The letters in this volume, virtually all of them personal letters to close friends and relatives, cover nearly fifty years of Emily Tennyson's life, from shortly before her marriage right up to the week of her death. These letters tell the reader much about the Tennysons' acquaintances and their guests at Farringford and Aldworth, many of them among the literary and political luminaries of the day. But more importantly they comment on Tennyson himself and on daily life in the Tennyson household. Written with no thought of posterity, Lady Tennyson's letters reveal the domestic Tennyson, just as he was, for the first time. They reveal crucial information about Tennyson's reading and his intellectual and spiritual preoccupations; and they will contribute in time to a better understanding of the complexities and subtleties of Tennyson's verse. Of course, these letters also provide a running account of the life of Emily Tennyson herself, and they give a valid impression of the sort of woman she really was. Her common sense and her erudition, her tolerance and her boundless kindness, her appreciation and command of music and other arts, her social and political awareness, her persuasive effect on Tennyson's poetry, and her shaping influence on the lives of the people who knew her best--all these aspects of Emily Tennyson are displayed in her correspondence.

The first volume of The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson showed the young manbecoming a poet and recorded the experiences--out of which so much of his poetrywas forged--that culminated in three personal triumphs: marriage, In Memoriam,and the Poet Laureateship. Volume IIreveals the gradual emergence of a new anddifferent Tennyson, moving confidentlyamong the great and famous--the intellectual, political, and artistic elite--yetremaining very much a son of Lincolnshire,whose childlike simplicity of manner strikesall who meet him. As a young man, he wasobliged to be paterfamilias of his father'sfamily; now he has a family of his own,with two sons reaching manhood, twohouses, and two lives, one in London andthe other at home. Through the letters we learn somethingabout his poetry (including "Maud," andThe Idylls of the King), much abouthis dealings with publishers, and evenmore about his travels--in Scotland,Wales, Cornwall, Norway, Switzerland,Auvergne, Brittany, the Pyrenees--and itis clear that all that he met became part ofhim and of his poetry. By the close of thisvolume he is one of the two or three mostfamous names in the English-speakingliterary world. The edition includes an abundance of letters to and about Tennyson as well as byhim, and its generous annotation has beencommended by reviewers for its range andwit.

Many years in preparation, this first volume of Lang and Shannon's edition of Tennyson's correspondence lives up to all expectations. In a comprehensive introduction the editors present not only the biographical background, with vivid portrayals of the dramatis personae, but also the story of the manuscripts, the ones that were destroyed and the many that luckily survived. The Tennyson who emerges in this volume is not a serene or Olympian figure. He is moody, impulsive, often reckless, now full of camaraderie, now plagued by anxiety or resentment, deeply attached to close friends and family and uninterested in the social scene. His early life is unenviable: we see glimpses of the embittered, drunken father, the distraught mother, the swarm of siblings in the rectory at Somersby in Lincolnshire. The happiest period is the three years at Cambridge, terminated when his father dies, and the two years thereafter, with Arthur Hallam engaged to his sister and a frequent visitor at their house. The shock of Hallam's death in 1833, coupled with the savage attack on Tennyson's poems in the Quarterly Review, is followed by depression, bouts of alcoholism, financial problems, and gradually, in the 1840s, increasing recognition of his work. The year 1850 sees the publication of In Memoriam, his long-deferred marriage at age forty to Emily Seliwood, and his acceptance, not without misgivings, of the post of Poet Laureate. The editors have garnered and selected a large number of letters to and about Tennyson which supplement his own letters, fill in lacunae in the narrative, and reveal him to us as his friends and contemporaries saw him.

First published in 1982, this book is inspired the ideas generated by Eric Hobsbawm, and has taken shape around a unifying preoccupation with the symbolic order and its relationship to political and religious belief. It explores some of the oldest question in Marxist historiography, for example the relationship of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, art and social life, and also some of the newest and most problematic questions, such as the relationship of dreams and fantasy to political action, or of past and present — historical consciousness — to the making of ideology. The essays, which range widely over period and place, are intended to break new ground and take on difficult questions.

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.