Enoch Arden

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"Enoch Arden" is a poem published in 1864 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, during his tenure as England's Poet Laureate.

The hero of the poem, fisherman turned merchant sailor Enoch Arden, leaves his wife Annie and three children to go to sea with his old captain, who is offering him work. Enoch had lost his job when he fell victim to an accident; in a manner that reflects the hero's masculine view of personal toil and hardship to support his family, Enoch Arden left his family to better serve them as a husband and father. However during his voyage he is shipwrecked and remains lost and missing for ten years. He finds upon his return from the sea that, after his long absence, his wife, who believed him dead, is married happily to another man, his childhood friend Philip (Annie has known both men since her childhood, thus the rivalry), and has a child by him. The unfullfillment of his life with Annie and his children, together with Philip taking his place, Enoch must watch someone else raise his son and daughter (the third child, a boy, dies just after Enoch leaves on his trek). Tragically Enoch does not ever disclose himself to her that he is really alive, and he dies of a broken heart.

[edit] "Enoch Arden" in popular culture

• In the 1940 screwball comedy My Favorite Wife, the character Ellen Wagstaff Arden (Irene Dunne) is a comic inversion of Enoch Arden. She returns from sea and boldly reclaims her husband and children.

• Enoch Arden is the alias taken by Robert Underhay, a character in Agatha Christie's novel, Taken at the Flood, who disappears in order to set his wife free of their marriage.