Tennyson’s Gift
From the bestselling author of ‘Eats Shoots & Leaves’, an unexpectedly moving, luminously wise and brilliantly funny novel about a Victorian Poet Laureate.In July 1864, a corner of the Isle of Wight is buzzing with literary and artistic creativity. A morose Tennyson is reciting 'Maud' to empty sofas; the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron is white-washing the roses for visual effect and the mismatched couple, actress Ellen Terry and painter G. F. Watts, are thrown into the company of the remarkable Lorenzo Fowler, the American phrenologist, and his daughter Jessie. Enter mathematician Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), known to Jessie as the 'fiendish pedagogue', and Lynne Truss's wonderfully imaginative cocktail of Victorian seriousness and riotous farce begins to take flight.
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LYNNE TRUSS
Tennyson’s Gift
Contents
Part One: HATS ON
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Part Two: Hats Off
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Part Three: Hats In The Air
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Appendix
About the Author
Praise
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
A blazing dusty July afternoon at Freshwater Bay; and up at Dimbola Lodge, with a glorious loud to-do, the household of Mrs Julia Margaret Cameron is mostly out of doors, applying paint to the roses. They run around the garden in the sunshine, holding up skirts and aprons, and jostle on the paths. For reasons they dare not inquire, the red roses must be painted white. If anyone asked them to guess, they would probably say, ‘Because it’s Wednesday?’
‘You’re splashing me!’
‘Look out!’
‘We’ll never get it done in time!’
‘What if she comes and we’re not finished?’
‘It will be off with our heads!’
The smell of paint could probably stop an engine on the Great Western; so it is no surprise that it stops the inquisitive Reverend Dodgson, who happens to be sidling by the house at this moment, on his way up the lane from the sparkling afternoon sea. In fact the smell wafts so strongly through the tall briar hedge that it almost knocks his hat off. He pauses, tilts his head, and listens to the commotion with a faraway, satisfied smile. If you knew him better, you would recognize this unattractive expression. It is the smirk of a clever dysfunctional thirty-two-year-old, middle-aged before his time, whose own singular insights and private jokes are his constant reliable source of intellectual delight.
‘O-O—Off with our heads?’ he muses, and opens a small notebook produced with a parlour magician’s flourish from an inside pocket.
‘Off with our h—heads?’ He makes a neat note with a tiny pencil.
‘H-H-H—Extraordinary.’
It is a very warm day, but Dodgson’s only thoughtful concession to holiday garb is a pale boater added to his clerical black. Perspiration gathers at his collar and in his armpits, but since this is just the sort of discomfort a real mid-Victorian gentleman is obliged to put up with, he refuses to take notice. Dodgson is a sober dresser always, and today he is on a mission of importance. The only thing that worries him is the straw hat – a larky addition which seemed a good idea at the time. He takes off the hat and studies it. He doesn’t know what to do.
The trouble with the Poet Laureate – on whom Dodgson plans shortly to call – is judging the etiquette. Will the fashionable summer hat be a help or hindrance? Tennyson is well known for his testiness; he is a great sore-headed bear of a man who expects his full due as Top Poet. Yet at the same time he has extreme short sight and filthy clothes covered in dog hair and smelling of stale pipe tobacco. Does it matter, therefore, what a supplicant wears? Dodgson tucks the hat carefully under his arm, touches his neat hair with one hand, and then the other, and replaces the hat. A small curl on his large temple lies exactly as it should. There never was such a fastidious fellow as Dodgson when it comes to attire. It has often been remarked. When he touches his hair like that, he does it with such concentration that he seems to be checking he still has his head fixed on.
‘The Poet Laureate? Oh, very good, Dodo. Why not drop in on Her Majesty, too?’ his Christ Church colleagues sniggered supportively, before he left Oxford for the Isle of Wight. Was this sarcasm? Did they think, perhaps, that he was making it up?
But yes, he is proud of it. The object of this smooth-faced stammering non-entity is indeed Alfred Tennyson, the greatest wordsmith in the land, the man who claims – with justice – to know the rhythmic value of every word in English except ‘scissors’. The man who had the extraordinary literary luck to write In Memoriam before Queen Victoria got bereaved and needed it. And if Dodgson is vain of the acquaintance (and inflates it), it is understandable. He forged this relation single-handed, Tennyson offering him no encouragement of any kind. A lesser man would have given up long since, and pushed off back to his Euclid.
But when Dodgson sets his heart on befriending a fellow of celebrity or talent, he forgives all bad-tempered rebuffs, however pointed those rebuffs might be.
‘Be off with you! What are you doing in my drawing room?’ Christina Rossetti once demanded in Chelsea. (He soon overlooked this outburst of hot-blooded Latin temperament.)
‘What was your name again?’ asked John Ruskin at Coniston, a clever remark worthy of the foremost critic of the age, at which Dodgson smiled indulgently.
‘I’ll set the dog on you,’ quipped Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Yes, between unequals in the social arena, the proverbial ‘nothing ventured’ is quite correct, and Dodgson proves it tirelessly. ‘Nothing will come of nothing, speak again,’ Dodgson is pleased to repeat to himself sometimes. It shows he knows Shakespeare as well as maths.
