Alfred, Lord Tennyson

This edited article about Alfred Tennyson originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 952 published on 19 April 1980.

Death! In the Victorian Age, the word worried many thinking people. Scientists like Charles Darwin were trying to show that man had evolved from simple living things. And people wondered, if this is true, how do we reconcile this with our Creator, the Scriptures and our deeper beliefs?

Alfred Tennyson, who was born in 1809, the fourth of twelve children of the rector of Somersby, Lincolnshire, wondered about it, too. It was hardly surprising, considering the effect that Tennyson’s family background and the deserted Lincolnshire countryside must have had on the young poet’s imagination.

Tennyson’s father was a strange, bitter man. He had been disinherited and sought solace in drink, after which he would become violent with his children.

Indeed, the whole family seemed to have a self-destructive streak running through it. Of Alfred’s brothers, Edward had a mental breakdown and ended up insane; Charles became addicted to opium and Frederick ran up enormous debts. When the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited Somersby he left with a vivid picture in his mind of Septimus, another of Tennyson’s brothers, rising up from a prone position near the fireplace and saying “I am Septimus, the most morbid of the Tennysons.”

At the lonely rectory, lost in the flat, barren wastes of Lincolnshire, the Tennyson children were thrown upon their own resources. To amuse themselves they would write plays and poems. It was in these innocent pastimes that Alfred’s gifts revealed themselves. By the age of 12, he had already written an epic poem 6,000 lines in length.

But in 1827, Alfred went up to Cambridge University, aged 18. It was here that he met Arthur Hallam, a gifted young man whose premature death was to mark Tennyson for life and inspire some of his greatest work.

Hallam was the son of a well-known historian and a poet himself. A close bond of friendship soon developed between them. Later they were to sign up for a volunteer army to help the rebel cause in Spain. For two months, Tennyson and Hallam wandered around the Iberian peninsula without firing a shot.

But already Tennyson’s poetry had caught the attention of the university authorities. In 1829, he won the Chancellor’s Gold Medal with a poem called Timbuctoo. A year later, he, Hallam and some friends published a small volume called Poems, Chiefly Lyrical.

This was an immediate success, and when it was followed by a volume consisting of Tennyson’s poems, there was no doubt that a major new poet had arrived on the literary scene.

But one day in 1833 Tennyson received a letter from Austria. He opened it eagerly, because Arthur Hallam was then on holiday in Vienna. The letter was brief, however, and to the point. His friend, it told him, was dead.

For a long time after this tragedy, Tennyson the poet was silent. Oppressed by financial troubles, his father as well as Hallam now dead and three brothers suffering from mental illnesses, he became even more obsessed with the problems of life and death. He began wandering around England, glad to be away from the rectory with its depressing associations.

However, in 1850 many of Tennyson’s problems came to an end. In May, he married Emily Sellwood, the childhood sweetheart he had been pursuing for so long. Then, four months later, he was offered the post of Poet Laureate.

This position had fallen vacant on the death of William Words worth; but there were other good reasons for offering the post to Tennyson. Not only was he the most talented poet of his day by far, but also his dire financial straits were known to several influential friends.

The year 1850 also saw the publication of the poem on which Tennyson had been working for the previous decade. It was called In Memoriam and in it Tennyson tried to exorcise his grief at the death of Arthur Hallam. Simply dedicated “To A.H.H”, it ranks among Tennyson’s greatest works.

Now an established poet, Tennyson settled at Farringford on the Isle of Wight, and from there he came to dominate the English literary scene. Although he was a shy man by nature, he was pestered by autograph hunters anxious to see the recluse.

Over the next few years, Tennyson published The Idylls Of The King. These dramatic poems with their medieval imagery and flowing verse inspired by the legends of King Arthur were an immediate success. Within a month of publication, no less than 10,000 copies had been sold.

Tennyson, along with the novelist Charles Dickens, had become the greatest literary entertainer of the Victorian Age. He was the most fashionable poet in the land. He was able to switch his pen and his style to write jewelled verse on any subject, from the deep funereal tones of In Memoriam to the thundering sounds of poems such as The Charge Of The Light Brigade.

He became a close friend of Queen Victoria, and it was said that he was the only person who could make her laugh. When he attended a funeral at Westminster Abbey, women stood on their seats craning their necks to catch a glimpse of him.

In 1884, he was made a baron, and became Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Around the same time, he published one of his most important collections of verse, Ballads and Other Poems.

It was characteristic of Tennyson that, when he died in 1892 at his home on the Isle of Wight, he was reading Shakespeare by the light of the full moon.

The Sleeping House

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I heard no sound where I stood
But the rivulet on from the lawn
Running down to my own dark wood;
Or the voice of the long sea-wave as it swell’d
Now and then in the dim-gray dawn;
But I look’d, and round, all round the house I beheld
The death-white curtain drawn;
Felt a horror over me creep,
Prickle my skin and catch my breath,
Knew that the death-white curtain meant but sleep,
Yet I shudder’d and thought like a fool of the sleep of death.

In this poem we see Tennyson’s obsession with death clearly to the fore, but it also reveals his liking for the lonely Lincolnshire landscape by night. This is clearly about his home at Somersby.