A Poet Never Sees a Ghost": Photography and Trance in Tennyson's Enoch Arden and Julia Margaret Cameron's Photography

Chapman, Alison 1970- ""A Poet Never Sees a Ghost": Photography and Trance in Tennyson's Enoch Arden and Julia Margaret Cameron's Photography"
Victorian Poetry - Volume 41, Number 1, Spring 2003, pp. 47-71
West Virginia University Press


Excerpt

TENNYSON'S VOLUME ENOCH ARDEN AND OTHER POEMS (1864), INITIALLY advertised as Idylls of the Hearth, was a publishing sensation, selling 17,000 copies on the day of publication and 60,000 before the year's end. 1 Nevertheless, little recent critical attention has been paid to the idyll that gives the volume its title. 2 Furthermore, while recent commentators have explored Julia Margaret Cameron's illustrations to many of Tennyson's poems, in particular Idylls of the King, her three photographs depicting characters from Enoch Arden have been even more overlooked than the poem itself. 3 The relation between the idyll and the photographs is, however, crucial to an understanding of the dynamic and gendered network of influence between poet and photographer. The publication of the volume, in mid August 1864, corresponds with the first few months of Cameron's experiments with her new camera, received as a gift in December 1863 from her daughter and son-in-law. Given her close friendship and lively correspondence with the Tennysons, Cameron would almost certainly have known of Enoch Arden during its period of gestation from Tennyson's receipt of Thomas Woolner's version of the narrative on November 11, 1861, up to its publication. 4 As an idyll, or a verbal picture, Enoch Arden is a poem about visuality and its uncanny limitations, responding in both a specific and tangential fashion to the conception of photography. Cameron's illustrations can be read, I argue, as a gendered response in turn to Tennyson's optical aesthetics, not only illuminating the poem's exploration of visibility, but also providing an alternative narrative which feminizes both vision and its photographic record.

Tennyson professed never to have seen a ghost. 5 After his troubled [End Page 47] father's death in March...