The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Volume II: 1851-1870

The first volume of The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson showed the young man becoming a poet and recorded the experiences--out of which so much of his poetry was forged--that culminated in three personal triumphs: marriage, In Memoriam, and the Poet Laureateship. Volume II reveals the gradual emergence of a new and different Tennyson, moving confidently among the great and famous--the intellectual, political, and artistic elite--yet remaining very much a son of Lincolnshire, whose childlike simplicity of manner strikes all who meet him. As a young man, he was obliged to be paterfamilias of his father's family; now he has a family of his own, with two sons reaching manhood, two houses, and two lives, one in London and the other at home. Through the letters we learn something about his poetry (including "Maud," and The Idylls of the King), much about his dealings with publishers, and even more about his travels--in Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Norway, Switzerland, Auvergne, Brittany, the Pyrenees--and it is clear that all that he met became part of him and of his poetry. By the close of this volume he is one of the two or three most famous names in the English-speaking literary world. The edition includes an abundance of letters to and about Tennyson as well as by him, and its generous annotation has been commended by reviewers for its range and wit.