University of Virginia Library

I

It was on 25 October 1854, in the Battle of Balaclava, that the Light Cavalry Brigade suffered grievous casualties and made itself immortal, and to speak of the Charge of the Light Brigade is already to pay tribute to Alfred Tennyson. On 13 November 1854 a leader in The Times, telling the British public of 'the attack on Balaklava' and 'the terrible form of a splendid self-sacrifice', declared: 'The British soldier will do his duty, even to certain death, and is not paralyzed by feeling that he is the victim of some hideous blunder'. Those last three words moved Tennyson by their substance and their cadence to create the line which his son came to believe had actually figured in The Times: 'Some one had blunder'd' (12).

The next day, 14 November, The Times carried both a further leader, on this 'fatal display of courage which all must admire while they lament', and their special correspondent's account for 19-28 October (headed as having 'appeared in our second edition of yesterday', so that Tennyson may have read this too in his copy of the paper for the previous day). William Howard Russell, the first war-correspondent and probably still the greatest, reported vividly and poignantly the Brigade's 'desperate valour'.

'On Dec. 2nd', Hallam Tennyson was to report, 'he wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in a few minutes, after reading the description in the Times in which occurred the phrase "some one had blundered," and this was the origin of the metre of his poem.'[1] This statement gives the impression that Tennyson read the description in The Times on 2 December and wrote the poem forthwith, but his wife, Emily, is no doubt correct in saying that it was composed 'as a recollection of the first report in The Times'.[2] The earliest extant manuscript (MS1), which is in Tennyson's autograph, does not have the opening four lines, beginning 'Half a league, half a league,' or the final stanza.[3] The second manuscript (MS2) is largely in the hand of Emily Tennyson, though the title, some corrections, and the last six lines are in Tennyson's hand, as are the signature 'A. T.' and a footnote about the number of participants in the charge: 'Written after reading the first report of the Times correspondent where only 607 sabres are mentioned as having taken part in the charge'. This manuscript Tennyson and his wife sent to John Forster, the editor of the Examiner, on Wednesday 6 December, with the following letter:

Already Tennyson, with that conscience about accuracy which some critics have found ludicrous and some of us find not only personally honourable but the condition for certain kinds of poetic achievement, was perturbed about the discrepancy in numbers among the accounts in The Times.[5] His instruction to Forster, 'put only A. T at the foot', presumably arose from the paradox by which a passionately patriotic poem, of all things, might prove not to be decorous for a Poet Laureate.

On the next day, Thursday 7 December, Tennyson posted another manuscript (MS4) to supersede the one of the previous day:[6]

On the same day, 7 December, Forster—who had received the previous day's manuscript—had it set in type for the Examiner, made a few proofreader's marks on a proof (P1) to correct the compositor's errors, and sent the proof to Tennyson. This and MS4 crossed in the mail.

Another proof (P2) having been pulled from the same type as P1, Forster at first made on P2 the same few marks as he had made on P1, and then on Friday 8 December (after receiving Tennyson's letter of 7 December, with MS4), he corrected P2 to conform to MS4, presumably giving instructions by word of mouth to abolish the indenting of lines, since such instructions do not appear on the proof. On the morning of Saturday 9 December, Forster had the next proof (P3) before him in its clean, uncorrected state.

In the meantime, Tennyson had received P1, had deleted 'No man was there afraid' (between what were to become lines 53 and 54 of the final authoritative text), had made two other substantive corrections, and had returned this proof with his letter of 8 (misdated 9) December:

When this letter arrived on Saturday morning, Forster revised P3 to return to the text of P1 as corrected by Tennyson, including making markings for re-indenting thirteen lines of the poem. The compositor accomplished all the changes in time for the printing of the Examiner

that day, 9 December. Forster returned P3 to Tennyson and apparently sent a clean proof (which has not survived and presumably was identical with the text in the Examiner) from the finally corrected type. Forster's letter of 9 December reflects a justified pride:

No sooner had Tennyson received his copies of the Examiner than he began tinkering with 'The Charge'; for a short manuscript (MS5) survives, consisting of nine lines (represented by final lines 32-38), in which he rewrote three lines of the Examiner text and added four new lines to the poem. These alterations Emily Tennyson dutifully copied onto a copy of the Examiner (E1); and they were conveyed to Forster in time for him to incorporate them in the text of the slips that he printed from the Examiner type after the forms were unlocked. Three of these

duplicate slips (P4, P5, and P6) are extant; one is clean, the second has several autograph revisions, and the third has extensive trial and rejected autograph emendations as well as others—in both the poet's and his wife's hand—that entered and remained in the text.

The next phase of the poem's story, which is embodied in a further proof (P7) and culminates in Tennyson's publishing an enfeebled version of the poem in Maud, and Other Poems (1855), may well have begun with a visit to Farringford of the American poet, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, 12-15 January 1855. It has often been said that Tuckerman should be credited, or rather discredited, with Tennyson's weakening of the poem, especially as to the deletion of 'Some one had blunder'd'.[9] But Tuckerman's letter to Tennyson of 22 February 1855, soon after returning to the United States, clarifies his role:

That Tuckerman had not known that the three lines were Tennyson's when deploring them to their author has its tang. But what is more important, Tuckerman's reverting to the poem does amount to a retraction. For he now 'cannot help hoping that this poem will not receive any alterations', and the parenthetical courtesy which follows is a diffident disclaimer along the lines of 'Not of course that anything I said. . .'. Such courtesies often lend a cryptic tone to such exchanges, but a straightforward reading of Tuckerman's letter (unbiased by the tradition of blaming him) would suggest that, though Tuckerman had indeed (the previous month) expressed disapproval of the rhyme in those three lines, he was now—on reflection, and knowing the whole poem and its authorship—moved to oppose (studiedly, politely) what he knew would be Tennyson's intention to re-write. Feeling some responsibility for Tennyson's having become dissatisfied with the lines, Tuckerman does not want anything that he had said (based on inadequate knowledge of the poem) to be a contributing or reinforcing factor in any drive towards revision.

