Arthur Hallam - Friendship With Tennyson

Friendship With Tennyson

Hallam and Tennyson became friends in April 1829. They both entered the Chancellor's Prize Poem Competition (which Tennyson won). Both joined the Cambridge Apostles, a secret debating society which met every Saturday night during term to discuss, over coffee and anchovy sandwiches, serious questions of religion, literature and society. (Hallam read a paper on 'Whether the poems of Shelley have an immoral tendency'; Tennyson was to speak on 'Ghosts', but was, according to his son's Memoir, 'too shy to deliver it' - only the Preface to the essay survives). Meetings of the Apostles were not always so intimidating: Desmond MacCarthy gave an account of Hallam and Tennyson at one meeting lying on the ground in order to laugh less painfully, when James Spedding imitated the sun going behind a cloud and coming out again.

During the Christmas vacation, Hallam visited Tennyson's home in Somersby, Lincolnshire; on 20 December he met and fell in love with Tennyson's eighteen-year-old sister, Emily, who was just seven months younger than Hallam.

Hallam spent the 1830 Easter vacation with Tennyson in Somersby and declared his love for Emily. Hallam and Tennyson planned to publish a book of poems together: Hallam told Mrs Tennyson that he saw this "as a sort of seal of our friendship". Hallam’s father, however, objected, and Arthur's Poems was privately published and printed in 1830. In the summer vacation, Tennyson and Hallam travelled to the Pyrenees (on a secret mission to take money and instructions written in invisible ink to General Torrijos who was planning a revolution against the tyranny of King Ferdinand VII of Spain). In December, Hallam again visited Somersby and became engaged to Emily. His father forbade him to visit Somersby until he came of age at twenty-one.

In February 1831, Tennyson’s father died, with the result that Tennyson could no longer afford to continue at Cambridge. In August, Hallam wrote an enthusiastic article 'On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson' for the Englishman’s Magazine. He introduced Tennyson to the publisher Edward Moxon.

In February 1832, Hallam visited Emily: 'I love her madly,' he wrote. She was charmed by his 'bright, angelic spirit and his gentle, chivalrous manner.' In July Tennyson and Hallam travelled to the Rhine. In October Hallam entered the office of a conveyancer, Mr Walters, of Lincoln's Inn Fields. In December, thanks largely to Hallam’s support and practical help, Tennyson’s second volume of poetry was published. Hallam again spent Christmas at Somersby.