ABSTRACT
Shortly after the publication of Maud and Other Poems (1855), Tennyson wrote to Dr Robert Mann:
Would it not be better that all literary criticisms should be signed with the name, or at least the initials of the writer […] To sign political articles would be perhaps unadvisable and inconvenient, but my opinion is that we shall never have a good school of criticism in England while the writer is anonymous and irresponsible.1
