Tennyson and The Golden Treasury: A Rediscovered Revision Copy

In 1971, Philip Larkin made a rare excursion into academic writing, while editing his Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. His subject was the most successful lyric anthology in literary history: The Golden Treasury, compiled by Francis Turner Palgrave and Alfred Tennyson. Published during his time at All Souls College, Larkin’s article described A. E. Housman’s no less than forty-one neat deletions in his copy of the anthology, alongside Housman’s heavy aesthetic interventions. Three years later, it was revealed that T. S. Eliot had used The Golden Treasury in his years as an extension lecturer on Modern English Literature. The anthology was extensively annotated by its many poetic owners, beginning with Thomas Hardy and stretching well into the twentieth century, offering a link between Victorian and Edwardian literary tastes. Yet for all its importance, no proof, trial or revision copies have previously been revealed, either in Palgrave’s hand, or in that of Tennyson. This article presents a rediscovered revision copy of The Golden Treasury in Tennyson’s library, and excavates its significance for the anthology’s textual history. By considering the copy’s annotations, the paper sheds new light on Tennyson’s poetic influences, and on his aesthetic control over the formation of a Victorian literary canon. Of the nineteenth century’s great versifiers, Tennyson was among the least prolific of literary critics. What survives in The Golden Treasury is his most prolonged and revealing judgment on the full span of English verse

Tennyson and The Golden Treasury: A Rediscovered Revision Copy

In 1971, Philip Larkin made a rare excursion into academic writing, while editing his Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. His subject was the most successful lyric anthology in literary history: The Golden Treasury, compiled by Francis Turner Palgrave and Alfred Tennyson. Published during his time at All Souls College, Larkin’s article described A. E. Housman’s no less than forty-one neat deletions in his copy of the anthology, alongside Housman’s heavy aesthetic interventions. Three years later, it was revealed that T. S. Eliot had used The Golden Treasury in his years as an extension lecturer on Modern English Literature. The anthology was extensively annotated by its many poetic owners, beginning with Thomas Hardy and stretching well into the twentieth century, offering a link between Victorian and Edwardian literary tastes. Yet for all its importance, no proof, trial or revision copies have previously been revealed, either in Palgrave’s hand, or in that of Tennyson. This article presents a rediscovered revision copy of The Golden Treasury in Tennyson’s library, and excavates its significance for the anthology’s textual history. By considering the copy’s annotations, the paper sheds new light on Tennyson’s poetic influences, and on his aesthetic control over the formation of a Victorian literary canon. Of the nineteenth century’s great versifiers, Tennyson was among the least prolific of literary critics. What survives in The Golden Treasury is his most prolonged and revealing judgment on the full span of English verse

Deborah Lutz, Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) [Review]

When Merlin falls prey to Vivien’s enchanting songs in Idylls of the King, infatuation leads to entrapment, and the power of song within the poem darkens. It is at this point in Merlin and Vivien that Tennyson likens rhyme to relics: this rhyme Is like the fair pearl-necklace of the Queen, That burst in dancing, and the pearls were split; Some lost, some stolen, some as relics kept. [...] It lives dispersedly in many hands, And every minstrel sings it differently (ll. 448-451, 455-456) The common thread that binds together the pearls of bardic matter is snapped, and alongside the variants and verses that scatter, some are venerated, as akin to relics. Such links between relics and verse are the subject of Deborah Lutz’s well-researched monograph, which performs a literary-cultural study of mourning in the nineteenth century. Tennyson, naturally, features prominently, though Lutz limits her analysis to In Memoriam and shorter elegies, alongside chapters on Keats, D. G. Rossetti, Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. Her focus throughout is on relics as ‘lyrical matter’ (1), a phrase which puns on the book’s conceptual origins in the recent wave of cultural and material analysis. Lutz invokes ‘Thing theory’ (3), and terms such as ‘thingification’ (10), to examine how the dead body, devoid of consciousness, returns to the state of an object: an object that can trigger memories, like an elegy or epitaph.</p

Functional shifts in bird communities from semi-natural oak forests to conifer plantations are not consistent across Europe

