Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I discuss the Victorian period in general, especially considered as an object of study and as a cultural moment between Romanticism and modernism; the life of Tennyson, including his painful childhood, his time in the secret society of Cambridge Apostles, his relationship with his beloved Arthur Hallam, his struggle with the legacy of Romanticism, his emergence as the voice of his nation, and his afterlife as modernist whipping boy; the short-lived Hallam’s claim that Tennyson carried on the legacy of Keats and Shelley as author of a sensuous but marginal poetry; Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott” and its feminized medievalist aestheticism in relation both to the Pre-Raphaelite avant-garde of poets and painters and the thundering “violent Tory” art criticism of John Ruskin; Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” and “Ulysses” as attempt to create a masculinist, futurist heroism to escape Romantic marginality; and Tennyson’s In Memoriam as an expression of Victorian anxieties over science and religion and an expression of Victorian faith in order beyond chaos. The first 20 minutes are free; please offer a paid subscription for the rest—and please enjoy! The slideshow for the lecture is below the paywall.
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