The lives of the poets from The Dictionary of National Biography ...

The lives of the poets from The Dictionary of National Biography
These are the official biographies of our poets. You can read and select the information you think is useful for the
analysis of the poems we are reading.
Tennyson, Alfred, first Baron Tennyson (1809–1892), poet, was born on 6 August 1809 at Somersby rectory,
Lincolnshire, the fourth child (there were to be eight sons and four daughters in fourteen years) of the Revd
Dr George Clayton Tennyson (1778–1831), rector of Somersby, and his wife, Elizabeth (bap. 1780, d. 1865),
daughter of the Revd Stephen Fytche, vicar of Louth, Lincolnshire.
The family
Tennysonʹs father, though not strictly disinherited, had been reduced in favour and fortune much below his
younger brother, and Tennysonʹs youth was overshadowed by this family feud between the Tennysons of
Somersby and the grandparents, of Bayons Manor (16 miles away), with their favoured son (later Charles
Tennyson‐DʹEyncourt; 1784–1861). Tennysonʹs wife, Emily, was to write, in her reminiscences for her two
sons, of this ‘caprice on the part of your great‐grandfather’, whereby Dr Tennyson
was deprived of a station which he would so greatly have adorned and put into the Church for whose
duties he felt no call. This preyed upon his nerves and his health and caused much sorrow in his house.
Many a time has your father [the poet] gone out in the dark and cast himself on a grave in the little
churchyard near wishing to be beneath it. (Lincoln MS; compare H. Tennyson, Memoir, 1.15)
The black blood of the Tennysons was all too familiar. The oldest surviving brother (George had died in
infancy) was Frederick Tennyson (1807–1898); irascible, he was to live, mostly in Italy, in expatriate
eccentricity. The next senior was Charles (later, from 1835, as the condition of an uncleʹs bequest, Charles
Turner, often known as Charles Tennyson Turner (1808–1879), an exquisite poet, praised by Coleridge); he
was for many years addicted to opium and vulnerable to alcohol (it was long before he arrived at his
serenity). A younger brother, Edward, succumbed in 1832 to insanity, which proved incurable throughout
his long life (he died in 1890, only two years before his famous brother). Arthur for a while in the 1840s
collapsed into alcoholism. Then there was the brother who rose from the hearthrug and introduced himself,
‘I am Septimus, the most morbid of the Tennysons’ (C. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, 199). Of him, Tennyson
wrote to his uncle Charles in 1834:
At present his symptoms are not unlike those with which poor Edwardʹs unhappy derangement began—
he is subject to fits of the most gloomy despondency accompanied with tears—or rather, he spends whole
days in this manner, complaining that he is neglected by all his relations, and blindly resigning himself to
every morbid influence. (Received 15 Jan 1834, Letters, 1.106)
Morbid influence, not blindly resigned to but contemplated with creative courage, informs much of
Tennysonʹs deepest work, unhappiness current or unforgettable, misery unutterable that yet found itself
uttered.
In my youth I knew much greater unhappiness than I have known in later life. When I was about twenty, I
used to feel moods of misery unutterable! I remember once in London the realization coming over me, of the
whole of its inhabitants lying horizontal a hundred years hence. The smallness and emptiness of life
sometimes overwhelmed me. (Lincoln MS, ‘Talks and Walks’; H. Tennyson, Memoir, 1.40)
Schooling, juvenilia, and Lincolnshire
In 1815 Tennyson left the village school and—staying with his grandmother in Louth—became a pupil at
Louth grammar school, where his elder brothers Frederick and Charles had started in 1814. Tennyson: ‘How
I did hate that school! The only good I ever got from it was the memory of the words, “sonus desilientis
aquae”, and of an old wall covered with wild weeds opposite the school windows’ (H. Tennyson, Memoir,

1.7). In 1820 he left Louth, to be educated at home by his learned, violent, and often drunken father—who
believed in him. ‘My father who was a sort of Poet himself thought so highly of my first essay that he
prophesied I should be the greatest Poet of the Time’ (Trinity Notebook, 34).
Tennyson was to recall ruefully his youthful ambitions and poetical models. It was the mouthability of
poetry, the urge to roll it aloud, that drew him.
The first poetry that moved me was my own at five years old. When I was eight, I remember making a line
I thought grander than Campbell, or Byron, or Scott. I rolled it out, it was this: ‘With slaughterous sons of
thunder rolled the flood’—great nonsense of course, but I thought it fine. (H. Tennyson, Memoir, 2.93)
He was much moved by the death of Byron in 1824: ‘I was fourteen when I heard of his death. It seemed an
awful calamity; I remember I rushed out of doors, sat down by myself, shouted aloud, and wrote on the
sandstone: “Byron is dead!”’ (ibid., 69).
Before I could read, I was in the habit on a stormy day of spreading my arms to the wind, and crying out ‘I
hear a voice thatʹs speaking in the wind’, and the words ‘far, far away’ had always a strange charm for me.
Tennyson spoke of the three‐book epic (‘à la Scott’) written in his ‘very earliest teens’. ‘I never felt so
inspired—I used to compose 60 or 70 lines in a breath. I used to shout them about the silent fields, leaping
over the hedges in my excitement’ (Trinity Notebook, 34; H. Tennyson, Memoir, 1.11–12) .
Tennysonʹs prodigious excitement is evidenced in the play he wrote (1823–4) in imitation of Elizabethan
comedy, The Devil and the Lady, a wondrous pastiche, alive in its ambivalent erotic deploring, its vistas of
space, its anatomizing of old age, and its grim humour. Duller, placatingly conventional, there was
published in April 1827, by J. and J. Jackson, booksellers of Louth, Poems by Two Brothers (three brothers,
since Frederick supplied four poems for this volume by Charles and Alfred); it earned them £20 (more than
half in books) and courteous flat notices in the Literary Chronicle (19 May 1827) and the Gentlemanʹs
Magazine (June). Tennysonʹs unoriginal contributions were written ‘between 15 and 17’ (1893 reissue of
1827, quoting Tennyson). Wisely, he did not include any of them in later editions of his works.
But the Lincolnshire of Tennysonʹs young days was alive in his late poems, notably those in dialect,
‘wonderful studies in English vernacular life’ as Richard Holt Hutton called them (Hutton, 380). Tennysonʹs
gruff gnarled humour here found its local habitation and intonation, audible in his own recorded reading of
the best of them, ‘Northern Farmer: New Style’, ‘founded’, as Tennyson said, on a single sentence: ‘When I
canters my ʹerse along the ramper [highway] I ʹears “proputty, proputty, proputty”’ (Poems, 2.688).
Cambridge, Arthur Hallam, and early accomplishments
In November 1827 Tennyson entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where Charles had just joined Frederick.
He was unhappy there at first (and often subsequently—see the bitter sonnet that he chose not to publish,
‘Lines on Cambridge of 1830’): ‘The country is so disgustingly level, the revelry of the place so monotonous,
the studies of the University so uninteresting, so much matter of fact—none but dryheaded calculating
angular little gentlemen can take much delight’ in algebraic formulae (18 April 1828, Letters, 1.23). But
fortunately he came to know some well‐rounded larger gentlemen, foremost among them Arthur Henry
Hallam (1811–1833) [see under Hallam, Henry (1777–1859)], whom Tennyson met about April 1829. Hallam
had entered Trinity College the previous October. The friendship, deepening into love, of Hallam and
Tennyson was to be one of the most important experiences of Hallamʹs short life and of Tennysonʹs long one.
A further flowering at Cambridge: in October 1829 Tennyson was elected a member of the Apostles, an
informal debating society to which most of his Cambridge friends belonged (such eminent, though not pre‐
eminent, Victorians as John Kemble, Richard Chenevix Trench, Richard Monckton Milnes, and James
Spedding). Then in June 1829 he won the chancellorʹs gold medal with his prize poem on the set subject
Timbuctoo. Reworking an earlier poem (as he was so often to do with consummate re‐creative imagination),

this on Armageddon, ‘altering the beginning and the end’ to bend it on Timbuctoo, ‘I was never so surprised
as when I got the prize’ (Lincoln MS, ‘Materials for a Life of A. T.’; H. Tennyson, Memoir, 2.355) . The
surprise was the greater in that the winning poem was, unprecedentedly, not in heroic couplets but in blank
verse. At the heart of the poem is a mystical trance such as fascinated Tennyson lifelong. Hallam, happily
worsted, wrote with characteristic generosity and acumen: ‘The splendid imaginative power that pervades it
will be seen through all hindrances. I consider Tennyson as promising fair to be the greatest poet of our
generation, perhaps of our century’ (A. H. Hallam to Gladstone, 14 Sept 1829, Letters of Arthur Henry
Hallam, 319).
Then in December 1829 (or, it may be, April 1830), Hallam met Tennysonʹs sister Emily, with whom he was
soon to fall in love. In the summer of 1830 Tennyson visited the Pyrenees with Hallam. (More than thirty
years later, in June 1861, Tennyson was to return there with his family and to write ‘In the Valley of
Cauteretz’, in lasting love of Hallam.) Hallam and Tennyson were to visit the Rhine country in the summer
of 1832. In the autumn of 1832 the engagement of Hallam to Tennysonʹs sister was to be reluctantly
recognized by Hallamʹs family.
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical was published by Effingham Wilson in June 1830; some of Tennysonʹs most enduring
notes, elegiacally lyrical, with his riven sensibility (‘Supposed Confessions of a Second‐Rate Sensitive Mind
Not at Unity with Itself’), are especially manifest in the volumeʹs most remarkable achievements, ‘Mariana’,
‘A spirit haunts the yearʹs last hours’, and ‘The Kraken’.
Tennysonʹs father, after marital separation and then a return to protracted illness and weakness, died in
March 1831. Tennyson left Cambridge without taking a degree. His choice of life? His uncle Charles wrote
on 18 May 1831 to Tennysonʹs grandfather, the Old Man of the Wolds:
We discussed what was to be done with the Children. Alfred is at home, but wishes to return to
Cambridge to take a degree. I told him it was a useless expense unless he meant to go into the Church. He
said he would. I did not think he seemed much to like it. I then suggested Physic or some other Profession.
He seemed to think the Church the best and has I think finally made up his mind to it. The Tealby Living
was mentioned and understood to be intended for him.
Then, reverting to the matter: ‘Alfred seems quite ready to go into the Church although I think his mind is
fixed on the idea of deriving his great distinction and greatest means from the exercise of his poetic talents’
(Letters, 1.59–61).
Poetic talents needed the support of financial talents. Fortunately, from his aunt Russell he received £100 a
year (this continued into the 1850s), and when his grandfather died in 1835, there came to Tennyson about
£6000. Even though most of this was lost in a bad investment, there was to be the civil‐list pension of £200 a
year that began in 1845 (he drew it until he died), and his straits were never as dire as he liked to maintain.
The poetic talents were Arthur Hallamʹs focus in the Englishmanʹs Magazine, in August 1831: ‘On Some of
the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson’. W. B. Yeats was to
praise this essay as
criticism which is of the best and rarest sort. If one set aside Shelleyʹs essay on poetry and Browningʹs
essay on Shelley, one does not know where to turn in modern English criticism for anything so
philosophic—anything so fundamental and radical—as the first half
of Hallamʹs piece (The Speaker, 22 July 1893; Yeats, 277) . Of Tennysonʹs art, Hallamʹs essay remains the most
compactly telling evocation, prescient too. Hallam limned five characteristics:

First, his luxuriance of imagination, and at the same time his control over it. Secondly his power of
embodying himself in ideal characters, or rather moods of character, with such extreme accuracy of
adjustment, that the circumstances of the narration seem to have a natural correspondence with the
predominant feeling, and, as it were, to be evolved from it by assimilative force. Thirdly his vivid,
picturesque delineation of objects, and the peculiar skill with which he holds all of them fused, to borrow a
metaphor from science, in a medium of strong emotion. Fourthly, the variety of his lyrical measures, and
exquisite modulation of harmonious words and cadences to the swell and fall of the feelings expressed.
Fifthly, the elevated habits of thought, implied in these compositions, and imparting a mellow soberness of
tone, more impressive, to our minds, than if the author had drawn up a set of opinions in verse, and sought
to instruct the understanding rather than to communicate the love of beauty to the heart. (Jump, 42)
Hallamʹs acute praise was welcome but not to everybody—Tennyson was already becoming ‘the Pet of a
Coterie’, according to Christopher North (John Wilson) in Blackwoodʹs Magazine in May 1832 (Jump, 50). In
February 1832 the notoriously scathing Christopher North had praised Tennyson highly, albeit with caveats,
in Blackwoodʹs, but then in May he followed this with a wittily severe—not indiscriminate—review of the
1830 volume, this to ‘save him from his worst enemies, his friends’ (Jump, 51). Tennyson, pricked though not
bridled by such reviewers, was exacerbatedly thin‐skinned and always self‐critical, often revising talent into
genius—or expunging: the volume of 1830 included twenty‐three poems that he did not subsequently
reprint, as well as seven not collected in his two‐volume Poems (1842) though reprinted later. The poems of
1830 that he did reprint, he—unusually—grouped as ‘Juvenilia’, justly in some cases, unjustly (protectively)
for such a great poem as ‘Mariana’.
Fertile, Tennyson issued in December 1832 Poems (published by Edward Moxon, the title‐page dated 1833).
Among its feats were ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘Mariana in the South’, ‘Œnone’, ‘The Palace of Art’, ‘The Lotos‐
Eaters’, and ‘A Dream of Fair Women’. There were some failures subsequently acknowledged: seven poems
never reprinted, and seven not collected in Poems (1842) though reprinted later. A venomous review by J.
W. Croker (Quarterly Review, April 1833) drew blood but was a spur: the best of the poems were to be made
even better, duly revised for republication, ten years later, but the painful rewording process began at once.
As his Cambridge friend Edward FitzGerald wrote on 25 October 1833:
Tennyson has been in town for some time: he has been making fresh poems, which are finer, they say,
than any he has done. But I believe he is chiefly meditating on the purging and subliming of what he has
already done: and repents that he has published at all yet. It is fine to see how in each succeeding poem the
smaller ornaments and fancies drop away, and leave the grand ideas single. (Letters of Edward FitzGerald,
1.140)
It is heartening that in October 1833 Tennyson could be so actively creative in new and newly improved
poems. For it was on 1 October that there was sent to him the news of the sudden death of Arthur Hallam,
stricken on 15 September by apoplexy while visiting Vienna. His body was brought back by sea to Clevedon,
on the Bristol Channel, ‘Among familiar names to rest’, ‘And in the hearing of the wave’ (In Memoriam,
XVIII and XIX).
The blow, not to Tennyson alone, but to his sister Emily, to both families, and to Hallamʹs many friends and
admirers, was profound, ‘a loud and terrible stroke’ (reported the Cambridge friend Charles Merivale) ‘from
the reality of things upon the faery building of our youth’ (from H. Alford, 11 Nov 1833, Merivale, 135). The
sense of the Tennyson family loss is audible in a letter by Frederick of 18 December 1833:
We all looked forward to his society and support through life in sorrow and in joy, with the fondest hopes,
for never was there a human being better calculated to sympathize with and make allowance for those
peculiarities of temperament and those failings to which we are liable. (Letters, 1.104)

Yet in the first stricken month, Tennyson set to write poems that later became some of the finest sections of
In Memoriam (the earliest is dated 6 October 1833, none being published until seventeen years after Hallamʹs
death), as well as soon drafting ‘Ulysses’, ‘Morte dʹArthur’, and ‘Tithonus’ (this last not published until 1860,
the other two 1842)—three great poems prompted by the death of his Arthur, and all finding extraordinarily
compelling correlatives, in ancient worlds, for his feelings personal and universal, ancient and modern.
‘The Two Voices’ belongs to 1833, and was said by Tennysonʹs son to have been ‘begun under the cloud of
this overwhelming sorrow, which, as my father told me, for a while blotted out all joy from his life, and
made him long for death’ (H. Tennyson, Memoir, 1.109). But Tennyson had longed for death before Hallam
died, and a draft of ‘The Two Voices’ was in existence three months earlier, in June 1833, when his friend J.
M. Kemble wrote to W. B. Donne:
Next Sir are some superb meditations on Self destruction called Thoughts of a Suicide wherein he argues
the point with his soul and is thoroughly floored. These are amazingly fine and deep, and show a mighty
stride in intellect since the Second‐Rate Sensitive Mind. (Poems, 1.570)
Suicide appears, often enacted and sometimes discussed, in an extraordinary number of Tennysonʹs poems
over the years, where it is complemented not only by suicidal risks but by martyrs and by the military (as in
‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’). Mary Gladstone was to record ‘a plan he had of writing a satire called “A
suicide supper”’, and that Tennyson ‘would commit suicide’ if he believed that death were annihilation
(Mary Gladstone, 8 June 1879, 160).
On 14 February 1834 Tennyson replied to a request from Hallamʹs father to contribute to a memorial volume:
I attempted to draw up a memoir of his life and character, but I failed to do him justice. I failed even to
please myself. I could scarcely have pleased you. I hope to be able at a future period to concentrate whatever
powers I may possess on the construction of some tribute to those high speculative endowments and
comprehensive sympathies which I ever loved to contemplate; but at present, though somewhat ashamed at
my own weakness, I find the object yet is too near me to permit of any very accurate delineation. You, with
your clear insight into human nature, may perhaps not wonder that in the dearest service I could have been
employed in, I should be found most deficient. (Letters, 1.108)
In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) was duly to render such dearest service—to Hallam, to Tennyson himself, and
to all his readers then and since, to all those who, like Queen Victoria and whatever their beliefs, have found,
in its mourning and in its recovery, lasting consolation.
Tennyson, afraid (with good cause) of the spite which—like Keats before him, and similarly with some class
animus—he precipitated in reviewers, tried in 1834 to placate Christopher North, and tried in early March
1835 to discourage John Stuart Mill from writing about the poems.
I do not wish to be dragged forward again in any shape before the reading public at present, particularly
on the score of my old poems most of which I have so corrected (particularly Œnone) as to make them much
less imperfect. (To James Spedding, Letters, 1.130)
Fortunately, Mill went ahead, and discerningly praised in Tennyson
the power of creating scenery, in keeping with some state of human feeling; so fitted to it as to be the
embodied symbol of it, and to summon up the state of feeling itself, with a force not to be surpassed by
anything but reality. (London Review, July 1835; Jump, 86)
Love, marriage, and lifelong faith

It was in 1834 that Tennyson fell in love with Rosa Baring, of Harington Hall, 2 miles from Somersby. It was
to be a brief and frustrated love (she was rich, she was a Baring, she was—it seems—a coquette), but it was
never to fade from his memory. It was less the joys of this young romance than the pains of disillusionment,
following promptly in 1835–6, that had a lastingly valuable presence within his writing, for the pressures of
social snobbery—long known from the Tennyson v. Tennyson‐DʹEyncourt feud—and of ‘The rentroll Cupid
of our rainy isles’ (‘Edwin Morris’), ‘This filthy marriage‐hindering Mammon’ (‘Aylmerʹs Field’), are acidly
etched in ‘Locksley Hall’, ‘Edwin Morris’, and Maud, all written or inaugurated between 1837 and 1839.
Tennyson was the better able to gauge this amatory excitement of his because of his soon coming to love,
deeply, Emily Sellwood [see Tennyson, Emily Sarah (1813–1896)]. He had first met her in 1830, the daughter
of a solicitor in Horncastle (5 miles from Somersby). In May 1836 Emilyʹs sister Louisa married Tennysonʹs
older brother Charles (now curate of Tealby in Lincolnshire), and Tennyson was to date his love for Emily
from this wedding, where he glimpsed the happy bridesmaid as his future happy bride. In 1838 the
engagement was recognized by her family and his, but was broken off in 1840, partly because of financial
insecurity (‘owing to want of funds’, their son was to write (H. Tennyson, Memoir, 1.150)), but also because
of Tennysonʹs religious unorthodoxy and spiritual perturbation. It was not until 1849 that his
correspondence with Emily was renewed. Then the honest faith and the honest doubt evinced within In
Memoriam (to be published in May 1850) played a large part in overcoming Emilyʹs doubts, and she and the
poet were wed on 13 June 1850. The service was at Shiplake‐on‐Thames where Tennysonʹs friend
Drummond Rawnsley was vicar.
This was to be a happy marriage, clearly seen in ‘The Daisy’, about Tennysonʹs visit to Italy with Emily in
1851 (a delayed honeymoon), and in the lovely late tribute, ‘June Bracken and Heather’, written in 1891, the
year before he died, and constituting the dedication of his final and posthumous volume. Equably
hierarchical and reciprocally loving, warmly embracing the double duty of family claims and the claims of
art, their life together was a joy. It was sadly darkened by the stillbirth of their first child on 20 April 1851,
and by the grievous loss of their son Lionel (b. 16 March 1854), dead in his thirties (April 1886), but it was
blessed with the lifelong self‐abnegating dedication of their son Hallam Tennyson (1852–1928). Their home
was at first Chapel House, Montpelier Row, Twickenham. In November 1853 they moved to Farringford
(Freshwater, Isle of Wight), which Tennyson bought in 1856. Among the many notable visitors to
Farringford was Garibaldi, in April 1864. In April 1868 the foundation stone was laid of Tennysonʹs second
home, Aldworth, near Haslemere.
Emily Tennyson was judged incomparable by Edward Lear:
I should think, computing moderately, that 15 angels, several hundreds of ordinary women, many
philosophers, a heap of truly wise & kind mothers, 3 or 4 minor prophets, & a lot of doctors and school‐
mistresses, might all be boiled down, & yet their combined essence fall short of what Emily Tennyson really
is. (2 June 1859, Noakes, 167)
More two‐edgedly, FitzGerald granted that she was
a Lady of a Shakespearian type, as I think AT once said of her: that is, of the Imogen sort, far more
agreeable to me than the sharp‐witted Beatrices, Rosalinds, etc. I do not think she has been (on this very
account perhaps) as good a helpmate to ATʹs Poetry as to himself. (7 Dec 1869, Letters of Edward FitzGerald,
3.177)
Benjamin Jowett praised her: ‘overflowing with kindness—but also in a certain way very strong’, ‘his friend,
his servant, his guide, his critic’. ‘It was a wonderful life—an effaced life like that of so many women’
(Harvard MS, Catalogue, 19–20). ‘One of the most beautiful, the purest, the most innocent, the most
disinterested persons whom I have ever known’: ‘she was probably her husbandʹs best critic, and certainly
the one whose authority he would most willingly have recognized’ (H. Tennyson, Memoir, 2.466–7).

