ABSTRACT
Published 1842. Written 1837–8; so Rader (pp. 41–2) argues convincingly. (i) Edmund Lushington thought he remembered that it was read to him in 1837 or early 1838 (Mat. i 246). (ii) It relates to T.’s disillusionment with Rosa Baring, and was probably influenced by the talk in 1837 of her engagement, and her marriage in Oct. 1838. (iii) T. read T. Pringle (the source of ll. 135–6) in 1837 (Mem. i 162), and l. 114 was written at High Beech where the Tennysons lived from 1837–40 (Mem. i 150). (iv) Y.MS is watermarked ‘1835’ and is not likely to be very much later. (Rader (p. 41) mistakenly calls this ‘the sole MS of the poem’; in fact the poem appears with the 1842 poems in HnMS (HM 1320), which at this point is watermarked 1838.) Rader adds, for those who wish to associate it with Lincolnshire, that T. was there in the spring of 1838. Furthermore Walter White says that it ‘was written at High Beech’ (Journals, 1898, pp. 151–2), and he corroborates Lushington in that much of it was seen and heard at Mitre Court Buildings, The Temple. W. D. Templeman’s preference for 1840–1 is supported by J. H. Buckley (writing before Rader, however), who believes it refers to T.’s breaking off his engagement with Emily in 1840; Rader’s discoveries make this unnecessary, as is Templeman’s suggestion that T. was adapting the unhappy love affair in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (Booker Memorial Studies, 1950). All variants from Y.MS are given below, as ‘ MS’. In T. Nbk 26 fragment, it is twice spelt ‘Loxley Hall’; cp. ‘Oxley Hall’ (Audley Court) in this Nbk.
