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Writer's pictureDave Goble

37 Tennyson, and the Cabbage Patch of Destiny

Updated: Mar 28

Oh the smell. Or was it more about the growing lack of privacy, as he perceived it? Perhaps these things were linked as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, tended his notice to leave Chapel House on Montpelier Row in Twickenham for The Isle Of Wight in 1853 after just three years there, aged about 44.


The blue plaque on the side of the house marking his life sheds no light on this. Evidence, however, does suggest his stay was curtailed by a feeling the location was too near to London.a feeling which had grown as the (then) new railway brought more visitors to the area. This said, a persistent whiff of cabbage was apparently a significant and contributory factor. And these things were indeed linked: the expanding railway network; the increasing population; the demand for food; and the growing and production of it locally. More on this later.

Chapel House


Tennyson


Tennyson lived from 1809 to 1892. Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria’s reign, he was known as a representative poet of the Victorian age, his work considered among the best reflecting the basic nature of the age – its achievements, doubts and fears.


Tennyson is also the ninth most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. We have him to thank for a number of phrases which have become commonplace in the English language, including:


"Nature, red in tooth and claw"

"'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all"

"Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die"

"Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers"


In 1883 he accepted a peerage that earned him the title Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and Freshwater. The title was subsequently shortened to the moniker Alfred, Lord Tennyson.


On the cabbage thing, the timing of Tennyson's move to Twickenham was unfortunate. Having begun in the 1830s, the building and expansion of railways in London was predictably accelerating population growth, seeing it rise six-fold between 1801 and 1901, from 1.1 to 6.6 million. The burgeoning network reached Twickenham in 1848, three years before the arrival of the unsuspecting poet. In so doing, in response to rising population and demand for food, it triggered the growth of market gardens in the area, and over ten acres of land around where Twickenham Rugby Stadium now stands were dedicated primarily to the growing of cabbages.


A west-north-westerly breeze would easily have carried what accounted for the torment inflicted upon Tennyson's nostrils the one and a half miles to Chapel House. The earlier photograph of him above seems to have captured one such moment (great hair).


Just over half a mile from the rugby stadium is the pub which

occupies part of the patch of land after which it was named


See Post 30 from May 4th 'Blimey, My Bike's Shrunk' for more on Twickenham Rugby Stadium and cabbages.


Red arrow : ​Chapel House

Yellow arrow : Twickenham, Rugby Stadium, a mile and a half west, and north a bit, from Chapel

House, and evidently within whiffing range of what was once the epicentre of the

long gone and malodorous 10+ acre cabbage patch

Purple arrow: ​The Cabbage Patch pub (live music venue)

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