¹ In one place Hallam says that Tennyson's “overwhelming sorrow … as my father told me, for a while blotted out all joy from his life, and made him long for death, in spite of his feeling that he was in some measure a help and comfort to his sister” and, some pages on, that “after a period of utter prostration from grief, and many dark fits of blank despondency,” “his passionate love of truth of nature, and of humanity, drove him to work again, with a deeper and a fuller insight into the requirements of the age” (Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, London, 1897, i, 109 and 123). Most of the letters mentioned are quoted or referred to below.

² These are the family papers of Alfred's uncle, Charles Tennyson, who, in 1835, took the additional surname of d'Eyncourt; they are now in the Lincolnshire Archives Office.

³ The Rashdall diaries (Bodleian MSS. Eng. misc. e. 351–360) extend over the years 1833–64, but I am concerned here only with the first of these (e.351), which covers the period of Rashdall's residence at Orby (1833–35). The later diaries also contain references to Tennyson, but few of these are of much importance except as they tell where, at various times, Tennyson was. I wish to thank here Mrs. Joan Varley of the Lincolnshire Archives Office, who called my attention to the existence of Rashdall's Lincolnshire diary.

⁴ Sir Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (London, 1949), pp. 234 and 268.

⁵ 28 Oct. 1833; Lincolnshire Archives Office, T d'E. H/113/51.

⁶ The two poems are dated 6 October and 20 October respectively in the Heath Commonplace Book. See Joyce Green, “Tennyson's Development During the ‘Ten Years’ Silence' (1832–1842),” PMLA, lxvi (Sept. 1951), 670–671, and Alfred Tennyson, p. 146. Tennyson wrote a good deal throughout the fall, as Miss Green's article demonstrates.

⁷ James Knowles, “Aspects of Tennyson, II: (A Personal Reminiscence),” Nineteenth Century, xxxiii (Jan. 1893), 182.

⁸ Letters of Edward FitzGerald, ed. W. A. Wright (London, 1907), i, 25. Wright gives the date of the letter in brackets, which has perhaps made scholars hesitate to draw the obvious inference; but a comparison of FitzGerald's references to plays and players he has seen with the theater listings for the corresponding days in the Times establishes the date beyond any doubt.

⁹ See Mary Joan Ellmann, “Tennyson: Unpublished Letters, 1833–36,” MLN, lxv (April 1950), 224; the related letters in the Memoir, i, 128–131; and the letter from Tennant quoted immediately below.

¹⁰ Memoir, i, 498. Years afterward Tennyson remembered himself in these early days as “utterly miserable, a burden to myself and to my family” (Memoir, i, 193, n. 2.)

¹¹ Rashdall says that the girl was “a daughter of the authoress of ‘Domestic Manners of the Americans’.” This would have been Cecilia Trollope, who was visiting her relatives, the Trollopes of Harrington Rectory, near Somersby (L. P. and R. P. Stebbins, The Trollopes: the Chronicle of a Writing Family, New York, 1945, pp. 58–59).

¹² The day after the party at the Brackenbury's Clara Tennyson, Julia's sister, reported to brother George that “poor Emily” had “not at all recovered the shock she received from Hallam's death.” “This was indeed,” she continued, “a melancholy thing” (L.A.O. T d'E. H/113/61). Emily was not, of course, at the Brackenbury party and, as nearly as one can tell from the surviving records, did not go out socially at all.

¹³ To Spring Rice, mid-November (Ellmann, p. 224); to J. M. Kemble, late November or early December (Memoir, i, 130–131); and to R. M. Milnes, 3 December (Memoir, i, 132). Earlier, apparently, his letters had been less cheerful, for on 26 November Francis Garden wrote to R. C. Trench: “When in London I saw a letter from poor Alfred Tennyson. Both himself and his family seemed plunged in the deepest affliction” (Memoir, i, 107).

