he became the first English poet, and the
last, to get a peerage for his services to
literature.) No wonder that Dickens and
Tennyson earned more than any previous
novelist or poet, both topping 10.000 a
year at a time when a young lawyer, say,
could marry and live respectably on 200.
They advertized their affluence in the
traditional English way by buying or building
country-houses: Tennyson had two, indeed.
Dickens's move to Gad's Hill Place in his
later years did not much increase or improve
his writings about the countryside. A
townsman by birth and upbringing, he has no
feel for the socio-economic life of villages,
and only a limited response to landscapes and
to nature. Here, as in many other respects,
Tennyson complements him. Country-born and
bred, and living most of his life in rural
areas, he is at home with natural phenomena
and with Nature conceptually, while he shares
the general weakness of nineteenth-century
English poetry in failing to deal much or
adequately with urban experience. Other
differences between the two were related to
their family backgrounds. Tennyson came of
professional and squirearchal stock, associated
with the very conservative county of
Lincolnshire; he went to Cambridge and was
an intellectual, well aware of the major
intellectual cross-currents of the day.
Dickens's family was precarious petit-
bourgeois\ his education was scrappy, and
though very intelligent he was never an
intellectual. The two men's responses to a
similar emotional crisis is characteristic. In
their mid-twenties, both suddenly lost a
beloved ypung friend (Mary Hogarth and
Arthur Hallam). In In Memoriam Tennyson
reflects on how current scientific theories
seem to be undermining traditional religious
convictions, including of course belief in the
immortality of the soul - a range of
speculation quite alien to Dickens, whose
presentation of the Mary-inspired death of
Little Nell is informed by simple traditional
The Porch at Gadshill
I am reminded of Ulysses' lines in
Tennyson's poem: he is leaving his son
Telemachus to rule Ithica while he follows
"knowledge like a sinking star/Beyond the
utmost bound of human thought." Tennyson
is the Ulysses-figure, Dickens is more akin
to Telemachus, "centred in the sphere of
common duties," with "the useful and the
good.... He works his work, I mine."
Dickens's is a much more secular, practical
and social mind (as indeed is common among
