The Boundless Deep Richard Holmes William Collins £25, 448pp: Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?

I wish the public could compel Alfred by act of Parliament to cut off his beard!’ These are the words of Emily Tennyson in 1857, clearly disapproving of her husband’s abundant facial hair. Yet it is the overflowing beard that largely shapes our image of Tennyson as the official bard of imperialism and the high Victorian era. Richard Holmes, in this new biography, wants to create a fresh portrait of ‘the young Tennyson, before the beard made him a Victorian’. He has succeeded triumphantly in doing so.

Tennyson was born in 1809, the middle child in a large family that today would undoubtedly be described as ‘dysfunctional’. His father, George, was a clever, scholarly man, disappointed by life as a clergyman in the Lincolnshire village of Somersby.

Frustrated in his ambitions, he turned increasingly to drink and was subject to bouts of overwhelming rage. He once stormed around the house with knife and loaded gun, threatening to kill his son Frederick ‘by stabbing him in the jugular vein and in the heart’.

So intense were these rages that the family doctor at one point considered certifying him as insane.

All the children were deeply affected by the atmosphere of simmering violence in the Somersby Rectory. ‘We Tennysons are a black-blooded race,’ the poet later said.

Alfred’s brothers, Holmes notes, showed ‘various degrees of brilliance, eccentricity, hypochondria and mental instability’. One exiled himself to Italy, another travelled even further to become a farmer in Tasmania; one became an opium addict; a fourth was committed to Lincoln county lunatic asylum, where he stayed for the rest of his life, another 50 years.

Several of the brothers wrote and published poetry, but it was Alfred who showed the greatest talent from an early age. Tutored by his father in the classics, he could recite odes by the Roman poet Horace at the age of seven. As a teenager he would write reams of his own verse and ‘go shouting them about the fields as I leapt over the hedges’.

He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1827, where he kept a pet snake in his rooms (‘I liked to watch his wonderful sinuosities on the carpet,’ he wrote) and made a number of close friendships. The most important of these was with Arthur Hallam, son of a well-known historian. The two young men became inseparable companions, travelling abroad together. Hallam, charming and sociable, was a favourite of the entire Tennyson family, soon engaged to Alfred’s sister Emily.

For financial reasons, Tennyson left Cambridge without a degree but his first solo collection of poems had already been published. In Somersby, his father’s violent outbursts grew worse. His wife decided it was no longer safe to live with him. She and the younger children left. Perhaps to the relief of the family, George Tennyson died in 1831. After the funeral, Alfred slept in his father’s bed, ‘hoping,’ he said, ‘to see his ghost’ and to perhaps ‘to lay it forever’. He was disappointed. Doubts about the existence of the afterlife continued to trouble him.

An even more devastating death soon occurred. In 1833, Arthur Hallam was staying in Vienna with his father. Henry Hallam left his son reading in their hotel room to go for a walk. When he returned he found Arthur dead, aged 22, of a stroke. The appalling, entirely unexpected death of his closest friend plunged Tennyson into profound grief. It was also the catalyst for some of his finest poetry, the verses that would eventually become the volume In Memoriam. He continued to add to the collection for years. As Holmes points out about some of them, ‘what is exceptional is their intensity’. Although there is no evidence that the two men had a sexual relationship, the verses often ‘seem like lover’s poems’. The often-quoted lines ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all’ are from In Memoriam.

The loss of Hallam led Tennyson towards reflections that had been troubling him for some time. Unusually amongst poets of his generation, he was extremely well read in subjects such as astronomy, geology and evolutionary studies. Darwin’s friend T.H. Huxley, grandfather to the novelist Aldous Huxley, was later to call him ‘the only modern poet… who has taken the trouble to understand the work and tendency of the men of science’.

New discoveries and theories in early 19th-century science, of which Tennyson was aware, had cast doubt on traditional religious belief. In poems later included in In Memoriam, he confronted, in Holmes’s words, ‘the increasingly remote evidence for a creative God in the natural world’. More than any poet of his time, the young Tennyson gave expression to the conflicts and contradictions between science and faith.

Throughout the decade and a half that followed Hallam’s death, and, at least in part because of the loss of his friend, Tennyson led a curiously rootless and nomadic life. There were plenty of moments of fun and enjoyment. His powers of mimicry were on display. ‘Alfred amusing us all the time by taking different characters,’ one of his sisters reported. ‘He made us laugh so much…’

Yet he began to worry for his own mental health. ‘Secretly,’ Holmes writes, ‘he feared he was doomed to fall victim to “the black blood of the Tennysons”.’ Old friends were concerned. Edward FitzGerald, future translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, who had known him since Cambridge days, wondered if he was ‘ruining himself by mismanagement and neglect of all kinds. He must smoke twelve hours out of the twenty-four.’ Later FitzGerald bemoaned Tennyson’s hypochondria, claiming he ‘thinks more about his bowels and nerves than about the Laureate wreath he was born to inherit’. He was probably right to be exasperated. Despite his anxieties about his health, Tennyson lived to be 83.

In 1850, he did indeed become Poet Laureate. This was his annus mirabilis. In Memoriam was finally published in May. It was a bestseller, with 50,000 copies sold in a matter of months. After a courtship that had lasted years, he married Emily Sellwood in June. Thanks in part to the enthusiasm of Prince Albert for his work, Tennyson was offered the Laureateship in November. The elderly poet Samuel Rogers loaned him the expensive court dress that Wordsworth had previously borrowed for his Laureateship ceremony, although, sadly, the trousers didn’t fit.

The process by which the young Tennyson, eccentric product of a chaotic family, was transformed into the bearded patriarch we see in later photographs was almost complete. In this engrossing biography, Richard Holmes charts it with enormous insight and subtlety.