Alison Chapman - "A Poet Never Sees a Ghost": Photography and Trance in Tennysons Enoch Arden and Julia Margaret Camerons Photography - Victorian Poetry 41:1 Victorian Poetry 41.1 (2003) 47-71 "A Poet Never Sees a Ghost": Photography and Trance in Tennyson's Enoch Arden and Julia Margaret Cameron's Photography Alison Chapman [Figures] 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. Nevertheless, little recent critical attention has been paid to the idyll that gives the volume its title. 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. 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...