Difficult, in the circumstances, to see how he could be described as anything other than "centrally Victorian".īatchelor's book is good as far as it goes, taking Tennyson from Lincolnshire to Cambridge, and thence from pillar to post during his younger, itinerant years until, in old age, he becomes a national treasure, as central to British life as tea and muffins, and the happy recipient of some of the most unrestrained brown-nosing ever recorded in the annals of literature ("odious incense, palaver & fuss", as Edward Lear succinctly put it). His poems were extremely popular, selling out in every edition. He was a traditional husband (his devoted wife, Emily, eventually collapsed beneath the burden of answering his correspondence), a stern father, a patriot and a devoted royalist. A hypochondriac, he was daffy about fashionable fads such as hydropathy. Like many of his contemporaries, he was au fait with the new science – with Darwin, Lyell et al – but equally troubled by change. His drunk, depressive father having been disinherited by his grandfather, he was ever sensitive when it came to social class, anxious that his income would not allow him to live like a gentleman. The third son of a Lincolnshire parson, Tennyson was as steeped as any man in the pieties of his day.
Judging by the looks on people's faces, the name Tennyson struck doom into more than a few hearts around that particular table.īatchelor's USP is that he presents Tennyson as "more centrally Victorian" than previous biographers – which seems to me to be about as radical as calling the aforementioned Price "deeply tanned". I sat on the committee that selected this line for the athletes' village (it ends: "and not to yield"), and all I can tell you is that we chose a sentiment, not a poet. But if he hopes this will make his book appear more relevant, he will be disappointed. John Batchelor has used a phrase from Tennyson's poem, Ulysses – "To strive, to seek, to find" – as his book's subtitle, presumably because these words are now inscribed on a wall in the Olympic Park. The reading public, however, could not care less. Literary reputation, though fading, dictates that the poet's life has already been dutifully picked over (most notably in 1980 by Robert Bernard Martin in Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart), and research papers continue to tumble out of our universities. And there was the funeral of Charles Dickens at Westminster Abbey in 1870, during which men lifted their children high above their shoulders that they might catch a glimpse of the great poet over the heads of the congregation.Ī new biographer of Tennyson, then, has his work cut out. There was a visit from the great Italian liberator, Garibaldi, who planted a wellingtonia at the Tennyson home on the Isle of Wight. There were audiences with Queen Victoria, who found solace after the death of her beloved Albert in the poet's verses for his friend, Arthur Hallam ("Next to the Bible, In Memoriam is my comfort," she told him). As Mick Imlah has it in his wry and plangent poem, In Memoriam Alfred Lord Tennyson: "No one remembers you at all." But in his day the extravagantly bearded creature who succeeded Wordsworth as poet laureate was as well known as Katie Price, and twice as much the product of his times. I t's sometimes hard to believe how famous Tennyson once was.