His wife was of unique importance to Tennysonʹs religious self. She trusted Charles Kingsley, who in
September 1850 described In Memoriam as
altogether rivalling the sonnets of Shakespeare.—Why should we not say boldly, surpassing—for the sake
of the superior faith into which it rises, for the sake of the proem at the opening of the volume—in our eyes,
the noblest English Christian poem which several centuries have seen? (Fraserʹs Magazine; Jump, 183)
Aubrey de Vere characterized Emily, a few months after the marriage:
Her great and constant desire is to make her husband more religious, or at least to conduce, as far as she
may, to his growth in the spiritual life. In this she will doubtless succeed, for piety like hers is infectious,
especially where there is an atmosphere of affection to serve as a conducting medium. Indeed I already
observe a great improvement in Alfred. His nature is a religious one, and he is remarkably free from vanity
and sciolism. Such a nature gravitates towards Christianity, especially when it is in harmony with itself. (14
Oct 1850, Ward, 158–9)
Gruffer, there are Tennysonʹs words to Gladstoneʹs daughter Mary (4 June 1879): ‘We shall all turn into pigs
if we lose Christianity and God’ (Mary Gladstone, 157). ‘T. loves the spirit of Christianity, hates many of the
dogmas’, reported William Allingham in January 1867 (Allingham, 149). He respected the breadth and
latitude of F. D. Maurice. In October 1853 Maurice was forced to resign from his professorship in London for
arguing that the popular belief in the endlessness of future punishment was superstitious. Tennyson
abominated the belief in eternal torment, and he had recently asked Maurice (who had agreed) to be
godfather to Hallam Tennyson. ‘To the Rev. F. D. Maurice’ is a verse invitation that glowingly revives the
Horatian epistle, and bears comparison with such classics of the kind as Ben Jonsonʹs ‘Inviting a Friend to
Supper’.
In April 1869 Tennyson attended the meeting to organize the Metaphysical Society, which he joined and
which flourished until 1879. In his seventies he said to Allingham, in July 1884: ‘Youʹre not orthodox, and I
canʹt call myself orthodox. Two things however I have always been firmly convinced of—God,—and that
death will not end my existence’ (Allingham, 329). The very late poems, ‘The Ancient Sage’ (1885), on Lao‐
Tse, and ‘Akbarʹs Dream’ (1892), on what was then called Mohammedanism, seek to realize—under the
influence of Benjamin Jowett—‘The religions of all good men’, in support of the conviction that ‘All religions
are one’.
Two months before he died, Tennyson talked with John Addington Symonds:
He told me he was going to write a poem on Bruno, and asked what I thought about his [Brunoʹs] attitude
toward Christianity. I tried to express my views, and Hallam got up and showed me that they were reading
up the chapter of my ‘Renaissance in Italy’ on Bruno. Tennyson observed that the great thing in Bruno was
his perception of an Infinite Universe, filled with solar systems like our own, and all penetrated with the
Soul of God. ‘That conception must react destructively on Christianity—I mean its creed and dogma—its
morality will always remain.’ Somebody had told him that astronomers could count 550 million solar
systems. He observed that there was no reason why each should not have planets peopled with living and
intelligent beings. ‘Then,’ he added, ‘see what becomes of the second person of the Deity, and the sacrifice of
a God for fallen man upon this little earth!’ (29 Aug 1892, Letters of John Addington Symonds, 3.744)
From Poems (1842) to The Princess (1847)
Between 1832 and 1842 Tennyson published no volume‐length work. The span has been mildly
melodramatized into ‘the ten yearsʹ silence’, but he wrote much during this period, founding and building In
Memoriam, creating his exquisite ‘English Idyls’ (most notably, ‘Edwin Morris’ and ‘The Golden Year’), and
he rewrote with depth and passion. At the urging of his friend Richard Monckton Milnes, he reluctantly sent

to The Tribute (September 1837) a true though as yet unperfected poem, ‘Oh! that ʹtwere possible’, which
was to be ‘the germ’ of the amazing monodrama of madness, Maud (1855).
Life was taxing. On the death of Dr Tennyson in 1831 the family had been allowed by the incoming rector to
continue to live in the rectory at Somersby, but then, in 1837, they had to move to High Beech, Epping
Forest. ‘His two elder brothers being away’ (Frederick in Corfu and then Florence—for good; and Charles
settled at Grasby, Lincolnshire), it was on Alfred that there ‘devolved the care of the family and of choosing
a new home’ (H. Tennyson, Memoir, 1.149–50; ‘My mother is afraid if I go to town even for a night; how
could they get on without me for months?’, to Emily Sellwood, 10 July 1839, Letters, 1.171) . Then in 1840
they had to move to Tunbridge Wells, and in 1841 to Boxley, near Maidstone. The engagement to Emily
Sellwood was broken off in 1840. Then there was the investing by Tennyson in 1840–41 of his invaluable
small fortune (about £3000) in a scheme for wood‐carving by machinery, which had collapsed by 1843. These
were among the things that made much of life a misery. ‘I have drunk one of those most bitter draughts out
of the cup of life, which go near to make men hate the world they move in’ (H. Tennyson, Memoir, 1.221).
FitzGerald reported of Tennyson, to Tennysonʹs brother Frederick, on 10 December 1843 that he had ‘never
seen him so hopeless’ (Letters of Edward FitzGerald, 1.408). In 1843–4 Tennyson received treatment.
The perpetual panic and horror of the last two years has steeped my nerves in poison: now I am left a
beggar but I am or shall be shortly somewhat better off in nerves. I am in a Hydropathy Establishment near
Cheltenham (the only one in England conducted on pure Priessnitzan principles) … Much poison has come
out of me, which no physic ever would have brought to light. (To FitzGerald, 2 Feb 1844, Letters, 1.222–3)
The hydropathy was endured near Cheltenham; Tennyson then lived, first, at 6 Bellevue Place, and then at
10 St Jamesʹs Square, Cheltenham.
In an unpublished poem (‘Wherefore, in these dark ages of the Press’), Tennyson spoke of ‘this Art‐
Conscience’, a surety which, along with courage, steadied and secured him. This, with more than a little help
from his friends, who encouraged him, pressed him. On 3 March 1838: ‘Do you ever see Tennyson? and if so,
could you not urge him to take the field?’ (R. C. Trench to R. M. Milnes, Reid, 1.208). ‘Tennyson composes
every day, but nothing will persuade him to print, or even write it down’ (Milnes, 1838, Reid, 1.220).
Another Cambridge friend, G. S. Venables, urged him in August/September 1838:
Do not continue to be so careless of fame and of influence. You have abundant materials ready for a new
publication, and you start as a well‐known man with the certainty that you can not be overlooked, and that
by many you will be appreciated. If you do not publish now when will you publish? (Letters, 1.163–4)
On 25 November 1839 FitzGerald all but gave up:
I want A. T. to publish another volume: as all his friends do: especially Moxon, who has been calling on
him for the last two years for a new edition of his old volume: but he is too lazy and wayward to put his
hand to the business. (Letters of Edward FitzGerald, 1.239)
Then there was the American threat. To the importunate FitzGerald Tennyson wrote c.22 February 1841:
‘You bore me about my book: so does a letter just received from America, threatening, though in the civilest
terms that if I will not publish in England they will do it for me in that land of freemen’ (Letters, 1.188). Long
after, to Allingham, Tennyson recalled this provocation:
I hate publishing! The Americans forced me into it again. I had my things nice and right, but when I found
they were going to publish the old forms I said, By Jove, that wonʹt do!—My whole living is from the sale of
my books. (Allingham, 168, 27 Dec 1867)

So at last, in May 1842, Tennyson issued Poems (Moxon). The first volume selected the best of 1830 and 1832,
together with a few poems written c.1833; the second volume consisted of new poems, some soon famous,
such as ‘Locksley Hall’, and some among his greatest: ‘Morte dʹArthur’, ‘Ulysses’, ‘Break, break, break’, and
‘St Simeon Stylites’.
By June 1845 Tennyson had set to work on his long poem about university education for women, The
Princess. The plan had formed in 1839, at a time when there was in Cambridge and elsewhere a renewed
sympathy with womenʹs claims, one that remembered Mary Wollstonecraftʹs Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1792) and gained a new impetus from Anna Jamesonʹs Characteristics of Women (1832), later
known as Shakespeareʹs Heroines. Jameson herself acknowledged many of the old ideals of womanhood.
What marriage would be, once womenʹs intellectual rights were respected: this was then the central woman
question. Tennysonʹs poem, ever apt, is a vivid reflection of the ageʹs humanely troubled concern. Like
Tennyson himself, it is liberal in spirit, conservative in upshot. Progressive, perhaps, for as T. S. Eliot said of
Whitman and Tennyson, ‘Both were conservative, rather than reactionary or revolutionary; that is to say,
they believed explicitly in progress, and believed implicitly that progress consists in things remaining much
as they are’ (T. S. Eliot, ‘Whitman and Tennyson’).
FitzGerald divined that this new poem was both a symptom and a cause of Tennysonʹs improved state of
mind. In September 1845, through the good offices of (among others) Henry Hallam, Tennyson was granted
by Sir Robert Peel a civil‐list pension of £200 a year, for life. The following year, with his publisher Edward
Moxon, he visited Switzerland (August 1846), ‘the stateliest bits of landskip I ever saw’ (A. Tennyson to
FitzGerald, 12 Nov 1846, Letters, 1.264). The mountainscape was soon to rise within The Princess (published
December 1847).
FitzGerald thought The Princess ‘a wretched waste of power at a time of life when a man ought to be doing
his best’ (FitzGerald to Frederick Tennyson, 4 May 1848, Letters of Edward FitzGerald, 1.604). Carlyle was
even less sympathetic: ‘very gorgeous, fervid, luxuriant, but indolent, somnolent, almost imbecil’ (25 Dec
1847, Collected Letters, 22.183). Yet here are three of Tennysonʹs finest lyrics—‘Tears, idle tears’, ‘Now sleeps
the crimson petal, now the white’, and ‘Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height’. The Prologue
presents a group of young friends at a country‐house fête; they speak of womenʹs rights, and then tell, each
in turn (‘a sevenfold story’; ‘Prologue’, 198) , the tale of a princess who founds a university for women; her
plans are broken by an irruption of men and then by an eruption of love. Tennysonʹs subtitle, ‘A Medley’, is
truthful, and defensive. The poem, locally fine, is happy not to have to be a whole, whether politically or
personally. It was for the poet a relief and a release from the pains of his 1840s. He duly felt obliged to recast
it more substantially than any other of his long poems.
In 1848 Tennyson visited Ireland and Cornwall, taking up again a projected Arthurian enterprise, and in
1849 the correspondence with Emily Sellwood was renewed. Tennyson now was granted his annus
mirabilis. For 1850 was to see, first, the publication of In Memoriam (anonymously, in the last week of May);
next, his wedding, in June; and then in November his appointment as poet laureate.
Hereafter Tennyson was to be, though he enjoyed denying it, secure. Secure in reputation, though the
passing judgements were sometimes harsh—‘that fierce light which beats upon a throne’ (Dedication to
Idylls of the King) beats too upon the poetʹs throne. Secure, too, in finances: with strong sales and with
publishers of integrity (Moxon through to Macmillan, with Ticknor doing the distinctly unusual thing for an
American publisher of the time and honourably paying up), he stayed the course and stayed in print. In the
last year of his life he earned more than £10,000, and he left an estate worth more than £57,000 (Martin, 578).
In Memoriam (1850)
In 1842 Tennysonʹs sister Emily, after eight years of quasi‐widowed fidelity to Arthur Hallam, had married
Captain Richard Jesse RN. Comments on this were harshly unjust, but Tennyson was not, and he gave his
sister in marriage. He must, though, have been aware that the changed relation of the Tennysons to the
Hallams might cast a shadow on the poem that was becoming In Memoriam, which he chose not to publish

until 1850, when it closed with the wedding of a different sister of Tennysonʹs (Cecilia) to a family friend
(Edmund Lushington) who could not but call up Arthur Hallam.
Tennyson had written what became sections of In Memoriam within a month of Hallamʹs death (September
1833).
The sections were written at many different places, and as the phases of our intercourse came to my
memory and suggested them. I did not write them with any view of weaving them into a whole, or for
publication, until I found that I had written so many. (H. Tennyson, Memoir, 1.304)
On 30 November 1844 Tennyson wrote to his aunt Russell:
With respect to the non‐publication of those poems which you mention, it is partly occasioned by the
considerations you speak of, and partly by my sense of their present imperfectness: perhaps they will not see
the light till I have ceased to be. I cannot tell, but I have no wish to send them out yet. (Letters, 1.231)
On 29 January 1845 FitzGerald wrote to W. B. Donne:
A. T. has near a volume of poems—elegiac—in memory of Arthur Hallam. Donʹt you think the world
wants other notes than elegiac now? Lycidas is the utmost length an elegiac should reach. But Spedding
[their Cambridge friend] praises: and I suppose the elegiacs will see daylight—public daylight—one day.
(Letters of Edward FitzGerald, 1.478)
The day dawned: it was in part the loving respect in which the poem (passed on to her, in manuscript or in
proof, by her cousin) was held by Emily Sellwood, soon to be Emily Tennyson, in April 1850 that fortified
Tennysonʹs confidence in the poem that he published (anonymously) next month, and that was to win him,
immediately and despite the mild fiction of anonymity, the laureateship and incontestable fame.
Tennyson had used the octosyllabic quatrain rhyming abba in his patriotic poems of 1832–3.
As for the metre of In Memoriam I had no notion till 1880 that Lord Herbert of Cherbury had written his
occasional verses in the same metre. I believed myself the originator of the metre, until after In Memoriam
came out, when some one told me that Ben Jonson and Sir Philip Sidney had used it. (H. Tennyson, Memoir,
1.305–6)
(For 1880, read 1870; see letter of 8 August 1870, Letters, 2.553–4.)
It is rather the cry of the whole human race than mine. In the poem altogether private grief swells out into
thought of, and hope for, the whole world. It begins with a funeral and ends with a marriage—begins with
death and ends in promise of a new life—a sort of Divine Comedy, cheerful at the close. It is a very
impersonal poem as well as personal. (Knowles, 182)
George Eliot saw the poem under a different aspect: ‘Whatever was the immediate prompting of In
Memoriam, whatever the form under which the author represented his aim to himself, the deepest
significance of the poem is the sanctification of human love as a religion’ (Westminster Review, Oct 1855; G.
Eliot, 191) .
Both human love and divine love faced the challenge not only of the ages but of the aeons. In ‘Parnassus’,
written three years before he died, Tennyson was to imagine the two powers that were now seen to tower
over all poetic aspirations: ‘These are Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses!’ In Memoriam did not stand
in need of or in dread of Darwinʹs Origin of Species, for the poem preceded the work of science by nine
years. Moreover Tennyson owed much not only to Charles Lyell and his Principles of Geology (1830–33),

which he mentioned to Milnes in 1836 (c.1 Nov, Letters, 1.145), but to William Buckland and his school of
thought. Yet In Memoriam became imaginatively central to the Darwinian evolutionary controversy, in a
world where the Victorians feared that the ape in the zoo might suddenly ask ‘Am I my keeperʹs brother?’
Tennyson threw off epigrams that he did not publish, one being ‘Darwinʹs Gemmule’, and another ‘By a
Darwinian’ (both 1868), and he published ‘By an Evolutionist’ in 1889.
By January 1851 In Memoriam was already in its fourth edition. Tennyson never issued an edition with his
name on the title‐page, but from 1870 it appeared in collected editions of his works. The poem was to be on
everyoneʹs lips and in most hearts, validating not only honest doubt but honest faith, a consolation of
philosophy for the age. In March 1889 F. W. H. Myers acknowledged what the poem had effected:
It is hardly too much to say that In Memoriam is the only speculative book of that epoch—epoch of the
‘Tractarian movement’, and much similar ‘up‐in‐the‐air balloon‐work’—which retains a serious interest
now. Its brief cantos contain the germs of many a subsequent treatise, the indication of channels along which
many a wave of opinion has flowed, down to that last ‘Philosophie der Erlösung’, or Gospel of a sad
Redemption—‘To drop head foremost in the jaws / Of vacant darkness, and to cease’—which tacitly or
openly is possessing itself of so many a modern mind. (Nineteenth Century; Jump, 399)
Queen Victoriaʹs poet laureate
In November 1850 Tennyson was appointed poet laureate, Wordsworth having died in April (and Samuel
Rogers having declined).
The night before I was asked to take the Laureateship, which was offered to me through Prince Albertʹs
liking for my In Memoriam, I dreamed that he came to me and kissed me on the cheek. I said, in my dream,
‘Very kind, but very German’. In the morning the letter about the Laureateship was brought to me and laid
upon my bed. I thought about it through the day, but could not make up my mind whether to take it or
refuse it, and at the last I wrote two letters, one accepting and one declining, and threw them on the table,
and settled to decide which I would send after my dinner and bottle of port. (Knowles, 167)
Tennysonʹs character and his convictions (political and national), as well as his versatility, enabled him to be
imaginatively duteous in the exercise of his responsibilities, the most felicitous of the poets laureate. The
next year, there followed his first such publication (dated March 1851), his deftly loving dedication, ‘To the
Queen’, heading the seventh edition of his Poems.
Aware that the poet laureate should express his convictions but should also be careful not to harness his
office to his own party political judgements, Tennyson on occasion published pseudonymously—for
instance a run of patriotic poems during the invasion scare from France in early 1852. ‘Among the most
enthusiastic national defenders are Alfred Tennyson and Mrs. A. T.’, wrote their friend Franklin Lushington
on 8 February 1852:
At least they have been induced by Coventry Patmore to subscribe five pounds apiece for the purchase of
rifles to teach the world to shoot—which appears to me a rather exaggerated quota for the laureate to
contribute out of his official income, his duty being clearly confined to the howling of patriotic staves.
(Letters, 2.26)
Tennyson differentiated such staves from his first independent publication as laureate later the same year:
his Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (published on the day of the funeral, 18 November 1852) is a
noble four‐square paean, much called on in later years when a great national loss has been felt, as at the
death of Winston Churchill. Written, Tennyson insisted, from genuine admiration of the man, it was a true
laureate ode, though not requested by the queen.

