‘A Life Lived Quickly’: Tennyson’s Friend Arthur Hallam and his Legend by Martin Blocksidge (review)

In all biographies of Alfred Tennyson his friend Arthur Hallam features prominently as the subject of Tennyson’s greatest poem, and Martin Blocksidge has now made the case for Hallam as the subject of a biography to himself. Hallam died suddenly in Vienna in 1833, at the age of twenty-two, having been taken there by his father during what was in effect a punishment tour of Europe. Hallam was desperately in love with Tennyson’s sister, Emily, and his father, the distinguished historian Henry Hallam, opposed the match and was doing all that he could to separate the young couple. He had his reasons: the Tennyson family—the widowed Mrs. Tennyson and her eleven children—looked shabby and improvident; the brothers were undisciplined; the sisters were unworldly; they lived in a remote village in Lincolnshire and spoke with the rural local accent; and George Clayton Tennyson, the father of the family, had died of drink. Henry hoped for a far more propitious marriage than this for his son. Arthur Hallam was a young man of outstanding promise; at Eton he had been a brilliant schoolboy in a generation of brilliant schoolboys. The best known, and closest, of his Eton contemporaries was the future famous statesman W. E. Gladstone.

By the time of Hallam’s death Henry must have been regretting his decision to send his son to Cambridge. Many Eton boys went from Eton to Christ Church, Oxford, as Gladstone did, and it seems that Henry had decided that it would be good for his son to be separated from his Eton friends. At Trinity College, Cambridge, Hallam formed the friendship with Tennyson that was later made famous by Tennyson’s long elegiac poem for his friend, In Memoriam (1850). Hallam and Tennyson were both members of the Apostles, a self-selecting closed society, largely comprising men from Trinity, which devoted itself to intellectual rigour, absolute truthfulness, and high-principled discussion of philosophical issues and important topics of the day. Hallam and Tennyson formed a friendship which was recognised by the other Apostles as the central relationship within the group. Hallam was the Apostles’ foremost intellect while Tennyson was their poet, a genius whose untamed shaggy beauty marked him out for admiration.

Hallam became an intimate of the whole Tennyson family in Lincolnshire and fell deeply in love with Tennyson’s sister Emily. But Henry Hallam sternly imposed conditions: the young people were not to see each other or communicate until after Hallam’s twenty-first birthday, which was February 1832. In retrospect Henry’s behaviour looks unbearably harsh. In fairness to him, however, it needs to be remembered that Hallam did not have a profession or independent means, was supposed to be training for a career in the law, and neglected his legal studies in order to promote his friend Tennyson’s poetry. No one was to know that Hallam’s tiredness, headaches, and high colour were symptoms of a propensity to aneurism which would suddenly kill him the following year.

Blocksidge’s biography tells the whole of this story with great tact and skill, and provides new information about the young man’s life. Hallam’s Eton years are particularly well handled. Hallam was at Eton under John Keate, a successful headmaster in the sense that the school was brought into control and became a responsible teaching institution in his hands. But his methods were notorious. He was a tiny man, just five feet high, and he would cope with problems of discipline by administering mass floggings to the boys. There was undoubtedly a sadistic side to Keate. Blocksidge is careful to be fair to Keate, though, bringing out the good side of his work in the school and stressing that he was a happily married man with a large family. He also points out Hallam’s good fortune in meeting with the care of...