The Boundless Deep:
Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief
Richard Holmes
William Collins
Alfred Lord Tennyson is now remembered – if at all – as the gloomily bearded Poet Laureate. In this dazzling new biography, Richard Holmes, the prize-winning and bestselling biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, and author of the landmark work, The Age of Wonder, reawakens this somnolent Victorian figure and brings him back to sparkling life.
Holmes recovers in young Tennyson an astonishingly magnetic and mercurial personality, a secretly expressive and highly emotional man but one haunted by the great intellectual and scientific issues of his time.
This is a book about the new science and scepticism of the 19th century; about ideas of geology and deep time, the vast beauty and the terror looming before all those who saw deeper into the stars and studied the new cosmology. Tennyson grew up amidst this turmoil, his imagination and intellect driven by the eruption of three new fundamentally transformative scientific ideas – biological evolution, the notion of a godless, unpitying universe and planetary extinction. These were as terrifying to Tennyson as climate catastrophe is to us today. They inspired him to grapple with ideas of his own destiny, the threat of suicide and depression, the struggle between love and loneliness, intellectual hope and spiritual despair.
- Meticulously researched and exquisitely written, this is an engaging study of the passionate young Tennyson as he confronts the momentous issues raised by early Victorian science.
Wolfson History Prize judges
An exclusive extract, read by Richard.
- To realise that a late book of mine might still appeal to both the academic and the common reader is the delight of this Ancient Mariner of Biography.
Richard Holmes
About the author
Richard Holmes is an award-winning author and biographer. His book, The Age of Wonder, won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His previous books include Falling Upwards, Shelley: The Pursuit and Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Holmes was awarded the OBE in 1992.
