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Adulation or Eggs

Susan Eilenberg: At home with the Carlyles, 7 October 2004

Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Pimlico, 560 pp., £15, February 2003, 0 7126 6634 6
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... come to know Giuseppe Mazzini, Geraldine Jewsbury, John Forster, F.D. Maurice, Thackeray, Dickens, Tennyson, the Brownings, George Lewes (though Jane refused to have Mary Ann Evans in the house), Lady Harriet Baring and William Bingham Baring, Charles and Erasmus Darwin, Margaret Fuller, Ruskin, Ellen Twisleton, Margaret Oliphant, Froude: practically ...

The Verity of Verity

Marilyn Butler, 1 August 1996

Essays in Appreciation 
by Christopher Ricks.
Oxford, 363 pp., £25, March 1996, 0 19 818344 5
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... the historian Clarendon, the philosopher Austin and the biographers Gaskell, Froude and Hallam Tennyson; and, throughout, the line of great dead critics – Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Trilling and Donald Davie. If, as I believe, this volume does add up to a book, in fact a considerable one, it is artfully shaped as a study of bereavement and ...

Smorgasbits

Ian Sansom: Jim Crace, 15 November 2001

The Devil's Larder 
by Jim Crace.
Viking, 194 pp., £12.99, September 2001, 0 670 88145 7
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... but these days his sentences sound forth as hoary pronouncements, less like Dickens and more like Alfred Lord Tennyson: speculative, morbid and poetic. Significantly, and most shockingly, there is no trace of bathos, that most common and undignified of modern effects, running beneath and below his lines. Indeed, in all the ...

How does he come to be mine?

Tim Parks: Dickens’s Children, 8 August 2013

Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens 
by Robert Gottlieb.
Farrar, Straus, 239 pp., £16.99, December 2012, 978 0 374 29880 7
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... then someone had to rush out and bring him back. The joke was repeated, and the five-year-old Alfred was sent with him; but when the boys had got used to being rescued, Dickens changed the rules, closed the gate after them, and hid in the garden with some of the older children. In Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, Robert ...

Behind the Veil

Richard Altick, 6 March 1986

The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England 1850-1914 
by Janet Oppenheim.
Cambridge, 503 pp., £25, March 1985, 0 521 26505 3
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... The need was pressing, and the answer promptly came, trailing clouds of ectoplasm. Tennyson’s In Memoriam, an instant best-seller in 1850, won him the laureateship largely because its long sequence of troubled, plaintive lyrics, written over a span of 17 years, told a story and described a situation that struck home to countless readers: the sudden death of a beloved friend and the questions it raised about the immortality of the soul and the possibility of spiritual communion now and physical reunion in the hereafter ...

Godmother of the Salmon

John Bayley, 9 July 1992

‘Rain-Charm for the Duchy’ and other Laureate Poems 
by Ted Hughes.
Faber, 64 pp., £12.99, June 1992, 0 571 16605 9
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... dull of ancient days’ in Pope’s Dunciad), Cibber, Whitehead, Warton, Pye, Southey, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Austin, Bridges, Masefield, Day-Lewis, Betjeman ... In 1921 E.K. Broadus wrote a book, The Laureateship. After the First War there must have been a need in the public mind for some good official stuff, like Spring-Rice’s ‘I vow to thee, my ...

Aubade before Breakfast

Tom Crewe: Balfour and the Souls, 31 March 2016

Balfour’s World: Aristocracy and Political Culture at the Fin de Siècle 
by Nancy Ellenberger.
Boydell, 414 pp., £30, September 2015, 978 1 78327 037 8
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... summer of 1883 Laura joined a private cruise to Copenhagen with an illustrious party that included Tennyson and Gladstone. Her tone – lively, candid, romantic – and her cheerful, provoking sympathy for ‘all that’s bad’ made her the toast of the trip. When she contemplated leaving early, Tennyson was ...

The Crystal Palace Experience

E.S. Turner: The Great Exhibition of 1851, 25 November 1999

The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display 
by Jeffrey Auerbach.
Yale, 280 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 300 08007 7
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... Officially this was The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. Its contents, as Tennyson explained, were ‘Brought from under every star,/Blown from over every main’, but it was much more than a display of husbandry, ‘enginery’ and ‘secrets of the sullen mine’. Subtly, and rather mysteriously, the nation was brainwashed into ...

