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

by Richard Holmes

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.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Science

448 pages, Hardcover

First published September 25, 2025

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[Bethan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not entirely bad but what annoyed me (hence my ungenerous rating) was that whilst it's an interesting premise trying to link Tennyson's poetry to science, half of the time I felt gaslit even after reading a quote two or three times. It was shoehorning and bullshitting half the time. Tennyson, who is a wonderful poet, wrote a lot that was simply romantic, dramatic and nature pictorials.

As a biography, it was OK although uneven, as if Holmes couldn't decide whether to stick to a book about Victorian science or to write a biography of Tennyson instead of mashing them together. Think it would have been better being one or the other. A standard biography that includes Tennyson's interest in the sciences and the more obvious quotes would have been just fine. There's interesting family background and Holmes does a good job of painting a picture of what Tennyson and his life was like - I came out feeling like that I had a good sense of that.

There's a strange and mildly interesting focus on Edward FitzGerald at the end especially since Tennyson didn't seem that keen on FitzGerald back at that point. Maybe because Holmes had access to FitzGerald letters and therefore had more material to write about or is hinting that there might have been something between them - but if so, it appears to be from FitzGerald only. I would rather that Holmes had addressed that more directly. Hallam of course is still a mystery and that's touched upon, again indirectly: was it a deep and platonic friendship with no romantic or sexual feelings -having experienced it, I know that happens - or something more? (My instinct is that it was the former especially given that Tennyson wrote overtly romantic poems about women and seemed to have a happy marriage with no real hints of liaisons with other men.)

2.5 - 1 star for a lot of the literary criticism, 2 stars for the structure/focus of the book, 3-4 stars for the standard biography and history stuff.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Holmes has always been one of those rare writers who can take a subject that might seem arcane, even forbidding, and infuse it with a sense of adventure, wonder, and, yes, intimacy. In *The Boundless Deep*, he turns his gaze toward the ocean—the vast, inscrutable, seemingly infinite realm that has, for centuries, inspired explorers, scientists, poets, and dreamers alike. It is a book that is part history, part science, part literary meditation, and part memoir of human curiosity itself.

True to form, Holmes approaches the sea not as a singular topic but as a palimpsest: a place where the stories of sailors, naturalists, poets, and imperial strategists are written one over the other, layer upon layer, like sediment on the ocean floor.

The sea, Holmes insists, is never just water. It is metaphor, it is promise, it is terror, it is resource, it is emptiness, it is home. In his pages, it is all of these things at once. And he makes us feel it. What makes Holmes so compelling is that he does not simply offer information; he dramatizes the act of discovery itself. Reading *The Boundless Deep* is to feel as though you are sailing alongside Charles Darwin aboard the Beagle, plunging into the Mariana Trench with Jacques Piccard, or reading Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by lantern-light while the ship creaks and groans in the storm. Holmes has that gift: he doesn’t just tell you what happened, he lets you inhabit the wonder, the peril, the vertigo of it.

The book is structured thematically rather than chronologically, allowing Holmes to move fluidly between scientific expeditions, literary representations of the sea, and cultural-historical reflections on imperial expansion.

He is as comfortable unpacking Darwin’s meticulous notes on barnacles as he is drawing out the symbolic weight of the whale in Melville or the abyss in Coleridge.

This movement back and forth between fact and metaphor, between science and poetry, is where Holmes thrives. For him, the sea is not divisible into categories. Its boundlessness, its refusal to be contained, is precisely what makes it such a fertile ground for imagination.

Reading *The Boundless Deep* during the Puja week of 2025 gave the experience an unexpected resonance. The streets of Kolkata were overflowing with people, a human tide that surged and ebbed like waves. At the pandals, the crowd pressed close, bodies jostling, voices rising in a collective roar, all part of a ritual that was both ancient and modern.

And as I moved through these living currents by day, I returned at night to Holmes’s account of the ocean as the primal force that has always both drawn and terrified humanity. The parallel was uncanny: Puja too is boundless, overwhelming, filled with depths of meaning that no single interpretation can exhaust.

