Tennyson’s Sounds

Tate, Gregory

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5_5

Tennyson’s Sounds

Gregory Tate⁵

Chapter
First Online: 18 June 2020

179 Accesses

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

Abstract

This chapter examines the links between Alfred Tennyson’s poetry and scientific theories of sound. Tennyson’s reading in acoustic science shaped his ambivalent conception of sound as simultaneously permanent and evanescent, and of the human voice as both a spiritual signifier of identity and a transient disturbance of the air. His preoccupation with the duality of sound informed his views on personal immortality, his politics, and his understanding of poetry’s relation to the rhythms of the natural world. In turn, Victorian physicists such as James Clerk Maxwell and John Tyndall used quotations and parodies of Tennyson’s poetry to illustrate the ways in which sound, existing at the same time as a material wave-pattern and as a subjective sensation, exemplified the epistemological authority and the limitations of scientific models of nature.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 79.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Softcover Book: USD 99.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 99.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
Alfred Tennyson, “The Miller’s Daughter” (1842), ll. 65–72, in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols., 2nd edn. (Harlow: Longman, 1987). Subsequent line references to Tennyson’s poetry are from this edition and will be cited in the text.
2.
Eric Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 60.
3.
Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1897), 1:11.
4.
Tennyson’s copies of these books are described in Nancie Campbell, Tennyson in Lincoln: A Catalogue of the Collections in the Research Centre, 2 vols. (Lincoln: Tennyson Society, 1971–73), 1:29, 34, 95, and 105.
5.
John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 8.
6.
Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, 4th edn. (London: John Murray, 1837), 148. Throughout this chapter I cite this edition, which Tennyson owned, rather than the first edition.
7.
William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, 3 vols. (London: John W. Parker, 1837), 2:298.
8.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), 4th edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 42.
9.
Shelley Trower, Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (London: Continuum, 2012), 37.
10.
Whewell, History, 2:312.
11.
Somerville, Connexion, 4th edn., 152.
12.
Ibid., 260–61.
13.
John Herschel, “Sound” (1830), in Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, vol. 4 (London: B. Fellowes, 1845), 810.
14.
Ludwig Büchner, Force and Matter, trans. J. Frederick Collingwood (London: Trübner, 1864), 4.
15.
Tennyson to George Grove, 17 January 1868, in The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982–90), 2:479.
16.
John Tyndall, in Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, 2:469.
17.
William Allingham, A Diary, 1824–1889, ed. Helen Allingham and Dollie Radford (London: Penguin, 1985), 136.
18.
Paul Janet, The Materialism of the Present Day: A Critique of Dr. Büchner’s System, trans. Gustav Masson (London: H. Baillière, 1866), 40.
19.
David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic Addressed to Sir Walter Scott (London: John Murray, 1834), 213–14, quoting Byron, Manfred, 2:4:150–51.
20.
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–88), 3:120.
21.
Somerville, Connexion, 4th edn., 255.
22.
Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 2 vols. (London: John W. Parker, 1840), 1:298.
23.
Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, 83.
24.
Somerville, Connexion, 4th edn., 148.
25.
William Wordsworth, “On the Power of Sound,” in Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), ll. 217–24.
26.
Gillian Beer, “‘Authentic Tidings of Invisible Things’: Vision and the Invisible in the Later Nineteenth Century,” in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (London: Routledge, 1996), 91.
27.
See Tennyson, Poems, 2:618.
28.
Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, 1:474–75.
29.
Herschel, “Sound,” 771; Somerville, Connexion, 4th edn., 155.
30.
Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment, 2nd edn. (London: John Murray, 1838), 108–9.
31.
Ibid., 112.
32.
James Emmott, “Parameters of Vibration, Technologies of Capture, and the Layering of Voices and Faces in the Nineteenth Century,” Victorian Studies 53 (2011): 476.
33.
Babbage, Bridgewater Treatise, 164.
34.
Babbage’s speculations have been discussed by critics such as Picker and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, but not specifically in relation to their similarities with Tennyson’s concerns about the permanence or impermanence of voice. See Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, 15–16; and Douglas-Fairhurst , Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 96–100.
35.
Arthur Hallam, “The Influence of Italian upon English Literature,” in The Writings of Arthur Hallam, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (New York: MLA, 1943), 222.
36.
