Turner, CHARLES TENNYSON, born July 4, 1808, at Somersby, second son to the vicar (see TENNYSON, ALFRED), educated at Louth School and Trinity College, Cambridge; graduated 1832, ordained 1835; for many years the devoted vicar of Grasby, a village in the Lincoln wolds. In 1837 he married Louisa Sellwood, sister to Emily, Lady Tennyson. Took the name of Turner under the will of a relation; died April 25, 1879; commemorated by his deeply loved and loving brother Alfred in the lines Midnight, June 30, 1879.
From 1830 to 1873 C. T. Turner published several small series of verse (collected in one volume, with a memoir, 1880). The first, issued during his college days, won much praise from S. T. Coleridge. Throughout life the poet adhered to the sonnet form, but with an irregular distribution of the rhymes. His was a nature singularly and nobly simple, pure, and tender with a woman's tenderness: 'at once, his nephew Hallam (preface to the volume of 1880) justly observes, 'childlike and heroic.' Add that he was a well-read scholar, gifted also with very fine and sympathetic observation of nature and of village-life. Hence these idyllic sonnets—sincere, pathetic, subtle, sometimes verging on quaintness—cover, in their pensive range, a vast number of motives from English country ways. By him and by his admirable contemporary poet, W. Barnes of Dorset, a hundred wild flowers, we might say, effaced or disappearing under the remorseless ploughshare of modern progress, have been preserved for us. Such work in an age like ours should have a wide appeal to Englishmen. But fit audience and few will almost uniformly be the fate of the writer who confines himself to the form of sonnet-sequence.