The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief

"Holmes does a remarkable job because when I think of Tennyson, I do think of him as the Victorian grandee with the stern countenance and frightening beard. It didn’t help that he became Poet Laureate. We don’t think of Victorians having a good time. He represents the Victorian era, in all of its grandeur and all of its stuffiness. Tennyson is like a statue that symbolises that age, and I think Richard Holmes has done a terrific job of getting rid of the cobwebs and seeing the young, beardless man, who was quite dashing in his own way. Our reviewer in the Times described Richard Holmes as being like Trinny and Susannah (who do makeover programs on British TV) doing a literary revamp on him. He’s done a very elegant job on that. Holmes also shows the intellectual ferment of the time. This is before Darwin , but you’ve got other scientific discoveries with geologists digging up fossils, etc. It was a faith-shaking era, and it’s interesting to see Tennyson engaging with these scientific controversies in his poetry. It’s like modern poets engaging with AI, how it’s going to change everything, and what it means to be human. Tennyson’s family story is also absolutely intriguing. There was a lot of mental illness. His father was violent and even tried to kill Tennyson’s brother. Tennyson always had this fear that the madness would catch up with him. It’s quite something for someone with a creative mind to want to engage with the world, and yet always be worrying about the dark recesses of that mind and what was going on there. There was also the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam. Tennyson had this death-stalked life. After you read it, you’re amazed that Tennyson got up in the morning to write his poetry. So there’s myth-busting going on in the book. The humanizing of this Victorian monument drew all the judges in. He’s written a couple of very good biographies of Romantic poets. But as one of my colleagues—who’s a big fan of Richard Holmes—said, it’s much harder to make Tennyson fun. With Coleridge, you’ve got drug-taking; if you’re writing about Byron, there’s sex. Tennyson is a harder character to get to grips with, but nonetheless, he’s given us the man in full."

"Holmes has won the prize before, of course, for Coleridge: Darker Reflections. He is a peerless writer about the Romantics and early Victorian poets, but I think he’s really excelled himself in this book. We tend to have a particular image of Tennyson, as a Victorian dinosaur—a sonorous, granite-like figure, but Holmes comes at the Poet Laureate, not from the present, but from his youth, and in so doing completely changes our picture of the man. Tennyson becomes, in this telling, vigorous, thrusting, inquisitive, dynamic, and very emotionally erratic as well. Holmes recasts him as someone who’s walking the dividing line between religion and science, and who is gripped by the contemporary moral arguments on both sides of these polar positions. Tennyson was fascinated by the scientific discoveries being made at the time, and Holmes reinterprets a lot of his early poetry in this light. The book is also the story of two key friendships of his youth. One was with Arthur Hallam, who died tragically young and whose death poleaxed Tennyson and eventually, of course, brought forth his great poetic sequence In M emoriam . The other was with Edward Fitzgerald, the poet and translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam , who becomes, in Holmes’s book, something very like Tennyson’s conscience. Tennyson is this young, dynamic, erratic figure who alternately delights and confounds and disappoints Fitzgerald, who watches rather sadly with us in the last 50 or so pages as Tennyson subsides from a dynamic young figure into a rather dull and static Victorian colossus. It’s beautifully done, and one of the best biographies I’ve read in years."