Context

• Tennson's family invested £8,000 (over £800,000 today) in the pyroglyph scheme proposed by Dr Matthew Allen- to make wood carvings with a mechanical wood-carving machine called the pyroglyph. They lost this money when the scheme ultimately failed.
• Suffering from depression, Tennyson stayed at a psychiatric sanatorium at High Beech in Epping Forest, run by Allen. Tennyson's brother Septimus was a permanent inmate there.
• Charles Tennyson (Tennyson's grandson): 'Unfortunately Allen was a speculator as well as a doctor and he became interested in a patented process for carving wood by machinery... The classical trade name 'Pyroglyphs' which the doctor coined for it cunningly reinforced the cultural appeal and Lord Brougham was said to have expressed the view that all of England ought to be acquainted with this new industrial miracle.
• Allen succeeded in interesting Alfred in Pyroglyphs in the middle of 1840 and he decided to make a substantial investment in the scheme. If this succeeded, as the promoter insisted it must, it would be the solution to all difficulties... His whole fortune he handed over to Allen. His brothers and sister were eager to follow his example.
• George Clayton Tennyson was a hypochondriac (health anxiety), a depressive man and an alcoholic. His death might have been self-induced by excessive drinking. Ralph Wilson Rader describes the suicide of the father in 'Maud' as a 'melodramatic exaggeration of the essential truth'- Tennyson himself feared he inherited these patrilineal traits.
• The 'black blood' of the Tennysons produced, first, pathological violence and alcoholism in the father, and in his children insanity, squalid sexual escapades, broken engagements, opium addiction, extended nervous collapses and intra-family feuding
• Tennyson believed that his family - the Somersby Tennysons - had been ill-served, not by neighbours as in the case of the poem, but by his relatives - the Tealby Tennysons
• Tennyson's family suffered financially because his alcoholic father George was arbitrarily disinherited in favour of a younger son - Alfred Tennyon's uncle, Charles Tennyson D'Eyncourt - who went on to be, not only very wealthy, but a successful politician.
• The hungry forties inspired Tennyson's depictions of poverty. Thackeray observed that Tennyson 'reads all sorts of things, swallows them, and digests them like a great poetical boa-constrictor'
• In 1850 an inquest was held on a 38-year-old man whose body was reported as being little more than a skeleton, his wife as being 'the very personification of want' and her child as a 'skeleton infant'
• In 1848 Lord Ashley referred to more than 30,000 'naked, filthy, roaming lawless and deserted children, in and around the metropolis'
• Tennyson called his poem 'a little Hamlet.' In the early scenes of the play, Hamlet, like the Maud speaker, is seen in a state of despair over his father's death and as the play unfolds his intelligent cynicism (scepticism, negativity) is likewise directed at the corruption of the world.
• Tennyson was courting Rosa Baring of Harrington Hall, four years younger than him and remarkably beautiful. The match had been 'discouraged by Rosa's parents' due to Tennyson's lack of financial stability (Rawnsley)
• Tennyson's paternal aunt Elizabeth marries Matthew Russel who inherited a vast fortune made in coal. They were closely allied to Charles Tennyson d'Eyncourt, the uncle Tennyson resented
• Tennyson's uncle - Charles Tennyson d'Eyncourt - inherited the ruins of the 'Beacons' estate and renovated it, renamed it 'Bayons Manor' to make it sound more elaborate and ancient 'old money'.
• Keeping with his father's will Charles changed his name by King's licence to d'Eyncourt. He then fulfilled his father's dream and built a Gothic mansion. The new manor house was erected in parts and designed as if built during different periods. this gave it the appearance of being extended over centuries, like many of the larger stately homes were, rather than being new. Villager's estate cottages were demolished and roads were diverted and sunk to create extensive Parkland views
• The anti-war religious preacher was possibly inspired by John bright who was a Quaker and went on to become an MP who opposed the Crimean War.
• Tennyson's mother Elizabeth Fytche was a calming influence on George Clayton known for 'ungovernable violence' and possession of guns and knives
• Tennyson was well-read in Victorian psychiatry and learned from his friend Robert Mann that 'memory, when mixed with delusion, yields insanity'