The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief

(Hardback)

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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.

Tennysons 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.

Tennysons work during these vagrant years is suffused with an unsuspected and strangely modern magic. Holmess 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.

Reviews

A glorious blend of the scientific and the literary that deserves to carry off armfuls of awards and confirms Holmes's reputation as one on the stellar biographers of the age. Dominic Sandbrook, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year

No question the non-fiction book of the year is Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder, not only beautifully written, but also kicking open a new perspective on the Romantic age. Andrew Marr, Observer, Books of the Year

ExuberantHolmes suffuses his book with the joy, hope and wonder of the revolutionary era. Reading it is like a holiday in a sunny landscape, full of fascinating bypaths that lead to unexpected vistasit succeeds inspiringly. John Carey, Sunday Times

Itself a wonder a masterpiece of skilful and imaginative storytelling. Michael Holroyd, Guardian Books of the Year

Dazzling and approachable. It's a brilliantly written accountoriginal in its connections and very generous in its attention. Andrew Motion, Guardia Books of the Year

Witty, intellectually dazzling and wholly gripping. Richard Mabey, Guardian, Books of the Year

So immediate and so beguiling is Holmes's prose that we are with him all the way. Sunday Telegraph

Brimming with anecdote, Holmes's enthusiastic narrative amply conveys the period's spirited, often reckless pursuit of discovery with an astute balance of technical detail and the wider cultural picture. Financial Times

'Rich and sparkling, this is a wonderful book Claire Tomalin, Guardian, Books of the Year

Thrilling: a portrait of bold adventure among the stars, across the oceans, deep into matter, poetry and the human psyche. Peter Forbes, Independent

Author Bio

Richard Holmes is Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia, and editor of the Harper Perennial series Classic Biographies launched in 2004. His is a Fellow of the British Academy, has honorary doctorates from UEA and the Tavistock Institute, and was awarded an OBE in 1992. His first book, Shelley: The Pursuit, won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1974. Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year, and Dr Johnson & Mr Savage won the James Tait Black Prize. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Heinemann Award. He has published two studies of European biography, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer in 1985, and Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer in 2000.