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

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