Radical Conservatism and Victorian Poetry: 1830-1906

Abstract

This dissertation explores the emergence of radical conservatism as a form of disjunctive aesthetic practice in the nineteenth century. Having traced Thomas Carlyle’s positive recuperation of disjuncture as a means by which to regenerate the present, I argue that his early essays and distinctive prose style provide a model for understanding poems by Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Charles Doughty – all of whom transform existing expressive repertoires in ways that offer neither a return to myths of origin nor a simple break from the past. Where Carlyle deems poetry incapable of regeneration, I suggest otherwise, by reading a series of works in which conventional prosodic forms are revived in equivocal ways that register (and feed off) the rupture of historical experience. Following Carlyle’s example, the works that I explore suggest that we need the past – not as a paradise to which we can return, but as a means of opening a rift through which to change the present instead. Thus, in my first chapter, I revisit Past and Present (1843), as a composite text whose use of Hebrew parallelism, macaronic language, and narrative ruptures ‘resuscitate’ not the past so much as a present that is made belatedly to recognise its own deadness. My second chapter reads Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’ (1842), as a poem that retrieves an obscured metrical repertoire in such a way as to regenerate both the ballad and the broader collection of which it is a part. My third chapter explores Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows (1851) through its fraught realisation of terza rima, in the context of an apparent break from history that itself forms part of a wider continuum of disappointed and revived political hopes. Charles Doughty’s blank verse in The Dawn in Britain (1906) provides the subject for my final chapter, in which I explore the manner in which Doughty inherits and transforms the tradition of geological catastrophism. Following Carlyle’s own use of catastrophist metaphors to insinuate his sense of the temporal process, blank verse provides a means by which Doughty actuates a punctuational account of historical change that he could never articulate in propositional form.