After the death of the poet laureate in 1892, Lady Tennyson spent most of her time assisting her son Hallam (second Baron Tennyson) with his prodigious task of preparing the Tennyson Memoir. Together she and Hallam collected, sorted, and assembled an extraordinary mass of materials related in various ways to Tennyson's life and works. Lady Tennyson gathered and inspected all extant letters to the poet, and she worked at recovering every available letter written by Tennyson, as well as the many letters she herself had written during forty-two years of married life. And, in addition to selecting and arranging hundreds of letters and other items for her son's convenience, Lady Tennyson prepared her own final Journal. From immediately after her marriage in June 1850 until shortly before her nearly fatal collapse in the autumn of 1874, Emily Tennyson kept a running account of life in the Tennyson home. Though she by no means made an entry for every day during that period of twenty-four years, certainly there are no sizable gaps, and she was particularly scrupulous in noting every occurrence of the slightest moment involving her husband. The epitome Journal put together after the poet's death is the product of a laborious combining of the several initial journals to form a more convenient and usable whole. Since Emily compiled her final Journal soley as a source of information for Hallam, one would suppose that she deleted certain items of highly personal material preserved in her antecedent diaries. Nonetheless, her Journal, as we have it, is a treasure trove of information about the Tennysons' daily life, and it enables us to see both the laureate and the entire Tennyson family circle more clearly than ever before. -- Introduction.

This is the first book-length study of Tennyson's record of publication in Victorian periodicals. Despite Tennyson's supposed hostility to periodicals, Ledbetter shows that he made a career-long habit of contributing to them and in the process revealed not only his willingness to promote his career but also his status as a highly valued commodity. Tennyson published more than sixty poems in serial publications, from his debut as a Cambridge prize-winning poet with "Timbuctoo" in the Cambridge Chronicle and Journal to his last public composition as Poet Laureate with "The Death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale" in The Nineteenth Century. In addition, poems such as "The Charge of the Light Brigade" were shaped by his reading of newspapers. Ledbetter explores the ironies and tensions created by Tennyson's attitudes toward publishing in Victorian periodicals and the undeniable benefits to his career. She situates the poet in an interdependent commodity relationship with periodicals, viewing his individual poems as textual modules embedded in a page of meaning inscribed by the periodical's history, the poet's relationship with the periodical's readers, an image sharing the page whether or not related to the poem, and cultural contexts that create new meanings for Tennyson's work. Her book enriches not only our understanding of Tennyson's relationship to periodical culture but the textual implications of a poem's relationship with other texts on a periodical page and the meanings available to specific groups of readers targeted by individual periodicals.

A narrative poem about the death of Elaine, "the lily maid of Astolat".

This Companion to Victorian Poetry provides an introduction to many of the pressing issues that absorbed the attention of poets from the 1830s to the 1890s. It introduces readers to a range of topics - including historicism, patriotism, prosody, and religious belief. The thirteen specially-commissioned chapters offer insights into the works of well-known figures such as Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, and the writings of women poets - like Michael Field, Amy Levy and Augusta Webster - whose contribution to Victorian culture has in more recent years been acknowledged by modern scholars. Revealing the breadth of the Victorians' experiments with poetic form, this Companion also discloses the extent to which their writings addressed the prominent intellectual and social questions of the day. The volume, which will be of interest to scholars and students alike, features a detailed chronology of the Victorian period and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

This biography of the poet is “acute in its examination of Tennyson’s character and his importance for Victorian culture” (The Times Literary Supplement). Alfred Lord Tennyson, Queen Victoria’s favorite poet, commanded a wider readership than any other of his time. His ascendancy was neither the triumph of pure genius nor an accident of history: he skillfully crafted his own career and his relationships with his audience. Fame and recognition came, lavishly and in abundance, but the hunger for more never left him. Resolving never to be anything except “a poet,” he wore his hair long, smoked incessantly, and sported a cloak and wide-brimmed Spanish hat. Tennyson ranged widely in his poetry, turning his interests in geology, evolution, and Arthurian legend into verse, but much of his work relates to his personal life. The poet who wrote “The Lady of Shalott” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” has become a permanent part of our culture. This enjoyable and thoughtful new biography shows him as a Romantic as well as a Victorian, exploring both the poems and the pressures of his era, and the personal relationships that made the man.