19th-Century Blues: When Science Killed God and Made Some Englishmen Sad

With the Royal Navy ruling the waves, Queen Victoria safely on her throne, science explaining a confusing world, and British missionaries, explorers, and armies turning the map pink you’d think that the mid-19th-century English (or at least the upper classes) would be a reasonably happy lot. In his superb new book The Boundless Deep Richard Holmes shows that this was not the case. Using Alfred Tennyson as his fulcrum Holmes unpacks the many intellectual currents that began to completely unhinge Victorian optimism and the Whig interpretation of history as one of linear progress.

The Boundless Deep has received rave reviews but it isn’t an entirely new idea. There is a moment in Ian Watt’s brilliant, perhaps now largely forgotten, study of Joseph Conrad, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (1979), when Watt reveals what he considers to be one of the keys to understanding Heart of Darkness, “Conrad derived from the facts of natural science a view of man’s situation very close to that of modern Existentialism.” Conrad had begun to reject ideas of progress and was deeply troubled by the “New Science.” He was not alone in this view.

Lord Kelvin’s discovery in the early 1850s of the second law of thermodynamics and the unavoidable “heat death of the universe,” together with the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, led to a growing cult of Victorian pessimism that infected many of the society’s poets, politicians and intellectuals. As Watt explains, “the previous century has inferred a divine watchmaker from the perfection of the celestial machine, it was now discovered that not only was there no watchmaker, but the spring was running down.”

In The Boundless Deep Holmes explains how the rapid growth of scientific knowledge reshaped Victorian intellectual and cultural life, in particular the life of the young Alfred Tennyson and his circle. Holmes points out that new discoveries about the natural world, especially the oceans, atmosphere, and unseen forces of nature, expanded the boundaries of human understanding and challenged long held assumptions about humanity’s place in the universe.

Tennyson, who became Poet Laureate in 1850, lived during a period when traditional religious beliefs were increasingly challenged by these new scientific theories. Holmes highlights Tennyson’s personal struggles with grief and doubt after the death of his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam. These experiences shaped Tennyson’s engagement with emerging scientific ideas, particularly debates about geology and evolution. His famous poem In Memoriam A.H.H. reflects the tension between faith and scientific discovery, acknowledging the unsettling implications of nature “red in tooth and claw.”

The Boundless Deep portrays the 19th century as a transformative moment when science profoundly altered both intellectual thought and everyday experience.

Tennyson was deeply curious about contemporary science and maintained friendships with many notable scientists and intellectuals who influenced his thinking. Holmes convincingly articulates Tennyson’s attempts to incorporate these insights into a broader philosophical and poetic vision. Even Tennyson’s mystical, deliberately old fashioned, Arthurian poetry often reflects awe at the vastness and mystery of the natural world, an attitude that paralleled the expanding horizons of Victorian scientific exploration.

Holmes presents the growth of science as a gradual and collaborative process rather than a series of isolated breakthroughs. Advances in fields such as oceanography, meteorology, and geology allowed scientists to explore areas that had previously seemed mysterious or inaccessible. Improved instruments and ambitious expeditions revealed the complexity of ocean currents, weather systems, and marine ecosystems. These discoveries changed how Victorians understood nature: instead of a static creation, the natural world appeared dynamic, interconnected, and governed by discoverable laws. Holmes emphasizes the networks of correspondence, research societies, and public lectures that helped spread these ideas beyond specialist circles. Indeed it was a series of sensational popular penny pamphlets that lamented the coming “heat death of the universe” not William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)’s dry scientific papers.

Holmes’s excels in these sections which collide many of his interests. His portrait of the young Tennyson and his family is delightful and everything we would expect from one of our greatest critics of the English Romantics.

Holmes shows how the New Science shaped literature, public debate, and the emotional life of the period. Victorian society grappled with the implications of new knowledge while still searching for meaning and moral order. Through this interplay between discovery and culture, The Boundless Deep portrays the 19th century as a transformative moment when science profoundly altered both intellectual thought and everyday experience. Even as their missionaries penetrated “darkest Africa” the established church knew that it was in trouble. Attempts to mock and ridicule Darwin failed and he ended up being buried in Westminster Abbey next to Isaac Newton.

In the name of progress the Victorians built railways, bridges, hospitals, roads, sewage systems. They banned children from factories and made schooling mandatory. Life expectancy went up especially after the “hungry forties.” Acceptance of the germ theory of disease likely saved more lives than any other single development in the history of medicine. Throughout Eric Hobsbawm’s so called “Long Nineteenth Century” the British navy pacified the oceans and British diplomacy prevented large European wars. Whiggish optimism and Pax Britannica seemed to herald a steampunk End of History. Yet in London even as child mortality crashed and the River Thames stopped smelling like an open sewer a large clique of intellectuals including Tennyson and Conrad began to have serious doubts about the point of it all.

If Darwin killed God and Kelvin killed any point to doing anything where does that leave the artist or indeed the ordinary human being?

Tennyson was certainly aware of Schopenhauer, and German pessimism was a growing influence in English literature throughout the late 19th century. Conrad read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and likely Nietzsche’s even more extreme compatriot Philipp Mainländer who cheerfully argued that not only was God dead but that he had committed suicide in disgust at the sorry state of his creation and that our universe had grown like a warped fungus from God’s decaying corpse.

If Darwin killed God and Kelvin killed any point to doing anything where does that leave the artist or indeed the ordinary human being? In a universe where all matter decays, all human achievement is for naught and the universe ends in a long, slow, silent death what should we do? Many Victorian intellectuals worried deeply about this and even today there are no easy answers.

It is a testament to Tennyson’s genius that he did actually come up with a sort of answer. Camus in Myth of Sisyphus suggested that we are to consider Sisyphus happy as he chases that stupid boulder down the hill. But happiness is perhaps too extravagant an emotion. Maybe just saying “fuck it” is enough.

This concept has long legs in our culture. Achilles returning to the fight in the Iliad, Macbeth choosing to go down swinging after he has been betrayed, tricked, and defeated by his own hubris and ambition. Fuck it is a powerful idea of acceptance and a rejection of inertia. You know you’ve lost and you’re gonna die but you’re not going to go out like a punk. Hollywood is replete with this notion, especially in Westerns. When William Holden just looks at Ernest Borgnine and Borgnine laughs at the end of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) we know exactly what Holden and Borgnine are thinking. They are going to attempt to salvage their honour and go to their deaths with dignity.

Tennyson captures this idea in his still very popular poem Ulysses (1842). Odysseus, safely back in Ithaca for decades, is now aged and weary but he is determined to rouse his tired, old shipmates for one last voyage. This is the essence of “fuck it.” Here’s how the poem ends:

Death closes all: but ere the end,
Some work of noble note may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.