"The Globe we groan in": Astronomical Distance and Stellar Decay in In Memoriam

Abstract

TENNYSON SCHOLARSHIP HAS YET TO ACCOUNT FOR THE IMPORTANT CONNECTIONS between the poet's lifelong preoccupation with astronomy and his larger poetic project. Astronomy fascinated Tennyson for its own sake, and also, I will argue, because it exposed a particular set of intellectual problems. 1 Tennyson's tutor at Cambridge (1828-1831) was the natural theologian William Whewell, who went on to write the 1833 Bridgewater Treatise On Astronomy and General Physics. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Tennyson followed contemporary debates in astronomy. He owned Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Times (1837), John Pringle Nichol's popular Views of the Architecture of the Heavens (1837), John Herschel's Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830), and Mary Somerville's On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1835). 2 He also appears to have acquired both Whewell's Bridgewater Treatise and Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), which begins with an evolutionary account of the origins of the universe. 3 Later in life, he had his own two-inch telescope at Aldworth and visited more powerful observatories to view double stars, and nebulae such as those in Cassiopeia and Lyra. 4 His friend Norman Lockyer, an innovator in the recent science of spectroscopy, 5 commented that Tennyson's "mind is saturated with astronomy" (Hallam Tennyson, 2:381). In later decades, Tennyson continued to follow developments in the new field of astrophysics, building up a substantial library. 6 He was particularly interested toward the end of his life in "the spectrum analysis of light, and the photographs which reveal starlight in the interstellar spaces where stars were hitherto undreamt of " (Hallam Tennyson, 2:408).