TENNYSON AND HIS PUBLISHERS

Transcription

1 TENNYSON AND HIS PUBLISHERS

2 Frontispiece Alfred Tennyson. From a photograph (circa 1860) by James Mudd of Manchester

3 TENNYSON AND HIS PUBLISHERS June Steffensen Hagen

4 June Steffensen Hagen 1979 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1St edition All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1979 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in Delhi Dublin Hong Kong Johannesburg Lagos Melbourne New York Singapore Tokyo British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Hagen, June Steffensen Tennyson and his publishers I. Tennyson, Alfred, Baron Tennyson - Friends and associates 2. Authors and publishers - Great Britain I. Title 821 '.8 PR5583 ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement

5 In memory of my mother, Emma). Steffensen, and for Jim either sex alone Is half itself, and in true marriage lies Nor equal, nor unequal: each folfils Defect in each, and always thought in thought, Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow, The single pure and perfect animal, The two-celled heart beating, with one foil stroke, Life. Tennyson, The Princess, VII,

6 Contents List of Plates Preface Acknowledgments viii xi XIV I Introduction: Tennyson's Early Publishing (I827-3 I) I 2 Persuasive Friends: Moxon, Hallam, FitzGerald (I 8 p- 4I) 2I 3 Heyday for Publisher and Poet Laureate: Edward Moxon (I842- s8) s8 4 Troubled Years with Moxon & Co. (I8S8-68) IOO s Successors: Strahan, King, and Kegan Paul (I869-83) Final Choice: Alexander Macmillan (I884-92) IS8 Appendixes: 1 Tennyson Editions I86 II Deed of Agreement, I4 February I879, Between Alfred Tennyson and C. Kegan Paul & Co. I88 Notes Bibliography Index I94 2I4 22I vii

7 List of Plates Frontispiece: Alfred Tennyson (Between pp. 128 and 129) 1. Proof page of "Book-making" (later entitled "Poets and their Bibliographers"), showing Tennyson's extensive corrections, revisions and additions 2. Emily Tennyson's handwritten list of semi-yearly income from Idylls of the King, Enoch Arden, and Selections 3 Alfred Tennyson's handwritten letter (I7 April I867) to J. Bertrand Payne, partner in Moxon & Co. 4 "The Lady of Shalott" illustration by Dante Gabriel Rossetti for the Illustrated Edition of Tennyson's Poems (Moxon, I 8 s 7) s. Charles Kegan Paul, Tennyson's publisher from I879 to I883. Reproduced from F. A. Mumby, The House of Routledge, (London: Routledge, I934) 6. Alexander Macmillan, Tennyson's publisher from I 884 to I 892. Reproduced in C. L. Graves, Life and Letters of Alexander Macmillan (London: Macmillan, I9IO) 7. Alfred Tennyson 8. Emily Tennyson with sons Hallam and Lionel 9 Aldworth, Tennyson's home in Blackdown, Sussex IO. "Merlin and Vivien" illustration by Julia Margaret Cameron for Idylls of the King (Cabinet Edition, King, I 874). Reproduced by permission of the National Portrait Gallery I 1. Title-page to trial copy of The Holy Grail and Other Poems (Strahan, I 869) I2. The parting of Lancelot and Guinevere. "Guinevere" illustration by Gustav Dore for the folio edition of Idylls of the King (Moxon & Co., I867). Reproduced by permission of the Mansell Collection I3. Guinevere's last meeting with Arthur. "Guinevere" illustration V111

8 List of Plates ix by Gustav Dore for the folio edition of Idylls of the King (Moxon & Co., 1867). Reproduced by permission of the Mansell Collection The frontispiece and plates 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9 and II are from the Tennyson Research Centre Collection and are reproduced by courtesy of Lord Tennyson, the Tennyson Society and Lincolnshire Library Service.

