Three New Sources for ‘Locksley Hall’: Goethe, Byron, and Dickens

Abstract

The principal source for Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’ (written in the late 1830s, and published in 1842) was William Jones’s 1774 translation of the Arabic ode collection the Moâllakát, and the poem also draws on works by Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, Carlyle, Goethe, and Byron. ¹ However, the influence of the last two of these authors may well have been greater than has been supposed, and Dickens’s Oliver Twist can be plausibly added to the list of sources.