While the area of plantation forest increased globally between 2010 and 2015, more than twice the area of natural forests was lost over the same period (6.5 million ha natural forest lost per year versus 3.2 million ha plantation gained per year). Consequently, there is an increasing need to understand how plantation land use affects biodiversity. The relative conservation value of plantation forests is context dependent, being influenced by previous land use, management regimes and landscape composition. What is less well understood, and of importance to conservation management, is the consistency of diversity patterns across regions, and the degree to which useful generalisations can be provided within and among bioregions. Here, we analyse forest birds in Ireland, France and Portugal, representing distinct regions across the Atlantic biogeographic area of Europe. We compared taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity of bird communities among conifer plantations and semi-natural oak forests, and assessed correlations between species traits and forest type across these regions. Although bird composition (assessed with NMDS ordination) differed consistently between plantation and oak forests across all three regions, species richness and Shannon diversity did not show a consistent pattern. In Ireland and France, metrics of taxonomic diversity (richness and Shannon diversity), functional diversity, functional dispersion and phylogenetic diversity were greater in oak forests than plantations. However, in Portugal taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity did not differ significantly between forest types, while functional diversity and dispersion were statistically significantly greater in plantations. No single bird trait-forest type association correlated in a consistent direction across the three study regions. Trait associations for the French bird communities appeared intermediate between those in Ireland and Portugal, and when trait correlations were significant in both Ireland and Portugal, the direction of the correlation was always opposite. The variation in response of bird communities to conifer plantations indicates that care is needed when generalising patterns of community diversity and assembly mechanisms across regions

A Spatial and Temporal Risk Assessment of the Impacts of El Niño on the Tropical Forest Carbon Cycle: Theoretical Framework, Scenarios, and Implications

Strong El Niño events alter tropical climates and may lead to a negative carbon balance in tropical forests and consequently a disruption to the global carbon cycle. The complexity of tropical forests and the lack of data from these regions hamper the assessment of the spatial distribution of El Niño impacts on these ecosystems. Typically, maps of climate anomaly are used to detect areas of greater risk, ignoring baseline climate conditions and forest cover. Here, we integrated climate anomalies from the 1982–1983, 1997–1998, and 2015–2016 El Niño events with baseline climate and forest edge extent, using a risk assessment approach to hypothetically assess the spatial and temporal distributions of El Niño risk over tropical forests under several risk scenarios. The drivers of risk varied temporally and spatially. Overall, the relative risk of El Niño has been increasing driven mainly by intensified forest fragmentation that has led to a greater chance of fire ignition and increased mean annual air temperatures. We identified areas of repeated high risk, where conservation efforts and fire control measures should be focused to avoid future forest degradation and negative impacts on the carbon cycle

Changes in habitat associations during range expansion: disentangling the effects of climate and residence time

The distributions of many species are not at equilibrium with their environment. This includes spreading non-native species and species undergoing range shifts in response to climate change. The habitat associations of these species may change during range expansion as less favourable climatic conditions at expanding range margins may constrain species to use only the most favourable habitats, violating the species distribution model assumption of stationarity. Alternatively, changes in habitat associations could result from density-dependent habitat selection; at range margins, population densities are initially low so species can exhibit density-independent selection of the most favourable habitats, while in the range core, where population densities are higher, species spread into less favourable habitat. We investigate if the habitat preferences of the non-native common waxbill Estrilda astrild changed as they spread in three directions (north, east and south-east) in the Iberian Peninsula. There are different degrees of climatic suitability and colonization speed across range expansion axes, allowing us to separate the effects of climate from residence time. In contrast to previous studies we find a stronger effect of residence time than climate in influencing the prevalence of common waxbills. As well as a strong additive effect of residence time, there were some changes in habitat associations, which were consistent with density-dependent habitat selection. The combination of broader habitat associations and higher prevalence in areas that have been colonised for longer means that species distribution models constructed early in the invasion process are likely to underestimate species’ potential distribution

An anthropogenic habitat facilitates the establishment of non-native birds by providing underexploited resources

