Tennyson's Life and Poetry: And Mistakes Concerning Tennyson

by Eugene Parsons

MISTAKES CONCERNING TENNYSON.

A STUDY IN CONTEMPORANEOUS BIOGRAPHY.

“Alfred Tennyson was born August 5, 1809, at Somersby, a hamlet in Lincolnshire, England, of which, and of a neighboring parish, his father, Dr. George Clayton Tennyson, was rector. The poet’s mother was Elizabeth, daughter of the Rev. Stephen Fytche, vicar of Louth. Alfred was the third of seven sons—Frederick, Charles, Alfred, Edward, Horatio, Arthur, and Septimus. A daughter, Cecilia, became the wife of Edmund Law Lushington, long professor of Greek in Glasgow University. Whether there were other daughters, the biographies of the poet do not mention.”

This is the opening paragraph of the Introduction to a school edition of “The Two Voices” and “A Dream of Fair Women,” by Dr. Hiram Corson. Here are several inaccuracies as to the Tennyson family and the poet’s birthday, and the same mistakes and others are found in nearly all the sketches of the Laureate in periodicals and works of reference.

It is generally supposed that cyclopedia articles are prepared by specialists who know what they are writing about. This is the popular conception, but this is evidently not the case in regard to Tennyson, who has fared sadly at the hands of his biographers. The brief accounts of his life given in Appleton’s, the Americanized Britannica, and other cyclopedias fairly bristle with blunders and objectionable features. As they stand, most of these articles are utterly untrustworthy. Their assertions are often misleading, or so vague as to be practically valueless. As a result, most people are more or less at sea in regard to Tennyson chronology.

Dr. Tennyson and Family.

A multitude of errors have been perpetrated about Dr. Tennyson and family. We are told that Bayons Manor was his native place,[19] and that he was “rector of Somersby and vicar of Bennington and Grimsby.”[20] One writer uncritically imagines him a doctor of divinity.[21] According to some questionable authorities, he died “about 1830;”[22] “in 1830;”[23] “about 1831;”[24] “on the 18th of March, 1831;”[25] and in 1832.[26] Mrs. Tennyson is said to have died “in her eighty-first year;”[27] also “in her eighty-fourth year.”[28]

The number of sons and daughters in the Tennyson household is rarely given correctly. Alfred is called, in a hit-or-miss fashion, one of three, four, six, seven and eight brothers. His sisters are variously reckoned as one, three, four and five.

The Rev. George Clayton Tennyson was born at Market Rasen, December 10, 1778. He graduated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1801; he received the degree of M. A. in 1805, and of LL.D. in 1813. He married (August 6, 1805) Miss Elizabeth Fytche of Louth. He moved to Somersby in 1808, where he was rector till his death. If the inscription on his tomb is to be trusted, Dr. Tennyson was rector of two neighboring parishes—Benniworth and Bag Enderby—and was vicar of Great Grimsby;[29] and died March 16, 1831. The poet’s mother died February 21, 1865, in her eighty-fifth year.

Alfred Tennyson was the fourth of eight sons—George (who died in infancy), Frederick, Charles, Alfred, Edward, Arthur, Septimus, and Horatio. The sisters were Mary, Emily, Matilda, and Cecilia. Excepting George and Frederick, all of the children were born at Somersby.

Alfred’s Birthday.

The discussion as to the poet’s birthday is now practically at rest—his lordship himself having authoritatively settled the matter. Would that he would enlighten us on some other perplexing points in his history! Mrs. Tennyson kept August 6 as Alfred’s birthday. Tourists who have hastily examined the parish registers of Somersby have mistaken the figure 6 for a 5, owing to the fading of the ink “at the back, or left, of the loop.”[30] But careless hackwriters, depending upon the compilations published decades ago, continue to assert that the Laureate was born August 5;[31] April 9,[32] or April 6.[33]

Year of Tennyson’s Birth.

In Welsh’s English Literature is a “biography” of Tennyson which says, amid various other slips, that he was born in 1810. Allibone’s Dictionary of Authors (p. 2371) is a year out of the way. When this ponderous work was first published, not much was definitely known of the poet, but Alden’s Cyclopedia of Literature (1890), and other unreliable authorities put 1810 or 1811 as the year of his birth.

In the parish registers of Somersby, Dr. Tennyson’s handwriting records Alfred’s birth and baptism among the entries of 1809. Here is an instance where one can put to flight a host—for the names of those who assign 1810 as the year of the poet’s birth are legion.[34]

Tennyson’s Schooldays.