Old Gravy

Mark Ford, 7 September 1995

Robert Graves: Life on the Edge 
by Miranda Seymour.
Doubleday, 524 pp., £20, July 1995, 0 385 40423 9
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Robert Graves and the White Goddess 
by Richard Perceval Graves.
Weidenfeld, 618 pp., £25, July 1995, 0 297 81534 2
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Robert Graves: His Life and Work 
by Martin Seymour-Smith.
Bloomsbury, 600 pp., £25, June 1995, 0 7475 2205 7
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Robert Graves: Collected Writings on Poetry 
edited by Paul O’Prey.
Carcanet, 560 pp., £35, June 1995, 1 85754 172 3
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Robert Graves: The Centenary Selected Poems 
edited by Patrick Quinn.
Carcanet, 160 pp., £15.95, April 1995, 9781857541267
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... of manhood: ‘It frightened mc so much,’ he confesses, ‘I could have killed her.’ Amy was Alfred Graves’s second wife. His first had died in 1886 leaving five motherless children, and Alfred seems to have felt anyone willing to undertake their upbringing would do. The marriage was loveless, though not particularly ...

A.E. Housman and Biography

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 22 November 1979

A.E. Housman 
by Richard Perceval Graves.
Routledge, 304 pp., £9.75
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... Graves applies a mild variety of the psychological technique favoured by so many biographers. ‘Alfred,’ he writes, ‘had been brought up by a weak father and a powerful mother, and it is reasonable to suppose that his unusually strong relationship with his mother had led to an early development of the more feminine aspects of his psychological make-up ...

Weeding in the Nude

Ange Mlinko: Edna St Vincent Millay, 26 May 2022

Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St Vincent Millay 
edited by Daniel Mark Epstein.
Yale, 390 pp., £28, March, 978 0 300 24568 4
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... enthusing over Beethoven and Chopin; friends and family read aloud to one another – Browning, Tennyson, Dickens – as others embroidered, or they’d take Sir Walter Scott on ‘tramps’ through the mountains. For entertainment, there were church socials, dance halls, Firemen’s Balls, the Glee Club, community players: ‘I am going to play Susie in ...

I gotta use words

Mark Ford: Eliot speaks in tongues, 11 August 2016

The Poems of T.S. Eliot: Volume I: Collected & Uncollected Poems 
edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue.
Faber, 1311 pp., £40, November 2015, 978 0 571 23870 5
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The Poems of T.S. Eliot: Volume II: Practical Cats & Further Verses 
edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue.
Faber, 667 pp., £40, November 2015, 978 0 571 23371 7
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... these seemingly sober, useful, self-deprecating sentences lurks the MacGuffin, to borrow Alfred Hitchcock’s term, that reaches its epic, mind-boggling climax in the publication, nearly a century on, of Faber’s two all-comprehending new tomes, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. The editors promise to ‘elucidate the difficulties’ of ...

Were you a tome?

Matthew Bevis: Edward Lear, 14 December 2017

Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense 
by Jenny Uglow.
Faber, 608 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 571 26954 9
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... back to England to sell his work and to sustain relationships that remained important to him (with Alfred and Emily Tennyson, and with the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt, whom he would call ‘daddy’). Lear’s travel journals and letters are full of observations that could have made it into nonsense ...

The Voice from the Hearth-Rug

Alan Ryan: The Cambridge Apostles, 28 October 1999

The Cambridge Apostles 1820-1914: Liberalism, Imagination and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life 
by W.C. Lubenow.
Cambridge, 458 pp., £35, October 1998, 0 521 57213 4
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... servant; less narrowly, he was not only an assistant private secretary to Joseph Chamberlain and Alfred Lyttelton, but an essential support to Winston Churchill. Nor ought we to overlook such figures as Sir John Sheppard, whose hard to characterise labours at King’s made that previously rather obscure Cambridge college the political and social force it has ...

Boomster and the Quack

Stefan Collini: How to Get on in the Literary World, 2 November 2006

Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 
by Philip Waller.
Oxford, 1181 pp., £85, April 2006, 0 19 820677 1
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... posthumously, selling an estimated 4.24 million copies in the 12 years after his death in 1870. Tennyson, the comparable grandee in poetry, naturally made much more modest sums for most of his long writing life, though by its final stages he was earning £10,000 a year from his writings in all forms. But these two were recognised as being in a class of ...

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