SD2894. Diary Entry of George Henry Lewes

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 363.

[London]

6 May 1867

Continued the writing of my Prolegomena. Called on Shirley Brooks—out but found his wife in. Dined with Morley at the Garrick. Browning, Forster, FitzJames Stephen, Beesly, Meredith, Greenwood, Macmillan, Trollope, and three or four others there. Browning told us that when Tennyson heard Wordsworth was about to publish the ‘Prelude’ he said he knew one line must be in it somewhere and it was:

One Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman. [1]

Publication: The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven, Conn., 1954–78), 4, 361.

Manuscript: Yale University.

1. It isn’t in Wordsworth. In 1835 Tennyson and Edward FitzGerald had a contest to see “who could invent the weakest Wordsworthian line imaginable.” Although FitzGerald claimed it, Tennyson told his son that he had composed the line. See Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir, 2 vols., 1897, I, 153.

___________________