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the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

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Listings for Author:  

Alfred Tennyson

 

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Alfred, Lord Tennyson : Funeral Ode

'That time Lord Tennyson was delightful - kind and friendly and full of stories, talking a great deal, and in the best of humours. He read the Funeral Ode to us afterwards, and one or two shorter poems (Blow, Bugles, Blow); and I was so glad and thankful that Cecco should see him so, and have such a bright recollection of him to carry through his life.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred, Lord Tennyson      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : More d'Arthur

'Communication between these poets and myself was instantaneous. I saw with delighted amazement that all poetry had been written specially for me. Although I spoke - in my back street urchin accents - of La Belly Dame Sans Murky, yet in Keats's chill little poem I seemed to sense some essence of the eternal ritual of romantic love. And Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur" bowled me over. I read it again and again until I fairly lived in a world of "armies that clash by night" and stately weeping Queens. So the poets helped me escape the demands of communal living which now, at thirteen, were beginning to be intolerable to me'.

Century:      Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Burnham      Print: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : 

'Our parents had accumulated a large number of books, which we were allowed to browse in as much as we liked.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Vivian (Molly) Hughes      Print: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : Locksley Hall

'My eldest brother was one day making disparaging remarks about Tennyson. My mother, all agitated in defence of her idol, fetched his poems from the shelf, and with a "Listen now, children" began to declaim "Locksley Hall". When she reached "I to herd with narrow foreheads" she burst out, flinging down the book, "What awful rubbish this is!"'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Thomas      Print: Book

  

Lord Alfred Tennyson : Poems, Chiefly Lyrical

[Marginalia]

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge      Print: Book

  

Alfred Lord Tennyson : 

'Garratt escaped [from factory life] to an evening course in English literature, where he felt "like a child that becomes ecstatic with a fireworks display". Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson "swamped the trivialities of life and gave my ego a fulness and strength in the lustre of which noble conceptions were born and flourished'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: V.W. Garratt      Print: Book

  

Alfred Lord Tennyson : 'The Lotus Eaters'

'[Muir's] account of his reading material as a young man in Glasgow points to an involvement with poems of the Romantic and post-Romantic periods which were concerned both with visionary experience and with the need to transcend human suffering. He tells us: I was enchanted by The Solitary Reaper, the Ode to a Nightingale, the Ode to the West Wind, The Lotus Eaters, and the chorus from Atalanta in Calydon'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edwin Muir      Print: Unknown

  

Alfred Lord Tennyson : 

'Philip Inman conveyed a ... specific sense of the uses of literacy for an early Labour MP. The son of a widowed charwoman, he bought up all the cheap reprints he could afford and kept notes on fifty-eight of them... There were Emerson's essays, Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, Holmes's Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Lamb's Essays of Elia, classic biogaphies (Boswell on Johnson, Lockhart on Scott, Carlyle on Sterling), several Waverley novels, Wuthering Heights, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, The Imitation of Christ, Shakespeare's sonnets, Tennyson, Browning, William Morris and Palgrave's Golden Treasury.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Inman      Print: Book

  

Alfred Lord Tennyson : 

'In 1898 Armstrong organised the Ashington Debating and Literary Improvement Society, and his reading broadened out to Shakespeare, Burns, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Byron, Whitman, Wordsworth, Scott, Robert Browning, Darwin and T.H. Huxley. Robertson Nicoll's British Weekly had introduced him to a more liberal Nonconformity that was hospitable to contemporary literature. The difficulty was that the traditional Nonconformist commitment to freedom of conscience was propelling him beyond the confines of Primitive Methodism, as far as Unitarianism, the Rationalist Press Association and the Independent Labour Party. His tastes in literature evolved apace: Ibsen, Zola. Meredith, and Wilde by the 1890s; then on to Shaw, Wells, and Bennett; and ultimately Marxist economics and Brave New World'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Chester Armstrong      Print: Book

  

Alfred Lord Tennyson : 'Break, break, break'

'[Through the Women's Co-operative Guild, Deborah Smith] began reading poetry and, at age fifty one, discovered her own spiritual longings in Tennyson: Break, break, break on thy cold grey stones, oh sea, Oh would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me!'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Deborah Smith      Print: Book

  

Alfred Lord Tennyson : 

'Robert White... had somewhat more progressive tastes [than Robert Story], which extended to Shelley, Keats, Childe Harold, and The Lady of the Lake. But his reading stopped short at the Romantics. In 1873 he confessed that he could not stomach avant-garde poets like Tennyson. "As for our modern novel-writers - Dickens, Thackeray and others I do not care to read them, since Smollett, Fielding and Scott especially are all I desire".'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert White      Print: Book

  

Alfred Lord Tennyson : 

'From a classroom library of perhaps two dozen volumes [Richard Hillyer] borrowed one by Tennyson, simply because it had 'Poet Laureate' printed on the title page: the coloured words flashed out and entranced my fancy... my dormant imagination opened like a flower in the sun".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Richard Hillyer      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : 

Bartlett dug out one of James Russell Lowell's poems, 'The Vision of Sir Launfal', though why he chose that dim poem I do not know: we went on to Tennyson, never learning by heart.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Victor Sawdon Pritchett      Print: Book

  

Alfred Lord Tennyson : 

'Daughter of the editor father, [Rose Macaulay] was given a copy of the complete works of Tennyson when she was eight and remembers knowing it "practically by heart"... Shelley, too, she found "an intoxicant". A coplete works of Shelley joined her Tennyson a year later, starting a fascination with the poet which she remembers in a letter to Gilbert Murray in January 1945: "I, like you, read Shelley's Prometheus very young... I was entirely carried away by it; as I was, indeed, by all Shelley... Of course, I didn't understand all Prometheus; but enough to be fascinated".'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Rose Macaulay      Print: Book

  

Alfred Lord Tennyson : unknown

Geraldine Hodgson, The Life of James Elroy Flecker (1925), 'Reading aloud in the family circle was an established custom [in 1880s-90s] ... by a very early age, Roy had listened to large parts of Dickens, Longfellow, and Tennyson, and to much of Thackeray, George Eliot, Carlyle, and Browning.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: James Elroy Flecker      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : unknown

' ... [Elizabeth and Alice Thompson] used to go for picnics at Porto Fino, loaded with books of verse, and Mrs Thompson and Mr [Alfred] Strettell would read aloud to them from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Christiana Thompson      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : unknown

' ... [Elizabeth and Alice Thompson] used to go for picnics at Porto Fino, loaded with books of verse, and Mrs Thompson and Mr [Alfred] Strettell would read aloud to them from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Baker Strettell      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : unknown

Alice Meynell recalls childhood reading: 'In quite early childhood I lived upon Wordsworth ... When I was about twelve I fell in love with Tennyson, and cared for nothing else until, at fifteen, I discovered Keats and then Shelley.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alice Thompson      

  

Alfred Lord Tennyson : [unknown]

[A Sheffield Survey organised by Arnold Freeman in 1918, assessing 816 manual workers, gives the following case:] 'Engine tenter, age twenty-seven...Often attends operas...Methodically building up a personal library following the guidelines of Arnold Bennett's Literary Taste. Has read the Bible, Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Much Ado about Nothing), Pope, Tennyson, Masefield, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Emerson, William Morris, most of Ruskin, Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol), The Cloister and the Hearth, GK Chesterton, Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara, John Bull's Other Island, The Doctor's Dilemma, Man and Superman, The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet, The Devil's Disciple, You Never Can Tell, Socialism and Superior Brains, Fabian Essays, An Unsocial Socialist, The Irrational Knot), John Galsworthy, about a dozen books by H.G. Wells and perhaps twenty by Bennett, Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Industrial Democracy and other books on trade unionism, Sir Oliver Lodge, Edward Carpenter's Towards Democracy and The Intermediate Sex, J.A. Hobson and Alfred Marshall on Economics and Plato's Republic'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : [unknown]

[analysis of a female respondent in Arnold Freeman's 1918 Sheffield Survey] 'Machinist in a shell factory, age twenty-four... Has read Shakespeare, Burns, Keats, Scott, Tennyson, Dickens, Vanity Fair, The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, biography and history'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : [unknown]

'In 1955 Manny Shinwell - who read all of Palgrave's Golden Treasury to his children, and had consoled himself in prison with Keats and Tennyson - regretted that that poetic heritage had been surrendered to the cinema and radio: "In the early days of the [socialist] movement it was common practice of speakers to recite poetry...".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Emmanuel (Manny) Shinwell, later Baron Shinwell      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : In Memoriam

'Newman Flower, born in 1879, was running from the classroom at Weymouth College to his housemaster's in a snowstorm when someone ... shouted: '"Tennyson's dead!" And in my pocket was a volume of Tennyson's poems, for we had been doing In Memoriam that afternoon.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: school class at Weymouth College     Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Cup

'In 1880 Tennyson attempted to interest Henry Irving in his play "The Cup" ... [he] "read in a monotone, rumbling on a low note" until, for the female parts, "he changed his voice suddenly and climbed up into a key he could not sustain". This was Ellen Terry's description: she was present with her 11-year-old daughter, who found the performance irresistibly comical, as apparently did Irving ...'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Passing of Arthur

'In 1876 Aubrey de Vere aranged for Alice Thompson ... and her sister Elizabeth a visit to [Tennyson at] Aldworth ... Alice was ready with her selection when the offer to read was issued. It was "The Passing of Arthur", and it was a mistake. Tennyson "complied ... [but] was not pleased with her choice, which he thought should have fallen on his later work".'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Maud

' ... [over] a weekend at Aldworth ... [Margot Tennant] told Tennyson how very handsome he was, and, after his after-dinner nap, asked him to read "Maud" ... read it he did ...'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Maud

'Mary Gladstone ... had experiences of Tennyson reading "Maud" in 1878, in 1879, and again in 1882.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Maud

'Mary Gladstone ... had experiences of Tennyson reading "Maud" in 1878, in 1879, and again in 1882.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Maud

'Mary Gladstone ... had experiences of Tennyson reading "Maud" in 1878, in 1879, and again in 1882.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Harold

' ... in November 1876, when a guest of Gladstone at Hawarden, Tennyson read the whole of his new play, "Harold" (1877) ... The marathon session began at 11.30 and continued for two and a half hours, during which Gladstone nodded off and other minds turned to "such earthly things as luncheon".'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington

'When the Duke of Argyll ... visited Farringford, Tennyson read his "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" (1852) ...'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : Locksley Hall

'Occasionally the discussions became acrimonious. My eldest brother was one day making disparaging remarks about Tennyson, and my mother, all agitated in defence of her idol, fetched his poems from the shelf, and with a "Listen now, children" began to declaim "Locksley Hall". When she reached "I to herd with narroe foreheads" she burst out, flinging down the book, "What awful rubbish this is!"

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Mrs Hughes      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : 

?I always have a profound impression that human beings have been much more like each other than we fancy since they got rid of their tails & that the great outbursts of speculation or art imply some special excitement more than a radical difference in people themselves. I have even a belief that if Browning had lived 200 years ago he would have been a small Shakespeare & perhaps Tennyson a second rate Milton ? though I agree that poor old Alfred has not quite the stuff in him.?

Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Leslie Stephen      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : In the Valley of the Cauteretz

"This bit of Tennyson sticks in my head; so I write it down: - 'All along the valley where the waters flow / I walked with one I loved two & thirty years ago / All along the valley while I walked today / The two & thirty years were a mist that rolled away / All along the valley by rock & wood & tree / The voice of the dead was a living voice to me'."

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Leslie Stephen      Print: Book

  

Alfred Lord Tennyson : 

'While his widowed mother... worked a market stall, Ralph Finn scrambled up the scholarship ladder to Oxford University. He credited his success largely to his English master at Davenant Foundation School: "When I was an East End boy searching for beauty, hardly knowing what I was searching for, fighting against all sorts of bad beginnings and unrewarding examples, he more than anyone taught me to love our tremndous heritage of English language and literature". And Finnn never doubted that it was HIS heritage: "My friends and companions Tennyson, Browning, Keats, Shakespeare, Francis Thompson, Donne, Housman, the Rosettis. All as alive to me as thought they had been members of my family". After all, as he was surprised and pleased to discover, F.T. Palgrave (whose Golden Treasury he knew thoroughly) was part-Jewish'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Finn      Print: Book

  

Alfred Lord Tennyson : The Charge of the Light Brigade

'When, during the 1926 miners' strike, [G.A.W. Tomlinson] read 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', an obvious political message "crashed into my mind, mixing together the soldiers of the poem and the men of the pits, I was terribly excited. Why hadn't all the clever people found this out?".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: G.A.W. Tomlinson      Print: Book

  

Alfred Lord Tennyson : The Princess

'[Helen Crawfurd] derived lessons in socialism and feminism from Carlyle, Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Ibsen's Ghosts and A Doll's House, Dickens, Disraeli's Sybil, Mary Barton, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Under the Greenwood Tree, Tennyson's The Princess, Longfellow, Whitman, Burns, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, George Sand, the Brontes, Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Helen Crawfurd      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : poetry

' ... [13-to-14-year-old Constance Maynard's] most intimate contact with reading .. took place ... in a secluded corner of the garden, where she haphazardly consumed Milton's sonnets, Cowper, Irving's Orations, and Tennyson ...'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Constance Maynard      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : poetry

Joan Evans, "Prelude and Fugue: An Autobiography" (1964): 'One of my few conscious naughtinesses after I had attained the age of perception was to steal into the drawing-room, when I knew my parents were safe in London, open the [book]case, and take deep delicious draughts of verse. Tennyson and Matthew Arnold were all the sweeter for being read in secret' (p.17).'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Joan Evans      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : poems including The Revenge

"Mary Stocks (b. 1891) recorded how her Aunt Tiddy made great efforts to preserve her and her siblings from 'indelicacy' [quotes from Stocks's account of how one of the poems read aloud by aunt included Tennyson, 'The Revenge', in her text of which the aunt covered the word 'womb' with a strip of paper] ..."

