In January 1832, the year the poem was published, a letter@Hallam, Arthur Henry. Letter. Trinity College, England, 1832. Web. was sent from Arthur Hallam, Tennyson’s best friend, to Emily Tennyson, the poet’s sister.The letter, sent from Hallam’s location at Trinity College, was in regard to Tennyson’s delicate health. Tennyson, who was prone to bouts of paranoia in fear of developing a mental disorder (due to a family history staggered with several cases of the malady@Everett, Glenn. Alfred Tennyson: A Brief Biography. Tennessee: University of Tennessee at Martin, 2004. Print. 8.), appeared to be suffering from a type of depression. In the letter, Hallam wrote ‘the more morbidly intense our inward contemplation of ourselves is, the more hollow and delusive we consider any temporary and apparently irrelevant diversion.'@Hallam, Arthur Henry. Letter. Trinity College, England, 1832. Web. This suggests the dark times Tennyson was experiencing and the difficulties his family was having in rousing him.

This information holds a particular significance to the meanings that can be read within "The Lady of Shalott", which Tennyson penned within the same year as his spell of disheartenment. As Herbert Tucker writes, '“The Lady of Shalott” clearly narrates the world’s failure to requite the desires of the self”@Tucker, Herbert F. Tennyson and Doom of Romanticism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988. Print.100.. An argument can in fact be made, within the context of Hallam’s letter, that Tennyson felt that the world in which he lived, the dominate culture, did not provide the fulfillment one needed to be happy. Tennyson used these feelings to make comments on society, which he in turn shares through his poem, “The Lady of Shalott.” The female gender of "the Lady," and the limitations and tragedy she encounters in the poem, lend to Tennyson’s apparent critique on the cultural role that women were expected to hold in the Victorian era.