Abstract
The introductory chapter addresses the current ‘two culture’ critical debate and controversies involved in reading literature and science together. Attention to these debates is especially vital for the present study, as Tennyson’s poetics and the geological texts under analysis are themselves seminal in the emergence of disciplinary division. The chapter introduces the connections between Tennyson’s poetics, geology and language theory, and goes on to examine the significance of fossil remains and their role as objects that initiate narrative construction. Finally, as a preamble to Chap. 2, Hugh Miller’s The Old Red Sandstone (1841) is introduced in order to establish its connections with Tennyson’s The Princess, as Miller’s geology not only figures prominently in the analysis of The Princess that follows but also helps to bring into relief the heterodoxy of Charles Lyell’s geology as discussed in further chapters.
no other object in the universe dominates human perception to the extent of the Earth. This dominion is all the more powerful because it is unperceived; the Earth provides the fabric on which all experience is located.
Robert Muir Wood, The Dark Side of the Earth (1985), 7.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
John Ruskin , The Works of John Ruskin (1912), Letter to Henry Acland (1851), 115.
- 2.
The modern history of literary criticism on Tennyson and geology begins with Eleanor Bustin Mattes in 1951. Mattes established the terms for reading In Memoriam’s geology. However, most of the criticism that has followed Mattes’s study has focused on In Memoriam and there is little written about how geology might figure in Tennyson’s other mid-century poems. See “The Challenges of Geology to Belief in Immortality and a God of Love”, in In Memoriam : The Way of the soul (1951), and Dennis R. Dean , Tennyson and Geology (1985). Also see, Milton Millhauser, Fire and Ice: The Influence of Science on Tennyson’s Poetry (1971); “Tennyson, Vestiges, and the Dark Side of Science” (1969); “Tennyson’s Princess and Vestiges” (1954). Walker Gibson, “Behind the Veil: A Distinction Between Poetic and Scientific Language in Tennyson, Lyell, and Darwin” (1958). Also see Basil Willey, “Tennyson” in More Nineteenth Century Studies (1956). Susan Gliserman, “Early Victorian Science Writers and Tennyson’s In Memoriam: A Study in Cultural Exchange” (1975). Gliserman’s article was perhaps the first to take account of the complex comingling of ideas and disparate discourses in In Memoriam, offering a sophisticated comparison of the divergent epistemological approaches found in the scientific and philosophical writings of Peter Mark Roget, William Whewell and Lyell, all of whom were read by Tennyson. For earlier critical accounts of Tennyson and science, see George R. Potter, “Tennyson and the Biological Theory of Mutability in Species” (1939); W.R. Rutland, “Tennyson and the Theory of Evolution” (1940).
- 3.
For a list of the publications in Tennyson’s library (although many books Tennyson is known to have read do not appear in the library list), see Nancie Campbell, ed., Tennyson in Lincoln (1971).
- 4.
For the most recent studies on Tennyson and Geology see, Virginia Zimmerman , “Tennyson’s Fairy Tale of Science” in Excavating Victorians (2008); Aidan Day , “The archetype that Waits: ‘Oh! that’twere possible’, In Memoriam” in Tennyson’s Scepticism (2005). On Tennyson and Darwin: Valerie Purton ed., Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers (2013). On the history of science: L.I. Anderson and M.A. Taylor “Tennyson and the Geologists Part 1” (2005); M.A. Taylor and L.I. Anderson, “Tennyson and the Geologists Part 2” (2016), in press. On the novel and geology: Adelene Buckland’s Novel Science (2013).
- 5.
Heringman (2004), xv.
- 6.
Gillian Beer , Open Fields (1996), 173.
- 7.
Ralph O’Connor , The Earth on Show (2007), 446. O’Connor revisits these models in his article “The meaning of ‘literature’ and the place of modern scientific nonfiction in literature and science” Journal of Literature and Science 10, no. 1 (2017): 37–45.
- 8.
Ralph O’Connor , The Earth on Show (2007), 241, 243, 244, 448.
- 9.
Charlotte Sleigh , Literature and Science (2011), 13.
- 10.
Gregory Tate , “The Uses of Poetry in Science” November 2015: https://drgregorytate.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/the-uses-of-poetry-in-victorian-science/.
- 11.
Donald Hair, Tennyson’s Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 4.
- 12.
Ibid., 256–7.
- 13.
Isobel Armstrong , Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993), 256.
- 14.
Richard Chenevix Trench , On the Study of Words (1851): 15, 16. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Words.
