LIFE AND WORK

OF

ALFRED LORD TENNYSON.1

SOMERSBY.

My father was born on August 6, 1809, at the Rectory of Somersby in Lincolnshire, the fourth son of a family of eight sons and four daughters. The parish doctor said of him when a week old

Here's a leg for a babe of a week! and he would be bound

There was not his like that year in twenty parishes round.

The Tennysons trace their descent through a long line of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire squires and yeomen from John Tenison of Holderness (1343), and according to Burke are the co-representatives with the Lords Scarsdale of the ancient family of d'Eyncourt. My father's grandfather and two of his uncles sat in Parliament. His father. Dr. Tennyson, Vicar of Somersby, was a distinguished-looking man, cultivated, and fond of languages and science. He was a competent scholar in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and Syriac, and something of a poet, a painter, and a musician. By the right of primogeniture he ought to have inherited a considerable fortune, but his father disinherited him in favour of his younger son Charles Tennyson, and made him take Holy Orders, for which he had no vocation, and this unfitness plunged him at times into deep fits of melancholy. He was a man of the highest truth and honour, and inspired his neighbours with a certain sense of fear, though he was a genial and brilliant conversationalist. His children were all by nature poets, and Leigh Hunt aptly described them as "a nest of nightingales." When Alfred was a boy, one of his earliest recollections was his grandmother reading to him "The Prisoner of Chillon." She used to say, "All Alfred's poetry comes from me." This brood of "nightingales" lived

1 [This preface to the poems is naturally an abridgment of my Memoir of my father, with here and there some few facts added, illustrating his character or the methods of his work. The commentaries and notes are for the most part those which he himself jotted down or bade me jot down for posthumous publication. -T.]

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