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Blissett®0“nd®y Bookbinders 020 8992 3965 www.blissetts.com Tennyson and After John Morton, Department of English Language and Literature, University College London PhD Thesis 1 UMI Number: U591556 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U591556 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Contents 3 Abstract 4 Acknowledgments 7 Preface 13 Chapter One: ‘How long will this posthumous life of mine last?’ 28 Chapter Two: The 1890s 59 Chapter Three: The 1900s 93 Chapter Four: The 1910s 142 Chapter Five: The 1920s 183 Chapter Six: The 1930s 229 Chapter Seven: The 1940s 268 Conclusion 283 Bibliography of Works Consulted 326 Appendix: Tennyson in Poetry Anthologies 1892-1950 2 Abstract This thesis is a study of the posthumous literary reception and reputation of Alfred Tennyson, from the year of his death, 1892, to 1950. Its focus is on allusions to Tennyson’s work in poetry, fiction and drama, but it also takes works of criticism and journalism into account, as well as other evidence of Tennyson’s continuing readership in the period. The thesis approaches the period by decades, involving in-depth assessments of Tennyson’s influence on the work of writers as diverse as Conrad, Housman, Austin, Forster, Bennett, Owen, Sassoon, Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Pound, Auden, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene. Their various responses - from the appreciative to the scornful, the ambivalent to the oedipal - are put into context using works of criticism which discuss Tennyson, by both canonical writers such as A. C. Bradley and F. R. Leavis as well as less famous critics. The thesis calls into question Bradley’s idea of a ‘reaction against Tennyson’ having already reached its peak by 1917. I will show that, in reality, Tennyson’s influence and popularity endured long into the twentieth century, and that the aftermath of the Great War meant that the poet’s work was truly at its nadir of popularity in the late 1920s and 1930s. The thesis will also address Tennyson’s ultimate resurgence in popularity in the 1940s, partly as a result of the impact of World War II but partly as the writers who had seemed radical earlier in the century (not least T. S. Eliot) felt more comfortable about accepting their influences. The thesis ends by placing this in the context of the wider revival of interest in Victorian literature and culture in the 1940s and early 1950s The appendix of the thesis is a database of Tennyson’s poems which appeared in anthologies in the period. 3 Acknowledgments The genesis of the ideas behind this thesis began when I was working on my MA dissertation at King’s College London in 2003, under the supervision of Leonee Ormond. I had decided to investigate the posthumous creation of a poetic identity for Keats, through poems like Shelley’s Adonais and works of biography and criticism, before his work was widely available to the general public (he died in 1821 and his work were only accessible to the wide reading public after 1848). The inspiration to work on Tennyson arose party from my study for this project of the Cambridge ‘Apostles’ and their taste in poetry in the early 1830s, but also as a result of being taught Tennyson as an undergraduate by Peter D. McDonald, and reading the introduction to his book British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914. I am extremely grateful to my supervisor, Philip Horne, for all the support and advice he has provided throughout the research and writing of this thesis, as well as my secondary supervisor Rosemary Ashton. The UCL Department has proven a stimulating and friendly place to study, and I am also grateful for the input provided by Danny Karlin, Hugh Stevens, Charlotte Mitchell, Henry Woudhuysen, Helen Hackett, Peter Swaab, Rachel Bowlby and Jane Lewty, as well as the support of Anita Garfoot and Kathryn Metzenthin. The advice, support and friendship of the graduate community at UCL has also been essential and special thanks must go to Oliver Herford, Miranda el-Rayess, David Gooblar, Ruth Maxey and Julia Jordan, as well as Anthony Cummins at Oxford University. 4 The staff at the Tennyson Research Centre, especially Grace Timmins, have been of enormous help, as have the staff at the Rare Books and Music reading room of the British Library and the staff of Exeter University Library. I would also like to thank the organisers of conferences at which I have presented material from this thesis, who include Robin Brumby, Roger Ebbatson and Marion Shaw of the Tennyson Society, Andrew Maunder, William Harmon, Max Saunders, and Jo McDonagh. I would also like to thank Robert Douglas-Fairhurst of the Tennyson Research Bulletin , Jan Piggott, and Samantha Matthews, as well as the AHRC for granting me a doctoral award for this research. I am grateful to all my friends for their support, and to my family for being there when I needed them most. Finally, and most importantly, I am grateful to Laura, for everything. 5 Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand, A hand that can be clasped no more - Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creep At earliest morning to the door. He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly through the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day.1 1 Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam VII, The Poems of Tennyson ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1969), pp. 870-871. HereafterThe Poems of Tennyson. 6 Preface Tennyson’s poetry makes an appearance in the work of many other writers. This thesis sets out to consider how Tennyson shows up in many of the most important, and indeed many of the most popular novels and poems published from his death in 1892 to 1950. Let us being by charting some manifestations of a single phrase, ‘Here in the long unlovely street’, from In Memoriam. In Henry James’s 1907 book of travel-reflections The American Scene , which details his return to the country of his birth, the author visits a Boston much changed since his youth, and finds vistas of bourgeois prosperity in the avenues of the ‘New Land’.2 It seems to James ‘a community leading its life in the social sun.’3 Why, accordingly, of December afternoons, did the restless analyst, pausing at eastward-looking corners, find on his lips the vague refrain of Tennyson's "long unlovely street"? Why if Harley Street, if Wimpole, is unlovely, should Marlborough Street, Boston, be so - beyond the mere platitude of its motiveless name?4 James can understand the ‘unloveliness’ of Wimpole Street, with its ‘monotony of black leasehold brick’, but is puzzled to find himself with the ‘vague refrain’ on his 2 Henry James, The American Scene ed. W. H. Auden (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946), p. 247. 3 Ibid, p. 248. 4 Ibid, p. 247. 7 lips when in this new comfortable area of Boston.5 A meditation of several pages is stimulated for James by the insidious question of why it is that ‘Marlborough Street, for imperturbable reasons of its own, used periodically to break my heart.’6 For the purposes of this thesis James’s complex speculations about the reasons need not concern us here.