There were arguments about rights for different economic classes, the sexes, and the separation between religion and government. With new inventions came more tourists and trade to and from Britain, and it grew into an empire that affected all nations around the world. These new inventions joined all different cultures together, but scientific findings were separating them because humans had no morality to each other anymore. (Damrosch 1009-19) .
Tennyson was a very well known and well-paid poet. He saw some principles of evolution much before Darwin published his facts. When his best friend Arthur Hallam died Tennyson was extremely depressed. He named his own son, Hallam. Within his poem "In Memoriam" Tennyson writes in grief and discusses mortality and evolution (Damrosch 1136-8). Tennyson loves to write poetically about nature and goes back and forth on the idea that nature has a rebirth every spring and that the universe is slowly dying. In section two he compares Christ's rebirth to the coming natural rebirth in spring, "Thy fibres net the dreamless head, / Thy roots are rapt about the bones. / The seasons bring the flower again," (Tennyson 2.3-5). In the next section he contradicts the last by seeing the sun and stars as slowly dying with no hope for rebirth,.
"The stars," she whispers, "blindly run;.
A web is wov"n across the sky; .
From our waste places comes a cry,.
And murmurs from the dying sun: (Tennyson 3.5-8).
Tennyson sees the geological and biological discoveries of his day, he knows of Spencer's theory of survival of the fittest and natural selection. In Memoriam sections 54-56 talk about what we, as humans, expect of God and the exact opposite findings within nature. .
That nothing walks with aimless feet;.
That not one life shall be destroy"d,.
Or cast as rubbish to the void,.
When God hath made the pile complete. (Tennyson 54.5-8).
Within Christianity the story of how God created all is usually taken under the text that God did not make things in excess, but that every animal had it's purpose.
