SOURCE: Scott, Patrick. “Tennyson, Lincolnshire, and Provinciality: The Topographical Narrative of In Memoriam.” Victorian Poetry 34, no. 1 (spring 1996): 39-51.

In the following essay, Scott portrays In Memoriam as a topographical narrative and argues that Tennyson wrote it with a sense of “provincial self-consciousness.”

Tennyson writes to Emily Sellwood, perhaps some time in 1838:

I have dim mystic sympathies with tree and hill reaching far back into childhood. A known landskip is to me an old friend, that continually talks to me of my youth and half-forgotten things, and does more for me than many a friend that I know.¹

This is a remarkable passage in many ways, not least in its timing and audience. In 1838, Tennyson had recently left, after twenty-eight years of almost continuous residence, the “known landskip” of his Somersby childhood, and as things turned out had left it more or less permanently. The original recipient of the...