In January 1862 Tennyson published the verse dedication to open a new edition of Idylls of the King, in
memory of Albert, prince consort, who had died in December 1861. (Tennyson was to conclude Idylls of the
King, in the Imperial Library edition of 1873, with a complementary or married tribute, ‘To the Queen’,
beginning ‘O loyal to the royal in thyself’.) There followed, in April 1862, his first audience with Queen
Victoria, at Osborne, Isle of Wight:
I went down to see Tennyson who is very peculiar looking, tall, dark, with a fine head, long black flowing
hair and a beard—oddly dressed, but there is no affectation about him. I told him how much I admired his
glorious lines to my precious Albert and how much comfort I found in his ‘In Memoriam’. He was full of
unbounded appreciation of beloved Albert. When he spoke of my own loss, of that to the Nation, his eyes
quite filled with tears. (Queen Victoriaʹs journal, 14 April 1862, Dyson and Tennyson, 69)
There was humour, too, in their relation. ‘She was praising my poetry; I said “Every one writes verses now. I
daresay Your Majesty does.” She smiled and said, “No! I never could bring two lines together!”’ (Allingham,
150, 18 Feb 1867). A later audience, in August 1883 when Tennyson was in his seventies, was movingly set
down by the queen:
After luncheon saw the great Poet Tennyson in dearest Albertʹs room for nearly an hour;—and most
interesting it was. He is grown very old—his eyesight much impaired and he is very shaky on his legs. But
he was very kind. Asked him to sit down … When I took leave of him, I thanked him for his kindness and
said I needed it, for I had gone through so much—and he said you are so alone on that ‘terrible height, it is
Terrible. Iʹve only a year or two to live but Iʹll be happy to do anything for you I can. Send for me whenever
you like.’ I thanked him warmly. (Queen Victoriaʹs journal, 7 Aug 1883, Dyson and Tennyson, 102)
‘Asked him to sit down’: for a sardonic rendering of such an audience, see Max Beerbohmʹs caricature, Mr.
Tennyson reading ‘In Memoriam’ to his Sovereign (Beerbohm). There, it is less the poetʹs vigorous left arm
than his splayed legs that should establish his taking his liberty. But two royal profiles face his singular one.
Maud (1855), and Idylls of the King (1859–1885)
In July 1855 Tennyson published Maud, and Other Poems. Notable among the other poems was ‘The Charge
of the Light Brigade’. The charge, at Balaklava in the Crimea, had taken place on 25 October. Tennysonʹs
periodical publication in The Examiner (9 Dec 1854) had stirred not only the nation but the troops to whom
copies were sent.
‘This poem of Maud or the Madness is a little Hamlet, the history of a morbid, poetic soul, under the
blighting influence of a recklessly speculative age’; ‘The peculiarity of this poem is that different phases of
passion in one person take the place of different characters’ (Poems, 2.517–18).
Tennysonʹs acquaintance with Dr Matthew Allen, the wood‐carving financial speculator who was also a
mad‐doctor (the poet John Clare was in his care for a while), was one experiential base for the poem—
Tennyson visited his asylum near High Beech. What also courses through the poem is the black blood of the
Tennysons. The poem aroused controversy, some of it low: ‘Sir, I used to worship you, but now I hate you. I
loathe and detest you. You beast! So youʹve taken to imitating Longfellow. Yours in aversion’ (reported in
letter of 8 Jan 1856, Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1.281–2). George Eliot reviewed it anonymously: ‘its
tone is throughout morbid; it opens to us the self revelations of a morbid mind, and what it presents as the
cure for this mental disease is itself only a morbid conception of human relations’ (Westminster Review, Oct
1855; G. Eliot, 192) . The poem was accused of craving war (the protagonist leaves at the end for the Crimea)
and of fomenting sin. ‘If an author pipe of adultery, fornication, murder and suicide, set him down as the
practiser of those crimes’. Tennyson: ‘Adulterer I may be, fornicator I may be, murderer I may be, suicide I
am not yet’ (Lincoln MS, draft ‘Materials for a Life of A. T.’; C. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, 286) . It
remained one of the poems that Tennyson was most moved to read aloud. Its sense of all that may impede
marriage, or darken it, lived on in the two long narrative poems, of sombre power, that Tennyson published
together in 1864: ‘Enoch Arden’ and ‘Aylmerʹs Field’.

Tennysonʹs Arthurian interests were lifelong: from the early lyrical poems, ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘Sir
Galahad’, and ‘Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere’, through the deeply contemplative ‘Morte dʹArthur’, to
the elongated linking of narratives that became Idylls of the King. (A long I in Idylls; no article, not ‘The
Idylls of the King’; and an intimation that the series did not, though Hallam Tennyson uses the word,
constitute an epic.)
From his earliest years he had written out in prose various histories of Arthur … On Malory, on
Layamonʹs Brut, on Lady Charlotte Guestʹs translation of the Mabinogion, on the old Chronicles, on old
French Romance, on Celtic folklore, and largely on his own imagination, my father founded his epic. (Poems,
3.255)
In 1848 Tennyson visited Ireland and Cornwall, taking up again his projected Arthurian enterprise. It was
not until 1855 that he decided the shaping, and in 1859 the first four Idylls were published, Enid (later The
Marriage of Geraint and Geraint and Enid), Vivien (later Merlin and Vivien), Elaine (later Lancelot and
Elaine), and Guinevere. A revision and expansion of Morte dʹArthur, as The Passing of Arthur, was
published in 1869, with a note: ‘This last, the earliest written of the Poems, is here connected with the rest in
accordance with an early project of the authorʹs’ (The Holy Grail and Other Poems, ‘1870’). Gareth and
Lynette was published in October 1872, and the Imperial Library edition of Tennysonʹs Works (1872–3) then
brought together the series (with a new epilogue: ‘To the Queen’), virtually complete except for Balin and
Balan (written 1874, published 1885).
Victorian Arthurianism was sometimes moral, sometimes romantic, sometimes both. In The Return to
Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman, Mark Girouard noted that after the 1830s Tennysonʹs
dealings with Arthurian material changed. ‘The 1850s were, indeed, studded with Arthurian projects’, and
Tennyson more and more shaped inspiring models for ‘modern members of the ruling class’ (Girouard, 180,
184). But Tennyson had aspirations larger than the political, the passing. ‘As for the many meanings of the
poem my father would affirm “Poetry is like shot‐silk with many glancing colours”’. On his eightieth
birthday, he said: ‘My meaning … was spiritual. I took the legendary stories of the Round Table as
illustrations. I intended Arthur to represent the Ideal Soul of Man coming into contact with the warring
elements of the flesh’ (Poems, 3.258–9).
Deaths in the family, honours, and the peerage
Tennysonʹs mother died in February 1865. There is no recovering just what she meant to her son, though she
is to be glimpsed, as a gracious silence, in the record of early life, her piety being praised in ‘Isabel’: ‘The
queen of marriage, a most perfect wife’. Then in April 1879 came the death of Charles, the brother whom
Tennyson loved best (‘altogether loveable, a second George Herbert in his utter faith’, Tennyson wrote to
James Russell Lowell, on 18 November 1880; Letters, 3.199) , and whom he hauntingly commemorated in
‘Frater Ave atque Vale’ and in ‘Prefatory Poem to My Brotherʹs Sonnets’ (1879, opening Charlesʹs Collected
Sonnets, 1880).
But the immitigable grief was the grievous loss of Tennysonʹs son Lionel (b. 1854). In February 1878 Lionel
had married Eleanor Locker. As is clear from a notebook of Lionelʹs, of 1874–6, in which he set down
epigrams, observations, squibs, and light verse, he had a levity light‐years away from the gravity of his elder
brother, Hallam. Lionel made fretful his protective parents, with his dashing ways, his nattiness of garb, and
his very unTennysonian stammer or stutter.
Lionel Tennysonʹs work for the India Office took him to India in 1885, where he contracted fever, ‘hung
between life and death for three months and a half’ (H. Tennyson, Memoir, 2.323), and then, in April 1886,
died in the Red Sea on his way home. Tennyson was desolate, but he strove to share his wifeʹs Christian
fortitude—in her words, ‘The loss to us is indeed unspeakable but infinite Love and Wisdom have ordained
it’ (26 Oct 1886, Letters, 3.343). Tennyson was to realize such family tragedy, both personal and everywhere,
in one of his finest poems of saddened gratitude: ‘To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava’. His love of Lionel

lived on in his love of his grandsons: first, Eleanorʹs and Lionelʹs Alfred B. S. Tennyson (b. 1878—see the
endearing playfulness of the dedication to Ballads and Other Poems, 1880, and ‘To Alfred Tennyson My
Grandson’); and then their Charles Tennyson (b. 1879) who lived to a great age, nearly 100, to honour his
grandfather in works biographical and editorial.
Honours came to Tennyson with and following the laureateship. In June 1855 he received an honorary DCL
at Oxford; the occasion was graced by the affectionate impudence of the cry (adapting the opening of ‘The
May Queen’), ‘Did your mother call you early, dear?’ In 1869 he became an honorary fellow of Trinity
College, Cambridge (where neither he in the past nor his son Hallam in the immediate future proceeded to a
degree). In March 1880 he was invited to stand for the lord rectorship of Glasgow University, but withdrew
when he learned that the election was conducted along party lines. He had in 1865 refused the offer of a
baronetcy, and again in 1873, 1874, and 1880. Then in September 1883 he accepted a barony, acknowledging
to the queen ‘This public mark of your Majestyʹs esteem which recognizes in my person the power of
literature in this age of the world’ (c.1 Oct 1883, Letters, 3.265).
As well as the honour to literature and to Tennyson, and the affectionate respect in which he held the queen,
he would have been moved by this chance to score, with dignity, off the rival branch of the family, who—
half a century earlier—had elevated themselves to the name Tennyson‐DʹEyncourt. ‘I am very glad we have
changed our name, as it gives us a good position’, had written Edwin Tennyson‐DʹEyncourt: ‘Besides which
it will keep us in a great measure clear of the Somersby Family who really are quite hogs’ (1 Aug 1835,
Letters, 1.135).
Closer to home, Tennyson and his wife justly saw the peerage as a bequest to their self‐abnegating son. In
1873 and again in 1880, Tennyson had even put to Gladstone a proposal (as to the baronetcy then offered)
that breached all precedent:
I am still much of the same mind—except that many of my friends having reproached me as for a wrong
done to my family in declining the Baronetcy for myself, I feel still more than I did that I would fain see it
bestowed on my son Hallam during my lifetime, if that could be done without embarrassment to you. (3
Nov 1880, Letters, 3.198)
In 1883 Emily said of the accepted barony: ‘That Hallam should inherit the duties belonging to this
distinction is a cause of deep thankfulness to me’ (27 Sept 1883, ibid., 3.264). She declared herself thankful
‘that he should have an honourable career marked out for him when his work for his father has ceased’ (C.
Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, 472). It would be to underrate Hallam Tennyson to say that he owed his
becoming governor‐general of Australia to his fatherʹs peerage, but presumably the title was no hindrance.
Three months after his father took his seat in the House of Lords (March 1884), Hallam married Audrey
Boyle; the couple duly lived with his parents, and continued the life of loving service.
Friendships
Tennyson and Edward FitzGerald had been friends since their Cambridge days, and the two rather enjoyed
their amiable friction. ‘He spoke of Edward FitzGerald—had not seen him for years before his death;
FitzGerald could not be got to visit. “But no sort of quarrel?” “O no! fancy my quarrelling with dear old
Fitz!”’ (Allingham, 320, 1883). One of Tennysonʹs finest late poems, ‘To E. FitzGerald’, alive throughout its
56‐line single sentence, recalls the last visit by Tennyson and his son Hallam to FitzGerald in 1876. The poem
breathes friendship, and it generously delights in FitzGeraldʹs great translation imitation, The Rubáiyát of
Omar Khayyám. FitzGeraldʹs affectionate scepticism had its bracing side. Of the elegies that became In
Memoriam, he wrote to W. B. Donne on 27 February 1845:
We have surely had enough of men reporting their sorrows: especially when one is aware all the time that
the poet wilfully protracts what he complains of, magnifies it in the Imagination, puts it into all the shapes of
Fancy: and yet we are to condole with him, and be taught to ruminate our losses and sorrows in the same
way. I felt that if Tennyson had got on a horse and ridden twenty miles, instead of moaning over his pipe, he

would have been cured of his sorrows in half the time. As it is, it is about three years before the Poetic Soul
walks itself out of darkness and Despair into Common Sense. (Letters of Edward FitzGerald, 1.486)
Tennysonʹs exquisite verse epistle ‘To E. L., on His Travels in Greece’ (published 1853) is a tribute to Edward
Learʹs artistic pencil and writerʹs pen. Lear set Tennysonʹs poems to music, and he worked lifelong on
illustrations of the poems; on 19 February 1886, two years before he died, he wrote to Ruskin that although
‘nearly always in bed’ he could ‘even go on working at my 200 Tennyson illustrations begun in 1849’ (Lear,
276). These appeared posthumously in Poems by Tennyson Illustrated by Lear (1889). In person, there had
been increasing tensions. ‘AT was most disagreeably querulous and irritating and would return, chiefly
because he saw people approaching’, Lear wrote in his diary of June 1860, but Frank Lushington
would not go back, and led zigzagwise toward the sea—AT snubby & cross always. After a time he would
not go on—but led me back by muddy paths (over our shoes,) a short cut home—hardly, even at last
avoiding his horror,—the villagers coming from church … I … believe that this is my last visit to
Farringford:—nor can I wish it otherwise all things considered. (Noakes, 176)
It was Emily Tennyson in whom Lear delighted.
Tennysonʹs friendship with F. T. Palgrave, with whom he visited Portugal in August 1859 (and Derbyshire
and Yorkshire in 1862), led to his assisting Palgrave in selecting poems for the most famous, most influential,
and best of anthologies, The Golden Treasury (1861). Palgrave dedicated it to Tennyson, and—faced with
Tennysonʹs refusal to have his own poems in it—included no living poets. The particular advice and
recommendations of Tennyson survive and are of enduring interest—not least because, of the great English
poets, Tennyson is the one who was least willing to expatiate as a literary critic. His summary judgements
are shrewdly content to remain pith and gist: ‘One plods over Wordsworthʹs long dreary plains of prose—
one knows thereʹs a mountain somewhere’ (Allingham, 294, 2 Sept 1880).
W. E. Gladstone had played a part in securing a pension for Tennyson in 1845: ‘it appears established that,
though a true and even a great poet, he can hardly become a popular, and is much more likely to be a
starving one’ (24 Feb 1845, Parker, 3.441). Gladstone showed his historical and critical acumen in 1859:
Mr. Tennyson is too intimately and essentially the poet of the nineteenth century to separate himself from
its leading characteristics, the progress of physical science and a vast commercial, mechanical, and industrial
development. Whatever he may say or do in an occasional fit, he cannot long either cross or lose its
sympathies. (Quarterly Review, Oct 1859; Jump, 248)
Gladstone published in the Nineteenth Century (January 1887) an important reply to Tennysonʹs onslaught
(dramatized, but …) on the age in ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’. Tennyson and Gladstone had long
enjoyed a wary but genuine friendship. They agreed in loving Arthur Hallam and his memory; they agreed
that Tennyson was a true poet; and they agreed to a cruise together to Norway and Denmark in September
1883, during which the offer of a barony was prompted and precipitated. But they disagreed about
Gladstoneʹs politics, which were both Liberal and liberal, and particularly about Ireland. Four months before
Tennyson died, he sent someone a letter: ‘Sir, I love Mr. Gladstone but hate his present Irish policy’ (28 June
1892, Letters, 3.446). Nor was it only Ireland, for the Franchise Bill of 1884 seemed to Tennyson a grave
mistake. He fired a warning sonnet across Gladstoneʹs bows. ‘Statesman, be not precipitate in thine act’, he
boomed, or so the first unauthorized printing ran—and then perhaps decided that he had himself been
precipitate in according to Gladstone the tribute of the word Statesman, for the poem as printed in the
Memoir reads ‘Steersman …’, which better fits not only the navigating metaphor of the poem but Tennysonʹs
reservations as to Gladstoneʹs statesmanship.
Tennysonʹs admiration for Benjamin Jowett is best articulated in ‘To the Master of Balliol’ (written 1890,
published 1892). Jowett had long been a close friend of the family. Both men were robust; the anecdote that

is either Benjamin Jowett or ben trovato has Jowett saying of a new poem that Tennyson recited, ‘I think I
wouldnʹt publish that, if I were you, Tennyson’; whereupon the poet retorted, ‘If it comes to that, Master, the
sherry you gave us at luncheon was beastly’ (Martin, 433). Jowettʹs ‘Notes on Characteristics of Tennyson’
cannot be bettered for their sympathetic acumen (Ricks, Tennyson and His Friends, 186–7):
Absolute truthfulness, absolutely himself, never played tricks.
Never got himself puffed in the newspapers.
A friend of liberty and truth.
Extraordinary vitality.
Great common sense and a strong will.
The instinct of common sense at the bottom of all he did.
Not a man of the world (in the ordinary sense) but a man who had the greatest insight into the world, and
often in a word or a sentence would flash a light.
Intensely needed sympathy.
A great and deep strength.
He mastered circumstances, but he was also partly mastered by them, e.g. the old calamity of the
disinheritance of his father and his treatment by rogues [Dr Allen and the wood‐carving scheme] in the days
of his youth.
Very fair towards other poets, including those who were not popular, such as Crabbe.
He had the high‐bred manners not only of a gentleman but of a great man.
He would have wished that, like Shakespeare, his life might be unknown to posterity.
In the commonest conversation he showed himself a man of genius. He had abundance of fire, never
talked poorly, never for effect. As Socrates described Plato, ‘Like no one whom I ever knew before’.
The three subjects of which he most often spoke were ‘God,’ ‘Free‐Will,’ and ‘Immortality,’ yet always
seeming to find an (apparent) contradiction between the ‘imperfect world,’ and ‘the perfect attributes of
God.’
Great charm of his ordinary conversation, sitting by a very ordinary person and telling stories with the
most high‐bred courtesy, endless stories, not too high or too low for ordinary conversation.
The persons and incidents of his childhood very vivid to him, and the Lincolnshire dialect and the ways of
life.
Loved telling a good story, which he did admirably, and also hearing one.

He told very accurately, almost in the same words, his old stories, though, having a powerful memory, he
was impatient of a friend who told him a twice‐repeated tale.
His jests were very amusing.
At good things he would sit laughing away—laughter often interrupted by fits of sadness.
His absolute sincerity, or habit of saying all things to all kinds of persons.
Tennysonʹs voice, character, and appearance
Thackeray stated, in the early summer of 1841: ‘Perhaps it is Alfred Tennysonʹs great big yellow face and
growling voice that has had an impression on me. Manliness and simplicity of manner go a great way with
me, I fancy’ (Letters and Private Papers, 2.26). In his readings, the poet himself evoked ‘the poet’ who ‘Read,
mouthing out his hollow oes and aes, / Deep‐chested music’ (‘The Epic’). Thrillingly chanting Maud, ‘The
Charge of the Light Brigade’, ‘Northern Farmer: New Style’, a song from Idylls of the King, and other verses,
Tennysonʹs voice has been preserved for posterity thanks to an emissary of Thomas Edisonʹs in May 1890.
Allingham relished Tennyson and ‘his own sonorous manner, lingering with solemn sweetness on every
vowel sound—a peculiar incomplete cadence at the end. He modulates his cadences with notable subtlety’
(Allingham, 158, 25 Aug 1867). FitzGerald exulted in the harsher music, reporting of ‘St Simeon Stylites’:
‘this is one of the Poems A. T. would read with grotesque Grimness, especially at such passages as “Coughs,
Aches, Stitches, etc.”, laughing aloud at times’ (FitzGeraldʹs notes at Trinity College, Cambridge).
Tennysonʹs eminent contemporaries paid affectionate tribute not only to his voice but to his character,
appearance, and garb. FitzGerald noted on 23 May 1835: ‘I will say no more of Tennyson than that the more I
have seen of him, the more cause I have to think him great. His little humours and grumpinesses were so
droll, that I was always laughing’ (Letters of Edward FitzGerald, 1.162).
Carlyle described Tennyson to Emerson in August 1844, as
One of the finest looking men in the world. A great shock of rough dusty‐dark hair; bright‐laughing hazel
eyes; massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate, of sallow‐brown complexion, almost Indian‐
looking; clothes cynically loose, free‐and‐easy;—smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical metallic,—fit
for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech and speculation free and plenteous:
I do not meet, in these late decades, such company over a pipe! (Collected Letters, 18.169)
Six months later Jane Welsh Carlyle remarked that
Alfred is dreadfully embarrassed with women alone—for he entertains at one and the same moment a
feeling of almost adoration for them and an ineffable contempt! Adoration I suppose for what they might
be—contempt for what they are! The only chance of my getting any right good of him was to make him
forget my womanness … he smoked on all the same—for three mortal hours!—talking like an angel—only
exactly as if he were talking with a clever man—which—being a thing I am not used to—men always
adapting their conversation to what they take to be a womans taste—strained me to a terrible pitch of
intellectuality. (31 Jan 1845, Collected Letters, 19.16–17)
Arthur Hugh Clough said: ‘I like him personally better than I do his manner in his verses; personally he is
the most unmannerly simple big child of a man that you can find’ (13 Nov 1856, Correspondence of Arthur
Hugh Clough, 2.522).
Nathaniel Hawthorne gave a detailed account of his impressions of the poet on 30 July 1857:

