Tennyson's Gift

A blazing dusty July afternoon at Freshwater Bay; and up at Dimbola Lodge, with a glorious loud to-do, the household of Mrs Julia Margaret Cameron is mostly out of doors, applying paint to the roses. They run around the garden in the sunshine, holding up skirts and aprons, and jostle on the paths. For reasons they dare not inquire, the red roses must be painted white. If anyone asked them to guess, they would probably say, ‘Because it's Wednesday?'

‘You're splashing me!'

‘Look out!'

‘We'll never get it done in time!'

‘What if she comes and we're not finished?'

‘It will be off with our heads!'

The smell of paint could probably stop an engine on the Great Western; so it is no surprise that it stops the inquisitive Reverend Dodgson, who happens to be sidling by the house at this moment, on his way up the lane from the sparkling afternoon sea. In fact the smell wafts so strongly through the tall briar hedge that it almost knocks his hat off. He pauses, tilts his head, and listens to the commotion with a faraway, satisfied smile. If you knew him better, you would recognize this unattractive expression. It is the smirk of a clever
dysfunctional thirty-two-year-old, middle-aged before his time, whose own singular insights and private jokes are his constant reliable source of intellectual delight.

‘O-O—Off with our heads?' he muses, and opens a small notebook produced with a parlour magician's flourish from an inside pocket.

‘Off with our h—heads?' He makes a neat note with a tiny pencil.

‘H-H-H—Extraordinary.'

It is a very warm day, but Dodgson's only thoughtful concession to holiday garb is a pale boater added to his clerical black. Perspiration gathers at his collar and in his armpits, but since this is just the sort of discomfort a real mid-Victorian gentleman is obliged to put up with, he refuses to take notice. Dodgson is a sober dresser always, and today he is on a mission of importance. The only thing that worries him is the straw hat – a larky addition which seemed a good idea at the time. He takes off the hat and studies it. He doesn't know what to do.

The trouble with the Poet Laureate – on whom Dodgson plans shortly to call – is judging the etiquette. Will the fashionable summer hat be a help or hindrance? Tennyson is well known for his testiness; he is a great sore-headed bear of a man who expects his full due as Top Poet. Yet at the same time he has extreme short sight and filthy clothes covered in dog hair and smelling of stale pipe tobacco. Does it matter, therefore, what a supplicant wears? Dodgson tucks the hat carefully under his arm, touches his neat hair with one hand, and then the other, and replaces the hat. A small curl on his large temple lies exactly as it should. There never was such a fastidious fellow as Dodgson when it comes to attire. It has often been remarked. When he touches his hair like that, he does it with such concentration that he seems to be checking he still has his head fixed on.

‘The Poet Laureate? Oh, very good, Dodo. Why not drop in on Her Majesty, too?' his Christ Church colleagues sniggered supportively, before he left Oxford for the Isle of Wight. Was this sarcasm? Did they think, perhaps, that he was making it up?

But yes, he is proud of it. The object of this smooth-faced stammering non-entity is indeed Alfred Tennyson, the greatest wordsmith in the land, the man who claims – with justice – to know the rhythmic value of every word in English except ‘scissors'. The man who had the extraordinary literary luck to write
In Memoriam
before Queen Victoria got bereaved and needed it. And if Dodgson is vain of the acquaintance (and inflates it), it is understandable. He forged this relation single-handed, Tennyson offering him no encouragement of any kind. A lesser man would have given up long since, and pushed off back to his Euclid.

But when Dodgson sets his heart on befriending a fellow of celebrity or talent, he forgives all bad-tempered rebuffs, however pointed those rebuffs might be.

‘Be off with you! What are you doing in my drawing room?' Christina Rossetti once demanded in Chelsea. (He soon overlooked this outburst of hot-blooded Latin temperament.)

‘What was your name again?' asked John Ruskin at Coniston, a clever remark worthy of the foremost critic of the age, at which Dodgson smiled indulgently.

‘I'll set the dog on you,' quipped Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Yes, between unequals in the social arena, the proverbial ‘nothing ventured' is quite correct, and Dodgson proves it tirelessly. ‘Nothing will come of nothing, speak again,' Dodgson is pleased to repeat to himself sometimes. It shows he knows Shakespeare as well as maths.

And now, this undaunted fellow carries under his arm a manuscript of a new book for children, about a girl called Alice. And he is bearing it like a great magical gift up the lane
to Farringford, Tennyson's house, two hundred yards further from the sea. He feels like a knight returning with the Holy Grail; positive that his king will be terrifically impressed.

‘You're not going to show Tennyson your
silly book?'
they said, those Oxford know-nothings. (Dodgson just can't stop remembering their jibes somehow.)

‘N—Not exactly,' he replied.

