Victorian Poetry
Poets are usually the first to indicate new trends in literature in their search for suitable style and technique. They like experimenting in versification and the art of narrative poetry, as did Robert Browning (1812-1889), Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909), Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844- 1889), and later, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Queen Victoria herself admired Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892).
With the emergence of the novel as a dominant literary form, the poets explored new ways to tell stories in verse, such as Tennyson's Maud, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, and Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book. George Meredith, William Morris (1834-1896) and Emily Bronte (1818-1848), both novelists and poets, realized that poetry could offer its rare potentials for longer narratives. Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) wrote a heartbreaking elegy Thyrsis on the death of his friend and poet Clough. Arnold's verse is undecorated, with occasional experiment in free verse.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), his sister Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), and William Morris form the Pre-Raphaelite group. It took its name from Raphael (1483-1520), the master painter of the Italian High Renaissance. Both in their paintings and poems, the Rossettis and Morris aspired to an unexciting quiet effortlessness.
From the former Romantic poets, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) survived into the Victorian Age. He abandoned rebellion and accepted the post of Queen Victoria's poet laureate, writing verses for state occasions.
Victorian Drama
Victorian drama did not develop in the 19th century the way the novel or poetry did. The only functioning theatres in London, since the Restoration were Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and later the Haymarket. The first two were huge, accommodating a large audience. The result was a vulgar kind of drama, as the contemporary stage demanded facial distortions to be seen from the rear rows and the loudest speeches to be heard there too. This offered no place for intimacy, soliloquies or asides.
Other theatres were allowed to stage musicals only. Some of them managed to put on regular plays with many musical interludes, just not to get in trouble with the law. So these plays were called melodramas or melodic dramas. The features of melodrama are violence, sadism, seduction, low humour, murder, conventional moralising; villainy is black, virtue is more than true. The negative colouring of the term melodrama has been around since the early 19th century.
When the Regulating Act was passed in 1843, finishing the monopoly of the three theatres, drama was able to return to the smaller theatres and to its old qualities of subtlety and intimacy. But there were very few playwrights, and drama lived thanks to its producers and actors rather than to its authors. Although Tennyson and Browning made their attempts at poetic dramas, Victorian audiences enjoyed light comic operas by William Gilbert (1836-1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900), such as The Pirates of Penzance (1880) and The Mikado (1885).
A new dramatic current was felt in the plays of Thomas William Robertson (1829-1871), particularly in his Caste (1867). Another dramatist, Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929), learned a lot from the French dramatist Victorien Sardou (1831-1908), and introduced contemporary issues and speech. But the most significant plays would come out only at the end of the century.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Alfred Tennyson, the chief representative of the Victorian age in poetry, was regarded like a mysterious magician, with a secure life under the royal favour. Yet he knew the other side of life too; he grew up in a difficult family, in his youth he lost a dear friend, and was often isolated throughout his career.
Alfred Tennyson (Aug. 6, 1809, Somersby, Lincolnshire — Oct. 6, 1892, Aldworth, Surrey) was the fourth son in a family of twelve children, of whom one was insane, one fell victim to the opium, another viciously quarrelled with his father, the Reverend Dr. George Tennyson. A man of extensive knowledge, he was a good tutor in classical and modern languages and prepared his sons for entering the university.
Young Alfred had already discovered a gift for writing before entering Cambridge. Together with his brother, in 1827 he published a collection, Poems by Two Brothers. Another collection The Devil and the Lady, published only in 1930, also belongs to his youthful attempts and displays an amazing understanding of Elizabethan drama. Although these first attempts showed the marked influence of the Elizabethans, Milton and Byron, he joined a group of gifted students, nicknamed the Apostles. The leader of that group was Arthur Hallam, one of his closest university friends, whose unexpected death in 1833 left a deep scar on Tennyson. The long elegy In Memoriam and numerous other poems, such as Break, Break, Break, are dedicated to their friendship. In this period he created some of his finest works, such as The Two Voices, Ulysses, St. Simeon Stylites and the first version of Morte d'Arthur.
Family and financial troubles made Tennyson quit university and return home, where he further worked on improving his poetic abilities. Though his next publication of 1832, including The Lotos-Eaters, The Palace of Art and The Lady of Shalott, was harshly criticized, he was determined to excel. The original versions of these poems show that his taste and sense of metre were hesitant at the beginning. But constant studies of his poetical forefathers perfected his technique. Various revision stages of such poems as The Lotos-Eaters, demonstrate what a scrupulous labourer in poetry Tennyson was. The 1842 edition, with new poems like Morte d'Arthur, Locksley Hall, and The Vision of Sin, was marked by an advance in the poet's taste and technique, and the 1850 edition brought him fame and recognition with In Memoriam. Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth as poet laureate, and finally could marry his beloved Emily Sellwood, whom he had known since 1836. In 1853, with their two sons, Hallam and Lionel, the Tennysons took a house in the Isle of Wight. Towards the end of his life, he was knighted by Queen Victoria, the honour, never before granted to a poet. In 1892, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.