This study of Caryle and Tennyson explores their mutual influence and the effect of each on his own time. The author analyzes the specific Carlylean ideas (social, political, religious, aesthetic) and examines the ways in which Tennyson resisted and transformed these ideas and their impact.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Queen Victoria's favorite poet, commanded a wider readership than any other of his time. His ascendancy was neither the triumph of pure genius nor an accident of history: he skillfully crafted his own career and his relationships with his audience. Fame and recognition came, lavishly and in abundance, but the hunger for more never left him. Resolving never to be anything except 'a poet', he wore his hair long, smoked incessantly, and sported a cloak and wide-brimmed Spanish hat.Tennyson ranged widely in his poetry, turning his interests in geology, evolution and Arthurian legend into verse, but much of his work relates to his personal life. The poet who wrote The Lady of Shalott and The Charge of the Light Brigade has become a permanent part of our culture. This enjoyable and thoughtful new biography shows him as a Romantic as well as a Victorian, exploring both the poems and the pressures of his era, and the personal relationships that made the man.

“Intelligent, witty, thoroughly engaging . . . the most fascinating biography I have read in years.” —The Minneapolis Star Tribune She was one of the all-time great letter writers, according to Virginia Woolf, but as the wife of Victorian literary celebrity Thomas Carlyle, Jane Welsh Carlyle has been much overlooked. In this “hugely satisfying” new biography (The Spectator), Kathy Chamberlain brings Jane out of her husband’s shadow, focusing on Carlyle as a remarkable woman and writer in her own right. Caught between her own literary aspirations and Victorian society’s oppression of women, Jane Welsh Carlyle hoped to move beyond domestic life and become a respected published writer. As she and her husband moved in exclusive London literary circles, mingling with noted authors, poets, and European revolutionaries, Carlyle created and reported to her correspondents on her rich, rewarding life in her Chelsea home—until her husband’s infatuation with a wealthy, imposing aristocratic society hostess threw her life into chaos. Through dedicated research and unparalleled access to Jane Welsh Carlyle’s private correspondence, Chamberlain presents an elegant portrait of an extraordinary woman. “Sparkles with the wit and intelligence of the subject herself . . . If you think, as I originally did, that you have no particular interest in the life of Jane Carlyle, read this—you will be captivated.” —Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lucy by the Sea “Compelling . . . illuminates the outwardly decorous but often inwardly tempestuous lives of Victorian women.” —The New Yorker “Chamberlain, Jane’s latest and incomparably best biographer . . . gives us, at last, a Jane Carlyle who seems thrillingly alive.” —Christian Science Monitor

In the wake of the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, the subject of In Memoriam, Alfred Tennyson wrote a range of intricately connected poems, many of which feature pivotal scenes of rapture, or being carried away. This book explores Tennyson's representation of rapture as a radical mechanism of transformation-theological, social, political, or personal-and as a figure for critical processes in his own poetics. The poet's fascination with transformation is figured formally in the genre he is credited with inventing, the dramatic monologue. Tennyson's Rapture investigates the poet's previously unrecognized intimacy with the theological movements in early Victorian Britain that are the acknowledged roots of contemporary Pentacostalism, with its belief in the oncoming Rapture, and its formative relation to his poetic innovation. Tennyson's work recurs persistently as well to classical instances of rapture, of mortals being borne away by immortals. Pearsall develops original readings of Tennyson's major classical poems through concentrated attention to his profound intellectual investments in advances in philological scholarship and archeological exploration, including pressing Victorian debates over whether Homer's raptured Troy was a verifiable site, or the province of the poet's imagination. Tennyson's attraction to processes of personal and social change is bound to his significant but generally overlooked Whig ideological commitments, which are illuminated by Hallam's political and philosophical writings, and a half-century of interaction with William Gladstone. Pearsall shows the comprehensive engagement of seemingly apolitical monologues with the rise of democracy over the course of Tennyson's long career. Offering a new approach to reading all Victorian dramatic monologues, this book argues against a critical tradition that sees speakers as unintentionally self-revealing and ignorant of the implications of their speech. Tennyson's Rapture probes the complex aims of these discursive performances, and shows how the ambitions of speakers for vital transformations in themselves and their circumstances are not only articulated in, but attained through, the medium of their monologues.