Chapter 2 - ‘Tennyson's Drift’: Evolution in The Princess

Summary

When the Darwinian naturalist T. H. Huxley described Tennyson as ‘the first poet since Lucretius who has understood the drift of science’, he meant of course to compliment the poet on his ability to interpret science, to divine its general direction, but he might have got by without using the word ‘drift’. As Huxley was a literary man, widely read and sensitive to language, we can assume the word was thoughtfully chosen. Drift means, at least as Huxley uses it here, ‘the meaning, tenor, purport and scope’ of science. Interestingly it has an ambiguity of agency at its heart for it can be used to mean either conscious direction or action (as in ‘What is your drift?’ or ‘Do you catch my drift?’) or a movement driven randomly by natural or unconscious forces (as in a ‘drift of leaves’ or a ‘drift of smoke’). Tennyson did indeed understand the drift of nineteenth-century science in ways that were broad, philosophical and insightful, and he played an important part in interpreting the new discoveries of science for a wide and trusting readership, but he also seems to have been curious about the ways in which the meanings of science were made. As an experiment in dialogic or conversational form, his long narrative poem of 1847, The Princess: A Medley, seeks, I will argue, to persuade us that educated mixed-sex conversation is the force that determines and shapes the drift of science.