Tennyson is the most picturesque figure, without affectation, that I ever saw; of middle‐size, rather
slouching, dressed entirely in black, and with nothing white about him except the collar of his shirt, which
methought might have been clean the day before. He had on a black wide‐awake hat, with round crown and
wide, irregular brim, beneath which came down his long black hair, looking terribly tangled; he had a long,
pointed beard, too, a little browner than the hair, and not so abundant as to encumber any of the expression
of his face. His frock coat was buttoned across the breast, though the afternoon was warm. His face was very
dark, and not exactly a smooth face, but worn, and expressing great sensitiveness, though not, at that
moment, the pain and sorrow which is seen in his bust … I heard his voice; a bass voice, but not of a
resounding depth; a voice rather broken, as it were, and ragged about the edges, but pleasant to the ear. His
manner, while conversing with these people, was not in the least that of an awkward man, unaccustomed to
society; but he shook hands and parted with them, evidently as soon as he courteously could, and shuffled
away quicker than before. He betrayed his shy and secluded habits more in this, than in anything else that I
observed; though, indeed in his whole presence, I was indescribably sensible of a morbid painfulness in him,
a something not to be meddled with. Very soon, he left the saloon, shuffling along the floor with short
irregular steps, a very queer gait, as if he were walking in slippers too loose for him. (Hawthorne, 351–3)
Julia Margaret Cameron, in 1862, caught Tennysonʹs prescience as well as the comedy of his so loathing
celebrity‐invading, a loathing strong in such poems as ‘To —, After Reading a Life and Letters’ and ‘The
Dead Prophet’ (1885), pieces dealing with what Tennyson saw as the invasion of the Carlylesʹ privacy by the
biographer James Anthony Froude.
He was very violent with the girls on the subject of the rage for autographs. He said he believed every
crime and every vice in the world were connected with the passion for autographs and anecdotes and
records,—that the desiring anecdotes and acquaintance with the lives of great men was treating them like
pigs to be ripped open for the public; that he knew he himself should be ripped open like a pig; that he
thanked God Almighty with his whole heart and soul that he knew nothing, and that the world knew
nothing, of Shakespeare but his writings; and that he thanked God Almighty that he knew nothing of Jane
Austen, and that there were no letters preserved either of Shakespeareʹs or of Jane Austenʹs, that they had
not been ripped open like pigs. Then he said that the post for two days had brought him no letters, and that
he thought there was a sort of syncope in the world as to him and to his fame. (J. M. Cameron letter, Taylor,
2.193)
Henry James described Tennyson for William James some seventeen years later, on 29 March 1877:
He is very swarthy & scraggy & strikes one at first as much less handsome than his photos.: but gradually
you see that itʹs a face of genius. He had I know not what simplicity, speaks with a strange rustic accent &
seemed altogether like a creature of some primordial English stock, a 1000 miles away from American
manufacture. (James and James, 1.283)
And finally, Thomas Hardy, in 1880,
often said that he was surprised to find such an expression of humour in the Poet‐Laureateʹs face, the
corners of his mouth twitching with that mood when he talked; ‘it was a genial human face, which all his
portraits belied’; and it was enhanced by a beard and hair straggling like briars, a shirt with a large loose
collar, and old steel spectacles. (Hardy, 178)
Tennyson had the good fortune to be the neighbour on the Isle of Wight, and then the friend, of the greatest
of Victorian portrait photographers, Julia Margaret Cameron. He valued her photographs of him, liking best
the one he dubbed ‘The Dirty Monk’ (1865). As to portraits: FitzGerald, on 5 June 1871, wrote to Emily
Tennyson, of Samuel Laurenceʹs, painted about 1840:

Very imperfect as it is, it is nevertheless the best painted Portrait I have seen; and certainly the only one of
old Days. ‘Blubber‐lipt’ I remember Alfred once called it; so it is; but still the only one of old Days, and still—
the best of all, to my thinking. I like to go back to Days before the Beard, which makes rather a Dickens of A.
T. in the Photographs—to my mind. (Letters of Edward FitzGerald, 3.290–91)
On this portrait see Letters, 3.290n. For the representations by Cameron (photographs), by Thomas Woolner
(medallion and busts), by James Spedding and D. G. Rossetti (drawings), by G. F. Watts (paintings), and the
statue by Hamo Thornycroft, see David Piper, The Image of the Poet: British Poets and their Portraits (pp.
166–80).
Tennysonʹs plays and final years
Tennyson wrote to Allingham on 29 July 1865: ‘To own a ship, a large steam‐yacht … and go round the
world—thatʹs my notion of glory’ (Allingham, 118–19). In his old age he enjoyed a series of cruises delightful
and calmative: in 1883, a fortnight on the Pembroke Castle (Scotland, Norway, and Denmark); in 1887, to
Devon and Cornwall; in 1888, on Lord Brasseyʹs yacht in and about the channel; and in the last two years of
his life, 1891 and 1892, to Jersey. He had travelled in 1880 to Venice, Bavaria, and the Tyrol, with Hallam
Tennyson. The sacred elegiac poem ‘Crossing the Bar’ was written in October 1889 while crossing the Solent.
According to his son, when Tennyson showed him this poem, ‘I said “That is the crown of your lifeʹs work.”
He answered, “It came in a moment”’. A few days before his death Tennyson said to his son, ‘Mind you put
my “Crossing the Bar” at the end of all editions of my poems’ (H. Tennyson, Memoir, 2.366–7).
Extraordinary fecundity, energy, and variety continued to characterize Tennyson. He returned to earlier
accomplishments: nearing seventy, in May 1879 he published, after repeated piracies, The Loverʹs Tale,
which had been omitted from Poems (1832) despite Arthur Hallamʹs protests: ‘You must be pointblank mad
… Pray—pray—pray—change your mind again’ (20 Nov 1832, Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam, 688). He
also created anew: in December 1880, Ballads and Other Poems; in November 1885, Tiresias, and Other
Poems; in December 1886, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After; and in December 1889, Demeter and Other
Poems.
Tennysonʹs youthful dramatic extravaganza, The Devil and the Lady, and his mature masterpiece in
monodrama, Maud, had given no notice that he would embark as a playwright during the last two decades
of his life. Back in the 1830s his art in the dramatic monologue had been assuredly inaugurative and diverse,
with the impassioned utterances of Ulysses, Tithonus, and St Simeon Stylites rivalling the simultaneous feats
of Browning in different veins—but the stage, the Victorian stage?
It was in June 1875 that Tennyson published Queen Mary, initiating this new misguided phase. Henry
James, no great hand at the stage himself, noted that
Great surprise, great hopes, and great fears had been called into being by the announcement that the
author of so many finely musical lyrics and finished, chiselled specimens of narrative verse, had tempted
fortune in the perilous field of the drama.
James saw that Tennyson ‘has not so much refuted as evaded the charge that he is not a dramatic poet. To
produce his drama he has had to cease to be himself’ (The Galaxy, Sept 1875; H. James, 165–6) . A production
followed in April 1876, and then in December 1876 (‘1877’) the publication of his second historical drama,
Harold. Henry Irving and Ellen Terry did their best for The Cup in July 1881. The Promise of May, his only
published work in prose, was produced in November 1882. As though anticipating T. S. Eliotʹs Murder in
the Cathedral, he wrote Becket. ‘I gave Irving my Thomas à Becket’, Tennyson said in 1880, and he meant
‘gave’:
He said it was magnificent, but it would cost £3000 to mount it,—he couldnʹt afford the risk. If well put on
the stage, it would act for a time, and it would bring me credit—but it wouldnʹt pay. The success of a piece

doesnʹt depend on its literary merit or even on its stage effect, but on its hitting somehow. (Allingham, 287, 5
Aug 1880)
Irving procrastinated for years, but six months before Tennysonʹs death he agreed to produce it, and did so
in February 1893.
Strong of constitution, Tennyson lived to a great age. In his nerve‐shattered thirties (the 1840s) he had
despairingly resorted to water cures, and intermittently throughout his life he had a fear of blindness, but it
was not until a few years before he died that ill health came upon him. In 1888 he suffered severe rheumatic
illness, from which he did not recover until May 1889; in 1890–91 there was perilous influenza; and then in
July 1892 he entered what was to be his last illness, bronchitis, influenza, neuralgia.
Death and posthumous reputation
On 6 October 1892, having recently reached his eighty‐fourth year, Tennyson died at Aldworth. That day,
Queen Victoria recorded:
A fine morning—I heard that dear old Ld Tennyson had breathed his last, a great national loss. He was a
great poet, and his ideas were ever grand, noble, elevating. He was very loyal and always very kind and
sympathising to me, quite remarkably so. What beautiful lines he wrote to me for my darling Albert, and for
my children and Eddy [her grandson the duke of Clarence and Avondale]. He died with his hand on his
Shakespeare, and the moon shining full into the window, and over him. A worthy end to such a remarkable
man. (Queen Victoriaʹs journal, Dyson and Tennyson, 140)
Tennyson was buried in Westminster Abbey on 12 October. The grave is next to that of Browning, and in
front of the monument to Chaucer. On 28 October 1892 there was posthumously published The Death of
Œnone, Akbarʹs Dream, and Other Poems. He left £57,206 13s. 9d.—this, and royalties to come, from poems
that have lasted.
Such was the sense of national loss that the abolition of the office of poet laureate was solemnly mooted
when Tennyson died. It was not until 1 January 1896, more than three years later, that a successor was
announced: Alfred Austin, poetaster laureate.
Emily Tennyson died on 10 August 1896. In October 1897 Hallam Tennyson published, in two volumes,
Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir. To this he had devoted the five years since the poetʹs death, amassing,
cutting, and (on occasion) shielding, towards the classic Victorian form, a life and letters. Indispensable, the
Memoir is capacious and honourable, at its best in breathing a sense of what it was like in the immediate
vicinity of Tennyson during the second half of his life, a memoir quite as much duly as unduly reticent.
In due course there came the expected ‘reaction against Tennyson’. Samuel Butler, his grim comic nose in the
wind, had started to jeer as soon as the breath was out of Tennysonʹs body:
I see they packed the volume of Shakespeare that he had near him when he died in a little tin box and
buried it with him. If they had to bury it they should have either not packed it at all, or, at the least, in a box
of silver‐gilt. But his friends should have taken it out of the bed when they saw the end was near. It was not
necessary to emphasize the fact that the ruling passion for posing was strong with him in death.
A little later he went on, ‘It seems that it was not the copy actually in bed with Tennyson when he died that
was buried with him, but another copy, let us hope of the same edition, and equally well bound, was
substituted for it’ (Butler, 254, 257).
Imminent Edwardians ousted eminent Victorians. Some lovers of Tennyson tried to reform things from
within: Harold Nicolson in 1923 brilliantly rescued many of the true poems by conceding that much of
Tennyson must go—while insisting that the essential Tennyson, ‘a morbid and unhappy mystic’, could and

would stay. Here, of all things, was an English poète maudit, more, a poète lauréat maudit. French
symbolism, in the person of Verlaine, had judged In Memoriam harshly: ‘When he should have been broken‐
hearted, he had many reminiscences’—for all the world as if reminiscences were not one deep and
honourable way of attending to a broken heart. It was W. B. Yeats who enjoyed giving English currency to
Verlaineʹs gibe (The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1936, ix).
It was left to T. S. Eliot, who warmed wittily and deeply to Tennyson, to insist in 1936 on the needed
obvious: ‘Tennyson is a great poet, for reasons that are perfectly clear. He has three qualities which are
seldom found together except in the greatest poets: abundance, variety, and complete competence’ (T. S.
Eliot, ‘In Memoriam’, 328).
Pressed by an anthologist for a biographical paragraph in 1837, Tennyson had sent only the ‘dry dates’: ‘I
have no life to give—for mine has been one of feelings not of actions—can he not miss me out altogether?’
(13 July 1837, Letters, 1.154). But the life that truly he gave was one that realized feelings, his own and ours.
The qualities of his poetry are most vividly commemorated, appreciated, and placed in the criticism by his
contemporaries: by Matthew Arnold, Walter Bagehot, Arthur Hallam, Gerard M. Hopkins, and R. H.
Hutton. Supremely, by Walt Whitman (The Critic, 1 Jan 1887; Jump, 349–50) :
To me, Tennyson shows more than any poet I know (perhaps has been a warning to me) how much there
is in finest verbalism. There is such a latent charm in mere words, cunning collocutions, and in the voice
ringing them, which he has caught and brought out, beyond all others—as in the line ‘And hollow, hollow,
hollow, all delight’, in ‘The Passing of Arthur’.
Christopher Ricks
Sources
Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. C. Y. Lang and E. F. Shannon, 3 vols. (1982–90) ∙ The Tennyson archive,
ed. C. Ricks and A. Day, 31 vols. (1987–93) [Tennyson MSS in facs., incl. the great collections at Harvard U.,
Houghton L.; at the Tennyson Research Centre, Lincoln; and at Trinity Cam.] ∙ The poems of Tennyson, ed.
C. Ricks, rev. edn, 3 vols. (1987) ∙ C. Ricks, ed., Tennyson and his friends (1992) [exhibition catalogue,
Harvard U., Houghton L.] ∙ Poems and plays: the Eversley edition, ed. H. Tennyson, 9 vols. (1907–8) ∙ H.
Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 2 vols. (1897) ∙ H. Tennyson, ed., Tennyson and his friends
(1911) ∙ C. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (1949) ∙ H. Dyson and C. Tennyson, Dear and Honoured Lady (1969) ∙
F. T. Palgrave, ed., The golden treasury (1861), ed. C. Ricks (1991) ∙ J. Jump, ed., Tennyson: the critical
heritage (1967) ∙ R. B. Martin, Tennyson: the unquiet heart (1980) ∙ C. Ricks, Tennyson, 2nd edn (1989) ∙ A.
Thwaite, Emily Tennyson: the poetʹs wife (1996) ∙ W. Allingham, Diary (1907) ∙ S. Butler, Notebooks, ed. G.
Keynes and B. Hill (1951) ∙ The collected letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, 18, ed. C. de L. Ryals and
K. J. Fielding (1990); 22, ed. C. de L. Ryals and K. J. Fielding (1995) ∙ Correspondence of Arthur Hugh
Clough, ed. F. L. Mulhauser, 2 vols. (1957) ∙ W. Ward, Aubrey de Vere: a memoir (1904) ∙ G. Eliot, Essays, ed.
T. Pinney (1963) ∙ The letters of Edward FitzGerald, ed. A. M. Terhune and A. B. Terhune, 4 vols. (1980) ∙
Mary Gladstone (Mrs Drew): her diaries and letters, ed. L. Masterman (1930) ∙ Letters of Arthur Henry
Hallam, ed. J. Kolb (1981) ∙ F. E. Hardy, The early life of Thomas Hardy (1928) ∙ H. James, Views and
reviews, ed. L. R. Phillips (1908) ∙ W. James and H. James, The correspondence of William James, ed. I. K.
Skrupskelis and E. M. Berkeley, 1 (1992) ∙ N. Hawthorne, The English notebooks 1856–1860, ed. T. Woodson
and B. Ellis (1997) ∙ R. H. Hutton, Literary essays (1888) ∙ J. Knowles, ‘Aspects of Tennyson II (a personal
reminiscence)’, Nineteenth Century, 33 (1893), 164–88 ∙ V. Noakes, Edward Lear, 2nd edn (1979) ∙ [E. Lear],
Selected letters, ed. V. Noakes (1988) ∙ C. Merivale, Autobiography (1899) ∙ C. S. Parker, Sir Robert Peel, 3
vols. (1899) ∙ T. W. Reid, Monckton Milnes, 2 vols. (1890) ∙ Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. O. Doughty
and J. R. Wahl, 1 (1965) ∙ Letters of John Addington Symonds, ed. H. M. Schueller and R. L. Peters, 3 vols.
(1969) ∙ H. Taylor, Autobiography, 2 vols. (1885) ∙ The letters and private papers of William Makepeace

Thackeray, ed. G. N. Ray, 2 (1945) ∙ W. B. Yeats, Uncollected prose, ed. J. P. Frayne, 1 (1970) ∙ M. Beerbohm,
The Poetsʹ Corner (1904) ∙ T. S. Eliot, ‘Whitman and Tennyson’, Nation and Athenaeum (18 Dec 1926) ∙ T. S.
Eliot, ‘In Memoriam’, Selected essays, rev. edn (1951) ∙ M. Girouard, The return to Camelot: chivalry and the
English gentleman (1981) ∙ J. Killham, Tennyson and The Princess: reflections of an age (1958) ∙ H. Nicolson,
Tennyson: aspects of his life, character and poetry (1923) ∙ D. Piper, The image of the poet: British poets and
their portraits (1982)
Archives
Harvard U., Houghton L. ∙ Tennyson Research Centre, Lincoln ∙ Trinity Cam.
SOUND
Tennyson Society, Lincoln
Likenesses
J. Spedding, drawing, c.1831, NPG ∙ S. Laurence, oils, c.1840, NPG ∙ D. G. Rossetti, drawing, 1855, Col. U. ∙ T.
Woolner, plaster relief, 1856, NPG ∙ G. F. Watts, portrait, c.1863–1864, NPG ∙ J. M. Cameron, photograph,
1865, NPG [see illus.] ∙ J. M. Cameron, photographs, NPG ∙ bust, Trinity Cam.
Wealth at death
£57,206 13s. 9d.: probate, 16 Dec 1892, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
© Oxford University Press 2004–11
All rights reserved: see legal notice Oxford University Press
Christopher Ricks, ‘Tennyson, Alfred, first Baron Tennyson (1809–1892)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2006
[http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27137, accessed 2 Nov 2011]
Rossetti, Christina Georgina (1830–1894), poet, was born on 5 December 1830 at 38 Charlotte Street,
London, the second daughter and fourth child of Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti (1783–1854) and
Frances Mary Lavinia, née Polidori (1800–1886). Her father, a Neapolitan patriot who had escaped to
England in 1824, was an Italian scholar, an expert on Dante, and professor of Italian at Kingʹs College,
London. He married, at the age of forty‐three, the 26‐year‐old daughter of Gaetano Polidori and Anna Maria
Pierce, another of whose children, John William Polidori, was Byronʹs physician and the author of The
Vampyre (1819). Christina Rossetti was close in age to her sister and brothers—Maria Francesca Rossetti
(1827–1876), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), and William Michael Rossetti (1829–1919)—and they were
bound by a strong family feeling. Their home was open to visiting Italian scholars, adventurers, and
revolutionaries; the works of Dante and Petrarch were part of their birthright; and all the children were
taught—the boys until they went to school, the girls until they were deemed to be ready to be employed as
governesses—by their mother, who was a formidable influence on all their lives.
Childhood and illnesses
Christina Rossettiʹs childhood—to judge from her brother Williamʹs reminiscences and from the blithe tone
of her childrenʹs verse—was happy. Family interests included visits to the zoo in Regentʹs Park (and an
enthusiasm for animals in general), chess, and games of bouts‐rimés (where the challenge is to write a sonnet
to fit a given sequence of rhymes within a certain time); a family newspaper was also kept. Among her
surviving juvenilia there is a poem addressed to her mother, dating from 1842, and a volume of Verses
which was privately printed by her Polidori grandfather in 1847. At about the age of fifteen she suffered a
collapse in her health and was attended by several different doctors, who advised that she spend winters at

the seaside. As a young girl she was vivacious, even (according to her own report) short‐tempered; the
children were characterized by their father as being two storms—Christina and Gabriel—and two calms—
Maria and William. A caricature by Gabriel of Christina shows her destroying a room in a fit of anger. As a
teenager she became neurotically self‐aware, always on her guard against sins of vanity and idleness,
reluctant to transgress her own strict rules of behaviour. William described this change of personality in his
1904 memoir of his sister: ‘Her temperament and character, naturally warm and free, became “a fountain
sealed” … Impulse and elan were checked, both in act and writing’ (Rossetti, ‘Memoir’, lxvi). It is likely that
it was about this time that her deep religious convictions were formed, when she came under the influence
of the Puseyite minister of Christ Church, Albany Street. Her mother and her sister regularly attended
church and Christina was a devout Anglican all her life.
In 1849 Christina Rossetti again became seriously ill, and in 1857 she seems to have experienced a major
religious crisis, which prevented her from taking the sacraments; this was also the year in which she wrote
several of her most heartfelt poems. There is a decided absence of any contemporary accounts of these
periods of collapse—apart from some of her melancholy verses (termed her ‘groans’ by her brothers) and a
perfervid semi‐autobiographical story, ‘Maude’ (1850), whose heroine, a poet, loses all zest for life and dies
young. This absence of any explanatory material intrigues modern biographers, who have gone to a good
deal of trouble to invent psychosexual reasons for the breakdowns. The recorded events which may have
influenced her depression, however, include her fatherʹs illness and his loss of paid employment, which led
to her mother and sister having to go out to work; there must also have been a sense of the closing in of her
own life as an invalid.
The Pre‐Raphaelites
In her late teens Christina Rossetti became involved in a group of her brothersʹ painting friends—among
them Ford Madox Brown, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais—and she was, emotionally at
least, involved in the formation of the Pre‐Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose dissolution in 1852 she marked
with some sprightly comic verses. It is difficult to know how much contact she had with these young men. In
one much quoted account, in a letter to William in 1849, she is characteristically sliding out of the picture:
Think of my dismay; today I met Mr Hunt on the stairs; and actually not knowing him, ran past without
exchanging greetings. Unconsciously I have thus transgressed the rules of my unlivable‐with politeness; and
this reflection costs me a pang. (Letters of Christina Rosetti, 1.26)
But she took an interest in their projects, continued to visit their studios, and, in one poem, ‘In an Artistʹs
Studio’, she takes a strongly sympathetic view of the painterʹs feelings for his model. She sat for the figure of
the Virgin in Gabrielʹs Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Ecce ancilla domini! (1850), and was a model for
works by Millais and Hunt and also sat for one of the founding Pre‐Raphaelite Brotherhood, James
Collinson.
Suitors rejected
Collinson was the first of Christina Rossettiʹs three suitors. In 1849 she became engaged to him and went to
stay with his family at their house in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, but her letters from there reveal only her
awkwardness and longing for home; a barrier may also have arisen in his conversion to Roman Catholicism.
The engagement was broken off in 1850. A second proposal came from one of her fatherʹs former pupils, the
Dante scholar Charles Cayley, who was refused in 1856 but became a lifelong friend. The third candidate for
her hand was the painter John Brett, who did at least two portraits of her and is believed to be the rejected
admirer in her forthright poem ‘No, Thank you, John’.
I never said I loved you John:
Why will you teaze me day by day.
Further ill health
Christina Rossettiʹs appearance at this time—pale, narrow‐jawed, with large‐lidded eyes and long, uncurled
hair—might be seen as a prototype for the introspective, melancholy Pre‐Raphaelite female, a look which

