Burying Tennyson: The Victorian Laureate immortalized

Abstract

Despite a strong cultural conviction that genius transcended death, the 19 th century British public was intensely preoccupied with the dead bodies and remains of famous poets such as Burns, Byron and Wordsworth, since they constituted a direct physical link to immaterial genius. This fascination was sustained by conventional metaphorization of the poets' works as an immortal textual body. By the 1890s confidence in poetic continuity was unsettled, leading to compensatory attempts to represent the volatile corpse as a recuperative icon of Poetry. When the Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson died in 1892, his love of privacy was defeated and ironized by unprecedented press and public curiosity about his death, burial and grave. This paper argues that, although Tennyson's body was never on public display, its image circulated widely through written and graphic representations of the idealized moonlit deathbed, which 'immortalized' his decaying corpse. The discussion concentrates on newspaper and eye-witness accounts of the funeral at Westminster Abbey on 12 October 1892, which construct the event in spectacular and symbolic terms. The paper concludes that fin de siècle anxiety determined the presentation of Tennyson's body to the people materially and rhetorically.