There is a want of precision in many of the statements that have been made by Tennyson’s biographers concerning his school days. In the Encyclopedia Americana (1889), vol. iv., p. 660, Dr. C. E. Washburn says Alfred “attended for a time Cadney’s village school, and for a brief period the grammar-school at Louth,”—which is partly true, but curiously misrepresents the matter. He was a pupil in Louth Grammar School four years (1816-20)—not a very “brief period.” Howitt and others make the length of time “two or three years,” and some have the mistaken impression that he passed some time in Cadney’s school before he went to Louth. Cadney came to Somersby about 1820, and, in the autumn of the next year, he instructed the Tennyson boys in arithmetic at the rectory. Cook erroneously supposes that Charles and Alfred were at Louth in 1827.[35]

There has been considerable guessing as to the time when Tennyson went to Cambridge. He is said to have entered Trinity College in 1826;[36] in 1827;[37] about 1827;[38] in 1829;[39] and “early in 1829.”[40] There is no occasion for such indefiniteness. To be exact, Alfred became a student of Trinity in October, 1828.[41] He left college without graduating, at the time of his father’s death. His brothers, Frederick and Charles, finished the course in 1832.

COINCIDENCES.

The cyclopedias also present numerous examples of coincidences as well as variations—some of the incorrect details being repeated almost verbatim, as though successive compilers had copied over and over the mistakes of their superficial predecessors. This ought not to go on forever.

The sketches of Tennyson in Lippincott’s Biographical Dictionary (1885) and in the Americanized Britannica (1890) may be taken as samples. In the following sentence from Lippincott’s the writer manages to make five or six misstatements:

“In 1851 he succeeded Wordsworth as poet-laureate, and about the same time he married, and retired to Faringford, in the Isle of Wight, where he resided until 1869, when he removed to Petersfield, Hampshire.”

In the biographical supplement of the Americanized Britannica, this becomes two or three sentences, viz.:

“He was made poet-laureate in 1851. It was about this time, too, that Tennyson married, returning to Faringford, in the Isle of Wight, where he lived until 1869.... It was in this year the poet moved from the Isle of Wight and took up his residence in Petersfield, Hampshire.”

There are similar passages in Appleton’s and Johnson’s cyclopedias. It is perfectly plain that there was not much independent investigation in these unscholarly performances.

MISTAKES.

Mistake No. 1: Tennyson received the Laureateship in 1850, the year of Wordsworth’s death. Mistake No. 2: he was married June 13, 1850. Mistake No. 3: Farringford is misspelled. Mistake No. 4: Tennyson lived at Twickenham three years after his marriage. Mistake No. 5: in 1853, he first took possession of Farringford, which is still his winter residence. Mistake No. 6: in 1867, the poet built a house near Haslemere in Surrey—not at Petersfield, Hampshire—where he spends the summer months. According to Prof. Church, the Laureate bought the Aldworth estate in 1872. The latter date is manifestly wrong.[42]

The story of Tennyson’s Petersfield establishment may be classed as a myth, though supported by several monuments of research called cyclopedias.[43]

Nothing is said of a Hampshire home in Jennings’ Life of Tennyson, in Church’s Laureate’s Country, or in Van Dyke’s admirable book on the Poetry of Tennyson; no reference to it is found in the essays on Tennyson by Mr. Edmund Gosse and Mrs. Anne Thackeray Ritchie. Nor is Lord Tennyson’s name found in the list of land owners of Hampshire, in Walford’s County Families of the United Kingdom. One is puzzled to understand how such a report started.

TENNYSON’S ELEVATION TO THE PEERAGE.

It is rather surprising to read in the People’s Cyclopedia, Johnson’s, Lippincott’s and elsewhere, that Tennyson was raised to the peerage in 1883 as “Baron d’Eyncourt,” etc. This he cannot properly be called, though a descendant from the ancient house of D’Eyncourt—which long ago ceased to be a barony. The pedigree of Alfred’s grandfather, who belonged to the Lincolnshire gentry, is traced through ten generations to Edmund, Duke of Somerset, and two centuries further back to Edward III.’s fourth son, John of Gaunt. Dr. Tennyson died in the lifetime of his father, and the D’Eyncourt seat and dignity passed to his younger brother Charles. The poet’s cousin Louis Charles is the present possessor of the family estate at Bayons. England’s noble Laureate (according to Burke’s Peerage, ed. of 1888, p. 1361) was created a peer of the realm Jan. 24, 1884, with the new title—Baron of Aldworth, Surrey, and of Farringford, Isle of Wight. He took his seat in the House of Lords, Mar. 11, 1884.[44]

LAPSES IN ENGLISH GEOGRAPHY.

