The Dirty Monk Next Door

A Poetry Tale about Alfred, Lord Tennyson, told by Hello Doggo.

On the Isle of Wight, in the eighteen sixties, the most famous poet in Britain had a neighbour. Her name was Julia Margaret Cameron. She had a camera. And nobody was safe.

She’d bought a house at Freshwater to be near Alfred Tennyson. She called him Alfred. She photographed him again and again, and in May eighteen sixty-five she made one of the most famous portraits of her career: rumpled, brooding, eyes heavy with shadow.

Tennyson rather liked it. He called it The Dirty Monk.

To be fair, he’d earned the title. Thomas Carlyle once described him as a man whose clothes were cynically loose, and who smoked infinite tobacco.

In July eighteen sixty-eight, Longfellow came to visit. Tennyson walked his fellow poet over to Missus Cameron’s studio, handed him in, and reportedly warned him to do whatever she told him. He’d be back soon, he said, to see what was left of him.

Now, the wilder tales are hearsay, so take them with salt. When the Italian hero Garibaldi sat in Tennyson’s garden in eighteen sixty-four, a wild-looking woman is said to have rushed up, begging to photograph him. He took her for a gypsy and sent her away. It was Julia. And when Tennyson refused to be vaccinated against smallpox, she supposedly marched round and called him a coward.

So the most famous poet in Britain, the dirty monk of Farringford, had met his match.

Next door to Julia Margaret Cameron, he was the quiet one.