Victorian Pearl: Tennysonian Elegy and the Return of a Medieval Poem

Abstract

In 1904, medievalist critic William Henry Schofield declared that the fourteenth-century poem Pearl was not an elegy, overturning an assumption that had persisted since the poem's first publication in 1864. This article focuses on the question of Pearl's genre and its relation to the Victorian literary culture into which the poem was reborn. I argue that Victorian critics did not read Pearl simply as an elegy, but as a Victorian elegy, a genre with a very particular cluster of thematic and formal attributes – and, indeed, a heightened sensitivity to the fit between theme and form. Although Pearl is five centuries older than In Memoriam, its long latency as a manuscript and its subsequent revival fourteen years into the In Memoriam craze created the impression that the medieval poem followed and was somehow derived from the Victorian one. This article proposes that Victorian models of form and genre were powerful enough to work backward. Pearl's late-century reception demonstrates how thoroughly In Memoriam defined Victorian poetics not only by instigating new prosodic fashions, but also by shaping the reading practices with which Victorians approached their literary historical past.