Poems II

Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ was written in white heat after he read of the suicidal charge by the light cavalry in the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War; 247 men of the 637 in the charge were killed or wounded. In wanting to maintain the jingoistic sentiments of the poem, Tennyson removed the line ‘Some one had blundered’. In this version – a copy from Charles Brasch’s library – the phrase has been restored. Tennyson was godfather to Dickens’s sixth child and fourth son: Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens.

[The Charge of the Light Brigade from Lord Alfred Tennyson's Poems II, page 225.]