The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief, Richard Holmes, William Collins, £25

By the summer of 1840, when he turned 31, Alfred Tennyson was – in theory, at least – living with his family at High Beech in Epping Forest. To his friends, who he saw on frequent visits to London, he seemed in a frenzy of motion. He made the rounds of their lodgings and kept them up drinking and smoking into the early hours of the morning while he talked or recited his poems. Sometimes he slept on their sofas instead of going home. His clothes, worn ‘cynically loose,­ free-and-easy’ were dirty and tramp-like. He stank of ‘the strongest most stinking tobacco’, which he smoked in a small, blackened clay pipe. He was ‘ruining himself by mismanagement and neglect of all kinds’, his friend Edward FitzGerald thought. ‘He must smoke twelve hours out of the twenty-four.’

His restlessness found expression in travel. He apologised in advance to one friend for arriving for supper ‘in traveller’s­ costume… I may have to leave you early on a steam to the Continent’. In 1841 he made unheralded, seemingly impromptu trips to Amsterdam, Calais and Paris. But even in London, he talked incessantly of elsewhere. ‘Alfred Tennyson has reappeared’, the writer James Spedding wearily noted, ‘and is going today or tomorrow to Florence, or to Killarney, or to Madeira, or some place where some ship is going – he does not know where.’ A couple of years later, while taking a hydrotherapy cure, he fantasised of other, further escapes, ‘to see the West Indies… [or] to see the earth from a balloon’. Escape, as Richard Holmes reveals in The Boundless Deep, his penetrating new study of what he calls Tennyson’s ‘vagrant years’ – the poet’s strange, haunted, punishingly extended adolescence that lasted until 1850, when he finally married and also accepted the laureateship – was an entirely characteristic need.

‘We Tennysons are a black-blooded race,’ he later said. He must have learned that early. He was one of 11 children born to the rector of Somersby in Lincolnshire. His father, George, ‘rude and ungovernable’ as a child, had been excluded from the family inheritance. Embittered and humiliated, he drank himself into rages. By 1829, by which time Tennyson had escaped to Cambridge, his father was storming around the rectory with a loaded gun and a large knife, swearing that he would stab his eldest son Frederick in the jugular or the heart. He was never certified; the family coachman, a big man, did his best to restrain him when he went too far. But a sense of doom surely hung over the household; the family’s cook burned to death when her dress caught fire in the kitchen. Among Alfred’s brothers, one spent most of his life drifting through Italy; one became an opium addict; one became an alcoholic; and another lived for 50 years in a lunatic asylum – all varieties of escape, one way or another.

Frederick went to Eton, but after him the money ran out. Alfred was sent to the local grammar school in Louth, where he was bullied by his peers and beaten by his headmaster. He remembered sitting and weeping on the school steps, desperate to be anywhere else. One of his textbooks is annotated: ‘A. Tennyson, Somersby, in Lincoln, in England, in the World, in the Air, in Space.’ Holmes sees here an early articulation of that need for escape, but each additional layer of address – at once precise and vague – seems to parallels a receding sense of self-worth: by the end, ‘A. Tennyson is adrift in the depths of space, untethered from anything that will give his life a sense of place or meaning. You might see it as a neat conspectus of his next few decades. ‘The smallness and emptiness of life sometimes overwhelmed me,’ he said. ‘I used to experience sensations of a state almost impossible to describe in words; it was not exactly a trance but the world seemed dead and myself only alive.’

Nevertheless, the wildness of his youth, of his landscapes both physical and psychological, is palpable. He found solace in the long, bare, windy beach at Mablethorpe, 15 miles east of Somersby, where he lay for hours listening to the ‘thunderous roar’ of the North Sea’s waves and reciting Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad, which he knew by heart. At night he walked aimlessly around through the Somersby churchyard, shouting his own poetry to the dead or throwing himself down among gravestones wishing he were deep among them. Burials – literal and metaphorical – would recur in his work, most notably in the 11 intense lyrics which close Part II of Maud, a long-worked-on exploration of madness published in 1855. ‘O me’, the last begins, ‘why have they not buried me deep enough?’

Along with all these familial demons, Tennyson discovered further demons of his own. Paradoxically, perhaps, the path to these new terrors led through one his few sources of solace as a child: science, which he seems to have initially experienced as a last redoubt for beauty and wonder in the world. He learned to use a microscope which he used to study insects and plant life and to explore the moon at night through a telescope in the rectory garden. The latter would be a life-long love; ‘His mind is saturated with astronomy,’ the Victorian astronomer Norman Lockyer later said. Holmes writes of Tennyson in the 1850s looking out at the stars ‘as if astronomy had become for him the alternative frontier of hope in the new Victorian world of military empire and colonial expansion’. But it had always been that for him: an early poem, ‘Timbuctoo’, which won him the Chancellor’s Gold Medal at Cambridge, contrasts the dismal reality of that fabled city, recently revealed to the world by the French explorer René Caillié, with the possibility of a new and better Timbuktu out among the blazing galaxies in the ‘unimagined depth’ of space.