¹⁴ L.A.O. T d'E. H/113/67. Since Alfred's attitude toward publication at this time is of some interest, I give the rest of Frederick's remarks on the subject here: “I forget,” he continues, “whether his second volume had appeared before you left England. I hold it to be considerably superior to the first. Though some blackguard wrote a filthy thing against him in the Quarterly this has merely had the effect of promoting the sale of the book.” It is difficult to know what to make of this. The review did not promote the sale of the book (Alfred Tennyson, p. 137); and whatever Tennyson's attitude toward publication may have been in late 1833, it was not at all favorable in the spring of 1835, when he wrote to Spedding: “I do not wish to be dragged forward again in any shape before the reading public at present, particularly on the score of my old poems” (Memoir, i, 145). But since Frederick repeats his assertion in his letter of 10 February and since Hallam Tennyson's statement that Tennyson refused to publish in the fall of 1834 is based upon a misinterpretation of the same letter, it is just as well to recognize that no contemporary evidence earlier than the letter to Spedding (late March 1835) can be set against Frederick's declaration in support of the usual view that the resolution which produced the famous ten years' silence was an immediate effect of the Quarterly review and/or Hallam's death.

¹⁵ Memoir, i, 109. The place of this undated passage in Hallam Tennyson's narrative suggests that he attributed it to the period immediately succeeding Hallam's death, but it seems more likely that Tennant would have written thus after his January visit, for in November Alfred's mood had appeared to him unrelievedly bitter.

¹⁶ No. lxxxv was one of the first written of the In Memoriam elegies (Memoir, i, 109), but Mrs. Ellmann has pointed out that the early version in the Heath Commonplace Book omits this and other stanzas of the published poem (“Tennyson: Revision of In Memoriam, Section 85,” MLN, lxv, Jan. 1950, 27).

¹⁷ L.A.O. T d' E. H/116/9.

¹⁸ Henry Hallam's letter of request (Memoir, i, 108; undated) must have come toward the end of January, for Tennant, writing to Frederick on 28 January, records the receipt of a similar letter. See Letters to Frederick Tennyson, ed. Hugh J. Schonfield (London, 1930), p. 35.

¹⁹ Alfred Tennyson, p. 151. In writing to Henry Hallam himself (on 14 February) Tennyson was more reserved about his feelings: “That you intend to print some of my friend's remains … has given me greater pleasure than anything I have experienced for a length of time. I attempted to draw up a memoir of his life and character, but I failed to do him justice. I failed even to please myself. I could scarcely have pleased you. I hope to be able at a future period to concentrate whatever powers I may possess on the construction of some tribute to those high speculative endowments and comprehensive sympathies which I ever loved to contemplate; but at present, tho' somewhat ashamed at my own weakness, I find the object yet is too near me to permit of any very accurate delineation” (Works, ed. Hallam Lord Tennyson, London, 1913, p. 954).

²⁰ Quoted from the original letter to John Frere in the Duke Univ. Library. Hallam Tennyson has used this letter very carelessly in constructing a passage in the Memoir which has commonly been used to establish Tennyson's state of mind and attitude toward publication in the fall of 1834 (the period to which Hallam attributes the letter). He writes (i, 138): “The elder brother Frederick was just then in the midst of music at Milan. He wrote a few lines urging my father to publish in the spring. But he would not and could not; his health since Hallam's death had been ‘variable and his spirits indifferent’.” Obviously, Hallam has 1) misdated the letter by approximately eight months, despite Frederick's clear superscription “Somersby February 10th 1834,” and moved him prematurely from Lincolnshire to Italy; 2) converted Frederick's statement that Alfred would publish to an implied statement by Alfred that he would not; and 3) attributed Frederick's phrase about Alfred's variable spirits implicitly to Alfred himself and unjustifiably given it specific association with Hallam's death.

²¹ Letter from Clara Tennyson to George Hildeyard Tennyson (27 April 1834); L.A.O. T d' E. H/116/22.

²² See Memoir, i, 124, and Alfred Tennyson, p. 149, but also Jerome H. Buckley, Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 68 and p. 270, n. 13.

²³ L.A.O. T d' E. H/116/18.

²⁴ L.A.O. T d'E. H/116/19.

