The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To ALFRED TENNYSON,1 [?7] MAY 1849

Envelope only.
Text from facsimile in International Autograph Auctions online catalogue, July 2022

Address: Alfred Tennyson Esquire | St James's Square | Cheltenham.
Date: PM Cheltenham 8 May 1849

• 1. Alfred Tennyson (1809-92; Dictionary of National Biography), poet; Poet Laureate from Nov 1850. When he and CD first met is not known; he possibly sought Tennyson's acquaintance through John Forster or William Makepeace Thackeray. But within a few weeks, almost certainly on 27 Apr 1843, CD entertained him, with Thackeray and Percy Fitzgerald (as the latter's guest), to dinner at Devonshire Terrace, after a drive together. As his sole documented meeting with CD it was long remembered by the poet, and revived by reading Forster's Life of Charles Dickens in 1872-3; he mentions again CD's "unaffectedness" despite his "American Triumph", "seeming to wish anyone to show off rather than himself", and recalls that they "talked of Crabbe" and had "a round game at cards and mulled claret in the evening" (Fitzgerald to Mrs Tennyson [Dec 1872], quoted in Tennyson and his Friends, ed. Hallam, Lord Tennyson [London: Macmillan & Co., 1911], pp. 112-13). For CD’s enthusiasm about Tennyson’s Idylls of the King see To John Forster, 25 Aug 1859: “How fine the ‘Idylls’ are! Lord! what a blessed thing it is to read a man who can write! I thought nothing could be grander than the first poem till I came to the third; but when I had read the last, it seemed to be absolutely unapproached and unapproachable (Pilgrim Letters 9, p. 112).