No, the idea was to reacquaint himself breezily with Tennyson (‘Dodgson? Is it you? Well met, my dear young fellow!'). And then, after some pleasant bread and butter on the lawn, a chat about the latest American poetry, and a kind offer of dinner and bed from Tennyson's saintly wife Emily, Dodgson would humbly ask permission
(ahem)
to dedicate his little book of nonsense to the laureate's sons. ‘To my very dear and very close friends Hallam and Lionel T,' was the modest idea, although of course every reader would guess at once the full name of these famous children, and be tremendously envious of the author's sky-high literary connections.

‘It's not much to ask,' Dodgson told his amazed collegiate cronies.

‘Want to bet?'

‘It's no more than asking a person to p—pose for a ph—ph'

‘Photograph?'

‘Yes.'

‘You mean it doesn't cost them anything, yet it profits you?'

‘W-W—Well, I w—wouldn't–.'

‘Best of luck,' they had laughed, interrupting.

‘I'll have you know, I am a gr—great friend of L—Lionel T-T—,' he began. But nobody was listening. They all knew Dodgson's Lionel Tennyson story, and thought it a lot less flattering than Dodgson did. Evidently the poet's glamorous ten-year-old younger son once agreed to correspond with Dodgson, but imposed an interesting condition: that he could first strike Dodgson's head with a croquet mallet.

‘More paint here!'

‘Slap it on, jump to it!'

Back in Freshwater, outside Mrs Cameron's house, Dodgson wonders what on earth is going on. After weeks of drought, the hedgerow is singed brown; it crackles as he presses his body close to hear. Perhaps Mrs Cameron has ordered her grass to be painted green, so that it will look fresh and emerald from an upstairs window. Knowing of his fellow photographer's boundless and misguided devotion to aesthetics, such lunatic set-dressing is certainly possible. Mrs Cameron is forever making extravagant gestures in the cause of Art and Friendship, both with capital letters. She is a bohemian (at the very word Dodgson shudders), with sisters of exceptional beauty and rich husbands. She hails from Calcutta, and burns incense. While Dodgson takes pictures only of gentlemen (and gentlemen's children), Mrs Cameron poses shop-boys and servants for her dreamy Pre-Raphaelite conceits. In short, in terms of exotic personality, she is quite off Dodgson's map. He has heard that she will sometimes run out of the house, Indian shawls trailing, stirring a cup of tea on its saucer! Out of doors! If in London, she will do this in the street! And sometimes, she gives away the photographs she takes, the act of a madwoman!

‘You will be visiting Mrs Cameron, sir?' the carter at Yarmouth asked Dodgson that morning, recognizing photographic gear as he loaded it aboard, straight from the mainland ferry.

‘Oh no,' replied Dodgson. He glanced around nervously, to check that this terrifying woman was not in sight; was not actually bearing down on him with a cup of tea and a spoon.

‘Not for w-w-w—'

The word refused to come.

‘Watering cans?' suggested the carter.

Dodgson shook his head, and made circular gestures with his hands.

‘Weather-vanes?'

A strangling noise came from Dodgson's throat. This was always happening.

‘Windmills?'

‘Worlds,' Dodgson managed, at last.

‘Very wise, sir,' said the carter, and said no more.

At Farringford, Emily Tennyson sorted her husband's post. Thin and beady-eyed in her shiny black dress, she had the look of a blackbird picking through worms. She spotted immediately the handwriting of Tennyson's most insistent anonymous detractor (known to the poet as ‘Yours in aversion') and swiftly tucked it into her pocket. Alfred was absurdly sensitive to criticism, and she had discovered that the secret of the quiet life was to let him believe what he wanted to believe – viz, that the world adored him without the faintest reservation or quibble. To this comfortable illusion of her husband's, in fact, she was steadily sacrificing her life.

Take ‘Yours in aversion'. Since this correspondent first wrote to him, he had become one of Tennyson's favourite self-referential stories (‘The skulking fellow actually signed himself
Yours in
aversion!'), but Alfred didn't know the half of it; he had no idea the skulker had continued to write. Emily had a large drawer of unopened ‘Yours in aversion' letters in her bureau upstairs. She would never let Alfred know of their existence – not while there was breath in her body, anyway. Afterwards, very well, he could find out then. It was only fitting that after her death he would discover the lengths to which she had gone in the wifely defence of his equanimity.

In general, however, the illusion that everybody loved Alfred Tennyson and found no fault in his poetry was quite easy to sustain day by day. It just meant narrowing one's circle of
friends to a small, scarcely visible dot, cancelling the literary reviews, and living in a neo-Gothic bunker in the farthest corner of the Isle of Wight. If people still insisted on visiting (and they did; it was astonishing), Emily's terrible hospitality soon put a stop to that. One of her favourite ruses was to make a note of all who fidgeted during the two-and-a-half-hour readings of Alfred's beloved
Maud,
and then deliberately tell them the wrong time for breakfast. When that gallant hero of the Risorgimento, Garibaldi, had visited Farringford in the spring, he obligingly planted a tree in the garden while the household sheltered indoors; but was he asked to stay for tea or dinner afterwards? He was not. Ironically in the circumstances, he was not offered so much as a biscuit.