It’s hard to think of a more indoor profession than “literary biographer”. Silk merchant? Gamer? Dust mite? Yet even at 79, Richard Holmes retains the four-square bearing of someone from a more active profession. Life writing remains, for this self-described “romantic biographer”, an adventure.
Celebrated for his depictions of the great poets and radical thinkers of 19th-century Britain, Holmes has pursued a quixotic, almost picturesque vision of the biographer’s craft, tracking his subjects over mountains and valleys, sometimes on foot and once in a hot-air balloon. Meeting me off the train at Norwich – lesser work, you might argue – he struck me as a figure out of a John le Carré novel, standing in a worn cream blazer under the old station clock.
There is an unusual, gentle mixture of imagination and empiricism in everything Holmes writes: a poetic sense of human psychology combined with a meticulous, organised mind. Though Holmes is the author of large-scale works about Coleridge, Percy Shelley, science in the romantic period and now Tennyson, he may be most admired for his investigations of the biographical form itself.
In suitably anomalous style, the house he shares with his wife, the novelist Rose Tremain, looks out from the top of a hill in Norfolk. Letting me in, he leads me past a shelf of their shared bibliography that stands proudly in the hall. Holmes has now authored, translated or edited 24 books. (The downstairs loo is wallpapered with the couples’ prizes.) When I ask Holmes if he would ever think about retiring, he dismisses the idea: “You should die in your boots.”
Holmes is known for pursuing his subjects through the world to deepen his sense of their perspectives. “The more closely and scrupulously you follow someone’s footsteps through the past, the more conscious do you become that they never existed wholly in any one place along the recorded path,” he wrote in Footsteps (1995). As he goes, he keeps a double-entry notebook. The left side fills with historical facts while the right side records personal reflections and diary entries. It’s a habit that emphasises the central (or as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of whom Holmes wrote a two-volume biography, might have said “esemplastic”, meaning “unifying”) role that imagination plays when reconstructing a human personality on the page.
For Holmes’s new book, there is a gentle shift in emphasis. Kept at home by Covid and other complications, he wanted to resituate the early life of the Victorian poet Tennyson in the context of the radical new science of the early-19th century. The book’s full title is The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief.
“I think that is a whole subject: how scientific discoveries actually affect the way we imagine the world,” Holmes says with enthusiasm. The task for the biographer is part-spiritual, part-technical. “How can you write in a way that shows somebody working day after day on a piece of work?” asks Holmes, with the triumphant twinkle of someone who has an answer to his own question. “How do you actually narrate that?”
The spaniel-eyed figure of Alfred, Lord Tennyson seems to have disappeared behind the poet’s face-eating Victorian beard. “People wouldn’t take him seriously for a long time,” Holmes said, his voice tinged with regret. “And then he sort of disappeared.” Tennyson’s Arthurian fantasies of empire – he was Queen Victoria’s poet laureate – have won him few friends among modern readers. James Joyce called him Alfred, Lawn Tennyson. Holmes’s book begins with the provocative question: “Was Tennyson ever young?”
The son of minor Lincolnshire gentry, Tennyson was born in 1809 and raised in a large, bookish family with more than a hint of madness in it. Arriving at Cambridge, he struck contemporaries with his tall stature and drawn masculine beauty. While he was steeped in the modern poetry of Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, he was also deeply immersed in the “new philosophy” – what we would now call science. (Holmes credits Tennyson’s Cambridge tutor, William Whewell, with actually coining the word “scientist”.)
Tennyson’s world was being rapidly changed by that new knowledge. The astronomer William Herschel had argued that the universe was vaster and older, by orders of magnitude, than anyone had realised. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) proved that the very ground beneath his feet had been reshaped countless times before the beginning of human history. Horrifyingly, it was littered with the remains of species God had created only to render extinct. “The material universe,” writes Holmes, “was stranger and vaster than previously thought, and yet more vulnerable – and, paradoxically, more temporary. There were no biblical eternities any more.”
After the shocking death of his friend Arthur Hallam aged only 22, the young Tennyson was forced to contemplate what an individual life could possibly mean. Many critics have remarked on Tennyson’s strange and seemingly inborn gift for producing “not mere pictures, but states of emotion, embodied in sensuous imagery”, as the philosopher John Stuart Mill had it in an early review. It’s strange and moving to imagine a poet of the 1830s, who had carved “Byron is dead” behind a waterfall as a teenager, labouring to make the process of “deep time” visible to his reader:
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
Tennyson was seen by contemporaries as having articulated a generational anguish. “So many of the central poems are about this kind of fear and the perils of extinction,” said Holmes. “The idea that there is a loving creator – you have to abandon that.” While never an atheist, Tennyson was one of the first writers to confront the reality of “nature, red in tooth and claw”. In his early poem “The Two Voices”, he achieves a savage exactitude that looks forward to modernism:
Today I saw the dragon-fly
Come from the wells where he did lie:
An inner impulse rent the veil
Of his old husk: from head to tail
Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.