A common mistake is that of locating Aldworth in Sussex. Mr. Frederick Dolman, in the Ladies’ Home Journal (August, 1891), carelessly speaks of “the poet’s residences in the fair Isle and sunny Sussex.” According to Murray’s Handbook for Surrey (ed. of 1888, p. 182), and other excellent authorities,[45] Aldworth is in the county of Surrey—not far from the northern borders of Sussex. In Walford’s County Families of the United Kingdom, p. 1203, Lord Tennyson’s name occurs among the land owners of Surrey—not with those of Sussex.

Somersby and Somerby have been mixed by many people who are not familiar with English geography. The latter village is in the western part of Lincolnshire, near Grantham—a considerable distance from Alfred Tennyson’s birthplace. Duyckinck, in his Eminent Men and Women, recklessly says he was born at “Somerby, a small parish in Leicestershire.”[46]

If Europeans are guilty of crass ignorance of the United States, Americans too are open to criticism for their hazy notions of foreign places. An inexcusable blunder is that in Phillips’ Popular Manual of English Literature, vol. II., p. 497, where Blackdown is loosely referred to as “a hill in the vicinity of Petersfield, Hampshire.” Another writer is remiss in accepting statements implicitly and without question. A footnote in Kellogg’s school edition of “In Memoriam,” p. 23, says “Hallam was buried in Cleveland Church on the Severn, which empties into British Channel.” If he had looked up the town for himself on the map of England, he would have discovered that Clevedon, the birthplace of Hallam, is situated on the bank of the Severn near its entrance to the Bristol Channel.

VARIOUS ERRORS.

It is not my purpose to enumerate all the errors that I have come across in my reading relating to Tennyson and his works. For the sake of brevity, I merely correct a few of them without giving full particulars in every case. Tennyson first visited the Pyrenees in 1830—not in 1831; the second visit was in 1862. He received the degree of D. C. L. in 1855—not in 1859. His son Hallam was born at Twickenham, Aug. 11, 1852; Lionel, at Freshwater, Mar. 16, 1854.

Tennyson did not write “Break, break, break” at Clevedon or Freshwater. The intercalary lyrics of “The Princess” were first published in the third edition—not in the second. The plot of “The Cup” is taken from Plutarch’s treatise De Mulierum Virtutibus; this work has been confused by Archer and Jennings with Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus.

Many unpardonable mistakes have been made in dating Tennyson’s published writings, also in wording and punctuating their titles. It has been said that “The Princess” first appeared in print in 1846 and 1849; “In Memoriam,” in 1849 and 1851; “Idyls of the King,” in 1855, 1858, and 1861; “Enoch Arden,” in 1865; “The Holy Grail, and Other Poems,” in 1867 and 1870; “Harold,” in 1877; “Becket,” in 1879 and 1885; “Tiresias, and Other Poems,” in 1886; and “Demeter, and Other Poems,” in 1890. In Hart’s Manual of English Literature, one of Tennyson’s poems is named “The Vision of Art,” and a recent German cyclopedia makes him the author of “Tristam and Iseult.” A newspaper account of the sale of Tennysoniana in London contains the queer bit of misinformation that Poems by Two Brothers “was published by Louth in 1826.” These slips could have been easily avoided. The mystery hanging about the Laureate’s life does not involve his works.

It is believed that the following list, which has been carefully verified, is correct both as to the titles and the dates of first publication of all of Tennyson’s books, viz:

Poems by Two Brothers		1826 (dated 1827)
Poems, chiefly Lyrical		1830
Poems		1832 (dated 1833)
Poems, 2 vols.		1842
The Princess		1847
In Memoriam		1850
Maud, and Other Poems		1855
Idyls of the King		1859
Enoch Arden, etc.		1864
The Holy Grail, and Other Poems		1869
Gareth and Lynette, etc.		1872
Queen Mary		1875
Harold		1876
The Lover’s Tale		1879
Ballads, and Other Poems		1880
The Cup and The Falcon		1884
Becket		1884
Tiresias, and Other Poems		1885
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, etc.		1886
Demeter, and Other Poems		1889
The Foresters		1892

---