A railway groove and a revised line
ringing grooves of change
The groove has a particular railway background. John Churton Collins's edition reports Tennyson's recollection that, travelling between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830, he thought the train wheels ran in a groove. Collins's note thus supplies an accidental physical origin for the figure Chesterton treats as an unconscious philosophical confession. The origin and Chesterton's interpretation can coexist; the former does not prove the latter. Collins also records that the 1842 text read ‘Peoples spin’, whereas his adopted 1857 text has ‘great world spin’. Chesterton's wording agrees with that later reading, already present in the inspected 1843 witness; it should not be presented as a diplomatic quotation of the first edition. Collins, The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, preface and notes 16–17 to ‘Locksley Hall’.
Sources
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