Word: tennysons
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...ALFRED TENNYSON (579 pp.)-Charles Tennyson-Macmillan...
...story of Tennyson's vast Victorian lifetime is like the story of a civilization in Toynbee: the whole age is embodied in it. Born in 1809, he was descended from the yeomanry and the county families that together bred England's great middle class. The north-country parsonage of his childhood tumbled with ten brothers & sisters; at seven he had to be able to chirp from memory the four books of Horace's Odes...
Fumes of Tobacco. Industry dismayed him, and so did London with its "leagues of lights"; he roamed the streets in horror that the seething crowds he found there would soon be lying horizontal underground. Like the middle class whose poet he became, Tennyson spent most of his life in a vague struggle to soften, to disavow the harsh materialism of mines and factories that made the wealth of England and killed her poor in slums; to cling to the beauty of the spirit and to belief...
...these early years, the new biography by the poet's grandson, Charles Tennyson, supplies much material never published before; Alfred hated to talk about them and his son, Hallam, had to scant them in his standard memoir of 50 years ago. Nothing, however, could so testify to Tennyson's magnetic power as this veneration by the second and third generations of his family. Charles, a distinguished lawyer and civil servant who is now 70 himself, remembers his towering grandfather in old age, shuffling downstairs in the morning and extending his great withered brown hand to the children...
Clouds of Faith. In 1850, all England wept over In Memoriam, Emily Sellwood consented, after twelve years, to marry him, and Queen Victoria made him Laureate. Thereafter until his death in 1892, Alfred Tennyson gave the profession of poetry a public dignity that it has never had since...