While the earth thus trembled, different and equally disruptive discoveries were happening in the sky. Thanks in part to improvements in telescope design, astronomers began identifying thousands of nebulae and star clusters, in essence making the universe suddenly larger in the same way that advances in geology had made the earth suddenly older. Meanwhile, some of those astronomers began speculating that, like our planet and its inhabitants, the very stars were subject to change, forming and growing and eventually dying. As on earth, so, too, in the heavens, it now seemed: there was more time than anyone had previously imagined—vast, inhuman stretches of it—but, paradoxically, less eternity.
“A quick rally before the anesthetic kicks in?”
Cartoon by Will McPhail
These radical insights, Holmes argues, were fundamental to Tennyson’s maturation. To show us how, he aims, like the geologists he writes about, to reach further back in time than usual, albeit on the more modest scale of his subject’s life. “For generations,” he declares of the poet, “he has been enshrined in the national memory as an ancient Victorian bard with a tremendous beard.” But Holmes does not plan to dwell on Tennyson the Laureate or Tennyson the lord. His interest lies with the plain, untitled youth, and with how this newly disorienting, newly dazzling world helped to shape his greatness.
Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809, the same year as Charles Darwin, in the small English village of Somersby. His father, although the rector there, was not what you would call a godly man: alcoholic, volatile, and violent, he once threatened to kill his eldest son, Frederick—credibly, since at the time he was wielding both a knife and a loaded gun—and his rages routinely sent young Alfred fleeing to the church graveyard, where he would curl up beneath a headstone and pray to die. The future poet’s mother, meanwhile, was a Patient Griselda figure: beautiful, kindhearted, widely beloved, and resigned to bottomless quantities of domestic suffering.
Whatever else can be said about Alfred’s childhood, it wasn’t lonely. Eleven young Tennysons spilled out of the Somersby rectory—seven boys and four girls, with Alfred third from the top. Locally, the children were regarded as smart but strange: close to one another but standoffish with outsiders, distinctly bookish but known to run a little wild. Alfred was especially close to his two older brothers, Frederick and Charles, and to a younger sister, Emily, but the whole clan shared both a fellowship of misery and a fellowship of brilliance: all eleven grew up terrified of their father, and all eleven were dedicated writers, mostly of journals and poetry. Half of them were published in adulthood, with Frederick and Charles regarded as exceptionally promising poets until their talents were eclipsed not only by their younger brother but by their inner turmoil.
“We Tennysons are a black-blooded race,” Alfred once declared, and much of what happened to their considerable collective potential can be seen as a kind of tragic attrition. The four daughters fared best, in the sense that they seem to have avoided overt mental breakdowns, but one by one the sons succumbed to dysfunction. Frederick battled intermittent despair and sought solace in Swedenborgianism and other, stranger beliefs. Charles became an opium addict. Edward veered from the general Tennysonian torments into true mental illness while still a teen-ager, and he spent the rest of his life in an asylum. Arthur inherited his father’s alcoholism and propensity for violence, with such ruinous results that he was eventually institutionalized as well. Young Septimus, whom Alfred doted on, was crippled by depression from his early teens—“the most morbid of the Tennysons,” as he introduced himself to the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti—and spent his fair share of time in an institution, too. Horatio, the baby of the family, fled as far as he possibly could, to Tasmania, only to fail there as a farmer.