With the publication of Poems in 1842 Alfred Tennyson became not only famous but also Poet Laureate in waiting. One poem in particular, “Locksley Hall” (which he wrote in 1837-38), with its eager readiness to imagine a future bright for “the Federation of the world” (AT 128), endorsed the new industrial age as one of heady promise. “Let the great world,” says his speaker, “spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change” (182). Although, as critics have often pointed out, the image that Tennyson chose to embody this change was inaccurate - train wheels did not run in “grooves” - the ardor with which he looked to the beaconing distance seemed very much of a piece with the spirit of the age. As Thomas Carlyle might well have observed, such ardor was only too plainly - and betrayingly - a “sign of the times.”

Almost half a century later in 1886, the aged Tennyson, who had been Poet Laureate since 1850, decided to write a progress report on that early optimistic vision.