But the Laureate did not heed Tuckerman's restraining plea—though a later letter to Tuckerman makes clear that Tennyson remembered it and came to wish that he had (see below, p. 10). He had a propensity to be discomposed by criticisms, and others had seconded Tuckerman's initial unease. When Tennyson collected the poem, under his full name now, in the Maud volume (published by Edward Moxon five months later, 28 July), not only was the final stanza re-written, but the eight lines which included the repeated 'Some one had blunder'd' were gone.

Tennyson had arranged for Moxon to send Tuckerman an advance copy of the book, and wrote him (?8 July 1855): "You will find in my little volume 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' with the 'blunder'd' that offended you and others, omitted. It is not a poem on which I pique myself but I cannot help fancying that, such as it is, I have improved it" (Harvard). Tennyson might more justly have spoken of 'the "blunder'd" that [had once] offended you'. And the turn of Tennyson's subsequent words—'but I cannot help fancying that [our italics], such as it is, I have improved it'—while acknowledging what might be felt on the other side, is itself an echo of the phraseology in which Tuckerman had expressed his resistance to Tennyson's predilection to revise: 'and I cannot help hoping that [our italics] this poem will not receive any alterations'.

Not piquing himself on the poem, the author, soon after he received copies of Maud, and Other Poems marked a copy (Historical Collation, 55a) in a way that manifests a decision (temporary, as it proved) to drop 'The Charge', by drawing a vertical line through each stanza of it. That he did so shortly after receiving copies is clear from his changing in this copy a colon to a semicolon — a correction sent by Emily Tennyson in a letter to Moxon on 1 August (Harvard); for, once Tennyson learnt of the Crimean soldiers' enthusiasm for the poem, he would not have contemplated dropping it.

Early in August 1855 began the ensuing phase of the development of the text, in which Tennyson promptly acknowledged that the poem should never have received the alterations in the Maud volume. On 6 August, acting upon an animating letter from Benedict Lawrence Chapman on 3 August,[10] Tennyson wrote to Forster and, it would seem, enclosed an autograph manuscript (MS6) that is essentially a fair copy of the third duplicate slip printed from the Examiner type (P6):

At the same time, Tennyson sent to Moxon another fair copy, this one in his wife's hand, on which he had made two small corrections (MS7). The next proof (P8) was set from this manuscript, and both it and the quarto broadsheet that went to the Crimea (Historical Collation, C) were struck from Moxon's printers' (Bradbury and Evans) type and not from Forster's for the Examiner. The 'little note to the soldiers', after minor revisions (see Historical Collation), finally read on the Crimea broadsheet:

All of this asked for tact; on the sheet which has a draft of this message, Emily Tennyson noted: 'It would be pleasant to write to the soldiers only one is afraid it looks too regal to do so—' (TRC). On 7 August, Chapman wrote to Emily Tennyson:

The next day, wishing no time to be lost, Tennyson spurred Forster on:

On the same date, he prodded Moxon:

Gerald Massey had written a favourable critique of Maud, and Other Poems in the Edinburgh News and Literary Chronicle on 28 July 1855,[12] and had sent a copy of it to the poet. In it Massey had applauded one of the revisions of 'The Charge' in the new volume and had deplored another:

On 11 August, Tennyson wrote to Massey and enclosed the latest text:

A letter from Charles Edward Hadow, Off. Chaplain to the Forces in the Crimea (received 14 October),[14] duly expressed fervid thanks, and gratefully accepted Tennyson's offer of a further 1000 copies.

Tennyson did not forget Tuckerman; on 17 October, Emily Tennyson wrote to him:

To his own part of this letter, Tennyson added a postscript: 'You are quite right about the Charge. I was overpersuaded to spoil it'.

The Laureate was now in no doubt about the damage that the revisions for the Maud volume had done to the poem and about the validity of his rectification. He used the same turn of phrase in a letter to William Johnson Fox, 25 October: 'The Charge I was overpersuaded to spoil. I send you a copy of that which I sent to the Crimean army at the soldiers' own request' (Harvard). Ruskin wrote Tennyson on 12 November, acutely lamenting the most important of the misguided revisions: 'I am very sorry you put the "some one had blundered" out of the "Light Brigade." It was precisely the most tragical line in the poem. It is as true to its history as essential to its tragedy.'[15] But by this time three months had elapsed since Tennyson had reinstated the line, though now with the value of a single instead of a double instance.

The text of the proof (P9) for the second edition of Maud, and Other Poems, like that of the second edition itself (1856),[16] corroborates Tennyson's

satisfaction with the state to which he had now brought the poem, for they both in all instances (substantives and accidentals) follow the quarto broadsheet. After 1856, there were six changes in accidentals, and the final text (as in the Eversley edition) was reached in the single volume Works (Crown edition) published by C. Kegan Paul in 1878. Four occurred in this 1878 edition, one in Volume III of the Imperial Library edition, 1872, and one in the eighth edition of Maud, 1862.