Tennyson imagines Hallam confirming this vocal segregation in section 85: “But in dear words of human speech / We two communicate no more” (85:83–84).
37.
Michelle Geric, Tennyson and Geology: Poetry and Poetics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 191.
38.
Oliver Lodge, “The Attitude of Tennyson towards Science,” in Tennyson and his Friends, ed. Hallam Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1911), 283.
39.
Griffiths, Printed Voice, 36.
40.
Barri J. Gold, ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 51.
41.
Matthew Bevis, The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 152.
42.
Anna Barton, “Long Vacation Pastorals: Clough, Tennyson, and the Poetry of the Liberal University,” Victorian Literature and Culture 42 (2014): 262.
43.
Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, 1st edn. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1830), 72–73. Tennyson’s copy is now in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina; I would like to thank Patrick Scott for telling me about it. See Scott, “Tennyson’s Marginalia in John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse,” Victorian Poetry (forthcoming), and Anna Henchman, The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 90.
44.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 125.
45.
For another discussion of the relation between song and speech in The Princess, see Daniel Karlin, The Figure of the Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 102–16.
46.
Sedgwick, Between Men, 133.
47.
Patricia Fara, “Educating Mary: Women and Scientific Literature in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830, ed. Jane Goodall and Christa Knellwolf (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 22.
48.
Virginia Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 82.
49.
Geric, Tennyson, 37.
50.
Donald S. Hair, Tennyson’s Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 70.
51.
Dennis R. Dean, Tennyson and Geology (Lincoln: Tennyson Society, 1985), 16.
52.
See the glossary in vol. 3 of Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1830–33).
53.
Somerville, Connexion, 4th edn., 157; Herschel, “Sound,” 752.
54.
Peter McDonald, Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12.
55.
Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians, 89.
56.
Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, “Marginalized Musical Interludes: Tennyson’s Critique of Conventionality in The Princess,” Victorian Poetry 38 (2000): 239.
57.
Ewan Jones, “Lyric Explanation: Tennyson’s Princesses,” Thinking Verse 4 (2014): 62.
58.
See Daniel Brown, The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 112.
59.
James Clerk Maxwell, “A Lecture on Thomson’s Galvanometer,” Nature 6 (1872): 46.
60.
Maxwell, “On Faraday’s Lines of Force,” in The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890), 1:156.
61.
Brewster, Letters, 199–200.
62.
Tyndall, “On Radiation,” in Fragments of Science for Unscientific People (London: Longmans, Green, 1871), 176–77. For details of Tennyson’s copy of the 1865 printing of Tyndall’s lecture, see Campbell, Tennyson in Lincoln, 1:102.
63.
Trower, Senses, 8.
64.
Tyndall, Sound: A Course of Eight Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (London: Longmans, Green, 1867), 13.
65.
Ibid., 50.
66.
Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, 113. For another discussion of the part played by Tennyson’s verse in promoting sound-recording technologies in the nineteenth century, see Matthew Rubery, “Thomas Edison’s Poetry Machine,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 18 (2014): http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/article/view/ntn.678/ (accessed 8 March 2019).
67.
Tyndall, Sound, 55, quoting Tennyson, Maud, 1:99. Tyndall discusses the same line in Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, 2:474–75.
68.
The 1881 version of the poem was located by Roland Jackson. See Jackson, The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 449.
69.
Tyndall, “From the Alps: A Fragment,” Pall Mall Gazette, 16 August 1881: 10.
70.
Tyndall, “A Morning on Alp Lusgen,” in New Fragments (London: Longmans, Green, 1892), 499.
71.
Ibid., 498.
72.
Tyndall, RI MS JT/3/44, 3–4. Quoted by courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.
73.
Brown, Poetry, 159.
74.
In his 1873 lecture on “Molecules,” Maxwell quotes these lines from Tennyson’s poem in support of his argument that Lucretius subverts his own materialism “by making his atoms deviate from their courses at quite uncertain times and places, thus attributing to them a kind of irrational free will.” Maxwell, “Molecules,” Nature 8 (1873): 440.
75.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. H. A. J. Munro, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Deighton Bell, 1864), 1:176.
76.
Somerville, Connexion, 4th edn., 260.
77.
Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 67.
78.
Tyndall, Address Delivered Before the British Association Assembled at Belfast (London: Longmans, Green, 1874), 6.
79.
John Holmes, “‘The Poet of Science’: How Scientists Read Their Tennyson,” Victorian Studies 54 (2012): 657.
80.
Tyndall, Sound, 49.
81.
Cornelia Pearsall, Tennyson’s Rapture: Transformation in the Victorian Dramatic Monologue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 348.

