Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle by Charlotte Boyce, Páraic Finnerty, and Anne-Marie Millim (review)

Though there is no danger of Alfred Tennyson following William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, or Jane Austen onto British banknotes any time soon—the closest he has gotten is a set of stamps commemorating the centenary of his death in 1992—he nonetheless remains something of a Victorian celebrity in the early twenty-first century. Lines from “Ulysses” (1842) were featured on a wall of the London Olympic Village in 2012, a major biography by John Batchelor was published in the same year, and in the last twenty years he has been a central presence in two neo-Victorian novels: Lynne Truss’s Tennyson’s Gift (1996) and Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze (2009). He has hardly disappeared from view. Nonetheless, his celebrity has certainly declined, both in literary and more general terms; shortly after his death, Tennyson was bracketed with “Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, [and] Milton” by F. V. N. Painter in the Homiletic Review, and while his state funeral was a genuinely public event in 1892, today his centrality within the British literary canon is subject to question (Homiletic Review 25 [1893], 202).

Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle seeks to investigate the former through a detailed examination of the latter, and in doing so it taps into a recent surge of interest in Victorian celebrity—specifically literary celebrity—through a writer whose celebrity has nevertheless been somewhat neglected in recent criticism. With the exception of Kathryn Ledbetter’s Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals (2007), one has to look back to Michael Millgate’s Testamentary Acts or Ian Hamilton’s Keepers of the Flame (both published in 1992) for considerations of Tennyson’s legacy as a celebrity. Both these books focus their attention on Hallam Tennyson’s two-volume 1897 Tennyson: A Memoir, which was compiled with the assistance of the Poet Laureate himself before his death in 1892, but is also full of the reminiscences of many of his friends. These “vicarious celebrities,” whose recollections “insert themselves into the poet’s history,” are the subject of one of the chapters by Anne-Marie Millim (168). That Hallam (with the blessing of his father) indulged so many of these “vicarious celebrities” in the Memoir seems at odds with the Laureate’s sometimes tortuous negotiations with the public—he and his wife deemed literary tourists (who would occasionally arrive unannounced at Farringford, the Tennysons’ home on the Isle of Wight, seeking branches from the tree planted there by Garibaldi in 1864) “Cockneys”—a rather unfortunate echo of an insult leveled at the young Tennyson by early conservative reviewers of his work (19).

Ledbetter’s book on Tennyson and the periodical press focuses primarily on Tennyson as a contributor to periodicals, and in a sense Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle begins where Ledbetter left off: Charlotte Boyce’s first chapter provides a well-researched consideration of “virtual literary tourism” in the periodical press, and she pays particular attention to accounts of visits to Farringford, identifying the myth of Tennyson “constantly besieged by hordes of inquisitive holidaymakers” as a product of the myriad accounts in the press (18, 19). This chapter, inspired in part by the work of Alexis Easley, provides some excellent close readings of these accounts, demonstrating the tension between revelation and secrecy that was vital to sustaining readerly interest in celebrity. Boyce continues this discussion in chapter 3, where she considers Julia Margaret Cameron’s engagement with “the workings of the celebrity apparatus” both in terms of the subjects of her photographs and her negotiations in selling and copyrighting her work (119).

Other chapters are less squarely focused on the relationship between celebrity culture and market forces. In one of his two chapters, Páraic Finnerty examines the differing approaches to celebrity taken by G. F. Watts and Edward Lear (both of whom were frequent guests at Farringford). His other...