Top of the morning to you, London Walkers.
Yes, London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
And it’s curtain up. Here we go. Here’s your daily London fix.
Today we’re going to talk about a man who spent much of his life standing in the shadow of a giant.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
Because when your father is Alfred, Lord Tennyson – booming voice, biblical beard, national monument in human form – there’s a fair chance you’ll spend your life carrying his papers, opening his letters, shooing away unwanted visitors and making sure the great man’s soup doesn’t go cold.
Because the boy’s very name was an inheritance.
He wasn’t simply named Hallam because it sounded distinguished and Victorian and faintly cathedral-close-ish.
He was named for Arthur Hallam, the golden young friend whose sudden death at twenty-two shattered Alfred, Lord Tennyson and gave English literature one of its greatest elegies: In Memoriam.
Which means the child arrived in the world already freighted with memory.
In a sense, he was born carrying grief that predated him.
Victorian families were very good at memorialising the dead. Sometimes almost professionally good at it.
So there in Twickenham was this adored little boy in scarlet stockings and lace finery, named for a ghost.
And yet.
And yet.
The son in question – Hallam Tennyson – turns out to be one of the most quietly fascinating figures of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
Secretary. Biographer. Empire man. Governor-General of Australia. Westminster Abbey bridegroom. Survivor of family catastrophe. Keeper of the flame.
And London man through and through.
Indeed, one of the greatest things ever said about London survives because Hallam Tennyson preserved it for us.
A sentence so good it rattles round the mind like a hansom cab on wet cobbles.
“This is the mind; that is a mood of it.”
We’ll come to that.
But first, the opening shot.
Picture it.
Twickenham. Summer of 1852. The Thames moving lazily along under a warm sky.
Villas. Gardens. Boatmen. The great Victorian metropolis swelling westward. And in one of those houses is born a little boy with one of the heaviest inheritances imaginable.
His parents are middle-aged already. Adoring. Protective. Almost absurdly devoted.
The boys – Hallam and his younger brother Lionel – are dressed alike in lace finery, scarlet stockings and strapped slippers. Like tiny aristocratic dolls escaped from a cabinet.
And then comes one of those wonderful Victorian crossover moments.
The boys are photographed by Lewis Carroll – though at that point he’s still Charles Dodgson, Oxford don, mathematical whiz and future inventor of Wonderland.
Dodgson reportedly said they were the most beautiful boys he’d ever seen.
Which frankly sounds faintly alarming to modern ears, but very Victorian.
Hallam grows up inside one of the most famous literary households in England.
And that means London.
London everywhere.
The London of publishers and clubs and literary dinners. The London of the Temple. The London of smoky railway stations and carriage lamps and drawing rooms full of famous people saying famous things.
He goes to Marlborough College.
Then Trinity College, Cambridge.
Then the Inner Temple.
Though one gets the feeling law was never really the point.
The point was his father.
Hallam becomes, essentially, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s right-hand man.
Secretary.
Confidant.
Travel companion.
Occasional human shield.
And almost certainly the fellow who had to say things like, “No, I’m terribly sorry, Lord Tennyson is not receiving visitors today.”
For nearly twenty years Hallam travels Europe with him during the summers.
Nineteen summer tours.
Imagine the accumulated luggage alone.
Imagine the railway compartments.
Imagine trying to keep track of the beard.
And then there’s the marvellous London quote.
Hallam records that the writer Edward FitzGerald visited St Paul’s Cathedral with Tennyson.
They emerge from the cathedral into the noise and thunder and human tumult of Victorian London.
The omnibuses.
The shouting.
The iron-rimmed wheels.
The roar of the City.
And Tennyson says of St Paul’s: “Merely as an enclosed space in a huge city this is very fine.”
Then, stepping outside into the chaos:
“This is the mind; that is a mood of it.”
Good lord.
What a line.
What a London line.
The cathedral as inwardness.
The streets outside as consciousness itself.
That boiling metropolitan roar.
And only London could generate an observation like that.
Hallam preserved it.
Which is one reason we owe him thanks.
Another reason is this.
After Alfred Lord Tennyson dies in 1892, Hallam undertakes one of the great acts of Victorian literary devotion.
He becomes curator of the legend.
Forty thousand letters.
Forty thousand.
Imagine the dust.
Imagine the sorting.
Imagine the arguments over what must stay and what must go.
Three-quarters of the letters were destroyed under Lady Tennyson’s supervision.
Victorians were often astonishingly good at preserving history and absolutely world-class at burning it.
And then Hallam writes the great official biography: Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son.
Guarded.
Loyal.
Conscientious.
Perhaps too conscientious in places.
But indispensable.
And all the while one senses a slightly melancholy undertow.
His father, dying, regretted making “a slave” of his son.
Oof.
That lands heavily.
Especially because Hallam seems never to have complained.
And then – astonishingly – at nearly fifty years old, his life changes completely.
Empire calls.
He heads to Australia.
First as governor of South Australia.
Then, briefly but importantly, as the first
Australian-born era’s Governor-General of Australia after federation’s shaky beginnings.
And by all accounts the Australians rather liked him.
Not pompous.
Not grand.
Hard-working.
Diligent.
Though perpetually worried about the ruinous cost of official entertaining.
Which is perhaps the most British gubernatorial anxiety imaginable.
“Terribly sorry, old chap, but the empire may collapse if we keep serving this much claret.”
And then comes the heartbreak.
The Great War.
Two sons dead.
Harold in 1916.
Aubrey in 1918.
Imagine telling Alfred Lord Tennyson that.
The poet of “Charge of the Light Brigade.”
The great bard of Victorian heroism and sacrifice.
What would he have made of the trenches?
Of machine guns?
Of sons obliterated by industrial warfare?
Hallam’s surviving son, Lionel, is wounded repeatedly but survives.
And Hallam himself keeps going.
That’s the striking thing about him.
Steadiness.
Duty.
Persistence.
Not flamboyant. Not dazzling. Not volcanic.
Steady.
The kind of man history often overlooks because he wasn’t the genius.
He was the man who made it possible for the genius to be the genius.
And perhaps there’s something deeply moving about that.
Because every famous figure has people around them doing the invisible labour.
Sorting.
Protecting.
Managing.
Absorbing.
Sacrificing.
Hallam Tennyson spent much of his life in somebody else’s light.
But what a life.
Twickenham childhood.
Temple lawyer.
Westminster Abbey wedding.
Literary London.
Victorian celebrity circles.
Empire politics.
Australian federation.
Family tragedy.
The Isle of Wight.
And that unforgettable London sentence echoing down the years from the steps of St Paul’s.
“This is the mind; that is a mood of it.”
You could build an entire philosophy of London out of that line.
And perhaps we do.
Every time we step out into the roar.
See you tomorrow.