MacDonald and Tennyson

There's a good chance that no one but Brent will find the following post very interesting.

A few years ago, my Dad and I had coffee with a man who had met J.R.R. Tolkien. He had a signed copy of The Hobbit (in Dutch for some reason) that he brought along because he knew how enthusiastic I was about Middle Earth. I had a similar experience at the Tennyson Library in Lincoln on Saturday.

As the curator was giving us a history Alfred Lord Tennyson's life in letters, I got the idea to ask if he had ever had a correspondence with George MacDonald, the "father of modern fantasy" and one of my favorite authors and thinkers. As it turns out, MacDonald had sent four letters to Tennyson from 1865 to 1872, and I got to hold them in my hand and try to decipher the hundred and fifty year old cursive. His script was a lot bigger than the majority of old handwriting I've seen, and because of that, it was more or less legible. The letters themselves were along the lines of most of the literary fan-mail lesser writers sent to England's greatest at the time, most of them accompanying copies of MacDonald's own novels, but they still displayed his personality and humor. One of them expressed the hope that Tennyson would not find "the Scotch in [the novel] more of an obstruction than is pleasurable." Being Scottish was still considered more or less an obstacle that writers had to overcome before they could be considered great in the wider literary scene of Britain.

The curator showed us a copy of Through the Looking Glass that Lewis Carroll, a good friend of MacDonald, had sent to Tennyson with a similar letter expressing admiration and the hope that the great poet would enjoy his work, but as she then pointed out, the spine of the book showed no evidence of having been opened. Apparently it took a lot to pass Tennyson's muster as far as literary merit went.

Lincoln itself was an eccentric city. The main street of the old town would probably rate about a challenging blue in Aspen, which made it interesting to walk up and down trying to find bathrooms and ATMs and bookstores. Elizabeth and I spent some time in two wonderful used book stores, the classic kind with more books than floor space. In the first, which had shelves to the ceiling and piles of books everywhere, I unearthed a copy of The Claw of the Conciliator, the second volume in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun from the bottom of a dusty shelf beside the door bell, which rang like a fire siren every time someone opened and closed the door, which was often. In the next store, I found the first and third volumes, which made me very happy. I haven't started them yet – in the throes of writing a few midterm essays – but I've read they're some of the best in literary science fiction.

Thanks for wading through the wanton display of nerditry.

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Take care!