English poet, and the brother of Lord Tennyson; born on the 4th of July 1808, at Somersby, England; graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1832; ordained in 1835; for many years vicar of Grasby, a village in the Lincolnshire wolds. In 1837 he married Louisa Sellwood, sister of Lady Tennyson. Took the name of Turner under the will of a relative. From 1830 to 1873 he published several small series of verse (collected in one volume, with a memoir, 1880). Throughout life he 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.” He died at Cheltenham, on the 25th of April 1879. His death was commemorated in a poem by Lord Tennyson, entitled Midnight, June 30, 1879. See also Literary Criticism.
