ (‘God’s Denunciations’, 20) and – foreshadowing his enduring concern with English political freedom – Tennyson echoes Byron and Felicia Hemans’s ‘Exhortation to the Greeks’ to rise and reclaim their ancient liberty.²⁹ Outcast speakers ‘wander in darkness and sorrow’ throughout the poems, but over-punctuated and relentless rhyme often results in bathos:

In this waste of existence, for solace,

On whom shall my lone spirit call?

Shall I fly to the friends of my bosom?

My God! I have buried them all!

(25–9)

Tennyson’s ‘passion for the past’ was noted as early as July 1831 by Arthur Henry Hallam,³⁰ the friend he buried in 1833 but whose influence endured until Tennyson’s own death in 1892. The importance of ‘Memory’ in recapturing ‘Thoughts of years gone by’ (6) is already a recurring theme in the early volume, in which images of blighted nature also evoke English poets – ‘In every rose of life, | Alas there lies a canker’ (27–8). Looking back on ‘Days of youth, now shaded | By twilight of long years’ (9–10) is an unconvincing viewpoint for an adolescent poet; Tennyson therefore adopts the persona of age for venerable speakers with literary origins, such as ‘Antony to Cleopatra’, who prefigure the dramatic monologues, ballads and idyl/ls of later years. As the Gentleman’s Magazine reviewer suggests, in 1827 Tennyson is a ‘domestic’ poet, but he is not yet an original English poet. In subsequent poems and volumes – and as reviewers increasingly recognize – Tennyson has the poetic maturity to ‘steal . . . fire, | From the fountains of the past, | To glorify the present’ (‘Ode to Memory’, 1830, 1–3) and, through original and exemplary representations of the classical, Elizabethan or medieval past, to interrogate and idealize nineteenth-century England.

Timbuctoo

The early volume’s ‘Advertisement’, or Preface, was follo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on the Text
• Introduction: The Enigma of Englishness
• 1 ‘A Poet in the Truest and Highest Sense’: The Early Poems and their Reception
• 2 ‘Mr. Tennyson’s Singular Genius’: The Reception of Poems (1832)
• 3 ‘Mr. Tennyson’s Truly English Spirit’: Landscape and Nature in Poems (1842)
• 4 ‘Fair Victoria’s Golden Age’: Tennyson and Monarchy
• 5 ‘To Serve as Model for the Mighty World’: Tennyson and Medievalism
• 6 ‘Ever-broadening England’: Tennyson and Empire
• Conclusion: Fabricating Englishness
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index