Standing before the idol of Durga, with her ten arms raised in eternal battle against the demon, I felt the same sense of awe and vertigo that Holmes describes in sailors peering into the dark, bottomless waters.

Holmes’s writing has that signature flourish we’ve come to expect from him: erudition combined with narrative zest. He marshals a staggering range of references—from Coleridge to Darwin, from naval logbooks to Romantic poetry—but never lets them ossify into dry scholarship. He delights in the sheer human texture of his material.

A detail about a sailor’s lucky charm, a poet’s marginal note, a scientist’s nervous scrawl in a notebook—Holmes lingers on these fragments as though to remind us that history is not an abstraction but a lived reality. His prose often feels like a tide itself: pulling back to reveal the wide sweep of history, then rushing forward to dwell on a single glittering detail.

One of the most compelling strands of the book is Holmes’s exploration of how the sea functioned as both a frontier of science and a metaphor of the unknown in the Romantic imagination.

For the Romantics, the sea was never just geography; it was psyche, it was soul. It represented freedom but also terror, the infinite possibilities of exploration and the infinite abyss of annihilation.

Coleridge’s mariner is both cursed and blessed, trapped in the endless circle of the sea’s vastness. Darwin’s voyage, though framed as science, was also a spiritual odyssey, confronting the immensity of creation. The sea’s boundlessness became a mirror for human boundlessness: our longing, our terror, our inability to comprehend our own limits.

Holmes does not romanticize exploration in a naïve way, however. He is attentive to the imperial undercurrents that shaped maritime voyages. Ships did not sail simply in the name of science or poetry; they sailed in the service of empire, conquest, and exploitation.

The sea was a frontier of profit as much as knowledge. This duality—the sea as inspiration and the sea as instrument of domination—is one of the book’s most powerful themes. Holmes navigates it with sensitivity, neither dismissing the wonder of discovery nor ignoring its costs.

In one particularly memorable chapter, he describes the Challenger expedition of the 1870s, often considered the birth of modern oceanography. The scientists aboard that ship were driven by insatiable curiosity, eager to measure the depths, to catalog the creatures of the deep, to bring the ocean into the realm of human knowledge. And yet, Holmes reminds us, their voyage was also a projection of imperial power, a way of mapping and mastering the globe. The boundless deep was thus both a scientific frontier and a political theatre. This doubleness is what makes Holmes’s account so compelling: he never lets us forget that the sea resists our attempts to simplify it.

As I read these passages, I thought again of Puja. Here, too, was a ritual that carried multiple meanings. For some, it was devotion, for others, spectacle; for some, it was commerce, for others, community. Like the sea, it could not be reduced to a single function. Its power lay precisely in its excess, its refusal to be one thing. Standing amid the crowd, I felt what Holmes describes in the sailors: a sense of being overwhelmed, swept into something larger than myself, something that exceeded comprehension. Puja, like the sea, was boundless.

Holmes is at his best when he juxtaposes science and story. A passage on the physics of deep-sea pressure is followed by an anecdote of sailors whispering about sea monsters. A meticulous description of ocean currents is offset by Coleridge’s hallucinatory visions of the spectral ship. The result is a book that inhabits both the rational and the irrational dimensions of human experience. Holmes understands that the sea has always demanded this doubleness: it is a place of data and of dreams, of sonar readings and of myth. To write about it truthfully is to honour both dimensions.

One of the more subtle but moving themes in the book is the way the sea confronts us with our limits. Holmes is fascinated by how sailors, scientists, and poets alike speak of vertigo, of awe, of the inability to grasp the full immensity of what lies before them. The sea becomes a metaphor not only for the unknown but for our own inadequacy in the face of the unknown. It is the ultimate reminder that human knowledge, for all its triumphs, will always be partial, provisional. And perhaps that is why the sea has inspired so much art, so much poetry: it is the canvas upon which we project our own longing for infinity.