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Tiddy      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : poems including The Revenge

"Mary Stocks (b. 1891) recorded how her Aunt Tiddy made great efforts to preserve her and her siblings from 'indelicacy' [quotes from Stocks's account of how one of the poems read aloud by aunt included Tennyson, 'The Revenge', in her text of which the aunt covered the word 'womb' with a strip of paper]: 'My family still cherishes the tattered volume of Tennyson showing the marks from which the strip was surreptitiously removed by us to satify a curiosity very natural in the young.'"

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Stocks and siblings     Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : 

'Stella Davies's father would read to his children from the Bible, "Pilgrim's Progress", Walter Scott, Longfellow, Tennyson, Dickens, "The Cloister and the Hearth", and Pope's translation of the "Iliad", though not in their entirety: "Extracts suitable to our ages were read and explained and, when we younger ones had been packed off to bed, more serious and inclusive reading would begin... We younger ones often dipped into books farf beyond our understanding. It did us no harm, I believe, for we skipped a lot and took what we could from the rest".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Stella Davies      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : In Memoriam

'after tea [W.J. Brown] would enjoy "five glorious hours of freedom" reading Darwin, Huxley and Tennyson's "In Memoriam" at the Battersea Public Library'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: William John Brown      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : The Dying Swan

'Masefield's early experience of literature came with the stories told or read to him by his nurse. The fare was what would be expected in a middle class Victorian home; even "Dick Whittington and his Cat" was introduced. Tennyson's "The Dying Swan" was one of the boy's earliest delights; and, having been taught to read before his sixth birthday, he read and committed to memory copious amounts of Longfellow, especially Hiawatha and Evangeline'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: John Masefield      Print: Book

  

Alfred Lord Tennyson : 

'my mother arrived in England with a great respect for culture, and eager to learn all she could. We find her struggling to read Browning and Tennyson and Shelley; battering her way with pride and tenacity through "La Petite Fadette"... But with all her respect for education...learning was never her strong point'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Maud du Puy      Print: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : In Memoriam

'Uncle Richard had adored Ruskin, and worshipped Morris, and had slept for years with a copy of "In Memoriam" under his pillow. He told me once how he and his friends used to wait outside the bookshops in the early morning, when they heard that a new volume of Tennyson was to come out. He had read all Browning too, and all Wordsworth, and Carlyle, in fact nearly everything contemporary; and he constantly re-read the Classics in their own classic tongues... a triumph of timing occurred once when he was listening to the Thunderstorm in the Pastoral Symphony, and reading the thunderstorm in "Oedipus at Colonus", and a real thunderstorm took place!'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Richard Litchfield      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : unknown

Henry James to E. C. Stedman, 1 September 1875: "My pretentions, in attenpting to talk about Tennyson [in review of Queen Mary], were very modest ... I know him only as we all know him -- by desultory reading ..."

Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Henry James      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : Lotos Eaters, The

'1943 My Favourite: Books: "How Green Was my Valley", "Witch in the Wood". Authors: T.H.White, Hugh Walpole Poems: "Christabel", "Lotus Eaters" Writers: Shaw, Shakespeare'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Hilary Spalding      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : Summer Evening

'I have been reading Tennyson's "Summer Evening", which is a lovely poem, full of pictures.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Hilary Spalding      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Locksley Hall

Henry James to Elizabeth Boott 30 October 1878, on lunch that day with Tennyson at his home, : "He read out 'Locksley Hall' to me, in a kind of solemn, sonorous chant, and I thought the performance, and the occasion, sufficiently impressive."

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : [poems]

?A situation as an errand boy at a bookseller?s was then found for me. A circulating library was attached to the business. My duties were to clean books and knives and brasses, and then carry books and magazines to the houses of the gentry who were subscribers to the library. The occupation was not uncongenial? for I was able to steal a peep at literature which would not otherwise have come within my reach. The book that was then in greatest demand, as I gathered from so often carrying it from one house to another, was Eliot Warburton?s "Crescent and the Cross", and next to it, I think, came Tennyson?s poems.?

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: William Edwin Adams      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : Morte d'Arthur

'In the evening we all went over to the Camerons. Several Pre-Raphaelite artists were there to meet Tennyson; Hunt and Rossetti and one or two whose names I did not gather. Lear was there also and sang a great many of his compositions to Tennyson's words. They are mostly very pretty things but he has no voice, and, on the whole, it is rather painful to listen to him. When they were all gone Tennyson read us his own Morte d'Arthur, and that really was a pleasure. It is a poem I have always been fond of.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred, Lord Tennyson      

  

Alfred Lord Tennyson : unknown

'Went to hear Mr and Mrs Wigan read Tennyson and "the Rivals" at Apsley House'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Mr and Mrs Wigan     Print: BookManuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Lord Tennyson : [poems including 'The First Quarrel']

'Read Tennyson's new vol. of poems and particularly like "The first Quarrel".'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud]      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : In Memoriam A. H. H.

Harriet Martineau to E. J. Furnival, 5 October 1851, thanking him for a copy of Tennyson's "In Memoriam": 'Like most other people (whom I have met with, at least), I shrank from a whole volume of published griefs; and the more, because I knew Arthur Hallam [...] I began to cut and read last night; and I stopped at last, by a virtuous effort, from the feeling that I ought not to be able to take in so much at once, -- that I ought to spread it out [...] I cannot honestly say that I had anything like so much pleasure from "The Princess." There are bits of wisdom and beauty [...] but the impression of the whole is more than odd; -- it is very disagreeable, to my feeling. It does not follow that I am not glad to know it'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Princess

Harriet Martineau to E. J. Furnival, 5 October 1851, thanking him for a copy of Tennyson's [italics]In Memoriam[end italics]: 'Like most other people (whom I have met with, at least), I shrank from a whole volume of published griefs; and the more, because I knew Arthur Hallam [...] I began to cut and read last night; and I stopped at last, by a virtuous effort, from the feeling that I ought not to be able to take in so much at once, -- that I ought to spread it out [...] I cannot honestly say that I had anything like so much pleasure from "The Princess." There are bits of wisdom and beauty [...] but the impression of the whole is more than odd; -- it is very disagreeable, to my feeling. It does not follow that I am not glad to know it'.

Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : [Unknown - Poetry]

'On the day that the bloody battle of Gravellote was fought [August 18, 1870] they [Hardy and Emma] were reading Tennyson in the grounds of the rectory.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Hardy and his wife Emma Gifford     

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : [unknown]

'Maybe to neutralise the Penny Dreadful, Cassells brought out the Penny Classics. These had a bluish-green cover and were world famous novels in abridged form, but sixty or seventy pages. And W.T. Stead brought out the Penny Poets. The covers of these were pimply surface-paper, a bright orange colour, and they contained selections from Longfellow, Tennyson, Keats, and many others. I first read "Hiawatha" and "Evangeline" in the Penny Poets and thought them marvellous; so marvellous that I began to write 'poetry' myself. Stead also brought out another penny book; this had a pink cover and contained selections from the ancient classics: stories from Homer, the writings of Pliny the younger, Aesop's "Fables". I took a strong fancy to Aesop, he was a Greek slave from Samos, in the sixth century BC, and workpeople were only just beginning to be called "wage slaves". I read all these; non-selective and Catholic my reading...'

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Stamper      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : Maud [and other poems?]

'So that, whatever may have been its deeper cause, the love which filled my imagination was of a kind that seemed, to me, to have little to do with what I meant by sex. "Love" was something I had learned about from "David Copperfield" and "Under the Greenwood Tree" and from the stories in "The Woman's Weekly", which my mother occasionally bought. And of course, from the poetry I was beginning to enjoy. I was naively oblivious to the sexual innuendoes of Keats and Tennyson but their romantic raptures set me trembling like a tuning fork. "Come into the garden, Maud" roused nothing of the derision, or even downright ribaldry, that it would surely rouse in a boy of today.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Norman Nicholson      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : '1865-1866'

'... such cursed nonsense as the last thing in Good Words. Oh! Alfred Tennyson! Alfred Tennyson, oh!'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson      Print: Serial / periodical

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Lotus Eaters/St Simeon Stylites

'By the way what awful trash Tennyson's serial poetry is just now. To think of the man who wrote the 'Lotus Eaters' 'St Simeon Stylites' et caetera.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : Maud; A Monodrama

?I have just been reading "Maud". Do not fear, dear; it has not been unpleasant to me; I see and know and accept all the limitations without a grudge.?

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'The Mermaid'

Elizabeth Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, ?24 August 1836: 'You have not read all Tennyson's poems -- neither have I -- but did you see his "mermaid" at the end of Leigh Hunt's paper on mermaids in the New Monthly Magazine? There is a tone in the poetry -- in the very extravagance of the poetry & language -- an abandonment & wildness -- which seemed to me to accord beautifully with the subject, & stayed with me afterwards -- a true sign of true poetry -- whether I would or not. And if there are [...] occasional perplexities & obscurations in the meaning -- still, no one could complain of them [italics]there[end italics] -- seeing that the language seems to have caught its strangeness with its music from the Mermaid's tongue.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett      Print: Serial / periodical

  

Alfred Tennyson : Poems

Elizabeth Barrett to John Kenyon, 15 May 1842: 'I ought to be thanking you for your great kindness about this divine Tennyson [...] But notwithstanding the poetry of the novelties -- & you will observe that his two preceding volumes (only one of which I had seen before .. having enquired for the other vainly) are included in these two, -- nothing appears to me quite equal to Oenone [...] That is not said in disparagement of the last, but in admiration of the first. There is in fact more thought, more bare brave working of the intellect in the later poems, even if we miss some of the high ideality, & the music that goes with it, of the older ones.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Poems

Robert Browning to Alfred Domett, 13 July 1842: 'I send this with Tennyson's new vol -- The alterations are insane. WhatEVER is touched is spoiled [...] Locksley Hall is shorn of two or three couplets I will copy out from the book of somebody who luckily transcribed from the proof-sheet -- meantime [italics]one[end italics] line, you will see, I [italics]have[end italics] restored'.

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Browning      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'Oriana'

Elizabeth Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, 9 December 1842: 'Do you really object to the re-iteration of [italics]Oriana[end italics] [in Tennyson's poem of that name]? Do you think it affected? To my mind, it is highly artistic, & [italics]effective[end italics] instead! It rang all day in my head when first I read it [...] You hear the Norland wind wail in it!'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'Locksley Hall'

Mary Russell Mitford to Elizabeth Barrett, 13 December 1842: 'I read Tennyson. "Locksley Hall" is very fine; but should it not have finished at '"I myself must mix with action, Lest I wither by despair"? 'It seems to me that all after that weakens the impression of the story, which has its appropriate finish with that line.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Russell Mitford      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : poetry

Harriet Martineau to Elizabeth Barrett, 11 July 1844: 'I read Tennyson with deep & high delight, yet with the mournful feeling that his operation & immortality must be restricted by the want of simplicity wh. is the curse of our poets now-a- days. None can live who do not speak out clear & substantial, well-rounded thoughts in the most lucid & direct expression. Scarcely one does this, -- & for want of it I do fear none will live.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.

'I tried to read Tennyson?s Ode on the Dook of Wellington (which is the finest lyrical poem in the language in case you don?t know) aloud this morning, and I had a hand at my throat tightening steadily as I read, until I could articulate no more and had to throw the book away. That is one of the experiences in life worth having; so were the Elgin Marbles.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson      Print: Unknown

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : 'Deserted House, The'

'I like your expression of 'an unwritten tragedy'. It quite answers to the sadness which fills my heart as I look on some of those deserrted old halls. Do they not remind you of Tennyson's 'Deserted House' - 'Life and thought are gone away', &c.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : Oenone

[Gaskell tells John Forster of Samuel Bamford who knows many of Tennyson's poems by heart and recites them, but does not have his own copy - she later asks Forster if he could procure a copy for Bamford, signed by Tennyson] ''whenever he got into a house where there were Tennyson's poems he learnt as many as he could of[f] by heart; & he thought he knew better than twelve', - & he began Oenone, & then the Sleeping Beauty'.

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Bamford      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : 'Sleeping Beauty, The'

[Gaskell tells John Forster of Samuel Bamford who knows many of Tennyson's poems by heart and recites them, but does not have his own copy - she later asks Forster if he could procure a copy for Bamford, signed by Tennyson] ''whenever he got into a house where there were Tennyson's poems he learnt as many as he could of[f] by heart; & he thought he knew better than twelve', - & he began Oenone, & then the Sleeping Beauty'.

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Bamford      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : [Poems]

''Tennyson' has arrived safe, without a shadow of damage and thanks without end for it. I have been half-opening the pretty golden leaves, and peeping here and there at old favourites since it came. But I have shut it up close again, that it may all properly stick togeher like a new bound book, before I take it to Bamford'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : 'Sleeping Beauty, The'

[Gaskell describes handing over the gift of a signed copy of Tennyson's poems to Samuel Bamford] 'I said, 'Look at the title page', for I saw he was fairly caught by something he liked in the middle of the book, & was standing reading it there in the street. 'Well! I am a proud man this day', he exclaimed, - then he turned it up and down, & read a bit, (it was a very crowded street), and his grey face went quite brown-red with pleasure [...] Then he dipped down into his book, and began reading aloud the Sleeping beauty, and in the middle stopped to look at the writing again, and we left him a sort of sleep[-]walking state, & only trust he will not be run over'.

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Bamford      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Timbuctoo

Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett, letter postmarked 14 June 1845: 'When I ask my wise self what I really do remember of that Prize-poem -- the answer is -- both of Chapman's lines a-top, quite worth any prize for the quoter -- then, the good epithet of "green Europe" contrasting with Africa -- then, deep in the piece, a picture of a vestal in a vault [...] I read the poem many years ago, and never since -- tho' I have an impression that the versification is good.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Browning      

  

Alfred Tennyson : (Probably) 'The Bugle Song' (opening 'The splendour falls')

Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 18 February 1850: 'Such a magical act as conjuring up for me the sight of a new poem by Alfred Tennyson, is unnecessary to prove you a right beneficent enchantress. Thank you, thank you [...] But now ... you know how free and sincere I am always! .. now tell me [...] apart from a certain sweetness & rise & fall in the rhythm, do you really see much for admiration in the poem. Is it [italics]new[end italics] in any way? [...] I do [italics]not[end italics] perceive much in this lyric, which strikes me, & Robert also (who goes with me throughout) as quite inferior to the other lyrical snatches in the Princess. By the way, if he introduces it in the Princess, it will be the only [italics]rhymed[end italics] verse in the work. Robert thinks that he was thinking of the Rhine-echoes in writing it'.

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning     

  

Alfred Tennyson : In Memoriam (extracts)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 7 November 1850: 'I have seen extracts in the Examiner from Tennyson's "In Memoriam," which seemed to me exquisitely beautiful & pathetical.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Browning      Print: Serial / periodical

  

Alfred Tennyson : In Memoriam

Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Louisa Boyle, 5 December 1850: 'We live just as quietly as we used to do [...] One drawback is not being able to get new books till they are old -- in spite of which, we have just read "In Memoriam" -- how beautiful! -- how full of pathos, and subtle feeling & thought! [...] Then we have Carlyle's Latter day pamphlets .. powerful & characteristic -- and seventeen numbers of David Copperfield, which we both set down or rather set up as Dickens's masterpiece.'

Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning     Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : In Memoriam

Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 13 December 1850: 'As to "In Memoriam," I have seen it, I have read it, .. dear Mr [John] Kenyon had the goodness to send it to me [...] the book has gone to my heart & soul [...] All I wish away, is the marriage hymn at the end, & [italics]that[end italics], for every reason I wish away -- it's a discord in the music. The monotony is a part of the position -- the sea is monotonous, & so is lasting grief [...] So the effect of the book is artistic & true, I think'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Browning      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : In Memoriam

Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Arabella Moulton-Barrett [sister], 16-19 December 1850, on 18 December: 'We have been reading together Tennyson's "In Memoriam" in the evenings. Most beautiful and pathetic. I read aloud, Robert looking over the page -- & we talked & admired & criticised every separate stanza. Now, we are going in like manner through Shelley.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Browning      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Maud

'By the way do you like Maud. I cannot say I do. It strikes me that if John Smith or Bill Jones had written it, they would have been put into an asylum. There are only those two parts beginning "Oh that it were possible" and "I have lead her home, my love, my only friend" that are not like ravings of a lunatic it strikes me, and yet my friends the Sellars say they admire it more than anything he has written [...] By the way I admire Whittier very much, and am very grateful to you for introducing him to me.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Emily De Quincey      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : In Memoriam

Passages transcribed in E. M. Forster's Commonplace Book (1930) include three stanzas (beginning 'Old warder of these buried bones') from Tennyson, In Memoriam (1870 edition).

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Morgan Forster      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'A Farewell'

Passages transcribed in E. M. Forster's Commonplace Book (1930) include Tennyson, 'A Farewell'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Morgan Forster      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Timbuctoo

'Matthew Arnold told G. L. Craik that when, as a youth, he first read "Timbuctoo" he prophesied the greatness of Tennyson.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Matthew Arnold      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Poems, Chiefly Lyrical

S. T. Coleridge on Tennyson's Poems. Chiefly Lyrical (1830): '"I have not read through all Mr Tennyson's poems, which have been sent to me; but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what I have seen. The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is."'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'The Lotos-Eaters'

'Charles Merivale [...] wrote to [W. H.] Thompson [...]: '"Though the least eminent of the Tennysonian Rhapsodists, I have converted by my readings both my brother and your friend (or enemy?) Richardson to faith in the "Lotos-Eaters."'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Merivale      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'The Lady of Shalott'

'[Edward] Fitzgerald writes on "The Lady of Shalott": '"Well I remember this poem, read to me, before I knew the author, at Cambridge one night in 1832 or 3, and its images passing across my head, as across the magic mirror, while half asleep on the mail coach to London in the "creeping dawn" that followed."'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Fitzgerald      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : sonnets

'[W. H.] Brookfield writes [to Tennyson] from Sheffield: '"You and Rob Montgomery are our only brewers now! A propos to the latter, Jingling James, his namesake, dined with us last week [...] I sent him copies of both you and Charles [Tennyson] yesterday, and met him in the street this morning [...] 'I read,' he said, 'twelve of the sonnets last night, which if I had not liked them better than other sonnets I could not have done. There are great outbreaks of poetry in them.' Omitting my own interjectional queries, etc., which leave to Jemmy's remarks an over-pompous connectedness which they had not viva voce, I give you his words as nearly as I remember."'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: James Montgomery      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'Morte d'Arthur'

'The "faithful Fitz" [Edward Fitzgerald] writes that as early as 1835, when he met my father in the Lake Country, at the Speddings' (Mirehouse, by Bassenthwaite Lake) he saw what was to be part of this 1842 volume [of Tennyson's poetry], the "Morte d'Arthur," "The Day-Dream," "The Lord of Burleigh," "Dora," and "The Gardener's Daughter." They were read out of an MS. "in a little red book to him and Spedding of a night, when all the house was mute."'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'The Day-Dream'

'The "faithful Fitz" [Edward Fitzgerald] writes that as early as 1835, when he met my father in the Lake Country, at the Speddings' (Mirehouse, by Bassenthwaite Lake) he saw what was to be part of this 1842 volume [of Tennyson's poetry], the "Morte d'Arthur," "The Day-Dream," "The Lord of Burleigh," "Dora," and "The Gardener's Daughter." They were read out of an MS. "in a little red book to him and Spedding of a night, when all the house was mute."'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'The Lord of Burleigh'

'The "faithful Fitz" [Edward Fitzgerald] writes that as early as 1835, when he met my father in the Lake Country, at the Speddings' (Mirehouse, by Bassenthwaite Lake) he saw what was to be part of this 1842 volume [of Tennyson's poetry], the "Morte d'Arthur," "The Day-Dream," "The Lord of Burleigh," "Dora," and "The Gardener's Daughter." They were read out of an MS. "in a little red book to him and Spedding of a night, when all the house was mute."'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'Dora'

'The "faithful Fitz" [Edward Fitzgerald] writes that as early as 1835, when he met my father in the Lake Country, at the Speddings' (Mirehouse, by Bassenthwaite Lake) he saw what was to be part of this 1842 volume [of Tennyson's poetry], the "Morte d'Arthur," "The Day-Dream," "The Lord of Burleigh," "Dora," and "The Gardener's Daughter." They were read out of an MS. "in a little red book to him and Spedding of a night, when all the house was mute."'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'The Gardener's Daughter'

'The "faithful Fitz" [Edward Fitzgerald] writes that as early as 1835, when he met my father in the Lake Country, at the Speddings' (Mirehouse, by Bassenthwaite Lake) he saw what was to be part of this 1842 volume [of Tennyson's poetry], the "Morte d'Arthur," "The Day-Dream," "The Lord of Burleigh," "Dora," and "The Gardener's Daughter." They were read out of an MS. "in a little red book to him and Spedding of a night, when all the house was mute."'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'In Memoriam' verses

[Edmund Lushington writes] 'At Xmas 1841 I went for a few days' holiday from Glasgow to Kent and spent the time mostly at Boxley, where A. T. was now settled with his mother and sisters [...] the number of the memorial poems had rapidly increased since I had seen the poet, his book containing many that were new to me. Some I heard him repeat before I had seen them in writing, others I learnt to know first from the book itself which he kindly allowed me to look through without stint.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Edmund Lushington      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : Poems

[The Dean of Westminster writes] 'In a letter from Arthur Stanley, written from Hurstmonceux Rectory in the September of 1834, he says to his friend W. C. Lake (afterwards Dean of Durham), still at Rugby, that Julius Hare, with whom he was staying, "often reads to us in the evening things quite new to me, for instance [...] A. Tennyson's Poems," and he goes on to name some which had greatly pleased him, and to advise his friend to get the volume and read it.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Julius Hare      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Poems

Samuel Rogers to Alfred Tennyson, 17 August 1842: 'Every day I have resolved to write and tell you with what delight I have read and read again your two beautiful volumes [...] very few things, if any, have thrilled me so much.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Rogers      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Poems

Thomas Carlyle to Alfred Tennyson, 7 December 1842: 'I have just been reading your Poems; I have read certain of them over again [goes on to praise Poems further, citing examples from volume]'.

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Carlyle      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : 

['Miss Fox' writes, on Tennyson's 1848 tour of Cornwall]: 'At one place [...] where he arrived in the evening, he cried, "Where is the sea? Show me the sea." So after the sea he went stumbling in the dark, and fell down and hurt his leg so much that he had to be nursed six weeks by a surgeon there, who introduced some friends to him, and thus he got into a class of society totally new to him; and when he left they gave him a series of introductions, so that instead of going to hotels he was passed on from town to town, and abode with little grocers and shopkeepers along his line of travel. He says that he cannot have better got a true impression of the class, and thinks the Cornish very superior to the generality. They all knew about Tennyson, and had read his poems, and one miner hid behind a wall that he might see him.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Cornish 'grocers and shopkeepers' and working people     Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Poems

Elizabeth Gaskell to John Forster, on presentation of inscribed copy of Tennyson's poems to Samuel Bamford, 7 December 1849: 'I have not yet taken my bonnet off after hunting up Bamford. First of all we went to Blakeley to his little white-washed cottage. His wife was cleaning, and regretted her "master" was not at home. He had gone into Manchester [...] At last we pounced upon the great gray stalwart man coming out of a little old-fashioned public-house where Blakeley people put up. Whe I produced my book he said, "This is grand." I said, "Look at the title-page," for I saw he was fairly caught by something he liked in the middle of the book, and was standing reading it in the street. "Well, I am a proud man this day!" he exclaimed. Then he turned it up and down and read a bit (it was a very crowded street) and his gray face went quite brown-red with pleasure. Suddenly he stopped. "What must I do for him back again?" "Oh! you must write to him, and thank him." "I'd rather walk 20 mile than write a letter any day." "Well then, suppose you set off this Christmas, and walk and thank Tennyson." He looked up from his book, right in my face, quite indignant. "Woman! walking won't reach him. We're on the earth don't ye see, but he's there, up above. I can no more reach him by walking than if he were an eagle or a skylark high above my head." It came fresh, warm, straight from the heart, without a notion of making a figurative speech [...] Then he dipped down again into his book, and began reading aloud the "Sleeping Beauty," and in the middle stopped to look at the writing again. And we left him in a sort of sleep-walking state, and only trust he will not be run over.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Bamford      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'The Sleeping Beauty'

Elizabeth Gaskell to John Forster, on presentation of inscribed copy of Tennyson's poems to Samuel Bamford, 7 December 1849: 'I have not yet taken my bonnet off after hunting up Bamford. First of all we went to Blakeley to his little white-washed cottage. His wife was cleaning, and regretted her "master" was not at home. He had gone into Manchester [...] At last we pounced upon the great gray stalwart man coming out of a little old-fashioned public-house where Blakeley people put up. Whe I produced my book he said, "This is grand." I said, "Look at the title-page," for I saw he was fairly caught by something he liked in the middle of the book, and was standing reading it in the street. "Well, I am a proud man this day!" he exclaimed. Then he turned it up and down and read a bit (it was a very crowded street) and his gray face went quite brown-red with pleasure. Suddenly he stopped. "What must I do for him back again?" "Oh! you must write to him, and thank him." "I'd rather walk 20 mile than write a letter any day." "Well then, suppose you set off this Christmas, and walk and thank Tennyson." He looked up from his book, right in my face, quite indignant. "Woman! walking won't reach him. We're on the earth don't ye see, but he's there, up above. I can no more reach him by walking than if he were an eagle or a skylark high above my head." It came fresh, warm, straight from the heart, without a notion of making a figurative speech [...] Then he dipped down again into his book, and began reading aloud the "Sleeping Beauty," and in the middle stopped to look at the writing again. And we left him in a sort of sleep-walking state, and only trust he will not be run over.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Bamford      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : stanzas from In Memoriam

Aubrey de Vere on time spent with Alfred Tennyson in London during 1850: 'Few of the hours I spent with Alfred surive with such a pathetic sweetness and nearness in my recollection as those which are associated with that time and with "In Memoriam" [...] 'I went to him very late each night, and he read many of the poems to me or discussed them with me till the early hours of the morning. The tears often ran down his face as he read, without the slightest apparent consciousness of them on his part. The pathos and grandeur of those poems were to me greatly increased by the voice which rather intoned than recited them [...] Sometimes towards the close of a stanza his voice dropped; but I avoided the chance of thus losing any part of the meaning by sitting beside him, and glancing at the pieces he read. They were written in a long and narrow manuscript book, which assisted him to arrange the poems in due order by bringing many of them at once before his eye.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : stanzas from In Memoriam

Aubrey de Vere on time spent with Alfred Tennyson in London during 1850: 'Few of the hours I spent with Alfred surive with such a pathetic sweetness and nearness in my recollection as those which are associated with that time and with "In Memoriam" [...] 'I went to him very late each night, and he read many of the poems to me or discussed them with me till the early hours of the morning. The tears often ran down his face as he read, without the slightest apparent consciousness of them on his part. The pathos and grandeur of those poems were to me greatly increased by the voice which rather intoned than recited them [...] Sometimes towards the close of a stanza his voice dropped; but I avoided the chance of thus losing any part of the meaning by sitting beside him, and glancing at the pieces he read. They were written in a long and narrow manuscript book, which assisted him to arrange the poems in due order by bringing many of them at once before his eye.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Aubrey de Vere      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : In Memoriam

Henry Hallam to Alfred Tennyson, on reading In Memoriam: 'I know not how to express what I have felt [...] I do not speak as another would to praise and admire: few of them [the poems] indeed I have as yet been capable of reading, the grief they express is too much akin to that they revive. It is better than any monument which could be raised to the memory of my beloved son [Arthur Henry Hallam, to whose death the poems were Tennyson's response], it is a more lively and enduring testimony to his great virtues and talents that the world should know the friendship which existed between you, that posterity should associate his name with that of Alfred Tennyson.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Henry Hallam      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington

Henry Taylor to Alfred Tennyson, 17 November 1852: 'I have read your ode ("Death of the Duke of Wellington") [...] It has a greatness worthy of its theme and an absolute simplicity and truth, with all the poetic passion of your nature moving beneath.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Henry Taylor      Print: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : Maud (sections)

'On Jan. 10th 1855 my father had "finished, and read out, several lyrics of Maud.'"

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : Maud

From Tennyson's journal of 1855: 'October 1st. [...] I read "Maud" to five or six people at the Brownings (on Sept. 28th).'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Charge of the Light Brigade

'The following tribute was received [by Tennyson] from Scutari: '"We had in hospital a man of the Light Brigade, one of the few who survived that fatal mistake, the Balaclava charge [...] This patient had received a kick in the chest from a horse long after the battle of Balaclava, while in barracks at Scutari. He was depressed in spirits, which prevented him from throwing off the disease engendered by the blow. The doctor remarked that he wished the soldier could be roused. Amongst other remedies leeches were prescribed. I tried to enter into a conversation with him, spoke of the charge, but could elicit only monosyllablic replies. A copy of Tennyson's poem having been lent me that morning, I took it out and read it. The man, with kindling eye, at once entered upon a spirited description of the fatal gallop between the guns' mouths to and from that cannon-crowded height. He asked to hear it again, but, as by this time a number of convalescents were gathered around, I slipped out of the ward. The chaplain who had lent me the poem, understanding the enthusiasm with which it had been received, afterwards procured from England a number of copies for distribution. In a few days the invalid requested the doctor to discharge him for duty, being now in health; but whether the cure was effected by the leeches or the poem it is impossible to say."'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: anon      Print: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : Maud

'At the end of the year [1855] an unknown Nottingham artizan [sic] came to call. My father asked him to dinner and at his request read "Maud." It appears that the poor man had sent his poems beforehand. They had been acknowledged, but had not been returned, and had been forgotten. He was informed that the poems, thus sent, were always looked at, although my father and mother had not time to pass judgement on them. A most pathetic incident of this kind, my father told me, happened to him at Twickenham, when a Waterloo soldier brought twelve large cantos on the battle of Waterloo. The veteran had actually taught himself in his old age to read and write that he might thus commemorate Wellington's great victory. The epic lay for some time under the sofa in my father's study, and was a source of much anxiety to him. How could he go through such a vast poem? One day he mustered up courage and took a portion out. It opened on the head of a canto: "The Angels encamped above the field of Waterloo." On that day, at least, he "read no more." He gave the author, when he called for his manuscript, this criticism: "Though great images loom here and there, your poem could not be published as a whole." The old man answered nothing, wrapt up each of the twelve cantos carefully, placed them in a strong oak case and carried them off. He was asked to come again but he never came.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Maud

'I shall never forget his [Tennyson's] last reading of "Maud," on August 24th, 1892. He was sitting in his high-backed chair, fronting a southern window which looks over the groves and yellow cornfields of Sussex towards the long line of South Downs that stretches from Arundel to Hastings (his high-domed Rembrandt-like head outlined against the sunset-clouds seen through the western window). His voice, low and calm in everyday life, capable of manifold and delicate intonation, but with "organ-tones" of great power and range, thoroughly brought out the drama of the poem.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Maud

Henry Taylor to Alfred Tennyson, 31 July 1855: 'I thank you much for sending me "Maud." I have only read it twice, but I have already a strong feeling of what it is [...] I felt the passion of it and the poetic spirit that is in it'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Henry Taylor      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Curse of Boadicea

'When Fanny Kemble heard that my father read his "Maud" finely, she wrote: "I do not think any reading of Tennyson's can ever be as striking and impressive as that "Curse of Boadicea" [sic] that he intoned to us, while the oak trees were writhing in the storm that lashed the windows and swept over Blackdown the day we were there." (Unpublished MS.)'

Unknown
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : 

'Mrs Vyner, a stranger,' to Alfred Tennyson, from River, New South Wales, 1855: 'I fancy a poet's heart must be so large and loving that he can feel for and forgive even folly. Folly it may be, and yet I [italics]must[end italics] write and thank you with a true and grateful heart for the happy moments your thoughts and your pen have given me. I am in the wildest bush of Australia, far away from all that makes life beautiful and endurable excepting the strong and stern sense of duty, the consciousness that where God has placed us is our lot to be, and that our most becoming posture is to accept our destiny with grateful humility. You must let me tell you how in a lonely home among the mountains, with my young children asleep, my husband absent, no sound to be heard but the cry of the wild dog or the wail of the curlew, no lock or bolt to guard our solitary hut [...] I have turned (next to God's book) to you as a friend, and read far into the night till my lot seemed light and a joy seemed cast around my very menial toils: then I have said, "God bless the poet and put still some beautiful words and thoughts into his heart," and the burthen of life becomes pleasant to me or at least easy.'

Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Mrs Vyner      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : poems

'In April [1857] a report reached us that old Tom Moore was dying. A friend writes: "This darling old poet is only just alive, mind and body. X goes over frequently to see him and read him your poems, which he cries over and delights in."'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Moore      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : 

Lord Dufferin to Alfred Tennyson [1858]: 'For the first 20 years of my life I not only did not care for poetry, but to the despair of my friends absolutely disliked it, at least so much of it as until that time had fallen in my way. In vain my mother read to me Dryden, Pope, Byron, Young, Cowper and all the standard classics of the day, each seemed to me as distasteful as I had from early infancy found Virgil, and I shall never forget her dismay when at a literary dinner I was cross-examined as to my tastes, and blushingly confessed before an Olympus of poets that I rather disliked poetry than otherwise. 'Soon afterwards I fell in with a volume of yours, and suddenly felt such a sensation of delight as I never experienced before. A new world seemed to open to me, and from that day, by a constant study of your works, I gradually worked my way to a gradual appreciation of what is good in all kinds of authors.'

Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'The Grandmother'

'In July [1858] we stayed at Little Holland House, Kensington, with the Prinseps; and here my father began "The Fair Maid of Astolat," and read aloud "The Grandmother."'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : In Memoriam A. H. H.

'The sudden death of Henry Hallam was a great grief to my father, for the historian had been a good friend through thirty years. On hearing of Mr Hallam's last days he read some of "In Memoriam" aloud and dwelt on those passages which most moved him.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Idylls of the King

W. M. Thackeray to Alfred Tennyson, [September-] October [1859]: 'I owe you a letter of happiness and thanks. Sir, about three weeks ago, when I was ill in bed, I read the "Idylls of the King," and I thought, "Oh I must write to him now, for this pleasure, this delight, ths splendour of happiness which I have been enjoying." But I should have blotted the sheets, 'tis ill writing on one's back. The letter full of gratitude never went as far as the post-office and how comes it now? 'D'abord, a bottle of claret [...] Then afterwards sitting here, an old magazine, Fraser's Magazine, 1850, and I come on a poem out of "The Princess" which says "I hear the horns of Elfland blowing blowing," no its "the horns of Elfland faintly blowing" [...] and reading the lines, which only one man in the world could write, I thought about the other horns of Elfland blowing in full strength, and Arthur in gold armour, and Guinevere in gold hair [...] You have made me as happy as I was when a child with the Arabian Nights [...] I have had out of that dear book the greatest delight that has ever come to me since I was a young man; to write and think about it makes me almost young'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: William Makepeace Thackeray      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'The splendour falls...'

W. M. Thackeray to Alfred Tennyson, [September-] October [1859]: 'I owe you a letter of happiness and thanks. Sir, about three weeks ago, when I was ill in bed, I read the "Idylls of the King," and I thought, "Oh I must write to him now, for this pleasure, this delight, ths splendour of happiness which I have been enjoying." But I should have blotted the sheets, 'tis ill writing on one's back. The letter full of gratitude never went as far as the post-office and how comes it now? 'D'abord, a bottle of claret [...] Then afterwards sitting here, an old magazine, Fraser's Magazine, 1850, and I come on a poem out of "The Princess" which says "I hear the horns of Elfland blowing blowing," no its "the horns of Elfland faintly blowing" [...] and reading the lines, which only one man in the world could write, I thought about the other horns of Elfland blowing in full strength, and Arthur in gold armour, and Guinevere in gold hair [...] You have made me as happy as I was when a child with the Arabian Nights [...] I have had out of that dear book the greatest delight that has ever come to me since I was a young man; to write and think about it makes me almost young'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: William Makepeace Thackeray      Print: Serial / periodical

  

Alfred Tennyson : Guinevere

The Duke of Argyll to Alfred Tennyson, 14 July 1859: 'I think my prediction is coming true, that your "Idylls of the King" will be understood and admired by many who are incapable of understanding and appreciating many of your other works. 'Macaulay is certainly not a man incapable of [italics]understanding[end italics] anything but I knew that his tastes in poetry were so formed in another line that I gave him a good test, and three days ago I gave him "Guinevere." 'The result has been as I expected, that he has been [italics]delighted with it[end italics]. He told me that he has been greatly moved by it, and admired it exceedingly. Altho' by practice and disposition he is eminently a critic, he did not find one single fault. Yesterday I gave him the "Maid of Astolat" with which he was delighted also.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Babington Macaulay      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Maid of Astolat

The Duke of Argyll to Alfred Tennyson, 14 July 1859: 'I think my prediction is coming true, that your "Idylls of the King" will be understood and admired by many who are incapable of understanding and appreciating many of your other works. 'Macaulay is certainly not a man incapable of [italics]understanding[end italics] anything but I knew that his tastes in poetry were so formed in another line that I gave him a good test, and three days ago I gave him "Guinevere." 'The result has been as I expected, that he has been [italics]delighted with it[end italics]. He told me that he has been greatly moved by it, and admired it exceedingly. Altho' by practice and disposition he is eminently a critic, he did not find one single fault. Yesterday I gave him the "Maid of Astolat" with which he was delighted also.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Babington Macaulay      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Maid of Astolat

Benjamin Jowett to Alfred Tennyson, 17 July 1859: 'Thank you many times for your last: I have read it through with the greatest delight, the "Maid of Astolat" twice over, and it rings in my ears. "The Lily Maid" seems to me the fairest, purest, sweetest love-poem in the English language [...] It moves me like the love of Juliet in Shakespeare'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Benjamin Jowett      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Lily Maid

Benjamin Jowett to Alfred Tennyson, 17 July 1859: 'Thank you many times for your last: I have read it through with the greatest delight, the "Maid of Astolat" twice over, and it rings in my ears. "The Lily Maid" seems to me the fairest, purest, sweetest love-poem in the English language [...] It moves me like the love of Juliet in Shakespeare'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Benjamin Jowett      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Idylls of the King

H. R. H. Prince Albert to Alfred Tennyson, 17 May 1860: 'Will you forgive me if I intrude upon your leisure with a request which I have thought some little time of making, viz. that you would be good enough to write your name in the accompanying volume of your "Idylls of the King"? You would thus add a peculiar interest to the book, containing those beautiful songs, from the perusal of which I derived the greatest enjoyment.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Prince Albert      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Boadicea

'The Duke and Duchess [of Argyll] spent some days at Farringford [...] My father [...] read aloud his "Boadicea," which he had now quite finished.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Two Voices

Herbert Spencer to Alfred Tennyson [1855]: 'I happened recently to be re-reading your Poem "The Two Voices," and coming to the verse 'Or if thro' lower lives I came -- Tho' all experience past became Consolidate in mind and frame -- 'it occurred to me that you might like to glance through a book which applies to the elucidation of mental science, the hypothesis to which you refer. I therefore beg your acceptance of Psychology which I send by this post.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Herbert Spencer      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Dedication, Idylls of the King

'Jan. 19th. [1862] Princess Alice wrote to my father about the Dedication of the "Idylls" to [her father] the Prince Consort: '[...] Mr Tennyson could not have chosen a more beautiful or true testimonial to the memory of him who was so really good and noble, than the dedication of the "Idylls of the King" which he so valued and admired. Princess Alice transmitted these lines to the Queen, who desired her to tell Mr Tennyson, with her sincerest thanks, how much moved she was on reading them, and that they had soothed her aching, bleeding heart. She knows also how [italics]he[end italics] would have admired them.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Queen Victoria      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Guinevere

The Crown Princess of Prussia to Alfred Tennyson, 23 February 1862: 'The first time I ever heard the "Idylls of the King" was last year, when I found both the Queen and Prince quite in raptures about them. The first bit I ever heard was the end of "Guinevere," the last two or three pages: the Prince read them to me, and I shall never forget the impression it made upon me hearing those grand and simple words in his voice!'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Prince Albert      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : In Memoriam

Alfred Tennyson to the Duke of Argyl, 3 March 1862: 'Your letter a little dismayed me, for, as you in the prior one had bound me by no promise of secrecy, I, in talking of Her Majesty and her sorrow [at death of her husband], did say to two friends, whom I bound by such a promise, that she had found comfort in reading "In Memoriam," and had made the private markings therein. 'I don't suppose much harm would result even if these broke their promise, for that is all that could be reported; still I am vexed, because if the Queen heard of the report she might fancy that her private sentiments were public prey.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Queen Victoria      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Poems, Chiefly Lyrical

Aubrey De Vere on his first 'acquaintance' with Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical: 'I remember most of them by heart still. Day after day my sister and I used to read them as we drove up and down the "close green ways" of our woods. Our pony soon detected our abstracted mood. Several times he nearly upset us down a bank; and often choosing his path according to his private judgement, stood still with his head hanging over a gate.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Aubrey de Vere and sister     Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : poetry

From William Allingham's 'Reminiscences' of Tennyson (1863-64): 'Oct. 3rd, 1863. Saturday. We drove to Farringford [...] Drawing-room tea [...] I wandered to the book-table where Tennyson joined me [...] In a book of Latin versions from his own poetry he found some slips in Lord Lyttelton's Cytherea Venus, etc.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Enoch Arden

'A district visitor was delivering tracts among a large meeting of some poor folk to whom she had lately read part of "Enoch Arden." "Thank you ma'am," one old lady said, "but I'd give all I had for that other beautiful tract which you read t'other day (a sentiment which was echoed by the others), it did me a power of good.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: anon      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Enoch Arden

Robert Browning to Alfred Tennyson, 13 October 1864: 'I have been two months away, and only just find your book now [...] "Enoch" continues the perfect thing I thought it at first reading; but the "Farmer," taking me unawares, astonished me more in this stage of acquaintanceship.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Browning      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Northern Farmer

Robert Browning to Alfred Tennyson, 13 October 1864: 'I have been two months away, and only just find your book now [...] "Enoch" continues the perfect thing I thought it at first reading; but the "Farmer," taking me unawares, astonished me more in this stage of acquaintanceship.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Browning      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Northern Farmer

W. G. Clark, on a reader of Tennyson's 'The Northern Farmer': '[?W. H.] Thompson has been staying at Fryston, where he met a Mr Creyke, a Yorkshireman, with a talent for recitation. This Mr Creyke had been staying at a farmhouse in Holderness, where in the evening the neighbouring farmers used to come and smoke. One evening, he repeated "The Northern Farmer." When it was done, one of them said, "Dang it, that caps owt. Now, sur, is that i' print, because if it be I'll buy t' book, cost what it may?" Creyke said, "The book contains things you mayn't like as well, so I'll write it out for you." 'This he did: the farmer put it in his breast-pocket; and next day when out shooting Creyke saw him from time to time taking it out to read.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: anon      Manuscript: Unknown, In hand of 'Mr Creyke.'

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Northern Farmer

'May 2nd. [1866] Marlborough [...] In the evening the Bradleys had a large dinner-party. [George] Bradley [headmaster] knowing my father's love of science had asked masters interested in geology, botany and archaeology to meet him [...] At the request of Mrs Bradley he read "The Northern Farmer," and then criticised amusingly some of the boys' Prize Poems which Bradley had asked him to look through.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Guinevere

'May 3rd. [1866] After dinner the Upper Sixth came in, and at their petition [Tennyson] read "Guinevere," refusing however enthronement in a large arm-chair, and asserting it was "too conspicuous."'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Northern Farmer

'After dinner [during stay at Marlborough College] my father was again asked to read by Mrs Bradley: "Will it be too cruel to ask you to read "The Grandmother?" [...] A Belgian governess, Mdlle. Stapps, was on the chair just behind him. He said, "I can't read 'The Grandmother' properly except after breakfast, when I am weak and tremulous; fortified by dinner and a glass of port I am too vigorous." "Well; read 'The Northern Farmer' then." So he did: and asked Mdlle. how much she understood. "Pas un mot, Monsieur." 'Then he read "The Grandmother," and after that four pieces out of Hood's Whims and Oddities, "Faithless Nelly Gray," "Faithless Sally Brown," "Tim Turpin" and "Ben Battle." He explained the play on words in them to Mdlle. who was "excessivement enchantee." He laughed till the tears came at some of the things he read. This went on till 11.50'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Grandmother

'After dinner [during stay at Marlborough College] my father was again asked to read by Mrs Bradley: "Will it be too cruel to ask you to read "The Grandmother?" [...] A Belgian governess, Mdlle. Stapps, was on the chair just behind him. He said, "I can't read 'The Grandmother' properly except after breakfast, when I am weak and tremulous; fortified by dinner and a glass of port I am too vigorous." "Well; read 'The Northern Farmer' then." So he did: and asked Mdlle. how much she understood. "Pas un mot, Monsieur." 'Then he read "The Grandmother," and after that four pieces out of Hood's Whims and Oddities, "Faithless Nelly Gray," "Faithless Sally Brown," "Tim Turpin" and "Ben Battle." He explained the play on words in them to Mdlle. who was "excessivement enchantee." He laughed till the tears came at some of the things he read. This went on till 11.50'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : In the Valley of Cauteretz

From Emily Tennyson's journal, 17 August 1866: 'We took Lionel [son] to school at Hastings [...] We then left for Park House, Maidstone [...] In the evening, at the Lushingtons' request, A. read "The Victim, or The Norse Queen," "The Voyage," and "All Along the Valley."'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Enoch Arden

From Emily Tennyson's journal, 17 August 1868: 'Dr Hook asked A. to read "Enoch Arden." He replied he could not to-day. Dr Hook thereupon began in fun to read it so badly that A. clutched the book, "No, I cannot stand that," and read it all to them.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Enoch Arden

From Emily Tennyson's journal, 17 August 1868: 'Dr Hook asked A. to read "Enoch Arden." He replied he could not to-day. Dr Hook thereupon began in fun to read it so badly that A. clutched the book, "No, I cannot stand that," and read it all to them.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Dr Hook      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : The San Graal

From Emily Tennyson's journal: 'Sept. 9th. [1868] A. read me a bit of his "San Graal," which he has now begun. 'Sept. 11th. He read me more of the "San Graal": very fine.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : The San Graal

From Emily Tennyson's journal: 'Sept. 9th. [1868] A. read me a bit of his "San Graal," which he has now begun. 'Sept. 11th. He read me more of the "San Graal": very fine.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : The San Graal

From Emily Tennyson's journal: 'Sept. 23rd. [1868] We took Lionel [son] to Eton, and left him in Mr Stone's house. At Mr Warre's request A. read the "San Graal" MS complete in the garden.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : 'Ulysses'

[the curriculum at the Dragon School] included much memorizing of poetry, particularly Tennyson's 'Ulysses' and 'Morte d'Arthur'. John learned a lot of poetry by heart and won a prize for recitation'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: John Betjeman      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : 'Morte d'Arthur'

[the curriculum at the Dragon School] included much memorizing of poetry, particularly Tennyson's 'Ulysses' and 'Morte d'Arthur'. John learned a lot of poetry by heart and won a prize for recitation'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: John Betjeman      Print: Book

  

Alfred Lord Tennyson : Princess, The

'Oddly, I remember little of what must have been read to us in the 'poetry' lessons. Apart from a fragment or two of strictly abbreviated nursery rhymes, there was the fact that Young Lochinvar came out of the west, and through all the wide Border his steed was the best. If anyone suggested just where in the west Young Lochinvar came out of, I don't recall it. As we were children in a Cornish school, I had a hazy notion that it might have been Penzance, or possibly Land's End. Then there were the lines of Tennyson: The splendour falls on castle walls And snowy ummits old in story.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Causley      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Holy Grail

From Emily Tennyson's Journal, January 1869: 'A. read "The Holy Grail" to the Bradleys, explaining the realism and symbolism, and how the natural, if people cared, could always be made to account for the supernatural.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'birth and marriage of "Arthur"'

From Emily Tennyson's Journal, 1869: 'Feb. 13th. A. read what he had done of the birth and marriage of "Arthur."'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Coming of Arthur

From Emily Tennyson's Journal, 1869: 'Before the end of February A. had read me all "The Coming of Arthur" finished, and was reading at night Browning's "Ring and the Book" -- "Pompilia" and "Caponsacchi" are the finest parts.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : "The San Graal"

From Emily Tennyson's Journal, 1869: 'May 18th. A. read the "San Graal." I doubt whether the "San Graal" would have been written but for my endeavour, and the Queen's wish, and that of the Crown Princess. Thank God for it. He has had the subject on his mind for years, ever since he began to write about Arthur and his knights.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : Maud

From Frederick Locker-Lampson's recollections of Tennyson: 'I once met Tennyson at dinner at the Conservative Club, in company with Dicky Doyle, Sir J. Emerson Tennent, Sir Arthur Buller [...] and others whom I have forgotten. Tennyson read "Maud" to us and was very gay and companionable.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Idylls of the King

From Emily Tennyson's Journal, 1869: 'Sept. 13th. [...] Read the "Idylls" through in their proper sequence during these months, also Tom Hughes' Alfred the Great, Pressense's Life of Christ, Martineau's Endeavours After a Christian Life, and Lecky's European Morals.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Emily Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'Tristram'

From Emily Tennyson's Journal, 1871: 'May 21st. He [Tennyson] read me his "Tristram" ("Last Tournament"), the plan of which he had been for some weeks discussing with me. Very grand and terrible.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'Guinevere'

From Emily Tennyson's Journal, 1871: 'Aug. 31st. [...] A. drove to the Lewes'. He read to them, and last of all at G. H. Lewes' request "Guinevere," which made George Eliot weep.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Gareth

Edward Fitzgerald to Alfred Tennyson (1873): 'I have a word to say about "Gareth" which your publisher sent me as "from the author." I don't think it is mere perversity that makes me like it better than all its predecessors, save and except (of course) the old "Morte." The subject, the young knight who can endure and conquer, interests me more than all the heroines of the 1st volume.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Fitzgerald      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Higher Pantheism

'The first meeting after the formation of the [Metaphysical] Society took place at the Deanery, Westminster, June 2nd, 1869, under the presidency of Sir John Lubbock, when my father's poem "The Higher Pantheism" was read.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Mr Knowles      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Queen Mary

Edward Fitzgerald to Alfred Tennyson, 9 July 1875: 'I had bought your Play a few days before your gift-copy reached me. I have not had sufficient time to digest either you see, though I have read through twice.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Fitzgerald      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Queen Mary

Sir Henry Bedingfield, Bart., to Alfred Tennyson, 20 August 1875: 'As a great admirer of your genius, I eagerly read your drama "Queen Mary," but was so surprised and pained at the ignoble part which is allotted to Sir Henry Bedingfield, that I cannot refrain from addressing you on the subject. I feel justified in so doing, for I am the direct descendant of Sir Henry [...] The millions who will read "Mary Tudor," or witness the play on the stage, will carry away the impresson that my ancestor was a vulgar yeoman in some way connected with the stables, whereas he was a man of ancient lineage, a trusted friend and servant of the Queen, who confided to him in time of danger the Lieutenancy of the Tower, and the custody of the Princess Elizabeth [continues] [...] I trust therefore to your high feeling of justice, that you will, if possible, strike out Sir Henry's name from future editions, or allott him a more dignified part on the stage, and one which will convey a more correct view of his character and position.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Sir Henry Bedingfield, Bart.      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Harold

Robert Browning to Alfred Tennyson, 21 December 1876: 'True thanks again, this time for the best of Christmas presents, another great work, wise, good, and beautiful. The scene where Harold is overborne to take the oath is perfect, for one instance.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Browning      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Harold

Aubrey de Vere to Alfred Tennyson, 28 December 1876: 'I do not like to defer longer sending you my most cordial thanks for sending me your "Harold." I have already read the whole of it twice, and many parts much oftener [...] You know how heartily I admired it when you read it aloud to me: and I can honestly assure you that the admiration has not been less on reading it to myself. On that first occasion it may have derived an advantage from your reading; but if so, the more careful attention one gives to what one reads with one's own eyes fully compensated for whatever was lost. The great characteristic of this drama is to me that of an heroic strength blended with heroic simplicity, and everything in it harmonious with that predominant characteristic [goes on to discuss in detail].'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Aubrey de Vere      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Harold

Aubrey de Vere to Alfred Tennyson, 28 December 1876: 'I do not like to defer longer sending you my most cordial thanks for sending me your "Harold." I have already read the whole of it twice, and many parts much oftener [...] You know how heartily I admired it when you read it aloud to me: and I can honestly assure you that the admiration has not been less on reading it to myself. On that first occasion it may have derived an advantage from your reading; but if so, the more careful attention one gives to what one reads with one's own eyes fully compensated for whatever was lost. The great characteristic of this drama is to me that of an heroic strength blended with heroic simplicity, and everything in it harmonious with that predominant characteristic [goes on to discuss in detail].'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Harold

A. P. Stanley to Alfred Tennyson, 25 December 1876: 'I will gladly contrive if you wish to transmit your poem [Harold] to the Queen. I know that Her Majesty is expecting it. 'I ought ere this to have thanked you for my own copy. It cheered some mournful winter evenings for me, and it will, I trust, for the country at large, revive or rekindle the dying touch of Truth and the belief that there is something greater and nobler than the capricious Norman Saints.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: A. P. Stanley      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Harold

G. H. Lewes to Alfred Tennyson, 18 June 1877: 'We have just read "Harold" (for the first time) and "Mary" (for the fourth) [...] It is needless for me to say how profound a pleasure both works have given us -- they are great contributions!'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot     Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Queen Mary

G. H. Lewes to Alfred Tennyson, 18 June 1877: 'We have just read "Harold" (for the first time) and "Mary" (for the fourth) [...] It is needless for me to say how profound a pleasure both works have given us -- they are great contributions!'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot     Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Becket

'The play [Becket] is so accurate a representation of the personages and of the time, that J. R. Green said that all his researches into the annals of the twelfth century had not given him "so vivid a conception of the character of Henry II. and his court as was embodied in Tennyson's 'Becket.'"'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: J. R. Green      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Becket

The Right Honourable J. Bryce to Alfred Tennyson: 'As I have been abroad for some time it was only a little while ago that I obtained and read your "Becket." Will you, since you were so kind as to read me some of it last July, let me tell you how much enjoyment and light it has given me? Impressive as were the parts read, it impresses one incomparably more when studied as a whole. One cannot imagine a more vivid, a more perfectly faithful picture than it gives both of Henry and of Thomas. Truth in history is naturally truth in poetry; but you have made the characters of the two men shine out in a way which, while it never deviates from the impression history gives of them, goes beyond and perfects history [continues].'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: J. Bryce      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Becket

The Right Honourable J. Bryce to Alfred Tennyson: 'As I have been abroad for some time it was only a little while ago that I obtained and read your "Becket." Will you, since you were so kind as to read me some of it last July, let me tell you how much enjoyment and light it has given me? Impressive as were the parts read, it impresses one incomparably more when studied as a whole. One cannot imagine a more vivid, a more perfectly faithful picture than it gives both of Henry and of Thomas. Truth in history is naturally truth in poetry; but you have made the characters of the two men shine out in a way which, while it never deviates from the impression history gives of them, goes beyond and perfects history [continues].'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : 

Lady Cardwell to Alfred Tennyson, 9 April 1878: 'It may interest you to know another instance of the solace you have given those in distant lands severed from all those with whom they could hold converse. 'You know all about Col. Gordon (Chinese Gordon) and the immense pressure upon him and the heroic services he is rendering to the cause of humanity in putting down the slave trade, as Governor of the Soudan [sic], by a wonderful sacrifice of himself. I often hear from him of his long solitary rides of hundreds of miles in the desert and wilderness, and wished to find the most acceptable companion I could send to him. 'It must be in a very small compass. Happily I found the beautiful edition of all your books in the small green case, and I sent it a few months ago. 'He is intensely delighted with it and mentions it in every letter. In his last, lately received from Khartoum, he says: "I find the reading of Tennyson is my great relief, and the volumes are so small and of such clear print that they will always go with me. I have long wanted a small copy, but never knew that he had published one," etc.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: C. E. Gordon      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Welcome to Alexandra

'My father's first meeting with the Princess of Wales took place at Mrs Greville's in Chester Square. The Princess asked him to read the "Welcome to Alexandra." When he had read it, the fact of his reading his own complimentary poem to the Princess herself suddenly struck both of them as being so ludicrous, that he dropt the book on the floor and both went into fits of uncontrollable laughter.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Revenge

'My father was fond of asking Joachim [celebrity violinist] to play to him in his own house. One particular evening I remember, at 86, Eaton Square. My father had been expressing his wonder at Joachim's mastery of the violin, -- for Joachim had been playing to us and our friends numberless Hungarian dances, -- and by way of thanks for the splendid music I asked him to read one of his poems to Joachim. Accordingly after the guests had gone he took the great musician to smoke with him in his "den" at the top of the house [...] my father read "The Revenge." On reaching the line 'And the sun went down, and the stars came out far over the summer sea, he asked Joachim, "Could you do that on your violin?" -- the peace of nature after the thunder of battle. There was no more reading however that night, for he suddenly turned round to me, saying, "I must not read any more, else I shall wake up the cook who is sleeping next door."'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'Bones'

[Mary Brotherton writes] 'I told him [Tennyson] the story [of the eighteenth-century woman soldier Phoebe Hessel] one day at Farringford, knowing it would touch him, and he came up to see my husband and me next day, and asked me to tell it him again: on whch I gave him the little penny magazine I found it in. It was an unpretentious account of "Old Brighton." Many months after he took me up to his library, after a walk, and read me what he called "Bones." That was before it was called "Rizpah" and published.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : "The Bugle Song"

From Hallam Tennyson's account of a voyage on the Pembroke Castle (September 1883): '[18 September] In response to an invitation from the hospitable Sir Donald [Currie] the Royalties came to luncheon on board [...] In the small smoking room after luncheon my father, at the request of the Princess of Wales, read "The Bugle Song" and "The Grandmother." The Czarina paid him some very pretty compliment, and he, being very short-sighted, and taking her for a Maid of Honour, patted her on the shoulder and said, "Thank you, my dear."'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : "The Grandmother"

From Hallam Tennyson's account of a voyage on the Pembroke Castle (September 1883): '[18 September] In response to an invitation from the hospitable Sir Donald [Currie] the Royalties came to luncheon on board [...] In the small smoking room after luncheon my father, at the request of the Princess of Wales, read "The Bugle Song" and "The Grandmother." The Czarina paid him some very pretty compliment, and he, being very short-sighted, and taking her for a Maid of Honour, patted her on the shoulder and said, "Thank you, my dear."'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Locksley Hall

From Phillips Brooks's journal (1883), on a visit to Tennyson's home: 'After dinner, Tennyson and I went up to the study [...] and I had him to myself for two or three hours. We smoked, and he talked of metaphysics, and poetry, and religion, his own life, and Hallam, and all the poems [...] Then we went down to the drawing-room where the rest were, and he read his poetry to us till the clock said twelve -- "Locksley Hall," "Sir Galahad," pieces of "Maud" (which he specially likes to read), and some of his dialect poems. He said, by the way, in reading "Locksley Hall," that the verse beginning 'Love took up, etc 'was the best simile he ever made; and that a certain line in "The Gardener's daughter" were the ones on which he most piqued himself.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Sir Galahad

From Phillips Brooks's journal (1883), on a visit to Tennyson's home: 'After dinner, Tennyson and I went up to the study [...] and I had him to myself for two or three hours. We smoked, and he talked of metaphysics, and poetry, and religion, his own life, and Hallam, and all the poems [...] Then we went down to the drawing-room where the rest were, and he read his poetry to us till the clock said twelve -- "Locksley Hall," "Sir Galahad," pieces of "Maud" (which he specially likes to read), and some of his dialect poems. He said, by the way, in reading "Locksley Hall," that the verse beginning 'Love took up, etc 'was the best simile he ever made; and that a certain line in "The Gardener's daughter" were the ones on which he most piqued himself.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Maud (extracts)

From Phillips Brooks's journal (1883), on a visit to Tennyson's home: 'After dinner, Tennyson and I went up to the study [...] and I had him to myself for two or three hours. We smoked, and he talked of metaphysics, and poetry, and religion, his own life, and Hallam, and all the poems [...] Then we went down to the drawing-room where the rest were, and he read his poetry to us till the clock said twelve -- "Locksley Hall," "Sir Galahad," pieces of "Maud" (which he specially likes to read), and some of his dialect poems. He said, by the way, in reading "Locksley Hall," that the verse beginning 'Love took up, etc 'was the best simile he ever made; and that a certain line in "The Gardener's daughter" were the ones on which he most piqued himself.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'dialect poems'

From Phillips Brooks's journal (1883), on a visit to Tennyson's home: 'After dinner, Tennyson and I went up to the study [...] and I had him to myself for two or three hours. We smoked, and he talked of metaphysics, and poetry, and religion, his own life, and Hallam, and all the poems [...] Then we went down to the drawing-room where the rest were, and he read his poetry to us till the clock said twelve -- "Locksley Hall," "Sir Galahad," pieces of "Maud" (which he specially likes to read), and some of his dialect poems. He said, by the way, in reading "Locksley Hall," that the verse beginning 'Love took up, etc 'was the best simile he ever made; and that a certain line in "The Gardener's daughter" were the ones on which he most piqued himself.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Leper's Bride

'1888. At Easter Miss Mary Anderson [actress] was with us again and he [Tennyson] read to her, whom he admired much, and held to be "the flower of girlhood," "The Leper's Bride," just finished.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Northern Cobbler

From Tennyson's notes on Demeter and Other Poems: 'A lady tells me that when she read "The Northern Cobbler" at a village entertainment, the drunkard of the village, on her coming to the line, 'An' I loook'd [sic] cock-eyed at my noase an' i sead 'im a-gittin o'fire, 'left the room, saying, "Women knoaws too much now-a-daay."'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: anon      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'Crossing the Bar'

'"Crossing the Bar" was written in my father's eighty-first year, on a day in October when we came from Aldworth to Farringford. Before reaching Farringford he had the Moaning of the Bar in his mind, and after dinner he showed me this poem written out. 'I said, "That is the crown of your life's work." He answered, "It came in a moment." He explained the "Pilot" as "That Divine and Unseen Who is always guiding us." 'A few days before my father's death he said to me: "Mind you put 'Crossing the Bar' at the end of all editions of my poems."'

Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Hallam Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'Crossing the Bar'

'My father considered Edmund Lushington's translation into Greek of "Crossing the Bar," one of the finest translations he had ever read'.

Unknown
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Ode on the Duke of Wellington

From Hallam Tennyson's journal (1890-91): 'May 28th. [1890] G. F. Watts left today, having done a fine portrait of my father [...] At the request of Watts, my father read the "Ode on the Duke of Wellington" [...] I read "The Golden Bough" and the "Story of a Balaclava Hero" to Watts and my father, while the portrait was in hand.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Guinevere

From Hallam Tennyson's journal, 1890-91: 'Aug. 6th. [1890] Aldworth. The Duchess of Albany came to luncheon with us in honour of my father's eighty-first birthday [...] At her request he read "Guinevere" aloud."

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Ode on the Duke of Wellington

'In April [1891] the President of Magdalen, Oxford, and Mrs Warren called upon us [...] Mrs Richard Ward, who had joined us, wanted her little boy to hear my father read. My father answered, "I will only read you something old." He read the "Ode on the Duke of Wellington." He dwelt long on the final words, letting them ring so to speak, especially "toll'd, Boom." At the end he said, "It is a great roll of words, the music of words. For a hundred people who can sing a song, there are not ten who can read a poem. People do not understand the music of words." He then read the little Dedication to "OEnone," then the poem. He explained the story, pausing from time to time, asking a few questions'.

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Dedication, OEnone

'In April [1891] the President of Magdalen, Oxford, and Mrs Warren called upon us [...] Mrs Richard Ward, who had joined us, wanted her little boy to hear my father read. My father answered, "I will only read you something old." He read the "Ode on the Duke of Wellington." He dwelt long on the final words, letting them ring so to speak, especially "toll'd, Boom." At the end he said, "It is a great roll of words, the music of words. For a hundred people who can sing a song, there are not ten who can read a poem. People do not understand the music of words." He then read the little Dedication to "OEnone," then the poem. He explained the story, pausing from time to time, asking a few questions'.

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : OEnone

'In April [1891] the President of Magdalen, Oxford, and Mrs Warren called upon us [...] Mrs Richard Ward, who had joined us, wanted her little boy to hear my father read. My father answered, "I will only read you something old." He read the "Ode on the Duke of Wellington." He dwelt long on the final words, letting them ring so to speak, especially "toll'd, Boom." At the end he said, "It is a great roll of words, the music of words. For a hundred people who can sing a song, there are not ten who can read a poem. People do not understand the music of words." He then read the little Dedication to "OEnone," then the poem. He explained the story, pausing from time to time, asking a few questions'.

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Lotos-Eaters

'In January [1892] Dr Hubert Parry stayed with us at Farringford, for he wanted to hear my father read "The Lotos-Eaters" which he was setting to music. 'For the first time my father's voice, usually so strong, failed while reading this poem and the "Ode on the Duke of Wellington," which he was anxious that a great composer should set as he read it.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Ode on the Duke of Wellington

'In January [1892] Dr Hubert Parry stayed with us at Farringford, for he wanted to hear my father read "The Lotos-Eaters" which he was setting to music. 'For the first time my father's voice, usually so strong, failed while reading this poem and the "Ode on the Duke of Wellington," which he was anxious that a great composer should set as he read it.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Passing of Arthur

'In March [1892] he [Tennyson] recovered his voice [which had failed him during January] [...] He read "The Passing of Arthur" to Lord Houghton (now Lord Crewe) and his sister, Mrs Henniker, as well as ever'.

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Maud (extracts)

'On one of these June mornings [in 1892], Miss L----, who was a stranger to us, but whose brother we had known for some time, called upon us. My father took her over the bridge to the summer-house looking on the Down. After a little while he said: "Miss L----, my son says I am to read to you," and added, "I will read whatever you like." He read some of "Maud," "The Spinster's Sweet-Arts," and some "Enoch Arden." 'His voice, as Miss L---- noticed, was melodious and full of change, and quite unimpaired by age. There was a peculiar freshness and passion in his reading of "Maud," giving the impression that he had just written the poem, and that the emotion which created it was fresh in him [...] 'He thoroughly enjoyed reading his "The Spinster's Sweet-Arts," and when he was reading "Enoch Arden" he told Miss L---- to listen to the sound of the sea in the line 'The league-long roller thundering on the reef'.

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Spinster's Sweet-Arts

'On one of these June mornings [in 1892], Miss L----, who was a stranger to us, but whose brother we had known for some time, called upon us. My father took her over the bridge to the summer-house looking on the Down. After a little while he said: "Miss L----, my son says I am to read to you," and added, "I will read whatever you like." He read some of "Maud," "The Spinster's Sweet-Arts," and some "Enoch Arden." 'His voice, as Miss L---- noticed, was melodious and full of change, and quite unimpaired by age. There was a peculiar freshness and passion in his reading of "Maud," giving the impression that he had just written the poem, and that the emotion which created it was fresh in him [...] 'He thoroughly enjoyed reading his "The Spinster's Sweet-Arts," and when he was reading "Enoch Arden" he told Miss L---- to listen to the sound of the sea in the line 'The league-long roller thundering on the reef'. 'His voice, as Miss L---- noticed, was melodious and full of change, and quite unimpaired by age. There was a peculiar freshness and passion in hiis reading of "Maud," giving the impression that he had just ridden the poem, and that the emotion which created it was fresh in him [...] 'He thoroughly enjoyed reading his "The Spinster's Sweet-Arts," and when he was reading "Enoch Arden" he told Miss L---- to listen to the sound of the sea in the line 'The league-long roller thundering on the reef'.

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Enoch Arden (extracts)

'On one of these June mornings [in 1892], Miss L----, who was a stranger to us, but whose brother we had known for some time, called upon us. My father took her over the bridge to the summer-house looking on the Down. After a little while he said: "Miss L----, my son says I am to read to you," and added, "I will read whatever you like." He read some of "Maud," "The Spinster's Sweet-Arts," and some "Enoch Arden." 'His voice, as Miss L---- noticed, was melodious and full of change, and quite unimpaired by age. There was a peculiar freshness and passion in his reading of "Maud," giving the impression that he had just written the poem, and that the emotion which created it was fresh in him [...] 'He thoroughly enjoyed reading his "The Spinster's Sweet-Arts," and when he was reading "Enoch Arden" he told Miss L---- to listen to the sound of the sea in the line 'The league-long roller thundering on the reef'.

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : In Memoriam

From Hallam Tennyson's account of his father's funeral: 'Many were seen reading "In Memoriam" while waiting before the service.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Mourners at funeral of Alfred Tennyson     Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Poems including 'The Two Voices'

John Tyndall to Hallam Tennyson (1893): 'Under the date of Sunday, 20th October, 1850, I find the following [journal] entry: "Up at 6 A.M. and began the day by reading Tennyson. I am acquainted with no spirit so strong, pure, and beautiful. Every line sparkles with empyrean fire, so that it is difficult to make a selection. I will, however, notice 'The Two Voices' [...] In this poem the tempter to despair is furnished with his best weapons, and foiled though armed cap-a-pie.'"'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: John Tyndall      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Poems

John Tyndall to Hallam Tennyson (1893): 'You were not born when the influence [of Alfred Tennyson] in my case began. Fifty years ago, in the sixth chapter of Carlyle's Past and Present I found the line: "There dwells the great Achilles whom we knew"; 'to which was attached a footnote referring the line to Tennyson [...] This footnote assured me that Tennyson was a poet whose acquaintance must be made without delay. Not very long afterwards, two young men might have been seen eagerly engaged upon a volume, in the corner of a modest hotel in St Martin's Court, Covent Garden. The one read, the other listened. The one, after a life of usefulness and honour, was snatched from us last year by influenza, and now lies in Highgate Cemetery, the other remains to record the fact. The book in which my friend Hirst and I were then absorbed was entitled "Poems by Alfred Tennyson."'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Hirst      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Poems

John Tyndall to Hallam Tennyson (1893): 'You were not born when the influence [of Alfred Tennyson] in my case began. Fifty years ago, in the sixth chapter of Carlyle's Past and Present I found the line: "There dwells the great Achilles whom we knew"; 'to which was attached a footnote referring the line to Tennyson [...] This footnote assured me that Tennyson was a poet whose acquaintance must be made without delay. Not very long afterwards, two young men might have been seen eagerly engaged upon a volume, in the corner of a modest hotel in St Martin's Court, Covent Garden. The one read, the other listened. The one, after a life of usefulness and honour, was snatched from us last year by influenza, and now lies in Highgate Cemetery, the other remains to record the fact. The book in which my friend Hirst and I were then absorbed was entitled "Poems by Alfred Tennyson" [...] 'The late excellent James Spedding, first drew my attention to the definition of poetry as "a fine excess," and certainly the effect of your father's inspired language upon the two young men above referred to could not be better expressed. It was wine to our intellects, and may a night between ten and eleven, during the winter of 1850-51, after the scientific labours of the day were over, we quaffed together of this noble vintage.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Hirst and John Tyndall     Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Maud

John Tyndall to Hallam Tennyson (1893): 'It may be worth while to mention here how I first made the acquaintance of "Maud." Rachel had come to the Haymarket Theatre, for a few representations, and I, anxious to see and hear the great actress, engaged a stall. I had picked up "Maud" at a bookseller's in Piccadilly as I went to the theatre [...] I had read several pages before the play began. I read between the acts, lowering the book to catch sufficient light from the stage. Once I went out, and walked to and fro between St James's Square and the theatre, still reading. Before I reached my lodgings I had finished the poem. I thought it true, strong and beautiful'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: John Tyndall      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Maud

John Tyndall to Hallam Tennyson (1893): 'It may be worth while to mention here how I first made the acquaintance of "Maud." Rachel had come to the Haymarket Theatre, for a few representations, and I, anxious to see and hear the great actress, engaged a stall. I had picked up "Maud" at a bookseller's in Piccadilly as I went to the theatre [...] I had read several pages before the play began. I read between the acts, lowering the book to catch sufficient light from the stage. Once I went out, and walked to and fro between St James's Square and the theatre, still reading. Before I reached my lodgings I had finished the poem. I thought it true, strong and beautiful'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: John Tyndall      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Tiresias and Other Poems

John Tyndall to Hallam Tennyson (1893): 'In the year 1885 [...] were published Tiresias, and Other Poems, by Alfred Lord Tennyson. For a copy of this remarkable volume I am indebted to its author [goes on enthusiastically to discuss, and to quote at length from, various pieces in volume]'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: John Tyndall      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Poems

From F. T. Palgrave's 'Personal Recollections' of Tennyson: 'On March 31st 1849, through the kindness of Henry Hallam, youngest son to the great historian [...] I was asked to meet Tennyson at the house of Hallam's cousin by marriage, W. H. Brookfield, in Portman Street [...] 'At that time the two green volumes of 1842, with "The Princess" in its first form (1847), had been to me, as to thousands more, Gateways into a new Paradise [...]I have preserved no memory of Tennyson during this evening. But at the close, discovering that our routes homeward began in the same direction [...] we set forth together [...] parting with an [Tennyson's] invitation to visit him in his lodgings [...] 'Two days after [...] I accordingly climbed to the upper floor of the lodgings, one of a few houses fronting the Hampstead Road, just south of Mornington Crescent, and found Tennyson in a somewhat dingy room, sitting close over the fire, with many short black pipes in front, and a stout jar of tobacco by his side [...] Tennyson offered to read me certain poems he had written about [Arthur] Hallam [...] He then brought forth a bundle of beautifully copied verse: the name "In Memoriam" I do not think he used; and read several pieces. One was No. CIII "On that last night...," [...] others from the early series describing the ship sailing "from the Italian shore" (No. IX): and that, I think, where parents or sweetheart await a son's or a lover's return. 'Poetry so rich and concentrated as this, and heard now for the first time from the lips of one who loved and mourned so deeply, I could but partly grasp, and knew not how to praise aright. But Tennyson's sweet-natured kindness, when he could give pleasure [...] I have never found exhaustible: and taking up one of those note-books [...] he went on to read certain songs which he thought he might do well to place between the sections of "The Princess." Thus "Sweet and low," "The splendour falls," "Ask me no more" [...] passed before me; giving the sense of some great and splendid procession slowly unrolling itself, and that to the sound of its own music.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Francis Turner Palgrave      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : The Princess

From F. T. Palgrave's 'Personal Recollections' of Tennyson: 'On March 31st 1849, through the kindness of Henry Hallam, youngest son to the great historian [...] I was asked to meet Tennyson at the house of Hallam's cousin by marriage, W. H. Brookfield, in Portman Street [...] 'At that time the two green volumes of 1842, with "The Princess" in its first form (1847), had been to me, as to thousands more, Gateways into a new Paradise [...]I have preserved no memory of Tennyson during this evening. But at the close, discovering that our routes homeward began in the same direction [...] we set forth together [...] parting with an [Tennyson's] invitation to visit him in his lodgings [...] 'Two days after [...] I accordingly climbed to the upper floor of the lodgings, one of a few houses fronting the Hampstead Road, just south of Mornington Crescent, and found Tennyson in a somewhat dingy room, sitting close over the fire, with many short black pipes in front, and a stout jar of tobacco by his side [...] Tennyson offered to read me certain poems he had written about [Arthur] Hallam [...] He then brought forth a bundle of beautifully copied verse: the name "In Memoriam" I do not think he used; and read several pieces. One was No. CIII "On that last night...," [...] others from the early series describing the ship sailing "from the Italian shore" (No. IX): and that, I think, where parents or sweetheart await a son's or a lover's return. 'Poetry so rich and concentrated as this, and heard now for the first time from the lips of one who loved and mourned so deeply, I could but partly grasp, and knew not how to praise aright. But Tennyson's sweet-natured kindness, when he could give pleasure [...] I have never found exhaustible: and taking up one of those note-books [...] he went on to read certain songs which he thought he might do well to place between the sections of "The Princess." Thus "Sweet and low," "The splendour falls," "Ask me no more" [...] passed before me; giving the sense of some great and splendid procession slowly unrolling itself, and that to the sound of its own music.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Francis Turner Palgrave      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Songs for inclusion in new edition of The Princess

From F. T. Palgrave's 'Personal Recollections' of Tennyson: 'On March 31st 1849, through the kindness of Henry Hallam, youngest son to the great historian [...] I was asked to meet Tennyson at the house of Hallam's cousin by marriage, W. H. Brookfield, in Portman Street [...] 'At that time the two green volumes of 1842, with "The Princess" in its first form (1847), had been to me, as to thousands more, Gateways into a new Paradise [...]I have preserved no memory of Tennyson during this evening. But at the close, discovering that our routes homeward began in the same direction [...] we set forth together [...] parting with an [Tennyson's] invitation to visit him in his lodgings [...] 'Two days after [...] I accordingly climbed to the upper floor of the lodgings, one of a few houses fronting the Hampstead Road, just south of Mornington Crescent, and found Tennyson in a somewhat dingy room, sitting close over the fire, with many short black pipes in front, and a stout jar of tobacco by his side [...] Tennyson offered to read me certain poems he had written about [Arthur] Hallam [...] He then brought forth a bundle of beautifully copied verse: the name "In Memoriam" I do not think he used; and read several pieces. One was No. CIII "On that last night...," [...] others from the early series describing the ship sailing "from the Italian shore" (No. IX): and that, I think, where parents or sweetheart await a son's or a lover's return. 'Poetry so rich and concentrated as this, and heard now for the first time from the lips of one who loved and mourned so deeply, I could but partly grasp, and knew not how to praise aright. But Tennyson's sweet-natured kindness, when he could give pleasure [...] I have never found exhaustible: and taking up one of those note-books [...] he went on to read certain songs which he thought he might do well to place between the sections of "The Princess." Thus "Sweet and low," "The splendour falls," "Ask me no more" [...] passed before me; giving the sense of some great and splendid procession slowly unrolling itself, and that to the sound of its own music.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : Ode on the Duke of Wellington

From F. T. Palgrave's 'Personal Recollections' of Tennyson: 'Some time in 1852 Tennyson read over to me his "Ode on the Duke of Wellington," discussing various points of detail. I think this was the sole occasion upon which, moved by the greatness of the man and of the memories which that colossal career called forth, the national sorrow and the loss of heroic example, he showed a certain anxiety about his own work. Yet he need not have feared. Heroism, at least since the days of Pindar or of Virgil, surely has never been sung of so heroically.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Locksley Hall Sixty Years After

From F. T. Palgrave's 'Personal Recollections' of Tennyson: 'On October 27th, 1886, he read aloud to me that piece of almost too terrible beauty, the "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," in which he has concentrated a wealth of thought and observance of life'.

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : Ulysses

From F. T. Palgrave's 'Personal Recollections' of Tennyson: 'In Nov. 1888 I visited Aldworth shortly after death had suddenly carried off my dearly-loved adventurous brother [William] Gifford (September 30) at Montevideo [...] Tennyson now read to me the beautiful lines named "Ulysses" after the title of my brother's last narrative of travel: a commemoration the honour of which he did not live to enjoy.'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      

  

Alfred Tennyson : In Memoriam

Bishop Westcott to Hallam Tennyson: 'When "In Memoriam" appeared, I felt (as I feel if possible more strongly now) that the hope of man lies in the historic realization of the Gospel. I rejoiced in the Introduction, which appeared to me to be the mature summing up after an interval of the many strains of thought in the "Elegies." Now the stress of controversy is over, I think so still. As I look at my original copy of "In Memoriam," I recognise that what impressed me most was your father's splendid faith (in the face of the frankest acknowledgement of every difficulty) in the growing purpose of the sum of life, and in the noble destiny of the individual man as he offers himself for the fulfilment of his little part (LIV., LXXXI., LXXXII. and the closing stanzas). This faith has now largely entered into our common life, and it seems to me to express a lesson of the Gospel which the circumstances of all time encourage us to master.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Brooke Foss Westcott      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : In Memoriam

Bishop Westcott to Hallam Tennyson: 'When "In Memoriam" appeared, I felt (as I feel if possible more strongly now) that the hope of man lies in the historic realization of the Gospel. I rejoiced in the Introduction, which appeared to me to be the mature summing up after an interval of the many strains of thought in the "Elegies." Now the stress of controversy is over, I think so still. As I look at my original copy of "In Memoriam," I recognise that what impressed me most was your father's splendid faith (in the face of the frankest acknowledgement of every difficulty) in the growing purpose of the sum of life, and in the noble destiny of the individual man as he offers himself for the fulfilment of his little part (LIV., LXXXI., LXXXII. and the closing stanzas). This faith has now largely entered into our common life, and it seems to me to express a lesson of the Gospel which the circumstances of all time encourage us to master.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Brooke Foss Westcott      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Idylls of the King

John Ruskin to Alfred Tennyson, from Strasburg (1860): 'I have had the "Idylls" in my travelling desk ever since I could get them across the water, and have only not written about them because I could not quite make up my mind about that increased quietness of style [...] 'The four songs seem to me the jewels of the crown, and bits come every here and there, the fright of the maid for instance, and the "In the darkness o'er her fallen head," which seem to me finer than almost all you have done yet. Nevertheless I am not sure but I feel the art and finish in these poems a little more than I like to feel it [...] 'As a description of various nobleness and tenderness the book is without price: but I shall always wish it had been nobleness independent of a romantic condition of externals in general.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : poem on the Holy Grail

From Alfred Tennyson's letter-diary to his family (1868): 'November. The Hollies, Clapham Common. I have sent the "Grail" to be [italics]printed[end italics] [...] I read it last night to Strahan and Pritchard, who professed themselves delighted.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Alfred Tennyson : Morte d'Arthur

3 November 1857: 'In the evening we all went over to the Camerons [i.e. Charles Hay, and Julia Margaret Cameron]. Several Pre-Raphaelite artists were there to meet Tennyson [...] When they were all gone Tennyson read us his own Morte d'Arthur, and that really was a pleasure. It is a poem I have always been very fond of.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : [poetry]

'It was strange that, as a girl of fifteen, my greatest friend should have been this Colonel Berkeley. The thirty years difference in our ages did not seem to matter. He was fond of reading and we read poetry together, a great deal of Tennyson, and although I had read George Eliot's novels, I was surprised that she who produced the dry prose of "Daniel Deronda", should also have produced "The Spanish Gipsy".'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Zoe Procter      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : poetry

'Mr Stansfield read an interesting paper on "Tennyson & his books" & in continuation of the subject readings were given by Mrs Reynolds, Mrs Edminson, Mr Cass & Mr Goadby. Mr Ridges also recited Sir Galahad and St Agnes Eve'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Florence Reynolds      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : poetry

'Mr Stansfield read an interesting paper on "Tennyson & his books" & in continuation of the subject readings were given by Mrs Reynolds, Mrs Edminson, Mr Cass & Mr Goadby. Mr Ridges also recited Sir Galahad and St Agnes Eve'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Edminson      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : poetry

'Mr Stansfield read an interesting paper on "Tennyson & his books" & in continuation of the subject readings were given by Mrs Reynolds, Mrs Edminson, Mr Cass & Mr Goadby. Mr Ridges also recited Sir Galahad and St Agnes Eve'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: T.T. Cass      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : poetry

'Mr Stansfield read an interesting paper on "Tennyson & his books" & in continuation of the subject readings were given by Mrs Reynolds, Mrs Edminson, Mr Cass & Mr Goadby. Mr Ridges also recited Sir Galahad and St Agnes Eve'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Allan Goadby      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : 'Sir Galahad'

'Mr Stansfield read an interesting paper on "Tennyson & his books" & in continuation of the subject readings were given by Mrs Reynolds, Mrs Edminson, Mr Cass & Mr Goadby. Mr Ridges also recited Sir Galahad and St Agnes Eve'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: John Ridges      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : 'St Agnes' Eve'

'Mr Stansfield read an interesting paper on "Tennyson & his books" & in continuation of the subject readings were given by Mrs Reynolds, Mrs Edminson, Mr Cass & Mr Goadby. Mr Ridges also recited Sir Galahad and St Agnes Eve'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: John Ridges      Print: Book

  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson : Complete Poems

Books read by Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol, July 1896-December 1896, taken from his list of books requested and then sent by his friends. Source text author notes that Wilde read and re-read everything available to him in prison. 'Greek Testament, Milman's History of the Jews; Farrar's St Paul, Tennyson's Poems (complete in one volume), Percy's Reliques (the collection of old ballads), Christopher Marlowe's Works, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Life of Frederick the Great, A prose translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, Keats's Poems, Chaucer's Poems, Spenser's Poems, Renan's Vie de Jesus and The Apostles, Ranke's History of the Popes, Critical and Historical Essays by Cardinal Newman, Emerson's Essays (If possible in one volume), Cheap edition of Dickens's Works.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Oscar Wilde      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Morte d'Arthur

Books read by Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol, December 1896 - March 1897, taken from his list of books requested and then sent by his friends. Source author notes that Wilde read and re-read everything available to him in prison. 'Gaston de Latour by Walter Pater, MA (Macmillan), Milman's History of Latin Christianity, Wordsworth's Complete Works in one volume with preface by John Morley (Macmillan, 7/6), Matthew Arnold's Poems. One volume complete. (Macmillan, 7/6), Dante and other Essays by Dean Church (Macmillan, 5/-), Percy's Reliques, Hallam's Middle Ages (History of), Dryden's Poems (1 vol. Macmillan. 3/6), Burns's Poems ditto, Morte D'Arthur ditto, Froissart's Chronicles ditto, Buckle's History of Civilisation, Marlowe's Plays, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (edited by A. Pollard 2 vols 10/-) Macmillan, Introduction to Dante by John Addington Symonds, Companion to Dante by A.J. Butler, Miscellaneous Essays by Walter Pater, An English translation of Goethe's Faust'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Oscar Wilde      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'The Eagle: A Fragment'

'I stared at the sea far below, and thought of our English master declaring how clever Tennyson had been in saying of his soaring eagle 'the wrinkled sea beneath him crawled'. Yes, it was like that. Then we hit an air pocket and we seemed to be dropping alarmingly, and I forgot about Tennyson.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Harold Edward Leslie Mellersh      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : 'Ulysses'

'I have been trying to think how far I and my like, middle class schoolboys at the end of our pre-war education, were unquestioning patriots ready to respond to heroics. I think it is true that we were. We were reading now, or having read to us by our English master, the newly published sonnets of Rupert Brooke: 'Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His hour / And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleep.' 'Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead.' and 'Honour has come back, as a king, to earth.' 'If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England.' We had been prepared for these heights: conditioned may be the right word. Tennyson and Browning (besides Shakespeare, of course) we read in the English lessons and learnt by heart; and it cannot be by chance that there comes to my mind unbidden 'Ulysses' - 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield' and the well-known 'Epilogue to Asolando': One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Harold Edward Leslie Mellersh      Print: Book

  

Alfred Tennyson : Guinevere

17 July 1859: 'I sat, very sad, in the garden [at Exeter House], took up Tennyson's Guinevere, and was engrossed with it. Arthur is the noblest creature that ever lived in fiction. What a speech is that of his on parting with the Queen. I can never read it without tears.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Charlotte Schreiber      Print: Book

 

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