Tennyson, Blake and Swedenborg a talk with Sibylle Erle

To coincide with the exhibition Swedenborg and the English Romantics: items from the Swedenborg Collection, Sibylle Erle will be giving an indepth talk on Tennyson, Blake and Swedenborg. The talk will last for 45 mins followed by a Q&A and drinks and snacks.

Tennyson had a life-long affinity with the great, Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. He was an incessant reader, as his wife Emily’s journal testifies, and he liked to ponder the reality of the spiritual world with his family and friends. The network of readers of Swedenborg is complex and it also includes Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Dante Gabriel and Rossetti. All of them knew the Swedenborgian James John Garth Wilkinson, who had published William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1839), as well as a biography of Swedenborg in 1847. Another work with a Swedenborgian tinge is Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826), presented to Tennyson by Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893) in 1856. This paper argues that Tennyson’s interest in Swedenborg was channelled through Blake’s early nineteenth-century reception.