Well, I do at least know what "mojo" really means - it's a bag containing fingernails, hair, etc, which Voodoo practitioners use to manipulate people. Hence Muddy Waters' complaint that "I got my mojo working, but it just won't work on you!" - and it's that song which put the word into common parlance with a completely different (and harder to define) meaning.
Maybe "intellectual aesthete" is the wrong term for Tennyson. I'm thinking of the virtual fetishisation (word?) of certain emotions in his work - basically regret, sorrow, etc over the death of Hallam - which is a sort of aestheticism. Little-known fact: before going to Cambridge and falling in with Tennyson, Hallam had been Gladstone's best friend at Eton, which is odd since you normally think of Hallam as eternally young and Gladstone as interminably old. When Gladstone and Tennyson were, respectively, prime minister and poet laureate, they initially found it hard to get on, because they were jealous of each other's friendship with Hallam. Although they obviously put that aside, since (if I remember correctly, and it was a long time ago that I read about this) at one point they went off - on a whim - on a yachting expedition to Scandinavia. This was when Gladstone was leader of the opposition, and the queen was typically unamused that the two of them had buggered off like this without asking her permission.
Getting vaguely back on track, Tennyson always went about wearing an enormous floppy hat and a long cloak. I remember a story of him - as an old man - out for a walk with a young boy, and complaining that people always stared at him. To which the boy responded - "Well, why do you dress like that then?"
However, eccentric dress sense isn't enough to be a dandy, surely. Tennyson was no Disraeli. Moreover, it strikes me that part of the essence of a dandy is light-heartedness, a sort of proactive shallowness and disdain for weighty matters. This is why Disraeli was a dandy - not simply because he wore his rings on the outside of his gloves, but also because he treated being a politician as a sort of enormous joke. Of course, the attitude was no doubt at least partly put on (Disraeli had a pretty miserable time as a young man, and after becoming prime minister he dressed entirely in brown, stopped smiling, and tried to appear more of an old-fashioned Tory grandee), and perhaps a cultivation of such an attitude is even more dandyish than simply having it. But that would surely rule out Tennyson as a dandy. It also helps explain why we think of Wilde as a dandy, with all his quips - despite the serious core of Wilde's personality and work, which makes him more than just a dandy.
This is a great thread, by the way. An unusual topic. And I wish I'd learned about dandies in A Level history...
Maybe "intellectual aesthete" is the wrong term for Tennyson. I'm thinking of the virtual fetishisation (word?) of certain emotions in his work - basically regret, sorrow, etc over the death of Hallam - which is a sort of aestheticism. Little-known fact: before going to Cambridge and falling in with Tennyson, Hallam had been Gladstone's best friend at Eton, which is odd since you normally think of Hallam as eternally young and Gladstone as interminably old. When Gladstone and Tennyson were, respectively, prime minister and poet laureate, they initially found it hard to get on, because they were jealous of each other's friendship with Hallam. Although they obviously put that aside, since (if I remember correctly, and it was a long time ago that I read about this) at one point they went off - on a whim - on a yachting expedition to Scandinavia. This was when Gladstone was leader of the opposition, and the queen was typically unamused that the two of them had buggered off like this without asking her permission.
Getting vaguely back on track, Tennyson always went about wearing an enormous floppy hat and a long cloak. I remember a story of him - as an old man - out for a walk with a young boy, and complaining that people always stared at him. To which the boy responded - "Well, why do you dress like that then?"
However, eccentric dress sense isn't enough to be a dandy, surely. Tennyson was no Disraeli. Moreover, it strikes me that part of the essence of a dandy is light-heartedness, a sort of proactive shallowness and disdain for weighty matters. This is why Disraeli was a dandy - not simply because he wore his rings on the outside of his gloves, but also because he treated being a politician as a sort of enormous joke. Of course, the attitude was no doubt at least partly put on (Disraeli had a pretty miserable time as a young man, and after becoming prime minister he dressed entirely in brown, stopped smiling, and tried to appear more of an old-fashioned Tory grandee), and perhaps a cultivation of such an attitude is even more dandyish than simply having it. But that would surely rule out Tennyson as a dandy. It also helps explain why we think of Wilde as a dandy, with all his quips - despite the serious core of Wilde's personality and work, which makes him more than just a dandy.
This is a great thread, by the way. An unusual topic. And I wish I'd learned about dandies in A Level history...
