Tennyson and His Friends

In the winter of 1892, Alfred Lord Tennyson died leaving behind a legend and a son determined to preserve the man beneath it. This intimate collection, assembled by Tennyson's son Hallam, gathers the voices of those who knew the poet intimately: his wife, his friends, his fellow Victorians who remembered dinners at Farringford, walks across the Lincolnshire moors, and the silences between verses. Here is Tennyson not as monument but as husband, father, friend, and neighbour. The contributors share private letters, morning conversations, and the small moments that birthed some of the most celebrated verses in English literature. Lady Tennyson recalls her courtship; contemporaries remember the poet's moods and humour. What emerges is a portrait in fragments of a man whose public works obscured his private self, finally rendered transparent by those who loved him best.