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

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’.