Mourning Economy: Tennyson’s Poetry and the “Commerce with the Dead”

Arthur Henry Hallam’s death in 1833 represented for Tennyson not only a personal tragedy, but also a “loss” that gave way to a prolonged poetic and creative “gain” which continued throughout his artistic career. At the same time, this event made Tennyson a renowned figure and increasingly “branded” artistic product, to the point that he was forced to move to the Isle of Wight to avoid his numberless fans. From the 1850s, Tennyson had “become a name” and an emblem of nineteenth-century poetics, suspended (as it were) between Romantic idealism and the social commitment which was typical of Victorian artists, in particular in his role as Poet Laureate. In this respect, the aim of my essay is to explore the paradoxical idea of the (economic) gain deriving from (personal) loss in Tennyson’s works, with Arthur Hallam’s death at its center. By writing poems inspired by personal mourning and, at the same time, dramatizing the economic profitability of the “commerce with the dead” (as it is called in In Memoriam) Tennyson proves that the notions of emotional vulnerability and artistic resilience are ambivalent.