Tennyson's Gift

It is July 1864 and the Isle of Wight is buzzing with eccentric creative types. Tennyson recites poetry to furniture while his invalid wife hides bad reviews in teapots and buries them in the garden. Also at Freshwater Bay are the creepy Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) and Julia Margaret Cameron, a photographer determined to capture an image of the bard in a suitably heroic pose. Unexpectedly moving and luminously wise, Tennyson's gift is the funniest novel ever written about a nineteenth-century Poet Laureate.