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

Baynes talks about new sources for "Locksley Hall." The principal source for Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" (written in the late 1830s, and published in 1842) was William Jones' 1774 translation of the Arabic ode collection the Moallakat, and the poem also draws on works by Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, Carlyle, Goethe, and Byron. However, the influence of the last two of these authors may well have been greater than has been supposed, and Dickens' Oliver Twist can be plausibly added to the list of sources. It may also have been Goethe's writings that led Tennyson to Jones' Moallakat translation, and that prompted the poem's allusions to Shakespeare.