Morton, John ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9089-7450 (2015) Review of 'Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson's Circle', by Charlotte Boyce, Paraic Finnerty, and Anne-Marie Millim. Victorian Studies, 57 (3). pp. 547-549. ISSN 0042-5222 (Print), 1527-2052 (Online)

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Abstract

Though there is no danger of Alfred Tennyson following William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, or Jane Austen onto British banknotes any time soon—the closest he has gotten is a set of stamps commemorating the centenary of his death in 1992—he nonetheless remains something of a Victorian celebrity in the early twenty-first century. Lines from “Ulysses” (1842) were featured on a wall of the London Olympic Village in 2012, a major biography by John Batchelor was published in the same year, and in the last twenty years he has been a central presence in two neo-Victorian novels: Lynne Truss’s Tennyson’s Gift (1996) and Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze (2009). He has hardly disappeared from view. Nonetheless, his celebrity has certainly declined, both in literary and more general terms; shortly after his death, Tennyson was bracketed with “Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, [and] Milton” by F. V. N. Painter in the Homiletic Review, and while his state funeral was a genuinely public event in 1892, today his centrality within the British literary canon is subject to question (Homiletic Review 25 [1893], 202).

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Papers and Responses from the Twelfth Annual Conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association (Spring 2015)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Tennyson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Celebrity, Isle of Wight
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > School of Humanities & Social Sciences (HSS)
Related URLs:	Organisation
Last Modified:	02 May 2019 09:09
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/13955

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