A carte de visite, circa 1870, of Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate, in the broad-brimmed hat and cloak that became his public image. Published by Elliott & Fry of Baker Street, it carries the retail label of an Edinburgh printseller on the verso, a record of how celebrity portraits travelled from the London studios to shop windows across Britain.

Tennyson faces the camera squarely from beneath a dark wideawake hat, the brim casting a soft shadow across his brow. His gaze is level and heavy-lidded, the eyes slightly narrowed. Long hair escapes at the sides and runs into a curling beard, gray at the edges and darker around the mouth. A cloak with a broad turned collar is drawn across his chest and falls in deep folds over one arm, a white shirt front showing at the opening. The figure fills the frame against a plain studio ground, close enough to read the weave of the hat and the wiry texture of the beard.

Tennyson (1809-1892) was born at Somersby in Lincolnshire and succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850, the year he published In Memoriam. He held the post for forty-two years, until his death, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The Charge of the Light Brigade, Maud, Idylls of the King and Crossing the Bar made him the most widely read English poet of the Victorian age, and his hat, cloak and beard were familiar to a public that knew him chiefly through photographs like this one. The caption names him Alfred Tennyson, placing the card before his elevation to the peerage as Baron Tennyson in 1884.

Elliott & Fry was founded in 1863 by Joseph John Elliott and Clarence Edmund Fry and occupied its Baker Street premises until 1919, publishing portraits of the leading figures in Victorian letters, science and public life.

Mount imprint: Alfred Tennyson. Poet Laureate. Elliott & Fry, Copyright, 55 & 56, Baker St. London W. The verso bears a royal arms backmark, the mount maker’s line of Marion, Paris, and the applied label of Hugh Paton & Sons, Printsellers & Publishers, Carvers & Gilders to the Queen, 115 Princes Street, Edinburgh.