- 15.
Michael Tomko has offered a re-reading of In Memoriam and the Principles of Geology as texts that similarly work to revise “Paleyan natural theology into a dynamic spiritualism.” See “Varieties of Geological Experience: Religion, Body, and Spirit in Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Lyell’s Principles of Geology” (2004).
- 16.
As well as being Tennyson’s tutor at Cambridge, Tennyson’s library contains the three volumes of Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences (1837).
- 17.
Deborah Lutz , Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture (2015), 127.
- 18.
Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy (1836), I, 128.
- 19.
Richard Owen , Lectures on the Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of the Vertebrate Animals, 2 vols. (1846), II, 3.
- 20.
Megan Perigoe Stitt , Metaphors of Change (1998), 2.
- 21.
Mantell, Wonders of Geology Or, A Familiar Exposition of Geological Phenomena (1838), I, 127, 128.
- 22.
Trench, 131.
- 23.
J. W. Marston, unsigned review, The Athenaeum, 21 (January 1, 1848), 6–8. Quoted in Shannon,Tennyson and the Reviewers (1967), 98.
- 24.
For critical comment on The Princess and geology and evolutionary theory respectively, see Zimmerman, Chap. 3, Rebecca Stott , “Tennyson’s Drift: Evolution in The Princess ,” in Purton ed., Darwin, Tennyson (2013).
- 25.
All references to The Princess and In Memoriam are taken from The Poems of Tennyson, Christopher Ricks ed. (1969). All references to Maud are taken from Tennyson’s Maud: The definitive Edition, Susan Shatto ed. (1986).
- 26.
Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians (2008), 8.
- 27.
Quoted in Ibid., 8.
- 28.
See particularly E. Warwick Slinn , Chap. 2, “Consciousness as Writing,” and Chap. 3, “Absence and Desire in Maud,” in The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry (1991).
- 29.
Paolo Rossi , The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, 1979, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (1984), 116.
- 30.
Armstrong, Victorian Poetry (1993), 493 n. 34.
- 31.
Anderson and Taylor, “Tennyson” (2015), 341–2. During his 1848 tour of Cornwall, for example, the young Elizabeth Rundle, records her conversation with the poet: “Then he turned to Geology … ‘Conceive,’ he said, ‘what an era of the world that must have been, great lizards, marshes, gigantic ferns!’… I replied how beautiful Hugh Miller’s descriptions of that time are: he thought so too” (Memoir, I, 277). Later, in 1857, Tennyson acknowledged a gift of Miller’s The Testimony of the Rocks (1857) from the Duchess of Argyll (Letters ALT, II, 178). More specifically, Christopher Ricks notes, with reference to In Memoriam section LVI, the “jotting by T. in H.Nbk 18 [which] acknowledges his reading of Miller’s The Old Red Sandstone, writing the title in brackets next to his ‘descriptive jottings’” (Tennyson, 1989, 399n.). Also see, Christopher Ricks ed., Tennyson: A Selected Edition Incorporating the Trinity College Manuscripts (1989), 50. Both the diary entry and the notebook are from 1848, which suggests that Tennyson had read Miller before 1848, although there is no evidence as to exactly when. Despite reading Miller and appreciating his literariness, Tennyson seems to have downplayed his interests in Miller. I think this is partly to do with Miller’s didacticism and the unsophisticated pitch of Miller’s address, which would have jarred with Tennyson.
- 32.
Dennis Dean suggests that “Tennyson was deeply affected by his delayed reading of Lyell’s Principles and other current works on geology, among which were Charles Babbage, The Bridgewater Treatise (1837). Lyell’s Elements of Geology (1838), Gideon Mantell’s Wonders of Geology (1838), Hugh Miller’s The Old Red Sandstone (1841), and Lyell’s Travels in North America (1845).” (1985), 10.
- 33.
Samuel Smiles , Self-Help (1859) 98. For Miller’s own account of his life see, My Schools and Schoolmasters; or, The Story of My Education (1854).
- 34.
Chapter 3 examines Lyell’s refutation of Lamarck.
- 35.
John Killham , Tennyson and The Princess: Reflections of an Age (1958), 65.
- 36.
Stott, Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers (2014), 32.
- 37.
Hallam Tennyson , Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son, 2 vols. (1897), 1, 249. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Memoir by volume and page number.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Geric, M. (2017). Introduction: Between a Rock and a Hard Place. In: Tennyson and Geology. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66110-0_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66110-0_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-66109-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-66110-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)