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I: The founding of a friendship
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The subject prescribed for the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for English Verse at the University of Cambridge in 1829 was a poem to be entitled Timbuctoo. If the subject was less than alluring the prize was sufficiently prestigious to attract quite a crop of entrants, including an ambitious seventeen-year-old who had recently arrived at Trinity. He was a reckless young man, whose gambling debts would soon compel him to flee the University. His entry, a burlesque about the eating of missionaries and their hymn books, was not appreciated by the assessors although it did pave the way for a lifelong friendship with the eventual prize-winner. If this candidate found no favour as a poet, his novels would soon make a rather imposing name - William Makepeace Thackeray - also illustrious.

Alfred and Arthur, also at Trinity, were more serious contenders for the poetry prize, one of them destined to win it. The two had scarcely met when the April deadline for submissions arrived. Arthur, just five months older than Thackeray, had become eighteen that February; Alfred would be twenty in August.

Although the two had already spent six months in the same college, they had seen almost nothing of each other until now. This was largely because Arthur had a room in college whilst Alfred, to save cash, lodged in the town with his two brothers, hardly ever dining in hall. He had come up with brother Charles at the end of 1827 to join Frederick, the eldest, who had recently transferred from St John’s to Trinity. In the autumn of 1828 a fourth Tennyson, cousin George Hildeyard, arrived at Trinity. He had no money worries and had been advised by his father not to have too much to do with his less civilised cousins.

When Alfred walked off with the prize, Arthur could justly claim that it had been his idea to persuade Alfred that a youthful, pre-Cambridge poem he had called Armageddon could, with a little judicious editing, form the basis for a poem called Timbuctoo. Their joint candidature for the prize had already made them the firmest of friends.

Less than two months before this, Arthur had written to his great friend of Eton days, William Ewart Gladstone, now at St John’s, Oxford, that, apart from Frere, a mutual Eton friend, he had so far failed to find a true friend at Trinity:

There are many, very many, whom I like, and esteem; but in the higher point I am difficult to please. [This and all other excerpts from Arthur's letters are quoted from The Letters of Arthur H. Hallam, edited by Jack Kolb]

By June, another ex-Eton friend also now at Oxford, James Gaskell, was telling his friends that a chap called Alfred Tennyson had apparently become ‘a great friend of Hallam’s’.

When Arthur wrote to Gladstone again in September, he reminded him that it was now two years since they had met. He thanked his friend for being kind about ‘my queer piece of work about Timbuctoo’, adding that it was not really a patch on ‘my friend Tennyson’s poem, which got the prize.’ Perhaps in order to demonstrate that friendship had not been allowed to cloud his critical faculty he conceded that

....to say the truth by striking out his prose argument the Examiners had done all in their power to verify the concluding words \"All was night\"....

But what he went on to say struck Gladstone, to the end of his life, as the death knell of their own friendship.

Arthur had continued:

....The splendid imaginative power that pervades it will be seen through all hindrances. I consider Tennyson as promising fair to be the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century.

Alfred would have loved this assessment of him. He himself grew increasingly critical of the poem that had secured the prize and begun to establish his reputation. He saw it as contrived and ulterior, marred by all kinds of imperfection. But Arthur’s unshakeable faith in his imaginative power and poetic prospects must have thrilled him to the core.

There were things about Arthur which Alfred found equally awe-inspiring. Alfred was short-sighted and often did not have a very clear impression of people unless and until he really scrutinised them, which he did not scruple to do if he became interested in an aspect of that person. When he first took a close look at Arthur, he knew something momentous had happened. Shortly afterwards, he gave Arthur a poem containing these lines:

So, friend, when first I looked upon your face ..
.....Opposèd mirrors each reflecting each -
.....though I knew not in what time or place,
Methought that I had often met with you,
And either lived in either’s heart and speech.

Alfred was destined to become the grand old man of Victorian literary England, his life being framed by the first and last decades of the century; Arthur would be dead in little more than four years.

In some ways they were the least likely of friends. Their backgrounds and earlier experiences had been about as different as they could have been. Yet, by the extraordinary chemistry that had established such instant rapport between them, and by the still more extraordinary determination with which Alfred refused to let their friendship die even when Arthur had died, this was to become the most famous friendship of the century. Alfred’s private grief, haunted by Arthur's ghostly presence, was to become public property and a chief source of solace for a queen crippled by bereavement.



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Before he met Arthur, Alfred had been terribly homesick. His father could never have afforded to send him here without help from his sister, Elizabeth, who, by marrying a certain Major Russell, had jointly inherited one of the wealthiest estates in the country. Unlike some other members of the family, she had always liked Alfred and had been one of the first to spot his budding genius. Although she was never prodigal in her generosity, her background support and belief in him were major stabilising influences in the young poet’s otherwise tumultuous early life.

All the same, it was no joke having to leave a country parsonage for this strange world where ‘dry-headed, calculating, angular little gentlemen’, most from public schools, made him feel very much a fish out of water. This was the first time he had been outside his native Lincolnshire. He seemed now to have arrived on a different planet.

What particularly appalled him was the heartlessness and pettiness of academia. He wrote a poem, never published, about the Cambridge of 1830, in which he castigated

........you that do profess to teach
And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart.

The one thing helping to compensate for all this was, even before he got the coveted Gold Medal, before he had even arrived at Cambridge, he was already a ‘published poet’. This meant something at Cambridge. Byron had been here at Trinity just twenty years ahead of him. He had been Alfred’s boyhood hero until his brother, Frederick, coaxed him into the Shelley camp. Before Byron, there had been Milton at Christ’s College and, before him, Edmund Spenser at Pembroke. Unlikely as it seemed, Cambridge was actually a nursery of poets.

Alfred had got into print just the year before he arrived at Trinity, when he was only seventeen. A printer in Louth, the nearest town to his home at Somersby, had agreed to publish Poems by Two Brothers in 1826. There were a hundred and three poems in the volume, forty-two by Alfred, fifty-seven by Charles and the remaining four by Frederick, an unacknowledged third brother. All three of them were now here in Cambridge.

But Alfred took his poetry a bit more seriously than his brothers; capturing the poetry prize had seemed to prove the point. Some of his more interesting and original work, poems like Armageddon and The Devil and the Lady, had been excluded from the published volume because they had been regarded as ‘too much out of the common for the public taste.’ At any rate, he and Charles had each received

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