About this item
In what will be the definitive biography of Alfred Lord Tennyson, an enthralling new study of the major poet of the Victorian era. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Queen Victoria's favorite poet, commanded a wider readership than any other of his time. His ascendancy was neither the triumph of pure genius nor an accident of history: he skillfully crafted his own career and his relationships with his audience. Fame and recognition came, lavishly and in abundance, but the hunger for more never left him. Resolving never to be anything except "a poet," he wore his hair long, smoked incessantly, and sported a cloak and wide-brimmed Spanish hat. The poet who wrote The Lady of Shalott and The Charge of the Light Brigade has become a permanent part of our culture, and this thoughtful new biography reveals him to be a fascinating paradigm of both the Romantic and Victorian ideals.
About the Author
John Batchelor was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, and at Cambridge (and at the University of New Brunswick, in Canada) . After the Cambridge Ph D he was a lecturer at Birmingham University, then a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and for the last phase of his career he was the Joseph Cowen Professor of English Literature at Newcastle University and is now an Emeritus Professor of that University. He has also been a visiting Professor at the University of South Florida, at the Jagellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and at Lancaster University's Ruskin Centre. Many of his books have been on academic themes (they include a literary history, The Edwardian Novelists, and short critical studies of Joseph Conrad, H.G.Wells and Virginia Woolf) but his first book was a biography of the writer and artist Mervyn Peake, and in his last four books (Joseph Conrad, John Ruskin, Lady Trevelyan and most recently Tennyson) he has returned to biography.
