The Boundless Deep

LONGLISTED 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.