"The passion-flower at the gate": Tennyson's Poetry in the "Annals" of Julia Margaret Cameron

Abstract

"The passion-flower at the gate":Tennyson's Poetry in the "Annals" of Julia Margaret Cameron Michele Martinez (bio) Whereas the title "Annals of My Glass House" might suggest a multivolume history of an artist, the text is a twenty-seven-hundred-word essay by the celebrated Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. "Annals" was written in 1874 and published in Mrs. Cameron's Photography, an 1889 London exhibition catalog that accompanied the Camera Gallery's show.1 Since the text's republication in the July 1927 issue of the Photographic Journal, the essay has been reproduced numerous times for its pithy outline of Cameron's ten-year career as a photographer and the author's heartfelt statements about her sitters, which included members of her immediate and extended family, Britain's cultural and political elite, selected local island models, and at least one presumptuous fan. Although Cameron's portraits of Alfred Tennyson, her Freshwater neighbor, frequent model, and book illustration collaborator, have been the subject of much scholarship, no critic has commented on Cameron's use of quotations from Tennyson's poetry in the text. On the surface, "Annals" affirms the bond between Poetry and Photography by means of her friendship and collaboration with the poet laureate. More subtly, Cameron's quotations address the condescension of her critics by challenging them with an authoritative position that is voiced in Tennyson's dramatic lyrics. I argue that Cameron employs quotations from "The Gardener's Daughter," Maud, and "Locksley Hall" to exert an "imperialist visuality," which is expressed by poetic speakers whose gazes cast their subjects as English heroic or Orientalized types.2 Tennyson's male characters offer Cameron an aesthetic vision shaped by competition, conflict, and obsession, torrents of feeling that create a jarring dissonance in her narrative but flow seamlessly into a Carlylean form of "visualized authority in the Hero" and the photographer-critics' representations of photography as acts of domination and mastery (Mirzoeff, p. 13). [End Page 631] My argument builds on the work of Jeff Rosen, Joanne Lukitsh, and Lori Cavagnaro, who have powerfully demonstrated that Cameron's colonial origins and interests reflect a mode of seeing allied with defenders of English imperialism.3 Cameron's artistic collaborations with Tennyson emerged from a friendship based first in London and then transferred to the Isle of Wight, a prosperous English Channel island, where Queen Victoria and other wealthy English families owned vacation homes.4 In 1860, while Julia Margaret's husband, Charles Cameron, and their two eldest sons traveled to Ceylon to survey their family's coffee and rubber plantations, Julia Margaret purchased "two cottages on the adjacent property" to Tennyson's in the village of Freshwater.5 "Annals of My Glass-House" celebrates the friends, workers, and family gathered together by a benevolent matriarch over the years. However, quotations from Tennyson's poetry challenge the stable gendering of that voice and vision and register the camera's role as an agent of "coloniality."6 Marion Shaw, Robin Inboden, Matthew Reynolds, Emily A. Haddad, and Marion Sherwood have explored the poet laureate's mythic constructions of Englishness and the Orient, informed not by travel abroad but by literary mediation, especially imitations of and translations from Arabic, Sanskrit, and Persian literature.7 In a move that Edward Said would call an act of imaginative geography, lines from Tennyson's 1873 encomium "To the Queen" encompass his vision of an "ever-broadening England, and her throne / In our vast Orient" (ll. 30–31).8 Composed in 1874, "Annals" creates a domesticated version of imperial territoriality that arises from Cameron's occupation of "colonial spaces" within Little Holland House, London, and Dimbola Lodge, the Isle of Wight.9 As Cameron narrates her photographic career in these domiciles, Tennyson's poetry reproduces a desiring, possessive gaze toward her subjects that, in photographic discourse, reflects technical mastery but also midcentury imperial authority.10 Cameron's transformation of husbandry spaces into a photography studio and a darkroom and her enlistment of family, neighbors, and visitors as models provide ample grounds for recognizing maternal and domestic sentiment in "Annals."11 Cameron's gendered spectrum of feeling and emotion erupts and relates to a long history of...