Publisher's Synopsis
A sourcebook of Victorian literary life, the diary of the Anglo-Irish poet William Allingham was first published in 1907. Coming from Donegal, where he was in the customs service, Allingham paid his first visit to London in 1847, published his first book of poems in 1850 and in 1851 began a lifelong infatuation with Tennyson. Tennyson is the central character of the book, talking and walking, airing his prejudices, reading his poems - "Allingham, would it disgust you if I read 'Maud'? Would you expire?" - and shown in many of the intimate revealing trivialities of his daily life.;Browning and Carlyle in London are the stars of second magnitude, Leigh Hunt Thackeray, Emerson, George Eliot, Turgenev, William Morris, the Rossettis, Coventry Patmore, William Barnes, Froude, Palgrave, Burne-Jones are other dramatipersonae of a diary covering half a century.
