The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief
*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.
‘Replaces the dusty usual portraits of the poet laureate – as the gloomy Victorian author of the GCSE syllabus poem The Charge of the Light Brigade – with a sparkling vision of him as an intelligent and imaginative man who welcomed in the new scientific age. Truly enriching’ -
SUNDAY TIMES -
‘Holmes is probably our greatest chronicler of the Romantic poets … The Boundless Deep is a dazzling and tireless work of advocacy … Feather duster at the ready, Holmes swats the crepe and the cobwebs away to restore the living Tennyson as he was before he fossilised into a Victorian sage’ -
THE TIMES -
‘Compelling … a fascinating insight into a great British poet whose depths, like those of the sea in his poem “Crossing the Bar” (1889), remain boundless themselves’ -
DAILY TELEGRAPH -
‘A spryly written but deeply learned biography’ -
SPECTATOR -
‘Biographer Richard Holmes specialises in seeing familiar figures from a new slant … The Boundless Deep takes a dive into the works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, rubbing away the stately, bearded behemoth beloved of Queen Victoria to reveal a more vibrant, youthful character’ -
FINANCIAL TIMES -
‘There is an unusual, gentle mixture of imagination and empiricism in everything Holmes writes: a poetic sense of human psychology combined with a meticulous organised mind’ -
NEW STATESMEN -
'An extraordinary glimpse into the nature of poetic genius and the heart of the Victorian miracle – no-one can match Holmes’ range and sensitivity' -
Rory Stewart -
‘What a book this is. Embracingly humane with its motifs of stars and rocks, love and grief, friendship and rivalry, genius and doubt rippling out at beautifully orchestrated intervals. It is symphonic’ -
Adam Nicolson -
‘An intimate and meticulous portrait … This is an outstanding work of scholarship, both of the poet and his craft and of the intellectually restless age in which he lived. It is, too, as you’d expect from this inspired biographer – engrossing, challenging and poignant’ -
Jim Crace -