later went through many exaggerations in her brother Gabrielʹs paintings. Even before the disfiguring
condition of Gravesʹ disease was diagnosed in 1872, she lost her looks rapidly. Photographs of her from the
1870s show a stout, swarthy, undistinguished‐looking Victorian matron. She was aware of this; her letters
often refer to her altered appearance, generally in a wryly humorous way: ‘Still I am weak and less
ornamental than society may justly demand’ (1 Sept 1871, Letters of Christina Rosetti, 1.380); ‘If only my
figure would shrink somewhat! For a fat poetess is incongruous, especially when seated by the grave of
buried hope’ (26 July 1881, Thomas, 316). Self‐consciousness about the way she looked may also have led to
her later reclusive habits. Her ill health was lifelong; she suffered at various times from breathlessness, a
persistent cough, angina, neuralgia, and sundry abscesses and swellings, which combined to prevent her
from going out and led to her spending part of each winter at lodging‐houses on the south coast of England.
However distressing these symptoms, her chronic invalidism had the effect of absolving her from the need
to leave home to work as a governess and, in providing an excuse for refusing invitations, they gave her time
to herself.
Impoverished by Gabriele Rossettiʹs illness, the family made two attempts to start a school: in Camden Town
in north London, and two years later in Frome in Somerset, where they remained from April 1853 to March
1854, when legacies from the Polidori grandparents enabled them to return to London, to 45 Upper Albany
Street, Regentʹs Park, close to Christ Church. After Gabrieleʹs death in 1854, the family settled down into its
pattern: Frances, Maria, and Christina at home, their lives a round of church, visiting, and good works;
Gabriel pursuing his successful career as a painter, caught up in his long affair with Elizabeth Siddal, whom
he married in 1860, and in his complicated negotiations with Ruskin and others over the sale of his work;
and William working at the excise office and writing art criticism for The Spectator. The record of Christina
Rossettiʹs life at this time is sparse, but it is known that from 1859 she did occasional voluntary work with
the inmates of the St Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate. This was a religious foundation dedicated to
the improvement of ‘fallen women’, a social category the picturesque and symbolic qualities of which also
appealed to the Pre‐Raphaelite painters.
Publications
Christina Rossetti had published a number of poems under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyn in the short‐lived
Pre‐Raphaelite Brotherhood magazine The Germ, and in Mary Howittʹs ladiesʹ annuals and, more
importantly, in The Athenaeum and Macmillanʹs Magazine. In 1862 her first collection, ‘Goblin Market’ and
other Poems, ‘with two designs by D. G. Rossetti’, was published under her own name by Macmillan & Co.
and was universally praised by reviewers as the herald of a new voice and an original talent. Sales, however,
were disappointing. ‘The Princeʹs Progress’ and other Poems was published in 1866 and Sing‐Song: a
Nursery Rhyme Book, with illustrations by Arthur Hughes, in 1872. A Collected Poems was issued in 1875.
All of these volumes had American editions and her reputation in the United States began to grow. After a
sustained burst of creativity in the late 1850s, she mainly wrote occasional works, often donating poems to
Christian charities such as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Anti‐Vivisectionist
League of which she was a passionate supporter. Her writing after 1866 was chiefly devotional: daily
collects, scriptural commentaries, improving tales for children, and memorial poems. The exception to this
tendency is found in her late sonnet sequence, Monna Innominata (1881), which is a romantic and part‐
secular imagining of the feelings of a ‘female troubadour’, the object of male devotion. Her attitude to her
own work in her dealings with publishers and critics was quietly professional, though her correspondence
with her publisher Alexander Macmillan, like her response to Gabrielʹs criticisms, was not at all subdued. In
one of her few pronouncements on literature she hinted, in a letter to Caroline Gemmer (27 February 1883),
that, in general, the world had too many men and women of artistic promise: ‘Oh, my dear friend, donʹt let
us wish for any more geniuses!’ (Marsh, 511).
Publication and literary recognition did not do much to change the quiet habits of Christina Rossettiʹs life,
though she must have been glad of the guineas since she had no money of her own and was dependent on
her mother and William. Her letters are the only direct evidence there is of her private life, and it is known
that she systematically destroyed personal family letters. Those which have survived give a glimpse of a
restricted existence with her mother and sister, first in Upper Albany Street, then at 56 Euston Square, and

then at 30 Torrington Square (she lived nearly all her life within a few square miles, north of Oxford Street),
within a subdued social circle; her ‘shy and stay‐at‐home habits’ allowed her visits to a few familiar friends,
such as the Heimann family, Alice Boyd, and Caroline Gemmer, quiet holidays at the seaside or in the
country for her health, and religious and charitable observances. She did, however, make two trips to
Europe with William and their mother in the 1860s.
Friends and death
Christina Rossetti was not in the habit of drawing pen portraits or vivid vignettes. Although she visited her
brother Gabrielʹs bohemian ménage in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, and spent some weeks at Kelmscott Manor,
the Oxfordshire house he shared with William Morris, she left almost no description of these places.
Preferring old friends to new, she never moved in literary circles. There is little record of her acquaintance
with Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Barbara Bodichon, or Algernon Swinburne, who admired her poetry
greatly, and she seems to have avoided meeting Tennyson and Walt Whitman, both of whom were known to
her brothers. Little can be learned about her reactions to such episodes as the death of Gabrielʹs wife after an
overdose of laudanum in 1862, nor to his mental collapse and suicide attempts in 1873. Her relationship with
Lucy, the sociable daughter of Ford Madox Brown and an exhibited painter, was uneasy, particularly after
Lucy married William in 1873, although she later derived pleasure from their children, who have provided
accounts of Aunt Christinaʹs piety, and her grimness and rectitude. It is hard to avoid the impression that, as
time went on, her life steadily became more and more melancholy. Maria, who had become an Anglican nun
shortly after Williamʹs marriage, died of cancer in 1876; Gabriel in 1882 and her mother in 1886; and Charles
Cayley in 1883. After William and Lucy and their family moved to Primrose Hill, London, in 1890, she
shared the house at 30 Torrington Square with her two very elderly Polidori aunts. On 29 December 1894 she
died there in great pain and anguish, of cancer, having undergone surgery two years earlier. She was buried
on 2 January 1895 in Highgate cemetery, Middlesex, in the Rossetti family tomb, which, notoriously, had
been opened in October 1869 so that Gabriel could retrieve a volume of poems he had buried with his wife.
Reputation
Although her literary status was never as high as Elizabeth Barrett Browningʹs during her life, Christina
Rossettiʹs posthumous reputation has remained strong and is increasing; she stands far above her popular,
prolific contemporaries Dora Greenwell, Adelaide Proctor, and Jean Ingelow. In the twentieth century a
great interest has been taken in Freudian interpretations of poems such as ‘Goblin Market’, and her work,
which was previously admired for its innocence and artlessness, has become a hunting‐ground for critics
and biographers; enlisted as a symbol of repressed female genius, she has had her work scanned for tropes
of starvation and sexual guilt. As with several other nineteenth‐century women writers, notably Emily
Brontë and Emily Dickinson, the poetry seems more heroic when set in the context of what seems to the
modern reader to be an unimaginably restricted life. In Christina Rossettiʹs case her pious scrupulousness
seems at odds with the heartfelt emotion expressed in her poetry. Earlier admirers were anxious to promote
her as a wholly Christian writer, as seen, for instance, in Mackenzie Bellʹs reverent Christina Rossetti (1898),
William Michael Rossettiʹs congenitally careful ‘Memoir’ prefaced to his edition of her Poetical Works (1904),
and Katharine Tynanʹs hagiographical ‘Santa Christina’ (1912). Later twentieth‐century biographers,
however, have tended to make more intimate moves and have sought to decode the writings in terms of a
personal romantic disappointment. And so Lona Mosk Packerʹs 1963 biography puts forward the theory that
the poetry was conceived around the poetʹs passionate, unrequited love for the painter William Bell Scott, a
family friend. Georgina Battiscombe, in Christina Rossetti: a Divided Life (1981), presents her interpretation
of a woman torn between religious observance and artistic rebellion. In her 1992 biography Frances Thomas
suggests that her collapses were, in fact, periods of insanity whose recurrence she dreaded and which led to
her circumscribed life. Most controversially, perhaps, Jan Marshʹs Christina Rossetti: a Literary Biography
(1994) presents her belief that the breakdown in 1845 and the strange imagery in some of the stories and
poems was possibly due to sexual abuse by her father, when as a teenager she was left to look after him
alone.
The interest in Christina Rossettiʹs life has led to a renewed evaluation of her work, which now is seen as
going beyond the familiar lyric sweetness of poems such as ‘My heart is like a singing bird’, ‘When I am
dead, my dearest’, and ‘In the bleak midwinter’, towards an appreciation of her gifts of versification and her

strangely direct, assertive manner—so different from the muffled voice of her brotherʹs poetry. Christina and
Dante Gabriel Rossetti were both attracted to a sumptuous vocabulary of exotic fruit and gems and, as poets,
they both favoured a kind of plangent melancholy. Christina Rossetti is more personal; she often employs a
confrontational address, opening on a colloquial note:
I tell my secret? No indeed, not I:
Perhaps some day, who knows?
(‘Winter: my Secret’)
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
(‘Song’)
Shall I forget on this side of the grave?
I promise nothing: you must wait and see.
(‘Shall I forget’)
Her apparent lucidity and the strength of feeling in her work encourages biographical interpretation. The
fair maidens and half‐animal goblins of ‘Goblin Market’ seem to modern critics to be a cover for an erotic
subtext with particular meanings for the poet herself. The poemʹs images of sensuality and violation
Tore her gown and soiled her stocking,
Twitched her hair out by the roots.
Stamped upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeezed their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat
and its outpourings
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura make much of me.
seem to many to be simply too strong for a fairy‐tale, and twentieth‐century interpretations have made use
of Freudian notions of guilt and disguised passion, as well as adducing Christinaʹs relationship with her
more strictly religious sister. Victorian readers, however, saw the work simply as a narrative poem for
children.
Since the variorum edition of Christina Rossettiʹs Complete Poems appeared in 1979–90, a publication which
made use of the manuscript notebooks in which the poems were copied, there have been dozens of reissues
and reassessments which place her at the head of nineteenth‐century womenʹs writing, itself newly
reassessed. The view of Ford Madox Ford (who was the son of Lucy Rossettiʹs sister Cathy) that she was ‘a
modern writer’ is the one which stands. In an article to mark the centenary of her birth, Basil de Selincourt
placed her as ‘all but our greatest woman poet … incomparably our greatest craftswoman … probably in the
first twelve of the masters of English verse’ (TLS, 4 Dec 1930). Virginia Woolf wrote of her as an enduring
presence in her essay ‘“I am Christina Rossetti”’, found in The Second Common Reader (1932). Christina
Rossetti also influenced poets as diverse as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Jennings, and Philip Larkin.
The growth of her reputation is well illustrated by her increased representation in anthologies of Victorian
poetry published throughout the twentieth century. For instance, Arthur Quiller‐Couchʹs Oxford Book of
Victorian Verse (1912) contains twelve pages of her poetry; Christopher Ricksʹs New Oxford Book of

Victorian Verse (1987) allots her twenty‐three; and in the Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (1997) fifty‐five
pages are devoted to her work.
Lindsay Duguid
Sources
M. Bell, Christina Rossetti (1898) ∙ W. M. Rossetti, ‘Memoir’, in The poetical works of Christina Georgina
Rossetti, ed. W. M. Rossetti (1904) ∙ V. Hunt, The wife of Rossetti (1932) ∙ L. M. Packer, Christina Rossetti
(1963) ∙ F. Thomas, Christina Rossetti (1992) ∙ G. Battiscombe, Christina Rossetti: a divided life (1981) ∙ K.
Jones, Learning not to be first (1992) ∙ J. Marsh, Christina Rossetti: a literary biography (1994) ∙ Olive and
Stepniak: the Bloomsbury diary of Olive Garnett, 1893–1895, ed. B. C. Johnson (1993) ∙ The letters of
Christina Rossetti, ed. A. H. Harrison, 1 and 2 (1997–9)
Archives
Arizona State University Library, papers ∙ Bodl. Oxf., letters [copies] ∙ Bodl. Oxf., notebooks and poems
[copies] ∙ Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, John Hay Library, papers ∙ Indiana University,
Bloomington, Lilly Library, corresp. ∙ Iowa State Historical Department, papers ∙ Princeton University
Library, MSS of poems and corresp. ∙ Ransom HRC, papers ∙ University of British Columbia Library, corresp.
| BL, letters to F. S. Ellis, Add. MS 41130 ∙ BL, letters to Sir Edmund Gosse, Ashley MSS B 1366, 1368, 1384 ∙
BL, letters to Hake family, Add. MS 49470 ∙ BL, corresp. with Macmillans, Add. MS 54975 ∙ BL, letters to
Royal Literary Fund ∙ Bodl. Oxf., letters to Sir T. H. Caine [copies] ∙ Bodl. Oxf., letters to Miss May ∙ Bodl.
Oxf., letters to D. G. Rossetti ∙ NL Scot., letters to Alice Boyd ∙ U. Leeds, Brotherton L., letters to F. J. Shields
relating to memorial for D. G. Rossetti ∙ U. Newcastle, letters to Sir Walter Trevelyan and Lady Trevelyan ∙
U. Nott. L., letters to Henry Septimus Sutton ∙ University of British Columbia Library, Helen Rossetti‐
Angeli–Imogen Dennis collection
Likenesses
D. G. Rossetti, pencil drawing, 1847, V&A ∙ D. G. Rossetti, pencil drawing, 1848, BM ∙ D. G. Rossetti, group
portrait, oils, 1848–9 (The girlhood of the Virgin Mary; as model for Virgin), Tate collection ∙ D. G. Rossetti,
group portrait, pencil, 1849, Tate collection ∙ D. G. Rossetti, group portrait, oils, 1850 (Ecce Ancilla Domini!;
as model for Virgin), Tate collection ∙ D. G. Rossetti, two pencil drawings, 1852–65, Wightwick Manor,
Wolverhampton ∙ W. H. Hunt, oils, 1853 (The light of the world; as model for head of Christ), Keble College,
Oxford ∙ D. G. Rossetti, pen‐and‐ink caricature, 1862, Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton ∙ L. Carroll [C. L.
Dodgson], group portrait, photograph, 1863 (The Rossetti family), NPG ∙ D. G. Rossetti, chalk drawing,
c.1866, FM Cam. ∙ D. G. Rossetti, chalk drawing, 1866, priv. coll. [see illus.] ∙ D. G. Rossetti, double portrait,
chalk drawing, 1877, NPG ∙ S. J. B. Haydon, etching and mezzotint, BM ∙ W. B. Scott, etching (aged about
seven; after miniature by Pistrucci), BM ∙ portraits, repro. in Thomas, Christina Rossetti ∙ portraits, repro. in
Marsh, Christina Rossetti ∙ portraits, repro. in Jones, Learning not to be first
Wealth at death
£13,371 18s. 6d.: probate, 11 Feb 1895, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
© Oxford University Press 2004–11
All rights reserved: see legal notice Oxford University Press
Lindsay Duguid, ‘Rossetti, Christina Georgina (1830–1894)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24139, accessed
2 Nov 2011]

Browning, Robert (1812–1889), poet, was born on 7 May 1812 in Camberwell, London, the first of the two
children of Robert Browning (1782–1866) and his wife, Sarah Anna, née Wiedemann (1772–1849).
Ancestry, childhood, and adolescence
Robert Browningʹs grandfather, also called Robert Browning (1749–1833), was of Dorset yeoman stock, and
moved to London at the age of twenty. He eventually rose to a prominent position in the Bank of England,
and married Margaret Tittle (1754–1789) who came from a family of some wealth emanating from the West
Indies. The couple had a son, Robert, the father of the poet. After the death of his first wife, Browningʹs
grandfather married a younger woman, with whom he had nine children. There was soon conflict between
his first son and his new wife, and Browningʹs father was sent to the West Indies to work on a sugar
plantation. Revolted by the slavery there, he soon returned to England and found employment as a clerk in
the Bank of England, where he remained until 1852.
In 1811 Browningʹs father married Sarah Anna Wiedemann. She was ten years his senior, and came from a
middle‐class family originally from Dundee, which had settled in Camberwell, where the pair took a cottage.
It was there that Robert Browning was born, and his birth was followed by that of his sister, Sarianna
Browning (1814–1903).
By all testimony Robert Browning was a precocious child who insisted on showing off. He learned to read at
an early age and from his largely self‐taught cultivated parents he gained a love of music and classical
literature. He seems to have attended a local dame school at the age of five but, owing to his superior
knowledge, was sent home to avoid embarrassing the older boys. At seven he began at the Misses Readysʹ
weekly boarding‐school in nearby Peckham, where he was both lonely and bored; and then at about ten he
moved to the tutelage of the Misses Readysʹ brother, the Revd Thomas Martin Ready, master of Peckham
School, where again he believed that he was taught nothing. It was at home during weekends that his real
education took place. His father helped him with Latin declensions by turning them into rhymes,
encouraging him in Greek literature, and teaching him to draw and appreciate pictures at the nearby
Dulwich Picture Gallery. His mother instructed him in the names of flowers, taught him to play the piano (at
which she was quite talented), and encouraged him in the love of music. At home the four Brownings
proved an extraordinarily close‐knit family. Robert Browning left Peckham School at fourteen, and for the
next two years, from 1826 to 1828, was tutored at home, primarily with the aim of making him a gentleman.
It was, however, mostly from his eclectic reading in his fatherʹs library that Browning gained the wide‐
ranging erudition later manifested in his poetry.
As for verse, Browning had begun making rhymes as soon as he could talk. Although he was familiar with
Shakespeare from earliest childhood, some of his earliest lines were in imitation of Macphersonʹs Ossian,
whence he moved on to the English Romantics. His earliest poems, however, he destroyed. His parents were
impressed by a collection of verse of somewhat later date and modestly entitled ‘Incondita’, and they
unsuccessfully looked for a publisher. Only two poems, dating from his fourteenth year, survive: ‘The Dance
of Death’, modelled on a poem of republican sympathies by Coleridge, and ‘The First‐Born of Egypt’,
demonstrating the influence of Byron, whose rebellious attitudes and dandiacal attitudes the young
Browning found worthy of imitation in life as well as in verse.
After the imitative pieces of ‘Incondita’ Browning seems to have ceased writing poetry for five or six years,
music becoming his chief means for finding expression, although he continued to regard the poetʹs calling as
pre‐eminent. Byronʹs influence on him began to wane at this time, and was replaced by that of Shelley,
whom Browning found far less egotistic and cynical. Late in 1826 or in 1827 Browningʹs maternal cousin
James Silverthorne gave him a copy of Shelleyʹs Miscellaneous Poems (1826), in which he found set forth his
own dreams and aspirations with a startlingly fresh beauty. Wanting to have more of the poetʹs work, he
persuaded his pious mother to purchase for him the works of an evangelizing atheist. Reading them

voraciously, Browning soon became an atheist and a vegetarian, and for the next few years ‘Shelley was his
God’ (Domett, 141).
Fired with Shelleyʹs beliefs and Byronʹs dandyism, the young Browning acted in such ways as to distress his
parents, whom he felt did not appreciate him. Seeking to widen his acquaintance, he began calling regularly
on the artistic, older Flower sisters. Eliza, a talented musician, may have given Robert music lessons, and,
idolizing her, he composed a stream of verses and letters to her. Sarah was a poet also interested in the
theatre. Together they probably exerted the greatest influence on Browningʹs adolescence, serving as models
of artistic activity and providing him with a sentimental education. The young man, however, also had an
influence on them, especially on Sarah, who wrote in November 1827 to her spiritual confessor that Robert
had unsettled her religious beliefs.
To help in finding a publisher for Browningʹs ‘Incondita’, Eliza showed the poems to William Johnson Fox, a
famed Unitarian minister and journalist of compelling personality. Liking them, but recognizing their
derivative nature, Fox praised them in person to the young poet but advised against their publication,
probably because of their extensive debt to Byron, and it may have been through Fox that the young poet
disavowed Byronʹs great influence over himself and destroyed all copies of ‘Incondita’. In any case,
Browning acknowledged Fox as his ‘literary father’ (Orr, Life, 43).
Following his two years of tutoring at home, Browning entered the newly founded University of London.
His father had earlier subscribed £100 towards its foundation and this allowed him, as one of the
‘proprietors’, the right to free tuition for his nominee. In April 1828 the elder Browning applied for
admission for his son, who was accepted. Robert, settled into a rooming‐house in or near Bedford Square,
began his classes in German, Greek, and Latin in late October. He was disappointed from the beginning,
finding student life drab and the lectures for the most part perfunctory. He soon withdrew from his student
lodging and went home to live while continuing his classes. At the end of the academic year he withdrew
from the university.
The question then arose as to how the boy of seventeen was to make a living. His father had hoped that by
attending the university he might qualify for the bar, but Browning expressed contempt for the legal
profession. His father then suggested the medical profession, but although he visited Guyʹs Hospital,
Browningʹs interest in medicine was merely that of the detached observer. What he undertook then was
study with no goal in view, following an unsystematic course of reading in his fatherʹs library. As he was
later to say, ‘[B]y the indulgence of my father and mother, I was allowed to live my own life and choose my
own course in it’ (Orr, Life, 378).
The years from 1829 to 1833 are the least‐known period in Browningʹs life. What is known is that he
continued his self‐education. He read widely in European culture in his fatherʹs library, the diverse subject
matter that he hoped to master proving unending. The result was that Browning became, with the possible
exception of Milton, the most learned of the great English poets. But more important than his gain of general
knowledge during this period was his discovery of a philosophy far different from that of Shelley, which he
had hitherto followed so devotedly.
What Browning perceived was that there is no stable centre of selfhood accessible to the thinking subject.
The subject, he learned, is accessible only obliquely, not in the continuity of its self‐consciousness but in the
discontinuity of its shifting forms. And following this perception, he saw that truth and meaning are not
fixed but, instead, are always becoming. Further, he saw that the questions posed determine to no small
degree the answers reached, and that the angle of view limits visions of the whole. This apprehension
caused Browning to conclude that not enough questions or enough points of view can ever be asked to gain
a complete, encompassing overview of any matter. At best, one gains approximations of the truth which are
always subject to better formulations. Absolute truth, then, is never present in the phenomenal world,
although informing it. It was with such newly gained belief that he recoiled from Shelleyʹs mythopoeic,

