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.”