Bibliography

Allingham, William. 1985. A Diary, 1824–1889. Ed. Helen Allingham and Dollie Radford. London: Penguin.
Google Scholar
Babbage, Charles. 1838. The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment. 2nd edn. London: John Murray.
Google Scholar
Barton, Anna. 2014. Long Vacation Pastorals: Clough, Tennyson, and the Poetry of the Liberal University. Victorian Literature and Culture 42: 251–266.
Article Google Scholar
Beer, Gillian. 1996. “Authentic Tidings of Invisible Things”: Vision and the Invisible in the Later Nineteenth Century. In Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay, 85–98. London: Routledge.
Google Scholar
Bevis, Matthew. 2007. The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Book Google Scholar
Brown, Daniel. 2013. The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Book Google Scholar
Brewster, David. 1834. Letters on Natural Magic Addressed to Sir Walter Scott. London: John Murray.
Google Scholar
Büchner, Ludwig. 1864. Force and Matter. Trans. J. Frederick Collingwood. London: Trübner.
Google Scholar
Campbell, Nancie. 1971–73. Tennyson in Lincoln: A Catalogue of the Collections in the Research Centre. 2 vols. Lincoln: Tennyson Society.
Google Scholar
Clapp-Itnyre, Alisa. 2000. Marginalized Musical Interludes: Tennyson’s Critique of Conventionality in The Princess. Victorian Poetry 38: 227–248.
Article Google Scholar
Dean, Dennis R. 1985. Tennyson and Geology. Lincoln: Tennyson Society.
Google Scholar
Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert. 2002. Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Book Google Scholar
Emmott, James. 2011. Parameters of Vibration, Technologies of Capture, and the Layering of Voices and Faces in the Nineteenth Century. Victorian Studies 53: 468–478.
Article Google Scholar
Fara, Patricia. 2008. Educating Mary: Women and Scientific Literature in the Early Nineteenth Century. In Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830, ed. Jane Goodall and Christa Knellwolf, 17–32. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Google Scholar
Geric, Michelle. 2017. Tennyson and Geology: Poetry and Poetics. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Book Google Scholar
Gold, Barri J. 2010. ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Book Google Scholar
Griffiths, Eric. 1989. The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Google Scholar
Hair, Donald S. 1991. Tennyson’s Language. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Book Google Scholar
Hallam, Arthur. 1943. The Influence of Italian upon English Literature. In The Writings of Arthur Hallam, ed. T.H. Vail Motter, 213–234. New York: MLA.
Google Scholar
Henchman, Anna. 2014. The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Google Scholar
Herschel, John. 1830. A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. 1st edn. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green.
Google Scholar
———. 1845. “Sound” (1830). In Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, 4: 747–824. London: B. Fellowes.
Google Scholar
Holmes, John. 2012. “The Poet of Science”: How Scientists Read Their Tennyson. Victorian Studies 54: 655–678.
Google Scholar
Jackson, Roland. 2018. The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Google Scholar
Janet, Paul. 1866. The Materialism of the Present Day: A Critique of Dr. Büchner’s System. Trans. Gustav Masson. London: H. Baillière.
Google Scholar
Jones, Ewan. 2014. Lyric Explanation: Tennyson’s Princesses. Thinking Verse 4: 50–78.
Google Scholar
Karlin, Daniel. 2013. The Figure of the Singer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Book Google Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas S. 2012. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). 4th edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Google Scholar
Leighton, Angela. 2007. On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Google Scholar