visionary expressions about a world that can be redeemed by poets who are the unacknowledged legislators
of mankind.
Early published poetry
Yet it was not easy to break with Shelley. Browningʹs first act of exorcism occurred in Pauline; a Fragment of
a Confession, composed late in 1832 and published anonymously by the firm of Saunders and Otley in
March 1833, with the subsidy of £30 offered by a maternal aunt. In a kind of poetic autobiography, the
speaker looks back over his past life in which he had deserted Pauline (who may have been inspired by Eliza
Flower) and had foregone his inherited religious faith under the influence of the Sun‐treader (Shelley). At
the end, expressing a willingness to submit to the world of limitations and not seek hereafter for a world in
which he will know all, he embraces God, Pauline, and the Sun‐treader. Yet in the final verse paragraph it
becomes clear that the poetʹs betrayal of Shelley the Sun‐treader is a greater source of remorse than his
forswearing of his traditional religious faith. Reviews of Pauline were mixed, W. J. Fox praising it and others
despising it as unintelligible.
In February 1834 Browning took his first trip abroad: to St Petersburg at the invitation of the Russian consul‐
general to accompany him there. Browning was so fascinated by court life on this occasion that for a brief
period he considered a diplomatic career. On his return to London he met in summer 1834 a young
Frenchman, Count Amédée de Ripert‐Monclar (1807–1871), an aristocrat who loved art and literature and
was in close touch with the cultural life of France. They became close friends, and their friendship lasted
until the 1840s, when they seem to have drifted apart. Monclar was an important influence on Browning in
many ways, and he even seems to have influenced Browningʹs poetic development, in that he was to suggest
Paracelsus as the subject for an extended piece of verse (Orr, Life, 72).
Browning began this poem early in October 1834, and completed it in mid‐March 1835. His father bore the
expense of publication, and Paracelsus was published anonymously on 15 August 1835. Although its format
is that of a play—it was divided into five scenes and contained four characters—the author claims in the
preface that it is not a drama nor a dramatic poem, but that each scene presents Paracelsus at a critical
moment of his inner life in which he is brought by an articulation of his ‘mood’ to new insights. In effect, the
five scenes are five monologues, in the first of which Paracelsus begins as a Shelleyan visionary whose role is
to encounter the divine and reveal the results to mankind. At the close he comprehends how his pursuit was
misconceived, for he learns that the noumenal, even if partially touched by means of language, cannot be
communicated to others through the phenomenal, which is language. The reviews of the poem were largely
favourable, although the work did not gain the author a great deal of money. For a number of years
thereafter the title‐pages of Browningʹs new works bore the legend ‘By the Author of Paracelsus’.
In the mid‐1830s Browning was introduced to a number of literary figures through the agency of W. J. Fox.
Although some of them (like Thomas Carlyle) found his dandyism in dress and manner off‐putting, they
soon discerned beneath the foppish surface a serious though ironic personality. In May 1836 Browning
attended a supper at which he was toasted by Francis Talfourd, the host, Walter Savage Landor, and
Wordsworth. Of most immediate importance, however, was the fact that William Charles Macready, the
actor and producer of plays, asked the young poet to write a play for him.
Browningʹs Strafford was produced at Covent Garden on 1 May 1837, after some conflict with Macready and
John Forster over its nature as a play. In the end, it ran for only five performances. It was not well received—
apparently because, as the author said in the preface to the published play, his aim was ‘Action in Character
rather than Character in Action’. Following his disappointment with the reception of Strafford, Browning
visited Paris and in spring 1838 made a three‐month tour of Europe. For the previous four or five years he
had been working on a long poem devoted to the Italian troubadour Sordello, but he was so taken with Italy
that he was unable to finish the poem among the scenes described in it. Sordello was not published until
March 1840, again at the expense of his father.

Browningʹs conception of the poem had changed several times and his intractable materials could not be
fused into a harmonious union. But to the poet this was no drawback, for, in his opinion, conventional
formal unity and logical coherence were attributes merely of poetry of the past. His aim was to be one of the
setters‐forth of unexampled themes,
Makers of quite new men.
(Sordello, 1.26–7)
This is why his speaker bids Shelley depart early on so that his poem, finally of approximately 5800 lines of
rhymed couplets, can get down to business. Speaking in his own voice, the poet admits to a new kind of
narrative presentation and to a new kind of genre (which mixed many genres). One of the chief
characteristics of the poem that gives it its distinctive voice is parabasis: that is, the presence of digressions in
which the author addresses the audience on personal or topical matters. After devoting six books often
relating in a roundabout way to Sordello, in the end the narrator suggests that the real subject was not
Sordello but rather the poet himself and his efforts to write the poem. Carefully ordered but appearing
unstructured, purportedly historical but in fact deeply personal, generically indeterminate and stylistically
complex, Sordello is unique in literary history.
Bells and Pomegranates
Browning believed that Sordello would make his reputation, but for the next two decades it had the opposite
effect, as its critical reception was almost universally condemnatory. The poem ‘became notorious for its
obscurity’, partly because Browning unreasonably assumed that his readers would be familiar with the
thirteenth‐century Italian history that was key to its narrative structure. Even Elizabeth Barrett, who was
soon publicly to praise the young poetʹs work, had difficulty with Sordello, and the confusion prevailed well
into the modern era, with only Ezra Pound finding the poem ‘a model of lucidity’, and consequently being
‘probably the only person who has ever seriously claimed to have understood Sordello’ (Poems, 1.1040).
Certainly in his own time, the work damaged the young poetʹs standing, and his publisher, Edward Moxon,
attempted to redeem Browningʹs reputation (as well as his own), with the suggestion that his next poetry be
printed in a series of inexpensive paper‐bound pamphlets, the cost to be borne by Browningʹs ever
supportive father. Browning agreed and chose the general title Bells and Pomegranates hoping by this title
to ‘indicate an endeavour towards something like an alternation, or mixture, of music with discoursing,
sound with sense, poetry with thought; which looks too ambitious, thus expressed, so the symbol was
preferred’ (ibid., 1.1069). The eight pamphlets were to contain seven plays and two collections of poems and
were published between April 1841 and April 1846.
Pippa Passes (April 1841), the first number, contests Romantic notions of poetry as lyric effusion, a view
summed up and advocated by J. S. Mill in two essays in 1833 in which he maintained that the greatest poetry
is by nature soliloquy, not heard but overheard. In Pippa Passes, Browning presents a heroine whose key
mode of utterance is lyric poetry overheard by others. The innocence and religiosity of Pippaʹs song which is
inadvertently overheard by the various characters is crucial. As she sings famously at the beginning of the
poem:
Godʹs in his heaven—
Allʹs right with the world!
But all is emphatically not right in the world of Pippa Passes, and the overheard lyric acts as a commentary
on the auditorsʹ situations, and acts on the characters to great effect, causing significant changes in their
viewpoints and actions. In working out the implications of this mode of poetic utterance Browning showed
that the poet has a dialogic relationship with the audience and a responsibility from which he or she cannot
escape. In effect, in the four scenes Browning shows how poetry is theatre, or performance, before an
interactive audience.

The next pamphlet and four more of them were plays, which Browning designed for stage production. The
only one produced, by Macready against his better judgement, was A Blot in the ʹScutcheon. Presented in
February 1843, it was withdrawn after three performances, at which point Browningʹs break with Macready
was complete and so, effectively, were his hopes for the stage. The plays offer little plot and almost no
action, their interest (as in Strafford) centring on action in character rather than character in action. The root
conception of Browningʹs plays lies in the conflict between love and duty, or love and power, which is for
the most part worked out within a political situation. However interesting to Browning, this was far from
being the primary focus that theatregoers expected.
Pamphlets three and seven—Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845)—contain
some of Browningʹs best‐known poems, such as ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Porphyriaʹs Lover’, and ‘The Bishop
Orders his Tomb at St Praxedʹs Church’. These are dramatic monologues (called by the poet dramatic lyrics
or dramatic romances), which take the form of narratives told in the first person by a carefully characterized
narrator who, so distanced, is understood to be distinct from the poet. Browningʹs achievement in grounding
these narrators in their historical milieu was memorably praised in Modern Painters by Ruskin, who
commented that in ‘The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St Praxedʹs Church’, Browning had put ‘nearly all that I
said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of the Stones of Venice into as many lines’ (Poems, 1.1093).
The narrator in one of Browningʹs dramatic monologues usually speaks to an auditor within the poem, and
inadvertently reveals his true nature to the reader through his words. The monologues internalize plot and
deal with an interior conflict of which the speaker is frequently not consciously aware. As Browning said in
the preface to Dramatic Lyrics, the poems in this genre are ‘for the most part Lyric in expression, always
Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine’. In other words, the
utterance by the fictitious speaker is lyric to the degree that it is expressive of self, and dramatic to the degree
that it is suggestive of conflicting motives and tendencies. The dramatic monologue became the chief genre
that Browning employed and experimented with for the remainder of his career, and in large part because of
his skilful manipulation of its peculiar characteristics, it became one of the dominant genres employed by
poets over the following century. Recognizing his young friendʹs amazing achievement, Walter Savage
Landor published a poem in November 1845 attesting to Browningʹs majority, as having become a name to
be listed, along with those of Chaucer and Shakespeare, among the greatest English writers.
Marriage and early life in Italy
Another poet, whom Browning had recently come to know, was equally enthusiastic. Elizabeth Barrett [see
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1806–1861)], among the most famous poets of the day, had praised Browningʹs
poetry in a journal article in 1842 and in one of her poems published in 1844. Browning was full of gratitude,
and posted a letter to her on 10 January 1845 telling her that ‘I love your verse with all my heart … and I love
you too’ (Browningsʹ Correspondence, 10.17). She replied the next day thanking him for his letter and
proclaiming herself ‘a devout admirer & student’ of his works (ibid., 10.19). Thereafter they began to
exchange letters every few days.
Elizabeth Barrett fended off Browningʹs requests to visit her for some time, as she feared his reaction on
seeing an ageing invalid some six years his senior confined to a sofa. But he persisted, and she finally
allowed him to come to 50 Wimpole Street on 20 May 1845. He fell in love with her almost at first sight, as he
told her in his letters. For her part, she could not believe that someone could love a seemingly incurable
invalid and was also terrified that her tyrannical father, who had forbidden his children to marry, would
learn about her admirer. But after many letters and visits, she was ready to declare her love for him in
forthright terms in November 1845, although she told none of her friends or family. When, however, her
father became suspicious of Robertʹs visits, she came to recognize her father as a despotic egoist and agreed
to discuss the possibility of marriage.
One obstacle to marriage was money. Browning was completely dependent financially on his parents, but
Elizabeth had inherited a fortune that yielded about £350 annually. Browning would not hear of taking any
money from her and for a time considered several careers that he might take up. At last the money question

was settled when he agreed that they would live on her income in Italy, where they proposed to go in part
because of southern benefits for her health. He was adamant, however, that she must write a will
bequeathing her property to her brothers and sisters.
The couple were married in St Marylebone Church on 12 September 1846 in the presence of two witnesses,
Browningʹs cousin James Silverthorne and Elizabethʹs maid, Wilson. Elizabeth returned home alone, with
Robert not visiting her for the next few days. On 19 September the pair, joined by Wilson and Elizabethʹs
dog, Flush, fled to Paris, where they rested for several days; thence to Avignon and Marseilles; thence by
ship to Leghorn; and finally by train to Pisa, where they arrived on 14 October.
In Pisa the Brownings found an apartment and settled in for winter 1846–7. Elizabethʹs health immediately
improved, but in March she suffered a miscarriage, which caused them both much grief. In mid‐April they
set out on a tour of northern Italy, and although they had intended to return to Pisa, they were so smitten by
Florence that they decided to move there. They found an unfurnished apartment in Casa Guidi, opposite the
Pitti Palace and a short walk from the Ponte Vecchio, and for the next thirteen years this was their home.
They were so happy with their active life in Florence that for the next two years Browning devoted little time
to writing. Their main interest during 1848–9 was the revolutionary fervour being manifested all over the
continent. They had both espoused the Italian nationalist cause while in England, and now in Italy they
became enthusiastic partisans of Italian liberty. They remained united in espousing the cause even after it
began to fail in spring 1849. This is more than can be said for their views on Louis Napoleonʹs later coup
dʹétat—Elizabeth saw it as an unfortunate necessity, but Browning detested the action. Admirably suited
though they were in so many other ways, their differences on this particular political issue continued for the
rest of their married life.
Amid all the military activity Elizabeth was pregnant, and gave birth to a son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett
Browning (soon called Pen), on 9 March 1849. Browning was delighted, yet his joy was diminished a few
days later by letters from his sister announcing their motherʹs illness and then her death. To escape from his
continuing sadness, the Brownings went to Bagni di Lucca. Yet Browningʹs despondency persisted,
aggravated by his having nothing to do. Elizabeth showed him for the first time her Sonnets from the
Portuguese, to be published in 1850, poems that she had written to him during their courtship. He was
greatly appreciative, yet ashamed that he himself had written almost nothing. He had, however, published
in two volumes with his new publishers, Chapman and Hall (Moxon being judged too slow), the first
collection of his works, excluding the unfavourably received Pauline, Strafford, and Sordello.
Late in 1849 Browning began a new work, which he published as Christmas‐Eve and Easter‐Day the
following spring. ‘Christmas‐Eve’ is the dramatic narrative of a speaker in London on Christmas eve 1849
who enters a dissenting chapel to escape the rain. Therein he falls asleep and envisions several kinds of
religious observance on that date, ending up with the belief that what he had regarded as absolute religious
truth was truth only to him and that other modes of worship, other than his own dissenting one, have their
own validity. While ‘Christmas‐Eve’ is a monologue, ‘Easter‐Day’ is the first of Browningʹs ‘parleyings’, a
dialogue in which the poet divides himself up into two voices to express, through relation of a visionary
experience in the past that may or may not be valid, how belief in the supremacy of the infinite resides in the
perception of the infinite through the finite. The volume was respectfully but not widely reviewed, and after
200 copies had been sold within a fortnight of publication, the rest were remaindered, and were still being
sold in the 1860s. On the other hand, Elizabeth, who was proposed by several journals to succeed
Wordsworth as poet laureate on his death on 23 April 1850, had a new edition of her Poems in two volumes
published in the autumn that received many reviews and enjoyed good sales.
Travels outside Italy, 1851–1852
In July 1850 Elizabeth suffered her fourth miscarriage, in the course of which she lost a large amount of
blood. At her doctorʹs suggestion the Brownings rented a villa above Siena until November. By 1850 they
had established an interesting circle of friends among the foreigners in Italy, mainly Englishmen and
Americans. Yet by 1851, for all the liveliness of Florence, there remained the attraction of England and the

friends and relatives whom they had not seen in almost five years. And so they returned for a visit, landing
in London on 22 July 1851. They rented a house on Devonshire Street, within walking distance of the
Barrettsʹ home. Elizabeth and the baby called on her sisters and brothers when their father was out, while
Browning spent long hours with his father and sister at New Cross, another suburb south of the Thames
where the Brownings had lived since 1840. They also saw many old friends, and called on the Carlyles. John
Kenyon, Elizabethʹs relation who had supplemented her income by the gift of £100 annually after Pen was
born, visited them frequently during their stay. Because of the Great Exhibition everything about London
seemed lively, and they hated leaving.
But late in September, accompanied by Carlyle, the Brownings travelled to Paris, where they found lodgings
on the Champs Elysées. They met a number of French literary figures, including George Sand, by whom
Browning was appalled. More importantly, they met Joseph Milsand, a native of Dijon who had recently
published a perceptive and laudatory article on Browningʹs poetry. Browning soon came to rely on
Milsandʹs judgement, eventually even sending him proof sheets of his work for final revision before
publication.
While in Paris, Browning was commissioned by Edward Moxon to write a preface to some letters by Shelley
that he had purchased and proposed to publish. The ‘Essay on Shelley’, as it has come to be known, is
Browningʹs major critical document. He had published another piece anonymously, on Thomas Chatterton,
in 1842 in John Forsterʹs Foreign Quarterly Review, but the essay on Shelley is far more important. In it
Browning contrasts the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ poets. The objective poet is the ‘fashioner’, with the work
so fashioned ‘substantive, projected from himself and distinct’. The subjective poet, by contrast, is the ‘seer’,
with the work produced an ‘effluence’ that ‘cannot be easily considered in abstraction from his personality’
(Browning, ‘Essay on Shelley’, in Poems, 1.1001–2). Browning demonstrates that in cyclically alternating
periods one or the other type of poet is dominant, and places Shelley firmly in the ‘subjective’ camp. The
essay in part attempts to deal with the overwhelming legacy of the Romantics, and to articulate a useful role
for the nineteenth‐century poet. In support of this, Browning accords the objective poet at least equal status
to the subjective by naming Shakespeare as its chief example. Ultimately, however, he maintains that there is
no reason why the two modes of poetic faculty might not be combined into ‘the whole poet’ who fully
displays the objective and subjective modes. Evidently, this was the kind of poet that Browning conceived
himself to be. The collection of letters was published early in 1852, but the letters were soon discovered to be
spurious and the book was suppressed.
The Brownings spent summer 1852 in London. Robert went there first because of a breach of promise and
defamation of character suit that had been brought against his father by a widow to whom he had offered
and then withdrawn a proposal of marriage. She won the suit, the courtʹs judgment awarding her £800 in
damages. Browning found his father and sister in deep depression, and to help them escape paying the
damages he accompanied them to Paris in mid‐July and saw them settled in an apartment. Later in July he
and Elizabeth went to London, where they again saw old friends, met new ones, and cemented their
friendship with the Tennysons, whom they had met in Paris the previous summer. They departed for Paris
in October and by mid‐November 1852 were home in Florence.
Life in Italy, 1853–1855, and Men and Women (1855)
Winter 1852–3 passed pleasantly. In summer 1853 the Brownings were again in Bagni di Lucca, where they
re‐encountered William Wetmore Story, an American sculptor, and his family, whom they had first met in
1848. The Storys, who by and large alternated between Rome and Florence, were highly cultivated and
interesting people and were among the closest friends the Brownings made in Italy. In October, after many
mutual visits in Bagni, both families returned to Florence and the next month went on to Rome, where the
Storys arranged lodgings for the Brownings, and introduced then to interesting foreign circles. But Rome
proved expensive, and tragically the Storysʹ son died. Their daughter also fell ill, and Pen was struck by the
same disease; by late spring the Brownings gave up on Rome.

