Tennyson on the Island
1853-1892
Context: The Victorian age valued its poets as public figures and moral guides, and Tennyson, as Poet Laureate for 42 years, occupied a position of unique cultural authority.
Alfred Tennyson, the most celebrated English poet of the Victorian age, made the Isle of Wight his home for nearly four decades, and his presence shaped the island's cultural identity in ways that endure to this day. He moved to Farringford, a house near Freshwater at the western end of the island, in 1853, and although he later acquired a second home at Aldworth in Surrey, Farringford remained his principal residence until his death in 1892. The high chalk down above the house, where he walked almost daily, now bears his name: Tennyson Down.
Tennyson was already famous when he arrived on the island. He had been appointed Poet Laureate in 1850, following the death of William Wordsworth, and his poem In Memoriam, published the same year, had established him as the voice of an era. But it was at Farringford that he wrote some of his greatest and most popular works: Maud, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Idylls of the King, and Enoch Arden were all composed wholly or partly on the island. The landscape of West Wight, with its dramatic cliffs, rolling downs, and ever-present sea, informed his poetry in ways both direct and subtle.
Farringford itself was a modest Gothic house when Tennyson took the lease, and he gradually made it his own. The park, with its cedars and ilex trees, provided shelter from the wind, and the poet could walk from his door to the summit of the down in half an hour. He was a formidable walker, tall and gaunt, wrapped in a cloak and wide-brimmed hat, and the sight of him striding along the cliff path became one of the fixtures of Freshwater life. The local population treated him with a mixture of reverence and familiarity that he seems to have appreciated.
Tennyson's presence attracted a remarkable circle of visitors. Charles Darwin came, as did Prince Albert, William Gladstone, Garibaldi, Edward Lear, and Lewis Carroll. Julia Margaret Cameron, the photographer, moved to Freshwater specifically to be near the poet and produced some of the most famous photographic portraits of the Victorian age in her studio at Dimbola Lodge, just down the lane from Farringford. The Freshwater circle, as it came to be known, was one of the most distinguished intellectual and artistic gatherings in nineteenth-century England.
The poet's relationship with the island was not without frustration. As his fame grew, so did the number of uninvited visitors who came to gawp at the great man. Tennyson was a private person, and the loss of solitude troubled him. It was partly to escape this attention that he built Aldworth in the 1860s, retreating to the Surrey hills during the summer months when the island was at its busiest.
Tennyson died at Aldworth on 6 October 1892 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, as befitted his status as the foremost poet of his generation. But the Isle of Wight claimed him as its own. The monument on Tennyson Down, a granite cross erected by public subscription in 1897, stands as one of the island's most prominent landmarks. Farringford, after a period of use as a hotel, has been restored and opened to visitors. The coastal path along the down that bears his name is one of the finest walks in southern England.
Tennyson's decades on the Isle of Wight gave the island a literary and cultural prestige that it had not previously enjoyed and has not since matched. West Wight, in particular, owes much of its romantic reputation to the poet who made it his home.
Impact
Established the Isle of Wight, and Freshwater in particular, as a centre of Victorian intellectual and artistic life, attracting a distinguished circle that included photographers, scientists, and statesmen.