Anthropogenic modification of habitats may reduce the resources available for native species, leading to population declines and extinction. These same habitats often have the highest richness of non-native species. This pattern may be explained if recently human-modified habitats provide novel resources that are more accessible to non-native species than native species. Using non-native birds in the Iberian Peninsula as a case study, we conduct a large-scale study to investigate whether non-native species are positively associated with human modified habitats, and to investigate whether this positive association may be driven by the presence of resources that are not fully exploited by native species. We do this by comparing the functional diversity and resource use of native and non-native bird communities in a recently human-modified habitat (rice fields) and in more traditional habitats in the Iberian Peninsula. The functional diversity of native bird communities was lower in rice fields, but non-native birds were positively associated with rice fields and plugged this gap. Differences in resource use between native and non-native species allowed non-native species to exploit resources that were plentiful in rice fields, supporting the role of underexploited resources in driving the positive association of non-native birds with rice fields. Our results provide a potential mechanism explaining the positive association of non-native species with anthropogenic habitats, and further work is needed to test if this applies more generally

Time and Origin of Cichlid Colonization of the Lower Congo Rapids

Most freshwater diversity is arguably located in networks of rivers and streams, but, in contrast to lacustrine systems riverine radiations, are largely understudied. The extensive rapids of the lower Congo River is one of the few river stretches inhabited by a locally endemic cichlid species flock as well as several species pairs, for which we provide evidence that they have radiated in situ. We use more that 2,000 AFLP markers as well as multilocus sequence datasets to reconstruct their origin, phylogenetic history, as well as the timing of colonization and speciation of two Lower Congo cichlid genera, Steatocranus and Nanochromis. Based on a representative taxon sampling and well resolved phylogenetic hypotheses we demonstrate that a high level of riverine diversity originated in the lower Congo within about 5 mya, which is concordant with age estimates for the hydrological origin of the modern lower Congo River. A spatial genetic structure is present in all widely distributed lineages corresponding to a trisection of the lower Congo River into major biogeographic areas, each with locally endemic species assemblages. With the present study, we provide a phylogenetic framework for a complex system that may serve as a link between African riverine cichlid diversity and the megadiverse cichlid radiations of the East African lakes. Beyond this we give for the first time a biologically estimated age for the origin of the lower Congo River rapids, one of the most extreme freshwater habitats on earth

Resistance of African tropical forests to an extreme climate anomaly.

The responses of tropical forests to environmental change are critical uncertainties in predicting the future impacts of climate change. The positive phase of the 2015-2016 El Niño Southern Oscillation resulted in unprecedented heat and low precipitation in the tropics with substantial impacts on the global carbon cycle. The role of African tropical forests is uncertain as their responses to short-term drought and temperature anomalies have yet to be determined using on-the-ground measurements. African tropical forests may be particularly sensitive because they exist in relatively dry conditions compared with Amazonian or Asian forests, or they may be more resistant because of an abundance of drought-adapted species. Here, we report responses of structurally intact old-growth lowland tropical forests inventoried within the African Tropical Rainforest Observatory Network (AfriTRON). We use 100 long-term inventory plots from six countries each measured at least twice prior to and once following the 2015-2016 El Niño event. These plots experienced the highest temperatures and driest conditions on record. The record temperature did not significantly reduce carbon gains from tree growth or significantly increase carbon losses from tree mortality, but the record drought did significantly decrease net carbon uptake. Overall, the long-term biomass increase of these forests was reduced due to the El Niño event, but these plots remained a live biomass carbon sink (0.51 ± 0.40 Mg C ha-1 y-1) despite extreme environmental conditions. Our analyses, while limited to African tropical forests, suggest they may be more resistant to climatic extremes than Amazonian and Asian forests

Long-term carbon sink in Borneo's forests halted by drought and vulnerable to edge effects

Less than half of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions remain in the atmosphere. While carbon balance models imply large carbon uptake in tropical forests, direct on-the-ground observations are still lacking in Southeast Asia. Here, using long-term plot monitoring records of up to half a century, we find that intact forests in Borneo gained 0.43 Mg C ha‾¹ per year (95% CI 0.14—0.72, mean period 1988-2010) above-ground live biomass. These results closely match those from African and Amazonian plot networks, suggesting that the world's remaining intact tropical forests are now en masse out-of-equilibrium. Although both pan-tropical and long-term, the sink in remaining intact forests appears vulnerable to climate and land use changes. Across Borneo the 1997-1998 El Niño drought temporarily halted the carbon sink by increasing tree mortality, while fragmentation persistently offset the sink and turned many edge-affected forests into a carbon source to the atmosphere