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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
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Page 39 and 40: Edie), confided to her hostess that
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Page 43 and 44: are three points of view to be cons
Page 45 and 46: ed., Robert Browning and Alfred Dom

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