An Imaginary England

Nation, Landscape and Literature, 1840–1920

Roger Ebbatson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351958844
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

In his highly theorised and original book, Roger Ebbatson traces the emergence of conceptions of England and Englishness from 1840 to 1920. His study concentrates on poetry and fiction by authors such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Richard Jefferies, Thomas Hardy, Q, Rupert Brooke and D.H. Lawrence, reading them as a body of work through which a series of problematic English identities are imaginatively constructed. Of particular concern is the way literary landscapes serve as signs not only of identity but also of difference. Ebbatson demonstrates how a sense of cultural rootedness is contested during the period by the experiences of those on the societal margins, whether sexual, national, social or racial, resulting in a feeling of homelessness even in the most self-consciously 'English' texts. In the face of gradual imperial and industrial decline, Ebbatson argues, foreign and colonial cultures played a crucial role in transforming Englishness from a stable body of values and experiences into a much more ambiguous concept in continuous conflict with factors on the geographical or psychological 'periphery'.

Chapter 1

Tennyson’s English Idylls: History, Narrative, Art

The claim that the English Idylls of the 1830s ‘attracted Tennyson’s mild bourgeois reading public’¹ needs to be balanced by a consideration of their moment of production and by a reading of the ‘political unconscious’ of these texts. The era following the Reform Bill of 1832 was one of unprecedented movements of social protest and bewilderment in the ensuing cycle of economic boom and slump. The majority of the populace suffered an absolute decline in living standards in the period up to 1850, and there was a complex process of class differentiation and re-affiliation going on throughout these two decades. Marion Shaw, in her examination of Tennyson at this juncture, characterises the 1830s as ‘a period of great emotional development and…of growth in social commitment’, a development mirrored in Tennyson’s move towards ‘reflective and narrative poetry’.² This is just, and is reflected in the varied achievement of the English Idylls. But it may also be observed that these poems ultimately serve a middle-class drive for power, as Bob Watts suggests, ‘by offering a vision of domestic happiness and prosperity based on the marginalisation of the disruptive forces of the working class’ through subscription to a doctrine of ‘inevitable progress’.³ Tennyson’s project in the Idylls is marked by that brand of radical conservatism which, in Isobel Armstrong’s account, ‘dreads change and sees its necessity’, generating a verse which is ‘both evasive and subversively bold’⁴ – an effect notably mirrored in what Armstrong characterises as the poems’ tendency ‘to disintegrate into dispersed descriptive detail’.⁵ Despite their domesticating trajectory, these idylls bear traces of difference and strangeness born out of the destabilised historical environment of the 1830s: in their gaps and absences they call up those issues of commodification, new technologies and transformations of the nation-state about which they are largely silent. The Idylls mobilise a deep figuration of Englishness through their access to a collective cultural unconscious, but paradoxically they resist recuperation to that new ideological and cultural formation. The Idylls are ‘English’ to the extent that they perform a narrativisation of nationhood that homogenises and contains social disruption by enabling the middle class to fulfil its historic mission as bearer of progress. The life of society is envisaged as a story, and narrative becomes a founding condition of social and national life, but the Idylls as domestic ‘pictures’ recurrently problematise narrative structure in ways that reflect the poet’s difficulty in representing an ‘imagined community’.

