Tennyson's Celebrity Circle: Victorian Collaborations on the Isle of Wight

This HEIF-funded project drew on previously under-utilised literary and historical resources to produce a website and print materials highlighting the Victorian cultural heritage of the Isle of Wight. Focusing on the figure of Alfred Lord Tennyson and the coterie of artists, writers, photographers and scientists who followed him to the island, the project worked to vivify the history of nineteenth-century Freshwater, benefiting the local community, arts and heritage organisations, and tourists to the Isle of Wight. The project findings were disseminated via a range of public talks and lectures.

The project established how the poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, was complicit in the fashioning of his status as a Victorian celebrity. It also demonstrated the ways in which other members of the Freshwater Circle, such as Julia Margaret Cameron, G. F. Watts, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, attempted to engineer their celebrity status in relation to Tennyson's.