Lodge, Oliver. 1911. The Attitude of Tennyson towards Science. In Tennyson and His Friends, ed. Hallam Tennyson, 280–284. London: Macmillan.
Google Scholar
Lucretius. 1864. De Rerum Natura. Trans. H.A.J. Munro. 2 vols. Cambridge: Deighton Bell.
Google Scholar
Lyell, Charles. 1830–33. Principles of Geology. 3 vols. London: John Murray.
Google Scholar
Maxwell, James Clerk. 1872. A Lecture on Thomson’s Galvanometer. Nature 6: 46.
Google Scholar
———. 1873. Molecules. Nature 8: 437–441.
Article Google Scholar
———. 1890. On Faraday’s Lines of Force. In The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, 2 vols., 1: 155–229. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Google Scholar
McDonald, Peter. 2012. Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Book Google Scholar
Pearsall, Cornelia. 2008. Tennyson’s Rapture: Transformation in the Victorian Dramatic Monologue. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Book Google Scholar
Picker, John M. 2003. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Book Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul. 1984–88. Time and Narrative. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Google Scholar
Rubery, Matthew. 2014. Thomas Edison’s Poetry Machine. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 18. http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/article/view/ntn.678/. Accessed 8 Mar 2019.
Scott, Patrick. Forthcoming. Tennyson’s Marginalia in John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse. Victorian Poetry.
Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press.
Book Google Scholar
Somerville, Mary. 1837. On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. 4th edn. London: John Murray.
Google Scholar
Tennyson, Alfred. 1982–90. The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Google Scholar
———. 1987. The Poems of Tennyson. Ed. Christopher Ricks. 3 vols. 2nd edn. Harlow: Longman.
Google Scholar
Tennyson, Hallam. 1897. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir. 2 vols. London: Macmillan.
Google Scholar
Trower, Shelley. 2012. Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound. London: Continuum.
Book Google Scholar
Tyndall, John. RI MS JT/3/44. Royal Institution of Great Britain.
Google Scholar
———. 1867. Sound: A Course of Eight Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. London: Longmans, Green.
Google Scholar
———. 1871. On Radiation. In Fragments of Science for Unscientific People, 169–218. London: Longmans, Green.
Google Scholar
———. 1874. Address Delivered Before the British Association Assembled at Belfast. London: Longmans, Green.
Google Scholar
———. 1881. From the Alps: A Fragment. Pall Mall Gazette, 16 August, 10.
Google Scholar
———. 1892. A Morning on Alp Lusgen. In New Fragments, 498–500. London: Longmans, Green.
Google Scholar
Whewell, William. 1837. History of the Inductive Sciences. 3 vols. London: John W. Parker.
Google Scholar
———. 1840. The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. 2 vols. London: John W. Parker.
Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William. 1999. On the Power of Sound. In Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Jared Curtis, 116–124. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Google Scholar
Zimmerman, Virginia. 2008. Excavating Victorians. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Google Scholar

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

School of English, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK
Gregory Tate

Authors

Gregory Tate
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gregory Tate .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Tate, G. (2020). Tennyson’s Sounds. In: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5_5

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5_5
Published: 18 June 2020
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-31440-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-31441-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics