![]() ![]() He and Tennyson knew each other only four years, but their intense friendship had major influence on the poet. Hallam, another precociously brilliant Victorian young man like Robert Browning, John Stuart Mill, and Matthew Arnold, was uniformly recognized by his contemporaries (including William Gladstone, his best friend at Eton) as having unusual promise. The group, which met to discuss major philosophical and other issues, included Arthur Henry Hallam, James Spedding, Edward Lushington (who later married Cecilia Tennyson), and Richard Monckton Milnes - all eventually famous men who merited entries in the Dictionary of National Biography.Īrthur Hallam's was the most important of these friendships. In 1829 The Apostles, an undergraduate club, whose members remained Tennyson's friends all his life, invited him to join. ![]() Because they had published Poems by Two Brothers in 1827 and each won university prizes for poetry (Alfred winning the Chancellor's Gold Medal in 1828 for "Timbuctoo") the Tennyson brothers became well known at Cambridge. In 1827 Tennyson escaped the troubled atmosphere of his home when he followed his two older brothers to Trinity College, Cambridge, where his tutor was William Whewell - see nineteenth-century philosophy. In the late twenties his father's physical and mental condition worsened, and he became paranoid, abusive, and violent. His brother Edward had to be confined in a mental institution after 1833, and he himself spent a few weeks under doctors' care in 1843. His father and brother Arthur made their cases worse by excessive drinking. He also had a lifelong fear of mental illness, for several men in his family had a mild form of epilepsy, which was then thought a shameful disease. (See the Tennyson Family Tree.) The contrast of his own family's relatively straitened circumstances to the great wealth of his aunt Elizabeth Russell and uncle Charles Tennyson (who lived in castles!) made Tennyson feel particularly impoverished and led him to worry about money all his life. The poet's grandfather had violated tradition by making his younger son, Charles, his heir, and arranging for the poet's father to enter the ministry. Alfred Tennyson was born August 6th, 1809, at Somersby, Lincolnshire, fourth of twelve children of George and Elizabeth (Fytche) Tennyson. ![]()
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