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The Boundless Deep - Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief (Hardcover)
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The Boundless Deep - Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief (Hardcover)
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*SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE*
A dazzling new biography of young Tennyson by the prize-winning,
bestselling author of The Age of Wonder.
Alfred Lord Tennyson is now remembered – if he is remembered at all –
as the gloomily bearded Poet Laureate, author of such clanking
Victorian works as ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, and the mournful
author of the lugubrious elegy In Memoriam. In this dazzling new
biography, Richard Holmes reawakens this somnolent Victorian figure,
brings him back to sparkling life, and unexpectedly transforms him.
From the prize-winning and bestselling biographer of Shelley and
Coleridge, and author of the landmark, critically acclaimed THE AGE OF
WONDER, Holmes recovers in Young Tennyson an astonishingly magnetic and
mercurial personality, a secretly expressive and highly emotional man
but now haunted by the great intellectual – and above all the great
scientific – issues of his time.
The brilliant child of an obscure dysfunctional Lincolnshire family,
terrorised by a drunken father, torn by unhappy love affairs but
sustained by vivid friendships (especially that of Edward FitzGerald,
the author of ‘Omar Khayyam’) Young Tennyson emerges in his first forty
years as a memorable poet, hypnotically musical (‘The Lady of Shalott’)
yet intensely engaged with the new astronomy, geology, biology – and
even the psychiatry – of the age before Darwin.
Tennyson’s imagination and intellect were haunted by the eruption of
three new fundamentally transformative scientific ideas – biological
evolution, the notion of a godless, unpitying universe and of planetary
extinction. These were as terrifying to Tennyson as climate catastrophe
is to us today. Their impact brought him into contact with the life and
scientific work of William Whewell (originally his university tutor),
the astronomer John Herschel, the geologist Charles Lyell, the
mathematician Mary Somerville, the computer pioneer Charles Babbage,
and the brilliant science populariser Robert Chambers. He also shared
his visions and anxieties with contemporary writers and social
commentators like Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens, and poets like
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Edgar Allan Poe.
Tennyson’s work during these ‘vagrant years’ is suffused with an
unsuspected and strangely modern magic. Holmes’s extraordinary
biography allows us to witness Tennyson wrestling with mind-altering
ideas of geology and deep time, the vastness, beauty and terror of the
new cosmology, and the challenges of social revolution. And how these
inspired him to grapple with the idea of human mortality, the threat of
suicide and depression, the struggle between love and loneliness,
agnosticism and belief.
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