²⁵ Sir Charles (p. 151) places the letter in early summer. It seems likely from a reference in Tennyson's letter of 21 August that it was sent in late June, before his visit to the Heaths and Hallams.

²⁶ That Tennyson at this time visited the Hallams as well as the Heaths has apparently gone unnoticed by the biographers. In a letter to his grandfather dated from Somersby, 21 August 1834, Alfred says that he has “been spending the last four weeks at Mr. Serjeant Heath's house near Dorking & with the Hallams at Moulsey-Park near Kingston” (L.A.O. T d' E. H/147/11). He must have gone to the Hallams first, for the letters he received at the Heaths in mid-July from Emily and his mother (Memoir, i, 135–136) imply that he had just transmitted to Emily an invitation from the Hallams to visit. Alfred's mood during his stay with the Heaths is suggested by some light verses he wrote at the time (Buckley, p. 69).

²⁷ This is uncertain. Alfred's 21 August letter says that he has been away the “last four weeks,” but Hallam Tennyson prints a letter from Tennant, dated 4 August (Memoir, i, 137), which implies that he had been at Somersby and received a letter from Alfred since; so that on this evidence Tennyson must have returned home nearly a month before he wrote his grandfather, a conclusion which would agree with the implication of Emily's 12 July letter that he had already been with the Hallams and would leave the Heaths in less than three weeks. Tennant's letter, however, is dated only “1834” in Hallam Tennyson's unpublished Materials for a Life of A. T. and is there printed with another, purportedly earlier, letter, proposing the visit, dated 25 October 1834 (i, 160–161), so that Hallam may well have obscured the sequence of events; but since Alfred in his August letter is apologizing for neglecting a prior letter of his grandfather's, a simpler explanation would be that his statement reflects his disinclination to call the old man's attention to the time which had elapsed since his return.

²⁸ The time of this arrangement is also uncertain because of the confusion in the dates of Tennant's letters, but Hallam Tennyson's statement (Memoir, i, 137) that a sympathetic and practical Tennyson concocted the plan of Horatio's schooling in August in order to encourage Tennant, as well as to help his academically lagging brother, is certainly erroneous. The plan was originated months before, during Tennant's January visit, and was largely due to Tennant himself (see Letters to Frederick Tennyson, pp. 33–37).

²⁹ According to the letters Emily and Alfred's mother wrote him in mid-July (Memoir, i, 135–136), Emily was to travel to the Hallams with Charles “in about three weeks' time,” but apparently Emily's wish to be introduced to the Hallams by Alfred resulted in a postponement. Sir Charles says that Tennyson took Emily to the Hallams in September, at the same time that he took Horatio to Tennant (Alfred Tennyson, p. 151), but a more likely date would be October. In a letter which is a reply to one of Spedding's, dated 19 September 1834, Tennyson says, “I am going to town with Emily tomorrow,” and since he also says that Spedding has “waited some time for a reply,” it seems unlikely that his letter (dated only 1834 in the Memoir, i, 140) was written in September, especially since Spedding's letter had been spent through an intermediary.

³⁰ H. D. Rawnsley, Memories of the Tennysons (Glasgow, 1912), p. 65.

³¹ See R. W. Rader, “Tennyson and Rosa Baring,” VS, v (March 1962), 224–260.

³² Fol. 48^v. By chance we have another record of this party in a letter from Tennyson's cousin Louis to his father (11 Nov. 1834; L.A.O. T d' E. H/115/36). Louis, like the rest of the d'Eyncourts, rather shrank from his Somersby cousins, as the letter indicates: “Yesterday week I went with Charles to a dance at Somersby. I excused myself at first on the ground that I could not leave my Mother—Charles mentioned it to her, & she kindly & unadvisedly s[ai]d she did not want me to stay, so that my excuse was gone, & not liking to have recourse to another, lest Charles sh[oul]d think I was determined not to go I went:—My aunt received me most kindly—There was a very pleasant party there of the country neighbours.”

³³ This paper is one product of a research project carried out with the help of a grant-in-aid from the American Council of Learned Societies.