The Sultan - A note on the imagery of Tennyson's Maud

Abstract

It is the intention of this note to suggest that the autobiographcal basis of Tennyson's strange poem may be responsible for its imagery. Unhappy family circumstances had filled Tennyson, as a young man, with a troublesome obsession about the wealth and position which were enjoyed by certain of his relatives, and which he considered to be rightly his own instead. The chief object of this obsession was his uncle Charles, whom the grandfather had wrongfully favoured in place of the eldest son, Tennyson's father George. It may be this uncle Charles who forms the basis of Tennyson's characterization of Maud's proud and wealthy brother.