Arthur Henry Hallam (1811-1833)
Autograph letter signed (‘Arthur Hallam’) to Emily Tennyson, Cambridge, n.d. [?1832]
One page, 112 x 185mm, bifolium. Provenance: Sotheby's, 25 July 1978, lot 396.

A love letter to Emily Tennyson, sister of the poet who immortalised him: ‘For my sake endure & hope & trust in the affection of those about you: these will be fearful times for all who are not strengthened in love’. Expressing his concern for Emily’s health, Hallam opens the letter ‘Cara, Carissima, let me hear from you’, continuing ‘Alfred gives a pretty good account of your health, and Arthur says you have a great colour. Thank Heavens I shall be soon with you, unless I am cruelly deceived in my expectations. Alfred is looking well, I think, & seems better in mind and body than when I saw him at Cheltenham. He surprises me by his progress in Italian: why should you not read with him? – it would do you both good’. Expressing his concern, and apologising for his brevity, ‘I have not now time to write more; daily or hourly I think of you, and hope in you: should that hope fail me, Emily, do not think I can recover the wound’. A postscript notes ‘I have stolen your purse, but you shall have it if you ask for it’.

Hallam is famous above all as the subject of his close friend Alfred Tennyson's elegy In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), inspired by his early death in 1833. Hallam had fallen in love with Tennyson's sister Emily late in 1829; she accepted his proposal of marriage, but his father's agreement was conditional on him and Emily having no communication before Arthur's twenty-first birthday in 1832. The engagement was then announced, but was impeded by the stubborn refusal of Emily's grandfather, George Tennyson (responsible for the Tennyson children's welfare after their father's death) to alter his financial provisions in her favour. Tragedy intervened ten months later, when Arthur Hallam died suddenly while visiting Vienna with his father. Emily, to her family's apparent disapproval, married Lieutenant Richard Jesse in 1842.