Tennyson’s Gift. Lynne Truss

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Part One: HATS ON

      One

      Two

      Three

      Four

      Five

      Six

      Part Two: Hats Off

      Seven

      Eight

      Nine

      Ten

      Eleven

       Twelve

       Part Three: Hats In The Air

       Thirteen

       Fourteen

       Fifteen

       Appendix

       About the Author

       Praise

       By the same author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       One

      A blazing dusty July afternoon at Freshwater Bay; and up at Dimbola Lodge, with a glorious loud to-do, the household of Mrs Julia Margaret Cameron is mostly out of doors, applying paint to the roses. They run around the garden in the sunshine, holding up skirts and aprons, and jostle on the paths. For reasons they dare not inquire, the red roses must be painted white. If anyone asked them to guess, they would probably say, ‘Because it’s Wednesday?’

      ‘You’re splashing me!’

      ‘Look out!’

      ‘We’ll never get it done in time!’

      ‘What if she comes and we’re not finished?’

      ‘It will be off with our heads!’

      The smell of paint could probably stop an engine on the Great Western; so it is no surprise that it stops the inquisitive Reverend Dodgson, who happens to be sidling by the house at this moment, on his way up the lane from the sparkling afternoon sea. In fact the smell wafts so strongly through the tall briar hedge that it almost knocks his hat off. He pauses, tilts his head, and listens to the commotion with a faraway, satisfied smile. If you knew him better, you would recognize this unattractive expression. It is the smirk of a clever dysfunctional thirty-two-year-old, middle-aged before his time, whose own singular insights and private jokes are his constant reliable source of intellectual delight.

      ‘O-O—Off with our heads?’ he muses, and opens a small notebook produced with a parlour magician’s flourish from an inside pocket.

      ‘Off with our h—heads?’ He makes a neat note with a tiny pencil.

      ‘H-H-H—Extraordinary.’

      It is a very warm day, but Dodgson’s only thoughtful concession to holiday garb is a pale boater added to his clerical black. Perspiration gathers at his collar and in his armpits, but since this is just the sort of discomfort a real mid-Victorian gentleman is obliged to put up with, he refuses to take notice. Dodgson is a sober dresser always, and today he is on a mission of importance. The only thing that worries him is the straw hat – a larky addition which seemed a good idea at the time. He takes off the hat and studies it. He doesn’t know what to do.

      The trouble with the Poet Laureate – on whom Dodgson plans shortly to call – is judging the etiquette. Will the fashionable summer hat be a help or hindrance? Tennyson is well known for his testiness; he is a great sore-headed bear of a man who expects his full due as Top Poet. Yet at the same time he has extreme short sight and filthy clothes covered in dog hair and smelling of stale pipe tobacco. Does it matter, therefore, what a supplicant wears? Dodgson tucks the hat carefully under his arm, touches his neat hair with one hand, and then the other, and replaces the hat. A small curl on his large temple lies exactly as it should. There never was such a fastidious fellow as Dodgson when it comes to attire. It has often been remarked. When he touches his hair like that, he does it with such concentration that he seems to be checking he still has his head fixed on.

      ‘The Poet Laureate? Oh, very good, Dodo. Why not drop in on Her Majesty, too?’ his Christ Church colleagues sniggered supportively, before he left Oxford for the Isle of Wight. Was this sarcasm? Did they think, perhaps, that he was making it up?

      But yes, he is proud of it. The object of this smooth-faced stammering non-entity is indeed Alfred Tennyson, the greatest wordsmith in the land, the man who claims – with justice – to know the rhythmic value of every word in English except ‘scissors’. The man who had the extraordinary literary luck to write In Memoriam before Queen Victoria got bereaved and needed it. And if Dodgson is vain of the acquaintance (and inflates it), it is understandable. He forged this relation single-handed, Tennyson offering him no encouragement of any kind. A lesser man would have given up long since, and pushed off back to his Euclid.

      But when Dodgson sets his heart on befriending a fellow of celebrity or talent, he forgives all bad-tempered rebuffs, however pointed those rebuffs might be.

      ‘Be off with you! What are you doing in my drawing room?’ Christina Rossetti once demanded in Chelsea. (He soon overlooked this outburst of hot-blooded Latin temperament.)

      ‘What was your name again?’ asked John Ruskin at Coniston, a clever remark worthy of the foremost critic of the age, at which Dodgson smiled indulgently.

      ‘I’ll set the dog on you,’ quipped Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

      Yes, between unequals in the social arena, the proverbial ‘nothing ventured’ is quite correct, and Dodgson proves it tirelessly. ‘Nothing will come of nothing, speak again,’ Dodgson is pleased to repeat to himself sometimes. It shows he knows Shakespeare as well as maths.

      And now, this undaunted fellow carries under his arm a manuscript of a new book for children, about a girl called Alice. And he is bearing it like a great magical gift up the lane to Farringford, Tennyson’s house, two hundred yards further from the sea. He feels like a knight returning with the Holy Grail; positive that his king will be terrifically impressed.

      ‘You’re not going to show Tennyson your silly book?’ they said, those Oxford know-nothings. (Dodgson just can’t stop remembering their jibes somehow.)

      ‘N—Not exactly,’ he replied.

      No, the idea was to reacquaint himself breezily with Tennyson (‘Dodgson? Is it you? Well met, my dear young fellow!’). And then, after some pleasant bread and butter on the lawn, a chat about the latest American poetry, and a kind offer of dinner and bed from Tennyson’s saintly wife Emily, Dodgson would humbly ask permission (ahem) to dedicate his little book of nonsense to the laureate’s sons. ‘To my very dear and very close friends Hallam and Lionel T,’ was the modest idea, although of course every reader would guess at once the full name of these famous children, and be tremendously envious of the author’s sky-high literary connections.

      ‘It’s not much to ask,’ Dodgson told