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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 In an unpublished poem (‘Wherefore, in these dark ages of the Press’), Tennyson spoke of ‘this Art‐ Conscience’, a surety which, along with courage, steadied and secured him.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
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Page 3 and 4: this on Armageddon, ‘altering the
Page 5 and 6: Yet in the first stricken month, Te
Page 7: His wife was of unique importance t
Page 11 and 12: which he mentioned to Milnes in 183
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Page 15 and 16: would have been cured of his sorrow
Page 17 and 18: He told very accurately, almost in
Page 19 and 20: Very imperfect as it is, it is neve
Page 21 and 22: would stay. Here, of all things, wa
Page 23 and 24: the seaside. As a young girl she wa
Page 25 and 26: then at 30 Torrington Square (she l
Page 27 and 28: Victorian Verse (1987) allots her t
Page 29 and 30: voraciously, Browning soon became a
Page 31 and 32: Browningʹs conception of the poem
Page 33 and 34: was settled when he agreed that the
Page 35 and 36: By early June 1854 the Brownings we
Page 37 and 38: In London Browning and Pen took tem
Page 39 and 40: Edie), confided to her hostess that
Page 41 and 42: When published on 15 April 1875, Ar
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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