“Glorious Insufficiencies”: Fulfilling Hallam’s Suspended Youth in Tennyson’s In Memoriam
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This essay examines Alfred Tennyson’s developmental narrative in In Memoriam (1850), a belatedly published requiem for the death of Arthur Hallam. Tennyson’s early poetry in 1830 and 1832, strongly advocated by his undergraduate friend Hallam, faced harsh criticism for its perceived immaturity. While disheartened by the hostile reception, Tennyson was also overwhelmed by Hallam’s untimely death in 1833. Tennyson’s return to poetry after a ten-year silence (1832-1842) reflects his intention to publicly claim his poetic maturation and to complete the intertwined, yet severed, growth narrative of Hallam. Hallam’s developmental arc, which I treat as a parallel growth narrative to the poet’s in the long elegy, has received less scholarly attention compared to the poet’s own overcoming of grief and religious doubt. This essay explores In Memoriam to demonstrate Tennyson’s specific attempts to fulfill Hallam’s suspended youth. By considering the reactions of Hallam’s friends and family to his early death, along with the mid-Victorian period’s gender ideals of active, civic manhood, I demonstrate that the elite male friendship between Tennyson and Hallam in Cambridge and their youthful enthusiasm for sensational poetry required reconfiguration in Tennyson’s later work. In In Memoriam, Tennyson employs various strategies to convince readers of Hallam’s manliness, emphasizing the friend’s masculine potential in the past and hypothesizing about his possible roles in the civic realm. Since Hallam’s presence is not sufficiently grounded in reality, Tennyson frames Hallam’s gentlemanliness as a spiritual antidote for certain youthful male groups that were socially problematized, including Chartists, Young Ireland, and Tractarians. However, Tennyson’s dual task of idealizing Hallam’s transcendence while substantiating his vocational competence ultimately leads to an abstraction of the deceased young man.
Abstract
This essay examines Alfred Tennyson’s developmental narrative in In Memoriam (1850), a belatedly published requiem for the death of Arthur Hallam. Tennyson’s early poetry in 1830 and 1832, strongly advocated by his undergraduate friend Hallam, faced harsh criticism for its perceived immaturity. While disheartened by the hostile reception, Tennyson was also overwhelmed by Hallam’s untimely death in 1833. Tennyson’s return to poetry after a ten-year silence (1832-1842) reflects his intention to publicly claim his poetic maturation and to complete the intertwined, yet severed, growth narrative of Hallam. Hallam’s developmental arc, which I treat as a parallel growth narrative to the poet’s in the long elegy, has received less scholarly attention compared to the poet’s own overcoming of grief and religious doubt. This essay explores In Memoriam to demonstrate Tennyson’s specific attempts to fulfill Hallam’s suspended youth. By considering the reactions of Hallam’s friends and family to his early death, along with the mid-Victorian period’s gender ideals of active, civic manhood, I demonstrate that the elite male friendship between Tennyson and Hallam in Cambridge and their youthful enthusiasm for sensational poetry required reconfiguration in Tennyson’s later work. In In Memoriam, Tennyson employs various strategies to convince readers of Hallam’s manliness, emphasizing the friend’s masculine potential in the past and hypothesizing about his possible roles in the civic realm. Since Hallam’s presence is not sufficiently grounded in reality, Tennyson frames Hallam’s gentlemanliness as a spiritual antidote for certain youthful male groups that were socially problematized, including Chartists, Young Ireland, and Tractarians. However, Tennyson’s dual task of idealizing Hallam’s transcendence while substantiating his vocational competence ultimately leads to an abstraction of the deceased young man.
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