ABSTRACT
Alfred Tennyson died at 1.35 a.m. on Thursday 6 October, 1892, aged 83. His son Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir ends ‘The Last Chapter’ 1 of Tennyson’s life, by picturing a family wait by the sickbed, his father’s death and finally the progress of his coffin to burial in Westminster Abbey. It is followed only by a long parenthetical notice of the death, four years later, of his mother Emily, and her burial in a humbler grave in the churchyard at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. Before giving the reader over 100 pages of appendices, the biography proper ends by quoting the family memorial in the Freshwater church, finishing with the epitaph of Emily: ‘Dear, near and true, no truer time himself can prove you, tho’ he make you evermore dearer and nearer.’ The last days of the Tennysons — Alfred and Emily - in the Memoir are one of the great tours de force of Victorian biography, but these are also last days written from within the family of a poet whose career was fashioned out of the endings of others. As Cecil Lang has rather grimly put it, ‘No great writer has been more fortunate in the death of others than Tennyson was’. 2
