"A Poet Never Sees a Ghost": Photography and Trance in Tennyson's Enoch Arden and Julia Margaret Cameron's Photography

TENNYSON'S VOLUME ENOCH ARDEN AND OTHER POEMS (1864), INITIALLY advertised as Idylls of the Hearth, was a publishing sensation, selling 17,000 copies on the day of publication and 60,000 before the year's end. ¹ Nevertheless, little recent critical attention has been paid to the idyll that gives the volume its title. ² Furthermore, while recent commentators have explored Julia Margaret Cameron's illustrations to many of Tennyson's poems, in particular Idylls of the King, her three photographs depicting characters from Enoch Arden have been even more overlooked than the poem itself. ³ The relation between the idyll and the photographs is, however, crucial to an understanding of the dynamic and gendered network of influence between poet and photographer. The publication of the volume, in mid August 1864, corresponds with the first few months of Cameron's experiments with her new camera, received as a gift in December 1863 from her daughter and son-in-law. Given her close friendship and lively correspondence with the Tennysons, Cameron would almost certainly have known of Enoch Arden during its period of gestation from Tennyson's receipt of Thomas Woolner's version of the narrative on November 11, 1861, up to its publication. ⁴ As an idyll, or a verbal picture, Enoch Arden is a poem about visuality and its uncanny limitations, responding in both a specific and tangential fashion to the conception of photography. Cameron's illustrations can be read, I argue, as a gendered response in turn to Tennyson's optical aesthetics, not only illuminating the poem's exploration of visibility, but also providing an alternative narrative which feminizes both vision and its photographic record.

Tennyson professed never to have seen a ghost. ⁵ After his troubled father's death in March 1831, Tennyson boldly spent the night in his father's bed in an attempt to summon the paternal spirit. The endeavor failed. Tennyson concludes: "You see, ghosts do not come to imaginative people" and "A poet never sees a ghost." His son Hallam's Memoir, however, reveals that Tennyson could feel haunted within; perhaps this is why ghosts need not be externalized. As a child, Tennyson silently reiterated his name (presumably his first name) in a "kind of waking trance":

till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life. ⁶

Hallam continues: "In the same way he said that there might be a more intimate communion than we could dream of between the living and the dead, at all events for a time." These comments have been taken to express Tennyson's religious belief, but they also illuminate the relation between his poetics and uncanny visuality. The ineffable experience of self-induced trance (which Tennyson would experience throughout his life and associate with poetic composition) ⁷ not only displaces language ("utterly beyond words"), but also puts the coherence and stability of the subject in question while the fading individuality paradoxically attains a clarity and focus ("the clearest of the clearest"). During this "waking trance," furthermore, it is the lack of boundaries of the self that is defined as sharp and visual. And it is a space of loss that, perversely, defies death.

Autobiographical evidence suggests, however, that throughout most of the 1840s, during a sustained period of ill health, Tennyson feared his propensity to trance was due to inherited epilepsy. In his biography of the poet, Robert Bernard Martin suggests that the trances, "weird...