During Puja, I felt this theme acutely. The rituals are elaborate, codified, repeated year after year, but they never fully explain themselves. Why does the goddess come and go each year? Why is destruction always paired with creation? Why do we weep at the departure of an idol we know will be reborn next year? These are not questions with answers. They are mysteries to be lived, like the sea’s depth, not solved. Holmes’s sea and Puja’s rituals converged for me in this realization: that our fascination with depth—whether oceanic or psychological, whether ritual or scientific—is really a fascination with our own limits, with the recognition that we are not the measure of all things.

Holmes’s prose is never flashy, but it lingers. He writes with the quiet authority of someone who has spent decades listening to the voices of the past, someone who knows how to balance erudition with narrative verve. His sentences often carry the rhythm of waves: swelling, breaking, retreating. There is a music to his writing, one that mirrors the very subject he is describing. Reading him is not only informative but pleasurable in the aesthetic sense.

By the time I finished *The Boundless Deep*, I felt both enlarged and humbled. Enlarged because Holmes had carried me across centuries of exploration and imagination, had shown me the sea in its many guises. Humbled because I realized, as his subjects did, that the sea ultimately resists mastery. It is always more than we can know, more than we can name. It is boundless.

And perhaps that is why reading this book during Puja felt so right. The boundless human tide, the boundless devotion, the boundless joy and sorrow of the festival—all of it mirrored the sea’s inexhaustibility. Standing in the crowd, I felt like a sailor staring into the abyss: overwhelmed, exhilarated, aware of my own smallness, yet grateful to be part of something so vast. Holmes’s book gave me the words, the metaphors, to think about that experience.

In the end, *The Boundless Deep* is more than a history of the sea. It is a meditation on the human desire to push against limits, to confront what lies beyond the horizon, to make sense of the infinite. It is about the joy and terror of boundlessness itself. Holmes has given us a book that is as inexhaustible as its subject, a book that will linger in the mind like the sound of waves long after you have put it down.

[Sarah]

One of the great pleasures of my teaching life has been twice teaching Victorian Literature to undergraduates. I've seen them hotly debate Rochester's culpability, care for Dorian Gray against their better judgment, and delight in the complexities of the Brownings. One small disappointment, though, has been that I've never seen anyone develop the enthusiasm for In Memoriam that I developed as a sensitive teen who wrestled with the draw of Christianity and the striking evidence for natural selection. All that is to say, I really want to read this book.

[Clare Potter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting, well researched biography of Tennyson, in the context of his time and contemporary scientific discoveries such as astronomy and geology and their impact on his faith and poetry.

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listened to the audiobook narrated by Oliver Hembrough

[Del Khan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Less about the arguments between science and religion in those times but more about Tennysons poetry. Insightful but nothing like the authors previous works.

[ANTHONY CUTLER · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating book, firstly about what a bohemian the young Tennyson was, but ultimately about his genuine scientific interests. There's a bigger picture here of the penetration of scientific ideas into broader culture and the impact on religious belief.

Fascinating cameos of William Whewell, Charles Kingsley and others. Whewell, mathematician and polymath, who coined the word scientist, wrote poetry. He was Tennyson's Cambridge tutor. Kingsley was deeply interested in scientific questions and their implications for faith.

Science and poetry may not seem natural bedfellows. Few have emulated Whewell, though I note Miroslav Holub. James Clerk Maxwell wrote satirical verse, some of it about science and religion. Nevertheless, I suspect many people's view will be similar to Walt Whitman in When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer. We read that at school and it always irritated me. I've subsequently become a great Whitman enthusiast but that poem still jars and falls flat.

Another school days poem was The Kraken. I always enjoyed that - "... sponges of millennial growth ...". I was disappointed as an adult to discover that it was considered mere juvenilia. However, Holmes dwells on it here at length as a key text.

As I said, a fascinating book that gives some cultural and psychological context to the scientific references in Tennyson's poetry. That said, there was nothing here to quite lift the book about three stars. All very well done and informative, enjoyable enough, but I fear nothing more than that.