The two voices. Dickens and Tennyson as
spokesmen of their age
Philip Collins
Few periods of four years have done so much
good to English literature as 1809-1812, when
were born Tennyson, Thackeray, Browning and
Dickens. All were active by the 1830s and all
had long careers, lasting from thirty to over
sixty years. Tennyson and Dickens dominated
poetry and fiction in the mid-century decades,
as eminently the leaders of their respective
forms. Dickens became the darling of the
nation with his first novel, Pickwick Papers
(1836-7), and was still at the top of the tree
when he died (1870). Tennyson created a stir
with his poems of 1830 and 1832, and
consolidated his position with the 1842
volumes. Justin McCarthy, arriving in London
from Ireland in 1852, found England
under the sway of a literary triumvirate:
Dickens, Thackeray, and Tennyson... No
one born in the younger generation can
easily understand from any illustration
that later years can give him, the
immensity of the popular homage which
Dickens then enjoyed.
"Homage" recurs in this remark by Anthony
Trollope in 1865: "Tennyson has received and
is receiving a homage more devoted than was
perhaps ever paid to a living writer". Many
other such remarks of the period could be
quoted, and the historian G.M. Young happily
sums up:
It was part of the felicity of the 1850s
to possess a literature that was at once
topical, contemporary, and classic; to
meet the immortals in the streets, and
to read them with added zest for the
encounter.
In those streets it was not only the
more literate who recognized and saluted
these masters: their appeal was relatively
classless. To walk with Dickens in London
was "a revelation", recalled his son Henry, "a
royal progress; people of all degrees and
classes taking off their hats and greeting
him as they passed." When walking through
the great manufacturing cities, he would
often be stopped by working men wanting to
shake his hand and thank him for his
writings. Tennyson was memorably
approached in the street by a drunken
vagrant, who said that if the Laureate would
shake his hand "I'm damned if ever I get
drunk again." In 1865 Tennyson published in
sixpenny serial parts a selection from his
poems dedicated to the Working Men of
England, and Queen Victoria expressed her
satisfaction that her Laureate's work had
thus become available to her poorer subjects.
At no other moment in our cultural history
could such an event have occurred, or
attracted the notice of the Monarch. (Later
