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The year Eighteen Hundred Fifty, when he was forty-one, has been called his "golden year," for in it occurred the publication of "In Memoriam," his appointment to the post of Poet Laureate, and his marriage. Emily Sellwood had waited for him all these years.
In this year, also, we find him happily married to Emily S. Sellwood, a lady of Berks, to whom the poet had been engaged since 1837. With his bride he took up house at Twickenham, near London, where his son, Hallam Tennyson, was born in 1852.
At present epics are read for duty's sake, not for the only valid reason, "for human pleasure," in FitzGerald's phrase. Between 1838 and 1840 Tennyson made some brief tours in England with FitzGerald, and, coming from Coventry, wrote Godiva. His engagement with Miss Sellwood seemed to be adjourned sine die, as they were forbidden to correspond.
Moreover, he was always speculating upon the mystery and the wonder of the human story. “The far future,” he says in a letter to Miss Sellwood, written from High Beech in Epping Forest, “has been my world always.” And yet so powerless is reason in that dire wrestle with temperament which most poets know, that with all these causes for despising criticism of his work, Tennyson was as sensitive to critical strictures as Wordsworth was indifferent. “He fancied,” says his biographer, “that England was an unsympathetic atmosphere, and half resolved to live abroad in Jersey, in the South of France, or in Italy.
But when he tells of his poverty to Emily Sellwood, the woman of his choice, there is anguish in his cry. In fact, her parents succeeded in breaking off her relations with Tennyson for a time, on account of his very uncertain prospects. His brothers, even those younger than he, had slipped into snug positions "but Alfred dreams on with nothing special in sight."
It is a very rare thing anywhere, especially in England, for a man deliberately to choose poetry as the duty of his life, and to remain loyal, as a consequence, to the bride of St Francis Poverty. This loyalty Tennyson maintained, even under the temptation to make money in recognised ways presented by his new-born love for his future wife, Miss Emily Sellwood.
The aforesaid Anne Sellwood was married in her Smock, without any clothes or headgier on." "This is not uncommon," remarks Mr. Ashton, "the object being, according to a vulgar error, to exempt the husband from the payment of any debts his wife may have contracted in her ante-nuptial condition. "VI. During the marriage the wife cannot contract on her own behalf.
From this time forward Tennyson, with increasing confidence in himself and his message, steadily maintained his place as the best known and best loved poet in England. The year 1850 was a happy one for Tennyson. He was appointed poet laureate, to succeed Wordsworth; and he married Emily Sellwood, Her whose gentle will has changed my fate And made my life a perfumed altar flame,
The action is against him and her as co-defendants. If the marriage is dissolved by his death, she is liable, his estate is not. Ashton, in his very interesting book, p. 31, quotes a peculiar note from a Parish Register in the reign of Queen Anne to this effect: "John Bridmore and Anne Sellwood, both of Chiltern all Saints, were married October 17, 1714.
In 1845 he was awarded a pension of £200 per annum from the Civil List, and in 1850 he was made Poet Laureate, on the death of Wordsworth. In the same year he married Miss Emily Sellwood, whom he had long known at Somersby, the daughter of a lawyer, and niece of Sir John Franklin.
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