Tennyson and His Sons by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79)

Tennyson and His Sons

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79)

c.1865

Albumen print

9 3/8 in. x 7 3/4 in. (237 mm x 199 mm)

Purchased 1984

Julia Cameron was a great admirer, close friend and for about fifteen years a neighbour of Tennyson, and shows him here with his sons Hallam, the future 2nd Baron Tennyson, Governor General of Australia and biographer (1852-1928), and Lionel, who died in early manhood after a visit to India (1854-1886). [Commentary continues below; click on the image to enlarge it, and mouse over the text for links.]

Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

When Tennyson took a house in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight in 1860, Cameron went down to see the place. At that time her husband and two of her five sons were away in Ceylon. She bought two cottages adjoining the poet's land, and had a tower built between them to make them into one establishment, which she called "Dimbola" after her husband's estates in Ceylon. It was here at "Dimbola" that she later took up photography, converting the coal-house into a dark-room.

Tennyson once described Cameron as "wonderful ... in her world-bearing benevolence" (qtd. in Thorn 291), and she was the only woman outside the family with whom he was on first-name terms (see Batchelor 261, Wilson 214). Indeed, he may have felt something more than affection for her (e.g., see Thorn 294, 349). At any rate, their closeness meant that she was able to take photographs of him alone or with his family in a variety of poses, some of them quite informal and intimate like this one.

Tennyson's importance for her photography cannot be overstated. Long before she even had her own camera, she had arranged for a young guest of hers, a medical student who had taken up amateur photography, to have a session with Hallam and Lionel. The interest that had been kindled many years before by her friendship with Sir John Herschel now received a further impetus: "It was from this young man that Julia Cameron caught the photography bug," writes Michael Thorn (303). Later on, "[a]s well as loving Tennyson as a dear neighbour, Mrs Cameron saw him as a 'bait' to to attract subjects for her portraiture" (Wilson 220). Tennyson also, and more directly, raised her profile by their collaboration on the illustrated edition of Idylls of the King, published in 1875, they year before she left for Ceylon. The results of this collaboration pleased them both, although Cameron seems to have felt (quite uncharacteristically) that she was not adequately recompensed for her part in what had been a major project. The final illustrations were chosen from as many as 245 photographs (see Roberts 69; Thorn 440).

Like any other relationship, theirs was not without its tensions. In particular, "[h]is general dissatisfaction with life infuriated her (Thorn 334). Even here, with his beloved sons beside him, his expression is profoundly melancholy. Lionel was the better-looking of the two boys, but he died in his early 30s after catching "jungle fever" in Assam, on the voyage home from Calcutta. It was Hallam who would achieve the greater success. — Jacqueline Banerjee

Related Material

Bibliography

Batchelor, John. Tennyson: To Strive, To Seek, To Find. London: Vintage, 2012.

Roberts, Pam. "Julia Margaret Cameron: A Triumph over Criticism." In The Portrait in Photography. Ed. Graham Clarke. London: Reaktion Books, 1992. 47-70.

Thorn, Michael. Tennyson. London: Little, Brown and Co., 1992.

Wilson, A. N. "Julia Margaret Cameron." In Eminent Victorians. London: BBC Books, 1989. 203-36.

Last modified 3 March 2015