Tennyson Transformed: Alfred Lord Tennyson and Visual Culture (review)

Alfred Tennyson has traditionally been understood as the most musical of poets. “He had the finest ear,” W. H. Auden remarked, “of any English poet” (qtd. in Cheshire 7). But while many have focused upon Tennyson’s prosody and style, few have addressed how Tennyson’s poetry intersects with developments in visual culture.

This state of affairs would have pleased Tennyson personally. His “indifference to the visual arts was entire,” remarked William Gaunt (qtd. in Cheshire 33). Tennyson was frequently hostile to the illustration of his poetry, reluctant to have it included in gift books or periodicals, and indifferent to paintings and portraits inspired by his verse. He preferred that his poetry should appear in sober books with no illustrations, rather than in the deluxe formats that his publishers increasingly preferred. And though his preferences were frequently overruled by publishers, or by a personal desire for profit, he wanted “serious books for serious people” (12), as Jim Cheshire terms it—publishing formats that suggested his was a poetry of intellect, for readers of intelligence and education.

But if Tennyson was outwardly hostile or indifferent to developments in visual culture, his poetry stimulated those developments to a degree surpassed by few other poets, and it is steeped in a sense of the visual that drew artists to it well into the twentieth century. “Other poets seek for images to illustrate their conceptions,” Arthur Henry Hallam wrote in 1831. But Tennyson is one of those who have “no need to seek” for “they live in a world of images” (Hallam, “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and The Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson” in Victorian Literature 1830–1900, edited by Dorothy Mermin and Herbert F. Tucker [Harcourt, 2002], 134).

Tennyson Transformed demonstrates comprehensively that Tennyson “lived in a world of images.” And while it does not address the visual underpinnings of Tennyson’s poetry itself—a topic that still awaits book-length treatment—it shows how Tennyson’s poetry not only generated paintings, illustrations, sculptures, portraits, photographs, illuminated texts, and eventually films, but relied on them for its dissemination. It grows out of an exhibit mounted by the Tennyson Research Center in Lincoln in 2009. Besides six well-illustrated essays by noted scholars, it contains a short preface by Christopher Ricks, a descriptive catalog, and many color reproductions.

Cheshire’s introductory essay is concerned initially with cultural trends that transformed the Victorian art world in the years immediately following Tennyson’s ascendancy to the Laureateship. Cheshire notes, among other things, the emergence of the art dealer and of changes in the way art was bought and sold; the growing distance between artist and owner, and the lessening significance of the original artwork, as reproduction and exhibition became more important, with artists increasingly producing their work for an anonymous “art public”; and the increasing centrality of art in fashionable social life. Drawing on recent work by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra and Kathryn Ledbetter, Cheshire shows how Tennyson’s publishers capitalized on these changes, as well as on his popularity and status after 1850, by incorporating illustration, photography, ornament, and portraiture into Tennyson’s books, sometimes thereby redefining what a printed book might be. Julia Margaret Cameron’s 1875 edition of The Idylls of the King, for instance, incorporates not merely “photographs as interpretations” but also extracts from the Idylls in Cameron’s own handwriting, reproduced lithographically, thereby lending the book “an unusually personal feel” (17).

Three of the essays that follow address portraiture. “The People’s demand for their Laureate’s portrait was insatiable,” Ben Stoker writes, although “the widespread dissemination of portraits confounded Tennyson and proved to be a source of constant anxiety” (67). The popular image of Tennyson is still a familiar one, duplicated in photograph after photograph, presenting Tennyson bearded, swathed in his cloak, slightly disheveled but always carefully posed. Stoker, however, is principally concerned with portraits presenting a more intimate, less widely known side of Tennyson—many executed...