Tennyson

Cultural approaches to poetry dominated Tennyson scholarship in 2013, with formalist analysis a strong secondary emphasis. In Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle (Palgrave Macmillan), Charlotte Boyce, Paraic Finnerty, and Anne-Marie Millim investigate three principal topics: the fraught relation of celebrity to notions of lasting fame for Tennyson, journalists, and readers; the impact of celebrity on Tennyson’s poetic production; and the artist colony that grew up around Tennyson at Farringford, where he could achieve more privacy than in London. Mere popularity divorced from poetic greatness was a threat not only to Tennyson’s highest aims but also to English national identity and the market for literary journalism. Accordingly, Charlotte Boyce argues in chapter 1, the press emphasized “virtual tourism” over actual sightseeing, creating a sense of intimate access to Tennyson’s inner being for audiences by tracing the links between landscapes or domestic scenes he inhabited and his poems. This promoted a more cerebral connection between Tennyson and his texts and shored up the poet’s inner mystery even while it heightened his celebrity. Chapter 6, by Paraic Finnerty, does most to reveal the impact of celebrity on Tennyson’s poetry. Finnerty approaches Idylls of the King as a representation of subjectivities shaped by celebrity culture. Lancelot and Guinevere convey what it feels like to live under constant public scrutiny and surveillance, while Vivien and Elaine function as female fans. In this context Elaine’s death emerges as the ultimate fan fantasy, since it results in her entry into public records as a figure closely connected to a glamorous celebrity. Finnerty also advances a fresh interpretation of the oft-noted distance of Arthur from center stage in most of the Idylls: the distance is a reflex of his celebrity, and it is only when his hold on his public fractures amidst the breaking of the Round Table that he emerges once more as an individual. Equally fresh is the volume’s treatment of the figures surrounding Tennyson—Julia Margaret Cameron, G. F. Watts (who built a home in Farringford at Tennyson’s invitation), Edward Lear, William Allingham—as a network or artist colony. In recent years we have learned more about Tennyson’s reliance on his London network to sustain his creativity and well-being. Attention to Farringford’s intellectual resources rounds out our grasp of Tennyson’s sociability. Victorian Celebrity Culture also examines the self-promotion of Tennyson’s closest allies (Lear and perhaps Allingham excepted) in the act of publicly attesting to Tennyson’s greatness.

The marketplace is a more indirect presence in Roger Ebbatson’s Landscape and Literature 1830–1914: Nature, Text, Aura (Palgrave Macmillan), which plays off phenomenological analysis of the perceiving self embodied in the natural world against the Frankfurt school’s emphasis on alienation and suffering in a managed and administered capitalist society to generate new insights. The opening “Tennysonian” section includes five short chapters, one a reprint of a 2008 essay on Charles Tennyson Turner. The chapter on “Locksley Hall” positions the speaker’s wildly veering moods, tones, and perspectives as a reflection of a Heideggerian “destitute time” (visible, e.g., in the unrest over Corn Laws and the new Poor Law) that gave the lie to bourgeois doctrines of progress and scientific advance. Visible in the speaker as well is “the liquidation of dramatic monologue, in which the single voice splinters into a Spasmodic cacophony of warring tones” (41). Ebbatson’s analysis of “Northern Farmer, Old Style” begins by aligning its Lincolnshire dialect with alienation, since it enters into print only as part of a lost cultural past overtaken by capitalism. Yet, he notes, Heidegger saw in the dialect poetry of Swabian Johann Peter Hebel a reflex of Hebel’s close connection to the land, and Ebbatson similarly approaches the farmer’s hatred of agricultural steam engines, those outposts of a homogenizing technological culture overtaking the land the farmer has tilled. The monologue thus glimpses lived experience as well as alienation.

Literature and its relation to science also played an important role in 2013. In Valerie Purton’s edited collection Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science...