Textual Notes 1836–1850

Tennyson to Elizabeth Barrett Browning

In his book, The Early Victorians 1832–1851, Professor J. F. C. Harrison writes that 'the early Victorian era was essentially a religious one'. He then expands on this: 'When we say, then, that the early Victorian period was a religious age we do not mean that everyone went to church (though a large proportion of the population in fact did so) but that Protestant evangelicalism was a basic ingredient in the dominant ideology'. Many of the sonnets written during this period certainly bear out that there is some validity in Professor Harrison's analysis. Sonnets and sonnet sequences abound that are not only religious in nature but staunchly defend the traditions and beliefs of the established Protestant church. Isaac Williams is one of the most visible sonneteers in this respect. Many of the sonnets by contemporaries such as Henry Alford, Aubrey deVere and Martin Tupper, whilst ostensibly dealing with other subjects, convey a strong religious message at their core. It is interesting to note that there are hardly any sonnets that challenge this religious perspective. Even the 1844 sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett [Browning], whilst recording her deep personal anguish at the death of her brother Bro and other family members in the preceding few years, chart a realisation that through Christ's love and suffering, one can submit to the pains of life on earth and find salvation in heaven. One anonymous reviewer of Poems (1844) wrote, 'Her philosophy is the only one that in this day is entitled to the name – a religious one.'

During this period, however, there emerge a number of publications that, in very different ways, challenged the foundations on which the essence of Christianity was based. Such publications include Charles Lyell's Elements of Zoology (1838), Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1841) and Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). David Friedrich Strauss's Das LebenJesu, first published in the mid-1830s, was translated by George Eliot in 1846, although published without her name. This questioning of the basis of Christianity was largely absent from the sonnets of the period. The poem, however, that epitomises a poet's inward struggle to reconcile such conflicting views is Alfred Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' (1850) and there are undoubtedly strong parallels between this poem and the sonnet. For one, the basic unit of 'In Memoriam' is a quatrain rhyming abba. In addition, critics have noted the similarity in poetic form between a sonnet sequence and Tennyson's poem with J. Pyre, for example, noting:

The lyric sequence [of 'In Memoriam'] has much the character of a sequence of sonnets. ... In the construction of the individual poems out of the stanza which he had adopted Tennyson was able to get something analogous to the effect of the sonnet and yet different from it.

By 1850 the poetic landscape had changed. Wordsworth died that year and Tennyson had established his reputation as the standard bearer for poetry with Poems (1842), The Princess (1847) and 'In Memoriam' (1850). Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough and others had also entered the poetic fray, although none of them would write significant numbers of sonnets.

Sonnets were written on a multitude of subjects such as personal feelings and reflections, landscapes, nature, paintings, sculptures, buildings, foreign countries, people and cities. Tennyson's youthful love sonnets of 1836/7 are typical of this period. What is noticeably absent, however, is the lack of engagement with the problems emanating from major social developments such as industrialisation and urbanisation. This is in stark contrast with the novel whose emergence as a major literary force was confirmed by writers including Charles Dickens with his savage indictment of different facets of modern life in works such as Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son, and David Copperfield. Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, her initial foray into the industrialised North, was published in 1848. Similar comments can be made about the social agitation aroused by the Chartists and related developments, and the revolutionary upheavals which swept Europe late in the period and threatened to be repeated in Great Britain. With a few notable exceptions such topics were kept off the sonnet agenda.

Female sonneteers were not particularly visible in the early part of Victoria's reign. However, the most famous sonnet sequence of this period is Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'Sonnets from the Portuguese' which appeared in 1850, the same year as Tennyson's 'In Memoriam'. Although traditionally associated with love and courtship, the sonnet was not over-used for such purposes in the years under discussion. Neither was Browning's sequence typical of sonnets written on this subject. The joy and happiness of the love between man and woman, as reflected by Browning, was rejected by sonneteers later in the century. More akin to these...