The making of Tennyson’s radical mind

Holmes remarks that it is hard to imagine Tennyson as a lad. And yet he was once, long before the “lord”, the cape and the laureateship. To rehabilitate him, Holmes concentrates on his first 40 years, and reveals him as one affected deeply by the vertiginous discoveries of his day, especially in geology and cosmology. He read keenly the new scientific publications, and images from the sciences seeped into his work. His was a time when, slowly, a new agnosticism was growing.

A “tall, clever, gangling boy”, Alfred was one of 11, born in his father’s rectory in Somersby, “a remote country village in Lincolnshire”. His father was well educated but thwarted and volatile. The whole family was regarded as strange; one brother would develop severe mental health problems. Young Alfred loved storm winds and the sea and the night sky. He was largely home educated, when his father’s moods allowed. His vocation came early; even as a child he was acting the part of the lonely poet and he was prone to sudden trances, which he thought might be epilepsy. In time, the coast at Mablethorpe, where the family had a cottage, became his retreat and place of “bleak inspiration”.

Like his father and elder brothers before him, Alfred went to Cambridge. Crucial friendships developed, especially with Edward FitzGerald, and the wealthy “golden boy” Arthur Hallam. Tennyson was still very much the poet. Aged only 20, he wrote The Kraken, which Holmes recognises as “some dark hidden shape in his mind … or even perhaps in his soul”. (Decades later, Tennyson would be credited with “psychological insight”, but he had to wait for the word “psychological” to be coined.) As a student, his poem Timbuctoo won the chancellor’s gold medal. He and Hallam travelled in Europe. Tennyson brought home from Spain a cloak and wide hat – a sartorial affectation he would maintain for the rest of his life.

Holmes teases out these friendships and connections, the mutual regard and boosting, the affections and love affairs between the clever young men and their many no-less-clever sisters. But Hallam was fated to die in Vienna, aged only 22, causing a years-long grief in his friend. Like The Kraken, his book In Memoriam arose from wells of darkness Tennyson carried within.

His early and increasing recognition as a poet is well documented. He wrote in butcher’s ledger books and was blessed with a canny and devoted publisher, Edward Moxon. He enjoyed review coverage that would astonish a 21st-century poet. But after Cambridge came years in which Tennyson seemed to drift. He flitted hither and yon, imposing on friends, sometimes staying in rooms in a Turkish bathhouse. He was often depressed, even as his work found admirers in Europe and the US. There were financial worries, which eased as the royalties began to pour in. By his late 30s, Tennyson was “large, chaotic, ill-dressed and physically imposing”. He smoked incessantly.

Holmes reveals a strange figure, emerging from a strange time. He illuminates the connections between the developing sciences, of which Tennyson was so well aware, and his poetic imagery. It can be subtle. Modern readers may easily miss them, as we are now so accustomed to images afforded from telescopes and microscopes, and familiar with the notion of “deep time”. In Tennyson’s young day, these disclosures were quite terrifying. The Two Voices, a long poem written at Cambridge, even discusses the merits and demerits of suicide, because in a universe revealed as godless, what was our human lot but insignificance and extinction? Indeed, Tennyson was an exact contemporary of Darwin, and almost a precursor. His famous line “Nature, red in tooth and claw”, now worn smooth, was at the time genuinely unsettling. The line occurs in In Memoriam, which was finally finished and published in 1850, 17 years after Hallam’s death, and nine years before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The whole book-length poem, 133 rhymed cantos, is as much science as elegy. There is personal death, but also the newly understood, bleak, compassionless violence of nature and time. Holmes offers marvellous readings, decompressing the poem, tracing its imagery and specialised language back to source. Some sections wrestle with the ideas articulated in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. Species (“types”) come and go, nature is pitiless:

From scarped cliff and quarried stone

She cries, “A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.”

John Herschel’s discoveries in astronomy stand behind Tennyson’s lines: “A web is wov’n across the sky” and his “dying sun”. (Tennyson loved star-gazing, and once settled, had telescopes of his own.)

The reviews of In Memoriam were extraordinary, although the final work was tempered somewhat. Tennyson had rowed back a little from his agnosticism and evolutionary views, not least to win the hand of Emily Sellwood, whom he quietly married in the same year.

It was a hinge year, falling neatly in the middle of his life. His bachelorhood, his In Memoriam era was over. Furthermore, William Wordsworth died. No more “homeless drifting” for the unkempt Arthur; at 41 he was famous, married – and, suddenly, poet laureate. He grew a beard (Holmes is very amusing on beards) and became the complete Victorian.

And then what? As with Wordsworth, the interest lies with the radical youth. For the remaining 42 years of his life, Tennyson was eminent. Many admirers found their way to his house in the Isle of Wight, where he settled with his family. One day, to the housekeeper’s alarm, Prince Albert himself turned up, ringing the doorbell.

It fell to his old Cambridge pals, by then somewhat estranged, to voice private concerns. FitzGerald lived quietly and had devoted himself to Persian poetry. In due course he translated and brought to western readers The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He had once championed Tennyson but, Holmes writes, by 1850 he had “secretly lost much faith in Tennyson’s work”. FitzGerald observed: “He will never write Poetry again … I mean such Poetry as he was born to write.”

What he did write, famously, was The Charge of the Light Brigade. Hughes says: “But what really first stirred Tennyson’s imperial consciousness, and roused his ‘warlike’ tendencies … was his fascination … with the Crimean conflict.” It was 1853. From his house, Tennyson could see the vast naval fleet setting off from Portsmouth. It’s worth recalling that The Charge of the Light Brigade does not celebrate an imperial victory, it denounces a massacre: more than 40% of the “six hundred” were killed or injured, and 335 horses died. The order to charge had been a disaster. “Someone had blundered.”

Two thousand copies of the poem were printed as leaflets and sent out to British troops in Crimea. Decades later, it was still selling, still being recited. Towards the end of his life, Tennyson would record some poems, including that one, on to the newly invented wax cylinder phonograph. The recording survives; you can hear him declaiming through the fizz and hiss, the public poet par excellence.

What of Tennyson now? What counts against him, aside from that whiff of imperialism? Perhaps it’s our present inability to discern the cutting-edge science in his imagery. Also, there is his “matchless ear”. Holmes writes that there “are two kinds of hypnotic Tennysonian music: so widely treasured, so frequently mocked, and so often misunderstood”. But our ears are detuned; we can’t hear well those metres, certainly not their subtleties. Or, paradoxically, the metre is all we hear, “thunderously loud”.

Do modern school students “do” Tennyson? I can still recall the weirdness of The Lady of Shalott, which was class reading in my Midlothian comprehensive, but that was 50 years ago. Perhaps he should be reinstituted. Holmes presents Tennyson as more interesting, more clever, more elusive and downright peculiar than modern readers may imagine.

He was indeed young once, and perhaps more suited than the Romantics to our own discomfited times.

The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes is published by William Collins (£25).  Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £22.50. Delivery charges may apply

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Photography by Alamy