Literary geneaology would trace Tennyson’s English Idylls of the 1830s to their classical source in Theocritus. The Alexandrian poet sought significance in the mundane realities of the world around him, in a project which rejected or reinflected the preoccupations of Homeric epic. In Idyll Seven, for instance, Lycidas remarks, ‘See how, at every step you take, the very pebbles spin singing from your boots’. Theocritus is highly attentive to humble detail and quotidian reality, whilst eschewing large-scale dramas about the human condition, but he seeks to enliven such detail through the artistic refinement, sensibility and irony that characterise his work. In refracting the dominant literary tradition, Theocritus defines and identifies his own individual qualities by focusing upon the themes of erotic and poetic competition, themes that would also generate Tennyson’s domestic idylls. The dominant matters of Theocritean verse, neatly identified as ‘erotic frustration and verbal competition’,⁶ are carried through into Tennyson’s poetic imitations or variations of the 1830s, in a series of works in which the young poet submits these founding texts to a subtle process of intertextual reaccentuation. The thematic concerns of classical Greek bucolic poetry were allied to a fixed typology of poetic genre: poems were classified according to strict metrical criteria in a procedure which, to some extent, cancelled out the significance of individual authorship, and both Plato and Aristotle inveighed against a developing tendency towards catachresis, a mingling of genres and a contamination of metre which they saw as hallmarks of new poetic trends. The Alexandrian school of poets were notable practitioners of such generic contamination, mixing and combining different elements so as to render more problematic the definition of bucolic poetry. As David Halperin remarks in his study of Theocritus, ‘The very notion of genre may be deemed inappropriate and alien to the aesthetic intent of the poems’. Halperin particularly notices Theocritus’s ‘contamination of narrative poetry in recitative metre with lyric elements’,⁷ and this provides an apt definition of Tennyson’s own procedure: his idylls are characterised by a refusal of narrative impulse and by a recitative or verse representation of speech-acts interspersed with lyrical or song-like passages. Tennyson modifies the art of his classical predecessor, just as Theocritus had contravened the doctrine of the fixity of poetic genres in his dedication to the art of the pastoral lyric. But whilst Tennyson follows his admired model in his rejection of epic scale in favour of the domesticated depiction of social manners, he also swerves creatively away from his poetic precursor: the English Idylls are thus composed through a kind of interpretive misprision or reappropriation of a founding classical model.

‘The Gardener’s Daughter; or The Pictures’ (1833–4) was one of the earliest and subsequently most revised of Tennyson’s English Idylls, and a biographical sub-text may be detected in which Eustace and Juliet represent Arthur Hallam and Emily Tennyson, the speaker voices the thoughts of the poet, and the gardener’s daughter Rose embodies a lower-class version of Rosa Baring. Tennyson was aiming here for a Theocritean tale saturated with the colours he discerned in Titian’s painting, and he later remarked of the defining portrait of the heroine:

The centre of the poem, that passage describing the girl, must be full and rich. The poem is so, to a fault, especially the descriptions of nature, for the lover is an artist, but, this being so, the central picture must hold its place.⁸

In essence the poem is generated by, and conforms to, a pictorial structure that reflects the early-Victorian vogue for domestic genre painting, and the speaker’s opening gambit articulates this concentration of the idyll upon a focused moment or spot of time:

This morning is the morning of the day,

When I and Eustace from the city went

To see the Gardener’s Daughter;

(ll. 1–3)⁹

The text goes on to stress an aesthetic fellowship which prefigures the later project of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood:

Brothers in Art; a friendship so complete

Portioned in halves between us, that we grew

The fable of the city where we dwelt.

(ll. 4–6)

In his inventive reading of ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’, Herbert Tucker notes how this friendship is, in the texture of the poem, ‘merely the first of a series of systematic doublings’ in a structure whereby the friends ‘turn their sweethearts into works of art’.¹⁰ The stress upon love and the instantaneous moment, Tucker observes, is countered by the final admission of the facts of loss and death, when the speaker concedes that Rose is ‘alas!/ Now the most blessed memory of mine age’ (ll. 272–3) in a manoeuvre offering ‘a beautiful illusion designed to lie against a void’.¹¹

Tennyson situates the action of his poem within an ambiguous social space: ‘Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite/ Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love’(ll. 33–4), and it is this sense of a liminal border that haunts the text and its protagonist in his estranged and lyrical evocation of place:

News from the humming city comes to it

In sound of funeral or of marriage bells;

And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear

The windy clanging of the minster clock;

Although between it and the garden lies

A league of grass, washed by a slow broad stream,

That, stirred with languid pulses of the oar,

Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on,

Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge

Crowned with the minster-towers.

