6th Assignment: Alfred Lord Tennyson: Crises of belief and faith central to the age

You've now encountered several literary forms invented or re-purposed by the Victorians, including the Dramatic Monologue, as seen in Robert Browning's narratives, spoken by invented Speaker to silent Listener, and the Novel, as seen in Dickens, Bronte's and Chekhov's stories, which take readers into the mind of various characters.

Melancholy and the restless drive to explore are the two remaining themes permeating Victorian literature.

The problems of belief and incredulity were intently examined by the Victorians. At the very moment the British Empire invited its inhabitants to think they were God's people, those same citizens faced serious challenges to belief in that God. Historical and scientific investigations undermined previously held literal translations of faith. Darwin's findings and Newton's discoveries distanced God from human activity. Despair and anxiety permeated previously held thoughts of an ordered universe.

The role tradition held for the Victorians produced in its writers a brooding melancholic tone, a state of turning inward, self-examination. Poets, in their role as spokespersons of their age, adapted traditional forms like the elegy to address current questions of belief and man's place in the universe. Traditional subjects like the Middle Ages, now shrouded in romanticism, were used as devices to allude to contemporary concerns. Tennyson's belief is the opposite of faith in empire and progress. It informs his poem, "In Memoriam, A.H.H." The speaker in his poem has a personal history, has undergone a change, suffered a loss.

In "The Lady of Shalott" Tennyson uses Arthurian legend to speak about the position of the creative artist in society. The setting suggests Tennyson's attitude about the past. The Lady as a prototype of the artist suggests the speaker's conflict with his own role as an observer of his age.

At the core of a rapidly enlarging empire still holding fast to old forms is a restless drive to explore, to experience more, to break away. The speaker in "Ulysses" expresses a desire "to seek a newer world." This poem suggests that Tennyson, like many Victorians, valued progress, was open to change.

Tennyson, writing ten years after Darwin's published work, Origin of the Species, considers the populist engagement with latest scientific discoveries a contributing source of alarm in the Victorian's faith in a Divine plan for the universe. He introduces up-to-date concerns, warning contemporaries what can happen to a powerful kingdom like Victoria's Britain. In an age of prosperity and progress, England's poets and novelists reminded their countrymen that empires crumble, individuals are fragile and vulnerable, and death awaits us.