Alfred Tennyson: Beyond the Academy or within It?

Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context, by Kathryn Ledbetter, Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2007, 244 pp., illustrated, £55.00, ISBN 978-0-7546-5719-4 Tennyson Transformed: Alfred Tennyson and Visual Culture, edited by Jim Cheshire, Farnham, Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2009, 160 pp., illustrated, £40.00, ISBN 978-1-84822-003-4 Tennyson among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays, edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, xvi + 436 pp., illustrated, £50.00, ISBN 978-0-19-955713-4 ‘What other literary career can offer us such intriguing glimpses into the overlap between poetry, art, technology and commerce?’ (Jim Cheshire, Tennyson Transformed, p. 17) Queen Victoria and Alfred, Lord Tennyson ‘were arguably the most popular of all media objects’ in nineteenth century periodicals. (Kathryn Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals, p. 144) ‘These essays seek to show that Tennyson's time continues to be our own.' (Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Tennyson Among the Poets, p. 13) Alfred Tennyson still looms large in twentieth-first-century culture. He has more pages in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations than any other English poet apart from Shakespeare. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1832, rev. 1842) has a vigorous afterlife in a great number of websites and in contemporary music. (The poem has even been recorded by an Israeli progressive rock band and dramatized by the Early Arts Guild of Victoria, Australia.) He haunts North American literature, particularly children's literature, in the novels of L.M. Montgomery and Laura Ingalls Wilder (and a modern Canadian novelist, Joan Givner, has called her latest work A Girl Called Tennyson (2010)). His lines echo in the heads of our own great communicators: ‘The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs’, was how James Naughtie, on BBC Radio 4's Today programme described a particularly long-drawn-out political negotiation (May 2009). Perhaps most powerfully, Tennyson gave us the phrase which resounds today in the media, seemingly indispensible to the recently revived evolutionary debate – ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’.1 He has, in Christopher Ricks's phrase, a ‘unique unignorability’ (Tennyson among the Poets, p. vii). To put it in more materialist terms, he is still today, across the world, a cultural commodity.

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