By early June 1854 the Brownings were back in Florence, where, settled into a more orderly routine, both set
diligently to work. Robert had a certain stock of poems on hand to which he intended to add. Elizabeth
continued to suffer from chest pains, however, and Browning was often in attendance on her as a result. In
spite of this, he had managed to compose some 8000 lines of verse by June 1855. Rumours of cholera in a
nearby neighbourhood meant that they left Florence soon after their return.
On 24 June the Brownings took an apartment in Paris in the same building where Robertʹs father and sister
lived. On 12 July they were back in London, settled into an apartment not far from Wimpole Street. In Paris
they had made possible the marriage of the maid, Wilson, who was pregnant, to their manservant,
Ferdinando Romagnoli; and while in London they sent Wilson north to her family for her confinement,
leaving Ferdinando responsible for household chores and (warily) for Pen. They again visited many friends
and relatives. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, long an admirer, drew Browningʹs portrait, and hosted a soirée during
which Browning and Tennyson each read one of their poems to the guests. Browning and Elizabeth also
attended a séance held by the famous American spiritualist Daniel Dunglas Hume, at which she was thrilled
and he disgusted, and not reluctant to show his feelings.
Browning took the manuscript of his fifty poems to Chapman and Hall soon after he arrived, and it was
decided that it should be published in two volumes. In September he added another poem, ‘One Word
More’, and before the end of the month he was reading proofs. In October he and Elizabeth retired to Paris
to await publication on 10 November.
The title of Men and Women probably derived from the twenty‐sixth poem in Sonnets from the Portuguese
(1850), which states:
I lived with visions for my company
Instead of men and women, years ago.
The subject matter of the volume centres on love, art, and religion, and contains some of Browningʹs best‐
known poems, such as ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, ‘Andrea del Sarto’, ‘An Epistle … of Karshish’, ‘Childe Roland to
the Dark Tower Came’, and ‘Cleon’. It contains quite a few important dramatic monologues in Browningʹs
best style, and he maintains that throughout he has gathered men and women ‘Live or dead or fashioned by
my fancy’ so as to:
Enter each and all, and use their service,
Speak from each mouth.
(‘One Word More’, ll. 130–32)
There are several instances, however, where he departs from the securities of the dramatized narrator, such
as in the coda to ‘The Statue and the Bust’, and in the monologue ‘Old Pictures in Florence’, where the
speakerʹs voice and situation are hardly to be differentiated from the poetʹs. And yet Browning concludes
with ‘One Word More’, in which, while he purports to ‘speak this once in person’ (l. 137), he speaks
ironically, as in this final poem of Men and Women his aim is essentially the same as in the preceding fifty
poems: to question the familiar by placing it within a new artistic network of relationships. Browning
concludes with a refusal to articulate meaning, saying that he sees novel sights
undreamed of,
Where I hush and bless myself with silence.
(ll. 196–7)
Although Men and Women has become arguably the most highly regarded of all Browningʹs works, it was
not well received at the time of its publication. Both the Brownings had believed that it would prove
popular, but as they read the reviews, many charging obscurity and unable to understand that the poet was

working in unconventional modes, they were bitterly disappointed. Critical opinion continued to depress
Browning for the rest of his life in Italy. As Elizabeth wrote to his sister in 1861, ‘his treatment in England
affects him’ for ‘nobody there, except a small knot of pre‐Raffaellite men, pretend to do him justice. Mr.
Forster has done the best,—in the press …—and for the rest, you should see Chapmanʹs returns [from sales]!’
(Orr, Life, 233–4). By spring 1856 the Brownings had left Paris and had gone to London, where Elizabeth
submitted her verse novel Aurora Leigh to her publisher, while Browning devoted himself to her work.
Last years in Italy
The Brownings left for Florence in mid‐November 1856, and later in the month Aurora Leigh was published,
immediately attaining critical and popular success. As Browning, more than Elizabeth, basked in the praise
and the couple were considering how royalties from its sales would lighten their financial situation, they
learned that John Kenyon had died and had left them £11,000, which meant that they would never again
have to worry about money.
Winter 1856–7 was uneventful, but April 1857 saw the death of Elizabethʹs father, which caused her great
grief. The Brownings went to Bagni di Lucca late in July and returned to Florence at the end of the summer.
Early in summer 1858 they went to France, stopping in Dijon to visit Milsand, and in Paris to find
Browningʹs father and sister in good health. After two months in Normandy they returned to Florence for six
weeks and then in November travelled to Rome, in search of warmer weather for Elizabeth. Excited by the
war declared on Piedmont by Austria and by Franceʹs declaration of war on Austria, the Brownings returned
in May 1859 to Florence to find French troops encamped. When in June Napoleon III made peace with
Austria, Elizabeth, who had been almost delirious over the exploits of the French emperor and the
Piedmontese king, suffered a physical collapse, all her hopes for a united Italy erased.
For a change of scene the Brownings travelled to Siena, where they were joined by the Storys and the
octogenarian W. S. Landor. Landorʹs characteristic irascibility had been exacerbated by old age and mental
decline, and he had become estranged from his family as a result. Through the agency of John Forster,
Browning agreed to act as guardian for Landor, and to administer the £200 annuity granted to the old man.
They settled Landor into the house of Elizabethʹs former maid, who had left their service after the birth of
her second child and was living with her husband in Florence. The Brownings then returned to Rome for
winter 1859–60, for the sake of Elizabethʹs health, but it had continued to worsen, and she was becoming
increasingly dependent on morphine, which she had been taking for years. The Storys feared that she would
not survive the winter.
In June 1860 the Brownings were briefly back in Florence, and then spent the summer in Siena, with the
Storys having a villa close by. In Rome again for the next winter, they learned that one of Elizabethʹs sisters
had died, and Elizabeth never entirely recovered from the shock. Browning wrote no poetry at this point; all
his time was spent in nursing Elizabeth and in overseeing Penʹs education. They returned to Florence late in
spring 1861. There Elizabeth caught a cold in June, which inflamed her lungs. As she grew worse Robert sat
by her day and night, and in the early morning of 29 June 1861 she died in his arms.
Elizabethʹs funeral took place on 1 July, and was attended by fewer people than the Storys expected,
although they also found Browning in better control of himself than they had anticipated. Out of respect, the
shops in the neighbourhood were closed, and a crowd followed the coffin to burial in the protestant
cemetery. After the funeral Browning immediately made plans to reorder his life. He had Penʹs long curls
cut and the boyʹs dress, which Browning had always contended with Elizabeth was too elaborate, was
simplified. As he wrote to correspondents, he wanted his future life to resemble his past fifteen years of exile
as little as possible. He packed belongings at Casa Guidi during the day, and he and Pen spent the night at
the home of Isa Blagden, the Browningsʹ devoted friend for most of their years in Florence. Browning and his
son left Florence on 1 August, accompanied by Isa Blagden. She left Paris after a few days while Browning
and Pen stayed on with his father and Sarianna in Paris and Brittany until October, when they went on to
London. Browning never again returned to Florence.

In London Browning and Pen took temporary lodging before settling into the rented house at 19 Warwick
Crescent that was their home for the next twenty‐five years. Browning found a suitable tutor for Pen and
met Elizabethʹs sole surviving sister, Arabella, and old friends like Carlyle and Forster; otherwise he
occupied himself mainly in solitary walks. But he was too sociable not to seek company, so by spring 1862 he
took to dining out. He was elected to the Athenaeum Club in February, and in March was offered the
editorship of the Cornhill Magazine on the retirement of Thackeray. He refused it, but was gratified by the
offer, which he took as a sign of increasing appreciation of his work. Before turning to his own work, he
guided Elizabethʹs Last Poems (1862) through the press and prepared a group of her essays for publication
in 1863. He then began preparation for a collected edition of all his poems (save for Pauline). Published in
three volumes in 1863, the poems of 1842, 1845, and 1855 were broken up and regrouped, and Sordello was
radically revised and enlarged by 181 lines. The edition was dedicated to Forster, with Sordello inscribed to
Milsand. A volume of Selections (1863) was put together by Forster and B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall), an
old friend to whom number 6 of Bells and Pomegranates had been dedicated. Both the collected edition and
the selections sold so well and were so respectfully reviewed that a new volume of Browningʹs completed
poetry was not published until the following year.
Life in the mid‐1860s and The Ring and the Book
The monologues of Dramatis Personae (1864) are more deeply concerned with matters of contemporary
importance than Browningʹs earlier work in the genre. Spiritualism, biological evolution, higher criticism of
the Bible, current social conditions, modern love—these are but some of the topics dealt with in these poems.
By and large, the verse demonstrates a working‐out, in generally new and more complex ways, of the poetʹs
long held ideas. Among them are ‘James Leeʹs Wife’, ‘Mr Sludge’, ‘The Medium’, ‘A Death in the Desert’,
‘Caliban upon Setebos’, and ‘Abt Vogler’. Dramatis Personae was such a critical and popular success that a
second edition was soon called for. Within the space of a year Browningʹs reputation had dramatically
changed.
Although now a celebrity, regularly dining at the great houses and meeting foreign and domestic
dignitaries, Browning never neglected his son. What he wanted more than anything was the admission of
Pen to Balliol College, Oxford, where Benjamin Jowett, the regius professor of Greek, was a tutor. Browning
greatly admired Jowett for his liberal views on theology, and hoped that Pen would come under his
influence. Browning, therefore, diligently oversaw his sonʹs education—but it became increasingly evident
that Penʹs academic qualifications were not high. Jowett helped the boy in every way he could and Pen took
almost a year of academic preparation at Oxford, but he failed the matriculation examination in 1868 and
returned home to his disappointed father. During Penʹs scholarly preparations, however, Browning was
awarded an Oxford master of arts degree by convocation in June 1867, and this was followed by his election
to an honorary fellowship at Balliol.
While overseeing Penʹs studies Browning made regular visits to Paris to see his father and sister. In June
1866 his father died in Browningʹs presence, and soon Sarianna came to live at 19 Warwick Crescent. She
became the companion, confidante, and housekeeper of her brother for the rest of his life. In June 1868
Arabella Barrett, Elizabethʹs surviving sister who had been so concerned with Robert and Pen when they
came to live in London, died in Browningʹs arms.
As partial relief from the sadness caused by deaths of loved ones, Browning turned more and more to
writing a long poem. In June 1860 he had purchased in Florence what he later called ‘the Old Yellow Book’,
containing pamphlets, legal documents, and manuscript letters concerning a 1698 murder trial in Rome. The
accused was Count Guido Franchesini, an impoverished nobleman from Arezzo, who was ultimately found
guilty of multiple murders, including that of his wife, Pompilia, whom he had believed guilty of adultery
with a young priest. He had also killed Pompiliaʹs parents. Browning was intrigued by the case, mainly
because, as the Latin lettering on the volume related, the trial ‘disputed whether and when a Husband may
kill his Adulterous Wife without incurring the ordinary penalty’. Reading through the matter, written in
Latin and Italian, Browning began to ask himself whether the wife was adulterous and, if so, why. He made
enquiries about the case in Rome and Arezzo, and in 1862 Isa Blagden obtained a supplementary manuscript

account for him. He began writing about the case in autumn 1864 and, working on it for three hours every
morning, completed the poemʹs 21,000 lines, divided into twelve books, in spring 1868.
Browning chose a new publisher for his poem: Smith, Elder & Co., whose senior partner, George Murray
Smith, the poet had known since 1843. Initially contemplating serial publication in magazines, the poet and
his new publisher finally decided on the appearance of the poem in four volumes. Named The Ring and the
Book, perhaps because this suggested the poetʹs own initials, the volumes were published in monthly
instalments in the last two months of 1868 and the first two of 1869.
In the first book, Browning, barely disguised as the narrator, offers three versions of the murder case and
instructs his audience to choose the true account. In the following ten books Browning presents the accounts
and interpretations of various figures, including ‘Half‐Rome’; ‘The Other Half‐Rome’; Count Guido; the
priest accused of adultery; and Pompilia herself, whose account is ostensibly related on her deathbed. Even
the pope is given a book of the poem in which to state his views on the murder. In book 12 the narrator again
offers several versions of the story, and the audience for whom this piece of Roman history has been
resuscitated is presented not with the poetʹs claim of truth, but with a kind of documental drama from which
they must decide for themselves. At the end of this work, Browning asks the reader to take away:
This lesson, that our human speech is naught,
Our human testimony false, our fame
And human estimation words and wind.
Why take the artistic way to prove so much?
Because, it is the glory and good of Art,
That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine, at least.
(The Ring and the Book, XII.834–40)
In Browningʹs view, a right interpretation of the case, like that of the Bible, is almost provisional: an
approximation for the time being. But, ultimately, this does not devalue the attempt to seek out that truth.
The ‘British public, ye who like me not’ (I.405, 1371) were wooed and won, as Browningʹs wish that it ‘may
like me yet, / (Marry and amen!)’ (XII.831) was finally fulfilled. Sales were high, and reviews were adulatory,
The Athenaeum of 20 March 1869 calling The Ring and the Book ‘the opus magnum of our generation … the
most precious and profound spiritual treasure that England has produced since the days of Shakspeare’.
Even the queen was impressed by the poetʹs new reputation, inviting him to an audience in March along
with Carlyle and two other eminent men. About the same time Browning also received and declined an
invitation to become lord rector of St Andrews University. But the pleasure in public acclaim was lessened
when he seems to have learned of his sonʹs sexual activities in Brittany the previous summer. And at about
this time he became seriously ill and for several months remained housebound.
The Lady Ashburton episode
During summer 1869, with Browning unable to enjoy his usual holiday in Brittany, he, Sarianna, and Pen
joined the Storys in Scotland, where he had never been before. Plagued by the bad weather and
uncomfortable lodgings, they received an invitation to the ‘lodge’ at Loch Luichart to visit Louisa, the
widowed Lady Ashburton, whom Browning had known since before her marriage to the wealthy second
Baron Ashburton. Although he had earlier refused such an invitation, Browning, along with the others, felt
compelled by her insistence to accept the invitation. Some days after they arrived, Lady Ashburton
apparently suggested that since both he and she were widowed and struggling to bring up a child, their
marriage might be felicitous. Browning was politely evasive, and seems to have defused the situation, for
when he and his party left, everyone was cheerful.
Browning and the Storys went on to visit their friends George and Rosalind Howard (later earl and countess
of Carlisle) at their castle in Cumberland. There the Storysʹ 25‐year‐old unmarried daughter, Edith (Edy or

Edie), confided to her hostess that Lady Ashburton had declared her love for the poet, that Browning had
asked Edieʹs advice, and that she had advised him that it was not right to marry a woman simply for her
position and his sonʹs sake. Edie further reported that a letter had come from Lady Ashburton wishing to
settle the matter and that Browning had replied saying no. Edie also claimed that Browning was in love with
her and was forcing his attentions on her, but Rosalind Howard did not believe her on this point, and
assumed that the passion she ascribed to the poet was probably Edieʹs own for him.
Browning returned to London in September and for the next seven or eight months was often away from
Warwick Crescent, visiting the country houses of the great and famous, and visiting Pen at Christ Church,
Oxford, where he had arranged for his admission, believing it to be easier than Balliol. In June 1870 Pen
failed his examinations and was forced to leave Christ Church. Browning became disconsolate and angry
with his son not only for his academic failures but also for his spendthrift nature and idleness.
In summer 1871 Browning and Pen set off for another holiday in Scotland. Pen had visited Lady Ashburton
and her daughter earlier in the year at their home in the south, and perhaps because of this, they again
visited Loch Luichart. Lady Ashburton raised the issue of marriage once more, and Browning told her that
his heart lay buried in Florence and any attractiveness of marriage lay in its advantage to Pen. Browning left
the next day, realizing that her vanity was wounded. She nevertheless wrote to him in derogatory language,
he reported to a friend, and she also told others that he had ill‐treated her. Thereafter he met her only on
large social occasions and viewed her as contemptible and unworthy of conversation.
Long poems of the 1870s
In spring 1871 Browning began composing a poem published in August of the same year: Balaustionʹs
Adventure: Including a Transcript from Euripides. The greater part of the poem is the young Balaustionʹs
account of the performance of the first extant drama by Euripides, the Alcestis of 438 BC. Elizabeth Barrett
Browning had admired Euripides, and the motto of the poem comes from her Wine of Cyprus (1844). The
poem is a modern adaptation, rather than a strict translation, forming what Browning called a ‘transcript’—
scenes are shortened and deleted, the Chorusʹs role is reduced, and the descriptions and actions of the main
characters are altered. The general movement of the play differs from that of the original, with Balaustionʹs
interpretation shoring up her main concern of salvation through love and art. Her account interweaves her
commentary on the characters with Euripides dramatic colloquies, so that Admetus learns the meaning of
love and loss, while Heracles is Christianized into a god‐man devoted to relieving the sufferings of others.
What Balaustion in effect presents is a ‘higher criticism’ of the play that looks beyond the actual text in an
attempt to grasp Euripides essential meaning. Some critics feel that the poem has autobiographical elements,
with the portraits of Alcestis and Admetus ‘affected by points of resemblance to Mrs Browning and the poet
himself’ (Poems, 1.1170). Admetus, for instance, is insistent that he will not remarry, and this emphasis may
well have derived from Browningʹs recent experience with Lady Ashburton. In the epilogue Balaustion is
revealed as the mask of the poet, who, quoting from his late wife and still smarting from earlier critical
neglect, nevertheless asserts his self‐confidence by asking in the final line ‘Why crown whom Zeus has
crowned in soul before?’ It was well received at the time, with the 2500 copies of the first edition quickly
selling out.
While in Scotland, Browning began to write a poem conceived of in rough draft in Rome in 1860. Prince
Hohenstiel‐Schwangau, Saviour of Society (December 1871) was based on the career of Napoleon III, who
had been defeated (to Browningʹs delight) by the Germans the previous year, and had taken refuge in
England. Although he had never shared his wifeʹs enthusiasm for the emperor, Browning had on occasion
seen some good in him. In the poem, a long monologue, he addresses the problem of why people with good
intentions fail to pursue them, in the end showing that this person who claims to be a man of action is
merely an indecisive homme sensuel. The poem sold well initially, 1400 copies in five days, but sales soon
tailed off. Reviewers were also baffled by a work which asks the reader to be both sympathetic and
judgemental of the monologuist, and although Browning himself thought it to be ‘a sample of my very best
work’ (Poems, 1.1177) it is now among the least read of his poems.

Soon after its publication Browning began another poem dealing with the same issue: good intentions
unfulfilled. Fifine at the Fair (1872) is composed of 2355 rhymed alexandrines, with a prologue and epilogue
of 108 lines. Dealing with conjugal inconstancy, Fifine at the Fair may touch on Browningʹs qualms
concerning disloyalty to his dead wife for even briefly considering Lady Ashburtonʹs proposal of marriage,
and on his fatherʹs disloyalty to his mother in proposing to marry another woman. The main part of the
poem is an almost cinematic monologue of shifting perspectives in time and space, but its narrative hardly
matters. What is significant is the internal action, structured on the Browning‐esque interplay between the
wish for constancy and law, on the one hand, and the desire for change and lawlessness, on the other.
Browning expected that most readers would find the poem difficult to understand—in April 1872 he said
that the poem was ‘the most metaphysical and boldest he had written since Sordello’, and that he ‘was very
doubtful to its reception’ (Poems, 2.975). Readers did indeed have difficulty with it. As the Westminster
Review put it on 1 October 1872: ‘for the ordinary reader it might just as well have been written in Sanscrit’.
One of the saddest events resulting from its publication was the rupture of friendship with Dante Gabriel
Rossetti that it caused. Browning had sent him a copy, and the poem enraged Rossetti for what he saw as its
satire of him and his poetry. At stake specifically was Rossettiʹs poem Jenny, which had been roundly
criticized by Robert Buchanan in The Fleshly School of Poetry (1871). It is likely that Browning had used the
poem as a source, and Rossetti saw him as part of the conspiracy that he felt was being ranged against the
pre‐Raphaelites at this time. Their friendship never recovered.
Browningʹs next work was based on a story he had heard concerning the suicide of a man in Calvados and
involving love, sex, religion, and social roles. As with ‘the Old Yellow Book’, the poet threw himself
imaginatively into the situation, so fascinated that he asked for legal documents and collected accounts of
people in the neighbourhood to try to come up with its truth. Published in May 1873, Red Cotton Night‐Cap
Country is a first‐person narrative in four parts and 4247 lines of blank verse. Its internal auditor was Anne
Thackeray, daughter of the novelist, who had been staying at Lion, about 5 miles from the scene of the
suicide. As the poem states, she referred to the region as ‘White Cotton Night‐Cap Country’, and Browning
changed the ‘white’ to ‘red’ in part to point up the bloody nature of his tale. Anne Thackeray was not
entirely happy with her association with the poem, particularly when hostile reviews of it appeared. Readers
had problems with the sordid nature of the story, and with ‘its grotesque blend of savage humour,
whimsical humour and intense seriousness’ (Poems, 2.986). It was generally disliked, but Browning seems to
have borne up well to the criticism, and probably as a diversion he made another translation of Euripides,
this time of Heracles.
Laying aside his translation, Browning turned to Aristophanes, who had denigrated Euripides. In the 1870s
there was general hostility to Euripides, stimulated by German criticism claiming that the playwright had
destroyed classical Greek poetry. Browning wanted to prove otherwise, and during his annual summer
holiday in France during 1873 he was deeply involved in a study of Greek books, especially the works of
Aristophanes. Over the next year he read widely about Greek dramatists, including arcane scholarship. In
mid‐August 1874 he began composing the material surrounding Heracles and completed it the following
November. Aristophanesʹ Apology (1875), composed of 5705 lines, is the third longest of Browningʹs works.
It acts as a kind of sequel to Balaustionʹs Adventure, and is formally complex. It progresses by statement and
counterstatement, and is divided into three different modes—the apology of Aristophanes, Balaustionʹs
admonishment of him, and a translation of Heracles—with a prologue and a conclusion. The poem is
Browningʹs boldest experiment with the dramatic monologue, and it concludes that all individual points of
view are in some way or other deficient, and that tensions of opposites should be recognized and accepted, a
paradox joyfully expressed by Balaustion at the close of her monologue when she sings:
There are no gods, no gods!
Glory to God—who saves Euripides.

