‘Ever-broadening England’: Tennyson and Empire

Abstract

The years 1815 to 1902 were ‘pre-eminently Britain’s Imperial century’.1 By 1902 the British Empire had expanded to cover a fifth of the world’s land surface and exercise authority over a quarter of its population and during the century English national identity had been increasingly defined in opposition to the Empire’s Others. Tennyson’s life spanned almost eight decades of the imperial century and questions of empire recur throughout his work. Contributions to Poems by Two Brothers (1827) narrate the destruction of ancient empires and the speaker of Timbuctoo (1829) gazes on the fabled city’s ‘Imperial height’ (162). Poems of the early 1830s reflect an ambivalent attitude towards more recent empires, particularly the British Empire administered from England’s capital city. (As Robert MacDonald remarks, ‘[t]he Empire was the colonised world overseas, but its centre and reason for being was London.’2) By contrast, in the later poems of monarchy Laureate Tennyson attacks the Empire’s critics and vehemently defends ‘ever-broadening England, and her throne | In our vast Orient’ (To the Queen’, 1873, 30–1) thus exemplifying, in more than one sense, Francis Palgrave’s comment that Tennyson came to occupy an ‘imperial position in Poetry’.3