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University of Alberta Civic Subjects: Wordsworth, Tennyson, and the Victorian Laureateship by Carmen Elizabeth Ellison A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English and Film Studies ©Carmen Elizabeth Ellison Fall 2010 Edmonton, Alberta Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission. Examining Committee Peter W. Sinnema, English and Film Studies Susan Hamilton, English and Film Studies Christine Wiesenthal, English and Film Studies Beverly Lemire, History and Classics Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, English, Ryerson University Abstract Civic Subjects examines the ways in which poets laureate William Wordsworth and Alfred Tennyson negotiated the terrain between poetics and politics during the long reign of Queen Victoria – a period during which the monarchy was both contested (especially by popular republicanism) and in a state of transition. The first chapter traces important moments in the history of the office in Britain, both in order to establish the traditions handed down to Wordsworth and Tennyson and to clarify the office‘s complex relationships to poetics, to reading publics, to the monarchy, and to the elected government. Despite the remarkable differences between the laureates examined, both have a common task: to balance the political claims of a monarchist institution against the responsibilities each feels to his own politics and poetics. Civic Subjects therefore examines circumstances where such negotiations become visible: Wordsworth‘s insistently private laureate relationship with Queen Victoria; Tennyson‘s early experiments in constructing a laureate voice in the Crimean War-era volume Maud, and Other Poems; and the role of Tennyson‘s verse written to mark royal events (deaths, marriages, and anniversaries). Overall, Civic Subjects argues that the laureateship can illuminate both the contested power of poetry in public political life and the constant, sometimes violent, renegotiation of concepts of British citizenship. The structure of laureateship, wherein one poet is called upon to be a ventriloquist for the monarchy and for the people, simultaneously, makes legible the difficult ideological work of maintaining a coherent national narrative – especially during a period in which the role of monarchy in national life is repeatedly brought under fire, debates about the constitution of a proper political subjectivity are constantly embattled, and the poets laureate themselves hold strong views of their own on the politics of poetics. Acknowledgements This thesis was supported in many ways by many people, including my supervisor, committee members, and external examiner: Peter W. Sinnema, Susan Hamilton, Christine Wiesenthal, Beverly Lemire, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. The Social Sci- ences and Humanities Research Council of Canada supported this work through a doctoral fellowship. Librarians at the University of Alberta Bruce Peel Special Col- lections, British Library, Tennyson Research Centre, and Royal Library at Windsor Castle were all generous and helpful. There is a long list of important people who helped me see this project to completion. And although I am absolutely certain that this list is terribly incomplete, here it is. My thanks to Rob Appleford, Chris Boughton, Thea Bowering, Melisa Brittain, Jonathan Busch, T.L. Cowan, Lucas Crawford, Travis DeCook, Sarah de Leeuw, Lucas Eades, John and Michele Ellison, Aimee and Robin Ellison, Theo Finigan, Alan Galey, Todd Janes, Jenny Kerber, Danielle Peers, Allison Sivak, Dan Southall, Jennifer van der Valk, and Marcie Whitecotton-Carroll. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: The Poet Laureate as ―The Voice of England‖ ....................... 1 CHAPTER ONE: The Laureateship, Beginnings to 1843 .................................... 30 CHAPTER TWO: Wordsworth's Refusals of Laureateship ................................. 77 CHAPTER THREE: Tennyson, 1850-1855 ........................................................ 121 CHAPTER FOUR: Tennyson and the Monarchy ............................................... 200 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................... 225 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................... 233 INTRODUCTION: The Poet Laureate as “The Voice of England” For reasons which are not difficult to discover, the office has often been unfortunate in its holders; but however much the circumstances of certain periods of history have conspired to cheapen it, there has never been a moment when it was without great possibilities. Even in the eighteenth century, the laureates were not restricted to perfunctory laudation. The very New Year and Birthday Odes themselves might have been—though unfortunately they usually were not—something other than empty adulation; and in the celebration of great events, the laureate always had the opportunity—however little he availed himself of it—of making himself the voice of England . If the results have been in many cases disappointing, the possibility has always been there; and, even in the most jejune period, there have been instances not a few when the laureate seemed at least to catch a glimpse of it. – Edmund Kemper Broadus, The Laureateship (1921) When the poets laureate William Wordsworth and Alfred Tennyson met Queen Victoria, nearly a decade apart (1843 and 1851, respectively), they were wearing the same suit – a suit that fit neither of them well. Both Tennyson and Wordsworth were initially presented to the queen under the same circumstances – at a court levee. Neither had appropriate clothing for such an occasion, and so both borrowed a court suit from the poet Samuel Rogers. Too small for both poets, the suit was serviceable, but by no means ideal (O'London 47). Surveying his silk- clad legs, Tennyson is reputed to have much admired his excellent calves (Dyson and Tennyson 30). The outfit, like at times the office, fit him a bit tight. But he knew he looked good in it anyway. Wordsworth is a different story altogether. In his capacity as poet laureate, between 1843 and his death in 1850, he wrote 1 absolutely nothing he wanted considered laureate verse. But silence is rarely a neutral condition, and Wordsworth‘s lack of laureate poetry was not a failure to produce for an office that somehow exceeded him, but an active refusal of laureate traditions demanding the production of rote annual odes to the monarch. For Wordsworth, then, the laureateship, like the court suit, was constraining: its historical function of fusing poetry with state power did not fit his poetics, which demanded verse that did not perform in the service of the state. This project is about the ways in which poets laureate negotiated the terrain between poetics and politics during the long reign of Queen Victoria. It examines the practice of laureateship in a period when the perfunctory tribute odes of the eighteenth century were no longer required and when the monarchy itself was both embattled (especially by popular republicanism) and in a state of transition with respect to the prerogatives of the queen. The Victorian poets laureate were servants to the monarch and members of the royal household, but were relatively free during this period to write when moved to do so; their choices – moments of versification and of poetic silence – are often telling. This project balances a number of narrative threads. While its main focus is to examine the poetry produced by laureates (in Wordsworth‘s case, the poetry he disavowed as issuing from the office), looking at the ways in which the institution provides a particular view into Victorian cultural politics, it also addresses itself to the changes in laureate practice and to both government and readership perceptions of laureateship across the period. Consequently, I also examine non-poetic texts: Wordsworth wrote little verse during the laureate 2 period, but both his prose writing on poetics and his comments on laureateship in letters provide a view into his poetic practices during his tenure in office. My goal in this study is to approach the Victorian laureateship as an institution, exploring the ways it functioned as an important location for representations not just of the monarchy, but also of individual and collective identities, citizenship and empire, and poetry‘s contested role in the public life of Britain. Any study of Victorian laureateship inevitably faces the long shadow cast by Tennyson. Poet laureate for much of Queen Victoria‘s reign, Tennyson was appointed in 1850, largely on the critical momentum produced by that year‘s publication of In Memoriam, A. H. H. Overall, I devote much of this study to Tennyson‘s active engagement with the problems and opportunities of holding an office that fused poetics and statecraft.

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