In 1855, Charles Tennyson, Baron d'Eyncourt of Bayons Manor, found himself once more embarrassed by one of his unsuitable relatives. Through-out most of his life he had become accustomed to treating the family of his Uncle George with open disdain. But now he was totally exasperated with his nephew Alfred's latest volume, Maud, and Other Poems. “Horrid rubbish indeed!” he wrote to a correspondent. “What a discredit it is that British taste and Poetry should have such a representative before the Nations of the Earth and Posterity! For a Laureate will so appear. Posterity will, it is hoped, have a sound judgment on such matters, and if so what an age this must appear when such trash can be tolerated and not only tolerated but enthusiastically admired!” (Ricks 233).

Posterity has not come to share Uncle Charles's judgment. The Bayons branch of the family never reconciled themselves to the fame achieved by their poor relation who had been elevated (quite unfairly in their view) to become England's poet laureate in 1850. The English public, however, and England's queen found in Tennyson the voice of their deepest hopes and fears. He was not simply one of England's poet laureates; in his own day, and for a century after, his name became synonymous with the term.

No poet has ever or since been more closely associated with his times than Alfred Tennyson. The Victorians were captivated by his poetry. He could make them weep over the plight of the poor fisherman Enoch Arden or fire their idealism with his portrait of the perfect ruler in his Arthurian epic Idylls of the King.