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Tennyson and “The Lover's Tale”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Tennyson's “hundreds and hundreds of lines in the regular Popeian metre,” written when he was ten or eleven, and “the six thousand lines à la Walter Scott,” written “at about twelve,” have passed into oblivion. “The Devil and the Lady,” an unfinished blank verse drama written when Tennyson was fourteen, was not published until 1931. “The Lover's Tale” is the first of his early long poems to be published in his lifetime. That this product of Tennyson's youth was so long cherished in obscurity and ultimately published with affectionate apology affords grounds for speculation regarding the relationship of the writer and the written.
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- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967
References
1 Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (New York, 1898), i, 11–12. (Later references to this two-volume work will be shortened to Memoir with volume and page.)
2 Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (New York, 1949), pp. 38–44.
3 The most complete bibliographical account of “The Lover's Tale” is that given by T. J. Wise in A Bibliography of the Writings of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 2 vols., London, 1908; Wise's study is modified and supplemented by John Carter's and Graham Pollard's An Inquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, London, 1934, and W. D. Paden's Tennyson's “The Lover's Tale,” R. H. Shepherd, and T. J. Wise, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the Univ. of Virginia, Vol. xviii, 1965.
4 The Tennyson Papers purchased from Sir Charles Tennyson, received 1947–54, described by Edgar F. Shannon and William H. Bond in Literary Manuscripts of Alfred Tennyson in the Harvard College Library, Harvard Library Bulletin, x, No. 2, Spring 1956: Notebooks 3, 4, 8, 12, 42 (MS. Eng. 952); Loose Papers, 132–136 (bMS. Eng. 952.1). I wish to express my gratitude to the authorities of Harvard College Library and especially to Mr. W. H. Bond, Houghton Library, for permission to examine and quote MS materials and the Harvard copy of the 1833 edition of “The Lover's Tale.”
5 Emily Tennyson's Journal, quoted in Memoir, ii, 50.
6 Houghton Library, bMS. Eng. 952.1, Loose Papers, No. 134.
7 The 1868 printing was limited to 2 copies. See Wise, I, 53. I am grateful to the authorities of the Miriam Lutcher Stark Library, University of Texas, for permission to examine a Xerox copy of the 1868 printing.
8 For the 1879 version of “The Lover's Tale” I have used that printed in The Complete Poetical Works of Alfred Tennyson, ed. W. J. Rolfe, Cambridge Ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1898), pp. 281–301.
9 XVI (August 1879), 221–223. See also Sir Charles Tennyson's “The Dream in Tennyson's Poetry,” Virginia Quarterly Review, XL (Spring 1964), 234. “The hero has two delirious dreams, very powerfully described, which foreshadow the tragic development of the story.”
10 Bibliography, i, 54.
11 Alfred Tennyson, p. 143.
12 Benares, India, Uttara Press, 1936, p. 14.
13 London, 1957, p. 437.
14 Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, 2nd Ser., xxiv, Pt. 1 (London, 1903), 61–79.
15 Letter quoted in Charles Tennyson's Alfred Tennyson, p. 129.
16 Alfred Tennyson, p. 129; Wise, i, 27.
17 Preface to The Lover's Tale (London: Edward Moxon, 1833), p. 3 (Harvard copy). Also in Tennyson's Suppressed Poems, ed. J. C. Thomson (New York, 1903), p. 140.
18 Paull F. Baum, Tennyson Sixty Years After (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1948), p. 319.
19 Alfred Tennyson, p. 101.
20 Conversation reported by Frederick Locker-Lampson, Memoir, ii, 73.
21 Alfred Tennyson, p. 52.
22 Quoted in Jerome Hamilton Buckley's Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 24. The whole poem appears in Unpublished Early Poems, ed. Sir Charles Tennyson (New York, 1932), pp. 42–45, and contains five lines (1879, i, 345–349) which were incorporated in the 1833 printing of “The Lover's Tale.”
23 Tennyson in Egypt: A Study of the Imagery in His Earlier Work (Lawrence, Kan., 1942), pp. 88–89, 91.
24 Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 55.
25 Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet, p. 23.
26 T. R. Lounsbury, The Life and Times of Tennyson (New Haven, 1915), pp. 30–36.
27 Alfred Tennyson, pp. 80–81.
28 John C. Walters, In Tennyson Land (London, 1890), pp. 78–80, 86–87.
29 Alfred Tennyson, pp. 35–36. See also Buckley, p. 20.
30 H. D. Rawnsley, Memories of the Tennysons (Glasgow, 1900), p. 65.
31 Alfred Tennyson, p. 194.
32 See Charles Tennyson's Alfred Tennyson, pp. 162–163; and “Alfred Tennyson at Somersby,” The Tennyson Chronicle, x (August 1959), 9. See also R. W. Rader's “Tennyson and Rosa Baring,” Victorian Studies, v (March 1962), 224–260; and Tennyson's Maud: The Biographical Genesis (Berkeley, Calif., 1963).
33 Alfred Tennyson, p. 163.
34 The Academy, xv (7 June 1879), 489.
35 Memoir, ii, 285, 498.
36 W. D. Paden, Tennyson in Egypt, p. 120, n.; and Rader, Tennyson's Maud: The Biographical Genesis, pp. 24–25.
37 Alfred Tennyson, p. 66.
38 Alfred Tennyson, p. 194.
39 In “Part i, Boyhood” of Unpublished Early Poems appears “In Deep and Solemn Dreams” in which the dream-visions bear considerable similarity to those in “The Lover's Tale.”
40 Charles Tennyson, “The Dream in Tennyson's Poetry,” Virginia Quarterly Review, xl (Spring 1964), 248.
41 A Bibliography of Tennyson, i, 30–75.
42 J. F. A. Pyre, The Formation of Tennyson's Style, Univ. of Wisconsin Stud. in Lang. and Lit., No. 12 (Madison, 1921), p. 82.