Ripping Yarns

John Sutherland

• Tennyson by Michael Thorn
  Little, Brown, 566 pp, £18.99, October 1992, ISBN 0 316 90299 3
• Tennyson by Peter Levi
  Macmillan, 370 pp, £20.00, March 1993, ISBN 0 333 52205 2

Victorian biography has recently come in clusters. In the last decade there have been four authoritative biographies of Trollope; two of Dickens; two of Wilkie Collins; three of Stevenson (one down, two to come); and – with the present centennial haul – three of Tennyson. Given the huge expenditure of scholarly energy modern biography demands it would be rational to redistribute some of it. One would like more studies such as Claire Tomalin’s of Ellen Ternan, or Rosemary Ashton’s of G.H. Lewes, which illumine by side-light. But just as publishers have found it pays to have five separate editions of Barchester Towers in print, but no Meredith or Lytton, so it pays to commission the same big familiar lives time and again.