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Ace History Desk – The 19th-century English poet was a “prolific reviser” who tested many variations of his work before publication. A new study sheds light on his creative process
Like most writers’ handwritten drafts, the papers of Alfred Tennyson—the 19th-century English poet known for nuggets such as, “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”—are littered with inkblots, crossed-out words and other markings.
Researchers at the University of Oxford recently set out to read some of Tennyson’s indecipherable scribbles using advanced imaging techniques. According to a paper published in the Review of English Studies, their research has recovered “previously unreadable variants” in Tennyson’s work.
“Whether from environmental damage, redaction or authorial revision, many factors affect how much of modern literature survives for us to read today,” lead author Michael Sullivan, a literary scholar at Oxford, says in a statement from the university.
In 2021, Sullivan founded Recovery of Literary Manuscripts in collaboration with chemist Andrew Beeby of Durham University. The project merges English literature with multispectral imaging, a technology that analyzes an image at specific wavelengths.
“Our project is developing new digital techniques to restore lost literature that has remained beyond the reach of readers,” Sullivan says.
Tennyson served as the United Kingdom’s poet laureate from 1850 to 1892, making him the “official poetic spokesman for the reign of Victoria,” according to the Poetry Foundation. He was also a “prolific reviser,” who frequently blotted out his words with ink, per the study. By digitally stripping away inkblots, his “lost literary draft text may therefore be recovered, retrieving traces of the author’s creative process.”
In addition to multispectral imaging, the researchers also used X-ray fluorescence, which surveys elemental composition, and fiber-optic reflectance spectroscopy, which analyzes pigments. They then digitally processed the imaging results, revealing words that had been lost.
One of the manuscripts they studied contains Tennyson’s 1847 poem “The Princess.” A line from the published version reads, “She said you had a heart—I heard her say it— / ‘Our Ida has a heart’—just ere she died.” But in the newly imaged manuscript, the researchers saw the line, “She said you had a heart —” then crossed out, “Just ere she died. / Our Ida has a heart—an hour before.”
Though he crossed it out in this manuscript, “Just ere she died,” was brought back before publication. According to the study, Tennyson’s deletion of the other words removed a “heavier characterization of a mother judging her daughter.”
The notebook containing “The Princess” was also water damaged, reports Artnet’s Min Chen. Through imaging, researchers were able to decipher parts of pages once made unreadable, discovering that Tennyson had changed “us” to “me” and “our” to “my.”
Another notable revision was found in Tennyson’s 1859 poem “Lancelot and Elaine,” published in Idylls of the King, a 12-poem series inspired by the legend of King Arthur. According to the study, Tennyson originally wrote “Till Arthur came” before replacing the line with “the King / Came girt with knights.”
The imaging also revealed several non-literary details, including ink bleeding through from the opposite side of a page, the indentation left by a pen’s tip and simple sketches. The drawings are “material traces of [Tennyson’s] visual imagination,” write the researchers.
Tennyson’s revisions show “recurrent patterns of thought” that are important to modern scholars’ study of his work, per the study. As Sullivan says in the statement, “Reading this recovered text helps us to illuminate the creative process behind works of art, but also to restore valuable parts of the world’s cultural heritage.”
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