Tennyson, Newman and the Question of Authority

Abstract

Of all areas of nineteenth-century English theology, none was more problematic and contentious than that concerning life after death.1 The centrality of the subject in the Victorian period is reflected in the sheer quantity and variety of other kinds of writing on death, and in the fact that Tennyson, the leading poet of his generation, and Newman, the greatest English Christian apologist of the age, both wrote poems which directly addressed the subject of the future life, and which were well received by a wide variety of readers. In Memoriam (1850) and The Dream of Gerontius (1865) were welcomed by Victorian readers as helpful, and specifically hopeful, religious poetry, although their interpretations of the Christian hope of eternal life are very different. Tennyson’s tentative expression of a vague ‘larger hope’ (In Memoriam, lv2) was later to become something of a rallying cry for F. W. Farrar, a leading churchman who, although not himself a ‘universalist’, was as hostile as Tennyson and F. D. Maurice towards what he called ‘the common view’ of judgement and everlasting punishment.3