‘A sweet disorder in the dresse’: Tennyson's The Princess

The Princess tells not one story but several; nor does it have a single mode or voice for its narratives. 1 Its frame narrator is a guest at Sir Walter Vivian’s ancestral home, along with other college friends of Sir Walter’s son. He is shown a medieval chronicle which tells of a noble lady turned warrior who fought and defeated a ‘wild King’. The narrator is fascinated by this story and takes the chronicle with him into the park which has been thrown open for the day to ‘the people’ (tenant families and members of the local Mechanics Institute) to enjoy sporting and scientific activities. He joins his friends and the ladies in the ruins of a Gothic abbey elsewhere in the grounds. One of the women, Aunt Elizabeth, talks fervently of ‘an universal culture’, using the day and the crowd as her ‘text’, but the students gossip and recount college japes. This clash of serious and mocking modes is to recur throughout the poem.