Abstract
An 1860 article in the family periodical the Leisure Hour, describing a summer ramble around the homes and haunts of famous poets on England’s south coast, concluded by encouraging readers to journey to the secluded region of Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. ‘Alfred Tennyson has selected this spot for his place of rest, and has shown his fine taste in doing so’, the article’s author enthused, adding, ‘altogether, for sweep and variety of view … there is nothing at all equal to it in the Isle of Wight, albeit it is at present the most neglected corner; and, as such, I commend it to all tourists’.1
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Notes
J. W. Hill, Historical and Commercial Directory of the Isle of Wight (London: T. Danks, 1879), p. 239; Briddon’s Illustrated Handbook to the Isle of Wight, Containing Everything Necessary to the Tourist (Ryde: J. Briddon, 1862), p. 65.
George G. Napier, The Homes and Haunts of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate (Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons, 1892), p. 167.
Highlighting the inaccessibility of Freshwater, one traveller wrote, ‘The journey from London turns one’s thoughts towards eternity. There are expresses as far as Brockenhurst, but there the traveller for the Isle of Wight is shunted on to a branch line, and the rest of the distance is through a country of crabs and tortoises. The train takes a nap of fifteen minutes at Lymington Town, and then softly steals on a quarter of a mile to Lymington Pier, where ancient mariners, who only need pigtails to connect them with Trafalgar, transfer you and your baggage to a prehistoric boat, which creeps across the Solent on the tips of its toes and cautiously lands you at Yarmouth. Still you are far away from Freshwater, reckoning by the clock. Octogenarian porters smile at you and your “boxes”, and then have a good, long chat among themselves and with the boat’s crew. Later — never sooner — perhaps in the course of an hour, the coach is ready to start, but … when the coach starts it stops, and starts to stop again to deliver a cabbage here, a newspaper there … When you reach Freshwater the day is done and you feel that Switzerland might have been nearer’ (William H. Rideing, ‘Tennyson in the Isle of Wight’, North American Review, 165 (1897), 701–10 (p. 707), in Cornell University Library Making of America Collection <http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/m/moa/> [accessed 3 April 2013]).
See, for instance, the stories about tourists in ‘Mr. Tennyson’s Garibaldian Tree’, The London Review, 8 (1864), 406–07 (p. 406), in ProQuest British Periodicals <http://www.proquest.co.uk> [accessed 3 April 2013]; ‘Tennyson’s Home’, New Hampshire Statesman (Concord, NH), 14 June 1867, column G, in Gale 19th Century U.S. Newspapers <http://gale.cengage.co.uk> [accessed 24 February 2012]; V. C. Scott O’Connor, ‘Tennyson and his Friends at Freshwater’, The Century, 55 (1897), 240–68 (p. 250), in Cornell University Library Making of America Collection <http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/rn/moa/> [accessed 3 April 2013].
‘Tennyson’s Aversion to Being Stared At’, Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco, CA), 8 November 1873, column D, in Gale 19th Century U. S. Newspapers <http://gale.cengage.co.uk> [accessed 13 March 2012]. The story is also told by W. E. H. Lecky in Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: a Memoir by His Son, 2 vols (London: Macmillan & Co., 1897), II, 200–01.
For reports of Tennyson’s self-imposed exile, see, for instance, Geoffrey Quarles, ‘Tennyson at Home’, The Sunday Inter Ocean (Chicago, IL), 27 November 1887, p. 21, in Gale 19th Century U. S. Newspapers <http://gale.cengage.co.uk> [accessed 13 March 2012]; ‘Tennyson and Sightseers’, Bismarck Daily Tribune (Bismarck, ND), 13 December 1892, p. 4, in Gale 19th Century U. S. Newspapers <http://gale.cengage.co.uk> [accessed 13 March 2012]; Grant Allen, ‘Tennyson’s Homes at Aldworth and Farringford’, English Illustrated Magazine, 10 (1892), 147–56 (p. 153).
For reports of Tennyson’s self-imposed exile, see, for instance, Geoffrey Quarles, ‘Tennyson at Home’, The Sunday Inter Ocean (Chicago, IL), 27 November 1887, p. 21, in Gale 19th Century U. S. Newspapers <http://gale.cengage.co.uk> [accessed 13 March 2012]; ‘Tennyson and Sightseers’, Bismarck Daily Tribune (Bismarck, ND), 13 December 1892, p. 4, in Gale 19th Century U. S. Newspapers <http://gale.cengage.co.uk> [accessed 13 March 2012]; Grant Allen, ‘Tennyson’s Homes at Aldworth and Farringford’, English Illustrated Magazine, 10 (1892), 147–56 (p. 153).
Alexis Easley, Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), p. 21.
