Enderby form a rectory once held by the poet's father, the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, D.D., the eldest brother of Mr. Tennyson D'Eyncourt, who was for some years member of Parliament for one of the metropolitan boroughs. As a boy, the future Poet Laureate was sent to the grammar-school of Louth, and afterwards proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge—Thackeray being at the University at the same time. In 1829 he gained the Chancellor's medal for the best English poem, the subject for the year being 'Timbuctoo.'
After leaving Cambridge, he spent much of his time in travelling about from place to place, from London to Hastings, Hastings to Cheltenham, to Eastbourne, to Twickenham—everywhere, in fact, where he might find food for that love of the beautiful in nature so characteristic of his poems. His first productions, as we have already said, attracted little public notice; but when people became awake to the nervous passion of 'Locksley Hall,' the indignant satire of 'Lady Clara Vere de Vere,' the tender beauty of 'The May Queen,' and the sensuous elegance of such poems as 'A Dream of Fair Women,' 'The Sleeping Beauty,' and 'The Palace of Art,' his claim as a poet of a high order was universally admitted.
How emphatically he has strengthened and enlarged his reputation by those later and more ambitious works with which we are all familiar, needs no remark.
On the death of Wordsworth, Mr. Tennyson was, it is generally understood at the express desire of the Queen, in 1851 appointed Poet Laureate; and he received at the same time, from Sir Robert Peel, the grant of a pension of 200l. per annum.
From this time he began to produce those works with which his fame is more eminently associated. For twenty years he has been Laureate; and during that period we have had at intervals for Tennyson is by no means a prolific author—'Maud,' which appeared in 1855; the 'Idylls of the King,' in 1858; 'Enoch Arden,' in 1864; 'The Holy Grail,' in 1869; and 'Gareth and Lynette' in 1872. Besides these, he has contributed occasional poems to the magazines, the most notable among these being 'Tithonus,' which first appeared in the 'Cornhill Magazine;' and the fine philosophic study entitled 'Lucretius,' in Macmillan.'
