"For the sisters Brontë my father had the highest admiration". On Tennyson's 200th anniversary

BrontëBlog celebrates Alfred Tennyson's 200th anniversary from a Brontë perspective.

The Guardian begins an article about the poet's anniversary like this:

Crowds flock to Shakespeare's birthplace. Visitors throng the Brontës' childhood home. Bonnet-fanciers trawl England for relics of the young Jane Austen. The early years of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, however, are way off the literary tourist trail. (Stephen McClarence)

But the Somersby poet has more in common with the Brontës than just more or less crowded literary shrines. His life spans the lives of all the Brontë sisters (1809-1892) and he was one of the poetic gurus of the time. Nevertheless, Brontë scholarship has determined that Charlotte Brontë disliked Tennyson based on some comments to Elizabeth Gaskell and has, in general, overlooked his influence on her works. It is true that Elizabeth Gaskell relates her first meeting with Charlotte Brontë in the Lake District like this:

She and I quarrelled & differed about almost every thing,-she calls me a democrat, & can not bear Tennyson- but we like each other heartily I think & I hope we shall ripen into friends. (EG to Charlotte Freude, 25 August 1850)

And it is also true that Charlotte Brontë disliked Tennyson's In Memoriam (the poem that the poet devoted to his late friend Arthur Henry Hallam (1811-33), published in 1850):

I have read Tennyson's "In Memoriam" -or rather- part of it; I closed the book when I had got about half-way. It is beautiful; it is mournful; it is monotonous. Many of the feelings expressed, bear, in their utterance, the stamp of Truth, yet if Arthur Hallam had been somewhere nearer Alfred Tennyson-his brother instead of his friend - I should have distrusted this rhymed and measured and printed monument of grief. What change the lapse of years may work - I do not know- but it seems to me that bitter sorrow, while recent, does not flow in verse. (CB to EG, 27 August 1850)

Not surprising, taking into account the very unhappy recent events that had happened in Charlotte Brontë's life.

But it is also true that Tennyson was not a rara avis in the Parsonage. After the failure of the Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, the sisters decided to send some of the unsold copies to well-known poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, De Quincey and Tennyson (16 June 1847)⁽¹⁾

Sir—My relatives, Ellis & Acton Bell and myself, heedless of the repeated warnings of various respectable publishers, have committed the rash act of printing a volume of poems.
The consequences predicted have, of course, overtaken us; our book is found to be a drug; no man needs it or heeds it; in the space of a year our publisher has disposed but of two copies and by what painful efforts he succeeded in getting rid of those two—himself only knows.
Before transferring the edition to the trunk-makers, we have decided on distributing as presents a few copies of what we cannot sell. We beg to offer you one in acknowledgement of the pleasure and profit we have often and long derived from your works.
I am sir, yours very respectfully,
Currer Bell (MS is at the Beineker Library at Yale)

And Tennyson was popular enough with at least Emily Brontë as to be chosen as a gift to her sister when Charlotte and Anne were in London in their famous July 1848 visit⁽²⁾. They chose the recently published The Princess (1847). The familiarity of Charlotte Brontë with Tennyson is unquestionable: In February 1849 William Smith Williams (WSW) sent Charlotte a parcel of books including Tennyson's Poems, which Charlotte informed him she already possessed⁽³⁾; in October 1850 reviewing for WSW Sydney Dobell's⁽⁴⁾ The Roman, she praised him with a

You hear Tennyson indeed sometimes and Byron sometimes in some passages of the 'Roman'. (CB to WSW, 25 October 1850)

Fortunately, recently some scholars have begun to re-examine Tennyson's influence on Charlotte Brontë. We are thinking of Alison Hoddinott, who in a recent issue of Brontë Studies⁽⁵⁾ exposed the so-called Perils of Biography: Charlotte Brontë and Tennyson:

It has been generally accepted by biographers that Charlotte Brontë thoroughly disliked Tennyson's poetry. This belief is based on a remark made by Elizabeth Gaskell in a letter written shortly after her first meeting with Charlotte. This article challenges the accepted view and explores the literary connections between The Princess and Shirley and between In Memoriam and Villette and argues that Tennyson had a complex influence on Charlotte Brontë's last two novels.

We don't know for sure, of course, if Charlotte Brontë felt the influence of Tennyson or loathed him, but what we do know is what Tennyson himself thought of the Brontës. According to his son and biographer Hallam Tennyson who printed Charlotte's letter to his father in his book: Alfred Lord Tennyson: A memoir (1897):

For the sisters Brontë my father had the highest admiration. (p. 262)

Notes
(1) Curiously enough in a review of the 3d edition of Jane Eyre (which included a reissue of The Poems), the Standard of Freedom's reviewer (21 Oct 1848) commented

"We meet wandering echoes of Wordsworth" (as in Acton Bell's Memory) and of Tennyson.

Quoted on The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, Volume Two: 1848-1851, edited by Margaret Smith; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000(pag 134)
(2) The influence of Tennyson on Emily Brontë have been recently discussed by Stevie Davies in a lecture in Brussels (April 2009):

Emily, said Davies, sees the flow of the natural world, rather than a benign universe. Her nature has more in common with Tennyson’s, “Red in tooth and claw” than with a romantic idyll. Davies showed that for Emily nature is always both beautiful and destructive, just as the mother is always associated with death. Her earth is as much tomb as birthplace. (Emily Smith on Brussels Brontë Blog)

(3) CB to WSW, 4 February 1849

We already possess Tennyson's poems.

(4) Sidney Thompson Dobell (1824-1874). A poet with whom she later corresponded.
(5) Hoddinott, Alison, Perils of Biography: Charlotte Brontë and Tennyson, Brontë Studies, Volume 34, Number 1, March 2009 , p. 47

Categories: Victorian Era