Charles Tennyson Turner Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Charles Tennyson Turner was born Charles Tennyson on July 4, 1808, in Somersby, Lincolnshire, into a large clerical family whose household was at once bookish and volatile. His father, the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, was rector of Somersby and a man of learning shadowed by instability; the children grew up amid sermons, farm lanes, and the moral weather of a parsonage where affection and anxiety lived side by side. The rural Lincolnshire landscape - its churchyards, hedgerows, and long, level horizons - lodged in Turner early and would remain the quiet ground-note beneath his poetry.

He was also the elder brother of Alfred Tennyson, later Poet Laureate, a relationship that shaped both his confidence and his reticence. In youth he wrote verse, acted in family theatricals, and shared reading with his siblings, but as Alfred's genius became publicly legible, Charles learned a different kind of vocation - to be serious without being loud, devoted without demanding the center. That temperament, formed in the pressure-cooker intimacy of the Tennyson home, helps explain why Turner would become a poet of small forms and careful feeling rather than public proclamation.

Education and Formative Influences
Turner was educated at Louth Grammar School and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, entering in 1827 and moving within the intense, competitive circle of the "Apostles", where intellectual candor and moral earnestness were prized. At Cambridge he wrote and published early verse with Alfred and their friend Frederick Tennyson in Poems by Two Brothers (1827), and he absorbed the habits of Romantic lyric, Anglican devotion, and the new Victorian emphasis on conscience - influences that steered him toward poetry as a discipline of perception, not merely a vehicle for ambition.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points
His life turned decisively from the prospect of a purely literary career toward the parish and the long duties of a country clergyman. Ordained in the Church of England, he served as vicar of Grasby in Lincolnshire for decades, a post that suited his inwardness and his preference for slow, local authority. In 1836 he married Louisa Sellwood, and on that occasion he adopted the surname "Turner", a personal and social recalibration that also marked his willingness to stand apart from the Tennyson name even while remaining bound to it. His best-known book, Sonnets (1860), and later sequences of devotional and reflective verse show a poet refining a narrow instrument - the sonnet and short lyric - to register memory, pastoral observation, and the ethical textures of ordinary time.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes
Turner wrote as a man for whom vocation was not a thunderclap but a practiced steadiness. The sonnet, with its strict boundaries and room for tonal pivot, became his moral technology: he preferred compression, poised argument, and a final clarifying turn, as if feeling needed form to become trustworthy. His poetry repeatedly tests how private emotion may be made answerable to faith and to the claims of other people - parishioners, family, the dead. In this he differs from Alfred's grander music: Charles tends toward the dimly lit interior, the hedged garden, the church path, where the soul is educated by attention and by restraint.

Psychologically, the drama in Turner is often the drama of worthiness - the longing to be equipped for duty while suspecting oneself unequal to it. "Not until he stood at the altar did he achieve a sense of being hale and furnished. It was strange, he thought, that a man would find his surest current in the spot where he felt least worthy". That sentence captures the logic of much of his devotional verse: grace arrives, if it arrives at all, through the very place one feels exposed. Equally characteristic is his sense of life as departure and return, a pattern that Victorian modernity sharpened with railways and accelerating time. "When the whistle blew and the call stretched thin across the night, one had to believe that any journey could be sweet to the soul". Turner is not a "train poet" in subject matter, but he is a poet of leave-taking, of the spiritual acoustics of farewell, and of the hope that motion - whether through grief, doubt, or the years - can be redeemed into meaning.

Legacy and Influence
Turner died on April 25, 1879, in England, having lived largely outside the metropolitan literary machine yet never outside the Victorian struggle to reconcile faith, feeling, and change. His reputation has long been eclipsed by his brother's, but his best sonnets endure as a parallel Victorian achievement: less famous, often quieter, and precisely for that reason revealing. In an age that increasingly rewarded scale and spectacle, Turner modeled a different authority - the authority of the minor key, of crafted brevity, and of a conscience willing to speak without shouting.

Our collection contains 3 quotes who is written by Charles, under the main topics: Wedding - Nostalgia - Journey.

• 1880 Sonnets: Edited by Hallam Tennyson (Book)
• 1862 Sonnets, and Other Verses (Book)
• 1830 Sonnets and Fugitive Pieces (Book)

• Wikipedia