Biographical and Historical: Alfred Tennyson was born in that memorable
birth year, 1809, which brought into the world a company of the greatest
men of the century, including Darwin, Gladstone, Lincoln, Poe, Chopin, and
Mendelssohn. He was one of twelve children who lived together a healthful
life of study and sport. Gathering the other children about him he held
them captive with his stories of knightly deeds--tales drawn partly from
his reading and partly from his fertile fancy. They lived again the
thrilling life of joust and tournament. Past the house in the village of
Somersby, in Lincolnshire, where his father was rector, flowed a brook, in
all probability the brook that came "from haunts of coot and hern... to
bicker down a valley." He was a student at Cambridge, where he met and
became deeply attached to Arthur Henry Hallam, whose death not long
afterward inspired the poem "In Memoriam." In 1850, upon Wordsworth's
death, Tennyson was made poet laureate and the poem commemorating the
heroic charge at Balaklava in 1854, "The Charge of the Light Brigade,"
shows how he adorned this office. In 1884 the queen raised him to the
peerage, and from that time he was known as Lord Tennyson. He lived as much
in retirement as was possible, part of the time making his home in the Isle
of Wight. He died in 1892 and was buried in the Poets' Corner in
Westminster Abbey.

The event which this poem describes occurred at Balaklava in the Crimea,
October 25th, 1854. Of six hundred seven men only about one hundred fifty
survived. The order to charge, bearing the signature of Lord Lucan, was
delivered by Captain Nolan to the Earl of Cardigan, who was in command of
the "Light Brigade." Nolan was killed in the charge while Cardigan
survived. The death of Nolan made it impossible to determine whether the
signature to the order was genuine or forged.