See, for instance, Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 90–127 [Abbotsford and Haworth];
Erin Hazard, ‘“A Realized Day-Dream”: Excursions to Nineteenth-Century Authors’ Homes’, Nineteenth Century Studies, 20 (2006), 13–34 [Abbotsford]; Alison Booth, ‘Author Country: Longfellow, the Brontës, and Anglophone Homes and Haunts’, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, Special Issue: Victorian Internationalisms, 48 (2007), DOI: 10.7202/017438ar [Haworth]; Erin Hazard, ‘The Author’s House: Abbotsford and Wayside’, in Literary Tourism, ed. by Watson, pp. 63–72; Ann Rigney, ‘Abbotsford: Dislocation and Cultural Remembrance’, in Writers’ Houses, ed. by Hendrix, pp. 75–92; and Christine Alexander, ‘Myth and Memory: Reading the Brontë Parsonage’, in Writers’ Houses, ed. by Hendrix, pp. 93–110.
F. G. Kitton, ‘Tennyson at Aldworth: a Reminiscence’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 278 (1895), 53–59 (p. 53).
‘Paul Pry’ considered it his duty to put to celebrities ‘a series of those inquiries which in the society interviewer’s case are considered pertinent, but in anybody else’s impertinent’ (‘Lions of the Day in their Dens’, Judy, 12 February 1890, p. 77, in Gale 19th Century UK Periodicals <http://gale.cengage.co.uk> [accessed 3 April 2013]). The fourth ‘Lion’ to be featured in Judy’s spoof series was Tennyson, who is pictured in an accompanying cartoon barricading himself behind a barrage of signs bearing slogans such as ‘Go Home!’ (‘Lions of the Day in their Dens’, Judy, 19 March 1890, p. 141, in Gale 19th Century UK Periodicals <http://gale.cengage.co.uk> [accessed 3 April 2013]). For a discussion of nineteenth-century attitudes to the celebrity interview, see Richard Salmon, ‘Signs of Intimacy: the Literary Celebrity in the “Age of Interviewing”’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 25 (1997), 159–77.
Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 16.
W. H. Davenport Adams, Nelson’s Handbook to the Isle of Wight (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1873), p. 148.
M. D. Conway, ‘South-Coast Saunterings in England: Saunter V — The Isle of Wight II’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 40 (1870), 523–42 (p. 541), in Cornell University Library Making of America Collection <http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/m/moa/> [accessed 4 April 2013]; Yates, Celebrities at Home, I (1877), 27. A similar point was made by the correspondent of the Truth in 1879: ‘Mr. Tennyson’s orders in reference to the admission of visitors are of the strictest kind. He has more than Wordsworth’s horror of tourists, and is equally inaccessible to his neighbours … But Mr. Tennyson can be much more than courteous with a sympathetic person; he can be the most charming of companions. Lounging in a comfortable arm-chair and smoking his pipe — he is a great smoker — the Laureate will talk on any and every subject, and equally well on all’ (‘Anecdotal Photographs VIII. — The Laureate’, Truth, 20 February 1879, pp. 234–35 (p. 234)).
James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 5.
Anne Thackeray Ritchie, ‘Alfred Tennyson’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 68 (1883), 21–41 (p. 38), in Cornell University Library Making of America Collection <http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/m/moa/> [accessed 4 April 2013].
I borrow this phrase from Nick Couldry’s essay on fan journeys to modern media locations (Nick Couldry, ‘On the Set of The Sopranos: “Inside” a Fan’s Construction of Nearness’, in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington (New York and London: New York University Press, 2007), pp. 139–48 (p. 146).
David Piper, The Image of the Poet: British Poets and their Portraits (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 166. In articles, too, Tennyson’s beard is iconified and fetishised; The World’s reverent reference to the ‘knightly growth fringing his lips’ (a quotation from Morte d’Arthur) casts the poet as an inherently noble figure in the Arthurian mould (Yates, Celebrities at Home, I (1877), 26).
Annie Fields, ‘Tennyson’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 86 (1893), 309–12 (p. 311), in Cornell University Library Making of America Collection <http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/rn/moa/> [accessed 4 April 2013].
In the case of smaller publications, the job of gleaning content might be performed by the general editor or a member of the reporting staff. For further information on the nineteenth-century culture of reprinting, see Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003)
and Ellen Gruber Garvey, ‘Scissorizing and Scrapbooks: Nineteenth-Century Reading, Remaking and Recirculating’, in New Media, 1740–1915, ed. by Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 207–27.
Anna Barton, Tennyson’s Name: Identity and Responsibility in the Poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 3.
Kathryn Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 52, 2–3.
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© 2013 Charlotte Boyce, Páraic Finnerty and Anne-Marie Millim
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Boyce, C. (2013). At Home with Tennyson: Virtual Literary Tourism and the Commodification of Celebrity in the Periodical Press. In: Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007940_2
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