Throughout much of his life, until he was over the age of forty, Tennyson experienced trance-like episodes which he found it difficult to describe. He said that, during these episodes, “the world seemed dead and only [himself] alive”. Sometimes they also involved doubts about his own existence.
As a young man, Tennyson found these experiences extremely troubling because he believed them to be epileptic seizures inherited from his father. Epilepsy was not well understood in the nineteenth century. Since ancient times, it had been associated with evil and demonic possession, and although the post-Enlightenment Victorians didn’t necessarily believe in supernatural causes, negative associations lingered. It was believed to be a mental illness rather than a neurological disorder, and people with epilepsy were frequently confined to insane asylums. They were often characterised as violent criminals; a notable example is Monks in Dickens’s Oliver Twist.
These associations continued long into the twentieth century, even after epilepsy came to be understood as a neurological condition. In Tennyson’s time, it was thought that epilepsy was contagious, and that even witnessing a seizure could be enough to catch the disease.
As such, it is understandable that Tennyson’s trances were so troubling to him. It is thought that the fear of passing epilepsy on to his future children was one of the factors that prevented Tennyson from marrying Emily after their initial engagement in 1837, since the condition was believed to be hereditary. Luckily, in 1848 Tennyson received a new diagnosis from the doctor in charge of the hydropathic hospital where he was staying to receive treatment for melancholia.
This doctor believed that the trances were not epileptic seizures but were, in fact, caused by a form of gout. Whether a modern doctor would agree with this diagnosis is doubtful, but to Tennyson it was immensely reassuring. He resumed correspondence with Emily the following year and, in June 1850, less than two weeks after the publication of In Memoriam A.H.H., they were married.
Over the following years, Tennyson found peace in married life with Emily at Farringford, and the trances seem to have taken on a different significance for him.
In his biography of Tennyson, Robert Bernard Martin suggests that, as well as gout, Tennyson ascribed these seizures to his “passing voluntarily into an extra-sensory state through a form of self-hypnotism or meditation” (p. 297). Hallam recalls his father talking about them in this light: “the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest” (Memoir, p. 320). In this description, the trance seems more like a transcendent state of imagination, similar to those described in the works of the Romantic poets, than a distressing seizure.
Martin argues that Tennyson explores his feelings about these trances through poetry, specifically in In Memoriam, Maud, and The Princess. He says it cannot be a coincidence that these three poems are all “so saturated with references to the fear of fits and trances, followed either by recovery from them or the discovery that they are not malign in their effect” (p. 278). Perhaps this was a way for him to make sense of the trances, to process his own complex feelings about them, or even to reassure himself of their harmlessness.
In any case, we cannot say with any certainty what caused the trances, or even what they entailed. Following Tennyson’s death in 1892, Emily and Hallam burned many of his letters, and few references to the trances in his own words remain. Much of the evidence we have about them comes from Hallam’s Memoir, written at a distance of many years and with a view to curating his father’s legacy. As such, it may not portray the trances in the most accurate light.
Nonetheless, the abiding impression we are left with, which is held up by the biographical evidence and the poetry, is one of early fear and shame, resolved into later acceptance and even thankfulness. Following his marriage to Emily and his retreat to Farringford, much of what was painful and stormy in Tennyson’s life became calm and pleasant. The trances are no exception.