To appreciate the vicissitudes of Tennyson criticism in the twentieth century, it is necessary to understand how his reputation first developed among his contemporaries in the nineteenth. Of course, any assessment of the early critical reception of Tennyson's poems must be undertaken with a certain degree of wariness. Tennyson often encouraged his friends to write reviews of his work, so his first readers would have been encouraged to buy his books by someone who had a vested interest in seeing Tennyson's career advanced. The most famous, and in some ways most biased, was written by the poet's bosom friend and fellow Cambridge Apostle Arthur Henry Hallam. His essay on Tennyson's 1830 volume, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in the Englishman's Magazine (1831), bore the pretentious title “On the Genius of Alfred Tennyson.” Another close friend, James Spedding, provided a similar encomium of the 1842 Poems in the Edinburgh Review. He praises Tennyson for his “sound view of human life and the condition of man in the world,” for his “healthy, manly, and simple” moral views (Jump 146), and for his exceptional ability at versification. His only reservation: these poems cannot be accepted “as a satisfactory account of the gifts which they show” Tennyson possesses (151). Carefully avoiding any mention that Tennyson is also his good friend, Spedding argues that the poet can, and will, do even more spectacular work in the future. Suffice it to say that one needs to be cautious of such special pleading.