Alfred, Lord Tennyson

1 portrait of Alfred, Lord Tennyson

© National Portrait Gallery, London

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Alfred, Lord Tennyson

by Julia Margaret Cameron
albumen print, May 1865
10 1/4in. x 7 7/8in. (255 mm x 200 mm)
Given by Royal Historical Society, 1952
Photographs Collection
NPG x18023

Sitterback to top

Artistback to top

  • Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), Pioneer photographer. Artist or producer associated with 119 portraits, Sitter in 9 portraits.

Linked publicationsback to top

  • Truss, Lynn, Tennyson and his Circle, 2015, p. 36
  • Various contributors, National Portrait Gallery: A Portrait of Britain, 2014, p. 152 Read entry

    Alfred Tennyson was the most popular poet of the Victorian age, renowned for his expressions of deep sentiment, as in In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) in remembrance of his best friend, Arthur Hallam. He was also acclaimed for his classical and Arthurian narratives, such as ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Morte d’Arthur’ (both 1842). The longest-serving Poet Laureate ever, he was held in such esteem by Queen Victoria that the post itself was considered for abolition upon his death. Despite his great fame and ambition, Tennyson was a socially awkward, private man who was prone to depression, acutely sensitive to critics and hostile to the imposition of celebrity.

    Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79) took up photography in her late forties and was one of the first, and remains one of the greatest, portrait photographers. As a close friend and neighbour of Tennyson on the Isle of Wight, Cameron photographed him often. This profile portrait of the poet, clothed in dark robes and in pensive reverie, his attribute of a book in hand, illustrates Cameron’s mid-Victorian fascination for High Renaissance art and the Romantic medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites. Tennyson wrote under the portrait, ‘I prefer the Dirty Monk to the others of me.’

Events of 1865back to top

Current affairs

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson is the first female to be awarded a doctor's licence. She is also involved in collecting signatures for the Manchester Suffrage Committee, the first suffrage organisation, formed this year. John Stuart Mill was also elected to parliament this year on the platform of women's suffrage.
Palmerston dies in October, and is replaced as leader of the Liberal government by his Foreign Secretary, Lord Russell.

Art and science

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is published, inspired by Carroll's relationship (as Oxford don Charles Dodgson) with his friend Henry George Liddell's daughter Alice.
Matthew Arnold publishes the first series of Essays in Criticism, a defining text in the development of English literature as an academic discipline.

International

In the American civil war, Robert E. Lee surrenders the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant, leading to the surrender of the Confederacy's remaining field armies. A few days later, US President Abraham Lincoln is shot dead by Confederate sympathiser John Wilkes Booth. Later this year slavery is officially abolished after years of fierce campaigning. In response, the first branch of the Ku Klux Klan is founded on Christmas Eve.

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