(ll. 35–44)

The collocation of funereal and marital bells offers a hint of the poem’s narrative trajectory, whilst the scenario as a whole pictures retreat within the dark leaves to counterbalance the inexorability of time marked by the minster clock and flowing stream. Such an invocation of an in-between landscape, neither city nor country, resonates with a number of contrasting significations: it suggests, for instance, that protected but threatened arena of the aesthetic in relation to a utilitarian society mobilised through exchange which was the subject of anxious discussion among the Cambridge Apostles, and which figures as an overriding concern in other poems of the period such as ‘The Palace of Art’ and ‘The Lady of Shalott’. As Kathy Psomiades has argued, ‘Culture, like woman, dwells in interiority, in enclosed spaces separated from the factual world’.¹² The passage may in particular be read off against the debatable role of the artist in early-Victorian England. This status-anxiety, as Paula Gillett has shown in her analysis of the Victorian art scene, was ‘a pervasive feature in a society that was continually creating new wealth and redefining criteria of gentility’. Her observations possess implications for a contextualised reading of ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’:

How could a painter overcome a sense of marginality in industrialising societies in which utilitarian values left little space (and sometimes even denied the need) for the experience of art? No wonder, then, that many artists took spiritual shelter in what one art historian has termed an ‘earthly paradise’.¹³

The figure of Rose, ‘hoarded in herself’ in the garden bower, becomes a figure for the painter, a member of a group that was not to be recognised as a profession until the 1860s, and the contradictions of the speaker’s status clearly mirror Tennyson’s own predicament as a poet starting out in the 1830s. The entanglement of class, social ambition and gender in the poem means that the conceptualisation of masculinity, and the potency of the male gaze, is problematised in ways which reveal its rhetorically constructed nature. ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’, that is to say, in reflecting Hallam’s identification of Tennyson as a poet of both sensation and reflection, exposes the challenge inherent in a construction of masculinity lying, like the garden, outside both the market and domestic space: significantly, a manuscript variant spoke of the narrator ‘Threading the fervent market-place alone’. Such a construction depends upon the image of female beauty as symbol of what Psomiades terms ‘the poet’s introspective separation from the public sphere’, and it enables ‘the possibility of simultaneously knowing and not knowing that art serves no function and yet is bought and sold’.¹⁴ The poem posits an exercise of power in the subjection of the female to the male gaze, but also suggests a revealing fragility in masculine identities which can only be secured through a competitive idealisation of the female initially embodied in Juliet:

… but Eustace painted her,

And said to me, she sitting with us then,

‘When will you paint like this?’ and I replied,

(My words were half in earnest, half in jest,)

‘Tis not your work, but Love’s.’

(ll. 20–24)

In his study of Victorian masculinities, James Adams suggestively remarks that, in early-Victorian discourses of maleness, ‘norms of manhood consistently work to resist the possibility that human identity is inevitably mediated and self-estranged’, but the trajectory of the poem endorses his proposal that the male ‘is as much a spectacle as the feminine’.¹⁵ The comradeship in art desiderated by Tennyson’s speaker reflects that characteristic Victorian preoccupation with male brotherhoods which, as Adams comments, ‘recognises that the monk or celibate priest marks one logical limit to manliness understood as self-control’,¹⁶ a limit registered here by the ecclesiastical setting of the action. Whilst the poem, with its sensuous evocations, appears to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Tennyson’s English Idylls: History, Narrative, Art
• Chapter 2: Enoch Arden’s Other Island
• Chapter 3: The Lonely Garden: The Sonnets of Charles Tennyson Turner
• Chapter 4: The Dewy Morn: Jefferies, Being and History
• Chapter 5: The Authorial Double: Hardy and Florence Henniker
• Chapter 6: ‘Trooped Apparitions’: Hardy and the Boer War
• Chapter 7: Poison Island: Quiller-Couch’s English Treasure
• Chapter 8: Rupert Brooke: The South Seas, Englishness and Modernity
• Chapter 9: The Imaginary England of Edward Thomas
• Chapter 10: ‘England, My England’: Lawrence, War and Nation
• Afterword
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index