Holmes helps to recapture the sharp modernity of Tennyson’s image world, sometimes with unforgettable effect. In the poem “Ulysses ”, Tennyson’s speaker writes about how travels only make his “hungry heart” yearn for new horizons: “Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough/Gleams that untravelled world, whose margins fade/Forever and forever when I move.” According to Holmes, the notion of a horizon-wide arch comes from contemporary astronomy. It is how the rings of Saturn would appear to someone standing on the planet’s surface.
There is more wonder than terror in Holmes’s book. He is a reassuring narrator, with a remarkable way of making large ideas concrete and comfortable, almost domestic. “Geology is the thing,” said Holmes, when we start talking about what ideas of deep time did to the Victorian world-view. “Darwin says that he could never have written On the Origin of Species without Lyell showing that there was enough time, massively enough time, for all this evolution to happen in.” We sipped our mugs of tea. A cuckoo clock hooted loudly on the kitchen shelf.
Up on his anomalous hill, Holmes’s office is at one end of the house, and Tremain’s office is at the other. They read each other’s work, but only once it’s reached a certain stage of completion. As a professional courtesy, Holmes took me upstairs so I could “just poke a head round the door”. Reading Holmes’s work, I had admired something meticulous and organised in his narrative style, which I assumed to be a natural quality of mind. Looking into his office, I saw on the central table perhaps 30 cardboard folders, stuffed to bursting point and stacked to about head height. “So you can see,” he said, reading my expression, “everything is not as organised as it might seem.”
Born a couple of months after the end of the Second World War, Holmes was educated at Downside School, unhappily, and then more rapturously at Churchill College, Cambridge. Like many writers, he started with poetry, and his first published book is a collection of poems, One for Sorrow, Two for Joy.
After sending a poem to the editor of the Times, William Rees-Mogg, Holmes was hired as its literary correspondent. Mogg summoned him for an interview. “He looked at me and said, ‘Are you eating enough?’” Holmes credits his career to the sense of freedom that was in the air in the late Sixties. “The very fact that I felt I could pursue a career as a writer and not have to immediately tie myself down – it was something to do with the spirit of the age.”
At the end of his twenties, Holmes signed a contract for a biography of Shelley, checked the Times would have him back in a year and went out in search of his man. He lived alone, travelling around, completely immersed in his travels and in Shelley’s journey through the same places 200 years before him. It was romanticism, or at least a kind of romance. In the book’s preface, he describes the process as a “haunting”. Living in Rome, he befriended two old exiles who would ask him at dinner each night about his friends, Mary and Percy.
Biographies, when Holmes first started writing them, weren’t always thought of in the highest terms. Late-20th-century criticism is littered with invectives against the form. The critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick called it a “scrofulous cottage industry”. In the New Yorker, Janet Malcolm compared its authors to professional burglars. Richard Ellmann, who wrote several biographies himself, described it as “a minor subgenre of fiction”. Yet even as this fusillade was sounding, an unconnected group of writers were reinventing biography as a form of literature. To read Robert Caro on Lyndon Johnson, or John Richardson on Picasso, is to encounter an intensity of narrative vision comparable to great novels. This year, Ellmann’s famous biography of James Joyce got its own biography. Holmes spent five years teaching life writing at the University of East Anglia, and watched the research process cast a spell over one student after another.
“Biography has a magic for taking you out of your own life,” Holmes said. “At the same time, by doing that, you learn something about yourself.” He reaches for Polonius’s line from Hamlet, about hoping to “by indirections, find directions out”, adding: “The resulting imaginative shift, the process of empathy, changes one’s way of looking at the world.”
Holmes speaks about his former subjects in a way that made me feel they lingered with him for years after the book is done. Writing Tennyson’s biography, he found himself returning to his old subject, Coleridge, from the perspective of a younger generation. “There’s a moment when Tennyson’s friends go down to see the old Coleridge in Highgate. And that’s extraordinary – it’s like walking and saying, ‘Ah, you’re there, that’s what happened to you.’”
There is a story about Coleridge that Holmes tells to underscore another point about biography: it involves an adventure. As a child, Coleridge carved his initials into a cave roof near his home. One stormy day, Holmes went into a cave to find them. Guided by a cigarette lighter, he looked ahead and saw the letters STC carved in the ceiling. He jumped up, and smashed his head.
Laid out in the dark, he contemplated the moment of impact. The stone was too soft to have retained those three letters so crisply. He realised that people had come before him and carved the letters deeper into the forgetful stone. “It seemed to me that was one of the processes of biography,” he said. “A biographer writes, a story is told, and then another biographer comes. And what we know about someone gradually alters and changes, and is recarved.”
“The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief” by Richard Holmes is published by William Collins
[Further reading: Jimmy Kimmel and the decline of the American comedian]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 25 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, “Are you up for it?” – Andy Burnham’s plan for Britain
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment