Alfred Tennyson was a divided soul. He even wrote a poem called The Two Voices in which dual versions of himself argued out the pros and cons of suicide. In this illuminating book, Richard Holmes has chosen to focus on the lesser known of the poet’s personae.
The year 1850 was pivotal for Tennyson. He published the great poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for nearly two decades. He became, as a result, both famous and rich. He got married, after a 14‑year courtship. He had been living in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or dossing down with bachelor friends in London, or lurking alone in a ramshackle cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire’s bleak beaches. Now he took a house where he could receive distinguished visitors. (When Prince Albert came calling, Tennyson was so far from obsequious that he forgot to invite the queen’s consort to sit down, though he did at least offer the poor man a drink.) He was appointed poet laureate. His life as a Great Man began.
For Holmes, this settling down – emotional, financial, social and poetical – is the end of the exciting part of Tennyson’s life. The Boundless Deep is not about the bestselling author of the nation’s favourite poem – The Charge of the Light Brigade – or the laureate lord, pacing along the clifftops of the Isle of Wight or posing for Julia Margaret Cameron’s famous photograph (known derisorily in his family as “the dirty monk”). Instead, Holmes gives us “young Tennyson”, the wildly talented youth whose story is far more rich and strange than that of the bearded celebrity.
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning prone to moods and melancholy. His father, a reluctant clergyman, was angry and very often drunk. There was an incident, the details of which are obscure, that resulted in the family cook being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a lunatic asylum as a boy and stayed there for life. Another suffered from profound depression and followed his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of paralysing gloom and what he called “weird seizures”. His Maud is narrated by a madman: he must often have wondered whether he was or would become one himself.
From his teens he was imposing, even glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome. Even before he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could dominate a room. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his siblings – three brothers to an attic room – as an adult he sought out solitude, retreating into silence when in company, vanishing for solitary walking tours.
Holmes, master biographer that he is, vividly conjures up this awkward, compelling figure. What gives his book its exceptional energy, though, is not what is happening on the surface of Tennyson’s life and Holmes’s narrative. It is the powerful undertow of threatened belief and existential anxiety tugging the reader down into the “boundless deep” of the title, where 19th-century thinkers wrestled with terrible thoughts. In 2008, Holmes published The Age of Wonder, a group biography charting the way that Romantic poets responded to the discoveries of their scientific contemporaries such as Humphry Davy, William Herschel and Joseph Banks. That book was full of exuberant hopes. This one, set a generation later, is its darker, sadder sequel.
In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Darwin about the origin of species, were raising appalling questions. If the history of life on Earth had begun millions of years before the appearance of the human race, then how to believe that the world had been made for humanity’s benefit and enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely created for us, who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun.” The new telescopes and microscopes revealed spaces infinitely large and beings infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s faith, given such evidence, in a God who had made man in his own image? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then might the human race do so too?
These conundrums were repressed. It was hard to confront them in public without being accused of blasphemy, or in private without seeming to give way to despair. It is easy, in retrospect, to make fun of those 19th-century creationists who strove to believe that God had hidden the fossils in the rocks for some good, if inscrutable, reason. Holmes doesn’t indulge in such patronising levity. He takes seriously the pain of those living through the crisis of faith, and writes about it with such sympathy that even his most secular-minded modern readers feel the shock of finding oneself alone and unloved in a God-forsaken universe.
Holmes binds his narrative together with two recurrent motifs. The first he introduces on his second page – it is the image of the Kraken, the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line sonnet introduces themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, submerged beyond reach of human inquiry, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a master of metre and as the creator of images in which awful mystery is compressed into a few dazzlingly suggestive words.
The second theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary sea monster epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is affectionate and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest lines with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in verse describing him in his rose garden with his tame doves sitting all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, hand and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an image of pleasure nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s great celebration of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant nonsense of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a beard in which “two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren” built their nests.
Holmes is not an uncritical fan – he is tart about the pseudo-medieval flim-flam of Idylls of the King – but when he loves a poem, he writes about it with a wonderful capacity for noticing every pulse of metre, every flicker of nuance. This biography is a compelling story of an odd, brilliant, charismatic character, and a reappraisal of a man who had become so very established we could no longer see him. In giving us young Tennyson – gauche, beautiful, veiled in stinking tobacco smoke – Holmes has given the great poet back to us.
• The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes is published by HarperCollins (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
