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Author: Hallam, Arthur Henry

Biography:

HALLAM, Arthur Henry (1811-33: ODNB)

He was born at Bedford Place, Bloomsbury, London, on 1 Feb. 1811, the son of Henry Hallam (1777-1859), historian and lawyer, and his wife Julia Maria Elton (1783-1840), who had married in 1807. He went to Eton (1822-27) where he was close friends with W. E. Gladstone (1809-98). After Eton he travelled to Europe with his parents and developed a passion for Italy and an English woman, Anna Mildred Wintour (1804-1880) who inspired his early poems. Returning to England, he entered Trinity College Cambridge (matric. 1828, BA 1832) and studied initially under William Whewell (q.v.) but turned from mathematics to metaphysics and literature. He became a member of the Apostles in 1829. At Cambridge he became friends with Arthur Tennyson (q.v.) who shared his interest in poetry. He also fell in love with Tennyson’s sister Emily (1811-1887), and despite his father’s initial opposition became engaged to her after a year’s enforced separation. At school he had influenced Gladstone with his liberal sentiments, and in the summer of 1830 he persuaded Tennyson to travel with him to Spain to aid the rebellion against Ferdinand VII in an act of youthful folly which had no effect. He returned to London and entered the Inner Temple in 1832, a career choice imposed by his father. In 1833 he travelled to Europe with his father but died from a ruptured aneurysm in Vienna on 15 Sept. His body was returned to England and he was buried at Clevedon church, Somerset, on 3 Jan. 1834. His friends persuaded his father to publish his work with a memoir, Remains in Verse and Prose (1834). The memoir is moving but excludes details of his early love for Anna Wintour, his engagement to Emily Tennyson, and the Spanish adventure with Arthur Tennyson. Two essays, “On Some Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poetry of Alfred Tennyson” (1831) and “Oration, on The Influence of Italian Works of Imagination Upon  the Same Class of Compositions in England” (1832) are worth another look but have long been overshadowed by J. S. Mill’s contributions of roughly the same date. Anna Wintour and Emily Tennyson went on to marry and lived on until the 1880s; Alfred Tennyson’s extended elegy to Hallam, In Memoriam (1850), has been long admired. (ancestry.co.uk 13 Jun. 2022; “Hallam, Henry” ODNB 13 Jun. 2022; Gloucester Chronicle 12 Oct. 1833; Remains in Prose and Verse [1834]; T. H. Vail Motter, ed., The Writings of Arthur Hallam [1943]; Notebook, BL, Add MS 74090 A) AA

 

Other Names:

  • A. H. Hallam
 

Books written (2):

[no place]: [no publisher], [1830]
[London]: printed by W. Nicol, 1834