Author: Tennyson, Frederick
Biography:
TENNYSON, Frederick (1807-98: ODNB)
Frederick was the second child but the eldest surviving one of a family of twelve children born to George Clayton Tennyson (1778-1831), rector of Bag Enderby and Somersby, Lincolnshire, and his wife Elizabeth Fytche of Louth, Lincolnshire, where her father had been the vicar. Born in Louth on 5 June 1807, he led the way for two brothers who followed closely, Charles (b 1808) and Alfred (b 1809), qq.v. He attended the grammar school in Louth from 1814, then Eton College from 1818, and was admitted to St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1825 (matric. 1826). He migrated to Trinity in 1827, the year in which Poems by Two Brothers was published in Louth--a collaboration between Charles and Alfred but with four poems by him, signed with his initials. He won the Browne Medal for a Greek ode in 1828 but was sent down for defiance over attendance at chapel. Readmitted in 1832, he graduated BA in 1833. An inheritance enabled him to live independently and he went to live in Florence and to travel about Greece and Italy. He married Maria Carolina Giuliotti (1817-84) in Florence on 5 July 1847 (according to the official record; not 1839); they had at least five children born in Italy before they moved to Britain in 1859 and settled at St. Helier, Jersey, in the Channel Islands. Frederick Tennyson’s later publications in verse—Days and Hours (1854), The Isles of Greece (1890), and Poems of the Day and Year (1895) did not attract much attention. He died on 26 Feb. 1898 at the home of his son Julius in Kensington, London, and was buried at St. Barnabas, Kensington. (But there is a headstone at Highgate cemetery now.) (ODNB 12 Aug. 2024; findmypast.com 12 Aug. 2024; ancestry.com 12 Aug. 2024; Westminster Gazette 28 Feb. 1898) HJ