When published on 15 April 1875, Aristophanesʹ Apology proved again a bewildering work to most of the
reviewers. Copies of the first edition were still being sold after the poetʹs death.
Browningʹs next work is formally entirely different from anything he had previously published. It is like
Sordello in being a dramatic poem in which the narrator sets the scene and ends the action. It is also like The
Ring and the Book, in that the point of departure is a text; but here the text is not one interpreted by the
narrator or the actors, but is a text written by the characters themselves and inscribed into an album. The Inn
Album was published in autumn 1875. Although 1100 copies of the 2000‐copy print run were sold within
three weeks of publication, no second edition was called for. Reviews, including that by Henry James in The
Nation (20 January 1876), were generally negative, although Swinburne praised the poem. Browning was
irate with the criticisms, as they yet again featured the old charge of obscurity.
Poems of the later 1870s and 1880
Browningʹs next work, Pacchiarotto and how he Worked in Distemper (1876), embodies the poetʹs discontent
with the reviewers and offers a stern warning to all who tried to delve into his private life. In the prologue
the speaker lives in a ‘house, no eye can probe’. In ‘Of Pacchiarotto’ the critics come to the house under the
pretence of helping with housekeeping, but bring in filth and are told to stay away. Whether they like him or
his house is to Pacchiarotto a matter of supreme indifference, as his only concern is to please the ‘Landlord’
to whom he pays rent for the ‘freehold’. The nineteen poems of Pacchiarotto, unsurprisingly, were not
cordially received, and Browning claimed that he had written them only to amuse himself at the expense of
his critics. Over the previous six years he had written six highly experimental but largely unappreciated long
poems totalling about 20,000 lines. He was at this time willing to relax, and published a volume that was
largely a jeu dʹesprit.
Browning went on to accept Carlyleʹs suggestion that he translate the Greek tragedians. He undertook the
translation of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, who in the nineteenth century was generally regarded as an
obscure writer, just as Browning himself had come to be. The Agamemnon of Aeschylus Transcribed by
Robert Browning, more a transcription than a translation and reading like Greek English, was published in
October 1877.
Browningʹs next poem was an elegy, La Saisiaz, in memory of Anne Egerton Smith, a close friend who had
died in the Jura mountains when she was staying in a chalet there with Browning and Sarianna. As the
speaker works his way through ‘facts’ and ‘fancies’ about the soul and an afterlife, he expresses belief in his
own being, ‘soul’, and a power outside and independent of himself—‘God’. That these ‘facts’ surpass his
ability to prove them, in fact:
proves them such:
Fact it is I know I know not something which is fact as much.
(ll. 223–4)
The poem was published in May 1878 along with its sequel, The Two Poets of Croisic, in a volume taking its
title from the names of the two individual poems. In The Two Poets of Croisic, the first poet is one who, after
writing a poem prophesying an event that comes true, feels himself divinely inspired, gives up poetry, and
retires to a secluded life. The other poet is one who becomes famous when his sister claims authorship of his
worthless verse, but who loses fame when he reveals himself to be its writer. From these stories of the two
poets, the speaker concludes that fame is dependent on externals, and cannot be a criterion for true value. In
his estimation, the great poet is one who will ‘Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse, / Despair: but ever ʹmid the
whirling fear’ and ‘tumult’ will let ‘break the poetʹs face / Radiant’ (The Two Poets of Croisic, CLIX.1269–72).
In other words, the great poet will be one like Robert Browning.
Late in summer 1878, still suffering from Anne Egerton Smithʹs death and upset over the sexual peccadillos
of Pen, who had decided to undertake formal training as a painter, Browning, with Sarianna, spent a month

in Switzerland before going on to Italy and delighting in Asolo and Venice. They both liked Venice, with its
large English and American community, so much that they returned there in seven autumns over the next
eleven years. While on this vacation, Browning wrote several poems that he joined with others to publish as
Dramatic Idyls in April 1879. The title inevitably forced comparisons with Tennysonʹs ‘idylls’, and Browning
defined what he meant by the term in this way in 1889:
a succinct little story complete in itself; not necessarily concerning pastoral matters, by any means, though
from the prevalency of such topics in the idyls of Theocritus, such is the general notion. These of mine are
called ‘Dramatic’ because the story is told by some actor in it, not the poet himself. (Poems, 2.1067)
The poems are in rhymed verse, and the metres approximate those of Greek idylls. ‘[B]esides the measure of
formal unity in the volume, there is also some kind of thematic unity in the stress on conscience and
remorse’ (ibid.). Browning was so pleased that the book was well received (for the first time since
Balaustionʹs Adventure a second edition was called for), that he wrote another series of poems, and
published them as Dramatic Idyls, Second Series (June 1880). The second series, however, was not as
popular as the first, and a second edition was not required.
Growing fame, and poems of the early 1880s
By 1880 Browning had become recognized, along with Tennyson, as one of the greatest poets of the period.
He was awarded an LLD degree by Cambridge in 1879, and in summer and autumn 1881 a group of his
admirers founded the Browning Society. The poet was amazed and elated by this outpouring of support,
and he was further delighted and surprised when Browning societies began to spread around the world—
there were twenty‐two of them within the next three years. In 1882 he was given an honorary DCL at
Oxford. In America his reputation spread so that in Chicago, for example, some of his works were printed on
railway timetables, and bookstores could not keep up with the demand for copies of his works. In addition,
foreign visitors in London sought glimpses of him as well as autographs. Browning was delighted and,
resting on his laurels for the next three years, published nothing. He and Sarianna continued to spend their
summers abroad. During the rest of the year he became a strenuous diner‐out and attender at all sorts of
social functions, dressed so dapperly that he was, according to the weekly World of 7 December 1881, ‘as far
a dandy as a sensible man can be’.
Browning ended his period of printed silence with Jocoseria (March 1883). Containing ten poems in the
mode of the dramatic idylls, all treating the theme of desire, the volume is largely undistinguished, ‘Ixion’
being the only poem now recognized as worthy of mention. At the time, however, Jocoseria was well
received. A second edition was needed almost immediately, and a third edition was published in 1885.
Browning himself was not very pleased with this collection, remarking that it had ‘had the usual luck of the
little‐deserving’ (Poems, 2.1084). He was increasingly aware that he was now proclaimed a sage by the
Browning societies, and he felt that he must therefore address philosophical and religious issues in a higher
way. He began trying to improve his German, and it may be that in Goetheʹs Westöstlicher Divan, a
collection of poems with a Persian backdrop divided into twelve books, he found a suitable setting and
persona for a religio‐philosophical poem. Ferishtahʹs Fancies, published in November 1884, contains twelve
‘fancies’, analogies and parables of the great theological problems, plus a prologue and epilogue. Each of
Ferishtahʹs theological speculations is followed by a love lyric, thereby indicating that the ‘fancies’ of the
intellect are authenticated by the ‘facts’ of love. The poem ‘is important as a fairly direct statement of the
poetʹs mature religious beliefs … Browning did not pretend that Ferishtah was more than a transparent
disguise for himself’ (ibid., 2.1096). The poem sold well—two further editions were needed in 1885.
Last long poem
Browning apparently began his next poem when he was seventy‐three. He worked on it for several years
and wanted it to be the summation of his career, so he found the writing difficult. Aiming at a kind of
intellectual autobiography told in a conversational style, he designed it to be of epic, encyclopaedic scope.
Parleyings with Certain People in their Day (1887) was modelled both on Faust and The Divine Comedy,
and consists of seven parts with prologue and coda. Each ‘parleying’ deals with the appearance of a ghost
from the past and its stimulation of a current thought or attitude to be argued with. This means that there

are three points of view to be considered: those of the speaker, the figure from the past, and a contemporary.
Further, each parleying poses two basic questions: is life good or bad? and what makes it tolerable? Among
the contemporaries treated are Carlyle, Lady Ashburton, Rossetti, William Morris, Swinburne, Disraeli,
critics of Pen Browningʹs art, and contemporary poets (like Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne, Morris, and
possibly Shelley) who adopt Greek models and attempt to write in a Greek style. Both in its philosophical
complexity and daring design, the Parleyings, dedicated to the memory of Joseph Milsand, who had died in
September 1886, is the boldest work of Browningʹs later career. Ranging from classical Greece through the
middle ages and the Enlightenment to the later nineteenth century, it deals with the evolution of manʹs art,
thought, morals, and religion. Most reviewers found the Parleyings bewildering and seemed to share the
reviewerʹs opinion in The Spectator of 5 February 1887 that ‘Mr. Browning does not condescend more
generously to the minds of his readers in age than he did in youth’. No second edition was called for.
Final years
In April 1887, owing to defects in the rented Warwick Crescent property, Browning bought a grander house
at 29 De Vere Gardens, Kensington; he and Sarianna moved there in June. On 4 October Pen, who had
become a somewhat popular artist because of his fatherʹs many busy efforts to promote him, married the
heiress Fannie Coddington, an American by parentage but English in upbringing and a great admirer of
Browningʹs poetry. Browning could now reduce the amount of money he had been giving Pen and, after a
conversation with the bride‐to‐be, he told Pen that he could provide the couple with £300 annually.
Browningʹs main business during 1887 and 1888 was to prepare his collected works, issued in sixteen
volumes monthly between April 1888 and July 1889. He and Sarianna spent three months in Venice in late
summer and autumn 1888, where they followed the negotiations that Pen (with his wifeʹs financial backing)
was making to buy and refurbish the baroque Palazzo Rezzonico. Back at De Vere Gardens, Browning
continued during winter 1888–9, as when in Venice, to correct proofs of his collected edition. In July he read
in a recently published edition of the deceased Edward FitzGeraldʹs letters a letter derogatory of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning. Greatly angered, Robert wrote a vituperative sonnet, which was published in The
Athenaeum on 13 July. The poem caused an uproar, and Browning felt that he had humiliated both himself
and his dead wife.
Although Browningʹs health had appeared good, during the winter both he and his acquaintances thought
him lacking in his usual energy. The FitzGerald incident worsened matters, and he fell ill. But he revived
sufficiently to attend some prominent social events, and by September he and Sarianna were on their way to
Italy. They stopped first in Asolo, which stimulated in him a burst of creative energy, and the preparation of
a new volume of poems incorporating verse written there. In mid‐October he sent off the poems to his
publisher and then he and Sarianna went on to Venice to stay with Pen and Fannie in the splendidly restored
Palazzo Rezzonico. Late in October Robert became ill with what he thought was a cold, but which was
diagnosed as bronchitis and a weakened heart. As he became worse, friends were notified of his critical
condition, which soon became known to the press and aroused the worldʹs curiosity.
On 12 December 1889, soon after hearing Pen read to him a telegram from his publisher that the book,
published that day, had received highly favourable reviews and was almost sold out, Browning slipped in
and out of consciousness and then, about ten oʹclock that evening, he died. Pen had hoped to bury his father
alongside his mother in Florence, but was told that the cemetery was closed. A message then came from the
dean of Westminster offering burial in the abbey, and it was accepted. A preliminary funeral service was
held in Venice in the great hall of the Palazzo Rezzonico, followed by a cortège of funeral gondolas down the
Grand Canal out to the island of San Michele. Soon thereafter the body was returned to London by train. The
splendid funeral in Westminster Abbey on 31 December 1889 ended with burial in Poetsʹ Corner.
After the funeral, Pen and Fannie remained in London until spring 1890 to settle the poetʹs affairs.
Browningʹs will, executed in 1864 in the presence of Tennyson and Francis Palgrave, was proved on 19
February 1890. The administration of his effects was granted to Pen, the residuary legatee, and the estate

valued at £16,744. Sarianna, who became seriously ill soon after the funeral, stayed on at De Vere Gardens
for another year and then went to Venice to live with Pen and Fannie, where Penʹs old nurse, Wilson, and
her husband also came. In April 1891 sixty‐six cases of household effects were shipped to Venice. Pen had a
memorial plaque to his father installed on the Palazzo Rezzonico and contributed to a window
commemorating him in the English church in Venice.
In time Pen and Fannie, who had no children, drifted apart, although they never divorced. Thereafter he and
Sarianna more or less settled in Asolo, where Pen had purchased some property that his father had wished
to buy, and thereon built Pippaʹs Tower in his fatherʹs honour. Sarianna lived with him until 1903. Pen
himself, who had grown obese, sickly, and almost blind, died of a heart attack in 1912 and received a
splendid funeral and burial in Asolo. Ten years later Fannie had his body moved to Florence. She died in
1935.
On six days in May 1913 Penʹs effects—which included his parentsʹ manuscripts, pictures, books, and
furniture—were auctioned at Sothebys in London. There were 1417 lots, described in a 170‐page catalogue.
After Penʹs enormous debts were paid, one‐third of the residue of the sale went to Fannie and two‐thirds to
sixteen Barrett cousins.
Posthumous reputation
By the time of his death Browning was one of the most famous people in the English‐speaking world,
although never as popular as Tennyson—the sales of his works being a fraction of the poet laureateʹs.
Chiefly admired as a philosopher and thinker, Browning became less well regarded in the 1890s, when
moral instruction as the end of art (something Browning had always denied) was regarded as deplorable.
The last public meetings of the London Browning Society were held in the season of 1891–2, although
meetings continued in membersʹ homes for several years and other Browning societies continued in
America. Several critical works over the next ten or so years attacked Browningʹs approach to serious
thought, the most important being George Santayanaʹs ‘The poetry of barbarism’ (1900). Nevertheless, there
were centennial celebrations in 1912, producing a large number of books and two editions (the centenary
and the pocket version of the Florentine) of the poetʹs works that were more or less standard for at least fifty
years. But in the 1920s, when there was a reaction to almost everything Victorian, Browningʹs reputation
suffered almost total collapse, kept alive by only a few poets (notably Hardy, Yeats, Pound, and Frost) and
lovers of Victorian verse. In the 1950s scholarly interest in his work began to revive, and in the early twenty‐
first century Browningʹs centrality in the history of English poetry is largely taken for granted. There are
Browning societies in both Britain and America; there is a Browning Institute in New York; there is the
Browning apartment preserved at the Casa Guidi and open to the public; and there is the Browning shrine
and great repository of his printed works and autographs, the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor
University in Texas. There are the journals Browning Society Notes, Browning Institute Studies (now
renamed Victorian Literature and Culture), and Studies in Browning and His Circle. Numerous books and
essays have appeared in increasing number since 1965, in addition to John Pettigrewʹs 1981 scholarly edition
of his works.
Clyde de L. Ryals
Sources
The Browningsʹ correspondence, ed. P. Kelley, R. Hudson, and S. Lewis, [14 vols.] (1984–) ∙ J. Maynard,
Browningʹs youth (1977) ∙ W. Hall Griffin and H. C. Griffin, The life of Robert Browning, 3rd edn (1938) ∙ C.
de L. Ryals, The life of Robert Browning (1993) ∙ W. Irvine and P. Honan, The book, the ring, and the poet
(1974) ∙ W. C. DeVane, A Browning handbook, 2nd edn (1975) ∙ A. L. Orr, Life and letters of Robert
Browning, new edn (1908) ∙ A. L. Orr, A handbook to the worlds of Robert Browning, 6th edn (1927) ∙ Robert
Browning: the poems, ed. J. Pettigrew, 2 vols. (1981) ∙ The diary of Alfred Domett (1953) ∙ V. Surtees, The
Ludovisi goddess: the life of Louisa Ashburton (1984) ∙ M. Ward, The tragi‐comedy of Pen Browning (1849–
1912) (1972) ∙ W. S. Peterson, Interrogating the oracle: a history of the Browning Society (1969) ∙ F. G. Kenyon,

ed., Robert Browning and Alfred Domett (1906) ∙ Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood: a broken
friendship as revealed in their letters, ed. R. Curle (1937) ∙ Dearest Isa: Robert Browningʹs letters to Isabella
Blagden, ed. E. C. McAleer (1951) ∙ New letters of Robert Browning, ed. W. C. DeVane and K. L.
Knickerbocker (1951) ∙ G. R. Hudson, ed., Browning to his American friends: letters between the Brownings,
the Storys, and James Russell Lowell (1965) ∙ The Brownings to the Tennysons: letters from Robert Browning
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Alfred, Emily, and Hallam Tennyson, 1852–1889, ed. T. J. Collins (1971) ∙
Browningʹs trumpeter: the correspondence of Robert Browning and Frederick J. Furnivall, 1872–1889, ed. W.
S. Peterson (1979) ∙ More than friend: the letters of Robert Browning to Katherine de Kay Bronson, ed. M.
Meredith (1985)
Archives
Balliol Oxf., corresp. and poems ∙ Baylor University, Waco, Texas, corresp. and papers ∙ BL, address book,
Ashley 5718 ∙ BL, biographical papers, Add. MSS 45558–45564 ∙ Boston PL, letters, literary MSS, and papers ∙
L. Cong., papers ∙ Morgan L., literary MSS and papers ∙ NRA, corresp. ∙ Ransom HRC, corresp., literary MSS,
and papers ∙ Yale U., Beinecke L., papers | BL, corresp. with Lord and Lady Carnarvon, Add. MS 60865 ∙ BL,
letters to Alfred Domett, Add. MS 45876 ∙ BL, corresp. with Michael Field, Add. MS 46866 ∙ BL, letters to
Edmund Gosse, Ashley B.238, B.252–253, etc.; 5739 ∙ BL, letters to Norman MacColl, Ashley 276, A.2549 ∙ FM
Cam., misc. letters ∙ Herts. ALS, corresp. with Earl of Lytton ∙ Herts. ALS, letters to Lord Lytton ∙ Hunt. L.,
letters, documents, literary MSS ∙ JRL, corresp. with John Leicester Warren ∙ Lincoln Central Library, letters
to Alfred Lord Tennyson ∙ Morgan L., letters to George Marlton Barrett ∙ Morgan L., letters to Frederic
Chapman ∙ Morgan L., letters to William Angus Knight ∙ Somerville College, Oxford, letters to Amelia
Edwards ∙ Syracuse University, New York, corresp. with Sir John Simeon ∙ TCD, letters to Mrs Lecky ∙ U.
Leeds, Brotherton L., letters to Sir Edmund Gosse ∙ University of Chicago Library, corresp. with Bryan
Procter and Anne Procter ∙ University of Sheffield, letters to Maria Theresa Mundella and Anthony John
Mundella ∙ Wellesley College, Massachusetts, letters to Elizabeth Browning and papers ∙ Yale U., Beinecke L.,
letters to Sophy Landor
Likenesses
A. Ripert‐Monclar, drawing, 1837, Armstrong Browning Library, Waco, Texas ∙ H. Hosmer, bronze cast,
1853, NPG ∙ W. Fisher, oils, 1854, Wellesley College, Massachusetts ∙ W. Page, oils, 1854, Baylor University,
Texas ∙ D. G. Rossetti, watercolour, 1855, FM Cam. ∙ D. G. Rossetti, watercolour drawing, 1855, FM Cam. ∙ T.
Woolner, bronze medallion, 1856, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery ∙ M. Gordigiani, oils, 1858, NPG ∙
R. Lehmann, crayon drawing, 1859, BM ∙ F. Talfourd, chalk drawing, 1859, NPG [see illus.] ∙ London
Stereoscopic Co., carte‐de‐visite, 1860–69, NPG ∙ W. W. Story, bust, 1861, Keats and Shelley Memorial
Museum, Rome ∙ J. M. Cameron, carte‐de‐visite, 1865, NPG ∙ S. Laurence, oils, 1866, Baylor University, Texas
∙ G. F. Watts, oils, 1866, Armstrong Browning Library, Waco, Texas ∙ G. F. Watts, oils, 1866, NPG ∙ W. W.
Story, two drawings, 1869, Morgan L. ∙ photograph, c.1869, Armstrong Browning Library, Waco, Texas ∙ J.
M. Cameron, photograph, 1870, Hult. Arch. ∙ R. B. Browning, oils, 1874, St Andrews School, Tennessee ∙ R.
Lehmann, oils, 1875, Baylor University, Texas; version, 1884, NPG ∙ W. Fisher, oils, 1877, Baylor University,
Texas ∙ A. Legros, oils, 1879, V&A ∙ R. B. Browning, oils, 1882, Balliol Oxf. ∙ F. Moscheles, oils, 1884, Wesleyan
University, Ohio ∙ R. B. Browning, bust, 1886, Browning Hall, Walworth, Connecticut ∙ R. B. Browning, oils,
1889, Baylor University, Texas ∙ G. D. Giles, drawing, 1889, Baylor University, Texas ∙ H. S. Montalba, bust,
1889, probably University of Oxford ∙ E. Myers, photographs, 1889, NPG ∙ R. Bryden, print, 1898, V&A ∙ Ape
[C. Pellegrini], chromolithograph, NPG; repro. in VF (20 Nov 1875) ∙ M. Beerbohm, cartoon, AM Oxf. ∙ E.
Edwards, carte‐de‐visite, NPG ∙ G. D. Giles, drawing (Last life‐picture, Venice, 14 November 1889),
Armstrong Browning Library, Waco, Texas ∙ photograph (death bed portrait), Poetry Society, London ∙
photographic prints, NPG
Wealth at death
£16,744 19s. 4d.: administration, 19 Feb 1890, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

© Oxford University Press 2004–11
All rights reserved: see legal notice Oxford University Press
Clyde de L. Ryals, ‘Browning, Robert (1812–1889)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford
University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2006 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3714, accessed 2 Nov
2011]