3085. Alfred Tennyson to EBB

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 189.

Chapel House

Twickenham

Aug. 11th [1852] [1]

My dear Mrs Browning

I wrote to you once before this morning. I now write again to tell you what I am sure your womans & poets heart will rejoice in that my wife was delivered of a fine boy [2] at 9½ a.m. this day & that both she & the child are doing well. I never saw any face so radiant with all high & sweet expression as hers, when I saw her some time after[.]

Ever yours truly

A Tennyson

Address: Mrs E. Barrett Browning. / 58 Welbeck Street. / London.

Publication: The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass., 1981–90), 2, 37–38.

Manuscript: Berg Collection.

1. Year provided by Tennyson’s reference to the birth of his son Hallam, which occurred on 11 August 1852.

2. Hallam Tennyson (1852–1928), who was named after Alfred Tennyson’s great friend Arthur Hallam (1811–33). In later years he served as his father’s private secretary, and he wrote the first biography of his father, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son (1897).

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