Like The Age of Wonder, Holmes’s previous book, The Boundless Deep is an exploration of how human psychology, and with it the imagination, was remade by scientific progress. Even as a child, Tennyson remembered, a book about physics ‘made my faith heavier and duller’. The process accelerated at Cambridge, where his tutor was the cosmologist William Whewell and where he encountered the work of Whewell’s great rival, William Buckland, the Oxford Professor of Geology, for the first time. Buckland’s paleontological discoveries – notably the megalosaurus – seemed to offer proof of radical ideas about mass extinction, which hit Tennyson and his generation like a bolt of lightning. Later he would describe these creatures found in ‘scarped cliff and quarried stone’:

…A monster then, a dream,

A discord. Dragons of the prime…

How loudly do those two words – dream and discord, buried between the monsters – speak to the psychological charge of these new truths sleeping in deep time beneath the landscape. But deep time was a monster, too: when Tennyson read the first volume of Charles Lyell’s The Principles of Geology, in 1833 the year after publication, it became apparent how new human life on earth was. As Lyell himself wrote privately: ‘The existence of life millions of years before Man was the first shock to our exclusive reference of all things to us.’ Tennyson’s reaction was immediate and visceral: he began drafting a poem titled ‘The Two Voices: Thoughts of a Suicide’. He would work on it on and off for the next decade, faith and doubt wrestling within him for his sanity.

Holmes’ aim is to resurrect this forgotten Tennyson of terrors and doubts, to rescue our idea of the man from his monolithic late-Victorian reputation, sequestered deep in respectability, buried in high Arthuriana. His was perhaps the first generation to grow up having to grapple with these ideas about mass extinction, about deep time, and about man’s infinitely trivial place in a newly indifferent universe of incomprehensible vastness, and Holmes shows the sometimes torture of Tennyson’s engagement with these ideas – and others – at every turn. No other contemporary writer was so exquisitely primed with hunger for a knowledge that rubbed away at his already friable certainties, so vertiginously aware of the abyss at his feet and the dark shapes that moved through its depths. Elizabeth Barrett remarked on the curious lack of physicality in his poetic representations of beauty – ‘You can no more touch or clasp it, than beauty in a dream. It is not less beautiful for that ; but less sensual…’ she wrote – and much of his writing maintains an eerie quality of interiority whatever it is describing. The pioneering psychiatrist John Charles Bucknill noted it too: ‘the writings of Tennyson are peculiarly metaphysical’, he wrote, ‘or to use the new term psychological’. But that is precisely why the seismic intellectual detonations of Lyell’s work – and of Babbage’s, of Buckland’s, and of many others – proved so destabilising to him. They threatened the very root of his being and his art. No landscape, however intimate or imagined, was safe. In this, Tennyson embodied a generational sense of awakened dread. ‘If only the Geologists would let me alone’, his contemporary John Ruskin wrote, ‘but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.’

Every facet of the young Tennyson’s psychology finds its apotheosis with In Memoriam, an elegy for his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died aged 22 in 1833. Tennyson worked on it for 17 years, and when it was finally published in his watershed year of 1850 it ran to 131 lyrics bookended by a prologue and an epilogue. It is one of the greatest achievements in the English language, and as such it is far more than an elegy: it is a profound exploration of the agonies of spiritual doubt when confronted by the cold fact of death, those agonies everywhere informed and enforced by the most radical and controversial expressions of contemporary scientific scepticism. TS Eliot would write that ‘In Memoriam… is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt. Its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience.’ The contradiction was not apparent to its Victorian readers, who saw in its faith a resolution of its doubts. Just a couple of months after the poem’s publication Charles Kingsley could write: ‘Blessed it is… to see in the science and the history of the nineteenth century new and living fulfilments of the words which we learnt at our mothers’ knee.’ The book sold 60,000 copies within the first seven months. Reviewers compared its author to Milton and Dante. One magazine’s coverage ran to 19 pages.

Almost at the last minute, Tennyson had added a 44-line prologue which, Holmes notes, ‘appeared to be a recantation of all his previous agnosticism, and much of his previous emotions’. It is as if the decision to publish these long-hoarded poems with their long-hoarded anguish was a moment of absolute release and renewal. The prologue ends with a plea that the poet’s vagrant years be set aside: ‘Forgive the wild and wondering cries / Confusions of a wasted youth; / Forgive them where they fail in truth…’ What was that truth? Something very other from the search for scientific understanding:

We have but faith: we cannot know;

For knowledge is of things we see;

And yet we trust it comes from thee,

A beam in darkness: let it grow.

The argument was, as Holmes says, ‘astonishingly – even shockingly – orthodox’. But it was no longer young Tennyson speaking, it was, in Holmes’s words, Old Tennyson, ‘suddenly anxious for acceptance’. It is difficult to see, even on this nuanced telling, the reasons for this apparent volte face, but perhaps it was less a rational process and more a psychological transformation. Just a few years later Tennyson would write:

My life has crept so long on a broken wing

Thro’ cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear,

That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing:

My mood is changed…

He would continue to patrol the frontiers of science, astronomy in particular, and keep pace with discoveries. But he had made peace with it.

The Boundless Deep is a remarkable book, both a spiritual and an intellectual biography of one of the dominant figures of 19th-century English literature during the long, excruciating crisis that dominated the early part of his life. Holmes has succeeded triumphantly in restoring to us the Tennyson whom contemporaries regarded ‘pre-eminently as the Poet of Science’. In doing so, he has also given us a thrilling portrait of the decades during the first half of the 19th century in which radical developments in science – most notably astronomy and geology – demoted mankind from the beginning of the world to some distant point millions of years hence, and placed us somewhere far distant from the heart of creation. Like the young Alfred Tennyson of Somersby and Louth grammar school, a generation found itself suddenly lost in insignificance – in the world, in the air, in space – the old comforts of faith devoid of assurance. ‘Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,’ Tennyson wrote. The line is from a poem of erotic oblivion, but the image surely speaks to other kinds of rapture and submission, and an unparalleled historical moment of vulnerability and wonder, when the breathtaking vistas of visionary science opened up a new-found interior world of naked existential dread.