The Homeric Competitions of Tennyson and Gladstone

In December 1865 the sculptor Thomas Woolner gave a memorable dinner party which, in a Victorian version of the Homeric games, generated a sportive clash between two of the age's heroes. The guests included William Ewart Gladstone, Alfred Tennyson, William Holman Hunt, and the Bristol physician John Addington Symonds. The son of this last entered later in the evening (as did F. T. Palgrave), and it is from the letters of the younger John Addington Symonds that we have a detailed, lively account of the stormy proceedings. The major feature of the evening was the persistency with which Tennyson and Gladstone gravitated toward polar attitudes whatever the topic of conversation, whether the issue under discussion was political or literary. As the younger Symonds entered the dining room, the assembled company had just begun to consider Governor Coote Eyre and his brutal suppression of the Jamaican uprising in which twenty Europeans had been killed and over 600 natives killed or executed. As Gladstone condemned the slaughter with the moral passion and oratorical skill by which he dominated Parliament, Tennyson kept interrupting not with counter-arguments but with obbligato, sotto voce prejudices: “We are too tender to savages, we are more tender to a black man than to ourselves. … Niggers are tigers, niggers are tigers.” Repeatedly the two men differed over this and other matters, “Gladstone with his rich flexible voice, Tennyson with his deep drawl rising into an impatient falsetto when put out, Gladstone arguing, Tennyson putting in a prejudice, Gladstone asserting rashly, Tennyson denying with a bold negative, Gladstone full of facts, Tennyson relying on impressions, both of them humorous, but the one polished and delicate in repartee, the other broad & coarse & grotesque.”