novelists). These two authors are moulded,
not only by their respective geographical and
social origins, but also by current
assumptions about their chosen literary
genres. Thus, Dickens is abundantly comic
in his novels, and would doubtless have
agreed with Troliope's off-hand definition of
the novel: "A novel should give a picture of
common life, enlivened by humour and
sweetened by pathos." Tennyson often
maintained that "It is only men of humour
who see things as they really are." and a
friend remarked "Did anybody make one
laugh more heartily than Alfred Tennyson?"
Well, he rarely attempts to, in his poetry:
"Serious" Victorian poetry mostly found it as
difficult to accommodate humour as to depict
urban life: the poetic inherited, from the
Romantics was of little help here. Thus
Matthew Arnold, who held that "genuine
poetry is conceived and composed in the
soul" (not in the "wits", as Dryden and Pope
had mistakenly thought) managed to write a
preface to Byron without mentioning 'Beppo'
or 'Don Juan'.
Both Dickens and Tennyson were of
course unhappy about much in their England
(not always about the same things). "Of all
great Victorian writers," Edmund Wilson
argued, "Dickens was probably the most
antagonistic to the Victorian Age itself."
"Nearly all the eminent Victorian writers,"
says his fellow-American E.D.H.Johnson, "were
as often as not at odds with their age, and in
their best work they habitually appealed not
to, but against the prevailing mores of that
age" (he applies this to Tennyson). Well,
there are get-out clauses there ("probably",
"in their best work") but it is hard to see
how authors radically antagonistic to their
age could have commanded all that homage
and cash. To criticize the age was part of
the spirit of the age; it was "a changing
age" in which many changes were arguably
for the better and were overdue. "The old
order changeth, yielding place to new," to
quote the favourite Tennysonian tag - or
"Our little systems have their day/They have
their day and cease to be." and that was
true of more "systems" than religious ones.
Writers, particularly social novelists like
Dickens, tried to hasten the process. For
Tennyson around 1847 the two great social
questions impending in England were "the
housing and education of the poor man
before making him our master [i.e.giving him
the vote], and the higher education of
women." Tennyson could make nothing
poetically of the first "question" (here
instead one thinks of Dickens) but his first
long poem, The Princess, is concerned with
the second.
Certainly reviewers of the time, though
sometimes annoyed by (say) Dickens's
political radicalism, much more often
stressed his and Tennyson's speaking for and
to, not against, their age. "The present age,
taken in the lump likes Mr Tennyson's
poetry... because he speaks its mind for it
more efficiently than anybody else" Temple
Bar, 1869). "Tennyson is the most modern of
poets... Lesser poets may represent more
fully the transient phases, the accidents of
the passing time; but it is Tennyson who
gives us back the true characteristics in
small as in great matters... He is touched
with the triumphant, somewhat boastful
temper of an age of physical discovery"