9 Preface Always the artist before the merchant, Alfred Tennyson was often reluctant to put his poems into print. In fact, early in his career only the efforts of persuasive friends such as Arthur Hallam and Edward FitzGerald and the dedication of such a committed poetry publisher as Edward Moxon enabled the poems ever to see publication. It was only after the appearance in I 8 50 of In Memoriam, for which Moxon particularly pressed, that the forty-one-year-old Tennyson felt sure enough of his own work to make such decisions by himself. After this success, he seldom allowed the convictions of others to undermine his own good judgment in the practical details of publication. On the major occasion when Tennyson failed to heed his own instincts about format and yielded to his publisher's wishes, both poet and publisher soon regretted it. Later repercussions from this single miscalculation contributed heavily to Tennyson's breach with the Moxon firm. I speak here of the celebrated Illustrated Edition of Tennyson's Poems published by Edward Moxon in I 857. A decade of difficulty, centering first on this edition and then on others, followed Edward Moxon's death in I858. With Moxon himself Tennyson had a close friendship, which began when both men were just starting their respective careers and which continued into their respective heydays. They dined and smoked and laughed together; they went on holiday together in Switzerland; they knew and cared about each other's wives and children. Only at the end of his life, this time with Alexander Macmillan, who had been a family friend for a full thirty years before finally becoming the aging laureate's publisher, did Tennyson again go beyond the bounds of a cordial, business relationship. With various other publishers - J. and J. Jackson, Effingham Wilson, Alexander Strahan, Henry S. King, Charles Kegan Paul- his dealings were never primarily personal. Tennyson expected his own tastes to be honored in the printing, binding and advertising ofhis poems, with the publishers being given a free hand in matters of distribution, sales, and demands for new xi

10 xii Preface editions. A natural business acumen made Tennyson decide early in his career to pay all costs of publication himself, dividing profits in varying proportions with his publishers through the years. Such a system allowed him greater control and ultimately greater income than he might have had from the outright sale of manuscript, leaving it to the publisher to bear the costs of production. Later he switched to a combination of publishers' commissions on old books and authors' royalties on new books. All in all Tennyson approached the commercial side of his art with the shrewd good sense and fiscal diligence of a person fully intending to live from it. And if there is any doubt that his livelihood was a good one, consider the following. At his death Tennyson left two fine country houses, Farringford on the Isle of Wight and Aldworth in Sussex, and a personal estate of s7,206 (at that time roughly the equivalent of b78,6oo, with a buying power today of $2,090,ooo). 1 Tennyson's estate may be seen in clearer perspective when we realize that a fellow poet, Robert Browning, left only 16,774 Two publishers of the day, however, managed to leave considerably more: George Routledge, 94,000, and George Bentley, 85,846.2 Although the records have demonstrated to me that Tennyson's income was substantial and his judgment sound, I have learned from them that in publishing activities Tennyson behaved ambivalentlythat is, he both did and did not wish to be involved with the day-today minutiae of getting poetry into print and printed books to the public. He was notoriously careless with his own manuscripts and with what, ironically, no doubt, he termed his "fair copies," yet he tolerated no errors on the part of printers. He claimed to enjoy his isolation and privacy, yet at certain periods of his life he entered enthusiastically into what J. A. Sutherland calls the "conviviality [which] seems to have been the rule" of social contact between authors and publishers. 3 He gave all indication of not caring for money, yet he gained a reputation for driving a hard- albeit fairbargain. He impressed many as being unimpressed by the whim of public taste and refused to write the kinds of poems for which his critics clamored, yet he nevertheless wrote much poetry which met with enormous popularity and he took delight in the appellation "Poet of the People." In pointing to such contraries I do not mean to perpetuate the "modem myth of'the Two Tennysons'" so favored by twentiethcentury critics, for I agree with John D. Rosenberg's sensible observation that Tennyson "was remarkably of a piece from birth to

11 Preface death." 4 But by that I take Rosenberg to mean that Tennyson was consistent in his attitude towards himself and towards his art, and not that the poet was free from all conflicts between his aesthetic stance and his desire for the rewards offame. And,just as Tennyson was both creator and purveyor of literary art, so, too, were most of his publishers themselves men of letters as well as businessmen. When these roles came into conflict, either between poet and publisher or within the poet himself, Tennyson almost without exception made his choices on artistic rather than mercantile grounds. His publishers, on the other hand, preferred to go with the trade. Tennyson even needed to be reminded often that the concerns ofhis publishers were legitimate ones. In what could be a keynote to this book, Charles Kegan Paul chided Tennyson in 1874 about the poet's resistance to advertising: "While we endeavor as far as possible to put ourselves in your position, and look on these matters as you do, in which we have not always succeeded, I am sure you will forgive our asking you to remember that the success of literature has two sides, and that the trade element is an important one, nor if rightly considered is it, I think, a wholly prosaic one." 5 Xlll

12 Acknowledgments The publishers and I are grateful to the following for their assistance and for their permission to quote from published and unpublished material: Chadwyck-Healey Ltd for the extract from Brian Maidment's introduction to the microfilm "Archives ofkegan Paul, Trench, Triibner and Henry S. King, ;" Columbia University Press for the extracts from "Edward Moxon: Publisher of Poets" (1939) by H. G. Merriam; the Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc. for the extracts from Tennyson by Christopher Ricks, 1972 by the publishers; George Moore for a short quotation from his thesis "A Critical and Bibliographical Study of the Somersby Library of Dr. George Clayton Tennyson;" The Pierpont Morgan Library for permission to consult letters from Alfred Tennyson and Edward Moxon; and Catherine B. Stevenson for the quotation from her dissertation "Narrative Form and Point of View in The Princess, Maud and Idylls of the King." Most of the primary material for this study is in the Tennyson Research Centre, Lincoln, England. (Where there is no other source listed for a letter or account in my text or notes, it may be assumed to be from that collection.) I commend the Tennyson heirs for having this collection administered by the Lincolnshire County Library Service and housed where it is readily accessible to the public, at the Lincoln City Library; there the tradition of service to the public continues, making the work of visiting scholars most pleasant. In particular I thank Laurence Elvin, former Keeper of the Tennyson Collection, for his gracious help and friendship. Susan Gates, Senior Reference Librarian of Lincolnshire County Library, has confirmed by her energy and insight my suspicion that reference librarians are the kingpins of scholarship. While I worked in Lincoln hospitality was extended to my family and to myself by Hope Dyson and Rose Mcintosh. The late Sir Charles Tennyson, as he also did for so many others, encouraged me in my work and directed me specifically to his Notebooks. Sir Charles's unpublished typescript "Tennyson's Dealings with His Publishers" was called to xiv

13 Acknowledgments XV my attention by James 0. Hoge, who also sent me his own transcripts of relevant letters. William E. Buckler at New York University first sparked my interest in Tennyson. The Alumni Association of The King's College, Briarcliff Manor, New York, provided a grant from their Faculty Research Fund for the completion of this book, the manuscript of which was typed- at lightning speed- by my Brooklyn neighbor, Laurel A. Dietz. My aunt, Helen Adams Johnson, provided a most welcome quiet work area in her basement. I was buoyed up through the years of this project by the enthusiasm of my husband, James B. Hagen. To the above and tot. M. Farmiloe, editor at Macmillan Press, to Julia Brittain, editorial services controller and to Nancy Tuczek-Williams, picture researcher there, I extend my thanks. Finally, I have been blessed with generous colleagues, Lynne Sacher and Catherine Barnes Stevenson, who read through the entire manuscript and offered invaluable suggestions, and with a copyeditor par excellence, Nerissa vom Baur. What felicities the book has I owe to these three- Lynne, Cathy and Nerissa. What it lacks I can blame only on myself.